Heroines

by Kate Zambreno

(God, the experience of reading her life. So abject and gooshy. It makes me cringe. I experience an absolute intimacy coupled with a desire to protect myself by distancing. Like a toxic girlfirend. I lose a sense of equilibrium reading these books—I get too inside.)

She frequented his plays, an apparition that refused to be forgotten, a vengeful Fury like that which haunts the hero in Eliot’s play The Family Reunion, the cast-off wife (literally, cast off the boat). She went to see his play Murder in the Cathedral nine times. She wanted to be the wife, the celebrity. At the back of one theatre she allegedly carried a sign that said: “I am the wife he abandoned.” I love the theatricality of this. Like the Code Pink protester being carried away during Senate hearings, yelling: “I have a voice!” A puncture in decorum. How horrified he must have been. Then she toyed with blackmail, writing letters to solicitors wondering about his proximity to certain young men. Tom said in 1954: “I was afraid of the dreadfully untrue things she said of me and afraid that my friends believed her.”

I find this note remarkable for so many reasons. Even the very phrase “the absence of a Vivien(ne) Eliot expert.” Or: “private study” outside of some larger discourse (she is still held captive, outside). So much of modernism is myth-making—who gets to be remembered? Whose writing is preserved and whose is not?

Did she write while inside? Did Zelda? Their asylum pieces? It is impossible to know. Most likely they were not given pens or pencils (thought of as weapons, weapons to prove one’s own reason).

Schizophrenia, which both Zelda and Lucia were diagnosed with, was originally a catch-all category like hysteria.

Elaine Showalter makes a link in The Female Malady between the diagnosis of schizophrenia and the idea of a woman dividing herself in two by being both the surveyor and the surveyed, quoting from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing: “A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself.” Berger goes on to use the example that at her father’s funeral the woman sees herself, weeping.

So many actresses in the old Hollywood star system became mental patients, constructed by the gaze, by the studio’s publicity department (Clara Bow, Gene Tierney, Frances Farmer, Marilyn Monroe, Vivien Leigh, these are the ones diagnosed, so many more are popularly retroactively diagnosed).

The quick and lively banter of the flapper, offset with dramatic silences (her quicksilver MOODS). The staccato rhythms of Christopher Isherwood’s heroine Sally Bowles. Sally Bowles reminds me of girls who are witty and brilliant and stylish characters but not yet authors—like art-school chicks. They prefer living as opposed to writing, or living while highly conscious of the gaze. Today Sally Bowles would totally audition for America’s Next Top Model and be cast as the alterna-crazy.

A haunting refrain: Mr. Fitzgerald is a novelist, Mrs. Fitzgerald is a novelty.

dictator. “Diver” suggests a desired trip to the female unconscious, calling to mind Carl Jung’s statement about his analysand Lucia Joyce and her father: “They were like two people going to the bottom of a river, one falling and the other diving.”)

“This is absurd. This is a letter from a mental patient.” “I was a mental patient.” He stood up and spoke more authoritatively. “Suppose we don’t have any more nonsense, Nicole. Go and round up the children and we’ll start.”

What is the flâneuse escaping? She is escaping her role as the object of desire. She wants instead to gaze, to desire.

(A recent Style story in the Times, on Courtney Love, looking like a Hans Bellmer doll, the one with the blonde frazzled wig and blue bow.

In literature when these women act out it is first seen as an embodiment of a philosophy

(sometimes monstrous and possessed), but later, once he grows bored with her, as is the case with Breton and Nadja, the violence he originally fetishized is now interpreted as the ordinary bizarre behavior of a madwoman he had confused for a muse.

The “women’s issues” section in the local bookstore contains books about dieting, what not to wear, and how to deal with your mastectomy.

There are magazines set out on the little table while I wait but I have brought Dodie Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker. I underline a line before I am called: “The monstrous and the formless have as much right as anybody else.”

This period adrift mirroring her twenties uprooted in Europe, Berlin, Rome, Munich, Dachau, taking up with different lovers—a career, from the French for carrière, that which takes you from place to place. For these girls, career was a matter of falling madly in love, or being carried away through the force of someone else’s desire, being allowed to travel in exchange for their bodies and a bit of their self, their soul—the Baroness modeling for the stained-glass artist, the playwright who wrote a play about her, the husband-novelist who wrote books about her. This is what allowed them temporary access into artistic circles and allowed them EXPERIENCE. (Better than other careers for bright intellectual girls at that time, such as being an invalid.)

