Russ Joanna

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            <title>The Esthetics of Power in Modern Erotic Art</title>
            <author>Carol Duncan</author>
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            <funder>Bucknell University Humanities Center</funder>
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               <licence>Bucknell Heresies Project: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial
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                  <title>Heresies: Issue 1</title>
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                     <publisher>HERESIES: A Feminist Publication on Art and
                        Politics</publisher>
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        <docTitle>
           <titlePart>Women Talking, Women Thinking*</titlePart>
        </docTitle>
        <docAuthor>Joanna Russ</docAuthor>
     </front> 
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         <p>What did we talk about?</p>
         <p>I don't remember. We talked so hard and sat so still that I got cramps in my knees. We had too many cups of tea and then
         didn't want to leave the table to go to the bathroom because we didn’t want to stop talking. You will think we talked of revolu-
         tion but we didn't. Nor did we talk of our own souls. Nor of sewing. Nor of babies. Nor of departmental intrigue. It was politics
         if by politics you mean the laboratory talk that characters in bad movies are perpetually trving to convey (unsuccessfully) when
         they Wrinkle Their Wee Brows and say (valiantly—dutifully—after all, they didn’t write it) "But, Doctor, doesn’t that violate
         Finagle's Constant?" I staggered to the bathroom, released floods of tea, and returned to the kitchen to talk. It was professional
         talk. It left me grey-faced and with such concentration that I began to develop a headache. We talked about Mary Ann Evans's
         loss of faith, about Emily Bronté's isolation, about Charlotte Bronté's blinding cloud, about the split in Virginia Woolf's head
         and the split in her economic situation. We talked about Lady Murasaki, who wrote in a form that no respectable man would
         touch, Hroswit, a little name whose plays may perhaps amuse myself," Miss Austen who had no more expression in society
         than a firescreen or a poker. They did not all write letters, write memoirs, or go on the stage. Sappho—only an ambiguous,
         somewhat disagreeable name. Corinna? The teacher of Pindar. Olive Schreiner, growing up on the veldt, wrote one book, mar-
         ried happily, and never wrote another. Kate Chopin wrote a scandalous book and never wrote another. (Jean has written
         nothing.) There was M-ry Sh-Il-y who wrote you know what and Ch-rl-tt- P-rk-ns G-Im-n, who wrote one superb horror story
         and lots of sludge (was it sludge?), and Ph-Il-s Wh--tl-y who was black and wrote eighteenth-century odes (but it was the eighteenth century) and Mrs. -nn R-del-ff- who wrote silly novels and M-rg-r-t C-v-nd-sh and Mrs.-d-n S-thw-rth and Mrs. G--rg-
         Sh-Id-n and (Miss?) G-rg-tt- H-y-r and B-rb-r- C-rtl-nd and the legion of those who, writing, write not, like the dead Miss B--l-y
         of the poem who was seduced into bad practices (fudging her endings) and hanged herself in her garter. The sun was going
         down. I was blind and stiff.</p>
         <figure><ab>***</ab></figure>
         <p>Twenty years ago I went to college and began to recognize the roof; having dressed for a date (dates were absolutely crucial
         then) in my low heels, my nylons, my garter belt, my horsehair petticoat, my cotton petticoat, my taffeta skirt, my knit jersey
         blouse, my circle pin, my gold earrings, my charm bracelet, my waist-cincher, my lipstick, my little bit of eye shadow, my heavy
         faille coat, my nail polish, my mohair scarf, and my gloves, I went into the dormitory garden to wait. The garden was full of late
         spring flowers. I had already admired myself in the full-length mirror on the back of my closet door, but standing between the
         stone walls on the stone-flagged walk, watching the flowers grow ever lighter and more disembodied in the blue twilight—and
         sitting on the stone bench under the Gothic arches and all that ivy—and we were supposed to get A’s and use the library—we
         were supposed to write papers—we were supposed to be scholars—I felt invisible. I felt awful, I wanted to take off all my
         clothes and step out of my underwear. And then take off my hair and fingernails and my face and my flesh and finally my very
         bones. Just to step out of it. All the way out of it.</p>
         <p>My date said,  There you are!'</p>
         <note>*Various excerpts from the forthcoming novel, On Strike Against God, to be published in the spring of 1978 by Out and Out Books.
         14</note>
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            <p>I've spent a lot of my time in the library here, picking out obscure references to memoirs written by bad ladies two hundred
            vears ago and novels by worse ladies who, although personally blameless, wrote wicked books: A Romance of the Pyrenees.
