Public Motherhood

I broke my own rule of never looking at Salon comments, since they generally tend to sap my belief in human goodness. I've fumed over the people telling Joe Lieberman to go back to Israel (Jews of course are only Americans when Christians agree with them), shuddered at the victim blaming responses to Kate Harding's columns, and felt ill at the blatant hate and misogyny that appears whenever a woman speaks, but particularly if she speaks about abortion or feminism. However, the comments on Ayelet Waldman's pieces reach a level of vitriol that I think might be unprecedented. What does it mean, when readers find depictions of motherhood to be more repulsive than even their usual strawmen of Jews,gays, girls who drink and/or are raped, and women who exercise control over their own bodies and voices?

I know that many of you might not like Waldman, for a diversity of reasons, and while I emphatically do like her, that's not really the point of this piece. I'd like to talk about one of the specific criticisms that usually gets lobbied against her and with which the Salon commenters truly outdid themselves. Most of the responses against her were not addressed to what she was saying in her individual articles, but rather were angry that she was speaking at all about Motherhood. Ironically, in an age of mommyblogs and mommy-driven tv advertisements, many people still seem to think that talking about motherhood at all is inherently inappropriate and immodest. People asked, "What if your children read this?" or called her an emotionally unstable oversharer. They responded to her piece with criticisms that her writing was filthy and should not be read and often prided themselves as having stopped at the first paragraph, as if that mechanism of self-censoring, of keeping themselves from the contamination of her prose, proved something not only about Waldman'their own mental, moral acuity.

It is this aspect of immodesty and immorality which particularly interests me. After all, in my own opinion, it would be less damaging for Waldman's son to one day read that his mother had hoped that he would be gay than for a child of Rick Warren's to one day learn that his father had helped craft legislation in Uganda that was used to deny human rights. Waldman uses her family as the plot and core of her writing; she has taken the domestic sphere and assumed that this traditionally female world nevertheless has insights and meaning for a greater populace. As I read it, her own family has become the microcosm through which her understanding of humanity functions. This is actually fairly common for writers, after all. Louisa May Alcott may have changed the names of her sisters for Little Women, but this device was only a transparent one. Saul Bellow showcased his ex-wives as the harpies of his novels. The idea that authors draw, often visibly, from life is one accepted broadly by the literary elite of our society.

However, the domestic sphere of motherhood remains a taboo one for mothers to speak provocatively about, both because it has traditionally been considered a private space (juxtaposed with the public, professional world of men), and because it is an environment of emotion and sentiment, also traditionally female and thus inherently insignificant . Takin on the latter first, many of the commenters in fact questioned why Salon would even be interested in Waldman's reflections on motherhood or why any "intellectual" would find value in such musings. Judith Warner, the "mommy blogger" for the New York Times has also faced similar questions and challenges for her own work. My guess would be that the entertainment sections of news outlets, with their coverage of American Idol and Dexter, don't face the same questions of relevance and greater significance that women columnists writing about women's lives, whether relationships, workplace challenges, health issues, or motherhood, face for every single publication. Of course, motherhood is something that every individual reader has had experience of, whether as the actor or recepient, yet despite its ubiquity, it is considered insiginficant and unnewsworthy, even in comparison to articles about fatherhood and paternity. The comments on the recent New York Times article about disputed paternity didn't ask "What's the point?" as at least one comment on every article about female life experience seems to.

Emotion and sentiment do show up as frequent themes within Waldman's work, yet I would argue that our very understanding of emotion and sentiment as unintellectual and pedestrian is a gendered one, harkening back to the Enlightenment's hierarchization of masculine-labeled Reason over soft, feminine, Feeling. Society has long had a vested interest in keeping the domestic sphere both emotional and private, as the place to which the professional men could return, relax the grim facades they showed to the world, and expose their hidden tenderness. When women start exposing the daily realities of life within a family, and not just the idealized models forcefed our society as acceptable pictures of maternity and womanhood, they expose not just the children, but also their own husbands' emotional "nakedness." They show the public something that our American Christian heritage has long told us was meant to be kept private. Thus, for the Salon commenter who asked a defender of Waldman if she allowed her small child to witness her giving oral sex to her husband, this is no leap of logic. The privacy of the child often seems to come back to the sexualized privacy of the husband, his security in maintaining his home as a non-public, distinct sphere.

