A Feminist Response to
Miller's 'Misogyny'
by Holly Hofmann
Presented at The International Durrell Society Tenth Bicentennial Conference
University of Cincinnati
May 21, 1998

      In 1970 Kate Millett declared of Henry Miller,  "Miller is a compendium of American sexual neuroses, and his value lies not in freeing us from such afflictions, but in having had the honesty to express and dramatize them" (Sexual Politics 295). Her study of him in Sexual Politics rather sardonically salutes Miller for his contribution to society in articulating "the disgust, the contempt, the hostility, the violence, and the sense of filth" associated with sexuality which "had never so explicitly been given literary expression before" (295-6). Susan Griffin, in her 1981 publication of Pornography and Silence, made no bones about classifying Miller a pornographer for his treatment of 'physical love for women'(3).
       Miller is troublesome reading for feminist critics, and those who do not accuse him of pornography who have labeled Henry Miller a misogynist on the basis of his obscentity. Misogyny may be a strong term to apply to Miller's admittedly exaggerated and almost ludicrous tales of sexual exploits.  It seems to this author that Miller's greatest sin was in his consistent depersonalization of women. This more subtle form of contempt against women can be just as damaging as open violence, and therefore if Miller is to be considered a misogynist it should be more for this sin than for his general obscenity.
      The understanding that the hate and contempt which defines misogyny is based on fear is essential to the equation in properly evaluating Miller's intentions. The most preliminary examination of Miller's insecurities, resulting specifically from his relationship with his mother and his earliest sexual relationships,  reduces his bold talk to mere bravado, and demonstrates that his passive-aggressive approach to the women in his life fueled the anger and violence in his writing.
       Miller's domineering mother was an influence on him that he would later cite as having been damaging in the rest of his relationships with women. Louise Miller was a strict disciplinarian, largely undemonstrative, and had high expectations of Henry. Desiring that he take over his father's duties in the tailor shop, she vehemently disapproved of his writing. In Plexus Miller tells the story of being made to hide in the closet with his typewriter when his mother's friends would come to the door, so embarrassed was she of his writing (505).
      Hurt at his mother's disappointment, angry at being treated like a child, Miller remained unable to stand up to her well into his adulthood. His feelings of anger toward her intensified as time went on to the point of her dying day, at which time, Miller told Jonathan Cott in in a 1975 Rolling Stone interview, he thought of smothering her: "We never got along--never. Not till her dying day. And even then we were still enemies. Even then she was berating me and treating me like a child. And I couldn't stand it. And I grabbed her and pushed her back on the pillow. And then I realized the brutality of it--I didn't hurt her--but the very thought of doing this to such a woman!" (Cott 192).
      His inability to confront his mother was translated into a passive aggression that affected his relationships with other women. Throughout the rest of his life he repeatedly blamed his mother as being responsible for his inability to consummate his love for his first flame, Cora Seward, to extricate himself from his failed relationships, and for his soon-emerging pattern of escaping one woman through another. In a 1971 interview with George Belmont, when asked if his mother's influence had an effect on his attitude towards women in general, he replied, "I suppose there's a half-truth there. Nothing is as terrible as not feeling loved by one's mother, and feeling no love for her," (Belmont 161).
      The earliest example of Miller's sexual paralysis was in his adolescent crush on Cora Seward, a pretty blond who lived a few houses down in his Brooklyn neighborhood.  The two developed a fondness for each other, and Henry played the piano for her, took  her to movies, gave her flowers--but ultimately the relationship failed to develop into anything. Later, says Robert Ferguson in his 1991 biography, "He blamed [his mother] for the timidity that had prevented him from approaching Cora Seward as a human being and from taking her 'like a man'" (321). Miller also saw the Cora episode as a foundation for a series of failed relationships. "I usually took a beating in love affairs after that, repeating the patterns of my relationship with Cora," he said in Reflections (Thiebaud 127).
      Miller's paralysis was again evident in his failure to escape from his first sexual relationship, that with Pauline Choteau. After his initial pride in bagging a woman fifteen years his senior, he became obsessed and disgusted with the age difference. As hard as he had tried to start a relationship with Cora, he tried to get out of this one, but again without success. "Can't she hear me screaming it? I don't love you! Over and over I yell it, with lips tight, with hatred in my heart . . .with hopeless rage. But the words never leave my lips," Miller says in Tropic of Capricorn (338). Ferguson concludes, "Henry had to face that, after his failure to start an affair with Cora, his inability to end with Pauline constituted a second decisive defeat in love, and the cause of his defeat was once again his own lack of decision and passivity" (Ferguson 26).
      In his first marriage to Beatrice Wickens, he demonstrated an equally cowardly attitude in trying to end it, using another woman--this time June Edith Smith--to escape the situation instead of taking responsible action. Powerless to act on his will, he was happy to be caught with June by Beatrice and the landlord's daughter so that the situation was resolved without his having had to act.
      Miller compensated for his sense of powerlessness in his relationships with women by attempting to establish his manhood as a literary legend. In order to achieve dominance without being courageous enough in his personal life to actually dominate, Miller's writings depersonalize women and thereby reduce the threat of intimacy. In this way Miller's sexual bravado betrays his own powerful personal insecurities. Kate Millett says in Sexual Politics:

