Francine Prose says she has often been accused of creating female characters who are “dishrags–well-meaning souls buffeted by the forces around them.”
But the squirming, excessively pierced Angela Argo, a young student in Prose’s new novel, “Blue Angel,” is anything but a dishrag.
Angela’s parents, fellow students and professors fear her. Dressed in her black leather jacket, chains and studded dog collar, Angela hatches a diabolical plot to bring down her creative writing teacher, Ted Swenson.
In the end, Angela ruins Ted.
Early in the novel, one of Ted’s students asks, ” `Is the devil ever female?’ ” Angela provides the answer.
Prose, who recently visited Chicago, says the book gave her a chance “to work with stereotypes and invert them–to take the male predator and turn him into a poor, blustering, victimized professor.”
The author of 13 novels, as well as many essays and works of non-fiction, Prose said:
“It’s a fact that there once were hideously abusive professors who would sleep with every woman in class. It was like, `Honey, if you want an A, you’d better show up after class.’ “
But Prose, 53, who teaches writing at the New School in New York City, said she thinks charges of sexual harassment on campuses have now gone “too far the other way.”
“It has poisoned relations with students,” she said. “I can’t tell you how many faculty members say they would think a million times before even touching a student on an arm.”
Prose said the national preoccupation with sexual harassment is merely a cover for “sexual hostility, real gender warfare–this feeling that guys can’t be trusted.”
That’s why she chose, in her latest novel, to revive–and put a twist on–Josef von Sternberg’s 1930 film “The Blue Angel,” (which in turn was based on a novel by Heinrich Mann). In the movie, the stuffy Professor Rath is overcome by his obsession with the sexy showgirl Lola Lola, portrayed by Marlene Dietrich. In the end, she turns him into her clown.
Prose’s “Blue Angel” is the updated version–the way the tale would unfold if an aging professor fell for one of his students at the dawn of the new millennium.
Ted has taught for 20 years at a second-rate private college in upstate Vermont. He has had many crushes but never acted on them; indeed, he professes to be happily married.
His two novels were published so long ago that they are now out of print. Blocked for more than a decade on his third novel, Ted finds himself in an unhappy rut, teaching creative writing to students who are profoundly and hilariously untalented. Indeed, many churn out work about humans having sex with animals.
Except for Angela, “A skinny, pale redhead with neon-orange and lime-green streaks in her hair and a delicate, sharp-featured face pierced in a half-dozen places.” Angela asks Ted to read the beginning of her novel.
Ted is so impressed he at first suspects her of plagiarism, then determines Angela has actually written the work. “Teaching is a lot more fun if he has even one student who might benefit from, or understand, what he’s saying,” Prose writes.
Prose describes the college writing class, where a student’s work is discussed by her peers as she is “bound and gagged and forced to watch her darling dismembered before her eyes.”
A graduate of Radcliffe and Harvard, Prose never offered her own writing up to the unsparing criticism of her fellow students. But as a creative-writing teacher, she says she is most like Ted: “Overidentified with the student whose work is being discussed. I feel like I am that student–that it’s my heart’s blood that’s about to be spilled.”
After a series of silly gaffes, it is Ted’s blood that is spilled–before a board of investigation convened to look into Angela’s allegations of sexual harassment against him. Ted likens it to “a witch-burning event, the incineration of a Puritan teaching assistant caught reading Shakespeare on Sunday.”
The hearing is Prose’s way of re-examining political correctness and sexual harassment.
“Let’s see if this is not doing something unfortunate and negative to humanity,” said Prose. “Puritan culture and heritage are such an unforgiving, harsh strain in our culture. It’s why Europeans think we’re so dorky.”
Prose grew up in Brooklyn, the daughter of two physician parents. Her father was a pathologist; Prose jokes that she was raised in a morgue.
“But I didn’t think it was particularly strange. It was my childhood,” she said.
Her mother, a dermatologist, is still practicing in Brooklyn. “My mother never made me feel that, because I was a girl, there were things I couldn’t do,” she said.
Her mother’s sister, a high school biology teacher, also lived with the family. “She was one of those wonderful, old-fashioned, city school teachers who was into culture with a capital C–the opera, the museums, the symphony,” Prose said.
Prose said her aunt, Beatrice Reuben, was a “huge influence” who read to her steadily. “As a child, I was a big reader, reader, reader, reader, going to the public library and taking away stacks of books–as many as I could take out.”
While at Radcliffe, Prose realized she did not want to live in academia. Her husband, Howard Michels, an artist, won a foundation grant, and the couple moved to India, where Prose began her writing career with her first novel, “Judah the Pious.”
Prose and Michels then moved to upstate New York. “Our existence was haphazard,” she said. “I would get a grant or my husband would sell a painting, and we’d have a little more to keep going.”
She took jobs as a visiting writer at colleges in Arizona, Utah and Iowa. Her husband became her “first reader.” Meanwhile, the couple had two sons, Bruno and Leon, now 21 and 17.
After writing the now-defunct “Hers” column in the Living Section of The New York Times, she began writing essays, travel articles, profiles and other non-fiction for magazines.
Prose says she prefers writing fiction because it’s more fun, but also finds non-fiction satisfying and utilitarian. “As a writer, I live an isolated life, and it can be hard to figure out what’s going on out there,” she said.
Her recent feature story for The New York Times Magazine on the dumbed-down women’s Web sites employed her trademark satirical tone.
“Though no one will admit it, the prevailing wisdom is that women are stupid and narcissistic, desiring only mindless entertainment,” she wrote.
Prose’s next book will focus on women. As a fellow at the New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers, Prose says she will use the library’s considerable resources to research a book about women who were great sources of inspiration in history.
Prose said her goal in writing is to hear readers say they were called to dinner but couldn’t put down her latest book. “If you’re reading a book that does that,” she said, “it can’t help but remind you why you like reading.”
