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- Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Women in Dark Times begins with three remarkable women: revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg; German-Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon; and film icon Marilyn Monroe. The story of these women, bound together by their struggles against iniquity, blazes a trail across some of the defining features of the twentieth century – revolution, totalitarianism and the American dream – and compels us to reckon with the unspeakable. Bringing to the surface the subterranean depths of history and the human mind that dominant political vocabularies cannot bear to face, pioneering critic and public intellectual Jacqueline Rose forges a new language for feminism. Extending her argument into the present, Rose turns her focus to 'honour' killings and celebrates contemporary artists whose work grows out of an unflinching engagement with all that is darkest in the modern world. Women in Dark Times, reissued a decade after its original publication, offers a template for a scandalous feminism, one which confronts all that is most recalcitrant and unsettling in the struggle to create a better world.
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1
‘It’s really hard for me to overestimate how important [Rose’s] work has been for me…. I don’t feel like that about very many writers.’
— Maggie Nelson
‘Jacqueline Rose has no peer among critics of her generation. The brilliance of her literary insight, the lucidity of her prose, and the subtlety of her analyses are simply breathtaking.’
— Edward Said
‘One of the most original and intellectually sophisticated minds at work today.’
— Eimear McBride
‘As a literary scholar and psychoanalytic thinker, Rose has long insisted that we pay close attention to the subterranean fears, fantasies, and narratives that structure our most pressing sociopolitical problems.’
— Merve Emre, The Nation
‘To read Rose is to understand that there is no border between us and the world; it is an invitation to a radical kind of responsibility.’
— Parul Sehgal, New York Times
‘A rigorously argued and at times breathtaking book. Many paragraphs contain a controlled explosion; her analysis of men’s fear of and fascination with female sexuality, born from the boy’s early proximity to the mother’s body, is one of them. The book closes with a clarion cry: “Women have been reasonable for far too long.” Her reasoning, ironically, is as tight and sinuous as a constrictor knot. It is a time to be afraid of the dark.’
— Frances Wilson, Daily Telegraph4
‘Jacqueline Rose is one of our most stimulating public intellectuals. This is the book we have been waiting for, a clarion call for us all, men and women, to be bolder and brasher in our advocacy for change but also more willing to embrace our contradictions.’
— Helena Kennedy QC
‘Formidable.… It is impossible not to listen carefully to what Professor Rose has to say in her thought-provoking, rigorously argued writing on feminism, literature and psychoanalysis.… It is a breathtaking book and a challenging read – ambitious, scholarly and innovative.’
— Herald
‘Jacqueline Rose’s book Women in Dark Times is pretty amazing.’
— Irvine Welsh
‘A surfeit of elegance and intelligence.’
— Ali Smith
‘Rose confronts dark times with dark and moving stories from the last century inspiring a new feminism for this one. By so doing she keeps alive the dreams of so many women from Rosa Luxemburg and Marilyn Monroe to young girls killed in the name of some perverted sense of “honour”. Most likely a classic.’
— Shami Chakrabarti, Director of Liberty
‘Women in Dark Times follows a long-established trajectory within her work, questioning assumptions and reframing debates from an explicitly feminist perspective. Rose’s text is intersectional in the best sense of the word, combining many approaches - including, but not limited to, concerns over gender, race, Jewish identity and politics. Linking all of these together is psychoanalysis, whose revelations allow for the demystifying and revisionist readings at the core of the book. 5Demonstrates the value of scholarly reappraisals of cultural figureheads.’
— Jewish Quarterly
‘This is not an easy book but a lucid, deeply absorbing and strangely soothing one.’
— New Statesman
‘The book provides a valuable record of the ideologies and achievements of women whom society would rather have kept silent.’
— Independent
‘Rose’s thesis is a measured and decisive stroke in contemporary feminist theory.’
— Financial Times
‘Jacqueline Rose is a pioneering feminist and a fine storyteller.… We need to listen carefully to Rose’s call in this inspiring and reflective book for a new “scandalous” feminism.’
— Rachel Holmes, Literary Review
WOMEN IN DARK TIMES
JACQUELINE ROSE
A FEMINIST MANTRA
WE ARE FEMINISTS.
WE FIGHT INJUSTICE AGAINST WOMEN.
WE ARE NOT INNOCENT.
WE ARE NOT IN FLIGHT FROM THE DARKEST SECRETS OF THE SOUL.
FOR THAT REASON, WE DO NOT HAVE
TO SUBDUE THE WORLD TO OUR WILL
IN ORDER TO ENACT THEM.
WE ARE FEMINISTS.
LISTEN CAREFULLY TO WHAT WE
HAVE TO SAY.
CONTENTS
For Mia Rose
15
‘Just imagine, it was precisely those bruises on my soul that at the next moment gave me the courage for a new life.’
—Rosa Luxemburg to Leo Jogiches, 1898
‘Darkness is a better form of freedom.’
—Thérèse Oulton, in conversation, January 2013 16
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Ten years ago, on the first publication of Women in Dark Times, I was asked: surely all times are dark for women. Today, woefully I have to acknowledge both the truth of that statement and the fact that across much of the world, the position of women this past decade has darkened still more. Over these years, sexual violence has been exposed at the very heart of social institutions, such as the police force, meant to be protecting women against it. ‘Honour’ killings continue to go unpunished. Women are the sexual prey of war. Abortion rights have been put severely under threat. The pandemic which raged globally in the early 2020s was witness to a shocking rise in the crime of femicide.
At the same time, this reality has become more and more visible, firing up a new generation of feminists which must surely give grounds for hope. I realise now that Women in Dark Times was offering a history of the twentieth century through the voices of women, from Rosa Luxemburg to Marilyn Monroe to Yael Bartana and more, brilliant revolutionaries, activists, artists, each one attuned to the world’s cruelties as they protest against injustice and craft their vision of a better life ahead. Today, the voices of these women, whose brave lives are explored in this book, speak to me even more loudly than before.
