The ObserverSociety booksReviewJacqueline Rose wants her book to be a clarion call for a new feminism. But it is long-winded, precious and paradoxicalIn non-academic circles, Jacqueline Rose, who teaches at the University of London, is best known as the author of the 1991 book, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, a feminist analysis of the poet’s work that drove Ted Hughes halfway round the bend. As Janet Malcolm wrote when she revisited the saga in The Silent Woman, her own book about Plath and Hughes, Rose, whose interests include psychoanalysis, is “an adept of a theory of criticism whose highest values are uncertainty, anxiety and ambiguity”. However, as Malcolm also noted, on the page this proficiency often translates into its opposite: Rose presents the case against Hughes with a coolness quite at odds with her commitment to equivocation.
Rose’s new book, Women in Dark Times, involves another weird interplay of hesitancy and conviction – only this time, things are the other way round. On the one hand, it seems to be – indeed, expressly wants to be – a clarion call, a template for a new kind of feminism, a fierce, urgent book written at a moment when the situation for many women is fraught, painful and dispiriting. On the other, it is a collection of long-winded, vaguely psychoanalytic essays, the exact purpose of which I was not able to decipher, and whose relationship to one other is tenuous. If Rose is expecting women to jump to attention, she’ll have a long wait. Her sentences are just too long, too precious, too paradoxical; like furred pipes, the water of her argument struggles to pass through them.
She begins with three biographical essays. There is Rosa Luxemburg, the revolutionary socialist; Charlotte Salomon, the German-Jewish painter; and Marilyn Monroe. All died young, all were – though only possibly, in the case of Monroe – murdered (Luxemburg was shot in 1919; Salomon died in Auschwitz). In her central section Rose examines “honour” killings with reference to three victims, Shafilea Ahmed (the Bradford teenager murdered by her parents in 2003), Heshu Yones (killed in 2002 by her Iraqi-Kurdish father) and Fadime Sahindal (a Kurdish immigrant to Sweden murdered by her father in 2002). Finally, she comes back with three essays celebrating the work of the artists Esther Shalev-Gerz, Yael Bartana and Thérèse Oulton (the Lithuanian-born Shalev-Gerz works in mixed media; Bartana is an Israeli video artist; Oulton is an English abstract painter).
What links this group? What connections does she want us to make? I’m not sure. Her writing is so wilfully obtuse. In a preface, she explains that women need a “scandalous feminism, one which embraces without inhibition the most painful, outrageous aspects of the human heart, giving them their place at the very core of the world feminism wants to create”. At first, this sounded exciting. God knows, we need a feminism capable of tackling more than the issue of what we should do with our pubic hair; it may even be that we need one that is able to move beyond the matter of equal pay. But when Rose writes that this world will be very different from the “sane, balanced, reasoned” one that feminism is meant to aspire to, alarm bells ring.
Do I regard women, as she does, as “custodians of the night”? No, I do not. To see them this way plays into the hands of those who deem women to be “mad”: hysterical, over-emotional, unable to think. Some feminists are apt to claim that women don’t feel at all reasonable right now. I’ve said so myself, faced with the latest sexual abuse case, a vexing headline, an internet troll. But do I want to bring “the dark” with me wherever I go, as Monroe did? Will this empower me? No. Rose writes that “claiming reason as a fiefdom” is an “efficient, if deadly, way of denying what is insane about our world whose instances of unreason… are everywhere to see”. By deadly, apparently she means “impoverished”. All I can tell you is that if thinking clearly means I’m impoverished, I am content to remain, metaphorically speaking, dirt poor.
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