Thinking about Women [1 ed.] 0156899000, 9780156899000

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Thinking about women

PUBLIC LIBRARY FORT WAYNE AND ALLEN COUNTY, IND. ALLEN COUNTY EXTENSION DEFT.

ALLEN COUNTY

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THINKING ABOUT WOMEN

Thinking About Women MARY ELLMANN

Harcourt, Brace

& World,

Inc.,

new york

Copyright

All rights reserved.

No

©

1968 by

part of this publication

Mary Ellmann

may be

reproduced

or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing

and

from the publisher.

First Edition

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 67-20309

Printed in the United States of America

In

memory

of

Nora Donahue

C742,'?:J(;

Conknis

Preface:

An

Interview

I

•

Sexual Analogy

n

•

Phallic Criticism

ni

^

^ I ^27

Feminine Stereotypes

•

ix

^

55

Formlessness Passivity Instahiliiy

Confinement Piety

Materiality Spirituality

Irrationality

Compliancy

Two

Incorrigible Figures:

The Shrew and

IV

•

Differences in

V

•

Responses Index

^

^231

the

Witch

Tone 175

^

147

Preface:

The

An

Interview

book was discussed

general nature of this

an

in

in-

terview conducted, several months ago, at the National

Lake Norman, N. M.

Institute of Interviews,

now

venient to

all

to reproduce the

that follows.

Interviewer and

It

also

It

seems con-

exchange as a reader's guide

seems convenient to abbreviate

my name as

i

and me. M.E.

I.

Do you

need any particular environment in which to

work? ME.

room without a view, preferably a

like a

I

Oddly enough, Tve never worked front of our attic has a view,

back part I.

ME.

Do you I

wish

I

is

jammed with

you

I.

ME.

and then the

old toys.

need seclusion? could say Td been locked in a room.

in this

It's

My

pe-

work

way, deprived of pathetic circumstance.

Never mind, perhaps you have a

writer's costume.

Only a navy blue woollen bathrobe. An drab garment, I

The

in the attic. see,

destrian not to have a tyrannical husband. is,

closet.

just don't

I

effortlessly

hate answering the phone in

it.

But

have any faded dungarees or open-necked

sport shirts. They're for men. I.

ME. I.

They're for men?

They're for men. I

see.

you

Well, speaking of men, could you explain

are writing about

women? IX

why

PREFACE ME.

I

didn't

want

to overreach.

Right from the start

I

thought: ME, you must limit yourself to half of the

human I.

ME. I.

ME.

race.

Then you were not prompted by feminism? \

Please.

Oh. Feminism

out, isn't it?

is

Well, yes, in the they're practiced.

way

principles

Say a bride

all

go out before

gets locked in the bath-

room. The guests have gone home from the wedding, they've already forgotten their sanction of this event

—

^which, as

it

happens, hasn't quite happened.

Still,

people can't go on throwing rice forever. I.

ME.

But think of the poor bride. It's

better for her to

in the mirror I.

ME. I.

You I

I.

I.

ME. I.

No

You

I.

will

not offend you.

don't have a program for

own?

I

will

women?

program.

Ah! But perhaps you

will define the attitude of the

the gun, the ship and the helicopter?

Impossible. It's

been done.

A man has

done

it

for

men.

Indeed.

Then have you something edge of

ME.

a female program of your

know what word

woman toward ME.

door than to argue

phrase things peculiarly.

scarcely

No.

at the

about her right to get out.

Then you do not have

try again.

ME.

gnaw

human

You mean with Yes.

to contribute to our

knowl-

sexual responses?

wires and thermometers and

all.

PREFACE ME. I.

No. This

Now

fun, isn't it?

is

me,

tell

ME. I.

You make Forgive

though

I.

ME.

I

me once

this

this subject.

I

to cut

statistics

a personal matter

tistics I.

ME.

down

looks as

it

deplore this slipping.

gradually on

on

it?

which

My

willing to reveal to the public.

me

And

slipping.

is

work.

But have you studied the

You touch on

good deal of

again. Nonetheless, a

their status

applaud

women?

everything sound like a symposium.

work has been done on

ME.

your work con-

is

cerned with the status of American

my

I

am

of course

internist has

asked

consumption of

sta-

about American women.

Why? It's

can

sort of sad.

Say

I

women became

read that only nineteen Ameri-

orthodontists in 1962.

miliated, depressed.

cry easily.

I

It's

am

I

hu-

days before

I

think to be glad that so few wanted to be orthodontists, I.

ME.

I

do you see?

think so.

You

Perhaps. But

I

only

like

think

it's

statistics

worse than

by miscomprehension,

flicted

of success. that.

I

am

af-

the failures often seem

to me successes. For example, we know exactly how many American women interrupted their husbands'

anecdotes at dinner parties in 1966. Quite a few, as a matter of fact just to table.

count them

—204,648

is

wives. But of course

to say they

have

failed at the

This complicated thing, interruption,

quite simply bad.

And

yet

XI

all

dialogue, like

is

made

you and

PREFACE me, might be defined as the prevention of monologue.

And

think of the other guests

—how can we hope

that

they wanted to hear the husbands out? Perhaps these

who place the liveliness of the own favor with their husbandk

wives are sociahsts party before their I.

you might say yes or TVo

think perhaps

I

for a while

again.

ME.

Or

think of the

ideal unions

official successes.

I

am

afraid of the

toward which counselors propel

take an intolerable

and put them

in

man and an

intolerable

us.

You

woman

an apartment together, and then

they are both mature, and each

tries to

if

understand

the other's monstrous nature, a good marriage results. I.

ME.

It

cannot be wrong to urge understanding.

No,

it

must be

right in social work. But in novels, say,

misunderstanding reasserts

and one

parent,

silience, the

I.

feels

itself.

a grudging admiration for re-

admiration one might

which

all

Then

really,

ap-

Its resilience is

feel for a viral strain

the aspirin in the world won't eradicate.

you

relish

confusion

—or

even

sore

throats.

ME.

I

said

it

was a grudging admiration. There's an enor-

mous number admit

of opinions about

women, and

I

will

Tm impressed by the regularity and the intensity

with which they are expressed. Some are more plausible

than others, but their plausibility or implausibility

isn't so I.

ME.

much

the point.

It's

their reiteration.

Perhaps an example.

With

pleasure. In the novel

xu

Ihe Awakening by Kate

PREFACE Chopin, the

woman

annoyed when the man says

is

he won't fan himself because when you stop fanning

youVe

hotter than

you never fanned

if

Tennyson, doesn't

all.

like

man

saying something true or not doesn't

is

feel

It is

it?

a tiresome thing to say

feel deeply. Either

and evidently

tedious,

Now

I

statement

think Til cry.

self-sacrifice or is

much

which some people

they must say. People also say things like

have a natural capacity for

That

But whether the

sounds

matter.

I.

at

Women Women

possibly true, certainly

irresistible.

knew women

never

I

suffered

from such compliments, that they were tormented by praise.

ME.

You know,

a funny thing,

you look like

a tape recorder

yourself. Til bet you're married to a walkie-talkie. 1.

Women

always get personal.

If

you disagree with

them, they insult your wife.

ME.

If

I

am

were willing to play that game, which not, I'd say

men always

ME. I.

ME. I.

ME. I.

Which one

Law?

shall

Let's us

be abstract again,

never wanted to be anything

Then

think a thought now.

Very

well. It has crossed

Those

it.

is it?

Dear me.

many

you

benefited from Boyle's

Boyle's

it

I

If

out of

make

A busy little person like you can look

as

ME.

we have both

Surely

certainly

Law

hurt their feelings, they I.

I

get impersonal.

my

up for

herself.

we?

else.

mind

that there are just

opinions about men.

are central opinions, about

xiu

Humanity or Man-

— PREFACE women

kind. Opinions about

phenomenon, which

upon the

fluence

is felt

center.

always female, on the

are about an eccentric

some obscure

to exert

Or on

tides.

is

dogs, disturbing

the dogs' peace of mind. I.

in-

Like the moon, which

\

men

But then perhaps youil simply confess that

are

more curious than women. ME.

That

is

a possibility

men

any

they're right. Historically, at

some

correlation

And

often raise.

is

controlled,

who

or a puzzle to the one

perhaps

rate, there's

between authority and

soon as something

perhaps

curiosity.

As

becomes a problem

it

controls

it.

We're

all

un-

comfortably aware of the prurience with which the

Or

white racist speculates about the Negro.

mayor

in

say a

Milwaukee imposes a curfew. Then he

can't

who

are

forbidden to come out, are doing in their houses.

It's

stand not knowing what

the

way the most powerful

seem put

it

to

have the most

those people

all

governments, like our own,

spies.

But

don't

I

know why

so unpleasantly. Actually, this curiosity

redemptive.

It

suggests the one

still

I

must be

wants a connec-

tion with the other. I.

I

trust

you

are not saying that

all

men

are

mayors of

Milwaukee. ME.

You're

still

pouting, aren't

you?

It

was only a meta-

phor. I.

ME.

I

got the distinct impression

Nonsense. At

least

nonsense here

or Sweden. Lots of American

XIV

—or say

men

in

England

say American

men

— PREFACE And Tm not wouldn't dare. What to speak of other places. say about men and women in India? Food men any

don't feel like American trying

I

could

has

more.

I

the authority in starvation. Sexual politics and

all

sexual opinions, and

I

suppose sexuality

itself,

are

all

fringe benefits of eating. I.

But in the United States,

let's

say,

you would

put an end to tedious opinions about

ME.

like to

women?

I'm not sure. Imagine the tedium without them! Any-

way, they're not simply tedious. They're often bold I

mean

in their flights

like their

beyond embarrassment.

crazy proliferation too

opinions are sexual themselves. other and multiply

—

—

I

rather

in that sense, sexual

They mate with each

incessantly! Also, the

little

ones

look like the big ones. I've come to like watching them

bob

and out of books

in

—

novels, especially. Like

those goldfish that go endlessly in and out of their grottoes. I.

Tell me,

ME.

Connect ing

I

and tides?

I

dare you.

have neither the time nor the desire to study your

mind.

I

shall

ment than ME.

fish

my crabbed little mind with water now, flowstreams and all that. Go ahead. Do me a Molly

Bloom. I.

do you often think about

I

only say that you pretend more detach-

Perhaps. But since

words

—

you

believe

as the

I

feel.

am most

words they

interested in

pull out of

mouths,

not pretending to some detachment, some I.

And

the rest?

XV

women is

I

real.

as

am

PREFACE ME.

What

One

can

imagine an impossibly different world, in which

this

can

I

say? [A Qallic gesture here.]

kind of attention was diverted from other phenomenon.

They might

of belief, for a change.

—

that

I.

ME. I.

ME.

By

would divide

seven,

I

Or

all

women

like that.

to

some

A suspension

eight sexes instead of^^wo

available attention

by

four.

think.

We are discussing close attention, But close attention

is

I,

not short division.

a compliment, isn't it?

