Heroines

by Kate Zambreno

lolling around hungover from the night before. And yet she still found time to write. Sylvia waking at four a.m., to be writer before wife. Typing up Ted’s poems. They were their husband’s secretaries, like Viv was to Tom. Yes, their husbands were more supportive of their wives as writers for the most part than the generation before (barring the Paul Bowles and Leonard Woolfs), Edmund Wilson locking Mary into a room to make her write the stories that would make her debut collection, but these wives were still expected to be the good wife and mother as well. Even Hardwick admits in her essay on Plath that being a mother meant one had to devote one’s energy to raising children in the first couple of years, not writing. I think her general attitude has to do with the philosophy of the time that to be a feminist was to complain. “People with a real gift for writing find the time, people with no talent complain all the time,” she once said.

In the essay on The Second Sex her position is kind of like—yeah, okay, great, but who exactly is supposed to do the housekeeping? Mary herself fumed: “Feminism is ridiculous. Feminists are silly idealists who want to be on top. There is no real equality in sexual relationships—someone always wins.” Perhaps they felt they were pragmatists. Yet Hardwick later reversed, or at least altered, her eyerolling stance on both feminism and Simone de Beauvoir, a sort of latent or revived consciousness perhaps brought about by the end of her marriage.

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.

In The Company She Keeps, McCarthy writes of the loss of self through these relationships, through marriage, by existing through men. From McCarthy’s foreword: “‘When did you have it last?’ the author adjures the distracted heroine, who is fumbling in her spiritual pocket-book for a missing object, for the ordinary, indispensable self that has somehow got mislaid. It is a case of lost identity.

Perhaps Edna in The Awakening wouldn’t have started to paint, seriously, without her solitude. (What does it mean to paint seriously, to write seriously? It is all about self-identity, and discipline, this audacity to believe that what one could possibly create is worth sharing with the world.) In Chopin’s novel, Edna begins to see herself as both a sovereign person and an artist because her husband has left the vacation island to go to work. So she spends the summer in unusual circumstances, alone and with a community of women (as well as with Robert, her eventual lover).

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.

Eve

cosset

The specter of the “ugly” feminist that still haunts us. For I still don’t want to be an ugly woman and when I write I am an ugly woman, I am rude and crabby, I am braless, my breasts knocking up against each other, I don’t wear deodorant or make-up, don’t leave the house for days, I forget what it’s like to be outside, a body, a body lumpy from lack of exercise and a hasty daily diet.

Ultimately, she writes, for the genius to realize himself, the “amputation” of this appendage is crucial and necessary. A sort of marital Oedipal, he needs to free himself from this twinning by a symbolic murder, or perhaps by making sure she’s locked away somewhere, depressingly the movement of much of modernism and beyond, the woman must be sacrificed for the art, the idea of the necessary sacrifice of Wife #1, the Lilith figure. William Burroughs, who killed his wife Joan in a game of William Tell (the apple, Eve, Edenic), said and acknowledged this most plainly when he gave advice to an aspiring novelist: SHOOT THE BITCH AND WRITE A BOOK.

So much of writing is about declaring that as your identity.

Canon actually comes from a Greek word for “measuring rod.”

And there is still this sense in our culture of writing as connected to fame, and that when one does make it big, get the BIG BOOK, the agent, the press, the publicity, blah blah, that it is deserved. That if one is really good enough—one will get discovered. Whatever that means.

But how does all this affect how I view myself as a “writer”—how society views me? We are weighted down in society by the expectation of capital, an advance or salary proves our worth and value. And what effect can that have on one’s own sense of self-esteem—

to be too full of herself. I think of this dismissal as girl-on-girl crime, an internalized bias against women being full of self, of writing their true experiences. SHE DO THE POLICE IN DIFFERENT VOICES.

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.

acutely. I know he suffered—poetically. “In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning,” he wrote in his 1936 “Crack-Up” essay.

On that recent ridiculous list of the 75 “Greatest Books Ever Written” that Esquire put together (featuring one woman, Flannery O’Connor), Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up made the list. The reason given? “Because Fitzgerald knew Lindsay, Britney and the Olsens better than we do.”

Zelda is not mentioned because Fitzgerald envisions his breakdown like Eliot’s in “The Waste Land”—impersonal, universal, philosophical. (“These fragments I have shorn against my ruins.”) His collapse is noble, religious, historical, and above all masculine: “It was very distinctly not modern—yet I saw it in others, saw it in a dozen men of honor and industry since the war.” Her crisis by contrast is not seen by him as spiritual, as she is not a great man or one with potential, her crisis is personal, petty.

know if she could. Or should. Shaking her just a little—she didn’t really want to look in my eyes—I said to her, firmly, to write, for fuck’s sake, to write, to fuck up and write about it and learn from it and never ever believe the bullshit that what she has experienced is not potentially all the valid stuff of literature. I don’t know if I got through to her. I wonder what would have happened if I had had those hands on my shoulder, shaking me the fuck up, at her age.

fucked-up idea that men don’t read women, which is endemic of this disgust and ambivalence towards the Feminine in our culture and in our literature. V.S. Naipaul recently bleating about “feminine tosh” in women writing, decrying the novels of Jane Austen for their sentimentality (but even Fitzgerald wrote romances; it’s who is privileged in our culture, who gets to name, who controls the narrative). I remember what it was like to have no real sense of self, to be dull with flashes of brilliance, trying on jobs like hats. Bored, restless, wanting. To live life quite foggily. And then to have one’s fabric altered by the experience of suffering—this is when the young girl gains consciousness in the acuteness of her solitude.

