Art and Ardor

Cynthia Ozick

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781786491091
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Art & Ardor was the first of Cynthia Ozick's collections of her non-fiction pieces, and covers the longest span (1968 to 1983) of the now seven volumes. First printed in a variety of publications, these pieces appeared in not only The New Republic, Partisan Review, and The New York Review of Books, but also Mademoiselle and Ms.

Justice to Feminism

The two essays that follow are “out of date”—the first in the most literal way (Vietnam, civil rights, high birthrates), and both in that they are at odds with their times. Each was written against the grain of academic expectation. Though they were composed a decade apart—the very decade that saw the birth and burgeoning of the women’s movement—and though they are united by a point of view that remains steady and unchanged, each essay appears to be out of phase with majority opinion at its own end of the crucial decade. Feminism as a literary issue was absent before the women’s movement, and now that there is a strong women’s movement consciously defining itself through deliberate segregation, it seems to me that feminism is again absent.

“No one has been serious and passionate, and certainly no one has been argumentative, concerning attitudes about women,” I wrote in 1965, when there was no glimmer of a women’s movement in sight. “The rebels are few.” “Enlightenment has, for women, and especially by women, not yet occurred.” How peculiar all that would sound only a short while later! And not simply peculiar, but offensively whimsical, like a costume not really antiquated enough to have taken on remoteness or indifference. The words grate.

But in the middle sixties, to write an essay on the exclusion (and self-exclusion) of women was an anomalous and isolating act—as anomalous and isolating as it had been for Virginia Woolf forty years earlier. Even its language (it shames me now) is strangely, unpleasantly formal. The eerie gravity of tone derives not so much from a pretense of authority as from the stiffness of the unused and the unfamiliar: a walk in new shoe-leather. The tone combines temerity and mimicry; it flaunts the sneer that fears a sneer. I was writing from a briar patch on a desert island in the middle of a bog—an uncomfortable and lonely place to be. Feminism was, in those years, a private tenet one held alone, in an archaic voice.

By 1977, when I wrote my “Dissent” from the headlong development of self-segregation in the women’s movement, I was again alone. I found that the new exclusions and psychological definitions of the shapers of this movement exactly matched the old exclusions and definitions. A politics of sex had come into being only to undermine classical feminism. For writers, regression under the banner of a “new” feminism was especially saddening. In the absence of a women’s movement, the term “woman writer” had shut out, damaged, and demeaned writers; with the emergence of the movement and the direction it has taken, there are now no allies anywhere against reductiveness, and the language of clarity falls more and more into rubble.

1. Previsions of the Demise of the Dancing Dog

Young women, . . . you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays of Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse?

VIRGINIA WOOLF, A Room of One’s Own

No comradely socialist legislation on women’s behalf could accomplish a millionth of what a bit more muscle tissue, gratuitously offered by nature, might do. . . .

ELIZABETH HARDWICK, A View of One’s Own

Several years ago I devoted a year to Examining the Minds of the Young. It was a curious experience, like going into theater after theater in a single night, and catching bits of first acts only. How will the heroine’s character develop? Will the hero turn out to be captain of his fate or only of some minor industry? I never arrived at the second act, and undoubtedly I will never be witness to the denouement. But what I saw of all those beginnings was extraordinary: they were all so similar. All the characters were exactly the same age, and most had equal limitations of imagination and aspiration. Is “the individual,” I wondered, a sacred certainty, and the human mind infinitely diversified, as we are always being told? Examine for yourself the Minds of the Young and it is possible you will begin to think the opposite. Democratic theory is depressingly correct in declaring all men equal. Just as every human hand is limited at birth by its five fingers, so is every human mind stamped from a single, equally obvious, pattern. “I have never in all my various travels seen but two sorts of people, and those very like one another; I mean men and women, who always have been, and ever will be, the same,” wrote Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the middle of the eighteenth century. Human nature is one.

The vantage point from which I came to these not unusual conclusions was not from reading the great philosophers, or even from reading Lady Mary—it was from a job. I was hired by a large urban university to teach English to freshmen: three classes of nearly a hundred young men and young women, all seventeen, some city-born, some suburban, some well-off, some only scraping by, of every ethnic group and of every majority religion but Hindu. Almost all were equipped with B high-school averages; almost all were more illiterate than not; almost all possessed similar prejudices expressed in identical platitudes. Almost all were tall, healthy, strong-toothed, obedient, and ignorant beyond their years. They had, of course, very few ideas—at seventeen this can hardly be called a failing; but the ideas they had were plainly derived not from speculation but from indoctrination. They had identical minuscule vocabularies, made identical errors of grammar and punctuation, and were identically illogical. They were identically uneducated, and the minds of the uneducated young women were identical with the minds of the uneducated young men.

