Primitive Passions: Men, Women, and the Quest for Ecstasy

by Marianna Torgovnick

Overview

Marianna Torgovnick's Primitive Passions investigates Westerners' profound attraction to cultures that we call "primitive." Torgovnick explores the stories of Carl Jung, Isak Dinesen, D. H. Lawrence, and Georgia O'Keefe and the ways they used the primitive as a medium for soul-searching and personal fulfillment. Brilliantly linking literature, art, psychology, and cultural studies, Primitive Passions provides insight into our very notion of the exotic.

"Primitive Passions intends to provoke thought, not to tell you what you already know and for that reason alone it's extraordinary."—Walter Kendrick, New York Times Book Review

"A powerfully argued, impassioned, and intelligent exploration of the 'primitive' in our culture and in ourselves. Like Marianna Torgovnick's previous work, it is certain to be much discussed and provocative."—Joyce Carol Oates

"An inspiring effort to bring gender to bear on matters of race, ethnic identity, and spirituality."—Susan Gubar

"A fascinating, wide-ranging and provocative tour of twentieth century Western culture."—Cynthia D. Schrager, Women's Review of Books

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226808376
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	10/01/1998
Edition description:	1
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Marianna Torgovnick is professor of English at Duke University and director of Duke’s New York Program in Arts and Media. She is the author of numerous works, including Primitive Passions: Men, Women, and the Quest for Ecstasy, Gone Primitive: Modern Intellects, Savage Lives, and Crossing Ocean Parkway, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Pt. I: Men
Ch. 1: "What an Ecstasy It Would Have Been!": Gide and Jung in Africa
Ch. 2: "Something Stood Still in My Soul": D. H. Lawrence in New Mexico
Pt. II: Women
Ch. 3: Loving Africa: Memoirs by European Women
Ch. 4: Dian Fossey Among the Animals
Ch. 5: "The Bones and the Blue": Georgia O'Keeffe and the Female Primitive
Pt. III: Trends and Movements
Ch. 6: New American Indian/New American White
Ch. 7: Of Drums and Men
Ch. 8: Medicine Wheels and Spirituality: Primitivism in the New Age
Ch. 9: Piercings
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index

What People are Saying About This

Joyce Carol Oates

A powerfully argued, impassioned, and intelligent exploation of the 'primitive' in our culture and in culture and in ourselves. Like Torgovnick's previous work, it is certain to be much discussed and provocative.

Editorial Reviews

Primitive Passions intends to provoke thought, not to tell you what you already know, and for that reason alone it's extraordinary. -- New Yorker

Walter Kendrick

Since the early 20th century, adventurous white European thinkers have pursued primitive places, cultures and states of mind, observes Torgovnick (Gone Primitive) in this lucid, freewheeling interdisciplinary study. Like many literary critics who've branched out into anthropology and cultural studies, Torgovnick, the chair of Duke University's English department, brings considerable critical skills to a wide range of cultural texts, tracing a fascination with the primitive from modernist literature to the New Age. The results are scattershot but always illuminating. In the writings of Carl Jung on North Africa, of D.H. Lawrence on New Mexico, Andre Gide on the Congo and ethnographer Bronislaw Malinowski on Melanesia, she highlights a desire for a kinship with nature, for a sense of the self as part of a larger, "oceanic" cosmos, for a fluid interaction with female energies. Aviator Beryl Markham and writer Isak Dinesen, both pioneers in Kenya, on the other hand, viewed Africa through an aestheticizing, aristocratic lens. Unlike male writers who sought to repress the appeal of the primitive, Georgia O'Keeffe in New Mexico and gorilla scientist Diane Fossey in Africa -- among the heroines of this study -- displayed a transgressive identification with animal life and the land. In the final section, Torgovnick turns to contemporary primitivism, deconstructing the "idealized, lyrical view" of Native American life presented in films such as Dances with Wolves; treating the craze for body piercing as taboo-violating and ritualistic; and casting a skeptical eye on New Age spirituality and the mythopoeic men's movement. What we seek in other cultures, she compellingly argues, we can, with some effort, find in Western traditions and practices.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Torgovnick (English, Duke Univ.) successfully elaborates upon her previous book, which dealt with the Western fascination with primitivism. In the first two sections of her new book, she contrasts Western male and female perceptions of the primitive by analyzing the lives and works of intellectuals and artists ranging from Andre Gide to Georgia O'Keeffe. In the third section, she examines the current Western attraction to primitivism apparent in the widespread admiration of Native American culture and traditions and in the attempts of the men's movement and New Agers to imitate what they perceive to be Native American customs or spirituality. Dividing her book this way effectively allows the reader to see a clear difference in how men and women see the primitive and to admit the possibility that the primitive is still valued in today's Western world. A worthy addition to academic anthropology collections that will also be appreciated both by scholars in literature and gender studies and informed lay readers. -- Ximena Chrisagis, Wright State Univ. Lib., Dayton, Ohio

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