highlyeccentric | Books! I read some!

Read recently:

Cranford, Elizabeth Gaskell

This was just -adorable-. It is, as

chally summed up a large swathe of 'literature', a story about 'unfortunate white women who can only afford one maid, the poor things'. But it is, I contend, a particularly adorable instance of this genre. It's a quiet, unhurried story about mildly amusing thigs which happen to irrevocably provincial people in a town where, although men exist, 'society' is dominated by unmarried or widowed ladies with nothing better to do than gossip.

I found it interesting that the novel began by proclaiming Cranford to be the domain of the Amazons (read: independant if fussy single ladies), but progressively over the course of the novel, more and more male characters are integrated into their circle, and the story ends with one of said men taking up the role of Chief Manipulator Of Social Relations In This Town.

Also Elizabeth Gaskell did not, I suspect, have the faintest idea about British India. I feel it is unlikely that the wife of a serving officer in the British army would be left to hike! by herself! through dangerous jungles! all the way to calcutta! I don't know much about colonial era India, but I'm pretty sure they didn't let middle class women go wandering around in the jungle as a matter of course.

Looking Like What You Are: Sexual Style, Race, and Lesbian Identity, Lisa Walker

This was an interesting but slippery book. It is, on the one hand, about the tenuous place of femme-presenting women in lesbian literature. It is also about the use of race and racial markers as analogies for sexual identity, especially in lesbian literature. It is about the troubling notion of 'passing'in both sexual and racial politics; and it is about identification and difference in the construction of group identities (gender, race), especially in literature.

I believe that the book's key argument is that the role of 'passing' and people who can 'pass' is problematic but under-explored in identity politics of both racial and sexual identity groups; that the privileging of visible signs of difference has obvious benefits in both discussions but marginalises those who do not carry said visible signs, and also misses an opportunity to explore other facets of identity.

I get the feeling Lisa Walker had trouble keeping the two key figures (the light-skinned woman and the femme lesbian) and their associated discourses together and relating them to one another in each section of the book. In the chapter on Jane Eyre/Wide Saragosso Sea/Abeng, particularly, lesbians dropped out entirely in favour of female homosocial identification, which was interesting, but not entirely cohesive. On the other hand, in the opening chapter on the Well of Loneliness, race figures primarily insofar as lightness (as an aspect of femme beauty) is racialised, so I think that balances out. In her conclusion, Walker acknowledges that her own discourse struggles to keep the two aspects equally prominent without creating inappropriate or reductive analogies between them.

It was a slippery book. But an interesting one.