Femi-Nietzsche

I've been reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and I recently had some conversations with Jarrod about the role women play in Nietzsche's philosophy. One chapter had me particularly incensed, entitled "Of Young and Old Women." The chapter begins with Zarathustra out walking alone, when an old woman approaches him and says, mildly critically, that he has spoken to women a great deal, but has never spoken of women. Zarathusta then expatiates on women's nature and the relationship between men and women. Here are some of the quotes that left me fuming and perplexed:

"Man should be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly." (91)

"The man's happiness is: 'I will.' The woman's happiness is: 'He will.'" (92)

"And woman has to obey and find a depth for her surface. Woman's nature is surface, a changeable, stormy film upon shallow waters. But a man's nature is deep, its torrent roars in subterranean caves: woman senses its power but does not comprehend it." (92)

"Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has one solution: it is called pregnancy." (91)

I am still grappling with some of these aphorisms, especially that last one that the "solution" to woman's riddles is pregnancy, but in taking such quotes in relation to some things that Nietzsche writes elsewhere, they are somewhat less offensive and inflammatory than on a cursory read-through. This will, however, require a follow-up post after I read some secondary sources.

Central to Nietzsche's concept of women is a belief that the sexes are very different, and remain incomprehensible to one another. He writes that woman senses the power of man's nature, but does not comprehend it, and I would venture to say that he would agree that man senses the power of woman's nature and is equally unable to understand it. The sexes, of course, have different natures, and seem to be comprised of different elements that are opposite, yet complementary. I think that it is important to know something of Nietzsche's biography on this subject; he was raised primarily by his mother and was close with his sister in his formative years. In his youth, he was surrounded by women, but he did not have many close relationships with women in his adult life and he never married. I think it's fair to say that he did not understand women very well, and that he did not feel like women understood him well. In "Of the Three Evil Things," Zarathustra asks, "And who has fully conceived how strange man and woman are to one another!" (207). That strangeness and fundamental unknowability of the other sex produces tension, but the tension is productive and uplifting.

There is a sense of opposition and even enmity between men and women, but the kind that arises between two worthy adversaries who push one another on toward greatness. It is redemptive in restoring the inherent virtues of each sex. The ideal relationship between the sexes would not domesticate or tame either, and would provoke the essential, elemental strength of each. I think many of Nietzsche criticisms of women attack cultured, European ideals that oppress women and pervert them into absurd, frivolous people, stealing their strength and mystical power. Although he seemed to be critical of the nascient feminist movement, he certainly did not deem the traditional view of women wholly satisfactory; these are the "fond little women" for whom Zarathustra is not the physician (320). This does not mean, however, that Zarathustra does not speak to any women at all; it is only the fond, little ones, the weaklings, to whom he cannot speak.

Nietzsche is censorious at times of women's behavior and mien, however, and he is equally critical of traditional concepts of femininity that make women frivolous and absurd, and the nascient feminist movement that, perhaps, denied something essentially feminine in the quest for equality. In "Of the Virtue that Makes Small," Nietzsche writes of contemporary society that, "There is little manliness here: therefore, their women make themselves manly. For only he who is sufficiently a man will redeem the woman in woman" (189, "Of the Virtue that Makes Small"). I think this idea of women making themselves manly is a criticism of the feminist movement that sought to make women adhere to masculine values and obscuring the feminine voice by absorbing it into male discourse. Nietzsche also implies here that modern men are not sufficiently masculine themselves, that their ideals are no more appropriate to their sex than women's adoption of masculine standards. Women and the feminist movement, then, are responding to a deficiency of strength and power in the contemporary culture and egalitarian values that Nietzsche saw as promoting little more than mediocrity. Women in Nietzsche, then, demand masculine strength, not because they themselves are weak, but because there needs to be a counterpart to feminine strength. The inverse of this is also true, and I think it's one of Nietzsche most trenchant criticisms of European feminism; there is also a need for a counterpart to masculine strength, and when women deny that femininity and take on masculine values, something beautiful and necessary is lost.

That is how man redeems the woman in woman, but Zarathustra abounds with examples of woman redeeming the man in man. As stated earlier, women demand masculine strength to match their own feminine strength. In "Of Young and Old Woman," Zarathustra asks, "Whom does woman hate most? --Thus spoke the iron to the magnet: 'I hate you most, because you attract me, but are not strong enough to draw me towards you'" (92). When I first read this, I thought that it was speaking to the weakness of the iron, that it could not draw itself toward the magnet, but in fact, the iron is angry with the weakness of the magnet, that it is unable to move the iron. Woman is angry that man's force is not sufficient to match hers, and she compels him to become stronger and worthy of her love. Through love, woman also inspires the creative child within man; Nietzsche writes that, "woman understands children better than a man, but man is more childlike than woman. A child is concealed in the true man; it wants to play. Come, women, discover the child in man!" (92). Zarathustra describes woman as "the most dangerous plaything," and while this descriptor may be shocking at first, the idea of being a plaything, one who inspires and provokes play, is by no means demeaning (91). Zarathustra's enemy is the spirit of gravity; one should live joyfully, striving upward and facing challenges with the attitude of a child at play. One should radiate life-affirming joyfulness in every struggle, every experience. That joyfulness of life, the sense of play, emits from the feminine presence in Zarathustra.

