“Pieces of Herself”: Key Signifiers and Their Connotations
It’s 1999 and I’m sitting beside my mother in our two-door, burgundy Ford Escort. It has the kind of seat belts that lift up when you open the door, and come down just enough not to crush your chest when the door is closed. I’m incredibly happy to be sitting up front because I have just gotten a Barbie Steering Wheel for Christmas and had spent all morning getting the suction cups just right on the dash so it’s level with the steering wheel my mother is holding now. Her nails are painted this matted, dark red and I begged her to paint mine the same color a couple of days earlier. Each time her perfectly manicured nails hit the turn signal, my chipped, nervously bitten nails do the same to my mock turn signal. Left at Main Street, right at the Arby’s, zooming past the high school and the grocery- every move she makes, I imitate. A stack of papers to grade in the back seat, Fleetwood Mac blaring on the radio, one hand rests on the wheel, the other on her Diet Pepsi. With each swig she takes, I take a gulp of my Minute Maid Orange Juice. She’s everything I ever wanted to be. She is me, and I am her.
Fast-Forward
I’m sitting at my computer filling out applications for a Masters of Teaching, downing a Diet Pepsi, a caffeinated comfort not quite realized. I’m twenty- three years old and look more like my mother than ever, my wavy hair up in a clip, a book to be read beside my bed and a paper to be written looming somewhere in my stratosphere. I’m just about to finish my application and start on the next “to-do” item, when I turn on the news and see that Donald Trump is ahead in the poles. It’s November 8th, 2016. I can’t believe it- ahead. He’s winning. Winning.
I think back a week before when my car was in the shop and my mom had to pick me up from work. Janie, my coworker, and I were standing out front making conversation. Suddenly, the color left my face and my hands began to shake. I liked Janie, I really did. It took her months to warm up to me, the new girl, and I was so ecstatic the day she invited me to sit with our other coworkers at lunch, breezily saying, “This is Vannah, she’s cool.” Cool. She thought I was cool. Three months in and I had finally made my first friend. It was quickly approaching 8:00pm and my mother was never late. I had to think fast. I found myself prefacing my mother’s arrival with stories of my childhood and what a great mom she is. I went on to tell Janie all about my mother’s academic achievements and volunteer work right up until the moment her car pulled up. “Well, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow!” I said cheerily, hoping Janie would start walking to her car. But she didn’t- she stayed right there, waving until she disappeared from my rear-view mirror. I melted into a puddle in the passenger seat, knowing that my mom’s bumper sticker was blatantly obvious by now to Janie. “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” in all capital letters, trimmed in a fire-engine red, was the lasting impression she got of me that day. Definitely not cool. Janie is African American.
Pause
So what made me so afraid that day standing outside with Janie? I am a mature, twenty- three-year-old woman. Not a close-minded, timid middle schooler! Who cares what people think of me or my family! Does my mom’s bumper sticker define her as a person? Does my mom’s bumper sticker define me as a person? Does supporting Donald Trump make my mother and everyone associated with her a raciest, biggest joke? Of course not! In the same way that Hillary Clinton supporters are not at all crooked, feminist liars.
This moment stayed with me throughout the entire election. From dinners with Janie (she still talked to me, of course) and her liberal, progressive friends, where I would nod and agree- even if I didn’t agree at all, to weekly Scrabble matches with my strictly Fox-watching, conservative family, where I would nod and agree- even if I didn’t agree at all. I was a mess. I felt there was no true place I could voice my opinion without feeling judged on a personal level rather than a political one. When that fateful time came and it was just me alone in the voting booth, I had no idea who I was, or what I stood for. Can a woman vote for Trump? Can a person who once voted for Mitt Romney vote for Hillary Clinton? I was conflicted then and I am conflicted now standing in my living room watching Donald Trump become the next President of the United States. How I wished I could go back to the days where my nail color and Barbie Steering Wheel were my defining qualities. Where all I wanted to be was like my mother, when identity was comfortable and familiar. Since when did identity, literally, become so political? Juliet Davis’s e-literature text, “Pieces of Herself,” brings my exact realization out the subconscious and into an interactive moment accessible to everyone, where the doll, like me, discovers the significance of her identity through the people in her life, the settings she finds herself in, and the objects she fills herself with. Before returning to the contemporary, confusing moment we find ourselves in post-election, I would like to break down each component of Davis’s text into signifiers and connotations. By labeling each piece of the text and assigning meaning, we will be able to better analyze how to interact with the piece and fill the doll, according to unique preferences and understandings. Once we have broken down the components by designating each signifier and defining their use, we will be equipped to utilize these fragments to rebuild the barrier between personal and political identity for the doll as well as for us, the readers.
