Fears of Compulsory Femininity in "Parable of the Sower"
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Resisting the Body: Fears of Compulsory Femininity in Parable of the Sower and Swamplandia! Whether they grow up on a Floridian alligator farm or in the morally desolate wastes of a future southern California, young girls mostly have the same issues to come to terms with as members of the female sex. The female body inherently hosts a multitude of societallyconstructed ideals, compulsions, and promises both divine and sordid, and under many circumstances, these principles can feel like a death sentence to a young woman. In their own ways, the protagonists of Parable of the Sower and Swamplandia! each interrogate the significance and risks of compulsory femininity, ultimately yielding an argument in favor of feminine autonomy and alternative gender expression. Parable of the Sower follows its protagonist, Lauren, from the ages of 15 to 18, and mainly focuses on her travels through the untamed post-economic-apocalypse American landscape. Her journey is cast through the ultra-feminine lens of her experiences as a hyperempath, or “sharer”; her own body is inflicted with whatever pain or pleasure she deals unto others, as well as pain she simply observes other people experiencing. This is a congenital disorder Lauren contracted due to her mother’s abuse of prescription drugs while she was pregnant. Although it is also shown to afflict men as well, hyperempathy is a female-coded condition literalizing the immense emotional labor women are expected to naturally undertake in society. From the moment of her birth, Lauren is fated to internalize the pain of others to the detriment of her own well-being; she is taught by her father to keep her condition a secret because it would be too easy for others to take advantage of her and incapacitate her. This literalized emotional labor becomes a hindrance as she travels northward in search of a safe haven. She is pulled between two extremes of conflict resolution: either avoid violence
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altogether, thus minimizing her own pain, or kill immediately, achieving the same effect. Later in the novel, when Lauren meets other sharers for the first time, they marvel at how she is able to fight at all; Lauren explains that while she used to be even more sensitive to pain, she’s learned to repress it. That this repression proves most vitally important on her journey away from home—her entrance into a violent, hypermasculine space, where she would be at risk if she simply presented herself as female—signifies a shedding of the ultra-feminine duty of emotional labor she was born into. Her choice to suppress her empathy becomes the key to her survival. Although she cannot change the femininely-coded role she was born into, she can choose to escape it. Much like she chose to suppress her hyperempathy, Lauren also chooses to embark on her journey masquerading as a man in order to minimize her risk of being raped. Throughout the novel, Lauren is hyperaware of female sexuality and the various threats it poses; the opening pages include descriptions of a woman lying naked in the street, and few scenes of violence do not feature Lauren pondering on, or directly witnessing, women being raped at the hands of their enemies. For the sake of her own safety on the road, she poses as a man, shedding the parts of herself that put her most at risk. This is unfortunately not possible for all the women in her group; Zahra, who was raped when her and Lauren’s hometown was attacked, is constantly under Lauren’s watch because her beauty and small stature make her an ideal target for rapists. Lauren’s fairly androgynous body allows her to protect herself, and she employs the same level of severity when she protects herself from the promises of marriage and pregnancy in her youth. Although marriage and childbearing are much more benign threats than rape, Lauren treats them with the same deadly seriousness. “Bianca Montoya is pregnant. It isn’t just gossip, it’s true, and it matters to me, somehow,” she writes of the accidentally-pregnant 17-year-old
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(Butler 86). Later that same chapter, she says, “…if all I had to look forward to was marriage to [Curtis] and babies and poverty that just keeps getting worse, I think I’d kill myself” (88). To Lauren, unexpected pregnancy and subsequent marriage are worse than death, and yet they are natural consequences of her physical anatomy and social position. However, it is not children nor marriage that Lauren abhors; she seriously considers marriage with Curtis and Bankole, and during her talks with Bankole and the other sharers of the group, she expresses her desire to start a family. Lauren’s chief preoccupation is that the role of the wife and mother will be forced upon her before she is ready to accept it. She fears the domesticated teenagers who unwittingly tether themselves to her hometown. From the start of the novel, she does not shy away from sexuality; at fifteen years old, she frankly describes how hyperempathy enhances sex because she receives her partner’s pleasure as well as her own. When her party is shopping, she comments that she bought condoms “for [her] own future,” indicating a mature sense of ownership over her own sexuality as well as her partner’s. Once again, the reader observes Lauren half-embracing the traditional feminine role; her hyperempathy and desires for marriage, children, and sex threaten to pin her as a conventional woman, especially within the bounds of her own world, but she molds these markers into her own shape of traditional femininity, choosing which tenants to embrace and which to discard. Her power to choose which aspects to surpass and embrace is the key to her survival in the outside world. Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, also confronts its female characters’ embracement of traditional femininity, though to much more sinister ends. After the death of their mother, Ava Bigtree and her sister Osceola struggle to fill the void of femininity left by her absence. Ava dreams of fulfilling her destiny as her mother’s protégé: becoming a renowned alligator wrestler
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and reviving their failing theme park’s profits. However, the femininity of Hilola Bigtree is its own brand of strangeness. Although Hilola at times defends her youthful marriage to Ava’s father, she later makes her daughters promise not to marry until they’re at least thirty years old. Ava remembers, “I used to think the promise would make more sense when I got older, but I was thirteen now and that night in the museum seemed even more mysterious to me with each passing year, a memory too baffling to even broach with my sister” (Russell 56-57). Ava also recalls Hilola being at her most motherly when she was watching her daughters in the gator pit— a situation most would consider too extreme to be the first trigger of motherly instinct. In their mother’s absence, and with only the vaguest ghost of conventional femininity to guide them, Ava and Osceola both struggle to navigate the course of their adolescence. When Ava’s father and brother are both away from the island and Osceola disappears with the intent of marrying the Dredgeman, Ava considers it her responsibility to find her sister. In this arc of the novel, she encounters the Bird Man, who, armed with knowledge of the swamp’s underworld to which Osceola has ostensibly fled, promises to aid Ava on her quest. Just before she tells him about her sister, Ava remembers feeling “…a kind of stage fright, as if the curtains were about to lift onto a new and never-rehearsed show,” hinting at the confusion and doubt growing within her as a result of her newfound role as mother and protector (Russell 184). In this same scene, she muses on the various physical reminders of her mother present in the kitchen, and juxtaposes these images with the Bird Man: “It was strange to see her cup and saucer in this stranger’s hand. The Bird Man had disappeared into his odd clothes again…” (185). Unconsciously associating the Bird Man with her mother, and thus with the only form of femininity she has ever known, Ava trusts him to guide her into the Underworld.
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This, of course, proves to be a grave error; the deceitful Bird Man leads Ava into the depths of the swamp and rapes her, never having intended on following through with their quest to the Underworld. Ava is forcibly acquainted with the fullest extent of traditional femininity: to be a mother is to inhabit the female skin, and to inhabit the female skin is to become vulnerable to sexual assault. Her rape is described as a birth of terrible knowledge: “Oh, this, I thought, and got a counterfeit déjà vu from the stories I had read and overheard” (Russell 328). Like Lauren of Parable of the Sower, Ava becomes acutely aware of the damning principles of her anatomy. To understand her assault, she draws upon the experiences of all the women who had been assaulted before her, signifying rape as a near-universal fate for women. Unlike Lauren, Ava lacks the maturity and awareness to abandon the parts of her femininity that would make her a target for assault; as a mere thirteen-year-old, they are forced upon her by the outside world. Ava’s sister Osceola, meanwhile, reaches the same conclusion as Ava through a different route. Feeling imprisoned by the hypermasculinity of Swamplandia! and reeling from the loss of her mother, Ossie seeks to embrace traditional femininity as a means of escape. For lack of any real boys on the island, she hosts séances and undergoes “love possessions” (forceful bodily violations in line with sexual assault) with male ghosts she calls her lovers, eventually stealing away with to marry the ghost of the Dredgeman in her mother’s wedding gown. Ultimately, the wedding falls through when she learns that she has to kill herself to marry the Dredgeman in the afterlife; Ava finds her sobbing in her wedding gown next to a noose. Both sisters, in the course of discerning their femininity, come to the same conclusions as Lauren: to be a woman is to face the risks of rape and death, two sides of the same coin. However, Ossie’s refusal to commit suicide can be read as a sort of resistance to her womanly fate, in line with Lauren’s resistance of marriage and children until she’s able to enter into that contract on her own terms. In this
