Neil Harris in his book on J. Carter Brown’s directorship of the National Gallery (Culture Capital) explains how our nation’s capital came to be appreciated through graphic and literary presentations. Samuel F.B. Morse painted Congressional proceedings, but cartoonists provided caricatures of politicians that encouraged interest in the “farcical as well as tragic features of government” (Harris 40).
Films and plays, however, really helped rally interest in the workings of government with themes “reflecting attitudes toward partisanship, corruption, power, and pretension” (Harris 41). Before television, government was a largely mysterious affair, occurring at a great distance from most every day lives. Films like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Born Yesterday, and State of the Union provided peeks into these places of power.
Television has changed some of that by providing us closer looks at Congress and the White House, but still we must remember how much we are influenced by what we see, or rather are given to see. There are parts of the world that I have never seen, but that I can describe because I have seen them in film and on television. We cringe at critical remarks in the 19th century about ‘exotic’ locales and people that are often derived from the Romantic imagery of the painters who visited, composed, and returned with canvases in hand. Art and stories do tell us something about a culture and a time, but sociological research also reveals those things that remained unacknowledged.
I feel compelled to mention this here because I am such an advocate for the role of poems and stories in encouraging interest in art and artists. I really do think we can use them to tell us about responses to certain works and movements over the years, why and how they have continued to appeal. There is a place in the history of art for the stories of art. BUT, all that being said, we must also remember that these are fictional accounts. They have dramatic requirements that allow them to warp evidence to the contrary. After all, as I’ve said before, why ruin a good story for want of a few facts?
A good story is a good story and over wine or on a Sunday night before a busy week ahead, that is what I want. I want drama! Give me House of Cards! But, Monday morning, don’t expect me to believe it. A peek into a place of power is not a good solid look. That requires more than sitting on the couch. It requires the hard work of investigative journalism, whose tales are far longer and more warped than any novel or film, and which we often ignore until it becomes entertainment…
All the President’s Men, Lincoln, The Butler, Selma.
These are fictions. But if well done, they might just make us wonder about what we’ve seen, what we think we see, what we might see if we looked more carefully.
Showing posts with label Book review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Book review. Show all posts
Book Review: Capital Culture, J.Carter Brown, The National Gallery, and the Reinvention of the Museum Experience by Neil Harris
Capital Culture is a detailed account of J. Carter Brown’s influence as Director of the United States National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., but Neil Harris’ fifteen chapters also offer a view of the changes that occurred in museum culture during the 23 years of his tenure. The book centers on the changes that Brown was able to impose during his time at the National Gallery, by using specific shows and internal situations as case studies for the transformations that helped turn the gallery into a world class museum. The blockbuster exhibitions that Brown spearheaded were often met with disapproval despite their public success. Harris is even-handed in presenting critical declamations, both aesthetic and political, alongside his archival research into the driving reasons for the National Gallery’s efforts into these shows.
The emphasis on museums as sites of cultural education rather than excited engagement stems in part from the origins of survey museums arising out of princely collections. Brown’s move away from this pedagogical tradition incited much criticism, and though such departures have grown common place, they are still treated with hesitation, attitudes which may not serve to encourage contemporary audiences who increasingly arise out of a culture of choice rather than instruction. J. Carter Brown was an innovator and the book argues on behalf of his successes, despite any failures, for making the National Gallery an important cultural center. Harris convincingly claims that Brown’s vision transformed the museum stage and readers will likely find inspiration in Brown’s dynamic belief in art for all.
A full review will be available at the Journal of Curatorial Studies in the summer of 2015.
CAPITAL CULTURE: J. CARTER BROWN, THE NATIONAL GALLERY, AND THE REINVENTION OF THE MUSEUM EXPERIENCE, NEIL HARRIS
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press (2013), 616 pp., Hardcover, ISBN: 978-0-226-06770-4, US$35.00
The emphasis on museums as sites of cultural education rather than excited engagement stems in part from the origins of survey museums arising out of princely collections. Brown’s move away from this pedagogical tradition incited much criticism, and though such departures have grown common place, they are still treated with hesitation, attitudes which may not serve to encourage contemporary audiences who increasingly arise out of a culture of choice rather than instruction. J. Carter Brown was an innovator and the book argues on behalf of his successes, despite any failures, for making the National Gallery an important cultural center. Harris convincingly claims that Brown’s vision transformed the museum stage and readers will likely find inspiration in Brown’s dynamic belief in art for all.
A full review will be available at the Journal of Curatorial Studies in the summer of 2015.
CAPITAL CULTURE: J. CARTER BROWN, THE NATIONAL GALLERY, AND THE REINVENTION OF THE MUSEUM EXPERIENCE, NEIL HARRIS
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press (2013), 616 pp., Hardcover, ISBN: 978-0-226-06770-4, US$35.00
Book Review: Broken Colors by Michele Zackheim
The book opens with the early life of Sophie Marks, whose parents died during the First World War, living with her artist grand parents in the English Midlands. She moves to Paris to go to art school, falls in love, and upon returning to her grandparents gives birth to a child she does not want, but eventually grows to love until air raids bomb her home and everyone she knows. Shell-shocked, she is hospitalized for several years. Any hesitation that I felt about the opening tragedy was allayed by the beauty of the language. Though sympathetic to the plight of the characters, the story never descends into melodrama.
The book has just laid its underpainting at this point, as Sophie must yet become an artist, and build a life as such. Across love and success, the story maintains a gorgeous calm. The chapters are brief and evocative of each step she takes, loving, losing, moving here, then there, in search of some indescribable sense of self, and all the other trite material of life that is never so trite for those living it, or for good fictional characters. The happy is satisfying not because it is a trite, happily-ever-after farce, but because the reader has come to believe that Sophie, nearing eighty, might yet be able to learn something, accept what she had refused, and find contentment.
The focus on Sophie makes some characters, like Nico, a little too simple, but since the reader is strongly positioned within Sophie's point of view, I was willing to ignore the occasional shallow quality in that character as an aspect of how Sophie saw them. She had not the knowledge, self or otherwise, to see them completely, and so neither do we.
I read this book within 24 hours, on the subway, while walking, ignoring family or friends after the holidays, because the book carries the magnificence of a Tolstoy life without the volume as a burden, and I wanted the satisfaction of knowing, in the end, the life of Sophie Marks completely.
The book has just laid its underpainting at this point, as Sophie must yet become an artist, and build a life as such. Across love and success, the story maintains a gorgeous calm. The chapters are brief and evocative of each step she takes, loving, losing, moving here, then there, in search of some indescribable sense of self, and all the other trite material of life that is never so trite for those living it, or for good fictional characters. The happy is satisfying not because it is a trite, happily-ever-after farce, but because the reader has come to believe that Sophie, nearing eighty, might yet be able to learn something, accept what she had refused, and find contentment.
The focus on Sophie makes some characters, like Nico, a little too simple, but since the reader is strongly positioned within Sophie's point of view, I was willing to ignore the occasional shallow quality in that character as an aspect of how Sophie saw them. She had not the knowledge, self or otherwise, to see them completely, and so neither do we.
