I favor implication, allowing space for each reader to respond to the story based on his or her imagination and preconceptions. However, to appreciate the nuances of the novel does require a certain level of openness to let the narrative communicate on its own terms. To me, that is part of the appeal of fiction. Therefore, using a framework of literary analysis—with the caveat that there are some mild plot spoilers below—I offer you this series[1] as a way to delve deeper into the authorial vision of my debut novel, There was Music.
Establishing Identity
Concept and Context
I love to explore ideas through narrative. Amanda Boulter calls this “working out what [one thinks] by writing about it.”[2] Though I am drawn to many ideas, one of the most prominent in my mind is human identity. There was Music follows Rhoda in her struggle with identity from the echoes of a blessed youth to losses from war, the torments of prison, and on through a wilderness of apparent freedom. Her journey is ultimately about healing, the struggle to resolve identities bestowed upon her in the past, abused in the present, and personally desired for the future; all the while she begins to encounter mysteries in the world beyond what is seen Overall, she represents questions about reconciling what can and cannot be controlled. In this way, I aim to create space for each reader to consider his or her own worldview, attentive to both external and internal influences.
Identity is an abstract concept, however, not merely being the product of biology, but socialization and psychology, both of which influence and are influenced by perceptions about sex and gender.[3] While identity can be defined as “the characteristics determining who or what a person or thing is,”[4] the emphasis on certain characteristics has varied throughout history and across societies. In “Western” society, perceptions of identity have often been linked to gender. While a person’s sex is usually defined by biological traits, gender is a complex construction of “attributes and behaviors acquired as a consequence of being a male or a female in a specific culture.”[5]
My choice of a female protagonist began with the intriguing challenge of writing from a different perspective, i.e. in fiction’s spirit of imagining “what it might be like to be [. . .] of another race, ethnicity, or gender.”[6] As a male writer, I recognize the risk and difficulty of this undertaking. Research has led me toward (I trust) a greater sensitivity to the nuances of gender, in which I aim to avoid stereotyping. A stereotype is “a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person.”[7] Masculinity is commonly related to “violence and risk-taking, and femininity with subordination and fear.”[8] Women are often portrayed as “sex objects, devoted homemakers, and mothers;”[9] or more recently “liberated” as “active, desiring sexual subjects who choose to present themselves in an objectified manner because it suits their [. . .] interests to do so.”[10] Female agency is often limited to physical appearance and sexuality.[11] This has contributed to a “beauty-myth” that a woman’s success and safety depend on her achieving a culturally-imbued and male-directed image of perfection—a combination of “unattainable heights of beauty, brains, physicality and behavior.”[12]
Here, I aim to join authors like Angela Carter in challenging patriarchal theories that reduce women to stereotypes. In The Sadeian Women, for example, Carter questions the trend of equating a woman’s value or honor to her virginity. Research has revealed that while the definition of virginity remains contested, it has historically been used as a means for control.[13] Manipulating the definition of virginity results not only in an attempt to control women’s sexuality, but their bodies as well. Virginity is reduced to a commodity that can be traded, bought, or stolen, and power remains at the center of this conflict. The rape of a woman—e.g. “stealing” her virginity in some cases—is thus one of the most horrendous methods of asserting domination.[14] In this, a “woman is disposed of.”[15] Of course, this abuse is not limited to virgins alone.
I believe the pinnacle of a hero’s triumph is only as profound as the challenges he or she overcomes. In The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood calls this “loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.”[16] From the start of preparing to write There was Music, therefore, I decided that Rhoda’s obstacles would be shaped by sexual assault because that seemed like one of the most common, traumatic experiences women endure. Research confirms such a tragic trend. In the US, 90% of adult victims of sexual assault are women, one in six being raped in her lifetime, with those 12-34 years old being at the highest risk.[17] Supplementing the aforementioned patriarchal manipulation of sex and gender, the nature of such statistics can be partially explained by the average man being physically stronger than the average woman.[18]
Despite the harrowing prevalence of sexual assault directed at women, it remains risky to present Rhoda as a target of rape, for some readers could decry her as a helpless victim. Yet within the conversation about sexuality and power is Carter’s ultimate question, posed by Fevvers the bird woman in Nights at the Circus: “Wherein does a woman’s honor reside . . . In her vagina or in her spirit?”[19] This question is integral to Rhoda’s reconciliation between what has happened to her body and mind, which involves what she cannot and can control. Rhoda’s spirit thrives between Marquis de Sade’s dichotomy of female agency: Justine’s “weak” albeit morally virtuous submission and Juliette’s “strong” apparently immoral use of sex as a weapon.[20] Carter acknowledges that both women “are without hope”; therefore, she seeks a “synthesis of their modes of being.”[21] I hope for Rhoda to represent this synthesis, this “New Woman”, both victim and victor,[22] embodied for Carter by Fevvers as she rises “out of mankind . . . [to] renew the world.”[23] More to the point, this assertion of new identity is the result of healing.[24]
Motivation
As I discuss at length in “The Origin of There was Music”, the idea for the novel began with a vivid dream I had about navigating challenges by adapting through any means necessary, what Orson Scott Card calls “Survival first, then happiness as [I could] manage it.”[25] I wondered if such a rationale, though externally successful, would be internally destructive. Therefore, at the heart of the novel is a conflict of the self, pulsing with ideas about meaning examined through characters whose identities are complicated by their own sense of frailty.
