43 Adrienne Rich and Susan Sontag, “Feminism and Fascism: An Exchange,” New York Review of Books, 20 Mar. 1975, pp. 31–32.
44 Hilary Holladay, The Power of Adrienne Rich (Doubleday, 2020), p. 269.
45 Benjamin Moser, Sontag: Her Life and Work (HarperCollins, 2019), pp. 397, 399.
46 Terry Castle, “Desperately Seeking Susan,” London Review of Books, 17 Mar. 2005, pp. 17–20, at 20.
47 Sigrid Nunez, Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag (Riverhead Books, 2014).
48 Needless to say, other novels also captured feminist experience in the seventies, in particular Sue Kaufman’s Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970) and Marge Piercy’s Small Changes (1973), as well as Lisa Alther’s Kinflicks (1976).
49 Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1970; repr. Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), pp. 45–46.
50 Ibid., p. 122. Objecting to the slogan “Black is beautiful,” Toni Morrison wrote in 1974, “The concept of physical beauty as a virtue is one of the dumbest, most pernicious and destructive ideas of the Western world, and we should have nothing to do with it” (“Behind the Making of The Black Book,” Black World 23, no. 4 [Feb. 1974]: 86–90, at 89).
51 Morrison, The Bluest Eye, pp. 123, 126.
52 Toni Morrison, “A Slow Walk of Trees (as Grandmother Would Say), Hopeless (as Grandfather Would Say)” (1976), in What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction, ed. Carolyn C. Denard (University Press of Mississippi, 2008), pp. 6, 7.
53 Fanny Hurst’s novel, published in 1933, was adapted in two successful films (1934, 1959).
54 Morrison, The Bluest Eye, p. 20.
55 Ibid., pp. 42, 151, 162–63, 206.
56 Toni Morrison, “What the Black Woman Thinks about Women’s Lib,” New York Times Magazine, 22 Aug. 1971, reprinted in What Moves at the Margin, pp. 18–30, at 19.
57 Alix Kates Shulman, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, rev. ed. (Penguin, 1997), pp. 18, 22, 42, 46, 63, 58.
58 Ibid., pp. 33, 149, 159.
59 Shulman does not sound penitent when she recalls one reader who chastised her, “complaining that his wife left him, taking the baby with her, after reading Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen” (preface to Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, p. ix).
60 Paul Theroux, for instance, excoriated “Erica Jong’s witless heroine” for “loom[ing] like a mammoth pudenda, as roomy as the Carlsbad caverns, luring amorous spelunkers to confusion in her plunging grottoes” (introduction to Sunrise with Seamonsters: Travels & Discoveries, 1964–1984 [Houghton Mifflin, 1985], p. 5, quoting his own review of Fear of Flying).
61 Erica Jong, Fear of Fifty: A Midlife Memoir (HarperCollins, 1994), p. 295.
62 Olive Schreiner, Woman and Labor (Bernard Tauchnitz, 1911), p. 74.
63 Erica Jong, Fear of Flying (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), pp. 9–10, 96.
64 Ibid., pp. 11, 205, 295.
65 Jong, Fear of Fifty, pp. 153–54.
66 Joan Didion, “The Women’s Movement” (1972), in The White Album (Simon and Schuster, 1979), pp. 109–18, at 112, 115.
67 Rita Mae Brown, Rita Will: Memoir of a Literary Rabble-Rouser (Bantam Books, 1997), pp. 280–81.
68 “All you got is a wad of pink wrinkles hangin’ around it. It’s ugly”: Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle (1973; repr., Bantam Books, 1977), p. 4.
69 Ibid., p. 107.
70 Ibid., p. 142. One straight-defined female lover asks Molly to pretend they are at a urinal “and you say, ‘That’s a nice cock, big and juicy’ ” (p. 202). A straight-defined man wants her to imagine “We’re in the ladies room at the Four Seasons and you’re admiring my voluptuous breasts” (p. 206).
71 For the quotation, see ibid., p. 147. The novel does sustain her optimism at the end. As if operating under the aegis of Huck Finn, Molly prepares to bolt her way into the forbidden territory of moviemaking until she’s “the hottest fifty-year-old this side of the Mississippi” (p. 246).
72 Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle (Simon and Schuster, 1976), pp. 46, 50, 50–51, 74.
73 Ibid., pp. 82, 310, 313.
74 Ibid., p. 319.
75 Margaret Atwood, “You Fit into Me,” in Power Politics (1971; repr., House of Anansi Press, 2005), p. 1.
76 Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (Simon and Schuster, 1972), pp. 162, 163, 176. The “Americans” are associated with murder —“To prove they could do it, they had the power to kill” (p. 134)—and are often actually Canadians from whom the troubled narrator wants to distance herself and her countrymen.
