The female text in literature has long remained an unexplored black continent, a lost point of reference – “Big” (i.e. masculine) prose has ignored it. This is exactly what some literary scholar (in this not-too-distant future, a pro-feminist) will be saying in twenty or thirty years’ time. This problem began to be discussed back in the sixties. By the middle of the twenty-first century, once the errors have been corrected and literature has been replayed, a large segment of the educated male population of the world will join those who talk about it with a pure soul and without the yoke of the past.
Why women are underrepresented in literature
If we turn to the justifiably aggressive critique of the feminist poststructuralist Helene Siksa, we can realize that the lack of a dense and weighty corpus of women’s texts is really to blame for the “penis-heads. And it is true: throughout human history, repressive phallocratic (as this Frenchwoman would put it) mechanisms have extended not only to family and marital relations – they have also made a great dent in the space of language.
All systems of governance – in our galaxy, so far represented by men – are fuelled by language and at the same time govern it, which amounts to power and violence (hence the desperate struggle of the new order for femininities that are ridiculous to many).
This is why the figure of the woman in literature embodies the myth of the Echo, the nymph deprived of her own voice, forced again and again by a weak voice to echo the creatures proud of her “pocket symbol. But she is deprived not only of her voice: her body, according to the myth, has been taken from her, and with it the very possibility of writing.
Why writing liberates corporeality.
In an important article for poststructuralist philosophy, “The Laughter of the Medusa,” Hélène Siksou loops between academism and poetry and writes that the flesh never lies by exposing itself, by physically materializing thought into text. Women, she argues, must come to know their corporeality through the act of writing. It is a corporeality-text, taken from women by male authors, harnessed to the rusted patterns of the marriage plot with its inevitable domestication: you are an incubator for children – and to have tea by five o’clock (in short, the eternal values of the golden classics).
At this point, Siksu’s programmatic theses remotely echo one of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s interpretations of the “body without organs. It is the concept of an empty shell, alienated from its desires, pleasure and the possibility of verbal or written expression. Postmodern philosophers constructed this metaphor of a “surgerized,” hysterical corporeality based on the story of André Breton’s “subject,” Nadia, and the writer Henry Miller’s second wife, June.
The cases of these two women are symptomatic of the collective fate of many modernist women. For the patriarchs of literature, “she” is from the strength of an intellectual lightweight, a non-author, a little cardboard doll that can be used only as a framework for creating a heroine-often a mutilated and ridiculous mannequin of a real prototype. It was this warped perception, the label of hysterical, that June wrote about in a letter to another of Miller’s friends, Anais Nin, lamenting her portrait in her novel, “Tropic of Cancer.” “He wasn’t writing me, he wasn’t writing me… How monstrous it is.” For Breton, a former student studying to be a psychiatrist and drooling over young female patients with Louis Aragon, Nadia was something like a laboratory mouse: after probing the material for a potential novel, the surrealist fled.
In the end we have truly magnificent things by two mastodons of modernism: Tropic of Cancer and Nadia are mast-readers. And in the ’70s, the pus of objectification and unhealthy fetishism in their texts was unearthed and the caricaturedness (if not the stiltedness) of their heroines was exposed. In the end, what Flaubert called “the muse” turned out to be a source of literary vampirism.
Miller did not even try to hide behind a gilded romance: he called the companions that inspired him cunts – and he was not ashamed of that.
To the question of collective destiny: what happened to Nadia or June? June is said to have undergone electroconvulsive therapy and alternately changed her life in motels to a succession of psychiatric wards. Nadia died in 1940 in some hospital is all we know. The second question is: Where are their texts? After all, if we are to believe Kathy Zambreno’s non-fiction study of Heroines, both wrote. There is, however, no evidence that they tried to publish anything. All that remains is an echo, a vague recollection only because men appropriated other men’s registers, preventing them from writing their own story.
What is a woman’s “fear of authorship”
A bible for feminist literary scholars, The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Jubar, states that the very possibility of women’s writing was hampered by a lack of antecedents and, as a result, confidence. Based on this construct, Gilbreth/Jubar developed the notion of “fear of authorship,” a malaise fueled by the patriarchal monopoly on art.
Decorative ladies had their pencils knocked out of their hands and were only occasionally allowed to scratch a sheet. Not surprisingly, without exaggeration, most of the Victorian and Modern women who tried to write ended up in mental institutions. Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady (a kind of female version of Michel Foucault’s History of Madness) suggests that the girls of the previous century were still lucky: they were at least sometimes allowed to write.
If you turn to the nineteenth century, when woman writing first began to emerge, you immediately stumble over the diagnosis: not only were they not allowed to approach paper at point blank range – this very attraction for women was considered a deviation, a mental disorder.
The archives of hospices and hospitals are full of stories of such “disorders. For example, a Swiss peasant woman was hospitalized in Canton just for delaying work for her morning letter.
