Real Woman Research Articles

Afterword: Sof Davar Hakol Nishma?

Afterword:Sof Davar Hakol Nishma?ʿ Marc Brettler Within the context of this volume, it is certainly ironic that the typical phrase for an afterword, , comes from Kohelet (12:13), one of the most misogynistic of all biblical texts. The preacher had earlier proclaimed (7:26) , "I find even more bitter than death the woman-she is composed of traps, nets are her heart, and fetters are her hands. The one who is found to be good by God might flee from her, but the sinner is captured by her." The stereotyping could not be worse in terms of the intensive entrapment imagery representing the woman, who here is viewed as everywoman-. Just as bad, or even worse, she has no autonomy; she is merely a vehicle for divine punishment placed on the earth. No wonder that two verses later, when this preacher is searching for a good person, we are told that not a single woman qualified (v. 28). The treatment of Kohelet 7:26 in biblical scholarship sheds broader light on the stages of feminist study and on the essays included in this volume, which concern reading Jewish literary texts through the lens of gender. The standard modern American Bible commentary series is the Anchor Bible, and one of the earliest Anchor Bible commentaries published was on Proverbs and Kohelet, in 1965.1 It does not even bother to comment on this verse. Kohelet is a guy's book, where the male protagonist lives in a rich man's club. The author of this Anchor Bible, like so many of his contemporaries, has bought into this world, where women [End Page 219] are invisible, and these verses-which are among the most disturbing in Jewish literature-do not even rate a footnote. Several years ago, the Anchor Bible volume of Ecclesiastes was redone,2 and we entered a different stage of feminist awareness in the (still) predominantly male world of biblical scholarship; we have moved from absence and silence to apologetics. Women are no longer absent, and these verses are no longer ignored. But to this author, "the woman" of Kohelet 7:26 was not a real, flesh-and-blood woman, but the metaphorical "dame folly." Kohelet was no misogynist-he was condemning not real women, but an abstract feminine noun, , "folly." The real woman has again vanished, though she was briefly present. She now exists in metaphor only. But not all read this section metaphorically or, should I say, apologetically. A recent article tells it as it is, viewing the woman as real, as representing the author's view of all women, who serve as "divine agents."3 This author has moved out of the world of deep religious commitment, which had typified much of religious and biblical studies, so for him, this woman is no angel: "In a sense, Qoheleth's worldview is one in which Eve has ganged up with God against Adam."4 This article represents the current state of the study of women in biblical studies: they are no longer invisible or metaphorical; they are discussed in mainstream journals that are not "malestream" journals;5 and apologetics, explaining away the problematic depictions of women in the Bible, is no longer the rule.6 There are other indications as well that biblical women have made it. Enough has been published for a huge anthology, Women in the Hebrew Bible, of over 500 pages, with a tightly packed, ten-page selected bibliography, to be published by a major publisher.7 Even general surveys on biblical literature remember that women, who were approximately one half of the population, deserve to be studied.8 The first piece for this volume of Prooftexts, a review essay, reflects the fact that the field of gender in the Bible is a relatively mature one, having recently celebrated its twenty-fifth birthday.9 It is old enough for its development to have been surveyed by a journalist in a book,10 men now regularly contribute to the field,11 and there have even been some joint ventures by male and female scholars.12 One of the most significant indicators of the field's maturity is its ability to produce the Feminist Companion...

Epistolary Fictions: Authorial identity inHeroides15

Heroides15, Sappho's letter to Phaon, is an enigma in its present context for many different reasons. What is Sappho doing, heterosexualised, at the end of a string of elegiac epistles written by women plucked straight from myth and each given their fifteen minutes of fame? Despite the mythology that grew up around her, of which Phaon was a part, Sappho was a real woman and a real writer,theGreek love poetpar excellence; not only that, she was and is a figure who, in her poetic persona at least, is famous for communicating her love for women, not for the local ferryman. This Sappho looks verywritten, yet as the only heroine–writer, and as the love-poet often cited as Ovid's influential predecessor, she can represent the culmination and reification of theHeroides'illusion of female authorship.In doing so, Sappho functions asthecrucial figure in a collection of poems in which the Ovidian author writes in disguise; in what becomes finally a life or death situation, her poem radically questions the definition and definability of authorship, gender and identity. We are constantly asked, and are prompted to ask: Just how authentic, or how written is Sappho in this self-conscious erotic alignment of His ‘n’ Hers, Roman and Greek love poets? What is it for an Ovidian author conspicuously to write, through and over, the poetess whose work he recommends should be read alongside his own, and whose influence on his own writing and love-affairs he hints at on several occasions?

