(En)Gendering History in Don DeLillo’s Libra

Noting that less critical attention has been paid to gender in Don DeLillo’s postmodern narrative of Libra, this essay examines the ways in which DeLillo’s postmodern conceptions of history and subjectivity-the two main topics of Libra -intersect with the structure of gender inequality. Libra deals with the masculine desire for agency over history and anxiety over the loss of that agency in the postmodern condition emblematized by the JFK assassination. While the novel interrogates the male-centered assumptions of history and the subject of modernity, it sustains the hierarchized opposition between the masculine and the feminine as the determining factor of subjectivity and history by leaving the female characters silenced at the margin of history and narrative even though the male characters’ attempts to control history are frustrated. The male characters’ view of history as secrets and mysteries, which transcend causality, reflects the masculine desire for restoring their privileged position as the master of history by exclusively possessing the secret knowledge of history. Mystifying history into a secret is the way in which the male characters try to regain their historical agency. Access to this secretive history is limited to the female characters because history is codified in a specific way only men can decipher. Excluded from the secret operations of history, the female characters are denied agency and assigned to the role of witnesses of indecipherable history without proper means of articulation or representation except bewilderment and terror. The mystified sense of history that defies human control and understanding ironically reinscribes the privileged position of the masculine subject in history. The secret network of history is a male-dominated sphere where men have the exclusive power of control and articulation while women are only allowed the role of a silenced witness.