A word with such a sulfurous reputation

This morning I read a poignant essay on Anna Banti's Artemisia by Susan Sontag. (It is reprinted in At the Same Time, a posthumous collection edited by Sontag's son.) I suspect at least partly because Banti repeatedly addresses the protagonist of her historical novel, bringing in a few carefully circumscribed details about her own life, Sontag's essay ventures into the area of Banti's life as a scholar and writer and her vehement disavowal of feminism. While speaking specifically about Banti, Sontag takes up the phenomenon of intellectual and creative women expressing hostility to feminism more generally. This has always been an interesting issue for me, one strewn with pitfalls for the feminist faced with an apparent contradiction, and so I read this passage with great interest:

To refuse, vehemently (even scorfully) refuse, a reputation as a feminist was, of course, a common move for the most brilliant and independent women of her generation-- Woolf being the glorious exception. Think of Hannah Arendt. Or of Colette, who once declared that women who were so stupid as to want the vote deserved "the whip and the harem." (La Vagabonde, her novel-manifesto about a woman choosing her career and a single life over the love of a worthy man and emotional dependence, was translated into Italian by Banti.) Feminism has meant many things; many unnecessary things. It can be defined as a position-- about justice and dignity and liberty-- to which almost all independent women would adhere if they did not fear the retaliation that accompanies a word with such a sulfurous reputation. Or it can be defined as a position easier to disavow or quarrel with, as it was by Banti (and Arendt and Colette). That version of feminism suggests that there is a war against men, which was anathema to such women; that feminism suggests an avowal of strength-- and a denial of the difficulty and the cost for women in being strong (above all, the cost in masculine support and affection); more, it proclaims pride in being a woman, it even affirms the superiority of women-- all attitudes that felt alien to the many independent women who were proud of their accomplishments and who knew the sacrifices and the compromises they entailed.

Artemesia is full of affirmations of the pathos of female identity: women's weakness, women's dependence, women's solitariness (should they want to be anything but daughters, wives, and mothers), women's sorrows, women's grief. To be a woman is to be incarcerated, and to struggole against incarceration, and to long for it. "'If only I were not a woman,' that futile lament," Banti's Artemisia reflects. "Far better to ally herself with the sacrificed and imprisoned, participate in their veiled, momentous fate, share their feelings, their plans, their truths; secrets from which the privileged, men, were barred." But of course, Artemisia's achievement-- her genius-- banishes her from this home. (53)

Interestingly, Sontag then observes the simliarities between historical and "fantastic fiction":

Artemisia is a tragic reflection on the condition of being a woman and of defying the norms of one's sex--as opposed to the comic, triumphalist, tender fable that is Orlando. As an account of exemplary tribulations that follow from being independent, an artist, and a woman, Banti's novel is also exemplary in its depair and its defiance: the merit of Artemisia's choice is never in doubt.

Read only as a feminist novel, which Artemisia certainly is, it confirms what we know (or think we know; or want others to know). But its power as literature is also that of an encounter with what we don't know or fully understand. The feeling of strangeness is a particular effect of that branch of literature tamed by the label "historical fiction." To write well about the past is to write something like fantastic fiction. It is the strangeness of the past, rendered with piercing concreteness, that gives the effect of realism.(54-55)

Sontag writes more about the book as a historical novel, all of which I found deeply interesting. She concludes by remarking "Anna Banti did not want to lose her manuscript in the battle for Florence in early August 1944. No writer could welcome such a destiny. But there can be no doubt that what makes Artemisia a great book--and unique in Banti's work-- is this double destiny, a book lost and re-created. A book that by being posthumous, rewritten, resurrected, gained incalculably in emotional reach and moral authority."(55-56)

I have often, in the past, reminded myself of this-- to remember that first versions, however complete they might seem, are not necessarily the only or best versions of the story one wants to tell: and more particularly, of the kind of book that resulted from Banti's having lost the first completed version of her novel and, in re-creating it, had found it necessary to haunt her re-telling of Artemisia's story with the pain of that loss. Her insertion of that loss into the novel, rather than being self-indulgent, is painfully spare, resonating with the others sorts of painful losses that Banti perceived in the brilliant Artemisia Gentilleschi's life.

