SOURCE: "Critical Warfare and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer," in Feminist Criticism: Theory and Practice, edited by Susan Sellers, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991, pp. 23-43.

Williams is an English educator and critic. In the following excerpt, she criticizes Kate Millett's influential attack on Henry Miller's misogyny as theoretically naive and ineffectual. Williams proposes a feminist reading which takes account of the sexual ambivalence implied by Miller's masochism and suggests that Miller embraced a desire for self-annihilation.

Tropic of Cancer is Henry Miller's polemic of antihumanism. It is an attempt to write 'The last book', an affirmation of extremity in the forms of transgression, disease and violence. For the Miller of Tropic of Cancer life is war, with Paris as its theatre. Men and women fight each other on the sexual battlefield of its pages, with a violence which makes the impossibility of impartial reading explicit: if we read the book...