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.
