ion, may have the anger of its (male) inhabitants coming. As he acknowledges,
If the development of civilization has such a far-reaching similarity to the development of the individual and if it employs the same methods, may we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization--possibly the whole of mankind--have become `neurotic'? . . . I can at least listen without indignation to the critic who is of the opinion that when one surveys the aims of cultural endeavour and the means it employs, one is bound to come to the conclusion that the whole effort is not worth the trouble, and that the outcome of it can only be a state of affairs which the individual will be unable to tolerate (Freud 91-92).
In a fully integrated society, it would appear, the individual is not entitled to anger but must find a way to come to terms with the ineluctable process of the higher good. But even Freud says society may be a sham. If that is so--and it is the feminist contention that this is precisely the case for women in contemporary society--then the assertion of individual or indeed idiosyncratic actions in that society is to be expected, perhaps applauded. For such a society it on its face intolerable.
It is fair to ask what would happen to feminist fiction if women as a group were to actually achieve anything like the utopia of full social and psychological equality, if the society were to somehow be made unambiguously tolerable for women. Undoubtedly some feminist art would be overtaken as historical curiosity and die as an emblem of vital art. But this presumes that the artistic temperament would stop in the current period of social criticism and not develop along with the rest of civilization to another troubling level of challenge to normative culture. In any case, the literature of the feminist social critique is very much aborning and has some way to ...