Unknown Speaker  00:00
In recent crises and this language of construction then is reflective of a crisis in naming, articulating coding knowing or mapping, the female subject complicates this crisis, both as an object which sits outside of this project of construction, and a subject which is termed or terms itself as such a subject. Well, the use of the word subject, it's always indicative of problematic construction, that will be used today as a marker for and as discourses and surfaces, which author selves are identities, writing subjects which come to stand for and as narrative surfaces in 20th century destroyed. Okay, so that's your introduction to the way that we're thinking about this. So I will begin this panel discussion with a look at the revisioning literally that split up so it's really seeing revisioning and rewriting revisioning think of it and both of those ways of Marilyn Monroe as subject who figures for more figuring than most a three dimensional figure, a figure who's really familiar with one of her dress makers claim to know the true dimensions the real figures, a subject who once requested that her tombstones simply bear the figures of her true form 3524 35 We can't say that this is a subject to evidence is no irony in her construction, a construction in which she participated actively in her life coining phrases, which became known as Monroe isms revisioning her history again and again, for reporters, potential biographers, photographers, they all figured into her constructions. Of course, we can go back and revision her story, we may say that she didn't really want to dye her hair, as did sign him. And at this point is to an essentialist and possibly feminist identification which obscures her status a sex symbol. The battle is one figuring figuring, whose symbol will she be? Gloria Steinem appropriate or live erase for women? What Norman Mailer penetrates or consecrates for the American man icons of figuring figure the iconic figure. If this isn't ironic, then what is okay, I'm working on a longer project, which is my dissertation on Marilyn Monroe and looking at her both as a surface for history telling, telling history and mystification of the American subject American subjects. Okay, but today I'm just talking about one area of that project of projection. This is the Marilyn Monroe of the post mortem era, the Marilyn Monroe washed ashore in a sea of words who asks only to be read and read well, and her life Steinem tells us she begged others to take her seriously admonishing photo biographer Baris, please don't make me a joke. And now she Services is a narrative, which seems to multiply itself as versions and revisions of the American Historical sensibility, the writing of our histories, biography in the form and figure of Maryland, the suicide gone homicide gone suicide again, the goddess turns corpse evidence in and on her deathbed, the readings of her dead body equal the constant process of exhumation, which so clearly are which so closely parallels what counts as writing history in this society. She's the icon for remembrance for the new Madonna for the historical coroner waxing poetic about her fate her form her figure. So let us turn to case number 81128 which is her corner case number and Thomas new Gucci's best seller corner to the stars, quarters. The most obvious manifestation of the history as exhumation is pure speculation, discourse, which is increasingly prevalent in our mass culture. In a society in which knowledge has come to equal evidence managed by experts. This evidence is manipulated and produced, discovered and made public through the detective like workings of an Information Systems philosophy or faith in the pervasiveness of the factual. We just to believe that we have only to uncover the evidence for the Truth to be told. So we turn incessantly to our technologies or technical knowledge is for reproducing and representing realities, records of phone bills, autopsies, chemical analyses, newsreels to take care of the role is to Pruder film played and the attempts to reconstruct JFK staff, and the inner workings of its mechanisms for replication and reproduction. We hope to find the shadow liberally, which would tell the truth as a story never seem to. We have faith that our technologies of recording will set the record straight, they will tell us just how drunk someone is whether or not someone is lying, or if they have or carried HIV virus. You know, there's just some states of course, we believe that the right information will lead us to the right conclusions when setting up or figuring a subject Information Systems philosophy. This is the case with construction taking place on and around the life slash dead or form of Marilyn Monroe. Increasingly, most biographical representations spend more time on details of her death than on her life. This was the case with summers book goddess the secret lives with Marilyn Monroe, which virtually skipped her childhood which he explained by saying everybody knows about her childhood and spent several chapters on the details of her last hours her autopsy and you know her burial I mean all of the details of her ever death.

