Raucous Perversities: The New Domestics
Teresa Fleming
In “Raucous Perversities: The New Domestics,” I dispute the equation of reproductive futurity with biological gestation which has emerged in contemporary queer theory. Taking up Lee Edelman’s polemic No Future as my interlocutor, I argue that drawing a false equivalency between biological and ideological reproduction betrays the destabilizing and liberatory potential of queer aesthetics: a mode of reading which by definition resists presumptions of a constant congruence between body and subject.
In framing this argument, I engage in revisionist readings of works which span decades, taking up Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film Rebecca and Zadie Smith’s 2000 novel White Teeth as evidence of how the frictions of illegible identities continue to manifest in contemporary fiction. I examine how these works are defined by their constraints, revealing how they each establish a vocabulary of visual and linguistic signifiers through which to articulate the discordant identities of their marginal queer characters. Here, domestic space and commodities carry the weight of veiled relations between women, taking the insistent labor of manifesting the desires and identities which fall outside the punishing grammar of the nuclear family. Ultimately, I aim to establish a practice of queer aesthetics as a mode of reading which turns back on itself, interrogating its own presumptions of embodied integrity to aspire towards a radically intersectional future.
Key terms: reproductive futurity, psychoanalysis, visual studies, queer theory
An abiding problem of queer theory is its inherent contradiction in terms: how to write on a body of desires whose articulation and representation have historically been subject to innumerable legal and moralistic constraints, and how to propose an analysis of the queer subject, which by its very definition refuses the categorical taxonomies of identity politics. Any project seeking to address these questions must locate the contemporary texts with which it engages within the larger canon of visual and literary culture—one that took shape in the shadows of violently compulsory heteronormativity, subsequently developing, out of necessity, a lexicon of misdirection and allusion which sought to speak into existence that which could not be expressed overtly. I will draw on this vocabulary of evasion to examine the ways indefinable identities are rendered visible within texts that forbid their very existence.
Although separated by sixty years and an ocean of ideological differences, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film Rebecca and Zadie Smith’s 2000 novel White Teeth share an oblique sensibility, their structures shaped by characters situated at the margins of more central familial units. Both narratives are informed by a profound concern for the competing impulses of reproductive futurity, as embodied by the static, self-replicating structures of the nuclear family, and the influence of deviant women, whose unfixed identities and illegible desires cast them in opposition to these stolid social apparatuses. Rebecca and White Teeth both unfold in an England overwritten by competing histories, an overtly contested land in which every space is imbued with meaning—a necessary device, as both pieces are defined, in many ways, by what remains unarticulated. The transgressors who are cast as threats to the nuclear family (and hence the future itself) are rarely, if ever, named for their crimes. But this is not to say that their identities are entirely absent from either text. Rather, both pieces employ a unique set of visual and linguistic signifiers which serve as a point of confluence and exchange between women, expressing those desires and impulses which cannot be named directly. I will argue that placing these two works, disparate as they may appear, into conversation with one another can offer a vital lens through which to examine a fissure in contemporary queer theory: the question of whether to cast reproduction as an inherently conservative or potentially liberatory process.
While resistance to the ideologies of compulsory reproduction is by no means a singular argument among queer theorists, I will take as the primary exemplar of this current of thought Lee Edelman, whose 2004 polemic No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive delivered a scathing critique and cultural analysis of reproductive futurism as it manifests in the processes of familial reproduction and the figure of the sacrosanct Child. Edelman evokes “the disciplinary image of the ‘innocent’ Child performing its mandatory cultural labor of social reproduction,” but he goes far beyond the assertion, borrowed from Louis Althusser, that the family unit serves as an ideological state apparatus that replicates the bourgeoisie status quo, assuring a continued cultural and economic inheritance to perpetuate systems of power.1 Reproductive futurism may thus be defined as the systems of value and thought which take for granted the primacy and inherent goodness of the Child, whose existence, real or imagined, is read as an affirmation and reification of the existing social order. The Child is imbued with the promise and potential of forward movement for the individual, the family, and the nation, while offering simultaneous assurance of a future formed in the image of the past—an inherently conservative vision of progress.
