Word: hardwicks
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...HARDWICK 531 pages. Scribner...
...doesn't talk too much," and dismisses the Story of O because it's a parody of French literature--besides it's pornography!" Seeing everything as a phase in some historical sequence, she dislikes de Beauvoir's existentialism, because it is always searching for conclusions and final decisions. Hardwick's style is more open-ended and experimental; a sense of intellectual vagueness pervades many of her more casual thoughts because she is constantly seeking for an even deeper answer. (Her deeper answers lie in her writing.) She believes strongly in the importance of speaking as a woman, for women...
Asking her reasons for stopping short at the twentieth century in her study, produced a more amusing insight on the rules of Hardwick's game. "I think that everything has changed in contemporars fiction," she smiles. "It's no longer a question of seduction and betrayal--there's just activity." Much of her talk was filled with a light-hearted rapport with her listeners. Gracious, delicate, charming, her Southern accent murdering a figure like Lovelace with a characteristic drawl of "ba-a-ad news," Hardwick was able to communicate much of her own personality to her audience. Always sympathetic...
...Hardwick's "playing-cards" provides a thoughtful, if not wholly comprehensive alternative to the "unhistorical feminist telescope made in Japan" she feels the women's movement has been using so rashly in analyzing past literature. Whether it is her Southern background or her long years of literary experience, Hardwick stresses the pre-eminent importance of accurate historical perspective. She condemns the "telescope" as a kind of retroactive method, which ridiculously not merely regrets the trials and tribulations of fictional females, but attacks their authors and authoresses for marrying off so many of their women. In this way, the writers supposedly...
...Hardwick is offended and infuriated most of all, however, by "little things that come floating through the mail"; Women's Lib pamphlets and propaganda whose very language and terminology insult her intellectual sensibilities. "At whom is it leveled, what good do they think it will do?" she asks, understandably, from her position as successful and professionally independent woman. There were those who cringed, however, at an absent-minded answer she gave to the effect that there are "only one or two women writers one thinks of when looking at the nineteenth century." (Maybe some day the pamphlet will come floating...