All the years I knew Carolyn Heilbrun, beginning in graduate school in 1984, I never heard her utter a single conventional sentiment. Even her more conservative views were unconventional, as though she had formulated them begrudgingly for pragmatic rather than prescriptive reasons. This meant, of course, that she was constantly embroiled in debates and controversies which, I think, alternately exhilarated and exhausted her. Storming the ivory tower continues to animate the intellectual lives of those who follow in her footsteps. But the gift of iconoclastic clarity must have been a burden at times. Nevertheless, she continued to rally, disrupting the smug assumptions of political correctness in the Nineties just as assiduously as she had challenged political reactionaries in the Sixties. Debate and dissent were the source of her pedagogical genius, which seemed to spring from a radicalism more profound than all the generations of graduate students who studied with her, myself included. For all our miniskirts and piercings, poststructuralism and queer theory, we were actually conventional in comparison. Her disarmingly prim bun deceived no one, once Carolyn Heilbrun opened her mouth or put pen to paper.

Carolyn's favorite debate with me concerned the relative merits of the marriage of Virginia Stephen and Leonard Woolf versus that of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, a topic she felt important enough to include in Writing a Woman's Life. Faced with my admiration for Gertrude Stein's avant-gardism, Carolyn invariably expressed her reservations about whether a woman whose wife cooked and typed and all but shined her shoes could really be considered radical, stylistic innovation notwithstanding. She sometimes artfully pretended not to understand obscure writers like Stein, which was probably her way of saying she was interested in the real rather than the theoretical. Theory, Carolyn's life and letters implicitly argue, may be intellectually stimulating, but it never liberated an actual human being. She did write that, "[w]ithout intellectual and theoretical underpinnings, no movement can succeed," but she also warned that feminism is "in danger of refining the theory and scholarship at the expense of the lives of the women who need to experience the fruits of this research." American feminism in particular has been characterized as an activist movement in contrast to more purely theoretical French methodology, and Carolyn has long been considered a pioneer of this more existential approach to women's rights. After countless debates over the years, she finally convinced me that real women and not just fictional and theoretical constructs were the proper subjects of academic inquiry. She was notorious for prevailing over seemingly indomitable resistance and opposition.

At Columbia, Carolyn Heilbrun submitted us all to what might be called pedagogical shock treatments. Presumably, when she embarked on the career that would change so many of our lives, considerable cerebral as well as rhetorical seismic activity was necessary to generate paradigm shifts. Though not particularly boisterous or aggressive in demeanor, she could disrupt centuries of complacent bigotry with one of her suspiciously simple, outrageously true observations. As a result, conversing with her, let alone submitting yourself to her unorthodox tutelage, was to risk being embarrassed by your own chauvinism. I remember her most fondly presiding over a roomful of exasperated scholars, utterly bereft of the privileged prejudices that had or would earn them tenure. She clarifies the pedagogical value of these scenes in Writing a Woman's Life: "I do not believe that death should be allowed to find us seated comfortably in our tenured positions. . . . Instead, we should make use of our security, our seniority, to take risks, to make noise, to be courageous, to become unpopular." Needless to say, her unpopularity did not extend to her graduate students. We loved her even, or perhaps especially, when she made us take risks along with her.

Those who attended the "Out of the Academy and Into the World" conference in 1992 might remember my relating how Carolyn utilized her unorthodox pedagogy in oral examinations. Predictably, she posed questions that could not be answered without scandalizing the stodgy graybeards on the committee, who were inured to questions about phallic symbols but decidedly unnerved by references to female genitalia which, before the likes of Carolyn Heilbrun assailed the citadel, had been decorously encoded, if not altogether nonexistent. Her favorite questions required us to explain the linguistic significance of multiple orgasms, breast milk, or, in my case, labia in écriture féminine. In this setting, she was all too happy to harness "theory and scholarship at the expense of the lives of the [men] who need to experience the fruits of this research." Conferring after my Orals with one of these hapless men, my major examiner in American Literature, he commented that my exam had been the most risqué on record - "pornographic" was the precise word he had used. If labia, those two lips that speak the language of female desire and subjectivity, are still considered pornographic, then the male gaze remains dominant. Following Carolyn's lead, we must therefore continue to articulate the language of the female body which, in its plenitude, might eventually engulf the merely monolithic structure of phallogocentric discourse. The fact that my computer is programmed to reject "phallogocentric" (which it considers orthographically unacceptable) seems to underscore this feminist imperative, especially since spell check recognizes "antidisestablishmentarianism" and similarly anachronistic (not to say ridiculous) words, despite the fact that French feminist language is undoubtedly more commonly used in the new millennium.

