15:30 - 17:00
Room: Muirhead Room 109
Stream: Open Stream - II
Bessie Head, Children’s Literature, and the Erotics of Power
Brendon Nicholls
School of English, University of Leeds, Leeds

In A Question of Power and in The Cardinals, Bessie Head twice cites her protagonists’ first children’s book – The Adventures of Fuzzy Wuzzy Bear. Gillian Stead Eilersen’s biography claims that Head’s adopted mother, Nellie Heathcote, only permitted her to have this one book when she was a child. My paper will demonstrate that this biographical detail is only partially accurate, but also of crucial importance to understanding The Cardinals. Head’s recollection of her first book is a screen memory, It is in fact another popular children’s picture book that her fiction describes.

Using as departure points these two children’s picture books and other popular forms – journalism, astrology, and even street signs – my paper investigates the paradox of Head’s screen memory. Like all screen memories, it is characterized by the recollection of vivid detail and perfunctory content. Like all screen memories, the disjunction is designed to repress auto-erotic content. This auto-erotic content helps us to reframe and rethink the incestuous and masochistic narrative of Head’s novella, in which Mouse is gradually seduced by an abusive father.

The Cardinals, I argue, dramatizes the distinction between gender and sexuality. While domestic violence directed against the protagonist must be read as gender-oppressive, it is also returned asymmetrically via her masochistic pleasure-taking. Head’s novella, therefore, operates a sly erotics. If abuse is perversely pleasurable, then patriarchal power’s own circuits of application cannot function self-adequately. In short, I argue that what is at stake in Head’s posthumously published first novella is not simply a drama of origins (anonymous paternity) or relations (unconscious incest, the Apartheid Immorality Acts), but also a covert narrative of emergent sexual visibility (pubescence) whose regimes of pleasure and pain are independent and self-organizing.


Reference:
Th-OSII-01 Women and Literature-P-002
Presenter/s:
Brendon Nicholls
Presentation type:
Panel
Room:
Muirhead Room 109
Date:
Thursday, 13 September
Time:
15:45 - 16:00
Session times:
15:30 - 17:00