Under the Weather

I’ve been a bit unwell these past few days; between that and a few personal matters demanding my immediate attention, it would be wise for me to step away from blogging for a little while. I also wanted to quickly apologise for having been such a bad commenter and so slow to reply to e-mails lately. Hopefully the next week or so will give me a chance to catch up.

I’ll be back in a week or so – in the meantime, feel free to leave me links to any posts you think I’d especially like to see. Happy reading and see you soon.

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Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches is a 1984 collection of fifteen pieces by activist, feminist and poet Audre Lorde, mostly about feminism, racism, and the intersection of the two. Sister Outsider was last December’s choice for the Year of Feminist Classics project; as usual I’m late to the party, but I’m very glad to have read it at last.

The first thing about Sister Outsider to captivate me was the fact that Audre Lorde’s voice is so personal. Her writing seamlessly combines feminist theory with everyday experiences. As someone who’s at the intersection of various forms of oppression, Lorde has in-depth knowledge of how these things actually affect people’s lives; but at the same time, she has the ability to use personal experiences as the point of departure for wider sociological analyses and appeals to change.

Some of the essays that resonated the most with me were “An Open Letter to Mary Daly”, in which she frankly addresses a fellow academic and feminist about the racism she found in her work; “Man Child: A Black Lesbian Feminist’s Response”, about her experience of bringing up a son; and “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”, in which she challenges the idea that difference is divisive, rather than a source of union that can encourage positive change. People can acknowledge the ways in which their experiences differ and the fact that they have common goals. This is the case with black women and white women, straight women and lesbians, and so on.

In this last essay, Lorde begins by addressing the fact that the onus of education is always put on members of the less powerful group, in a way that takes responsibility away from those in a position of privilege:

Whenever the need for some pretence of communication arises, those who profit from our oppression call upon us to share our knowledge with them. In other words, it is the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppressor their mistakes. I am responsible for educating teachers who dismiss my children’s culture in school. Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.

She then goes on explain the importance of intersectionality in what I thought was a simple, brief, and very powerful manner:

Somewhere, on the edge of consciousness, there is what I call a mythical norm, which each one of us within our hearts knows “that is not me.” In america, this norm is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, christian, and financially secure. It is with this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside in this society. Those of us who stand outside that power often identify one way in which we are different, and we assume that to be the primary cause of all oppression, forgetting other distortions around difference, some of which we ourselves may be practicing. By and large within the women’s movement today, white women focus upon their oppression as women and ignore differences of race, sexual preference, class, and age. There is a pretence to homogeneity of experience covered by the word sisterhood that does not in fact exist.

Passages such as these were the main reason why I so enjoyed Sister Outsider. Another piece that really stood out to me was “The Uses of Anger”, in which Lorde discusses the fact that anger is often framed as disruptive and unproductive, particularly in conversations about race. She begins by offering a powerful list of bullet points exemplifying everyday racism. For example:

I wheel my two-year-old daughter in a shopping cart in Easterchester in 1967, and a little white girl riding past in her mother’s cart calls out excitedly, ‘Oh look, Mommy, a baby maid!’ And your mother shushes you, but she does not correct you. And so fifteen years later, at a conference on racism, you can still find that story humorous. But I hear your laughter is full of terror and disease.

And later she says:

I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivialises all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.

I liked this essay because she begins by acknowledging the legitimacy of people’s emotional reactions, but then warns against being limited by them. It’s understandable that a white person would experience guilt in a discussion about racism, especially if they know (as most of us do) that there were moments in their lives in which they could have done better. Feeling guilty and taking a moment to move beyond that does not make anyone a bad person. The problem only begins when the conversation then becomes about the white person’s guilt, rather than about the problem at hand; about them proving they’re not horrible human beings, rather than about racism; or when experiencing guilt becomes a reason to legitimatise complete avoidance of these conversations.

