The legacy of writing
The gift of writing is also viewed alongside the gift of drawing and the need to sketch by Jong. We can possibly assume that E. Jong’s vision of women artists is a broad-scale one as a vision any creative woman, who is free and gifted enough to aspire to various disciplines, to visual arts, to music, to literature. So that next to drawing, writing activates Leila’s alternative self, the self of the writing woman artist, the woman artist-of-letters. It is also symptomatic of this close relationship between writing and visual art that eventually, by the close of the novel Leila, the artist, decides to give up painting ‘(because it is so much a product of my narcissism)’ to become a writer. She finds herself in a state of grace, with her mask stripped off, when she eventually seems to discover her identity as a woman, ‘propelled by an unseen muse’, with her pen ‘scratching in her sketchbook’ - 345,6/XX. However Leila Sand fails to give up painting altogether. She keeps covering ‘pages and pages with pictures and words’ before she falls asleep that night. What is most important for her is that she needs to accomplish her creativity by all means of expression. It is not that writing is any easier than painting. But for Leila it is a pleasure at first, because it is a sort of holiday from expectations, a hobby, not for sale, ‘not to be bartered by Andre’, Leila’s art dealer -280/XVIII. This radical shift is somehow anticipated and prompted by a number of images and novel characters.
The image of the marbled sketchbook
The marbled note/sketchbook stands alone amongst those images. Once bought in Italy seems to be kept for a long time before it can match the easel and the canvas as their proper equivalent. The longing to write somehow has turned this notebook into a mythologema. What is more alongside with the first entries of words, the ‘little notebook with the marble paper cover’ is the only real drawing of Leila offered within the text. This is her revelatory version of the faun and fauness, of the nymph-and-satyr that provides the notebook with extraordinary mythological depth, as well as an optimistic ending to the novel Any Woman’s Blue. We virtually experience a book within a book, a marble notebook of poetry and scratchings within a book, which recreates the women artists' myth in the format of the book.
Isadora Wing and Emily Quinn - women-of-letters
On the level of Jong's development of her characters we can interpret the important role played by Isadora Wing, the established poetess and the 1970s protagonist in Fear of Flying [Jong 1973] and How to Save Your Own Life [Jong 1977]. Obviously Erica Jong can’t help projecting her ex-heroine into the ongoing narrative of Any Woman’s Blues. As a result we have Leila Sand who is punctuated passim with the interruptions of Isadora Wing, arguing with Leila Sand (the author arguing with her protagonist - with herself, in short) which suggests that all the prior novelistic experiences and characters really matter; that they can even make us believe it is the same old story, the same old myth of E. Jong. So that the interaction of the two main characters within Erica Jong’s story can be treated as a sort of myth into myth structure or ‘Chinese boxes within boxes, or Russian dolls within dolls, or an onion peeling back its skin’, if we are to rely on the novel’s self-awareness of telling a tale of no end in the very closing line of the Afterword by Isadora Wing [Jong 1991, p.362]
Another woman-of-letters is Emily Quinn - Leila’s best friend, a writer of non-fiction books on trendy subjects, working on ‘the first no-holds-barred book on menopause for the 1990s’. Emmie’s role throughout the story is that of another self-empowering creative woman who guides Leila towards self-love and respect, providing her with the coziness and safety of a woman-to-woman relationship.
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998