I read this book within 24 hours, on the subway, while walking, ignoring family or friends after the holidays, because the book carries the magnificence of a Tolstoy life without the volume as a burden, and I wanted the satisfaction of knowing, in the end, the life of Sophie Marks completely.
Book Review: Counterfeit Murder in the Museum of Man by Alfred Alcorn
What a silly book! An aging museum Director has another murder near his museum grounds, but this time he is a suspect for the detectives on the case, while his prime suspect had an affair with the woman that he will sleep with, which his wife accepts because she slept with the murder victim! And there is a signing monkey whose life narrative is interespersed as the Director reads the memoir that the Chimpanzee signs to a typist.
A lovely send up of academic and museum bureaucracies, mid-life crises, old men with women barely half their age as wives and lovers, and our bizarre and entirely unexplainable self-satisfaction as a species. This is a series written by the former director of travel at Harvard's Museum of Natural History, so Alcorn's hilarious dialogue among academic bureaucrats about various theorretical fads, and the pretensions of those who take them seriously, his descriptions of the endless complexities of museum paperwork, and the characters who believe their cubicle defines the universe (or at least university). A perfect read when you need a reminder that it's only life after all.
A lovely send up of academic and museum bureaucracies, mid-life crises, old men with women barely half their age as wives and lovers, and our bizarre and entirely unexplainable self-satisfaction as a species. This is a series written by the former director of travel at Harvard's Museum of Natural History, so Alcorn's hilarious dialogue among academic bureaucrats about various theorretical fads, and the pretensions of those who take them seriously, his descriptions of the endless complexities of museum paperwork, and the characters who believe their cubicle defines the universe (or at least university). A perfect read when you need a reminder that it's only life after all.
Book Review: The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin
This brief book is a strange and uncomfortable tale of Christ's crucifixion from the point of view of his mother, who is not the peaceful, accepting figure of iconography. This Mary finds her son and his friends strange, self-important, and grand-standing. She is angry at herself and others for letting this happen to her son. She has run away to protect herself and is alternately ashamed and careful to keep her identity secret.
The novella is told in the first person by Mary, her internal monologue as she must patiently accept the visits of two men who want a story she refuses to describe as they desire (we are to assume they are apostles), as she retells the years of his preaching, wishing she could stop him, had stopped him, but could not, both out of weakness and because his followers had become adamant. A mother's anger at the influence her child's friends seem to have, encouraging him towards an end that all can tell will be a confrontation with law and order, is authentic and, if her voice were not so full of spite the reader might be able to feel sympathy, but instead we can only approach as close as to feel her horror and resentment at the world.
Her retelling of the raising of Lazarus is just one example of how Toibin retells the story to consider how on earth, the family might have dealt with the return of the dead, how the village might have reacted. In the Bible, the story is a miracle of Christ, but in life...what would it have been? Toibin reminds us that miracles are not simply glorious but also deeply upsetting re-orderings of the laws of nature, of reason, of what we believe we know to be real. For the family and friends of Lazarus, life is never the same. For those who just happened to be with Christ that day, and will never see Lazarus again, of course, it is a testament to the power of their leader. But, they do not consider the cost...
As many have turned to Mary, throughout history, for a sense of peace, for her grace, so did she need something similar, something ancient to embrace her. She leaves the Jewish faith of men and fathers to seek the feminine, a goddess from another culture. She will die not in the faith of her son, whose followers cleverly encompassed her tale in theirs, but seeking what many seek in her.
A quick read, the story is however unsettling. Its brevity was a clever tactic on Toibin's part to keep his reader from quitting before the end. This is not a beach read, as it were, but is a part of the tradition of myth and fairy-tale retellings. I am sure many will be horrified that Mary is depicted beyond the blue virgin, but many may find it comforting to recognize that she too might have felt the strong, complicated emotions of life.
The novella is told in the first person by Mary, her internal monologue as she must patiently accept the visits of two men who want a story she refuses to describe as they desire (we are to assume they are apostles), as she retells the years of his preaching, wishing she could stop him, had stopped him, but could not, both out of weakness and because his followers had become adamant. A mother's anger at the influence her child's friends seem to have, encouraging him towards an end that all can tell will be a confrontation with law and order, is authentic and, if her voice were not so full of spite the reader might be able to feel sympathy, but instead we can only approach as close as to feel her horror and resentment at the world.
Her retelling of the raising of Lazarus is just one example of how Toibin retells the story to consider how on earth, the family might have dealt with the return of the dead, how the village might have reacted. In the Bible, the story is a miracle of Christ, but in life...what would it have been? Toibin reminds us that miracles are not simply glorious but also deeply upsetting re-orderings of the laws of nature, of reason, of what we believe we know to be real. For the family and friends of Lazarus, life is never the same. For those who just happened to be with Christ that day, and will never see Lazarus again, of course, it is a testament to the power of their leader. But, they do not consider the cost...
As many have turned to Mary, throughout history, for a sense of peace, for her grace, so did she need something similar, something ancient to embrace her. She leaves the Jewish faith of men and fathers to seek the feminine, a goddess from another culture. She will die not in the faith of her son, whose followers cleverly encompassed her tale in theirs, but seeking what many seek in her.
A quick read, the story is however unsettling. Its brevity was a clever tactic on Toibin's part to keep his reader from quitting before the end. This is not a beach read, as it were, but is a part of the tradition of myth and fairy-tale retellings. I am sure many will be horrified that Mary is depicted beyond the blue virgin, but many may find it comforting to recognize that she too might have felt the strong, complicated emotions of life.
Looking for a Heroine, Book Review: Heroines by Kate Zambreno
Heroines. Kate Zambreno. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e) Active Agents, 2012. 309 pages.
“Your job will be to suppress everything suppressible” said T.S. Eliot to John Hayward, his literary executor. Kate Zambreno's Heroines recounts the numerous acts of suppression experienced by modernist women, wives and mistresses of the Great Male Authors of that time. The account of how these women’s art and work were stifled, their emotional outcries condeming them as mad, their letters and journals becoming controlled by their husbands’ literary estate speaks for a great silencing. Zambreno became entranced by these shadow lives flitting behind, around, and in the major works of modernism and sought out their stories. Reading the literary works by these marginalized women revealed a community that shared her own feelings of anxiety, while reading the letters, diaries and histories of these women presented the manner by which women’s writing has been minimized and dismissed. Zambreno's text is therefore an appeal to reconsider the way the literary and culture establishment has censored the mistress-muses of modernism.
Her research is thorough and she shares endless fascinating and disturbing anecdotes from the lives of Zelda Fitzgerald, Vivien(ne) Eliot, Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary McCarthy, Virginia Woolf, Anais Nin, June Miller, Sylvia Plath and many others, about the silence demanded of them. Her task is to make them Heroines, to help her reader see them as potential heroines when the established narrative has most of them diagnosed as mad (schizophrenic or depressed), crazy emotional tyrants to their suffering artist husbands. Here the Woolfs are the exception, as Leonard “wifes” Virginia and tends to her needs, maintaining the regime of her various rest cures. Here too, though Virginia must depend on Leonard for permission to write since “stimulation was seen as bad for a woman’s moral character.”
