Word: ellmann
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Thinking About Women, by Mary Ellmann...
...MARY ELLMANN, a free-lance writer and critic married to the distinguished Joyce scholar Richard Ellmann, has written about the sexual analogies that permeate everyone's thinking, much to our tedium. Loosely constructed, confused, unfortunately titled, the book still manages to amuse as it meanders through various conceptions of femininity and their relationship to criticism and fiction...
...Ellmann's chief preoccupation is the way They impose sexual forms and opinions on the external world. Amidst multiple contradictions one principle stands firm: masculinity is good, femininity is bad. Beyond the usual visual analogies--curves and receptacles are womblike; steeples, shoes, and cylinders are phallic--lie physiological comparisons. They equate woman's mind with "her most definitive organ," according to Norman Mailer (one of Them), and just as the womb is conservative, nutritive, claustrophobic, feminine influence is antithetical to energy and thought. "Let's get out of here," a Harvard student said to a girl he visited...
...Dubliners and just before A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was completed-the susceptible Irish emigre fell in love with one of his students, a young, solemn Jewish girl of dark and fragile beauty. Giacomo Joyce is the title that Joyce Scholar and Biographer Richard Ellmann found written on the cover of the notes and diary in which the author recorded his amorous experience...
This is Joyce at his worst, in his plush, provincial "poetic" vein, which even the captain of the Joyce industry, Dr. Ellmann himself, delicately refers to as a "rather anemic style." And Giacomo gets no better...