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.
