Last book I read: Imagining Characters (A.S. Byatt and Ignes Sodre)
This would have to be one of the best Literary Criticism pieces I've ever read. It's written in a dialogue form, a recorded conversation between psychoanalyst Ignes Sodre and A.S. Byatt, who has been hailed as the George Eliot of her generation. For me, though, this description doesn't at all do Byatt any justice because she, on her own, is worthy of being seen as a literary giant, right up there with Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Jane Austen, and George Eliot.
The conversation being between two women, it goes without saying that the feminist undertow figures strongly on the book's pages. Nothing radical is presented, at least not the in-your-face kind, although for female readers, the seemingly innocuous ideas would rightly come across as stronger than they would to the casual (read: male--no offense meant) reader.
To put it in a nutshell, the two authors discuss books written by women, giving them a motley richness of readings--mythical, biographical, archetypal, psychoanalytic, structuralist, feminist, etc. Some of the pieces they discussed (and the ones I liked best) were George Eliot's Daniel Deronda , Charlotte Bronte's Villette and Toni Morrisson's Beloved.
Here are some insights which I found really noteworthy:
1. Coleridge's idea of life-in-death, from his "Rime of the Ancient Mariner", is a recurring discussion thread in the conversations. It's not surprising for such a dark theory to be associated with the texts, as the texts' writers are women who, at some point in their lives, found themselves bound by the patriarchal social structure in which they lived, which, to some--or more--extent, must have thwarted their supposedly "ideal" (again, as expected by society) perception of how they should have lived their lives. A life strictly patterned (for the sake of conforming in order to avoid stigmatization) after the dictates of a seemingly "moral" or "correct" society would eventually prove to be a form of death, after all. Upto this very day, the emancipated woman is looked down upon; if at all admired, it is done so begrudgingly and with reservations.
2. One of the most beautiful parts of the book is where Byatt dips into Beloved for the section where Sethe, the main protagonist, arrives at the breaking point, having punished herself for so long in desperate longing for a lost child, Beloved, whom she calls "her best thing" and Paul D., her lover, corrects her, saying, "You your best thing, Sethe. You are" (p. 273). I remember having been moved by the line, as well, while I was reading the novel about a year ago. One of the remarkable differences in the treatment of men-women relationships between literature written by men and those written by women, according to Byatt in the discussion of Villette, is that in the former, women are made to respond to masterfulness whereas in the latter, women respond to kindness (ch. 2). Both authors agree that Paul D's statement embodies their belief that the true literary heroes are the men who see women for what and who they are in themselves, their intrinsic make-up as opposed to their relation to the external world; that prior to being daughters, mothers or slaves (in African-American literature, especially), women are foremost women, and no one has the right to take this from them, regardless of whatever costumes get thrown their way by society.
3. Below is a passage from chapter 6, stated beautifully by Sodre:
"...however horrible the past, you can only live and be sane and integrated if you live in contact with it. The connection with beauty is important--the sense of hope and the will to create a better life are deeply connected to the ability to preserve beauty and goodness in the internal world. One of the fundamental ideas in Kleinian psychoanalytic theory is that sanity depends on the capacity to retain a good, trusting link with good figures in the internal world--the capacity to survive loss through the internalisation of the good experience." (p. 221)