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By Laura (Riding) Jackson Edited by Elizabeth Friedmann and Alan J. Clark Persea Books, 1993 |
"Woman is the universal character: she is the balance-point of various being, the crucial law of proportion in a complex universe." --Laura (Riding) Jackson
The title piece of this book was written in Majorca during 1933-1935 when Laura Riding, as she was known then, was associated with Robert Graves in a literary partnership. In its pages, Riding searches for an understanding of woman by investigating definitions of the word and its historical and literary usages. Among the topics she discusses are motherhood, "man-fever" in women, work satisfaction, sexual equality, and the essential relationship between man and woman. Also included in this edition are three later essays and two stories. An early poem serves as epigraph, and the appendix contains a previously unpublished personal commentary on the relationship of her thought on woman to Robert Graves's The White Goddess.
Introduction (excerpt)
by Elizabeth Friedmann and Alan J. Clark
Two decades before Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex launched modern feminist theory, a young American writer living in Majorca was actively exploring the idea of woman as "Other" in the man-made world of human culture. A full half-century befo re Betty Friedan proclaimed the "Second Stage" of feminism, Laura Riding was writing, "Woman has two works to perform: a work of differentiation, of man from herself, and a work of unification, of man with herself . . . We, women, are now entering upon ou r second work."
By the mid-1930s Laura Riding could have been seen as a prototype of the emancipated woman. She had received two scholarships to Cornell University, had been admitted into an all-male fraternity of Southern writers who published a highly acclaimed literar y magazine called The Fugitive, had published nineteen books of poetry, criticism, and short fiction, and was the originator and editor of Epilogue, A Critical Summary (1935-1938). She had been married and divorced, and after a period in England had settled in Majorca with another writer, Robert Graves, with whom she collaborated on a number of writing and publishing projects, including the co-founding and operation of the Seizin Press (1927-1939). As a woman who had achieved an extraord inary degree of success in a man's world, Riding was uniquely qualified to look at feminist ideas from a vantage point still denied most women, and with a breadth and sweep all her own. Much of what she discovered, in the decade of the thirties, is now be ing recognized on a large scale by the women of the nineties.
The Word 'Woman' (excerpt)
by Laura Riding
Primitive peoples give no more than ritualistic stress to the different appearance of woman: it is recognized and ceremonially observed, but not exploited dramatically. A woman is always a woman, but only in certain specific, practical contexts is she wom an as against man. Among early civilized peoples the different appearance of woman begins to be exploited dramatically; she begins to play, more or less constantly, a costumed role, to become the female protagonist: to be "feminine." And man at the same t ime becomes more self-consciously "manly." The secondary sexual characteristics begin to be stressed: appearance must illustrate the literary sense of the role. And all the categorically female characteristics tend to become the negative counterparts of the categorically male characteristics: man, in his growing self-importance, reads difference as negativeness--namely, the absence of, or deficiency in, male characteristics. Woman becomes more and more a foil to male positiveness. And the irony of this p rocess is that the more man subordinates woman to himself as something different, the more expressly different she becomes; he may interpret her difference as negativeness, or lesserness, or inferiority, but the difference itself remains unconquerable.
Among primitive and early peoples, for example, the hair and its arrangement does not mark, specifically, sexual difference. Among many tribes hair is held to be endowed with magical properties. Samson, who wore his hair long according to Nazarite religio us custom, lost his magical strength when it was shorn. Sir James Frazer tells us that the King and grandees of Ponape, a Caroline island, wear their hair long as a sign of dignity--but not of sex; so the Frankish kings wore their hair long--not to seem womanly but kingly. Among the Hos, a negro tribe of West Africa, priests may not shave their heads. The god who dwells in the priest forbids the cutting of hair on pain of death: the hair is conceived as the seat of the god, so that when it is shorn the g od loses his abode in the priest. Similarly, in a certain Masai clan, the head chief and rainmakers and sorcerers do not pluck out their beards, believing that some supernatural power resides in them. And since in statues Apollo was generally represented with long hair, the youth of Rome wore long hair until their seventeenth or eighteenth year, by way of inducing in themselves magically the graces of this god. And the tradition of the long-haired poet has survived into modern times, though long hair in a man has become a sign of effeminacy through the association of short hair with the specifically manly qualities.
General hairiness of body is identified in civilized society with barbaric virility. (Thus Francis Thompson said of Margaret Armour's translation of The Fall of the Nibelungs: "It is hardly gear for woman to meddle with, this hirsute old German e pic.") Short hair is the mark of conventional manliness; long hair, of freakishness and femininity. Disrespect of long hair in man was due to that shifting from the standards of magical to worldly success by which the magical and mysterious became the foo lish and weak-minded. In this transition, coincident with a heightening of man's sense of self-importance and power, long-hairdedness, worldly foolishness and weak-mindedness naturally became female characteristics, by rational assignment (as the Russian proverb "Hair long, mind short"). But with such characteristics went, inevitably, all the mysteriousness and magical fascination primitively associated with hair; and in the poets a woman's hair still retains this hold on the imagination. Sometimes the ha ir is more magically attractive if it is fair, sometimes if it is dark. Long golden hair is the sinister attribute of the sirens; but dark hair may be far more sinister in attractive force.
Thus hair, as an attribute of beauty, becomes (indeed beauty itself becomes) the negative complement of power, though originally it was strictly associated with power; or, rather, it remains associated with a kind of power to which only poetical respect i s now given. In its softness, silkiness and indefiniteness, it comes to seem as water to land, sleep to waking, dreaming to thought; a symbol of dream-like mystery tempting the male mind from rational activity. Hair is, physiologically, a covering, and pr operly symbolic of self-concealment--of secrecy or modesty. It is only when woman is construed as the negative complement of man that it assumes, as female head-dress, specifically "feminine" connotations; only when man begins to make invidious contrasts between the physical gentleness of woman and his own physical forthrightness.
Copyright © 1997 by the Board of Literary Management of the late Laura (Riding) Jackson
Updated 12 June 1997 || ottotwo@email.unc.edu