Modeling, Mothering, and the Postpartum Belly in Zola's L'Œuvre

OF THE TITLES THAT ZOLA IMAGINED for his novel of the artist's life, L'ÂŒuvre (1886), several recall the birthing process, including Faire un Enfant, ProcrA©er, Engrosser la Nature, Enfantement, Accouchement, Parturition, Conception, Enfanter and Les Couches saignantes (IV, 1338).2 Many readings of L'ÂŒuvre have focused on Claude Lantier's failed attempt at sustaining a new movement in art. Although some of these readings cite the painter's indictment of the model's body as a factor in this failure, my own reading positions that failure of the female body at center stage.31 will propose that L'ÂŒuvre inscribes the deformations of gestation onto the female belly and then presents the ventre, poses it, before the artist (and reader) as unrepresentable, even as the very sign of unrepresentability. Indeed, one way that Zola works through the problem of the nude is to ask the question Can the postpartum model pose?—this in a novel that repeatedly, even compulsively, stages the pre- and post-partum belly as problem for the artist and metaphor of artistic production. This essay reads naturalism's posers in terms of the relationship between modeling and motherhood and, to a lesser extent, modeling and aging, for both motherhood and aging mark the body of the model in such a way that her posing potential becomes questionable. After the model's youth in Balzac's Le Chef-d'Âœuvre inconnu (1832), she reaches motherhood and middle age in L'ÂŒuvre and the Goncourts' Manette Salomon (1867); her death is then staged in Guy de Maupassant's Fort comme la mort (1889). The evolution of realist literature in France follows this life span of the model (i.e., of her body) from youth to maternity, to decline and death.4 As the terms artist, woman, mother and model took on new meaning in the nineteenth century, the pregnant and postpartum model emerged as the worrisome site of conflicts posed by the intersection of the body, art and gender. It is useful, therefore, to first inquire of these terms. Then, after a brief reading of Octave Mirbeau's tale of the aged model, L'OctogA©naire, and references to Zola's Le Ventre de Paris (1873) and the Goncourts' Manette Salomon, the strategies centering on the postpartum belly in L'ÂŒuvre can be untangled. I will argue that in L'ÂŒuvre the female ventre inhibits the successful passage from the problem of the model (the real woman) to the problem of the nude

“She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not:” The Short Happy Symbiotic Marriage of Margot and Francis Macomber

does a woman want? is a question Freud asked, but never was able answer and literary critics have often focused their critiques of Short Happy Life of Francis on the very same question with similar results. Their main strategy has most often been unravel the Macomber conundrum by applying an solution. Margot either fired her rifle saver her husband's life from the charging buffalo or she took advantage of the opportunity become a respectable widow and murdered him. And, quite predictably, much criticism has often laid the blame for the bloody ending of the story squarely on the shoulders of Margot Macomber.' Thus, H. H. Bell, Jr., for example, perpetuates the anti-woman position of the tale by viewing Margot as something [not someone!] akin a lioness (78). Bell notes that the narrator describes Margot as hard, cruel, and predatory. Therefore, Wilson's treatment of Margot at the story's conclusion is what one would expect from a professional hunter dealing with a dangerous, wild beast, i.e., Margot Macomber. Despite or because of the animal imagery, Bell brands Margot a murderer, and she is, in turn, destroyed by Wilson who kills her by killing her spirit and making her beg for his help in avoiding a scandal. Nina Baym finds a more appealing use of the lion metaphor in a manner diametrically opposed Bell. Actually I Felt Sorry for the Lion, is surely one of the finest attempts portray Margot as neither American nor murderer. Yet by analyzing the section of the text with lion as focalizer, and creating a bond between the beast and Margot, Baym argues, in effect, that Margot is innocent because she herself is as much a victim of macho cruelty as is the lion. Both have been hunted down by the great white hunters: one, Francis, her husband, is a master gamester of the western capitalist world, while the other, Wilson, sees himself and perhaps is master of the heart of darkness. In the last analysis, Baym claims, Margot did not shoot kill but rather to save her husband (113). But perhaps Baym's most important contribution, one which I would like fortify in a both/and rather than either/or manner, is that Hemingway need not be branded a misogynist if Margot emerges from the story without having murdered her husband. Baym suggests convincingly that the standard view of work, in its treatment of women, has much do with the way critics have read this story: Hemingway's fiction casts all but the most passive, submissive, and silent women as corrupting or destructive. Only when women accept their 'place' as a lower order of being than men, rightly assigned the functions of waiting on them when they are around and waiting for them when they are elsewhere, do they win authorial approval (112). And whatever else might be said about Margot, we know that she is as far removed from Saint Paul's edict be silent and submissive as is Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises. Thus both characters become the prototype for American bitch. What makes a reinterpretation of this story especially difficult, however, is the author himself and the way he is portrayed by his biographer, Carlos Baker. Simply put, Baker and Hemingway deserve a lot of the credit for the criticism that has perpetuated Margot's image as bitch. Baker claims Margot's character was based on a real woman they both knew: Macomber's wife, Margot, [in addition Francis] was also invented from a living prototype. Handsome, well-kept, a society beauty with a nearly perfect oval face and a wealth of dark hair, she embodied all the internal qualities that Ernest detested among the wives of his wealthier friends (Baker 344). And Hemingway adds this description in his own words: 'I invented her complete with handles,' said he, 'from the worst bitch I knew [then] and when I first knew her she'd been lovely. Not my dish, not my pigeon, not my cup of tea, but lovely for what she was, and I was her all of the above, which is whatever you make of it' (344). …

Freudian Slips: Woman, Writing, the Foreign Tongue, and: Skirting the Issue: Essays in Literary Theory (review)

