Wysocki’s article made me think a lot about women, and a lot
about poetry. The main point that I’ve seemed to glean from her article is that
we find ultimate form “beautiful;” that is, we are less concerned about the
particular beauty (the dimples, the wrinkles, the certain shape of one person
vs. another) and more concerned about the ideal form which something is
compared to. The closer it comes to the ideal, the more beautiful it becomes.
This, of course, relies on the fact of comparison to that ideal, and the
reliance upon that ideal being universal to all (which is an immediate point
for criticism) but let’s go with it for a while.
It made me think of poetry because poetry functions within
form and meter in order to be successful; while free verse is all the rage when
the modern person thinks of poetry, a poem doesn’t become good or absolutely
beautiful until it is paying attention to a particular form, until the meanings
with the words mimic or are strengthened by the form and meter, until form
meets subject, and subject meets form. But that’s only the first step. By
trying to fit a certain form, our poem becomes more beautiful, more ideal, more
meta. It can’t be that simple, though. The best poets of all time take that
form and do something more to it: they add a trochee where an iamb should be,
or they twist the form in such a way that allows for a resistance to meaning
but at the same time holds it together. If it were simply form = subject, then
what would we get out of it, other than looking at a beautiful object?
So Wysocki is interesting to me in that women/models used in
advertising are airbrushed and primped and clothed to look only like a form of
a woman instead of a particular woman in a particular setting (we could say the
same for any male model, or any dog used on dog food packaging, any image used
in advertising or art). But is that as far as it goes? Is the woman simply a
form, or is there a way in which she is resisting certain parts of the “ideal”
or of the “ultimate form” in order to give way to a meaning that is not only
beautiful but also challenging and difficult?
My next question concerns the Jameison article; the fact
that women ultimately don’t have a voice until the male (dominant) counterpart
takes up the challenged of performing a “woman” style. This is kind of enraging
and outrageous, I get kind of fed up when we genderize everything, but it makes
sense in an off-putting way. But anyway, how can we use Jameison’s ideas to
further the argument that Wysocki is making about “forms” of things being more
ideal than actual things? Maybe it just speaks to the fact that the male and
female forms of speaking, those styles are in themselves ideal forms rather
than actual forms. Once we’ve gone through and stereotyped everything, then
everyone has a sense of what is “right” or “ideal” and therefore all speakers
can be judged accordingly to how well they fit the guidelines provided for them
(I’m having de ja vu regarding this topic in old papers; fitting into certain
speech communities, genres, etc).
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| Obligatory comparison image |
Just like with any magazine or any advertisement of a “beautiful”
woman, I have to remind myself with my own genre-locked writing: that woman isn’t
real, she doesn’t exist. Those ideals, those expectations that these
communities establish for us are based on a very limited number of realities,
so why should I have to live up to it in order to be successful? How can we
take these ideals and push the boundaries to challenge and resist society’s
notions and create out own based on the content and subject that we are trying
to present?
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