18. Kate
Millett1
[1. The only abbreviation for Millett citations is: SX: Sexual
Politics (1978 [1970])]
Kate Millett is a critic
who, like Fiedler, reads literature from a cultural perspective and culture from
a literary one. 2 [2. The parallels between Millett and
Fiedler are numerous. Both draw a link between sex and violence, or between love
and death. Both portray the sexual division as a war between social classes.
Both recognize sentimentality as a pretext for skirting sexual issues and
disguising the problems of marriage and family. Both perceive the image of the
American male as a boy. And both detect the tactic of white males to project
their own sadist fantasies onto dark-skinned races as a pretext for exploitation
or warfare.] Yet instead of accepting culture as the given backdrop for art, she
advocates sweeping changes in social coding, and ultimately the creation of a
new culture. Literature in turn becomes the backdrop for her program, a
documentation of the problems and conflicts we must overcome.
Within this distribution
of interests, she advocates “a criticism which takes into account the larger
cultural context in which literature is conceived and produced” (SX xiv).
“Literary criticism” is “capable of seizing upon the larger insights which
literature affords into the life it describes or interprets or even distorts.”
However, since “literary history is too limited in scope to do this,” and
“aesthetic” “criticism” such as “New Criticism” never wished to do
so,” Millett's “essay composed of equal parts of literary and cultural
criticism, is something of an anomaly, a hybrid,” and a “hypothetical,”
“tentative” enterprise (SX xiiif). Her chief innovations lie in her special
perspective and her use of exceptionally comprehensive reading to put in
question the dominant ideologies not just of literature, but of psychoanalysis,
sociology, anthropology, and political science.
Her initiative
focuses on “the role which concepts of power and domination play in some
contemporary literary descriptions of sexual activity” (SX xiii). Like our
other critics, she emphasizes the centrality of her concern. She concurs with
Genet that “sexuality” is “the fundamental human connection” and “the
nuclear model of all more elaborated constructs” (SX 27). She holds
“coitus” to be “set so deeply within the larger context of human activity
that it serves as a charged microcosm of the variety of attitudes and values to
which culture subscribes” (SX 11). Engels” (1884) conjecture was “probably
true” that “the origin of property began in the subjection and ownership of
women” (SX 157, 155).
Such views have the
pessimistic corollary that “sexuality” acts as “the very prototype of
institutionalised inequality” (SX 27). “Sexual caste supersedes all other
forms of inegalitarianism: racial, political, or economic.” In historical
evolution, “sexual dominance became the keystone to the total structure of
human injustice” (SX 170). John Stuart Mill (1869) “discovered” “in
sexual super- and subordination” “the psychological foundations of other
species of oppression” (SX 145f). Indeed, “sex” is “the most pernicious
of our systems of oppression” and “the cage in which all others are
enclosed” (SX 30).
Millett defines
“politics” as “a set of stratagems designed to maintain a system” (SX
31). “Sexual politics obtains consent through the “socialization” of both
sexes to basic patriarchal politics with regard to” “temperament, role, and
status” (SX 35). In this configuration, “temperament” is “the
psychological” “component,” “role” “the sociological,” and
“status” “the political,” although they “form a chain” of
“interdependence” (SX 35f). “Temperament” “forms the human personality
along stereotyped lines” of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’’’ (SX 35).
“Role” “decrees” an “elaborate code of conduct, gesture and attitude
for each sex.” “Status” solicits “a pervasive assent to the prejudice of
male superiority.”
“Patriarchy” is
the major “institution perpetuated by” “political” “techniques of
control” (SX 31). “To recognize its basis in patriarchy,” wherein “the
relationship between sexes is essentially political,” is “the most pertinent
and fundamental consideration one can bestow upon our culture”; “no other
system has ever exercised such complete control over its subjects” (SX 90,
378, 44). Its “chief institution is the family,” which “mediates between
the individual and the social structure” and “effects control and conformity
where political and other authorities are insufficient” (SX 45) (cf. Goode
1964). “The patriarchal family” has a “feudal character,” “granting
the father nearly total ownership over wife or wives and children” (SX 46).
The “family” is expected to “socialize the young” into “patriarchal
ideology's prescribed attitudes” (SX 48). “The patriarchal mind” is
distinguished by the way it “equates” “human affection and reproduction
with slavish subordination, excessive or accidental progeny, and servile
affection,” and “cannot separate the liberation of women from racial
extinction and the death of love” (SX 249).
Millett's assessment of
the status quo is undeniably grim. “Delusions about sex foster delusions of
power, and both depend on the reification of woman” (SX 28). In “our
society,” where “sexism may be more endemic than racism,” “the sexual
politic” can engender a “hopeless mess,” a “sick delirium of power and
violence” (SX 54, 28, 30). The “belief that sexuality is incompatible with
social effort and dedication” and “antithetical to collective” or
“cultural achievement” is not found only in contemporary Western society; it
is an “ancient error” persisting in Freud and even in “the revolutionary
mentality” of the Soviet Union, where “new liberties” were “gradually
eroded” via a “humanistic justification of traditional strictures” (SX
240f, 243). The greatest loser is always the “woman,” who is “denied
sexual freedom and the biological control over her body through the cult of
virginity, the double standard,” and “the prescription against abortion”
or “contraception” (SX 76). In “Arnerica,” “young women neglect
contraception, unconsciously willing pregnancy” as “punishment” (SX 244).
Sexual politics has
fragmented modern culture. “Because of our social circumstances, male and
female are really two cultures, and their life experiences are utterly
different” (SX 42). “Under the aegis” of
“the categories ‘Masculine’ and ‘feminine’,” “each
personality becomes little more, and often less, than half of its human
potential” (SX 44). “In patriarchy, the function of norm is unthinkingly
delegated to the male,” such that “the female is ‘other’ or ‘alien’
and inspires fear” (SX 43, 65). “The basic division of temperamental
traits” is “along the lines of “aggression is male” and “passivity is
female,” while “all other traits” are “aligned to correspond” (SX 43).
Typically, “masculine” gets associated with “strength,”
“intelligence,” “force, and efficacy,” along with “cruelty,
indifference, egotism, and property”; “feminine” gets associated with
“weakness,” “ignorance, docility, “virtue,” and ineffectuality,”
along with “ravished” and “subjugated” (SX 476, 3 5, 26). “The limited
role” “arrests” “the female at the level of biological experience” and
“animal activity,” where “any display of serious intelligence” is “out
of place” (SX 35, 81; cf. SX 283). Through a characteristic “logical
inconsistency,” “feminine passivity is reasoned from anatomy, but masculine
activity is reasoned from history and technology” (SX 304).
Millett clarifies the
confusion by distinguishing “sex” from “gender”: “sex is biological,
gender psychological, and therefore cultural” (SX 41) (cf. Stoller, 1968).
“In terms of masculine and feminine, and in contradistinction to male and
female,” “there is no differentiation between the sexes at birth”;
“psychosexual personality is therefore post-natal and learned,” and
“gender” may appear, according to Money (1965: 13), “with the
establishment of a native language” (SX 410 (a contingency neither Holland nor
Bleich brings into focus). “Removed from their contexts of social behaviour,”
“the words ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ thus “mean nothing at all and
might well be replaced with what is biologically of naturally verifiable -- male
and female” (SX 271).3 [3 Most of the time, Millett is
careful to follow this advice. However, “male” and “female” do at times
turn up where “masculine” and “feminine” should go (SX 28f, 51, 59, 122,
264, 402). The reverse displacement is much rarer (SX 262, 402).] Millett
proposes a “reassessment” of which traits are “desirable”:
“violence” and “passivity” might be cast off as “useless in either
sex,” while “efficiency, intellectuality,” “tenderness, and
consideration” might be “recommended” for “both sexes” (SX 86).
