I don’t usually get along with militant feminists.
By this, I mean the kind of Angry Young Women who thought the SCUM Manifesto was meant to be taken at face value. By extension I should probably be repulsed by Eve Ensler, but I’m not. In fact, I actually find her endearing. She’s a charming, humorous, and skillfully tongue-in-cheek (unfortunately, it looks like her tone of voice is lost on a lot of her detractors) writer who knows when to be vulnerable, when to be tough, when to be emotional, when to be stoic, and when to just be her own persona.
Take, for example, the title poem “I Am An Emotional Creature.” The poem represents the many faces of Eve, as well as the many faces women as well as (yes, Ensler would probably disagree with me) men have but rarely recognize: her masculine side, her feminine side, her androgynous side, her own I-don’t-belong-to-anything-side. Likewise, Ensler’s tone of voice is brilliant and bombastic, with a winking, accusatory rasp Maya Angelou should be proud of. “Things do not come to me as intellectual theories or hard-shaped ideas," boasts Ensler with eviscerating pointedness. "They pulse through my organs and legs and burn up my ears.” These lines are a musical statement, cut more from the discordant jazz cloth than the classical tradition, and an indictment against the cold, logical detachment people (specifically men) Ensler is rallying against throughout the entire poem. The logic vs. emotion conflict appears to be a frequent theme in Ensler's writing, as even The Vagina Monologues intersperses 'vagina facts' between the comparitively ambiguous monologues. Even "I Am An Emotional Creature," which is a mostly straight-forward poem, has numerous interpretations.
For instance, there is one point in the poem which confuses me. It's difficult to interpret what Ensler's intentions are here, or if her intentions are really meant to be known - "don’t you dare say all negative that it’s a teenage thing, or because I’m a girl." This line is potentially hypocritical. Was she not previously attributing numerous emotional advantages, such as “knowing when your girlfriend is pissed off,” to womanhood? However, I feel like Ensler wrote the line knowing full well what she was doing. It's all part of the duality of being an emotional creature. Logic juxtaposed against the openness of the soul. As brazenly emotive as she is, or wants to appear to be, Ensler’s a smart writer exercising a lot of precision over the words she puts on the page. She's jazz music - presenting a facade of corrosive dynamics, threatening to fall apart, comatose at any moment in front of the audience, while in reality she's as controlled as an orchestrated baroque piece. Her voice drips calculation dressed in the wildness of the Atlantic Ocean. Though at face value Ensler revels in being an iconoclastic, feel-everything woman, she's a dichtonomy. Her dynamics are dualities, and they only serve the purpose of making Ensler's poetry even more vulnerable and realistic. "I Am An Emotional Creature" is a celebration of dualities. We aren't Vulcans, but all of us have hearts connected to being an "emotional, devotional, incandotional creature." Just look at the word incandotional here. Incandotional isn't even listed listed in the dictionary - it's apparently a word of her own construction, which appeals to Ensler's emotional rawness and uorthodoxy , but at the same time, Ensler attaches a deliberate meaning to the word. She didn't just pull the word out of thin air. There's a personal meaning, whatever it might be, that Ensler lovingly grafts onto the word, and it didn't come from osmosis. Raw emotionality and pre-meditated, LOGICAL deliberation can co-exist despite Ensler mostly ignoring to consciously awknowledge the latter.
Similarly, how many people are wholly objective? Even scientists are guided by some kind of moral obligation that isn't entirely steeped in tangibility. The connection of the brain to the heart and to the soul just increases the intensity of emotion because we feel tugging on all aspects, logic and emotion, of our being. "Everything is intense to me," says Ensler, but it should be everything is intense to us.
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