The good news is that Carolyn's pedagogical shocks, which collectively constituted a veritable San Andreas fault line of paradigm shifts, have helped to promote freer discussions of female sexuality and subjectivity. When I began teaching at Barnard College in the early Nineties, my students fell silent when we discussed the so-called phallic stage in Freud's theory of arrested development. No doubt Carolyn, with her pedagogical genius, could have prompted them to utter the word "clitoris" without dying of shock, but I could not. Now they bandy the word about as though they were talking about nothing more out-of-the-way than a finger or a nose, so freely, in fact, that they spontaneously protest the fallacious "fact of their castration," championing rather than shrinking from the theoretical implications of active or clitoral sexuality. Female subjectivity dares to speak its name. The ultimate result of Carolyn's feminist version of the talking cure is that what was once repressed and taboo is now powerful and desirable.

Having started out our lives as housewives or the daughters of housewives, we can attest to the miracle of the feminist movement in a way our students cannot. As a result, they can be remarkably lackadaisical about feminism, and even women's rights. This fact both gratifies and frightens me. If young women today don't feel the need to arm themselves for battle every time they dare to leave their homes, we have cause to celebrate. How wonderful that women can now attend Columbia College, that they can row on the East River in the wake of Title IX, and readily buy birth control, and expose sexual abuse at Take Back the Night rallies rather than internalizing someone else's shame. But their indifference to these hard-won privileges does not bode well. I'd like to record how things have changed so they won't change back again. After all, I am of the age that my friends had abortions on kitchen tables and lost everything in contentious divorces. Many of my friends attended college only after marrying and mothering and launching the careers of everyone else on the planet before their own. I'd like to record how one of Columbia University's most renowned professors once shared a cubbyhole in General Studies because women didn't teach in the College or Graduate School, and how this same woman ultimately resigned because, after all, things really hadn't changed that much during her tenure at Columbia. Mind you, I am not one of those disgruntled alumnae who malign Columbia and disparage the time I spent there as a graduate student. In fact, I like Morningside Heights so much I made it my professional home, traveling only across Broadway to Barnard College, teaching in the lion's mouth, as it were, translating the language of the academic king of beasts into other tongues.

The decision to study and continue to work at a place like Columbia University stems from ambivalent scholarly impulses, a reverence on the one hand for canonicity and a desire on the other to defy it. Seduced by the sublime aesthetics of Eliot's impersonal model of poetry in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," I was chronically reluctant to engage in biographical criticism. But Carolyn Heilbrun always wrenched our discussions of literature back to the personal - back to the actual life of the writer and how it did or did not foster female subjectivity in her writing and in her readers. This biographical recovery proves particularly challenging with authors who conform, at least on the surface of their writing, to the Modernist model of impersonal genius. Consistently resistant to the autobiographical impulse, Virginia Woolf never intended the sketches in Moments of Being to be published in their present form, though she might have suspected they would be. They certainly read more like public work than her private diaries whose publication, I dare say, she would have experienced more as a violation than as evidence of her stature as a writer. Had they not been published, however, we would never have understood the personal wellspring of her genius.

Carolyn Heilbrun's pedagogy has come full circle, and I am now eager to use biographical methodology to convince her that Gertrude Stein's sexual politics are radical, in practice as well as in theory. Thanks to the elucidation of deeply encoded autobiographical allusions, we now know that in spite of Stein's masculine pretensions, the act of writing was intimately connected to daily living with Alice B. Toklas. References to their sexual intimacies were so artfully obscured by unorthodox images, nearly a century elapsed before Stein's literary Caesars and cows revealed themselves as orgasms, and only then after brilliant scholars like Ulla Dydo and Catharine Stimpson spent half their careers poring over every last imperial moo on the page. Perhaps if I had called Carolyn's attention to the parallel structures of the Stein/Woolf ménages, she would have changed her mind about Gertrude. Just as Virginia successfully canonized female subjectivity in A Room of One's Own because Leonard was in the next room editing Hogarth Press editions, husbanding his wife's books through publication and making sure she ate lunch, so Gertrude successfully transcribed female plenitude in "As A Wife Has A Cow A Love Story" because Alice was in the next room editing the Plain Edition, wifing her wife's books through publication and making sure she ate lunch. How I miss debating this point with Carolyn.

Where the so-called personal meant the writer's life to first wave biographical critics like Carolyn Heilbrun, the personal is now beginning to include the scholar herself, the autobiography of the living woman wielding the critical pen. Thus the majority of this record of the "Writing a Feminist's Life" conference, in honor of Carolyn Heilbrun, consists of memoirs of contemporary critics. I take this to mean that we have finally fully recovered from the Modernist impersonal theory of art, with its thinly veiled patriarchal agenda. Autobiography is no longer a generic booby prize for women, who produce letters and memoirs and other merely personal forms of writing because they cannot muster the requisite subjectivity to write anything else. Feminists like Carolyn Heilbrun remind us that autobiography is radical and subversive, not trivial and submissive. Perpetuating her legacy, the proceedings of this conference suggest that we now truly believe that the personal is not only political, it is also a worthy subject of criticism as well as art.

