Essays Take Critical Look at Female Icons

What might Olive Schreiner, Gertrude Stein, Mae West, Anais Nin, Margaret Mitchell, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Marina Tsvetaeva, Ayn Rand, Doris Lessing, Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy have in common?

Well, to begin with, all 12 are subjects of Claudia Roth Pierpont’s “Passionate Minds,” an expanded reworking of 11 essays first published in the New Yorker. (How do 12 women yield 11 essays? McCarthy and Arendt, close friends and intellectual allies, share a single essay.)

Some of these women were fine writers, some were not. Some were brilliant thinkers, others not. But, as Pierpont puts it, “whatever the merits of their prose or their arguments, these women told stories that changed the way people thought and lived.”

Pierpont divides them into three groups. She considers Schreiner, Stein, Nin and West as exponents of sexual freedom; Mitchell, Hurston and Welty in terms of their attitudes on race; and Tsvetaeva, Rand, Lessing, Arendt and McCarthy for their politics.

The categories overlap: Schreiner was not only an advocate of women’s equality, but one of the first white South Africans to condemn racism. West, a great accentuator of the sex-positive, wrote a novel celebrating interracial romance. Hurston created a heroine who was not only black and proud, but also sexually liberated.

Pierpont’s approach to these cultural icons is far more tough-minded than the deification all too common among feminist historians. Of Stein, she remarks: “The work that made her famous . . . [is a] barrage of janglingly repetitive lyric obfuscation . . .”

She notes how the militantly butch Stein, who claimed to have taught Hemingway to “write like a man,” took refuge from reality in coy baby talk. Ironically, she finds, Stein’s greatest contribution to Modernism may have been serving as nurturing den mother to generations of artists and writers.

Nor is Pierpont sacerdotal about the so-called “Bible of the Women’s Movement,” Doris Lessing’s “The Golden Notebook.” The heroine’s real problem, Pierpont insists, is not that her life is divided into different parts but that “each part is rife with lies and self-delusions.

Her true division . . . is between the intellect and the emotions; or, between knowing what is right and doing the opposite anyway, because for Lessing the emotions always win.”

Not surprisingly, Pierpont does a superb job of showing how “Gone With the Wind” played a major role in reinforcing racial prejudice, even though sex, not race, was the theme that truly intrigued Mitchell and most of her readers. More surprisingly, Pierpont debunks one of the most over-revered of all Southern writers, Welty, particularly for her willful blindness on racial issues.

Lonely, brave Hurston emerges as the most admirable and likable of Pierpont’s dozen--a true original, while the consummate liar Anais Nin (whose name, perhaps, should have been Ananias) as the most loathsome. Although trenchant in her criticisms, Pierpont shows sympathy for all her subjects. (Only Nin’s pathological dishonesty and narcissism seem to exhaust her tolerance.)

Pierpont’s main theme is the role of the passions in shaping these women’s political ideas. She notes the ravenous heterosexuality behind Rand’s glorification of the capitalist ubermensch: “It is surely gratuitous to point out that the author suffered from an edifice complex.”

She also demonstrates how Arendt’s fluctuating opinions on Jews, Nazis and German culture seem to reflect the ins and outs of her relationship with her former mentor and lover, Martin Heidegger. (All he had to do, Pierpont argues, was tell her she had been the one real passion of his life, and she began concocting philosophical excuses for Nazi complicity and shifting some of the responsibility to the victimized Jews.)

Although Pierpont’s arguments are strongly convincing, one wonders why she has chosen to describe the undue influence of passion only on female minds. It does seem perilously close to the old male chauvinist position.

Nonetheless, this book is a joy to read: stimulating, incisive, gracefully written. Deftly combining biography, literary criticism, political commentary and cultural history, these essays not only offer fresh perspectives but could well serve as introductions to their subjects.