And yet it is not merely a reinvestment and renewal of the social order that the Child signifies; rather, Edelman argues, it “marks the fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity: an erotically charged investment in the rigid sameness of identity that is central to the compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism.”2 The Child is therefore called upon to codify the notion of identity as stable, articulable, and capable of being defined in coherent terms. Edelman asserts that the conception of queerness is defined through its negative relation to the Child: it “names the side of those not ‘fighting for the children,’ the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism.”3 The notion of a queer identity, in Edelman’s terms, thus appears oxymoronic: if it can be defined at all, it is through its devotion to slippage and fantasy and its refusal to signify with any consistency and coherence. It stands in direct contradiction to the narratives of linear growth offered by reproductive futurity, which promise a stable identity for individuals and nations alike through the inevitable continuation of scientific knowledge and political progress—a self-actualization story writ large, in which the failures of signification are hurdles to be inevitably overcome.
Edelman’s treatise provides a useful framework through which to envision the competing impulses of reproductive futurity and queer resistance in contemporary visual culture, but he never establishes a meaningful distinction between the figure of the Child, as a signifier produced and perpetuated by ideological systems, and the beings themselves, as embryonic creatures which emerge from the messily imprecise biological processes of human reproduction. Edelman plays fast and loose with this division, and in doing so extends his indictment of the inherent conservatism of reproductive futurism to literal reproduction, casting the choices of queer individuals to procreate through in-vitro fertilization, surrogacy, or adoption as an outright betrayal of “the ideological burden
of queerness.”4
How, then, to envision a form of reproduction that does not adhere to the ideology of reproductive futurity? Maggie Nelson addresses this question in her 2015 genre-defying work of autotheory, The Argonauts. She takes the temperature of contemporary queer theory as exemplified by Edelman’s argument, arguing that “the tired binary that places femininity, reproduction, and normativity on one side and masculinity, sexuality, and queer resistance on the other has lately reached a kind of apotheosis.”5 Nelson’s evocation of this binary gets at the heart of Edelman’s inherent contradiction: to define queerness purely and singularly through its opposition to reproduction is to render immovable the very thing which is purportedly characterized by its refusal of static identity, to fix in place that which refuses to be pinned down. It is also worth noting the distinction Nelson hints at here: for childless cisgendered male critics such as Edelman, the functions of biological reproduction are relegated to the realm of the theoretical, and as such they may be all the more easy to conflate with ideological reproduction. Without any lived experience, Nelson suggests, it is easy to overlook “all the messy, raucous perversities to be found in both pregnant and nonpregnant bodies … in cavorting in crumpled bed sheets, in the daily work of caretaking and witness.”6 In describing her own experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, Nelson bears witness to the overlapping impulses of maternal caretaking and desire—two instincts which, rather than conflicting with one another, are inherently linked within the body itself. This connection transcends the conventional mechanics of heterosexual intercourse: Nelson recalls visiting a clinic for the in-vitro fertilization procedures that led to her pregnancy, writing directly to her partner as she recalls how “after the nurse dimmed the lights and left the room, you would hold me as I made myself come. The point wasn’t romance as much as it was to suck the specimen upward.”7 Desire and reproduction, even when removed from the context of sex, remain inextricably linked. The latter is dependent upon the former in literal terms as a matter of bodily mechanics, the dimming of the lights evoking the cliched gesture of a lover, even as it constitutes a necessary step in a medical procedure, carried out by a professional.
Far from the clear cut process of biological reproduction that Edelman envisions in lockstep with the dogma of the family as an ideological state apparatus, Nelson teases out instead the various intersections and divergences of sexuality and reproduction. The converging meanings of these acts, at once clinical and romantic, seem to embody Edelman’s notion of queerness, where nothing can be singularly defined and double meanings abound. Rather than reiterating a conventional sequence of familial formation as mandated by reproductive futurity (first comes love, then marriage, then the baby carriage), Nelson proposes a complex constellation of erotics and procreative processes, as unique and irreplicable as the individuals who might constitute a family. Her work is a necessary check on Edelman’s indictment of images of pregnancy and the maternal body as the physical manifestations of reproductive futurity.
In calling up White Teeth as a fictive testing grounds for Nelson’s narrative theories, I will argue that if Nelson’s work lays out a theory of radical reproduction (that is to say, a form of reproduction which does not cleave to the ideological strictures of reproductive futurity), then Smith’s work can be read as its fictional praxis. White Teeth offers literary proof of Nelson’s premise, demanding that its readers imagine a process of procreation that stands in direct defiance of the myths of progress and fixed identity upon which reproductive futurism lays its foundation. Instead, Smith imagines a future free from a past, a deviant desire that is rendered illegible within familial structures but emerges, unscathed, in the form of a child that embodies an open, undefinable identity.
