SOURCE: Cronin, Gloria L. “Those Dreadful Mothers.” In A Room of His Own: In Search of the Feminine in the Novels of Saul Bellow, pp. 37-49. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001.

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.

—William Faulkner, Lion in the Garden

The androcentric text, by its very nature, is rarely able to see the feminine. In Bellow's middle to later novels in particular, however, even his most narcissistic monologists experience a melancholic absence, a place of emptiness, or an abyss that draws them to seek that missing element of the feminine which is symbolized in the Bellow text as the soul, the anima, the spirit of being, poetry, genuine feeling, the transcendental, or a literal woman.

Yet for all their yearning, these protagonists both seek and evade literal women who, as they are represented to us, quickly become only the women of androcentric representation. The maternal, mother matter, or maternal ground of the male protagonists' masculine physical and spiritual existence is erased or hidden from view, its only trace a nostalgically constructed sense of absence or lack in the Bellow text, a lack that then animates the comic quest of the Bellow protagonists.

Ironically, then, it is the Bellow monologist's narcissistic representation of his own masculine subjectivity that inevitably results in the erasure of the feminine in these mostly male-voiced monoglossias. As the male monologist fills the narrative with a constant recounting of his impressions, his remembered events, or his historical experience, he is able only to delineate who he is, where he is, and what he is talking about. Others whose presence is necessary to him he locates according to his own need. Through such an apparently seamless staging of the male subjectivity, all other voices are virtually preempted. Thus he creates the feminine absence he can rarely name, but almost always mourns because women in Bellow's novels are severely tailored to the androcentric desire and are contained almost entirely within the masculine gaze of the protagonist.¹

It is this policing, egocentric voice engaged in self-representation (and much feminine misrepresentation) in Bellow's novels that constructs the patterns of masculinity and femininity these books simultaneously reveal and suppress. More specifically, it is the textual or semiotic apparatus of tripled masculine “looks” of the protagonist, the narratee, and the sympathetic reader that enable the kind of readerly voyeurism which feeds on the stereotypical women that recur in Bellow's novels. For some readers there is the ego ideal represented by the narrator or monologist with whom he or she identifies. Readerly desire, then, contributes to the doubling, if not tripling, of its effects. The alternative is a resisting reading, producing a rupture within the reading subject and the text that can be produced either by the inability of some readers to make this ego ideal identification or their deliberate choice not to.

Bellow's novels, however, are more complex and self-aware in their understanding of gender than are many androcentric novels. Bellow and several of his monologists seem to sense the nature of the melancholic absence that haunts them, even to the extent of locating the problem within their own masculine subjectivity. And even though they control the narrative gaze, traces of the feminine inevitably erupt. Sometimes the male protagonists actually recognize it, and sometimes they barely apprehend its possibility. Regardless, their common search for this elusive feminine is usually foreclosed by their joint failures to unthink their own imprisoning masculinities. For these same reasons, it could be said that masculinity in the Bellow text is also imagined poorly by the egocentric monologist. For all that he speaks, he rarely speaks himself. Rather, he speaks incessantly about himself according to the cultural pattern of the sequestered romantic individualist-dreamer who longs for solitude, autosufficiency, and mystical powers. Enclosed within such a social construction, as well as within the typically worldly masculinity he also inhabits, he frequently succeeds in erasing an undiscovered part of his own masculinity as well as much of femininity in what amounts to a double movement of human loss. Throughout every novel, from Dangling Man to The Bellarosa Connection, The Actual, and Ravelstein, the male protagonist attempts to untangle his own social construction by trying to reclaim the lost feminine within himself.² In Ravelstein's case it is his significant other, Nikki.

Such storytelling as Bellow's produces the figure of woman cut mainly to the dimensions of the masculine symbolic. Just as in narrative cinema, woman in the Bellow novel is very often framed by the look of the male protagonist as an icon, a cut-out, the object of the male gaze, and even as a spectacle. It is an image made by a male writer and a male narratee mostly for the consumption of a male spectator/reader. The male protagonist, the bearer of the spectator's look, empowered by both a male narratee and a complicitous male reader, controls the events of the narrative by passing this look back and forth between men in a collusive trafficking in woman. This effectively triples the scopic drive of the novels in its textual and readerly production of woman as object.³

But phallocentric representations of woman in the Bellow text have a habit of breaking down. Despite the protective policing of representation within the masculine symbolic economy, she always threatens to escape from the protagonist's look and become real outside of an isomorphic male imaginary. Hence, the elaborate narrative strategies employed by the androcentric text for her containment, concealment, or complete erasure. In order to find the displaced or relegated feminine in the margins of the Bellow texts, we must look elsewhere and differently, there where there is no spectacle, as Cixous suggests.⁴ It is behind the spectacle produced by phallocentric representation of woman, somewhere in that elsewhere in the shadows and margins of the texts, that her traces may occasionally be seen.