Reviewed by: Freudian Slips: Woman, Writing, the Foreign Tongue, and: Skirting the Issue: Essays in Literary Theory Pascale Bécel Mary Gossy. Freudian Slips: Woman, Writing, the Foreign Tongue. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995. 112 pp. Mary Lydon. Skirting the Issue: Essays in Literary Theory. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1995. xiii + 294 pp. Mary Gossy’s Freudian Slips: Woman, Writing, the Foreign Tongue is an informative, provocative, and enjoyable reading of one of Freud’s most popular studies, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. In his text, Freud collected some two hundred anecdotes involving verbal slips in order to illustrate the presence of the unconscious in conscious discourse. Through close readings, Gossy shows that the majority of the anecdotes are written over female bodies, feminized texts, or foreign words. She argues that the men (including Freud) whose language slips [End Page 1060] in the anecdotes are actually repressing their experience of the body of a real woman, and that “the repression . . . returns to disrupt the masculine hegemony of their dialogues.” Gossy’s first chapter catches Freud’s language slipping as he misquotes Goethe’s Faust in his epigraph for The Psychopathology, and provides the argument for a politicized interpretation of the slip: its feminization and its threat to authority and intentionality. Freud’s borrowed epigraph inaugurates a book on the unwelcome manifestation of the repressed in language, and does so, as Gossy pointedly demonstrates, while performing a slip in gender, a slip which “is concretely engendered in the text as feminine.” Chapter 2 discusses an anecdote on another misquotation that a Jewish friend of Freud’s makes as the two men are travelling abroad. Meant to express his rage at the anti-Semitism of the times, the misquotation leads to understanding the friend’s repression of the idea that a foreign woman he met during his journey might be expecting his child. Gossy’s analysis again reveals the political implications of the slip: how it points to the friend’s cooptation with structures of domination that protect his male privileges while contradicting his conscious intent—namely, his rage at anti-Semitism. Chapters 3 and 4 prefigure a feminist psychoanalysis of Freudian psychoanalysis and highlight how a theory of the unconscious that is based on a fictionalized idea of femininity cannot contain and control women’s bodies, specifically the women’s pregnant and raped bodies favored in the anecdotes. In chapter 3, Gossy playfully asks if it is “possible that making a Freudian slip makes a man feel pregnant with unwelcome meanings.” She answers her question through a reinterpretation of three anecdotes on screen memories involving men who are narrating childhood memories about their mothers’ pregnant bodies and about learning the alphabet. In these examples, Gossy argues that the excessiveness of the female body upsets “the order of the alphabet of castration,” disrupts the grammar of patriarchy, and becomes a defining term of both femininity and masculinity. Chapter 4 further illustrates how the Freudian theory of the unconscious slips when Freud constructs a “hair-raising” analogy between the operation of the unconscious in the case of suicide and its operation in the case of rape. The last and fifth chapter of Freudian Slips is particularly insightful as it takes the reader back to the conditions of production of Freud’s [End Page 1061] The Psychopathology. According to Gossy, the proliferation of anecdotes with each new edition of the book emerges as compensation for what the Dora story is unable to tell. “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” which records the famous Dora case and Freud’s failure at theorizing the meaning of her body, was written during the composition of The Psychopathology. Gossy convincingly infers that the meaning of Dora’s body, which Freud’s interpretations cannot contain, “returns as repressed content in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which is full of examples of how the bodies of women make the discourse of man slip.” But beyond writing about Freud’s narrative of the slip, Gossy judiciously underlines the productivity of a parapractic discourse in terms of a political practice—let us say, a feminist practice—and points to a new (slippery) pedagogy that undermines absolute...

L'Etreinte des mots: Flamenca, entre poésie et roman (review)

REVIEW Jean-Charles Huchet, L'Etreinte des mots: Flamenca, entre poésie et roman. Caen: Paradigme, 1993. Pp. 232. While the three works ofJean-Charles Huchet (L'Etreinte des mots, Le roman occitan medieval and Littérature médiévale et psychanalyse: Pour une clinique littéraire) are linked by Huchet's methodological apparatus, L 'Etreinte des mots is a successful illustration ofhis methods, producing a sophisticated reading of the Occitan romance Flamenca. The text ofFlamenca is shown to initiate a dialogue with othergenres to define itselfand to attempt to produce a renewal ofOccitan literature through the interrogation ofthe principles oítrobar and amor, and their integration into the novas. The text also attempts to mediate and resolve the tension between several binary concepts, such as troubadour lyric and religious dialogue, lyric poetry and romance, Occitan and French literature. In the first chapter, Huchet summarizesFlamenca and comments on the poor reception of the work at the time of its writing. He also gives a briefdescription of his "clinique littéraire," but refers the reader to his Littérature médiévale et psychanalyse for a more detailed explanation. Through this method, his reading of Flamenca attempts to clarify "Ie rapport de lasexualité et de l'écriture, des genres littéraires, del'écriture et de la réécriture" (25) Huchet beginsthe second chapterwith the problem ofgenre, passing through the medieval references to novas and arriving at his own definition: "le signe du dialogue entretenu par le texte narratif avec la lyrique" (31), which opens a space of renewal for both genres through their dialogue. The primary focus ofthe chapter is the dialogue between poetry and narrative, each serving as the Other through which identity is questioned. The lyric in Flamenca is presented in a fictionalized form and serves as a mise-en-abîme ofa key moment ofthe narrative. As lyric 48 REVIEW is converted into narrative, religious discourse is converted into love discourse, prefiguring events in the text and taking on a profane meaning. Huchet also discusses the textual play on the concept of fin amor "qui fai soen de dos core us," which he finds in the constant reduction of two to one in the text. In the third chapter, Huchet addresses the question oí Flamenca's dialoguewithfin'amorand thetext's attempt to synthesizeand renewthe troubadour discourse within the narrative form. The decline offin amor and troubadour poetry is attributed to the reinforcement ofalterity, with the rise of the cult of the Virgin Mary and the replacement of the Dame with a truly unattainable lady. Rather than emphasizing the impossibility of union, Flamenca reintroduces a real woman and thefach intofin' amor. At the same time, the narrative valorizes the word and its meaning(s), stressing the difference between gilosia, in which the husband loses sens (meaning) and misreads signs, and amor, which is "une longue initiation à la polysémie des signes" (108). Language assures the success of the union which no longer denies (hefach, and gilosia becomes the excess which words cannot express. The role of trobar in this dialogue is not the traditional jouissance of unfulfilled desire and sexual impasse, but the construction ofa union in language before its inscription in reality through ihefach. In a series of short analyses of various episodes, Huchet explores in detail the principle of "dos cors us." In examining the salutz sent to Flamenca by Guilhem, Huchet lingers on its illumination and the trick offolding it to make the lovers depicted there seem to embrace. He relates its folding, unfoldingand refoldingto the structure ofthe text itself, which allows the interplay of poetry and romance throughout the narrative. The interplay ofreligion and love discourse is the topic ofthe fourth chapter, divided into discussions on religious versus poetic discourse, liturgical versus romance time and intervals between events. Romance discourse puts religious and other discourses under tension in order to exceed them and to draw its own identity from them while reinforcing the 49 REVIEW specificity of each. The liturgical calendar is discussed as a part of the dialogue with religious discourse, stressing the Otherness of religion in relation iofin' amor. Huchet suggestsyet anotherdialogue in Chapter5, that ofOccitania with France. The novas seems to follow...

