Sexual violence in Golding’s Lord of the Flies: A Gynetic Perspective
Dr. Ayan Mondal,
Assistant
Professor of English (UG & PG),
Bankura
Christian College,
Bankura,
West Bengal, India.
Sir William
Golding’s debut novel Lord of the Flies
(1954) dealing with the innate evil, boorishness and depravity of mankind has
provided a fertile ground for diverse critical enquiries ever since its
inception. Louis J. Halle, for instance, points out the struggle between
civilization and barbarism in the novel and also highlighlts the impression the
novel leaves on the readers while expressing the irony
and tragedy of man’s fate.1Peter Green reads
the novel as a terrifying microcosm of political totalitarianism.2E.M.Forster
aptly underscores Golding’ s partial Christian attitude in the novel for the
novelist’s stance approaches the Christian but never completes it –Golding
shies away from introducing the idea of a Redeemer in the novel.3James
Gindin reads the ending of the novel as merely a gimmick, a means of cutting
down or diluting he impressions built up hitherto within the structural
framework of the boys’ society in the island.4 The apparently simple
moral tale makes a perceptive reader sceptic therefore. Despite all the
aforementioned intense critical studies, the present paper proposes to
re-explore the sow-killing episode of the novel in the light of Alice Jardine’s
concept, “gynesis”. The paper thereby seeks to light up the hitherto dark and
neglected female space in the text. It
also attempts to show how the episode is replete with suggestions which quite
fittingly bolster Golding’s basic agenda to lay bare the brutalities and
atrocities inherent in mankind which includes the potential threat of even
sexual violence.
The postmodern feminist
Alice Jardine’s concept of ‘gynesis’ was in opposition to the female-centered
“gynocriticism”, associated specially with the Anglo-American feminist Elaine
Showalter. In her seminal work A
Literature of their Own (1977) Showalter
provides a general outline of the literary achievements of women writers and
simultaneously examines the British women novelists since the Brontes from the
point of view of women’s experience. Showalter therefore confines literary
criticism within the precincts of ‘women writing’ only and at the same time
chooses only the erstwhile ‘second sex’ as the target audience. Golding’s Lord of the Flies is a typical
master-narrative marked by the absence of any female character. In the novel, a
group of male British boys secluded in an island in their attempt to eke out
their survival ends up betraying the worst extremities of their nature and
finally the novel ends with the end of human innocence pervading the island.
Incidentally, the novel can never fall under the purview of traditional
gynocritical feminist discourse. A holistic approach to the novel, however, in
the light of “gynesis” allows one scope for exploration of the female space in
the novel which is only apparently invisible. Concerned with the non-knowledge
or ‘feminine space which the master narratives always contain, but cannot
control’ (Selden, et al, 220),
Jardine’s gynesis is a process of putting into discourse the ‘other’-“woman”.
As Mary Eagleton observes:
Though gynesis and
gynocriticism would agree that the master narratives are bankrupt, gynesis does
not want to substitute mistress narratives instead. That strategy, gynesis
would argue. is ostensibly attractive but at the level of structure changes
nothing: it is simply to replace men at the centre of humanist endeavour with
women. Therefore gynesis gives no special
emphasis to female authors and characters: Most of the examples of ‘feminine
writing’ it considers are by men.(Eagleton 171,emphasis added)
Jardine clearly
maintains that ‘gynesis’ is not necessarily preoccupied with women’s
achievements in history or with women’s groups; on the contrary the location
that gynesis concerns itself with is a space, a gap, an absence. Whereas the
focus of the French feminists Helen Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva was
on ecriture feminine, that is, on the
construction of a language that is distinctively feminine, Jardine’s gynesis
shares the poststructuralist credo that language being a slippery medium is
never under the control of any unifying central voice of the author.
Theoretically, ’gynesis’ therefore embraces certain postsructuralist strategies
as its base.Mary Eagleton rightly points out in this regard:
The author is dead:
long live the text. Under the influence of Roland Barthes and Derrida, gynesis points to a textual free play of
meaning which cannot be bound by authorial intention or critical analysis.
