How To Be A Heroine

by Samantha Ellis

  The specialists wouldn’t name it. They talked about events or episodes or funny turns. They held my head and spun me round, poured hot and cold water in my ears, held up pencils for me to follow with my eyes, and gave me travel sickness pills – which seemed appropriate, because sometimes it felt like stepping on a boat and sometimes it felt like waves rising up and washing over me. They said it was an inner ear infection, they said it would be gone in six weeks. But it wasn’t. And I couldn’t stop crying. I’d had a bad reaction to the pills, so they took me off them and promised I’d be fine, in six months tops.

  The crying stopped but the falling got worse. I fell harder, faster. I couldn’t grab a chair quickly enough. I fell out of bed, I fell down stairs, I fell on the cobbled streets. I was always covered in bruises. I don’t remember when I started flailing and spasming, jerking and rolling. Now the doctors said it could be narcolepsy. Or cataplexy, or migraine, or peripheral vestibular dysfunction, or benign positional paroxysmal vertigo. They said the brain was uncharted territory and they were explorers, embarking on dangerous journeys to the edges of the maps where there were dragons. When I went for my first MRI scan, and they strapped me down and slid me into the white, coffin-like tube, I remembered Esther going in for ECT. It was cramped inside the tube, and dark, and the walls vibrated as though the doctors were hammering and drilling at them. Esther thought she must have done something terrible to have ECT, and in that tube, I thought the same. But I had something to comfort me that she never had; unlike her, I had The Bell Jar.

  I’m embarrassed now that I thought this was my rite of passage, my equivalent of Esther/Plath’s breakdown. I’m ashamed that I thought I was finally living an interesting life, suffering as (it was scarcely comparable) my family had in Iraq. I lumped it all in together, such was my confusion, and just because I thought that suffering might have value. The insidious idea was everywhere, in the music I listened to and in my favourite books. And maybe it had been imprinted even earlier by one of my favourite childhood novels: Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did.

  I thought Katy Carr, the heroine of this 1872 book, was a carefree rebel, her hair, like mine, ‘forever in a snarl’, always having adventures with her five younger siblings, and getting into trouble with her strict Aunt Izzie, who is helping their distracted, widowed father bring them up. I remembered Katy falling off a swing and being horribly injured, but if you’d asked me where this came in the book, I’d have said near the end. I blanked out the rest of the book – the bulk of the book – in which Katy comes to terms with being bedridden. It reads very differently to me now I’ve had seizures for nineteen years. (They never did go away.)

  Even the healthy Katy of the book’s beginning is a drip. She’s supposed to be a writer (yes, another writer-heroine) but all she writes is a religious newspaper about her boring resolutions to be good. Her siblings gleefully burn it in the kitchen fire – the only instance of a heroine’s work being burned that I can unreservedly support.

  Like the girls in Little Women, when Katy does any slightly wayward thing, she is crazed with contrition. So when Aunt Izzie tells her not to go on the swing, and she does anyway, well, you can imagine. It’s worse than Beth’s dead canary. Katy lies there, weak, frightened, paralysed, sobbing with pain – yet Aunt Izzie and Katy’s father’s top priority is to get her to apologise for being disobedient. Which she does. She doesn’t scream at her heartless relatives, she doesn’t rail against the gods, she meekly says she’s sorry. And, by the way, Aunt Izzie never told Katy why she shouldn’t go on the swing. It was broken, but she didn’t say that because she expected blind obedience. But she doesn’t feel bad about this, not at all. Maybe that’s why, having made her apology, Katy is a bit sullen. Well, wouldn’t you be? She can’t move. She may never be able to move again. She’s only twelve.

  Then Cousin Helen visits. There should be a special place in hell for Cousin Helen, a saintly invalid who wafts about in ruffled lace nightgowns, is gracious at all times, and thinks illness is an opportunity. Yes, an opportunity. Now Katy’s spine is injured, she promises Katy that ‘God is going to let you go to His school – where He teaches all sorts of beautiful things to people.’ Reading it now, when Helen starts calling God’s school The School of Pain I hurl the book at the wall. Because although I wanted to suffer, believed it would be transfiguring, internalised this message from Plath, and (as it turns out) from Coolidge, when suffering came, it didn’t teach me, or liberate me.

