My Professor, Myself

Many readers will come to Terry Castle’s newest book still buckled over from “Desperately Seeking Susan,” a hilarious account of Castle’s self-abasing semifriendship with the grandiose Susan Sontag. Written for the London Review of Books in 2005, it is reprinted here along with five other previously published, personal essays from 2002 to 2007. Like the Sontag article, most of these offer a darkly humorous look at one of Castle’s assorted, esoteric obsessions, from the Great War to the saxophonist Art Pepper to the airbrushed rooms of home decorating magazines. Only the long title piece, comprising the book’s latter half, makes its debut in this volume. The older essays nevertheless assume a host of new meanings when brought together and capped by the saga of Castle’s traumatic seduction and abandonment, in her first year of graduate school, by the eponymous Professor. Taken as a whole, they form a sequel to Castle’s other collection of general-reader essays, Boss Ladies, Watch Out! Essays on Women, Sex, and Writing, and, I suggest, an oblique follow-up to her best-known scholarly work, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture.¹

Marking Castle’s shift away from “straight” eighteenth-century literary studies, Apparitional was a bold exploration of the “ghosted” lesbian, derealized and often denied to be sure, but nonetheless hauntingly, recognizably present throughout modern culture—a category Castle insisted was hardly arcane and even (contra Judith Butler) reasonably stable. Through readings of the figure of Marie Antoinette as well as works by Daniel Defoe, Denis Diderot, and many others, Castle challenged both the Foucauldian truism discounting lesbian desire before 1900 and the feminist tendency to recover minoritized lesbian writers rather than explore the spectral images of lesbianism recurrent in the dominant culture. Like Apparitional, the narrator of The Professor knows a lesbian when she sees (or fucks) one, all the more so when this identity is still somewhat ghosted—as it is with Sontag or the reclusive painter Agnes Martin or the randy, closeted Professor herself. Despite its very different idiom, The Professor also arguably builds on Apparitional’s scholarly findings by evoking the phantoms of odd-girlness within a variety of seemingly unlikely mainstream discourses.

“Courage, Mon Ami,” for example, details Castle’s long-standing, ghoulish fascination with “the filthy minutiae of 1914–18 trench warfare” (7), along with her pilgrimage to the grave of a great-uncle, killed on the battlefield in 1918 and buried near Amiens. Castle confesses bewilderment at her unladylike penchant for military history, and even friends are put off by her expanding collection of musty first editions and macabre souvenirs. But an early reference to The Well of Loneliness—its war chapters inspiring further research into “butch lady–ambulance drivers at the Western Front” (7)—would seem to offer a clue. Indeed, Castle ultimately parses her “odd questing” (32) in explicitly gendered terms: as envy of men heroically facing down death and shame at the cowardice she attributes to women. We may question Castle’s denial that history offers any female models of comparable physical courage (what about the Stephen Gordons, not to mention women soldiering in more recent wars?) even while grasping the point that identification with a warrior uncle helps renounce the hapless femininity Castle associates with her mother. It only makes sense, we realize, that the author of Apparitional should seize on the ghosts of manly men to trope her own embattled, alienated, and vulnerable experience of gender.

If The Professor and Other Writings instantiates some of Castle’s prior theoretical claims, it is more obviously, of course, an exercise in memoir. (In this way, too, it is anticipated by Apparitional, which actually includes two personal essays.) “Courage, Mon Ami,” “Sicily Diary,” and “Travels with My Mother” all involve touristic expeditions, and the book as a whole might be seen as a kind of cathartic, psychological travelogue. Accordingly, the chapters proceed in the order they were composed, their chronology tracing not events as they occurred but the writer’s process of delving back...