Heroines

It all comes down to who gets to name, including the Professor X’s listing off Great American Writers on their fingers. The madwomen of modernism have been named — diagnosed — and this diagnosis, this demonology has been endlessly repeated through how they have been documented, written about, and read. The codes of identity in psychiatry have molded their identity in literature, as characters and authors, and this extends also to how we read women in general, and to how women read and write themselves.

The specter of the “ugly” feminist that still haunts us. For I still don’t want to be an ugly woman and when I write I am an ugly woman, I am rude and crabby, I am braless, my breasts knocking up against each other, I don’t wear deodorant or make-up, don’t leave the house for days, I forget what it’s like to be outside, a body, a body lumpy from lack of exercise and a hasty daily diet. But Flaubert got all syphilitic from fucking the prostitutes and bath boys in Egypt, he became a gross old man so quickly as he was writing Bovary, long-haired and balding and potbellied, like Robert Lowell who went from being movie-star handsome to a sort of goatish professor-type. Or God how about Ford Madox Ford! I shudder to think of that wheezing walrus pressed up against Jean Rhys’ petite, perfumed frame. These men lost their looks or never had them and it never once stopped them from writing. I’m sure Paul Bowles never looked at his ass and worried that he looked like a stuffed sausage in his skinny jeans.

For these girls, career was a matter of falling madly in love, or being carried away through the force of someone else’s desire, being allowed to travel in exchange for their bodies and a bit of their self, their soul — the Baroness modeling for the stained-glass artist, the playwright who wrote a play about her, the husband-novelist who wrote books about her. This is what allowed them temporary access into artistic circles and allowed them EXPERIENCE. (Better than other careers for bright intellectual girls at that time, such as being an invalid.)

In his Arcades Project Walter Benjamin seizes on Poe’s story “The Man of the Crowd” for his chapter on flânerie. In the story the narrator follows a flâneur down the streets of London and (as a voyeur) observes the man’s erotic compulsion towards the crowd, this ecstasy of being lost in the crowd. Yet the flâneur by his essence is male — the woman in the city is still viewed as both commodity and consumer. What is the flâneuse escaping? She is escaping her role as the object of desire. She wants instead to gaze, to desire.