Beyond Bodies Gender, Literature and The Enigma of Consciousness by Daphne M. Grace

Beyond Bodies
Consciousness
&
Liter ture
the Arts 38
General Editor:
Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe
Editorial Board:
Anna Bonshek, Per Brask, John Danvers,
William S. Haney II, Amy Ione,
Michael Mangan, Arthur Versluis,
Christopher Webster, Ralph Yarrow
Jade Rosina McCutcheon
Beyond Bodies
Gender, Literature and
the Enigma of Consciousness
Daphne M. Grace
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014

Cover illustration: bronze figure “Junge Frau” (Young Woman) by George
Kolbe 1926, in Huntington Gardens, Arcadia, CA, USA.
Photo by author 2013.
Cover design by Aart Jan Bergshoeff.
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-3834-9
ISSN: 1573-2193
E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-1079-9
E-book ISSN: 1879-6044
© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014
Printed in the Netherlands
Contents
Chapter One
Cognition, consciousness and literary contexts 9
Gender, literature and consciousness 10

Gender, literature and society 11
Addressing bodies and the trouble of gender and consciousness 12
Challenging models of “woman” 15
Interdisciplinary approaches to cognition
and consciousness 16
Questions of qualia and consciousness 20
Quantum consciousness 21
The gendered world according to traditional concepts 23
The “problem” of consciousness: Eastern and
Western approaches 24
The Cosmic Web 28
Literature and “superconsciousness” 30
The scope and contents of Beyond Bodies 32
Chapter Two
Forging roads into consciousness: rasa and the influence
of emotion in Wuthering Heights 35
Wuthering Heights: a journey through the images of emotion 36

Wuthering Heights and the uncanny 40
Symbolisms and sex 41
Rasa theory in drama and literature 45
Rasa, qualia, and consciousness 48
Rasa and Wuthering Heights 50
The horror of Heathcliff 52
Qualia, rasa and moral responsibility 55
6 Beyond Bodies
Chapter Three
Isolating consciousness: secrets, silencing and insanity 57
Jane Eyre: a journey through modes of consciousness 57

Jane Eyre and higher states of consciousness: up on the roof 61
Jane Eyre as “autobiography” of being and becoming 63
Maya and madness 66
“The Library Window” 68
Paradoxes and problems: the “other” woman 70
Lady Audley’s Secret 74
Madness as metaphor 78
Madness, marriage and meaning: “The Yellow Wallpaper” 79
Conclusions 82
Chapter Four
Beyond the veils of consciousness: individual and
collective awareness in the novels of George Eliot 85
George Eliot and the exploration of female consciousness 85

Middlemarch: “The world is as we are” 86
The pier-glass analogy 87
Chhandas: the cover of reality 92
Inner and outer worlds: language and consciousness 98
The Lifted Veil: A metaphysical masking of consciousness 98
The Victorian woman in action 106
Chapter Five
Shifts into quantum consciousness: Virginia Woolf’s
moments of being 109
Twentieth century revolutions in thought 109

The “New Woman” of the twentieth century 110
Virginia Woolf’s radical writing 112
Escapes into consciousness 114
The stream of consciousness 117
Contents 7
The Waves 119

Loss of consciousness: Woolf beneath the waves 125
Quantum waves shed light on the stream of consciousness 127
Mrs Dalloway: The entanglement of consciousness 129
Gender and the quantum world: universal connectedness 134
Disturbing the universe 135
Chapter Six
Consciousness and freedom: women’s space in the
twentieth-century Bildungsroman 137
Patriarchy and women’s space 137

The Black Narcissus 139
The female quest narrative: The Crying of Lot 49 142
The “Wild Zone” of consciousness 145
Modern science and Vedic science shed light on
Pynchon’s paradox 147
A journey through the Wild Zone: Housekeeping 149
Consciousness and women’s language 152
Transience and transcendence 154
Chapter Seven
Beyond gender myths: Angela Carter’s feminist fables 161
Myths, fairy stories and gendered power games 162

Angela Carter’s feminist rewriting of fairy tales 164
The Bloody Chamber and the myths of Eve 166
The problematic enchantment of passivity 169
The fantastic world of Angela Carter’s novels 170
Bodies as “Infernal Desire Machines” 171
Challenges to the self 172
Paradoxes of postmodern and Puranic tales 174
8 Beyond Bodies
Chapter Eight
Transforming gender: passion, desire and consciousness 175
Becoming woman 175

Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flames 177
Quantum gender and the creation of new myths:
Jeanette Winterson 182
The Passion 182
Sexing the Cherry 184
Gut Symmetries 187
Becoming human: The Stone Gods 190
AI: imprints of consciousness 194
Chapter Nine
Quests and questions of consciousness: Margaret Atwood’s
post-human futures 197
Margaret Atwood and the problematic search for new worlds 198
Surfacing: Society, secrets, and subjectivity 199
Atwood’s twenty-first century dystopia 205
Consciousness and philosophies of conscience 213
Chapter Ten
Consciousness and conscience: the ethics of enlightenment 215
Consciousness, creative writing, and the discovery of the

Higgs boson 216
Encountering physics and consciousness 217
The universe of Self-referral creation 218
Consciousness and the quantum brain 220
Consciousness, emotion and ethics 222
Projecting worlds from consciousness 224
Literary fiction meets scientific fact 226
Bibliography 231
Index 245
Chapter One
Cognition, consciousness
and literary contexts
A female writer, according to Virginia Woolf, traditionally encounters two

fundamental problems. The first is the “severe severity” with which men
condemn women’s behaviour and curtail their freedom to self-expression.
She explains the second and more difficult problem as that of: “telling the
truth about my own experiences as a body”, which “I do not think I solved. I
doubt that any woman has solved it yet”. While questioning why women
have “more ghosts to fight” than men, she finds these gender-specific obsta-
cles to be “immensely powerful and yet […] very difficult to define”
(1931/1993: 8).
The gendered body continues to be one of the most controversial preoc-
cupations of the modern age, and the ability to “tell the truth” of the body
perplexes many feminists and women today, just as it did Virginia Woolf. In
today’s world, “writing the body” and “righting the body” could be synony-
mous, both in terms of academic preoccupations with gender and individual
rights to self-determination of sexuality—yet also in the other meaning of
“right” as “correct”. In general, bodies (and specific parts of them) can be
enlarged, reduced, rejuvenated, altered or replaced. Our societies are ob-
sessed with our bodies: for example, whether the human body should be
covered or exposed has taken on transnational political and religious signifi-
cance to the extent of becoming a controversial issue of global women’s
rights.
Biological differences appear to determine both gender and conscious-
ness, yet developments in critical theory and modern technology are close to
dissolving these notions. The differentiation of male-female roles continues
to be eroded while arguments about the apparent biological differences be-
tween male and female brains both confirm and problematize the issues.
Recent popular books emphasize the “delusion” of gender difference, which
usually emphasises the “neurosexism” or “neurononsense” that determine
10 Beyond Bodies
male brains to be superior in understanding and building systems (Fine

2010). Equally irrelevant and misleading, according to Cordelia Fine, are
arguments for the unique adaptive superiority of the “female” brain as “a
high-performance emotion machine” (see Brizendine 2007: 159). The human
brain, Fine argues, is an organ that “remains a vast unknown, a perfect medi-
um on which to project, even unwittingly, assumptions about gender” (2010:
xxviii). Fine’s text demonstrates the types of overt and subtle discrimination
that still exist against women based on the projection of gender role models,
both descriptive and prescriptive, that haunts females both at work and in the
home (2010: 56-7). In the workplace especially, gender bias triggers hostile
discrimination involving “segregation, exclusion, demeaning comments,
harassment and attack”, all of which are “intentionally and consciously done”
(Fine 2010: 68). So far it seems little has progressed in terms of “gender
equality” or female inclusion since Woolf’s perception of male condemna-
tion, confinement, and control of women almost a century ago.
Gender, literature and consciousness
How is gender relevant to consciousness studies? Can gender influence con-

sciousness, or vice versa? Through an interface of literary theory and the lens
of literature, this book will address the possibilities inherent within the dy-
namics of exploring gender and human consciousness, which will provide a
paradigm ultimately addressing such crucial questions.
Consciousness studies in the context of literature are emancipating, draw-
ing upon the widest possible conceptualization of the range of human experi-
ence in all its global variations as its fundamental derivation. Thus, while
interdisciplinary in many aspects, this book is in essence a work about litera-
ture, and how literary imagination can provide insights into the “enigma” of
consciousness. Within literary perspectives, identity becomes increasingly a
shifting, multiple, and renegotiable concept. In this discussion, consciousness
can be posited as the blank backdrop to the stage of performative gender
roles as well as the dynamic force of their expression.
This book uses some key current debates in consciousness studies in the
analysis of several pertinent, and well-known, novels. The chapters explore
the role literature plays in dwelling on and explicating the so-called hard
problem of consciousness. Regarding literature as “consciousness in action”,
the works of literature selected have been chosen for discussion on the basis
of either how consciousness is represented, or how the author deals with the
topic of consciousness itself. How can the human mind, with all its powers of
creativity, give voice to ineffable experience? Can consciousness “expand” or
develop to higher, alternate states? How have authors attempted to wrestle
with the ephemeral nature of subjectivity and other “problems” of conscious-
ness? Equally importantly, and fundamentally, these authors also seek to
question or to challenge social, cultural and political hegemonies that restrict
women’s freedom of speech or behaviour, and to establish empowerment of
women as individuals, as agents of action, and as writers. These aspects will
collide with/ elide into a commentary of each specific text with conscious-
ness theory, either in contemporary western science and philosophy and/or
from the perspective and understanding of Indian literary theory. The book
will further intensify the discussion of consciousness by being focused
around the topic of gender and women’s literature; it will approach the topic
from the angle of gendered representations of consciousness in literature,
mainly through the study of female authors or, in some cases, female charac-
ters.
Gender, literature and society
Attitudes to gender, and expression of gender within both male and female
perspectives, are culturally and very specifically articulated so that any dis-
cussion of gender and literature, or gender in literature, must be both local
and global. Patriarchal world structures have traditionally placed men centre
stage and confined women to the margins of society. In a parallel determina-
tion of geographical and social space, public space of commerce, politics and
nationalism has—until recent decades—been the locale of male/masculinist
power; while the domain of the home and hearth, nursery and kitchen, have
been designated as female, private space. Arguably, the very fact of women
being trapped for centuries within homes and texts produced literary outputs
that focused on an exploration of subjectivity. Genteel women before the mid
twentieth century had the dubious advantage of free time: time and oppor-
tunity to go within and explore the nature of the self. In her essay “Three
Guineas” Virginia Woolf expresses that women—barred from participating
in the male world of commerce and politics and thus outsiders—preserved a
higher moral and spiritual life as a result of their life in seclusion or isolation.
In fact, she also considers that the English readership would expect “moral
12 Beyond Bodies
purity” from a female writer, and be outraged if she did not, or was judged
not, to provide it (1993: 15).1
Writers such as Jane Austen, George Sand, George Eliot and the Brontë
sisters were able to take a dual positioning as documenters of woman within
society and the subjectivity involved in the roles enforced on them, while
also rebelling against the very fabric of their patriarchal containment. In their
different voices, all were writing demanding a gender-definition other than as
property, urging recognition of the equality of mind and body with men. By
the twentieth century, women writers were forging a new role as experiment-
ers with language technique as a means to express the sub-conscious female
life of the mind and emotion. The “mad women” trapped in the attic wrote
back to the men holding the keys.
Addressing bodies and the trouble of gender and consciousness
While in Western cultures the Cartesian split between mind and body has
long been debated and even discredited, still the body remains the filter of the
mind to the outside world, and vice versa. We return again and again to de-
scribe our identity through the body. “The way we view our bodies is synon-
ymous with how we view ourselves,” claims the back cover of popular author
Susie Orbach’s Bodies (2009). The female body is not only a target of bigot-
ry, but also a political weapon used by left and right, the religious and the
secular, to argue for or against human rights. The body, as well as the brain,
has long been used as “the battle site in controversies over sex or race differ-
ences” (Bleier 1986: 148). Yet second and third wave feminisms have frac-
tured concepts of biological identity and emphasise the independence of body
and gender.
Our cultures do much to determine and prescribe or proscribe the modes
of play and display of bodies in their sexual incarnations of male/female, and
as subjectively experienced and displayed as straight, gay, and bisexual. With
arguments of cultural determination of “the body” according to critics such as
Michel Foucault (1980) and Judith Butler, the body becomes the site of prob-
lematic politicization. Whether gender and sex are biologically or culturally
1
Expressed in Woolf’s essay “Women Novelists”, where she cites the case where
George Eliot was accused of “coarseness and immorality”, despite writing under a
male pseudonym, which, like the Brontës, had been adopted “in order to free them-
selves from a more fundamental tyranny—the tyranny of sex itself” (Killing the Angel
in the House: Seven Essays 15.)
constructed, the sexualized body is inevitably bound up in concepts of identi-

ty formation and identity politics, forged through competing discourses
whether of heredity, religion, or patriarchal hegemonies. Judith Butler’s in-
fluential texts Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter have clarified prob-
lems of definitions of “woman” as bound up with other intersecting issues of
sexuality, ethnicity and class. “Feminism”, Butler argues in her 1999 Preface
to Gender Trouble, “ought to be careful not to idealize certain expressions of
gender that, in turn, produce new forms of hierarchy and exclusion” (viii).
Feminist theory may be liable to endorsing the limited and received notions
of masculinity and femininity, and to reinforce “a pervasive heterosexual
assumption” (Butler 1999: viii). If feminists and feminist theory seek to over-
throw or eliminate gender because of a perceived subordination or inequality,
this may, in Butler’s opinion, omit perspectives from non-normative and
ambiguous gender. Her critique is most famous for her proposition of gender
as performance, where “performativity” is both linguistic and theatrical; it is
“not a single act, but a repetition and a ritual” (Butler 1999: viii) through
which:
what we take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a

sustained set of acts, posited through the gendered stylization of the body. In
this way […] what we take to be an “internal” feature of ourselves is one that
we anticipate and produce through certain bodily acts, at an extreme, an hallu-
cinatory effect of naturalized gestures. (1999: xvi)
Butler’s work continues to expand the concept of “gender” and its possible
interpretations and expressions, while clarifying how the sexed body is de-
scribed and configured within both subversive and “normative” codes of
operation. While in practice, we may not be aware of our performance, it
nevertheless is culturally imposed, and thus the gender norms of society are
open to interrogation and resistance if they do not conform to our idea of
“normality” or our desired mode of living.
From today’s poststructuralist perspectives, self-hood is dependent on the
presuppositions and cultural limitations of language in a world where any
sense of self floats free from and excludes notions of transcendence, totaliz-
ing narratives, or any unifying world view—yet equally, the body alone
seems to anchor theory into practice (feminisms, postmodernism, queer stud-
ies) and to unify individual entities into a corporate wholeness of “an-
thropos”. The articulation of the body as identity and as a means of agency
remains political. In today’s often extreme, and politicized, interpretations of
14 Beyond Bodies
religion, the body and the physical space it occupies remain a preoccupation
of monumental proportions. The gendered body is to be controlled; gendered
space is to be clearly defined and firmly regulated. Both gendered bodies and
gendered spaces are to be strictly patrolled and violations punished. In many
cultures, women’s bodies are not independent but are owned and defined by
family and the nation. As Cordelia Fine concludes, it is our societies—not the
brain physiology or psychology—that create and determine gender difference
and the concomitant gender hierarchies and inequalities.
So what, then, can be beyond the body? Apparently not discourse, or eth-
ics, religion, nor “spirituality”. Why are bodies and their gendered modes of
experiencing so feared, or negated, or abused; philosophized or theorized?
Why is the body of woman so difficult to define and to evade? Can it be
because in some small, intuitive way, we recognize that beyond the body is
an even greater mystery—that of human consciousness? Writing/righting the
body must entail understanding the human physical body in terms of
bodymind2: the interface, interconnection and identity of body-consciousness.
Yet who and where is the “I” that thinks of itself as “having” or residing in
the body?
In his book The Blank Slate, based on the Lockean concept that all
knowledge and behaviour are derived from experience, Steven Pinker argues
that it “might seem that the theories that are most friendly for women are the
Blank Slate—if nothing is innate, differences between the sexes cannot be
innate” (2002: 339). Yet, he clarifies, “the belief that feminism requires a
blank slate […] has become a powerful impetus for spreading disinfor-
mation.” He argues “there is, in fact, no incompatibility between the princi-
ples of feminism and the possibility that men and women are not psychologi-
cally identical” (340). Assuming gendered physiological differences (such as
brain functioning, together with differences in modes of experiencing emo-
tion) Pinker endorses evidence that shows that “the difference between men
and women is more than genitalia-deep” (346). Despite rejecting claims that
gender difference between males and females comes from “the way society
treats them” (350), the fact that “virtually all psychological traits may be
found in varying degrees” in each sex, creates a dichotomy of views and he
concedes that “notions like ‘proper role’ and ‘natural place’ are scientifically
meaningless and give no grounds for restricting freedom” (Pinker 2002: 340)
2
In line with the fact that physicists such as Brian Greene (2011) now refer to
‘spacetime’ as one word, it seems that ‘mindbody’ and ‘bodymind’ should properly be
conjoined also, as in Sanskrit, where the term used is namarupa.
Yet while the aim of this book is not to espouse either Butler’s or Pinker’s
arguments, it will take up the challenge of locating and discussing the rela-
tionship of the gendered body and consciousness through the discerning lens
of literature—predominantly, although not exclusively through literature
written by women. It will challenge notions that the body is the foremost
defining factor in “self-hood” (whether based on arguments of nature or nur-
ture) and lay the foundation for a “quantum” view of consciousness as the
underlying reality of human-ness that goes beyond gender. The discussion
here will naturally involve historically situated ideas and arguments put for-
ward by feminisms, as well as relating to the shifting social positioning of
women through diverse times and texts.
Challenging models of “woman”
The writing of the female body has long been located as the core of much
feminist expression; centralising the experiences relating to fertility, child-
rearing and motherhood—despite these life events not being universal among
all women. Yet symbolically, the “feminine” has dwelt on the nurturing, soft,
sexual qualities and imagery of woman as healer and reconciler, as opposed
to the more masculinist tendencies of power, control and justice.
Throughout literature, however, examples that shatter this gender stereo-
typing abound. From as early as Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, we find
female characters who are just as likely to venture defiantly “where no man
has gone before” as their male counterparts. Feisty and independent Criseyde
defines herself as “myn owene woman, wel at ese” and “oon the fayreste, out
of drede,/and goodlieste […] right yong,” who “stand unteyd in lusty lese”.
Above all, she relishes her independence and intends to keep her physical and
intellectual freedom: “shal noon housbonde sayn to me, ‘Checkmat!’” (Skeat
1900: 750-754).3 She effortlessly dominates over weaker, submissive, and
more “effeminate” Troilus, until beaten by the crafty machinations of Panda-
rus and the fateful tide of a war where women are positioned as both the
instigators (Helen of Troy) and the pawns (Criseyde). 4
3
According to my translation, Criseyde is asserting, “I am an independent women,
and at ease with that. There’s no doubt that I’m one of the loveliest, as well as being
virtuous. . . I’m young and free, and enjoy being in this pleasant situation … So no
husband is going to say ‘Check Mate’ to me!” (Book 2, verse 108)
4
It must be said in Troilus’s defence, however, that the popular author Jilly Cooper
recently cited Troilus and Criseyde as her choice of favourite erotic literature, high-
16 Beyond Bodies
Through the rise of the English novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, the world of literature abounds with characters, who at the very
least question and taunt convention (Thackeray’s Becky Sharpe for example)
if not forcefully rebelling with the tragic results of a Madame Bovary. The
strong female characters in Jane Austen’s novels who subvert society’s posi-
tioning of women through the narrative’s famous irony and social satire, lead
the way to the powerful, outspoken, heroines in the Brontë sisters’ novels. As
we shall see, throughout Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë urges a rethinking of
gender and sexual role-play leaving the reader ultimately contemplating the
reversed gender roles of Jane and Rochester as strong provider and weak
dependent.
Many female figures play a vanguard role in exposing the foibles of fin de
siècle society as women’s literature and feminist debates developed into the
twentieth century. Women writers articulate the need for change in a rotten
society, targeting patriarchal views towards sex and love. Woman herself is
seen as being agents of transformation, however limited. Yet women’s great-
est power is as a spiritual life force, as harbingers of the new life: a life char-
acterised by a sense of humanity and caring (Gilligan 1982) and connection
with the Self.
Interdisciplinary approaches to cognition and consciousness
The Romantic philosopher and poet Novalis writes that, “The Self—
considered under the categories of quantity, quality, causality and substantial-
ity—is perhaps the object of the various sciences” (qt Maclagan: 7). Yet over
two centuries later, human consciousness is still being described as “one of
the last great mysteries of science” (Greenfield in Blackmore 2005a: 93). As
Susan Blackmore points out, neuroscientists (here she cites Vilayanur Rama-
chandran) are still working on the problem, which she calls the “‘greatest
scientific and philosophical riddle of all—the nature of the self’” (2005a: 80).
Unable to identify the “self” with either body or brain entirely or exclusively,
the experiencer asks, “Who is it who seems to be living this life and having
these experiences?” (2005a: 66). Theories that equate the self with a particu-
lar set of brain processes, “may begin to explain the origin and structure of
lighting the passage where Troilus demonstrates his amorous skills: “Thus in his
heaven he took his delight/And smothered her with kisses upon kisses/Till gradually
he came to learn where bliss is” (qt Cooper in “Holy hell, this book’s hot”: Saturday
Guardian Review, 07.07. 2012: 3).
the self, but they leave the mystery of consciousness untouched” (2005: 80.)
Consciousness, as the ever-sceptical Blackmore elaborates, remains “a sub-
jective phenomenon that we can’t really define properly”:
Everyone knows what it is, but we can’t use the normal operational definitions
for defining it; and therefore it is very hard to know how to even frame the
question as to how a subjective state is associated with something physical.
(2005a: 93)
Theories debating the existence and defining the qualities of consciousness

involve the disciplines of neuroscience, philosophy, and physics, through
which leading minds have devoted themselves to elucidating the apparently
irreconcilable and inexplicable fact that something physical is able to gener-
ate or produce something so ineffable—so unphysical. Or should it be de-
scribed as the opposite, as popular authors today such as Deepak Chopra
argue (2011): that a non-physical reality produces the physical?
Neurophysiologist Gerd Sommerhof, who delights in referring to what he
terms the “fuzzy notion” of consciousness, argues for a biological approach
to the problem of mind/matter that has divided philosophers since Plato and
Aristotle (2000: 4). He proposes three central roles of consciousness, priori-
tising the facets of first and third person perspectives, a division that will
prove useful in later chapters here in relating roles of consciousness within
literature. Indeed, Sommerhof argues that in this differentiation between
subjective and objective experience, it is fallacious to imagine that science
should account for subjectivity, since theories of sensations or feelings be-
long “to the work of poets, novelists and painters” (Sommerhof 2000: 64).
Within the hard sciences, the realm of “inner” experience and the subjective
forms of gaining knowledge have been stigmatized into the unreliable or
even fraudulent—and it has been left to the humanities and the arts to be the
areas in which the “interior” experience is legitimately expressed and de-
fined. This definition of experience, however, forced the inner and outer
worlds apart, with the resulting problem today of how to reconcile the two
apparent opposites, subjective and objective, the world of thought and the
world of observable fact.
The study of consciousness, however, is essentially a study of subjective
experience, detailing what it is to have awareness of the self. The vast majori-
ty of current consciousness studies are limited to objective measurements and
understanding which at best give a cursory and fleeting reference to subjec-
18 Beyond Bodies
tive experience.5 Yet first person approaches to consciousness are becoming

more mainstream. Subjective verbal reports, for example, are still held to be
the “gold standard” as a measure of conscious experience. Verbal reports,
linked in many ways to explorations of the inner life in literature, are able to
give us a picture of a “continuous stream” of consciousness, despite some
shortcomings in providing a phenomenological account of consciousness as
unified over time (Klincewicz 2012: 104).
So while full knowledge of human consciousness can only be understood
within consciousness itself, it is literature that has long been concerned with
the question of how to explore, and give voice to, the vast array of human
experiences of consciousness. Literature (whether prose or poetry) explores
and elucidates a world of mental states, elaborating the depth and breadth of
human emotion and motivation, the variety and meaning of the course and
process of subjective experience. If consciousness remains ineffable and the
mechanisms of consciousness have long remained a mystery to science, Ho-
mo sapiens have always relied on artistic and literary expression to investi-
gate and document consciousness, and to represent whatever “meaning” can
be derived from quotidian existence. While individual embodiments of con-
sciousness may be temporally fleeting within the perspective of space-time,
the summation of consciousnesses is what we refer to as “culture”, “civiliza-
tion” and their evolution—the collision of human consciousness and society.
As integral to the discussion, this text aims to draw upon literary repre-
sentations and literary discussions of consciousness as a means to explicate
what has become known as the “hard problem” of consciousness within con-
temporary science: the interaction of the seemingly separate subjective world
and the objective world.6 The human mind is unique, perhaps, in having the
5
A comparison would be to trying to understand a Shakespeare play on television by
analysing the electrical signals passing through the circuits of the TV. A recent con-
ference on consciousness studies held by the Association for the Scientific Study of
Consciousness in Brighton, July 2012—while demonstrating the widespread and
fascinating research on consciousness being undertaken at universities and research
institutes around the world today—concentrates mainly on the objective “observable”
qualities of consciousness in terms of neuroscience. Other scientists or philosophers,
however, such Susan Blackmore (in her presentation and workshop) deal with subjec-
tive insights into consciousness gained from meditation techniques and are possibly
more pertinent to my present discussion.
6
The “hard problem” of consciousness, a term coined by David Chalmers, refers to
areas of human performance that cannot be directly measured, as opposed to areas
such as memory, learning, child development and so on. David Chalmers is also one
of the philosophers who reject the theoretical comparisons of the functioning of con-
abilities of introspection and intuition, which remain unaccounted for in neu-

rological explanations of brain functioning. Levine (1983, 2000), Chalmers
(1996) and others discuss this as the “explanatory gap” between brain me-
chanics (in terms of neural and chemical processes) and the production of
feelings and subjective experiences of either physical or non-physical events.
Writers have been concerned with how to explain the problem of human
subjectivity, and the conflicting status within human experience of the mind-
body duality, at least since the days of Shakespeare, when questions of the
nature of the human self as merely a “strutting player” on the stage of life,
“full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” gave a clear call to philosophers
to resolve the questions of existence versus nothingness, being/not-being, and
the mind/body differential. A subjective sense of personal identity was not
enough: the “problem” of consciousness was born. It has long been a core
concern in neuroscience and philosophy, never more so than today.
The problem of how to relate science to the arts in the approach towards
any topic, must take into account the different approaches of the two disci-
plines to knowledge. The scientific approach is to examine objective world of
“fact” in order to move towards finer and ever subtler levels of appreciation
and understanding—often increasingly subjective. The scientist who has a
hunch or an intuitive “feeling” about a phenomenon that s/he then sets out to
investigate is a well-known occurrence. An approach to knowledge from
within the arts or humanities begins from the inner most core of creative
inspiration or insight and moves increasingly outward towards the most man-
ifest expression. By using opposite directions, both arts and sciences however
aim at the same goal: the uncovering of the mechanics of thought/existence
and conferring meaning to a random universe. Don Gifford uses the terms
“descriptive” and “predictive” as techniques to knowledge and he provides an
example in terms of how the disciplines approach the matter of memory:
Science, I’m afraid, will continue to have trouble with human memory because
science aspires to be predictive as well as descriptive, and memory insists on
personal spaces of its anarchy, defying description, let alone prediction. (2011:
31)
sciousness and quantum mechanics. Restricting ideas to remain within boundaries of

classical physics may account for statements projecting the understanding of con-
sciousness as being difficult and problematic.
20 Beyond Bodies
A literary approach to memory not only attempts to fill in where memory is

lost in “personal space” or the anarchy of aporias. The availability of descrip-
tions of different states of consciousness from dream to ecstatic wide-awake-
ness allows literary (first or third-hand) analysis of these states, granting a
legitimate space for deciphering meaning, life, and human roles within the
ongoing indifferent universe. The literary imagination, in other words, is
essential, or at least exemplary in providing for those experiences that in
science, “defy description” at least for the time being.
Take for example, George Eliot’s description of her character Maggie
Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, whose return to the familiar scenes of her
childhood on the river triggers a flood of emotion:
The sight of the old scenes had made the rush of memories so painful […]
Memory and imagination urged upon her a sense of privation too keen to let
her taste what was offered in the transient present: her future, she thought, was
likely to be worse than her past, for after her years of contented renunciation,
she had slipped back into desire and longing; she found joyless days of dis-
tasteful occupation harder and harder –she found the image of the intense and
varied life she yearned for, and despaired of, becoming more and more impor-
tunate. (Eliot 1995: 335)
This passage raises many questions about the human brain’s ability simulta-
neously to comprehend past, present, and future, and the role of memory and
the imagination in projecting possible futures. These temporal perceptions are
also often associated with a range of intense (and simultaneous) emotions.
How can we explain, other than by example, the origins and effects of long-
ing, of desire, of contentment, of joy, or of despair? Yet all these emotions
are compacted within a few lines of narrative. The text also opens up for
inspection the role of women in society, the unique social patterns that have
formulated both restriction (in terms of repression and entrapment) and op-
portunities for the more intense introspective voyage inwards.
Questions of qualia and consciousness
The fact that literary theory has already accessed trauma theory as a valid
approach to the subjective story-telling of “literature” and its inherent confes-
sional revelations of personal experience (whether fictional, factual or a mer-
ger of the two) demonstrates that contemporary literary studies already en-
dorses approaches from cognitive studies and interdisciplinary approaches,
whether including sociology and politics (postcolonial theory), psychology or

physics.
Theories of the existence of qualia, the characteristics of what it is like
subjectively to undergo a particular experience, are also central to our current
understanding of phenomenal consciousness. Their discussion clearly also
implicates why individual differences exist in the physical and emotional
reactions to trauma, stress and loss. In conversation with Susan Blackmore,
Stuart Hameroff explains, “The brain is an excellent information processing
system, but there is no accounting for how and why we have subjective expe-
rience, emotional feelings, an ‘inner’ life” (in Blackmore 2005a: 115). He
continues to argue that consciousness “must involve something fundamental,
something that’s intrinsic to the universe”—the problem for science involves
explaining exactly what this reality “at the fundamental level of the universe”
actually is (Hameroff in Blackmore 2009: 118).
If one central discussion in consciousness studies remains the problematic
explanation of subjective experience of qualia (the “quality” of experience) it
may be even more contentious to bring gender into the debate—to problema-
tise in fact how far such subjectivity is influenced, or even determined, by the
sex of the experiencer. To use the often-cited example of qualia, that of the
experiences of redness or the taste of strawberry (see Blackmore inter alia) is
it possible to assess if men and women are subject to a differing impact of the
colour or flavour?
Quantum consciousness
Philosophers as well as physicists consider various cultural and philosophical

traditions that address questions about the nature of the mind and its relation-
ship to the body, and how these interact with the overlapping spheres of the
animate and inanimate environments. Many thinkers, artists and composers
(Gustav Holst, for example) as well as physicists and philosophers (including
Michel Foucault and Jean-Paul Sartre) find inspiration from Vedic literature,
especially The Rig Veda and The Upanishads, regarding them as some of the
primary and oldest discourses on the source, course and goal of human exist-
ence in relation to the greater cosmos—a trend I will continue here.
Yet it seems that to understand human consciousness at all, we must turn
not only to neurochemistry, psychology or philosophy, but also most essen-
tially to modern physics, and what has been revealed in quantum mechanics
over the past hundred years—a discussion that has informed the chapters
22 Beyond Bodies
here.7 In comparison to a purely neuropsychological approach, the field of

quantum physics seems to come closest to being able to explain this paradox;
through simulating a “quantum mechanical” viewpoint the human mind can
begin to understand how consciousness functions.
From another perspective, Katherine Hayles argues for the significance of
the “philosophical and epistemological implications” of quantum field theo-
ries and “what they imply not only about the nature of the world, but about
how one interacts with the world” (1984: 31). She sees the shifts in percep-
tion due to the new physics as “a revolution in world view” (Hayles 1984:
15), including the important breakdown of Cartesian dichotomy due to un-
derstanding of the interaction of observer and the observed—pictured by her
as a “cosmic dance” or “energy field”—a fluid, dynamic, interactive model
of reality that has “no detachable parts” (1984: 15). Hayles suggests a seman-
tic failure of language to be able adequately to describe such a system in
which “the usual distinction between cause and effect breaks down” (Hayles
1984: 19). Language is both the means of description and that which is being
described. Hence, she explains, the cosmic web of the universe “is inherently
paradoxical” since there can be no separation of subject and object, no in-
side/outside, no “objective” reality, merely the metaphorical conceptualiza-
tion of an elusive wholeness (Hayles 1984: 20-21).
Many physicists now endorse the view that the worldview posed by quan-
tum mechanics has relevance far beyond science, as for example Bruce Ros-
enblum and Fred Kuttner explain:
The relevance of quantum mechanics is, in a sense, more immediate than ei-
ther Copernican or Darwinian ideas, which deal with the long ago or far away.
Quantum theory is about the here and now and even encounters the essence of
our humanity, our consciousness. Why then hasn’t quantum theory had the in-
tellectual and societal impact of those other insights? (2007: 12)
In dealing with a discussion of quantum enigma and consciousness, these

authors are aware that such a marriage of topics is usually avoided in teach-
ing physics students, and that most physicists will ignore the “shocking im-
plications” of quantum mechanics:
7
In recent years, breakthroughs in our understanding of this greatest of all enigmas
have gained momentum, with the inclusion of consciousness studies within psycholo-
gy and other university departments, and within interdisciplinary literary and cogni-
tive studies. A centre for consciousness research has recently been founded at the
University of Sussex, for example.
The physics facts we present are undisputed. Only when it comes to the mean-
ing behind the facts is there argument. What those facts tell us about our world
(and perhaps about ourselves) is today a contentious issue that extends beyond
physics. There are intriguing hints of a connection of the world we call physi-
cal with that which we call mental. (2007: 13)
While a quantum consciousness or quantum mind hypothesis has been in

existence for some years, it has not gained wide acceptance since the exact
mapping of one theory (quantum states of particle physics) onto another is
fraught with problems—most importantly that of attempting to superimpose
physical and phenomenal states of a system onto the non-locatable field of
consciousness.
The material world, as described in quantum physics is divided into two
main categories of matter/energy, the bosons and fermions. Technically,
these differ in terms of a quantum mechanical quality called “spin”. Bosons
have integer spin (0,1… etc) and fermions have half-integer spin (1/2, 3/2,
etc). This one difference results in fundamental differences in behaviour:
Bosons aggregate and create coherent states. Fermions stay separate and do
not create coherent states. Both qualities are vital in the structure of the uni-
verse: creating cohesion and structure; uniformity and difference; together-
ness and dividedness. At an underlying level, bosons and fermions are the
basic building blocks of nature; the fundamental particles emerge at the first
level of symmetry breaking from the unified field. The interaction between
the bosons and fermions creates the infinite complexity of the material world.
As more complex structures are created—as these building blocks build the
infinite diversity of nature—these qualities are replicated at stages up the
chain: in atoms, molecules, and into ever more complex structures.
In many ways, quantum consciousness mirrors the Vedic perspective that
“subjective” mental states of consciousness exist at a more fundamental level
of the mind to the grosser level of senses. Unified Field Theories suggest the
common source of both matter and energy fields (physical and mental forces
within the body) as being in an unmanifest quantum field of pure potentiali-
ty—the unified field of consciousness.
The gendered world according to traditional concepts
In the traditional literature of ancient cultures, a parallel description is seen.

In the ancient writings of Vedic literature, and in Chinese culture, in which
the essential unity of creation divides into the duality of Yin and Yang, the
24 Beyond Bodies
essential division of one into two is represented. Described in Taoist philoso-

phy in terms of yin/yang, male/female, at the basis of this dual nature of the
universe, is the void, wu-chi, which is represented by an empty circle. Com-
parable to the empty set in mathematics, in which all finite forms are con-
tained,
This void represents a state of unity and nondifferentiation. In other words, in

the wu-chi state there is only void and nothing else. But this void contains the
potential for the creation of everything because without void there is no room
for anything else to emerge. (Liu and Blank 2011: 171)
In both cases, the qualities are often described as being male and female,
principles both diversifying and unifying. However, there is a paradox (as
one might expect in the writings that depict the fundamentals of creation)
since sometimes it is the cohesive, binding nature that is described as male,
as for example Vishnu, the maintainer of the universe. At other times it is the
Divine Mother who holds the universe as one undivided whole. In Indian
literature, these forces are also sometimes represented by Shiva (unmanifest
pure knowledge) and his consort Shakti (manifesting energy); and by puru-
sha and prakriti. Thus, differences are sometimes seen as upheld by a male
force, at other times created by the ultimate female creative force. In this
context at least, male/female differentiation is not a simple, linear, all-or-
nothing divide—it is elaborate, graded, and contingent.
The “problem” of consciousness: Eastern and Western approaches
At the heart of quantum mechanics is the role of the conscious observer,

since, as Niels Bohr emphasised, there is no “objective existence of phenom-
ena independent of our observations” (Rosenblum and Kuttner 2007: 100).
Yet as these authors point out, this apparently revolutionary concept—that
observation creates the universe of forms—was already expressed several
millennia ago in the Vedic texts of India.
William S. Haney clarifies:
It is important to remember, then, that Eastern thought distinguishes between

consciousness and mind, whereas Western thought identifies the two. The
Eastern tradition regards consciousness as completely noncorporeal, the wit-
nessing aspect of awareness, and mind, which is a form of matter, albeit sub-
tle, as related to the content of consciousness. The mind is the link between the
phenomenal world of sense impressions and the realm of quality less pure
consciousness. (2002: 44)
Here, the word “consciousness”, in line with much recent scholarship that
locates a rationale for explaining consciousness in academic terms that draw
upon ancient Vedic truths, refers to the intelligence or awareness underlying
thought, speech and creativity. Consciousness is the intelligence at the foun-
dation of all subjective experience and material existence. Consciousness is
not the product of thought but the origin. Consciousness is appreciated in its
qualities of wakefulness, pure intelligence, total knowledge—consciousness
is “pure” in the sense that it is entirely self-contained, self-referral and self-
knowing. The very condition of consciousness being a self-referral state,
explains why it is difficult to define externally. As in physics, a more funda-
mental state of nature’s functioning cannot be explained in terms of a more
gross level.8
By comparison, Katherine Hayles pictures this dilemma in terms of the
lack of an objective position from which to observe the quantum universe:
No matter where we stand we are within the kaleidoscope, turning within it, so
that what we see depends on where we stand. To change positions does not
solve the problem, because the patterns are constantly changing: what we see
when we change positions is not what we would have seen, for in the interven-
ing time the patterns will have changed, and our shift in position will be part
of that change (1984: 20).
From a non-quantum level, the observer will fail to appreciate their self-
referential involvement in what they are attempting to describe. The unified
field level is superimposed with a system of signs and signifiers, where ob-
server, observed, and process of observation are not perceived as coexistent.
The subjective and objective correlates of quantum consciousness diverge
into notions of self/other, body/mind, inner/outer, and here/there.
8
Although some philosophical traditions may regard “pure” consciousness as a void
of thought (and associated meditation practices emphasise the forced attempt to empty
the mind of thoughts) this is only based on intellectual analysis of consciousness from
a waking state point of view. The experience of pure consciousness can only be relat-
ed once the mind returns to the normal waking state, and then give subjective ac-
counts of what was experienced. These usually contain expressions describing feel-
ings of “oneness” and bliss, a state outside of time, space and body sensation (Travis
and Pearson 2000) since this is a state of pure wakefulness and full potentiality, rather
than emptiness.
26 Beyond Bodies
Consciousness, while the centre of controversy, has been defined in many

ways, essentially bifurcated between being a product of the mind/brain, or the
basic substrate from which thought arises. The hard problem of conscious-
ness impinges on this very nature of consciousness as being defined in sub-
jective/objective dichotomy, a difficulty that fundamentally derives from the
concept of mind-body also being a duality rather than a unity of structure and
function.
Discussions around the topic of the so-called “hard problem”, addressing
the discrepancy between objective and subjective means of gaining
knowledge, remind us that in Indian philosophical traditions the distinction
between theory and practice has always been a central tenet. The philosophy
of yoga, “union” (and its related physical and mental techniques of human
development) for example, has its elaborated description and theory of the
states of consciousness in seven levels, each with its corresponding theoreti-
cal texts to elucidate the path of expanding awareness. According to the theo-
ry of Vedic or Upanishadic wisdom, without recourse to the unbounded self,
there cannot be a non-changing objectively verifiable knowledge. The com-
plete collection of Vedic texts, based in the four main Vedas, is vast, but all
are engaged in coalescing and concretizing the “intangible” nature of con-
sciousness in terms of conceptualization (understanding) and direct experi-
ence. The non-dual nature of existence expounded by Vedantic philosophy
means nothing exists that is not consciousness: there is no distinction be-
tween inner and outer, objective and subjective—other than a point of view.9
Human consciousness, within this paradigm, is regarded as the means of
bridging and reconciling these two extremes of existence.10
9
It is significant to note that the great physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was respon-
sible for the basis of modern quantum physics, embraced the philosophy of Vedanta
while teaching at the University of Vienna, although he apparently kept this learning
“apart from his physics” (see Rosenblum and Kuttner 2007: 69).
10
In the Bhagavad-Gita, often regarded as the “pocket book” version of Vedic wis-
dom, Arjuna the great warrior is told by his teacher Lord Krishna: “there are two
aspects of life, perishable and imperishable. The perishable is relative existence and
the imperishable is absolute Being” (translated by Mahesh Yogi: 1967: 128-9). By the
human mind directing its attention “from the gross planes of experience, through the
subtle planes and thus to the subtlest plane of existence; transcending even the subtlest
plane […] the secret of arriving at the state of pure consciousness” will be revealed
(1967: 129). The commentary continues to explain that this verse:
has really given the technique of Self-realization. […] “Freed from duality”
[means] freed from the field of conflicts. The field of life is full of conflicting
As we have seen, some scientists are rapidly coming to endorse the same,
or similar, concepts, especially in the light of quantum physics.
Significantly, Stuart Hameroff and popular philosopher and physician
Deepak Chopra have recently collaborated to co-author an article entitled
“The Quantum Soul” in which the concepts of the “quantum brain” and the
quantum universe are united and expanded to a logical conclusion. Here, the
“quantum soul” implies consciousness in the brain as described by the quan-
tum nature of activity of microtubules in the neurons, and the possibility of a
quantum basis of consciousness in which consciousness “could conceivably
exist independent of biology” (Chopra and Hameroff 2012: 79)—a concept
that links human biology with contemporary physicists’ (such as Steven
Hawking’s) model of a conscious universe. They conclude, “with the advent
of quantum biology, non-locality in consciousness must be taken seriously,
potentially building a bridge between science and spirituality” (2012: 91).
While for many readers and critics, the field of consciousness studies is
preferably bifurcated according to biological/scientific approaches versus the
ambiguous terminology of the metaphysical, these approaches—like the
Cartesian split of mind/body itself— is rapidly being superseded by the more
holistic vision of great minds such as Stephen Hawking and Martin Rees.
Both these writers endorse the terminology of the “non-scientific” within
their explanations of the functioning of both universe and the role of human
consciousness within it.
Hawking in 2005 concludes that until recently:
most scientists have been too occupied with the development of new theories
to describe what the universe is to ask why. On the other hand, the people
whose business it is to ask why, the philosophers, have not been able to keep
up with the advance of scientific theories. […] If we do discover a complete
theory, it should be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a
few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and just ordinary
people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that
we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ulti-
elements: heat and cold, pleasure and pain, gain and loss, and all the other
pairs of opposites that constitute life. Under their influence life is tossed about
as a ship on the rough sea from one wave to another. To be freed from duality
is to be in the field of non-duality, the field of pure Being. (1967: 129)
28 Beyond Bodies
mate triumph of human reason—for then we should know the mind of God.
(Hawking and Mlodinow 2005: 142)
The fact that Stephen Hawking, and others, ultimately resort to “metaphysi-
cal” language indicates that a simplistic division into science or philosophy
as mutually exclusive is no longer tenable, not at least, in describing the uni-
fied functioning of the universe and the participatory role of human con-
sciousness within it. Popular works such as the recent collaboration of
Deepak Chopra and Leonard Mlodinow in their discussion War of the
Worldviews (2011) further indicates new camaraderie across comparative and
conflicting viewpoints—allowing for a possible shift in rigidly one-sided
approaches to more interdisciplinarity. What may have previously appeared a
purely “spiritual” concept of the “cosmic” nature of consciousness is en-
dorsed through quantum physics, in particular the infinite overlap of multi-
verses since the Big Bang (Rees 2000: 166), and developments in unified
field theory. Yet the question of “what ‘breathes fire’ into the equations”
developed by physicists and what “actualizes them in a real cosmos” (Rees
2000: 145) allows for the inclusion of the dynamic role of consciousness. As
Martin Rees explains, cosmologists may have to guard their mode of expres-
sion when claiming that the universe arose “ ‘from nothing’ […] especially
when addressing philosophers” (2000: 145).
The Cosmic Web
In 1984, N. Katherine Hayles revolutionised the way literature can be ana-

lysed with her cross-disciplinary approach that cites the relevance of quantum
field theory to understanding several key twentieth century novels. In her two
books, Hayles utilises ground-breaking explanations of the functioning of
universal laws from physics and mathematics, in order to elucidate their im-
pact on a number of literary authors and their works, which are significantly
or subtlety influenced by such theory. The Cosmic Web opened a new direc-
tion for literary analysis that has regrettably not been developed further other
than by Katherine Hayles’s next thought-provoking book, Chaos Bound,
Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (1990). Her focus
here is “the spontaneous emergence of self-organisation from chaos”, and
basing much of her discussion on the Nobel Prize winning work of physicist
Ilya Prigogine, she argues that chaos can be “conceived as an inexhaustible
ocean of information rather than as a void signifying absence” (8). Hidden
order exists within chaos, a fact that resolves long-standing metaphysical

problems, since “it reconciles being with becoming” (10). Chaos theory thus
has its implications for the humanities, for the dichotomy of order/disorder
(which she sees as central to Western thought) is destabilised, along with the
associated constructions in culture and language.
Hayles extends the boundaries of literary analysis to create a mode of
theorizing that takes into account up-to-date knowledge in the sciences. “The
new scientific models implied not only a new physics, but a new world view”
(43)—yet most still remain unaccountably unknown to the general public.
Her stated purpose is to “blaze a trail rather than cover the terrain (1984: 11),
and it is with respect to her brilliant work that I hope the analysis presented
here will continue with the trail she created.
Viewing literary expressions in the twentieth century as reactions to the
holistic, interactive world presented through science, Hayles regards modern
literature as “an imaginative response to the complexities and ambiguities
that are implicit” in models of scientific field models, where:
a comprehensive picture of the field concept is more likely to emerge from the
literature and science viewed together than from either one alone […] both af-
fect our understanding of what the field concept means in its totality. (1984:
10)
Hayles also suggests how field theory can be used as a means to heightened
consciousness, but this tempting allusion is not expounded throughout her
discussion. Here, my discussion aims to push her argument one step further
by concretising this connection between quantum field theory and conscious-
ness, equating the unified field as being accessible to and through the human
brain. “Literature” Hayles claims, “is not about reality but what we can say
about reality” (1984: 84), thus interconnecting the objective and subjectivity
of representation with the self-referral participatory nature of the interactive
creation. The texts she refers to in her analysis are chosen for their ability to
engage with the notions of existence not as separate and objective, but as
participatory, filtered through narratorial voices (such as Conrad’s Marlow)
or affected by the involvement of an author (such as Borges) in the “paradox-
es of self-referentiality” (1984: 24).
Paradoxes and indeterminacy are in fact deeply engrained in the dynamic
of representing the quantum world: apparent paradoxes such as the part con-
taining the whole, and the non-linear nature of space and time, collide with
old-world Newtonian perspectives of a “solid” structure of the objective
30 Beyond Bodies
world, and can create a powerful loss of certainty that permeates and under-
mines the creative text. Yet while many texts can play with transformations
and permutations inherent in the quantum field of all possibilities, Hayles
concludes that the reader remains “within the fragmented consciousness of
modern analytical thought” (27)—and the realm of classical physics. “When
things are thought to exist ‘out there’, separate and distinct from the observer,
the world has already been divided into two parts” (1984: 32), and it is simp-
ly part of the on-going process that the observing self is then further divided
into the classical polarity of mind and body, of sexuality and gender identity.
Literature and “superconsciousness”
Within literary explorations of consciousness the notion of different states of

consciousness has very much rested upon human experience in waking,
dreaming and sleep states, and even definitions of these are conflicting and
superficial at best. The dream state in particular has baffled philosophers,
scientists and psychologists—with a general agreement that sleep and dream
deprivation have drastic consequences, yet no real consensus has been
reached as to the function or purpose of dreaming. So what can be said of
knowledge of states beyond waking and dream states? What are transcenden-
tal consciousness, cosmic consciousness, and unity consciousness and how
can we experience them? In his recent book Superconsciousness, the author
Colin Wilson traces the philosophical discussions on transcendental con-
sciousness, moments of inner revelation and heightened awareness, and their
on-going relevance to literature. Referring to Maslow’s “peak experiences”
and the Romantic poets’ longing for “the transcendent” (4-5) he details the
centuries of yearning and despair (including sexual encounters as offering
glimpses of the eternal feminine) through which writers have tackled the
ineffable moments of clarity that illuminate problems of individual relevance
in the universe. Yet he argues, the problem lay in the lack of any technique of
writers, poets and artists to access this experience systematically. For exam-
ple, as he explains:
The problem with the Romantics is that they didn’t know how to canalise
these volcanic energies from the depths of the psyche. Faced with the awe-
some spectacle of a mountain by moonlight, Wordsworth confessed that he
was filled with a sense of “unknown modes of being”. Yet he couldn’t sum-
mon those modes of being at will. The best he could do was to summon a little
gentle melancholy in a poem about daffodils “through recollection in soli-

tude”. (Wilson: 2009: 29)
Jeanette Winterson corroborates such a view, in discussing how “normal”

everyday consciousness is changed, heightened, in the pursuit of art and the
expression of individual creativity:
Inside the writer’s study, the balance of the everyday is overturned. In some
ways the overturning is not unlike the effects of LSD. Art alters conscious-
ness, and the consciousness of the writer in the process of writing is not the
consciousness of the writer at any other time. Part of the Romantic experiment
with drugs (particularly by DeQuincey and Coleridge) was an attempt to en-
hance or induce this altered state […]. (1996: 57)
Altering consciousness through drugs, of course, can at best be temporary

and illusory, and at worst life damaging. In contrast, Colin Wilson’s own
encounter with the Indian classical text of the Bhagavad-Gita confirms his
intellectual and practical experience of “power states of consciousness”
(2009: 183). His reading of the Gita, with its central assertion that “the indi-
vidual soul the Atman, is identical to the ultimate reality, God or Brahman”
leads to his rethinking of twentieth century writers and philosophies such as
Samuel Beckett’s bleak nihilism. The “sense of newness” that the experience
of super consciousness (triggered through reading the Bhagavad-Gita)
brought to Wilson powerfully negates Beckett’s “nothing new”, the pointless
and malign parade of life, as “being factually inaccurate” (Wilson 2009:
184).
Wilson’s discussion of the philosophy of consciousness takes as its start-
ing point William James’s question “of how human beings can learn to live at
much higher levels of power” (2009: 178). “Compared to what we ought to
be, we are only half awake”, claims James. “We are making use of only a
small part of our possible mental and physical resources. In some persons this
sense of being cut off from their rightful resources is extreme […],” yet it
becomes a “habit of inferiority to our full self” and “that is bad” (James qt in
Wilson 2009: 201).
So how can experiences of consciousness be capable of transforming eve-
ryday life? In further tackling this question, this text will approach authors
such as Virginia Woolf, who critically enunciate gender ambiguities while
wrestling with the nature of consciousness, famously creating new modes of
expression and style. Authors such as Forster and Wilde (although not dealt
32 Beyond Bodies
with at length here) subvert gender roles through parody and satire thereby
challenging the very basis of societal mores and codes of behaviour. More
recent authors such as Margaret Atwood challenge gendered roles in western
culture through an unleashing of female consciousness as a weapon for social
change. Peeling away layers of ignorance, misunderstanding and prejudice,
the field of consciousness is at the forefront of contemporary expansion of
knowledge in literary and performance studies.
Yet to what extend is gender implicated when we refer to the “I” of our
identity, and to the “I” that appears to remain consistent throughout temporal
changes and transformation? Language itself frees up the notion of the stable
self, since, if words have no innate transcendental meaning but different
meanings dependent on their contexts, then the “self” can be differently de-
fined in diverse space-time locations and yet remain the same self. Since “All
knowledge resides in the imperishable transcendental field” (Rig Veda
1.164.39), the source of Self is the “home” of all knowledge, thus the subjec-
tive experience of opening up one’s knowledge of the Self results in an ex-
pansion of consciousness—of self-actualisation. In this traditional perspec-
tive, with the understanding of the Self, all is known:
Heart and mind, perception, injunction, understanding, knowledge, wisdom,

vision, firmness, thinking, considering, helping, memory, resolution, will,
breath, love and desire. All these are only names of knowledge […] all that is
guided by knowledge, it rests on knowledge. The world is guided by
knowledge. Knowledge is its foundation. (Aitareka Aranyaka 2.3.8. qt in Ma-
hesh Yogi 1997: 9 )
The scope and contents of Beyond Bodies
The argument throughout this book centres on debates and explorations from
two centuries of writers who strive to redefine the gendered world of “sexual-
ized” space, whether internal or external, mental or physical. Together, their
diverse texts impact our understanding of human consciousness. Through
patterns formed out of fractured moments, human conscious experience is
explainable, relatable as a stream of recognizable continuity over time: a
story.
Following this chapter, which introduces some interdisciplinary para-
digms of consciousness from physics and neurophysiology (which will be
referred to again later) the chapters are arranged in approximately chronolog-
ical order. Chapters Two and Three examine the literary legacy of women’s
writing as it pertains to the exploration of consciousness within Victorian

women writers, beginning with a detailed reading of key novels of the Brontë
sisters (Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre) and their inherent interpretations
of higher states of consciousness. Chapter Three discusses the problematic
counter-development of madness—as both a narrative device in literature and
as social stigma. For many Victorian writers, women’s instability of mind
becomes a major point of narrative plotting, this popular diagnosis is used in
works by writers such as Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Margaret Oliphant
and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Chapter Four develops themes in the nine-
teenth century women’s writing with George Eliot’s Middlemarch and her
shorter novel, The Lifted Veil, examined from perspectives of metaphor and
symbolic meaning in relationship to consciousness. Moving into the twenti-
eth century, Chapter Five examines the works of Virginia Woolf, highlight-
ing the importance of her “moments of being” and the relevance of quantum
mechanical interpretations of natural laws in relationship to gender and con-
sciousness. The postmodern novel is examined in Chapter Six, which eluci-
dates representations of the spiritual quest as part of female writers’ respons-
es to the need for “female space” in a world where meaning is fractured,
shifting and yet still gendered. Chapter Seven pertains to the dimension of
feminist responses to traditional social myths of fairy stories, and the rewrit-
ings of the genre by Angela Carter. Chapter Eight examines concepts of
androgyny, sexuality and fantasy, looking at two contemporary authors,
Jeanette Winterson and Chris Abani, whose works challenge “traditional”
modes of gender and sexuality, pioneering possibilities of transformations of
gender and consciousness. This chapter includes discussion of problematic
masculinities and trans-gender writing. Chapter Nine discusses contempo-
rary dimensions of feminist writing in the recent science fiction novels of
Margaret Atwood, and seeks to envision future responses to social and cul-
ture change within “new” dynamics of consciousness. The need for a “quan-
tum” shift in the world’s understanding of self and other, whether ethnic or
gendered, impacts both human and ecological environments. Chapter Ten
attempts to draw some conclusions, and argues that such a shift can only
occur beyond the “surface structures” of body and society, through a deeper
understanding of the Self and the development of individual consciousness.
Chapter Two
Forging roads into consciousness: rasa and the

influence of emotion in Wuthering Heights
“To you I am neither man nor woman,” writes Charlotte Brontë in response
to harsh criticism in a letter from England’s Poet Laureate Robert Southey,
which informs her that: “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life,
and it ought not to be” (in Gaskell 1857). The novels of the Brontë sisters can
be read as an oeuvre of fiction by women not only concerned with female
empowerment (as here, defending her right to be considered equally) but with
articulating a vibrant and rebellious “feminine” consciousness through writ-
ing. Challenging paradigms of both society and literature, the Brontës created
a voice of female experience that was separate from the masculinist defini-
tion of mind, body and behaviour. As Barbara Caine elaborates:
literary developments at this time have pointed to a widespread discussion of

sexual and familial relationships, indeed to the whole question of the nature of
manhood and womanhood […] further emphasizing the possibility that sexual
relations and the whole gender order were undergoing a major upheaval.
(1992: 20)
Victorian feminists believed in “fundamental, significant and unalterable

differences between men and women” and an emphasis on the physicality of
the body as expressing the qualities of female identity was linked to female
morality (Caine 1992: 52). They sought to determine if female consciousness
could be variant from its male counterpart and to express their exploration in
different modes of experience, emotion and ethics. Victorian women had few
rights, and it was within the closed home sphere of woman defined as daugh-
ter, wife and mother that female experience was mainly encompassed. Any
concept of independence was stifled within strict patriarchal codes of morali-
ty, which enforced standards of behaviour and permissible freedoms. Bypass-
ing or juggling social expectations—even in the choice of pseudonyms—the
36 Beyond Bodies
Brontë sisters overcame obstacles within patriarchal policies controlling life

