Book Reviews

TOWARDS A FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF HEIMAT

Gisela Ecker (ed.) Kein Land in Sicht. Heimat ± weiblich? (No Land in Sight: Feminist Critiques of Heimat) Munich: Fink, 1997. 224 pp., ISBN 3-7705-3104-3

Since 1989 there has been a renewal of debates on nation and nationalism in Germany, and these debates are of continuing consequence in the face of all the problems of a process which has been welcomed as `a growing together of what belongs together', namely a German nation, as well as problems which arise in the wake of globalization (a catchword for a complex of social problems arising from the neoliberal turn in politics) and the founding of a uni®ed Europe and the wars we have witnessed in the Balkans and in countries formerly belonging to the Soviet Union. Kein Land in Sicht. Heimat ± weiblich? is an interdisciplinary collection of essays which illuminate aspects of Heimat and add considerably to an under- standing of its importance for the discourse of the nation. Heimat is of central importance in the German discourse of the nation. It is a uniquely German word, although, as Gertrud Koch explains in her essay (`Vom Heimat®lm zu Heimat'), we can ®nd the complex of feelings described by Heimat in discourses of regional movements trying to construct differences and regional identities. To give an idea of the complex of feelings, Koch quotes a passage on Scottishness from David Miller's On Nationality (1995):

He also wanted to keep the past alive; though his intelligence suspected that much of the tradition owed itself to nineteenth-century invention and a wish in the Scots to be other than the Irish, his heart swelled in a way he could not stop at the old songs and stories. This access to something he could not describe but that ®lled his heart when he heard, for instance, the word `Locheil' or the talking crackle of heather burning, he wanted to pass to his child. He supposed he wanted her to have those things he could not describe but knew he did possess, loyalty and a sense of place, as a father with a faith might show the way to his child.

The difference between a Scottish feeling of Scottishness, for instance, and the German feeling for Heimat would then concern different functions, Heimat being a discourse of nation. Heimat has its roots in the 19th century. It emerged long before the German nation, originally constructed along cultural lines (Kulturnation), established a nation-state. Heimat signi®es a vague sense of belonging, and does not require clear legal de®nitions or citizenship regulations. Its vagueness lends it the character of an empty space to be ®lled by projections of various kinds expressing people's desire for homogeneity and a natural order. Thus, Heimat

