Dearest Readers,
I am in my office this morning, ostensibly working on my writing but more or less still reading The Benefactor and making sure all of the programs on my laptop are updated by the school, as it is technically their machine. The quiet here is very nice today, and the weather is temperate--not too hot nor too cool, but just right. I have the window open, the fan blowing, my shoes and socks off, and I am quite comfy.
This morning, I went to have my blood taken for my usual panel of tests before a doctor's visit. I was talking with a phlebotomist whose family had been friends with the poet and memoirist Audre Lorde and who have found some serious misrepresentations of them and her in some of the recent work on her life. I am wondering how one goes about interviewing and documenting these issues before those who know the truth about them are no longer alive. Where can we publish those kind of very valuable remembrances? What format do they take professionally for us? The phlebotomist is willing to be interviewed and I would not mind at some point perhaps later in the summer conducting and writing this interview; I would have to brush up my reading of Lorde as I have not considered her works in a long while, although I have taught in the past in Introduction to Poetry and in my Women in Literature courses.
Currently, I am working my way through Sontag's The Benefactor as well as Elizabeth Berg's Dream Lover, which Angie gave me for my birthday, and which is based on the life of George Sand. Sand is a fascinating and important writer, but, as with many writing and artistic women who lived extraordinary lives (such as Aphra Behn among others), the work they wrote and produced is itself overshadowed by the life. Sand had long relationships and perhaps affairs with many of the major male writers and artists of her day (e.g., Liszt, Chopin, Flaubert) and occasionally smoked a cigar and cross-dressed to travel as a man. The couple of her novels that I have read have been thoroughly my kind of book, so she is someone I have wanted to read about and in more deeply.
Most often, however, where I come across Sand is when I teach Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who wrote two amazing sonnets in admiration of Sand, and which offer two (separate) lines of fascinating and relevant feminist thought--one of the sonnets argues that Sand is more woman than any woman has ever been, and the other argues that Sand transcends gender categories all together. These sonnets chart for my students and me two approaches to feminist thought: One seeks to reconstruct masculine values by emphasizing those that are most deeply female. I like this side of feminism best because of its potential to remake the world with those values-values of affect (empathy, an ethic of care, cooperation instead of competition, etc.), openness to change and the Other, and an ethics that responds deeply and empathically to contingency.
The other side of feminism (at least in those sonnets, and you can find this side most pronounced in the wonderful chapter 6 of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and some of the work of Carolyn Heilbrun) is an emphasis on moving beyond gender into a kind of androgynous space. Androgyny has perchance received a bad rap, but it is not without its strong merits. I think the Unisex movement of the sixties and seventies may have had something to do with this reputation, but that is only part of the larger picture. Julia Kristeva in The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt argues rather convincingly that androgyny's real problem is its evocation of a kind of asexuality; she suggests that bisexuality is a better and more productive model of a move beyond gender and gendered categories. She may indeed be right.
Okay, so now it is back to The Benefactor, which also raises some of these issues as the major character is bisexual and rather open in discussing it. Yet I am not sure of his motivations nor his self-concept here. More about that later, I suppose.
No comments:
Post a Comment