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The Male Mystique of Henry

Miller

By Jeanette Winterson
Jan. 26, 2012

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What happens when the unreliable narrator turns out to be the
cultural critic?

What we write about fiction is never an objective response to a

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text; it is always part of a bigger mythmaking — the story we are
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telling ourselves about ourselves. That story changes. George
Orwell, writing in 1940 about Henry Miller, has very different
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preoccupations from Kate Millett writing about Miller in 1970.
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Orwell doesn’t notice that Miller-women are semihuman sex
objects. In fact, his long essay “Inside the Whale” barely mentions
women at all. Millett does notice that half the world has been

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