Feminism, Wages, and How Protest Movements Support "The Man"

I guess I'm kind of a feminist. I'm an educated woman living in the 21st century. I have a B.A., I'm enrolled in a Master's program, I've spent a year in Belgium on a Fulbright grant. I intend to have a career. I hate movies and books with weak, fainting heroines. I get angry when I hear about Muslim women being stoned to death at the mere accusation of "impurity," and I find it repulsive that until 1981 in Italy, a “crime of honor”—killing your wife for being unfaithful or your sister for having premarital sex—could be treated as a lesser offense than other murders (and that the attitudes allowing for that law seem to have been operative as late as 2007--though I don't know the details of the case).

But then again, maybe I'm not. Not a feminist, that is. It all depends, really, on what you want the term to mean, and as I've gotten older I've come to realize more and more that like most labels in contemporary life ("capitalist," "conservative," "liberal," "environmentalist"), the term is wildly ambiguous. That ambiguity is one of the more frustrating aspects of the contemporary experience; how can you expect to have a fruitful, rational discussion about, say, political positions, with anyone when the terms "conservative," "Tea Party," "liberal," "progressive," and so on all need to be painstakingly redefined before the conversation can even begin?

See, my gut instinct is to recoil from the term "feminist" as though it were the verbal equivalent of a big, hairy wolf spider (the worst kind, barring tarantulas). That's because when I hear the word, I immediately envision State Representatives at the Governor's mansion scribbling the words "Girl Power" in bubble letters on a white board within a border of bloated, magic-marker flowers. I recall sitting around in circles at Girl Scouts, weaving and painting flower pots while being encouraged to talk about "feelings"--because apparently "Girl Power" means casting off boyish things, such as actual fun (camping, hiking, canoeing -- isn't that what scouting should be about?). I also remember heartily despising it all. This sort of feminism (and its proponents) appeared rather stupid...even to a second or third grader. I also despise several positions that by many are considered staples of feminism:  most importantly pro-abortion-ism. (I disagree with the typical secular feminist positions on contraception and the "bias against women" evidenced by an all-male priesthood, but I don't despise them, because for those lacking the proper theological background they're not without a logic of their own.) I certainly despise the idea that to be a strong woman, in charge of your own body, you need to have a "right" to kill babies--half of whom are, of course, future women. (Whatever happened to Madeleine Albright's "I have always said, there is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women"? Ah the hypocrisy.)

But I'm not primarily writing to complain about bad childhood experiences with a Spice Girls-inspired girl power doctrine, nor to rant about our cultural blindness to "murders of convenience." I'm writing because of this article recently published in the Atlantic. The issue it treats, that of the oft-cited income disparity between men and women, is one about which I have mixed feelings.

Now, speaking from my experience alone, the idea that women are discriminated against appears more than a little ridiculous. I've definitely grown up in a time, place, and social circle that tends to a.) see women, especially young women, as much more dependable and therefore job-worthy than guys of the same age, and b.) explicitly privileges women in many of the ways that the author of the above piece mentions. I know that I've had greater access to scholarships than many of my male peers, and I've sensed in more than one college class (even at a school as conservative as the University of Dallas) a certain bias towards female students (in that my reasons for being late or missing a class were often given more credence than a guy's equally valid ones). To an achievement-oriented personality, this privileged position can actually chafe a bit. I want to achieve things because I achieve them, not because of my gender. It's vaguely humiliating to imagine that some of what I've accomplished has been enabled by the fact that I was born a woman, and the mere possibility lessens the amount of satisfaction I find in having accomplished "this much." I look at the demographics of the Fulbright grantees in Belgium (one guy, eight girls), for instance, and have to wonder whether, as a male student from UD, I would have won the position.

The article above also brings up the highly misleading quality of statistics. It's another pet peeve of mine that people tend to put so much faith in one of the most inexcusable instances of reason-from-instantiation of which I can conceive (I hold a grudge against Auguste Comte for essentially founding the social sciences on this basis. Adolphe Quetelet was at least as responsible though). I've already given a few examples in this blog--Ron Paul can be read as a pro-abortion radical if you take certain votes out of context, much as Rick Santorum can be read as a raving progressive. If you only poll in the bluest of the blue states, the "pro-life" movement appears to be a fringe crusade; if you look at the unemployment numbers in the states without realizing that they account for only a fraction of the actually unemployed, our economy doesn't look so bad. Seventy-seven cents to the dollar looks like a pretty bad statistic. Maybe it is. Maybe women really are still secretly being discriminated against in a way that I've never had an opportunity to see. I admit: that probably is the root of some portion of the disparity.

The real question though, is "is gender-based discrimination a sufficient causal explanation for the wage disparity between men and women?" While the answer may or may not be as cut and dry as Marty Nemko suggests, it seems to me that there are plenty of other possible explanations for this "hard evidence that women are still subject to widespread discrimination." One bit of information that I found particularly interesting is summarized in a table reporting wage disparity in relation to age (about a third of the way down on this page).  Essentially, we see here that the "77%" statistic is by no means a constant as people age. At my age and slightly older, women's earnings are very close to equivalent with men's: nearly 93%. The percentage drops at a fairly constant rate until it comes to women's earnings after age 65, at which point it rises slightly. To some, this would indicate one thing and one thing only: women's status in the workforce is improving, if slowly; the greater wage disparity between older men and older women indicates that when these women were entering the workforce, they faced greater discrimination and enjoyed less opportunity for advancement than did their male peers. This might indeed explain some of the gap. There's another rather important point to consider though. What about all the women who take time off to raise children between the ages of, say, twenty three and forty? What about all of those who prefer to hold a part-time position while their children are still young? Now, I'm not saying that the wage disparity is explained by averaging the earnings of working women with the lack thereof of non-working women (or the low ones of the part-time employees): these statistics are only looking at full time employees, obviously. No, what I'd like people to consider is the very very basic question "how do people get raises?" From what I understand, you tend to get bumped up to a higher pay rank after you've worked in a place for a long time. Higher levels of experience also count for a lot when you're applying to a higher-paying job. Think of what that does to wages: for the men (and women) who remain in their careers long-term, wages rise gradually, almost inevitably with time. If you're returning to the full-time workforce after several (or more)  years away from it, or of only part time involvement, of course you won't be making as much. It's a fairly simple observation, and one that certainly holds true at least to some extent. Whether it can account for the entirety of the wage gap is another story. It probably can't.

Another, oft-cited point is that women and men tend to make different choices regarding their type of employment. Women often choose to find work in the education profession (especially elementary school), in secretarial positions, as nurses rather than doctors and as dental hygienists rather than dentists. It's not that they can't handle the higher levels of education and experience required of say, college professors (though that's by no means a male dominated field), CEOs, doctors, or dentists. But if you are a woman who does want a family, you're facing essentially the same dilemma that many career women in their twenties face: a family or a high-powered job/extra education? When people point out that men tend to earn more in many of these traditionally female-dominated careers, I have to wonder how much of that is sexism and how much of it might be a.) encouragement (male elementary school teachers are unfortunately hard to come by), or b.) if a man is going to choose such a profession, it's probably because he's either unusually good at it or because it's a higher-paying position in the first place: you're more likely to find a man working as a secretary for a CEO than a man working as the secretary at your local dentist's office.

Now, one may argue of course that women shouldn't have to choose between family and a great career. They should be able to have it all. Society should help them with childcare so that they can go ahead and get that education, so that they can grab that promotion. Maybe one would be correct. I know that, for myself I can't help at least sympathizing with the frustration, only because, as already mentioned, I'm achievement-oriented and want a career. And a family.

I also want to be the world's greatest mountaineer, a black belt in every variety of martial arts, a marathon runner, an expert in botany and a much better pianist.

Sometimes we have to choose between "wants."

Maybe there is still gender discrimination out there in the US. There certainly is in the rest of the world. But see, what really gets me riled up about the whole gender inequality debate is the way it privileges a certain definition of "success" and "worth" over any other. The same goes for most formulations of the race debate. And the social class debate. We've gotten so used to seeing success and worth in purely economic terms that even those who rail against "corporate America and its amorality" are still using the same definitions to give an account of what makes life worth living. (That's my biggest problem with Marxism too, incidentally.) How is it liberating to argue that what we need to do to destroy the monopoly of big business and the allure of excessive wealth is to ensure that those who by some standards don't have it, get it? Women are only really liberated if they are just as interested as men in high-powered careers (because if they're not, the only possible explanation is that the male-dominated hierarchy has been brainwashing them from infancy to be submissive). They're only liberated if they're willing to put academia and a paycheck above family and friends.

