Feminine Is A 4-Letter Word

Thinking About Women, by Mary Ellmann.

Harcourt, Brace & World, 240 pp., $4.95

"I was surprised at all the Cliffies who came up to me and commented on my article."

"Don't you think Cliffies read the Crimson?"

"Yes, but I thought it was too dry for them." --Crimson editor

PERHAPS it started when you were ten years old and you lost a fight with the kid up the block for the first time. You ran home bleeding and crying to your mother and she patched your wounds and told you, "You can't fight with boys, dear. They're stronger than you are." And she was right. Boys not only had strength you could never match, they had all the paraphernalia of strength: sweat socks, Erector sets, laundry bags full of shoulder pads, aircraft carrier models, framed photos of The Varsity, dirty books, baseball cards and pup tents, while you got the leftovers: paper dolls, hair curlers, bedmaking, frilly underwear, dishwashing, piano lessons, pajama parties. As you grew older, things got more confusing: boys went on fishing trips with their fathers, you were taken shopping by your mother; boys covered themselves with grease, you learned to pick out the right color hair ribbon; boys stayed out late at night, you babysat; if you were sent to a sexually segregated school, you found that yours had fewer labs and playing fields than theirs; boys could go alone to movies, parties, dances, baseball games, restaurants, any public assemblage, you had to go in groups or be escorted as a Date; and all this, which had nothing to do with strength, had no more comprehensible rationale than the last resort of harrassed parents (roughly equivalent to "because I said so," in turn equivalent to "history ordains it," signifying that the parents, helpess to transcend their role as evolutionary functionaries, are merely passing on the lessons of the collective past and present)--"because you're a girl." For the most unfortunate, there were parents like this one:

He loved his daughters very much...but they were girls and he sometimes felt that because they loved him, he could not make a serious mistake with them. If he did something wrong, they being women would grow up around the mistake and somehow convert it to knowledge. But his sons! He had the feeling that because they were men, their egos were more fragile--a serious error might hurt them forever.   --Norman Mailer, Armies of the Night

It was rough, in a way. Only in a way, because you weren't really aware of it. You and everyone else around you were thoroughly immersed in the process; you were feeding on it; you could never quite pull yourself out and conceptualize what after all was bigger than you. Only when it was too late, when you were 16 or 17 or 18, when your mind was becoming aware of itself, did you begin to realize that men were faster runners, louder speakers, and more credible human beings, and that it was They ("They" being not so much men as the spokesmen of the general view), not you, who were proclaiming what you were.

MARY ELLMANN, a free-lance writer and critic married to the distinguished Joyce scholar Richard Ellmann, has written about the sexual analogies that permeate everyone's thinking, much to our tedium. Loosely constructed, confused, unfortunately titled, the book still manages to amuse as it meanders through various conceptions of femininity and their relationship to criticism and fiction.

Mrs. Ellmann's chief preoccupation is the way They impose sexual forms and opinions on the external world. Amidst multiple contradictions one principle stands firm: masculinity is good, femininity is bad. Beyond the usual visual analogies--curves and receptacles are womblike; steeples, shoes, and cylinders are phallic--lie physiological comparisons. They equate woman's mind with "her most definitive organ," according to Norman Mailer (one of Them), and just as the womb is conservative, nutritive, claustrophobic, feminine influence is antithetical to energy and thought. "Let's get out of here," a Harvard student said to a girl he visited in her dorm. "The smell of women paralyzes me."

Many of these analogies are based on wishful thinking, the author says:

An immobility is attributed to the entire female constitution by analogy with the supposed immobility of the ovum.... In actuality, each month the ovum undertakes an extraordinary expedition,...an unseen equivalent of going down the Mississippi on a raft or over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Ordinarily too, the ovum travels singly, like Lewis or Clark, in the kind of existential loneliness which Norman Mailer usually admires. One might say that the activity of ova involves a daring and independence absent, in fact, from the activity of spermatozoa, which move in jostling masses, swarming out on signal like a crowd of commuters from the 5:15. The physiological contrast of apathy and enthusiasm might reasonably shift to one of individualism and conformity.

If women were making the contrasts.

Freud agreed that the psychoanalytic idea that there are feminine and masculine qualities in both men and women was painful for his listeners to acknowledge, Mrs. Ellmann argues. The pain is still with us, as an interview with Donovan in a recent issue of the New York Times shows:

"To be gentle is to be feminine," he quoted the general view.

"I've been called homosexual," he said, adding: "But things are getting better. Last week I was called bisexual."

At the same time, They can accept feminine ideals--gentleness, passivity, endurance--if actual femininity is rejected. In Bernard Malamud's The Fixer, the hero partakes of the heroic aspects of femininity but is revolted by actual femininity to the point of refusing sexual intercourse. Conversely, They revile women for manifesting masculine qualities, aggression in particular. Women's books are reviewed as if they were women--criticized for being "shrill," praised for being "not shrill." Critics call Marianne Moore "the best women poet in America." Why not the best blue-eyed poet? In the Nov. 1 issue of Time Magazine (one of Their favorite mouthpieces), a group of books by women are reviewed in these terms: "mere female savagery," "hysterical," "measuring feminine eye," "becoming feminine pique over fit," "gruesome little stories," "all the women's-fiction cliches," etc., etc.

ON THE MOST general level, They use women and sexuality to symbolize whatever man is not, Mrs. Ellmann notes. Her idea is only partly developed, but its implications are extensive. Behind it lies Their ethic of the male writer. In art, the feminine is everything external to the artist--the incoherence and incomprehensibility of Nature. The writer must struggle against this all-encompassing enmity. Sexual capacity is equated with the capacity to write, and woman is what resists both.