There were, however, a few pieces in Sister Outsider where Lorde lost me: much like Emily Jane, who hosted the discussion at the Feminist Classics blog, I really struggled with Lorde’s approach to the ideas of intuition and rationality. For example, in a long interview with Adrienne Rich, Lorde talks about how being asked by a white academic to reference her work on female-positive deities and religious rituals in Africa seemed to her a form of dismissal. I completely understand that Lorde has very good reasons to say what she did: there is a history of marginalisation of writing by women like her that I absolutely don’t want to make light of. But this story still gave me pause: I don’t think the way we acquire, develop and organise knowledge is necessarily flawed, even though historically it has been used to privilege certain groups and exclude others. It’s also not intrinsically masculine or white, and it’s dangerous to buy into the idea that it is. Methodological concerns can and surely have been used to cover up prejudice, but we can address racism and sexism in scholarship without necessarily having to embrace an “intuitive” approach to research. As you can imagine, I also have big issues with the essentialist idea that there’s a link between such “intuitive” forms of knowledge and femininity.

I fully admit I might not have understood everything that Lorde was trying to say about intuition and rationality, though, especially in the essay “Uses of the Erotic”. I found mdbary’s comment about this very helpful:

She is not against reason, only against being limited by it. For those of us who seek clear logical answers, that is a difficulty. In some of the essay/speeches, Lorde is also resisting a twentieth-century pattern of educated, middle-class black women who responded to the stereotype that they were over-sexed by being overly respectable and restrained, hiding their sexuality and passions behind masks meant to protect them. Lorde would have none of that. She sought to live life fully and passionately; like a lover, loving and experiencing life even when it hurt. (Although the dynamics differed, she resonated here with some of us were white and had been raised to be “ladies”.

And this is why I love the Feminist Classics project. You can join us this month for bell hooks’ Feminism is for Everybody, by the way. I’m determined to actually read it on schedule this time.

They read it too: One Read Leaf, Care’s Online Book Club, The Eleventh Stack

(You?)

Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%.

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Jane and Prudence by Barbara Pym

Barbara Pym’s 1953 novel Jane and Prudence tells the story of two friends, Jane Cleveland and Prudence Bates. In the opening scene we’re told that Prudence “was twenty-nine, an age that is often rather desperate for a woman who has not yet married”, whereas Jane “was forty-one, an age that may bring with it compensations unexpected by the anxious woman of twenty-nine”.

The two women became friends at Oxford, where Jane was Prudence’s tutor, and then went on to follow very different paths in life. Jane is a vicar’s wife who always feels she’s performing her duties inadequately; when the novel opens, she and her family are about to move to a small country parish, and Jane wonders if her life will become like something out of a Trollope novel. Prudence, on the other hand, is a single young professional woman living in London, where she enjoys love affairs that would scandalise her friend’s small community. When Jane meets a seemingly eligible widower, she decides to try her hand at matchmaking, and what follows has slight echoes of Emma both in the process and in the results.

Jane and Prudence is a satirical look at the frugal post-war world of continued food rationing and rigid social distinctions. The novel is a sharp comedy of manners, but there’s an undercurrent of… perhaps not exactly sadness, but certainly darkness underneath it all. Pym’s main focus is on women’s lives and on the limitations of the roles available to them in the 1950’s. She’s brilliant at capturing the intricacies of social life and all the nuances and implications of everyday social exchanges, and at conjuring a whole community with just a few colourful details. Comparisons to Jane Austen always seem to make an appearance in reviews of Barbara Pym’s novels, and there’s a very good reason for that.

Despite the darkness I alluded to (or, more accurately, along with), Barbara Pym’s sense of humour is absolutely fantastic. Her portrayal of the social conventions and norms most of her characters accept and take for granted is so funny that the reader can’t help but see them in their full absurdity. The result, of course, is an elegant form of social critique.

