103
" Sylvia Plath's greatest poetry was sometimes conceived while she was baking bread, she was such a perfectionist and ultimately such a fool. The trouble is, of course, that the role of the goddess, the role of the glory and the grandeur of the female in the universe exists in the fantasy of the male artist and no woman can ever draw it to her heart for comfort, but the role of menial, unfortunately, is real and that she knows because she tastes it everyday. So the barbaric yawp of utter adoration for the power and the glory and the grandeur of the female in the universe is uttered at the expense of the particular living woman every time. And because we can be neither one nor the other with any piece of mind, because we are unfortunately improper goddesses and unwilling menials, there is a battle waged between us. And after all, in the description of this battle, maybe I find the justification of my idea that the achievement of the male artistic ego is at my expense for I find that the battle is dearer to him than the peace would ever be. The eternal battle with women, he boasts, sharpens our resistance, develops our strength, enlarges the scope of our cultural achievements. So is the scope after all worth it? Again, the same question, just as if we were talking of the income of a thousand families for a whole year. You see, I strongly suspect that when this revolution takes place, art will no longer be distinguished by its rarity, or its expense, or its inaccessibility, or the extraordinary way which in it is marketed, it will be the prerogative of all of us and we will do it as those artists did whom Freud understood not at all, the artists who made the Cathedral of Chartres or the mosaics of Byzantine, the artist who had no ego and no name. "
― Germaine Greer
108
" Love, love, love—all the wretched cant of it,
masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of
sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys,
blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures
of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its
barrenness. ‘We were not made to idolize one another, yet the whole
strain of courtship is little more than rank idolatry.’ It may seem
that young men no longer court with the elaborate servilities that
Mary Astell, the seventeenth-century feminist, was talking about,
but the mystic madness of love provides the same spurious halo,
and builds up the same expectations which dissipate as soon as the
new wife becomes capable of ‘calmly considering her Condition "
― Germaine Greer , The Female Eunuch
114
" When the choice lies between the ultra-feminine and the virago,
Shakespeare’s sympathy lies with the virago. The women of the
tragedies are all feminine—even Lady Macbeth (who is so often
misinterpreted as a termagant), especially Gertrude, morally unconscious,
helpless, voluptuous, and her younger version, infantile
Ophelia, the lustful sisters, Goneril and Regan opposed by the warrior
princess Cordelia who refuses to simper and pander to her
father’s irrational desire. Desdemona is fatally feminine, but realizes
it and dies understanding how she has failed Othello. Only Cleopatra
has enough initiative and desire to qualify for the status of female
hero. "
― Germaine Greer , The Female Eunuch
