"The Politics of Love: Women's Liberation and Feeling Differently"

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The politics of loveWomen’s liberation and feeling differently TF

Victoria Hesford State University of New York at Stony Brook

Feminist TheoryCopyright 2009 ©SAGE Publications

(Los Angeles, London,New Delhi, Singapore,and Washington DC)

vol. 10(1): 5–33. 1464–7001

DOI: 10.1177/1464700108100390http://fty.sagepub.com

Abstract Contemporary queer interrogations of heteronormativity arefraught with the traces of feminist contestations of the intimate domainsof women’s ‘ordinary’ lives during the era of the women’s liberationmovement. These traces remain enigmatic within contemporary theoriesof public affect and emotion rather than incorporated into their critiquesof the present political moment. This essay argues that the work of theearly women’s liberationists – their attempts to bring the personal in toview as the dense, affect laden, site of social reproduction – can offer usa countermemory to the enduring and alluring force of the ‘private’domains of love and ordinary feeling in the contemporary US nationalpublic sphere. In order to hear the echoes of that moment – the time ofwomen’s liberation – in this one, the essay stages a comparative readingbetween two novels, Doris Lessing’s A Ripple from the Storm (1958) andJune Arnold’s The Cook and the Carpenter: A Novel by the Carpenter(1973). Although the two novels were written over a decade apart, bothhave as their subject the dense and complex relations between politicalaction, personal relationships and feelings within a (broadly conceived)feminist paradigm. By taking the risk of an odd conjunction and readingthe two novels side-by-side, the essay aims to open up the messinessand contingencies of an era in which both ‘the political’ and ‘thepersonal’ were contested terms, their meanings challenged, theirdomains struggled over, their practices altered, and in some cases,transformed.

keywords feeling, heteronormativity, the personal, politics, queer,women’s liberation

In Against Love: A Polemic, Laura Kipnis writes of love in the presentAmerican context:

Nothing must change. Why? Because you’ve poured so much of yourself into themachinery already – your life blood, your history – which paradoxically imbuesit with magical powers. Thus will social institutions (factories in Capital, butlove is a social institution too) come to subsume and dominate their creators.(Kipnis, 2003: 22, emphasis in original)

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Love as a social institution, as ‘machinery’, has been a subject of socialtheorists and historians since at least the time of Freud. In the 20th century,love has been secularized and theorized as a form of social control andreproduction. As a modern institution, love is marriage, or romantic love,or simply, as Kipnis defines it, ‘coupledom’ (p. 15). Its durability andpower to dominate us comes precisely from its constitutive role in narrat-ing true personhood; our ‘life blood’ and ‘history’ are made intelligiblethrough the discourses of love. We are not simply ‘workers’ or ‘alienatedlabour’, thanks to love, we also have ‘a life’. In their equally polemical, ‘Sexin Public’, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner call the discourse ofmodern love ‘heteronormativity’ and situate its disciplinary effects in the‘ideologies and institutions of intimacy’ (Berlant and Warner, 2002: 192).As the socially differentiated space of ‘private life’, intimacy legitimatesand privileges family life and heterosexual coupledom as the organizingprinciples of social life (p. 192). For Berlant and Warner, this space isconstituted precisely in order to ‘conjure a mirage: a home base of pre-political humanity from which citizens are thought to come into politicaldiscourse and to which they are expected to return’ (p. 193). In the early21st century, intimacy is the ‘elsewhere’ of political public discourse (p.193). While Kipnis questions the ‘nothing must change’ of modern love bypoliticizing its functional role in the reproduction of late capitalist, neo-liberal society, Berlant and Warner trace the way in which love has, incontemporary American life, become a refuge from politics and the publicsphere, a move that, in turn, designates family life and heterosexualcoupledom as ‘pre-political’. In both, love is politicized in order to projectpossible alternative social worlds in which other ‘forms of intimacy notnecessarily domestic, based on kinship, or bound to the couple form,nation or property’ can be imagined and practised (Berlant and Warner,2002: 199).

Such politicizations of love and intimacy are offered as a critique of theUS political present. They reveal the ruse of power that would position‘private life’ as outside of, or an escape from, the ongoing privatization andneo-liberalization of American (trans) nationalism. And as critiques ofheteronormativity, they offer an important counter to the strategy ofnormalization by gay marriage advocates. Yet the focus on the ‘ideologiesand institutions’ of love and intimacy also, inevitably, raises spectres fromthe past. Contemporary queer interrogations of heteronormativity arefraught with the traces of feminist contestations of the intimate domains ofwomen’s ‘ordinary’ lives during the women’s liberation movement. Thesetraces remain enigmatic within contemporary theories of public affect andemotion rather than incorporated into their critiques of the present politi-cal moment – an effect, no doubt, of the contemporary concern with anenervating lack of political consciousness in the public sphere rather than,as was the case at the time of women’s liberation, with a lack of politicalattention to the personal and the intimate. For Berlant and Warner, theproblem is not that the intimate worlds of ordinary life are untouched orignored by the political but that, in their idealized bourgeois form, theyhave come to stand in for an active, public, political agency. In the culture

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of feeling, what Berlant calls ‘national sentimentality’, that organizes thedomain of national belonging in the US public sphere, the intimate is thegenerative ideal for an affective citizenship that pacifies its subjects intocitizen-consumers.1 What was, for women’s liberation, a site of activepolitical contestation is, for Berlant and Warner, along with other contemporary feminist scholars like Wendy Brown, a domain of activedepoliticization in the US present.

And yet, it seems to me that the work of the early women’s liberationists– their attempts to bring the personal in to view as the dense, affect laden,site of social reproduction – can offer us a countermemory to the enduringand alluring force of the private domains of love and ‘ordinary’ feeling inthe contemporary national public sphere. If, as Wendy Brown amongothers has argued, second wave feminism has contributed to the solipsis-tic attachments to ‘wounded’ identities that often count as politicalactivism in the present, then I would like to suggest a ‘return’ to the earlymoments of the women’s liberation movement as a way to open up thepossibility that it didn’t have to be that way (Brown, 1993). In this essay,then, I want to hear the echoes of that moment – the time of women’s liber-ation – in this one.2 My aim is not to trace out a single line of historicalprogress (from feminist to queer), nor to collapse the one into the other(women’s liberation is queer), but to ‘mobilize and activate’ a counter -memory of women’s liberation in the present (Brown, 2001: 173). Activat-ing the past of women’s liberation in the present will not only enable usto confront the losses of that time, but also reanimate its possibilities in apresent that has too often foreclosed the connections between women‘sliberation and queer theory and politics.

‘Against Love’ and ‘Sex in Public’ are phrases that, for this reader at least,conjure up another phrase from the enigmatic time of the recent feministpast – a past I was too young to experience but which nevertheless infusesmy present moment. That ‘the personal is political’ now tends to operateas a kind of motto, or better still, an epitaph on the tombstone of a feminismthat is now remembered by many as inadequate or lacking in some way,speaks to its unmooring from the historical context in which it emerged.‘The personal is political’ has become an empty phrase – empty that is ofthe complex historical moment that engendered it. We are now more likelyto hear it as the birthing cry of that most infamous of second wave crimes:essentialism. As a performance of essentialist thinking, ‘the personal ispolitical’ is read as literally equating personal experience with the political. Women’s experience becomes, as Joan Scott has argued, the foundational site from which a feminist politics is fashioned, and as aresult, some women’s experiences – those of the feminists who write andtheorize about them, namely, white middle-class women – become theauthentic, defining ground for who ‘women’ are and what feminism is(Scott, 1999: 88–9). In this reading, ‘the personal is political’ signals a naïvecollapsing of ‘women’ with ‘experience’ and ‘politics’ that has resulted inthe privileging of white middle-class women as the site and source of(second wave) feminism.

But what if the meaning of the phrase was never so singular and fixed?

Hesford: The politics of love 7

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What if we read its elegant simplicity as an enigmatic trace from the past,and, therefore, as potentially productive of multiple interpretations?Rather than understand ‘the personal is political’ as a statement that (belatedly) describes a settled theoretical position, I want to approach it inthis essay as a remainder from the unsettled past of women’s liberation. Iwant to excavate how ‘the personal’ was thought and theorized during theemergent moments of women’s liberation and what feminist political imaginaries were glimpsed, if not necessarily realized, as a result. Excavat-ing the past, raising questions about it, and tracing out the continuitiesbetween it and the present rather than simply assuming its over-and-done-with-ness, enables us to challenge the accepted temporality of Americanfeminism that, ironically, assumes a progressive trajectory from the naïveessentialism of identity politics to the sophistications of the postmodernpluralist present.3 My argument, in contrast, is that early second wavecontestations of marriage, family life, and compulsory heterosexualitycreated the conditions of possibility for queer critiques of heteronormativ-ity, and offer us in the present, a memory of another refusal to viewmarriage and intimacy as the site and source of a pre-political humanhappiness and freedom.