Vivien(ne) Eliot, who changed the spelling of her name and took on pseudonyms in a desperate quest for identity, published “satirical and sometimes savage portraits of the popular kids in the Bloomsbury set” under the name Fanny Marlow. T.S. Eliot eventually confessed to the offended group that his wife was the mysterious columnist in Criterion and promised never to publish her again. A rejection from another journal destroyed Vivien(ne)’s tender confidence, who would thereafter only jot notes in her journals. Convinced she could not write, her lifelong physical ailments increased and so did her emotional intensity. Though she cared for him during his breakdowns, Tom would have her hospitalized to free himself of the burden, regarding which Virginia Woolf wrote, “this is the bag of ferrets around Tom’s neck,” while Bertrand Russell wrote his mistress Lady Ottoline Morrell, “She is a person who lives on a knife edge, & will end as a criminal or a saint–I don’t know which.” Perhaps curiosity led him to drop Lady Ottoline for an affair with Vivien(ne), making Vivien(ne) the only woman to have slept with two Nobel winners, as Zambreno notes. When Tom received an offer to go teach at Harvard, and wanted to leave without her, the Bloomsbury set “gleefully” helped Tom escape. Distressed Vivien(ne) tried to place an advertisement in The Times: “Will T.S. Eliot please return to his home, 68 Clarence Gate Gardens, which he abandoned September 17th, 1932.” When she was found six years later wandering the streets of London, her family had her permanently hospitalized.
Zelda Fitzgerald, on the other hand, asked to be hospitalized to escape Scott. When she chooses to dance rather than tidy after Scott, or tend to their baby, she is interned in Switzerland for “obsessional illness” and “incipient egomania” but it is there that she writes Save Me The Last Waltz. When she returns, Scott is trapped by writer’s block and needs her memories and witticisms to spark his own work as she had always previously provided. She resists in order to complete her own novel, which she submits for publication to his horror. He steals at least one of her journals. She locks her writing in a drawer. He is outraged that her story about her time in the asylum might get published before his Tender is the Night, which addresses the same subject. He campaigned to suppress her script, but instead managed to review and cut any parts he wanted. He insisted that any writing ideas she had “will have to be submitted to me.” One would like to read the 114 page account of their final conversation recorded by a stenographer with a psychiatrist present in which it is decided that if Zelda can not write masterpieces like her husband than she ought not bother. F. Scott says “I am the professional novelist, and I am supporting you. That is all my material. None of it is your material.” She asks to be hospitalized but he insists she is not insane, that she must tell him her stories of madness. His inconsistencies and demands are exhausting, and Zambreno’s quotations are some of the best parts of this book. Zelda eventually manages to be institutionalized, where she spends the rest of her life, dying in an asylum fire.
Elizabeth Hardwick described Zelda “as the paragon of the unhappy woman,” but had no sympathy for the less resilent. Married to the poet Robert Lowell, she saw her own writing success as a rejection of any difference between the sexes (as did Mary McCarthy about whom Zambreno also writes). In her essay on Sylvia Plath, Hardwick wrote “every artist is either a man or a woman and the struggle is pretty much the same for both” though she also admits that having children means relinquishing a focus on writing for the woman. People who are gifted find time she insists, as Sylvia Plath did by waking at 4am to write in the morning quiet. Jean Stafford, Lowell’s first wife, would return home from her job at The Southern Review to make him, and any other poets belatedly waking from their hangovers, lunch, despite which she still wrote. Hardwick likewise sacrificed for him, quitting teaching jobs when he needed to move, tending him through his depressions, even as she knew he had endless affairs. She moved to London for his work, where he left her after 23 years of marriage for Lady Caroline Blackwood. She dreaded how biographers would interpret “Lizzie” in Lowell’s award winning The Dolphin that shamelessly presented their intimacies, but Hardwick insisted that her marriage was the best thing that had ever happened to her. Their marriage over, as she left London, she slipped him the note: “If you’ll need me, I’ll always be there. If you don’t, I’ll not be there.”
The stories of the women Zambreno has engaged are scattered across the pages of Heroines. A woman’s story will be introduced in one section, woven and compared to others, dropped and addressed again later, possibly multiple times. Composed of fragments, paragraphs and sentences stand alone but are gathered to develop themes and concerns. The first part presents the challenge that Zambreno and these modernist women faced to discover their own voice–Jean Rhys staying up one night filling exercise books with the story of her life, laughing and crying to hear it in her own words. The second part examines the difficulty in rejecting matrimonial or social expectations to be a mirror or muse–Katherine Mansfield who struggled to write when in a relationship and so lived apart from her husband most of their married life. For those familiar with the relationships of these modernist couples, the details that Zambreno highlights make compelling reading. Other readers may find themselves confused by these figures’ biographies since the chronology is scattered.
Across these stories and more, Zambreno makes the point quite clearly that “what is seen as signs of great Artistry in a man can be seen as alarm in a woman’s behavior.” Where the men are allowed eccentricities, breakdowns, passions for their art, the women are restrained from the same by requirements to be dutiful, loving, supportive wives to the great masters. The men are writing great works of literature. The women are scribbling away at the autobiographical. One of Zambreno’s main concerns is how a woman’s self-revealing writing has often been derided as a “girlish, self-involved act” because “memoir is a woman writer’s forbidden and often avoided continent,” though a review of women’s writings from the last forty years–from Maya Angelou to Brooke Shields to Joan Didion–argues this is no longer really true. Nevertheless, Zambreno hopes to liberate these women from their marginalized status as wives, by reclaiming their autobiographical writings as important and meaningful, not merely as surplus to inform the histories of their husbands but as works of literature in their own right. She weaves her experience into the narrative to perform the value of life writing that she is presenting.
It is not the personal stories she shares of reading or shopping, nor her particular brand of “girl” feminism, nor her strange argument against second wave feminism’s empowerment agenda, nor the lack of citation or clear referencing that undermined Zambreno’s presentation of these women’s lives. She strains the reliability of her narrative when she writes, “it is not lost on me the similarities in my current situation to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ which I teach. The husband named John. The gothic surroundings. The sense of being isolated, haunted. And I am: Unnamed Narrator. It’s really so Victorian I can’t stand it.” In the 21st century, in the United States there are few left who can argue their resemblance to the nameless narrator of Gilman’s classic text. Marrying your boyfriend to travel with him to his post-doc in London, working in a bookstore or as a freelance writer to contribute to the household income, considering graduate school but dismissing it in favor of your own free reading, no pressure to have children or tend home, rejecting doctor and therapist recommended medications are only some of the obvious dissimilarities. Kate’s husband encourages her to write, offering her a sunroom in which to write in peace while he pursues his full-time academic career. He supports her stance against psychotropics and psychological labeling. Though she is isolated in Akron, OH, she “escapes to Chicago” regularly, and is free to leave her writing room, and her house whenever she wishes. That her husband’s name is John and that she lives in a Victorian house are similarities too superficial to be convincing.
This passage, and others like it, make some of her distress at the lives suffered by the modernist women appear unnecessarily excessive. There are moments in these women’s lives that seem potentially manipulated or altered by the fragmentary telling composed within her intense reactions. Tying much of her contemporary feminist argument to modernist situations feels false when simple sympathy to these stories becomes radicalized empathy. Excessive emotions are not in themselves a problem for a reader, unless their disproportion makes them no longer believable, and puts the rest of the text in question. Such occurences in Heroines are unfortunate since they defeat an important argument for Zambreno that the excess of emotion women feel, then or now, is not only necessary, but valid because real and true. In many of her own examples, however, such excess seems peculiar and contrived.