This idea comes out in fiction, where men are impotent and women are insatiable. In The Graduate, Benjamin must undergo ordeal by orgasm before he can act decisively; in Bonnie and Clyde, the woman takes bank robbery and murder in her stride while the man battles paralysis (this is not to say that Bonnie is crudely portrayed). Man must prove himself against the external and feminine. The hero of Malraux's La Voie Royale is driven to conquer nameless woman after nameless woman. The vision of writing that emerges from all this is somewhat masturbatory--the emphasis is not on understanding or even communication but on the need to dominate an outside implacability, like sleeping with a whore. Here again is Norman Mailer in Armies of the Night:

Without guilt, sex was meaningless. One advanced into sex against one's sense of guilt, and each time guilt was successfully defied, one had learned a little more about the contractual relation of one's own existence to the unheard thunders of the deep--each time guilt herded one back with its authority, some primitive awe--hence some creative clue to the rages of the deep--was left to brood about. Onanism and homosexuality were not, to Mailer, light vices--to him it sometimes seemed that much of life and most of society were designed precisely to drive men deep into onanism and homosexuality; one defied such a fate by sweeping up the psychic profit which derived from the existential assertion of yourself--which was a way of saying that nobody was born a man; you earned manhood provided you were good enough; bold enough.

Here is sex, closely linked to creativity, as a solitary descent into an abyss; here is sex as a warlike self-assertion "against much of life and most of society"; here is an onanistic vision of sex as defiance of onanism.

HERE ALSO is a key notion put forward by Mrs. Ellmann when she turns from Their analogies to Their view of women themselves. This is the idea that men must struggle to achieve manhood, they must prove themselves in all sorts of tests, while women are women and must transcend the failings of their sex to attain their ideal condition. Manhood is a title conferred; womanhood is a judgment to be escaped. They say "he's a man" in praise of any manifestation of worth; the equivalent for women is "she's a real person." "She's a woman" is said in reference to sexual performance.

Beneath this is Their unfailing tendency to see Woman lurking behind every individual and to define Woman exclusively as a sexual being. They don't like women to deviate from preconception, and when women do threaten to leap the boundaries their achievements are either discounted or attributed to some mysterious quality of femininity. At one point Mrs. Ellmann quotes an article on Sylvia Plath:

Owen that 'all a poet can do today is to warn.' But being a woman, her warning is more shrill, penetrating, visionary than Owen's. Owen's came out of the particular circumstances of the trenches, and there is nothing to make us think that if he had not been on the Western Front ... he would not have warned anyone about anything at all. He would have been a nice chap and a quiet poet. With Sylvia Plath, her femininity is that her hysteria comes completely out of herself.

Sylvia Plath would have agreed with Wilfred

The absurdity of assuming that since Sylvia Plath is a woman, her dislocation has no relation to reality while Wilfred Owen's is purely a response to reality goes unnoticed.

With individual considerations dispensed of, the remaining abstraction is either idealized or debased. Women are glowingly told that their lack of ordinary creativity is made up for and surpassed by the creativity of bearing a child. Here again They confuse individual personal worth with sexual function and voluntary, conscious achievement with involuntary, passive achievement. At the same time, women as sexual objects are the butt of endless jokes; getting pregnant is getting knocked up. One of the most ingenious of Their numberless stereotypes is the belief that women can be salvaged from piety, ambition, bad temper, nervousness, sadness, fear, worry, pedantry, distressing political beliefs, hysteria, pretentiousness or aggression by a good session in bed.

*****

IT IS OBVIOUS that the villain of the story is They. Mrs. Ellmann does a good job of pinning down the general view of femininity; she even manages to grind her axe gently. But instead of explaining why the view exists and how it affects real women she trails off in feeble optimism. She argues that writing and opinions are moving toward a mode of indecision, a non-judging, antiabsolutist, amoral, particularized view of life in which no form the species can take is not somehow acceptable and in which the artist's aim is to become rather than to judge the other. The mode of Joyce, Sartre, Godard, drugtakers and anarchists, it excludes sexual stereotyping and indeed is a feminine mode in that it shuns ethical sweep for the underside of life that women have always been relegated to. (In contrast is the masculine, decisive mode of someone like Mailer, who emphasizes the battle of the ego with reality, the importance of choice, of change, of self-assertion, of evaluation coupled with insistent sexual discrimination.)

Presumably, though Mrs. Ellmann stops here, when the imagination of the multitude seizes on this world view women's minds will be finally liberated. But even overlooking the fragility of this vision of a non-struggling, non-judging society, problems arise. Everyone can't groove passively on the complexity of reality; someone will have to make decisions and run things--and it is then that we will have women factory managers and women Presidents; men's minds will function on higher levels.

More realistically, evidence shows that women will never shake off their chains. Feminism has won its battles, and except for a deranged member of the Society for Cutting Up Men shooting Andy Warhol and demonstrators at the Miss America pageant burning girdles and false eyelashes, there is no neo-feminist agitation against male supremacy. Women remain as charmingly or dully subjugated or as neurotically anguished as ever. Indeed, most are well satisfied with their lot; their freedom is always increasing and no one is really sure that Y-chromosome doesn't give the male mind all sorts of innate superiority.

But there is more to women's conservatism than biology. Hegelians could find a rewarding case study of a dialectical process in women's identity crises. If people are known by their actions, women (thesis), whose lives for the most part are not showcases for decisive action, are unknowable. The opinion-makers fill the gap with preconception and stereotype (antithesis), and the idea takes on a life of its own as women struggle to accommodate it. They may be warped (synthesis) in the attempt to reconcile potential with the roles assigned, but then a perfect circle is formed, and curves are feminine.