The social position of
women is in an equally discouraging state. On the one hand, “the female has
fewer permanent class associations than does the male”;
"economic dependency
renders her affiliations with any class” “tangential, vicarious, and
temporary” (SX 52). Treated as “unpaid domestics” without “many of the
interests and benefits any class may offer its male members,” women
“have less of an investment in the class system” (SX 52f)
On the other hand, some
variations among classes deserve notice. “In the lower social strata, the male
is more likely to claim authority on the strength of his sex rank alone,” the
extreme form being “'utmost habitual excesses of bodily violence toward the
unhappy wife” noted by Mill (SX 50, 141; cf. SX 172). Also, “the
unpropertied classes make practical use of women, while the propertied convert
her into a decorative or aesthetic object with only limited uses,” as pointed
out by Engels (SX 171).4 [4. Because “inherited property is
germane to the foundations of patriarchal monogamy,” Millett suggests that
“patriarchy is less strongly entrenched economically among the dispossessed”
(SX 171f), even though she singles out the “lower classes” as assertively
male and more violent (SX 50, 141f, 172). The picture is further complicated if
“middle-class women” who take on “employment are failing a step below the
class of their birth” (SX 205).] Thorstein Veblen (1899) argues that “the
bourgeois class displays its wealth” by granting “idleness and expensive
vanities” to “its women” (SX 102). Women were distracted away from
“solidarity” and from the “struggle for personal fulfilment or
liberation” by a “dream” of “gilded voluptuousness” attainable through
“sexual patronization of the male.” Genuine “economic independence,” in
contrast, is “perceived to be a direct threat to male authority” (SX 122).
Following Wirth (1945),
Millett defines “minorities” in terms of “status,” not “numerical
size”; they are “singled out” for “differential and unequal
treatment”“ (SX 77). She then draws analogies between the status of women
and that of other minorities, particularly racial ones. 5 [5
In older legal systems, women were “placed in the same class” with
“lunatics or idiots”; or they were minors like “children” (SX 94, 123).
Allowing some women to attain the “characteristic virtues of masculinity”
is likened to “conceding an exceptional negro or peasant or native” (SX
296).] In analysing a study of sexual roles, she remarks: “Were one to
substitute white and black for male and female, one would have a perfect
picture” of “a racist society” (SX 326). “Being born female in a
masculine-dominated culture” matches “the traumatizing circumstance of
being born black in a white racist society” (SX 255). Though women may now
“compete” as “labour” with “racial minorities,” “feminists once
combated slavery” as “active and dedicated abolitionists,” and later
“were inspired” by “black protest” during the “Civil Rights”
movement (SX 56, 112, 506). This trend was “logical” not merely in view of
their “service ethic,” but also in view of the “frequent parallels”
(detected by Mill and Engels) between the “bondage” of women and “slavery
or serfdom” (SX 112, 128, 175). For Engels, “the disguised domestic slavery
of women” makes “the man” “the bourgeois,” and “the woman” “the
proletariat” (SX 177).
The
consequences Millett draws from this state of affairs are indeed radical. The
programs of action advocated by our other critics mainly concern reshaping the
uses of literature. Millett, however, envisions for cultural criticism a vastly
larger goal: a “sexual revolution” leading to “a system of political,
economic, and social equality between the sexes” and “bringing us all a
great deal closer to humanity” (SX 103, 507). It is “mandatory that we
develop a more relevant psychology and philosophy of power relationships”
among “races, castes, classes, and sexes” (SX 32). We must relieve the
“continuous” “oppression” of “groups” with “no representation”
in “recognized political structures” (SX 32). “Revolutionary theorists”
can promote “emancipation” only if they “move beyond agitation to provide
an analysis of the past and a new model for the future” (SX 152).
“Chernyshevsky, Mill, Engels, Bebel, and Veblen” have achieved this --
especially Engels, who cast aside “fatalistic or “biological” versions of
the origin of human institutions” and advanced “equitable and feasible
recommendations for the general conduct of sexuality in a revolutionary
society” (SX 152, 155, 176).
Major objectives of the
“revolution” include: “an end of traditional sexual inhibitions and
taboos”6 [6 Particularly singled out are “taboos” that
“threaten patriarchal, monogamous marriage: homosexuality, illegitimacy,
adolescent, pre- and extra-marital sexuality” (SX 86).]; “a permissive
single standard of sexual freedom” “uncorrupted by the crass and
exploitative economic bases of traditional sexual alliances”; “an end” to
“patriarchy” and “the ideology of male supremacy”; “an integration of
the separated sexual subcultures,” plus “an assimilation” of “previously
segregated human experience”; and “an end of the present chattel status and
denial of rights to minors” (SX 86). Further objectives are to relieve “the
problem of overpopulation” and to entrust “the care and education of
children” to “the best trained practitioners” (SX 87, 178; cf. SX 223).
Millett stresses that
“the arena of sexual revolution is within human consciousness even more”
than in “human institutions” (SX 88). The “social change involved” is
“a matter of altered consciousness, the exposure and elimination of social and
psychological realities underlining political and cultural structures” (SX
506). Though “to be free” should be “the ambition of every conscious young
woman in the world,” the “consciousness” of the current “majority”
must be “raised” before “liberating radical solutions” can be
“contemplated” (SX 204, 53). “The emergence of a positive collective
identity” must “precede revolutionary awareness” (SX 496).7
[7. The same argument is made more elaborately by Jameson, for whom the
“achieved Utopian or classless society” brings “the ultimate concrete
collective life” (PU 291).]
As “a dependency
class who live on surplus,” women have so far a “marginal life” that
“frequently renders them conservative” (SX 53). Besides, “oppression
creates a psychology in the oppressed,” who are “corrupted” by “how
deeply they envy and admire their masters,” and are “polluted by their
ideals and values”; “even their attitude toward themselves is dictated by
those who own them” (SX 490). Thanks to “the totality of their
conditioning,” “many women do not recognize themselves as discriminated” (SX
78). Although Millett sees a “way out” --
“to rebel and be broken,
stigmatized, and cured”
--
she owns that “to be a rebel is not to be a
revolutionary”; it may be just “a way of spinning one's wheels deeper in the
sand” or of inviting an “even greater reaction” (SX 329, 488, 88).
In Millett's view, “the
sexual revolution” failed in the past because it “left the socialization
processes of temperament and role differentiation intact” and
“insufficiently affected” “patriarchal marriage and the family” (SX
250). “Systems of oppression will continue to function simply by virtue of
their logical and emotional mandate in the primary human situation” (SX 29).
“Legislative reform” “represents” “superficial change” rather than
“sweeping radical changes in society” (SX 119).8 [8.
Millett attaches small importance to suffrage for women: it did not “challenge
patriarchy at a sufficiently deep and radical level,” and women were still
denied “candidacy or election to office” (SX 118, 116). However,
“franchise” “mobilized the greatest consciousness and effort” in “the
sexual revolution” (SX 117).]
Moreover, a
“counterrevolution” or “reaction” set in, and “the great impetus of
the sexual revolution was brought to a halt” (SX 221). Opponents of
“feminism” would vilify it as a plot to “end” “home, family, and
motherhood” and as an “ally of nihilism, anarchy, anti-Semitism, Communism,
racism” (SX 294, 292) “ even though anti-feminist outlooks often combine
with such ideologies, especially the anti-Semitism and racism fostered by
fascism (cf. SX 53f, 213, 235, 237, 389ff, 455f).
Another
counterrevolutionary force was the thesis in psychoanalysis and social science
that patriarchal society and the oppression of women are natural and fundamental
states of human life. 9 [9. Literary authors also adapted some
version of science amenable to their purposes. Hardy “fancied be was following
scientific law in awarding his characters instincts” and “hereditary
traits” (SX 185). Lawrence made both explicit and implicit use of Freud (SX
338, 345ff, 349, 353, 407).] Research on social and sexual issues is determined
by “the extent to which” “scientific interest” is “so deeply affected
by the culture” (SX 313). “Science” often “assumes” “psycho-social
distinctions to rest upon biological differences between the sexes, so that
culture” merely “cooperates with nature” (SX 36; cf. SX 38, 264, 316). The
“formula” “anatomy is destiny” then makes “sexual status, role, and
temperament” into “fixed entities” (SX 268, 286, 288, 300). Millett
observes that “social scientists” are “often remarkably gullible” toward
“physiological evidence” (SX 305) (though I find it hardly “remarkable”
in view of her exposé of the vested interests of patriarchal institutions).
