Only Bildungsromans featuring anxious heroes are feted. All the sad young literary men.
ANXIETY: When she experiences it, it’s pathological. When he does, it’s existential.
In Ben Lerner’s recent novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, a young privileged neurotic poet is on a Fulbright in Spain (a work we can assume is at least semi-autobiographical, a la Christopher Isherwood, as Lerner has the same background, including the fellowship). In the novel he writes the intellectual man-boy, a literary version of Woody Allen or a contemporary Amory Blaine, who basically stays inside his apartment, looks up porn on the Internet, gets high, takes benzos, fucks or wants to fuck pretty Spanish girls who he doesn’t even try to get to know, all the while meditating on art and literature. The brilliance of the novel is how aware the character is of his own fraudulence — his poetry, the way he treats women in his life, his English-language American-culture imperialism. My god though the novel is being feted as the tale of our times, written about rapturously by Lorin Stein in The New York Review of Books, by James Wood at The New Yorker. I mean, it’s a beautiful book, but I don’t get all the adulation. The narrative of the nervous girl would never receive that treatment.
We’re Ophelias beneath the window. We’re left outside. Drowning in our bathtubs.
The texts of the woman writer will be read, not as existential, but in starkly autobiographical terms. A woman is read so close to the body/skin. Both Flaubert and Ibsen can write the “New Woman,” Emma and Nora, but they were not ostracized by their heroines’ acts of exile, not like Kate Chopin was upon publication of The Awakening, a book modeled on Madame Bovary, even mimicking the opening pages, through the point of view of the dunce husband. Critics did not care for her heroine’s “torment.” I mean, Gustave was Emma, yes, but he wasn’t really, he didn’t have the burden. People didn’t say, “Gustave, did you really try to take poison as a desperate cry for help? Gustave, did you really toss your wedding bouquet into the fire? Gustave, it’s really a shame you didn’t keep up with those piano lessons.”
Maybe the girl’s fearfully depressed in part because her alienation is never seen as existential and she is disciplined for her excess.
I think about Jean Seberg’s character Patricia Francini in Godard’s Breathless, the girl-reporter who wants to write novels and not be a sidekick in some film noir. I wonder if while making the film Godard was conscious of how much he makes Patricia a cipher, and shows this blank character who is searching for an identity, for a self outside of men, but is never really able to escape it. She wants to write novels, someday, like Faulkner, but she needs to sleep with her editor to write articles, and she must be a muse-baby for the famous novelist in order to get his attention. And her self-worth is completely bound up in how others see her, through another’s gaze, and like a Jean Rhys heroine part of her only wants a Dior dress and a man who loves her. But there’s this other part that’s just forming, that is having a complete identity crisis, that is Simone de Beauvoir’s woman questioning her immanence, questioning her lack of freedom, wanting something more, feeling dreadfully incomplete.
Yet in The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir doesn’t have much respect for the existential crisis of the girl. She sees her alienation, her sense of apartness, as frivolous, showy, without reflection: “Oppressed and submerged, she becomes a stranger to herself because she is a stranger to the rest of the world.” To de B the young girl is doomed to immanence, she is Emma Bovary as Flaubert, not as Mary McCarthy has imagined her, enraptured by herself as her own heroine in the fantasies she has concocted.
There has been no female equivalent of The Trial or Ulysses, de B writes in The Second Sex, because women writers don’t interrogate the human condition. “A woman could never have become Kafka: in her doubts and anxieties, she would never have recognized the anguish of Man driven from paradise.” “Man” is the capitalized eternal, the transcendent — the woman has already been driven away, has always been excluded from this category.
Perhaps the woman cannot recognize the alienation of Man, but she can certainly understand Eve, and what it means to be rewritten.
Claude Cahun’s series of monologues, entitled Heroines, where she takes fictional characters such as Eve or Salome and gives their mythologies a hilarious, contemporary gloss, revisioning them as both flappers and aborted authors. She dedicates these pieces to girls everywhere.
In her girl portraits often published in “pulp” (hence not literary) journals like College Humor, Zelda writes of the young girl perennially imagining herself as a character, performance artists of surface and frivolity, although inside is this sense of apartness, of unexpressed sadness. There is a loneliness and lament to these pretty girls. Throughout, the author-narrator watches these girls, from a distance, perhaps the distance of the former self. There is Gay, in “The Original Follies Girl”: “The thing that made you first notice Gay was that manner she had, as though she was masquerading as herself.”
She isn’t writing the American Dream perhaps, but the Frivolous Girl Dream.
Fitzgerald of course dismissed Zelda’s stories as not saying anything greater about the human condition: “Did she have anything to say? No she has not anything to say.”
The difference is privileging in literature a hero as opposed to a heroine. The difference is dismissing anguish that is seen as feminine, and not “universal” (i.e. masculine). Perhaps Gregor Samsas also take the form, in literature, of 18-year-old chorus girls, or unraveling divorcees, or suicidal overachievers from a prestigious woman’s college.
This is an issue I have with some feminists in the Second Wave, how they often read writers of the girl — how they often dismiss the idea that these writers are actually philosophers of the girl, just like the Professor X’s do. They neglect the concept that a philosophy of the girl is even possible. But also, there is this sense reading de Beauvoir and others that the woman writer must write an empowered woman, like Jo in Little Women or something. Maybe these women writers’ heroines or anti-heroines are not empowered — but maybe they render honestly a flawed and skewed subjectivity. My main problem with de Beauvoir is that she doesn’t give the silly girl any space to revolt. Maybe the girl seeks revenge by wedging herself into the larger cultural conversation.
The continuing education seminar on “Madness and Women Modernists” I taught at the Newberry Library the summer we moved back from London. I met with a dwindling class of three Newberry employees and female retirees all gung-ho about reading Mrs. Dalloway but put off by reading authors they had never heard of (we also read Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight).
How we buy into this idea of the canon, its memory campaign that verges on propaganda, that the books remembered are the only ones worth reading.