LESLIE FIEDLER and the reluctant virgin
HOFFMAN, FREDERICK J.
LESLIE FIEDLER and the reluctant virgin by FREDERICK J. HOFFMAN In the Preface to his elaborate study of Love and Death in the American Novel (Criterion Books), Leslie Fiedler acknowledges four...
...In the sentimental novel, Richardson's man Lovelace is split into components: ". . . whatever is truly masculine and clearly attractive being identified with the 'good* and whatever is grossly phallic or unduly polished being identified with the 'bad...
...Lawrence's book, which appeared in 1923, is a fascinating parade of half truths and compulsive assertion...
...Any one of these might be used as a beginning of this review, but it is obvious that the last is preeminent...
...or an innocent "homo-erotic" companionship on a symbolic, extra-terrestrial raft or whaling ship...
...Worst of all, the analysis of fiction is bluntly and often crudely tendentious...
...Hemingway's descriptions of sex are either intentionally brutal or unintentionally comic...
...he is at his best in analyses of obscure, unimportant, third-rate early American fiction...
...Sex leads to complication and bitchery, and Huckleberry Finn hurries back to the homo-erotic island-raft wherever and as quickly as he can...
...Fiedler's "pieties" are offered sometimes with the subtlety of an evangelical preacher with a "sound message" for unsound and frivolous people...
...Against this tyranny of sentimentality and Protestant "reform," the male fights bitterly and hatefully, until in modern fiction he reasserts himself as Lovelace, the author-rapist who treats woman with contempt and bluntly efficient "realism...
...There is much more, but these suggestions will prove the rest...
...But the advantage is short-lived, and the purchase is proved costly indeed...
...This is essentially what Fiedler does...
...In the curious history of this kind of fiction, the sentimental fights a losing battle with a reductive naturalism, until, in Dreiser, we have the "absolutely sentimental world, in which morality itself has finally been dissolved in pity...
...the woman reads and enforces the Puritan gospel, which in the beginning had been a severe "father-image" retreat from sentimentality...
...This is surely a praiseworthy moral obligation...
...LESLIE FIEDLER and the reluctant virgin by FREDERICK J. HOFFMAN In the Preface to his elaborate study of Love and Death in the American Novel (Criterion Books), Leslie Fiedler acknowledges four major influences: C. S. Lewis (The Allegory of Love), "certain Marxist critics" (not specified), Freud and Jung, and D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature...
...as in most Lawrence criticism, there are many intuitively "right" observations, but also much of the "man preaching and declaiming...
...Each of these choices is a condemnation of the Pure Maiden's wiles, but it is also a false retreat from the central failure described in American fiction, the failure to achieve a sexual rapport, in which neither partner asserts superiority or aggressive sexuality...
...Fiedler's pieties are much to the point...
...or gothic terror, with which (in Poe especially) are associated the pleasures of necrophilia...
...The literature of childhood written for the pleasure of adults appeals to their nostalgic love of fan-tasaic reminiscence and turns them into pre-sexual children, the "Good Bad Boy" who remains forever immune from the penalties of growing up...
...He is at his worst with Henry James and Faulkner: for example, since James was not and could not ever have been a benedict, his "central intelligences" are voyeurs engaged in Peeping-Tomfoolery...
...a tortured one) with that novel...
...The approach leads to distortions, destroys or defies perspective, exaggerates some works out of proportion, and simply ignores others...
...and she "corrects" male errors committed against taste and decorum...
...The tale of terror rises in esteem because of "the failure of love in our fiction...
...Literature is solely for the "genteel, sentimental, quasi-literate, female audience...
...The former's early novels suggest him as the "laureate of the coitus interruptus...
...From the elaborate artifices of force and rebuff social implications emerge of a moral world dominated by literate and wily females...
...There are also many errors in minor details...
...To take them as a major directive source of criticism is equivalent to committing oneself to the elaborate spinning out of half-truths...
...The great source book of sexual combat is Richardson's Clarissa Har-lowe (1747-48), which provided outlines of the archetypal situation: ". . . in which the Seducer and the Pure Maiden were brought face to face in a ritual combat destined to end in marriage or death...
