Silences (52 page)

Incorporating prevailing male (and class) values
—ignoring or contempt for the work and services most women do in and out of the home—contrary to one’s lived knowledge of their essentiality, substance, challenge, worth, yes—for some aspects of our being, self-development, fulfillment of potentials. (In rarer form, exalting
or romanticizing aspects of these services, ignoring the criminality of their consuming most of women’s lives.)

Constriction to One Dimension—III: Confinement to Biological (Sex-Partner) Woman
^▴

“Killing the angel in the house, I think I solved,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her already-quoted discussion of problems before women writers, “but the second [problem], telling the truth
about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved.”
^*

Fifty years after, still to be solved.

With motherhood (and in this instance, in spite of thousands of books by men and hundreds by women on “love” and, now, on sexuality) the least understood, the most tormentingly complex experience to wrest to truth.

Telling the truth about one’s experiences as a body, forbidden, not possible,
for centuries.

Rights of one’s own body denied to woman for centuries. Men owned us. Babies inhabited our bodies year after year.

Knowledge of one’s body that comes only through free use of it, even free exercise of it, denied. (Thoreau’s birthday wish for himself one year: “to inhabit his body with inexpressible satisfaction.” Never possible for his sister Sophia. He could swim—and naked, walk
to exhaustion, “dithyrambic leap” about; all physical activity was open to him. Never for Sophia—or any woman—that inexpressible satisfaction.)

The way-making to do.

The obvious coercions: to “write like a man” (of one’s experiences as most men write, have written, of us—Miller, Lawrence, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath); to “write like a woman” (flatter, conciliate, please; lie; the mirror to magnify
man). The problem of finding one’s own truth through the primacy accorded sexuality
^*
by our times. The pornographic, the Freudian, times. Our freer—that is, voluntary about reproduction—times. Our still restrictive, defining sexuality as heterosexual, times.

The confusion of “sexual liberation” (genitally defined) with the genuine liberation of woman: “the exercise of vital powers along lines
of excellence in a society affording them scope.” The unworked through, unassessed relationship between body difference and the actual power relationship permeating associations between the sexes. The question of the place, proportion,
actual
importance of sexuality in our (now) longer-lived, more various, woman lives.

Telling the truth about one’s body: a necessary, freeing subject for the woman
writer.

*
Akin to “passing”: the attempt to escape inferior status, penalties, injustices, by concealing one’s color, class, origin. Identifying oneself as of the dominant.

“Several men have through the years said to me: You write like a man. They consider this a compliment. I want to ask: Which man? I never have. Without the answer, I do not feel complimented.”—Harriette Arnow, 1973.

Arnow’s “
which
man?” is of course the right question-answer. It is significant that, until recently, this affront was considered unquestionable accolade, for all its inherent assumption of distinctively male and female characteristics and orders of writing—the male, naturally superior.

*
Among these: a different existential sense of life; a different placing of what is important; an opposing vision.
Motherhood in the voice of mothers themselves; children. “The sense of wrong.” Fear. Feeling for other women. Sexuality. Truth of one’s body.

*
Jane Cooper’s account in
Maps and Windows
of the process is searching and complex; especially illuminating the pull toward these forms—so great in our cultural heritage.

*
“Feminism, as I continue to understand it, demands that sex be regarded as irrelevant
to merit and ambition,” Ozick explained later that evening, disclosing that she mistook a consummation devoutly to be worked for, for past and present reality.

**
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

*
There is an analogous common expression: the “you’re a real woman” (or “a real man’s woman”).

**
Virginia Woolf, of course. The angel in the house of literature: “My dear, be sympathetic, be tender, flatter,
deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. . . .”

†
To be clearly distinguished from the only-beginning-to-be-won right of women to “tell the truth about one’s body.”

*
See footnote
page 43
. “Ways in which innate human drives and capacities . . . denied development and scope, nevertheless struggle to express themselves and function.”

**
Especially, given prevalent practice, theory, can this be formidable for the analyzed writer-woman; deflecting, blinding, robbing of sources of one’s own authority (that is: basic woman-experience comprehensions, and “motherhood truths” not yet incorporated into literature and other disciplines, let alone into psychiatric theory and practice). Among the too often deferred to: reductive formulas:
sex as primary; once suicidal, always suicidal; assignment of certain characteristics, behavior, as innately female; masochism, passivity, “every woman loves a Nazi,” you (women) want to fail, be seduced, raped, punished. Oedipus, Electra. Mother blaming. Guilt where it is not guilt at all but the workings of an intolerable situation. The springs of achievement. Mind-body relationship.

