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.
