Where the Stress Falls (28 page)
Read Where the Stress Falls Online
Authors: Susan Sontag
To see such a face as this set on shoulders that a sculptor would have longed to model—to be charmed by the modest graces of action through which the symmetrical limbs betrayed their beauty when they moved, and then to be almost repelled by the masculine form and masculine look of the features in which the perfectly shaped figure ended—was to feel a sensation oddly akin to the helpless discomfort familiar to us all in sleep, when we recognise yet cannot reconcile the anomalies and contradictions of a dream.
Collins’s male narrator is touching a gender fault line, which typically arouses anxieties and feelings of discomfort. The contradiction in the order of sexual stereotypes may seem dream-like to a well-adjusted inhabitant of an era in which action, enterprise, artistic creativity, and intellectual innovation are understood to be masculine, fraternal orders. For a long time the beauty of a woman seemed incompatible, or at least oddly matched, with intelligence and assertiveness. (A far greater novelist, Henry James, in the preface to
The Portrait of a Lady,
speaks of the challenge of filling the “frail vessel” of a female protagonist with all the richness of an independent consciousness.) To be sure, no novelist today would find it implausible to award good looks to a woman who is both cerebral and self-assertive. But in real life, it’s still common to begrudge a woman who has beauty as well as intellectual brilliance—one would never say there was something odd or intimidating or “unfair” about a man who was so fortunate—as if beauty, the ultimate enabler of feminine charm, should by rights have barred other kinds of excellence.
The Portrait of a Lady,
speaks of the challenge of filling the “frail vessel” of a female protagonist with all the richness of an independent consciousness.) To be sure, no novelist today would find it implausible to award good looks to a woman who is both cerebral and self-assertive. But in real life, it’s still common to begrudge a woman who has beauty as well as intellectual brilliance—one would never say there was something odd or intimidating or “unfair” about a man who was so fortunate—as if beauty, the ultimate enabler of feminine charm, should by rights have barred other kinds of excellence.
IN A WOMAN BEAUTY
is something total. It is what stands, in a woman, for character. It is also, of course, a performance; something willed, designed, obtained. Looking through an old family photograph
album, the Russian-born French writer Andreï Makine recalls a trick used to get the particular glow of beauty he saw in some of the women’s faces:
is something total. It is what stands, in a woman, for character. It is also, of course, a performance; something willed, designed, obtained. Looking through an old family photograph
album, the Russian-born French writer Andreï Makine recalls a trick used to get the particular glow of beauty he saw in some of the women’s faces:
These women knew that in order to be beautiful, what they must do several seconds before the flash blinded them was to articulate the following mysterious syllables in French, of which few understood the meaning:
“pe-tite-pomme.”
As if by magic, the mouth, instead of being extended in counterfeit bliss, or contracting into an anxious grin, would form a gracious round … The eyebrows arched slightly, the oval of the cheeks was elongated. You said
“petite pomme,”
and the shadow of a distant and dreamy sweetness veiled your gaze, refined your features …
“pe-tite-pomme.”
As if by magic, the mouth, instead of being extended in counterfeit bliss, or contracting into an anxious grin, would form a gracious round … The eyebrows arched slightly, the oval of the cheeks was elongated. You said
“petite pomme,”
and the shadow of a distant and dreamy sweetness veiled your gaze, refined your features …
A woman being photographed aspired to a standardized look that signified an ideal refinement of “feminine” traits, as conveyed
through
beauty; and beauty was understood to be a distancing from the ordinary. As photographed, it projected something enigmatic, dreamy, inaccessible. Today idiosyncrasy and forthrightness of expression are what make a photographic portrait interesting. And refinement is passé, and seems pretentious or sham.
through
beauty; and beauty was understood to be a distancing from the ordinary. As photographed, it projected something enigmatic, dreamy, inaccessible. Today idiosyncrasy and forthrightness of expression are what make a photographic portrait interesting. And refinement is passé, and seems pretentious or sham.
