{"id":167857,"date":"2024-06-21T09:47:12","date_gmt":"2024-06-21T13:47:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=167857"},"modified":"2024-06-21T09:59:48","modified_gmt":"2024-06-21T13:59:48","slug":"intelligent-attractive-powerful-lesbians-conquering-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/06\/21\/intelligent-attractive-powerful-lesbians-conquering-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cIntelligent, Attractive, Powerful Lesbians Conquering the World\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

A letter from Marilyn Hacker to Joanna Russ.<\/p><\/div>\n


\nThe following correspondence between Joanna Russ and Marilyn Hacker is drawn from a new edition of Russ\u2019s <\/i><\/em>On Strike Against God<\/a> (1980), edited by Alec Pollak, to be published by Feminist Press in July. You can read Pollak\u2019s introduction to the work of Joanna Russ on the <\/i><\/em>Daily here<\/a>.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

October 23, 1973<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dear Marilyn,<\/p>\n

Your letter is lovely\u2014esp. since now I can write two letters where formerly I would\u2019ve written one: one to you, one to Chip.<\/p>\n

Your book business is rather like my teaching, except teaching does leave more time & more ways one can cut corners, and so on. And you are beginning to sound just like Chip about London\u2014I have this feeling that the two of you will turn up in NYC again\u2014or I guess I should say the three of you.<\/p>\n

And goodness knows, you BOTH need separate rooms. And the baby ought to have a velvet-lined cell where it can be put when both grown-ups have other things to do. Mind you, a nice <\/em>cell, and a nest, too, but having seen your flat, I agree that it\u2019s crowded.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

God, it seems we all end up in the same place. A very close friend of mine, who used to get upset when I went on & on about MEN is now divorced; another came back from Canada more militant than I\u2019ve ever been, and here you are saying just what we\u2019re all thinking.[1]<\/a> I can\u2019t read modern novels anymore (unless they\u2019re by women), I can\u2019t bear <\/em>the conventional Didion sort of stuff, the usual Young Enraged Man simply seems to be writing from the other side of the moon or something. And I am worrying endlessly over the aesthetics of propaganda\/polemic\/didactic writing, trying to figure out (the worst problem currently) whom <\/em>one is writing to. I think we both went through the business of I\u2019m Not A Girl I\u2019m A Genius, only they really won\u2019t let one do that; it just won\u2019t work. George Eliot is the most heartbreaking cop-out I\u2019ve been able to find: every book I\u2019ve read (tho\u2019 I haven\u2019t read Romola<\/em>) breaks about halfway through. Her courage falters, her plot switches in midtrack like a locomotive suddenly on a switchback, and the scheme of the book crumples up. And it\u2019s always where she comes to the conventional limits of femininity. Maggie changes into a different character in midbook in The<\/em> Mill on the Floss<\/em> (so does Tom, by the way)\u2014Daniel Deronda<\/em> is really two books\u2014poor Gwendolen is left hanging in midair in the damnedest way while Daniel takes off for Zionism\u2014and in Middlemarch<\/em>, Dorothea\u2019s first problem (what to do with herself ) somehow vanishes in the middle of a Love Affair. You can just see the book fall to pieces in each case. Only Adam Bede<\/em> holds together\u2014and there\u2019s no stand-in for the author there. Bront\u00eb, seems to me, simply stuck to her own experience and let it dictate to her: she writes the Great Romance once (Jane Eyre<\/em>, naturally the book everyone reads), lets her book split in two in Shirley<\/em>, and breaks into the most bitter, passionate kind of subversion in Villette<\/em>. Which is why, I am beginning to suspect, George Eliot (with her male worldview) is considered a Great Writer and Bront\u00eb isn\u2019t. Or aren\u2019t (both).<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a matter of space but of fear. There\u2019s Daniel\u2019s mother in Deronda<\/em>, the Jewish opera singer who hacked her way out of the ghetto and a ghastly father, even gave away her son so (1) she wouldn\u2019t have to bother about him & didn\u2019t want to and (2) so he wouldn\u2019t be raised a Jew: it\u2019s all there, the freedom, the ruthlessness, the price, the transcendent, necessary arrogance\u2014and the author takes it all back by saying she isn\u2019t LOVING. (!) Her life could be written, even in the nineteenth century, but Eliot didn\u2019t. Bront\u00eb could have. I think Lucy Snowe is magnificent, tho\u2019 I suspect some of the loose ends in the book might just come from Bront\u00eb\u2019s early death. Was it published after her death? \u2026<\/p>\n