In addition to criticizing the vertical of psychiatric power that has served men well, Showalter collects techniques for treating such afflictions: confinement in an attic (hello, Jan Eyre!), dousing with cold water (if a bourgeois), but worst of all, no ink.
Once an Austrian seamstress, Agnes Richter, who was imprisoned in the Heilberg asylum, somehow managed to steal ink. Her ugly jacket is densely covered with illegible text, with occasional dashes of “I want to read,” “I want to write. For feminists, this macabre artifact is further evidence of the repression of masculine language, of the creepy need to wrap oneself in text; for the indifferent, it is a scribble reminiscent of abstractionist Cy Twombly (which is probably fine, too).
Lost Writers.
If one makes a pilgrimage to the memorial sites of modernist writers like Jane Bowles or Zelda Fitzgerald, one will run into the voluminous, almost menacing shadow of their author husbands everywhere.
Jane Bowles,
a New York-based American writer who lived in Tangier, wrote a novel about the “all-out” journey of two well-to-do ladies.
Playwright Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote called her the most significant novelist of the century – yet her name always goes only in conjunction with that of her husband Paul Bowles.
In Tangier, elbow your way through the hijab-wrapped crowd, and fish out a cab driver. Many of them only need to hear “Po Bo” to know that you want to visit the home of Paul Bowles. Bowles was a great author: admired by beatniks, intellectual trendsetter Gertrude Stein – in short, a bohemian buddy of three whole continents. More importantly, he was the very embodiment of Kipling’s “West is West, East is East,” having lived half his life in Tangier and remained a foreign voyeur. With his wife Jane, he shared everything but his bed-including the famous house in which they lived above each other and called each other daily, but rarely saw each other.
She was inexcusably underpublished and translated, and her beautiful somnambulist novel Two Serious Ladies was missed not only by most critics but also by readers. Not a few reviews could do without the phrase “a novel by Paul Bowles’ wife.” That’s partly true.
Jane will be angry for the rest of her life that in many ways this is her husband’s novel: constantly edited by him, full of his edits and notes in the margins. In a sense, this man’s weeding out of a woman’s text could be considered a literary monument to gaslighting.
Jane died delirious in a Spanish Catholic convent, leaving behind a half dozen short stories, one play, and a novel. And a house in Tangier, on which hangs a patina-covered plaque that says in English and Arabic: “Paul Bowles, American writer and composer, lived here from 1960 to 1999. And no mention of Jane.
Vivian Heywood Eliot,
English novelist, author of a series of short stories.
Her literary legacy was praised by Bertrand Russell, Gore Vidal, and her texts were praised by Virginia Woolf and Ezra Pound. But in your search for Vivienne’s creative legacy, you’ll come across the figure of a man again. She is not used to being called a writer, but the “mad muse” of the great poet Thomas Stearns Eliot.
Early in the marriage, the jealous man generously allowed his companion to write. Then she even managed to publish in The Criterion magazine under several pseudonyms, whose lyrical characters had different styles and spheres of interest – just like the famous heteronyms of the poet Fernando Pessoa.
Later, Eliot would write how he hated chick lit (that is, women’s prose) and would not only throw away Vivien’s diaries, but demonize her abilities in front of her friends.
Shards of Vivien’s few surviving notes are preserved, of course, in the Thomas Stearns Eliot Foundation. It’s as if the entire essence of the poet’s relationship to his wife has transmuted into a foundation whose mere name is meant to plunder someone else’s legacy. And what a mystically frightening coincidence that Vivian – like Jane Bowles – spent a fair amount of time in a mental institution.
Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald,
American writer, author of the novel and diaries from which Francis Scott Fitzgerald borrowed ideas.
Zelda’s literary value was realized only after her death. She was adored by the New York bohemia of the beginning of the last century, from ballet dancers to art dealers (but hated by Ernest Hemingway). However, not many people knew about Zelda the writer then, for her husband Francis was the slyest of all literary husbands. Giving his doll wife luxurious dresses from Patou and sending her to dances, he meanwhile copied out entire passages from her diaries almost word for word, “screwing” them into his heroines. And, incidentally, still did it in such a way that the confessional, resilient text of Zelda turned into a description of the impenetrable idiots of his novels.
Zelda’s legacy – dozens of voices from novels celebrating one of the most epathetic beauties of the jazz era, novels dedicated to her by her husband Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams’ play Clothes for a Summer Hotel, Gilles Le Roy’s Song of Alabama, TV series, movies – but where is her own voice?
The sum total of life was a fire at Highland Hospital, where Zelda was locked in a room awaiting another round of electroconvulsive therapy, the infernal agony of being engulfed in flames, one novel, letters and diaries stolen by a male writer – and one miraculously unburned slipper.