Arborescent Culture within a Rhizome: Rhoda’s Ego Disintegration and Lesbian Suicide in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves
In their critical theory text, A Thousand Plateaus, Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari argue the existence of a rhizome, a metaphysical map of existence without a principle source of unity. In a rhizome, relationships are infinitely horizontal, stratified rather than vertically polarized. In contrast to a rhizome, arborescence is described as a fictional reality that grows like a tree and creates points of division and cessation. To account for tree-like hierarchy in our culture, Deleuze and Guattari explain, “[t]here are knots of arborescence in rhizomes, and rhizomatic offshoots in roots” (20). Deleuze and Guattari go on to argue, “We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They've made us suffer too much” (15).
This fundamental rejection of dualistic hierarchy is reflected in Virginia Woolf’s novel, The Waves, where she explores the relationship between the mind and body, time and space, and the corporealization of consciousness through language. Her experimental, stream-of-consciousness novel begins with a third person account of a sunrise, followed by a scene comprised entirely of soliloquies given by the six main characters. This alternation between nature-inspired vignettes and character soliloquies continues throughout the novel, illustrating Deleuze and Guattari’s idea that, in a rhizome, “thoughts lag behind nature” (5).
Of the six main characters, Rhoda is the outcast. She’s awkward, depressed, and not well-liked. Scholarship surrounding Rhoda’s character in The Waves typically surrounds her sexuality, gender expression, and suicide. There is no overwhelming consensus regarding Rhoda’s identity, but most scholars agree that her suicide is a method of transcendent rebellion, one that frees Rhoda from an oppressive, patriarchal society largely maintained by polarizing gender and propagating hierarchal binaries. However, I’ve found no scholarship that takes Rhoda’s rejection of dualism and applies it to the world of The Waves as a whole.
In the following, through Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, as well as theories of psychoanalysis and gender and sexuality, I analyze Rhoda through the rhizome in which she died, in contrast to the arborescent culture in which she lived. By exploring Rhoda’s ego disintegration and the fantasy world she creates to escape reality, I hope to demonstrate a queer reading of Rhoda’s character and evince the impossibility of transcendence or triumph in her suicide.
“I Hear a Sound”
When the characters of The Waves are introduced, Bernard, Susan, Neville, and Jinny describe their surroundings in terms of visual space. In contrast, Rhoda and Louis ignore what visually dominates the landscape and concentrate on the movements they hear around them. The two outsiders don’t see the animals they hear, which means Rhoda and Louis must imagine the space the animals occupy and abstractly configure the temporal relationship between sound, movement, and invisible space. A surface-level reading of the first interlude’s line: “The blind stirred slightly,” might designate the “blind” to physical blinds that accompany windows (8). However, the subtext also points to an indication of Rhoda and Louis’ theoretical blindness. This interpretation is amplified in the second half of that sentence when Woolf writes, “[B]ut all within was dim and insubstantial.” Again, these words could be describing a quiet house separated from the outside world, but they could also establish the characters as being very young and in the beginning stages of ego formation.
In his psychoanalytical text, Écrits, Jacques Lacan discusses the mirror-stage of ego formation by describing the moment when an infant sees themselves in a mirror for the first time and undergoes a shift in understanding their relationship to reality. He asserts, “I am led, therefore, to regard the function of the mirror-stage as a particular case of the function of the imago, which is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality— or, as they say, between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt” (4). By introducing two of her six characters as metaphorically blind, Woolf calls into question Rhoda and Louis’ ability to form a coherent imago.
When Lacan calls the mirror-stage a “drama,” he specifically points out the role of spatial identification in ego formation (4), and in Rhoda’s first soliloquy as a young child, there is a clear lack of static space. Almost everything Rhoda describes is spatially abstract or in relation to movement (18), whereas Louis, who is also introduced as being metaphorically blind, manages to achieve a more cohesive relationship between his corporeal body and his environment without the aid of movement (12). In her avoidance of spatiotemporal definition, Rhoda seems to be seeking solace in the multiplicity of space-time. Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari use the concept of multiplicity to assert a lack of principle unity: “Multiplicities are rhizomatic [. . .] There is no unity to serve as a pivot in the object, or to divide in the subject” (8). Rhoda is still in the very early phases of her development, but in her understanding of the interstice between time and space, she is beginning to question the possibility of principle unity.