77 Ibid., pp. 187, 222.
78 French protests the horror of pregnancy “because it wipes you out, it erases you”; the misery of lecherous husbands; drunken dinner parties; the “poverty, stigma, and loneliness” associated with divorce; the “boring and painful and full of despair” routines of housekeeping; the wife beatings; the marital rapes (“It was over fast and he never looked at her”); the snarling at kids; the electric shock treatments. Marilyn French, The Woman’s Room (Summit Books, 1977), pp. 49, 133, 141, 162.
79 Ibid., pp. 189, 199.
80 Ibid., pp. 245, 433.
81 Kim A. Loudermilk, Fictional Feminism: How American Bestsellers Affect the Movement for Women’s Equality (Routledge, 2004), pp. 45–51, 62–63.
82 For more on Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro’s installation, see the 1974 documentary Womanhouse, directed by Johanna Demetrakas and available at judychicago.arted.psu.edu/womanhouse-video/; further information is supplied by Penn State’s Jude Chicago Art Education Collection at judychicago.arted.psu.edu/about/onsite-archive/teaching-projects/womanhouse/.
83 Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, “Marriage and Divorce: Changes in Their Driving Forces,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 21, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 27–52.
84 The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. Karen V. Kukil (Anchor, 2000), p. 275.
85 Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (Faber and Faber, 1963), p. 1.
86 Ibid., pp. 6, 7.
87 Ibid., pp. 74, 71.
88 Ibid., p. 80. For figs as vulvas see, for example, D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Fig,” which Plath would have known well.
89 Sylvia Plath, “Hanging Man,” in Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (1981; repr., HarperCollins, 2018), p. 141.
90 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique [50th anniversary ed.] (W. W. Norton, 2013), p. 14.
91 Robin Morgan, “Arraignment,” in Monster (Random House, 1972), pp. 76–78, at 76.
92 The friend is Elizabeth Compton Sigmund, whose account of this conversation is quoted in Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001), p. 149.
93 Ted Hughes, “The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother,” in Birthday Letters: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), pp. 195–96, at 195.
94 Diane Seuss, “Self-Portrait with Sylvia Plath’s Braid,” in Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (Graywolf, 2018), p. 84.
95 Erica Jong, “Alcestis on the Poetry Circuit,” in Half-Lives (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), pp. 25–26.
96 Anne Sexton, “Sylvia’s Death.” Poetry 103, no. 4 (Jan. 1964): 224–26, at 224.
97 Catherin Bowman, The Plath Cabinet (Four Way Books, 2009). See also The Plath Poetry Project, plathpoetryproject.com/.
98 Joanna Biggs, “I’m an Intelligence,” London Review of Books, 20 Dec. 2018, pp. 9–15, at 15.
CHAPTER 6: SPECULATIVE POETRY, SPECULATIVE FICTION
1 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey [1818], ed. Marilyn Butler (Penguin Classics, 1995), p. 104.
2 See Bradley v. State, 1 Miss. (1 Walker) 156, 157 (1824).
3 Adrienne Rich, interview in David Montenegro, Points of Departure: International Writers on Writing and Politics (University of Michigan Press, 1991), pp. 5–21, at 11.
4 W. B. Yeats, “Easter, 1916,” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran, rev. 2nd ed. (Scribner Paperback Poetry, 1996), pp. 180–81, at 180.
5 The quotation, from Alfred Conrad, appears in his obituary in the New York Times, 20 Oct. 1970.
6
Adrienne Rich to Hayden Carruth, letter quoted in Michelle Dean, “The Wreck,” New Republic, 3 Apr. 2016, newrepublic.com/article/132117/adrienne-richs-feminist-awakening.
7 Rich, interview in Montenegro, Points of Departure, p. 17.
8 Hilary Holladay, The Power of Adrienne Rich (Doubleday, 2020), p. 222. Rich wrote the book for Joseph Goldberg, a film professor at the New School.
9 Dean, “The Wreck.”
10 Ibid.
11 Adrienne Rich, quoted in John O’Mahoney, “Poet and Pioneer,” The Guardian, 14 June 2002, www.theguardian.com/books/2002/jun/15/featuresreviews.guardianreview6.
12 Hayden Carruth, quoted in ibid.
13 See ibid.
14 Elizabeth Hardwick, quoted in Dean, “The Wreck.”
15 See Emily Dickinson, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R. W. Franklin, reading ed. (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 494.