I want to create this disturbance – between past and present, feministand queer – by staging a comparative reading between two novels, DorisLessing’s A Ripple from the Storm and June Arnold’s The Cook and theCarpenter: A Novel by the Carpenter. I use ‘staging’ purposefully to high-light the artificiality of the action, and in one sense the contrast is certainlymanufactured in that the two novels cannot and should not be read asrepresentative of women’s liberation thought. It is also somewhat arbitraryin that Lessing’s novel was published before the rise of women’s liberationand cannot, in the way that Arnold’s novel can, be read in direct relationto the movement’s ideas and practices. This staging is also, therefore, arisky act. Lessing’s novel could be read as the ‘strawman’ against whichthe other is heralded as the ‘true’ feminist voice, a move that would mimicrather than upset the progressive narrative of American feminism outlinedabove. But in another sense the contrast is not arbitrary at all, and the riskis worth taking precisely because it risks disrupting accepted feminist,literary, political, and temporal orders. Both novels have as their subjectthe relation of the personal to the political, in each the narrative focuseson the workings of a political group or collective and the dense andcomplex relations between political action, personal relationships, andfeelings and both address the problem of the personal–political relationwithin a (broadly conceived) feminist paradigm. Though Lessing’s novelwas first published in 1958, the Children of Violence series (of which ARipple from the Storm was the third of five volumes), along with TheGolden Notebook (1962), were popular novels within women’s liberation,and Lessing was an influential writer for many in the movement.4 And so,although the two novels were written over a decade apart (The Cook andthe Carpenter was first published in 1973) both circulated within women’sliberation at the same moment and can be read, therefore, as instrumentsin the ongoing articulation of feminist ideas and theories in the early years


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of the movement. Moreover, the emergence of postmodernism as an epis-temic shift, and postcolonialism as a geopolitical process, preceded andinfused the beginnings of women’s liberation, and in that sense A Ripplefrom the Storm and The Cook and the Carpenter form part of the samediscursive public of post-war Anglo-American feminism.5 By taking therisk of an odd conjunction and reading the two novels side-by-side, I wantto open up the messiness and contingencies of an era in which both ‘thepolitical’ and ‘the personal’ were contested terms, their meanings chal-lenged, their domains struggled over, their practices altered and, in somecases, transformed.

Family feelingThe problematization of ‘the personal’ by American feminists in the post-war era took place within the context of the failure of ‘Politics’ to offereither an explanation or a set of practices that could address the newdomestic and international realities of the Cold War. A loss of confidencein the grand narratives of revolution and progress, engendered in the mostimmediate sense by the crimes committed by both sides in World War Two,provoked what Wendy Brown has diagnosed as ‘an era of profound politi-cal disorientation’ (2001: 3). While neither Marxism nor Liberalism wassuperseded or replaced, the erosion of their ‘constitutive premises’ createda fragmentation of the idea of the political and a multiplication of itsmeanings (Brown, 2001: 4). Different constituencies – nationalist and civilrights movements, students, women, gays – began to conceive of differentways of doing the political and, as Foucault writes, ‘to ask politics a wholeseries of questions that were not traditionally a part of its statutory domain’(1997b: 115). Women’s liberation, rather than being anterior to, or simplyan agent of, this political disorientation was formed by it. The incoheren-cies of the movement’s mixture of Liberal ideals and Marxist rhetoric, andits confusion of revolution with ‘bourgeois’ preoccupations, were asymptom of the breaking down of the foundations of modernist politicalnarratives. The politics of women’s liberation was a strange and incoher-ent mixture because politics – what it was and how to do it – was, by thelate 1960s, open to debate.

The belief that traditional political theories and strategies (of the radicaland liberal kind) were inadequate to the problems women faced in thepost-war era is evident in the early position papers and books of thewomen’s liberation movement. Many of these publications were written asa protest against the turning away from participatory democracy in theStudent Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Students for aDemocratic Society (SDS), and the increasing glorification of masculinityand violence in both movements (Echols, 1989; Evans, 1979). But theywere also an enactment of a sense of keen frustration with the languageand rhetoric of Left politics. From the fantastical projections of the lesbianas ‘the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion’ in the Radicalesbians’ ‘Woman Identified Woman’, to Robyn Morgan’s (2000)exhilaratingly articulate, and savage, denunciation of the macho posturings


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of New Left men in ‘Goodbye to All That’, to the profoundly courageousanalysis of loss, anger, and betrayal in the lives of inner city Black womenin Patricia Haden, Donna Middleton, and Patricia Robinson’s ‘A Historicaland Critical Essay for Black Women’ (2000), many of the movement’s earlywritings were explicitly, if not brazenly, emotional.6 The embrace of angeras a radicalizing emotion that could shake women free of their attachmentsto the myths and illusions of political machismo, domesticity, and hetero-sexual unions, was also a recognition on the part of these feminists thatfeelings did things – socially and politically – to women, and that theycould, in turn, do things for women.

In fact, much of the early theorizing in what became the women’s liber-ation movement focused on the relations between social organization andemotional life.7 Betty Friedan begins her 1963 classic, The FeminineMystique, with a problem that, as she quickly makes clear, evades anyattempt at clear definition. The ‘problem that has no name’ was ‘a strangestirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning’ felt by the suburban wife andmother (p. 1): it was a ‘strange feeling of desperation’ that contradicted thematerial comfort and ease of her life (p. 16). For Friedan, ‘the problem’ washard to define precisely because it manifested itself through feelings ratherthan through measurable ‘data’: it was an emotional malaise, a conundrumof contradictory feelings that left many of the women Friedan interviewedtrapped and alienated in family life. Using a completely different politicaland theoretical framework, Shulamith Firestone also focused on thepsychic life of the family. In The Dialectic of Sex she argues that Marx andEngels did not go ‘deep enough’ in their analysis of ‘the historical dialec-tic’ (Firestone, 2003: 6). The real dynamic of human history, Firestoneasserts, was not economic but ‘psychosexual’ (p. 7). For Firestone the ‘basicreproductive unit’ of the biological family instituted a psychic as well asmaterial relation of ‘dominance-submission’ that then organized all otherforms of social organization. In this dialectic it was love in the form ofheterosexual reproductive relations, not capital, that had to be destroyed.And in Sexual Politics, Kate Millett called for a more expansive idea of thepolitical, one that included sexual relations. Politics, for Millett, referredto ‘power-structured relationships, arrangements whereby one group ofpersons is controlled by another’ through ‘techniques of control’ (Millett,1978: 31). One of the techniques of control examined by Millett wasromantic love. And like Firestone, Millett understood sexual relations asan originary locus for the production of social power. In Millett’s terms,‘coitus’ is a ‘charged microcosm’ of social relations and cultural values(p. 31), a conceptualization of sex that echoes Foucault’s definition of sexuality as a ‘dense transfer point for relations of power’ (Foucault,1990: 103).

To think of Millett’s understanding of sexuality as an echo of Foucault’sis not to make it the same, or to think of it as a precursor to Foucault’sperhaps more sophisticated theoretical elaboration. Rather it is to thinkof it in Benjaminian terms as a ‘blazing up’ from the past and from a different discursive domain (radical feminism as distinct from post -structuralism) that allows us to see, in a flash, a connection between the


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two. What we glimpse in early second wave position papers and theoriesis a struggle to articulate the relationship between the subjugation ofwomen, social institutions and ideologies like the family and hetero -sexuality, and what Pierre Bourdieu would later call ‘family feelings’(1998: 68). Foucault’s decentring and spatializing of power allowed him toconceive of sexuality as a field of power that shifted the focus of analysisaway from the individual as the source of desire or/and feeling and towardsan emphasis on practices, relations, and discourses. Bourdieu would latertake up Foucault’s understanding of power in his conception of the familyas a ‘field of forces’ and ‘struggles’ that constructs social reality through thereproduction of social space and relations (Bourdieu, 1998: 68–9). InBourdieu’s terms, the family is enacted as an ‘instrument’ in the construc-tion of reality through the two-way relationship between the ‘objectivestructures’ of the social and the ‘subjective mental structures’, or habitus,of each family member (i.e. all members of society) – structures that arethemselves socially constructed (p. 67).8 Family feelings, then, are the‘obliged affections and affective obligations’ that form what we recognizecollectively to be conjugal, maternal, paternal, and filial love. Our dis -position to feel or love in these recognized ways comes from whatBourdieu calls ‘the practical and symbolic work that transforms the obli-gation to love into a loving disposition’ (p. 68). Both Millett and Firestoneattempted to expand the political into an understanding of the family asan ‘instrument’ of social reproduction, and they, along with very differentthinkers like Friedan, Morgan, and Haden, Middleton and Robinson, alsorecognized emotions as a source and conduit of power. It is this effectivedispersal of the political into the realm of social relations, conceived at thesame time as also private and ‘psychic’, as well as material, that forms thekey intervention of early second wave problematizations of the ‘personal’in relation to the political.

