Silences

by Shelly Fisher Fishkin

  Only in the context of this punitive difference in circumstance, in history, between the sexes; this past, hidden or evident, that (though objectively obsolete—yes, even the toil and the compulsory childbearing obsolete) continues so terribly, so determiningly to live on, only in this context can the question be answered or my subject here today—the women writer in our century: one out of twelve—be understood.

  How much it takes to become a writer. Bent (far more common than we assume), circumstances, time, development of craft—but beyond that: how much conviction as to the importance of what one has to say, one’s right to say it. And the will, the measureless store of belief in oneself to be able to come to, cleave to, find the form for one’s own life comprehensions. Difficult for any male not born into a class that breeds such confidence. Almost impossible for a girl, a woman.

  The leeching of belief, of will, the damaging of capacity begin so early. Sparse indeed is the literature on the way of denial to small girl children of the development of their endowment as born human: active, vigorous bodies; exercise of the power to do, to make, to investigate, to invent, to conquer obstacles, to resist violations of the self; to think, create, choose; to attain community, confidence in self. Little has been written on the harms of instilling constant concern with appearance; the need to please, to support; the training in acceptance, deferring. Little has been added in our century to George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss on the effect of the differing treatment—”climate of expectation”—for boys and for girls.

  But it is there if one knows how to read for it, and indelibly there in the resulting damage. One—out of twelve.

  In the vulnerable girl years, unlike their sisters in the previous century, women writers go to college.* The kind of experience it may be for them is stunningly documented in Elaine Showalter’s pioneering “Women and the Literary Curriculum.”** Freshman texts in which women have little place, if at all; language itself, all achievement, anything to do with the human in male terms—Man in Crises, The Individual and His World. Three hundred thirteen male writers taught; seventeen women writers: That classic of adolescent rebellion, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; and sagas (male) of the quest for identity (but then Erikson, the father of the concept, propounds that identity concerns girls only insofar as making themselves into attractive beings for the right kind of man).† Most, not all, of the predominantly male literature studied, written by men whose understandings are not universal, but restrictively male (as Mary Ellmann, Kate Millett, and Dolores Schmidt have pointed out); in our time more and more surface, hostile, one-dimensional in portraying women.

  In a writer’s young years, susceptibility to the vision and style of the great is extreme. Add the aspiration-denying implication, consciously felt or not (although reinforced daily by one’s professors and reading) that (as Virginia Woolf noted years ago) women writers, women’s experience, and literature written by women are by definition minor. (Mailer will not grant even the minor: “the one thing a writer has to have is balls.”) No wonder that Showalter observes:

  Women [students] are estranged from their own experience and unable to perceive its shape and authenticity, in part because they do not see it mirrored and given resonance in literature. . . . They are expected to identify with masculine experience, which is presented as the human one, and have no faith in the validity of their own perceptions and experiences, rarely seeing them confirmed in literature, or accepted in criticism . . . [They] notoriously lack the happy confidence, the exuberant sense of the value of their individual observations which enables young men to risk making fools of themselves for the sake of an idea.

  Harms difficult to work through. Nevertheless, some young women (others are already lost) maintain their ardent intention to write—fed indeed by the very glories of some of this literature that puts them down.

  But other invisible worms are finding out the bed of crimson joy.* Self-doubt; seriousness, also questioned by the hours agonizing over appearance; concentration shredded into attracting, being attractive; the absorbing real need and love for working with words felt as hypocritical self-delusion (“I’m not truly dedicated”), for what seems (and is) esteemed is being attractive to men. High aim, and accomplishment toward it, discounted by the prevalent attitude that, as girls will probably marry (attitudes not applied to boys who will probably marry), writing is no more than an attainment of a dowry to be spent later according the needs and circumstances within the true vocation: husband and family. The growing acceptance that going on will threaten other needs, to love and be loved; (“a woman has to sacrifice all claims to femininity and family to be a writer”).*

  And the agony—peculiarly mid-century, escaped by their sisters of pre-Freudian, pre-Jungian times—that “creation and femininity are incompatible.”** Anaïs Nin’s words.

  The aggressive act of creation; the guilt for creating. I did not want to rival man; to steal man’s creation, his thunder. I must protect them, not outshine them.†

  The acceptance—against one’s experienced reality—of the sexist notion that the act of creation is not as inherently natural to a woman as to a man, but rooted instead in unnatural aggression, rivalry, envy, or thwarted sexuality.

  And in all the usual college teaching—the English, history, psychology, sociology courses—little to help that young woman understand the source or nature of this inexplicable draining self-doubt, loss of aspiration, of confidence.

  It is all there in the extreme in Plath’s Bell Jar—that (inadequate)‡ portrait of the artist as young woman (significantly, one of the few that we have)—from the precarious sense of vocation to the paralyzing conviction that (in a sense different from what she wrote years later)

  Perfection is terrible. It cannot have children.

  It tamps the womb.

