Chapter Three: Gender Performativity
I. Theoretical introduction on gender performance
Lewis creates bunches of stereotyped characters, characters without ambivalent morality and having little variety of personality attributed to them. He does not make them oscillate between gender choices; one might fall into either male or female category. That characters are made to cleave to their gender identity testifies to the fixity of gender. Still, much in The
Monk implies rather that sexuality is a matter of performativity, along the lines first explored
by Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.Gender’s performativity is a cultural construct by virtue of reiteration and reinforcement of norms that people in a given society do not even realize do exist, as is the case with The
Monk. These fixed stereotypes act on each character as signifying signs to denote their
personality and forms an appearance, an appearance that is virtually “a sexed position” within symbolic domain (Butler, BM 96).9 Yet such performativity of the gender type represented by characters in the novel faces a crisis when the question is raised with reference to whether the molds of these gender types are indeed stable and unchangeable. Judith Butler’s point inGender Trouble and Bodies that Matter is that gender precedes individuals in the form of
norms for them to assume, and that such norms are cultural constructs.Butler examines Jacques Lacan’s concept—that one follows the symbolic demands to assume a sexed identity purely out of a culturally embedded fear of castration, a token of punishment—to launch her questioning of the preexisted symbolic demands, demands that base their constraining power on oedipal scenario. Gender is a fantasmatic imagination
9 Judith Butler reinvestigates feminist reading of Jacques Lacan: sexual differences are mainly based on the symbolic demand within language. That is, sexual differences are not mere matter of anatomy to decide the sexed role one takes but a presumption constructed through language. The quotation is excerpted from Butler’s Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” which will be abbreviated as BM hereafter to avoid confusion with her other work.
delimiting one’s identification in sexuality, to negate the crisscross of sex
identification—“identification with masculine feminization and feminine phallicization”
(Butler, BM 97). As Butler suggests, the category of sex marks the anatomical body through language, yet there has already been an existing mark prior to the marking of the first kind.
That is, a preexisted concept of sex is precedent to language’s marking and naming the body as man or woman. As a result, to announce “there is no body prior to its marking” denotes that body is signifiable, which makes the identification of assuming a sex fundamentally fictional despite the necessity of naming (Butler, BM 98).
The cultural significance of assuming a sex is twofold: the phallus as the symbol of desire for man to possess that symbol. The other significance of assuming sex resides in women’s hankering after such symbol for the symbol embodies the masculine power they lack. “The feminine position is constructed as the figural enactment of that punishment, the very figuration of that threat and, hence, is produced as a lack only in relation to the
masculine subjects” (Butler, BM 102). That is, that woman lacks a phallus is itself a punishment and reinforces the concept of male-centered symbolic law. From the
perspective of the figures of abjection, i.e. fag and butch, not grouped into the heterosexual modality, the gender roles collapse into each other and they are being reversed as such: “man wishing to ‘be’ the phallus for a woman who ‘has’ it, women wishing to ‘have it’ for a man who ‘is’ it” (BM 103). They are foreclosed, neglected in the mechanics of fantasized identification within the symbolic, yet their existences challenge the binarism of gender.
If sex becomes an imperative norm for a subject to take and then construct his or her identification, Butler argues, the imperative mode becomes a “‘constitutive outside’”
facilitated by reiteration and exclusion. And it is this imperative that constitutes a subjects identity, the performativity—a subject’s identification indicates. Butler agrees with Žižek’s thought on language’s fabricating a subject through the interaction of foreclosure and
repetition of the same concept while the aim to frame a coherent, self-identical subject is beyond possibility and a fraud, since the acts of exclusion “persists as a kind of defining negativity” (BM 190).
The body becomes, on the one hand, the passive social inscription of the whole pack of sex/gender divisions and on the other is considered preexisted before the sexed signification.
In her other work, Butler suggests that Nietzsche and Foucault have the same thought about body, namely that cultural values emerge and make inscriptions on the body, whose function mimicking the medium should be “transvalued into sublimated domain of values” (Butler, GT 130).10
Butler quotes Foucault “the soul is the prison of the body” to elaborate the point that the cultural inscription actually effects the mind and works on the body to perform and conform to social regulations: a compulsory grid of intellectuality, the heterosexuality, incest taboo, taboos against homosexuality, etc. (qtd. In Butler, GT 135). Gender, then, is phantasmatic investment rooted in the inscribed values that is expressed through body to fulfill its
performative ends. Butler assumes that “acts, gestures, enactments…are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means” (Butler, GT 136). The body is thus gendered, and acts as a medium to the gender’s performativity.
Forceful and influential in effects as it the gendered body may be, there is nowhere an ontological essence of such concept to be found, because the performative acts are based on something which itself is regarded not as immutable, but slippery, and not immutable throughout the history of gender’s troubles.
Lewis constructs his stereotyped characters partly under the sway of Gothic conventions, and partly from the tradition of fairy tales. The stereotyped characters not only help to
10 This quotation is excerpted from Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity which will be abbreviated as Gender Trouble to distinguish from her other work.
construct the basic matrices for male and female types but also to solidify the gender’s construction to nail the embraced manhood or womanhood to its identified and allocated categories. Thus, Lewis’s characters’ functions are not merely to make the gothic convention run smoothly or to denote its derivation from the fairy tales’ molds, but most important of all, to point to the cultural significance. The text’s characters are found in culture and from the fixed mold the culture in return is able to solidify and stabilize gender’s differences for men to gain full control of the ascendancy in a cultural context. Kate E. Behr argues that the Gothic formula of stock characters and repetitive patterns in the plot are the nexus to penetrate the contextual influence and indication of political and gendered anxiety embedded in the storyline and frisson of terror.11 Through Lewis’s vivid characterizations of male forwardness, and the extolled female passiveness as something valuable and virtuous, the categorizations of these stereotyped characters are suggestive of the restraints and
confinement of females in cultural space. In this way, males gain far more space to develop and take hold of power in the feudal society of Madrid, the cultural background of The Monk.
Women under Lewis’s pen feature four kinds: mature, mainly married women, the gentle, the rapacious of all kinds, and superstitious followers to denote the feature of stupidity
embedded in women. In contrast, male characteristics are less divergent: they are honorable, brave, and full of integrity, or cowardly and irresponsible. There are two characters,
however, that do not fit in these binary categories because of the doubt they incur either by their gender identity or by signifying characteristics: Ambrosio and his conspirer, Matilda.
11 See Kate E. Behr, The Representation of Men in the English Gothic Novel (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002). In her thorough study of male types in gothic novels, Behr believes she is doing a research not of the definition of models the genre represents, but of the fantasies made by means of seemingly fixed, inflexible models. Gothic formula as Behr states is the work of the archaic chivalric world projected, and the products of the contemporary ideology on issues of gender, class, politics, etc. superimposed on the eighteenth-century gothic fictions. The critics mentioned for the first time will come in full name, and for the second time onward it will show in abbreviated form by his/her last name.