and literature with firm resolution. That they succeeded with such a lasting
impact inspired Virginia Woolf to write in the context of women authors:
But how impossible it must have been for them not to budge either to the right
or to the left. What genius, what integrity it must have been for them in the
face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold
fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking. Only Jane Austen did it and
Emily Brontë. (Woolf 1928: 75)
In the works of both Charlotte and Emily Brontë, the narrative voices cry out
from the strictures of social mores and conventions to portray the inner strug-
gles of characters confronting the chains of both internal and external en-
trapment. The female characters’ search for fulfilment is within religious and
spiritual modes of expression, and yet they crave for something more—a
personal level of fulfilment gained by transcending conventional means of
gaining knowledge. Throughout the Brontë novels, the reader experiences the
novelists’ overarching ache for a quality of experience that neither social
relationships nor religious dogma can provide—a clear experience of self-
actualisation. Emily searches for it in nature; Charlotte in her professional
life, travels and personal encounters. Ultimately, however, the writers’ explo-
rations fall within the dynamics of how the quotidian limitations imposed
upon gender may be transcended through inner progression from ignorance to
a more profound, satisfying, wisdom. Charlotte Brontë’s novels in general
are renowned for their ability to combine the sexual with the supernatural
(Showalter 1977: 104) a blend of genres also true of Emily’s sole novel.
Their writing juxtaposes the mundane with intensely redolent otherworldly
metaphor. Both sisters create a vibrant new mode of feminine writing that
merges the sexual and spiritual: creating a “volcanic literature of the body as
well as of the heart” (Showalter 1977: 104). In this and the following chapter,
I shall discuss two of their most popular novels, Wuthering Heights and Jane
Eyre, with the intention of focussing on the former as a journey to deeper
levels of consciousness through emotion, and the latter as a quest through the
intellect.
Wuthering Heights: a journey through the images of emotion
Taking human emotion far into the reaches of trauma and beyond, Emily
Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights elucidates the extremes of gender-related
Forging roads into consciousness 37
conscious experience. For over a century, critics have discussed almost every
possible interpretation of the novel, the characters, symbols and structure of
the plot, and the novel’s place within twin traditions of gothic horror and high
Romanticism. Yet it remains an enigmatic novel. The interpretation offered
in this chapter focuses on the novel’s effect on the reader, and how the vio-
lent extremes of emotion, crystallized within the imagery, ultimately have a
positive and uplifting impact rather than a negative one. Asking whether the
violence and unfulfilled cravings of Heathcliff and Catherine in fact stem
from their frustrated search for an ultimate, if infinitely elusive, transcendent,
this chapter seeks to answer the questions relating to how, even with the
extremes of violence and cruelty (both mental and physical) Emily Brontë
succeeds in leaving the reader with a sense of elation and a vision of worldly
transcendence.
J. Hillis Miller summarises the problem the text presents for critics when
viewed as realistic fiction. The “undecidability” and uncanny in Wuthering
Heights provide the reader with “the invitation to believe that some invisible
or transcendental cause, some origin, end or underlying ground, would ex-
plain all the enigmatic incongruities of what is visible” (1987:176). He con-
tinues to ask, “whether there is some extra linguistic explanatory cause. Nor
is this a trivial issue. It is the most important question to novel raises” (177).
In order to elucidate such problems, I shall discuss some of the work to
date relating the novel to the sublime and the gothic, and in association with
feminism. My main focus however, will be on the theory of rasa from Indian
literary theory, which, I will argue here, provides the most cogent means of
interpreting the novel. Utilising the model of rasa theory—which I shall elab-
orate shortly—provides not only a link with contemporary consciousness
theory’s notion of qualia, but is also a logical progression of thought from the
existing arguments relating the sublime, the uncanny and the gothic in Emily
Brontë’s work. The sublime, as originally defined is primarily caused by the
experience of terror, “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of
feeling” (Burke: 1756/1806); the terror of pain or death triggers the experi-
ence of the sublime leading towards a transcendent experience. Yet unlike the
transcendence associated with pure consciousness, in which an absence of
“surface” thought is subjectively blissful, Burke’s definition is associated
with self-loss—an abnegation of affirmation.
Consciousness is frequently formulated as being predicated upon
memory. Trauma theory has questioned how far the self is dependent upon
stored memory, and developed the notion of the self-fractured or damaged
38 Beyond Bodies
through traumatic experience. Yet how can this be reconciled with a more
fundamental concept of consciousness as the storehouse of not only memory,
but of infinite creativity, the individual intelligence as reflector and participa-
tor in the infinite intelligence of the cosmos? William Haney elucidates how
the level of meaning of any text is opened up to awareness through the “sug-
gestive powers of literature”. This is most powerful at the level of turiya, or
transcendental pure consciousness, the subtlest form of human thought. The
level of turiya and its associated level of subtle, suggestive, language,
pashyanti, are at the most receptive and creative levels of the mind, which,
according to Haney is also, “associated with the fantastic to the extent that
both go beyond the boundaries of time, space, and causality, and thus beyond
consensus reality” (1993: 143). This explanation is clearly relevant here to
our initial understanding of Wuthering Heights and the process of its most
powerful effect on the reader.
The characters in the novel glimpse the transcendent in the wilderness of
moors and mountains, in a pantheistic communion with nature—as Emily
Brontë’s poetry suggests the author did herself. Heathcliff in fact is nature,
for he is “heath”, the moors, and “cliff”, the peak represented most vividly in
the text by the projecting phallic symbol of Penistone Crag, which dominates
the whole landscape of the action. Its significance is demonstrated, for exam-
ple, in the second half of the novel, when the young Cathy Linton (Catherine
Earnshaw’s daughter) is prevented from ever travelling as far as the Crag.
The cliff becomes a symbol for her of desirable adult attainment of forbidden
experience, associated with the forbidden knowledge of her family’s recent
history as well as the terrors of adult female participation in patriarchal dom-
inance. The narrator here is the housekeeper, Nelly Dean:
The abrupt descent of Penistone Craggs particularly attracted her notice; espe-
cially when the setting sun shone on it and the topmost heights, and the whole
extent of landscape besides lay in shadow. I explained that they were bare
masses of stone, with hardly enough earth in their clefts to nourish a stunted
tree.
“And why are they bright so long after it is evening here?” she pursued.
[…] Oh, you have been on them!” she cried, gleefully. “Then can I go, too,
when I am a woman?” (Brontë 1993: 163-4).
When Nelly rightly guesses that Cathy has headed out on her own to experi-
ence the crag for herself, her response is significant:
“It struck me directly she must have started for Penistone Craggs. ‘What will
become of her?’ I ejaculated, pushing through a gap which the man was re-
pairing, and making straight for the highroad.” (165)
In a close reading of this passage, every word in this sentence considera-

bly implicates the threat facing Cathy: struck, ejaculated, pushing, gap, man,
repair. The association of all these words with rupture and sexual violence,
most specifically with the violation of (Cathy’s) virginity, associate the
Craggs, with an ongoing, looming, force of destructive male power and fe-
male vulnerability, and hence with Heathcliff himself. To reiterate the con-
nection, we are told here that “The Craggs lie about a mile and a half beyond
Mr Heathcliff’s place” (166). Wuthering Heights as a house can be regarded
as the female counterpart of the Crag. The warm, womb-like kitchen is the
sanctuary of most the central characters at some point in the story, including
both Catherines, Nelly Dean and even Lockwood. It is a space from which
Heathcliff is frequently banished, and in which he is alien, unwelcome, and
uncomfortable. Despite being referred to here as “Heathcliff’s house” it is
primarily with female consciousness that the edifice of Wuthering Heights is
associated. For the elder Catherine, the house represents not only her home
on earth, but also that in the after-life, and hence it is there that she struggles
in vain to reach from her window in her fit of madness, and there that Heath-
cliff is finally reunited with her. Away from the house of her upbringing,
Catherine imagines: “ ‘I thought I was at home […] I thought I was lying in
my chamber at Wuthering Heights. Because I’m so weak my brain got con-
fused, and I screamed unconsciously’” (106). Displaced from her home
through her marriage, she feels herself to be “the wife of a stranger: an exile,
an outcast” (107), and residing in “the abyss”. The only cure to her torment:
“I am sure I should be myself again were I once again among the heather on
those hills. Open the window again wide, fasten it open!” (108).
The moors offer not only a space of escape and transcendence, but are the
site of transformation. Cameron Dodworth discusses how, in traversing the
moors, all the major characters enter a “mysterious void”, or “a void of
vagueness” all travelling to unnamed destinations, from which they return
utterly changed from the “characters that they were when they left, to the
characters they became when they return” (126). In his editorial introduction
to the novel, Harold Bloom also locates the moors as mysterious, equating
the barren space to a spiritual “cosmological emptiness” or a Gnostic purga-
tory (Dodworth: 129). The haunting of the spiritual otherworldliness of the
40 Beyond Bodies
environment is mirrored in the characters’ obsessions with alienation, bleak-

ness, isolation, and of the deep psychological need to “divide the desolation”.
Wuthering Heights and the uncanny
Donna Heiland has linked the homeliness of Wuthering Heights with the
Heimlich, which is in opposition to the Unheimlich, or the uncanny (2004:
117). If the opposite of Wuthering Heights is not so much Thrushcross
Grange, but, as I suggest here, the “male” space of Penistone Crag, then that
awe-inspiring natural peak is the uncanny, and thus designated as “out of
bounds” for the younger Cathy. The uncanny, according to Freud, is “the
name for everything that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has
come to light” (Freud: 1919). Homi Bhabha has extended this definition of
the uncanny as “outside the home” to equate it with “out of control”
(1994:10). In their youth, both Catherine and Heathcliff are “out of control”
when in nature, and Penistone Crag is the location for their escapes into free-
dom and erotic encounter.
In Brontë’s novel both Catherine and Heathcliff represent aspects of
usurping patriarchal power: Heathcliff by his seizing possession of the Earn-
shaw’s land and property, and Cathy by her disregard for conventional mar-
riage—as she sees no conflict between marrying one man and wanting his
children while maintaining her (presumably consummated) passion for an-
other. Furthermore, Heathcliff is “othered”, made “uncanny”, by his dark
skin colour and “exotic” origins from the city of Liverpool—significant here
since it was a main port for the slave trade with the West Indies. Similar to
Rochester’s mulatto Caribbean wife Bertha, Heathcliff’s origin may well be
one of the Spice Islands, with Heathcliff the offspring of a black slave and
Mr Earnshaw. There are hints throughout the novel of Heathcliff’s “evil
origin” with embedded Satanic and bestial images. Heathcliff remains the
ultimate other, maintaining his mystery up to and beyond his death.
In her introduction to the second edition of her sister’s novel, Charlotte
Brontë describes Wuthering Heights as “a horror of great darkness”. Freud’s
definition corroborates this absence of light as being paramount to the uncan-
ny, but here, we could also argue that the “darkness” is patriarchy’s fear of
female power—a fear that has run a powerful course through literature up to
the present day. This overarching fear has created the tradition where power-
ful, conventional women must be punished, reduced in status by exile from
society, or killed off through sickness or accident. The uncanny, as associated
with the female, and with lack of control, is closely connected with madness.
Emily Brontë ’s Catherine falls into a state of apparent madness before her
death, and as Nelly Dean narrates, she has to be dealt with in an appropriate
manner: “Perceiving it in vain to argue against her insanity, I was planning
how I could reach something to wrap about her, without quitting my hold of
her myself, for I could not trust her alone […]” (109). But like her death,
Catherine’s “disorder” (103) is given scanty explanation, other than the self-
starvation remarked upon by several critics as being a mechanism resorted to
by many women (and men, Heathcliff included) as a strategy of empower-
ment and self-determination.
Whether in terms of a mind divided from itself, or in terms of characters
and plot structures, Heiland argues that, “The novel emerges as a pattern of
uncanny doubles, one piece mirroring but also subverting another so that our
sense of the whole is powerfully uncertain”. Heathcliff, for example, “is an
uneasily bifurcated character” who has been named for a dead child (Heiland
2004:116). Then there are two Catherine’s; the parallel cousins; heavens and
hells on earth and beyond; life and death; nightmares and dreams—and then
the uniting of these binary identities in the immortal phrase of Catherine’s, “I
am Heathcliff. Our souls are the same” (80).
Symbolisms and sex
Symbols, too, are presented in twinned or binary oppositions: windows and

gates; moor and kitchen; beast and man; love and hatred; the human and the
inhuman; emptiness and fullness; mutilation and repair; consciousness and
the extinction of human identity. Darkness and light are reoccurring and
traditional metaphors for imagination, knowledge and discovery, both mental
and physical. The novel’s text is structured in a way to oscillate these pairs of
opposites and to be a vehicle for a swing of awareness in the mind of the
reader. Oscillating between the opposites, the awareness swings from the
conventional to the supernatural, from the quotidian to the eternal, from the
known to the unknown. This experience of alternating realities through textu-
al experience is transformative: expanding the consciousness of the reader.
For the contemporary reader, this would have also involved breaking bonds
of education and societal prejudice, of going beyond the ambiguities in which
the rational thinking level of the mind is trapped, to emotional and spiritual
depths. The process of alternating opposites could be described as analogous
to the perpetual movement in an atom upheld by the opposite “spin” of parti-
42 Beyond Bodies
cles, positive and negative. These two realities act to produce a movement, a
collision between natural forces. The conflict between individual desire and
societal conventions, for example, creates a contradiction of opposites within
consciousness. In reconciling these apparent oppositions, the reader gains
understanding into the infinite nature of the self—a glimpse of consciousness
in its fullness. This reconciliation of “the coincidence of opposites” results in
the refinement of intellect and, as F.C. Happold discusses:
a development and extension of rational consciousness, resulting in an en-

largement and refining of perception […] so that through it the “real” is gained
which could not be gained through rational consciousness. (Happold 1970: 17)
Symbols also suggest meaning beyond surface perception and take the
mind farther than the level of ratiocination. In Wuthering Heights, windows
have far-reaching symbolic implications throughout the novel—mostly asso-
ciated with freedom and release from imprisonment. Like a Turner painting,
they effortlessly but inevitably lead the mind to the contemplation of an infi-
nite horizon. For the elder Catherine, windows offer the only access to physi-
cal and spiritual freedom; they offer a threshold to the social transgression
available in the solitude of nature, but above all to the transcendence she
craves in body and soul: the promise of peace and permanent joy. Yet in the
lattice window of the “forbidden” bedroom (with all its concomitant secrets
and enclosures of dark oak panelling) both Lockwood and Heathcliff are left
bloodied (“blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes” [21]) or dead, through
their encounter with Catherine’s spirit. Men are clearly endangered, or cor-
rupted, by contact with the chthonic female. Moreover, even the house has its
vagina dentata,1 the jaw-like menacing gates that can be closed from within,
or – once Heathcliff is dead—left harmlessly open to welcome visitors. When
Mr Lockwood first arrives, as the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange he visits
Wuthering Heights to meet his landlord Heathcliff for the first time, who
reluctantly asks him to “walk in”:
The “walk in” was uttered with closed teeth, and expressed the sentiment, “Go
to the Deuce” even the gate over which he leant manifested no sympathizing
movement to the words […] When he saw my horse’s breast fairly pushing the
barrier, he did pull out his hand to unchain it …(1).
1
The vagina dentata, according to Freudian theory, are associated with the figure of
Medusa, and reflect male terror of castration/decapitation (Freud 1962: 18)
By the time of Lockwood’s final visit to Wuthering Heights over a year later,
not only did the gate yield to his hand, but “both doors and lattices were
open”; the inhabitants visible near one of the windows; the atmosphere is
warm and “homely” (263). The brooding menace—dangerous to both man
and beast—that existed for so long has been almost literally de-fanged.
“How dreary life gets over in that house,” utters Lockwood after one en-
counter with Heathcliff and Hareton (261) with almost comical understate-
ment, or a touch of dramatic irony worthy of an unsuspecting thane or king
about to enter Macbeth’s castle. In the last paragraph of the novel the reader’s
attention is again drawn to the Yorkshire heath as symbolic of the eternal
regeneration of life in nature. Yet that force of nature is beyond explanation,
and implicated in the ineffable conspiracy of scenery with ghosts and walk-
ing spirits. While man-made structures, such as the church are here described
as in decay, the heath is alive with moths and hare-bells; and “the soft wind
breathing through the grass” is significantly personified. These apparently
simple images are indicative of some transcendental reality greater and more
powerful than both human mortality and the cyclical renewal of seasonal
change, for amidst all this burgeoning life, Lockwood cannot “imagine un-
quiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth” (290).
Wuthering Heights has long been regarded as a gothic novel. The Marquis
de Sade considered the gothic novel to be a product of a revolutionary age,
suggesting that the Gothic experience mirrored the struggle between the pro-
hibiting outer world and the rebelling individual (Graham 1989: 164). Ken-
neth Graham comments that the Gothic novel plays on the reader’s apprehen-
sion that another universe “lurks on the borders of our worlds of order and
restraint. The Gothic novel extends our realms of possibility” (1989: 262).
Although the gothic cannot explain, or contain, all the themes and nuances of
Wuthering Heights, it is a useful reference point, since the reader identifies
gothic conventions with the “willing suspension of disbelief”—of going
beyond the intellect. This understanding or appreciating of text outside rati-
ocination indicated the type of parameters of rasa, which is an experience of
text through its suggested content or flavour—an experience of the senses
rather than the intellect. In the tradition of the gothic in literature, Heathcliff
and Catherine’s love is one that transcends the boundaries of both the social
conventions and the physically possible—providing a bridge between the
worlds of the body and the spirit.
In several of her poems, Emily Brontë meditates on such crossings and
bridges from her personal experience, as the natural world, death and spirit
44 Beyond Bodies
merge and co-exist. The poem, “Last Lines” delineates her vision of loss,
death and the non-changing:
Though earth and man were gone,

And suns and universes ceased to be,
And thou were left alone,

Every existence would exist in Thee.
In another poem, “The Old Stoic”, Brontë voices her prayer for “In life and
death a chainless soul/ With courage to endure”. Liberty, as for Catherine and
Heathcliff is a boon only available through death. Emily, however, also con-
templates the role of Conscience and repentance, (in “Self-Interrogation”)
two qualities apparently devoid of meaning for the delinquent protagonists of
her novel. Yet in contrast, Emily’s poem “The Prisoner” clearly describes her
own experience of “eternal liberty” through transcending all “outward sense”
to pure consciousness:
When, if my spirit’s sky was full of flashes warm,

I knew not whence they came, from sun or thunder storm.
But first, a hush of peace--a soundless calm descends;
The struggle of distress and fierce impatience ends.
Mute music soothes my breast—unutter’d harmony
That I could never dream, till earth was lost to me.
Then dawns the Invisible; the unseen its truth reveals;

My outward sense is gone; my inward essence feels;
Its wings are most free--its home, its harbour found,
Measuring the gulf, it stoops, and dares the final bound.
O dreadful is the check--intense the agony--
When the ear begins to hear, the eye begins to sea;
When the pulse begins to throb--the brain to think again--
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.
Yet I would lose no sting . ... the vision is divine. (2011)
Here, the poet describes the state of suspension of breath, calm, and blissful
sense of freedom usually associated with meditation—the most profound
experience of the peace of consciousness beyond thought, yet also the agony
of then losing this quality of awareness of the self. The quality of aberrant
horror associated with man’s hunger for the supernatural in her novel be-
comes all the more extraordinary in contrast. The importance of dreams,
forebodings and omens, and the images of the uncanny, along with events of
gross violence, madness, incest, death, necrophilia, hauntings, and supernatu-
ral sightings allow Wuthering Heights to fall within the “norms” of a typical
gothic novel, yet these are underpinned with more fundamental psychological
questions relating to the nature of consciousness and the unconscious, and
how these opposites co-exist within one human mind. The limits of experi-
ence are defined in their most dramatic polarities of darkness and light, joy
and terror. Taboos are torn aside as meaningless as the two protagonists blaze
their paths towards desolate bliss and ecstatic self-destruction. Ultimately—
when for example Heathcliff opens Catherine’s grave to be united with her
again—even the sacred barrier between life and death is scorned and
breached, a rent created and justified solely by a love (both physical and
spiritual) that passes all understanding—a love certainly beyond the bounds
of reason and morality. Even by the novel’s end, mysteries remain unre-
solved: what are Heathcliff’s origins and source of sudden wealth; are Heath-
cliff and Catherine incestuous half-siblings; and from exactly what ailment
do they die? Such ambiguities or problems in the novel are not solvable by
logic alone. It is this unaccountability, or paradoxical nature of Brontë’s
novel that reiterates the need for a different kind of theory and criticism, one
that can account for the diverse effects it produces in the reader.
Rasa theory in drama and literature
This chapter began by raising questions about the effect of Wuthering

Heights on the reader, posing problems of interpretation and response. Does
Brontë justify the violence of her novel by the “loftier” theme of the charac-
ters’ craving for a higher, eternal reality—one that would in fact fit with an
orthodox Christianity? Does Heathcliff and Catherine’s search for subliminal
wholeness and for a transcendent reality have the effect of justifying for the
reader their brutality and anti-social behaviour? How is it possible that we
feel any sympathy for them, or for any of the characters?
Critical reviews written at the time of the novel’s publication revelled in
its ability to shock and disturb. One reviewer in the Atlas of January 1848
saw a “shocking picture of the worst forms of humanity” arousing in the
reader “loathing and much contempt. […] Wuthering Heights casts a gloom
over the mind not easily dispelled” (in Brontë 2003: 283). For the Douglas
46 Beyond Bodies
Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, “the reader is shocked, disgusted, almost sick-

ened by the details of cruelty, inhumanity, and the most diabolical hate and
vengeance” (ibid: 285). Other critics have spoken of the novel producing
feelings of dread, awe, and horror.
As a fundamental theory to most of Indian drama and literature, rasa de-
scribes how the arousal of these, and other emotional responses, must be
understood as crucial to the aesthetic experience of an artistic work. Krishna
Rayan’s account of Rasadhvani theory emphasises how, in literature, all
elements of plot, imagery, character and other fundamentals such as rhythm,
all function as “correlatives of emotion” (1972: 148). One of the classic
works on rasa is the Nātyashāstra,2 a work on dramatic theory by Bharata in
the fourth or fifth century AD. Rasa is defined as the “taste” or “flavour” of
the mind experiencing states of emotion, or moods, as “aesthetic rapture”
analogous to the appreciation of tastes from food that has been properly pre-
pared. This experience ultimately is associated with the bliss that is innate in
pure consciousness, or “least excitation” of consciousness – that is character-
ised as a state devoid of thought. In fact, it could be argued that the purpose
of theatrical performance and literary appreciation is to help the spectator, or
reader, towards an experience of pure consciousness (Haney 2008). Accord-
ing to the traditions of Indian aesthetics described in the Nātyashāstra, there
exist eight main rasas, which create the bhavas, or emotions. Thus, an emo-
tion expressed by the poet, playwright or author becomes experienced
through the transfiguration of rasa by the audience or reader. The rasa pro-
duces an emotional experience and the bhava is the experience. These tradi-
tional bhavas and their corresponding rasa are as follows:
Bhava Rasa
Rati (love) Srngaram (Love, eroticism)
Hasya (mirth) Hasyam (laughter, comedy)
Soka (sorrow) Karunyam (compassion, mercy)
Jugupsa (disgust) Bibhatsam (disgust, aversion, pathos)
Bhaya (terror) Bhayanakam (horror, the terrible)
Krodha (anger) Raudram (fury)
Utsaha (energy) Viram (heroism)
Vismaya (astonishment) Adbhutam (wonder, amazement)
2
The Sanskrit term nātya means “drama” and shāstra means “science of”.
In later developments of aesthetic theory, another rasa of Santam, peace or

tranquillity, and its associated bhava of “aesthetic bliss” or “serenity” was
added to explain an important and essential audience reaction to dramatic
performance (Rayan 1972).
In literature and poetry, in a similar manner to an audience in a theatre or
opera,3 the reader can experience a text through the rasa or suggested emo-
tional content. The reader, through the maintenance of aesthetic distance,
comparable to the witnessing aspect of an audience, is able to “relish” the
flavour of the text, whether in terms of comedy, horror or wonder, and thus
experience, through “poetic suggestion”, a going-beyond of the intellect to a
field of aesthetic ecstasy. In discussing the power of suggestion (as opposed
to “statement”), Rayan cites the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
who speaks of: “ideas which may indeed be suggested and awakened, but
cannot, like the images of sense and the conceptions of the understanding by
adequately expressed by words” (1972: 17).
Any word, passage or text has the capacity for invoking specific emotion-
al rasas and be savoured in the consciousness of the reader. Rasa is thus “a
kind of contemplative abstraction in which the inwardness of human feelings
irradiates the surrounding world of imbedded forms” and “an essential ele-
ment of any work of art that can only be suggested, not described” (“rasa”:
Encyclopaedia Britannica).
The aesthetic images that induce rasa correspond to the basic human emo-
tions latent within the mind. Since the experience of the rasa involves the
“taste” of the idealised flavour, it differs from the perception or memory of
an actual experience. Thus, the images relate to mental activity rather than
objective reality. As a result:
Through the intervention of rasa, the audience can remain detached from all
specific passions and thereby appreciate the whole gamut of possible respons-
es without running the risk of being overshadowed by them [because] rasa
constitutes an experience of the subtler levels of activity of the mind itself
(Haney 1991: 300-1)
Ultimately, rasa refers not to specific emotions but to the liberating experi-
ence of moksha, the bliss of release from the cycles of birth and death. Many
in the western tradition, will also find resonance between rasa and Aristotle’s
3
Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe (2011) elaborates on the “spiritual” experience and aesthet-
ic bliss gained by the performers and audiences of opera.
48 Beyond Bodies
theory of catharsis, the effect on the audience’s mind of the tragic in which a
powerful purge, or purification, takes place. While these concepts may come
close in terminology of experiencing, the theory of rasa goes much farther in
encompassing all if not most of the possible range of human emotions. The
concept of rasa also resonates with some aspects of qualia, which, according
to Susan Blackmore can be defined as:
The subjective quality of a sensory experience, such as the redness or sweet

scent of a rose, or the rasping sound of a saw on wood. It is not the physical at-
tributes of these things but the intrinsic property of the experience itself, and is
private and ineffable (2005b: 5).
Rasa, qualia, and consciousness
Blackmore emphasises that qualia are “indescribable”, yet, “these experienc-

es seem real, vivid and undeniable. They make up the world I live in. Indeed
they are all I have” (2005a: 3). Thus qualia relate to conscious experience.
The concept of rasa, however, centrally involves the play of emotional re-
sponse to a stimulus, yet it is interesting to compare these two theories in the
light of recent advances in western neuroscience.4 For our current purposes,
rasa theory is an intriguing one to use as a key to explain the effect of reading
Wuthering Heights. The novel is permeated with emotion and arouses a sen-
sory emotional response in the reader, whether in terms of the loathing and
contempt, disgust and shock (as voiced by nineteenth century critics) or the
passionate desire for a “bad-boy” hero-lover highlighted in twentieth century
film adaptations.
Even when the characters do not verbalize their subjective experience, the
reader’s awareness apprehends the subtle levels of emotional subtext; a deep
structure is created within the consciousness of the reader herself. Elizabeth
Van de Laar contends, for example, that the imagery reveals the “inner struc-
ture” of the novel, a pattern made by the literary imagination. This deep
structure is created:
By that spiritual mobility which is characterized by the ability to transform

sights and sounds suggested by perception or memory, into a new sequence of
4
Susan Blackmore refers to the topic of qualia as a “thorny” one, and it is one that is
rejected by many leading researchers into consciousness (2005:5).
living images which has the power to open up new worlds of experience.
(1969:7)
Through their aesthetic power, these images produce in the reader an

emotional response that, through the process of rasadhvani (the “suggested”
meaning of rasa), takes the reader’s consciousness towards an expanded
awareness, as it were, a more profound level of consciousness—turiya or
pure consciousness—which contains the latent form of these emotions. In
reading or responding to a text, we absorb and appreciate the subtle influence
of metaphor and imagery, yet, “Suggestion more than denotation, connota-
tion, or any other aspect of expression is responsible for conveying rasa”
(Haney 1993: 50).
In terms of connecting the brain with properties of quantum physics, Stu-
art Hameroff (following Roger Penrose’s theory) compares that level of hu-
man consciousness to qualia. He explains:
… the qualia, if they are fundamental, must exist at the fundamental level of
the universe, the lowest level of reality that exists. In modern physics that’s
best described at the Planck scale, the level at which space-time geometry is
no longer smooth but quantized. […] Roger [Penrose] had also suggested that
Platonic values in mathematics as well as ethics and aesthetics were embedded
there. (Blackmore 2005b: 118-9)
Thus linking qualia, subjective conscious appreciation of experience, with

the most fundamental levels of physical existence and aesthetics is most
apposite here. As a result of rasa, the mind is taken in the direction of this
most fundamental level of nature, which physicists have also argued to be the
level of pure consciousness—the level from which consciousness becomes
conscious of its own nature. It is a level of self-referral, of knowing itself—a
deeper, more refined level of the mind than the intellect or ego, where the
knower, the known and the process of gaining knowledge are one and the
same. In experiencing this level, the mind experiences one of the qualities of
the self-referral state—that of bliss, sat-chit-ananda (eternal bliss conscious-
ness). The experience of bliss occurs on the level of transcendental con-
sciousness (which is latent within every human brain) a level that, through
rasa, is enlivened through an emotionally powerful expression created by
poet or author.
50 Beyond Bodies
Rasa theory and Wuthering Heights
Since its publication, Wuthering Heights has provoked a range of emotions in

readers, ranging from terror to the thrill of identification—recognition of a
fundamental “spiritual” reality that underlies the “horror” of surface struc-
tures. Both imagery and plot reveal a magical world akin to transcendence. In
the novel, it is primarily with the characters of Catherine and Heathcliff that
associations of transcendental experience are directly associated or embod-
ied. They, and the dynamic of unearthly imagery that surround them, are the
central means of the reader’s apprehension of connections from ordinary life
to the extra-ordinary transcendent world. It is in these protagonists’ (and thus
the readers’) imaginations that the leap is made to the “other-worldly”. For
the reader, this suspension of disbelief to a certainty of “something-else” is
effortlessly achieved.
The theme of escape from normal reality is, as already discussed, much
evident in the imagery of windows, and it is also prevalent in Catherine’s
dreams, premonitions and visions. These link her desire for escape with her
identification with the “otherness” represented in Heathcliff. The importance
of being in nature for both characters may be a reflection of Emily Brontë’s
transcendental experiences triggered by the wild, natural environment, as
seen in her poetry.5 Catherine’s dissatisfaction with the triteness of life could
be explained by her having known the bliss of the transcendent, and the frus-
tration of not being able to maintain pure consciousness after having such
experiences.
One such dream is central to this notion:
“I once dreamt I was there [in Heaven …] heaven did not seem to be my
home; and so I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the
angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on top
5
This fundamental need for both escape to the freedom of nature and its spiritual
associations can be clearly derived in Emily’s own life. Charlotte writes in her prefa-
tory note to Poems by Ellis Bell:
My sister Emily loved the moors. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in
the blackest of the heath for her; out of a sullen hollow in a livid hill-side her
mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear de-
lights; and not the least and best loved was – liberty.
Liberty was the breath of Emily’s nostrils; without it, she perished. (Wuthering
Heights 2003: 319).
of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy. That will do to explain
my secret, as well as any other”. (68)
Nelly Dean’s response is the orthodox one; that Catherine is not “fit to go
there. […] All sinners would be miserable in heaven” (68).
Yet it is for different reasons that Heaven for Catherine provides no last-
ing consolation nor haven from emotional anguish; yet she does use the
dream experience as her moral and emotional justification that she has “no
more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven”—yet (with
fatal consequences) she goes against the truth of her intuition. It is this con-
fession by Catherine that Heathcliff half overhears, and following which he
disappears. This passage, apart from its implications to questions of morality
also foreshadows the desire that her ghost will remain near her home and
with Heathcliff. The novels raises, and leaves largely unresolved, these un-
ending chains of questions regarding morality, choice, inter-personal respon-
sibility, religion, freewill—yet all are inextricably linked with the ability to
experience these deeper levels of consciousness.6
“But surely”, Catherine asks Nelly, “you and everybody have a notion
that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the
use of my creation if I were entirely contained here?” (69-70). Catherine’s
dreams eventually take over from mundane reality, “uniting the life of the
individual to cosmic and transcendent life” (Van de Laar 1969:99). The de-
scription of her dreams sets Catherine apart from the other “normal” mortals
who lack imagination, such as Nelly Dean, Edgar Linton and Mr Lockwood,
all of whom remain firmly rooted in their pragmatic, and scientific world
views—the Horatios who can only glimpse a limited comprehension of Ham-
let’s “more things in heaven and earth”. Thus Catherine’s enigmatic: “I am
Heathcliff” remains an unfathomable statement without the experience of the
unity of all consciousness at the foundation of creation.
After her marriage to Edgar Linton, as a willed abandonment of
love/Heathcliff/free access to nature (and thus the bliss of transcendence all
these produce), Catherine escapes more and more into the dream world, as
the only available transcendence from what for her is a hostile reality. Even-
tually, the dreams predominate: as she seeks her escape to freedom, her per-
ceptions and demeanour swing between the highs and lows of mental exist-
ence, and her state is inevitably diagnosed as “madness”.
6
Roger Penrose also links consciousness with questions regarding issues such as free
will and human morality (See Blackmore 2005: 184).
52 Beyond Bodies
Such hope of liberation is liable to end in dejection and disappointment,

because the wonder of all-knowingness, heightened awareness of nature and
meaning inherent in the universe, and bliss, cannot be sustained. Similarly,
the lovers in Wuthering Heights, as Catherine describes so dramatically,
crash back down to “reality”, and cannot find a way to encounter a similar
state of bliss again: “ heaven did not seem to be my home; and so I broke my
heart with weeping to come back to earth” (68). Her tragedy is that she be-
gins to misunderstand such rapture as that which can only be regained after
death—and thus begins her self-induced physical and mental demise. Her
death robs Heathcliff of “his soul”—for each lover sees the other as the key
to “peak” experience. Catherine feels desperate; she tries to escape through
windows, and from the entrapment by Edgar and his house, trying to return to
Wuthering Heights, for it is there—and on the moors—that she first experi-
ences the heightened state of spiritual bliss. Neither the place nor the person
(Heathcliff), however, are able to recreate the experience. She may feel that
“the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath
on top of Wuthering Heights” (68) but her loss is caused by her lack of any
systematic means of accessing the necessary direction for her mind to retrace
a path to transcendence—to pure consciousness. Yet at her death, the reader
is left with not a sense of tragedy but of triumph: tasting the rasa of the mar-
vellous (wonder and amazement) and heroic, rather than the pathetic or terri-
ble.
Finally, we must raise questions of Heathcliff’s violence and unrelenting
cruelty: Heathcliff would certainly seem to qualify as an archetypal figure to
arouse rasas of horror, disgust, and terror. Yet why is it we (or, at least, many
generations of readers) are –ultimately—not horrified by him? If there is a
“monster” of the novel, it is arguably the weak Edgar Linton, whose only real
crime is to kill through kindness. Can this be explained through rasa theory?
The horror of Heathcliff
In her Editor’s preface to the 1850 edition of the novel, Emily’s sister Char-
lotte attempted to ameliorate the shocking effect of Heathcliff on conserva-
tive Victorian sensibilities by writing that: “Heathcliff, indeed, stands unre-
deemed; never once swerving in his arrow-straight course to perdition” and
she showed a placatory capitulation in her opinion that, “Heathcliff betrays
one solitary human feeling, and that is not his love for Catherine; which is a
sentiment fierce and inhuman: a passion such as might boil and glow in the
bad essence of some evil genius” (E. Brontë 2003: 315).
Yet the novel as a whole indicates that this is far from Emily’s view of
her character.7 The imagery reveals a possibly more sympathetic aspect: the
grief, frustration and despair (seen in imagery of weather), the conflict of
light and dark forces that fuel his relentlessly loyal love. Even his dreams are
obsessed with his hopeless longing and unquenchable passion. Separation is a
living death, a hell on earth; union is heaven.
Emily Brontë does give at least two concrete explanations for his brutal
behaviour: his disappointment in not inheriting from Mr Earnshaw (again a
possible reason to surmise he was the illegitimate son), and his subsequent ill
treatment by Hindley. Brian Crews regards Heathcliff as being “like Nie-
tzsche’s Superman […] beyond good and evil, beyond praise and blame”
(1987: 176). Nietzsche himself discusses the psychological ramifications of a
similar situation to Heathcliff’s, where a man is unjustly rejected and suffer-
ing at the hands of others:
Beware of martyrdom! Beware of suffering for the truth’s sake! Even of de-
fending yourselves! It spoils all the innocence of your conscience; it makes
you headstrong against objections and red rags; it stupefies, animalises, and
brutalizes […]. These outcasts of society, these long-pursued, wickedly perse-
cuted ones –always become in the end […] sophisticated vengeance-seekers
and poison-brewers. (1966: 37)
Thus the abused become abusers: Heathcliff indeed!

The main episode that seems intended to destabilize the reader’s judge-
ment of Heathcliff is however, the near the end of the novel and his death
when Heathcliff at last is able to give his version of events and his heart.
Instead of seeing him as the dark stranger, the usurper and “foreign” invader,
in his conversation with Nelly, he explains his past motivations are actually
at odds with the change he feels in his being:
“I get levers and mattocks to demolish the two houses, and train myself to be
capable of working like Hercules, and when everything is ready, and in my
power, I find the will to lift a slate of either roof has vanished! My old enemies
7
Many critics have hailed Heathcliff as a character created out of Emily’s fascination
with Lord Byron (and thus the classic “Byronic hero”). Yet it would seem more likely
that her model is her brother Branwell, who devolved into a violent alcoholic and drug
abuser.
54 Beyond Bodies
have not beaten me […] But where is the use? I don’t care for striking: I can’t
take the trouble to raise my hand!” (277)
The cause of the change, he reveals, is that “my mind is so eternally secluded
in itself”; in his alienation from his fellow society, he is living in the constant
torment of being visited by others from another world, beyond the grave, “the
ghost of my immortal love” (278). This insight corroborates the other, most
dramatic, passage following her death that provides another justification for
Heathcliff’s brutality: that in losing Catherine, he has lost his soul. With a
Faust-like pathos, he cries, “I cannot live without my life! I cannot live with-
out my soul!” (144). He has lost his link with the world of transcendence.
Without that, in the material world he has lost the ability to taste the rasas of
joy and love: his humanity. Nelly describes how after this anguished cry: “he
dashed his head against the knotted trunk; and lifting up his eyes, howled, not
like a man but like a savage beast getting goaded to death with knives and
spears” (144). When a man loses his soul, his anima (the female principle
according to Jung), only something half-human and bestial remains.
Heathcliff’s character, in fact, is the means through which the awareness
of the reader is able to swing between different modes and moods of rasa,
from elation to horror and disgust, from terror to compassion and apprecia-
tion of heroism—and finally to wonder and amazement. The aspects of the
protagonists’ oxymoronic violent love and mystical concept of twin souls (“I
am Heathcliff”/“I cannot live without my soul”), together with the permeat-
ing leitmotifs of doors and windows pointing towards both physical and spir-
itual transcendence, all indicate the characters’ heroic struggle to reach the
world of their spiritual vision.
Moreover, the theory of rasa explains why the transformation from bhava
(raw emotion) to rasa (suggested meaning) in a work of art is essential, since
emotional modes in a work are:
aesthetic idealisations [and] would not be a source of delight […] Yet rasa, as
a “subjective experience objectified” involves the coexistence of feel-
ing/intellect, unity/diversity, truth/rhetoric; it is therefore not purely subjective
or extra-linguistic (Haney 1993: 49).
The subtle experience process of rasa is one that turns the audience/reader
away from the purely rational level of conventional meaning. The narrative
journey through the images of emotion and their resulting flavour within the
conscious mind, but beyond the senses, leads eventually to the inner self of
the reader. Rasa, is in fact “the manifestation […] of the intrinsic bliss of the
Self”, whereby basic human emotions are freed from attachment to the ego,
“like a mirror cleaned of dirt”, which is then able to “reflect the bliss of the
self” (Ramachandran 1980: 101).
Finally, within the text, Brontë’s image of the window swinging open as
the rain lashes in upon Heathcliff’s smiling corpse (while being eerily fore-
shadowed in the similar scene with Lockwood at the novel’s start) is symbol-
ic of the fact that he has at last broken through to another, happier, state of
being. This explains why the reader experiences such tremendous elation—
not fear or horror—by the report of ghostly sightings at the end of the book,
knowing that Catherine and Heathcliff (the two halves of one being) are unit-
ed after death. They have overcome all the limitations and conventions of
patriarchal society and the physical world. The power of their desires even
thwarts the one law of nature thought to be immutable. They are the rebel-
lious “transgressors” of the gothic novel genre (Graham 1989: 231), who
survive through self-assertion and self-definition and ultimately triumph on a
metaphysical level. Being united, they transcend the limitations of partial
awareness and incomplete knowledge.
Qualia, rasa and moral responsibility
The discussion of the subjectivity of rasa inevitably raises further associa-

tions with the philosophical concept of qualia in consciousness studies, since,
as intrinsic properties of inner mental experience qualia are ineffable and yet
a central part of defining inner or introspective states (Dennett 1991). Qualia
and rasa theory both deal with the quality of subjective experience and how
such variable distinctions in appreciation or evaluation interact with con-
sciousness and self-awareness. As well as being responsible for the phenom-
enal characteristics of sense-data, qualia, like rasas, are associated with felt
moods, reactions, passions and emotions—the feelings of love, grief, fear or
delight, and moods like elation or misery (Haugeland 1985: 230-235). Rasa,
as already described, is a delight or essence “beyond the senses” and yet
impacting upon them and the resulting mental and emotional experience.
Rasa theory explores how performance affects the spectator, and how experi-
ence influences the mind. Abstract in its theoretical aspect, the realities of its
psychological insight can be verified through the “witness” quality of human
consciousness in reaction to performance or textual engagement, and the
sublimation of extreme emotion into aesthetic elation.
56 Beyond Bodies
One import of qualia theory that is central to its utilisation here is in the
interrogation of moral responsibility. Daniel Dennett, for example, implicates
questions of free will and morality in his discussions of consciousness
(1991). How can a human mind understand and be held responsible for the
intentional choices it has made? Intentionality apparently derives from qualia
(Searle 1992), from our interpretations of feelings and meanings, and from
the ability to realize consequences, thus implicating moral choice and respon-
sibility for our actions. In discussing Wuthering Heights, the problem of
morality, ethics and social responsibility is frustrated through the slippery
nature of both characterization and theme. The intentions and meaningfulness
behind fictional Heathcliff’s actions must be imputed through the information
provided in the text; as a “real’ person, his behaviour would clearly brand
him either a psychopath or sociopath—a man unable to comprehend or act in
accord with human or social law, or the most fundamental emotional norms
of humanity.8 Yet, by the end of the book the reader not only forgives him
but also—incredibly—generations of readers have forgotten every act of
brutality and insanity to regard him as a romantic hero. Catherine Earnshaw
is depicted and described by Nelly as cruel, self-centred, spiteful and hysteri-
cally unstable. Again, the readers’ emotions of shock and horror, “loathing
and contempt” are sublimated through the interplay of language, imagery and
emotion into a celebration of love and the triumph of passion over circum-
stance.
Emily Brontë’s own glimpses of an ecstatic state of awareness—that she
reached through nature and describes in her poetry—were never comple-
mented in her life by joy through a personal relationship: perhaps making
even more poignant both her understanding of the mystical experience she
herself had (the marriage of knowledge and understanding, spirit and matter)
and her creation of two of the literary world’s most memorable lovers.
Through the effect of rasa, the reader gains a taste of that bliss and can only
wish for more.
8
Elaborating on the emotional derivations of psychopathology, Dylan Evans explains
that, “Psychopaths are indeed curiously amoral, but this is not because they lack an
‘ethical subroutine’. The moral capacities that most of us have, and that psychopaths
lack, are based not on a set of rules […] but on emotions like sympathy, guilt, and
pride” (Evans 2003: 46).
Chapter Three
Isolating consciousness: secrets, silencing

and insanity in Victorian novels
Three generations of women writers predominate the nineteenth century, the

first being the “Golden age” of the Brontës, Elizabeth Gaskell and George
Eliot. The second generation includes Margaret Oliphant and the third the
later Victorian “sensationalist” novelists, the most famous being Mary Eliza-
beth Braddon (Showalter 1977: 19). Whether writing from social protest or
from the need for “sisterly” connection with other women, all these novelists
were to contribute to the examination of women’s psyche, to the role of
women and society, and to the psycho-bodily needs of woman in terms of
intellectual, physical and spiritual fulfilment. This chapter examines works
from all three generations to elucidate the development of women’s interests
while also highlighting how some themes and concerns pertaining to the
relationship of material and mental worlds persist in their literature.
Jane Eyre: a journey through modes of consciousness
While Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights demonstrates the wild excesses of

social conduct at its extreme edges of acceptable behaviour and emotion, and
the triumph of passion over patriarchal convention, then her sister Charlotte’s
Jane Eyre demonstrates a different kind of journey into consciousness. This
journey is both spiritual and intellectual, an exploration of modes of con-
sciousness: it engages all the most pertinent and dynamic questions of what
makes a person fulfilled or unfulfilled in their human potential. Jane Eyre
can be regarded as a female Bildungsroman—charting the development of
the female self to higher, expanded, states of consciousness—framed within
the narrative of early feminist rhetoric. At a time when the nature of women
and female consciousness were under intense exploration, female Victorian
novels were both rebels and reinforcers of the conventional stereotypes of
femininity. In 1849 Charlotte Brontë wrote: “I cannot, when I write, think of
58 Beyond Bodies
myself and what is elegant and charming in femininity; it is not on these

terms, or with such ideas, that I ever took pen in hand” (Shorter 1908: 80).
Like the hero of Pilgrim’s Progress, a work frequently alluded to in Jane
Eyre, Jane’s quest is a journey of the soul, in which she must struggle with
both internal and external conflicts in order to reach a state of happiness
based upon her own definition of female integrity. Her spiritual growth is
juxtaposed to the powerful sexuality latent within her and lurking around her
in the shape of Mr Rochester and his wife Bertha. The Rochesters as a mar-
ried couple together epitomise unrestrained physical desire and its corrupting
mental, spiritual and ethical consequences. Jane, of course, rejects the ex-
tremes of pure physicality (offered by Rochester) and the austere spirituality
(offered by St John Rivers). Her ultimate triumph is perhaps not the fact that
“Reader, I married him”, so much as her ability to marry or reconcile the
passionate and the spiritual aspects of her personality—to find a middle way,
much as Forster urged in his plea that the only valid emotional life is to con-
nect “the passion and the prose”. Her ultimate fulfilment is thus emotional,
physical, intellectual, as well as moral. Jane at her most glorious is a rebel, as
revealed in her outspoken outburst to Rochester:
“Do you think I am an automaton?—a machine without feeling? And can bear
to have my morsel of food snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water
dashed from my cup? Do you think because I am poor, obscure, plain, and lit-
tle, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!—I have as much soul as
you,—and full as much heart. […] I am not talking to you now through the
medium of custom, conventionalities, or even of mortal flesh:--it is my spirit
that addresses your spirit; just as if we had both passed through the grave, and
we stood at God’s feet, equal—as we are!” (255)
Jane cries out with impassioned reasoning for sexual equality—of the fact
that at its core, the being of a human is beyond gender—yet Jane’s final posi-
tioning is to settle within a traditional female role, as wife and mother;
“wherever you are is my home—my only home” she tells Rochester (248).
Her final happiness would not be complete without her creator ensuring that
Jane remains firmly within the strictures of acceptable society; she gains
status and acceptance through her unexpected wealth and her insistence on
marriage. Thus it is Jane’s internal change in consciousness that Charlotte
presents as boldly defiant and the strategic plotting of which is ultimately so
revolutionary in terms of women’s literature.
Isolating consciousness 59
Jane’s quest is one of practical necessity, and thus has universal and time-
less appeal, since it implicates the essential need for differentiating fact from
fiction, and reality from illusion. In different states of consciousness, an indi-
vidual’s perception of the environment differs: the most striking being be-
tween the states of waking and sleep, and the state of dreaming. For most,
these three states of consciousness encompass all we know as categories of
experience. More “advanced” states of consciousness have long been posited
by mystics, philosophers and physiologists. Colin Wilson examines how,
from the Romantics onwards, writers and poets revealed “‘everyday con-
sciousness’ is only one of many possible states, and that we become trapped
in it by assuming that it is the only kind” (2009: 51).
If we consider the episode of the young Jane and the terror of spending a
night being locked in the Red Room where her uncle had recently died, the
horror of the unknown and the bombardment of phantom fears are based on
dream consciousness. Like Catherine’s panelled bedroom in Wuthering
Heights, the Red Room is a place where dream and reality may overlap or
merge, and human minds may conjure up ghosts or unearthly visitations.
While for Heathcliff and Catherine these states remain interchangeable and
undifferentiated, Jane must learn to distinguish and master the boundaries of
waking, dream, and sleep states of consciousness as a matter of survival. As
she grows up, it is the trials of waking consciousness and the experiences of
death, loss and punishment that form Jane’s character and forge her inde-
pendent will. Yet within her dour stoicism, she protects herself from the delu-
sions of need, as she begins to transcend everyday modes of consciousness
and gain a state of pure consciousness, characterised by the pervading calm
that accompanies a true knowledge of the unchanging nature of the true self.
Only then can she gain an unfluctuating sense of happiness, one that—like
the calm ocean water beneath the turbulent waves—underlies all the chang-
ing events on the “surface” of her experience.
Jane must, above all, negotiate a rapidly changing sense of what compris-
es reality in the world of Thornfield Hall—a place characterised by multifac-
eted veils of deception, madness, and the ever-shifting disguises of human
motivation. Jane’s sense of “reality” is constantly tested by the manifestation
of “illusions” both auditory (the insane laughter) and visual (the shadowy
figure in her room). For Jane, waking consciousness is clearly defined as
maya, unreliable and not real.
The character of Edward Rochester epitomises the theme of the charade
of reality, or the masquerade of appearances. Magicians throughout time have
60 Beyond Bodies
developed and displayed “extensive knowledge of how to manipulate our

conscious experience” (Kuhn and Rensink 2012:41) especially how to divert
attention from what is really happening. Rochester acts in this capacity to
blind Jane’s perception of reality, when, like a conjurer he makes his wife
“disappear”, hiding her away, and then covering up all traces of her nocturnal
ramblings—and, of course, her very existence. To trick and gain information
from Jane, he disguises himself as a gypsy woman. Ultimately, his trickery is
inverted as his fate is to live beneath the permanent “disguise” of blind crip-
ple. His whole life is based on lies, deception and masquerade both literal and
metaphorical, and sudden disappearance tricks. Adele is possibly his daugh-
ter—but he never reveals the complete truth of his relationship with her
mother—the only account we have of his past is the one he gives to Jane
himself—and why would he not be motivated to lie further? Jane’s triumph is
her perspicacity, and her ability to tap into an additional dimension of the
supernatural, to access deeper knowledge of self and other. Indeed, Rochester
frequently refers to Jane in terms of the spirit world, that she belongs to the
elves and pixies, and refers to her life being lived in a place between waking
and dream.
The contrast between religion and the supernatural is an important one
throughout the novel. Jane’s spirituality and sense of ethics seem innate, not
dependent on the harsh strictures of religion that have been forced upon her
first in Lowood School and later by St John Rivers. While the religious tenets
remain in her surface awareness, she engages with ethical and philosophical
debates from a more fundamental level of decision-making and thought based
on a more universal understanding of the laws of natural existence. Her voice
of intuitive reason is not based solely on the masculinist world order of laws
and justice. In her relationships with both Rochester and Rivers, when con-
fronted with dilemmas between following her own heart or the laws of con-
vention—by rejecting possible choices of a bigamous marriage, remaining as
a mistress, or as an unloved wife—in every case she plunges into solitude,
thus allowing herself to dive deep into her own consciousness and develop
intuitive and emotional strength. Her inner struggle ultimately leads to a
degree of self-actualisation. She has become a whole person: one whose
sense of her core integrity and equality with all men balance outer and inner
notions of self/Self. Her final words in the novel denote surrender, and
through the paradoxical self-empowerment that comes with surrender, she
finds peace.
Jane Eyre and higher states of consciousness: up on the roof
How distinct are dream and waking within the Brontë fictional world? We as
readers suspect that the membrane between the two is as fragile as that be-
tween sanity and madness. Jane Eyre’s journey can be seen as a woman’s
struggle not only out of the physical confines that hold her captive—locked
in the Red Room; incarcerated at the harrowing Lowood School; ensnared
within a mad, bad and dangerous relationship with a Byronic hero, and iso-
lated in his Bluebeard’s house full of dangerous locked rooms and their terri-
fying contents; exiled in a remote house on the moors—but also trapped
within mental boundaries of “everyday” consciousness. No quest myth is
complete without the protagonist’s experience and refining knowledge of the
underworld. Charlotte Brontë provides several hints as to how the text may
be read as a systematic uncovering of the development of higher states of
consciousness. If, in terms of consciousness, the Red Room represents the
loss of consciousness in sleep and the terrors of the dream state of conscious-
ness, then the other possible states of consciousness can be apprehended
through Jane’s revelations on the roof of Thornfield Hall.
When Jane arrives at Thornfield to take up her position as governess, she
is shown around by Mrs Fairfax, who eventually takes Jane through a
trapdoor to the roof and up “onto the leads”. From this high vantage point,
Jane leaned “over the battlements and looking far down, I surveyed the
grounds laid out like a map” and all the countryside around, as far as “the
horizon bounded by a propitious sky” (98). As she beholds the vastness of the
natural landscape and the limitless horizon, her individual life finds its corre-
sponding sense of freedom beyond physical boundaries. The sense of expan-
siveness and her mental liberty seem to her both natural and “pleasing”. As
she turns to re-enter the house, however, “I could scarcely see my way down
the ladder, the attic seemed black as a vault” (98). The dark descent in con-
trast to the “arch of blue air to which I had been looking up” conjures up the
painful, limited states of awareness associated with imprisonment and igno-
rance. The house seems now like a vault or a mausoleum, which of course,
since it is the living grave of Bertha Mason, it literally is. The text’s fore-
shadowing imagery indicates the destruction of the house by fire, almost as if
Jane foresees that the house will become itself a grave. Unknown to her, it is
the very same point on the roof from which Bertha Rochester will fling her-
self to her death.
62 Beyond Bodies
As Mrs Fairfax refastens the trapdoor, and thereby also imprisons Jane in
the “vault”, Jane gropes her way in the darkness to find her way back and to
descend the narrow staircase. The passage is “narrow, low and dim” (all
words resonating with connotations of her ignorance), and with the “two
rows of small black doors all shut, like a corridor in some Bluebeard’s castle”
(98-9). Again, in her lack of true knowledge or wider perception (which has
been denied her since leaving the elevated state of awareness of the roof), she
is unaware that these rooms are the prison cell of Bertha, and that she is in-
deed in Bluebeard’s castle. Bertha represents the “unseen” threat to Jane in
many ways, the obstacle to her happiness, and not only as the legitimate wife
of Rochester. Bertha is the “bestial other”, the threat of unleashed naked
desire (Freud’s id) residing beneath the surface of restraining superego, and
civilising religious rules. She is the female Minotaur, caged in the under-
ground passages of Jane’s subconscious mind. Bertha is not Jane’s antithesis
so much as mirror image: her alter ego.1
As she descends further into the house, Jane hears the laugh: a “low”
sound emanating from the bowels of the passage. Mrs Fairfax admonishes
Grace Poole (who emerges to explain the ghostly laugh), with the words
“Remember directions!”, an expression that has a double meaning here—and
one intended not only for Grace but for Jane. She has shown Jane the “direc-
tions” around the house, and metaphorically the route to full knowledge and
happiness that now, as she descends into a world of deception, is closed to
her. In her role of governess-servant, access to the freedom of the house is
only via the “directions” her employers will give her. The house, thanks to
Mrs Fairfax’s tour, now represents entrapment, and Jane will soon experience
the solitude and bleak loneliness within its walls. Moreover, the house in
which she is to live has been established as the “home” of all levels of con-
sciousness, from the “lower’ dimensions of consciousness in dream, night-
mare and delusion (the spectre of her night-time visitations, the denied
1
Joyce Carol Oates compares Bertha with Dr Frankenstein’s doomed monster; she is
even deprived a gender, but is an it, an animal, a “clothed hyena” (introduction to
Jane Eyre 1987: viii). Moreover, Oates points out that Bertha’s inherited madness was
no doubt a result of syphilitic infection—a silent, shameful disease that would also
have been handed on to Rochester, and then presumably infect Jane once she marries
him. Thus Bertha represents a deadly threat of “otherness” on many dimensions—as
animal masquerading as “woman”, and also as primitive, degenerate mind: foreign,
insane, violent, and infectious. Yet Bertha as a native of the British West Indies is
essentially a victim of ruthless colonialism and patriarchy—as explored in Jean
Rhys’s “rewriting” of Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea.
screams) to the enlightened vision of expansion and light now denied her.
(Yet “the leads” remain an ambiguous symbol of light: for the roof of the
house will be the setting and means for Bertha’s final “liberation” in flames.)
Jane’s guided tour of the house ends in her having to extinguish any sparks of
intuition and to suppress her superstitious fears. The stage is now truly set for
Jane’s on-going journey from the depths of ignorance to knowledge.
It is therefore all the more clear that the opening of the next chapter is
loaded with dramatic irony. The reader notes the adjectives as Jane the narra-
tor informs her: “The promise of a smooth career, which my first calm intro-
duction to Thornfield Hall seemed to pledge, was not belied on a longer ac-
quaintance with the place and its inmates” (99). “Inmates” indeed! If Jane
previously admonishes herself “I was a fool for entertaining a sense of even
surprise” (99) and successfully resisted being “superstitiously afraid”, the
fear and uncanny premonitions now fall to the reader to imbibe and recall.
Thus Charlotte Brontë ensures that Jane carries her reader with her on her
spiritual quest for enlightenment—emotional, physical, and intellectual. This
quest from ignorance to knowledge is played out in the mind and heart, while
embodied (as we have also seen in Wuthering Heights) in house and natural
environment.
Jane Eyre as “autobiography” of being and becoming
As originally published, Jane Eyre hinted broadly at the fact that the work
was autobiographical. Indeed, the narrator’s voice simulates the artful act of
remembering: and as is now theorised, the distinguishing of fact and fiction
within life writing is a problematic juxtaposition. Memory is fraught with
ambiguities, and is in itself problematic: “Memory selects, and interprets –
and what is to be selected and how it needs to be interpreted is a moot matter
and an object of continuous contention” (Bauman 2003: 86). If experience is
to be recollected in tranquillity, how much of it is lost in this process, and
how much recreated? The quality of consciousness can determine the out-
come of these questions. Physiologists have found that the brain functions
differently in different states of consciousness. Charles Alexander suggests
“an architecture of increasingly abstract, functionally integrated faculties or
levels of mind” (1990: 290) where, in waking consciousness, the levels of
mind extend from the senses, desire, mind, intellect, feelings, and ego, to
pure consciousness.
64 Beyond Bodies
Like a cloth being repeatedly dipped in dye and then left to dry until the
colour deepens, when pure consciousness has been repeatedly experienced, it
comes to permeate the mind, until such a time as the bliss and equanimity of
that state becomes a permanent condition—cosmic consciousness. This expe-
rience is best explained in terms of Vedic psychology, which proposes four
higher stages of consciousness. In cosmic consciousness the mind is opened
up to its source, the infinite potential at the all-pervading level of nature’s
functioning. The permanent experience of pure consciousness (Turiya
chetana in Sanskrit) with all of the other three states (dream, waking, and
sleep) means that Pure consciousness is fully awake to itself, and the individ-
ual experiences the quality of being a non-attached “witness” of life while
able to maintain a continuum of inner bliss. This becomes refined cosmic
consciousness (Bhagavat chetana) through the gradual enhancement of sen-
sory perception. Finally, in unity consciousness (Brahmi chetana or the sev-
enth state of consciousness) one is able to perceive everything in terms of
one’s own transcendental self (Alexander 1990: 290). This state is one where
the individual perceives, as the Upanishads describe, “All this is That, and
That is my Self.”
Jane Eyre—whose life of solitude, contemplation and self-reliance could
be argued to have led to development of such a state, is in touch with her
most intuitive brain, and seems to some extent settled in a condition of ex-
panded awareness. She hears the voice—and heeds its message as being
valid, simply because she is fully awake. Jane’s journey to peak experience
and higher states of consciousness can be examined in terms of her process of
growing self-awareness. The most exhilarating moment in the novel is surely
Jane’s uncanny or unexplained experience of intuitively hearing Mr Roches-
ter’s voice. As previously mentioned, Jane has nurtured a life of quietness
and self-referral, and this moment reveals the importance of her physical and
mental state—and how it suddenly is able to trigger the illumination—almost
comparable to the moments of “peak experience” of the mystic after the dark
nights of the soul.
All the house was still; for I believe all, except St. John and myself were no re-
tired to rest. The one candle was dying out: the room was full of moonlight.
My heart beat fast and thick: I heard its throb. Suddenly it stood still to an in-
expressible feeling that thrilled it through, and passed at once to my head and
extremities. The feeling was not like an electric shock; but it was quite as
sharp, as strange, as startling: it acted on my senses as if their utmost activity
hitherto had been but torpor; from which they were now summoned, and
forced to wake. They rose expectant: eye and ear waited, while the flesh quiv-
ered on my bones.
[…] I saw nothing: but I heard a voice somewhere cry—
“Jane! Jane! Jane!” nothing more.
“Oh God! What is it?” I gasped. (422)
In many ways, as a woman Jane embodies what would, over a century later,
become known as “emotional intelligence”, the harmonious marriage of
mind/body from disunity into wholeness. 2
The solution to the quest within the Brontë novels discussed here reso-
nates with the Platonic discussion of the nature and destiny of “the soul”, that
innermost search for “the very being with which true knowledge is con-
cerned”. Jane’s marriage represents more than personal fulfilment: it repre-
sents the philosophical ideal of the harmonious unity of emotion and reason.
The novel depicts that the emotional life is not “fundamentally at odds with
reason” as the Romantics believed (Evans 2001: ii). The almost desperate
longing expressed within the novels goes, surely, beyond the mere need for
romantic fulfilment to that expressed in Plato’s Phaedrus, for “the colourless,
formless, intangible essence, visible only to the mind” (Happold 1963: 181).
2
It is interesting here to compare the fictional experience of Jane with “real-life”
experiences, some of which have been described by more recent (twentieth century)
women writers, such as by Rosamond Lehmann:
I look up and see the moon quite high in the sky. […] I stop and stare at
it. The something extraordinary happens … A flash…as if an invisible
finger had pressed a master switch and floodlit my whole field of vi-
sion. At the same time the world starts spinning, and I am caught up in
the spin, lifted, whirled. A voice splits the sky, splits my head. …And
yet there is absolutely not a sound in the garden […] and although the
detonation is within me it is also immeasurably distant, as far beyond
the moon as I in the spinning garden am immeasurably below it. […]
All over in a second. (Lehmann in Anderson 1997: 162)
Another experience from Irene Tweedie (born in 1907), is similar:
He went inside and I remained alone in the garden. […] The air was so
pure, the earth so fragrant. All the objects around—the trees, the leaves,
the stones, the whole town, seemed to breathe. […] Well, I thought,
that’s that. And went home. […] and lay on my back looking at the sky.
Then it happened. It was as if something snapped inside my head, and
the whole of me was streaming out ceaselessly, without diminishing, on
and on. There was no “me”, just flowing. Just being. A feeling of un-
ending expansion, just streaming forth… (Anderson: 82).
66 Beyond Bodies
This is a realisation that fulfils both emotional and intellectual goals, and
provides that experience of reaching a true “home” that the characters Cathe-
rine and Jane so ardently crave:
The divine intelligence, being nurtured upon mind and pure knowledge […]
rejoices at beholding reality, and once more gazing upon the truth, is replen-
ished and made glad, until the revolution of the world brings her round again
to the same place. In the revolution she beholds justice, and temperance, and
knowledge absolute […] in existence absolute; and beholding the other true
existences in like manner and feasting upon them, she passes down into the in-
terior of the heavens and returns home. (Happold 1963: 181)
Maya and madness
Interest in psychological motivation became a central core of Victorian wom-

