One major feminist who found Sontag’s commitment to the movement disappointing was Adrienne Rich, who in 1975 addressed a critical letter to the New York Review of Books about Sontag’s sophisticated, nuanced (and hostile) discussion of Leni Riefenstahl in “Fascinating Fascism.” How, Rich wondered, did the “same mind” produce “this brilliant essay” and the “equally brilliant essay” on “The Third World of Women”? Responded Sontag, “Easy. By addressing itself to a different problem, with the intention of making a different point.”43 But why didn’t Sontag note the profound misogyny animating Nazism? (That she had done so in “The Third World” doesn’t seem to have mattered.)
“The feminist movement,” wrote Rich, “has always been passionately anti-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian.” Feminists have also been “justly alert to and critical of women who have ‘made it’ in the patriarchy”—a definition that paradoxically could have described not only Riefenstahl and Sontag but Rich herself. In a magisterial tone, Sontag observed that “I would assume that Riefenstahl offends some feminists (though I wish it were for a better reason than her being on that ominous-sounding enemies list, ‘male-identified “successful” women’).” Furthermore, she added, if Rich “is going to start baiting that heavy bear, the intellect, then I feel obliged to announce that anyone with a taste for ‘intellectual exercise’ will always find in me an ardent defender.”
Point, set, and match. But perhaps not. According to Rich’s biographer Hilary Holladay, the two women decided to meet and talk in person following this in-print debate. At Sontag’s apartment they “started out talking and ended up making love.”44 At the same time, Sontag’s biographer Benjamin Moser notes that “Sontag’s attack on Rich alienated many feminists, who would never consider her one of their own: a breach that may explain why Sontag’s own feminist writings were mothballed.” Moser attributes her public disavowals of feminism and lesbianism to her ambition to serve “as a universal arbiter” of culture: “To be known as a feminist, much less as a lesbian, would have pushed her to the margins.”45 But perhaps Sontag’s evasiveness about feminism and lesbianism, her intellectual arrogance, her grandiosity both on and off the page, arose from wounds that she could never acknowledge.
In a sardonic elegy for her, the literary critic Terry Castle proclaimed in the London Review of Books that she was “sibylline and hokey and often a great bore,” though she was “a troubled and brilliant American.”46 More poignantly, in Sigrid Nunez’s memoir Sempre Susan, we see the author of Against Interpretation in the flesh, living in a cockroach-haunted apartment on the Upper West Side, unable to stop smoking, fearful of being alone, acting as a kind of theatrical mother-in-law to Nunez, who was also living in the apartment and dating David Rieff.47 Life, even the life of the intellect and of underground feminism, can be strange.
Very few feminists in the seventies knew about Sontag’s radically feminist essays. Certainly, we did not. We discovered them only in the process of composing this book, some four decades after they appeared. And of course, Sontag defined herself primarily as a creative writer rather than an essayist, as the author of novels, plays, and screenplays, few of which appealed to the elite audiences that adored her as “the Dark Lady” of American letters.
BEST SELLERS IN THE WOMANHOUSE: FROM TONI MORRISON TO MARILYN FRENCH
While Sontag’s creative works rarely received the acclaim she thought they deserved, a number of her contemporaries were quite successful in producing feminist fiction that captivated readers. In novels published throughout the seventies, writers of Sontag’s generation countered Miller’s and Mailer’s suppositions about compliant bimbos by illuminating Kate Millett’s concept of “the interiorization of patriarchal ideology” and Sontag’s thesis about “sexist brainwashing,” both of which explain young women’s submission to dysfunctional societal institutions. They take as their subject a process of socialization detrimental to their characters’ well-being: their induction into femininity. Toni Morrison, Alix Kates Shulman, Erica Jong, Rita Mae Brown, Margaret Atwood, and Marilyn French portrayed female lives deformed by mind-sets destructive to women’s full humanity.48
Dense with details about the indignities of growing up female, feminist fiction in the seventies describes the secrecy around the onset of menstruation, the furtive discovery of clitoral masturbation, the first (generally unsatisfactory) experience of heterosexual intercourse, the shame inculcated by a sexual double standard, the overvaluation of love and of male protection, and an all-pervasive fetishization of the female body as well sexual harassment, illegal abortion, domestic abuse, and rape. Heterosexuality, the institution of marriage, and the nuclear family are presented as blighting the lives of girls and women.