In Threshold to a Visible World, Kaja Silverman furthers the importance of time and space in ego formation. She argues that it isn’t just the visual imago (as formed by Lacan’s mirror-stage) that constitutes the bodily ego, but instead it is the integration of the visual imago and sensational ego that create a coherent bodily ego. The sensational ego, or proprioceptive ego, is formed out of the subject’s awareness of the physical sensation as it happens specifically to them in a particular space and defined time. Silverman explains, “Indeed, proprioceptivity would seem to be intimately bound up with the body’s sensation of occupying a point in space, and with the terms under which it does so” (16).
In Rhoda’s second soliloquy, she laments her inability to solve a math problem and is left alone to stare at the blackboard. She continues, “‘I begin to draw a figure and the world is looped in it and I myself am outside the loop; which I now join—so—and seal up, and make entire. The world is entire, and I am outside of it, crying, “Oh , save me, from being blown for ever outside the loop of time!”’” (21). Here, Rhoda creates a spatial and temporal world she excludes herself from and calls that world whole. As Silverman argues, a subject must understand where they fit spatially and temporally in any given environment in order to form a coherent bodily ego. Despite her lack of integrated ego, Rhoda quickly comes to understand the constraints of a strict, arborescent culture entangled with a fluid, rhizomatic society. From her metaphorical blindness to an alienation from her environment, Rhoda battles with both the heartbreak of invisibility and the instinct to reject individuality.
“Opening the Shut”
An arborescent culture is saturated with representations of identities that appear to conform to impossible hierarchical standards. This ever-present misrepresentation of humanity impacts ego formation. Particularly, identifying oneself through a cultural lens leads a subject to assume an identity that is not their own. Silverman notes, “[T]he subject can only successfully misrecognize him—or herself within that image or cluster of images through which he or she is culturally apprehended.” (18). Interestingly, Rhoda does not experience misrecognition, because Rhoda never identifies with anyone in society. She may have “taught [her] body to do a certain trick,” but Rhoda never assumes an identity that is not her own (Woolf 222), and the further Rhoda’s identity falls outside accepted cultural norms, the more pathological her alienation from society becomes.
As the female characters of The Waves attend boarding school, Rhoda often compares herself to Susan and Jinny, who represent an arborescent culture’s two paths of femininity: the mother and the lover. When discussing a rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari argue against this correlated dichotomy when they say, “[T]he rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature” (21). In a rhizome, having the same sex organs is not an indication of similar objectives. Rhoda’s arborescent culture wants to place her on the path of “lover” or “mother,” but because she exists in the multiplicity of a rhizome, Rhoda isn’t able to identify within those strict parameters.
When she faces a mirror with Susan, Rhoda “ducks behind” Susan and claims, “‘I am not here. I have no face [. . .] I have to look first and do what other people do when they have done it’” (43). Because she knows her identity is not only culturally unacceptable, but also culturally invisible, Rhoda says she has no face. She goes on to say that she mimics the way Susan and Jinny put on their stockings and tie bows, and that she knows both of them despise her for it. She recognizes her attempts at mimicry for what they are, not identification but imitation. However, Rhoda’s rhizomatic understanding of self is still fraught with arborescent cultural expectations. She may long for Jinny and Susan’s confidence and their assured presence in space and time, but Rhoda is unwilling to sacrifice her identity in order to conform.
Rhoda’s continuous disintegration of bodily ego isn’t confined to her lack of identification in gender norms. There’s also evidence to suggest Rhoda is unable to identify with the physical sensations other women experience in their heteronormative culture. Through a methodical use of figurative language, Woolf provides ample evidence to suggest Rhoda is a lesbian. In a rhizome, sexuality would be fluid, but Rhoda’s apparent object preference can be explained by Deleuze and Guattari’s arborescent “knots,” or isolated pockets of hierarchy found within a rhizome.
The first inkling of Rhoda’s divergence from heterosexual norms appears while she is watching other girls socialize. In expressing a desire to impress them, Rhoda’s use of language and imagery is very suggestive in terms of eroticism and romance. She is “rocked from side to side from the violence of [her] emotion” when a girl comes to sit with her, and in bed she imagines she “excite[s] [the girls’] complete wonder” (43-44). Rhoda fantasizes about dying in a tragic sacrifice, assuming the role of a stereotypical male hero in a bid for a woman’s love. And as she lies in bed, waiting for night to fall, Rhoda imagines a “quivering” tree growing from her body (53).
