Margaret wrote:
> Greg Nowell wrote:[clip]
>
> 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,
Greg's shift from confident "old critical" references in his earlier post to a sort of vulgar historicism (the utter incommensurability of historical periods) in his second post is more or less par for the course. If historical analysis is against you, try facts. If both analysis and facts are against you, retreat to epistemology or change the subject with an ironic wisecrack.
But anyhow, I'd be interested in your response to the various female characters in *The Bostonians*. (It is my misfortune or fortune to be in love with reactionary authors.) I would say that James's intentions with Olive were at best male supremacist, perhaps even misognynist. Did the novel get "away from him" in that respect or does it embody such intentions for the woman reader?
Carrol
P.S. We do really know somethings about Shakespeare, though like all other human knowledge epistemology can dissolve it. We know, for example, that he would not have seen (and did not see) a difference of kind but only of degree between men and women, (Thomas Laqueur, *Making Sex*, is helpful here) and therefore could not have (nor would he have dreamt of trying) created any character who was "a woman" as distinct from a man, though he could (and did) start out with a "man" (generic) and then add a number of "accidents" which would have been more or less expected or surprising in a particular woman. Women are incomplete men -- and when such an incomplete man acts as though she were complete, we get a monster, e.g., Goneril.