Border Crossing as Method and Motif in Contemporary American Writing, or, How Freud Helped Me Case the Joint

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Diane P. Freedman

Throughout women's lives, the self is defined through social relationships; issues of fusion and merger of the self with others are significant, and ego and body boundaries remain flexible.—Judith Kegan Gardiner, "On Female Identity and Writing by Women"

When a graduate student in English, I became fascinated by post-Freudian theories like those informing Judith Kegan Gardiner's essay. As a writer-critic, I could identify with Gardiner's notion that for women there is a "continual crossing of self and other." Because of this ego crossing or merging, Gardiner goes on, "women's writing may blur public and private and defy completion"; it resists tidy alignment with a single genre or realm of discourse. For women, borders—of ego, genre, discipline, geography—are made to be crossed (for warring men, too, though their deadly border wars that simply reaffirm and rearrange dividing lines among nations are not what most women writers seek). Many contemporary women writers want an intimacy with their readers and subjects as well as with themselves, for, as Susan Griffin puts it, "separated from our authentic cries we become weak imitations of who it is we think we should be" (249). In a series of self-disclosures like Griffin's, increasing numbers of feminist poet-critics explicitly announce their commitment to forms which transgress conventions and so better facilitate communion with self and others. This metadiscursivity is another way in which women writers cross borders, loop the inside to the outside.

Many of these writers find border crossing a simultaneously risky and empowering metaphor or compositional mode. Perhaps the works best exemplifying the crossover and even cross-fire mode are those by writers who have had literal, geographic borders to cross, those writers exiled from both home and dominant, white, heterosexist, bourgeois culture. So Gloria Anzaldúa, in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, a text foregrounding border crossing as the chief mode of her life and language, asserts she will face and overlap the borders of her many selves, countries, and cultures in her writing: "I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, White. I will have my serpent's tongue—my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence." Yet there are those not so often or obviously marginalized as a Chicana lesbian feminist writer from the working class who nonetheless feel themselves to be in the "Borderlands," where, as Anzaldúa describes it, "Being a writer feels very much like being a Chicana, or being queer—a lot of squirming, coming up against all sorts of walls. Or its opposite: nothing defined or definite, a boundless, floating state of limbo; ... [and yet] living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create" (72–73).

Many of us whose essays are assembled here feel ourselves in a kind of borderland, too often caught in the cross fire between cold, competitive, critical writing on the one hand and personal, even confessional, creative responses to literature and life on the other. We're caught between our families and our work, facing the pressures of publishing or perishing, choosing between traditional scholarship and feminism. Or we find ourselves faced with no such choices at all, scarcely being listened to, asked to quit griping and turn in our poetic licenses or quit this heady scene.

On the other side, we do have allies, even in surprising places. As Jane Gallop, who crosses disciplinary borders in her writing to join psychoanalysis with literary criticism, feminism, and poststructuralism, tells us, "[Freud] too worked at the juncture of the autobiographical and the theoretical, inventing a science by interpreting his own dreams and personal history in connection with his work with others.... Willy-nilly, he stumbled into a realm of knowledge where science is not clearly separated from poetry" (5–6). And it is that Jewish writer-analyst Freud, I recently realized, who helped me route my way away from tidy generic and critical borders or boundaries. As I read and was inspired by the liberatory aesthetics of American poet-critics Gallop, Anzaldúa, Adrienne Rich, Louise Bernikow, Susan Griffin, Marge Piercy, Maxine Hong Kingston, Judy Grahn, Mary Daly, and so many others, Freud—and my father's home library—came to mind.

When as a sophomore English major I learned that several of my professors considered Freud's and other psychoanalysts' writing relevant to the study of literature, I looked around at my father's collection for a book of Freud's work. I knew my father had once intended to become a psychiatrist and had earned an M.A. in psychology; moreover, he had an extensive collection of books, most stamped with the little man (Mercury) that is the logo of the Random House "Modern Library." The text I found, The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, translated, edited, and introduced by Dr. A. A. Brill, fascinated me, and my father said I could keep it for my own. I have it to this day, though I have not read much beyond Brill's introduction, having taken most of my Freud in smaller, paperback doses doctored by other editors and translators. But what fascinated me about this edition was the final footnote to Brill's introduction: "Alas! As these pages are going to the printer we have been startled by the terrible news that the Nazi holocaust has suddenly encircled Vienna and that Professor Freud and his family are virtual prisoners in the hands of civilization's greatest scourge" (32).

This footnote or epilogue showed me that a book's "borders"—its packaging, format, and the contexts in which it is read and published— are inseparable from its more apparent content. Not only was an author more a part of the text than I had imagined, but so were its editors and readers. Brill alerted me to the fact that every book, every reading, is laced and surrounded with circumstances worth considering, border crossings within the text as well as at its edges. (It wasn't until later that I saw the sustained and sophisticated use of border imagery foregrounded in works by ethnic-American women, about which I speak more in the book-length study from which this essay derives.)

Brill's entire introduction expresses, even without its final alarum and news brief, such personal and dramatic concern for the safekeeping of Freud's works that I was shocked, since such voicings, such extratextual paraphernalia were not a concern of the New Criticism practiced in the literature seminars of my day. The introduction forced me to be an active reader newly attentive to the many forces behind a published text. I was intrigued by Brill's personal relationships with Freud and...