Heroines

by Kate Zambreno

This book is also for the girls who still seem, as they did in Virginia Woolf ’s time, so fearfully depressed.

Minus a community, I invented one. “I entered into alliances with my paper soulmates,” writes Hélène Cixous in her essay “Coming to Writing.” These women served as an invisible community—like in Susan Sontag’s play Alice in Bed, about the brilliant letter writer and diarist Alice James (sister-of-Great-Men, Henry and William), except I’m the neurasthenic, and they are all hovering over me. Or like in Judy Chicago’s 80s installation The Dinner Party, where she lays out place settings for famous heroines both real and fictional.

miserabilism.

I begin rereading the journals of Anaïs Nin, both the abbreviated ones that she published during her lifetime, and then the ones with all of the fucking (which I prefer of course). In the narrative Anaïs weaves over countless journals, she is a liberated woman who finally escapes the oppression of her provincial environment. In her version she leaves out Hugo, her banker-husband who supports her. Apparently, according to Nin’s biographer, all the American housewives who first read Nin’s journals felt they were given permission to leave their marriages, but then felt betrayed when they learned the truth.

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.

of suicides. “I am the ghost of a former suicide” —the beginning line of her poem “Electra on Azalea Path.” A doubling, the dybbuk.

Anne Sexton, who thought she was the reincarnation of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

The mad wife’s journey from committed to committal.

The ability for me to remain vertical not horizontal (to reword Sylvia).

In Eliot’s essay on Hamlet in which he coins the phrase “objective correlative,” he writes, “Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear.” His theories of depersonalization form the foundation of the theoretical school called New Criticism, still the fundamental ideology governing how we read and talk about writing. One cannot portray emotions in excess (in literature or in life). This is a judgment not only of a work of literature but also of propriety, how one should behave. One must discipline one’s text, one’s self.

(I read these biographies of the Great Men, their pathologizing, constructing, language, and hone my fury, like listening to right-wing talk radio.)

In 1918, Viv writes in a letter that “life is so feverish and yet so dreary at the same time, and one is always waiting, waiting for something. Generally waiting for some particular strain to be over. One thinks, when this is over, I will write.”

childhood. Jane Bowles sickly too after having TB of the knee.

TB of the knee?

Virginia and Vivien(ne) were told by their families and their doctors that they suffered from “moral insanity,” a label often assigned to girls who somehow rebelled against their confined gender role (often promiscuity, in behavior or in one’s body maturing early).

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.

Mitchell’s whole idea was that women got sick because they were trying to be like men when really they should be kept in an infantile state. So neurasthenics were sent to a nursing home, expected not to stir, to sleep abundantly, to drink great quanties of milk and red meat for weight gain, and to avoid any stimulation or excitement. Women were pushed into the feminine role (housewife, mother), men into the masculine one (being a good father and provider, picking up sports), because of this belief that illness came from deviating from one’s natural sex role. They were all prescribed sedatives as well.

In 1970, at a meeting before the American Psychological Association, a mostly male audience of psychologists, feminist psychologist Phyllis Chesler asked for one million dollars in reparations for women who had been “punitively labeled, overly tranquilized, sexually seduced while in treatment, hospitalized against their wills, given shock therapy, lobotomized, and above all, unnecessarily described as too aggressive, promiscuous, depressed, ugly, old, fat, or incurable.” The audience sat there in silence. Maybe they thought it was a joke.

Could it be anxiety? my French doctor muses in his French way. I call him this week to complain of fatigue, swollen glands. I don’t know. It could be, I say. I am desperate. It has been well-documented that women are diagnosed more because they are trained to be help-seekers. SOS. Save me from myself.

neurasthenia.

A definition, I think, of being oppressed, is being forbidden to externalize any anger. I am beginning to realize that the patriarch decides on the form of communication. Decides on the language. The patriarch is the one who rewrites.

“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.

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.

What to make of Virginia Woolf’s insistence in Room that the “red light” of anger actually blocks a clear and receptive mind and hence thwarts good writing? When it is her political take-down of the lawmakers that gives Mrs. Dalloway its bite, or again in Room, the sneer against all of the Professor Xs.

Although Woolf perennially enacted such fury and revolt in her personal life, she obviously internalized the current ideology of mental illness, made clear in her thesis against anger in Room. Perhaps this is also why she distanced herself from the sickly, intense wife of the American poet. Viv is the id she wants to avoid, Tom the superego.

Not only how women should behave, but how writing should behave. Writing should be composed. Should be transcendent.

I am also in communion with my ancestors. Writing towards these women is like engaging in a seance. I put pictures of my criminals on my wall, like Jean Genet in his jail cell in Our Lady of the Flowers. At night I love them and my love fills them with life.