Unknown Speaker  04:53
No Gucci's book corner does the job one better by writing a series of narrative surfaces which equal the stories of the auto She's a famous American figures. For example, Sharon Tate, Natalie Wood Bobby Kennedy. He was the coroner to all these famous people. These are interspersed with the story of new Gucci's life, his anecdotes about the American and Japanese cultures, and his detailings of his subjects lives. In the case of 81128. Most of these details are either entirely wrong or significantly altered. He states for example, that at the time of her death, Marilyn Monroe was living in a cheap rented home because she couldn't afford the rent and her expensive bungalow. Actually, she was living in the first home she'd ever owned and things like this, but he just entirely rewrites her life. What's important here is not just a general faulting of Noguchi As historian or as he didn't check a list of sources, that kind of thing, but the translation of the subject which is beginning to occur via his historical process, he will relate stories and impressions of Monroe's life as he details the state of her lymphatic system, the amount of Nibiru tall in her stomach, the condition of her liver, according to toxicologist ruff Abernethy, what is important is that he authorizes his deconstructive reconstruction. On the basis of some mythical unnamed source of evidence or knowledge of his subjects life, he creates himself as authority because of his factual relationship to the actual Marilyn Monroe, her corpse. At the same time, he's creating a history made up of bits and pieces of images which haunt his subjectivity and encourage his revisioning of the court. She will be revealed to the reader as a sum of her bodily parts the pieces of her mythical past the content and color of her disorganized organs. Noguchi writes as he literally dissects the subject, and involved blood is taken for alcohol and barbiturate examination, liver, kidney, stomach and contents, urine an intestine are saved for further toxicological study. This sort of listing of Maryland's body parts and the status of her bodily fluids is combined with writing such as his initial descriptions of his encounter with Marilyn Monroe s corpse. My mind wandered back to 1962 when I a young and impressionable medical examiner first viewed the body of Marilyn Monroe. Later I will be asked, How did she appear in death, and I could only reply with the words from the Latin poet Petrarch, it's folly district in fear of this is dying for death look lovely in her lovely face, where his comments on her life such as the worst saved her, after which he goes on to relate actual events in her life, but each is out of sequence and made to bear some moral judgment on sort of the status of America. By Noguchi. It is as if the coroner now has absolute authority over the subjects life. It is he who will author her as he dissects her because only he really knew her, after all, he was recorded. Well, this is the most blatant example of this sort of re envisioning and this dissection which occurs around and as the writing life of Marilyn Monroe. Similar post mortem fascinations may be evidenced in work as varied as Norman Mailer's and Anthony summers. Excuse me. A recent Phil Donahue show, was devoted to the topic of Monroe and spent a good deal of his time defining and speculating its cause for death circumstances of death. In most of these cases, what was a suicide once is made now into a conspiracy at best and a homicide at worst. Each of these rewritings makes Monroe less powerful over her death, and more of a surface to be written and won in the Battle of figuring and fixing American identities and moments. We will now know Kennedy through Monroe understand women's condition through and as that of Maryland has even placed her next Rock Hudson on People magazine cover as one in a series of problematic depths, or diseases dying to be resolved or resolved in the American not so unconscious mind. It is no accident that these revisions occur under the banner of the times we've come to call postmodern, Maryland seems to collage naturally, as she's so easily made into fragments and bits of speeches, clips from films part of a body, she was all women and no woman all access in the blank slate. And so as we engage in a battle to remake her, we attempt to construct a subject, which seems to express and relate the very problems of its own construction. This is especially true with suicides, we've created a particularly interesting and difficult surface by authoring a death which asks to be read as conscious and therefore possibly meaningful because it's authored.

Unknown Speaker  09:04
To reclaim the death of a suicide as a homicide is to rewrite a life story gone wrong and to make to get them of the suicide and a villain of the murderer. To rewrite the suicide as a conspiracy is to relocate meaning within the realm of the living to lay blame on institutions or persons who exist apart from the suicide and to hold them responsible for writing a coherent script, motive and reason that emerges byproducts of this reconstruction. They make the death readable by writing it in terms we recognize as coherent and sensible. A logic of death is replaced your biological life. The logic of the political logic of the historical illogical, presents itself as forthright and readable. This is the logic applied to the life death of Marilyn Monroe the constant search for meaning and her death, the story behind her suicide is waged so as to dispel the power of frighteningly unreadable form. But this dispelling literally on spelling and dispelling is never grounded in a single or simple resolution and rewriting when deconstruction leads to a series of reconstructions, and more deconstructors There are no longer one true death even if she didn't live one actual life there all these different kinds of lives that she was oh, so damn Sorry, I'm trying to not move my time. Well we are surrounded by are the writings and erasers of minification the vision of the American self are subject and postmodern America. Each writing tells us more about its author than its subject reveals more of our time, our obsessions, our ideologies, our struggles, our attempts to make meaning stick. The Maryland renaissance of the past few years is further an indication of the ongoing nature of this crisis in constructing the female subject. Maryland has been rewritten and prepared to express and embody myths and signs as diverse as a feminist heroine role model and Steinem and a foil to the Kennedys all American identity. For example, in summers, Norman Mailer has written her for and as his daughter and an actor studio performance of straw head in which he literally wrote a play about Monroe and his daughter play Monroe. And he's also as you know, probably written two books on on Monroe one in first person as if you were Monroe. That's a woman in their elegance. She is made to conform to the shapes required by the designs of her authors. She's transformed into Budweiser ads, or movie posters. Its new movie pretty cool. I don't know if you've seen that. They take the icon of the nude Maryland from the beer calendar and she's put her in Angel a prostitute suit with her new dye. And last night in Times Square I saw they have a huge Maxell tape billboard which is reflected sort of grotesquely distorted and all of the you know, Windows and things around and it says Maxell the legend oh no that the tape that lasts as long as the legend and a huge picture of Monroe. As she is made to extend everywhere she's lost as a human subject and born as either a sign or a surface figure or an icon. As Marilyn Monroe replicates, she becomes a simulacrum, which is a copy with a copy with no originals, which is most like itself when located and translated into surfaces and spaces perennially somewhere other than where the authentic or original self lives and that's where I'm gonna stop I could go on but I want to make sure that my I'm looking

