Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)
Studies - Enikő Bollobás: (De-) Gendering and (De-) Sexualizing Famale Subjectivities: Woman-Hating and Its Revisions in Literature and Painting
inequality, religion, economics, philosophy, journalism —to name only a few fields where the dismissal of the role of women goes quite far. 1. Woman in the texts of male misogyny Probably the most famous example of male modernist misogyny is T. S. Eliot. The women in his texts have become staple figures of modernity, whose alienation and ennui are only strengthened by the fact that they are affected by this alienation and ennui indirectly, through the men that define them. At best, Eliot's woman character is a lifeless, ghostlike figure, one of those who "come and go / Talking of Michelangelo" ("The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"), or spends her life "serving tea to friends," mourning her lost youth, neurotically twisting lilacs "in her fingers while she talks" ("Portrait of a Lady"). At worst, as throughout The Waste Land , she is female hysteria personified, famous for her bad nerves; or she is thirty-one year old yet "antique" looking Lil, whose abortion pills made her lose her teeth but who now will disappoint "poor Albert" for not being able to look good and give him "a good time"; or she is the bored typist making monotonous love with the repulsive "young man carbuncular." The desperate scene of her life includes her stale things left from the morning and the previous day: her kitchen stuff and her feminine "notions": The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, light Her stove, and lays out food in tins. Out of the window perilously spread Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last rays, On the divan are piled (at night her bed) Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays. The last line seems to give away the misogynist: the items that touch the body he is repulsed by, "[s]tockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays," become repulsive themselves. These are items that supposedly participate in the material construction of femininity, that is, they make the person wearing an underbodice, a corset, stockings, and slippers clearly desirable and desiring in the heterosexual context. Therefore, portraying these feminine notions as graceless and unbecoming parts of a repulsive love scene will evoke disgust not just in their love-making, but the womanliness of this woman too. 108