“Biological difference” can be deployed to “explain and rationalize” the
“inferior status” of “an oppressed group” by insisting that “the
biological factor is really the rock bottom” (SX 320. 266, 309).10
[10. The phrase is Freud's, duly echoed by Erik Erikson, who however “pleaded
that the preordained historical subordination of women be abridged by a gallant
concession to maternal interest” (SX 266, 309, 300).]
Millett retorts:
“Today,” “the best medical research” shows “sexual stereotypes have no
bases in biology” (SX 36). “The sexes are inherently alike, save
reproductive systems, secondary sexual characteristics, orgasmic capacity, and
genetic and morphological structure” (SX 131). In fact, these real differences
lend women a superior rather than inferior status: according to “all the best
scientific evidence,” “the female possesses” “a far greater capacity for
sexuality than the male,” as measured by the “frequency of coitus” and
“orgasm” (SX 164) (cf. Masters & Johnson,1961). Moreover, the
“clitoris” of the female is “the only human organ specific to sexuality
and pleasure” (SX 166) (the real reason, I suspect, why Freud prescribed
“the elimination of clitoral sexuality,” SX 262 --- the converse of “penis
envy”). And “recent embryological research leads to the conclusion that the
female is the race type”: “all embryos begin as girls” (SX 281).
The “patriarchal
myth” about the “greater sexual capacity in the male” was merely a device
to “sanction the double standard” whereby “society” “punishes the
promiscuity in women it does not think to punish in men” (SX 167, 172).11
[11. This definition fits most uses of the term “double standard” in
Millett's book (SX 79, 167, 203, 267, 294, 306). A related yet distinct sense --
needed to fabricate a group of promiscuous women -- splits the woman in the
“socio-sexual division” of “wife and whore” (SX 125; cf. SX 52, 99, 211,
236, 360). Some passages don't clarify which is meant (SX 9, 86, 222, 452). On
one occasion, the reference is the license of homosexuality for men, but not for
women (SX 374).]
Arguments based on
“superior physical strength” are scarcely compelling, if “civilization”
“substitutes other methods” of power, such as “technic, weaponry,
knowledge”; and “physical exertion” is “generally a class factor,” not
a biological one (SX 37; cf. SX 153).12 [This argument is
dubious in view of Millet’s thematic references to violence in
sources that
are
both social (J.S.
Mill) and psychological (Marie Bonaparte) (SX 141, 290). She owns that
“control in patriarchal society” would be “inoperable unless it had the
rule of force to rely upon”; and that “patriarchal force relies on a form of
violence, particularly sexual in character, and realized most completely in the
act of rape” (SX 60f). She also thinks “violence” “likely to be the
leading counter-revolutionary symptom” (SX 502, cf. SX 29).] Similarly, such
factors as the “debilitating” effects of pregnancy in the female” and the
“discomfort” of “menstruation” are more “psychosomatic and cultural”
than “physiological” and “biological” (SX 153, 65). A
“rnasculine-dominated culture” “invests biological phenomena with symbolic
force” (SX 255).
In such ways, sociology
uses biology to rationalize current politics. Thus, “conservative social
science” “takes patriarchy” to be “the state of nature”, “the first
form of human grouping, the origin of all society, and therefore too fundamental
to merit discussion” (SX 78, 312). 13 [13. “Nature” is
deemed “an emotional term” enlisted to “justify class absolutism and
feudalism,” so that its use is “pre-eminently a political gesture” (SX
130, 132).]
“The leading school of
thought,” “functionalism,” “taking the situation at hand, measuring,
stating, and generalizing from it,” “neglects” the “causality” of
“learned behaviour” in “patriarchal society” (SX 311). “Sociology”
“pretends to take no stand,” “thereby avoiding the necessity to comment on
the invidious character of the relationship between the sex groups” (SX 328).
“ Yet by slow degrees of converting statistic to fact, function to
prescription, bias to biology,” research “comes to ratify and
rationalize.” “Its pose of objectivity”
“gains a special efficacy in reinforcing stereotypes.” “Description
inevitably becomes prescriptive,” and “conformity is strongly urged” (SX
311f). “Any woman who fails to conform” is issued a diagnosis of
“maladjustment” expressed in a “mediating terminology,” a “polite
intervening semantics,” and a “turgid cipher of language” intended to seem
“disinterested and beyond opinion” (SX 322ff). Millett's analysis attains a
deconstructive insight: a “study” whose results embody “the unconscious
sexual-political impressions of the social scientists” “is a study of
itself” (SX 327), reproducing what it claims to put in question.
Freud's account of the
psyche fit the pattern in “the emerging social sciences of psychology,
sociology, and anthropology” (SX 251). He too sought a “connection with the
more readily validated sciences of biology, mathematics, and medicine.” His
“fallacious interpretations of feminine character” were in fact “based
upon clinical observations of great validity” (SX 252f). Yet he took “his
patients’ symptoms” “as evidence” not “of a justified
dissatisfaction” with a “limiting” “society,” but of “an independent
and universal feminine tendency” (SX 253). He “appears to have made a major
and rather foolish confusion between biology and culture, anatomy and status”
(SX 265; cf. SX 268).
He “based his theory of
the psychology of women” on “the idea of penis envy (SX 254). “The child's
discovery of the anatomical differentiation between the sexes” was depicted as
a “cataclysm,” a “catastrophe” that “haunts a woman all through
life” (SX 254f, 259). In consequence, “Freud believed,” “women”
“accept the idea that to be born female is to be born “castrated” (SX 2
54; cf. SX 66; cf. Holland, DY 48). He had “no objective proof,” and
followed the “subjectivity” of his own “masculine” or “male
supremacist bias” (SX 257f). His “etiology of childhood experience”
enabled him to “bypass the more likely social hypothesis” on the origins of
inequality (SX 255). “As it would appear absurd to charge adult women” with
“literal jealousy of the organ,” he derived “personality” from
“childhood biography” (SX 259, 288). As a further step, “the female is
bested even at reproduction” when “childbirth” is depicted as “a hunt
for a male organ,” a “surrogate penis” (SX 262).
With such theses,
“Freud's work” served to “rationalize the invidious relationship between
the sexes, to ratify traditional roles, and to validate temperamental
differences” (SX 252). His “redaction of durable patriarchal assumptions”
was carried to greater lengths by his “popularizers” (SX 477, 252).
“Although the most unfortunate effects of vulgar Freudianism far exceeded the
intentions of Freud himself, its anti-feminism was not without foundation in
Freud's own work” (SX 252). Despite his reputation as “a prototype of the
liberal urge toward sexual freedom,” he became nothing less than “the
strongest individual counterrevolutionary force in the ideology of sexual
politics” (SX 2510. His “doctrine of penis envy” “came at the peak of
the sexual revolution” as a “withering,” “destructive weapon against
feminist insurgence,” “enabling masculine sentiment to take the offensive
again” (SX 267).
Thanks to Freudian
theory, it could henceforth “be said scientifically” that “the woman” is
“constitutionally unfitted for civilized life”; “she enjoys her oppression
and deserves it” (SX 285, 287). Her “intellectual inferiority” was
attributed to “the inhibition of thought necessitated by sexual suppression”
(SX 280). Her “physical vanity” and “charms” were a “late compensation
for original sexual inferiority” (SX 279). Her “demand for justice was a
modification of envy'“ (SX 264).Her “vaginal sensitivity” was an
“acceptation” of “immense masochistic beating fantasies” and a
“love” of “violence” (SX 290) (cf. Bonaparte 1953). “Psychoanalysis”
“forced woman to “adjust” to her position” and “accept her fate” by
seeking “fulfilment in passivity and masochism” (SX 277, 287).