These vivants who later became authors, these girls who later became unsightly spectacles, brilliant and angry hags. If the alluring young woman in modernism is the femme fatale, the older or ugly woman who won’t shut the fuck up is also represented as deadly, a scary contagion, something syphilitic.

In her never-finished biography of the Baroness, Djuna Barnes called her “a citizen of terror, a contemporary without a country.”

It’s all context, I suppose. Or perhaps Lady Gaga gets away with it because she is young.

“We like nothing so much as youthful hysterics,” André Breton and Louis Aragon write in their manifesto praising the “invention of hysteria,” and its 50th anniversary, glorifying the practice of med students fucking the female mental patients.

During the time I begin reading the biographies of the mad wives, stewing in my obsessions, feeling eerily like I was performing their lives, I write a letter to Poetry magazine about a review of Djuna Barnes’s posthumous poetry collection. Although I had previously written theater and book reviews, I think of this letter as one of my first acts of “criticism,” which for me always originates in feeling, in an angry protectiveness, especially towards my beloved women.

A way to bully, which is to humiliate, to silence, to make a woman smaller whose behavior is seen as outsized. (Won’t she fucking shut up?)

Simone de Beauvoir who writes that the woman is always reduced to the body, regardless of how she situates herself.

The existential female nausea Sylvia Plath depicts in The Bell Jar. The first half of the novel is set in the Manhattan glossy magazine world, and Esther becomes infected by the desire for a patent-leather purse that matches her belt

androgynous mind is one that “transmits emotion without impediment” yet doesn’t necessarily have “any special sympathy with women.” But I think of how fervently, in letters to Louise Colet as well as in his novel, Flaubert dismissed women and their minds. He writes to LC (how did she handle these dismissive letters?) that the only writer who understood women, “these charming animals” was Shakespeare. “He portrays them as overenthusiastic beings, never as reasonable ones.” He might have identified with Madame Bovary, or had been her, but he also thought of her as a frivolous thing, with a feminine (weak) mind, all flesh instead of spirit. There is no ambivalence to her characterization, there is no consciousness, or possibility of consciousness. She is in Kant’s minority, a silly, frivolous animal. Her emotions are never sincere, unlike even Charles’s misguided uxoriousness (yet Emma’s husband also just romanticizes her as the character in his own novel, he never really sees her).

In a letter to Louise Colet, Flaubert amazingly tells her he KNOWS a woman’s sufferings, including her own, because he is author of them. You speak of women’s sufferings: I am in the midst of them. You will see that I have had to descend deeply into the well of feelings. If my book is good, it will gently caress many a feminine wound: more than one woman will smile as she recognizes herself with it. Oh, I’ll be well acquainted with what they go through, poor unsung souls! And with the secret sadness that oozes from them, like the moss on the walls of their provinicial backyards…

He sets these stylish Bloomsbury women in mine country, rendering them ridiculous.

Probably the most generous writer of this period towards other women writers was Nin, who was snubbed in her attempts to connect with both Djuna Barnes and Anna Kavan,

insouciance

telling was made nearly impossible). There are so many biographical details online relating to every woman tangentially connected to Henry Miller, every address where the married Millers lived, even trying to unravel the origins of Jean Kronski, the 21-year-old poet and artist who became a lover with June and who Henry made a character, everyone is obsessed with every detail of the godheads. She is important only as connective tissue to the Great Man.

Is making someone a character giving them life, or taking it away? Perhaps making someone a character is a way of alienating them from themselves, so that their lives are read through the character.

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.

(All these women writers who received a brigade of shock treatments, their doctors unconcerned about the resulting memory loss, how this can destroy a writer. Hemingway shot himself after the results of such “treatment.”)

I wonder if the new complex on campus was built on the site of the destroyed dormitory, where women patients were locked inside their rooms and allegedly tied to their beds, making it impossible for them to escape during the fire. (I think of this as a sort of metaphor: locked up, confined, made safe.) Who were these other women, I wonder? What was the interior monologue of their unquiet minds? Or had they too been erased, subdued, rewritten?

Or perhaps the guide is now narrating that Nina Simone took singing lessons with Dr. Carroll’s wife as a young girl.

She follows him where his work calls him,” writes Simone de B of her archetypal wife whom she sees as willfully refusing sovereignty.