Similarly, Rhoda’s fascination with her teacher, Miss Lambert, is established immediately upon Rhoda’s arrival at school. She says, “‘The purple light’ [. . .] ‘in Miss Lambert’s ring passes to and fro across the black stain on the white page of the Prayer Book. It is vinous, it is an amorous light’” (33). Not only does Woolf expose Rhoda’s thoughts on prayer by calling the book’s contents a stain, she also associates the light Miss Lambert offers Rhoda with wine and love. Wine has long been associated with lesbians, most notably after Homer’s Circe of Lesbos serves Pramnian wine to Odysseus’ men before turning them into swine.
Later, when Miss Lambert passes her, Rhoda says that “‘everything changes and becomes luminous [. . . ] Wherever she goes, things are changed under her eyes [. . .] Miss Lambert makes the daisy change’” (45). In Margaret Sullivan’s “Let there be Rose Leaves’: Lesbian subjectivity in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves,” she describes this moment as not only sexual but explicitly lesbian: “Through such rhetorical formulations Woolf indicates that Rhoda’s garden, centered around the woman she desires, is a place where- because of its female centered sexuality—there has been a ‘change’ from the originating text. Here, we are invited to read differently. This sacred garden, it seems, will not be defined by blissful heterosexual union” (8).
Scholars who neglect to account for Rhoda’s sexuality in her alienation from society may have a naïve disregard for the importance of sexuality in ego formation, be blind to Rhoda’s erotic nature, or simply adhere to a “default” heterosexual reading, one incapable of deciphering queer code.[1] Montashery argues, “Rhoda is unable to find a proper language to express her sexuality and desire, which are defining markers of identity” (807). However, Montashery’s failure to understand Rhoda’s words doesn’t mean Rhoda is incapable of intelligible language. For those adept in queer coding, the soliloquies that follow Rhoda’s enchantment with Miss Lambert settle any questions regarding Rhoda’s lesbian eroticism.
As she waits for night to fall, Rhoda imagines a “quivering” tree growing from her at night while she lies in bed (53). Trees are often associated with the men of The Waves, most notably as Louis’ body (12), Neville’s desire (52), and Bernard’s inspiration (83). This could be a sign of gender fluidity in Rhoda, where her rejection of defined time and space translates into phallic growth, but Rhoda’s imagined phallus could also signify an erotic desire that Rhoda believes she can only experience when in possession of a penis. In combining her heteronormative culture with a rhizomatic understanding of gender, Rhoda grows a metaphorical penis to have sex with a woman. This theory is realized in her next soliloquy where she imagines she’s sitting under the moonlight, looking at water-lilies, and worrying over whom to present her flowers. She then undergoes a sensual transformation: “Now my body thaws; I am unsealed, I am incandescent. Now the stream pours in a deep tide fertilizing, opening the shut, forcing the tight-folded, flooding free. To whom shall I give all that now flows through me, from my warm, my porous body?” (57) One might assume that the mention of fertilization in her orgasmic soliloquy alludes to a male presence. However, Rhoda is the one in possession of the metaphorical and transient penis, which she uses to explore her role as an active pursuer of another woman; a woman that then opens for Rhoda and allows Rhoda to flow within her. Because she lacks a physical penis, Rhoda dithers between being the penetrator and the penetrated, but she is desperate to share her body with another woman.
Being unable to find identification in her culture ensures Rhoda will struggle to accept her desire for women as a valid sexuality. To compensate, Rhoda creates a fantasy world, one where her bodily ego can mature and evolve. In her fantasy, Rhoda is able to transform her body and her body’s responses to stimuli. Rhoda’s fantasy world then becomes a metaphor for the integration of her visual imago and sensational ego.
“The Swallow Dips Her Wings”
Silverman argues that when the visual imago and the sensational ego are “smoothly integrated [. . .] the subject experiences that mode of ‘altogetherness’ generally synonymous with ‘presence’” (17). She also asserts that if the visual imago and sensational ego disintegrate, “that ‘presence’ is lost.” This lack of presence leads to a phenomenon Silverman refers to as “fantasy of the body in bits and pieces” (20), which is most often experienced in the form of dreams and fantasies. This phenomenon is meant to help subjects reconcile the pieces of themselves that elude identification.