I\u2019m happy with my teaching now, loathing my colleagues more than I can say (it wasn\u2019t Cornell; it\u2019s just the Type), and have just finished a thirty-eight-thousand-word novella in which my two Lesbian heroines end up practicing shooting a rifle in their backyard. I want to call it \u201cOn Strike Against God,\u201d this being what some judge said in the nineteenth cent. to a group of striking women workers: that they were on strike not just against their employers but against God.<\/p>\n

I would imagine you\u2019d know by now\u2014has Chip mentioned it to you?\u2014that I\u2019ve just about decided heterosexuality is, for me, the worst mistake I could make with the rest of my life. I was itching to tell you when I saw you in London but was too craven. And\u2014not that I think you will immediately broadcast the news\u2014do not tell anyone. I am not sure yet how I want to become publicly branded or by whom. And certainly if by chance any news of this should seep back to the academic community in which I live, that would most likely be IT.<\/p>\n

The labeling still bothers me. I don\u2019t feel like an anything sexually\u2014and am quite capable of watching Christopher Lee on the Late Late Show<\/span> <\/em>(when I don\u2019t have class the next day) and mooning about him all night. But I have more and more the feeling that my attraction towards men is compounded of a real witch\u2019s brew of bad things\u2014adoration, self-contempt, nostalgia, negativity\u2014there\u2019s something not-real about it, very imaginative and all that but still all in the head. While what I have felt for women has always been real, concrete, hooked to a concrete situation and person, and quite freeing. And very sexual. I keep trying to tell myself that the sex of the person I\u2019m attracted to doesn\u2019t matter, but that\u2019s nonsense. It matters tremendously. Because all the power di!erentials, all the politics, all the pain & despair and God knows what of the past 34 years (by the age of two I was already being made into a sexist mess), simply can\u2019t be wiped away. Maybe they could if the world around me did not constantly and endlessly reinforce them. (Which is a point I often tried to make to my analyst, without the slightest success.) I suspect you are right, and that we are all involved in very complex gender games, that people become hetero- or homosexual for very different, individual, and complicated reasons, and that men and women do so for extremely different reasons. But somehow all this has to be shoved into two labels. As a character says in that wonderful What the Butler Saw<\/em>: \u201cThere are only two sexes, Preston, only two! This attempt at a merger will end in catastrophe.\u201d<\/p>\n

So I have fantasies (when I do) about men, but seldom. And none at all about women (except willful ones). And am not sleeping with anybody. And I keep losing the memory of my one rather pitiful and disastrous Lesbian affair, which was nonetheless <\/em>magnificent, freeing, sensuous, beautiful, mind-bending, and real. I suppose the problem is that even with a Lesbian mind or soul or personality, I still walk around with a head full of heterosexual channeling. But it doesn\u2019t seem to get below the head.<\/p>\n

Of course there seems to be no way of making friends with any of the men here without getting my toes trampled on constantly. I try to turn a lot of it aside, or laugh at it, or ignore it, not wanting to fight a dozen battles a day, so eventually I explode and they <\/em>are all amazed. I\u2019m told I\u2019m \u201coversensitive\u201d\u2014a quantified view of existence that has always puzzled me immensely! And alas there are so few people to talk to. And I\u2019m tremendously gregarious at work. That is probably a writer\u2019s problem: one can be either alone-and-working or gregarious, but switching takes time.<\/p>\n

That may be why you\u2019ve been so caught up in buying books\u2014get into one head and you can\u2019t get out into another.<\/p>\n

My former lover and I are still very good friends, by the way. She has simply run shrieking from any sexual contact with anybody, apparently feeling so overwhelmable by people that she won\u2019t sleep with anyone. And I do think feeling herself to be a (gasp, gulp) Lesbian did freak her out. But my goodness, I don\u2019t feel any different.<\/p>\n

