Mobile Afterlives: A Response to Susan Stabile

Susan Stabile's essay "Stilled Lives" discusses how narratives about women's lives—especially those narratives conventionally categorized as "women's fiction"—are organized around a series of spectacular carceral devices, some of which drive the texts' plots, others of which guide the texts' reception by, and continued circulation among, women readers and viewers. The essay's elegant argument concentrates on the moment of stillness produced when a woman pauses to regard a textual figure—a character in a novel, or a figure representing that character in a museum—and is thus produced herself as an object around which larger cultural stories about gender, race, and nation revolve. Stabile's focus on the hushed moment of consideration when women readers and women's fictions stand motionless before one another in book or museum form demonstrates how narratives of women's confinement are made and remade at different sites in culture. This, in turn, is the basis of her argument about "the museum's persistent relationship to gender, confinement, and death in US women's fiction from the late eighteenth century until the present moment." Stabile writes,

At the same time natural history, dime, anthropology, house, and art museums were presenting hierarchical fictions of progress (from primitivism to civilization), women's fiction configured museum collection (removing objects from natural contexts), curation (trapping them within new narratives), and conservation (forestalling disintegration, ruination, and death) as a way to both perform and undermine the heteronormative fictions of white womanhood. Museums, like the fiction that featured them, presented the same ideological constructs that reflected and, in turn, expected audiences to mirror the gendered, racial, ethnic, and nationalistic taxonomies of display.

For Stabile, the museal complex stages and reproduces ideologies of gender, race, and nation across a range of cultural sites and audiences, but to do so it depends on the real bodies of women, which it must not only make motionless, but also put into motion in narrative. In this sense, the arguments of "Stilled Lives" remind us of the profoundly structuring force of narrative itself, and they remind us, too, of how seductive can be arguments about how institutions manage narrative in ways so apparently seamless that their ideological force seems all but assured, their reach perfectly coordinated to their desires, their intention entirely consonant with their effects. The panopticon, the museal complex, the narrative of confinement in women's fiction all function like a perfectly coordinated machine, working silently to maintain a pure Foucauldian model of contained power in which all local resistance is but an effect that must finally be recuperated again and again. As a historically specific example of this form of narrative economy, Stabile's essay reveals a great deal about how disparate cultural sites work in concert to produce texts that can be cited and circulated: not just Charlotte Temple but the object of the fallen woman; not just the object of the fallen woman, but the objects for which all women care.

But what happens if we ask a set of counterintuitive questions that are produced by the logic of the essay itself? What happens if we interrupt the perfect workings of the museal complex, not only in ordinary or historical time, but as a textual model, or as the narrative that governs all other narratives? What happens if we go behind the scenes of the museal complex? In particular, I want to interrogate the stillness on which the museal complex's success depends, especially its temporal power. When does a moment of stillness yield to motion? Is historical analysis itself a way of going behind the museal complex's scenes? What do we make of women who fail to interpret a text as it directs them to, or women who do not understand or care to comply with museal complex's solicitations, who disagree with the very version of history in which they and the object of their reflection together occupy? Here we might imagine a woman walking into a museum and being unmoved, but perhaps entertained as she pauses before an exhibit organized down to its particulars to entice and emotionally touch...