KH: I was just showing my work as part of a panel at UCLA. I attended another panel of women artists where the first audience question was, "Do you find working with your autobiography self-indulgent?" I was struck by that question. Why is it that the first question about this work is whether or not it's self-indulgent? Will women be making work about their experience always be accused of being self-indulgent and narcissistic? So it is interesting for me to now hear you say that people made the same comments to you in the early sixties. Could you speak to this? Do you think that this relates to your teacher's comment, "Don't put your heart into art [because you're 'just a girl']"?
CS: If a man crosses a threshold to depict or engage a lived reality, he becomes a hero. To deal with actual lived experience--that's a heroic position for a male and a trivial exposure for a woman. A woman exploring lived experience occupies an area that men want to denigrate as domestic, to encapsulate as erotic, arousing, or supporting their own position.
Culturally it has to do with the whole diminution of the feminine, what is female. Being so saturated with our own contradictory traditions and the degree of freedom that we have within these shifting traditions, it is hard for us to see where the deep hatred of the feminine still maintains its squirmy hostile boundaries.
This reminded me of two criticisms I read lately of Jane Austen. One is from Martin Amis (1996): "Jane Austen is weirdly capable of keeping everybody busy. The moralists, the Eros-and-Agape people, the Marxists, the Freudians, the Jungians, the semioticians, the deconstructors--all find an adventure playground in six samey novels about middle-class provincials. And for every generation of critics and readers, her fiction effortlessly renews itself." This is one of the great things to me, about Austen: in a weirdly pre-feminist way, she depicts the "feminine" side of English country life - society and relationships and the mercenary institution of marriage - and in sense, she does so with very little romance. She was high minded morally, and though her stories are often given stronger romantic overtones in contemporary adaptations, her work is deeply ironic. In the context of Schneemann's comments on the continuing denigration of all things feminine as trivial, Austen's triumph feels even greater to me.
The second criticism is, more broadly, an argument that the depiction of Elizabeth Bennet in Joe Wright's 2005 Pride and Prejudice is a post-feminist Elizabeth, a postmodern one even. She isn't a middle-class English country girl fighting for her liberty and right to marry who she chooses - she's won that battle already, and she assumes her freedom carelessly. This is something that I suppose might be a negative criticism, but it's something that I really, really appreciate about this particular adaptation. Austen adaptations ride waves of popularity over the years, with filmmakers repurposing her stories and introducing them to new generations. I love that this latest incarnation of Elizabeth Bennet can be viewed as post-feminist. Though I know we aren't really in a place where the feminist fight is no longer relevant, we're still in a place where depicting a woman as possessed of her independence and liberty is a positive thing. It's subtle, in this adaptation, but it's still there. Lizzy roams the countryside at her leisure, oversees her own formal education, and forms her own opinions (or judgements) of people's characters regardless of their class. At the same time, she partakes in feminine pleasures with her sisters. She goes to town to shop for ribbons, she enjoys dancing, she takes pride in preparing and dressing for the ball, and she girl-talks with her sister under the covers at night. She's both strong-minded and independent, and feminine and girly. And don't contemporary women have the right to be both?
I would also just like to observe that it is 10:30 on a rainy Friday night and I am in pajamas in bed eating a bit of a baguette and drinking white zinfandel while watching Atonement and reading scholarly articles on feminist experimental filmmakers for fun. I can't decide if I am completely satisfied or if I think I need a life.
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