en novelists’ exploration of contemporary female experience, although these
insights were frequently derided or trivialised by male critics for their senti-
mentality or over-emotionality (Showalter 1977: 82-3). Yet the upsurge of
the women novelist who revelled in bridging the gap between male and fe-
male spheres of understanding, and thus created new voices of domestic and
social commentary, were seen (by Margaret Oliphant for example) as an
exciting new direction for society, characteristic of the developments in “en-
lightenment” and science (Oliphant 1855: 555). Despite, or perhaps due to,
the critics, women writers were free to explore the inner world of female
existence, an introspective analysis that allowed time and space to the world
of women in which nothing much—in the exterior world—might be thought
to be happening.
The exploration of the frustrated mind that could lead to madness or ill-
ness was a frequent theme—as if these women writers knew instinctively that
the separation of mind and body was not a dualism of any value to the reality
of their experience. As interest in the brain and mental conditions grew in
Victorian culture, so too did the fascination with understanding madness,
explored in literature or in visiting the famous madhouses as entertainment.
Frequently related to morality (or lax morals) and women’s inherent wicked-
ness, gradually madness began to be understood as a response to traumatic
events and experiences. Famous “mad scenes” became the highlight of opera
as well as novels, climatic scenes that relied on the hair-raising terror of
events, as well as pathos of the woman’s tragic demise. (Then, as now, the
sights and sounds of the blood-splattered Lucia de Lammermoor’s final
aria—by Gaetano Donizetti—are enough to terrify.) By the end of the nine-

teenth century, Sigmund Freud drew his inspiration from studies of “hysteri-
cal” and traumatised patients; his work predicated upon the pre-existing Vic-
torian belief that insanity was a predominantly female problem. The ongoing
popularity of his ideas that connected women and madness perpetuated such
theories and their associated “treatments” well into the twentieth century.
The texts through which this fascination with women and mental illness is
represented in literature (and of course, operatic libretti) can shed light on the
discussion of women’s consciousness in fiction, if only (as with Antonio
Damasio’s exploration of consciousness through brain damage and mental
aberrations) to explore a reality through its negation, or lack.3 So why does so
much literature place madness within a predominantly female domain? Can it
be verified that women have a lower threshold to stress, for example, and are
more likely than men to react to trauma in this way—and if so, is this a fail-
ing of society rather than individual?
3
In researching this book, the topic of madness in women quickly became evident as
a major theme throughout texts written by either male or female authors, until it al-
most became a work about insane females and consciousness in literature. It has to be
a cause for some concern that the option of madness has been so widely accessed by
writers as a major narrative device and character detail. Literary madhouses have long
thrown their doors open to receive inmates. Infamous as a way to remove unwanted
wives or female relatives in novels such as Collins’s The Woman in White, and
whether for reasons of gaining wealth or ridding oneself of an unwanted burden, the
diagnosis of insanity has liberated men from their problems—and provided authors
with a predictable fate to finish off their females. “Madness” as a diagnosis in order to
institutionalise wives is also parodied by Mary Elizabeth Braddon in her Sensational-
ist novel of 1863 Aurora Floyd, where it is mentioned as a convenient way to dispose
of unwanted wives (or other “crazy relatives”) at least three times (see Braddon 1996:
9, 35). Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre of course famously centre their plots on
social and spiritual ramifications of characters’ madness. The trend persists into the
twentieth century (as I shall discuss in the following chapters) Virginia Woolf through
to Margaret Atwood maintain the tradition of literary texts depicting female characters
going (or gone) mad. Rumer Godden’s Black Narcissus pictures nuns creating their
own perfect spiritual environment, and yet insanity remains the only way out for one
bitter and disillusioned (and sexually-unfulfilled) woman. As I discuss in later chap-
ters, in the 1970’s, the novel Housekeeping by America novelist Marilynne Robinson
centralises female characters who are branded as mad as they try an alternative life-
style; and Angela Carter’s protagonists inhabit a very strange psychic world indeed.
68 Beyond Bodies
“The Library Window”
Margaret Oliphant’s short story, “The Library Window”, demonstrates that

women writers located “madness” not only as a masculine punishment for
inconvenient female existence (Bertha in Jane Eyre) or for the usurpation of
a woman’s wealth (The Woman in White), but as a profound problem of
women trapped in a meaningless existence. Women’s mental state could be
affected not only by her material circumstances. It was not simply crushing
poverty that was the problem but the abyss of middle class comfort. The lack
of fulfilment in her interior life was also stifling her creative or emotional
needs. The following stories discussed in this chapter can be read as studies
of women isolated within society due to the limited availability of creative
employment or emotional choice, and often suffocating within the restrictions
of social expectations.
Set in Edinburgh, a city that celebrates a reputation for ghosts and the
gothic, “The Library Window”, while initially appearing to read as a super-
natural story involving apparitions and eerie old buildings, rapidly becomes
an investigation into a woman’s psychological state. The subtitle of the story,
“A story of the seen and the unseen” elaborates the purpose of the story as
dealing with the uncertain and subjective nature of sense perceptions, as well
as the “blindness” of society in its general oversight of women’s needs. Plot
elements incorporating references to the occult and second sight tantalise the
reader with possible motivations for the protagonist’s strange behaviour and
her ability to perceive a “reality” not seen by others. Yet, the ghost story
elements are used by Oliphant to discuss larger issues: the confusions and
delusions of sensory sight/mental insight of a young woman denied access to
self-knowledge and to the masculine world of scholarship and academic
study. The associated theme of sexual repression linked with mental stagna-
tion is reinforced as the woman’s identity and her purpose for existence dis-
appear when she withdraws into a life of self-imposed mental isolation. She
gradually redefines herself in terms of what she can see (or thinks she can
see) in a window of the public library opposite her room. Metaphorically, the
analogy could be made to the fact that women themselves are more complex
than may appear on the surface: that they can be “read” as mono-
dimensional, but with more insight can be seen to have an inner depth of
character and detail only appreciated by those with uncommon powers of
more profound perception. The hidden becomes seen; women begin to per-
ceive the cage that maintains their entrapment.
The story’s unnamed narrator initially explains that she is said by others
to be “fantastic and fanciful and dreamy” since she has “a sort of second-
sight”, the ability to be able to see and hear “all sorts of things” and be “con-
scious of things to which I paid no attention”(2). Her heightened sense of
perception puts her at odds with her family and friends, so that she withdraws
into the habit of looking out of the window to gaze at the library opposite.
She listens to their debates discussing whether or not one of the library win-
dows—“a very dead thing without any reflection in it” (3) is real or simply
painted, or even merely a door bricked over. Or is it “an optical illusion” (4)?
Gradually the narrator begins to see clearly through the window to a room
behind, and then can make out a man, a scholar, reading in the room at a
desk. She connects this solitary figure with various explanatory identities,
and she becomes increasingly obsessed with “the Poet”. Projecting her vari-
ous fantasies of sexual fulfilment, the discovery of her lost father, and her
desire for meaningful activity onto the “imagined” room, she descends into a
state of delusional dream consciousness. Gradually the imagined reality takes
over: “The real place was the room I knew,” she explains, while the original
Edinburgh buildings and her home were “some theatrical illusion” (17). At
last she is able to visit the building and search for her Poet—only for the
event to precipitate a dramatic mental collapse. She is taken up to bed and
treated like an invalid (20), even though her insightful Aunt Mary recognises
her symptoms as being caused by: “a longing all your life after—it is a look-
ing—for what never comes” (21). Her aunt hints at a possible family legacy
of “second sight” or an inheritance of knowledge of witchcraft—connected to
a mysterious and powerful diamond ring she wears. Whether a family curse,
a ghost, or an illusion, the narrator’s life remains haunted by what she has
seen and experienced in the window: she feels that nothing else much matters
“unless if one could get into the dark somewhere—the soft, deep dark that
would cover you over and hide you—but I could not tell from what” (22).
From the viewpoint of consciousness, the alienation and disturbance are
caused by situations in which the self is repressed; a delusional state is
caused by a breakdown in the differentiation between self and other, subject
and object-referral. David Chalmers’ delineation of consciousness distin-
guishes mind from consciousness: “we can say that a mental state is con-
scious if it has a qualitative feel—an associated quality of experience” (1996:
4). A distortion of that “qualitative” reaction with the individual’s environ-
ment will cause a corresponding aberration of behaviour and a breakdown
into a type of dual consciousness. The breakdown of the normal ability of the
70 Beyond Bodies
mind to swing between polarities of the concrete and abstract, the phenome-
nal and the imagined, the rational and intuitive, leads to alienation from both
Self and other. The sense of a unified self is shattered, and an imaginary
world is created in which the damaged self seeks to gain meaning, or at least
to have control over the interaction of frequently delusional internal/external
existences.
Paradoxes and problems: the “other” woman
Nina Auerbach delineates the Victorian myth of the “explosively mobile,

magic woman, who breaks the boundaries of family within which her society
restricts her”. She sees that woman as a “disruptive spiritual energy, which
lived in defiance of the three cherished Victorian institutions: the family, the
patriarchal state and God the Father” (1982: 1). In defining the fragile social
placement of women, Anita Levy explains that in nineteenth century repre-
sentations:
…a new definition of what it meant to be human and female emerged. It was

primarily a norm that placed those members of a different race, class and sex
in a negative relationship to the rational, middle-class, white Englishman. Out
of this process of displacement was engendered a monolithic “other woman”
who came to represent a whole range of sexual behaviours, class practices and
ethnic and racial groups. (Levy 1991: 5)
As Levy argues, although primarily defined in terms of “foreignness”, as the

British Empire expanded its territorial hegemony to embrace larger swathes
of the globe, yet the “other” woman could also come from within the ranks of
the white middle class and yet still be displaced, a rebel against the domestic
norm.
Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House, for example, suggests that woman
does not have to be either foreign or poor in order to be stigmatised as “out-
side” society. Written in serial form and published in 1853, Bleak House
exposes the social world of the Victorians as well as its prevalent injustices,
inconsistencies and prejudices as perceived by Dickens. A major sub-theme
is the position of woman, particularly the secretly experienced “fallen” wom-
an, who struggles to maintain her position within society. The influential
feminist critique The Madwoman in the Attic famously describes the predic-
ament of Victorian woman as either being represented as “the angel in the
house”, the endlessly tolerant and self-sacrificing female, or “the madwoman
in the attic” (Gilbert and Gubar 1979). In alternative readings of the Victorian
woman, Bram Dijkstra defines the “wicked woman” within the Victorian
psyche as the sexually experienced and threatening “idol of perversity”, who
is a threat both to man and to the order of society itself (Dijkstra 1986). Kim-
berly Reynolds and Nicola Humble (1993) propose however that the dualistic
reading of Victorian woman as either “angel in the house” or wicked tempt-
ress is too simplistic a reading of the situation. Yet the role of “fallen wom-
en” obsessed the Victorians (including painters such as the pre-Raphaelites)
alongside their fascination of all things “other”, weird and strange.4 Patriar-
chal discourse traditionally displaced the “thoughts, words, opinions, and
beliefs of the real women of other classes and cultures.” Moreover, “as a
result of this suppression all manner of positive cultural values and alterna-
tive sexualities were discredited” (Levy 1991: 4).
In Bleak House, Dickens explores many modes of Victorian women and
the subversive stereotype of women who violate expected gender roles. Ada
Clare presents a portrait of the feminine, pretty and demure “angel in the
house”, yet it is the more complex Esther Summerson who is the “heroine” of
the novel. She is an orphan of unknown parentage, the result of a woman’s
shady secret, and it is she who must undergo a troubled journey from igno-
rance to knowledge. The characterisation of Lady Dedlock in particular high-
lights the structural role of the other woman as scapegoat of prevalent sexual
mores.5 The secrecy surrounding her past is as dense as the impenetrable
shroud of London fog. When Lady Dedlock and Esther meet, two of the great
mysteries of the novel collide: and Lady Dedlock’s shocking and shameful
secret—a secret that must be kept at all costs—is made known. Lady Ded-
lock reveals herself to be Esther’s “wicked and unhappy mother” (565).
4
Whether in terms of spiritualism, spirit tapping, mesmerism—and a host of “other-
worldly” attempts to reconcile consciousness with science and the expanding
knowledge of the workings of the human brain, these excursions into pseudo-science
or anatomical studies ensured that the “madness” of women remained a central
theme—as well as remaining a means of controlling women’s behaviour and speech
(by assigning independent or outspoken women to the attic) and providing a mascu-
line/medical theory of propagating women’s inferiority of mind and consciousness—
as I discuss in the following chapter on George Eliot.
5
A definition of women’s position in society was clearly related to the masculine
project of Empire expansion. Fear of the “other” (a theme at the centre of much late
Victorian fiction) whether in terms of race or gender, remained at the core of middle
class Victorian dread of the breakdown of the social structure and the collapse of the
prosperity based on the Empire. See, for example, Edward Said Culture and Imperial-
ism (1994).
72 Beyond Bodies
Later, when she is accused of murdering her husband’s lawyer, Tulking-

horn, Lady Dedlock finally admits to herself that “there is no escape but in
death” (816):
Hunted, she flies. The complication of her shame, her dread, remorse and mis-
ery overwhelms her at its height. [. . .] She veils and dresses quickly, leaves all
her jewels and her money, listens, goes downstairs at a moment when the hall
is empty, opens and shuts the great door; flutters away, in the shrill frosty
wind. (816)
Lady Dedlock moves towards her fate, a figure of classic tragedy. Pursued by
Esther and Sergeant Bucket, she is eventually found dead at the gates of the
cemetery where Captain Hawdon is buried (869). Dickens, although fascinat-
ed in his own life by prostitutes and their rehabilitation6 may appear to show
great sympathy for Lady Dedlock’s circumstances, yet he does not challenge
her appropriate social punishment—self-annihilation. As we have seen, Vic-
torian middle-class hegemony specified a set of cultural and gender-based
behavioural norms any violation of which prompted stigmatisation as Other
woman. Anita Levy suggests that this set of norms not only subjected women
to men but also established one class of people “whose women met certain
standards of femininity” over the other social and cultural groups “whose
women were improperly gendered” (Levy 1991:12). When Lady Dedlock
leaves her jewels and her money (816) to disguise herself and leave her
home, she is re-defining herself in terms of class as well as gender (that is to
say, no longer being “feminine”). As Levy elucidates, the cultural idiom of
morality and sexuality, focusing as it does on deviance and aberration, repre-
sent the working class “not so much as a consequence of their economic
deprivation but as a symptom of their pathological depravity” (1991: 26).
Lady Dedlock assumes this valuation by divorcing herself from her wealth as
an expression of her acceptance of her “pathological depravity”. Indeed, she
removes herself economically, morally and physically from society. De-
sexed and de-classed, Lady Dedlock in her death comes to represent no-
place, mirroring her lover’s adopted pen name of Nemo, no-one. While the
Victorians were eager to propagate a philosophy of gendered space, different
spheres of public/private life for men and women, the morally-excluded
woman had no place in either domain. Lady Dedlock reaches her goal—the
6
See Jenny Hartley, Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women (London:
Methuen, 2009).
sanctuary of her lover’s graveyard—and yet she must remain outside the
closed gates, barred from the (possibly) sanctified ground within. Her fate
epitomises Freud’s designation of women as devoid of reality, with no being
and no truth: woman as absence, or indeed, so far outside the norms of socie-
ty that she can only be classified as “mentally disordered”. If Lady Dedlock
escapes the fate of actual madness, she is represented by Dickens as never-
theless a creature for whom there is no place in “sane” society. 7
In contrast to Bleak House, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s novel Lady
Audley’s Secret presents an alternative reading of woman’s role in society,
subverting the concept of the desirable “angel in the house” and, in the pro-
cess of providing a different style of protagonist, deconstructing the ideal of
what constitutes a Victorian heroine. Both Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady
Audley and Charles Dickens’s Lady Dedlock in Bleak House exemplify the
discourse surrounding the female self and the placement of woman as dan-
gerous other, as defined against the Victorian middle-class norm.
Winifred Hughes has suggested how, in the hands of a female writer such
as Mary Elizabeth Braddon:
Lady Dedlock would have not only become the central character, she would
probably have married her original lover, committed bigamy, then patched
things up with Sir Leicester. Or else she would have been an out and out vil-
lainess, doing away with both lover and blackmailer before she got caught.
(Hughes 1980: ix)
With a few altered details, this is exactly Braddon plot in Lady Audley’s Se-
cret—or at least what Lady Audley attempts to do before she gets caught.
In “writing back” to her friend Dickens, with Lady Audley’s Secret Brad-
don helped to create a genre that was to revel in the creation of unconven-
tional, strong female protagonists, extolling female independence while sati-
rising man’s fear of women’s power and how it must be suppressed. The
novels can also be compared in terms of theme: how much oppression can a
7
Women such as Lady Dedlock—like Oscar Wilde’s later creations of Mrs Erlynne,
Mrs Cheveley and Mrs Arbuthnot are the fallen women who are outcasts of Victorian
society. (See respectively, Lady Windermere’s Fan, The Ideal Husband, and A Wom-
an of No Importance.) Unlike Lady Dedlock however, the disgraced and reviled Mrs
Erlynne is never given the chance to tell her daughter (Lady Windermere) the truth:
that she exists. Lady Gwendolen in The Picture of Dorian Gray shares the same fate
of being shunned by respectable society: “Even her children are not allowed to live
with her” (126)—a martyrdom inflicted by society for a woman’s sexual sins.
74 Beyond Bodies
woman tolerate before being driven from sanity to apparent madness? While
refusing to submit to male authority, Lady Audley resorts to either real or
assumed “madness”; Lady Dedlock is pushed to the brink of desperation, yet
remains utterly sane—a pathetic and pitiable victim of masculinist social
mores, who is fully aware of her tragedy.
Lady Audley’s Secret
The great popularity of Sensationalist novels was, no doubt, due to their abil-
ity both to titillate the Victorian male reader with promises of scandalous
female behaviour, and to inspire female readers that while men appeared to
be in control, women were equally capable of manipulating the conventions
in the pursuit of their own desires. These novels created a hybrid of social
realism with the fantastic: the gothic elements of horror overwritten with the
urgent social agenda of feminism. Here, women refused to adopt sentimental
literary themes of weak females “saved” by strong men.
Elaine Showalter describes the novel Lady Audley’s Secret as “a careful-
ly controlled female fantasy, which Braddon understands and manipulates
with minute exactitude” and her praise extends to the subtle crafting of sensa-
tionalism blended with a “rather frightening” realism (1977: 163). The novel
introduces us to the apparently angelic and child-like Lady Audley, but the
reader soon realises that (like Lady Dedlock) she has a deadly secret, which
she struggles to keep hidden. Although recently married, it appears she has a
past—a life she is determined will remain undiscovered. Within Victorian
codes of morality, any sexual experience before marriage would be a terrible
crime, knowledge of which would expose women to alienation from society,
or worse. But is this Lady Audley’s only secret?
In this novel, the sensational thrills are built up through hints and sugges-
tions, by the tension between the known and the imagined. Each layer of
textual revelation—often a literal stripping away of a “cover-up”, either relat-
ing to inaccurate, forged, lied-about, hushed-up, lost, buried, misplaced or
otherwise unavailable information—forms palimpsestic layers of reality to be
exposed by the both characters and the readers in their turn. This is maya: the
superimposition of faulty interpretation through ignorance: deceptions of
Life/death, lies/truth, darkness/light, face/mask, surface appearance/ hidden
reality. Just as Lady Audley must scheme to escape detection, the text paral-
lels the need to juxtapose that which must remain hidden with that which can
be exposed—the uncanny in opposition to the expected; the perverse versus

the permissible.
The intricate plot cleverly plays upon layers of secrecy, each revealing
another beneath, like a set of Russian dolls. At one point, the “hero” of the
novel, the barrister and amateur detective Robert Audley, discovers a piece of
luggage that he suspects will at last reveal Lady Audley’s secret identity. He
peels off one luggage label only to find another concealed beneath. The im-
age of the luggage labels acts as a metonym for the novel itself, which is
structured to expose different levels of reality one by one. Reminiscent of the
nature of levels of consciousness, and the deceptive nature of appearances in
the waking state of consciousness, the covering-up or veiling of texts occurs
frequently in the novel. The superimposed names of the luggage labels on her
trunk, the obituary of Helen Talboys (Lady Audley’s former married name)
in The Times, her fake gravestone on the Isle of Wight: all act as palimpsests
by which Lady Audley re-writes her identity, or tries to obscure the truth.
Indeed, the whole novel is characterised by palimpsests: even the house
Audley Court is a hotchpotch of historical styles built one upon another. The
novel also frequently delights in the metatextuality of referencing other con-
temporary works: Wilkie Collins and French novels being the inspirational
reading matter of Lady Audley herself and a sly hint of perversion in Robert
Audley.
The logical revelation of facts is uncovered simultaneously by Robert and
the reader, building suspense and anticipation, and punctuated by moments of
sensation: engaging the need for the reader to distinguish appearance from
truth, sanity from madness. As long as she maintains her secrets, Lady
Audley has nothing to hide. Once her relentless adversary, Robert Audley has
successfully uncovered her schemes and her original identity, he challenges
her with the truth. Yet even when at the end of the novel Lady Audley di-
vulges her ultimate secret, the reader is left unconvinced that she has yet
reached the truth.
Lady Audley’s declaration that she is a madwoman seems too conven-
tional and contrived, a mere excuse for her perfectly sane, if desperate, be-
haviour. As Dr Mosgrave, the expert in mental health, 8 explains to Robert:
8
With his wonderfully ironic name and ruthless attitude to his patients, Dr Mosgrave
is a precursor to Virginia Woolf’s Doctor Holmes in Mrs Dalloway. In Fingersmith,
Sarah Waters also gives her sadistic mental doctor the apposite name of Dr Graves.
76 Beyond Bodies
. . . there is no evidence of madness in anything she has done. She ran away
from home, because her home was not a pleasant one, and she left it in hope
of finding a better. There is no madness in that. She committed a crime of big-
amy, because by that crime she obtained fortune and position. There is no
madness there. When she found herself in a desperate position, she did not
grow desperate. She employed intelligent means, and she carried out a con-
spiracy which required coolness and deliberation in its execution. There is no
madness in that. (298)
Despite these conclusions, the doctor agrees to the incarceration of Lady

Audley, because “she is dangerous!”(301)
Both Lady Audley and Lady Dedlock end in the grave: Lucy in the “liv-
ing grave” of an asylum, and Lady Dedlock dead at the desolate gates of her
lover’s grave. It is tempting to question how far the different treatment of
these powerful women is determined by the gender of their authors. Despite
their very different trajectories of events and character, they share similar
challenges in defiance of patriarchal society. While both are described as
outside the pale of acceptable Victorian society, when being pushed to the
limits of their physical and mental endurance, they both appear desperate, but
sane women. Through their fight with patriarchal codes, rather than forging
new identities that are socially or politically transformative, both women
characters are ultimately defeated. While Lady Audley may seem to escape
the dramatic death of Lady Dedlock, her fate may be regarded as actually
worse, since she dies within only a year of being in the madhouse. But why
and of what does she die? Braddon—and the male characters—brush this
detail aside.
It takes, perhaps, a glimpse into another novel, Sarah Waters’s neo-
Victorian Fingersmith, to discover the sort of “care” Lady Audley would
have received in this institution. One of the intertwined plot lines of Finger-
smith follows the story of the petty-thief Sue Trinder, and how she is tricked
into becoming a patient at an asylum. Sue, as narrator, describes the acts of
brutality she must endure at the hands of Dr Christie and Dr Graves and their
team of “nurses” as they subject her to an assortment of tortures in the name
of treatment. She receives slaps and punches to her face and body, and is
shaken until “you thought your teeth were being rattled out of your head […]
shaken until you were sick” (Waters 2002: 430). She is drugged and purged;
straight-jacketed and placed in a padded cell; and most terribly, plunged into
a tank of icy water:
What I recall most is the wooden frame they fixed me to, at the arms and legs;
and then, the creaking of it, as they winched it up and swung it over the water;
the swaying of it as I pulled against the straps.
Then I remember the drop, as they let fly the wheel—the shock, as they
caught it—the closing of the icy water over my face, the rushing of it into my
mouth and nose, as I tried to gasp—the sucking of it, when I had spluttered
and coughed.
I thought they had hanged me.
I thought I had died. Then they winched me up and dropped me again. […]
Fifteen plunges in all. Fifteen shocks. Fifteen tugs on the rope of my life.
After that, I don’t remember anything. (Waters 2002: 443-4)
In this story, Sue successfully plots an escape—after surviving in the mad-

house for about two months. It shows some resilience on her part that Lucy
Audley manages to survive for as long as a year in such a place.
In many ways, even a sensationalist novel such as Lady Audley’s Secret,
in which the protagonist apparently subverts the male concept of Victorian
heroine, can be read as a work that nevertheless espouses certain patriarchal
attitudes. Lucy’s rebellion succumbs to patriarchal authority (albeit in the
form of the dandy Robert), first when she gives the excuse of insanity—the
epitome of an assimilated patriarchal illness—and then when she sees her
idea used against her as she is tricked into travelling to the asylum. Yet the
horror of her plotting and her misdeeds, the “horrible, ghastly truth of this
wretched woman’s wickedness” that haunts Robert Audley (314), make it
impossible for the reader to achieve a clear moral stance on these characters.
Even the final chapter “At Peace” raises many questions. When George re-
turns from America and learns of his wife’s recent past and her current loca-
tion, he has no wish to visit Lucy in Brussels—after all, with a wife still liv-
ing he places himself in the same predicament here as Mr Rochester. Why is
he content with his friend having condemned her to a living death, while in
fact, as is now clear to all, she has killed no-one? Yet the reader can still
ponder if Braddon’s intention was to hold patriarchal values up to scorn ra-
ther than merely providing a thrilling sensational text based on the exploits of
an “evil” woman, and thus the influence of the text as a whole may be social-
ly transformative in subtle ways. Lady Audley’s final triumph over the “supe-
rior” male intellect has to be that mad or sane, her brilliant psyche is one that
even an astute legal brain such as Robert Audley’s cannot penetrate or com-
prehend. She remains enigmatic to the end, problematic and unreadable as a
78 Beyond Bodies
text, defying deconstruction. And that inscrutability gives her a measure of

final freedom.
Madness as metaphor
The prevalence of the instance of insanity in novels polarises questions of

whether “madness” is a reaction to intense trauma, or merely a label for a
desperate, but very sane, response to the impossible social positioning in
which women could so easily find themselves. Another possible argument is
to realign notions of so-called insanity with the simple idea that women may
channel or interpret life through different modes of intuitive and emotional
experience—and thus need a different vocabulary to express themselves.
The language of the imagination uses trans-temporal symbols that reach
out across cultures—and perhaps it is in this positive light that the continual
return to the connection of women with insanity should be placed—with
madness as a symbol of a quality both extraordinary and complementary.
Nonetheless, explorations of female consciousness must be possible without
reference to the negative transcendence and the suffering implied in any form
of insanity or mental disturbance. It appears almost a travesty of the human
brain—so infinite in potential—to focus on diminishment, restraint, and dis-
tress rather than expansion towards bliss.
In her work Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag discusses how in twentieth
century literature, metaphors of madness function in a similar way to those of
TB (consumption) in the nineteenth century. “In the twentieth century, the
repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity,
the vehicle of ‘spiritual’ feelings and ‘critical’ discontent, is insanity” (Son-
tag 1978: 35). Her comments are intriguing, drawing together the threads of
concepts of transcendence, the desire of “escape” from the mundaneness of
human suffering through art, and the shifting trends in popular uses of meta-
phor in language and literature. “Insanity is a kind of exile”, she explains:
Just as travel used to be associated with the consumptive patient who must
leave normal life to seek a cure; so madness is the “psychic voyage” –the trip
into the mind (Sontag 1978: 36).
Not TB but insanity is the current vehicle of our secular myth of self-
transcendence. The romantic view is that illness exacerbates consciousness.
Once that illness was TB; now it is insanity that is thought to bring conscious-
ness to a state of paroxysmic enlightenment. (Sontag 1978: 36)
Yet insanity is also always seen as a loss or weakness, a type of failure either
on the part of the individual or society. Where are the writers who will imag-
ine enlightenment as a state of being in higher states of consciousness, a state
of enrichment, bliss and fulfilment, rather than the failings of conscious-
ness—the diminishment in experience, understanding, and happiness?
Madness, marriage and meaning: “The Yellow Wallpaper”
Other texts later in the century were to continue the theme of exploring mad-
ness as an inner route to understanding female consciousness—or rather, the
loss of self through the traumatic encounter with male power-games. From
the Romantics onwards, philosophers and poets centralised notions of “inner”
versus outer experience, the interior self of experience and its relationship to
the larger environment. For women in the nineteenth century, the freedom of
the inner life could be juxtaposed against outer restrictions. The torment of
lack of outer freedom—also mirrored in inner freedom—led to the expres-
sions of a state of incompleteness: loss of self.
In some stories, this loss of self is itself portrayed as a state of madness.
This interdependence of mind-body, internal-external is nowhere more clear-
ly demonstrated than in the American author Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s
short story of 1892, “The Yellow Wallpaper”. The story raises a number of
key issues that were to be developed into the twentieth century by writers
such as Virginia Woolf: the mental and physical imprisonment of woman in
the home, the mental decline of a woman denied access to self-expression,
the dangers of enforced silence and stifled creativity, and the oppression of
women’s inner spirit—all of which have implications for consciousness. The
story’s startling value both for the nineteenth century and the contemporary
reader is its focus of the creative concerns and spiritual struggle of a female
protagonist whose rapid disintegration of mental health comes about through
the oppression and the uncomprehending oversight of her apparently loving
husband. He is incapable of knowing how to deal with her problem and is
unsympathetic to her needs.
Feminist critics regard “The Yellow Wallpaper” as a symbolist allegory
not only of the woman writer dominated and oppressed in a phallocentric
literary tradition but also of woman herself trapped in omnipotent patriarchy.
Moreover, as symbolic of a more extensive problem, Annette Kolodny points
out, “The wife’s progressive descent into madness provides a kind of com-
mentary on, indeed is revealed in terms of, the sexual politics inherent in the
80 Beyond Bodies
manipulation of those [linguistically based interpretive] strategies” (1985:

52). John, both the protagonist’s husband and her doctor, disallows her to
write and controls even what she is to read (or rather, what he insists on read-
ing to her). Both her creative output and input are thus censored, and he
gradually takes over control of all aspects of her life. He thwarts every desire
she expresses and laughs at her; “But one expects that in marriage” she
comments dryly (168). He treats her like a child, literally trapping her in the
male-dominated world, where men prescribe words, texts, and meaning and
even thought. As if representing the real struggle of many women writers, “I
did write for a while in spite of them”, the wife explains, “I sometimes think
that if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of
ideas and rest me” (128). Soon however, both pen and paper are denied her,
and she is left alone without any means of self-expression as an outlet of her
frustrated creativity, which as readers, we suspect would be the safety-valve
mechanism that would allow her to preserve her sanity.
As she is progressively isolated from both human company and mental
stimulation, as Kolodny states, “the narrator gives up the attempt to record
her reality and instead begins to read it”: imposing her interpretations of the
apparently ever-shifting patterns in her bedroom wallpaper, and becoming
“obsessed with her quest for meaning” (1985: 53). The paper surrounds her
like an inexplicable text to be deciphered. She attempts various interpretive
strategies, but the closer she comes to defining a meaning in the objective
“reality” the further she loses self-referral knowledge of herself. Lost in the
state of object-referral, the ever-shifting “meaning” slips ever further beyond
reach. Her experience reflects the definition of textual meaning by the post-
modernists following Ferdinand de Saussure, in which any ultimate meaning
can never be reached since all signifiers (words) can only produce an endless
chain of other signifiers. For the philosopher Jacques Lacan, language is an
endless process of difference and absence. One signifier implies another, one
meaning can only produce more definitions of more meaning, ad infinitum.
In the same manner, the wife in the nursery bedroom attempts to follow
the endless pattern on the wallpaper, imputing meaning at each step of her
analysis, which in the end lead her nowhere. In the wife’s case, her desire is
for both meaning in her life, and for freedom from her mental and physical
incarceration. She believes that if only she can find an ultimate meaning in
the pattern, she will be free. Increasingly, she identifies with the woman she
perceives creeping behind the pattern: she sees herself as text. In the context
of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Ruqaiya Hasan’s theories of the relationship of
language, society and consciousness elucidate this failure to distinguish the

relationship between text and context, and thus correctly to navigate linguis-
tic/social contexts and to orientate the self in the social world. “Linguistically
created meanings […] pertain to our experience of the world around us and
inside us” (Hasan 2009). Hasan’s construction of language pictured as a con-
trast of pattern against background exactly articulates the problem in this
story; for the interaction of human reader with semantic codes depends on
being able to distinguish the foregrounded patterns of signifiers from the
background patterns and textual locations or “situational setting”—and thus
correctly attribute a text’s deeper meanings.
In desperation to derive meaning from her confusion of surface/depth/text
and context, Gillman’s narrator analyses the woman who, in her imagination,
creeps by day and shakes the bars of the paper by night. She perceives un-
blinking eyes, and great waving stripes, but above all, the patterns in the
paper slip and slide upon each other in layers of undecipherable meaning—
reminding the reader of Lacan’s definition of the unconscious mind as the
sliding of the signified beneath the signified. Terry Eagleton continues to
elaborate this uncertainty as “a constant fading and evaporation of meaning, a
bizarre ‘modernist’ text which is almost unreadable and which will certainly
never yield up its final secrets to interpretation” (2003:169). Moreover, for
Lacan, “the human subject can either ‘mean’ or ‘be’, but it cannot do both
together” (Eagleton 2007: 52).
These comments perfectly describe the wife’s predicament as she strug-
gles to interpret the meaning/lack of meaning of her environment, as her
normal state of mind descends into a schizophrenic state of non-being. As she
does so, the signified, the meaning, always slips away from her mental grasp
(like the woman behind the pattern) for there are no stable meanings and no
end to the incessantly transforming designs in the wallpaper. She sinks ever
further into delusion, as Eagleton’s model seems to predict: “If this constant
sliding and hiding of meaning were true of conscious life, then we would of
course never be able to speak coherently at all” (169).
It is both the wife’s failure to find meaning in her life (as represented by
the wallpaper) and her inability to fulfil her desires in any aspect of her life
and the consequent intolerable build-up of stress, that lead to the collapse of
her mental world. All meaning collapses onto a point, so that in the end there
is only one thought pattern available to her mind and one activity possible.
She has created her own fantasy world—and, crucially, it is one in which she
able to bypass John’s authority. Believing she has at last escaped from her
82 Beyond Bodies
barred existence behind the paper, she creeps incessantly around the room.
“I’ve got out at last” she cries to her stunned husband, “in spite of you and
Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” Real-
ising his own misreading of the situation, John faints at the shock of her
wife’s delusional state of mind. He falls, “right across my path by the wall, so
that I had to creep over him ever time” (137). She appears to have at last
triumphed over him, although as Kolodny points out, her apparent freedom is
“liberation only into madness” (1985: 56).
Significantly, Gilbert and Gubar comment that the wife’s incarceration
within the house, devoid of meaning or activity, denies her the hope of “spir-
itual transcendence of the body” (1997: 84). This denial of transcendence can
be located as the root cause of the problem. In the non-dualistic Vedic under-
standing of consciousness, the transcendent nature of the self is regarded as a
unity of self and non-self (the knower, process of knowing and the known
together in one wholeness)—a unity of form and meaning. The wife’s experi-
ence of “reading” the meaning in the wallpaper, and finally merging with the
wallpaper (a confusion of self and environment) is like a negative transcend-
ence, of going beyond the boundaries only to be totally entrapped—and de-
fined—by them; being totally dominated by the object of awareness she loses
the stable state of her own inner consciousness, her Self.
Conclusions
Female characters who are alienated from their place and time—such as
Gilman’s wife trapped in the nursery, Braddon’s Lady Audley, Dickens’s
Lady Dedlock, or George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver—have to wrestle between
the social pressures placed on women and the dictates of their inner desires.
Emotion has to be sacrificed for the demands of socially acceptable behav-
iour, and such spiritual murders frequently occur long before the final dé-
nouement. In such a climate, Maggie Tulliver and Lucy Audley are active
agents in their own tragic destruction. Wilful women and their dynamic tra-
jectory through Victorian society become unsustainable in the climate of
oppressive censorship. As seen in the literary examples here, women—
especially wives—are frequently branded as mentally unstable, or mad, as a
means of control. Ultimately they have to yield to the greater power of patri-
archal laws that restrict women’s social positioning, and, whether due to
insanity or despair, their consciousness suffers the great price.
While acts resembling insanity—or the assuming of madness as a survival

strategy—have long held validity in literature (adopted most famously by
Hamlet), in our paradigm of exploring the nature of consciousness, can we
learn anything from the mind’s anomalies and apparent failings? The feminist
emphasis on madness as caused by male oppression and as “punishment”
also raises the crucial problem of any delusional behaviour being caused by
suffering, and the cause of suffering. While some women writers have ex-
plored female access to “madness” as an escape from a confining patriarchal
and neo-colonial society (in, for example, Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing,
which I discuss in a later chapter), in any understanding of consciousness as
an experiential continuum, the path into madness is one that is in itself re-
strictive—a limited journey into greater darkness rather than an expansion
into light. Even in recent literature, the decision to assume madness for pur-
poses of escape or profit never ends in success (as in Sarah Waters’s Finger-
smith, where, as we have seen, such machinations dramatically misfire).
The “problem” of madness also negates the possibilities of higher states
of consciousness, which are traditionally associated with increased clarity,
brain coherence, and tranquillity. Through meditation practices, in the even-
tual state of bliss consciousness, the individual experiences the unity of self
and other, and the experiential unity of individual intelligence within that of
the greater cosmos. Described as a balance of enhanced understanding and
infinite joy, the state of cosmic consciousness (or super consciousness) is also
hailed as a condition of mind and physiology where desires are fulfilled,
where wishes are materialised for the betterment of both individual and her
society. In this state of Yoga or “union”, there is no duality, so that the indi-
vidual’s life becomes so “at home” with this state that it is not influenced by
all the sorrows and sufferings that go on in the surface, relative, level of life.
Suffering is averted or at least, having gained the experience of blissful
awareness, the mind and heart are able to maintain that bliss. As the devel-
opment of consciousness continues, the ability to transcend thought is main-
tained throughout the states of waking, dreaming and sleeping, and “irrespec-
tive of the mind’s engagement in activity or in silence”. Once this peak state
of moksha or liberation is reached, “there is no trace of sorrow or suffering”
(Mahesh Yogi 1967: 426).
Yet such a vision must be tempered with the reality that the development
of the human mind is dependent on the quality of what it experiences and on
the interrelationship of language, communication, interpretation and memory
(Hasan 2005). In practice, the possibility of maintaining pure consciousness
84 Beyond Bodies
as a permanent living reality through all the disparate phenomena inherent

within waking, dream and sleep—a state often referred to as “enlighten-
ment”—is dependent on the social and physical environment. As the litera-
ture in this chapter reveals, our experience of consciousness is affected by
stress, violence and the negativity of others that pollute the psychosocial
environment. In an apparent vicious circle of influence, the collective con-
sciousness of our societies reciprocally reflects the quality of individual con-
sciousnesses.
Chapter Four
Beyond the veils of consciousness:

individual and collective awareness
in the novels of George Eliot
For the latter part of the nineteenth century, female novelists explored how
far women dare go socially and spiritually, and what it meant to be a member
of the female subculture. Elaine Showalter explains, “women novelists’
awareness of each other and of their female audience showed a kind of covert
solidarity that sometimes amounted to a genteel conspiracy” (1977: 16).
Through writing, women were to embark on a journey of self-discovery that
was to have shattering consequences for both culture and consciousness. Yet
while craving and striving for outer recognition in the literary world, and
improved social rights in the political world, it was the nature of conscious-
ness itself that underpinned all the debates on the nature of women’s posi-
tioning in the definition of patriarchal humanity.
George Eliot and the exploration of female consciousness
Certain works of literature address the realm of consciousness as their main

theme. George Eliot’s novels have long been regarded as the great realist
novels of the nineteenth century, chronicling the connections between indi-
vidual experience and the rapidly changing social landscapes of Victorian
England, yet they also engage with the subject of human consciousness and
its possible expansion into “higher” capability of expression. Her work taps
into the interest at the time in scientific approaches to the mysteries of the
human mind: What was the unknown life force that creates consciousness,
what is the one underlying substance that connects all living matter; what was
the connection between the brain size and intelligence, morality, or social
status? Eliot kept up with the rapid developments in the pseudo-sciences—
86 Beyond Bodies
such as phrenology—and techniques such as mesmerism to explore in her

fiction the problems of free will, and the vital interconnectivity between indi-
vidual consciousness and group consciousness.
In this chapter, I shall examine two widely divergent works by George El-
iot, and argue how they both examine different aspects of human conscious-
ness and confront the “hard” problems that this entails. Much of Eliot’s work
asks us: in what ways can the self be reconstituted, or developed, to live a
more fulfilled and worthwhile life? Middlemarch depicts the development of
higher states of consciousness in a woman, and presents the hypothesis that
the interior life of the individual can, and must, influence society. This theme
that the individual spiritual life entails transcending ego is further developed
in Daniel Deronda, where Eliot directly confronts the interconnections be-
tween mysticism, moral choice and social responsibility. In this novel, she
also challenges society’s rigid classifications of class and race, extolling the
inner reality of selflessness and empathy as opposed to the adulation of social
status gained through ruthless materialism. Eliot destabilizes gender expecta-
tions here too, since the qualities of care and compassion are the characteris-
tics of Daniel, while Gwendolyn Harleth embodies the heart-less and ego-
driven social climber.
The second text discussed in detail here, The Lifted Veil, suggests what
can happen to a person who denies—or misinterprets—that the powers of
developed consciousness should be used for the betterment of society, not
personal gain. This dichotomy between self-worth and the reward of human
love as opposed to alienation and self-hatred can be explained in terms of the
various stages of development available to human consciousness.
Middlemarch: the world is as we are
The insight of reality having many different levels within the dimensions of
experiencing and of perception, like the multiple overlaid universes described
by today’s leading physicists (see for example, Greene 2012), is one of the
main themes of Middlemarch. The multiple story lines and characters weave
a web that is both complex and interconnecting: and it is here that the differ-
ence between reality—and the misconceptions or misperceptions of it by the
several characters— is elucidated. The novel is intricately plotted to conjure
up the interweaving lives and consciousness of the characters, while also
acting to reflect the mesh of interrelationships of individual and society. Each
character, with their fractured and partial perspectives, is unable to perceive
Beyond the veils of consciousness 87
the whole—and thus the world becomes an ever-more complex superimposi-

tion of limited and incomplete knowledge.
According to Vedic philosophy, a verse in Rig Veda relates to the fact
that “Knowledge is structured in consciousness”, or to put it more simply:
The world is as we are. The mental interpretations of physical qualia, and the
resulting behavioural choices are a mirror of our consciousness. The ancient
Yoga Sutras of Patanjali refer to mental misconceptions, or misguided
knowledge as avidya. (Vidya in Sanskrit means knowledge, and the prefix
“a” denotes negation, thus, an absence of knowledge, or false apprehension.)
Through ignorance, wholeness begins to be seen as parts. The level of activi-
ty, as Vedic wisdom explains, is just a perceived reality, an illusory projec-
tion, onto the field of universal consciousness—unmanifest wholeness (see
Katz 2011: 114). Yet that duality of part (individual perception) and whole-
ness (existence) is a faulty conclusion of the intellect.
George Eliot’s novel can be interpreted in such a way as to show how
these arguments are relevant in our contemporary societies. Throughout the
novel, the protagonist Dorothea Brook’s journey from ignorance to
knowledge becomes that of the reader. This is achieved through the narrator’s
omniscient perspective and her role as guide, both in terms of our interpreter
on morality and metaphor, as shall be elucidated in the following example.
The pier-glass analogy
In chapter twenty-seven of Middlemarch, Eliot’s narrator introduces the met-

aphor of the pier-glass, the “extensive surface of polished steel”, which will
be:
minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now

against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! The scratches
will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round
that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere im-
partially, and it is only your candle, which produces the flattering illusion of a
concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection.
These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the ego-
tism of any person […]. (Eliot 1872/1994: 255)
A pier glass is a large high mirror, usually placed between two windows,
with the aim, presumably, of creating a contrasting effect of looking outward
with looking inward—of a vision of self as opposed to other. Eliot’s analogy
88 Beyond Bodies
here is not unlike the premise of quantum mechanics, that it is the observa-
tion of an observer that creates an event in the physical world. On the finest
levels of the manifest world, sub-atomic particles are random events located
everywhere or anywhere until the act of observation freezes them, as it were,
into one identity and one location. In the observer’s process of observing lies
the creation of his/her observation. This apparent paradox (from the stand-
point of classical physics) is captured in Eliot’s expression that the scratches
on the glass are “impartial”, whereas under the gaze in the light, they become
not only orderly, but concentric, each in perfect symmetry with another and
forming a symmetrical totality. This analogy continues to resonate with an
extension of parallel examples, all of which act to forge deeper aspects of
both plot and character in the novel. Here, the analogy will be used to inter-
pret George Eliot’s examination of divergent aspects of society—national
and local, public and personal—and to show an important means of revealing
characters within opposites of egoism and altruism, the surface and the depth,
the superficial and the profound.
Uncertainty is part of knowledge, and a major theme of Middlemarch is
how the human intellect and heart can overcome this dilemma and strive
towards a more fulfilling assurance—towards psychological or even spiritual
wholeness. On the level of science, the characters of Lydgate and Casaubon
attempt this reconciliation of the known and the greater unknown through
rationality (the scientific, objective approach to knowledge). Eliot plays on
the irony that, in their differing academic fields, the two men are both search-
ing for a similar finding: the fundamental piece of knowledge that will pro-
vide the key to understanding all—what is referred to now in science as a
“theory of everything”. While Casaubon seeks the key to all mythologies in
the classical pagan world, Lydgate searches for the one “primitive tissue”
underlying all human life (1994:144). In contrast, other characters, such as
Fred Vincey, Mr Bulstrode, and Rosamond, are purely driven by emotion.
The protagonist at the core of the novel who combines these aspects of
knowledge—gained through both the heart and the intellect—is Dorothea. In
the name of rationality, both Lydgate and Dorothea are motivated by their
social duty, by their desire to help others, while Fred and Bulstrode are solely
motivated by self-interest. Lydgate is determined to “do small good work for
Middlemarch, and great work of the world” (Eliot 144). Yet both Dorothea
and Lydgate are self-deluded and must strive—both trapped in unhappy mar-
riages—for enlightenment beyond superficial emotional happiness. Like the
scratched pier-glass, the characters have their apparent surface and their hid-
den depth, which can only be recognised with a light of greater understand-
ing. One overarching problem tackled by the text is which has the greater
reality: the chaos (and delusion) or the true order (the hidden depth).
Yet who is to decide what is real: the surface or depth? From the point of
view of the author who is working with the raw elements of life and the cha-
otic world of seemingly chance events, Eliot’s depth of perception creates
meaning and order out of this apparent randomness. Her narrator is posi-
tioned as “someone who is scientifically unraveling the social fabric” (Gilbert
and Gubar 1979: 523), in order to study and faithfully reproduce it. This
society is a web of interconnected lives and events, like the scratches on the
shiny surface of the glass, which appear random and scattered “in all direc-
tions”. Only by bringing a lighted candle to that surface can the scratches be
seen to lie in a total symmetry. On one level, the author via her narrator is the
candle, since “the narrator is searching for the hidden structure that gives
coherence and meaning to the whole” (Gilbert and Gubar: 526). It is Eliot as
author who weaves the labyrinthine web and gives it the “flattering illusion”
of concentric order: all events ordered around a central reality.
Although being an author who relies on realism for the depth and impact
of her descriptions, Eliot uses metaphor (such as that of the pier glass) and
philosophical comments of the narrator to reach the deep structures underly-
ing both the plot and the individual traits of characters. Through realism, she
can order her basic material; holding the candle to the glass, her intellect and
finely honed insight and compassion give form and coherence to the different
structures and aspects of the novel, superimposing unity onto diversity. Ran-
dom experience has not only purpose but also a direction.
Yet, as Eliot remarks, the order is produced by a “flattering illusion”
(1994:255) superimposed by the observer. The observer creates her reality.
We create our own reality, ordering our perceptions of the external world in
relation to our internal world, to our own understanding of ourselves. To a
certain extent, all of the protagonists (including Dorothea Brook and Tertius
Lydgate) are self-deceived and must urgently find stratagems for dealing with
their interface with society until they are ultimately undeceived. For example,
Dorothea’s uncle Mr Brooke is finally forced to see himself as others see him
by coming face to face with his ridiculous effigy (370); Bulstrode the banker
faces his dark inner reality by looking up to see the tragic figure of his wife,
dressed as a widow (550); Fred realizes his inner weakness by recognizing
his own faults in Lydgate (494), and so on.
90 Beyond Bodies
In the context of consciousness theories, philosophers like Dennett com-

ment on how we are able to locate intentionality in others, but not in our-
selves, since the “third person” point of view can attribute “simpler explana-
tory strategies we apply to objects and machines” to others’ behaviour. Since
our own lives are so “saturated with meanings, intentions, and interpreta-
tions”, it is more difficult to “step back” and gain objective knowledge of our
own motivations (Dennett 1991).Moreover, this ability to attribute mechanis-
tic “meaningfulness” to others has implications for society:
The more we succeed in explaining people’s behaviour as due to the mechani-

cal operation of biochemical systems, the more it seems we move away from
ideas of personal responsibility and (in particular) punishment. Without these
ideas, it may be felt, the orderly structure of society, and the basis for self-
belief and self-improvement, are threatened. (“Three and a half problems”:
np).
In Middlemarch, the internal changes within the characters transform blind-

ness and illusion to a clearer perception of people and events, and all are
played out against the backdrop of great social change. By moving between
the concerns of individuals and society, from social issues to the inner depths
of characters, Eliot’s novel swings the awareness of the reader from a surface
level of understanding to a deeper structure of meaning underlying all the
themes of the plot and the discussion of the individual characters.
The outer life mirrors the inner and vici versa. The story on the level of
society is handled by Eliot on two levels: the first is on the most manifest
level of the environment, on the level of national social change, and the real-
istic historical drama of contemporary Victorian England. The second is on
the level of social conduct, the role-playing, the mores and etiquette conceal-
ing the deeper emotional and psychological forces (again, the scratches on
the glass) that govern the behaviour of people beneath their words and ac-
tions. Examples of this are seem in the characters of Celia and Sir James (the
conformists), and particularly Rosamond Vincey before her marriage. Her
perfect social façade of ease and graciousness—as well as socially conven-
tional triviality—disguise the real motivation beneath. Rosamond is an emo-
tional manipulator, yet in the episode where she sees Lydgate again after a
long absence, her genuine doubts and disappointment allow her mask to drop.
She is genuine in her speech and actions, if only for a few moments. She
drops her chain-work on the floor, as if, symbolically, at last no longer able
to command her ever tightening grasp over Lydgate. (At no other time in the
novel is she not in total control of her ever-present needlework!) She is una-
ble to hold back her tears, and Lydgate, unprepared for such sudden sponta-
neity and honesty can only react by breaking down his defences and reveal-
ing his own emotional inner self. Once they are married, the social norms and
the masks of performance take over once again, especially controlling Rosa-
mond’s mind and motivation. Lydgate’s fate has been sealed and he remains
a victim of his wife’s caprice and his own needy emotions. In a Vedic para-
digm of the mind, the emotions function at a deeper level than the ego or the
intellect (Grace 2007: 45) thus, no matter what his mind may reason, his
emotions are more fundamental to his mind and his ultimate decision-making
facility.
In the same model, if the deepest sense of self is in the transcendent level
of being, gained through an inward directed attention, then the most overt is
that of the environment: that which is perceived through the outward-directed
senses. In Middlemarch, the importance of socially acceptable norms and
standards of behaviour is a part of the central theme of the relationship be-
tween the individual, his/her neighbours and the society as a whole. In the
novel, there are ultimately few characters that are incorruptible, either
through the influence of money, or the craving for prestige and power. In the
Finale, Eliot writes, “there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that
it is not greatly determined by what lies about it” (612). This influence of the
society on each character is also analogous to the candle or lamp superimpos-
ing some “meaning” or value onto the randomly scratched glass. These su-
perimpositions, however, do not necessarily imply order. The analogy ex-
tends to include how perception covers reality with a veil—how the prejudic-
es, opinions, and virulent rumours of society influence and change the “ran-
dom” actions of individual members. These social viewpoints impose some
moralistic interpretations: a character is deemed good or bad, proud or im-
moral. This group viewpoint is so insidious and overriding that it can equally
bring about the downfall of powerful men such as Bulstrode and clever, ide-
alistic men such as Lydgate. Eliot depicts brilliantly how the voice of the
local collective consciousness (in the form of rumour or gossip) can become
a dominant force in society. In the pivotal episode that brings together the
destinies of Lydgate, Bulstrode, and the dying Raffles, what begins as mere
conjecture in the town soon becomes accepted as fact. Here, maya—the
viewpoint of ignorance—creates motives and circumstances of murder, brib-
ery and corruption. The scratches, the play of illusion that covers the deeper,
more complex situation, become accepted as the only reality.
92 Beyond Bodies
Chhandas: the cover of reality
Like the scratches on the face of the pier glass, which hide what is beneath,
the unscratched, shiny surface of pure steel, Vedic texts describes “the
known” surface of reality as only one third of existence. The remaining struc-
ture of reality or knowledge is covered by appearances, a phenomenon re-
ferred to by the Sanskrit word chhandas. Chhandas, the manifest, observable,
“objective world” conceals the true nature of reality, and it comprises all that
in the usual waking state of consciousness can be known. The other two
thirds of knowledge comprise full awareness of the knower (rishi) and the
process of gaining knowledge (devata).1 Moreover, a state of enlightenment
is said to occur when the rishi, devata and chhandas (the entire reality of
knower, knowing and known) are united in pure consciousness—at the quan-
tum level of reality from where anything/everything can be created:
Because consciousness is the most fundamental element in creation, he who

thinks and acts from this holistic field of self-referral consciousness [the Self]
is naturally served by the infinite organising power of pure knowledge. (Ma-
hesh Yogi 1994:7)
The viewpoint of ignorance—maya—is described in a story by the sage

Shankara as deceptive perception, something created out of nothing. A monk
walking along a path is terrified to find a snake lying across his path, and in
his fear causes a great hullabaloo that reaches the village and scares all the
residents. At last they dare to venture out onto the road to find the snake; but
on closer inspection, the “snake” is recognized to be nothing more than a
piece of string (Shankara 570, 485). As in a conjuror’s trick, the snake is the
viparyaya of the string, the non-existent false impression. Viparyaya is de-
fined as mistaking a thing to be “the opposite of what it is”, or “the wrong
knowledge” of the real thing. The snake represents the relative creation and
the string the Absolute reality: the opposites do not become the other but
begin to appear as the other (Katz 2011: 112-113). The perception and con-
sequent emotional upheaval (of the string-snake delusion) is caused by lack
1
This fundamental process of consciousness has been explained as: “being conscious
of itself; and being conscious of itself consciousness is the knower of itself, and thus
consciousness is both knower and known. Being knower and known, consciousness is
also the process of knowing. Thus consciousness has three qualities—the qualities of
knower, knowing and known. When these three exist together, consciousness exists.”
(Mahesh Yogi 1994: 53)
of knowledge, of the appearance of boundaries; yet this is the state of aware-

ness of the majority of people in society. In Middlemarch, the escalating
illusions of appearance create motives and circumstances of murder, bribery,
and corruption, where—for example in the story of Lydgate—only profes-
sional benevolence and concern originally exist. The apparently petty nature
of gossip, the most superficial level of knowledge, eventually perpetrates
profound and devastating effects.
A major theme of the novel, moreover, connects individual and society on
the level of physical health. Clearly, the sickness at the heart of the text is
that suffered by the town of Middlemarch itself—an illness that spreads to all
who live there, a malady that can only be fought against and conquered
through strength of character and morality. (The spiritual sickness is made
concrete in Middlemarch’s controversial fever hospital.) Only by rising
above petty yet powerfully corrupting motivations, such as greed for wealth
or social status, can the individual remain safe from infection. Dorothea (who
renounces “sick” money for love) and Will Ladislaw (who refuses his right-
ful inheritance when offered it by the corrupt Bulstrode), Caleb Garth and his
daughter Mary (both incorruptible by the possibilities of easy wealth) are the
very few who are beyond the reach of Middlemarch’s toxic discharge.
In addition to prejudices and opinions, social perception also imposes its
“veil” of group preconceptions with regard to women, and what is considered
appropriate for their behaviour and thought. Although never an outspoken
feminist herself, George Eliot sympathizes with their cause in her works, and
many of her novels deal with “the woman question”, a prevalent problem in
the later nineteenth century. Dorothea, in having her own original ideas and
plans for social reform and the overwhelming desire to improve the lives of
those less fortunate, is regarded at the outset as strange by both family and
friends. At the conclusion, her two marriages are deemed unsuitable, improp-
er and immoral. Yet, as Eliot queries, what other possibilities are open to her
other than marriage? Feminist critics have been angry or disappointed by
Dorothea’s marriage to Will; Zelda Austen refers to it as “a copout of some
magnitude” (1976: 549), yet Dorothea is trapped within the conventions of
her time. In both marriages, the best that can be said is that she is true to
herself. At least in marrying for love, she has placed herself at some distance
from the town gossips and their power to destroy or disrupt. In her final move
to London, she places herself in a place large enough to contain her broad
spirit, a place her aspirations can gain fulfilment—the heart of contemporary
reform movements. The reader can assume from the narrator’s final and fa-
94 Beyond Bodies
mous commentary on Dorothea that she is unique amongst Eliot’s characters

in being able to glimpse the still and silent level underlying the everyday
turmoil if activity. Through metaphors like the pier glass, Eliot also ensures
this experience is shared by the reader.
A key word in Eliot’s description of the pier glass “parable” is “egoism”.
Eliot comments that the candle “is the egoism of any person now absent—of
Miss Vincey, for example” (1994: 255). Karen Chase comments:
One candle, a single ego, can organize a totality. Merely by providing a centre,
the self creates patterns and threatens the independence of events […] The
world no longer forms the ego, the ego forms a world (1984: 167).
This can be related to another of Eliot’s metaphors: “We are all of us born in
moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves”
(205). This is at a stage of the novel, where, on her bleak honeymoon in
Rome, the newly-married Dorothea begins to emerge from the protection of
her stupidity; she “had begun to see that she had been under a wild illusion”
to expect a return of her affection. While still believing that the place of the
Victorian woman is humbly to imbibe greatness from men rather than from
within herself, she begins to suspect that her husband Casaubon is far from
being the “wise and strong” hero she has imagined, but rather a being centred
on self—driven by a massive egotism. As Eliot’s narrator explains:
It has been easier for her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr Ca-
saubon than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but
feeling—the idea wrought back to the directness of the senses, like the solidity
of objects—that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and
shadows must always fall with a certain difference. (1994:205)
Here, Eliot clearly differentiates knowledge gained in different states of con-

sciousness, or at least on more subtle levels of the mind: Feeling is projected
as more fundamental than ratiocination (refection), which then, like bubbles
from a deep pond, returns back as an idea to the surface level of the senses.
The analogy refers back to the pier glass, where ego—here associated with
Casaubon—is the “centre of self”, a core shaped merely by sensory impres-
sions alternating according to the stimuli playing upon them.
Elsewhere in the novel, Rosamond Vincey provides the extreme example
of egoism. Like Dorothea, she creates her own romantic dream, but unlike
Dorothea (who undergoes profound change) her egotistical world-view and
her stubborn attachment to her belief system remain unconquered to the end.
In many ways, Rosamond produces the main tragedy of the story through her
ruthless manipulation of Lydgate. She operates from the perspective of
pragya paradha, or the mistake of the intellect, a solipsism that sees every-
thing in terms of the “small self”, of ego and vanity—of a restricted con-
sciousness that delineates all in terms of self and other. In Vedantic philoso-
phy, “the mistake of the intellect” is a fundamental misconception in which
diversity is disconnected from the unity grounded in physical laws. Rosa-
mond has no recourse to experience any deeper sense of self, of an inner
world of introspective development, and thus is deluded on a most fundamen-
tal precept of existence. For “the subject and object of knowledge form an
integrated whole and cannot be separated without falsification or misrepre-
sentation” (Haney 1993: 143). Without any recourse to referral to the “larger
Self” of pure being, then any intellect can only remain “object-referral”, and
as Haney continues to explain:
Most of us live in an ordinary state of waking consciousness immersed in ob-

ject-referral, a state in which the thoughts, impressions, notions, beliefs, and
memories about a particular object of awareness, imposed by an interpretive
community, dominate our individual experience of the object. Whereas object-
referral involves thoughts about an object, self-referral involves the experience
of an object from a level of blissful awareness prior to historical memory. […]
Living in object-referral we identify with objects, whether material, social, or
psychological; living in self-referral we identify more with the Self as bliss
consciousness. (1993: 147)
According to Gillian Beer, Rosamond is so entrapped in the patriarchal sys-

tem however (which allows few outlets for women’s creativity or self-
expression) that she is not even aware of it: she simply knows that she is
bored, restless, and unappreciated, and “that ‘type’ of woman most traps man
into mutual delusion” (1986:169). It is ironic that Lydgate escapes from a
relationship with a French actress, Madame Laure, who has killed her hus-
band because she is tired of his doting affection, only to become ensnared in
a comparable relationship with a wife, who, rather like the basil plant in
Keats’s poem, “flourishes on a murdered man’s brains” (1986: 610).
If Rosamond represents egotism, Dorothea represents altruism. The first,
egotism, Eliot defines as the “scratches” on the glass, the other –the untar-
nished pure existence that lies beneath. Casaubon also represents the blind
folly of academic/intellectual ego and the inflated reverence of one’s “small”
96 Beyond Bodies
self—delightfully encapsulated in the scene of him being painted as Thomas

Aquinas. Yet it is the meeting between the two women that is the emotional
climax of the novel, for in it we see the two quintessential values that have
played out their juxtaposition throughout Middlemarch being finally recon-
ciled.
Many similarities also exist on the surface of life: both women married
men that they erroneously perceived would enhance their role in society, both
form strong attachment and friendship with Will Ladislaw to ease their lone-
liness within marriage, both initially misinterpret their husbands’ abilities and
interests and create a fictional dream of marriage that can only end in disap-
pointment. Once Dorothea overcomes the limited attachment to self-interest,
she is transformed through her suffering and its spiritual revelations. This
experience takes her to a transcendental state of consciousness beyond the
realm of thought, after she realizes her inner truth that:
“Oh, I did love him!”