Compliments again! But what critical attention are the

if

fixed attention

and

same? Like those love poems

where the beloved's ugly hands or crooked teeth turn

up

in the

second stanza.

Of

loved the more for her defect

course she

—but

still,

is

presumably

there are those

damn teeth. Nothing can be looked at very long, that's why lovers fall asleep. And then so much attention is unloving all over. am thinking of the kind of attenI

tion the States.

English newspapers focus

Or

the

way

on the United

people at the zoo stare at cobras

or at the outrageous backsides of baboons. I.

We

have come a long

way now from

the topic of

women. ME.

On

the contrary.

We

are just beginning

XVI

it.

SEXUAL

ANALOGY

'pes. As long as the two basic equations can

be kept quite clear of each other, good

Even

if

art

place

is

an agreeable phenomenon.

as the

barley.

Men may

its

be wheat but,

of Bath noticed, even the Apostles fed well

And

but charms

considered superior to nature, nature in

is

Wife

can prevail.

will

on

then, nature sometimes not only supplements Self-consciousness, the advantage of

art.

which

people are ordinarily vain, seems occasionally burdensome;

and they then admire and envy what seems instead the natural, physical

and oblivious being

of children, of

women

Negroes. From

this

less

welcome

of others

in the twentieth

vie\s',

century than those of the com-

and

com-

of the

by

age)

.

The

constantly tries to prevent or combat the

person's sheer being. Others, then, less

societ>^, of

no revelations have been

plexity of children (to parents, supremacists felt,

of animals,

and, often in American

point of

plexity of Negroes (to white supremacists)

mind, Valen,'

—

who seem

mindful than himself, seem also to

to the person

live

more

easily,

happily, effortlessly. Being, Valery's Monsieur Teste calls

Madame Teste, incapable of

it)

instead of Emilie.

And as

childbirth (to those

seems the most natural and 61

least self-con-

:

THINKING ABOUT WOMEN scious of to

human

experiences,*

particularly the capacity

it is

which the praise of feminine being

The less,

two

subject to at least

when

attached.

is

celebration of thoughtless achievement qualifications.

own

the observer reconsiders his

periencing a revived gratification on

is,

The

nonethe-

first is

condition and, ex-

account, finds the

its

same supposed thoughtlessness of others contemptibly

Or

artless,

and

in that sense

directed achievements.

At

made

naive.

not comparable to designed and

very often, careful

this juncture,

differences, instead of similarities, will

be described between

the production of the child and the production, say, of

rhymed

verse.

A useful example of the workings of this much

argued issue occurs incidentally in an

article

by Milton

Himmelf arb

A

few years back

I

read a neo-feminist^s approving review of

another neo-feminist's book. the author that for a

The reviewer

woman,

being a mother. That puzzled

thought to

it,

I

*

It

of

and

in childbirth.

criticisms

is,

to

when

a

creative than

without having given

woman

A

little

closest the

much

human

bears a child, nur-

later

I

was looking

to suffer acute is

tion of pain fades quickly,

states

lapsing of ordinary interests, observations

one suspects, commonly exaggerated.

delivery because her hair

I

:

more

have a psychological study of women's

The

been known, for example,

bered.

is

and cares for him.

would be valuable

mind

me

said she agreed with

is

had assumed that about the

race can get to creation tures him,

a career

up

in curlers.

what

is

A woman

has

embarrassment throughout her Moreover, while the recollec-

said during the delivery

is

remem-

myself recall a shoppy discussion of various antiseptics, and

I

have known women who could mimic the manners and the remarks of obstetricians years after their children were

62

bom.

— FEMININE STEREOTYPES through the racks in a drugstore and came across a specimen

common

of a

—books

for adolescent girls

subliterary genre

about a young heroine with an interesting /creative job /career.

The

title

of the

How can being TV secretary?*

understood,

I

with being a

The

more

Secrelary.

Then

a mother compare in creativity

The phrase without having interesting.

It

with one hand, while

The confusion

given

much thought

TV

is

secretaries are cuffed with the

of sexual function

and personal worth

seems inevitably to coarsen judgment and

Whites expands

it

always patted on the head

restrict choice:

the same intellectual vulgarity that brushes off the Phyllis

to

precisely with this air of vague

is

benevolence that maternity

other.

TV

li^hite,

predictable slur of the neo-feminist reference can be

ignored. is

book was Phyllis

easily to snigger at the

little

unmarried

or the impotent and, particularly in the United States, to persecute the homosexual. At the same time, this idealization of childbirth obscures the distinction between involuntary

and voluntary achievement which we depend upon cribing

any achievement

women,

as creative.

When,

as for Indian

the sequence of conception, birth and starvation

invariable, this distinction remains clear;

act (at once voluntary

the

means of birth

society, does

and

and the

socially beneficial)

is

63

in giving

race can get to creation"?

* Milton Himmelfarb, "Varieties of Jewish Experience," p. 59.

creative

American

anyone seriously believe that women,

human

is

to procure

control. But even in middle-class

birth, get ''the closest the

July 1%7,

in des-

Commentary,

THINKING ABOUT WOMEN Closer than Bach, whose wives between them produced

When we

twenty children?

think of our primary metaphor

of creation, God's creation of the world,

world

and

an idea

as

we

think of the

His head (not as a foetus in His belly)

in

of His deliberately choosing to bring this idea into ex-

That

istence.

tellectual

and

is,

our concept of creation

self-directed.

out of Adam's rib

He

surgeon.

:

God

Adam

is

plays the

profoundly

is

in-

formed out

of dust.

Eve

sculptor

and the

first

first

begins Art and Science. In the same way, Vladi-

mir Nabokov speaks of the creation of the novel as a blas-

phemy,

a small but insolent ambition for divinity.

There

nancy and

childbirth,

to befuddle the

cal process for nine

and most creativity.

but they

issue

Women may want to rejoice in

are,

I

to value preg-

think, slowly persuaded

every sense)

(in

be involved

with creativity.

in a particular physiologi-

months: some enjoy the process

its

itself

conclusion. But not on the grounds of

The astonishment

of childbirth

able result of having done no in a

women

are, of course, reasons for

prolonged vagary of

its

more than indulge the body

own

design.

And

tached impression of uterine accomplishment at once, the child appears

the unimagin-

is

is

even brief

this de:

almost

always to have been a separate

and complete being, whose body cannot be seen

as the prod-

uct of cellular multiplication. In this sense, prenatal develop-

ment

is

known but not

believed.

opposite, a moral conviction

A hubris of childbirth is the

beyond

natural verification.

marks an extraordinary schism between the

body

in

which the

self

conscious workings of

self

It

and the

acquires conscious pride in the un-

its

container.

64

FEMININE STEREOTYPES Another common deterrent to templation of feminine ''being'' tive purity in this

that

women

They

full

enthusiasm in the con-

itself

denies any such primi-

form of being.

It

infect their nature, not

appear, after

is

generally suspected

with art but with

artifice.

to partake of at least a bastard self-

all,

consciousness, which leads them

into contrived postures,

deceptions and pretenses. These are thought of as almost ineradicable blemishes it

upon a fundamental

and

sometimes indicated that one of the beauties of the

is

primary natural function, childbirth, tion of utter artlessness.

woman. So Freud, on

it is

is its

moment

At the

emerges from the vagina, a

artlessness,

temporary restora-

that the child's

head

possible for everyone to trust

the day of his

first child's birth,

wrote his wife's mother: I

have never seen her so magnificent in her simplicity and

goodness as on

this critical occasion,

which

after all doesn't

permit any pretences.*

A second consistent quality repeated effort to

of feminine stereotypes

move women

a premised, though indefinable,

in

two

human

directions center.

is

the

away from

These move-

ments, like those of an autistic child, perhaps signify no

more than obsessive result in

an odd effect of hoisting up or lowering down, as

elevators

move from

again,

day

all

attention to a single subject. But they

the basement to the roof and back

long, or as pieces of clothing, once they are

bought, must steadily alternate between being dirtied and cleaned. In this sense, opinions of *

7he

Letters of

Sigmund 7reud,

p. 224.

65

women

reflect

two

volatile

:

THINKING ABOUT WOMEN by

impulses, to set things apart

them ideal

—and then

distinction but also to return

to less than even the

common

stock.

as every feminine virtue implies a feminine vice

and

An

seems formulated only to be regretted or begrudged,

frigidity, intuition

domination)

irrationality,

was Emerson's impression

It

.

was

volatility

and

especially prominent in

(chastity

motherhood and that this

American

life

form of

—

to the

extent, as he suggested, that election to office in the United States might

be looked upon as a mane's most

reliable guar-

antee of impeachment.

Perhaps the most extreme range, between elevation and descent, in feminine stereotypes

lies

between a statement

like

Addison's:

Women

in their nature are

men; whether

more

delicate,

it

much more gay and joyous

be that their blood

and

is

more

their animal spirits

than

refined, their fibres

more Hght;

vivacity

is

the gift of v^omen, gravity that of men.

And the Marquis ...

I

de Sade's observation

believe that the flesh of

female animals,

is

women,

as the flesh of all

necessarily very inferior to that of the male

species.*

All that links the

two

is

the unlikelihood of ever proving

either one. Sade, of course,

seems extraordinarily rude

:

one

does not want to be eaten, but being eaten, one does not *

From

"Juliette" in

7he

!Marcfuis de

Sade (An Essay by Simone de

Beauvoir and Selections from His Writing, Chosen by Paul Dinnage),

(London, John Calder, 1962),

p. 171.

66

:

FE

want

M

I

N'

I

NE

STEREOTYPES

be thought an inferior dish. At the same time, a

to

sentimental exaggeration of virtues, like Addison's, for in an equal exaggeration of defects

upon

body

a close examination of the

delicate spirit resides.

porary. Swift,

who

was, after

It

—

in

all,

paid

is

usually discovered

which the

light

and

Addison's contem-

focussed for horror upon the Brobding-

nagian nurse's breast (rather than, say, the Brobdingnagian butler's buttocks)

Does Celia vivacitv',

principle,

and who asked that portentous question.

shit? (Yes, competently.

Hence her gayet>% her

her refined blood.) Just as on the same seesaw all

sexoial diseases are

named

for Venus,

It is

really

this effect of alternation, the sheer coexistence of irrecon-

cilable opinions,

which breeds

one of definition so much

up and down

erratic.

impression

is

not

movement

are not, however, entirely

TTiey involve at least t\vo fixed moral judgments.

first is

that

women

their ideal condition

When

The

in a sport called Definition.

Tlie directions of

The

dissent.

as of the subject's being tossed

is

unfortunately are

attained

his sister-in-law, Marj.'

by

rising

women, and

that

above themselves.

Hoganh, died

at seventeen,

Dickens praised her character She had not a

single fanlt,

and was

in life almost as far

the foibles and vanir>- of her sex and age as she

is

above

now

in

Heaven.*

On

the other hand,

their ideal

condition

men is

are not

attained

* Letters of Charles Dickens, edited

men without by

effort,

and

their becoming,

and

by Madeline House and

Storey (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 263.