Jacqueline Rose November 202418
PREFACE
It is time to return to what feminism has to tell us. It is time to make the case for what women have uniquely to say about the perils of our modern world. But the case cannot be made along the lines that have become most familiar. We cannot make it only by asserting women’s right to equality or by arguing that women are qualified to enter the courts of judgement and the corridors of power. Those claims are important but they tend to be made – loudly, as they must be – to the detriment of another type of understanding, less obvious but no less vital, that makes its way into the darker spaces of the world, ripping the cover from the illusions through which the most deadly forms of power sustain and congratulate themselves. This we might call the knowledge of women. In its best forms, it is what allows women to struggle for freedom without being co-opted by false pretension or by the brute exertion of power for its own sake.
I say ‘women’ but of course I mean ‘some women’. No feminism should claim to speak on behalf of all women. In these pages, I will be following the paths of individual women who have taught me how to think differently, and who can help us forge a new language for feminism. One that allows women to claim their place in the world, but which also burrows beneath its surface to confront the subterranean aspects of history and the human mind, both of which play their part in driving the world on its course, but which our dominant political vocabularies most often cannot bear to face. We need to draw on women’s ability to tell that other story, to enter that domain and then return to tell the tale. We need, I will argue here, a scandalous feminism, one which embraces without inhibition the most painful, outrageous aspects of the 20human heart, giving them their place at the very core of the world that feminism wants to create. Certainly it will be a different world from the one that feminism is meant to aspire to – sane, balanced, reasoned, where women are granted their due portion. Not because these aspirations should not be met, nor because we want a mad world, but because women have the gift of seeing through what is already crazy about the world, notably the cruelty and injustice with which it tends to go about organizing itself.
That the personal is political has become a well-worn feminist claim. In the beginning it rightly drew attention to the way that women’s private and family lives were soaked in the ugliest realities of patriarchal power. But if the claim has faded somewhat, it might be because it shied away from the most disturbing component of its own insight – which is that once you open the door to what is personal, intimate, you never know what you are going to find. The innermost lives of women do not just bear the scars of oppression. If the women of this book are for me types of genius, it is because of the way that, as part of their struggle to be fully human, they invite us into the gutter, allowing – obliging – us to look full on at what they, in their dreams and nightmares, have had to face (unspeakable thoughts unspoken, in Toni Morrison’s famous phrase).
So this book is also a plea for a feminism that will not try to sanitize itself. We need to go back to the original wager – that the personal is key – and give it a new gloss. Feminism should make it a matter of principle to tell the world what it has to learn from the moment when we enter the landscape of the night. I know that, for many, politics can only be effective – can only be politics – by asserting its distance from this domain. In fact, it has been the strength of modern feminism to mess with the idea of 21a cleaned-up politics by bringing sexuality to the table. In a way I am simply taking it at its word, and asking: What happens when we push that feminist insistence on the inner, private dimension of political struggle to the furthest limits of conscious and unconscious life?
To pursue this question into our time I have found myself in some very dark places, where women suffer in ways that are often unseen. In this I am following another vital strand of modern feminism for which making visible the invisible histories of women has always been a key task. It has felt crucial to do this, as a type of caution, as a way of reminding us of the worst that a still patriarchal world is capable of. Honour killing – the fact of it, its prevalence in modern times – stands as a glaring rebuke, perhaps the most glaring, to those who would argue that the task of feminism is done, to the idea that women today are free, that sexuality – so this argument runs – is something that women today control and dispose of at will. Nothing could be further from the picture of sexuality offered here. All of my stories make it clear that sexuality always contains an element beyond human manipulation, however free we think we are. To assert otherwise is a type of daylight robbery which knocks the humanity of all my women down by at least a notch.
Attributing honour killing to ‘other’ (less civilized) cultures or communities is in fact, I will argue, one way of keeping that bland, evasive image of Western sexual freedom intact. Women are not free today – not even in the West, where the inequalities are still glaring. Certainly it must be one of the goals of feminism for women to be freer in their sexual life. But we must be careful not to exchange an injustice for an illusion. We are nowhere more deceived than when we present sexuality not as the trouble it always is but as another consumable good. Honour 22killing is the cruellest modern exemplar of how the sexuality of women can provoke a patriarchal anguish which knows no limits in the violent lengths it will go to assuage itself. But we kid ourselves, as everything in this book will confirm, if we think that human fear of sexuality, and then the hatred of women which is so often its consequence, is something that the so-called reason of our modern world can simply and safely dissipate.
All the women in this book are therefore issuing a warning. They are all reminding us of the limits of enlightenment thinking which believes that we can, with sufficient persistence, simply drive the cobwebs of unreason away. I do not want feminism to hitch itself to this wagon. Indeed, rather than the idea of light triumphing over darkness, my women suggest that confronting dark with dark might be the more creative path. If there is such a thing as a knowledge of women, this, I would venture, is where we should go looking for it.
This book is intended to change the terms of feminist debate by giving women the task – already embraced by some – of exposing everything that is darkest, most recalcitrant and unsettling in the struggle for the better political futures we want, women and men, to build for ourselves. My aim is to persuade the reader of the brilliance of all these women in showing us how.
Jacqueline Rose April 201423
INTRODUCTION
‘Life being how it is, isn’t necessarily how it is.’
—Heshu Yones, killed by her father, London, 2003
‘It was the unpredictable in herself that she used.’
—Eve Arnold on Marilyn Monroe
This book begins with the story of three women who create their lives in the face of incredible odds. Whether they do so despite or because of those odds is a question which each of them embodies, a question they put as much to us as to themselves. It will also tell the story, more starkly, of the odds that women, in the worst of cases, can find themselves up against. For me, the three women are survivors, although the idea may at first glance seem strange, since each could also be said to have died before her time. They have everything to teach us about the complex reckoning – the traffic – between the cruelties of the heart and of the world. Each one belongs to the last century, in which prosperity and killing multiplied in ways previously unknown. In this book, death shadows the lives of women whose energy, whose fierce protest against the constraints and injustice of the modern world, is still exemplary today.
