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He is a Sister: The Monstrous (De)Construction of the Sex/Gender Binary in Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory

Vikki Winkler

English 498: Honours Thesis

Advisor: Dr. Jodey Castricano

March 31, 2008

If it is appropriate to define “ideology” as that which constitutes social, cultural, and political order, then perhaps it can be said that as a genre, the Gothic paradoxically both challenges and reinforces the stability of these seemingly “fixed” structures and, similarly, that it both disturbs and reifies what one deems “normal” or “natural” in western industrial society. In this way, the Gothic functions as both a noun and a verb, and can be equated to Queer Theory in that it “queers” heteronormative “truth” claims. The Gothic may appear to stabilize the “natural” order because most novels, and now films, end with the eradication of any “monsters” that have posed a threat to society. However, it is the appearance of the “monster” in the first place that gives one pause. One could argue that the Gothic serves as the repository of all that is repudiated in society as “abnormal,” and, in effect, becomes the binary opposite of what western society deems intelligible and legitimate. In general, binaries function as ideological absolutes and exist in pairs that are contingent on one another for their meaning. However, one half of the pair is usually privileged as the original, “true,” and desirable portion of the pair, and the other half takes the position of “other,” undesirable, and an aberration of the “original.” Therefore, notions of what constitutes socio-cultural reality and what constitutes the Gothic depend on this relationship of terminal opposites. That being said, I will argue that although the Gothic seems to perform the dual or double function of stabilizing and destabilizing ordered systems, it ultimately becomes a deconstructive tool that exposes western heteronormative, taxonomic, teleological, epistemological, and theological systems that operate discursively to construct socio-cultural “norms.” With such a dual function in mind, I will use the Gothic through Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus as a lens to examine the social, cultural, and political order of Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory with the aim of deconstructing ideologies surrounding the “natural” and the manifestation of the Other specifically in regards to a heteronormative sex/gender system. As a Gothic novel, The Wasp Factory queers or “gothicizes” the apparent stability of heteronormativity and the structure of binary oppositions. I will argue that although the novel appears to subvert sex/gender categories, it ultimately reinforces them through his main character, Frank Cauldhame. Throughout the novel, Banks shows that the “obvious” incontestability of sex and gender as two (and only two) possibilities is an outrageous notion because there are slippages and categorical exceptions at every turn; Frank’s hypermasculine identity is clouded by “female” biology. However, the novel returns to an essentialist and/or “biology is destiny” perspective at the novel’s conclusion.

Iain Banks’s novel, The Wasp Factory, written in 1984, grapples in part with the longstanding essentialist-constructionist debate: Is man/woman born or made? Banks’s main character, Frank Cauldhame, must come to terms with being socialized as a male even though s/he[1] was born with “female” genitalia. Angus, Frank’s father, is a renegade doctor of biochemistry who, after his wife leaves him, decides to experiment on Frank with hormone therapy. Angus creates a bizarre story around the mutilation of Frank’s “male” genitalia by a dog named Saul. When Frank was born, Angus decided not to register h/er birth. As a result, Frank grew up without a birth certificate, National Insurance number, or any formal documentation “to say [he was] alive or [had] ever existed” (Banks 10). Angus Cauldhame keeps Frank in virtual isolation partially because of the geographic location of their home, and partially because he chooses to educate Frank himself. Angus is Frank’s source of knowledge – in fact, because Angus educates Frank at home, he is able to construct/manipulate h/er understanding of the world and the body s/he inhabits. Frank identifies as masculine, but “he” is “female.” S/he struggles with feeling emasculated as a result of h/er apparent accident, and commits murder three times. Frank believes that “both sexes can do one thing specially well; women can give birth and men can kill…[and] I consider myself an honorary man” (154). Just as Angus experiments with the chemical construction sex/gender, Frank experiments with the psychological construction of masculinity and femininity. The social construction of Frank’s body as male stands in direct opposition to h/er biological “beginnings” and makes h/er a Gothic figure, one that destabilizes the “natural” binary sex/gender system, and thereby exposes its compulsory yet arbitrary nature. Frank’s body troubles the “bounded” sex/gender system because s/he does not fit neatly into one of the two “intelligible” categories. H/er body also challenges the constructed masculine and feminine qualities that constitute “the human” because humanness is recognizable through the binary lens of the heteronormative sex/gender system, and therefore, “the subject, [even] the speaking ‘I,’ is formed by virtue of having gone through such a process of assuming a sex” (Butler Bodies 3). However, Judith Butler writes, “perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all” (Gender 9-10). Therefore, the novel illustrates the mimetic relationship between the social and the biological, and shows how individuals must reinforce the “reality” of his/her sex/gender through socio-cultural performative acts.