Then came the hour in which the waves of suffering shook her too thor-
oughly to leave any power of thought. She could only cry in loud whispers,
between her sobs, after her lost belief which she had planted and kept alive
from a very little seed since the days in Rome—after her lost joy of clinging
with silent love and faith to one who, misprized by others, was worthy in
her thought—after her lost woman’s pride of reigning in his memory—after
her sweet dim perception of hope, that along some pathway they should
meet with unchanged recognition and take up the backward years as a yes-
terday. In that hour she repeated what the merciful eyes of solitude have
looked on for ages in the spiritual struggles of man –she besought harness
and coldness and aching weariness to bring her relief from the mysterious
incorporeal might of her anguish: she lay on the bare floor and let the night
grow cold around her. (Eliot 1994: 748)
Following this “death” of the small ego-bound self, when she collapses onto
the stone floor, she undergoes an awakening of her greater, inner self of pure
being. Symbolically, when she rises up next morning she changes into a pale
dress to symbolize her entry into a new life. (This is an ironic reversal of Mrs
Bulstrode, who changes into a widow’s black dress to embrace her new
death-in-life.)
Eventually, it is due to the similarities between the plight of the two
young women, Dorothea and Rosamond, that they can reach out to each other
in mutual understanding, and ultimately give each other the gift of a new life
(Chapter 81). The resonant exchange is possible due to this dark night of the
soul, when Dorothea gains self-knowledge. In this new journey she sees her
past as if “bound up with another woman’s life” and resolves to ameliorate
the situation and free herself from “her first outheap of jealous indignation
and disgust” (1994:749). She had “sat as the bride of a worn-out life; and
now, with a full consciousness which had never awakened before” she is able
to move forward with her life—and not only embrace Rosamond, but the
object of her now un-deluded passion, Will Ladislaw (748).
After her expansion of consciousness, Dorothea realizes her life will nev-
er be the same: “What should I do now—how should I act now?” she asks
herself (1994:750). She realizes that she must be “more helpful”, and yearns
to do right in those lives that are influenced by her own. It is at this moment
of self-realization that “There was a light piercing into the room. She opened
the curtains and looked towards the bit of road that lay in view” (750). This
blinding revelation is comparable to that of mystics or saints, for whom a
temporary suspension of sensory stimuli allows for a heightened appreciation
of the “oneness” of or unity with the sense of a greater power of the universe.
In this instant of illumination, she feels compassion for all creation; the in-
sight into her own feelings leads her to realize those of others, and the pain
that underlies most of human existence. The individual isolated sense of self
becomes overwhelmed with the larger apprehension of an all-embracing
environmental unity of being.
In her supreme altruism, Dorothea becomes aware of the oneness of all
things, and how she can influence that united world: the boundaries between
self and other dissolve. Her self becomes a part of the “involuntary, palpitat-
ing life” with which, at the end of the novel, like a stream joining a subterra-
nean river, she merges and disappears as a definable individual. Her life has
been able to reveal an underlying truth. Action beyond the limits of the small
self is the ideal discussed in the works of Eliot’s partner G.H. Lewes. Lewes
writes in Problems of Life and Mind that “nothing exists in itself and for
itself; everything in others and for others […] hence the highest form is Al-
truism, or that moral and intellectual condition which is determined by the
fullest consciousness” (qt in Levine 1986: 197). His belief appears to be one
shared by Eliot, and, as George Levine writes of Dorothea: “The power of
her own feeling allows her to imagine the reality of other people’s feelings”
(1986: 196). Despite Eliot’s Preface in which she informs the reader that this
is the story of a Saint Theresa who is the “foundress of nothing” (8), Dor-
othea’s spiritual nature and her invisible influence “for the growing good of
the world” is beatific. She is ultimately like the spotless unstained shining
98 Beyond Bodies
steel of the pier glass, a central core of pure nourishment and altruism. Dor-
othea is reminiscent for the reader of other female characters, such as those in
Dickens or in Henry James—those enigmatic and mystical figures such as
Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove, whose beneficent influence pervades
the world even after their death. She is one of those “who live faithfully a
hidden life” (Eliot 1994: 613).
Inner and outer worlds: language and consciousness
The pier-glass analogy, together with George Eliot’s other images and com-
ments, allow the reader a glimpse into a profound reality. From the everyday
waking level of language (madhyama) the reader’s awareness is moved in the
direction of ever-subtler levels of language and appreciation, towards a level
of para, that “pure” yet vibrant silence beyond the surface of language.
In writing a novel of such depth and breadth that involves the unravelling
of so many layers of understanding and interpretation, Eliot is depicting the
hidden levels of the “inner self” in both her characters and in their society. “If
we had a keen vision,” writes Eliot in one of her narratorial commentaries,
“and a feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass
grow and the squirrels’ heart-beat”. If we had this deeper, more complete
perception—such as that in unity consciousness—we could apprehend “that
roar which lies on the other side of silence” (1994:144). Eliot seems to be
describing her realization of the inner reality that lies beyond the junction
point of pashyanti (activity) with para (silence). It is at this level—far be-
neath or beyond the scratches on the surface of the mirror—that actions,
events, and emotions begin to coalesce into a greater unity of name and form,
into a greater wholeness of meaning.
George Eliot’s extraordinary novel carves into the heart and mind of the
reader the reality of growth to higher states of consciousness. The reader is
allowed to be witness to Dorothea’s journey from ignorance in the everyday
waking state to the subtler and subtler levels of truth and reality—towards a
level of ego-less action, the state of sustained pure transcendental conscious-
ness.
The Lifted Veil: a metaphysical masking of consciousness
George Eliot’s novella The Lifted Veil involves concepts that remained im-
portant to George Eliot, and ideas that she wished her readers to take serious-
ly. The book was written at a time of personal strife for Eliot, her alienation
from her family as well as “respectable” society as a whole. Eliot was mar-
ginalized and reviled by society for living with the already-married George
Henry Lewes, and hence she was perceived as a threat to Victorian codes of
morality and social stability based on the family (Gray in Eliot 1985: 71).
In The Lifted Veil, George Eliot exposes and parodies many the attitudes
of her society. While safely distancing herself by using a male narrator, she is
able to assume a voice of patriarchal attitudes and portray the female sex as
she believes many men to see them. Latimer, the male protagonist and narra-
tor of the story, is able to perceive the thoughts of others, although his clair-
voyance, referred to as his “double consciousness” is an unwelcome and
unwanted experience. The altered state of consciousness as it is presented in
this text can also be analysed here in terms of a gendered approach to
knowledge: the male “scientific” approach given by Latimer, the protagonist
and narrator, and the female “intuitive” ways of gaining knowledge. George
Eliot herself, with her lively interest in science as it was rapidly expanding in
the mid-nineteenth century, expresses her interest in areas of “the unknown”
that may be uncovered through new scientific developments. 2 As a prescient
male, Latimer literally sees through the muddle of people’s minds, but, to his
disappointment, finds nothing worth knowing. The title of the work suggests
references to the “veil” as symbol of the great divide separating ignorance
from wisdom, spiritual blindness from sight, or life from death. Throughout
the short novel, Eliot continues the imagery of veiling. The “veiled woman”
as symbol of woman’s real nature runs parallel with the use of the veil in the
metaphysical sense: the covering of reality by the veil of ignorance. She uses
the image of the veil also in its meaning as a boundary:
which separates two distinct spheres: the phenomenal and the noumenal; cul-
ture and nature; two consciousnesses; life and death; public appearance and
private reality; conscious and unconscious impulses; past and present; present
and future. (Gilbert and Gubar 1979: 469)
2
An interest that is also an important theme of Middlemarch, both in Causabon's
search for a “key to all Mythologies” and in Dr Lydgate's fascination in new scientific
techniques in medicine.
100 Beyond Bodies
In the opening of The Lifted Veil, the reader discovers that Latimer, the narra-
tor, is “cursed with an exceptional mental character” (1).3 Thanks to this
clairvoyance, a “mental vision”, individuals can know what is taking place in
places they have never visited, and know “what is being thought or felt by
individuals of whose personality they had no previous knowledge” (Grey in
Eliot 1985: 83). While Latimer refers to his exceptional ability as a “curse”,
he furthermore is represented as a Faustian figure who “thirsted for the un-
known”. As he retells his life and its ultimate fate, like Faust he is weary of
his knowledge and wishes, “Oh God, let me stay with the known” (Eliot
1878/1985: 2).
But what, the reader is wondering, has happened to him that is so terrible?
Following a brief account of his childhood, his contemplative character and
his early—and shocking—experience of foreseeing a future scene in his trav-
els to Prague, the most horrific event of his life is revealed. He has had a
vision of a woman:
. . . a tall, slim, willowy figure, with luxuriant blond hair, arranged in cun-
ning braids and folds that looked almost too massive for the slight figure
and the small featured, thin-lipped face they crowned. [ . . .] The pale green
dress, and the green leaves that seemed to form a border about her pale
blond hair, made me think of a Water-Nixie--for my mind was full of Ger-
man lyrics, and this pale, fatal-eyed woman, with the green weeds, looked
like a birth from some cold sedgy-stream, the daughter of an aged river. (El-
iot 1985: 16)
This passage is dense with connotation and allusions that are useful to discuss
the portrayal of women in the novel. The first jarring element in the descrip-
tion of the “lady . . . of no more than twenty” is the word “cunning”. Against
her frailness, a virtue for Victorian woman, her hair is coiled and “cunning”,
immediately suggesting the appearance of a blond Medusa, with snake-like
3
This extreme negative view of his condition is perhaps taken by the narrator in order
for Eliot to protect herself from criticism, for she was in fact very interested in the
subjects of mesmerism and phrenology that were in vogue in England at the time.
Phrenology involved the psychological and scientific reading of character from exam-
ining the shape and contours of the skull. Phrenologists also questioned the relation-
ship between inherent cerebral characteristics and moral capacity—a topic that fasci-
nated Eliot, since she herself had been deemed suffering from a “morbid mental aber-
ration” when she went to live with the already-married George Henry Lewes. Wide-
spread interest in phrenology’s abilities was current up until the end of the nineteenth
century, as was mesmerism, although both remained controversial.
curls. Then, the narrator emphasises her pallor and “green” clothes that sug-
gest to him a “water-nixie”, a supernatural elf or sprite. This rhetoric is remi-
niscent of Rochester’s description of Jane Eyre. But, as Beryl Grey points
out, “there is neither innocence not kindness” associated with the ghostly
figure (1985: 74). She is “fatal-eyed”, suggesting both that she is diseased
and dying and that, like Medusa, her gaze is fatal to those who look at her.
She is reminiscent of Keats’s Belle Dame Sans Merci, a consumptive or
syphilitic and deadly figure, a comparison particularly apt as the woman
“looked like a birth from some cold sedgy-stream” (1985: 74).
In her book Venomous Women, Margaret Hallissy outlines the archetype
of female power and the male fear of that power, epitomised in legend by
Circe, Medea and Lamia.4 She elucidates
The image of the venomous woman depends on a combination of misogy-

nist notions and traditional role expectations; in other words, evil women
stand as representatives for all women. […] Added to this […] is the long-
held belief that sex debilitates men and is metaphorically poisonous in being
physically harmful. Making the potion becomes a metaphor for being seduc-
tive and women in general, not only poisoners, are harmful. (1987: xiii)
Yet despite the warnings of this vision, Latimer plunges headlong into a
desire to own and tame, that is to say, marry, Bertha Grant. Like many men
before him, from Perseus on, he believes his superior intellect will be able to
suppress the natural, sensual, power of woman. (It is also interesting to note
that the “demon” woman is, like Charlotte Brontë’s mad wife in the attic,
named Bertha.) Despite Latimer’s “abnormal sensibility” of being able to
read the minds of others, initially Bertha is the one being whose inner
thoughts he is unable to penetrate. “About Bertha”, Latimer reveals, “I was
always in a state of uncertainty […] she had for me the fascination of an
unravelled destiny” (21). Bertha therefore retains the allure of being “my
ocean of mystery in the dreary desert of knowledge” (26).
No matter how ardently he pursues her (she is at first unavailable as en-
gaged to his brother), his feeling of unease remains, until it climaxes with a
4
In Greek mythology, female characters such as Medusa or Circe are the archetypes
for this role of woman. They appear frequently in Victorian painting, especially in
Pre-Raphaelite art. For example paintings such as John W. Waterhouse’s Circe, La
Belle Dames Sans Merci and Edward Burne-Jones’s The Beguiling of Merlin (1874),
all display the Victorian fascination with bewitching women: women with supernatu-
ral powers over men.
102 Beyond Bodies
premonition of their married life together. While visiting an art gallery, Lati-
mer gazes at a painting of Lucrezia Borgia, “fascinated by the terrible reality
of that cunning, relentless face, till I felt I felt a strange poisoned sensation,
as if I had long been inhaling a fatal odour” (28). Soon after, while still re-
covering from the “gaze of Lucrezia Borgia”, Latimer has a vision of an
incident many years in the future. Bertha, now his wife, enters the room
where he is sitting, where a “white marble medallion of the dying Cleopatra”
on the mantelpiece catches his eye. Then:
Bertha was entering with a candle in her hand—Bertha, my wife—with cruel

eyes, with green jewels and green leaves on her white ball-dress, every hateful
thought within her present to me . . . “Madman, idiot! Why don’t you kill
yourself then?” It was a moment of hell. (Eliot 1985: 29)
The references to both Lucrezia Borgia and Cleopatra associate Bertha with
poisons and man’s instinctive loathing of all things reptilian. Like a Medusa,
the gaze of Lucrezia Borgia, the famous Italian poisoner, creates in him a
“strange intoxicating numbness” (28), as if he has been literally poisoned by
her look. Latimer is also threatened by the reversal of “the male gaze”. Freud
asserts that the gaze is a masculine entitlement—for a woman to usurp his
rightful gaze suggests something unnatural or uncanny.5 Latimer’s clairvoy-
ance can be regarded as the intrusive male gaze par excellence, and hence his
fear of women taking over that power is even greater.
Latimer’s vision continues with more serpentine imagery:
She came with her candle and stood over me with a bitter smile of contempt, I
saw the great emerald brooch on her bosom, a studded serpent with diamond
eyes. I shuddered—I despised this woman with the barren soul and mean
thoughts; but I felt helpless before her, as if she clutched my bleeding heart,
and would clutch it till the last drop of life-blood ebbed away. (Eliot 1984: 29)
The emerald green brooch depicting a serpent at her breast harks back to
Latimer’s statue of the dying Cleopatra, while also alluding to Bertha’s own
poisonous nature—the snake being both upon and within her heart. Yet, una-
ble to read her thoughts, for many years Latimer continues to live in ignorant
bliss of her real character, until one evening “the veil which had shrouded
5
See Freud’s essay on “Das Unheimlich”, the Uncanny, or more literally that which is
“not at home”.
Bertha’s soul from me—had made me find in her alone among my fellow-
beings the blessed possibility of mystery, and doubt and expectation—was
first withdrawn” (48). At last, seeing “all around the narrow room of this
woman’s soul”, he realises nothing but “petty artifice and mere negation […]
systematic coquetry and scheming selfishness”. He sees her as a woman
inflicting pain “only for the sake of wreaking itself” (49). Yet in this moment
of revelation, he also becomes aware that Bertha is troubled with a terror of
him. She “meditated continually on how the incubus could be shaken off her
life—how she could be freed from this hateful bond to a being whom she at
once despised as an imbecile, and dreaded as an inquisitor” (1984: 51).
If the novel were written from Bertha’s viewpoint, as we briefly are given
access to here, we see Latimer as a male voyeur, a kind of Nosferatu, leering
hungrily not only over the body, but the mind of his wife. Here perhaps is
voice of George Eliot’s own opinion, interjecting into her male narrator’s
viewpoint. Several of Eliot’s other novels centre on the problem of strong
women trapped within loveless marriages, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda
most particularly. Indeed, Latimer’s terrible vision into Bertha’s mind could
be regarded as merely a gender-reversal of Dorothea Brooke’s insight into
her husband Casaubon’s soul, where she finds only sterility and death.
Eventually, Bertha comes to see Latimer in his library, just as his vision
had predicted. Yet Latimer wonders, “Why did she stand before me with the
candle in her hand, with her cruel contemptuous eyes fixed on me, and the
glittering serpent, like a familiar demon, on her breast?” (53). Their mutual
hatred excludes any possibility of real communication, and Latimer is briefly
able to read her thoughts, her desire for his death. Despite Latimer’s weak
nature, he refuses to kill himself, since he considers suicide is a woman’s
method of death. He prefers his self-inflicted inner torment, in which he pro-
jects the cause for all his miseries onto Bertha. When Bertha does at last
decide on a desperate course to remove him from her life, it is not a sign of
insanity, any more than it is in Lady Audley’s fight for survival. As George
Eliot’s heroine Gwendolen Harleth in Daniel Deronda explains, women are:
“brought up like the flowers, to look pretty as we can, and be dull without
complaining. […But] the plants often get bored, and that is the reason why
some of them have got poisonous”. (Eliot: 2009: 110)
Meanwhile, Bertha brings a new maid into the house, one who will help her,
as we discover, plot to poison her husband. (Poison is woman’s secret weap-
on: the weapon that even Latimer’s clairvoyance cannot detect.) Soon after,
104 Beyond Bodies
however, the maid dies, and Latimer and his friend Doctor Meunier perform
a bizarre operation to test the effects of giving a blood transfusion to the fresh
corpse. The maid’s corpse suddenly becomes animate, rising up from the bed
and casting its eyes upon Bertha cries, “You mean to poison your hus-
band!”(65). Latimer appears to have won.
In Latimer, George Eliot successfully conveys events through a character
who exemplifies the misogyny and fear of women inherent in the Victorian
world. According to the poststructuralist critic Jean Baudrillard, it is not only
woman in her sexual nature that man fears, but woman in her metaphorical
role of “guardian of the void” or the absolute. In Seduction (1984),
Baudrillard describes woman is representative of the “door” or veil between
man and the void. In The Lifted Veil, the narrator Latimer initially reveals
that the reason he curses his “double consciousness” is because “I foresee
when I shall die” (Eliot 1985:1). He has a glimpse into the abyss: and this
deadly void is associated with Bertha (and the blank of the mind he cannot
read). Victorian patriarchy, a society obsessed with death, and the desire to
know what happens to consciousness after death, enforced strict oppressive
forces against the liberation of women. Where Latimer “thirsts for the un-
known” he is aware he is letting himself be influenced by the unknown forces
of nature—both birth and death. The seductive Bertha leads Latimer to the
edge of the void and then, since he is not able to penetrate her “soul”, she
leaves him there, in a state of suspended animation—a living death. Latimer
himself “tastes something of the horror that belongs to the lot of a human
being whose nature is not adjusted to simple human conditions” (Eliot 1985:
17).
This fear of going beyond quotidian reality is the central theme of The
Lifted Veil. Baudrillard argues that it is safer to stay with the simulacrum than
going beyond to find what—if anything—lies beneath. He comments, “One
does not want to dispel appearances (the seduction of images). But if one
does, it is imperative that one does not succeed lest the absence of truth be-
come manifest.” He concludes by quoting Nietzsche, “We do not believe that
the truth remains true once the veil has been lifted” (Baudrillard 1984: 74). 6
6
The use of Baudrillard’s theories in this chapter may invoke criticisms of anachro-
nism, since his concepts are written in the context of the late 20th century consumer
society. However, this transhistorical reading is illuminating, as “postmodernist”
ideas, defamiliarisation and deconstruction, were already circulating in the late 19th
century. One need only cite the essays of Oscar Wilde (a tremendous deconstructor of
artistic and moral ideals) and his aphorisms which open The Picture of Dorian Gray,
In Eliot’s story, the implications also are that the veil is better left unlifted.
Latimer’s nightmare reaches its height at the “terrible moment of illumina-
tion” when the cover is removed (Eliot 1985: 40).
If the theme derives from Eliot’s own experience of going beyond the
pale of socially acceptable behaviour, for which her family disowned her, the
theme of the abyss of alienation is both literal and metaphorical. Eliot uses
the story of Latimer’s “curse” or unique ability that places him outside nor-
mal society to express her moral conflict and her yearning for acceptance in
the face of her own “visionary excursions into the forsaken and the un-
known” (Eliot 1985: 89,72).7
The broader implications of society’s fear of both women and transcend-
ence of surface appearance are crucial, and throughout the novel, Eliot uses
the imagery of veiling to explore a theme that she considered of the utmost
importance. That the literal veiling of women, the closeting of women within
Victorian society and homes, and the “silencing of women” can be associated
with her choice of metaphor is no coincidence. The novel itself contains a
sub-narrative of Eliot’s own commentary upon the limited discourse of Vic-
torian England. Her theme attacks both the limited perceptions of the intellec-
tual/scientific world, as well as the severely restricted patriarchal mind. Yet
the text highlights certain ongoing problems of the human mind’s eternal
search for meaning and an understanding of consciousness. Is the state of
human ignorance in fact desirable? Can mankind live without the need for
mystery? As Latimer ruminates:
So absolute is our soul’s need of something hidden and uncertain for the
maintenance of that doubt and hope and effort which are the breath of its life,
that if the whole future were laid bare to us beyond today, the interest of all
mankind would be bent on the hours that lie between; we should pant for the
uncertainties of our one morning and our one afternoon […] Conceive the
condition of the human mind if all propositions whatsoever were self-evident
except one, which was to become self-evident at the close of a summer’s day,
but in the meantime might be the subject of question, of hypothesis, of debate.
or indeed, the work of the German expressionist and Art Nouveau art movements.
Michel Foucault also points out that twentieth century poststructuralists were plagued
by the possibility they were merely repeating the nineteenth century (Foucault 1978:
3-13).
7
Similarly, Gilbert and Gubar find several biographical similarities between Latimer
and Eliot herself (1979: 447-8).
106 Beyond Bodies
Art and philosophy, literature and science, would fasten like bees on that one
proposition which had the honey of probability in it, and would be the more
eager because their enjoyment would end at sunset. (1985:29)
If metaphysical mysteries and the “problem” of consciousness are resolved, it

would seem that, according to Latimer’s logic, some contravention of the
laws of nature has taken place—a situation parallel to the violation of both
human and women’s rights in the final deathbed scene of the novel. Lati-
mer’s “all-knowingness” is in fact another expression of ignorance—a lack of
understanding of himself and inability to feel empathy towards others, and
most importantly, unawareness about the workings of the cosmic laws of
nature, the universal nature of consciousness itself. Latimer is ultimately
driven out of human society, wandering the earth like the monster created by
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in the grip of an eternal sense of horror, para-
doxically awaiting only for that one remaining question or “proposition” to
be answered: for the “Unknown Presence” to be revealed from behind the
“moving curtain of earth and sky” (42).
In The Lifted Veil, one distorted augmentation of the mind leads to a cur-
tailment in the quality of life, and the diminishment of involvement in or
empathy for one’s fellow creatures on earth. The fact that Latimer has full
knowledge of others should imply an improved sense of morality. Latimer’s
limited insight into the minds and hearts of others is in fact an intentional
parody of human development to more expanded “higher” levels of con-
sciousness. His experience of negative growth is the opposite of Dorothea
Brook’s expansive and enlightening path to greater humanity: “the fullest
consciousness” (Lewes in Levine 1986: 197) lived for “the growing good of
the world”.
The Victorian woman in action
In analyzing the question of woman and consciousness in Victorian women

writers we have found that repeatedly the possibility of personal revelations
within consciousness are set against, or come at moments of, recognition of
social suffering. While reflecting that the personal is also social, these in-
stances also endorse an understanding that group consciousness is comprised
of individual consciousnesses and that the quality of one reflects and impacts
on the other: the personal and the political are not only intellectually coupled,
but on the level of the (quantum) physical world, they are also mutually de-
pendent.
Individual suffering is both caused by and linked to society’s suffering.

Both Dorothea in Middlemarch and Margaret Hale in Elizabeth Gaskell’s
North and South are survivors who, through gaining self-knowledge, triumph
over personal weakness and social judgement. They can be contrasted to
those women steeped in victimised suffering: Witness for example, the effect
of the community of St Ogg’s on the doomed Maggie Tulliver in Eliot’s Mill
on the Floss. Unable to rise above their social condemnation, Maggie (like
Gaskell’s Ruth in the eponymous novel) is punished for her supposedly im-
moral past actions by despair and death. The suggestion here is that personal
moral fortitude predisposes for a chance of revelatory moments of unity be-
tween self and society—individual and group consciousness. In The Mill on
the Floss, Eliot enunciates her despair through the stern voice of Mr Wakem,
who declares, “‘We don’t ask what a woman does—we ask to whom she
belongs’” (1995: 381). Here we hear the articulated scream of Victorian
women’s hope that this definition can and will be changed through the power
of women’s collective consciousness. Light and hope are possibilities where
suffering does not overwhelm awareness, and the mind remains open to ap-
preciate how self and other are not only linked but identical.
For those who relate such identities in religious or spiritual terms, this
type of experience has sometimes been described in terms of the “dark night
of the soul” or a via negativa, the path of negation, for, as these authors iden-
tify, the moments of greatest light are often most clearly seen within the
deepest darkness. In Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, Margaret Hale’s
slow but inexorable progress towards understanding the role she must fulfil
in society ensures that when happiness is realized, it is as a result of self-
knowledge. In the hope of finding some solace or meaning in all the hard-
ships she has witnessed and lived through, Margaret returns to her old family
home in Helstone, the scene of her former happy existence before her move
to the industrial North. Finding so much changed, and that she herself has
altered too radically to find the spiritual comfort she craves, she reaches a
point of deep weariness:
A sense of change, of individual nothingness, of perplexity and disappoint-

ment, overpowered Margaret. Nothing had been the same; and this slight, all-
pervading instability had given her greater pain than if all had been too entire-
ly changed for her to recognize it. (Gaskell 1994: 370)
An overwhelming realization of transience, however, brings the most pro-

found insight, for within the very thought that “everything is always chang-
108 Beyond Bodies
ing” lies the affirmative word “always”. Permanence exists. Thus she rea-
sons:
“I begin to understand now what heaven must be—and, oh! The grandeur and
repose of those words—‘The same yesterday, today, and forever.’ Everlasting!
‘From everlasting to everlasting, Thou art God.’ That sky above me looks as
though it could not change, and yet it will. I am so tired—so tired of being
whirled on through all these phases of life, in which nothing abides by me, no
creature, no place; it is like the circle in which the victims of earthly passion
eddy continually. […] I am in the mood in which women of another religion
take the veil. I seek heavenly steadfastness in earthly monotony”. (Gaskell
1994: 370)
Relating her own dilemma to one of the hellish punishments in Dante’s In-
ferno, it is at this point of giving up that she renounces her attachment to any
outcomes and thus frees herself to gain full understanding. Her conscious
mind is enabled for her moment of epiphany. She awakes next morning:
“After all it is right”, said she, hearing the voices of children at play while she
was dressing. “If the world stood still it would retrograde, and become corrupt
[…] Looking out of myself, and my own painful sense of change, the progress
all around me is right and necessary. I must not think so much of how circum-
stances affect me myself, as how they affect others.” (Gaskell 1994: 370-71)
This passage may bring echoes for today’s reader of T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gid-
ding”, where the sound of unseen children’s laughter in the rose garden trig-
gers a sudden moment of revelation. The poet’s spiritual breakthrough takes
the form of an appreciation of permanence, of now being always, and con-
cludes with the mystic Saint Julian of Norwich’s words, “And all shall be
well; And all manner of thing shall be well” (T.S. Eliot 1958). Despite the
years (and contexts) that separate these works, the words closely resonate
with Margaret’s affirmation: “After all it is right”. The welfare of others, not
herself, must be the centre of her universe, yet she has simultaneously experi-
enced that her own consciousness can be the “still point” of that turning
world. For Margaret, that realisation brings the blessings of not only self-
knowledge, but also fulfilment of her personal, passionate, desires. Through
overcoming and reconciling opposing qualities—embodied by her apparent
antithesis, Richard Thornton—she finds her real home, and true love.
Chapter Five
Shifts into quantum consciousness:

Virginia Woolf’s moments of being
“Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems,”

writes Virginia Woolf in her famous essay A Room of One’s Own (1928: 6).
Despite such doubts raised by the women writers themselves, literary critics
such as R. Brimley Johnson present a clear picture of the “feminine novelist
of the twentieth century”, who had abandoned realism and was now reformu-
lating fiction: “She does not accept observed revelation. She is seeking, with
passionate determination, for that Reality which is behind the material, the
things that matter, spiritual things, ultimate Truth” (1966: 147).
Disillusioned by wars, frustrated in the attempts at suffrage, many women
yet again withdrew within to explore inner dimensions of reality in order to
explain external chaos and to formulate new modes of spirituality and ways
of being in the world. The interior female experience constitutes a constant
battle with inner and outer forms, with having to be defined by and to negoti-
ate society’s bifurcated gendered existence. Many female writers, were, in
fact embracing ever more exploratory and deep-seeking social and sexual
encounters and spiritual practices, yet for many, literature was the chosen
path for investigating the problematic negotiations between inner and outer
realities that characterised women’s lives.
Twentieth century revolutions in thought
Literature, science, and art simultaneously underwent a transformation in

thought—a paradigm shift—in the early years of the twentieth century. At
about the same time that science relinquished a belief in the certainty of some
underlying vital essence to all biological living creatures, the idea of life (and
history) as a unitary, meaningful narrative, collapsed. Perhaps the two most
important discoveries at any time of human evolution are those of Darwin
and the founders of quantum physics. The former changed the way “man” is
110 Beyond Bodies
understood, and the latter our understanding of the universe. Both theories
together proved forever that “no man is an island”, that the overlapping and
interactions of physical realities bind us together in time and space.
In the last decade of the nineteenth century, William James’s revolution-
ary treatise The Principles of Psychology (published 1890) had launched into
the world the mysterious depths of consciousness as a major field of study.
Human thought, according to James, resembled the ever-changing nature of a
stream: a concept that was to revolutionise techniques of writing as well as
how the structure of the human mind and identity were henceforward to be
perceived. Consequently, the psycho-analysts Freud and Jung; the physicists
Bohr, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, through to Bell and Wheeler; and the sym-
bolists and modernist writers and artists, all transformed the way we looked
at human consciousness for ever. Freud and Jung famously focussed on the
problematic dream state of consciousness or relegated consciousness to a
mire of the ultimately unknowable, with areas of the unconscious mind not
accessible to direct experience. Associated with hysteria, sexuality and sup-
pressed memory, their catalogue of traumatic psycho-physiological illnesses
and key ideas on the nature and structure of the mind spawned many popular
misconceptions, further muddling definitions of consciousness.
At the time of the greatest revolutions in the history of ideas, the intellec-
tual breakdown of certainties was certainly part of the agenda of many artists,
writers and scientists, both male and female.
The “New Woman” of the twentieth century
It was not only women authors, however, who desperately sought to chal-
lenge the late Victorian or early Edwardian social status quo. Arguably one
of the greatest iconoclasts of society and sexuality, Oscar Wilde died just as
the twentieth century was being born. Wilde (although sometimes unpopular
himself with the Feminist movement) can in many instances be read as an
unlikely champion of women’s rights—by exposing society’s double stand-
ards. His character Hester in A Woman of No Importance, for example, ar-
gues:
“Don’t have one law for men and another for women. You are unjust to wom-
en in England. And till you count what is shame in a woman to be infamy in a
man, you will always be unjust, and Right that pillar of fire, and Wrong, that
pillar of cloud, will be made to dim your eyes, or not be seem at all, or if seen,
not regarded.” (Wilde 2000: 242)
Shifts into quantum consciousness: Woolf’s moments of being 111
Hester, as an American “outsider”, is able to be a vital voice of criticism

of English society. She speaks with natural and honest sincerity, without
satire or silliness; eventually she becomes the saving grace of other damaged
and socially-reviled women in the play. Wilde creates a “New Woman”
without mockery. In other works, Wilde subverts concepts of social norms of
both male and female roles—as if anticipating Butler’s late twentieth-century
formulation of gender as a performance. The “female” characters of Salomé,
Lady Bracknell, and Mabel Chiltern, for example, are all androgynous, if not
bisexual, or transsexual, or transvestite cross-dressers. Their sexuality and
gender remain open to performative, and entertaining, interpretation.
Wilde’s fin de siècle challenge to deconstruct gender was taken up with
alacrity by women writers, eventually exemplified in Woolf’s Orlando in
1928. In the early decades of the century, writers such as Virginia Woolf and
others (for example Radcliffe Hall) dismantled previously conceived, tradi-
tional, notions of how emotion, language and the physical body interact,
challenging the interrelationship of human physiology and consciousness.
Their fiction forged innovations into how to express fundamental human
experience through emotional, often sexual, encounters. Virginia Woolf sub-
verts gender ambiguities while wrestling with the nature of consciousness
itself, famously creating new modes of expression and style. (Through their
own personal lives, Wilde and Woolf also challenged the contemporary dic-
tates of monogamy and heterosexuality: both married yet found more fulfil-
ment in same-sex relationships.)
In her essay “Professions for Women” (delivered as a lecture in 1931),
Woolf demanded the death of “the Angel in the House” syndrome and the
associated guilt many women felt in pursuing occupations not confined to the
nurturing of others. She describes the qualities of the perfect self-sacrificing
woman as an illusion, a “phantom” of an idea of woman that in literature was
“written by a man” (Woolf 1993: 4). Empowering and urging women to
break free of illusory definitions of womanhood, Woolf concluded that a
woman must have not only a room, but a mind of her own. Women writers,
in particular, must be roused from the “state of unconsciousness”, for now
“the trance was over”, they should no longer be “impeded by the extreme
conventionality of the other sex” (1993: 7). It is the occupation of a woman
writer, she claims, to kill the Angel: “Had I not killed her, she would have
killed me” (1993: 4).
112 Beyond Bodies
As a means of channeling her own anger, the violence and negativity in

Virginia Woolf’s prose are expressions through which her “version of female
aestheticism and androgyny, sexual identity is polarised and all the disturb-
ing, dark, and powerful aspects of femaleness are projected onto maleness”
(Showalter 1997: 264).
Virginia Woolf’s radical writing
In A Literature of their Own, Elaine Showalter cites Virginia Woolf as being

amongst the first writers living a truly androgynous life, able to balance in
both her personal relationships and through her art, the expression of both
sides of her personality, male and female, creating her “androgynous vision”
(Showalter 1997: 263). Yet this androgyny, as Showalter continues to argue,
was just one more “myth” of women about themselves—a means to avoid
confrontation with her inner, painful, reality—a complex and torturous sub-
jectivity that would pervade Woolf’s fictional representations of women
struggling against themselves and society’s demands. For Woolf, living with-
in the mores and codes of the radically free-living Bloomsbury group of art-
ists, writers, philosophers and critics, the spiritual life and the ability to main-
tain her freedom of sexuality in relationships was accepted as a core tenet.
Virginia Woolf, a victim of recurrent bouts of self-destructive insanity1
that plagued her throughout her adult life, regarded this experience as central
to her ability as a writer, as she explained in a letter to Ethel Smyth:
“As an experience, madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed
at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of
one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets as sanity does. And the six
months—not three—that I lay in bed taught me a good deal about what is
called oneself.” (qt Clark 2009: 5)
Since the episodes of “madness” (now thought to be a bi-polar disorder) and

the treatments involving long periods of inactivity caused her such unhappi-
1
Nigel Nicholson writes in his Introduction to the Letters of 1912 to 1922: “Virginia
was mad, self-dangerously mad, for about three months in 1913, and attempted sui-
cide by swallowing 100 grains of veronal when Leonard was absent from the house.
Sixteen months later she had another attack, even more serious. […] She emerged
from the tunnels weakened but sane. Her subsequent off-hand references to them give
no idea of the agony she endured in passing through them.” (Nicholson and Tra-
utmann 1976: xv).
ness, it is uncertain how disingenuous this comment may be. Critics have
linked Woolf’s episodes of madness with her inability to overcome the deaths
in her family—especially with the loss of mother, father and her brother—yet
these losses were but the final end of battles, according to Elaine Showalter,
with both her father (“a patriarchal villain”) and her female identity. Her
eventual suicide can thus be read by feminists, as “a triumphant overthrow of
maleness” (1997: 265) and possibly her revenge against her husband. Her
madness has been related to some kind of interior battle between the princi-
ples of male and femaleness, both of which were fraught with anxieties for
her. Glimpsing transcendence through non-alignment with either gender
identity may have guided her in the intuitive recognition of the importance of
an inner subjectivity beyond physiological definition. Androgyny may offer
some means of temporary escape, yet the dive deep into consciousness holds
a tantalising potential for escaping the superficial masks of sexual identity.
Yet how is it possible to make this dive? Is it experiential or merely tex-
tual? One of the clearest answers to these questions appears in a revealing
text, not by Woolf herself, but in Michael Cunningham’s re-imagined charac-
ter of Virginia Woolf in The Hours, in which pure consciousness and creativ-
ity collide and are cogently described:
She will write for an hour or so, then eat something. […] This is one of the
most singular experiences, waking on what feels like a good day, preparing to
work but not yet actually embarked. At this moment there are infinite possibil-
ities, whole hours ahead. Her mind hums. This morning she may penetrate the
obfuscation, the clogged pipes, to reach the gold. She can feel it inside her, an
all but indescribable second self, or rather a parallel, purer self. If she were re-
ligious, she could call it the soul. It is more than the sum of her intellect and
her emotions, more than the sum of her experiences, though it runs like veins
of brilliant metal through all three. It is an inner faculty that recognizes the an-
imating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same substance, and
when she is very fortunate she is able to write directly through that faculty.
Writing in that state is the most profound satisfaction that she knows, but her
access to it comes and goes without warning. (Cunningham 1998: 34-35)
Describing the “inner faculty” of creativity, this segment invokes the exciting
“infinite possibilities” inherent within accessing the unlimited creative poten-
tial within pure consciousness when the mind settles down into its own na-
ture. The moment is created in the story when Virginia retreats from the
household to her study and “quietly closes the door. Safe.” She has eaten
nothing and feels “quick and clean, clearheaded” (Cunningham 1998: 34), the
114 Beyond Bodies
ideal state of her physiology to reach calmer and more settled states of func-
tioning. The mind can then easily gain increasing silence, clear of disturbance
from within or without, and gradually transcend thought. The most settled
state of pure consciousness, linking mind, body, and matter, is depicted as the
state of “gold”—brilliance, richness, certainty—the state of perfect equilibri-
um and silence out of which inspired activity will emerge. The “room of her
own” here becomes a metaphor of transcendence.
Escapes into consciousness
Ensuring Woolf’s powerful and lasting literary influence, A Room of One’s

Own exposed for a new generation of women the connections between gen-
der, social positioning and creativity—linking the ability to be fulfilled in
terms of gender with intellectual rather than domestic achievement. Being an
authentic woman thus became a matter of the mind rather than only the body.
Woolf propelled women out of the attic, the nursery or the kitchen and into
the solitary room where—alone—she might find her true identity. While it
may be a truism to state that the inner journey to self-knowledge is necessari-
ly one of solitude, yet it is the relationship of individual to society that we
have seen as the core of a developed consciousness—the awareness that even
the enlightened sage must bring benefit to the larger wholeness of communi-
ty.
Among women at the turn of the twentieth century, largely due to their
growing dissatisfaction, the desire and demand for a separate female sphere
of creative activity began to take hold. By the First World War, the gulf be-
tween genders seemed to widen rather than diminish due to the controversial
nature of suffrage and the encroachment of women into the male world of
work and responsibility. The forces oppressing women were more visible and
tangible, yet not weakened by the light of exposure. Indeed, first wave femi-
nists were concerned not only to improve individual women’s lives but also
to change the social conditions of all classes, especially the poor and vulner-
able for whom education, health, and freedom from all types of molestation
(including from sexually-transmitted and contagious diseases) were largely
unavailable. Together with the ability to vote, gained the previous year in
1928, the publication of A Room of One’s Own marks a major turning point
for women, which raised them out of material, social, and intellectual oppres-
sion. Like Jane Austen’s famously cynical claim in Pride and Prejudice that
the “universal truth” most pertinent to women involves pecuniary advance-
ment (in this case, Mr Bingley’s “four or five thousand a year”) so too Vir-
ginia Woolf defines women’s mental liberation in terms of a more modest
“five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door” (103). Happier (and
less sinister perhaps) is her friend E.M. Forster’s suggestion that the room
should also have a view.
More than any other twentieth century writer, Virginia Woolf centralises
debates around gender issues and the problematic search for more profound
experience of consciousness—one that will liberate her from suffering. Trag-
ically, of course, her ultimate bid for freedom took the form of suicide at-
tempts. Whether based on feelings of guilt, depression, inadequacy, or fear,
or of a sense of “failed” womanhood, her suicide appears to endorse her ini-
tial negative vision of the “tyranny” of gender expectation in A Room of
One’s Own.2 From a more exalted and academic perspective, Showalter
(1977: 280) discusses how Virginia’s depression had its source in “female
experience”, aggravated in the abhorred rest cures, and that:
2
If one visits Monk’s House near Lewes today (the house in which the Woolfs were
living at the time of her death), one is struck by the quietness and serenity of the
gardens, including Virginia’s secluded writing-shed in one corner (also the retreat
where she relaxed with friends such as E.M. Forster), which enjoy the idyllic location
overlooking the undulating green sweep of the South Downs. The site and source of
her death, the river Ouse, is not immediately visible but some minutes’ walk away
along the footpath through the fields. Virginia’s private bedroom is separate from the
house’s main drawing room and kitchen, and, with its narrow single bed, is simply
furnished with a desk and some bookshelves. The room is framed by the large win-
dows that only marginally separate the interior—filled with light—from the exterior
profusion of flowers, rose bushes and lawns that surround it. Virginia’s own room, it
turns out, looks out onto a riot of colour, with a background of insect-life and bird-
song—a nature sanctuary that for most would be an inspiring “green thought in a
green shade” rather than a place for gloom and melancholy introspection. Significant-
ly, the visitors to the house at the time of my own visit (June 2012) were largely en-
gaged in discussing questions of Woolf’s suicide—the place she entered the river,
where and how much later was the body found (in fact, it took two weeks for the body
to surface in Lewes), and the fact that she had apparently attempted a similar suicide
by drowning some days before. Sadly, in the general discussion that took place in the
kitchen with the well-informed guide, few of the visitors seemed interesting in her
works. In contrast, the guide mentioned intriguing theories relating to Woolf’s recent
tragedies of her house in London being bombed in the War and her consequent fears
of a Nazi occupation of England—moreover, as liberal academics, the Woolfs knew
they were on a hit-list of undesirables—a horrific future faced them if the invasion of
Britain was successful. (My thanks to the current guides and curators of Monks House
and apologies for my failure to name them individually here.)
116 Beyond Bodies
Deprived of the use of her womanhood, denied the power of manhood, she
sought a serene androgynous “oneness”, an embrace of eternity that was inevi-
tably an embrace of death. […] In recognizing that the quest for androgyny
was Woolf’s solution to her existential dilemma, we should not confuse flight
with liberation. (1977: 280)
This seems a sad conclusion, confirming the gender conflict within Virginia’s
life and bestowing it with a bitter pathos given her materially comfortable
existence within a group of supportive friends and relatives for whom bisex-
uality, homosexuality, and cross-dressing were frequently the norm, as were
all variations and permutations of relationships (for example, the Carrington
and Lytton Strachey household). The Bloomsbury group, artists and writers
alike, even today appear unique in their manner of living their personal be-
liefs of society’s relationship to art. For Woolf, literature and writing were
part of her sexuality and her exploration of sense of self. Her sexual orienta-
tion may have been ambiguous (or, like Orlando’s gender, free to shift and
change), but her writing remained always “feminine”—written through the
female body and part of the tradition of women writers throughout time and
history.
Woolf’s novel Orlando certainly epitomises the playfulness and liberating
quality of gender possibilities that she was experiencing at that time in her
life. Critics have highlighted the many circumstances in which Woolf uses
clothing as a means of determining gender choice; yet clearly, she intuits that
consciousness is not only androgynous, but beyond the superficial expres-
sions or decisions of gender role play. Orlando, both as novel and character,
certainly continues the legacy of Wilde’s androgynous Dorian Gray, with the
clandestine nature of such an existence now exposed into the more healthy air
of personal pastiche and private laughter replacing Wilde’s ennui and des-
pair. For many, Orlando remains the quintessential feminist text of empow-
erment, connecting Woolf as creative writer and theoretician (Watkins 2001:
188). The novel epitomises the agency of writing story as a means of model-
ling subjectivity into meaningful selves independent of socio-historical limi-
tations. Watkins praises the novel as being “simultaneously deconstructive
and reconstructive” in its feminist strategy, and as a playful questioning of
previously stable conventions and rules of biography, fiction, sexuality, gen-
der, and identity (2001: 119-110). Ambiguities and self-questioning are rel-
ished, as in the novel’s first sentence that claims “He—for there could be no
doubt as to his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise
it, was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor…” (Woolf 2003: 5). Simul-
taneously disproving its own premise, through the raising of doubt, this
opens the way to the whole of sexuality being confusing role-play. Even after
changing sex, and becoming a woman, “Orlando remained precisely as he
had been” (Woolf 2003: 67).
Moreover, “The narrator appears to suggest that at the most profound lev-
el there is some aspect of Orlando which remains fundamentally the same
throughout the experience, and implies that this is fundamentally ungen-
dered” (Watkins 2001: 111). Apparently only the externals have changed
(although Woolf gives no physical details), and consciousness—that which is
at the most profound level of identity— remains unchanged because beyond
gender definition. The fact that consciousness as a substrate of infinite intel-
ligence is both within and without the human mind/body, indicates that con-
sciousness transcends or is independent of gender.
Here, clothes define the man, or woman, as may be. Anything more pro-
found, Woolf appears to be saying, is either asexual or bisexual:
If we compare the picture of Orlando as a man with that of Orlando as a wom-

an we shall see that though both are undoubtedly one and the same person,
there are certain changes. The man looks the world full in the face […] The
woman takes a side-long glance at it, full of subtlety, even of suspicion. Had
they both worn the same clothes, it is possible that their outlook might have
been the same. […] Clothes are both the symbol of something hid deep be-
neath. (Woolf 2003: 92)
Yet having claimed that gender difference has both first and third person
correlatives: it is all a matter of how one looks out at the world (subjective),
and what one wears (objective), Woolf reduces sex distinctions to be the
petty differentiations in time taken to dress, and in choice of pastimes, and
the vulnerability of the emotions –then finally gives up the attempt at defini-
tion all together: “Whether, then, Orlando was most man or woman, it is
difficult to say and cannot now be decided” (Woolf 2003: 93). There are
more important things: “what she had come in search of—that is to say, life
and a lover” (93), with which to be concerned.
The stream of consciousness
Virginia Woolf’s works for which she is most highly praised are the increas-
ingly complex and experimental novels Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse
and The Waves. It is through these novels that Woolf is now regarded as the
118 Beyond Bodies
chief proponent in the development of the stream of consciousness technique.

