Silences

by Shelly Fisher Fishkin

  —Eminent novelist, Wm. Thackeray, explaining the pitiful situation of Charlotte Brontë—and her own infinitely preferable one—to a young friend, 1853

  There was but little feminine charm about her, and of this fact she was herself uneasily and perpetually conscious. . . . I believe she would have given all her genius and all her fame to have been beautiful.

  —Brontë’s publisher, George Smith, summing her up in a reminiscence in 1900, forty-five years after her death

  “Insights” unsupported by her work or life. Blinded by commonplace male attitudes, they did not see (missed!) the actual Charlotte Brontë. The little bit of a creature lacking feminine charm and perpetually conscious of it; eating up her heart because no Tomkins will come; as the Brontë glad to give up all her genius and fame to be thought beautiful and charming, are conjures, bred out of “judging by a standard of what is deemed becoming in her sex” and the (sexist) preconception that single women aren’t complete and, being women, what they must really care about, would give up anything for, is to be deemed attractive and to snare a man.

  Think of Charlotte Brontë, that proud, lonely writer-self, coming to London “hungry for equals”; encountering instead this blindness to her actual being; this patronizing, subtle discounting of her very source-motivations, achievement, stature.

  She knew this reductiveness well. In her work, as in her personal conduct, she fought it. The novels are, among so much else, proud, conscious refutations of it. Remember: it was Jane Eyre that first challenged the judging a woman on the basis of appearance or singleness; indeed the very standards for beauty, charm—and created the first heroine—fascinating and of substance—who was “plain.”

  She once told her sisters that they were wrong—even morally wrong—in making their heroines beautiful as a matter of course. [When] they replied that it was impossible to make a heroine interesting on any other terms, her answer was “I will prove to you that you are wrong. I will show you a heroine as small and as plain as myself who shall be as interesting as any of yours.” Hence Jane Eyre . . . but she is not myself, any further than that.

  —Harriet Martineau, a conversation with Brontë

  Nevertheless: “Her mind must have been strained and her vitality lowered by the need to oppose this.”

  Climate: This Abasement

  Then why did she mind what he said? “Women can’t write, women can’t paint.” . . . Why did her whole being bow, like corn under a wind, and erect itself again from this abasement only with a great and painful effort?

  —Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

  Without the semblance of a suspicion that I may be busy . . .

  And the egotism of men surprises and shocks me, even now. Is there a woman of my acquaintance who could sit in my armchair from 3 to 6:30 without the semblance of a suspicion that I may be busy, or tired or bored; and so sitting could talk, grumbling and grudging, of her difficulties, worries; then eat chocolates, then read a book, and go at last, apparently self-complacent and wrapped in a kind of blubber of misty self-salutation?

  —Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary

  “Obliged to shut off three-fourths of their being”: 1816–1916

  1816: A woman, especially

  Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person should always wish to avoid. A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.

  —Jane Austen, Persuasion

  1916: The Literary Lion and young women writers

  With a flash of insight. . . she saw how very slight, how restricted and perpetually baffled must always be the communication between him and anything that bore the name of woman. Saw the price each one had paid with whom he had been intimate either in love or friendship, in being obliged to shut off . . . three-fourths of their being.

  What could any one of them be for him, beyond the fact that they were providers of what he regarded as vitalizing physical contacts, or sounding-boards for his ideas; admirers, supporters? Either they were disciples . . . and were therefore not women at all, but the “intelligent emancipated creatures” for whom he expressed so much admiration while fighting shy of them in his leisure hours because of their awful consistency and conscientiousness . . . “a rush of brains to the head usually made them rather plain in the face”; or they played up whenever they were with him, . . . and lived for the rest of their time in their own deep world. . . .

  There was no place in his universe for women who did not either sincerely, blindly, follow; or play up and make him believe they were following. All the others were merely pleasant or unpleasant biological material. Those who opposed: misguided creatures who must not be allowed to obstruct. The majority played up: for the sake of his society, his charm, the charm of enjoying and watching him enjoy the pranks of his lightning-swift intelligence. The temptation was great.

  She knew she had not always resisted it.

  —Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage

  A man whose work I revered . . . [my] book a serious, original contribution

  When The Hours of Isis was published I sent it to the greatest authority on Egyptology at that time, a man whose work I revered, and whose knowledge filled me with awe. I wanted to make some return for the inspiration his books had brought to me, and I was filled with astonishment and joy when he acknowledged the gift with an invitation to meet him. He asked me to come to his office in the late afternoon when he would be at leisure.

  I was shown into a room which was not so much an office as a private library, with books from ceiling to floor, armchairs and reading lamps and a large desk on which I could see The Hours of Isis beside a great tome which I recognized as Sir Wallis Budge’s Osiris. The sight of them together overpowered me and I could hardly stammer “How do you do?”

  “Come here,” he said. “I have something to show you.”

  I went round to his side to look down at the books.

