Lately, I’ve been going through a medley of sources on Woman’s condition. 

Est-ce que vous ne plaignez pas

 le sort des femmes?

asks a character in a play by Alfred de Musset way back in 1833. Do you not pity the lot of women?

I am not sure if I pity women more, or men more, but there is, I am pretty persuaded, something pitiable about the female and male conditions in our culture at the present moment.

To see this, let me set out a few initial suggestions about the shaping of a human life. First of all, we live and get our bearings in a world of desire. Assuming I can access my desires directly – they not being learned about from somebody else or come by at second hand – and assuming I’m old enough to act on a legal, grownup preference, here’s how it goes when we live and get our bearings in a world of desire.

First, so far as I can tell, there is something I want to be or do more than anything else. I mean something feasible. (When I was little, I wanted to be a deer. That’s not feasible.) Ordinarily, I’m not absolutely sure that x is my predominant desire, but I’m as sure as I can manage to be at this point in my life. At the setting-out point, let’s say. 

So what now? I act on it, or act in such a way as is most likely to fulfill that desire. Now what? Obstacles present themselves, blocking or forcing deviations from the straightest path to the desideratum. The obstacles may come from within me, or from outside, or both. That’s to be expected. This is not a smooth world. It’s the terrain of resistances. In coping with them, I may have to scale back my ambition, or go to Plan B, its nearest replacement, whether the fall-back proves provisional or permanent. But I’ll never know whether Plan A was achievable, if I don’t set out trying to achieve it.

Along the way, as I course-correct and persist, I’ll be testing the sincerity of my desires and what they actually come to, in real-life terms. Meanwhile, should some duty, unsought but inescapable, relegate my original hopes to the memory bin, I’ll still know why and how that happened. I will keep the story of my life in view. I will live a sincere life.

Among the books that figure in my recent researches about women is a collection accurately titled Short Story Masterpieces by American Women Writers. These fictional stories proceed chronologically, first in late-nineteenth-century settings. The one I’ve read most recently, takes place around 1920. So far, I’ve read half of them. In the stories I’ve read, cultural norms, including those affecting women, had fixity. Feminism is not a theme. The women writers are almost breathtakingly intelligent, observant, and uncowed. They see what they see and they tell it straight. They don’t tilt the scene so as to favor their female characters. The sympathy of these writers, one senses, has to be earned. Nobody is more perfect than reality permits, or gains something without paying the price of it. These constraints allow the writers to shape characters we will remember with the precision imposed by reality. They were just so and not otherwise.

Alongside the fictional stories, I’ve just finished a nonfiction book titled Dumped: Stories of Women Unfriending Women. It’s a contemporary collection of reports, of varying length, by women who tell how they were dumped – usually by women they thought were their closest women friends. Typically, the dumping is done without explanation. Mostly the writers were very hurt when this happened – and they still are. So far as I can see, in most cases no lesson was learned and no informing context supplied, not from the family background nor from the victim’s life purposes.

In contrast to the fictional stories from an earlier era, here the cultural backdrop has dropped out and the victimized women do not try to replace it. Perhaps some medley of psychological theories lie back of their hangdog passivity. They’ve been told to “get in touch with their feelings” and that’s all they know how to do. They don’t know what’s missing. They believe they can live lives devoid of the search for purpose, and ask no more than to have friends with whom to share their stationary lives.

Finally my researches touch the academic sphere. On the recommendation of an academic feminist, I’ve begun to make my way through a book titled, Gender Trouble. It’s by Judith Butler, who is said to have provided the foundations for current, cutting-edge theoretical thinking about women. So far as I can make out, the message of this book is that the category of “women” is so enmeshed in unequal power relations that it pretty much drops out of use for Butler. And so does “gender,” for similar reasons. All these distinctions are the shake-out of unfair power relations. Even to apply them, in a context beyond the local one, risks subsuming the relations – that are internal to disparate cultures – under the oppressive dominance of one’s own. Language itself can only be wielded provisionally, in temporary alliances for the purpose of achieving some practical, near-term victory over hegemonic oppressors.

What’s happened? What’s wrong with these developments? What’s missing?

The dumped women, who can’t figure out why their bosom buddies dropped them, were not living their stories. Their intimacies were static, their hurts static, their raw reports devoid of purpose. Where were you headed, girl? What threw you off your track? What was your track? I am not trivializing the pain. But even pain needs a context.

As for Judith Butler, she seems devoted to the project of dispensing with maps and methods for assessing which road to travel or the distance traveled. I do not know why this relentless, tireless, ubiquitous befogging has been deemed the cutting edge of feminist thought today.

Because I loved my mother, I have a natural sympathy for other women. However, with a woman who takes all the escape routes, directional arrows and exit signs off the path, I would keep my hand on my wallet.

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