Jane and Prudence is set at a time and place where gender roles are very narrowly defined. For the most part, this is not a novel about women who break away from that, but Jane in particular notices how gender affects her life, and her observations are always very sharp. One of the most interesting scenes takes place when Jane finds herself without anything to eat at home (a considerable blunder for a married woman), and she and her husband go to the only café in the village for lunch. Mrs Crampton, who runs the café, tells them there isn’t much in the way of meat, but she can manage to cook them some bacon and eggs:

Mrs Crampton brought the soup, which they finished, and there was a long silence. Neither Jane nor Nicholas spoke and nobody came into the café. After a time Jane heard sounds from behind the velvet curtain, the low mumblings of voices and the hiss of frying. At last Mrs Crampton emerged from behind the velvet curtain carrying two plates on a tray. She put in front of Jane a plate containing an egg, a rasher of bacon and some fried potatoes cut in fancy shapes, and in front of Nicholas a plate with two eggs and rather more potatoes.
Nicholas exclaimed with pleasure.
‘Oh, a man needs eggs!’ said Mrs Crampton, also looking pleased.
This insistence on a man’s need amused Jane. Men needed meat and eggs – well, yes, that might be allowed; but surely not more than women did? Perhaps Mrs Crampton’s widowhood had something to do with it; possibly she made up for having no man to feed at home by ministering to the needs of those who frequented her café.
Nicholas accepted his two eggs and bacon and the implication that his needs were more important than his wife’s with a certain amount of complacency, Jane thought. But then as a clergyman he had had to get used to accepting flattery and gifts gracefully.

Then another man enters the café - the young, single Mr Oliver, who lives in lodgings:

Mrs Crampton now returned and set down before Mr Oliver a plate laden with roast chicken and all the proper accompaniments. He accepted it with quite as much complacency as Nicholas had accepted his eggs and bacon and began to eat. Jane turned away, to save his embarrassment. Man needs bird, she thought. Just the very best, that is what man needs.

“A man needs eggs” and “a man needs meat” go on to become recurring joke throughout the rest of the novel – jokes that perfectly exemplifies the way the Pym balances humour with darker undercurrents. The scenes in which several characters say this with a perfectly straight face are hilarious, but the implications of second class status for Jane and other women are very much not.

One of the things I appreciated the most about Jane and Prudence was the fact that it portrayed both the single, independent woman and the married one as having their troubles and their sources of contentment. No single life path was glorified or shown to be the miraculous solution to women’s problems, and no life path was reviled. Instead, Jane and Prudence’s choices are validated but shown in their full complexity, and both stories draw attention to how much social structures still needed to change before these women could find satisfying ways out of their particular difficulties. I find this approach somewhat rare even today, let alone in 1953.

This was my first Barbara Pym novel, but I can’t wait to read her again. I must pick up Excellent Women soon.

Other bits I liked:

‘Ah, here is Nicholas coming in now,’ said Jane, stepping carefully to the window in her tight shoes. ‘Now we can have tea. Darling, go and put the kettle on, will you? I think everything else is ready.’
Flora went quietly from the room and Nicholas came in, rubbing his hands together and looking vaguely benevolent.
‘Ah, good afternoon, Oliver, very glad to see you,’ he murmured. ‘Tea not ready yet?’ he said, in the way men do, not pausing to consider that some woman may at that very moment be pouring water into the pot. ‘Teaching those lads is thirsty work.’

‘Do you suppose Miss Bates has any love life?’ asked Marilyn idly one morning after Prudence had been staying with Jane. ‘She’s quite attractive still, really.’
‘I wonder how old she is,’ said Gloria. ‘About thirty, do you think?’
‘Oh, yes, must be. I hope I die before I’m thirty – it sounds so old.’
‘Forty must be worse,’ said Gloria sensibly. ‘I shouldn’t like to be forty. Miss Trapnell’s over forty, I should think, and Miss Clothier too.’
They brooded silently for a moment over this horror.
‘Manifold’s thirty,’ said Marilyn in a brighter tone. ‘It doesn’t seem so bad for a man.’

They read it too: Lakeside Musings, Fleur Fisher in Her World, Letters from a Hill Farm, Musings, Books Ahoy!, Bookgirl’s Nightstand

(You?)

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On Mrs Whatsit: Celebrating 50 Years of A Wrinkle in Time

This post contains minor spoilers for A Wrinkle in Time.

The fact that the first chapter of A Wrinkle in Time is titled “Mrs Whatsit” should give you an idea of one of the key roles this memorable character plays in the story: she introduces the first notes of mystery and magic in what initially appears to be an everyday scenario.