This concept of consciousness as a “stream of thought” in which thought is
always changing originated in the philosophical writings of Heraclitus, and
was, centuries later, developed in the work of William James. As a narrative
technique, it has been employed in the style of an interior monologue, mirror-
ing the quality of a soliloquy on the stage, through which the character re-
veals motivation, emotion and innermost confidences. Virginia Woolf created
her distinctive technique that appears to report verbatim the random thought
processes within each character, with the author having equal access to each
character’s mind. Like a deep-sea fishing net that trawls all levels of the
ocean, this method of recording mental activity is a way of capturing every
cogent thought—so that the discriminatory process of determining signifi-
cance could be performed in retrospect—or not at all.3 For Woolf, this was an
exciting development in the depiction of mind beyond gender—as individu-
als are allowed to express their consciousness independent of any other char-
acter. Since entirely self-contained, the mind is able to beyond bodily identi-
fication and thus beyond gender.
The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio argues that consciousness is an in-
tensely private event, one that (according to his strictly biological approach)
we cannot directly perceive, we may only have, as the title of his 1999 book
indicates, “The feeling of what happens”. We cannot observe directly but
only perceive the effects of consciousness in behaviour and action. These
effects are the only window into consciousness itself. It is on this level that
Woolf’s texts function, to reveal what Damasio refers to as “extended con-
sciousness”: the interaction of the human brain with time and space. The
sense of “I-ness” of the mind that allows full mental interaction with the
environment is derived from the interplay of the human mind with past, pre-
3
While these passages may appear to the reader to be the uninterrupted flow of geni-
us, or of merely free-associating and writing down all one’s uncensored ideas, for
Woolf, the creation of these stream of consciousness passages of text was not easy.
She writes in her diary of August 1921 of the difficulties and strains of writing:
“Sometimes it seems to me that I shall never write out all the books I have in my
head, because of the strain. The devilish thing about writing is that it calls upon every
nerve to hold itself taut. That is exactly what I cannot do…” (Bell 1978: 129). The
next day’s entry is merely a copied-out passage from Leigh Hunt describing Cole-
ridge’s genius and then Shelley’s death. Possibly refreshed by her dip into the world
of Romantic metaphysics, two days later, her diary entry refers to her return to “scrib-
bling” (Bell 1978:131).
sent, and future, and maintained through memory of past and the anticipation
of the future.
Taking a different stance, the philosopher Daniel Dennett identifies third
person point of view as quintessentially the modus operandi of discovering
the nature of consciousness. The human being has developed (or evolved) a
capacity for self-knowledge, “access to ourselves that gives us subjective
experience which gives us a way of looking out at the world from where we
are” (Blackmore 2005a: 80). But this capacity brings with it inherent prob-
lems of point of view:
Each one of us is trapped within a point of view. I can’t ever get inside your
head and you can’t ever get inside of mine. The undeniable fact that we have
these perspectives is not closely paralleled with anything we know about any-
thing else […] the only thing we know in the whole universe that has this fea-
ture is ourselves, and we’re not even sure about each other. (Blackmore 2005a:
80)
The Waves
Having challenged gender uniqueness and the superficial nature of body-

identity in Orlando, in her 1931 novel The Waves, Woolf turns to imagery of
the ever-changing to depict the constancy of human suffering. The title was
originally to be The Moths, but the eventual title does much to reflect the
changes in knowledge of quantum mechanics at the time, and one can conjec-
ture how far Woolf refers to the notion of reality being both wave and parti-
cle simultaneously. Revelling in the present moment informs Woolf’s ap-
proach to capturing the “moment in and out of time” through a series of nar-
rative soliloquies. The novel has been called an “experiment in dissolving
identity” (Abel 1989: 132), a text characterised by disembodied voices that
apparently mingle in social terms of the plot, and yet through the soliloquy
technique, remain utterly separate. Like characters in a Samuel Beckett play
who share a stage and speak their words, they remain utterly isolated, defying
direct communication. If identity is to be dissolved, at what point, if at all, is
it reconstructed?
The “disembodiment that characterises the text”, as discussed by Eliza-
beth Abel, is complemented by Woolf’s desire to suspend time, to make
sense of existence through the replay of memories, each one remembered in
the present tense, fractured and replaced in a new format of meaning. The
120 Beyond Bodies
character Susan, for example, tries to escape time through dreams of project-
ing a future in which she will find freedom, as she explains:
“I have torn off the whole of May and June […] and twenty days of July. I
have torn them off and screwed them up so that they no longer exist, save as a
weight in my side. They have been crippled days, like moths with shrivelled
wings unable to fly. There are only eight days left. […] Then my freedom will
unfurl, and all these restrictions that wrinkle and shrivel—hours and order and
discipline, and being here and there at exactly at the right moment—will crack
asunder.” (1931: 41)
The attempt to dissolve time in order to gain personal freedom appears to be

Woolf’s attempt at freezing and thus encapsulating the moments of being, the
only means through which she could render her perceptions of what consti-
tutes consciousness. For the reader, the result of isolation bordering on psy-
chosis is at times a chilling nod towards the absurdity of Beckett and Pinter:
“‘Here I am nobody,’” says Rhoda, “ ‘I have no face. […] We are all callous,
unfriended.’” (25).
By the novel’s close, Bernard’s soliloquy summarises the “events” of
their lives, ending in his declaration:
“Heaven be praised for solitude! I am alone now. That almost unknown person
has gone, to catch some train, to take some cab, to go to some place or person
whom I do not know. The face looking at me has gone. The pressure is re-
moved. Here are the empty coffee cups. Here are chairs turned but nobody sits
on them. […] Let me now raise my song of glory. Heaven be praised for soli-
tude. Let me be alone.” (245)
Since the entire novel is in direct speech, one can imagine that the novel
could easy be transferred to the stage: and it would not be inappropriate to
place each character in a dustbin up to their necks in sand, each happily una-
ble to see the other.
Woolf’s interest in exploring and expressing modes of consciousness may
have begun as a means of transcendence from the problems of sexuality that
pervaded her life. Feelings of inadequacy as a woman and guilt as a wife that
characterised much of her adult life could be evaded through limiting life to a
succession of moments, each one as meaningful or meaningless as any other.
Her novel The Waves, heavily cross-referencing classical texts and Shelley’s
poetry, is also almost a parallel text to T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and the
Waste Land. Indeed, Woolf’s prose often reads much like Eliot’s verse, with
a similar weight of imagistic suggestion. His “tedious argument of insidious

intent” is replaced here by the five characters’ tedious monologues, the solip-
sistic soliloquies that gradually reveal the banal achievements (employment,
dinners out, motherhood) and tragedies (death in a riding accident) of their
lives. The linking of the text to all the male writers who are alluded to is
significant in a work that attempts to forge a new feminine writing through
the “female” technique of stream of consciousness—one defined as an at-
tempt towards transcending the paradoxes of gendered writing, “by present-
ing the multiplicity and variety of associations held simultaneously in the
female mode of perception” (Showalter 1997: 260). Virginia Woolf herself
describes the technique of fragmented sentences, ellipses, and suspended
punctuation that characterises stream of consciousness, as:
the psychological sentence of the female gender. It is of a more elastic fibre

than the old, capable of stretching to the extreme, of suspending the frailest
particles, of enveloping the vaguest shapes. […] It may descend and investi-
gate the depths of [a character’s] consciousness. It is a woman’s sentence, but
only in the sense that it is used to describe a woman’s mind by a writer who is
neither proud nor afraid of anything she may discover in the psychology of her
sex. (Woolf 1923: 261)
Stream of consciousness then, places “the centre of reality in the subjective

consciousness” (Showalter 1997: 261), yet it is a means of using conscious
perception through the senses in order to determine the nature of reality,
which then in the process is flattened into a procession of empty moments—
Prufrock’s measuring out of life “by coffee spoons”. T.S. Eliot’s poem “The
Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock” itself also seems to be wrestling with the
enigma of trying to capture the content of human consciousness:
After all the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail across the floor,
And this and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning to the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant at all.” (1954: 15)
122 Beyond Bodies
Like Eliot’s poem, The Waves begins with disembodied voices of characters
(who we soon realise are children); each speaks in turn, but not relating to
any other characters’ previous statement or memory. They know each other
and their lives will continue to intersect, but the technique of the text suggests
they will intertwine, like their voices, in a cold quasi-psychotic social dimen-
sion without impinging on each other. Yet, as a part of Woolf’s continuing
interplay with Eliot: they are the children in Eliot’s rose garden, whose fleet-
ing distant laughter in the trees induces his contemplation of time and history.
She has taken that laughter and embodied it, producing a possible story for
their future lives. The children laugh as they “skim the flower beds with their
nets. They skim the butterflies from the nodding tops of the flowers. They
brush the surface of the world”. And the children are overheard—watched (or
heard) not only by the gardeners, but also by the lone woman writing at her
desk (Woolf 1992: 12).
Woolf, of course, had intimate practical and intellectual knowledge of
T.S. Eliot’s poems, including The Waste Land, which she and her husband
Leonard hand type-set for publication at their Hogarth Press. The novel is
heavily indebted to Eliot’s profound conceptualisation of relative and Abso-
lute, as gleaned from his study (and cross-referencing) of the Vedic literature
of India and the corresponding religious concepts. Many allusions hark back
to Eliot’s poems, and appear as a commentary upon them. Neville’s mono-
logue on time, as he looks at the clock on the mantelpiece appears a reference
to the frozen town-hall clock in “Sweeney Agonistes”; and then further
comments almost replicate other moments of Eliot’s famous phrases and
staccato rhythms: “‘Time passes, yes. And we grow old. But to sit with you,
here in London, in this firelit room, you there, I here, is all’”. Neville’s fol-
lowing comment that, “ ‘The descent into the Tube was like death’ ”
(1992:147) –distorts even as it echoes Eliot’s poem “Burnt Norton”, where
the journey down into the London underground has luminous metaphysical
implications of the awareness going ever deeper into more profound levels of
mind and consciousness.
Woolf’s text “flattens out” as it were the highs and lows of Eliot’s internal
landscapes, creating her own female domain where every moment is subjec-
tively equal in intensity and import. In many ways, Woolf has succeeded in
rendering these passages of “male” experience (with all its hard linguistic
edges and rigid morality) into “female” language. She has significantly made
these texts her own. Yet a levelling-out of experience avoiding the highs and
lows of human endeavour is inevitably associated with flattening of emotion,
but not with equanimity. In The Waves, hopelessness is the pervading tone
throughout: so that any hint of a deepening of consciousness from the surface
level to the state of pure consciousness –and its associated quality of bliss—is
nullified. The result becomes the narrative understanding channelled through
a chronically depressed mind. As Bernard reflects:
“Now I shall go and lunch somewhere. I shall hold my glass up and shall look
through the wine, I shall observe with more than my usual detachment. […] A
meaningless observation […] with a fatal sound of ruining worlds and waters
falling to destruction.” (157)
The failure here seems to be in the endless observation of chhandas, the cov-
ering of reality, rather than an attention of the self to the self in the “present
moment”, as used in the traditional meditative Zen technique of “training the
attention”. As the spiritual writer Anthony de Mello comments on the im-
portance of self-observation, “The unaware life is not worth living. The una-
ware life is a mechanical life. It’s not human. […] We might as well be stone,
a block of wood.” Spirituality, contact with reality, is about “waking up”
(1992: 67).
Attempting to grasp or to question the quality of consciousness as observ-
er or witness of itself, The Waves constructs a catalogue of voices, a chorus
that is both subject and object of observation, as the characters reflect on life
and on each other. In some moments, the text almost reaches the point of
understanding the localised value of being that encapsulates the relationship
between human intellect and cosmic intelligence—but the novel also depicts
a loss of consciousness, the failure to make sense of experience. Both Rhoda
and Neville express a dislocation and disaffection with life itself, born from a
lack of both engagement and understanding: “ ‘I cannot make one moment
merge with the next. To me they are all violent, separate…’”, complains
Rhoda, unable to comprehend “the whole and indivisible mass that you call
life’” (105-6). With Percival’s accidental death in India, Louis reflects that
the Indian philosophy that teaches “I am this, I am that” (and “All This is
That) is false (112).4
In her essay “A Veil of Words” in Art Objects, Jeanette Winterson argues
that, “rhythm not logic is the anchor of The Waves” (1996: 90). She perceives
4
This suggests a reference to A Passage to India: he may be commenting on E.M.
Forster’s Maribar caves revelation “Tat twam asi”–which Mrs Moore alone appre-
hends, but then misinterprets as nihilism rather than infinite possibility.
124 Beyond Bodies
how the textual rhythms of The Waves are an essential dimension in being
able to determine the meaning of the novel. A perspective of Vedic literary
theory would elaborate this comment in describing the process of how words,
thoughts and language emerge out of the pure field of consciousness through
rhythm as a more profound level of verbal utterance. Rhythm is a quintessen-
tial part of the emergence of language from its pure source in consciousness,
and is fundamental to the elaboration of consciousness into the sequences of
audible sound and derived meaning. At the basis of sound, shruti:
…is the self-generated murmur, the continuous, unstructured sound, spontane-

ously generated by the fully alert, wakeful quality of consciousness knowing
itself—the continuous unstructured sound that evolves into the sequentially
developing, properly structured sounds, developing in sequence within the
field of consciousness. (Mahesh Yogi 1993: 205-6)
This transformative, effortless, progressive emergence of creation (sound)

from pure intelligence is a similar process to how knowledge unfolds. 5 In
terms of physics, this process is described to occur through the spontaneous
symmetry breaking of the unified field into manifest, observable, creation.
In The Waves, the description of the sun’s passage through the day is re-
peated at intervals in imagistic text to separate the acts of the story, and pro-
vides the unifying symbol, the sole object that is capable of lasting beyond
the waves, even as it is progressing toward its death on the horizon. The
worlds of sea and sky become identical at the novel’s opening when the sun
has not yet arisen; by the novel’s close the sun has gone, leaving only univer-
sal darkness in its wake. From the sun’s dawn and setting, life is encapsulated
within the in-breath of birth and the out-breath of dying. Jeanette Winterson
also perceives how the rhythm and imagery of descriptions of the rising sun
at the novel’s opening predetermine the reader’s ability to access meaning in
the characters’ dialogue, unrealistic as it appears to be in comparison to “re-
al” human modes of expression. If we take the sun as representing con-
sciousness—the central core of permanence within apparent change—the
image also takes on resonant meaning that allows for a more lucid interpreta-
tion of a difficult text. Indeed, the novel revolves around natural rhythms of
sun and the tides, as laws of nature, textual themes and symbols of perma-
5
“The creative potential of pure consciousness, through the structuring mechanics
eternally lively within its nature, structures Shruti, the sound of Veda, and lays open
all the different values of Creative Intelligence” (Mahesh Yogi 1994: 144).
nence against the mutability of human life. Moreover, the novel appears to
reflect, the sun is perceived as setting and rising again, but these events are
only due to point of view—the limitations of consciousness by the individual
mind being located in a specific space-time location.
Loss of consciousness: Woolf beneath the waves
All thoughts are, and remain, merely thoughts—and without going beyond
them, the human mind is trapped on the surface. Trying to capture the es-
sence of Being through thought (the endless waves of the ocean) will never
allow access to below the surface. This may account for Woolf’s sense of
bitterness and hopelessness that irradiates the text of The Waves, in particu-
lar. The novel ultimately reads as a terrifying entrapment of the characters on
the surface level of thought by a writer who intuitively recognises the possi-
bility of transcendence and yet is unable to access or portray it. Like the tran-
scendental signified, it is hopelessly sought after and never reached, since
only the signifiers are under consideration. Only since the waves imagery
suggests a deeper presence beneath can the reader begin to ponder how a
more profound or fundamental level of the mind can be reached. Yet the
waves endorse a never-ending process of object-referral, of the superficial
observer (like the woman writer and the gardeners in the garden), never a
self-reflexivity beyond ratiocination. Even the possibility of dreaming does
not render the characters (or reader) free of the relentless waves.
Despite an attempt to tap into a “deeper” linguistic reality, the sequential
flow of time remains unchallenged in the novel; hopes are dashed by disap-
pointment and futility, the characters grow old. Even an Eliot-inspired vision
such as that in “Ash Wednesday”, that “time is always time” and cannot be
removed from human existence, yet “Consequently I rejoice, having to con-
struct something/ Upon which to rejoice” (1954: 84); Eliot’s narrator reaches
across time, memory, and finds permanence within impermanence, and that:
The single Rose

Is now the Garden
Where all loves end […]
End of the endless
Journey to no end
Conclusion of all that
Is inconclusible
Speech without word and
126 Beyond Bodies
Word of no speech (1954: 86)
Unlike the possibility of reconciling apparent paradoxes and the certainty

created out of uncertainty found here (and its consequent blessing of grace in
“The Garden where all love ends”), Woolf’s streams of consciousness go
nowhere, and offer no hope to the characters or reader. “Death is the enemy,”
utters Bernard in the final soliloquy of The Waves. “‘Against you I will fling
myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!’” are his last words and
appear just before the concluding words of the novel: “The waves broke on
the shore” (1998: 248). On a quantum level of understanding, both time and
language can be reduced to a state of unity, an endless flow of potentiality of
which human consciousness is a part, and thus there can be no conflict—or
concept of “death”. “Profane time must be accounted for,” comments Terry
Brunt on The Four Quartets, Eliot’s poems that “embody a journey from
ignorance of time to an awakening of eternity” (2012). According to Brunt,
Eliot (especially in “Burnt Norton”) understands time—the world of time that
is a “reflex of the energy of what is eternal”. In “sandwiching past, present
and future together, he [Eliot] creates the eternal moment, the natural condi-
tion of time according to quantum physics and the Vedas” (2012: 1).
The states of consciousness within the novel The Waves hover between
wake and dream, and indeed, Woolf was well aware of Freudian theory that
highlighted the interpretation of dreams.6 She was also an expert on the al-
tered awareness inherent in illness. Nigel Nicholson (1921) describes her
reaction in the face of frequent illness, such as any headache, bouts of pneu-
monia, or flu, all of which “might be signals of re-approaching madness”
(1976: xvi). “But she was un-frightened, almost as if she sometimes looked
forward to re-entering that dream-world which she describes so vividly in
Night and Day:
Being a frequent visitor to that world, she could find her way there unhesitat-
ingly. If she had tried to analyse her impressions, she would have said that
there dwelt the realities of the appearances which figure in our world; so di-
rect, powerful and unimpeded were her sensations there, compared to those
called forth in actual life. There dwelt the things one might have felt, had there
been a cause; the perfect happiness of which here we only taste the fragment;
6
Woolf’s friends went to study with Freud, and on their return she writes: “The last
people I saw were James and Alix, fresh from Freud—Alix grown gaunt and vigor-
ous—James puny and languid—such is the effect of 10 months of psycho-analysis.”
Letter to Janet Case, September. (In Nicholson and Trautmann 1976: 482).
the beauty seen here in flying glimpses only. (Nicholson and Trautman 1976:
xvi)
Most tragically these glimpses of altered consciousness came at a high cost to

her health, and her “manic-depression” could strike at any time and “with
terrifying suddenness”, according to Nicholson, especially when she had just
completed writing a book. In these bouts of mania she became increasingly
incoherent and eventually sank into a coma. Thus, it appears, the brief win-
dow of opportunity to perceive any more lucid glimpses of reality seems
negligible. Moreover, her all-absorbing fixation with the passionless, almost
frigid level of experience and thought expressed in The Waves misses the
point of exploring consciousness. Yet Woolf’s “moments of being”, in at-
tempting to disclose the importance of every instant of life, do influence the
reader to contemplate the nature of the inner mechanism of the mind—and
how individual mind relates to the greater organism of society. The novels
that exemplify the finely tuned technique of Woolf’s stream of conscious-
ness, such as To The Lighthouse and The Waves are absorbing and often
engrossing as probing prose fiction. In Mrs Dalloway the interconnecting
interior thoughts are revealed from each character as they overlap in place or
time: creating a sense of a unity of collective consciousness in which experi-
ence is shared between consciousnesses—reflecting a more Jungian approach
to the understanding of consciousness as the collective unconscious.
On the level of structure and technique, the mesmerising quality of the
rhythms of Mrs Dalloway, in particular, draw the reader into a gradual
heightening of tension and the sense of an urgent need for release from the
incessant thought-process. That longed-for moment is delivered in the last
two lines of the novel: when Peter finally sees Clarissa Dalloway—a moment
of both climax and post-coital relief.
Quantum waves shed light on the stream of consciousness
The great discoveries in quantum theory, those of Schrödinger, and the fol-
lowing revelations by Werner Heisenberg and Neils Bohr that became known
as the Copenhagen interpretation, took place in the early 1930’s: the years
around the time both Orlando and The Waves were published. Thus, all the
great revelations of the time—most importantly that of Bohr who asserted
that an observation produces the property or reality observed—were contem-
poraneous with Woolf’s greatest experimental novels. Yet, decades before
128 Beyond Bodies
Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and her attempts to capture the essence of con-
sciousness in each fractured moment, the world of science had begun to dis-
cuss the notion of our universe constructed as simultaneously particles and
waves.7 The idea of wave-function (and its accompanying equations) was
perfected by Erwin Schrödinger, who, in puzzling over quantum wave theo-
ry, identified not only how light and sound could be described in terms of
waves, but ultimately he laid down the foundation of all modern quantum
mechanics with his equations describing waves of matter (Rosenblum and
Kuttner 2007: 71). Describing any object in terms of its probability of loca-
tion, the wave function can be used to discuss the location of any moving
object, whether sub-atomic or the size of a galaxy.
The wave-quality of any object describes “the probability of finding the
object in that region”, but Rosenblum and Kuttner warn the non-scientist
reader to be careful, for “the waviness is not the probability of the object
being there […] The object was not there before you found it there. Your
happening to find it there caused it to be there. This is tricky and the essence
of the quantum enigma” (2007:75). Any atom or object is simultaneously in
any number of positions—referred to as being in a “superposition state” –a
counterintuitive reality (2007: 79). The wave function, therefore, describes as
best possible the probability of what will be observed. 8
In the “stream of consciousness” technique of recording or creating
thoughts with the intention of creating a form of writing that mirrors more
“realistically” the human mind, the writer (such as Virginia Woolf) in fact
creates an unrealistic problem. An author could spend an eternity analysing
the infinite multiplicity of an instant, for it is impossible to go into the minu-
tiae of every moment. Making the mistake of analysing the profound depth of
infinity as a more superficial level of intellectual analysis is like trying to
understand the quantum mechanical basis of the functioning of the universe
7
By the early 1800’s, Thomas Young had overturned Newtonian “laws” by demon-
strating light to exist in terms of waves rather than particles. Michael Faraday and
James Maxwell then followed, uniting electricity and magnetism into the most fun-
damental principle of the universe: electromagnetism. Now into the twentieth century,
the laws of nature in terms of the force and matter fields (the physical forces of gravi-
ty, magnetism, electricity, light and matter) were all being united: culminating in the
theories of spontaneous symmetry breaking and unified field theory.
8
It was in response to this indeterminacy, or randomness, that Einstein uttered his
famous comment that “God does not play dice”, to which Niels Bohr responded by
telling him not to tell God how to run the universe (see Rosenblum and Kuttner 2007:
80 inter alia).
from the more superficial classical level—which is impossible epistemologi-

cally, ontologically, and empirically. This is why, ever since the birth of
quantum theory, physicists have pondered over the apparent paradoxes pre-
sented by experiments such as Young’s slits, Schrödinger’s cat, and so on.
They cannot be understood classically (according to the laws of classical
physics) but at the quantum level there is no paradox. These experiments
(and other similar apparent paradoxes) put forward by various physicists are
all variants on the same problem posed by attempting to understand the quan-
tum world classically. That is, attempting to pin down a more subtle level of
nature’s functioning by a description of a “wave” or a “particle”, both of
which are invalid descriptions at the quantum level.
With this explanation, it becomes clearer that the type of exploration of
consciousness attempted by Virginia Woolf will fail at revealing more than a
superficial level. While fascinating as an experiment attempting to under-
stand a deeper conceptualisation of consciousness and the human mind, it
remains (to give an analogy) like trying to understand a TV picture from
capturing every electron that hits the screen. The collapse of the wave is what
is crucial in the apparent location and observability of an atom—and for
Woolf, the relentless waves never cease to exist on the surface of the mind.
Moreover, this level of “reality” is the surface that traditional Vedantic
thought would equate with maya, illusion.
For neurologist Vilayanur Ramachandran the observation of the object
does not cause it to exist; the thought does not cause the action—but the
process is rather more complex. He equates human free will and consequent
action to Siva’s dance, in so far as “you think that you’re an aloof spectator
watching the universe, but actually you’re just part of the cosmic ebb and
flow of the world,” he explains. Moreover, “…if you think you’re part of the
ebb and flow of the world, and there’s no separate little soul, inspecting the
world, that’s going to be extinguished—then it’s ennobling. You’re part of
this grand scheme of things” (in Blackmore 2005b: 196).
Mrs Dalloway: the entanglement of consciousness
One of the most fascinating phenomena observed in quantum physics is the

instantaneous bond between what happens at widely separated locations—
how “the observation of one object can instantaneously influence the behav-
iour of another greatly distant object – even if no physical force connects the
two” (Rosenblum and Kuttner 2007:12). Elaborated and experimentally veri-
130 Beyond Bodies
fied through the research by Erwin Schrödinger (in 1935), Schrödinger used
the term ‘entanglement’ to describe “the correlations between two particles
that interact and then separate” (Kumar 2009: 313). Challenging the founda-
tions of quantum mechanics, the properties of entanglement seem to be coun-
terintuitive, and were refuted by Albert Einstein, rejected by him as “spooky
interactions at a distance”.9 Yet this phenomenon has been observed to exist,
along with other facets of universal connectedness. John Bell took the con-
cept further by raising the possibility of using these strong correlations—
effects due to entanglement travel at least a thousand times faster than the
speed of light— as a resource for instantaneous long-range communication
(Salart 2008: 862).
Going beyond the discovery that the observer creates reality (the collapse
of the wave-function), these interactions at a distance, referred to by Niels
Bohr simply as “influences”, remain baffling, unless they are interpreted in
terms of an underlying consciousness that pervades the most refined levels of
manifest creation—the “something” behind and beyond the created universe.
Yet most intriguing of all for the non-physicist, perhaps, is the finding that
“any two objects that have ever interacted are forever entangled. […] In prin-
ciple, our world has universal connectedness” (Rosenblum and Kuttner 2007:
150).
Although I have argued that, through its inevitable superficiality, the
“stream of consciousness” in Woolf’s texts may have its limitations, in her
texts can be found the counterpart in narrative technique to these so-called
“spooky” entangled interactions. In the novel, as each individual conscious-
ness is entered into and exposed—each voice merges for an instant (perhaps
half a sentence on the page) and creates overlapping realities. Although each
life seems unrelated—linked only in time and place—yet each impinges in
subtle ways on the next. Whether in terms of a feeling, a comment or a criti-
cism, each character is aware of the other, and each influences the other. Not
only creating a dynamic way of perceiving individuality, Woolf here also
creates a new clarity on what we mean by “society”: and how the society is a
holistic synergy of individual awarenesses. The dynamic paradigm of over-
lapping, although not quite interconnecting, members of society determines
social attitudes and the ability of characters to cast judgement over others.
In the brilliant opening of the novel, the lives of several individuals touch
each other, and rebound, like billiard balls. Each human life is in the “super-
9
Einstein in a 1947 letter to Max Born. See “quantum entanglement” in The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
position” state, in an unmanifest void as it were, until called into existence

through being the object of someone else’s observation. Septimus Smith
(shell-shocked and bordering on insanity) sits quietly in the London park and
is cautiously observed by his wife; Sarah Bletchley walks along the Mall and
sees a plane in the sky, then she passes Emily Coates, who also looks up at
the plane; and Maisie Johnson (up in London for the first time and facing the
“horror! horror!” of being alone in Town) observes Septimus sitting in the
park, judging him “awfully odd” (30); Mrs Dempster watches Maisie and
sees her as “that girl [who] don’t know a thing yet. […] Get married , she
thought, and then you’ll know” (31)—and at the end of the daisy-chain of
observers, Septimus watches his dead friend Evans behind the park railings,
and is furious that his wife’s observations interrupt him—“She was always
interrupting” (29).
Unaware of all of these characters and events, Mrs Clarissa Dalloway is
nevertheless linked to them. Woolf skilfully weaves in Clarissa (although
mentally isolated in her own private pampered world of prestige) through the
repetition of vocabulary to the other individuals who flit through this narra-
tive—key words that echo in the reader’s mind. Clarissa remembers being
interrupted in her moment of greatest happiness, kissing Sally Seton: “ ‘Oh
this horror!’ she said to herself , as if she had known all along that something
would interrupt, would embitter her moment of happiness” (41, my empha-
sis).
As distinct entities, the characters here are also linked through being ob-
servers. From various locations, and in discrete mental spaces, all the charac-
ters watch the aeroplane circling overhead; and they all try to decipher mean-
ing from the random display of letters in the plane’s advertisement. Similarly,
they all see a glimpse of a hand in a car window and are determined to be-
stow significance on a flash of grey glove: was it the Prime Minister, or the
Queen going shopping? Irrelevant, insignificant, observances overshadow
life’s more urgent need for understanding: the need of the individual charac-
ters to understand each other.
Each person performs the function of being a signifier in an endless chain
of signifiers, in which the end—a meaning, or transcendental signified—is
never ultimately reached. Yet there is one observer for whom it all suggests
possible sense, and for the reader, this may be Woolf’s intended conclusion
in terms of attributed denotation:
132 Beyond Bodies
Away the plane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a
concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr Bentley, vigorously rolling his
strip of turf at Greenwich) of man’s soul; of his determination, thought Mr
Bentley, sweeping round the cedar tree, to get outside his body, beyond his
house, by means of thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendeli-
an theory—away the aeroplane shot. (Woolf 1996: 32)
Bentley, Einstein, Mendel: it clearly takes world-class intellects to decipher

reality! Yet, returning after a long absence abroad, Peter Walsh observes
Clarissa Dalloway, and sees not only her past persona but what she has be-
come—and discovers that she has become what he imagined years earlier she
would be (45-47). Clarissa in turn observes Peter, and reconnects with the
past emotion, her faded hopes, and the painful loss of a relationship (a love)
she had thrown away (Woolf 1996: 72). In Clarissa Dalloway’s narrative
stream of thought, her perceptions, feelings and certainties are all undermined
by Woolf’s crafty interjection of seemingly irrelevant expressions. Many
years previously, when she rejected Peter’s proposal, she did so since she felt
it “intolerable” that he wished to share so much of their lives: his continual
presence would have been an intrusion into her inner life (10). In recalling
her decision that in marriage both of them would have been “ruined”, she
remembers the grief that she had “borne about her for years like an arrow
sticking in her heart” (10), yet “she is convinced” she did right. The throwa-
way word “convinced” reveals her situation to be quite the reverse: she does
not know herself. Thus Peter’s perception of her—as observer—may be more
accurate than the one she has of herself.
Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness technique is arguably most use-
ful and successful in revealing to the reader the limitations of the awareness
and self-knowledge of each character. While the reader has access to the
interior thoughts of Peter, or Clarissa, both characters reveal how little they
know about themselves, although appearing to have insights about others:
Peter for example, feels confident he remembers the past accurately, in order
to justify the decisions and events of his life. For how can he allow his con-
scious mind to realise he has been a failure?
Mrs Dalloway as a character acts as an observer, a witness, but not a
reliable one, for she is far too self-absorbed to be wholly perceptive. Her gift,
she thinks to herself “was knowing people almost by instinct” (11) and yet as
the narrative develops we discover her flaws, her lack of understanding or
empathy—exhibited perhaps in the wake of her “illness”, which has divided
her from her husband and relegated her to a room of her own—significantly
the attic. (And in that one noun, we know the nature of her illness.) She has a
“perpetual sense […] of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always
had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day” (11).
Other than her social engagements, her life is meaningless and empty. While
she may have once lived for (and through) her husband and daughter Eliza-
beth, they are now presented to us through the prism of her narrative voice as
shadowy, distant, almost non-existent entities. Although the “stream of con-
sciousness” technique ostensibly gives us, as readers, insight into her
thoughts and feelings, the third person narrator reduces/shrinks/diminishes
any intimate subjectivity: all the first person access into interior thought is
qualified by subjectivity—Mrs Dalloway’s self-delusion and lack of self-
knowledge. She is constantly distracted by irrelevant thoughts—the hat shop,
the open books in Hatchard’s, her clothes and gloves—constantly bouncing
on the surface of the waves without ever permitting a moment to allow a
pause—a collapse of wave function to a deeper level of significance. Thus
for Clarissa Dalloway everything, and nothing, has meaning. She inevitably
finds she feels her body, her identity to be “nothing at all […] invisible, un-
seen, unknown” (13). Yet paradoxically, the superficiality of constant obser-
vation of minutiae also holds the possibility of bliss in those fragments of
“exquisite moments” of literally living on the surface (33).
Negativity appals Clarissa: she is furious when she thinks that death has
come into her party, and when she hears of the young man (Septimus) having
committed suicide, she remains insensible to tragedy, devoid of pity (201).
Eventually, however, she judges the suicide to have been a triumph of will
over circumstance: “Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communi-
cate” (202). The fact that Woolf has rewritten here her own experience as
Septimus’s “insanity” reveals further textual layers of entanglement. “Life is
made intolerable […] there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear”
(203), she writes as an insight of the character of Mrs Dalloway as she realis-
es that the man’s death was somehow her own disaster, “her disgrace” (203).
Clarissa finally realises her interconnectivity with others. Yet if Mrs Dallo-
way’s reality touches and overlaps those of others, she remains as a discrete
particle in the wave of ocean currents, as the quintessential observer of life.
But in that process of observation, she binds together and connects the oth-
erwise separate identities of human lives.
134 Beyond Bodies
Gender and the quantum world: universal connectedness
As quantum physics reveals, the entanglement of objects holds real for both
small and large objects. Not only is what we call “reality” created by the
process of observation but also the object observed and the “remote observ-
er” are consequently non-separable:
Any two objects that have interacted are forever entangled. The behaviour of
one instantaneously influences the other […] Quantum entanglement for large
objects is generally too complex to notice. But not always. […] Quantum theo-
ry has no boundary between the microscopic and the macroscopic. (Rosen-
blum and Kuttner 2007: 150)
To extend the phenomenon of gender differentiation into the world of quan-

tum physics could also involve comparing the concept to the reality of quan-
tum pairing—where the direction of spin of any particle can be predicted by
observing its co-existing, yet spatially separate, twinned particle. Once elec-
trons have interacted, they are linked through the “spooky interactions at a
distance”, and when one is spinning in one direction its pair will always be
the opposite. How far this analogy can be extended in terms of macro-states
has been much discussed; and some experimental research has found that
quantum pairing and the interactions at a distance do occur in the macroscop-
ic world. Can we imaginatively extend this state of “opposite spin” to being
analogous to gender difference?
The character of Mrs Dalloway seems to personify a Wildean scorn or
even fear of profound meaning in his warning against reading symbols and
going beyond the surface observable reality, “Those who go beneath the
surface, do so at their peril”(Wilde 1985:4)—uttered just at the time when
science was about to revolutionise over two thousand years of philosophy
and physics. If Wilde exemplifies the end of the reign of “classical”, Newto-
nian physics, and the collapse of the certainties of the world defined in mate-
rialistic terms, Virginia Woolf in some ways comes to herald the new world
of quanta, qualia and consciousness—even if their deeper import for human
life passed her by. On the level of quantum mechanics, there is no definitive
“either/or”, only a “both/and”, making possible the choices of bi-sexual Or-
lando and the stream of consciousness as writing technique and physical
force that determines for her the observable world.
Disturbing the universe
“Do I dare/Disturb the universe?” asks a prescient Eliot’s Prufrock. All fields
of knowledge lead not to any “overwhelming question” (Eliot 1954: 11-12),
but to the overwhelming answer that the one unified reality underlying exist-
ence is consciousness. Yet for Virginia Woolf, the lack of any method or
technique of going deeper than the superficial level of experience rendered
through a fixation with “consciousness” as inner speech will never allow the
mind to fathom the tranquillity beneath the tossing waves of incessant
thought. The fact that consciousness by definition is infinite and omnipresent
does not presuppose that many humans access their unique ability, as hu-
mans, to tap into and develop the full potential of expanded consciousness.
The result of the failure to experience pure, unbounded, consciousness is
suffering.
Moreover, as Susan Setzer and Terry Fairchild explain, for the arts in
general this lack implies:
a dearth of creativity, so that what often passes for art is simply an expression
of human stress and unhappiness. What is needed then […] is a reopening of
the natural connection between individual expression of consciousness – indi-
vidual human life—and its source in pure consciousness. The result of redis-
covering this eternal highway between one’s own individual self and the cos-
mos is an access to infinite creativity, not only as a form of artistic expression,
but also as the means to solve creatively the entire range of problems in life
born of human limitation. (2001: 9)
It may be indicative of the way knowledge continues to expand that, in de-

scribing the probable quantum functioning of the brain, the recent article by
Hameroff and Chopra (2012) embraces further notions drawn from the world
of particle physics and the “multiple coexisting possibilities known as quan-
tum superimposition” of the universe and “nonlocal entanglement” (82).
Their theory of consciousness in the brain, based on the Penrose-Hameroff
quantum model of connecting brain processes concludes an “interconnected-
ness via entanglement among living beings and the universe” and that “Con-
tact with cosmic wisdom/Platonic values [is] embedded as quantum infor-
mation in fundamental space-time geometry” (2012: 91). They conclude their
study of consciousness in the brain that the processes and observations at the
Planck scale of the physical universe “may repeat at increasing scales in
space-time geometry, reaching to the scale of biological systems” (Hameroff
136 Beyond Bodies
and Chopra 2012: 84). They explain that then, most crucially, “at some point
(or actually at some complex edge or surface) in this hierarchy of scale, the
microscopic quantum world transitions to the classical world.” It is possible,
they propose, that consciousness “occurs as a process on this edge between
quantum and classical worlds” (Hameroff and Chopra 2012: 84). In postulat-
ing this fascinating link between the consciousness inherent in the universe
and in the human brain (specifically the microtubules within neurons), the
article mentions that this knowledge is, however, nothing new. For thousands
of years, the Indian philosophy of Vedanta has held that “consciousness is
everything, and manifests, or creates reality […] consciousness is both sub-
ject and object, both quantum and classical. Consciousness is all that there is”
(2012: 85). In Vedic literature, this is explained as the one dimension of con-
sciousness pervading from anoranyan to mahatomahiyan –from the smaller
than the smallest to largest of the largest, from the tiniest sub-atomic particle
to the entire cosmos.10 The authors diverge in their opinions on whether con-
sciousness is “all that there is” (Chopra) or “a process on the edge between
quantum and classical worlds” (Hameroff), yet in their profound research on
the interface of neurobiology and quantum physics, Hameroff and Chopra
open a new window for consciousness studies in academia—one that has
increasing relevance in contemporary literary theory and literature.
10
A concept also used as a trope of the physical basis of reality in Winterson’s Gut
Symmetries, as discussed in Chapter Eight.
Chapter Six
Consciousness and freedom: women’s space in

the twentieth-century Bildungsroman
In the twentieth century, fiction written by and about women ventured into
the area of the novel of development. Appropriating the genre of the mythic
quest for psychological and spiritual renewal previously reserved for male
protagonists, writers now were forging a new feminist Bildungsroman in
which the female hero undergoes the epic journey to gain the treasure of
wholeness and selfhood. The new heroine refuses to be a captive to any pre-
existing norms, forging instead new definitions of self and society, and dis-
covering a whole, integrating self, which “transcends limiting sex-role pat-
terns” (Pearson and Pope 1981: 14). Women who had been trapped in the
collective cultural myths, whether as depicted in fairy stories or in literature
that defines them as selfless domesticated creatures, now struggled beyond
this prescribed role to enunciate their strength and independence. Moreover,
the novels discussed in this chapter implicate that the feminist search for self
involves a move towards the discovery and experience of a transcendent
quality in consciousness, an experience of one undifferentiated state of
awareness that lies beyond limited waking consciousness.
Patriarchy and women’s space
Responding to the sense of being relegated to the domestic sphere and denied
access to “male” public spaces of employment and commerce, feminists
since Virginia Woolf have urged that a woman must have a space of her own:
room—mental, physical and fiscal—where men were not in control. Yet
language itself has for centuries been a masculine domain—women have
been silenced or excluded from the dominant discourse. By the 1970’s, femi-
nists such as Hélène Cixous famously urged, “Woman must write woman”.
She laments that the “repression of women has been perpetuated. Nearly the
138 Beyond Bodies
entire history of writing […] has been one with the phallocentric tradition
[…] where woman never has her turn to speak (1976: 879).
In the context of women’s symbolic captivity within patriarchy, Sandra
Gilbert and Susan Gubar re-emphasise the importance of women’s liberation
from social and literary confinement in both “male houses and male texts”
(1979: 58). Paradoxically, women may be trapped “in someone else’s space”
while denied access to some patriarchal spaces of agency, and yet also active-
ly seeking a space free from men. Gillian Rose, in her evocative article “As if
the Mirrors had bled”, argues that sexually differentiated space has been
defined in terms of being real or non-real, both in literal and metaphorical
senses. Women are imprisoned by actual and symbolic patriarchal power,
hegemony that limits both creative and dynamic action—a characteristic of
“real space”—and enforces immobility and stasis, which characterize “non-
real space” (Rose 1996: 59).
From the viewpoint of a feminist psychoanalyst, Luce Irigaray argues that
even female space is granted by men as “the place which is appropriate for
the need you have of me…the place you have positioned me, so that I remain
available for your needs” (1985: 47). Overall, twentieth century feminism
struggled to resolve the basic question of how to free women from the iconic
functions to which centuries of patriarchy had confined them, and how to
express a different, positive vision of female subjectivity. Hope of transfor-
mation was a key: to create freedoms literal and metaphorical, spatial and
spiritual, and ultimately to create alternative agendas to “victim-based” femi-
nism.
The novels in this chapter share the theme of a quest for an alternative re-
ality in terms of space—socially, creatively and spiritually. The age-old prob-
lems of women in society and the desire of women for a true role and mean-
ing in life are transformed in a variety of ways through the expansion of
women’s consciousness. Some texts express the possibility of “expanded”
states of awareness. The female protagonists struggle to overcome the seem-
ingly insurmountable problems inherent within patriarchy—with a variety of
approaches to self and other, thereby forging new realities and redefinitions
of the self.
While some western feminists, such as Luce Irigaray argue for the need of
solidarity, comfort and safety of women-only spaces, where women may
articulate and fulfil their needs (however this may appear to be excluding
individual difference) yet some representations of “gendered” spaces in fic-
tion have exposed profound limitations.
Consciousness and freedom 139
The Black Narcissus
The perilous journey into the seclusion of a convent in Rumer Godden’s 1939
novel Black Narcissus demonstrates the tensions, anxieties and behavioural
distortions that can plague women who attempt a life cut off from male socie-
ty. The isolated state of the women, high above “civilisation” in the Himala-
yan Mountains of India, is gradually revealed as both unnatural and danger-
ous. The protagonist, Sister Clodagh, has become a nun in order to escape a
failed love-relationship with a young man in Ireland. In the remote locale of a
mountain village where they aim to establish a convent, the Sisters work to
transform the abandoned Palace at Mopu into a chapel and schoolrooms: “In
those first days they were happy. The place might, they agreed […] have
been Heaven; they were filled with a kind of ecstasy” (Godden 1994: 41).
Yet Sister Clodagh finds it impossible “in this freedom of air and space” (42)
to prevent a daydream of heart-rending memories from taking over her every
thought. Other Sisters are also plunged in different ways into confronting
their deepest desires: Sister Honey with her deep longing for children; Sister
Philippa with her obsession to create the most beautiful garden.
Yet it is the house itself that is to defeat them all: for the Palace had pre-
viously been the quarters for the women (the harem) of the local ruler and
even the walls seem to have absorbed the qualities of pleasure, desire and
happiness of the sensual lives that had been lived there. For the nuns, this
lingering, palpable, atmosphere is incompatible with their lifestyle and devo-
tions—they begin to long for the things of the world rather than of the spir-
it—and to rebel. The sisters blame each other for being “irreverent” (119), of
neglecting their duties, or perverting the purpose of their work. Gradually, all
the sisters seem to have changed (128). The most devastating transformation
occurs with Sister Ruth, who descends through doubt and suspicion to para-
noia and eventual madness. Her death epitomises the failure of the nuns’
attempted project, and they must abandon the place and descend the moun-
tains to another city, and the ignominy of demotion. The women’s failure
also mirrors the climax of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, where friend-
ship between an Indian and an English man cannot survive, not at least in that
place or time. (Their fate of having to leave also prefigures the rapidly ap-
proaching end of British rule and Indian independence in 1947.)
In their high mountain retreat, the only man with whom the nuns must in-
teract is Mr Dean, the local land agent, who is treated by them with dislike
and disapproval. As both a non-believer and male (in addition to being a
140 Beyond Bodies
shabby drunk) he is an interloper into their contented seclusion and lives

quite outside their sphere of understanding. He functions, however, as the
external observer of their activities, the disinterested witness to their ever-
stranger ideas and rigid, culturally inappropriate beliefs. He warns them,
“You’re all in a highly dangerous state; an exaggerated state of mind,

or heart, or soul, or whatever you want to call it. Why don’t you have
the sense to leave? It’s not easy to stop people once they have let
themselves go…”. (Godden 1994: 160)
This “highly dangerous state” is again reminiscent of E.M. Forster’s im-

portant concept of “muddle” (a major theme in A Room with a View)—the
volatile state of moral and emotional failure that jeopardises both individual
happiness and society’s delicate balance of civility. This state of muddle, as
with Lucy Honeychurch in Forster’s Room with a View or here with Sister
Clodagh, is caused by the characters’ determination to reject the need for the
expression of genuine emotion and to deny the very existence of love. For
Lucy Honeychurch, it takes the heart-rending plea from Mr Emerson for her
to realise and embrace the reality of her feelings. Here it is Mr Dean who
reveals to Clodagh the truth of how much she has changed, and become
“‘much nicer’”. He tells her, “‘You’re human. Before you were inhuman,
much too invulnerable. Now you’re not. You can feel.’ ‘I can feel!’ she re-
peated” (158).
This technique of being told a truth is an important method of gaining en-
lightenment—usually in the context of the spiritual teacher or guru uttering
one statement (a mahavakya) that clarifies all the student’s questions or un-
certainties and dispels ignorance. In this traditional exchange, “a series of
arguments will eventually culminate in some simple spoken word which will
revolutionise the whole understanding of life and will once and for all raise a
man to the state of eternal freedom from bondage” (Mahesh Yogi 1967: 275).
Through intellectual understanding, the correct mahavakya, given at the cor-
rect time will “set the seal” on a particular level or state of consciousness.
The most famous is “tat twam asi”: “That thou art”—everything is the Self
(Katz 2011: 315-16).
In Black Narcissus, the natural necessity for wholeness (symbolised both
by the palace building and by the mountains that surround it) demands that
the life of the emotions cannot be divorced from other demands of spirituali-
ty, religion, or duty. “‘What’s underneath will soon come through’”, Mr
Dean warns the nuns as they attempt to transform and redecorate the ancient
Palace (52). Repression of “what’s underneath”—the life of feeling and emo-

tions—clearly does not work. Sister Ruth is eventually driven mad by her
tormented discovery that, despite all her severe self-discipline, she has fallen
in love with Mr Dean. Sister Clodagh eventually realises that the lack of
wholeness in their lives, caused through the distortions of their own under-
standing of life’s meaning, is not only useless but also destructive. Even her
motivation for entering the life of a nun, she finally sees as a “secret unwor-
thy reason” (158). The Palace initially brings to the nuns a sense of blissful
peace (161)—but it is caused through reasons they all deny or reject. Their
fussy rule-bound religious practice stands in sharp contrast to the sannyasi
silently meditating in the Palace grounds. Their solipsistic, even narcissistic,
way of life makes them blind to the magnificence of the surrounding Himala-
yan environment—and its local gods. Finally, for the exiled nuns, the poten-
tial beauty and bliss offered by all aspects of their location is transformed
into the “feeling of horror [that] was everywhere” (206).
In the analysis of women’s self-awareness, and its implications for con-
sciousness, we could conclude that attempts at artificial segregation –either
of outer/inner realities, of self/other, of mind/body or male/female, will al-
ways end in a damaging distortion of natural laws, a lack of fulfilment, and
the diversion of life away from values of enlightenment. In Black Narcissus,
it is Sister Clodagh alone who gains the degree of self-knowledge to be al-
tered by the experience; and her significant transformation is described as a
rebirth:
In these long sad days something strange was happening to Sister Clodagh.
She thought it was as if she were born again, as if at the end of their time at
Mopu had come the birth of a new Clodagh, a birth out of death. First there
had been the days where she had dreamed and drifted, her life shaping itself to
the old dreams […] then the days had become altogether sharp and she had
striven with intensity and agony. Now all that had fallen away; she was de-
fenceless and unencumbered as a new-born child. She had no pretences, no
ambitions and no pride; she hardly had any identity. She was not Sister
Clodagh any longer, she was a new, not very certain Clodagh, and it seemed to
her that she had new eyes and a new understanding. (207)
Her redefining path begins and ends with a glimpse of the unity underlying
all things in life. In a flash of realisation, she sees as she holds a wine-cup in
her fingers: “They were all in it, everything was in it; the things she had
thought and said and done” (207). All is revealed to have meaning; and the
142 Beyond Bodies
fullness inherent in her vision confirms new knowledge, new understanding,

of both the inner and outer, the absolute and the relative. The core Indian
Upanishadic wisdom “Purnamadah purnamidam” is hinted at: both the
world of activity and the realm of the absolute are characterised by fullness.
At the end of the novel, Sister Clodagh’s future is uncertain and unknown,
yet the reader is finally aware that, for Sister Clodagh, as in the verse from
the Bhagavad-Gita, “even a little of this dharma [the path of evolution] de-
livers from great fear” (Chapter 2 verse 40, quoted in Mahesh Yogi 1969:
117). This reading of Black Narcissus indicates that a new feminist approach
to “freedom” sought merely through the separation of women into their own
social sphere cannot be more than a superficial and temporary solution.
Women’s journey to a meaningful new identity and placement within society
must also involve an inner dimension—a growth of consciousness as demon-
strated by Sister Clodagh. She alone undergoes a transformation of aware-
ness, to integrate the internal and external environment (imbued as it is with
India’s profound spiritual traditions) to gain a profound redefinition of self.
The female quest narrative: The Crying of Lot 49
By the 1960’s, a new type of heroine was emerging: a woman who is asser-
tive, intelligent, resourceful, and deeply compassionate. Written at the height
of expressions of the crisis of identity inherent within a deconstructive ap-
proach to life and language, as well as during the height of the second wave
of feminist activism, The Crying of Lot 49 retells the mythical story of Oedi-
pus’s quest from the perspective of a female protagonist. The work has been
described as a quintessential post-modern novel with regards to its tone of
intense paranoia, the suspicion of all things in the material man-made world,
as if it were all a conspiracy. As Christopher Butler points out, in the post-
modern construction of society and “the nature of reality” are shaped by
political, military, and “ideological agendas of powerful elites” (2002: 38).
The “heroine”, moreover, is characterised by an unreliability merely symp-
tomatic of the bewildering world around her; and with no sense of a stable
external reference point may appear to be either “notoriously confused, or
perhaps mad” or at least in “an ambiguous mental state” (Butler 2002: 69).
Thomas Pynchon remains renowned for his experimental writing tech-
niques and novels that portray the vast social network of postmodern Ameri-
ca. In The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon leads his characters (and his readers) on
a seemingly wild goose chase, marking the path with apparently significant
but actually irrelevant clues to a possible mystery. Lot 49 in fact epitomises

the boundless signifying potential of language in the postmodern world in
which there are no facts but only indeterminate signifiers and irresolvable
conflicts of interpretation. The novel’s parade and parody of textual refer-
ences and ambiguities exemplify the general resistance of all texts to defini-
tive meanings, and deconstructs both masculinist hegemonies and society’s
over-reliance on science. Only if the novel is read in the light of it being a
spiritual quest, one that transcends surface power games and conspiracy
theories, does the novel make any satisfactory sense. The theme of woman’s
search for identity and fulfilment in life can been recognised as a spiritual
journey.
Oedipa Mass’s quest in Lot 49 is as Everywoman on a search for a tran-
scendental reality; she is on the archetypal quest for meaning in a hostile
universe. Like a female J. Alfred Prufrock, she is a loner walking the streets
of an urban wasteland; everything in Oedipa’s environment is man-made, she
is an alien in a masculine, concrete world. As the female protagonist, Oedipa
projects “an image of woman as an exploited victim in a male-dominated
society, which albeit a feminist cliché 20 years later, was somewhat ahead of
its time in 1966” (Colville 1988: 78). Although by the end of the novel, Oe-
dipa does not necessarily resolve the mystery, she recognises that the true
quest is an internal one that can only be fully understood within herself. Like
happiness, knowledge cannot be given externally. “There was nobody who
could help her. Nobody in the world. They were all on something, mad, pos-
sible enemies, dead” (Pynchon 1966: 128).
At the opening of the novel, Oedipa is a typical American young woman,
who has “conned herself into the curious, Rapunzel-like role of a pensive girl
somehow, magically, prisoner among the pines and salt fogs of Kinneret,
looking for somebody to say, hey, let down your hair” (10). The tower as
image of female isolation in a male world, and the myth of Rapunzel domi-
nate the imagery of the novel, but the dream turns into nightmare. Like The
Lady of Shallot, once she has left the safety of the tower and its mirror onto
the world, her fate is to search for meaning in the void outside—a void full of
information to be deciphered. Her quest is apparently as futile as her escape,
since:
Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realises that her
tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what
really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant. (Pynchon
1966:11)
144 Beyond Bodies
Yet unlike Tennyson’s Lady of Shallot, who moves zombie-like to her death,
when Oedipa breaks free to create her own reality away from the mirror im-
age, she has four alternatives, “she may fall back on superstition, or take up a
useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey” (1966: 11).
She does the last first, with the other choice of madness lingering as a distinct
possibility.
Oedipa is made executrix of a will. In her search for what (or who) she
has inherited, she navigates her way between the concrete world of California
and the unknown world of the Trystero—a shadowy organisation symbolised
by a muted post horn. As Oedipa begins her quest, armed with “no apparatus
except gut fear and female cunning” (8) she must integrate her knowledge of
the material and transcendental worlds into a meaningful whole. She hopes
that the discovery of Trystero will end her sense of being entrapped within
the confines of mundane meaninglessness. She is however, hindered in her
search by episodes with various men, all of whom eventually fail her.
Through a series of bizarre experiences she becomes aware that the world
is her own making, as reality, like postmodernist language, becomes an end-
less process of difference and absence.
The reader experiences the suggested transcendencies in the story as al-
ternatives to “waking state” reality and they provide a glimpse of possible
authenticity underlying the superficialities of American life. The mysterious
organisation Trystero, denoted by the muted post horn and a hidden code of
symbols represents variously the disinherited of America and most im-
portantly it represents the shadowy presence of WASTE, an alternative to the
mail (“male”?) system. When Oedipa finds her first clue to the identity of
Trystero and the WASTE system, written beneath a restroom mirror, she
writes in her notebook “Shall I project a world” (59). She knows intuitively
that the world outside is a projection of the mind inside: it is self-referral.
This knowledge that the external world is as we are, shatters her own self-
image (like the mirror breaking) for although she starts by attempting to find
Trystero outside herself, she soon comes to accept her own participation and
responsibility for whatever “reality” is. She discovers that being object-
referral—only gaining knowledge through the senses—is not enough.
Trystero opens up the possibility of transcendental meaning, which includes
her own inner consciousness. To gain total knowledge of both inner and outer
realities (expressed in the binary opposites of Trystero/ the US mail, the “dis-
inherited”/ material America) Oedipa learns to be self-referral, to see the
environment literally and metaphorically as self-reflections in a mirror.
Thomas Schaub discusses that Oedipa is caught between two worlds, real
and imaginary, intolerable and insane, chaos and order (1980: 106). The link
between the two alternate worlds—America and Trystero, sanity and mad-
ness, totalitarian order or chaos—is frequently made through the recurring
symbol of the mirror. The imagery of mirrors as windows to perception,
verses literal and spiritual blindness abound in the novel, parodying both
Greek epics and myths. After breaking a mirror on a motel bathroom, Oedipa
later awakes to find herself staring into a mirror (36). She often resorts to
looking at herself in the driving mirror, as if to reconfirm her identity in the
face of threatening paranoia (128). Ultimately, the key to any possible mean-
ing lies at the auction of Lot 49 to be held in San Narciso—a city whose
name obviously plays on the myth of Narcissus, the Greek youth who fell in
love with his own face, not realising the reflection in the pool to be his own
image. Simone de Beauvoir, writing a decade before Pynchon’s novel, takes
the symbol of the mirror as central to her discussion of women’s traditional
subordinate position in society. She argues that “Woman . . . is the mirror in
which the male, Narcissus-like, contemplates himself” (de Beauvoir 1952:
175).
The “Wild Zone’ of consciousness
In her essay, “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness”, Elaine Showalter argues

that oppressive patriarchy has forced women to forge a new reality for them-
selves. She has elaborated a strategy of the Wild Zone, an area of female life-
style that is both outside of and unlike that of men. The original definition of
the wild zone by Edwin Ardener emphasises that it is a muted sphere of expe-
rience. Women, he argues, are “overlooked”, muted, invisible, mere “black
holes in someone else’s universe” (1978: 25). The crucial word, muted sug-
gests for Showalter problems of both language and power (1985:262). The
main problem for women as a subculture is one of self-expression, since all
language is controlled by the dominant patriarchal order (ideas which again
parallel Pynchon’s concept of Trystero as shadowy subculture and alternate
means of communication). The “wild zone” of women’s experience compris-
es aspects of creativity and imagination, a “place for revolutionary women’s
language, the language of everything that is repressed”, yet an area of em-
powerment since “through voluntary entry into the wild zone […] a woman
can write her way out of the cramped confines of patriarchal space”
(Showalter 1985: 264). The wild zone of women’s experience comprises
146 Beyond Bodies
aspects of creativity and imagination, a place for revolutionary women’s

language that is elsewhere repressed, an area of interpersonal experience and
awareness inaccessible to men, an area of female consciousness. By having
access to this alternative sphere of living, female characters in literature are
able to live both in and out of male (public) spaces, they are able to oscillate
between zones of male and female knowledge, ethics and mores—of gen-
dered performance—able to transcend patriarchy and find new realities of
both language and consciousness. As a female space of interpersonal experi-
ence, the wild zone can be expanded to represent a free space in female con-
sciousness—a gap that allows for the expansion of women’s awareness be-
yond the confines of everyday consciousness.
The wild zone represents an experience of the co-existence of opposites,
whether material and spiritual, civilised and uncivilised, central to and yet at
the boundary of established society. The alternation of awareness between
these opposite values of abstract and concrete—here the conventional experi-
ence of patriarchal structures (the concrete) and the unbounded nature of the
wild zone (the abstract)—precipitates an experience of unboundedness for
the reader: the co-existence of opposites in fact precipitates an experience of
self-referral in which the reader’s awareness is directed “if not to the Self, at
least toward the Self, toward the level of pure consciousness underlying the
more active levels of the mind” (Orme-Johnson 1987: 353). Self-referral
consciousness is characterised by the fact it is “awake” to its own nature, it
knows itself, and being awake to its own nature, has been described as the
source of creativity in nature and in human intelligence. In traditional Vedic
terminology, this wakefulness creates the co-existence of the three-fold as-
pects of knowledge: rishi, devata, and chhandas, the knower, the process of
knowing, and the known (Dillbeck 1988: 249). These three aspects must
come together into a samhita (the wholeness of parts) if knowledge is to be
complete. Where protagonists—heroes or heroines—in literature are over-
come by the problem of inadequate knowledge, either knowledge of them-
selves or their environment, it is often because one aspect of these three is out
of balance. They may be acting out of object- rather than subject-referral.
Chhandas, the known, ever-changeable material world of sense perception
may dominate consciousness rather than an underlying stable notion of the
pure Self, which is the balanced unity of chhandas with rishi and devata. (In
Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, for example, the wife becomes lost in the
object of her perceptions, chhandas, and completely loses any notion of her
stable, non-changing self.)
Modern science and Vedic science shed light on Pynchon’s paradox
Oedipa begins her quest in a state of what is termed in Vedic poetics

“praghya aparadh”, basing her actions of the “mistake of the intellect”. The
basic mistake is that human awareness is differentiated from a universal
awareness, believing that the universe is void and lacking meaning. In the
course of Oedipa’s journey to self-knowledge, she comes to discover that
everything has meaning, she locates the transcendental reality she has been
seeking; everything, like the interconnected railroad tracks of America, is
infinitely correlated. Oedipa’s isolated tower and the “NADA” sign swinging
above her husband Mucho Mass’s used-car lot are images comparable to the
Maribar Caves in Forster’s A Passage to India, where every sound in the
caves distorts the meaning of a glimpsed universal reality, transformed by the
echo into total negation. “All this is That”, Tat twam asi, (Chandoya Upani-
shad 6.12-14) is the ultimate realisation of universal reality, in which That is
fullness and Bliss, not emptiness as the confusing echo in Forster’s cave and
the “nothing” sign would suggest. Oedipa’s spiritual journey places her both
in-the-world and not in-the-world; her experience of meaning lies in her
oscillation between the known world of California and the unknown world of
Trystero, which ultimately lead to her realisation that her reality is within her
own consciousness.
Pynchon refers to the “alternate reality” of quantum field theory, underly-
ing the visible universe and revolutionising the previous commonly held
understandings of Newtonian physics. The implications of this theory and
quantum physics as a whole (see for example the theories of John Wheeler
and David Bohm) have been largely ignored by the general public. Bell’s
theorem, for example, states that everything in the universe is linked by “in-
visible quantum connections” and that it is in fact consciousness that creates
reality. Oedipa knows that in contrast to the material world of America, there
“had to exist the separate, silent, unsuspecting world” (92). Oedipa is at one
point described as functioning like Maxwell’s Demon, sorting the entropic
particles in the machine, and as such she is again situated on the junction
point between two realities. Oedipa’s awareness swings between these oppo-
sitions: she lives both in and out of the quotidian world of California, within
patriarchal society and also in the “wild zone” of her own consciousness, not
subject to man-made laws. This oscillation between inner and outer worlds is
like the swing of awareness between concrete and abstract that has been dis-
148 Beyond Bodies
cussed as being primary in a growth to higher states of consciousness. As