I see them as artists, women who etch words and images out of living history and their own flesh. One most obviously perhaps – she is famous in her own way, but for many might also be the least familiar: the German-Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon, who poured on to the page – over a thousand gouaches painted in an extraordinary rush of two years between 1940 and 1942 – the colours and musical notes of her epoch in combinations and shapes never seen before or since. But Rosa 24Luxemburg, with whom I begin, was also an artist – a wordsmith who wrote poems, as well as painting, and whose political speeches and letters sing as much as they exhort, cajole and proclaim. In her work, the revolutionary potential of the first decades of the twentieth century is gifted with a language painstakingly crafted to its task. And Marilyn Monroe, contrary to the dismissals or even mockery she so often attracts, is also, I argue, to be seen and respected as a consummate performer, a brilliant artiste in whose hands – or rather across whose body and face – the dreams of Hollywood, in a post-war America straining under the weight of its own ideals, receive their most thorough and ultimately tragic exposure.
All three are therefore truth-tellers who lay bare the ugly secrets of the consensus, the way of the world which the corrupt, powerful and over-privileged in the West never stop telling us – no more so than now – is the only way that the world must and always will be. The fact that they are women is key. If one of my aims in this book is to add their names to the already distinguished ancestry, the foremothers, of modern feminism, it is not because they saw themselves as feminists – they did not – but because I believe that each one of them, in the way they understood and negotiated the perils of their lives, has something urgent to say to feminism today. One thing they have in common is their suffering. But if each of them is stricken, they also make themselves the subjects of their own destiny (destiny as distinct from fate, which condemns all its players in advance). Each of them trawls the darkness of their inner life, where their own most anguished voices reside, in order to understand what impedes them but also in search of the resources to defy their own predicaments. If they attract me so deeply, it is because not one of them makes the mistake – as I see it – of believing that effective 25existence in the real world must come at the expense of the most painful forms of self-knowledge. Subject to violence, they also take their lives into their own hands. They are never – any of them – solely the victims of their history, even if that history finally kills them.
Luxemburg begins the story. A Jewish woman born in Poland, she rose up the highest echelons of German socialist circles to become one of the most outspoken revolutionary voices of the early twentieth century. She was exceptionally versatile: revolutionary Marxist, propagandist, teacher and speaker; stylist and rhetorician; lyricist and word-artist; translator and linguist; painter and botanist; and, as I recently discovered, a passionate cyclist (together with Edith Cavell, who is famous as a nurse but less as a socialist, she participated in a six-day cycling event at Dieppe in the summer of 1902). Enthusiast of the 1905 and then 1917 Russian revolutions, she was the uncompromising detractor of her colleagues in the German Social Democrat Party, whose betrayal of revolution reached its crisis for her when they supported the munitions bill which heralded the start of the 1914–18 war. Frequently imprisoned – for insulting the Kaiser and then for her opposition to that war – she was murdered by government henchmen in 1919 after the failed Spartacist revolutionary uprising. The brutal suppression of that revolution has consequences still with us to this day. It was a moment of truth when ruined, defeated soldiers were able fleetingly to glimpse that they had been the victims of a capitalist, imperialist war which had put the workers of the world at each other’s throats. ‘Socialism or barbarity’ was Luxemburg’s famous slogan. After her death, barbarity would of course triumph. Out of the Freikorps that killed her would emerge some of the most fervent future supporters of Hitler. 26
When Luxemburg steps on to the public stage for the first time, launching what will be a brilliant career of public speaking, she slowly but surely takes the measure of her own power. ‘Not that I am all fired up and bursting with enthusiasm,’ she writes from Berlin to her grudgingly appreciative lover, Leo Jogiches, in 1898. ‘On the contrary I am quite calm and look to the future with confidence … I am sure that in half a year’s time, I will be among the best of the party’s speakers.’ The voice, the effortlessness, the language – everything, she writes to him, ‘comes out right’, as if she had been speaking for twenty years (she is twenty-eight at the time). Luxemburg is collecting herself, finding her voice in what is of course essentially a man’s world. A small, Polish-Jewish woman with a limp, she is – metaphorically but also literally – drawing herself up to her full height. She will be the equal of every man she addresses, and more than the equal of the many male revolutionary pundits and stars, including Lenin, whom she will take to task in the course of her life. Quite simply, she conquers their world.
At the same time, she has no doubt that what she brings to that world is uniquely her own. ‘Do you know what I have been feeling very strongly?’ she writes to Jogiches a few months later. ‘Something is moving inside me and wants to come out … In my “soul” a totally new, original form is ripening that ignores all rules and conventions. It breaks them by the power of ideas and strong conviction. I want to affect people like a clap of thunder, to inflame their minds not by speechifying but with the breadth of my vision, the strength of my conviction, and the power of my expression.’ Fiery, intemperate, ruthless – Luxemburg could be all of these. But for Luxemburg, to be a political actor in the world is to usher into that world something as unpredictable as a new birth. Then she adds: 27‘How? What? Where? I still don’t know.’ Appearances can be deceptive. Luxemburg’s hesitancy is the backdrop, the indispensable companion of her poise. She is calling for a new language of politics, one which today is still met mostly with incomprehension or intolerance: a political vision that will not try to extinguish what cannot be controlled in advance or fully known. In this she is profoundly in tune with Hannah Arendt – from whose book Men in Dark Times I take my title – who, writing of totalitarian terror, describes the ultimate freedom as identical with the capacity to begin. Over such beginnings, she writes, ‘no logic, no cogent deduction can have any power because the chain presupposes, in the form of a premise, a new beginning’. It is therefore each new birth that totalitarianism hates. Terror is needed ‘lest with the birth of each new human being a new beginning arise and raise its voice in the world’.