The opening chapters of Madeleine L’Engle’s classic introduce us to Meg Murry and her many worries: she’s worried about her missing physicist father, and also worried that the effect of his absence on her mother is far greater than what Mrs Murry allows her children to see; she’s worried about her school performance and what this may say about her intelligence; she’s worried about the inescapable fact of her difference; she’s worried that her prodigious little brother, Charles Wallace, will also not fit in and will be bullied once he starts school. Meg’s troubles are rooted in the everyday (and this is, of course, part of the novel’s appeal), but they gain a mythical proportion in the “dark and storm night” when Mrs Whatsit first knocks at the Murrys’ door.

Mrs Whatsit visits the Murrys under the guise of an eccentric old lady, though at first Meg isn’t sure of what she is, exactly:

The age or sex was impossible to tell, for it was completely bundled up in clothes. Several scarves of assorted colors were tied about the head, and a man’s felt hat perched atop. A shocking-pink stole was knotted about a rough overcoat, and black rubber boots covered the feet.

Later, when Meg gets a look at what’s under the bundle of clothes, this is what she sees:

Under all this a sparse quantity of grayish hair was tied in a small but tidy knot on top of her head. Her eyes were bright, her nose a round, soft blob, her mouth puckered like an autumn apple.

Mrs Whatsit picked a disguise that smart literary heroines, much like Miss Marple, have always known how to use: that of the harmless, easy to underestimate older lady. These characters use our culture’s sexism and troubled relationship with age to their advantage. They become invisible; they take others by surprise. Mrs Whatsit’s eccentricity only adds another layer to her camouflage: as we’re told, “the very oddness of it was what made her seem so comforting”.

Mrs Whatsit’s cryptic parting words to Mrs Murry that first night, “there is such a thing as a tesseract”, are the first unmistakeable sign that something momentous and unusual is about to happen. Soon, Meg, Calvin and Charles Wallace are whisked away on an intergalactic journey to battle the forces of darkness and rescue Mr Murry; by then, Meg’s initial suspicion has given place to the certainty that her new friend is “someone in whom one could put complete trust”.


Mrs Whatsit transformed: fan art by ~mheuston on DeviantArt.
Part of Mrs Whatsit’s appeal is that for all her knowledge and power, we see her as far more vulnerable and human than her two companions. She’s the youngest, too – we’re told she’s “only” 2,379,152,497 years and 8 months old, and that this explains a lot about her. But it is also what allows her to become a bridge between the children and the more all-knowing and remote Mrs Which and Mrs Who.

Meg eventually comes to perceive this more accessible persona as “a game Mrs Whatsit was playing; it was an amusing and charming game, a game full of both laughter and comfort, but it was only the tiniest facet of all the things Mrs Whatsit could be.” But the thing is, it works — not only on Meg, but also on the reader. We’re not left with the feeling that Mrs Whatsit is beyond our reach. Her relative inexperience humanises her; it draws her near.

The gifts she gives Meg before she goes off to fight the forces of darkness at Camazotz are also very human: first she gives Meg her faults, then she gives her her love. Both of these gifts highlight the simple yet powerful ideas at the heart of A Wrinkle in Time: the humanising power of love, the importance of embracing difference, the value of resourcefulness and creativity, of taking risks even when you’re afraid. To have the love of one such as Mrs Whatsit gives Meg strength when she’s alone in Camazotz; to have her faults given back to her allows her to begin to feel comfortable in her own skin.

Mrs Whatsit is a fine addition to the great literary tradition of magical helpers. But one of the most important things about her is that she’s a helper who knows when to steps back: she allows our very human, very uncertain and very frightened heroine to come into her own.

Madeleine L’Engle’s Newbery Medal winning A Wrinkle in Time celebrates its 50 anniversary this year, and this post is part of a fifty days celebration around the blogosphere to mark the occasion. You can follow the link to find out more about the commemorative edition of the book, and also about other 50th anniversary related events both in the blogging world and offline.

Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%. I received a copy of the 50th Anniversary edition of the book from the publisher.