This is not to say that children themselves don't deserve privacy. However, the extent to which Mommy blogging is perceived to threaten children as opposed to the very public behaviors of fathers across the country, seems to point to greater issues than whether or not a 20 year old will regret his mother publishing his seven year old thought that he might be gay. He might perhaps feel embarrassed. However, the actions of all parents, both fathers and mothers, have the potential to embarrass and humiliate their children. It is the potential of the mother to embarrass that seems to particularly haunt American readers.

Are the Israeli charedim "good for the jews?"

The news that a woman was arrested at the Kotel for wearing a tallit earlier this month was a striking reminder to me of how far ideologically Israel truly is from America. American Jews are called on upon to support Israel politically, financially, and unwaveringly. When we question Israeli policies, we are called blood traitors, self-haters, or Nazi collaborators. However, ultimately the real break between Israel and American Jews may not come from the increasing discomfort on the part of American Jews with the violence and lack of diplomacy that Israeli leaders repeatedly indulge in; rather, it may come from the Orthodox dictators eventually deciding that all of us over here really aren't Jews after all. The question will be, will we still all be asked for money and political support once our birthright is taken away? Will the letterhead be addressed "Dear goyish mamzerim?"

In Israel, it would be literally illegal for me to marry my (born-Catholic) boyfriend. True, he could try to convert, but in Israel as we saw last year in the headlines, his conversion could be retroactively nullifed a decade later by a different Rabbi feuding with his predeccessor. (Thank you, Avraham Sherman!) One minute, you'd be married, with legitimate children, and the next, you're notified that your marriage never happened and your children are bastards. I just don't see Ha-Shem being ok with something like that. If we teach that a convert was born with a Jewish soul, what kind of soul does someone whose conversion was nullified have? Why convert with rules like that? Look up conversion of http://www.failedmessiah.com/ to see just how much of a clusterf--k these haredi rabbis have made.

The rules of religion in Israel are basically set up to exclude people, not just Arabs, but other Jews. If you believe that G-d has bigger things to worry about than gay sex, congrats you're not a real Jew. If you think that a man who has a problem hearing a woman's voice in prayer should maybe just get over it, come back to the Kotel later, or put in ear plugs, well then you're a heretic (really, we're using that word now?).

The sad thing is, the Women of the Wall are not asking for equality in prayer. They only want equal access to the most sacred place in Judaism (next to the Temple Mount, but it's not like any of us are getting over there). They're not storming on to the men's side or treating the Torah with disrespect by reading from it without wearing a tallit or kippah. They wanted to hold a service for women only, making the basic assumption that, unlike haredi men, G-d is not offended by a woman's voice raised in prayer. Many of the comments on http://www.jewlicious.com/ were appalling; calling the women troublemakers and anti-semites, asking about the rights of the men who currently pray on more than two-thirds of the wall and why women can't just be satisfied with knowing that they got it easy from Ha-Shem.

Most American Jews are religious Jews. They may eat clam chowder now and again, but they believe deeply in Judaism and in their identity as part of Am Israel. They go to synagogue fairly often, although many drive to get there. They raise their children as Jews while managing to treat the often non-Jewish father/mother of the same children with respect. Assimilation gives Judaism the chance to take on a broader meaning, not a lesser one. When the Israeli rabbis call these people heretics or goyim, they create a schism right down the community and threaten to remove the meaning of Israel for American Jews. Why support a country that hates your president, that doesn't recognize your marriage, your rabbi, or your children? How can an American Jew reconcile their own love for democracy and equality and then write a check to a nation that allows its bigots to dictate its religious and cultural policy? How can I, a woman who prays to G-d (although not with a tallit or kippah), believe that a country that arrested a devout woman while she was holding a Torah is a fitting nation in the sight of G-d?

I teach Religious School to children who will one day find out that many of them are not considered Jews by the Orthodox community. How do I explain to them, or to my own future children (who will be Jews, but probably illegitimate to some ultra-Orthodox), that they should support a country that does not acknowledge them? How do we raise American supporters of Israel who Israel itself will treat with contempt? American Judaism may have a lot of problems facing it, but it has a sense of morality and justice that the Israeli version seems to have altogether lost sight of.

"excluding" half-Jews

The Jezebel article on half-Jews was unfortunately frustrating, even though I usually like the author quite a lot. I guess the very idea of a self-labeled "half-Jew" decrying their lack of inclusion into Orthodox Judaism seems illogical and deliberately targeting. I get it, Jews stick together, you don't feel included, you think the ethnic identity of half your DNA can excuse you from responsibility over not perpetuating stereotypes, etc.

