Silences (49 page)

Limitation of circumstances (experience, knowledge) for scope, subject, 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.
^*

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—