Bhaduri, Laforest, and Suicide as Text

Spivak's story about Bhubaneswari Bhaduri was very interesting in the way that it considered the body as a text. She states, "[Bhaduri] generalized the sanctioned motive for female suicide by taking immense trouble to displace (not merely deny), in the physiological inscription of her boy, its imprisonment within legitimate passion by a single male" (806). In other words, by committing suicide when she did, Bhaduri writes--or attempts to write--herself out of the traditional text of female in disgrace. It is interesting to compare this subaltern suicide with the suicide of a black man, Edmond Laforest, described in Gates' "Writing 'Race.'" Laforest tied a dictionary to his neck before leaping from a bridge to his death. Gates states that, "While other black writers...have been drowned artistically by the weight of various modern languages, Laforest chose to make his death an emblem of this relation of overwhelming indenture" (13). Instead of intentionally using his body as text, Laforest uses text to indicate the imprisonment of his body (and his intellect) by a language that writes him as a second-class citizen.

In both cases, the marginalized group is attempting to both speak against its oppression and escape that oppression using the language of the body. Perhaps it is the body, then, which is really the voice of the subaltern, because it is the only acting-thing available to the speaker (since speech-acts using language are not). However, it's interesting to note that Bhaduri uses her suicide to indicate what she is not, while Laforest uses his to indicate what he is forced to be, in the eyes of society. To me, this difference indicates the particular struggle of female voices to be heard. It seems that they must constantly be proving what they are not (not adulterous, not committing suicide because of illegitimate pregnancy), rather than being permitted to state what they are. And this locks them, more than other groups perhaps, into subordination because they are unable to provide an identity for themselves except by negating--with various degrees of success--the stereotypes that attempt to describe them.