Wolfe: Misogynist or Realist?

Mo Holkar / UKG · 19 Oct 2006, 09:08 · from 2006-October.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: lists at ukg.co.uk (Mo Holkar / UKG)
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 10:08:31 +0100
Subject: (urth) Wolfe: Misogynist or Realist?
In-Reply-To: <1f7617370610181106q5d4dd180uccb42658ae54b9aa at mail.gmail.co
 m>
References: <19ee41770610171332h3c56cd21h91172dd9465fb362 at mail.gmail.com>
	<200610171750.25563.ddjones at riddlemaster.org>
	<1f7617370610171515s4d7aceb1l4cabb8c8cbd744f0 at mail.gmail.com>
	<6.2.5.6.2.20061018105935.04972058 at ukg.co.uk>
	<1f7617370610181106q5d4dd180uccb42658ae54b9aa at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <6.2.5.6.2.20061019095815.02fb1420 at ukg.co.uk>

At 19:06 18/10/2006, Dan'l wrote:
>For what it's worth, Dick himself eventually decided that the image 
>of "the dark-haired woman" in his writing was all about his twin 
>sister, who died shortly after birth.


Mmm... I've never found that a psychologically convincing explanation 
for this particular aspect of his writing (although clearly the 
missing-twin theme does emerge elsewhere). It seems to me that Dick 
shied away from confronting the influence of his relationship with 
his rather domineering mother.

But maybe it's wrong of me to feel it's OK to psychoanalyse Dick 
because he's not around any more, when I'd be reluctant to examine 
Wolfe the same way ;-)


> > Positive images of women to put alongside these negative > ones 
> are very rare -- so I think it's fair to describe this writing > as 
> having a misogynistic trait, albeit a fairly tightly-focused one.
>
>Positive images of women in Dick? H'mmm. I think most of his 
>characters, male and female, are "positive," just not "heroic." If 
>you'd said this about, say, Barry Malzberg, now...


Sure, you're quite right. I was using a lazy shorthand of implication 
-- meant to say something like "images of women engaging positively 
with the male protagonist", as contrasted to the dark-haired woman's 
activities.

Mo



===================================================
Live dirt, up a sidetrack carted, is a putrid evil.
===================================================

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net