Christina Stead—no banker she, nor dweller in the realms of power—wrote the definitive novel on world banking (House of All Nations). But for seven years she had had to work for a living in a bank, and long before that had made herself a peerless writer-observer (the acknowledged classic, The Man Who Loved Children, already years behind her). If—besides time—she had been able to move freely up and down the social scale, had all open to her, would a year have sufficed (as it did for Balzac, Zola)—and she been able to go on to other revealings? What rarest combinations of imaginative fiction might we not have had from her.
What rarest combinations might we not have had from Beatrix Potter, imaginative writer, excluded from the world of science she sought to enter, turned instead to Peter Rabbit and a garden patch.
From birth on, Virginia Woolf moved in personal-social relationship to men of power in her time—among them makers of British policy, “constantly affect[ing] the course of history.”** Restricted personal-social only. The savage (and to me great) essay, Three Guineas (as A Room of One’s Own), comes partly out of genius brooding on that exclusion (restriction).*
The public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other
she observed in Three Guineas. She gave us inexhaustible fiction on the private, the restricted personal; but all her hard-won genius, to little avail in imaginatively creating for us the inseparable connection; the public worlds; the full beings of the men as they affected history;—the circumference.
I should have liked a closer and thicker knowledge of life. I should have liked to deal with real things sometimes.
—Virginia Woolf
Think: If Tolstoy had been born a woman.
Restriction, Deprivation, Exclusion
Emily Dickinson’s Testimony: Some Beginning Lines of Some Poems**
I breathed enough to take the Trick—
And now, removed from Air—
I simulate the Breath . . .
Why—do they shut Me out of Heaven?
Did I sing—too loud?
Before I got my eye put out
I liked as well to see—
As other Creatures, that have Eyes
And know no other way—
It knew no Medicine—
It was not Sickness—then—
It would have starved a Gnat—
To live so small as I—
And yet I was a living Child—
With Food’s necessity
Upon me—like a Claw—
I had been hungry, all the Years—
My Noon had Come—to dine—
I trembling drew the Table near—
And touched the Curious Wine—
They shut me up in Prose—
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet—
Because they liked me “still”—
I never hear the word “escape”
Without a quicker blood,
Victory comes late—
And is held low to freezing lips—
Too rapt with frost
To take it—
’Tis true—They shut me in the Cold—
But then—Themselves were warm
Deprived of other Banquet,
I entertained Myself—
Had I not seen the Sun
I could have borne the shade
But Light a newer Wilderness
My Wilderness has made—
I was the slightest in the House—
I took the smallest Room—
A loss of something ever felt I—
The first that I could recollect
Bereft I was—of what I knew not
Not with a Club, the Heart is broken
Nor with a Stone—
A Whip so small you could not see it
“I want”—it pleaded—All its life—
Hope is a subtle Glutton—
He feeds upon the Fair—
And yet—inspected closely
What Abstinence is there—
“My business is circumference.”
But even Emily Dickinson could not free herself to consummate her business. Trespass vision cannot make circumference. Nor can the most ascendant imagination. Vision must have a place from which (as well as territory) to observe. Imagination must have freedom, velocity—and ground from which to soar.
(And time, confidence, concentration, means.)
Many a woman writer seeking circumference—of whom I am one (Circumference, thou Bride of Awe)—has had to abide by, solace herself with trespass vision; the “being one on whom nothing is lost.” They do not suffice.
O! dreadful is the check—intense the agony—
When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again;
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.
—Emily Brontë
ONE OUT OF TWELVE, P. 40–41
ONE OUT OF TWELVE, PP. 40–41
*“Power is not recognized as the power it is at all, if the subject matter is considered woman’s.”
**The definitive Twentieth Century Authors, first edition (1945), edited by Stanley Kunitz, was an example of this. Scarcely a woman writer escaped discussion of her appearance (and domestic habits).
*A small demur: Sontag seems to be that high priestess.
ONE OUT OF TWELVE, P. 41
*(I tried to resist quoting this, but it belongs with the museum pieces.)
*Lewis Carroll. Through the Looking Glass.
*Ntozake Shange (author: For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf) speaking of limitations for women and for Third World youngsters in a panel on Women and Creative Process, Stanford University, 1975.
ONE OUT OF TWELVE, P. 41
*Tumin and Stein: “A Study on Creativity.” The arbitrary change of pronoun from male (him, he) to female is mine.
**“Molly has very unfairly, I think, laid upon me the burden of providing a memoir tonight. . . . But it is unfair. It is not my turn; I am not the oldest of you. I am not the most widely lived or the most richly memoried. Maynard, Desmond, Clive and Leonard all live stirring and active lives; all constantly brush up against the great; all constantly affect the course of history one way or another. It is for them to unlock the doors of their treasure-houses and to set before us those gilt and gleaming objects which repose within. Who am I that I should be asked to read a memoir? A mere scribbler. . . . My memoirs, which are always private, and at their best only about proposals of marriage, seductions by half-brothers, encounters with Ottoline and so on, must soon run dry. . . . I can speak a kind of dog French and mongrel Italian; but so ignorant am I, so badly educated, that if you ask me the simplest question—for instance, where is Guatemala?—I am forced to turn the conversation. . . .”
