The controversial issue of women artists’ age
A polite prejudice within our culture is that a woman is never asked about her age. This kind of myth is not valid for Erica Jong though. She is devoted to fight this belief not only in her book Any Woman’s Blues [Jong 1991] but she carries it on still further in her midlife memoir Fear of Fifty [Jong 1994/a]. Even the most recurrent metaphor of Jong's epitomised by the female fear of flying evidently stands not only for the fear of creativity and the fear of success, but for the fear of aging. Erica Jong strongly believes that person can get rid of his/her fears only through facing them and taking the risk of doing so. Let us find out how Leila Sand will handle her own fear: the fear of aging.
Within the narrative Leila is identified with a woman artist in her prime. We should note that within the book there is a shift in this concept, as well. A woman in her prime is no longer a woman in her 30’s but rather in her 40’s and 50’s. The story of Leila Sand revolves around the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ side of her 40’s. It opens with her at 39 and closes down with her turning 45. Yet Leila is always furious at the social conventions that condemn to old women the right to grow old gracefully by comparison to men who it seems can enjoy growing old. Such a distinction returns us to the mythologized distinction of inferior/superior beings.
It is hard enough to be a good girl and a pretty young woman - but if you try being old and female in a culture that hates the latter even more than the former... 236/XIV
The question of age is really a problem which persists in our new age, a problem which Erica Jong puts at the forefront through the relationship between Leila and Emily. Emily, Leila’s contemporary, is seen as the ‘working woman of the fin de siecle’ and for her the essential issue of aging seems to be dealt most efficiently. Emmie looks the way everyone should look at fifty - serene, wise, willowy, clear-eyed, ‘just crinkly enough to be womanly - and infinitely kind’. Emmie has a will of iron. She is also funny. What is often said is characteristic for the jolly way the two creative women look at this pressing issue - ‘We are laughing our way towards the apocalypse. At seventy, we both expect to be working, giggling, and getting laid’ p.78/IV. This is the philosophy of a wise age in which women cannot afford to grow sulky and get lost because of the ruling social norms.
With wisdom comes the re-assessment of the male/female bonds. It is conveyed in a manner which is typical for Jong, in that it is an outrageously ironic mode of expression. It is ‘cosmically sad’ because all their lives, women are taught to look to men for guidance and support. And then when women reach middle age they realize how ‘terribly frail’ men are. Leila is caught in the game of it, and it makes her weep. She wants a partner, and all she finds are the ‘gigolos or terrified middle-aged babies’. At some point even Wayne Rebound, Leila’s colleague, is a perfect example of a terrified baby of 50-ish. He is easily seduced by a 22-year-old girl in a bar where he has taken Leila out for a drink. It becomes evident through that tiny episode that the difference between 44 and 22 in a woman’s life is not just a question of looks. Leila is sure she doesn’t look worse than a 22-year-old. To some men she looks better - but she knows too much. That is the evil tree of knowledge whose sour fruits creative women are supposed to pick up.
I am less easily conned. I don’t beam at them with those eager eyes. I don’t smell the bullshit and call it roses. 185/XI
Right from the sarcastic imagery Erica Jong jumps into the philosophical discourse pondering on a biological determinism, on the question of whether it is all is a matter of hormones. A striking question follows: ‘Is it Estrogen uber alles?’, where Deutchland, Deutchland uber alles! is suddenly and threatening misplaced by Estrogen. It seems that the Estrogen theory could prove as seriously incriminating as was the idea of a Nazi homeland. Yet Jong fights further this fear and speculates on the possible reasons for the issue of the value of aging when coupled with knowing. The sharp contrast of bullshit/roses is still tenacious yet further developed in the blindness/power one:
Nature gives us thirty years of blindness to male bullshit so we can make the maximum number of babies. And then the estrogen begins to wane, and we come back to ourselves again. We return to the bliss we know as 9-year-olds, coloring in our coloring books. We get our lives back, our autonomy back, our power back. 185/XI
And is that the moment of bliss when women become witches to be stoned at the marketplace? Not because they are ugly but because they know too much, because they are onto men’s games, and men certainly don’t like it.
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998