!!Ruined and Daddy Essay Plan

Intro (thesis statement)

• heterosexual relations are structured by unequal systems of power rather than mutual recognition

• By engaging in the language of war, the woman can speak not only to a female audience but frame her argument in terms which were created and maintained by the figurative masculine

• the militarised struggle of patriarchal control in the two texts

• neither text offers a sentimental account of gendered relations → both suggest that antagonism between genders is historically produced rather than natural.

‘Waves’ of feminism

broader impulse remains consistent in writing tradition amongst women throughout the various ‘waves’ of feminism → to imagine new forms in which the feminine can write herself into a repressed world

how did first wave feminism understand writing?

in the lead up to and aftermath of suffrage

understood writing as a vessel to communicate the agenda of suffrage, and a means by which women could insert themselves into the political sphere

how did second wave feminism develop writing tradition?

writing became a mode of self-authorship amongst second-wave feminists

The reclaiming of intellectual authority gave women the space to more deeply introspect on the extent to which their identities were dictated through an androcentric lens

quote about holocaust imagery in Daddy

‘Panzer-man’

repeated identification of ‘I think I may well be a Jew’

Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘Le deuxieme sexe’ (The Second Sex)

seminal feminist essay

argues that women are constructed as ‘Other’ within patriarchal systems

men occupy the position of subject while women are positioned relationally and subordinately

quotes from Daddy detailing the move from divine to fascism

‘a bag full of God’ → ‘not God but a swastika’

how are relationships between men and women shaped in ‘Ruined’?

shaped by the ongoing civil war in the Congo and militarised masculinity

how is sexual violence portrayed in ‘ruined’?

topic of sexual violence and genital mutilation turns women’s bodies into a battleground

episode of sexual violence in ‘ruined’ - sophie

The violation of Sophie with a bayonet

• this episode, while it does not directly address the crime, is ironic

• a bayonet is manufactured to be wielded as a mode of protection in warfare is perverted as a mode of dominating and stripping women of their liberty

• The phallic imagery of the bayonet as being responsible for creating the ‘damaged goods’ critiques how militarised masculinity collapses distinctions between conquest and intimacy

• Nottage insinuates, then, that to put a bayonet in the hands of a man, always strengthened by patriarchal institutions, is to give him a second phallus through which he can exert more gendered violence

how is sexuality portrayed in ‘ruined’

• shaped by economics and conflict

• Women’s bodies are commodified within Mama Nadi’s brothel, where sex becomes transactional rather than romantic

[CRITIC] Janice Radway’s ‘Reading the Romance’ (1984)

Radway argues that romance narratives can function both as emotional refuge and as contained protest within oppressive systems

quote about romance in ‘ruined’

‘you read too many of those romance novels where everything is forgiven with a kiss’

reading mama nadi through de beauvoir and radway

While Mama Nadi is initially proposed as a character skirting the periphery of gendered violence,

conducive to de Beauvoir’s conceptualisation of women as ‘Other’

Nottage contrastingly reproduces Radway’s argument that women can find empowerment in ‘mild acts of protest’

Julia Kirsteva’s ‘Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection’ (1980) → how does Kirsteva define the word ‘abjection’?

Kirsteva posits the term ‘abjection’ as a psychoanalytic and philosophical concept referring to the human reaction of horror and disgust towards things that blur the boundaries between ‘self’ and ‘other’

How does Kirsteva connect ‘abjection’ to women?

• Abjection as the ‘violence of mourning for a maternal object that must be lost so that the subject can exist

• the mothers body remains a ‘permanent threat’ to the subjects identity

• representing the boundary which abjection seeks to define as nauseating, between inside and outside

quote + analysis ending line of Daddy

‘Daddy, you bastard, I’m through’

• ends with apparent liberation → closure remains unstable

• cyclical structure of the poem and obsessive repetitions suggest that the emotional severance is incomplete

• the father survives physically and linguistically

how does the speaker in Daddy end up replicating the violence from their childhood? (quotes + analysis)

psychological inheritance

• the speaker does not escape patriarchal authority but recreates it, marrying “a man in black”

• admitting “I made a model of you.” 

• the husband reproduces the ‘brute’ father,

• suggesting that heterosexual desire operates through traumatic repetition

• Rather than liberating the speaker, sexuality reinscribes patriarchal structures → this dynamic culminating in the speaker’s marriage: ‘I do, I do, I do’.

how does nottage theorise men as being associated with military aggression and female powerlessness?

• sympathetically → insinuates that many male characters are themselves products of violent systems

• problem lies not in men individually but in inherited models of masculinity that equate authority with domination

Hélène Cixous’ ‘Le Rire de la Meduse’ (The Laugh of the Medusa) (1975)

conceptualises ‘women writing women’ as an ‘aphonic revolt’

What is Salima’s final declaration of protest and its effects?

‘You will not fight your battles on my body anymore’

functions not merely as protest but as a redefinition of intimacy and bodily autonomy

how do plath and nottage differ in their conclusions?

Plath → the failure of men and women to ‘really like’ one another appears tragically cyclical and unresolved

Nottage → antagonism between genders is historically produced and therefore potentially remediable

conclusion (what both texts do → what Plath does → what Nottage does)

• Both ‘Daddy’ and ‘Ruined’ represent gender relations as damaged by unequal systems of power that transform intimacy into domination and sexuality into coercion

  Plath internalises this crisis through fascist metaphor and traumatic attachment - ‘At twenty I tried to die/And get back, back, back to you’ - portraying heterosexuality as psychologically repetitive and contaminated by patriarchal inheritance

• Nottage externalises the same crisis through war and economic exploitation, revealing how violence structures emotional life