Theory, Literature and Society Lecture Notes- Epiphany Term PDF

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Rachelle Ojomo Durham University

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Theory, Literature and Society Lecture Notes- Epiphany Term

Lecture 1: We Need to Talk About Kevin

Introduction Situating the novel: 

It deals with several key issues such as: parenthood, in particular “motherhood”, good vs. evil, nature vs. nurture, uses contemporary concerns over teenage violence (high school killing sprees in the US)

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Same year WNTAK was published, in 2003, Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (a film with similar themes) won the Cannes Palme d’or and Prize for Best Director

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Won the British Orange Prize in June 2005

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In 2008, BBC Radio4 serialised the novel into 10 episodes on ‘Woman’s hour’: link with feminist concerns

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Became a feature film in 2011

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Premiered in 2011 Cannes film festival – well received by film critics

Focus is on psychoanalytic readings of the novel and some feminist issues

WNTAK= tale of a failed Oedipus?

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Oedipal triangle easily found in We Need to Talk about Kevin

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SUPERFICIAL LEVEL – Kevin kills his father to ‘marry’ his mother, be the only man in her life?

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This does not get us very far in a critical reading of Kevin

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We must extract from the narrative story of a protagonist caught between his/her desire for the maternal and his/her fight to suppress the paternal – modern reading of Oedipal conflicts in We need to talk about Kevin, rather than a more dogmatic Freudian reading.

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Themes such as castration, repression, return of repressed contents, narrative as symptom

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In more modern understanding of Oedipus, father may be the actual flesh and blood father, but more importantly the paternal refers to a function!

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Father- can be any instance of authority, which frustrates the individual in their desire to remain on the side of the maternal.

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The maternal – can be the mother but more importantly, it is an instance of what the mother is associated with: instinct, survival, nurture, animalistic, biological, bodily, etc.

Character of Kevin 

Mission to destroy some instances of authority that he sees as inauthentic or as he puts it ‘dumb’: the school, his father and everything that gives his mother symbolic status and authority: her work, finances, her daughter and her son

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Kevin’s destructive spree stops when he has reduced all these, and especially his mother’s authority to nothing

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Eva can be constructed as an authority figure – the phallic in Freudian terms

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Eva identifies with authority not the feminine

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Kevin seeks to destroy Eva’s phallicism, to reduce her to something maternal i.e. her biological function

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Kevin seeks to symbolically castrate Eva, so she becomes more like the mother he wants.

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Beyond a first degree reading, we can argue that WNTAK is about a male child’s attempt at retaining the maternal for himself and his fight to destroy what stands between him and the maternal.

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Resolution of an individual’s Oedipal conflict gone wrong, because child does the castration, not the father!

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Failed Oedipality at the level of the parents- neither parent is successful in convincing Kevin to take membership in his society

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Reason being- Franklin and Eva seem to construct Kevin as the son they want him to be rather than what he might actually be

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Further reading on child as narcissist extension of the parent

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How do Franklin and Eva see Kevin?

Franklin: Kevin is one element of the American formula for happiness 

For Franklin, Kevin represents the end product of a life well lived

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Having a child = successful and rewarding experience, part of his journey in achieving the American dream

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Utter belief in the good of the American way of life never weakens  his death

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Franklin is portrayed by Eva as the caricature of the good American who believes and defends puritanical ethics: pragmatic, hard-working, honest, respectful, a good citizen

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Happy Days discourse – believes he will be rewarded with happiness

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In order to be validated by this discourse, Franklin needs to smooth out what threatens his carefully constructed self.

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He ‘rounds up’ – refuses to believe Eva because narrative clashes with his representation of the world

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His denial of Kevin’s evilness is the refusal to let go of his vision of the American dream

Eva: Kevin is her new frontier 

At beginning of story, Eva is battling with herself over what she might do with her life

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She has achieved a lot – successful businesswoman, managing director of her own company, nice husband, more money than she needs etc.

