ROBERT BOYERS
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genuine reality of women's lives by failing to reflect the possibilities they
might have realized had they been conscious of the actual choices. Consider–
ably more vicious, in the feminist view, are works in which women characters
fail
to
adapt but, in failing, achieve nothing but unhappiness and more or
less permanent disaffection from the stable norms of their culture . No
matter that, in fact , only quite exceptional people do manage to feel satis–
fied and
to
grow despite their having refused to adapt and to moderate their
demands. Correct works may acknowledge the norms, but will stress that
there are people in this world who are ready
to
resist, and who become all
the more appealing,
to
themselves and to us, in the degree that they elude
comfortable solutions. For feminist criticism, the failure of artists to arrive at
proper conclusions and
to
explicitly reject the existence of character types
functionally required by the male dominated institutions of advanced capi–
talism, is unforgivable, humanly and aesthetically reactionary. The view of
literary creation implicit in all of this is that the best writers necessarily have
what current fashion takes to be the best ideas and opinions, that these ideas
take hold of writers before they conceive their creative projects, and direct
their efforts . Qualities of temperament and will are ignored or entirely
discounted.
Nothing more perfectly illustrates the impoverishment of feminist criti–
cism than recent feminist approaches to the art of film. The problems are
usefully concentrated in a book by Joan Mellen, entitled
Women And Their
Sexuality In The New Fzlm.
I shall say at once that it is an awful book, and
that it is likely to do a great deal of damage.
It
has been extravagantly praised
by a variety of feminists and academics, and is now widely distributed in an
inexpensive paperback edition. Moreover, Ms. Mellen knows how to write,
and has read just enough Freud, Marx and Reich to sound like she knows
what she's talking about. Alas, her book indicates that a little learning is as
dangerous as some have said it is .
But let us consider what Ms. Mellen has to say. Her original object was
to discover in contemporary films "a new perception of women which as–
sumes their capacities and value ." Disappointed in this goal, she wishes in
her book to examine the various "negative" images of women projected in
recent films, and
to
urge upon film-makers and film-goers a liberationist
discipline that will create a new kind of film informed by .. a new perception
of women." This is not the place to go into all of the assumptions under–
lying Ms . Mellen's approach, but surely we can pick at one or two. First, and
most obviously , there is the theory of "negative" images. In Ms. Mellen's
view, these include most generally "patronizing and hostile portrayal of
women as flawed creatures." What, we may wonder, is a patronizing and