So, the best way to be a feminist is to encourage women to become the worst possible version of the (male) WASP stereotype? Remind me again why it's bad to want children? Oh, right, because they get in the way of education/career. Why is education/career better than children? Because it just is! Because we (feminists) say so. Because if you think otherwise, you must be conforming.

As I already said, and as is probably fairly evident from this blog, I'm the last person to start devaluing education. Or careers. And the satire in the above paragraph is, like all satire exaggerated. The feminist movement has, over the past hundred and fifty years or so, accomplished a lot of good, in my opinion. And most individual feminists are probably (especially now) willing to admit that children are not an inherently bad thing and may even be to some extent desirable. Nonetheless, even that mild version of feminism buys into the pervasive rhetoric of money-as-power, and degree-pursuant education as the primary worthy achievement. Insofar as it does that, feminism is useless. It's useless because it can't change anything fundamental; it can only turn the tables and make men the underdogs.

A truly counter-cultural feminism, one that would really stick it to the proverbial man, would be one that celebrated all of a woman's accomplishments as having their proper dignity. One that recognized the responsibility of caring for a human person as at least as challenging, exciting, and heroic a enterprise as that of starting a business or being granted a Ph.D.

And hey, let's not forget that that sort of cultural revolution would do an awful lot to get men on board with the child-raising. Right now we say "women should have what you have because it's worth more; get ye to the family and feed the kids." So the family remains the item of lesser importance and the men relegated to its care grow to resent it. Smart, smart move.


Note: After writing this, I remembered that I also wanted to relate our society's broken value system to our tendency to consider certain jobs as "more worthwhile" than others. What annoys me the most, for fairly obvious reasons, is the way we cast aspersions on those in the teaching profession, especially elementary and middle school educators. There are plenty of bad teachers out there, which is unfortunate. But there's nothing about the profession itself that warrants the denigration it receives. In point of fact, education is one of the most influential professions out there, and "underachieving" female teachers are in a position to shape the way the CEO's of tomorrow think. (Which is, of course, a fantastic reason to give the profession a little more respect and stop glutting it with people who can barely do basic math, but that's another point entirely.)

Contraception, Vatican II, and a few comments on Classic Capitalism

I spent a while the other day grousing to my boyfriend about this rather awful article by a self-proclaimed "Catholic." He referred me to an excellent rebuttal of Townsend's position (it predates her article, obviously) in the First Things magazine; I liked it so much I had to repost it. It's fantastic to see the empirical social evidence that supports the Church's position on birth control supported so well, since Catholics like Townsend will not respond to the theological argument. Why would you if you were firmly convinced that the role of religion is social, not spiritual? (Then again, why not just head over to the local Universalist church if you believe that?)

For the record, Malthus and Margaret Sanger, the "parents" of the birth/population control movement, were not particularly Nice People. The idea that humans would "breed" and "spawn" was fairly repulsive to their Victorian sensibilities ("Victorian" used here only as a descriptive adjective; Sanger came at the tail end of the Edwardian Era). People are "...human weeds,' 'reckless breeders,' 'spawning... human beings who never should have been born"--or so Sanger claims in Pivot of Civilization. Note that the "human weeds" she refers to are not the members of her own white upper middle class; they are. very specifically, poor people, immigrants, and blacks. (Here's an obviously biased website listing some of her choice quotations. Biased or not, the quotations are real, and one can easily find the works to which it refers.)

On a more positive note, here's a link to an amusing article I came across that (jestingly) reads Star Wars as an allegory for Vatican II. It's way over the top, and becomes more so as it goes along, but it does give a pretty good sketch of the situation post-VII. Hard to take oneself seriously quibbling with a blatantly joking article, but I do find the Tusken Raiders=Muslims thing to be kind of offensive and uneducated.

And the capitalism thing! Gah, allow me to get distracted for a moment by my long-standing frustration with the misunderstanding of capitalism that So Many People take for the Gospel Truth. As I have previously argued, both on this blog and countless times in person, Capitalism is not an "evil system." It's very simply a description of how markets work. Really, I begin to think that no one has even read Adam Smith. Or rather, they've read excerpts, which as I've argued plenty of times before regarding such classics as The Education of Henry Adams, is disastrous to one's understanding of the text. How many people realize that Smith's enormous tome The Wealth of Nations actually contains plenty of cautionary advice to governments acknowledging that if the market is left absolutely unrestrained, it'll kind of make for a Horrible Society?

Précisons: sure, self-interest drives the market, according to capitalism, and that's not entirely a bad thing from its perspective. As Smith observes,

 "By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other eases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good."

 Of course, this is only saying that sometimes self-interested pursuit of economic profit results in the best public good, and that direct pursuit of the same end is often disappointing. I admit that this possibility is not in itself sufficient reassurance to those who care about developing a just society. However, this is simply one observation extracted from the entirety of the book. What you're not getting in this paragraph is the fact that Smith is restricting his observations to purely economic interactions. "Self-interest" does not mean Being Greedy and Stomping on the Little Guy, and anyone who does those things claiming to be justified by capitalist principles would most likely be roundly censured by Smith (who, among other things, was also the author of the mostly-forgotten Theory of Moral Sentiments). "Self-interest" as understood here is as simple as Person A. selling a bushel of beans that he's grown spending about $2 on seeds and about $30 worth of labor to Person B. for a profit of $40. Of course, Person B. only enters into the transaction if it serves his interests as well. So he's willing to pay $40 for beans because the cost (opportunity cost, in econ terms) of producing the beans himself would have been higher than the cost of buying them. 


Again, this is only economic interactions we're talking about ("economic interactions" strictly understood, because one can understand everything in economic terms, assuming that a notion of values is agreed upon). It in no way limits a person's ability to step outside of the limitations of economic self-interest and act generously, and as I've observed above, Smith actually finds generosity fairly important if the system isn't going to crumble. And he even encourages the government to put some elementary limitations on the system so that it doesn't become dehumanizing. (Great quote from Noam Chomsky: "People read snippets of Adam Smith, the few phrases they teach in school. Everybody reads the first paragraph of The Wealth of Nations where he talks about how wonderful the division of labor is. But not many people get to the point hundreds of pages later, where he says that division of labor will destroy human beings and turn people into creatures as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be. And therefore in any civilized society the government is going to have to take some measures to prevent division of labor from proceeding to its limits."--from Class Warfare)

Of course, it's obvious that greedy people looking to maximize their own gains can find ways to manipulate the system, but it's a bit of a mystery to me why greedy people thus manipulating things discredits the very basic economic principles of capitalism. That's kind of like saying that corrupt politicians discredit American democratic republicanism or that corrupt "charitable" organizations discredit charity. Greed is not defined as "working to promote your own advantage." I'm pretty sure that last time I checked, the Church was fine with people earning money and bettering their social position. The problem is when people obsess about it to the expense of more serious matters (relationship with God and others), or, worse (and this almost always goes hand-in-hand with such obsession; it's a logical progression), do so unjustly. In other words, greed is manipulating a system or structure to promote one's own advantage at the expense of others. The "problem" Catholic writers are seeing with capitalism isn't a systemic problem, it's a moral problem. One that I'd attribute partly to fallen human nature, partly to materialism. Now that latter, that's something one can complain about. But I'm not about to get into a discussion of the effects of materialism on society at this point.

On Friendship

This article, another from the Stanford Enclyclopedia of Philosophy, is worth a read. Friendship is one of those things that Americans seem to have a terrible time understanding. The media portrayal of friendships is weak, to state matters kindly. (I'm about to generalize unabashedly, but here goes.) If friendship is portrayed at all in the movies, you can count on its being: 1.) in a comedy--how many times do close friendships actually matter, if they appear at all, in drama? 2.) of the following varieties:

1. the female "best friend" who either exists only to support the main character (friendship of utility? usually seems so)
2. the female "best friend who suddenly becomes worst enemy"-again, one suspects that the "friendship" the two characters had was only ever a friendship of utility, given how quickly it dissolves and how reluctant each one is to make any compromises that would affect her own self-interest
3. the male "best friend" who is almost universally a bumbling idiot, and who seems to exist only to spur the main character on to ever more extreme acts of bumbling idiocy.
4. the sidekick: sometimes a comedy figure, sometimes an action movie character: occurs in three major types: yes-man, comic relief, or slightly-inferior-to-the-main-character fighter.

