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November 23 - November 23, 2025
I am realizing you become a wife, despite the mutual attempt at an egalitarian partnership, once you agree to move for him. You are placed into the feminine role—you play the pawn. Once you let that tornado take you away into the self-abnegating state of wifedom. Which I did from the beginning, now almost a decade ago, quitting my job as an editor of an alt-weekly so we could live in London and he could attend a graduate program in the history of the book. I write this book of shadow histories. These histories of books’ shadows.
He is the guardian of the correct, at home and in literature, of what is kept out (emotions, excess).
Not enough has been made of the existential alienation that can come for women in that first year of marriage. Both Virginia and Viv experienced this debilitating depression. The first years of Woolf's marriage “beset by arguments, extended periods of alienation.” Virginia's suicide attempt the second year.
They were expected to leave the house they grew up in, change their names, and be suddenly not their own sovereign person but a “wife-of.”
The Great Men's marriages were their wars. They who didn't actually make the Great War. Eliot, unfit because of his hernia. Fitzgerald who enlisted but never actually saw the front lines, much to his disappointment. A return to these old roles that we play, that we didn't even originate. All the ghosts of the past. Ghosts that aren't even our ghosts.
It is like you have two selves. And you have no memory of the other self. You can be withholding, cold. You can be nurturing, supportive. I have two selves too. The me that lectures women on literature where husbands oppress their wives, and the me that secretly lives that life.
Fights fueled by feelings of entrapment, a fervent, feral desire to escape. “Enforced domesticity brought on black moods.”
Their panopticon mothers. They never let them out of their sight for long. Admonishing them to be good, to behave. And perhaps one got married to escape one's childhood, one's family. To escape one's mother. For a sense of adventure. Through marriage, not war or kingmaking. And then to find oneself right back in, perhaps worse. The husband is also a father. To act out—what does that even mean? It sounds suspiciously like acting (as oppposed to being passive, a doll). Created as characters. They learn to play a role. The spastic girls.
This idea that one must control oneself and stop being so full of self remains a dominating theory around mental illness, and, perhaps tellingly, around other patriarchal laws and narratives, including the ones governing and disciplining literature.
“In masculine hands logic is often a form of violence, a sly kind of tyranny,” writes Simone de Beauvoir. He tears me into rags and rages.
Still now, a discomfort with a woman who rages.
Better to call the fury “The Thing.” It is the illness talking. It is allowed if we call it a possession—a spinning head. When she uses nasty language, when she throws a scene. Where is it supposed to go? All of this fury? A woman's anger: it must be contained, repressed, diffused. Maybe Emma B. is pissed off. So instead of destroying something (not permissible) she sets off to systematically self-destruct. Or to try to live intensely. Or perhaps those are the same things. Maybe these women were furious. (She is mad, yes, but she is also angry.)
In the calm communion with and recognition of one's ancestors. And one has to somehow sacrifice the suffering man to make great art, to transcend one's own state. There is some of this in Woolf's concept of transcendence in art. In opposition Viv, the wife not the writer, the clever dilettante, was seen as all excess of emotions. Doomed to thingness, to the body, to immanence. Reduced to her blood, her bowels, her body. A tortured Molly Bloom, wondering at her hole. I am also in communion with my ancestors. Writing towards these women is like engaging in a seance. I put pictures of my
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These domestic storms are now rare, occasional. But still they have the power to destroy. It can take a day of clean-up.
All these literary patriarchs who thought they were doctors too. A corroboration.
Days I worry, wonder—what if I'm not a writer? What if I'm a depressive masquerading as a notetaker? Is this the text of an author or a madwoman? It depends perhaps on who is reading it. Who has read it first. For once you are named it's almost impossible to struggle out from under the oppression of those categories—it is done, it is done at a price, and the price is daily, and it is on your head.
compose yourself. What does this mean? You must compose yourself. They were undisciplined women. That is the storyline. To be disciplined and write of the undisciplined.
I use the term “madness” here to describe these women's alienation, because I see their breakdowns as a philosophical experience that is about the confinement, or even death, of the self. This gesture of confinement, of exclusion, occurs when we speak of and name the figures of literary modernism: Us versus Them. The mentally ill ones versus the geniuses. But who gets to decide?
The chattering woman is the muse of modernism.
The Great Men fetishized the hysteric, they channeled hysteria, both in style (automatic writing), as well as in their writing of these female characters, yet in their material lives these men were not objects, but authors, subjects. I see this as a slumming. They fetishized the actresshysteric, the spastic flapper-girl, the witty mystic, the lovely mental patient, they sucked her bone-dry. An alchemy: burning down the raw material. A possession narrative, dictated by the male authority figure. He possessed, she possession. They can channel the feminine, her emotional and bodily excesses, they
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These men, fetishizing and vampirizing the excessive (in their texts) while disciplining and punishing her in real life. She is raw material. Too raw, too open, too needy, too emotional.
