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Louise Bourgeois in her Brooklyn studio in 1993, with Shredder (1983) and Spider (then in progress). From Runaway Girl.

Biography and art
Runaway Girl: The Artist Louise Bourgeois by Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003, 80 pp., $19.95 paper.
Louise Bourgeois by Robert Storr, Paolo Herkenhoff, and Allan Schwartzman (includes texts by the artist and by Françoise Sagan). London: Phaidon Press, 2003, 160 pp., $39.95 paper.
Louise Bourgeois: Intime Abstraktionen/Intimate Abstractions edited by Beatrice E. Stammer, Kathrin Becker, Antje Weitzel, and Valeria Schulte-Fischedick. Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 2003, 223 pp., hardcover.

Reviewed by Patricia G. Berman

ON CHRISTMAS DAY 2003, the artist Louise Bourgeois will turn 92. Her vitality, wit, and ability to fuse excess with elegance continue to rival the works of artists one-third her age. In a career spanning over 60 years, she seems to have been everywhere first, helping to pioneer the arts of installation and assemblage, moving between abstraction and figuration in the service of a sustained narrative, and shaping some of the terms of later 20th-century feminist art practices. Sculptures such as Fillette (Young Girl, 1968), whose extravagantly elongated and bulbous forms suggest both vulva and phallus, provide some of the most startling images of sexuality of the later 20th century. Her large-scale installations, such as The Destruction of the Father (1974), a latex-and-plaster, cave-like environment suggestive of pulsating viscera, and I Do, I Undo, I Redo (2000), the titanically scaled steel towers that initiated the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London, contain pockets of the uncanny, narrative details in otherwise abstract compositions. These, and many of her other works, seem to disclose her most intimate memories and traumas, as well as her attempts to grapple with them.

For many in Bourgeois's audience, her work has appeared as a lengthy dialogue with her internal demons. Supporting her production is a large volume of interviews and published writings issued by the artist. In them, Bourgeois asserts a homology between her work and her life: "I want to be like a glass house. There is no mask in my work. Therefore, as an artist, all I can share with other people is this transparency." Her biographers invariably draw upon her interviews, locating her images within the narrative of her biography. As she says in Runaway Girl, "All my work in the past fifty years, all my subjects, have found their inspiration in my childhood. My childhood never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama."

Torso, Self Portrait, 1963-64. Bourgeois said, "This is the way I experience my torso… some- how with a certain dissatisfac- tion and regret that one's own body is not as beautiful as one would like it to be." From Runaway Girl.

Three new publications circulate around such statements, in turn accepting, unpacking, or amplifying them. Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan's Runaway Girl is the least critical. Although the authors quote Bourgeois's warning that "An artist's words are always to be taken cautiously," they consistently pair her projects with her autobiographical narrative, as though memory were a direct and transparent medium. At its best, the book presents straightforward interpretations of Bourgeois's best-known works based on the artist's own statements. Directing their work toward non-specialist audiences and younger readers, the authors, who have formerly collaborated on other artists' biographies, present an overall narrative of the amelioration of childhood trauma through art, of art as compulsion and therapy. What is lost here is the notion of the artist as gender anarchist and ironist, indebted as much to Marcel Duchamp as to Marcel Proust.

In contrast, the theme of Phaidon Press' Louise Bourgeois seems to be summed up by Robert Storr's observations of the ruptures and folds in Bourgeois's stories: "The obsessional return to these traumatic times, and the hope-against-hope that the damage can be retroactively undone or patched has been the driving force behind everything that she has made." The big question, however, is "not what she tapped into but how she has transformed it."

Louise Bourgeois, published as the latest in Phaidon's excellent series of source books about contemporary artists, is a highly useable reference work. It focuses on a cluster of fundamental questions: how Bourgeois has translated her memories into form, how her adult criticality has reshaped her childhood perceptions, and how she adapted unconventional media to give shape to her ideas. In addition to judiciously edited essays and aphorisms by the artist, selected to represent the broad sweep of her career, the book is grounded by an essay by Robert Storr, formerly curator of contemporary art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Storr's article is bracketed by an interview by Museum of Modern Art curator Paolo Herkenhoff with the artist (and with interventions by her assistant of 20 years, Jerry Gorovoy) and a laudatory article by Allan Schwartzman, a contributor to The New York Times. All three writers have known and worked with the artist and followed her career for years. They consequently evoke her personal history while, at the same time, parsing it.

Bourgeois in her studio in 1988. From Runaway Girl.

AS STORR NOTES IN HIS ESSAY, Bourgeois is the "polymorphous protagonist of her own drama." He approaches her narrative biography as a "fundamentally true but richly ornamented myth of origins she has embroidered" and notes that it threatens to overshadow the more interesting facts of her life. "[T]hose who listen carefully will realize that her retelling of various episodes [of her childhood stories] is less a dialogue with the public than an inner monologue made audible."

Indeed, a thumbnail biography suggests larger-than-life struggles and circumstances. Bourgeois was born to an elite family in Paris on the eve of World War I, the daughter of tapestry restorers. Even her birth, on Christmas day in 1911, anchors fact in mythology: "I was a pain in the ass when I was born. All these people had their oysters and champagne, and there I came. My mother was very apologetic and the doctor said, 'Madame Bourgeois, really, you are ruining my festivity.'" After the war, she assisted the family in their textile repair business. Her childhood reminiscences dwell on the affair between her authoritarian father and her English tutor, and her perceptions of her mother's complicity in it. Although she had two siblings, Bourgeois recalls her singular alienation in her unwitting alliances within this triangle. In her text project Child Abuse, she narrates her sense of betrayal by all three adults and her thwarted desire both to possess and be protected by them. Bourgeois's narration also locates her impulses to create art in her rage at the brutality of a patriarchal household: In an oft-repeated anecdote, she recounts how her father carved an orange peel into an angelic figure that he identified as Louise: head, arms, wings, breasts, legs, and feet emerged from the spherical skin. Pointing to the orange pith that emerged as a protuberance between the figure's legs, he noted: "Look at this splendid thing. Louise has nothing down there. It can't be my daughter after all." Bourgeois responded: "I took white bread, mixed it with spit and molded a figure of my father. When the figure was done I started cutting off the limbs with a knife." She thus provides a story of the genesis of her work in acts of verbal and physical violence, and in empowerment through cultural production.

Her training and debut as an artist are also dramatic. After studying mathematics at the Sorbonne, she attended art classes at the École des Beaux-Arts, where she later became an instructor. Among her mentors was Cubist painter Fernand Léger. To support herself, she opened a small print shop where, one day, the young American Robert Goldwater (soon to become one of the most important art historians of his generation) purchased some prints. She married Goldwater in 1938 and then moved to New York where she circulated within the Surrealist emigré community, socializing with the likes of Joan Miró and André Breton.

Bourgeois began to exhibit her work in the late 1940s. Her first exhibitions are notable for the new ways in which she conceived of her art, not as discrete objects, but as clusters of figures, providing intimate, proximate confrontations with her audience throughout the gallery. Bourgeois's career was slowed in the early 1950s both by the practicalities of raising three children and by her struggles with depression following her father's death. Her work was then reintroduced to the public by the critic Lucy Lippard in 1966 in the exhibition "Eccentric Abstraction." For several years, Bourgeois was hailed as an innovative force in New York before withdrawing again, only to reemerge in the 1970s with three-dimensional organic forms in stone, metal, and latex, and again in the 1980s with poetic environments.

In 1982, the Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective of her work. It was then that she first narrated publicly her childhood memories. From that moment onward, the terms of her reception were fixed. In the late 1980s, Bourgeois began to create elaborate environments out of furniture and industrially produced materials such as chain link fencing. These she entitled Cells, room-sized environments that suggest intimate museums of memory (some of the objects had indeed belonged to her family), juxtaposing refined marble carvings and old splintered doors, blown-glass orbs and her own vintage dresses and peignoirs. Her recent and, currently, most visible work, consists of a series of huge spiders, rendered in a variety of media. A disciplined and prolific draftsperson, she also recently issued 220 facsimile illustrations of her freely rendered Insomnia Drawings in a volume entitled Louise Bourgeois: The Insomnia Drawings. From these works, and her large body of self-disclosure, it is possible to feel that one knows the artist intimately. Certainly the drama of her early domestic life provides the space for a close identification and multiple points of projection by her audience and reviewers. It is for this reason that so many historians and critics return to her own words again and again, although, as we have seen, the most prescient of them move beyond biography as she narrates it.

