=some random notes on The Four-Gated City=

As much as "The Four-Gated City" is about freeing oneself from political and cultural propaganda it is every bit as much about freedom from oppressive social, sexual, and, ultimately, psychological conformity. 

Martha drifts through the city (of London) without destination. She plays with identity, often spontaneously assuming an alias when a stranger approaches to strike up a conversation. She proceeds to invent an entire biography on the fly. She finds she can do this effortlessly. She observes that her interlocutors regularly help to fill in the details of her own invented history "out of what they wanted, needed, from-not you, not you at all, but from their own needs." By becoming a cypher, she can talk to anyone, be anyone, gain access to people and places that would otherwise be inaccessible if she insisted on defining herself to others.

But this mode of being has it's downside. If she remains purposely undefined in order to adapt, to adopt any role she chooses based on the occasion, she is also allowing others to redefine her according to their own needs, doing so with or without her permission, or even knowledge. As she walks home alone late one evening after a dinner out, she passes through a dark section of park where she comes to understand that she is no longer "Martha Quest," but that she is subject to the interpretation of others against her will. She is vulnerable to reclassification, in this particular instance, as a potential victim.

"Martha now walked fast...she was a 'young woman'—yes, she must remember that she was, and that along these pavements a category of being, "man", prowled beside or behind her. That was what she must be for a few minutes, not Martha or Matty, only 'young woman.'"

Even in ordinary daylight social situations, Martha finds herself subject to a treacherous slippage of personal identity. She is irritated to find that she is complicit in her own betrayal. She finds herself involuntarily speaking and acting in ways meant to appease others, to fit in, but also to avoid giving offense, even at the expense of her own self-respect. 

When she is among associates of the working class, she finds herself acting and speaking in such a way so as not to betray her education and cultured background. Conversely, when she is among well-heeled acquaintances of a class higher than her own, she finds herself adopting a deferential mien. She is not doing this in a premeditated self-serving way. Instead, these behaviors seem socially imprinted into her. And that is what makes them all the more difficult to uproot. 

As a woman, she finds herself being alternately obsequious, apologetic, and subordinate even when she feels herself to be none of these things. Her social conditioning seems to her a betrayal of her unique human individuality. Once aware of this conditioning, she can no longer plead ignorance. She has a choice, difficult as it may be. She must take responsibility for her acquiescence to the code—or stand up in opposition to it. To Martha, surrender isn't an option; it is self-betrayal; it is cowardice. 

Martha struggles to assert herself without relying on habitual patterns of manipulative passivity. She tries repeatedly, with limited success, to make her desires known directly without treating them—and herself—as a kind of joke, without resorting to a self-effacement verging on self-erasure, or acting the bumbling, scatter-brained female which are the only "socially accepted" ways for a female to step outside her accepted role and to assert herself. Martha no longer wants to be thought of as an "eccentric character," the misguided, if well-intentioned, girl who amuses her  audience with her comic unorthodoxy. 

As Martha becomes more and more conscious of the numerous "roles" she is assigned to play in society, she becomes painfully aware that she is not acting out of a stable center. What is her center? Does she even have one? Who is this amalgamation of pleasing, self-effacting gestures she calls by the all-too-general name Martha Quest? More to the point, who is the person that other people call "Martha Quest"? The question bedevils her.

"...who then was she, behind the banalities of the day? A young woman? No, nothing but a soft dark respective intelligence, that was all...she was, nothing to do with Martha, or any other name she might have had attached to her, nothing to do with what she looked like, how she had been shaped. And if she were able to go on walking, as she was now, day after day, night after night, down this street, up that, past houses, houses, houses, passing them always, with their shuttered and curtained eyes behind which a dull light hid, if she were able only to do that..."

"...if only I could understand that it's a question of trying to see things steadily all the time, then perhaps I could understand it."


Martha is seeking individuation, coherence, unity. Ask twenty people who know her, they will all tell you who Martha Quest is. Ask her, she won't know. This is the Quest Martha has embarked on in "The Four-Gated City."