8.4 Subversion and containment

Subversion in Literature

Subversion and containment describe the push and pull between literature that challenges power and the mechanisms that try to neutralize that challenge. Within New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, this dynamic is central: literary texts don't simply reflect their culture but actively participate in struggles over meaning, authority, and social order.

Stephen Greenblatt's foundational question drives this topic: does literature genuinely threaten dominant power, or does the system allow apparent subversion only to contain it more effectively?

Subversion in Literature

Subversive literature challenges dominant ideologies, questions social norms, and works to undermine power structures through its themes, form, and perspective. It exposes contradictions and oppressive aspects of prevailing belief systems, presents marginalized voices and alternative narratives, and pushes readers toward critical thinking about the world they inhabit.

Challenging Dominant Ideologies

Subversive texts target the ideologies that shape a society's beliefs and power relations: capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism, and others. These works expose contradictions within prevailing worldviews and present alternative perspectives that challenge what a culture treats as natural or inevitable.

• They reveal how ideologies serve specific interests rather than universal truths
• They present narratives that undermine the legitimacy of dominant belief systems
• They encourage readers to critically examine the ideological forces shaping their lives

Shakespeare's The Tempest, for instance, can be read as both reinforcing and questioning colonial authority through Prospero's relationship with Caliban.

Questioning Social Norms

Subversive literature challenges the conventions and expectations that regulate behavior and maintain social order. It exposes how norms around gender, sexuality, race, and class are often arbitrary and restrictive rather than natural.

• Characters, relationships, and situations that deviate from normative standards force readers to confront their assumptions
• These texts imagine alternative ways of being and relating to one another
• They show that what counts as "normal" shifts across time and place, revealing norms as cultural constructions rather than fixed truths

Undermining Power Structures

Subversive works expose and critique the hierarchies that organize social, political, and economic life. They reveal how power operates within institutions like government, religion, education, and the family.

• They give voice and agency to marginalized and oppressed groups
• They challenge the erasure of subordinated perspectives within dominant narratives
• They imagine alternative forms of social organization grounded in equality and justice

Containment Strategies

Containment strategies are the methods dominant groups and institutions use to control, suppress, or neutralize subversive elements in literature and culture. These strategies aim to protect existing power structures and limit the transformative potential of disruptive ideas.

A key insight from New Historicism: containment doesn't always look like outright repression. Often, the most effective containment works by absorbing subversion, making it seem harmless.

Censorship and Suppression

Censorship is the most direct form of containment: the outright prohibition or destruction of subversive texts, along with punishment of their authors and publishers.

• The Catholic Church's Index Librorum Prohibitorum banned books deemed heretical for centuries
• The Comics Code Authority (1954) sanitized comic book content in response to moral panic
• The fatwa against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses (1989) represents state-religious censorship with a death threat attached

Censorship aims to control which ideas circulate, but it often backfires by drawing more attention to the banned work.

Co-opting Subversive Elements

Co-optation is subtler than censorship. It involves absorbing subversive ideas into the mainstream in ways that strip away their oppositional force.

• Subversive styles get commodified: punk fashion moves from political statement to department store product
• Radical literature gets adapted into Hollywood films that soften or remove the political critique
• Countercultural symbols get incorporated into advertising, turning rebellion into a brand

The process works by transforming subversion into something marketable and consumable, neutralizing its challenge to the status quo.

Reframing Narratives

Reframing uses discursive strategies to reinterpret subversive literature in ways that align with dominant interests. Rather than banning a text, those in power change how it's understood.

• Subversive works get labeled as obscene, unpatriotic, or corrupting to youth
• Critical elements are decontextualized or misrepresented to obscure their implications
• Reactionary movements sometimes appropriate subversive symbols and slogans for their own purposes

This strategy is particularly effective because it doesn't require removing the text from circulation. It just changes the frame through which people encounter it.

Subversion vs. Containment

The relationship between subversion and containment is not a simple binary. New Historicists like Greenblatt argue that power structures sometimes produce the subversion they then contain, using the appearance of dissent to reinforce their own authority.

Tension Between Opposing Forces

Subversion and containment exist in constant push and pull. Subversive literature disrupts and critiques; containment strategies defend and reproduce existing power relations.

