A quick post on the seventeenth--I'm going to push through a flurry in the closing days of this month, so there may well be a few more posts in the next couple days.
Hastings continues both "Men and Manners" and the story that began as "Feminine Fables," with the current iteration titled "Ropes of Sand."
"Men and Manners" is more interesting to me this week: the strange brew of Hastings-style feminism/anti-feminism is on full display (page 374). I'll walk through it here. Joan and Harry are having a fight. Harry is mad because Joan won't speak, and Joan won't speak because she's convinced that Harry won't understand. Here we go:
"Here, snapshot as it was, I saw one of the perennial complaints of men and women against each other-on woman’s side, man’s inability to see from the woman’s point of view; on man’s woman’s silence."
When the author of "Men and Manners" gets Joan to explain herself, here's Joan's point of view:
"DO you think Harry would waste his time trying to explain a joke to a man without a sense of humour? Then, what’s the use of my putting the woman’s case to a man without a sense of woman?"
That's cool, feminism of the gap. But the author answers Joan:
"S’pose so, said I ; but doesn’t that partly come about because women are so unfair to each other?" She goes on: "That’s where I blame women. If they were sex-loyal enough to found an institution similar to the Trade Union that exists among men for the protection of man against the wiles of woman, things would be very different. As it is, thanks (for nothing) to the spirit of rivalry among them, women are like a city divided against itself, and they fall at each other’s hands."
Again, cool: women need to build solidarity to counter the power of the patriarchy, or something like that. Next stop:
"Well personally, I blame both men and women for it. In the interest of general justice men should try to acquire this sense of woman (which Joan analogised with a sense of humour), and it is only by talking to women that they will learn it. Women again, should do their best to help men to acquire it, by at least trying to put the woman’s point of view before them. Necessity gives power, and if women would only begin to talk I wouldn’t be a bit surprised should they discover, after a trial or two (patience, please, men!) that they could ! Indeed, they might find that all the time they had been playing- rabbit to his weasel. Had they but known it, they could have outstripped the brute any day!"
We end up roughly here at the end of the article: women fall back on silence as their primary weapon, because men have no "sense of woman" that will allow them to understand women. The solution is not more silence, but more communication. Women will attain eloquence through engagement and building relationships with men, not by remaining in isolation. Note, though, the sexism that is like the sugar on the pill in phrases like "patience, please, men!" All this also has to be taken in the context of the opening of the piece, which made much fun of presumptuous women that hang around cafes.
Quick notes:
Max Nordau appears in translation, defending Germans from the snide comments of the French press, and appealing to moderation of racial profiling between nations.
Another Max: Max Jacob writes an article on French literature, ending by declaring himself "a champion of Art for Art's sake" if that is understood to mean art that represents, rather than declares.
This from Orage/R.H.C. on modernism and Dostoevsky: "Dostoievsky was a remarkable thinker even above the remarkable writer. The Pushkin address, in particular, appears to me to be decisive of his rank; for in it-and thirty years ago now-he diagnosed the sickness of intellectualism as pride. More, even, he anticipated in several other respects the judgments elsewhere being passed in these pages (by my respected colleagues Mr. de Maeztu and “T. E. H.”) on modernism, even before it was modern" (372)
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