If I didn’t already know it, keeping a blog for a couple of weeks shows me how creativity doesn’t just happen; it has to be sought, eked out.  Also, that no sooner does one announce a new creative era than weeks of listless TV-watching and net surfing ensue. 

In the interests of reviving my creative project, off to South Yarra library and get a nice, mixed haul: The Group by Mary McCarthy, Personality by Andrew O’Hagan, Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin, two books by Alberto Moravia (Boredom and Contempt), and Lady Chatterley’s Lover According to Spike Milligan:

… crippled for ever, with a dead willy, and knowing he could never have children, he was not really downcast — pissed off, yes — but not downcast. He could wheel himself about in a wheelchair and whistle “The Trout” by Schubert. 

Mark Ruffalo

While browsing the shelves, read the following blurb on a Susanna Moore novel:

Susanna Moore’s erotic landscape and her vision of woman — as witty, passionate, betrayed, noble — suggest the temperament and artistry of a new Jean Rhys.

I’ve read Susanna Moore’s “In the Cut”, an erotic book indeed, made into an even more erotic movie with Meg Ryan and Mark Ruffalo, the Mellors of the NYPD.  But what rivets me here is not the promise of more of the kind, but the vision of woman attributed to the writer, in particular, the word “noble”. What rivets me is how strange and wonderful it sounds in relation to women.  

I think of nobility as a combination of courage, vulnerability, stoicism, self-sufficiency and the submersion of personal desires for a greater good.  And even in today’s gleefully ignoble culture, I can think of some noble and womanly examples: Hillary Clinton fighting and conceding the candidacy for the US presidential election, perhaps Queen Elizabeth II to give the literal example. But even though these and other women may display nobility, think how unlikely it would be they were described as such.  Even the Queen. Perhaps nobility as a virtue is out of vogue, or nobility as a word or a concept has fallen into disuse.  Just as likely, however, is that nobility is seen as a male characteristic, something beyond or bigger than women. 

Consider how far it is from the lexicon of Australian journalists writing about prominent women.  The article in yesterday’s Age about Therese Rein by journalist, Katharine Murphy, is a case in point.  If one could manage to persist beyond the risible subheading, “A standout everywoman”, you could read that Rein “teared up” at the launch of one of her new “pet projects” when a young indigenous girl read a poem dedicated to her dead mother, that she was ”instinctively maternal, hugging [the girl], pressing lips to head”, that when you meet her, “your instinct is not that you are encountering some arch and grasping political creature, but a well-meaning person, secure in her extraordinary ordinariness, with a rock-solid moral centre”, and, coup de grace, you could read the view of ex-politician Warwick Smith and his apparently willing accomplice, the journalist:

“She’s such a nice girl. Oh, hang on, that’s not appropriate is it,” he says with a giggle.  “She’s a nice lady.  You can see her everywhere. You can see her at morning coffee, at a black-tie function, in the supermarket, on one of those beaches in Queensland,” and he trails off, considering all those images. We know what he means.

If a woman were to be ascribed the virtue of nobility, it’s not going to be an Australian woman.  For in this country, no matter who you are –wife of the Prime Minister, multi-millionaire, successful business owner –you’ll always be ordinary, always a Mum, always a girl.  In this country, the idea of woman is so paltry even the word “noble” shocks.