Lynne Cheney, Feminist Intellectual?
By ELAINE SHOWALTER
Academics may not always be completely up-to-date on political personalities, but there can't be many who have had to be filled in on Lynne V. Cheney, wife of Republican vice-presidential candidate Richard B. Cheney. As head of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1986 to 1993, and as author of several controversial books about political correctness and declining standards in American higher education (most recently, Telling the Truth, in 1995), Lynne Cheney has long had name recognition in academic circles.
Of course, to many in the humanities, she has been the Wicked Witch of the West, described last year by Jonathan Chait in The American Prospect as "the leading policy assassin for the right-wing cultural warriors." When her husband's nomination was announced, conservative critics of the universities, like William Bennett, openly rejoiced at the prospect of a tough-minded Second Lady who would defend the Western canon and lash out at women's studies and multiculturalism. "She'll be hard to muzzle," Bennett gleefully predicted.
But a closer look at Lynne Vincent Cheney reveals a more complicated woman than either the right or the left has acknowledged. Born in 1941, trained as a scholar of Victorian literature, married young, a mother and grandmother, her C.V. has a number of parallels with my own -- and with those of many academic women of my generation who combined traditional and professional roles.
Cheney grew up in Casper, Wyo., where her mother was a deputy sheriff. She was a homecoming queen, and started dating Dick Cheney in high school. She also became an aspiring scholar in an environment and era largely unsupportive of women's academic ambitions. Graduating from Colorado College in 1962, she got an M.A. in English from the University of Colorado in 1964 and, as a new bride, went off to further graduate work at the University of Wisconsin, where she got a Ph.D. in 1970 with a dissertation on Kant's influence on Matthew Arnold. With two young daughters, as well as the problems of finding a teaching position at a time when many universities had barriers against hiring women, Cheney left academe and made her career as a journalist, writer, and TV commentator.
Among the less familiar items on her bibliography are three novels written in the late 1970's and 1980's: Executive Privilege: A Washington Novel (1979); Sisters (1981), and The Body Politic (1988), written with Victor Gold (who also served as a coauthor of George H. W. Bush's "autobiography" Looking Forward). The Body Politic, a racy, broadly satirical novel in which the wife of a dead vice president inherits his position after many plots and machinations, has received some attention from the press because of its cynical comments about the powerlessness of the vice presidency (Executive Privilege also gives the V.P. short shrift). Stylistically, however, The Body Politic has little in common with Cheney's other publications and, unless she privately cherishes a predilection for Yiddish slang, bawdy humor, and outrageous puns, seems dominated by Gold's voice.
As a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Cheney lists The Body Politic on her vita, and the book is shortly to come out in paperback from St. Martin's Press. But she doesn't mention the two earlier novels, and that's a shame, because they are skillful and fascinating -- and also show Cheney as a feminist intellectual who is using popular literary genres to wrestle with serious ethical and political issues.
Each displays a compassionate, indeed liberal, attitude toward a fraught issue of personal choice. In Executive Privilege, Cheney's narrator defends the right of an elected political figure to seek psychiatric counseling and psychotherapy without losing stature (did she have inside information about Richard Nixon?). In Sisters, her 19th-century heroine forcefully defends a woman's right to use contraception. At the same time, both novels also dramatize serious ideological debates about political loyalty, journalistic ethics, feminist grievances, and sisterly bonding, going back and forth between contrasting positions with impressive openness.
Executive Privilege is dedicated to "Dick, who has shaped my life -- and even one or two of my opinions." It deals with a leaked memo from the president's confidential log that suggests that he has been having daily counseling sessions with an aide who is also a psychotherapist. While the novel is primarily a mystery story about the identity and motives of the leaker (he turns out to be the vice president), it is really about life inside the Beltway, especially for women.
Nancy Dodman, an irreverent academic who is writing a dissertation about Kant and is married to one of the journalists who figures in the book, is one of Cheney's surrogate voices; another is Sarah Hoff, the White House correspondent for Newstime. A third is First Lady Mary Jenner, a Montana native wise to the ways of Washington. Together, they provide a great deal of pithy comment on women's marginality in politics.
