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The Iterability of the Woman Condition: a Derridean Reading of Glaspell’s Trifles

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2016

Derrida defines artifactualities as artificially made norms by institutions and hierarchies which turn into conventions over time in dominating mankind, conventions which must be recognized and dismantled. Every particular event or presence can assume its singularity outside such biased tautology by iterating itself to generate its own specific body of norms in supplementing itself. Accordingly, this study tries to highlight the female logic and the iterability of the woman condition against patriarchal artifactualities in Glaspell's Trifles (1916). The women of the play illuminate a world invisible to patriarchy, an overlooking gaze blurred by artifactualities. Dismantling the binary opposition of male/female, the play highlights the singularity of females in discussing the truth of its events. Moreover, the women's aporetic decision in the play not to reveal Minnie's killing motive is an attempt to defend the female cause and highlight the iterability of the woman condition against patriarchy. Thus, the researchers aim at interpreting Trifles through a Derridean perspective to dig up and open up the stifled woman question against patriarchal artifactualities. Contrasting the collective female knowledge to logocentrism, this study illuminates Glaspell's attempt at foregrounding the unique sphere of women's knowledge over patriarchal artifactualities. Glaspell anticipates Derrida's remarks in turning logocentrism and artifactualities over their heads in favor of the singularity of any phenomena which can iterates itself to proof its unique position outside artifactialities.

The underestimated power of woman In Susan Glaspell’s Trifle

لارك

This paper examines the theme of feminism through focusing on the female bonding as a means of gaining power .In this paper I’ll prove that the America dramatist Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) makes a feminist leap as she portrays her female characters with an ample cunning to secretly and humbly triumph over male prejudice. She challenged those who believed that the United States offered freedom and equality by demonstrating that women were not treated equally since they were excluded from participating in the justice system except as defendants the underestimated power of woman in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles (1916) which is written in the early twentieth century but it transcends time periods and cultures.

Language and Gender in Susan Glaspell’s Trifle (1916)

مجلة وادی النیل للدراسات والبحوث الإنسانیة والاجتماعیة والتربویه

Trifles is a one-act play that premiered in 1916, which discusses social construction of women in a male-dominated society in the 1980s. It reflects patriarchal oppression exercised against women in an era that belittles women's right of independence and freedom. This paper puts into focus the submissive gender roles of women, paying special attention to the relationship between language and gender as major elements in forming female identity. This paper provides an analysis of the play which is inspired by sociolinguistics, language and gender, dealing with language as a social phenomenon that reflects differing uses of language based on individuals' gender differences. First, this paper will deal with the discussion of the relationship between gender and language in Susan Glaspell's Trifles. Second, it will explore the linguistic features used by women that reveal the oppressive gender roles of women at that time. It will shed light on gender differences in language use which perpetuate the subjugation of women.

A Drama of Detection: Susan Glaspell's Trifles

Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesi Dergisi

Though Susan Glaspell's well-known one-act play Trifles (1916) has been predominantly framed by the themes of female condition at the turn of the twentieth-century United States, it is intrinsically built on the concepts of detection and crime. The dramatic text reveals a narrative tendency that keeps deferring the detection of a case of murder committed within the farmhouse of the Wright family. Against the backdrop of its social and cultural context, the play gives voice to its female characters in the inspection of the crime whereas the male characters fail to detect the motivation behind the murder. This article argues that Trifles can be construed as a feminist crime account whose language and structure are couched in a narrative of deferral. The play subtly illustrates that the story of investigation not only shakes the strict bounds of convention but it also divulges precariousness of social justice particularly for women in the early twentieth-century United States.

Appropriating women: The violence and potential liberation of textual revolutions

2009

This dissertation relates the violence perpetuated by phallogocentric traditions of reading and writing to the violence of appropriating traditional categories of gender and asks whether or not and how texts that resist these traditions might help us change the way we think about identities, our own and others', opening up a space for new and as yet un-thought ways of exchanging texts and the identities they make possible. Focusing on the ways in which Jacques Derrida's Éperons, Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, and Elena Garro's "La culpa es de los Tlaxcaltecas" and "El árbol" interminably reverse the roles of readers and writers, further disorienting them with the complex blend of genres in their texts and the networks of other texts that they juxtapose with their own, leads to the conclusion that the ultimate revolutionary function of these texts is to be found in the ways that they suspend the processes of appropriation and identification indefinitely, giving time, namely the time of waiting, but also time that is filled with the constant weaving of narratives, maintaining the possibility that a way out of historical cycles of violence, especially the violence of being forced to fit within current categories, might be found. iii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Cristina Dahl received a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English from California State University, Chico in 1997, a Master of Arts Degree in English from California State University, Chico in 2001, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University in 2009. She currently teaches full time in the English Department at Butte Glenn Community College in Oroville, California. Her primary interests lie in comparing historical representations of gender in a variety of different genres and media in European and Mexican culture, including fiction, philosophy, painting, photography, sculpture, and film. She is also interested in the relationship between ethics, hermeneutics, and pedagogy. iv I would like to dedicate this dissertation to Michael and Groverlee Dahl. Without their constant support over the past two years, I could never have completed this project. I would also like to thank Aaron, who continues to inspire me and who patiently and unwaveringly supported me through many years of just reading, writing, and thinking, a gift and a debt that I can never fully return. I would like to thank Lisa Patti, Ana Rojas, and Angela Naimou for showing me what an ideal network of reading and writing can look like, another gift that defies response, and I will be forever grateful. Finally, I would like to thank Jonathan Culler, Ellis Hanson, and Debra Castillo for their thoughtful and thought-provoking feedback on my first draft, which I will continue to take into consideration as I proceed to other projects. I also want to thank them for exposing me to so many rich texts and asking so many provocative questions in the seminars they taught. Again, I hope I may continue to respond to these questions for many years to come. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to acknowledge the graduate school at Cornell University, for the Sage Fellowship that allowed me to focus exclusively on my research during my last year at Cornell and for the Provost's Diversity Fellowship, which also allowed me to take a semester off from teaching to complete that research.

