Analysis of "Disappearing" by Monica Wood

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Mariela A. Lassalle

Professor: Cecilia Acquarone

Literatura de las Culturas Anglófonas – LLLI

16 May 2014

Analysis of the female character‘s discourse in

“Disappearing” by Monica Wood.

INTRODUCTION

"Li hom fu faiz a l'ymage de Dieu, mais le feme fu

faite a l'ymage de l'ome, et por ce sont les femes

souzmises as homes par loi de nature." ["Man is

created in God's image, but woman is made in man's

image and for that reason are women subject to men by

natural law."] 1

A patriarchal society is based on the belief of male

supremacy over women. Males make up the meanings for

society and create a reality with rules according to what

they believe is right. Women are not excluded from this

reality but they are not supposed to question it. As Dale

Spender (1990) in Man Made Language sustains:“Women live

under the reality of the dominant group. They are required1 Brunetto Latini’s Li Livres dou Tresor, p. xxii, 20.

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to `know´ it, to operate within it and to defer to its

definitions” (90). If women fail to meet male standards,

this is interpreted as their own personal inadequacy. As

with many other issues, Patriarchy creates its own images

of women. In the postmodern world, these images are ruled

by a slender supremacy and fat oppression, therefore, a

woman whose body does not conform to the standards of the

privileged dominant class has little value. Throughout the

years, Patriarchy, through the mass media (mainly TV,

magazines and films) and the fashion industry, has been

trying to control people’s views and ideas to ensure female

subordination in the world today, in that the nourishment

comes from women’s insecurities. It is implied that women

must try to achieve the thin ideal and that beauty is the

emblem of success. This, in many cases, causes women to

suffer from dieting disorders, inferiority complexes and

low self-esteem. And this is exactly what men want: the

“perpetuation of Patriarchy” (Spender 1990: 1) and thus,

power.

In view of this, women have two choices: either pursuing

the ideal beauty image and submitting to the values imposed

by society (and consequently lose their identities) or

reacting against those rules and alienating themselves from

the environment that tries to oppress them.

The short story “Disappearing” (pp. 168 - 170)2 by Monica

Wood will serve as the corpus of analysis of the present

2 In Marcus, Sybil. Comp: A World of Fiction: Twenty Timeless Short Stories. 1995.

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paper. The main character and narrator of the story is

presented as an overweight woman who decides to take up

swimming lessons to lose weight. With the time, not only

does she become thinner but she gradually gains confidence

in herself. However, in her attempt to be slender and fit

in society, her swimming and dieting become obsessive to

the point that she eventually disappears, vanishing in the

water. As Susan Bordo states in her book Unbearable Weight

(1993) “[This] psychological struggle characteristic of the

contemporary situation of women [...] is one in which a

constellation of social, economic, and psychological

factors have combined to produce a generation of women who

feel deeply flawed, ashamed of their needs, and not

entitled to exist unless they transform themselves into

worthy new selves (read: without need, without want,

without body)” (47).

The analysis will be mainly based on the clash between

the values of a contemporary image and male dominated

society according to which women must be slender to please

others, especially men, on the one hand; and the female

character’s reaction to those imposed values on the other,

as expressed in her discourse. As Nelly Furman asserts, “It

is through the medium of language that [women] define and

categorize areas of difference and similarity, which in

turn allow us to comprehend the world around” (qtd in

Showalter, 20)

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For the purpose of understanding the context of the

society in which this woman lives, Patriarchy, Feminism and

Postmodernism will be explored. Can we make a connection

between Patriarchy and the Postmodern world? Catherine

Keller (1987) claims in Toward a Postpatriarchal Postmodernity3:

The question of the relation between feminism and

postmodernity breaks into two antecedent subquestions:

Is modernity in any important sense, that is,

fundamentally, patriarchal? And is patriarchy

fundamentally modern? No suspense needs be sustained

here. Yes, modernity […] is intrinsically and not

accidentally sexist in its erection of the machine

metaphor for the universe, in its assertion of dominion

over nature. But no, patriarchy is not essentially

modern, for it long predates modernity, which

represents only a latest stage of patriarchy.

