Seduction and Betrayal, by Elizabeth Hardwick

Writing About Women
Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature. 
by Elizabeth Hardwick. 
Random House. 208 pp. $6.95.
Elizabeth Hardwick's new collection of essays, all first published in the New York Review of Books, is a work of diverse and contradictory features. It is by turns, and often on the same page, both brilliant and opaque, wise and fatuous, perplexing for qualities which may represent either virtues of restraint or failures of imagination, and containing some of the best and worst writing she has ever done. Miss Hardwick examines her subject in terms of a limited and seemingly arbitrary selection of female characters in literature and women who were practicing writers or intimately associated with distinguished literary men. Her opening essay on the Brontë sisters consists largely of biographical description—a critical method for which, together with plot summary, she has rather too facile a gift—and says nothing of particular interest about these remarkable women except that, given the adverse conditions of the Haworth environment and the limited opportunities open to 19th-century women of their class and type, writing was for them a refuge from the austerities of the world and quite literally their sole means of psychic survival.
Miss Hardwick is considerably better than this in her discussions of Ibsen's women; in fact, she is excellent. The essays on Hedda Gabler, A Doll's House, and Rosmersholm are, in spite of their overattentiveness to the mechanics of plot, among the very best in the book. In them she creates a perspective which enables her to present the heroines of these plays as in part the victims of social forces oppressive to women, but at the same time as individuals with personal weaknesses that may transcend their sexual roles and finally create the terms of their self-victimization. Miss Hardwick understands the importance of moral and psychological flaw in the establishment of tragic authenticity, and she wisely avoids the programmatic feminist approach which would reduce complex human situations to instances of merely sexist domination and martyrdom.
This same perspective distinguishes the fine studies of Zelda Fitzgerald and Sylvia Plath, two women whom it has become a feminist convention to treat hagiographically, with an oftentimes militant disregard for those qualities of the demonic and suicidal which doomed them both to become martyrs to no cause but their own psychoses. Miss Hardwick quite rightly sees Zelda as a woman of undoubtedly large creative potential who may have been severely damaged by the life she and Scott chose to live, and was perhaps as much his victim as he was hers, yet who may, in fact, have achieved what little she did achieve as an artist just because she was driven by her marriage into competition with him. Miss Hardwick also quite rightly finds terrifying the more vicious of the Plath poems, particularly those attacking the poet's long-dead father, not because she is impressed by their justice as indictments but, on the contrary, because they seem, in the very excess of their brutality to any conceivable hurt inflicted by the father, the expression of a mind out of control and raging for revenge against itself.
By contrast, Miss Hardwick seems, in her essay on Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf, to flounder badly. One senses throughout it a quality of strain, a struggle for definition and perception, above all, for a means of coming to terms with material which, as Miss Hardwick admits, has been overly documented in recent years but which is also somehow intellectually uncongenial to her. The result is that she engages neither Bloomsbury nor Virginia Woolf and is reduced to meandering in search of a thesis from observation to observation about people and places: Lady Ottoline and her house, Garsington; Clive, Vanessa, and Quentin Bell; the painter, Mark Gertler; Lytton Strachey and his love life; the sexual liaisons of Bloomsbury; Leonard Woolf; Vita Sackville-West; and Harold Nicolson. The essay finally lodges on the point of Virginia Woolf's “androgyny” and seems for a moment to be about to crescendo there. But Miss Hardwick merely observes that “‘Androgyny’ is a way of bringing into line the excessive, almost smothering ‘femininity’ of the fiction of a feminist like Virginia Woolf.” Unfortunately, Miss Hardwick manages by the end to bring nothing into line. She simply wanders away, muttering frustratedly to herself.
In her discussions of Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Carlyle, Miss Hardwick is again strikingly uneven. She says little that is fresh or important about Dorothy, who was, to be sure, an elusive and enigmatic figure, but in contrast to her performance on Virginia Woolf, what she has to say is said very clearly and directly. The essay on Jane Carlyle is far better, perhaps because Jane was a much more open and dynamic woman, and Miss Hardwick writes about her with a strong effect of personal identification and with very great sympathy and conviction.
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It is considerably to her credit that Miss Hardwick has been able to deal with this subject in these times without once raising her voice in the shrill, sanctimonious keening that is the normal accompaniment of feminist declarations. Her approach throughout these essays is judicious and fair-minded, and there is a decent reticence to assign responsibility in her treatment of the extremely complicated question of the influences that shaped and, on occasion, destroyed the lives of the women she examines. Yet such qualities in a work of this kind inevitably have their ambiguous aspect. There are moments when it is unclear whether Miss Hardwick is holding back from making a point or is at a loss to find a point to make. Furthermore, since her method is, for the most part, descriptive rather than analytical and almost entirely lacking in generalizing dimension, it is often very difficult to decide how to interpret or evaluate the situations she discusses. If the condition of women in society, as reflected in history and literature, is in fact her subject, then what precisely is she trying to tell us about it? What are the implications which, out of fastidiousness or imperfect understanding, she has left unstated? That the accomplishments of women have been made at the cost of immense suffering, frustration, and even at times their sanity? That the actions and attitudes of men have been primarily responsible? That the women she discusses are illustrative cases?
