Valley of the Stone Dolls

...Christmas Book Issue VALLEY OF THE STONE DOLLS BY PEARL K. BELL The New Feminism has been growing both in numbers and in embattled intensity since about 1966, when Betty Friedan, that tireless ideological yenta, talked a batch of middle-class militants into demanding equal rights for women now (National Organization of Women) But it was not until this past August that the movement was presented with its old and new testaments, apocrypha, proverbs and prophecies, in one volume by Kate Millett Blessed by the Midas touch of instant fame that is conferred by Time-magazine cover stones, Miss Millett's Sexual Politics (Doubleday, 393 pp, $7 95), which started out in life as a PhD thesis in English at Columbia University, quickly shed its plain academic wrapper and became a Holy Book Among the true believers, it has by now replaced such earlier bibles of feminism as Mrs Fnedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963), Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (originally published in 1949), Mary Woll-stonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women (dating back to 1791), and, the lone Victorian male voice to penetrate the high-pitched babble, John Stuart Mill's essay "The Subjection of Women" This last Miss Millett somewhat reluctantly praises because Mill understood "the realism of sexual politics" and recognized that "society's female is a plant grown half in a steam bath and half m the snow...

...Aside from the sheer volume of attention lavished on Sexual Politics (not one but two timorous and guiltily inconclusive reviews in the daily New York Times) and the kind of eminently quotable remark such a work gives rise to (one of Miss Millett's advisers at Columbia informed Time that "reading the book is like sitting with your testicles in a nutcracker"), what accounts for Kate Millett's grand slam is neither her style (much of the tune a relentlessly pounding mvective, irntatingly prolix and repetitious), nor the brilliant unpersuasiveness of her arguments (only her literary scholarship can be taken seriously, and even there she scolds, despises and exposes), but the aggressive, insidious consistency of her ideological equations Unlike James Thurber, and without the smallest particle of his humor, Miss Millett's focus is not on the war but the politics between the sexes And politics, she is at pains to make clear, is not "that relatively narrow and exclusive world of meetings, chairmen, and parties", it is for her the "power-structured relationships, arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another " If racism is an example of political repression, so, in spades, is sex, which she labels an "ingenious form of 'interior colonization '" Because all historical civilizations have been patriarchies, "sexual dominion obtains as perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power " Despite this portentous intellectual pronouncement, Sexual Politics opens not with an exposition of its theoretical premises about patriarchal power and sex, but oddly with a literary chapter entitled "Instances of Sexual Politics", namely, brutal episodes from Henry Miller's Sexus, Norman Mailer's An American Dream and Jean Genet's Thief's Journal While all three examples are repellent in their sadism, their savage pleasure in the degradation of one human being by another, Miss Millett's indignation is spent on Miller and Mailer only In his own life Genet sank far lower than any woman has been forced to grovel at the whim of the Miller-Mailer supermales, but in the view of Miss Millett (and of Sartre, from whose book on Genet she borrows heavily) he thus "acquires the pride of the utterly abject, a condition which turns out to be next door to saintliness " The literature he wrought from his painfully direct experience of depravity and corruption ' constitutes a painstaking exegesis of the barbarian vassalage of the sexual orders, the power structure of 'masculine' and 'feminine' as revealed by a homosexual, criminal world that mimics with brutal frankness the bourgeois heterosexual society " How conveniently Saint Genet, as Sartre called his study, is made to fit Miss Millett's scheme' The homosexual is the great leveler, however debased that level may be, its distance from ordinary society is, for Miss Millett, the nature of Genet's greatness The writer whose perspective is that of a snake, who regards all humanity, of whatever gender, as scum, is admirable to her because he makes no sexual distinctions, and therefore plays no sexual war-games With the obsessive astigmatism of the true fanatic, she bends Genet's ideas of social revolution, at the end of his play The Balcony, to the mold of her theory, strangely indifferent to the savagery at the heart of his vision, his cruel delight in the prospect of violence on the most appallingly personal plane, she writes approvingly "His critique of the heterosexual politic points the way toward a true sexual revolution, a path which must be explored if any radical social change is to come about In Genet's analysis, it is fundamentally impossible to change society without changing personality, and sexual personality as it has generally existed must undergo the most drastic overhaul" Although Miss Millett begins with literature she never confronts the question whether literature is life, and whether the caricatures of literary portrayal--particularly in Miller, Mailer and Genet--actually reflect the day-by-day complicated and varied relations between men and women One can prove almost any case by arguing the extreme as the typical What Miss Millett does for literature she seeks to do for all other realms as well to demonstrate, as Simone de Beauvoir had attempted before her, that history, science, and particularly