Taking a Long Look: Essays on Culture, Literature, and Feminism in Our Time - Vivian Gornick
Paperback edition published in 2022 by Verso, London, UK, and New York, NY
304 pages
ISBN: 9781839765094
For the past half of a century, Vivian Gornick has been a forefront voice in the world of radical feminism, journalism, and literary criticism. From her time as a reporter for the Village Voice in the early 1970s to her current position as a professor at The New School, Gornick has consistently written with a distinct and vivid style throughout her life. A newly published collection of essays spanning over forty years of her career, Taking a Long Look: Essays on Culture, Literature, and Feminism in Our Time serves as an introduction to Gornick not only as a critic and activist but also as a reader.
Overview:
Taking a Long Look is a series of essays published over the last forty years of Gornick’s career. As the title suggests, these essays examine the works of influential authors and philosophers, comment upon the burgeoning women’s rights movements of the early 70s, and illustrate various scenes from the streets of New York City. In the first section, Gornick analyzes the biographies and literature of eight authors (Herman Melville, Mary McCarthy, James Salter, Lore Segal, Alfred Kazin, Kathleen Collins, Diana Trilling, and Edna St. Vincent Millay) as well as her reflections on her reading group.
Gornick sketches out the basic rhythm of the authors’ lives by giving each of them a mini-biography before diving into the details of their work. Whether she is lambasting James Salter for his fixation on wealth and sex or praising lesser-known black author Kathleen Collins for deftly writing about the complexities of her identity, Gornick never holds back in her honest and thoughtful appraisals of these authors. In each of these chapters, she weaves together the personal lives of the authors and their work together to illustrate a larger picture of their place in the literary canon.
In the following section on culture, Gornick takes eight chapters to explore various influential works, such as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism, and Elizabeth Lubnbeck’s The Americanization of Narcissism. Additionally, she ruminates on the lives and influence of writers and thinkers such as Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, Eric Fromm, and Rachel Carson. She then gives two slice-of-life stories from her twenties in New York, which capture her unique point of view as she describes the idiosyncratic characters on her bus commute and in a local salon.
Finally, her last set of essays addresses the feminist struggle against inequality. Written in 1978, these essays show Gornick developing her voice amid the second-wave feminist movement. She recounts in detail the conversation of one of her women’s group meetings, which is often messy and full of disagreement. Gornick is confident that this form of consciousness-raising is one of the best ways to begin the process of combatting patriarchal structures and attitudes. Gornick writes, “Consciousness-raising is, at one time and the same time, both the most celebrated and the most accessible introduction to the women’s movement and the most powerful technique for feminist conversion known to the liberationists. Women are drawn to the practice out of a variety of discontents, but it's under the spell of a wholly new interpretation of their experience that they remain” (198).
Gornick also delves into the details of a 1968 French sex scandal, in which 30-year-old divorcee and high school teacher Gabrielle Russier began an illicit love affair with one of her former students, a sixteen-year-old boy named Christian Rossi. Rossi’s father and mother, who was one of Russier’s former professors, became incensed when she told them of the affair, and his father had her arrested for “corruption of a minor.” She was imprisoned for several months, and after being granted amnesty in a closed court hearing, her lawyer received the news only thirty minutes later that the state would be appealing the court’s decision to seek a more punitive penalty. This was done so that there was now a police record, thus barring her from teaching in France ever again. Russier suffered a mental breakdown, and after being sent back to prison in Marseilles and spending a few more months there awaiting a new trial, she ultimately committed suicide.
Gornick finds this case utterly tragic, as she believes that the state sought to humiliate and punish Russier so severely not only because of her political beliefs (she, along with Rossi and his parents, were Communists) but also because, while she was educated, she did not possess the cultural capital that comes with high intellectual attainment, which was often utilized to excuse the worst forms of eccentric and deviant behavior in a French society that highly admires intellectuals. In sum, Gornick writes, “Gabrielle Russier went on trial then, in the court of public opinion, for acting like a man--and for this brazenness was punished inordinately” (230).
Gornick spends her final essays assessing the state of feminism as she experienced it in the 1970s, decrying Gloria Steinem's Ms. magazine “slick, conservative, philistine…its intellectual level is very low, its sense of the women ‘out there’ patronizing, its feminist politics arrested at the undergraduate level” (241). Yet, she is clear to emphasize that these different branches of feminism should not be enemies, but rather they should focus on the true enemy: sexism. She also lambasts Norman Mailer’s book, Genius and Lust: A Journey Through the Major Writings of Henry Miller along with the work of Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. She highlights the amount of misogyny that undergirds their work, which stunts their potential as writers and masks their insecure masculinity. Her final chapter then serves as a celebration of feminism and how old ways of living and being will be slowly eroded in the light of consciousness.
Commendations:
First of all, few can deny that Gornick is an immensely talented writer and literary critic. She can seamlessly weave together literary analysis, biographical information, and incisive social theory to flesh out the significance of these figures and their work. She undoubtedly does not hold back in her criticism, as she lambasts writers such as Salter, Mailer, Miller, Roth, and Bellow for their misogyny and outdated views of sexuality. Much to the chagrin of many MFA students, she even criticizes Joan Didion’s work and sharply jabs at Gloria Steinem’s brand of feminism, showing that Gornick does not discriminate when it comes to her polemics. While I did not know several of the writers that Gornick analyzes, her commentary on them opens up a new world of writers to explore further.
