Annotation for Les Guérillères
Building a Digital Feminary
Building a Digital Feminary
"Fais un effort pour te souvenir. Ou, à défaut, invente."
"Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent."
Thursday, July 10, 2003
I find a lot of names on Google by searching on the name along with one or several of these words: woman, feminist, french, lesbian, famous. By doing this I am slanting the definitions ideologically. It helps me filter information. For example, if I search on "Ceza" I get 162,000 hits which seem to be mostly Turkish web sites. I conclude that ceza is a common word or name in Turkish. "Ceza feminist" gets me instant information on an Egyptian feminist of the early 20th century and in fact I remember hearing of her. She published a magazine in French. I conclude, or hypothesize with reasonable certainty that Wittig knew of Ceza and was referring to her.
They are names that could be lost. I read them and dont' know them. They shouldn't be cryptic; they should be instantly recognizable to us as women and feminists. But they aren't. She shouts their names without apology or explanation. The text is ergodic but its obscurity is an indication of a problem - the forgetting of women from history. Feminists, lesbians and non-western women are especially forgotten. Wittig throws them in. If she did not explain Eleanor of Acquitaine because she assumed "we" the western reader would know who she was talking about, and yet she did explain Ceza, assuming "we" wouldn't know, that would be obnoxious. She is trying not to assume anything about who the reader is or will be. I would like to re-read and reference some books like Joanna Russ's "how to suppress women writers" or Dale Spenders "Women of Genius and what men have done to them" and I wonder if there are other similar books that I'm not aware of. I'm not expressing this very formally or very well here - just trying to jot down ideas as they happen...
And in fact as I browse I find sites and books that give an overview of Egyptian feminism and I read them with interest. This seems like a logical result , a logical outcome of the act of reading Les Guerilleres. In a way it is "what is supposed to happen". Part of what happens is that I become angry at the amount of history lost or forgotten. I am also encouraged at finding the overview of Egyptian feminism, and feel a sense of kinship with its creator, a rescuer of crucial history.
A friend of mine is in the process of writing a game about victorian london. he had a small sidebar talking about the problems of playing a female character in an RPG where the characters should be fairly upper class and educated. I bridled, thinking of the Lady Authors and characters from fiction and the few women I knew about from the 1880s or 1890s (for example, Mary Kingsley). My friend had emphasized that women coudl get no formal education. I wondered suddenly, "Well, how did they get their education if not from universities? Can we not respectthe home taught or the autodidact?" (a tender issue with me, a passionate autodidact and intellectual constantly under-respected) Again a cursory web search turned deep and took hours.
I spent a long time trying to figure out "what were the best finishing schools - where did the rich and noble send their daughters, and what was the curriculum at such schools?" it was nearly impossible to find the answers, as most everywhere that mentioned "finishing school" did so to disparage them. because Olive Schreiner went to a bad one, did that mean that all finishing schools squeezed girls' souls into a thimble with room to spare? I would like to think not.
After all, the women who DID gain huge advances in politics, who got universities to accept women, opened professions, certainly came from SOMEWHERE. They didn't just spring fully armed out of the mind of Daddy, although it seems to be a common trope to say that they "read from their fathers' library" or "were taught at home by their father" or "helped their father with his work". Did their mothers not have a library? Did no one have a mother who taught? Did no one have a great algebra teacher at Miss Cheltenham's Finishing School? Did no governess inspire a girl to a love of Latin? That seems very unlikely.
This trope is common to the point where I run into it personally, when someone is probing to find out why I know [computer programming, translation, some bit of scientific knowledge] If I say anything about my father, I can see the gears turning as the questioner slots me right into that "male identified daddy's girl" slot, as if I had learned everything from my father, when maybe my mom wasn't in there operating the voltmeter with me or programming in basic, but she was the one 99% of the time teaching me stuff, driving me to the library or radio shack, or giving me time to read or otherwise being supportive)
I digress.... Anyway through reading about women in medicine I discovered quite a lot, including a super dynamic circle of victorian feminists who all knew each other and were catalysts for each other.