A relatively large number of women are present in Bellow's texts. They are, however, built around a few disappointingly familiar stereotypes. The majority of them function as silent bit players or as prisoners on the scene of representation. Though many of them are as brilliantly imagined as any characters created by Hogarth or Dickens, and often much funnier, few of them are heard speaking in their own voices. More important, none, not even Clara Velde, speaks herself into an equivalent female subjectivity. Despite a few spectacular voicings here and there, they remain more spoken about than speaking, despite their sharp tongues, keen minds, impressive educations, distinctive personalities, and saving insights. Such remarkable creations as Grandma Lausch, Charlotte Magnus, Anna Coblin, Thea Fenchel, Madeleine Pontritter, Tante Taube, Renata Koffritz, Matilda Layamon, Treckie, Clara Velde, and Sorella Fonstein are unforgettable. Nevertheless, these women characters are mostly variations on the recurring images found in the traditional masculine representational economy. It is not that women are more negatively portrayed than the male characters. When men are negatively portrayed in the Bellow novel, however, the actual portrayals are not usually built on a narrow series of stereotypes as are the portrayals of women. Neither are they portrayed as disempowered or emptied of metaphysical content as are the stereotypical women. When Bellow's men fall from grace, they do not fall out of his sympathy or tolerance.

Furthermore, the male monologist exercises a very different kind of representational power when he creates negative stereotypes of women than when he creates a broad variety of negative representations of men. The difference lies in power relations between the genders, the larger historical representation of gender in Western culture, and the relationship between representation and social structures that these texts circulate and reinscribe.

Mothers, wives, mistresses, elderly women, sisters-in-law, and sexual consorts comprise the majority of Bellow's female characters, and only rarely do we see them outside of the emotional economy of the male protagonists' needs. There are, however, those female characters whose outlines do not fit within this bankrupt representational economy and, conversely, those who suggest the excess, multiplicity, and trace of a femininity. Their presence, sometimes literal and sometimes only a melancholic absence, always hovers around edges of Bellow's texts, suggesting that not all can be contained and controlled within the androcentric text.

The male protagonists' mothers include their biological mothers (living and dead), mothers-in-law, stepmothers, and surrogate mothers. One is immediately struck by the male protagonists' ambivalence toward these women. The feelings range everywhere from severe pity to contempt, hostility, revulsion, mistrust, great good humor, and love. As a group, however, the previously mentioned women are generally mentally inadequate, emotionally unstable, cunning, untrustworthy, scheming, coarse, physically grotesque, whorish, or decaying. Ultimately, they are repulsive or pitiable in the eyes of these fastidious, narcissistic protagonists. These women constitute that rejected mother, mother matter, or maternal ground and have been relegated to the realm of nature, whose rot and chaos threaten to contaminate the male protagonists' attempts to transcend it. They are typically of nature—gross, malformed, poorly socialized, mentally and spiritually inadequate, neurotic, decaying, dirty, irrational, promiscuous, loud, vengeful, destructive, and subversive. They are that untrustworthy maternal ground that always threatens to engulf the protagonist's body, strip him of higher resolves, overwhelm him with its erotic powers, undermine his aesthetic sensibilities, make inordinate demands on his material and emotional resources, strip him of his illusions of self-sufficiency, and threaten him with bodily decay. The male protagonist blames them for bestowing upon him an inadequate genetic endowment, or even for their absence. Above all, they threaten to fetter him in his quest for metaphysical abstractions.

We do not hear about Joseph's (DM [Dangling Man]) own mother, but we do see his revulsion and resentment of his mother-in-law, Mrs. Almstadt. He says he has always disliked her because she is foolish and unknowing (DM 19), not to mention babbling, tedious, oblivious, and ugly. He hates her thick face powder, her wrinkles, and her bathroom full of face packs and lotions (20). He is appalled by her constant talking on the phone and asks his father-in-law how he has ever managed to stick with her. He cannot tell whether she is malicious or merely guileless.

