Seduction and Betrayal by Elizabeth Hardwick

First published: 1974

Type of work: Literary criticism

Principal Personages:

• Anne Brontë, ,
• Charlotte Brontë, and
• Emily Brontë, three sisters, nineteenth century English novelists and poets
• Jane Carlyle, a nineteenth century diarist, the wife of Thomas Carlyle
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, a twentieth century American novelist
• Zelda Fitzgerald, his wife, also a writer
• Henrik Ibsen, a nineteenth century Norwegian-born dramatist
• Sylvia Plath, a twentieth century American poet
• Virginia Woolf, a twentieth century English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer
• Dorothy Wordsworth, a nineteenth century diarist, the sister of William Wordsworth

Form and Content

As early as 1959, Elizabeth Hardwick declared, “The proper study of mankind may be man, but the subject for women is other women. . . . It is a subject upon which one can speak with something like authority.” Seduction and Betrayal bears out that conviction. It collects essays on women that Hardwick, a founding editor of The New York Review of Books, originally published in that journal, though some have been altered and others expanded since their initial appearances. A few of the essays were read as papers: The title essay was presented at Vassar College in 1972, and the essays on Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Carlyle formed part of lectures given for the Christian Gauss Seminar in Criticism at Princeton University. Although there is a unifying theme insofar as the book considers women and literature, Seduction and Betrayal has no central argument. The ten essays in the slim volume (208 pages long) address women as authors, novelists, or poets; as fictional characters; and as close associates of literary men. They do not offer close textual readings or historical data but rather sensitive interpretations of lives, personalities, and literary themes in accordance with the vision of a cultivated critic who is herself a novelist.

The essays are arranged in five sections. The long opening biographical essay on the Bronte sisters is followed by “Ibsen’s Women,” a section of three essays devoted to the female characterizations in Et dukkehjem (1879; A Doll’s House, 1880), Hedda Gabler (1890; English translation, 1891), and Rosmersholm (1886; English translation, 1889). The third section, “Victims and Victors,” comprises individual essays on Zelda Fitzgerald (construed as victim) and on Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf (victors). Under the heading “Amateurs” follow individual essays on two talented women who, to Hardwick’s regret, never fully exercised their gifts and were dwarfed by their men: Jane Carlyle, the wife of historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle, and Dorothy Wordsworth, the sister of poet William Wordsworth. Finally, balancing the opening essay, the long title essay, “Seduction and Betrayal,” discusses seduced and betrayed women characters in the Western literary tradition, principally in English, American, Russian, and French novels, though opera and narrative poetry are mentioned too. Although the arrangement of the essays does not constitute a progression, the title essay, easily the most provocative piece, nevertheless serves as a culminating statement by virtue of its challenging claims.

Eminently readable and presented without documentation (except for a single note to the Woolf piece), the essays are directed to the intelligent nonspecialist, male or female, and, while informed by a strong awareness of the problems created by gendering, are not noticeably feminist in tone but reflective and urbane.

Critical Context

Elizabeth Hardwick’s place in contemporary feminist criticism lies among the more conservative critics. She has been grouped by more radical thinkers with critics such as Mary Ellmann in Thinking About Women (1968) as epitomizing the critic who does not write as a woman, who never says, “I, as a woman, think,” but instead talks about other women writers as if they were a third sex and is careful not to be too angry or earnest in her feminist pronouncements, thus deflecting male criticism. In terms of the influential distinction made by Elaine Showalter in “Towards a Feminist Poetics” between feminist critique and gynocritics, Hardwick practices feminist critique, that version of feminist criticism in which woman as reader principally seeks out the errors of omission and commission concerning women in past criticism, the terms of her investigation coming out of male critical thought. Feminist criticism, however, has thrived through the plurality of its approaches; although Hardwick’s book has become less significant than it was when first issued in 1974, hers is still a respected voice among the moderates. Notably, she was less conservative by the time of Seduction and Betrayal than she had been in her 1962 A View of My Own: Essays in Literature and Society, in which, repeating an opinion from the 1950’s, she was convinced that women writers could never compete with men because of their ineradicably differing life experiences. By 1974 she did not condone limitations on women’s performance. Whatever her changing views on women, an impeccable style of writing and an assured literary sensibility have been characteristic of Elizabeth Hardwick’s criticism from the start.

Bibliography

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W. W. Norton, 1963. An exploration of the ways in which women’s behavior is controlled through social norms, Friedan’s book was a harbinger of the American women’s movement in the latter part of the twentieth century. A classic of its kind.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979. A collection of readings of major woman writers of the nineteenth century, the volume also presents a controversial theory of female creativity. The authors maintain that male writers have traditionally looked to their sexuality as a source of imagery for explanations of their creativity, and they propose that this has put women literary artists at a disadvantage. Therefore, Gilbert and Gubar claim, women writers should explain their own creativity with reference to the female body. The scope of The Madwoman in the Attic is formidable. The book is, however, also highly readable.

Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970. A pioneering work in feminist literary criticism, Millett’s book first defines the nature of the power relationship between the sexes and then demonstrates how this relationship is enacted in works by such male authors as D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet. A highly political work, Millett’s book has been criticized for being one sided. It is, however, both powerfully argued and readable. It has a good index.

Moi, Toril. Sexual-Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Methuen, 1985. Emphasizing the Anglo-American and French traditions of feminist literary theory, Moi offers a brief and readable introduction to the field from a leftist perspective. Of particular value is Moi’s discussion of the French feminist theorists Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva. Her section on Anglo-American feminist criticism gives useful summaries of the work of Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Sandra Gilbert, and Susan Gubar, as well as Elaine Showalter. Sexual-Textual Politics contains an index, a bibliography, and suggestions for further reading.

Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977. Although some feminists believe that Showalter is not sufficiently critical of patriarchal power, Showalter’s book is useful. It contains both an index and a useful bibliography