 In all four types, whatever sappy message may be stuck on the end of some of the comedies about "the real meaning of friendship", the message of the story (so often different from that sappy closing message, which is probably why that latter seems so very sappy) is that friendship is a combination of Aristotle's friendship-for-pleasure (I have fun with them) and friendship-of-utility (I can use this person to get something for myself). Both are deficient forms of friendship in which the self comes before the other. The difficulty is that in a culture of instant gratification, it's hard to comprehend of an attachment to another that is based upon concern for that other's well being, and their similarly unselfish concern for yours. (The degree to which a more long-term type of "wise" self-interest comes into that sort of friendship is one that philosophers may well debate, but which I am inclined to believe will vary depending of the characters of the people involved.)

Which, then, leads right into the observation that friendship, as well as all other types of human relationships (parent-child, husband-wife, sibling-sibling, etc) are "hot topics" in popular media to the extent that they provide the filmmakers/songwriters/etc to talk about sex. Human sexuality is the very opposite of a bad thing (see Pope John Paul, in case you're one of the very few people reading this blog who might be unaware of the Theology of the Body). But a culture that singles that out as the only real indicator of the value of human relationships is missing not only a huge range of human emotion, but the crux of what makes sexuality itself important.

Sex is something you can "get," as is more than obvious from contemporary slang. And in an obsessively consumerist culture, everything revolves around this notion of "getting"--whether it be things, "likes" on facebook, "views" of profiles, or sex. But that obsession in turn makes it very difficult, if not eventually impossible--and again, this is no matter how many times we've heard the unconvincing platitudes at the ends of movies--to conceive of a relationship based on giving. Look again at that list of "friend-types" above. What do they all have in common? They all get the main character something:  the trusty side-kick who helps the action hero win again (and who makes him look good by virtue of those slightly inferior skills); the comic side-kick, who again, makes the hero look good in comparison--usually for the benefit of the romantic interest; the female best friend is usually "best" insofar as she helps the lead to "get" the guy; the "worst enemy" usually becomes such because the two have become rivals for the same guy. You get the picture.

The ability to direct one's attention outwards, toward others and their interests, is crucial to maintaining friendships, family relationships, and, yes, even marriage--because it doesn't stop at the wedding, whatever the traditional rom-com story arc would make us think. And until you have a culture that recognizes that, it's likely that deep friendship in media will be confined to the margins of Indie films. The disturbing thing is that our culture is to such a large extent formed by the media that even in the most counter-cultural of venues (my undergraduate institution, and others about which I've heard stories) it is perhaps a rarer thing and more vulnerable to the ups and downs of self-interested "drama" than could be hoped.

I do have one last comment that is unrelated to the rest of the post: the discussion of the "Shared activity" criterion for friendship is particularly interesting now, when the internet is making communication over long distances increasingly easy. One wonders about the possibility of sustaining old friendships via email, facebook, even (still) letter writing. What is the sort of "shared activity" that would allow this to be the case? Talking is obviously the primary one, but when looking at the origins of friendships, they tend to come about through a much more concrete shared experience--of going to similar classes or spending free time together, or even sharing a rather unpleasant experience (like, oh, maybe getting stuck without a flight in Barcelona and needing to be in Rome by the next day). And they are strengthened by further experiences like these more than they are by, say, just sitting around and talking. Is the ability share pictures, reminisce, chat, skype, even--via status updates and such--share vicariously in a friend's day, enough to sustain a deep friendship over thousands of miles and several years? Not really sure about that one. Probably depends largely, as so many things do, on individual determination.

Update:  Here's a quote that actually addresses my above question, though it doesn't answer it, of course. It's helpful to include "moral and intellectual activities" in the "shared activities" category. They certainly continue to be valid over a distance, though there's still the question of to what extent the absent friend can continue to be as influential in encouraging these--one of the many, many possible pitfalls of social media's facilitation of the temptation to create a fictional, "better" self.

"Cooper's Aristotle claims that the sort of shared activity characteristic of friendship is essential to one's being able engage in the sort of activities characteristic of living well “continuously” and “with pleasure and interest” (310). Such activities include moral and intellectual activities, activities in which it is often difficult to sustain interest without being tempted to act otherwise. Friendship, and the shared values and shared activities it essentially involves, is needed to reinforce our intellectual and practical understanding of such activities as worthwhile in spite of their difficulty and the ever present possibility that our interest in pursuing them will flag. Consequently, the shared activity of friendship is partly constitutive of human flourishing."

The "Problem" with Men?

This is a rather disturbing article published in The Atlantic which discusses in a bit more detail that social phenomenon that it seems everyone's been talking about lately. Namely, the "disenfranchisement" of men. The facts and figures, and many of the explanations that this article and others present are all pretty valid. What one finds inevitably lacking is any idea of what to do about it. I understand that it's a complex problem and that there are many factors to be considered. But it seems to me that one of the foremost problems is that no one is talking about the real problem. I'm going to look at three of the major issues/effects of this phenomenon, and try to identify at least one aspect of the underlying problem.

Educational styles:

"Researchers have suggested any number of solutions. A movement is growing for more all-boys schools and classes, and for respecting the individual learning styles of boys. Some people think that boys should be able to walk around in class, or take more time on tests, or have tests and books that cater to their interests. In their desperation to reach out to boys, some colleges have formed football teams and started engineering programs. Most of these special accommodations sound very much like the kind of affirmative action proposed for women over the years—which in itself is an alarming flip." 

 The author is right to call the flip "alarming." Such tactics seem to invite a pendulum model of social empowerment (for lack of a better word). First you have women fighting their way into an all-male workforce, then a brief moment of equilibrium, and now men are the ones having to fight for every inch. Once you have a sort of affirmative action singling out men for assistance, you're going to get more and more of them in the workforce as employers hire and then over-hire. And then it's back to square one, with women now facing the problems and men on the brink of being back in exactly the same boat. It's one of the fundamental problems with affirmative action of any sort (other than the fact that it far too often excludes from consideration more highly qualified job candidates and students simply because they happen to be part of the "privileged majority"--never a way to run an efficient, effective society); it may help to fix one social problem, but goes right ahead and creates more in doing so.

Then there's a key historical consideration. Men were always taught this way. By "this way" I mean purely in the mechanical sense: sitting in a classroom, at desks, etc. I respect what education specialists and child psychologists can tell us about how a child learns best, and I do think that's had some positive effect on the classroom since the 1800s. The problem is that, rather as in the affirmative action case, a problem is validly identified and the solution taken way too far. Look back at education in the 1800s, read letters written by the average college-educated Civil War soldier; look back even further to Harvard and Yale back when they were attended by prospective colonial preachers; or even glance over the records of British boarding schools and the American Catholic school (maligned as it is) of the 1940s. Guys sat in classrooms. The discipline forcing them to be quiet and still was much more strict. They had arguably less opportunity for sports, although those that did exist were usually very popular. Now take a look at what they were required to know in the 1860s just to get into Harvard.

My point is that whatever we may understand about male psychology now--that boys need more activity, that they are less naturally inclined to focus on reading than girls--male success has never been historically dependent upon schools pandering to them. A few hours of class, a few hours of homework required discipline, sure, as you can see whenever you have the classic case (literary and historical) of the "wayward son" who flunks out of school and does poorly in everything because of his inability to work hard. But boys were still able to get out, to exercise, to roughhouse. And they usually succeeded, either moderately or brilliantly depending on intellectual capacities, but either way you did not have a similar phenomenon of only the rare, very clever, very quiet bookworm succeeding in academics (I say "only" very provisionally, because well-disciplined boys are another, almost invariable, exception).

I do admit that discipline in the classroom may not entirely solve the problem. There's a job shortage generally, and someone is going to be out of work. Back in the day it's true that higher education was more confined to the upper classes; that is, you could work your way into Harvard if you were a very clever young man from a poorer family, but no one expected that of you. There were always other jobs to take if you weren't inclined academically. Now however, traditionally male blue-collar jobs are increasingly rare, so men who really do need something more active are left with fewer and fewer options.