—from “Am I a Snob?” read to the Memoir Club, “close friends of long standing,” in 1936 (Moments of Being, 1976). The chaffing tone is instructive.
*The impairment of all women resulting from exclusion, and the denial of full circumference for her own work, are recurrent threads throughout Woolf’s essays, letters, diaries—and fiction.
**From The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson; the entire poems could not be quoted, but it is hoped they will be read in entirety.
SOME EFFECTS OF HAVING TO COUNTER AND ENCOUNTER HARMFUL TREATMENT AND CIRCUMSTANCES AS A WRITER WHO IS FEMALE. DENIAL OF CIRCUMFERENCE.
These pressures toward censorship, self-censorship; toward accepting, abiding by entrenched attitudes, thus falsifying one’s own reality, range, vision, truth, voice . . .
Constriction to One Dimension—I: “Writing Like a Man”*
When Charlotte Brontë, still publishing as Currer Bell, wrote to George Lewes in 1849
I wish you did not think me a woman. I wish all reviewers believed “Currer Bell” to be a man: they wou
ld be more just to him
she had no intention of or desire to write like a man. She wished to have the privileges of one, that is, have her work accorded serious, just treatment; and to have equality of circumstance in writing, that is, be able to write “as author only,” unsex-consciously, freely.
It was in that hope that she, her sisters, and other women writers before and since—from George Sand, George Eliot, Ralph Irons (Olive Schreiner), Henry Handel Richardson, I. Compton-Burnett, to A.G. Motjabai—camouflaged themselves under male pen names or neutral initials. Innocent, evident strategem—and ineffective.
The “as author only” situation yet to be achieved, it is inevitable that distortions of work will result—most often in writers of highest aim, to whom the overt/covert woman’s place (“women writers, woman experience, and literature written by women are by definition . . . minor”) damnation (humiliation!) is intolerable.
The coercion to “write like a man” takes vari-forms:
Denying profound (woman) life comprehensions* and experiences expression (sometimes not even bringing them to consciousness)—as not legitimate or important or interesting enough material for literature. Overt, covert effect of their major absence from the dominant “male-stream” (“the great tradition”), and of the attitude that “women’s subjects” are minor, trivial.
Casting (embodying) deepest comprehensions and truths in the character or voice of a male, as of greater import, impact, significance. (Rebecca Davis, a Hugh instead of a Deb, a Life in the Iron Mills instead of Life in the Textile Mills; Willa Cather, a male narrator in “Wagner Matinee,” My Antonia, Lost Lady; Jo Sinclair, a male hero in her autobiographical Wasteland.)
In writing of women, characterizations, material, understandings, identical to that of most male writers. In the extreme: repeating male stereotypings, indictments, diminishings of women. Nurse Ratchetts. Portnoy mothers. Francis MacComber bitches. Parasites, bores, gabs, dummies, nags, whiners. Not asking the writer’s question: is this true? is this all? if indeed gargoyled, then what misshapen? (Mary McCarthy’s The Group. How more perceptively—and as tragedy—would these women’s lives be written today.)
Refusing “woman’s sphere” subjects altogether. (A form, as are these all, of acceding to the patriarchal injunction: if you are going to practice literature—a man’s domain, profession—divest yourself of what might identify you as woman.)
Writing in dominant male forms, style, although what seeks to be expressed might ask otherwise. In its extreme, consciously seeking (stereotypically) male-identified characteristics, bluntness, thrust, force (the phallacy of biological analogy); abstraction, detachment, “the large canvas,” etc. Far deeper, more pervasive, is the unexamined acceptance of forms (subjects, vision) as one’s own.*
Proclaiming that one’s sex has nothing to do with one’s writing: In its understandable, but unadmirable form, what Margaret Atwood analyzes as:
the often observed phenomenon of the member of a despised social group who manages to transcend the limitation imposed on the group, at least enough to become “successful,” disassociating him/herself from the group. . . . Thus the [successful] women who say: “I’ve never had any problems. I don’t know what they’re talking about.” . . . Why carry with you the stigma attached to that dismal category you’ve escaped from?
In its traditional form: accepting or seeming to accept that the circumstances for and the practice of literature are above gender. “Every artist is either a man or a woman, and the struggle is pretty much the same for both,” proclaims Elizabeth Hardwick (quoted earlier).
. . . The term “woman writer” . . . has no meaning, not intellectually, not morally, not historically. A writer is a writer.
declares Cynthia Ozick at a symposium on Literary Women (1976).*
As a writer-woman wrote to another one century and a half ago:
Thou large brained woman and large hearted man,
Self called George Sand whose soul amid the lions
Of thy tumultuous senses, moans defiance
And answers roar for roar . . .
