Unbearable Lightness
Unbearable Lightness
Unbearable Lightness
Andrea Gamalski
Lit Crit
11/28/08
unknowable feminine that is a construct of the body of misogynistic text in the literary
canon. Both Sabina and Teresa exemplify binary representations of this female persona
as described in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gilbert’s The Madwoman in the Attic.
According to Gilbert and Gubar, women are forced into one of two opposing roles of
either angel or monster, thus fulfilling the male generated construct of femininity. In
binary of the angel or monster. Even the contrast between lightness and weight or Sabina
exemplifies lightness in her desperate drive to avoid the shackles of monogamous love.
In opposition is Tereza is heavy, jealous and flawed. She represents the ideal male
concept of woman because she is dutiful, faithful and jealous. Teresa gives all of her
female energy and creative powers over to the unrequited object of love she wishes to
possess, Thomas. In contrast, Sabina lives in constant fear of weight. This weight
manifests as the dark angel of jealousy and obsession. Thus, Sabina moves rapidly from
one lover to the next, avoiding a soul collision at all costs. If Sabina and Tereza are
opposing forces Thomas is the magnetic lodestone. Thus Thomas represents the great
neither mistress nor wife. She was a child whom he had taken from a bulrush basket that
had been daubed with pitch and sent to the riverbank of his bed”(The Unbearable
Lightness of Being 7). Thus Thomas describes himself as a Pharaoh, receiving the god
granted gift of Tereza, the harmless, helpless infant whom he must mold into an adult
woman. Helen Cixous discusses this sort of narcissistic male creationism in her manifesto
The Laugh of the Medusa. She describes the literary construct of women as
"phallocentric", love-less and full of self- loathing. Women have absorbed this self-
loathing because of her inability to conform to the binary of angel and monster. She has
projected it onto other women, thus creating an entire gender that tries desperately to
become a no-one. Because this male binary construct is an anomaly we fail and then
project self-hatred upon fellow women. This self-inflicted oppression further manifests
as all the neurotic diseases attributed to women, including hysteria, anorexia, agoraphobia
and amnesia (The Madwoman In the Attic 2033). Cixous describes the anxiety a woman
experiences when she realizes her interiority and sexuality do not align with the male
construct. She says, “Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives
(for she was made to believe that a well adjusted normal woman has a divine composure),
hasn’t accused herself of being a monster? (The Laugh of the Medusa 2040)
Tereza vacillates between these binary archetypes throughout the text. She is the
dutiful angel and helpless child delivered to Thomas like Moses in the bulrush basket.
When he marries her and she protests his infidelities she becomes his prison warden. He
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says, “For seven years he had lived bound to her, his every step subject to her scrutiny.
She might as well have chained iron balls to his ankles”(30). Here we see the inscrutable
woman of man’s imagination. She is a faithful angel, childlike in her reverence for her
husband, catering to his every whim sexually and domestically, yet allowing him
complete freedom to do whatever he likes with whomever he likes. This person is not
human, she is a delusional fantasy devised by the "phallocentric" ego. She has been so
imposed upon real women that we do not recognize our authentic drives and desires as
healthy and true. Rather, we suppress our creative life force in order to lace ourselves
into the stiflingly oppressive role of male generated woman. We degrade and criticize
other women because within this patriarchal literary structure we are in fierce
competition with one another to be the impossible, virgin, whore, angel, monster, scholar,
Cixous says, “Men have committed the greatest crime of all against women.
Insidiously, violently, they have led them to hate women, to be their own enemies”
Tomas, Tereza immediately realizes he is having multiple affairs. She begins to have
dreams depicting grisly death marches with Tomas as the gunman who shoots at the
woman doing knee-bends. She explains, “Tereza saw herself threatened by women, all
women. All women were potential mistresses for Tomas, and she feared them all”(18).
atmosphere of insecurity and mistrust because of his promiscuity. He knew Tereza loved
him monogamously, yet he married her and continued to have one adulterous affair after
the next. Because the text is written in a male voice it is impossible to know the reasons
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why Tereza would stay with such a man. Cixous cites the male dominant economy of
explains, “… writing has been run by a libidinal and cultural -hence political, typically
masculine –economy; that is a locus where the repression of women has been
perpetuated, over and over, more or less consciously, and in a manner that’s frightening,
since it’s often hidden or adorned with the mystifying charms of fiction…”(2042-2043).
Thus, for the sake of fiction, Tereza remains in an abusive relationship where she is
Within the guise of innocuous fiction, Tereza’s mother represents a monster from
the past. She invades the present with each painful discovery of Thomas’ infidelity.