Vedic wisdom expounds:
Absolute consciousness is the phenomenon of holding together the two oppo-

site values – singularity (togetherness) of diversity (observer, process of ob-
servation and observed) – holding together singularity and diversity. […] In
this we have the display of infinite organising power—opposite values held
together. (Mahesh Yogi 1993: 268)
This process takes the awareness beyond the everyday waking state to deeper
levels of the mind, characterised by a field of all possibilities. For Oedipa, in
expanding her awareness through alternating between concrete and abstract,
inner and outer, Trystero and the world of California, her “wild zone” and the
zone of men, she grows in both inner and outer knowledge, a state described
as “the birth of a unified consciousness” (Pearson 1981:158).
Oedipa’s epiphanic experience at the end of the book lies in her realisa-
tion that Trystero—despite its other (possibly imagined) sinister overtones—
holds the key to transcendent meaning. Throughout the constant threat of
paranoia or a descent into actual madness, Oedipa retains all her feminine
qualities of love and understanding. In fact, Oedipa’s real quest has been one
of love, of finding a human being’s responsibility to others. It is Oedipa’s
deep compassion for her fellow humans that strikes us so forcibly in contrast
to the materialism and violence of the wasteland of American life and the
“hollow men” of the novel. Her response, for example, to a dying sailor,
whom she holds cradled in her arms produces the image of a modern pieta, a
compassionate Madonna (93) contrasted to the background of “a culture that
is paranoid beyond belief” (Wagner 157). At the beginning of the novel,
Oedipa weeps with empathy for the maidens trapped in the tower in a Reme-
dios Varo painting. By the end of the novel, she has grown to a “new com-
passion” (130) that like her vision of America “has no boundaries” (134). In
thinking of America, she thinks primarily of its people: of children, mothers,
squatters and drifters, of “walkers along the road at night” (135).
Such caring and compassion are indicative of not only a new feminist eth-
ics (such as that discussed by psychologist Carol Gilligan), but also of a spir-
itually enlightened person. She identifies with everyone as a gigantic family,
exemplifying the Sanskrit saying, “The world is my family”. Oedipa’s ability
to maintain, in fact to expand, her qualities of compassion and caring against
such overwhelming odds, demonstrates that her consciousness is expanding,
that she is in touch with the deeper levels of her mind—for beyond the gross
level of thought lies feeling, and the Self. Linda Wagner argues that “Pyn-
chon points out again and again that Oedipa wants nothing for herself, only
answers to her questions, ‘What was there left to inherit? Was there just
America’?” (1974: 160). Although at the end of the book it is the auctioneer,
Loren Passerine, who spreads his arms out like a Pentecostal angel, it is Oe-
dipa’s deep compassion that reaches out to encompass the whole of America.
She sits back patiently waiting for the revelation of truth about Trystero,
which may be either malignant or divine.
“One of the things Oedipa must decide”, concludes Dwight Eddins, “is
whether the transcendence offered by Trystero’s gnosis affirms or negates the
human and humane equilibrium she prizes” (1990: 107). Despite this ambi-
guity, the reader is left with a sense of elation of the end of the novel, since
she recognises the possibility of Oedipa’s eventual rise to a higher state of
consciousness. Romantic love has failed her completely, yet through her
access to deeper levels of her own consciousness she has found possible
alternatives to her questions about meaning, as well as an escape from the
“dark tower” of male domination. Whatever is to happen next in the story is
not as important as the fact that, like Arjuna on the battle field in The Bhaga-
vad-Gita, she has “gained equanimity in pleasure and pain, in gain and loss,
in victory and defeat” and she is ready not only to “come out to fight” but
will do so “unattached to the fruits of action” (Mahesh Yogi 1967:
113,133)—established in a state of pure consciousness.
A journey through the Wild Zone: Housekeeping
Similar to the quest motif in The Crying of Lot 49, the first novel by Ameri-
can author Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping, suggests a search for tran-
scendental reality. Both these novels provide demonstrations of how spiritual
transcendence offers an alternative reality, a “female space” that can empow-
er and liberate women. Contrasting Pynchon’s novel with Marilynne Robin-
son’s Housekeeping can perhaps elucidate a gendered perspective on wom-
en’s quest for meaning and identity amidst the turbulent breakdown of cer-
tainty and the deconstruction of central cores of truth or transcendence in the
mid twentieth century. The notion of the socially-constructed self is chal-
lenged through these novels, for the female characters here undergo internal
(mental or spiritual) changes that both reject and defy societal norms. In both
novels, such defiance is branded as “madness”. Housekeeping depicts the
female protagonists’ ability to escape the world of limitations and live in a
150 Beyond Bodies
self-defined space of their own invention. As Oedipa determines to do, they

succeed in projecting their own world.
Published in 1981, Housekeeping has since been hailed as a feminist clas-
sic, “an essentially female novel” (Weintraub 1986: 69). Joan Kirkby regards
the novel as a rejection “of the patriarchal values that have dominated Ameri-
can culture and a return to the values and modes of being that have been
associated in myth and imagery with the province of the female” (1986: 92).
The title is perhaps ironic, since the main theme of the novel is how women
can evade the normal responsibilities of home and family ties to escape into
their own re-defined way of life. While female characters dominate the novel,
it is essentially the journey of the protagonist, Ruth, to full self-hood, against
the background of an inadequate, uncomprehending society. The novel can
also be seen as one of the few attempts by an author to write from within a
conceptual “wild zone”, to create a novel exploring female consciousness
from the perspective of a woman-only social space. While other feminist
writers in the 1970’s and 80’s (Marge Piercy and Ursula Le Guin, for exam-
ple) envisioned female spaces in terms of science fiction—problem-free
planets or futuristic locales where women reigned supreme—Robinson lo-
cates this possibility for women within the heart of rural America.
At the edge of Fingerbone Lake, in the vast northwest of America, the
women of the Foster family live in a world completely removed from the
world of men. (As in the wild zone: they live in a space separate from, and
yet geographically overlapping, that of men.) The plot, which begins with the
girls’ grandfather dying in a train wreck, is thereafter devoid of male charac-
ters. The action of the characters takes place almost entirely outside the terri-
tory of male experience, as they create a safe haven, an option to the world of
oppressive masculinist values.
Sylvie, the strange and enigmatic aunt of the two young orphan girls,
Ruth and Lucille, by choice lives a migrant existence on the periphery of
society. Rejecting rules of dress, life-style and sociability, she teaches the
girls her own style of self-sufficiency, integrity, as well as spiritual aware-
ness. She is considered mad by the neighbours for not running a “normal”
household: inviting the reader to consider whether it is she, or the “normal”
town residents with their restricted thinking, who best depict strangeness.
Challenging the concept of family and roots, the novel ends with Sylvie burn-
ing down the house and heading off with Ruth for a life of migrancy—
freeing them forever from the life designated and required by “housekeep-
ing”—and disappearing from the confinement of traditionally organised

space.
On one level, the novel depicts the tensions and tragedies of three genera-
tions of a family living in a small town on the edge of a huge lake that domi-
nates both the physical and social landscape. On a deeper level, William
Burke argues that the novel is “an unconventional primer on the mystical
life” (1991: 717). Other critics respond to the spirit of survival pervading the
novel, and how the lyrical prose transforms the potential melancholy and
trauma of bereavement, abandonment and loss. Rosemary Booth goes further
by suggesting that “the notion of shelter is linked with an inner effort to forge
a new self” (1983: 306).
Ruth’s dream-like narrative voice throughout the text transforms apparent
problems into a quasi-mystical interior landscape—a dimension experienced
through a pantheistic communion with nature, as well as her growing bond
with her aunt Sylvie. Both order and family bonds dissolve and the comforts
of house and “home” are rejected; yet out of destruction and dissolution, “a
new self and life emerge” (Booth 1986: 306).
As the central characters progress towards a life beyond boundaries—
unboundedness in both literal and metaphorical senses—rejecting society’s
norms of behaviour, the reader also participates in this expansion of aware-
ness. This growth is portrayed through the central metaphor of transience and
the images of border crossings—social, geographical and perceptual. The
long railway bridge crossing the lake and the lake itself (male and female
symbols respectively) are key locations of change and transformation
throughout the novel—being the sites of deaths accidental and suicidal—and
of the characters’ final escape. With its many stories of drowning, the lake is
also a central symbol of change, death and resurrection. The deep, frozen
waters contrast with the lushness of woods: darkness and light are constant
metaphors for imagination, knowledge, and discovery, both mental and phys-
ical. The characters learn through their experiences in nature, particularly
crossing the lake into the deep woods beyond, how their inner and outer lives
are mirror images of each other. The fate of the protagonists, Ruth and Syl-
vie—similarly mirror images in terms of desire and imagination—may be
regarded as ambiguous and yet their escape to a new life offers “a vision of
wholeness and harmony” (Burke 724).
The central theme of transience is not only superficially linked with tran-
scendence (the crossing of borders) both social and spiritual. Even Ruth’s
name is of significance, echoing as is does the Old Testament Ruth, who
152 Beyond Bodies
leaves her own people to follow her destiny into a new land. Like Oedipa’s
name with its resonance of the classical world, so Ruth’s name enriches the
reader with allusions to the biblical Ruth, who was known for her kindness,
devotion and faithfulness. According to the story, she insists on leaving her
home and accompanying Naomi, saying, “Whither thou goest, I will go; and
where thou lodgest, I will lodge” (Book Of Ruth). In many ways her relation-
ship with her mother-in-law Naomi compares to that of Ruth’s relationship
with her aunt Sylvie in Housekeeping. In several instances, Ruth confuses or
merges the identities of her aunt and her mother, Helen. When Ruth leaves
her home with Sylvie, she places similar faith in her newly adopted mother-
substitute, as they leave for an uncertain, yet fulfilled, future.
The two women transients transcend the world. They are united in a wild
zone through their mutual love and shared language and experience—one
from which her sister Lucille gradually and purposefully excludes herself.
Ruth is led into this transcendental world by her aunt as they row across the
vast freezing lake into the wilderness—“drawn down into the darker world”
(151)—where Ruth is left alone to experience an initiation into self-reliance/
self-referral and thus expanded awareness. Sylvie has left her to watch and
wait for some ghostly children, who may or may not inhabit a ruined house in
the woods. In the depths of this intensified isolation and loss, Ruth enters a
liminal world of her imagination. In her state of coldness, loneliness, and
sensory deprivation, her awareness travels within herself to a state of least
mental excitation or activity. The narrator describes the subjective journey,
the discovery of how inner and outer realities flow into each other; the co-
existence of past and future moments, of resurrection and a new blossoming
of life, where the “world will be made whole” (Robinson 1982: 152).
Consciousness and women’s language
If language creates the culture that employs it, the transcending of verbal
thought is also a means of escaping the limitations of society. Thought, of
course, is not limited to words, it exists prior to verbalisation as imagery, or
as fusions of meaning. The ability to go beyond thought—to reach transcen-
dental consciousness—is a means of reaching to a pre-verbal level, that of
truth. Ruth describes one experience of sensory refinement so profound and
delicate in its nature that the activities of thinking of it and feeling it become
identical. “To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow”, she
realises, “when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it?”
(152). The moment of desire and fulfilment merge: the mere thought produc-
es the result. Ruth explains:
For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may
lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly
know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smoothes our hair, and brings us
wild strawberries. (153)
This level of mental functioning is similar to that described in Vedic poetics

as ritam bara pragya; a state where the awareness functions at such a refined
linguistic level that name and form become one, and where mere thinking
produces the desired result. This state is also described as jyotish mati
pragya, meaning the “subjective experience of light” at the finest level of
manifestation or appearance before creation dissolves into pure conscious-
ness—or from the converse viewpoint, it is at that very first moment of
emerging manifestation from the unmanifest—the junction point of relative
and absolute. When the human mind is capable of acting from this level, it is
functioning from the source of where sound produces form; where the word
produces the “thing-itself” (the signifier and the signified are one). From this
state of ritam, the thought-desire of the mind is projected into the world as
the object: the “wild strawberries”. (Here, the choice of wild strawberries is
not an arbitrary one as the fruit also invoke the memory and are thus also a
symbol of Ruth’s dead mother.)
Gender, on a superficial level, appears a formulation of both body and
language—constructs emphasised in the work of poststructuralist feminists.
Some feminist critics see women’s use of language as reflecting the inner
world of female experience. Julia Kristeva, for example, argues that women
use a semiotic language—the pre-logical, pre-symbolic maternal language of
mother to child that proceeds the formally-learnt patriarchal language. For
Kristeva, this is a deeper level of unity in language, since it is based on an
emotional, pre-linguistic, bond (1991). This theory of language could be
compared to the Vedic theory of levels of language that go beyond vaikhari
(the level of gross speech) to pashyanti (the finest relative impulse) and para
(the transcendent). Is women’s use of language closer to an unbounded, ab-
stract and thus more unified level? Perhaps any such conclusions would rely
too heavily on biologically-determined and essentialist definitions of woman,
yet from the examples of The Crying of Lot 49 and Housekeeping, we could
argue that women have the ability to access the deeper (non-verbal) level of
language—such as the emotional sub-verbal communication by women in the
154 Beyond Bodies
“wild zone”. Male language use arguably remains on the vaikhari level, with-
in the boundaries of prescribed patriarchal semantics and rules of rhetoric.
Women’s intimate and intuitive language provides a creative counterbalance
to these rules. Women could find themselves freed from definition within
temporal-historical patriarchy. Just as the female characters themselves nego-
tiate the boundaries between material world of space-time, and the metaphys-
ical world of interdeterminacy, this level of more abstract or imagistic lan-
guage impinges on ambiguity, transcendence and unboundedness. One tech-
nique for gaining transcendence is the ability to live within boundaries and
unboundedness, and the alternation of this experience brings the awareness to
the state where transcendence becomes lived in more and more of quotidian
life—and when transcendental consciousness is maintained throughout all of
life, waking and dreaming, then the individual is said to have attained cosmic
consciousness.
Allowing her female characters women a deeper ability to experience the
non-rational dimension (which is often associated with the non-temporal),
Marilynne Robinson certainly seems to be projecting similar concepts for the
reader to contemplate. Her own use of language—the text borders in places
on the purely poetic—also provides Robinson with the technique of project-
ing the reader’s awareness into a quasi-dreamlike absorption into the aesthet-
ics of language, almost intruding upon the need for surface meaning. Thus
the reader also has a taste of the “wild zone” of women’s language, closer to
the unifying level of image and abstraction.
Transience and transcendence
As the story progresses, this textual technique and the plot run a parallel
course: Ruth spends the day alone, suspended in a state between waking and
sleep, a state of near-dreaming in which she can almost conjure up her moth-
er, not as a figure, but as “a music I no longer heard, that rang in my mind”
(158). After Ruth’s long lonely vigil, Sylvie reappears to take her out once
more on the boat, to spend the night silently watching and waiting. Ruth is
terrified they may drown in the lake “full of people”, but comforts herself
that the difference between water and air “may be relative rather than abso-
lute” (160). After surviving this intense day and night rite-de-passage into
womanhood, which seems to have been arranged to test her self-reliance and
bravery, a new unspoken bond has been formed between the two women.
Symbolically, Sylvie wraps her huge coat around Ruth to let her rest “under
the reach of her arms” (163). When morning comes, they jump a freight train
and return to Fingerbone. From now on, they live in the wild zone, apparently
having reconciled the oppositions of inner/outer, the house/the lake, house-
keeping and freedom. With like minds and hearts, verbal communication
between them is almost unnecessary –“this was the measure of our intimacy”
(195).
It is at this point that the townspeople become alarmed, afraid that “Sylvie
was an unredeemed transient and that she was making a transient of me”
(177). They are afraid because transients, like ghosts, remind them of their
own impermanence. Desperately, the neighbours and the sheriff (representing
patriarchal control) attempt to reason with the two women, and to anchor
them to their home. Ruth realises, “Their motives were complex and un-
searchable, but all of one general kind. They were obliged to come by their
notions of piety and good breeding, and by a desire, a determination, to keep
me, so to speak, safely within doors” (183). They fear that Ruth will become
lost to ordinary society, and Sylvie makes some gestures towards conforming
to normal life by cleaning and housekeeping. But the reader knows that phys-
ically, emotionally and spiritually the two women belong to another world, in
which “reality” is differently defined. Ruth has already described how she
has her own inner reality—a different state of consciousness— and knows
that staying is impossible, “Like a soul released, I would find here only the
images and the simulacra of the things needed to sustain me” (183).
“Realism” as a genre has long been disparaged by some women writers,
who prefer instead to regard society in terms of magic realism; redefining
gender through fantasy; and history through metafiction. Women are able to
re-evaluate society by looking at it askew. Women characters in the early
twentieth century (one can think of E.M. Forster’s Margaret Schlegel, Mrs
Wilcox, and Mrs Moore) have also been endowed by male authors with mys-
tique and power in hypocritical societies in which men have ultimately failed
through lack of self-knowledge and love. Here, the superficiality of society’s
values have gone beyond meaning to be mere simulacra—an image of an
image of an idea of reality.
With this realisation, and having gained both self-knowledge and love,
the threat of separation drives Ruth and Sylvie to escape to their freedom.
They turn out the lights of the house and proceed to set it on fire, to be sym-
bolic of their rejection of the demands of society and the start of their new
life together, as a unity:
156 Beyond Bodies
Sylvie and I (I think that night we were almost a single person) could not leave
the house, which was stashed like a brain, a reliquary, its relics to be pawned
and sorted and parcelled out among the needy and the parsimonious of Fin-
gerbone. Imagine the blank light of Judgment falling on you suddenly. It
would be like that. For even things lost in a house abide, like forgotten sor-
rows and incipient dreams. (209)
Marilynne Robinson endows religious references with significance, since the

house had previously been likened to Noah’s Ark and regarded as a “holy”
image for Ruth. But now she compares their situation to an even more iconic
story: “now truly we were cast out to wander, and there was an end to house-
keeping” (209). Like two Eves leaving the Eden they have destroyed behind
them, they walk across the railway bridge—a dangerous crossing that takes
all night—and thus symbolically break the last link between social conven-
tions and the unbounded life they so desire. From there, the rest of America
opens up, offering the freedom to travel, to be unlocatable, and to be them-
selves. Aware that the townspeople regard them as mad, and that “they can
always get you for increasingly erratic behavior” (213), the women become
drifters, their journeys intricate and random: “And once you have put your
foot on that path it is hard to imagine any other” (213).
As the boundaries to their behaviour and life-style dissolve, so too do the
distinctions between the levels of the mind, and the levels of language. Ruth
explains: “I have never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming.
I know my life would have been much different if ever I could say, This I
have learned from my senses, while that I have merely imagined” (216).
Oscillating between objective and subjective realities, and allowing for the
blurring of such concepts in both experience and expression, Ruth gains an
almost quantum mechanical perception of the world. She rejects the classical
worldview of observable certainties: “All this is fact. Fact explains nothing.
On the contrary, it is fact that needs explaining” (217). Rather, she speaks
from an insight into the free play of probabilities and possibilities, and the
non-existence of boundaries or exact locations. Imagining how Lucille may
be trying to find them, she explains, “Sylvie and I do not flounce in through
the door […] we do not sit down at the table next to hers […] We are no-
where in Boston. However Lucille may look, she will never find us there, or
any trace or sign. We pause nowhere…” (218).
Thus, at the end of the novel, Ruth metaphorically rises from the ashes of
the destroyed past (which had been defined in terms of classical physics) and
chooses a life of quantum non-locatability. Although ostensibly about social
transformations, Housekeeping is also a novel of spiritual quest: indeed, the

distinction between the spiritual and the secular or mundane seems to be
collapsed: the quotidian and the mystical merge.
In some of her non-fictional writing, Robinson addresses the historical
debates over the nature of the mind, and how, although from perspectives
often antagonistic to each other, both science and religion have tried to clari-
fy the mind’s purpose and structure. If the terms “mind” and “soul” remain in
dispute, she argues, “they are at least terms that have been found useful for
describing aspects of the expression and self-experience of our very complex
nervous system” (2010: xi). She considers the ancient philosophies that pos-
ited the human mind as a microcosm, mirroring the structure of the universe,
which asserted “a profound kinship between human kind and the whole of
being”, a belief that she sees one that “common sense must encourage us to
believe does in fact exist” (xiii-iv). Housekeeping (although written thirty
years previously) endorses these observations—and expresses Robinson’s
belief that modernist and postmodern rejection of metaphysics has resulted in
a truncation of our understanding of being human: “even as our capacity to
describe the fabric of reality and the dimensions of it has undergone an aston-
ishing deepening and expansion, we have turned away from the ancient intui-
tion that we are a part of it all” (2010: xiv).
While knowledge of reality in all its different forms can only be liberat-
ing, yet it is research into the nature of our own human consciousness that is
still imperative for the collective culture as well as for the individual. Robin-
son, in her conclusion, quotes Emerson’s essay “The American Scholar”, in
which he reflects that it is “in silence” and “in going down into the secrets of
his own mind [that] he has descended into the secrets of all minds” (qt Rob-
inson 2010: xvii). Taken as part of the novel’s extended metaphysical meta-
phor, the characters of Ruth and Sylvie personify the union of mind and mat-
ter, and the path of exploration into nature and beyond society reflects on the
nature of consciousness as memory, identity, and imagination—the
knowledge and experience of consciousness “that would emancipate human-
kind if only it could be made accessible to them” (Robinson 2010: 3).
In the light of consciousness studies and the information gleaned from
quantum mechanics, the differentiation of the human self into gender may be
even more inaccurate, irrelevant, or unhelpful than previously realised. Rob-
inson defines the self as “The solitary, perceiving, and interpreting locus of
anything that can be called experience” (2010: 7), and calls for the reinstated
belief in the non-physicality of the mind, since the mind’s awareness of itself
158 Beyond Bodies
(its capacity to “stand apart from itself”) is as important of its awareness of

physical reality (117-8). As seen from a viewpoint of consciousness, the
existence of levels of body-mind is more fundamental to identity, to culture
and to history, than the superficial outward appearance or the gross levels of
language.
This chapter has demonstrated the polarities of experience in the concept
of “women’s space” and its implications for consciousness. The dichotomy
between whether such segregation affords opportunity for personal growth
and the reformulation of identity in “positive” directions is perceived through
literary examples and also in the critical debates that have ranged from dy-
namic liberation (Housekeeping) to a “post-modern” questioning of the na-
ture of self and reality itself (The Crying of Lot 49) to the collapse of mental
and spiritual well-being (Sister Ruth in Black Narcissus) or the possibility of
transformation and self-knowledge (Sister Clodagh).
Traditional feminism and critical approaches to gendered space also em-
phasise the political positioning of women as already “outside” and “hidden”
in nationalistic and patriarchal hegemonies; women are already non-members
of the “imagined communities” that constitute nations (Yuval-Davis 1998:
23-28). The need here, therefore, would be for already-excluded women to
fight their way into a male-dominated world in order to gain recognition,
agency, and fulfilment. Other viewpoints, however, propose the potential, for
example, of “in-between living” as a highly creative way of surviving—as a
place to question the regimes of truth and be reminded of “the unchangeabil-
ity of change” (Minh–Ha 1991: 21).
Arguments for female interconnectivity extend these viewpoints to the
question of consciousness and imbricate dimensions of women beyond being
exclusively socially embodied, or defined by patriarchal positioning. The
possibilities for deconstructing public/private concepts of space hold exten-
sive liberatory potential for women (especially in colonial or post-colonial
contexts, as I shall discuss in a later chapter). Perhaps an analysis of gendered
space, which seems to deny both social, and often spiritual, agency, suggests
the need for a further integration of space, rather than risking further aliena-
tion of the sexes through separation. True insurrection, perhaps, lies in under-
standing and empathy, not further division. The struggle to create new crea-
tive and subjective female spheres in terms of writing also continues to chal-
lenge and rewrite female roles: endlessly refining subjectivity and redefining
the multiplicity of “perfect” feminine selves.
The Crying of Lot 49, with all its attributes of ambiguity and allusion, in
fact allows for a deeper metaphysical analysis of the contemporary world,
despite it being a world defined by its negation of universal truths and cer-
tainties. The instability of the ever-changing surface world necessitates the
search for a deeper structure on which to base individual identity as well as
the opportunity of an exploratory reappraisal of personal ethics. Spiritual
uncertainty is translated into the theme of a quest for an alternative but af-
firmative reality. Ultimately, these novels go beyond a deconstruction of
signification to a reaffirmation of woman’s meaning in life through the ex-
pansion of consciousness—socially, creatively but most importantly, spiritu-
ally—to an ultimate experience of higher “expanded” spiritual awareness.1
Finally, in terms of higher states of consciousness, the definition of what
constitutes “space” or “place” would need to be placed in the larger perspec-
tive of the entire manifest world: since activity in any part of the relative is
distinct from non-activity, the silence, experienced in the state of the Abso-
lute. When the mind transcends relative thought to reach the innermost state
of unbounded, pure consciousness, then by its intrinsic nature, the mind is
beyond “space” or any concept of locality. Moreover, we know from modern
physics that the nature of space itself is not static but constantly expanding.
The constantly morphing nature of space –propelled by the energy of gravi-
ty—challenges or even negates any metaphorical conceptualisation of space
as either limited or definable. Can any specific quality of space even be lo-
catable? Bifurcating space into female or male may therefore seem to ignore
the elastic nature of space as well as restricting the unbounded potential of
human consciousness. Brian Greene (2011) states that the purpose of the
study of physics—in fact, “the beauty of physics” (271)—is to discover not
only the “how” of the universe but also the “why” of the way the universe
functions. “The heart of physics,” he writes, “would be lost if it didn’t give us
1
In a similar process, the gap between the text and sub-text, the denoted and conno-
tated meanings—while challenging or even disturbing the reader’s sense of stable
“reality”—leads to the reader’s epiphany that, paradoxically, the concept of the “ever-
changing” contains the certainty of “ever”. The endless chain of signifiers, with its
implied lack of meaning, the transcendental signified, in fact endorses the stable
concept of infinity. As Terry Eagleton cleverly points out in commenting on the
postmodern rejection of meaning and grand narratives that gave the illusion of “some-
thing real”: “It is no use pining for depths that never existed. The fact that they seem
to have vanished does not mean that life is superficial, since you can only have sur-
faces if you have depths to contrast them with” (Eagleton 2008:58).
160 Beyond Bodies
a deep understanding of the hidden reality underlying what we observe”

(271). With the recent theories of multiverses, and the “profoundly vast”
cosmos (2011: 370), the answer to why space has been constantly expanding
since the Big Bang may however, only be accessible through “expanded”
human consciousness—preferably, it seems, that of an enlightened physicist.
In its everyday state of waking consciousness, the mind is incessantly en-
gaged in the field of activity, of being located in space-time, with the
thought-process being directed towards the pursuit of one desire or goal after
another. These desires of the mind, body, and senses–and the need to fulfil
them—overshadow any experience of the underlying stillness, of the non-
localised bliss at the source of thought and being. The best way out of op-
pression caused by rules and boundaries is first by liberating the inner self,
then outer freedom will follow.
Chapter Seven
Beyond gender myths:

Angela Carter’s feminist fables
Simone de Beauvoir, the “spiritual mother” of European feminism

(Showalter 2001: 222), describes how the traditional woman is “the Sleeping
Beauty, Cindarella, Snow White, she who receives and submits […] she is
locked in a tower, a palace, a cave, she is chained to a rock, captive, sound
asleep; she waits” (1952: 271).
Feminist theory is rooted in women’s perspectives and women’s experi-
ences. It returns again and again to centralising the female body and the rela-
tionship between gender and sexuality as a powerful marker of identity and
ideology. Similarly, for de Beauvoir, woman must no longer be defined
through masculinist discourse, where she is a slave to a male master, and the
way to freedom for women is through the body.
Yet, as Judith Butler argues: “a feminist view argues that gender should
be overthrown, eliminated, or rendered fatally ambiguous precisely because it
is always a sign of subordination for women” (1999: xiv). The first wave
feminists in the 1970’s, “discovered the non-being of woman: the paradox of
being at once captive and absent in discourse, constantly spoken of, but of
itself inaudible or inexpressible” (De Lauretis 1990: 115). Across cultural
and national divides, from the late 1970’s on, new forms of connection and
solidarity were slowly being established; concepts of “sisterhood” were de-
veloped, and the work of writers such as bell hooks discussed female experi-
ence in terms of relationship between local and universal. In her essay “Sis-
terhood: Political Solidarity between Women”, hooks argues that
women do not need to eradicate difference to share solidarity. We do not

need to share common oppression to fight equally to end oppression. We do
not need anti-male sentiments to bond us together, so great is the wealth of
162 Beyond Bodies
experience, culture and ideas we have to share with one another. We can be
united by our appreciation for diversity. (In Kouramy et al, 1995: 104) 1
Whether in western or more global feminisms, the suppression of women’s

sexuality is perceived as central in maintaining control of both contemporary
and traditional order by the male elite. Just as postmodernism was concerned
with a dismantling of narratives of truth, problematising subjectivity and
representation, feminist authors (of both theory and fiction) in the last dec-
ades of the twentieth century wrote to subvert patriarchal foundations of
narrative and society.
Myths, fairy stories and gendered power games
Fairy tales, often said to be “timeless” and fundamentally oral, have a long
written history. Max Lüthi discusses how fairy stories provide a genre that
offers “a representation of man which transcends the individual story” and “a
particular way of looking at the world and at human existence” (1985: ix).
Yet the fact that a writer in the 1980’s can title his work on Fairy Stories as a
portrait of “Man” suggests why feminists early on had located a rewriting of
the genre as being of prime importance to revising society as a whole in
terms of feminist liberation. Challenging, and indeed reversing these myths
therefore gains both theoretical and experiential importance. Despite their
diverse origins, the pattern of the stories, in which enchanted people in fabu-
lous worlds eventually receive their just reward or punishment, also served a
moral purpose as cautionary tales, a subconscious system of warnings. Wom-
en were depicted as dependent upon men as figures of rescue and salvation in
all dimensions of life; while the stories also highlighted rivalries and hostili-
ties between women.
In the context of consciousness and the “female” self, cultural myths and
fairy stories endorse the gendered role-play and social values that surround us
all from birth—myths that play into the “delusions of gender” enforced
through the arts and sciences alike. Gender differences are believed to exist
in both mind and body, with neuroscience in particular reinforcing “with all
1
Other theorists such as Avtar Brah, for example, posited that while it is widely ac-
cepted that “woman” is not a unitary category, it can be a unifying category: “it is
possible to develop a feminist politics that is global” (1993:31). In similar vein, Jodi
Dean proposes a “reflective solidarity” that upholds the possibility of “a universal
communicative ‘we’” as a bridge between universality and difference (1996: 8).
Beyond gender myths 163
the authority of science, old-fashioned stereotypes and roles” (Fine 2011:

237). The development of the full potential of consciousness is restricted—
because fear or denial of self-expression on outer levels can only mirror in-
ternal restriction. Breaking the boundaries of the body, as many feminists
suggest, can only be achieved through the body. Moreover, the body can only
be freed through the mind.
This chapter examines the overturning of the fairy story genre and tradi-
tional “myths”, often considered by feminist authors as representative of
misogynist and patriarchal paradigms that structure societies. Jack Zipes
discusses that central to fairy tales is the concept of power, asking: “Where
does it reside? Who wields it? Why? How can it be better wielded?” (1979:
169). Such questions also resonate and overlap with the questioning of the
relationship between masculinist power and female agency. As Zipes remarks
about fairy tales in general:
We refer to myths and fairy tales as lies by saying “oh, that’s just a fairy
tale”, or “that’s just a myth”. But these lies are often the lies that govern our
lives. […] These myths and fairy tales are historically and culturally coded,
and their ideological impact is great. (Zipes 1994: 4)
Fairy stories as a popular genre had originated in European countries with the
publication in 1697 of Charles Perrault’s Histoires ou Contes du Temps Pas-
sé, or Contes de la Mère L’Oye (The Tales of Mother Goose). This work
included the classic tales of The Sleeping Beauty, Red Riding Hood, Blue-
beard, Cinderella, and Puss in Boots, among others, which became collective-
ly known as fairy tales, despite few of them having fairies involved in the
stories. This collection was most famously followed by the Grimm brothers’
Children’s and Household Tales published in the first half of the nineteenth
century. Whilst these names have since been associated with folk and fairy
tales, these men were the collectors of tales, rather than their originators,
since as Marina Warner points out, the main authorship of the stories and
fables would most likely have been women (Warner 1995: xii). Whether in
the form of Charles Perrault’s 1697 tales in France, or the folk stories in Asia
that became known as The Thousand and One Nights, the role of women’s
positioning in society remains central.
For feminists, the classic fairy stories demanded a fundamental rewriting,
to reformulate women’s diverse and individualised roles in society—not as a
defined, universalised or normative expectation. As Angela Carter argues:
“The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and
164 Beyond Bodies
the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick”

(1979a: 12). In her notes, she writes, “I’m in the demythologising business.
I’m interested in myths … just because they are extraordinary lies designed
to make people unfree” (qt Sage, in Roemer and Bacchilega 2001:71).
Angela Carter’s feminist rewriting of fairy tales
Notions of feminist rewriting of the distortedly imposed masculinist narra-

tives that had overtaken the so-called “norms” of society are provocatively
addressed in the stories of Angela Carter whose fictional representations of
captivity, trauma and trial within the fairy story elaborate patriarchal posi-
tioning of women within both society and text. They address the problem of
the problematic enchantment of passivity both for women in society and
especially for the woman writer. Women must speak out and fight with any
strategies of subversion available—both textual and sexual. In her ground-
breaking work Sadeian Women (published in 1979, the same year as The
Bloody Chamber), Carter fuses feminism with a ruthless dynamic of sexual
liberation, and appropriates the male ownership of pornography, transforming
previous constructions of the subjugation of women into a rebellion reclaim-
ing male textual and performative territory as their own. Most importantly
she argues that the purpose of art is as a means of “knowing the world”. Lit-
erature must make an impact on “real life” or not be of any value at all, but
be “relegated to a sort of rumpus room of the mind” (1979a: 13). Angela
Carter is best known for her audacious postmodern novels, which elaborate
divergent avenues of women’s exploration of their sexuality and modes of
self-expression in the patriarchal world. Betty Moss comments that Carter
sought to “represent particularised voices of desire and sexuality” through
stories that centralise the female body as a dynamic “ ‘secret place’” of
“transformative possibilities […and ] of boundless movement without desti-
nation” (in Roemer and Bacchilega 2001: 195-196).
As part of her iconoclastic femininist ethic, the fairy story remains central
to Angela Carter’s repositioning of women’s consciousness in society—part
of the interplay between “sex and love, freedom and bondage, prey and pre-
dation” as Carter sought “synthesis” between contemporary women and their
past subjugation (Atwood in Sage 1994: 132). Her fascination with the fairy
story as a cross-cultural unravelling of myth pervades her other novels, in
which characters are never far from straying into the realms of the fantastic
and the magical.2 Her early novels, such as Heroes and Villains (1969) and
The Passion of New Eve (1977) reversed prior expectations of mythical top-
ics, challenged orthodox notions of history, and boldly exploited the female
body and sexuality to confront masculinist hegemonies of what does and
should constitute conventional society. Her revisionist stance towards literary
traditions crossed boundaries and created a post-modern paradigm for female
and feminist expression, and moreover, to a reformulated female/feminist
experience. Angela Carter’s novels subvert traditional avenues of masculine
power, and her female characters reclaim their rightful heritage as the instiga-
tors and owners of both knowledge and agency—power over their own lives
and the way they choose to live them. These stories are permeated with a new
female dimension of the erotic and the violent—as women get their long-
awaited revenge.
Angela Carter’s fictional representations of captivity, trauma, and trial
within the fairy story elaborate the patriarchal positioning of women within
both society and text. For Carter, writing is a way of addressing apparently
normalised, “innocent” elements and structures of society—such as the sto-
ries told to children that have been used for centuries to influence and imbibe
them into patriarchal values—and to challenge and subvert them. Carter
utilized throughout her career the language and characteristic motifs of the
fantasy genre. Carter, also a notable British exponent of magic realism, added
dimensions of Gothic themes, violence, and eroticism to create a new literary
oeuvre of feminist repudiation of patriarchal power structures. Her work
represents a successful combination of evocative avant-garde narratives and
feminist politics, through an interrogation of sexuality. Carter’s work was
revolutionary in its time: and her novels in particular forged a new dimension
to (post)feminist writing. Redolent of the influences of Anaϊs Nin and Co-
lette, Carter’s short stories also derive much from French literature— for
centuries held with either delight or horror in the imagination of the reading
public for their erotic and subversive social influence. Angela Carter’s quest
for eros, Marina Warner writes, “drew her to fairy stories as a form” through
which she creates “some of the most original reworkings in contemporary
literature” (Warner 1995: 193). Carter locates in fairy tales an ethos of re-
pression and violence against women, a myth of male domination. The fairy
story genre for Carter allows an exploration of the psychology between the
2
Carter was also the editor of two volumes of Fairy Tales (published in 1990 and
1992).
166 Beyond Bodies
victim and the aggressor, providing some unsettling and surprising reversals,
including a revision of typecasts of female sexuality.
In her Afterword to Fireworks, Carter claims, “we live in Gothic times”
(1974: 460), and she explains her ongoing fascination with the Gothic tradi-
tion. Carter’s stories link the romantic with its Gothic counterparts of aliena-
tion and atrocity, and their associations with the uncanny, with all its implica-
tions of “silence, solitude and darkness”, and the uncanny as “a feeling that
happens only to oneself, within oneself, its meaning or significance has to do
[…] with what one is not oneself” (Royle 2003: 2). Here, “what one is not
oneself” (the Other) is represented by the male, the husband or lover, and is a
concept used to explore problematic juxtapositions of rape/ chivalry; love/
the entrapment of marriage; atrocity/retribution; and pain/ pleasure. In this
collection of stories retelling, or rather re-creating, a classic feminist rework-
ing of the traditional stories, the heroines previously trapped or tricked by the
cruelty of male oppressors fight back in unexpected ways.
The stories in The Bloody Chamber concern overturning the fairy story
genre and traditional “myths” considered as representative of misogynist and
patriarchal paradigms that structure society, in order to rewrite the gendered
social constructions that patriarchy has invented to enslave and dehumanise
women. The trend to overcome women’s victimisation—with themes of
power, sexuality and the means of thwarting discourses of power, pornogra-
phy, and female oppression by strong female characters has been linked with
the genre of the Gothic novel. The female gothic novel rewrites masculinist
violence, paranoia and injustice to be within the parameters of safety, of
home, and of equality-based relationships and companionate marriage
(Hoeveler 1998).
The Bloody Chamber and the myths of Eve
The story of Eve is one of the most fundamental myths occurring in diverse
forms in both Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions. Originating in the Old
Testament story of the birth of the human race (Genesis 2-3), the tale of Ad-
am and Eve in many ways establishes cultural representations of women and
their role in society for the millennia to follow. In Bible and Qur’an, Eve is
blamed for the “fall of man” and cursed by God, who tells her that she will
always be reprimanded as the cause of man’s plight on earth and fall from
grace. In the story of the fall and the exile from the Garden of Eden, the
crime essentially lies in Eve’s strength of mind, her intelligence and determi-
nation to expand beyond prescribed bounds of knowledge and experience. 3

Adam and Eve are tempted with forbidden knowledge, which involves a loss
of sexual innocence: “Satan tempted them, so that he might reveal to them
their private parts that had been hidden from each other” (Qu’ran Sura 7:20).
In the Old Testament, Yahweh threatens, “I will also pull up your skirts as far
as your face and let your shame be seen” (Jer. 13.26)
Carter’s fascination with fairy tales and the reworking of the story of Eve
is as the “fallen woman” who fights back. Although an archetypal story that
Carter references throughout her work, the volume of short stories The
Bloody Chamber centralises her concerns and her re-writing of Eve’s
“crime”. Here, Angela Carter’s heroines, framed within structures of ex-
pected and prescribed feminine behaviours and the physical structures of
permitted “private”, female spaces—surrounded by the imprisoning bounda-
ries of both physical walls and dominant husbands or potential rapists—
replicating, through their intransigence, the original sin of Eve.
In cross-cultural terms, Angela Carter’s translations and reformulations of
the classic fairy stories in The Bloody Chamber have already been explored
in terms of orientalism, where she hails the Middle East as the west’s cradle
of civilisation and the source of both order and forbidden, erotic, and incom-
prehensible difference (Roemer 2001: 109). Thus, for example, the central
figure of Bluebeard in these stories, the quintessential threatening and domi-
nant male figure, transforms into the barbarian, the treacherous Turk. Images
of forbidden knowledge of the bloody chamber, like that gained by Eve,
become placed within contexts of the mysterious east—where the gaining of
knowledge comes with the threat of violence and even death.
Carter also overturns previously accepted cultural myths through the fe-
male characters’ appropriation of the male ownership of the gaze: a concept
in both western and middle-eastern traditions (Grace 2004). Like Eve, once
they have accessed the way to knowledge, women are not prepared to give up
their power gained through the reversal of the gendered gaze on nakedness.
Yet despite such fundamental wrongdoing, Carter’s characters also play upon
their “innocence” as a source of reclaiming power. In Carter’s reworking of
the familiar fairy tales, the man-beasts, such as The Beast, or the Lion, are
feminised and thereby civilised—almost literally being de-clawed or de-
3
In the Qur’an, Eve is not mentioned directly as the cause of man’s downfall, and
both Adam and Eve share equally in the blame for going against God’s instruction:
“…come not near this tree or you will both be wrongdoers” (Qur’an 2:35).
168 Beyond Bodies
fanged through the taming influence of love. Yet for the Beauties of the tales,
this more docile male remains desirable and even more erotically charged. It
is through the strength of that femininity that the female characters ultimately
are able to defy male authority, whether sexually or through the usurpation of
the male gaze. Angela Carter again centralises the power of the eye as a
weapon used by males, such as when, in “The Bloody Chamber”, the mon-
strous husband, “raised his head and stared at me with his blind, shuttered
eyes as though he did not recognise me, I felt a terrified pity for him” (1979:
35-36). He forces her to look at her own image in the mirror to recognise her
own guilt: the mark of Cain that will not wash away.
In the short story, “The Bloody Chamber”, the typically passive heroine,
stranded and imprisoned in a bleak, isolated castle—the lair of Bluebeard and
his chamber of torture and horrific death—locates within her own intelli-
gence and courage the means to outwit her sadistic husband. The myth of Eve
appears in the story “The Bloody Chamber”, where the innocent young bride
dares to venture into the one room her new spouse forbids her to enter. As
with Eve, the voice of temptation proves overwhelming: and similarly, the
knowledge she finds in the forbidden room is one that exposes the reality of
death (for here lie the bodies of Bluebeard’s previous wives). When asked for
her defence for having violated the laws, the bride can only claim that, like
Eve, she only did what he always knew she would (Carter 1979: 38). In typi-
cal misogynist behaviour, ignoring his own horrific crimes, her husband
blames her, terming her “a wicked woman” and tells her she must prepare for
her death (1979: 38-39). She apparently lacks all resistance to his will, and,
as if sleepwalking, moves towards the designated spot of her execution. She
is ultimately rescued, not by a male lover, but by her indomitable mother
responding intuitively to her daughter’s telepathic communication. This pow-
erful and quasi-supernatural communicative ability is possible in subversive
modes of women’s interaction and characteristic again of the “Wild Zone” of
female consciousness. The women are able to communicate outside the zone
of male understanding or control in order to ensure their safety and survival.
Indeed, this ability of women to survive and overcome is depicted
throughout Carter’s short stories as being due to the strength of female intel-
lect (through extra-sensory communication, or sheer cunning), through the
body as being resilient to and resisting (or even relishing) pain, and through
emotions. As Lorna Sage comments, the title itself, The Bloody Chamber,
“alludes in the last analysis not to Bluebeard’s meat locker, not even to the
womb/tomb, but to the human heart” (2001: 70).
The problematic enchantment of passivity
In a reversal of “The Sleeping Beauty”, the beautiful woman who must be

“saved with a kiss” in “The Lady and the House of Love” is rescued from her
eternal state of isolation, not of enchanted sleep, but of eternal vampirism. As
a gender-reversed Dracula, the Countess, a rampaging vampire in Transylva-
nia, at last is released from her eternal loneliness when she meets her fated
bridegroom. When an English soldier visits her strange castle, he falls in love
with her beauty, and in entering her bedchamber is able to break the en-
chantment so that the kiss of her lover is her death. In finally becoming hu-
man, the “end of exile is the end of being” and the Countess does not awak-
en, but disappears (1979: 123).
Kathleen E.B. Manley points out that the protagonists are not mere vic-
tims, but women looking for opportunities to liberate themselves, to write
their own stories and establish their own subjectivity (in Roemer and Bacci-
lega 2001: 83-84). Another example is in “The Tiger’s Bride”, where the
heroine defies both her father’s demands when he sells her to the strange
masked beast in the castle as well as society’s expectations of her as dutiful
daughter and wife. Seeing beyond the mirage of both physical appearance
and patriarchal positioning, she negotiates a new female identity based on her
own desires and needs.
Yet in Carter’s aesthetic of the grotesque, women take on the power pre-
viously denied them: the innocent female figure (like Eve) wandering in the
forest is translated into Red Riding Hood recognising, not “what great big
teeth” Grandma has, but appropriating unlikely power for herself. She realis-
es that her grandmother is the werewolf, and that knowledge gives her a new
power to change her fate. With Grandmother safely dispatched by the neigh-
bours—killed as a witch—the child prospers, living in her grandmother’s
house (“The Werewolf”, in Carter 1979: 126-128). In another version of the
same fairy tale, in “The Company of Wolves”, the girl’s sexual knowledge
and power gives her the ability to transform the wolf into her adoring, tamed,
sexual partner. She is neither terrified by male power nor does she compro-
mise. There is no need for her to be banished from the bed, the Eden, she so
skilfully appropriates. The film version of The Company of Wolves (directed
by Neil Jordan, 1984) becomes a bloodthirsty, Freudian retelling of the “Lit-
tle Red Riding Hood”. This visually ground-breaking film studies the wolf-
girl relationship in the light of sexual awakening, and with it questions of
power in all male-female relationships.
170 Beyond Bodies
Heroines in fairy stories typically face dangers both in terms of social ex-
clusion and horrific or grotesque cruelty—often from within their families
(the treacherous mother is a well-known example). Asylum can either be
retreat or incarceration, depending on the ability to access physical, mental
and spiritual agency. Thus the Countess-vampire is trapped in her enchanted
castle, the piano player-wife is initially trapped in Bluebeard’s castle, yet for
other heroines—Red Riding Hood (in “The Company of Wolves”) and Beau-
ty (“The Courtship of Mr Lyon”)—home, and especially the bedroom, be-
come places of female sexual power and fulfilment. Women in Carter’s
world need be subservient no more.
The fantastic world of Angela Carter’s novels
In From The Beast to the Blond, Marina Warner brilliantly elucidates Euro-
pean traditions of carnival, pantomime, and the mythology of Eve, Greek
myth, and the stories of other women saints—and how they are all merge in
fairy stories and our ongoing story-telling in terms of film and theatre repre-
sentations of the mythologized female body. In her scholarly elaboration of
the traditions of the folk tale and fairy story Warner includes discussion on
how Carter’s work, especially her longer fiction, epitomises and blends many
of these sources:
Carter conjures gleefully with fairytale motifs: changelings and winged be-
ings, muted heroines, beastly metamorphoses, arduous journeys and improba-
bly encounters, magical rediscoveries and happy endings. […] It is interesting
in the context of fairytale narrators’ masquerades, that Carter was also deeply
interested with female impersonation, as a literary device, as a social instru-
ment of disruption, as an erotic provocation. [Carter understood] mercurial
slipperiness of identity, as well as the need to secure meanings. (1995: 194)
Merging witch and heroine, male and female, Carter moreover, challenges
and extends notions of the female body—as she does in The Passion of the
New Eve and other novels—to embrace facets of bi-sexuality, sexual trans-
formation, trans-sexuality, and physical difference. Alternative expressions of
sexuality and codes of so-called “normality”, both in terms of gender and the
“reality” of the universe in which the body has its existence, are also chal-
lenged to the extremes of imagination. In terms of consciousness, Carter’s
stories revel in the diverse expressions possible to women to formulate and
express their own identity and power—yet they are predicated upon the con-
cept of gender being beyond the body—being both performative and chosen.
Carter’s bizarre world exemplifies consciousness as a realm of all possibili-
ties: the domain of creating from desire, of reality emerging out of the initial
conditions of conscious will.
Bodies as “Infernal Desire Machines”
The female body in Carter’s fiction is highly sexualised, and woman is per-
verse and ambiguous. Caught in a moment of coitus, she can remain innocent
and unknowing; yet caught with the bloody keys in hand her mind is discern-
ing and dangerous. Woman’s body like a Russian doll is a sequence of hid-
den identities masking gender or even her true animal identity. Masquerade,
as Marina Warner points out, is the reality of fairy stories and characters
morph into beasts or broads in their performance as “the acrobats of desire”,
or “erotic travellers” (both chapter headings in Carter’s 1972 novel, The In-
fernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman). “The freak” as one character
says in this novel, “is the norm” (Carter 1972: 111). In the peep show of life
in her novels, bodies are punished, mutilated, vaporised and victimised both
sexually and textually. Notions of a constant self or physical reality that can-
not be either pervert or be perverted or vanish in a puff of ether appear to
have no place in her world view. Yet surprisingly perhaps in Carter’s world
of shifting appearances the stories confirm rather than deny the notion of a
stable self—a constant identity. In The Infernal Desire Machines, Desiderio
(the narrator) lives in a city under the control of “the diabolical Dr Hoffman”
who “filled it with mirages to send us all mad” (11). Hoffman’s technique to
gain total Faust-like knowledge and power is to disturb the foundations of the
physical world, by making: “great cracks in the hitherto immutable surface of
the time and space equation we had informally formulated in order to realize
our city and, out of these cracks, well—nobody knew what would come next”
(Carter 1972: 17). Desiderio, the only man capable of withstanding Hoff-
man’s modifications of reality, undergoes many transformations into new
(cross-gendered) identities in which s/he is to suffer all manner of hallucina-
tory, violent and sexual experiences. At the end of each temporary incarna-
tion (and encounters with figures materialising and metamorphosing as mon-
sters, shapes, ideas, or images; or a combination of characters in one identi-
ty), he always wakes to find himself back in his original identity. Through the
opera or pantomime of bizarre costume changes, shape-shifting, and sexual
fantasy, Carter’s novel becomes a metaphysical meditation on the nature of
172 Beyond Bodies
appearance versus reality, one in which the text projects notions of perceived
realism as illusion (maya)—and a treatise on the history of philosophy re-
garding the nature of the self. It can also be read as a warning of possible
“real’ futures as science develops and forges ever nearer to the control and
“ownership” of the sub-atomical core (and biological equivalents of the ge-
nome) of the physical world. Near the end of the novel, Albertina, Desider-
io’s lover and ally, explains how and why Hoffman must eventually fail in
taking over the city and the minds of its people:
“His fatal error was to mistake his will for his desire. […] Desire can never be
coerced […] and so he willed his own desires. […] His self-regarding ‘I’
willed himself to become a monster. This detached, external yet internal ‘I’
was both his dramatist and his audience.” (1972: 168)
Here, the self is formulated as both agent of action and as witness; Hoffman’s
identity becomes “the projective other who was his self”—which makes him
both the tyrannical creator of his world and its victim (1972: 168). Moreover,
Hoffman’s diabolical world control is revealed to have been formulated
through a laboratory distillation of “essence of being” (here, the precipitation
of erotic energy), which is able to generate “uncreated” alternative realities
through reality modifying machines—“devices that could utterly disrupt
human consciousness” (1972: 210).
Challenges to the self
Doctor Hoffman’s credo, his version of Descartes’ cogito, is “I desire there-

fore I exist” (Carter 1972: 211). According to Vedic literature, pure con-
sciousness is overlaid, or covered, by desires: “As fire is covered by smoke,
as a mirror by dust, as an embryo by the amnion, so is This covered by that”
explains the Bhagavad-Gita (Mahesh Yogi 1967: 238). “Desire arises from
pure consciousness and veils it […] all desires arise from the outer stimulus
in the field of activity—which appears to bind the self in activity” (238).
“Going beyond” the limitations and forces of the physical world, the laws of
nature expressed in terms of the three forces of creation, maintenance and
dissolution, is one essential of developing consciousness according to Vedic
wisdom. Being trapped in the quotidian and surface levels of existence (as
women symbolically are in many fairy stories) disallows any transcendence
of the waking state of consciousness or the experience of pure consciousness
at the source of thought. To follow this interpretation: without a technique for

transforming mental and physical activity, the body and its desires, there is
no possibility for the development of heart and mind so that desires and their
resulting activity can “serve as tidal waves of love and bliss in the unbounded
ocean of oneness” that is pure consciousness (Mahesh Yogi 1967: 240). Such
an ability to “go beyond” the three forces that govern activity (the three
Gunas) to its source:
involves giving a pattern to the machinery that creates desire—senses, mind

and intellect—so that even while remaining in the field of desire, it remains
free from the impact of desire. This allows the Self to remain uninvolved,
leaving the desires to be taken care of by the three gunas, by virtue of which
they arise, grow and have their play. (Mahesh Yogi 1967: 240)
The works of Angela Carter challenge the reader’s awareness to realise the
play and display of desires is entirely within the realm of the gunas, the man-
ifest world that is outside the silence of pure consciousness—the ways that “it
is desire which in every way veils the uninvolved nature of the Self” (Mahesh
Yogi 1967: 240). Like an unquenchable fire, desire hides wisdom simply
through its nature of constantly searching for happiness, perpetually craving
greater happiness, which can never be found in the relative world. This
“ceaseless activity of desire continues to maintain a close association be-
tween the self and the outside world, thus keeping the self bound, as it were,
to the field of action” (1967: 239). Angela Carter’s stories depict extreme
examples of this state of entrapment of the self within action—where the
field of action becomes increasingly divorced from a sense of reality into
hallucinatory structures of mirage and fantasy. This forces the reader to con-
sider the nature of “reality” and her social “norms” while also appreciating
that the only true constant of reality must be the inner self—the true “I” of
identity, the experiencer and witness of outer events. Many of the characters
do penetrate the veils of mirage and desire to achieve states of greater wis-
dom. As the Bhagavad Gita explains, there is no way to destroy or eradicate
desire, as this is physically impossible, but to live a life free from bondage by
rising above it and gaining “a life of eternal freedom is not difficult but easy”
(1967: 239). Desire can be transformed through transforming consciousness.
Being “out of bondage”, the “dweller in the body” (240) can live in such a
way as to bring fulfilment to desires while not allowing desires to overshad-
ow pure Being.
174 Beyond Bodies
Paradoxes of postmodern and Puranic tales
Often bizarre and otherworldly, Carter’s stories are reminiscent in many

ways of the ancient Indian literary texts, the Puranas: stories that involve
monumental encounters between gods (devas) and devils (rakshasas), shape-
shifting ogres, demons, heroes, nymphs (the apsirasas) and other “fantasy”
characters, many somewhat similar to those found in fairy stories, but on a
much larger epic scale. Yet, as the notion of any stability in outer form is
challenged by these bizarre characters, so the stories encourage (or even
force) the reader’s or listener’s intellect deeper into the more stable and pro-
found levels of the mind and eventually into the pure consciousness of Self:
“Beyond the three gunas” of changing surface form. The function of the
astonishing stories in the Puranas and their many phantasmagorical figures
(who appear in their extreme guises and disguises a little like today’s comic-
book superheroes or perpetually-transforming machines) is to recall the read-
er to the Self: to the underlying non-changing reality beneath the surface play
of good and evil, of winners and losers, of challenge and conflict.
The Puranas, according to Vedic traditions, “bring out the reality of the
eternal continuum of transformation of silence into dynamism and dynamism
into silence”. The result is “a loop of silence. Silence performing within itself
becoming dynamism and returning back to silence, and the same situation
with dynamism” (Mahesh Yogi 1993: 281-2). This eternal theme of “perfor-
mance of silence within itself” demonstrates the law of self-referral—of “the
two qualities of intelligence, the two qualities of consciousness—Purusha and
Prakriti [male and female forces of nature] eternally in the state of union”
(283). Interestingly, as in Carter’s zany universe—the end result is a balance
of male/female energy and desire, a restoration of peace. As Carter writes in
Sadeian Women: “we must learn to live in this world … because it is the only
world that we will ever know” (1979a: 110).
Chapter Eight
Transforming gender:
passion, desire and consciousness
If, as Marina Warner comments, “The fairytale transformations of Cinders

into princess represent what a girl has to do to stay alive” (1995: 195), the
appropriation of this theme is continued in the novels of the twenty-first cen-
tury, which push further in terms of liberating gender by breaking down defi-
nitions of what is means to be “a girl”. While early feminist theories tended
to focus on gender as the prime cause of women’s oppression, towards the
end of the twentieth century feminism sought answers to problematic differ-
ences inherent in race and ethnicity, but above all, the notion of power be-
came entangled with the question of sexuality. Gender was increasingly open
to individual interpretation and to challenge.
The legacy of Carter, Woolf and other outspoken writers continues with
the author Jeanette Winterson, who combines the tradition of rebellious coun-
ter-patriarchal narratives and explicit lesbianism. Her novels The Passion and
Sexing the Cherry in particular take “survival” of the sexually unorthodox as
their main theme. This chapter takes the divergent expressions of gender and
sexuality begun in Angela Carter’s rewriting of fairy stories, and continues
with a vision of the opportunities addressed in narratives of transgender and
cross-dressing, with examples from contemporary gay and lesbian writers.
Such themes also influence male authors, including the Nigerian-British poet
and novelist Chris Abani, whose novels tackle head-on the often traumatic
negotiations of gender and sexuality and the conflicts of personal identity
choice with today’s society.
Becoming woman
Since Simone de Beauvoir’s groundbreaking work The Second Sex, in

which she voiced the famous phrase “One is not born, but rather one becomes
a woman”, gender is generally argued to be a cultural rather than biological-
176 Beyond Bodies
ly-given entity. Philosophers have conceptualised “becoming woman” in a

variety of ways; Deleuze and Guattari for example see it as “in the midst of
becoming […] it is the Other, our becoming Other” (1987: 190). Naturally,
while the reader would not expect physical transformations to occur over-
night, in the startling manner of a gender-transmogrifying Orlando, yet since
the mid-twentieth century, “gender” has incorporated possibilities of
choice—opportunity to gain the physiology of a man or a woman.
In Angela Carter’s The Passion of the New Eve, the body of the “New
Eve” was a triumphant transformation of identity, sexuality, and power. In
this novel, the male protagonist Evelyn undergoes surgery to become Eve.
Impregnated with his own sperm, the new Eve creates a self-sufficient new
breed of woman, suitable for the new world emerging out of the ashes of
gender confusion and sexual discrimination. In her new identity Evelyn/Eve
enjoys an array of sexual encounters in the subterranean world of New York
and America: experiences that challenge both social and psychological
norms.
Feminist understanding by necessity had to cross cultural and national di-
vides to create new forms of female connection and solidarity, with postcolo-
nial feminism, in particular, aiming at deconstructing the axes of gendered,
racialised, and politicised identity. In this light, fiction also addresses bisexu-
ality and transgender issues as one means to direct attention to continuing
inequalities, both within ethnicities and across racial groupings.
In the novels of Chris Abani, the twenty-first century world of trans-
gender and homosexuality is not one of libidinous freedom and self-
gratification, but one entangled with the problematic political and racial envi-
ronment. Chris Abani’s novels deal with ongoing situations involving gender,
youth, violence and racial identity in Nigeria, Britain, and America. His no-
vella Becoming Abigail, for example, deals with the torturous legacy of the
British empire in Africa, with London now the capital for the unrestricted
immigration of young women to become part of the “slave” subculture of
forced prostitution. The story of the survival of one young Igbo woman, who
struggles against physical oppression and family abuse, implies the failure of
liberal multiculturalism. Abigail searches for meaning in her alien environ-
ment in order to come to terms with the sexual abuse she has endured; a pro-
cess that involves an imaginative reconstruction of reality. For Abigail, the
body is synonymous with the self, yet is a painful recognition of the female
body as target of abuse–both by herself and by others. As symbolic indication
of her “self-hood”, she marks her body with a knife to imprint a meaningful
record of her “identity”. The outer reality of Abigail’s violated body is vastly
at odds with her inner self, which she sustains with “the deeper joy” of love
for the social worker Derek, and on snippets of Chinese and African poetry
(41, 54). Abani’s short novella is haunted with the horror of loss of innocence
and desperate modes of survival, where the female body is also pictured as a
palimpsest recording of inherited historical struggle.
The Virgin of Flames
Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flames could be seen to continue the legacy of
many themes found in the novels of Angela Carter, including the attractive-
ness of androgyny and the transcendence it offers to writers and artists both
personally and textually (as we have also seen with Virginia Woolf). It also
tackles the lasting problematic legacy of religious memes and myths. Abani’s
innovative and poetic texts present gender metamorphosis and the female
body as an infinitely deferred and problematic symbol of hope—as an image
of enlightenment. Cross-dressing has long been a metaphor of re-invention.
If, however, for Woolf, androgyny allowed her to develop both male and
female sides of her nature and emotions, and “evade confrontation with her
own painful femaleness” (Showalter 1977: 264), in Abani’s novel The Virgin
of Flames, the metamorphosis from male to female becomes a more torturous
balancing act, with attempts to evade painful male identity.
Abani’s protagonist, known simply as Black, transforms himself, swing-
ing between the polar opposites of his identity—through dress and through
his artistic creativity. His shifting and uncertain sense of self is initially due
to the conflicting demands of his dual national heritage, West African and
Latino, with their requirements of what constitutes “masculinity”. Black’s
androgyny is a response to the troubled performance of these culturally coded
masculinities and is hard-fought, physically and spiritually. His life is a
search for a deeper level of human-ness, beyond superficial definitions of
race or gender. As the novel opens, Black is busy with white make-up and an
old wedding dress as he turns himself into a female figure. He justifies his
dressing up as part of a project he is working on, as he could not afford a
model: his project of painting “The Virgin Mary”. Yet he realises he resem-
bles Miss Haversham more than the divine beauty he desires (4). The com-
parison has lasting reverberations throughout the novel—symbolising (as
Dickens’s character) abandonment and solitude, faithlessness, heartbreak,
manipulation, and a final violent death by immolation.
178 Beyond Bodies
Black’s act of transformation takes on the symbolic significance of Luce

Irigaray’s definition of masquerade as vital in gender identity. She examines
the potential of the masquerade:
What do I mean by masquerade? In particular, what Freud calls ‘feminini-

ty’. The belief that, for example, it is necessary to become a woman, where-
as a man is a man from the outset. He has only to effect his being-a-man,
whereas a woman has to become a normal woman, that is has to enter the
masquerade of femininity (1977).
Bearing this concept in mind, the masquerade of cross-dressing can be re-

garded as a means of transgressing and challenging heteronormative subjec-
tivity for either a woman or a man. Chris Abani’s novel, however, agonises
rather than idealises androgynous change: it does not avoid a confrontation
with the body, but exacerbates it. The attempt at self-transformation through
masquerade only confuses illusion with reality. The bi-gendered body is
viewed through the lens of the isolation of the search rather than through the
joy of liberation.
Yet how far does the fictionalisation of drag and troubled bisexuality (if
such it is) endorse Butler’s argument that drag “subverts the distinction be-
tween inner and outer space” and “effectively mocks” (1990: 186) the ex-
pression of both gender and gender identity? While Black dresses in wom-
en’s clothing, for him the transformation it involves is one of “art” and
“truth”, recreating a miraculous religious vision of his youth. Rather than
creating dissonance, his gender “performance” is an attempt to find a method
of healing, through symbolising the past and creating a new future. Thus,
what takes the novel to a different sphere of signification is that the search for
gender identity becomes synonymous with the quest for redemption. Fre-
quently, transformations of gender identity are related to spirituality—truth
seeking and personal quest for resolution to childhood trauma, the loss of the
mother figure, and brutal father. Black, has dressed since childhood in female
clothing—enjoying, he realises, both an escape from the macho male-role
enforced upon him by his father, and the sense of security of the mother fig-
ure—despite being brought up by a religiously fanatical and abusive mother.
The surface of dress and appearance (as with his friend Iggy, the tattoo-artist)
is all about a style of being, what Foucault called “the stylistics of existence”
(Butler 1990: 189).
Black has rejected his original name in forming a post-“life-with-mother”
identity. His name also implicates identity confusion and conflicts in terms of
colour and belongingness since he is mixed-race. Similarly, despite a male

rape that appears traumatically identity confirming, Black rejects an identity
of “homosexual”, preferring his non-committal fantasies in the solitude and
safety of the “spaceship” pod above his apartment and relishing the opportu-
nities of solitude to cross-dress. He is besotted by a stripper, Sweet Girl (a
transvestite man), and thus remains confused, or in denial, as to his sexual
preference. Yet the ambivalence of Sweet Girl’s gender is precisely what
gives her the erotic uncertainty that enthrals Black.
In a twenty-first century world in which gender can be fixed either per-
manently or temporarily by choice, Black searches for his identity in the back
streets of Los Angeles, or the company of his fringe-LA friends. Working as
a motorway “graffiti” artist creating huge portraits of women aimed at explic-
it social comment, he is occupied painting his self-portrait as Fatima, a
veiled, gun-wielding, naked Madonna. This representation of the female
human body is to be created as art and desecrated in acts of iconoclastic de-
struction. As one critic comments, in a narrative that is all about “unstable
identities, boundaries, margins, and crossing over”, Black’s art reflects his
“transgressive becoming” (Saidullah 2012: 2).
The boundaries between the sacred and the profane are blurred in Black’s
experience. The Virgin Mary continues to signify the divine female, and The
Virgin of Guadeloupe, the angel of flames, appears in the city and in visions
as redemptive, unifying—functioning in his mind to bring harmony between
the painful past and present uncertainty. Throughout the novel, Black also
has visions of the angel Gabriel (in various guises), which he accepts as being
as real as any other experience. Traumatised by the religion represented by
his mother, the symbolic figures of Christian mysticism (Gabriel, the Madon-
na, and Fatima) become both hallucinatory and haunting, offering him either
help or temptation. Yet in his quest for sexual and social identity, Black fails
to realise that his true “guardian angel” is Iggy, the tattoo artist who “flies”
above her clients suspended on chains hooked into loops attached along her
spine.
The hope at the end of the novel is that the androgynous self he discovers
as his true gender role can offer him salvation—in and beyond life. As with
Woolf, androgyny and its potential of liberation are also associated with
death. In an analysis of the novel in terms of the comparative, possibly con-
flicting, discourses of theology/sexual variance in dialogue with postcolonial-
ism, Cheryl Stobie discusses the “ritual transgender act” through which Black
attains an unlikely annunciation (2010: np). The end of the narrative, “raises
180 Beyond Bodies
questions of compassion, redemption, and satire” that leave the reader being
denied easy responses to the problems of religion, culture and shifting sexual-
ities (Stobie 2010). In postcolonial terms, Black remains in a state of sus-
pended hybridity, caught not only within conflicting ethnic and national iden-
tities, but these are compacted with his “in-between” gender identity. He is in
a frustrating neither/nor existence.
The transgendering transformation of Black’s identity, and the release it
heralds, is catalysed once the stripper and object of his fantasies, Sweet Girl,
visits his “spaceship” apartment. From a quantum perspective, Black has
been oscillating between two possible locations (male and female) at once
neither or both, and, like Schrödinger’s cat, is caught in a perpetual bi-state
existence. He is simultaneously in neither/nor, both/and, dead/alive locations.
Black is “manifested”—finally localised in time, space, and gender— by
being found and observed in his home by Sweet Girl. The witness of his
inner reality, Sweet Girl provides the human consciousness that collapses the
wave function: creating location and existence from the manifold possibilities
for potential states of being. Then, she/he teaches Black how to tape back his
genitals and disguise his “maleness”: to become a woman. Once observed,
his gender identity is now firmly positioned, literally and metaphorically. He
is transformed into what is to be his permanent new “incarnation” as virgin
bride, white woman, and martyr. Black becomes both himself and other—the
woman he had always wanted to be.
Finally, conflicts of religious sanctity, mysticism, cross-dressing, and the
desire for sexual fulfilment collide in a moment of pure transcendent specta-
cle, as the flaming body of the Virgin Mary is seen by an eager crowd to
plunge through the air. For the believing spectators, it is a vision of truth: but
is the figure a lost transvestite taking his last fall (a blazing falling angel like
Satan) or the blessed Virgin flying to freedom? Unlike the crowd watching
from the street, the reader is aware that “the virgin” is a fraud, a dressed-up
sham, a male acting the female character, Miss Haversham, a black man in
the white make-up of a circus clown—and to see anything else is a gross
mistake of the intellect. Yet in terms of consciousness, is it not a matter of
perspective and the level of one’s awareness, one’s perception? Perhaps to
judge purely through the sense of sight is inadequate. Yet as for most reli-
gious martyrs, the moment of triumphant transfiguration is also one of horror,
a travesty of the real meaning of transcendence, of misinterpreted identity,
and of unnecessary sacrifice:
Stumbling down the corridor toward the staircase that lead to the roof, Black
looked like a deranged and psychotic Miss Haversham, dragging a long train
of white death behind him, the gossamer hide of a dead angel. […] he hesitat-
ed for a moment and then stepped out onto the roof of the spaceship.
The spotlight from a helicopter picked him up.
The crowd of the faithful gathered below screamed in ecstasy. There she
was, the queen of heaven, perched on the roof of the spaceship. (Abani 2007:
278-88).
Watching the crowd that gathers below, Black is struck by the unreality of
the world, and his last realisation is that of the cosmic reality:
It was all dance.