It was, in a way, despite the pharmaceutical intervention, an existential breakdown. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. I was supposed to be graduating—and everyone else was lining up in suits for interviews with Anderson Consulting or getting reporter jobs at feeder papers for the Trib or the Times—I was reading Dostoevsky and Artaud, chainsmoking and writing madly in my diary. I didn’t want to be a journalist anymore. Maybe a performance artist like Karen Finley, tits out, on stage, ranting in her huge voice,

You’ll always be spinning your wheels, Katie, the psychiatrist said to me at the time, trying to convince me to stay on the drugs, confident with that sort of armchair assurance that if not, my future was already written. At the time, my biggest desire was to finally really write, to complete things, even a journal. He told me that this was not likely if I lived my life unmedicated.

different level of experience, in slumming. Everything I did I did for EXPERIENCE,

in order to someday write about it.

During that time I decided someday I wanted to write the Infinite Jest for fellow fucked-up girls, for the slit-your-wrist girls like me. I hadn’t even finished Infinite Jest, but I knew it didn’t speak to me, just like I knew Kerouac’s On the Road didn’t speak to me, because he kept on writing about jumping into girls, and I knew I was one of the girls who were fucked and forgotten.

my publisher Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir The Chronology of Water.

It’s one thing to feel a sense of ethics when drawing from one’s life. But the sense of guilt or shame or badness when writing the story that is our own seems to me a form of discipline and punishment. HE DO THE POLICE IN DIFFERENT VOICES. I wonder if Lowell or Fitzgerald felt the same internal pressure when they wrote their narratives, their break-downs?

I am reading Jane’s last year. I am mourning my poor Jane, my poor shadowed Jane. I feel so viscerally for these women when I read their biographies. All these women and their abject ends. Demonized as angry old women or insane. We forgive the eccentrities of young girls (sometimes), but almost never those of older difficult women.

Deirdre Bair’s pathologizing biography about Anaïs Nin, which won the National Book Award. The biographer seems to really detest (and judge) her subject, and find her basically narcissistic and disgusting.

Actually, it seems so many of the biographies of these literary women that I have read retroactively diagnose their subjects with bipolar disorder (they don’t specify which diagnosis on the current “spectrum”), and theorize that medications (usually outdated in the older biographies, or weakly corraled as “lithium”) would have been a balm for these women, mirroring the overdiagnosis of the disorder in contemporary practice, as well as twinning the way “bipolar” has seemingly become the new female malady du jour for the self-destructive or fucked-up girl/woman.

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. The charges of borderline personality disorder are the same charges against girls writing literature, I realize—too emotional, too impulsive, no boundaries.

Except sometimes her characters don’t speak. They think instead what they’d like to say to the cool, slimy face of patriarchy. (In After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie Julia thinks, “Because he has money he’s a kind of god. Because I have none I’m a kind of woman.”) Julia who has been “smashed up” by her lover leaving her, who worries over becoming “shabby” and growing old. The rage and violence and vulnerability in these forgotten women. That scene where Julia’s staring at a Modigliani reproduction (the slanted honey-toned nude): “I felt as if the woman in the picture were laughing at me and saying: ‘I am more real than you. But at the same time I am you. I am all that

matters of you.’”

Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight may be my favorite book. I read it nearly every six months. I open it and then despair and wrench and fall madly in love. In the novel Sophia Jensen (who has changed her name to Sasha), visits Paris for a fortnight, after being saved by a concerned friend from drinking herself to death in London, and finds herself flooded with memories of the past. What Rhys does best: rooms and moods.

Sasha is like Duras’ Lol Stein, she numbs herself with another Pernod, please, a bottle of wine on the tic, she numbs herself with passivity, but she is wide open to the cruel world, as if a layer of skin has been flayed off, and she cannot keep from being seduced by the past. She sits in public at cafes, feeling on Exhibition. She cries in public. She is a wound ripped open. “Today I must be very careful, today I have left my armour at home.” She cannot but sink back to the past, flashbacks of her baby dying, her husband leaving, humiliating encounters with the outside world, piggy bosses and wolfy predators. The gramo-phone record going off in her head, here this happened, here that happened. Always an SOS, always something that can save her from herself, dying her hair blonde, a beautiful dress, a new hotel room with a better view. But what Rhys does best is the ecstasy within the melancholy. Jean Rhys is not restrained despite her perfecting economy. She is messy, she spills over, her characters are Ophelias drowning in the whirlpool of their own emotions. But, oh, what emotion. What energy. The abject ending mirroring the end of the Molly Bloom passage in Ulysses, falling into the arms of a man who horrifies and disgusts her. Yes, yes, yes.

