"Free Women"

The dilemmas of "Women's Lib". Erica Jong is brutally honest - can't say I like the style, but it is certainly admirable, because I can never be that cynical and that honest. :)文学么，总是要夸张一点吧，生活哪里有那样复杂。：）另外，看得那么透透的，生活岂不是毫无趣味。：）

Oppressed “Free Women”:

Where were the women who were really free, who didn’t spend their lives bouncing from man to man, who felt complete with or without a man? We looked to our uncertain heroines for help, and lo and behold – Simone de Beauvoir never makes a move without wondering what would Sartre think? And Lillian Hellman wants to be as much of a man as Dashiell Hammett so he’ll love her like he loves himself. And Doris Lessing’s Anna Wulf can’t come unless she’s in love, which is seldom. And the rest – the women writers, the women painters – most of them were shy, shrinking, schizoid. Timid in their lives and brave only in their art. Emily Dickinson, the Brontes, Virginia Woolf, Carson McCullers… Flannery O’Connor raising peacocks and living with her mother. Sylvia Plath sticking her head into an oven of myth. Georgia O’Keefe alone in the desert, apparently a survivor. What a group! Severe, suicidal, strange. Where was the female Chaucer? One lusty lady who had juice and joy and love and talent too? Where could we turn for guidance? Colette, under her Gallic Afro? Sappho, about whom nothing is known? “I famish/and I pine,” she says in my handy desk translation. And do did we! Almost all the women we admired most were spinsters or suicides. Was that where it all led?

So the search for the impossible man went on.

From Erica Jong: Fear of Flying