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Literary Lionesses. - Brief Article - Review - book review
Interview, March, 2000 by Brendan Lemon
Women artists are at the heart of three passionate new books, but there's nothing predictably feminine--or feminist--about the books' intellectually formidable authors
Passionate Minds is the title of a new essay collection about well-known female writers by Claudia Roth Pierpont, but the phrase could be applied equally to two other authors with books appearing this month: Susan Sontag, whose novel In America is being published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Anne Carson, whose Men in the Off Hours, a selection of poetry and prose, comes from Knopf.
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Pierpont, whose eleven essay subjects range from Hannah Arendt to Mae West, is eloquently aware of the contradictions inherent in grouping figures by gender; no one, after all, would try to compile a book--or an article-about intellectual men. But, Pierpont argues, comparing and contrasting Olive Schreiner with Margaret Mitchell or Doris Lessing with Ayn Rand allows us to see the pitfalls they all faced trying to make their way early in the modern age. "There were so many possibilities for error and catastrophe," Pierpont writes, "all so eagerly embraced, and all likely to prompt furious exasperation from today's reader--along with the affectionate gratitude that these women deserve. For they had hardly any models to follow, apart from a handful of suicidal literary heroines; one of the reasons we can judge so harshly now is because we have had them."
Those suicidal literary heroines--the Emma Bovarys, the Anna Kareninas--flourished in the nineteenth century, which is the time frame for Sontag's new novel. Sontag's heroine, Maryna Zalewska, is anything but self-destructive, though. Her vitality is a magnet for men in Poland, where she is a famous actress, and in California, where she and a troupe of family and friends emigrate in 1876 to establish a commune.
In America is a distillation of Sontag's personal and professional themes. Her life path has been the reverse of Maryna's--she grew up in California and has spent much of her adulthood thinking about and living in Europe--but her work has been so infused with continental cultural influences that she has sometimes seemed almost a foreigner to Americans outside of New York. Like her French intellectual friend Roland Barthes, who at the end of his life grew tired of the shore-hugging constrictions of essay writing, Sontag has turned decisively this past decade to the open sea of fiction.
Carson, by contrast, seems not to struggle with genre. Though usually classed a poet and, by virtue of her position as a classics professor at McGill University in Montreal, an intellectual, her work is a heady, beautifully crafted mixture of forms. Men in the Off Hours consists mostly of poetry and ranges across a Great Books shelf of pale-white-male references; but it also includes unusual prose reflections about such feminist icons as Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson. Carson's literary snob appeal is formidable, and her books are becoming a favorite of show-biz types attempting to add luster to their coffee tables. But don't let that fool you: She is a fiercely individual writer. Hollywood will never adapt a volume by her.
Because there were no available acting roles for a woman who drove men wild and enjoyed them in bed by the dozen and gave as good as she got and didn't want to marry and never suffered for any of it, Mae West had to become a writer before she could be a movie star.
from Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World, by Claudia Roth Pierpont
Utopia is not a kind of place but a kind of time, those all too brief moments when one would not wish to be anywhere else.
from In America, by Susan Sontag
[The Greek poet] Sappho is one of those people of whom the more you see the less you know. But it might well have been for Sappho, as representative of the whole mysterious, polluted species of ancient womanhood, that Dorothy Parker composed her famous epitaph:
"If you can read this, you've come too close."
from Men in the Off Hours, by Anne Carson
COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group