Chip\u2019s preface to Hogg impressed me a lot as you know, if you saw my letter to him\u2014because of the connection it suggests\u2014absolutely bedrock connection\u2014between aesthetics and ethics. Aesthetics IS ethics,[2]<\/a> in another key, one might say. I find myself worrying endlessly over my novel and the new novella that somehow the structure isn\u2019t right, isn\u2019t tidy, isn\u2019t \u201cdramatic\u201d or \u201cgood\u201d\u2014because indeed once you get outside the accepted values, everything changes, including one\u2019s ideas of narrative. So the long, long short story (I think it\u2019s really a short story in motion, if not in length) has no proper \u201cending\u201d\u2014it ends with a leap into the future, so to speak. Either one must leave that up in the air, as it were (Villette<\/em>!), or end in defeat, which is a beautifully aesthetic ending, but hateful morally. Both the novel and the story end by, in a way, dumping themselves into the reader\u2019s laps. And my OWN aesthetic sense, nurtured by unities and conclusiveness and dramatic resolutions which, in fact, are embodiments of accepted moral ideas, stirs uneasily and says, No, no, no. But (responds the other lobe of the brain) that\u2019s what happened<\/em>. How can one write about success in a situation in which success and the implications of it are still unrealized and fluid in actuality?<\/p>\n

Suppose, for example, in The Left Hand of Darkness<\/em>, Estraven hadn\u2019t <\/em>died? What a bloody moral mess Le Guin would have on her (I almost wrote \u201chis\u201d) hands! Here we have an alien hermaphrodite and a male human (who\u2019s not quite real) in bed <\/em>together. Worse still, living <\/em>together. Could they live happily ever after? What would the real quality of their feeling for each other be? Could they get along? (Probably not.) Would they end up quarreling? (Their heat periods don\u2019t match, let alone culture shock.) So the great old Western Tragic Love Story is called in to wipe out all the very human, very real questions, and we can luxuriate in passion without having to really explore the relationship. You see what I mean.<\/p>\n

It just struck me that my 2 pieces, like Invisible Man<\/em>, like Rubyfruit Jungle<\/em>, like even Isabel and Sarah<\/em> (which is cute but not that good) have no \u201cendings\u201d\u2014the story ends either by saying; Here I Am\u2014i.e. burning into you an image of the protagonist\u2019s predicament[3]<\/a> (like Ellison and like my novel) OR by saying not \u201cWe succeed\u201d but \u201cWe are now ready to attempt\u201d or \u201cWe begin to attempt.\u201d Which, studied by traditional criticism, is all very unimpressive, and \u201cbadly-structured.\u201d Villette<\/em><\/span>, it seems to me, ends with a Here I AM. You either end with \u201cNow we actually begin\u201d (or \u201cIt\u2019s up to you, reader\u201d) i.e. the rallying cry to the barricades\u2014or we end with sheer lyricism, the power of one image, like the man in his room lined with electric light bulbs. One is a double-bind; the other is a promise or an appeal. And promises and appeals are certainly suited to propaganda. There have been lots of Unhappy Housewife novels in which (if she doesn\u2019t go mad) the woman abruptly \u201csolves\u201d her predicament by denying it; I have 5 paperback books that do this, inc. Up the Sandbox<\/em><\/span>, which is the worst. Also Diary of a Mad Housewife<\/em><\/span>. They won\u2019t make the leap. Polemics ought to end with a kind of prayer. I found myself writing at the end of my novel \u201cGo, little book\u201d etc. and last line \u201cFor on that day, we will be free.\u201d (Schmalz, I tell you!) And in the novella, \u201cI never challenged Daddy\u2014til now.\u201d But these are beginnings, not endings. So the aesthetic of polemic is going to be very very di!erent from the aesthetic of either comedy or tragedy. (Isn\u2019t there something in German romantic writing that has this odd, \u201cunfinished\u201d quality? Because, in fact, it hasn\u2019t yet happened? Shelley\u2019s Prometheus<\/em><\/span> ends with the lyrical faith-leap into The Image.) Oh tragedy is so beautiful<\/em>. Jeez. Ugh. In my novella I said \u201cYou want a reconciliation scene? You <\/em>write it.\u201d<\/p>\n

It really is aesthetically different. I suppose to poets it\u2019s just as hard, but I envy you\u2014you don\u2019t have to produce PLOTS, you bastards.<\/p>\n