Unlike Foucault and Bourdieu, these feminist thinkers never entirelyabandoned the rhetorics of liberal humanism and individualism; the individual was still, for many, the source of desire and the site of emanci-pation, and power was still, despite the focus on localized struggles,imagined in juridical terms. Metaphors of surface/depth, authenticity/artificiality, and the retention of dualistic paradigms for understanding therelations between public and private, men and women, homosexuality andheterosexuality, produced an emphasis on repression and imposition (of‘sex roles’, of heterosexuality) that usually resulted in a solution of escapeand an idealization of autonomy. And yet, through the focus on personalrelations, sex, and family life, the early women’s liberation movement alsoenacted a practice of the political that was concerned with the micrologiesof the everyday: how we feel and how we love became as much a part ofthe domain of the political as economic exploitation (for example), and‘politics’ as a result was dispersed into multiple localities – social, psychic,sexual, and emotional. These strange mixtures and incoherencies are notso much the symptom of a less-than-well-thought-through theoreticalparadigm, and more the effect of a crisis in the political – a crisis thataugmented the emergence of the new social movements, including


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women’s liberation – and an opening up of the problem of how to understand what power is and what it does.9

The tension between a juridical and more Foucauldian understanding ofpower also produced a different way of doing the political in women’sliberation. Through the taking-up of consciousness-raising in small ‘cells’or groups, women’s liberation practised a form of politics that centred ona self-transformation through the production of new relations and socialbonds.10 Social transformation would take place through the enactment ofdifferent practices and relations, rather than through the institution of newlaws or policies. Before early second wave experiments in a feminist wayof life were labelled and in some instances became lesbian separatism, theywere most often understood as attempts to break out of the economic andemotional dependencies of family life. The stated goal of these earlytheories and experiments was to form communities of women who wouldlive not only outside of what was called at the time the ‘role-playing’ ofheterosexual married life, but also outside what the Radicalesbians definedas all ‘coercive identifications’, including racial and sexual identifi-cations.11 Part of the experimentation in different ways of living was anattempt to have different loving relationships (primarily with other womenthough not exclusively). Non-possessive and in some cases non- monogamous relationships were practised in the attempt to love withoutfeelings of jealousy and dependency.12 In her 1974 autobiography, Flying,Kate Millett documents her and her radical feminist cohort’s attempts tocreate a ‘cult of friendship’ in which possessiveness, monogamy, gay andstraight were things of the past (Millett, 1990: 123). While these experi-ments weren’t always successful in the sense that the utopian transform-ations in social relations and feeling they sought could not confront theconstitutiveness of their sociality as middle-class white women, theynevertheless form part of the continuing production of feminist, gay andqueer communities and counterpublics in the US and elsewhere, includ-ing those formed around AIDS activism in the 1980s and 1990s and radicalsex communities today.

In the rest of the essay, I want to examine the genealogy of the shiftingarticulations of the personal and political in second wave feminism Ioutline above, by turning to the literary. For June Arnold, as for many ofthe writers active in women‘s liberation, literature was a means of creatinga feminist public and exploring the goals and aspirations of feminism. AsArnold herself wrote, the novel ‘will lead to, or is revolution . . . Women’sart is politics, the means to change women’s minds’ (Arnold, 1995: xix,emphasis in original). Lessing too understands literature as a means to domore ‘than simply state the problem’, but to also offer alternatives –whether to the limitations of particular women’s lives, or to the destruc-tive effects of colonialism and bourgeois respectability (Lessing, 1969:421). For both Arnold and Lessing, fiction has a usefulness preciselybecause it doesn’t separate distinct realms of life in order to analyse themin isolation but brings them together: it offers a discursive space for depicting and analysing ‘social and political reality as complex, contradic-tory processes’ (Scott, 1999: 93). And as a medium through which the


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messiness of life can be simultaneously expressed, explored, and trans-formed, fiction conjoins the imaginary and the real in a way that bringsfeelings, politics, and social change together. As Avery Gordon writes, thefictive is ‘an ensemble of cultural imaginings, affective experiences,animated objects, marginal voices, narrative densities, and eccentric tracesof power’s presence’ (1997: 25). It is, therefore, a peculiarly apt site forthe exploration of the meaning of politics that women’s liberation’s problematizations of the personal were engaged in.

A home away from homeAt the beginning of Martha Quest, the first volume in Doris Lessing’sChildren of Violence series, Martha, the central character in the series, issitting on the steps of her parents’ house looking up at the veranda whereher parents are seated talking to their neighbours, the Van Rensbergs. Thehouse, in contrast to the brightness of the African veld in which it sits, isseen as dark and impenetrable, cut off from the veld by the ‘colour barrier’of golden shower creeper (Lessing, 1952: 11). Martha’s feeling of exile fromthe house is revealed through her marginal position and explicit irritationwith the conversations her parents are having: her mother and Mrs VanRensberg talk of ‘servants, children, cooking’, while her father and Mr VanRensberg talk of ‘crops and the weather and the native problem’. Martha’sperception of these conversations as petty, narrow, and false, is echoed byher feelings of claustrophobia and constraint as she looks up at the adultstalking. The hierarchies of gender and age – women talking to women, mento men, and Martha, the young girl, looking up from the steps – along withthe ‘colour barrier’ separating the house from the veld and its Africaninhabitants, are depicted by Lessing, and felt as such by Martha, as themanifestation of the interlocking social worlds of colonial racism and bourgeois, patriarchal family life. Martha’s felt sense of exile from thisscene becomes, as the series progresses, a ‘quest’ for alternative socialworlds and relationships. By the fifth and final volume, The Four GatedCity (1969), Martha has left not only Africa and the middle-class homewhich comes to symbolize, among other things, England, colonialism, andthe bourgeois family, but also the realist European novel that is itself representative of the world Martha is both a part of and desperate to escape.

Lessing began the Children of Violence series in the immediate postWorld War Two period. For her, and for many of her critics, the series wasan attempt to ‘get the atmosphere of that particular time’, namely theparanoia and pessimism of the emerging Cold War and the correspondingcollapse of a collective investment in the Soviet Union as a socialist utopia(Lessing, 1994: 139). Lessing’s experimentation with form in The GoldenNotebook (1962), and her move away from realism into science fiction inThe Four Gated City, were literary responses to the breakdown in politicalorthodoxies engendered by the Cold War, and were an attempt to findalternative ways of thinking and conceptualizing the world and its seem-ingly intractable problems. The rejection of politics and political activismas a means to social transformation by the third volume in the Children of


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Violence series, A Ripple from the Storm, has to be understood as a reactionto the ‘atmosphere of that time’, and in particular, the horrifying effects oftwo totalitarian political regimes – fascism and communism – that, by1958, the year A Ripple from the Storm was first published, were imposs-ible to escape. Yet, while Lessing necessarily critiques the fanaticism andviolence underpinning totalitarian political regimes, her examination ofthe failures of an orthodox Marxist ideology to address the practice andexperience of colonialism and the complex lived reality of an individuallife, lead her to reject ‘politics’ altogether. In my reading of A Ripple fromthe Storm, then, I want to trace some of the implications of this rejectionof politics, both in terms of what it reveals about the conception of ‘thepolitical’ at work in the novel, and in terms of what gets constituted as nonor ‘pre-political’ as a result.

Part one of A Ripple from the Storm begins with a quotation from LouisAragon:

There is no passion for the absolute without the accompanying frenzy of theabsolute. It is always accompanied by a certain exaltation, by which it may firstbe recognized and which is always working on the growing point, the focal pointof destruction, at the risk of making it appear to such as have not been warned,that the passion for the absolute is the same as a passion for unhappiness.(Lessing, 1995: 8)

Seen in the context of the novel as a whole, this quotation has a predictiveforce that sets the tone for the entire novel. The trajectory of the novel isthe deliberate exemplification of this truth: that the search for totalizingsocial change will only lead to failure and ‘unhappiness’. The ‘absolute’for Lessing is the Marxism propounded by the communist group in theprovincial town of a small southern African country during World WarTwo, and especially by Anton Hesse, a German political refugee living inthe town and the effective leader of the group. Yet the absolute can also befound in Lessing’s depiction of the social world of the town. The hier-archical and vexed relationships between the African majority, colouredand white minorities, as well as the friendships, love affairs and familyrelationships of the group, are portrayed by Lessing as constantly threat-ening to undermine the political beliefs of the group. While Machiavellianintrigue and ideological clashes cause friction and breakdown in the political world of the town, it is the life deemed on the outside of politics– the private world of sexual and emotional intimacy – that proves to bethe ultimate cause of the political failures that end the novel.