Beauty—as photographed in the mainstream tradition that prevailed until recently—blurred women’s sexuality. And even in photographs that were frankly erotic, the body might be telling one story and the face another: a naked woman lying in a strenuously indecent position, spread-eagled or presenting her rump, with the face turned toward the viewer wearing the vapidly amiable expression of respectable photographic portraiture. Newer ways of photographing women are less concealing of women’s sexuality, though the display of once forbidden female flesh or carnal posturing is still fraught as a subject, so inveterate are responses that reassert male condescensions to women in the guise of lecherous appreciation. Women’s libidinousness is always being repressed or held against them.
The identification of women with beauty was a way of immobilizing women. While character evolves, reveals, beauty is static, a mask, a magnet for projection. In the legendary final shot of
Queen Christina,
the
queen—Greta Garbo—having abdicated the Swedish throne, renouncing the masculinizing prerogatives of a monarch for the modesty of a woman’s happiness, and boarded the ship to join her foreign lover and depart with him into exile only to find him mortally wounded by a vengeful rejected suitor from her court, stands at the ship’s prow with the wind in her face, a monument of heartbreak. While the lighting for the shot was being prepared, Garbo asked the director, Rouben Mamoulian, what she should be thinking during the take. Nothing, he famously replied. Don’t think of anything. Go blank. His instruction produced one of the most emotion-charged images in movie history: as the camera moves in and holds on a long close-up, the spectator has no choice but to read mounting despair on that incomparably beautiful, dry-eyed, vacant face. The face that is a mask on which one can project whatever is desired is the consummate perfection of the looked-at-ness of women.
Queen Christina,
the
queen—Greta Garbo—having abdicated the Swedish throne, renouncing the masculinizing prerogatives of a monarch for the modesty of a woman’s happiness, and boarded the ship to join her foreign lover and depart with him into exile only to find him mortally wounded by a vengeful rejected suitor from her court, stands at the ship’s prow with the wind in her face, a monument of heartbreak. While the lighting for the shot was being prepared, Garbo asked the director, Rouben Mamoulian, what she should be thinking during the take. Nothing, he famously replied. Don’t think of anything. Go blank. His instruction produced one of the most emotion-charged images in movie history: as the camera moves in and holds on a long close-up, the spectator has no choice but to read mounting despair on that incomparably beautiful, dry-eyed, vacant face. The face that is a mask on which one can project whatever is desired is the consummate perfection of the looked-at-ness of women.
The identification of beauty as the ideal condition of a woman is, if anything, more powerful than ever, although today’s hugely complex fashion-and-photography system sponsors norms of beauty that are far less provincial, more diverse, and favor brazen rather than demure ways of facing the camera. The downcast gaze, a staple of the presentation of women to the camera, should have a touch of sullenness if it is not to seem insipid. Ideas of beauty are less immobilizing now. But beauty itself is an ideal of a stable, unchanging appearance, a commitment to staving off or disguising the marks of time. The norms of sexual attractiveness for women are an index of their vulnerability. A man ages into his powers. A woman ages into being no longer desired.
Forever young, forever good-looking, forever sexy—beauty is still a construction, a transformation, a masquerade. We shouldn’t be surprised—though of course we are—that in real life, when she is not decked out as a cliché of desirability, the flamboyant, bespangled, seminude Las Vegas showgirl can be a mature woman of unremarkable features and sober presence. The eternal feminine project of self-embellishment has always been able to pull off such triumphs.
SINCE TO BE FEMININE
is to have qualities which are the opposite, or negation, of ideal masculine qualities, for a long time it was
hard to elaborate the attractiveness of the strong woman in other than mythic or allegorical guise. The heroic woman was an allegorical fantasy in nineteenth-century painting and sculpture: Liberty leading the People. The large-gestured, imperiously draped, convulsively powerful woman danced by Martha Graham in the works she created for her all-women troupe in the 1930s—a turning point in the history of how women’s strength, women’s anger have been represented—was a mythic archetype (priestess, rebel, mourning daimon, quester) presiding over a community of women, not a real woman compromising and cohabiting with and working alongside men.
is to have qualities which are the opposite, or negation, of ideal masculine qualities, for a long time it was
hard to elaborate the attractiveness of the strong woman in other than mythic or allegorical guise. The heroic woman was an allegorical fantasy in nineteenth-century painting and sculpture: Liberty leading the People. The large-gestured, imperiously draped, convulsively powerful woman danced by Martha Graham in the works she created for her all-women troupe in the 1930s—a turning point in the history of how women’s strength, women’s anger have been represented—was a mythic archetype (priestess, rebel, mourning daimon, quester) presiding over a community of women, not a real woman compromising and cohabiting with and working alongside men.
