Very likely, there are but a few men who are able to capture with complete conviction the inner lives of the women within their novels. The “In Depth” panelists in New Orleans in May — Francis Baudry, Theodore Jacobs, Jane Kite, and Paul Schwaber—were asked, “How do these men do it?” The fictional women the panelists chose to discuss were Emma Bovary, Molly Bloom, Anna Karenina, and Juliet.
Morris L. Peltz briefly introduced the panel. He has read that some writers describe the task of the novelist as akin to the task of the mystery writer: the fastidious investigation of a character to progressively reveal what had been hidden and unknown.
Often our first encounter with the character is her physical description: her face, her coiffure, her body posture and movement, her dress, and how she enters the novel. We hear her spoken dialogue and read her inner monologues. In the best portraits, the reader begins to “know” these women: their dissatisfaction, their passion, and the often suffocating grip of the society in which they live. Even as these women come to life, they retain some secrets. The mystery is never fully revealed. But the writers of these portraits are not simply writing about women. They are writing something bigger, something about humanity.
As is well known, Peltz observed, it is inevitable that all novelists turn to their own lives for the models of their characters. Some of these fictional portraits must come very close to the real thing. Other characters are likely to have been composites, distilled from several people, further embellished by imagination.
After examining two failed portraits of women — Gudrun in D.H. Lawrence's Women In Love, a near-caricature of an evil woman, and Isabel Archer in Henry James's Portrait of a Lady, who implausibly surrenders herself to the prison of her marriage — Peltz concluded that as a minimum, for a man to convincingly create a fictional woman, he has to have loved at least one woman deeply, any conflicts and inhibitions notwithstanding.
Writing Madame Bovary would drain Gustave Flaubert's energy beyond his wildest imaginings, Francis Baudry noted. It dragged on for more than four years. Baudry believes we should consider two separate questions:
What capacities and special talents allowed Flaubert such insight into the feminine mind?
How was he able to transmit his knowledge so poetically and so successfully?
“The writers of these portraits are not simply writing about women. They are writing something bigger, something about humanity.”
Baudry narrated some biographical facts. Flaubert never married:
He was deeply fearful of any real commitment to a lasting relation with any woman. He reassured his mother that she never needed to fear that a rival would displace her in her son's affections. … Flaubert was keenly aware of his profound self-involvement, coupled with a deep fear of intrusion. He needed to be in total control.
Baudry explored the sources Flaubert tapped “to put together such a coherent, convincing, and powerful portrait of a young woman's struggles against the constraints of her sex.”
In an 1852 letter, Flaubert wrote that love “has been a major preoccupation of mine my entire life … and the heart I was studying was mine. How many times, in my best moments, did I feel the cold blade of the scalpel pierce my flesh!”
Baudry believes Flaubert infused into Emma's character his forceful and ambitious traits as well as his pensiveness and deep feminine identifications. Emma loved playing at being a man in both manner of dress and posture. Emma has both feminine and masculine traits. She instantly becomes dominating the moment she notices any weakness on the part of the man, which forces the man to assume a female attitude.
Baudry theorized that like other great writers, Flaubert possessed “a certain split in the ego between the real person who has his own views, including a past history and a set of experiences from which he can draw upon, and the persona of the creator.”
Theodore Jacobs arrived at similar conclusions. To so vividly create the character of Molly Bloom, Jacobs believes, it takes “a man who has the imaginative capacity to think and feel as a woman, to live inside a woman's skin, and, perhaps, in his mind's eye to be a woman.”
For Jacobs, James Joyces Molly stays in one's mind as, arguably, the most vivid, dramatic, openly revealing and fully realized woman in literature. In the thirty-five pages of [her] monologue, the reader gains an unforgettable picture of the mind, the emotions, the imaginations, the motivations, and the preoccupations — in short the essence — of a woman.
How could a man have the interest, the knowledge, and the talent to render so fully, so accurately, so convincingly the intimate details of a woman's bodily experiences and sensations as well as her erotic fantasies?
