Beginning to See the Light by Ellen Willis

First published: 1981

Type of work: Social criticism

Form and Content

Ellen Willis’ choice of the title Beginning to See the Light to name a selected collection of her journalism from the late 1960’s to the early 1980’s has a double significance. First, the title is lifted from a rock song by one of her favorite groups, the Velvet Underground, thus signaling that her origins as a writer were in music criticism and that she has an abiding concern with the lessons she learned in that field. Second, there is the literal meaning of the title, which refers to the process of enlightenment that the writer undergoes as she brings her sensibility to bear on new subjects outside the cultural field, particularly on feminist and Jewish issues. Willis both learns from these issues and, laterally, uses them to tease out undeveloped perceptions that she had about popular culture. The book’s thematic shift from music to social concerns—these make up the two major parts of the book—parallel a meditation on history that juxtaposes the 1960’s and the 1970’s, analyzing how the latter demolished many of the assumptions of the former in a way that was tragic and yet enabling, in that it allowed for a reconstruction of some of the projects of the 1960’s on firmer footing.

The book has three parts. The first and second, as noted, focus on cultural and social concerns. The first contains such pieces as a review of rock icon Elvis Presley’s comeback concert and of various music festivals, assessment of the careers of rock stars Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan, and jottings on books and films. The second section contains pieces on topics that are of special relevance to women (such as abortion, the fight against pornography, and rape) and those that address Jewish issues (such as on the Jewish American conservative writer Norman Podhoretz and on the stereotype of the rich Jew). The briefer closing section, entitled “Next Year in Jerusalem,” details a personal odyssey that Willis made to Israel to confront her brother, who had converted to a fundamentalist brand of Judaism, and to tussle with her own feelings about spirituality. She examines both the type of otherworldliness that she had sketchily and laboriously worked out for herself and the one that appears in an oddly attractive, finished and tested form in the teachings of her brother’s sect.

Each of these investigations connects to Willis’ interest in promoting personal and collective liberation on the most generous terms. For her, liberation in the long run means the equalization of the sexes so that neither would have power over the other. Ultimately, this equalization would entail the move from a capitalist to a democratic socialist economy, since the centralization and hierarchical nature of capitalism make inequality of some type unavoidable. In the short run, the quest for liberation involves her in measuring both cultural productions and social issues with a flexible yardstick to determine how far current struggles or creations face toward or away from the distant goals.

Discovering both the positive and the negative moments of the phenomena that she studies involves her in a rectification of rhetoric—that is, in the uncovering of exact meanings and implications, which are perennially unnoticed or confused, in political discourse and cultural objects. Also, going deeper, Willis looks for a subtext in these phenomena, which leads her to the suppressed sexuality or power hunger behind the less-than-revealing surfaces. Both of these operations are carried out so lucidly by Willis that, in convincing the reader of the validity of her excavation, she also tends to demonstrate the justice of her total analysis and her convictions.

Context

Most of the essays in Beginning to See the Light originally appeared in such magazines and newspapers as Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, and The New Yorker. It was at this stage that the pieces had their greatest impact in inflecting and contributing to the progressive understanding of cultural and feminist issues.

Willis was one of the few females among a new breed of rock-and-roll critics who followed the lead indicated by Tom Wolfe in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965). Wolfe wrote of such things as car customizing and Las Vegas casino architecture as representing a distinct American lower-class and lower-middle-class aesthetic that was as worthy of study as high art for its revelation of social meanings. In the 1960’s, these music critics branched out from the chores of reviewing records and concerts to link the sounds that they discussed to the ongoing political ferment and other emergent features of American society. For example, in Greil Marcus’ Mystery Train (1975), a study of the African American pop group Sly and the Family Stone is contextualized in terms of the Black Power movement. In Willis’ cultural criticism, music was examined from the perspectives of feminism and socialism.

Willis’ social essays can be seen as attempts to mediate between and give a critique of different positions in American feminism. It should be recognized that, as the 1970’s wore on, in many ways this feminism became a type of single-issue politics. Major separate strands of the movement focused on specific topics. The liberal feminists organized in such groups as the National Organization for Women (NOW), centered on pay equity and the passage of equal rights bills, while the politically radical groups focused on abortion rights. Willis challenges such groups on their own terms, by criticizing some of their premises, and suggests that they broaden their horizons.

Her piece on pornography, for example, debates the socially radical feminists, who wanted stricter controls on or total banning of pornography. In such works as Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (1975), the social radicals argued that dirty books and X-rated films both victimized women in their presentations and spurred male users to assault females. Willis’ essay on the subject tries to force open-minded readers both to examine the epistemological foundation of this strand of feminism and to ask whether the alliances that the antipornography fighters had made in the political arena were appropriate and if, with altered premises, they might not make more valuable alliances with other sectors of the women’s movement.

In whatever discourse she placed herself, whether in discussing popular culture or women’s issues, Willis labored so that what she focused on would be seen in the light of and (if possible) in its contribution to a broadly conceived, transformative struggle for an egalitarian world.

Bibliography

Aronowitz, Stanley. Roll Over Beethoven: The Return of Cultural Strife. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1993. Aronowitz’s novel and cogently argued thesis is that Willis and other rock critics of the 1960’s were inventing a cultural studies approach similar to the one that had developed in Great Britain since World War II. He uses Willis as a prime example of these writers’ abilities to find meaningful aesthetic and social values in pop culture.

Brownmiller, Susan. Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975. Brownmiller argues that pornography stereotypes women either as virgins who have to be violently assaulted by males or as nymphomaniacs. The danger of these portrayals is not merely that they give men a distorted view but that, the author believes, these views often motivate men to commit abuses against women.

Lederer, Laura, ed. Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography. New York: William Morrow, 1980. This book is a collection of articles by such writers as Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin, Gloria Steinem, and Alice Walker on the price that women pay for the United States’ toleration of pornography. The book grows out of a movement of women in various cities who organized to demonstrate against the presence of “adult” theaters and bookstores.

Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music. 1975. Rev. ed. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1982. Marcus went the farthest in examining the way in which rock and roll can be understood as embodying the primal, underlying traits of its time. He uses Elvis Presley as an exemplar of how a rock star can express a period.

Wolfe, Tom. The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965. Wolfe led the way in exploring the values of the lower level of American culture. He points to the importance of style in mass cultural production, a theme taken up by Willis and other music writers.