Smith’s work is revolutionary because it possesses the breadth to acknowledge both Edelman’s and Nelson’s theoretical frameworks; Smith does not ignore the punishing mandates of the nuclear family, which demands the replication of its structure and ideology through compulsory reproduction, but nor does she confine her representations of procreation to this profoundly limiting framework. The critical body of work examining White Teeth has primarily approached it from a postcolonial lens, an appropriate choice given Smith’s sustained attention to the migration of the Iqbal and Jones families across continents and the pressing weight of history that shapes their lives. But I believe that a new point of entry can be found by recentering and examining the marginal queer characters who emerge in Smith’s text, and tracking the oblique ways that their desires manifest within a limiting familial grammar.
The discourse surrounding Hitchcock’s work in Rebecca has likewise framed it as a product of the constraints which gave rise to it, reading it less as a work of representation than one of absence and allusion. Its celluloid images stand in contrast to the imagined ‘true’ film, which might have been produced outside the moralistic confines of the Hays Code. But such readings bely the revelations Hitchcock enacts onscreen, materializing the forbidden specter of queerness through the visual vocabulary of domestic melodrama. If Hitchcock developed a visual lexicon of sublimated desire out of necessity, Smith takes up this vocabulary of allusion by choice, resituating the subtly subversive potential of queer desire within the heart of the family. I will place White Teeth within the canon of closeted cinema, as exemplified by Rebecca, to evoke the ways in which the codified language of family relegates queer desire to the unspeakable margins, casting its subjects alternatingly as sites of shame and fascination, and displacing desire into the nonverbal realm of image and material.
And yet White Teeth goes further, daring to speak into existence a future which situates the porous, shifting identity submitted by Edelman as a direct product of the radical reproduction proposed by Nelson. In situating these competing currents of queer theory within the narrative frame of a familial history, Smith’s work speaks acutely to the most pressing questions of critically conscious reproduction in the twenty-first century.
Reproductive Futurity and the Specter of Queerness in Rebecca
Hitchcock’s Rebecca has long been read by queer theorists as a foundational text, exemplary of the dichotomy Edelman posits: an unforgiving binary between the mandates of heterosexual reproductive futurity, and a destabilizing queerness which refuses the legibility and logic of a stable identity. Its nameless, naive heroine is swept away to Manderly, the ancestral estate of Maxim de Winter, after their whirlwind romance and marriage. Her obligations are clear: to facilitate the continuation of his family line by giving birth to a future that closely resembles the past ensuring the continuation of the name, wealth, and estate of the de Winter family. She is the mechanism through which the power structures undergirding this familial narrative seek to reproduce themselves, and her progenerative coupling with Mr. de Winter seems to hold all the conservative promises of reproductive futurity Edelman describes. But this imagined future is threatened by the recurrence of aberrant women, whose obscure identities and desires have no place within the grammar of the De Winter family. Maxim’s late first wife, whose name lends the film its title, and her faithful servant, Mrs. Danvers, manifest as unwelcome reminders of an unquiet past, come to imperil the promised future of familial regeneration. This conflict embodies the competing influences of a self-regenerating heterosexual coupling which affirms the stable identities of its subjects, cast in opposition to a destabilizing, illegible queerness which threatens the linear reproduction of the social order.
Rebecca can be viewed as a seminal work of filmmaking, but it is also a case study in the limitations of the social and political conditions from which it emerged. Released only a few years after the institution of the Hays Code, which issued a broad strokes ban on all forms of “sex perversion,” it is a masterwork in simultaneous concealment and revelation. Here, the unspeakability of queer identity is not metaphorical but literal, and where language is limited by law, Hitchcock turns to the visual grammar of cinema to offer form to the unspeakable identities of its queer villains. The material of fabric emerges as the motif through which their desires are articulated—the blank cinematic dream screen onto which indeterminate impulses can be projected, and through which they may gain form.
Throughout the film, Rebecca never appears onscreen but her influence is made visible through the domestic spaces she once occupied. In a pivotal scene, the new Mrs. de Winter enters the closed wing of the house where Rebecca once lived in seclusion, a space whose forbidden status evokes the fairy tale sensibility of Bluebeard’s castle. But it is not a punishing patriarch she encounters here; rather, she meets a more menacing order of uncanny female power.