Here I am, hung up on explaining to my friend here why I loathe and wish to destroy paternal middle-aged white men who tease me by flirting with me.<\/p>\n

And a former Cornell colleague saying airily that Gilman et al. are silly people and why get angry at them?<\/p>\n

Anyway, just came to me that in the novella, the process is as clear and plain as can be: (1) heroine has happy Lesbian love affair, after lots of initial worrying and reluctance (2) heroine \u201ctries out\u201d her feminism\u2014integral to the affair and in fact what produced it\u2014on 2 sets of friends (3) is repulsed by both (4) is radicalized (5) gets lover back (who has been going through same process) (6) prepares for Ultimate Revolution by learning to shoot rifle. Says her one wish is to \u201ckill someone.\u201d Not in hatred, but to make a change, a difference, a dent in the world. Could it be more dramatically\/narratively put? Problem is that the ending is ethically the wrong sign\u2014it shocked me as I wrote it. And what it will do to my colleagues if they ever read it is best left unimagined!<\/p>\n

The pressure of the endings I didn\u2019t write\u2014the suicide, the reconciliation, the forgetting of the feminist issues (which I think far outweigh, or rather include, the Lesbian ones) kept trying to push me off my seat as I wrote. I kept saying to myself \u201cThat\u2019s banal. That\u2019s propaganda. That\u2019s obvious<\/em>.\u201d (Oh how subtle failure can be!) But there was simply nothing else to do\u2014anything else would have been false. In a vague way I remembered Frantz Fanon\u2019s bit about having to shoot the oppressor just to make the tremendous discovery that The Man is<\/em> vulnerable. But it was pure Russ, I assure you.<\/p>\n

The aesthetic problem, as I see it, is that the \u201cprepare to succeed\u201d is itself tentative and complex\u2014it\u2019s not like an already settled issue, i.e. the Knights of Malta marching off to the Crusades. The real uncertainty of real issues comes in.<\/p>\n

Goddess knows, it\u2019s also the only kind of live literature now. All the old solutions have turned to fuzz & lint, as far as I am concerned. For women it was always (1) failure (2) the love affair which settles everything. Look at George Eliot, WANTONLY drowning Maggie so she can rehabilitate her. Oh, it kills me. This, from a talent as good as (or even better than) Tolstoy! Wuthering Heights <\/em>gives us both the old tragedy and the new tentative hope-of-success\u2014which is why, of course, all movie adaptations leave out Part II and no critic up until College English 1970 has spent any time at all on Cathy #2 and Hareton Earnshaw, except to say that the novel \u201cdeclines.\u201d<\/p>\n

I am getting so that the very name \u201ctragedy\u201d or phrases like \u201cthe beauty of tragedy\u201d make me grind my teeth. What excuses! Ah, one learns from suffering. Go tell it to Ralph Ellison.<\/p>\n

And the happy ending of The Exception.<\/p>\n

Still, it\u2019s good to be writing now (if not living). All these beautiful pathetic heroines drowning & dying & getting poisoned or going interestingly mad. And all these heroes dying nobly, feh. Feh, feh, feh.<\/p>\n

I must stop now\u2014I haven\u2019t yet got my rugs and my downstairs neighbors (who get up at 6 a.m.) come hallooing up the stairs if I type past 11. This spring I shall try to get a house.<\/p>\n

Tell Chip that my new novella ends where he thought Female Man<\/em> should end. (Actually I was getting there at the end of Chaos<\/em>, when I had someone say \u201cJust life\u201d i.e. not a settlement or solution, just things going along.) Oof! If you have time, tell me what kind of poetry you\u2019ve been thinking <\/em>of. The whole business of propaganda is utterly fascinating to me.<\/p>\n

It is the only live stuff.<\/p>\n

Joanna<\/p>\n

September 28, 1975<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dear Joanna,<\/p>\n