There can be no more poignant rape victim than 11-year-old Pecola Breedlove in Toni Morrison’s eloquent first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), who—even before an incestuous act of violence—is undone by her internalization of white standards of beauty. Convinced that she is unlovable, enthralled by pictures of blue-eyed Shirley Temple, Pecola grows up trying “to discover the secret of [her] ugliness” and praying for “pretty blue eyes.”49 Her mother, Mrs. Breedlove, had also been corrupted by one of “the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought”: the assumption that (white-defined) physical beauty is a virtue.50 Pregnant at a movie theater, she had curled her hair “almost just like” Jean Harlow’s when a bite of candy pulled a tooth out of her mouth. At that moment, she “settled down to just being ugly” and eventually gave birth to a daughter with a “Head full of pretty hair, but Lord she was ugly.”51
Toni Morrison composed her first novel while she was working for Random House and raising her two sons. She had been brought up in Lorrain, Ohio, by parents who “assumed that black people were the humans of the globe; but had serious doubts about the quality and existence of white humanity”: “So I grew up in a basically racist household,” she explained, “with more than a child’s share of contempt for white people.”52 Such a view must have been strengthened when a landlord once set the family’s house on fire to force them to leave, although her hardworking father put out the flames and refused to leave.
Only at Howard University, where she began to study literature, did she change her name from Chloe Anthony Wofford to Toni Wofford. After writing a master’s thesis at Cornell on the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, she married and divorced the Jamaican architect Harold Morrison, hinting that she objected to his conventional notions of marriage. She wrote The Bluest Eye in part to examine the motto of the civil rights and Black power movements: “Black is beautiful.”
Sweetly sickening and addictive, white-defined ideals of feminine beauty explain why the Breedlove family in The Bluest Eye sport the maiden name of the millionaire Madam C. J. Walker, who produced hair-straightening and skin-lightening products, and why Pecola’s first name recalls Peola, the daughter torn between her lauded white appearance and her scorned Black identity in Fanny Hurst’s novel Imitation of Life.53 Morrison pointedly depicts other female characters who haven’t been tainted by an overvaluation of white standards of attractiveness, but gullible Pecola plummets into madness in part because “adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured.”54
What pushes Pecola into schizophrenia, however, is the evil act of a man himself victimized by racism. Pecola’s father, Cholly, had been violated as a boy by white men who surprised him in an earnest first attempt at lovemaking by “shining a flashlight right on his behind” and goading him, “nigger,” to “make it good”: Cholly was not old enough to hate the white men so instead “he hated, despised the girl” who “bore witness to his failure, his impotence.” Yet even in the act of raping his daughter, her misery kindles his need to protect her and this “confused mixture” leads him “to fuck her—tenderly.” Despite the horror of the rape, one of the narrators of The Bluest Eye believes
that Cholly “was the one who loved [Pecola] enough to touch her,” though “his touch was fatal.”55
Such a cursory summary of the central plot of The Bluest Eye does not do justice to its aesthetic power, but it does illuminate its analysis of a beauty myth that affects Blacks and whites differently. Morrison’s insight into that disparity surfaced in an essay on women’s liberation published a year after The Bluest Eye. As she considered the segregation signs common in the South, Morrison found one type oddly reassuring. To her mind, “White Ladies” and “Colored Women” properly labeled white females as soft, helpless, and dependent, in comparison to their Black counterparts who “were tough, capable, independent.”56
The novels of Alix Kates Shulman and Erica Jong tackle a feminine dependence on men, shaped by the training of “White Ladies,” that has no place in The Bluest Eye. In Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (1972), Shulman links an overemphasis on good looks with her heroine’s single-minded determination to attract men. To Sasha Davis, “being beautiful mattered so much that I always suspected I was just passing my prime.” Schoolyard bullies—she accepts “the boy’s hatred of us as ‘normal’ ”—cause her to focus her attention on an appearance that will attract male protection, though she fears being labeled a slut. Sasha absorbs the shock of “bleeding down there”; the shame of discovering a “joy button” that no one else apparently has or has named; the attacks of boys who abduct her into the woods and, like her boyfriends, “always go as far as they can”; the frustrating contrast between the pleasure of petting and the nonevent of penetration; and the putdowns of envious sorority sisters who confirm her belief that “Surely I must be beautiful.”57
