Sontag & Company: Noemie Emery on Susan Sontag, Elaine Showalter, and September 11 - journalist, author - Brief Article

ELAINE SHOWALTER has the darndest bad luck. First, Inventing Herself, her chatty new book about feminist superstars, preaching the merits of free love and risk-taking, hit the bookstores at about the same time that intern Chandra Levy went missing, possibly as the result of taking one risk too many. Second, she had the worse luck of having war break out in September, exposing Susan Sontag, one of her heroines, as a stunningly self-satisfied blithering idiot, incapable of making the most basic moral distinctions between human error and cold-blooded evil. Feminism's great talent for giving bad advice to women has never appeared quite so crashingly evident. Nor has the rot at its core.

Showalter, who has a long and brave record of trying to inject life and humor into the grim world of the academy, has overcompensated here with a gossipy, breathless, gee-whiz account of an odd collection of women, who have nothing in common beyond their notoriety, and their often irregular personal lives. Here you will find the brilliant Rebecca West, one of the great writers of the twentieth century (though the scope of her work is not even hinted at); the estimable Vera Brittain, known mainly for her unbearable account of personal loss in the World War I generation; and the erratic but talented Mary McCarthy. But you will also find, given equivalent prominence, erstwhile Al Gore wardrobe coordinator and alpha male expert Naomi Wolf; failed exhibitionist Germaine Greer; former First Victim turned senator Hillary Clinton; and Oprah Winfrey, famous for dumbing down popular culture. You will also find here the unhappy Princess Diana, killed in a car crash with her rich playboy lover. Showalter claims to have f ound in these women the lines of a "feminist intellectual heritage," though some of these women barely have intellects. Any "heritage" they might share is bizarre.

In this ragtag assortment of brains, scolds, and nitwits, Showalter's clear favorites are Sontag and Simone de Beauvoir, who represent blackstocking life-style models for women protesting society's norms. The latter revealed this in her strange relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, in which she defined "liberation" as turning normative mores upside down. She would not make coffee for Sartre, iron his shirts or run everyday errands. What she would do for him was pimp shamelessly, endanger her academic career by "recruiting" her young students for him, and put up with endless betrayals.

In Sontag, this hostility to bourgeoise conventions took the form of an intense contempt for her country. As Showalter writes, apparently approvingly, "The ordinary details of American life in the forties drove her crazy, led her to grind her teeth, twirl her hair, overeat." Especially popular culture: "The weekly comedy shows, the tready hit parade, the hysterical narratings of baseball games, and prizefights, the radio--whose racket filled the living Room--was an endless torment."

Sontag, apparently, continues to be driven crazy by life in America. On the Monday after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it was not surprising to read Sontag in the New Yorker calling America "stupid," suggesting that America had it coming, and saying that the major problem is that America has too much power in the world. Sontag was particularly offended by the president's address and by Congress' singing "God Bless America." She wrote, "We have a robotic president who assures us that America still stands tall." Sontag compared the "rhetoric" of American officials to "the unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress." Nowhere did Sontag suggest that there might be anything wrong in flying planes filled with civilians into buildings filled with other civilians. Nor did she show concern for the casualties.

IN THIS she was closer than ever to Simone de Beauvoir, who could find nothing amiss in a Soviet Union that killed more than 30 million civilians. Nor did the Third Reich much annoy de Beauvoir. As Showalter herself admits of this feminist heroine, "During the war, de Beauvoir managed to sustain a set of moral, political, and sexual definitions that made it possible for her to sleep with her students, publish her writings, produce her plays, and make her way in occupied Paris without any anxiety about collaborating with the Germans or guilt about putting her needs first."

These are the models she wants to emulate? No wonder so many are saying no thanks.

Essayist Noemie Emery is a contributing editor of the Weekly Standard.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Independent Women's Forum
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group