“Summarizing these effects of long subordination,” “Freud” and “his
followers” “concluded they were inevitable” and “prescribed them as
health, realism, and maturity” (SX 279).
Millett's analysis again
assumes a deconstructive tendency when she uncovers psychoanalytic
presuppositions that undermine each other. Such conflicts are to be expected in
a framework which rationalizes contradictory social practices, as when
“patriarchy” “converts woman to a sexual object,” but does not
“encourage” her “to enjoy” “sexuality” (SX 168). Freud called upon
women to “sublimate” their sexuality and renounce such activities as
“clitoral” stimulation and “masturbation,” yet insisted that the woman
“has less sexual drive than the male,” and thus should have very “little
sexual instinct to sublimate” (SX 283, 262, 285). Or, Freud's
“prescription” of strong role differentiation “ignores” his own notion
of “bisexuality” as the common state of young children, the more so if women
who fail to conform are denounced for “backsliding” into bisexuality (SX
277; cf. SX 270, 272, 290). Related ambivalences figure in literary treatments
of male-female relations, as will be seen below.
“Myths” is Millett's
designation for the commonplaces of sexual politics underlying Western
civilization, a “system” whose “coercive agents” are both “actual”
and “mythical” (SX 28). Thus, the concept of “myth,” highly valued by
critics like Wellek and Warren, Frye, and Fiedler, gets a decidedly negative
rating here. Millett views “the myths of a political system” as “the
psychic basis of racial-sexual beliefs” (SX 404). According to her historical
scheme, the “taboo and mana” that “primitive society” utilizes to
“practice its misogyny” “evolve into explanatory myth,” which later
takes on “ethical” and “literary” forms (SX 71). In “the two leading
myths of Western culture,” namely “the classical tale of Pandora's box and
the Biblical story of the Fall,” “earlier mana concepts of feminine evil
have passed through a final literary phase to become highly influential ethical
justifications for things as they are.”
In this sense, “Myth”
is simply “a felicitous advance” in “propaganda,” “basing its
arguments on ethics or theories of origins.” “Sexual fallacy” engendered
the “old myths” of “sin and virtue,” guilt and innocence,”
“cowardice” and “heroism” (SX 30). Correspondingly, the invention of new
“myth” is a symptom of the “counterrevolution” (SX 29, 219, 251), such
as Lawrence's “fraudulent myth” of “the penis as deity” (SX 403; cf. SX
394f, 409). Millett bleakly concludes that “elements of myth” “have
enslaved consciousness in a coil of self-imposed absurdity” (SX 30).
More precisely, the
oppression of women is mythologized from two diverse standpoints. The one
sparked by “the myth of religion” with its “fallacy of sin” holds that
“the female is sexuality itself and therefore an evil” (SX 27f; cf. SX 72,
187). This “connection of women, sex, and sin constitutes the fundamental
pattern of western patriarchal thought” (SX 75). Such “archetypes”
“condemn the female through her sexuality and explain her position as her
well-deserved punishment for the primal sin” (SX 72). Even when our
“rationalist era” has “given up literal belief” in “the myth of the
Fall, it maintains its emotional assent intact” (SX 73). “This mythic
version of the female as the cause of human suffering” is “still the
foundation of sexual attitudes.” Women themselves participate when their
“personal insecurities” reflect “the gnawing suspicion” that the myth”
“might be true” (SX 79).
The other standpoint
mythologizes in the opposite direction, claiming to exalt the woman as a
superior being and as the conscience of the human race. The “general tendency
to attribute impossible virtues to women” helps to “obscure the patriarchal
character of Western culture” and “confines” women within a “conscribing
sphere of behaviour” (SX 51). “Chivalry” is both a “palliative to the
injustice of woman's social position” and “a technique for disguising it”
(SX 50). “Courtly and romantic” “love are “grants” “the male
concedes out of his total powers” in order to practice “emotional
manipulation” and to “obscure” the “burden of economic dependency” (SX
51). The Victorian view, typified by Ruskin (1865), that “the salvation of the
world” “should come from women” was “a concoction of nostalgic mirage,
regressive, infantile, or narcissistic sexuality, religious ambition, and
simplistic social panacea” (SX 151). A “perfect ethic” was created “for
a harsh business society”: the “female” was to “serve as the male's
conscience and live the life of goodness he found tedious”; “the male” can
“exploit other human beings” while his wife “replenishes his vanishing
humanity” (SX 132, 51; cf. SX 147).
The “doctrine of the
separate spheres,” also enunciated by Ruskin, included “war, money,
politics, and learning” under “male “duties,” leaving “philanthropy”
as a “female “duty”“ (SX 127, 146). Whatever “education” the woman
received “should prepare her” to “exercise some vague and remote good
influence” and “dispense a bit of charity” that is in reality
“humiliating to the poor” in “presupposing a benevolent master and
grateful serf mentality” -- a brand of “neo-feudalism” (SX 135, 148). All
such “ chivalrous blandishment” merely assisted “expediency, even
duplicity”: as Mill observed, “we are perpetually told that women are better
than men by those who are totally opposed to treating them as if they were as
good”“ (SX 149).
Though she assumes the
role of a literary critic (and formerly taught as an English professor), Millett
harbours complex misgivings about both literature and criticism. She detaches
herself from conventional critics, with their “tricks of the trade” and
their “dutiful round of adulation” (SX xiv). She suspects “literature”
and “scholarship” of contributing to the “intellectual origins” of
“the counterrevolutionary era” via “the wholesale defection of literary
and critical minds from rationality into the caverns of myth,” abetted for
instance by “T.S. Eliot's piety” and “the neo-orthodoxy” in “New
Criticism” (SX 251). She likes to point out how “critics are often
misled”; how they “fudge the meaning” by “mumbling vaguely that it is
all allegorical, symbolic”; how they “mask disagreement” by tendering
“sympathetic readings” or evasive suggestions that the artist is “a
“poor technician” (SX 342, 402, xiv).
To be sure, she does
employ some standard critical methods. She pays skilled attention to language
and usage, detecting “the pretense that “man” and “humanity” are
terms” for “both sexes,” or comparing the custom of “referring to”
“women workers as “girls”“ with that of “addressing” “black men as
‘boy’ right through senility” (SX 76, 352). She delivers close readings of
texts, showing for example how “Lawrence's images of genital topography”
signify “the supernatural origin of the penis,” “the miracle of an
erection,” and “the negation of the womb”; or how Henry Miller's thematics
“link” “sex” “with money” and present “sex as a war of attrition
waged upon economic grounds” (SX 409, 417, 419). Or, she demonstrates how the
“deep unfathomable free submission” Lawrence preaches for women is unmasked
by his own metaphors and imagery as a “plunge” into “sleep, even death”
(SX 392, 341, 372; cf. SX 400, 406, 416).
Yet these familiar
methods fulfil a special function in Millett's criticism. They provide
subsidiary tactics for her leading objective of uncovering the sexual politics
of authors and their works. Sometimes, the message can be readily extracted from
the more overt thematics of the work. In one respect, she especially resembles
Jameson, namely in uncovering “object lessons”.14 [14 This
habit is strongest in Jameson’s Political Unconscious (PU 164, 168f,
173f, 198, 217, 259). Millett's connection to Marx is mainly through the
latter's impact on Engels’ ideas about the family (SX 171, 175). She complains
that “Marxism” “has often neglected” “to notice how thoroughly the
oppressed are corrupted by their situation” (SX 490). Jameson's book agrees
with “radical feminism” that “to annul the patriarchal is the most radical
political act -- insofar as it includes” “more partial demands, such as the
liberation from the commodity form” (PU 100).] Such lessons include as “how
monstrous the new woman can he”; or how “the lot of the independent woman”
is “repellent”; and so on (SX 368, 366; cf. SX 370, 400, 435). But such
straightforward lessons are likely to be rare if, as Millett emphasizes,
attitudes about sexuality are typically kept outside conscious awareness (cf. SX
88, 182, 208, 251). Indeed, Millett appears to mistrust literary techniques and
products precisely to the extent that they may be made into vehicles for covert
sexual politics.
