Pope 'n' chaucer

Margaret mairead at mindspring.com
Thu Mar 25 08:11:22 PST 1999


Greg Nowell wrote:


> Indeed, we may note, the fetish to play
>music on original intruments (e.g. Bach), which I love
>because I love the way the music sounds, is in fact not
>what Bach heard, because 200 year old instruments were
>new in Bach's day.
>...
>There is of course an empirical solution. Have
>various texts read by women who presumably don't know
>them and ask them which they find more "believable."
>...
>I am sorry. I forget. All the Male Works are Wrong,
>and even when they were right (perhaps Mill, Engels)
>they were Wrong. And I looked at literary history and
>the Politically Correct Synthesizer held up a hand:
>and first I saw three fingers, and then there were
>six, and then they seemed to blur; and then I
>realized, there were as many as I the committee of
>scholars from the right journals said there were,
>neither more, nor less.

Lovely sarcasm, but not an especially clear argument, i shouldn't think. I can't tell whether you're doing a michael extract or really believe what you're saying here. But it doesn't sound too good.

Given that we are children of our time and, as you point out, cannot 'hear the music as Bach heard it', whyever did you try to argue from Shakespeare et al. at all?

Your suggestion of a species of Turing test is about what most people do, though, in their casual way, isn't it? I have no slightest ideological problem with female chars being written by male authors...indeed, i'd like to see more of them, as long as they're credible, because i can identify with female chars more easily! My problem is that men's depictions of women, with very few exceptions, ring out with all the believability of a lead bell. I think there are credible reasons put forward by feminist critics to explain and account for this discrepancy, but i don't believe that feminism creates it. The problem is in the world, not in feminism.

=margaret



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