\u2026 I had just gotten to the part in the letter where I was going to say, and now, about intelligent attractive powerful Lesbians conquering the world, & talk about On Strike Against God<\/em>. I picked it up to remind myself of what I was going to say, and read it, again, all the way through, which is why this is Sunday afternoon instead of Sunday morning. What a good book. I\u2019m glad you wrote it. I\u2019m glad somebody <\/em>wrote it, and especially that it was you. (I\u2019ve never gotten to say that I found The Female Man <\/em>even better on second and third readings, that all the minor changes were right, that I can\u2019t wait to see it in print.) Not to finish a book with anger or disappointment or disgust. Thank you. I would like to write a letter to Ted Solotaroff at The<\/em> American Review<\/em>, sending him a copy, and saying I think this novella is great, and I\u2019m sending it to you in the hope that you will agree & accept the privilege of publishing it. And what a good antidote to the sexist claptrap you usually present as fiction. In fact, if you (Joanna) agree, I will do just that\u2014perhaps a slightly more diplomatically phrased letter, copy to you of course. They would give you (comparatively) lots of money. And lots of people, lots of women <\/em>would read it, instead of being insulted by Philip Roth or collaborating in the cheerful hopelessness of the Catholic convert woman short-story writer with eight children and a sexy but unsympathetic husband. (but Nature is beautiful, isn\u2019t it?)<\/p>\n

May I indulge in a few very small bits of lit-crit? I will.<\/p>\n

Until the party scene, I was confused about Jean\u2019s age & status (job). On second reading, I noticed that she is said to be considerably younger than her friends, who are later said to be in their mid-thirties. But on first reading I assumed she & Esther were coevals until the party, when I found out she was 25. Somehow things would have clarified themselves much more quickly (in terms of visualizing the characters &c) if she was said fairly early to be a 25-year-old graduate student (because I kept picturing her to myself as 35, profession to be revealed, simply, I guess because one assumes that people described first as my friend X are the same age as the speaker. The narrator\u2019s past experiences given in the first pages place her in her thirties pretty definitely.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m probably not entitled to say this, but Stevie\u2019s reaction, though perfectly believable seemed to me pretty atypical of what the average gay male reaction would be (Relieved? Congratulatory?) Which is not to exonerate gay males of sexism, or to want the episode changed.<\/p>\n

Very <\/em>minor point\u2014when Esther goes back home, & describes having been attracted to a girl she saw walking in front of the library, this girl seems to be wearing the same outfit, or at least the same top, as Leslie was at Ellen & Hugh\u2019s, though it isn\u2019t said to be the same or similar. And it just made me stop a moment. I mean, if it was <\/em>the same blouse, Esther would have noticed it. And if it wasn\u2019t, its description made it seem so.<\/p>\n

And last. The last pages are good, well-written, occasionally brilliant, threatening, strong, &c. But why are they addressed to men<\/em>? I wanted this one to be for us, women. I can see the problem, that the book must end on a note of challenge, and you\u2019re not looking to go out & shoot women<\/em>, but there is still the implication that The Man is still so important that even this <\/em>book, even in defiance, in hatred, in challenge, is addressed to him<\/em>, that the person you see reading it is not a woman or a girl thinking here is something at last, but a man <\/em>being Affronted.<\/p>\n

Chip & Whi”es came back. Chip out again to see if an ambulance comes for a man who had a heart attack or epileptic fit in the park next door. Whiff is sitting on the floor at my feet, tearing a telephone book in half. Page by page, admittedly, but she\u2019ll work her way up to more impressive feats. Trying to crawl these days, and obsessed by the problem. Betting (straight light brown) hair.<\/p>\n

Will close now and post this.<\/p>\n

Love, Marilyn<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> And what you were not saying two summers ago.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Like \u201cThe political is the personal!\u201d Propaganda<\/em> is<\/em> an<\/em> appeal<\/em> to<\/em> the<\/em> future.<\/em><\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> which is always a double bind, a no-win situation.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Joanna Russ (1937\u20132011) was a Hugo and Nebula Award\u2013winning author of feminist science fiction, fantasy, and literary criticism. She is best known for her novel<\/em> The Female Man and now for her darkly funny survey of literary sexism,<\/em> How to Suppress Women\u2019s Writing.<\/p>\n

Marilyn Hacker\u00a0is an award-winning poet, translator, editor, and lesbian activist. She\u00a0is the author of nineteen volumes of poems, and her honors include the National Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, the Robert Fagles Translation Prize, and the PEN\/Voelcker Award for Poetry.\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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