Her sketch of literary
history is conceived accordingly. She senses in very early literature the traces
of a repressive period in which patriarchy was superseding a still earlier,
prehistoric matriarchy (cf. SX 71, 154f, 158). She takes “the Furies” in
“Aeschylus” to be “the deposed powers of a matriarchate, reduced already
to the level of harridans,” but, as the play's ending suggests, originally
“fertility goddesses” (SX 159, 161). Their outcry against Orestes “has
something of the sound of matriarchy's last stand in the ancient world” (SX
159). They confront “patriarchal justice” when “Apollo” rules that
“the mother is not the parent,” but merely the “nurse”; to prove that
“father without mother may beget,” “Athena, born full-grown from the head
of her father,” comes to witness and advocate “male supremacy in all
things” (SX 160f).
Suggesting that “this triumph
went nearly uncontested” until Ibsen’s Doll's House (SX 162), Millett
leaps all the way to the time of the industrial revolution. She notes in passing
that “Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance literature in the West each had a
large element of misogyny” (SX 63; cf. Rogers, 1966). The middle ages are
briefly featured for their literature of “courtly love,” which however
“had no effect upon the legal or economic standing of women, and very little
on their social status” (SX 500 (cf. Valency, 1958).15 [15.
The problem with the literature of courtly love affirming the status quo also
troubles Jauss and Iser, who were originally medievalists. They propose opposite
views: this art “fortified the existing system against the challenge of social
change” (AR 77f); or it “contributed” to the “emancipation” of
“communication between the sexes” (AL 18). Compare Note 22 to Ch. 8 and Note
15 to Ch. 9.] Besides, “the new idealization of woman” subsisted alongside
“the old diatribes” (SX 63). The “Renaissance” is commended for its
interest in “liberal education,” including “for women,” and for its
possible “glint” of the “sexual revolution” (SX 90, 103, 91), but
specific works of literature are not analysed in any detail. The
“Enlightenment” is treated in much the same way (cf. SX 90, 104).
The Victorian period is
central to Millett's literary analysis. Though “only at the extreme of each”
“were unmixed attitudes to
be found,” she distinguishes “three different
responses to the sexual revolution” (SX 182, 179). First, “the realistic or
revolutionary” school (e.g., Engels, Mill, Ibsen, Shaw, Dickens, and Meredith)
included “radicals,” “reformers,” and “moderates,” who expressed
“a critical attitude toward the sexual politics of patriarchy” (SX 179). It
produced mainly “theory,” “polemic,” “theatre,” and “novels.”
Second, the
“sentimental or chivalrous school” (e.g., Ruskin) made an “appeal to
propriety” and a “protestation of its good intentions,” hoping to
“forestall change of any kind by proclaiming the status quo both good and
natural.” It “sentimentalised the monogamous family, which it refused to see
as an economic unit.” It produced mainly “escapist” “poetry” and more
realistic “novels” (SX 180).
Third, the
“fantasy” school expressed the “unconscious emotions of male response to
what it perceives as feminine evil, namely sexuality” -- being “actually”
“the sexuality the male has perceived in himself, and despising it, casts upon
the woman” (SX 180f). The dominant genre is “poetry.” This school made a
“considerable contribution” “to the sexual revolution”: “through its
tactics of refuge in the unconscious and in fantasy, it released more sexual
energy and expressed more tenuous and deeply buried sexual attitudes,”
including “sexual deviance,” “than
did its rivals” (SX 182). 16 [16
But on the same page, she remarks that the “old myth of feminine evil” had now become “deeply
self-conscious.” Several critics, such as Wellek/Warren, Frye, Fiedler, Iser,
Holland, and de Man, picture authorship as an interaction between conscious and
unconscious.]. “It was able to explore sexual politics at a more inchoate
primary level.” In return, though, “the fantasists” were “often so
incoherent as to be liable to subversion.”
As we might infer from
this brief history, Millett is concerned lest the creative powers of literature
be harnessed to cloak objectionable ideologies. It can “endorse what it
appears” “to parody,” or “vindicate” “virility” “while seeming
to caricature” it, conveying for example a “secret admiration” for
“violent people” (SX 450f, 443; cf. SX 456, 461).17 [17.
The phrase is Mailer's own from a retrospect on his work. Elsewhere, Millett
diagnoses a split within Mailer's “oeuvre”: “ideas one is convinced are
being satirized” in his “fiction” “are sure to appear with
straightforward personal endorsement” in his “other prose writings” (SX
460).] It can “pander to pornographic dream”: “the liberal, the
humanistic, and the well-meaning are satisfied with the fable at its surface
level, while the aggressive, the malign, and the sadistic are provided with
greater sustenance below the surface” (SX 403).
Literary style is also
suspect. In Tennyson, she notes the strategic use of “the hyperbole of
chivalrous stereotype,” and the intent to “render inherent biological
differences into pretty phrases” (SX 109f). Or, Ruskin's “history of women
is based on the gossamer of literary idealization” (SX 142). Or, Lawrence
“veils the sanctities of sex in vague phrases about cosmic flight” (SX 334).
A similar concern is
reflected in Millett's criteria for rating genres. Her ideal would seem to be
the non-literary genre of the ideological essay. Next to that, the novel is of
greatest interest; it may be more “tepid” and “less objective” than the
“theoretical and rational” work of “Mill and Engels,” but it can (as
among the Brontë sisters) ingest “the informative addition of the
conflicts” “the sexual revolution” “involved” and “the emotions”
it “awakened” (SX 125, 208).
Millett is less at home
with “poetry,” which “often” works on an “unconscious level” and
uses “the accommodating vehicle of myth,” notably “the myth of feminine
evil,” whereas “prose fiction” “demands” a “more honest
explanation” in “social and economic” terms (SX 208, 181). Moreover,
“poetry” is claimed to have “nearly always been identified with the ruling
class, its views, values, and interests,” as in the “escapist” manoeuvre
of “resolutely shunning the contemporary world” (SX 180). 18
[18. The same suspicion seems to involve prose when she implies that the
“working-class ideal of brute virility” became “middle class” when it
became “literary” (SX 52). To be consistent, she might have to make this
provision for the ideals of Genet, her model revolutionary arisen from the
lowest possible class.] Such evaluations resemble Millett's commendation that
Dante Gabriel Rossetti's “finest poem” is one written “in the best
analytical and rational vein of the novelists”; or her complaint that it
suited Ruskin's “purpose” “to ennoble a system of subordination through
hopeful rhetoric” when he “trusted to poetry” as an “accurate picture of
the condition of women,” or when he “eked out” an “educational
program” from certain “poems of William Wordsworth” (SX 212, 138, 142f,
136f).
This perspective would
treat literary genres according to their adaptability for ideological programs.
However much literature as a whole resists ideological control, the specific
author is prone to assimilate operative ideologies during the concrete task of
representing human relations (cf. Chs. 17, 19). Some position is necessarily
implied between regressive and progressive politics, between reaction and
revolution; and Millett's useful exposé brings this frequently neglected factor
of choice into sharp perspective.
Her special concern is
with cases where authors, whether consciously or not, deploy literature as a
defense against troubling aspects of sexuality. This conception of “defense”
gives a more comprehensive picture than Bloom's vision of poetry “defending”
against primeval anxieties or overpowering precursors through an overt politics
of masculine aggressiveness (which would probably remind Millett of the typical
“fascist tone”: “jealous of prerogative” and “spoiling for a war,”
SX 395f; or Holland's vision of literature as both carrier of and defense
against infantile bodily fantasies. Neither vision materially clarifies the
social and political engagement of literature, since they situate the
transaction more in the individual personality than in the process of
patriarchal socialization and manipulation. Both critics seem to think the
defensive function normal, if not inevitable -- healthy for Holland and morbid
for Bloom, but not an issue of ideological choice. Their theories could thus be
special cases of Millett's, cases where, for motives of defense, a certain class
of responses is judged natural or universal. The two critics can thereby remain
more complacent than Millett with the institution of literature as it stands.