...There is a fascinating game, in which masculine-aggressor and feminine-victim exchange roles with bewildering speed and frequency...
...And, in his Freudian, Jungian, "Marxian" elaboration of Lawrence's description of American failures, he brings all of his powers of "patient" and "insolent" analysis to bear upon the subject...
...He considers literary criticism to be "an act of total moral engagement, in which tact, patience, insolence, and piety consort strangely but satisfactorily together . . ." This fine statement is like hundreds of "insights" his book contains: high-minded and earnest, and quite outside the range of precise verification, amusing and half-pertinent...
...and here, in more than 600 pages of cultural-sexual analysis, he attends to the task of making Lawrence's study a definitive one...
...Though he briefly comments upon the 1930's novel of violence, Fiedler's "Marxism" is strictly a social extension of the sexual conflict...
...nothing seems irrelevant, and the "worst" and the "best" are equally valid as documentary illustration...
...This is not to say that there are no differences...
...The details are engrossing, though often given in awkward affectations of paradox...
...but the male wearies of the sport, which he consistently loses, and prefers to it de-feminized nature, or the great wide open spaces of Cooper's Leatherstocking...
...He must surely come close occasionally to the truth...
...Moby Dick is curiously sliced into four portions, which are never significantly related to each other...
...Descending from his Sister Carrie, there is a long line of latter day Clarissas, who no longer count suicide the only consequence of folly, but end in "the split-level house beautiful of exurban New York...
...but whether the act of criticism has in this case been one of both moral engagement and critical balance is surely a valid and important question...
...There is a serious question, however, as to its validity as criticism, as literary history, even as straightforward reporting...
...Fiedler has long maintained he is the only living American who understands that book...
...All of this is a foreshortening...
...In a laudatory review (in which he condemns all but a few critics and scholars of American literature), Lionel Trilling called Fiedler a "conservative"—in the sense that his attack upon American literature is based upon his desire to "conserve" the precious image of sexual balance (and of course, familial and social balance as well...
...But Fiedler's failure as a critic is more and more obvious as he tries to interpret the more complex works of our literary tradition...
...the death of love left a vacuum at the affective heart of the American novel, into which there rushed the love of death...
...He is convinced of an absolute, and "ideal" form of sexual engagement, to which the heart and genitals are equally and fully committed...
...It fails, because the results are forced, inaccurate, and much of the time only subjectively valid...
...One of the literary consequences of the American sexual failure is the retreat to childhood, to that point before the rigors of sexual maturity set in, when the undifferentiated terrors and privileges of life are not yet fixedly judged...
...Fiedler moves from this pattern into a discussion of the inadequacies of Fitzgerald and Hemingway...
...There is no question of the "piety" of this critical engagement, nor of its "insolence...
...In any case, Fitzgerald's Gatsby is a tragic victim of harsh female reality, and Hemingway's men are comfortable only in idyllic intervals when they are "without women," in strictly male situations...
...Fiedler's main prognosis is Freudian (with Jungian after-images) in the large sense of a culture analysis that begins in the essential situation, of a stylized conflict between the evil male and the reluctant virgin...
...Fiedler joins an analysis of manners in the novel to Lawrence's pseudo-biological tendentiousness...
...In the distribution of moral imagery, the Indian and the Negro become projections of natural and social evil, the "id" and the introverted ego...
...In the Nineteenth Century, America becomes a woman's world, to which the male reluctantly submits...
...The angle of vision and of judgment becomes less and less exact, until at times the eye observes only the outer margins of central works...
...Lawrence's observations were a good and necessary form of prodding and probing of American self-esteem, but they were largely journalistic, uncomplex, and forcibly distorted...
...The Maiden in this case exploits her virginity and the social and moral illusions associated with it to eminent advantage in American life and literature (the text of life is for Fiedler identical with the text of literature...
...He is actually engaged in an analysis of the inadequacies of Protestant decorum—as was Lawrence, though neither seems able to define his object...
...Statements about Huckleberry Finn show a loving preoccupation (though...
Vol. 24 • June 1960 • No. 6
