Read Online What Do Women Want? by Erica Jong - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Erica Jong
Ads: Link
Barnard was a miraculous place where they actually gave you a degree for losing yourself in a library with volumes of Chaucer and Shakespeare, Byron and Keats, but the whole female side of the literary heritage was something I would have to discover for myself years later, propelled by the steam generated by the women’s movement.
No critic, however distinguished, would dare say such things to a college class today, however much he might privately think them. Sexism is somewhat better hidden now, though far from eradicated. And no college class would sit listening meekly to such rubbish. That is one of the things that have happened in the years since I graduated from college, and I am proud to have been part of the process. Now, when I go to read my work at colleges, I find the students reading and discussing contemporary writing by women as if there had never been a time when a critic could say “Women can’t be writers”—even in jest. I am grateful for that change, but it has not been won without pain. Nor is it necessarily a lasting change. Like the feminists of the twenties, we could easily see the interest in female accomplishments eclipsed once again by reactionary sexism, only to have to be passionately rediscovered yet again, several decades later.
It’s ironic that the critic—the late Anatole Broyard—should have identified “blood and guts” as the quality that women writers supposedly lacked, since clearly women are the sex most in tune with the entrails of life. But we can better understand the critic’s condemnation if we remember that in the nineteenth century, women writers were denigrated for their delicacy, their excessive propriety (which supposedly precluded greatness), while in the past couple of decades they have been condemned by male critics for their impropriety—which also supposedly precludes greatness. Whatever women do or don’t do precludes greatness, in the mind of the chauvinist. We must see this sort of reasoning for what it is: prejudice.
In the beginning of the “second wave” of the women’s movement (late sixties, early seventies), there was so much blood and guts in women’s writing that one wondered if women writers ever did anything but menstruate and rage. Released from the prison of propriety, blessedly released from having to pretend meekness, gratefully in touch with our own cleansing anger, we raged and mocked and menstruated our way through whole volumes of prose and poetry. This was fine for writers who had a saving sense of irony, but in many cases the rage tended to eclipse the writing. Also, as years went by, literary feminism tended to ossify into convention. Rage became almost as compulsory to the generation of writers who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies as niceness and meekness had been to an earlier generation. Feminists proved with a vengeance that they could be as rigidly dogmatic as any other group. They did not hesitate to criticize works of art on political grounds, or to reject poems and novels for dealing with supposedly counterrevolutionary subjects.
This was unfortunate. It was also, I suppose, inevitable. Anger against the patriarchal stifling of talent had been so proscribed for so many centuries that in letting it loose, many women writers completely lost their sense of humor. Nor could anyone maintain that getting in touch with anger was unimportant. It was, in fact, a vitally important phase of women’s writing. Nothing is more destructive of the spirit and ultimately of creativity than false meekness and anger that does not know its own name. Nothing is more freeing for a woman or for a woman writer than giving up the pleasures of masochism and beginning to fight. But we must always remember that fighting is only a first step. As Virginia Woolf points out in A Room of One’s Own, many women’s books have been destroyed by the rage and bitterness at their own centers. Rage opens the doors into the spirit, but the
No critic, however distinguished, would dare say such things to a college class today, however much he might privately think them. Sexism is somewhat better hidden now, though far from eradicated. And no college class would sit listening meekly to such rubbish. That is one of the things that have happened in the years since I graduated from college, and I am proud to have been part of the process. Now, when I go to read my work at colleges, I find the students reading and discussing contemporary writing by women as if there had never been a time when a critic could say “Women can’t be writers”—even in jest. I am grateful for that change, but it has not been won without pain. Nor is it necessarily a lasting change. Like the feminists of the twenties, we could easily see the interest in female accomplishments eclipsed once again by reactionary sexism, only to have to be passionately rediscovered yet again, several decades later.
It’s ironic that the critic—the late Anatole Broyard—should have identified “blood and guts” as the quality that women writers supposedly lacked, since clearly women are the sex most in tune with the entrails of life. But we can better understand the critic’s condemnation if we remember that in the nineteenth century, women writers were denigrated for their delicacy, their excessive propriety (which supposedly precluded greatness), while in the past couple of decades they have been condemned by male critics for their impropriety—which also supposedly precludes greatness. Whatever women do or don’t do precludes greatness, in the mind of the chauvinist. We must see this sort of reasoning for what it is: prejudice.
In the beginning of the “second wave” of the women’s movement (late sixties, early seventies), there was so much blood and guts in women’s writing that one wondered if women writers ever did anything but menstruate and rage. Released from the prison of propriety, blessedly released from having to pretend meekness, gratefully in touch with our own cleansing anger, we raged and mocked and menstruated our way through whole volumes of prose and poetry. This was fine for writers who had a saving sense of irony, but in many cases the rage tended to eclipse the writing. Also, as years went by, literary feminism tended to ossify into convention. Rage became almost as compulsory to the generation of writers who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies as niceness and meekness had been to an earlier generation. Feminists proved with a vengeance that they could be as rigidly dogmatic as any other group. They did not hesitate to criticize works of art on political grounds, or to reject poems and novels for dealing with supposedly counterrevolutionary subjects.
This was unfortunate. It was also, I suppose, inevitable. Anger against the patriarchal stifling of talent had been so proscribed for so many centuries that in letting it loose, many women writers completely lost their sense of humor. Nor could anyone maintain that getting in touch with anger was unimportant. It was, in fact, a vitally important phase of women’s writing. Nothing is more destructive of the spirit and ultimately of creativity than false meekness and anger that does not know its own name. Nothing is more freeing for a woman or for a woman writer than giving up the pleasures of masochism and beginning to fight. But we must always remember that fighting is only a first step. As Virginia Woolf points out in A Room of One’s Own, many women’s books have been destroyed by the rage and bitterness at their own centers. Rage opens the doors into the spirit, but the
Similar Books