Fantasies of Gender and the Witch in Feminist Theory and Literature, Purdue University Press: 2008

Focusing on the contemporary representations of the 'witch' as a locus for the cultural negotiation of genders, this book revisits some of the most prominent traits in past and current feminist perceptions of exclusion and difference. It examines a selection of 20 th century Northern American and European 'witch' stories to reveal the continued political relevance of metaphors sustained in the fantasy of the 'witch' widely thought to belong to pop-cultural or folkloristic formulations of the past. Through a critical rereading of the feminist texts engaging with these metaphors, I develop a new concept of the witch, one that challenges stigmatized forms of sexuality, race and ethnicity as linked to the margins of culture and monstrous feminine desire. I turn instead to the causes for radical feminist critique of 'feminine' sexuality as a fabrication of logocentric thinking, and show that the problematic conversion of the ugly hag into a superwoman can be interpreted today as a therapeutic performance translating fixed identity into a site of continuous negotiation of the subject in process. Tracing the development of feminist constructs of the witch from 1970's radical texts to the present, my book explores the early psychoanalytical writings of Cixous, Kristeva and Irigaray and feminist reformulations of identity by Butler and Braidotti together with fictional texts from different political and cultural contexts.

Theories of the Gaze Crossing Feminisms: Trifles as a Site to Ponder the Fundamentals

Critical Literary Studies, 2023

Ever since the publication of Susan Glaspell's play in one act, Trifles, in 1916, it has become a playground for different feminist theories to counterpart, many of which struggle to categorize the play as a reproduction of the traditional gender roles set by patriarchy. Since there seems to be no unity in defining the term 'feminism,' many believe that it would do justice to call its varieties, 'feminisms'. Being one of the most well-known terms in feminism, men's gaze has been viewed and reviewed constantly throughout the years. Yet, what seems to be new to this field is the concept of the 'female gaze'. Unlike anti-essentialists, essentialist feminists believe in embracing the 'essential' differences between men and women. Therefore, this paper analyzes Glaspell's play in the light of these two points of view on feminism, especially the theories of gaze, and looks for a shared ground for reconciliation. So, by delving into these theories, the researcher eventually concludes that although Trifles is criticizing the female status in a patriarchal society, relating all associated with her to 'trifles,' at the same time, it reproduces the traditional gender roles by approving essentially feminine characteristics which need to be celebrated instead of criticized.

Binary Trouble: Preconditions for Non-binary Gender in Works of Heidegger, Derrida and Butler

Binary Trouble: Preconditions for Non-binary Gender in Works of Heidegger, Derrida and Butler, 2018