Cheney also explores the nuances of professional ethics. Ultimately, the journalists in the novel have to decide whether to publish a big story about a politician that deals with his private life. Sarah is ambivalent: "Since when has feeling sorry for somebody ever been a reason not to do a story?" Is telling the truth despite all costs the primary responsibility of a free press, or are there other responsibilities that take precedence? Cheney leaves the question unresolved, giving equal voice to each side in the debate. Similarly, she depicts a number of professional women, along with both happy and miserable politicians' wives.
In contrast to Executive Privilege, Sisters (published only in a Signet Canadian paperback edition) is a gothic female historical novel, in the tradition of Jane Eyre, with a strong dash of Gone With the Wind. Set in Wyoming in 1886, it tells the story of the beautiful, headstrong widow Sophie Dymond, an actress and magazine editor, who returns from the East to Cheyenne to discover the reasons for the death of her sister, Helen. The blurb on the book gives a good sense of the lurid and exciting plot: "Sophie had left the west to find success and independence. Helen had remained to wed a handsome, powerful cattle baron. Now Helen was dead -- and Sophie returned to find the reasons why ... in the secret world of frontier wives that most men never entered ... in the revelations of the town's most notorious prostitute ... in the passionate letters written to Helen by another woman ... and finally in the arms of the man whom Sophie had every reason to desire and despise ... her late sister's husband and possibly her killer. ..."
I first discovered Sisters in a used-book stall in Paris in the early 90's, and I brought it home to share with members of the Modern Language Association's Executive Council during the years when the M.L.A. was under attack from the right, and an official visit from Cheney to M.L.A. headquarters felt like a visit from the queen of a hostile country. I found Sisters surprising and impressive then, very different from Cheney's public persona. Rereading it a decade later, I am even more struck by its narrative power and daring. Historical color, forbidden passion, female bonding, whips and fires, strong opinions, scenes of morbidity and madness -- Sisters is a real page-turner and would make a wonderful movie.
Most surprising of all, it is a searching meditation on the significance of women's culture in the 19th century, informed by the work of the pioneering feminist historians who were writing as Cheney was thinking about her novel. Despite its sensational packaging, Sisters is a deeply thoughtful book, a departure from Cheney's high-minded dissertation research, as well as from her life as the wife of a young Republican politician.
Following in the literary tradition of feminist writing of the 1970's, Sisters begins with a dedication to female kin: to Cheney's "mother and my grandmothers, at rest in the past, and to my daughters, who are running toward the future."
In her acknowledgments, Cheney also thanks "the men and women working to bring to light details of the daily personal lives of nineteenth-century women." In particular, she thanks Linda Gordon for her book on the history of the birth-control movement, Woman's Body, Woman's Right; G. J. Barker-Benfield for his study of obstetrics, gynecology, and sexual surgery, Horrors of the Half-Known Life; and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, for her celebrated article in the first issue of Signs, "The Female World of Love and Ritual."
Those scholarly influences are clear in the novel. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's article was among the most influential pieces of research and interpretation that came out of the early years of women's studies. Looking at correspondence between American women friends in the 19th century, Smith-Rosenberg hypothesized a female culture "built around ... an unselfconscious pattern of single-sex or homosocial networks ... institutionalized in social convention or rituals that accompanied virtually every important event in a woman's life." Those rituals were reinforced by intense bonds between mothers and daughters and by restrictions on intimacy between young men and women, and "devotion to and love of other women became a plausible and socially accepted form of human interaction," Smith-Rosenberg wrote. She placed such erotic friendships between women along the spectrum of 19th-century sexual and social relationships.
In Woman's Body, Woman's Right, Linda Gordon argued that, despite frequent childbirth, miscarriage, and maternal and infant death, women with feminist beliefs both advocated and resisted contraception: "The suppression of birth control ... was partly a means of enforcing male supremacy, but partly, too, a self-protection for women, a means of enforcing men's responsibility for their sexual behavior," Gordon wrote.