Unknown Speaker  12:24
interestingly, my paper is is also about a movie star. What what, what I want to talk about is kind of the the pre postmodern moment that prints is fits into what Paige has talked about. And my title is called, as it says on the board the snake pit of postmodern memory, Frances farmer as the hysterical my femininity was mauled my power to reason. My power to reason simply I've got the quote wrong. Okay. My femininity was more of my power to reason our struggle clannish, I simply existed in chilling confusion. This is a quote taken from this autobiography by Francis former which he has been in hydrotherapy for over 24 hours. Francis far former movie star of the 1930s and 40s, a surface a body in the mind functioning today as a zone for interpretation of a certain historical shift, a place to map the history that is of hysteria, not in terms of her own diagnostic history so much as an historical epistemological paradigm. We're in bodies react and are acted upon, are used in terms of hysterical cultural visions, as well as the historical legacy of the hysterical body. Quote, hysteria in particular has adapted its symptoms to the ideas and mores current in each society, its predispositions and its basic features have remained more or less unchanged, unquote. That comes from the book by Elsa bytes called the history of hysteria. Hysteria then can be a clinical diagnosis a popular adjective for certain behavior, as well as the construction of a form of knowledge developed out of ideas of femininity, social norm, and the relation of the body to social historical, political and ideological meanings. It can also be a way of characterizing a form of dominant masculine is discourse at moments of crisis, when it seeks to control contain undermine various deviance, adopting the language of medicine and sexuality as a form of social control. I am particularly particularly interested in this paper in the relationship between bodies and knowledge between gender and epistemology, between the embodiment of knowledge by historical subjects and the way historical subjects react to knowledge through their bodies. Hysteria has particular significance in this regard. because it ranges over all of these areas. What I would like to do today is to just suggest some of the many ways that hysteria and history interact metaphorically and actually using just a piece from the friends as farmer story as symptomatic of a prefiguring of the post modern crisis in knowledge, subjectivity, and a crisis in historicity, as it is related to gender and sexuality of the individual and social body. I quote again, this is from a psychological monograph called hysteria, the elusive neurosis when considered and so this is a scientific backing up. When considered within a particular culture, the definition of hysteria remains elusive because the definition itself rests largely on the way in which the disorder uses cultural forms. Regardless of the culture specific content of those forms. The hysteric uses the dominant forms of his culture in a particular way, in an attempt to resolve conflict, and of quote, the use of dominant forms the embodiment of a historical context, history in hysteria, a trope that turns both ways, for there is history and hysteria, or reaction to dominant forms to personal histories, as well as hysteria in history. In other words, the period that I'm covering the post war pre war World War Two period is also the period prefiguring the hysteria of anti communism

Unknown Speaker  16:25
figurations of embodied knowledge hysteria becomes a way into history by looking at iconic moments where mind and body interface with each other rupturing the boundaries of both simultaneously precisely what evoked hysteria as an illness and cinema as a phenomena perform. When can read the reaction formations embedded in these figurations as struggles as representations of bodily epistemological shifts, somatic interpretations against the grain of specific context. Part one, the history of hysteria, this is quite short, and Susan will pick up much more on some of this, I'm just going to suggest an outbreak and epidemic of sorts erupting at the end of the 19th century among a certain class middle, in a certain milieu of Europe in America, within a certain race white out of certain bodies, women's figures a certain moment through its disease, a moment when certain bodies writhing and articulate pain are seen in feminist hindsight as flailing their body range anxiety, powerlessness, a master's in makers of the condition of the historical moment they are in. But instead of asking it from Bellion was mental pathology, we must ask whether mental pathology was suppressed rebellions was Elaine Showalter in her book, a female mount malady. So emerges hysteria not so much as a new disorder but as a prevailing social fact marking the latter half of the 19th century as the golden age of this illness. The 20th century inherits this 19th century legacy through the literature's and new experimental languages of wealth and Gilman and what Susan will be addressing, as well as in representations frozen in shortcodes documentation of the hysteric posing before his camera, or scientifically received the hysteric as an app the origin of psychoanalysis, or Bertha Pappenheim, celebrated activist feminist and writer during her time appears in her starring role as Ana Oh, a character and studies on hysteria, a book fused with the musings of science and imagination shortcodes in Freud's histories of hysteria are and is true of a very real illness experienced in very real ways. Hence, my invocation of Kuhlman Gilman, both experienced hysteria and wrote out of it, the but this story has been all too easily aligned with women made out of their femininity seen as an illness, which is a consequence of biology. The woman's misdirection up or down was for sensory seen as the cause of this illness, and it is the origin of its name, hysteria, both a reaction to men and upman. At once an actual disorder slides into the filters of the popular and scientific imagination of the 20th century. What what has resulted in the case of the hysterical personality is a picture of women in the words of men, and as a Paret perote, a perusal of these traits will show what the description sounds like amounts to a caricature of femininity exclamation point, in the quote. This is not a startling articulation, except that it is made by two prominent medical men in an article published in 1958. In the American Journal of Psychiatry, I wish to invoke the 19th century historic momentarily, not as a caricature nor merely a representation, but as a reminder, a reminiscence to be remembered, the signifier of a lived reality embedded in the social memory of the 20th century. part to the hysteric as history, history is hysteric.

