Monday, 2 April 2012
Women and Death review
Dear readers,
Well I thought it high time for another review. This review is on Women and Death: Linkages in Western Thought and Literature by Beth Ann Bassein. I hope you will enjoy it.
Review:
I have to
admit that I was less taken with this book than I expected to be. In this book Ann Beth Bassein tries to portray the ways in
which women are linked to death in Western culture. What I found the most
problematic of this studies is that Bassein's idea of Western culture seems to
be limited to the English speaking parts of America, France and England. With
this her study necessarily generalizes quite a bit and the reader cannot help
but think it best if she had restricted her work to either American or English
literature (or perhaps both).
After
reading a few chapters it becomes blatantly clear that apart from a study of
the relation between women and death, this book also has the function of a feminist
pamphlet with the goal to dissolve the association between these two topics.
Throughout the book Bassein banters one author after another for forcing their
characters to die or to live death in life. In the case of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa she accuses the author of being
unnecessary cruel towards the female protagonist, just because she was a woman.
As such Bassein chooses to ignore the edifying purpose Richardson explicitly
said that he wished for the book to have. It was supposed to provide the reader
with an image of what could happen if they did not follow the rules as they
were indicated by parents or even society as a whole. Bassein also accuses
Richardson, as well as a few other writers, of providing the reader with an unrealistic
image of women. I found this claim extremely strange as the books she chooses
to launch this claim against belong to the genre of Victorian fiction.
At times
one almost gets the feeling that Bassein is almost pro-adultery as she argues
in the case of, for example, Madam Bovary,
that the female protagonist is unjustly punished for her choices, as Flaubert
forces her to die a cruel death. I suppose this argument is based on the assumption
that Bassein makes that men who commit adultery do not get punished in a
similar way in the Victorian novels. However, one had only to look at novels
such as Tess of the d'Urbervilles by
Thomas Hardy or The Tennant of Wildfell Hall
to discover that such an assumption is not necessarily just.
All in all
I believe that this book might have benefitted greatly if the author had not so
strongly expressed her personal opinion and would have tried a more theoretical
approach to offer an explanation for the existence of the link between women
and death. For those of you who are interested in the relation between women
and death and would like a more indebt exploration of the connection between
the two, I would kindly refer you to Over
Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic by Elisbeth Bronfen
instead. Though please note, that one has to be armed with a good understanding
of theorists such as Freud before one approaches this book. For, if you are
not, this book might prove to be quite the hurdle.
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