Therefore, from a feminist viewpoint, postmodernity may

or may not herald a postpatriarchal age. Because any

number of premodernities, reaching back into the

prehistorical mists, have assumed and strengthened the

dominance of the male in culture and his prerogative to3 Keller, Catherine. “Toward a Post-patriarchal Post-modernity.”(Conference Paper: Toward a Post-modern World, January 16-20, 1987.) Santa Barbara, CA, USA. In Spirituality and Society: Postmodern Visions edited by David Ray Griffin.

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define the roles of both men and women, we can imagine

a postmodern patriarchy as well (64).

Although our postmodern society is characterized by

multiple truths, multiple roles and multiple realities, we

cannot deny the binary opposition male/female that still

exists. And in this, we do not refer to biological

differences, but the male superiority and oppression of

women that still remains, no matter how pluralistic the

postmodern world is claimed to be.

The Objectification theory (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997)4

will provide a framework for understanding the experience

of being a woman in a sociocultural context that sexually

objectifies the female body, and closely related to it, the

concepts of “male gaze” in feminist theory and the

“dominant and the muted”5 by Dale Spender (1990). Moreover,

the feelings of women living in an image and male dominated

society will be supported by Susan Bordo (1993) in the

analysis of the impact of culture in shaping the female

body. Finally, the study of the narrator’s discourse will

show how the female character perceives reality and how she

handles it in view of the obsession with image in the

postmodern / patriarchal society in which she lives. For

4 Fredrickson and Roberts, 1997 cited in Szymanski, Dawn et al. SexualObjectification of Women: Advances to Theory and Research. Department ofPsychology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA, 2011.5 Spender, Dale. Man Made Language, 1990.

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this purpose, the works by Robert Humphrey (1954) and

Manfred Jahn (2005) which will serve as the theoretical

framework to explore how speech and thought are

represented.

ANALYSIS

The context in which discourse is expressed can shape

the way a person signifies his or her reality. Therefore,

in order to analyse the short story “Disappearing”, context

and discourse cannot be separated since the ideas of

women’s body, language, and psyche must be interpreted in

relation to the contexts in which they occur. This paper

sustains the idea that in order to live in a postmodern

society which is mainly dominated by men and which uses the

slender body as the only path to success and power, women

must surrender and accept the cultural demands or

otherwise, alienate or oppose to the culture´s grip on

women’s subordination. A patriarchal society is dependent

on female subordination and based on the belief that the

male is the superior sex. If a society can come to accept

the male supremacy, that males are more worthy and more

deserving, then the system is perpetuated (Spender 1990: 1)

. While it is true that in many countries advances have

been achieved in asserting women’s rights, some women

worldwide still earn less and own less property than men,

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and have less access to education, employment and health

care. Pervasive discrimination continues to deny women full

political and economic equality with men. In view of this,

women whose lives do not conform to society’s expectations

are often the victims, not only of ostracism but also of

violent treatment. Much of the violence faced by women in

everyday life is at the hands of the people with whom they

share their lives, whether as members of their family, of

their community or as their employers. There is an unbroken

spectrum of violence that women face at the hands of men

who exert control over them. In the story under analysis,

this violent behavior is mainly manifested in the use of

language as well as in indifference.

The opening paragraph in Disappearing depicts the female

character having mechanical and indifferent sex with her

partner. She does not seem to be interested in it or

attracted to him but she must please her husband:

“When he starts in, I don’t look anymore. I know what it looks like, what he

looks like, tobacco on his teeth. I just lie in the deep sheets and shut my eyes. I

make noises that make it go faster, and when he’s done he’s as far from me as

he gets. He could be dead he’s so far away” (lines 1-4).

