Patrick James_Response

[Sondra Perl]

#540

In her essay “Surfacing: Secrets of the Women’s Locker Room,” Lynn Z. Bloom’s voice is a mutable presence. She embeds in her title a transactional dynamic, a hook to pull the reader forward into her text: read this she suggests, and you will learn something—a secret will surface. However, like Bloom’s voice, these secrets are not what they appear to be. They function, initially, as clever, tongue-in-cheek promises—a shifting, mercurial rhetoric that highlights Bloom’s feminism by juxtaposing it against a history of female exploitation: her title calls to mind the silliness of a sex comedy, and yet her essay works to undermine that levity. Consequently, Bloom uses voice to reorganize the investment of feminine secrets back on to the concerns of women; and in doing so, she upends the expectations constructed by the title.

Which is to say, over the course of Bloom’s essay, the locker room comes to represent a locus of safety for the writer, an environment free of the male gaze. Here “the spraying water [bestows] innocence, washing away makeup, hairdos, neutralizing skin colors” (39). There is a democratic quality to this space, a tightly knit community in which the shared commonalities of the body and mind unite women of different ages, abilities, and interests. And language is the medium through which this community is constructed—the informal articulation of one’s life—secrets shared with trust, and the ability to follow one another into the depths of difficult experience: “Even on dry land we dive beneath the surface. Issues close to home” (41).

In striking contrast, the central “secret” that drives Bloom’s narrative is the random and violent attack she experiences in a Swedish locker room. Even as her attacker chargers towards her, “his face suffused with hatred, the eyes vacant” (44), she emphatically insists on her right to a safe space. “Get out!” she cries, “You’re in the women’s shower” (44). Beyond the violence she experiences, it is the violation of sacred space that is the most jarring, the most unsettling, and the writing voice adjusts accordingly—the effect is both disturbing and beautiful:

Then time slowed down, inside my head, the way it does when you think your car is going to crash as it goes into a skid, and I could hear the voices, all mine, in cacophony. One voice, terrified, could say nothing at all. I had never been hit before in my life—how could I know what to do? (44).

Having read a majority of Blooms’ essay, the reader has by now—like Bloom herself—come to trust the sanctity of the locker room, the consistent female-centric reliability the space affords. As this sanctity is broken, so too is the voice. It fractures into a cacophony, running the spectrum from outrage to confusion: “one voice, terrified, could say nothing at all. I had never been hit before in my life—how could I know what to do?”

As Bloom recounts her attack, she once again overturns the expectations of her title, shifting her voice from the comedic to the serious. The “Secrets of the Women’s Locker Room,” speak not only to the homosocial, nurturing community the locker room affords, but also to the inherent fragility the space is constructed upon, the ease with which it can ben penetrated by the violence and misogyny of men. And at the center of these rhetorical moves is the word “secret,” it’s emotional resonances veering from lurid to quotidian to shocking; and then, finally, the secret surfaces as an extremely powerful feminist statement on the continuity of female friendship, “ever hospitable, ever open” (46).

Having said that, I believe I would characterize Bloom’s voice as capacious in its modes. She is able to be funny, wry, and elegiac within the confines of her short piece: and I believe it is this faculty with voice that keeps the many modalities of the word “secret” in play, and the reader engaged. Ultimately, what is most revelatory is Blooms’ ability to transform our attitudes about secrets: what they reveal and from whom they are withheld. And it is this dynamic that allows the piece to unfold as something much more complicated than it initially appears to be.

[Sondra Perl]

#555

Patrick:

As I read your astute response, I realized I glossed over what you referred to as the “locus of safety”. As I thought about this response, I gained clarity. There is much broader, more powerful significant other than “establishment of place” to this essay. Upon first reading, I took the title for face-value, the place where Bloom established her observations. But upon further review, it dawned on me by using the word “Locker Room” Bloom has quietly injected the delineation of locker rooms. A place where one can keep things safe and locked up until it is necessary to retrieve. This interpretation further establishes Bloom’s diminished explanation and exploration of the violence perpetrated on her.

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