INTIMATE ABSTRACTIONS, an exhibition catalogue accompanying a retrospective of Bourgeois's work held at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin is the most scholarly and analytical of these publications. As noted in the catalogue's introduction, the exhibition and publication were a decade in the making, and they represent the first significant presentation of Bourgeois' work in Berlin. The essays, each presented in both German and English, range from close biographical interpretations to psychoanalytic readings of Bourgeois's work and statements. This publication is notable for the multiple points of view it brings to bear on Bourgeois's work, including an essay by Gabriele Werner on the role of Euclidian and non-Euclidian geometry in the shaping of the artist's images and theories ("Destruction[s] of the Mathematical Model") and an essay by Mieke Bal that destabilizes some of the narratives that have solidified around Bourgeois's works ("Anthropometamorphosis--Forking Paths and Crystals in Louise Bourgeois' Philosophy"). Hanne Loreck's essay entitled "The Indiscreet Space or Perfume with the Scent of Feet" provides a historiographic reading of the artist's career and analyzes the rise of the mythology that has been attached to her. Despite the awkwardness of some of the English translations, the essays, taken together, provide a wide array of perspectives, some of them provocative, through which to examine the artist's work.

The artist in a latex costume she made, 1975. From Runaway Girl.

These publications contribute to the rapidly growing appreciation of Bourgeois as one of the most influential artists of the last several decades. For her, this recognition is another milestone in a stunning career. As Robert Storr notes, the average age of the artists profiled in the Phaidon series is 43:

In an art world where 'new' is at a premium, youth is often assumed to be the predicate of innovation. In this context, it is striking that of the senior figures to have been given such attention at first two--and now three--are women. This fact tells us something about the generally delayed recognition women's accomplishments have received during the second half of the twentieth century. It also says much about the sustained effort such recognition has demanded. In their case it has not been enough to be 'new' once. Rather they have been constantly forced to revise and reinforce that claim in the face of rising stars, without, at the same time, being able to rely on the critical, institutional, and commercial powers that buttressed the reputations of so many of their male counterparts. (p. 28)

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Ms. President
Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003, 562 pp., $28.00 hardcover.
Anticipating Madame President by Robert P. Watson and Ann Gordon, eds. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003, 271 pp., $22.50 paper.
Madame President: Women Blazing the Leadership Trail by Eleanor Clift and Tom Brazaitis. New York: Routledge, 2003, 340 pp., $19.95 paper.
Women Transforming Congress by Cindy Simon Rosenthal, ed. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002, 448 pp., $44.95 hardcover, $34.95 paper.

Reviewed by Judith Nies

IN 1995 WALMART ADVERTISED A T-SHIRT with a cartoon of Dennis the Menace's pal Margaret saying, "Someday a Woman Will Be President." When customers objected--too political for children--WalMart executives pulled the item off the shelves explaining that Margaret's message went against the corporation's philosophy of "family values."

Hillary Rodham Clinton

Fast forward eight years to July 2003. At the WalMart in Fairfax, Virginia, a line winds out into the parking lot, many of those on it waiting from nine in the morning until 7:30 at night, when Senator Hillary Clinton arrives to sell her memoir Living History, about her life and her years as First Lady. She sells over 2,000 books in two hours--over one million copies in her book's first two weeks of publication, a record for nonfiction.

Whatever you believe Senator Clinton's ambitions might be--a Boston TV station ran a nighttime news poll encouraging viewers to e-mail their answers to the question, "Should Hillary Clinton run for president?"--her memoir makes the other books under review here less abstract than they might have been six months ago. Although the US prides itself on its progressive politics, these books reveal how far America has to go before it elects a woman to top political leadership. Hillary Clinton's chances to be the United States' first woman president depend on the answers to a number of questions. Is there a critical mass of women in America's national political life? What qualifications does a woman need to become president? Will the media cover a woman's candidacy seriously? How has the US done in comparison with other Western democracies in promoting women's political leadership? As the reception of Senator Clinton's memoir shows (only the new Harry Potter book outsold it), Americans have great curiosity about how a former First Lady--a representative of one of America's most conservative institutions for women--was able to transform herself into a senator. As all the books under review illustrate, she is one of only a handful of women ever to stroll the men's club corridors of the US Senate.

LET'S BEGIN WITH WOMEN IN CONGRESS. In the introduction to Women Transforming Congress editor Cindy Simon Rosenthal explains that in all of US history since the first Congress convened in 1789 "only 200 women have ever served as members." If the total number of members of Congress, 11,590, were sent to populate a small town, women would be barely visible. Until l970, most of the women arriving in Congress came as widows of their deceased congressional husbands. No woman was elected to the Senate in her own right until Nancy Kassebaum in l979.

Unfortunately, because the book's charts are so unwieldy, I had to go to the Encyclopedia of Women in American Politics to learn that by l970, only 72 women had ever served in the House or Senate. It is only in the past 30 years that 108 women have been elected. At present 59 women serve in the House and 14 in the Senate. These numbers are important because historical context is crucial to understanding the assumptions of many of the essays. Based on material assembled for a first-ever conference on women and the US Congress held at the University of Oklahoma in 2000, the purpose of Women Transforming Congress was to assess the impact of women. For a general reader, however, examining Congress as a gendered institution in academic language is daunting:

[G]ender analysis exposes how structures, practices, and institutional history produce an ethos about men and women and masculinity and femininity in institutions that operates in both conscious and non conscious ways. (p. 10)

[Edward Hébert of Louisiana, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee] didn't appreciate the idea of a girl and a black forced on him. He was outraged that for the first time a chairman's veto of potential members was ignored. He announced that while he might not be able to control the makeup of the committee, he could damn well control the number of chairs in his hearing room…He said that women and blacks were worth only half of one "regular" member, so he added only one seat to the committee room and made Ron [Dellums] and me share it. (p. 118)

The essays that make up Anticipating Madame President give a fascinating picture of cultural attitudes about women in American political life. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in women in contemporary politics at any level. The book takes as its premise that very little research has been done on how women are excluded from presidential politics, and they are right. The authors deal with the complexity and challenges surrounding a woman's pursuit of the presidency and "our sputtering efforts as a culture to envision a woman in the White House in the top job rather than in the role of First Lady." Reading the essays, I better understood why America ranks 49th in the world in terms of the percentage of women serving in public office. Many countries have already had "Madame Presidents." England and Canada have had women prime ministers. Benazir Bhutto was elected twice to Pakistan's highest office. Even countries with large Islamic populations like the Philippines, Bangladesh, India, and Malaysia have broken down the gender barrier to leadership before the US--all have women leaders at the top.

The authors explore the difficulties women candidates have had in getting media coverage, appearing on the Sunday morning talk shows as experts, obtaining appointments to the powerful committees in Congress, raising money ($1 million is the minimum for a congressional run), and making their past experience translate to the political arena. In "Changing the Climate of Expectations," Erika Falk and Kathleen Hall Jamieson provide a good explanation of the barrier to entry: Presidential candidates come from the ranks of senators, governors, and generals. "Taking into account all the women who have ever had the same experience as our recent presidents (been governor, served in the House and Senate, served as vice president, or held the rank of five-star general), there have been only twenty-six" (italics mine). Clearly, the most significant obstacle for women in presidential politics is that there are so few women in the pipeline. Is this changing?

IN MADAME PRESIDENT: Women Blazing the Leadership Trail authors Eleanor Clift, the feisty and knowledgeable commentator on The McLaughlin Group, and her husband Tom Brazaitis, a journalist for The Cleveland Plain Dealer, make the case that it is. Each of their chapters use specific candidates and campaigns to illustrate larger themes such as fundraising, media, organization, running to win, and family connections. They track the campaigns of women candidates at upper levels, including Geraldine Ferraro's path-breaking but never repeated vice presidential run, and Pat Schroeder's and Elizabeth Dole's presidential campaigns. When Bob Dole was the Republican candidate in l996, people said that "the wrong Dole was on the ticket." But when Elizabeth Dole launched her own campaign in 2000, she found it hard going. Her husband joked about being the first First Lady named Bob." At the same time, Dole herself, although qualified in terms of executive experience, could not raise money in the quantities needed to be a viable candidate. By the end of l999 she had raised only $700,000, compared to George Bush's $13,000,000. When Dole's campaign manager, Tom Daffron, gave her the financial figures, she reacted by saying she'd make another hundred phone calls. "Daffron thought this must be a female characteristic, to suppose the whole campaign can be rescued if you just work harder."