A couple of things, though. One, whatever the haredi Jews in Israel say, the only person who decides whether an American Jew is Jewish or not is that Jew him/herself. If your father is Jewish (like the author and many complaining commenters), any Reform or Reconstructionist congregation in America would love you as a member. I know many Hebrew school teachers whose fathers were not Jewish and yet who consider themselves proud Jews. However, of course, the author of the article is not looking for synagogue membership. In fact, she defines half-Jews as those who either "compromise" by going to Unitarian or Quaker memberships or those who light menorahs in front of Christmas trees and grow up without a "single religion."

Everyone's faith is their own business of course, but I don't see how belonging to a Christian Church and not identifying as Jewish really qualify one as an MOT. I don't get how the author can complain about being excluded from a religion/culture which she indicates no desire to participate in. Is she taking Hebrew lessons? Does she study any Jewish history or current politics? Does she observe any holidays? Does she laugh when those around her, assuming she's Christian, make jokes about Jews? It's not just like being Italian or Irish; Judaism is a commitment to a people and a heritage that is simply not compatible with simultaneously practiced Christianity. When someone with only one Jewish parent makes that commitment, they're not called a "half-Jew." They're simply Jewish, whatever the Orthodox mishpocha thinks about it.

Being Jewish may come with a free Birthright Israel trip (thanks, btw, it was great!), but it also comes with a lot of burdens. In the eyes of much of this country and the world, to be Jewish is never to be completely white, completely American, completely "normal." It is to grow up knowing about the Holocaust, and pogroms, and suicide bombings against Israeli civilians. It is to know that as a Jewish woman, particularly among other secular Jews, your looks are valued on how well you can pass as non-Jewish. There is a reason why so many of the commenters have shiksa mothers; decades after Annie Hall, a WASPy blond is still the ultimate catch for a Jewish man. For many of us, women included, thanks to the openness of American society, passing is still a constant tempation and often a resented fantasy.

I have only respect for those individuals who are born as "half-Jews," and decide to embrace their Jewish identity, willingly tackling all of the above. Those are the people whom I believe the Conservative movement should move to welcome and whom the State of Israel should incorporate under its policy for olim. However, the "half-Jews" of this article, who consider themselves equally "half-Christian," have excluded themselves from the Jewish community. If they ever wish to return, to shoulder their responsibilities as Jews and assume the joy and sorrow inherent in a Jewish identity, we'll be waiting.

Whitney, My Love

I just finished Judith McNaught's "Whitney, My Love" last night and I have to say that I found the experience fairly disturbing. In its favor, the book reads as solid, if unimaginative, prose with good characterizations. It's extremely absorbing as well; I read the first three hundred pages in one sitting. However, finishing the book later that night, I was left with a sense of great insecurity and doubt about love, not the emotions that a romance novel is supposed to elicit. If as Jayne Ann Krentz famously stated, romance novels are ones in which "the answer is always yes," then "Whitney, My Love" might in fact have been ascribed to entirely the wrong genre. More than anything, it seems to dwell on the fragility of love, the instability of romantic relationships which constantly teeter on the brink of hate and lust (here seen as entirely negative). Here, the answer the characters get is not a "yes," but a perpetual "maybe."

This novel can clearly be seen to follow the genre of "oppositional romance" created most famously by Jane Austen in "Pride and Prejudice." Just like P&P, it has a male and female lead who frequently despise each other and yet are manifestly destined to be together. In P&P, the conflict between the two leads provides the main narrative thrust, culiminating in a joyous denouement in which all ambiguity and misinterpretation have been cleared away. "Whitney" seems to wish to imitate this model, and yet the book diverges from it in many significant ways. The type of emotional growth and maturity demonstrated by Darcy and Elizabeth over the course of the novel is lacking here. Whitney might hate the Duke when she originally meets him, but she apparently hates him just as much four hundred pages later when she believes him to have broken their engagement, despite intervening declarations of affection.

Both main characters of the novel are able to go for long stretches of time believing themselves deeply in love with the other and then, upon some mistaken revelation, reverse entirely and deny all previous emotion. They allow the present to cancel out all the past they have built together and that is, or at the very least should be, inexcusable in a romance novel. Here, love lacks all constancy. The characters are repeatedly quick to believe the worst of each other and to act on that misapprehension. Circumstances may align to bring those misunderstandings to a point of clarity and thus facilitate reconciliation, yet the very arbitrary nature of the resolution itself highlights the lack of trust which necessitated its implementation within the narrative.