In her own way, Zambreno has also used these women, as a catalyst to get more women writing. The book concludes with the message that “[i]f I have communicated anything to you I hope it is the absolute urgency to write yourself, your body, your own experience. The absolute necessity for you to write yourself in order to understand yourself, in order to become yourself. I ask you to fight against your own disappearance.” A poet that Zambreno admires, Audre Lorde, said something similar in “Silence Transformed into Language and Action,” first presented in 1977. Lorde saw then, as Zambreno sees now, that many women struggle to tell their own story. Heroines is full of interesting anecdotes about modernist wives and muses, but the question of why women remain silent today will not be answered in looking at those women whose lives were curtailed as women rarely face in the Western world today. Instead the issue remains a deeper one, requiring the arduous work of introspection that Lorde suggested thirty-five years ago when she asked her audience:
Zambreno is a talented writer clearly capable of offering her silent readers more than simply an encouragement to write. When she uses her emotional depths to consider why women (and men, since in my classroom I see as many men struggling to state their original truth as women) remain silent when the visible tyrannies are gone, she will have offered her readers a new, much needed, and gloriously outspoken Heroine.
“Your job will be to suppress everything suppressible” said T.S. Eliot to John Hayward, his literary executor. Kate Zambreno's Heroines recounts the numerous acts of suppression experienced by modernist women, wives and mistresses of the Great Male Authors of that time. The account of how these women’s art and work were stifled, their emotional outcries condeming them as mad, their letters and journals becoming controlled by their husbands’ literary estate speaks for a great silencing. Zambreno became entranced by these shadow lives flitting behind, around, and in the major works of modernism and sought out their stories. Reading the literary works by these marginalized women revealed a community that shared her own feelings of anxiety, while reading the letters, diaries and histories of these women presented the manner by which women’s writing has been minimized and dismissed. Zambreno's text is therefore an appeal to reconsider the way the literary and culture establishment has censored the mistress-muses of modernism.
Her research is thorough and she shares endless fascinating and disturbing anecdotes from the lives of Zelda Fitzgerald, Vivien(ne) Eliot, Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary McCarthy, Virginia Woolf, Anais Nin, June Miller, Sylvia Plath and many others, about the silence demanded of them. Her task is to make them Heroines, to help her reader see them as potential heroines when the established narrative has most of them diagnosed as mad (schizophrenic or depressed), crazy emotional tyrants to their suffering artist husbands. Here the Woolfs are the exception, as Leonard “wifes” Virginia and tends to her needs, maintaining the regime of her various rest cures. Here too, though Virginia must depend on Leonard for permission to write since “stimulation was seen as bad for a woman’s moral character.”
Vivien(ne) Eliot, who changed the spelling of her name and took on pseudonyms in a desperate quest for identity, published “satirical and sometimes savage portraits of the popular kids in the Bloomsbury set” under the name Fanny Marlow. T.S. Eliot eventually confessed to the offended group that his wife was the mysterious columnist in Criterion and promised never to publish her again. A rejection from another journal destroyed Vivien(ne)’s tender confidence, who would thereafter only jot notes in her journals. Convinced she could not write, her lifelong physical ailments increased and so did her emotional intensity. Though she cared for him during his breakdowns, Tom would have her hospitalized to free himself of the burden, regarding which Virginia Woolf wrote, “this is the bag of ferrets around Tom’s neck,” while Bertrand Russell wrote his mistress Lady Ottoline Morrell, “She is a person who lives on a knife edge, & will end as a criminal or a saint–I don’t know which.” Perhaps curiosity led him to drop Lady Ottoline for an affair with Vivien(ne), making Vivien(ne) the only woman to have slept with two Nobel winners, as Zambreno notes. When Tom received an offer to go teach at Harvard, and wanted to leave without her, the Bloomsbury set “gleefully” helped Tom escape. Distressed Vivien(ne) tried to place an advertisement in The Times: “Will T.S. Eliot please return to his home, 68 Clarence Gate Gardens, which he abandoned September 17th, 1932.” When she was found six years later wandering the streets of London, her family had her permanently hospitalized.
Zelda Fitzgerald, on the other hand, asked to be hospitalized to escape Scott. When she chooses to dance rather than tidy after Scott, or tend to their baby, she is interned in Switzerland for “obsessional illness” and “incipient egomania” but it is there that she writes Save Me The Last Waltz. When she returns, Scott is trapped by writer’s block and needs her memories and witticisms to spark his own work as she had always previously provided. She resists in order to complete her own novel, which she submits for publication to his horror. He steals at least one of her journals. She locks her writing in a drawer. He is outraged that her story about her time in the asylum might get published before his Tender is the Night, which addresses the same subject. He campaigned to suppress her script, but instead managed to review and cut any parts he wanted. He insisted that any writing ideas she had “will have to be submitted to me.” One would like to read the 114 page account of their final conversation recorded by a stenographer with a psychiatrist present in which it is decided that if Zelda can not write masterpieces like her husband than she ought not bother. F. Scott says “I am the professional novelist, and I am supporting you. That is all my material. None of it is your material.” She asks to be hospitalized but he insists she is not insane, that she must tell him her stories of madness. His inconsistencies and demands are exhausting, and Zambreno’s quotations are some of the best parts of this book. Zelda eventually manages to be institutionalized, where she spends the rest of her life, dying in an asylum fire.
Elizabeth Hardwick described Zelda “as the paragon of the unhappy woman,” but had no sympathy for the less resilent. Married to the poet Robert Lowell, she saw her own writing success as a rejection of any difference between the sexes (as did Mary McCarthy about whom Zambreno also writes). In her essay on Sylvia Plath, Hardwick wrote “every artist is either a man or a woman and the struggle is pretty much the same for both” though she also admits that having children means relinquishing a focus on writing for the woman. People who are gifted find time she insists, as Sylvia Plath did by waking at 4am to write in the morning quiet. Jean Stafford, Lowell’s first wife, would return home from her job at The Southern Review to make him, and any other poets belatedly waking from their hangovers, lunch, despite which she still wrote. Hardwick likewise sacrificed for him, quitting teaching jobs when he needed to move, tending him through his depressions, even as she knew he had endless affairs. She moved to London for his work, where he left her after 23 years of marriage for Lady Caroline Blackwood. She dreaded how biographers would interpret “Lizzie” in Lowell’s award winning The Dolphin that shamelessly presented their intimacies, but Hardwick insisted that her marriage was the best thing that had ever happened to her. Their marriage over, as she left London, she slipped him the note: “If you’ll need me, I’ll always be there. If you don’t, I’ll not be there.”