Raising a voice in the world would of course be one definition of feminism – speaking out, protesting, clamouring loudly for equality, making oneself heard. ‘Find your voice and use it’ was recently described as the first lesson feminism has to learn from the suffragettes. Mary Beard has recently spoken publicly of the high price women pay for being heard. Patriarchy has been very efficient in countering the noise of feminism with epithets – ‘shrill’, ‘hysterical’ – intended to send women’s voices scurrying back, abject, underground. The famous backlash against feminism is, we could say, not just aimed at restoring the ascendancy of men in the material world, but also, and no less forcefully, directed at women’s speech. An outspoken woman is a threat, not just because of the content of what she says, the demands she is making, but because, in the very act of speaking, her presence as a woman is too strongly felt. Drawing language up from 28inside her, she makes the body as the source of language too palpable in her person, giving the lie to the delusion that the body is sublimated in our utterances, that we can hide our mortal flesh behind the words that we speak. On this, Luxemburg’s opponents were unapologetic. August Bebel, self-proclaimed feminist, wrote of her ‘wretched female’s squirts of poison’; Viktor Adler called her a ‘poisonous bitch … clever as a monkey’. On another occasion he more simply complained that she had ‘proved herself too much of a woman’. ‘We will hang her,’ he is reported as saying half jokingly after the 1905 Social Democratic Party in Jena. ‘We will not allow her to spit in our soup.’ Women who speak out threaten and expose the limits of the human: vile liquid, animal, or both.
One reason women are often so hated, I would suggest, is because of their ability to force to the surface of the everyday parts of the inner life – its visceral reality, its stubborn unruliness – which in the normal course of our exchanges we like to think we have subdued. For me this is also their gift. Today we read much about the over-sexualization of women’s and young girls’ bodies, which is of course also a form of potentially lethal control: bodies that must be perfect, but which must also shrink to the point where they more or less disappear. I see this, however, as something of a decoy, or even a distraction. Such idealization, such diminishment (the two extremes are inseparable) is a way of concealing another impossible, but no less sinister, demand: that our bodies should never remind us of our failings, of the limits to what we can fully command or know about ourselves, that the surface of the world should never bear the visible marks of what we all carry most disturbingly – physically but also in our dreams and nightmares – beneath. As if women, always potentially the bearers of new life, were being asked to 29smother the messy uncertainty to which every new beginning, if that is what it truly is, gives rise. ‘Something is moving inside me and wants to come out … a totally new, original form is ripening that ignores all rules and conventions.’
When Rosa Luxemburg is murdered by government henchmen in 1919, Charlotte Salomon is barely two years old. Salomon’s war, both public and private, begins more or less at this moment, when the benighted legacy of the First World War is already being written. Because Luxemburg was murdered for her part in the Spartacist revolutionary uprising in Germany in 1918, we do not always remember that it was her opposition to the war that consigned her for the longest time to prison: first for a year in 1915 for inciting public disobedience, and then when that sentence ended in February 1916, under indefinite detention without trial for the rest of the war. If her support for the Spartacist uprising was at the outset cautious – she felt the revolutionaries were not ready, had not seized the right time – it was because she was painfully aware of the vulnerability of a defeated and humiliated Germany, notably its returning, mutilated army, to the blinding rhetoric of patriotism which would be so decisive in the rise of Hitler. ‘It is a foolish delusion,’ she writes in her famous anti-war ‘Junius’ pamphlet that was smuggled out of prison, ‘to believe that we need only live through the war, as a rabbit hides under a bush to await the end of a thunderstorm to trot merrily off in his old accustomed gait when all is over.’ Germany, she predicted, would learn nothing from defeat. ‘The Jew,’ Goebbels famously pronounced in 1930, ‘is the real cause of our losing the Great War.’
Charlotte Salomon can fairly be described as her heir. As if in counterpoint and anticipation, she ushers in the 30next phase. Her monumental work, Life? or Theatre?, is a unique record of what Germany became in the aftermath of the First World War for the Jews who were to become the victims of the next – she was the daughter of a distinguished German-Jewish artistic and medical family. Charlotte Salomon paints her way through that history, gouache upon gouache, which she created in the last years of her life and which were then bound into a book after she died. She was murdered in Auschwitz, but it is a fatal error to assign her work to the category of Holocaust Art, which has been the partial effect, if not the aim, of including her work in the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Israel, Yad Vashem. Salomon is another woman whose creativity exceeds her final tragedy, both historically and in terms of the energy and exuberance of her work. Life? or Theatre? was painted in a cacophony of colours, often glaring, as if in defiance of the private and public anguish she charts with such deft and vivid precision. It spans the two wars, orchestrates the space between them, running its brightly coloured lines between now and then.
Certainly she creates a new form that ‘ignores all rules and conventions’ (specifically the rules of artistic form stipulated by the Nazi custodians of art). This has certainly been the view of the commentators – followers would not perhaps be an exaggeration – who have given her work almost a cult status over the years. Life? or Theatre? is an in-mixing of genres, announced on the first page as a three-coloured Singspiel, a musical drama with a cast list, a series of painted images accompanied by words and songs which are spelled out in transparencies laid across each page. Salomon instructs her audience to look at the images with the accompanying tune running inside their head. She created the work in the years immediately preceding her capture and deportation, while 31in exile on the French Riviera when it was still under the relatively benign occupation of the Italians. According to one reliable report, she sat humming as she painted by the sea. Seizing her history against the encroaching dark, Salomon ushers us into a picture gallery which is also a poetry recital, history lesson and concert hall. The combination of sight and sound adds to the sense of historic urgency, as if to proclaim: ‘See this!’ ‘Listen here!’ You do not exactly look at, or read, Life? or Theatre? You enter into its world. The Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, which houses the work, has created a site where you can look at the images, read the transparencies, reverse each gouache to see what it carries beneath, and even listen to recordings of the music, taken from the moment, which Salomon intended to accompany her paintings.
