by Helen Garner
Our reliable knowledge of what menopause actually is and does remains disgracefully slight, Doctors are not yet able to distinguish symptoms of hormonal change from the effects of ageing. And one cannot fail to notice the punitive nature of medical treatments meted out to menopausal women, or the eagerness with which surgery is applied: ‘A man,’ says Greer, ‘who demands that his penis and/or testicles be cut off will be immediately understood to be deranged; a woman who for no good reason wishes to extirpate her uterus will be given every assistance.’ The only thing more shocking than Greer’s catalogue of the carnage visited on the persons of menopausal women over the last two centuries is the connivance of women in this charcuterie, their readiness to endure and request invasive, mutilating procedures for ailments which, according to Greer, might well have derived directly from the unbearableness of their female lot, or which could have been temporary manifestations of hormonal upheaval that in time, given patience and gentle treatment, would have eased gradually, as the natural change completed itself.
Greer unearths certain gruesome and pathetic case studies and applies to them a broader reading, more patient, and more womanly—feminist, if you like. She carefully examines the woman’s particular social and family situation, her history of loss and grief, details of which were present all along in the file but which the doctor, in his narrow focus on symptoms, had failed to take into account; thus, suddenly, these women in the grip of rages or depressions that looked like insanity become people struggling with bereavement—people whose motives are utterly understandable.
She calls oestrogen ‘the biddability hormone’, and suggests that at menopause, when the body ceases to secrete it, women may find themselves back in touch with a rage ‘too vast and bottomless’ to have been allowed expression during the thirty-five years of altruistic family life—that long process of ‘censorship by oestrogen’. ‘Many women only realise during the climacteric,’ she says, ‘the extent to which their lives have been a matter of capitulation and how little of what has happened to them has actually been in their interest.’
Yes, perhaps it is only at menopause—or towards the age of fifty when age shows in their faces and bodies—that women begin to grasp how deeply their lives have been defined and limited by men: by the physical fear of men’s violence, which has circumscribed their freedom of movement (and a daily glance at the newspapers shows us that even extreme old age offers us no immunity from this); but still more thoroughly, if more subtly, by the gaze of men. How can it ever be measured, the shaping, the formative effect on women’s lives and intellects and imaginations of being, for more than thirty-five years of their lives, under constant sexual scrutiny?
Around fifty, according to Greer and as many an older woman has observed, this gaze ebbs, and is withdrawn. One becomes, in the outer world of street and work, and often too within the family and the home, all but invisible. It is disconcerting, this gradual removal of a ubiquitous force against which, in order to survive as a social being, a woman has been obliged to learn to define herself. Invisibility is a very humbling thing, no matter how many times during the decades of eyeballing one cursed one’s fate and wrestled with it, becoming ‘strident’, ‘unfeminine’, ‘dikey’, ‘badly dressed’, ‘hostile’, ‘castrating’, and so on, in the process. But invisibility, writes Greer, which feels for a while like formlessness, like a non-existence, is the first taste of the freedom that is to come.
She slashes away in a most gratifying and invigorating manner at women’s fear of ageing, and more ferociously still at our spineless collaboration with men’s fear of women’s ageing, that pressure which slides many a woman towards an unthinking grab at the proffered hormone replacement therapy. Greer is not ‘against HRT’. She states plainly that if certain symptoms have been identified as menopausal, and if they become intolerable, they should be treated with hormones, and welcome to it. But she urges women not to rush in. She challenges us to examine our motives for taking HRT with more self-respect and scrupulousness than she believes we do. And what she is against is the proposal now being seductively articulated: that menopause is somehow old-fashioned and unnecessary: that menopause should be eliminated.
She insists that it is not a disease, but an essential stage in a woman’s journey towards death. Our children, at this time of our lives, grow up and leave; and we shall have no more. The end of motherhood, potential or actual, is a little death. The death of the womb brings with it a grief that is, in Iris Murdoch’s impressive phrase, ‘an august and terrible pain’. Menopause is serious. At the exact point where our external culture loses interest in her, menopause presents a woman with a challenge to respect and define herself in a new way. It may be a sombre way. ‘Calm, grave, quiet women,’ says Greer, drive youth-obsessed men ‘to distraction’. When I read this I thought it an amusing exaggeration. A week later I was being interviewed by a male journalist who, learning with surprise that it was a long time since I had gone out dancing in a club, bristled with disapproval, then burst out, ‘You don’t laugh much any more, Helen, do you!’ Yes, I do—but not at the same things; and I don’t feel obliged to crack jokes and kick up my heels just to keep a stranger comfortable.
Twenty years ago, when I was ploughing my destructive way through a series of ‘love’ affairs, I was taken aside one evening by a woman in her late forties who taught a yoga class into which I sometimes blundered. She wanted to give me a piece of advice, though she must have seen I was too addicted to emotional upheaval to be able to hear it. She said, ‘Helen—if you learn to know yourself, you may not even need a partner.’ The advice itself, at the time, went in one ear and out the other, but I have never forgotten her way of delivering it: she whispered it, as if it were too subversive to be spoken out loud. Germaine. Greer does not lower her voice, but the advice is the same; and it’s the kind of thing that people do not want to hear, because in our impoverished culture nobody can imagine anything more terrible than being solitary.