Miller staves off the threat of . . . woman's transcendence of the mindless material capacity he would assign her . . .through the fiat of declaring her cunt and trafficking with her only in the utopian fantasies of his 'fucks'.    That this is but whistling in the dark is demonstrated by his own defeating    experience with Mara, and even more persuasively by the paralyzing fear    which drives him to pretend--so that he may deal with them at all--that women are things.                                                                            (312).
      Miller's women are represented as faceless whores and body parts. The few who are named are quickly reduced to anatomy. Readers learn little or nothing about about their personalities; the only distinctions made between them concern their sex organs.
       Tropic of Cancer opens with a description of "Tania", a compendium of  "fat, heavy garters" and "soft, bulging thighs" who can "stuff toads, bats and lizards up [her] rectum" (5). Llona is a "wild ass snuffing pleasure", otherwise known as "one cunt out of a million" (6). There is Germaine, "a whore all the way through", who Miller applauds for her devotion to her art. In Tropic of Capricorn, Francie is remembered for her "strong Scotch teats and a row of white even teeth" (257).
      Miller's women function solely as his tool of sexual pleasure. He talks about taking two women at once (Sexus), swapping women (Cancer), going right from one to another (Cancer). He is surprised when they display emotion, because he thinks of them as objects. "Imagine that! Asking me if I loved her! I didn't even know her name. I never know their names." (Cancer 107)
       The most attention given in Miller's writing to any distinct female personality is the character of the infamous Mara or Mona, a thinly disguised representation of his second wife June, the love and disappointment of his life. While Miller does develop her character beyond her sexuality, she still appears in an unflattering light, portrayed as a lying, self-centered nymphomaniac. As Miller's reduction of other women characters to parts demonstrates contempt based on his personal fears, so his fear of being consumed by June is evident in his depiction of her. Miller freely admits in his passages on Mona how much he loved her and how much she disappointed him. As Ibib Hassan says in Literature of Silence, "Tropic of Capricorn's ode to Mara is a "romantic outburst of love and hate, fear and awe" (Hassan 78).
       June was angry and hurt to read what Henry had made of her when she first read Tropic of Cancer. Anais Nin tells us, "She wept and repeated over and over again, 'It is not me, it is not me he is writing about. It's a distortion'" (Diary 34). Nin's diaries show that June's sense of self threatened Henry. "Henry distorted June because of his neurotic love of his mother and his hatred of her, his need and repudiation of woman," she wrote (Diary 151). Henry felt frightened by June because she was not the submissive woman with whom he was most comfortable; she was a person in her own right, strong enough to threaten him with her dominance. As June told Anais, "He desires ugly, common women, passive women. He can't stand my strength" (Diary 25).
       It is telling that that Anais was the one female in Miller's life who amazingly escaped attack in his fiction altogether, and whom he treated with respect and admiration. It is no coincidence that she was the woman with whom Miller had his most healthy relationship, undoubtedly because she was never a threat to consuming him. Married to someone else, she never gave herself to him completely; she reserved a part of herself for her home with her husband, to which she could always retreat. In Reflections Miller tells how he asked her to leave her husband, and she refused. Her stand-offish approach allowed Miller to experiment as aggressor in a relationship rather than needing to express his aggression in his writing. Instead of reducing her in his fiction, he praised her in his nonfiction.
      However, Nin was well aware of Miller's tendency to depersonalize women in his writing, and in 1937, after reading a fragment of Tropic of Capricorn, Nin confronted him. She sent him a letter accusing him of  "reducing all women to an aperture, to a biological sameness", calling him "an ego in the crowd" dependent on his anonymity in the collective to protect him from intimacy, and identifying his fear as "fear of the immediate, possibly tragic, personal relationship" (Stuhlmann 307-8). In reply Miller admitted, "I don't want to deny whatever is true . . . what I am now I shall probably always be" (Stuhlmann 309).
      By the time he was an old man, though, interviewed and revered as a celebrity, Miller appeared to have changed his tune. He had become a veritable sage, a paragon of wisdom on sexuality. In a 1966 interview with David Dury, Miller spoke of how sick he was of the "constant harping on sex" in the public arena and claimed he was "fed up" with the whole sexual revolution, describing it as "an adolescent rebellion" in which "people are becoming commodities, especially women" (Dury 106-7). It is hard to miss the irony in Miller's disgust with sex talk as being "adolescent", considering the similar accusations which have been directed at his own writing style. When Dury questioned him on the label of misogyny, he responded,  "Masochism, misogyny--there's a little of both in all of us, isn't there? . . . But obviously I have no misogynistic feelings in the true sense. That's absurd!" (Dury 118,120).