It is almost absurd to imagine, within some post-denouement future, Darcy repudiating Elizabeth after discovering yet another abhorrent relation. Or on the contrary, Elizabeth invalidating her affection upon recieving a cold look or word from her husband. And yet, McNaught allows her leads to do just that, to erase all claims of love based on a rumor, a scrap of paper, an ill-timed letter. And, she does this not just once, but four or five times, building layers of insecurity and doubt upon what the reader is meant to envision as a marriage. For McNaught, love itself, without intervention, does not pervail or survive (particularly for the man); thus, any happy ending is automatically overshadowed by the ephemarality and romantic inauthenticity of that conclusion.

This wouldn't be quite so disturbing if McNaught wasn't percieved as one of the direct and most important literary heirs of Austen and Heyer within the genre. As the first modern writer to take up the mantle of historical regency, her conclusions seem to take on a greater weight, to speak for our era in the face of earlier generations. Yet, what she says speaks only to a cynicism and a blatant distrust of affection which, if valid, should shame us all.

Thoughts on "The History of Love"

I have difficulty deciding if The History of Love functions best as an affirmation or inditement of romantic love. Perhaps, in a particularly disturbing way, it does both. Love is seen as the raison d'etre of many of the adult main characters and yet, it also debilitates and permanently maims them. Alma's mother and Leo Gursky, the two adults most central to the story (ignoring Zvi Lvitinof for the moment), each seem to be unceasingly drowning in their own love. Their emotion has lost its object and yet the emotion itself traps them. By the time Leo Gursky loses his family to the Nazis, he had already lost something of himself that he is simply never capable of getting back. The novel seems to warn of the danger of putting a human being at the center of your world. The characters circle as satellites around a beloved who inevitably disappears; lost, bewildered, they orbit still, unable to replace that center or willing to live independent of it. At one point in their lives, Leo Gursky and Charlotte Singer each created a definition of themselves and their place in the world that had another human at its heart. Now, alone, they live with memories and rob themselves of the possibility of further life. This is wrenchingly romantic, true, but it also a terrible, heartbreaking waste, leaving the reader crying not so much for the lost love as for the lost life.

Thus, the final ambiguity left in Alma's relationship with her friend Misha seems both intentional and salvatory for the reader. She feels herself falling in love and fighting it at the same time. And at least, we don't have to see her fall. Alma is preserved by her indecision, saved for the space of the book, and thus forever in the imagination of the reader, from the descent into love/obsession that haunts her elders. Human life is transitory, human relationships even more so. And yet, for Krause and her characters the ephemerality of every type of relationship only serves to highlight love's centrality. The Holocaust is thus an ideal backdrop for the story. It allows Krause to play with a character madly in love, who has lost every human being capable of stirring emotion within him. His choice to "live" as a hollow satellite of the people he loved from the past seems like an ultimate rejection of life. Leo Gursky has centered his life around loving the dead or unattainable. The reader is torn with the aching, sad waste of such a pursuit, the emptiness vacancy that spans a life stole from the teeth of Hitler's murderers. Among all the dead, he alone has a chance to live and chooses to spend it loving a vacuum. And yet, looking at the issues the opposite way, if love is the most powerful form of remembering, of recreating the vanished beloved, then people like Leo Gursky and Alma's mother are also fighting waste, preserving love despite the destruction of human life.

I don't really have an answer on this. Reading back to the very beginning of the book, it seems that perhaps Nicole Krauss thinks she does. She refers to her husband as her life, the same phrase that Gursky uses for his Alma. So, perhaps, we as readers are meant to embrace the romance and value it over the simultaneous, inseparable emptiness experienced by the characters. Krause has presented a picture of love with loneliness and loss always only briefly held at bay, a love that is a denial of both life and death. Perhaps as Alma wonders, such love is simply too much, as she silently begs her mother, "Love me less."(pg. 43) And yet, neither Alma nor the reader can turn away from it. Maybe the only message we are meant to take away from the book is that no one in life, love, or death, ever really has a choice.

Reading Romance Literature

As an author, Georgette Heyer does not so much fit the genre of Romance Literature, as define it. If Austen holds the ultimate adulatory status, then Heyer comes a distinguished second. Perhaps, as I'm sure many self-proclaimed intellectuals would argue, that is not particularly notable in a field of literature which at its best is patronized by the public and its worse, relentlessly mocked. And, of course, there are some examples of execrable prose and plot among romance novels, the way there are many among any genre. However, romance novels are women's literature and thus inferior to any other form of textual production. In the literary climate of Modern America (as well as every other place/time), women can either write to be read by men or eschew all claims to "literary merit."