While reading The Change I did a little browsing through our suburban library’s sparse holdings on the topic of menopause. In one bracing text I came across the expression ‘sex-lazy’. Sex-lazy, apparently, is what a lot of women (and some men) become as they grow older. It’s not that they dislike sex. They sort of can’t be bothered. Sex has slid to a low position on their list of activities, and this the writer of the tract severely deplored. The term brought to my mind something I spotted a while back in a New Yorker piece on comparative attitudes towards clothing in France and the United States: the French, said this woman fashion writer, look with horror on American women’s loose, comfortable dress, and believe that such women are not facing up to their ‘erotic responsibilities’. I would like my disappointed journalist to know that this made me laugh, till tears ran down. ‘The very notion of [the older woman] “remaining attractive”,’ writes Greer, ‘is replete with the contradictions that break women’s hearts…Is one never to be set free from the white-slavery of attraction-duty?’ Be sexy, or be alone. Is this the choice that women are presented with, at fifty? If it is, suggests Greer, we should seriously consider the more challenging option.
‘Menopause doctors,’ Greer goes on, ‘see as one of their chief functions the curing of ailing marriages.’ An ageing wife loses interest in sex, while her similarly ageing husband is still keen. What is to be done? Why, drug treatment for the sex-lazy woman, of course, and a lot of work on herself, of a cosmetic, sartorial and surgical nature, so that the husband’s failing interest in her might be revived, or his straying eye brought back within the fold: because, after all, people will ‘persist in the irrational belief that regular psychosexual release is essential for the proper functioning of all individuals’. This is the attitude to which Greer most forcefully and satirically objects; and at this point many a reader thus far sympathetic might part company with her contentions. What about long, loving monogamous relationships? they ask. What is the husband to do with his sexuality?
Greer spins out an
anthropological phantasmagoria of Asian and Middle Eastern and African extended families, matrilocality, polygamous set-ups and the like, in which ageing women, she claims, are not obliged to remain sexually active against their will in order to be accorded status and dignity. It makes fascinating reading; but much good may these speculations do us, here where we live. They serve merely to highlight what we in the developed world have given up in exchange for relative health and prosperity, and to point up our lack of proper rites of passage, as well as the bleakness of our landscape of isolated, helpless little nuclear arrangements where, if sex is ‘the [only] cement of the family’, its decline (should this occur with the wife’s ageing) can cause the tight, inflexible structure of the couple to collapse.
To tell the truth, Greer is not very interested in long-lasting couples. Her experience of them is slight. Though she writes gripping accounts of splendid old women—Madame de Maintenon, Diane de Poitiers, ‘neither of [whom] would have looked good in shorts’—who despite their physical decrepitude kept the love and respect of kings until they died, her whole imaginative drive is towards solitariness.
And why not? For even the strongest partnership, these days, is liable to end in widowhood. Women live longer than men. We are likely, at an advanced age, to find ourselves alone; and then everything Greer has told us will apply, whether we were happily married or not.
Many chapters of this book sizzle with vigorous polemic. For example, Greer takes it right up to the late Simone de Beauvoir, who ‘aged ungracefully and ungratefully’ and ‘wasted time in bitter regret’. Greer sorts her out mercilessly for the ‘futile repining’ at growing old which fills and sours her memoirs. ‘Simone de Beauvoir is, she tells us repeatedly, an intellectual; notwithstanding, she faces the future as unprovided as any empty-headed beauty queen…It is as if she has no interior landscape…[Her] vanity and poverty of spirit…undermine the importance of her thinking, which could not bring her serenity or self-command.’
But the finest writing (and thinking) comes in the book’s two final chapters, ‘The Old Witch’ and ‘Serenity and Power’. With her generous intelligence working at full spate, Greer draws together material from women’s poetry, fiction, memoirs and letters into a beautifully complex and challenging statement, funny, calm and wise, which I know I will read again and again. Who could have predicted that Germaine Greer would reach this point? She looks poised to become not a witch, but a mystic.
1992
* Germaine Greer, The Chance: Women, Ageing and the Menopause, Hamish Hamilton, 1991.
On Turning Fifty
EARLY IN 1992, the year I turned fifty, my fifth book, Cosmo Cosmolino, came out. The fact that there had been a gap of eight years since my previous novel, The Children’s Bach, was much remarked upon by journalists, although in the intervening time I had published a collection of stories, written two screenplays and had them produced, and continued to earn a living by various forms of journalism. One critic said that to let such a gap occur ‘in one’s career’ was ‘dangerous’. This way of thinking about work—a treadmill, never relaxing, always looking back over your shoulder, hearing footsteps—seems to me at worst exhausting and corrupting, and at best simply beside the point.
The word ‘career’ is one I can never imagine applying to what I do. ‘Career’ is a word that can only be applied from without. It’s a word with connotations of speed and certainty, of a smooth forcefulness, like the trajectory of a comet seen from a great distance. How can one speak without irony of one’s own career?