He is not kind to her either. He is critical of her

weight and careless with her emotions. In lines 23 to 28

her husband sees her eating “a cake and a bottle of milk” and

comments on this:

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“No wonder you look like that he said. How can you stand yourself. You’re

no Cary Grant I told him and he laughed and laughed until I threw up. When

this happens I want to throw up again and again until my heart flops out wet

and writhing on the kitchen floor. Then he would know I have one and it

moves.”

One of the first days she returns from the swimming

pool, the narrator lets readers know a dialogic exchange

between them: “He says it makes no difference I look the same. But I’m not

the same. I can hold myself up in deep water. I can move my arms and feet [...]

and not be afraid. It makes a difference I tell him. Better believe it mister”

(lines 41-45) This passage illustrates well the idea of

anticipation of the end, she is not doing it only to lose

weight. There is more that her husband cannot see. In a

similar fashion, there is anticipation of what is going to

happen in the end when one night, her husband tells her

that “it won’t last, what about the freezer full of low-call dinners and that

machine in the basement.” to what she answers that she is “not

doing it for that and he doesn’t believe me either. But this time there is another

part. There are other men in the water,” she tells him. “Fish he says. Fish in

the sea. Good luck” (lines 41-74).

As Spender (1990) explains “When the meanings of women

are consigned to non-existence, when the registers for

discourse are male decreed and controlled, women who wish

to express themselves must translate their experience into

the male code. They are then a muted group” (81).

Therefore, if women want to be heard and understood they

must adapt their discourse to that of the “dominant group”,

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i.e. the language men speak. Her discourse is further

emphasized by the relative inarticulateness she suffers.

Instead of trying to explain and rationalize her

motivation, she describes her feelings and actions in

simple sentences or fragments. The reason could be that she

does not know what drives her or maybe she cannot explain

it, for she tells her friend and husband that she is not

just interested in losing weight and she knows they cannot

“imagine” what she is attempting to do or why. “The problem

is not that language is insufficient to express women’s

consciousness but that women have been denied the full

resource of language and have been forced into silence,

euphemism, or circumlocution” (23), explains Showalter.

There is a moment in the middle of the story when the

relationship seems to evolve, once she starts losing

weight, her husband starts paying attention to her: “He says

I’m looking all right [...] I haven’t been invisible.[...] Even on days when I don’t

say no [to having sex] it’s all right, he’s better.” (lines 67-70). However,

she does not seem to enjoy the attention she gets. By the

end of the story, she expresses she prefers to be invisible

for him “He doesn’t touch me and I smile into my pillow, a secret smile in my

own square of the dark.” (lines 94-95). She is somewhat

obtaining what she has been looking for since the moment

she decided to go unnoticed.

The contradiction between her desire of being noticed vs.

being invisible is found in many instances throughout the

story. The basic motivation of the woman in the story is

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suggested in the title; she wishes to disappear. At first,

people ignore her, she is “invisible” despite her weight;

then she starts becomes thinner and gains confidence while

being noticed by her husband and even other men; and

finally becomes “invisible” again. Despite an early

consideration as a text based solely on a woman’s desire to

be slender, it would be interesting to point out the deeply

problematic nature of the female character which goes

beyond the mere adjustment of the body to social

conventions. She decides to lose weight and realizes she is

in control of both her body but this reaction can be

interpreted as her ultimate victory over a patriarchal

system that consistently denies women the equality they

deserve. The main character, though profoundly disturbing

in her claims, does not seriously engage in an open battle

against the system that oppresses her. In spite of some

replies to what her husband says, what she does is to keep

silent.

One fundamental absence in this story is any possibility

of a sustained alliance with members of the same devalued

sex. Female bonds are simply not there or, if they are,

they do not work. Her friend Lettie starts taking swimming

lessons with her but then stops, and tries to give her

advice out of magazines to cut down on certain foods lo

lose weight, to what the narrator expresses “I’m not doing it for

that [...] but she wouldn’t believe me. She couldn’t imagine” (lines 36-37).

