The Whole Woman By Germaine Greer Knopf. 373 pp. $25 Germaine Greer Untamed Shrew By Christine Wallace Faber and Faber. 333 pp. $27.50 Reviewed by Elizabeth Ward, an editor with the Japan Times in Tokyo who grew up in Australia Sunday, May 23, 1999

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Oh. Had she stopped? According to her biographer, Christine Wallace, "Dr. Grrrr" has been angry with the world since she was a child in 1940s Melbourne: with her parents, with men, with other women (especially other feminists, from the suffragettes to the ERA campaigners) and ultimately with society in all its multiple oppressive manifestations. After the great whip-crack of "The Female Eunuch," Greer can hardly be said to have sat back paring her fingernails while the tyrants and traitors got on with it. Perceived transgressions large and small have regularly called forth trumpet blasts of Greerian ire, although not such sustained ones. Lately, she has been very angry indeed with her compatriot Wallace, whom she has rather intemperately compared to a "dung beetle" and "flesh-eating bacteria" for having presumed to write an unauthorized and, what is worse, ungrammatical biography of her.

Anger, in short, is Greer's shtick; she makes an art form of it, albeit more street theater than literature. Had she been born a couple of generations earlier, she might well have found herself a real Sunday-afternoon soapbox at London's Hyde Park Corner rather than the virtual soapbox she has constructed out of her academic and polemical publications and her talent for deploying the media to her advantage. She is an English professor at Warwick University and a longtime occasional journalist but so much more besides: performer, prophet, avenging angel, lash of the ignorant, scourge of the complacent, foe of despots. If this sounds less like a c.v. than a litany, it is only appropriate to the near-religious sense of mission informing Greer's entire career. "I am an anarchist, basically," she told a British interviewer recently, which – given the scope of her rage – is really her way of saying that she, too, brings not peace but a sword. People with such lofty aspirations tend to wobble on the knife-edge between brilliance and battiness. It is to Greer's credit that, through the years, she has tumbled off on the wrong side somewhat less often than she has found herself on the side of the angels.

So, "The Whole Woman": not a new anger, then, but an old anger taken to a whole new level. Readers of "The Female Eunuch" – and there were literally millions of them back in the '70s – will recognize its ghostly influence here, right down to the cosmic chapter headings ("Body" and "Love" are back, but "Soul" has become "Mind" and "Hate" has mutated into "Power") and inset boxes of poetry and other quotations. The opening "recantation" is simply Greer going back on her vow never to write a sequel to that first, furious, infuriating, oddly inspiring, ultimately quixotic book. Things have not worked out as she had hoped – or prescribed – so, at the age of 60, she is taking another tilt at the windmill. "The Female Eunuch," she points out, was "one feminist text that did not argue for equality." It argued for liberation, for doing "as much for female people as has been done for colonized nations." Looking about her nearly 30 years on, Greer saw women everywhere continuing to bend and attune themselves to a male-ordered world, laboring under crushingly "contradictory expectations" in everything from health care to housework to sexual harassment. That, she said, is what the spurious notion of equality had amounted to: equality with slaves, freedom "to live the lives of unfree men." Hence her rekindled anger; hence this book.

Without question, the world Greer paints for us, brush stroke by sweeping brush stroke, is a desolate one, almost apocalyptically so. We Western women, it appears, still have not shucked off male ideas of female beauty; the voluntary mutilation of plastic surgery bears witness to our thralldom. We continue to buy into the myth of male-pleasing penetrative sex, locking ourselves into a cycle of hazardous contraceptive practices, abortions that we ludicrously celebrate as "a right" (rather than mourn as "a sad and onerous duty"), and exploitative fertility treatments. We fight for the right to be soldiers and boxers and CEOs; certainly we should have those options, she responds, but why would we want to? Armies are bastions of "conscientious inhumanity." Professional boxers are little better than performing animals, promoters' commodities – an opinion shared by Muhammad Ali. And a woman who succeeds in business (or politics) usually ends up doing it, Thatcher-like, over the bodies of other women.

In an extraordinary chapter on "Sorrow," at the literal center and philosophical heart of the book, Greer berates us for confusing our real, rational feelings of sadness with illnesses to be medicated or outbreaks of hysteria to be shushed and apologized for. "Disturbed animals in the zoo are given Prozac too," she writes, "not for the misfortune of being [a tiger] but for the misfortune of being in a zoo; female depression could as likely be a consequence not of being female but of an inhuman environment." (What other feminist, by the way, would risk her PC credentials by starting such a chapter with an invocation of the Mater Dolorosa herself, "Mary the mother of Jesus"?)

