Two Serious Ladies

'I can't live without her, not for a minute,' a heroine of Jane Bowles's Two Serious Ladies says about the teen-age whore she has taken as a companion. 'I'd go completely to pieces.'

To which one of her serious friends replies: 'But you have gone to pieces, or do I misjudge you dreadfully?'

'True enough," says Mrs Copperfield, 'I have gone to pieces, which is a thing I've wanted to do for years . , . but I have my happiness, which I guard like a wolf, and I have authority now and a certain amount of daring which, if you remember correctly, I never had before.'

Women's right to self-determination-at-all-cost (even at the cost of going to pieces) has been a dominant theme of feminist literature ever since Charlotte Bronte's chaste Jane Eyre was attacked by male critics for 'fostering Chartism and rebellion at home' and I sense that most male readers continue to resist the vision of women who are truly independent from men - spiritual, nomadic, asexual women. One of the ironies of the current porn chic is that it cosily reinforces the ancient and comfortable male myth that we are nothing but a bunch of dependent sexpots. How much more threatening to the male psyche is the celibate freedom of Jean Rhys's heroine when she exclaims, in After Leaving Mr McKenzie, 'I wanted to go away with just the same feeling a boy has when he wants to run away to sea!'