Now this last observation was the least surprising of all. Though unacquainted with the darkest underbrush of the human mind (and here it must be emphatically averred that deep scrutiny, at indecently short intervals, of one hundred freshman themes is the quickest and most scarifying method of achieving intimacy with the human mind in its rawest state), I had never doubted that the human mind was a democratic whole, that it was androgynous, epicene, asexual, call it what you will; it had always seemed axiomatic to me that the minds of men and women were indistinguishable.

My students confirmed this axiom to the last degree. You could not tell the young men’s papers from the young women’s papers. They thought alike (badly), they wrote alike (gracelessly), and they believed alike (docilely). And what they all believed was this: that the minds of men and women are spectacularly unlike.

They believed that men write like men, and women like women; that men think like men, and women like women; that men believe like men, and women like women. And they were all identical in this belief.

But I have said, after all, that they were alike in illiteracy, under-education, ignorance, and prejudice.

Still, to teach at a university is not simply to teach; the teacher is a teacher among students, but he is also a teacher among teachers. He has colleagues, and to have colleagues is to have high exchanges, fruitful discourses, enlightening quarrels. Colleagues, unlike students, are not merely literate but breathtakingly literary; not merely educated but bent under the weight of multitudinous higher degrees; not merely informed but dazzlingly knowledgeable; not merely unprejudiced but brilliantly questing. And my colleagues believed exactly what my students believed.

My colleagues were, let it be noted, members of the Department of English in the prestige college of an important university. I was, let it be revealed, the only woman instructor in that department. Some years before, the college had been all male. Then the coeds were invited in, and now and then in their wake a woman was admitted, often reluctantly, to the faculty. Before my own admittance, I had been living the isolated life of a writer—my occupation for some years had consisted in reading great quantities and in writing embarrassingly tiny quantities. I was, I suppose, not in that condition generally known as “being in touch with the world.” I was in touch with novels, poetry, essays, enlarging meditations; but of “the world,” as it turned out, I apparently knew little.

I came to the university in search of the world. I had just finished an enormous novel, the writing of which had taken many more years than any novel ought to take, and after so long a retreat my lust for the world was prodigious. I wanted Experience, I wanted to sleep under bridges—but finding that all the bridges had thickly trafficked clover-leaves under them, I came instead to the university. I came innocently. I had believed, through all those dark and hope-sickened years of writing, that it was myself (“myself”—whatever that means for each of us) who was doing the writing. In the university, among my colleagues, I discovered two essential points: (1) that it was a “woman” who had done the writing—not a mind—and that I was a “woman writer”; and (2) that I was now not a teacher, but a “woman teacher.”

I was suspect from the beginning—more so among my colleagues than among my students. My students, after all, were accustomed to the idea of a “woman teacher,” having recently been taught by several in high school. But my colleagues were long out of high school, and they distrusted me. I learned that I had no genuinely valid opinions, since every view I might hold was colored by my sex. If I said I didn’t like Hemingway, I could have no critical justification, no literary reason; it was only because, being a woman, I obviously could not be sympathetic toward Hemingway’s “masculine” subject matter—the hunting, the fishing, the bullfighting, which no woman could adequately digest. It goes without saying that among my colleagues there were other Hemingway dissenters; but their reasons for disliking Hemingway, unlike mine, were not taken to be simply ovarian.

In fact, both my students and my colleagues were equal adherents of the Ovarian Theory of Literature, or, rather, its complement, the Testicular Theory. A recent camp follower (I cannot call him a pioneer) of this explicit theory is, of course, Norman Mailer, who has attributed his own gift, and the literary gift in general, solely and directly to the possession of a specific pair of organs. One writes with these organs, Mailer has said in Advertisements for Myself; and I have always wondered with what shade of ink he manages to do it.

I recall my first encounter with the Ovarian Theory. My students had been assigned the reading of Wise Blood, the novel by Flannery O’Connor. Somewhere in the discussion I referred to the author as “she.” The class stirred in astonishment; they had not imagined that “Flannery” could connote a woman, and this somehow put a different cast upon the narrative and their response to it. Now among my students there was a fine young woman, intelligent and experimental rather than conforming, one of my rare literates, herself an anomaly because she was enrolled in the overwhelmingly male College of Engineering. I knew that her mind usually sought beyond the commonplace—she wrote with the askew glance of the really inquisitive. Up went her hand. “But I could tell she was a woman,” she insisted. “Her sentences are a woman’s sentences.” I asked her what she meant and how she could tell. “Because they’re sentimental,” she said, “they’re not concrete like a man’s.” I pointed out whole paragraphs, pages even, of unsentimental, so-called tough prose. “But she sounds like a woman—she has to sound that way because she is,” said the future engineer, while I speculated whether her bridges and buildings would loom plainly as woman’s work. Moreover, it rapidly developed that the whole class now declared that it too, even while ignorant of the author’s sex, had nevertheless intuited all along that this was a woman’s prose; it had to be, since Flannery was a she.