I found a few of the authors' judgments troublesome, such as their characterization of Hillary Clinton as a "sixties activist," when she was actually a Goldwater Republican. But they provide knowledgeable analysis about a wide range of women politicians from Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to run for president (who memorably said she faced far more discrimination as a woman than she did as an African American); Geraldine Ferraro; and Hillary Clinton; as well as lesser known women like Jane Swift (governor of Massachusetts); Jean Shaheen (governor of New Hampshire); and the five women who hold the top elected jobs in Arizona.

Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham at Yale in the early '70s. From Living History.

SENATOR HILLARY CLINTON'S personal life story Living History may have been the most widely reviewed book in history. A mix of personal memoir and conventional First Lady biography--"when Bill and I met [Tony and Cherie Blair] at 10 Downing Street, we started a non-stop discussion about our common concerns"--sometimes a genuine voice breaks through. We get a glimpse of the human being underneath it all when she tells us about her conservative father and how he treasured the photograph of her with Republican leaders Gerald Ford and Melvin Laird: "[It] was hanging in my father's bedroom when he died." When she writes about her trip to Africa with her daughter Chelsea or her trip to India where she recited student Anasuya Sengupta's poem--"We seek only to give words/ to those who cannot speak"--I got a sense of a mind that was stretching. Yet in the end, I felt Clinton is still a woman who hasn't found her voice.

The appeal of Living History is that Hillary Clinton embodies the confusion and double binds in America life for many women--she is wife, betrayed wife, mother, and lawyer, as well as First Lady and Senator. Describing herself as "trapped between an outdated past and an uncharted future" she went from being a conservative Republican (like her father) when she graduated from college to being the only woman lawyer on the staff of the Senate committee investigating President Nixon's impeachment in l974. It must have been a shock to realize that being an outstanding student at Yale Law School was not going to provide the same ticket for her as it would have for a man. Yet she doesn't tell us this or reflect much on the women's movement swirling around her. The word "feminism" has only three entries in her index, all negative, as when her father refers to "bra-burning feminists." Instead, her index sends the reader to "women's issues."

In 1968, Rodham interned at the House Republican Conference, working with Gerald Ford, Melvin Laird and Charles Goodell. From Living History.

In a bizarre way, Ken Starr made Clinton a viable political candidate. Under the extraordinary pressure of her husband's sexual scandal and subsequent impeachment, she remained cool and focused, her synapses firing. The importance of those circumstances should not be minimized in her decision to run for the Senate.

Living History is the only book under consideration that describes how the right wing is currently operating in American politics. The religious right intimidates candidates by sending thousands of e-mails and postcards to political figures whose views it disagrees with. Conservative political groups finance and run candidates in primaries to eliminate officeholders who vote against their positions. Christian conservatives particularly dislike women, especially women candidates who support abortion rights, day care, or women working.

There has never been a golden age of American politics, but we are in a period where a minority intent on forcing its views on the majority has gained control of the centers of power in order to ensure its financial and ideological dominance. The virulence of the right wing does not seem to offer a good point in the cycle to break the glass ceiling for women's political leadership.

Pat Schroeder maintains that the largest obstacle for a woman presidential candidate is to show that she can be commander in chief. I think a larger obstacle is the myth that a president is a good "family man." Endless pictures of candidates surrounded by friends and family are staples of American politics, yet they have nothing to do with the realities of power in contemporary America. The subtext of Hillary Clinton's book is the artful presentation of her as "a family woman." Think about that phrase and the confused symbolism it represents.

In short, the WalMart T-shirt incident is still emblematic of the themes running through current politics for women: family values, money, and media.

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Fashion and politics
Reforming Women's Fashion, 1850-1920: Politics, Health, and Art by Patricia A. Cunningham. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2003, 250 pp., $45.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Lois W. Banner

Amelia Bloomer in 1851 in the full trousers the press soon named the Bloomer. From Reforming Women's Fashion, 1850-1920.

IN 1851, IN ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS EPISODES in the history of dress, Elizabeth Cady Stanton helped to design and began to wear the Bloomer reform dress. It was a long-sleeved, high-necked, bell-shaped dress extending to mid-calf, worn over a pair of pantaloons. Yet the outfit stirred up such a negative public reaction that Stanton--and the other women's rights advocates who had also begun wearing it--gave it up after only a few years. Because of that rejection, historians of dress have assumed that other dress reform endeavors of the early 19th century and later were relatively unimportant. In her interesting and impressive Reforming Women's Fashion, Patricia Cunningham proves decisively that this was not the case. As I argued 20 years ago in my book, American Beauty, Cunningham substantiates that the interplay between feminism and fashion over dress in these periods was complex and that fashion did not always come out on top.

Cunningham admits that most women followed the dictates of fashion, at least to some extent (even Elizabeth Cady Stanton thought that fashionable dress was more attractive than the Bloomer costume). Yet many disliked the oppressive features of the mode, and many were convinced of its dangers by the arguments of the dress reformers. That's not surprising, since the prevailing fashion dictated by Parisian designers between 1820 and 1900 and disseminated by dressmakers and fashion magazines throughout the United States and Europe decreed that women tight-lace their corsets to a waist circumference of 18 inches and wear numerous undergarments and skirts so long that they trailed in the mud. The cage crinoline, dating from the mid-1850s, was unwieldy at best, and it gave way in the mid-1860s to the bustle, a small cage on the backside. Both made sitting difficult. They were followed in the 1890s by a corset that thrust the breast forward, making women look like, as contemporary wags put it, "pouter pigeons."

Cunningham first discusses reformers critical of fashionable dress because they found it unhealthy. Tightlacing, for example, cut off breathing and could damage internal organs. In the United States, these reformers included the followers of Sylvester Graham, the advocates of water cures, members of communal societies such as Oneida, and supporters of gymnastic exercise, such as Catherine Beecher. All promoted healthy living and a natural diet; all were known nationwide. They also designed loose, comfortable clothing for women and publicized their designs. In addition, before the Civil War, the National Dress Reform Association had members in every state in the union, and its 1860 meeting attracted nearly 800 women and men, in spite of its being the first year of the war. Dress reform had commercial appeal: At the huge Philadelphia Centennial of 1876, for example, a number of manufacturers displayed hygienic undergarments for women. Later in the century there were dress reform stores in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

“The Emancipation Suit (patented August 3, 1875).” From Reforming Women's Fashion, 1850-1920.

Cunningham proves conclusively that although Stanton and her woman's rights cohort gave up dress reform, later in the century women's leaders like Frances Willard, head of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and organizations like the women's clubs espoused and publicized it. Cunningham convincingly shows that the writings of dress reformers were partly responsible for the popularity among women of the simple suits and white shirtwaist blouses and dark skirts of the turn of the 20th century. And as she points out, it was not just wealthy and middle-class women who were going to gymnasiums and taking exercise classes; immigrant and working-class women were also doing so. Bicycle riding, which required comfortable dress, often including some variation on Bloomer trousers, became a national craze in the 1890s. By 1893 there were one million bicycles in the nation.

An outstanding feature of Cunningham's book is that, although she focuses on the United States, she also incorporates a number of European countries, including Scandinavia, Austria, the Netherlands, and especially Germany. The history of fashion crosses national boundaries, but too often fashion historians (myself included) have failed to extend their analyses beyond the United States, Great Britain, and France.

THE EUROPEAN MATERIAL IS ESPECIALLY IMPORTANT in Cunningham's discussion of a second group of dress reformers, those who wanted changes in fashionable dress because they found current trends aesthetically unappealing. This group included artists such as William Morris and the pre-Raphaelite painters in England and individuals in the United States such as Annie Jenness Miller. Appropriate to the pre-Raphaelite affection for the medieval period, many of them adopted the high-waisted style of the 14th century (echoed in the so-called Empire gowns of the Napoleonic period), in which drapable fabrics were gathered under the bosom and fell loosely to the floor.

