Ornament and Silence : Essays on Women's Lives, from Virginia Woolf to Germaine Greer (Hardcover)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Ornament and Silence is a highly personal and exquisitely well-written collection of essays that address the relationships between women and the creative process. The subjects of Fraser's essays are mostly writers and artists, mostly famous, and mostly dead. Fraser's engagement with them, however, is immediate, and her interests are timely and self-revealing. This collection considers how women's artistic accomplishments are bundled up with their relations toward men. This theme is explored in particular in an essay on Russian writer Nina Berberova, whose literary career did not take off until she left her male lover, as well as an essay concerning the impact of sexual abuse on the life and work of Virginia Woolf. These essays are exceptional in their vibrancy and lack of didacticism. The very personal element of Fraser's theme comes through in her poignant essay entitled "Meat," in which Fraser describes her own failed marriage, her artistic struggles, and her writing career at The New Yorker under William Shawn.

From Publishers Weekly

These thoughtful, well-crafted essays by Fraser (Scenes from the Fashionable World), previously published in Vogue and the New Yorker, deal largely with the relationship between creative women and the men in their lives. In an extended piece, the author explores the life and work of Russian emigre writer Nina Berberova, whose literary achievements (The Italics are Mine) were accomplished after she left her lover, Russian poet Vladislav Khodasevich. Other articles deal with the impact of childhood sexual abuse on the life of Virginia Woolf and with Edith Wharton's successful struggle to find sexual freedom. Fraser includes several perceptive essays on writers and artists, such as novelist Paul Scott and painter Henri Matisse, that examine the women who influenced them both positively and negatively. Of particular interest are Fraser's reflections on the time she spent working as a young writer at the New Yorker with famed editor William Shawn.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 247 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (October 29, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394585399
• ISBN-13: 978-0394585390
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #376,682 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must have for your home library, July 22, 2008

By	Kirie Pedersen (Seattle & Manhattan) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I re-read this book from time to time, the focus on different essays depending on where I am in my own life. The chapter on Virginia Woolf is one of the best essays on Woolf for this Woolfian scholar. Fraser describes how Virginia and Vanessa Stephen's father, Sir Leslie Stephen, wandered around their Victorian house weeping after his wife died. "I am a man without a skin," he said. He reportedly told his fragile, beautiful, and talented daughters: "When I am sad, you should be sad. When I am angry, you should weep." According to Fraser, Virginia Woolf believed her father "the model of the patriarchal family, with men given license to bully and rant while women and children submitted and served...." Fraser says Woolf believed that when such conditions are tolerated in private life, in public they can lead to fascism. "The tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other."

Fraser interviewed the Russian ex-patriot Nina Berberova many times. Nina Berberova only became known to the English-speaking world in her eighties, and is a role model for those who hope to thrive to their final breath. Berberova was active, thinking, writing, and living on her own to her death at 92. Fraser quotes the questions Berberova poses to herself as a writer: "Did you try to look inside yourself, or did you play the victim and look to others to blame? ... Did you speak out and tell the truth? Were you bold in your work? .... Did you fulfill your promise, the talent you were born with? ...Were you cooperating with the life force, or were you willfully moving in the direction of suicide?"

Also of interest is Fraser's reading of Edith Wharton. After describing an attempted rape in The House of Mirth, Fraser poses the possibility the author knew enough about such events to portray this scene and its impact on the heroine so vividly. As happens with so many young women, the character, Lily, feels shamed. "I am bad--a bad girl--all my thoughts are bad." She keeps the attempted rape a secret even from her best friend. Again, Fraser hones in on the secrets, the "ornament and silence" so many women continue to observe.

"Lily, though a grown and sophisticated woman, is strangely spellbound, lonely, and unprotected, like a girl in an incestuous house," Fraser says.

The other evidence the author might have been molested include her childhood illnesses, and in young womanhood, "symptoms of what her Victorian doctors called neurasthenia but which contemporary diagnosis often links to early sexual trauma. Panic attacks, breathing difficulties...migraines, debilitating depressions. .... Nausea so severe...she became incapable of eating."

After citing the famous quote from Flaubert: "Be regular and ordinary in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you can be violent and original in your works," Fraser politely observes how easy it can be for some male artists and writers to pursue their art with mothers, wives, lovers, or daughters to cosset, cook, and keep the household quiet.

For example, Fraser says, "In the old, old female story, Penny embarked on the old, old course: trying to mend a wounded man in an attempt to heal the hurt little girl from her past." This refers to Penny Scott, who married Paul Scott, a British novelist. Penny Scott kept the world quiet for her husband even though he disdained and possibly abused her. She didn't "know" of his homosexuality or his alcoholism, though at least one of these should have been fairly obvious, and she later had to take refuge in a shelter for battered women.

"As an alcoholic who couldn't stop drinking, he was still committing suicide. The disease of alcoholism is as patient as a tiger; it will life in wait for its victims for years and years," Fraser observes of Scott. With this, Fraser astutely hones in on yet another "secret" many continue to believe in poor taste to discuss.

Fraser refers to women in their roles as ornaments to men's art, or their silence in the face of duty or shame. In her chapter on George Eliot, she writes: "To a woman writer, exposing family secrets can seem perilously close to going mad. Men have had the support of the culture as they recognized their own experience and laid claim to it by writing it down. On the whole, they have been able, without inhibition,to feed their creative ambitions with the details of other people's lives. Men had a mandate, after all, to inform the public about the nature of life. Things have not been--are not--so simple for a woman. Women have often withheld their stories, because honesty about emotions and about the family feels to many women like a sin. It means drawing aside the curtain, lifting lids. It means rencouncing the role of good girl....It may mean expressing anger....Women must set aside the bowl they have used to beg for approval and praise. George Eliot was not free as an artist until her respectable family had cast her out. Only a community larger than family, only powers greater than lovers or husbands, can sustain women writers....

Finally, of interest to anyone who has been a long-time reader of the New Yorker, is Fraser's memoir of her own arrival there in her early twenties, and her apprenticeship with William Shawn. Not only is the essay hilarious, with the author's description of flying up the stairs in her mini-skirt, her hair so long she could wrap it around her neck, but the reader gets to glean some of Mr. Shawn's wisdom about writing and writers as taught to someone who clearly learned her lessons well.

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing, March 6, 2004

By	Pamela E.B. Davis "pamistheprincess" (Salt Lake City, UT United States) - See all my reviews

I read this book looking for something and I found in it the most strong women I could ever know. An inspiration in every way to my young mind I will be changed forever by this amazing collection. Kennedy Fraser captures the essence of each of the women (and the few men) that she writes about. She's amazing, it's amazing.