16 Sandra M. Gilbert, “A Life Written in Invisible Ink,” American Scholar, 6 Sept. 2016, theamericanscholar.org/a-life-written-in-invisible-ink/#.XWdLF-hKhPY.
17 Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck,” in Diving into the Wreck: Poems, 1971–1972 (W. W. Norton, 1973), pp. 22–24, at 24.
18 Margaret Atwood, “Diving into the Wreck,” New York Times Book Review, 30 Dec. 1973.
19 Leslie H. Farber, “He Said, She Said,” Commentary, Mar. 1972, pp. 53–59, at 53.
20 Adrienne Rich, “Waking in the Dark,” in Diving into the Wreck, pp. 7–10, at 8.
21 Adrienne Rich, “From an Old House in America,” in Collected Poems, 1950–2012 (W. W. Norton, 2016), pp. 425–37, at 435.
22 Adrienne Rich, “Trying to Talk with a Man,” in Diving into the Wreck, pp. 3–4, at 4.
23 William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (ca. 1790–93), in The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Doubleday, 1965), pp. 33–44, at 39 (plate 14).
24 Adrienne Rich, “From the Prison House,” in Diving into the Wreck, pp. 17–18, at 17; “The Stranger,” in ibid., p. 19.
25 Rich, “Diving into the Wreck,” pp. 22, 23.
26 Ibid., pp. 23, 24.
27 Ibid., p. 24.
28 Adrienne Rich, “A Marriage in the ’Sixties,” in Collected Poems, pp. 137–39, at 139 (originally published in Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, 1963); “Like This Together,” in ibid., pp. 174–76 (originally published in Necessities of Life, 1966).
29 Rich, “Diving into the Wreck,” p. 24.
30 Adrienne Rich, “From a Survivor,” in Diving into the Wreck, p. 50.
31 Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken” (1971), in Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert (W. W. Norton, 2018), pp. 3–19, at 3–4.
32 Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980), in ibid., pp. 157–97, at 159, 160.
33 Holladay, The Power of Adrienne Rich, p. 264.
34 Adrienne Rich, “Twenty-One Love Poems,” in Collected Poems, pp. 465–77, at 465.
35 Ibid., pp. 468, 470, 471.
36 Ibid., pp. 472–73.
37 Adrienne Rich, “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity” (1982), in Essential Essays, pp. 198–217, at 216.
38 Rich, “Twenty-One Love Poems,” pp. 476–77.
39 Other notable works in this tradition include Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies (1405) and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666), as well as, closer to Gilman’s era, Mary Elizabeth Bradley Lane’s Mizora (1880–81) and Elizabeth Corbett’s New Amazonia (1889).
40 Julie Phillips, James Tiptree Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (St. Martin’s, 2007), p. 245.
41 Ibid., p. 337.
42 James Tiptree, Jr., “The Women Men Don’t See” (1973), in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (Tachyon, 2004), pp. 115–43, at 115.
43 Ibid., p. 134.
44 Ibid., pp. 141, 138, 142.
45 James Tiptree, Jr., “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (1973), in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, pp. 43–79.
46 Ibid., p. 77.
47 Ibid., p. 47.
48 James Tiptree, Jr., “The Screwfly Solution” (1977), in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, pp. 9–31, at 9.
49 Ibid., pp. 24, 25–26.
50 Whether or not there was any direct influence, the two tales are strikingly similar, for in each three male travelers confront an all-female utopia whose customs fascinate, baffle, and befuddle them. Both stories are narrated from the perspective of one of the bemused (and often confused) explorers. Both portray peaceful all-female worlds characterized by almost stereotypically—and sometimes comically—“feminine” traits: both feminist utopias stress the significance of maternity and education. In both, the women reproduce without male assistance: in Herland through parthenogenesis and in “Houston” through a sophisticated form of cloning. And in each, one of the three men temporarily disrupts the serene fabric of the community by inappropriately (hetero)sexualizing the women and ultimately attempting to rape one of them. Julie Phillips, Tiptree’s biographer, has said there is no evidence that Alice Sheldon knew Herland—and indeed Gilman’s utopia wasn’t published in book form until 1979, several years after Tiptree’s tale appeared in print. But The Forerunner, the feminist journal where Herland was first published, had in fact been reprinted in 1968, so it’s possible that Sheldon—who had just recently earned a Ph.D. in psychology and was a serious academic—might have seen it.
51 James Tiptree, Jr., “Houston, Houston Do You Read?” (1976), in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, pp. 163–216, at 186, 189, 173, 175.