67

G.'-ahani

:

THINKING ABOUT WOMEN (with luck) remaining, simply men.

It is

by

this route that

a perverse appetite for unpleasant experiences, at least in the lives of others,

develops: various regimens

wet sleeping bag, going

commonly

'My Secret

abysmal

academy,

said to ''make a man'' out of a

presumably has

tion too, of course, In

to a military

first

Life, for

etc.)

are

man. But copula-

this goal,

among

others.

example, at the conclusion of an

performance (which involves the kindest and

most patient cook crows, ''Now

(sleeping in a

I

am

in

a

London

man

!''

at the time), the protagonist

an index of grimness

It is

work, however, that copulation

is

still

at

the only shared, innoc-

uous and more entertaining than competitive experience

which

is felt

to

have the desired

effect of virilism.

These two variant conditions of clarified

can perhaps be

ideal

by diagram

Super-sexual IDEAL

^^ WOMEN = DEFECT

MEN = IDEAL Sub-sexual

A third consistent pattern is ties.

This

feel

some

is

DEFECT

that of complementary quali-

perhaps the pattern toward which everyone can

cordiality, since

it

shows an understandable desire

for sexual order as well as a pretty confidence that balance

and economy actually not, cannot,

prevail.

The

feeling

is

that there

must

be waste by duplication, that the complementary

nature of the male and female reproductive systems must

68

—

:

FEMININE STEREOTYPES have

intellectual

point of view,

men

and women eyes

would be ears,

and emotional

from

parallels. Ideally,

this

should have ears (to hear lectures with)

(to see trinkets with)

organs which, unlike

sufficiently defined as ''those

cannot take in sound/'

which case eyes

in

,

One might

in that

way

avoid

the disturbing sense of overlapping and disorder which, as things are,

must constantly be warded

off

by

assertions to

the contrary. For example, Otto Weininger established, at least to his

own

satisfaction

(in

1904), that blood trans-

fusions should be carried out only within each sex: since all cells

of the female

in the individual

body were

male system, as

female, their being set free in all social systems,

would

The complementary impulse

cause an immediate internecion.

seems particularly strong in those,

Weininger, whose

like

chief sources of anxiety are mobility, diversity, fluctuation

Keats's ''negative capability'' of the poet.

Such anxiety must

urge a uniform commitment to fixed characteristics, an insistence

upon the tidy and immutable

properties of a reality

which, as Bertrand Russell has said, suggests to others only the "higgledy-piggledy"

I

think the universe

is

all

spots

and jumps, without unity,

without continuity, without coherence or orderliness or any of the other properties that governesses love.

may be small,

an

illusion,

but

if it exists, it

The

external world

consists of events, short,

and haphazard. Order, unity, and continuity are human

inventions, just as are catalogues * Bertrand Russell,

7he

Scientific

and encyclopaedias.*

Outlook

(New

York,

W. W.

Norton,

1931), pp. 94-95. Russell assigns the appetite for order to clergymen

and

journalists as well

—

i.e.,

to the sanctimonious

69

on the one hand and

THINKING ABOUT WOMEN

The though

fourth consistent pattern effect

its

is

to disturb

dividual speaker

moment.

is

not,

related to the third,

and confuse what,

might be the limpidity of the tend to be not merely what

is

third. In the fourth,

men

is

and

woman

forceful, the

women

what the

are not, but

and even what he

man

is

quite

oblique and fugitive.

But in the fourth pattern, the woman's nature

may be

The

dispassionate sense, for example,

women

Defoe's judgment of

temper of

all

tive

his observations

—upon

is

woman

—stones

—the basic impression

If

the

first

seems at any moment lusty,

:

seems moral, the second invariably ascribed to

is

sluttish.

women,

some circumstances, a is

one of the

itself.

the second seems prudish but at another

curly hair

is

temperament, single and passing moods can

govern contrasts.

defect in

upon

are brought in to

stony

generally vindictive temper of the novel

And beyond

the plague as

in a novel like Philip Roth's

Qood, which attempts to describe a vindic-

and merciless young

hint that she

of

seems consistent with the

Moll Flanders. Similarly now,

When She Was

de-

who

termined largely by the temperament of the person describes her.

in-

not at any given

In the third pattern, let us say, the

steadily direct

left to itself,

like

Even

moment,

if

a quality

the

first

which

is

compliancy, will be a

virtue in others, rather as

sometimes chic, sometimes not, but always

curly. the sensational on the other. Clearly, both states of

nent

in the

propagation of feminine stereotypes.

70

mind are

also promi-

FEMININE STEREOTYPES The

sense of this erratic direction

by mood,

in

an area

formerly governed (with some startling exceptions) by a fairly

At

benevolent certitude, seems

least since the

now

particularly strong.

Second World War, the work of assigning

men and women,

stereotypes, not only to racial groups but to

has of course continued, but in a markedly distressed and

even demoralized manner. The more stable sexual stereotypes of, say, the mid-nineteenth century provided tranquility for those

some has

who

of those

now

who framed them and

A

bore them.*

some

perhaps also for

perceptible disturbance

replaced that calm, in relation to

all

contrasts but

especially in relation to the former contrast of strength

weakness and

to

its

former reconciliation

:

and

the tolerable ex-

Among

change of male protection for female helplessness.

the varieties of suffering which have always been abundantly available, the suffering of

children

was

men

as protectors of

traditionally considered the

women and

most

severe,

therefore the most valid proof of sexual superiority.

and

What-

ever revision of this point the peaceful society might suggest, the always present threat of roles, for

off

war denied. This balance

which everyone must

feel nostalgia,

was thrown

by the Second World War, which replaced

appalling equality in suffering. In the atomic

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and

* In TAiddlemarch

,

for example,

in the

George

Eliot

murder

of

it

with an

bombing

of

of six million

remarks on Mrs. Garth's

hearty endorsement of the "principle of subordination":

"On

ninety-

nine points Mrs. Garth decided, but on the hundredth she was often

aware that she would have carrying out her

own

to

principle,

perform the singularly

and

to

71

make

difficult

herself subordinate."

task of

THINKING ABOUT Jewish men,

manner and

women and for the

ability

was

children in Europe, in the same

established, before

contrasts of strength

died like

women

concept of mutual voliier-

which the

traditional sexual

and weakness, courage and

authority and subservience

The Japanese

distinctions in age,

were equally responsible for being

modem

and human), the

MEN

O

same cause, without

sex or responsibilit\^ (all alive

U"

of Hiroshima should seem to us to have since

less sleep of early

many

of

them died

morning, and

in the light, rest-

sleep (like night itself)

all

—

might be stereotyped as feminine pacific, unresisting.

who

thoughtless,

passive,

But within the same daylight, masculine

ethic of aggressive action,

Jews

timidity,

became meaningless.

died awake?

what

It is

is

to be said of the European

some

possible for

critics, like

Bruno Bettelheim, to deplore their not countering the aggression of the Nazis with aggression of their own.

(we must always say yielded] to life

despair, odiers

on passive and subservient terms. But

sible to

suppose that the ethic

Some

itself

it is

yielded

dung

to

equally pos-

died at that time, ex-

tended into monstrosity by those whose minds and bodies

were equipped achronism by

modem

to kill indiscriminately,

as an-

This ethic collapsed before the

their victims.

exigencies

and exposed

which the Jews faced and has not applied

convincingly to those which have since prevailed. Starvation, racial injustice

to

and atomic

fear are also

which monosexual responses are

American engagement

in

mutual exigencies

irrelevant.

warfare has, so

It is

true that

far, retained

a

conventional masculinity (and so President Johnson retains the "our boys" rhetoric of

World War 72

I).

But

this

rde

FEMININ'E STEREOTYPES would as

disintegrate before the

bombing

of American cities,

we bomb. Amer-

has disintegrated in those places which

it

women

ican

perience of

are

still

divorced, then, from the personal ex-

war which American men

upon the women of other intend to

kill

Most

countries.

soldiers

must

only other soldiers, but their weapons erase

and

age.

It is

are ''neo-feminists."

It is

not that they refuse pro-

distinctions in both sex

women

are obliged to confer

tection or prefer

napalm

not that Vietnamese

no

to a double standard, but that

one can provide protection for them. In

consequence of such changes, inherited Western stereo-

and

are weakened,

t>^pes

forced to be frantic. feisty in the it

their continued

When Norman

men and languid women, one form

in

which

it

endorsement

is

Mailer talks about

touches the past

—hardly

persists in bourgeois enclaves, but as

drags at a mind attempting to reconcile an acute apprecia-

mas-

tion of the present with a passionate attachment to a

culine ideal.

The

difficulty,

and perhaps the

futilit}^

of such

a reconciliation account for Mailer's always thrashing qualit>^

At

his best,

he has a desperate bravado, a last-standness

which becomes a way of extracting some ting blood,

vitality, like clot-

from defunct opinions.

Ordinarily, the chief

tedium. As the

mark

body comes

of sexual stereotypes

their

is

to sexual adulthood, the

mind

seems to exchange spontaneity^ hke a secondary^ innocence, for conviction. But a surfeit

is

felt

increasingly with set

formulations, and a hunger renewed for idiosyncratic isolated

phenomena. Both help

unsuccess of the

realistic

and

to account for the present

novel whose main source of energy

:

THINKING ABOUT WOMEN has been, and

still is,

psychosexual comparison and contrast.

In turn, the reader recognizes the patterns of distinction,

and

closes the book.

Even various degrees of

plausibility

within the stereotypes no longer hold an audience for them.

Most seem ready

up the chance (now,

to give

is how it is'' to avoid the how they always say it is." The original

at

any

rate,

diminished) of 'This

certainty of

'This

exhilaration

is

of the chance slides irresistibly, through repetition, into banality.

I Formlessness The

impression of women's formlessness underlies the

familiar,

and often most generous, acknowledgement

superficial form.

It is

of course a physiological impression,

and the sexual analogy

The and

flesh of less

is

(as

transparent: soft body, soft mind.

Sade would put

it)

muscular than that of men. Pinched,

And

easily.

women

if it is

is less it

impressionable, the impalpable

maintain even so lax and careless a hold upon does. There, in the mind,

Solid ground

The

is

masculine, the sea

all is is

liquid

resistant

bruises

be not only beyond pinching but beyond form.

body

of their

more

mind must It

cannot

itself as

the

and drowning.

feminine.

chief consequence of liquidity

is

formless utterance

thoughts run out of women. In Molly Bloom's soliloquy, for

74

FEMININE STEREOTYPES example, thinking and menstruating are similar and concom-

She can no more govern the

itant processes.

by sentence

first,

structure or punctuation, than she can the second. Since

Joyce, in fact, the omission of these civilized impediments

has become standard in the representation of feminine thought. Sartre applies the technique to a Lesbian in his short story Intimacy, but he

independently clever:

is

He

loves me, he doesn't love

my

appendix in a

feeling me, but

touch

if

my

bowels,

if

they showed him

he wouldn't recognize

glass,

it,

he's always

they put the glass in his hands he wouldn't

he wouldn't think "that's hers," you ought to love

it,

we

them because we

don't love

aren't used to them,

the

them; the

starfish

we

if

way we saw our hands and arms maybe we'd

saw them

all

Maybe

of somebody, the esophagus, the liver, the intestines.

love

must love each other better than we do. They

on the beach when there's sunlight and they poke

stretch out

out their stomachs to get the air and everybody can see them; I

wonder where we could

More

stick ours out,

through the navel.

often, repetitions of the effect are fairly dismal

example, the

letter written

by Elena Esposito

—

for

in Mailer's

7he Beer Park: .