Non-binary gender as an umbrella term refers to any gender beyond the male/female categories. With the progressing LGBT+ movement and future predictions referring to all persons equally „regardless of their chosen gender” (Cave, Klein, 2015), the question of philosophical and societal limits of being non-binary is a fundamental one for understanding the patterns in the current sign system. Binary, as such, is of a philosophical nature and can be interpreted as political; as in the works of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler who both accelerated feminist criticism by analysing how the masculine is privileged in the construction of meaning. Also, for Martin Heidegger binary is a subject of criticism as he tried to establish a new dualistic-thinking humanism in which being comes before metaphysical oppositions. However, in his attempt to define being through its difference to beings, being is dependent on the difference. There is a significant problem with Heidegger's approach to gender and sex. The neutral Dasein is neither of the two sexes but as factual it is a gendered being (Geschlechstwesen). Derrida analyses the pre-differential state as a precondition for uniqueness of each gender, which is separated by space and time of endless difference, and Butler investigates the reinterpretation of meanings of differences and the becoming of gender. The goal of this article is to compare the approaches of these three scholars to find the possibilities, preconditions and limits of non-binary gender. Thus, I read Heidegger and compare his thoughts on sex and gender of Dasein with the perspective of Derrida and Butler, and then I discuss the limits of Butler's approach by using the perspective of Derrida and come to the conclusion on visibility of gender signs and their validity in discourses. Together with Butler, I assume that there is no gender identity but performatively constituted expressions (Butler 1990, 25), whose origin is the own desire for recognition, which is why I don't differentiate between sex/gender/desire. In his lectures on Geschlecht, Derrida describes inter alia the way logocentrism has been genderized on the example of Dasein, a fundamental concept in the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger which has opened novel possibilities. Although these three thinkers rarely come together in comparisons, I am of the opinion that analysing them in this sequence is optimal for the reasoning about gender and its limit within the process of structural reorganization of society in the Western culture throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. I argue that the point of clash of their arguments dwells in the interlinkage of thinking, acting and signifying of a politicized material body. All of them problematize authenticity and repetition. Heidegger provokes the idea of a neutral and bodiless Dasein which can become authentic but where no becoming of gender is possible, Derrida seeks the pre-differential state which enables becoming, and Butler seeks the way in which gender is becoming. Although Heidegger tried to establish thinking beyond dualistic terms, he defined being by using its difference from beings, i.e. he thought of being through difference and escaped the problem of identity, including the sexual or gender identity of Dasein. Derrida criticized the binary domination, reviewed the conditions for the functioning of the prime beginning, which he understands as the primordial sexual difference that existed before the binary opposition. In this context, sex is pre-differential, unsigned, naked but is being veiled by the clothes of language and culture. This pre-differential state can be understood as a positive potential for a non-binary identity, a possibility of sexual multiplicity and denotation of self as any possible sex. Similarly, as a stroke strikes validity as for example when minting the coin, the formation of gender should be understood as striking, respectively as signification rather than construction or production. It is a violent act which is exercised from the outside on the surface which is initially reconciliatory. In the space opened by Derrida and by using his instruments of decomposition and citationality, Butler builds her concept of performativity and gender performance as a practice by which discourse produces effects that it names. She regards binary as fiction which has the regulatory function to confirm the heterosexual coherency. The materiality of sex is violently created and operates as a ritual. Such performativity as a predicate used for creating facts is based on a game of sign because whatever we think of materiality it is always embedded in a chain of signs that constitutes its concept. The possibility of subversion offered by Butler does not “mint” the validity of non-binary identity because this is being done, with Derrida's words, by a stroke which is the discourse itself. It has its power just by the sign, if it would not operate with signs, it wouldn't be visible. However, in the space of the current „we“ invisibility means recognisability, i.e. the legibility of the sign. By breaking the power of the current „we“ or „discourse“ the possibility of sexual multiplicity can be afforded, respectively of non-binary identity. But its strike, which would impede the validity of such identity, will only be possible in chaos. Until then, the signs of the non-binary identity will be assigned to the ideal created by the actual „we“, i.e. to the ideal of masculinity, respectively femininity, likewise there will be the effect of phallogocentrism. Subversion is necessarily political because it requires a refusal of repeating the imposed sign and its replacement by a modified sign in a new context. It can take place only within the discourse because it cannot be left out. Concluding on her approach, I argue that sex/gender/desire depends on the strength of the discourse and on the strength of subversion; their essence is incidental and can be compared to the essence of thrownness, which Derrida describes on the basis of Heidegger's thrownness into being. The spreading of non-binary visibility can further abolish the effects of the discourse, but not the discourse itself. It is the power of the „monster” which shifts away into a field of impossibility, excludes, respectively pathologizes. Similarly, the expressions of non-binary gender identity are excluded because they are visible and therefore unreadable. Although Derrida is considering the possibilities of a pre-differential state and Butler points out to the possibility of returning back into it, neither of them shows a way how it would be possible to overcome the power of discourse because, in my opinion, the existence outside of the discourse is not possible. Likewise, it is not possible to break the logic of positivity by destruction because we would lose communication and thus ourselves. Thus, logocentrism cannot be done away with, it is only possible to disturb it and let the act of questioning it function further.

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Volume XXXVI, Number 1, Spring 2003

Studies in the …, 2009

Although ethical memory is vital to Christine de Pizan' s rhetorical agenda, the fact that it is deeply embedded within the text of Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (The Book of the City of Ladies) has been little explored. Since medieval rhetoric viewed memory as the path to ethical knowledge and wisdom, the individual memory had to be trained in order to be fully functional in ethical pursuits. So Christine fashions an artificial memory system within the text that provides a means for women to develop an ethical memory practice, thereby disproving the anti-feminist tradition of women' s vice and inconstancy. As she builds a pro-feminist history of "Woman" in the Cité by revising the anti-feminist tradition, Christine concomitantly instructs her female audience in the ways they can remember and practice this new history. Ultimately, this architectural system organizes a memorial space into a haven for the memories of her female readers, the new citizens of Christine' s visionary citadel.