Women who read are dangerous
Laure Adler & Stephan Bollman
Editions Flammarion
March 2006
29€
Etre Une Femme – Michel Sardou
Hail Mary – The Monastic Fraternities of Jerusalem
Paris, August 15, 2010
1ère de couverture
What to think of such a gift? That’s the question that this wonderful, typically Parisian dog weather allowed me to raise on August 15th. And in one fell swoop, I could even pay homage to the Virgin Mary, for – if you didn’t already know – Mary was quietly reading when the archangel Gabriel came to tell her the good news (Gospel according to Saint Luke). Unfortunately, the story doesn’t say whether, as soon as Gabriel left, she picked up her book just as quickly – or not – to continue reading. I’m inclined to think that she didn’t waste a second getting back to it, but maybe things are different when you’re told you’re going to become the mother of God’s only son, and you’re already engaged to Joseph.
Marilyn lit Ulysse, 1952, Eve Arnold
Jokes aside, « Les femmes qui lisent sont dangereuses » examines women’s relationship to reading in Western art through painting and photography. The book does not refer to any rules of reading. You can read the texts as well as the images. You can start wherever you like. Even at the end (p. 146), if you like the vision of a certain Marilyn reading Joyce’s Ulysses. And we wonder (or no longer really wonder) what all these women find in all these pages. What they can live for – inside themselves – when the Earth keeps spinning, the others keep working on their files, going out clubbing, watching Secret Story 4, drinking glasses of rosé, doing Power Plate in their gym, picking the kids up from school, sleeping their daily 8 hours… But yes, what is this thing – a sort of « grabbing » phenomenon – that immediately sets a space-time framework that is in every respect « one of a kind » between selfish paradise and solitary elopement? And what becomes of us women?
Chambre d'hôtel, 1931, Edward Hopper
La Lectrice, vers 1880-1890, Jean-Jacques Henner
« From the moment they consider reading as a way of exchanging the narrowness of the domestic world for the unlimited space of thought, imagination and knowledge, women become dangerous. By reading, they appropriate knowledge and experiences to which society had not predestined them. »
Jeune fille lisant, 1850, Franz Eybl
Jeune Fille lisant, 1886-1887, Théodore Roussel
And « connoisseurs of the inner movements of the soul and psyche, reading gives women ideas! Sacrilege. »
A must-have for all dangerous women, and even more so for those on the way up.
Elisa Palmer