Yet of this group only the Bronte sisters appear to represent instances of women whose creative ambitions were directly compensatory for their position in society. And even at that there would seem to be small cause for lamentation in the fact that they may have been socially victimized into producing such works as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Carlyle, both of whom may have had some literary talent, gave over their lives to the care and encouragement of great men. Yet there is nothing to indicate that they saw this as sacrifice and much to indicate that they found their fulfillment, to say nothing of their place in history, through the creativity they so devotedly helped to sustain. It seems equally clear that the difficulties of Zelda Fitzgerald and Sylvia Plath were, before all else, psychological While it is perfectly true that Zelda, particularly in the early stages of her breakdown, was mistreated by Scott, it is also true that he was badly damaged by her. Nevertheless, they fed creatively on each other, quite literally exploit ed their relationship as subject-matter for their writing, and achieved what they did through a kind of desperate masochistic collaboration. Sylvia Plath was a mentally disturbed person rather than a socially victimized woman, and what is striking about her is the extent to which she concerned herself with the conventional roles and expectations which women who are not artists or intellectuals allow to dominate their lives. She seems never to have understood that she was under no obligation to conform to these stereotypes, and the fact that she felt compelled to try is a commentary not so much on society as on the precariousness of her psychological balance. Miss Hardwick may or may not have had these considerations in mind during the writing of this book. But she does not engage them directly, nor does she indicate that she perceives them as being among the possible implications of her material.
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This opacity or evasiveness becomes particularly disturbing in the title essay which, since it is placed at the end of the collection, might seem to have been intended as a concluding statement of thesis or summation of argument but is in fact neither. Instead, the essay reads like a lengthy preamble or an overextended marshaling of data in support of an argument which is never discovered. Miss Hardwick examines in considerable detail and often very perceptively several women characters in fiction who suffer seduction and betrayal by men. Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede, Roberta Alden in An American Tragedy, Maslova in Tolstoy's Resurrection, Richardson's Clarissa, and Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles are all brought forward to enforce a point that must have had a weightier significance in Miss Hardwick's mind than she is able to give it on paper: namely, that to be taken seriously as a character in fiction, the woman who is seduced and betrayed must have superior moral qualities. She must be pure and innocent, honorable and independent, and have “the capacity for high or lowly suffering, for violent feeling absorbed, finally tranquilized, for the radiance of humility, for silence, secrecy, impressive acceptance. . . . Her fall or her fate can only be truly serious if a natural or circumstantial refinement exists.” Of the women Miss Hardwick discusses, Hester, Maslova, Clarissa, and Tess are genuinely heroic because they possess these qualities. The others do not.
It is difficult to say exactly what Miss Hardwick intended to do with this insight. One can scarcely imagine that she would go to such lengths merely to restate in relation to women an aesthetic principle as ancient as Aristotle's Poetics. At moments it almost seems she is trying to suggest that male authors have conspired to make their women characters noble, humble, and enduring so that they will appear to be passive, even willing victims of the fate imposed upon them by ruthless men. If that is in fact the correct interpretation, then why does Miss Hardwick herself find these women admirable? One would suppose she would prefer them to be rebellious and vengeful, resisting to the death the efforts of men to manipulate them in this deceitful way. But once again she fails to clarify her position. She cites cases; she describes and passes on.
There can be no doubt, however, that the great theme of the seduction and betrayal novel is the often tragic disparity between the high personal worth of individual women characters and the low valuation which society places upon them, between their heroism and the unheroic status to which they are conventionally assigned. If, as Miss Hardwick suggests, we have now evolved into a period of cultural history in which innocence in women is no longer prized and we have ceased to respect superior moral qualities, then clearly the theme of seduction and betrayal has become obsolete. This may represent a crucial further stage in the liberation of women from male sexual and moral tyranny, but like so many developments in contemporary life, it is another humanitarian gain at the expense of literature.
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A final question must be raised about the principle governing the selection of these particular essays for the collection. It is of course common practice and perfectly permissible for a critic to bring together essays on whatever subjects he may have been invited by editors to write. But Miss Hardwick nowhere suggests that she intended the book to be simply a gathering of occasional pieces. The contents all relate to, and appear to be meant to develop, the theme indicated by the title and subtitle, and if that is their purpose, it is difficult to understand the rationale behind the inclusion of certain studies and the omission of certain others. If the Brontë sisters are considered germane to the discussion, why are not George Eliot and Jane Austen? Ibsen's women are given extensive treatment as are the heroines of the novels discussed in the closing chapter. Yet Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary are mentioned only in passing, while Moll Flanders, Isabel Archer, and Sister Carrie—to name only the most obvious among a great many possible candidates—are not mentioned at all. The subjects seem, in short, to have been chosen arbitrarily or according to some plan whose secret Miss Hardwick does not divulge. Other selections might well have served more persuasively as demonstrations of her thesis. But then in the body of her discussion Miss Hardwick reveals considerable uncertainty as to just what her thesis is, and she is unable to define and sustain a consistent attitude toward the evidence brought forward in her individual studies. It is for these reasons that, with due allowance for its many admirable features, her book seems an unsatisfactory performance, one that is often illuminating but that is finally vitiated by the obscurity or the confusion underlying her conception of her subject.

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