SOURCE: “Back to the Barricades,” in New York Times Book Review, May 9, 1999, pp. 19-20.

[In the following review, Paglia provides a summary of Greer's life and career through evaluation of Christine Wallace's biography of Greer and offers negative assessment of The Whole Woman.]

After a year of divisive White House scandals, the feminist movement in the United States has been struggling to regain its bearings. Reminiscence rather than innovation is the trend, as memoirs and biographies of older feminists pour from the presses.

Two books arrive as timely reminders that feminism is a world movement. The first, by Christine Wallace, an Australian journalist, is a biography of Germaine Greer, author of the 1970 feminist classic, The Female Eunuch. The second, by Greer herself, is the “sequel” she vowed she would never write.

Wallace pursued her biography under fire from her displeased subject: Greer called her “a dung beetle” and “flesh-eating bacteria” and blocked access to key sources. Suspicion was probably warranted: Germaine Greer: Untamed Shrew veers into partisan sermonizing when it rebukes Greer for being insufficiently feminist (as the term has been narrowly defined by what feels like a shadowy female collective breathing down Wallace's neck).

Wallace should have just stuck to her story, which is spell-binding. Many of today's young feminists outside Britain, where Greer has lived as a formidable public presence since 1964, have never heard of her and badly need a primer in feminist history. Middle-aged feminists, on the other hand, still relish Greer's swash-buckling 1971 American book tour, which was as provocative as Oscar Wilde's 1882 visit.

Though she wonderfully illuminates Greer's early life in Australia, Wallace too often impugns Greer as a faux feminist who latched onto the women's movement for publicity. The facts show the contrary: that well before Betty Friedan's 1963 manifesto, The Feminine Mystique, the young Greer was boldly challenging conventions of feminine speech and behavior. She exemplified the revolutionary spirit of the generation rising after World War II.

Born in “conservative, Anglophile, stultifyingly predictable” Melbourne in 1939 to a dapper advertising representative and his “headstrong” wife, Greer was rigorously educated in Roman Catholic schools. She was “terrorized” by her mother, who beat her with a stick or toaster cord. Her “distant, sometimes tortured” father, absent overseas in the Royal Australian Air Force, was in Greer's opinion “weak, craven, feeble” for not protecting or praising her.

Greer's seething sense of defraudation and her stinging portrayals of men as cheats and parasites appear rooted in her disappointment with her father. She would cross the world in obsessive quest of his true identity: Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (1990) charts her sleuthing into her murky, shame-filled family origins.

“Lanky and clever,” Greer was an awkward six feet tall by adolescence. She took up fencing and had an affair with another girl. Arriving at the University of Melbourne in 1956, Greer already had “intellectual arrogance” with a persistent “Catholic intensity.” “Bullying and obnoxious in argument” but with “a palpable vulnerability,” she sank into misery and made “a melodramatic gesture at suicide” by flinging herself down a cliff.

Greer's shocking language and odd dress got her satirized by a student newspaper as “Germaniac Queer.” She aspired to a male sexual freedom, and there were abortions and gynecological problems, whose scarring affected her fertility when, in maturity, she longed for a baby.

Wallace examines Greer's rape at a football club barbecue, a trauma that she later publicized as emblematic of male oppression. A witness raises questions about Greer's judgment and actions at the time and insists, contrary to her claims, that sympathetic male students came to her defense.

Wallace gives an invaluable overview of the bohemian coteries and intellectual trends of Melbourne and Sydney University, where Greer received her M.A. in English literature. The combination of anarchism, moralism, and libertarianism in Greer's thinking is deftly traced to such disparate influences as the sex theorist Wilhelm Reich and the critic F. R. Leavis. But Greer's devotion to Byron, her thesis subject, is badly handled by the uncomprehending Wallace. At Sydney, Greer dabbled in theater and fell in love with a libertine male philosopher—the most serious relationship of her life.

Leaving Australia for doctoral study at Cambridge University, Greer found a female mentor in the Renaissance scholar Muriel Bradbrook. Greer's thesis, on love and marriage in Shakespeare's early comedies, is distorted by a hostile Wallace, who can't reconcile Greer's real-life “sexual braggadocio” with the male conquest in The Taming of the Shrew—when in fact Greer was asking searching questions about virility and female desire that feminism still cannot answer.

Wallace vividly documents Greer's rise to celebrity. A tour with Cambridge's Footlights Club, where Greer starred in musical revues, led to television offers that introduced her to the booming British rock scene. Greer's life was split between swinging London and the University of Warwick, where she taught for five years.

In London Greer spotted the rugged, hard-drinking Paul du Feu, a well-educated construction worker whom Wallace describes as “the heterosexual equivalent of a rough trade fantasy come true.” Du Feu was captivated by what he called Greer's “frizzed-out soul-sister hair,” “pre-Raphaelite beauty” and “tough-guy” sexual style. Their hasty marriage lasted three weeks. Greer's new “theology,” according to du Feu (who later posed nude for a Cosmopolitan centerfold), was sexual promiscuity, as espoused in underground periodicals like Oz and an Amsterdam-based, radically pro-pornography magazine Greer co-founded.

