A Difficult Woman Read Online Free Page A

allowed her to function independently at a time when such independence was largely seen as the prerogative of men defied nature. Characteristically, an achieving woman, instead of accruing admiration, became known as greedy and self-serving. She met a more hostile world, fended off challenges with a sharp tongue and prickly temper, built a potent set of defenses. Being a self-made woman was not at all like being a self-made man.
    The transgressive woman typically provides a troubling subject. To write about her empathetically is to display her temper, her anger, her rudeness. To explain these away does her an injustice; it denies the difficulties she faced in achieving her goals. Observers frequently describe Hellman as simply unliked and unlikeable by many, especially many women. I see another side of her, one much loved and cared for by a succession of friends who accepted or ignored the difficult parts of her persona because they so enjoyed the benefits of her warmth and wit and friendship. Her legendary anger and bad temper constituted part of a personality that was also generous, caring, hospitable, and womanly. The tension between the two parts tells us something about how twentieth-century women coped, howthey repeatedly compromised their private lives and reframed their public personas as necessity demanded and opportunity allowed. Hellman’s dual stance, simultaneously furious and nurturing, loving and dismissive, insecure and insistent, may well illuminate elements of gender that women have often feared to show.
    Lillian Hellman is a juicy character: her life is filled with sex and scandal, with spirited advocacy and victimhood. She might be the subject of one of the melodramas she wrote so well. If we delve into the context in which she lived we might discover something more. For Hellman illuminates the interplay between the historical moment and individual responses. She earned her laurels and she brought her troubles on herself. But she did so within a shifting and changing political, social, and cultural environment that constituted the century’s challenge. The persona and her reactions took on different colors as Hellman enacted them in changing contexts. Her capacity to contain (and to reveal) so many contradictory elements turned her into the perfect lightning rod, and thus the perfect subject for the historian.
    Literary scholar Rachel Brownstein points out that literary biography poses the problem of finding out how the character imagined herself. It allows great play for the biographer’s imagination—allowing the biographer to make the subject what she wants her to be. Political or historical biography shifts the emphasis to ask how the character related to the world around her—how she faced the world. In searching for the relational self, the historical biographer uses the individual as a window into a moment, a lens, a mirror. Inevitably that lens is clouded. But peering through Hellman, trying to experience the world in which she made political and personal choices and searched for a place, promises to provide a sense of how myriad ordinary folk made difficult choices under circumstances not of their own choosing. What can Hellman tell us, I ask, about the hope and anxiety that infused the war-torn and Stalinist worlds of fear in which she lived? What can she teach us about how any of us might react if we were faced with a choice between giving up a utopian dream and clinging to a false god? How would we behave if to achieve our goals we needed to abandon the rewards of constraint and appear rebellious? Would we, given the option, betray a friend or betray ourselves? These questions lead me to worry whether I do Hellman a disservice by using her life to access not only particular events but the larger cultural and social and even political processes of a moment in time. I do not know whether Lillian Hellman would approve of that, but I like to think shemight find it more useful