In addition,
there is the danger of fixing to the past; to self-involvement; the distortion of memory; the focus on the personal (most the psycho-sexual); the ignoring of societal roots, causes, effects. All of which diminish, make shallow, falsify one’s writing.

*
”The obstacles are still immensely powerful,” Woolf goes on to say, “and yet they are very difficult to define.”

▴
ONE OUT
OF TWELVE, P
. 42

*
Carolyn Heilbrun might add: “the exploration of experience
only
through sexuality, which is exactly where men have always told them that such an exploration should take place.”

OTHER OBSTACLES, BALKS, ENCUMBRANCES IN COMING TO ONE’S OWN VOICE, VISION, CIRCUMFERENCE

Do not forget:

The overwhelmingness of the dominant.

The daily saturation.

Isolations.

The knife of the perfectionist attitude.

The insoluble.

Economic imperatives.

How much it takes to become a writer. Bent (far more common than we assume), circumstances, time, development of craft—but beyond that:
how much conviction as to the importance of what one has to say, one’s right to say it. And the will, the measureless store of belief in oneself to be able to come to, cleave to, find the form for one’s own life comprehensions. Difficult for any male not born into a class that breeds such confidence. Almost impossible for a girl, a woman
.

These pressures toward censorship, self-censorship; toward
accepting, abiding by entrenched attitudes, thus falsifying one’s own reality, range, vision, truth, voice, are extreme for women writers . . . remain a complex problem for women writing in our time
.

            
To discuss and define them is, I think, of great value and importance, for thus only can the labour be shared, the difficulties solved.

—Virginia Woolf

Fear

            
Fear is a powerful
reason; those who are economically dependent have strong reasons for fear. . . . But [even with economic independence] some fear, some ancestral memory prophesying war, still remains, it seems. . . .

                  
What then can be the nature of the fear that still makes concealment necessary . . . and reduces our boasted freedom to a farce? . . . Again there are three dots; again they represent
a gulf—of silence this time, of silence inspired by fear. And since we lack both the courage to explain it and the skill . . .

—from Woolf’s great
Three Guineas

            
“And here I must step warily, for already I feel the lash upon my shoulder.”

—Virginia Woolf

Fear. How could it be otherwise, as one is also woman.

The centuries past. The other determining difference—not biology—for woman.
Constrictions, coercions, penalties for being female. Enforced. Sometimes physically enforced.

Reprisals, coercions, penalties for not remaining in what was, is, deemed suitable in her sex.

The writer-woman is not excepted, because she writes.

Fear—the need to please, to be safe—in the literary realm too. Founded fear. Power is still in the hands of men. Power of validation, publication, approval,
reputation, coercions, penalties.

“The womanhood emotion.” Fear to hurt.
^*

“Liberty is the right not to lie.”

“What are rights without means?”

Love

Of course it is not fear alone.

Fear—in itself—is assailable. As every revolt against oppressive power throughout the human past testifies.

There is also—love. The need to love and be loved.

It has never yet been a world right for love, for
those we love, for ourselves, for flowered human life.

The oppression of women
^*
is like no other form of oppression (class, color—though these have parallels). It is an oppression entangled through with human love, human need, genuine (core) human satisfactions, identifications, fulfillments.

How to separate out the chains from the bonds, the harms from the value, the truth from the lies.
^**

What compounds the personal agony for us, is that portion of the harm which comes to us from the beings we are close to, who are close to us. Their daily part in the balks, lessenings, denials. Which we must daily encounter.

And counter?

“The times are not ripe for us,” the times are “not yet.” Except for a privileged few who escape, who benefit from its effects, it remains a maiming sex-class-race
world for ourselves, for those we love. The changes that will enable us to live together without harm (“no one’s fullness of being at the cost of another’s”) are as yet only in the making (and we are not only beings seeking to change; changing; we are also that which our past has made us). In such circumstances, taking for one’s best achievement means almost inevitably at the cost of others’
needs.