the social sciences have been dominated by power-greedy males, and have been deliberately repressive of females Considering how much of Miss Millett's design, momentum and conclusions derive from Mme de Beauvoir, it is curious that Sexual Politics mentions the Frenchwoman exactly twice, both rather trivial points in the awesome thesis-architecture of footnotes and page references One would assume that such a sweeping foray into human culture would require a formidable learning, yet it is all quite easy For Miss Millett--and this is the secret of the book's success--has in place of a theory an ideology, and every human experience is cut and made to fit to ideological measure She declares, for example, that always and everywhere-historical differences of time, place and culture notwithstanding--women have been denigrated and oppressed, and this tyranny rationalized by the innate physiological and intellectual inferiority of the female to the male, "the threadbare tactic of justifying social and temperamental differences by biological ones " She slogs her way through Victorian humbuggery about sex and chivalry, the sexual revolution of the 19th century, the history of women's rights in America, and finally comes to that archdevil, Sigmund Freud By Miss Millett's conspiratorial slide rule, Freud, more than any other influential thinker of modern times, made possible the triumph of the enemies of the 19th-century sexual revolution With characteristic rigidity, she excoriates Freud as "beyond question the strongest individual counterrevolutionary force in the ideology of sexual politics during the period Since for ideological reasons she is more interested in Freud's theoretical psychology of women, based on penis envy, than in any cure for individual suffering the Viennese doctor may have had in mind, Miss Millett has neither breath nor space for the healing aims of psychoanalysis Moreover, Erik Erikson is given short shrift for suggesting, m his recent revisions of psychoanalytic thought, that " 'femininity' is socially and politically useful" But it is in her analysis of D H Lawrence's work that Miss Millett's ramrod--this began, one should recall, as a literary thesis--is put to its severest test To her Lawrence is not a novelist, he is an ideological opponent Lawrence's sole aim in writing his novels, she says, was the conversion of his readers to his deplorably sexist views about women "Women in Love is the first of Lawrence's books addressed directly to sexual politics," and it "presents us with the new man arrived in time to give Ursula her comeuppance and demote her back to wifely subjection It is important to understand how pressing a mission Lawrence conceived this to be, for he came himself upon the errand " That is, he did what many novelists have done, base a central character upon himself Only in the preface, not m the textual discussion of specific works, can Miss Millett admit that Lawrence is "a great and original artist, and in many respects a man of distinguished motal and intellectual integrity " Such marginal conciliations are unconvincing, because nowhere does she give us a clue to her literary standards for greatness and originality, other than the ideological ones she cites in praise of Genet, but ideology is not literature, though it is itself a debased form of politics After Millett, the deluge Shulamtth Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex, Eva Figes' Patriarchal Attitudes, Robin Morgan's Sisterhood Is Powerful, and on and on In the weary course of plowing through those millions of angry, hortatory, menacing, and defiant words about the liberation of women, I was reminded of two profound and prophetic remarks made years ago by Jean Giraudoux and William Butler Yeats The first put his comment into the mouth of the Madwoman of Chaillot "Nothing is ever so wrong in the world that a sensible woman can't set it straight m the course of an afternoon " Yeats was less playful "Women, because the main event of their lives has been giving themselves and giving birth, give all to an opinion as if it were some terrible stone doll Men take up an opinion lightly and are easily false to it We still see the world, if we are of strong mind and body, with considerate eyes, but to women, opinions become as their children or their sweethearts, and the greater their emotional capacity, the more do they forget all other things They grow cruel, as if in defense of a lover or child, and all this is done 'for something other than human life ' " To such an extreme spokeswoman for women's liberation as Robin Morgan, both of these male assertions would be diabolically typical of the way men have written about--that is, patronized and depreciated--women throughout the "civilized" centuries Yet Miss Morgan, in her single-minded and vitriolic dogmatism, usually sounds like a strident demonstration, in every possible key, of both the Madwoman's sweeping, demented simplicity and Yeats' cruel defender of the "terrible stone doll" Amid the dm of rhetorical excess and the thunder of resentful obscenity heard so loudly from the fulminating Miss Morgan, one can easily lose sight of some basic truths that women have indeed been discriminated against, their talents wasted or misused, by many institutions and many men for a very long time, and that an end to this inequality is still not m sight Women have been unpaid or underpaid, overworked and unthanked, and the ordinary, boring dailiness of both domestic and professional life would be much more bearable if the traditionally defined roles of men and women were less tamely and uncritically accepted by most people of both sexes But to call for a total metamorphosis of personality and society, in a barbarous howling for blood, is a form of melodramatic