experiences. These experiences are absent from the representation of her conscious thoughts, but they appear in embodied images provided in the text. As evocations of her split memory, these images are examined in relation to Mrs. Pyy’s dream worlds. Certain works of art are also analyzed as being among the self-mirrors that she uses while building up her middle-class identity. Finally, the emotional story structure of the novel is explored in the context of the cycles of Mrs. Pyy’s emotional arousal, which led to repetitious failures and disillusionment. These structures are then approached from the perspective of the deferred patterns of female self-discovery staging the possibilities of Mrs. Pyy’s awakening to herself and reality as it is.
The Deceiving Mind. Looking at the Self in the Mirror of Others
In Kaikki naiset näkevät unia, a mind-reading ability becomes one of the survival tools for Mrs. Pyy, who shields herself by reading the minds of other people. “I read people like an open book, and my instinct does not fail”
(K, 47).3 Eventually, she is shown to be suffering from serious self-delusion.
While Mrs. Pyy tries to find answers to her personal crises, she continuously reflects upon herself through the mirrors of others, builds identities and roles that protect her from intrusions by others, yet simultaneously these maneuvers separate her from real human contact. The beginning of the novel stages this ambivalence of private and public selves with Mrs. Pyy portrayed as peeping from behind curtains as the new neighbor is moving in. Mrs. Pyy critically observes the woman’s property and her appearance.
Mrs. Pyy considers herself lucky to have been the first to move into an empty row house: “The same old furniture, although the apartment is new, and one has to show one’s life to strange people” (K, 13).4
The friendship and solidarity between women is a common theme in female Bildungsromane. The exploration of the self with a dimension of group solidarity and collective identity typically projects a visionary hope of future change in women’s roles (Felski 1989: 139). In Kaikki naiset näkevät unia, however, other women reflect the protagonist’s deepening sense of self-alienation and resignation. The idea of hostility to other women’s thoughts is emphasized in the dialogues between Mrs. Pyy and her husband following the opening scene. Mrs. Pyy describes the women of the neighborhood as
“snakes” full of ulterior motives and evil gazes: “If it’s possible for a human to have an evil eye, then she has one” (K, 47), Mrs. Pyy says of one of the women.5 Mrs. Pyy tries to convince her husband of the accuracy of the rumors that she has heard the other women spreading about her: “I heard it with my own ears,” Mrs. Pyy insists (K, 34).6 But the narrator catches her out in a lie: “She had heard it from the cleaning woman. She had recounted what she had heard the other women talking about” (ibid.).7
Rumors are shown to be marked by potential unreliability: the more layered the talk, the more distorted the initial message. The risks for misreading increase if the character listens to others too eagerly. The self-deceiving sufferers, such as Mrs. Pyy, tend to deliberately mishear everything others say. When Mrs. Pyy visits an artist with whom she has tried to strike
up an acquaintance, she keeps listening to the ”true” meaning behind every word: “‘No, you don’t disturb me, I wasn’t doing anything special,’ the artist replied. But Mrs. Pyy heard the voice; it answered her: ‘Yes, you disturb me, but I don’t have the nerve to tell you, because you are tactless enough to ask if you disturb me’” (K, 139).8 Here Mrs. Pyy misreads the exhaustion in the artist’s expressions as a personal insult directed at her. She considers her own false attributions as actual representations of the artist’s thoughts. The reader, however, can interpret the more likely signs embodied in the artist’s gestures: she is exhausted after an intensive period of working.