  And indeed, in our century as in the last, until very recently almost all distinguished achievement has come from childless women: Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Mansfield, Isak Dinesen, Katherine Anne Porter, Dorothy Richardson, Henry Handel Richardson, Susan Glaspell, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, Eudora Welty, Djuna Barnes, Anaïs Nin, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Zora Neale Hurston, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Christina Stead, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Jean Stafford, May Sarton, Josephine Herbst, Jessamyn West, Janet Frame, Lillian Smith, Iris Murdoch, Joyce Carol Oates, Hannah Green, Lorraine Hansberry.

  Most never questioned, or at least accepted (a few sanctified) this different condition for achievement, not imposed on men writers. Few asked the fundamental human equality question regarding it that Elizabeth Mann Borghese, Thomas Mann’s daughter, asked when she was eighteen and sent to a psychiatrist for help in getting over an unhappy love affair (revealing also a working ambition to become a great musician although “women cannot be great musicians”). “You must choose between your art and fulfillment as a woman,” the analyst told her, “between music and family life.” “Why?” she asked. “Why must I choose? No one said to Toscanini or to Bach or my father that they must choose between their art and personal, family life; fulfillment as a man. . . . Injustice everywhere.” Not where it is free choice. But where it is forced because of the circumstances for the sex into which one is born—a choice men of the same class do not have to make in order to do their work—that is not choice, that is a coercive working of sexist oppression.*

  What possible difference, you may ask, does it make to literature whether or not a woman writer remains childless—free choice or not—especially in view of the marvels these childless women have created.

  Might there not have been other marvels as well, or other dimensions to these marvels? Might there not have been present profound aspects and understandings of human life as yet largely absent in literature?

  More and more women writers in our century, primarily in the last two decades, are assuming as their right fullness of work and family life.* Their emergence is evidence of chan
ging circumstances making possible for them what (with rarest exception) was not possible in the generations of women before. I hope and I fear for what will result. I hope (and believe) that complex new richness will come into literature; I fear because almost certainly their work will be impeded, lessened, partial. For the fundamental situation remains unchanged. Unlike men writers who marry, most will not have the societal equivalent of a wife—nor (in a society hostile to growing life) anyone but themselves to mother their children. Even those who can afford help, good schools, summer camps, may (may) suffer what seventy years ago W.E.B. Du Bois called “The Damnation of Women”: “that only at the sacrifice of the chance to do their best work can women bear and rear children.”*

  Substantial creative achievement demands time . . . and with rare exceptions only full-time workers have created it.**

  I am quoting myself from “Silences,” a talk nine years ago. In motherhood, as it is structured,

  circumstances for sustained creation are almost impossible. Not because the capacities to create no longer exist, or the need (though for a while as in any fullness of life the need may be obscured), but . . . the need cannot be first. It can have at best only part self, part time . . . Motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, responsible. Children need one now (and remember, in our society, the family must often try to be the center for love and health the outside world is not). The very fact that these are needs of love, not duty, that one feels them as one’s self; that there is no one else to be responsible for these needs, gives them primacy. It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity; spasmodic, not constant, toil. Work interrupted, deferred, postponed makes blockage—at best, lesser accomplishment. Unused capacities atrophy, cease to be.

  There are other vulnerabilities to loss, diminishment. Most women writers (being women) have had bred into them the “infinite capacity”; what Virginia Woolf named (after the heroine of a famous Victorian poem) The Angel in the House, who “must charm . . . sympathize . . . flatter . . . conciliate . . . be extremely sensitive to the needs and moods and wishes of others before her own . . . excel in the difficult arts of family life . . .”

  It was she who used to come between me and my paper . . . who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her . . . or she would have plucked out my heart as a writer.*

  There is another angel, so lowly as to be invisible, although without her no art, or any human endeavor, could be carried on for even one day—the essential angel, with whom Virginia Woolf (and most women writers, still in the privileged class) did not have to contend—the angel who must assume the physical responsibilities for daily living, for the maintenance of life.

  Almost always in one form or another (usually in the wife, two-angel form) she has dwelt in the house of men. She it was who made it possible for Joseph Conrad to “wrestle with the Lord for his creation”:

  Mind and will and conscience engaged to the full, hour after hour, day after day . . . never aware of the even flow of daily life made easy and noiseless for me by a silent, watchful, tireless affection.

  The angel who was “essential” to Rilke’s “great task”:

  like a sister who would run the house like a friendly climate, there or not there as one wished . . . and would ask for nothing except just to be there working and warding at the frontiers of the invisible.

  Men (even part-time writers who must carry on work other than writing**) have had and have this inestimable advantage toward productivity. I cannot help but notice how curiously absent both of these angels, these watchers and warders at the frontiers of the invisible, are from the actual contents of most men’s books, except perhaps on the dedication page:

  To my wife, without whom . . .

  I digress, and yet I do not; the disregard for the essential angel, the large absence of any sense of her in literature or elsewhere, has not only cost literature great contributions from those so occupied or partially occupied, but by failing to help create an arousing awareness (as literature has done in other realms) has contributed to the agonizingly slow elimination of this technologically and socially obsolete, human-wasting drudgery: Virginia Woolf’s dream of a long since possible “economical, powerful and efficient future when houses will be cleaned by a puff of hot wind.”

