SHADOW DANCE: A rambling post about Angela Carter and gender. Not trying to rigorously prove anything, more trying to show some of the roots of my current beliefs about men and women.

Since I actually FINISHED my fall reading list (sorta… I knocked a couple books off it, which I guess is cheating), I’ve been on an Angela Carter rereading kick. I first found Carter in high school. I loved the way she could draw you into an inchoate world where half-expressed motivations were always shifting and uneasy–everything was undercurrent, it was all subtext and no text. She writes terrific conversations in which both parties are constantly misfiring, misreading each other, or sussing out complex and unacknowledged motives–conversations in which the participants are opponents, not colleagues. You had the sense that she herself wasn’t quite sure what she wanted to say (unlike, say, Dostoyevsky, or even Chandler), so she just threw a lot of situations and images and characters at the wall to see which ones stuck. She relied heavily on archetypes, using stock-characters to fill in the blanks in her characterizations: the tormented artist, the twins locked in a folie a deux, the middle-class girl suddenly discovering a dangerous world. She took those cliches and revivified them, and sometimes made them more than cliche. (Sometimes, of course, she only made them extremely intensely expressed cliches, cliches-to-the-sixth-power, and that’s when her books became the equivalent of B-movies: If you find one of your obsessions expressed in her cliches, you’ll be drawn into the heightened and artificial world of the book/B-movie, but if your obsessions lie elsewhere you’ll probably just think it’s silly.)

Later, when I started to rethink my support for the thing I called “feminism” (which I imagine many feminists wouldn’t have considered especially feminist, but hey), I recalled one of the attractive aspects of Carter’s writing: her ability to display gender in action. Her men and women are never “people”; their gender, their particular ways of expressing masculinity or femininity, are always intrinsic parts of who they are. She was especially adept at conveying male silences and cynicism, and female naivete, disappointment, and condescending pity. Her men and women viewed each other sometimes as enemies, sometimes as inscrutable aliens, sometimes as fascinating traps; but the intensity of their interactions always stemmed from the fact that men and women desperately desired gender. Men wanted to be men and wanted to find women; women the reverse. It was not just sexual desire, but the desire for gender, that gave her start-and-stop, menacing conversations their allure.

Maggie Gallagher, unsurprisingly, gets this right in Enemies of Eros: “However great or small biologically-based sex differences are, culture always exaggerates them. This frustrates and shocks the modern intellectual. ‘But clearly biological femaleness is not enough,’ complains Susan Brownmiller. ‘Femininity always demands more.’ She is right. Culture exaggerates sex differences to make them more gratifyingly real–to satisfy our lust for gender.

“…Fashion cycles alternate. Women strive to be full-bosomed fertility goddesses or tomboyish Annie Halls, but either fashion exaggerates our femaleness. There’s nothing more feminine than Cher in a black leather motorcycle jacket.

“When talking about how people acquire gender, social scientists revert to mechanical concepts such as ‘social conditioning.’ They imagine a process in which parents, teachers, and media moguls cram childish souls into little gender packages from which we escape only with extraordinary difficulty. If this were the case, creating a gender-neutral society, while very arduous, might be possible. But the truth is children do not passively permit themselves to be gendered. Instead they hunger for it, actively reaching out for ways to establish a sexual identity. They too [] lust for gender.”

Gallagher describes two families that tried to raise their children without gender stereotypes. The kids rejected years of gender-neutrality training after very brief periods with relatives who promoted gender roles. Gallagher notes, “Offered a gender stereotype, they grabbed it and ran, much to their parents’ dismay. Sex roles are stubborn in part because they satisfy a basic human need.”

She adds that gender roles do not require a belief that men are better than women: “One sure way to deprive women of [belief in their own equality] is to tell them that their most cherished contributions to society are inferior, that their deepest feelings and values are but self-delusions, that indeed, their very selves are lost as long as gender lives.”

Now, in high school I would have thought this was hooey, for a lot of reasons. For one thing, there is the desire to view the exceptions as the places where the Truth is exposed–thus, since some children really do reject attempts to categorize activities as “boys’ things” and “girls’ things,” the conscientious objectors of gender must be more important and more right than the gender-seeking majority. Second, and related, there’s the belief that if you accept gender roles you must accept narrow ones, rigid roles in which only men can be doctors and only women can care for children.