Throughout The Waves, Rhoda consistently questions her presence in the space she occupies and in the time she can’t define. Additionally, the infeasibility of identification within a binary further exposes stereotypical gender conformity and heterosexuality as privileged characteristics Rhoda can’t abide. From these alienations, Rhoda is forced to create a fantasy world where she can be free of spatiotemporal cages and social stratification. Her fantasy world is not an imitation of the real world, nor does Rhoda attempt to physically realize her fantasy world through imitation after childhood. Instead, Rhoda’s fantasy and reality form a sort of co-existence, one based on mutual necessity and desire. This relationship is rhizomatic. As Deleuze and Guattari would say, there is a becoming-fantasy of reality and a becoming-reality of fantasy: “Each of these becomings brings about the deterritorialization of one term and the reterritorialization of the other; the two becomings interlink and form relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialization ever further” (10).
In Rhoda’s first soliloquy, she creates the foundation of her fantasy when she plays with a basin of water and pretends flower petals are ships in a vast sea: “‘And I will now rock the brown basin from side to side so that my ships may ride the waves. Some will flounder. Some will dash themselves against the cliffs. One sails alone. That is my ship’” (19). Rhoda’s ship goes on to seek refuge in a dark cave and eventually sails safely to a beautiful paradise. With her basin of water and her armada of Sweet Alice petals, Rhoda physically and socially isolates herself from the world around her. This alienating isolation, brought on by a lack of culturally accepted multiplicity within identity, makes it even harder for Rhoda to identify with any of her peers.
In her second soliloquy, where Rhoda is feeling tortured by her math lesson, she imagines the sands of time being represented not as a beautiful island, but as a barren desert with little hope for survival. Her fantasy changes to reflect her reality, but her reality is also altered by her fantasy. Rhoda begins to cry as the figure she draws in reality fills with imaginary sands of time, which she then “seals up and make[s] entire” without her (21). Rhoda’s physical tears reflect her imagined distress over being “blown outside the loop of time” (22).
Rhoda’s fantasy world begins to take on flight imagery in her third soliloquy, where she uses avian descriptors like “plumes” and “wings,” and says, “‘I rise over the spring-heeled boots over the tree-tops’” (29). Rhoda’s personal association with birds begins with her very first utterance of the novel: “‘I hear a sound’ [. . .] ‘cheep, chirp; cheep chirp; going up and down’” (9). As she grows older, Rhoda fully transforms herself into a swallow: a bird often found by the sea that represents love and hope. The becoming-fantasy of reality and becoming-reality of fantasy, or the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of both planes of existence, occurs for the last time when it’s hinted that Rhoda seeks flight in the course of her oceanic suicide. Neither reality nor fantasy imitates the other; they exist as a multiplicity.
In both her fantasy world and reality, Rhoda repeatedly refers to her tumultuous relationship with water. In her fantasy, she finds comfort in the “dark pools on the other side of the world” where the water “reflect[s] marble columns” and “the swallow dips her wings” (105). In reality, Rhoda refuses to breech the water of a gray puddle and seeks something hard to balance her as she avoids contact with it. The alliterative puddle/pool of water, with its similar coloring but contrasting affect, can easily be interpreted as a metaphor for an arborescent culture’s dichotomous impression of lesbian desire: something distasteful to be avoided or something beautiful to be embraced. This interpretation is made all the more evident when, after crossing the gray puddle without touching it, Rhoda says, “‘I returned very painfully, drawing myself back into my body over the grey, cadaverous space of the puddle. This is life then to which I am committed’” (64).
The lifeless puddle in her reality, which is presented with a hard object intended to aid in her avoidance of it, is reterritorialized in her fantasy. This is illustrated by her gravity-defying swallow choosing to touch the water and the phallic marble column’s role being reduced to that of an observer. Being but a spectator of Rhoda’s lesbian desire, the metaphorical phallus then becomes the male voyeur. During this translation, at the same time the pool in Rhoda’s fantasy is reterritorialized, the puddle in her reality is deterritorialized. It is no longer just an accumulation of rain drops, nor is the hard object she uses to avoid the water just a brick wall. Instead, they are both representations of that which she feels obligated to reject or embrace. Rhoda’s compulsion to touch hard objects to obstruct or balance out her contact with soft or fluid objects could represent compulsive heterosexuality in an arborescent culture. In her mind, the presence of a metaphorical penis protects Rhoda from, and absolves Rhoda of, her lesbian desire.