  “You know what all this is about, don’t you?” he asked. “It’s a phallic myth. You know what a phallus is?”

  He proceeded to show me. The shock was enormous. Not so the object. I had seen those before . . . indecent old men in the Paris métro exposing themselves at the rush hour in the hope of getting a reaction. Once a sturdy fishwife standing next to me turned the tables superbly by saying loudly: “Quand on n’a pas de marchandise on n’ouvre pas sa boutique,” which I suppose can be translated roughly: “If you’re short on goods don’t open up the shop.” The crowd laughed and he edged over to the door and got out quickly at the next station.

  What shocked me was that this great man could insult Isis and Osiris by behaving in that way. The book was a serious, original contribution to his own field.

  By this time he had seized me and was pawing and nuzzling my breasts. I managed to squirm loose, shaking with rage and shame, and after a moment, during which he probably saw me clearly for the first time, he began to mutter something, excuses, justification. The gist of it was that no nice girl would fill her little mind with phallic myths. A girl who wrote a book about Osiris was fair game, obviously asking for it. . . .

  —Evelyn Eaton’s autobiography,

  The Trees and Fields Went the Other Way, 1974

  What They All Need . . .

  One of them was complaining about the number of female writers.

  “And they’ve all got three names,” he said, “Mary Roberts Wilcox, Ella Wheeler Catheter, Ford Mary Rineheart . . .”

  Then someone started a train of stories by suggesting that what they all needed was a good rape.

  “I knew a gal who was regular until she fell in with a group and went literary. She began writing for the little magazines about how much Beauty hurt her and ditched the boy friend who set up pins in a bowling alley. The guys on the block got sore and took her into the lots one night. About eight of them. They ganged
her proper . . .”

  “That’s like the one they tell about another female writer. When this hard-boiled stuff first came in, she dropped the trick English accent and went in for scram and lam. She got to hanging around with a lot of mugs in a speak, gathering material for a novel. Well, the mugs didn’t know they were picturesque and thought she was regular until the barkeep put them wise. They got her into the back room to teach her a new word and put the boots to her. They didn’t let her out for three days. On the last day they sold tickets to niggers . . .”

  Miss Lonelyhearts stopped listening. His friends would go on telling those stories until they were too drunk to talk. . . .

  —Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts

  Climate; Critical Attitudes; Exclusions

  The Ground of Departure

  I have a terrible confession to make—I have nothing to say about any of the talented women who write today. Out of what is no doubt a fault in me, I do not seem able to read them. Indeed I doubt if there will be a really exciting woman writer until the first whore becomes a call girl and tells her tale. At the risk of making a dozen devoted enemies for life, I can only say that the sniffs I get from the ink of the women are always fey, old-hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquille in mannequin’s whimsy, or else bright and stillborn. Since I’ve never been able to read Virginia Woolf, and am sometimes willing to believe it can conceivably be my fault, this verdict may be taken fairly as the twisted tongue of a soured taste, at least by those readers who do not share with me the ground of departure—that a good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls.

  —Norman Mailer (Advertisements for Myself), in “Evaluations

  —Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room” (1959). This is the one paragraph considering women in ten pages, twenty-eight paragraphs.*

  Subtler Exclusions

  In the first stages of his development, before he has found his distinctive style, the poet is, as it were, engaged to language and, like any young man who is courting, it is right and proper that he should play the chivalrous servant, carry parcels, submit to tests and humiliations, wait hours at street corners, and defer to his beloved’s slightest whims, but once he has proved his love and been accepted, then it is another matter. Once he is married, he must be master in his own house and be responsible for their relationship. . . .

  . . . The poet is the father who begets the poem which the language bears. At first sight this would seem to give the poet too little to do and the language too much till one remembers that, as the husband, it is he, not the language, who is responsible for the success of their marriage which differs from natural marriage in that in this relationship there is no loveless love-making, no accidental pregnancies. . . .

  . . . Poets, like husbands, are good, bad and indifferent. Some are Victorian tyrants who treat language like a doormat, some are dreadfully hen-pecked, some bored, some unfaithful. For all of them, there are periods of tension, brawls, sulky silences, and, for many, divorce after a few passionate years.

  —W.H. Auden, Poets at Work

  Exclusion: Language Itself

  “Language itself, all achievement, anything to do with the human [cast] in exclusively male terms.”

  But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knockdown argument,” Alice objected.

  When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.

  The question is, said Alice, whether you can make words mean so many different things?

  The question is, said Humpty Dumpty, who is to be master—that’s all.*

  It is the saturation—the never ceasing, life-long saturation.

  Man. The poet: he (his). The writer: he (his).

  No, not simply a matter of “correct usage”; our inherited language; i.e., man, a generic term, defined as including, subsuming, woman, the entire human race.

  The perpetuating—by continued usage—entrenched, centuries-old oppressive power realities, early-on incorporated into language: male rule; male ownership; our secondariness; our exclusion.