The European Journal of Women's Studies Copyright # SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 6, 1999: 369±381 [1350-5068(199908)6:3;369±381;009530] 370 The European Journal of Women's Studies 6(3) belongs to those uni®catory discourses on which discourses of the nation feed and which gives them their affective appeal. Gisela Ecker, in her introduction to this collection of essays, characterizes the bundle of emotions expressed by Heimat: homesickness, nostalgia, a desire for harmonious and satisfying circumstances, a desire to return to a space without con¯icts, signifying either a return to an early phase in one's life or a return to a former cultural and social phase in history. These emotions may be activated and instrumentalized by and for a variety of political and national discourses, by patriots and supporters of Vaterland, in the dif®cult processes started by the reuni®cation of Germany (Wiedervereinigung), as well as for a critique of capitalism and for ecological programmatics. Heimat is very often a substitute and a dehistoricized version of nation, used to avoid acknowledging troubling facts in German history. From analyses focusing on the construction of nation, for instance in early- modern England, we know that the discourse of femininity is fundamental for the discourse of the nation. Femininity and nationality were constructed in a recipro- cal process as has been described by scholars analysing the representations of nation in Elizabethan works of art and literature. Kein Land in Sicht. Heimat ± weiblich? makes it very clear that what applies to nation and femininity applies to Heimat as well. Heimat is a place typically peopled by women, mainly mothers, whereas men typically are soldiers who defend Heimat somewhere else and suffer from Heimweh, homesickness or nostalgia. Since the turn of the century Heimat signi®es the place where the self enjoys a stable identity, and which functions as a help to cover up losses, traumatic experiences and psychic cracks. A recent government publication, for instance, celebrates Heimat as saving us from the coldness of functional logics, rigid rationality and instrumentality, anonymity and isolation. Heimat, as patterned on the gender system, is, then, constructed and represented along the lines of the prevalent mother image. The affective and emotive longings for Heimat are of an oedipal character, and the oedipal track can be traced, for instance, in a vast production of Heimat literature and ®lms in a Heimat setting. In Heimat literature and ®lms, women are represented as guaran- tees for wholeness, innocence, stability and homogeneity, and the narrations of the ®nal return to a non-ambivalent place of Heimat and of the struggle to regain it follow patterns of stereotypical gendering. In producing a discourse of unity and wholeness, Heimat literature and ®lms of necessity cover up gender differences and a lot of other differences as well. The illlusions of homogeneity always function by denying differences or making them disappear. Twelve essays by scholars from across the disciplines analyse various aspects of Heimat discourse in the 20th century. Silke Wenk and Irene Nierhaus are art historians. Wenk analyses the gendered national and Heimat message and mean- ing of placing KaÈthe Kollwitz's sculpture Mutter mit totem Sohn (Mother with a Dead Son) in a telling architectural context of Germany's old and new capital, Berlin. Irene Nierhaus analyses the meaning of the Vienna Wehrmann, a sculpture of special import for an exclusively male understanding of nation, and the ritual of hammering nails into this ®gure as an important link to understand how elements of the discourse of Heimat can be transformed into elements of a national discourse. Theologian Doris Brockmann makes us aware of the Christian equation of heaven and Heimat and of the implications of the dogma about the Assumption of the Virgin Mary (proclaimed in 1950) for gendering heaven according to Heimat by putting the Virgin and Mother Mary in heaven. Annegret Pelz discusses cartographic traditions and 20th-century literature in order to ®nd out about Europe as a possible projection of Heimat. Annette Brauerhoch and Gertrud Koch Book Reviews 371 analyse aspects of Heimat in ®lms. Brauerhoch discusses Helma Sanders-Brahm's ®lm Shirin's Wedding (1976). The ®lm, which narrates relevant events in the biography of a Turkish immigrant, ends up ontologizing the fate of women under patriarchy through a concomitant denial of difference and a denial of Heimat to the protagonist Shirin. Koch analyses the aesthetics of Heimat®lm and the functionality of discourses of Heimat for the discourse of the nation. Gisela Ecker, Monika Nienaber, Ina Brueckel and Kader Konuk analyse the discourses of Heimat in works of 20th-century literature and their reception. Birgit R. Erdle discusses Levinas's constructions of the myth of Ulysses and the story of Abraham in the context of a discourse of Heimat, and Herta MuÈ ller gives us a notion of what discourses of Heimat would mean to a Romanian woman of Roumeno-German descent. MuÈ ller's contribution to the collection helps to understand the depressive and constricting implications of Heimat via an autobiographical and idiosyn- cratical reconstruction of Heimat in the rituals and lifestyles of people, and she pleads strongly for a de®nitive dismissing of all discourses of Heimat. The book is a really good read. The selection of essays is convincing, and the range of disciplines covered is extensive. This collection is an inspiring and illuminating contribution towards a better understanding of the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion at work in the cultural construction and circulation of Heimat. It helps to make Heimat a debatable matter and recognize its tremendous in¯uence in constructing German nationality. It is useful and liberating to read this book.

REFERENCE

Miller, David (1995) On Nationality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gisela Engel J. W. Goethe University, Frankfurt

WHEN WILL THEY EVER LEARN?

Billie Melman (ed.) Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1870±1930 London and New York: Routledge, 1998, 459 pp. (with biographical references and index), ISBN 0-415-91114-1 (pbk), ISBN 0-415-91113-3 (hbk)

