Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage
Elaine Showalter
Picador £16.99, pp384
Diana: Story of a Princess
Tim Clayton and Phil Craig
Hodder & Stoughton £18.99, pp402
'And they lived unhappily ever after,' Rebecca West said, writing of the lives of feminists who preceded her. Unhappiness - family abandonment, internal conflicts, public opprobrium, painful relationships, anger, loneliness, despair - marks so many of the stories of the feminist women that Elaine Showalter collects together here that the resolute optimism of the author's voice is sometimes surprising.
From Mary Wollstonecraft, who died in a summer of 1797, to Princess Diana, who also, in an over-felicitous juxtaposition, died in a summer of '97, her characters refuse to go quietly into Showalter's calming set of essays, which are intended to celebrate our feminist heritage, find a pattern and a way of understanding where we are today.
They quarrel among themselves, often virulently. They insult the ones who've gone before them (as the much-missed literary critic Lorna Sage said, feminists frequently find themselves in opposition to their literal mothers and their symbolic ones; there are lots of ungrateful daughters in this book and lots of daughters who feel they've been abandoned): Mary McCarthy calls Germaine Greer an 'absurd Australian giantess'; Camille Paglia has perfected the dubious art of hurling deliriously malicious epithets at other women.
Showalter's first book was A Literature of Their Own. Published in 1977, it was a cornerstone of future women's studies, impassioned and authoritative. She followed this with other energetic and timely studies, most recently the controversial Hystories (about mass hysteria). Inventing Herself is less academic, more overtly accessible. It has a simple magazine style and deals in stories rather than analysis. The geography is self-admittedly narrow (America, Britain and France); the canon necessarily arbitrary (Paglia in and Angela Carter out), white (Zora Neale Hurston has a walk-on part), thoroughly gripping and a bit bland, like a tour through feminism's Hall of Fame.
The heroines of her stories are 'icons' (though she derides the way the word 'icon' has become a tawdry sound-bite), from Wollstonecraft, through the likes of Margaret Fuller, Emily Perkins Gilman, Simone de Beauvoir, Margaret Mead, Germaine Greer, ending with Oprah Winfrey, Hillary Clinton and Princess Diana. As Showalter moves forward into the Sixties and beyond, she inserts herself into the story, becomes a bit-player in the drama. It's hard to write about history while it's happening, and the more contemporary accounts are the least gripping, the most cautious and anxious not to offend. For a book about resonances, the way some lives ripple outwards, it is oddly unresonant.
Showalter is an impressive, level-headed and always enjoyable writer, but in Inventing Herself she seems to have been trapped by a thesis that doesn't entirely work. She looks for a pattern, but the pattern is forever splintering and breaking up. The maverick, often turbulent characters of her women break brilliantly through, disrupting easy meaning.
What's more, the self-invention of the title implies a kind of freedom, whereas many leading feminists are trapped by their versions of women's liberation, or are invented by others, forced into roles that they did not want or having meanings thrust on to them. This is especially true of her more recent icons, who use or are used by a salacious, infatuated media - the cartoonish, swashbuckling Paglia, riding high on insults and feuds, the haunted Diana, sanctified by death.
And if the self-invention is uncertain, the 'celebration' of the subtitle is forever undercut by the lives of the women she has chosen. Many of them came from terrifyingly unhappy families; many of them had unsatisfactory love lives, or worse. A lot of them (Margaret Fuller, say, or Simone de Beauvoir, or poor, self-sacrificial Eleanor Marx) could be self-abasing in their relationships. Most were lonely and embattled, often they were humiliated. As she is very good at showing, for a lot of them, joy and pleasure don't come into it. The women preach liberation while the men practise it.
Showalter is attractive as a writer because she leans towards inclusiveness and searches for the 'we' of the women's movement. Her criticisms are always mild, tactful. But behind the generous accounts of these women, there is another, more forceful book, which is about the perilous cross-currents of theory and desire, women's rights and women's longings. Sex is a dark force; what women want to want and what they actually want can be utterly contradictory. Life ambushes them, and love and lust. The pincer motion of ideology on the one hand and desire on the other can crush them.
A figure like Mary McCarthy, who introduced the idea of 'women at ease', comes as a powerful relief - she was elegant, sharp, dry, sexy, profane, very funny and fierce. She easily cuts through earnestness and sentimentality. So does Greer. But both these women have always been outsiders, loose cannons in the feminist battle.
Showalter's first feminists are rule-breakers, but she ends in our age of celebrity, where beauty and glamour are the premiums, where fame is the goal and where ideas are boiled down into sound-bites. To succeed you have to be looked at; the camera has to love you and make you into a star. It's not just what you say, it's the way you say it, the way you smile, the dress you wear, how much you weigh, the shape of your legs, the magic something that makes you into a star. Is Oprah Winfrey a feminist icon? Is Diana, Princess of Wales?
Showalter is at her most trenchant when she writes of the 'intellectuals' who were disturbed by the mass outpouring of grief at Diana's death. She thinks we need our saints and our shrines. And, certainly, Diana is a potent symbol crushed by the weight of her significance. But she was a mirror, not a lamp. In the fable of her life (with her shyness, insecurities, compassion, oppression, sorrow, fragility, strength, survival) we read about ourselves.
Too much has been written about Diana. As a subject, she's irresistible, shining with all the meanings we may give to her. She's a soap opera, a creature of the confessional age who spoke the new language of caring, a damaged and fragile young woman, Cinderella who did go to the ball and meet her prince, a saint. There can't be anything new to say, but still books come thick and fast. Diana: Story of a Princess (the book of yet another TV series) is a good, plain, lucid, responsible one. Diana's life is pieced together by a montage of voices. Friends and critics give their sides and the authors steer clear of judgment or analysis. Their job is simply to tell a story.
But like Marilyn Monroe's short life, it's a story that's so familiar now that it has become like a myth. And a curious thing has happened. Diana died, as Showalter begins her book by saying, in the summer of '97. The grief that shook the country was unlike anything we've ever witnessed. Strangers wept for her as if their hearts were breaking. Vast crowds gathered in her name. It was as if a religion was being born; shortly after her funeral, there were the first sightings of her, miracles of healing were claimed. Then she faded. It was weird how quickly the hysteria abated or transferred itself to other objects (like Mary Bell, or Sarah Payne, and who knows who comes next?). We have a religious need for heroes; we are hungry for stories. But we are fickle. Being an icon is a brutal business.
