[ilds] Durrell's misogyny

[Bruce Redwine]

Richard,

Excellent comments, bold and sweeping.  They will take a while to digest.  You intimate a new way to understand the author and his works.  Thanks.

Bruce




> On Nov 21, 2015, at 4:04 PM, mail at durrelllibrarycorfu.org wrote:
> 
> Durrell as a misogynist: 
> I believe that misogyny - which we normally understand as "dislking" or even "maltreating" women comes from fear. Men who fear women become misogynists in that they conduct a love-hate realtionship both with the gender as a whole and with specific women, starting with the mother. If (to be very cautious) we acknowledge that most (and I mean most) men are, indeed, fearful of woman as "the Other", and if we go even further and accept that love and fear are co-habitants of the marriage bed, we cannot paint any particular man, or writer-man, in dishonourable colours SIMPLY on account of their behaviour in or out of bed, the kitchen, or the novel.
> It's a hugely complex question in LD - partly because of the way he wrote about women, but also due to the facts and imagined facts of his life: Start with the birth scene in Pied Pipers, and D's own assertion that he remembered the moment of his birth (highly unlikely but there have been instances of others which have been well documented). Move on to the characterisations of women in Dark Labyrinth. Then the HUGE issue of what JUSTINE means as a person - a sin-cushion? a sexual turnstile? and the general description of Alexandria as a city where women cry out to be abused; MELISSA as a whore-with-a-heart-of-gold, and her statement (twice, in variants) "I no longer defend myself". CLEA as hetero- and homo-sexual. LIVIA ditto. The character of BENEDICTA, seen from Felix's perspective. The complexity of women in the QUINTET - where they amy or may not be part of one another (as many of the men certainly are). The central icon of CONSTANCE, whom I believe to have been D's idealisation of CLAUDE.
> When I gave  a copy of JUDITH to a non-D-reader, her immediate reaction was "I enjoyed the storyline, especially the tension over the Jewish-Arab conflict, but D treated women very badly, didn't he?" (a common complaint by women about D's writing generally about women, and maybe one reason why there are far fewer women critics of D than there are men).
> Some of the poems celebrate female beauty, especially in the abstract, but there are instances when he addressed poems to specific women that are, at the least, ambivalent. 
> And the plays... And the unpublished novel Placebo, and the unfinished novel version of Sappho, and the "Magnetic island",,,, And "Chantal de Legumes"...
> The women in D's life: stories (some corroborated, others not) of his treatment of, and attitude towards 1) Nancy (e.g. his disregard for her as an artist, his neglect of her on their long visit to Paris), 2) Eve, with whose psychiatric problems he was unable to (or refused to) cope 3 ) Claude (especially the occasions, witnessed, when he physically attacked her) but who, if anyone, captured his admiration AS A WRITER and whom I think he genuinely mourned, 4) his ambivalence about Ghislaine, 5) his love of (and dependence on) Francoise, but whom (to my certain knowledge becaue I was there) he could be painfully offensive, 6) Margaret McCall (again, I was witness to his disdain for her except in professional terms).
> One woman who was his lover said to me "He was a very big part of my life, but I was only a very small part of his, and I can accept that" - maybe she got off lightly!
> Is that enough to be going on with? 
> I would very much like to see a balanced, bisexual discussion - maybe a conference, however much I dislike and distrust such events, to explore these issues. Yes, there have been notable attempts to address them: Jim Nichols' "The Stronger Sex" is a valuable contribution to the topic - his exegesis of the poem "nemea" is very important. And, as I said in that review, the essay on "harems" and the unpublished "Gynococracy" are important, even if they are unknown.
> RP

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