Wallace is scathingly negative about Greer's 1969 manifesto, The Universal Tonguebath, a paean to rock groupies and group sex. Her political disdain for popular culture is a salient weakness in this biography; Wallace should have noted the striking parallelism between the 1960‘s Greer and the resurgent pro-sex wing of 1990’s feminism, which embraces rock-and-roll instead of condemning it as sexist. Mocking the Oz Greer as “grooviness personified,” Wallace droningly indicts her “anachronistic passivity” and “hegemonic heterosexuality.” Yet Greer's vitality and wit leap off those pages.

The genesis of The Female Eunuch, Greer's trenchant analysis of the modern female condition, is ascribed to a woman agent and to Greer's Cambridge friend Sonny Mehta, now the editor in chief of Alfred A. Knopf. Wallace's wholesale rejection of the criticisms of feminist activists in Greer's famous best seller misses Greer's prescience about what would indeed go badly wrong with second-wave feminism.

But Wallace's chronicle of Greer's American tour, notably her tumultuous debate with Norman Mailer at Town Hall in New York City, is a major contribution to cultural history. Wallace unfortunately talked only to feminist leaders—thus committing the same “elitist” sin she accuses Greer of. In attacking Greer for belittling Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, Wallace fails to realize that that 1970 book, with its stridently anti-male premises about art, split feminism down the middle. The cultivated Greer was right about Millett's philistinism.

Wallace hurries through Greer's later career—her four years at the University of Oklahoma, her residence in Italy, her active support of third world causes and her books on art and poetry. Though she charts Greer's reversals—“disengaging from sex in her middle 40's” and abandoning concern for her looks—Wallace lacks psychological insight into the Greer who declares “I don't have any enduring relationships of any sort except with animals and plants.” But despite its hatchet-grinding and its mundane literalism about esthetics, this biography is a treasure trove of information about one of the world's leading intellectuals—whom women's studies programs, as Wallace observes, have outrageously neglected.

The Whole Woman gave Greer a golden opportunity to retake center stage by reassessing feminist history in her own terms. Alas, the book, which reads as though it was rushed into print to counter Wallace's biography, is exasperatingly disjointed and scattershot. It is overconcerned with Greer's British opponents and provincial feuds. Most American readers, for example, will be baffled by Greer's dark allusions to her angry resignation from Cambridge over the appointment of a male-to-female transsexual astrophysicist to a woman's college. And there are cryptic references to Greer's clash with catty women journalists who falsely claimed that she had had a hysterectomy and whom she charged in turn with excessive, brain-rotting use of lipstick. That battle, showing Greer's rejection of vixenish post-feminism, cries out for fuller detailing.

Like its precursor, The Whole Woman is structured in four parts: “Body,” “Soul,” “Love” and “Hate” (in The Female Eunuch) have become “Body,” “Mind,” “Love” and “Power.” Is Greer acknowledging that the sexes must get beyond mutual recriminations and that women have made slow but substantive advances in public life? Not at all: she insists that she never called for “equality” but only “liberation,” and she dismisses as inconsequential women's professional gains. “It's time to get angry again,” she proclaims about “the false dawn of feminism.”

The book is shot through with unhelpful and pass‚ invective against men. “Patriarchal authority,” we are told, strangles medicine, the stock market, and media and entertainment. Men are portrayed as filthy, lazy louts, sponging off women's labor. Greer bizarrely claims that “our culture is far more masculinist than it was 30 years ago.”

Though she says that “the identification of feminism with the United States has dishonored it around the world.” Greer freely borrows without attribution from American writers, as in her critique of the sexual revolution for having liberated men but exposed young women to exploitation and infection.

Among Greer's questionable assertions: ultrasound scanning of pregnant women may cause dyslexia in infants; the Pap smear is “the dragooning and torturing of women”; the “real powers” behind Roe v. Wade were male doctors, judges and mobsters who made “fortunes” in “the abortion industry,” unleashing “a tide of feticide” that swept the world. In Greer's grisly scenarios, modern medicine is simply “300 years of male professionals lancing women's bodies as if they were abcesses.”

Too much of the book consists of citations from recent magazine articles. Tantalizing points are raised but not developed—for example, Greer's attack on post-modernist gay theorists for making the vagina and rectum equivalent or her fascinating juxtaposition of African genital mutilation with Western plastic surgery and breast augmentation. Her gibes at recent pop music and the Internet have a third-hand quality, and she makes breathtaking misstatements—like saying that women's studies faculty members have been “regularly refused tenure” (what planet does she live on?).

The tone of this book is seriously unbalanced: Greer's normal humor and oratorical propulsiveness seem lost in her orgy of contemptuous sardonicism. I miss the mature, contemplative voice of celebration of nature in The Change, Greer's 1992 meditation on menopause. The Whole Woman, in short, does not give us the whole Greer. Ironically, Greer emerges with more dignity and stature from Wallace's acid-etched biography, which is also a far better read.