Introduction
One of the reinforced prejudices of our contemporary culture is the tendency to stereotype the sexes, to see male and female as separate opposed beings instead of in terms of the human qualities we all possess. From our current vantage point the eternal balance of the world is represented in a display of the patriarchal hierarchy and the dominance of a rational model of the world. In this model, men are presumed superior to women and thus are automatically entitled to spiritual creation. Male creativity is taken for granted and further more supported. And within this same picture of the world women are presumed inferior. Spiritual creation is denied to them and any woman has to pay dearly if she dares to aspire dauntingly to creation.
There are social and historical reasons for the patriarchy to rank first the man rather than the woman. The Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution empowered Man as master and creator of the world. An ideal of the self-sufficient man was initiated - the male came to represent the rule (the norm), rather than the woman.
Today, Feminism tries to establish the place of the woman as a master of the world as well. These practical and theoretical efforts are analogous to the revolutionary endeavour of the Renaissance. But Feminism confronts the huge backlash of the years of patriarchal and sexist thinking, prejudices and female inertia. Yet there are reasons of social and psychological nature that are quite unsolvable by Feminism - neither society nor men who are good fathers are able to take up the role of the mother in childbirth and the raising of children.
In this essay, I will try to hypothesize further about seeing the world in the new perspective which feminism has created and find out whether it is fruitful to debase the basic social pillar of this hierarchy. Perhaps these speculations will lead us to the apocalyptic vision of all women as lesbians and all men as gays which will virtually end reproduction and drive the world to a dead end. Feminists, who claim to be different from lesbians, also enter into acute clash with men as patriarchs yet it often seems as if they tend to imitate men in their lifestyle as if struggling to become surrogate men. Thus women try to ban and erase all the ideas of an eternal womanhood.
But is there an eternal man and an eternal woman? Is the Renaissance man or the Feminist woman able to embody the craving of humankind for harmony? Perhaps the answer is in compromise between the two general characteristics male/female. The masculine and the feminine, the Yin and Yang qualities are discernible in every person, regardless of his/her sex. This compromise could be perceived as the chaos in its positive revelation, the complexity, dynamics or ambivalence of human nature, or cooperation as a break in the spiral of power.
This compromise also makes use of this duality whenever the social environment is friendly and allows for the woman to have both her motherhood and the life of her mind, to be a passionate scholar and a passionate mother at once. Perhaps with the close of the XX century we will be able to see the birth of a new myth of contemporary woman. Perhaps the specific rendering of Erica Jong’s woman of the late 1980s will be able to give us an insight into the developing myth of women caught in the process of emancipation.
However I will argue that to create life is not woman’s sole creative occupation. I am challenging the assumption that a woman by nature and biological determination is an artist only in her daily life, that she is permitted no further yearnings to create. The woman of the late 1980s, that is the major concern of this paper and of Erica Jong’s in her recent novel Any Woman’s Blues (1990)[Jong 1991] could hardly enjoy the traditional opposition nature-women versus culture-men.
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998