In contrast to the calm pool/puddle of water that represents Rhoda’s embraced or repressed lesbian desire, the roaring sea can be interpreted as a representation of heterosexual desire. In her offering to Percival after his death, Rhoda imagines sacrificing herself to the violent and unpredictable sea. With its seemingly endless territory and promise of consumption, Rhoda hopes the sea might perform similarly to a rhizome in that it would lack stratification and offer absolution from individuality. However, the sea is just one part of a rhizomatic ecosystem. As a symbol of female fertility, the sea also represents the potential for birth, with the “white foam” Rhoda speaks of being the fruits of the wave’s labor and exemplifying the purity of new life (164). The metaphorical sea, despite its dominion over earth and illusive universality, still only offers two paths to Rhoda—“mother” or “lover.” A puddle or pool of water lacks such potential. It is serenely stable; it does not ebb and flow within the gravitational war between sun and moon. After Rhoda symbolically submits to the sea, she attempts to cast her fantasy aside, but in doing so, she unwittingly ceases to exist in reality. There is no reality for Rhoda without the fantasy, because they exist as a multiplicity. Rhoda disappears from the novel until she embraces her fantasy again.
Later, in a scene that will eventually mark her final words, Rhoda’s fantasy and reality bleed together. Unlike other moments of Rhoda’s two worlds colliding, the truth of her reality dominates the farce of her fantasy, which helps Rhoda to finally recognize her body in a specific space and time. Unfortunately, finally forming a coherent bodily ego is what leads Rhoda to suicide. Her symbolic sacrifice after Percival’s death is paralleled in her actual suicide, where it’s implied Rhoda throws herself from a seaside cliff. In her physical submission to the feminine sea, Rhoda proves she would rather die among women she can’t identify with, than live under men with whom identification isn’t permitted.
“Dissolution of the Soul”
After she’s left Louis, Rhoda unleashes her hatred for her arborescent culture in an angry diatribe:
“None had the courage to be one thing rather than another. What dissolution of the soul you demanded in order to get through one day, what lies, bowings, scrapings, fluency and servility! How you chained me to one spot, one hour, one chair, and sat yourselves down opposite! How you snatched from me the white spaces that lie between hour and hour and rolled them into dirty pellets and tossed them into the waste-paper basket with your greasy paws. Yet those were my life.” (204)
Here, Rhoda berates humanity for their conformity, acknowledging that her misery is in large part due to society’s adherence to norms. Rhoda’s refusal to identify with anyone in an arborescent culture, which depends on identification in order to perpetuate, can be viewed as a rebellion. However, this initial insurrection does not translate into a suicidal uprising. Rhoda’s suicide is the result of personal repudiation, not systemic rebellion. This distinction is elucidated by returning to Silverman’s Threshold to the Visible World.
When she’s discussing the importance of identification in ego formation, Silverman expands on Max Scheler’s two forms of identification: idiopathic annihilation and heteropathic surrender (qtd. 24-25). She says, “the ego consolidates itself by assimilating the corporeal coordinates for the other to its own—by devouring bodily otherness. The ‘coherent’ ego subsequently maintains itself by repudiating (emphasis added) whatever it cannot swallow—by refusing to live in and through alien corporealities” (24). When this theory is applied to Rhoda’s fantasy world, which is a figurative representation of her bodily ego, it can be argued that Rhoda first “devours” or annihilates her fantasy then assimilates it into her reality. Then, when she’s finally in possession of a “whole” or “coherent” ego, Rhoda rids herself of that which isn’t represented in her culture.
Unfortunately for Rhoda, the aspects of her character that evade identification aren’t so easily expunged. In order to repudiate her culturally rejected gender expression and sexuality, Rhoda has to deny the existence of her entire mind and body. It’s in the performance of this denial that Rhoda commits suicide. As Silverman argues, “The aspiration to wholeness and unity not only has tragic personal consequences, but also calamitous social effects, since it represents one of the most important psychic manifestations of ‘difference’” (27).
