Genders 22. Ellen E. Berry
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feminine is consecrated as the maternal in Western culture, and Russian culture, with its emphasis on Mary as the Mother of God, is far from exceptional in this regard.44 Natal’ia Sukhanova’s story “Delos,” first published in the liberal journal The New World (Novyi mir) in 1988, is a case in point. Sukhanova, it should be noted, made her literary debut with this story. The narrator, a male obstetrician, philosophizes in the following terms about the pregnant woman:
I do not know anything more beautiful than a pregnant woman … what ideal — cosmic! — roundness of the belly burdened by new life. There is no miracle that is rounder or more even! The son of God also lay with his head down … in the weighdessness of the maternal waters. A world within a world … I do not know anything baser than the obligation to help a woman get rid of a baby!45
The pregnant woman, in this view, has aesthetic, cosmological, and Christian significance. But on the very next page, the same narrator castigates “literature” for its descriptions of maternity as “necessarily sacred.” If women are cruel, he reflects, then they are portrayed as “the children of hell.” He concludes: “But labor and pregnancy — it’s indecent to write about such things — men’s passion might be dulled.” The narrator’s paean to pregnancy is ironically undercut by his own characterization of literary stereotypes.46
The difference between Sukhanova and Rasputin is the political agenda. Rasputin links alleged female sexual pathology to female political violence. Furthermore Rasputin metaphorically projects the ills of the Russian nation onto the supposed sexual ills of modern women, who have abandoned their role as mothers and homemakers and therefore suffer from “hysteria.” These very same women are made to bear the symbolic blame for the waywardness of the Russian nation, expelled and dispersed from the national body. In Rasputin, woman’s body is a site for a contest about national identity. Women’s bodies as such and women as individuals are rendered invisible. Women and their bodies are usurped by the Body Politic. Women and their experience are absorbed by this forced symbolic service to the conservative vision of the Russian nation.
In contrast, the women’s writing that I am going to discuss thematizes the problem of women as individuals in conflict with the state and the oppressive conditions that it imposes on ordinary life. The hospital is the site where this conflict unfolds. In both stories to be discussed the hospital and the prison are explicitly linked. Iulia Voznesenskaia’s The Female Decameron (Zhenskii dekameron), first published in Russian in 1987 in Israel, offers an early example.47 Voznesenskaia was one of the founders of a feminist religious group, called “Mariia.” She spent time in Siberia for her work and was exiled from the former Soviet Union in 1980. Her writing is distinguished from the current generation of women writers in Russia in that it is itself a form of dissident activity. In The Female Decameron, ten Soviet women are quarantined in a maternity hospital due to an outbreak of a skin infection. To pass the time, they tell stories — about first love, revenge, jealousy, money, and whether it is better as one of a couple to be left or do the leaving. Among the women characters is a party worker who spouts clichés about the family as the fundamental building block of the state (9). This sort of party slogan is juxtaposed to the list of “forbidden topics” that the other women describe as part of their everyday experience: rape, labor camps (“a camp is a camp, whether it’s under the star or the swastika” [34]), crime, drug use, and abortion.
The work of Marina Palei explicitly takes up the connection between the hospital and the prison. Palei, one of the “new” women writers, spent some time as a medical student in Leningrad, but finished her studies at the literary institute instead. She has published in the “liberal” journals, in a 1991 anthology called The New Amazons, and has a collection of her own. In the preface to her “Day of the Catkins,” Marina Palei writes:
I only wanted to show the exceptional peculiarity of that place of transition called the hospital, where the individual appears in the world and where more often he or she leaves it. The existential nature of this institution, which with terrible simplicity reveals the basis of life and death, corresponds to the nature of the army barracks, the prison cell, the module of a spacecraft, the barracks of a concentration camp. … The list could be continued.48
The hospital, like the other institutions on Palei’s list (with the possible exception of the spaceship), is a place of punitive state control. The Foucauldian overtones of the hospital-prison link have been noted by several authors.49
It is significant that in Palei’s “The Day of the Catkins” the two patients are women. The first is dying of liver cancer, which has been discovered by the surgery she has just undergone. She is tormented by thirst, but is forbidden to drink for unexplained medical reasons. The orderly, a young woman studying to be a doctor, soaks some cotton in water and places it on the woman’s lips. She is embarrassed by the profuse gratitude she receives. When the dying woman asks to be taken out into the fresh air, the surgeon (a man) cruelly replies: “Soon! They’ll carry you out!” The woman is not told in any other way of her condition. The supervising nurse rebukes the orderly for wasting time on a dying patient. The second patient, an old woman operated on for a bowel obstruction, now suffers from uncontrollable diarrhea. Ignoring the nurse’s growing irritation at her, the orderly tirelessly and kindly cleans her and changes her bedding — in violation of the nurse’s order not to “waste linen.” Outside, the poplar catkins which covered the street and stuck to everything — the “dry hot sperm of summer” — have been washed away by rain.
In “Day of the Catkins” women’s bodies are the place where the state’s punitive control reveals itself in starkest terms. In the writing of Rasputin, Sheveleva, and Belov, the intersection between women and the state takes place on a mythological plane. The nation is constructed as feminine, and the supposed moral ills of women correspond to the ills of the nation. The actual conditions of women’s lives are ignored. Marina Palei redresses this silence. The Soviet state and the nationalist writers may find it convenient to glorify mythological images of Mother Russia, but those images belie the state’s brutality toward individual women’s suffering. What makes this brutality more horrifying is that it is an unexamined part of everyday life. To depart from it is a waste of the state’s time and resources. Palei restores the physicality of women’s bodies in nonmythological, “realist” terms. The women patients’ thirst, cold, dizziness, and incontinence all merit simple, humane care. Each of these ills is rendered as part of the physical business of living and dying. Women’s bodies are reembodied. In “The Nymph from the Canal” (“Kabiriia s obvodnogo kanala”) Palei continues her study of the female body in illness.50 The issues that she raises in this work go beyond the framework of Mother Russia. The story might be called an anti-bildungsroman of a young woman with the absurd name Raimonda Rybnaia (“Raimonda” was the name of a French revolutionary, “rybnaia” suggests “fish”). Raimonda discovers the pleasures of sex at an early age. Her capacity for pleasure is not diminished even as she suffers one illness after the other and ultimately dies. Using a series of remarkable images and philosophical digressions, Palei interrogates what Laura Mulvey, in her study of the pleasure of narrative cinema, has called the coding of woman as that which is to be looked at.51 Men are the “controllers of the gaze” and women, the objects on display. I call upon Mulvey’s work not only because it helps us understand what Palei is about in this story, but also because Palei explicitly refers to one of America’s most reproduced film icons. In one scene, a woman’s room is plastered with images from forensic medicine. Different types of bullet holes and strangulations are displayed. In one corner, referred to by the narrator as the “icon corner,” there is a prominent photograph of Marilyn Monroe. The representation of woman as an object of beauty and sexual desire is linked to violence. This violence is perpetrated by the “normal” police power of the state, by “Western” commercial culture, and by the now collapsed Soviet order. Palei subversively links the aesthetic gaze with the medical therapeutic gaze.52 The doctor is likened to a voyeur, and at one point in the story, the presence of the patient at a medical demonstration is compared to a striptease. To cut open the patient, and penetrate into the interior is to render palpable and quantifiable that which ultimately cannot be known. The state’s power and the intrusive therapies of medical science are intertwined. The