Step One: Assign Signifiers
In the text, “Pieces of Herself,” there are multiple connotations when experiencing the signifiers signified. The signifiers in this case being: the outlined doll present in each space, the objects the reader drags from each space to fill the doll, and the space itself. Three signifiers at play, with each one having primary and secondary connotations of its own. Using visible and invisible layering, Davis allows the reader to become interactive with the game, creating the physicality of the reader. N. Katherine Hayles presents the idea of the reader being a part of the co-authorship of a text in her article, “Print is Flat, Code is Deep.” Once the reader is a part of the physicality of the text, it is then the reader’s duty to “reconceptualize materiality as the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies” (Hayles 3).
Step Two: Assign Connotations to Signifiers
Signifier #1: The Doll
The first signifier, the outlined doll present in each of the scenes, initially invokes emptiness. This emptiness is projected onto the reader because upon entrance into Davis’s interactive piece of literature, the reader becomes the doll. The image itself, being in the shape of a doll, represents a copy or repressed individual.
Furthermore, Davis’s decision to use the outline of a doll is suggestive. There is an uncanniness surrounding dolls, representative of the dichotomy between human and plastic or dead and alive. Sigmund Freud’s “The ‘Uncanny’” touches on the use of the doll, Olympia, to portray the uncanny when referring to Hoffman’s “Nachtstücken” (Freud 5). While Freud dismisses the argument of the doll to focus on the “Sand-Man,” the mention of the doll is still worth noting. The idea that dolls are copies of living things and “Pieces of Herself” is meant to “comment on social inscriptions of the body” (Davis 1), holds true to the idea that the doll is a representation of a repressed woman due to societal expectations. Freud refers to this idea of replication in the context of repression: “-the fact, that is, that man is capable of self- observation- renders it possible to invest the old idea of a “double” with a new meaning and to ascribe many things to it, above all, those things which seem to the new faculty of self-criticism to belong to the old surmounted narcissism of the earliest period of all” (10). Return of the repressed and self-reflection is Freud’s central focus when examining the uncanny: “for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old- established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression” (13). Davis is taking this traditional and familiar expectation of womanhood and signifying it as emptiness. Thus, the doll has a double meaning of the uncanny.
The primary connotation is the doll blurring the dichotomy between real or fake and the secondary connotation of the doll symbolizing returned repression. Both of these connotations come into play throughout the movie, Ex Machina. In the film, Ava, an Artificially Intelligent being, is being tested to see how believable her humanity is. Nathan, her creator, has built her to look like the perfect female. She has all of the physical characteristics of a woman, as well as the social characteristics of sexuality and style that fits the modern stereotypical “woman.” The boundaries are broken down when Ava escapes and finds that she is merely the latest model in a chain of Artificially Intelligent beings and that she, like them, no matter how “real” she feels, is a powerful machine. Like a doll, she is a replica of what it is to be human, and like Davis’s assertion, has been repressing her given role as an inferior female, confined to only the world Nathan allows. There is a distinction between Ava, being an example of the actual uncanny, and "Pieces of Herself," being an example of the literary uncanny. Davis uses the doll throughout her piece to show what Miriam Posner states in her article, “What’s Next: The Radical, Unrealized Potential of Digital Humanities”: “how digital humanities might critically investigate structures of power, like race and gender” (Posner 1).