Bernard breaks the news of Rhoda’s death nearly fifty pages after her last scene at Hampton Court: “‘Rhoda, always so furtive, always with fear in her eyes, always seeking some pillar in the desert, to find which she had gone; she had killed herself’” (281). Woolf’s choice to kill Rhoda off the page, rather than have Rhoda poetically fling herself off the cliff after her scathing rebuke of society, speaks to Woolf’s unwillingness to paint Rhoda’s death as a triumph (203-06). Instead, Rhoda’s death is as invisible as her existence, and readers are robbed of the emotional processing that permits them to cleanly move on from the tragedy. This refusal of catharsis rejects all notions of suicidal transcendence or transformation.
Deleuze and Guattari would likely argue the impossibility of transcendence in death, because it implies an untethered plane of existence that is privileged over other planes of existence. Similarly, they might argue that there can be no transformation in death without “deterritorialization as the maximum dimension” (Deleuze and Guattari 21). Meaning, until all variable deaths are characterized by the same elements, a unique death cannot be the catalyst for change. Death in a rhizome is not a pivot or ascension; it’s merely a reduction of life. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, “The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension [. . .] Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted.” (6).
It’s understandable that scholars, particularly queer scholars, want to interpret Rhoda’s suicide as an act of lesbian transcendence. Queer suicide is a manifestation of homophobic rejection, an effect of systemic discrimination. The world was built for heterosexual white men, and anyone who lives outside of those distinctions runs the risk of pathological ego disintegration. Scholars who choose to interpret Rhoda’s suicide as something positive or rebellious must do so out of hope or self-preservation. No one wants to believe their death is meaningless. Those whose lives were lost to exclusion especially want their deaths to be significant. However, in a rhizome, death is simply a subtraction. Rhoda’s alienation from society and subsequent suicide are not variables to be added in order to find purpose. Rhoda’s lesbian suicide within the rhizome of The Waves is, tragically, meaningless.
In Virginia Woolf’s world, however, Rhoda’s suicide may have more significance. A suicide in an arborescent culture should force people to re-examine their adherence to such arduous modes of being. Instead, suicide tends to reinforce hierarchy. Those who take their lives are deemed weak or defective, and those left to mourn rationalize any guilt they may feel over participating in a culture that leads to suicide. An arborescent culture not only increases the likelihood of suicide, but it also perpetuates suicide as an effect of degeneracy. In a rhizome, however, suicide would be far less likely. A rhizomatic understanding of identity accounts for an infinite variable of expression and identification. It’s identity as a multiplicity: humanity as a multiplicity.
Conclusion
Rhoda’s ego was formed by a culture that exists in opposition to the conditions in which she died. She was shaped by an oppressive regime of hierarchical standards that she couldn’t conform to, and it’s her non-conformity that proves the existence of a rhizome within The Waves. If binaries or one/multiple dialectics truly existed, Rhoda’s identity would fit naturally within those parameters. However, Rhoda lived and died in a multiplicity, therefore her identity was inorganically confined within a severe framework. The other characters also lived and died in a multiplicity, but their ignorance of their state of existence, or their weakness of character, saved them from the existential angst Rhoda was forced to endure.
If Rhoda’s ego had formed in a culture that embraced multiplicity, rather than hierarchy, it’s likely Rhoda would have developed a stronger connection to her identity and gone on to lead a relatively normal life like her friends.[2] As it is, the world decides who and how we should be. From the way we dress to the way we smile. From gender assigned names to sexuality assigned absolution, we are at the mercy of our culture. Until humanity accepts its multiplicity, we are, just as Rhoda was, left to annihilate and assimilate, repress and reject all that we see in ourselves but not in each other.
Notes
[1] For more information on queer reading strategies, see Hannah Kubowitz’s “The Default Reader and a Model of Queer Reading and Writing Strategies Or: Obituary for the Implied Reader.”
[2] I have refrained from mentioning Neville’s queer identity until this moment because as a man benefiting from patriarchal, homosocial behavior structures, he does not suffer the same way Rhoda does. Although I recognize the value in comparing two queer characters, a worthwhile comparison of Neville and Rhoda’s identities and life experiences would require a twenty page paper of its own.
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