On 7/5/06 2:33 AM, "Edmund Hardy" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Agreed - & history as violence is always intersecting other fields - I think
> at least one of Greer's apparent directions in her arguments on poetry does
> come parallel with specific expository writings by Howe, and by writers on
> Howe -
I'd be incredibly surprised if Greer's argument had anything to do with
Howe's aesthetic. Though of course I could be very wrong.
I found the context of her original remark:
"Literature is a masculinist invention; poetry in particular is a
spectacular form of male display. Women have to adapt a language which
objectifies them absolutely to become the speakers, the verbal aggressors;
what they too often do is exhibit themselves within an inappropriate
rhetoric, only to find themselves merchandised in the most degrading way,
until, that is, they are too old to be touted as the muse incarnate who
lisped in numbers before she reached enough understanding to recoil from the
use that was being made of her. The "respect and attention they deserve" is
just that, not less as has historically been the case, but not more either.
The sort of triumphalism that sees Aphra Behn's desperate career as a
success story and that attributes the ideas present in the texts she
translated as her own inventions is unfair to her and, by the by,
academically indefensible."
Howe is in the same ballpark: "The impossible question posed in every
crevice of this work is: How to make a culture that does not demand
subjugation when "Culture representing form and order will always demand
sacrifice and subjugation of one group by another" [MED, p. 93).
The page is not neutral. Not blank, and not neutral. It is a territory."
But it seems to me that Greer is implicitly addressing and critiquing a
different kind of feminism to that Howe (in my reading at least) is
invoking. I'd suggest Ruth Padel, Carol Ann Duffy etc as names to kick
around here. In making that critique I'd suggest (sticking my neck out but
it's my guess that is more or less what Greer is doing, given that "women
have to...") she elides such practises as Howe's entirely. More, she is
almost saying that there is no tradition in which they might exist, that
women have (and have had) no choice but to objectify themselves in those
masculinist terms. I think that's rubbish. And it depends on leaving
significant women poets out of the argument in order to sustain it, from
Chrstine de Pisan and Sor Juana de la Cruz on.
Best
A
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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