The Nature of Least Resistance

The Barthesian fly

My son did dread

shouted, “A FE-male! Kill it!”

brandished a swatter, thwacked it on the head.

It took years to undo

what Disney did

the misread ideal Academy Awards fed.

The power of words, we humbly disavow

but the truth of their strength

surfaces anyhow. 

The Backstory:

“Mom! Kill it! It’s a FE-male!” My son ran for the flyswatter, his nose crinkled, lips pursed, eyebrows furrowed in consternation. He propelled himself with violent vigor, as if his life depended on it, for the flyswatter. Hoisting it aloft, he took aim then THWACK! “Got it!” he shouted, his little-boy voice taking on a new pitch full of victory like a wolfling learning to howl after he has tasted meat instead of his mother’s milk for the first time. He had defended hearth and home against a villainous evil that went by the name of “FE-male.” The fly lay silent.

A parade of banner slogans marched through my mind: “Votes for women;” “History is herstory too;” “A woman’s place is in the House and the Senate.” Words like “misogyny” palpitated in multicolored neon as shockwaves shook me to the core. Whence came the venom my sweet little boy had directed at my entire gender? He was not of the generation that resented Rosie the Riveter’s place in the workforce. 

Where did he learn this? Had my five-year-old forgotten all his politically engaged Latin, his feminist gynocriticism and other literary debunking of Neanderthal views of women? Hadn’t we as parents properly deconstructed the errors of injustice and male oppression of women configured in cartoons where a caveman clubs and drags a woman by her Rapunzel hair to his man cave? Even the holy writ we studied spoke of the feminine and masculine views of God, how men AND women were created as beings of divine original value.

I ran a comb small enough to detect lice nits through my mental floss looking for some embryonic miscommunication that could have attached itself to his young mind at home and found nothing. My late husband, an artist and scholar, was an advocate for women’s rights. His fantasy pin-up calendar was twelve months of nude feminists. He delighted in bright minds contained in bodies lumpy from age, rounded from childbirth, with dimples and skin folds. These human landscapes, he said, were more interesting to sketch than the simple lines of anorexic nymphs. With such a father as a role model, surely my little lad had not picked up a negative view of women from home.

I relived over and over his swatting of the “FE-male” as if I were a character in a Marguerite Duras novel. My son’s cry of horror, his crinkled nose, the way he pursed his lips, took a warrior stance, his arm raised clenching the white handle of his fly-killing device, the swishing scream as the vented plastic flap flew downward releasing turbo streams of air through the perforations that removed all resistance to the velocity of the descent as he cried, “A FE-male! Kill it!” The power and vehemence of the act continued to send shockwaves of fear through my body.

As I cringed for the future of humanity, the failure of our parenting stood before me with tousled yellow hair. This monster of Frankensteinian proportions came up to my waist; he liked gummy bears and still struggled to tie his shoes. The demise of civilization was imminent. If I could not teach him right from wrong, what hope was there on earth for the survival of our species? 

Stilling the ululation that welled up in my throat, I swallowed down sobs. As I spoke, I didn’t recognize my own voice. It quavered, went thin and rose an octave higher as I asked, “Where did you learn the word ‘female,’  Sweetheart?” 

Still proud of his conquest, he shined a bold smile at me and said, “I’ll show you, Mom.” He took me by the hand into the living room where he deftly turned on the VCR, chunked in a tape, masterfully grabbed the remote and fast-forwarded to a scene of the seven dwarfs coming home to their cottage. 

Grumpy says, “There’s been a FE-male here!” because the dwarf cottage sparkles having been tidied up by Snow White.

As Grumpy speaks, the other dwarfs listen. In the lower right corner of the screen, a fly buzzes innocently. The fly is not a character in the film. It does not speak. In fact, the dwarfs do not even care that it’s there. These guys live in the woods. They are used to having flies in their bachelor pad. 

The fly serves the same purpose as the barometer in Flaubert’s, “A Simple Heart.” That is, according to Roland Barthes, it is there not to convey a message of status, bourgeois or otherwise, for it is a neutral object—an item that appears in the text to add a touch of authenticity. It makes the wall seem more real if there is a barometer hanging on it. (Barthes goes on to quibble over denotation and signification, an issue I imagine we’d all like to ponder another time.)

So this fly in the movie is just minding its own business. It conveys the idea that there is air. It gives the impression that the dwarfs inhabit three-dimensional space. It does not have a star on its dressing room door. 

What was real to my son was the association, which one might argue was purely incidental, between the presence of the fly and Grumpy’s words. When Grumpy said the unfamiliar word “FE-male,” my son searched for a visual clue to understand its meaning. He found a definition buzzing in the corner of the scene. 

Later, Grumpy would fan the flame of indignation concerning the “FE-male” in a dialog with Bashful:

Grumpy:  Angel, ha! She’s a female! And all females is poison!

                 They’re full of wicked wiles!

Bashful:   What are wicked wiles?

Grumpy:   I don’t know, but I’m agin’ ‘em.

~ Snow White and Seven Dwarfs (1937)

Who wouldn’t be “agin’ ‘em” if you were to assume that the more bombastic the discourse the more legitimate the position? Perhaps to a child who fears anger, Grumpy’s authority is assured by the degree to which his rhetoric is cantankerous. 

Furthermore, the deferential posturing of the other dwarfs to Grumpy’s opinions models the appropriate response behavior to a child who, as a learning sponge, takes in every opportunity to figure out how grownups relate to each other. (A bewilderment I am hopeless to decipher.)

Our son’s misidentification was not an error of logic. He deciphered the subtext of Grumpy's attitude toward women with accuracy. Absent other irregularities, the presence of the fly presented a facile association for a strange new word. The attitudinal error was inherent in the text. I suspect Barthesian flies will continue to proliferate the closer we get to November 8, 2016. They will be inserted into the text on purpose to distract from the real issues at hand. Don’t forget your flyswatter.

Photo from Public Domain