She again tries to explain what she is doing, but neither

her husband nor her friend seems to understand or take her

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seriously. Later in the story the narrator tells readers

that Lettie is not going to the pool anymore “now that she’s

fatter than [her].” (line 64) and she even accuses her of being

“uppity”. “All this talk about water and who do you think you are” (line 66).

Towards the end of the story, when the narrator has lost

weight and looks really skinny, her husband suggests he

should take her to hospital and Lettie says “what the hell are

you doing” to what she answers “I’m disappearing [...] and what can

you do about it not a blessed thing.” (lines 96-98).

The difference between men and women, and all it

entails, has been one of the chief concerns of feminist

criticism. It is worth mentioning in the present analysis

the Objectification theory (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997)6,

which postulates that many women are sexually objectified

in a socio cultural context that equates a woman’s worth

with her body’s appearance and sexual functions. From the

very beginning of the story and all throughout it, there is

a recurrent use of expressions and terms related to the

body, which centre around two main binary oppositions:

fat / bad vs. thin / good. The female character describes

herself as having “three hundred pounds” (line 5), “the fat one

parting the Red Sea” (line 14) and describes her weight as “the

heft of me” (line 39). She also mentions her “skin like tapioca

pudding” (line 6) and “dry flesh” (line 21). On the contrary,

the people at the swimming pool where she takes lessons are

6 Fredrickson and Roberts, 1997 cited in Szymanski, Dawn et al. SexualObjectification of Women: Advances to Theory and Research. Department ofPsychology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA, 2011.

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described as being little and thin. Their skin is “like milk”

(line 13), “white” and “wet” (line 17), and their hair is

“gold” (line 13), red and “white milkweed” (line 48). The

instructor is also seen by her as having “no stomach, a

depression almost” (line 16), a “skinny voice” (line 32) and “thin

calves hard as granite” (line 57).

According to Fredrickson and Roberts (1997), women to

varying degrees internalize this outsider view and begin to

self-objectify by treating themselves as an object to be

looked at and evaluated on the basis of appearance. Self-

objectification manifests in a greater emphasis placed on

one’s appearance attributes when comparing themselves to

other people. In this case, the mirror for this constant

reassurance of her “imperfect” body is the environment that

is around her, which “encourages and deepens Sexual

Objectification (SO), thereby constituting a sexually

objectifying environment (SOE)” (Szymanski, 2001: 21)

The environment of the pool certainly helps to assert

her body flaws. There is an instance when one cannot help

smiling at the humorous description of the time when the

main character and her friend Lettie first start their

swimming lessons. She describes the experience as being

“awful”. “First it’s blow bubbles and breathe, blow and breathe. Awful, hot

nosefuls of chlorine. My eyes stinging red and patches on my skin. I look worse.

We’ll get caps and goggles and earplugs and body cream Lettie says” (lines

8-11). Certainly this description stands in opposition to

the rest of the place where “wearing tight and revealing clothes that

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show the body serves to place women in the ‘objectification limelight’”

(Szymanski, 2001: 23) and this contributes to self-

objectification, as women are constantly reviewing their

own appearance in the “surrounding mirrors”. As it has been

noted before, the swimming instructors, as one expects, are

thin and have a well-built body and this clearly increases

women’s anxiety about physical appearance and their

opportunity for body shame which in many occasions, as in

the case of the main character in Disappearing, can lead

women to disordered eating, depression, and sexual

dysfunction (Szymanski, 2001: 24). Although the narrator

anticipates she “is not doing it for that”, the constant references

to body parts lead readers to think that she is obsessed

with physical appearance.

Another interesting component worth recognizing here is

the notion of “gaze”, which is a term that describes the

anxious state that comes with the awareness that one can be

viewed and considered an object. By gazing at the people in

the environment and evaluating physical appearances, the

narrator becomes the spectator, not the object of the gaze,

therefore, acquiring a position of mastery and control. The

moments she goes to the swimming pool and her body is

sustained by and hidden in the water, she is powerful, the

others are the objects, not her. “For one hour a day I am thin, thin

as water, transparent, invisible, steam or smoke” she says (lines 61-62)

However, there are other instances, outside this

environment of the pool, where the “male gaze” is enforced.