Coming from the former Yugoslavia and living in the west while that country was disintegrating through a war, I often encountered one set of questions: `Haven't people from the former Yugoslavia had enough of bloodshed throughout their history? Haven't they had enough of expulsions, persecutions, massacres in World War II, World War I, the Balkan Wars, and all the other con¯icts in the past? Were they not sick and tired of the past hatreds, mutual accusations and endless quarrels? Why are they repeating it all over again?' In short: `Haven't they learned anything from their history?' Reading the collection edited by Billie Melman, one is tempted to ask these same questions again, and, having asked them, to end up in despair. For this extraordi- nary collection of texts about the Great War presents an almost frightening mirror image of today's wars and con¯icts, showing that the ubiquity of gendered and racialized symbolism defeats time as much as space, and stretches from the past to 372 The European Journal of Women's Studies 6(3) this very day. It proves that the same passions still drive individuals and communities into the same violent ends as they did one hundred years ago, and that dissenting voices are always too few or too easily silenced. Seen from that perspective, the collection can be read as a requiem for humanity, forcing us to conclude that, when it comes to wars and con¯icts, at the end of this millennium we, as humankind, do not seem to be any better off than we were at the end of the last century. So, does it really mean that we have not learned anything from history and that we never will? Or, is the world divided between those who are advanced in their knowledge, and those ± like the Somalis, ex-Yugoslavs, Indonesians, etc. ± who are bound to repeat their mistakes? The answer offered by contributors to Melman's book is absolutely impressive: they dismiss the question altogether, and argue that the point is not learning from history, but learning about it. They embark upon that task in a most sincere, inspiring and energizing manner. And this is where learning comes into the picture, for there is a lot to learn from this book. There are two theoretical levels on which the book develops. One concerns concepts; another concerns the epistemological status of the material used in the texts. It is a careful and stimulating handling of these two levels in almost every contribution that makes this collection such extraordinary reading. With regard to the concepts, an objective is de®ned in the introduction: recon- sideration of many assumptions about gender and war ± as well as their relations (p. 2) ± and, I would add, assumptions about history. The authors perceive the period with which the Great War is associated as a historical process, not an event with a clear beginning and end. As a process, it is, furthermore, de®ned as much as a `global and colonial affair' as `a European one' (p. 1), and it is analysed as inseparable from the processes of building up as well as breaking down nations, states and empires. It is this speci®c understanding of war and (war) history that forms the basis from which individual authors approach `intersections' and `mutations' of gender before, during and after the Great War. But although gender relations and identities are de®ned as central to the inquiries, it is assumed that `popular images of masculinity and femininity stood for much more than gender. These images helped make sense of the apparent shifts within colonial and interracial relations' (p. 8). Thus, ethno-colonial and national identities are analysed as constitutive of gender identities and vice versa. Signi®cantly, sexuality is also given a due place in the analysis of how different individuals or groups of women and men de®ned and defended social, cultural and political spaces marked by the war. From Egyptian noblewomen to British war volunteers, from male imperson- ators to religious feminist organizations, from the ®rst generation of Jews in Palestine to the tirailleur senegalais in the French army, we follow individuals and groups who acted not only as political agents pursuing certain goals, but who were also gendered, sexualized and racialized embodiments of the speci®c ideas and ideals. It is this attention to speci®city that makes the contributions in this book so valuable. No grand history there, no larger than life forces and powers, no generalizations. Instead, a careful analysis of parties involved, of interests at stake, of values and norms challenged, changed or reasserted. Behind this care for many different, concrete and speci®c situations which each author addresses, lays a common concern for the epistemological status of the material. The texts are based on an enormous variety of data: from diaries and personal letters to ®ction, from newspaper cartoons and posters to war memoirs, from documents found in Book Reviews 373 the archives to the live words of interviewees. Bearing in mind all the inter- and intra-disciplinary debates about `interpretation' and `reality', about `representa- tion' and `experience', about the `currency' and `reconstruction' of history, such variety of material and themes could have resulted in an almost unreadable book. For, what could a text about theatrical gender-bending possibly have to do with a text about domestic servants? And how could a text about war cinematographers relate to a text about welfare policies? Still, reading the contributions one after another, I did not feel that with each new subject I had to jump into another level of reality and completely change my frame of reference. Although the texts address a wide variety of themes and use different data, the attitude of the authors towards their material has a common base. First of all, they all adore and distrust their material, at the same time. Second, they vivisect with equal rigour every image, word and symbol, without privileging one over another. And, ®nally, while some texts are more consistent and successful in pursuing that methodology than others, taken together, they show that granting the same epistemological status to a newspaper cartoon, a book of ®ction, or the colour of a tie, bears intellectual fruit: a book in which the reality of a war is neither beyond nor above its political and cultural represen- tations, and in which the experiences of men and women are never transparent and self-explanatory. This is a book which teaches us that when the history of wars is in question, the only ones who need to learn are scholars.

Dubravka Zarkov University of Nijmegen

BEDROOM SECRETS AND TROUBLESOME POLITICS: THE PROBLEM OF INTEGRATING LIFE AND WORK IN THE BIOGRAPHIES OF FAMOUS FEMINISTS

Deirdre Bair Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990, 718 pp., ISBN 0-671-74180-2 (pbk)

Bascha Mika Alice Schwarzer: Eine kritische Biographie (Alice Schwarzer: A Critical Biography) Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 1998, 333 pp., ISBN 3498-04390-0

No celebration of the impact of Simone de Beauvoir's literary and philosophical work would be complete without some attention to her life and the way it has been represented in her own memoirs and the biographies which have been written about her. Successful novelist, co-founder of existential philosophy, left-wing activist and advocate of the women's movement, author of the feminist classic The Second Sex (1949), and ± last but not least ± Sartre's lifelong companion and fellow champion of sexual freedom, de Beauvoir's life has been a source of inspiration for the generations of feminists who have followed. One would expect that any biography devoted to such an amazing individual would of necessity be an intellectual biography. It would do more than collect the bedroom secrets of de Beauvoir's life (her relationship with Sartre, her sexual experiments with men and women). Rather it would focus on how her life was shaped by her work and how her work was informed by the circumstances of her life. A feminist intellectual 374 The European Journal of Women's Studies 6(3) biography of Simone de Beauvoir would take into account the constellation of gender/power relations in which she lived and critically assess the signi®cance of her work for feminist thought and praxis. The small, but respectable genre of biographies written about de Beauvoir seems, however, to be less devoted to what she wrote than to who she was. From dutiful daughter of a bourgeois, Catholic family to sexual libertarian to leading ®gure in postwar French intellegentsia, de Beauvoir's personal life and relation- ships are of primary interest. In particular, her liaison with Jean-Paul Sartre takes centre stage of any book written about her. Whether it is viewed as the romance of the century or an alliance made in hell, the details of their life together seem to be what interest most biographers. Deirdre Bair's Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography was expected to be the exception. Written by a highly respected biographer (Bair had earlier won critical acclaim with her biography of Samuel Beckett), this readable and comprehensive 700-page study was based on nearly ten years of painstaking research. Bair not only had numerous conversations with de Beauvoir herself, but she talked with many of her intimate friends and contemporaries. She tracked down everything ever written by or about de Beauvoir, including newspaper clippings, letters and personal documents. De Beauvoir, who had been disappointed with her previous biogra- phers, insisted that this was the only biography which grasped both her life and her work. Their collaboration was by all appearances satisfactory to both parties. In fact, Bair was so excited about their `very different kind of collaboration' that she ± counter to earlier agreements and standard biographical practice ± asked de Beauvoir to read and comment on the book before its publication. As she put it:

