Word: hardwick
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...LEVEL of literary criticism in the women's movement today is shamefully low," Elizabeth Hardwick told me, the afternoon before her talk in the Summer School's Literary Lecture Series on July 18. "That's what I'm going to talk about tonight," she confided, "--you'll see what I mean!" Coming from a literary critic of such high standing and such often devastating opinions--an advisory editor of the New York Review of Books, a woman who has accompanied the Review on its way of political radicalization, and who now speaks wearily of her experiences at the recent Democratic...
...mouldering collections of poetry by some oppressed New England saint; she preferred to scrutinize fictional heroines familiar to us all. Given the title of her lecture. "Seduced and Betrayed Women in Fiction," I had at least expected a descent into revealing murky depths along this pleasant stroll. But Hardwick's approach remained brisk and cheerful. Her "different way of seeing things now" did not represent a rallying-cry to the oppressed, to the long-suffering victims of sexual exploitation and abandonment, but an elementary lesson in power politics: meet your favorite heroine and watch her gain power through victimization. From...
...undertaking her journey in search of the truly victorious in the battle of the sexes, Hardwick eventually took pity on a bewildered young knight from The Canterbury Tales. Burdened with the task of finding Woman's heart's desire, he was to discover that the answer fit in perfectly with his own feudal society: to dominate. From Hardwick's final hypothesis, it would seem that this struggle for dominance on the part of the female has been the guideline in the fluctuating fortunes of seduction and betrayal ever since...
...review of a paradigm of socio-historical research. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, Hardwick described her responses to that work as "not like reading a book, but like playing a game." And Hardwick, one finds, is all in favor of this approach when it comes to reading a book she respects or setting up a model for a lecture. For her, the writing of fiction requires the inspiration of first-hand experience (an argument she used several years ago in explaining what she viewed as the limitations of women's literature). The reading of the fiction under Hardwick...
CLARISSA HARLOWE embodies the bourgeois, prudish ideas of her family, and Lovelace is the monomanical assailant of the complacent power she wields by virtue of her chastity. Clarissa's latent and unlady-like fascination for Lovelace's sordid reputation damns any possibility of her innocence or heroism in Hardwick's eyes. She complies unconsciously in her own downfall. Hester Prynne, too, is merely a symbolic figure, and she persists marble-like, from the moment she leaves prison--"the place where radicals are made"--by becoming the epitome of the omnipotent New England matriarch, a self-reliant Puritan. Like Tess...