A group of girls dancing in the forest inspire Zarathustra to compose "The Dance Song," which abounds with energy and passion for life. In this section, Life is personified as a woman, and so is wisdom. Zarathustra sings that Life "laughed mockingly when I called you unfathomable. 'All fish talk like that,' you said; 'what they cannot fathom is unfathomable. But I am merely changeable and untamed and in everything a woman, and no virtuous one'" (131). Again, the essential incomprehensibility of the sexes is present, and this forms an analogy to the mystery inherant in life. Throughout "The Dance Song," Zarathustra describes this immense passion he has for life, through the metaphor of a romantic interlude, a game of courtship (he sings "as cupid" for the girls and dedicates the song to this "little god whom girls love best"). Life, love, and sexual tension intertwine in this song, and it acts as a fulfillment of the great longing expressed in the previous section, "The Night Song."

"Man's happiness is: 'I will.' Woman's happiness is: 'He will.'"

This one was very difficult to reconcile, but after staying with it for some time, I think I have begun to understand it in a different light. Woman exercises her will through love, and in Nietzsche, such an association with love endows women with profound connection with life itself. Woman's strength, honor, and virtue originate in her endless capacity for love. Although she surrenders and gives herself completely through love, she is not diminished. Like Zarathustra with his happiness and wisdom, woman is a squanderer of her love, bestowing it without restraint-- when she chooses. Woman's will and capacity for choice is exercised through her decision whether to love or hate (Nietzsche claims earlier in Zarathustra that woman is only capable of love, not friendship). Nietzsche is very hetero-centric here, in assuming that the recipient of love will necessarily be a man. There are still implications of a sexual politics that subordinates women, even if they willfully submit to men. In Zarathustra, women are presented as very powerful, but their greatest desire is to surrender that power to a man of comparable strength. They want to submit and have the man enact his will, and find happiness in his will to power once he has shown he is strong enough to overcome her.

Women are not weak, however, even though Nietzsche seems to simultaneously suggest their great power and their desire to submit to the power of men. Women are often associated with laughter, which plays a very important role in Zarathustra as an antidote to the Spirit of Gravity. Although the old woman Zarathustra encounters in "Of Young and Old Women" is not described in great detail, I imagine her with merry, mischievous eyes and a tone of playful teasing when she speaks to Zarathustra. From the beginning of this chapter, she is somewhat ironic towards him; he claims that one should speak of women only to men, and she responds that she is old enough to forget whatever it is he has to say. At the end of the chapter, she gives a rather flippant response to Zarathustra's string of aphorisms about women. She affirms that he has said many things that are true, but there is no sense that he has managed to teach her anything she did not already know. There is perhaps the hint that she is merely humoring him in his attempts to untangle the "riddle" that is woman. She unexpectedly gives something to Zarathustra in the end, her "little truth," which he carries with him like "an unruly child." This little truth is also humorous; she advises Zarathustra to bring his whip if he is going to women now, possibly acknowledging the accuracy of his estimation of women's untamed nature. Nietzsche, however, does not want woman (or man) to become tame and cultured; the whip will not tame the women Zarathustra meets, but it is a metaphor for the type of strength that he needs in order to speak to them effectively. The old woman is being facetious here in her suggestion, but she does offer some truth into woman's nature; she doesn't want to listen to someone who cannot back up his words with a whip, with a concrete show of the strength that he should possess.

There should be a sense of fear between the sexes, because they recognize the immensity of each other's sexuality. Awe is a better word; Nietzsche regards the good marriage as a sacred union, certainly not something to be taken lightly and dismissed as commonplace. When the sexes are in proper relation to one another, with this central tension and overcoming of each other and themselves, it is something to behold in awe and wonder. An equal relationship between the sexes does not exist for Nietzsche, but recall that he is a harsh critic of egalitarian values; equality eliminates greatness. A constant striving is the best way to live, so it is no surprise that the relationship between man and woman would be full of strife. There is a sense of enmity, but enmity as between Achilles and Hector-- they honor one another in their difficulty of being defeated. Woman's intractible nature presents an honorable challenge to man to overcome her, and the subsequent imbalance of power does not strip the woman of her own will to power. She exercises it through him, through the power of her love, which she can only fully bestow once he has proven himself "sufficiently man."