.

And

.

cause so

much

him not and

I

would haunt

I

that

I

had the

worry, that

to

moment

thought

kept saying to myself that

I

was going

but the I

then did

if I

was

I

know what

I

to I

Collie

feeling I

make

I

I

couldn't die be-

began to bother

and

this

had

to call

him up and

wouldn't do anything to bother him, it

a nice quiet sophisticated

little call

was

terrified,

heard his voice on the phone

talking to

thought, but

me tell

I

my

doctor or to

started screaming at

75

I

St.

Peter,

him

.

.

I

.

don't

THINKING ABOUT WOMEN upon the woman named Doris

or the soliloquy forced in

Mollis

Hemingway's 7o yiave and Jlave 'Not:

...

wish that luminol would work.

I

shouldn't have really gotten so tight.

way

can help the

am

that.

now

night and can't sleep

all

much

of that

suppose

damned

and then sometimes

it

I

stuff

I

he

IS

it,

a bitch I'll

I'll

am

isn't,

really,

Servile.

if

I

he here take too

day tomorrow

Oh,

well,

I

he

is

.

.

and

I

didn't

want

to,

but

tion,

and I'm the one that cannot go

.

most amorphous

of the time too.)

Hemingway simply

is

lying

awake

in bed.

articles of furniture in the

And

And

for

is

in

Molly Bloom's menstrua-

substitutes Doris Hollis's masturbahis malice for Joyce's

good

yet even with so fine a model to follow,

Hem-

tion, rather as

temper.

I

sweet, no he's not, he's not even

house, are favored in the stereotype. Sartre's Lesbian

bed most

I'll

might as

I'm sweet, yes you are, you're lovely,

Like Molly Bloom, this Doris

(Beds, as the

all

I

you do? What can you do but go

here, I'm here, I'm always here

away, no, never,

awfully

if

even though, even though, even anyway, oh,

sweet, no he

I

but

go crazy and

feel

oh, you're so lovely, yes, lovely,

am, now

one

all right,

feel frightful.

hate to but what can

ahead and do

He

No

won't put you to sleep and anyway

be cross and nervous and well.

Eddie, really.

they're built but getting tight has nothing to

do with

I

Damn

It isn't fair really.

he substitutes

ingway remains implausible. Quite ludicrously, the character's

phrases, even in her most private circumstances, are

trapped in the unmistakable rhythm of phrases.

76

all

Hemingway's own

FEMININE STEREOTYPES Joyce's indulgence

Hemingway's attempt lery's

Madame

more common

is

to scourge

Emilie Teste,

Molly Bloom,

it.

like

Va-

warmth and sympathy:

all

is

to the stereotype than

one could no more disapprove of their liquidity than disapprove of

warm

baths. Oasis,

by her husband

called

priest, is a desert.

And

Madame

—whose

Teste

sometimes

is

mind, according to her

Sartre's character, too,

is

as affec-

Moreover, these

tionate

and vulnerable

swirling

and disordered sensibilities will sometimes suddenly

manage a

as she

small force, either of

They conform when

good sense or

to the masculine

pocketbooks, ridiculous jumbles Teste,

witless.

is

she

is

not Oasis,

is

of

humor.

conception of women's things

of

(as

Madame

apt to be 7hing] out of

which, to everyone's surprise and pleasure, the owners sometimes fish up exactly

what

is

needed

—a throat lozenge,

a

safety pin, a telephone number.

however, the same stereotype

In criticism,

employed critic

pejoratively.

himself

is

is

almost always

persists there,

but as a defect. The

by

crystalline purposes

presently possessed

of precision, clarity critic

It

is

and firmness. Arnold's notion that the

should ''undulate" with whatever work he considers

quite

demode.

It

can be contrasted, for example, with

Norman

Podhoretz's remark that the book reviewer properly

receives

new books with

undulate with suspects undulating

by

suspicion.

One

does not wish to

or, for that matter,

approve of their

themselves. Consequently, a distaste for any

indication of temperamental yielding or

accommodation

often raised to the level of critical premise: writers

show

firmness, resistance, inflexibility.

77

It is

on

is

must

this premise,

THINKING ABOUT WOMEN out of

all

conceivable premises, that

Hochman S.

in

we

Commentary, that Kafka

is

by Baruch

are told,

a better writer than

Y. Agnon:

Within the psychic smog of Kafka's world there

is

a tensed,

even compulsive will to be, to achieve, to escape. Kafka's obsession with his father, with authority in general, in its clinical baldness, but out of

it

is

unpleasant

there seems to

grow a

tenacity of will, and a counter-fixity of guilt. Such tension largely absent in

Agnon. In psychological terms,

is

his characters

are obsessed not with the father, but with the mother, and the result

is

a propensity to undergo Hfe in a labile, feminine

mode.*

The

certainty here of the

mode

in

which experience should

be met, and the unqualified insistence upon characteristic of the stereotypal imagination.

influences

and

pop

Labile,

in

and out

like Fair

fixities,

The

are

parental

and Cloudy, Tenacious

on what Mr. Hochman would probably

call

a

psychic barometer.

2. Passivity But to return to the

flies,

I

like to think of those

that hatch out at the beginning of winter, within

* Baruch

Hochman, "Agnon's Quest," Commentary, December

p. 50.

78

1966,

F E

M

I

N'

doors, and die shortly after.

and

fluttering in the

STEREOTYPES

NE

I

You

see

them crawling

warm comers, pmiy,

sluggish,

torpid, mute.

—Samuel

Beckett, jSiolloy

Like formlessness, the stereotype of passivity

ened by a physiological impression

—now

and torpidity

tive horizontality, atonality

is

of the of

strength-

compara-

women. How-

despite the determinism which physiology must imply,

ever,

passivity

not condoned.

is

lethargy should be avoided.

It

felt

is

Some

that this unavoidable

alternative activity, in des-

ignated areas, has always been recommended. In the Tal-

mud, even the

rich wife

was

to take

work, for fear of her otherwise

some part

in

household

falling into promiscuity or

morbidity, the two irregularities

(first

of the body, then of

which constitute permanent exceptions

the mind)

to the

rule of passivity.

Preventive exercises, however, have been intricately qualified

and are

still

much

debated. There

is

really only general

agreement that actions of conjugal relevance should be encouraged.

And

even these actions are

least as far as action

United

States,

is

mummies.

seem

paralytic.

in sheets

It is

in the

They

and wheeled on

disappear, carts, like

who emerges, upright, boy." And yet childbirth

the doctor

calm, flecked with blood: "It's a will proceed,

itself,

so locked in the concept of male ''attend-

women, wrapped

(the other)

be passive, at

can be passive. Childbirth

ance'' or ''delivery"' as to

these

felt to

and even end, according

inine muscular contractions

to the pace of fem-

whether or not

79

it

is

attended.

THINKING ABOUT WOMEN (Customarily, the engaged obstetrician

may be

though he emergence

in

crowning.)

It is

and

initiative

their effort

is

is

paid his fee, even

backing out of his garage, a birthlike

moment

curiously

called

in recognition of the incontrovertible

energy

itself,

at

shown on

the

so

by women,

these rare occasions

that

called labor.

In childbirth, passivity

swept, willy-nilly, into activity.

is

But some study has also been given to those situations in

which passivity

tant of these situations

now famous

One

yields voluntarily.

was

described

first

most impor-

by Freud,

envy for passivity

substitution of penis

central characteristic of the female.

And

in his

as the

to this first active

he subjoined a second and related one of shame.

principle,

The

of the

active core of

shame had not previously been described.

Since shame prompts hiding and since, once hidden, the

shamed person

is

supposed to lapse into immobility, the

energy of the emotion had escaped But as he explained, nature

itself

was

the genital deficiency of the female, hair as a

means

of hiding

it.*

all

still

more

effectively.

visual opinion of is

embarrassed by

and devised her pubic

This

is,

means

again, a

at least

of hiding them-

more moral than

a mole's view of Givenchy, but

it

undeniably an affirmation of feminine industry. It is

*

women,

first

Then women, capable

of taking a hint, invented weaving as a selves

but Freud's notice.

even one of the happier affirmations. Generally, the

The purpose

of

male pubic hair was not,

by Freud. Some other students a visual emphasis upon the

to

my

knowledge, explained

of the subject, however, have suggested

genitalia, of

orders.

80

both the sufficient and deficient

FEMININE STEREOTYPES motives which are acknowledged to bring about a substitution of activity for passivity are less edifying, or less pathetic,

than shame. Bad temper, for example,

is

women from

is

their

customary torpor, as

known

to rouse

the desire to dis-

turb someone else's torpor. For the purposes of scolding or interruption, the ively to

life.

A

woman

capable of coming quite excess-

is

character in

Dutourd remarks upon

this

7he

perates them.''

Love by Jean

metabolic reversal as though

were a norm: ''Women love occupation leads nowhere.

Jiorrors of

be occupied, even

to

The

inactivity of the

The key words

are even

if

if

it

the

male exas-

the occupation

leads nowhere: passivity yields to senseless activity. Either senseless or exasperating.

It is

known

that

when they

when they

are least occupied,

habitually,

when women become aware

guise of cogitation, they are seized tion.

It

activity,

is

by

men

think best

are passive

—and

of this artful dis-

the impulse of disrup-

then that they plunge into aimless but noisy

such as vacuuming the rug.

Feminine passivity

is

closely related to

Negro apathy.

In

both cases, having restricted the participation of the group, the observer finds that inactivity teristic.

is

an innate group charac-

According to the same sequence of event and

pretation, the person

who

grieves for the death of his parent

or his child should find himself described

brious

by

nature.

inter-

Women and Negroes

by

others as lugu-

are also linked in the

stereotypes of frivolity and fecklessness, respectively.

The

congruity of these with those of passivity and apathy

81

is

in-

the

THINKING ABOUT WOMEN cost of asserting the radical irresponsibility of both groups.

That

is,

Negro has appeared

the American

in the past to

be

devoid, shockingly devoid, of energetic and serious concern

and economic values

for those social, political

did not share. But now,

when

his previous

in

which he

apathy has de-

veloped into open resentment, the Negro develops simultaneously a brand-new stereotype, in the making now, of

Through some Dar-

antisocial or insurrectionary violence.

winian caprice, innate characteristics of social (rather more than of sexual) groups undergo quite sudden mutations.