            Marianna or The Puritan's Daughter. Weird, ghastly stuff. Five romances under the pseudonym By a Lady. Domestic sentiment. Gothic castles. Purity. If only I can reduce this pulp to pulp and spread it out into some kind of shape. Dead voices,
            haunting and terrible: I want, I need, I hope, I believe. What sort of homes did they have? Did they do their own cooking? Did
            they expect to get pregnant every year? (See Mrs. Defoe's journal.) The awful constriction, the huge skirts. Mrs. Pepys' dress
            allowance (''the poor wretch," her husband called her).How are we fall'n, fall'n by mistaken rules!" Women live like Bats or
            Owls, labour like Beasts, and die like Worms." Anyone may blame me who likes." "How good it must be to be a man when
            you want to travel."John laughs at me, but one expects that in marriage."It had all been a therapeutic lie. The mind was
            powerless to save her. Only a man . . ." "I / Revolve in my / Sheath of impossibles—</p>
            <p>Scholars don’t usually sit gasping and sobbing in corners of the library stacks.</p>
            <p>But they should. They should.</p>
         </div>
            <figure><ab>* * *</ab></figure>
          <div>  
             <head>Conversations with the Tooth Fairy:</head>
            <p>When I was five she stood at the foot of my bed in a dream, wearing an airy, blue, nylon-net gown and glittering rhinestone
            jewelry, with a little rhinestone coronet on her head. Her magic wand was star-topped and she looked just like a Tooth Fairy
            should.</p>
            <p>She was going to give me three wishes.<lb/>
            But I woke up.<lb/>
            <hi rend="italic">And much later:</hi></p>
            <p>Last night she came again and sat down on the end of my bed, looking very benevolent, spreading out her blue nylon-net
            skirts, and recalling to me (even though I was asleep) where I had seen her before—she was somebody I saw in a live stage show
            when I was four and I’d swear it was the Ice Follies because I remember her in ice skates.</p></div>
            <div>
               <sp><speaker>The Tooth Fairy:</speaker> <ab>Good evening, dear child. I am here to help you.</ab></sp>
           <sp><speaker>Me:</speaker> <ab>Look here, I'm almost forty. This is ridiculous.</ab></sp>
            <sp><speaker>The Fairy:</speaker> <ab>Never mind. To me you will always be a child. Tell me what you want and I shall get it for you.</ab></sp>
            <sp><speaker>Me:</speaker> <ab>Thanks but no thanks ha ha. (My standards of wit are pretty lousy in dreams.)</ab></sp>
            <sp><speaker>The Fairy:</speaker> <ab>Shall I restore to you your lost heterosexuality so that you may once again on the Late Late Show have strange and
            brilliant adventures in foreign climes with handsome actors such as Buster Crabbe, Dirk Bogarde, James Mason, and
            Christopher Lee?—leaving it to you to determine what common characteristics (if any) unites this rather peculiar list because,
            my dear (to be perfectly frank), you have the damnedest tastes I ever saw.</ab></sp>
            <sp><speaker>Me:</speaker> <stage>(sitting bolt upright in terror)</stage> <ab>No, no, no, no, no, no!</ab></sp>
            <sp><speaker>The Fairy</speaker> <stage>(crossing one leg over another, thus revealing she is indeed wearing ice skates, great big clumpy white ones):</stage> <ab>Well,
            what do you want, for goodness' sakes! Don't be so difficult.</ab> <stage>(She then mutters under her breath, What do women want? Dear
            God, what do they want?')</stage></sp>
            <sp><speaker>Me:</speaker> <ab>That lousy imitation of Freud—</ab></sp>
            <p>But here I must break off. The Tooth Fairy cometh not. Messias ist nicht gekommen. It's all ours to get, with Mrs. Anne
            Radcliffe in one hand and a jackhammer (or jennyhammer) in the other, with books and bricks, pride and perseverance, et
            cetera. Here endeth the first sermon. (Are ninety-nine.) Suppose you woke up and saw her...</p></div>         
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           <p>Joanna Russ is the author of a novel published by Dell Books, We Who Are About To, and of the science fiction novel, The Two of Them, to be published by Putnam's. This spring
              Daughters, Inc. will present her fantasy novel, Kit'a Story: A Tale of Magic. She lives in Bellevue, Washington.
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