Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children's Novels

3. Subjectivity as a Gender Issue: Metaphors and Intertextuality

3. SUB J E C T I V I T Y A S A GENDER ISSUE: METAPHORS AND INTERTEXTUALITY One of the most fundamental concepts to an understanding of poststructural feminist theory is that of subjectivity. Poststructural critics use the concept of subjectivity to question the liberal humanist position that the individual 's inner self is the ultimate source of meaning (Belsey, Critical Practice 3). Different from the concept of "identity" often used in the study of children's literature, which implies that an individual has one fixed inner essence that makes her unique from all other people, subjectivity is a fluid concept based more on the primacy of language than on the primacy of the individual mind. Poststructural critics define the subject as constructed by language and by the exterior forces that language asserts upon the individual (Belsey, "Constructing the Subject" 46-50). Thus, it is language that makes us who we are. The French psychoanalytic literary critic Jacques Lacan, for example , states that the unconscious mind is constructed like a language (Four Fundamental Concepts 149).1 According to Lacan, language is the sole determinant of being: "The unconscious is that which, by speaking, determines the subject as being" (Lacan, Feminine Sexuality 165).2 Ifhaving some form oflanguage is what makes humans human , then we can say that they are sOcially constructed by language. 26 SUBJECTIVITY AS A GENDER ISSUE· 27 It is not so much that people manipulate language as it is that language manipulates them. The concept of subjectivity, then, implies that every individual is multiply constructed by a variety of sociolinguistic forces that act upon her or him. Because language and the institutions it represents are so fluid, any given individual can occupy simultaneously a number of subject positions, some ofwhich can seem at times even contradictory . In fact, it would be more accurate, if stylistically awkward, to refer to any given child assuming her subject positions, since any subject position is implicitly constructed from a variety of differing positions. As Judith Butler reminds us, being female constitutes an entire range of subject positions that can never be stable or uniformly defined: "there is very little agreement after all on what it is that constitutes, or ought to constitute, the category of women" (1). Nevertheless, studies of subjectivity acknowledge that language is fundamental to how women come to occupy various subject positions . Such a premise implies the primacy of language; without it, the individual would have no being. The subject is who she is because language has so fashioned her. She has been constructed, as we all have been, by the cultural forces of language that have acted upon us. Immersed in cultural forces as she is, the subject depends on language to define her very being. Francis Jacques explains how subjectivity is a linguistic process that derives from and depends on the interactions inherent in human language activities. He formulates the thesis that subjects only develop a sense of self-identity if they are able to think of themselves in the first person, as I, in the second person, as you, and in the third person, as he or she (xv). In other words, subjectivity is determined by the individual's perception of herself in all three grammatical persons : the first person, the second person, and the third person.3 Jacques further notes that the use of the third person is not always the objectifying process that Emile Benveniste argues it is. If a person is linguistically situated in the object position of a sentence, she is not automatically objectified; she is not necessarily deprived of her humanity and transformed into an object devoid of agency (35). On the contrary, perceiving one's self from the third-person point ofview allows for an unlimited range of possibilities that the first-person 28 . SUBJECTIVITY AS A GENDER ISSUE point of view alone might exclude. Distinguishing one's self from others in the process called "individuation" depends on the ability of the subject to perceive herself from a variety of positions. As Catherine Belsey puts it, "'Identity,' subjectivity, is thus a matrix of subject-positions, which may be inconsistent or even in contradiction with one another" ("Constructing the Subject" 48). To refer to someone's "subject position(s)" is to acknowledge simultaneously her dependence on language structures and her point of view within the matrices of her subjectivity. "Taking the subject position " generally refers to...