It’s unimaginable, to me, to use the word ‘career’ to refer to this daily slog; the absolute inability, while you’re working, to judge whether or not what you’re doing has any value at all—thus, the blind faith and grim stubbornness required in order to keep going; the episodes of elation, the occasional sense of hitting your stride, or of being in tune with the force that creates—the feeling that now you’ve got it, now you can’t put a foot wrong—then the guilt you feel, when your work’s going well, that you are allowed to spend your days having this much fun and ultimately being paid for it, while others have jobs in offices or schools, and bosses, and laid-down work hours they have to stick to—then the arrival next morning at your desk, the dropping away of the floor from under your feet as you see the thinness of what yesterday seemed so rich and right; the picking up of the pen, the dogged keeping going—the sickly envy of people with jobs, because they have got bosses to tell them what to do next, and work hours that finish at a certain regular time so they can go home, and holidays, and secretaries, and superannuation—and they’re allowed to ask for help; the pathetic pleas for encouragement you make, invariably to the wrong person—a child, a husband, a parent—someone who can’t possibly know the right thing to say, or who is in the grip of some barely conscious hostility towards you that they can’t help expressing at the most destructive possible moment; the hatred of your own name, because of its connection with this slogging labour and with the expectations which you have caused the outside world to have of you, and that you’re afraid you’ll never live up to; the despair of feeling trapped inside your own style.
This last may be a particularly middle-aged despair; or perhaps it’s one that strikes just before a new surge occurs in your work. The Caribbean writer Clarice Lispector said, ‘Even one’s own style is an obstacle that must be overcome’; and the Cubist painter Georges Braque, ‘One’s style is one’s inability to do otherwise.’ I once wrote to Manning Clark, grumbling that I was ‘sick of my style’. He wrote back a postcard saying bluntly, ‘Your style will not change until you do.’
I like to think that if there was a big gap in my so-called career, it was for the simple reason that I had nothing to say.
The idea of career also ignores something that my working life has taught me: you write a novel, and you think, good, right, now I know how to write a novel. WRONG. You found out how to write that novel; but what you nutted out for that one is not going to help you to write the next. Each new bout of work demands a new approach. You have to teach yourself everything afresh, every single time, and then when you’ve learnt that, you have to teach yourself a whole lot more.
This too may be specially true of middle age. Because at middle age, life gets serious. At middle age you have to learn the language with which to speak of death. This is the time when a kind of sombre colouring can enter your thinking and feeling, and thus your work. It can also be a difficult transition—and perhaps it’s just as difficult for your audience.
Once an artist has become reasonably well known in her society, specially if it’s a rather small one, like ours, there’s a danger that she will be pinned down. People dislike change. If they’ve settled into your already established content and style, they like you to stick with it. They want the comfortable feeling of opening your new book and settling down to an afternoon of what they’ve come to expect of you.
There’s a problem, too, specially in Australia, or if you belong to my generation and kind of education and social experience, anyway—a problem of embarrassment. People are embarrassed, for example, about religion, they’re embarrassed about God, they’re embarrassed by biblical imagery and angels and ideas of redemption and salvation. The people I’m thinking of want materialism and realism, and if that’s not what you’ve written this time, they’ll bloody well distort your book till that’s what they get out of it—anything rather than read what you’re actually trying to say.
I used to suffer a lot from what critics said. But after Cosmo Cosmolino I was able to see the reviews as a cavalcade of attitudes. I enjoyed them as a spectacle. They fascinated me and made me laugh. This is how I knew that suddenly I was a grown-up. I did not shed a single tear.
The grand thing about being fifty is how tough you can be. You don’t have to care what people think. You can let things rip, in your work, that good manners and being lady-like would once have inhibited. At fifty you can stop wanting to be nice.
And, anyway, who wa
s ever silly enough to imagine that you could be an artist and a nice person? How can a woman be an artist and nice in the way women are supposed to be? Who can be the oil in the social machine when she’s got the fiercely over-developed observing eye that the artist has to have? The two don’t match. They can’t. The nice thing is not to notice. But artists must notice. They have to stare coolly, and see, and remember, and collect. That’s their job, their task in the universe.
I don’t see how you can be an artist without causing pain. I don’t mean hurting people on purpose, for revenge, or idly, or to settle accounts. But what you see, if you’re really looking, is often what people wish you wouldn’t see.
A good friend of mine recently reread, after twenty-five years, Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary. I asked her, ‘How does it last?’ She looked uncomfortable, then blurted out, ‘I hated it. It’s cold, it’s horrible, it’s cruel—I couldn’t bear it.’ We were both shocked. To two educated readers of our generation this was heresy. Soon after this, my friend went to visit a wonderful old woman we know who is a tremendous, voracious reader. In her eighties, she’s the widow of two painters and has known many writers. This is a woman who, when I once admired her trenchant turn of phrase, laughed and said, ‘The men in my life, when women spoke, had an attention span so short that if I wanted to be heard I was obliged to haiku everything.’
My friend phoned me after her visit to this woman. ‘I told her,’ she said, ‘about hating Madame Bovary. I thought she’d be scornful of me—but she laughed and said, “Good. When a woman realises that she hates Madame Bovary, darling girl, that’s when she knows she’s come of age.” ’
