152
PARTISAN REVIEW
,
feels, as I do, that
Near the Ocean
is not a wholly successful book , William–
son's argument is valuable, for it involves no less than a revaluation of
Lowell's entire work, in which each successive innovation represents the
further development of a single enterprise: to articulate " the power and
brutality, the discontent, the helpless participation in sweeping historical
forces that he knows about concretely and can give a particular artistic
shape ."
Williamson's critical faculties are taxed even more in his defense of
Notebook,
if only because its virtues are less evident than those of Lowell's
earlier works. Here Williamson is least effective , and must resort to
emphasizing the " bardic" character of the poem, placing
i~
rather tenuously
in a tradition of Blakean visionary politics . Such a solution is not entirely
satisfactory, given the overly self-revelatory tendencies of
Notebook,'
and it
leads Williamson to some fanciful, even banal and labored justifications.
Still, the great value of
Pity the Monsters
resides in its unified argu–
ment, the creative intensity and purposiveness with which its author has
elucidated the genuine grandeur of Lowell's career. Perhaps the most
convincing sign of its success is that it sends us inevitably back to the poems
themselves and with a new sense of their urgent, pitiless truth.
JAMES ATLAS
FREUD AND FEMINISM
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND FEMINISM: Freud, Reich, Laing, and Women .
By Juliet Mitchell. Pantheon. $10.00.
In America, psychonalysis has paid a price for being accepted by
psychiatry . Its popularization has meant a general focus on psychotherapy
and, as J uliet Mitchell notes, on adjustment to social prescriptions .
Nevertheless, though Mitchell clearly understands the importance of social
as well as psychological forces, she seems to me to exaggerate the conserva–
tive impact of psychoanalysis in this country . For if psychoanalysis and
psychoanalyt ically oriented therapy has, as she claims, helped readapt
discontented women to a subordinate status, she would have to show that in
England, where psychoanalysis did not enjoy a similar popularity, women
were less adapted
to
the traditional feminine role during the two decades
