Book Review: Swooning Beauty: A Memoir of Pleasure by Joanna Frueh

As a young scholar and journalist there was one word I was trained to expel from my vocabulary: “I”. Personal feelings, opinion, comment, did not belong in a news story or a piece of academic analysis, I was firmly told, and after a decade or more of conditioning even now, in a blog world in which such injunctions look antique, my finger still hovers momentarily over that dangerous key, before making the plunge to the personal pronoun.

If you were to look the absolute opposite approach, then Joanna Frueh’s Swooning Beauty: a Memoir of Pleasure could be a fine example. Freah is an art historian and performance artist, and both of those frameworks are evident in this memoir, but it is the personal nature of the text that is dominant. This is an account of a time of loss and pain in her life – the death of both her parents and a divorce come in quick succession. But while she’s understandably struck down by this trio of losses, she’s also determined to build herself back up – psychologically, but very much through the mechanism of her body. Self-pity it seems is not in her make-up, or at least not in her writing.

For Frueh there’s certainly no mind/body split – both are open to any experience, any possibility. If she sometimes gets too mystical, too New Age for me, that doesn’t mean she’ll be that for every reader, and her determination to live in the moment, to be inspired, and inspiring, can be uplifting:

…late August, dragonflies appeared in my life…. I spotted a small metallic bronze dragonfly above some pink cosmos and lavender… Within the week, I noticed a large one… lying on the paved walkway about three feet from the entrance to the building that I teach in. … At first I assumed it was alive, but I touched it and it didn’t move. The stillness of death had found the dragonfly, as it had found my parents… Part of me wanted to leave the insect where it was, undisturbed. But the part that moved me to action wanted to protect its intact beauty, so I took the dragonfly to my office and set it on my desk. Students and colleagues remarked on its perfection and size, and I enjoyed telling them the story of my finding it, even though I felt a twinge of sadness each time: why had this animal magically offered itself to me? And why was it dead? After a month or so, I brought it home, then eventually laid it in one of the backyard flowerbeds.

That passage pretty well sums of Frueh’s writing, and it seems, life: she lives in the moment, embraces it in every detail, in a way that I can only admire, although I doubt, as a “big picture person” I could emulate it. She always stops to smell the flowers.

Although there’s little overt theory, this is also a passionately feminist book: one of its conceits – not as developed as I might have liked it– is her feeling that at this point in life she is “becoming a man”. I came away from Swooning Beauty without being entirely clear what she meant by this – sometimes it seems she is appropriating traditional male prerogatives and powers, sometimes it is a bodily sensation of the phallus as a symbol of power, but perhaps non-traditional male power, what she calls the “fairy phallus”. Frueh nods to Susan Bordo’s The Male Body and its definition of “the masculinist phallus as delivering conventional male force”, but indicates there can be others, one of which she finds, somewhat curiously, in Mel Gibson. This is not really Mel Gibson the actor (perhaps luckily in light of recent events), but a fantasy character created by viewing his movies, particularly Braveheart.

Article Author: Natalie Bennett

Natalie is the editor of My London Your London, an independent cultural guide featuring theatre, gallery and museum reviews, and also blogs at Philobiblon, on history, culture, Green politics and all things feminist. …

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