“We Were Girls Together”
-Tony Morrison, Sula
Competing with the narrative point of view for center stage is the curious spectacle of one of the girls’s, Jeanne Macek’s, “extra” thumb: a birth defect. Remarkably, rather than ostracize Jeanne for this oddity, the group of girls fetishizes the extra thumb, worships it, “court[s] Jeanne’s favor for the chance to pet it” (1). The girls envy the extra thumb, and see that it confers on Jeanne a number of (traditionally male) privileges, for example, exclusion from childcare, housekeeping, and personal hygiene responsibilities. The thumb is also obscurely and ironically credited for Jeanne’s exceptional athletic and strategic prowess, and “when she won, she treated her thumb like a teammate who had helped her out” (3). In short, the thumb stands in as a sort of phallus, a transcendental signifier of sorts. And in fact, despite the ambiguity of the narrator, it is apparent from the early lines of the novella that Jeanne centers and directs the group of five girls.
In her critical essay on the use of the collective first person in French literature, "’Romans Des Nous’: The First Person Plural and Collective Identity in Martinique," Dawn Fulton advances the claim that the use of the collective identity—for example as in the “royal ‘we’”—has historically functioned as a discursive strategy conferring legitimacy and power upon a line of discourse. In Girls in Peril, the use of the collective first person is significant in this respect, because the gang of girls achieves legitimacy and power through use of collective identity. In fact, they are acutely aware of the fact that coalition confers power as they negotiate their interactions with adult authority figures. “Alone we were vulnerable,” they reason. “We felt more comfortable as a group…together, we had a firmly fixed identity” (6). In the comfort of this firmly fixed collective identity, the girls garner confidence in their collective action. Also, the narrative voice achieves greater authority to tell its story.
Furthermore, the girls achieve an even greater measure of authority through their association with Jeanne, who possesses the transcendental signifier in the third thumb. Laura Kipnis explores the nature of the phallus as the marker of entitlement (to authority and power) in her 2006 article “Something’s Missing”. Historically, she claims, it is inexplicably and invariably true that authority and power coincide with the phallus—which is why Lacan refers to it as the transcendental signifier—what is transcended, in this case, is the physical body. Power is entitled by virtue of anatomy but extends beyond anatomy. The female response, according to Kipnis, is to choose between feminism, constituted by social activism opposing male entitlement in the first place, and femininity—by which the female can obtain access to the phallus on a “time-share basis” through pair bonding/marriage (23). In the case of the girls of Girls in Peril, however, association with the transcendental signifier is appropriated though the use of collective identity as opposed to marriage. By forming a coalition with Jeanne, in other words, Donna, Lauren, Corrine and Stacey all attain a share of the collective power conferred by the phallus.
Jeanne Macek’s third thumb may also be read as a symbolic clitoris. In this scenario, collective identity is associated with youth and sexual immaturity. As long as the group remains sexually immature their collective identity is secure. Reading Jeanne’s thumb as a clitoris, however, is not inconsistent with reading it as a phallus if it is also read through the lens of sexual immaturity, and therefore the thumb still symbolically confers upon Jeanne the status of transcendental signifier. This is because, according to Freudian psychoanalysis, the preadolescent girl’s clitoris functions much in the same way that the preadolescent boy’s phallus does. It is, in essence, a substitute—or inferior—phallus. According to Jane Gerhard, in her Feminist Studies article "Revisiting "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm": The Female Orgasm in American Sexual Thought and Second Wave Feminism," Freud maintains that until the transfer phase, in which an adolescent girl transfers her libidinal center to the vagina, it is located in the clitoris. During this pre-transfer phase the girl is gender and sexually ambiguous—being neither masculine nor feminine, neither heterosexual nor homosexual, but somehow all of these at once (452-3). This description of the adolescent girl as androgynous seems well-suited to Jeanne Macek, who navigates the sphere of preadolescent girlhood as well as dabbling the in the sphere of male privilege.