I thought it would mark a new kind of biography if we had, within the pages of my book, the autobiographer Beauvoir commenting on the biographer Bair's work, with the biographer sometimes arguing against the autobio- grapher's memory and interpretations, and with each explaining and de- fending her particular version of the life. Together we arrived at the same conclusion at the same time: we would have a sort of biographical Hall of Mirrors, an in®nity of re¯ection, an elusive truth in all its varieties. (p. 16; emphasis added)

De Beauvoir was so moved by Bair's suggestion that she `uncharacteristically' reached out and embraced her. Unfortunately, the collaboration never took place. Within a week, de Beauvoir entered the hospital for what proved to be a terminal illness. Despite her intentions, Bair's book reads mainly as a chronicle of de Beauvoir's life with Sartre, after all. While her subject emerges as a strong and competent woman, she is not treated as an independent thinker. Time and time again, we read about how de Beauvoir's work is placed on a backburner. She herself never tires of asserting that Sartre's intellect and work were superior to her own or that he was `essential' for everything she ever thought, wrote or did. She apparently took it as a matter of course that she should devote her time and energy to correcting his manuscripts while hers barely merited a ¯eeting glance from him. An inveterate womanizer, Sartre lost interest in de Beauvoir sexually early on. She not only tolerated his in®delities, but encouraged them by supplying her own young students as sexual fodder for their menage aÁ trois. When, in 1947, she met the love of her life, the American writer Nelson Algren, she refused to marry him out of loyalty to Sartre. Although Bair is intent on marshalling the facts and goes to some length to Book Reviews 375 avoid sensationalist revelations, she, nevertheless, does not provide an interpret- ation of her subject's life which would enable us to reconstruct de Beauvoir's perspective on the events of her life. De Beauvoir remains somewhat shadowy ± a competent, yet ultimately rather cold woman who is ambivalent with women and inexplicably obsessed with an ageing adolescent with a Don Juan complex. As Karin Vintges notes in her excellent Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir (1996), Bair's biography does not allow us to understand the relevance of de Beauvoir's life for her thinking and vice versa. It is against this backdrop that I read the recent biography of the well-known German feminist Alice Schwarzer by Bascha Mika, Alice Schwarzer. Eine kritische Biographie. Like de Beauvoir, Schwarzer was in¯uential in the feminist movement of the 1970s. She was an activist, journalist, author of several books, media star and founder and long-time editor of the successful feminist magazine Emma. Schwar- zer became famous with her in¯uential interview with Simone de Beauvoir in which Simone not only admitted to having had an abortion (at a time when abortion was illegal in Western Europe), but described herself for the ®rst time as a feminist. Schwarzer, a great admirer of de Beauvoir, did six more long interviews (Schwarzer, 1991). I remember reading Schwarzer's books on sexuality, abortion and women's position on the labour market as a scholarship student living in Germany in the 1970s. (I also read her book on de Beauvoir and while I don't remember all the details, I do know that she was more concerned with de Beauvoir's work and her importance for feminism than her relationship to Sartre.) I enjoyed the combi- nation of accessible German (a relief after the pretentious and convoluted lan- guage of the Germany academy), provocative and often witty feminist analysis, and the attention to the everyday experiences of ordinary women. I remember chuckling at Schwarzer's performances on television where she proved an able sparring partner with myriad politicians, journalists and anti-feminists. While being extremely successful, Schwarzer was also highly controversial within the German women's movement. I will never forget the heated discussions in my local women's centre about whether we should boycott Emma because it was usurping the popular feminist magazine Courage. Schwarzer's biographer, Bascha Mika, is a well-known journalist for the left- wing German Tageszeitung (taz). Mika met Schwarzer in 1994 when she was awarded the Emma prize for the best female journalist. She describes ®rst seeing Alice Schwarzer talking animatedly to a circle of admirers. Although she admits ®nding her `charismatic and fascinating', she is also immediately struck by her `natural' tendency towards `tyrannical' and `harsh' behaviour towards her col- leagues and her `cold and calculating desire to dominate others' (p. 14). But, even more `irritating' is the throng of admirers surrounding Schwarzer which Mika perceives as a `closed club'. Two years later, she publishes a virulent critique of Schwarzer in an