"Women... must surely have become fundamentally riper people, more human people, than easygoing man, who is not pulled down below the surface of life by the weight of any fruit of his body, and who, presumptuous and hasty, undervalues what he thinks he loves. This humanity of woman, borne its full time in suffering and humiliation, will come to light when she will have stripped off the conventions of mere femininity in the mutations of her outward status..."
--Leslie, quoting Rilke
I don't see woman "pulled down below the surface of life by the fruit of [her] body." It's far more complicated than that. In many ways it depends on the mother and the child, their relationship and their characters. One can feel much more a part of humanity after childbirth--and under the best of circumstances this is a boon to creativity. In fact, encouraging and enabling creativity in one's child is an enormous spur to one's own creativity. But circumstance and possibility are so variable in childraising, as one can easily perceive almost anywhere.
"women, having...'cleansed their own most characteristic nature of the distorting influences of the other sex'"
--Leslie, quoting ??Tim Murphy?? {Sorry if I'm mistaken on the source, but if someone corrects me on this, I'll be happy to edit.}
Which influences distort and which do not? What is a distortion and what is not? Well, that depends...Many layers of twaddle here.
"I guess I am just really leery of sweeping gender statemenst regarding the arts. People go into art for such idiosyncratic reasons, and "poets" is such a statistically small sampling, that it seems to me individual aesthetics and temperament are likely to be as strong or stronger factors than groupings such as "female poets writing in form". Sure, some subject matters and experiences will tend to show up in one gender rather than another, but hardly exclusively..."
--Alicia
Precisely! Thanks for clarifying, Alicia.
"There may be masculine or feminine sides of the imagination, if we want to define them thus..." [Alicia]
I doubt even this is true except for environmental influences, and the act of defining too is subject to certain environmental/historical influences.
"...male poets tending to be more "sensitive" and introspective or what have you than many men, female poets tending to have "bolder" or more aggressive imaginations than many other women." [Alicia, cont.]
True for the most part, perhaps. But it's not about poets per se--more about writers [who are generally more independent thinkers than one finds in the general population] and other artists and intellectuals as well.
Edit: re the latter two paragraphs: Another reason what Alicia says is true is the tendency of androgynous people to become artists/writers more readily than those who are not androgynous (of mind and temperament). They're more creative--whether they can handle the incredible challenges of devoting their lives, incomes, psyches, and love life to the arts is another question entirely, it seems.
[This message has been edited by Terese Coe (edited November 07, 2008).]
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