Unknown Speaker  19:50
hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences Freud and Breyer tell us in their introduction to studies on hysteria, as this quote suggests, bodies overwhelmed by memories very deep curing pains and associations so untenable they are masked, layered converted into symptoms. Subjects made ill by the force of the past. That hysteric is an historical text, where the past erupts into the present as a symptom which must be read. traumas are uncovered slowly as the process of the investigating Doctor detective archivist on puzzles the pile of sets sifting through the various text documents symptoms, collecting them into a cure of insight, interpretation and knowledge. In a rate recent paper delivered at the University of California Santa Cruz called Make Believe mail subjectivity, Hollywood and World War Two, cause your Silverman transforms the very notion of history itself into an hysterical formulation, much like the hysterics riddled with history described above. Taking off from Frederick Jamison formulation that history is what hurts she states more imperatively the history is trauma. It is quote, a force capable of tearing a hole in the dominant fiction unquote. And she's using dominant fiction to equal ideology at this moment. History is trauma as rupture tears into the seams and fabrics of culture threatening significant signification as the individual hysteric is seem to be subject to the riddles of an historical moment. So history reacts in a hysterical manner, forcing the trauma into a conversion, a signification, which is controllable. She is concerned with the representation of male subjectivity of postwar Hollywood movies she sees in such films as pride of the Marines the best years of our lives. It's a Wonderful Life, a form of coping with the trauma of the return of a ravaged, fragmented ill and shell shocked male within these representations. Shell Shock is the first moment when men were seeing the hysterical it's called form of male hysteria. signification systems are produced which render the trauma of history into controllable images. The social body has become an hysterical body, some suffering from its own reminiscences varying the traumas of social upheaval, tension rifts of the dominant fiction into fictions shimmering across screens, which project outwardly the contradictions and anxieties of social sexual identity in relation to the trauma of historical process. The notion of history is trauma obviously suggest history as I intimated, but just the significant is the history Silverman has chosen to focus on cinematic representations of the late 40s in relation to the post war male subjectivity. It is at this time from 1945 to 1950. The Frances farmer is incarcerated in the state mental hospital stealing home in Seattle, Washington, and she's placed in the violent border. fittingly enough, in her description of what is known as the women's film. Marianne Dolan makes the following statement and women's films were the were films made for a female audience at this exact time and she describes them as quote, there is an almost obsessive association of the female protagonist with a deviation from some norm of mental stability, or health resulting in the recurring investigation of psychical mechanisms, frequently linked with the feminine condition. masochism, hysteria, neurosis and paranoia. While Silverman evokes a social moment where history read is trauma infiltrates the psyche of a post war, male subjectivity and don't uncover the representational schema, a discursive community of and for women, which images the instability of their subjectivity within the familiar paradigm of pathology, Francis pharma, no mere Phantasm or disembodied subject, but renegade star fallen from the graces of the Hollywood dream machine exists, as I quoted in the beginning of this paper in chilling confusion.

Unknown Speaker  23:34
Part three, the realities of fantasy, the snake pit and Frances farmer in 1945, and that's when he looked back, an army colonel was allowed to read the galleys of maraging Ward's novel The Snake Pit, from which he would eventually make a film of the same title one characterized incidentally in Don's description of the women's film. He described his interest in the film as wanting to, quote, awaken public interest in the vital matter to reassure people that mental disorder is an illness which can be cured, and to direct attention to facilities now available in our institutions. And of quote, in 1945, Frances farmer was committed to steal a coal mine her mother, she already had a previous record a social memory of sorts of institutionalization in Hollywood hospital hospital, ostensibly for a drunk driving charge, but in reality due to her hysterical and offensive behavior in front of a police authorities, where she exhibited outright contempt and disregard for Hollywood, and any vestige of an image of femininity, which was socially acceptable at the time. This memory of a previous app offense as well as her continued rage against Hollywood, traditional institutions such as marriage and femininity. She drank smoked use foul language, was a loner was described as dressing salt sloppily, made it quite easy for her mother to commit her 1945 the year the conceptual conceptualization of the film The Snake Pit took place. In 1948, the snake pit was really At least hailed as a revelation on mental health. Now I have a long quote here that I'm actually not going to read but what it's from this biography by William Arnold called Shadow Lin and he described his year 1948. And he talks about how at that moment, there were such, the institutions were so overcrowded, they started to use electric shock and lithotomy as ways of sort of trying to make more passive movers in the institution. And then he talks about how the place where friends former was, they brought in Dr. Freeman, who lobotomized her and a lot of mice many of the women and in the description the botany room was described as an operating theatre which for people who are familiar with the history of hysteria, hysteria, in, in France struck Sherco, the doctor who sort of brought hysteria out in a way, you said, situate women in a in a kind of theater to so Frances farmer Postman lithotomy is an actress now who will no longer suffer from reminisce reminiscences. Note how the room where the lithotomy is performance described as an operating theatre pack, packed with many different kinds of of spectators. From hypnosis to lithotomy, an infiltration and enrichment of a female imagination may be traced. This is a quote by Dr. Freeman describing what he sees lithotomy as why, what it does basically, quote, the patients for who this operation brings the best results are those who are tortured with self concern, who suffer from terribly painful disabling self consciousness, whether it expresses itself in pains of the body organs or terrible distress from feelings of persecution. In order ordinary language, the technique severs the nerves that deliver emotional power to ideas, along with a cure from some loss in the patient's imaginative power. But that's what we want to do. They are sick in their imaginations. And Frances former terrible icon of rebellious femininity represents a sickness a trauma to the social and imaginings of a time. It it is her imagination and the likes of once regarded as similarly deviant at the time, political subversives, communist homosexuals, which is seen as sick. As the emotional aspect of her mind is being severed as its imagination is cured of its power Hollywood produces in imagining the snake pit, a filmic representation a surface to protect and bury the wound, which replaces consumes becomes an icon of this age is historical memory.