(I do not experience the anxiety of influence with these women writers that I love, no, no, I experience instead the ECSTASY of influence.)

Second Wave feminists like the novelist and critic Angela Carter have reacted so strongly to Rhys’ raw and sensitive heroines, who often cry in public, her “dippy dames,” as Carter calls them. Yet this is what I’ve always loved about Jean Rhys. Her characters are so girly and damaged.

In her essay collection Nothing Sacred, Carter reads Jean Rhys as being a “female impersonator,” (a critique she also levels at the female characters in D.H. Lawrence) mostly because she writes her characters as wounded and scarred. It seems an older generation of feminist critics have swallowed some sort of narrative punishing women who are too feminine that reflects the revulsion towards the excessive that comes right out of patriarchy. These feminist critics take it a step further and say this is not an adequate reflection of how women live their lives. This is a move of the Second Wave I distrust, that women must write, must be, empowered heroines, and if they are not, they are frivolous and should be dismissed.

The purity of the ideology of the Second Wave, I believe, makes us lie about the dividedness and contradictions of our lives for fear of being seen as bad feminists. It took me years before I could confess my love of make-up or clothes. My fellow bloggers often post images from various couture shows or fashion spreads on their Tumblrs or Facebook pages.

reminds me of Nathalie Sarraute’s memoir Enfances. Rhys would have been used to the language of trials as she was perennially hauled into court at this time for physical altercations with neighbors. But in this piece at least there are no easy enemies, and it reflects what I love most about Rhys, the searing exorcism, the naked honesty, the interrogation of the “difficult” woman. In this piece she examines herself ruthlessly, she is both persecuted and persecutor. DEFENCE. It is untrue that you are cold and withdrawn? It is not true. DEFENCE. Did you make great efforts to, shall we say, establish contacts with other people? I mean friendships, love affairs, so on? Yes. Not friendships very much. Did you succeed? Sometimes. For a time. It didn’t last? No. Whose fault was that? Mine I suppose. You suppose? Silence. Better answer. I am tired. I learnt everything too late. Everything was always one jump ahead of me. The phrase is not ‘I do not know’ but ‘I have nothing to say.’ The trouble is I have plenty to say. Not only that but I am bound to say it. Bound? I must. Why? Why? Why? I must write. If I stop writing my life will have been an abject failure. It is that already to other people. But it will be an abject failure to myself. I will not have earned death.

Anaïs Nin also agonized over the material in her journal, how to convert it into fiction. Every year Nin applied for the Guggenheim fellowship (and was rejected)—proposing a project to convert all of her diaries into one long novel. That portrait of her in the vault at UCLA, her hair in the elegant chignon, surrounded by her diaries, which numbered 65 at the time. Her diaries were so easy and fluid for her. Anaïs Nin would spend hours, literally her days, writing in her diary. It was her chosen form, a form often considered illegitimate and dangerous as a compulsion, like Zelda’s dancing.

This also makes me think of Hardwick’s vitriolic takedown of Anaïs Nin’s first book, Under A Glass Bell. Why does she hate me so much? Nin wonders in her diary after the review. There’s a lot of this disgust and hatred towards Nin by other women writers. I also wonder at this—perhaps it’s because Edmund Wilson was now courting Nin, and writing about her self-published book in The New Yorker, of all places. Perhaps Hardwick was playing mean girl/defensive best friend to Mary M. God I love literary gossip.

And in this subsubcommunity of literary blogs I’ve come into contact with through FFIMS, many of us also read and write like girls. It is perhaps not “serious” criticism, but intensely personal and emotional. A new sort of subjectivity is developing online—vulnerable, desirous, well-versed in both pop culture and contemporary writing and our literary ancestors. We write in public (in our blogs, on our Tumblrs, in comments sections on other’s blogs, on Facebook) a new, glib, casual, entirely feminine form of criticism that takes the form at times of heroine-worship. A fan fiction. We read, intensely and emotionally, like Emma Bovaries. We read like girls, often prone to passion and superlatives—passing around books like love letters in the mail. These spaces operate as safe havens to be all sorts of identities at once, to be excessive, to feel and desire deeply.

For my criticism came out of, has always come out of, enormous feeling. Often the feeling was anger, finally allowed to let loose in these visceral rants. (I had written book reviews previously, for publications like Bookforum or The Believer, but my editors expected the pretense of objectivity, a journalistic gloss, these blog posts felt like I was committing a gleeful hari-kiri on my journalist girl-self.) Virginia Woolf hiding behind Mary Carmichael in Room, not wanting to write the self in her criticism (although like Elizabeth Hardwick, it is everywhere diffused in her essays). Writing about the “red light” of anger as impeding one’s mind, one’s argument (in opposition to the “white light” of truth). But what’s wrong with writing out of anger?

All these experiments being written online—notes for projects never written, resembling sketches from Camus’s notebooks, experiments in the epistolary, the fragmented, this casual, cultural criticism, some of it in the comments. It is all ephemeral, not wanting to be formalized. I am beginning to think of this note-taking as the project itself.

about the unemployability of the woman writer who writes explicitly about emotions and the body. (HE DO THE POLICE IN DIFFERENT VOICES. We are policed, surveyed.)