Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood (Taschenbuch)

-Idols- introduces us to the images of a number of fascinating academic and Symbolist artists of the 19th century, and makes them interesting by roundly condemning them for various sins against political correctness.

This book tries to do the same; unfortunately, he covers more familiar territory, and deals with works that are far more familiar. Dijkstra's judgmentalism adds spice to the obscure, but to familiar masterpieces it seems like vandalism.

It is not new or insightful to point out, say, that Hemingway was mighty interested in Real Manliness; or that Faulkner had peculiar notions about hereditary degeneration. Mr. Dijkstra does a good job at connecting these features of these works to half-forgotten ideas like Lombroso's physiognomy; but the overall effect is far less striking. Those who want to read Hemingway or Faulkner will not find their interest whetted by the diatribe against their sins against political correctness. Unlike nineteenth century paintings, these familiar books stand on their own.

Dijkstra's main contention, that racist and sexist books, pictures, and films led to the Nazification of Europe, is hooey. Sure, the books, films, and pictures existed, and sure the conquest of Europe by Nazi Germany took place, but that doesn't prove that the one LED TO the other. Events may demonstrably correlate statistically without correlating causally--as I learned in High School Social Studies. If racist pictures and literature abound, and if the Nazification of a continent occurs, isn't it at least as likely that both phenomena are due to some antecedent cause as that one phenomenon impels the other? Sure it is, as high school kids flunk Social Studies tests for failing to realize.

Dijkstra's minor contention, that specific strains of antifeminism, anti-Semitism, and race-baiting were ubiquitous throughout the Western world around the turn of the century and up till World War II, is correct, but it's so indisputably correct that Dijkstra, never a fellow to let a blind alley go unexplored, experiences difficulty choosing among his sources. So much so that one is left wondering why Dijkstra should choose to pick on only certain people: why should he scold Fitzgerald and Hemingway for their unacceptable racial and sexual assumptions when London and Cather beckon as temptingly? Could it be because Fitzgerald and Hemingway are bigger literary game and consequently more fun to bag?

Pretty much anything pop-cultural published around 1909 would be castigated as racist/sexist by today's standards; and, as per usual, the stereotypes perpetuated in the pulps found themselves echoed ("archetypally") in the pages of reputable writers. Dijkstra is spot-on in his observation that the basic difference between a stereotype and an archetype inheres in the reputability of the artist who invokes it. Hence, Al Jolson in "The Jazz Singer" has come to be an embarrassment while Willa Cather's blind, instinctually musical, perpetually nodding "small-brained" mulatto pianist in _My Antonia_ is still Art. Unfortunately Dijkstra is not content to make this thouroughly accurate observation only once: he makes it again and again and really, it's too self-evident to need that much repetition.

Again, Dijkstra errs, as I see it, when he attributes to the ubiquitous race-baiting of the early Twentieth century a nasty triumphalism which I don't believe it possessed. The lessons of High School and of the playground are always at hand: secure people do not taunt their neighbors. Still less do they taunt neighbors in relation to whom they believe they are one-up. The people who really run this country, still more this world, "have better things to do than be anti-Semitic" or racist, however devastating their policies may be to given out-groups. The "rasping protofascist tone" of early Twentieth-century literature was always most raucous and most inescapable in the pop-cult pulps, and it trickled UP to the comparatively rarified realms of "high culture" from there. Don't get me wrong, I realize that racism was respectable at the turn of the century even in America, and that it kept right on being respectable until the abhorrent sight of Nazi Germany caused the nations of this world to take stock of themselves. What I DON'T believe is that the currency racial/sexual Theories of Everything gained in the Western world at that time was due to Caucasian self-confidence. Quite the opposite. I believe it was contingent upon a great loss of faith. Nietzsche proclaimed that God was dead and and forthwith, though with his tongue in his cheek, proposed Das Volk as a substitute for the Divinity, part-Slavic as he was. What could be more inevitable that that he be followed by disciples who were just as insecure as he was but not as smart, who were dead to irony, and whose toungues were most emphatically NOT in their cheeks? Dijkstra holds Darwin reponsible for a great many things, and of some of these things, in my view, Darwin is innocent. But in one respect Dijkstra is right--Darwin had a profound decentering effect on Western philosophers and pulp writers alike. He was the sensei roshi who taught them that they could no longer believe themselves to be the particualar favorites of God. (As such, he was really only the carrier for Spinoza's bad news, but then nobody ever reads philosophers; natural historians get a lot more airplay.) What could be more natural than that people, deprived of a consoling vision of themselves as favorites of God, should bend every sinew to prove themselves favorites of Nature instead?

This self-proof was a burden that devolved heavily upon the shoulders of Twentieth-century people, which their Nineteenth-century forbears did not wholly share. Nineteenth-century Westerners could most of them still depend upon the love of God, a love which might conceivably be lavished more unstintingly upon some groups than others but which was theoretically illimitable and free to all. Christianity had not yet become--let's not follow Nietzsche and say "dead" but UNFASHIONABLE. Consequently strains of racism and sexism existed in Nineteenth-century popular culture but Nineteenth-century popular culture did not CONSIST of them. Early Twentieth-century popular culture almost did. Dijkstra's previous and far superior book, _Idols of Perversity_, was dedicated to mapping the change. _Idols of Perversity_ is much more interesting than _Evil Sisters_ because it chronicles a FIGHT between ideas, and explores the consequences of the resulting strain in the Nineteenth-century mind. _Evil Sisters_ is comparatively uninteresting because it all takes place after the fact, after the bad guys won.

Still, I'm willing to give Dijkstra an A for Agitation and for Attitude. I like Attitude. Too many academic works are unavailable to the public because they are written in a dull untranslatable jargon seemingly designed to keep readers at bay. Sure, Dijlstra employs jargon, but at least it's his OWN jargon. And why shouldn't one SOUND passionate about those issues concerning which one IS passionate? As for Dijkstra's digressivity: I, too, believe in leaving no stone unturned. I wish merely to suggest that, in the interests of those readers who are interested in getting to the POINT, already, this book could have been cut down by about a third. And some of Dijkstra's verbal formulations are genuinely bizarre. While discussing the Louise Brooks vehicle "Pandora's Box", he writes as follows: "As Lola's blood seeps into the dried boards of civilization..." The dried boards of civilization? Give me a break.