Beginning with England, Cunningham shows how the Liberty Company (founded by Arthur Lasenby Liberty) marketed its artistic designs and fabrics throughout Europe, opening a popular shop in Paris in 1889. The vogue for artistic dress spread throughout Europe, spurred on by individuals aligned with the modern design movement at the turn of the 20th century. It was axiomatic to that movement that beauty lies in the fitness of an object to its purpose, and that houses, furnishing, and occupants should be in aesthetic accord. Thus art nouveau objects and interiors required art nouveau dress.

An 1898 Jan Toorop lithograph depicting women in reform dresses. From Reforming Women's Fashion, 1850-1920.

Especially in Germany, department stores and fashion magazines promoted artistic dress. They were influenced by the German arts and crafts movement, known as Jugenstil. The name was taken from the Munich journal Der Jugend, established in 1895 to publish works of avant-garde writers and artists. In Austria the famous Viennese painter Gustav Klimt believed in dress reform, and he dressed the women he painted in long, loose, flowing garments.

By the 1900s artistic dress breeched the walls of fashion's main citadel in Paris, when Paul Poiret, the major Parisian designer of the day, took it up. For anyone who admires Poiret's gowns, it is rewarding to learn that he had a reform side, especially given recent work that presents his intent as mostly commercial. Yet Cunningham suggests that when Poiret claimed he was the sole creator of his designs, drawn from the Empire style, he wasn't entirely forthcoming. They closely resemble the artistic dresses the Liberty Company was marketing and selling in Paris as early as the 1880s. When Poiret contended in the 1910s that he had freed women from the corset, he was incorrect again: The dress reformers had done that several decades before.

The field of fashion history is rife with theoretical approaches, but Cunningham rejects those methodologies to focus on empirical evidence and the statements of reformers, making her revisionist thesis about the power of dress reform especially convincing. Moreover, as a specialist in textiles and costumes, she has worked extensively in costume collections, examining the actual dresses themselves, and that approach also gives her work authority. Her discussion of movements outside the United States and England is equally impressive, although her work on the countries of continental Europe is based on secondary sources. Moreover, she has not read the major fashion magazines, even for the United States, although research in sources like Godey's Lady's Magazine or Harper's Bazar would probably have considerably lengthened her book. She confines her discussions of specific reform dress mostly to trousers and undergarments, while noting that dress reformers also criticized uncomfortable shoes and ugly hats.

Cunningham's book, which ends in 1920, raises the issue of dress reform in more recent times. Was the flapper dress of the 1920s a product of feminism or of fashion? Did the dress reform movement continue after 1920? Does the fashion industry, with its periodic confining fashions, such as the tight-laced corsets of the 1950s or the current pointed toes on shoes, always manage to slip away from feminist reform?

The rich illustrations, large page size, and expensive glossy paper of this book make it a pleasure to read and justify its steep price. Such features are usually found only in high quality art books or in books on fashion of a more general nature.

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Radical royalty
Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left by Susan Braudy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003, 460 pp., $27.95 hardcover.

Reviewed by Susan Brownmiller

Kathy Boudine and Bernardine Dohrn at a press conference August 19, 1969, after Dohrn's 's return from Cuba. From Family Circle.

NO EVENT WAS AS SHOCKING to the American left during the early 1980s as the daylight robbery of an armored Brinks truck in a suburban shopping mall, and minutes later, a bloody shootout at an entrance ramp to the state thruway near Nyack, New York. A Brinks guard and two Nyack police officers were murdered that sorry afternoon in October 1981, the outcome of a botched plot by a druggy gang, addicted to cocaine, that called itself the Black Liberation Army. Among those captured was Kathy Boudin, a white woman of 38, who in turn captured the headlines. She had been in the passenger seat of a rented U-Haul, the designated "switch car" the robbers had piled into during their short flight, and from which they emerged at the thruway, guns blazing.

Kathy Boudin was famous, though not sufficiently famous for television reporters covering the story to pronounce her family name correctly. (It is "Boodine," not "Bowdin.") A new left organizer who had joined Weatherman, a small, charismatic group that advocated violence and went underground during the Vietnam era, she first made headlines in 1970 as one of two women who had walked away, naked and dazed, from a townhouse explosion in Greenwich Village and joined the revolutionary underground. The explosion, in which three of her comrades perished, was the result of crossed wires on an anti-personnel bomb that occupants of the house were preparing.

Even before the townhouse explosion, Kathy had been a figure of fascination for the left. Leonard Boudin, her illustrious father, was a popular and dynamic appellate lawyer for unpopular but just causes, with a roster of important clients and friends from Paul Robeson to Benjamin Spock. His law firm represented Fidel Castro's Cuba in the US courts. A great uncle, the labor lawyer Louis Boudin, had represented the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the Communist-dominated Furriers' Union. An uncle by marriage on her mother's side, I. F. Stone, was the beloved, revered editor of an independent leftist journal. To her peers, who knew her political linage the way some people know the British royals, Kathy signified the up-and-coming generation. Great things were expected of her, not least of all by her father. It is this phenomenon, the tensions, conflicts and eventual downfall of a seemingly confident dynasty of radical thinkers and super-achievers, that gives Susan Braudy's Family Circle its stunning power. I mean, the story of Kathy Boudin is a whale of a tale by itself. When it is examined within the prism of a high-profile dysfunctional family, as Braudy tells it, the story attains the epic stature of a genuine American tragedy.

Braudy's book, ten years in the making, was being readied for publication when the news was announced that Kathy Boudin had been granted a parole after 22 years in prison. The book also became news, prompting Boudin's attorney to charge that the author was "a somewhat frustrated and repressed person who has never been able to outgrow her awe of Kathy." Defense lawyers sometimes say silly things. Braudy is a distant friend of mine (hardly repressed), a former Ms. editor and Hollywood movie scout who has written four books and who happened to go to college with Kathy Boudin, a strong enough hook to get her into this book. Of course she was frustrated when Kathy refused to cooperate with her project. Jean Boudin, Kathy's mother, cooperated fully, as did Victor Rabinowitz, Leonard Boudin's longtime law partner.

The Boudins lived and entertained on the upper two floors of a quaint old townhouse in Greenwich Village, several blocks from the house on Eleventh Street that would explode in 1970. Kathy's energetic, exuberant father was a tireless womanizer in the manner of John Barrymore, making endless conquests of colleagues and admirers, falling in love dramatically on several occasions (several of his conquests talked to Braudy). The fragile Jean Boudin, a poet, attempted suicide at least twice during Kathy's formative years, and underwent electroshock treatments. In contrast to Kathy, her brother Michael rebelled early against the family's tradition of left-wing activism. He is now a conservative, Republican-appointed appeals court judge.

Kathy's psychological challenge, Braudy maintains, was to impress her father and gain his undivided attention. There are strong clues that she began failing early in that impossible task. She did not get into the college of her first choice, and "settled" for Bryn Mawr, where she became a top student. After spending a year in the Soviet Union on a visit arranged by a family friend, she tried to write a memoir about her experiences, but could not pull it together. She was turned down by Yale Law School; her brother had graduated from Harvard Law with flying colors. Briefly she wished to write about Dostoevsky.

What she excelled at was argumentative political debate and community organizing. A year and a half spent in Cleveland, from 1965 to 1966, trying to organize a poor black community with members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), was probably her finest hour until, ironically, the organizing work she was later to do in prison. The hard work of going door to door, talking to neighbors about welfare rights and better housing, trying to persuade them to commit to action, went slowly with many setbacks, dashing the idealistic hopes of her impatient group of young radicals. Most of the residents resisted the organizers' lofty goal of changing the system. They believed the shortest route to a better life was to get out of their blighted neighborhood.

KATHY'S EXPERIENCE WITH THE CLEVELAND PROJECT was replicated in SDS projects in other cities. She tried, unsuccessfully, to write about it. By 1967 other voices, angrier, raising the cry of black power, had appeared in the American inner cities.

In 1968 Leonard Boudin was representing Dr. Spock in Boston against charges that the renowned pediatrician had conspired with others to counsel young men to resist the draft for the war in Vietnam. Kathy was meeting in Chicago with radical theorist Tom Hayden to figure out how to disrupt the Democratic Party convention. In a telephone conversation between father and daughter that was taped by the FBI, each tried to outdo the other with tales of their respective valor, each insisting "I'm the one doing serious work."

