At 9:21 AM -0700 5/5/03, Mark Weiss wrote:
>I'm really talking about what I'm guessing is the psychological phenomenon
>behind the muse and skipping the historical, which is interesting but
>largely no longer operative. I also have never called on one, but a female
>figure personifying longing (in my case with traceable roots) did appear
>during one stretch of years in my work. Does something similar never happen
>to women? Or to gay men? I'm thinking of O'Hara's great poem "In Memory of
>My Feelings":  "My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent / and
>carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets."

One fruitful way of thinking about it might be Bakhtin's idea of the
"ideal interlocutor" (whom he cites as perhaps god, or some other
imagined ideal reader addressed in works).  It's usefully ungendered.

But you are changing the subject: you say things like "It's
inconceivable that any respectable US universities would discourage
gay studies" and in reply to Chris' pointing out that a major
university refused to endow a chair of gay studies because of its
"narrow focus" you splutter and say how can they be biased? they
publish books on gay studies; you poopoo the idea of systemic or
structural biases which operate specifically against women, citing a
number of examples, which are refuted, and then say, oh, but I wasn't
talking about that anyway, but something else.

I wasn't arguing anything so coarse as your paraphrases
("conspiracies against women" &c).  Nor was I saying that unjust
obscurity does not happen to men.  But the existence of a systemic,
endemic historical bias against women poets seems to me unremarkably
obvious and has been in the past decades very thoroughly documented,
and I wonder that you find it so unbelievable; and your assertion
that people like Mary Shelley and HD had no trouble with such issues
(they did) makes me question seriously whether you could perceive any
such patterns now.

The "mechanism" you are asking for evidence for is a million subtle
mechanisms, far from a single crude conspiracy.  I was talking about
one of them, the gendering of a historically specific concept of
creativity in a way which makes creativity for a woman sterile, and
therefore impossible. This started as a discussion about the Muse and
my observation that the Muse is part of a gendered construction which
has been around for a few centuries, and which is one of the ideas
that fenced women out of writing.  I _wasn't_ saying that things
haven't changed (nor was I saying that things aren't complex): I
_was_ saying that many of those constructions are still extant
(otherwise we might not be arguing about the Muse) and in conjunction
with a reactive swing against the very prominence of women that you
are citing, I find it troubling.    Because we seem to be entering
reactionary times.  And the fact that you don't believe such
attitudes are around and finding public space doesn't mean that they
are not present.  I mentioned one myself: a recent hubbub about the
"feminisation" of Australian literature representing a corruption of
literary integrity.  That has been happening _this year_.

Rukeyser remains stubbornly and individually herself, to her
detriment (her first book was 1935, if that makes any difference).
No, she would appeal to neither the agendas of Vendler (too left
wing) nor Perloff (too conservative in her poetics).  I am not sure
whether that proves anything. Why does she have to be promoted by
women in order to be visible?  Why are women presumed to have the
same hegemonic priorities?  Why wouldn't men equally embrace her
work, as they might embrace say Langston Hughes?  Why is she
considered to be merely of "special interest" (the "narrow field" of
"women's studies", perhaps?  I think her work suffers in that
particular corral).

The difficulty is and has always been twofold: how to highlight these
actual systemic biases in order to permit the work to exist in more
interesting relationships with the rest of the culture, without
creating a further excuse for its dismissal as a marginal part of
literature.  I remember years ago seeing two (male) Australian
anthologists interviewed on tv; they talked about "special interest"
groups like "women" and "aborigines".  Is that valuable notice?  I
would ideally like my poetry just to be read as poetry, but my sex
gets in the way all the time, whether I draw attention to it or not
(I've tried both tactics and both are equally useless).  I am,
whether I choose to embrace it or not, a "woman writer" in a way that
a man is never a "man writer".  (Such a ridiculous phrase, no?)
Whether or not I choose to write about specifically female experience
(sometimes I do, sometimes I don't) it is filtered through my "woman"
status: I have been interested for example by how the less "feminine"
poems often get filtered out of discussions of my work.

At 6:37 PM +0100 5/5/03, Douglas Clark wrote:
>What Chodorow, based on object relations, says is that men have one
>basic relation with their mothers whereas women have relations both with
>father and mother at the levels that matter. So women can opt out of one
>relationship and transfer to another in the way that men cant. So me would
>appear to be limited to a Muse whereas women are not.

Douglas, I'm not familiar with Chodorow, but I find this apparent
erasure of the father out of the male psyche simply unbelievable.
What does she mean?  That fathering doesn't count or matter (or only
to girls)?  That a father, absent or otherwise, is not formative to a
boy's development?  If it matters to girls, it matters to boys.  Of
course there may be differences in _how_ it matters.  But it seems to
me that would vary enormously from child to child.

Best

A
--


Alison Croggon
Editor
Masthead Online
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/

Home page
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