Politics as something you do in public, that you take-up or not depend-ing on your character or your circumstances is an assumption that iscommon to all the characters in the book, and as such, politics is under-stood by the group to be distinct from ‘real life’. When Anton warns Marthathat ‘the personal life of a comrade should be arranged so that it interferesas little as possible with work’, he is assuming the personal and the political to be separate, for the one to be irrelevant in relation to the other(p. 66). And when Mr Maynard, the town magistrate and conservativecounterpoint to Anton, ‘advises’ Martha that if she ‘really wants a finger in


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the pie’ then she ‘should marry a politician and run him’, he assumes thata woman’s influence on society lies in her homebound roles as wife andmother, and not in the public sphere of organized politics (p. 64). AlthoughMartha scoffs at both men and the artificiality of the border they constructbetween private and public, she nevertheless increasingly comes to feelthat politics can’t tell her anything meaningful about her ‘real life’. Theassumption that politics and the personal are separate also comes, there-fore, from Lessing’s depiction of Martha’s frustration with not only theinability of Marxist ideology to account for the complex social world ofthe town, but also its inability to illuminate the complex world of her‘private’ life.

That politics fails to offer Martha a means to self-understanding and,moreover, a means of understanding the complex social relations ofcolonial southern Africa as a whole, is posited by Lessing through anumber of narrative strategies, including her deployment of class discoursein the text. Like all good Marxists the group communicates through ahighly self-conscious language of class; it is how they position themselvesin relation to each other. And yet, Lessing shows that the group uses classdiscourse as much to elide as reveal the meaningfulness of their relation-ships. Class discourse becomes, for the group, an increasingly rarefiedlanguage that operates at an ironic distance from the relationships anddramas it is used to explain. Bill Bluett, an RAF member of the group,jokingly refers to Martha as the ‘middle-class comrade’, in order to mockher gender which is evident, to him, in her preference for compromise anddiplomacy. We know this because Bluett is also middle class, and becauseJasmine, the other woman in the group, is similarly accused, although thistime for different reasons: ‘Well the RAF say we are bourgeois . . . [b]ecause. . . we wear lipstick and nail varnish’ (p. 118). Here, gender is invokedthrough class in such a way that the former remains unarticulated – presentin the text but operating in a way that the characters are less knowingabout. In contrast to the ready-made language of class that Marxismprovides for the group, they have no access to a language that wouldexplain, or account for ‘the problem’ of gender relations, which is theproblem they feel just as intensely.

Indeed, Marxist class discourse is made to look inconsequential, evenabsurd in its totalizing claim to universal application. Lessing furthersubverts its claims to truth by having her characters speak it through cliché.Marxist discourse is not a language through which the characters makesense of their world, as exemplified in the case of Anton, whose constantrefrain, ‘we must analyze the situation’, becomes a sign, not of his politi-cal perspicacity, but of his blindness and impotence. The fact that Antonsuffers not only from premature ejaculation, but from not realizing that itis even a problem, adds to Lessing’s portrayal of Anton as unable either toact on his politics, or to see the world around him. In contrast, Tommy, theyoungest and most naïve member of the group, ‘feels’ things but in a waythat is ‘wrong’ when placed next to Anton’s highly articulate ‘analysis ofthe situation’. Similarly, Maisie, an old friend of Martha’s, ‘frowns’ andwaits ‘for Martha to use a word she could feel with’ after Martha responds


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to her tale of Mr Maynard’s attempt to blackmail her with, ‘he’s a damnedold reactionary’ (p. 138). On the periphery of the group, Maisie and Tommyare situated in relation to Anton as more self-knowing and more able to getat the ‘truth’ of their respective situations despite their lack of a politicalanalysis or language, and precisely because of their ability to ‘feel’ things.

The disjuncture Lessing sets up between the explanatory power of politi-cal discourse and feeling becomes the means for her critique of the‘absolute’ of Marxism. While political discourse is portrayed as a highlyartificial and obfuscating language, emotions become the propulsive forcein the novel – causing the characters to act in ways that are counter to theideology they espouse, or in a way that is, ultimately, more effective thantheir ‘political’ actions. The expressions of feeling in the novel become thesign, or guarantee, of a ‘truthful’ perspective or experience, and as a result,emotions, desire, love, become, in their expression through heterosexuallove affairs and fraught family relations, not only the guarantee of a truthfulexperience or perspective in the novel, but also the guarantee of the naturalness of ‘family feeling’.

In her discussion of the Children of Violence series, Ingrid Holmquistposits that the family operates through the series as the most stable andcontinuous of structures. And it is through the family, Holmquist argues,that ‘an oppressive and hierarchical society is passed on from generationto generation’ (Holmquist, 1980: 33). I would develop Holmquist’sargument further by noting that it is through the given narrative of the bourgeois nuclear family (from which gender, class and race relations arealso understood) that people also feel their place in Lessing’s world. It isthis narrative, and the relationships it articulates, that operate centripetallyin the novel, resisting the pull of the promise of revolution, and undermin-ing Martha’s attempt to transform herself and society through meaningfulpolitical action. If the family is, as Holmquist rightly points out, the prin-ciple reproductive force in the continuation of ‘an oppressive and hier-archical society’ in Lessing’s work, Lessing cannot see a way out, in ARipple from the Storm at least, despite her critique, because the family isalso the generative source for the ‘obliged affections and affective obli-gations’ through which her characters feel the ‘truth’ of their situation andaspirations.

The power of the family as the cog of continuity in the social structureoperates in the novel through a series of displacements that enact familyfeelings as an ahistorical phenomenon. Anton’s paternal concern forMartha during her illness leads her to project onto him an idealistic figure.He suddenly becomes a kind and gentle man who will protect her. Anton’skindness leads Martha to remember his comment about the status ofwomen in the party, ‘“[F]or a woman things are more difficult than for aman; and that is why a woman comrade is entitled to help from her malecomrades. The problems of women, in my opinion, have not been givensufficient thought in the movement”’ (p. 67). When she hears this Marthafeels ‘liberated into understanding and support’, and when she becomesromantically involved with Anton it is precisely because of this promiseof recognition (p. 67). Yet, when Anton’s attitude towards her changes from


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gentle paternalism to a ‘dogged and cold’ possessiveness after they marry,Martha wonders how Anton cannot be embarrassed at the dichotomybetween his personal life and his political work. Martha has been betrayed,not only by the schism in Anton’s life between his political beliefs and hispersonal life, but also by her own complicity in the well-worn stories ofdesire and romance that infuse the familial drama. Martha cannot feel herrelationships with other people without these stories (hence her attractionto Anton precisely on account of his fatherly concern), and as a result,her political work is constantly mediated through relationships that undermine the goals of her political beliefs.

Conversely, Martha cannot make sense of a political life without thesefelt relationships. Lessing begins part three of the novel with a quotationfrom Olive Schreiner that illustrates the paradox of Martha’s predicament:‘My friendship for him began by my being struck by the stand he took oncertain political questions’ (p. 195). Martha’s attitude towards Anton isguided by his political beliefs, which are simultaneously transformed intoromantic qualities manifested in his paternalism, kindness, and apparentconcern for the condition of women, all of which promise Martha that shewill be understood and recognized. The politics of Anton and the groupbecome the means of escape to a new home, to a new sense of belongingfor Martha in which she will be free of the claims of her bourgeois, colonialexistence. At the same time, that home is, ironically, a home away fromhome, only conceivable in the familiar familial terms of fatherly concernand the promise of recognition that form the seductive power of the hetero-sexual contract. When Martha’s disillusionment with Anton is complete,she does not dream of escape by imagining a socialist state full of a collec-tive and unfamiliar love, she dreams of ‘the faceless man who waited inthe wings of the future, waiting to free the Martha who was in cold storage’(p. 294). It is the ‘family feelings’ of the bourgeois household, and inparticular, the feelings of mutual recognition and fulfilment of self thatform the modern heterosexual couple as ideal, that become both the groundof Martha’s conception of ‘reality’, and the only means of her attempt tothink beyond that reality.

Martha also displaces the promise of the political onto mother figureswho, like Mr Maynard and Anton, operate in the novel as representationsof Martha’s past and (potential) future. The figure representing the past isMrs Carson, Martha’s landlady. The paranoid colonial nightmare in whichMrs Carson lives – her fear of her native servants that is at once both aracist and a sexual fear – is a ‘voice already dead’ but which ‘had oncemade sense’ (p. 67). Mrs Carson is directly aligned with Martha’s motherwhen the latter echoes Mrs Carson’s fears (literally repeats Mrs Carson’sworry that her servant is spying on Martha as she gets dressed) when shevisits Martha during her illness. In an echo of Mr Maynard’s Hobbesianvision of history, the two women exist in a fateful universe in which, inorder to maintain their privilege as white women in a colonial world, theyabdicate from responsibility for the world around them. It is an exclusivelyfeminine abjection in which the surrendering of any will to act is offeredin return for a blameless life.