Unknown Speaker  27:36
This historical coincidence of the release of the snake pit celebrated at the time for depicting insanity with terrifying precision, as well as for doing quote what Hollywood had rarely done before look harsh reality in the time on quote, with the literal actual D realization of the imagination of one of Hollywood's once upon a time icons of movie star femininity resonates horrifically with a glance at the credits of the film, playing a minor but significant role as a psychiatrist in the latter part of the film is Leif Erickson, who had been Francis farmers husband in the 30s when she was in Hollywood. He plays the overseer of the violent ward where Virginia played by Olivia de Havilland is said after a breakdown at this very moment Erickson's ex wife is in an actual violent word, a social memory and capable of repressing the trauma of farmers absence from memory at this moment in time, forces the appearance of Erikson as a kind of Uncanny symptom, a layer of association figuring in muted, unrecognized macabre unreality, the wound of the confined in the bottom eyes rebellious wife. I say this because I've never heard anybody mentioned that Erikson is in this film or playing this role. I do not draw the connection between Erickson and pharma for nostalgia, romance, or even in order to ask whether he liked the other stars in the film research this part in order to achieve the clinical accuracy, for which in the case of De Havilland the film was acclaimed, no, their marriage was long over, it was apparently a creation of the climate of idealized Hollywood heterosexuality, rather than any bond between lovers at the time, but the connection is a fundamental one since it is the inability of pharma to adapt to the kind of social conformity that marriage represents, which was seen as a sign of strangeness. marriage as a sign of cure is also the moral of the snake pit. As Leslie Fishbein has said, the film quote celebrates the efficacy of psychoanalysis and restoring its heroine to mental health, a cure which transforms Virginia from the psychotic who rejects her husband, who cannot recognize him at the beginning of the film into the responsible knowing why at the end. As Fishman continues he says, that's why the snake pit one public acclaim for its realistic treatment of the theme of mental illness is more central concern was the crisis in modern womanhood, which popularized Freudian Freudian ism had promised to solve by its parallel with femininity and mental health and quote, significantly in the beginning of the film, would Virginia sees the hospital as it prisoner Dr. kickers Award and the social criticisms are seen as the ravings of a mad woman. It is here that the residues of a rebellious femininity red is deranged as the rantings of a woman with no organic ills for there's no reasons for her ramblings are muted red is the products of a sick imagination. Farmers disdain for Hollywood as an institution was also seen to be the ravings of someone quote, hopelessly insane, unquote. In this sense, like a hysteric, in the in the depiction quoted earlier, it is the cultural dominance of the historical moment which farmer rebels against, specifically the image or plot space of femininity, which is the sign of mental health in the snake pit. It is important to remember that hysteria is an actual manifestation of frustrations, angers traumas, and acted through bodies at war with the demands of the genders and the demands of sexual conventions. It is a disorder emerging out of ambivalence as well as reflect reflecting an ambivalence of patriarchy with non conventional sexuality, desires and expressions. The 19th century hysteric is seen to be reacting to the silencing of for period to a reality which offers no figuration for the legitimate pursuit of an intellectual, creative, productive life. And so the body bursts forth tortured meanings as desperate language muted porn experimental, representing the desperation to contest and remake the masculine discourse of the time. There is no revolution in hysteria, as there was no revolution for Pharma. But it does figure the dilemmas of the rejection of femininity and therefore it must be read the seriousness performer has now been reclaimed as reclaimed as synonymous with a feminine rage. And I've heard I think there's even another a depthless surface shimmering into the dispersions of the postmodern cultural dominant pharma herself lobotomized removed, the promotional aspect exists as the chilling confusion of this hysterical sublime embodying for us the crisis in history, the trauma of the loss of reminiscences which characterize according to Jameson, the very condition of the postmodern.

Unknown Speaker  32:58
Want to start out by thanking whose work has been important to me and thinking through what I've done here in this paper. And I also want to warn you and comment on the fragmentary condition of this paper, which is deliberate. But there are going to be times when I pause, and go on to something that may seem unrelated, but is related just in not, maybe an immediately obvious way, I hope, I hope the reason for that will become clearer. And also, these are examples of what I'm talking about in the paper. And I've blown them up like this, because to emphasize the way in which their visual arrangement on the page is as important as the content that they're trying to convey, and that they have been arranged in this way. very deliberately. I mean, they, it's been suggested by some women poets working in this tradition that their work should be displayed, like a show in a gallery rather than reading a book. So this is my display of it. Okay, page and there's a focused on a postmodern moment and a modernist turning postmodern moment in constructions and representations of women. And I want to turn now to some of the fictions modernist women have constructed themselves. And the ways in which the poetics of forming these construction have been inherited and transformed by some contemporary women writers especially call it early 20th century British and American women writers inherited the predominantly white and middle class 19th century debate around the woman question. With the large increase of women writing in the 19th century. One of the main issues around which the woman question debate, revolved was women's proper relation to writing and literature. These discussions focused on the links between sexuality and art, and I quote, in mid 19th century discussions of women and literature the sexually laden language suggests two theories. According to one female imagination is a volatile and highly erotic force that must be repressed or at least controlled. According to the other women's writing is a sign of sexual and emotional frustration. Both must be seen against the prevailing assumption that artistic creation is like the sexual act a male activity in which women have only an extremely restricted part. That the Saturday Review reminds readers in 1865. female nature mental as well as physical is essentially receptive and non creative. From the mid to late Victorian period, there was a remarkable increase of madness of institutionalization and of publication among women. At this time and on into the early 20th century, the contradictory demands and expectations on women to be in the midst of an increasingly industrialized society. Representatives have feminine purity and order and to be perfectly controlled in their conduct and skilled in domestic managerial capacities coincided with the growing fear of female sexuality.

