Silences (12 page)

What possible difference, you may ask,
does it make to literature whether or not a woman writer remains childless—free choice or not—especially in view of the marvels these childless women have created.

Might there not have been other marvels as well, or other dimensions to these marvels? Might there not have been present profound aspects and understandings of human life as yet largely absent in literature?

More and more women writers
in our century, primarily in the last two decades, are assuming as their right fullness of work
and
family life.
^*
Their emergence is evidence of changing circumstances making possible for them what (with rarest exception) was not possible in the generations of women before. I hope and I fear for what will result. I hope (and believe) that complex new richness will come into literature; I fear
because almost certainly their work will be impeded, lessened, partial. For the fundamental situation remains unchanged. Unlike men writers who marry, most will not have the societal equivalent of a wife—nor (in a society hostile to growing life) anyone but themselves to mother their children. Even those who can afford help, good schools, summer camps, may
(may)
suffer what seventy years ago W.E.B.
Du Bois
called “The Damnation of Women”: “that only at the sacrifice of the chance to do their best work can women bear and rear children.”
^*

            
Substantial creative achievement demands time . . . and with rare exceptions only full-time workers have created it.
^**

I am quoting myself from “Silences,” a talk nine years ago. In motherhood, as it is structured,

            
circumstances
for sustained creation are almost impossible. Not because the capacities to create no longer exist, or the need (though for a while as in any fullness of life the need may be obscured), but . . . the need cannot be first. It can have at best only part self, part time . . . Motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, responsible. Children need one
now
(and remember, in our society,
the family must often try to be the center for love and health the outside world is not). The very fact that these are needs of love, not duty, that one feels them as one’s self;
that there is no one else to be responsible for these needs,
gives them primacy. It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity; spasmodic, not constant, toil. Work interrupted,
deferred, postponed makes blockage—at best, lesser accomplishment. Unused capacities atrophy, cease to be.

There are other vulnerabilities to loss, diminishment. Most women writers (being women) have had bred into them the “infinite capacity”; what Virginia Woolf named (after the heroine of
a famous Victorian poem)
The Angel in the House,
who “must charm . . . sympathize . . . flatter . . . conciliate
. . . be extremely sensitive to the needs and moods and wishes of others before her own . . . excel in the difficult arts of family life . . .”

            
It was she who used to come between me and my paper . . . who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her . . . or she would have plucked out my heart as a writer.
^*

There is another angel, so lowly as to be
invisible, although without her no art, or any human endeavor, could be carried on for even one day—the essential angel,
with whom Virginia Woolf (and most women writers, still in the privileged class) did not have to contend—the angel who must assume the physical responsibilities for daily living, for the maintenance of life.

Almost always in one form or another (usually in the wife, two-angel
form) she has dwelt in the house of men. She it was who made it possible for Joseph Conrad to “wrestle with the Lord for his creation”:

            
Mind and will and conscience engaged to the full, hour after hour, day after day . . . never aware of the even flow of daily life made easy and noiseless for me by a silent, watchful, tireless affection.

The angel who was “essential” to Rilke’s “great
task”:

            
like a sister who would run the house like a friendly climate, there or not there as one wished . . . and would ask for nothing except just to be there working and warding at the frontiers of the invisible.

Men (even part-time writers who must carry on work other than writing
^**
) have had and have this inestimable advantage toward productivity. I cannot help but notice how
curiously absent both of these angels, these watchers and warders at the frontiers of the
invisible, are from the actual contents of most men’s books, except perhaps on the dedication page:

To my wife, without whom
. . .

I digress, and yet I do not; the disregard for the essential angel, the large absence of any sense of her in literature or elsewhere, has not only cost literature great contributions
from those so occupied or partially occupied, but by failing to help create an arousing awareness (as literature has done in other realms) has contributed to the agonizingly slow elimination of this technologically and socially obsolete, human-wasting drudgery: Virginia Woolf’s dream of a long since possible “economical, powerful and efficient future when houses will be cleaned by a puff
of hot wind.”

Sometimes the essential angel is present in women’s books,
^*
though still most “heroines are in white dresses that never need washing” (Rebecca Harding Davis’s phrase of a hundred years ago). Some poets admit her as occasional domestic image; a few preen her as femininity; Sylvia Plath could escape her only by suicide:

              
. . . flying . . .

              
Over the engine
that killed her

              
The mausoleum, the wax house.

For the first time in literary history, a woman poet of stature, accustomed through years to the habits of creation, began to live the life of most of her sex: the honey drudgers: the winged un-miraculous two-angel, whirled mother-maintenance life, that most women, not privileged, know. A situation without help or husband and with twenty-four
hours’ responsibility for two small human lives whom she adored and at their most fascinating and demanding. The world was blood-hot and personal. Creation’s needs at its height. She had to get up at

            
four in the morning, that still blue almost eternal hour before the baby’s cry

to write at all.
^*
After the long expending day, tending, caring, cleaning, enjoying, laundering, feeding,
marketing, delighting, outing; being

            
a very efficient tool or weapon, used and in demand from moment to moment. . . . Nights [were] no good [for writing]. I’m so flat by then that all I can cope with is music and brandy and water.