The Janus-faced ambivalence of intersubjectivity, evoking both yearning and anxiety, is portrayed in the mind-reading sequences when Mrs. Pyy is talking with her old friend Laura. Laura is sharing the experiences of her painful divorce. In turn, Mrs. Pyy makes her own confession that comes as a surprise to the reader. She has had a lover for some time. In the scene, possibilities for empathy and recognition are suggested and simultaneously denied as Mrs. Pyy imagines tears running down Laura’s face, “as if Laura had been somewhere and gotten to know something that she was not even going to try to share with anyone” (K, 94).9 Mrs. Pyy understands that one can never truly know another person. A genuine intimacy means an ability to be silent when words are in vain: “Mrs. Pyy understood. She was herself;
Laura over there was someone else. They might talk to each other about everything, like before, but they knew not to talk about things they couldn’t speak of. This thing that was happening to them right now, there were no words to explain it” (ibid.).10 The time of unconditional sharing is over: “It wasn’t important anymore,” Mrs. Pyy claims and gives a sad laugh (ibid.).11
The failure to keep track of oneself as the source of the representations of other people’s minds particularly characterizes mentally unstable characters.
A paranoid quality of mind-reading arises out of the mechanisms of misrepresenting one’s own mind. This aspect of mind-reading manifests itself as the characters perceive their own thoughts emanating, not from their own intentions, but from some outer source not under their control (Zunshine 2004: 55). Disembodied voices stem from a mind that loses its ability to keep track of itself as the origin of obsessive thoughts. The delusions of thought insertions and alien control are manifested in Mrs.
Pyy’s hallucinations after she has escorted Laura back to the train station.
After the train has gone, Mrs. Pyy stands watching the tracks that lead to life elsewhere. She imagines the station clock transformed into a huge eye, resembling a surrealist painting (cf. Ruuska 2010: 131). The clock observes her every movement, as if measuring the diminishing time left in her life.
When the second hand moves again, she feels “as if she has heard someone taking a big bite and swallowing it – or as if someone had fallen head over heels down into the darkness, and she had heard the fall” (K, 96).12
The Icarian fall is mentioned for the first time when Mrs. Pyy talks to Laura about the “black region” (“musta alue”) into which she has fallen:
“You yourself are so sensible and calm; maybe you are not even aware that there is something inside you – how should I put it – a black region into which you fall, or wish to fall […]” (K, 91).13 The fall becomes an image of the unconscious, the unknown within, which alienates Mrs. Pyy from
The Deceiving Mind. Looking at the Self in the Mirror of Others
her habitual self. She stands, paralyzed, at the station. The world turns into a dark and frightening place, even as she struggles to come back into her own skin, “to breathe herself alive again and free, to be again who she was, Mrs. Pyy” (K, 99).14 The mode of narrated monologue is employed to generate an impression of Mrs. Pyy’s self-distancing as she pictures herself joining the stream of citizens who know who they are and where they are going and are rationally planning their actions. She is Mrs. Pyy, “who walks forward, opens the door of the hall, opens another door, comes to the stairs of the station and walks down and to a specific platform to wait for a specific bus that will take her to a specific part of the city, and then she would go into a specific building, and into a specific apartment, number A 8. She was Mrs.
Pyy” (ibid.).15
As Mrs. Pyy’s sense of estrangement deepens, the metaphor of “the evil eye” (“paha silmä”) takes a materialized form of paranoia. It is reduced to pure delusion: all humans have evil eyes. The conditional source tag in Mrs.
Pyy’s previous thought – “If it’s possible [for a person to have an evil eye]”16 – disappears. Mrs. Pyy imagines other people as creatures with “feelers”
(“tuntosarvet”) watching her. She is an outsider who has landed on another planet, an alien who does not belong where she is. Cars turn into living beings with intellects of their own; a bus has thoughts that resemble Mrs.