Asa Leventhal's (TV [The Victim]) dead mother arouses fear, hatred, and mistrust in him. With narcissistic anger he remembers her face as distracted and mad-looking, with nothing in it that is directed toward him. Her absence is coupled with a sense of his own erasure and is linked in the reader's mind with his condition of paranoia, “He dreaded [her face]; he dreaded the manifestation of anything resembling it in himself” (TV 46). Neither has he “forgotten his mother's screaming” (TV 47). Later he will project this instability and madness onto his sister-in-law, Elena, and her mother.

Augie (AM [The Adventures of Augie March]) loves his mother, Rebecca, but knows she has been morally compromised since he and his brother seem to be the random by-blows of a passing salesman. She is simple minded, meek, easily commanded, and gentle. He also remembers her as round-eyed, tall, and toothless. She wears circular glasses, ravelly coat sweaters, and men's shoes without strings on her large feet (AM 4). She is virtually a servant to Grandma Lausch, is bullied terribly by Simon, and is only intermittently attended to by Augie (3-4). Not even Grandma Lausch's dog treats her with respect.

Augie, however, has two more surrogate mothers, Grandma Lausch and Anna Coblin. Despite his obvious love for them both and the welter of comic detail with which he describes them, his misogynous gaze is not lost. He calls Grandma a Machiavelli of neighborhood politics, a plotter, a despot, a fierce contestant, who commands, governs, schemes, advises, and intrigues in all languages (AM 5). He describes her playing cards with “palatal catty harshness and sharp gold in her eyes” (5). His funniest terms for her include “Eastern Great Llama” and “pouncy old hawk of a Bolshevik” (10-12). He is highly amused by her masculine smoking, her autocratic manner, and her fascinating combination of guile and malice (10-12), and he laughs at her self-designation as “intelligentsia.” When she dies, he sees her as a pitiful fallen Pharaoh or Caesar and notes how old, powerless, and pathetic she has become. Although his heart goes out to her, realizing what she has meant to them in former years and how much they took her for granted, he can see her only as a pathetic old woman.

Periodically, Augie is sent to stay with Anna Coblin, his mother's cousin. She is one of nature's gross aberrations, according to his depiction of her. Although he has great affection for her, he is repelled by her physicality. She has, coupled with great size and energy, moles, blebs, hairs, and bumps of all kinds. She has a burning, morose face and a voice crippled by weeping and asthma. He describes her lying in bed with compresses, towels, and rags, cursing her enemies extravagantly, swollen, fire-eyed, her face framed in a “terrific” halo of red hair (AM 16-19). Augie remembers with great irony “she had the will of a martyr to carry a mangled head in paradise until doomsday, in the suffering mothers band led by Eve and Hannah” (16-17). In his eyes “she is in a desert pastoral condition of development and not up to the fancy stage of Belshazzar's feasts of barbaric later days” (22). He comments on her religious excesses and remembers that she was “a strong believer in eating” (21). She is also a filthy housekeeper who spends much of the day “shouting incomprehensibly on the telephone” (19). Her kitchen religion and hilariously distorted renderings of biblical stories amuse him, as does her strong grasp of her husband's business affairs.

Augie's description of Mrs. Renling is worse. He describes her as a lustful old woman who bribes him with elegant clothes while he squires her around. Augie thinks she is “dotty,” a false “flatterer” with “ungentle eyes” and “a smarting, all-interfering face” (AM 135). He despises her for her grievances, antipathies, doomedness, and nasty mouth.

Tommy Wilhelm (SD), like Asa Leventhal, has a deep-seated ambivalence toward his dead mother. In his moment of crisis and failure, he remembers her opposing his plans for an acting career. Though he loved her and feels badly about having disappointed her, he remembers that she denied him her blessing and instead bequeathed him her sensitive feelings, soft heart, brooding nature, and tendency to be confused under pressure. In short, he believes she has endowed him with his weaknesses. And though he laments that he can do nothing for her (SD [Seize the Day] 94), we wonder if he is really lamenting that in death she can do nothing for him.