self-indulgence To insist on the impossible is to seriously and willfully diminish all prospect of effecting realistic change In "Goodbye to All That," a snarling tirade against the male chauvinists of the New Left printed in Betty and Theodore Roszak's anthology Masculine/Feminine Readings w Sexual Mythology and the Liberation of Women (Harper & Row, 316 pp , $2 45), Miss Morgan lets fly m all male directions She makes the extraordinary shift, in one paragraph, from denouncing the Weathermen for lionizing Charles Manson to declaring that "Honest, at least Manson is only the logical extreme of the normal American male's fantasy (whether he is Dick Nixon or Mark Rudd) " For this maenad, ours is a time to murder rather than create What Miss Morgan really has in mind is not freedom, not revolution with any kind of material or psychological purpose, but vengeance Her Introduction to Sisterhood Is Powerful (Random House, 602 pp, $8 95), an anthology of founding-mother documents of the women's revolution, gives a terrifying view of the relentless Puritan's obverse side To have us recognize exactly how hard she worked on putting this volume together, she writes " during the past year I twice survived the almost dissolution of my marriage, was fired from my job gave birth to a child, worked on a women's newspaper, marched and picketed, breast-fed the baby, was arrested on a militant women's-liberation action, spent some time in jail, stopped wearing makeup and shaving my legs, started learning Karate, and changed my politics completely " It is hard not to speculate whether each of these events did in fact have the equal importance she seems to give them, one also wonders how close she came to throwing out the baby with the lipstick and the razor Vengeance and violence weigh heavily on Miss Morgan's mind ("Sexism is not the fault of women--kill your fathers, not your mothers"), and her simplistic diatribes can be laced with a vulgarity that is as ugly as it is obtuse In a biographical note about the poet Sylvia Plath at the back of Sisterhood, Miss Morgan notes "She committed suicide on February 11, 1963, at thirty-one years of age There was no movement for women's liberation at that time " A similar hysterical rash covers the Roszaks' introductory remarks in their anthology with a mottled mindlessness True apostles of the contemporary sensibility, which finds authenticity only in the reductive discoveries of narcissism, they give high praise to the title of a manifesto by the San Francisco Redstockings, "Our Politics Begin with Our Feelings " To Mr and Mrs Roszak such a statement is "a direct response to the events and relationships that we experience, that's how we know what's really going on " What, then, are we to believe about Betty Roszak's feelings toward her husband and collaborator, who wrote the primal pre-Reichian celebration of the new "counterculture," when she speaks of "the marriage ghetto" with such righteous scorn9 Even more to the point, what are we to make of her ability to think and write, or of her eyesight, when she says "This male habit of setting up boundary lines between imagined polarities has been the impetus for untold hatred and destruction Masculine/feminine is just one of such polarities among many, including body/mind, organism/environment, plant/animal, good/evil, black/ white, feeling/intellect, passive/active, sane/insane, living/dead " If living/dead is an imagined polarity, then I, in chorus with Dorothy Parker, am Queen Mane of Rumania Ironically, it has taken a male academic historian to show that the clear sound of reason can survive in the midst of all this unliberating inimical noise Page Smith, toward the end of his fascinating Daughters of the Promised Land Women in American History (Little, Brown, 392 pp , $8 95), courageously takes the bull by the horns (or the cow by her ears) and quietly acknowledges that "anyone who writes about women has to confront, sooner or later, the question of the 'nature' of women " His answer to this question--I haven't the space here to paraphrase it--has considerable profundity, though the very terms he uses would automatically render him anathema to Women's Lib But he avoids the obvious pitfalls with such intellectual adroitness that anyone having even a partly open mind must listen attentively to his conclusions Smce Smith's admirable aim in this book is social history, not ideological conversion, he points out some facts that are loudly ignored by the theorists of the New Feminism For example- "Women enjoyed an almost unparalleled status and importance in early New England Part of this status came from their scarcity and their economic importance, but a major part came from the new relationship in the reformed family where daughters, perhaps for the first tune in history, had as much worth and dignity as sons " It didn't last The deterioration of this state of affairs makes up the bulk of Smith's account, and helps explain why "women were behind every significant social reform of the late 19th and early 20th centuries Without careful attention to their actions American history cannot be properly understood ' And he urges the young feminists of today to claim those brave women as their ancestors Nevertheless, the contributors to Sisterhood Is Powerful, which provides a "Drop Dead List of Books to Watch Out For," would have nothing but obscenities in response to Page Smith for daring to state "that men and women are different, and I think it unimportant and undiscoverable whether this difference is biological or cultural" New editions of Robin Morgan's anthology will probably add Daughters of the Promised Land to the Drop Dead List, they will thus have gained still another enemy, and, to their misfortune, lost an enlightening and sympathetic mind...