Joanna Russ by Joanna Russ

Author:Joanna Russ
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Library of America
Published: 2023-07-27T20:14:48+00:00

George Eliot never ended her books properly. There’s so little for heroines to do; they can fall in love, they can die. As the story begins, you wonder whether the heroine will be happy, but by the middle of it you’re beginning to wonder if she will be good. Such is George Eliot’s sleight-of-hand, i.e. cheating. We still think this way a hundred years later. I’ve been reading wretched-housewife novels written by women and they all end the same way; either the awful husband has a mysterious change of heart (off-stage) on the last page but one or the wife thinks: Yes, but I really loved him so it was all right. You would not believe the suffering and wretchedness in these books. (And one of the characters is called Sophia, too, which means Wisdom.) I spent two Jean-less days reading these books and making marginal notes for some article or other I was going to do next winter if I ever got around to it, and then, like the heroines of these stories, I had a great “realization,” a pious illumination (they’re always having these, like their children really love them or they adore housework or they are really happy even though their husband ties them to a newel post and beats them with a goldfish). Progressing by a series of flat denials of the evidence. My pious illumination was that I did not want to do the article. But everything in print is sacred, as we all know, including this sentence. All words are sacred. (Unless written by a computer, in which case the computer is sacred.) Some astonishing things are sacred, really; thus we have the Pain Goddess and the Sleeping-late-in-the-morning Goddess, the Trip Troll (who makes the transmission fall out of your car fifteen miles from your destination), and the Mayonnaise Diety, who presides over gourmet cooking. Love is like sleeping late in the morning; you dive down through layer after transparent layer, utterly content, farther and farther until you reach the sea floor. But it’s bottomless.

Waiting for Jean is pleasant: one anticipates her arrival.

Waiting for Jean is useful: perceptions are sharpened.

Waiting for Jean is educational: it teaches you that even good things must be waited for.

Waiting for Jean is fortunate: that she will come at all makes you feel blessed.

Waiting for Jean is exasperating: I can’t wait much longer.

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