Pyy’s own mechanical, automatic thoughts as the bus “opened up, unloaded something, without paying attention to what it was doing, still thinking about the same thing, the same thing, as if continuing the same thought even while it was standing in place” (K, 101).17 Mrs. Pyy keeps counting the dots in an illuminated advertisement. Her mind is mesmerized by the blinking lights that trigger her need to count the number of dots over and over again. Unable to break the circle, she starts from the beginning, even while she is aware of the irrationality of her actions: “The things I count, she mumbled; she became vexed when she realized she had started to count for the third time the red dots blinking in the illuminated advertisement over the door of the restaurant opposite” (K, 103).18
The cycles of counting resemble Mrs. Pyy’s cycles of self-attentive thought, which demonstrate the dangers of an over-aroused mind. Arousal involving the feeling of fear, for instance, locks the mind into its emotional state, causing emotional tension and anxiety in the aroused mind. In the portrayal of Mrs. Pyy’s mental actions, the feeling leads into the vicious cycles of pathological arousal as the mind’s attention is persistently directed toward the emotional responses rather than the external reality seen “as it is.”19 Mrs. Pyy cannot control her mind. She is obsessed with the irrational thought that someone is observing her with a malicious eye: “She was hiding there on the fringe, observing, but she had been seen; it was known that there was someone strange over there, looking around the way a stranger does; she had woken that person up, over there” (K, 104).20
Mrs. Pyy’s random interpretations of her environment and other people reveal the imaginative mind’s tendency to be superstitious, thereby giving birth to circles of fear and desire (cf. Kavanagh 1993: 12–13). For a tragic, superstitious mind, fate becomes an internalized force, manifesting itself as a desire to repudiate chance and see meaning in every event.21
The characters’ denial of randomness may result in superstitious beliefs or, by contrast, in delusion, as randomness is repeatedly interpreted as meaningful. This kind of “delirium of interpretation” (Bell 1993: 99) triggers a feeling of mysteriousness that does not truly exist. In Vartio’s fiction the delusive quality of imagination is also emphasized in the representations of paranoia that stem from an excess of interpretation, “logical thinking gone wild” (ibid.: 98). Even the most minor details of others’ behavior become sources of far-reaching conclusions: “Not only is every event down to the most inconspicuous and minor one incorporated into the paranoid’s world view, but, in addition, each of those details is enlisted in the service of an explanation meant to prove that malice of some sort is intended toward the paranoid himself or herself”(ibid.).
The delusiveness of the mirroring of oneself in the mirrors of others relates to Mrs. Pyy’s self-obsession. Compared to Vartio’s early figures, Anni and Leena, Mrs. Pyy is overly self-conscious. She resembles the figure of Napoleon in her tendency to perform and reach for better worlds: “She read the art column and the for-rent ads in the newspaper. She read them line by line as if looking through them into another world, into other environments, as if they provided comfort, encouragement” (K, 39–40).22 While reaching for better worlds, Mrs. Pyy ends up constructing her self-performances in relation to others. Her motivation to look at others is to see others looking back. The characters’ attentiveness to versions of themselves is dependent on how confident they are. The less self-assured the character is, the more attentive she or he is as to what others think of her or him. (Butte 2004: 58) Characters such as Mrs. Pyy perceive themselves mostly as imaged through others. They are powerfully aware of others as a mirror in which their own image is reflected.
In the narratives of female awakening, the false roles imposed upon the protagonist are juxtaposed to the more authentic self, which – in the best scenario – comes to light during the course of the narrative (Felski 1989:
132). The making new of Bildung in the narratives of female development is manifested in formal innovations related to the narrative dynamics of self-formation that reflect the new ideas of subjectivity and the artifice of the self.
The frustrated and detoured Bildung of modernist novels leads to a “failure”
in terms of the traditional form. This very failure, however, illustrates the re-assessed notion of the self as a constructed and reconstructed image, an ego, rather than as a coherent, harmonious identity. (Castle 2006: 27–28, 192–
193) The modernist Bildung refers to identities that are hybrid, ambivalent, and may involve traumatic processes of self-formation (ibid.: 64).23
In Kaikki naiset näkevät unia, the experience of otherness derives from the dichotomization between self-images that problematizes the process of Mrs. Pyy’s self-formation. The other women reflect a narcissistic split in her personality. She is captivated by her own image, and for this very reason, is unable to see others as they are. Other people serve only as projections of her emotional responses. Mrs. Pyy’s inclination to see herself through the eyes of others, however, is portrayed with special clarity in her relation to her lover. Mrs. Pyy’s thoughts about the affair are revealed only at the point the relationship has begun to approach its end. During her last dinner with
The Deceiving Mind. Looking at the Self in the Mirror of Others
her lover, Mrs. Pyy analyzes her expectations of the relationship: “She had expected the man to tell her, the woman, who she was. The woman wanted to see herself through the man, as if only through his eyes would she see herself” (K, 156).24
Even in the middle of an emotional outburst, Mrs. Pyy is constantly aware of the impression she is making on people. Leaving the restaurant, humiliated and furious, she keeps reading the impressions of herself in the people around her: “I’ll walk with my back straight. It’s important that I walk with my back straight. I’ll walk to that door. And she knew that she had gotten free of something, she walked along the carpet and she knew.