Not "As She Fulfills His Dreams" but "As She Is": The Feminist Voice of Christina Rossetti

Not "As She Fulfills His Dreams" but "As She Is": The Feminist Voice of Christina Rossetti Terry L. Spaise University of California, Riverside The "canonization" of Christina Rossetti as a woman and poet gained considerable momentum after her death due primarily to the number of platitudinous obituaries written about her and to William Michael Rossetti's idealized (and vastly edited) construct of his sister 's life and his attempts to censor and/or alter the mood and content of her previously unpublished poetry. Some of these works he suppressed altogether, possibly because their message was too personal or contradictory to the picture he had painted of his sister, and, in many cases, he "felt free to alter words in some of the poems ... to tone down the sensuality which is one of the strongest characteristics of her poetry, but which seemed inappropriate to her brother" (Jones 228). As a result of all of these posthumous actions, Rossetti's artistic successes and talents were stressed far less than the example she supposedly set of the perfect Victorian woman who posed no threat to the masculine portion of her society in either a personal or professional capacity. Her verses were lauded as examples of her life of self-sacrifice, simplicity, personal suffering, and lack of egoism and were professed to indicate her wholehearted support of the patriarchal social system in which she lived. At the time of her death, very little was mentioned of her work as a lay helper at Highgate, a sanctuary for fallen women, her active support of antivivisection , her interest in projects for women's education, and her acquaintance with the organizers of a Factory Girls' Club (Leighton 123). Even less was revealed about her volatile temper, failed love affairs, and her devotion to her art. Today, much of the research on Rossetti has focused on who the real Christina Rossetti was, how she really viewed the world in which she lived, and how those views and feelings manifested themselves in her verses. Scholars have attempted to answer such questions as how her religious canon exemplifies and explains her philosophy about life and God, what her succession of passive and dying women reveals about her thoughts of male/female relationships , and what her poetry tells us about her views of woman's place in this world and the next. Because Rossetti herself was an intensely private person who resisted revealing any personal information about herself (indeed, as Kathleen Jones states, she destroyed 53 54Rocky Mountain Review almost all personal material before her death), and because of William Michael's attempts to hide the real woman behind an idealized one, the answers to the above questions may be difficult to discover . Where, then, do we look for insights to Rossetti's social, political, and moral sentiments and attitudes? Where else but her poetry, which contains a magnificent breadth of style, theme, and craftsmanship. In the limited correspondence available to us, it is obvious that Rossetti was a serious artist who worked hard to perfect her skills as a poet. It is also clear that, at least early in her writing career, she needed the security of Dante Gabriel's approval of her verses and valued his observations and suggestions for change. After all, she was continually reminded by both her family and the general public of her brother's genius, and, true to the sentiments ofher age, she did not presume to place her own verses on a par with his. However, as she grew more secure with her art and talent, and as her work achieved a marked degree of public acceptance and praise, she was more reluctant to follow the critical advice of her brothers. She became very cognizant of her own artistic vision and voice, and on more than one occasion refused to follow Dante Gabriel's suggestions for revising both the theme and content of her work, which he felt was too radically challenging to contemporary values.1 It is this "radical" aspect of her verse which I want to explore in this article. To call Christina Rossetti a feminist may be a bit misleading and inaccurate, particularly considering her belief, based primarily on religious...

