This is so long, it's sickening -or- sorry guys, I got carried away
I’m just going to post a few comments here on the Victoria Ocampo piece. I figured I’d start with the shortest one first.
Anyways, I was trying to contextualize her writing as I was reading along, so I went on Wikipedia and looked her up. Here are some interesting little facts I found:
1. Ocampo came from a fairly well-off Argentinean family. They believed women should not be formally educated, so she was taught at home by a French governess. However, her family did let her sit in on a few lectures at Sorbonne when they traveled to Paris.
2. Wikipedia says she was married in 1917 “briefly� – I’m assuming this means she got a divorce, or her husband died.
3. She was an important Buenos Aires intellectual during the 1920’s and 1930’s – she wrote much of her work during this time period – In 1931, she founded the literary magazine Sur.
4. She was imprisoned for speaking out against Perón in 1953 for a short period of time.
5. In 1976, she became the first woman to be a member of the Argentine Academy of Letters.
The significance of all this info is that when I was reading, I kept in mind that this lady was from the upper class and that, while not trained in a formal school, she nonetheless appears to have been fairly well educated. Plus, she had access to an immense amount of Argentinean literature and contact with many Argentinean intellectuals.
I think it’s important to note that she does touch on class issues, but it is still from a position of privilege. I think it’s equally necessary to point out that she herself does not mention this. In fact, I had no idea where she was coming from until I Wikipedia-ed her. I don’t know how many women writers were doing this kind of thing during the 1930’s though, so I suppose I shouldn’t expect it.
Also, and I could be reading this wrong, but did anyone else get this sort of post-structural feeling when reading over some parts of her essay? I’ve been reading ungodly amounts of post-structural writing for my senior paper, so it might just be that I’m so overloaded that I see post-structuralism everywhere. I guess, specifically, I’m looking at the part on page 228 where she says, “The English thinker who affirmed that the masculine sex is sadistic by constitution and the feminine sex is masochistic has found, as I see it, part of the explanation of the problem – but only if you take away the words ‘by constitution’ and substitute ‘by force of habit.’� I read this as, men and women are a certain way not because there is something inherent inside them that makes them act the way they do, but that because they have done a certain act so many times (“by force of habit�), it has appeared as if it is something that comes natural. Or rather, the meaning of their acts is shifting and not tied to anything biological. I got this feeling on page 230 as well, where she’s talking about certain abilities meaning different things in different contexts. Again, I saw this as evidence of her understanding of meaning as unstable.
If I am reading this right, Ocampo seems ahead of her time. I didn’t think post—structural thought came into being until much later in the century. Could be wrong. Alright, I have written an obscene amount. Time to stop.
Love,
Sarah