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Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes by Mary M Talbot and Bryan Talbot

Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes, written by Mary Talbot and illustrated by her husband Bryan Talbot, combines two coming of age stories set decades apart. One is a memoir of the author’s upbringing and of her troubled relationship with her father, renowned Joycean scholar James S. Atherton (using Joyce’s own words, she thinks of him as her “feary father”); the other is a biography of James Joyce’s own daughter, Lucia. The two stories are seamlessly interwoven in a structure that draws attention to the parallels in these two women’s lives and highlights the book’s overall themes.

Mary Talbot grew up in Wigan, Northwest England, in the 1950’s and 60’s; Lucia Joyce lived, and discovered her talent for dancing, in bohemian 1920’s Paris. Their stories unfolded worlds apart, and in many ways are very different. Yet both were talented young women growing up in the shadow of intimidating fathers, who were widely acclaimed for their genius but whose attitude towards their daughters’ individuality and career ambitions left something to be desired.



Troubled father-daughter relationships play a key role in Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes, as do attitudes towards women. Mary’s and Lucia’s paths are both affected by the straitjacket of gender expectations. The decades that separate them mean that these don’t take the exact same shape, but the parallels are nevertheless many. Entering school introduces Mary to the rigid gender roles of the 1950’s, which include complete segregation for most activities. Lucia’s bohemian environment, on the other hand, was seemingly more flexible, but her very traditional mother disapproved of her ambitions as a dancer, and even her modern father believed that as a woman she should be content to “carry an umbrella gracefully” and “know how to walk into a room properly”.

As Mary Talbot says in this interview, the structure of the book gave her room to “explore aspects of social history – gender politics and social expectations, shifting attitudes about ‘proper’ behaviour – in a very concrete way that hopefully makes these abstractions come alive.” As a reader I get to remove that “hopefully”: this is exactly what it does, and very well indeed.


If there’s as aspect in which these two women’s stories differ greatly, it’s fortunately their conclusion. Mary went on to become a successful academic, whereas Lucia ended her days in a mental institution. One is a story of survival, the other a story of collapse. However, Mary’s triumph only highlights the sadness of Lucia’s breakdown. There is so little that separates them – time, the loosening of social mores, a person there at the right moment, and a respite from sexism and the infantilisation of women.


Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes is the exact kind of book I love – an acute analysis of the impact of rigid gender roles in two women’s lives, and also a memoir of intellectual and emotional growth, full of references to books and to the cultural markers of the author’s life. Furthermore, it does a great job of combining social history and a more personal angle. The section about Lucia Joyce conveys some of the charm we tend to associate with 1920’s Paris and its literary life, but it does so while revealing its dark side, particularly for women who lived in the shadow of great men.




As you can see from the images I included, Bryan Talbot’s art is as wonderful as always. He uses different art styles for the alternating sections – colour for the present day, sepia for Mary’s past, and tones of blues (my favourite of the three styles) for Lucia Joyce’s story. This approach makes the temporal transitions smoother and helps highlight each section’s different feel.

Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes was one of my most anticipated releases of the year: not only do I love Bryan Talbot’s art, but I have encountered and been impressed by Mary Talbot’s academic work on gender and linguistics in the past. As you might have gathered by now, I wasn’t disappointed in the least. The way I described the book might have reminded some readers of Alison Bechdel’s brilliant Fun Home, and it’s very telling to say that Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes doesn’t really suffer in the comparison.



Reading this book made me want to learn more about Lucia Joyce, so I was delighted to see that a reading list was included at the end. Some of the books listed are Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake by Carol Loeb Shloss, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties by Meyer Howard Fitch, and a biography of Nora Joyce by Brenda Maddox. I loved Maddox’s biography of Rosalind Franklin and would love to read her take on James Joyce’s wife.

Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes will be out next Thursday, the 2nd of February, to coincide with James Joyce’s 130th birthday and the 90th anniversary of the publication of Ulysses.

(Have you read this book too? Leave me your link and I’ll be happy to include it.)

Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%. I downloaded a copy of this book via NetGalley.

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