Trites analysis of Margaret Mahy’s The Changeover (1984), Dangerous Spaces (1991), and Katiangata Twitch (2005) focuses on the way that Mahy depicts the complex understanding of the relationship between thought and body through her characters. Trites uses the analysis to highlight how Mahy changes the interaction between feminist thought and the female body as the larger feminist conversation on embodiment changed over the course of twenty years.
I was really excited to start reading this article because Trites seemed to be doing a feminist historical analysis. I find myself often falling back on that methodology with my own research. It provides an understanding of the text through the feminism in which it was produced as opposed to the feminism of today. The two are rarely similar. Philosophies change, and the way change is approached is usually vastly different as the decades passed. While approaching form a modern feminist analysis is still useful, the value of the text as feminist or not is much easier understood with this feminist historical analysis. And it seems that Trites wants to understand the *feminist value* of these texts, and in order to do that, she is contextualizing Mahy’s characters and ideas within the feminist philosophies during the books’ publications.
Before she begins discussing the novels, she contextualizes the larger feminist ideas on female embodiment. Then, she parallels Mahy’s text with the feminist philosophy during the years surrounding the publication of each text until she begins analyzing Katiangata Twitch. At this point, she switches her methodology to queer theory. This creates a strange imbalance, and it is one of the many things that make her argument feel underdeveloped. Don’t get me wrong, I thought some of her conclusions in this section were the most interesting, but the way she approaches the text is so fundamentally different than the rest of the article that it almost does not seem to fit. The only saving grace is the similar approaches and ideas that the two theories have. If there was more historicizing like in previous sections, I might not have found the section so problematic.
Speaking of problematic, I had a really hard time liking this article. At times, her analysis feels superficial. She does align her work in conversations with other scholars who have researched embodiment in Mahy’s texts, but she relies too heavily on summarizing their arguments and summarizing the text. It feels like the summarization gets far more page space than Trites own ideas and conclusions, which is disappointing. I was interested in what Trites had to say, and I often wanted her to develop her train of thought more. Take her analysis of Sorry touching Laura in The Changeover:
Laura’s laughing response acknowledges sexual desire as a “disease,” with her body still the object of his somewhat ominous sexuality: “Laura felt his left hand, his sinister hand, between her dress and her skin. ‘You probably won’t get a very bad attack,’ she said, nervous but enchanted” (204). She is both “nervous” and “enchanted,” Mahy implies, because sexuality is powerful, dangerous—and fun. (Mahy 142).
After describing how “Sorry preys upon Laura, ogling her breasts, demanding rather than asking for their first kiss, touching her breasts without invitation” and using a quote where Sorry’s hand is referred to as “sinister,” Trites concludes that Mahy is depicting sexuality as “fun.” I understand the powerful and the dangerous, but I feel like Trites is reading something that I am not in these sentences because she reads it as “fun.” This is the last word in a paragraph about “undermining” feminist assertions and repeated depictions of predators, I feel like Trites needs to explain where she is seeing the “fun” part of sexuality. I believe her when she says it is there, I just am not seeing it in the material that she is presenting here.
Ultimately, I think I would have enjoyed this article so much more if it had a narrower focus on one book of Mahy’s OR she developed her points further. I enjoyed what she had to say, to the point that I wanted more of it, but it just wasn’t there.
And I’m going to leave this as a question/idea for the class: I know little to nothing about New Zealand’s feminist movement, but in theory, there is a chance that philosophies trends were different in New Zealand (where the books were published and Mahy was writing). The feminist authors/philosophers Trites references are from a variety of places: Lorde is Caribbean-American; Cixous, French; Susan Bordo, American; Elizabeth Grosz, Australian. However, she does not reference any specific New Zealand feminist philosophies, and it might be that New Zealand followed the “popular” trends in feminism. I was just curious about how that might influence the text, and if anyone actually knew the answer.