She might, in fact, include their ideologies within the whole spectrum she wants
to see transcended by a revolutionary break with prevailing critical tactics.
Due to this ambition,
Millett frequently contradicts traditional critical estimations of authors. She
shows supposed sexual liberators to be still dependent on the “puritan”
values they were thought to write against (SX 6, 355, 376, 397, 408, 414, 429,
433, 452f), notably the drive to “separate sexuality from sex” (SX 408,
420). She contravenes the “critics” imagining that Lawrence “recommends
both sexes cease to be hard struggling little wills and egoists”; he really
felt that “only women must desist to be selves” (SX 342). She demonstrates
that Miller was by no means “the liberated man” “representing “sexual
freedom,” but “actually” “a compendium of American sexual neuroses,”
obsessed with a “sense of defilement in sexuality”; “under the brash
American novelty” lie “guilt, fear, a reverence for “purity,” and “a
deep moral outrage whenever the
'lascivious bitch' in women is exposed” (SX
412f, 433f). “Mailer once put himself forward as a hero of the sexual
revolution,” but later embraced the “attitudes” of a “parish priest”
-- “lyric” about “chastity,” ferocious about abortion,” “opposed to
birth control,” and preaching that “guilt” is “the existential edge of
sex,” without which the act is “meaningless” (SX 45iff).
Conversely, she
upholds the reputations of other authors. She repudiates the criticism that
would “convert” the Brontë sisters
“into case histories” and “label” their “bitterness and anger”
“neurotic” before “attacking every truth the novels contain” (SX 208).19
[19. Her thesis that “to label it neurotic is to mistake symptom for cause in
hope of protecting oneself from what could be upsetting” (SX 208) might apply
to her own judgment of Miller, whose “attachment to Mara” is termed “a
case history of neurotic dependence” (SX 436), were she less careful to show
how Miller's outlook represents masculine sensibility at large.] Her vision of
“anxious pedants who fear that Charlotte might ‘castrate’ them or Emily
‘unman’ them with her passion” raises the prospect of probing the sexual
politics of literary criticism itself, an implication in Holland's work (Ch.
10). But this task is not the main goal of her book, though it did inspire much
work of this kind. She is content to refer us to the pioneering work of Mary
Ellman on “phallic criticism,” exemplified by Mailer, that “measures
intelligence as “masculinity of mind” and “praises good writers for
setting a ‘virile example’” (SX 4610.
Nor is Millett
mainly concerned with furnishing a new set of standards for evaluating literary
works -- a totally separate enterprise from exploring their sexual politics. She
takes pains to reassure us that “counterrevolutionary sexual politicians” (SX
329) can be great writers. Her “radical investigation” may “demonstrate
why [D.H.] Lawrence's analysis of a situation is inadequate or biased, or his
influence pernicious, without ever needing to imply that he is less than a great
and original artist” with “distinguished moral and intellectual integrity”
(SX xiv). He attained a “superb naturalism” in his “most convincing and
poignant prose” -- ”probably” the “greatest novel of proletarian life in
English” (SX 346f). “Lawrence is remarkable in having felt” “so keenly
and recorded so memorably” “events” in “the ordinary progress of
masculine experience in our culture” (SX 394).
Miller is redeemed
as “avant-garde and a highly inventive artist” whose “most original
contribution” was to give “the first full expression” to “sentiment
which masculine culture had long experienced, but always rather carefully
suppressed” (SX 434, 439). 20 [20. She apologizes for not
“paying tribute to Henry Miller's considerable achievement as an essayist,
autobiographer, and generalist,” since she is “restricted to an
examination” of his “sexual ethos” (SX 412). Mailer's writings get broader
coverage, probably because his fiction is too evasive by itself (see Note 17).
He “articulated” “the disgust, the contempt, the hostility, the violence,
and the sense of filth” with which “masculine sensibility” “in our
culture” “surrounds sexuality” and “women” (SX 413). He “gave
voice” to “the yearning to effect a complete depersonalisation of woman into
cunt, a game sexuality of cheap exploitation,” and “a childish fantasy of
power untroubled by the reality or persons or the complexity of dealing with
fellow human beings” (SX 439). And Mailer is lauded for having best
“described” “the practical “working-day American schizophrenia”; his
“powerful intellectual comprehension of what is most dangerous in the
masculine sensibility is exceeded only by his attachment to the malaise” (SX
440).
Such estimations
suggest that authorial honesty commands respect, even (or especially) when
reporting disturbing aspects of human existence.21 [21.
Presumably, the use of “movie script,” “Hollywood,” and “cinema” as
the epitome of bad quality (SX 443, 405, 445) reflects the lack of honestly
Millett attributes to that medium. Holland makes no difference between film and
literature for his analysis (Ch. 10).] “A great novel” gets valued
“because it has the ring of something written from deeply felt experience” (SX
345) -- just the criterion Wellek and Warren soundly rejected (TL 80).
Lawrence's “great” work “conveys more” of his “own knowledge of life
than anything else he wrote” (SX 345). Charlotte Brontë
is commanded for “justice” of “analysis,” “fairness” of
“observations,” and a “generous degree of self-criticism” (SX 208).
“Genet's feudal system” is “more honest than that of our other authors in
its open recognition of power” (SX 472). Even Miller's “virulent sexism”
is at least “an honest contribution to social and psychological
understanding”; “there is never reason to question the sincerity” of his
“emotion”: its “exploitative character” and “air of juvenile
egotism” (SX 439, 414).
To the extent that these
estimations address the merit of the works involved, Millett holds a broad
conception of authorial responsibility for ideological implications, whether or
not these are conscious during the act of composition. The
“counterrevolutionary politicians” in Millett's gallery were widely misread
as liberators when they took advantage of the “abatement of censorship” to
“express what was once forbidden” “outside pornography”; yet their
“explicit” portrayals were consistently “anti-social,” not
“revolutionary,” voicing the “masculine hostility” that “outdistanced
romance in interest” when women's “gains in this century” “provoked”
“jealous patriarchal sentiment” (SX 63f, 444, 470). Millett delineates how
Lawrence and Miller exploited the modern freedom of expression to “deplore”
or “stave off” the “sexual revolution” -- the one by “renovating and
romanticizing masculine dominance” and “feminine” “subservience;” the
other by “converting the female to commodity” and by “isolating sex”
within the “utter impersonality” of a “biological event between
organisms” (SX 383, 437, 386, 417, 420; cf. SX 365, 415f).
“Sentimentality” is
regarded by Millett as yet another literary means to “hide” “sexual
politics” (SX 111). It helps to idealize patriarchal institutions, such as the
“family,” and “beautify the traditional confinement of women,” while
“deploring” their “prostitution and poverty” (SX 179f, 111; cf. SX 341,
425). More ominous is the “masculine sentimentality” in depicting
“relationships with other men”; the “tone” is “boastfully masculine,
jealous of prerogative, stupidly patriotic, and spoiling for a war” (SX 70,
396).22 [22. Millett follows Riesman (1967) in confirming that
“sport and warfare are consistently the chief cement” of male
“camaraderie,” as attested by the “men's house of Melanesia” (SX 68).]
Evidently, “in the experience of the American man-child, sex and violence,
exploitation and sentimentality, are strangely, even wonderfully,
intermingled” (SX 435) -- most dramatically revealed when literary imagery
combines intercourse with murder (cf. SX 29, 410f, 421, 429, 442ff, 446ff, 503).23
[23. These images do fit the “primal scene” imagery that Holland wants to
see in every instance of watching a performance (compare SX 47 with DY 110f).