The doll is experimenting with self- investigating each time a new object is pulled from the space to fill her. Cornel West, one of America’s most provocative public intellectuals and champions for racial justice addresses the idea of self- examination in his interview, Examined Life: “How do you examine yourself, what happens when you interrogate yourself? What happens when you call into question your tacit assumptions and unarticulated presumptions and begin then to become a different kind of person.” West emphasizes that we have to push aside the notion that we have it all, or will ever have it all, and in that removal, we are able to reach our full potential as proud individuals, contrasting our consortium with the societal outlook on identity. By stripping down the doll to an outline, Davis is doing just that. She forcing the reader to come to terms with the essence of the doll, thus examining the purest version of themselves. In that naked honesty, the doll can then decide what secondary elements will be added to fulfil her and what aspects of everyday life will define her. After the introduction but before the simulation begins, Davis presents the reader with a preface stating, “Her friends said she needed to ‘find’ herself. And sure enough, when she started looking, she found pieces of herself everywhere . . .” The exploration doesn’t begin with the first object the reader drags from the space to the doll, but from the very beginning- when the doll is nothing but a shell, an empty outline. It is evident from the first moment of interaction that identity is not pre-destined for the doll, it is a truth the reader can create themselves and then project once complete.
Signifier #2: Objects Within the Space
The various objects scattered throughout the room are the second signifiers. This is when the doll’s uncanny connotation begins to change. This aspect allows the reader to partake in “filling” the paper doll with objects in her everyday life. In printed text, “all the words and images in the print text are immediately accessible to view” (Hayles 4), but in David’s simulation, the object signifiers only become visible when the mouse sweeps over the area they are located. For example, in the Shower, the revealed writing on the bathroom stall, “Tracy & John True Love 4-ever” represents a lasting relationship- love. If the reader navigates into the Living Room, another object becomes apparent- the television, blasting Oprah Winfrey. The sound comes into play here as well. The volume and flashing colors of the television demands an overwhelming and powerless sense of noise, blinding the reader from everything else in the room. The clamor of media is numbing to the reader. All of these spaces are presented in black and white, where all of the objects within them, possess color. The spaces are meaningless and bland. It is the colorful objects the reader uncovers that give the rooms value. The connotation of the television supports a point the author of the article, “Examples of Simulacra: Disney and Chinatown” makes in the last paragraph of the text, “to trigger viewers to recollect the idea of the truth that lies underneath the manipulated artificial images generated by society” (“Examples of Simulacra: Disney and Chinatown”). These are all examples of how the objects found throughout the spaces have their own primary connotations, and all of these objects added up together create the secondary connotation of fulfillment. Each time the reader drags an object to the doll, she is less empty inside.
Signifier #3: The Space
The third signifier is the space itself: the rooms the reader moves back and forth from. The reader is enabled to enter seven different spaces: Shower, Bedroom, Outside, Kitchen, Living Room, Office and Main Street. Some of these spaces are private, while others are public. Each time the reader is moved from inside the house to an outside space, there is a shift between a primary and secondary discourse. The objects presented in the inside spaces are personal, even comforting. The objects found in outside spaces are impressionable, even controversial. In the outside spaces, the reader finds a church, flag, police station, hospital and school. All of these places represent the public spectrum and relationships with others outside of the home. For example, the church representing religion: a community one can be a member of. Or the flag, representing America: a country one can be a citizen of. The outside presents a different type of “knowing” the reader can’t find inside, a “knowing” that comes from interaction with different people and things outside of the doll’s comfort zone.
This “knowing” is explained through Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” In “Thoughts about the cave,” Socrates asks Glaucon, “And then what? If he again recalled his first dwelling, and the “knowing” that passes as the norm there, and the people with whom he once was chained, don’t you think he would consider himself lucky because of the transformation that had happened and, by contrast, feel sorry for them” (Plato 4). In this case, the primary connotation is the separation and differences in objects between the inside space and the outside space. The secondary connotation is the transformation the reader experiences when going from a primary discourse to a secondary discourse. In Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” this transformation happens through the prisoner’s introduction to sunlight. Socrates states, “It would obviously take some getting accustomed, I think, if it should be a matter of taking into one’s eyes that which is up there outside the cave, in the light of the sun” (Plato 3). Unlike the prisoners in the cave, Davis allows her reader the choice to venture into the public space. The reader can choose to fill the doll up with familiar objects from the outside, or confront the political, educational and religious issues represented in the outside spaces. Much like Ava in Ex Machina, and in today’s society, we are given the choice to stay in our dark cave of comfort or take a chance and embrace the light of truth. Either way, the doll will continue to fill up, whether the reader chooses objects from a personal or public space.