The stories of the women Zambreno has engaged are scattered across the pages of Heroines. A woman’s story will be introduced in one section, woven and compared to others, dropped and addressed again later, possibly multiple times. Composed of fragments, paragraphs and sentences stand alone but are gathered to develop themes and concerns. The first part presents the challenge that Zambreno and these modernist women faced to discover their own voice–Jean Rhys staying up one night filling exercise books with the story of her life, laughing and crying to hear it in her own words. The second part examines the difficulty in rejecting matrimonial or social expectations to be a mirror or muse–Katherine Mansfield who struggled to write when in a relationship and so lived apart from her husband most of their married life. For those familiar with the relationships of these modernist couples, the details that Zambreno highlights make compelling reading. Other readers may find themselves confused by these figures’ biographies since the chronology is scattered.
Across these stories and more, Zambreno makes the point quite clearly that “what is seen as signs of great Artistry in a man can be seen as alarm in a woman’s behavior.” Where the men are allowed eccentricities, breakdowns, passions for their art, the women are restrained from the same by requirements to be dutiful, loving, supportive wives to the great masters. The men are writing great works of literature. The women are scribbling away at the autobiographical. One of Zambreno’s main concerns is how a woman’s self-revealing writing has often been derided as a “girlish, self-involved act” because “memoir is a woman writer’s forbidden and often avoided continent,” though a review of women’s writings from the last forty years–from Maya Angelou to Brooke Shields to Joan Didion–argues this is no longer really true. Nevertheless, Zambreno hopes to liberate these women from their marginalized status as wives, by reclaiming their autobiographical writings as important and meaningful, not merely as surplus to inform the histories of their husbands but as works of literature in their own right. She weaves her experience into the narrative to perform the value of life writing that she is presenting.
It is not the personal stories she shares of reading or shopping, nor her particular brand of “girl” feminism, nor her strange argument against second wave feminism’s empowerment agenda, nor the lack of citation or clear referencing that undermined Zambreno’s presentation of these women’s lives. She strains the reliability of her narrative when she writes, “it is not lost on me the similarities in my current situation to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ which I teach. The husband named John. The gothic surroundings. The sense of being isolated, haunted. And I am: Unnamed Narrator. It’s really so Victorian I can’t stand it.” In the 21st century, in the United States there are few left who can argue their resemblance to the nameless narrator of Gilman’s classic text. Marrying your boyfriend to travel with him to his post-doc in London, working in a bookstore or as a freelance writer to contribute to the household income, considering graduate school but dismissing it in favor of your own free reading, no pressure to have children or tend home, rejecting doctor and therapist recommended medications are only some of the obvious dissimilarities. Kate’s husband encourages her to write, offering her a sunroom in which to write in peace while he pursues his full-time academic career. He supports her stance against psychotropics and psychological labeling. Though she is isolated in Akron, OH, she “escapes to Chicago” regularly, and is free to leave her writing room, and her house whenever she wishes. That her husband’s name is John and that she lives in a Victorian house are similarities too superficial to be convincing.
This passage, and others like it, make some of her distress at the lives suffered by the modernist women appear unnecessarily excessive. There are moments in these women’s lives that seem potentially manipulated or altered by the fragmentary telling composed within her intense reactions. Tying much of her contemporary feminist argument to modernist situations feels false when simple sympathy to these stories becomes radicalized empathy. Excessive emotions are not in themselves a problem for a reader, unless their disproportion makes them no longer believable, and puts the rest of the text in question. Such occurences in Heroines are unfortunate since they defeat an important argument for Zambreno that the excess of emotion women feel, then or now, is not only necessary, but valid because real and true. In many of her own examples, however, such excess seems peculiar and contrived.
In her own way, Zambreno has also used these women, as a catalyst to get more women writing. The book concludes with the message that “[i]f I have communicated anything to you I hope it is the absolute urgency to write yourself, your body, your own experience. The absolute necessity for you to write yourself in order to understand yourself, in order to become yourself. I ask you to fight against your own disappearance.” A poet that Zambreno admires, Audre Lorde, said something similar in “Silence Transformed into Language and Action,” first presented in 1977. Lorde saw then, as Zambreno sees now, that many women struggle to tell their own story. Heroines is full of interesting anecdotes about modernist wives and muses, but the question of why women remain silent today will not be answered in looking at those women whose lives were curtailed as women rarely face in the Western world today. Instead the issue remains a deeper one, requiring the arduous work of introspection that Lorde suggested thirty-five years ago when she asked her audience:
What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?
Zambreno is a talented writer clearly capable of offering her silent readers more than simply an encouragement to write. When she uses her emotional depths to consider why women (and men, since in my classroom I see as many men struggling to state their original truth as women) remain silent when the visible tyrannies are gone, she will have offered her readers a new, much needed, and gloriously outspoken Heroine.
Book Cover Review- The Revealing Cover: Naomi Wolf’s Vagina
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Naomi Wolf’s new book Vagina attempts to empower women’s sensual desire by reducing the confusion surrounding women’s sexual bodies. Her descriptions of recent studies on the psycho-physical connections of the vagina and stories from her own experiences aim to reveal the full power harnessed by women when focused on their vagina. She has been faulted for the lack of rigor in her intellectual work and for her propensity to generalize from the personal. The design for the book’s US cover (the United Kingdom edition has a different design) demonstrates many of the same difficulties critics have found within the book. The title indicates the book is about vagina, that passage from the uterus to the vulva, except the term vagina is used “somewhat differently from its technical definition,” as “the entire female sex organ, from labia to clitoris to introitus to mouth of the cervix.” No single word unifies woman’s sexual parts, so vagina, derived from the Latin for sheath, serves here to wrap it up. Since the vagina is a female sexual part, the word automatically alludes to women, so this book can discuss women, the gender and sex, while examining a body part. Generalization is made easy; since all women have a vagina, having a vagina makes a woman like all others. Choosing as a title the word vagina implies a definitive study, but when not contained to the medical the word slips easily into other associations, as her own redefinition indicates.
--The capital letter V
Florid script suggests personal writing and private letters from a day gone by. It is often used for romance novels because its curls are associated with femininity. Flourishes and adornment divorce it from representing the stern work of analysis. The text can dive into the personal and rise to the universal in a single stroke, and yet not connect with the rest. This may be appropriate for the topic, but such wandering undermines the suggested seriousness of the effort. The wavering line reads as vacillation. Arguments will loop and leap, and possibly leave you hanging.
--The author’s name
The author’s name takes as much horizontal space as the title, indicating she is equal to her topic. Both the title and name are in red which draws the eye so both the title’s self-declared topic and the author’s name vie for attention. Vagina and Naomi Wolf are established as important visual elements; linked through size and color, they come together. That the vagina and Naomi Wolf are intertwined puts in question whether the vagina presented isn’t particularly Naomi Wolf’s experience of her own. In contrast to the elaborate script of the title, the simple font of her name implies she is a clear, careful writer. Her topic has been shown to be sweeping, though, so she might find herself carried away. A conflict seems inevitable.
--The subtitle
The subtitle indicates that the vagina is not simply a part of the human body like the knee or nose, but has her own life story to share. The biographical slant on the topic personifies the body part so that the vagina’s life either overwhelms or conflicts with the whole-bodied woman’s life. Either way, a woman’s life is then defined by her body, specifically her sexual body–an ideology that many women fought to eradicate only a few decades ago. Since there is no personal pronoun in the title or subtitle, the biography recounts the experience of all vaginas. An individual woman must either accept this broad tale told to her by another, or reject such generalizing to define her own sensual-sexual identity. Naomi Wolf’s subtitle establishes the very grounds for much of the criticism she has received. That the story told has been inadequate is implied by the need for a new account, but the new does not address the problem with the old–indiscriminate generalizations about a deeply personal area of a woman’s life.
