ridgerunner • thursday, january 27, 1972
“The Woman As Artist In A Sexist Society”
from page 1
sitters.
After Ms. Whisnant’s introduc
tion, Bertha Harris began,reading
some of her thoughts about the
woman in literature and the
role of woman in general.
Ms. Harris stated that she felt
crippled as a writer and yet she
did not know how to begin, that
the reading she was to do was
from a lecture at Wesleyan and
that it suffered from an inco
herence of rage.
“The writer is confused by
her own difinitions,” stated Ms.
Harris, “since to be human is to
be man”. The portrait of the
artist as a young woman is a
confusing one, according to Ms.
Harris, and Sylvia Plath illustrat
ed that confusion, the poet’s
ignorance as to the source of her
pain.
Ms. Harris pointed to Joyce as
the ultimate transfigurement of
the World, the Flefsh and the
Devil held up to her as a young
student of literature and she
went on to explain that suffering
in literature seems to be like the
work itself, a male perogative. In
literature, the woman may be the
target of tragedy, but she is never
the agent of her own destiny.
Sophocles gives Oedipus
center-stage to act out his
destruction and Jocasta simply
recedes into the back ground. In
literature, Ms. Harris said,
Icharus can fly too high and fall
to his death but it was his aspira
tion, his attempt that ended in
failure. The woman, on the other
hand, is noble if she gives in,
female nobility is a submission,
not a willing as it is for men.
The conditions of being a
woman, then, are in contrast to
those if being an artist. A woman
may write poetry, but her poems
“are still the records of a slave’s
sensations”, said. Ms. Harris.
Suicide, madness and worse
are the results of the woman’s
life as an artist. It may.even be
worse for the writers who survive,
according to Ms. Harris for they
“become the house nigger, they
learn to bow and scrape”; they
become women who mumble the
man formulae.
“We can only hope that all
of humanity will be allowed to
participate in that creation,”
Ms. Harris stated and added that
because women have been
hibitions and inability to write as
she read a section of prose from
her forth-coming book. It was a
section which dealt with a period
of being lost, searching for mean-
THE WOMAN AS ARTIST
IN A SEXIST SOCIETY
denied self-love, they deny
self-love to their literature and to
their world.
Ms. Carolyn Kizer was next
and she spoke first of her close
friend, Denise Levertov who at
one point, seemed be able to
attend the symposium but can
celled later. Ms. Kizer related her
search for the muse, in which
Denise Levertov was such an in
spiration. When Ms. Kizer re
ferred to the Muse, she stated she
was referring to the goddess of
poetry, a female image to conjure
and she presented a poem entitled
“Who is The Muse?”, dedicated in
part to Robert Lowell who stated
once that it was impossible for
women to be great artists.
Ms. Kizer later recited several
other of her poems, one of which
was “Persephone Pauses”. Per
sephone was the mythological
character who was forced to live
half the year in Hades and the
other half in light. Ms. Kizer uses
the analogy of the housewife who
spends half her day (when her
husband is at work) ordering her
life and making the household
run and spends the other half
being subservient to the wishes
of her husband. Half-light, half
dark is the life of the housewife.
It pertains to the schizoid person
ality of woman under these con
ditions, continued Ms. Kizer.
Another poem was concerned
with era, who in a moment of,
“adness” considered herself the
equal of a god and hangs upside
down, tied to the firmament as
punishment for her presumption.
Most of the work read by Ms.
Kizer is available in her volume,
“Midnight Was My Cry”.
Kate Millett was fourth on the
program and she spoke of the in-
$600.00 Missing
from Loan Fund
Six hundred dollars from the
SGA Loan Fund from last year is
missing and is not expected to
ever be recovered, according to
SGA President Jim Cochran and
Finance Commissioner Jan Green.
The fund which was allocated
$1,000. at the beginning of the
second semester of last year was
administered directly by Tom
Barrett under the direction of
Ed Rosenberg, then Finance
Commissioner.
Cochran and Green who have
been etehting to recover or
at least track down the missing
funds have complained of gross
administrative negligency, and
incompetence on the part of
Barrett whose primary respon
sibility was the fund and on the
part of Rosenberg who was
responsible for reviewing Barrett’s
work.
“Some of the receipts for
loans and loan agreements were
made on napkins from the snack
shop,” Cochran added. The loan
fund is open to any full-time
students, and allows for a
maximum loan of $100.00 to any
aeserving individual who submits
a request to the loan office.
Legitimate need is determined by
a committee chosen either by
the President of the SG or the
Finance Commissioner. Pro
cedures are not strictly set down.