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manner, Ossie makes a more successful escape from conventional femininity than her sister, who gained her knowledge at the cost of personal trauma. Neither of these novels present conventional femininity as a deadly force; rather, by placing them in conversation with one another, one can track the idea that forcing young women to neatly adhere to the feminine ideals of their society is what leads to devastation. The worstcase example between the two books is Ava, who in her motherless ignorance decides to mold herself into the role of the mother protector, all the while unaware of the true dangers of aligning herself with the female body. She does not realize she was given a choice until it is too late, much like how her mother contracted herself into marriage and motherhood before she realized it may not have been what she wanted. Ossie, having endured a more metaphorical rape, literalizes her mother and sister’s regret in the form of her near-suicide, which would have rendered her will-less for all time. Instead, although it means losing the affections of her beloved, she chooses to live. Lauren, the most self-aware of the three girls, is able to skillfully negotiate through a world which, considering her hyperempathy and traditional female desires, could easily peg her into conventional femininity and all its perils. Like Ossie, Lauren recognizes the dangers of abandoning her own will, and chooses which aspects of femininity to adopt while maintaining her own safety. By comparing Parable of the Sower and Swamplandia!’s individual takes on this complicated pseudo-feminist lens, the careful reader can observe a powerful argument regarding conventional femininity, female gender roles, and feminine autonomy taking shape. Without condemning femininity itself, it is possible, as these novels show, to critique the parts of societal femininity that teach girls to expect to be victims of sexual assault and to expect to become wives and mothers—both of which are literalized in these novels as death sentences. Russell and
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Butler suggest that the key to a healthy adaptation from girlhood to womanhood, and to eventually healing a society that condones the gendered barbarisms that women endure, is to simply provide choices: alternatives founded in education and awareness that allow each girl to tailor herself to whatever definition of femininity she wishes to uphold.
Works Cited Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower. New York: Warner, 2000. Print. Russell, Karen. Swamplandia! New York: Vintage, 2011. Print.
Resisting the Body: Fears of Compulsory Femininity in Parable of the Sower and Swamplandia! Whether they grow up on a Floridian alligator farm or in the morally desolate wastes of a future southern California, young girls mostly have the same issues to come to terms with as members of the female sex. The female body inherently hosts a multitude of societallyconstructed ideals, compulsions, and promises both divine and sordid, and under many circumstances, these principles can feel like a death sentence to a young woman. In their own ways, the protagonists of Parable of the Sower and Swamplandia! each interrogate the significance and risks of compulsory femininity, ultimately yielding an argument in favor of feminine autonomy and alternative gender expression. Parable of the Sower follows its protagonist, Lauren, from the ages of 15 to 18, and mainly focuses on her travels through the untamed post-economic-apocalypse American landscape. Her journey is cast through the ultra-feminine lens of her experiences as a hyperempath, or “sharer”; her own body is inflicted with whatever pain or pleasure she deals unto others, as well as pain she simply observes other people experiencing. This is a congenital disorder Lauren contracted due to her mother’s abuse of prescription drugs while she was pregnant. Although it is also shown to afflict men as well, hyperempathy is a female-coded condition literalizing the immense emotional labor women are expected to naturally undertake in society. From the moment of her birth, Lauren is fated to internalize the pain of others to the detriment of her own well-being; she is taught by her father to keep her condition a secret because it would be too easy for others to take advantage of her and incapacitate her. This literalized emotional labor becomes a hindrance as she travels northward in search of a safe haven. She is pulled between two extremes of conflict resolution: either avoid violence
Honsowetz 2
altogether, thus minimizing her own pain, or kill immediately, achieving the same effect. Later in the novel, when Lauren meets other sharers for the first time, they marvel at how she is able to fight at all; Lauren explains that while she used to be even more sensitive to pain, she’s learned to repress it. That this repression proves most vitally important on her journey away from home—her entrance into a violent, hypermasculine space, where she would be at risk if she simply presented herself as female—signifies a shedding of the ultra-feminine duty of emotional labor she was born into. Her choice to suppress her empathy becomes the key to her survival. Although she cannot change the femininely-coded role she was born into, she can choose to escape it. Much like she chose to suppress her hyperempathy, Lauren