The Bohemian Body: Gender and Sexuality in Modern Czech Culture

7. "The Unborn”: Postwar Feminist Fiction and Film

7 “The Unborn” Postwar Feminist Fiction and Film What does a woman want? In recent years this question, first asked famously by Freud, has been appropriated by such Western feminists as Luce Irigaray and Shoshana Felman to address the central issues of feminism: What is a woman? Does she exist? Does she have an identity or a subjectivity of her own? Discussing the pioneering work of the French feminist Irigaray, Felman is skeptical about these questions: “Throughout the Platonic metaphors that will come to dominate Western discourse and act as a vehicle for meaning, Luce Irigaray points out a latent design to exclude the woman from the production of speech, since the woman, and the other as such, are philosophically subjugated to the logical principle of Identity—Identity being conceived as solely a masculine sameness, apprehended as male self presence and consciousness-to-itself ” (What Does Woman Want? 23). If female speech has always been subjugated to male identity, how, we might ask, is it possible for women to conceive of their own subjectivity in the first place? And if Western discourse is as intrinsically male in its consciousness as Felman and Irigaray imply, it follows that all attempts at female writing are on some level citational and derivational. This derivational status of femininity is further complicated by the woman’s position in a small-nation culture. In nineteenth-century Bohemia, as discussed in chapter 2, gender was invariably associated with national identity, and 200 the relationship between these categories was not always harmonious. In fact, more often than not, feminism was subordinated to the interests of nationalism. How do women writers and artists react against this potential conflict of interests between their female subjectivity and their collective obligations as representatives of a national cause? A parallel to the situation of Czech women can be found in the experience of other ethnic female writers. For example, the Irish poet Nuala Ni Dhomnaill uses traditional Gaelic folkloric narratives to explore the situation of female subjects, and the African American writers Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, and Alice Walker challenge traditional models of black identity by questioning a heterosexual and reproductive definition of black femininity. As Madhu Dubey argues, the “second renaissance” of African American cultural history centered on the black man, leaving the black woman liberated racially yet still confined by traditional gender definitions. A major work of fiction to deal with such themes is Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987), which portrays the tragedy of a mother who kills her own offspring and the haunting consequences of the crime for her and the community to which she belongs. Morrison’s novel is set in the nineteenth-century American South, but it also serves as a metaphor for the situation of black women in the 1970s: although liberated on racial grounds, black women still faced the same sexual subjugation to men as they did in the nineteenth century. Avery F. Gordon has argued that Beloved can be read as a palimpsest in which a nineteenth-century slave narrative, based on humanist assumptions of literacy, moral truth, and reason, is overwritten by a feminist focus on orality, folklore, and corporeality.1 In this way, Morrison rescripts a conventional narrative in the interests not only of her identity as an African American but also as a woman. The palimpsest that emerges from this revisionism supplements what the slave narrative forgot . This act of remembering is personified as the ghost of the murdered baby who returns from the past to unsettle the present. Her incomprehensible baby-babble dramatizes ways in which a slave narrative born of a patriarchal European tradition of literacy and rationality can be supplemented and revised by a native African tradition of “female” orality, antireason, and physicality. In a similar way postwar Czech women’s fiction and film negotiate between a traditional master narrative and a subjective female rescripting of that narrative to create a complex, multilayered palimpsest. This “The Unborn” 201 • is not to say that Czech women writers and filmmakers completely rewrite traditional narratives as feminist texts. Like Toni Morrison’s representation of slavery, Czech women’s fiction and film constitute a more complex and ambivalent reaction to the inherited narratives of nationalist tradition. Their revisions do not erase the trace of the original text entirely, but they come to exist in a state of ambiguous tension with it, a tacit acknowledgment that their identity as women is...