The Democratic convention was indeed disrupted. Cops were photographed beating demonstrators and hurling tear gas in the streets and parks while protesters chanted, "The whole world is watching." Kathy's personal contribution to the chaos, in addition to marching, was to deface a mirror in the ladies room of the Hilton Hotel with red lipstick and to drop two stink bombs in the hotel lobby, for which she and a few friends were arrested. Leonard got the charges reduced and picked up the bill for cleaning the hotel carpet.

After Chicago, Kathy briefly enrolled in Case Western Reserve law school, but the pull of radical politics was too strong. She went to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade to help in the sugar fields and then joined Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers in an SDS faction called the Revolutionary Youth Movement that split again into Weatherman--named for a quote from Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues," "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." These splits, divisions, and permutations happened rapidly, reflecting the general frustrations of the antiwar movement, the in-your-face militancy of the Black Panthers, which some white radicals wished desperately to emulate, and the sense of futility that individuals like Kathy had felt in their community work.

What is remarkable to me, as a feminist activist of that era, is that the women who became the core of the Weather organization so totally missed the boat on women's liberation. Toughening themselves for violent confrontation, like the Days of Rage in Chicago one year after the Democratic convention, or gearing up for the excitement of planting a homemade bomb in the restroom of a public building--and calling the night watchman and writing a press release--they ignored the new revolutionary thinking of feminism and its antiviolence issues, such as rape and battery, dismissing the feminist ideas as off the mark and namby-pamby.

Kathy co-wrote The Bust Book during this time, a manual for radicals and hippies who might be facing arrest and prosecution. Its major piece of advice for dealing with cops was "Don't talk."

By 1975, most of the Weather leaders, including Ayers and Dohrn, had figured out that the wind was not blowing in their direction and were negotiating a settlement of the outstanding charges against them so they could reenter the above-ground world. Leonard Boudin, now wearing a pacemaker, held buoyant meetings in his Greenwich Village house to strategize about his daughter's surrender. Jean Boudin had poignant talks with Kathy on the relatively secure grounds of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. But Kathy and David Gilbert, a lover she had had a child by, remained obdurate. Along with a handful of colleagues, all women, they were not convinced their cause was finished, arguing that the ongoing role of a white revolutionary was to give support, with few or no questions asked, to black revolutionaries acting for the most oppressed segment of American society. They linked up with a group of addicts, former addicts, and aides who ran an unusual detox center at Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx, who called themselves the Black Liberation Army, or the Family.

ON THE DAY OF THE BIG DANCE, the Family's code name for their armed robbery, the whites were assigned to drive the switch cars. Peter Paige, a Brinks guard, was killed beside his truck at the Nanuet mall. After hoisting the Brinks money bags into their red Chevy, the BLA soldiers drove to a parking lot where Kathy and David Gilbert's rented U-Haul was waiting. The U-Haul sped away with the men and their loot in the closed rear cabin, only to be stopped at a road block. As two policemen approached, Kathy wriggled out of the passenger seat, shouting "Tell them to put the gun back." Expecting blacks from police radio descriptions, officers Waverly Brown and Edward O'Grady put their weapons aside and were mowed down by the men who emerged from the U-Haul's rear door. Kathy was nabbed by a passing court officer who saw her attempt to flee the scene of the crime.

Gilbert and Judith Clark, a driver of an escort car on the day of the shootout, refused to take part in their court trial and received sentences of 75 years to life in prison. The BLA soldiers didn't fare any better. Leonard Boudin tried every gambit he knew to defend his daughter. She had finally and unqualifiedly claimed his full attention. Gilbert, whom Braudy interviewed in prison, said that Leonard begged him to testify that Kathy knew nothing about the robbery plans, adding that he could not comply. Without Gilbert's words, the best Leonard could do was plead her guilty in return for 20 years to life.

During her 22 years at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, Kathy turned into an exceptional prisoner, using her organizing skills to set up a program for young mothers, counseling inmates with AIDS, helping with legal appeals, getting a master's degree in education, writing poetry. Her father and mother, and her uncle, IF Stone, died. Her faithful supporters on the left, including many luminaries she had known since childhood, kept up the pressure for her release begun by Leonard, mounting strenuous campaigns for parole or pardon. Her son, Chesa, who had been deposited with a babysitter on the day of the robbery, was brought up by Ayers and Dohrn. He graduated from Yale and became a Rhodes scholar.

Kathy Boudine. From Family Circle.

Judith Clark mingled less easily with the inmate population, but also acquitted herself admirably in Bedford Hills; two of her poems appeared in The New Yorker. Efforts on Clark's behalf for clemency never reached the proportions of the campaigns for Kathy. Some said that Clark's severe sentence made such efforts implausible. Others would counter that Clark never achieved celebrity status and wasn't part of the left aristocracy (her father had been the Moscow correspondent for the Daily Worker).

At 60, Kathy Boudin is poised to reenter a world as torn by international conflict as the one that set her on her radical path in the 1960s. It will be interesting to see what contribution to its betterment she chooses--and is allowed by the restrictions of her parole--to make.

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Unsettling sex
3 by Julie Hilden. New York: Plume, 2003, 218 pp., $13.00 paper.

Reviewed by Amanda Nash

Julie Hilden (© Leslie Cashen)

AT THE RISK OF SOUNDING either depraved or pretentious I will say that I've read a formidable quantity of smut. I use the word affectionately. But despite my affection for it in theory, the vast majority of what I've read has been unsatisfying: neither sexually arousing nor interestingly written.

3 is not smut. It's debatable whether it's even sexy, although it's certainly about sex. I wouldn't recommend it, however, to spice up an erotic interlude. I would recommend it to readers such as myself, who are fascinated, perplexed, stymied, and occasionally even arrested by the power and complexity of sex and the endless permutations of sexual power dynamics.

Julie Hilden, whose controversial first book, The Bad Daughter, provoked reviews ranging from adulation to horror, has written a novel that is almost painfully impossible to put down. It's first of all a love story--about a relationship that is all-consuming in both positive and negative ways--and only secondly a sexual adventure.

Maya meets Ilan in college, and from the moment they meet it is clear what their roles will be; she is the innocent, and he the teacher. Having been largely ignored by her family as a child, she says, "Before I meet Ilan, I live in my mind. I have been this way since childhood: the stillest girl, the one who waits quietly." By emotional design or perhaps simply by default, Ilan is what she has been waiting for.

He is my third lover. Unlike the previous two, he reaches me.... He picks a lock of pain and pleasure, of shame and want--waiting patiently as if he were listening for each of a safe's tumblers to fall into place.... I begin to believe I have always wanted to be touched this way. Whether he changes me or reveals me, I have difficulty telling. (p. 15)

Although Maya eventually becomes the more capable of the two professionally, Ilan's sexual power over her eclipses all other forms of control in the relationship. After she's caught him in an infidelity, Ilan persuades Maya to permit him to have sex with other women. She agrees only under the condition that she can be present and participate. Following the first of their official threesomes, in which Maya has found herself more turned on than she expected, she says,

I realize, all at once, that we've done this, it's over, and I have not left him. Yet I am still unsure whether I want this, at least a little, or whether only he does; whether I like it or only he does. Whether it is an acquired taste he has truly taught me, or only a way in which I am trying to resemble him. (p. 72)

And in certain ways she does enjoy it. She is turned on by the vulnerability of other women and by knowing that at the end of the night, the others will be turned away, and she will remain with Ilan. But we never really know whether she truly enjoys the sexual bargain for her own satisfaction. She, and we, begin to see herself only through Ilan's eyes.

