At forty-four:
Woke up perhaps at 3. Oh it’s beginning, it’s coming—the horror—physically like a painful wave swelling about the heart—tossing me up. I’m unhappy, unhappy! Down—God, I wish I were dead. Pause. But why am I feeling this? Let me watch the wave rise. I watch. Vanessa.* Children. Failure. Yes. Failure. Failure. The wave rises.
She was one month to forty-six before she could write
. . . And yet oddly enough I scarcely want children of my own now. This insatiable desire to write something before I die, this ravaging sense of the shortness and feverishness of life, make me cling, like a man on a rock, to my own anchor. I don’t like the physicalness of having children of one’s own. This occurred to me at Rodmell, but I never wrote it down. I can dramatise myself as a parent, it is true. And perhaps I have killed the feeling instinctively; or perhaps nature does.
Or perhaps nature does. Only at forty-eight, on
a day of intoxication . . . when I sat surveying the whole book [The Waves] complete . . . felt the pressure of the form—the splendour, the greatness—as perhaps I have never felt them
could she write, unqualifiedly:
Children are nothing to this.
Not until 1971, is there poetry:
My body knows it will never bear children.
What can I say to my body now,
this used violin?
Every night it cries out desolately
from its secret cave.
Old body, old friend,
why are you so unforgiving? . . .
—Jane Cooper, Maps and Windows.
Might There Not Have Been Other Marvels?
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?
That was not all I said at the MLA in 1971, nor was it phrased as question—but as based conviction.
I spoke not only of the loss in literature, but to other fields of human knowledge and action as well, because comprehensions possible out of motherhood (including, among so much invaluable else, the very nature, needs, illimitable potentiality of the human being—and the everyday means by which these are distorted, discouraged, limited, extinguished) have never had the circumstances to come to powerful, undeniable, useful expression—have had instead to remain inchoate, fragmentary, unformulated (and alas, unvalidated).
But I scarcely began on what needed to be said. Not only its seeming digression or the time limitation. I was entering into an almost taboo area; the last refuge of sexism; what has been, is, the least understood, least and last explored, tormentingly complex core of woman’s oppression (and, I believe, transport as woman)—motherhood. No context had been established.
I was conscious, too, of the many childless women present (professionals! having to obey the patriarchal injunction), and that to speak to them of yields possible in circumstanced motherhood, unless placed in context, might come only as more of its familiar traditional (mis)use to rebuke and belittle the hard-won achievement of their lives; more of the societal coercion to conform; family as the only suitable way of life for a female.
I was not able to reconstitute my remarks satisfactorily by the College English deadline. (They remain unpublished.)
II. Writer-Mothers: The Fundamental Situation
“. . . that only at the sacrifice of their best work can they bear and rear children . . .”*
When a man becomes an author, it is merely a change of employment to him. He takes a portion of that time which has hitherto been devoted to some other pursuit . . . and another merchant or lawyer or doctor steps into his vacant place and probably does as well as he. But no other can take up the quiet regular duties of the daughter, the wife or the mother. . . . A woman’s principal work in life is hardly left to her choice; nor can she drop the domestic charges evolving on her as an individual for the exercise of the most splendid talents that were ever bestowed. And yet she must not shrink from the extra responsibility implied by the very fact of her possessing such talents. She must not hide her gift in a napkin; it was meant for the use and service of others. In an humble and faithful spirit she must labor to do what is not impossible.
—Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Brontë, 1857—and still:
(The very fact that these are real needs, that one feels them as one’s own, that there is no one else responsible for these needs, gives them primacy.)
—“Silences,” 1962
The Fundamental Situation: Its earliest expression (1838)
“Come Harriet,” said I, as I found her tending one baby and watching two others just able to walk, “where is that piece for the ‘Souvenir’ which I promised the editor I would get from you? You have only this one day left to finish it, and have it I must.”
“And how will you get it, friend of mine. . . . You will at least have to wait till I get housecleaning over and baby’s teeth through.”
“As to housecleaning, you can defer it one day longer; and as to baby’s teeth, there is to be no end to them, as I can see . . .”
“But. . . there is a great baking down in the kitchen, and there is a ‘new girl’ for ‘help’ besides preparations for housecleaning next week. It is really out of the question.”
“. . . I do not know what genius is given for, if it is not to help a woman out of a scrape. . . . Just take your seat at the kitchen table with your writing weapons, and while you superintend Mina, fill up the odd snatches of time with the labors of your pen.”
In ten minutes she was seated (the baby in her lap); a table with flour, rolling-pin, ginger, and lard on one side, a dresser with eggs, pork, and beans, and various cooking utensils on the other, near her an oven heating . . .
“. . . Mina, you may do what I told you, while I write a few minutes till it is time to mould up the bread. Where is the inkstand?”
“Here it is, on top of the tea-kettle.”
[interruptions]
“Come, come, you see how it is. . . . We must give up the writing for today.”
