When Hope Rattles the Cage:
Impressions and Explorations of Confinement
in Women's Autobiographical Writings
1,2,3,4
The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment...-- Sylvia Plath, Edge
Writing, generally considered a solitary activity, becomes like a lifeline for so many women that it is all the more dismaying when a woman writes, fights to write, clears her life and path to write, and still, despite it all, does not escape her confinement but instead turns on herself within that enclosed physical and emotional space and inflicts pain, damage, and, so often, death. For every Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who runs away with her dashing poet husband and flourishes in the warmth near her open Casa Guidi windows, there is a Sylvia Plath, whose dashing poet husband runs away from her and who disintegrates in the cold of her London flat.
Granted, Plath (and even, to some extent, Woolf) is an extreme example, for she was, in addition to bearing the burden of being both abandoned housewife and frustrated artist, clinically unbalanced. Also, both women, for all their obvious unhappiness, share an environment of intellectual and fiscal privilege that sets them off as exceptions just as surely as their individual illnesses. But, returning to Plath, if a summa cum laude from Smith who had achieved countless personal and artistic opportunities felt so confined that the only way she could escape her "stasis in darkness" was to take her own life in her own kitchen while her children slept down the hall from her chosen execution site, we might wonder what hope there is for any woman, for any woman artist, sane or not.
How far removed is any woman from the brink of sanity? What might drive any one of us to the vase's edge, eyes glazed like pottery and bodies wearing the "dead smile of accomplishment" that shows our perfection? Judging and condemning herself for what she believed her self unable to be -- the perfect mother, wife, artist and achiever -- Sylvia Plath effected her worst nightmare upon herself and gassed herself with her own oven. For Sylvia Plath, death was the only place where she believed she would be free of confinement. For Sylvia Plath, even being able to write was finally not enough.
Even worse, for every Sylvia Plath, whose collapse is known to the world, are the household equivalents of Woolf's Judith Shakespeare, the legions of women who never had the opportunity to put their writing gifts to use, the ones doing the laundry and putting the children to bed who did not even have the dubious luxury of Plath, to rise before dawn and compose before the demands of home and family rose to meet her. They are all buried at some version of Virginia Woolf's bus stop by the Elephant and Castle, at the various crossroads, unknown ghosts without names or stories by which we can remember them.
Her betrayal so maddened them, they saw to it that she would suffer forever, even after death. Always hungry, always needing, she would have to beg food from other ghosts, snatch and steal it [...] my aunt remains forever hungry. Goods are not distributed evenly among the dead.
-- Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
This loss of identity, this bastardization of the spirit, is a penalty carried out on a woman who steps outside the boundaries of societal expectation and, very often, her children -- especially if those children in any way signify her rebellion. While it is true that sometimes women are freed by the "fallen woman" syndrome as described by Carolyn Heilbrun (once a woman has "fallen" from the expectations held by others for her, she is free to be herself), others are forever imprisoned, bound by the "wrong" their circle (be it friends, family or fellow citizens) determines they have committed.
Maxine Hong Kingston has had to give us a history for her aunt, a once-favored daughter who is now No-Name Woman, a young wife who became pregnant outside her marriage and who subsequently brought dishonor on her entire family. Unworthy of sisterhood, daughterhood or even motherhood, she is driven to suicide and to infanticide, taking the life of her newborn daughter (Kingston believes it was probably a girl because "there is some hope of forgiveness for boys") with her own.
With no room for the luxury of contemplating any potential intellectual suffocation that might be inherent in motherhood, Kingston's aunt with no name takes her life, and her daughter's life, by drowning in the family well; a dead mother and girl-child, plugging up the source of water and survival for the family -- which, of course, is the fear that drove the family to disown and bastardize them in the first place -- fear of luck drying up, fear of recrimination falling upon the household connected to any woman who would have a child out of lawful, approved, family-charted union.
In the literal sense, the story is appalling enough (and appallingly common). It is also certainly not restricted to any one culture. But looking at the symbolic significance of this story, when examining questions of women and writing, we see a lineage of no-name women, mothers and daughters alike, robbed of their place in a patrilineal literary tradition. Three centuries earlier, Aphra Behn was called a whore because she wrote for money, and the plays she wrote compared to the "birthing of bastards" by her contemporaries and survivors alike. She herself even refers to at least one of her works as "ma enfant" -- "my child" -- and she is far from alone in that characterization of her relationship to her work.
Both male and female writers have chosen such imagery. Yet ironically, because women are so often expected to sustain a pedigree and not a canon, women who write may as well have been bearing the wrong kind of children, and the punishment for that is always the same. If mothers with bastard children steal from their society (or so they are told), then women who give their energy to their writing, to seeing their works brought forth, sometimes with pain and suffering, who devote much of their energy to their work as if it were giving life to do so, are guilty of something just as seditious.
Women without stories (which of course means women who were unable to tell their stories, or women whose stories were lost) are nameless, and if they are nameless they are shaken out of the literary family tree and set begging at the crossroads for some scrap of remembrance paper. Anonymous, after all, was probably a woman.
Next... Finding the key
1,2,3,4
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