Why Modern Anxiety? Anxiety has always been with us, but what is anxiety in a technological society? If our tolerance for sensory stimulus is finite, when do we reach breaking point in our frenetic world with its 24 hour media, its visual onslaught, its relentless material aspiration? If happiness is found in moderation, what becomes of us in a world of extremes? These are the threads that run through this collection – with an occasional glance back at more innocent times. Emily Brontë forged, arguably, the most passionate novel in literature from an ascetic daily life inconceivable to most of us, accustomed as we are to distraction. Both over and under stimulated, seduced and sedated by easy-won pleasures – are we losing the facility to reach below the surface? Why Modern Woman? There is a focus in these pieces on the outer reaches, or extremes, of the romantic experience – impossible love, tragic love, disappointments that scar us for life. Are these 'female' themes, or simply attempts to describe the most human of experiences? Undoubtedly we see more writing by and about women, but after millennia of silence, of being almost entirely undocumented and without context – do we even know what a woman is? Ecclesiastes says there is no new thing under the sun, but perhaps a new perspective is possible – and what a weary world needs most.
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Lida Prypchan. Modern Anxiety, Modern Woman
Introduction
Absence
Anxiety
Women and The Novel
Anger
A Queen in Literature, a Slave in Reality
The Fate of a Brilliant Woman in the Century
Creative Work and the Androgynous Mind
A Funeral On Her Shoulders
And There Are Small Joys
Female Sexuality, A Social Issue
What Is Happiness?
Mirror Me
Nervous Hunger
Anatomy and Sociology
Frances: Woman of Passion
Single Again
Drunk With Love
Running Away
Madness Begotten of Love and Jealousy
Are There Only Happy Moments?
How Much Can You Do In Just Eighty Years?
A Turbulent Love Story
True Love
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The absence of certain people dogs us throughout our lives. It becomes a cross for us to bear because it reappears day after day, like an imploring phantom. Places become meaningless and people, interesting as they may be, no longer measure up to our expectations. When a relationship has been cultivated, lives become interwoven in a way that is not easily forgotten, leaving a deep imprint that transforms our interior into a cavern where refuge is hard to find.
… it reappears day after day, like an imploring phantom …
.....
In the words of Borges, “Evenings where I cherished your image, music reverberating with your presence, words from the past – would I could I smash it all to smithereens! In that ravine shall I hide my soul to flee from your absence, which shines perpetually and mercilessly like an intolerable sun, without setting? Your absence is as all-encompassing as any noose around my neck.”
What would have happened to a talented woman in the sixteenth century? Virginia Woolf says she’d have refused to marry the young man chosen by her parents; she would have run away from home and gone to London; she’d have shown up at the theater door and told the director how much she wanted to become an actress and he would have laughed in her face. An intelligent, talented woman born in that century would have gone crazy after running into so many difficulties. She would have committed suicide or ended her days in a solitary house in the countryside away from anyone else - half witch, half sorceress, the object of fear and ridicule. A woman with a talent for - let’s say - poetry, was a hapless individual in conflict with herself - all her circumstances including her own instincts were at odds with the mental state necessary for unleashing her intellectual powers