Rebecca’s bedroom is a site suffused with material. When Mrs. Danvers approaches the new Mrs. de Winter, she is framed within a billowing set of parted curtains that threaten to envelop her. The room itself appears to be constructed (or concealed) entirely by floor to ceiling curtains, a shifting layer laid over more solid walls which seems to render the framework of the house itself fluid. The physical structures of the house are thus visually destabilized from the inside out, Maxwell’s rigid familial legacy overwritten by the more fluid markers left behind by Rebecca. Even as the new Mrs. de Winter attempts to explore, it is Mrs. Danvers who holds control in this space, pulling a cord to release heavy curtains, letting in light and transforming the room with the air of a theatrical director. Her power here upsets the domestic hierarchy of mistress and servant, establishing a privileged relationship between Mrs. Danvers and Rebecca’s impeccably preserved domestic sphere. In this scene, desires are laid bare with a frankness that is absent throughout much of the film. “You’ve always wanted to see this room, haven’t you madam?” Mrs. Danvers inquires: a statement masquerading as a question, which tugs at the tension of their power dynamic, evoking Danvers’s purported position of subservience even as she reveals to the new Mrs. de Winter her very own unspoken desires.
As she opens a closet door to show the new Mrs. de Winter Rebecca’s perfectly preserved clothes, Mrs. Danvers appears framed within the closet doors, nestled among fabrics and furs. As Judith Mayne notes in her essay Directed by Dorothy Arzner, the structures of closets as liminal spaces frequently operate as signifiers of queer female desire: “the closet, as a figure of the precarious boundary between privacy and publicity, can submerge or express lesbian possibilities.”8 The bedroom in its entirety operates as a kind of closet, cloistered by numerous layers of curtains, and the intimacy shared by the new Mrs. de Winter and Mrs. Danvers is more overt in this scene than in any other.
Thus, the physical structures of the house, overlaid with meaning by their previous inhabitants, reach out from the past to disrupt the orderly hierarchies of the present. The scope of the scene narrows as it progresses, shifting from encompassing the space at large to framing only the garments, which function as surrogates for unnamed desires. When Mrs. Danvers presses the arm of a coat against her cheek, the score trills, a musical cue that signals a greater significance than the mere contact of skin on fur, creating a disconnect between affect and image. She touches her face to the coat, then brushes it against the new Mrs. de Winter’s cheek and collar bone, as the younger woman stands mutely paralyzed. Here, fabric operates as a substitute for physical contact between them, functioning as a tactile intermediary between the two. The women, so frequently cast in opposition to one another, appear for once visually unified in a reverse shot that casts them as doubles, two sides of the same coin united by a shared fascination with the absent former mistress of the house. As the new Mrs. de Winter approaches the bed, beckoned on by Mrs. Danvers, the camera pans across the room, encircling her as she appears framed within the bed’s curtains, her background obscured by another layer of billowing fabric.
Mrs. Danvers reveals an embroidered monogrammed pillowcase, its textured surface a signifier of her hours of handwork. But this is a case that conceals as much as it reveals, opening to uncover a hidden black nightgown that Mrs. Danvers shifts back and forth through the light, as one might a dance partner. Her probing fingers appear through the translucent fabric, proof of the fabric’s fragile value, as the women both gaze, transfixed, at the gown. This, too, is a garment characterized primarily by what it lacks—opacity, for one, but also its owner, leaving it a hollow space animated only as Danvers pushes her hand through it. In a single gesture, she simultaneously reaches out through the fabric, forward to the new Mrs. de Winter, and back into the past, as if to grasp some remnant of Rebecca through her gown. As she approaches, the new Mrs. de Winter raises her hand jerkily as though to reach out along with Danvers, both hands moving through the obscured interior of the gown, both occupying the space that serves as a surrogate for Rebecca. But then she seems to think better of it, recoiling and turning away from Danvers, who remains transfixed by the robe, as she exits, once again parting the curtain that sequesters Rebecca’s room from the rest of the Manderly estate. After leaving the closed wing of the house, the new Mrs. de Winter gathers herself and assumes a more authoritative stance with Danvers, asserting that she “prefer[s] to forget everything that happened this afternoon.” She offers no clarification of what events, exactly, she wishes to forget, and so this experience too remains unarticulated, the ambiguities of the previous scene never clearly distilled for the spectator but left in the nebulous space between what is shown and what may be interpreted. The desire Hitchcock represents visually, through material and movement, cannot be named within the film, and therefore manifests primarily through visual and tactile mediums.
