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Authors: Elizabeth Hardwick
Seduction and Betrayal
ELIZABETH HARDWICK (1916â2007) was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and educated at the University of Kentucky and Columbia University. A recipient of a Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she is the author of three novels, a biography of Herman Melville, and four collections of essays. She was a co-founder and advisory editor of
The New York Review of Books
and contributed more than one hundred reviews, articles, reflections, and letters to the magazine. NYRB Classics publishes
Sleepless Nights
, a novel, and
Seduction and Betrayal
, a study of women in literature.
JOAN DIDION is the author of the novels
Run River, Play It as It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer, Democracy
, and
The Last Thing He Wanted
. Her nonfiction includes
Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, Salvador, Miami, After Henry
, and
Political Fictions
.
SEDUCTION AND BETRAYAL
WOMEN AND LITERATURE
ELIZABETH HARDWICK
Introduction by
JOAN DIDION
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
Copyright and More Information
ELIZABETH HARDWICK
is the only writer I have ever read whose perception of what it means to be a woman and a writer seems in every way authentic, revelatory, entirely original and yet acutely recognizable. She seems to have seen early on that the genteel provincial tradition of “lady” novelists and essayists served mainly to flatter men, that there would be certain wrenching contradictions between growing up female and making any kind of sustained commitment to write. She understood at the bone the willful transgression implicit in the literary enterprise â knew that to express oneself was to expose oneself, that to seize the stage was to court humiliation, that to claim the independence implicit in the act of writing could mean becoming like the women she described in
Sleepless Nights
, left to “wander about in their dreadful freedom like old oxen left behind, totally unprovided for” â and she accepted the risk. Every line she wrote suggested that moral courage required trusting one's own experience in the world, one's own intuitions about how it worked.
Hardwick created a voice that carried the strength of that moral courage, a way of putting words together that could make the most subtle connection seem at once thrilling and domestic, subversively matter-of-fact, the quick stunning judgments of the kitchen. In
Seduction and Betrayal
, our sympathies are seen to stray from the spurned wife in
The Master Builder
because “depression is boring, suspicion is deforming, ill health is repetitive.” Catherine in
Wuthering Heights
is seen to have “the charm of a wayward, schizophrenic girl,” Zelda Fitzgerald's life to have been “buried beneath the ground, covered over by the desperate violets of Scott Fitzgerald's memories.” The daunting persistence of Bloomsbury as a literary ideal is briskly dismissed: “To see the word âOttoline' on a page, in a letter, gives me the sense of continual defeat, as if I had gone to a party and found an enemy tending the bar.”
These are bold assessments, rendered no less adamantine by either the pleasure they give or the exquisite diffidence with which they are offered. “Essays are aggressive,” Hardwick once wrote, “even if the mind from which they come is fair, humane, and, when it is to the point, disinterested.... The true prose writer knows that there is nothing given, no idea, no text or play seen last evening, until an assault has taken place, the forced domination that we call âputting it in your own words.'” Yet the aggression derives in this instance from an aching empathy: in
Seduction and Betrayal
, first published in 1974, she observes both women in literature and women who have made literature with the loving but fretful familiarity of a troubled sister. She gives us Emily Brontë's “spare, inviolate center, a harder resignation amounting finally to withdrawal,” and she also gives us Emily Brontë waiting up to carry her drunken brother Branwell (“like a pestilence”) upstairs, and “brutally beating her dog about the eyes and face with her own fists in order to discourage him from his habit of slipping upstairs to take a nap on the clean counterpanes.”
She gives us the “strange and striking
stardom
” of Hester Prynne, the mysterious center of a novel in which the characters emerge as “not characters at all, but large, fantastically painted playing cards.” She gives us Sylvia Plath as yet another star, “both heroine and author,” and “when the curtain goes down, it is her own dead body there on the stage, sacrificed to her plot.” She gives us this breathtaking understanding of Dorothy Wordsworth, whose literary effort was largely restricted to recording the weather in her journals, a woman whose “dependency was so greatly loved and so desperately clung to that she could not risk anything except the description of the scenery in which it was lived”: from Dorothy Wordsworth's earliest years, Hardwick writes, “her situation was close to the dreaded one we find in novels: she was a female orphan. The dearest things mysteriously vanished from her life. She had only her intelligence, her exacerbated sensibilities, and her brother.”