"You Just Can't Keep a Good Woman Down": Alice Walker Sings the Blues

Oh - Just can't keep real good woman down Oh - Just can't keep real good woman down If you throw me down here Papa, I rise up in some other town (Miller) Alice Walker has been profoundly influenced and inspired both by African American music and musicians and by writers whose work is grounded in music and in expressive folk traditions of African Americans. Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and blues music of blues women like Bessie Smith rank among Walker's most significant musical/literary influences.(1) In her words, Music is art I most envy... musicians [are] at one with their cultures and their historical subconscious. I am trying to arrive at that place where Black music already is; to arrive at that unself-conscious sense of collective oneness; that naturalness, that (even when anguished) grace. (In Search 259, 264) Zora Neale Hurston, Billie Holiday, and Bessie Smith form sort of unholy trinity. Zora belongs in tradition of black women singers, rather than among the literati .... Like Billie and Bessie she followed her own road, believed in her own gods, pursued her own dreams, and refused to separate herself from common people. (In Search 91) These influences are most clearly seen in works like short story Nineteen Fifty-five, from her 1981 collection You Can't Keep A Good Woman Down, and in her novel The Color Purple. In Nineteen Fifty-five and The Color Purple, Walker talks back to blues musicians and writers, signifying extensively on Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God as well as on specific musical pieces of several singer/composers. In signifying, following Henry Louis Gates's usage, Walker with difference (xxii-xxiii, xxvii) material, revising and personalizing it, giving, in words of Sherley Anne Williams, a statement about situation new response (37). In Nineteen Fifty-five Walker begins to explore significance of female blues singer and blues she sings - for creative artists like herself, for others in community, and for society as whole. This exploration is continued in The Color Purple, where Walker probes in more detail role of blues woman as model and catalyst for change in her community. In Nineteen Fifty-five and The Color Purple, Walker employs character, language, structure, and perspective of blues to celebrate lives and works of blues women, to articulate complexity of their struggles, and to expose and confront oppressive forces facing Black women in America. In her portraits of blues women, Walker shows us vitality, resiliency, creativity, and spirituality of African American women, illuminating core aesthetic concepts which have been crucial to their survival in society that has largely used and abused them for its own purposes. Indeed, in Walker's works, African American women performers and their performances symbolize vitality and aliveness, and will and spirit not only to endure but potentially to flourish. The blues woman, whose song is true to her own experience and rooted in values and beliefs of community, empowers those who love her and effects change in those around her. Her outer struggles and inner conflicts reflect issues of oppression in society as they have been internalized within community. In addition to blues characters, Walker employs blues forms, themes, images, and linguistic techniques. Her forms - letters and diary entries - are like blues stanzas in their rich compactness and self-containedness; like blues pieces, her works take shape from repetition and variation of these core units. Walker's focus on complexities and many-sidedness of love and relationship repeats subject of many blues. As in Their Eyes and blues, paradox and contradiction are explored in context of relationships, projected via responses to traditional situations of these relationships and articulated using contrast and oppositional structures. …

Defending the Lenses of Gender

Three cheers for Stephanie Shields, whose provocative analysis of mainstream psychology's blindsight perfectly captures what I find so frustrating about essays of my two most mainstream reviewers in this issue, Kay Deaux and Alice Eagly. The problem, in other words, is not so much what they say; it is what they fail to see. The first thing Deaux and Eagly fail to see has little to do with or feminism but much to do with how social, personality, and developmental psychology might begin to re-embed individual into his or her culture. Shields may imply too much explicitness when she writes that The Lenses of Gender sets what is needed for major reworking of how psychology construes person's development as culturally situated, because setting out is done more by example than by metatheoretical analysis and critique of psychology as discipline. But there is clear model here of how one might theorize the link between psychological and macrosocial (Shields), and it is link forged by concept of cultural lens.1 There are lot of things I like about using concept of cultural lens as tool of analysis. It can directlyand meaningfully-be applied both to psyche of individual and to discourses and social institutions of culture. It takes for granted that there is way of construing reality embedded in culture's discourses and social institutions and, furthermore, that developing child somehow picks up this way of construing reality by virtue of being enmeshed in cultural context. It highlights that, rather than being derived from nature, not only person's perception of social reality but social reality itself is socially constructed. And last, it opens door to an explicitly feminist psychology by providing language of culture and psyche that can readily be integrated with language of power and inequality. The only additional leap required is to conceptualize culture's discourses and institutions as not just socially constructed but socially constructed by those in power-which, in feminist analysis of U.S. culture, means rich, White, heterosexual men. This brings me to second thing that Deaux and Eagly fail to see, which is that The Lenses of Gender constitutes theoretical attempt to explain institutional, ideological, and psychological mechanisms that together keep economic and political power of society primarily in hands of men. It is thus not theory of some neutral-sounding construct like or sexual difference or even sexual difference in situational context. It is theory of how male power reproduces itself in society through an insidious-and relatively invisible-interaction of systemic and psychological. Consistent with this historically and culturally situated project, well more than half of The Lenses of Gender consists of feminist analysis of cultural context in which individual is situated from birth to death-a cultural context in which discourses and social institutions are said to be permeated with androcentrism, polarization, and biological essentialism. And rest of book presents model in which individual enmeshed in that context internalizes these lenses, struggles to construct an identity consistent with their definition of real woman or man, and thereby unwittingly participates in reproduction of male power. Although model surely makes too sharp distinction between this gender conformist and theoretical counterpart, gender subversive, book also briefly theorizes how those who seriously violate culture's definitions of maleness and femaleness have managed-in different ways at different historical moments-to construct viable identity in society that insistently denies them any legitimacy. The Lenses of Gender is surely inadequate. What theory isn't? And there are surely serious questions and criticisms that could be raised about omissions, oversimplifications, blind spots, misplaced emphases, and all rest. But not only do my mainstream critics not 1In describing this cultural-psychology aspect of my book, Shields writes that I make a sustained effort to examine notion of culture from psychological perspective. I never before thought of my book as defining culture psychologically, but it is language I find very congenial.

