Archetypal Feminine, Fantasies and Aspiration for Freedom in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer

Archetypal Feminine, Fantasies and Aspiration for Freedom in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer

Dr. Mahendra Madhav Kamat

ABSTRACT

Henry Valentine Miller (1891-1980) is one of the most controversial writers of the twentieth century America. His novels are actually a presentation of the series of autobiographical events in his life supplemented with fantasies and dream sequences. He defines his novels as ‘auto novels’.  Tropic of Cancer is his first published novel, which created a controversy in the contemporary American society and invited legal suits and consequently it was banned.

Miller challenges the conventional ideas of Victorian based morality of the contemporary American society and by presenting the sexual encounters from his own life in his novels and Cancer is the first such attempt of Henry Miller.  In this novel, Miller narrates his experience in Paris and his ‘adventures of penis’ in the city of fashion and trends. For the expression of his thought, Miller narrates his sexual encounters in the city mostly with whores and prostitutes and opens a dark world of brothels for his readers. Through which Miller also presents chaos and destruction of the cancerous world. Further, in order to complete his visions of freedom, Miller takes help of Archetype feminine and fantasies.

Archetype Feminine is emerged from neo-paganism and Wiccan traditions and it is explored in the Jungian psychology as inheritance of earliest human ancestors and supposed to be present in the collective unconscious. Through the archetypal feminine images the writers of the twentieth century have presented the contemporary female mind which resists the values, canons and taboos of the patriarchal society. Henry Miller is one of them in the modern American Literature who challenges the hegemony of canons and taboos and Tropic of Cancer is the best example of this.

(Key words: Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, Archetypal Feminine, fantasy, individual identity)

A female archetype has emerged within neo-paganism, and more specifically Wiccan traditions. This archetype is one that encourages feminine empowerment and corroborates the spiritual aspect of female in a patriarchal society, culture, and values. In Jungian psychology, in fact an archetype is a primitive mental image that inherited from the earliest human ancestors, and supposed to be present in the collective unconscious. (Clarke, 2013) Through the archetypal feminine images the writers of the twentieth century have presented the contemporary female mind which resists the values, canons and taboos of the patriarchal society. Henry Miller is one of them in the modern American Literature who challenges the hegemony of canons and taboos of the Victorian moral standards in the contemporary America. He persuades his resistance through his autobiographical novels, in which his female characters register their rebellion against the Victorian model of morality.

Henry Miller, the eminent twentieth century writer expresses his life in his novels, which he delineates as ‘auto-novels’ and Tropic of Cancer is his first published auto-novel. In this novel, the narrator gives a spontaneous outlet to the feelings which have been bottled up for years. The novel is a document of Miller’s Paris life. In spite of this, the narrator, though, the author himself, remains detached and relatively free from of his environment, even when, he describes his own personal experiences and feelings including sexual one.  The narrator presents himself as a man bursts out of the detentions of his culture. He is an arbiter of values. Moreover, he presents himself as the messenger of the new world who comes after the final destruction of the contemporary world. Miller’s renowned critic William Gordon points out Miller’s intention in his famous novel Tropic of Cancer when he writes:

“Tropic of Cancer accepts that destruction and celebrates the affirmation of individual life. Its various sections explore the undiscovered life which belongs to the self but has been covered over in the effort to come to terms with a corrupt civilization.” (Gordon, 1967, p. 85)

In this novel, Miller leaves America and comes to Paris in search of the values imbibing individual freedom from social canons. He is consumed with the desires and loses everything to create new.  The task of Miller is to establish a sense of the self and a sense of the world. He tightly holds to the sense of self endeavour to make it freer and more independent of external events as the source of his well being and pleasure. Miller experiences the same pandemonium in Paris which he left in America. But he succeeds to sustain his self alive in the world of chaos. He expresses:

“I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am.  Everything that was literature has fallen from me.  There are no more books to be written, thank God.