Step Three: Application to the Reader
Once the reader has experienced each room, the outside spaces, and all the objects it offers; the doll is full. Now the doll has a different connotation. She is full, she is different and colorful, but does she have meaning? That all depends on the connotation associated to each item found and the reader’s own decision whether to drag the object into the doll. The reader is given a choice. Through interactivity, the reader is given power in the outcome of the story.
These three signifiers are not the only ones the reader is allowed to experience. Everything from the sound, the position of the objects in the room, the timing in which they are revealed, and the shapes and colors have meanings. This is where the line becomes blurry between affective personal and connotation. Yes, the doll is prefaced by Davis explaining a crisis in identity. However, it is hard for the reader to focus on the idea of “feminine embodiment” when the reader is now a part of a “hyper-reality” and he or she becomes the doll. The simulation of private and public space transcends into the reader’s own primary and secondary discourses. Although there are clear connotations throughout the game, Davis is able to relate her theme to the reader while connecting with the reader on a personal and resonating level.
So what does a representative doll have to do with you? The idea of identity is tremendously relevant and personal to each American in the moment we find ourselves in. Especially with the division our country is in with our “political identity” defining us on a deeply, personal level. Through my own interaction, I felt a personal connection to the doll in “Pieces of Herself” and agree with the theory it presents: it’s the people, objects and ideas you surround yourself with that defines you as a person- not your gender, race, or even political views.
Play
Remember, we have paused our contemporary moment and taken time to examine this e-literature piece in hopes of defining our own identity, outside of a virtual space. In order for me to do so, I must again return to the moment I find myself replaying again and again- and move through it. That day I stood on the curb with my coworker Janie, I was worried that she would revoke her friendship because she would associate my political affiliations with my mother. Or worse, it would raise suspicions and questions about my own political identity I couldn’t answer. There on the street, I wasn’t at all like the doll at the beginning of “Pieces of Herself.” I was full, but there was no meaning behind all of the objects filling me up. Sure, there was an abundance of memories made up of spaces and objects, but all of them were two-dimensional, stuck in a space that couldn’t translate to my physical world. Throughout the election, I made a mistake. I let other people’s opinions and judgements fill me up completely. There was no room left to explore secondary discourses and reexamine primary ones. I had let society define me- as a woman and as a millennial, and all of these preconceived notions were so filling that I became a collaged copy of everyone else. I was as far away from my true self as possible. Even the little girl in the car beside her mother is not completely innocent. I’m not saying that we all need to erase where we came from or who we know in order to become like the doll, but we do need to retrace the ideas and notions that happened when we were our most impressionable. Just like the doll in the text, she is not going to all new places and environments with foreign objects, but taking each familiar space and object and placing it under a microscope and choosing whether or not to let it define her. While on the verge of a new political era, that’s what I believe each one of us will need to do. Examine ourselves at our most empty and most vulnerable, and let ourselves be the guide of the mouse filling our doll- not society. Once we have filled ourselves with objects, people and spaces we have a clear connotation of, we will be able to define ourselves on all levels, whether that be political or personal. With our definitive identity comes understanding and tolerance of others and their fulfillments. Janie was able to welcome me to the lunch table the next day at work, regardless of the bumper sticker with words she cringed at the day before. There is a difference between me as a person and me as a voter. Political identity is a part of what makes us who were are, but it is not the defining factor. We are. We decide, we choose what we reflect onto the world, although at times it seems we are mirroring the world. Juliet Davis allows her readers to get back to the basics in a safe, interactive space, reminding them that identity is a choice, not a label.