The parallel to Fiedler's “love and death” was cited in Note 2.] Even Henry
Miller, when “in love, reverts to” a “narcissistic” “sentimentalism”
and a “sludgey idealisrn” (SX 436). Only Genet eventually manages to
“present” a “revolt” with “explicitness devoid of romantic
sentimentality” (SX 492) (p. 354f).
In exploring how far the
author “took his sexual politics with him” in his work (SX 395), Millett's
analyses reveal a wide spectrum of results and admissable evidence. Sometimes,
she uses fairly commonplace biographical materials: Meredith's “wife” and
“father-in-law,” Charlotte Brontë’s
“half-mad sisters” and “domestic tyrant” of a “father,” Ruskin's
“mother” and “child-mistress,” Swineburne's “sexual peculiarities,”
Miller's “ménage “a trois,” and so on (SX 190, 207, 136, 151, 213, 426).
Meredith is said to have taken over members of his family directly into a novel,
though without “the revenge one would inevitably expect,” whereas Ruskin,
Lawrence, and Miller are taxed with having written to air their resentment
against lovers or wives (SX 191, 136, 396, 426). Also, “all of the romances”
of Lawrence's “later fiction” are interpreted as “reworkings of his
parents’ marriage” (SX 349; cf. SX 343, 348). But such tendencies, even if
we accept them literally, account for general attitudes more than for the
specific development of characters and plots.24 [24 Millett
relies, I think, too heavily on biographical parallels when she cannot
comprehend the “waspishness” of Lawrence's “portrait” of a “new
woman” because Lawrence was on amicable terms with the real person presumed to
have been the model (SX 369).]
A related tactic is to
read literary characters as projections of the author's own self. This
identification is practised above all on D.H. Lawrence, who is claimed to be his
own protagonists Oliver Mellors, Paul Morel, Rupert Birkin, Aaron Sisson, Rawdon
Lily, and Richard Sommers (SX 343, 346, 369, 379, 393). In only one case is this
identification documented, by citing Lawrence's preface: “The novel pretends
only to be a record of the writer's own desires, aspirations, struggles” (SX
369). Miller is duly equated with his protagonists (e.g., SX 4), and seems to
have desired such a reading; yet Millett finds “the major flaw in his
oeuvre” precisely in “too close an identification with the persona, “Henry
Miller,” “operating insidiously” against the thesis that “Miller the man
is any wiser than Miller the character” (SX 414) (cf. Hassan, 1967).
Still, Millett
acknowledges these equations to be problematic, because the resemblances between
author and character are typically tenuous. Lawrence for instance had the habit
of bestowing “adulation” and “admiration” on his protagonists, for
example, as “an utterly desirable man” -- which, as Millett dryly injects,
“is rather a lot to say of oneself” (SX 346, 369). It is also hardly
credible that Miller would expect to be taken seriously if he calls himself
“the “undisputed monarch” of the “Land of Fuck” (SX 424).
Millett routinely
explains these discrepancies between character and author by interpreting the
former as the author's “surrogate’, a vehicle for “idealized
self-portraiture and “wish-fulfillment” (SX 379, 397, 352f, 381, 395, 485). 25
[25. A woman can serve for a male author, as when one heroine is a “female
impersonator” and Salome might be read as Oscar Wilde in “drag” (SX
399, 217, 220; cf SX 400, 405).] “Lawrence novels” are seen as “a
compensatory dream to offset the author's failures at home,” where he was
unable to “establish seignority” (SX 395f). Lawrence might indulge in
“pretentious fantasies,” such as “extra-marital” episodes that “fall
just short of consummation,” yet “satisfy” a “whole pack of vanities”
(SX 393, 397). Or, he might permit a “talented” working-class male to
“escape and rise above his class” and be adored by the higher classes, just
as Lawrence “wished to be better than the working class” as well as “the
middle and upper class” (SX 379; cf. SX 343, 349, 352f, 379f).26
[26. The desire to overreach this snobbery of class with a snobbery of sexual
prowess no doubt contributed to the “aristocracy of sexual dynamism”
imagined by Lawrence, and to Miller's frantic need to compensate for his
“seedy” “jobless” “existence” in “commerce” “by shining in a
parallel system of pointless avarice”: “if he can't make money, he can make
women” (SX 343, 417f). Or, he would assign his protagonists “the
adoration” of “males” and imagine “a desirable homosexual lover” he
did not seem to meet in life (SX 379, 343; cf. SX 373ff, 381f, 400). Contrarily,
he would exact “spiteful revenge” on characters who reject his protagonists,
for instance, by “heaping insult upon insult”; or would launch a “savage
personal attack” on some figure of “the new woman as intellectual” (SX
376).
We might attempt a more
elaborated account for this problem. Millett declares her intent to “take an
author's ideas seriously when they wish to be taken seriously or not at all” (SX
xiv). But a broad or liberalized conception of authorial responsibility may he
far too demanding and restricting. Identifying authors so closely with their
characters means holding the former unduly accountable for the sayings and
actions of the latter. Lawrence might have a character calling for a return to
“slavery” and slandering “Asiatics” as “vermin,” “niggers” as
“wallowers,” and “Jews” as “despicable” (SX 390f), and yet not
intend to make a solemn public declaration of his own personal opinions. If, as
Millett contends, authors are busily borrowing characters from the world around
them, surely they can borrow opinions with the same alacrity. Moreover, Millett
explicitly demonstrates that biased authors are formed by genuine pressure from
patriarchal culture, such that even the ideology they openly endorse is not of
their own fabrication; and that escaping it is hardly a step to be taken for
granted -- which is why we need feminist criticism.
Consider this problem
from the standpoint of constructing a fictional world. Millett's synopses of
literary plots often paint the authors as potent creators making something
happen. They “cause” one character “to fail her exams” and another “to
become a catamite”; they “condemn” yet another “to a lifelong
sentence”; or they actually “murder” and “execute” characters for
various motives (SX 368, 479, 485, 185, 405, 368, 375, 422). This way of putting
matters lends the author an aura of superhuman power. Yet her authors are often
found running against limitations or creating characters and events they would
be expected to dislike or devalue. Even the authors Millett considers devoted to
“wish-fulfillment” or “fantasy” keep portraying incidents in which their
male protagonists” desires for social and sexual mastery are not met (SX 358,
364f, 375ff, 386ff, 423, 454f).
Thus, we need to inquire
which factors in Millett's analysis might be identified as limitations on the
authorial license she places in the foreground. One factor might be that
diversity is essential to the complexity of art and the dynamics of narrative. A
novel in which all characters shared the same set of attitudes, however warmly
approved by the author, would be dull and stagnant. Of course, the author can
portray different attitudes and yet control the action to ensure the triumph of
the favoured party; and Millett detects this option on several occasions.
Lawrence can devise powerful intelligent women as long as they “spend each
book learning their part as females”; these “realistic” exemplars of the
time when “the female has actually escaped the primitive condition” get put
in a story wherein they “relinquish” their “self, ego, will,
individuality” (SX 402, 342; cf. SX 359, 406). Miller can portray “good
girls”“ who make “tough lays,” or “women who have a soul and a
conscience” and want to be “recognized” “as a person,” because their
“resistance” dramatizes “the enterprise of conquest” and “the
exhilaration of the chase”; “the more difficult the assault, the greater the
glory” (SX 423ff, 421, 419, 439). Mailer can “render homage to the enemy as
a worthy opponent” and imagine “the desirable woman” to be a “tough
fighting spirit” in order to satisfy “his combative urges” (SX 457). He is
“concerned” that “the male struggle to retain hegemony will have the spice
of adventure.”
