Silences (51 page)
Authors: Shelly Fisher Fishkin
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“Power is not recognized as the power it is at all, if the subject matter is considered woman’s.”
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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).
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A small demur: Sontag seems to be that high priestess.
▴
ONE OUT OF TWELVE, P
. 41
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(I tried to resist quoting this, but it belongs with the museum pieces.)
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Lewis Carroll.
Through the Looking Glass.
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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
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Tumin and Stein: “A Study on Creativity.” The arbitrary change of pronoun from male (him, he) to female is mine.
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“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.
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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.
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From
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson;
the entire poems could not be quoted, but it is hoped they will be read in entirety.
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”
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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 would 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
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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.
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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).
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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 . . .
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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
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) 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.”
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“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.
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“Sparing him, and so on.”
Deferring to, accepting, writing from dominant male attitudes, assumptions, interpretations
of human behavior and motivation (even regarding oneself).
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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?