This tension shows up as the ongoing struggle between innovation and tradition, resistance and repression, change and stability in the literary field. Neither force ever fully wins.

Cycles of Resistance and Control

The dynamic plays out in recurring cycles:

1. A subversive movement emerges and gains momentum
2. It opens spaces for critique, imagination, and solidarity
3. Dominant institutions respond with censorship, co-optation, or reframing
4. New forms of subversion develop in response to those containment strategies

These cycles reflect a historical dialectic between oppression and liberation. Both subversive and dominant forces prove resilient and adaptable.

Negotiating Boundaries

The struggle between subversion and containment constantly renegotiates boundaries: what counts as acceptable expression, legitimate critique, and whose voices get included.

• Subversive literature pushes against and redraws these boundaries
• Containment strategies police and reinforce them
• The outcomes depend on the relative power, resources, and alliances of each side, as well as broader social and political conditions

Greenblatt's reading of Renaissance theater illustrates this well: the Elizabethan stage was permitted to stage challenges to authority precisely because the state believed it could contain those challenges within the theatrical frame.

Subversive Literary Techniques

Authors use specific formal and rhetorical strategies to challenge dominant ideologies. These techniques create dissonance, ambiguity, and irony that invite readers to question conventional meanings. The techniques themselves aren't inherently political, but they become subversive depending on how and in what context they're deployed.

Irony and Satire

Irony uses language that says one thing but means another, highlighting contradictions or hypocrisies. Satire takes this further, using wit, exaggeration, and ridicule to criticize individuals, groups, or institutions.

• Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal proposes eating Irish children to mock British colonial exploitation
• Voltaire's Candide ridicules philosophical optimism in the face of real suffering
• George Orwell's Animal Farm uses a farmyard allegory to critique Soviet totalitarianism

These works make their critique through indirection, which can help them evade censorship while landing their point more forcefully.

Allegory and Symbolism

Allegory uses characters, events, and settings to represent abstract ideas or political realities. Symbolism uses objects, actions, or images to evoke multiple layers of meaning, often ambiguous or open to interpretation.

Both techniques allow authors to encode subversive messages beneath a surface narrative, which historically helped writers evade persecution.

• Dante's Divine Comedy layers political critique within a religious framework
• William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience uses symbolic contrasts to critique industrialization and institutional religion
• Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man uses the metaphor of invisibility to represent the erasure of Black identity in American society

Unreliable Narrators

An unreliable narrator is one whose credibility is called into question through limited knowledge, bias, or deception. This technique challenges the authority of dominant discourses by showing that all narration involves perspective and construction.

• Nabokov's Lolita forces readers to see through and past a manipulative narrator, exposing how eloquent language can mask abuse
• Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day reveals how a narrator's self-deception mirrors broader cultural repression
• Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest uses a marginalized narrator whose "unreliability" actually exposes institutional violence

Unreliable narration can give voice to perspectives that mainstream readers might otherwise dismiss, subverting assumptions about who gets to tell the truth.

Containment in Literary Criticism

Literary criticism itself can function as a containment strategy. Dominant schools of thought, interpretive frameworks, and evaluative criteria shape which texts get taken seriously and how they're understood.

New Criticism's Depoliticization

New Criticism, which dominated mid-20th century literary studies, emphasized close reading, formal analysis, and the autonomy of the text. By insisting that a poem or novel should be analyzed apart from its social, historical, or political context, New Critics effectively contained literature's subversive potential.

This approach treated literary meaning as timeless and universal, divorcing texts from the political conditions that produced them. Later schools of criticism (Marxist, feminist, postcolonial) challenged this by insisting that context is inseparable from meaning.

Formalism's Focus on Aesthetics

Formalism more broadly prioritizes the formal and aesthetic properties of literature over its content or politics. While close analysis of literary devices and structures produces valuable insights, an exclusive focus on aesthetics can contain subversion by privileging form over content and technique over meaning.

When a critic discusses only the craft of a protest novel without engaging its political argument, that's a form of containment. Cultural Materialists like Raymond Williams and Alan Sinfield specifically targeted this tendency.

Canon Formation and Exclusion

The literary canon is the body of texts considered to have the highest artistic and cultural value within a tradition. Canon formation determines which texts get taught, studied, and celebrated.