Salomon paints and rhymes her way out of an abyss which is as intensely personal as it is historical. It is the genius of her work to navigate across the two domains, uncovering the perilous foundations they share. Life? or Theatre? begins with the suicide of her mother’s sister in 1913 on the eve of the First World War. She is the offspring of that moment. In response to the death, her mother-to-be becomes a nurse, a sister again (like English ‘sister’, Schwester in German means both nurse and sister), who then travels against her parents’ wishes to the front where she meets her surgeon husband. Charlotte, named after the lost sister, will be their only child, steeped in unspoken tragedy before her life begins: ‘Little Charlotte did not seem at all pleased at being born.’ ‘There is’, the written commentary announces across the scene of her parents’ wedding, ‘nothing to remind the gathering of the still raging war.’ Salomon is born into a world of secrets and lies. From the outset, she is instructing her audience to see what others are refusing to see: a 32nation at war which seizes its moments of elation in a type of grim desperation against a bleak and threatening sky; and her aunt’s suicide, hushed up because German Jews have the highest suicide rate of all population groups in the country, which makes them vulnerable to the charge of degeneracy (a charge which will of course fatally intensify). In fact there are seven suicides in her family, including her own mother when Salomon is eight years old. Salomon is told that her mother died of flu. ‘Nobody’, the text observes, ‘had ever told Charlotte how some of her family lost their lives.’
In defiance of a future she could not have known in advance, Salomon makes her extraordinary bid for freedom. As a young woman, she had dreamt of herself as a larva bound by a thousand shackles, ‘a larva with the one burning desire to be freed one day from these shackles’. Only when she finally learns the truth, at the age of twenty-three, does she start painting her work. ‘Keep this safe,’ she said when she handed the completed work to her friend, Dr Moridis. ‘C’est toute ma vie.’ (‘It is my whole life.’) Dipping her brush into the worst, painting the unspoken and barely speakable, she makes herself the chronicler of her world. It is how, internally, she survives. In this, she can also serve as a model. Like Luxemburg and, as we will see, Monroe, Salomon draws her strength from the most disturbing parts of her history and her own mind. It is a central part of my argument that they can, therefore, only be understood if we are willing, unlike most of the people around them, to countenance – live with, one might say – what is most horrendous about their public and private worlds. You cannot close the blinds, or turn up the volume to drown out the sounds of war. Unsolicited, for the most part, by the official rhet-oric, or more simply excluded, women have the privilege, 33or at least the option, of being less in its thrall. In search of her own talent, Salomon combs the depths (we might say that it is her talent that drives her there). According to Alfred Wolfsohn, her mentor and lover, she made death her familiar – as opposed to an ugly family secret or the buried dead of a nation marching defiantly to its next war (Wolfsohn was himself a survivor of the First World War). Writing of one of her early paintings, Death and the Maiden, he comments: ‘From the deeply moving expression of the girl I feel that the death’s head holds none of the usual horror for her … Maybe this is the reason why the expression of Death shows so much softness, tenderness, almost defeat.’
What, for women, are the wages of fear? This is a question that has returned to recent feminism. If fear is something women experience, it is also something they are instructed to feel. ‘I don’t like the fact,’ Emily Birkenshaw stated at the UK Feminista summer school held in Birmingham in 2011, ‘that as a woman I have to feel scared.’ Fear is not only a signal. It can also be a demand. Women have to feel scared. Birkenshaw is talking about the danger to women on the streets – women whose visible sexuality is seen as the real threat, thereby making women responsible for crimes committed against them. But her statement also beautifully captures the ambiguity of fear – the appropriate response to the threat of violence, but also an image of what women should be (weak, powerless, would be the accompanying cliché). If women are always or always potentially frightened then the illusion can be nurtured that no one else ever has to be. Let women be fearful so men can feel brave and safe. As with most projections, this neatly parcels off a fundamental problem of the heart. As if the world were not a frightening place. As if fear were not somewhere 34everyone has to go. If instead we think of fear as place or portion, then it can be seen as a component of mental life that everyone, by dint of being human, inextricably shares. For Luxemburg, Salomon and Monroe, fear is an intimate, a companion. It is part of their world or psychic repertoire, and a type of knowledge, something they are able to tolerate. Why do we talk of conquering fear, as if there would be no price to pay for such brutal inner defacement? We might take as a model of such defacement a defeated army – Germany after the First World War, for example – that will go to war once more and destroy the whole world rather than admit its own failures as a nation or face its own worst fears. The fact that it has to live these fears so totally at the end of the Second World War shows such denial to be as ineffective as it is absolute. Nothing, we might say, is more dangerous than the repudiation of fear – at which men (often) and nations (regularly) excel themselves.
When Salomon arrives in Auschwitz, she is five months pregnant. Her biographer, Mary Lowenthal Felstiner, carefully unearths the figures which show that women were first in line for extermination (when Auschwitz was liberated, 17 per cent of the Jewish survivors were women to 83 per cent men). Witnesses have described how pregnant women were picked out, ostensibly for improved rations, and then immediately sent to their deaths. ‘Genocide’, writes Felstiner, ‘is the act of putting women and children first.’ Her shocking claim simply underlines that it is the capacity of women to engender life that sparks the greatest fear. Not just the act of gestation and birth. This is not the idea of womb-envy used by some feminists to counter Freud’s infamous theory of penis-envy, which is seen as his greatest slur against women (overlooking the fact that for psychoanalysis 35there is no greater dupe than the man who holds on to his anatomy as his own ideal). Nor is this the argument that men always potentially hate the bodies to which they owe life, although that may also be true. Nor, more obviously perhaps, should this be taken to imply that all women are or must be mothers, or even – although this is more contested – that being a woman is something with which all women primordially self-identify, seeing themselves as a woman before and to the exclusion of anything else (as if that reality exhausts all the psychic options on offer). Rather, it is the question of what the possibility of birth represents, in Arendt’s terms, as unpredictable beginning. A new birth confronts us with the collapse of our omnipotence, creaturely life whose future – other than by magic – cannot be foretold. Totalitarian terror is needed, to cite Arendt again, ‘lest with the birth of each new human being a new beginning arise and raise its voice in the world’. ‘Totalitarianisms’, Margaret Atwood wrote on Obama’s 2012 re-election, ‘always try to control women’s bodies, one way or another.’ (She was referring to laws against reproductive rights which remained in the pipeline, after his re-election, in individual states.)