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Yet dissatisfied character

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She is looking to ‘turn the page’ – move on to the next adventure, discover territories that she has not yet chartered

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Kevin represents her new frontier

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In this sense, Kevin is also, for Eva, a part of a very American type of fantasy

Eva: Kevin becomes the frontier of patriarchal discourse

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Eva searches for the new, un-chartered, the space not yet officialised by mainstream discourse

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Eva has an infatuation in finding new territories well before Kevin even becomes a possibility

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Before Kevin, her need for territorialising was satisfied in finding new geographical spaces

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With idea of Kevin growing, her sense of ambivalence also grows

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On one hand, curious at prospect of new adventure

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On the other hand, reluctant to visit the territory of motherhood: ‘the one foreign county into which [she has] been most reluctant to set foot.’ (379)

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Her ambivalence can be understood in two ways: 1. In order to become a mother, she has to give up on symbolic protection her status afforded her 

Her success as a businesswomen rested on criteria defined by patriarchal society: society where her sex was disregarded

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Motherhood – confines her to boundaries of her biological sex

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First, she wants to believe what patriarchal construct of motherhood tells her

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Adventure as mother begins with stereotyped view of motherhood

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Like many mothers, she is surrounded by cultural propaganda that tells her that motherhood is the most meaningful experience a woman can have, that child = fulfilment

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She is expecting to ‘turn the page’ and experience motherhood as something exciting

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Instead, she experienced pregnancy as an invasion of her body, robs her of herself

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She now belongs to the child and the society child is destined for

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Purpose in life = Kevin’s fulfilment

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She feels cheated by establishment: she has given up on her symbolic status, but did not get the reward promised.

2. While Eva was the one marking her territory, she was satisfied. As soon as she becomes territory, she resents her condition 

While Eva identifies with a masculine position (active, territorializing), she feels rewarded

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When she seeks identification with a feminine position (passive, territorialized), she feels disempowered and unhappy

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WTNAK – can be read as a narrative of feminist struggle

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How can one do the ‘feminine’ (giving birth) without losing intelligibility, social reward, empowerment??

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How can Eva maintain her social status while being a mother?

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Social empowerment and motherhood seem to be incompatible

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Kevin become the frontier, the limit of a discourse that obliterates Eva in favour of the child

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Mother-narrative = one of sacrifice

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She makes and offers her child to social organisation – but without the child (without the penis or phallus, she is nothing)

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Kevin also describes the journey of dispossession or castration that mother goes through to become intelligible/understood as a mother

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Single woman and mother – completely different roles

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Disappointing for feminism??

Other Freudian themes in We Need To Talk about Kevin 

Freudian theory to be used in explaining how Eva constructs Kevin as evil

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Kevin uses suppression and release as a mode of exchange with his surrounding very early on

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Kevin’s mode of exchange is reversed compared with that described by Freud

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In Freud, sexual object held and released in manner acceptable to society e.g. potty training

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Satisfaction one gains when rewarded for ‘good’ mastery of sexual object = enough to accept losing one’s naturalness/impulses

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Kevin’s character does not fit this mould- gains no pleasure in mastering instinct

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Kevin implies this pleasure is alien to him (it’s dumb, physically he has no muscular control)

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On the contrary, he gains pleasure from enactment of antisocial behaviour

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Kevin suppresses the object when release would reward him in social exchange (e.g. when he refuses to speak to his mother because it would reward her effort at teaching him his mother tongue)

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He releases the object when suppression would reward him in social exchange (he wets himself when he is old enough to be potty trained; he screams all day long etc.)

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Kevin also encourages others to do the same – girl with eczema scratches when she shouldn’t; Eva loses control and breaks Kevin’s harm much to his pleasure

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Eva constructs him as having no remorse for any suffering he causes = psychopath

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However, his behaviour at end of novel contradict this so Kevin’s actions can’t be explained through theory that he presents a psychopathic structure

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On contrary, Kevin does learn social behaviour but only as a means to his own sado-masochism

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Kevin fishes out those areas in the other where socialisation is too forced: his mum’s attempt at good motherhood

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He forces the fakeness of socialisation to come to light – his mother has to admit that she hates him; Catholic nanny questions her morality

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Kevin – something of a Meursault – as an outsider, he is demonised by his peers for exposing the hypocrisy of social organisation

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Unlike Meursault, Kevin’s mission in life: to expose the fallacy of that social organisation

Kevin is the recipient of projective identification 

Projection refers to: ‘an operation whereby qualities, feelings, wishes, or even ‘objects’, which the subject refuses to recognise or rejects in himself, are expelled from the self and located in another person or thing. (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1988:349)

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E.g. in paranoia, individual places ill intentions in another person that the individual has had himself or herself

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Freud- subject-matter, what persecutes the person, remains unchanged but its location is modified

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You persecute me instead of I persecute me.

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Phobia – displacement of fear from internal (instinct) to external (phobic object) in order to control it

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Uncontrollable fear of dark, hairy spiders is really fear of my own instinctual impulses, which the spider comes to represent

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Statement: ‘If I can control instinct, my ego will be safe’ becomes ‘If I can control the spider, my ego will be safe’.

