Had I not studied Aesthetic Realism, I would have spent my life trying to be strong in ways that hurt me, and feeling that when I was tender and affected by things, I was weak. In The Right Of #1354, Ellen Reiss explains the trouble I had about tenderness and strength:
A woman does not feel she is the same person determined in her career, holding her own in an argument—and yielding in a man’s arms….Both man and woman feel, with the old pain of centuries…that when we are tough we aren’t kind or sweet but mean; and when we are tenderly considerate and yielding, we’re not strong but foolish and will be taken advantage of.
This describes the fight that was going on in me. Then, at 23, I met the understanding I was looking for when I began to study this principle stated by Eli Siegel: “Every person is always trying to put together opposites in himself.”
How I Came to See Strength & Tenderness
Growing up on the south shore of Long Island, I cared very much for animals and I liked running down to the beach after it snowed with my neighbors’ St. Bernard dog, Brandy. I also remember when my parents, five younger brothers and I gathered around the TV to watch Louis Armstrong. I loved when he sang “Hello Dolly” with the sweet tenderness and gravelly roughness in his voice.
There was also a lot of anger in our home—often about money. When my brother Mark had a serious illness that the insurance company would not pay for, my parents had to use all of their savings so he could get treatment. From that point on, money was tight and there was a lot of pain about and arguing about it.
I regret that I didn’t try to understand what my parents were going through, but used their fights to feel disgusted with everything. In an early Aesthetic Realism consultation, my consultants asked me, “Do you think you came to feel that the world was a messy place?” “Yes,” I said. I felt I had to harden myself and manage people to get what I wanted; and more than I realized, I felt I shouldn’t be too affected by anything, or need anyone—and I secretly enjoyed feeling that I was above all the mess. My consultants explained that this attitude was contempt, which Mr. Siegel defined as “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.” And this was the reason I increasingly disliked myself.
I came to see that the fight in me between wanting to be affected by things, being honestly tender, and wanting to manage and be superior to other people, took many forms. For instance, as the oldest child, my father taught me how to fix and build things, and I took to this very much, doing a lot of heavy work in the yard, secretly thinking I was better and stronger than any boy. I was competitive and wanted to outshine my brothers in my father’s eyes. There were two songs I heard as a girl that I felt stood for me—”Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better” from “Annie Get Your Gun,” and Helen Reddy’s hit “I Am Woman” with the line, “I am woman, I am invincible,” which I would sing like it was my anthem.
Women have agony about these opposites of strength and tenderness, and I did. As I got older and became interested in boys, I would get into contests with them in ways that made me ashamed. I saw early I could affect a man through how I looked, but I also remember that when someone got what I thought was too close, I would act hard and aloof. At other times I ended up having an intense intellectual debate with a man I was dating, and I would even challenge some men to arm wrestle. This did not endear me to them.
In one of the kindest essays, titled “Medusa Is a Nice Girl,” Eli Siegel explains so compassionately:
A girl knows she is hard, but she knows also that softness is socially necessary. Some mode of having hardness and softness is acquired for social persistence and advancement. But the two within a girl do not serve the same purpose. A girl is not hard for the same reason that she is soft. She is soft in order to be liked; she is hard in order to protect herself.
This describes so clearly what went on in me! Along with acting like the strongest thing going, I also cultivated a sweet and seemingly soft manner because I wanted very much to be liked. I also wanted to have my way, and with every year the division in me grew between an insincere softness and something like impenetrable steel?like hardness inside. I felt like two different people.
In an Aesthetic Realism class some years ago when I said I didn’t understand why I would go from being agreeable and yielding to getting my dukes up and not wanting to budge, Chairman of Education Ellen Reiss asked me, “Is there a battle of hard and soft?” I said yes, and she asked, “Do you want to answer it, or do you feel it’s wiser to have it both ways?” I had thought I was clever being able to go from one to the other.
In another class I spoke about something that had occurred very often: my getting into arguments with men—on a date, at work with a boss or co-worker, and even with a male sales clerk at a store. Ms. Reiss explained that this had to do with my attitude to the whole world. She said: “Miss Nietsch feels somewhere if a man doesn’t see her right she has more evidence for her favorite case— and it is like a jewel.” And she said one of my mottos was: “I’m not going to let any man walk over me!” But then, she explained, “There is something else in you that wants to be very sweet and have a lot of feeling, but you don’t see it as strong.”