Seen in this light, the fact of birth is a type of endless reminder of what escapes us, a living caution to our totalitarian dreams. In 1936, at the age of nineteen, Charlotte Salomon was accepted as the one Jewish student by the Berlin State Academy of Art. According to the minutes of the admissions committee, her reserved nature meant that she was not seen to pose the normal threat of ‘non-Aryan’ females to the Aryan male students. It was because her sexuality coiled back into itself that the state granted Salomon permission to paint (she was still a larva in shackles). The Nazi dread is of course that miscegenation will produce the wrong kind of racial life. Salomon, 36they surmised, was no danger. Were the context not so lethal, such reasoning would be laughable – as if to be reserved robs a woman of all sexual being (the idea of appearances as deceiving acquires an additional gendered gloss). But behind the inanity, we can discern the drive to control the bodies of women – to master the unmasterable – which is at the core of totalitarian logic. Or to put it more simply: a woman is terrifying because you never know what she is going to come up with.
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The demand for perfection directed at women in modern times (everything in place, no flaw, no lines, no shadow) can therefore be seen as one of the places where terror of the unknown takes refuge. As the centre of gravity shifts across the Atlantic after the Second World War, no woman carries the weight of that demand more heavily than Marilyn Monroe. As if, like America itself, Monroe were being handed the keys of redemption to the dreadful story – for which Luxemburg’s and Salomon’s deaths can be taken as emblems – that came before.
America had been Europe’s saviour, first militarily through its 1941 intervention and then economically through the Marshall Plan. As the continent struggled to emerge from the catastrophe of the war, America took up its position as bastion of freedom and new dawn. In that role, Hollywood will be one of its strongest suits (American cinema was wildly popular in post-war Europe at least partly because most American films had been banned under the Nazis, under Mussolini and by the Pétain regime in France). This was America, in the words of film critic Laura Mulvey, as ‘the world’s image of a new democracy of glamour’ which ‘proclaimed the desirability 37of capitalism to the outside world’. Monroe is the face and emissary of that desire. In 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, one of her most successful films, the two dazzling showgirls sail across the Atlantic ferrying American beauty to a still war-scarred Europe. Europe’s catastrophe was America’s opportunity, allowing it to resume fully a cultural and economic colonization of Europe which dated back to the 1920s and 1930s, and which had merely been interrupted by the war: between 1947 and 1949, Coca-Cola plants opened in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Italy. News of a target of 240 million bottles for France in 1951 provoked an outcry in the country. Monroe, we could say, was America’s answer to the war, its greatest boast, and a covert – or not so covert – weapon in the Cold War that follows. One of her most famous moments is her singing to US troops in Korea in 1954 (she herself said later that nothing had ever made her so happy). When Khrushchev asks to meet Monroe on a visit to the US in 1959, his aides explain that, for the USSR, America is Coca-Cola and Marilyn Monroe. Monroe herself put it rather differently. ‘I don’t look at myself as a commodity,’ she said in her last interview, ‘but I’m sure a lot of people have.’
Monroe was a child of the post-war Depression – she was born in 1926, in the suburbs of Los Angeles. According to the latest count, she moved during her childhood between eleven different foster homes, apart from the short periods of time she lived with her mother’s closest friend and also briefly with her mother before watching her being carried off to a mental home. She will be the most photographed woman in the world, as well as one of its most gifted cinematic performers, as is now, sometimes grudgingly, being recognized. But there is always something wrong. Not just because the back story of 38her life is so grim, nor because of her early death (whether accidental or suicide or indeed something far more sinister is to this day unclear); but also because both of these realities are the bleak undertow, the always hovering B movie to the triumphant tale which a newly dominant America, spreading its goods and money across the globe after the war, will try to tell the world and itself. She is far more aware, more critical, more resistant to everything that moment stands for – to all that she herself is meant to stand for – than we have been allowed to see.
Monroe’s life shadows the transition of America from Roosevelt’s New Deal, which saved the nation from Depression, through the Second World War, and from there into the 1950s Cold War, Korea and McCarthy’s witch-hunt of suspected communists which was one of its ugliest legacies. To such moral decay, Monroe’s beauty was the perfect foil. Her flawlessness was a type of magical thinking, America’s dream of itself come true (no limp, no stutter; in fact Monroe stuttered all her life). As we will see, despite her Korean moment, she surrounded herself with people who provided some of the most searing commentary on any such delusion and on the decline of America’s liberal ideals which accompanied it. Monroe may have embodied the perfection of America, its most dazzling image of itself, but she did not believe in it. She was suspicious of the official line. In May 1960, at the height of the Cold War, a CIA U2 plane was shot down by the Soviets. A few weeks later,when a second plane was spotted trespassing in the same airspace, Monroe phoned an aide to ask why. He told her it was not spying but merely carrying out an oceanic survey. ‘I don’t know … I don’t trust us,’ she replied. The fact that the sentence grammatically defies all logic makes the political point all the more strongly 39(how can ‘I’ distrust ‘us’ in which ‘I’ is syntactically included?).