article titled `Watch out for Alice'. The article evokes a ¯ood of angry responses from readers, convincing Mika that she has stumbled on to a feminist taboo. This ± along with an offer of a book contract by the publisher Rowohlt ± results in Mika's decision to write an `independent' and `realistic' biography of Schwarzer. It will be a `critical biography' ± a biography free of `false solidarity' and `intellectual prohibitions' (p. 16). She intends to situate the life of Germany's most famous feminist within the feminist movement because, as she puts it: `What would the women's movement be without Alice Schwarzer, what would Alice Schwarzer be without the women's movement?' (p. 12). Bascha Mika has an axe to grind when it comes to the women's movement. She describes it as a hotbed of con¯ict, struggle and betrayal. Women are defamed as 376 The European Journal of Women's Studies 6(3) traitors to the cause should they wander from the straight-and-narrow of feminist dogma. The political dilemma of feminism is a desire for conformity in a move- ment dedicated to liberation and a denial of con¯ict among women who, when all is said and done, are more different than they are alike. The feminist movement is nothing but `a mass of women' oscillating between the `sticky porridge of female solidarity' and the `sadomasochistic desire for sister murder' (p. 182). Unlike Bair, Mika did not spend years interviewing the subject of her biogra- phy. Given her infamous piece in the Tageszeitung, Schwarzer apparently refused to even speak with her. Mika was forced to rely on secondary sources: interviews with people who knew Schwarzer (and had since parted ways), books, newspaper clippings and television appearances. The result is an `unauthorized', but, never- theless ± she assures us ± `legitimate' account of Schwarzer's life and work. The biography traces Schwarzer's life from her uneventful childhood in Wuppertal where she grew up in impoverished circumstances as the illegitimate child of a mother who went out to work as a secretary, leaving the raising of Alice to her grandparents. Alice left home at an early age to become a journalist, although not a very successful one. With the advent of the 1960s, she moves to Paris and this is where her life takes off. She becomes a feminist and one of the initiators of the Mouvement de libeÂration des femmes. From the beginning, Schwarzer takes on the role of spokeswoman, always at the centre of attention. (She loves to ®ght and, according to Mika, is `addicted' to scandal [p. 225].) In Mika's view, her motives are more opportunistic than ideological, however. Feminism is Schwarzer's road to fame and recognition ± a way for her to escape her inauspicious beginnings and make something of herself. Moving from `femin- ist witch' in the 1970s to `media darling' in the 1990s, Schwarzer is presented as using the women's movement as little more than a stepping stone in her career. The main body of the biography is devoted to Schwarzer's activities in the women's movement and the picture which emerges is, again, not a pretty one. Schwarzer is depicted as ruthless and tyrannical in her dealings with her `sisters' in struggle. Her collaboration with other women (from the ®rst women's calendar in 1975 to the setting up of Emma to, much later, a feminist archive) follows the same pattern: unsuspecting feminists ¯ock to Schwarzer, ready to put their energy into her projects for the good of the cause, only to ®nd themselves several years later, feeling exploited and disillusioned. Schwarzer's projects are just that: Schwarzer's projects. She takes all the credit, while forcing her colleagues to do the work ± and under conditions which would make even the most hard-hearted capitalist cringe. As a result, few friendships survive and Mika takes her readers along a trail of betrayal and abandonment. Throughout the book, Mika uses a double strategy which simultaneously discredits Schwarzer and the women's movement. At times, she treats Schwarzer as representative of the feminist movement which is, by de®nition, depicted as hate ®lled, strife ridden, pathological and dogmatic. At other times, she takes a protective stance towards the movement, showing how Schwarzer damages other feminists with her megalomania and intolerance. At no point does the reader have the opportunity to understand what Schwarzer's perspective on various events might have been. Her writings on various feminist issues are largely ignored. But, most importantly, we have no way of understanding her life as situated within a particular historical and social context. The feminist movement appears ultimately as a somewhat unpleasant aberration, to be forgotten as soon as possible. I could not help but wonder why so little attention was paid to the social context: the polarization of postwar German society, the problems of alternative projects of the 1970s, or the since acknowledged pitfalls of second wave feminism in Western Book Reviews 377