Heyer and Austen write for women (though Austen at least has now found a wide-spread, if unwilling, male readership in progressive high school classes). They write about the female experience in society, embracing female characters who seek to preserve their own identityand human integrity by actively pursuing (relatively) safe marriages based on affection and financial security. They write narratives whose trajectories end in happiness and are thus dismissed as "light" and unrealistic. However, in many ways, Heyer and Austen are the most "realistic" of novelists. In an age when Keith Gesson can publish a critically acclaimed book dealing with the ephemeral travails of being a young man in our society and be considered an intellectual writer, there should be no stigma assigned with Heyer or Austen or any other woman writing narratives of young women trying to find themselves. Yes, they associate finding their identities with finding men. However, few young men coming of age do so in a fictional world devoid of women. Perhaps, for male readers of such books (both the involuntary and the potentially nonexistent willing ones), the true unreality comes from these female authors' assertion that it is love for which their characters seek. Sex on the other hand, seems a much more realistic and laudatory goal.

Heyer and Austen write of women trapped in penury, legally owned by their fathers, forced to live lives constrained by the minutiae of social detail. And yet, they are transcendent characters, recasting the inevitable trajectory of their lives into a context of choice and will. Romance novels give both their characters and readers a vision of female intentionality and decision. Still, they never forget to also tender the reassurance that such "unfeminine" agency does not need inevitably to result in a context of loneliness and alienation. Heyer and Austen assert that there are lucky women who find exceptional men who allow them to maintain the integrity of their characters and their agency without sacrificing the love and companionship for which all people, both men and women, yearn. Is that unrealistic? Too idealistic to qualify as the focus of a serious genre of literature? Well maybe...but judging from the amount of readership which romance literature achieves, the intellectual community might eventually want to get around to examining, instead of merely denigrating, such "female" concerns in its literature and scholarship.

The Drama of Narrative and Life in "The Group"

When confronted by a book like Mary McCarthy's The Group, following the lives of eight Vassar graduates, it is perhaps a natural response for the reader to try to identify with individual characters. Perhaps one might see some of Libby in onself, or rather Lakey, or on the contrary, feel a revulsion towards Kay, or Priss or Norine. We see each woman through her own eyes for such a short time and then we are reduced to once again seeing her through the cloudy lens of others' opinion. We wish as readers to judge, to quantify, to feel as if we might sum up a character and shelve her; confronted by eight, perhaps this is the only way to procede. And yet, McCarthy seems to both intuit our impulse and to deny it. She leaves us with each woman's internal humanity, her fright and joy and the sheer drama which each person's life holds for themselves. And then, once we feel that we might just see the soul, the essence, the uniqueness of that woman, McCarthy again drops the curtain. Because of course, every person is the whole world in their own eyes...and something much less to even their friends and lovers, let alone to the general populace.

One might even say that it is to some extent those interactions with others, almost always men, which define these women's life moments as dramatic enough to witness. Thus, Dottie Renfrew is worth looking at while losing her virginity to a man all the readers know is bad news. She willingly forfeits her dramatic, narrative potential when deciding to marry that man Brook from Arizona. In a classic role reversal, Dottie's mother begs her to throw away security for "love," for the one moment of transgressive, rule-breaking passion of Dottie's life. She feels disappointed in Dottie when Dottie refuses, let down by Dottie's very practicality and sense (pg. 229). Dottie has thrown away her chance for drama and centrality in the narrative. She could have married the weak, immoral man and remained a central figure, like Kay. And yet, instead Dottie chooses to close that curtain of reader interest herself. She chooses happiness and security over passion. Perhaps a model person, but certainly not a model character, as McCarthy herself concludes by passing over her for the rest of her book. Apparently, there is no drama, and thus no rasion de lire once a Vassar girl goes to Arizona.

The truly dramatic women, with whom we are meant to emotionally connect, tend to be the ones who inhabit constantly emotionally-searing landscapes. In particular, I think Kay and Polly remain the most truly dramatic and ergo the most heavily developed characters of the novel. Kay, whose story bookends the entire novel, seems inevitably destined for despair. Polly in contrast, beginning in poverty seems designed for an equally inevitable, Horatio Alger-ish rise to happiness. These characters are created on a trajectory; it is unclear whether it is their lives that lend themselves to a dramatic narrative or vice versa, but either way, they lack the stagnant security which to McCarthy signals a life lacking in both conflict and significance. When wondering which characters to empathize with and focus on, the reader of The Group might keep in mind the narrative blandness of contentment and the lure of a falling/rising star.