This then? This is not a book. This is a libel, slander, defamation of character.  This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word.  No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny Time, Love, Beauty….. what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing” (Miller, 1968, pp. 1-2)

This also shows his becoming a parasite in order both to survive on his own terms, perhaps that is without working and despite his protestations to the contrary, in order to make literature of the experience. Miller further continues his efforts to establish his individual identity on the Victorian background. It is a form of rebirth after the destruction for Miller. To present his self destruction and rebirth he uses the archetypal feminine figure in the novel. According to him, the rebirth is from the womb of the terrible mother. Here, a terrible mother is EKHIDNA (or Echidna) is a monstrous drakaina with the head and breast of a woman. She, probably, represents or presides over the corruptions of the earth- rot, slime, fetid waters, illness and disease. This also suggests a struggle for self consciousness. This is a self destruction as Miller says to his beloved Tania in poetic expression. He expresses:

“The world is a cancer eating itself away. . . . I am thinking that when the great silence depends upon all and everywhere music will last triumph.  When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written. You, Tania, are my chaos. It is why I sing, it is not even I, it is the world dying, shedding the skin of time.  I am still alive, kicking in your womb, a reality to write upon.” (p. 2)

A feeling of self destruction hangs out his mind. He searches for chaos, moreover, to express his fascination. Miller’s archetypal feminine figure is not a person but Paris. For him, it is an eternal city. Female figures are Miller’s major concentration in the novel and he does not construct these figures from imagination or fiction though they appear in illusion some of the time. A renowned critic, Frank Kermode, who recognizes that Miller’s Paris is potentially symbolic, sees the city as representatives of twentieth-century American and European civilization, especially, and oddly, the puritan cultures of the North.  His female characters are mostly whores, prostitutes and hags. They are also dirty and starving people but, they are necessarily human beings having a symbolic relationship with images. Many of the female figures in the Cancer are visually fragmented. They appear with different names like, Tania, Irène, Llona. They are manifestations of a devouring, castrating, chthonic, Aphrodite, fascinating and deadly aspects of terrible feminine. Tania is equated with chaos. It is a destructive source of writer’s inspiration. She gives him both a reaction of hatred and a feeling of fascination.  A trouble with Irène, a wealthy woman in the forties, whom Miller’s companion Carl and Miller write letters is ‘that valise instead of cunt’. She expects the fat letters to shove in her valise. Miller retrieves her in illusion and presents his dream. He expresses:

“O Tania, where now is that warm cunt of yours, those fat, heavy garters, those soft, bulging thigh? There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I will ream out every wrinkle in your Sylvester with an ache in your belly and your womb turned inside out.” (p. 5)

His illusion continues with the strong possessive sense of sex in either situation. His dream continues thereby:

“I am fucking you, Tania, so that you’ll stay fucked. And if you are afraid of being fucked publicly I will fuck you privately. I will tear off a few hairs from your cunt and paste them on Boris’ chin. I will bite into your clitoris and spit out two franc pieces…..” (p. 6)

Here, Miller expresses his erotic passion. There is, actually, his revolt against the social taboos in the figurative way. He gives the roles of wives and mistresses to these feminine figures. Their function is the symbols of the unconscious. These women are stylized emphatically in order to show the outlining of their sexual functions. The Gorgonesque quality of the chthonic feminine is clearly recognized in the figure of Mona. She is a significant character in the novel. She comes to visit Miller in Paris. He commemorates her in a state of despondency and there, he seems to have some more affinity for her.  Mostly, she is symbolic and she flows as a memory. Mona is hardly a realistically developed character. Moreover, she is an image of other female figures and city. Miller describes:

“She talks to me so feverishly – as if there will be no tomorrow. “Be quiet, Mona! Just look at me . . .  don’t talk!” Finally she drops off and I pull my arm from under her.  My eyes close.  Her body is there beside me . . . it will be there till morning surely . . . It was in February I pulled out of the harbor in a blinding snowstorm.  The last glimpse I had of her was in the window waving goodbye to me. ...” (p. 19)

Here, Miller creates a dream image of Mona that is actually the expression of revolt which he conceals in his heart. She is a visualisation of his subversion also.