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In contrast, Mrs Van der Bylt (‘Mrs Van’), the local leader of the Labourparty, represents Martha’s potential future. Like Anton, Mrs Van believespolitics can change the world. But unlike Anton, who devotes himself to‘analyzing the situation’, Mrs Van’s politics are all action. As the mostskilful political player in the novel, she successfully, and with a certainrelish, manipulates the local Labour party committee into agreeing to votefor African representation. And as a wife and mother in what initiallyappears to Martha to be a happy marriage, Mrs Van becomes an idealizedfigure for Martha in that she combines, with seeming success, the dual rolesof public citizen and sexually fulfilled woman. Yet the sacrifice Mrs Vanwas forced to make early in life – her refusal to acquiesce to her husband’simplicit demand that she devote her entire self to his needs, and histurning away from her as a consequence – results in Martha eventuallyrefusing to identify herself and her future with Mrs Van. For Martha, thefuture cannot be imagined without the romantic bond between a man anda woman. Her image of freedom, we remember, is the faceless man in herdreams who will awaken her to her real self.

Mrs Van’s sacrifice becomes a sign in the novel of the incompatibility ofa woman’s life with a political life. And although Lessing understands thatincompatibility in terms of the mutually problematic conceptions of ‘awoman’s life’ and ‘a political life’ projected by a bourgeois, racist, colonialsociety on the one hand, and an orthodox Marxism on the other, shecannot, ultimately, see a way out of the conundrum (except for Martha toleave, which she does in the next novel in the series). While Martha rejectsthe conventions of her middle-class, English, colonial society by leavingher husband and child and by actively campaigning for the end of whiterule in the Colony, and although she rejects Anton’s political dogmatismby engaging in political activities he deems ‘incorrect’, neither she, norLessing, questions the inevitability of the affective bonds of the family, andin particular, the heterosexual bond. Martha may reject the conventions ofmarriage and motherhood, but she still yearns for ‘a close completeintimacy with a man’ (p. 54). She still understands herself as the ‘type ofwoman who can never be . . . “themselves,” with anyone but the man towhom they have permanently or not given their hearts . . . it is his concep-tion which forms her’ (pp. 54–5). Indeed, Martha decides to become ‘a goodcommunist’ in part as a distraction from her loneliness and her failure tofind the man who would reveal herself to herself. Politics can be a tempor-ary means of escape (from the predicament of being a woman), but it cannotchange that predicament, nor can it offer an analysis of the ‘problem’ ofbeing a woman, despite Anton’s promised but never actualized assertionthat it can. Here the absolute that causes unhappiness is not only the totalitarianism of Anton’s orthodox Marxism, but also the fatefulness ofLessing’s acceptance of the ahistorical continuity, and necessity, of heterosexual love as mutual recognition of ‘man’ and ‘woman’.

Although, by the fifth and final volume in the Children of Violenceseries, Lessing does come to reject ‘forms of intimacy’ that are ‘domestic,based on kinship, or bound to the couple form, nation or property’, shehas also rejected politics as a means to achieve social change. The


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transformative moment in The Four Gated City comes as a result of anuclear accident. If, as one critic has written, Lessing reveals in herChildren of Violence series ‘the crippling effects of history on the individ-ual while denying the individual the power to contest them’ (Middleton,1988: 20), it is, at least in part, because she cannot imagine a politics thatwould offer her an analysis of what, for her, are the timeless and inevitablesocial realities of racial and sexual oppression which are, in turn,conceived in familial terms. Lessing’s men and women are trapped by theirdisposition to feel their familial relationships as timeless and natural. Norcan they escape the sense that their true selves will only be revealedthrough the relationship they have with the other. But it is the boundedand eternal sense of heterosexual relations in particular, that prevents thegroup, and Martha specifically, from engaging in meaningful or effectivepolitical work. Politics becomes that which falls into inconsequentialitywhen brought face-to-face with the timeless permanence of family feeling.

Feeling differentlyThe focus on ‘personal life’, and the emergence of ‘experience’ as a politi-cal and theoretical concept for feminism, emerged out of the practice ofconsciousness-raising in the women’s liberation movement.13 At its best,consciousness-raising was a method for interpreting experience in order to‘pose skeptical questions’ (Morris, 1998: xxii) about history and society.14

Women would speak of their lives in order to bring into view the histori-cal contingencies of those lives, and from this questioning and the insightstheir various perspectives afforded them, they would then propose otherways of being women and of organizing society (Sarachild, 1968).Although some consciousness-raising groups did emphasize the produc-tion of sameness as a necessary beginning for political solidarity,15 thetheoretical emphasis was on a future-directed becoming for women.16 LikeFoucault, for whom homosexuality was neither a condition nor an identity,but an ‘historic occasion’ to invent new social and affective bonds, manyfeminists understood consciousness-raising (and living a feminist life) asa practice of social change rather than as confession or simplistic ‘truth-telling’. Giving voice to their experiences would not tell women who they‘really were’, so much as it would enable them to question the social struc-tures and representations through which they had come to understandthemselves and their lives. The concept of the political that emerged fromthe practice of consciousness-raising, therefore, was one that not only privileged ‘experience’ and ‘the personal’ as sites of contest and power insociety, but also politicized, that is, denaturalized, the very idea of ‘experience’ and ‘the personal’.

I read The Cook and the Carpenter as a literary form of consciousness-raising in which both the plot and stylistic experiments, including the useof ‘na’ and ‘nan’ as non-gendered pronouns, are used to examine therelationship between political activism, social change and personal experience. By situating the story in the events and relationships of afeminist collective in which the protagonists both live and work together,


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Arnold, like Lessing, questions the distinction between ‘a political life’ and‘a private life’ and, indeed, ‘a woman’s life’. Yet, rather than regard politics,as Anton does in Lessing’s A Ripple from the Storm, as something that youuse and apply to the social world and which is, therefore, somehowseparate or distinct from that world, or, as Martha does, as something thatcan be rejected – the elsewhere of the ‘truth’ about her life – Arnold under-stands the political as something intrinsic to the structuration of the socialitself. That is, the ‘site’ of the political in The Cook and the Carpenter isprecisely the relationships between the characters in the collective, andthose between the collective and the outside world.

Like Lessing’s novel, The Cook and the Carpenter features a series ofmeetings in which the dense and complex relations between politics andthe personal are dramatized. Although in both novels, the group meetingsare elaborate dances in which political discourse is used to mask bothplays for power and the simmering undercurrent of personal feelings, themeetings held by Arnold’s collective also incorporate explicit expressionsof the personal and constantly veer from discussions about political actionsto discussions of personal feelings. In the first meeting of the book, the cooktells the collective of the carpenter’s expression of love for her whilealso offering a plan for defending the collective from an imminent attackby local men. For the cook, the two are related: the carpenter’s ‘courage togrow’ is part of the collective’s search for growth. The term around whichthe cook draws the relationship between the two is ‘privacy’. The carpenter’s love for the cook is no more ‘private’ (i.e. not political or notabout social change) than the privacy of the collective. The defence planbecomes, therefore, an open celebration, in the form of a carnival, of thecollective’s new home in the town.

As the home for their private lives as well as their political work, thecollective collapses the distinction between the private and the public,becoming, in the process, an experimental space in which both Arnold andher characters constantly question the relationship between the two. Whenthe cook tells the group about the carpenter’s declaration of love for her,the carpenter feels her ‘politics tumble across the floor of nan mind like abarrel of puppies’ and a ‘giant tear lodged in nan throat’ as her thoughts‘forced naself back into the child’ she once was (p. 23). The sense ofconfusion and unravelling the carpenter feels is precisely a result of theway in which the cook’s actions dissolve the border between the personaland the political. By invoking childhood vulnerability at a moment ofpolitical disorientation for the carpenter, Arnold makes the connectionsbetween affective experience and political work apparent: the carpenter’sfeelings of fear and vulnerability (and the memories they are felt through)are shown to be part of the practice of social and personal change both sheand the collective as a whole are engaged in.

Although many of Lessing’s characters, particularly Martha, also cometo trust their feelings rather than ‘dry’ political analysis, that trust is placedin opposition to the political discourse on offer to the group. For Lessing,personal feeling and politics are separate domains of experience thatoperate in increasing tension with the other as A Ripple from the Storm


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progresses. Martha’s frustration with the group and politics comes from herintuitive understanding that the political ideology spouted by Anton canneither account for, nor acknowledge, the power of feelings in people’slives. Yet her (and Lessing’s) response to that frustration is to accordemotion, and ‘family feeling’ in particular, a timeless permanence that thenbecomes the reason for the failure of politics. In contrast, in Arnold’s novel,we see a reorientation of the relation between the political and thepersonal. The world of the feminist collective is one in which the affectiveand emotional experiences of the characters produce their political viewsand actions and vice versa. Rather than the incommensurable worlds of theprivate and the political, Arnold portrays feelings and politics to be deeplyand complicatedly connected, the relationship between the two neithercausal nor simply antagonistic but mutually productive. As such, both theprivate realm of feeling and the public realm of political action become, inThe Cook and the Carpenter, ‘structure-systems’ that act on and througheach other (p. 87).

