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In "A Room of One's Own," Virginia Woolf talks about how the struggle to be heard and taken seriously by a dismissive and mocking world leaves ugly traces in a writer's work-- how it distorts reasoning, undermines arguments, sharpens the tone. Woolf is talking about novels written by female writers of the past, but it seems to me that she could be talking about books by Germaine Greer or sermons by Jeremiah Wright or, I can't help thinking, the shifting self-presentations of Hillary Clinton:
One has only to skim those old forgotten novels and listen to the tone of voice in which they are written to divine that the writer was meeting criticism; she was saying this by way of aggression, or that by way of conciliation. She was admitting that she was 'only a woman,' or protesting that she was 'as good as a man.' She met that criticism as her temperament dictated, with docility and diffidence, or with anger and emphasis. It does not matter which it was; she was thinking of something other than the thing itself. Down comes her book upon our heads. There was a flaw in the center of it. And I thought of all the women's novels that lie scattered, like small pock-marked appes in an orchard, about the second-hand bookshops of London. It was the flaw at the center that had rotted them. She had altered her values in deference to the opinion of others.
[Then Woolf says of the two writers she feels have managed to wriggle free of these conditions, Jane Austen and Emily Bronte:]
What genius, what integrity it must have required in the face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking. ... They alone were deaf to that persistent voice, now grumbling, now patronising, now domineering, now grieved, now shocked, now angry, now avuncular, that voice which cannot let women alone, but must be at them, like some too conscientious governess...
If we were to contrast Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama we'd have to say that Clinton is one of those forgotten novelists, with an edge of rage warring in her with a penchant for excessive deference to the "divisive" politics of the past, and Obama is Jane Austen, speaking as Woolf said she did, with "freedom and fullness of expression." But I'd also have to say that what Clinton has weathered is far more horrifying than anything Obama has weathered—think of all the mean articles about her hair, about her glasses, about her name, about her every utterance and deviation from the well-scripted role of first lady. Given all this, I think it's a miracle that she has emerged as unscarred, as clear-thinking, as politically effective as she has.
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