      In a reflection on feminism published posthumously in Twinka Thiebaud's edited collection entitled Reflections, Miller responded to Kate Millett's attack, saying, "When I reread passages from those books I'm most noted for even I am shocked by my use of language. Especially in regards to women and sex, I can well understand the rage women must feel," and then explains, "I was a much angrier man when I wrote those first books than I am today" (Thiebaud 90, 92).
      Yet subtly evident in these late interviews is the chauvinistic attitude with which Miller had done real damage. While he takes care to "appreciate" the woman's interest in the liberation movement, he cautions the woman from becoming too "masculinized", in which case "she is the tragic loser" (120). "I am sincerely convinced that a woman's greatest reward comes from the role of stimulator and comforter," he told Dury in the same 1966 interview, "She's best when she's that way" (120). "I believe . . . submissiveness is the greatest quality in a true woman" (121)
      Although the eighty-year-old Miller as public sex-guru appeared to appreciate women as people more in late life than in his earlier writings, it is obvious that he still felt most comfortable with women serving nonthreatening, submissive roles. Although his vocabulary had changed considerably between his days in the Tropics and his late interviews, his early fears of the assertive woman remain apparent.
      Endless criticism has brought Miller under attack for his treatment of women, and his own self-defense has been largely unconvincing. His old age benevolence in recognizing women as people sounds suspiciously prompted and sexist. There is no way around the fact that Miller was an old-world chauvinist who was misogynist in his writings about women, and his pen was directed by his own fears and insecurities.
      Feminist criticism has as a number of ways to respond to this. Mary Kellie Munsil sees his "excesses" as a window into "the depths of male insecurity and despair" ("The Body In The Prison House" 290). Linda Williams suggests in her essay "Critical Warfare and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer" that an effective strategy of feminist criticism is to "use the 'arms' of the text against it to show how the text capitulates and contradicts itself"(33).What makes the deliberation so difficult for women is that although Miller's anger can be explained and his obscenity overlooked, violence cannot easily be disregarded.
      Women today reading Miller will only find so many ways to read him, because . his writing will never satisfy modern feminist expectations. Therefore I would suggest that perhaps the woman who best reconciled Miller's violent sexism with his writing was the one who was there at the time, Anais Nin. She was essentially his first feminist reader, an assertive woman in the dawn of modern feminism, surrounded by men with old-fashioned ways of thinking about women. Her perspective is vital to modern readers in determining how to respond to Miller's 'misogyny'.
      Nin understood that his voyeuristic gaze and his venomous pen were together both his gift and his tool of destruction. Miller spared no one, make or female; every person he met became material. "Henry always makes characters," June told Anais, "He made one out of me," (Diary 23). Anais herself reflected on Henry's "caricatural mind" soon after meeting him, writing in  her diary, "I will see myself in caricature" (Diary 11). She realized that Henry's "great passivity in action" which made him "write despairingly but act in no way to change his surroundings" was the force that made him "write violently, curse, and take whatever woman comes his way,"(Diary 357). Yet she did not excuse Miller for his depersonalization of women; she held him accountable for the way he had distorted June and reduced other women to bodies.
      Nin told Miller in 1934, "In Tropic of Cancer you were only a sex and a stomach . . . with each book you will create a complete man, and then you will be able to write about woman," (Diary 356). She saw that in his reduction of woman to anatomy, Miller protected himself from danger--but although he "saved himself in his work" (Diary 151) he consequently failed in writing well about women. Leon Lewis says that it was not until late in life that Miller "sensed that his method for describing and analyzing erotic experience was not appropriate for a man who was vitally interested in understanding the nature of feminine reality" (Lewis 45).
      Miller's portraits of women in his writing offer little of the literary value of his other descriptions, and angered the women in his life at the time just as much as they anger modern women. Not only did his sexism distort his perspective and thereby limit the potential of his writing from what it might have been, it also discredited much of his gift. But a writer can only write from what he is, from what he knows, and Miller never understood women.
      Had he been something other than he was, that is to say, had he not been so crippled by his early experiences with women, and so afraid of being dominated and consumed, his writing about women might have been more healthy, more complete. Henry Miller was who he was: human, incomplete, and sexist! But as a writer he had an extraordinary gift of exposing the raw realities of the humanity he saw and experienced in himself and others. Women readers today cannot reject him for his 'misogyny' without rejecting the essence of what made his writing powerful.