True genius, but true woman! Dost deny
Thy woman’s nature with a manly scorn
And break away the gauds and armlets worn
By weaker women in captivity? . . .
Ah, vain denial! That revolted cry
Is sobbed in by a woman’s voice forlorn!
Thy woman’s hair, my sister, all unshorn
Floats back—dishevelled strength in agony . . .**
Dishevelled strength in agony
Surely it is evident that heretofore, and in what follows, I am writing of (and against) pressures, impediments, to what should rightfully be the writer’s fullest freedom to write of anything—in any sex, voice, style—in accordance with the best need of whatever seeks expression.
Constriction to One Dimension—II: Writing Like a Woman
Woman’s Place. “Obliged to shut off three-fourths of one’s being”
The obverse twin, Siamese, to “writing like a man”—enforced, created, by the same causes (although there is no complementary (complimentary) “you write like a woman” expression*) compounded by the great crippler, lack of confidence in one’s own experiences, one’s own authenticity, one’s own potential powers.
Among the vari-forms, overlapping:
“The mirror to magnify man.”** “A sensibility that will not threaten man.”
Being charming, entertaining, “small,” feminine, when full development of material would require a serious or larger tone and treatment. Pulling away from depths and complexity. Irony, wit, the arch, instead of directness; diffuse emotion or detachment instead of tragedy. Avoiding seriousness altogether. Concealing intellect, analytical ability, objectivity; or refusing to credit that one is capable of them. Abdicating “male” realms: “the large,” the social, the political.
Accepting that one’s writing is only within the (reductively defined) feminine. The personal, the intuitive, the sensuous, the inner, the narcissistic: “swathed in self.” “Love is a woman’s whole existence.” Centrality of the male. Centrality of sexuality. Confinement to biological (sex-partner) woman. The trap of biological analogy: glorifying womb, female form imagery; or softness, the inner.† Earth mother, serving vessel, sex goddess, irresistible romantic heroine; victim; “do with me as you will” stereotype.
Not being ambitious in accordance with one’s capacities. Using writing as “a means of self-expression instead of an art” when, with seriousness and ambition, the art might be achieved as well (applicable only to women writers of favored background and circumstances for whom the attainment might have been possible).
“Leaving out what most men writers leave out”: woman’s most basic experiences once they get up out of bed and childbed; other common female realities.* “Sparing him, and so on.”
Deferring to, accepting, writing from dominant male attitudes, assumptions, interpretations of human behavior and motivation (even regarding oneself).** Repeating male stereotypings, indictments, diminishings of women, in woman form. As was said a few pages ago. Not asking the writer’s question: is this true? is this true in my own experience and life-knowledge?
Incorporating prevailing male (and class) values—ignoring or contempt for the work and services most women do in and out of the home—contrary to one’s lived knowledge of their essentiality, substance, challenge, worth, yes—for some aspects of our being, self-development, fulfillment of potentials. (In rarer form, exalting or romanticizing aspects of these services, ignoring the criminality of their consuming most of women’s lives.)
Constriction to One Dimension—III: Confinement to Biological (Sex-Partner) Woman
“Killing the angel in the house, I think I solved,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her already-quoted discussion of problems before women writers, “but the second [problem], telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved.”*
Fifty years after, still to be s
olved.
With motherhood (and in this instance, in spite of thousands of books by men and hundreds by women on “love” and, now, on sexuality) the least understood, the most tormentingly complex experience to wrest to truth.
Telling the truth about one’s experiences as a body, forbidden, not possible, for centuries.
Rights of one’s own body denied to woman for centuries. Men owned us. Babies inhabited our bodies year after year.
Knowledge of one’s body that comes only through free use of it, even free exercise of it, denied. (Thoreau’s birthday wish for himself one year: “to inhabit his body with inexpressible satisfaction.” Never possible for his sister Sophia. He could swim—and naked, walk to exhaustion, “dithyrambic leap” about; all physical activity was open to him. Never for Sophia—or any woman—that inexpressible satisfaction.)
The way-making to do.
The obvious coercions: to “write like a man” (of one’s experiences as most men write, have written, of us—Miller, Lawrence, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath); to “write like a woman” (flatter, conciliate, please; lie; the mirror to magnify man). The problem of finding one’s own truth through the primacy accorded sexuality* by our times. The pornographic, the Freudian, times. Our freer—that is, voluntary about reproduction—times. Our still restrictive, defining sexuality as heterosexual, times.
The confusion of “sexual liberation” (genitally defined) with the genuine liberation of woman: “the exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a society affording them scope.” The unworked through, unassessed relationship between body difference and the actual power relationship permeating associations between the sexes. The question of the place, proportion, actual importance of sexuality in our (now) longer-lived, more various, woman lives.
Telling the truth about one’s body: a necessary, freeing subject for the woman writer.
*Akin to “passing”: the attempt to escape inferior status, penalties, injustices, by concealing one’s color, class, origin. Identifying oneself as of the dominant.
Silences Page 29