Europe and North America as a predominately white, middle-class phenomenon. All of these features would have helped make sense of Schwarzer's biography as well as the movement of which she was a part. Instead Mika sets Alice Schwarzer up as an exemplary measuring stick for the feminist movement and proceeds to show how both fail to measure up. Compared to Bair's biography, Mika's book is clearly of a different calibre. Bair's book belongs to the category of the literary biography, while Mika has produced another celebrity biography. Where Bair aims at an exhaustive and even-handed account of Simone de Beauvoir's life, devoting years of her life to amassing all the facts, Mika's biography of Alice Schwarzer is slipshod and full of glaring omissions. While both claim to have discovered the `truth' of their subjects' lives, Bair's is based on years of painstaking research, while Mika seems to have reached hers by virtue of her position as outsider to the `closed club' of feminism. Bair's stance towards her subject is respectful, while Mika clearly dislikes Schwarzer. Despite these differences, in some respects the books are remarkably similar. Both seem concerned to expose their subject's personal lives ± whether bedroom secrets or personal and political intrigues ± to the expense of their intellectual biographies. In view of the proli®c writings of both women and their importance to contemporary feminist thought and practice, this oversight is both perplexing and problematic.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

De Beauvoir, S. (1949) The Second Sex. New York: Knopf. Schwarzer, A. (1991) Simone de Beauvoir heute. GespraÈche aus zehn Jahren. 1972±1982 (Simone de Beauvoir Today. Conversations during Ten Years. 1972±1982). Reinbek: Rowohlt. Vintges, K. (1996) Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Kathy Davis University of Utrecht, The Netherlands

MYTHS AND REVISIONS: REWRITING THE STORY OF UNHAPPY DIDO

Paola Bono and M. Vittoria Tessitore Il mito di Didone Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 1998, 505 pp., ISBN 88-424-9452-6

In this immensely detailed study, the authors trace the story of the ill-fated Queen Dido, whose tragic love for Aeneas, hero of the Trojan Wars and founder of the city of Rome, provided material for writers, artists and composers for centuries. The principal author of Dido's story was Virgil who, in Book IV of the Aeneid, provided the version that was to have such in¯uence on subsequent generations. According to Virgil, Aeneas is driven by a sense of duty to betray Dido, the woman he had come to love during his sojourn in Carthage after his ¯ight from Troy, and abandons her in order to ful®l his destiny in Italy. Desperate at this betrayal, Dido builds a great funeral pyre and stabs herself as Aeneas and his ships sail away. 378 The European Journal of Women's Studies 6(3)

