DIANA TRILLING
505
There is a passage to pause over in a recent novel call ed
Kinflicks,
by Lisa Alther, in which the female protagoni st phon es her hippie
lover and is to ld by hi s fa ther tha t the young man has just been
hospitalized as a paranoid schizophrenic. We are no t surprised because
we have already seen him inching across the ground on his bell y,
wormlike. The speaker tell s us tha t "every cell in her body call ed out in
requi em [for him], her h eroi c nonwarrior. " On one level of meaning
thi s unh ero is clearl y a po liti cal sta tement, a p rotest of the milita ry and
governmental a uthority. But he is no t th a t alone; he is also a statement
against all masculine assertion as thi s has been traditi onally under–
stood. The unhero nevertheless has hi s unheroine ma te.
And indeed thi s is one o f the sta rtling revela ti ons of our current
fi cti on o f libera ti on , tha t behind the refusal of women' s retrograde
subjuga ti on to male dominance there is the same old pattern of
female compli ance. Thi s is how it always was in hi story: if men wanted
their women strong, women found the requi site streng th; if men
wanted th eir women frail , women compliantl y fainted. And so it
appears to be still : if men cave in , women collapse in due proportion; if
men want to fl y, swing, or tee ter precario usl y in emoti on al mid-air,
women become gymnasts. T o be sure, our sexual language has radi–
call y altered, as have the rul es which for a long time governed femal e
sexual deportment; but the fundamental accommoda tion to male
preferen ce, or to wh a t is assumed to be male preference, still continues
except in frankl y lesbian fi cti on . Nor is th ere any contradiction
between thi s a ttitude of female compliance and the closer a pproxima–
tion to each other of the sexes, to whi ch I just referred. On the contrary.
The force o f women 's own sexual needs, the ri ght of women to a sexual
life as full as th a t of men , having been so eloquentl y urged upon them,
women now ha ve even more need of men than they had before; and
ingenious creatures tha t they are, they begin to contrive ways in whi ch
to make th eir bed partners better than a match for their own giant
sexual appetites and powers.
It
is no longer in war tha t men are invited
to measure their heroi c capacities but in love-making- certainl y it is a
kamikaze enterpri se in whi ch men engage when they take on the sexual
mi ssion assigned them by an Erica Jong or a Gale Greene.
But if women 's need to pl ease men is the con stant over the
centuri es, the form in whi ch literature has presented us with the image
of des irabl e femininity is, as I have indicated , anything but sta tic or
unitary. Vi ewed hi stori ca ll y or even within a single cultura l p eriod the
hero ine is an exceedingly p rotean phenomenon . T o the h ero ine of
fortitude and endurance, litera ture has opposed the heroine of adorabl e
