Page 13 - Boca ViewPointe - July '20

July 2020 Viewpointe, Page 13

Book Review from page 12 sex appeal, though without the hot flashes and other women continue to define themselves and seek out
disturbing biological results. Missing from her argument men, revive the embers of sexual passion, or recluse
the mid-nineteenth century, but her argument has little is recognition of the role of spouses, married men, who themselves. Over the years, women exploited herbal
in common with the “Grandmother Hypothesis.” Though often do provide a support system for their wives, and are concoctions, leeches, extreme surgery, divorce, madness,
she foreshadows Professor Mattern’s anthropological not insensitive to the despair of their life-partners. She suicide, hypnotism, voodoo, transplanting of animal
identification of the role of the older woman in primitive prefers to insist on a woman’s autonomy and necessary glands, tucks and Botox, bombardment with electrons.
societies like the Tiwi of Melville Islands, as well as in independence till the end. She argues that the association of older women with
traditional African and Afghan societies where older She quotes from the Diary of Countess Tolstoy married witchcraft derives from both insensitivity and fear men
women enjoy elevated status as mentors. and spurned by the aged genius author, who lamented: have regarding the hormonal changes that a woman is
Professor Greer rehearses the desperation plea, the “something is broken inside me--I ache inside and cannot undergoing.
affective fallacy, enunciated by Shakespeare’s Cleopatra control myself,” the novelist Iris Murdoch describing She celebrates such authors as George Eliot and
cited in the epigraph of this piece, in which the woman “an august and terrible pain,” the psychologist Helene Colette who conspicuously took young lovers. She
despondent by her own ageing assumes that her lover Deutsch noting “everything that was granted the female recalls the sixteenth century great Beauty, Diane De
(Antony) will necessarily be disappointed. She is prone being at puberty is taken back.” And she offers her own Poitiers, who in her youth enjoyed physical relations
to the opinion put forth by many feminists in books with summary: “The misery of the middle aged woman is with Henry II of France and, following menopause, went
titles like The Dangerous Age and The Summer Before a gray and hopeless thing born of nothing to live for, on to counsel him and even take charge of the children
the Dark. Menopause has a deservedly unappealing disappointment . . .” born to his new wife, Catherine de Medici; for which she
reputation. No one would welcome the biological She rehearses the efforts over the millennia for women was richly rewarded with wealth and estates. She also
changes that occur, though in all fairness it should be in history and literature to deal with their situation, cites one of my most beloved novels, Garbriel Garcia
noted that men also lose their vigor, youth looks and drawing as well upon her particular experiences. Some Marquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera, but fails to note
that it is indeed a romantic celebration of the menopausal
interlude. Florentino Ariza fell in love with Fermina Daza
when they were teen-agers. After she rejected him and
married Dr. Juvenal Urbino, he waited and waited and
waited. Some fifty one years later, widowed, Fermina
now accepts his proposal, and together they embark on
the steamship New Fidelity on the river Magdalena for
their belated honeymoon, perhaps not Professor Greer’s
“myth of geriatric love” but rather, for Marquez and me,
a novel journey of mature love and companionship.

Dr. Ronald J. Meyers, Emeritus Professor of English,
resides in La Paz. rmeyers@esu.edu. 

Rainbow After

The Storm

After an hour of heavy rain, wind, lightning, & thunder
the sun came out and an amazing rainbow emerged. 

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