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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) naomichana | |
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Carolyn Heilbrun -- the author of mysteries under the name "Amanda Cross," for those of you not instantly up on your authorial pseudonyms -- died last week, but the obituaries are only now popping up. They're calling it apparent suicide. I learned details from this Chronicle article, but I think that link's subscription-only, so here's the NYT obituary instead. I don't generally do death notices -- the death is either too personal or too public, and since when am I an obituary writer? But I'm writing this post because I don't have time to update my blog before class, because plenty of the people who'd be interested are on my LJ friendslist anyway, and because... I wanted to say something. Well, two somethings. One: it baffles me that a woman who wrote an entire novel about a well-known feminist scholar whose death was made to look like suicide by a jealous male colleague could then go and commit suicide. I mean, am I missing something here? I for one would be considerably less upset had Heilbrun passed away from illness or even accident. Two: Heilbrun was a good two academic generations ahead of me -- as was the fictional Kate Fansler -- and I hadn't fully realized I saw either of them as a role model until now. After I put together a few lectures and teach this morning, my plan is to go find a copy of The James Joyce Murder (I did own a copy, but it seems to have gone missing somewhere over the last six moves) and look up my very favorite passage in all Heilbrun's works, the one in which Kate is politely turning down a proposal of marriage. Kate tells her suitor that Marvell's line about "world enough and time" has always struck her as a brutal statement of fact -- that, indeed, the world seems to be divided into people with enough time but a severely limited world (old people on park benches, mothers waiting for the children at play) and people with enough world but insufficient time (businesspeople, travelers). She has chosen, she explains, to have the world. I had that quote in my .plan file -- does anyone remember those? -- a good decade ago. It only now occurs to me that perhaps the choice is irrevocable. Current Mood:  sad
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... it baffles me that a woman who wrote an entire novel about a well-known feminist scholar whose death was made to look like suicide by a jealous male colleague could then go and commit suicide.
You're right; this is a great irony.
The comment about world OR time is very thought-provoking. Now I want to go reread the Amanda Cross novels (which I once thought didn't interest me very much).
Listen to the last paragraph of Writing a Woman's Life , which I find extraordinarily moving:
"Biographers often find little overtly triumphant in the late years of a subject's life, once she has moved beyond the categories our available narratives have provided for women. Neither rocking on a porch, nor automatically offering her services as cook and housekeeper and child watcher, nor awaiting another chapter in the heterosexual plot, the old woman must be glimpsed through all the disguises which seem to preclude her right to be called woman. She may well for the first time be woman herself."
Again, I can't reconcile the author's mode of death with her own words. Had Heilbrun moved beyond all her own "available narratives"?
Another quotation, this time from Shoshana Felman's What Does a Woman Want? , which is a well-thumbed book on my shelf:
"... the collective empowerment of women becomes possible only when, to borrow Carolyn Heilbrun's acute terms, 'women no longer live their lives isolated in the houses and the stories of men,' when woman is 'dragged by the roots of her own will into another scene of choices.'"
The last bit of that quote comes not from Heilbrun, but from Adrienne Rich. Yet somehow it seems apt to Heilbrun. I hope she saw her death not as the abdication of choice, but as the embracing of it.
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From: ide_cyan |
Date: October 14th, 2003 01:23 pm (UTC) |
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I had to look up .plan files.
The only work by Heilbrun that I have read is my copy of Writing a Woman's Life, found in the women's studies section of a used books store a couple of years ago. It's one of my favourites non-fiction works. It was so revelatory. (I must find more books by her.)
On page 128, she quoted a passage from Toni Morrison:
"(...) Throughout this fresh, if common, pursuit of knowledge, one conviction crowned her efforts: since death held no terror for her (she spoke often of the dead), there was nothing to fear."
The context being portraits of women in old age, who are so rarely described as "launching off into another world."
Perhaps her suicide was not a loss, a lie, or a mistake, though the world will miss her.
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From: naomichana |
Date: October 16th, 2003 01:07 pm (UTC) |
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Re: Carolyn Heilbrun
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I'm nearly fifty years Heilbrun's junior. Perhaps I'm too young, or perhaps I can't break out of our culture's widespread conventions about suicide, but... I just can't wrap my brain around it. I've known, and still know, many people (as family, as friends, as colleagues) who continue(d) to live full and rich lives for a decade or more past age 70. I've also spent a lot of time these last few years mourning people who have died, and I wouldn't want to put my loved ones through that grief any sooner than I absolutely had to. It's difficult for me to imagine a scenario in which someone could decide -- in the absence of depression, fear, or terminal illness -- that life was simply no longer worth living.
I do find some comfort in the idea of Heilbrun's last action being a strong one, though. It certainly fits.
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Name: she praised god for the creation of the heights
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"Outside books" is the literal translation of a Hebrew phrase used in Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:1 to describe those religious writings which fall outside the accepted canon of divinely inspired scripture -- i.e., apocryphal literature.
In Mishnah Yadaim, however, apocryphal books are instead described as those which "do not defile the hands." This contrasted them with sacred texts, which were considered to be ritually impure in the second degree (probably in order to discourage anyone from touching them casually or storing them together with food).
I use this LJ to comment on various aspects of media fandom, especially those concerning the extension or subversion of TV, movie, or book "canon." I'm sure you all get the idea by now.
(And, yes, it would have been simpler to just say, "This is the journal of a confirmed humanities geek" and leave it at that, but this way is more fun.) |
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