3. Instability

At

least

two

reconciliations of this stereotype with that of

passivity are possible. sorts, the passive

divided into two tinction

(1)

and the

moods

Women

are divided into

hysterical.

(T)

woman

is

or responses. But in turn, the dis-

between mood and response

hysterical response,

Each

two

is

important.

In

a

the person indicates her connection,

nervous but actual, with external event. Sylvia Plath writes her

poem

''Cut'' after

she has cut herself:

What a thrill— 'My thumb instead of an onion. But in the mood, which hysteria

is

is

the

more associated with women,

generated from within, like a hormone, and

82

little

FEMININE STEREOTYPES or no connection with external event

is

acknowledged.

In general, the feminine psyche suggests an extreme internality to others, like that of a ship in a bottle. Sealed off,

the psyche undergoes various but obscure glandular changes,

which create a semblance of reactions fact oblivious to

On

it.

to reality but are in

a similar basis, Freud

and Wilhelm

Fliess tried, unsuccessfully, to define the significance of the

menstrual numbers 23 and 78

whole.* So, hysteria

still,

surely this arithmetic of the

:

some

uterus must be the clue to

larger arithmetic of the

one might easily reconcile passivity and

by menstrual analogy:

the being shuffles about for

several weeks; then suddenly, senselessly, gathers ergies for

an eruption of violent temper.

This alternation novel.

Back

employed

typically

is

to China.

while the wife

down

*

Petri sherry.

manic

ance

sits at

is,

gear,

home on

On

in Leslie Fiedler's

The husband moves about town

day having experiences, each a

to

en-

its

little

model

of authenticity,

the living-room sofa slurping

his return, she shifts

and makes a deplorable

as usual, related to the

Though, as Ernest Jones remarks

all

from depressive

Her

scene.

disturb-

problems of conception.

in connection with Fliess,

no regular

patterns of psychic periodicity have been determined for either sex, the

idea

is still

casually employed in literary criticism. John

Weightman,

for

example, refers to a presumably clear distinction between the psychological

"receptivity" of "female" homosexuals

women, which

is

and

the receptivity of

"part of a physiological cycle." In his sexual ethic, ac-

ceptance of the male partner ("submission")

is

less

degrading

if

it

is

periodically imposed rather than psychologically chosen. ("Black Chivalry,"

T^ew Jork "Review

of Books,

August

83

24, 1967, p. 8.)

THINKING ABOUT WOMEN Years of disappointment account for the sherry, in turn the sherry accounts for a tardy success: a student of her hus-

band's has impregnated her without her being entirely conscious of the effective procedure. Hence, her hysteria

merely her

way of bringing the

In fact, in bringing

any

:

it is

news.

sort of news,

these same states of mind. Elizabeth

women

bring only

Hardwick disagreed on

one occasion with Frederick Crews' estimate of Edmund

Wilson a quintessentially mental entanglement, one would :

have thought. But Mr. Crews' rebuttal was brief and, he

seemed confident,

sufficient: in disagreeing

with him. Miss

Hardwick had been hysterical* Stephen Spender has similarly

clarified

the

mysterious

quality

of

Sylvia

Plath's

poetry:

One

does not think of Clytemnestra as a hysteric: one thinks of

her as hysterical for very good reasons, against which she warns. Sylvia Plath would have agreed with Wilfred a poet can do today

that

''all

her

warning

is

more

is

to warn." But being a

shrill,i

penetrating,

Owen

woman,

visionary

than

Owen's. Owen's came out of the particular circumstances of the trenches, and there

is

nothing to

make

—

had not been on the Western Front which

his nose

was rubbed

one about anything

and a quiet

poet.

at

With

all.

the

us think that

mud and

if

he

blood into

—he would not have warned anyHe would

have been a nice chap

Sylvia Plath, her femininity

is

that her

hysteria comes completely out of herself, and yet seems about * ?X^OMEN Johnson's criticism of Shakespeare, the most natural and

now

innocent (we would say

naive or subjective or effe-

minate) statements of personal reaction witches in CMacbeth

—

—such

and resounding judgments. Just

as fear of the

among

are easily interspersed

acute

as in the century before,

for that matter, no fixed distinction can be kept between intellectual authority

and intimate emotion

in

Donne's

ser-

mons. But such a distinction tury.

It

was

then,

endemic to the nineteenth cen-

is

when women

only as novelists but as (what

method

of

first

we

male utterance codified

began

call)

to publish not

intellectuals, that a

itself;

and, as a result, a

genuine difference seemed discernible between the ways in

which men think and think and write.

write,

They might

risk of being confused.

be dreaded living, as

is

and the ways

in

which women

publish simultaneously without

(Why,

in turn, this

confusion should

complex, though certainly connected with the

opposed to the

literary,

dread that each sex ex-

periences of being taken for the other.) So Dickens recorded his conviction that

George

Eliot's

Scenes from Clerical Life,

published anonymously, must be written by a woman.

The

dichotomy was established: the dominant and masculine

mode

possessing the properties of reason and knowledge, the

subsidiary and feminine tions. If this

on the

mode

possessing feelings and intui-

dichotomy was unreal,

part, particularly, of the

it

was not

less

dedicated

dominant mode. Until Oscar

Wilde, a direct and progressive control of circumstances,

however stubborn or ambiguous, seemed sirable to all writers.

possible

and de-

Wilde disrupted a voluntary assump158

:

DIFFERENCES tion of authority

IN

TONE

which had previously

an involuntary

fit

sense of cultural condition.

One

has the impression that the subsidiary

genuine, too

—

that, at

any

rate, as

women

time jobs more than men,

women

mode was

still

take part-

critics in the

nineteenth

century were gratified to discuss at least the feelings.

Anna Jameson's comparison

impossible to believe that Mrs. of Juliet

and Thekla

(''the

German

the heroine of

Juliet,''

was disingenuous

Schiller's Waltenstein)

The same

It is

confidence, innocence, and fervor of affection dis-

more vehement,

tinguish both heroines

:

the love of Thekla

more calm, and reposes more on

is

but the love of Juliet

is

itself;

the love of Juliet gives us the idea of infinitude, and that of

Thekla of eternity; the love of

Juliet flows

on with an increas-

ing tide, like the river pouring to the ocean, and the love of

Thekla stands unalterable, and enduring

as the rock. In the

heart of Thekla love shelters as in a home; but in the heart of Juliet

—"he

he reigns a crowned king

umphant!"

I

know,

I

rides

on

its

pants

know, both young women should be shut up

a year, with Mrs. Jameson, inside a computer. But

Jameson thought out that even though, exhausted by river/ rock distinction.t * Mrs.

Anna Jameson,

Burt, undated)

,

I

it,

am

is

still,

for

Mrs.

distinction,

infinitude/ eternity

she collapses at once into the rather fond of Mrs. Jameson:

Shakespeare's Tleroines, 1832

(New

York, A. L.

p. 77.

t Water, as Freud would observe,

"There

tri-

*

in the

is

often Mrs. Jameson's undoing:

beauty of Cordelia's character an

effect too sacred for

words, and almost too deep for tears, within her heart

159

is

a fathomless

— THINKING ABOUT WOMEN her bad

worse, but her worst

is

is

incomparable, as here in

her acrobatic pleasure in the notion of heartbeat-riding. Also,

son

it

would be dishonest not

is still alive.

To

to admit that

admit as well that

in

Mrs. Jame-

her present senility

she seems to have lost both her old occasional pertinence

and her constant

'Dolls,

Jbe Shadow

but more reputable observations of writers

IPife, etc.),

Nin

not only what are called

(7he Valley of the

'ladies^ novels"

Ana'is

Now

integrity.

or Rebecca

sibility, just as

West

like

repeat the ritual gestures of sen-

some men repeat those

of authority.

The one

seems essentially no more anachronistic than the other, but

women

these

strain

what was from the

start a subsidiary

mode, whereas these men merely prolong the dominant mode of a century.

Though

the one

as dubious as the other,

is

we

too continue involuntarily to anticipate cerebral benefits and

emotional

injuries.

This

perhaps

is

own time,

why we

since the authoritative

of original,

which

is

tion

interesting writing

have

I

mode

is

of sensibility

is

men

or the

women whom we

Extremes, of course, of anachronism are I

not marked in the

by women now. So

the very distinc-

tried to characterize will not apply consistently

to either the

ized.

no longer the mode

more than competent, expression. At the

same time, the exertion most

daily anticipate the worst of our

now^ admire most.

still

easily categor-

should guess that a particular aridity, what seems a

well of purest affection, but

its

waters sleep in silence and obscurity,

never failing in their depth and never overflowing in their fullness."

[My

italics.]

(Shakespeare's Jieroines,

p. 228.)

160

:

DIFFERENCES

TONE

IN

systematic dehydration of a subject,

for us not only

is still

obviously academic but obviously male

The

fourth set of images

is

provided through Dilscy's

re-

and symbolically there

an

flecting angle of vision. Implicitly

is

analogous relationship between Dilsey's emphasis on certain basic, primary, positive values throughout

and Ben's

intuitive

sense of values. Thus, the positive angles of vision, mirrored

by Ben and Dilsey most sharply tural parts of ally

7be Sound and

and symbolically

in the first

the yury,

as bracketing

and fourth

may be

struc-

considered

liter-

and containing the two

negative angles of vision mirrored

by Quentin and Jason

second and third parts. Taken in

this sense, the structural ar-

in the

rangement of these four hinged mirrors serves to heighten the reader's awareness of Faulkner's major thematic antithesis be-

tween the chaos-producing producing

human

effects of

effects of self-love

compassionate and

self-sacrificial love in

experience.*

This plane lands at Laputa protest that this

written

and the order-

is

in fifteen minutes.

One might

simply graduate-school prose, as

by both men and women

of nineteenth-century scholars

Germany, which has

students. But

it

emerge as such writers; but

is

(and men), particularly in

in the past

school model. In this way,

it is

it

the prose

been

is

this

set as the graduate-

true,

mode

some women may is

for

them even

* Lawrance Thompson, "Mirror Analogues in 7he Sound and the 7ury,"

Jbe Modern American T^ovel, dom House, 1966), p. 153.

ed.

Max

161

Westbrook (New York, Ran-

— H

T

more

.V

I

K

I

ABOUT

G

N-

men, an

imitative than for

XT

O

ME

N

intellectual transvestism as

well as a culturBl aitectation.

Again, one might say that the in

Norman The

fact c:

womar.

mate

r:

~?."er

::-.e

:??.'?.;.

if

zr.i

mode

of aiithorit\^ persists

immediately identifiable. a? male:

is

:h?.:

if

the prime responsibiiln' of a

on earth long enough

:o be

to find the best

and conceive children who

r:5f::ie ror herself,

prove

Jhe

Mailer and

.pecies.*

Ae

fact of the matter, the prime responsihtUty,

mode

phrasing of the

current of rir^dv. drivel,

I

I:

admire

authorin- \\ Allen

it is

joke.