In terms of method, this is a book that stands squarely within the traditions of comparative literature, focusing as it does on the different representations of a literary ®gure from the Romans through to 20th-century Mexico. What distin- guishes it, however, is the feminist approach of the authors, who are seeking not only to trace the story of Dido in its many different manifestations but also to discuss the gender implications of the way that story is presented. So Virgil is critiqued as a writer who, since he was employed by the Emperor, was required to produce a version of the founding of the Roman Empire that cast Aeneas in a positive light. Noting that Virgil describes Aeneas as pius (noble and devout) and Dido as infelix (unhappy), they argue that this effectively reduces Dido to an emblematic ®gure of a woman driven by passion ± that is, driven by a state of internal disorder that can only be portrayed negatively when set against the signi®cant attributes of nobility and duty that are manifested in Aeneas. This case is well-argued and the authors have obviously done their research thoroughly, though they somewhat overstress the political implications of Virgil's work and lay rather too little emphasis on the obvious ambiguousness of his portrayal of Dido. Certainly, he does set female passion in direct opposition to male duty and, as the authors point out, he suggests that Dido led Aeneas into the love affair in the ®rst instance, but it could be argued that the last lines of Book IV, when Dido is dying in great pain in the arms of her sister Anna, shift the argument against Aeneas. Dido is released from her agony by women, when the goddess Juno sends Iris down to cut the thread that binds her to this world. In Book VI, Aeneas meets Dido again, in the Underworld, where she refuses to speak to him and he weeps and pleads that he did not leave her willingly and could never have imagined that she would take her own life. What makes the story of Dido and Aeneas so powerful is not so much the gender con¯ict depicted in terms of polarized opposites, but rather the dif®culty Virgil had in distinguishing where his own (and his readers') sympathies should lie. In this respect, the story of Dido and Aeneas is similar to Dante's equally ambiguous account of the deaths of Paolo and Francesca in The Divine Comedy. Although Virgil necessarily receives a lot of attention in this book, the authors interestingly open their analysis with pre-history. The opening sections look at goddess cults in the Mediterranean and the authors show how the notion of woman as sexual being, simultaneously endowed with the capacity both to procreate and to destroy through her sexuality, underpins the story of Dido. They make important connections to abandoned women from Greek myth, such as Medea or Ariadne and also point out that Dido, similarly, was an African queen. The myth of the sexually voracious foreign woman from the East whose values stood in direct contrast to the militaristic values of Greek and Roman civilization can be seen as a common thread in both mythologies, and Virgil's contemporaries would inevitably have compared Dido to Cleopatra. The Aeneid became the effective template upon which later representations of Dido were based. Chapter 4 looks at the differences and similarities in Christopher Marlowe's retelling in his play Dido, Queen of Carthage written c. 1586. Here again the political context is crucial, for at the court of the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I, excessive sexual passion was frowned upon as dereliction of duty. The story of Dido became the tragedy of a good woman whose passion led to her downfall, a moral tale in which the virtues and nobility of Dido the Queen are stressed over and above the weaknesses of Dido the lover. Bono and Tessitore argue convincingly that the popularity of the story of Dido in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries resides in the con¯icts that it exposes between passion and power. The relationship between Dido and Aeneas becomes Book Reviews 379 a power struggle and, signi®cantly, writers such as Lope de Vega present an alternative to Virgil's depiction. The Dido of this new reading is a woman whose chastity remains inviolate, who never broke the vow she had made to her dead husband, who was not driven to her death by sexual frenzy. Dido is presented not only as a chaste and honest woman but as a noble and fair ruler. The story has begun to change direction, and the range of different versions re¯ect a widespread desire to rethink the story of Dido and reinstate her as a woman of power rather than as a victim of love. By the time Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas appeared in 1689 the story had undergone yet other transformations, even more apparent in Metastasio's melo- drama of 1724. For while Virgil had depicted Dido as a woman doubly burdened with grief ± anguish at her betrayal by Aeneas and bitter self-recrimination because she had broken her vow never to love anyone else made to her dead husband, Sichaeus ± these versions show Dido rather as a martyr to love, an example of the grandeur that love can inspire in the human heart. Dido chooses to die rather than live without love, but it is a deliberate choice, not the action of a woman driven mad by passions she cannot control. This is a hugely enjoyable book, not only because it provides such a clear account of the different readings of the story of Dido across the centuries, but also because the authors have uncovered so many fascinating retellings in so many languages. One such version appears in La Araucana, an epic poem of the 16th century written by a Spanish nobleman in Peru, in which the story of Dido and Aeneas is represented as a clash of cultures, similar to that between the Spaniards and the Araucanian Indians. Another is the version written by Charlotte von Stein, close friend of Goethe. In the concluding section, the authors look at her account, pointing out that the number of versions of the story written by women appear to be minimal. Apart from Charlotte von Stein in the 18th century, they identify a retelling by the medieval French writer Christine de Pisan, a novel, Dido, Queen of Hearts, published in 1929 by the American writer Gertrude Atherton and a monologue titled LamentacioÂn published in 1954 by the Mexican writer Rosario Castellanos. They suggest that the enduring signi®cance of this ancient story re¯ects the continued dichotomy between public and private and between the personal and the political, a dichotomy that is not only at the core of human existence but is also the nub of feminist thought and critical activity. Bono and Tessitore have written a thought-provoking intriguing book that also contains illustrations, albeit in black and white, and contains a huge comprehen- sive bibliography. The subtitle of the book, `The Adventures of a Queen across Centuries and Cultures' aptly describes what they have done: through comparing the dozens of different versions of the story of Dido and Aeneas, they have begun to hint at other untold ones, at further adventures. The question I was left with at the end was the one with which this book opens: why should this story emerge so powerfully at certain moments in time and sink into relative obscurity at others? It is a question we might ask of all the great mythical women: Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, Electra, Medea, Cassandra, Antigone. Bono and Tessitore, through their historicist approach, suggest that great female myths such as the story of Dido emerge at particular moments in time due to changing sociopolitical circumstances, but are also linked to the grand narratives of a shared cultural history:

Desires, fantasies, prejudices are written into the narrating, sometimes very obviously, sometimes more implicitly, concealed within the fascination that the story engenders. In this way, a whole value-system is laid down, a vision 380 The European Journal of Women's Studies 6(3)

of the world and of power relationships, that often means a vision of men, women and gender relationships. (p. 1, my translation)

Finally, it is worth noting that this is a 500-page book with detailed scholarly footnotes, but which is nevertheless a very good read. Anyone with an interest in literature and mythology will enjoy this book, and anyone who seeks an example of feminist comparative literature need look no further than Il mito di Didone.