Dentist, orchestra conductor, commercial pilot, rabbi, lawyer, astronaut, film director, professional boxer, law-school dean, three-star general … no doubt about it, ideas about what women can
do
, and do well, have changed. And what women
mind
has changed. Male behavior, from the caddish to the outright violent, that until recently was accepted without demurral is seen today as outrageous by many women who not so long ago were putting up with it themselves and who would still protest indignantly if someone described them as feminists. To be sure, what has done most to change the stereotypes of frivolity and fecklessness afflicting women are not the labors of the various feminisms, indispensable as these have been. It is the new economic realities that oblige most American women (including most women with small children) to work outside their homes. The measure of how much things have
not
changed is that a woman earns between one-half and three-fourths of what a man earns in the same job. And nearly all occupations are still gender-labeled: with the exception of a few occupations (prostitute, nurse, secretary) where the reverse is true and it needs to be specified if the person is a man, one has to put “woman” in front of most job titles when it’s a woman holding them; otherwise the assumption will always be that one is referring to a man.
do
, and do well, have changed. And what women
mind
has changed. Male behavior, from the caddish to the outright violent, that until recently was accepted without demurral is seen today as outrageous by many women who not so long ago were putting up with it themselves and who would still protest indignantly if someone described them as feminists. To be sure, what has done most to change the stereotypes of frivolity and fecklessness afflicting women are not the labors of the various feminisms, indispensable as these have been. It is the new economic realities that oblige most American women (including most women with small children) to work outside their homes. The measure of how much things have
not
changed is that a woman earns between one-half and three-fourths of what a man earns in the same job. And nearly all occupations are still gender-labeled: with the exception of a few occupations (prostitute, nurse, secretary) where the reverse is true and it needs to be specified if the person is a man, one has to put “woman” in front of most job titles when it’s a woman holding them; otherwise the assumption will always be that one is referring to a man.
Any woman of accomplishment becomes more acceptable if she can be seen as pursuing her ambitions, exercising her competence, in a feminine (wily, nonconfrontational) way. “No harsh feminist, Ms. X has attained …” begins the reassuring accolade to a woman in a job with executive responsibilities. That women are the equals of men—the new
idea—continues to collide with the age-old presumption of female inferiority and serviceability: that it is normal for a woman to be in an essentially dependent or self-sacrificingly supportive relation to at least one man.
idea—continues to collide with the age-old presumption of female inferiority and serviceability: that it is normal for a woman to be in an essentially dependent or self-sacrificingly supportive relation to at least one man.
So ingrained is the expectation that the man will be taller, older, richer, more successful than the woman with whom he mates that the exceptions, of which there are now many, never fail to seem noteworthy. It seems normal for a journalist to ask the husband of a woman more famous than himself if he feels “threatened” by his wife’s eminence. No one would dream of wondering if the non-famous wife of an important industrialist, surgeon, writer, politician, actor, feels threatened by her husband’s eminence. And it is still thought that the ultimate act of love for a woman is to efface her own identity—a loving wife in a two-career marriage having every cause for anguish should her success overtake and surpass her husband’s. (“Hello, everybody. This is Mrs. Norman Maine.”) Accomplished women, except for those in the performing professions, continue to be regarded as an anomaly. It appears to make sense, for many reasons, to have anthologies of women writers or exhibits of women photographers; it would seem very odd to propose an anthology of writers or an exhibit of photographers who had nothing in common except that they were men.
WE WANT PHOTOGRAPHY
to be unmythic, full of concrete information. We are more comfortable with photographs that are ironic, unidealizing. Decorum is now understood as concealment. We expect the photographer to be bold, even insolent. We hope that subjects will be candid, or naïvely revealing.
to be unmythic, full of concrete information. We are more comfortable with photographs that are ironic, unidealizing. Decorum is now understood as concealment. We expect the photographer to be bold, even insolent. We hope that subjects will be candid, or naïvely revealing.
