Go girl

• Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier
  Virago, 398 pp, £17.99, March 1999, ISBN 1 86049 685 7
• Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995-98 by Adrienne Rich
  Norton, 75 pp, £14.95, March 1999, ISBN 0 393 04682 6

The language of survival has always been fundamental to feminism. Germaine Greer seems to be convinced that the species is heading for extinction. (Some time ago, in an article in the Observer, she envisaged a time ‘when, far in the future, the human race has exterminated itself.’) For a time, Adrienne Rich believed that what was destroying itself was patriarchy: ‘The creative energy of patriarchy is fast running out,’ she wrote in 1971, ‘what remains is its self-generating energy for destruction’ (‘When We Dead Awaken’). Women’s task in advancing its end was simple, brutal and clear: ‘As women, we have our work cut out for us.’

Rich often speaks of ‘survival’ and of feminism as a ‘struggle for survival’. (She has also said of writing poetry: ‘I feel as though it’s for my survival, first and foremost’ – Interview, 1991.) But in the early poems she was not so much exhorting ferninism – a role at which no one has been better – as setting it a question. In ‘Waking in the Dark’, a poem from her 1973 collection, Diving into the Wreck – Midnight Salvage can be read at least in part as that book’s reprise – she asks what can be salvaged if ‘Nothing can save this’: if nothing can rescue the world which masculinity has made ‘unfit for women or men’, what will be left for the survivor other than to wander lost and dazed, or else to dive into the debris and shine the beam of poetry into the wreck? And if we are, as we seem to be, talking survival, with all its Darwinian echoes, can feminism exempt itself from the failures of the race? Diving into the Wreck was Rich’s seventh collection of poetry. Her first appeared in 1951, which is to say that in 1973 – generally seen as the very beginning of the second wave of 20th-century feminism – she was already in a position to look back:

I don’t know who we thought we were
that our personalities
could resist the failures of the race

Lucky or unlucky, we didn’t know
the race had failures of that order
and that we were going to share them

                           (‘From a Survivor’)

Surviving is an awkward business; Rich’s writing can be read as a continuous exploration of the difficulties it poses for feminism. If patriarchy is hurtling towards extinction, should feminism join in, to complete the job? If the energies of patriarchy are so overwhelming, how can the inspired fierceness of our own enterprise, even our own dreams, not be contaminated by the fierceness of men? ‘When I dream of meeting/the enemy, this is my dream:/white acetylene/ripples from my body’ (‘The Phenomenology of Anger’ from Diving into the Wreck). Can you destroy something well? No survivor ever feels wholly benign. No survivor, surveying the wreckage all around her, feels simply entitled to survive. One of the – millenarian – questions being put today both by feminists and, for very different reasons, by their critics is how far feminism has survived itself. Feminism, one might say, is uniquely poised to consider the question – recalcitrant and yet germane to any politics – of how to endure one’s own rage. If, as Rich would have it, feminism is a struggle for survival, are women, or the species, to be saved?

The bonobo is a female-centred, egalitarian primate species, of which only a few thousand survive, virtually inaccessible to humans, in the remote forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Aggressive Behaviour, the Official Journal of the International Society for Research on Aggression, introduces a review of Frans de Waal’s Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape somewhat apologetically: ‘Although most of this journal is devoted to papers on aggressive behaviour and violence, it is worth remembering that its mandate also includes the study of peaceable alternatives.’ A ‘tragic and optimistic species’, the bonobo exceptionally uses sex to resolve clashes of power rather than the other way round. ‘As these intelligent creatures gaze from the photographs,’ the reviewer writes, ‘it is virtually impossible to avoid responses of anthropomorphic delight.’ Natalie Angier shares this delight and in Woman: An Intimate Geography offers the bonobo, if not quite as a role model for women, at least as an alternative primate lineage, another history we can wrench from biology in order to build a better future world. ‘Our lineage,’ she says, citing Bonobo, ‘is more flexible than we thought.’

On the face of it, Angier has written a book about science. Although it can be seen as being in some ways critical of Darwinism, it begins with a defence of what Darwinian science might have to say about the female body. Feminism has repudiated scientific arguments about the body at too high a cost, severing the mental from the sensual substratum of our lives. Germaine Greer devotes chapter after chapter of The Whole Woman to the monstrous inflictions and mutilations enacted on women’s bodies, mainly at men’s but sometimes at women’s own behest. Angier comes at the same problem from the other end. She has written a ‘celebration of the female body’; and science, including Darwinian science, can be mobilised in the service of that celebration: woman is an ‘evolutionary masterpiece’. Woman: An Intimate Geography is in this sense a kind of conjuring act. Angier knows how hard it can be for women to enjoy, as one might say, or take pleasure in themselves. She knows that celebration is close to incantation, like warding off demons in the dark. ‘I have made it a kind of hobby, almost a mission,’ she said in the introduction to The Beauty of the Beastly (1996), ‘to write about organisms that many people find repugnant.’ She is, one could say, a writer who honours her own loathing. Woman: An Intimate Geography is not the first feminist ode to joy which feels at moments as if it has been snatched from the jaws of fear.

Do women love women? Feminism – uniquely perhaps among political movements – has always had to wrestle with what its main protagonists are feeling and thinking, not only about their opponents, but about each other and themselves. In part because it assumes that one of the things patriarchy does best is to drive wedges between women, feminists have been spared the delusion of believing that harmony and shared political interest are necessarily the same thing (or that the second can be comfortably relied on to breed the first). In one of her most famous essays, ‘Compulsive Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’, Rich called on women to reject what she defined as the forcing house of heterosexual intercourse and turn instead to women – for love, for sex, for contact. Angier is firmly on the side of heterosexuality and even marriage. (In a bizarre twist, she argues that monogamous women – precisely, ‘married, conservative, Christian women’ – have especial orgasmic capacity, or rather claimed to have when questioned, which might make us wonder who this group of women were aiming to please.) But if the bonobos are crucial, it is because they seem to suggest that there are no heights of solidarity which women cannot reach, that they do love each other – or at least did once, in another species existence. ‘The original adult deep bonding,’ Rich wrote in her essay, ‘is that of woman for woman.’ The bonobo is the best living example we have of a gynae-cocentric primate world.