“There were no records,”
stated Cochran. Barrett and
Rosenberg left no records and
receipts were scarce, and
usually informal if present at
all. One student has com
plained that he returned an
institutional loan (one adminis
tered by the Business Office) to
Barrett and that Barrett never
turned the money over to the
administration.
The Ridgerunner published
an account last year about the
Loan Fund’s dealings and the
allegations that friends of Barrett
and Rosenberg, non-students,
were receiving money from the
Loan funds. That account went
unheeded.
“We have almost no hope of
recovering that money,” said
Cohran and hadded that,
“Since there are no records, no
receipts and no formal way of
seepage 7
ing and seemg only meaningless
ness ahead.
In the discussion and question
and answer period which followed,
the writers made these statement.
“The woman’s history has been
told by man. Before we find our
selves as artists who are women,
we must separate ourselves from
men. Men cannot lead us now,”
said Charleen Whisnant.
The writers agreed that the goal
of the woman artist is to tell the
truth because for so long, the truth
of the woman’s experience has
been buried that now it must be
uncovered.
Ms. Harris stated that women
still lack courage, that many times
they use their sex to excuse weak
ness and lack of achievement,
but that “poets need to be tough”.
Ms. Kizer agreed and added that
she is tired of hearing her stu
dents (female) write about “Oh,
God, the pain”. She said she
wanted to hear somthing more
real.
Charleen Whisnant complained
that when she and her colleagues
were in college to learn to write,
they were taught to write as
though it would be a hobby, not
a profession, “We want begging
to be trained for a profession and
we were trained for a hobby,”
she added.
“We are like any emerging
people, any group of people newly
freed, we are coming into a new
age,” stated Ms. Harris.
the writers^ symposium:
Some Male Thoughts
It is hard to sit before a sterile
typewriter trying to put on paper
some of the impressions, the
conflicting thoughts that arose
during the writers’ symposium.
Indeed, there’s even the question
of whether a male is in any pos
ition to make comment at all;
it could be hostile territory. Yet,
the questions asked, the state
ments made are so direct and so
immediate, so important both to
men and women that I have to
comment; perhaps it is a way to
calm some of the impressions and
clarify some of my own confused
opinions.
“Women are an emerging
people, Charleen Whisnant said.
And I couldn’t disagree. Women
are stepping into their own in
business, politics and maybe even
the arts, or at least they seem to
be.
But mention emerging people,
or mention “up against the wall”
and males all over the world get
wet, shaky hands. Feminism,
Women’s “Lib” is threatening
to males, it smacks of something
far away and dangerous. I
remember watching the Dick
Cavett Show sometime last year
and seeing a parody of the times
going'on before me: two women,
one in her “Superwoman” out
fit and the other a screaming,
tousled matron’s nightmare, as
they screeched and re-screeched
obscenities at a cool and some
what aloof Hugh Hefner.
He sat there, representing in
every motion and every cool,
subtle statement, the plastic-
supermasculine - manipulation
which is Playboy and they were
like something out of The Cab
inet of Dr. Caligari; neither
of the two were real. They were
both satires somehow and I sat
wanting to laugh but afraid to.
Sexual Liberation is not only
a Feminist slogan; it is a genuine
call, for the loosening of strict
sexual behavior which so many
times keeps us from being authen
tically ourselves. We are strapped
and buckled by the proscriptions
of myths; distant, vague terrors
and suspicions.
It was interesting for me per
sonally after the symposium to
get the candid reactions of some
of the spectators; interesting
because inevitably people were
not touched by Ms. Whisnant’s
statements that women have
never been great artists to the
degree of men because many of
their emotions are still-born;
nor were they bowled over by
Bertha Harris’ commentary on
the woman in literature; nor did
they mention Carolyn Kizer’s
^ wit, razor sharp and acid-burning
in places. No, they all say right
off, “You mean, Kate Millett is
a LESBIAN!”
It was funny because if they
had done any reading at all,
they would have found that Ms.
Millett has made the statement
many times before, but mostly
its just funny because they man
aged to miss the deepest, the
most profound and they fell
into the most incidental, the most
rivial of all that was said.
One professor at the end of
.[uestion and answer period
voiced what may have been a
male feeling in the audience when
he mentioned that he hadn’t
heard much “about cooperation”.
He was threatened; his palms
were sweaty.
Sexual Liberation for women
means something deadly for so
many men in that it means the
end of a power system, the end of
a form of security which was
time-honored and sacrosanct,
worshipped in temples and law
courts, obeyed in the home and
held in the street; the supremacy
of the male and the subservient
role of the woman.
Another man asked if there
were any way for woman artists
to write anything other than
suffering and repression; Kate
Millett answered that they
tried. Again threatened, a man
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