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Constructing the Subject: Deconstructing the Text

Catherine Belsey initially wrote several key ideas in the first edition of Critical Practice in 1980. The essay “Constructing the Subject: Deconstructing the Text” was released in Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl’s Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism in 1991, dating the text to 1985.

The Argument

The text’s main argument is that literature, like other pieces of ideology, is part of what constitutes and constructs a subject, as well as claiming that classic realist fiction interpellates the reader and addresses “the reader as the position from which the text is most ‘obviously’ intelligible, the position of the subject in (and of) ideology.”

The Subject in Ideology

In the first subsection of this work, Belsey poses several questions about feminist thinking. She asks why all women are not feminists and why some feminist women fall into patriarchal values of society. To explain the answer, Belsey looks into previous theory and ideology of Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan, as well as introduces the reader to the idea that because people read, fiction is involved in constructing subjectivity. In Althusser’s Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, he provides and initial list of apparatuses that influence society: “the religious ISA, the educational ISA, the family ISA, […] the cultural ISA (Literature, the Arts, sports, etc.).” Belsey suggests that literature influences the subject, and especially women, through the classic realist fiction. Furthermore, Belsey argues that ideology is both real and imaginary: real in the sense of how people live life and imaginary in the sense of how social conditions impact their lives without them realizing it. People are constructed as subjects through society while they appear to be individuals. To further explore ideology and the construction of the subject, Belsey relates literature and construction to language by discussing both Ferdinand de Saussure and Émile Benveniste’s takes on language and linguistics of the “I” as creation of the subject: without language, humans would be unable to communicate the idea of self and subject. Both Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I” promotes the notion that infants must be able to identify a self either through an image or the word “I” to differentiate itself from others in relation to fiction: “The self-image that causes identification and recognition is a fiction ‘over there,’ dictating the efforts of the subject (‘I’) toward a totality and autonomy it can never attain.” Belsey’s understanding of Lacan and the linguistics of self lead her to posit that change is capable for the subject (returning to the questions about feminists at the beginning) because the subject is a process. Women especially are subjects capable of change because of the production of numerous contradictory discourses. Belsey argues that literary texts can have a major role in the process of subjectivity because of language in social formation.

The Subject and the Text

In this subsection, Belsey discusses the notion of classic realism in relation to literature and other media to the unconscious and ideology. Classic realism offers the reader the ability to understand the ideology of the fictional world as well as understanding through the action of reading. The reader/subject can understand both the social formation of those in the text while also understanding the relationships between individuals and society. She suggests that the style of the novel enables the reader to view a society from the outside and that classic realist texts work with ideology and theory to interpellate the reader. Belsey expresses that mystery/detective stories most clearly represent the classic realism bill in allowing the reader to feel both privileged and knowledgeable.

Deconstructing the Text

Belsey states that Derrida’s deconstruction theory is vital to break apart a text and see its contradictions and plurality. She uses examples of Roland Barthes’s S/Z and Pierre Macherey’s A Theory of Literary Production to highlight their ideas that the purpose of criticism and theory is to discover a text’s contradictions and self-critiques. Belsey suggests that “to deconstruct a text” “is to open it, to release the possible positions of its intelligibility, including those which reveal the impartiality (in both senses) of the ideology inscribed in the text.”

The Case of Sherlock Holmes

Belsey utilizes several stories of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to present insight on ideology and classic realism through the detective lens addressed previously in her work.

Returning to her feminist questions at the beginning of her essay, Belsey focuses primarily of the treatment of female characters in the detective stories. Her reading suggests that women are seen continually as mysterious, shadowy, magical and marginal. Even when women are at the forefront of the mystery itself, they are silenced or too provocative to be completely revealed to the reader. The issues brought to attention of the women all relate to the ideals and social functions and expectations of marriage and of women’s hidden sexuality. Women in the social construct of Doyle’s works are shown to have a need for a marriage and that marriages can be ruined by scandalous behavior of women, including secretive letters. Holmes and Watson, although scientists, are incapable of deducing information about the women and their sexualities on two parts: first, Belsey argues, because the women are unreadable and unscientific, thus limiting the powers of the scientists. Second, the fictional men are too concerned about propriety to reveal any information from the women’s letters and even apologize at the beginning of the stories for leaving out information that they felt was too much for the reader. This chosen leaving out suggests that the detective stories work in two ways: first, they fail to permit the reader all knowledge of the classic realism text, and second, they form seamlessly to ideological pressures of ensuring a society omit information on the sexuality of women.

Similarly, Belsey suggests that the detectives also work mysteriously around political issues as they do with women’s sexuality. Normally, fiction is forgiven for implications surrounding political spheres and for dabbling in politics in the first place because it is “innocent and therefore ideologically effective.” Yet, with the innocent nature of the fictional narrative, Belsey suggests that protecting identities and authorship becomes more important than revealing all secrets. By deconstructing the text, deconstruction shows the nature of fiction to be simply that, instead of being a discussion of the real world.

Conclusion

This contradiction in the Sherlock Holmes stories show just how ideology is manipulative: it can provide a truth of how ideology operates (by showing society what to think and believe), a truth of what ideology represses (the truths about women’s lives and sexualities), and that a story/literature itself is ideological (as it impresses upon society a certain truth or belief).