A collection of discrete essays always illuminating and enlarging
from the particular to convey something beyond the existence of
certain women whether in life or the life they assumed through art.
In some cases (Zelda's for instance - this on the "inadvertently"
shifted focus of Mrs. Mil-ford's success) art for art's sake, not
as the brothers Goncourt conceived it, becomes a form of tyranny
and Zelda's frenetic energies were scattered in a desperate attempt
to prove something - her splintered self. Again art may be the
by-product of another kind of entrapment - the self-destructive
despair of Sylvia Plath for whom suicide was just another form of
assertion. Sometimes creativity is only a surrogate alternative -
see Miss Hardwick's lovely piece on the Brontes; battered by
circumstances those high-minded, "serious, wounded, longing women"
found the outside world was unavailable. Thus in many cases Lionel
Trilling's "What marks the artist is his power to shape the
material of pain we all have" is only too clearly demonstrated. On
the other hand, subsiding into domesticity, never free of the daily
vexations of the man around the house or the household, we have the
"Amateurs" - Dorothy Wordsworth and put-upon Jane Carlyle, both
accessories of greater men. There is a triptych of "Ibsen's Women"
- the sympathetic Nora, the meaner-spirited and more ambiguous
Hedda, and Rosmerholm's less familiar Rebecca West. The title
piece, which is also the closing one, opposes not only seduction
and betrayal, but also lust versus stoicism in the 19th century
works of Hawthorne and Dreiser and Tolstoy until we reach modern
times: "Now the old plot is dead, fallen into obsolescence. You
cannot seduce anyone when innocence is not a value." There are
gains - there are also losses. . . . One of the cardinal virtues of
Miss Hardwick's essays is that she returns us to the intricate,
multivalent relationships - always contained within society's
"arrangements" - of people that singularly attract us and they are
appraised with a fine intelligence and just sensibility. (Kirkus
Reviews)
The novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick is one of contemporary
America's most brilliant writers, and "Seduction and Betrayal," in
which she considers the careers of women writers as well as the
larger question of the presence of women in literature, is her most
passionate and concentrated work of criticism. A gallery of
unforgettable portraits--of Virginia Woolf and Zelda Fitzgerald,
Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Carlyle--as well as a provocative
reading of such works as "Wuthering Heights, Hedda Gabler," and the
poems of Sylvia Plath, "Seduction and Betrayal" is a virtuoso
performance, a major writer's reckoning with the relations between
men and women, women and writing, writing and life.
General
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