On and on she goes, cataloguing the injustices and misguided aspirations that diminish and embitter our lives. Not just ours, either: Scouring the earth for "a glimpse of a surviving whole woman," Greer found everywhere, from Africa to China, from rural Oklahoma to Central Australia, the insidious encroachment of the Western feminine stereotype, with its sad baggage of high heels, lipstick, contraceptives, baby formula and eagerness to please.

Of course, demurrals bubble up as one reads. The bleakness is so absolute it matches the experience of no woman I know on four continents. There is a curious absence of compassion for men: If they are so unfree and oppressed themselves, what about their rational feelings of sadness, bitterness and inadequacy? "To be male is to be a kind of idiot savant – " We know what she means, but we also know that it is unfair and untrue. What about the patient, humorous, gentle, generous men who have as little time for the sexist jocks and violent jerks as women do? The fact is, Greer's jeremiad is so sweeping it scarcely allows for such nuances and often pushes her over the edge into outright silliness. The solution to the housework problem is not to advise a woman to pack up her stuff and become an "apple-cheeked bag lady" on a park bench. Revulsion at plastic-surgery abuses in Western societies does not somehow put the Third World practice of female genital mutilation in a better light. Nor would there seem to be much of a future for the human race in all-female communes.

And yet "The Whole Woman" remains a marvelous performance. Certainly it is dark, but Picasso's "Guernica" and Tennyson's "In Memoriam" are dark, too, and we recognize those as true, if partial, representations of our complex human experience. Besides, like them, it is oddly exhilarating. Greer may have grim things to say, but she has a rip-roaring time saying them – the soapbox syndrome again. No feminist writer can match her for eloquence or energy; none makes us laugh the way she does. "Feminism," she quotes deluded optimists as saying, "has served its purpose and should now eff off." "Men are no more likely to submit their testicles to official care and attention than they are to wear their muffler when it is cold and keep their feet dry." "Women are to be taken care of whether they like it or not." "Women are worker bees; males are drones." "When cultivation is done with mattocks and hoes, women do it; when a tractor comes along, men drive it."

Again and again, too, she interrupts some tirade or lament with a jolt of profound wisdom or glancing poetry, like that great central paean to female sorrow, which throws us back onto her side all over again. Provided, of course, one can even keep hold of her "side" on this intellectual and emotional roller-coaster ride.

Nobody has ever found it easy to pin down Germaine Greer – and that includes her biographer. True, Christine Wallace's much-resented attempt has resulted in a diligent, intelligent and in many ways enlightening book. It is useful to know, for instance, of Greer's longtime hostility toward her mother, her rape as a university student, her single, three-week fiasco of a marriage and her unsuccessful attempts in later life to have a child. It is helpful to learn of her anarchist "training" (as Wallace dubiously insists on calling it) as a member of the Sydney bohemian and libertarian group known as the Push. Wallace's view of "The Female Eunuch" as essentially a mirror of Greer's own "psychic wounds" is thought-provoking, and at least one sharply worded sentence should be borne in mind in any assessment of "The Whole Woman": "Testimonial feminism has an important and honorable role in the history of the women's movement, but extrapolating social theory from a statistical sample of one is a dangerous enterprise."

Still, though the portrait of Greer as a disturbed, manipulative, inconsistent, self-promoting, genius-tinged maverick is persuasive, one is not persuaded that it is complete. Perhaps because Wallace was unable to talk to her subject, aspects of Greer that show up in all her books are missing here: notably her humor, her sadness and her odd likableness. More than anywhere, though, the temperamental mismatch of biographer and subject is evident in Wallace's style. If there is one thing Greer handles beautifully, it is language. She must have found it particularly galling to have her life laid bare in English as graceless and lumpy as this: "Far from being a matter of inconsistency, her stance was often a result of her adherence to anarchistic pessimism – which provided a framework within which seemingly contrary positions could have their own internal consistency" – a typical, though by no means the worst, example of Wallace's prose.

In the end, a reader can probably glean more of the essential Greer from one chapter of "The Whole Woman" than from all of this conscientious, plodding biography.

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