                          Works Cited

Belmont, Georges. "Henry Miller in Conversation." Conversations with Henry Miller.  Ed. Frank L. Kersnowski. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. 156- 167.

Cott, Jonathan. "Reflections of a Cosmic Tourist."  Conversations with Henry Miller. Ed.  Frank L. Kersnowski. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. 181-202.

Dury, David. "Sex Talk Goes Public: A Talk with Henry Miller." Conversations with  Henry Miller. Ed. Frank L. Kersnowski. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,  1994. 105-116.

Dury, David. "Henry Miller's Real Woman." Conversations with Henry Miller. Ed.  Frank L. Kersnowski. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. 117-129.

Ferguson, Robert. Henry Miller: A Life. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1991.

Griffin, Susan. Pornography and Silence. New York: HarperCollins, 1981.

Hassan, Ihab. The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett. New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1967.

Lewis, Leon. Henry Miller: The Major Writings. New York: Schocken Books, 1986.

Miller, Henry. Tropic of Cancer. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1961.

-----------------. Tropic of Capricorn. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1961.

-----------------. The Rosy Crucifixion: Sexus, Nexus, Plexus. New York: Grove Press,  Inc., 1965.

Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1970.

Munsil, Mary Kellie. "The Body in the Prison-house of Language: Henry Miller,  Pornography, and Feminism." Critical Essays on Henry Miller. New York: G.K.  Hall, 1992. 285-295.

Stuhlmann, Gunther, ed. A Literate Passion: Letters of Anais Nin and Henry Miller 1932- 1953. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1987.

----------------. The Diary of Anais Nin Volume One: 1931-1934. New York: The Swallow  Press and Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1966.

Thiebaud, Twinka, ed. Reflections: Henry Miller. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1981.

Williams, Linda R. "Critical Warfare and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer." Feminist  Criticism: Theory and Practice. Ed. Susan Sellers. Toronot: University of Toronto  Press, 1991. 23-43.