The Blazing World, Siri Hustvedt’s 6th novel, goes for the jugular from its opening paragraph. A fictional editor’s note reads, “all intellectual and artistic endeavours, even jokes, ironies, and parodies, fare better in the mind of the crowd when the crowd knows that somewhere behind the great work or the great spoof it can locate a cock and pair of balls.” What follows is the story of a female artist trying to find a place for herself in the biased art world, interwoven with multiple stories of forgotten female artists and scientific theories of perception. The novel is a dazzling call to arms against the persistent barriers placed around female artists and intellectuals.
The narrative chronicles a project undertaken by middle-aged artist Harriet ‘Harry’ Burden to seek revenge on the prejudiced New York art scene that has ignored her work. She enlists three male artists under whose names she plans to exhibit three different pieces of work, only to reveal her identity after the final show. Burden records her life-long struggle with her gender in detailed personal notebooks, excerpts from which make up large portions of the novel. The story of a woman disguising herself as a man is a tale as old as time but Hustvedt has concocted a chorus of voices to give alternative perspectives on Burden’s story, the result of which is a thrilling confusion of opinion. We hear personal testimony from the artist’s children, lover, childhood friend, male foils, and several loosely parodied high-brow art publications. Each of Hustvedt’s flawed and complex voices highlights one of the author’s favourite themes: that human perception is deeply subjective, and that we can never fully understand each other.
Hustvedt’s obsession with theories of perception forms the bedrock of all her novels. Each book is a kaleidoscopic journey through her vast range of references, from obscure French cinema to abstruse German philosophers. Hustvedt is a true intellectual polymath. She believes it is still more difficult for a woman than a man to be an artist and an intellectual, admitting that she feels much more acceptable now that she is in her 60s and that “there remains a profound cultural bias about young and to be honest fertile women. The idea of the body is still so deeply associated with women and the intellect remains associated with masculinity.”
Hustvedt is acutely aware of the injustice of this deep association. The cruelty of beauty culture causes persistent suffering for Harry. She is very tall and large, with huge breasts and wild fuzzy hair. One particularly cruel art critic describes her as “an unhappy combination of Mae West and Lennie in Of Mice and Men.” She is painfully aware of how her looks affect her life, lamenting to her daughter, “Maisie, you’re lucky you didn’t get my breasts. Big breasts on a little woman are fetching; big breasts on a big woman are scary–to men that is.” Harry, like Hustvedt, is voraciously intellectual, devouring countless scientific and artistic journals as well as novels, philosophy and art theory. She believes that the combination of her appearance and her opinions make her a pariah of the Patriarchal art world. There is one particularly horrible passage where the slimy and misogynistic art critic Oswald Case describes Harry entering the apartment of one of her male masks and meeting his young, beautiful assistant. Case scoffs that “there, in harsh contrast to the lithe and lovely Fanny, stood the enormous Harriet, a shrill presence even before she had opened her mouth.”
Apart from Harry’s fictional struggles, Hustvedt uses her novel to highlight the real struggle women face in trying to get their voices heard. One character paints a grim but accurate picture of the contemporary art scene: “Although the number of female artists has exploded, it is no secret that New York galleries show women far less often than they show men. The figures hover around twenty percent of all one-person shows in the city, despite the fact that almost half of those same galleries are run by women . . . with almost no exceptions, art by men is far more expensive than art by women. Dollars tell the story.” Hustvedt later cites the Goldberg Study from 1968, revisited in 1983 and the late 1990s with similar results; women students evaluated an identical essay more poorly when a female name was attached to it than when a male name was attached. The same result was found when they were presented with visual art.
What I find most consoling about reading Hustvedt is her acknowledgment of the chaos of human interaction and the machinations of the mind without being morose or nihilistic. She weaves complex theories and ideas into her prose without alienating her readers, and employs unexpected black humour to great effect. The Blazing World should be avoided by readers who are put off by references they do not understand but it is a novel full of life, chaos and questions, and should be required reading for anyone with an enquiring mind and a frustration about gender bias.
Buy The Blazing World (Simon & Schuster, 2014) here.
Wonderful review. I look forward to reading the book!