June 10, 11 & 18, the Tribeca Film Festival is screening the world-premiere of the documentary, “My Name is Andrea”. JTA reported: “The lightning-rod life of Jewish radical feminist writer and activist Andrea Dworkin is examined in this documentary [by filmmaker Pratibha Parmar], which features dramatic reenactments by Ashley Judd, Soko, Christine Lahti, Amandla Stenberg and Andrea Riseborough. The descendant of Holocaust survivors, Dworkin wrote blistering critiques of misogyny and mounted a lifelong anti-pornography campaign [co-authoring legislation with Catharine A. MacKinnon]. She also frequently explored [her own identity and intersectionality, and her heritage] particularly in relation to Israel, whose formation she supported in stark contrast to many of her leftist peers.”
I’ve received permission from Humanities and Social Sciences Online (H-net) —to whom Dworkin’s husband, John Stoltenberg, very kindly directed me— to republish in Daily Kos, under Creative Commons license parameters —proper attribution, not transforming the content, or using it for commercial purposes— the book proposal she was working on at the time of her death, April 9, 2005. For further biographical/CV material donated by Mr. Stoltenberg, please read here.
Writing America: How Novelists Invented and Gendered a Nation by Andrea Dworkin
The nationalism that fueled the Iraq war —as well as the anti-nationalism that opposes it— has a unique and identifiable origin story that has never been told. It is the dynamic process by which writers at the beginning of the twentieth century articulated a new American national identity—they literally made it up.
In this book I will tell that story--how the notion of "American" came to mean what it does today--through a completely fresh reading of writers who came of age around World War I, especially Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Wright, Cather, O'Connor, Welty, and Hurston. I will analyze the ways in which each claims to be an American, or claims qualities that are American, or frames what America is and who Americans are. For better or for worse, American national identity is like a self-generated, closed system of values and self-referential beliefs about itself—an ecology to which each of these writers has been a major contributor.
This will also be a reading of American national identity that takes account of gender in a way that has never been done before. I will show how these writers use writing to create and maintain gender and then how gender is used to formulate the self-concept American.
Gender in American national identity is not, and never has been,like the popular conception of gender as something that is formed in childhood and then remains constant. In fact writers write gender, constantly creating and recreating it, constantly giving it new content. This is as true for Zora Neale Hurston as it is for Ernest Hemingway. Then the gender that writers write becomes the crucible in which writers concoct the meaning of being American.
I am proposing that there is direct causal relation between gender —the internal sense of self-identity with social expression— and national identity, which is the communal expression of dominance and submission. The desire in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries has been for dominance. The character of American national identity has become a desire for greater and greater influence on foreign cultures. Hemingway's contribution to a normative masculinity suffuses pop culture and American military policy post nine/eleven, as surely as Richard Wright's sociopath Bigger Thomas foreshadows the pathology of the urban ghetto as well as the basic ethos of hip-hop. Zora Neale Hurston is the real exile, inside the boundaries of the United States. Her work has been ignored because of her race and its power: de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don't tote it. He hand it to his women-folks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as I can see.
Hurston's national identity challenged Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner: But one thing is definite. The iron has entered my soul. Since my god of tolerance has forsaken me, I am ready for anything to overthrow Anglo-Saxon supremacy, however desperate. I have become what I never wished to be, a good hater. I no longer even value my life if by losing it, I can do something to destroy this Anglo-Saxon monstrosity.
Each writer I have selected has a political dimension or a sexual theme not often remarked on. For instance, Hemingway, even in For Whom the Bell Tolls, returns to the sexual theme of androgyny or sameness in sex ultimately to repudiate it; but it haunts his work. Given that he forbade his sons to see his mother because she was "androgynous," this emerges as part of the internal masculinity he creates through his writing. Like Hemingway, the writers I will deal with are more complicated when it comes to gender than they seem. The same is true with respect to national identity. Hemingway, part of an exile community in Paris as a young writer, lived most of his adult life outside of the United States, spoke fluent Italian, French, and Spanish; and worked over the facts of his life in book after book.
