Feminist (2)

            I became a feminist in my early twenties. I was a student at the University of the West, Timisoara (that’s in Romania), and I was studying literature and languages. It was the early 90s. In my Romanian literature classes, made up of twenty-five women and at times one or two men, I learned, from male professors, that women can’t write Great Novels. There was a female novelist, Hortensia Papadat Bengescu (the Romanian equivalent of Virginia Woolf) whom we studied and who actually had written great novels… and our professors told us that she had had a very, very unhappy life. When Virginia Woolf herself was mentioned, everyone reminded us about her suicide. In other words: writing is so bad for women, it makes them suicidal.

            I was then reading Christa Wolf’s Cassandra too, one feminist book available among shelves and shelves of theory of literature, linguistics, history, novels, so many novels, most of them written by male authors of course. Out of one hundred books I read every four or five months, let’s say less than ten were by women, and I almost expected that the author’s femaleness would carry into her writing, the mark of their gender giving an indelible aura to the printed word: this was written by a woman. I almost expected the black ink to ripple: what would this woman have to say that it would be so different? and of course, it was up to the male professors to prove, immediately after the word was read, that it was… well, insufficient, different, charming perhaps at first but soon revealing some mysterious flaw emanating from the gender of the writer. 

            One of my professors once told me, about a modern Romanian (guy) writer, that the said writer had been complimented—by women, no less!—that he understood female psychology better than any woman could. In other words, why should women write at all?

            But I still owe it to another male professor (who taught Comparative Literature) with whom I once shared this story and talked about Christa Wolf and Virginia Woolf and he suggested, for my senior thesis, to write about feminist literary criticism. It was the early nineties, after all, and he was perhaps more attuned to what was going on beyond the parochial borders of our country that had for more than two decades shut itself off from foreign cultures.

            After a tour through libraries around the country, I assembled a bibliography that included Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Toril Moi, Elaine Showalter… I agreed and disagreed with all. I had finally found my books.

            But more about this later.