  It took years to get a not-implausible diagnosis; I have (probably) seizures, caused (probably) by a basilar migraine which itself is (probably) caused by a throbbing in the basilar artery that runs up the nape of the neck into the brain.

  This is what happens when I have a seizure. First there’s a flicker, like a moth going in and out of the light. The colours are suddenly too bright, the noises too loud, it’s all too much. My arm’s moving. I didn’t tell it to; it’s moving of its own accord. It doesn’t feel like my arm. It doesn’t feel like an arm at all. There are tiny tremors going up and down it. Rising panic, rising nausea. If people are talking, they stop making sense. If there’s music, it contorts. The beat throbs in my head. Phrases and patterns repeat, nonsensically. I feel fuzzy. Sick. My ears ring loud. I’m spinning, so’s the world and not in the same direction. Everything goes blurry. Colours seep. Things are big that should be small, close up that were far away; they loom. The world goes Cubist, goes to bits. I try to grab something but my hands lose their grip. They float up. They feel enormous and light, like balloons. And I feel a terrible sense of doom. The world is ending and there’s nothing I can do about it. Sometimes there are hallucinations. My hands disappear. The lower part of my face dissolves. Dark figures close in on me. My arms fly up, and I feel the itch of wings sprouting at my shoulders. Or I’m a fish, bucking and flailing on a wooden deck. My muscles go, my legs go to jelly, I open my mouth to say something and my mouth’s gone slack, no sound comes out. I fall. My arms and legs jerk. I kick, I twitch. I melt and then I vanish altogether. I’m at the bottom of a well. It’s dark down here and I can’t hear anyone, see anything. And then it starts to recede. And I’m back. Until the next time.

  My seizures haven’t made me virtuous or cheerful. Fretful, yes. And cross. And self-pitying. But not virtuous. There is no School of Pain. There is just the tedious business of getting through suffering, day after day, and trying not to hope too hard that it will ever stop, because the harder you hope, the more disappointing it is when those hopes are dashed. So it’s hard for me, now, to read the manipulative ending of What Katy Did. Katy recovers. It’s her reward for becoming so cheerful and capable; she’s gone from tween tearaway to angel of the house. But she wasn’t such a tearaway in the first place. At least The Bell Jar doesn’t advocate self-sacrifice and selflessness. Esther would laugh at Katy’s vapid, goody-goody pieties. Maybe we have moved on a tiny bit.

  As I ploughed through my first year, I don’t think I read a single book by a woman, but I read a lot about women suffering. There was Samuel Richardson heaping pain and indignity on Clarissa and calling her ‘an Exemplar to her sex’ as though learning to suffer well made us exemplary. There was August Strindberg implying Miss Julie wanted a bit of rough (or just to cut to the chase and shag Death himself), and Thomas Hardy throwing things at poor Tess until she collapsed under the weight of it all.

  Or so I thought. Now I think in Tess of the d’Urbervilles Hardy tied himself in knots trying to show the plight of a poor Victorian woman while making her feisty enough to be actually interesting. Tess’s family are pretty much ready to sell her to louche Alec d’Urberville who they think might be a distant relative (he isn’t) and who only has to open his mouth for it to be clear he’s a lying womaniser (and not just because the first thing he does is get Tess to open her mouth so he can feed her strawberries). Hardy wanted to put Tess through the mill but didn’t want her to be a victim. He wrestled hardest with the crucial seduction scene set in the forest, The Chase. In the firs
t draft, Alec tricks Tess into a sham marriage, and quickly consummates it. But Hardy wanted to make Tess more innocent, so in his second draft, Alec drugs and rapes her. Then Hardy changed his mind again. In his final draft there’s no mock marriage, no drugs, and it’s not a rape but a seduction.

  It’s a deep and churning novel. On the surface, Tess is submissive and passive, an exemplar like Clarissa. But underneath she’s shrewd, sharp, strong-willed and sensual too – strawberries are never innocent again once you’ve read Tess. She lets Alec seduce her but she doesn’t let him master her. She refuses to become just another fallen women. After her child dies, she considers pretending it never happened and trying to start over, but instead she bravely confesses to the man she loves, Angel Clare. She hopes he’ll accept her as she is – just as she’s fine with him having had an affair. ‘Forgive me as you are forgiven!’ she says. But Angel’s just another Buddy Willard. ‘O Tess, forgiveness does not apply to the case!’ he says. ‘You were one person; now you are another. My God – how can forgiveness meet such a grotesque – prestidigitation as that!’

