Desire and the Divine: Feminine Identity in White Southern Women's Writing

Chapter 2. Erotic Churches and Sacred Bedrooms

chapter 2 Erotic Churches and Sacred Bedrooms the present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. —michel foucault, “of other Spaces” Space, in contemporary discourse . . . has taken on an almost palpable existence, its contours, boundaries, and geographies are called upon to stand in for all the contested realms of identity. —anthony vidler, The Architectural Uncanny in his posthumously released essay “of other Spaces,” Michel Foucault defines what he calls a heterotopia, or a heterotopic space as a real or socially constructed space in which multiple, often opposing and incompatible meanings can exist at once. these heterotopias, however, can be more than just places where these opposite meanings exist; they can be places that are actually constructed through the interaction and/or collision of those opposing ideas, the places where homi Bhabha says identities are often formed. utopias, Foucault argues, are “sites with no real place. . . . [t]hey present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down” (24). Much work has been done on the construction and destruction of utopias and dystopias, but heterotopias, he says, are “something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” and are “outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate 30 | Desire and the Divine their location in reality” (24). the experience that lies between the utopia and the heterotopias he calls the mirror. the mirror, he argues, “is a placeless place,” and in it the viewer sees “an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface.” the mirror “functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that i occupy at the moment when i look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived, it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there” (26). if the mirror functions as a heterotopia, though, it also functions as a site of construction. the existence of the space inside (or behind) the mirror does not exist without a viewer. So the “unreal, virtual space” is one that is, at least partially, constructed by the viewer. Further, when looking in a mirror, the viewer sees herself as interpreted by her own expectations, desires, and fears—and so the virtual viewer in the unreal space is as much constructed as the space she occupies. another trait of the heterotopia is that it is often “linked to slices in time” or what Foucault calls “heterochronies” (26). these heterochronies exist where “men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time.” Places such as museums, libraries, or cemeteries exist in real space, but time in these places is at odds with traditional time. instead, multiple times may be collected through artifacts or even stopped, as in the case of the cemetery. While time around the cemetery and even in the cemetery itself is continuing onward, there is a sense, while in those spaces, that time has ceased—and for the residents of a cemetery, psychic time has indeed come to a close. in the South, it is easy to argue, time has not moved at the same rate as elsewhere in the country. historian George rable makes the point that the post–Civil War South even took pride in “being able to quarantine their homes, churches and schools from the forces of modernity that threatened to destroy traditional values” (2–3). that this pride in “tradition” still exists has been made clear by many southern critics and theorists who continue to show the relevancy today of such time-stamped ideas as the Plantation Myth and the Southern Belle. in fact, just as the myth of the glorious southern plantation was created in response to and as a result of feelings of disappointment and failure, the image of the Southern Belle was in many ways a reaction to gender codes of the South that, as modernity progressed, were impossible to follow. Michele Wilson and John Erotic Churches and Sacred Bedrooms | 31 Lynxwiler explain, half tongue-in-cheek that, “as with most...