Malice: The New American Hero

Malice: The New American Hero M. Daphne Kutzer Malice, Directed by Harold Becker. Screenplay by Aaron Sorking and Scott Frank. Castlerock, 1993. The latest contender in the Woman as Evil Bitch Film Sweepstakes is Harold Becker’s Malice. The film is less interesting for its portrayal of the Bitch, Tracy (Nicole Kidman), than for its view of what makes a Real American Man. The character of Tracy—a beautiful fraud who pretends to love children and her husband while plotting with handsome Dr. Jed Hill (Alec Baldwin) to make herself sterile and thereby collect insurance money—doesn’t add much to the string of recent screen villainesses in Fatal Attraction, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, Basic Instinct, and others. All share the central quality of denying their feminine and motherly sides and/or exploiting their sexuality to ensnare hapless men. However, the development of the character of Tracy’s husband Andy (Bill Pullman), along with the ultimate fate of handsome Jed Hill, shows us that something both old and new is happening to the men in these films. Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas) in Fatal Attraction (1988) is guilty of bringing evil into his domestic Eden, and in the end his wounded wife must kill the bitch. The only man aware of the bitch’s true nature in The Hand That Rocks The Cradle (1993) is the mental handicapped black handyman, Solomon (Ernie Hudson): the scientist husband is blind to her true nature even once he knows her true identity. In both these films the male “heroes” are weak and ineffectual, if not emasculated. Nick Curran (Michael Douglas again) in Basic Instinct (1992) is made of sterner stuff, but despite his nickname of “Shooter,” the film hints that he, too, will be a victim in the end. Malice provides a step—forward?—in the development of the American film hero, at least in the genre of thrillers. The male leads of the film are Andy and Jed. Andy’s shortened name suggests his initial weakness, while Jed’s name suggests his hunkiness—it’s the sort of name you find attached to cleft-chinned romantic soap opera heroes. The names match the physical attributes of each character. Bill Pullman’s Andy is slightly built, has a non-descript face, and is always dressed in a corduroy or tweed jacket, button-down Oxford cloth shirt, and knitted tie—suitable if stereotypical garb for an Associate Dean of Students. Jed is the former high school running back, solid and athletic (we see him jogging energetically, for instance, while Andy drinks coffee), and the film allows him to doff his shirt frequently, so that the viewer may admire Alec Baldwin’s broad and hairy chest. The way each man handles his women is also instructive. Andy has married, according to the local campus newspaper, his “favorite student.” We aren’t meant to raise our post-Anita Hill eyebrows at this. The detail is provided so that we may understand that Andy is not man enough for a Real Woman: he needs a “student wife,” someone young enough to be malleable in his inexperienced hands. Of course, Tracy turns out to be anything but malleable. The film foreshadows this by way of a sex scene between Andy and Tracy. The happy couple are eating take-out Chinese in bed (perhaps a reference to the scene in Woody Allen’s Manhattan, which also concerns the power balance between an older man and a younger woman). Andy can’t handle the chopsticks, and says to his wife, “Would you think any the less of me if I used a fork?” Tracy coyly begins to feed him from her chopsticks, and before we know it she is straddling him and they are having sex. It is Tracy who is on top, both literally and figuratively. She is less prudish and more aggressive than her husband; she doesn’t mind the curtainless windows and he does. Andy remains passive throughout, and all we see of his naked body is a scrawny lower leg. You can tell he doesn’t jog. Jed, on the other hand, is a Real Man. When we see him having sex, Jed is energetically...

The Two Authenticities of The Photographic Media

dramatic episode in a recent court trial in Los Angeles has made us explicitly aware of the juridical, ethical, and aesthetic aspects of authenticity in the use of the photographic media. videotape taken of the action of four white police officers who had stopped and manhandled a black motorist was used as evidence to show whether the police had used unacceptable violence or whether behavior was appropriate to what duty required. During the trial the truthfulness of the tape was challenged because it had been modified by such means as slow motion and stop action. This had been done to inform the jury most clearly of the decisive facts. The same modifications, however, were challenged because they changed decisive qualities of the crucial event. motion minimizes the violence. In the real world, a faster blow is a harder blow; a slower blow is softer. ... Slow motion also makes the beating seem less real and more fantastic.' Stop motion also broke the dynamic impact of the action, and the removal of the soundtrack diminished the presence of the event even further. Quite apart from the political drama of the trial, the episode could not but remind us of an ambiguity that has plagued the aesthetic and epistemological theory of the figurative arts. To the extent that the arts were representational, they aspired to a faithful rendering of the facts of reality; but in order to make images comprehensible to the human mind they had to select and shape and organize the material taken from reality-they had to find and impose form. By doing so, however, they had to partially reshape the facts of nature perceived by the eyes. Hence aesthetic theory had to put up with a compromise. Another way of putting the problem is to say that the figurative arts are always dealing with two kinds of authenticity. They are authentic to the extent that they do justice to the facts of reality, and they are authentic in quite another sense by expressing the qualities of human experience by any means suitable to that purpose. The latter, the aesthetic function of representations, is greatly helped by the former, which offers recognizable images of creatures and objects. But the latter hampers rather than supplements the former: the fancies and liberties of the human imagination are anything but authentic when taken as documents of physical reality. This dilemma was sharpened by the advent of photography. The mechanically obtained pictures revealed more clearly than the handmade images of artists ever could that when the imitation of nature was taken literally it could not fully meet the requirements of art in its usual sense. In his Salon de 1859, Charles Baudelaire had published a section on Le Public Moderne et la Photographie, where he praised the ability of the new medium to serve the sciences and the arts, but only as their very humble servant without any further pretenses, just as the printing press and shorthand have neither created literature nor added to it.2 But he warned against the popular craze for photography as the ideal fulfillment of what painting had always aspired to. A vengeful God has answered the prayers of this multitude; and Daguerre was his Messiah. The competition between the two aspirations of authenticity has characterized Western figurative art ever since antiquity. On the one hand, great painters were praised for imitating nature so perfectly as to deceive humans and animals, and the sculptor Pygmalion's ivory statue was suitable to be transformed into a real woman.

Gerard Manley Hopkins—A Stranger Still?

