Well, at this point in the social calendar, when anyone invited the Duchesse de Guermantes to dine--with great urgency, in case she was already engaged--she would turn down the invitation with the one excuse that no society person would ever have thought of: she was about to set off on a cruise--"Quite fascinating, my dear!"--of the Norwegian fjords. Society people were thunderstruck by this, and, without any notion of following the Duchesse's example, nevertheless derived from her project the sense of relief you get when you read Kant, and when, after the most rigorous demonstration of determinism, it transpires that above the world of necessity there is the world of freedom. (from The Guermantes Way)
I remember the sense of relief I felt several months ago when I realized that I wasn't bound to live the life I was supposed to live. I needn't worry about the ruler of life and being within the exact centimeter of where society dictates one should be (in a menacing way at times) when it comes to studies, career, marriage, children, etc. Even in these liberated times, even in Lower Manhattan, there is constant pressure to conform.
When I was in high school, I assumed I would have four children and home school them all while my carpenter/poet husband fed the fireplace each evening in our renovated farmhouse in Vermont. I'm not sure where this fantasy came from, yet my life veered off the tracks by the time I started college. I've spent years trying to catch up, yet I've also abandoned false expectations. At this point, I may never have children. And 40 isn't a death knell.
I remember sitting in the back of a church on a wooden pew several years ago. I was attending a 12-step meeting. (I won't say which one.) One distraught woman was sharing and she had a catch in her voice. At the end of a litany of complaints and miserable happenings in her life, she finished with a sob. "And I'm thirty-seven!" she said. That was code for: "And I'm not living the life I was supposed to live! Feel sorry for me!"
I love unconventional women such as Heloise (the learned Parisian woman from the Middle Ages who loved and lost her beloved Abelard and ended up a nun with embers of passion still burning in her loins and in her letters) and Frieda Kahlo (the Mexican painter who expressed herself and her narrative of physical suffering in graphic terms and lived life without worrying how people would peg her).
Who knows where I'll be in ten years? I may be in Paris; I may be in Rome. I may be meditating in a small town in India. I may be happily married; I may enjoy my solitude. I may have a second act that will make up for everything before it.
Wherever I am and whatever I am doing, I will try to abandon the ruler. Because, according to the ruler, I'll never measure up.
I hope I have plenty of friends and lovers and dogs and cats. I'll shred my college newsletters that bring glorious tidings of what everyone has been up to and use them as mulch for my garden. Isn't it a relief to finally understand that you have and are everything you need to have and be?
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Down and Out
Madam Monce: "Salope! Salope! How many times have I told you not to squash bugs on the wallpaper? Do you think you've bought the hotel, eh? Why can't you throw them out the window like everyone else?"
...the walls were as thin as matchwood, and to hide the cracks they had been covered with layer after layer of pink paper, which had come loose and housed innumerable bugs. Near the ceiling long lines of bugs marched all day like columns of soldiers, and at night came down ravenously hungry, so that one had to get up every few hours and kill them in hecatombs. (Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell)
I thought that in honor of the holiday season and the news that the chasm between the rich and the poor is larger than its been in decades, I would take a break from Proust's drawing room dramas in The Guermantes Way, and focus on those who are prey to creepy crawlies. (Though, I must admit, Orwell awakens a certain pleasure in the grotesque.)
Last Saturday, while so many were going hungry, I joined a luncheon at the Scandinavia House, with an open buffet table creaking under the weight of a variety of Nordic delicacies, from herring to pork meatballs to gingerbread, and then plenty of steaming glogg to go around. (Of course, I'm a fun-loving teetotaling vegan, so I focussed on the mashed potatoes.)
Yesterday, I attended Meet Me at MOMA with my mother and, as we were looking at the controlled chaos of an early Jackson Pollack and talking about the postwar art world, one woman said she couldn't bear to read the front page of the newspaper anymore. "I know," the young guide replied, "I was an activist when Bush was in office and now I just don't want to pay attention to politics at all." That numbness can be felt everywhere.
The holiday season lends itself to gloomy reminiscences along with its good tidings.
In the "search of lost time" corner--I realize that often we must act (feel the fear and do it anyway!) when an opportunity presents itself. That moment only lasts a split second before it's lost forever.
It's been an entire decade since I missed a chance to have a relationship with someone I still have feelings for and, I'm afraid to admit, someone I google from time to time. Talk about a phantom in the machine...he is so close, yet so far. To cultivate this thorny regret is unnatural but strangely satisfying in a compulsive way, like emptying the lint filter in the dryer or reading US magazine.
But enough of that! This is the season of birth and beginnings. It's been so cold. I fear for those with empty stomachs and nothing to protect them from the elements. I'm grateful for everything in my life--even that black L.L. Bean coat I wear that looks like a burqa and the gloves I bought yesterday on a street corner.
In spite of all the fear and all the lack, there's a certain solemn magic to the season as in this spiritual by Jay Althouse:
Whisper! Whisper! Tiny baby in a manger lay.
