Spitfire and Sass: Valerie Solanas’s “A Young Girl’s Primer” and the Creative Possibilities of a Survival Self

Abstract

In July 1966, Valerie Solanas had just finished her play, Up Your Ass, and would soon begin to pen her famed indictment of men, masculinity, and Daddy's girls, SCUM Manifesto (self-published in 1967, published with Olympia Press in 1968, self-published again in 1977 as the CORRECT version). While scholars have taken the intellectual contribution of the SCUM Manifesto and its relevance to contemporary (radical) feminism seriously (Deem 1996; Fahs 2008; Harding 2001; Harrison 2013; Haut 2007; Heller 2001; Ronell 2004; Third 2006; Warner and Watts 2014; Winkiel 1999), and a few have analyzed the histories of Up Your Ass (Harding 2001; Rosenberg 2010)-particularly its role in inspiring Solanas to shoot Andy Warhol (Rowe 2013; Warner 2012)-most work on Solanas has grossly ignored the savvy, subversive, and wildly funny essay Solanas wrote for Cavalier magazine, A Young Girl's or How to Attain the Leisure Class (1966). As Solanas's biographer, I have contextualized her life in relation to the times and places she inhabited, just as I have worked to frame her writing in relation to her various (and changing) constructions of herself (Fahs 2014). As her third piece of published writing, the Primer most directly speaks to the conditions of her embodied, lived experiences as a homeless prostitute on the streets of New York and, as such, serves as a commentary not only about Solanas herself but also about more broadly.Deploying rhetorical and affective strategies of nihilism, anger, and callousness, Solanas reveals how can paradoxically require contradictions and tensions like optimism/pessimism, humor/outrage, and grandiosity/self-effacement. This essay explores these contradictions and tensions, revealing the ways that Solanas carefully constructs different selves in her text and in her life that play up these egos and caricatures, all while actually struggling to survive on a daily basis. Barely getting by, starting to unravel with various symptoms of her emerging paranoid schizophrenia, and struggling as a writer who had to carry her typewriter from one crash pad to the next (Fahs 2014), Solanas wrote the Primer as a textual counterpart, an effortful meditation on how she could (and did) survive in a context that degraded and dismissed her.W hile most people may imagine to mean meeting one's basic needs for food, shelter, and safety, Solanas's needs presented a much more complicated set of priorities. As a fringe character on the margins of Greenwich Village bohemia and Warhol's Stupid Stars, and as a brilliant writer and thinker (she scored in the ninety-eighth percentile on her IQ test), Solanas's ambitions extended far beyond mere physicality. Solanas's need to survive differently, embodied in her decision to craft an alternative self who could withstand the stressors of her daily life, shines through in the Primer. W hatever deterioration she experienced in her actual self/body, she could resist these indignities and intrusions by honing her skills as a writer and satirist. Vivid in its startling contradictions with her actual self, brash and bold in its depiction of the shamelessly downtrodden, funky, low-down counterpart who emerges unscathed from life in the Primer, Solanas cultivates a revolutionary self who thrives on the chaos of New York City panhandling and S&M sex.This essay considers this survival self as a viable strategy for (struggling) feminist artists, writers, and thinkers-particularly those whose conditions of daily life require an alter to endure the various taxations, trivializations, violences, and mockeries directed toward women within a patriarchal culture. Building on previous work on constructions of the self (Smith and Sparkes 2008), I first trace the particular textual assertions of Solanas's ego in the Primer, and then analyze how it contradicted Solanas's lived conditions in 1966. Following this, I return to Solanas's philosophy of the gutter, where knowledge, revolution, and self are produced within conditions of trash, waste, and excess, and I make connections to Solanas's politics of the visceral, guttural, and trashy/ trasher. …