The insecurity generated by these events convinces Shulman’s heroine that she remains “worthless without a man.” In college, predictably, Sasha’s love of philosophy gets channeled into her seduction of a 43-year-old married-with-children philosophy professor. When he jerks out of her to come in her mouth, she considers it “an honor,” though his wife soon intervenes with the information that he has had a succession of youthful playmates.58 Instead of Prince Charmings, real-life husbands arrive to prove to Sasha that marriage is no happily-ever-after.59
Shulman’s self-destructively licentious heroine resembles the ribald central character in Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973). Isadora Wing’s frankness about orgasm, oral sex, threesomes, and the messiness of dealing with menstrual blood without a tampon earned the accolades of Henry Miller and John Updike, while other reviewers castigated the novel’s vulgarity.60 Yet Jong agreed with Morrison that “Black women were at least a century ahead of white women in banishing the slave in the self,”61 and also with Shulman that the crucial problem of white women hinges on their dependence upon men. (In the first wave, the turn-of-the-century South African feminist Olive Schreiner called this problem “sexual parasitism.”)62
Lusty Isadora Wing finds herself tormented by a need for stability, on the one hand, and a desire for adventure, on the other; however, she associates both options with men: security with her staid Freudian psychoanalyst-husband Bennett and freedom with her hippy Laingian psychoanalyst-lover Adrian Goodlove. No wonder, since she has been “brainwashed,” as are all girls who grew up with “cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip”: “you longed to be annihilated by love, to be swept off your feet, to be filled up by a giant prick spouting sperm, soapsuds, silks and satins, and of course, money.” Isadora nevertheless defines herself as a feminist because she wants to be a poet, not a typist: “the big problem was how to make your feminism jibe with your unappeasable hunger for male bodies.” 63
Resisting taboos against bawdy women, Isadora Wing realizes that all her ideas about orgasm are suspect, coming as they do from Freud and D. H. Lawrence. She looks in vain for a woman writer “who had juice and joy and love and talent,” finding only Colette and the shadowy Sappho. Through her heroine’s fantasies, Jong made her name as a juicy writer extolling “the Zipless Fuck.” Impersonal, fleeting, no strings attached, the satisfactions of the zipless fuck seem related to the independence Isadora seeks in her sensual poetry and in her adultery with Adrian. But when Isadora goes on a hot road trip with him—“for the first time in my life, I live out my fantasy”—he “goes limp as a water-logged noodle and refuses me.” Although men “wanted their women wild,” when “women were finally learning to be wanton and wild,” the “men wilted.” 64
The discrepancy between fantasy and reality is pointedly emphasized at the end of Fear of Flying. After Isadora resists the Freudian psychobabble of her husband and the existentialist sermons of her lover, a stranger does try to push his hand between her legs in an empty train compartment, only to elicit her outrage. Isadora ends up submerged in her absent husband’s hotel bathtub, not knowing whether her story will end in love, as it would in the nineteenth century, or in divorce, as it would in the twentieth. The indeterminate ending of Fear of Flying involved lots of outtakes, Jong has explained. “In one, Isadora writes long letters, à la Herzog, to Freud, to Colette, to Simone de Beauvoir, to Doris Lessing, to Emily Dickinson. In another, she dies of a botched abortion. In another, she blows off Bennett and goes to Walden Pond to live alone in the woods. In another, she promises eternal slavery, and he takes her back.” 65 Instead, Jong leaves Isadora Wing—unable yet to fly away—submerged in the waters of a potential rebirth.
Shulman and Jong clearly ridicule the victimization of their heroines. In this respect, they put the lie to Joan Didion’s condemnation of “the coarsening of [the] moral imagination” in feminist thinking. In a 1975 essay, “The Women’s Movement,” Didion sneered at the “Everywoman” of feminists who is “everyone’s victim but her own: She was persecuted even by her gynecologist, . . . raped by her husband, and raped finally on the abortionist’s table.” 66 With a heroine who refuses victimhood, Rita Mae Brown deplored not female dependence upon men but the heterosexual script upon which that dependence was built. Molly Bolt’s good looks, insatiable desire for lots of sex, and indomitable spirit empower her to defy her mother’s prejudice—the mother is generally a regressive agent of socialization in these novels—in Rubyfruit Jungle (1973).