I have only one comment regarding that, and it's a provisional one. When talking about "class divisions and education," let's recall that for the upper middle class, education wasn't so voluntary. The blue-collar job solution could work, especially in America. But usually that was if you were totally inept in school. In general, if you came from a certain background there was little discrimination based on ability and inclination. You had to go through it and that was that. Even the wilder sort who ended up an officer in the British Army and would be sent to some colonial outpost was at least required to go through a public or private school. And those standards, as evidenced by the Harvard entrance exam previously cited (as well as in literature, letters, etc) were quite a lot higher than our public high school standards.

In short, I'm inclined to see the "men aren't educated" phenomenon as something that should be addressed by teaching young men and boys how to be self-disciplined. Teaching them that there's nothing emasculating about sitting down and controlling their understandable desire to play guns and compete. That by doing so, they'll compete even better in the long term. That later on, by the time they're college graduates, they'll already have achievements of which they can truly be proud, and will be on the road to more. In short, the response is to move away from the culture of instant gratification. We need to stop encouraging kids (both girls and boys, because believe me, the single biggest reason girls do better in school now is that it's not as much of a struggle against their natural inclinations) to go for what they want, when they want, no matter how inappropriate or unhealthy it may be. We need a renewed ability to value some things above others. And even in a totally secular society, surely we can return at least to the conviction that some behaviors really are self-destructive in the long term, while others are constructive?

Marriage and Relationships: 

"Over the years, researchers have proposed different theories to explain the erosion of marriage in the lower classes: the rise of welfare, or the disappearance of work and thus of marriageable men. But Edin thinks the most compelling theory is that marriage has disappeared because women are setting the terms—and setting them too high for the men around them to reach. “I want that white-picket-fence dream,” one woman told Edin, and the men she knew just didn’t measure up, so she had become her own one-woman mother/father/nurturer/provider. The whole country’s future could look much as the present does for many lower-class African Americans: the mothers pull themselves up, but the men don’t follow. First-generation college-educated white women may join their black counterparts in a new kind of middle class, where marriage is increasingly rare. "

While one knee-jerk response to the phenomenon of more and more men being single because of women being more and more picky is to blame "the feminists,"  just the opposite seems to be the case. Another phenomenon that's turning the heads of journalists and cultural critics in all branches of the media is that of women (yes, the same women taking on increasingly high-paying, high-profile jobs)  are becoming more and more conservative in their outlooks on family life. They usually want families, want monogamous relationships, and want to be able to spend time raising their kids. Moreover, I can tell you from personal experience that the desire to date and marry a man with at least a comparable level of education doesn't stem from academic snobbery. Nearly every college-aged woman I've talked to has the same concerns I did--before meeting my very well-educated, well-mannered, and self-disciplined doctor-to-be boyfriend. Namely, we jolly well don't want to have to dumb down our conversations so that our husbands/boyfriends can understand them! How would that be for equality of the sexes? Thanks a lot, you wonderful old 1970s-era feminists...you made us into the bad guys, put us into the uncomfortable once-male role of occasionally having to settle for a ditz (the male equivalent, of course). It's no wonder that some women are preferring to remain single!


The Male Role Model (Or Lack Thereof):

"American pop culture keeps producing endless variations on the omega male, who ranks even below the beta in the wolf pack. This often-unemployed, romantically challenged loser can show up as a perpetual adolescent (in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up or The 40-Year-Old Virgin), or a charmless misanthrope (in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg), or a happy couch potato (in a Bud Light commercial). He can be sweet, bitter, nostalgic, or cynical, but he cannot figure out how to be a man. “We call each other ‘man,’” says Ben Stiller’s character in Greenberg, “but it’s a joke. It’s like imitating other people.”"

There's another concern that causes women to "raise the bar too high," as the author puts it. Let's imagine for a moment that the educational gap would not have serious ramifications on any relationship. What are women who want a monogamous relationship and healthy, well-nurtured children going to be looking for? A bum who sits around and plays video games because school is "too boring" or "not cool"? Or what about the "sweet" one, whose inability to be assertive ensures that he'll start out at the bottom and stay at the bottom?

I very much understand that not all men without jobs are "bums," nor just "sweet and unassertive" as I rather harshly put it. But there's an age-based distinction to consider here. On the one hand, you have your unfortunate victims of the economic crisis, the blue-collar worker who is now jobless; usually he wants to support his family, but lacks the means. They tend to be older though. Young people getting into the American blue-collar workforce isn't quite unheard of yet, but the number is small enough to make that group statistically negligible for my purposes.

Guys my age and a little older usually fall into a few very distinct categories. There's the pretty much successful guy, who faces obstacles both in getting into college and in getting a job because of affirmative action, but who realizes that education is key to succeeding in this country at this time, and so gets one. Then gets a job. It may take him longer to get to that point (immaturity resulting from bad examples in school is one primary cause, I think; then also the affirmative action thing); he may or may not have a brilliant transcript. But either way, he either has gotten there or is getting there. Or even if he's forced to live with his parents because of the current economic crisis, he's usually doing something constructive with his life. There were lots of guys like this at my school. But on the whole, you don't meet that sort very often. They're the exceptions now. The ones who have something of a character; as I've said before, "values systems" nowadays are often vague and contradictory, but at least on the practical level of getting you somewhere in life they tend to be similar.

Then there's the type one sees much more often. The type I saw all the time while working at the library. This sort is usually lucky to finish high school. But he doesn't even care much if he doesn't. He's usually characterized by exactly one "skill", which he shows off to his friends ad nauseam (at least from the perspective of the bored librarian who's seen it a million times). The skill might be:

1. knowledge of manga and anime
2. computer gaming
3. skateboarding

(There might be others...I don't think I've encountered one.) He usually focuses on impressing his female friends and fighting with his male friends for dominance if they happen to share a "skill". He usually "hangs out" with a younger girl or three and gets at least one of them pregnant. I have seen exactly one of them not abandon the mother and child.

This sort is the real victim of our anti-masculine culture. What one sees here is very palpably the result of a lack of male role models. The dead giveaway is that these guys are always modeling themselves after someone, usually an action hero, either from comic books or movies. The gamers often go so far as to allow their own identity to be consumed by that of the online character, a character who is "heroic" by some perverted standard, who has the ability to go out and fight battles, and who usually (at least in many role playing games)  actually has an older, male mentor of some sort to guide him. When I say "consumed," I mean it. The violence with which the gamers will defend their right to stay online and keep playing is astonishing; knives have been pulled over this in our library--and I come from a town of 15,000. Even when it doesn't go that far, trying to get the gamer to talk about anything other than his virtual reality is nearly impossible. He will try to impress girls not with anything he's done, but with his feats of virtual heroism.

Of course, mixed in with the gamers, skateboarders, and anime fans (and many other reincarnations of the same basic pattern: skill-focused to fill the gap left by the absent role model) is the sweet-but-helpless guy. This is the one that I really feel for. The more aggressive ones are usually acting out on all of their worst tendencies to in response to their lack. It's understandable, but not at all admirable. The gentler sort of guy nowadays is more sensitive to the way his actions affect other people, which leads him to eschew the same sort of dominance-seeking, "I'm a  Man so I am The Best and can do whatever I want" attitude and behaviors of others. For him, being left without a role model doesn't mean inventing his own adolescent, angst-driven version of what it is to be a man. It means that he sees the aggressiveness and thoughtless behavior of other guys his age and thinks that that's what it means to be masculine. So he avoids it like the plague. He's utterly unassertive, utterly passive. He allows himself to be walked over, and even kind of puts himself in other people's way, seemingly for that very purpose. He never even tries to compete, because competition is what the "bad kids" do.

With this being the case, again, how can one blame women for "setting the bar high"? Not only is the conversation inequality a problem; it's more than a little likely that an enormous percentage of guys who do not have either a good education or a good job (or both) are extremely flawed. They rarely will have the confidence or the genuine humility that it takes to be a good husband and father: the humility that comes of having been taught what one knows, and the confidence that it takes to teach one's children the same.