“No, no; you can dictate as easily as you can write. Come, I can set the baby in this clothes-basket and give him some mischief or other to keep him quiet; you shall dictate and I will write. Now . . . what shall I write next?”
“Mina, pour a little milk into this pearlash.”
. . . and etc.
—the twenty-seven-year-old Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) making light of her attempts to get writing done.
Writer-Mothers: Harriet Beecher Stowe and A Room of One’s Own
Another child and two years later (1840) (“for a year I have held the pen only to write an occasional business letter such as could not be neglected”), she had a near-breakdown. Away from home, “confiding to her husband some of her literary plans and aspirations,” to his (yes) “my dear, you must be a literary woman,” she answered:
Our children are just coming to the age when everything depends on my efforts. They are delicate in health, and nervous and excitable and need a mother’s whole attention. Can I lawfully divide my attention by literary efforts?
. . . [But] If I am to write, I must have a room to myself, which shall be my room. I have in my own mind pitched on Mrs. Whipple’s room. We can put the stove in it. I have bought a cheap carpet for it, and there is furniture enough at home to furnish it comfortably, and I only beg in addition that you will let me change the glass door from the nursery into that room and keep my plants there, and then I shall be quite happy.
All last winter I felt the need of some place where I could go and be quiet and satisfied. I could not there [the dining room], for there was all the setting of tables, and clearing up of tables, and dressing and washing of children, and everything
else going on, and the continual falling of soot and coal dust on everything in the room was a constant annoyance to me, and I never felt comfortable there, though I tried hard. Then if I came into the parlor where you were, I felt as if I were interrupting you, and you know you sometimes thought so, too.
Now this winter let the cooking stove be put into that room, and let the pipe run up through the floor into the room above. . . . You can study by the parlor fire, and I and my plants will take the other room. I shall keep my work and all my things there and feel settled and quiet. I intend to have a regular part of each day devoted to the children, and then I shall take them in there.
[1841]
Plans. Plans. Sporadic writing for magazines, and, furthermore, only what would add to family income.
Six children and “cares endless” later (1846, she was thirty-five)—like Rebecca Harding Davis, “having lived too much in relations . . . she became a stranger to the resources of her own nature”—“broke down.” While a sister took over at home, she stayed for eleven months in Vermont, giving “the renovating fountains time to rise up.”
There was the death of one child; the birth of another. The sporadic writing went on—under the same old circumstances—
I can [now] earn four hundred dollars a year by writing, but I don’t want to feel that I must, and, when weary with teaching the children, and tending the baby, and buying provisions, and mending dresses, and darning stockings, sit down and write a piece for some paper.
Like Rebecca she became more and more habituated to rapid, unripened (usually made-to-order) work. The book she wanted to write “to make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is” waited and waited. “As long as the baby sleeps with me nights I can’t do much at anything, but I will do it at last,” she vowed in a letter.
There was “many a night weeping, the baby sleeping beside me, as I thought of the slave mothers whose babes were torn from them,” but nothing was translated onto paper.
Stowe was thirty-nine before she got to Uncle Tom’s Cabin—at last. She wrote it in magazine serial installments—in between—when weary with teaching the children and tending the baby and buying provisions and mending and darning; much of it on the kitchen table as the younger Harriet Beecher Stowe had, when trying to get writing done fourteen years before. The firm, flawless style of her girlhood letters was gone.
If—
Another Early Writer-Mother in the Fundamental Situation
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1815–1852), as seen in reminiscences by her similarly named daughter:
Now she sits correcting proof-sheets, and now she is painting apostles for the baby’s first Bible lesson. Now she is writing her new book, and now she is dyeing things canary-yellow in the white oak dye—for the professor’s salary is small, and a crushing economy [is necessary] . . . Now—for her practical ingenuity is unlimited—she is whittling little wooden feet to stretch the children’s stockings on, to save them from shrinking; and now she is reading to us from the old, red copy of Hazlitt’s British Poets up on a winter night. Now she is a popular writer, incredulous of her first success, with her future flashing before her; and now she is a tired, tender mother, crooning to a sick child while the Ms. lies unfinished on the table, and the publishers are wishing their professor’s wife were a free woman, childless and solitary, able to send copy as fast as it was wanted.
—from Elizabeth Stuart Lyon Phelps’s autobiography, Chapters from a Life
Not until she was in her mid-thirties, was the mother able to begin on her writing. She was stunningly successful, first with fiction for the young. But within a few years, she was dead. Her attempt “to achieve the difficult reconciliation between genius and domestic life” (“her last book and her last baby came together, and they killed her”) is unforgettably fictionalized in the daughter’s classic Story of Avis.
The mother’s pioneering story of this (then) insoluble situation, “The Angel Over the Right Shoulder,”* tells the woman’s side of Coventry Patmore’s nineteenth-century cherished angel-in-the-house** for it limns the toll exacted. There are two angels in Phelps’s story: the angel over the right shoulder who records for God every evidence of right mothering, of “performing faithfully all those little household cares and duties on which the comfort and virtue of her family depend”; and the awful angel over the left shoulder who, weeping, records for God every bit of time not so used, every lapse and deficiency. Though in the mother’s view, “it is right and important for her to cultivate her own mind and heart,” in actuality, even “the little fragments of broken time” made with such enormous effort (as well as the very toll of making the effort), “rob her little ones.” Eventually she can no longer keep up the struggle.