Of course, subjects who are accustomed to posing—women of achievement, women of notoriety—will offer something more guarded, or defiant.
And the way women and men really look (or allow themselves to appear) is not identical with how it is thought appropriate to appear to the camera. What looks right, or attractive, in a photograph is often no
more than what illustrates the felt “naturalness” of the unequal distribution of powers conventionally accorded women and men.
more than what illustrates the felt “naturalness” of the unequal distribution of powers conventionally accorded women and men.
Just as photography has done so much to confirm these stereotypes, it can engage in complicating and undermining them. In Annie Leibovitz’s
Women
, we see women catering to the imperatives of looked-at-ness. We see women for whom, because of age or because they’re preoccupied with the duties and pleasures of raising children, the rules of ostentatiously feminine performance are irrelevant. There are many portraits of women defined by the new kinds of work now open to them. There are strong women, some of them doing “men’s jobs,” some of them dancers and athletes with the powerful musculature that only recently began to be visible when such champion female bodies were photographed.
Women
, we see women catering to the imperatives of looked-at-ness. We see women for whom, because of age or because they’re preoccupied with the duties and pleasures of raising children, the rules of ostentatiously feminine performance are irrelevant. There are many portraits of women defined by the new kinds of work now open to them. There are strong women, some of them doing “men’s jobs,” some of them dancers and athletes with the powerful musculature that only recently began to be visible when such champion female bodies were photographed.
ONE OF THE TASKS
of photography is to disclose, and shape our sense of, the variety of the world. It is not to present ideals. There is no agenda except diversity and interestingness. There are no judgments, which of course is itself a judgment.
of photography is to disclose, and shape our sense of, the variety of the world. It is not to present ideals. There is no agenda except diversity and interestingness. There are no judgments, which of course is itself a judgment.
And that variety is itself an ideal. We want now to know that for every
this
there is a
that
. We want to have a plurality of models.
this
there is a
that
. We want to have a plurality of models.
Photography is in the service of the post-judgmental ethos gaining ascendancy in societies whose norms are drawn from the practices of consumerism. The camera shows us many worlds, and the point is that all the images are valid. A woman may be a cop or a beauty queen or an architect or a housewife or a physicist. Diversity is an end in itself—much celebrated in today’s America. There is the very American, very modern faith in the possibility of continuous self-transformation. A life, after all, is commonly referred to as a
lifestyle
. Styles change. This celebration of variety, of individuality, of individuality as style, saps the authority of gender stereotypes, and has become an inexorable counterforce to the bigotry that still denies women more than token access to many occupations and experiences.
lifestyle
. Styles change. This celebration of variety, of individuality, of individuality as style, saps the authority of gender stereotypes, and has become an inexorable counterforce to the bigotry that still denies women more than token access to many occupations and experiences.
That women, in the same measure as men, should be able to fulfill their individuality is, of course, a radical idea. It is in this form, for
better and for worse, that the traditional feminist call for
justice
for women has come to seem most plausible.
better and for worse, that the traditional feminist call for
justice
for women has come to seem most plausible.
A BOOK OF PHOTOGRAPHS;
a book about women; a very American project: generous, ardent, inventive, open-ended. It’s for us to decide what to make of these pictures. After all, a photograph is not an opinion. Or is it?
a book about women; a very American project: generous, ardent, inventive, open-ended. It’s for us to decide what to make of these pictures. After all, a photograph is not an opinion. Or is it?
[1999]
BEFORE THERE WAS
travel—in my life, at least—there were travel books. Books that told you the world was very large but quite encompassable. Full of destinations.
travel—in my life, at least—there were travel books. Books that told you the world was very large but quite encompassable. Full of destinations.
The first travel books I read, and surely among the most important books of my life, were by Richard Halliburton. I was seven, and the year was 1940, when I read his
Book of Marvels
. Halliburton, the handsome, genteel American youth, born in Brownsville, Tennessee, who had devised for himself a life of being forever young and on the move, was my first vision of what I thought had to be the most privileged of lives, that of a writer: a life of endless curiosity and energy and countless enthusiasms. To be a traveler, to be a writer—in my child mind they started off as the same thing.
