Lived realities are ‘All Cunt and No Conscience’
Readers interact with literary texts through accessing and engaging with imagination,
experiencing the literary world from characters’ perspectives; details and thoughts comprise rich
inner lives that humanizes, perhaps villainizes, or even objectifies them. Should a writer develop
characters through a purely creative flow and a view to lived realities, or should they be
interpreting that creativity through a particular lens, maybe a feminist lens? Hannah Nicholls
argues against George Elliot Clarke’s framing of female characters in The Motorcyclist, rereading
it “to unsettle and problematize its representation of women” (189).
In “All Cunt and No ‘Conscience’” Female Sexuality and Representations of Misogyny in
George Elliott Clarke’s ‘The Motorcyclist’, Nicholls argues Clarke’s framing of women
perpetuates misogyny in Atlantic Canadian literature, and that Clarke didn’t do enough to depict
the femininity, sexuality, and agency of his female characters. “His women rarely represent
alternatives outside the stereotypical good/bad feminine dichotomy, and they are given few
opportunities to explore their agency without suffering the consequences outlines by patriarchal
governance” (189).
Nicholls states she’ll compare Clarke’s work to An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness (Achebe) to draw parallels between Achebe’s criticism that Joseph Conrad
portrays an “image of Africa that reflects colonial and white imperialist discourses,” and Clarke’s
portrayal of women as “heteronormative and misogynistic” (189).
“Similar to Conrad’s portrayal of the Congo and the people who inhabit that space, Clarke
establishes an image of women and femininity that does not reflect the complexity or reality
women’s experiences” (189).
Nicholls sets a discordant tone with a title utilizing the phrase “All Cunt and No
Conscience,” but then balances it with an introduction summarizing Clarke’s accomplishments and
literary works. “Clarke demonstrates here the purpose behind his work, which actively identifies
and interrogates the institutionalized racism routinely left out of Canadian and Atlantic Canadian
narratives of place and belonging” (188).
Nicholls’ point, however, is not to fan Clarke’s accolades as a champion of Atlantic
Canadian black culture by the media, of which she cites extensively, and she states such acclaim
precludes in-depth examination of negative female characterization. “Critics continue to emphasize
the racialized discourses that Clarke highlights over other blatant forms of oppression and
marginalization, particularly in his depiction of his female characters” (189).
This text is mostly taken from Nicholls’ 2017 Master of Arts in Atlantic Canada Thesis,
“You’ll just have to do something about it”: Re-Reading Female Desire, Sexuality and Agency in
Contemporary Atlantic Canadian Literature, in which Nicholls analyses four separate texts,
including The Motorcyclist, against feminist theory.
“The lack of any sustained critical response to Clarke’s misogynistic
representations only serves to normalize and perpetuate this kind of writing.
Clarke’s work is consistently read through a lens that focuses primarily on race
relations instead of challenging the other overtly problematic representations he
provides” (Nicholls, 2017, 100).
While Nicholls maintains a textual context alluding to feminist theory including
Intersectionalism and Phallocratic Gaze, she does not address either theory within this text other
than to suggest some characterizations normalize misogyny. The inference to these theories seem
to be leftover from her previous thesis, from which much of this work is directly taken. Some
analysis of characters is held up through lenses of the Virgin Mary Ideology and the virgin-slut
continuum, which Nicholls references but does not clearly address in the bulk of her text, which is
largely comprised of detailed descriptions of relationship tension between Carl, Clarke’s
protagonist, and the supporting female characters.
Nicholls fails to address the feminist and pop culture theory pertinent to north American
black women in the 1950’s, or the novel’s setting, a historical context of time and place in which
women’s real lived existence was subjective to patriarchy and racism.
“Sexism, racism, classism, and ableism explicitly intersect to create complex lived realities
for women under patriarchy” (190), she says of Clarke’s framing, which she says continues to
marginalize his female characters. The sexism, racism, classism, and ableism characterized by
Clarke, were, however, the lived realities of women in the 1950’s, particularly black women.
An examination of key themes and discourses in Canadian women’s magazine, Chatelaine,
provides a glimpse into how messaging to women in the 1950’s was tailored to patriarchal
domination and classism. “Instead, the mostly male-dominated and -operated mass media tended to
represent career women as unhappy and unsatisfied, removing traces of women as independent,
intellectual individuals (Friedan, 1963; Sangster, 1995).
Freidan and Sangster explore women’s health advice in Chatelaine written by Dr. Marion
Hilliard between 1954 and 1957.
“Her works, published in eight Chatelaine articles and a 1957 book, are of
particular significance because they demonstrate some of the many paradoxes
Canadian women faced: women were told to stay at home and be housewives, but
that they could have an identity of their own; that women too were sexual beings,
but that their sexuality was confined within heterosexual, monogamous limits.”
(Mendes 515)
Neither is there clear further reference by Nicholls to the parallels of Heart of Darkness
until her conclusion, where again, she draws an unsubstantiated comparison between Conrad’s
depiction of the Congo and Clarke’s presentation of feminized women who’re “patriarchal
caricatures unable to move outside the narrow definitions that patriarchy creates for them” (203).
Clarke’s framing of female characters in the Motorcyclist could definitely be called
misogynist, but Nicholls lengthy descriptions of how ‘his’ women are portrayed in a patriarchal
society as “all cunt and no conscience,” (198) are obvious and not argument in themselves.
Those portrayals are true to Clarke’s creative vision, however, which reflects the real, lived
experience of many black women in the 1950s and contributes to his portrayal of Africadian
culture. To insist on removal of such framing in literary text would be tantamount to ignoring and
belittling these women’s struggles. Providing such framing and experience to the reader in the
Motorcyclist also creates opportunity for a reader to shift a standpoint in their subjective beliefs.
Works Cited
Clarke, George Elliott. The Motorcyclist. HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, 2016. EBSCOhost,
library.macewan.ca/full-record/cat00565a/7466317. https://library.macewan.ca/fullrecord/
cat00565a/7466317
Mendes, Kaitlynn. “Reading Chatelaine: Dr. Marion Hilliard and 1950s Women’s Health
Advice.” Canadian Journal of Communication, vol. 35, no. 4, Dec. 2010, pp. 515–
531. EBSCOhost, library.macewan.ca/full-record/ufh/58079380.
https://library.macewan.ca/full-record/ufh/58079380
Nicholls, H. (2018). “All Cunt and No Conscience”: Female Sexuality and Representations of
Misogyny in George Elliott Clarke’s The Motorcyclist. Studies in Canadian
Literature/Etudes En Littérature Canadienne, 43(2), 188–204.
https://library.macewan.ca/full-record/mzh/2019701496
Nicholls, Hannah. Re-Reading Female Desire, Sexuality and Agency in Contemporary Atlantic
Canadian Literature By Hanna Nicholls, Halifax, N.S. : Saint Mary's University, Aug. 3,
2017. http://library2.smu.ca/xmlui/handle/01/27171#.X6V7YpNKh3J