Saturday, January 12, 2008

Woman's whole existence?


I want to read A.S. Byatt's Possession (I'm in that kind of mood) but my local bookshop didn't have it, so I'm reading her lesser known Still Life instead. From the blurb:

Frederica Potter, 'doomed to be intelligent', plunges into Cambridge University life greedy for knowledge, sex and love. In Yorkshire her sister Stephanie has abandoned academe for the cosy frustration of the family. A.S. Byatt illuminates the inevitable conflicts between ambition and domesticity, confinement and self-fulfilment, while providing a subtle yet incisive observation of the intellectual and cultural life in England during the 1950s.

Half a century later, is there still an inevitable tension between ambition and domesticity? I don't know, I've already opted out: at 23 I am neither ambitious or domesticated. I suppose you can have both -Nigella Lawson could be said to be ambitious within her domesticity? God give me strength. I like that phrase 'the cosy frustration of the family'. It neatly captures that feeling of stifling oppression within something which is meant to be Good and Godly.

I love how Byatt describes the normal yet horrendously disfunctional family. Stephanie has married a vicar, Daniel. Her father doesn't visit her, 'because he dissaproved of Daniel, the Church of England, Christianity and Stephanie's burial of her talent amongst these things. He disapproved with a liberal atheism that produced emotions more akin to seventeenth-century fanaticism than to agnostic tolerance.'

I love love love that last sentence about seventeenth-century fanaticism. It reminds me of Richard Dawkins' evangelical zeal in The God Delusion etc.

One of the most deeply annoying quotes I have ever come across is mentioned in her book. Byron's 'Man's love is of man's life a thing apart: 'tis woman's whole existence.' Even Simone de Beauvoir says something similar in The Second Sex: 'What he requires in his heart of hearts is that this struggle remains a game for him. While for woman it involves her very destiny. Man's true victory...lies just in this: that woman freely recognizes him as her destiny.'

Why why why why why?

I'm so incredibly annoyed by this that I'm going to have to stop writing and go away and think about something else.

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