This process can function as containment by:

• Privileging texts that align with dominant ideologies while marginalizing those that challenge them
• Using criteria like "aesthetic merit" and "universality" that often reflect the values of dominant groups
• Excluding entire traditions of writing by women, people of color, queer writers, and working-class authors

Feminist, postcolonial, and queer scholars have worked to expand and diversify the canon, arguing that its traditional boundaries reflect power relations rather than objective quality.

Subversion and Identity

Subversive texts frequently challenge dominant constructions of identity, exposing how identities are socially constructed, historically contingent, and shaped by power relations.

Marginalized Voices

Subversive literature foregrounds the voices and experiences of groups underrepresented in dominant traditions: women, people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, working-class people.

• Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God centers a Black woman's quest for self-definition against both racial and gender oppression
• Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name creates a new literary form ("biomythography") to capture the intersections of Black, lesbian, and immigrant identity
• Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things exposes how caste, class, and colonial legacies shape whose stories get told in India

By centering these voices, subversive texts challenge the supposed universality of dominant narratives.

Challenging Stereotypes

Subversive literature undermines the reductive stereotypes that justify oppression by presenting complex, multidimensional characters and experiences.

• Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart directly counters colonial stereotypes of African societies by depicting Igbo culture in its full complexity
• Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior deconstructs stereotypes of Asian American women through a blend of memoir and myth
• Alison Bechdel's Fun Home challenges assumptions about queer identity and family through its layered graphic memoir form

These texts don't just replace negative stereotypes with positive ones. They expose how stereotyping itself works as a mechanism of power.

Reclaiming Agency

Subversive literature depicts marginalized characters reclaiming autonomy and subjectivity against oppressive forces, challenging the passivity and victimization that dominant narratives assign to them.

• Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John traces a young Antiguan girl's resistance to colonial education and maternal authority
• Octavia Butler's Kindred uses time travel to force a modern Black woman into direct confrontation with slavery, exploring agency under extreme constraint
• Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis depicts a young Iranian woman asserting her identity against both Western stereotypes and theocratic repression

These works explore alternative forms of power and resistance that go beyond simply inverting existing hierarchies.

Containment and Power

Containment strategies are deeply intertwined with power. They operate through institutional authority, hegemonic discourse, and processes of normalization that shape how literature gets produced, circulated, and received.

Institutional Authority

Dominant cultural, political, and economic institutions act as gatekeepers for literature. Schools determine what gets taught. Publishers determine what gets printed. Media determines what gets attention. Government determines what gets censored.

• The publishing industry's focus on marketability filters out texts that challenge consumer culture
• Educational systems emphasize canonical texts that often reinforce dominant values
• State censorship directly suppresses materials deemed threatening

These institutions don't need to coordinate consciously. Their individual logics of profit, tradition, and order converge to contain subversive work.

Hegemonic Discourse

Hegemony, a concept from Antonio Gramsci central to Cultural Materialism, describes how dominant ideologies become "common sense" so thoroughly that alternatives seem unthinkable.

Hegemonic discourse contains literature by:

• Naturalizing dominant perspectives so they appear universal rather than partisan
• Marginalizing alternative views as extreme, impractical, or irrelevant
• Shaping reader expectations about what literature should look like and do

The valorization of "individual genius," the emphasis on aesthetic autonomy, and the marginalization of political critique in literature all reflect hegemonic containment at work.

Normalization and Assimilation

Normalization and assimilation incorporate subversive elements into the mainstream in domesticated form.

• Normalization standardizes literary forms and content, making them more predictable and marketable
• Assimilation selectively includes marginalized voices in ways that dilute their oppositional potential

Examples include the mainstreaming of once-experimental techniques (stream of consciousness becoming a standard workshop tool), the commodification of ethnic identities in publishing ("diverse voices" as a marketing category), and the depoliticization of feminist and queer themes into feel-good narratives of individual empowerment.

The result is that subversion gets absorbed into the system it was meant to challenge.

Subversive Genres and Forms

Subversive genres and forms push the boundaries of literary convention, emerging in opposition to the limitations of mainstream literature and in response to broader social and political struggles. These modes challenge dominant aesthetic and ideological conventions while exploring new possibilities for expression and critique.