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the mit press WHY SO SLOW? The Advancement of Women Virginia Valian "Valian provides insights and remedies that, over time, may help us all to achieve the equality for which we have been striving for so long." — Julia S. Falk, Michigan State University "Valian takes a broad view of the many questions relating to achievement by women. The presentation is balanced and well reasoned. It is written in an engaging style, and most importantly, it addresses fundamental questions about equality and gender." — Diane F. Halpern, California State University, San Bernardino 605 pp., 23 illus. $30 Now available in paperback IMMERSED IN TECHNOLOGY Art and Virtual Environments edited by Mary Anne Moser with Douglas MacLeod Critical essays and art projects from the Banff Centre for the Arts explore the social and cultural implications of cyberspace from the perspective of cultural studies, communications, art history, art criticism, English, and women's studies. A Leonardo Book 368 pp., 64 illus., 18 color $22.50 paper Now available in paperback HANNAH ARENDT Twenty Years Later edited by Larry May and Jerome Kohn "[PJrovides innovative and provocative readings and re-readings of significant aspects of Arendt's work, suggesting that, twenty years after her death, we can better afford to listen to her." — Lisa J. Disch, University of Minnesota Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought • 400 pp. $17.50 paper http://mitpress.mit.edu To order call 800-356-0343 (US & Canada) or (617) 625-8569. Prices higher outside U.S. and subject to change without notice. winter 1998 - 58 repaid in his transmutation of her life and death into art. Alison Eliot at first seems a plausible but rather nondescript Millie, a rich naive tourist, hungry for experience, but as she nears death, she grows and expands, battening on the love, both sacrifice and trap, offered by her treacherous friends. Kate, played by a beautifully calcu- In Washington Square, Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Catherine Sloper, a young heiress in love with the penniless Morris Townsend played by Ben Chaplin. Maggie Smith is the sympathetic Aunt Lavinia lating Helena Bonham Carter, is an extraordinary character, far more earthbound and materialistic than the ethereal Minnie, ready to move mountains or risk everything to get the money so she can marry the penniless Merton Densher and keep her place in society. Linus Roache, in the most difficult part of the journalist, makes her desire wholly persuasive: he must be—and is—both passive and appealingly virile. Director Iain Softley and screenwriter Hossein Amini have shifted the action from the novel's 1903 to 1910, an era they felt was more modern, fraught with both choice and confusion. These greater social and sexual freedoms are in fact James'concern in the novel; there is even a scene, rare for James, in which Kate, asked by Merton to give some sign of her commitment, finally gives the pledge of her body. But this unique moment has been expanded into an emphasis on the carnal aspects of the relationship which seems both unnecessary and intrusive. like the other distractions—orchestral swells, children gamboling in a park, gliding gondolas and masked dances—these effects that presumably cater to contemporary audience taste also suggest a lack of confidence in the characters. James is more about renunciation than consummation, the anguish of awareness, the drama of gradually unfolding consequences. It is a testament to the brilliance of the film that so much of this is captured. By the end, Kate has outsmarted herself. The dead girl, without even trying, has won. Yet in I our minds, they have both won, for I James created not some either/or opposition, not a good woman and a bad woman along the old virgin-whore axis, but two remarkable and rounded originals. Both are fascinate ing, one is almost impossibly good; the other desperate and reprehensible, but too clever to acquiesce to a life of mediocrity. James has been raked over the academic coals for the last 20 years, his sexual proclivities and famed reserve dissected, their impact on his writing analyzed. He certainly had homoerotic crushes, but he was squeamish about sex generally, and socially conservative—an attitude not particularly conducive to wild homosexual love affairs or bohemian rebellion against prevailing mores. The "homosexual panic" traced by Eve Sedgwick, reigning doyenne of queer studies, is certainly there; but no less central are the advance and retreat with women, the passionate friendships, the guilty love of the dying Minny Temple, the long furtive relationship with Constance Fenimore Woolson. These (along with his