Poetry
Nixon, John Jr.
reader there is the sense that despite these contradictions, Weil's was a life of the mind, and that she had carried her thought as far as it could go. It is her thinking that puts her in the...
...Public dialogue at the end of the nineteenth century created the use of the words "feminism" and "homosexuality...
...The homeless population of America's cities, camped out on hot air vents, must be reminiscent of London in the 1890s, where hordes of people made a home in Trafalgar Square and the city's parks...
...She quotes Frank Kermode, who suggests that "we project our existential anxieties onto history...
...She discusses literature, art, and film, both American and English, and finds that the fin de siecle brings with it an earthquake of social and sexual upheavals, and that this occurs cyclically, perhaps caused by a "sense of an ending...
...the last two decades of the nineteenth century in England were a time of severe economic depression, and the expression "unemployment" was coined, an expression used with frightening and relentless repetition in America today...
...728: Commonweal...
...there is a real correlation between the ends of centuries and the peculiarity of our imagination, that it [increased anxiety] chooses always to be at the end of an era...
...All have a familiar echo as the last decade of our century draws to a close...
...Most of her facts are annotated and the viewpoints provided in quotations from acknowledged and usually witty sources...
...Jekyll and Mr...
...I wish I could give copies of her book as Christmas presents to members of the United States Senate...
...While women looked for a new feminist order at the turn of the last century, men too searched for new definitions of masculinity...
...In the world of male "Clubland," and in the literature of "quest romances," written especially for boys ("little boys who read will become big boys who rule"), the need for male superiority and exclusiveness became a virulent theme...
...her book is not a political statement nor a sociological scaremonger...
...Hyde...
...We must not allow fear to push us into cruel homophobia, make us abandon our commitment to women's sex~aal autonomy, or lead us to repudiate thefinde-sidcle vision of a future in which sexuality is a source of pleasure, comfort, and joy...
...As she describes the Genitron, an electric clock above the Pompidou Center in Paris, flashing the remaining seconds and minutes of the decade, time cannot be stopped or turned back...
...Her picture of the dreary past makes a return to it impossible, and she is optimistic about the future...
...Attempts to redefine gender, to explore sexual and psychological borders, and to understand the meaning of feminine liberation filled the art and literature of the day...
...She has no ax to grind...
...aesthetic duplication, as in The Picture of Dorian Gray...
...The parallels in Ms...
...Showalter is both engaging and scholarly in comparing social, sexual, and political attitudes prevalent at the end of the nineteenth century to our ownf/n de siOcle...
...Late nineteenth-century concern with the horrors of an imminent feminist takeover were fed by fantasy, not fact, and yet "the nineteenth century had cherished a belief in the separate spheres of femininity and masculinity that amounted almost to religious faith...post-Darwinian 'sexual science' offered...testimony on the evolutionary differences between men and women," f'mding, of course, that "women's nurturant domestic capabilities fitted them for home and hearth...while men's aggressive, competitive abilities fitted them for public life...
...She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts...
...though wellresearched, the book avoids the pitfalls of academic dryness...
...Showalter's book are not only in the sexual arena...
...Elizabeth Shannon El IZABETH SHANNON,afrequentCommonweal contributor, is the author of I Am of Ireland (Little, Brown...
...here is one book I especially want to recommend this year, Elaine Showalter's Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the 'Fin de Si~cle' (Penguin, $9.95, 242 pp...
...transfusion, as in Dracula...
...nor can we legislate or intimidate men and women into shame and repression of the past...
...Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in 1886 that"the begetting of one's thoughts on paper...is a kind of male gift," and writers of the period fantasized about alternate forms of male reproduction, such as "splitting or cloning, as in Dr...
...She detaches herself by her humor and scholarship...
...The parallels she discusses are fascinating in their similarities, but depressing in their recurrence...
...AIDS has taken the place of syphilis, the right-wing movement in America still tries to impose cultural and artistic censorship on our population, the senators who sought to degrade Anita Hill could have quoted Teddy Roosevelt at the turn of the century: "There is no place in the world for nations who have...lost their fiber of vigorous hardness and masculinity...
...What seems today like the apocalyptic warnings of a frightening sexual anarchy may be really the birth throes of a new sexual equality...
...Showalter's writing is crisp, full of verve, anecdotes, and wit...
...Reaction to this "sexual anarchy" was typically reactionary: worries about sexually transmitted disease (particularly syphilis, which had reached epidemic proportions by 1900), concern that the liberation of women would erode family life, and efforts to impose codes of Victorian morality on the whole population...
...It is her thinking that puts her in the realm of the blessed, and it is the avenue of her thought that we want to travel down to the end...
...Like the deepest thinkers of the century--Beckett, Rahner, Wittgenstein--she wore a halo of despair...
...reincarnation, as in Rider Haggard's She...
Vol. 118 • December 1991 • No. 21