Monroe was a rebel spirit. Her close friend Norman Rosten tells the somewhat unlikely story of how in 1960 she tried to persuade Arthur Miller to offer their home as a safe haven to Indonesian President Sukarno, who had led his country’s struggle for independence, when he faced an imminent coup. He was eventually overthrown by Suharto with the backing of the CIA. ‘My nightmare is the H Bomb,’ Monroe wrote in her notes for an interview in 1962, ‘What’s yours?’ None of this of course is well known. Monroe’s politics are like a hidden life behind the screen. There is a lesson here too that feminism can make use of. No woman is ever as bad as her own worst cliché.
It is, I will argue, at least partly because her own belief in the American dream was so precarious, her hold on what she was meant to personify so fragile, that Monroe became the object of such mania. Monroe was too close – remained too close even as a star – to the other side of her own story. As those who knew her insisted, the audience she most cared about were the workers, down-and-outs and misfits whose investment in her as a fantasy she understood only too well. Her mother was a film cutter in Hollywood; Monroe had gazed at the RKO neon signs out of the window of the orphanage she had briefly inhabited as a child. She was a champion of the underdog. There was, observed Carl Sandburg, the poet and biographer of Abraham Lincoln who became a close friend at the end of her life, ‘something democratic about her’. In 1960, she wrote to Lester Markel, a senior New York Times editor and friend, protesting about the US government’s policy towards Fidel Castro. ‘You see, Lester,’ she writes, ‘I was brought up to believe in democracy, and when the Cubans finally threw out Battista with so much 40bloodshed, the United States doesn’t even stand behind them and give them help or support even to develop democracy.’
Democracy is of course the ultimate, potentially threatening, new beginning – as recent events across the globe, starting with the Arab Spring of summer 2011 and its painful aftermath, have once again made all too clear. For Rosa Luxemburg, it was the lodestar and litmus test of all political life. ‘The elimination of democracy,’ she wrote when Lenin and Trotsky decided to abolish it in Russia in 1917, ‘is worse than the disease it is supposed to cure: for it stops up the living source from which alone can come the correction of all the innate shortcomings of social institutions. That source is the active, untrammelled, energetic political life of the broadest masses of the people.’ There is a historical irony here which links the two women. Monroe is coolly observing that, in the aftermath of a war waged on behalf of democratic freedom, America was turning out not to be the unqualified champion of democracy after all (a fact even more obvious to any observer of US foreign policy today). The CIA’s first major overseas operation was the ousting of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 (the year of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), which ushered in the reign of the Shah. In fact, there were no lengths to which America would be unwilling to go to stifle democracy when faced with the prospect of socialism – the only condition, for Luxemburg, under which true democracy could flourish.
In moments like this, Monroe rips the cover off what she herself was meant, as if by nature, to personify. In fact if Monroe was a natural, it is only in the sense that the one who appears most natural, like the clown or fall-about comic, is mistress of her craft. ‘It was almost as if she were the shooter and the subject,’ writes Lawrence Schiller, 41called in to photograph her on the set of Something’s Got to Give, her unfinished last film. She had shown him ‘what other photographers knew: that when she turned herself on to the camera, the photographer didn’t have to be more than a mechanic’. For Eve Arnold, this power extended into the processing room. Once she had taken the picture, Monroe’s images seemed to grow almost organically; they came into being, under their own momentum, out of the dark:
‘What was it like to photograph Marilyn?’ I waved him off and went on my way. But the question would not be denied. What was it like to photograph her? It was like watching a print come up in the developer. The latent image was there – it needed just her time and temperature controls to bring it into being. It was a stroboscopic display, and all the photographer had to do was to stop time at any given instant and Marilyn would bring forth a new image.
As if an icon were to put not just herself but also the process of her own construction as an image under a magnifying glass (stroboscopic refers to creating movement out of a set of still images). Thus Monroe turned overexposure – the most photographed woman in the world – into part of her art. To this extent, those who suggest she was wholly subject to that image, and controlled by it, could not be farther from the truth. ‘She could call the shots, dictate the pace,’ wrote Arnold, ‘be in total control.’ This is not, however, control as it is most commonly understood. Their intimate collaboration involved something different. ‘It might have been easier to set a specific situation, to tell her what to do, to move her through it quickly, click-click and finish. This would have been efficient, but would have had pre-set results.’ ‘It was,’ Arnold 42continues, ‘the unpredictable in herself that she used.’
None of the women I discuss in this book falls into the trap of responding to the worst of their lives with a counter-affirmation of power. They have other and better ideas. Luxemburg is famous for her critique of the authority of party and state (a ‘night-watchman state’ as she put it with reference to post-revolutionary Russia). Instead she yearned – Sehnsucht or ‘yearning’ was one of her favourite German words – for another type of energy, like that of the mass strike, which she described as flowing like a broad billow, splitting into multifarious streams, bubbling forth and then disappearing beneath the earth (she was never more poetic than in her accounts of this other form of power). Monroe, too, felt herself moving between two different realms. Her unpublished letters and journals show a woman using her privacy to scavenge beneath the veneer of reason. This is just one of many extracts which show Monroe not just confronting the dark side of herself but lifting that struggle to another type of insight: ‘fear/wonderment/the wondering of something – ask it questions – the unbelievableness of the actuality if it happened/or the pleading and promising of anything – reasoning – which is more conventional.’ Pleading and promising are forms of bad faith. They ask and offer too much. Like Monroe in her photo sessions, life is unpredictable (far more than the content of any role, it was her performance in which Monroe placed her faith). No amount of conventional reasoning will withstand what is unbelievable or unexpected about the world. Ask questions, or we might say keep an open mind.