Furthermore, Miller creates a number of nonhuman symbols of the Feminine.  In a later passage of Gorgonesque, nature is revealed. He writes:

“I wake from a deep slumber to look at her. A pale light is tricking in. I look at her. A pale light is tricking in.  I look at her beautiful wild hair. I feel something crawling down my neck. I look at her again, closely. Her hair is alive. I pull back the sheet- more of them. They are swarming over the pillow.” (p. 20)

The figure of the Gorgon is one of the most familiar representations of the Terrible Mother in ancient mythology. Miller uses these symbols of Medusa and Gorgon to present a lust of a person and its outcome. Miller presents the demonic world of Terrible Feminine in Cancer with the crawling vermin in Mona’s hair, the serpents and spiders, the lice and bedbugs of the filthy scenes. Miller feels that this world is inescapable. This is a tenacious symbol of the unconscious and its dangerous but fecund character. Also, this filthy world is a birthplace of the sterile world. Fertility, creation, and life are impossible while having sterility. At the end of the first section, Mona and Miller leave the filthy Paris Hotel for the Hotel des Etats-Unis to rescue from bedbug.  In spite of this, they have to confront the dangerous and unpleasant encounter with the demonic world.  His confrontation with filthy world is unavoidable for him. And, accordingly, it creates a sense of fear in his heart and further, he expresses the afraid of loneliness. Miller writes:

“When I sit down to eat I always sit near the window.  I am afraid to sit on the other side of the table-it is too close to the bed and the bed is crawling.  I can see bloodstains on the gray sheets if I look that way, but I try not to look that way.  I look out on the courtyard where they are rinsing the slop pails.” (p. 65)

The Crawling vermin is a part of the archetype of the Terrible Mother It is clearly apparent in the serpentine hair of the Gorgonesque Mona. He cannot avoid confrontations with the deadly aspects of the Archetypal Feminine. The inner Experience of the Archetypal Feminine is expressed through the “Madame Delorme” fantasy scene.  The external world of the Cancer is projected to the outside world and less directly revealed. But, notwithstanding, similar relationship between the narrator and the aspects of the Archetypal Feminine is outlined in this analysis. The movement between this inner and outer world is a part of the action of the book.  An individual self of Miller wants freedom from the canons and taboos. In fact, his urge for freedom is reflected in much earlier when he speaks:

“I am a free man - and I need my freedom.  I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companies, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company...” (p. 68)

Moreover, Miller wants to use the freedom for the satisfaction of appetites. But he is constrained to admit that he likes Germaine’s sexuality. Proving suitable to Miller’s vision, Germaine is also a whore but she is different for him than others. He describes:

“Germaine was different. There is nothing to tell me so from her appearance. Nothing to distinguish her from the other trollops who met each afternoon and evening at the Café de l’Eléphant . . . . . . She commenced rubbing her pussy affectionately............ (pp. 44-45)

He likes Germaine and her sexuality too.  He quite intensively expresses his feelings for her when he writes:

“There was Germaine and there was the rosebush of hers. I liked them separately and I liked them together.” (p. 45)

Miller shows respect for Germaine because of her possession of the values which he admires- they are guts, fire, stamina, courage, and cunningness. Kate Millet comments on Miller’s approach in her article ‘Narcissism’. She writes:

“Miller’s ideal woman is a whore. Lawrence regarded prostitution as a profanation of the temple, but with Miller the commercialization of sexuality is not only a gratifying convenience for the male (since it is easier to pay than persuade) but the perfection of feminine existence, efficiently confining it to the function of absolute cunt. To illustrate this he calls upon Germaine, the archetypal French prostitute of American tourism: “a whore from the cradle; she was thoroughly satisfied with her role, enjoyed in it.” (Gottesman, 1992, p.138)

Further, Miller searches freedom in the novel. This is a freedom of I from myself and it is an urge of the novel as ‘myself’ is a constituent of social and religious dogma. Miller uses the imagery of flow to present the confrontation of consciousness and unconsciousness with its positive and negative sides both.  According to Leon Lewis:

“Miller sings in his most powerful voice of a world at once awful and wondrous; a world in which the artist/hero can thrive and his art can prosper” (Lewis, 1968, p. 101).