--The stem of the fig leaf beneath the hand
Discussion of the vagina may seem like a hole in women’s lives, but this book fills that need with a peek inside. The keyhole in the cover encourages a voyeuristic approach by covering the stated body part with the quintessential fig leaf. The keyhole and the fig leaf signal there are many barriers to enter the vagina’s secret realm. Through the hole, we see a hand holding a fig leaf with a remarkably phallic stem. This is odd. There are many images of a fig-leafed Eve without such a stem, which makes the choice of this image peculiar in the context of celebrating the body part that the fig leaf is not only hiding, but covering with a seeming penis. Despite the title’s attempt at clarity, the language and the design elements (the subtitle, the fonts, and now the partial picture) exhibit confusion.
--The picture within the circle
Underneath the paper cover, Cranach the Elder’s 1531 painting of Eve is printed onto the hardback book, though only in part. Because Eve is the historical representation of the Judeo-Christian world’s rejection of female sexuality (though men’s was shamed at the same time), she is a natural choice to recall the vagina’s obfuscation. Women’s sexuality was chastened for centuries, though the question remains whether vaginal shame is a greater problem then the years of intellectual veiling that women also endured. Women didn’t need a brain–still don’t apparently, since the painting printed onto the hardback cuts Eve at her eyebrows. (This is particularly inappropriate given the book’s extensive discussion of scientific studies showing the importance of a vagina-brain connection.) In general, Naomi Wolf wants women to see their vagina in a new and positive light. Though a man is perfectly capable of painting a woman sincerely, given this book’s attempt to encourage women’s engagement with their sexual selves, why not exemplify that with artwork by a woman? Many female artists have produced work on the vagina in the last few decades, and been challenged for so doing. In the early eighties, Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party was threatened with censorship because of its unhesitant depictions. The vagina’s new biography might have chosen an image less than five centuries old.
--The author’s attribution
Naomi Wolf is a “bestselling author,” read by many on topics of great relevance to women such as the socio-cultural demands of physical perfection that constitute the beauty myth. Wolf’s first book was described as “smart, angry, insightful...a clarion call to freedom” by Gloria Steinem, who has remained silent about this one. If it was time for the vagina to reassess her position in the world, then perhaps Naomi Wolf might revisit some of her work in The Beauty Myth. She spoke there about the impact of visual images, and media studies scholars have continued to illuminate that effect. Images can be interpreted, and a book cover is no different. I don’t blame Cranach’s Eve or the stylized fonts for highlighting the confusion of this book. Though Naomi Wolf expounds on the vagina-brain connection, her enthusiasm is focused on the “nurturing and sustaining” vagina. This is a pity because her seemingly simple topic is actually quite complex and could have been nurtured and sustained by the brain’s particular skills, analysis and synthesis. The lack of consideration in the design reveals the lack of coherence that has concerned the critics of her book. You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but sometimes you can.
Book Review: The Value of Art: Money, Power, Beauty by Michael Findlay
The Value of Art: Money, Power, Beauty. Michael Findlay. Munich, London, New York: Prestel, 2012. 208 pages.
Michael Findlay has the experience in the art world to tackle his declared topic. After many years as the director of Acquavella Galleries, working with artists, collectors, auction houses and museums, his stories reflect on these encounters with thoughtful arguments and gentle mockery. In a book meant for “amateurs, from the Latin amare (to love),” who wonder what appreciation remains in the art world, he discusses how to consider the question of the value of art. He presents an engagement with art through the conceit of the Three Graces: Thalia (whose province is fruitfulness and so, commerce), Euphrosyne (joy and thus, society), Aglaea (beauty). The overall value of art engages these elements, in a constantly shifting balance, influenced by varying tastes at different times and in diverse cultures.
Acknowledging the ties that bind this triangle of ideas, people, or graces–with wonderful stories that alone make the book a pleasure to read–Findlay is largely advocating that we return to looking at art, individually, independently, immediately. The newspapers will ensure that big-hit auction items receive attention, and self-generated publicity will let us know about a new artist or gallery, but the constant among the highs and lows of the art market is a simple, visual appreciation maintained across time by spectators. One can begin to appreciate why this is, not by reading a biography of an artist, a gallery press release, or a theoretical underpinning for the work, but simply by taking the time to look. After ten minutes, Findlay warns, you may be bored, but after twenty you will find something unexpected, and after forty, you may no longer be keeping track of time.
This is the advantage that art collectors have against those who visit museums: time. Time permits a relationship with an individual work that will be there after a bad day at work, or the best day, in the morning and at night, glowing under professional lighting or shadowy in a night walk through the house. This advantage however can be allayed by a patient, focused visit to a museum. Findlay remembers his high school art teacher, Anthony Kerr, sending his less talented students into London for museum visits, after which each boy was expected to discuss what he had seen. These trips permitted Findlay, who was one of these less talented, to find compelling works and wonder why he found them so. Museum guests could likewise select a work to view for an extended period of time rather than rushing through the rooms to have seen everything the museum contains and, yet, be able to discuss none of it. The point is well made.
Findlay acknowledges a general discomfort with imagery in favor of textual knowledge, but encourages his reader to reconsider, titling one subsection “Perception trumps Information.” Approximately 20% of the information that the brain receives about a visual image, such as color and form, comes from the retina. We fill out what we see with other areas of the brain, including memory, which helps explain the subjective response to works of art. Reading placards may help us see, but it may equally influence what we see, diminishing our own vision. Seeing a lot of art and growing a personal repertoire of references will, however, develop a better eye than any amount of reading can, and Findlay is careful never to provide an opinion of the works whose stories he tells, instead encouraging his reader to consider them independently.
Towards the end of his book, Findlay states, “I am convinced that in modern times the most exciting and innovative art occurs in concert with events (invention, war, migration) that mark tectonic shifts in humane behavior and thought,” which he reiterates in several places. His forty plus years as a gallerist undeniably provide him with a breadth of experience about the art world, both the established blue-chip and truly bohemian. The importance placed on art’s response to the socio-political world, however, is an attitude whose importance in the 20th century may no longer serve a generation raised by political imagery. The politics of the Cold War, the fight against AIDS, the celebrity culture of certain diseases from autism to Parkinson’s, and then, of course, 9/11 have been projected like a slideshow onto our psyches. News cameras, impressive photo journalism, cell phone images, tweets, Facebook posts, all provide us with a constant barrage of information about the world in which we live. Art need not reinforce that disillusionment; otherwise it simply repeats a message already presented. In the 21st century, therefore, art may need to consider an alternate approach to the significant socio-political perceptions of the previous century.