Unknown Speaker  36:08
In reading the fiction and poetry written by many modernist women with Freud's late Victorian analysis of female hysterics, it is striking to see what could be called a poetics of hysteria emerge. For hysterics, this was a grammar of some of some versions spoken through the body and in words, there's a has described, but not written, at least not by Freud's hysterics, although perhaps by Freud himself. For the women writers it is a subversion of grammar and other given rules of ordering words on the page. This refusal to follow receive rules of composition also had the impact of producing bodies of writing that were diagnosed by male critics or writer authorities as abnormal, unhealthy and really feminine way. As there's another's have suggested, hysteria can be viewed as an expression of the desire to escape the strangulating demands of repressive patriarchal bourgeois family and social expectation. The classic symptoms of hysteria loss of voice, loss of the use of a limb complete mutinous, stammering coughs, loss or disorder of memory, hallucinations, nightmares and hostility. fragmentation of logical trains of thought, can all be seen as attempts to break out of social roles by exaggerated identification with what was considered feminine, or through exploration of alternate modes of experiencing and describing the world. The symptoms shared by poems and novels that were healthy and made sense. Like hysterics, when recovered a normal was that they both to art were able to tell linear narratives proceeding along logical sequences of thought, rather than falling in there telling through a steep kilter of association, fragmentation, mute spaces on the page, palimpsest ik memory overlays, hostile harangues or hallucinatory lapses. Freud wrote for instead of his hysterics, and was himself disturbed by the mode in which he wrote up these case histories. And this is Freud, it still strikes me myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories, and vet, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science, I must concern myself with the reflection that the nature of the subject that is women, hysterical women, is evidently responsible for this, rather than any preference of my own. The fact is that local diagnosis and electrical reactions lead nowhere in the study of hysteria, whereas a detailed description of mental processes such as we are accustomed to find in the works of imaginative writers, enables me with the use of a few psychological formulas to obtain at least some kind of insight into the course of that affection. And as Bernheimer says of Freud, the sheer complication of the processes to be represented at the meta level, forces Freud to resort to a language of similes. So science in this matter of psychology often speaks in the figures of poetry. And since such figuration as Freud noted in 1897, has much in common with hysterical fantasies. One might argue that Freud's ambivalence about the literary aspect of of his work reflects his uneasy awareness of his own hysterical potential. And as Freud himself said, the mechanism of poetry is the same as that of hysterical fantasies. It is a terrible thing for a man to be forced to resort to a language of similes. And this is from Norman O'Brien. It is but reorganized by me is a tip it is terrible for a girl to be a wall. I am that tree. That's the rain. I could be the rain that share that wall. Every Raven girl is a delphic priestess or Daphne's saying I am that it is a terrifying thing for a girl to be chased and turned into a laurel. More terrible still when she who is Daphne is poetry begins to write. I do not wish to imply that modernist or contemporary experimentalist women writers are hysterics. Instead, I want to call attention to this coincidence in representation. That is no accident. hysterics, women writers, Freud all attempt to articulate something that is socially rampant that their historical moment, hysterical symptoms existed and continue to exist. But as in current discussions of AIDS, it is the moral overtones in these debates that manifest widespread social anxiety about sexuality and morality in the early century, and

Unknown Speaker  40:51
how to take behavior and communication coded deviant as sources that offer possible forms for a different coherence, or as precedent for a comprehensible kind of incoherence. How does this get translated into writing, working notes? The origin of weeks, my friend, the writer Barbara Rosenthal, gave me a page a day diary last Christmas to encourage me to write. Not saying words anymore, I looked for another source. I found it in the TV news, which accounts for the bulk of the material. I typed it up week by week, which accounts for the title spoke was written clairvoyantly I saw the words in small groups on my forehead, and wrote them down in a notebook. The large words were seen on the notebook page. I wrote it one summer, late at night, in bed in my mother's home. This is from the most recent issue of however, on which I'm an editor, however, is a journal for poets and scholars interested in modernist innovative directions and women's poetry. These are what we call working notes from the poet Hannah Wiener, and in this poem, she calls what she is doing hysterical form. This is the poem one of the poems that was published with those working notes. You can't see it but she comments on it here and underlyings form. We request the contributors right working notes, something like short casual case histories of their own imaginative mental processes to accompany their poetry. poetic line is Kathleen phrase your state is a primary defining place, the site of watchfulness where we discover how we hear ourselves, take in the outside world, and tell it back to ourselves. There are very few great poets who have not taken chance with the line, perceived it as a tool for reassembling language to a new order one's own at that moment. For this reason, the frame of the page measure of the line has provided for many contemporary women poets, the difficult pleasure of reinventing the givens of poetry, imagining and visual structural terms, core states of female social and psychological experience, not yet adequately tracked hesitancy, silencing or speech lessness continuous disruption of time, illogical resistance, simultaneous perception, social marginality. The experiences Fraser lists as manifest in the line, locate the juncture of kinds of subjectivity turned into kind of aesthetic choices concerned with formal aspects of writing the complex relationship between syntax multiple viewpoint shifting narrative voices layering of meaning, the arrangement of language on the page are only a few elements of a poetics that, to speak very generally was characteristically modern, modernist. These concerns in themselves reflect a modernist discomfort with the relationship between subjectivity and representation, a discomfort quite different for female modernists than for male. Female modernist writers were often seen by contemporaries such as LB and Elliot, as receptacle like muses rather than active agents. Thus, the kinds of subjectivity and poetics that many of these writers present are posed against dominant notions of what is naturally feminine by women who are already unnatural by virtue of writing. One of the traits that often distinguishes their work from that and experimenting male modernists which there were a lot of is a concern with gender constructions themselves as featured issues of importance to explore within and through the structure of the poem.

