PARTISAN REVIEW
283
Indeed, it is a simple matter to recognize that in
Women and M ad–
ness,
we
are once again being served up the prototypical female mono–
logue. The book is a ladies-magazine smorgasbord of Demeter, Sylvia
Plath, the penis-envy paragraphs of Freud, the usual bits from Reich,
Laing, and Cooper, photographs of Athenian pottery, of paintings by
Raphael, Rossetti, and Fra Bartolornmeo, of the sculpture of a wounded
Amazon, a few charts and tables, some poetry and writing of the women's
Liberation movement, and the words of women patients interviewed by
Chesler. Chesler has actually
written
only a portion of this 333 page book.
There is a poem of hers, "Something Borrowed, Something Blue," and a
sampler of asides, pauses, and sighs in the galaxy of footlIlotes: "Men
are often victims of nature, but women
are
'nature.''' "I really wonder
what a group of Amazon women would make of my
writing
about them?"
"Promiscuity, like 'frigidity' is both a 'female' and a 'non-female' trait:
either can mean a flight into or a flight from 'feminity.' "
Thus, even those who have come fOl'th to praise
Women and Mad–
ness
we are once again being served up the prototypical female mono–
as a personal document, "a passionate essay." Why should a woman, with
the intellectual and philosophical aspirations which Chesler lays claim
to,
have decided to speak out to 1lhe worJd in the voice of Cinderella?
Surely, as a student of Language and Llterature at Bard College, she
must have been exposed to the inseparable relationship between form and
content, emotionaJ and intellectual truth? Chesler herself says, "Women
must be able to go as directly to the 'heart' of physicaJ, technological,
and intellectual reality as they presumably do
to
the heart of emotional
reality. This reqwres discipline, courage, confidence, anger, the ability to
act, and an overwhelming sense of joy and urgenoy." Alas,
Women and
Madness
is
hardly an act of courage, confidence, and joy. Such qualities
of thought cannot survive her strident quest to redo the world in an
image comfortable to her own needs and person-al saavation. The book
is rather an advertisement for pollyannish optimism and
chutzpah.
Ches–
ler
has
not yet learned to respect her own observation that the abi1ity to
act requires emotional and intellectual discipline.
As psychological researcher, theoretician, and clinician, Chesler de–
vises antidotes for the clinical and diagnosnic monstrosities of the psy–
chiatric profession that are themselves an expression of a naive and out–
dated conception of the human mind. Chesler's "theoretical proposaJ"
has
it that, "What we consider 'madness' whether it appears in women or
in
men is either the acting-out of the devalued female role or the .total
or partial rejection of one's sex-role stereotype." "Female diseases" are
merely the reflection of -the self-destructive, turning-aggression-toward-