Book of Marvels
. Halliburton, the handsome, genteel American youth, born in Brownsville, Tennessee, who had devised for himself a life of being forever young and on the move, was my first vision of what I thought had to be the most privileged of lives, that of a writer: a life of endless curiosity and energy and countless enthusiasms. To be a traveler, to be a writer—in my child mind they started off as the same thing.
To be sure, there was a good deal in that child mind that prepared me to fall in love with the idea of insatiable travel. My parents had lived abroad most of my first six years—my father had a fur business in northern China—while my sister and I remained in the care of relatives in the States. As far back as I can remember, I was already conducting a potent dream-life of travel to exotic places. But my parents’ unimaginable existence on the opposite side of the globe had inspired a too precise, hopeless set of travel longings. Halliburton’s books informed me that the world contained
many
wonderful things. Not just the Great Wall of China.
many
wonderful things. Not just the Great Wall of China.
Yes, he had walked on the Great Wall, and he’d also climbed the Matterhorn and Etna and Popocatepetl and Fujiyama and Olympus; he’d visited the Grand Canyon and the Golden Gate Bridge (in 1938, when the book was published, the bridge counted as the newest of the world’s marvels); he’d rowed into the Blue Grotto and swum the length of the Panama Canal; he’d made it to Carcassonne and Baalbek and Petra and Lhasa and Chartres and Delphi and the Alhambra and Timbuktu and the Taj Mahal and Pompeii and Victoria Falls and the Bay of Rio and Chichén Itzá and the Blue Mosque in Isfahan and Angkor Wat and, and, and … Halliburton called them “marvels,” and wasn’t this my introduction to the notion of “the masterpiece”? The point was: the faraway world was full of amazing sites and edifices, and I, too, might one day see and learn the stories attached to them. Looking back now, I realize that
Book of Marvels
was a prime awakener of my own ardor and appetite.
Book of Marvels
was a prime awakener of my own ardor and appetite.
The year before I read
Book of Marvels
, Halliburton had ventured a trip under sail in that quintessentially Chinese vessel, a junk, from Hong Kong to San Francisco, and had vanished somewhere mid-Pacific without a trace. He was thirty-nine years old. Did I know he had died when I was reading his book? Probably not. But then, I’d not entirely taken in the death of my own thirty-three-year-old father in Tientsin, which I learned about in 1939, several months after my mother returned from China for good.
Book of Marvels
, Halliburton had ventured a trip under sail in that quintessentially Chinese vessel, a junk, from Hong Kong to San Francisco, and had vanished somewhere mid-Pacific without a trace. He was thirty-nine years old. Did I know he had died when I was reading his book? Probably not. But then, I’d not entirely taken in the death of my own thirty-three-year-old father in Tientsin, which I learned about in 1939, several months after my mother returned from China for good.
And a sad end couldn’t taint the lessons of pluck and avidity I drew from reading Halliburton. Those books—from
The Royal Road to Romance
, his first, published in 1925, to Book
of Marvels,
his last; I eventually read them all—described for me an idea of pure happiness. And of successful volition. You have something in mind. You imagine it. You prepare for it. You voyage toward it. Then you see it. And there is no disappointment; indeed, it may be even more captivating than you imagined.
The Royal Road to Romance
, his first, published in 1925, to Book
of Marvels,
his last; I eventually read them all—described for me an idea of pure happiness. And of successful volition. You have something in mind. You imagine it. You prepare for it. You voyage toward it. Then you see it. And there is no disappointment; indeed, it may be even more captivating than you imagined.
