How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo

Author:Elaine Castillo [Castillo, Elaine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

For young America it had everything: nature as subject matter, a system of symbolism, a thematics of the search for self-valorization and validation—above all, the opportunity to conquer fear imaginatively and to quiet deep insecurities. It offered platforms for moralizing and fabulation, and for the imaginative entertainment of violence, sublime incredibility, and terror—and terror’s most significant, overweening ingredient: darkness, with all the connotative value it awakened.

In her review of Mailer’s book, Didion describes the “Western” sections of the novel as “a fatalistic drift, a tension, an overwhelming and passive rush toward the inevitable. . . . The women in the ‘Western’ book are surprised by very little. They do not on the whole believe that events can be influenced. A kind of desolate wind seems to blow through the lives of these women. . . . The wind seems to blow away memory, balance.”

This passive, barren portrait of white women’s interiority in the West is not just textbook Didion but textbook Americana: it’s a deliberate characterization of white colonial femininity as grimly but unoperatically tragic; helpless and blameless. (Sometimes, the defense of Didion’s writing from critique takes a page from this proto-girlboss handbook, i.e., that to criticize her is misogynist; defending white heroines is, after all, a totemic American pastime.) The women are fragile but hard; too scattered and distracted to ever be anything as overt as a heroine or a villain; always imperiled but somehow never quite vanquished—most of all, they are ethically neutral objects through which history happens, not decisive actors of history themselves. Their presence in the West is not an active project of occupation, but an inevitability; nobody’s fault.

It cannot furthermore escape anyone’s notice that many of the articles praising Didion’s work take pains to mention, quasi-fetishistically, the author’s physical build—often emphasizing the combination (not quite contrast) of her appealingly laconic, “masculine” prose with her sylphlike thinness: again and again we are encouraged to appraise her apparent fragility as well as be impressed by her severe, distilled purity; the pale pared-down sliver of her. That casual fatphobia should also have its comfortable nook in literary criticism, as in all reaches of society, comes as no surprise; writers like Sabina Strings, in her book Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, help coax out the psychosocial regimes of control, refinement, and respectability that govern the glorification of thin wealthy white femininity, in contrast to the supposedly overflowing appetites—and ungovernable bodies—of poor women, immigrant women, women of color (not even always women; think of the racist and fatphobic experiences recounted by the late great aesthete and indisputable fashion polymath André Leon Talley). Strings writes that at the end of the nineteenth century, “it was incumbent upon Anglo-Saxon women, then, to serve as the flag bearers of a new standard of beauty, one rooted, ‘thanks to our benign religion and better civilization,’ in morality, health and racial pride. . . . The new standard of beauty . . . that of the tall, slender, Anglo-Saxon Protestant woman, did arrive.

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