A famously reluctant memoirist, Virginia Woolf writes in "A Sketch of the Past" that memoirs almost always fail because "they say: 'This is what happened'; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened." This profoundly psychological approach to the self, to the subject, to autobiography, contrasts sharply with Carolyn Heilbrun's much more existential approach to writing a woman's life. In this, Heilbrun is decidedly not postmodern; she asserts the self with resounding confidence. In this, she is not even a Modernist, if Woolf and Stein and Eliot are the exemplars of the movement, let alone Proust with his elusive memories of things past. "There will be time" to act, Eliot's Prufrock assures himself, once he has explored all the psychological ramifications of his quintessentially modern angst. Throughout her oeuvre, Carolyn insists that we are the authors of our own lives, and that action is the essence of authorship. In a less purely psychological mood, Woolf approaches this more existential stance when she suggests that, as a writer, she experiences life itself as a series of scenes which, after all, happen not just in the mind but in the actual world of action: "These scenes, by the way, are not altogether a literary device." Similarly, the memoir writer is not just a literary construct, postmodern theory notwithstanding. The subject of this memoir, a mixture of Carolyn Heilbrun and myself, is the sum total of the actions I am able to perform, including writing, thanks to her influence. Woolf goes on to say that, "when I am writing about a person, I must find a representative scene in their lives." The essence of the person is a scene, an event. In the case of Carolyn Heilbrun, there are two monumental events that tower above the rest.

The first emblematic scene occurred at my dissertation defense. By the time I completed my dissertation on "The Androgyny Crisis in Modernism," twenty-three years after Carolyn's publication of Toward a Recognition of Androgyny, I was perhaps the only person left in the academy who still believed in the theoretical viability of androgyny. I am not convinced even she still stood behind the thesis of her earlier work. Nevertheless, at my defense, Carolyn deflected an examiner's question as to whether or not this model, along with Cixous's "other bisexuality," was not outdated, if not outright counterproductive. With characteristic authority, gloriously dismissive in this case, Carolyn said, "That question is hardly relevant here. The dissertation speaks for itself." Though I have never been precisely sure what she meant, her tone certainly spoke for itself, and that was the end of this line of questioning. I have never felt so supported and protected and vindicated in my life, before or since, as though an army of Amazons (with buns) had just vanquished every last hostile force in the field of gender studies. If I were to psychoanalyze the almost embarrassing fact that I continue to believe that the androgynous syzygy dismantles dualistic hierarchies, and still read Jung and Cixous with my students, I might say that I am unwilling to let go of that moment of jouissance, when the feminist mentor of us all defended me at my defense.

The second emblematic scene consists of a single act of astonishing simplicity and power, the kind of routine action Carolyn no doubt performed numerous times a day as part of her habitual existential genius. Having already resigned in protest from Columbia, she avoided campus and invited me over to her apartment to discuss my ongoing work on my dissertation. After a fruitful conversation about the joys of dog walking in Central Park, Gertrude Stein's various canine companions, the inevitable superiority of the Woolfs' over the Steins' marriage, and a word or two about androgyny, I handed Carolyn the English Department's official dissertation progress report form. Without so much as reading the long series of questions on the form, which she may have known by heart or never deigned to read, she put pen to paper and wrote, in the center of the sheet, "excellent progress this year." She then handed the form back to me, asking as she escorted me out, what on earth I saw in pedigree cats.

That moment changed my life. Virtually every day - because every day is fraught with psychological demons and worldly distractions - I hearken back to Carolyn's refusal to countenance nonsense of any kind, real or imagined. At first I was aghast. Carolyn herself probably thought she was just dispensing with a tedious task as efficiently as possible. A professor, a novelist, a biographer, a wife, a mother, a dog walker, she didn't have time to fuss over forms. But to me, that act of the pen was terrifically transgressive. With characteristic audacity, she seemed to defy the superego itself, which still held great sway with me. Carolyn never needed to be the good girl, which is, perhaps, a woman's most serious temptation, earning the approbation of one father after another until silence ensues. This may be the source of the crippling perfectionism that haunts especially women, producing writer's block rather than manuscripts. Reducing the specious complexity of that form to a simple act of the pen, Carolyn repulsed the monstrous maw of bureaucracy, the paperwork and email that gobble up our time. Far from being unprofessional, her indifference to institutional protocol taught me to concentrate on what was really important - the work she needed to get back to that afternoon, and my work on the dissertation - not busywork on a form that may or may not be read, to no productive end. An existentialist, the author of this memoir, was born.