Herzog's (H [Herzog]) mother is also dead, but we do see his stepmother, Tante Taube, and his sometime surrogate mother, Aunt Zipporah. Tante Taube, now in extreme old age, has a face “grooved with woe and age” (H 244). She has thin gray hair, no eyebrows, luminous, tame, protuberant eyes, a steady, slow, shrewd gaze, a pleated mouth, poorly made dental plates, a pendulous lip, an accent, a thickening neck, loose skin, and an arthritic body. Herzog thinks she looks like a woodchuck but remembers with boyish narcissism that she was an excellent cook who made strudel like a jeweler's work (243). Despite his grudging admission, given at her request, that she was a good stepmother to him, he can only associate her with food and with the collapse of nature.

Aunt Zipporah fares less well. Herzog is clearly in awe of her strong grudging character, flushed thin face, large hips, heavy steps, wit, terrible denunciations, harsh affection, malicious mouthy tongue, antagonistic nature, and powerful curses. He recalls her “nervous, critical awkward feet” and calls her “a stormy woman, a daughter of Fate,” whose visits to his childhood home “were like a military inspection” (H 147). To the adult Herzog she is funny because she is ugly, terrifying, and masculine.

Charlie glimpses Humboldt's mother (HG [Humboldt's Gift]) only once and briefly. He watches her staring out of a dim doorway “with some powerful female grievance” (5).

Mr. Sammler's mother (MSP [Mr. Sammler's Planet]) is mentioned only briefly as a culturally privileged, beautiful young woman, a freethinker whom Sammler blames for giving him his education in male privilege. He recalls her giving him a copy of a work by the notoriously misogynist and anti-Semitic Artur Schopenhauer on his sixteenth birthday, just as earlier she had named him for the philosopher. Sammler recalls how she herself brought “the nervous young Sammler his chocolate and croissants as he sat in his room reading Trollope and Bagehot, and making a ‘Englishman’ out of himself” (MSP 59). The adult Sammler blames her for this petted upbringing, which has made him “pleased,” “haughty,” “eccentric,” “irritable,” and worse still, “without compassion” (59).

Dean Corde's mother-in-law (DD [The Dean's December]), Dr. Valeria Raresh constitutes a special case. (And so does Dean Corde.) She is one of the rare women who escapes the fixed scene of masculine representation. Though she is first seen in an intensive care unit, half-paralyzed, and clearly dying, hooked into respirator, scanner and monitor, Corde never allows us to think of her as weak and helpless. Through Dean Corde's recollections of her emerges the picture of a powerful and heroic political figure. Corde describes her face as “criss-crossed every way with tapes, like the Union Jack. Or like windowpanes in cities under bombardment” (DD 4). He looks at her loose, long, fine white hair and wonders what it was once like. Then he is moved to pity by the big belly and thin legs, genuinely moved, but with a kind of get-it-over-with eager violence, and concludes that part of him is monster (5). He also concludes that she was a great woman (7). His picture of her is respectful, kindly, involved, and compassionate. Both Dean Corde and Valeria Raresh represent a better imagined masculinity and femininity, a difference that marks them off sharply from all the other pairs of sons and mothers. As he examines her bookshelves in the favorite room where she sewed, trying to know something of her and of her daughter to whom he is married, Corde remembers that she has always been fair and tactful with him, even when he was uncomfortable under her scrutiny. He remembers her in London, shopping at Harrods, and being undemonstratively accommodating. It is Albert, not Minna, who notices the pills in her pocketbook, her tripping, listing, and increasing lack of coordination. It is he and not Minna who monitors her exhaustion.

Mrs. Layamon (MDH [More Die of Heartbreak]) is only eight years Benn Crader's senior and is not a well-developed character. Benn suggests, however, that she is rather cold, extremely polite, and given to an unwelcoming kind of privacy. He is shocked when she lets it be known that she reserves her little office exclusively for herself. It is this office which contains the artificial azalea that tricks the botanist, Benn, into thinking it is real and thus demonstrates to him how badly his powers have been blasted by association with these money-hungry Layamons (MDH 180). Ravelstein's mother is described as a powerhouse, but not in any positive sense. She fails to protect him from his abusive father.