And wind: howling through the city, tearing souls from their moorings and
casting them into the primordial swirl of making and unmaking. (ibid: 289)
Black’s realisation of “primordial swirl” hints at the concept of universal

action that upholds life as a “cosmic dance” (sometimes referred to as the
Veda Lila, the dance of the Absolute within itself from which creation is
manifested). This dance forms the core dynamism of all activity in the world
of sense perception and in the realm of action. Gender and consciousness can
be seen as the twin forces of existence through which individuation of agency
and choice are expressed and put into play: they are the dance. His final in-
carnation is as blazing, incandescent, spectacle: his body transformed into
true work of meaningful, sacred, art. And the final message of the city—
represented as a living being, with “spines of freeways, like arteries, like
blood”—is one of hope and of permanence: a benediction (290). His desire
for being “woman” is in fact a desire for the Absolute. His epiphany comes at
the moment of his “becoming” both woman and Virgin—and in a blaze of
symbolic light he reaches some kind of purity of being.
At the end of The Virgin of Flames, it is love that is the final redemption,
the only fact, “trembling with knowledge beyond measure” (2007: 291).
Through all the illusions of “reality” and identity in the constantly changing
river of life, only the love that transcends and endures can bring a sense of
completeness:
Here on the edge of morning, perched on the lip of a bridge, hunched in the
solitary sadness of a gargoyle, a woman picks petals from a flower, dropping
each into that endless flow, her whispers holding it all like prayer: he loved
me; he loved me not. (Abani 2007: 291)
182 Beyond Bodies
Quantum gender and the creation of new myths: Jeanette Winterson
Jeanette Winterson’s works bring together several strands of concern here,

including the connections between gender performance and masquerade,
while developing themes of the interface of sexuality, androgyny and lesbian-
ism. Drawing on a legacy subtly explored in Virginia Woolf’s novels, Win-
terson also experiments with forms of text and style, playing with modes of
narrative stream of consciousness. Yet, unlike Angela Carter, rather than
basing her metamorphing characters and their quixotic journeys on sheer
fantasy, her ideas are firmly rooted in her interest in physical laws and the
theoretical physics of time and space. Her novels create a new interface in
female writing: that of the fantastic with the sexual, and uniquely she utilises
her interest in and awareness of how the conservatively stable world-view
has been shattered by quantum physics. Her novel GUT Symmetries remains
one of the few to incorporate theories of physics and its late-twentieth centu-
ry understandings of the universe from the point of view of Grand Unified
Theories. Yet for Winterson, no objective knowledge remains divorced from
the interior, emotional life. Her writing, which continues with her most recent
novels The Stone Gods (2008) and The Daylight Gate (2012), remains a
powerful endorsement of woman’s role in history and of creativity unique to
female modes of expression.
The Passion
Winterson’s novel The Passion (first published in 1986), involves the crea-
tion of reinvented history, places and people. She explains that her use of
history and historiography is as a mirror of contemporary life:
My own cities were invented; cities of language, cities of connection, words as

gang-ways and bridges to the cities of the interior […] I wanted to create a
separate world, not as an escape, as a mirror, a secret looking-glass that would
sharpen and multiply the possibilities of the actual world. Hold it up and your
own face is there, disguised in time and place […]. (Winterson 2001: i)
Written from the dual perspectives of the two protagonists, the novel alter-
nates between the stories of Henri, a cook in Napoleon’s army in France, and
Villanelle, a cross-dressing female casino worker in Venice. Villanelle dou-
bles identities as a Venetian boatman, and thus (since boatmen are exclusive-
ly male) represents a mythical bi-sexual androgyny. Negotiating her own
powerful “female” position in the schizophrenic chaos of Venetian society

following Napoleon’s invasion, she splits herself into different identities.
Through wearing a variety of “borrowed uniform” (Winterson 1986:144) of
gender performance, she can choose either same-sex or heterosexual relation-
ships. As her means of challenging patriarchal society while finding modes of
self-identity, Villanelle’s lesbianism (also playing within tropes of the carni-
valesque) transcends mere sexuality and allows her passion to be raised to
modes of experiencing spirituality.
The central male character in the novel, Henri, is part of Napoleon’s great
army and idolises Bonaparte to the extent that he loses his own sense of iden-
tity. Dependent on others for his identity, he has no self-awareness other than
the “reality” he has created. Moreover, Henri feels threatened with the possi-
bility of becoming merely an objective “other” in someone else’s world. His
dependency on his idol Napoleon is later transferred to Villanelle, and his
love makes him totally dependent on her—forcing Villanelle to assume the
strong “masculine” role in their relationship, teaching him, for example, how
to make love.
The two characters first meet, and the two disparate stories merge initial-
ly, in time, at the moment of new Years’ Day 1805, and later in space, as the
French army facing its catastrophic defeat at Moscow. Villanelle has become
one of the vivandières, the army prostitutes, and together, thanks to her lin-
guistic and practical skills, she escapes with Henri back to Venice, that “city
of disguises” (100). Truth, history and “passion” unite, like the metaphorical
“living bridge” between human souls (57), as Henri, hopelessly in love, even-
tually sacrifices his liberty and his sanity for the sake of Villanelle. Losing
that foothold in one norm of existence, Henri prefers to maintain his sense of
reality within the mental sanatorium on the Venetian island of San Servolo,
safely protected from his knowledge of the human condition beyond its walls.
Villanelle repeatedly attempts to get him released from the madhouse, but he
rejects her and the world she represents: “The cities of the interior are vast
and so not lie on any map. […] I thought I was doing a service to the world,
setting it free, setting myself free in the process” (Winterson 152-3).
Throughout Winterson’s oeuvre, it is love in its many guises that leads to
awareness of the self. Henri, although rejecting the outside world in favour of
the safety within the walled space over which he has control, remains in love
with Villanelle, for “When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mir-
ror for the first time and saw myself” (154). His love for her creates tran-
scendence of body and the ego, the small self, and he eventually gains the
184 Beyond Bodies
pure freedom of Self-awareness—the “capacity to grow and develop into

what are in effect new states of consciousness” (Malekin and Yarrow 1995:
36)
Yet within this world askew with unreliable narrators and sexually am-
biguous characters, there also exists the magic (or magical realism) found in
the character of Patrick, a soldier with the ability to see (usually girls un-
dressing) for miles with his one eye (21-22). Villanelle herself represents the
Venetian legend of the web-footed boatman, and part of her narrated persona
is as myth. After leaving her female lover one night, desolate that her hus-
band has returned, she must cross one of the canals. She removes her shoes,
and “faltered at the slippery steps leading into the dark. […] I might die if I
fell in. I tried balancing my foot on the surface and it dropped beneath into
the cold nothingness” (2001:69).Yet the episode is shrouded with tantalising
ambivalence:
Could I walk on that water?

Could I? […] I stepped out and in the morning they [were] talking about a
young man who’d walked across the canal like it was solid.
I’m telling you stories. Trust me. (Winterson 2001:69)
Miraculous visions, apparent violations of physical laws, legends that be-

come reality, stories that have not happened but are as likely—or even tru-
er—than those that did: all are traits of Winterson’s increasingly experi-
mental style. For Winterson, the quantum reality and overlapping curved
space-time with their inherent probabilities become more centralised in her
later novels, embedded in further stories of androgyny, the erotic, the fantas-
tic, the fairy tale and the future.
Sexing the Cherry
In Carter’s reworking of the familiar fairy tales, as we have seen, the stability
of gender is undermined as the boundaries of male-female differences are
melted away, and females empowered in surprising ways. In Winterson’s
Sexing the Cherry, gender roles are similarly reversed as a woman takes on
the usually male role of the grotesque “beast”. The novel, like The Passion,
bifurcates into two principle perspectives and narrators: Jordan, a young man
who becomes an explorer in both physical and mythical dimensions of exist-
ence, and his mother, the “Dog Woman”, whom he describes as “ a fantasist,
a liar and a murderer” (1989: 92). Both are unreliable narrators: one caught
up with the fantasies of his imagination, and the other with the harsh political
and social problems that define her physical existence.
In an interview on her website, Jeanette Winterson explains that Sexing
the Cherry “is a cross-time novel in the same way that The Passion is cross-
gender. The narrative moves through time, but also operates outside it”
(2012: np). The novel is prefaced with a discussion of the nature of time
according to the Hopi Indians, setting the theme of the unreliability, not only
of narration and of love, but also of time and space themselves. The novel is
part historiography, part feminist rewriting of fairy stories, and part philo-
sophical discussion of the non-linear nature of space-time. One of the most
fascinating ongoing conceits, for example, is Winterson’s play with the word
“light”, used as both noun and adjective, thus signifying contexts of weight,
luminosity and brightness, and the physical properties of light associated with
the limits of speed. All of these connotations are brought together in her re-
writing of Grimm’s fairy story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses, and her
own imagined floating city of words. (As the dancing princesses relate their
individual stories, it also becomes apparent that the traditional male-authored
version of the fairy stories misrepresented the truth.)
The narrative traverses the seventeenth century London of King Charles’s
execution and the Puritan government, to England in the 1970’s. The charac-
ters’ identities collapse, replicated across a continuum in space-time dimen-
sions—a conceit combining the fairy-story genre with contemporary notions
of space travel in physics:
There are so many fairy stories about someone who falls asleep for a while
and wakes up to find himself in a different time. Outwardly nothing has
changed for me, but inwardly I am not always here […] If I have a spirit, a
soul, any name will do, then it won’t be single, it will be multiple. It may in-
habit numerous changing decaying bodies in the future and in the past (126).
While the Dog-Woman firmly believes the earth is flat, she is aware that
travelling involves traversing both vertical and horizontal planes, through
history and geography, and that “journeys folded in on themselves like a
concertina” (46). Jordan meets and goes travelling with the great discoverer
of exotic flora, John Tradescant—the man to first bring the banana and the
pineapple from the Caribbean islands to England. Jordan’s voyages of dis-
covery take on metaphorical significance, for who knows what one may find
with inward rather than outward journeys? The narrative proposes two major
theories: the first is that physical, observed reality is a cover of another di-
186 Beyond Bodies
mension, resembling the parallel overlaid universes proposed by contempo-

rary physicists. Jordan’s narrative explains: “Physics and metaphysics appear
to be saying the same thing” for “knowing is not separate from being” (90).
For Jordan, his travels take him around the physical world and beyond. “Eve-
ry journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and
the forgotten angle.” Yet these journeys are both interior and exterior ones,
without record in journal or logbook. “These are the journeys I wish to rec-
ord. Not the ones I made, but the ones I might have made, or perhaps did
make in some other place or time” (80). Ultimately his knowledge of the
world increases until he is able to perceive a type of quantum reality where:
Time has no meaning, space and time have no meaning on this journey. All
times can be inhabited, all places visited. In a single day the mind can make a
millpond of the oceans. […] The self is not contained in any moment or any
place, but it is only in the intersection of moment and place that the self might,
for a moment, be seen vanishing through a door, which disappears at once.
(80)
Whereas Susan Blackmore concludes that the concept of a “single inner self
who has consciousness”, cannot exist as any more than as a “useful fiction”
(2005: 81), here, Winterson’s story suggests that everything other than the
self is the fiction, for the self is the only fixed point of which we can be cer-
tain. Our lives may be “squashed between facts” almost to the extent of being
erased—certainly the lives of most people who have ever existed have been
expunged by official history and records. But the Self is redeemable since,
“the journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the calendar,
the wrinkles and lines of the body” (80). The future is similarly a “fake”: The
future and the present and the past exist only in our minds. The complicit
relationship between time and the self are what we consider to be “self-
hood”, while the notion of memory of the self in other times and places both
problematises limited “selves” and supports the idea of a Self that endures
across lives and times—memory of which is lost. Jordan—now living in the
twentieth century—encounters himself as the man travelling on the boat with
Tradescant in a previous lifetime (120-21).
In a long meditative section on “The Nature of Time” the narrator ex-
plains, the Self has no place-time location:
…we do not move through time, time moves through us. I say this because our
physical bodies have a natural decay span, they are one-use-only units that
crumble around us. To everyone this is a surprise. […] The most prosaic of us
betray a belief in the inward life every time we talk about “my body” rather
than “I”. We feel it as absolutely part but not all of who we are. (1989: 90)
This crucial understanding is quite radical on behalf of an outspoken feminist

author—one who has clearly moved far beyond self-identification with the
self (or gender) as body alone. “Our existence”, she continues as narrator, “is
really countless existences holding hands like those cut-out paper dolls, but
unlike the dolls never coming to an end” (90). Moreover, it is art, that along
with concentration or meditation, brings us to a place of freedom of mind, a
place where we are “drawn out of ourselves”—a place where “we are no
longer bound by matter, matter has become what it is: empty space and light”
(91).
Gut Symmetries
The physicist David Bohm heralded a new breakthrough in quantum theory

with his proposition of hidden variables, whose presence may be inferred
even if not perceived directly. His theory of “implicate order” argues, “each
part […] contains the whole in some sense. The whole is folded into each
part” (Bohm 1978: 90-91). This concept, together with the idea of non-
locality—the connection between two particles otherwise separated in
space—continues as a theoretical basis underlying Winterson’s exploration of
characters, consciousness and desire. Her novel Gut Symmetries concerns her
ongoing fascination with science and the dimensionality of time, addressing
questions such as “How do we understand time? What happens to the past?
Does the future already exist?” As she explains:
The human heart is my territory. Gut Symmetries is about all kinds of relation-
ships […] as well as sexual affairs either heterosexual or queer. […] But I set
these personal private passions against an outside world—sometimes hostile,
sometimes strange, so that we can see what happens when inner and outer re-
alities collide. (2012: 1).
Winterson creates a novel that dares to introduce and utilise all the major
theories of contemporary physics, as a subtle theme, as subject matter, and as
structure. The wave function, symmetry and symmetry breaking, the four
fundamental forces of nature, parallel universes, theories of space-time and
their consequences: the interaction of individual and universe, that “the sepa-
188 Beyond Bodies
rateness of our lives is a sham” (1997:98)—are all cogently explored and

thrown out to the reader as tantalising alternatives to conventional (“classi-
cal”) thought about daily reality. In order to clarify the title’s pun on GUT
(Grand Unified Theory) and ‘gut’ (as in the body’s sense of intuition), the
novel begins with a meditation on the nature of co-existences, or contingen-
cies, overlapping realities of space, time, and matter—all of which take their
life through the human body. The universe is given meaning through the
body: “‘As above so below’. The zodiac in the sky is imprinted in the body”,
as the medieval alchemists and Greek philosophers believed; as did the Vedic
rishis: “smaller than small, bigger than big” (Winterson 1997: 2-3).
The structure of the novel plays with the idea of Grand Unified Theories
and how “they wanted to recognise the true relationship between the three
fundamental forces” (1997: 97). The text transposes the behaviour of forces
to that of characters, a possible negotiation since the theme plays with con-
cepts of “our place in the universe and the place of the universe in us” (97).
The novel in fact treads a fine line between fiction and philosophy, as in
discussion such as:
It may be that here in our provisional world of dualities and oppositional pairs:
black/white, good/evil, male/female, conscious/unconscious, Heaven/Hell,
predatory/prey, we compulsively act out the drama of our beginning, when
what was whole, halved, and seeks out again its wholeness. (1997: 5)
The text is experimental in approaching characters from the point of view

that: “all the seeming dislocations and separations of the atomic and sub-
atomic worlds are unified into a co-operating whole” (2) and the key to un-
derstanding the plot is that any measurement—any event in life—must take
into account the effect of the human observer. Winterson’s story utilises a
familiar scenario of a triangular love-relationship to tease out the implications
of the observer-observed connection and the collision of particles. The char-
acters, Jove, Stella and Alice revolve around each other in space-time, each
interacting (sexually and socially) to demonstrate that there is no such thing a
coincidence, only quantum pairing and entanglement. Even the narrator
(Jove) is caught up in the need to define reality: “I cannot tell you who I am
unless I tell you why I am. I cannot help you to take a measurement until we
both know where I stand” (Winterson 1997: 11).
Jove and Stella are married; Jove and Alice have an affair, as do Stella
and Alice. “Difficulties begin when these three separate forces are arbitrarily
welded together. His wife, his mistress, met” (97). The triangle breaks down
into positions of observer and observed: the viewpoint is everything, deter-

mining the “truth” of the story. While to readers this is a familiar literary
convention that “what happens” depends on the viewpoint of the narrator, or
character, yet Winterson’s narratorial interjections and plot structure go fur-
ther in “quantifying” or rationalising this technique in terms of physics. Iden-
tity also depends on time, due to the curved nature of space-time. Implicated
in explaining the characters’ behaviour are their parents’ stories of survival
and sacrifice, and stored memories of the past that still impact the present.
Yet, explains Stella: “I can’t go back into the past and change it, but I have
noticed that the future changes the past. What I call the past is my memory of
it and my memory is conditioned by who I am now. Who I will be” (45).
Inheritance implicates the laws of karma: the effect of past action on present
life. Physics, referred to throughout the novel, thus eventually collides with
implications for human consciousness. Alice muses on her past relationships:
In space-time there is always a lag between prediction and response […] but
we programme events far more than we like to think. I do not think this is con-
scious, usually it is not, and there lies the difficulty. […] the mind is a self-
regulating system, where consciousness and unconsciousness work as load-
balancing pulleys. (Winterson 1997: 120)
The consequence of Alice’s realisation “she has touched something relevant”

is that “although I still know nothing, I am no longer a disciple of Fate”
(120). Consciousness of consciousness is both empowering and humbling.
Eventually her perception and knowledge increase to realise in personal
terms that: “‘we’ and the sum total of the universe cannot be separated […].
What is it that you contain? The dead, time, light patterns of millennia, the
expanding universe opening in your gut”; and the reality: “We are and we are
not our bodies” (162).
If Winterson’s novel plays upon the pun of GUT/gut, it also plays with
the interaction of karma (the ‘imprint of past action’) with kama (‘desire’)—
more fundamental forces of nature. Karma is that which remains following
our actions—sometimes referred to as a “mountain” which we bring with us
from the past into the present:
Out of this mountain of Karma, we take some of it and to work it out we ac-
quire our physical body. […] As long as the body is to be, we have to bear that
Karma for which we acquired a body. Our present actions leave their impres-
sions on our minds, and these become the seed of desire; desire leads to Kar-
190 Beyond Bodies
ma. So it is the acting in the present that becomes the seed for future Karma.
Thus there is the Karma of the past, Karma of the present, and the Karma of
the future. (Mahesh Yogi: 1967/2012: 115)
In scientific terminology, physicists such as Bohm and Bell speak of the

notion of “the mysterious conspiracy” that links particles in space-time (qt
Hayle: 56). Fritjof Kapra concludes that, “The whole universe appears to be
dynamic web of inseparable energy patterns” (1977: 69); while similar con-
cepts are engaged by Winterson’s narrator who speaks of the building blocks
of matter as “an infinite web of relationships” (1997:161), and our real lives
as formed of: “vibrations, relationships, possibilities” (1997:207).
Gut Symmetries—while the marriage of fiction and physics creates an
awkward and self-conscious novel from the point of view of narrative —
nevertheless presents a creative and thought-provoking experience. The
theme that “the separateness of our lives is a sham” (1997: 98) and its impli-
cations for literary narrative that “History is not unalterable. […] If we knew
how to manipulate space-time as space-time manipulates itself the illusion of
our single linear lives would collapse” (1997: 160) continue in Winterson’s
next novels. Themes of exploration examine the relationship between feel-
ings and emotion and “what it means to be human”. Indeed, Winterson takes
on the challenging questions of how we can define human consciousness. Her
science fiction novel The Stone Gods considers some of the most important
enquiries in Artificial Intelligence studies today: Can robots be intelligent and
have emotions? Will computers eventually develop consciousness?
Becoming human: The Stone Gods
Winterson’s 2008 novel The Stone Gods immediately plunges the reader into
controversial issues of bio-ethics, the colonisation of space, and the failure of
conservation in preserving the planet as a viable living-place. Wars and con-
flicts have brought humanity close to destruction. The plot imagines and
implies futures where artificial intelligence, humanoid computers, and the
bioengineering of human bodies have become the norm.
The Stone Gods opens with the exciting possibility of humanity relocating
to a new planet: the “old” one having been destroyed through years of wars
and ecological disasters. Organised by the Central Power with the hope of a
new start, as well as the colonising mission of imperial conquest into space,
“The new planet will be home to the universe’s first advanced civilisation”
(2008:7). “Planet Blue” is presented as the new Utopia, the new world that
will offer a future to the human race—which has become increasingly genet-
ically modified to the point of ageless perfection.
The central character (of the novel’s first section), the aptly named Billy
Crusoe, remains a rebel, refusing for her body’s DNA to be “re-coded” and
“Fixed” or “Genetically-reversed” at a young and permanently desirable age,
and insisting on living in a natural farm bio-dome, as well as maintaining
reading and writing in a society where technology has made these obsolete
(9). Words have been reduced to coded capital letters (so that, for example, F
now stands for ‘Fixed’.) Billy works for “Enhancement Services” the gov-
ernment body that ensures individual daily life remains “happy” (4, 10).
Involved with PR, she must put the necessary spin on the news, yet often fails
at the required “political correctness”, as in this discussion with her boss
about how the new planet will be advertised:
“We have to present this positively.”

“It is positive, isn’t it? Are you saying there are presentation problems with the
chance that everyone is dying for?”
“Don’t use the word ‘dying’.”
“But Orbis is dying.”
“Orbis is not dying. Orbis is evolving in a way that is hostile to human life.”
“OK, so it’s the planet’s fault. We didn’t do anything, did we? Just fucked it to
death and kicked it when it wouldn’t get up.” (2008:8)
In this new “hi-tech, hi-stress, hi-mess” world (13), it is not only the planet’s
environment that is close to destruction. For “we have no need for brains so
our brains are shrinking. […] it’s an inevitable part of the process” (17).
Meanwhile, computer technology has successfully developed Robo sapiens:
“The first artificial creature that looks and acts human, and that can evolve
like a human—within limits, of course” (17). It is these “limits” that become
a central question in the novel: to what extent can a computer or a robot emu-
late or possess consciousness? They seem able to replicate all human behav-
iour, “except that they don’t have hearts” (17).
This concept returns to the notion that “authentic” consciousness is in-
complete without emotional content. Billie interviews one of these Robo
sapiens, a robot called Spike, who Billie finds “drop-dead gorgeous” despite
knowing that inter-species sex is illegal and punishable by death (33). Spike
warns her that the differences between humans and robots are rapidly disap-
pearing, with implications that their current quasi-slave status may also
change (34).
192 Beyond Bodies
Billie is arrested on trumped-up charges, and sent as part of the vanguard

group to explore and settle the new Planet Blue—along with Spike. There, a
love affair is possible. Yet, this is a shipwreck story (as the reader may pre-
dict from Billie’s name), and the hope of making the new planet habitable as
a new home for humans is shattered due to a major “massively miscalculat-
ed” technological mistake (68). Planet Blue is rendered uninhabitable for
millions of years to come—and Billie and Spike, along with the other crew,
are trapped there. Human beings, capable of great developments, “are capable
of destruction, too” (67). Yet mankind is constantly being given second
chances—further opportunities for repeating the same mistakes (68).
The only chance for survival in this world is to understand the quantum
nature of the universe, which as Spike explains to Billy, is “neither random
nor determined. It is potential at every second. All you can do is intervene”
(75). The only way, she suggests is “to bend the light” and this can best be
done through love (76). Billy’s reaction, naturally enough, is to be confused,
since Spike is a robot and incapable of feelings. But for Spike, “Gender is a
human concept and not interesting”, and, moreover, simply raises more ques-
tions on the authenticity of what it means to be human: “is human life biolo-
gy or consciousness?” (76).
She continues: “If I were to lop off your arms, your legs, your ears, your
nose, put out your eyes, roll up your tongue, would you still be you? You
locate yourself in consciousness, and I too, am a conscious being” (76). In
this civilisation where human bodies are bio-engineered through cloning,
DNA screening, and genetic modification, the differentiation between a “hu-
man” and a “machine” is rapidly collapsing. So what then is a human being?
Spike further points out the illogicality to the concept of human being defined
through the capacity to experience emotion. “How much emotion?” she asks,
“The more sensitive a person is, the more human they are? (78). In a world in
which humans are “rendering themselves obsolete” it may be that the Robo
sapiens are in fact more human, since they are still evolving, and humans are
not. Moreover, “We are solar powered and self-repairing. We are intelligent
and non-aggressive. You could learn from us”, Spike tells Billie. “There are
many kinds of life. […] Humans always assumed that theirs was the only
kind that mattered. That’s how you destroyed your planet” (79).
The fact that Spike is falling in love confirms that she continues to evolve
into something beyond her original programming: her capacity to love initial-
ly being triggered by an encounter with poetry (81). Her affair with Billie
appears both inevitable and yet strange. But what, ponders Billie, really
forms a significant difference between them?
I forget all the time that she’s a robot, but what’s a robot? A moving lump of
metal. In this case an intelligent, ultra-sensitive moving lump of metal. What’s
a human? A moving lump of flesh, in most cases not intelligent nor remotely
sensitive. (99)
This section of the novel concludes with Winterson’s key idea on the nature
of consciousness and the quantum universe. Consciousness, as the character
Spike concludes, means that, “Everything is imprinted for ever with what it
once was” (105). This concept resonates throughout the remaining two sec-
tions of the novel: for time overlaps, nothing is ultimately forgotten, and what
once was, is.
Some religions call life a dream, or a dreaming, but what if it is a memory?

What if this new world isn’t new at all but a memory of a new world?
What if we do keep making the same mistakes again and again never remem-
bering the lessons to learn […] Perhaps the universe is a memory of all our
mistakes. (105-6)
It is this last question that permeates the novel. Characters and situations
repeat in different locations (Easter Island and England) and at various times
in history. Billy and Spike’s affair is repeated by different persona and differ-
ently gendered bodies, for love “is a recognition” (109) irrespective of gender
or sexuality; Love “is the chance to be human” (110). In their last moments,
the original Spike attains a heart, and becomes “what she said life would
be—consciousness” (111). Even without a body, if love exists, then so too
does the infinite imprint of consciousness on the universe.
The final section of the novel, entitled “Wreck City”, is set in a dystopian,
post-nuclear war, twenty-first century England, where a robot called Spike—
comprising only a talking head—explains some of the truths of the quantum
universe to an outlaw, Billy. Together they discover the truth of what hap-
pened to Planet Blue—and to the original Spike and Billy. Winterson’s mes-
sage is clear:
A quantum universe—neither random nor determined. A universe of poten-

tialities, waiting for an intervention to affect the outcome.
Love is an intervention.
Why do we not choose it? (244)
194 Beyond Bodies
AI: imprints of consciousness
The Stone Gods is a richly layered novel with pivotal additional plots beyond
those elaborated here, most notably those that highlight the importance of the
lesbian/gay nature of the love relationships, which lies at the heart of the
novel’s message. The present discussion has intentionally not revealed the
surprising conclusion, nor the full significance of the novel’s title, that sug-
gests “Love is not easy to leave behind” (149); only love is powerful enough
to counteract the destructive nature of humans.
The core theme permeating both Winterson and Abani’s novels is that de-
spite the sacrifices, the delusions, and the masquerades of gender identity,
ultimately what remains authentic and imperative in human existence is love.
Winterson has explained: “I write about love because it’s the most important
thing in the world. I write about sex because it often feels like the most im-
portant thing in the world” (2012: 1). Both writers emphasise the importance
of love for humanity: whether crossing barriers of race, gender or species
(here, the human-robot relationship). Winterson takes on the challenging
question of whether computers can ever become conscious. Whereas Dylan
Evans proposes that robots might eventually “evolve” to have emotions, yet
they would be very different to those felt by humans, and moreover, “The
different physiologies of robots and humans might make it very hard for us to
sympathise with them” (2003: 119). The Stone Gods argues just the reverse:
it may be robots that show humans how to empathise and to love most altru-
istically. Winterson suggests that the capacity for emotions of love and pas-
sion exist regardless of the types of physical body: consciousness is beyond
the body.
Recent discussions on the post-human condition argue that the mind and
the body are both required to produce consciousness, “even if the body is
artificial” (Pepperell 2013). Human bodies, according to Robert Pepperell
have no boundaries, and consciousness (the mind) and the environment can-
not be separated. These statements then lead to the “apparently absurd, yet
logically consistent, conclusion that: consciousness and the environment
cannot be absolutely separated” (2013:2). The possibilities of consciousness
in non-human entities, Pepperell implies, depend upon the ability of a ma-
chine to synthesise both random and non-random events: in other words, the
machine must go beyond logic (and logical programming) to have the sort of
non-logical reasoning possible by human brains, which have evolved to ex-
pect the unexpected. Human brains can assert meaning into chaos; it is this
“compulsion to reassert order in the face of random stimuli which generates

our sense of Being” (Pepperell 2013: 7). Yet for Pepperell, since our models
of how the brain functions are still imperfect, the creation of a non-human
synthetic consciousness “would be impractical” (2013: 5).
“Consciousness includes human mental processes, but it is not just a hu-
man attribute”, agree Chopra, Penrose and Kragh in a collection of recent
articles, but they go much further in their claims that “Consciousness is pri-
mary in the cosmos, not just an epiphenomenon of physical processes in the
nervous system” (2012: np). Moreover, consciousness exists “outside ‘space’
and ‘time’, it was ‘there’ ‘before’ those two words had any meaning.” Con-
sciousness, they argue, is not just a human attribute. “We are products of the
same conceptual expansion by which primordial consciousness turned into
the physical world” (Kafatos, Tanzi, and Chopra in Chopra, Penrose and
Kragh 2012: np).
As fiction, The Stone Gods enacts this connection of human conscious-
ness with universal consciousness. Consciousness unifies physical life and
emotional meaning: the human brain acquires quantum status—projecting
coherence onto the universe of sensory experience. The overlap between
science and literature here seems profoundly enticing. The popular physicist
Brian Greene, in closing a chapter on the nature of quantum channelling in
superstring landscapes within the multiverses (not merely the universe), de-
lights:
in the possibility that copies of the earth exist in the far reaches of space, or
that our universe is one of many bubbles in an inflating cosmos, or that we live
on one of many braneworlds [sic] constituting a giant cosmic loaf. These are
undeniably provocative and alluring ideas. (2011: 187)
Jeanette Winterson bravely dips her literary toe into a few such ideas in the
plots and narrative structures of Gut Symmetries and The Stone Gods, in the
hope of taking the reader with her into the realities of quantum physics and
our space-time universe; meanwhile, the leading physicists let their imagina-
tions run wild. Greene continues to enthuse about what various models and
approaches to these extra dimensions might imply:
… the Landscape Multiverse is not merely broadening our view of what might
be out there. Instead, an array of parallel universes, worlds that may be beyond
our ability to visit or see or test or influence, now and perhaps always, are di-
196 Beyond Bodies
rectly invoked to provide insight into observations we make here, in this uni-
verse.
Which raises the essential question: Is this science? (2011:187)
Meanwhile, within parameters of telling the often bleak and violent story
of life on our contemporary planet, Chris Abani taps into the core of what it
means to be human, with his emphasis on exploring “the silence of the heart
where unknowable things become illuminated even without thought” (2009
np). Writing the body’s truth, he confesses, means revealing himself, “not in
the sense of my autobiography, but in the sense of the deeper self, the one we
keep too often hidden even from ourselves.” In his essay “Ethics and Narra-
tive”, Abani shares further insights:
The point of the purposeful narrative, of the ethical story, is to draw all the cour-
age, kindness, goodness, and hope from the world into the open, where everyone
can share it. To be human requires no action. What is required, though, is harder:
the non-judgmental (and I don’t mean non-discerning) daily accounting of our
lives and narratives to ourselves. It is owning all the power and privilege we have
wielded that day, as well as its true cost. […] One of my earliest spiritual advisers
told me that to be human is to accept that there will never be world peace, but to
live life as though it is possible. This is the core of my aesthetic; belief in a deeper
humanness that is beyond race, class, gender and power […] .(2011)
Brian Greene concludes with the reflection that no one actually knows
how science will be able to confirm the properties of the “Ultimate Multi-
verse”, yet “it is only through fearless engagement that we can learn our own
limits” (2011: 370). It is tempting to imagine that contemporary writers such
as Winterson and Abani, who forge so far into revealing compassionate,
redemptive, gender-alternative states of being and becoming, would agree
that reaching a state of complete understanding—and writing the story of
being human—involves a “fearless engagement” with life, yet it is only by
occasionally being “whisked” into “strange and unfamiliar domains that we
stand a chance of revealing the expanse of reality” (Greene 2011:187).
Chapter Nine
Quests and questions of consciousness:

Margaret Atwood’s post-human futures
Literary studies highlight the importance of studying works of art in connec-

tion with their location and socio-historical settings, yet what must also be
considered is the impact the work has on the consciousness of the reader or
audience. The local and the global must be considered in terms of conscious-
ness, together with the possibility of these consciousnesses being changed or
augmented, a concept that encourages the possibility of human evolution
towards a “higher” level of interaction with the global population as well as
with the natural environment. The concept of transnationalism—which im-
plicates the connection between individual and collective consciousness—
already emphasizes the placement of identity being defined as beyond and
independent of boundaries of nation or race. According to postcolonial theo-
ry, the present is always embedded in the re-memory of the past: new worlds
cannot be created unless incorporating a telling knowledge of the old. Thus,
we remember the future. While being based on an informed and critical
memory of the past, Utopias in the imagination are also necessary for provid-
ing upcoming hope. They are crucial as critical points of opposition to op-
pression. New worlds, brave or not, must be created as parallel realities to
address and challenge current creations of self and other, subject and object,
friend and alien. As Lyman Tower Sargent postulates: “dissatisfaction is the
beginning of utopianism, and ultimately, utopianism is about the transfor-
mation of everyday life” (2010:49).
This chapter addresses issues of new Otherness and argues that we need
to look more closely at how the shifting concepts of “human kind” (with both
biological and ethical dimensions) are constructed in the contexts of both
literature and life. Feminists throughout the twentieth century developed
interests in the possibility of apocalyptic endings to the current known civili-
zations of the world, and project possible future disasters, either through war
or devastating pandemics. The notion of consciousness must be asserted as
198 Beyond Bodies
not merely negotiable within that future, but crucial if there is to be a survival
of our world. Margaret Atwood—despite claiming that “‘human”, however,
does not necessarily mean ‘wonderful’” (1994: 132)—provides a challenging
new map of humanity and contributes to the crucial debate on what it means
to be human in a post-human world.
Margaret Atwood and the problematic search for new worlds
The Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s novels have formed a central core
of the exploration of women’s consciousness in twentieth and twenty-first
century literature. They challenge gendered roles in western culture through
an unleashing of female consciousness as a weapon for social change. Her
novel, Alias Grace, for example accesses factual records of historical charac-
ters to problematise the ambiguities of deciphering history and truth, through
the medium of “female” language. While being a novel that tries to decon-
struct the notion of a woman’s madness, Alias Grace continues to formulate a
feminist aesthetic based on alternatives to “logical” male order. Even from
the multi-optional viewpoints of one woman’s life, new possibilities of ana-
lysing consciousness seem to be involved in this model. New language opens
up the possibility for dynamic rewriting of reality. The language of female
writers, such as Margaret Atwood, often reflects a profound intuitive in-
sight—one that goes beyond the normal surface level of words—to tap into a
more subtle level of knowledge that augments the reader’s receptive experi-
ence.
This chapter examines three of Margaret Atwood’s works, Surfacing
(1972) and the first two novels of her “Maddaddam” trilogy, Oryx and Crake
(2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009). These novels form a trajectory in
many ways, since the concerns and themes relate to contemporary issues of
female agency, colonialism and neo-colonialism; control and conflict; and the
impact of all of these on humankind’s impact on the environment. In these
novels (and to some extent in The Handmaid’s Tale) Margaret Atwood ex-
plores the superior ability of women to survive. The women characters in
these novels overcome the seemingly insurmountable problems inherent
within ongoing postmodern/post-human patriarchy—forging new realities
and redefinitions of the self. Surfacing, one of Atwood’s earliest novels,
involving themes of madness, gender, language and ecology, has been called
“the blue-print of revolt” which facilitates a quest for freedom and autonomy
(Prebhakar 1995: 71) while the later novel Oryx and Crake delineates both
Quests and questions of consciousness 199
the powers of the mythical feminine and the dangers of the post-human deni-
al of consciousness.
A key question sometimes asked as to whether we live in a post-
postmodern era, conjectures whether an end to postmodernism might also
imply complacency in the post-postmodern world to important issues of spir-
ituality. Contemporary fiction writers are still able to explore avenues of
spiritual questioning despite postmodernism’s denial of spiritual truths and
repudiation of master narratives rendering this theme as inherently more
problematic. As Salman Rushdie discusses, “the rejection of totalized expla-
nations is the modern condition” and the role of fiction and the novel be-
comes even more important in recording and problematising this “fragmenta-
tion of truth” (Rushdie 1991: 422). He continues:
The elevation of the quest for the Grail over the Grail itself, the acceptance of
all that is solid has melted into air, that reality and morality are not givens but
imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins. This is
what J-F. Lyotard called in 1979, la Condition Postmoderne. The challenge of
literature is to start from this point, and still find a way of fulfilling our unal-
tered spiritual requirements. (Rushdie 1991: 422)
The main framework of the postmodern dilemma denoted in the novels of

Margaret Atwood portrays the anxieties inherent in the meaninglessness of
life and then suggests ways of making sense of the ominous nonsense. In the
last decade of the twentieth century, following the dramatic collapse of polit-
ical regimes in Europe, it became more apparent that “the idea that men and
women could ever define themselves in terms that exclude their spiritual
needs” had failed (Rushdie 1991: 422). This chapter will argue that these
novels demonstrate how spiritual transcendence offers an alternative reality
that can empower and liberate women.
Surfacing: society, secrets, and subjectivity
Atwood’s 1972 novel Surfacing continues many of the themes already seen
in the previous chapter in the works of Robinson and Pynchon. It also can
also be regarded as a feminist Bildungsroman, both spiritual and social quest
narrative, which exposes many of the author’s concerns that link society with
individual consciousness. Richard J. Lane describes the multifaceted nature
of Atwood’s Surfacing as not only a novel but:
200 Beyond Bodies
an implicit or explicit manifesto for eco-warriors, feminists, nationalists, psy-

choanalytic critics, and so on. […] Such a paradoxical and contradictory for-
mulation is related to the mode of the manifesto itself, and the question be-
comes: is Surfacing a manifesto, or does Surfacing explore the manifesto
mode as being indicative of transformed, previously unreflective, experience?
(Lane 2006: 78-9)
Lane explains that the narrator’s role is a self-reflective one (2006: 79), and
through this self-reflexivity, she sets herself up as a witness of and antagonist
to, issues of identity and environment that are contested throughout the novel.
Her inner reality of the self is a mirror of outer: and both are problematic.
Indeed, the image of mirrors and mirroring is central throughout the novel,
and the character of Anna defines herself solely in terms of her mirrored
image. Like The Crying of Lot 49, Surfacing engages a female protagonist
who undertakes a solitary quest to find meaning in her environment against
the backdrop of increasing chaos in society. The multi-layered images within
Surfacing are those that have made critics envision the novel as a manifesto
for increasing awareness of threatened gender identity choices and the natural
environment.
The novel juxtaposes postcolonial conflicts of man-made technology and
its threats to nature, and the ethical question of what it means to be human
(specifically, female and human) with a symbolic story that relates to the
future of the species as a whole. At what point does the apparent madness of
the world around us become naturalised? A key to the novel’s questioning of
a “sane” future lies in the first words uttered by the (unnamed) narrator and
the story’s protagonist: “I can’t believe I’m on this road again” (7): warning
the reader of her unreliability as narrator and our guide to her story into the
wilderness of the Canadian woods and lakes. This island space becomes (like
William Golding’s in Lord of the Flies) the scene of the dissolution of “civi-
lized” behaviour, the breakdown of rationality and interpersonal responsibil-
ity. “Surfacing” refers to not only the discrepancy between individual inner
and outer conflicts, and the difficulty in reconciling physical and psychologi-
cal demands of the human body, but expands to debate how any individual
can find fulfilment in the restrictive route offered by heterosexual “love”
relationships. Gradually, the novel becomes concerned with the conflicts of
appearance versus reality, most centrally through the metaphor of the lake:
the choice between playing on its surface as opposed to diving into the depths
of the water, and thus to the revelations of truth to be found there.
The non-linearity of the novel gradually reveals the various anxieties and
psychological problems plaguing the narrator. She harbours lingering re-
sentment towards patriarchal society, especially in the form of the United
States of America (at the time in the throes of the Vietnam war) and the in-
creasingly belligerent, destructive, technology it represents. She travels with
friends, including her boyfriend, to the wilderness cabin on the lakeshore,
which was her childhood home with parents seeking the freedom to live the
“natural” outdoors life distant from city or civilization. Now, her father has
disappeared, and it is with the intent of finding him that they return to the
abandoned home for a week’s holiday. Although with this ostensible purpose
of finding her lost father, the trip rapidly becomes a twisting inward journey
to become reconciled to her place as a woman in a hostile society. Thus the
expedition must resolve the narrator’s past traumas of a forced abortion, lack
of love, and loss of identity, and her consequent rejection of traditional fe-
male roles. Yet, returning to the novel’s first phrase “I can’t believe I’m on
this road again…” the entire text could be read as a reworking through of
mental trauma, especially as the narrator’s status as “insane” by the novel’s
closure would endorse the idea that the entire narrative is her psychoanalyti-
cal-therapeutic projection of a mental journey onto a physical one.
All the rules that she had previously lived by gradually break down. She
has lived by the “myths of rationality” represented by her father, and in re-
jecting these as being incompatible with her inner sense of reality, she must
confront the failure of logic to live “according to her own deeper sense of
mystery and passion” (Pearson 1981: 207). Her gradual breakdown (if such it
is) from sanity to insanity is revealed to the reader through the increasing
paranoia of her comments. Feeling trapped in the island, she wants to protect
her friends from “him” (her father) (Atwood 1972: 89, 95), and she becomes
increasingly suspicious of every action or conversation that takes place, em-
bodied in the home-movie the men are making of the visit.
Later she reveals the classic symptoms of flatness of affect typical of
schizophrenia:
I didn’t feel awful; I realized I didn’t feel much of anything. I hadn’t for a
long time. Perhaps I’d been like that all my life […] At some point my neck
must have closed over, pond freezing or a wound, shutting me into my head;
since then everything had been glancing off me, it was like being in a vase.
(1972: 121)
202 Beyond Bodies
As self-uncertainty increases, so too, as for many feminists, does her inability

to trust language. She seeks to find new ways of formulating expression of
her new experience—and as sentences become increasingly fragmented they
suggest an expansion into awareness without conventional restrictions. She
claims she cannot use language “because it wasn’t mine”; it is a code belong-
ing to the rational and male world alien to her inner experience. When con-
fronted with the question from her boyfriend if she loves him, she has to
“hunt through my brain for any emotion” that would coincide with her expe-
rience (122).
Her moment of revelation—her epiphany—is the moment she dives into
the lake to look for the ancient indigenous art works her father had been re-
searching. What she seems to discover instead is his dead body. “Pale green
then darkness, layer after layer, deeper than before. […] It was wonderful
that I was down so far; I almost forgot to look for the cliff and the shape. It
was there but it wasn’t a painting…” (1972: 162). The symbolism here is
difficult to avoid if one wishes to discuss the novel in terms of transcendence.
Like a modern-day myth of Psyche descending into the underworld to
emerge with a new wholeness of knowledge, the narrator’s dive takes her
into either a dark place of the subconscious, or to a symbolic transcendence
of thought, of going deeper into abstract concept, to images beyond language.
The native Indian artists, as she explains, marked the sacred places, “where
you could learn the truth” (166). She has found out some truth about her
father, despite the fact there had been no paintings at the lake, for the true
vision is an internal not external one. “He had discovered new places, new
oracles, they were things he was seeing the way I had seen, true vision; at the
end, after the failure of logic” (166).
For my purpose here, an insightful interpretation of the “madness” in the
novel is Carol Christ’s discussion of the text as claiming the power to create
“new ways of being for women in new worlds” (1976: 318). She expands the
concept of “quest in society” to one of quest for “self in cosmos”, continuing:
“rejection of a male-defined world may also open a woman to a full experi-
ence of great powers” (1976:325). The narrator’s descent into madness is
portrayed through a narrative strewn with false clues (reminiscent of Pyn-
chon’s Oedipa), which also leave the reader oscillating between traditional
concepts of “truth” and “fantasy”, sanity and craziness. Before retreating into
the freedom represented by the woods (alluding to much American literature,
where the woods are so far outside the boundaries of society as to be feared)
she spends a last night in her father’s cabin. Symbolically, she realizes that:
“I must stop being in the mirror […] Not to see myself but to see. I reverse
the mirror so it’s toward the wall, it no longer traps me (Atwood 1972:203).
Then she destroys everything in the cabin: “Everything from history must be
eliminated […] everything I can’t break […] I throw on the floor […] these
husks are not needed any longer, I abolish them, I have to clear space”
(1972:205).
Then, as if beginning her new life with a ritual baptism, she steps into the
lake. When she undergoes her final transformation in the woods, tearing off
her clothes and burying herself in leaves and dirt to sleep in a state that re-
jects everything touched by society, she appears to transform herself willing-
ly into a feral animal. Christ discusses this climatic episode as a mystical
experience, a union of individual consciousness with a greater being.
The animals have no need for speech, why talk when you are a word
I lean against a tree, I am a tree leaning
I break out again into the bright sun and crumple, head against the ground
I am not an animal or a tree, I am the thing in which the trees and animals
move and grow, I am a place”. (Atwood 1972: 210)
Having experienced nature as transforming herself out of being-a-woman to

her new state of non-being, she actually experiences a pantheistic union with
all forms of life, as “the boundaries between herself and the other forms of
life are abolished” (Christ 1976:324). This reformulation of being, is howev-
er, opposed to the French philosophers’ Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) con-
cept of the process of “becoming-woman”, which they conceptualise as a
phase in a journey of diminishment, a step on the road to becoming-
imperceptible: just the sort of masculinist positioning of woman against
which the narrator of Surfacing is rebelling.
Yet is this mystical state of union one that could be described as one of
higher states of consciousness? Certainly, it depicts an experience of tran-
scendence where everything is seen in terms of the self. Again, a reference to
Salman Rushdie discussion in his essay “Is Nothing Sacred” can be used to
endorse my argument that the concept and experience of transcendence is not
incompatible with postmodern philosophy. He writes:
What I mean by transcendence is that flight of the human spirit outside the
confines of its material, physical existence which all of us, secular or religious,
experience on at least a few occasions. […] The soaring quality of transcend-
ence, the sense of being more than oneself, of being in some way joined to the
204 Beyond Bodies
whole of life, is by its nature short-lived. Not even the visionary or mystical
experience ever lasts very long. (1991: 421)
The Indian traditional Vedic texts describe higher states to be when the
boundaries between the individual self and the universe dissolve—as a state
when the individual realises the total force of universal being within them-
selves. Everything is seen in terms of the Self, and as a glorification of the
celestial values of infinite creation. Both inner and outer realities are per-
ceived as pure, unbounded, consciousness. Certainly, Atwood’s protagonist
here experiences nature as a great, transformative power. Colin Wilson
(2009) also describes many instances of such experiences, induced involun-
tarily, in which the individual “falls” into a state of rapture, a state of under-
standing the vastness of the universe both without and within the self—and
such descriptions are frequently devoid of any necessary religious or mystical
preconditions or terminologies.
As a consequence of her experience, Surfacing’s narrator “refuses to be a
victim. Unless I can do that I can do nothing” (222), yet she is wary of how
society will regard her transformation. She has found “self definition and
strength unknown in a male-defined world” (Christ 1976: 324), yet has no
means of knowing how to reintegrate into society as her new self. She dresses
herself again in her clothes, as if resuming her old identity, yet the reader is
keenly aware that she is changed in other subtle ways—she hints that she is
pregnant and bears within her “a time-traveller, the primeval one […] It
might be the first one, the first true human” (Atwood 1972: 222). Unlike the
reformulations of identity and existence in Housekeeping into the gendered
sanctuary of “the Wild Zone”, the heroine here remains in a state of uncer-
tainty in no-man’s land, hovering on the border of old/new social and spiritu-
al spaces, “asking and giving nothing” (224). Dare she suppose that any
woman can ever truly live as she wants? Everything (as for Oedipa) seems to
be a trick: whatever is waiting for her back in the world of men might be
“captivity in any of its forms” or “a new freedom”; yet she realizes “To trust
is to let go” (Atwood 1972: 223).
Yet just as the narrator is transformed into something new through her
journey, the reader also recognizes that this is not merely another “descent
into madness” tale; the reader experiences her own transformation to recog-
nize the sanity of the narrator’s final positioning. The depth—and the revela-
tions given by diving beneath the surface of the lake—results in the formula-
tion of a new and stronger woman, one who has conquered her fears and past
traumas. She watches and waits, and the reader is left in a similar state not
knowing if the narrator as “natural woman” will return to “civilization” (so-
ciety and friends) or not. Surfacing ends in a state of uncertainty: has the
experience of the true self of the narrator been profound enough to be sus-
tained in everyday waking consciousness? Early in the novel, the narrator
explains that if only she could experience such a diving down into reality
(like Lazarus being raised from the dead): “I would feel there was something
special about me […] I would have returned with secrets, I would know
things that most people didn’t” (Atwood 1972: 83). Now the question re-
mains: can she actually fulfil this promise, and surface from her apparent
(although brief) dive into alternative consciousness and return to society,
wiser, transformed and bearing the boon—as is the traditional conclusion in
spiritual quest narratives?
For the reader, at least, Atwood’s novel offers the momentary glimpse of
alternative modes of being-woman, and encourages an expansive self-
reflexivity. Salman Rushdie concludes that it is the very role of literature to
“capture the experience” of transcendence and offer it to its readers, “to be,
for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love
of god offers in the world of faith […] an articulation of our half-glimpsed
knowledge of exaltation, of awe, or wonder” (1991: 421).
Atwood’s twenty-first century dystopia
Margaret Atwood’s two futuristic novels, Oryx and Crake (2003) and The
Year of the Flood (2009) extend the range of her previous postcolonial, eco-
logical, and societal concerns and provide a devastating vision of what may
befall society if the bio-technological and scientific experimentation of today
continues. Problematising how the near future may develop if certain cultural
and social trends are continued to their (il)logical extremes, these novels—
famously claimed by Atwood as not being science fiction at all—have been
hailed as all the more chilling for holding a mirror up to our contemporary
society. Both novels also demand a revision of our social priorities: a new
dimension of concern on questions of freedom, violence, and the interface
between political power, technology, and individual agency.
Man and missiles in space, genetic modification, the cloning of human
DNA, techno-medicine, the destruction of the planet through depletion of its
natural resources and disruption of the ecosphere: Without the need to project
futures onto distant planets or imagined brave new worlds, writers throughout
206 Beyond Bodies
the past century have located planet Earth as strange enough to encompass
their visions of utopia or anti-utopia. At this time in its history, it seems more
than ever likely that one of these dystopias is rapidly advancing to become
reality. For, as Elaine Graham points out, “there has always been a close
relationship between technological innovation and social change” (2002:1),
and moreover, “New reproductive technologies, cloning and genetic modifi-
cation also promise to engender a future in which the boundaries between
humanity, technology and nature will be ever more malleable” (3). Whatever
the ramifications of technological advance, writers have concerns over the
implications for the future of the human race. Sidney Perkowitiz claims
…we have learned something from the issues swirling around other forms of
human alteration such as genetic manipulation; namely, technology that modi-
fies people in unnatural ways or overturns old definitions of birth, life, and
death raises moral and legal questions, and the earlier we consider these, the
better. (2005: 214)
Post-humanism addresses not only the complicated realignments of human-