Thursday, July 03, 2003
Wednesday, July 02, 2003
I will make a separate page for other words, places, or things that could use some notes.
The Internationale - 144 (put all the words)
Funeral March - a specific one?? 144
évohé - 144
lacunae - 143
trismagesta - 142
PUnic wars - 140
stupas 136
dagbas 136
chortens - p. 136
Sporphyra - 119
army of Wu - 119
Perségame 119
Seumes 119
Apone 119
Gathma 119
Rome 120
Amazons - 85
bohemia 114-115
moldavia - 114
carpathian - 114
bacchantes - maenids93
thyrsi, thyrsus - wand held by bacchantes/maenids 93
Eurotas - a river in sparta - 98, 93, 144
Sarmatians - 112
Lemnos - 112 mentioned in herodotus i think
Sidon (early)
The Ophidians - p. 74, 103
odonates
oögones
Odoacres
Olynthians
Oöliths
Omphales
Ormur
Orphise
Oriennes - 103
Souame - p. 77
the Four Powers p. 78
the Front (78)
bombyx sounds like technical term for silkworm cocoon?
jenny - used in spinning automation p. 81
glenuri - made up by wittig (or did it appear anywhere in other SF? )
ephemerides
Holy Grail
Round Table
I keep thinking it would be fun to make a "Feminary Purity Test" where the test-taker can go through the whole list of names and check off which ones they think they "know" or recognize and which names they don't. It could be simple recognition with checkboxes for "know a specific example" or "have heard the name" or "no clue". Then you get a Feminary Knowledge score back. And your curiosity is piqued to read more about the ones you don't know or to check if you were right on the ones that sounded familiar.
Will read this Article on Wittig translated with online tool...
Hrmm, I see right away that I was right, the English translator messed with the names. "Des personnages comme Koue Fei, Blanche Neige, Nu Wa, Hippolyte, Minerve..." Blanche Neige = Snow White. Grrr.
Perhaps adding a new field, a checkbox for "french" or "english" version of the name. If I don't have that, then I throw off my name counts and sorting. I'd like to be able to say "there are XXX names in the book", at least.
Must get my hands on the French version. Did the translator change any of the names? I have my suspicions of the names in the vignettes. I doubt Wittig wrote "Snow-White" in the original, but it's not impossible. If names are different, I shoud add them somehow, either at the top level or in the English definitions.
Another issue: Why? Why am I doing this? I'm not sure.
Part of the point of the lists of names in capital letters is, I think, their anonymity. The inclusion of women's names from many places and times, mixing the everyday with the mythological, brings the everyday to the status of myth and the goddesses down to earth. The real/historical names mix with the fictional. Full or last names have been lost or eliminated. There is the issue of last names coming from the father in many cultures - these women are invoked here by first name only. I think "invoked" is the right word for what is going on; by listing the names interspersed with the rest of the text gives an impression of an ongoing chant happening simultaneously with the vignettes, a sense of timelessness and of ritual.
Making a glossary and index feels a bit perverse.
But I love a good index and have always wanted to write one. And footnotes rule!
Into the middle of the book there are more names in the vignettes that sound like traditional last names, like Elsa Brauer or Odile Roques.
I have settled on typing in all of the names and page numbers first. I've researched about 50 names so far. It is clear that I will be able to find most, maybe 75% of them, in standard name dictionaries, so that will be my first pass through the library.
I am wondering if I should have separate fields for various bits of information, like country of origin, language of origin. That seems tough, though, because I can't have any one country for a name like "Maria". Why do I want this info? It could be neat to search or sort on country, language, or culture. Or maybe on chronology - I could divide the name origins into different eras. But then some names might be Old Testament names, but were popularized by a saint or, like "Edna", by a bestselling novel. For now, I will stick with one big field. I could still search and sort, though results will be inaccurate.
This blog is to hold my notes and ongoing thoughts on Monique Wittig's book Les Guérillères. I am annotating the proper names in the book. The working annotations will be available as soon as I have password protection in place for the editor.