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Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson, a contemporary of wolves, and one of the first to experiment from the point of view of a woman's consciousness with the form of the novel, as well as many modernist poets feature the dismantling of feminine essences, and what Burke has called a critique of attention in their critical poetic and fictive writing. In fiction and poetry. This critique of attention can be witnessed by looking at the arrangements of language on the page when or if it's been experienced as a constraint, it becomes itself a deliberate tool for making meanings. As with the demonstration of the female hysterics body, if we look on defensively at what may at first appear chaotic visual cues remind us to attend to our own automatic habits of reading for content and plot to reorient and read here for something else. That may not be a story, though it is a narrative that tells us greater suggests, while the unit of sense is still the sentence, the unit of our attention is the line and our interest is captured or deflated by how that line is articulating its subject. What can an accurate skeletal picture reveal about the subject or if the subject is yet to be brought into focus? What learned prohibitions have women poets worked against to uncover and catch partial knowledge? What is the subject itself is resistance, vulnerability, seeming lack of will the condition self denial that creates uncertainty, unsteadiness in the world. Richardson HD Mina Loy Stein Neidich are law writing Jackson and other modernist innovating writers all share with Woolf in perpetually wishing, as she says in her 1929 essay, women and fiction to alter the established values to make serious what appears insignificant to a man and trivial what is to him important. In her critical essay Women in the Arts, Richardson describes an inclusive awareness from which men for good or ill are exempt. In the introduction to our 13th Volume epic novel pilgrimage, Richardson explains that in attempting to invent an alternative to the current masculine realism, she has developed a method that captures 100 faces of revelation by direct statement on the page of the early 20th century British novel, the profile of Richardson's heretic line use was thought to be dull, obsessive experimental in the worst sense of what feminist experiments could bring, and it was more rarely loved. This is a page from one of her novels, help honeycomb and closer you can see how it's very oddly constructed on the page and it goes on with lots of variations throughout the 13 volumes, like that. Okay, HD introduced the concept of the palimpsest writing on top of other writing, memory on memory, which through time and benign or active neglect has been imperfectly erased, defaced or lost. Stein introduced the concept of a continuous present, Emily Dickinson gave formed hesitation breaking lines at the point where one Emily hesitate to speak another. Mina Loy and Lauren knee Decker, condensed to a shorthand of bare bones acute and shifting observation, laced with images stick and ironic social critique, and marry and more plays constantly with grammatical authority and authorial presence, beginning of home with thought, dismantling in the end of a poem, a statement presented as an answer in the beginning. These and many other modernist experimenting women writers are usually viewed as Burke has pointed out as isolated cases, rather than as a group of women who, due to a convergence of historical circumstances, class positions and their marginal relations to white male dominant discourses as both desired privileged objects and colonized subjects found it necessary to question inherited notions of their proper places in their own writing. And in their early 20th century British or US context. There is danger and being thought of as an isolated case, rather than as one of many women subverting the given forms and orderings of subjects and writing. One of the hazards and being thought of as an isolated case, and one which has occurred to most of the writers I've mentioned, is exclusion from the male literary canon. There's currently an even more alarming danger of double exclusion from the male and also from the forming canon of women's literature. A recent example of this is the deletion from the new Norton Anthology of women writers of Mina Loy law writing Jackson, Jane Bowles married butts Laurine Decker and the contemporary poet, novelist, Barbara guest, among many others. The Norton Anthology is of course, one of the most often used texts for the teaching of high school and college writing and literature throughout this country. The two highly respected feminist critic editors of this new edition have subtitled the tradition in English.