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This concept is, as Western culture constructed it, the

privilege of men to consider and turn women into objects of

desire, thus asserting their dominance (Beth Newman 1990:

451) and sometimes taken as a form of violence against

them. And the female character of “Disappearing”, when

noticing she is being looked at, especially now that she is

thinner, reacts to this situation. At first, she seems to

enjoy the attention, as she has been ignored for so long,

but then she expresses “For a long time in the middle of it people

looked at me. Men. And I thought about it. Believe it, I thought. And now they

don’t look at me again. And it’s better” (lines 99-101). She cannot

surrender to the idea of being the object of the gaze

anymore because she would be losing the position of

control. By being ignored, or invisible again, she is not

an object and nobody can exercise power on her.

Edgar Roberts (1969) in Writing Themes about Literature states

that “Style is understood to mean the way in which a writer

employs his words, phrases, and sentences to achieve his

desired effects.” A close study of style in the story under

analysis will consider aspects such as diction (the choice

of words); sentence patterns (the arrangement of words into

sentences); and use of imagery.

It is important to explore how speech and thought are

represented in fiction. Robert Humphrey (1954) in Stream of

Consciousness in the Modern World and Manfred Jahn (2005) in

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Narratology: A Guide to the Theory of Narrative provide the theoretical

framework for the analysis in the present paper.

The short story seems to be using the stream-of-

consciousness technique, by which, as Humphrey (1954)

states, “the depicted consciousness [of characters] serve

as a screen on which the material [...] is presented” (2).

By shifting readers’ attention to the point that narrative

reports blend with representations of speech and thought,

there is an effect of drawing readers into the heads of the

characters in ways that cannot be achieved by simpler, more

straightforward representations, so that the characters’

consciousness are exposed to view. According to Humphrey

(1954), the basic techniques used to present stream of

consciousness are interior monologue (divided into two

types designated as “direct” and “indirect”), omniscient

description and soliloquy (23). The analysis in this paper

will be centred on the interior monologue technique and

more specifically, on the “indirect” type.

As regards styles of discourse representation, there

three traditional forms: the “direct” style, the “free

indirect” style and the “indirect” one (Jahn 2005). A

fourth category, “free direct” style, is also mentioned in

some works. Tom McArthur7 indicates that the major markers

of direct speech (DS) are the exact words in the report and

the quotation marks in writing and print; indirect speech

(IS) conveys the report in the words of the reporter, with

7 Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language , 1998.

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verbs generally ‘backshifted’ in tenses and changes in

pronouns and adverbials of time and place are made to align

with the time of reporting; free direct speech (FDS) lacks

a reporting clause to show the shift from narration to

reporting, it is often used in fiction to represent the

mental reactions of characters to what they see or

experience; free indirect speech (FIS) resembles indirect

speech in shifting tenses and other references, but there

is generally no reporting clause and it retains some

features of direct speech (such as direct questions and

vocatives).

It is in the scope of this paper to find out how,

through the use of language, the female character expresses

her discomfort and personal inadequacy to the world around.

The analysis of the narrator’s discourse portrays the

psychological state of a woman profoundly influenced by her

obsession with image. The story is told by a first person

narrator, thus allowing readers to have intimate access to

her mind, i.e. that readers see reality through the

narrator’s eyes, and the choice of the lexis and sentence

structure act as indicators of how this reality is

perceived. As it has been noted before, the choice of words

is not done at random. There is a recurrent use of

expressions and terms related to the body, the narrator’s

desire to be invisible, to become “a new self without

body,” as Bordon expresses. This idea of disappearing and

becoming invisible is present throughout the story but is

more explicitly expressed in the middle and towards the

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end. When she first starts swimming, people “smirk” (line

30) at the “groan of the water” (l. 29) but then she is ignored

now that she does not “splash the water, know[s] how to lower silently

and [...] can cut the water cleanly” (lines 58-60).