  Angel wants her to be Artemis, or a daughter of nature, or an angel. He can’t cope with her honesty, her courage or her past. But she won’t be his possession, trophy, saint or doll. The day after their wedding, she doesn’t make a scene. And in refusing to faint, or weep hysterically or beg him to stay, she makes it easy for him to leave her. Poverty and censure only make her stronger. She runs into Alec again and rages at the sexism of society: ‘Once victim, always victim – that’s the law!’ But she’s not a victim. She’s tough, and she’s a realist. At the end of the novel, she goes back to Alec to keep her family from starving. And when she can take it no more, she stabs him to death. Hardy calls the bloodstain she creates ‘a gigantic ace of hearts’: he’s saying she’s a winner. The winner of the novel. She’s an avenging angel, she’s Lady Lazarus, and Hardy rewards her with a few pages’ grace, where she and Angel have a kind of belated honeymoon. She goes to her arrest like a goddess.

  Hardy cried when he killed Tess off. I’d cry too, if I’d written her. She’s amazing. And I love her wishing her mother had warned her about men: ‘Ladies know what to fend hands against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance o’ learning in that way, and you did not help me!’ – Hardy is justifying his novel: novels show women that men are dangerous. Therefore novels are good! But what resonates is the force and clarity of Tess’s anger.

  Blinded by the idea that real women suffer, I never noticed this. I brought the same misreading to The Color Purple. Its heroine Celie is raped by her father on the first page. He sells or kills the two children she has by him, and abuses her so monstrously that she becomes infertile. He beats her and denies her education. He forces her to marry a man almost as brutal. Her sister disappears. The Color Purple is like a black hole you fall into. Misery and more misery.

  And then, things change. Celie meets a woman who should be her enemy: her husband’s lover, Shug. But Shug turns out to be Celie’s fairy godmother. A voluptuous lounge singer, all sequins and laughter, she gets Celie to put a mirror between her legs and see her own ‘wet rose’. I still remember the anxious thrill this gave me. By the end of the book Celie has experienced sexual pleasure (with Shug), she’s been reunited with her sister, she runs her own business (designing and making trousers, despite her husband’s view that ‘Men spose to wear the pants’) and she’s the centre of a happy, messy, noisy, dysfunctional family. Alice Walker gives her unprepossessing, poor, black, gay heroine an ending fit for a princess.

  For years I thought this happy ending was Celie’s reward for suffering. But now, I realise it isn’t. Not at all. She gets her happy ending because she learns to be strong, and she learns to demand pleasure from life. It’s the opposite of a suffering heroine novel. The only problem is – and I’m gutted to admit it – Celie’s no fun. She’s steadfast and patient and dignified, but those aren’t the kinds of qualities that make me want her to be my new best friend. Critic Trudier Harris famously exploded about Celie that she ‘just sat there, like a bale of cotton with a vagina, taking stuff from kids even and waiting for someone to come along and rescue her’.

  Luckily, Shug, the book’s other heroine, enjoys life and makes other people enjoy it too. Even Celie’s brutal, unimaginative husband is nicer when Shug is around. Shug won’t let anyone get away with being horrid or boring. Not even God. In fact, she’s reinvented Him as a loving, pantheistic joy-giver: ‘One day . . . it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree my arm would bleed.’ It’s incredibly moving. And I like the schmaltzy ending because I think Walker was so brave to write it. In her 1976 essay ‘Saving the Life That is Your Own’, she writes, ‘It is, in the end, the saving of lives that we writers are about . . . We do it because we care . . . We care because we know this: the life we save is our own.’ It’s a radical fairy tale she’s writing, a dream of how things could be.

  Realising how wrong I was about Tess and Celie makes me think it’s time to go back to Plath. I rejected her at the end of that sad first year. I put her books away. I was sick of suffering. I thought Plath was navel-gazing, luxuriating in her own misery. I didn’t want to do that any more.