(Eagleton 10, emphasis added).
Eagleton highlights
Mary Jacobus’s preference for textuality over sexuality by virtue of which the
very writing effect of the text may lead to the discovery of the apparently
absent female space. Gynesis counters the inability of Anglo-American criticism
to theorize adequately the significance and significations of avant-garde
literary texts, often many modernist texts. Though Jardine’s model of gynesis
often seems to be anti-humanist, anti-realist and anti-essentialist, she still
wants to hold on to a model of feminist politics. As Catherine Belsey suggests
(Critical Approaches,1992) postmodernism for Jardine is ‘incompatible with
feminism to the degree that feminism is a single story of ‘woman’’(qtd in
Selden et al,220).Selden cogently
observes:
Gynesis is a potent
form of political, cultural and critical deconstruction. It revalues and
reshapes (if not explodes)literary canons, refuses unitary or universally
accepted meanings, and overtly politicizes the whole domain of discursive
practice. Gynesis does not see ‘Woman’ as empirically provable: rather ‘woman’ is a gap or absence that
troubles and destabilizes the master narratives. (Selden et al 220).
The narrative style
or ‘writing effect’ of the sow-killing episode of Lord of the Flies offers us certain interesting clues to uncover
the hidden female space within the novel. It is worth mentioning here, that in
tune with the significant desert-island fiction writers Golding consciously
eschews direct female representation, in person, in his novel. In Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), for instance, almost all the
characters-Crusoe, Friday, Xury are male. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) also
harps the same tune. R. L. Stevenson’s Treasure
Island (1883) is no exception,
for there is just one female character Mrs. Hawkins who hardly has any
essential role to play in the novel. Incidentally Ballantyne’s The Coral Islands (1857),5 the
text which Golding self-consciously appropriates and subverts also doesn’t have
any female character who plays a crucial role. Since Golding was out to write
an intertext, arguably, his exclusion of female characters in the hypertext
corresponds to that of the hypotext. In other words, Golding had to subscribe
to many minute details of Ballantyne’s text even while he was interrogating the
celestial, blissful possibilities of the island and its inhabitants as depicted
by Ballantyne, the exclusion of female characters being one such detail. Critics
may quite justifiably question whether Golding while subverting the imperial
ideology is himself intimately associated with it, since the exclusion or marginalization of
women characters in novels was part of the imperial project. For instance in Foe(1986),an adaptation of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe ,the novelist J. M. Coetzee interrogates the
absence of women characters in the original text; Susan Barton, the female
protagonist urges the writer Daniel Foe to write about her experiences. Gilbert
and Gubar also question the rather reductive and biased notion of Victorian
womanhood in their seminal work The Mad
Woman in the Attic (1979).It is
interesting to note-keeping aside Golding’s intention-that the withdrawal of
female characters makes a perceptive reader curious. A re-exploration of the
sow-killing episode in the light of ‘gynesis’ ultimately foregrounds the hitherto hidden female space
and the writing effect that re-presents the “female” scaffolds the central
message of the novel that evil is awfully predominant even in children who are
traditionally known to ‘trail the clouds of glory in heaven’6 and
‘to shine in their Angel infancy’7.
A close look at
some of the relevant passages of the sow-killing episode of the novel narrated
explicitly in Chapter 8 entitled “Gift of the Darkness” may be useful in the
present context:
A little apart from
the rest, sunk in deep maternal bliss,
lay the largest sow of the lot. She
was black and pink: and the greater bladder of , belly was fringed with a row of piglets that slept or burrowed
and squeaked.(Golding 150,emphasis added)
The way the
novelist describes the impending threat to the sow is worth mentioning here:
Fifteen yards from
the drove Jack stopped: and his arm
straightening. He looked round in inquiry to make sure that everyone
understood and the other boys nodded at him. The row of right arms slid back.
(Golding, 150-151, emphasis added).