Rita Mae Brown’s landmark novel, which was turned down by all the agents and publishers she approached, found its way into print through the small feminist publishing house Daughters, Inc. When they “couldn’t keep up with the demand,” the novel was sold to Bantam Books, and to Brown’s shock she received a check for $125,000. She also got “notoriety, a ton of hate mail, numerous threats on my life including two bomb threats, increased outrage from the conservative wing of the feminist movement and scorn from the radical dykes”: “Straight people were mad because I was gay. The dykes were mad because I wasn’t gay enough.” 67
While the inquisitive, racially ambiguous, and illegitimate Molly Bolt experiments throughout Rubyfruit Jungle with all sorts of polymorphous couplings, Brown explodes the idea—inherited from Radclyffe Hall’s resonantly titled The Well of Loneliness (1928)—that lesbians are freaks doomed to a miserable fate. She does so by satirizing the Freudian idea that buttresses such a plot. Never a male wannabe, Molly reacts to the sight of a childhood friend’s penis not with envy but with an entrepreneurial scheme to make money by charging neighborhood kids for a good look.68 From a young age, Molly—disdaining Shirley Temple dolls and experimenting by kissing girls as well as boys—determines to do exactly as she pleases: “Why does everyone have to put you in a box and nail the lid on it?” 69
The straight people Molly goes on to encounter in college and later in New York City assume that lesbians are sick or that they must relinquish an immature form of eroticism. Yet their own heterosexuality—like that of the man who “gets his kicks out of being blasted with grapefruits”—is portrayed as downright kinky.70 The gay scene offers its own problematic boxes for people divided into butches and femmes: Molly scoffs, “What’s the point of being a lesbian if a woman is going to look and act like an imitation man?�
� At the end of the novel, she manages to complete a degree in film and make peace with her mother. Nonetheless, she notes the prosperity of male peers—who specialize in pornography—while she herself is offered a job as a secretary.71
Margaret Atwood extends her contemporaries’ attacks on fairy tales, romantic movies, Hollywood idols, and pornography in Lady Oracle (1976). Atwood’s humorous metafiction takes aim at thin heroines and stories that ultimately fail to starve her escape artist into anorexic submission. Resisting a skinny, tyrannical mother (who ices a cake for her daughter with Ex-Lax), Joan Foster finds herself in the grip of what has come to be called matrophobia, a fear and hatred of the mother that leads her to consume huge amounts of food. At first Joan’s “jiggly thighs” and “bulges of fat” debar her from performing the role of butterfly in a dance recital: “who would think of marrying a mothball?” she frets. By 15, however, she feels a “morose pleasure” when everyone looks away from her 245-pound figure.72 Girth lends her invisibility and protection from male harassment. She starts to fantasize about an exhibitionist Fat Lady walking skillfully on a high wire—wearing pink tights, a sparkling tiara, and satin slippers, and carrying a diminutive pink umbrella.
We are what we eat, but also what we read and write. After Joan loses weight to gain an inheritance, she embarks on a series of relationships with men, all of whom seem seductively Byronic to her, but all of whom turn out to lead dreary pedestrian lives. Joan hardly notices, because she is juggling the impostures that fund her life with them: her secret identities as the mystic poet of a successful book of verse, Lady Oracle, and as the romance writer of lucrative costume gothics. In sharp contrast to the Fat Lady, both these thin avatars of Joan are tangled in stories of feminine victimization.
Joan, the photographed poetess, is haunted by the tragic fate of female artists in legends: the Lady of Shalott, who leaves her weaving to die in the real world, and the dancer in The Red Shoes, who is “torn between her career and her husband” and whose shoes end up dancing her into an oncoming train. “All my life I’d been hooked on plots,” Joan realizes, in which “you could sing and dance or you could be happy, but not both.”73 The author of costume gothics fares no better than the poet, for her commercially successful stories reward persecuted heroines with happy endings. Her fearful central characters trespass into grim ancestral mansions while competing with ravenous wives and confronting heroes who might just be nefarious villains. In the interpolated passages from Stalked by Love upon which Joan works throughout the novel, the wife Felicia is supposed to die so her successor Charlotte can rest her throbbing breast against the chest of the equivocal master of the mansion.
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