  I thought perhaps, like Catherine Morland, I had got my genres mixed up. I’d been trying to be a tragic heroine, and it was making everything worse. I didn’t have to be tragic. If I couldn’t change what was happening to me, I could at least change my response. Rather than see my seizures as a dark fate, a necessary suffering, or even (in my more Nanda-esque moments) as being struck down by God, I could decide to be a survivor, to keep getting up again every time I was knocked down.

  When I was temping over the summer, my boss took me out for lunch and patronisingly said, ‘You like white wine now, and milk chocolate, and Shakespeare’s tragedies, but when you grow up you’ll like red wine, dark chocolate, and the comedies.’ I wish he wasn’t right, and every time I drink red wine or eat dark chocolate, I feel irked. He was right about wanting less tragedy, too. So I’m scared, now, to go back to Plath.

  When I do, the first thing I notice is that lots of the suffering she writes about is not her own. Sometimes it’s problematic – as in ‘Daddy’ where she identifies with the victims of the Holocaust because she’s angry that her father, who happens to be German, died when she was eight. But sometimes her empathy is so powerful it transcends the self. Famously, in ‘Ariel’ she merges with the horse she’s riding till they become an arrow, the dew and the morning. And in ‘Cut’ she even gives voice to the blood pouring out of her cut thumb: ‘A celebration, this is./ Out of a gap/ A million soldiers run,/ Redcoats, every one.’ It’s not macabre; it’s the jaunty, euphoric voice of a writer who wants to see everything, feel everything. And by stripping emotion out of some things while empathising furiously with others, Plath makes you see the world fresh.

  But it’s hard to separate her from her myth. Her readers are so personal, so biased, so devoted. Women post their tattoos on the Sylvia Plath Ink blog – elongated images of her face, or the quote from The Bell Jar, ‘I am, I am, I am’, inked into a heart monitor’s squiggly red line. One woman has the line tattooed next to an image of a heart, not cutesy but anatomical, all ventricles and muscle. At the churchyard in Heptonstall in Yorkshire, I find Plath’s grave by following the women in black. Their eyes are smoky, their lips blood-red. They leave pens on the grave, and lipstick. There’s a plastic mermaid and a gaudy theatre mask. The flowers are fresh. As I read the inscription, I feel desperately sad. Plath was just thirty when she died.

  In The Bell Jar, I notice a line I’ve always missed. It’s on page three. Esther describes the gifts she got during her internship, including a plastic sunglasses case decorated with a starfish. She says that for a while she hid the gifts, but now she feels better and ‘last week I cut the plastic starfish off the sunglasses case for the baby to play with’. This is a mass
ive relief. It means Esther’s all right in the end. All right enough to make her peace with her nightmare in New York, optimistic enough to start a family. She has survived.

  The Journals are a bit jejune in places (whose diaries aren’t?), but they’re full of Plath’s omnivorous curiosity, her frank sexuality, her hunger for ‘a life of conflict, of balancing children, sonnets, love and dirty dishes; and banging banging an affirmation of life out on pianos and ski slopes and in bed in bed in bed’. When suffering comes, she meets it with anger and with strength. It’s got to be worth something that she’s such a fighter.

  One evening, walking around Primrose Hill, my gaze is caught by a lit window. The blue plaque says it’s Plath’s, but it seems the wrong house. I remember an address round the corner, on Fitzroy Road. I check Frieda Hughes’s moving, restrained introduction to the restored edition of her mother’s Ariel, and find that Fitzroy Road was where Plath spent her last eight weeks, wrote thirteen poems, and, in February 1963, put milk and bread by her sleeping children, sealed off her kitchen and put her head in an oven. The house I saw, on Chalcot Square, was where she lived with Hughes for nearly two years, gave birth to Frieda, published The Colossus and wrote most of The Bell Jar. Her daughter insisted that the plaque should reflect Plath’s life, not her death.

  Her edition reinstates Plath’s original selection and arrangement of the poems, and has a very different arc to the book I first read. The bleak, chilly ‘Edge’ is not even included – immediately making Ariel less like a suicide note. In fact, the collection begins with the word ‘love’ and ends with the word ‘spring’, and it feels like the story of a woman recovering from a break-up and looking forward to the future. I wish I’d read this cathartic version of Ariel when I was unhappy about my parents’ divorce. It’s the version I’ll read from now on, a version that allows me to think that Plath wasn’t advocating suffering: she was struggling and heroically wishing for rebirth and giving her readers that possibility too.