Women's Lives: The View from the Threshold

by Carolyn G. Heilbrun

Book Overview

Eve has been supposed to have remarked to Adam as they left the garden, my dear, we are in a state of transition, and of course they were. It is no coincidence that Eve delivers this line. While humanity in every era and stage in history has been marked by a strong sense of itself as being in a state of transition, women have always had a particularly close relationship to changeable terrain. In their quest for self knowledge, boundaries, and names, women have found themselves between varying cultural demands. In one view, perhaps the dominant one, the only way to gain positive status is to fit appropriately into approved categories: appropriately beautiful, appropriately young, appropriately thin, appropriately successful. In another view, the view compellingly expressed by Carolyn Heilbrun, women must abandon the appropriate and seek out the liminel. The word limen means threshold. To be in a state of liminality is to be poised upon uncertain ground, on the brink of leaving one condition or country or self to enter upon another. When recognized, liminality offers women freedom to be or become themselves.

In Women's Lives: The View from the Threshold Carolyn Heilbrun looks at the biographies and memoirs of women who have wrestled with their own betwixt and betweenness (in the process altering the face of literature, and the world): George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Gloria Steinem. She reveals the ways in which feminism has changed our perceptions of these lives. Surprising explorations of the positions which launch women into uncertain ground extend these lectures outside the academic purview.

Each year the Alexander lectureship invites a distinguished scholar to the University of Toronto to give a course of public lectures on the subject of English Literature. These four lectures from the 1997 series put Carolyn Heilbrun in a line of distinguished scholarly work with such previous lecturers as Walter Ong, Robertson Davies, and Northrop Frye. But Heilbrun, within this distinguished genealogy, reworks the very notion of the line, creating a new pattern of writing and approaching literary culture, just as the women whose lives she examines have done. The reader will come out of this experience moved, refreshed, and inspired to create rather than take a position.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802082289
• ISBN13: 9780802082282
• Release Date: December 1999
• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Length: 120 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.6" x 8.5"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Woman: Betwixt and Between

This book represents Heilbrun's effort to show how the feminism begun in the sixties and developed throughout her life has affected the literature she read and taught. She decided to arrive at this through a study of the biographies of four women, taken from before and after feminism, but while the study yielded obvious differences, there was nothing astonishing or unexpected. So, she took another look. Utilizing the concept of "liminality," a condition in which one is neither here nor there, but trapped in a societal "betwixt and between," and what life in such a conditiion can and cannot be. She discussed the "beauty imperative." The absolute need for women to have or effect a physical beauty has always had a strong relationship to the quality of women's lives. She discussed the differences between male and female sexual pleasure, noting how the pattern of male pleasure had become the rhythm of the narrative. She referred to another article on the subject: "Women, Men, Narrative, and the Principles of Pleasure" by Susan Winnett. She then wrote the remainder of the book in the circuitous pattern of female pleasure. The book discussed the liminality of Joan of Arc and other famous women. It touched upon the concept of "Queen bees," those women of power who got there by becoming one of the boys and did, and would do, nothing to help other gifted women to stand by their sides. They were as derisive about women as their male counterparts. Largely, though, the book is a collection of short recollections and stories regarding the liminal lives of women poised on the threshold, ready to begin to start.