S. S. Proleterka by Fleur Jaeggy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Scary Women

Testosterone may be useful for personal protection; but it is a social plague. One of the best measures of a civilised society is the degree of mitigation of the difference in physical power between the sexes. This is accomplished by laws and customs that limit the use of male physical strength to intimidate females. This is to the good. But as in most other aspects of life, there is a downside. Men can be intimidated by females who resent and seek to punish men. Being nowhere near as clever or persistent as women, men are at a decided disadvantage, especially if the women concerned act tribally.

Jaeggy captures this dialectic rather well in the oxymoronic descriptions of her protagonist’s life among domineering women who exploit men mercilessly: “acrimonious indulgence;” “rapacious charity;” “abysmal politeness;” and “vainglorious restraint.” Her grandmother (a German Miss Cavendish) is the leader of the pack: “In not forgiving she was magnanimous, tolerant, equable.” The girl herself is “a hostage to good. A prisoner of good.” She lives a life in which “Pleasure and punishment are combined.” Her father is anathema because of his failure to live up to the economic expectations of the coven.

In this world of contradictions, reality is hidden behind impenetrable symbols. The girl lives within “a genealogy of images.” At one time her mother played the piano; but that was before the family’s financial troubles. Now, she says “The sound of the piano represents all that I have not had.” Her personal history is swallowed up in these symbols. She is “The girl who has no past.” Even her gender is a symbol of symbolic obsession: “The women of that family had an autistic passion for camellias, roses, and nothing else.” Women, she is taught, are, or ought to be, nihilists: “they harbor a profound resentment, a visceral resentment toward the world, toward existence.”

Estrogen, it seems, has its own unique challenges. Legal reform is unlikely to be effective in meeting them, probably because the law tends to be dominated by men who don’t have a clue about its effects. Women, on the other hand, run society.

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