So, I just finished all of the revisions on my M.A. thesis, and it's begining to appear that this chapter of my life will conclude with a degree. I had to laugh however, when I reached the conclusion of my paper and, there it was, the same old obsession trotted out again. It seems, that I really only ever make one argument, and my thesis is no exception. Here's the conclusion:
In a political world where women possess only very limited means of representation, the question of who is entitled to construct narratives becomes crucial. Earla Wilputte writes: "For Haywood, “to control modes of narration…is to control the world” (Doody xxvvii), and women, readers, and citizens must carefully and responsibly interpret the representations offered by men, authors, and politicians. Neither a woman’s nor a nation’s history can be neatly allegorized, romanticized, or narrated without bearing the impression of its storyteller. Haywood’s hybrid novel suggests that one closely examine the politics of representation and decipher the voices and the meanings behind artistically constructed texts"(Wilputte, Textual 42).
Narrative constructions are implicated by power differentials, as are politics. To gain understanding, the individual, in life and in reading a text, must assess sometimes contradictory and always biased pieces of information in order to form his or her own understandings about events and ideologies.
Viewed through this lens, The Adventures of Eovaai is not about the advancement of a specific political system as much as it is about becoming a critical political subject. In order for women to gain any access to political agency, they must, like Eovaai, come to interpret society for themselves and make their own decisions about politics. Rather than acting as receptacles of received knowledge, which set women up to be the manipulated pawns of “great” men, they must begin to make their own evaluations of the information that they receive. This prevents women from becoming, like Atamadoul, the amorous political subject who remains faithful in the face of gross mistreatment.
The process of reading that Eliza Haywood engenders in the The Adventures of Eovaai is one of attunement. This attunement is forced upon the reader through the sheer complexity of the text. By defying the reader the possibility of a singular, unified reading, the text demands the creation of multiple contingent readings. In that way, Haywood’s mélange is a reveling in partiality, a refusal of completeness, of completion. Instead, the text produces a new vision of political subjectivity for all readers; a vision that urges the reader to become her own arbiter of meaning rather accepting the interpretations created by others. This vision advances the radical notion that the act of constructing a reading functions fundamentally as a mode of empowerment. It thus implies that by becoming an independent reader that is attuned to the modalities of interest within received information, a person can create her own space of understanding. It is within this space that independent political subjectivity begins.