Whisper! Whisper! Baby born today!
Whisper! Whisper! Tiny baby, he sleep in the hay.
Whisper! Whisper! Baby born today.
...the walls were as thin as matchwood, and to hide the cracks they had been covered with layer after layer of pink paper, which had come loose and housed innumerable bugs. Near the ceiling long lines of bugs marched all day like columns of soldiers, and at night came down ravenously hungry, so that one had to get up every few hours and kill them in hecatombs. (Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell)
I thought that in honor of the holiday season and the news that the chasm between the rich and the poor is larger than its been in decades, I would take a break from Proust's drawing room dramas in The Guermantes Way, and focus on those who are prey to creepy crawlies. (Though, I must admit, Orwell awakens a certain pleasure in the grotesque.)
Last Saturday, while so many were going hungry, I joined a luncheon at the Scandinavia House, with an open buffet table creaking under the weight of a variety of Nordic delicacies, from herring to pork meatballs to gingerbread, and then plenty of steaming glogg to go around. (Of course, I'm a fun-loving teetotaling vegan, so I focussed on the mashed potatoes.)
Yesterday, I attended Meet Me at MOMA with my mother and, as we were looking at the controlled chaos of an early Jackson Pollack and talking about the postwar art world, one woman said she couldn't bear to read the front page of the newspaper anymore. "I know," the young guide replied, "I was an activist when Bush was in office and now I just don't want to pay attention to politics at all." That numbness can be felt everywhere.
The holiday season lends itself to gloomy reminiscences along with its good tidings.
In the "search of lost time" corner--I realize that often we must act (feel the fear and do it anyway!) when an opportunity presents itself. That moment only lasts a split second before it's lost forever.
It's been an entire decade since I missed a chance to have a relationship with someone I still have feelings for and, I'm afraid to admit, someone I google from time to time. Talk about a phantom in the machine...he is so close, yet so far. To cultivate this thorny regret is unnatural but strangely satisfying in a compulsive way, like emptying the lint filter in the dryer or reading US magazine.
But enough of that! This is the season of birth and beginnings. It's been so cold. I fear for those with empty stomachs and nothing to protect them from the elements. I'm grateful for everything in my life--even that black L.L. Bean coat I wear that looks like a burqa and the gloves I bought yesterday on a street corner.
In spite of all the fear and all the lack, there's a certain solemn magic to the season as in this spiritual by Jay Althouse:
Whisper! Whisper! Tiny baby in a manger lay.
Whisper! Whisper! Baby born today!
Whisper! Whisper! Tiny baby, he sleep in the hay.
Whisper! Whisper! Baby born today.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Men Who Write About Women
Can male novelists portray female protagonists convincingly?
This is the question I had in mind when reading Proust and Larsson side by side for the past couple of weeks. To compare Larsson's Lisbeth Salander to Proust's character the Duchesse de Guermantes is to compare an alienated, fiercely boyish outcast to a voluptuous social insider, privy to the upper echelons of Parisian high society.
Lisbeth, with her piercings and tattoos, has odd looks compared to the more conventionally beautiful Duchesse de Guermantes, whose eyes "captured like a picture the blue sky of an afternoon in the French countryside, broad and expansive, drenched in light even when there was no sun." Instead of old t-shirts with quirky statements printed across them and leather pants, the Duchesse wears a "ballooning skirt of painted blue silk."
Yet, Salander has a strong moral code that leaves the petty-minded Duchesse in the dirt. "I thought at least that, when she spoke, her conversation would be profound and mysterious, strange as a medieval tapestry or a Gothic window," Proust writes. Instead, "'What a bird-brained woman!' I thought to myself, still smarting from the icy greeting she had given me. 'So this is the woman I walk miles to see every morning, and out of the kindness of my heart!'"
Does the male author's sexual orientation help or hinder him when conjuring up his female characters?
Proust, as a homosexual, is often accused of having created female characters by simply prettifying the men in his life. In fact the (heterosexual) English critic Cyril Connolly wrote in his 1938 book Enemies of Promise that "homosexual novelists who are able to create mother-types and social mother-types (hostesses) and occasionally sister-types (heroines) have trouble with normal women and may often make them out worse or better than they are."
Hogwash! Think of Henry James' Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady or Michael Cunningham's Clarissa Vaughn in The Hours--the first two examples that come to mind. They may be heroines, not "normal women," but they are characters I've lived in.
As Edmund White wrote, "It would be a mistake to see all of Proust's women as disguised men...some of the female characters are unquestionably, quintessentially womanly, such as Odette...or the Duchesse de Guermantes or the actress Berma."
Is Larsson's Lisbeth Salander a man disguised as a woman?
Luisita Lopez Torregrosa writes for Politics Daily, "She's set a new standard: a lesbian/bisexual geeky girl with a bad attitude, a knack for violence, a steel-trap mind, and best of all, she's not a vampire. Could it be that androgynous, industrial-strength macho girls will become role models for women in the second decade of the 21st century?"