  Sometimes the essential angel is present in women’s books,* though still most “heroines are in white dresses that never need washing” (Rebecca Harding Davis’s phrase of a hundred years ago). Some poets admit her as occasional domestic image; a few preen her as femininity; Sylvia Plath could escape her only by suicide:

  . . . flying . . .

  Over the engine that killed her

  The mausoleum, the wax house.

  For the first time in literary history, a woman poet of stature, accustomed through years to the habits of creation, began to live the life of most of her sex: the honey drudgers: the winged un-miraculous two-angel, whirled mother-maintenance life, that most women, not privileged, know. A situation without help or husband and with twenty-four hours’ responsibility for two small human lives whom she adored and at their most fascinating and demanding. The world was blood-hot and personal. Creation’s needs at its height. She had to get up at

  four in the morning, that still blue almost eternal hour before the baby’s cry

  to write at all.* After the long expending day, tending, caring, cleaning, enjoying, laundering, feeding, marketing, delighting, outing; being

  a very efficient tool or weapon, used and in demand from moment to moment. . . . Nights [were] no good [for writing]. I’m so flat by then that all I can cope with is music and brandy and water.

  The smog of cooking, the smog of hell floated in her head. The smile of the icebox annihilated. There was a stink of fat and baby crap; viciousness in the kitchen! And the blood jet poetry (for which there was never time and self except in that still blue hour before the baby’s cry) there was no stopping it:**

  It is not a question in these last weeks of the conflict in a woman’s life between the claims of the feminine and the agonized work of art

  Elizabeth Hardwick, a woman, can say of Sylvia Plath’s suicide,

  Every artist is either a man or woman, and the struggle is pretty much the same for both.

  A comment as insensible of the two-angel realities (“so lowly as to be invisible”) as are the oblivious masculine assumptions, either that the suicide was because of Daddy’s death twenty-three years before, revived and compounded by her husband’s desertion; or else a real-life Story of O (that elegant pornography) sacramental culmination of being used up by ecstasy (poetry in place of sex this time):

  the pride of an utter and ultimate surrender, like the pride of O, naked and chained in her owl mask as she asks Sir Stephen for death. . . .*

  If in such an examined extremity, the profound realities of woman’s situation are ignored, how much less likely are they—particularly the subtler ones—to be seen, comprehended, taken into account, as they affect lesser-known women writers in more usual circumstances.

  In younger years, confidence and vision leeched, aspiration reduced. In adult years, sporadic effort and unfinished work; women made “mediocre caretakers of their talent”: that is, writing is not first. The angel in the house situation; probably also the essential angel, maintenance-of-life necessity; increasingly in our century, work on a paid job as well; and for more and more women writers, the whirled expending motherhood years. Is it so difficult to account for the many occasional-fine-story or one-book writers; the distinguished but limited production of others (Janet Lewis, Ann Petry, for example); the years and years in getting one book done (thirty years for Margaret Walker’s Jubilee, twenty for Marguerite Young’s Miss Macintosh My Darling); the slowly increasing numbers of women who not until their forties, fifties, sixties, publish for the first time (Dorothy Richardson, Hortense Calisher, Theodora Kroeber, Linda Hoyer—John Updike’s mother); the women who star
t with children’s, girls’ books (Maxine Kumin), some like Cid Ricketts Sumner (Tammy) seldom or never getting to adult fiction that would encompass their wisdom for adults; and most of all, the unsatisfactory quality of book after book that evidence the marks of part-time, part-self authorship, and to whose authors Sarah Orne Jewett’s words to the part-time, part-self young Willa Cather still apply, seventy years after:

  If you don’t keep and mature your force and above all have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago. . . . Otherwise, what might be strength is only crudeness, and what might be insight is only observation. You will write about life, but never life itself.*

  Yes, the loss in quality, the minor work, the hidden silences, are there in woman after woman writer in our century.** We will never have the body of work that we were capable of producing. Blight, said Blake, never does good to a tree:

  And if a blight kill not a tree but it still bear fruit, let none say that the fruit was in consequence of the blight.

  As for myself, who did not publish a book until I was fifty, who raised children without household help or the help of the “technological sublime” (the atom bomb was in manufacture before the first automatic washing machine); who worked outside the house on everyday jobs as well (as nearly half of all women do now, though a woman with a paid job, except as a maid or prostitute, is still rarest of any in literature); who could not kill the essential angel (there was no one else to do her work); would not—if I could—have killed the caring part of the Woolf angel, as distant from the world of literature most of my life as literature is distant (in content too) from my world:

  The years when I should have been writing, my hands and being were at other (inescapable) tasks. Now, lightened as they are, when I must do those tasks into which most of my life went, like the old mother, grandmother in my Tell Me a Riddle who could not make herself touch a baby, I pay a psychic cost: “the sweat beads, the long shudder begins.” The habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing are not easily broken, even when circumstances now often make it possible for writing to be first; habits of years—response to others, distractibility, responsibility for daily matters—stay with you, mark you, become you. The cost of “discontinuity” (that pattern still imposed on women) is such a weight of things unsaid, an accumulation of material so great, that everything starts up something else in me; what should take weeks, takes me sometimes months to write; what should take months, takes years.