Biography is enjoying one of its periodic resurgences in popularity. Literary biography seems to be particularly in vogue. But the purpose of telling the story of some great author’s life is no longer simply historical or even hagiographical. In this post-structuralist age, the intention of such a pursuit as biography has to be expository —to get behind the public face and reveal the real man or woman; to deconstruct the myth and reconstruct the person and their ‘emotional, intellectual and psychological makeup’.’ It is precisely this which Professor Martin tries to do in his most recent biography ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life’.Hopkins, the enigmatic priest-poet of the nineteenth century, seems in one way a particularly suitable candidate for such a treatment. On the surface there seems to exist such a very great divergence between his public persona, a Jesuit priest dedicated to the discipline of the Ignatian ‘Spiritual Exercises’, and the private man, a poet of great imagination and originality. Whether this dichotomy is seen as responsible for the psychological imbalances which intermittently afflicted him, or as the dynamic which is at the centre of his creativity hardly matters. On the other hand, the facts of Hopkins’ life, both public and to a large extent private, are very well established. His poems were published in their first collected edition in 1918; the personal journals were published in 1937 and the letters between 1935 and 1938. Professor Martin did, it seems, have access to the originals of the journals and to Jesuit sources especially with relation to the final period of Hopkins life in Dublin.

All-American Girl: The Ideal of Real Womanhood in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America.

Our image of nineteenth-century American women is generally divided into two broad classifications: victims and revolutionaries. This divide has served the purposes of modern feminists well, allowing them to claim feminism as the only viable role model for women of the nineteenth century.In All-American Girl, however, Frances B. Cogan identifies amid these extremes a third ideal of femininity: the Woman. Cogan's Real Woman exists in advice books and manuals, as well as in magazine short stories whose characters did not dedicate their lives to passivity or demand the vote. Appearing in the popular reading of middle-class America from 1842 to 1880, these women embodied qualities that neither the True Women--conventional ladies of leisure--nor the early feminists fully advocated, such as intelligence, physical fitness, self sufficiency, economic self-reliance, judicious marriage, and a balance between self and family. Cogan's All-American Girl reveals a system of feminine values that demanded women be neither idle nor militant.

The Girl Nobody Loved: Psychological Explanations for White Single Pregnancy in the Pre-Roe v. Wade Era, 1945-1965

Today public discourse about pregnancy often centers on the biological or religious meaning of conception: when does life begin? When is the fetus viable? In the years between World War II and Roe v. Wade, however, public discourse about pregnancy-especially single pregnancy-assumed racially specific forms. Though in this era of rapidly rising illegitimacy rates' single pregnant women of whatever race still shared a debased social status, the cause of black single pregnancy was portrayed as the strength of black women's biological, sexual urges and their absence of psyche, while white pregnancy (both single and marital) was now discussed mainly in psychoanalytic terms. Psychiatrists argued that a real woman lived to fulfill her destiny as wife and childbearer. When they considered white women who were unhappily pregnant, including white unwed mothers, they asked what disorder or disease accounted for behavior that denied this destiny. The clear distinction between the motivations, the sexuality, and the offspring of black and white unmarried mothers determined the levels and kinds of responsibility society should have for these two groups of unmarried mothers and their babies. Other portions of my current research deal with the theoretical and practical treatment of black unwed mothers during this period;2 this essay focuses on the adaptations of psychoanalytic theory that gained currency in the postwar era as explanations for white unwed pregnancy, and explores how these adaptations shaped treatment strategies for white, broadly middle-class unwed mothers.3 Both the psychological theories and the social policies they supported treated individuals in ways that shored up the postwar family agenda: they absolved the male sexual partner of responsibility; rendered white illegitimate babies adoptable by removing any inheritable taint; made white unwed mothers marriageable despite the episode of illegitimate pregnancy; punished nonmarital female sexuality; and generally reinforced the containment of females in roles of domestic subordination. The psychological explanations did provide a form of social protection for many white girls and women. But these diagnoses were applied indiscriminately and coercively to all white unwed mothers, thus rendering them, both as a group and individually, mentally ill.

Redressing Passion: Sophie d'Houdetot and the Origins of Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse

