“How does The Wasp Factory deal with the issue of gender?”
...r seen or read seems to pay strict homage to.” The importance of this passage being that Francis refers to all that she has “ever seen or read”. Francis has recognised the fact that as a female she is not a natural born killer but in many ways the exact opposite. The instinct to kill and destroy was not something naturally occurring for Francis. Her feminine subconscious was unable to understand the details behind the reason for killing, making her only an imitator. In comparison the killing done by Eric is, in the retrospective view of Francis, the natural instinct at work. It is not so much a conscious decision but an unconscious desire to fulfil the expectation placed upon him by his gender. For Francis this is of course different. With the conflicting objectives between her believed gender and real gender, she had made both a conscious decision to fulfil what she believed to be the required characteristics of a male, along with the subconscious decision to replace the act she was rendered incapable of: the ability to produce offspring, the chance to make uncertainty. In The Wasp Factory Banks outlines the typical social expectation of a woman as being the producer of offspring to continue the family into the future. For the male however it is expected that they will kill, a final and conclusive act. Again this returns to the ideas of Angus and his quest for superiority and unquestioning power. The actions taken by Francis often involve either a constructive or deconstructive nature. One thing, which Francis does, that involves both of these principles is the activity of dam building. The process of dam building is something that even Francis recognises as an activity that mixes the respective male and female characteristics of certainty and uncertainty. In chapter 2 Francis observes: “I realise that you can never really win against the water: it will always triumph in the end… All you can really do is construct something that will divert it or block its way for a while” Here we see a unique metaphor which basically summarises not only both the differences between the male and female characteristics of certainty and uncertainty but also a description of the pattern that Francis’ life has followed by the end of the novel. The idea of creation is very much in the female principle. As in childbirth, the woman brings in a previously unseen life to the outside world. Although this is the process of creating uncertainty, it’s an activity unique to women. At this early stage of the novel Francis is still under the illusion that she is male and is therefore not in the mental position to think about creating uncertainty. However the activity of dam building is in effect a creation of uncertainty. The dam building is an action from within Francis’ female subconscious to find a substitute for the creation of a child. When Francis builds a dam, she does it on the principle of creating uncertainty. By building a replica village below she (in her female mindset) is in effect waiting to see the outcome of her actions performed in the male mindset. The male action comes in the form of the wanton destruction that Francis performs once the construction side of the dam building activity has been completed. Francis notes that: “Bursting a good dam, or even just letting it overflow, is almost as satisfying as planning and building it in the first place.” Of importance in this passage is that Francis notes that bursting the dam is “almost” as satisfying as the creation of it is in my view Banks displaying the true identity of Francis well before the actual announcement made at the end of “The Wasp Factory”. This is a demonstration of the subconscious female predominance that has a hold over the majority of Francis’ cognitive processes. The whole idea of dam building is the female act of creation, as mentioned before a substitute for the lack of ability to produce offspring. The destructive nature comes from Francis’s expectation that as she believes that she is male, some of her actions must reinforce that belief. Francis is someone who has an obvious identity crisis, even though she is not aware of it herself. As a result both sides of her male and female characteristics make gestures to reinforce their presence. In this section of conflicting objectives I feel Banks is also attempting to outline the differences in society and its attitude towards gender. The relationship between men and women being that whilst men kill one another, women will remain to provide the next generation to fight and kill other men. Banks is trying to show that without one another, life itself would be non-existent, whilst although they may have conflicting objectives of certainty and uncertainty, both of these are required for the human race to succeed. The idea that men are effectively the dark side of human activity is evident in the criticism of The Wasp Factory made by the Evening Standard newspaper, which commented: “Piles horror upon horror in a certain way to satisfy those readers who subscribe to the currently fashionable notion that Man is vile.” This quotation effectively shows that The Wasp Factory has been interpreted by other to be a demonstration of the evils of the male gender, something which can be interpreted from the decisions made by the male controlled conscious of Francis’s brain. Yet the quotation is also important for the historical context in which The Wasp Factory was conceived and produced by Banks. The novel was first published in 1984 a period where the Cold War was still present. Also of importance I feel is the Vietnam War, which had ended only a few years before the publishing of the novel. This had shown the effective evil of man in its most raw sense, killing to defend the idea of superiority. The ways in which Francis kills countless numbers of small animals such as gerbils can be compared to the way in which the US Army killed vast numbers of innocent Vietnamese citizens in an attempt to press their masculine orientated superiority. This conflict between the female subconscious entity and conscious male entity can also be seen in the physical structure of the house in which Frank and Angus live. Within Francis’ mind their exists the female subconscious, something that cannot be affected by the efforts of Angus with the hormones or the fake stories about Francis’s past. In the house the loft in which Francis lives can represent this. Due to the poor health of Angus, he is unable to climb the stairs and gain access to the loft. As a result he is kept away from Francis’s secrets and also he does not see or have any knowledge about the Wasp Factory itself. Angus therefore is not fully aware of the internal conflict between certainty and uncertainty, which Francis is undergoing for the majority of the novel. This constant conflict of ideologies is in effect building throughout the novel. It can be seen to grow and become more and more prominent as Eric becomes closer and closer to returning home. It is also noted that as Eric becomes closer to the house, the physical temperature has also risen much higher than before. Clearly Banks is showing that something is ready to explode. In terms of the physical structure of the house this can quite clearly be seen as the bales of cordite stored below the house. Like the conflict between Francis’s emotions, the cordite is basically one large bomb just waiting for a charge to detonate it, something that would destroy both the physical and mental foundations of Francis’s life. Something which the return of Eric effectively does, as it explodes both the cordite and makes Angus tell Francis the truth about her past thus exploding her mental state. Finally there is the actual secret of the true identity of Francis, something only Angus is able to divulge. However these remained locked away within the mind of Angus, something he does not want to share until it is necessary. Francis cannot then gain access to this important part of her identity. This then creates the ensuing conflict between her masculine consciousness and feminine subconscious. The basis of the whole novel and the battle between certainty and uncertainty stems from this locked reality. Inside the house this is symbolised by the locked study that belongs to Angus. Something that Francis cannot gain access to no matter how hard she tries. The most important physical object within the house is in many ways the Wasp Factory itself. This importance is enhanced by Banks’s d...