I've written about Anna Banti's work before on this blog, here.

Anna Banti's "The Women Are Dying"

What do James Tiptree Jr., George Sand, George Eliot, Katherine Burdekin (alias "Murray Constatine"), Jane Austen (alias "A Lady"), Charlotte Bronte (alias "Currer Bell"), Emily Bronte (alias Ellis Bell"), Anne Bronte (alias "Acton Bell"), and Isak Dinesen all have in common? They all concealed their legal names from the reading public. There have been many reasons why writers have felt the necessity for doing this. Certainly I would argue that I, personally, have benefited from the protective resource of pseudonyms, since I would have been impoverished by being deprived of these writers' work.

I've recently been reading a translation of short fiction by the pseudonymous Anna Banti (aka Lucia Lopresti-Longhi [1895-1985]), who is best known for her fascinating novel Artemeisa. The excellent MLAA series "Texts and Translations" has published a volume by Anna Banti titled The Signorina and Other Stories, containing 5 short fictions. Because I loved Artemesia, when I saw the volume listed as one of the titles in the MLAA series, I decided I just had to read it. I'm finding the stories interesting, though sometimes frustrating. It is clear that Banti thought that each sex was locked into innate gender differences that ensured the perpetual (and perhaps even justified) subordination of women. On the other hand, she delves into relationships between women with a rare intensity. I'm particularly taken with the occasional glimpse of a feminist imagination that fantasizes things like "a senate of women" (as in her historical piece, "Joveta of Betania") without being able to realize them in any satisfactory way.

One of the stories in the volume, "The Women Are Dying," originally published in 1951, is actually science fiction. In her introduction, Carol Lazarro-Weis writes:

"The Women Are Dying" received the prestigious Viareggio Prize in 1952. Using the science fiction genre to speculate about the innate differences between men and women, Banti imagines the utopian and dystopian possibilities of a world that is biologically defined. As in her historical works, the science fiction narrative depicts the permanence of male control over history and female destiny.

Published two years after Simone de Beauvoir's novel Tous les hommes sont mortels (1947; "All Men Are Mortal"), "The Women Are Dying" shares many of its themes. Both women writers show how men's desire for immortality can cause men to lose their humanity at the same time that it motivates heroic actions, foolish or otherwise. While Beauvoir's book is situated within a debate about existential philosophy, Banti's story, a parody of Fascism's attempts to revive Italy's glorious past, emphasizes how men's desire for immortality excludes women. "The Women Are Dying" also bears a strong resemblance to Margaret Atwood's more recent dystopian science fiction novel A Handmaid's Tale (1987), since both depict the return of women's oppression after a period of supposed progress and emancipation. Banti's Agnese would agree with Atwood's handmaid narrator that it is men who possess time whereas women only endure it.

Set in the year 2617, "The Women Are Dying" depicts the return of women's oppression when sexual difference again becomes a means of isolating and disparaging women. Science has made progress in areas such as hygiene and rational education, and men and women enjoy gender equality in the public domain. However, this situation changes when men discover that they can remember past lives. This "second memory" allows them to conquer their traditional fear of death and to claim immortality for themselves through constant reincarnation. Unable to participate in this self-preserving continuum, many women retreat to female communities...

I find the notion that such memory of past lives would result in a lack of interest in existing social relations and institutions fascinating. It raises the question, for one, of whether this would be a typical reaction in other cultures and other times, or would only apply to the men living in 1950s Italy... The men in the story completely disdain their current, material lives and so lose themselves in the memories of their past lives that their only social relationships center on those memories. The provinces of literature and scholarship, considered outdated and irrelevant, are de facto ceded to women. Moreover, the story depicts such a deep, almost irrevocable alienation between most men and most women, that the only women in the story who attempt to perpetuate the institution of the family are those who despise all other women and are willing to accept that men are like gods, infinitely superior to women and thus not interested in them or in having children-- something most women in Banti's 27th Century are unwilling to do.

I'd love to hear from someone who's read this story. There's much in it worth discussing. The volume is The Signorina and Other Stories by Anna Banti, translated by Martha King and Carol Lazarro-Weis, with and Introduction by Carol Lazarro-Weis, published by The Modern Language Association of America, New York, 2001. I bought a used copy from Powells for $6.