As a mentor, Carolyn strenuously rejected what might in this context be called the nurturing or even mothering model. She did not lavish attention on her students, the way Manhattan mothers hover over their children with self-sacrificial zeal. Carolyn used to tell the story that years ago she had instituted a system at home where each member of the family, including the children, was responsible for preparing dinner once a week, a practice that sometimes produced peanut butter sandwich meals, and so be it. In many ways, this was analogous to how she treated her graduate students, much to my satisfaction. Her professional, mature mentoring style offset the often infantalizing dynamic of graduate training. From a strictly feminist point of view, I had felt alienated by Ruth Perry's paradigm of "mothering the mind" as well as Julia Kristeva's metaphor of writing with maternal breast milk. A woman with no desire to play the role of mother, I needed what I considered to be a less reactionary model of feminist mentoring. This has been especially important to me in my work at Barnard, as women's colleges are all the more susceptible to falling into the trap of mothering their students, thereby arresting their development as independent thinkers. Far from feeling neglected as a graduate student, I learned from Carolyn's example that my job as a feminist was to pay attention to my own work, without worrying too much what others thought of it, because valuable work, not nurturing intentions, would best advance the cause of women.

Both A Room of One's Own and Writing a Woman's Life locate subjectivity in work. In Woolf's famous account of Chloe and Olivia, the fact that they "shared a laboratory together" has the potential to change not only the course of literary history but also the lives of the actual women who will enact and write this new history. There is, of course, an apparent irony here. Chloe and Olivia are fictional characters, thus reflecting postmodernism's contention that the self itself is a fictional construction. But this irony is now anachronistic. Almost a century of feminist work has transformed fiction into fact, at least for the woman who has, as Heilbrun puts it, ceased "automatically offering her services as cook and housekeeper and child watcher." Chloe and Olivia are now the very real women who people the pages of Writing a Woman's Life, women like Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich and Käthe Kollwitz, for whom work "marks the end of fantasy" and the beginning of a "stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying" life. Even Amanda Cross, Carolyn's nom de plume, was a real woman who rose at five in the morning to write mystery novels, before her children arose, before she transformed, when the clock struck nine, into Professor Carolyn Heilbrun of Columbia University. If Amanda Cross suffered from the "anxiety of authorship," she faced it down on a daily, even hourly basis. Though no doubt gripped with fantastic fears, just like the rest of us, Carolyn Heilbrun the writer managed to allay her fears with work. This is her most valuable gift to me. Whenever I feel paralyzed by the blank page, on a daily, even hourly basis, I think of Carolyn's existential example, and I pick up the pen and write.

Is there a self in this memoir, or in any memoir? At the risk of sounding naïve to poststructuralists (and Carolyn would definitely counsel throwing caution to the wind), I would assert that there most definitely is a self - the one who rises at five in the morning to write, and dashes off forms to save time to write, and eats peanut butter sandwiches for dinner in order to write some more. Like Eliot's "extinction of personality," Barthes' "death of the author" may constitute another plot, postmodern this time, to rob us of ourselves. Though this memoir does not pretend to present "a coherent life," as Woolf describes her biography of Roger Fry in "A Sketch of the Past," it does "sum up and make a knot out of innumerable little threads" connecting Carolyn Heilbrun with myself. It does present, through emblematic scenes, a record of the very real acts of very real women, not postmodern "paper-authors" but existential authors of their own lives. Far more than a theoretical construct or critical stance, feminism is an action. Feminists do things, thereby defying the prescribed sphere of passivity. Little wonder, then, that Carolyn's death was also an act, something she authored rather than something that happened to her. This final act was, I think, an assertion of the personal, the autonomous, the right to choose to be or not to be, all the things her life continues to embody in her work, and in the work we are able to produce and the lives we are able to live, thanks to her.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." Image-Music-Text. Ed. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1977.

---. "From Work to Text." 1971. Textual Strategies. Ed. Josue V. Harari. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979.

Cixous, Hélène and Catherine Clément. The Newly Born Woman. 1975. Trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.

Eliot, T. S. "Tradition and the Individual Talent." The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. 1920. New York: Methuen, 1960.

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. "Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship." The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Toward a Recognition of Androgyny. New York: Knopf, 1973.

---. Writing a Woman's Life. New York: Norton, 1988.

Perry, Ruth and Martine Watson Brownley. Mothering the Mind: Twelve Studies of Writers and Their Silent Partners. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1984.

Stein, Gertrude. "As A Wife Has A Cow A Love Story." 1926. A Stein Reader. Ed. Ulla E. Dydo. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1993.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. 1929. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989.

---. "A Sketch of the Past." Moments of Being. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.