Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

And the answer is no, no she did not; she loved him, and shewanted him to love her. Love is more complicated than a psychologicalcliche: “ ‘Well, maybe there’s something in everybodythat likes to be debased, but I don’t think life’s thatsimple. ’”26Leona wanted love, not pain; her loyalty, her faith,could not conquer or heal hatred. There is no analysis ofLeona’s life in the book, not what drove her or why, except thather humanity, her capacity to love, comes from what she hasalready suffered; her bravery in surviving her husband, herfamily, the loss of her child, leaving the South to try to make anew life, trying to love, a hard case, a black man whom she hasbeen taught she should hate, but she never believed it. Theman she loved was too far gone, and could not be pulled back,not by devotion or compassion, not by her endurance or herpleading. There is a value placed on suffering here, not a distinctlyfemale suffering, in this case a suffering that goes upagainst hatred and can never win because hatred is strongerthan anything else, and it kills. Baldwin’s view is that she loves,not as a masochist, which is a near synonym for female, but asa human being.“I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering, ” he writesin an essay, “ . . . but people who cannot suffer can never growup, can never discover who they are. ”27 This suffering, however,is not done in a protected environment or inside the delusionsof the middle class. There is no foregone conclusion, nolast-minute rescue, no great and inevitable triumph of goodover evil. Survival is not guaranteed, or even likely. One loves,one suffers, one strives to use what one knows; but none of itstands up against enough hate. In his fiction, both men andwomen suffer as human beings, a tragic suffering with an innerdignity, the dignity of having been worth more than this cru-