  In reading Auden (“The poet is the father who begets the poem”), the effort having to be made in us somewhere to include ourselves as writer also. The reinforcement to the “ground of departure” attitudes: “a real writer has balls—is male. . . .”

  The unconscious, conscious harm (as well, as ill), to a woman—when writing of writing or writers or of oneself as poet, as writer—of having to refer to oneself, and to one’s activity, as masculine. As Willa Cather (quoted earlier):

  usually the young writer must have his affair with the external material he covets . . .

  Or as Denise Levertov, from “The Poet in the World”:

  He picks up crystal buttons from the ocean floor

  Gills of the mind pulse in unfathomed water.

  In the infinite dictionary he discovers

  gold grains of sand. . . .

  Blind to what he does not yet need,

  he feels his way over broken glass

  to the one stone that fits his palm . . .

  Why is it so hard for us? So difficult to, naturally, state our presence in the “she” “hers” belonging to us?

  (Precision of language—the writer’s special tool and task. Exact to meaning.

  Man, he, mankind—only if meaning: exclusively male.

  Humanity (two more syllables) when meaning the human race. (Ascent of Humanity, not “Ascent of Man.”) The individual (not he); the human being (not man); humankind (not mankind)—if that is what is meant. To write naturally: the poet, she; the writer, she—if the reference is to self, if that is what is meant.

  The awkwardness (and often ridicule) if we try now to be accurate. To say: she/he; her/him; or the ungrammatical “they” when referring to both-sex poets, writers, or a writing activity.)

  Marks of centuries-old entrenched power realities. Measure of the heaviness of our task no longer to abide by them,—to find and raise our various truths into truthful language.

  Exclusions; Isolations; Patriarchal Atmospheres

  Distinguished poet and editor A. Alvarez on assignment to meet and interview the new poet-sensation, Ted Hughes (1958):

  I was also told that he had a wife called Sylvia, who also wrote poetry, “but”—and this was said reassuringly—“she’s very sharp and intelligent.” . . .

  We arranged to take our kids for a walk . . . Ted went downstairs to get the pram ready while she [Sylvia] dressed the baby. I stayed behind a minute, zipping up my son’s coat. Sylvia turned to me suddenly, without gush:

  “I’m so glad you picked that poem,” she said. “It’s one of my favorites but no one else seemed to like it.”

  For a moment I went completely blank; I didn’t know what she was talking about. She noticed and helped me out.

  “The one you put in The Observer a year ago. About the factory at night.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Sylvia Plath . . . I’m sorry. It was a lovely poem.”

  “Lovely” wasn’t the right word, but what else do you say to a bright young housewife? . . .

  I was embarrassed not to have known who she was. She seemed so embarrassed to have [had to remind] me, and also depressed. . . .

  After that I saw Ted occasionally, Sylvia more rarely. He and I would meet for a beer in one of the pubs. . . .

  Ted occasionally dropped in and I would hobble with him briefly to the pub. But I saw Sylvia not at all. . . .

  They had had a new baby in January, [this time] a boy, and Sylvia had changed. No longer quiet and withheld, a housewifely appendage to a powerful husband, she seemed made solid and complete. . . . Perhaps the birth of a son had something to do with this new confident air.

  —from “Sylvia Plath: A Memoir”

  Restriction (Exclusion) Deprivation

  Limitation of circumstances (experience, knowledge) for scope, subj
ect, context: the kind of comprehensions that can come only in situations beyond the private:

  Restriction: Riveted to the Ground

  Culture must be apprehended through the free action of a transcendence: that is, the free spirit with all its riches must project itself toward an empty heaven that it is to populate; but if a thousand persistent bonds hold it to earth, its surge is broken. . . . [The woman artist-writer] can today go out alone, but . . . eyes and heads [lie] in wait everywhere; if she wanders carelessly, her mind freely drifting, if she lights a cigarette in front of a cafe, if she goes alone to the movies, a disagreeable incident [may well] happen. She must inspire respect by her dress and manners. But this preoccupation rivets her to the ground and to herself.

  —Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

  When women finally do begin to try to write . . . we write autobiographically. So autobiographically in fact that it is very hard to find any sense of any other reality. There is no other reality besides my house. There is no other reality outside Chattanooga. St. Louis is the only city that exists. This grammar school where me and my friends went, we chewed bubblegum, and went and got screwed the first time—that’s all that happens. See, the whole thing is that our mobility is limited, our ability to read is limited, our ability to write is limited, our ability—or even the impulse—to dream is limited. . . . And the work has to move us to some other place.*

  A culture fosters creativity to the extent that it provides an individual with the opportunity to experience its many facets. . . . A culture that limits a person’s freedom to work, study or experience, that restricts [her] opportunity for exposure, that keeps [her] from learning necessary media through which feelings and ideas could be contributed to others, decreases probability of creative contributions.

  . . . Creativity is transactional between the individual and the environment in which [s]he lives.*