The second objection is the most powerful, since it also feeds the first objection. (For example, the first objection assumes that girls who reject “femininity” are rejecting the concept itself rather than simply rejecting an overly-narrow version of femininity.) And really, all of literature refutes this second objection. Literature, because it relies so much on making explicit the implicit roles and characters and poses by which we live, naturally relies on gender, the category that underlies and colors all other roles. Literature refutes both people who think gender should be abolished and people who have overly-narrow views of womanhood or manhood. Rosalind, Antony, Lear, Beatrice, Iago, Emilia, Leontes–could any of them exist in a genderless world? I think not; and I think even the apostles of gender neutrality would miss that menagerie when they were gone. And also: Could any of them exist in a world where women were “angels in the house” and men were Strong Silent Types? Again, no; I can only hope that the apostles of gender rigidity would miss them.

When I was a feminist, or when I called myself a feminist, I didn’t reject gender–I just viewed it as a costume box. You could combine a boa, a pirate eyepatch, a muumuu and a Stetson hat, and as long as you didn’t create a unified picture that could be somehow identified as “womanly” or “manly” you were performing a feminist act. (Emphasis, of course, on “performing”; I’ve never bothered to try to understand Judith Butler’s “gender as performance” shtik, but certainly the idea of consciously both performing and confusing gender roles was a big part of my feminism. Performance implies both individuality and role, both self and culture, and to that extent I think “gender as performance” is a fairly important insight: Gender gives a language, a tradition, through which the individual can most powerfully speak. Beyond that, I have no clue what Butler was going on about….) I think this mix-but-never-match approach is closer to the truth than an approach that seeks to produce gender neutrality; but it’s not close enough. Angela Carter is much closer.

Carter is closer to the truth about gender because she recognizes, first, that one can’t shape a character without it; and second, that the individual need not dissolve into the role. The role can be a means through which the character expresses his or her individuality. No one would confuse Fevvers from Nights at the Circus with Annabel from Love, but both draw on recognizably female archetypes–different ones. (Fevvers’s good-time girl is about a hundred times healthier than Annabel’s white-clad, world-fearing maneater.)

Carter also recognized one of the most important facts about men and women: Fatherhood isn’t “natural” or obvious. Wise Children is an attempt to turn this into comedy, while mostly, in the world around us, it plays out as tragedy. The title comes from the saying, “It’s a wise child that knows his own father”–or, in Gallagher’s words, “A central problem in any culture, as Margaret Mead once remarked, is: ‘What to do with the men?’ The male flight from family stems from our failure as a society to come to grips with the need and the dilemma expressed in that question. Women have babies. That is an awesome and indisputably feminine capacity.

“My six-year-old son puts a large grey plastic knife underneath his sweater. He then pulls it out and looks up at me, anxiously, testing, and announces, ‘Women have babies. Men have swords.’ At a very young age the male senses a certain sterility at the root of his condition and searches for some positive way to assert his sexual identity. …[M]ore than half the men in one survey confessed …nagging doubts that they were really the baby’s father, a fear that they had been left out of something–something as monumental as the creation of life.”

Fatherhood is a social construction–the act of “legitimating” a child (a metaphor that comes up throughout Wise Children) places men in relation to children. Without that social construction, without social support for fatherhood as a masculine role, men simply do not have the strong ties to their children that women do. Jennifer F. Hamer’s What It Means To Be Daddy, a study of black fathers who do not live with their children, attempted to prove that men can be fathers without marriage. But for me–since I grew up with my father there, tied to us, one of the rocks on which our family was founded, ours–the connections between fathers and children in NAME’s book seem frighteningly attenuated, ad hoc, and unreliable. Many of the men in her book are torn between several different sets of mother-and-children; even those who aren’t, simply are not available, do not belong to their children in the way that a married father belongs to his. They haven’t put down anchor. And these are the men who are most dedicated, men who are admirably and heart-breakingly struggling to be “daddies,” men who want to be good fathers (and, in many cases, men who are shut out of their children’s lives by the children’s mother or grandmother). But because they have stepped outside of or refused to accept their role as husband, their role as father also becomes unstable and conflicted.

So in short, the solution to contemporary conflicts over gender–over the roles of men and women–can’t be solved by trying to erase gender. We can seek to channel the desire for gender; I talk a little about this in my post about “the beauty myth.” We can seek to channel and complicate or temper male aggression, for example, without seeking to diminish or reject masculinity. We can point out the variety of gender roles, without seeking to dissolve the roles. This is only the very first thing that needs to be said about gender; the later, and more interesting, things concern how we will re-imagine and renew gender roles. But the first thing to say is: Relations between men and women are not what they should be, and the answer is not less gender but better gender.