Dissolving the Reader/Author Binary: Sylvia Molloy's Certificate of Absence , Helena Parente Cunha's Woman Between Mirrors , and Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body

In Western culture, we have been trained in binary thought: good or evil, white or black, logical or emotional, male or female. One of the consequences of such thought processes is associative, wherein the individual equates all of the terms on one side of the equation: good, white, logical, male or evil, black, emotional, female. Such conclusions have created serious problems for women and people of color, namely the association of evil with being female or with being a person of color. One response to binary constructions is to redefine the associations of terms, such that female is good or black is good. This, however, does not change the inherent bias of the binary construction. A more radical approach is to challenge binary logic itself, to argue, for example, that such definition is not absolute or even particularly valid. Sylvia Molloy (1938-), Helena Parente Cunha (1929-), and Jeanette Winterson (1959-)--three contemporary writers, from Argentina, Brazil, and Great Britain respectively--all write against a male tradition that is validated by its insistence on distinctions between self and other, subject and object, reader and author. Molloy, in Certificate of Absence (En breve carcel, 1981), Parente Cunha, in Woman Between Mirrors (Mulher no espelho, 1985), and Winterson, in Written on the Body (1992), use the metafictional tropes of narrator-writers and readers to challenge binary thought. First, each eliminates the role of the male reader or author; second, a female reader is presented who is an adept reader of both texts and bodies; third, reading is shown to be a physical as well as an intellectual pursuit; and finally, the distinctions between self and other, reader and author are blurred, frequently through the metaphor of the mirror. By creating metafictional texts, Molloy, Parente Cunha, and Winterson engage a Western literary subgenre that has been especially complicit in the construction of women as passive and nonintellectual readers. The trope of the "woman reader" appears during the eighteenth century in the development of the English novel; much of the literary tradition of the passive "woman reader" can be traced to Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy (1760-67) and its negative construction of the "Madam reader." Sterne's "Madam reader" is not as adept as his "Gentleman reader" and even on second readings "misses the point." (1) The "woman reader" is carried over into twentieth-century Western literature as well, most notably as the "female reader" in Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch (1963), In Hopscotch, Cortazar proposes two ways to read, one of which is the "female-reading," which involves reading the novel from chapter one through fifty-six, and then stopping, omitting the final ninety-nine chapters; the "female-reader" "will not get beyond the first few pages, rudely lost and scandalized." (2) Following Cortazar, Italo Calvino, in If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979), introduces his Reader (who is constructed as a heterosexual male) to a second reader, the Lady Reader: "To understand [the position books occupy in your life], our Reader knows that the first step is to visit the kitchen." (3) Calvino is constructing his Lady Reader as inherently domestic; like Sterne and Cortazar, Calvino is curtailing the female reader's intellectual possibilities. As we find out nine pages later, the interest of the narrative lies not in the Lady Reader's ability to read, but in her ability to provide sex for the (male) Reader. Milorad Pavic's novel Dictionary of the Khazars (1988) repeats the same biases; the female edition of Dictionary of the Khazars emphasizes not reading but emotion: "And so, when I began to read the proffered pages, I at one moment lost the train of thought in the text and drowned it in my own feelings." (4) With such a tradition as this, it becomes imperative for women writers to change the dynamic of the woman reader. As a response, I believe, to the reductive definition of women readers, women writers consciously disqualify or exclude male readers and/or writers from their texts. …