Subject: (urth) Re: Digest urth.v028.n135

From: Richard Horton <rrhorton at prodigy.net>
Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 22:19:28 +0000

On Fri, 21 Jan 2000 12:10:32 -0800 (PST), you wrote:

>In
>fact, I always thought some of the criticism of Wolfe here was misplaced--
>if you want to attack Wolfe for being misogynistic, it's not in the possible
>sympathy of the narrative for Emery's way of seeing things, but in the author's
>construction of Jan.

another writer often accused of misogyny is Kingsley Amis, and I read
his novel _The Russian Girl_ at about the same time I read "The
Ziggurat".  It struck me that the portrayal of the wives in the two
stories was striking: both are portrayed as quite thoroughly vicious.

(The Amis thing is complicated by reading about Amis' feelings about
his second wife, writer Elizabeth Jane Howard, though.)

-- 
Rich Horton | Stable Email: mailto://richard.horton at sff.net
Home Page: http://www.sff.net/people/richard.horton
Also visit SF Site (http://www.sfsite.com) and Tangent Online (http://www.sfsite.com/tangent)

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

---

From: Alex David Groce <alex_groce at gs246.sp.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 12:34:53 +0000

Ah, but it's always been my opinion (and I'm fairly sure I've read somewhere
an essay by someone agreeing with it) that Amis, while falsely accused of
"sexism," could be quite rightly accused of misogyny.  Amis didn't think
women were -inferior-, he just didn't seem to much like them (not in the
sense of being homosexual, just in the sense of actively disliking the way
he thought women saw the world and acted in it).

I don't think this is true of Wolfe (who seems to have gotten on with the
women in his life somewhat better than Amis, as well), but both share the 
sometimes controversial perception that women and men, in general, have some
very different ways of seeing and doing things--and not in a trite, "Mars
and Venus," sense of this either.

"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." John 8:32
--
Alex David Groce (agroce+ at cs.cmu.edu)
Ph.D. Student, Carnegie Mellon University - Computer Science Department
8112 Wean Hall (412)-268-3066
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~agroce