In keeping with Findlay’s argument, we need stillness–a return to the self pausing to reflect on the world in which we live. Art has always been a place where this can occur. However, works in response to 9/11, which he seeks, may not appear as obviously political. To traverse contemporary concerns may require the quieter concentration of the beautiful, with respect for the perspective produced within the art work. We have seen the world’s cruelty; art may need instead to show us an alternate vision so that we have something to cherish as we fight for change. Outspoken works of art propagate action, which is certainly important, but so is consideration for the desired outcome, before hand. Some political motivated paintings and sculptures manage to make us pause, but many choose language and concept over the visual that Findlay so eloquently insists is, finally, the one inherent value in a work of art. After a century of cultural and political revolutions, the “most exciting and innovative” art of these modern times may have something new (again) to propose about the personal and the political by providing us a framed space for private reflection, a place from which to position our own perspective.
I only voice this small disagreement because Findlay’s book is the most arresting argument on behalf of the pleasure of art that I have read in a long time. He does not denigrate an economic art market that allows so many artists to earn a living, nor the social market that ensures their work remains appreciated, even as he recognizes the inherent foibles of the participants in both of these. The value of art lies in the eyes of the beholder, which means beauty can only be appreciated, its economic and social value understood, if after reading this review and his book, you go look at a painting in your home, one you noticed in a gallery, or a work in your favorite museum, and look at it, and look at it, and forty minutes later have forgotten that you were wondering why, because looking at it is just that good.
Michael Findlay has the experience in the art world to tackle his declared topic. After many years as the director of Acquavella Galleries, working with artists, collectors, auction houses and museums, his stories reflect on these encounters with thoughtful arguments and gentle mockery. In a book meant for “amateurs, from the Latin amare (to love),” who wonder what appreciation remains in the art world, he discusses how to consider the question of the value of art. He presents an engagement with art through the conceit of the Three Graces: Thalia (whose province is fruitfulness and so, commerce), Euphrosyne (joy and thus, society), Aglaea (beauty). The overall value of art engages these elements, in a constantly shifting balance, influenced by varying tastes at different times and in diverse cultures.
Acknowledging the ties that bind this triangle of ideas, people, or graces–with wonderful stories that alone make the book a pleasure to read–Findlay is largely advocating that we return to looking at art, individually, independently, immediately. The newspapers will ensure that big-hit auction items receive attention, and self-generated publicity will let us know about a new artist or gallery, but the constant among the highs and lows of the art market is a simple, visual appreciation maintained across time by spectators. One can begin to appreciate why this is, not by reading a biography of an artist, a gallery press release, or a theoretical underpinning for the work, but simply by taking the time to look. After ten minutes, Findlay warns, you may be bored, but after twenty you will find something unexpected, and after forty, you may no longer be keeping track of time.
This is the advantage that art collectors have against those who visit museums: time. Time permits a relationship with an individual work that will be there after a bad day at work, or the best day, in the morning and at night, glowing under professional lighting or shadowy in a night walk through the house. This advantage however can be allayed by a patient, focused visit to a museum. Findlay remembers his high school art teacher, Anthony Kerr, sending his less talented students into London for museum visits, after which each boy was expected to discuss what he had seen. These trips permitted Findlay, who was one of these less talented, to find compelling works and wonder why he found them so. Museum guests could likewise select a work to view for an extended period of time rather than rushing through the rooms to have seen everything the museum contains and, yet, be able to discuss none of it. The point is well made.
Findlay acknowledges a general discomfort with imagery in favor of textual knowledge, but encourages his reader to reconsider, titling one subsection “Perception trumps Information.” Approximately 20% of the information that the brain receives about a visual image, such as color and form, comes from the retina. We fill out what we see with other areas of the brain, including memory, which helps explain the subjective response to works of art. Reading placards may help us see, but it may equally influence what we see, diminishing our own vision. Seeing a lot of art and growing a personal repertoire of references will, however, develop a better eye than any amount of reading can, and Findlay is careful never to provide an opinion of the works whose stories he tells, instead encouraging his reader to consider them independently.
Towards the end of his book, Findlay states, “I am convinced that in modern times the most exciting and innovative art occurs in concert with events (invention, war, migration) that mark tectonic shifts in humane behavior and thought,” which he reiterates in several places. His forty plus years as a gallerist undeniably provide him with a breadth of experience about the art world, both the established blue-chip and truly bohemian. The importance placed on art’s response to the socio-political world, however, is an attitude whose importance in the 20th century may no longer serve a generation raised by political imagery. The politics of the Cold War, the fight against AIDS, the celebrity culture of certain diseases from autism to Parkinson’s, and then, of course, 9/11 have been projected like a slideshow onto our psyches. News cameras, impressive photo journalism, cell phone images, tweets, Facebook posts, all provide us with a constant barrage of information about the world in which we live. Art need not reinforce that disillusionment; otherwise it simply repeats a message already presented. In the 21st century, therefore, art may need to consider an alternate approach to the significant socio-political perceptions of the previous century.
In keeping with Findlay’s argument, we need stillness–a return to the self pausing to reflect on the world in which we live. Art has always been a place where this can occur. However, works in response to 9/11, which he seeks, may not appear as obviously political. To traverse contemporary concerns may require the quieter concentration of the beautiful, with respect for the perspective produced within the art work. We have seen the world’s cruelty; art may need instead to show us an alternate vision so that we have something to cherish as we fight for change. Outspoken works of art propagate action, which is certainly important, but so is consideration for the desired outcome, before hand. Some political motivated paintings and sculptures manage to make us pause, but many choose language and concept over the visual that Findlay so eloquently insists is, finally, the one inherent value in a work of art. After a century of cultural and political revolutions, the “most exciting and innovative” art of these modern times may have something new (again) to propose about the personal and the political by providing us a framed space for private reflection, a place from which to position our own perspective.
I only voice this small disagreement because Findlay’s book is the most arresting argument on behalf of the pleasure of art that I have read in a long time. He does not denigrate an economic art market that allows so many artists to earn a living, nor the social market that ensures their work remains appreciated, even as he recognizes the inherent foibles of the participants in both of these. The value of art lies in the eyes of the beholder, which means beauty can only be appreciated, its economic and social value understood, if after reading this review and his book, you go look at a painting in your home, one you noticed in a gallery, or a work in your favorite museum, and look at it, and look at it, and forty minutes later have forgotten that you were wondering why, because looking at it is just that good.
Supergirl No More! Book Review: Supergirls Speak Out: Inside the Crisis of Overachieving Girls by Liz Funk
Supergirls Speak Out: Inside the Crisis of Overachieving Girls. Liz Funk. New York: A Touchstone Book, 2009. 244 pages.
Accused of being an occasional Supergirl myself, I was intrigued by Liz Funk’s Supergirls Speak Out, a book offering to reveal the Supergirl psyche through interviews and case studies. There are many books about Supergirls, perfect girls, those girls that seem to always get it right–whatever it is. We have read about the connection to eating disorders, self-hatred, anxiety, exhaustion and now Liz Funk joins the bandwagon with a how-to guide for those desiring to take it down a notch.
Let me begin then by saying that this book should under no condition be given to any young woman you think might be a Supergirl, if you do not want to encourage a storm of masochism that might well lead her into the sanatarium. The adolescent girls in this book will make any Wonder Woman you know seem relaxed. Liz Funk worked so hard that besides the usual list (an A student, editor of the school newspaper, president of a foreign cultures club, class treasurer, etc.) she had a literary agent by tenth grade. At the wise age of nineteen, she has published this book on her overachievements on the way to taking it easy. She now lives in Manhattan with a seemingly successful writing career that many college students would envy. Her overachieving self seems to have brought her many rewards...why is she discouraging others from doing the same?