52 Ibid., pp. 191, 163.
53 Ibid., pp. 212, 215.
54 James Tiptree, Jr., to Joanna Russ, letter quoted as the epigraph to Pat Wheeler, “ ‘That Is Not Me. I Am Not That’: Anger and the Will to Action in Joanna Russ’s Fiction,” in On Joanna Russ, ed. Farah Mendlesohn (Wesleyan University Press, 2009), pp. 99–113, at 99.
55 Joanna Russ, “The New Misandry,” Village Voice, 12 Oct. 1972, villagevoice.com/2011/03/21/the-new-misandry-man-hating-in-1972/.
56 Joanna Russ, The Female Man (Bantam Books, 1975), p. 7.
57 Wheeler, “ ‘That Is Not Me. I Am Not That,’ ” 99. Yet as Judith Gardiner noted in the nineties, The Female Man began to feel dated within two decades. The book, wrote Gardiner, was “a heavy-handed treatment of a situation that I now find embarrassing even to recall. It’s hard for me to recapture the fresh moral indignation of that time, its conviction of rightness, the enthusiasm and group solidarity of its feminist anger, yet also its despair at patriarchal odds” (quoted in ibid.). But for a recent, highly positive review of the novel, see B. D. McClay, “Joanna Russ, the Science-Fiction Writer Who Said No,” New Yorker, 30 Jan. 2020, www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/joanna-russ-the-science-fiction-writer-who-said-no.
58 Russ, The Female Man, pp. 213–14.
59 Letter from Ursula K. Le Guin to James Tiptree, Jr., quoted in Phillips, James Tiptree Jr., 371. See also “Ursula K. Le Guin: An Interview,” conducted by Paul Walker, Luna Monthly, no. 63 (Mar. 1976): 1–7, at 1.
60 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969; repr., Ace Books, 2010), p. 100.
61 See Ursula K. Le Guin, “Is Gender Necessary? Redux,” in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (Grove, 1989), pp. 7–16.
62 Ursula K. Le Guin, introduction to “Winter’s King,” in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (Bantam Books, 1975), p. 85.
63 See “Coming of Age in Karhide” (1995), reprinted in The Birthday of the World: And Other Stories (HarperCollins, 2002), pp. 1–22.
64 Ursula K. Le Guin, “Sur” (1982), in The Compass Rose (Harper and Row, 1982), pp. 230–46, at 234, 236.
65 Ibid., pp. 239, 240.
66 Ibid., pp. 242, 243–44.
67 Ibid., p. 246.
68 Adrienne Rich, “Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev,” in Collected Poems, pp. 443–46, at 446.
CHAPTER 7: BONDED AND BRUISED SISTERS
1 Vivian Gornick, “Who Says We Haven’t Made a Revolution? A Feminist Takes Stock,” New York Times Magazine, 15 Apr. 1990; she is quoting Wordsworth’s “French Revolution” (1809).
2 Gloria Steinem, quoted in Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger (Simon and Schuster, 2018), pp. 109–10; Steinem, “Alice Walker: Do You Know This Woman? She Knows You” (1982), in Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1983), pp. 259–75, at 275.
3 Carolyn G. Heilbrun, The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem (Dial Press, 1995), p. 255.
4 Ibid., p. 268.
5 Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement (Random House, 1976), p. 244; the passage appears in a section titled “Betty Friedan’s Notebook: Struggling for Personal Truth (1971–1973).” Friedan disagreed with Ms. essays advising women not to do anything that “would make them attractive to men. It was so annoying to me that Gloria would preach this kind of doctrine in Ms., and at the same time be dating some very glamorous men and having her hair streaked at Kenneth, a very fancy New York salon” (Betty Friedan, Life So Far [Simon and Schuster, 2000], pp. 249–50).
6 Nora Ephron, “Women,” Esquire, Nov. 1972, pp. 10–18, 28, at 10, 18.
7 Heilbrun, The Education of a Woman, p. 255.
8 “The fact that [Alice] didn’t want to work full-time and refused to come to meetings was fine,” Steinem thought. Evelyn C. White, Alice Walker: A Life (W. W. Norton, 2004), pp. 265, 266.
9 Adrienne Rich, quoted in Alexis De Veaux, Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde (W. W. Norton, 2004), p. 133. The money was earmarked for the New York advocacy group Sisterhood of Black Single Mothers. In fact, the actual award was divided between Rich and Allen Ginsberg, but, as Walker explained, “I think she felt unable to accept anything for herself in the context of our exclusion” (White, Alice Walker, p. 271).
10 Hilary Holladay, The Power of Adrienne Rich (Doubleday, 2020), pp. 256, 257.
11 The essay was reprinted in Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1974; repr., Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), pp. 231–43, at 232, 235.
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