Arnold’s politicization of the private realm as a ‘structure-system’ isevident in the language she has her characters speak. While scattered withsixties ‘Movement’ rhetoric (the police are ‘pigs’), the language spoken bythe cook and the carpenter is, for the most part, free of Marxist terminol-ogy. Instead of class, the terms of analysis are ‘big’ and ‘little’. The abstract-ness of the terms (and their lack of a political history) make them mobile– the cook is able to use them to analyse her relationship with the carpen-ter as well as the relationship between the collective and the local men:‘“It’s about big and little, isn’t it?” The cook was little and the carpenterwas big. Their own group was little and the men threatening to comeSaturday were big’ (p. 10). Through the language she uses Arnold revealsthat power is produced not only in the socially constructed relationshipbetween the private and the public, but also between individuals withinthe ‘private’ domain. Moreover, by making a distinction between the groupor individual and the designation, ‘big’ or ‘little’, Arnold denaturalizes anddecentres power by not making it content specific, that is, by not locatingit in particular bodies. This relational understanding of power is exempli-fied when the collective takes over an abandoned building. The forces of‘big’ and ‘little’ are shown to act upon each other in such a way that thedifferences between the women in the collective are made irrelevant. Theneed for solidarity rather than difference is made apparent when, and only,in relation to the oppressive forces of the state. In the eyes of the police thewomen are indeed all the same, not because they are women per se, butbecause the situation dictates the taking up of sides: the police versus thefeminist collective, a fact exemplified in that one of the policemen is awoman.

Similarly, Arnold’s deployment of the pronouns, ‘na’ and ‘nan’, for thefirst two-thirds of the book, disrupts the reader’s attempts both to natural-ize the distinction between the private and the public realms, and also toattribute gendered meaning to the actions and feelings of the characters.Instead, the awkwardness of Arnold’s terms forces the reader to work tomake the distinctions and associations, and as a result, the constructedness


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of the process becomes an integral part of the reading. Gender is coded inthis novel, not in order to differentiate between men and women, but toseparate, and therefore denaturalize, actions and feelings from particularbodies. When, in the last third of the book, pronouns become gendered,the reader is forced to confront the fact that it is the roles that people arecoerced or ‘disposed’ into playing, and not some natural separation of‘spheres’ or innate biological essence, that result in certain actions andfeelings. Gender, Arnold illustrates, is not about the ‘truth’ of being awoman or a man, but rather a social process of differentiation that is hier-archical and enacted through a field of power that also reproduces the waysin which people act, think and feel.

Arnold’s understanding of the relational operation of power as the siteof the political enables her to denaturalize both the ‘private’ and the‘public’ as social domains. As a result, the home and the family becomecategories of analysis in The Cook and the Carpenter in a way that liesbeyond the scope of Lessing’s understanding of the political. In BonnieZimmerman’s terms, the concepts of home and family are interrogated inthe novel ‘in each strand of storytelling’, from the way in which Arnoldmoves the story from her ‘political home’ in New York back to her familialhome in Texas, to the way in which the carpenter ‘tries to leave the“home” of her familiar identity and shape a new sense of self’, to the wayin which the collective works to create a new sense of home and family(Zimmerman, 1995: xxvii). Arnold constantly analyses the social andemotional investments people place in ideas of home and family. Indeed,the collective’s difference from, but not complete dissimilarity with, thebourgeois family enables Arnold to displace, and therefore make strange,family life. The Christmas holidays, for example, which the collectivespends cleaning, leave the house ‘permeated with past emotions’ – areminder of a world they have ‘discarded’ but which is still present inmemory (Arnold, 1995: 88). How the collective interacts with each other,the relationships of attraction and repulsion, like and dislike, are examinedby the characters in relation to, but at a distance from, familial relation-ships – their proximity generating mixed or confused feelings of belongingand alienation. And because the collective is a conscious attempt by itsmembers to live outside ‘normal’ family life, their distance from it becomesthe means for an analysis of the limitations and constraints of family life,as well as the difficulties of inventing new relationships within the collective.

The cook and the carpenter, as is indicated by their names, initially relateto each other through roles that evoke the ‘affective obligations and obligedaffections’ of family feeling: the cook nurtures and feeds, her belly is soft;the carpenter builds things with her hands, her forearms are strong andsinewy. Early in their relationship the cook tells the carpenter ‘“You aremy child, my own precious child”’ (p. 48), and when Three arrives shetells her that she was attracted to the carpenter because she neededsomeone who was strong and powerful to help with her children (p. 60).Conversely, one of the carpenter’s ‘first disappointments’ in her love affairwith the cook is with the ‘tender’ and apologetic way the cook makes love.


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And after the collapse of the affair the carpenter tells Three that one of theproblems was that they saw things ‘in pros or cons, this or that, a versus b– opposites’ (p. 87). The binary relationship becomes a trap for the cookand the carpenter, limiting their ability to escape the patterns of lovingeach other that replicate previous relationships. They were ‘people withhistories, of a certain age’ who were ‘caught behind a jut’ (p. 87). Thecarpenter’s strength becomes a way for her to maintain her sense ofisolation, while the cook’s nurturing becomes a ‘closet’ in which she candisappear ‘into the kids’ and hide from the risk of loving differently(p. 105).

With the arrival of Three the binary relationship between the cook andthe carpenter dissolves. As is indicated through the name, Three acts as acatalyst or initiator of change in the novel, and her arrival in the collectiveallows both the cook and the carpenter, and the collective as a whole, toescape from their own limited, felt, sense of who they are in relation to theother. When the carpenter is with Three she feels as if she can ‘escape defi-nition’, the sense of fluidity a ‘fantasy’ realized (p. 86). And when thecarpenter analyses her feelings for Three she concludes that Three has‘filled my vacant places with the tenderness I have felt only when holdingmy baby infant’, yet, she adds, ‘you are not my child’ (p. 84). Here, theaffective bonds of family life are suggested through a negative simile, thedistance created by the ‘you are not’ acting as the beginning point forthe articulation of different affective bonds where tenderness, for example,will be felt and articulated in ways other than through the normativeparent–child relationship.

Yet, Three’s arrival also precipitates feelings of loss and anger in thecarpenter. Her ‘fantasy’ of fluidity comes at the cost of feeling her ‘special-ness’ in relation to others. The desire to change and to love differently alsobrings with it the risk of losing a sense of oneself that the ‘structure-system’of ‘family feeling’ gives one. The contradictoriness of the carpenter’sfeelings is both a sign of the difficulty of trying to invent new affectivebonds, and also a sign of the power of the ‘affective obligations’ that areproduced by, and help maintain, the socially inscribed relationships of thefamily. Paradoxically, the contradictoriness of the carpenter’s feelings canalso be read as a sign of the instability and contingency of feeling which,in turn, can be understood as a productive force for the personal and socialchange the carpenter and the collective seek.

That Arnold understands the unpredictability of feeling as a productiveforce is evident in her depiction of dancing and drinking in the text. Bothare represented as creative and potentially liberatory activities. For thecook, dancing creates a space of freedom, a way of being that enables herto escape, if only momentarily, from her roles as feeder and carer. And forthe carpenter, drinking becomes a means of dissolving the sense ofisolation she feels and of experiencing a transformative, even violentemotion. On one trip, the carpenter and Three drink themselves into ‘astorm’ in which feelings of class envy and guilt, and the desire thosefeelings produce, are expressed in a furious, uninhibited screaming match.Drunkenness is presented, as a result, as a painfully difficult experience


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that also simultaneously provides an opportunity for the carpenter andThree to negotiate, through their desire and feelings of envy and guilt, thesocial hurt produced by social inequity.

It is interesting to note here how Arnold’s play on gendered roles throughher use of names like the cook and carpenter, and her exploration of classin the relationship between the carpenter and Three, echo representationsof butch-femme culture in later work by lesbian writers (Davis andKennedy, 1993; Feinberg, 1993; Nestle, 1992). Although the women’s liber-ation movement is largely understood to have been critical and evendismissive of butch-femme sexuality, we can see in Arnold’s novel a muchmore complex and ambiguous attitude towards it.17 While neither the cookand carpenter’s relationship, nor that between the carpenter and Three, isidentified by Arnold as butch-femme, her depiction of gendered role-playing and class envy and privilege, suggests the social inequities throughwhich butch-femme sexuality is practised. As Ann Cvetkovich argues inher exploration of the ‘affective labor’ of butch-femme culture, butch-femme relationships are ‘complex economies of embodiment and social-ity’ in which the social world and its ‘traumas’ are negotiated through thesexual and emotional practices of the couple (Cvetkovich, 2003: 66). Aswith butch-femme sexuality in which the ‘social hurts’ of homophobia andsexism are ‘worked through’ in the relationship between the two women(with the butch and femme partners transforming the meaning of ‘mascu-line’ and ‘feminine’, for example, in the interplay of attraction and desire),Arnold reveals how the relationships between her three protagonists negotiate and work through the social hurts of gender and class hierarchiesrespectively. That is, rather than a leap into a utopian representation of anon-gendered, non-hierarchical relationship, Arnold, like later lesbianwriters on butch-femme, uses the strange yet familiar ‘intimate’ publicspace of the all-women collective to explore the affect (and effect) of classand gender in intimate relationships.