Her bio claims she spent a long time wishing she were Carrie Bradshaw, to learn that “it would be more fun (and more fulfilling) to just be herself” and certainly herself seems to have succeeded at that. The five girls she follows closely, and many of the 100 women she interviewed for the book, are exemplars of adolescent perfection. The problem she explains is that these women are fulfilling goals without a sense of pleasure in their accomplishments, or life. Her book hopes to encourage these women to laugh, and take life a little more lightly. Undoubtedly these young women deserve to cut themselves some slack but, given the case studies she shares, they can afford to do so since their hard work has borne fruit.
Many Supergirls, in fact, do not see results like the ones described here, and far more difficult is explaining to those girls why they should not work as hard as they do. Despite their dieting, they are not a size 0 (since the goal is obviously to disappear). Despite their makeup, clothes and hair stylist they are not attracting hordes of admirers (since constant recognition is the requirement). Despite their grades, extra-curricular activities, charity work and part-time internships, they did not get into the school of their choice (since there are only a dozen or so acceptable colleges to attend). These girls worked hard, and for naught.
This book will only make those girls feel worse.
Not because those girls did not work hard enough but because there has never been the competition for school admittance or jobs as there is today. Every girl, and every boy, who does not have the advantage of a trust fund and a parent who will ensure that every one of their contacts is notified about the brilliance and availability of John or Jane Junior, needs to work harder, better, faster, smarter than others. The race begins earlier than a young mind can apprehend which is why parents manage and manipulate their children into the right schools, activities, therapists, friendships. Is this ideal? No! Is it what you see if you live in Liz Funk or Carrie Bradshaw’s Manhattan? Most certainly, yes.
In her chapter on feminism, Liz Funk points out, these Supergirls are on auto-pilot, meeting deadlines and goals, despite Betty Friedan’s warning years ago that living through someone else is easier than “to become complete yourself.” She explains that society needs to learn to accept women for who they are, “to not punish women for being born female, and to stop expecting them to compensate for their gender with resumés,” a tired and true statement among many that fill this book. Funk seems to believe that her trite repetition of past feminist sayings will break through the hard shell of Supergirls’ success drive so that they will begin “sleeping late and reading Cosmopolitan”–a statement which leads me to doubt she has altogether absorbed some of the underlying messages of the feminists she quotes. Betty Friedan was right in her time and because she was, the nature of the problem has subtly changed so that the equivalences Funk presents–superachiever is linked to popularity, dieting is for love and attention–are simplistic. Her work would have benefited from reflecting on these overachieving women not from the standards of the women’s rights movement several decades ago, but through the altered lens of today.
Her book concludes with advice from other Supergirls on how to relax. Planning time off is key, she explains. Doing it until it feels natural is the only way to make it normal. Think about who you are, what you want and what life you desire, she adds. This advice is good, available in most women’s monthly magazines, and unfortunately avoids addressing the complicated fear of what happens when you do pick a different life, one not scripted, not even by a Supergirl like Liz Funk.
Accused of being an occasional Supergirl myself, I was intrigued by Liz Funk’s Supergirls Speak Out, a book offering to reveal the Supergirl psyche through interviews and case studies. There are many books about Supergirls, perfect girls, those girls that seem to always get it right–whatever it is. We have read about the connection to eating disorders, self-hatred, anxiety, exhaustion and now Liz Funk joins the bandwagon with a how-to guide for those desiring to take it down a notch.
Let me begin then by saying that this book should under no condition be given to any young woman you think might be a Supergirl, if you do not want to encourage a storm of masochism that might well lead her into the sanatarium. The adolescent girls in this book will make any Wonder Woman you know seem relaxed. Liz Funk worked so hard that besides the usual list (an A student, editor of the school newspaper, president of a foreign cultures club, class treasurer, etc.) she had a literary agent by tenth grade. At the wise age of nineteen, she has published this book on her overachievements on the way to taking it easy. She now lives in Manhattan with a seemingly successful writing career that many college students would envy. Her overachieving self seems to have brought her many rewards...why is she discouraging others from doing the same?
Her bio claims she spent a long time wishing she were Carrie Bradshaw, to learn that “it would be more fun (and more fulfilling) to just be herself” and certainly herself seems to have succeeded at that. The five girls she follows closely, and many of the 100 women she interviewed for the book, are exemplars of adolescent perfection. The problem she explains is that these women are fulfilling goals without a sense of pleasure in their accomplishments, or life. Her book hopes to encourage these women to laugh, and take life a little more lightly. Undoubtedly these young women deserve to cut themselves some slack but, given the case studies she shares, they can afford to do so since their hard work has borne fruit.
Many Supergirls, in fact, do not see results like the ones described here, and far more difficult is explaining to those girls why they should not work as hard as they do. Despite their dieting, they are not a size 0 (since the goal is obviously to disappear). Despite their makeup, clothes and hair stylist they are not attracting hordes of admirers (since constant recognition is the requirement). Despite their grades, extra-curricular activities, charity work and part-time internships, they did not get into the school of their choice (since there are only a dozen or so acceptable colleges to attend). These girls worked hard, and for naught.
This book will only make those girls feel worse.
Not because those girls did not work hard enough but because there has never been the competition for school admittance or jobs as there is today. Every girl, and every boy, who does not have the advantage of a trust fund and a parent who will ensure that every one of their contacts is notified about the brilliance and availability of John or Jane Junior, needs to work harder, better, faster, smarter than others. The race begins earlier than a young mind can apprehend which is why parents manage and manipulate their children into the right schools, activities, therapists, friendships. Is this ideal? No! Is it what you see if you live in Liz Funk or Carrie Bradshaw’s Manhattan? Most certainly, yes.
In her chapter on feminism, Liz Funk points out, these Supergirls are on auto-pilot, meeting deadlines and goals, despite Betty Friedan’s warning years ago that living through someone else is easier than “to become complete yourself.” She explains that society needs to learn to accept women for who they are, “to not punish women for being born female, and to stop expecting them to compensate for their gender with resumés,” a tired and true statement among many that fill this book. Funk seems to believe that her trite repetition of past feminist sayings will break through the hard shell of Supergirls’ success drive so that they will begin “sleeping late and reading Cosmopolitan”–a statement which leads me to doubt she has altogether absorbed some of the underlying messages of the feminists she quotes. Betty Friedan was right in her time and because she was, the nature of the problem has subtly changed so that the equivalences Funk presents–superachiever is linked to popularity, dieting is for love and attention–are simplistic. Her work would have benefited from reflecting on these overachieving women not from the standards of the women’s rights movement several decades ago, but through the altered lens of today.
Her book concludes with advice from other Supergirls on how to relax. Planning time off is key, she explains. Doing it until it feels natural is the only way to make it normal. Think about who you are, what you want and what life you desire, she adds. This advice is good, available in most women’s monthly magazines, and unfortunately avoids addressing the complicated fear of what happens when you do pick a different life, one not scripted, not even by a Supergirl like Liz Funk.
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