The unspeakability of Rebecca’s desires is rendered still more overt when Maxim evokes but refuses to name them, casting her instead as an overt threat to the progression of familial lineage. He confesses to the new Mrs. de Winter that after his wedding to Rebecca, “She told me all about herself. Everything. Things I’ll never tell a living soul.” Maxim’s words sketch the outlines of a transgression that goes further than the infidelities and incest he recounts to the new Mrs. de Winter, evoking the unnameable qualities Rebecca revealed to him. This identity remains unexpressed but ever present, a subtext that reveals itself even as it conceals its exact details. As a ghostly figure, Rebecca’s body, as well as her unspoken identity, are rendered both absent and present. Her eventual pregnancy, rather than becoming part of a pattern of generations, is cast as a threat to Maxim’s continuing lineage, a product of an affair with her cousin. Maxim speaks as Rebecca, recounting her assertion that “it ought to give you the thrill of your life, Max, to watch my son grow bigger every day and know that when you’re gone, Manderly will be his.” This confession, for which she is ultimately murdered by Maxim, reveals not only her deviant desires but the threat she poses to the reproduction of familial structures. Her apparent pregnancy, rather than constituting a continuation of the processes of regeneration and inheritance, poses a distinct threat to Maxim’s family line—the child, as she warns him, is not his own. Moreover, Rebecca’s pregnancy is ultimately revealed to be not a fetus but a tumor, the procreative image turned on its head and rendered sterile. Her abortive demise is typical of this cinematic era, which takes up the queer subject as an object of intrigue and fascination before subjecting it to a punishing ending, extinguishing the disruptive desires it embodies with a
moralistic finality.
Familial Language and Radical Reproduction in White Teeth
Where Hitchcock employed the language of film to negotiate the legal limitations imposed upon representation, Smith borrows from this visual vocabulary to demonstrate the ways in which the family renders desires that fall outside the bounds of heterosexual reproduction unspeakable in White Teeth. At the outset of the novel, Alsana Iqbal, pregnant with twins and newly resituated by her husband Samad in the London neighborhood of Willesden Green, suggests the inevitability of a future for her unborn children that will mirror the past of their father: “these bumps . . . they will always have daddy-long-legs for fathers. One leg in the present, one in the past.”9 Alsana’s conception of her family straddles national and temporal boundaries, evoking an image of bilateral symmetry: her husband and sons manifesting as the various limbs of a singular body, perpetually in motion, replicating itself through the vehicle of her womb. This definition would seem, at first, to exemplify in literal terms the vision of reproductive futurity outlined by Edelman. But, as in Rebecca, the narrative expands to encompass women whose desires are cast as bizarre and inarticulable threats to the stability of the budding family.
Smith directly addresses the use of evasive linguistic structures in her introduction of Neena, the niece of Alsana, who appears as an ancillary character at the outset of the novel and is renamed “Niece-of-Shame” within the argot of the Iqbal family: “It used to come in longer sentences, e.g., You have brought nothing but shame . . . or My niece, the shameful . . . but now because Alsana no longer had the time or energy to summon up the necessary shock each time, it had become abridged to Niece-of-Shame, an all-purpose tag that summed up the general feeling.”10 In this familial context, Neena’s identity demands the creation of a new vocabulary, resulting in a compound label that frequently eclipses her real name throughout the text’s narration. Like Rebecca, her deviance manifests not as specific transgressions but as a “general feeling,” a sense of impropriety that remains unspoken. Throughout much of the text, this is the only context in which readers know her, the source of her shame remaining undefined, visible only through her resistance to the prescriptive familial structures to which Alsana adheres. She overtly challenges these processes by imagining a hypothetical pregnancy, asserting “if I knew I was going to have a boy I’d have to seriously consider abortion.”11 In this provocation, Neena calls up at once her rejection of men as a whole and reproductive futurity itself, wedding the two in an utter repudiation of the processes of progeneration that Alsana seeks to fulfill. Alsana reacts with shock and outrage, covering her ears, as though the very naming of such a desire poses a hostile threat to her own pregnancy. When Neena is finally named as a lesbian, it is this terminology alone which prompts a reaction from Samad, who protests “I don’t think I want to hear that word in this house again . . . I am trying my best to run a godly house.”12 Samad takes issue not with the presence of queer desire in his home, but with its articulation and labelling as such. The home is synonymous with “godly” faith, a physical structure which stands in for the familial order he hopes to impose. Smith thus casts the overt naming of female desire as a disruptive force at odds with the familial grammar established by the Iqbals.
