Are there two Panopticon Networks... (Clara B. Jones)

Are There Two Panopticon Networks: Male and Female?

Men and women write differentially of relationships, men with a concern for the universal, women for the “local.” Compare Wordsworth and Adrienne Rich (“I am present and local; but, I know my power.”); Flaubert and Virginia Woolf (“Nothing was so solid, so living, so hard, red, hirsute and virile as these two bodies for miles and miles of sea and sandhill.”). As a graduate student in upstate New York, no book impressed me more than Francoise Giroud’s autobiography, I Give You My Word. Her talent for communicating time, emotion, and place and her own role in it exposed a woman wounded by love yet open to future experience and change. My copy of the volume became worn as several other female students read it, also, each of us making comments in the margins with a pen of a different color. We were captivated by this woman, Minister for Women’s Affairs and Minister of Culture in Valery Giscard D’Estang’s cabinet from 1974 to 1977, who understood her sex so well. Writing of Alma Mahler in her 1988 biography, Giroud observed, “No, she was certainly not just anybody, this young woman around whom men never ceased to buzz…. Alma…had the feeling that she really was a perfect example of a superior human being…. This lofty idea of herself, so rare in women, this satisfied awareness of herself…was one of her striking characteristics.”. Giroud might have been describing herself.

I knew that the quotation did not describe me. I knew that I was driven to achieve only because I was afraid to fail. To lose face with my parents, husband, and professional colleagues was low, not lofty, leading to a reaction-formation identified by false pride, arrogance, and compensation. Aside from my grandmother Clara, Giroud is the only woman I have consciously modeled (attempted to conform to). This virtual absence of female models in my life became a sign of my early self, alone and precocious and emotionally impoverished. I am less in awe of Giroud today, but I am grateful for her role—or, my idea of it—in my psychological progression.