“I am thin, thin as water, transparent, invisible, steam or smoke” she

says (lines 61-62). Towards the end, Lettie becomes

surprised at how thin she looks, to what she comments “I’m

disappearing” (line 97). Then, readers get an impression of

her ultimate goal when in the last lines she expresses that

she is “almost there. Almost water.” (line 102) and how she can

“vanish like a needle into skin” (line 104).

Taking into account that syntax addresses the way words

are put together, in the short story under consideration

the words and ideas are arranged breaking the syntactical

rules to achieve a certain effect. The Free Direct Style

lacks a reporting clause to show the shift from narration

to reporting and it is often used to represent the mental

reactions of characters to what they see or experience. In

the following examples, the main character lets readers

know what she or other characters say but there is a lack

of adequate punctuation. Every time characters speak, there

is an omission of commas, speech or interrogation marks (or

a combination of the three) in their utterances.

“A little redhead in an emerald suit, no stomach, a depression almost, and

white wet skin. Good she said you float just great” (lines 16-17)

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“At home I ate a cake and a bottle of milk. No wonder you look like that he

said. How can you stand yourself. You’re no Cary Grant I told him” (lines

23-24)

“One night he says it won’t last, what about the freezer full of low-cal

dinners [...] There are other men in the water I tell him. Fish he says. Fish in the

sea. Good luck.” (lines 71-74)

“Oh my God Lettie says what the hell are you doing what the hell do you

think you’re doing. I’m disappearing I tell her and what can you do about it not

a blessed thing” (lines 96-98).

The story is almost entirely told in this way and this

might be done with the intention of showing the character’s

emotional state, that is to say, making readers feel as if

they were inside her mind, perceiving the world around in

the same way as the narrator. A few sentences in this story

are grammatically correct or complete by strict standards,

because one does not speak or think spontaneously in well-

written discourse.

Moreover, the great deal of dialogue that the story

presents has the intention of reflecting the characters and

the relations among them.

The language used in this story is mostly informal,

conversational and colloquial, which echoes the natural,

unforced speech rhythms and vocabulary of everyday speech.

The narrator and the other characters, as it has been

noticed in the examples, express themselves very informally

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all the time, even using slang in some cases. The intention

may be to show characters acting naturally, as if there

would be no mediation between them, their utterances and

the narration of the story. Examples of this use of

language are when the narrator’s husband refers to “a

freezer full of low-cal dinners” (line 71) and Lettie calls

her friend “uppity [...] and who do you think you are

(lines65-66)” and suggests leaving “Doritos out” (line 36).

Another characteristic of the syntax in this short story

is the use of sentence fragmentation, which is achieved by

the use of stops and commas within the same sentence

favouring a looser and more incomplete style. In first-

person narration, fragmented sentences are used to show a

character’s disturbed state of mind. The short, jumpy

quality to the sentences mirrors a character’s emotional

state and emphasises certain words in the text, making

readers slow down and pause at those fragmented sentences.

Examples of these are when she mentions physical attributes

of others and her feelings towards certain things that

occur to her. When the narrator realizes that other men

start noticing her, she says:

“Other men interest me. I look at them, real ones, not the ones on TV that’s

something else entirely. These are real. […] The meter man from the light

company, heavy thick feet in boots. A smile. Teeth. I drop something out of the

cart in the supermarket to see who will pick it up. Sometimes a man. […] Young.

Thin legs and an accent. One was older. Looked me in the eyes. Heavy, but not

like me. My eyes are nice. I color the lids.” (lines 46-53).