also chooses to embark on her journey masquerading as a man in order to minimize her risk of being raped. Throughout the novel, Lauren is hyperaware of female sexuality and the various threats it poses; the opening pages include descriptions of a woman lying naked in the street, and few scenes of violence do not feature Lauren pondering on, or directly witnessing, women being raped at the hands of their enemies. For the sake of her own safety on the road, she poses as a man, shedding the parts of herself that put her most at risk. This is unfortunately not possible for all the women in her group; Zahra, who was raped when her and Lauren’s hometown was attacked, is constantly under Lauren’s watch because her beauty and small stature make her an ideal target for rapists. Lauren’s fairly androgynous body allows her to protect herself, and she employs the same level of severity when she protects herself from the promises of marriage and pregnancy in her youth. Although marriage and childbearing are much more benign threats than rape, Lauren treats them with the same deadly seriousness. “Bianca Montoya is pregnant. It isn’t just gossip, it’s true, and it matters to me, somehow,” she writes of the accidentally-pregnant 17-year-old
Honsowetz 3
(Butler 86). Later that same chapter, she says, “…if all I had to look forward to was marriage to [Curtis] and babies and poverty that just keeps getting worse, I think I’d kill myself” (88). To Lauren, unexpected pregnancy and subsequent marriage are worse than death, and yet they are natural consequences of her physical anatomy and social position. However, it is not children nor marriage that Lauren abhors; she seriously considers marriage with Curtis and Bankole, and during her talks with Bankole and the other sharers of the group, she expresses her desire to start a family. Lauren’s chief preoccupation is that the role of the wife and mother will be forced upon her before she is ready to accept it. She fears the domesticated teenagers who unwittingly tether themselves to her hometown. From the start of the novel, she does not shy away from sexuality; at fifteen years old, she frankly describes how hyperempathy enhances sex because she receives her partner’s pleasure as well as her own. When her party is shopping, she comments that she bought condoms “for [her] own future,” indicating a mature sense of ownership over her own sexuality as well as her partner’s. Once again, the reader observes Lauren half-embracing the traditional feminine role; her hyperempathy and desires for marriage, children, and sex threaten to pin her as a conventional woman, especially within the bounds of her own world, but she molds these markers into her own shape of traditional femininity, choosing which tenants to embrace and which to discard. Her power to choose which aspects to surpass and embrace is the key to her survival in the outside world. Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, also confronts its female characters’ embracement of traditional femininity, though to much more sinister ends. After the death of their mother, Ava Bigtree and her sister Osceola struggle to fill the void of femininity left by her absence. Ava dreams of fulfilling her destiny as her mother’s protégé: becoming a renowned alligator wrestler
Honsowetz 4
and reviving their failing theme park’s profits. However, the femininity of Hilola Bigtree is its own brand of strangeness. Although Hilola at times defends her youthful marriage to Ava’s father, she later makes her daughters promise not to marry until they’re at least thirty years old. Ava remembers, “I used to think the promise would make more sense when I got older, but I was thirteen now and that night in the museum seemed even more mysterious to me with each passing year, a memory too baffling to even broach with my sister” (Russell 56-57). Ava also recalls Hilola being at her most motherly when she was watching her daughters in the gator pit— a situation most would consider too extreme to be the first trigger of motherly instinct. In their mother’s absence, and with only the vaguest ghost of conventional femininity to guide them, Ava and Osceola both struggle to navigate the course of their adolescence. When Ava’s father and brother are both away from the island and Osceola disappears with the intent of marrying the Dredgeman, Ava considers it her responsibility to find her sister. In this arc of the novel, she encounters the Bird Man, who, armed with knowledge of the swamp’s underworld to which Osceola has ostensibly fled, promises to aid Ava on her quest. Just before she tells him about her sister, Ava remembers feeling “…a kind of stage fright, as if the curtains were about to lift onto a new and never-rehearsed show,” hinting at the confusion and doubt growing within her as a result of her newfound role as mother and protector (Russell 184). In this same scene, she muses on the various physical reminders of her mother present in the kitchen, and juxtaposes these images with the Bird Man: “It was strange to see her cup and saucer in this stranger’s hand. The Bird Man had disappeared into his odd clothes again…” (185). Unconsciously associating the Bird Man with her mother, and thus with the only form of femininity she has ever known, Ava trusts him to guide her into the Underworld.