One good thing that came (obliquely) out of feminism is the recognition that women can't, despite their natural desire to do so, fix a bad character. No one can do that but the person who needs to change, once he has recognized that need. Setting the bar high in terms of what one is willing to accept in marriage is partly an offshoot of that, then. We know that the aggressive adolescent won't change his behavior unless he's had a change of heart; we know that the gentle doormat won't start standing up for himself until he believes it's okay to do so.

Women are increasingly realizing that marital security, children, and a loving husband aren't the nefarious traps of the oppressive bourgeois male that radical feminists had portrayed them as being. The problem is that now, in the wake of political and social changes advocated by feminists and actuated by both men and women of the years between 1960 and 1980, we have a society in moral crisis. Women have escaped some of the worst effects of those years; after all, when marriages broke up, kids usually at least had the mother to look up to as a role model.

But for boys and young men now, the father is all too often absent entirely. And if he's not absent, the particularly radical (and particularly unintelligent)  brand of feminism that has been attacking the schools for decades (without realizing that the pendulum has been swinging the other way for almost 20 years now), does its best to make him absent for the 6 or 7 hours a day the boy is at school. Popular media then does its best to discredit the father with its seductive (and yes, I use the word intentionally) surrogate figures, which make Hollywood et al. rich off the teenage male crowd, but which pervert young boys' understanding of what it is to be masculine. No longer is the father who works hard, stays faithful to his wife, protects and loves his kids a "hero". No, to be a hero you need three things: 1.) abs, 2.) biceps, and 3.) skills. Plus plenty of disposable women.

So to go back to the opening point: what are we to do? Reintroduce values? Extol positive role models who can help boys see that instant gratification is not the way to live life and that heroism requires more than a superficial "skill"? Yes, I think. How one would go about that is beyond me, however. It can be done on a family-by-family basis, but that requires being boldly counter-cultural. And then the parents must hope that once the kid is out on his own, he'll have the strength of character to continue being counter-cultural.

Either way, solutions like "reversed affirmative action," new classroom strategies, or even that of women becoming less "picky" aren't going to solve anything in the long term. Like so many other problems in our society, this one's a moral problem, and it won't ultimately change unless individuals make the right choices.

Helal on “Anger, Anxiety, Abstraction: Virginia Woolf's 'Submerged Truth.'”

Woolf is an angry feminist. Anger in women is completely justified because it has been historically frowned upon, while anger in men is illegitimate because it has been historically enabled. These are the two flawed presuppositions that support this discussion of Woolf's political essays and the novels Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Though the latter assumption is illogical, it does not significantly mar the opening discussion of the essays, many of which Woolf did in fact write in a polemical vein; the presence of anger here is unmistakable, and its expression does line up in some respects with Helal's description of it as a tool for attacking historically repressive structures. However, Helal claims—assumes rather—that “the discourse of anger constructs and organizes social reality” (80), and this assumption is the framework for a much less than convincing reading of Woolf's two most famous novels. Focusing on Clarissa Dalloway's and Mrs. Ramsay's minor outbursts of anger or irritation, she takes these as a sign that the two women are boiling over with a rage that then is suppressed in favor of the feminine role that society expects them to play. With its disregard for anything in the text that might modify this rather extreme claim, the essay takes a single (minor) element of the characters as the unspoken “reality” underlying the text. Despite its relative uselessness as actual criticism, the essay is deserving of passing note in the annotations as a telling caricature of a significant quantity of Woolf criticism, much of which likewise seems to begin with a few assumptions about what they are “supposed” to find in Woolf's writing, and then to extrapolate wildly from the textual evidence to find psychological subtexts that agree with this presuppositions.

Harper on "To the Lighthouse"

Howard Harper is currently very high up on the (small) list of Woolf critics whom I really like. As I've made abundantly clear to anyone who will listen, there's a really unfortunate tendency to read her political views (which, if you actually read a good biography you'll realize were a lot less important to her and more tenuously held than many assume) into her work. Thus love is bad and must be surpassed by the artistic vision. (Oh, right, because Woolf was a feminist. Therefore love, particularly married love, is bad.) Personally, I rather think that she is searching out a proper understanding of love that can serve as a context for responding to the world in general in a particular way. This often is betrayed by the common ways of defining love; for one thing, it can't be contained in a few words, as in a hallmark card or something. Hence in To the Lighthouse, for instance, Mrs. Ramsay's refusal to tell her husband that she loves him comes at the moment in the novel (save the conclusion, arguably) when her love for him is most clearly triumphant.

I could argue all this, but some of it will come into my major paper for the semester, and I really don't want to get bored with the topic. So here instead is a rather longish passage regarding the relationship of the artistic vision and the love that inspires it from Harper's admirable book, Between Language and Silence. It's not an argument at this point either, coming at the conclusion of a rather long chapter, but it's an excellent description. Note the secondary role that the former takes as the framer of something that can exist in every human life. In other words, there really is none of the arrogance of the artist that Woolf is often accused of in this vision. The artist's role doesn't surpass the best in ordinary human life, but orders and preserves it.(Woolf is hesitant to affirm this latter point, even.)

Lily's painting has somehow captured the meaning of the Ramsays and their voyage. Just as the depth and subtlety of the world of Part I had been subsumed within Mrs. Ramsay's awareness, so the essence of that world, reclaimed from the ravages of time, is expressed in the work of art. . .Lily's insight is, in some ways, greater than Mrs. Ramsay's. Lily sees her as a shadow and paints her as one. Yet in a sense, Lily herself becomes a shadow of Mrs. Ramsay, approaching in art what Mrs. Ramsay had done in life. . .To the Lighthouse is about hope and promises and, especially, love. And as Lily discovers, "Love had a thousand shapes." It is not only the love of man for woman, which the narrative sees as awesome and terrible. It is also the love of parents for children, and of children for their parents, love which also may find expression in puzzling, even outrageous, ways. It is the quiet love of friends, with its shelter of respect and privacy. And it is the love of the artist for art, which allows both intimacy and distance, detachment and desire.

The forms of love are also the forms of conflict--between mother and father, man and woman, parents and children, friends, the artist and the work of art. These tensions reach moments of unexpected horror, as when Mr. Ramsay says, suddenly, to the woman he loves, "Damn you!" Then the promised voyage to the lighthouse suddenly becomes even more necessary: Mr. Ramsay's unspoken guilt will last for more than a decade.

The problem, then, is somehow to come to terms with who and what one inescapably is, not really in hope of changing it, but in the hope of understanding it. The struggle is to comprehend, to express what is, to paint its picture, tell its story. When that story has been told, a kind of immortality is achieved, so that we can say of Mr. And Mrs. Ramsay what the brothers Grimm say of the fisherman and his wife [this Grimm story is an important recurring reference in the novel]: "there they are living still at this very time," fallen into ordinary mortality, as they must for ordinary mortals to recognize them. So their very mortality gives rise to their immortality. When the narrative discovers their authentic place in time, it also endows them with universality--and timelessness...

When chaos threatens to overwhelm her dinner, Mrs. Ramsay commands her children to "Light the candles." And they do. At her side, the poet [Mr. Carmichael] becomes "monumental" in the failing light. In that same realm of twilight, as the story of the fisherman and his wife ends, the failing light of day gives way to the first reflection, in the eyes of a child, of the light of love. Toward that light, to the lighthouse, the human spirit must always turn. in that light the most ordinary actions become monumental, archetypal, reflections of a love and longing which are so deep, so mysterious, that they can never be directly stated, only surrounded and suggested by poetry.

Tony Tanner on Pride and Prejudice

So, after reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time since I was very young (and practically drooling over Austen's perfect sentence structure the entire time), I read Tony Tanner's classic introduction, less because I wanted to than because it was assigned in class. Am I glad it was assigned! It's kind of fantastic, and I don't say that lightly. Especially after having done Junior poet, and most of the annotations part of Senior novel, I have a keen appreciation for good criticism; a truly depressing percentage of what somehow gets published is painfully inferior. Tanner's essay, in striking contrast to this norm, is intelligent, well-balanced, up front about his presuppositions, etc.