Unknown Speaker  49:34
This absence of work by experimental women writers is duplicated in other anthologies and journals in the US at a time when there is an overabundance, literally 1000s of literary magazines and journals a time called by some a virtual renaissance in American poetry. As Marianne de COVID describes in her recent women's Review of Books article gertrudes granddaughters the fact that one hardly ever sees the writers I will just Guss hear mentioned in print except by one another is particularly surprising given the widespread interest among feminist critics in French theory, which emphasizes precisely the kinds of formal dislocations these writers employ. One hears of the language poets occurred predominantly male American avant garde, they occupy a margin that has become a recognized position in the American literary scene. As long as an experimental writer whose signature is female aligns herself with the language poets. She has a place on the Literary Map. The price she pays a price familiar to all of us is twofold, the question of gender will be erased and declared a non issue and at the same time, it is less likely than if her signature were male, that you will become one of the stars even in that time firmament. The sheer complication of the processes to be represented at the metal level forces, it forces Freud to resort to a language of similes. More terrible still, when she who is a tree is Daphne begins to move her limbs to attend to her own nature. Working notes on or Jonathan. At first, I was struck because the dark spot in each one repainting, which opens like a lot or porthole reminds me of his mouth. And in that way, landscape is a portrait. When I think back over something, it isn't just a postage stamp stamp, it has its own nips to give. I tried to see the cornfield, in which I grew up, but instead of a ribbon of vision, each part opens and fractures emotionally, the kind of thing that makes me want to flinch into my own shoulders, and the break of surface seems to happen at each point. And deeper. I become very vulnerable, as if there were a story which I can only get my body Partway into the rest is barred, blackened, really never was, as her language never was is part of diversity and rhythm, seizing on new tones and fields, new hallucination, like the paintings I do in my sleep, more person lying than a place. These working notes from another issue of however, Echo descriptions of hysterical symptoms and the echoes ricochet elsewhere, throughout the work of experimentalists, women writers, to COVID sketch of what is at stake for women and understanding that their aesthetics is at the same time and scription of a subjectivity. And agreement to or breaking of laws defining the proper behavior for a poem or a woman has ramifications. I watched the ramifications circulate the difficulty of publishing, I watched student writing change when exposed to this tradition, the ways in which tradition can serve as precedent and permission to remind writers that they are not isolated cases, the anxiety that women present when they represent the imagined and gendered place of that which is impossible to represent, to make rationally coherent, the roaming female womb, the dangerous female imagination embodied in the erotic act of a woman writing. Last paragraph of a review of however, by prominent male poet, I have yet to meet anyone who has been able to sit and read Gertrude Stein for more than an hour at a stretch. KENNETH Rexroth alone has had the balls to say so in print, or to remain excited by HD after 20 pages or so. These things are primary goddesses behind the sort of writing. A poem is not a dictionary, a poem is not a set of easy metaphysical speculations on the nature of grammar, guilt, or the primal flood. Let's not keep the trope flying. Let's strangle the little creature in his crib before He soiled his pants and screws up our life. Needless to say, we still inherit the woman question debate.

Unknown Speaker  54:05
In the face of that mutinous inability to speak, the talking cure for those who need to be given rules about how to tell their stories, the obvious balls of the poem should suffice to enforce to strangle infantile feminine talk before it makes a mess of a perfectly clean page. I'm going to end by reading a poem, which is what you all have called the colors in the story. This poem is about an actual event of separation that occurred, and it is also about the severity of the separation and dislocation experience in the urgency of writing about anything. It has a narrative thread that moves through the poem, but the narrator is not in one place or of one mind. Each section of the poem works like a spot to walk around. Each time you stop there is a different view of the convergence of events, a different arrangement of sense and a different sensory image that tells each section is a variation of the way that the story literally lines up a new entry into the field of what has happened

Unknown Speaker  55:17
in the story, someone said, Drink water. Someone else opened a window saying peel, the orange and a perfect spiral. Sometimes the egg was an explosive mining the socket of her gut, acid light white of shell, washing her where hands can enter water, water and what comes after the light of the story spoken after biting into an orange sliver. After what Burns is white again. There are two worlds. In one she is in labor forever. Submarine life. We all focus on her face and opening animal watch. comings and goings, no daylight or darkness. The pressure of water kept off all around us. Time collapsed to its cuticle. In the other book, she speaks to her zero and embraces the other one. She says let your skin part without pulling off mine. Let lips part. You are a sliver dissolving on my tongue. A crescent slipping the horizon. You're what's left of our suction. It was called Summer, yet she felt no gravity in the middle. That word the weather came up fever glaze on burnished metal sky. Glass son on redwoods morning unstoppable. In the mirror her legs turn to marble, succulent and stark as the surrounding Magnolia flesh in all stages of bloom. Without training she new laser surgery to cut with fine light to bond with heat, a steady hand threaded invisibly to an unblinking eye. The absence before earthquakes, no clatter of birds, no clutter at the node of the gut. Three gestures so quick that the attendants miss the execution of Sumi painting, severing of space by line arc of Iris Cleves site of pistol poles are Glantz stem to leaf pull a perfect fit no longer perfect beheading that heals if a bird is trapped in the house what you have to do after what burns it's white again she rinses her hands of the colors in the story water water and what comes after is left as a submarine surfaces with those white fingers she candles the orange holding it up to the flame thing veins arteries cartilage someone else saying pockets of juice dark tight she fits one swollen section to another twin to twin tiny core muscles shining saying and fitting to make her body returned with what is said she places her voice on the table thank you the last

Unknown Speaker  58:39
20 minutes and then we'll have discussion around this is going to be quite long but you can follow the cables without the slides

Unknown Speaker  59:19
okay it doesn't shut it off okay. It's perhaps a little break in the continuity.

Unknown Speaker  59:42
My