As she continues to try to mold herself into Ilan's perfect woman, Maya recognizes she is losing herself. At times she is jealous of the women who share their bed but then are free to leave. "I always imagine her emerging onto the street below us, into the dark, free night. And I always envy her a little, the woman leaving--while at the same time understanding that I am not the type of woman who leaves." She has recognized this from the very beginning, when she first caught Ilan in the infidelity that precipitated their open-marriage arrangement:

"You have to go now," he tells [the other woman]. She dresses insolently slowly... "Fuck you," she tells Ilan. "You fucking liar. I deserve better than you." Righteous anger, but controlled. She and I brush past each other in the doorway. She is the woman I am supposed to be: A hair tosser, a thrower of water from glasses, a slapper, a terrific girl all told. Dignified, she slips through the high reeds near the driveway and begins to walk along the road slowly, carrying her pretty embroidered shoes. She does not look back at him, at us, at the house for even a moment, because she knows what she deserves.... "I should leave too," is all I say. "You can't leave me, Maya. I love you." (pp. 6-7)

but immediately I am flooded with sadness; I understand just how hard it would be, how painful to bear. I imagine handing him a plate of fishhooks with my blood on them--a silver platter of bloody metal and, caught on it, scraps of ripped-up skin. I imagine saying to him, 'Here, I've finally torn you out.' (p. 92)

What makes this book so different from other novels about erotic love is Hilden's ability to walk the tightrope between pleasure and pain. In perfect, equal measures she expresses Maya's need for what Ilan gives her and her suffering at his transgressions. The reader is caught in the same bind as Maya; the delight at how Ilan opens her up to sexual ecstasy and the excruciating pain of his betrayals. What keeps the book from being sexually stimulating in spite of its beautifully detailed descriptions of their sexual experimentation is that Maya's emotional pain is uncomfortably close to the surface throughout. The reader feels almost guilty (or as the author says, "implicated"--see interview, p. 11) about feeling aroused while the protagonist is so conflicted. This is a deeply unsettling book, one that it's difficult to get out of your mind. But it's one of very few novels I've read that perceptively expresses the sometimes insurmountable power that sex can exert.

A conversation with Julie Hilden:

While reading 3 I became so involved with the characters that when I finished the novel I couldn't quite let go of them. Curious to know more about them and about the person who created them, I contacted Julie Hilden in New York. What ensued was an interview that I found particularly satisfying as well as unusually pleasant. --AN

Amanda Nash: You've said that 3 is a "feminist novel."

Julie Hilden: I think simply presenting sex from a woman's point of view is feminist. 3 is also very much about how a woman's desires can virtually be replaced by a man's desires--until she finds it hard to tell the two apart. In the novel, the desires are sexual, but my point is more general: Women get encroached upon by male desire and sometimes are ambivalent about whether they want to resist it, or adopt it, or transform it, or choose any of a variety of other strange options. There's a reason that the demon lover in the myth comes to visit a woman, not a man--and that both [the Virgin Mary] and Rosemary [of Rosemary's Baby] have babies without any choice in the matter. It's as if you're impregnated by desire: It's yours, yet it's not your own, and it will grow beyond you. I think 3 is a modern novel, but also a gothic one, and a horror novel. I read somewhere that Darren Aronofsky said Requiem for a Dream, which I loved, is a monster movie where the monster is addiction; I think 3 is a monster novel where the monster is sexual desire.

AN: Your first book, the memoir The Bad Daughter, in which you wrote about how you chose not to return to your mother when she was dying of Alzheimer's Disease, received radically disparate responses, some people praising you for your honesty and strength, and some people deriding you as, well, downright evil. Is the response to 3 as divided?

JH: Reviewers of 3 have been very supportive. All the reviews on Amazon so far (famous last words!) are very positive, and Cake [www.cakenyc.com -- a New York club dedicated to giving women a safe environment to explore their sexual curiosity] featured the novel very positively on their email newsletter. The audience for 3 is more self-selecting--the book clearly proclaims its nature, and it is likely to be bought only by readers open to a sexy book. The wonderful cover by Lucia Kim is very helpful in this regard. In contrast, The Bad Daughter was probably a shock for people who may have been looking for an inspirational memoir. It was very different from the memoirs--funny, moving, redemptive--that created the memoir craze. My life was not funny or moving or redemptive; I think for a long time, it was sad and dark, and the book reflected that.

AN: So is there redemption for the "bad daughter," or for the woman who realizes she's forsaken her own desire for a man's?

JH: In terms of the idea of being a bad daughter, for me redemption is hard because my mother died young. If she hadn't, I think I would have understood her better as I aged--and been less hard on her. I would have been able to be a kinder, more supportive daughter. As it is, it's eerie for me to pass the ages that she once was without being able to talk to her about it. It's going to be even stranger if I outlive her: My mother never got to be 55, or 60.

In terms of being a woman who gives up her own desire for a man's, I think that describes many, many young women--especially because women often date men who are older, and thus more assured, and because men are often less ambivalent about their own desire than women are. But often, women grow out of being submissive or subsidiary--as long as they are not trapped in a marriage in which they have to be submissive, as occurs with Maya in 3. I don't have anything against male desire in itself--just its tendency to subsume female desire!

AN: Do you find males respond to 3 differently than females do? Do you find responses align with other categories (i.e., dominants vs. submissives, or married people vs. single people, etc.)?

JH: I think women tend to relate their own experiences to the book--the Sliptongue.com reviewers (both women) discussed the novel in the context of their own sexuality and views on sex. Male reviewers, like Counterpunch's Adam Engel, who wrote a rave, seem to focus more on the book as a book--putting it in the context of other novels, past and present.

Another interesting divergence in responses is between those who find it disturbing and sexy, and those who just find it disturbing. Sliptongue.com's two reviewers represent these two viewpoints: Lisabet Sarai said her "pulse raced," but Kristine Hawes said, "I would not pick up this book as a sexual stimulant. Many of the feelings that Maya encountered were too similar to my own demons." For some readers it cuts too close to the bone to be sexy. My ideal readers would find it sexy, and sort of hate themselves for finding it sexy, but find it sexy anyway, and then think about that.

AN: Could you say more about people who "hate themselves for finding it sexy"? Why? And what would you hope they would conclude as a result of examining that feeling?

JH: I think many people--men and women--find female submissiveness sexy but think they shouldn't. However, the reaction is involuntarily; only upon reflection can they reject it. In my book the submissiveness is not temporary; it's part of the structure of Maya and Ilan's marriage. So if you find it sexy--and the sexiness builds--the submissiveness is building at the same time, and you are more and more implicated.

AN: I loved and was fascinated by the book, nonetheless there were things about it that I didn't really "buy." For instance we are told (by Maya--but I'm not sure whether it is you speaking through her or her trying to convince herself) that Ilan's final act is for her benefit, but I don't believe that it is. It seems to me that his final act is the result of his realization that there's no configuration that will satisfy him; that when his desires are not accommodated he is frustrated, but when they are, they escalate. I think he is ultimately selfish--not selfless.

JH: But....I did think it was for her! You're right that when Ilan's desires escalate, it's because they're literally insatiable, impossible to satisfy, which leaves him in a predicament. I pose the question: What if your childhood has led to desires that the world just can't satisfy? I saw the origin of his desires in his early loss of his mother--an irremediable loss, as I've found in my own life. He's crazy about his mother; she dies when he's a boy; no woman will match her, so why not have many women? That's a crude thumbnail sketch of what I imagined to be his psychology.

AN: The other thing I didn't believe was that Maya frees herself at the end. I think she still does everything for his eyes. Does she believe she is free, as she says she does? Do you?

JH: At that point in the book, Maya has had so many relationships to Ilan--love, rescue, subjugation, haunting, possession, and imitation--that I think the idea that she expresses, that she is going to entirely escape him, is an illusion. The book ends on a note of hope, but I don't think her life will ever detach from his life. He replaced her parents, friends, workplace--he was everything to her, a claustrophobic world.

AN: At the end Maya says, "It occurs to me then that strength and power can be a mistake, and there can be a kind of strength and power, too, in the ability simply to be open, to be courageous enough to be known." I'd like to believe that but I'm not sure I do. What has she learned?

JH: Maya must learn simply how to be alone. Although she left her own family, her marriage with Ilan took its place, and became similarly all-encompassing. Now I think she might date and sleep with a number of different people--ramp down the intensity a bit--indulge her curiosity, and make herself vulnerable emotionally, but without disappearing into such extreme submissiveness. Nevertheless, the fact that she is still obsessed with Ilan doesn't entirely bode well.

AN: In the press material it says that Ilan is threatened by Maya's growing independence. But the way I see it he is threatened by his dependence on her. He seems to want to sully her so that she will be less powerful, and to apportion his desire to limit his dependence on her.