Sitting by the bedside of her young sleeping daughter, her tears “falling fast,”
most earnestly did she wish that she could shield [her] child from the disappointment and mistakes and self-reproach from which [she] was suffering; that the little one might take up life where she could give it to her—all mended by her own experience. It would have been a comfort to have felt that, in fighting the battle, she had fought for both.†
Sustaining Interruption; Postponing (1877)
“Where [now] is the strength and glory of the vision?”
Scarcely had the palette-knife struck the cobalt to the Naples yellow, when the studio-door shivered, stirred and started with a prolonged and inspiriting creak. Van admitted his little nose on probation into the crack and heaved a heart breaking sigh.
“Shut the door, Van.”
His pretty mamma had an unhappy habit of expecting to be obeyed, which was a source of serious disorder to Van’s small system. He shut the door in—nose and all—with a filial haste and emphasis, the immediate consequences of which fell heavily upon both parties. . . . When the outcry is over, and the sobbing has ceased, and the tears are kissed away, and the solid little sinner lies soothed upon the cramped and forgiving arm, where is the strength and glory of the vision? Where are the leaping fingers that quivered to do its bidding in the fresh life of the winter morning hour?
“Run away again, Van: mother must go to work now.”
“Mamma,” faintly, “I’ve sat down on—something. I’m all blue and colors, Mamma, on my sack behind. I didn’t know it was your palette, Mamma. I didn’t mean to.”
By and By
Avis left the unfinished sketch or painting patiently. She said, “By and by. After a while. I must wait a little.” She was still able to allure herself with the melody of this refrain, to which so many hundreds of women’s lips have shaped themselves trembling; while the ears of a departing hope or a struggling purpose were bent to hear. Life had become a succession of expectancies. . . .
Women understand—only women altogether—what a dreary will-o’-the-wisp is this old, common, I had almost said commonplace, experience, “When the fall sewing is done,” “When the baby can walk,” “When house-cleaning is over,” “When the company has gone,” “When we have got through with the whooping-cough,” “When I am a little stronger,” then I will write the poem, or learn the language, or study the great charity, or master the symphony; then I will act, dare, dream, become.
—from Story of Avis by Elizabeth Stuart Lyon Phelps, 1877—a century or so ago.
Sustaining interruption—a century later
a child with untameable curly blond hair. i call her kia, pine nut person, & her eyes so open as she watches me try to capture her, as I try to name her . . .
. . . what of the lonely 7 year old (7½ mommy!) watching tv in the front room? what of her?
what of yesterday when she chased the baby into my room & I screamed
OUT OUT GET OUT & she ran
right out but the baby stayed,
unafraid. what is it like to have
a child afraid of you, your own
child, your first child, the one
who must forgive you if either of you are to survive . . .
& how right is it to shut her out of the room so i can write about her?
how human, how loving? how can
i even try to
: name her.
—from Alta’s Momma: A Start on All the Untold Stories, 1971
Writers, Mothers: It is humanly impossible for a woman who is a wife and mother to work on a regular teaching job and write
People ask me how I find time to write with a family and a teaching job. I don’t. That is one reason I was so long with Jubilee. A writer needs time to write a certain number of hours every day. This is particularly true with prose fiction and absolutely necessary with the novel. Writing poetry may be different, but the novel demands long hours every day at a steady pace until the thing is done. It is humanly impossible for a woman who is a wife and mother to work on a regular teaching job and write. Weekends and nights and vacations are all right for reading but not enough for writing. This is a full-time job, but for me such full attention has only been possible during the three Depression years I was on the Writers’ Project and during that one [graduate] school year in which I finished Jubilee.
—Margaret Walker, thirty years (1938–1968) from the inception of Jubilee to its completion: four children and twenty-six years in “the teaching harness” in that time.
And yet I do not regret the shape my life has taken.
Three contemporary writer-mothers speak:
My grandmother, who wrote and sold short stories at one point in her life, before raising six children, used to claim with some bitterness that bearing and raising children drained a woman’s creativity. Her disappointment reminds me of my own failure to solve the problems of raising children and carrying on a fulltime career. I haven’t lost my sap, but I have certainly lost time: five out of the past ten years, at least, have been “lost” to bearing and raising three boys, and the end is not yet in sight. My work is reduced to five or six hours a week, always subject to interruptions and cancellations; and yet I do not regret the shape my life has taken, although it is not the one I would have chosen, ten years ago.
I don’t believe there is a solution to this problem, or at least, I don’t believe there is one which recognizes the emotional complexities involved. A life without children is, I feel, an impoverished life for most women; yet life with children imposes demands that consume energy and imagination as well as time, and that cannot all be delegated—even supposing there were a delegate available. . . .
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