He opens the essay musing on the question of how Pride and Prejudice may be considered a novel relevant to Austen's early nineteenth century British society, despite the fact that it keeps well aloof from any discussion of the Napoleonic wars or various forms of contemporary social unrest within the burgeoning empire. As he observes, the central event can be reduced to “a man changes his manners and a young lady changes her mind” (368-9). Yet within a stable society, guided in nearly all its affairs by a strict set of traditions, the tension between these traditional forms and individual expression renders such alterations deeply effective: Tanner describes a tendency within such society to script the lives of others, and reduce knowledge of a person to knowledge of his or her role within the traditional forms. Moving first to explore these issues from the perspective of Pride and Prejudice's original title, “First Impressions,” Tanner discusses the emphasis that philosophers of Austen's time put on the distinction between “impressions” and “ideas”; the former is a complex of sensory and emotional responses to events and characters, which is then acted on by reason to form ideas. Austen is highly conscious of the problems inherent in this epistemological structure, as evidenced by the most basic elements of the narrative: the plot exists, one might go so far as to say, only because Elizabeth—and many supporting characters with her—has the misfortune of finding perceptions, or “first impressions” unreliable as a basis from which to draw true conclusions. Thus her assumption of Darcy's pride and ungentlemanly disposition leads her to give far more credence to Wickham's self-presentation than it deserves. Tanner moves on to note the essentially linguistic aspect of the misunderstandings and corrections of the novel. Acting as, and recognizing others as genuine or not comes down to a sort of discrimination between styles; the divide between social appearance and “inner” reality is least problematic where the style is at its best, that is, where it is most indicative of the truth about a person. Tanner notes the many instances wherein this is the case, the most important of which is the way in which Pemberley's tastefulness becomes a metaphor for its owner's well-ordered mind. He then observes that the novel itself moves formally from a dramatic mode of expression, in which impressions and experience are paramount, to a reflective, retrospective narrative mode that allows the reader to discriminate between “styles” of people just as Elizabeth is learning to do so. Unlike the many objects of Austen's harsher satire, who have in various ways lost the ability to relate as complete persons to their social role (Mr. Bennets solipsism and Mrs. Bennet's social superficiality are contrasted as two sides of the same coin), Elizabeth puts 'truth to self above truth to role' (390). She thus can recover from her initial judgments and fit the truth about Darcy into her initial impressions in a way that makes her re-understand both. “Love,” according to the Austenian definition, follows naturally from this re-comprehension. Both passion and romantic idealization are rejections of mature reason, and so are invalid definitions of love, for Austen; rather, it must be based upon a rational recognition that one possesses a true respect and regard for the other. Emotion, Tanner explains, must be able to be verbalized (that is, to be reasoned), or it is folly. Importantly, Tanner does not end the essay with an assertion of Austen's absolute preference for the path of formality and reason over Elizabeth's laughter (even when the latter is mistaken). While he suggests that several of Austen's later novels do display such a marked preference, Pride and Prejudice asserts above all the necessity of a union between the “wildness” that an Elizabeth Bennet is capable of displaying, and the rationality of Darcy. In ending with their marriage, Austen is above all asserting that social forms and individual energy are really only brought to their full potential when brought into harmony with one another.

“The Pseudo-Homeric World of Mrs. Dalloway.”

Hoff reads Mrs. Dalloway in light of Joyce’s contemporaneous publication of Ulysses, arguing that Woolf utilizes classical literary tradition in a manner that parodies Joyce’s “rigidly restrictive” employment of his Homeric inheritance. Finding obscure Homeric references in Woolf’s depiction of minor characters such as Mr. Bowley (who is “sealed with wax”) and Miss Kilman (recalling Scylla and Charybdis through her monstrous appetite both for food and people), the essay focuses on the parallels between Peter Walsh and Odysseus. Several of these parallels are persuasive at least in their potential as frameworks within which to understand this character; the identification of the garden world of Bourton as the Calypsean locus amoenus to which Peter desires constantly to return, but from which he is repeatedly distracted, is a particularly promising instance of this parallel. However, the essay suffers from two weaknesses. For one, it falls into the common trap of pushing a parallel a bit too far; many of the instances Hoff presents are almost impossible to give credence to, such as the idea that Peter’s visit to Clarissa is consciously reminiscent of Odysseus’ visit to Helen’s chamber towards the beginning of the Odyssey. Moreover, though purportedly aimed at pointing out the parodic nature of the text, Hoff neglects to provide any discussion of how exactly the parallels she discerns would be a parody  of Ulysses rather than a simple imitation, or at best, a project coincidentally similar in drawing on the Homeric world.

Lucio Ruotolo's "The Interrupted Moment: A View of Virginia Woolf’s Novels"

Devoting a chapter to each of Woolf’s novels, Ruotolo incisively examines the phenomenon interruption as seen in the lives of Woof’s characters. The ability to accommodate interruption indicates an openness to undefined experience, he argues.  He contrasts the average citizen as he or she appears in Woolf’s non-fiction works, with the heroines of her novels; the former tend to rest in society’s formulaic explanations for the complexities of human life, while the latter habitually indulge “interruptions,” physical or intellectual, that allow them to conceive of the world more richly. The chapter on Mrs. Dalloway is particularly illuminating, as he makes use not only of Woolf’s non-fiction, but is able to highlight the way this patience with interruption grows into a primary characteristic of Clarissa Dalloway by contrasting the finished novel with the study “Mrs. Dalloway’s Party.”  In the finished novel she is tempted to “crystallize the present” (108),  as Ruotolo puts it, moving, for instance, from an intense enjoyment of the particularities of London during her flower-buying errand, to see the footmen and mysterious car as permanent signs of an unchanging, stable reality within her society. Yet the climactic party succeeds so well, Ruotolo argues convincingly, precisely because it is an image of Clarissa’s triumph over such impulse to reduce her experience to symbols: circulating among her guests to ensure the comfort of each, she allows the party to develop a life of its own and so “entertains a world of motion and change” (117).

Jacob Littleton's “Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Woman”

Littleton’s essay teems with fruitful and perceptive observations about aspects of Mrs. Dalloway ranging from the eponymous character’s conception of life to the contrast between community and individual isolation. The body of the paper focuses primarily on defining Clarissa’s artistic endeavor, arguing that her love of life for its own sake is at the heart of her ability to transmute this love into a communal setting at her climactic party. Her heightened awareness of existence leads her to find unity with others in shared experience and memory of shared experience, and Littleton intelligently characterizes her secular “faith” in such communal moments as a counter to the fear of death (physical or societal) that plagues her even to the close of her triumphant party. This excellent argument, however, forms only the central portion of the paper, and is rather weakened by being couched in political language that relates only distantly to his attempt to characterize her artistry. Depicting Clarissa as a subversive element in the midst of a stifling traditional society, the close of the paper comes off as rather bathetic after the highly engaging discussion of the body.

Forbe's “Equating Performance with Identity: The Failure of Clarissa Dalloway’s Victorian ‘Self’ in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.”

What a pretentiously-titled essay, no? Forbes concentrates on the tension between private identity and the performance of a public role as it plays out in this day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway. Buying unquestioningly into her role as hostess, her day regulated by the demanding chimes of the Big Ben clocktower, Clarissa makes the error of equating her performance with identity, Forbes argues. The essay places much interpretive weight upon her occasionally-mentioned wish that everyone could “merely be themselves,” pointing out that her failure to pursue romance in the person of Peter Walsh, is an instance of her not being herself. Because personal desire conflicts with her social role, she is not, she believes, a unified self, as the Victorian aesthetic of her patriarchal society demands that she be. In pursuit of such unity, she substitutes role-playing for individuality, allowing the former state to dominate the latter impulse and decomplexify her identity. The essay makes in passing some valid points about individual symbols occurring throughout the novel (Big Ben, the streets of London), and some good observations about Clarissa’s thought process. But in seeing her as an essentially “failed” character, who has caved to the demands of a patriarchal society while ignoring all of the moments when Woolf emphasizes the ethically-oriented aspect of being a hostess, of trying to bring others into a temporary community, the essay makes essentially the same error it accuses Mrs. Dalloway of committing. Extrapolating a single, supposedly definitive, feminist interpretation of the novel from a few observations, it fails to see Woolf’s novel in the full complexity it deserves.

Auden Yet Again

This Auden fellow is really quite insightful sometimes. One further comment on one of the reasons writers generally have very mixed feelings about publicizing their work. It's a bit of an elitist remark in some respects; I think I'd be more comfortable with it in general if the conclusion were "if a good ethos were equally distributed among all men." But still.