Cheney is ambivalent about Smith-Rosenberg's analysis of women's culture, and sympathetic to Gordon's argument. She acknowledges the emotional bond between women, and their fears of male sexuality; but she favors remedies that would allow women freedom to enjoy their own sexuality with male partners. Sophie discovers that Helen had suffered many painful miscarriages and had withdrawn from marital sex. She had also been converted to the values of the local Women's Christian Temperance Union, led by her beloved schoolteacher friend Amy Travers.
Through Sophie's eyes, we see a group of female fanatics convinced of female moral superiority to men, and conflating temperance with celibacy. They have become convinced of Woman's spiritual purity, expressed in tender friendships between women. Sophie first discovers the evidence of Helen's "affair" with Amy Travers in letters, journals, and underlined poems. "Let us go away together, away from the anger and imperatives of men. We shall find ourselves a secluded bower where they dare not venture. There will only be the two of us, and ... in the evenings I shall read to you while you go work your cross-stitch in the firelight. And then we shall go to bed, our bed, my dearest girl," Miss Travers had written to Helen.
Repelled by lesbian ardor veiled as spiritual fervor, Sophie nonetheless comes to sympathize with the women's grievances -- abuse, prostitution, rape, frequent unwanted pregnancies -- and to admire their intimacy, although she cannot identify with it. Listening to one W.C.T.U. member, Lydia Swerdlow, crippled by the rigors of childbearing, insist that only reproduction can transfigure and redeem the animality of sex, Sophie understands despite herself: "For a moment, just a moment, she had a sense of the pressures which molded Lydia's feelings, and she saw that the way the other woman felt was not perverse, but a right response to her life. It had to do with wanting control; it was a different path to a goal Sophie herself was always seeking."
Watching two women embracing in a wagon after a fire, she "felt curiously moved, curiously envious of them. ... She saw that the women in the cart had a passionate, loving intimacy forever closed to her. How strong it made them. What comfort it gave."
Such a world of female love and ritual is alien to Sophie, who is not even sure how she feels about her real sister, her mother, or her grandmother; who prefers men to women; and who defines control as the sponges, powders, and condoms she keeps in a lacquered box given to her by the actress Adah Menken.
In another subplot, Sophie grapples with the quarrel between the rights of the wealthy cattle barons and the crude homesteaders, and comes to share the view of the man she loves that the government is giving an unfair advantage to the homesteaders and penalizing the cattle barons, who use their wealth for the public good. She also wonders whether the fact that the Wyoming Territory gave women the vote in 1869 indicates that feminism is no longer needed to win equality for women. Here, too, Sophie has to acknowledge that "anything women do is generally considered beneath notice" and that women's equality must be forcefully demanded.
Overall, then, the novel uses the metaphor of sisters to confront the differences among women, and the impossibility and futility of absolute sisterhood as a feminist goal. Not fusion, but mutual understanding, is the most that can be attained across the divides of class, generation, sexuality, and individuality. Yet that empathy is also a form of sisterhood: "The hardest thing any human being can do," says Lydia, "is fully to acknowledge the actuality of another. To admit, truly admit, that their thoughts, cares, their ardors and aversions are -- or were -- as real as our own." Having reached this point, Sophie begins to realize that she and Helen were not, after all, as different as she had once supposed.
Reading Lynne Cheney's novels might challenge the stereotypes many academics have about their opponents in the culture wars. It might also startle those devoted followers of Lynne Cheney who expect her to be the attack dog for the right. And it might make all sides realize that the culture wars, like the women's culture in Sisters, were more complicated than they first appeared. As a conservative political figure, Cheney has certainly not revealed in her public positions over the last decade much of the sympathy for feminism that she demonstrates in these novels. But as a multitalented, energetic professional woman, Cheney is very much a product of the intellectual and social forces of change that have swept academe in the past 25 years. A sister? I don't think so. But definitely kin.
Elaine Showalter is a professor of English at Princeton University.
chronicle.com |