JH: I think he escalates their sex for the reason I discussed above--he's insatiable, because what he's looking for can't be found. But for the purposes of the novel, I thought it was more plausible to have an external motivation too--a threat that she could free herself (through her career). Ilan is definitely worried about dependence--he loved his mother, and she died, and it's been devastating, so why fully love again? Their marriage is predicated on the need for him to allow desire and control it at the same time; he has very specific requirements, and they live by very specific rules. The rules are even in the personal ad they place. It's all a desperate fight for control--of emotion, desire, dependence, life itself.

AN: You manage to describe Ilan's and Maya's actions without judging them. Do you think Ilan is pathological? A victim himself? Just a little unusual? Someone with a healthy curiosity that just got a little out of hand?

JH: I wanted to illuminate Ilan's basic psyche--the relationship with his parents, his upbringing--but also to allow ambiguity as to whether he was a real person, or almost a fantasy of Maya's. I think the same kind of ambiguity operates in the movie Eyes Wide Shut--is this sexual journey all a dream or a myth, or is it real? In the movie, the dream begins with a confessed wish--the woman confesses she was tempted to leave her husband and child for a stranger--so the trigger is a wish, a fantasy, and then dreams and fantasies follow, across a surreal quasi-New York City that is highly dreamlike and sexualized. I wanted to create some of the same ambiguity in 3. The downside is that I ended up making Ilan less realistic and believable than he would have been if I had provided more specificity, more detail. We know a lot about Maya--from what sport she favors (rowing), to what she considers most vital (a child, her writing), to exactly what she feels during sex. In contrast, Ilan is a cipher, and often playing a role--meaning perhaps he is dream lover, and if so, she's even more implicated in his games. But to the extent that I see Ilan as a real and realistic person, I see him essentially as an addict--he finds certain things so pleasurable, or compelling, that he does them no matter how much they imperil him or the person he loves. And therefore I find him sympathetic: Though he controls Maya, he himself lacks control. I feel sympathy for him, too, because he is desperately trying to figure out how to make his life work--how to have everything he wants. He is trying to live two lives--a life of marriage, and an experimental sexual life, and they don't work together at all. He escalates the way an addict escalates as the body acclimates itself to a given drug, or develops a tolerance for alcohol. His desires are dangerous; he doesn't choose them, he indulges them, but doesn't end up happy. I understand why Maya loves him--it's as if the sadism is his, but it's outside of him, and it's hurting him, too.

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Alternative universes
Changing Planes: Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin, illustrated by Eric Beddows. New York: Harcourt, 2003, 256 pp., $22.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Susanna J. Sturgis

 

Ursula K. Le Guin (Photo by Marion Wood Kolisch)

URSULA K. LE GUIN has been at the top of her form for so long that it's easy to forget just how "top" that form is. In less than three years she has released not only Changing Planes but also a novel, The Other Wind; two other story collections, The Birthday of the World and Tales from Earthsea; and a translation from the Spanish of Argentinean writer Angélica Gorodischer's novel Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was. Many science fiction or fantasy writers won't "waste" a vividly realized world on a short story, or even on a single novel--only a series will do. In some 250 pages of Changing Planes, Le Guin creates and populates 15 worlds lavishly; she clearly isn't worried about running out of ideas.

Like many writers, Ursula Le Guin starts from what she knows--in this case, airports.

In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape route from hell. These rushing people are watched by people who sit in plastic seats bolted to the floor and who might just as well be bolted to the seats. (pp. 1-2)

Marooned in Chicago by a delayed connecting flight, Sita Dulip of Cincinnati discovered that escape is possible, that "by a mere kind of twist and a slipping bend, easier to do than to describe, she could go anywhere--be anywhere--because she was already between planes." Nor was she the first to make the change: The Interplanary Agency had long ago established hotels on the many planes that welcome tourists, and travelers were being advised not to leave home without a translatomat, to minimize the language barrier, and a copy of Rornan's Handy Planary Guide. Illustrator Eric Beddows is almost certainly an adept at changing planes: His woodcut-like images evoke not only the distinctiveness of each world's people but often the response of the visitor as well.

When tourists too flagrantly abuse or exploit the planes they visit, it is the Interplanary Agency that intervenes. On Ansar, the Ansarac had long followed their Madan, their Way, a pattern of mass migration between North and South. Life in the South is urban and communal; life in the North family-based and rural. During the Northern spring and summer, young people mate and reproduce; sexuality is a prominent part of life; it is quiescent during the Southern seasons, when life is remarkable for its egalitarianism. As the author notes, "Gender is not of much import where there is no sexuality." Into this millennia-old Way came the Beidr, "an aggressive and enterprising people with highly advanced material technologies, who have been in trouble more than once with the Interplanary Agency for interfering on other planes." Master your environment and your instincts, advised the Beidr; drive, don't walk; have sex (and babies) all year round. The Ansarac women pointed out that this would institutionalize gender differences, with probably disastrous results. The Ansarac voted the Beidr off their plane, and the Interplanary Agency enforced their decision.

On The Holiday Plane™, the often hazy boundary between tourist economy and latter-day imperialism was erased altogether. The Great Joy Corporation impressed the natives into service on its resort islands, each one of which is dedicated to the round-the-clock, year-round celebration of a particular holiday, including Christmas, Easter, and the Fourth of July. The Interplanary Agency, learning of the exploitation, shut the plane down. The holiday islands are now being operated by the islanders themselves, since the "modest subsistence economy of the region was completely destroyed by the Great Joy Corporation and cannot be restored overnight."

An illustration by Eric Beddows from Changing Planes.

AS EXPERIMENTS ARE AFFECTED by the presence of observers, so places are affected by the influx of newcomers, whether they be clans in search of better grazing, crusaders serving a militant god, or stir-crazy travelers from another plane. From the beginning of her literary career, Le Guin has been fascinated by the accommodations that places and peoples make with each other and, especially, what happens when equilibrium is upset, from within or without. In "The Fliers of Gy," the challenge comes from within: In late adolescence a very small number of the avian but wingless Gyr undergo a grueling, year-long transformation into winged fliers. Who will change isn't known until the first symptoms appear. Some urban Gyr embrace their new possibilities; others bind their wings and opt for a landbound existence. The challenges facing the Gyran fliers will be recognized by many on our plane--artists, gay men and lesbians, and anyone who feels herself a stranger among her own people.

Tourists are often adept at finding common ground with their hosts; what comes hard is perceiving and acknowledging the differences. Le Guin manages this brilliantly, using easily comprehensible language to evoke the incomprehensible. Asonu children chatter like children anywhere, but as they mature they speak less and less: Adults speak rarely, at many-month intervals, and then enigmatically. "This nearly absolute abstinence from language makes them fascinating," notes the author. For tourists from our culture, where the spoken word is widely considered indispensable and where many are so uneasy with silence that they must have TV or radio chattering in the background at all times, the Asonu are the ultimate in exotic. This proved too tempting to one visitor. Convinced that the Asonu force silence upon their children, he kidnapped an Asonu child and tried to keep her speaking so that she would reveal to him the supposed "Secret Wisdom of the Asonu."

Most alien of all is "The Nna Mmoy Language," which completely boggles the translatomats. As the author explains:

A word in Nna Mmoy has no denotation, but is a nucleus of potential connotations which may be activated, or created, by its context.... Texts written in Nna Mmoy are not linear, either horizontally or vertically, but radial, budding out in all directions, like tree branches or growing crystals, from a first or central word which, once the text is complete, may well be neither the center nor the beginning of the statement. (p. 167)

Understanding flickers just behind the back of the mind; this could no more be explained than the "answer" to a koan. But there's a key concept in there: context. Without context nothing can be fully understood, not one's own history or the complexities of another culture. Without context, the eyes may not see truly.

Ursula Le Guin has long delighted in sending her characters into cultures whose unexpected conventions challenge everything the newcomer holds to be self-evident. In the delicate, occasionally disastrous interplay that follows first contact, both host and visitor are irrevocably changed, and likewise the reader, who experiences events from both perspectives. Despite the brevity of each interplanary visit in Changing Planes, the armchair traveler will return home with images and insights that promise to last longer than most snapshots and duty-free purchases.

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The staff of the Women's Review were very saddened to hear of the death of Carolyn Heilbrun. She was a dedicated contributor and a feisty spirit and we will miss her. Carolyn's most recent article for the Women's Review was part of the special section on Women Aging in our July 2003 issue. This article is reprinted here in its entirety.

Carolyn had also written a review of the book Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith by Andrew Wilson for the Women's Review shortly before her death. This article will appear in our December 2003 issue.

