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The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Woman Redux: de Kooning, Mailer, and American Abstract Expression: Difference between revisions
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Mailer’s portrait of Deborah Rojack’s murder in ''An American Dream'' bears uncanny parallels to de Kooning’s “Woman I,” a painting that Norman Mailer knew well by the time he was working on his novel. An examination of the two works in tandem illuminates how Mailer’s attempt, at least in this novel, was not to destroy women but to liberate them from within and to restore harmony for both men and women. I realize that my ideas here risk comparison to all those sick doctor jokes wherein the patient is told the good news that the doctors will be able to save her. The bad news is that to save her they must first kill her. Mailer recognized that Kate Millet, along with other feminists, believe that male writers love to kill off their heroines as aggressive acts of male superiority. Judith Fetterly never forgave Hemingway for killing Catherine Barkley in ''A Farewell to Arms'', and Millet lashes out at D. H. Lawrence for his slaughter of a white woman at the hands of natives in “The Woman Who Rode Away.” As Mailer quotes her in ''The Prisoner of Sex'', Millet says that “it is the perversion of sexuality into slaughter, indeed, the story’s very travesty and denial of sexuality, which accounts for its monstrous, even demented air.”{{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=141}} | Mailer’s portrait of Deborah Rojack’s murder in ''An American Dream'' bears uncanny parallels to de Kooning’s “Woman I,” a painting that Norman Mailer knew well by the time he was working on his novel. An examination of the two works in tandem illuminates how Mailer’s attempt, at least in this novel, was not to destroy women but to liberate them from within and to restore harmony for both men and women. I realize that my ideas here risk comparison to all those sick doctor jokes wherein the patient is told the good news that the doctors will be able to save her. The bad news is that to save her they must first kill her. Mailer recognized that Kate Millet, along with other feminists, believe that male writers love to kill off their heroines as aggressive acts of male superiority. Judith Fetterly never forgave Hemingway for killing Catherine Barkley in ''A Farewell to Arms'', and Millet lashes out at D. H. Lawrence for his slaughter of a white woman at the hands of natives in “The Woman Who Rode Away.” As Mailer quotes her in ''The Prisoner of Sex'', Millet says that “it is the perversion of sexuality into slaughter, indeed, the story’s very travesty and denial of sexuality, which accounts for its monstrous, even demented air.”{{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=141}} | ||
Certainly Mailer's no-holds-barred portrait of Deborah's murder followed by Rojack's "bitch of a brawl" with Ruta seems monstrous and even demented as does the "Woman" painting that de Kooning labored over for almost three years. He became increasingly slovenly with his personal hygiene and his studio space, and he often painted in the nude, obsessively creating and recreating his woman, slashing at the canvas, slathering on swabs of paint only to scrape it all off in order to start again. He had a particular difficulty with mouth and her hands, which seemed to him "clawlike." Steven and Swan describe de Kooning's struggle to find "intimacy with an image; the broken, convulsive, and awkward must be conveyed, if the truth was to be served, "and the meanings were necessarily "contradictory." "A mouth meant far more than a realistic depiction of two lips and a hole could reveal. A mouth was nourishment, smiles, frowns, sex, teeth, whispers, and shouts. It told lies and truths. It was inside and outside, a lipstick pose and a revelation. Viewed this way, a mouth was an almost impossible thing to get right" [323]. | |||
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