And what does it mean that it took a man to create a 21st century feminist icon?
Maybe it shouldn't come as a surprise that a Swedish man created Lisbeth, as Nordic countries like Sweden are the most egalitarian when it comes to gender roles. You wouldn't have a character like Lisbeth spring from a more traditional society like Nigeria or Pakistan or India.
That brings me to a question from Gender Studies 101: What does it mean to be a woman? Does womanhood=motherhood? Pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding...these are foreign territories for me. Am I any less a woman?
At forty, I am "unmarried and childless," which sounds like a wail of misery, but really suits me for the moment. Am I a spinster or a bachelorette? The origins of the word "spinster" go back to the Middle Ages when women who spun wool were able to support themselves on a decent wage. "Bachelorette" brings up images of reality television shows with ten women piled high in a hot tub vying for the attention of the alpha male.
Neither am I Eleanor Rigby who "picks up the rice in a church where a wedding has been" and "waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door...who is it for?"
Still, I yearn to find...someone. The tenderness of a long partnership.
In sum, I don't identify fully with either character. I am neither an aggressive loner like Lisbeth nor conventionally "womanly" in conduct or appearance like the Duchesse. Yet I find these female characters compelling enough to keep reading, no matter that they leapt out fully formed from the minds of men.
This is the question I had in mind when reading Proust and Larsson side by side for the past couple of weeks. To compare Larsson's Lisbeth Salander to Proust's character the Duchesse de Guermantes is to compare an alienated, fiercely boyish outcast to a voluptuous social insider, privy to the upper echelons of Parisian high society.
Lisbeth, with her piercings and tattoos, has odd looks compared to the more conventionally beautiful Duchesse de Guermantes, whose eyes "captured like a picture the blue sky of an afternoon in the French countryside, broad and expansive, drenched in light even when there was no sun." Instead of old t-shirts with quirky statements printed across them and leather pants, the Duchesse wears a "ballooning skirt of painted blue silk."
Yet, Salander has a strong moral code that leaves the petty-minded Duchesse in the dirt. "I thought at least that, when she spoke, her conversation would be profound and mysterious, strange as a medieval tapestry or a Gothic window," Proust writes. Instead, "'What a bird-brained woman!' I thought to myself, still smarting from the icy greeting she had given me. 'So this is the woman I walk miles to see every morning, and out of the kindness of my heart!'"
Does the male author's sexual orientation help or hinder him when conjuring up his female characters?
Proust, as a homosexual, is often accused of having created female characters by simply prettifying the men in his life. In fact the (heterosexual) English critic Cyril Connolly wrote in his 1938 book Enemies of Promise that "homosexual novelists who are able to create mother-types and social mother-types (hostesses) and occasionally sister-types (heroines) have trouble with normal women and may often make them out worse or better than they are."
Hogwash! Think of Henry James' Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady or Michael Cunningham's Clarissa Vaughn in The Hours--the first two examples that come to mind. They may be heroines, not "normal women," but they are characters I've lived in.
As Edmund White wrote, "It would be a mistake to see all of Proust's women as disguised men...some of the female characters are unquestionably, quintessentially womanly, such as Odette...or the Duchesse de Guermantes or the actress Berma."
Is Larsson's Lisbeth Salander a man disguised as a woman?
Luisita Lopez Torregrosa writes for Politics Daily, "She's set a new standard: a lesbian/bisexual geeky girl with a bad attitude, a knack for violence, a steel-trap mind, and best of all, she's not a vampire. Could it be that androgynous, industrial-strength macho girls will become role models for women in the second decade of the 21st century?"
And what does it mean that it took a man to create a 21st century feminist icon?
Maybe it shouldn't come as a surprise that a Swedish man created Lisbeth, as Nordic countries like Sweden are the most egalitarian when it comes to gender roles. You wouldn't have a character like Lisbeth spring from a more traditional society like Nigeria or Pakistan or India.
That brings me to a question from Gender Studies 101: What does it mean to be a woman? Does womanhood=motherhood? Pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding...these are foreign territories for me. Am I any less a woman?
At forty, I am "unmarried and childless," which sounds like a wail of misery, but really suits me for the moment. Am I a spinster or a bachelorette? The origins of the word "spinster" go back to the Middle Ages when women who spun wool were able to support themselves on a decent wage. "Bachelorette" brings up images of reality television shows with ten women piled high in a hot tub vying for the attention of the alpha male.
Neither am I Eleanor Rigby who "picks up the rice in a church where a wedding has been" and "waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door...who is it for?"
Still, I yearn to find...someone. The tenderness of a long partnership.
In sum, I don't identify fully with either character. I am neither an aggressive loner like Lisbeth nor conventionally "womanly" in conduct or appearance like the Duchesse. Yet I find these female characters compelling enough to keep reading, no matter that they leapt out fully formed from the minds of men.
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