Every writer would rather be rich than poor, but no genuine writer cares about popularity as such. He needs approval of his work by others in order to be reassured that the vision of life he believes he has had is a true vision and not a self-delusion, but he can only be reassured by those whose judgment he respects. It would only be necessary for a writer to secure universal popularity if imagination and intelligence were equally distributed among all men.

More Auden

"In literature, as in life, affectation, passionately adopted and loyally persevered in, is one of the chief forms of self-discipline by which mankind has raised itself by its own bootstraps."

Auden on Writing

"Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about. There is a certain kind of person who is so dominated by the desire to be loved for himself alone that he has constantly to test those around him by tiresome behavior; what he says and does must be admired, not because it is intrinsically admirable, but because it is his remark, his act. Does not this explain a good deal of avant-garde art?"

Why Style Matters

I've always been rather profoundly disgusted with much modern fiction. Let me express a caveat: I have certainly read very little of it in its entirety. Generally I pick up a book, read a few chapters, and then have to close it in disgust--the style is abysmal.

While digging around in the archives of First Things, I came across a mildly dismissive mention of this article from the Atlantic Monthly by B.R. Myers. Apparently back in 2001, this article provoked a barrage of criticism; no surprise--the entire thing bashes the literary establishment, particularly the tendency of critics to moon over "literary" writers at the expense of all others. I am not enamoured of the basic thesis of the article. Myers is expressing little more original thought than the classic Marxist criticism of elitist literature. He wants Stephen King's horror novels and such to be accorded an equal place in the developing canon of literature as the works of Proulx and McCarthy.

I think there's some merit in being stylistically excellent. The interesting thing is that despite his basic thesis, Myers clearly does as well. In fact the truly interesting part of the article (and the bulk) is devoted to incisive analyses of the prose styles of these darlings of the literary world. He's quite good at this.

In fact, the portion of the article that I most appreciated was the section entitled "Muscular" Prose, referring primarily to Cormac McCarthy. Now McCarthy is something of a sore spot for me. I've read so many snippets of high praise of his work from Catholic websites (particularly First Things), and yet despite giving him a fair test this summer, I found his prose little less than nauseating. One sentence that Myers quotes, in fact, I went around quoting in mild rage to anyone who would listen for at least a week after I read it: "He ate the last of the eggs and wiped the plate with the tortilla and ate the tortilla and drank the last of the coffee and wiped his mouth and looked up and thanked her." (The Crossing) Saints preserve us! (No, really!) Have you ever come across such a gratuitous use of repetition? Some writers use repetition to effect something--an emotion, for instance. This instance displays the sort of repetitiveness that, according to my first instinct, and now to Myers' article, seems aimed only at showing off how literary the author can be. I wouldn't take it from Myers either if I hadn't found the exact same thing happening for the five chapters before I had to put it down.

Another caveat: generally speaking, I rather despise arrogant young critics who think that their opinions must become literary doctrine merely because they are their opinions. Even the most revered T.S. Eliot gets annoying when he does that. But that's what I'm doing with McCarthy. So be it. It does at least have some basis in textual reality.

And again, I must admit that I've never managed to complete anything of his. The high praise I read is invariably focused on the Old Testament centric-ness of the work, its Christianity, etc. That may well be; I wouldn't know--my testimony is necessarily one-dimensional. On the other hand, my family has always strongly adhered to the idea that a bit of Biblical imagery and a dash of God language doesn't make something a Christian work of art. A Christian something maybe, but not art. (There are worse examples than McCarthy that I'm thinking of now. Especially various didactic items of childrens literature.)

Another amazingly irritating bit:

He said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war. Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold ... Lastly he said that he had seen the souls of horses and that it was a terrible thing to see. He said that it could be seen under certain circumstances attending the death of a horse because the horse shares a common soul and its separate life only forms it out of all horses and makes it mortal ... Finally John Grady asked him if it were not true that should all horses vanish from the face of the earth the soul of the horse would not also perish for there would be nothing out of which to replenish it but the old man only said that it was pointless to speak of there being no horses in the world for God would not permit such a thing. (All the Pretty Horses)

I started this book too. Didn't get up to this point. But read it. Ignoring the kind of painful abstraction that McCarthy seems to regularly allow free rein in his descriptions of anything whatsoever (interrupted only in appearance by the sort of mundane "realistic" detail of the previous example) consider the fact that John Grady is a cowboy. My understanding of character in fiction is that the language of the character should be suited to him. I think that's a fairly classical, Aristotelean view. Now, I understand that John Grady is a pretty unusual cowboy. He thinks a lot. He's "deep". But to suggest that he is speaking in the sort of convoluted syntax more appropriate to bad Cavalier poetry, and in terms more appropriate to an advanced philosophy class...that's a very poor use of free indirect discourse. For someone like Jane Austen (brilliant at the technique, by the way), free indirect discourse is indicated less syntactically (:"John Grady asked him..." ) and more by the tone that the narrator's prose assumes (see Austen's passages on Mrs. Norris' reactions to Fanny in Mansfield Park). Nothing that I saw in the first few chapters indicated that John Grady ever had a tendency to sound like that. In fact, one of the things that rapidly turned me off about the novel was just how banal and quotidien the dialogue was...sure cowboys may talk like that, but do you need to torture the readers with their "Nice day." "Sure is." "Goin' somewhere?" sort of exchanges, which far too often seemed to be there as scenery rather than plot-movers.

So, having just written a bit of an invective on the poor man's style, I do think that the derision in which Myers holds his work (and even his character) in is unwarrented. I'm willing to believe that he has nice Biblical themes. I can see justification for his use of Biblical language as the default narrative tone (although that's not helped much by his hyper-realism à la Zola). The first sentence of his that Myers quotes is entirely unobjectionable. Quite good, in fact. And I have heard that "The Road" is excellent.

The real point that irks me about it is simply what Myers put his finger on. It's too self-conscious. Too "artsy," while not being genuinely artistic. And that goes for so much contemporary prose. Perhaps I'll get past that one day and be able to give some of these writers the sort of thematic or plot-centered reading they may or may not deserve. Until then, such vaguely evocative sentences as "War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner" will be to me as Zola or Gide: rather clever in their own way, but dreadfully disappointing as a whole.

Also, it is not inherently literary to despise punctuation.

Terry Eagleton and Wuthering Heights

I'm currently reading Terry Eagleton's book "The English Novel," which is really quite a good read, despite the fact that he's a Marxist critic, and I entered it a bit suspicious of his likely ideological bias. That exists, it certainly does, and I find rather skews his vision of what a novel is (is it really only a social instrument"? I disagree, at any rate), but whenever he delves down into criticism of/commentary on specific novels, he's quite perceptive. The key to this seems to be a certain intellectual honesty, by which Eagleton may heartily disagree with, say, Jane Austen's overall worldview, and certainly finds much problematic in the claim that any sort of absolute truth can be located by human society (it can't, that's why we have the Church, my friends, and that's what will always be missed as long as people insist upon considering the Church a purely social institution...), but he's willing to take the authors' ideas as they are. Thus you have here a genuinely remarkable admission that, yes, Jane Austen is a moral figure on the model of Aristotle and Homer, looking at a person's proper role in society as the context in which they live a moral life.

I'll take one example which has been rather on my mind of late. Wuthering Heights. He gives a remarkably "conservative" interpretation of this novel. Refreshingly, given how often that book has been distorted by readings that see it as little more than a sordid romance novel (think Stephanie Meyer and Twilight). Fairly obviously, even though I read it years and years ago, it is in part a serious critique of the Byronic hero, showing how uncontrolled "naturalness" in Heathcliff results in a grotesquely unnatural character who is willing to act atrociously to every person around him, using them more blatantly than the entire utilitarian society which he tries to escape. In short, Heathcliff is not a romantic hero. He's an antihero, and his romance with Catherine is a wild, egotistical fall into passion that is simply a hiatus in his general project of manipulating the society he loathes in order to gain revenge on basically everyone who's ever offended him. I do think Emily Bronte is more of a moralist here than Eagleton seems to give her credit for being, but he does a very excellent job of bringing out the contradictions inherent in Heathcliff's and Catherine's alternate acceptance of, then rejection of society--in both cases they are really using it as an objective standard to measure themselves against. Heathcliff, from what I can remember, pretty much defines himself in terms of his antagonism towards society, but in doing so, he's implicitly accepting the demands it makes on him as real...you can only "throw off" real constraints.