Furthermore, as Gerhard elaborates, Freudian psychoanalytic theory holds that failure on the part of the adolescent girl to successfully navigate the transfer phase, reassign her libidinal center to the vagina, and achieve sexual maturity can result in penis envy, hysteria, and neurotic discontent. This is relevant to a reading of Girls in Peril insofar as the amputation of Jeanne’s thumb can be read as a forced transfer via clitorectomy, and her resulting hysteria evidence of its failure. The amputation signals a move toward sexual maturity in alignment with Freud’s transfer phase. This is reinforced in the text by Jeanne’s escalated role in the domestic sphere. “As her hand healed,” the narrative voice recounts, “Jeanne’s chores increased and we saw less and less of her than ever” (61). The idea that the amputation corresponds with sexual maturity is also reinforced by the shift in dominant personality from Jeanne (whose sexuality is rooted in the third thumb as clitoral symbol) to Lauren, who represents a traditionally feminine (vaginal) sexuality. What is problematic about this sexual maturation is the fact that it is enforced upon Jeanne, without her consent, via the authority of the medical community. Furthermore, it accompanies her rapid disappearance from the public sphere, and ultimately her silence and the dismantling of the group identity. These events signify a feminist critique of assigned gender roles and the authority conferred upon the owner of the transcendental signifier (see Cicoux and Kuhn, and Lindenmeyer.)
Moreover, the group’s collective identity breaks down after Jeanne’s amputation. The loss of the thumb signifies a disconnection from the phallus and its conferred privileges, among which may be included the discursive authority that also accompanies the collective first person (i.e. “royal we”.) However, this also can fall within the purview of reading the third thumb as clitoral symbol, the amputation read as a clitorectomy forcing Jeanne into the transfer phase. The loss of collective identity here is associated with sexual maturity and the traditional feminine domestic role, which forces her out of the public sphere and into the private sphere. The implication is that women in the home—in the private sphere—are disconnected from each other and from society; therefore the group sacrifices its collective identity.
The climax of the feminist critique in Girl’s in Peril is signified by Jeanne’s breakdown at the end of the story, whereby her brother Joey’s attempted murder and successful suicide trigger Jeanne’s (apparent) hysteria. However, the hysterical reading is contestable by way of feminist theorizing. Hysteria is typically derived from psychoanalytic readings of failed transfer, mislaid gender association, and/or penis envy. This helps to explicate the implied association between Jeanne and Joey, whether Jeanne’s amputation is read as a castration or clitorectomy. In fact, clitorectomy is rather analogous to castration in Freud’s construction, as the clitoris functions as a stand in for the penis up until the transfer phase where the adolescent girl is forced to abandon it. Jeanne’s “hysteria,” then, is read as the psychoanalytic diagnosis that is criticized in this text. On the one hand, Jeanne’s response to Joey’s violence and death is understandable. On the other hand, it can be read as hysterical due to its extremity. Finally, however, Jeanne is simply silenced by her elimination from the family. This is in accordance with traditional methods of dealing with vocal women (who perhaps transgress gender boundaries) by silencing them. Here the notion of medicalizing/pathologizing female behaviors is relevant. Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s The Yellow Wallpaper and Virginia Woolf’s lived experience provide both textual and material examples of this phenomenon.
Karen Lee Boren’s Girls in Peril utilizes the collective first person in conjunction with the central metaphor of the transcendental signifier to perform a feminist critique of traditional female roles in postmodern society. The critique is particularly salient in this context because it foregrounds the dissonance between the traditional role expected of mature women, (even, as Kipnis explores in The Female Thing, in contemporary American society) and the possibilities they are taught to entertain in adolescence. As Jeanne’s emotional breakdown demonstrates, the dissonance can prove psychologically crippling.
Works Cited
Cixous, Helen, and Annette Kuhn. "Castration or Decapitation?" Signs 7.1 (1981): 41-55. JStor. Web. 7 Mar. 2010.
Fulton, Dawn. ""Romans Des Nous": The First Person Plural and Collective Identity in Martinique." The French Review 76.6 (2003): 1104-114. JStor. Web. 9 Mar. 2010.
Gerhard, Jane. "Revisiting "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm": The Female Orgasm in American Sexual Thought and Second Wave Feminism." Feminist Studies 26.2 (2000): 449-76. JStor. Web. 7 Mar. 2010.
Kipnis, Laura. "Something's Missing." Women's Studies Quarterly 34.3/4 (2006): 22-42. JStor. Web. 8 Mar. 2010.
Kipnis, Laura. The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability. New York: Pantheon, 2006. Print.
Lee Boren, Karen. Girls in Peril. Portland: Tin House, 2006. Print.
Lindenmeyer, Antje. "Postmodern Concepts of the Body in Jeanette Winterson's "Written on the Body"" Feminist Review 63 (1999): 48-63. JStor. Web. 6 Mar. 2010.
Morris, Adalaide. "First Persons Plural in Contemporary Feminist Fiction." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 11.1 (1992): 11-29. JStor. Web. 8 Mar. 2010.
