[Henry] James’s repressions and evasions are many, varied and exhausting. Why more people are not seen rushing shrieking from libraries, shredding Ja… - Camille Paglia
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[Henry] James’s repressions and evasions are many, varied and exhausting. Why more people are not seen rushing shrieking from libraries, shredding James novels in their hands, I cannot say. I used to wonder whether enthusiasm for him was based on identification, since his passive, tentative heroes resemble many academics. Perhaps what is intolerable is his enshrinement in a soporific criticism. So much must be overlooked to crown him with laurel.
Camille Paglia (born 2 April 1947) is an American author, scholar, feminist and critic, best known for writing Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, a survey of Western art and literature from earliest recorded history to the 20th Century.
Portrait adapted from
Wikimedia Commons, Fronteiras do Pensamento (CC BY-SA)
The polemical tactic of exhibiting garish mugshot photos of women’s bruised faces evades the real issue. What led up to that moment in the emergency room? A video camera recording episode before and after the assault would upset the received black-and-white view of male ogres and female martyrs. This is not to excuse men for their scurrilous behavior; it is to awaken women their equal responsibility in dispute and confrontation.
Every male copulating with a woman returns to his origins in the womb. Goethe postponed intercourse until he was forty. This must be related to his self-imposed distance from his forceful mother. To refuse phallic penetration is to refuse surrender to the female matrix.
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Women's studies is a comfy, chummy morass of unchallenged groupthink. It is, with rare exception, totally unscholarly. Academic feminists have silenced men and dissenting women.