With the notable exception of Valeria Raresh, all of these mothers are depicted by the male protagonists as metaphysically inadequate, socially pitiable, and constituted of a myriad of shortcomings. Generally speaking, the portraits are remarkably consistent in their portrayals of women as loony, ugly, silent, powerless, powerful, scheming, vindictive, full of guile, decaying, or ineffectual. They are noticeably lacking in integrity, nobility, and intellectual horsepower. For the most part, they are regarded with ambivalence or hostility or both by their untrusting sons, regardless of whether they are loved.

Mothers not in maternal relation to the male protagonists fair badly also. Mimi Villars (AM) aborts her child. Simon March's mother-in-law is depicted as the willing victim of Simon's cruel, rejecting behavior, which she mistakenly interprets as humorous acceptance. Margaret Wilhelm (SD) is seen by Tommy as a castrating bitch; Ricey (HRK [Henderson the Rain King]) is an unwed teenage mother; Madeleine (H) is an enraged manic depressive; Renata (HG) appears to be an unsuitable mother; the wily Señora (HG) is a scheming, batty stage mother. Kenneth Trachtenberg's would-be mother-in-law (MDH) establishes new standards of disappointment in the mother department. Sensing that her daughter, Treckie, has made a mistake in passing Kenneth up as a husband, she decides to have him for herself. Acknowledging that she is ten years his senior (he thinks it is more like twenty), she suggests that a quiet marriage of pleasant nights would suit both their needs. Kenneth, however, comments nastily: “What stunning offers you get from the insane” (MDH 282). He notes her winsome teeth, which contrast dramatically with the sheer preposterousness of her “violent-bluish raccoonlike mask” (274). He thinks her eyebrows are made-up with a magic marker, and despises her Arabian musk perfume. She is full of charm signals, he reports, and has “a calculating manner like General Patton, who sat deciding from which side to hit you next” (277). He condemns her morally by concluding that like Uncle's friend, Caroline Bunge, she had probably seen more naked men than the surgeon general. Old Adletsky describes Frances Jellicoe as “built like a brick shithouse,” a woman whose cortisone swellings make her “look like Babe Ruth” (TA [The Actual] 10). Jay describes Amy Wustrin, the love of his life, as a “gray-faced maid-of-all-work—an overworked mother” who is almost unidentifiable under the black girders of the el tracks (19). Madge Heisinger fairs even worse. She is notorious, provocative, and murderous.

Jay Wustrin's mother is a great embarrassment to him. She would shake her “big brainless head” possessed of rich stupid black eyes. Furthermore, she seemed to be “sexually arrested” and in the final analysis strikes Harry as “an old country village woman” (41).

As a group, these women seem callous, destructive, mentally unstable, careless, ill-prepared, hysterical, wily, abandoning, sexually rapacious, castrating, and generally wacky. Nowhere in either group is there anything approaching a normal, adequate mother.

With few exceptions Bellow's mistresses are also loony and destructive. Aged women, however, bear the brunt of the most graphic and perhaps unkind representations. They seem to have all the fascination of reptiles for the male protagonists, who usually admire and love them inordinately. They are present from the earliest to the latest work, occurring in the single largest number in The Adventures of Augie March. Some are minor and others major presences in the life of the male protagonist, but none escapes his eye for the physically grotesque, not even the most loved, such as Mother March, Grandma Lausch, Anna Coblin, and Tante Taube. From the earliest to the latest novels, there is no softening of the grotesque detail with which these women are described. There is, however, a hardening of the gaze of the male protagonists of middle and later works with regard to the perceived erotic and passive-aggressive female scheming capacities of these old women. Each is ultimately viewed with disgust and in large part dismissed as metaphysically unusable, along with mothers, wives, and mistresses, sisters-in-law, and women friends. In nearly all cases, however, something of personal need and something of metaphysical endeavor draws the male protagonist to these women as powerfully as he is repelled by even the most loved of them. In these characters, as much as in any of the others, lies the clue to the real quest of the male protagonist for that elusive feminine he subconsciously senses, pursues, and fails to “see.” The category is large and includes Mrs. Almstadt, Joseph's mother-in-law, Asa's sister-in-law, Elena, and her mother, Mrs. Nunez, Asa's neighbor, Grandma Lausch, Anna Coblin, Mrs. Renling, Mrs. Lennox, Willatele, Wanda, Tennie, Zinka, Zelda, Zipporah, Tante Taube, Humboldt's unnamed mother, Margotte Arkin, the old Señora, Rebecca Volstad, Valeria Raresh the anonymous aging women of Dr. Layamon's female surgical wards, Della Bedell, Caroline Bunge, Sorella Fonstein, Amy Wustrin, and Madge Heisinger. And despite their old age and grotesquerie, they are still subjected to the searching, voyeuristic gaze of a male who loves some of them and fears and ridicules all of them for their apparently still dangerous and even more corrupt sexuality, that same erotic power manifested by younger women.

