608
PARTISAN REVIEW
various intransigeant ftxations which "no amount of cultural engineering and
consciousness raising will inevitably
affect.
An apologist for no ideological
position explicitly demeaning to women, Bergman's portraits of confused,
anxious,
sometimes
self-consuming women nonetheless make him a target
for those who
see
in these portraits what Ms. Mellen calls "a repellent bio–
logical frailty . ' ,
What, we may justly ask , is the particular status of the feminist objec–
tion to the idea of biology, or of instinctual disposition? Insofar as it is
founded upon nothing but the will to deny the validity of explanations that
depend upon such factors , it may be said to fly in the face of ordinary experi–
ence itself. Susan Sontag and a number of
0
:ler brilliant women writers
have recently taken up this point , and decried the feminist attempt to dis–
miss the concrete stuff of historical and present-day experience as so much
"epiphenomenal trash. " It is true enough that
wome~
may usefully be
encouraged to undertake projects ordinarily restricted in previous times to
men, but it is ridiculous to deny that there may be special consequences
owing to this recent encouragement, or that these consequences will have
something
to
do with the organic , instinctual, chemical dispositions of
women. Elizabeth Hardwick laid out the terms of the argument with impec–
cable clarity and wit long before the current feminist movement took deftni–
tive shape: " ... a woman's physical inferiority
to
a man is a limiting reality
every moment of her life. Because of it women are 'doomed ' to situations
that promise reasonable safety against the more hazardous possibilities of
nature . . . and against the stronger man . Any woman who has ever had her
wrist twisted by a man recognizes a fact of nature as humbling as a cyclone
to a frail tree branch. How can
anything
be more important than this?"
Similarly, Ms. Hardwick goes on
to
argue , though it is stupid
" to
saywomen
aren ' t interested in
sex
at all, "
it is equally stupid to claim that their sexual
appetites are the same as men 's in intensity or persistence. Women, Ms.
Hardwick writes, " ftght very hard
to
get the amount of sexual satisfaction
they want-and even harder
to
keep men from forcing a superabundance
their way.
It
is difftcult to
see
how anyone can be sure that it is only man's
voracious appetite for conquest which has created, as its contrary, this reluc-
tant, passive being who has to be wooed , raped, bribed, begged, threatened,
married and supported. Perhaps she really has to be." Just as likely, of
course, women will differ among themselves as to what constitutes satisfac-
tory levels of accommodation
to
the surrounding male reality , but it is
clear that feminist criticism will need to establish a less willful and dismissive
relation
to
the idea of inherited disposition if it is
to
make any sense of our
shared experience.
Where an artist like Bergman is concerned , of course, any one-dimen-