Redressing Passion: Sophie d’Houdetot and the Origins of Julie, ou la Nouvelle Heloise SUSAN K LE M JACKSON Few critical judgments adhere more tightly to a literary work or hold greater sway over its public than Gustave Lanson’s famous line on Julie, ou la Nouvelle Heloise. Generations of readers have by now been predis­ posed to regard Rousseau’s novel as “un reve de volupte redresse en in­ struction morale.”1 Even encounters with Julie which do not take the formula’s validity for granted tend to position themselves by taking ex­ ception to it. Widespread suspicions that the “redressing” remains incon­ clusive are confirmed by Paul de Man’s deconstruction of a polarity which could easily have been named, in Lanson’s terms, “reve de volupte”/ “in­ struction morale.” Rather than in a permanent awakening, Julie’s pivotal conversion would result only in a displacement of the initial fantasy, in a failure of past errors to instruct effectively.2 It is sometimes forgotten in the elaboration of responses to Lanson that he claims to account, not for Julie’s actions, but for Jean-Jacques’, not for the definitive text of Julie, but for the process of its composition. “La Nouvelle Heloise est sortie d’un reve de volupte redresse en instruction morale” (my emphasis). Christopher Frayling further reminds us that the formula privileges a version of that process told, compellingly and in great­ er detail than is reserved for the genesis of any other work, in Book Nine of the Confessions.3 As an eminently quotable summary, Lanson’s for­ mula sustains belief in the accuracy of that genetic narrative. In turn, the formula derives staying power from a pleasing capacity for reducing the novel as written and the writing of the novel to a single plot line. The heroine’s conversion would replicate the author’s, and thereby proclaim 271 272 / JACKSON the primacy of the empirical self; the genetic narrative would escape redun­ dancy by actualizing the epistolary novel’s potential for storytelling in general and for telling a specific story of redressing. Lanson’s line emerges from this referential confusion endowed with two mutually reinforcing truth claims: it is true to the novel because true to (Rousseau’s) life, and vice versa. If the adequacy of the formula to the novel is open to question, so too is the historical accuracy of the genetic narrative which it summarizes. In some quarters, faith in the narrative’s essential truth remains unshaken, despite the discovery of discrepancies between the chronology of Rous­ seau’s life and his rendering of that chronology in the Confessions. Ber­ nard Guyon at one point taxes the autobiographer with confusing “deux moments differents de la genese de son oeuvre,” but still affirms, when commenting on the prefaces to Julie, that: “les vraies explications de la genese de son oeuvre ne seront avouees que dans les Confessions" (my emphasis).4 Frayling concludes, however, on the basis of manuscript study, that the Confessions fundamentally misrepresent the early acces­ sion to the novel of elements belonging to the category of “instruction morale”: some measure of redressing would have been underway long be­ fore the erotic fantasy had run its course. “Not only Lanson’s conclusion— that La Nouvelle Heloise increasingly came to resemble a book of ‘instruc­ tion morale’—but the conclusion of recent commentators—that the in­ troduction of religious themes constituted an ‘afterthought’ on Rousseau’s part —need to be reconsidered in the light of this previously unpublished brouillon” the draft in question being that of Julie’s recapitulative letter on the occasion of her marriage (III, xviii).5 Extension of the field of inquiry in another direction challenges the authority of the Confessions on more theoretical grounds. Christie V. McDonald reads a cautionary tale into the interplay between the episodes of the genetic narrative and intervening materials recounting Jean-Jacques’ relationship with Sophie d’Houdetot. Coming into his love life when much of La Nouvelle Heloise had already been written, Sophie cannot by defini­ tion have served as an artist’s model for Julie. On the contrary, the real woman is said, repeatedly, to have replaced the novel heroine as the...

Virginia Woolf and the Real World

finest critical book on Virginia Woolf to date. Alex Zwerdling's large and subtle study places Virginia Woolf's world of class, politics, feminism, pacifism, and the family into firm historical perspective. The book leaves us with renewed appreciation for Woolf's work and for her mind. (Elaine Showalter, Princeton University). Buried beneath piles of criticism Virginia Woolf has at last been dug out by Alex Zwerdling. Virginia Woolf and the Real World is the most enlightened account of the real woman to appear for years. (Noel Annan, The Observer). A relief from the Bloomsbury fan dub: penetrating, learned, wide-ranging appreciation of Virginia Woolf in her social and political context, documenting what muscle and thought there was in her allegedly gossamer work. (Richard Mayne, Encounter). A well written book that deals with a field of Woolf studies that badly needs dear thinking and dear expression ...I think it a most useful work and in every way first rate. (Quentin Bell).

The Lives of Lee Miller

Part memoir, part photo essay, part search for the real woman behind an unconventional mother....Should ensure Miller the place she deserves in future histories of the period.--Art in America - Lee Miller: 1927: New York. Classically beautiful, she is discovered by Conde Nast and immortalized by Steichen, Hoyningen-Huene, Horst, and other famous photographers. - Lee Miller: 1929: Paris. Protege and lover of Man Ray, she invents with him the solarization technique of photography and develops into a brilliant Surrealist photographer. - Lee Miller: 1939-1945: Europe. She becomes a U.S. war correspondent and covers the liberation of Paris. Her photographs of the Dachau concentration camp shock the world. These are but three of the many lives of Lee Miller, intimately recorded here by her son, Antony Penrose, whose years of work on her photographic archives unearthed a rich selection of her finest work, including portraits of her friends Picasso, Braque, Ernst, Eluard, and Miro. To these are added many other photos that complement Penrose's highly readable biography of this uniquely talented artist. 171 duotone illustrations.

The Real Woman Inside the Fence in "The Chrysanthemums"

The Real Woman Inside the Fence in "The Chrysanthemums"

An Optical Theme in The Merchant’s Tale

An Optical Theme in The Merchant’s Tale

Red and White in Ovid's Metamorphoses: The Mulberry Tree in the Tale of Pyramus and Thisbe

Throughout theMetamorphosesOvid draws special attention to the colors red and white. Red (rubor, rutilus, rubesco, puniceus, purpureus, ‘red’ or ‘purple’) is, of course, the color of blood, of a blush, of ripening fruit, Tyrean dye, and the sky at dawn. White is the color of marble, ivory, lilies, and the sky at noon. If we examine this pair ineroticcontexts, however, we will find that white is associated with innocence and chastity, with the frigid absence of sexual feeling and with emotional and physical death. Red is associated withpudor, that sense of shame that afflicts the innocent whose eyes have just been opened to erotic reality, and with the heat of violence, both the violence of feeling (furor) and the violence of rape.Perhaps one of the most familiar examples of this color contrast and its erotic associations occurs in the story of Pygmalion and his ivory maiden, in Book X. Ovid is emphatic that the statue is ivory (X.247-48:niveum…ebur, ‘snowy ivory’; 255:ebur, twice) and that the ivory is white. Her ivory flesh, however, is so lifelike that the sculptor fears she will bruise. He dresses her like a real woman, adorns her with countless gifts, and makes her recline on a couch covered with red-dyed spreads (X.267:conlocat hanc stratis concha Sidonide tinctis).