File spoon-archives/french-feminism.archive/french-feminism_1996/96-07-07.000, message 176


Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 07:01:29 -0700
From: dwalter-AT-ucla.edu (don walter)
Subject: Sacred prostitution


Somebody on a French-Feminism list referred me appovingly to The Sacred
Prostitute: Eternal aspect of the feminine, by Nancy Qualls-Corbett.  While
checking into that on our local library system, I also enountered Sacred
Prostitution & Marriage by Capture, by G.S.Wake, privately printed 1929.
The Wake thing is an amazing/amusing example of academic-language snickering
and nudging among The Boys, about How You Can Find Smut in the Classics
Curriculum--- a real throw-back!  And yet it is helpful to read such naive
stuff, to re-tune one's detectors, for noticing that kind of cloaking.  The
Q-C piece is a smallish paper-back by a Jungian analyst, in a _very_ jungian
series; I had to get my Jung-filter out of the attic, and dust it off, it's
been so long since I read anything in that specialized rhetoric.  What the
intructions of the filter reminded me was that I have always felt about
those folks, rather like my feelings about Christ versus Christians: Old
Jung was fairly valuable, at least early on, when he was trying to work
through his own individuation; but most jungians seem to me little better
than cheap sloganizers.  Qualls-Corbett is a little better than that, but
only a little: she adopts uncritically, for example, the inexpensive
Whiggishness of Simone de Beauvoir, concerning the truth and trustworthiness
of Frazer, Strabo, Herodotus and Michener (!).  And even Old Jung himself
seems to me not much more trustworthy than Freud, when either of them is
writing about prehistory.

  Jane Harrison may be out of fashion these days, but I prefer her attempts
to empathize with the Classical Greeks, and her version of the Great
Goddess.  And Page duBois is a post-modern contemporary of ours, who also
struggles to feel/think into/along-with the Differentness of those Greeks,
and the further differentness of Sappho in her time and culture.  I find
Qualls-Corbett's Sacred Prostitutes too much like Pretty Woman, whereas I
feel/think that duBois' Sappho, and the equally difficult-to-grasp Virgins
of Ita Sheres & Anne Kohn Blau (in their The Truth About the Virgin) are
more helpful and worthwhile exercises for our imagination and empathy.




   

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