Women Artists' Social Identity
While approaching Leila Sand’s social self we will be getting further away from the popular myth of conventional women. Erica Jong’s woman artist will appear to be a very extraordinary woman - strong and fierce, successful and famous, who is nearly mythologized in her lifetime for her artistic achievements. Despite her first-ratedness Jong’s woman artist is not blind to the follies and obsessions of the world of moneymakers and winners. Leila Sand can hardly belong to this world that has ostracized her as a lonely outcast and a mad woman artist. However without being didactic Erica Jong’s criticism is an effective skewering of contemporary art and society. Her apt and pointed humour employs various social metaphors - S & M, blackness, telephones, cars - which somehow dovetail neatly with the contemporary women artists myth.
The high profile of a successful strong woman artist
The very first impression of Leila Sand that welcomes the reader is of a prosperous woman rather than of a woman artist. There is not a word, nor a hint on the artist in her. Her profession and vocation is given even lesser prominence through the device of the subordinate clause and still further by the brackets. The first contact is overwhelmingly suggestive of the triumphant ego of Leila:
In my waking life I am a successful woman (does it matter for the moment what I do), known as a tough deal-maker, an eagle-eyed reader of contracts, a good negotiator. p.10/I
But it is also suggestive of the self-addressed humour that will prevail in her approach to the reality and to her mind. The deliberate choice of epithets like tough and eagle-eyed is setting the background for a woman who values her success but yet is not taking it that seriously. The entertaining distinction waking life is a telltale of Leila’s sleeping life in which she is presumably an artist. Indeed a bit later we will face Leila Sand that will keep her high profile of a fortunate woman artist. But she will sheepishly and ironically keep the brackets as well.
I once painted a picture of lust (all right: the secret is out: you know what I do) p.13/I
The conscious strong emphasis of Erica Jong on the success story of Leila could probably show us what is the alternative of the average humble and non-aspiring housewife like. Or perhaps it could claim the overcoming of the female fear of power and success. The uncovered ‘secret’ reveals to the reader a woman artist. The first encounter in the novel with Leila Sand as an artist is quite misleading. Through her fully described painting ‘of lust’ Leila seems to acquire the reputation of a maker of erotic art in people’s minds. However what is more relevant to the professional identity of Leila is that lust stands for her passion and desire both for work and life. Her lustful picture will prove a symbol of Leila’s craving to fulfill both her sexuality of a woman and her excellence as an artist despite all of the social obstacles. This symbol also implies the emergence of the full female being despite the utopia of the good-girl myth of 1960-80s Feminism.
Unsurprisingly besides lust the key word success will be occurring frequently whenever Leila’s social ego is explored. There are just a few occasional remarks on the family and educational background but they are made from the perspective of the established artist:
I wasn’t always the queen of SoHo and Litchfield County. p.50/III
This is how the third chapter Strong Woman’s Blues opens trying to revise our readers’ wrong idea of the woman artist’s steady identity of always-being-a-celebrity. The connotations of power, matriarchy, luster and glory which spring from the word 'Queen' could possibly carry the reader from the outset of the book where Leila has made a tremendous success of herself. SoHo and Litchfield County will turn into the land of art for Leila as she devalues the myth of Paris which was valid for generations of artists except hers. America’s obsession with celebrities, with money and name recognition is reflected in Erica Jong’s focus on her Leila Sand who has attained wealth, position and honours as a woman and an artist. This is only a person that has scored a thorough success who could claim to be ‘on the top of the world (or so it seemed)’ p.65/III. We will not fail to notice that the self-assertive mode is slightly debased by the second thought left behind in brackets. This however pertains to the overall playfulness of the narrative. Perhaps we should account it on this playfulness that Leila’s success is measured up in personal terms rather than in social. Her immediate reward is not the high profile of her public image but rather a ... love affair. Her success appears to be the nice excuse for Leila to fall into an addiction with a much younger man, called pertinently Dart. Dart is perceived as made by Leila throughout the book. He is more of a piece of art and her muse but unfortunately he fails as an artist and lover himself. One could have observed that Dart’s life story was told as early as in the first chapters thus focusing on the woman artist’s creation, i.e. on Dart as such, rather than on her woman artist’s life. Being a woman in a grip of a sadomasochistic obsession with love Leila could rationalize her fortune in the following pathetic mode:
What would my success be worth if I could not afford a man as beautiful and death-defying as Dart? p.20/II
Leila Sand knows perfectly well that her howling success is due to her work, rather than to a man but in ‘challenging the gods’ by becoming so successful she could find reasons to somehow deserve Dart’s generosity in bed. Leila needs a treat, a reward for all the ‘desperate climbing’, and at first Dart seemed to give it to her. When Leila met Dart, she had spent some 39 years of ‘climbing the glass mountain of woman artist’s destiny’. The very use of the Sisyphus imagery implies the dark side of the brilliant success. It is really a Sisyphean toil, an endless and heart-breaking job to achieve a crumb of power for a woman. The difficult labour of Sisyphus is increased through the image of the fragile glass mountain. Until about this watershed in her life - the time Leila met Dart - she has lived her life for discipline, for art, as if mimicking a man’s hardness despite her woman’s heart.
I had lived my life like a man, managed my career, my investments, even my pregnancy, exactly as a man would have done, so I thought I can manage Dart as well. p. 20/II
Here we face a self-empowering woman who applies both female and male approach to her life. Merely because she cannot afford being only a mother. She needs rather to live up to her high profile of a mother and artist at once. I want raise at this point the issue of non-separatism - of female and male as qualities in every person rather than as qualities in two different sexes. Our contemporary culture tends to separate male and female as people to the extreme which brings us to the trouble of sexism and misunderstood feminism.
Women artists’ fierceness
Thus we come eventually to the Erica Jong’s own way of undoing the popular myth of the ever weak, passive woman by creating a strong, ‘fierce’ woman artist who could ride out the crises but who is nevertheless caught in her own trap: the artist in her is stronger than the woman. The dilemma to Leila is rather between the lover and the artist in her. What remains untouched is her fierceness. A ‘fierce lover’ would have kept her beautiful man under wraps but a ‘fierce artist’ instead made a star of him - and chaos ensued. (p.68/III)
The controversy is delineated by the debatable word ‘fierce’. In its primary meaning of brutal, barbarous and stormy is encoded the complete antonymical opposition of the eternal woman, who must be affectionate, civilized, domesticated, gentle and innocent. Erica Jong’s fierce woman artist proves to be a denial of the established myth, a woman in search of her identity at once battling the old myth and looking for a new one which is not available at hand.
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998