The Female Eunuch ~ Germaine Greer

http://emilydewsnap.wordpress.com/2010/12/31/321/

Until recently, The Female Eunuch wasn’t even lurking, War and Peace style, in my reading pipeline. Nobody had ever suggested that I read it, Amazon included, and it just never seemed to hone into view, so to speak, though I’ve always been a fan of Germaine Greer. It was actually a Guardian article, 40 Years of the Female Eunuch, that made my little grey cells prick up thoughtfully and, on a whim, I finished said article and instantly bought a second hand copy of the 1970 edition online. And once I started to cart the book around with me, I realised that it was no wonder it had never been recommended. Not because it is unrecommendable (far from it!), but rather because of the peculiar reactions it produced in people. I got sneers, raised eyebrows; ultimately looks of disgust with… what was that flickering… was that… it couldn’t be… could it? Yes, it could. It was fear! People were afraid of this book. What made it all the more bizarre is that I couldn’t find a single person who’d actually read it and when I asked any of the fearful what it was about they just said something along the lines of “man hating, feminist nonsense,” and the sentiment was almost certainly followed by “I can’t stand Germaine Greer.”

What I discovered in the first few pages of this book was life changing. Not in the sense that it opened my eyes to a new way of thinking, but that it corresponded, almost exactly, with what I’d spent my life being told was a weird perspective on life. I was wrapt. For once, someone other than my mother was in agreement and it felt like a homecoming. I was a feminist by default, not design, it would seem.

I haven’t felt this way about a book since Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. Erudite, witty, insightful and delightful, this book should be every woman’s bible. The anger and force of a strong writer pervades throughout, but this is not merely about slating the male. In fact, Greer’s points are often as sympathetic to the man as to the woman, which is particularly pronounced in her denunciation of the way we are brought up to believe women the fairer sex; feeble creatures who should be treated like glass dolls to be looked after like possessions. As Greer rightly questions: what man wouldn’t be grateful to have the burden of being the protector lifted from his shoulders? In addition, when the question of female superiority is raised, Greer highly criticises women’s lib’ groups who attempt to elevate themselves above men, deeming them childish. These groups are, in her eyes, one of the reasons feminists have a bad reputation amongst the male population.

From burning witches to burning bras, The Female Eunuch is a history lesson on the lives of women, female liberation, the suffragette movement and the shortfall of western society. The inefficiency of our social order is Greer’s main bugbear, as it is mine. But, like anything that threatens to drastically change our way of life, it brings about a fear. Fear of disruption, fear of revolution, fear of change and the uprooting of the comfortable morals we lazily live by.

Of course, every person is different and not every point rang true for me. The unforeseen pooh-poohing of female ejaculation made me positively cross, since, without going into too much detail, I know for a fact that it is not a myth*. And, what with it being written some forty years ago, some sections are slightly outdated or irrelevant. It all added to the charm as I found myself comparing the life of the ‘70s woman to the woman in patriarchal society today and I put the book down and instantly wanted to know how Greer felt these days. Luckily for me, she has written another book: The Whole Woman.

Fiercely interesting from beginning to end, this book hit no lulls. Germaine Greer concisely presents the problem as she sees it, the history, the facts and the solution; a rational and shrewd theory of how society ought to be broken down and rebuilt on an equal footing.


FOOTNOTES:

* If you e-mail me nicely, I might explain


Recommended reading:

The Women’s Room ~ Marilyn French
The Golden Notebook ~ Doris Lessing

Clock Without Hands - Carson McCullers

http://emilydewsnap.wordpress.com/2010/11/18/clock-without-hands-carson-mccullers/

The year is 1953 and the USA is going through some changes. In the Deep South in a town called Milan, the abolition of slavery has brought about much confusion: a black man can go unnoticed in a white church, the price of keeping a servant has gone through the roof, mixed race children have started to populate the streets, employees are expected to pay income tax...

In this progressive, ever shifting clime, J. T. Malone has just months to live. A wishy-washy, malleable, middle-aged pharmacist adhering to a routine that hasn’t changes in decades, he muses over his life and its shortcomings; resenting his wife for her success, he questions the fate brought about by his supposed leukaemia, while his good friend, the once charismatic Judge Fox Clane, vehemently opposes the diagnosis. But looming death can change a person and Malone slowly begins to question the Judge’s judgements. Meanwhile, Fox Clane is having problems of his own: his grandson, Jester, offspring of his late son, has become obsessed with his amanuensis, the blue-eyed “nigra,” Sherman, who is tolerated in such capacity for once saving Clane’s life.

From the moment Malone bumps into Sherman on the street, the undertone of the novella changes, although the reader cannot be sure why at such an early stage. In Sherman, Malone senses danger. In Sherman, Carson McCullers elegantly presents the core issue of the story: the inevitable meshing of black and white and the subsequent knee-jerk reactions. And Sherman is angry. An orphan found on a church pew, he can only assume that his black mother was raped by a white man and, too ashamed to admit it, left him to fend for himself. After running away from an abusive white family, he spends his life searching for the woman who may be his mother, even writing to a famous singer in the hope of being reunited with the source of his black roots. But things are not always as they seem and the novel provides one speculation after another as to the history of Sherman’s parentage, each time leading to a dead end.