Asa (TV) decides Elena's mother is an ignorant, superstitious, ugly old immigrant woman who is using her daughter against his own brother Max, whom she blames for the death of her grandson. He looks fearfully at her “grizzled temples, thin straight line of her nose, the severity of her head pressed back on her shoulders, the baring of her teeth as she opened her lips to make a remark to her daughter” (TV). Asa is still convinced she is mad, vindictive, and crazy. Her smiling he interprets as “frightful glances of spite and exultation, as though he were the devil” (159). When he attempts to gain Max's complicity in this viewpoint, Max identifies his paranoia, “Well you've sure turned out to be a suspicious person” (216).

Aunt Zipporah fares less well. Herzog is clearly in awe of this “stormy woman, a daughter of Fate” (H 147) but mainly because she is ugly, terrifying, and masculine. Then there is the “fat-assed 200 pound” Auntie Rae, who appalls the young Herzog, who is forced to speculate upon her enormous rear end.

He describes Tennie (H), Simkin's wife, as a kindly elderly sister woman with bad legs, stiff, dyed hair, abstract jewelry, and butterfly-shaped eyeglasses. She is diabetic, and Herzog accuses her of wickedness, hypocrisy, and cunning. Aunt Zelda seems to Herzog the epitome of “female deceit” and a woman “lying from an overflowing heart” (H 41). He thinks of her kitchen of enamel and copper and can only see the molded female forms bulging from all sides and Aunt Zelda's face full of mistrust. After she has accused him of shouting at Madeleine and the baby, bullying, being sexually selfish, and burying Madeleine alive in the Berkshires, the resentful Herzog says: “I will never understand what women want. What do they want? They eat green salad and drink human blood” (41-42).

Mrs. Lennox (HRK), Henderson's housekeeper, is a batty old neighbor with a toothless old face who, like a seventeenth-century witch, lives in a tree with her cats. Her tree is hung with a myriad of mirrors and old bicycle lights, while her yard is strewn with junk. She is a dirty derelict, and, in the finish, Henderson literally shouts her to death in his kitchen, leaving a “don't disturb” note pinned to her clothing.

Humboldt's mother is a madwoman in the attic of her husband's nineteenth-century masculine world of capitalistic endeavor. Charlie is particularly hard on the old Señora. He says that there is a “serpentine dryness” about her eyes (HG 410), and that she is probably bananas. His pity is completely aroused the morning he sees her sans eyebrows and makeup on her way to the bathroom. To him she is the ultimate stage mother and schemer responsible for her daughter's “sexual monkeyshines.” He cruelly describes her unassailable, furious rationality, her whiskery lips, operatic nostrils, and chicken luster eyeballs (410).

Rebecca Volstad, the Danish lady whom Charlie meets while parenting the abandoned Roger, he describes as a haggard elderly lady with a bad hip who is desperate to find a husband.

Miss Porson (DD), secretary to Dean Corde, is described as an old gossip, a “gabby old bag, not worth a damn” (41). “In her late sixties, she was fleshy, but her bearing was jaunty. Her plump face, heavily made up, was whitish pink, as if washed in calamine lotion, and on some days she painted a racoon band across her face in blue eye shadow—the mask of a burglar or a Venetian reveler. She kept her pants up with heavy silver and turquoise belts. … Her erotic confidences and boasts set his teeth on edge” (143-44). He admits the only reason he keeps her on is that she has him hostage because of his hatred of administrative detail.

Della Bedell is passed around the listening circle of Kenneth, Uncle Benn, and the implied listener, as an excessive weekend drinker who is inappropriately forward with Uncle Benn. She is, according to these two, full of sexual predatoriness, belligerence, and shrillness. He delights in recounting to his audience how Benn has hightailed it to Brazil, causing Della Bedell to die of a heart attack brought on by sexual deprivation. Kenneth laughingly sums her up as “a fat little lady who hit the bottle” (MDH 88).

