The Women by Hilton Als

Author:Hilton Als
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 1998-01-31T05:00:00+00:00

Despite the sophistication of her thesis, Dean did not develop her own voice as a writer. In much of her writing, her voice is self-consciously authoritative, as if she’s performing what she assumes to be the role of a scholar. Her work is almost always based on the parameters set by someone else’s authority. (Along with a number of other scholars’ work, the eminent critic E. H. Gombrich’s writings are listed in her bibliography as source material.) Still, it is also possible to find places in Dean’s thesis where one can feel her pushing against the parameters set by recognized authorities; it’s as if she wouldn’t have much to say at all if she didn’t struggle against the resistance their work and authority provided.

Dean’s thesis is also a window into the value-based but purportedly objective stance she would would maintain in the social environs of Cambridge and New York, capable of “reading” most people but not “just” anyone. Aspects of this performance included projecting certain European modes of behavior—a distanced, “objective” stance, which is an impossibility, or a performance—as well as being a snobbish Negress who regarded the white world of privilege as the Good and whose fairy godmother happened to be gay men. Dean was only interested in those men who were as aesthetically pleasing to her and as frozen in the perfection of their appearance as the Flemish art she eventually studied and categorized, as a slide librarian at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where she worked for fourteen months in the late fifties, and as a curator of slides in the Art Department at Brandeis University, where she worked for two years after receiving her degree in fine arts from Harvard in 1958. As with most intellectuals, Dean was interested in where her mental computation could take her. Her choice of companions validated her mind but not her physicality. The principal attraction between Dean and the gay men she had begun to seek out in Cambridge was language, but language as a tool to obscure intimacy and enforce distance. One’s internal world is never language-based, and if it is, that language is baroque and not academic in tone, which Dorothy’s written work always was. Dean and her male companions tried to communize their language of isolation through academic study and drinking parties, but at its core this language was emotionally noncommunicative, since it had been cultivated in their childhood rooms, where books and an interest in aesthetics supplied the metaphors that approximated their feelings but could not describe them or be made to express them.

Dorothy’s male friends lived within the conundrum of being queer and privileged. And it was out of their need to distance themselves from this conundrum, which their collective background would not let them forget was a problem (an interesting aspect of being born to power is how it makes you very aware, from an early age, of where you are positioned in the world—and who might want to usurp it), that the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.