SEDUCTION AND BETRAYAL: Women in Literature

by Elizabeth Hardwick ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 5, 1974

A collection of discrete essays always illuminating and enlarging from the particular to convey something beyond the existence of certain women whether in life or the life they assumed through art. In some cases (Zelda's for instance -- this on the ""inadvertently"" shifted focus of Mrs. Mil-ford's success) art for art's sake, not as the brothers Goncourt conceived it, becomes a form of tyranny and Zelda's frenetic energies were scattered in a desperate attempt to prove something -- her splintered self. Again art may be the by-product of another kind of entrapment -- the self-destructive despair of Sylvia Plath for whom suicide was just another form of assertion. Sometimes creativity is only a surrogate alternative -- see Miss Hardwick's lovely piece on the Brontes; battered by circumstances those high-minded, ""serious, wounded, longing women"" found the outside world was unavailable. Thus in many cases Lionel Trilling's ""What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have"" is only too clearly demonstrated. On the other hand, subsiding into domesticity, never free of the daily vexations of the man around the house or the household, we have the ""Amateurs"" -- Dorothy Wordsworth and put-upon Jane Carlyle, both accessories of greater men. There is a triptych of ""Ibsen's Women"" -- the sympathetic Nora, the meaner-spirited and more ambiguous Hedda, and Rosmerholm's less familiar Rebecca West. The title piece, which is also the closing one, opposes not only seduction and betrayal, but also lust versus stoicism in the 19th century works of Hawthorne and Dreiser and Tolstoy until we reach modern times: ""Now the old plot is dead, fallen into obsolescence. You cannot seduce anyone when innocence is not a value."" There are gains -- there are also losses. . . . One of the cardinal virtues of Miss Hardwick's essays is that she returns us to the intricate, multivalent relationships -- always contained within society's ""arrangements"" -- of people that singularly attract us and they are appraised with a fine intelligence and just sensibility.

Pub Date: May 5, 1974

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1974

Categories: NONFICTION