The actress Frances Farmer arrested for disorderly conduct, who was carried away kicking and screaming bellowing have you ever had a broken heart. She who put down “cocksucker” as her career.

“Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences,”

Viv too was drained, and afterwards, she had nothing to show for it. No Name. No Nobel Prize. Aren’t vampires the ones who become immortal?

And the Papin Sisters were on their menstrual periods, allegedly. THEY WEAR THE RED GARBS OF CRIMINALS. A line reworked from The Maids. Hormones also blamed for Sylvia offing herself as well: It was all PMS! I once read in an article. How humiliating. Can you imagine? She is bleeding Ophelia, not a tortured Hamlet. All of Vivien(ne)’s problems always blamed on her menstrual periods. Virginia too had difficult periods.

As confusing as Rochester explaining to Jane Eyre that his first wife Bertha turned out to be vulgar and sluttish, and we’re supposed to believe this gives him some moral license to lock her up in the attic.

Flaubert thought his mistress and confidante, the poet and artist’s model Louise Colet, was vulgar as well. She was known in the artistic circles of 19th century Paris as the Muse. He wrote to her: “Don’t you feel everything is currently dissolving into the humid element—tears, chatter, breast-feeding. Contemporary literature is drowning in women’s menses.”

Eliot’s ancestors who judged the witches at Salem.

Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, who believed strongly that to be a happy woman, to not be nervous, one must “live as domestic a life as possible” and “never touch pen, brush, or pencil as long as you live.”

According to it, I have exhibited “marked distress that is in excess of what would be expected from exposure to the stressor,” that has caused a “significant impairment in social or occupational (academic) functioning,” although at least my stressor is “identifiable.”

Bertha Pappenheim, who later became an author and activist.

theories of fiction, theories that HE wrote.) Julia Kristeva with her theory of the semiotic, which draws on Baudelaire and the French Symbolists, Hélène Cixous who reads Molly Bloom’s monologue as an exemplar of her theories of l’écriture féminine.

Writing as a nervous system, as Deleuze writes in his chapter “Hysteria” in his book on the painter Francis Bacon.

The chattering woman is the muse of modernism. Her talk that is represented as unconscious and intuitive and associative. He always accompanies her with a notepad. He copies down her “disordered”

speech, and later he will use it to convict her.

Yesterday’s hysteric becomes the modern period’s schizophrenic girl. Elaine Showalter in The Female Malady, her feminist Foucauldian reading of women in the English asylum: “While the name of the symbolic female disorder may change from one historical period to the next, the gender asymmetry of the representational tradition remains constant.” Even if it’s a madman, Showalter theorizes, his madness is still read as feminine.

In her journals Anaïs Nin writes of the speech of June Miller, Henry’s wife, her feverish talk with its “nervous flow.” A spinner of tales like the hysteric. “June was always telling stories; June with drugged eyes and a breathless voice.” She and Henry both colonize June, used June for their fictions. In Tropic of Cancer Henry Miller changes her name to Mona: “I sit down beside her and she talks—a flood of talk. Wild consumptive notes of hysteria, perversion, leprosy.”

They worship Dionysus but play Apollo (the rational god) in real life.

They channel the cunt yet are phobic of the cunt, of the woman’s body, the real material life she lived, both in their texts as well as in the way they treated their muses.

these men were not objects, but authors, subjects. I see this as a slumming. They fetishized the actress-hysteric, the spastic flapper-girl, the witty mystic, the lovely mental patient, they sucked her bone-dry.

Compose yourself. Compose yourself. How were they composed? A HAG-iography—the biography of a female criminal not a saint.

Morrell and Woolf both intellectual women who suffered from and were diagnosed according to all of the gendered categories of mental illness of the time, and went through numerous treatments for their revolving physical maladies. Their diagnoses and doctors were some of the only things these women shared with one another, swapping them like recipes or diets, passing around a dis-ease.

In Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic they read the figure of the violent double in Victorian texts as an unconscious incarnation of the female author’s own rage and alienation, her “desire to escape male houses and male texts.”

But then one day I decided to start a blog I called Frances Farmer Is My Sister, where I began to communicate with other voices. A small community of mostly women, all writers, each to their own cages, in different corners of the world. In private email exchanges and in the public comments on our blogs, we began to speak of solitude, like Katherine and Virginia. To speak of writing. To confess and hear confessions of the pauses and gaps and scratches that were not writing, but still part of this cycle. I even began correspondences with a few where we spoke about our marriages and partnerships, breaking the silence with each other.

Rhoda in The Waves is Virginia’s attempt to write a mad-woman. The alienated woman, distanced from her body. She experiences the torment of the alienated self, she is terrified, anxious, preferring absolute solitude. “But here I am nobody. I have no face. This great company, all dressed in brown serge, has robbed me of my identity. We are all callous, unfriended.”