Halliburton’s books convey in the most candid and ingenuous—which is to say, unfashionable—way the “romance” of travel. Enthusiasm for travel may not be expressed so giddily today, but I’m sure that the seeking out of what is strange or beautiful, or both, remains just as
pleasurable and addictive. It has certainly proved so for me. And because of the impact of those books read when I was so young, my more enviable sightings throughout grownup life, mostly by-products of opportunity or obligation rather than pilgrimages undertaken, continue to bear Halliburton’s imprint. When I finally did walk on the Great Wall, and was rowed into the Blue Grotto, and was shat on by monkeys in the Taj Mahal, and wandered in the ruins of Angkor Wat, and wangled permission to spend a night in a sleeping bag on the rosy rocks of Petra, and surreptitiously climbed the Great Pyramid at Giza before daybreak, I thought: I’ve done it. They were on
his
list. Truth is, although San Francisco is anything but an unusual destination for me, I never drive across the Golden Gate Bridge without recalling where it figures in Halliburton’s book. Even a place I’ve assumed isn’t very interesting and haven’t visited, Andorra, remains on my interior map because he went there. And when Machu Picchu or Palmyra or Lhasa or Fujiyama comes to mind, I think, I haven’t done that. Yet.
pleasurable and addictive. It has certainly proved so for me. And because of the impact of those books read when I was so young, my more enviable sightings throughout grownup life, mostly by-products of opportunity or obligation rather than pilgrimages undertaken, continue to bear Halliburton’s imprint. When I finally did walk on the Great Wall, and was rowed into the Blue Grotto, and was shat on by monkeys in the Taj Mahal, and wandered in the ruins of Angkor Wat, and wangled permission to spend a night in a sleeping bag on the rosy rocks of Petra, and surreptitiously climbed the Great Pyramid at Giza before daybreak, I thought: I’ve done it. They were on
his
list. Truth is, although San Francisco is anything but an unusual destination for me, I never drive across the Golden Gate Bridge without recalling where it figures in Halliburton’s book. Even a place I’ve assumed isn’t very interesting and haven’t visited, Andorra, remains on my interior map because he went there. And when Machu Picchu or Palmyra or Lhasa or Fujiyama comes to mind, I think, I haven’t done that. Yet.
The cult of youth that animates Halliburton’s books could hardly have meant something to a seven year-old. But it is the association of travel with youth, beautiful youth, that seems most dated now. As an undergraduate at Princeton just after World War I, he succumbed to the spell of
The Picture of Dorian Gray
; and throughout his brief life his
beau idéal
remained Rupert Brooke, whose biography he hoped one day to write. Even more remote than these references is Halliburton’s assumption that he is bringing news to his readers, that what will entice and seduce are his words—not the photographs in the books, most no better than snapshots: the author standing in front of the Taj Mahal, and so forth. Today, when lust for travel is awakened primarily through images, still and moving, we expect the sights, many of them all too familiar, to speak for themselves. Indeed, we’ve seen the famous sights unrolling in color long before we actually travel to see them.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
; and throughout his brief life his
beau idéal
remained Rupert Brooke, whose biography he hoped one day to write. Even more remote than these references is Halliburton’s assumption that he is bringing news to his readers, that what will entice and seduce are his words—not the photographs in the books, most no better than snapshots: the author standing in front of the Taj Mahal, and so forth. Today, when lust for travel is awakened primarily through images, still and moving, we expect the sights, many of them all too familiar, to speak for themselves. Indeed, we’ve seen the famous sights unrolling in color long before we actually travel to see them.
Halliburton’s travel narratives are stocked with people: guides, facilitators, scam artists, and other locals. The busy world that he encounters fills his mind. Today it is possible to travel solo, without traveling, to vacancy itself. The distraught heroine of Don DeLillo’s
The Body Artist
logs on to her computer at odd hours to watch a livestreaming
video feed from the edge of a two-lane road outside Kotka, Finland, where a webcam is always trained on asphalt. “It emptied her mind and made her feel the deep silence of other places.”
The Body Artist
logs on to her computer at odd hours to watch a livestreaming
video feed from the edge of a two-lane road outside Kotka, Finland, where a webcam is always trained on asphalt. “It emptied her mind and made her feel the deep silence of other places.”
To me, travel is filling the mind. But that means, by launching me beyond the self, it also empties my mind: I find it almost impossible to write when I am traveling. To write I have to stay put. Real travel competes with mental traveling. (What is a writer but a mental traveler?) When I recall now how much Halliburton’s books meant to me at the beginning of my reading life, I see how the notion of “traveler” infiltrated, perfumed, abetted my nascent dream of becoming a writer. When I acknowledge to myself that I’m interested in everything, what am I saying but that I want to travel everywhere. Like Richard Halliburton.
[2001]
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