My second encounter with the idea of literature-as-physiology was odder yet. This time my interlocutor was a wonderfully gentle, deeply intellectual young fellow teacher; he was going to prove what my freshmen had merely maintained. “But of course style is influenced by physical make-up,” he began in his judicious graduate-assistant way. Here was his incontrovertible evidence: “Take Keats, right? Keats fighting tuberculosis at the end of his life. You don’t suppose Keats’s poetry was totally unaffected by his having had tuberculosis?” And he smiled with the flourish of a young man who has made an unanswerable point. “Ah, but you don’t suppose,” I put it to him cheerfully enough, “that being a woman is a disease?”

But comparing literary women with having a debilitating disease is the least of it. My colleague, after all, was a kindly sort, and stuck to human matters; he did not mention dogs. On the other hand, almost everyone remembers Dr. Johnson’s remark upon hearing a woman preacher—she reminded him, he said, of a dog dancing on its hind legs; one marvels not at how well it is done, but that it is done at all. That was two centuries ago; wise Lady Mary was Johnson’s contemporary. Two centuries, and the world of letters has not been altered by a syllable, unless you regard the switch from dogs to disease as a rudimentary advance. Perhaps it is. We have advanced so far that the dullest as well as the best of freshmen can scarcely be distinguished from Dr. Johnson, except by a bark.

And our own Dr. Johnson—I leave you to guess his name—hoping to insult a rival writer, announces that the rival “reminds me of nothing so much as a woman writer.”

Consider, in this vein, the habits of reviewers. I think I can say in good conscience that I have never—repeat, never—read a review of a novel or, especially, of a collection of poetry by a woman that did not include somewhere in its columns a gratuitous allusion to the writer’s sex and its supposed effects. The Ovarian Theory of Literature is the property of all society, not merely of freshmen and poor Ph.D. lackeys: you will find it in all the best periodicals, even the most highbrow. For example: a few years ago a critic in The New York Review of Books considered five novels, three of which were by women. And so his review begins: “Women novelists, we have learned to assume, like to keep their focus narrow.” And from this touchstone—with no ground other than the “we have learned to assume”—falls his praise and his censure. The touchstone, of course, is properly qualified, as such touchstones always are, by reverent asides concerning the breadth of George Eliot and the grasp of Jane Austen. Ah, indispensable George and Jane! They have come into the world, one concludes, only to serve as exceptions to the strictures of reviewers; and they are exceptions. Genius always is; it is how genius is defined. But if the exception is to be dragged into every routine review of novelists and poets who are women, then the rule must drop equally on all. Let every new poet, male and female, be reviewed in the shadow of Emily Dickinson and Coleridge. Let every unknown novelist, male and female, be reviewed in the blaze of Anna Karenina and Wuthering Heights. If this seems like nonsense, then reviewers must take merit as their point of concentration, not stale expectation, and not the glibbest of literary canards.

Still, the canards are, in their way, small fun, being as flexible and fragile as other toys. A collection of canards is bound to be a gaggle of contradictions. When, for instance, my bright engineering student identified Flannery O’Connor as “sentimental,” she was squarely in one-half of a diluvial, though bifurcated, tradition. Within this tradition there are two hoary views of woman. One: she is sentimental, imprecise, irrational, overemotional, impatient, unperseveringly flighty, whimsical, impulsive, unreliable, unmechanical, not given to practicality, perilously vague, and so on. In this view she is always contrasted with man, who is, on the other hand, unsentimental, exact, rational, controlled, patient, hard-headed, mechanically gifted, a meeter of payrolls, firm of purpose, wary of impulse, anything but a dreamer. Description One accounts for why throughout her history she has been a leader neither of empires nor of trades nor o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Justice (Again) to Edith Wharton
• Mrs. Virginia Woolf: A Madwoman and Her Nurse
• Diary-Keeping
• Morgan and Maurice: A Fairy Tale
• Truman Capote Reconsidered
• Literary Blacks and Jews
• Cultural Impersonation
• The Fourth Sparrow: The Magisterial Reach of Gershom Scholem
• Toward a New Yiddish
• Literature as Idol: Harold Bloom
• The Riddle of the Ordinary
• Remembering Maurice Samuel
• I. B. Singer’s Book of Creation
• The Phantasmagoria of Bruno Schulz
• Out of the Flames: The Recovery of Gertrud Kolmar
• The Biological Premises of Our Sad Earth-Speck
• Innovation and Redemption: What Literature Means
• The Hole/Birth Catalogue
• Justice to Feminism
• The Lesson of the Master
• A Drugstore in Winter