Eve

I think of these literary wives who picked up and went where their husbands wanted to, to whichever Shangri-La where the men could finish the book—everything in service of an eventual masterpiece. The self-imposed exile of wifedom.

I entertain entering a frivolous femme period. I take on new selves and lives. In Chicago I buy two amazing dresses from my favorite boutique, sort of goth-flapper creations—they are my Jeanne d’Arc dresses, as Zelda said of the blue number in which she sauntered down the Champs-Élysées. I bought the dresses so I could bear living here and being the wife-of, and having no employment possibilities to speak of, even though with losing my paltry teaching income we couldn’t afford them. I bought the dresses so I could start acting out some version of witchy debutantism or eccentric post-flapperism.

Sylvia Plath writing in The Bell Jar about the spiritual effects of a hot soak.

They don’t know what the fuck’s wrong with me, it’s probably a combination of IBS and worsening endometriosis, but so far I have eschewed more surgical investigations (I AM MADAME OVARY). John and I endlessly discuss the state of my bowels like Tom with Viv. All the mad wives, once they are named as ill, obsessively recording every aspect of the organic. Following whatever routine they thought would provide relief—while all along it is impressed upon them that it’s probably psychological, the result of nerves.

I am terribly lonely here. In my loneliness I’ve become ornate with the rituals of makeup. I invent more steps because there is more time. (Although some days I don’t even wash my face.) I go for counseling sessions at Sephora. I consume. I am consumed. I buy make-up I don’t need, don’t use. I ask advice about concealer from the girl with the ring on her glossy pink lip. I feel now that we are almost friends, that she recognizes me. I buy a NARS blush called Madly.

Isn’t that what female friends do together? Something simple, felt. The wife of a librarian at Duke, one of John’s colleagues, has reached out to me, and even though I really like her, I find myself afraid, feeling too fucked up to have real friends in my embodied existence. I’m seemingly always depressed and anxious about some sort of deadline or reading or project—who wants to be friends with someone that self-involved?

The friendships I keep up online feel safer. And yet my relationships with these intellectual (and emotional) women is much more complex, our communications forming a rhythm, months of silence when life gets too intense for us. We are all so sensitive, difficult. I wonder if this is like the friendship Elizabeth Hardwick and Mary McCarthy had. Lifelong frenemies, redlipsticked and tightsweatered, highballs and cigarettes in hand. Sometimes it seems impossible to be real friends with other women writers, we are all such trainwrecks, messes, it seems, but sometimes it seems impossible to be real friends with other women who do not identify primarily as writers. Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: We spoke of silence.

Nancy Milford’s bio became a sort of cri de femme of the Second Wave when published, Zelda heralded by the first generation of American women’s studies students in the 70s as both a heroine of some resistance but mostly a glamorous victim, like a literary Marilyn Monroe.

Hardwick so horrified by the metamorphosis of her former friend, who later came out as a lesbian, her friend who rallied to her defense in The American Poetry Review upon publication of The Dolphin (Lowell dismissed the review as “dogmatic feminism” and relegated Rich afterwards in his Harvard seminars to the category of “minor”). “She deliberately made herself ugly and wrote these extreme and ridiculous poems,” Hardwick remarked. Hardwick was most likely shocked by the anger in these poems. (Later in life though Hardwick expressed an admiration for Rich.)

It is the FURY of Sylvia Plath, another peer, that makes Hardwick in an essay on the poet both so enraptured and uncomfortable. Sylvia like a dybbuk-double. Sylvia who was Lowell’s student in his writing class at Boston University, along with fellow housewife-poet Anne Sexton. Sylvia who only took the mask off for her poetry. The striptease of the Ariel femme fatale persona, the burlesque of trauma. Plath’s housewife’s revenge. The head in the gas oven. A brilliant symbol of both the Holocaust and the contained housewife. The feminine mystique is to return back to the smile—Sylvia swallowed this and then spat it out, sarcastically—“And I a smiling woman.”

In her criticism Hardwick refutes the notion that women writers have a different lot than men. In her essay on Sylvia Plath Hardwick writes, “Every artist is either a man or a woman and the struggle is pretty much the same for both.” It’s amazing to me. When I think of Jean Stafford rising at dawn to work as a secretary at The Southern Review (Lowell was studying with Robert Penn Warren at Louisiana State), then coming home to prepare the boys lunch, the poets still