HURRICANE NAOMI:

'I Am Victim' (Anne Applebaum, February 25, 2004, Washington Post)

[I]n an extraordinary, several-thousand-word article in New York magazine, Naomi Wolf, the celebrated feminist writer, has just accused Harold Bloom, the celebrated literary scholar, of having put his hand on her thigh at Yale University 20 years ago.

But Wolf's article is not merely about that event (a secret that she "can't bear to carry around anymore"). The article is also about the lasting damage that this single experience has wrought on a woman who has since written a number of bestsellers, given hundreds of lectures, been featured on dozens of talk shows and photographed in various glamorous poses, including a smiling, self-confident head shot on New York magazine's Web site this week. [...]

[I]n the end, what is most extraordinary about Wolf is the way in which she has voluntarily stripped herself of her achievements and her status, and reduced herself to a victim, nothing more. The implication here is that women are psychologically weak: One hand on the thigh, and they never get over it. The implication is also that women are naive, and powerless as well: Even Yale undergraduates are not savvy enough to avoid late-night encounters with male professors whose romantic intentions don't interest them.

The larger implications are for the movement that used to be called "feminism." Twenty years of fame, money, success, happy marriage and the children she has described in her books -- and Naomi Wolf, one of my generation's leading feminists, is still obsessed with her own exaggerated victimhood? It's not an ideology I'd want younger women to follow.

She should have chosen Allan Bloom for a mentor instead. Meanwhile, here's Camille Paglia on Harold Bloom:

In the early 1990s, to my vexation, European commentators sometimes misidentified me as a student of Allan Bloom -- whom they confused with my real mentor, literary critic Harold Bloom, my dissertation director in graduate school. The latter's massive new book on Shakespeare has recently inspired press queries about my connection with him. For the record: Harold Bloom was the first person to fully understand and encourage my vast project for "Sexual Personae," which as a dissertation drew on materials (notably about Shakespeare's treatment of sex roles) that I had been developing since my undergraduate years at the State University of New York at Binghamton.

I never enrolled in any of Bloom's courses at Yale, nor did I meet him until he imperiously summoned me in 1970: He had heard, via fellow students, what I was planning for my doctoral thesis, and he had also been told about my problem in finding a sponsor after my graduate-seminar teacher Richard Ellmann left Yale for Oxford University to complete his biography of Oscar Wilde. "I am the only one who can direct that dissertation, my dear!" Bloom grandly announced to me -- thus beginning one of the most fruitful professional relationships that anyone could wish for.

Bloom had not yet published "The Anxiety of Influence" (1973), which made him the leading literary critic in the world, but he had already achieved fame for his books on English and Irish poetry, which revolutionized Romantic studies. Bloom and I shared a respect for Freud, a love of great art, a drive for omnivorous learning, an instinct for epic sweep, a contempt for conformist careerism and dainty institutional etiquette and an unembarrassed openness to strong emotion and intellectual risk-taking. I preached the pop gospel to him with Warholite fervor, but at that time he shared Allan Bloom's scorn for pop.

Through the long, isolated and increasingly impoverished years when I could not get "Sexual Personae" published in whole or part, Harold Bloom's faith in the book and in my ideas was an enormous source of strength and fortitude. In today's campus climate of adolescent sexual paranoia, I wonder whether women will ever get the kind of generous, freewheeling mentoring I did from Harold Bloom. Perhaps that era is over -- gone with the feminist wind.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 25, 2004 8:31 PM