Primary Sources:
Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (New York: Boston, 1970), pp. 189-199.
Germaine Greer, Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (New York: Fawcett, 1989), pp. 1-15, pp. 117-127 ("The Quest" and "When a Girl Marries").
Christine Wallace, Germaine Greer: Untamed Shrew (New York: Faber & Faber, 1989), pp. 80-108 ("Byrony"), pp. 155-174 ("The Female Eunuch").
Germaine Greer, Shakespeare: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), entirety. (1st ed., 1986.)
Supplemental Sources:
Richard Eldridge, The Persistence of Romanticism: Essays in Philosophy and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 145-165 ("How can tragedy matter for us?").
Lynne Segal, Why Feminism? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 46 (Greer is alleged to claim that "anyone who fails to see that domination is essential to heterosexual genital penetration is in denial" even as Greer has also said "I love men!").
"Be good sweet maid and let who will be clever." (Quoted by Germaine Greer.)
I discovered Germaine Greer's writings as a high school student. I had certainly read her work by the time I was in college, when I discovered an Australian and Cambridge flavor in my prose that seemed rather odd. However, being "rather odd" has never disturbed me much. Hence, I was more pleased than bothered by this discovery. Ms. Greer raises a troublesome issue, however, that my Zorro-nature must confront. Romantic feeling and culture is challenged by some radical feminists -- including, allegedly, Ms. Greer -- because romanticism is deemed to threaten feminist values and the status of women in relationships with men.
We are told that romantic values place women in the "subordinate" position, as "ingenues" requiring male guidance in sexual and all moral matters, not to mention a great deal of annoying (to women) "rescuing." (See "Master and Commander" and "The Taming of Somebody.")
This depends on the woman, I think. One or two women I know enjoy displaying sexual prowess and beating up men in bars -- men who usually require rescuing:
"Debutantes still come out every year" -- Must they stay at home, Ms. Greer? -- "in their virginal white, curtseying to the Queen, the Mayor, the Bishop, or whomever, pacing their formal patterns with downcast eyes. The boys ask politely for dances while the girls accept prettily, or try to find pretexts for refusing in the hope that someone nicer will ask. Their beaux ought to have given them flowers. But every girl is hoping that something more exciting, more romantic than the expected sequence of social events will happen. Perhaps some terrifyingly handsome man will press a little closer than the others and smell the perfume in her hair." (p. 180.)
I have been told that I am quite "terrifying." Ms. Greer fails to consider the possibility that the Queen, Mayor, and Bishop may be the same man. Let us grant the "she-devil" (Norman Mailer's term) her due:
"The lover in romance is a man of masterful ways, clearly superior to his beloved in at least one respect, usually in several, being older or of higher social rank or more intelligent and au fait." (pp. 182-183.)
What Ms. Greer objects to is the respective masculine and feminine "roles" assigned to men and women by history or literature, perhaps cinema or Madison Avenue. These roles are reversible since they are subject to reinterpretation. They are not written in the stars. We decide what they require or mean. Thus, I expect that a woman will take me to dinner and treat me with some kindness as well as regard for my feelings before seeking to have her brutal way with me. I fear that Ms. Greer would not be gentle with me in the act of love. ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory.")
"Roles" is the right word for a scholar of Shakespeare's works, devoted to Romeo and "his" Juliet, to say nothing of those melliflous sonnets, even as she is also an expert on the English Romantics, having been described herself as a "Byronic figure." Byronic indeed. Give Ms. Greer an "inch" of my well-toned flesh and she will ask for (or take!) much more. I can not think of a more romantic and Romantic writer than Germaine Greer, as evidenced by the elegy for her father, which happens to be an achingly beautiful book written with expansive lyricism.
The man who is the subject of that highly personal Greer work is an enigma to his larger than life daughter -- herself a fair copy, perhaps, of this mysterious paternal figure who glides like a ghost through her pages. I identified with Ms. Greer's "quest" (her word), recognizing her, at once, as the ultimate romantic with a father lost -- Prince Hamlet. Compare Erica Jong's Shylock's Daughter with Nicholas Mosley's Hopeful Monsters. Ms. Greer's mother fares less well than "daddy" in her pages.
I wonder whether Ms. Greer has fully considered why these needs for romance, magic, dreams exist in some wounded persons -- persons carrying even more pain than she has known in her sometimes difficult life. I am aware of Germaine Greer's battles with depression. There are many women and some men whose mere survival is a kind of miracle.
"All the story of the night told over ..."