This was an exact description of me, and I am grateful with all my heart that the coldness and hardness I once felt was inevitable, changed. Aesthetic Realism enabled me to have authentic tenderness for people, and to feel strong in having it—for my mother, including when she was dying of cancer; for my father; for my brothers and their families; my friends and co-workers. And through what I learned, I came to care deeply for a man, and to feel proud in being affected by him. I am very grateful for my nine-year marriage to Bennett Cooperman, who is an Aesthetic Realism consultant and actor. Bennett is a deep, kind, often humorously critical friend to me in many ways, including on the subject we’re speaking of tonight. I am proud to need him to be a stronger, happier, more honestly tender woman. Having this emotion is a million times greater than the wasted years I spent being hard and trying to defeat men.
Rebecca in “Ivanhoe” Is Beautifully Strong and Tender
Aesthetic Realism explains that we will be both tender and strong when our purpose is to have good will for the world and people. Good will is not what I once thought—something gushy, soft, and fake. Mr. Siegel described it as “the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful.”
In Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe there is a character who has affected people for many years, because of the way she puts together tenderness and strength. She is Rebecca, daughter of Isaac, the Jew.
The novel takes place in England, during the time of King Richard the Lion-Hearted and Robin Hood. A young nobleman, named Wilfred of Ivanhoe, had been banished from his home by his father, who disapproved of Ivanhoe’s love for Rowena. Ivanhoe then joins King Richard in the crusades, and later returns as a knight with Richard, who is in disguise.
Meanwhile, during King Richard’s absence, his brother John, who is cruel to the people of England, has been scheming to overthrow him so he can be king. But, in a spectacular tournament, Ivanhoe—who is also in disguise—battles and defeats all of John’s knights, including the fierce and evil Templar, Brian de BoisGuilbert. Though he has won and gives hope to the people of England, Ivanhoe is seriously injured. He is rescued, and restored to health in the following days by Rebecca, who has great knowledge of medicine.
In Scott’s description of her we see tenderness and strength. There is the beauty of her person, which Scott says is “exquisitely symmetrical,” with “brilliant eyes,” and “sable tresses.” But she also has a strength of mind and a purpose to be kind to people. Rebecca, Scott writes:
…had been heedfully brought up in all the knowledge proper to her nation, which her apt and powerful mind had retained, arranged, and enlarged in the course of a progress beyond her years, her sex, and even the age in which she lived…Rebecca, thus endowed with knowledge as with beauty, was universally revered and admired.
She is very much affected by Ivanhoe’s faithfulness to Richard the Lion-Hearted, who stands for people getting the economic justice they deserve and for his courage in fighting the traitors. As she takes care of Ivanhoe, enabling him to gain strength, Scott tells how she:
…performed her task with a graceful and dignified simplicity and modesty, which might, even in more civilized days, have…seem[ed] repugnant to female delicacy. The idea of so young and beautiful a person engaged…in dressing the wound of one of a different sex, was melted away and lost in that of a beneficent being contributing her effectual aid to relieve pain.
Ivanhoe does get stronger and he is deeply moved by her. And she comes to love him. But because they live in a time when no Catholic could marry a Jewish woman, they cannot show their love.
An important aspect of Rebecca’s strength is that she does not use her beauty to weaken Ivanhoe. Most women feel, as I once did, “If I can have this man in a tizzy about me, then I am strong.” But this kind of thinking is really contempt, and always weakens a woman. When Rebecca sees that Ivanhoe is affected by her, she says to him:
It is well you should speedily know that your handmaiden is a poor Jewess, the daughter of that Isaac of York to whom you were so lately a good and kind lord.
And Scott shows that Rebecca, strong as she is, also has a fight within when she sees Ivanhoe trying to stop his feelings for her. He writes:
She could not but sigh internally when the glance of respectful admiration, not altogether unmixed with tenderness, with which Ivanhoe had hitherto regarded his unknown benefactress, was exchanged at once for a manner cold, composed, and collected, and fraught with no deeper feeling than that which expressed a grateful sense of courtesy.
And she says later, “I will tear this folly from my heart, though every fibre bleed as I rend it away.” And the larger purpose in Rebecca wins out. When Ivanhoe says he must get well enough to bear his armour and fight John, and if Rebecca will enable him to do this he will pay her with a “casque full of crowns,” she replies:
[T]hou shalt bear thine armour on the eighth day from hence, if thou wilt grant me but one boon in the stead of the silver thou dost promise me…I will but pray of thee to believe henceforward that a Jew may do good service to a Christian, without desiring other guerdon than the blessing of the Great Father who made both Jew and Gentile.
Speaking about the importance of the novel Ivanhoe, Eli Siegel said in a lecture, “it did give a dignity which is necessary to the Jews.” And placing the tremendous value of Scott, author of so many powerful novels and creator of hundreds of characters in fiction, Mr. Siegel said he was among the 30-40 World Great Writers, and that, “the notion of one mind having all this come forth from it, makes you prouder of yourself. It staggers you with respect for man.”