The strangeness or queerness of the collective, like the queerness ofbutch-femme culture, produces a necessary experimentation with, anddefamiliarization of, intimate relationships that can, in turn, produce acritique of heterosexuality as a ‘structure-system’ that holds people andtheir feelings in place. Unlike Lessing’s communist group which is over-whelmingly heterosexual and which lived its private life through thenorms of heterosexuality and ‘family feeling’ (if not the norms of marriageand family life), the collective lives its ‘private’ life as a public experimen-tation in non-heterosexual forms of affective and sexual bonds. As a resultof this experimentation the social construction of feelings becomes visibleas part of the social world the collective is seeking to transform. By makingtheir ‘private’ life public, the collective is also able to reveal how ‘awoman’s life’ and ‘a political life’ are not so much incompatible as inter-dependent. Whereas Martha Quest and Lessing understand the political tobe incapable of addressing the reality of a woman’s life, the collective’spoliticization of the private reveals that Anton’s form of absolute politicsis dependent upon the separation of ‘a woman’s life’ (and the family feelingthat helps produce it) from the public world of politics.


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The power of affect and the contingency of feeling become central politi-cal discoveries for Arnold’s collective. In their struggle to think and lovedifferently, the carpenter, cook, and Three not only attempt to inventalternative affective and sexual bonds, but also come to understand politi-cal activism differently. Rather than the absolutism of Anton’s revolution,the collective comes to realize that social change happens through ‘little’as well as ‘big’ actions, and through the contingencies of time and placerather than abstract certainties. In ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’, Foucaultwarns against making gay life a ‘program’ with laws that would prohibitand exclude (Foucault, 1997a: 139). Rather, living a gay life should entailkeeping the possibilities of that life ‘wide open’ by a constant working onourselves in what Foucault calls the practice of ‘homosexual ascesis’ (p.137). A commitment to invention and a resistance to institutions andtraditions – but not to historical excavation and memory – are central toFoucault’s conception of homosexuality as an ‘historic occasion’ for theforming of new social relations and affective bonds. In the same way, thepolitical success of Arnold’s collective does not lie in any absolutepersonal or social transformation but in the ‘affective and relational virtu-alities’ (Foucault, 1997a: 138) it has opened up, both for the members ofthe collective and in its relations with the town, the local townspeople.

The idea that nothing is fixed, that things change and that invention andmovement are intrinsic to a successful feminist politics, is also reflectedby, and connected to, the carpenter’s own sense of continuing fluidity andchange. After the group takes over the building and after Three leaves, thecarpenter understands things differently and acts differently. She assumesher old name, Henrietta, not because she’s returning to her old self, butbecause now she understands that she is not her name, she realizes thatshe has ‘been chasing after a fantasy of being whole’ and that she can neverbe whole or complete, finished and ‘known’ once and for all (p. 172). Herrelationship with Three has changed her relationship with the cook who,in turn, has also changed. The takeover of the building and the ending ofher relationship with Three have enabled the carpenter to understand thather feelings for Three and for the cook are never still or complete, butcontingent upon place and time. As she becomes Henrietta, ‘a name thathad taken on a new sound, the sound of sound only’ (p. 159), the carpen-ter also comes to realize that she has felt her relationships through a seriesof narratives and conventions (‘the cook and the carpenter’) that haveserved not only to limit and fix those relationships, but to contain andstructure her feelings.

Words, sentences, and metaphors become, by the end of the novel, thethings the carpenter resists as she tries to tell the cook what she feels forher: ‘It would have to be done with words. I am alive only when I am withyou. Your separate being is as precious to me as a character I am loving ina novel. We are below power and can trust one another. “I hate thesewords,” the carpenter said’ (p. 179). Love will not do as a word because itis ‘those awkwardly-printed words on mother’s day cards, that we taughtthem, because we couldn’t bear to hear them say, I eat your soul because Imust grow big and replace you’, and ‘that word sticky with semen which


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we begged them to say instead of, Stand still, target’ (p. 177). ‘Love’ is aword that enacts limited and prescribed feelings that reproduce therelationships that the carpenter realizes have trapped both her and thecook. The search for different words (and different concepts) will producedifferent ways of feeling desire and love so that, in the future, the carpen-ter’s ‘strength’ and the cook’s ‘nurturing’, for example, will have differentmeanings and affects.

Feeling politicalPassion for the absolute, whether it is revolutionary Marxism or the perma-nence of family feeling, is that with and against which The Cook and theCarpenter argues. In The Cook and the Carpenter political analysis andaction undoes the separation of the ideologies and institutions of intimacyfrom the public sphere: it becomes a practice that is contingent and local-ized, but that also operates across and through distinct social fields. In ARipple from the Storm, the distinction between the personal and politicalis maintained with the relation between the two problematized in terms ofa disjuncture between ‘a woman’s life’ and a ‘political life’. Emotions liebehind, or underneath, the workings of the political in A Ripple from theStorm: they propel the activism of the communist group, but in a way thattheir politics can’t acknowledge or confront, which only adds to thedestructiveness, or impotency, of their actions. The distinction betweenpolitics and the personal is maintained by Lessing in order to locate thefailings of one in relation to the other, and by the end of the novel both theintimate sphere of Martha’s marriage, and the public sphere of her politi-cal activism, are rejected as constraining domains. But in maintaining thedistinction between politics and intimacy, Lessing also maintains thefamily, and the heterosexual relations that are its generative force, asseparate from and outside of politics. Private life is still, finally, the eternal‘pre-political’ present of ahistorical family feeling, the reality againstwhich the world of politics (futilely) struggles.

In The Cook and the Carpenter, in contrast, the distinction between thepersonal and the political is less stable and more fluid producing, as aconsequence, a notion of the political that moves away from the liberalideal of the individual as the beginning point for action, and towards relationality and its production of feelings as the source of sociality (amove foreshadowed by Lessing’s experimentation with form in theChildren of Violence series). The relational understanding of power in TheCook and the Carpenter, and the blurring of the borders between a politi-cal life and a personal life it enacts, enable Arnold to explore the family asa field of power that not only situates us in relation to each other, but alsoconstrains our ability to create new social and affective relations. By theend of the novel the cook and the carpenter leave the collective, theirstruggle to live and love differently propelling them to move on and to keepchanging. While the attempt at social and personal change is, ultimately,limited – the ‘coupledom’ of the cook and carpenter a familiar rather thanespecially strange form of intimacy – The Cook and the Carpenter suggests


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that the meaning of political action includes the practices of inventing newrelationships and affective bonds. The novel also suggests that it is onlythrough the continuing attempt to invent new relationships and newcommunities that women will not only transform the social relations thatkeep them locked into their role as ‘Woman’, but will also enable them tobreak out of the ‘affective obligations and obliged affections’ of a family lifethat has, so far, constrained their possibilities.

The crisis of the political mapped out for us by feminist cultural criticslike Berlant, is one in which the public feelings produced by mass culturecome to dominate the national public sphere to the extent that politicalaction seems inconsequential and even counterproductive in comparison.People’s attachments and disattachments to the state, the nation, or a socialidentity are more compelling as felt norms of aspirational longing than theyare as expressly political acts of cognition or ideological fealty (Berlant,2008). Today, to be a feminist is to be out of date, in part because of theassociation of that term with an overtly political relation to the world.Feminists don’t have a sense of humour because they’re too busy being theangry activist, constantly reminding us that buying shoes is a cop-out tothe big bad capitalist machine. The shift enacted by women’s liberationtowards a politicization of the intimate domains of romantic love andfamily life as sites of subjugation for women, meant that feelings becamethe ineffable stuff of feminist contention during the early years of themovement. It also meant that the stories and words used to formalize ourdesires and identities were troubled, and became troubling, for feminism.But the problem of how a politicization of feeling converts into an effec-tive propulsive force for collective political action remains. How doesfeminism avoid falling into the solipsistic traps of self-help cultures if itwants to ‘attack’ feelings as a producer and enabler of the status quo? Themove away from an organized and ideological politics as represented inLessing’s novel to the more improvisational and contingent politicsexplored in Arnold’s novel, does not solve the problem of how to ‘do’politics better. Indeed, the utopianism of much early women’s liberationtheory tended to elide this problem precisely through the incitement ofpassionate feelings – emotions that were predicated on a felt sense ofcommon oppression that precluded many women from feeling an identifi-cation with ‘women’s liberation’. Nevertheless, the movement’s opening upof the intimate domains of ‘obliged affections and affective obligations’ asa political problem for feminism created a space – a critical space – for ourcontinued thinking through of the relationship of feelings and politics.