Carl Jung understood the power of the dreaming and aesthetic faculty (religions?) to endure even the horror of concentration camps in order to permit the organism to live. Take away hope, yearning, emotion, meaning from the sexual act and many of us who live with, or as pain, will happily die rather than "function" as machine-like entities. Sexual union in such a state of dehumanization is just as deprived of poetry as, say, defecating. (Diana?)
Sexual violation through rape is a form of dehumanization that never leaves a person. One is always aware of what it is to be used and discarded, reduced to a body part, insulted, offended, denied the basic human dignity afforded even to a homeless person. Rape is about power, not (primarily) sex. For a man to be raped is to be made into a woman in sexist society. Rape is the opposite of love-making.
The ability to transform a suffering or wounded woman's life into a ("Midsummer Night's"?) dream of romance and laughter is a gift "for the other." It is one way of taking away her pains. Laughter has almost miraculous healing power, like Wolfsbane at Hogwarts Academy of Magic and Witchcraft, where Ms. Greer lectured for several semesters, arriving at her office in dark glasses and incognito after riding a Sirius (2008) broom. Rather than lecturing on "Defense Against the Dark Arts," Germaine Greer provides "Instruction and Initiation Into the Dark Arts."
Women expressing this yearning for poetry are not fools. They are often well-aware of the hardness and cruelty of the world. Readers of romance novels are usually responsible for children. Caring for a child on a day when one's heart is breaking, finding a way to laugh and play with that child through bitter, unshed tears will teach Ms. Greer much about romance. Hester Prynne's story was described by its author as a "moonshiny romance." The Scarlet Letter is the opposite of a romantic comedy. Why this description by Nathaniel Hawthorne? "God, I love him, even though he makes me suffer. Love -- luff, he says -- is agony. A-go-ny, Midge." John Updike, S. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), p. 43. (Updating The Scarlet Letter.)
"If women's liberation is to accomplish anything at all they will have to cope with phenomena like the million dollar Cartland industry." (p. 187.)
Again:
"Settings, clothes, objects, all testify [to] the ritualization of sex which is the essential character of romance. Just as the Holy Communion is not a real meal and satisfies no hunger, [really!] the Almighty Kiss stands for a communion which cannot actually be enjoyed. Cartland's imagery of hem kissing and lillies gives away the fact that we are dealing with a kind of sexual religion. Devotion is what is demanded, not love. For some women, these rituals are necessary even in married life to make sex acceptable." (p. 191.)
My response is to suggest that romance is indeed a religion of sex and also of loving. Perhaps all religions amount to this message concerning the centrality of love against death in human life. While devotion is an aspect of love, even as love-making (as distinct from sex) is a kind of prayer in many religious traditions, from antiquity until today.
In my life, prayer is mostly to get some sex. There are non-physical hungers -- the need for beauty in life and meaning serve as examples -- that are satisfied only by spiritual means. Reductivism in what Santayana describes as the "life of spirit" within the "realm of essence" is misplaced.
Ms. Greer offers us a poor diet of meaningless animal sex (which sounds great!), together with an unacceptable impoverishment of the spirit (which sounds not-so-great). Ms. Greer shows readers "the steep and thorny path to heaven while herself the primrose path of dalliance treads."
Germaine Greer has described herself as "passionately" in love on several occasions. She was married for two days. She has experimented with Lesbianism (not for her), returning to a "steady" diet of men, epitomizing -- shall we say -- something less than a banker's (!) prudence in public debates and discussions, reciting the occasional love poem to a lover, publicly, and has been photographed in the nude. (I occasionally capitalize "Lesbian" and always capitalize "Vagina.")
In light of this "colorful" life, Ms. Greer's advice to become accountants and take up chemistry at university, while "eschewing" (no, that's not something sexual) all romantic "social intercourse," as it were, with the opposite sex strikes me as less than sincere. Germaine Greer does not seem, to me, like the mild-librarian type. Why suggest such a tepid life to others, Ms. Greer?
We men have decided to "step out" (this is not gender-specific) by relishing as well as using our sexual power to win equality from women. We only need to reinvent traditional romantic roles, laughing as we do so, celebrating our human talent for making new worlds for one another, placing a bandaid on the wounds of those we love, a bandaid made of poetry and song, images and ideas. For the few women and especially for every seductress that I love -- in life or fantasy -- I provide these words of encouragement ...
Teach me, dear creature, how to think and speak;
lay open to my earthly gross conceit. ...
The folded meaning of your words' deceit. ...
Are you a god? would you create me new?
Transform me then, and to your power I'll yield.
"The Comedy of Errors," 3. 2. 33-4, 36. 39-40. (Greer, Shakespeare, at p. 130.)