"eternal

a hard lesson. There

is

an eternal object of which war

or inadequate idea.

worship of

sibylline

own

that

of re-

previous pub-

L. Kittredge.

Unexpectedly, as though one found that some frivolous expenditure was practical

women

writers

Norman

all,

move about with an

O. Brown, "A Reply

March 1%7,

after

to

in

this

new*

idiom

ease they could not feel

Herbert Marcxise," Commentary,

p. 83.

165

:

THINKING ABOUT before. Again,

am

I

X*:'OMEN

not speaking of those

who

relentlessly

prolong our evening with Elizabeth Barrett Browning (they

up and

will not get

Call it is

me a now

cab/')

say, ''Enough of this lucrative distress.

Instead,

.

possible for

I

hope

women

to define the

way

which

in

to WTite well. Quite simply,

having not had physical or intellectual authority before, they

have no reason to

There

me-downs, century. voir

resist a literature at

odds with authority.

who prefer instead to wear handborrow now the certitude of the nineteenth

are, of course, those

to

One might

say that the defect of Simone de Beau-

the authority of her prose

is

in hesitant times

:

the absence of hesitation

amounts to a presence, a tangible

defi-

ciency, a sense of obtuseness. In better

work by women now, while sentiment (as the inimical

as stigmatic

mark

—

avoided

is

of their sex in others'

again, as in Mailer

and

Svevo, by deliberate rashness or by ironic constraint.

The

minds), authority too

is

skirted

tenor of

Mary McCarthy's remarks on

different

from that of

He

is

a general

set.

seen.''

and has

On

just

won

a battle; he enters the scene

its

mind." "Is

commonplace man who

it

fair

and foul

murderous

who

day

I

is

seem

to

hot /cold /wet enough for you?"

A

talks in

"The sun

can't

commonplaces, a

might guess, on the Scottish fairways, Macbeth Shakespeare hero

a

note Macbeth's character tone

this flat

"Terrible weather we're having."

make up

rather

is

E. E. StolFs

making a remark about the weather. "So have not

2iacbeth

golfer, is

one

the only

corresponds to a bourgeois type: a

Babbitt, let us say.

166

DIFFERENCES

TONE

IN

Macbeth has absolutely no

feeling for others except envy, a

common

He

At once

middle-class

which

his rest,

is

trait.

a strange

a comical

and a

way

envies the murdered

suicidal wit: the intention of wit

What

exceeds that of justice or plausibility.

more

naturally

the opinion of

and more quickly than what

Macbeth

for a minute accept

And

Eisenhower.

hemline of the

is

Macbeth

late thirties.

to

determination to

its

criticism

middle-class

is

philistine

But

it is

it,

which

God knows had

deur.t

The

point of view

37.

t

is

It

daring,

feminine,

later preferred

is

in its social

narrow-

middle-class, the

hard to imagine a more

its

"common

middle-

mocking diminution of a subject taken on an institutionalized gran-

Mary McCarthy,

for

all

their

Harper's, June 1962, pp. 35

of

Mary McCarthy, which

ousts conventional attitudes,

"We

not the rashness, say, of Rebecca West: little

care of two or three nuns.

any part

girls'

is

wifely depreciation of

make Macbeth

itself. It is

rashness links

house was packed with

in

doesn't

perhaps necessary to distinguish between varieties of rashness.

The rashness is

its

''good sense"'

Mary McCarthy, "General Macbeth,"

and

One

and

the rashness of the judgment which re-

deems

its

Stoll says,

said

quite dead, like a

is

conception of envy than that

class trait.''

*

The

Macbeth's ''simple panic'O , but also

ness. In

is

as the general, the golfer, the

not only in

Macbeth (Lady Macbeth's

said

is

engaging. But wrong.

the Babbitt reference

in the pejorative sense,

Duncan

of looking at your victim.*

school.

of the world,

girls,

They

were not alone. The

aged from twelve

were, like

more comfortable

They were apparently waiting

167

to sixteen, in the

any gathering to look at

of their kind

than an English

quite calmly to

grow up.

:

.

THINKING ABOUT Norman

disagreements, with

>X^

O

MEN

Mailer; the diminution with

Svevo, and with now.

The

wit there

upon

Colette's

admire child gymnasts, but

I

To

writers.

in the

of

arrogant, as

is

not in this comment of

it is

literary prodigies

I

am

start with, there are too

world would not be afraid of a

movement through

a

little

many

afraid of child

of them.

Then who and ease

child's vigour

He

the impenetrable?

lacks only our

vocabulary to be our equal when the passion to write comes

upon him.

could give the name, at any rate the pseudonym

I

she has chosen to write under, of

whose

poems, two plays, three

There

is

same

the

more than one

if

not more novels, and ^Memoirs

facility

among

retain

my

me

Of

boys.

pressing hurry to form an opinion on so

confided to

as they are without

it,

and

my

part.

adults.

There were no

consent. But if it

to

make

all

no

feel

I

still

should only be

There was

There were none of the unhappy

which follow the English attempt

and show no

I

(sic)

youthful works,

so did the people looking after them.

no panic on anybody's

docile,

course

many

faculty for astonishment, even

They expected

girl of fifteen

baggage already comprises a slim volume of

literary

results

and

children look insipid

signs whatsoever that they will ever develop into little

with poked chins and straight hair,

girls

aggressively proud of being plain, nor were there pretty girls

making a

desperate precocious proclamation of their femininity. But, of course, in

a country where there

grow up

into

is

very

little

homosexuality,

it is

easy for

womanhood." (Black £amb and Qrey lakon,

girls to

Vol.

I,

p.

163.)

The

final generalization is the clue:

low herself

to

a person

is

obviously rash to

say anything so simple-silly. But the rashness

auntlike. In the end,

it

reiterates

is

placid

an old point of view rather than

a new one.

168

al-

and

risking^

:

DIFFERENCES

TONE

IN

for youthful writers' attempts to exploit their

Sometimes,

it is

own

novelty.

true, they conceal their identity, but they never

forget to state their age.*

A

muted,

and precious animosity,

light

McCarthy's. But the contradiction wit

the

is

means of relinquishing

Mary

in contrast to

superficial, in that all

is

authority, of deprecating

the importance not only of the subject but of the writer as well.

And

women

it

is

this predisposition

which moves men and

now. The same impulses

writers closer together

at

once to diminish and to amuse occur in Elizabeth Hardwick's description of Boston

Harvard (across the

Cambridge) and Boston are two

river in

ends of one moustache. Harvard tional

it

is

now

so large and interna-

has altogether avoided the whimsical stagnation of

Boston. But the two places need each other, as

say of a mismatched couple.

Behind such a passage

Auden argues

.

lies

the persuasion that prose, as

that poetry, can

public or loudspeaker voice.

we knowingly

.f

.

no longer be written

The

in the

persuasion too, that, within

judgment and so within some assumption of authority, there

must be

still

conscious reduction. Repeatedly, the large

and the unknown are compressed

into terms of the small

and known.

The

opposite tendency

is

to enlarge.

* Colette, 7f?e Blue Cantern, translated

Even the inhibited

by Roger Senhouse (New York,

Farrar, Straus, 1963), pp. 93-94.

t Elizabeth Hardwick, "Boston,"

in

A

Farrar, Straus, 1951), p. 154.

169

View

of

lAy

Own (New

York,

THINKING ABOUT WOMEN passage on Macbeth

Stoll

one must be so cautious large

in saying a thing, then

and important thing

be given a modern form.

end an enlargement:

in the

is

is

and

scrutinized again,

''echo of the soul.''

must be a

to say. But enlargement too can

What was

thought to be small and

known, and therefore not meaningful, such of milk,

it

if

as Mailer's glass

swells out into the bizarre

There are heroic confrontations but they

take place in the small intestine.

and

disquisition, carrots

And

even as such topics of

eggs, disturb our sense of proper

or authoritative enlargement, so the circumstances in which

they are discussed seem deliberately to deride their

official

or public significance. Like Sade's ''Philosophy in the Bed-

room," Mailer's "Metaphysics of the Belly" against formality I

like

by

Dickens

would be

I

who

shielded

disparateness.

have perhaps not helped

writers. But

is

are bent

at all those

upon

obsessed readers

identifying the sex of

could not promise that the second distinction

foolproof, and, except

on

its

lower

levels (those of

women and of reputable competence now less trustworthy than ever before.

popular sentiment for for

men)

,

it

seems

As both simple authority and simple

sensibility

have become

anachronistic, writers cohabit an area of prose in

sudden alternations of the reckless and the

sly,

which

the wildly

voluble and the laconic, define only a mutual and refreshing

disturbance of mind.

I

ing

have confined the point of authoritative tone, by thinkof

it

almost exclusively in terms of

170

critical

prose.

,

DIFFERENCES

IN

TONE

Meanwhile, the present approaches to poetry and to

which

are quite similar to those

Auden,

as

I

have

fiction

affect criticism as

well.

remarks on the impossibility of the

said,

public voice, and chooses for himself the private, personal

and

casual.

He

person can do, choice

is

will not i.e.,

seem to do more than the simplest

speak to one other person. But as

this

the poetic equivalent of critical modesty, so there

are poets, like prose writers,

who

choose

just as deliberately

be rash and immoderate. Allen Ginsberg and Andrei

to

Vozneshensky coincide

in the conviction that poetry

now be more

than public

phetic. Poets

may

priest,

—beyond

choose

now

must

secular authority, pro-

to play either penitent or

but no one wants to be prime minister.

Similarly in fiction, the often tedious discussion of ''point of view'"

probably

authority. This author.''

now

The

is

again, a backing

reflects,

expressed in a dismissal of the ''omniscient

preference has

equally commonplace)

sumably

away from

become popular for the narrator

(in fact,

who

is

by

pre-

like any reader: imperfectly informed, confused,

insecure in judgment

upon, the story.

—a part

And if this

than a commentator

of, rather

fallibility is

not

another withholding of authority occurs pretative faculty

is still

—

felt (or affected)

in

not directly exercised.

which an

The

total

inter-

com-

prehension, on the part of the writer, of his created situation is

merely implied by the factual terms in which he, seemingly

by

necessity

and with the utmost economy, puts the

situa-

tion forward.

Alternatively, these forms of reluctance to speak yield to

the relaxation of the sentence into

171

its

least strenuous, least

:

THINKING ABOUT WOMEN emphatic and

least periodic form.

denial of authority, but the

This relaxation

first qualities

is

an equal

put forward in

its

place are tentative: an acknowledgement of minute qualifications, a fidelity to this

and tremors

all flickers

of sensation. In

kind of sentence, especially, the sense of the manipula-

tion of experience yields entirely to the sense of reception. Virginia

Woolf was

its

sheer

new

inclined to consider the

sentence as sexually characteristic, as a ''woman's sentence''

She [Dorothy Richardson] has invented, vented, developed and applied to her

which we might gender.