Kenneth talks of Caroline Bunge as “a big graceful (old style) lady, vampy, rich, ornate, slow-moving, a center-stage personality. Middle-aged, she still stood out like a goddess from a Zeigfield extravaganza, the Venus de Oro type” (MDH 75). He laughs at the way she speaks through her nose, uses mood pills, and wears heavy makeup. She is “détraquée” (76), and her general air “somnambulistic.” Because he cannot share the surrogate father, Kenneth signifies this rival for Uncle's affections as “a strange siren who took lithium or Elavil” (79). Harry Trellman and Sigmund Adletsky are another pair of classic misogynists sitting together and gossiping about various women, most of whom fall victim to their critical gaze as they are passed back and forth as barter-goods in the formation of this “intellectual” partnership.

“Good sports” and other men's mistresses and wives are frequently reduced to stereotypes of “good lay,” despite the fact that some of them are quite liked and quite complexly drawn. Mimi Villars (AM), Polly Palomino (HG), the woman designated only as the lover of the “tuxedo man” (HG), and Angela Horicker (MSP) offer themselves as obvious examples.

Sisters-in-law are represented with similar hostility and suspicion tempered only occasionally with grudging admiration. They seem to be strong-willed, heavy, spoiled, materialistic, compromising, unattractive, powerful, and often hostile toward their cerebral and sentimental brothers-in-law. Most stand condemned for their power and their lack of sexual or intellectual appeal for him. Some stand condemned for their husband's lack of spiritual peace, even when they are grudgingly admired. They include Elena Leventhal (TV), Charlotte Magnus (AM), and Hortense (HG).

The pattern is that of the classic witch, crone, sexual predator, mad woman, deceiver, mantrap, and siren. Not even old women are sexually neutral or innocent of wicked designs upon men. None of these women presents a pleasant picture, and in nearly every depiction, the text makes it clear that the problem is the flawed, misogynistic, male protagonist through whose eyes she is viewed.

Notes

1. Maurice Blanchot, L'entretian infini, (Paris: Gallimard, 1969) quoted in Jacques Derrida, “Living On/Borderlines,” in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom et al. (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), 75-106. Blanchot observes that in such cases it is as if the masculine subject then acts in response to some felt need to “police” or “enforce” some unspoken order or law which insists that there is in operation some truth of equivalence about male and female subjectivity that must be sustained. In other words, the masculine seeing and speaking subject preserves this male homosocial world by controlling the phallogocentric orthodoxy of feminine representation, lest perhaps this other or feminine escape his verbal containments and wreak havoc within this isomorphic masculine symbolic order. This egocentric male voice then functions to preserve the stage for untrammeled masculine action precisely in order to maintain the illusion of the truth of equivalence. This feminine I am allowing you to see, says the egocentric monologist, is not my construction, but is the very essence or presence of the feminine that precedes existence.

2. Michel Leiris, L'age d'homme. (Paris: Gallimard [Folio], 1939). The pain of this “lack” or perpetually reconstituted “absence” is explained by Michel Leiris in a broad postmodern historical paradigm or master narrative similar to Irigaray's. With Irigaray, he describes the founding fantasy of the Platonic and Judeo-Christian tradition as an active negation of the mother or the feminine as the material basis of biological, cultural, and historical life. Both Leiris and Irigaray talk of the relegation of woman to passive matter through an ever-increasing spiral of nonmaterial philosophical abstractions like God, Money, and the Phallus. Leiris in particular talks of the resultant anxiety these substitutions produce in men: the horror of such a lack or absence, the anxiety of presence and absence, the separation of form and content, spirit and matter, value and exchange. He also explains its most tragic accomplishment—the metaphysical separation of Man and Nature, Man and Mother. He calls the results of this matricidal founding fantasy of Western culture the history of the emergence of “Man” and predicts the end of such a history. What follows, he argues, can only be the quest for reunion with the feminine, the exploration of the maternal abyss, and movement towards new access for the feminine, made possible by the collapse of or production of the masculine selfsame in place of other.

3. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology. As Derrida explains, “Wherever there exists the traditional male subject present to himself in relationship to an object [woman or other], there exists metaphysics and its attendant phallologocentric representations.”

4. Hélène Cixous, “Entretien avec Françoise van Rossum-Guyon,” Revue des sciences humains 168 (1977): 487; and Cixous and Clément, The Newly Born Woman, 72.