Tereza’s mother is described as bawdy and shameless. She is abusive and intolerant,
constantly torturing Tereza out of jealousy of her youth and beauty. In addition, she
allows her perverse husband to watch Tereza in the bath. Kundera says, “Once she
locked herself in and her mother was furious. ‘who do you think you are, anyway? Do
you think he’s going to bite off a piece of your beauty?’”(45). The narrator explains that
Tereza’s mother must have been jealous and spiteful toward her daughter, rather than
concerned by her husband’s lechery. Thus Kndera proves that the male generated anti-
narcissism among women is not relegated only to sisterly competition but encroaches
haven for women. Even the sacred bond between mother and daughter is subject to the
vicious rivalry man has written between women. Cixous explains, “The mother, too, is a
metaphor. It is necessary and sufficient that the best of herself be given to woman by
another woman for her to be able to love herself and return in love the body that was
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‘born’ to her”(2045. This rivalry or self-hate is, at its center a mass of misinformation
about the true nature of woman. The center of this inter-gender hatred is man’s mistaken
If Tereza is the archetypal angel, Sabina tends toward a monster for her lack of
committed relationship. Kundera explains her yearning for alienation from human bonds
as weightlessness. For Sabina, the very notion of betrayal is an act of revolt toward all
declaring her autonomy from his puritan constraints. Thus, Sabina brings this element of
betrayal to all of her relationships because it makes her uniquely Sabina. The narrator
says, “Betrayal means breaking ranks and going off into the unknown. Sabina knew of
nothing more magnificent than going off into the unknown”(91). Although Sabina is
characterized as a free agent of pleasure, her oblivion to the casualties of her affairs could
only be derived from a male generated feminine voice. This in part explains the necessity
for women to write women. Cixous says, “By writing herself, woman will return to the
body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the
uncanny stranger on display—the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the
nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions”(2043). Because Sabina is a male
construct, she is emotionally one-dimensional. She does not exhibit any conflicting
emotions over her relations with married men. She seems to seek out married men,
which is clearly a sign of pathos, yet Kundera never examines this because it is
impossible for him to truly live in the interiority of a woman. Thus, Sabina only
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woman. She is a male construct of the imaginary monster-woman who simply does not
exist.
bi-sexual writing. She demands that the only authentic representation of gender and
sexuality in literature be written with the sensibilities of both or possibly all genders thus
creating a rich, multi-faceted character with real human yearnings, drives and desires.
She explains, “Bisexuality; that is, each one’s location in self (reperage en soi) of the
presence –variously manifest and insistent according to each person, male or female—of
both sexes, nonexclusion either of the difference or of one sex, and from this ‘self-
permission,’ multiplication of the effects of the inscription of desire, over all parts of my
body and the other body”(2047). Cixous does not ascribe bi-sexuality to castration, but
between Sabina and Tereza which, began as Tomas’ attempt to introduce his wife to his
mistress evolved into a representation of Tomas’ linguistic and sexual sign system played
out in the bodies of two naked women. The fact that Sabina introduces Tomas’ command
of “strip” into her encounter with Tereza illustrates this lack of bisexuality in Kundera’s
novel. Even the lesbian scene is encroached upon with a male sign system devised by a
male character. The women do not interact sexually. Instead, they burst out laughing
and re-dress. When describing the bowler hat on Sabina’s head, Kundera asks, “Was
excitement really a mere step away from laughter?”(86). He does not allow the laughter
Male authors not only lack knowledge of the feminine, they deem women an
impossible mystery. Cixous explains, “Men say that there are two unrepresentable
things: death and the feminine sex”(2048). Tomas’ erotic encounters are a means for him
to collect a piece of the unknowable feminine and possess her mysterious core. For
Tomas, it was not the mere vision of the naked woman but her sounds and gestures,
including her face at the moment of climax that make her the “other”, a soul to add to his
collection. Kundera says, “What is unique about the ‘I’ hides itself exactly in what is
unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like
everyone else, what people have in common”(199). Kundera describes Tomas’ drive to
possess the female core, as the human desire for unity via understanding however Tomas
still believes that the core of woman is an incomprehensible universe. This negates the
validity of Tomas’ motive. If woman is incomprehensible because she is not male then
their history, they have lived in dreams, in bodies (though muted), in silences, in aphonic
revolts”(2049). Tereza embodies this notion of the muffled woman. Her character
predominantly exists in dreams and visions of the past. She is haunted by nightmares of
naked women marching around a pool and her mother and being shot. These dreams
identify her within the text yet they are the direct result of her relationship with Tomas.
They define her only in relation to her husband. She is simply a possession, a
Cixous’ solution to the “phallocentric” literary culture calls for a female literary
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revolution. She asserts that the current literary period is on the wane. She explains, “For
when the Phallic period comes to an end, women will have either annihilated or borne up
combustion takes place retrospectively during the Prague Spring, a radical attempt at
feminine revolution because it encompasses the rupture and spreading out of new,
subversive feminine values over the old. As Cixous describes, such a revolution, “…is
volcanic; as it is written it brings about an upheaval of the old property crust, carrier of
masculine investments; there’s no other way”(2051). Thus, the Prague Spring, with all
its fertility and fecundity was a symbolic gesture of feminine voice for those dissenting
persons who took up their pens, or phallic extensions and signed for the wide-open hope
of democracy. Unfortunately, the Red Army invaded with their erect guns and launched
were purged from the country, assuring ultimate power to the grand phallus via force and
intimidation. Thus, the incandescence of the feminine revolution does not illuminate
The only solution to the lack of feminine authenticity in literature is for women to
write women. It is no fault of Kundera’s that he cannot accurately write the interiority of
woman because she still exists on, “the Dark Unexplorable Continent”(2048). The
bisexual writing that Cixous deems necessary for the evolution of literature will not
happen overnight. This sort of progress comes slowly through male exploration of
Shelly is not enough. One must learn about the “anxieties of authorship” attributed to
early female authors. This scholarly query necessitates an honest interest and desire to
understand the subject matter. Herein lies the quandary. If the literary power differential
favors the phallus, what male scholar wants to question the authorities that control
publishing? This is a significant bind, however there are a large number of progressive
thinkers in gender studies today that have exploded the notion of a heterosexual male
and literature, which in turn has awakened the volcano of feminine text and spread over
the ancient ruins of monuments to an old phallic regime. The resulting creative soil is
rich with the volcanic nutrients. It has been replaced by fertile earth for the outgrowth of