Writing is essential because writers are conscious of choices made through language and have a set of ethics based on their aspirations as writers. The source of being for each writer is that they identify the purpose of their lives as writers; all experience goes through that metaphysical praxis. Not to take on writing as such as the first element of building a self and a country or nationalism would be a form of willful blindness. In the same way, the deep impulses of gender have been invisible, the connection, that is, between writing and gender. I am saying that each of these writers defined or redefined gender and the American soul in ways that continue to move and motivate us as Americans. Nine/eleven might have pushed us too close to Hemingway and too far from Eudora Welty.
The chapters will be interrelated, not separate essays. The model is my book Intercourse, in which I use literature to explicate the paradigm of dominance and submission involved in sexual intercourse. I want to know what one can learn about the masculine from Hemingway, who after all created a castrated hero; or the feminine from Fitzgerald, who was arguably parasitic in relation to real women and whose gorgeous writing style affirms a dimension of the feminine; or the meaning of a modern consciousness in Faulkner, who in As I Lay Dying conflates the living and the dead; or the brutal and subversive rage of the oppressed in Wright, who himself set the benchmark for Ellison and Baldwin; or the love in O'Connor's dark Catholic faith; or the imagination in the immigrant novels of Cather, with their wide, rural landscapes; or the ethical choices made as a writer by Welty; or Zora Neale Hurston's long exile from the world of white-controlled literature and the making of an American culture.
I intend to focus on the creative work, the books or a book of each author to locate the gender strategies that account for the creation of an American identity. While the biographical information on each author will inform my vision, my plan is not to write mini-biographies or to mine familiar clichés about their work. Instead what I will bring to this is my deep commitment to literature and my love of writing. I also value the political in writing; I value it too much to fall back on stereotypes about these writers. Rather, using their books more than their lives will allow me to bring a new eye to the work. From The Sun Also Rises to Native Son to Their Eyes Were Watching God, my analysis of gender and national identity will provide new readings as well as a new theory of the founding of the contemporary American consciousness and conscience.
I want to articulate the meaning of national identity. Conceptually this approach follows on the political explication of the nation of Israel that I did in Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation, which won the American Book Award. The ways in which gender suffuses national identity, or, following Virginia Woolf, two separate national identities, one for men, another for women, will be the central focus of Writing America.
The writing style of each writer will be integrated into the analysis by showing how the formal use of language exposes or hides the purposes of each writer.
For instance, with Hemingway his early work suggests a flexible, even gender-bending, view of male-female sex and sex roles. In two books published posthumously, he posits a sameness in men and women and explicates role reversal in sex. Perhaps the through-a-Freudian-glass analyses of The Sun Also Rises are wrong and the castrated hero and female heroine are gender inverted? Perhaps one is not reading a story about the submerged male fear of women's sexuality but instead the woman lives a male life and the male a female life. Perhaps she's the boy and he's the girl, which suggests that women are castrated and live limited lives because of it. The more I read (or reread in most cases) Hemingway, the more I believe that at leas this early work has a feminist subtext. One begins to see in The Sun Also Rises the beginnings of Hemingway's nationalist chauvinism, expressed paradoxically in the exile of these two characters. The question of how Hemingway changed into someone who wrote about men as an advocate of hypermasculinity while at the same time his American chauvinism grew is what I propose to follow.
The influence U.S. writing has had on world literature is no less explosive than the influence of pop culture. I intend to explore in each writer the American identity with its dynamism and, in some cases, the appearance of an optimism, the dark side of which is not extinguished. This American identity as these writers forged it is the beginning of what is called "the American Century." Some of it runs counter to the nationalist rhetoric surrounding both Normandy and the post-nine/eleven war. The regionalism of Welty and Faulkner, for instance, constitutes a deep critique of the American nation as such, a kind of literary federalism. Hemingway and Fitzgerald, with their differing pro-American stances, lived much of their adult lives outside the U.S. With all the writing on Hemingway and Fitzgerald, there is nothing that expresses a complex view of how gender actually creates their nationalism. I have also been thinking a great deal about writing and would like to explore what it is and what it means using the writers I have identified. Finally, then, this is an homage to writers who articulated the early modern principles of a late twentieth-century American identity.
Writing America will be both original and accessible. I intend to use simple prose without a surfeit of quotes from secondary sources. I can write Writing America in three years.