While Smith does not deny the marginal, menacing role to which queerness is relegated within the nuclear family, neither does she suggest that this manner of unmoored, illegible identity is the exclusive province of Sapphic desire. In the final chapters of White Teeth, she proposes a new identity that categorically refuses the various possible identifiers levied upon it, when Irie Jones becomes pregnant following the quick one-two punch of dual trysts with the identical twins Magid and Millat Iqbal. The narrative revelation of her pregnancy is delivered while the Jones and Iqbal families are en route to a presentation of the FutureMouse © experiment, a public culmination of research which promises to forecast the biological future of a mouse’s life through an exact map of its carefully calibrated DNA. The project is bolstered by faith in the absolute certainty of genetics as insurance against the unknown, the ideal set of signifiers through which a select few may read the future, a synthesis of scientific and personal progress which would seem to embody the tenets of reproductive futurity. Irie’s ambiguous pregnancy thus stands in direct contradiction to this promise of a complete, inborn identity: her unborn child is defined from its very conception by the impossible dual parentage of the Iqbal twins:
Irie was eight weeks pregnant, and she knew it. What she didn’t know, and what she realized she may never know (the very moment she saw the ghostly blue lines materialize on the home test, like the face of the madonna on the zucchini of an Italian housewife), was the identity of the father. No test on earth would tell her. Same thick black hair. Same twinkling eyes. Same habit of chewing the tops of pens. Same deoxyribonucleic acid. She could not know her body’s decision, what choice it had made, in the race to the gamete, between the saved and the unsaved. She could not know if the choice would make any difference. Because whichever brother it was, it was the other one too. She would never know.13
In this early assessment of the unborn child’s life, the only thing posited with any certainty about its future is the perpetual unknowability of its paternal lineage. Through Smith’s parenthetical invocation of the madonna on the zucchini, the presumably stable relationship between the signifier of the binary test and the signified state of pregnancy is pulled into the register of the ghostly apocryphal. Rather than a one-to-one correspondence between the two, this simile draws out the process of reading by the perceiving subject, evoking the ambiguous labor of meaning-creation that is present in any process of interpretation. This is the “gap of signification” that Edelman calls up, the inherent lack in the signifier that falls short of naming the real, and that challenges the subjective stability which reproductive futurity takes for granted. Her references to the body’s “decision” and “choice” locate the true active agent of the reproductive process within Irie herself, buried so deep that she cannot know it, affirming the inherently random chance of procreation as a physical process which defies any attempt of the mind to impose an external logic upon it. Within the body, there can be no binaries between “saved and unsaved,” only that which is discarded and that which takes root. The moral order of the exterior world collapses in this sphere. Smith toys with the tension between the known and the unknown, situating the reality which Irie may “never know” amongst a laundry list of phenotypic details: the hair, the eyes, the pens, all reflect an intimate knowledge of the child’s parentage. Its lineage is clear as mud, narrowed down to a single branch of the Iqbal family tree which Smith has traced back for generations. This list of qualities further underscores the dissonance between signifier and signified: there can be no visible proof offered of the different identities, because the visual markers of parentage are all shared.
But this list of qualities goes further, undermining the fantasy of total knowledge offered by narratives of scientific progress: DNA, the presumed signifying code of the body, proves itself an unreliable narrator here. The subject of the children’s father is positioned between the two boys, an inheritance equally shared, a code split in two while paradoxically remaining whole. Smith thus undermines the promise proffered by FutureMouse © of a fixed identity, a knowable future, a selfhood written in permanent ink. The dual assurances of reproductive futurity, a coherent self and a fantasy of progress, are dashed against the competing realities of Irie’s embryonic daughter. And yet, at the end of this passage, this apparently central question of parentage is declared null and void “because whichever brother it was, it was the other one too.” Smith thus proposes a child whose parentage is not just unknowable but inherently fluid, an overlapping set of identities which play out simultaneously. In place of Edelman’s symbolic Child, which affirms the fantasy of a fixed and stable selfhood, Irie’s unborn daughter challenges both the possibility of naming and fixing any identity and the guarantee of an all-seeing, all-knowing, scientific certainty promised by the doctrine of futurity itself.