And her brother
. “Sweet to be pierced by daggers at the end of paragraphs,” as the author of those lines wrote in
Sleepless Nights
. This is a writer who can read
An American Tragedy
and see Clyde Griffiths as “in many ways a trusting, yearning
girl
.” This is a writer who can read
Clarissa
and see the drugging and rape of its heroine as “not exactly a betrayal of her expectations.” And to the point of Dorothy Wordsworth's brother, a further piercing, in fact a veritable tattoo: “We may feel a grain of smugness or some outsized concentration on self in Wordsworth's poems on Dorothy. At times, in some peculiar way, he seems to be
misleading
her, always insisting on the moon and misty mountain-winds as her freedom and salvation. In the end the congratulations are to himself.”
Elizabeth Hardwick was born in Kentucky, and grew up in Lexington. “In the summer the great bands arrived,” she told us in
Sleepless Nights
, “Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Chick Webb.... They were part of the summer nights and the hot dog stands, the fetid swimming pool heavy with chlorine, the screaming roller coaster, the old rain-splintered picnic tables, the broken iron swings. And the bands were also part of Southern drunkenness, couples drinking Coke and whiskey, vomiting, being unfaithful, lovelorn, frantic.” Although she exiled herself from this as soon as she could get up to graduate school at Columbia (“1940. Dear Mama: I love Columbia. Of course I do. The best people here are all Jews â what you call âHebrews'...”), we hear Kentucky still in her voice, not only in her eccentric rhythms but in the extreme gravity of her remembered world, both its destructive romanticism (“
Drinking himself to death
: I could name many who did not reach twenty-five”) and its dramatic promises of redemption. “Yes, I accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior on the west side of town in June, accept Christ once more in the scorched field in the North End in July, and then again on the campgrounds to the south in August,” she wrote in
Sleepless Nights
. “Perhaps here began a prying sympathy for the victims of sloth and recurrent mistakes, sympathy for the tendency of lives to obey the laws of gravity and to sink downward, falling as gently and slowly as a kite, or violently breaking, smashing.”
The redemption she found was in the exercise of her luminous mind, in the “assault” itself, the “forced domination, ”the act of making something where nothing exists, of “putting it into your own words.” In
Seduction and Betrayal
, she quotes Robert Southey: “Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life,” he had advised Charlotte Brontë, who had sent him a few of her poems. “The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation.” She does not find it necessary to note that the making of literature has been for many women precisely about the abandonment of those proper duties, the ultimate seduction. Nor does she find it necessary to note that Robert Southey is no longer read, and Charlotte Brontë is. At the time
Seduction and Betrayal
was first published, a reviewer in
The New York Times
complained that if the book had a fault, it was that its author failed to “make sufficient distinctions between the real and the literary.” That there are no such distinctions to be made, that the women we invent have changed the course of our lives as surely as the women we are, is in many ways the point of this passionate book.
These essays have been, since their publication in
The New York Review of Books
, altered in some cases, expanded in others. “Seduction and Betrayal” was read at Vassar College in 1972; “The Brontës” and the essays on Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Carlyle were part of three lectures given for the Christian Gauss Seminar in Criticism at Princeton University. I wish to express my gratitude to Robert Silvers for the most fundamental and varied help, and to Devie Meade and Professor Susan Turner for the many things I have learned from our long conversations about literature and history.
To my friend Barbara Epstein, with love
T
HE CAREERS
of the three Brontë sisters â Anne, Charlotte, and Emily â conferred a sort of perpetuity upon the whole family. The father's eccentricities, once brought under scrutiny by the fame of the daughters, proved to be rich enough in detail to provide a good store of anecdote. There is, as with all of the family, always some question about what was truth and what fancy.
The Reverend Brontë was a failed writer. He had published
Cottage Poems
and
The Rural Minstrel
, and he certainly had the sedentary habits and wide range of peculiarities that might have assisted a literary career, but perhaps the Reverend was not able to take in enough from the outside to nourish his art. He carried a pistol around with him and sometimes when he was angry found relief by shooting through the open door. It was rumored that he cut up one of his wife's silk dresses out of regard for his strict standards of simplicity and seriousness. For his own part the Reverend Brontë disowned claims to flamboyance and said: “I do not deny that I am somewhat eccentric.... Only don't set me on in my fury to burning hearthrugs, sawing the backs off chairs and tearing my wife's silk gowns.”
There were five daughters and one son in the Brontë family, and the father unluckily placed his hopes in his son, Branwell. It is only by accident that we know about people like Branwell who seemed destined for the arts, unable to work at anything else, and yet have not the talent, the tenacity, or the discipline to make any kind of sustained creative effort. With great hopes and at bitter financial sacrifice, Branwell was sent up to London to study painting at the Academy Schools. The experience was wretched for him and he seemed to have sensed his lack of preparation, his uncertain dedication, his faltering will. He never went to the school, did not present his letters of introduction, and spent his money in taverns drinking gin. It finally became necessary to return home in humiliation and to pretend that he had been robbed.