More about the nun

Mme Cyr says further – a propos the fact that for centuries a debate ranged among scholars as to whether the Portuguese Nun’s Letters had been written by her or rather by a man – that women have been denied the right to speak. In this she picks up the favorite argument of the femlib movement. There is something to it: some (male) scholars’ insistence that the author could not possibly be a woman does seem to betray a strong wish that she should not have been. But the general remark makes no sense: whoever had written the letters, man or woman, they were published – and made a stir – precisely as the production of a woman. Apparently, there was no social barrier to a woman’s literary success in 1666.

(Besides, the relationship between gender rights and gender publication is completely made up: in male chauvinist Victorian England more women published than men).

But to the point.

Mme Cyr then adds, a propos the Brooklyn Seamstress who had found her feelings helpfully expressed by the letters, that such exclusion from literature has meant a kind of crippling of the whole sex, leaving, as it were, women uncertain how to feel. But then, given that the feelings of the letters may not really be those of the seamstress, but only put on, one wonders whether such publications are in fact a good thing.

For centuries now young privileged people have read Marx and been worked up by him into white fury about social injustice which they themselves did not actually experience. Their feelings of personal frustration – perhaps with parental authority or lack of sexual fulfillment – were channeled by a craftily crafted book into feelings of revolutionary fervor. But the so-called revolutionary class consciousness, which they thereby acquired, being proletarian consciousness, is false – cannot be anything but false – in upper middle class youth: it is not their consciousness at all.

Just so the Portuguese nun’s love may not be the Brooklyn Seamstress’ love, either; by putting it on, the seamstress may not be adopting the correct diagnosis of her ills, and therefore not getting at all closer to a cure; and the book, by offering wrong diagnosis of her ills, may in fact be reducing any prospect of improvement.

Books are dangerous things. If we are to read like this – impose their creations upon us – perhaps we better not read at all?