At the novel’s close, Irie’s daughter remains nameless, fatherless, and undefinable, an affirmation of the boundless potential her conception represents. The scientific conference falls into chaos, and the FutureMouse © slips free of its cage—its inborn affirmation of a fixed, knowable future disappearing into thin air. By way of an epilogue, Smith offers “a snapshot seven years hence of Irie, Joshua, and Hortense sitting by a Caribbean sea
. . . while Irie’s fatherless little girl writes affectionate postcards to Bad Uncle Millat and Good Uncle Magid and feels free as Pinnocchio, a puppet clipped of paternal strings.”14 Rather than shoehorning the subjects of the photograph into a provisional familial structure of stepparent relations, they are simply named as themselves. Irie’s daughter remains “fatherless,” her lack of a defined paternal lineage cast not as a deprivation but a blessing. She is “free as Pinnochio,” a creature simultaneously real and unreal, a changeling defined at first by the circumstances which led to its creation, but whose transformation ultimately renders it something else entirely, far outside the parameters set by its creator. Her two possible fathers are situated at a slant within the grammar of the family, recast as uncles, two sides of the same coin which occupy a shared, if distant ledge in the life of their daughter. Their binary morality is rendered inert by way of their joint relationship to Irie, in which each is allocated an equal measure of affection. In its framing as a snapshot, a single moment in time preserved, Smith’s imagined future is left open to interpretation—no fixed destination for Irie and her daughter, but rather a promise of freedom, of family that scarcely resembles a nuclear model, which fixes nothing in place but the enduring fluidity of an undefined identity.
While White Teeth employs the vocabulary of elusion that was necessary to represent queer desire in the cinematic era of Rebecca, the tenor of their closing scenes stands in direct contrast to one another: where the latter leaves viewers with a slowly dissolving shot of the ancestral de Winter estate burning to the ground, the former leaves viewers with a bucolic memento, a vision of a future unbridled by a stultifying past. And yet the meaning conveyed in both messages is in many ways a shared one: they signify the end of the patriarchal lineage of the de Winter and Iqbal family names, the promise of a future defined by nothing so much as its break from the past, the cessation of the processes of reproduction and replication that consumed much of their narratives thus far.
These fictional counterparts raise the question implicit in Edelman and Nelson’s debate: if we must turn away from the demands of reproductive futurity, can it be possible to envision a path forward which is radically different? One which casts off the bonds of limiting, singular identities and refuses the promises of a coherent subjectivity, embracing instead the fluid potentiality of undefined selfhood? White Teeth predates the current era of millennial anti-natalism as an increasingly popular response to life in the anthropocene era of climate crisis and global economic collapse, and yet it seems to speak profoundly to our current moment which questions the viability of a future, any future, which might break from the downward spiral of the past. As Nelson writes, “reproductive futurism needs no more disciples,” and yet it seems that something vital is lost when we are unable to imagine procreation through any other lens than that which casts it as the mere reification of an oppressive and limiting ideology. If the project of Smith’s novel is to push open that door, to propose an alternative framework through which to view future potentialities, then we might do well to imagine such a future, rather than settle into a comfortable certainty that a radical path forward is impossible. Like Hitchock, she struggles to write into the unspeakable, to articulate that which resists representation. And now, at a moment in which any vision of the future seems unbearably fraught, these oblique modes of articulating the impossible feel especially timely. To materialize desire and potential in the dead zones of repression and refusal may be the only way left to approach a future about which we know nothing, save that it must break from the past.
ENDNOTES
1. Lee Edelman, No Future Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 14; Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 21.
2. Edelman, 21.
3. Edelman, 3.
4. Edelman, 18.
5. Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (London: Melville House UK,
2016), 75.
6. Nelson, 72.
7. Nelson, 77.
8. Judith Mayne, Directed
by Dorothy Arzner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 178.
9. Zadie Smith, White Teeth (London: Penguin Essentials, 2017),68.
10.Smith, 53.
11.Smith, 66.
12.Smith, 238.
13.Smith, 426.
14.Smith, 448.
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