She talked to the greats, while I talked to the wives and mistresses. I hear their voices, calling to me. * * *
(But does her writing transcend therapy? who is to judge? and who decides? Cannot a piece of writing also be a personal exorcism? Was not “The Waste Land” itself a form of personal exorcism?)
Suppressed even after death—she cannot be read easily.
So much of modernism is myth-making—who gets to be remembered? Whose writing is preserved and whose is not? The implicit threat is made here. Where does fair use begin and end? In this context, this almost becomes a matter of zombie civil rights: who speaks up for the voice of the dead, and who is allowed to suppress it? Who is the keeper of this charge?
Most unhygienic, I think, would be her female aggressiveness, her rage.
In this mythical alchemy of Art she is forgotten. A heroine sacrificed on the plot of literature.
(Yes, yes—the exquisite corpse is female.)
I wonder if the male genius identifying with the female heroine is really a form of masquerade, like Marcel DuChamp in drag as his alter-ego Rrose Sélavy. An exaggerated performance of feminine stereotypes as opposed to really trying to enter and understand a character.
Can I examine any of these brilliant girls as heroines of a sort? Were they heroines? They were ultimately silenced and contained, institutionalized in asylums, where they experienced dehumanizing, degrading treatment. They suffered terribly (bodily, psychically). Also institutionalized in literary works that stole their identity.
Mirror, mirror. The hag hates the young girl. She wants to tear her heart out. She refuses an uncomfortable reflection—yet she once was young, she once was desired, she once was foolish. She is still doomed to caricature. And the young girl judges the hag—she thinks, I will never be like that, I will be loved, immortalized, forever, because I am special.
Eventually the beautiful, bright young girl runs away into the dark woods of anonymity. Heartbroken, torn to pieces. We don't know what she thought of being drawn as a damsel in distress. Perhaps she grew up into a mad queen. For the most part we cannot access her narrative. She is lost to us. The lost girls. Of course the two women are supposed to be enemies, not former and future selves. All these myths of madness and the mirror. Who writes these myths? Who meditates on their reflections?
I've always found the language of the borderline personality diagnosis, a label assigned to women almost entirely, compelling in that it's an identity disorder which is defined almost exclusively by not actually having an identity. As well as the intensity, the enormity, of one's emotions. Zelda often saddled posthumously and anachronistically with this diagnosis by that great diagnostician, the Internet.
So many of these modern women became artists in isolated settings. They did this to rally against the existential crisis that a traditional marriage can be—the man allowed to go out into the world and transcend himself, the woman reduced to the kind of work that will be erased and forgotten at day's end, living invisible among the vestigial people of the afternoon.
Zelda did not succeed as a writer because she was brainwashed into believing that she was ill and that her art came out of her illness, not her brilliance, so much so that she really became ill. In the course of her treatment and her war with her husband over her right to take herself back as her own material she was systematically broken and dehumanized, and her tools were taken away from her, and most importantly, her nerve.
When she was a young girl it was okay to live as opposed to write—to allow others to take her as their muse.
The suppression of one's first person in a literary marriage.
In the artist and sacrifice, who (or what) is sacrificed? She is asked to destroy herself, to sacrifice herself, for his art, an Iphigenia. And yet, when she attempts to progress as an artist, she is accused of being self-destructive, of self-immolating, of throwing herself headfirst into the fire.
She was written as a madwoman and then she became a madwoman. This was her shadow, her sheltering sky. Prophets and prophesies.
Inherent in any dismissal of women writers who draw from memoir is a bias against autobiography that comes out of modernism. The self-portrait, as written by a woman, is read as somehow dangerous and indulgent.
The charge against women writers so often is narcissism. This unconscious bias against women who are full of themselves bleeds into reactions against their literature. That it's somehow cheating to draw from one's own life, even if it's with startling insight into the human condition, or more forbidden still, the complex and ambivalent feminine condition. This charge is almost never leveled at male writers.
Why is self-expression, the relentless self-portrait, not a potentially legitimate form of art? Why do we have this notion that to write the autobiographical (especially if you are a woman), even in the context of a novel, is to not write literature?
Don't let them find the bodies. Take out anything that can be verified or named. * * *
What prohibits the young girl from actually being an author? I think this idea of tradition is important. If she only sees herself as a character in the books she is given, these characters that are often pathologized, can she have the audacity to dream of being an author? Perhaps with girls there's less of a belief in their future genius.
The girl read as undiscipined, disordered, not just struggling.
Once they are diagnosed, every aspect of their biography is read and interpreted according to the disease. Their identities are married to the diagnosis.
anxiety: When she experiences it, it's pathological. When he does, it's existential.
How we buy into this idea of the canon, its memory campaign that verges on propaganda, that the books remembered are the only ones worth reading.
Inherent in these students’ bias is, again, the criminalizing of the confessional. That this is somehow not “real” writing. It didn't go through a necessary alchemy to make into literature.
I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order—pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature.