Honsowetz 5
This, of course, proves to be a grave error; the deceitful Bird Man leads Ava into the depths of the swamp and rapes her, never having intended on following through with their quest to the Underworld. Ava is forcibly acquainted with the fullest extent of traditional femininity: to be a mother is to inhabit the female skin, and to inhabit the female skin is to become vulnerable to sexual assault. Her rape is described as a birth of terrible knowledge: “Oh, this, I thought, and got a counterfeit déjà vu from the stories I had read and overheard” (Russell 328). Like Lauren of Parable of the Sower, Ava becomes acutely aware of the damning principles of her anatomy. To understand her assault, she draws upon the experiences of all the women who had been assaulted before her, signifying rape as a near-universal fate for women. Unlike Lauren, Ava lacks the maturity and awareness to abandon the parts of her femininity that would make her a target for assault; as a mere thirteen-year-old, they are forced upon her by the outside world. Ava’s sister Osceola, meanwhile, reaches the same conclusion as Ava through a different route. Feeling imprisoned by the hypermasculinity of Swamplandia! and reeling from the loss of her mother, Ossie seeks to embrace traditional femininity as a means of escape. For lack of any real boys on the island, she hosts séances and undergoes “love possessions” (forceful bodily violations in line with sexual assault) with male ghosts she calls her lovers, eventually stealing away with to marry the ghost of the Dredgeman in her mother’s wedding gown. Ultimately, the wedding falls through when she learns that she has to kill herself to marry the Dredgeman in the afterlife; Ava finds her sobbing in her wedding gown next to a noose. Both sisters, in the course of discerning their femininity, come to the same conclusions as Lauren: to be a woman is to face the risks of rape and death, two sides of the same coin. However, Ossie’s refusal to commit suicide can be read as a sort of resistance to her womanly fate, in line with Lauren’s resistance of marriage and children until she’s able to enter into that contract on her own terms. In this
Honsowetz 6
manner, Ossie makes a more successful escape from conventional femininity than her sister, who gained her knowledge at the cost of personal trauma. Neither of these novels present conventional femininity as a deadly force; rather, by placing them in conversation with one another, one can track the idea that forcing young women to neatly adhere to the feminine ideals of their society is what leads to devastation. The worstcase example between the two books is Ava, who in her motherless ignorance decides to mold herself into the role of the mother protector, all the while unaware of the true dangers of aligning herself with the female body. She does not realize she was given a choice until it is too late, much like how her mother contracted herself into marriage and motherhood before she realized it may not have been what she wanted. Ossie, having endured a more metaphorical rape, literalizes her mother and sister’s regret in the form of her near-suicide, which would have rendered her will-less for all time. Instead, although it means losing the affections of her beloved, she chooses to live. Lauren, the most self-aware of the three girls, is able to skillfully negotiate through a world which, considering her hyperempathy and traditional female desires, could easily peg her into conventional femininity and all its perils. Like Ossie, Lauren recognizes the dangers of abandoning her own will, and chooses which aspects of femininity to adopt while maintaining her own safety. By comparing Parable of the Sower and Swamplandia!’s individual takes on this complicated pseudo-feminist lens, the careful reader can observe a powerful argument regarding conventional femininity, female gender roles, and feminine autonomy taking shape. Without condemning femininity itself, it is possible, as these novels show, to critique the parts of societal femininity that teach girls to expect to be victims of sexual assault and to expect to become wives and mothers—both of which are literalized in these novels as death sentences. Russell and
Honsowetz 7
Butler suggest that the key to a healthy adaptation from girlhood to womanhood, and to eventually healing a society that condones the gendered barbarisms that women endure, is to simply provide choices: alternatives founded in education and awareness that allow each girl to tailor herself to whatever definition of femininity she wishes to uphold.
Works Cited Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower. New York: Warner, 2000. Print. Russell, Karen. Swamplandia! New York: Vintage, 2011. Print.
