When Your Friend Is Also a Mentor: The Mentrix Identity Nancy K. Miller (bio) My mentor killed herself in 2003. Just about everyone in the realm of feminist academia who had encountered her fabled generosity thought of Carolyn Heilbrun as a mentor, sometimes their mentor. Everyone, that is, except for Carolyn—and me. Only after she died did I begin to refer to Carolyn as my mentor. Until she died, she was to my mind, a great friend, an older friend, a friend. Although we met at Columbia University where rank and position might have suggested a mentoring relationship between us, she too always described me as a friend, a younger woman often in need of rescue, but never, as would be expected in a university setting, a disciple. Disciple, rather, was a word Carolyn invoked in her vision of the celebrated literary critic and brilliant teacher, Lionel Trilling. Carolyn longed to be recognized by Trilling, the man who might have played the role of mentor when she was first a graduate student and then a colleague of his in the English department at Columbia. Might have but did not. Carolyn evoked that failure in her 1979 Reinventing Womanhood, a book she wrote on turning fifty, as she reflected on the shape her own life and those of other women of her generation had taken. She sought to understand the pattern of their paths to achievement and, in particular, the role played by male mentors in their success. As she traces the Greek origin of the word “mentor” (Mentor, an elderly companion of Odysseus, became the teacher of young Telemachus), she reinterprets the role from being solely a matter of education and pedagogy, “a mere teacher,” by adding an affective dimension: “a guide or exemplar in dealing with the central concerns of one’s life.”1 That is what Carolyn was to me: the person who helped me deal with the central concerns of my life, not solely in school. This was not a role Trilling was remotely interested in playing, at least not with her. He preferred their male colleagues. Who would Carolyn have had to be in order to get Trilling’s attention? She reflects in Reinventing Womanhood, Most women for whom male teachers become mentors turn to them with a devotion either daughterly or loverlike. I was neither attractive nor submissive enough to have made either role possible, and Trilling had no sense of my discipleship. The word disciple was his, and the role was filled by several men, [End Page 435] some of whom became my colleagues and, in interpretations of the process of the moral life, my adversaries. (p. 126) Either or, neither nor—doubly decisive binaries. Although it is clear that Trilling’s failure to recognize the intellectual value of his talented younger colleague wounded her, it is also the case that Carolyn did not in fact imagine a “close relationship of mentor,” invariably male, “and woman follower” as a plausible configuration in academia (p. 51). In 1979, the model of female mentor and “woman follower” did not appear in her sketch of institutional relations, not even as a horizon of possibility within the male-dominated ether of the university. I have often wondered whether Trilling’s snub made Carolyn reluctant to embrace the label of mentor later in her career when she was a feminist icon, despite her legendary support of young scholars, especially women. Trilling, she writes, seemed not even to know she existed: “During all the years we were colleagues he never once talked to me, except in the most routine way of politeness. I used to fantasize that we would one day engage in dialogue—this ponderous phrase exactly explains what I aspired to” (p. 127). The power of dialogue is at the heart of Heilbrun’s argument in Writing a Woman’s Life (1988) about female friendship, what she calls the “untold story” of women’s lives, “sustaining but secret.”2 Recalling the extraordinary emotional intimacy between British writers Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby, she notes: “Only death could halt the friendship and its constant and continuous dialogue” (p. 99). But can this kind of dialogue unfold within the...
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Jun 17, 2019
A.S Jacobson + 2
Open Access