Susan Bassnett University of Warwick

THE BECOMING OF THE SUBJECT: SINGULARITY AND THE RELATIONAL ONTOLOGY

Christine Battersby The Phenomenal Woman. Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998, xii+236 pp., ISBN 0-7456-1554-6

Many issues are at stake in Battersby's reproposition of a feminist metaphysics. Reality ®nds again its theoretical relevance because it is no more reduced solely to the discursive realm; thus, feminist thought can analyse again the con¯icts between the discursive and the real. The self is newly available as a sophisticated entwinement of sameness and differences, and the subject is postulated as a political agency able to engage in provoking changes in the world. Moreover, the assumption of woman as a subject opens to a different relation to the past, to the western philosophical past. Battersby is aware that her theoretical proposal is problematic as many feminist theories consider `feminist metaphysics a contradiction in terms'. Getting rid of second-hand reconstruction of the history of metaphysics, the author shows that there are different ways to consider the metaphysical commitment to issues such as subject and object, being and becoming, self and other. The result of this reconsideration of the past is a `relational ontology' which is presented through ®ve features: natality, unequal basic relationships, entwinement of self and other, embodiment and singularity. Irigaray's early writings ± especially Speculum of the Other Woman ± offer the tools for deconstructing western male representations of the self/other problem. There the self is presented as an autonomous identity opposing itself to the other which is only considered in the negative form of the `non-self'. This is the source of other classic dualisms between mind and body, spirit and nature, being and becoming, substance and attributes, reality and appearance, subject and object, and so on. From this perspective, metaphysics is concerned with the essence of being, with a universal, eternal and necessary substance, while becoming, time and space, embodiment, historical and cultural changes and boundaries are unessential. But metaphysics can be thought of beyond these oppositional patterns. And in fact, Irigaray herself also offers some clues to think differently of woman as a subject. Engaging with the feminist postmodern refusal of essentialism, Battersby shows how the subject can be theorized within an ontological frame which does not cancel sexual difference, differences among women, cultural and historical changes. The very interesting move of this book consists in showing how a woman as a subject can unfold the philosophical past in order to discover new Book Reviews 381 and differentiated possibilities. In fact, the author addresses the theories of philosophers such as Kant, Nietzsche, Adorno, Kierkegaard, Deleuze and Guat- tari, and many others; but certainly not in order to testify a monolithic unity of western thought founded on woman's exclusion. Rather, she considers them for what they have to offer. Thus Locke's nominal essence, although failing to explain the origins of language, allows us to consider linguistic, historical and cultural variations. Kant's schematism introduces the transcendental ego as an embodied, relational and not self-evident self. In fact, the Kantian ego can think of itself only in thinking a world of objects. Nevertheless, the opposition self/other still remains and makes sexual difference impossible to think; woman remains a radical form of otherness threatening the I. (In the author's view, Kant, in conceiving the feminine as a radical otherness, is very near to Lacan and Derrida.) According to Adorno, the subject/object relationships have to be considered in their different historical patterns and the relation to the historical past is made both by recollection and forgetting. Moreover, forgetting is what allows one's singularity to emerge in the temporal dimension. But Adorno fails in recognizing the necessary embodiment of subjects. Then, a very special place is devoted to Kierkegaard in order to propose woman's peculiar being-subject. Kierkegaard's rereading of Antigone reveals that `identity emerges out of movement; change is not simply something ex- traneous that ``happens'' to substances. Nor is relationality extrinsic to the self . . . the other emerges from her own embodied self' (p. 201). This assumption leads the author to reconsider the body, beyond biological reductionism, as an entwinement of consistency and technologies (Mauss); to discuss the primacy of sight in the constitution of the self in order to open to the hearing and to the peculiar temporal structure of music (the repetition and ritournelle in Deleuze and Guattari); and to stress her distance from the opposition between a disembodied `feminine' and the `female' de®ned as an immediate given (Derrida, Lacan and feminist poststruc- turalist thought). In describing `relational ontology', Battersby makes a paradoxical and therefore very promising theoretical move. On the one hand, she assumes the most extreme postmodernist critique of Enlightenment universal ideals of fraternity, equality and freedom, and criticizes the idea of an abstract subject de®ned as autonomous, rational and neutral. In taking natality seriously, the author points out how the originally unequal relations of the self call for a critical awareness of the power enacted by relationships. On the other hand, assuming the permanence of woman as a subject ± as a relational self worked through by embodiment, temporality and singularity ± she allows us to think of feminist politics on a grand scale, thus avoiding the risks of relativism involved by many feminist positions. To conclude, two brief remarks. First, the frequent use of the somehow com- promised terms `identity' and `metaphysics', which stand out as crucial terms in the text, seems to answer mainly a polemical function, given the complexity of concepts such as `relational self' (different from Gilligan's) and `relational ontol- ogy'. The second point concerns Battersby's dialogue with Kierkegaard; she seems to attribute too much to the philosopher, thus forgetting the important role played by the historical position from which she questions him. For, as Battersby herself demonstrates, becoming a subject is a strong relational move which allows to see what was invisible before.

Federica Giardini University of `Roma tre', Italy ^