Some Guerrilla Girls’ concerns
Unsurprisingly the issues raised by Guerrilla Girls are highlighted at the point where the novel picks up the topic of artistic recognition. As a group of anonymous women who zap the white male establishment for their sexism and racism Guerrilla Girls consider themselves ‘the conscience of the art world’. It is worth noting that Guerrilla Girls’ irony is intrinsic to Erica Jong’s approach in dealing with her woman artist, as well as for her self-reflections. Back in 1980s Guerrilla Girls took Feminism which at that point was becoming a dirty word and made it sexy and funny. There is something very empowering and also very positive, about targeting people with a lot of humour, and addressing issues that all women have a vested interest in - not apologizing for it, but being very overt about it. Here is Erica Jong anxious to argue that her woman artist Guerrilla Girls’ awareness even precedes the actual one which is quite differentiating and positive a remark:
I was a bad girl in high school and even badder in college. At Yale, years before the advent the Guerrilla Girls, I railed against the male-dominated art world (this was in early sixties, before feminism was chic, let alone tolerated, yet I was not at all against wooing art critics with my sex appeal if it would help my career. I felt even then that women were so discriminated against as a class that all was fair in love and war. p.54/III
Obviously Leila doesn’t need to turn 80 her career will pick up but she certainly needs to work under the pressure of success just like a man. Yet she keeps applying her lipstick and her sex appeal to lure the (presumably) male art critics. This is what might get her into trouble and lead to her being called and treated as a bad girl. The deliberate use of the grammatically improper neologism 'badder' could draw our attention to the claim of early Feminism that women showing off their sexuality are nothing but bad girls. Thus even through the implications of 'badder' Erica Jong keeps on arguing that creative women should not be denied their sexuality. Pursuing this view throughout her books and her characters, even the women of letters, who very often go through the bad experience of being hurt and sabotaged by Feminist women writers, Erica Jong is happy to discover that the youngest feminists of today are re-claiming the positiveness of women’s sexuality. [Jong 1994/a] Perhaps that is why Leila Sand is always fascinated to be praised and appreciated by the men in her life (much too much like her creator Erica Jong in her own career. What is however sad but true should also be admitted: famous women attract con men and carpetbaggers.
So one looks around and sees a world filled with Claus Von Bulows, Cheris, and Morris Townsends, in short a world of heiress-hunters, gigolos, and grifters. p.31/II
Ironically Leila’s fatal attraction and addiction is to her Mr. Wrong Boy, who is both suffocated and allured by her fame as if being under the spell of a myth. While introducing Leila to his parents Dart said her name being ‘proud to be fucking a household name’. His father’s first contact with Leila is also taking notice of her mythologized identity: ‘Well, well, well’, said the elder Darton. ‘What an honour’. (p.33/II)
Dart’s delight when bringing Leila home is made prominent by the mute fight over her between father and son. Dart was ‘titillated’ by his father’s jealousy over Leila Sand as his father knew and admired her work. This fight takes some even more pathetic turns when the elder Darton goes as far as to try to seduce Leila up in the attic of their family house, making her try on his wife’s wedding dress. The fact that he fails as a seducer in the same way his son eventually fails as a lover is perhaps just another way of saying that work, not love, keeps a woman artist alive.
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998