Daily Writing #6
Monday, February 20
As I organize more sources for this paper it becomes clearer to me that I need to narrow my focus and my thesis a bit. Talking effectively about all the hired girls and all the issues surrounding them is going to be difficult in a fifteen page paper. I still want to explore how language, time, and place factors into the construction of the hired girls and their position in Blackhawk, but I’m increasingly more focused on the ways a community defines femininity and sexuality, and the ways in which the hired girls move through and around those definitions. A societies need to enforce a certain kind of proper femininity for its accepted women by using the marginalized hired girls as an example of sexuality that must be contained and controlled shows the play between pleasure and power the Foucault discusses but it also opens up the discussion of what a woman becomes and how she relates when she is the thing that must be suppressed and contained for the common good. I’m interested in the idea of female masculinity as something that constructs not only a female/male binary, but as a part of the construct of masculinity as a whole, something that cannot be separated from classical western definitions of the masculine.
Tuesday, February 21
Annotated Bibliogrpahy entry:
Kinnison, Dana. "Images of Possibility: Gender Identity in Willa Cather’s My Àntonia. “Women in Literature: Reading through the Lens of Gender. Ed. Jerilyn Fisher and Ed. Ellen S. Silber. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003. 205-207. Print.
Kinnison falls into the trap of conventional feminism which is so easy because it is a story we like so much to tell. Plucky self-reliance and “masculine” traits of physical strength, financial intelligence, and ambition make the hired girls in My Ántonia exceptional examples of femininity. She oversimplifies the questions and complications of female experience, and the ways in which we consider gender, access and choice. Her brief analysis is valuable to me because of its contrast. Her article is published in an anthology titled: Women in Literature: Reading through the Lens of Gender, which is valuable to me because it enforces the ways in which we continue to limit the definition of femininity in terms of a gender binary which only travels between gender signifiers. The way she portrays Antonia and Lena closely parallels my introductory comparisons to Laura Ingalls as an example of the quintessential frontier female. Kinnison says, “Àntonia’s full significance is not only as a flesh-and-blood figure but as a spirit, a Muse: an inspirational and invigorating life force identified with the new country, clearly feminine and beautiful yet not overly delicate” (207). Her article is designed to examine questions and themes an educator might raise when reading Cather in the classroom. The reduction of Antonia to a “muse” is highly valuable as a contrast to my thesis.
Wednesday February 22
In class writing outline mapping:
Title—Sexuality, Power and the Position of the female “other” in Willa Cather’s My Antonia.
Introduction—Iconic imagery of settling the west, and the ideal frontier woman—Laura Ingalls
Thesis: Access to language, nationality, and a system of sexual compulsion and repression create a framework in which the hired girls can function just outside of, but not removed from, acceptable Blackhawk communities. Because they function as the “other” against which the community establishes it’s social and sexual morays, they have a more complicated relationship to their femaleness than the more proper town girls whose choices are limited by their position.
The New Americans and access to language
- Research—Saussure Course in General Linguisitics
- social contract of language
- language must be acquired in an apprenticeship
- Who is considered American
- What it means to the Hired Girls to be first generation immigrants.
Comparisons between the town girls and the hired girls
- Research—Toni Morrison’s Romancing the shadow
- Text examples—
- the way the hired girls are in their bodies, as opposed to the town girls who are cut outs or floating heads with no bodies in motion.
- Wick Cutter—“bad girls” get pregnanent/ Rape discussion.
Thursday February 23
Annotated Bibliography entry
Laird, David, "Willa Cather's Women: Gender, Place, and Narrativity in O Pioneers! and My Antonia" (1992). Great Plains Quarterly (1992). 242-253. Print.
Laird writes about the characters of My Antonia in relationship to their specific time and place on the Nebraska frontier. Unlike other male scholars I have read on this subject, he does not dismiss the duality of the female experience, a need to fit both within the framework of a society, and within the psychic framework of one’s own experience. He does not, like so many others reduce Antonia and the hired girls to one dimensional, stock characters. He is willing to consider how place, the solitary experience of homesteading, and Cather’s own experience of living in Nebraska shapes a unique feminine perspective. He argues against the feminist idea that the woman author cannot write an authentic female voice because the nature of authorship requires a female novelist to insert herself into a masculine field. He argues that an author’s ability to write in a unique and successful way from within the patriarchal structure of bookmaking is evidence that the structure itself does not fully exist. I find this line of inquiry to be a fertile one for further research and examination as I am very interested in the ways female authors contain their voice in male narrators, as Cather so blatantly does with Jim Burden. This vein of Laird’s research may not have significant relevance to my current thesis, but will be valuable for later exploration. For the purposes of my current research I will focus on his discussion of the complications of female duality.
Friday February 24
My work today is focused on reading thoroughly and lifting specific passages from new sources that I would like to incorporate into my argument. I will be thoroughly reorganizing and outlining my existing draft over the next two weeks, and today I want to significantly narrow my focus and determine which sources will be included in my final paper. I am more focused on reading and narrowing focus than drafting today.
