It's not the height, it's the intensity

[oursin]

And I should be doing a recent reading post, but I'm still too exhausted and out-of-sync. But this irked me enough to generate a probably deceptive surge of energy to post with.

Making my way through the piles of accumulated mail, I came to Focus: the BSFA Magazine for Writers, Autumn 2007 no 51, which included an article on 'How do I stand out on

Comments

[noveldevice]

I caught myself describing something to someone the other day as "urgent, phallic". You are contagious. :)

Why is it that some women, who seem overall to be fairly thoughtful, humanist etc become very angry and defensive when one mentions the persistent Otherization of women by men? Am I just horribly abrasive?

And I apologize for the horrifically off-topic nature of this comment. I hate to be "you remind me of something I said", but it suddenly occurred to me just because you seem to have these sorts of conversations with other people a lot, and perhaps you would have some insight. Or could tell me if it's just that I am a Horribly Abrasive Feminist.

[sollersuk]

Good point. It made me realise that I did do the right thing, however many problems it brings, in having alternating narration by the male MC and the female MC. It's set in a time when male and female worlds barely intersected and I felt that I couldn't deal with the story and its complexities properly if I ignored either world - which I would have had to do otherwise.

[noveldevice]

I--and my discipline--struggle with this on a regular basis. We want to know about women in the ancient world, but--with a few exceptions--we can't get access to a woman's direct experience, only to what men say about women. Even the women who speak for themselves in poetry or drama are to some extent only men speaking in falsetto, and figuring out what exactly that extent is for any specific text or character or author is maddening. The male and female spheres intersect only slightly, around the margins of marriage, childbirth, and servitude.

John Younger made the point in a talk I recently went to that in ancient sources, love between same-sex couples is always assumed, and love between different-sex couples is never assumed. If love is about transgressing differences, he said, for the ancients, those differences were social and economic distinctions, not sexual ones. He doesn't think that "the problem of love" really enters the scene until Austen.

I think he's decomplexifying by leaving out rather a lot of centuries

[oursin]

What about Shakespeare? or indeed, Chaucer and the whole courtly romance genre which preceded him. There were certainly female writers addressing the issue from, what, C15th? There are also those medieval saint legends which are about religious difference - whether, like St Elizabeth, she converts her husband, or, like St Wilgefortis, grows a beard to discourage one. We only know less about the infinitely complicated area of heterosexual relations because so far, the historiography has focussed on the homosexual variety.

[noveldevice]

Yes; I thought about Chaucer almost immediately I left the comment, but that is what John said. :) Perhaps he was simplifying for the non-classicist portion of his listeners, who were in Women's Studies with a modern focus, so they spent a lot of time during his lecture asking the sort of painful and obvious questions that people tend to ask about classical sex for a while before they can wrap their head around the issues. Although there again--are Chaucer's depictions of women genuine, or just a better falsetto?

I wonder how much this isolation of male/female has caused the excessive focus on homosexuality--when the majority of the sources are male writers writing about what they know, and their world is for the most part isolated from the female world, it takes time to work your way down to the exceptions, male and female, that talk about inclusion?

[oursin]

I'm also wondering about how absolute that division really was, especially after having read Amanda Vickery deconstructing the prevalent public/private world assumptions about C18th life. Also about surviving non-literary sources, whether archaeological or things like law-suits etc.

[noveldevice]

It seems to have been pretty absolute for the Greeks--deliberately so, especially around the 5th c. BCE once people started moving household into the big urban centers. Things are always different for the poor, though, and social divisions were nothing like absolute for the poor woman who went to the market herself, or the farming wife who made major and noticeable contributions on a daily basis to the oikos.

[oursin]

Yes, once you start controlling for class, economic position, etc things can look very different - and even those Victorian separate spheres patriarchs sometimes left control of the firm to their wives while going abroad on business (cf John Tosh A Man's Place. Also, jobs in which for a long time (and to some extent even today) the wife has a recognised function as e.g. the vicar's or doctor's wife (in earlier centuries the latter even documentedly performed some medical/surgical activities involving female patients, for modesty's sake).

Re: I think he's decomplexifying by leaving out rather a lot of centuries

[tree_and_leaf]

Or all the early female martyrs and their husband problems. Elisabeth is actually a very interesting case, because her marriage is entirely successful and, at least in the early sources, portrayed as an actual romance, with Ludwig marrying her over his family's opposition and, in contrast to the earlier 'conversion of the husband' stories, it's clear that they didn't remain virgins (for one thing, they had issue, and there are a couple of incidents that indicate that they shared a bed. Of course, later on, Elisabeth gets reformed into the reluctant bride who hated every minute of her polluting married life; a shame, really - the woman who scandalised the court by dashing up to her husband and hugging and kissing him as soon as he'd got off his horse, but who nevertheless was deeply inspired by Fransiscan teaching on poverty and the ascetic life, is a lot more interesting (not to mention human)

... sorry to go on at length; I'm very interested in Elisabeth, and I think she'd make a good subject for a novel.

Re: I think he's decomplexifying by leaving out rather a lot of centuries

[oursin]

There seem to me to have been some women who were very relieved that religion gave them an out from disgusting conjugal duties, and others who did feel that these were a sin and temptation to themselves.

Re: I think he's decomplexifying by leaving out rather a lot of centuries

[tree_and_leaf]

Oh, absolutely, on both counts. And I suspect Elizabeth probably felt guilty about being happily married, on some level. She's interesting to me because she doesn't really quite fall into any of the patterns (though it's partly because there are more eyewitness sources on her that haven't been quite so heavily refined by the trained hagiographers, who were always keen to make things tidy and typical.† It is always more complicated - but you don't always know that from the sources, so it's nice when it comes through!

† In this they strangely resemble bad socialist realist writers - it's probably a general problem of literature that wants to be improving.

[jonquil]

My 17-year-old came in yesterday, flapping her arms in rage, and described something as "phallic", and I thought "I have not lived in vain".

[oursin]

Because it's just too scary to think about? If, for whatever reason, they personally have not come across any egregious examples (and it's woefully easy to justify things that have happened as just down to specific personal or situational factors) they may want to think that other women are Just Whingeing On.

This may be about the desire of the successful X [of whatever discriminated against group] to consider their success entirely due to personal merit (this also, of course, applies to members of privileged groups) rather than any adventitious factors owing more to luck, who they know, and being in right place/subject at right time. And therefore, even if other Xs are conspicuous by their absence, it is because they just can't hack it and are trying to make excuses.

I think a consideration of why some women do that thing about women who get raped somehow were doing something that was a contributory factor, even if not wholly blameworthy, is pertinent here.

[noveldevice]

That could be. The most recent example of this was during a conversation with a young woman of my acquaintance and her boyfriend--her boyfriend seemed to grasp my point, but she seemed very resistant to it. They are both younger than I am; perhaps she just hasn't made her peace with the idea that sometimes all you can do is be angry and go on as you were.