Additionally, these essays are easily accessible and relatively short in length, which makes this book a relatively quick read. While it may seem a bit disorganized at first glance, Gornick has expertly arranged these essays reverse-chronologically, with the newest essays first and the oldest ones toward the end. As she openly admits, her earlier essays (written in the 60s and 70s) are the most polemic, which in turn make for an undoubtedly entertaining read. While the essays on feminism feel outdated, they are still interesting to read as a historical glimpse into the debates around second-wave feminism.
Furthermore, it is thrilling to see a sharp mind such as Gornick’s pick apart a wide array of literature. Gornick deftly connects these authors to other interlocutors within the literary canon, and one can see Gornick as a deep and thoughtful reader. Gornick’s most recent reviews (situated in the earliest chapters of this book) are her most thoughtful, reflective, and mature, as we see a lifelong reader connect so many disparate threads across such a wide breadth of material. Gornick’s extensive grasp of literature serves as a deep repository of wisdom, which she neatly and regularly scatters throughout the text. Even the smallest details are, for Gornick, ripe with meaning and a deeper story, which she beautifully illustrates in this work.
Critique:
There are, however, a few shortcomings to this collection. Firstly, the entire book can feel rather disorganized and cobbled together. This is partially because these essays are reprints that have appeared elsewhere over the past four decades. While it could be useful for the reader to have all of these pieces together in one place, many of them can easily be found through other sources for free. While Gornick informs us that the pieces are arranged reverse-chronologically, it would still have been helpful to have a date on all of these pieces to set them in historical context (admittedly, a few of the years do appear in the acknowledgments at the very end of the book, but they only give a date range and where the essays were previously published).
Additionally, her oldest essays on feminism do come off as remarkably outdated. Granted, no one can predict the future, and it is far too easy for political takes to age poorly after forty years of hindsight. In particular, her optimism regarding the potential of second-wave feminism, consciousness-raising, and the inevitability of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to pass are some of her most glaring missteps. Her brand of feminism in these essays can come off as individualist and overwhelmingly white, rather than collectivist and intersectional, which leads to some bullish and shortsighted assertions. As she wrote in 1978, “If the ERA does not pass this year, it will pass next year. Of that there can no longer be any doubt” (243). Gornick did not anticipate the conservative backlash that would manifest itself in the form of Phyllis Schlafly and other anti-feminist activists that flourished during the Reagan era. To this day, the ERA has still not passed, and it seems to be in legal limbo after five states rescinded their ratification in 1979 and several extended deadlines have passed. To be fair, while her predictions have not come to fruition, Gornick’s essays on feminism are a fascinating window into the debates and contentions within second-wave feminism.
Conversation:
In terms of the Gabrielle Russier case, it is quite difficult to stomach the defense of someone who had sexual relations with a minor, regardless of gender. I think Gornick’s assertion that she was dealt with harshly because she “dared to act like a man” can appear quite simplistic and wholly ideological on the surface. Yet, I do see her point, especially when one considers the double standard that existed in the 1960s when no one made a fuss about older male professors sleeping with their young female students. To this day, it is still a common trope for an older man to seek companionship much younger women, while older women who try to date younger men are seen as aberrant and sexually deviant. Taking this consideration in mind, Gornick’s defense at least seems a bit more justified, even if, by today’s standards, such an act, regardless of gender, would be widely frowned upon.
This case is especially interesting when one compares the love affair to contemporary French history and politics. As opposed to Russier and Rossi, who had a fifteen-year age gap between them, a 39-year-old high school teacher named Brigitte Trogneux met her future husband and present President of France, Emmanuel Macron, when he was only 15 years old (thus making their age gap twenty-four years). While they did not officially begin their romance until he was eighteen, his parents, much like Rossi’s, were deeply uncomfortable with their relationship. While his parents sent Macron away for a year, their relationship still blossomed, leading to their marriage in 2007.
Macron’s parents did not seek any legal action against Trogneux, perhaps due to the lingering memory of the Russier case. Regardless, their relationship has still generated controversy, as Macron described it as “a love often clandestine, often hidden, misunderstood by many before imposing itself.” There are remarkable parallels between these two cases, which shows that this is not simply a situation confined to the past. The key difference between them is not only the political affiliations of the participants but also their class position.
As such, in regards to Gabrielle Russier, I do see that her prosecution could likely be seen as a counterreaction against the May ‘68 uprisings, in which both Russier and Rossi participated. Furthermore, there are undoubtedly deep issues within the French criminal justice system, just as there are within the United States. As such, I would be interested to analyze some of the case files in France around the time of Russier’s case to examine other cases with similar charges to see if Russier’s treatment was an outlier and whether or not her case could be a sign of disparity within the French criminal justice system. Despite my initial discomfort with Gornick’s unabashed support for Russier in 1978, I do appreciate her insight and the parallels and debates it brings to our current social discourse.
Conclusion:
Overall, Taking a Long Look is a beautifully written, if uneven, collection of essays from an incisive and profound writer. Gornick is masterful in her writing to weave together the personal, the political, the literary, and the social in a seamless way to tell a larger story. In her essay on the writer and literary critic Alfred Kazin, Gornick writes, “In his autobiographies, Alfred Kazin becomes a narrator whose major concern is with storytelling; the storytelling voice delivers a life set fully in its times. In writing them, Kazin came to understand what every good memoirist understands: that the writer’s own ordinary, disheveled, everyday self must give way to that of a narrating self — a self who will tell the story that needs to be told” (21). As a set of essays reflecting her own life as a writer, Taking a Long Look is Gornick’s best example of her showing her narrating self. If you enjoy literary criticism with a feminist bent, you will undoubtedly enjoy this perceptive collection from Gornick.