Tried, that man, tried to prop me up, and that head waiter looks at me and thinks that I’m someone, someone whom someone has gotten drunk here” (K, 165).25 In the restaurant episode, Mrs. Pyy splits in two. She sees herself from a distance as if through someone else’s eyes.
In Mrs. Pyy’s self-reflection, the scripts of the intersubjective – the layerings of gazes and gestures – are gendered in a subtle way (cf. Butte 2004: 111). The lover’s act of mirroring, in Mrs. Pyy’s mirror, is hostile and critical. She keeps imagining what the lover is seeing, what occurs in his consciousness as he looks at her. “Then she stared at the man with her head high, and it was as if she had seen her own profile from the outside”
(K, 157).26 The vision Mrs. Pyy imagines is not a pleasant one: “[A] cruel look in the eyes, head high, hands trembling, she looked at the man and was pleased with herself. Of course, in his eyes I look awful right now, but that’s exactly what I want. For once, to be who I really am” (K, 157).27 Mrs. Pyy has realized that she cannot hold onto her performance for long. Paradoxically, her affected smile becomes the signifier of her “real” face: “Someday this man too would see this face, this one that she herself saw in the mirror, saw only this face, not her real face, this face that kept smiling and which she offered to the man’s eyes, when he looked at her” (K, 124).28
The mirroring effect is intensified by the use of a mirror in the restaurant scene. As Mrs. Pyy and the lover are leaving the restaurant, they see their reflection in the mirror on the wall of the elevator: “But a woman looked at them from the mirror, and she knew who it was. And behind her, sideways, stood a man. Sideways, so that his face would no longer be next to the woman’s face. The man doesn’t need to stand sideways. And she turned, and the woman in the mirror turned [...]” (K, 165).29 The couple’s composition reflects the change in their relationship – the distance which has grown between them. This distance is reflected in their gestures when they are trapped in the confined space. Mrs. Pyy wants to show the man that she has no romantic expectations, which leads to a loop of mirrorings: “The other surely understood that she wasn’t still standing close to him on purpose, her back against his back. For you are a stranger now, but you think that I pushed you because I still want something from you” (K, 166), Mrs. Pyy speculates.30
Mrs. Pyy’s sense of self-identity is being formed as a result of identifying with her own specular image. This mirror shows the reflections of the people around her. It provides imaginary wholeness to a self that is experienced as a fragmentary entity. Self-articulation of this kind implies, of course, a false
recognition: the self is a product of a series of misunderstandings. In the restaurant, Mrs. Pyy realizes the performed quality of her identity: “Wouldn’t I try to be wiser than I am, to perform a role so as not to lose favor in his eyes, even though I am only a dumb little woman. And that’s what he wanted of me, a small dumb woman, who has been pleasant and even considerate, at least lately” (K, 155).31 The scenes of self-distancing reflect Mrs. Pyy’s ability to see herself anew as she realizes what the man has thought of her: “And it felt as if she had suddenly risen above that man by seeing and understanding herself the way he had judged her” (ibid.).32
As Mrs. Pyy begins to see her lover more realistically, she drops the mask she has been wearing. The mask, however, has already become another version of her self-understanding. Mrs. Pyy cannot always be clear to herself (or to her audience) or define where pretense begins and where it ends. The boundaries between performance and performer have disappeared. She performs even if there is no audience, in the privacy of her home:
She had poured coffee, taken sugar and cream, stirred it with a spoon, had done
She had poured coffee, taken sugar and cream, stirred it with a spoon, had done