Frank undergoes a rebirth, a re-naming or re-classification of identity as the novel ends. In Frank’s final reflections s/he says that “our journey,” presumably the journey of life, is “part chosen, part determined” (Banks 244). I would argue that, in terms of sex/gender, choice is not in equal parts with determination because “choice” only exists within the binary sex/gender system of classification. At birth, there are two possibilities for the basis of identity, and one possibility must be rejected based on the intelligibility of reproductive genitalia. Butler states that “such attributions or interpellations [in regards to the constitution of ‘male’ and ‘female’ bodies] contribute to that field of discourse and power that orchestrates, delimits, and sustains that which qualifies as ‘the human’…[and] of those abjected beings who do not appear properly gendered; it is their very humanness that comes into question” (Bodies 8). In Banks’s novel, Frank is not “properly gendered,” but rather is gender ambiguous and therefore a fitting subject for a gothic novel. If Frank had not uncovered h/er “true identity,” who would Frank be? Was s/he ever really a man? Does believing or “feeling” that you are a man/woman make you one? And if not, what would make you a man/woman? In characteristic Gothic form, the novel raises unsettling questions for the reader. However, while it appears that Banks is questioning gender norms, social boundaries, and the arbitrary or “slippery” characteristics that are meant to categorize men/male and women/female, he ultimately reinscribes heteronormativity and the sex/gender binary by having Frank (re)claim “womanhood” without question. Why is it necessary for Frank’s sex/gender to be “resolved” or “dissolved” into one category or the other? On the other hand, however, the fact that Frank, as a “female,” is capable of “essentialized” male/masculine behaviour continues to problematize binary categorizations of sex/gender.

In the novel, Frank was born female, but masculinized by the somewhat questionable experimental scientific genius of h/er father. The experiment ultimately fails when Frank discovers the “truth” about h/er birth sex; s/he is not a mutilated male but actually a female. Banks addresses, or perhaps parodies, the discourse of psychoanalysis by way of Frank being a “castrated” male. By lacking a penis within this system of binaries, Frank is paradoxically a “woman.” Johnathan Culler notes that psychoanalysis sees women as “not the creature with a vagina but the creature without a penis, [and] is essentially defined by that lack” (qtd. in Schoene-Harwood 139). The view that women are merely degenerated men is apparent early on in the text when Frank comments matter-of-factly, “I hate having to sit down in the toilet all the time. With my unfortunate disability I usually have to, as though I was a bloody woman” (Banks 14). This quotation solidifies women’s position as both “less evolved” and “disabled” versions of men. Ironically, Frank fights against the “feminizing” effects of being a mutilated male when, if one were to see this situation in Freudian terms, s/he is merely a woman experiencing unresolved penis envy. Schoene-Harwood argues that “[Angus’] tale of Frank’s accidental castration is designed to disable woman, to keep her in check by inculcating in her an awesome respect and envy of the penis” (141). Additionally, it appears that Frank is completely subject to the “law of the father,” which Barbara Creed describes as a “universe of shame” (13). Frank is constantly embarrassed and humiliated by h/er “unmanly” body. Schoene-Harwood comments that “the child’s originally chaotic, intransigent nature is moulded into shape by the Law of the Father…[and] Frank’s father is shown to wield absolute power over his daughter’s understanding of the world” (141). However, Frank unabashedly uses the elements of the abject body as a source of power: “Sometimes, when I have to make precious substances such as toenail cheese or belly-button fluff, I have to go without a shower or bath for days and days” (Banks 51). Creed notes that “images of bodily wastes threaten the subject that is already constituted…as ‘whole and proper’” (13), paradoxically, however, Frank utilizes the abject in order to constitute h/erself. Creed further argues that the world of the mother, or maternal authority, “point[s] back to a time…when bodily wastes, while set apart from the body, were not seen as objects of embarrassment and shame” (13). One could argue that Frank’s character “gothicizes” or queers the “law of the father” by incorporating the world of the mother, “a universe without shame” (Creed 13) in regards to the abject body.

The novel’s outcome would seem to support an essentialist point of view because Frank is not “made” into a man despite chemical and social influence. H/er “femaleness” is simply repressed by h/er social environment, but ultimately, h/er “true” sex is revealed. It is impossible to ignore, however, the fact that Frank represents h/erself as male because h/er father labelled h/er as such. It is reasonable to assume that the development of an individual’s gender identity, according to Richard Lewontin, “depends on what label is attached to him or her as a child…thus biological differences [become] a signal for, rather than the cause of, differentiation in social roles” (qtd. in Wodak 4). Frank adopts a masculine persona because s/he is identified as or named male, and is led to believe that the dog, Saul, destroyed h/er “signalling” genitalia. It could be said that gender, although strongly dependent on sex, paints a more accurate picture of a person’s identity – allowing for a continuum of characteristics rather than a binary system. If this is so, then it is important to explore what sex and gender mean in a society of naming.