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Melanie Klein – projective identification:

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‘A mechanism revealed in phantasies in which the subject inserts his self- in whole or in part into the object in order to harm possess or control it.’ (Laplanche & Pontalis)

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Projective identification = mode of signification whereby what I do not like in myself, I unconsciously throw out of me and onto another

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Traits one doesn’t like in one’s self are thrown unto another person

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What I do to the bad other is significant of the relationship I have with the bad in me

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Other becomes ‘bad object’ – object through which I deal with my bad character traits

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E.g. bullying, psychological games, hate crimes

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Narrative allows us easy construction of Kevin as Eva’s bad object

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‘I am damned if I am going to let you freeze out another kid of mine’ – Franklin to Eva’s suggestion of having another child

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Franklin constructs Eva as bad mother, using her child to satisfy her own internal conflicts

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Eva’s construction of Kevin = antagonistic

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Eva makes Kevin bad, responsible, guilty for badness in her life

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I am a bad mother  Kevin is a bad son

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Difficult to source the blame as there is confusion between herself and Kevin

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Is Kevin bad son or is Eva just a bad mother?!

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Projective identification – Kevin can be constructed differently

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Kevin can be reinserted into society with a place and function (catharsis).

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He himself suggests process of projection animates his social exchanges

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He highlights that people have fascination for people like him, people who ‘make the bad happen’.

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Good citizen – capacity to split themselves into, good and bad

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Good citizen enacts good and contains the bad in fantasy or by projecting it onto a target

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Content of bad = that which individual cannot allow themselves to fell, determined by individual psychical development

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Bad is projected onto another individual who becomes recipient of ideas, feelings, fantasies etc.

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Kevin’s comments mean his badness is useful to society

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People who enact badness – needed so that majority can purge their badness through the one who ‘acts out’ i.e. Kevin

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Acting out – when barrier of good and bad is superseded, e.g. when individual actually harms someone instead of merely fantasising about harming them

Lecture 2- The Old Man and the Wolves

Part Three: Feminism/Post-Modernism

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Week 3– Feminisms

‘no time for black feminism’ loll

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Feminism and patriarchal organisation

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The three waves of the feminist struggle: a) Liberal feminism b) Radical feminism c) Hard-wave feminism

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Male students expect to earn more than their female counterparts

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Males paid 30% more than ladies

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Definition of feminism: the fight against patriarchy

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“the principle objective of feminist criticism has always been political. It seeks to expose, not to perpetrate patriarchal practices. (Moi, 1988: xiv)

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READ TORIL MOI – SEXUAL/TEXTUAL POLITICS

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Patriarchy is an organisation of culture around a hierarchical difference between the sexes (Feminist Review)

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Patriarchy is an organisation

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Patriarchy – there is a coding of the social differences based on gender

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Codes individual according to certain differences i.e. differences in gender

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A patriarchal society is based on the belief that the male is the superior sex and many of the social institutions and much social practice is then organized to reflect this belief: in one sense a patriarchal society is organized so that the belief in male supremacy ‘comes true’. (Spender, 1980:1)

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Marginalisation of women

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Patriarchy – something that is preventing women and favouring men and what they

want to become 

Still difficult for women to become pilots or conductors

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Tendency to want to favour men becoming orchestra conductors

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Men glorified, women marginalised

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Women still bound to their biological destiny – still questions of whether women should get abortions etc.

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A lot of people see feminism as passé, however the goal of feminism still hasn’t been reached

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Diversity awareness

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Issues of sexual identity

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Queer theory, post feminism, post structuralist feminism

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Traditional feminism is about fighting the oppression from women

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But to fight oppression is in itself being oppressive

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Later feminism is then using the very tools that it seeks to suppress

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Even if feminism is the fight against patriarchy, it is also a constituent and an integral part of patriarchy

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Feminism is many different things

The three phases of the feminist struggle (Kristeva)

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Historically located feminism- the three waves of the feminist struggle:

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First wave: Liberal feminism

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Struggle of the suffragettes and the existential feminisms, 20s and 30s, Simone de

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Beauvoir publishes the second sex in 1949, rooted in social and political life, uses the values of that society, socially anchored type of feminism, also looks at gender differences in the collective way, understanding of women in a globalising way 

Uses liberal politics and ideas

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The demands that they make are made around notions of equality

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Liberal- suggests that this type of feminism endorses liberalism

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Limited state intervention etc.

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Aims to apply liberal principles to men AND women

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Women are potentially as rational and morally responsib...