That the judge and Sherman are linked in more ways than one is evident, but the prior association is only hinted at throughout as the story dips in and out of the psyche of each character. We know that the judge’s son committed suicide on Christmas day some years previous, which Clane passes off as a random brainstorm. We know that he did so because he couldn’t stand his father’s racist views with particular reference to Sherman’s mother. And it becomes plain that with the judge’s ingrained bigotry and Sherman’s volatility, this placid connection cannot end happily. The loose ends do finally come together in one emotional, violent culmination.

As in life, there is no black and white in this book – no “goodies” or “baddies” – which adds a roundness and depth. The Judge, his arrogance and prejudices aside, is nothing more than a weak old man in denial; forlorn after the death of his beloved wife, he finds himself in a constant state of remoteness, to which he refuses to admit even to himself. Sherman is damaged goods: abandoned and mistreated, he rails against society and the friendship so eagerly offered to him by Jester. And Jester, himself an orphan, sees in Sherman a wonderful escape from the lifestyle he is used to; he is fascinated by Sherman and senses also the enigmatic link to the dead father he knows nothing about. Each character’s loneliness is created by distinct situations and each is bonded to the next in hatred or in love.

It’s not often that I shed a tear at a book and it was only unfortunate that I was sitting at my desk at work with a mouthful of sushi when I reached the end. However, I do fail to see how anyone could read Clock Without Hands and not get emotional. In such a small volume, McCullers manages to engage the reader, telling a tale with equal elements of hope and despair.



ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Carson McCullers deserves a review of her own. She was a remarkable woman who suffered from stroke from an early age. At the age of 31 she had a stroke that left her almost paralysed. From that moment on, she was only able to type with one finger. She went on to publish several novels, living until her untimely death at the age of 50.



RECOMMENDED READING:

Ragtime ~ E. L. Doctorow
The Secret Life of Bees ~ Sue Monk Kidd
Beloved ~ Toni Morrison
To Kill a Mockingbird ~ Harper Lee

Poison for Teacher - Nancy Spain

http://emilydewsnap.wordpress.com/2010/10/10/poison-for-teacher-nancy-spain

There’s a rural girls’ school, an assortment of bizarre characters, a murdered teacher and, of course, a play. It can only be a Nancy Spain whodunit.

Miriam Birdseye is as poised as ever; this time she’s prepared to take on the role of Elocution tutor at Radcliff Hall, right down to the clothes that she wears and her part in the school play. Engaged by the mannish and eccentric Miss Lipscoombe as an unlikely body-guarding service, Birdseye &co. set out for Brunton on Sea disguised as teachers, where all sorts of tomfoolery is afoot.

Radcliff Hall is an old-fashioned girls’ grammar in the county of Sussex. Recently deserted by the enterprising Miss bbirch, the school has turned to bedlam at the hands of one very bored traitor, and it is Birdseye &co’s responsibility to sniff this conspirator out. But it is only during a rehearsal of the school play, Quality Street, that the mischief turns sinister and the prankster finds herself the prankstee. Ex-actress and contemporary private detective, Miriam Birdseye (along with her partner in anticrime, Russian ex-ballerina, Natasha Du Vivian*), is the perfect candidate for investigating the murder of Radcliff Hall’s French teacher, the spiteful Miss Devaloys. But will she expose the murderer before s/he strikes again?

Poison for Teacher would never win the Booker, but, whether you catch on or not, between its sheets, Spain has raised a staunch eyebrow at the society in which she lived. Let’s take one reference from many; the most obvious: Radcliff Hall… otherwise known asRadclyffe Hall, one of the literary world’s most well-known lesbian writers. Not overtly sexual in tone, the underlying themes of homosexuality surface in Pukey, the bumbling Classics teacher, and her too-close interest in Gwylan Fork-Thomas, the elegant Chemistry mistress. It is also latent in the schoolgirls and their adolescent crushes on their tutors, and even in the relationship between Miriam and her partner, the recently separated “Darling Natasha”, who has no wish to be found by her dashing and brilliant husband, no matter how hard he searches.

The question of bigotry hangs over this novel and prevented its republication prior to its being picked up by Lesbian Landmarks in 1979. As well as Spain’s not so complementary portrayal of the only overtly gay character in the book, Roger Partick-Thistle**, there is the "woolly-haired", "dusky-skinned" and butch Miss Lesarium and the small-boned, “oriental” Jew. It would be easy to get on a high horse about these references, but only if they were to be taken out of context. Spain, being a lesbian and one that openly cohabited with a figure as public as herself, Joan Werner Laurie***, could only be attempting to create a story as a wry outsider inside a society that had pressured her to feign a public relationship with Gilbert Harding. Spain was writing as a writer who would be accepted and published, whilst still imparting a nod to the minorities. Radcliff Hall clearly represents Roedean, Spain’s own girls’ school from the same coastline; and the characters’ bigoted opinions, that of Roedean’s inhabitants.

Poison for Teacher is light-hearted entertainment. With a writing style somewhere between Wodehouse and Christie and not dissimilar to Pamela Branch, Spain delivers homicide with as much humour as she would farce. Witty, satirical and regrettably forgettable, this book would never be hailed for its literary content; however, I put it down feeling cheered and slightly mischievous with not a grisly thought in my head. Tongue-in-cheek and gentle, this novel of murder most horrid, is a surefire pick-me-up that will leave you feeling warm and fuzzy, but ultimately unmoved.

FOOTNOTES

* nee Nevkorina

** You’ll recognise him as the screaming queen

*** The creator of SHE Magazine