It is

call the

of a

more

or, if she

own

has not in-

uses, a sentence

psychological sentence of the feminine elastic fibre

than the old, capable of

stretching to the extreme, of suspending the frailest particles,

of enveloping the vaguest shapes. Other writers of the opposite

sex have used sentences of this description and stretched them to the extreme. But there

is

a difference. Miss Richardson has

fashioned her sentence consciously, in order that

it

may

de-

scend to the depths and investigate the crannies of Miriam

Henderson's consciousness. in the sense that

writer

may

who

is

it is

It is

a

woman's

sentence, but only

used to describe a woman's mind by a

neither proud nor afraid of anything that she

discover in the psychology of her sex.*

But, in fact,

sentence.

it

seems impossible to determine a sexual

As Virginia Woolf

certain femininity

is

sentence has more in

in

herself

clear, the

Dorothy Richardson's

common

subject.

only

Her

with Henry James's or Joyce's

* Virginia Woolf, Contemporary Writers

& World,

makes

1966), pp. 124-25.

172

(New

York, Harcourt, Brace

DIFFERENCES than with, say, George

Eliot's.

TONE

IN

The

description of a sound

iromPilgrimage:

The sound

came from the den

of reading

word-slurring monotonous drawl

...

thurrah, thurrah

looped and forced into

—

—thurrah,

a

word-mouthing,

thurrah, thurrah;

a single beat, on and on, the words it

without any discrimination, the voice

dropping uniformly at the end of each sentence

... An

a child

to .

.

out.

...

a

class

.

.

emerge from

is

one from

to that of registration of

effect

upon

its

going

itself

femininity.

The

visible circumstances

unseen impressions. The implica-

again modest, in that judgment, or even comprehen-

sion, of the

whole scene

is

not pretended. Nothing

beyond the impression of the whole upon a (however

sensitive)

arrogance, though is

reciting.

about

a consciousness expresses

inwardness rather than

its

rhetorical shift

is

thrah.

.*

The means by which such

tion

.

.

board-school children

of

Perhaps they had changed their minds

.

.

Early Victorian voice, giving reproachful instruction

it

limited witness.

is

asserted

single, living

and

The only remaining

alone can sometimes

become

palpable,

the conviction that the witness's impressions have signifi-

cance.

At the same time, extravagance

American

is

as in poetry, a contrary allegiance to

apparent in

fiction

—a

fiction,

deliberate rhetorical swinging-out be-

yond previous bounds. This *

perhaps particularly in

is

the

first

and most

striking

Dorothy Richardson, "The Tunnel," Pilgrimage (New York, Alfred A.

Knopf, 1967), Vol.

II,

p. 61.

173

H

T

I

N:

K

I

-V

ABOUT

G

\r

O

ME

N'

aspect of William Gass's Omettsetter's Luck, of Mailer's li'hy

We in Vietnam

Are

?,

IVeed Jactor and Qiles Qoat-Boy

John Earth's Jbe Sot-

of

—where pleasure

in reproduction, in the mock-re\ival

fundamental ity. It is

shift

from

clear in such

niscience

is

work

that the conventional

a critical half-truth.

the unqualified assumption

which

will

is

taken

(appropriate to the

sobriet}') of extinct tones of author-

Only

the stolid

and

of understanding.

no longer do

ban on omstraight-

now seems insupportable,

forward assumption of omniscience

qualit}'

Norman

in the

The same

game warden

is

in-

stead sought out in the goat or the rhinoceros. It

must be

an appetite

said for the authoritative

for

strong. This

mode,

as

is

it is

it,

as for

met by

illusion of certitude,

—

in

pronouncement,

(the freshman theme:

It is

perhaps for

this

and more read conventional

They

can't be

assumed

still

common

past

in definition, in

Describe a mechanical

process. Analyze the charaaer of a person welT),

is

a general capacity- to write in the

least difficult to write out of a

and common training exposition

any

mode, however, that

whom you know

reason that more people write writing

critical

to care

more

now than

for fact

theor>^ than others have. N'onficrion,

before.

and opinion and

on the whole,

is

now

simply the easiest and most familiar (and, at the same time, useful)

ambiance of words which

thorit}^ in the

gence, been exiled garit\^ It

lags

clings

now

But intelligence

behind the

now

is left.

An

equivalent au-

conventional novel has slipped beneath to

intelli-

our vast Siberian reaches of

in turn

difficulties

is

a limited reading qualit\'.

of innovation

and therefore

to the last reputable area of convention.

174

\'ul-

^v

e-^

RESPONSES

there

must have been a time

when

things were looser

a time between gas and sohd

when

things could shift about

imagine seeing through people or whatever

we were

then

and hugging vapor to vapor or jelly to jelly that

was an

—Edward

inventive time

Field, ''Jellyfish Invasion"

from Stand Vp, Jriend, With 7de.

«^ am I

of

eager to describe the small capacity or inclination

many women

thinking which

and

for executive sexuality, that

of sexual

primarily forceful, economical, forthright

is

decisive.

While they provide of feelings,

losing

if

women

by

achieved

evidence of a superior delicacy

little

tend to be skeptical of what can be

physical force. After

all,

they involve themselves. Their

game

football ''It

mode

would be

or the prize fight, pointless for

me

''It's

they are certain of first

comment on

the

so pointless,'' means,

to take part."

With modern

weapons, of course, and with the modern integration of combatants and noncombatants (children too are committed to

war now

wounded and diminish.

sense that, like their parents, they are

in the

killed), this

Women

distinction of feebleness

are already soldiers in the

namese army and, behind the in

our minds the distinction

to

which

women United

all

the

weak

are

more

Out

is

Still,

subject than the strong,

And

in the

withdrawal holds them apart from a ma-

jor preoccupation of the society. ciliation

army.

of that cowardice

continue to withdraw from violence. States, this

North Viet-

lines, in the Israeli

persists.

may

an emphasis,

like

The only

available recon-

Norman Mailer's, upon women's 176

RESPONSES pleasure in seeing violence done.* But this suggests again the

and compensation: men do, women watch;

fallacy of balance

the cast has an audience, the Scotch takes soda. In fact,

watch

Everyone

too.

vicarious,

it still

available to that taste;

is

does not constitute

full

men

and since

it is

participation in the

predominant mode.

Moreover, watchers vary

They may

Women

as easily

must be

in their reactions to spectacle.

grow confused or

tired as dedicated.

any

partially conscious, in witnessing

dis-

(however apparently purposeful or deliberate), of

order

emerging from disorder as well. Their physiology

from which confidence tracted.

in executive procedure

not one

is

can be ex-

Menstruation proves that the body carries out ex-

pensive, time-consuming

and

tion of the uterine wall,

which leaves the

futile operations.

The

retrac-

inflated veins to

atrophy, break open and lose their absurd provisions for a

non-event, constitutes an image of repeated bankruptcy.

monthly reminder that failure

may

failure

as likely as success,

is

sometimes be as welcome as success

A

and that

—

principles

which, obviously, do not govern our society.

Nothing is

else in

human

physiology, except perhaps aging,

comparable to the eerie abstraction of

resolute private timing seems *

The opinion

quis de Sade: tacle,

is

mad. The

revived, rather than conceived,

this process.

by Mailer. The Mar-

"Would you meet them [women]? Announce a

cruel spec-

a burning, a battle, a combat of gladiators, you will see droves of

them come running; but these occasions are not numerous enough feed their fury in the

Its

sane purpose of

:

to

they contain themselves, and they suffer." ("Philosophy

Bedroom," 7he ^Marcjuis de Sade,

177

p. 255.)

— THINKING ABOUT WOMEN punctuality

is

an encounter between one thing and another

an editor and meets

his desk, a

at least death.

But the menstrual schedule

while the conception is

like

farmer and his cow. Even aging

it

an alarm clock going

schedule, an unnerving suggestion of

even,

is

its

being

compulsively, for being pointlessly, timed.

forces

mounts

rain falls

by which

It

most heavily on

moral decision.

about the

all

more

the

the intensity of physical

purpose

It is

—

as

picnics.

in the vociferous opinions of others

cerning the functions of

It

observes only

in inverse ratio to their rational

Nothing much

precise,

an empty bedroom, or a

off in

mentally disturbed computer. There

the Archimedean rule

is

anticipates occurs capriciously.

women

con-

encourages them, either, in

impossible for

women

to consider

them-

selves with the unqualified rapture or the unqualified horror

through which they move. Inhabiting the only form there is

for

them

to inhabit, they cannot find

asylums, in that case, would

complex.

Nor is

judgment of

So they

find

it

their it

swarm with

possible for

own

it

women

simply heroic

—the

victims of a Ceres

to accept the opposite

loathsomeness, and continue to

live.

hard to honor the wife and dishonor the pros-

titute, to

dispense these moral merits and demerits with the

standard

celerity.

called

The

prostitute in

Women's Court:

what was,

until recently,

a Daumier sketch, female in center

of males, a creature not calculated to enhance, for other creatures like her, the effect of consistency in our sexual ethic.

On the contrary, not taking part in the prostitute's

ployment or her punishment, other to confuse the

two

women

em-

tend (obtusely)

as superficial, night-and-day variations

178

RESPONSES Next

of use.

to the pleasure of reading

pornography

that

is

of deciding whether or not such reading should be forbid-

den. So

we inexorably

Steiner's ''Night

vacy.

To become

George

arrive at public essays, such as

Words/' on the importance

of erotic pri-

so doubly engaged, one must have not only

appetite, but the illusion of one's authority to direct the

appetite of others. But

women,

like

many Negroes, may

cease

to endorse either the elevation or denigration of themselves,

and so

reject the prevailing habit of

who

Christ honored only the mother

who

tercourse and the prostitute

were

and both

alike, after all,

extreme differentiation. conceived without in-

resigned from

to endorse such absolute

sense of sexual experience

form upon contrasting there

may be

itself

only contrast.*

One

evident compulsion. contrast as the only

men. Essential nature

The

insistence of

Its

with an odd impression of

of continuance, as though

not

fectly

girl in

women: "They had

the picture;

persuaded themselves that she must be

mean

that

man

life

comparative than that

in the light of other

and glamorous than they were. called into question. If a

its

fixed for them: they hold themselves con-

phone operator that there was a all,

one

validity fades before

not permitted themselves to feel resentment because they

and

for them.

judgments when the

women seems more

is less

under reconsideration

stantly

form

with the other suggests that

is left

means

* Even the physical vanity of of

relative.

is

So they

at fault in the sexual

which God the Father had presumably designed It is difficult

it.

infinitely

In this way, their

prefers, say,

you are not perfectly

all

the

more beautiful

own charms were not

Greta Garbo

right in

knew from

and they had, one

your own

to you, style,

it

does

not per-

adequate to any of the usual requirements." (Mary McCarthy,

"Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale

Keeps.)

179

Man," from

J/^e

Company She

H \K

T

were denned erties of

N'

I

I

ABOUT WO M E

G

a? the lungs'

>J

compulsion to contrast the prop-

oxygen and carbon dioxide. Or

as

Genet describes

the imposed monosexuality of the men's prison, in which

some men must become pseudowomen

in order that all the

customar>' sexual, psychological and social distinctions persist, artificially.

