walked into the river; and she told us each time a book was published and she went mad—don’t hurt me for what I have done, I will hurt m yself first, I w ill be incapacitated and I w ill suffer and I
will be punished and then perhaps you need not destroy me, perhaps you w ill pity me, there is such contempt in pity and I am so proud, won’t that be enough? She told us over and over in her
prose too: in her fiction she showed us, ever so delicately so that
we would not take offense; and in her essays she piled on the
charm, being polite to keep us polite. But she did write it straight
out too, though it was not published in her lifetime, and she
was right:
A certain attitude is required—what I call the pouring-out-
tea attitude— the clubwoman, Sunday afternoon attitude. I
don’t know. I think that the angle is almost as important as the
thing. W hat I value is the naked contact of a mind. Often one
cannot say anything valuable about a w riter—except what one
thinks. Now I found my angle incessantly obscured, quite unconsciously no doubt, by the desire of the editor and of the public that a woman should see things from the chary feminine
angle. M y article, written from that oblique point of view, alw ays went dow n. 7
To value “the naked contact of a mind” is to have a virile intelligence, one not shrouded in dresses and pretty gestures. Her work did always go down, with the weight of what being female demanded. She became a master of exquisite indirection. She hid her meanings and her messages in a feminine style. She labored under
that style and hid behind that mask: and she was less than she
could have been. She died not only from what she did dare, but
also from what she did not dare.
These three things are indissolubly linked: literacy, intellect, and
creative intelligence. They distinguish, as the cliche goes, man from
the animals. He who is denied these three is denied a fully human
life and has been robbed of a right to human dignity. Now change
the gender. Literacy, intellect, and creative intelligence distinguish
woman from the animals: no. Woman is not distinguishable from the
animals because she has been condemned by virtue of her sex class to
a life of animal functions: being fucked, reproducing. For her, the
animal functions are her meaning, her so-called humanity, as human
as she gets, the highest human capacities in her because she is
female. To the orthodox of male culture, she is animal, the antithesis
of soul; to the liberals of male culture, she is nature. In discussing
the so-called biological origins of male dominance, the boys can
afford to compare themselves to baboons and insects: they are writing books or teaching in universities when they do it. A Harvard professor does not refuse tenure because a baboon has never been
granted it. The biology of power is a game boys play. It is the male
way of saying: she is more like the female baboon than she is like me;
she cannot be an eminence grise at Harvard because she bleeds, we
fuck her, she bears our young, we beat her up, we rape her; she is an
animal, her function is to breed. I want to see the baboon, the ant,
the wasp, the goose, the cichlid, that has written
Even more I want to see the animal or insect or fish or fowl that has
written
Literacy is a tool, like fire. It is a more advanced tool than fire,