The projection of
the sow sunk in ‘deep maternal bliss’
recalls the contention of Helen Cixous that motherhood, the erstwhile
patriarchal tool to subjugate woman is a rare and important feminine experience
to be celebrated. But the hapless sow has hardly any voice to register and the
best that she can do is to stagger and shudder at the tormenting patriarchal
forces. That the gesture of Jack was enough to let the other boys stand united
as they ‘understood’ and ‘nodded at him’ makes us perceive that the ultimate is
not far away:
They surrounded the
covert but the sow got away with the sting of another spear in her flank. The
trailing butts hindered her and the sharp, cross-cut points were a torment. She
blundered into a tree, forcing a spear still deeper; and after that any of the
hunters could follow her easily by the drops of vivid blood. The afternoon wore
on, hazy dreadful with damp heat; the sow
staggered her way ahead of them, bleeding and mad, and the hunters followed, wedded to her in lust,
excited by the long chase and the dropped
blood. They could see her now, nearly got up with her, but she spurted with
her last strength and held ahead of them again. They were just behind her, when
she staggered into an open space where bright flowers grew and butterflies
danced round each other and the air was still.(Golding 151-152 emphasis added).
The very words
‘staggered’, ‘bleeding’, ‘mad’, ‘excited’, ‘wedded’, ‘lust’, as it were, make
the sow-killing episode no longer merely a question of getting meat, or even of
exercising control or imposing oneself. As the hunters chase the sow through
the oppressively hot afternoon, the author carefully underscores, they become
‘wedded to her in lust’. As the hunters hurl themselves at her, the violence
unmistakably has sexual undertones and finally the vulnerable, wretched,
helpless sow succumbs to their pressure:
Then Jack found the
throat and the hot blood spouted over his hands. The sow collapsed under them and they were heavy and fulfilled upon
her. (Golding, 152, emphasis added)
Roger’s spear moved
forward inch by inch and what was previously a terrified squealing became a
high pitched groan. If the first killing satisfied Jack’s bloodthirstiness like
a long drink, now his blood lust is fulfilled in a killing-wedding.
The details of the
sow-killing episode add therefore an altogether different dimension to the
novel. The linguistic signs in the episode are arranged in such a manner that
the entire episode projects the spectacle of a gang-rape. The victim is
obviously the dehumanized female, the sow,
who has hardly any potential to buffet the lust-drawn patriarchal
prowess. Roland Barthes declared the death of the author in 1968.Taking cue
from Barthes’s poststructuralist stance, the hidden subtext lying beneath the
conscious of the text becomes quite manifest here. The pack of British boys had
given expression to the worst imaginable depravities earlier, but that even
sexual violence is very much predominant in their psyche, can be quite
justifiably deciphered from the sow-killing episode of the novel. One wonders
at the extremity of their brutality when they can unhesitantly stand united to
annihilate the sow’s motherhood while she was blissfully giving suck to her
piglets. They display the cruelest and the most macabre spectacle while
violating the womanhood of the sow and at the same time projecting her head as
the potential site of all filth and evil-“the lord of the flies”. One recalls
the stereotypical association of a female with a demon. Even the children, as
is evident, are not free from the patriarchal ideology, which they translate
into actuality in the distant south-pacific island far removed from the society
they inhabit.
Despite being a
master narrative, the novel’s sow-killing episode seen through the lens of
“gynesis” allows one room to critique the male desideration for the female
flesh that even the children are not free from. Moreover, the sow projected as
weak and helpless obviously stands as a parallel to the “female” in society who
is constructed by patriarchy as weak and otherized. One recalls Simone de
Beauvoir’s distinction between “sex” and “gender” in her seminal book The Second Sex(1949).8Beauvoir maintained that whereas sex is natural and
biological “gender” is a patriarchal construct carried out to justify and
perpetrate the different oppressive moves of the male-dominated society. No
wonder , Jack’s spear is the perfect phallic symbol used to crush the weak and
wretched sow’s identity as a woman, as a mother. Both her womanhood and
motherhood are given a hard blow by the pack of British boys, who are proud of
their English identity. Among the other incidents, this episode makes explicit
the ironic thrust in Jack’s statement made in Chapter 2 of the novel:
I agree with Ralph. We’ve got to have rules and obey them
.After all, we’re not savages .We’re English; and the English are best at
everything. So, we’ve got to do
the right things.(Golding 43-44,emphasis added)
Furthermore, the
presentation of the female in such a dehumanized form whose head can at best
serve as the emblematic site of all filth and sordidness is worth mentioning
here:
Instinctively the
boys drew back too; and the forest was very still. They listened and the
loudest noise was the buzzing of flies over the spilled guts.