abiding sense of his mother and father's reversal of roles, his relationship with his ailing, sidelined sister Alice, and the powerful ambivalence of his rivalry with older brother William) are the emotional and creative sources of his work, the constants that feed his theme of seesawing power. I fell in love with James at the age of 21 and have never wavered in my devotion. Leon Edel cites a forgotten writer named Mr. Nadal as to James' attractiveness to women. He "possessed an inscrutability," but more importantly he discerned in women the qualities they saw in themselves. "Women looked at women as persons; men looked at them as women. The quality of sex in women, which is their first and chief attraction to most men, was not their chief attraction to James. This is what enabled him to draw them in his fiction with both detachment and intimacy" It was no doubt for this very sensitivi
ty that James was for a long time out of fashion in the academy. He lacked the apparent robustness of the virile writers and the social consciousness of the "realists." But James' concerns have proved more "real," his anatomy of consciousness more enduring, than the writers who temporarily eclipsed him in the canon. For him, the struggles of women to free themselves from the boundaries of tradition were as exciting, and as perilous, as the more obvious adventures of male heroes in the wider world. We are lucky to have two glorious adaptations which should not only captivate you for a couple of hours, but drive you back to James himself, to read or reread the originals. As a postscript, I want to urge anyone interested in that rarely occurring phenomenon— the appearance of meaty roles for adult women—to rush off to see A Thousand Acres before it disappears. Never has a film been so meanly and undeservedly massacred by reviews. Critics who murmur not a word about the implausibility of Face-Off or Air Force One object on realistic grounds to this midwestern version of King Lear where three daughters have been variously seduced and mistreated by a patriarchal father. Reviewers who wax ecstatic over edgy, unsympathetic performances like Robert de Niro's in Taxi Driver and Raging Bull complain that in A Thousand Acres there's "no one to like." A double standard, maybe? Jessica Lange as the elder daughter with the cheerful facade and the repressed memory and Michelle Pfeiffer as the perpetually enraged middle sister with cancer are wonderful as they gradually come to terms with past and present. But perhaps their willingness to be unlovable as a price for freedom and self-respect is an affront to critics who prefer their women to be, and remain, good sports and ingratiating icons. The fact that director Jocelyn Moorehouse has disavowed the film privately and badmouthed the Disney cut doesn't help. But ignore the scuttlebutt and see for yourself Molly Haskell is the author of Holding My Own in No Man's Land (Oxford University Press), and From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment ofWomen in the Movies (University of Chicago Press), The Game of Women's Choices Good Girl or Witch? Let the system win or Support Women Players laugh, shake their heads, groan, say, "I wish!" and think. $12.99 + 2.50 s/h (NJ add tax) Barefoot & Pregnant Productions 65-A Linn Drive, Verona, NJ 07044 i Ancient Wisdom for this Time silver bronze H^^ (f» jjfe), Goddess jewelry gold Hf Catalog { P.O. Box 389-U Brimpeld MA 01010 hone/Fax: (413) 245-9484 the Goddess Jiot Jjneli " 1-900-737-4637 with cZ Budapest I am interested in helping you with * your passages in life, soulwork and '• Goddess mentoring. I have a lot of wisdom to share. j Call the Crone! I'll pick up when I am' available, otherwise try again. Consultations • Readings • Mentoring ' $3.99 a min. first min. free, must be 18 The Redemption of the Feminine Erotic Soul "Dr. Rachel Hillel brings women's private sexual I experiences and fantasies into the area of public dis-l course, impelling women to question traditional, in-1 grained taboos and to claim the desires of their bodies." I —Dr. Betty De Shong Meadorl Uncursing the Dark Paper $16.95 Sophia ^REDEMPTION ,/tf.F.EMlNlNE 1 EROTIC SOUL Aspects of the DR. RACHEL H I L L E L Divine Feminine, Past and Present Dr. Susanne Schaup explores how Sophia—the feminine aspect of God—has been lost within the Christian tradition. She searches for Sophia in the Old Testament and throughout Christian history, as well as in Eastern religions. Paper $18.95 Nicolas-Hays Inc. We prefer that you support your local bookseller. If you are unable to locate our titles, please call our distributor: Samuel Weiser, Inc., 800/423-7087. on the issues - 59
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