The term 'canon' is derived from the Greek kanon, which means 'rule' or 'standard' (Pollock 1999:3). The term invokes the power of symbolic law and social organisation.
Thus, texts and artifacts that have been approved by and accepted into the canon both constitute and set the standard for it. This circularity circumscribes western artistic production. A cultural canon functions within the logic of an inside/outside opposition:
texts and artifacts that are selected or recognised by the canon are constituted as the objects of artistic mastery that are admitted into the canon. Because artistic canons have been defined by those who have been advantaged historically, in terms of material and symbolic supremacy (a ubiquitous heterocentric white male identity group) artistic canons effectively legitimate and reinforce the analogy of white, heterosexual males with culture (and relegate women to the realm of nature). ~ Pollock (1999:9) reinforces this claim when she defines the canon as "...a discursive formation which constitutes the objects/texts it selects as the products of artistic mastery" which essentially "...contributes to the legitimation of white masculinity's exclusive identification with creativity and culture".
Clearly, the bounded structure of the canon also privileges the unified, rational subject that, as we have seen in Chapter One, is produced within phallocentric imaginary. Like the fixed phallic signifier, the canon and its aesthetic standards supposedly pre-exist that structure.
The standard text or object of artistic mastery should thus itself be bounded and bear no trace to its maker. Due to the inscription of the female body as lacking in discretionary boundaries, artistic mastery, like the rational mastery of the individual, eludes the feminine subject.
In the western collective unconscious, the artistic genius or auteur who is included in the canonical structure is firmly embedded (and I intend to pun) in hommosexual fantasies that erect a generative paternal figure, god or artistic genius, as the imagined source of creation and creativity. The creative genius (the artist) in this sense displaces the power of the maternal body to produce life itself and takes us back to the production of a problematic subject in the Oedipal narrative. It is apparent that canonical standards and traditions are built around a biased selection process that renders female artists an
1 It should be noted that statements that identify a 'group' such as 'white heterosexual males' are not intended as a reversed misogyny (ie. misandry) but instead point to a particular version of masculinity, powerfully entrenched, that has in turn enabled the production of negative versions of femininity.
exception to the rule. In theatrical canons, it is no coincidence that the majority of highly trained, well-funded and influential practitioners are western-educated white men. Surely it is not merely coincidental that the academy is based upon a historical affiliation with the works of European male academics, artists, philosophers and scientists. The gender, sexuality and race of the artistic genius or the auteur is not problematised in mainstream criticism because the supreme indifference of the heterocentric, masculine voice is assumed. The structural borderlines of the canon foreclose the immanence and corporeality of the particular, gendered body. The particular, gendered body is pushed aside both in the production of the artistic persona and in modes of representation that reproduce dominant modes of signification.
The canon is steeped in ideals of regulated beauty and form. The aesthetic standards of the canon are assuredly sexuate, although vis a vis Kantian aesthetic judgement, the appeal to natural and universal phenomena in producing these standards
sublimate the gender biases that underpin them. According to Alberro (2004), Kant divides the aesthetic into the artificial dichotomies of the beautiful and the sublime. In the presence of beauty, the human subject experiences a pleasurable sense of alignment between the faculties of the mind and the mind's experience of reality. The turmoil of the sublime exceeds sense, measure and order; the subject is "powerfully made aware of its own limitations" (ibid). These aesthetic categories, however, have been associated with the masculine and feminine respectively, the female body having been thought of as disorganised and disruptive. This categorical division of the aesthetic into the beautiful and the sublime serves to explain the division of representations of the canonical female between the beautiful and sublime: the 'beautiful' female is necessarily passive (already castrated), fetishised and her body classically closed, smooth and young. She is to be found in the dramatic canon typically fainting, weeping or dead (I am thinking of
'unfortunate females' such as Ophelia or Juliet). The "Bad Sublime" (Zeglin Brand 1995:
43) on the other hand, is the quintessential castrating female who takes on the form of the witch, whore, monster, murdereress, temptress or demonic woman whose overt sexuality and/or corporeal excess (grotesquerie really) is threatening and simultaneously fascinating (such figures as Medea, the Medusa, Sphinx and Salome are recalled here). Griselda Pollock suggests that horrific female figures, and here Pollock refers particularly to the representation of lesbian and prostitutional bodies, are used by male artists to displace the maternal, so as to reclaim a virile and autogenic creativity that has no debt to a maternal figure or origin (Pollock 1999:35). The sublime female is not merely an historical figure.
Alberro (2004:38) argues that a resurgence of the demand for the beautiful object in contemporary contexts is indicative of a nostalgia for pre-modernist aesthetic sensibilities that valorise a Kantian notion of different types of aesthetic experience (Alberro 2004:38).
I would suggest that the 'cult of beauty' in the arts indicates also a nostalgia for the promulgation of the feminine ideal as commodity-object and the conservative patriarchal framework that guarantees such a construct.
I have been speaking about the representation of the female body specifically in dramatic and artistic texts, but in terms of the structure of canonical, written dramatic texts, there is certainly also a bias towards the phallic imaginary that forecloses the maternal. The Aristotlean dramatic structure that is the blueprint for 'good' drama is premised upon the inside/outside dichotomy, or the difference between open/closed. The Aristotlean drama focuses on narrative coherence and closure which reasserts the desirability of aesthetic closure/harmony/resolution. This aesthetic, I argue, disguises the traces of the text's production so that there is one (phallogocentric) authorial voice that prescribes the narrative trajectory, from introduction to climax to denouement. This really begs the question of whether narrative closure is a necessary condition of a dramatic text or whether this structure really just reinscribes phallic authority in the guise of universal moral lessons. I would add that Aristotle himself considered women to be alogos or without reason and hence incapable of making rational judgements. In The Generation of Animals, he cautions that women, because their bodies can change shape in pregnancy and childbearing, are morphologically dubious. For Aristotle, the lack of stable form means that women by default share with the monster the abnormality that evokes both the horror and fascination which psychoanalytic theory takes as the "fundamental structure of the mechanism of desire" (Braidotti 1999:33). Being alogos, of course, precludes women from artistic mastery. Lest we think that Aristotle's thinking has no bearing upon modern thought, Kant argued that aesthetic judgement must be "disinterested". However, the immanence of the female precludes her from producing such judgements about standards of taste. Kant finds women's opinions quite tasteless in itself: a woman who "has a head full of Greek" or who "indulges in arguments about mechanics...might as well even have a beard" (Zeglin Brand 1995: 92). In short, a knowledgeable woman is ugly. It is such thinking that has established the canon as a structure that excludes women on the grounds of dubious (Shildrick (1997) uses the term 'leaky' corporeality and assumed moral and aesthetic ineptitude.