Word: ellmann
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Freud agreed that the psychoanalytic idea that there are feminine and masculine qualities in both men and women was painful for his listeners to acknowledge, Mrs. Ellmann argues. The pain is still with us, as an interview with Donovan in a recent issue of the New York Times shows...
...MOST general level, They use women and sexuality to symbolize whatever man is not, Mrs. Ellmann notes. Her idea is only partly developed, but its implications are extensive. Behind it lies Their ethic of the male writer. In art, the feminine is everything external to the artist--the incoherence and incomprehensibility of Nature. The writer must struggle against this all-encompassing enmity. Sexual capacity is equated with the capacity to write, and woman is what resists both...
HERE ALSO is a key notion put forward by Mrs. Ellmann when she turns from Their analogies to Their view of women themselves. This is the idea that men must struggle to achieve manhood, they must prove themselves in all sorts of tests, while women are women and must transcend the failings of their sex to attain their ideal condition. Manhood is a title conferred; womanhood is a judgment to be escaped. They say "he's a man" in praise of any manifestation of worth; the equivalent for women is "she's a real person." "She's a woman...
...Woman lurking behind every individual and to define Woman exclusively as a sexual being. They don't like women to deviate from preconception, and when women do threaten to leap the boundaries their achievements are either discounted or attributed to some mysterious quality of femininity. At one point Mrs. Ellmann quotes an article on Sylvia Plath...
...OBVIOUS that the villain of the story is They. Mrs. Ellmann does a good job of pinning down the general view of femininity; she even manages to grind her axe gently. But instead of explaining why the view exists and how it affects real women she trails off in feeble optimism. She argues that writing and opinions are moving toward a mode of indecision, a non-judging, antiabsolutist, amoral, particularized view of life in which no form the species can take is not somehow acceptable and in which the artist's aim is to become rather than to judge...