Thinking about the de-humanizing potential of adaptive survival—for “The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart”[26]—I knew that I wanted to direct my narrative theme toward the pursuit of inner peace. While love nurtures the fruits of peace, ideally introduced in the context of family—for the influence of family is pivotal to how one processes trauma[27]—research has shown me how important healing is to that journey. To begin healing, in other words, the story of trauma must be told, naming the pain and finding forgiveness.[28] This reveals the path toward freedom from a victim identity, guiding a person in the hope of peace. Forgiveness is power. Atwood writes that “To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power.”[29] While Rhoda has not yet reached the point of forgiving her oppressors by the end of the There was Music, she is shown to recognize its hope. Rhoda thus offers what Valerie Martin in her introduction to The Handmaid’s Tale calls “the hope of a survivor’s tale.”[30]
My interest in healing also comes from music. As a musician, I believe music gives voice to the inner self with a distinct, universal language. The character of Bard embodies this belief, introducing it to Rhoda. I set out to convey the power of music through the limitation of written form, all the while my thoughts resonated with the original music I composed during the research process as a narrative soundtrack. Research has furthermore confirmed the scientifically credible use of music therapy to help people heal from trauma, adding veracity to Rhoda’s character arch.[31]
Overall, I am most interested in stories about the human spirit overcoming obstacles, in the act of “becoming”—the “indestructible power of man in his struggle” that is conveyed so uniquely through the novelistic form.[32] This is rooted not only in the inspiration of other narratives, fiction or non-fiction, but my own experiences as an artist, endurance athlete, and friend of trauma survivors.
Footnotes
[1] Adapted from my dissertation (M.A. in Novel Writing) submitted to Middlesex University, London (5 October, 2018).
[2] 2007, p. 173.
[3] Giancaterino, 2010; Jahme, 2015; Schemmer, 2014; Slaughter, 2015; Snow, 2007; Wood, 1994.
[4] Oxford English Dictionary. Available at: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/identity.
[5] Spence & Buckner, 1995, p. 114; see also Hoffman, 2011; Il’inykh, 2012; Kachel, et. al., 2016; Lombroze, 2012; Snow, 2007.
[6] Prose, 2017; see also Spampinato, 2017.
[7] Oxford English Dictionary. Available at: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/stereotype (Accessed 14 May, 2018).
[8] Snow, 2007; see also Dutt, 2014; Wood, 1994.
[9] Wood, 1994, p. 236.
[10] Gill, 2008.
[11] Dastagir, 2017; Gill, 2008; Wood, 1994.
[12] Dutt, 2014, p, 3.
[13] Feeney, 2014; Planned Parenthood, 2017.
[14] Comprehensive Healthcare, 2015; Gall, 1999; Spampinato, 2017; Wood, 1994; Ziv, 2018.
[15] Carter, quoted in Gall, 1999, p. 30.
[16] 2000, p. 518.
[17] NSOPW; RAINN.
[18] Burton, 2012; Miller, et. al. 1993. Women do commonly demonstrate greater endurance, however (Carter, et. al., 2001; Clark, et. al., 2003).
[19] 1993, p. 230.
[20] Gall, 1999.
[21] Quoted in Gall, 1999, p. 16.
[22] Gall. 1999, pp. 17, 52; see also Gilman, 1979.
[23] Carter, quoted in Gall, 1999, p. 17.
[24] Bard, therefore, is important as a male character because his compassion helps contrast the evil of Nabilak, to remind Rhoda that men can be good. Rhoda and Bard’s relationship, as with Rhoda’s parents, is not a unilateral but bilateral exchange: each learns from and empowers the other. Their love is mutual, which Carter champions as having “nothing to do with the strong and the weak, or ownership” (Gall, 199, p. 62).
[25] 1991, p. 277.
[26] Martel, 2001, p. 90.
[27] See Matis, 2016.
[28] Tutu & Tutu, 2014, p. 3.
[29] 2006, p. 154.
[30] 2006, p.vii.
[31] For details, see my “Research Proposal: Music and Healing” (11 February, 2018) and “Psychological Veracity in Character Research” (22 April, 2018) submitted to Middlesex University, London during my master’s studies.
[32] Bakhtin, 1994, pp. 180, 185.