Thesis
In this piece of research I will argue that creativity is available to women in the 1980-1990s but that there is still an outrageous price to be paid. We can see the metaphoric image of this price in Bessie Smiths’ song Any Woman’s Blues which Erica Jong deliberately highlights as a title of her book about a fictional woman artist, Leila Sand. We could adopt the image of Germaine Greer's Obstacle Race [Greer 1979], as this was the name she chose for this price in her book about women painters. I am concerned here with this racing against all odds, and the damage, and the blues of the discouraging mythologies and paradigms for so many would-be women artists and poets. I argue that the experience of the blues and the outcome of this obstacle race bring us to a new myth of the contemporary woman. I am be interested to find out how this new myth is related to the woman artist in particular.
I therefore try to compare the popular myth of the eternal woman with the specific identity of the woman in Erica Jong’s novel. Thus we will venture into the historically variable and site specific myth of the woman artist. I am concerned with this myth as one which is valid for America from the 1970s up until early 1990s and which Erica Jong is re-creating through her protagonist Leila Sand.
It will be useful to start from the assumption that the American woman as discussed by Jong is distinct. She is much too much of a pioneer, working on her own, carrying many responsibilities on her shoulders since the rise of the American nation. The American woman also experiences the immediate impact of Feminism from the early 1960s onwards in her native country. One of the possible consequences of this is the acute self-awareness in the American woman of her creative energy, of her artistic self. This local breakthrough gains universal meaning in the concept of women artists which Jong develops and accounts for the emergence of a new myth.
My approach will be to find out the components, the attributes i.e. the mythologemas of the women artists myth as depicted in the story of Leila Sand. In this thesis I collect the motifs and images in the book that are support the myth. To make it more comprehensible I offer an approach to Leila Sand through her identity - personal, sexual, social and professional. Then I draw together all the motifs that build up the mythological framework of women artists. Through the textual analysis, interpretation and deconstruction we eventually find out that women artists’ identity is unstable, ambivalent and definitely creative. I argue we could all probably share the narrator’s perception of the woman artist as an inconsistent, split self set on a ‘roller-coaster ride’ and question the ongoing social claims about women’s unambivalent nature and the popular myth of the eternal woman. Thus I try to make a final statement in the search of women artists’ selfhood and argue or rather agree with Caryl Fleishman-Stanger that Any Woman’s Blues ‘has as its theme a woman’s search for a way out of addictive love and toward real self-love, which is not to be confused with narcissism.’ [Stanger 1991] We must be clear that Erica Jong oeuvre as a whole hasn’t been thoroughly studied yet. Neither has her latest novel been scrutinised from the mythological perspective of the women artists. Though Caryl Fleishmann-Stanger, Ph.D. claims to be the ‘editor, the official biographer, and literary executor to so feminal a writer of our time’. There is however just a brief foreword by her to Any Woman’s Blues. Since there are hardly any books that deal concretely with Erica Jong’s novel, our survey will be based mainly on the text itself [Jong 1991] and on her autobiography Fear of Fifty [Jong 1994/a]- as the most relevant comprehensive self-study. Some effective references will be made back to her earlier novels Fear of Flying [Jong 1973] and How to Save Your Own Life [Jong 1977] and to her book on Henry Miller The Devil at Large [Jong 1992].
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998