The

habit of each sex

is

may

to define the

inadequacies of the other, and then to love or hate them.

Whichever has

the larger opportunity to speak defines the

more

all

loudly.

At

intellectual levels. In a single issue of Life

Magazine, there have been ing that no

and

woman

(1) the

White House chef

claim-

can make grasshopper pie as good as

(2) the poet John Berr\'man shouting, All

are spinsters or Lesbians! But

why

women

his,

poets

does he care? WTiat

is

the implied interdependence of good poetr\' and hetero-

sexual experience?

own work

primatur of his

But, of course, the

whatever one does could do is

it.

Each

this cry, that

more

the

commitment

It is

equally

is

his

own

is

to say that

cries

out for

its o\s'n

matchlessness. as

And

it

He, which batters

therefore, inevitably, discourages

women

difficult,

of aggrandizing

no one of the opposite sex

She cannot do as well

of

copulative histor\'?

most immediate means

— and which

the

ears

Does Mr. Beriyman suppose the im-

to our social professions.

physiologically, for

to the sexual virtues of purpose, foresight

women

to aspire

and economy. The

pre-eminent shrewdness, for example, with which Henry Miller's protagonist, in

Jbe Jropic

grante), steals his bus fare

doned

purse.

less sense of

A woman

of Cancer (and in fla-

home from

his partner's

might do the same, but

I

aban-

think with

her election thereby to Everx^woman. Pleasure

ISO

— RESPONSES or profit seems

more

by men. Keeping

easily interpreted as

commandment

the

Duty

or Destiny

and multi-

to ''increase

ply" coincides more neatly for them with natural inclination.

At the same

time,

women

cannot help observing that con-

ception (their highest virtue,

or doesn't.

by

show,

reports) simply happens

all

lacks the style of enterprise.

It

exaggerated), but

is

if

.

devious business benefiting

not to care, as though the

as

it

quence of

do not

—

does in

illness

body

here, as abortion

anything, a deterrent.

indirection,

must

self

regrettable conception, the

much

by

can be prevented

accomplished by luck

it is

(good or bad) Purpose often seems,

A

It

and device (though success

foresight

rates

by

by pretending

trick the

body. In the

instead tricks the self

or death.

It is

probably in conse-

this physical sense of double-dealing that

any

at

rate,

convincingly

—endorse

women

evangelical

views of sexual intercourse. Sober self-congratulation

peded for them by the ever-present

possibility of

is

im-

becoming

the butt of a joke.

Nor can women

think properly in terms of the conser\'a-

tion or frugal distribution of sexual materials.* fusion, for

men, of a

capitalistic

muse women, whose *

At

chief sexual

the present time, thrift

bet%veen the self

and what

and physical

is

is

(if

The easy

ethic

must be-

not spiritual) charac-

repeatedly urged in every interchange

not the

self. If

materials must be lost to the

outer world, the loss must be regretted, or at least studied. In About the J^ouse,

Auden

expresses gratification in the achievement of normal

regular bowel movements, leaves

—modem "sermons

esting that

Malamud

and Norman Mailer "reads" in stones."

From

and

feces like tea

this point of view,

it is

inter-

should assign Jakov Bok (in 7be Jixer) the job

of supervising truckloads of bricks.

181

THINKING ABOUT WOMEN teristic

is

an ungovernable extravagance. In

human

entrepreneur except nature, the

fact,

to

any

female would seem

too wasteful an item to be kept in stock.

This extravagance

like

when Western

two empty

available

when

(i.e.,

are largely

their adult lives,

—and almost

picnic hampers. Yet in the

pregnancies were more

upper-class

numerous and when no convenient

was

During

of sex.

carry this excess baggage everywhere

always aimlessly, past,

The breasts

even external.

any economy

gratuitous to

women

is

substitute for breast milk

breasts were

most economical),

nursing was instead considered socially degrading. According to their caste, as

women

cows do now, or

child of the

while rive. first,

its

for

provided milk for

none

at

all.

An

all

infants,

much

infant, like the first

Sigmund Freuds, might scream with hunger

mother and father waited for the wet nurse to

according to Freud, did nothing but eat

now, when nursing has become

ar-

in turn.

The

his food.)

And

(The Freuds waited for two wet nurses

optional, a practice one

chooses or declines according to temperament, the breasts take on a macabre physiological

How they engorge themselves, bing tumors of pain,

when

plasticine (in his play 2iotel)

At the same

not erotic) character.

swelling into great red throb-

the

nurse the child. In comparison.

(if

woman

Van is

"decides"' not to

Itallie's

making them of

an innocuous grotesquerie.

time, the use of the breasts having declined as

their susceptibility to cancer remains stable

creases, as a correlation

tance to cancer

is

(or rather in-

between breast-feeding and

resis-

generally assumed), they indicate death

182

RESPONSES more than

Like out-of-season

life.

two forms of marketing waste But then,

all

fruits,

they exemplify

—display and decay.

productions of the female body are slow and

burdensome: the dropsical heaviness which can precede menstruation, the monstrous weight of pregnancy. pausal disturbances are relieved tranquillizers

—

to drain off excesses of

So much for the

tion.

by combined

Meno-

diuretics

and

both water and emo-

spiritual significance of either.

(Or

does the body, in this way, offer intimations of some im-

And

mortal dismay?)

Tolstoyan, reckless of

its

property.

:

the release of

body

the

One might

ference of

women,

placentae.

An

is

all

these materials

is

freed rather than deprived

take as characteristic the indif-

after childbirth, to the disposition of their

indifference corrected

by those models

of our

economy, the drug manufacturers, who put the placentae to (their

second) profitable use by extracting hormones from

them.

The

Victorian correlation between sexual discharges

and money,* and the consequent recommendations of sexual budgeting, persist in masculine and provident, rather than in

feminine and improvident, contexts.

This variation in attitude attaches particularly to pregnancy.

To

speak of

ment (something to the observer

and impossible tional

is

one of gain or incre-

a simplification natural

(axiom what grows larger must be richer) :

for the participant.

commitment

* This correlation

this condition as

in the oven, etc.)

is

to

No

intellectual or

emo-

pregnancy can erase the physical

discussed

by Steven Marcus

torians.

183

in his

^he Other Vic-

THINKING ABOUT WOMEN sense,

if

not of invasion, at least of inconvenience. Colette

having looked

recalls

acquisition

may be

a rat with a stolen egg'': the

''like

precious but

ward.

It

down

someplace. Delivery

it

is

as

much

Secret Life, a pregnant country

cates

girl is

"My

(In

called ''poisoned.'')

seems to have no moral relevance,

this relief

it

a relief as an achieve-

ment. Literally, one gets rid of a foreign body.

And

awk-

also extremely

is

always seems desirable, at the proper time, to put

no connubial or maternal vice or

virtue.

It

it

indi-

is

only

an intense variety of the individual and amoral pleasure of

any convalescence, mere

existence.

in

which the person newly appreciates

Conventional sexual economics are too

simple, since the pleasure in the child

both profit and

So

riage,

fall

to

seem deciduous, men evergreen.

from women, repeatedly,

they drop even their

girls, in

complexly one of

loss.

women come

Things

is

last

names

cyclically.

which case they sometimes hyphenate

with their husbands'.

The

With mar-

(unless they're English

eclat of this

their

punctuation

the hint of sexual parity). Ordinarily, even couples

names

justifies

named

Beasley want boys, else the-name-will-die-out. Girls lose their virginity too,

bloodied sheet

more markedly than boys

is still

(in Algeria, the

exhibited to the wedding guests)

their reputation, or both.

Next they

—

or

lose babies in miscar-

riage; or, allowed the natural posture of childbirth, they drop

them

at full term. Eventually they lose the capacity itself for

experiencing these former losses. Even the uterus, the pear

standing on of

its

its

stem, tends to

fall

over, as though wearying

inane poise. At the same time, the chins, the breasts

184

RESPONSES and the

The

belly sag.

flesh of the

bones, like a wet wash on the

Of

course,

women

the end of Jinnegans of

humanity

(or

all

line.

are not quite alone in this losing. At

Wake, Anna

men) and

their brash bodies.'' But

plumped

arms hangs from the

''all

more

Livia Plurabelle

for gaining only, even

down

the lazy leaks

often, in societies

tired

is

over

which have

young women suggest

its

twin losing too keenly. Though the young of both sexes feed

upon

fantasies of the

power

these fantasies are diluted for

the effect of their bodies of pregnancy

still

tyrannical caprices,

upon

is

possibility

the chance of being so

girls' irresponsibility,

that everyone

—bound

to

knows,

in fact,

dom-

of their

they are

be caught, and soon,

(Donne: 'Tor thou thyself

their giving birth,

new

may

voiding

a concomitant fear of

art

thine

in

own

perhaps in stubborn reaction that the emphasis

It is

introduce

by

young

with the net

consequence. bait.")

of

by

an innate insecurity. Dreams

constitutes

The charm

fish flirting

girls

upon themselves. The

of domination are disturbed inated.

of their bodies over others,

upon

lives, is blatant.

their ability

and readiness

to

The most remarkable human

then, in turn, be thought of as fulfillment,

the implication of the parents' end be obscured

beginning. Their joy, too, modifies this implication. clearer in that mixture of pleasure

and comic

and

in the child's

distress

It

is

with

which people become grandparents.

The

sexual responsibility of

But nature, society.

in this matter,

It is

as

women

is

inevitable, proper.

seems excessively subsidized by

though the female body, more subdy

cistic in its intents

than the male, was nonetheless

185

fas-

felt to

be

THINKING ABOUT WOMEN an

insufficient obstacle to license or insouciance.

must lend

its

about them.

The

society

help, to island the bodies in vast seas of

An inescapable

against inattention

attention

—nothing

is

is

more

words

repeatedly cautioned lucrative,

I

suppose,

than manuals of popular gynecology. The advertisements,

7emina sang the

for example, of Dr. Eric Trimmer's

invari-

able duet of purposes: (1) the renovation of the libido and (7)

the detection of disease. These are only superficially

incompatible

—

like

frequenting and sentencing prostitutes,

sweating and freezing, part of the diurnal advance and retreat.

One

Can

is

to

be enticed by sample revelations of Jemina-.

a missed period be a

symptom

of a disease completely

unrelated to the reproductive tract?

What symptom may

suggest the need for increasing the fre-

quency of intercourse?*

A blind passion

for the gas-meter

the dog's ear. Underlying ever, the play

is

all

man, no doubt, or

these joys of speculation,

upon two sources

biting

how-

of anxiety: (1) the uni-

form suspicion that some female bodies

are doing tricks

that other female bodies haven't learned, and (2) the uni-

form suspicion that

all

female bodies take nasty advantage

of the least diversion of interest from themselves. ing prospect for

one of

men

is

one of morbid

relentless self-scrutiny.

The

The

titillation, for

read-

women

society's twin deities of

sensation and hygiene exact the tribute of feminine narcissism.

* 7