To explain his point of view, Lewis refers the following much celebrated extract from the novel:

““I love everything that flows”, said the great blind Milton of our times.  I was thinking of him this morning when I awoke with a great bloody shout of joy: I was thinking of his rivers and trees and all that world of night which he is exploring.  Yes, I said to myself, I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag.  I love the kidney with its painful gallstones, its gravel and what not; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul; I love the great rivers like Amazon and the Orinoco, where crazy men like Moravagine float on through dream and legend in an open boat and drown in the blind mouths of the river.  I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow, be that carries away the seed unfecund.  I love scripts that flow, be they hieratic, esoteric, perverse, polymorph, or unilateral. I love everything that flows, everything that has time in it and becoming, that brings us back to the beginning where there is never end: the violence of the prophets, the obscenity that is ecstasy, the wisdom of the fanatic, the priest with his rubber litany, the foul words of the whore, the spittle that floats away in the gutter, the milk of the breasts and the bitter honey that pours from the womb, all that is fluid, melting, dissolute and dissolvent all the pus and dirt  that in flowing is purifies, that losses its sense of origin, that makes the great circuit toward the death and dissolution. The great incestuous wish is to flow on, one with time, to merge the great image of the beyond with the here and now.  A fatuous, suicidal wish that is constipated by words and parlyzed by thought.  ( p. 261)

The symbols used above are the symbols of creative power. They suggest fecundity of the creator, whereas, the womb represents the great feminine Archetype of the unconscious.  The last lines, ‘that makes the great circuit...’, point out the danger of facing the self, and powerful and incestuous wish.  The acceptance without differentiation of this flow and flux leads to death, and further the wish for such dissolution is primordial. Miller gives an intellectual recognition clearly to the fecund depths of the individual. The last line gives way to the necessity of avoiding the fatuous, suicidal wish.

Miller’s most of the fantasies are presented in illusions which are his efforts to topple the established Victorian moral ideas in the society. The orthodox Victorian morality gives hardly any scope to an individual to express one’s sexuality. Every sexual activity including the physical, verbal and social which is strictly under control is rejected by Miller. Moreover Victorian morality does not allow sexual expression and satisfaction of a woman. Sexuality is an obvious expression for men but not for women according to the Victorian moral standards. Miller revolts against the moral standards and endeavours to establish his own identity in the Victorian background. His women, too, achieve pleasure of freedom and ultimately the separate identity. They boldly come out for sexual gratification in the patriarchal society.

Miller presents here how sexuality was used as a means more to control the freedom of the thought than the freedom of the body and presents his aspiration for freedom. Therefore, Miller’s presentation of sexuality through the descriptions of actual incidents and the construction of fantasy and illusions are significant. They are not complete pornographic details of the sexuality. Through this, he asserts that his sexuality is not physical but it is his psychological necessity of subversion. He takes his fantasies and illusions to project sexuality. His sexuality is not purely for his own sexual satisfaction but they are also the representative of the subversion against patriarchal and Victorian moral values. Miller’s novels created agitation and anger in the contemporary society and simultaneously they were tremendously popular too. In fact, these were not only his efforts to convey the resistance in the mind of a contemporary generation to the social establishment and the flag bearers of the Victorian Morality in the contemporary American society but reflect the minds of the upcoming generation of the Western world.

References:

-        Gordon, William A. (1967). The Mind and Art of Henry Miller. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

-        Gottesman, Ronald (Ed.). (1992). Critical Essays on Henry Miller. New York: G.K. Hall and Co.

-        http://www.theoi.com/Ther/DrakainaEkhidna1.html. (2011)

-        Jung Carl Gustav. (1968). Man and his Symbols. Dell: Mass Market Paperback.

-        Lewis, Leon. (1968). Henry Miller: The Major Writings. New York: Schocken Books.

-        Miller, Henry. (1961). Tropic of Cancer. New York: Grove Press.

-        Richard L. W. Clarke. (2013). http://www.rlwclarke.net/