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Other instances in the story let readers get the

impression of being in direct, unfiltered contact with the

thought or feelings of the woman narrating. When she

compares herself unfavorably with the thin swimmers around

her, she describes them as “Gold hair, skin like milk, chlorine or no”

(line 13), “no stomach, a depression almost, and white wet

skin” (line 16-17). Here the absence of verbs makes the

visual impact stronger and reminds readers of her less

flattering description of herself as “skin like tapioca pudding”

(line 6) and “the fat one parting the Red Sea” (line 14). Her

feelings, towards the end of the story, can be sensed more

real by the use of these fragmented sentences. Readers

pause and even sense the tranquility conveyed in her words

in lines 99-102:

“For a long time in the middle of it people looked at me. Men. And I thought

about it. Believe it. I thought. And now they don’t look at me again. And it’s

better.

I’m almost there. Almost water.”

The narrator here is addressing the readers directly

“Believe it,” she says, as a form of complicity with them,

showing she is calm now and has finally succeeded in

achieving the goal she had set herself since the very

beginning of her narration: disappearing.

There are moments in the story when the narrator’s voice

becomes less colloquial and more poetic, and readers can

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feel the pathos underlying the situation. This is

accomplished through the employment of vivid pictures that

appeal to our visual, auditory and tactile senses. Many of

these images are related to the water and what she does in

it. The narrator mentions a “groan” (lines 29-30),

encouraging readers to imagine the water´s strained sound

as of pain or displeasure as the fat woman tries to swim in

it and then says “it was as heavy as blood” (line 83) showing

readers how she felt during her first attempts to swim. On

the other hand, she later describes her improvement: “I don’t

splash the water, know how to lower myself silently […] I cut the water cleanly

(lines 59-60) vanish like a needle into skin” (line 104). Readers

cannot but sympathize with the narrator when for example

she says she “want[s] to throw up again and again until [her] heart flops

out wet and writhing on the kitchen floor” (lines 26-27) and “in the

pool it [the color on her lids] runs off in blue tears” (line 53). With the

use of these powerful images, readers can easily see how

she feels.

Symbolism in Literature is an object or reference that

provides meaning to what is narrated. In the story being

analyzed, water can be considered the most powerful. When

the narrator starts swimming, she finds the water in the

pool rather scary as “drops of gray shadow rippling” (line 20)

appear at the bottom of the pool. However, when she masters

the technique, she feels at ease. It is the only place

where her weight is not significant, the water does not

resist, it is transparent and invisible, in the same way

she is. Moreover, the image of water evokes ideas of

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uncertain suspension and imminent dissolution of the self,

since for her, to become one with the water is to lose the

physical self completely, towards freedom and liberation.

“I’m almost there. Almost water. […] vanish like a needle into skin, and every

time it happens […] I think, this will be the time” (lines 102-105)

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CONCLUSION

It has been the aim of the present paper to examine how

the short story “Disappearing” by Monica Wood can be read

from a different perspective, since it more than a woman’s

account of losing weight. It is a glimpse into the mind of

a woman who strives for power in a context where she feels

alienated, a Patriarchal Postmodern society that oppresses

her.

Christiane Makward describes the female language as

being:

“open, nonlinear, unfinished, fluid, exploded,

fragmented, polysemic, attempting to speak the body i.e.,

the unconscious, involving silence, incorporating the

simultaneity of life as opposed to or clearly different

from pre-conceived, oriented, masterly or ‘didactic’

languages” (qtd in Nina Baym, 1984: 282).

Her discourse is a clear example of this way of

expressing against the language of the dominant group.

Language, the same as any other form of representation, is

immersed in cultural ideology and it is this cultural

ideology that gives shape to the perceptions of the world

and that of human beings. The language of the narrator in

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the story is emotional, fragmented, unfinished, unconscious

and inserted at the various stages of the story much like a

running commentary of what she is experiencing and that

discloses her own beliefs against domination and the world

around.

Her impossibility to communicate in “male standards” and

her will to liberate from the grasps of cultural values and

to the power of men, forces the main character to confront

reality in a particular way: by trying to be invisible. She

could transcend her sex, setting herself apart and refusing

to conform to the requirements of social ordering and

prejudice.

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