Morris L. Peltz is a training and supervising analyst with the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. He manages the Program Committee's “In Depth: Art, Culture, and Politics” program.
Jacobs answered, “In his imagination, it seems Joyce could be and was both sexes, and he could switch rapidly from one to the other.” Jacobs believes that Molly Bloom functioned for Joyce in the novel as his wife Nora did in his life.
What is well known about Joyce's sexual fantasies, some enacted with Nora, is that they were strongly colored by his anal preoccupations, evidences of infantile fixations. Jacobs convincingly speculated that these were traumatic residues related to his mothers ten pregnancies.
Early educated by the Jesuits, Joyce developed an extremely refined, albeit cynical, intelligence and an acute ear for poetry and language.
“Tolstoy was a remarkable writer, a keen observer, and a gifted psychologist,” said Jane Kite. But it is only at the end of Anna Karenina, when Tolstoy abandons his “nuanced and distanced view of Anna,” that he finds her soul, her “feminine subjectivity.” It occurs as Tolstoy joins Anna in her torrential, passionate, paranoid thoughts. “The extraordinary power of Anna's last hours seems to lie in the fact that Tolstoy has become, for a few pages, the soul of his heroine via a barrage of half-conscious, disordered thoughts which embody his conflicts as intensely as they do hers,” reflected Kite.
“Tolstoy was notoriously moody, opinionated, misogynistic, and often belligerent,” Kite said. “Tolstoy writes pure conflict, and he writes it continuously, accurately, and beautifully. The apotheosis of conflict is written in the character of Anna, the one who takes the greatest personal risk in abandoning her husband and child for a passionate affair” that ends disastrously.
Early in the novel, Kite said, Anna is “described as having a surplus — a surplus of life, a surplus of light…. Anna is portrayed from the beginning as a radiant person, one with whom men fall in love and women envy.”
As Anna travels toward her suicidal death, Tolstoy allows her briefly to turn on the bright light of her mind. She understands that Vronsky hasn't deceived her but that their relations nonetheless are doomed.
Paul Schwaber acknowledged, in his study of Romeo and Juliet, that so little is known of Shakespeare he could “sensibly and without embarrassment say I have no idea how he could render Juliet so vividly,” but the playwright had that “marvelous ability to perceive and allow the reality of others.”
In 1596, when Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, he had two teenaged daughters, and it is conceivable that he was an observant and empathetic father. Yet Schwaber argued for additional contributions for Shakespeare's creativity. “He wrote for the stage when all actors were male, the girls and women played by boys and young men. … Might talented male actors portray women believably, and might talented male authors — male analysts — be able genuinely to imagine the reality of women?”
Schwaber, in a close reading of the plays, allowed Juliet to speak for herself, a passionate, conflicted thirteen-year-old trapped in the play's fusion of love and tragedy. The reader or theatergoer “is prepared early for young love thwarted by the folly and evil of others.”
Shortly after their brief first meeting, the lovers flirt in gorgeous poetry, disclosing their initial overwhelming love. In Juliet's “early monologues, interactions and dialogues, [she] exposes intense and shifting emotions, her alacrity of mind and notable self-awareness,” said Schwaber. “If she has been captured by Romeo, Juliet asks no less of him. … His identity, family, and position are dismissible. She wants more, something at once sacrificial and unique to them.”
After Juliet “proclaims her love as deep and infinite as the sea,” when the lovers impetuously decide to marry, Schwaber reminded the audience of something crucial: “They are still children. … Their explosive, brave, immediate, and incomparable love is precocious.”
Juliet's further enticements to Romeo, Schwaber believes, “contain menace. She would imprison Romeo like a pet. … She would kill him with cherishing, take his very life. She wants not only love, but also darkness and secrecy.” Ultimately, Juliet's love is apocalyptic.
What these four writers appear to have in common is an immense capacity to imagine a woman, anchored in empathy and comfort with their feminine identifications.