An incisive study of the role of woman as seductress and the evolution of distorted ideas of race, gender, and sex examines the devastating impact of this portrayal of women and the links among misogyny, racism, and the rise of nationalist politics, as embodied by Hitler. 10,000 first printing.
| ||||||||||||||||||
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
In Evil Sisters Bram Dijkstra, a professor of comparative literature at the University of California, San Diego, has taken on the task of detailing the various threats female sexuality is said to have posed throughout this century. Some of these so-called threats seemed alarming; for example, many leading intellectuals from early in the century believed that women were in pursuit of semen to fulfill their reproductive need. Others blamed war as a female creation. He shows how the link of women to vampires was particularly damaging. An interesting historical look at imagery that crops up in today's society.
From Publishers Weekly
Beginning with "vamp" Theda Bara's 1915 silent-film debut in A Fool There Was, Dijkstra (Idols of Perversity), writing with passionate feminist scholarship, decodes images of women as predators, destroyers and vultures who deplete civilized males of their creative energies. He unmasks predatory females in Hemingway, H.L. Mencken, Elinor Glyn's bestselling 1907 potboiler Three Weeks, and unravels the sexist assumptions of sociologist Emile Durkheim, sexologist Havelock Ellis and philosopher of love Remy de Gourmont. Shuttling between high and popular culture, Dijkstra argues that antifeminine, racist and imperialist attitudes merge in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and the Damned, in Kipling, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. Rider Haggard, in Jung's psychology of unchanging archetypes, in the social Darwinist teachings of Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner. Finally, he traces a trajectory of fantasies involving men attaining supermale status from Nietzsche to Ezra Pound and Hitler. His conviction that sexist imagery, codified around 1900, still dominates the popular imagination informs this brilliant, often startling study. Dijkstra is professor of American and comparative literature at UC-San Diego. Illustrated.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Shadow History,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood (Paperback)
This fascinating book explores some shadowy aspects of early 20th Century American cultural history...pop Nietzscheism and pop Darwinism combined to make a hideous blend of racism, eugenics, sexism, and very strange biological pseudosciences...this dark part of our intellectual heritage was ignored and forgotten after we saw that it led to Hitler and genocide...to learn about it is to fortify ourselves against its contemporary permutations.
13 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
deliberate digression,
By A Customer
This review is from: Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood (Paperback)
Here is a book which can best be characterized as an inspired failure. That is no insult: academic literature is rife with works that either don't prove what they set out to prove and thus provoke indipensable rebuttals, or which set out to prove the obvious, and prove it to nobody's startlement or particular satisfaction, but, although their conclusions are unexciting, contrive to retain their currency by virtue of their usefulness as info-mines. Had Casaubon's _Key To All Mythologies_ been published, it might have been of the second type. (_Evil Sisters_ belongs to both categories.) Inspired academic failures are often nifty and in my opinion they are even necessary, since academic life depends on discourse and, in order to maintain discourse, someone always has to take the losing position. Henry Petroski writes books on the importance of failure in design; well, failure is no more expendable in discourse than in design; Dijkstra in _Evil Sisters_ proves as much, intentionally or not. 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.
8 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Useful But Obsessive Info,
By
This review is from: Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood (Paperback)
Throughout this book the author attempts to prove that all popular forms of entertainment have roots in misogyny. His reliance on examples nobody remembers is interesting, given his insistence on their powerful cultural influence to this day. Though it is useful in tracing the roots of misogynistic icons, the book strains at the bit to find a conspiracy of male poets, writers, artists, and scientists who were all out for one thing: to put women in their "proper" inferior place in the game of natural selection and pave the way for Nazism. He puts words in his sources' mouths repeatedly and engages in sometimes ludicrous speculation, making one wonder where the good professors own deepest beliefs lie. Very "politically- correct," but still a useful analysis, like his previous(better) work, IDOLS OF PERVERSITY.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