Jack spoke in a
whisper.
‘Pick up the pig.’
Maurice and Robert
skewered the carcass, lifted the dead weight, and stood ready. In the silence,
and standing over the dry blood, they looked suddenly furtive.
Jack spoke loudly.
‘This head is for
the beast. It’s a gift.’
The silence
accepted the gift and awed them. The head remained there, dim eyed, grinning
faintly, blood blackening between the teeth. All at once they were running away, as fast as they could, through the forest
towards the open beach. (Golding 154)
Mary Jacobus’s
assertion that gynesis deals not with the sexuality of the text but the
textuality of sex, therefore holds good for Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The sow-killing episode therefore sparks off
more meanings and ramifications than what one apparently comes to observe. The
female space is illuminated when the sow doesn’t merely need to be hunted, but
to be controlled, raped and killed thereby for the perpetration of male
ideology in post-War British society, of which the island is only a microcosm.
Golding’s central idea behind writing this novel was to debunk the established
myth that children are epitomes of innocence and pristine glory on the one hand
and also to shatter the high-nosed imperialist notion that the English are
rather best at everything. The re-exploration of the sow-killing episode taking
cue from Jardine’s postfeminist concept of gynesis bolsters and firmly
establishes this agenda of the novelist. Whereas the killing of the pig in
Ballantyne’s The Coral Islands was
narrated with ease without any kind
of conflict, tension and excitement,
when it comes to the hypertext Lord of
the Flies, the writing-effect of the episode brings to the fore the tremendous propensity
of the children towards sexual violence. Small wonder that Harold Bloom in his
“Introduction” to his edited book Viva
Bloom’s Notes on Golding’s Lord of
the Flies notes:
One can admire Lord of the Flies as a tale of
adventure, while wondering whether its moral fable was not far more insular
than Golding seems to have realized.(Bloom 6)
It is seemly to
conclude with what Mark-Kinkead Weakes and Gregor observe in their
collaborative essay “Lord of the Flies”:
Lord of the Flies fulfils most
effectively the novelist’s basic task of telling a good story. It also meets
Conrad’s prescription, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to
make you feel… before all, to make you see
.(Bloom 37,italics original).
Notes
- Refer
to Viva Bloom’s Notes on
Golding’s Lord of the Flies, p.
24.
- For
detailed reference, see Peter Green’s essay on Golding’s symbolism, an
excerpt of which is anthologized in Viva
Bloom’s Notes, pp. 27-29.
- Reference
drawn from E.M. Forster’s “Introduction” to Lord of the Flies relying upon Viva Bloom’s Notes as the source,p.33-34.
- Refer
to “‘Gimmick’ and Metaphor in the Novels of William Golding”, an
excerpt of which is
anthologized in Viva Bloom’s Notes,
pp. 29-31.
- Golding’s
source text or technically the ‘hypotext’.
- Refer
to Wordsworth’s famous “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”.
- Reference
drawn from Henry Vaughan’s famous poem “The Retreat”.
- Refer
to Selden et al p.130.
Works Cited
Bloom, Harold. “Introduction”. Viva Bloom’s Notes. Viva Book’s Private Limited, 2007.
Eagleton, Mary. “Introduction”. Feminist Literary Criticism.Longman
Group UK Limited, 1991.
---. “Mary Jacobus
and Stephen Heath”. Feminist Literary
Criticism. Longman Group UK Limited, 1991.
Golding, William. Lord
of the Flies. UBSPD, 1954.
Kinkead-Weekes,
Mark and Ian Gregor. “Lord of the Flies”. Viva Modern Critical Interpretations,
edited by Harold Bloom. Viva Books
Private Limited, 2007.
Selden, Raman et al. A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary
Literary Theory. Pearson, 2006.