The madwoman and a heart of glass

This book is way too huge to talk or think about as a whole. So here are some of my reading notes for the first few chapters. Pardon incoherence --

I'm fascinated by fairy tales, so the use of "Snow White" as an example of how men view powerful or/and creative women is a delight. I never connected the Queen's mirror to Snow White's glass coffin, but - of course!

The evil stepmother Queen needs to shine, literally, to keep her power. One of the ways that the tale illustrates her evil is to show her being creative, making up stories to entrap Snow White. That kind of creativity, in that context, is considered male, so not only is her intent evil, but the stories' transgression goes beyond intent. Snow White has become the ideal that Coventry Patmore describes as "the angel in the house," a domestic, serene presence serving a house-full of men.

Virginia Woolf's injunction to kill the Angel in the House is enacted here, almost, when Snow White is in her glass coffin - a looking-glass, but a transparent one, designed for the vision of others. We know how she is rescued - but what becomes of her? Will she, in turn, become frightened of the threat posed by a beautiful girl-child? Will she lie and scheme to preserve her power? Will she also die a fiery death on the dance floor?

I wonder. .. And while I was reading this chapter, I wondered also why, in another culture, a woman who could tell story after story to her all-powerful man was considered a heroine and a role model. Scheherazade not only saved her own life and her sister's, but her stories live on in 1001 Nights. It would be interesting to compare the images of storytelling women in other cultures.

If artists have women muses (Dante, Rossetti, innumerable others), who would be a literary woman's muse? Would it be another woman? Who is mine - who is yours?

Is Renoir the only artist who said he painted with his prick? (p. 6) I'm sure Hemingway thought he wrote with his. (I vaguely remember someone - Cynthia Ozick, I think - asking Norman Mailer what color he dipped his ... well, I'll stop here.)

I'm keeping a reading list - books mentioned that I have not read and that I think I might, reasonably - so far it includes Aurora Leigh (Elizabeth Barrett Browning) and Lady Oracle (Margaret Atwood). I'm ashamed and startled at how many of the women writers are utterly unknown to me. Is anyone else having that reaction? Are you keeping lists, too?

The Madwoman in the Attic - thoughts on the introduction to the 2nd edition

(edited 9.17.07 - The BronteBlog already has picked us up!)

My undergraduate degree in English was granted in early 1975 by a country-club-like college, whose English professors were all - save one - male and reactionary. Their idea of reading women's literature was to compare the green light in The Great Gatsby to the zipless f**k in Fear of Flying. (I am not making this up.) I never heard of the New Critical theories until I stumbled upon them them on my own, over a decade later. My first reaction, a beak-dropping "huh?" (see below...), holds to this day.

Now that I have read the new introduction to Madwoman, I am again torn between laughter and scorn for the mainstream critical academy. Sandra Gilbert's slightly-bitter overview of the critics who battered the Madwoman from the moment of her birth leaves me wondering why anybody would bother to read at all, if the experience (the personal, subjective experience, that is) had to be purified and filtered through the latest critical net.

The larger question, of course, is whether any of the heroines of this book - the Brontes, say, or Emily Dickinson - would recognize themselves in the postmodern/deconstructed/exquisitely-partisan world of the critics, whose vocabulary has become so fractured and abstruse as to seem ("seem," madame?) deliberately obscure. (Sandra Gilbert's phrase "a jargon... of our own" made me snort with glee.) They would appreciate, I believe, the original work that Gilbert and Gubar undertook, to examine and excavate their art in the context of their times, but I can not imagine any of them being particularly sanguine in the face of their imminent deconstruction.

(Oh, and wouldn't you like to be in the room when Camille Paglia is outed as a non-feminist?)

Have you seen the AFLAC commercial in which the Duck's beak drops when Yogi Berra says that cash is the same as money? That's the quintessential beak-dropping moment, at least from my essentialist, seedcake-loving, personal, authoritorial, and individually-deluded stance.

So far, so good. I'm loving this book!