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BITCHES AND SAD LADIES: AN ANTHOLOGY OF FICTION BY AND ABOUT WOMEN EDITED BY PAT ROTTER (New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1976. 445 pages, $225.) When I suggested to a friend that she consider Bitches and Sad Ladies for a course in contemporary women writers, she sighed, "I'd never get it past my curriculum committee with a tide like that." While I deplore such lexical prudery (and the committee would presumably be even more indignant at the language in many of the stories, especially coming from female writers), the phrase is not felicitous, particularly because the stories concern women who are too fully human to be simplistically labeled. Pat Rotter begins her brief preface by defining a bitch as "a woman who takes care of herself and seeks her identity from within," while a sad lady "needs to be taken care of" and destroys herself by wanting "to bury herself in a man." Most of the main characters are a blend of both, and more. Although fortunately the thirty-five stories are too varied to present a single viewpoint, a recurring motif is the woman who is indeed aware of the injustices and limitations of her relationships with men, but who has not yet found a satisfactory solution or alternative. The narrator in Sybil Claiborne 's "Flotsam and Jetsam" merely reverses the prevailing roles, casually using men as sexual objects and wittily noting their foibles and weaknesses. In other stories the woman's anger and resentment are released as bitter humor or translated into desperate self-protection or revenge. In Julia O'Faolain's "Man in the Cellar," for example, Una endures months of physical abuse from her husband who commands her to "laugh while I'm hurting you." Finally Una chains him to a brass bed in the cellar and departs for another country and a career of her own. In other stories the leading characters fantasize escape even if it means going mad in a lonely rented room ("Tearing," by Martha Blumenthal), disappearing into anonymity ("Dreams," by Sherry Sonnett), or willing their own deaths ("Notes on a Necessary Pact," by MJ7X. Fisher). Women in other stories wait endlessly for men and internalize their continuing oppression out of sick habit and hopelessness. In only one story, "Bertha Schneider's Existential Edge," by Andrea Dworkin, does the central character recognize the possibility of total love between women, and although she finds tenderness and sexual pleasure with "women who were good to me," she says she has been so brainwashed ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW51 by patriarchal attitudes of dominance and submission that she cannot love anyone with openness and wholeness. It is with relief that one reads the few stories which concern something other than the difficulties and insanities of women trying to maintain intimacies with men. Judith Rossner's "Some Thoughts on the Question of Being a Separate Human Being" shows a young writer coping with the reality of her mother's suicide. In her writing she explores the differences and similarities between herself and her mother. If her mother had been able to write, she concludes, "she might have digested the ironies of her life instead of letting herself be poisoned by them. Writing is my survival kit. My independence ." The narrator in Grace Paley's "The Long-Distance Runner" is a woman in her forties who takes up running and runs away from her nearlygrown children to recover her own childhood beginnings. The longest selection , and one of the finest, is Cynthia Ozick's "An Education." One theme in the story is the interweaving of art and life, a theme treated more obliquely in Anne Sexton's "The Letting Down of the Hair," which is reminiscent of her "Rapunzel" in Transformations. The narrator is a recluse who attracts thousands as she washes and brushes her long hair each day, letting it float down from her high window. People write her hair fan letters. Her sister Ruth writes, "I've even discovered what your hair means. It is a parable for the life of the poet." Unfortunately, Ruth hangs herself before the narrator can ask her more about the meaning of her hair, of her life. Almost all the...

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