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
