Word: mailer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fairness, Mailer transcends his sexist prejudices and does quite a job on Sister Kate, a beautiful and sensitive one perhaps, but nevertheless, a job. He hammers away at the "flatiron" of her mind, calls her to task for slight flaws and gross insensitives in her argument...
...opens his attack by uncovering Millett's sexual gaff in her treatment of the motivation for the central murder in Mailer's own, An American Dream. Millett maintains that the novel's hero Rojack kills his wife to punish her for committing sodomous adultery. But Mailer insists (and who after all, should know better than he?) that the crime was not in fact, sodomy, but analingus. Academic perhaps, but indicative to Mailer of a mind that hedges the niceties of distinction, a mind that abandons evidence in the pursuit of thesis...
...criticizes Millett for sins of omissions as well. He notices that in a chapter she calls "The Sexual Revolution, First Phase: 1830-1930," she actually neglects to discuss anything that happens between 1900 and 1930. Thus, she quietly skirts the first world war and the twenties-a decade, notes Mailer, "conceivably as interesting in the emancipation of women as any other ten years since the decline of Rome...
...WHAT Mailer finally considers Millett's fatal flaw is the way she butchers the literary material and the writers she criticizes. D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Jean Genet all fall under her carving knife. (So does Mailer, for that matter, but in the Harper's essay, he seems to be too, er, modest to reflect on Millett's criticism of his own work, except in passing.) He is, however, swift to show us how and where the good woman wrecks havoc...
Charging that Millett disrupts the chronology of Lawrence's work to prove that he is a "counterrevolutionary sexual politician," Mailer restores the chronology, plus several passages Millett has lacerated with ellipses and paraphrase. Then, he brings to the analysis such delicacy and compassion for Lawrence that the section often moves along with the surge of a hymn, and may perhaps be among the finest pieces of Lawrence criticism to date...