The Oneness of Hardness and Softness in a Woman
One of the reasons Rebecca is so admirable is because we feel she is trying to have a good relation of hardness and softness, opposites related to tenderness and strength. As I said earlier, these have been very big in my life. I could be sweet, but also terrifically stubborn. Early in my marriage to Bennett, we had a quarrel concerning who knew more about the computer. I had prided myself at my speed and knowledge on the PC, but Bennett was an expert on the Mac, which I didn’t know so much about, and I’Â’m sorry to say that I found my hackles going up at the idea of having to learn from my husband.
We told about this in an Aesthetic Realism class, and to have me get some perspective, Ms. Reiss said humorously “Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning never argued about the computer.”
Then she asked me an important question which I recommend every woman ask as to her husband. “What do you think you do that most annoys Mr. Cooperman?” I said, “My desire to manage him, hover over him when he’s doing something in the house. I say ‘I think I could be of use.'” Ellen Reiss asked:
Do you think “I could be of use” is really “I can do this better than you, so step aside”? That’s superiority.
This was so true, and Ms. Reiss asked about ways I could be sweet and yielding and then get my back up. She asked: “Do you think you have good will for Mr. Cooperman?” I said, no. And she continued:
Good will is the firmest thing in the world…And it’s the most flexible thing—you give up any notion of yourself that would get in the way of being fair to that person.
I thank Ellen Reiss for teaching me how I can be proud of myself as a woman and wife.
One of the reasons I am so affected by Rebecca and am learning from her is that she is a means of seeing what real strength and true tenderness are. She is not obstinate or stubborn as I have been, nor is she strategically sweet. Also—different from me and many women—she doesn’t use a man not seeing her right to ratify a case against the world and see it as a jewel. As Ivanhoe continues, we see Rebecca has that beautiful oneness of firmness and flexibility that are in good will. In a lecture titled “Poetry and Strength,” Mr. Siegel said that “one idea of strength” is the:
Ability to take many things and to remain what you are…The ability to endure, to remain the same amid much vicissitude.
This, we see in Rebecca as she meets great danger. She is captured with Ivanhoe and others, and they are held prisoner in the castle Torquilstone by the evil Brian de Bois-Gilbert and King John’s men. As Brian de Bois-Guilbert tries to force Rebecca to submit to him, and she shows magnificently what Mr. Siegel described—the “ability to take many things and remain what you are.” They are high in the turret of Torquilstone castle, and Bois-Guilbert says:
Thou art the captive of my bow and spear, subject to my will by the laws of all nations; nor will I…abstain from taking by violence what thou refusest.
‘Stand back,’ said Rebecca—’stand back, and hear me ere thou offerest to commit a sin so deadly! My strength thou mayst indeed overpower…but I will proclaim thy villainy…from one end of Europe to the other…I defy thee.’
As she spoke, she threw open the latticed window which led to the bartizan, and in an instant after stood on the very verge of the parapet, with not the slightest screen between her and the tremendous depth below…’Remain where thou art, [or] thou shalt see that the Jewish maiden will rather trust her soul with God than her honour to the Templar!”
While Rebecca spoke thus, her high and firm resolve…gave to her…a dignity that seemed more than mortal. Her glance quailed not, her cheek blanched not…on the contrary, the thought that she had her fate at her command….gave…yet a more brilliant fire to her eye. Bois-Guilbert…thought he never beheld beauty so animated and so commanding.
He respects her tremendously. Rebecca is courageously strong and critical of him throughout this novel, but he feels he has to have her. She is falsely accused by the Templars of bewitching Bois-Guilbert and is sentenced to death, unless she can find a Champion Knight to fight Bois-Guilbert on her behalf. Even in the midst of such peril we see she is brave and true to herself. She says in a room full of her accusers:
God will raise me up a champion…It cannot be that in merry England, the hospitable, generous, the free, where so many are ready to peril their lives for honour, there will not be found one to fight for justice.
Then, in a dramatic moment, Scott writes this sentence—itself a beautiful oneness of tenderness and strength, delicacy and power:
She took her embroidered glove from her hand, and flung it down before the Grand Master with an air of simplicity and dignity which excited universal surprise and admiration.
As the novel nears its end, Rebecca is rescued by the noble Ivanhoe; and we see tenderness and strength as one thing become triumphant.
Aesthetic Realism which can teach every woman and man how to have these opposites which people have felt would always war in them honestly work together in our lives. This, I am thankful to say is what is happening to me—and I want to be a means of it happening to people everywhere.