Women Artists' Personal Identity
We can now touch upon something that has always concerned Erica Jong - the issue of the protagonist’s ‘I’ as this is perhaps not the ‘I’ that narrates the story in the first person singular. Every character of the book, as in every book, is part of that mysterious mosaic we call the protagonist’s ‘self’. The problem of women artists’ personal identity in Erica Jong’s narrative reflects a complex weaving of specific and general issues. Here we will try to dismantle one of the most central ones - the woman artist as a wunderkind; as a self-made person and someone who is outside social mores, and a drug/drink addict. Below I consider this idea in relation to her age and name, as well as her sane mind. My aim is to find out how they are integrated in the contemporary myth of women artists.
The wunderkind background of Leila Sand
Erica Jong’s latest novel is definitely preoccupied with Her Mythological Highness the Artist. By shifting the setting of the story from the usual world of books to the fine arts world, Erica Jong creates her central character as an established artist, Leila Sand. However the emphasis is not on the growing up of the character as is common in a bildung-roman or as James Joyce did in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916 [Joyce 1992] focus on the adolescence and youth of Stephen Daedalus. Instead she looks back at her past. In Any Woman’s Blues there are just a few occasional remarks on the ‘mythic old days’- the family and educational background - but these are all conveyed from the perspective of the ‘swollen ego’ of the celebrated artist. Leila’s brief account of her youth brings to the front her early recognized ‘prodigious talent’:
I was treated like the Wunderkind of the Western world...By the time I took the test for Music and Art, when I was twelve, I was a better artist than most of my teachers and they knew it. The oohing and aahing over my portfolio was fierce.(p.50,1/III)
The semantic ramifications over her prodigious talents highlight Leila’s extraordinary and enormous gift of a wunderkind. Moreover Leila proves to excel not only above the children of her own age but also the abilities of her tutors. The exaggerated celebration of her phenomenal talent results in a cluster of words of praise. The stormy applause of her early works is referred to as fierce, which later in the text will denote her fierce self as a woman artist. The air of something brutal and barbarous in her fierce will further stresses the tremendous and astonishing gifts of Leila. One is likely to think that Leila’s inborn gifts are worthy of a genius but throughout the text this is a taboo-word for a woman artist. The irony of it, picked up by Erica Jong, is that in spite of being treated like a genius, Leila is not allowed to consider herself like one. The bitter undertone of 'oohing and aahing' is somehow exposing the cunning nature of those who approve of her art yet work to deprive her of any further success.
In terms of her inherited self Leila believes that her art is something entirely inborn : artists are not taught but merely grow into their real selves if their real selves are not blocked. In search of her real self Leila will controversially credit her success both to her heritage and her self-made nature. Her immense skills in making things Leila attributes to her father - for her craftsman’s hands and for her eye that ‘could immediately see the right juxtaposition of shapes and colors’. Yet she seems to take on the ‘crazed bravado’ - this notion that she can do anything - from her mother. Although the account of her life with her parents is restricted to half a chapter we are strongly convinced that Leila is as much her father’s and mother’s daughter as her own creation. Her inherited bravado is of huge value to Leila and it is a feature that very much relates her to the rest of Jong’s heroines. It is no longer perceived as a pretentious, swaggering display of courage but as the gift that a woman artist needs most so as to fulfill her dreams. Equipped with her bravado and her humour she can face and fight the hostility of the world. Her bravado may border on madness but in a strange way it can fire her ambition for creativity.
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998