The smog of cooking, the smog of hell floated in her head. The smile of the icebox annihilated. There was a stink of fat and baby crap; viciousness in
the kitchen! And the blood jet poetry (for which there was never time and self except in that still blue hour before the baby’s cry) there was no stopping it:
^**

            
It is not a question in these last weeks of the conflict in a woman’s life between the claims of the feminine and the agonized work of art

Elizabeth Hardwick, a woman, can say of Sylvia Plath’s suicide,

            
Every
artist is either a man or woman, and the struggle is pretty much the same for both.

A comment as insensible of the two-angel realities (“so lowly as to be invisible”) as are the oblivious masculine assumptions, either that the suicide was because of Daddy’s death twenty-three years before, revived and compounded by her husband’s desertion; or else a real-life
Story of O
(that elegant pornography)
sacramental culmination of being used up by ecstasy (poetry in place of sex this time):

            
the pride of an utter and ultimate surrender, like the pride of O, naked and chained in her owl mask as she asks Sir Stephen for death. . . .
^*

If in such an examined extremity, the profound realities of woman’s situation are ignored, how much less likely are they—particularly the subtler ones—to
be seen, comprehended, taken into account, as they affect lesser-known women writers in more usual circumstances.

In younger years, confidence and vision leeched, aspiration reduced. In adult years, sporadic effort and unfinished work; women made “mediocre caretakers of their talent”: that is, writing is not first. The angel in the house situation; probably also the essential angel, maintenance-of-life
necessity; increasingly in our century, work on a paid job as well; and for more and more women writers, the whirled expending motherhood years. Is it so difficult to account for the many occasional-fine-story or one-book writers; the distinguished but limited production of others (Janet Lewis, Ann Petry, for example); the years and years in getting one book done (thirty years for Margaret
Walker’s
Jubilee,
twenty for Marguerite Young’s
Miss Macintosh My Darling);
the slowly increasing numbers of women who not until their forties, fifties, sixties, publish for the first time (Dorothy Richardson, Hortense Calisher, Theodora Kroeber, Linda Hoyer—John Updike’s mother); the women who start with children’s, girls’ books (Maxine Kumin), some like Cid Ricketts Sumner (
Tammy
) seldom or
never getting to adult fiction that would encompass their wisdom for adults; and most of all, the unsatisfactory quality of book after book that evidence the marks of part-time, part-self authorship, and to whose authors Sarah Orne Jewett’s words to the part-time, part-self young Willa Cather still apply, seventy years after:

            
If you don’t keep and mature your force and above all have
time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago. . . . Otherwise,
what might be strength is only crudeness, and what might be insight is only observation. You will write about life, but never life itself.
^*

Yes, the loss in quality, the minor work, the hidden silences, are there in woman after woman writer in our century.
^**
We will never
have the body of work that we were capable of producing. Blight, said Blake, never does good to a tree:

            
And if a blight kill not a tree but it still bear fruit, let none say that the fruit was in consequence of the blight.

As for myself, who did not publish a book until I was fifty, who raised children without household help or the help of the “technological sublime” (the atom bomb
was in manufacture before the first automatic washing machine); who worked outside the house on everyday jobs as well (as nearly half of all women do now, though a woman with a paid job, except as a maid or prostitute, is still rarest of any in literature); who could not kill the essential angel (there was no one else to do her work); would not—if I could—have killed the caring part of the Woolf
angel, as distant from the world of literature most of my life as literature is distant (in content too) from my world:

The years when I should have been writing, my hands and being were at other (inescapable) tasks. Now, lightened as they are, when I must do those tasks into which most of my life went, like the old mother, grandmother in my
Tell Me a Riddle
who could not make herself touch a
baby, I pay a psychic cost: “the sweat beads, the long shudder begins.” The habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing are
not easily broken, even when circumstances now often make it possible for writing to be first; habits of years—response to others, distractibility, responsibility for daily matters—stay with you, mark you, become you. The cost of “discontinuity” (that
pattern still imposed on women) is such a weight of things unsaid, an accumulation of material so great, that everything starts up something else in me; what should take weeks, takes me sometimes months to write; what should take months, takes years.

I speak of myself to bring here the sense of those others to whom this is in the process of happening (unnecessarily happening, for it need not,
must not continue to be) and to remind us of those (I so nearly was one) who never come to writing at all.

We must not speak of women writers in our century (as we cannot speak of women in any area of recognized human achievement) without speaking also of the invisible, the as-innately-capable: the born to the wrong circumstances—diminished, excluded, foundered, silenced.

We who write are survivors,
“only’s.”
^*
One-out-of-twelve.

I must go very fast now, telescope and omit (there has already been so much telescoping and omitting), move to work, professional circumstances.

Devaluation:
Still in our century, women’s books of great worth suffer the death of being unknown, or at best a peculiar eclipsing, far outnumbering the similar fate of the few such books by men. I think of the writers
Kate Chopin, Mary Austin, Dorothy Richardson, Henry Handel Richardson
(Ultima Thule),
Susan Glaspell
(Jury of Her Peers),
Elizabeth Madox Roberts
(Time of Man),
Janet Lewis, Ann Petry, Harriette Arnow
(The Dollmaker),
Agnes Smedley
(Daughter of Earth),
Christina Stead, Kay Boyle, Jean Rhys—every one of them absorbing, and some with the stamp of enduring.
^*
Considering their acknowledged stature,
how comparatively unread, untaught, are Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Elizabeth Bowen, Dorothy Parker, Gertrude Stein, Katherine Mansfield—even Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, and Katherine Anne Porter.
^**