Notes1. See Lauren Berlant (2001, 2008). It is interesting to note that in her latest

work, The Female Complaint, Berlant brackets off feminism completelyfrom her explorations of the intimate public sphere of American women’sculture. As a ‘nosy neighbour’ to the sentimental work of mid-20thcentury middlebrow writers and artists such as Edna Ferber and DorothyParker, feminism’s relationship to the intimate public sphere ofsentimental feeling remains unarticulated by Berlant – except through an


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analogy that tends to suspend explication rather than offer it (p. x).2. I should state at this point that ‘women’s liberation’ is generally used in

this essay to designate the historical specificity of the predominantlywhite middle-class radical feminist movement of the late 1960s throughthe early 1970s. I use ‘second wave’ less as a descriptive term for themyriad feminist movements of the era, including the Black and Chicanafeminist movements that emerged at the same time as the women’sliberation movement, than as a placeholder for a term that would betterdescribe the highly contested, diverse, and energetic explosion offeminisms during this time. Of course, using the term ‘women’sliberation’ to name a specific feminist collectivity in this way distorts themore permeable reality of a feminist movement that sought to align itselfwith national liberation struggles and the Black Power movement eventhough, at the same time, it largely failed to enact cross-class and cross-race feminist alliances. In addition, we would elide the complexityof the historical moment if ‘women’s liberation’ was deployed as propername for the multiple feminisms of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

3. For a fascinating discussion of the way citation practices in contemporaryfeminist theory tend to reproduce the progressive narrative I outline here,despite their explicit identification with poststructuralist theoreticalparadigms that seek to counter their political and epistemological effects,see Clare Hemmings (2005).

4. See, for example, Kate Millett’s autobiography of her time in the women’sliberation movement, Flying, for a vivid description of the god-like statusshe accords Lessing (Millett, 1990: 357). See also Lauret (1994) andHogeland (1998) for discussion of Lessing’s influence on second wavetheory and fiction.

5. See Marianne DeKoven (2004) for her examination of the 1960s as a‘pivot’ moment in the turn from modern to postmodern theoreticalparadigms in political and social thought.

6. All of these essays were first published or circulated in movementnetworks in 1970. 1970 was also the year women’s liberation explodedonto the national scene becoming one of the dominant stories in thenational media. See Baxandall and Gordon (2000), Echols (1989), Koedt,Levine and Rapone (1973).

7. Of course, one of the main inspirations for much of the theoretical workin the early women’s liberation movement was Simone de Beauvoir’s TheSecond Sex, first published in the US in 1952. Indeed, all of the feministwriters and thinkers I take up in this essay incorporated many of deBeauvoir’s arguments into theirs, often without acknowledging herinfluence. And, as one of the readers of this essay pointed out, thecontinuities between de Beauvoir’s work and that of later Frenchintellectuals, like Foucault and Bourdieu, remain an unexplored part ofthe post-war shift to poststructural thought in the French and US leftistpolitico-intellectual public spheres.

8. For Bourdieu the ‘specific ontology’ of social categories lies in the ‘two-way relationship’ between the objective structures of state policyand legislation, and the subjective structures of everyday living, orhabitus – the field of dispositions, practices, classificatory schemes andfeelings (Bourdieu, 1998: 67).


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9. For example, Friedan’s solution to ‘the problem with no name’ in TheFeminine Mystique was for housewives to have interests – professionaland creative – outside the home that would lead to a self-fulfilmentseparate from their roles as wives and mothers. Yet, within the context ofher argument about the relations between consumer capitalism and theproduction of the middle-class home and the role of women within it, thesolution does not make sense. In other words, Friedan’s solution is anindividual one for a structural problem. Similarly, in Sexual Politics,Millett argues for a sexual revolution in which desire would be freed fromthe imposition of gendered role-playing. Yet, in her reading of Genet as adiagnostician of heterosexuality as the site of the reproduction of socialpower, she simultaneously suggests that heterosexuality is neither simplyan imposition, nor natural, but a generative ‘principle’ in thereproduction of the social. The incoherencies of her argument signal acontradiction between two models of power: the juridical, and one that ismultiple, diffuse, and reciprocal.

10. This focus on self-transformation and the production of new social andaffective bonds was not exclusive to women’s liberation. SDS and SNCCwere also concerned, in the early days at least, with practising a politicsof personal responsibility in which how you lived your life on a day-to-day basis within the context of your private affairs and actions,rather than the party you voted for, became the terms of a viable politicalidentity. Women’s liberation emerged partly as a response to the turningaway from ‘participatory democracy’ in the New Left and Civil RightsMovement, and it was the women’s liberation movement in particularwhich focused on the psychic and emotional dependencies ofheterosexual family life as both a source and site for politicalintervention. See Evans (1979), Miller (1987), Zaretsky (1976).

11. See the Radicalesbians’ 1970 position paper, ‘The Woman IdentifiedWoman’. Although this paper is often read as one of the first theorizationsof an essentialist lesbian feminism (see, for example, Nicholson, 1997),the paper offers a more ambivalent working through of the idealization ofthe lesbian figure for radical feminism, and proposes the working towards‘a new consciousness’ and a new community of women that wouldoperate beyond ‘coercive identifications’, that is, beyond existing socialidentities including gay and lesbian identities. See Radicalesbians(1973: 240).

12. For experiments in creating lesbian-feminist communities, see Ross(1995) and Wolf (1979). See also, Koedt, Levine and Rapone (1973).

13. According to Alice Echols, the Redstockings was the first radical feministgroup to instigate consciousness-raising as a feminist political practice.However, it seems likely that other feminist groups in the late 1960s werealso engaging in similar practices. See Echols (1989). See also Sarachild(1968) and Cornell (2000). Cornell wrote ‘Las Grenudas: Recollections onConsciousness-Raising’ in order to counter some of the assumptionsabout the practice of consciousness-raising during the second wave era.Using the example of her own predominantly working class and raciallydiverse group, Cornell argues that, for some groups at least,consciousness-raising was not an attempt to reveal the sameness ofwomen, but a practice of radical democracy in which group members not


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only gave voice to their differences, but also engaged in a ‘symbolic andrepresentational practice’ that attempted to invent new meanings for‘feminism’ and ‘women’ (p. 1034).

14. Meaghan Morris has argued that while some feminists have used theirexperience as a way of ‘imposing a claim to personal authority’, manyhave also used the ‘category of experience’ as a way to question theirsocio-historical context. Teresa de Lauretis has also argued that it wassecond wave feminists who theorized experience as a ‘category’ ofanalysis. See Morris (1998: xxii) and de Lauretis (1989: 7). See also Scott(1999).

15. See Karla Jay’s account of her consciousness-raising group in Tales of theLavender Menace, her autobiographical account of her participation inthe Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation movements. Jay eventuallyleft the Redstockings for Gay Liberation in part because of theheteronormativity of her consciousness-raising group (1999: 66–9).

16. Kathie Sarachild, one of the co-founders of the Redstockings, has beenattributed with setting out the theoretical and political goals ofconsciousness-raising for women’s liberation. Her memo detailing thevarious stages and goals of the practice was distributed through women’sliberation groups as they set up their own consciousness-raising ‘cells’.The memo indicates that the process should lead to self-transformationand the production of a social analysis, and while it does assume thatcommonalities between women’s experiences would be found, thediscovery of these commonalities was not the goal, or endpoint of theprocess (Sarachild, 1968).

17. At the risk of simplifying what have been mixed, changing, and, at times,politically fraught feminist attitudes to butch-femme sexuality andculture, I would argue that there have been two main criticisms of butch-femme by ‘second wave’ feminists. The first can be located in theinitial utopian impulse of early second wave activism in which an anti‘role-playing’ argument against gender and sex identities was part of theemancipatory project of radical feminism. The second criticism can belocated in the sex wars of the early 1980s when sex-positive and anti-pornography feminists fought over the effect of power in sexualrelationships. For the anti-pornography feminists, unequal power (in theform of heterosexual relationships or butch-femme relationships) oftencreated exploited and even abused victims and was, as a result, a negativeeffect in sexual relationships. In contrast, sex-positive feminists arguedthat power was intrinsic to sexual relationships and that it operated inmuch more complex and not necessarily negative or pathological ways.See Koedt, Levine and Rapone (1973) for examples of early second waveessays on female sexuality and anti role-playing arguments againstgendered sexuality, and Vance (1983) for analysis of the ‘sex wars’debates.

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Victoria Hesford is an Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at SUNY-StonyBrook University. Her fields of interest include cultural memories of the queerand feminist past, queer and feminist literature and history in the post-warera, and feminist media studies. She is currently completing a book, FeelingWomen’s Liberation: Figures of Feminism, in which she returns to thebeginnings of the women’s liberation movement in order to trace theproduction of cultural memories of the movement around specific socialfigures, metaphors, and objects that emerged out of the movement’s struggle tocreate a feminist counterpublic sphere. She has published essays in Women’sStudies Quarterly and Feminist Theory, and is also co-editor, with LisaDiedrich, of Feminist Time Against Nation Time: Gender, Politics, and theNation-State in an Age of Permanent War (Lexington Books, 2008).

Address: Women’s Studies Program, 105 Old Chemistry Bldg, State Universityof New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY 11794-3456, USA. Email:[email protected]


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"The Politics of Love: Women's Liberation and Feeling Differently"

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