Now Eagleton more or less concludes claiming that the problem is that society exists in anything like a form that makes objective demands on its members. Or that's more or less the claim holding up most of the book. You can understand immediately why a Marxist would have a problem with that. Or really why any modern liberal would: human freedom has become the paramount value in their perspective. Any external force that influences behavior is an illegitimate invasion of human freedom--a capital crime.

I disagree with him here. The thing he misses--or rather, doesn't really miss, but is unwilling to admit--is that there may be some objective standard outside the purely human sphere of action, that human society, for all it's internal insecurity and propensity for error, may ideally be based on. And thus I see Bronte's suspicion of radical breaks with this society in terms of the ideal Jane Austen puts forward and can't bring myself to disagree with her all that much. What Eagleton has a problem with is that this ideal is rarely--one may even say never--really met. My question is...because an ideal is constantly unachieved, does that make it illegitimate in itself?

I've far too little time now to present a defense of that my actual position, or even to try to explain it more clearly, but the question should make things clear enough. Far too much to say, and work summons.

Helen Gardner's "The Art of T.S. Eliot"

Gardner's classic book focuses on Eliot's poetic style, making it a welcome addition to a body of criticism which often neglects the prosodic elements of the poetry in favor of analyzing its images. Tracing Eliot's style in terms of his artistic maturation, Gardner identifies a turning point in his poetry from his earlier work, in which he often imitates the voices of other poets, to a newly developed independent style after “The Waste Land,” a style which underscores the musicality inherent in natural rhythms, in part by its use of semi-accentual meter, and allows Eliot equal access to the poetic and the prosaic in his work. A thematic evolution is evident in Eliot's corpus as well, and Gardner does not allow her attention to Eliot's mechanics to overshadow his core ideas. The content of his poetry finds its most complete development in the Quartets, whose mastery of theme is accompanied by the pinnacle of Eliot's mechanical expertise. Whereas “The Waste Land” identifies fear as the beginning of wisdom, “Ash Wednesday” and the post-conversion poems move beyond this Sophoclean sentiment to hint at a promised resurrection, while the Quartets take on a visionary quality in their ability to make present this resurrection in the midst of this movement towards wisdom through fear.

T.S. Eliot: The Scholarly Conversation

The infamous and to some extent deliberately cultivated difficulty of T.S. Eliot's highly allusive poetry has produced an onslaught of critical attempts to elucidate it in light of one “crucial” insight or another. These attempts have been more or less successful according to the degree in which they actually address the main thrust of his poetic legacy instead of wandering off, as Heaney complains is too often the case, in pursuit of one or another esoteric reference to literary tradition.

The poems are in many respects pastiches of literary reference, and though critics agree on the ubiquity of such references, they disagree about whether a comprehensive understanding of these is necessary to understand the poetry. Gardner and Heaney present compelling cases for initially encountering the poetry on its own ground, an attractively unpretentious approach when one considers the plethora of attempts to read Eliot's entire corpus in terms of some arcane paraphrasing of one dead author or another. Arguments such as Chinitz's regarding the influence of popular song or Lowe's comparison of Raskolnikov and Prufrock—though valuable in some respects—will often give too much weight to a single influence, implicitly suggesting that Eliot's work is intrinsically esoteric, accessible only to the scholars who can chase down such references and solve them as one might work out a puzzle. A reasonable balance is found in the work of scholars such as Moody, Manganiello, and Rogers, who admit the power of the allusions to enrich an understanding of the poetry and believe the major ones to be worth pursuing in consequence, but who stop short of reducing the poetry to the sum of its references.

Having studied with some of the leading thinkers of the early twentieth century at Harvard and abroad, Eliot had a clear set of philosophical convictions, and study of these philosophical influences forms a significant subcategory of Eliot criticism. There is less disagreement on this subject than there is about the importance of allusion in his work. Though Heaney still holds the philosophical underpinnings of the poetry to be potentially distracting, critics from Gardner in the 1950s to contemporary writers such as Moody, Perl and Childs have agreed on the relevance of Eliot's philosophy to a comprehension of the intellectual arc of his poetry. Brooker and Childs, authors well-versed in Bergsonism and Bradleanism, substantially treat Eliot's relation to these thinkers, while Perl hones in on the often overlooked influence of Eastern philosophy, all making welcome contributions to the understanding of Eliot's early poetry. Schneider, Clark, and Thomas Howard (not cited here) treat Eliot's later career, when his thought is more completely his own, verifying his new preoccupation with Anglo-Catholic theological concepts such as the Incarnation as well as his continued interest in the concepts of time, history and change. This area of criticism manifests, perhaps because of the general coherency and clarity of Eliot's philosophical theory, a much greater degree of consensus than is often seen among his critics, and is a fertile area of scrutiny.

Less helpful in general is the movement, born of what often seems a voyeuristic interest in Eliot's (largely exaggerated) psychological neuroses, to interpret his work in terms of these biographical details. Däumer, Chinitz, and Cuda speculate on the effect of Eliot’s “inhibitions” regarding domineering women, romantic assignations, and medical operations to support their interpretations of his work, and the result is generally unsatisfying as a macroscopic explanation, though occasionally interesting in details.

While literary, philosophical, and biographical influences are common focuses, the body of criticism suffers from a relative dearth of comprehensive treatments of Eliot’s prosody. Gardner and Hartman excepted, many critics seem bewildered by the peculiar metricality of Eliot’s “free verse.” When critics such as Rogers, Sanders, and Unger make incidental forays into prosodic issues, the analysis of one will often differ wildly from that of another, and it is often true that allegations that, for instance, a certain passage “is” an abortive sonnet are not backed up and seem presupposed for the sake of the main argument.

Charles Hartman on "The Discovery of Meter"

Hartman's examination of the manifestations of meter in free verse focuses on Eliot's poetry in this chapter, in which he defines his verse as vers liberé and attempts to discover precisely what qualities characterize vers liberé. Eliot's prosody seeks to draw out the rhythmic elements of common speech, and Hartman identifies syntactic parallelism and counterpoint as important features of this attempt. Particularly important is Eliot's practice of approximating stricter metrical forms before departing from them: it is a truly “loosened up” verse in the sense that he allows himself to move in and out of this formal metrical structure. The only major aspect of Hartman's argument at which I cavil is his categorical denunciation of Helen Gardner's evaluation of certain of Eliot's passages as accentual. Hartman asserts that Gardner has fallen prey to the “fallacy of calling 'accentual' all verse which has accents” (115), but never backs this statement up, presenting an “alternative” understanding of Eliot's prosody which is actually quite compatible with the idea that Eliot occasionally takes advantage of the incantatory effect of heavily accentual verse, such as in the “Lady of Silences” passage in “Ash Wednesday.” On the whole, however, he is laudably faithful to direct textual evidence in his discussion of the basic rhythmicality and musicality of Eliot's syntactic form.


Commenting on the chapter from Free Verse: An Essay in Prosody; overall a quite recommendable book.

Paul Douglass on “Eliot's Cats: Serious Play behind the Playful Seriousness"

Douglass turns his attention to one of Eliot's works that has been almost wholly ignored in the critical world. The Book of Practical Cats is not mere fluff to be dispensed with entirely, Douglass argues, but is, despite being intended for children, a work which reflects many aspects of Eliot's corpus and which, by its very simplicity, sheds light on some of these. The rhythm of the poems in this collection not only displays Eliot's metric virtuosity, but unveils many of the techniques he uses elsewhere, such as his affinity for four-stress rhythm and his tendency to have anapestic and dactylic rhythms slip in and out of one another to heighten the lilting feeling of a passage. In terms of content, the Book of Practical Cats, with its character sketches of uncannily human felines, aims to explore the “battle between the ego and social self” (115), which Eliot reads as a preoccupation of the Quartets as well. The book “accepts its own fascination with human imperfection” (115) and through its rollicking tone, its rhythm, and its clever but benevolent satire, choreographs a jubilant dance that shows the reader the possibility of rejoicing in the foible-ridden but wonderfully variegated ranks of humanity.