sheaves of reality

I'm still stuck on Mrs. Ramsay. Why didn't she stand up againt her husband's "tyrannical" rationality? Why didn't she say something in her own defense? I don't buy that she's shy and docile by nature. Pshh.

I'm reading Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, and while her sections on psychoanalysis are just mumble jumble to me, she's got quite a few powerful passages that make the book a worthwhile read for anyone as easily confused and bored by psychoanalysis as me.

This passage offers an explanation for Mrs. Ramsay's silence.

Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body.

- Monique Wittig

Discourse becomes oppressive when it requires that the speaking subject, in order to speak, participate in the very terms of that oppression - that is, take for granted the speaking subject's own impossibility or unintelligibility. This presumptive heterosexuality, she argues, functions within discourse to communicate a threat: "you-will-be-straight-or-you-will-not-be." Women, lesbians, and gay men, she argues, cannot assume the position of the speaking subject within the linguistic system of compuslory heterosexuality. To speak within the system is to be deprived of the possibility of speech; hence, to speak at all in that context is a performative contradiction, the linguistic assertion of a self that cannot "be" within the language that asserts it.

- Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

body: flying in the face of facts

In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf beautifully illustrates the tension inherent in the Cartesian dualism of mind/body and its "tyrannical" inscription on the man/woman dichotomy. From a "female" perspective, the "male" virtue of rationality, when pursued for its own sake, as done by Mr. Ramsay, is nothing short of tyranny with a cool explanation.


"The extraordinary irrationality of her remark, the folly of women's minds enraged him. He had ridden through the valley of death, been shattered and shivered; and now she flew in the face of facts, made his children hope what was utterly out of the question, in effect, told lies. He stamped his foot on the stone step. 'Damn you,' he said. But what had she said? Simply that it might be fine to-morrow. So it might.

Not with the barometer falling and the wind due west.

To pursue truth with such astonishing lack for consideration for other people's feelings, to rend the thin veils of civilization so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency that, without replying, dazed and blinded, she bent her head as if to let the pelt of jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked. There was nothing to be said."