Another restraining
factor would be the author's “ambivalence” or “ambiguity” regarding
social and sexual policies (SX 181ff, 357, 365, 440, 196, 405, 443, 450; cf. SX
107, 204, 209ff, 456, 461). “A male supremacist society” would tend to
affect “the psyche of a woman” so as to produce not only a female character
(Lucy Snow) who was “full of conflict” and “self-doubt,” but also an
author (Virginia Woolf) who was “argumentative yet somehow unsuccessful,
perhaps because unconvinced, in conveying the frustrations of the woman
artist” (SX 197) (cf. Showalter, 1977). C. Brontë
“retorted” to “a division in the culture” by “splitting her people in
half” and representing a “dichotomy” between “revolutionary spirit”
versus the “old ways which infect” the “soul” (SX 204). “Deep in
Lawrence's own nature” were “perverse needs,” leading to an oscillation
between “the masochistic” and “the sadistic” (SX 405). Mailer got
trapped in a “conflict between his perception and his allegiance”: his
“attitude toward” the “posturing of heroes” “vacillates between mild
irony and gratified participation” (SX 461, 456).
Ambivalence and conflict
can affect the quality of the work. In Tennyson, ".mixed feelings” constitute
“a virtue” that “creates tension and interest” (SX 211). The
“fantasists,” in contrast, were “so ambivalent they could hardly be relied
upon for more than” “cultural information” (SX 182). And Lawrence can be
“so ambivalent” “that he is far from being clear, or perhaps even
honest,” and he “begins to lose rapport with his characters” (SX 357,
365).
Similarly, the work may suffer when
authors hesitate or fail to carry out their projects to the full extent.
Meredith recognized “the feudal character of patriarchal marriage and the
egotism of male assumptions,” but was “incapable of transcending them and
consequently mistook the liberating turmoil of the sexual revolution” (SX
196). Hardy offered a “savage criticism” of “marriage and sexual
ownership,” yet was “troubled and confused” about “the sexual
revolution,” and “far too timid” to “be identified” with “notorious
feminists”; he “abdicated to period opinion” (SX 188f, 184).27
[27. According to Culler, “the possibility of quarrelling with Millett,” for
example, by interpreting Hardy's “confusion” as “'careful nonalignment”
(Jacobus, 1975: 305), “should not obscure the main point”: her “feminist
response” remains the “point of departure” (CD 48).] Lawrence “was too
puritanical or too timid to risk the accusation” of “unmanliness” or to
portray “sodomy” (SX 397, 376).
This explanation is once
more reminiscent of the Freudian concept of “defense,” whereby literature
defends on one level against what it fantasizes on another (Ch. 9). Even authors
consciously disposed to transcend prevailing sexual politics can be impeded by
unconscious inhibitions. Still, an author may succeed, for instance, in creating
a “truly feminine sensibility” (Brontë),
or “transcending the sexual myths of our era” (Genet) (SX 196, 299). Even
these exceptions had no easy victory: Brontë had to “deal with” both a “private” and a
“public censor” by deploying “devious fictional devices”; and Genet had
to heal a “dichotomy” between his “irony” and his “romantic myth” in
his “earlier works” (SX 206, 489). Thus, Millett's outlook might be compared
to Paris's: in their works, authors express inner conflicts they may not
overcome or even notice, or only with much effort. We should therefore not
demand a consistent policy or unlimited wish-fulfillment in plots or
characterizations.
Genet, in fact, becomes a
star achiever because of his exceptional accomplishment in the face of huge
odds. He alone took the “step from rebellion to revolution” and moved
“toward the creation of new alternative values” (SX 489; cf. SX 495). He
“alone” “took thought of women as an oppressed group and revolutionary
force, and chose to identify with them” (SX 498). Moreover, he “achieved the
lowest status in the world,” the “perfection of opprobrium in being
criminal, queer, and female,” yet he found in “the utterly abject” a
“condition” close to “saintliness” (SX 24). “Through the miracle of
Genet's prose,” “art” “can effect” the “transformation to
nobility”; the “masochism” of “slaves is converted to the aura of
sainthood” (SX 481). He also “rebelled” from “social judgment” “by
embracing crime and converting it by ‘certain laws of fictional aesthetic’
into his own version of evil as good” (SX 486). And his “aesthetics of bad
taste” exalted “the accoutrements of the poor” (SX 495; cf. SX 481f, 484).
In Genet's
“painstaking exegesis of the barbarian vassalage of the sexual orders, the
power structure of
'masculine'
and
'feminine' is revealed by a
homosexual criminal world that mimics with brutal frankness bourgeois
heterosexual society” (SX 25). “In the hierocratic homosexual society” of
his “novels,” “sexual role is not a matter of biological identity but of
class or caste” (SX 22). Paradoxically, therefore, his “homosexual
characters represent the best contemporary insight” into the “constitution
and beliefs” of “heterosexual society.” “His critique of the
heterosexual politic points the way toward a true sexual revolution” needed
for “any radical social change” (SX 29). Because “both his groups are
male,” his “use of the terms” “masculine and feminine” “reveals”
them as poles of an “odious social code” and “terms of praise and blame,
authority and servitude, high and low, master and slave” (SX 480).
Genet thereby illustrates
how “role” is “arbitrary,” a “function of a nakedly oppressive
system” (SX 480, 26). He has deconstructed and “negated” the opposition of
“gender”; he does the same with the opposition of right and wrong by
unmasking “how crime and law are but each other's shadow” (SX 480, 483).28
[28. Another deconstructive move might be seen in Genet’s subverting black and
white by having “black actors” dress up as “the White Court who judge the
ritual murder of whiteness as performed by another group of blacks” (SX 494).
The affinities between feminism and deconstruction are especially developed by
lrigaray (Ch. 19).] Also deconstructive is his involvement with themes he is at
the same time denouncing. Lawrence, for example, quite seriously presents the
“common fantasy of the white world” wherein “the white woman is
captured,” “raped, beaten, tortured,” and “murdered” by
“savages”“; this “titillates the white male,” “intimidates “his
woman,” and slanders the persons upon whom the white male has shifted the
burden of his own prurient sadism” (SX 402f). Genet, “whose perceptions are
more acute,” recognizes this “self-seeking white fantasy” as a “maniacal
myth” serving to “excuse atrocities”; he caustically has a group of
“clowns” costumed as “blacks” “replay” this “murder” as
“entertainment” (SX 404, 494).
Millett's reading of Genet provides a hopeful conclusion to her
preponderantly pessimistic treatise on sexual politics. In retrospect, her
“post-scripted” promise, penned in the late 1960s, of “a growing radical
coalition” between “the new women's movement” and “blacks and
students” (SX 507) seems a bit wistful now, when anyone who can – and thy
are not at all numerous who succeed -- is avidly scrambling into the
establishment and the family is being resentimentalised by TV preachers and
their doting audiences (not to mention Republicans in the White House). Yet
precisely now, her exploration of the conditions and motives of sexual politics
urges a pressing claim upon our consideration. What has been widely imagined a
“sexual revolution” in our lifetimes emerges from her analysis as yet
another of those “revolutions” bringing little benefit for “one half of
humanity” (cf. SX 90); only males enjoyed a genuine expansion of privilege.
Millett's point that
“human consciousness” is the major “arena” for any real
"revolution”
--
a point made by numerous contemporary Marxists as well -- attains conviction
through her probing of literature, a cultural vehicle whose ideological
implications had seldom been so keenly scrutinized from a sexual standpoint. As
a forum for alternativity, literature engages with ideologies that seem
invisible because they are ingrained in the very activity of reading. When they
are foregrounded, they turn suddenly, oddly, opaque, far from indisputable or
inherent in the nature of things. Moreover, Millett compels the author, a
participant whose presence in the literary transaction has been de-emphasized in
recent critical theory (as lamented by Paris, Ch. 12), to leap back into focus
as a shaper and partisan of cultural policy.
Indisputably, Millett's book vitalized the upswing of feminist criticism. She has contributed, in the words of Carolyn Heilbrun (1971: 390), “an unexpected, even startling point of view,” “not the last word on any writer, but a “wholly new word, little heard before and strange”; “her aim is to wrench the reader from the vantage point” “long occupied, and force” us “to look at life and letters from a new coign.”
Click here to
go to Critical Discourse Main Page