Carolyn Heilbrun (photo by Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Taking a U-turn
The aging woman as explorer of new territory

By Carolyn G. Heilbrun

I HAVE BEEN A FEMINIST for most of my adult life, which makes my drift away from feminism in my middle 70s a bit strange, even to my eyes. Not that I do not work politically for feminism now as ever, perhaps more while the Christian Right rules over us. My feminist antennae continue to quiver. But recently, the fate of women in fiction or nonfiction has failed to compel me as a reading subject; my writing, reading, and cogitations have turned to other avenues of contemplation. When not pondering life in general, I read and learn about science, primarily physics but also evolution and the grandeur of Darwin's life and thought.

In the wondering part of my life these days, I seek out poetry. But even here, the poetry that I meditate upon is not the poetry I read for so many years before my 70s. The women poets, many of whom seemed, in past years, to be writing my life, make little demand upon me. My esteemed Auden, too, leaves me only with excerpts for things I need to say and cannot say other than in his words. I mostly return instead, odd as I find it, to Wordsworth and to Gerard Manley Hopkins--Hopkins most strangely, since for me one of the chief comforts of science lies in its abandonment of God. Yet here is Hopkins, perfectly conveying what is these days my chief despair:

birds build--but not I build; no, but strain, Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes. Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

Another race has been, and other palms are won. Thanks to the human heart by which we live, Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

I am struck by the way the work of these men forced them into challenges, if not denials of the prevailing and powerful religions of their day. They did not so much deny God as suggest that the laws of the universe might be better understood, not only by disaffirming God, but by refusing to see him as an adequate hypothesis for the universal laws of physics and evolution. To attribute all creation to God was to accept the threat, as with Galileo, of having to disclaim one's discoveries. Faith has been called the evidence of things not seen; rather it is, for scientists, the refusal to see. I may learn but little of science; yet, turning to scientists in my 70s, I make myself a poet by Thoreau's definition: "The art of life, of a poet's life, is, not having anything to do, to do something." (And I rejoice in his vestigial, elegant use of commas.)

The great reward I find in science is the way in which scientists see a problem and set out to solve and understand or, at the least, to interpret it. Sometimes they are right; sometimes their efforts are later disproved; perhaps there is no answer at all. In fields like sociology, psychology, philosophy, and literary criticism, however, no lasting answer is ever to be found. Certainly for the question to which the major part of my life was devoted--the question of women's attempt to become whole human beings able to chose among destinies--there is no "right" answer to be found. There are only cycles and pendulum swings. A math problem from my childhood concerned a frog who, trying to get out of a well, continually climbed up five feet and fell back four. The frog did, eventually, make its way out; for women, on the contrary, the fall back seems eternal. In science, any solution, any explanation, must be capable of being repeated. It must also face and survive Karl Popper's test for falsification, which says that you cannot prove that a proposition is correct unless you have tried to falsify it and not succeeded. Richard Feynman, as his biographer James Gleick reports, "believed that the inefficiency, the guessing of equations, the juggling of alternative physical viewpoints were, even now, the key to discovering new laws." But new laws in science, once discovered and defended, are established.

Also, I find gratifying the models of a "good" life offered by the scientists--lives encompassing work that powerfully matters, in relation to which a private life is definitely secondary. Romance, spouses, children are appreciated but are not, and never can be, at the center of rewarding achievement or endeavor in the world of science.

Do I understand the science I am reading? I grasp it a little better than I did before entering upon this venture, but the extent of my comprehension is best expounded by Chaim Weizmann, describing a trans-Atlantic crossing with Einstein in 1920: "Einstein explained his theory to me every day; by the time we arrived, I was finally convinced that he understood it." The work of Newton and Einstein are more available to the likes of me than either cosmology, about the birth of the universe and the death of stars, or string theory, the postulation of tiny one dimensional invisible filaments called strings uniting quantum mechanics with general relativity. The reward in each case is in the striving to understand and the glimpses of the scientists at their work. In addition, I am greatly aided by the exposition science journalists provide precisely for such as I. As to evolution, that I seem able to grasp more directly and with greater ease.

AND WHAT PART HAS GOD in all this; and why do I bother with that question? My oldest friend, who believes in God, formulates the problem for me. Why do so many scientists, even Stephen Hawking, sooner or later invoke the name of God? Why did the mathematician John von Neumann turn to Catholicism at his death? Grappling with this question has allowed me to face the agnosticism of my life--and to confirm it. My friend sends me highly intelligent, searching articles about the connection between science and God. These, figuring God as a master mathematician, convince me that such investigations are necessary to those who need a place for God in modern science, but not for those who find the universe, and the earth itself, sufficient compensation. Wallace Stevens' Sunday Morning, though he too died a Catholic, expresses perfectly my final religious conviction, which was probably Stevens' first: "We live in an old chaos of the sun." And at the poem's end we have not a single dove's annunciation to Mary, but casual flocks of pigeons who make "ambiguous undulations as they sink / Downward to darkness on extended wings." I intend no condemnation of those institutionalized religions that do not define themselves by their enemies, their own righteousness, or their missionary zeal. Ritual and community, worship and holidays, are essential to many, but not to me--and the scientists bolster me in this.

Do I imagine that others in their 70s, or approaching them, or now beyond them, will find any benefit from learning where I find myself? Yes, some will. For they may, as I have, come to realize that it does not suffice to hold on to the life one has long known as a way to prolong it. I have found that a swift deviation from past interests is surprisingly sweet. One's politics may not radically change; one's commitments usually remain unaltered. But if the focus of one's attention shifts sharply, one awakens. There are, I surmise, three alternative, reasonable roads to a workable compliance with old age: One is to go on doing what one was doing, preserving as far as possible those physical aspects and activities that help to deny aging; another is to contemplate the past, reflect upon it, and, if one is talented, write about it in the form of memoir; a third is the way I have taken, of a u-turn onto something hitherto ignored. This last, I have found, has the benefit of stimulating one's mindfulness, one's new-found capacity for attention, the faculty most readily lost in old age.

And then there is death. "'In the middle of my party, here's death,' Clarissa Dalloway thought." What business have I to talk of death in these pages? At the opening of my book, The Last Gift of Time, I wrote that I had always planned to end my life at 70, the biblical span. That statement astonished many people, and my explanation--I was often asked about this when speaking in public--seemed to offer them little enlightenment. My encounter with death at 70 was neither sudden nor dramatic; it was rather a daily struggle willingly to proceed and endure. It was not that I had nothing to live for; it was that, at that time, and later, I could not credit the unconsidered commitment to go on living if my particular journey seemed to be over. At 70, rather to my surprise, I found I still had promises to keep.

Is the end of the journey now near? I fear living with the certainty that there is no further work demanding to be done. Margaret Atwood, at the beginning of Negotiating with the Dead, quotes Marguerite Duras: "Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book"--Duras perfectly describes the situation.

I have always believed that, over 70, one should be as free to choose one's death as one must, earlier, be free to choose whether or not to give birth. Well into my 70s I live, as all must live at this age, with the inevitability of approaching death and the chance of a devastating, unanticipated assault from some bodily failure. I have, unlike many of the old, consented to life only on the terms of borrowed time. Perhaps, however, there are, even among those most privileged by life, more than we might guess who, like myself, ruminate daily upon death and consider each day as accepted, so to speak, on loan. One may, of course, choose to hold onto the loan beyond one's ability to decide on death--one of life's profounder ironies. But there is also a curious compensation for this risk: If each day is a loan from eternity, one spends it with the joy known to gamblers betting everything on a last roll of the dice. The payoff is intensity.

Meanwhile, I shall probably not attempt to publish a book about the men of science; I write because, as I read and cogitate, I must write--but only for myself. Is that, I ask myself, because, were I to attempt to publish, I would have to fear rejection? Yes, there is that, but not as much of that as there might be.

What it comes down to, finally, is that I think life beyond 70--and these days life can go on for decades beyond 70--is an adventure so far largely unrecorded, unanticipated, unacknowledged. Wordsworth warned if "solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief / Should be thy portion," well--what in that case shall we do? These portions are inevitable, part of the adventure of old age, like frostbite for explorers in the arctic. Such dangers are undertaken by the old, as is extreme cold by explorers of the poles, in the hope of startling oneself into vibrancy.

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