Agent/cy--The Ethical Involvement of Literature (and the Author?)

During our recent class discussions regarding Agent/cy, our list of questions regarding the agent and agency has grown and evolved. Out of our updated list, the question of the connection between ethical involvement and literature has emerged. While we have not spent much time on this issue, I think it is one that deserves a little attention. In the Gilbert and Gubar essay entitled Infection of the Sentence, the authors briefly touch upon the ethical involvement of women in literature. In confronting the "anxiety of authorship" writers such as Dickinson, Sexton and Atwood utilized their poetry to insert themselves into an ethical and cultural discussion regarding women in both society and literature.

As Gilbert and Gubar address in their essay, Dickinson confronts the representation of females in patriarchal texts. In the poem quoted in the epigraph of the essay ("Infection in the sentence breeds/We may inhale Despair/At distances of Centuries") it is evident that as an author, Dickinson is utilizing her poetry to address the conflict of the anxiety of authorship in literature. She is keenly aware of how literature has constantly cast women in a negative and even stereotypical role. As Gilbert/Gubar state "The despair we [female writers] 'inhale' even at 'distances of centuries' may be the despair of...a life that 'has no story'" (Gilbert/Gubar 456). While Dickinson did so privately (her poems were found and published after her death), she as an author has the agency to insert herself into discourse. It seems to me that it is the author, not literature itself, that seems to have the ability (or, the agency) to be ethically involved in such issues. The ethical involvment of the author, and their literature, is further illustrated by both Sexton's poetry and Atwood's prose.

The poetry of Sexton and prose of Atwood featured in the essay are also important examples of female writers acknowledging and confronting the negative portrayal of the female figure in literature. However, in contrast to Dickinson, these two writers also illustrate the constraining boundaries of the female writer in society. Specifically, as Gilbert and Gubar state "The woman writer feels herself to be literally or figuratively crippled by the debilitating alternatives her culture offers her" (Giblert/Gubar 458). As female authors, both Sexton and Atwood utlize their writing as a means to confront the both the restrictiveness of literary tradition. But perhaps more importantly in regards to ethical involvement, they (along with Dickinson) mirror the social realities of women in patriarchal society. Using literature as their weapons, these authors confront both the "anxiety of authorship" as well as the role of women in literature and culture as a whole.