technology interface. The notion of the importance of consciousness has been
raised in contemporary fiction by texts such as Ishiguro’s desolate tale of
dehumanized clones, Never Let Me Go, and also in a film with a similar sce-
nario of “consciousness-less” clones being bred as genetic replicas for trans-
plants, The Island (2005). Many writers imagine symbioses of physiology
and machine as a positive development, yet scary, such as Judith Butler’s
claim that no objects or bodies can be considered sacred in themselves: any
commixture and reorganization is permissible, as long as some sort of regu-
lated code is adhered to (2003). The argument, however, must be made that
any definition of what constitutes “a proper code” is fraught with problematic
subjectivity and the warning bells of ethics can be plainly heard. As a legacy
of the postmodern stance, which emphasizes the social construction of the
self and negates universal or transcendental unifying truths, together with the
deconstruction of self that it postulates, the need for maintaining a substrate
of “consciousness” as a meaningful concept at all becomes devoid and deval-
ued. Thus, worries over the demise of human consciousness are perhaps
limited to the few scientists, artists and writers who have themselves become
aware of consciousness as an authentic lived—and precious—experience.
Yet, as Atwood raises as the premise of her novels, who is ultimately to de-
cide between these perspectives?
In his article, “Then You are Them”, Fredric Jameson addresses At-
wood’s latest novels in context of the history of dystopias in literature, claim-
ing that the purpose of such writing is always political and questioning
whether any Utopia (or dystopia) can ever have any closure other than “abso-
lute death and destruction” (2009: 3). In these two novels, both individual
and collective existence are in jeopardy, despite valiant attempts by the vari-
ous characters in The Year of the Flood to find means of physical, mental and
religious survival. In year 25, the Waterless Flood is to wipe out most hu-
mans—but year 25 of or since what is left vague—presumably it is the time
of the since the catastrophic climate change. Ursula Le Guin points out in her
review of The Year of the Flood, Atwood’s novel is not so much science
fiction as half-prediction, and the book “is not an affirmation at all, only a
lament, a lament for what little was good about human beings” (2009: 3). It is
the more fundamental question of “what it is to be human” that underpins all
other environmental concerns.
In the first two novels of Atwood’s “MaddAddam” trilogy, the power of
creation falls into the hands of a genius gene-splicer, Glenn—more frequent-
ly known by his code name Crake—who creates a new breed of “human”
based on his concepts of where humanity has gone wrong in the past. So,
“destructive” features such as racism, fear of death and need for “harmful
symbolisms” such as property and religion are genetically removed, while
others such as herbalism and regular on-heat mating are spliced in (305).
(Although, as we see near the end of Oryx and Crake, the Crakers seem to be
making a spontaneous return to religion and symbolism of representative art.)
Ultimately the reader is left to question whether this new breed of super-non-
intelligent, placid and simple beings is an improvement on the original, once
most of the “human” population of the world is annihilated through a devas-
tating disease—one designed and put into effect also by Crake. Citing Rich-
ard Dawkins’ definition of DNA as a “machine for making life”, Pepperell
claims “there is no distinction between the mechanical and the organic when
it comes to considering DNA” (2003: 10), so we could deduce that these new
beings are as much machine as “human being”, that these new inhabitants of
the planet are arguably as human as the originals.
Atwood’s bitter “brave new world” invokes plays on the postmodern ac-
ceptance of copy as reality, of clone as close-enough-to-be-acceptable replica
of original. Hence, while Roland Barthes postulates that realism consists not
in copying the real but in copying a copy (1974), this postmodern “discourse
of the copy” of art and text does not have to mutate far. It takes only one
208 Beyond Bodies
scientist to turn a philosophy into a biological body. Atwood launches into

her devastated world through the character of Snowman, who used to be
Jimmy, before the rest of the human race had been destroyed when the mas-
sive and rapid pandemic but unspecified “plague” swept across the world.
Her critique of contemporary society encompasses a broad and devastating
satire on twentieth and twenty-first century complacent attitudes to swine flu,
The Human Genome project and corporate ownership of genetic blueprints,
the continuing extinction of animal species, and evidence of global climate
change. Atwood’s two novels provoke a rich discussion on the nature of
ethical uses of technology—especially with the interface of technology and
capitalism. In the new ecology of the United States, post global climate
change has caused the destruction of the eastern coastal cities by a tsunami
(including the symbolic drowning of Harvard University) and the new sea-
son-less weather of scorching sun and daily torrential rainfall.
At the opening of Oryx and Crake, the character Snowman is isolated in a
jungle wilderness where nature is swiftly reclaiming the man-made structures
of cities and compounds. He is surrounded by the life-threatening shapes of
the recently-created pigoons, wolvogs and liobams (the lion-lamb splice that
gambles around bleating cutely before ripping your throat out). He “feels the
need to hear a human voice—a fully human voice, like his own” (2003: 10).
It is the word fully that indicates here the nature of the problem—that of the
confused identity of gene-selection, of the spliced new breeds. This theme of
the man-beast interface being so intimate continues with hinting at Snow-
man/Jimmy’s own potential non-human-ness—his identity as feral beast. As
howling unhappy wolf-man, in his persona as Snowman, Jimmy has de-
volved farther than just “going native”. Despite the attempts at evolution
though scientific “advance”, the novel’s subtext denotes devolution as a key
motif of the novel. In reviewing his memories, and trying to figure out how
the devastation was planned and put into effect, Jimmy ironically—and chill-
ingly—remembers Crake as “some sort of mutant” (174). Crake excels at the
intellectual pursuits Jimmy himself finds so challenging, and in the context of
their academic sparing we are given a fragment of conversation that purports
to the larger situation of Crake’s work:
“Why are you doing this?” Jimmy asked in the middle of one exasperating
session.
[…]
“Because I’m a sadist,” Crake said, “I like to watch you suffer.” (2003: 174)
Can the reader conclude, then, that the motivation behind mankind’s destruc-
tion is as simple as the relish of watching human suffering—a kind of ex-
tended violent video game? Certainly, it is through the online portal of the
extinct species game “Extinctathon” that Crake and his initially subversive
group of gene-splicers secretly communicate. Later, this group is to become
the centre of mainstream scientific and social power. Crake again explains his
rationale:
“Sometimes he’d say he was working on solutions to the biggest problem of

all, which was human beings—their cruelty and suffering, their wars and pov-
erty, their fear of death. ‘What would you pay for a design of a perfect human
being?’ he’d say. Then he’d hint that the Paradice Project was designing one,
and they’d dump more money on him.” (2009: 305)
The people to whom he tells this unfortunately dismiss him as a rich, harm-
less loony (305). Little do they realise his solution to the problem of human
beings is to eradicate them and start again with a new model of his own de-
vising/design.
Crake’s devastating weapon comes in the form of one product to fulfil all
of human desires— his corporation’s “must-have” BlyssPluss Pills that will
eliminate ageing, war and all diseases, while ensuring an “unlimited supply
of libido” (2003, 294). Human craving for infinite youth and immortality,
both portrayed by Atwood as the ultimate hubris, is in more ways than one
the cause of its demise. Atwood’s contempt for the contemporary beauty
business is pervasive theme, and one that continues earlier critique of such
artificiality and its price in her feminist novels such as Surfacing. The themes
of madness, gender, language and ecology are all topics that warn of dan-
ger—and all these the dangers are now personified in Crake.
Atwood’s gentle tone lulls the reader into realising how quickly the
strange can be accepted as “normal”, how rapidly and silently the voices of
conscious concern or political activism can be quieted. The ease with which
society can allow itself to slip into such perilous situations of totalitarian
control is reminiscent of Ursula Le Guin’s hellish utopias (1969, 1974), and
of Marge Piercy’s 1976 Woman on the Edge of Time: where even a feminist
culture based on the superficial eradication of gender difference cannot offer
a real source of personal freedom nor permanent hope of an “ideal society”.
In Atwood’s fearful new world, the age-old problems of women (as mar-
ginalised, generalised, silenced, or “spoken for” in society) are not solved but
transferred from “original” women to the positioning of the newly created
210 Beyond Bodies
green females, who function merely the objects for sex and propagation. The
female (subservient once more) is at odds with the masculine world of ration-
ality and order, and as a “blue-print of revolt” the text engages a quest for
female freedom and autonomy. Reading Oryx and Crake in terms of femi-
nism is also possible since the second novel in the trilogy, The Year of the
Flood, covers the same events and time-period but from the point of view of
different, female protagonists. It is also in this novel that the reader is given
free reign to doubt further the reliability of Jimmy/Snowman as narrator in
Oryx and Crake. The female survivors of the man-made waterless flood are
presented as saner, stronger and more “fit” in the Darwinian sense of being
able to adapt to their new environment, while Jimmy, now on the periphery
of the narrative, is a pathetic creature whose days are numbered.
In these novels in which Atwood portrays her vision of post-apocalyptic
society, women have not advanced in their lifestyles at all it seems, relegated
mostly to being miserable mothers or abused prostitutes. Yet in The Year of
the Flood, the surviving human woman, Ren and Toby, are portrayed as more
in tune with nature and consequently experiencing a degree of agency and
freewill. Toby is the caretaker of bees and maker of natural potions and bears
some resemblance to the protagonist of Surfacing who slips back to a more
“natural” mode of existence. As discussed earlier, Surfacing is a novel that,
even in the 1970’s, warns of the disassociation of human from nature, and the
ever-encroaching destruction in the form of American technology. Nature
and the survival of humankind remain inextricably linked in terms of survival
and adaptation. In Surfacing, the heroine returns to the “wild” to find her true
self; in these later novels, everywhere has become the wild and any notion of
a self is problematic. In Surfacing the heroine is apparently driven mad—yet
in so doing finds her authenticity; in The Year of the Flood this possibility is
epitomized in Jimmy, who is eventually defined by this concept of alternative
strangeness.
Within another facet of feminist consciousness, Atwood allows for an in-
terpretation of the mythical feminine through the character of Oryx—a wom-
an who is the object of desire for both Crake and Jimmy. Yet in the fact that
Oryx’s story is mainly always told through the perspectives of the male char-
acters, Atwood undermines both her power and agency. Although raised to a
level of goddess-like perfection, her body and spirit are commodities in the
consciousness-less scheme of the cloned zoo over which she must—in all her
apparent innocence—preside. Once dead, Oryx is projected through Jimmy’s
rhetoric and imagination as the earth goddess. In life and death, Oryx is ob-
jectified, deprived of a voice, and essentially a pawn-like victim of her male-

dominated environment.
In other aspects of the novels, like other contemporary cultural commen-
tators, Atwood takes aim at the terrifying power of multinational corpora-
tions, at the failure or total collapse of government, which has led to the take-
over by private corporations of all security and commercial ventures, ranging
from the plethora of beauty enhancements—a NuYu—to the heavily armed
guards on the gates of residential compounds—armed with the purpose of
keeping the residents in, as well as unwanted less-than-people from the ple-
blands, out. Conformity is everything; free thought results in unexplained
disappearances or the sudden sicknesses delivered through tailor-made daily
vitamin supplements. Thus, technological advances have been used for small
groups to gain power and to control the population through inferior foods,
mind-altering drugs, and a rigidly patrolled boundary system based on new
class designations led by a favoured elite. The corporations provide a territo-
rial barricade, both physical and mental. New walls and fences and defenses,
and ways of keeping the undesirable Other of the “Exfernal” world out, are
constantly under construction (85,346). Yet what has been lost is not only
freedom. As Elaine Graham warns, “Far from assisting human development,
technology will bring about alienation and dehumanization, the erosion of the
spiritual essence of humanity” (2002: 6).
William S. Haney elaborates that the problems of technological human-
machine centralize conjecture over the post-human condition. He argues that
while consciousness has long been regarded as the seat of human identity, it
is still a concept that is arousing fierce debate in neuroscience, to the extent
that the problem of a consolidated definition of consciousness remains unre-
solved. Yet worldwide experience of the substrate of a “pure consciousness”
demonstrates a suggestion of a quantum-like structure, equivalent to a unified
field of consciousness. The human ability to experience “true being” is an
innate capacity, he argues (2006: 6). Moreover, it is this experience of “a
non-changing level of awareness-as-such” (2006: 9) that will suffer or be
unavailable in a post-human mind:
The capacity for the psychophysiology to settle down to an experience of un-

bounded Being is precisely what is under threat by posthumanism, with its
growing emphasis on enhancing cognitive activity through bioelectrical pro-
cedures. (Haney 2006: 11)
212 Beyond Bodies
Experience of unboundedness, or unbounded Being-ness, provides an under-

standing of the interconnectedness of manifest life on the quantum level. A
lack of this realization, according to Haney, places “greater emphasis on
localization, boundaries, and difference, [and] directs awareness away from
human nature”(18). Indeed, “At its most basic, the spiritual is the experience
of the connectedness that underlies reality” (Deikman qt Haney 2006: 18).
Yet, it is remarkable, perhaps, that while Atwood’s biochemists are busy
playing God in the Paradice [sic] lab, the novel provides no mention of fur-
ther advances in physics—where are the quantum mechanics providing bi-
location, or higher abilities such as invisibility? Even weaponry remains
conventional, if slightly more lethal than today. Nor is there much evidence
of advanced experience of hyperreality in cyberspace: Atwood’s futuristic
world before the Waterless Flood remains firmly Newtonian.
Moving towards the interface of physics and ethics, if ethics is at its core
a matter of defining and determining inter-human interrelationships, then in
relation to developments in biotechnology, “these factors—ethics, volition,
and consciousness—hang in a delicate balance” (Haney 2006: 157). While
post-human physical potential may advance—and mankind has always main-
tained the desire for an ultimate vision of some kind of perfection—it will be
at the cost of consciousness and the extermination of what it means to be
human. Far-sighted literary critics such as Haney have explored the implica-
tions of advances in terms of human consciousness, arguing that conscious-
ness, as we understand it will be threatened. First person experience of pure
consciousness would be unavailable, as it is to the genetically over-simplified
Crakers. These creatures of the new world are the extreme vision not of
Frankenstein’s monster so much as Rousseau’s or Huxley’s less civilized
“savage”, and in them Atwood presents a wry commentary on the triumphing
of a primitive golden age over culture and enlightenment. She projects the
idea of the future world as a colony of Man Fridays, those who are always the
other, whose ignorant minds are a void and receptive for the preaching of
Jimmy/Crusoe’s improvised –and terrifying—version of “reality”.
At the novels’ core then is the question at the heart of much posthuman
deliberation: “whose versions of what it means to be human will prevail?”
(Graham 2002: 17). Atwood presents a post-apocalyptic society defined by a
general fear, a dystopian vision of the future that presents the perils of our
losing touch with the “human” with its notions of a stable consciousness. The
new Otherness is not constructed through fear and exclusion based on nation,
race or class; the new other is the “human” devoid of conscience and con-
sciousness. For after the Flood all that it left is: “here and there a swatch of
fabric, a glint of bone. That’s where the people fell…” (Atwood 2009: 4).
Oryx and Crake and the Year of the Flood present an anxious anticipation
of the dangers of the post-human denial of consciousness, and the interrela-
tionship at source of all the possible dangers that may lead us to destruction.
Ultimately, throughout Atwood’s two novels, the fate of the characters is
bound together like the complex strands of DNA, each one isolated and yet
intimately wound around each other—reflecting that it is the nature of human
life and consciousness itself that are so crucial here. Without some form of
protection of “what it means to be human” and the individuals who will
maintain the crucial guardianship of the knowledge of consciousness and its
full development into higher forms through the maintenance of pure con-
sciousness in life, civilisation may indeed collapse on a planetary level.
“How much is too much,” asks Jimmy, “and how far is too far?” (2003: 206),
when the whole world is “one vast uncontrolled experiment”? (228).
Consciousness and philosophies of conscience
For Iris Murdoch, the concept of consciousness enables the obliteration of

“the picture of individual people in an accidental world” (1992: 238). Mur-
doch suggests that the concept of consciousness “should contain the moral
idea of truth-seeking” (243); consciousness should be linked to a moral be-
haviour of compassion, and most importantly, the spiritual energy of love—
and loving good (1992: 505). A denial of the vast array of human expression
and human possibilities (and their inherent rights) are, she warns, what can
lead to totalitarianism (363). Winnie Tomm also links patriarchal morality
(represented in Oryx and Crake most clearly by the ruthless ambition of
Crake himself) with:
…the desire for power over the other, beginning with sexual power over
women and extending to political power over nations. The politics of sex has
the same source as the politics of wars: ignorance, fear, and hostility towards
the other. (1992: 101)
Most moral doctrines and religious codes of behaviour have developed in

societies where women have a subordinate position, and Murdoch’s call for
the concept of transcendent goodness as a code of ethics has inspired other
proponents of feminist ethics, such as Carol Gilligan (1982), who proposes
an ethic of care, communication and compassion as an antidote to oppression,
214 Beyond Bodies
injustice and totalitarianism. Murdoch’s philosophy of ethics is relevant to

the discussion here since not only does she espouse “the deep similarities
between art and morality” but also shows “that we must not allow our fanta-
sies, fears, and needs to get in the way of a clear, loving attention to art and to
human beings” (Fox 1992: 113). Today, an expanded “holistic ethics”—
clearly endorsed by Atwood’s novels—place the environment and the natural
world equally within the need of moral behaviour codes—areas of responsi-
bility that endorse the rights for life within all conscious entities.1
The centralisation in the novels discussed in this chapter of the dangers of
uncontrolled or unlicensed scientific progress, brings this discussion back to
the recent developments in physics and how these impinge on our lives. Ac-
cording to an understanding of physics, at a fundamental level of reality, the
unified field of consciousness links the local with the global, and the human
with the cosmic, and gender differentiation into male/female with the forces
of creation. Beyond difference is unity, sameness. Yet, this realization must
be one based on scientific understanding and individual experience—
transcending the surface levels of ratiocination and restricted thought-based
philosophies—not on the totalizing ideologies of either political or religious
narratives.
1
As Atwood emphasizes in the acknowledgements at the end of Maddaddam, the
concluding novel in this trilogy, “Although MaddAddam is a work of fiction, it does
not include any technologies or biobeings that do not already exist, are not under
construction, or are not possible in theory” (2013).
Chapter Ten
Consciousness and conscience:

the ethics of enlightenment
The physicist Brian Greene explains how he first became interested in ex-
plaining the world of appearances in terms of physics. It was all due to mir-
rors. The multiple images reflected in the two mirrors in his bedroom created
an illusion of parallel realities that “extended back as far as the eye could
discern” (2011: 3). He uses this picture to symbolise the possibility of infinite
universes; yet the story could equally well shed light on the structure of dif-
ferent states of consciousness, each one overlapping the other and potentially
available to those who are sufficiently aware to perceive—and experience—
them. Just as many children may have mirrors in their bedrooms, but not
necessarily the clarity of awareness to “these youthful flights of fancy” as
Greene puts it (2011:3), and devote a career to discover the exact physical
laws that define those multiple universes. “What’s at the heart of the subject”,
he explains, “is whether there exist realms that challenge convention by sug-
gesting that what we’ve long thought to be the universe is only one compo-
nent of a far grander, perhaps far stranger, and mostly hidden, reality” (2011:
5).
If there was any doubt at the turn of the twentieth century, by the turn of the
twenty-first, it was a foregone conclusion: when it comes to revealing the true
nature of reality, common experience is deceptive. […] Through physical in-
sight and mathematical rigor [… ] we’ve established that space, time, matter
and energy engage in a behavioral repertoire unlike anything any of us have
ever directly witnessed. (Greene 2011: vii)
The fact that contemporary physics emphasises the hidden nature of “real-
ity”, that is to say of the universe(s), defies philosophies based entirely on
observable reality, and is reminiscent of the Upanishadic notion that three
fourths of the universe are unseen; only one fourth is manifest (see for exam-
216 Beyond Bodies
ple Rig Veda 10.90.4 and Chandogya Upanishad 3.12.6). This concept is
further endorsed by suggestions that black holes, cosmic dust, and other cur-
rent mysteries may occupy a great proportion—even ninety per cent—of the
universe.
In literary theory and fiction, the notion of parallel or alternative univers-
es is usually the domain of science fiction or fantasy. In more Earth-bound
fiction, writers are still trying to emphasise the “parallel” realities of different
cultures, races, and societies that co-exist (or should be able to co-exist) on
our contemporary planet. Recent theories in literary and cultural studies in-
volving gender, feminisms and masculinity highlight the individual and local,
yet shed light on the necessary preoccupation with globalisation and transna-
tionalism. To be part of today’s cosmopolitan, globalised world is to be sim-
ultaneously aware of its increasing fragmentation (Appiah 2006)–a situation
that calls out for a more widespread and profound understanding of the nature
of consciousness and the need for raising individual and world conscious-
ness. These cutting edge fora help reveal the concept of consciousness as
both locatable and transcendental, both sub-atomic and galactic in scale.
Consciousness, creative writing, and the discovery of the Higgs boson
The most recent excitement in the world of quantum physics—the “discov-

ery” or indication of the existence of the Higgs Boson is not without rele-
vance here. The Higgs boson is responsible for, or involved with, the process
of spontaneous symmetry breaking of the unified field. Without this process,
the fields (and particles) of matter and energy remain unmanifest (at the level
of subatomic physics, mass and energy are interchangeable). The role of the
Higgs Boson is to ascribe mass to the otherwise mass-less particles. Thus,
without the Higgs Boson matter would have no mass. So the boson is in-
volved in the process of manifestation, and the process through which the
manifest world attains mass, and thus comes into existence as the observable
creation. The observation or confirmation of the Higgs Boson will be regard-
ed as confirming the “standard model” of the quantum fields, which is the
commonly accepted theory of the fundamental quantum fields and their rela-
tionship to quantum gravity to provide a fully unified field theory of nature
(Clements 2013). This process is not without its analogy in terms of the crea-
tive writer. For it could be argued that the author, from the pure potentiality
of her consciousness, breaks the symmetry to create a reality. This is not
simply a random string of thoughts; it is the creation of a whole universe.
Every character, every episode of plot and the unfolding of the whole story
result from the spontaneous symmetry breaking, the acquisition of specificity
from pure potentiality in the mind of the writer, as the story acquires mass—
its own momentum. The self writes the self.
Encountering physics and consciousness
The encounter of physics and consciousness informs us that the quantum

laws of creation apply from the smallest dimension to the largest, and that
“everything” can include the whole universe, as Rosenblum and Kuttner
conclude, enjoying the “outrageousness” speculation that current quantum
theory allows. Quantum physics concludes that we create our reality from
conscious observation, yet this is the schema put forward millennia ago by
Vedic philosophy, as Rosenblum and Kuttner also point out, but this notion
was lost by the nineteenth century by which time the scientific process was
linked with materialist thinking (2007: 170-71). They argue that, fundamen-
tally, the most objective of disciplines—physics—is based on consciousness.
Referring to the archetypal quantum experiments (for example, the two-slit
experiment) in which conscious observation creates the resulting condition,
only consciousness “can collapse a wavefunction” and they conclude “the
quantum experiment is thus objective proof of consciousness” (191). For
these physicists, “the objective evidence that conscious choice itself can
affect a physical situation [is] evidence that consciousness exists as an entity
beyond its neural correlates” (2007: 186). The universe, as the Astronomer
Royal Martin Rees, observes, only exists because we are aware of it. (Rees qt
in Rosenblum and Kuttner 2007: 193).
Almost reassuringly, Rosenblum and Kuttner conclude that quantum me-
chanics “tells us that the mysteries still exist” (2007: 152). One of the greatest
unsolved mysteries is how manifestation came out of the Void—how some-
thing came out of nothing. Frank Close, Professor of Physics at Oxford, ex-
plains from his personal experience how:
It is as hard to understand how consciousness emerges and dies as it is to com-

prehend how something, the stuff of the universe, erupted out of nothing. Was
there creation or was there always something? Could there be nothing if there
were no one to know there was nothing? The more I tried to understand these
enigmas, the more I felt I was on the edge of either true enlightenment or
madness. (Close 2009: 3)
218 Beyond Bodies
The universe of Self-referral creation
In discussing the connection between the mind and body, the question might
arise as to whether consciousness could be regarded as the “something” that
connects mind and body. With the profound discoveries of the twentieth
century of quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, Unified Field Theories
and quantum gravity, the material phenomena of the physical world are found
to have their origin and explanation in an underlying abstract and non-
physical field of universal intelligence. Thus, from a physicist’s point of
view, there is no gap or differentiation between mind and body, since the
fields of matter and energy are united ultimately in the unified field.
MATTER Manifest World ENERGY
Electrons Four forces

Protons Gravitation
Leptons
Quarks Grand Unified
Force Field
UNIFIED FIELD PURE CONSCIOUSNESS
Only by appreciating the junction point of forces and matter in the unified
field can we understand how the matter and force fields interact fully, other-
wise it remains a phenomenological investigation (that is to say, accounting
for things in a descriptive way, not based on the deeper principles). In creat-
ing a differentiation between the mind and body– and not taking into account
their unified foundation in pure consciousness—any analysis remains merely
a study of symptoms or phenomena. More useful is to equate the mind/body
to the electron and the proton, both wave functions. The all-important wave
function describes the hydrogen atom that is the wholeness of electron and
proton, which is more than and different than their separate realities.
In these terms, it is impossible to describe the body and the mind as sepa-
rate: they are a unified entity that is more than the body and the mind sepa-
rately.
Identity
Sense of self
BODY MIND
UNIFIED FIELD / PURE CONSCIOUSNESS / THE SELF
By extension, gender can only be defined one in terms of the other. This
means that the definition of male/female is only relevant in the context of the
relationship between the two. Just as the unified wholeness of intelligence at
the source of the physical world bifurcates at grosser levels into matter/ ener-
gy or body/mind, to understand male and female and their relationship, we
have to go to the origin of that relationship, a unity of intelligence from
which differentiation springs. In the Vedic texts of Indian literature this is
visualised through the image of a “male” purusha (pure consciousness) be-
coming conscious of its own nature through the “female” element of prakriti.
(The male element of creation in this scenario is silent and unmoving, and the
female is dynamic and creative.) In Vedic terms and traditional Indian litera-
ture, the “male” is associated with matter, and the “female” with energy: the
creation of the universe is their eternal dance, the Veda Lila, through which
the manifest universe is created from pure consciousness.
Both modern physics and ancient Vedic texts emphasize the self-referral
functioning as characteristic of the source of creation. In Veda, this is de-
scribed as sound unfolding sequentially into the numerous texts of sacred
literature. This “mechanics of transformation” within and projected by the
220 Beyond Bodies
unbounded, self-referral intelligence, the unified field of physics, is the

source of “all material and non-material expressions of creation” (Mahesh
Yogi 1994: 65). This level of pure consciousness (“pure” since self-contained
and as yet unmanifest) is explained to be the most powerful level of all exist-
ence: “All life emerges from and is sustained in consciousness. The whole
universe is the expression of consciousness. The reality of the universe is one
unbounded ocean of consciousness in motion”. As applied to human exist-
ence, “All speech, action, behaviour are fluctuations of consciousness […]
consciousness is the most basic element of everyone’s life” (Mahesh Yogi
1994: 68). Consciousness, to borrow from T.S. Eliot, is the “still point” with-
in the turning world.
Francisco Varela reaches a similar conclusion from his unique viewpoint
that combines perspectives from Buddhist meditation and neurophenomenol-
ogy:
[…] consciousness feels so personal, so intimate, so central to who we are, and

of course, that’s why it’s interesting. The study of consciousness is a kind of
singularity in science, because you’re studying precisely the most cherished
quality of what it is to be alive. (Blackmore 2005a: 226)
Consciousness and the quantum brain
The paradox for the scientific approach (and why neuroscientists and philos-
ophers alike remain frustrated in their “search” for consciousness) is that in
the human mind all aspects of consciousness are knowable to consciousness.
Even the level of pure consciousness, where consciousness is complete with-
in itself, is open to experience—as are the “higher” or more developed levels
of consciousness in which pure consciousness becomes integrated into quo-
tidian experience of waking, dreaming, and sleep states of consciousness. It is
at this level that some physicists have claimed consciousness can be equated
with the unified field of nature’s functioning: a substrate of existence where
the manifest world and the subjective world of human consciousness coin-
cide. Consciousness is experience; it is knowledge of the known, the process
of knowing and the recognition of “I” as the knower.
As cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman discusses:
[I] believe that consciousness and all its contents are all that exists. Space-
time, matter and fields were never the fundamental denizens of the universe
but have always been, from their very beginning, among the humbler contents
of consciousness, dependent on it from the very beginning. (qt in Rosenblum

and Kuttner 2007: 176)
Most momentously, arguments from neuroscience have recently drawn paral-

lels between quantum mechanics and the functioning of the human brain:
We live in a 3-dimensional world measured in inches and seconds. Objects

follow predictable laws. […] In contrast the atoms of our brain live in a world
that is 10 million times smaller than ordinary experience, and objects in that
world follow different rules. (Travis 2012: 144)
Combining classical and quantum models of the brain, cognitive scientist

Fred Travis goes beyond defining consciousness as cognitive function or the
ability to report subjective experience and perceptual events, and argues
The brain can be understood as a classical structure that encodes the world in
action potentials within neural circuits comprising millions of neurons. The
brain can also be understood in terms of quantum events at the neuronal level,
i.e. Quantum superposition, quantum uncertainty and quantum tunnelling.
These quantum events coexist with classical brain processes. By looking at
both together—superposition of both quantum and classical events—we may
gain insight into the relation of brain functioning and consciousness. (Travis
2012: 144)
Quantum events are not merely descriptive, but can be explanatory of the
way brain physiology functions. Travis locates quantum superimposition
(electrons existing as both/either particle or wave until a measurement is
made and the wave function is collapsed), quantum tunnelling, and quantum
uncertainty as all processes operating within the brain and accounting for
consciousness. As the human brain changes and matures with age, it builds
feedback circuits or parallel connections between brain areas, creating core
and matrix circuits that “could be considered part of a single brain system
underlying conscious experience” (Travis 2012: 145). Travis postulates that
quantum events, which have so far been described at the molecular level (the
microtubules) of the brain (Hameroff and Penrose 1966) may also influence
brain states at the macroscopic level (Travis 2012: 146). “These quantum
processes may well exist. However,” he cautions, “they occur at time and
distance scales far removed from human experience” (147). Yet his research
has implications for understanding the experience of “pure” consciousness,
the state of self-awareness that is described as “beyond” qualities and
222 Beyond Bodies
thought-content and thus “pure”. In this state, the physiology is in a quiet

condition of restfulness, and “physiological feedback mechanisms are mini-
mized” so that leaves “the contributions of quantum events as the primary
determinant of matrix circuit dynamics. Thus the experience of pure con-
sciousness, which is described as a state outside of time, space and body
sense […] could be the experience of innumerable quantum events at the
microscopic level of the brain” (2012: 148). This exciting research allows for
a different level of reality to permeate how we perceive everyday life and our
individual role in it (and projects ideas that fulfil the types of “science fact”
speculations in Jeanette Winterson’s latest novels, such as The Stone Gods).
Again from the perspective of neuroscience, Gerald Edelman and Giulio
Tononi hypothesise a dynamic core underlying consciousness that negates
the depiction of the brain as computer (2000: 154). From this standpoint, they
examine qualia as “high dimension discriminations” (157) through which
enhanced perception and language abilities create a “higher order conscious-
ness”, which eventually, through evolution, “permits a person to be conscious
of being conscious” (2000: 175). These “higher brain functions require inter-
action with the world and with other persons” (xii), achieved through physi-
cal, psychological and social connectivity (2000: 216).
While rejecting quantum mechanical explanations of consciousness that
ignore evolution and neurology, Edelman and Tononi believe it is here that
qualia attain their relevance in connection with ethics—even without resort to
notions of metaphysics or mysticism. Since the mind arises from the body,
they argue, “it is embodied and therefore part of nature” so logically, every
human being must follow the natural laws (2000:215). Through higher order
consciousness, we also give ourselves a place of significance in the universe,
which we describe through aesthetic, artistic means: consciousness in all its
dynamism provides both this freedom and security (2000:218).
Consciousness, emotion and ethics
As the literature examined throughout these chapters has demonstrated, the

interaction of the human mind with its social and physical environment cre-
ates extensive and enduring implications for morality—in the sense of “right”
behaviour that sustains, rather than damages, life. Literature bridges the gap
between experience, emotional response and ethical choice through the repli-
cation of conscious experience and the sharing of human subjective observa-
tion with others. Fictional representations continue to endorse female rights
to agency and expression as part of this ethical stance on human existence.

Without such an on-going transcultural ethic, based on the development of
consciousness, the future quality of life of the human race is endangered—a
concern of much recent fiction, as discussed here.
Works of literature open windows in our minds and can change our con-
sciousness. Interestingly, in terms of human neurophysiology, human brain
chemistry may actually react similarly whether the stimulus is factual or
“fictional”. According to Gordon Stokes and Daniel Whiteside:
It makes no difference to the brain/body whether something actually happened

or not. What we feel about experiences creates our “reality”, our model of the
world. Emotion releases hormonal patterns which activate circulation, muscles
and organic response as well as etching memory. Again, the brain and the
body respond in exactly the same way to both real or imagined experience.
(2006)
Recent discussions in the study of emotion reinforce the evolutionary role of

intuition and emotion as crucial factors in reasoning. Consulting one’s emo-
tions rather than intellect (the heart above the brain) is often a more intelli-
gent and reliable thing to do in one’s rational decision-making, according to
Dylan Evans (2003: 90). For Charles Darwin, the importance of the emotions
as part of the human mind also has ethical implications. He writes in his diary
pondering his life-long over-use of his brain as a “machine for grinding out
general laws”, which may have damaged: “the intellect, and more probably
the moral character by enfeebling the emotional part of our character” (Dar-
win 1959: 139). Margaret Atwood’s novels engage with Darwinian evolu-
tion—taking implications of the laws of natural selection into the near future
in a world devoid of Darwin’s own introspective moral intelligence.
In today’s understanding of consciousness and emotion, the ability to feel
emotion remains a defining characteristic dividing “human” as opposed to
“robot” existence. While some emotions appear to be culturally specific,
others—love, fear, anger—are “hard-wired” into the brain. While science
fiction may endorse the idea that machines can have emotions, so far scien-
tists working in artificial intelligence have not produced a sentient and feel-
ing computer. What prevents the creation of emotional machines (robots,
computers, androids…) is that “computers will never have true emotions
because they will never be conscious”, as Dylan Evans explains (2003: 116).
According to this view, taken by most contemporary scientists: “computers
224 Beyond Bodies
might come to exhibit emotional behaviour, but they will never have that
subjective feeling that constitutes the essence of true emotion” (2003: 117).
Since consciousness and emotion are intricately connected, a lower level
of consciousness could imply a corresponding failure in emotion. Intelligent
action, Evans proposes, “results from a harmonious blend of emotion and
reason” (ii). Any emotional response, as Sharon Promislow explains, is expe-
rienced as a feeling, a physiological response and a behavioural response. If
we change any of these three, the memory of the event is also changed. Thus,
we “lock” emotion into the body’s cellular memory:
Researchers have found the biological messengers of violence, aggression,

love and bonding in these neurotransmitters and hormones. They in turn are
affected by nutrition, genetics, our relationship with the environment, our state
of being and our conscious choice. The important message of self-
responsibility is that we are not the helpless products of chemical messaging:
We can consciously shape it. (Promislow 1998: 82)
Charles Dickens’s essay on faces and masks (1866) gives a description of the
person who is an emotionless “blank”, a terrifying version of a human who
has lost their capacity for empathy and enjoyment. This portrait still seems to
hold true: a lack of emotion creates a fearful “nothing”, an automaton. Dylan
Evans believes that emotions are vital to the survival and evolution of “any
half-intelligent creature” (2003: 117) and argues that any imaginary race of
aliens who are without emotion (Mr Spock and other Vulcans from Star Trek,
for example) would be less rather than more intelligent than humans (24).
“On balance, a creature who lacked emotions would not just be less intelli-
gent than we are, it would be less rational too” (123). Yet he explains that
scientists will continue to fail to produce an emotion-capable machine given
the complex interdependency of consciousness, the mind, and emotion, and
since, according to Evans, “at the beginning of the twenty-first century, no
one really has much of an idea what consciousness really is” (2003:117).
Projecting worlds from consciousness
According to Vedic philosophies, action is based on thought, thought is based

on knowledge, and knowledge is structured in consciousness. Knowledge of
consciousness is knowledge of the “most fundamental element in creation”—
the whole field of Being and Becoming (Mahesh Yogi 1994: 6-7). Moreover,
the world of action “lies at the surface of life and is separate from real expe-
rience”; thus, “the Self [is] separate from activity” (Mahesh Yogi 1969: 223).
If one remains perpetually caught up in the field of activity, this philosophy
argues that one is actually living “no longer intimately connected with one’s
existence” (223)—a state reminiscent of Dickens’s human “blanks”, the re-
sult of the “spiritual murder” created by, amongst other things, a “long course
of worldliness” (Dickens 1866). Only through action originating “beyond the
field of activity” can the Self cease to be overshadowed or deluded.
Overall, the most powerful, yet provocative, notion from the last century
of physics is the underlying and profound finding that our consciousness is
central to the quantum world—that awareness directly affects physical phe-
nomena. Consciousness—the feeling of what it is to have awareness, and
what that awareness is—influences the world around us. Chopra (with other
collaborators) argues that consciousness is “a field phenomenon, analogous
to, but preceding the quantum field”: a “part” of the undivided wholeness of
the creation (2012: np). According to their article “How Consciousness Be-
came the Physical Universe”:
In the words of John A. Wheeler (1981) we live in an observerparticipatory

universe. […] To extend Wheeler’s reasoning, consciousness includes us as
human observers. We are part of the feedback loop that links our conscious
acts to the conscious response of the field. (In Chopra, Penrose, Kragh, et al
2011: np)
What we choose to put our awareness on must also depend on choice, on our
free will. Free will in turn, would apply ethical choices. Traditions of philos-
ophy have long debated how the human mind relates not only to the body but
also to other minds and to the external world in which it resides. How can the
field of human cognition connect with the social and moral spheres of our
own and other cultures? In the academic world of consciousness studies, the
concept that our conscious choice creates reality also implies the linking of
consciousness, intersubjectivity, and moral responsibility.
The continuum of universal consciousness and individual consciousness,
“continuously emerging patterns of interaction” (Tomm 1992: 107) relates
ethics with self-knowledge, since:
Development of self into person is a process of emergence according to pat-

terns of interconnectedness. […] Knowing oneself, knowing another, or know-
ing an object requires connectedness between subjective awareness and reflec-
tive description of the knower. It also requires partial revelation of the subjec-
226 Beyond Bodies
tivity of the known. Attention to the revelations of the other constitutes caring
for the other. Knowing, in this sense, is a form of caring. (Tomm 1992: 107-
108)
One of the most recent discussions on qualia addresses the notion that subjec-
tive experience must involve behavioural “responsibility”, and engage the
concepts of ethics and morality. This ability may finally distinguish the hu-
man from the robotic person, since it seems improbable that a robot could
take real moral responsibility for their choices and actions, and have con-
scious awareness of the consequences and meaning of their actions. Daniel
Dennett in particular has discussed that consciousness studies need to take
into account concepts of free will and morality. “Creating” consciousness
through scientific methods—either in the case of robots, intelligent comput-
ers or Victor Frankenstein’s “monster”—continues to implicate the dangers
of uncontrollable power in moralistic terms of good versus evil, either on the
part of the non-human creation (Frankenstein, HAL in 2001: A Space Odys-
sey and other “movie monsters”) or the creator (in Oryx and Crake). Respon-
sibility and consciousness also of course entail further questions of free will,
introspection, and intentionality; and so the debate continues, projecting
possible consequences:
The more we succeed in explaining people’s behaviour as due to the mechani-

cal operation of biochemical systems, the more it seems we move away from
ideas of personal responsibility and (in particular) punishment. Without these
ideas, it may be felt, the orderly structure of society, and the basis for self-
belief and self-improvement are threatened. (“Three and a Half Problems”
2012: 7)
Literary fiction meets scientific fact
Literature, poetry and the arts function to affect different levels of the mind
and the physiology of the reader or audience. Art and literature not only func-
tion through language and symbol on the surface level of life, but stimulate
consciousness by taking the reader or viewer inside the mechanisms of
change, of transformation within the creation. These transformations exist
between words, in the gaps and silences, just as they occur in the brain be-
tween synapses. In today’s scientific world of high-speed particle accelera-
tors, it is now evident that human consciousness and its counterpart in the
physiology, the brain, with its vast complexity and capacity for coherent and
integrated functioning in fact provide the most sophisticated experimental

apparatus for the discovery of the laws of nature. The human mind is capable
of experiencing the “ground state” of nature’s functioning, existing in its
unified state. This capacity for individual awareness to discover and appreci-
ate the finest fabric of existence comes only at the most refined level of the
mental activity, “and in the same stroke, consciousness is trained to act in
accordance with the full potential of natural law” (Clements 1982: 9-10).
As we have seen, quantum theory (and the so-called quantum enigma) af-
firms that “observation creates everything, including ourselves” and appears
“to deny the existence of a physical reality independent of its conscious ob-
servation” (Rosenblum and Kuttner 2007: 201). Traditionally it was the mys-
tic or poet who described the nature of consciousness in terms of a self-
referral process of how the unexpressed becomes expressed, silence becomes
sound, and the uncreated becomes creation. Romantic poets such as Samuel
Taylor Coleridge describe their intuitive realisation that human creative pow-
er, the Self or the “primary imagination” is: “The living power and the prime
Agent of all human perception and as such a repetition in the finite mind of
the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (1817/1956: 167). More re-
cently, any notion of a “universal” or continuous self has been disparaged,
yet contemporary literature continues to reflect on how individual and society
are interdependent, how global culture and environment are perilously linked,
and how the global creation is impacted by the human mind. Even for the
sceptic, it is clear that the environmental reality is influenced by human mo-
tivation: The non-physical becomes physical.
The postmodern collapse of totalizing narratives and the need to articulate
alternatives to humanistic concerns of signification (epitomised in Oedipa
Mass’s pointless search for “meaning”) may require some clarification on the
nature of consciousness to avoid accusations of “essentialism”. An awareness
of how such critiques of consciousness as “universal” close down engage-
ment with academic discussion, such as that I have engaged with here, allows
such claims to be addressed with a literary example. As T.S. Eliot’s poetic
character Prufrock thinks of daring to “disturb the universe”, he remains
within the mind-set of classical (Newtonian) physics. The world “out there”
appears a daunting place, unrelated to human existence. Yet only a decade or
so later, Pynchon’s Oedipa Mass asks, “Shall I project a world?” as if realis-
ing the true extent of her mind’s infinite creative potential on the level of
quantum reality: Not disturbing, but creating. The so-called collapse of mean-
ing and truth in fact suggests a liberating sense of all possibilities, since noth-
228 Beyond Bodies
ing, including “truth” is fixed. Reality on the quantum level is characterised

by its wave-like quality, nothing is certain or even manifested as “reality” but
every moment in time or atom in space is constantly being “created” by hu-
man consciousness. The wave function describes the sum of all possible
states, the potentiality of the universe. The collapse of the wave function
merely “manifests” one possibility in space/time. As my discussion and liter-
ary examples have argued here, the “I-ness” of human identity is neither
limited by physics nor defined by social conventions of gender identity.
Novelist Chris Abani elaborates:
We have wrestled with the question of our humanity since man pointed to a star
and saw that his finger was not connected to the night sky. Our humanity, this
humanness, is something we still cannot fully define. It is in fact more like a black
hole. We know that it is there simply by observing and charting the phenomenol-
ogy of our reactions. Wise ones amongst us know that it is the sum of all the play
and field and the phenomena and the black hole. (2009 np)
Scientists and philosophers across disciplines have in recent years re-

evaluated our understanding of human consciousness. Robert Pepperell, for
example, in a new edition of The Posthuman Condition, revisits his original
work on the possibility of technology “creating” consciousness. Where a
decade earlier consciousness was thought to be confined to the brain, now,
not only does the text conclude that “the body has a significant role in the
production of higher mental functions” but the incorporation of eastern phi-
losophy has made “continuity between object and subject more readily ac-
ceptable” (2009:i). His re-assessment that “consciousness is a phenomenon
that pervades all reality” has significant implications for non-human artificial
intelligence in machines. As great strides forward in the understanding of
consciousness are taken in neuroscience, other researchers conclude that the
whole of human life takes place in the interaction of Self and physiology,
regardless of gender, culture or nationality (Nader 2012). “There is nothing
beyond one grand field of consciousness,” Nader claims, “which holds: body
is mind—matter is intelligence—physiology is consciousness” (1995: xiii).
As we learn from quantum physics and chaos theory, reality is created by
the interception, the act of observation, by a human consciousness, and this
interception both creates and bestows order upon reality (Hayles 1990: 9). In
this light, we could continue to speculate on how gender is a result of the
manner in which individuals perceive their own relationship between self,
mind, consciousness and body.
Jeanette Winterson offers the conclusion: “Space and time cannot be sep-
arated. History and futurity are now. What you remember. What you invent.”
Individuals can, moreover, invent their own modes of happiness and tran-
scendence, so that whatever “hurls you past the boundaries of your own life
into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough” (1997: 219).
While the ongoing debate continues on the important issues of intercon-
nectedness of gender, identity, subjectivity and power, the discussion pre-
sented here offers a vision of freedom and empowerment through the appar-
ently infinite potential of the human brain and consciousness. Through ex-
ploring a diverse range of literary fiction, gender and sexual differences have
been delineated as superficial, performative, and socially prescribed, encom-
passing both a painful legacy of oppression and a joyous exploration of new
experience. Articulations and expressions of gender can be destabilising,
transgressive, revolutionary and radical. Paradoxically, they appear to be
grounded in the deepest level of self-referral consciousness, on the quantum
level of the mind-body-universe interface. From there, the “eye”/I observes
itself, and thus creates itself in its own image—and projects a world.
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Index
Abani, Chris, 33, 175, 176, 177, Brontë, Emily, 12, 16, 33, 35, 57,
178, 181, 194, 196,228 65
Abel, Elizabeth, 119 Burke, Edmund, 37
Alias Grace, 198 Burke, William, 151
Androgyny, 33, 112, 113, 116, Butler, Christopher, 142
177, 179, 182, 184 Butler, Judith, 12, 13, 15, 110,
Appiah, Kwame, 216 161, 178, 206
Aristotle, 17, 48
Atwood, Margaret, 32, 33, 67, 83, Caine, Barbara, 35
164, 197, 198, 199, 201, 203, Carter, Angela, 33, 67, 161, 163,
204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169,
210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 223 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175,
Auerbach, Nina, 70 176, 177, 182, 184
Austen, Jane, 12, 16, 114 Chalmers, David, 18, 19, 69
Austen, Zelda, 93 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 15
Chopra, Deepak, 17, 27, 28, 135,
Barthes, Roland, 207 136, 195, 225
Baudrillard, Jean, 104 Christ, Carol, 202, 203
Bauman, Zygmunt, 63 Cixous, Hélène, 137
Beckett, Samuel, 31, 119, 120 Clements, Geoffrey, 216
Becoming Abigail, 176 Close, Frank, 217
Bhabha, Homi, 40 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 31, 47,
Blackmore, Susan, 16, 17, 18, 21, 118, 227
48, 49, 51, 119, 129, 186, 220 Collins, Wilkie, 33, 67, 75
Bleak House, 70, 71, 73 Colville, Georgiana, 143
Bleier, Ruth, 12 Conrad, Joseph, 29
Bloom, Harold, 39 Cooper, Jilly, 15, 16
Bohm, David, 147, 187, 190 Crews, Brian, 53
Bohr, Niels, 24, 109, 127, 128, Cunningham, Michael, 113
130
Booth, Rosemary, 151 Damasio, Antonio, 67, 118
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, 33, 57, Daniel Deronda, 86, 103
67, 73, 74, 76, 77, 82 Darwin, Charles, 110, 223
Brontë, Charlotte, 12, 16, 33, 35, Dawkins, Richard, 207
57, 61, 65, 101 De Lauretis, Teresa, 161
246 Beyond Bodies
Deleuze, Gilles, 175, 203 Graham, Kenneth, 43, 55

Dennett, Daniel, 55, 56, 90, 119, Greene, Brian, 14, 86, 159, 195,
226 196, 215
Dickens, Charles, 33, 70, 71, 72, Grey, Beryl, 101
73, 74,82, 98, 177, 224,225
Dijkstra, Bram, 71 Hall, Radcliffe, 111
Dodworth, Cameron, 39 Hameroff, Stuart, 21, 27, 49, 135,
Donizetti, Gaetano, 67 136, 221
Hamlet, 51, 83
Eagleton, Terry, 81, 159 Haney, William S., 24, 38, 46, 47,
Edelman, Gerald, 222 49, 54, 95, 211, 212
Einstein, Albert, 128, 130, 132 Happold, F.C., 42, 65, 66
Eliot, George, 12, 20, 33, 57, 71, Hartley, Jenny, 72
82, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, Hasan, Ruqaiya, 80, 81, 84
93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, Haugeland, J., 55
102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 120, Hawking, Stephen, 27, 28
122, 125, 126, 135 Hayles, Katherine, 22, 25, 28, 29,
Eliot, T.S., 108, 121, 220, 227 30, 228
Evans, Dylan, 56, 65, 131, 194, Heiland, Donna, 40, 41
223, 224 Heisenberg, Werner, 109, 127
Higgs boson, 216
Fairchild, Terry, 135 Hillis Miller, J., 37
Feminism, 13 Hoeveler, Diane, 166
Fine, Cordelia, 10, 14 Holst, Gustav, 21
Forster, E.M., 31, 58, 115, 123, Housekeeping, 67, 149, 150, 152,
139, 140, 147, 155 153, 157, 158, 204
Foucault, Michel, 12, 21, 105, Hughes, Winifred, 73
178 Humble, Nicola, 71
Fox, Ellen, 214
Freud, Sigmund, 40, 42, 62, 67, Irigaray, Luce, 138, 178
73, 102, 109, 126, 178 Ishiguro, Kazuo, 206
Gaskell, Elizabeth, 35, 57, 107, James, Henry, 98

108 James, William, 31, 109
Gifford, Don, 19 Jameson, Fredric, 207
Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar, Jane Eyre, 6, 16, 33, 36, 57, 58,
71, 82, 89, 99, 105 62, 63, 67, 68
Gilligan, Carol, 16, 148, 213 Johnson, R. Brimley, 109
Gillman, Charlotte Perkins, 81 Jung, Carl, 54, 109, 127
Godden, Rumer, 67, 139, 140
Golding, William, 200 Katz, Vernon, 87, 92, 140
Gothic, the, 43, 165, 166 Keats, John, 95, 101
Graham, Elaine, 206, 212 Klincewicz, Michal, 18
Index 247
Kolodny, Annette, 79, 80, 82 Novalis, 16

Kuhn, Gustav, 60
Kuttner, Fred, 22, 24, 26, 128, Oliphant, Margaret, 33, 57, 66, 68
129, 130, 134, 217, 220, 227 Orbach, Susie, 12
Oryx and Crake, 198, 205, 207,
Lacan, Jacques, 80, 81 208, 210, 213, 226
Lady Audley’s Secret, 73, 74-77
Lane, Richard, 199 Patanjali, 87
Le Guin, Ursula, 150, 207, 209 Penrose, Roger, 49, 51, 135, 195,
Lehmann, Rosamond, 65 221, 225
Levine, George, 19, 97, 106 Pepperell, Robert, 194, 195, 207,
Levy, Anita, 70, 71, 72 228
Lewes, George H., 97, 99, 100, Perkowitiz, Sidney, 206
106, 115 Piercy, Marge, 150, 209
Liu, Steven, 24 Pilgrim’s Progress, 58
Lüthi, Max, 162 Pinker, Steven, 14, 15
Pinter, Harold, 120
Madness, 33, 39, 41, 45, 51, 59, Posthuman, the,
61, 62, 66, 67, 68, 71, 73, 74, 194,198,199,206,211,212,213,
75, 76, 78, 79, 82, 83, 112, 228
126, 139, 144, 145, 148, 149, Promislow, Sharon, 224
198, 200, 202, 204, 209, 217 Puranas, 174
Mahesh Yogi, Maharishi, 26, 32, Pynchon, Thomas, 142, 143, 145,
83, 92, 124, 140, 142, 148, 147, 149, 199, 202, 227
149, 172, 173, 174, 190, 219,
220, 224 Qu’ran, the, 167
Maslow, Abraham, 30 Qualia, 20,21,48,49,55,
Masquerade, 59,60, 56,134,222,226
171,178,182,194 Quantum brain, 27, 220
Maya, 59,66,74,91,92,129,172 Quantum consciousness, 21
Memory, 20, 32,37,38, Quantum enigma, 22, 128, 227
47,63,83,95,109,119,122,157,1 Quantum entanglement, 134
86,193,224 Quantum field theory, 22, 28, 29,
Middlemarch, 33, 86, 87, 88, 90, 147, 218
91, 93, 96, 99, 103, 107 Quantum mechanics, 19, 21, 22,
Mlodinow, Leonard, 28 24, 88, 119, 128, 130, 134,
Murdoch, Iris, 213, 214 157, 212, 217, 218, 221
Quantum uncertainty, 221
Nader, Tony, 228
Never Let Me Go, 206 Ramachandran, Vilayanur, 16, 55,
Nicholson, Nigel, 112, 126, 127 129
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 53, 104 Rasa, 35, 37, 43, 46, 47, 48, 49,
North and South, 107 52, 54, 55, 56
248 Beyond Bodies
Rayan, Krishna, 46, 47 The Crying of Lot, 142, 149, 153,

Rees, Martin, 27, 217 158, 159, 200
Reynolds, Kimberly, 71 The Handmaid’s Tale, 198
Rig Veda, 21, 32, 87, 215 The Hours, 113
Robinson, Marilynne, 67, 149, The Infernal Desire Machines of
150, 152, 154, 156, 157, 199 Dr Hoffman, 171
Roemer, Danielle, 164, 167, 169 The Madwoman in the Attic, 70
Romantic poets, 30, 227 The Mill on the Floss, 20, 107
Royle, Nicholas, 166 The Virgin of Flames, 177,178-
Rushdie, Salman, 199, 203, 205 181, 243
The Woman in White, 67, 68
Sade, Marquis de, 43 The Year of the Flood, 198, 205,
Sage, Lorna, 168 207, 210
Said, Edward, 71 Tomm, Winnie, 213, 225
Saidullah, Ahmad, 179 Tononi, Guilio, 222
Sargent, Lyman Tower, 197 Trauma, 37
Schaub, Thomas, 145 Travis, Fred, 25, 221
Schrödinger, Erwin, 26, 109, 127, Tweedie, Irene, 65
128, 129, 130, 180
Searle, John, 56 Uncanny, the, 40, 102
Setzer, Susan, 135 Unified Field, the, 23, 218
Shelley, Mary, 106 Upanishads, 21, 64
Shelley, Percy B., 118, 120 Utopia, 190, 207
Shorter, Clement W., 58
Showalter, Elaine, 36, 57, 66, 74, Van de Laar, Elizabeth, 48, 51
85, 112, 113, 115, 121, 145, Veda, 124, 126, 219
161, 177 Veda Lila, 181, 219
Skeat, W.W., 15 Veda(s), 26
Smyth, Ethel, 112 Vedanta, 26, 136
Sommerhof, Gerd, 17 Vedic literature, 21, 23, 122, 136,
Sontag, Susan, 78 172
Southey, Robert, 35
Star Trek, 224 Wagner, Linda, 148, 149
Stobie, Cheryl, 179, 180 Warner, Marina, 163, 165, 170,
Surfacing, 83, 198, 199, 200, 203, 171, 175
204, 205, 209, 210, 235 Waters, Susan, 75, 76, 77, 83
Watkins, Susan, 116, 117
Thackeray, William Makepeace, Wilson, Colin, 30, 31, 59, 204
16 Winterson, Jeanette, 31, 33, 123,
The Black Narcissus, 139 124, 136, 175, 182, 183, 184,
The Bloody Chamber, 164, 166, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190,
167, 168 193, 194, 195, 196, 222, 228
Index 249
Woolf, Virginia, 9, 10, 11, 12, 31, Wuthering Heights, 33, 35, 36,
33, 36, 67, 75, 79, 109, 111, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 45, 48,
112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 50, 51, 52, 56, 57, 59, 63, 67
118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 125,
126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, Zipes, Jack, 163
132, 133, 134, 135, 137, 175,
177, 179, 182

Beyond Bodies Gender, Literature and The Enigma of Consciousness by Daphne M. Grace

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Beyond Bodies

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014

Cover design by Aart Jan Bergshoeff.

Gender, literature and consciousness 10

Wuthering Heights: a journey through the images of emotion 36

Jane Eyre: a journey through modes of consciousness 57

George Eliot and the exploration of female consciousness 85

Twentieth century revolutions in thought 109

The Waves 119

Patriarchy and women’s space 137

Myths, fairy stories and gendered power games 162

Becoming woman 175

Consciousness, creative writing, and the discovery of the

A female writer, according to Virginia Woolf, traditionally encounters two

male brains to be superior in understanding and building systems (Fine

Gender, literature and consciousness

How is gender relevant to consciousness studies? Can gender influence con-

Gender, literature and society

Addressing bodies and the trouble of gender and consciousness

constructed, the sexualized body is inevitably bound up in concepts of identi-

what we take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a

Challenging models of “woman”

Interdisciplinary approaches to cognition and consciousness

Theories debating the existence and defining the qualities of consciousness

tive experience.5 Yet first person approaches to consciousness are becoming

abilities of introspection and intuition, which remain unaccounted for in neu-

sciousness and quantum mechanics. Restricting ideas to remain within boundaries of

A literary approach to memory not only attempts to fill in where memory is

Questions of qualia and consciousness

whether including sociology and politics (postcolonial theory), psychology or

Philosophers as well as physicists consider various cultural and philosophical

here.7 In comparison to a purely neuropsychological approach, the field of

In dealing with a discussion of quantum enigma and consciousness, these

While a quantum consciousness or quantum mind hypothesis has been in

The gendered world according to traditional concepts

In the traditional literature of ancient cultures, a parallel description is seen.

essential division of one into two is represented. Described in Taoist philoso-

This void represents a state of unity and nondifferentiation. In other words, in

The “problem” of consciousness: Eastern and Western approaches

At the heart of quantum mechanics is the role of the conscious observer,

It is important to remember, then, that Eastern thought distinguishes between

Consciousness, while the centre of controversy, has been defined in many

The Cosmic Web

In 1984, N. Katherine Hayles revolutionised the way literature can be ana-

order exists within chaos, a fact that resolves long-standing metaphysical

Literature and “superconsciousness”

Within literary explorations of consciousness the notion of different states of

gentle melancholy in a poem about daffodils “through recollection in soli-

Jeanette Winterson corroborates such a view, in discussing how “normal”

Altering consciousness through drugs, of course, can at best be temporary

Heart and mind, perception, injunction, understanding, knowledge, wisdom,

The scope and contents of Beyond Bodies

writing as it pertains to the exploration of consciousness within Victorian

Forging roads into consciousness: rasa and the

literary developments at this time have pointed to a widespread discussion of

Victorian feminists believed in “fundamental, significant and unalterable

Brontë sisters overcame obstacles within patriarchal policies controlling life

Wuthering Heights: a journey through the images of emotion

In a close reading of this passage, every word in this sentence considera-

environment is mirrored in the characters’ obsessions with alienation, bleak-

Wuthering Heights and the uncanny

Symbolisms and sex

Symbols, too, are presented in twinned or binary oppositions: windows and