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PARTISAN REVIEW
under d iffi culty, abl e to susta in sufferin g and depr iva ti on , su bd uing
their personal needs to those of o th ers. Over all , tha t is, heroine-i sm is a
capability but it is of the n ega ti ve variety. It is seldom demonstra ted in
action , or no t in freely-elected acti o n. Heroin es are in the fi rs t instance
women who p lease, help, and wa il. T hey please men and a re help fu l
to
them in their undertakings. T hey wait for men
to
return from war,
from crusades, from dangerous ways of ea rning a li vin g, from miss ions
in d istant lands. H eroism ranges the world. Heroine-i sm is fixed;
characteri sti call y it takes p lace a t home-Penelope is an ex treme
instance of the female expectabl e. To extend the point, borrow ing the
langu age of psycho logy: the traditi onal hero ine is rea lity- bound; her
home and famil y are her secti on o f rea lity, and she is bound
to
and by
them . T he traditi onal hero has the right to put himself to imaginative
tes t, to p ursue a remote goa l or an abstract idea l. He does not objectify
this ri ght but experi ences it as virtua ll y a g iven of hi s biology- any
intelligent woman knows tha t she will fail in competiti on with Moby
Di ck. It is of some con sequence th a t the p ursuit of the white whale is
now cla imed as a female preroga ti ve too. Women now hunt the whi te
whale of female selfhood as men h ave always sought the white wh ale of
male selfhood . And if the search does no t yet look parti cul arl y eleva t–
ing, i t is perh aps worth keep in g it in mind tha t as recentl y as the
thirti es and forties our twenti eth -century vi siona ri es o f the masculine–
I think of H emingway, among o thers- were no t doing much beller in
pursuit of their grail than publicly counting the hair on their ches ts.
Except for hi s earl y Nick Adams stori es, whi ch h ave their roots in
James Fenimore Cooper and the litera ture of the fronti er, Heming–
way's best work is set again st the background of war. Hero ic acti on has
always been associated with war, which has excluded women . Of the
many social changes tha t h ave contributed to the disappearance of the
hero from the litera ture of recent decades, and hi s replacement with the
non- or unhero of ou r present advanced literary cultu re, p robabl y
the mos t crucial are the clos ing o f the fronti er and the grow th of
antiwar sentiment. And these are central as well in the development of
our fi cti on of female libera ti on . For if there are no n ew worlds to
conquer and no ba ttl es in whi ch
to
p rove bravery and manliness, then
bravery and manliness forfeit some o f th eir va lue. Al so the sexes come
to be more like each o ther. Perhaps nowhere is the propheti c geniu s o f
Dos to ievski 's
Not es from Underground
beller revea led than in its
description of the man of acti on as "a limited crea ture" and in the
ass imila ti on to on e another th a t the underground man makes between
traits that were once tho ught to be pa rti cu la r to each sex.