This is not an easy realm to enter. It can break you apart. ‘I feel,’ Monroe wrote, ‘as though it’s all happening to someone right next to me. I’m close. I can feel it, I can hear it, but it isn’t really me.’ For Luxemburg, life ‘was 43not inside me, not here where I am, but somewhere far off … off beyond the rooftops’. At moments like these the resonances between the women are uncanny. You do not find yourself – or simply another self – when you enter these regions of the mind. For Salomon, the only way to survive the suicides in her family was to people her inner world with the dead by becoming each and every one. She had to multiply herself, making room for all those who – according to a rather different way of thinking – could be said to have most utterly betrayed her. She had to remember on their behalf. In this she could not be further from the forms of amnesia that would scar Europe after both of its wars: thus Tony Judt writes of the pall of forgetfulness that descends over Europe after 1945, the ease with which Europe cast the dead ‘“others” of its past far out of mind’, a forgetting which he sees as preparing the ground for the ethnic hatreds, the sectarian violence, the hostility to immigrants to follow.
Entering this domain is also, therefore, a type of accountability. Not one of these women deludes themselves that violence simply belongs to somebody or somewhere else. On this Monroe is unequivocal. ‘Everyone has violence in them,’ she states baldly in her personal notes of 1955. ‘I am violent.’ The critique of reason or the logos, as it is sometimes called, brings with it no false presumption of innocence. As Angela Carter writes in the introduction to her short story collection Wayward Girls and Wicked Women, we find it very hard as women ever to blame ourselves. In this book, you will hear much praise for women, but nowhere will you find the idea, entertained by some feminisms, that women are simply nicer than men. These are women who exist – who know that they exist – on more than one plane, whose rage against the iniquities of the world meshes with their own darkest hours. ‘Why,’ 44Luxemburg writes to her young lover, Kostya Zetkin, in 1907, as she wanders the streets of London, ‘am I plunging again into dangers and frightening new situations in which I am sure to be lost?’ ‘Somewhere in the depths an indistinct desire is coming to light, a desire to plunge into this whirlpool.’ For me this is the creative paradox they offer. Their indictment of injustice requires no internal whitewash of their minds. They are – as women often are, I would argue – the only partly self-declared psychoanalysts of their moment and of themselves. Their reckoning with the unconscious is an inherent part of, rather than an obstacle to, their acutest vision.
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Such leeway is not of course always possible. There are acts of cruelty towards women which wipe out – seem at least partly aimed at wiping out – all freedom of mental life. Incest would be one of them, described by psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas as crashing so brutally into a child’s world that any former ability she may have possessed to mentally roam, find her own way inside her thoughts, is instantly lost. Being rounded up and crammed into a railcar with thousands, one of whom is a grand-father who, since his wife’s – your grandmother’s – suicide, has been pestering you to share his bed, might be another. Thus Salomon narrates the Nazi deportation of German nationals in France in May 1940 as reducing them, redu-cing her under such personal as well as collective assault, to a condition of ‘bare life’. In this, she anticipates by many years philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who makes this exact phrase the representative term for twentieth-century horror, while adding to it her own feminist gloss: ‘I would rather have ten more nights like this than a single 45one alone with him.’ As Felstiner points out, Salomon’s painted version of the German deportation order changes the original wording to make it refer to German women nationals – ‘ressortissantes allemandes’ – as she picks up the implication for women that had not yet been explicitly stated. Along with roughly nine thousand women between June and July 1940, Salomon was transported to Gurs, France’s largest and most desolate concentration camp, home predominantly to women (a later Nazi announcement spelt out the gender). Hannah Arendt was interned there at the same time. Gurs: ‘One stupid syllable,’ Louis Aragon wrote later, ‘like a sob that gets stuck in the throat.’ An inmate remembered the buses pulling to a stop from high speed ‘to prevent the women from jumping out’. Gurs, as much as Auschwitz, is the vanishing point of Salomon’s story. Although, remarkably given the conditions, she paints herself sketching in the railcar, Life? or Theatre? contains no mention and not a single painted image of Gurs.
It therefore seems logical that this study should move from my ‘stars’, as I call them, to a situation in which the balance between a woman’s freedom and her oppression seems to tip irremediably towards the worst. So-called crimes of ‘honour’ pitch women against one of the most deadly manifestations of patriarchal law: men killing women at the merest hint that a woman’s sexuality might be under her own, or rather out of the man’s, control (the point is that the distinction is not clear). For that reason, one feminism argues that there should be no such concept. These acts are simply part of a continuum of male violence against women. Why, for example, do the police in Britain tend to be uninterested in domestic violence unless the idea of ‘honour’ – meaning that the crime can be pointed to the Muslim community – is involved? This 46too has the deepest links with the history already told here. When Tony Judt talks of post-war Europe casting its dead ‘others’ out of mind, he is suggesting that such amnesia prepared the ground for today’s hatred for Muslim others, who arrive on the continent like ghosts, trailing the detritus of a past history of which they cannot be aware. After 1945, an eerie ‘stability’ settled on the land which can at least partly be attributed to the accomplishments of Stalin and Hitler, who ‘blasted flat the demographic heath upon which the foundations of a new and less complicated continent were then laid’. In Germany today, honour crimes are used to stigmatize the whole community of Turkish immigrants, which also serves as another way to erase the past (Muslims not Germans are concealing a hidden world of unspeakable crimes). Feminism has to be especially alert when an apparent drive on behalf of women’s lives is doing covert service for racism, injustice or the brute manipulation of Western power. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, ostensibly to save women from the Taliban, would merely be the most glaring example. ‘The most important question,’ asks Eman Ibrahim, cited by Fadia Faqir in her article on honour crime in Jordan, ‘is why the West and the Western media are launching holy campaigns to defend the oppressed outside their own countries.’
As we will see, honour crimes are not restricted to the Muslim community, nor can they be attributed to Islam (there is no justification for honour killing in the Qur’an). Anyone who has sat through The Duchess of Malfi will have witnessed a sister strangled on the order of her brother because her sexual freedom, above all the sons conceived within her secret marriage after the death of her first husband, threatens his sacred primogeniture (another attack on women’s capacity to give birth to a scandalously 47