Throughout Thus Spoke Zarathustra, women appear as mysterious beings who come into the solitary world of Zarathustra, and are usually associated with laughter and nature. They are surprisingly self-sufficient; they do not flock to Zarathustra to be disciples or students, they do not want to follow but to challenge him, mock him for his weaknesses. They are somewhat wild and out of his grasp, yet they captivate him. Life and Wisdom are personified as women in Zarathustra, and their intriguing unreachability as women is essential to the concept of desiring and pursuing life that guides much of the philosophy of this text.

Be Kind to Spinsters

I know that I just wrote that my new theme would be In Search of Lost Time, but in preparation for a job interview this week, I just finished Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, and as I've resolved to write something about every book I read, here's my take on the children's classic.

Most of Alcott's first-time readership is between 10 and 13 years old; I'm an obvious late-comer at age 23, so my experience with the book is probably very different than other readers my age, who will look back upon it with fond childhood memories. I'm also reading a biography of Louisa May Alcott and her family as I read Little Women, which has enriched my understanding of the characters and Alcott's authorial remarks.

Like much 19th century domestic literature, gender is a prominent feature of Little Women. Alcott's protagonist Jo March is based on the author herself- a tempestuous, vibrant, independent tomboy with a strong sense of the dramatic, who also cannot seem to find a place within the feminine world to which she is confined. Jo angrily says that she wishes she were a boy so she could do whatever she wanted, and the young Louisa felt the same way; she was constantly reprimanded for her improprieties, her un-ladylike interests in athleticism and drama. In her diary as a teenager, Alcott wrote that if she couldn't be a writer, she wanted to be an actress; at that time, a career in the theater was still considered highly inappropriate for a middle class young lady, not only because of the ostentatious position in the public sphere, but also because of the theater's past association with prostitution. Actresses were still very much regarded with suspicion for stretching the narrow confines of gender roles (especially in the wildly popular but risque burlesques, in which women dressed in drag and mocked public figures). Although she never gave her heroine Jo this ambition and kept all of the March sisters' dramatic performances strictly within the domestic sphere of their parlor and barn, Alcott was a daring woman who took pleasure in shocking her family and polite society.

The March girls are a rather watered-down version of Louisa herself; Jo was defiant, but became docile and gentle, two qualities that Alcott claims, at the age of 50, she never acquired in her entire life. She, unlike the March sisters, would not be content with submissive meekness.

Marriage also becomes a prominent feature of the narrative in the latter two-thirds, as the March girls grow into women and meet suitable mates. Even wild Jo March settles into domestic life; Alcott gives her a husband and children, and reworks Jo's literary aspirations into running a school for boys out of her home (and Jo's husband, not Jo, is the schoolmaster and teacher, while she plays mother to the lonely little boys). This is an intriguing departure from autobiography for Alcott's heroine, for she never married. At the end of the novel, Jo claims that she couldn't be happier as a wife and mother, although she hasn't given up her literary dreams. But, she reasons, those can wait while she raises her children and the boys at the school. Alcott, however, seemed to be faced with two irreconcilable options: marry and become a mother, or remain a spinster and become an author. The first choice requires giving up her freedom and a large part of her identity. The latter means resigning herself to a loneliness, which she seemed to feel painfully as she wrote Little Women. After describing the happy marriage of the youngest March sister, Alcott inserts an authorial aside, imploring young people to be kind to the spinsters, because their lives are difficult and lonely, and they are already isolated from society by virute of having no husbands. She alludes to the fact that she has enough internal strength to fight off despair and is fulfilled by her writing career, but there is a tinge of regret that she never was loved. In the biography, that is a sadly frequent refrain of Alcott's diaries; as a child, she felt that her unruly behavior and feisty independence made her bad and unworthy of love (her father often scolded and threatened her that God only loves good children). As a teenager, she had fervent crushes on Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, impossible unrequited love for these two much older and married men. She experienced a young romance with a former schoolmate, who died shortly after he extended an invitation to go riding together. This seems to have been a dilemma and disappointment for Alcott her entire life, that she could love, but never felt it was fully reciprocated by anyone but the characters she created herself. As she wrote in Little Women, she had her pen for a spouse and her stories for her children, and this was not altogether satisfying.

Alcott also gives Jo March a quick temper, which she herself had, but she spares her heroine from the debilitating bouts of depression and despair that she suffered herself. I think that a significant factor in Alcott's wildly variable moods was the fact that she could not fulfill the very restrictive feminine ideal of her age. She was told, from age two onward, that she was a bad child, that she couldn't do the things that she longed to do, and she was forced to choose between giving up her writing and independence, or living a solitary life as a noevlist, pursuing a career that still wasn't very highly respected or well paid. She could never fully be herself, and I read that in Little Women; she couldn't find the intellectual man who would bolster her own literary pursuits for herself, and she felt terribly isolated for much of her life.