Names are signs that carry layers of meaning like signifying strands of a web that sprawl outward from the signified object. The web is flexible, changeable and forever expanding, and its structure forms the social order in which we exist. We can easily conjure several mental and sensory associations from one single word, and therefore we do not simply speak or hear names; we experience them. The spelling of given names is traditionally gendered, or perhaps sexed, to remove ambiguity as is indicated by the homophones Francis Leslie Cauldhame and Frances Lesley Cauldhame, the first being the masculine form. Additionally, it is not uncommon to hear comments like “you don’t look like a Sue,” suggesting that “Sue” is a type and encompasses a preconceived set of characteristics. We evaluate, situate, demarcate and in extreme circumstances, eliminate based on the power of names alone. Names are powerful because they are badges of identification branding us from birth just as “male” and “female” brand us in a heteronormative society. The very basis of identity stems from the naming of a child’s sex: “Consider the medical interpellation which…shifts an infant from an ‘it’ to a ‘she’ or a ‘he,’ and in that naming, the girl is ‘girled,’ brought into the domain of language and kinship through the interpellation of gender” (Butler, Bodies 7). Throughout the paper I have “named” Frank as “s/he” or “h/er” in an attempt to both confuse and fuse pronouns. This action, however, could be interpreted as merely a hyphenation of two sexes or genders that does not remove or alleviate sexual branding, or it could be interpreted as a hybrid construction or a “neither/nor” representation of sex/gender. It is my intention to linguistically confound the “coherent” sex/gender binary and move towards new identities or signs that leave room for possibilities.

As mentioned briefly before, the concept of “gender” appears to blur the distinct binary boundaries of “sex,” but it seems impossible, however, to view gender without making reference to individuals in terms of their masculinity and femininity. Butler argues that “the presumption of a binary gender system implicitly retains the belief in a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it” (Gender 9). Amy Sheldon notes, “speakers of English don’t ordinarily notice anything peculiar about expressions such as ‘the opposite sex,’ or ‘the same sex,’ since these reflect shared, cultural beliefs that gender is about difference, if not dichotomy” (225-26). Sheldon further writes, “critical discussions of gender theory have pointed out the descriptive inadequacy of theorizing gender as a dichotomy and of assuming that the categories ‘woman/girl’ and ‘man/boy’ refer to either natural or homogeneous social categories” (226). Gender identity is so strongly linked to sex that it is also viewed in binary sets of characteristics. Ruth Wodak argues:

It makes no sense…to assume that there is merely one set of traits that generally characterizes men and thus defines masculinity; or likewise, that there is one set of traits for women which defines femininity…[a] unitary model of sexual character is a familiar part of sexual ideology and serves to reify inequality between men and women in our society. (3)

While this may be true, Wodak does not account for the “horror” of gender ambiguity – the un-named. Gender appears to be a fluid social construction, or in other words, ideas about masculinity and femininity flow on a continuum and exist as such within individuals. Gender, primarily based on the dichotomy of sex, is problematic because binary opposites are literally lists of extremes that foster an “either this or that” mentality, and leave no room for degrees. Butler also suggests that “sex” is not a fact, but is rather discursively produced in the same way as gender, if not by gender constructions: “gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive,’ prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts” (Gender 10). Therefore, discourses surrounding sex are “gendered” just as discourses surrounding gender are “sexed.” Butler’s deconstruction of sex as a “natural fact” or as “prediscursive” undermines the binary sex/gender system as a compulsory basis for identity. The Wasp Factory, however, perpetuates the binary sex/gender system by having Frances Lesley Cauldhame (a character who is “unquestionably” female by the novel’s end) close the door on “Frank” and start again. There is no indication at the novel’s close that Frances will continue to identify in part with masculinity, but instead appears to reject it and embrace h/er “femaleness” as a “natural” inescapable fact.

In order to (re)construct sex/gender as “natural,” it is imperative that one engages in sex/gender affirming rituals. Throughout the novel, Frank performs rituals, similar to religious rites, that s/he has constructed in order to affirm h/er identity: “I held my crotch, closed my eyes and repeated my secret catechisms. I could recite them automatically, but I tried to think of what they meant as I repeated them…they still make me shiver whenever I say them, automatic or not” (Banks 157). Frank’s ritualistic behaviour can be seen to illuminate the ritual or performative aspect of a sex/gender system, whereby one must “come to believe [in one’s “assumed” gender] and...perform in the mode of belief” (Butler Gender 192). Frank’s ability to “automatically” recite h/er “secret catechisms” can be equated with the “naturalization” of sex/gender and its uncontested existence as “truth.” In order to clarify the performative aspects of sex/gender, Butler argues:

[B]ecause gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis; the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions…the construction ‘compels’ our belief in its necessity and naturalness. (Gender 190)