Jasmine Woodson's Reviews > Heroines

I’ve gotten tired, I think, of Men do this, Patriarchy f-cks us over in this way, Look at the these assh-les, and, in the particular case of Heroines, Look at these literary assh-les.

Patriarchy, and in some cases, men, individual, specific men, (occasionally individual, specific women as well), silence us. Pathologize us. Confine us to a cage and cut our claws off if dare we make a move toward escape. I feel that Zambreno’s audience—which I imagine is largely comprised of literate, conscious women and men—knows this, is conversant this fact—she doesn’t need to go over it and over it and over it. This is the bulk of the work, by far. Zelda and Viv and Jean and June and Sylvia and Jane and Louise and their demise at the treacherous hands of the patriarchal institution and their husbands/lovers. Perhaps I’m tired of this litany of misogynist transgression because I’ve more or less accepted it as fact. Yes, I think that’s it: this is a fact of life, has been for much too long, and so I want to move beyond it, move beyond weeping and wailing and gnashing my teeth because my personhood does not exist except in relation to a man, and even then, when I’m allowed to be a human, that humanity exists as lesser. Again, let me say: I want to move beyond it. I strive to keeps it pushin, always. To refer back to the insidiousness of the men in these women’s lives at every turn caused me trouble. I didn’t particularly care to read about Scott and Tom and Ford and Ted and Gustave and Andre and Henry and the rest of those brilliant sons, those geniuses, those jerks, who suppressed and/or stole outright from and/or criticized for its messiness then the work of their wives. Instead of hearing about what Zelda and Viv didn’t do, I would have liked to read about what they did do. Show me their work, show me their scribbles. I realize that this, of course, is problematic due to the obliteration of much of what these women produced (or the stopped sensations on their souls that didn’t allow for production at all), but, and this brings me to my second problem with this work, without my eyeballs and mind and heart rolling over their writings and inciting miniature meltdowns over their prose, untamed, personal, “vomitious”, like I do when I read much of Zambreno’s writing, particularly when she writes her life, it’s difficult for me to put as much spiritual stock in the biographical details related throughout Heroines as Zambreno does--Janet Macolm’s The Silent Woman cast a long shadow over my biography reading, and so I can’t readily accept theories, feelings, emotional superstructures, built on biography. The biographer built the bricks of those books’ foundations, and erected the house. Their hands are all over it. More primary source material would have strengthened her case, to my mind.

Now, all that being said, the last 40, 50 pages of Heroines were goddamn amazing. Her mental trackings here, a rumination on how the internet, that oft-derided no-literary-man’s-land, has provided fecund spaces for women writers writing like motherf-ckin women as messily and bodily and glitterily as they want (though I had dips in and out of “Well, what about privacy? Safety? Digital footprinting?” Heroines isn’t the forum for this conversation, I don’t think.) are what I would have liked to have read more concerning . The dismantling of traditional notions of “literariness”. My god that made me so excited. I do realize that the recurrent marital treacheries Heroines is built from is what made my affective whoosh to the last fifth of Heroines possible, but still, ack, I wanted more Zelda straight up, a bit more critical rigor building rhetorical bridges from women’s voices into alternative spaces in which to enact and exercise those voices and a little less slapping down men’s necks on the guillotine lunette(I can do this particular brand of bad all by myself, and I suspect most women can, as well), I think.

Also, the bibliography is bonkers.