A dream of her own
(In honor of Women’s Month this March)
I think often of Jane Austen, especially when I make my to-do list in the mornings. Right there, Jane comes to me, in the middle of No. 2 (“Do the groceries”) and No. 6 (“Begin the column.”).
There she is, in all her splendor, writing in secret on a small desk in the parlor. Her biographers tell us that in the evenings she read her fiction to her family. Perhaps she took down notes, was sensitive to the comments of her mother (I am convinced most women writers are sensitive to the comments of their mothers). On some days, in my reverie, I presume her mother is worried about only one thing: that her writing will make it difficult for her to find Jane a husband.
Critics often mention the genius of Jane and I have often been riled at how they have gotten it wrong. Most critics can’t believe such a woman of limited education, limited socialization, limited life experience, limited travel, could have had such an unlimited imagination. It appalls me how simple people can be. Of course education, social events, travel, experience widen the imagination. Can you imagine what imagination could do if it did not? You would have Jane Austen.
What was it that moved her to take pen and paper and write? It is a most conscious, intentional act. There is movement and stillness in this very act. And there is a kind of selfishness in it, too; a selfishness in all artistic acts. Perhaps women writers had it best in the beginning of the imaginative arts. Since they were hardly recognized, they could do this act in private and secret. There is power in the private and the secret.
This is the easiest to imagine: Jane, chuckling to herself as she worked on stripping characters to reveal their most real selves. I can imagine the debates in her head between the faults and values of pride and prejudice and sense and sensibility. In Jane’s world, one did not marry for love but Jane obviously felt otherwise. Money seemed an aberration in her world; caused people to be false to each other and to themselves. Each of her novels is driven to get to the bottom of peoples’ characters. Reading her fiction, it is patently comforting to believe that one can get to the bottom of a person’s character.
Sometimes it is Sylvia Plath who comes to me. Teaching her difficult poetry in class, I find myself fighting with her on the page. Sometimes I tell her “Say it plainly, Sylvia! Enough with the allusions that can obscure your pain.” But how can I ask that of her? I know what it is like to use metaphor to articulate pain.
I wonder how can she possibly have done housework in the midst of all that grief. How impatient she must have been with herself, with her inability to simply let it go. Hers was not the first husband to have strayed. Why couldn’t she just let it go? How she would have hated Frozen and its pithy advice. “You can’t be an Ice Queen and let it go, you idiots!” I can imagine her saying. Of course she would say it more beautifully.
Why can I understand the comfort of suicide? I am, after all, the kind of person who can place a cockroach, a centipede, a spider, or a lizard in the loving embrace of a piece of tissue and bring the smallest of the small out into the garden where it belongs. But I can imagine Sylvia, in her writing room that must have been near the children’s bedroom because, in my fictional mind, a single mother would never be far from her sleeping children. On her desk, piles of books and papers.
The demands of children are noisy and never-ending. They impinge upon your person until there is very little room left for yourself and your Muse. I can imagine Sylvia looking at the door to her children’s room and her pile of papers on her desk. There seemed to be no other room to inhabit but despair. There must have been more choices for her out there, but isolated and alone, it might have seemed that there were only two choices left to her.
I can imagine Sylvia arguing with herself, locking herself into an even tinier metaphysical room where she needed to choose what would live. She couldn’t choose herself so she chose her children to live. At least this way she could remain faithful to the Maternal Hippocratic Oath: Do no harm to your children. She didn’t know that no matter what we do, we will always harm our children. At least, she must have argued, I protect them from me.
There is a kind of famous Filipina writer I am close to and sometimes it is her life that comes to me in my reverie. I cannot name her, but you know her, if you are a reader. Her days are built on the needs of her children. Her writing life is something she has built on the side, and like a dog waiting for some scraps at the table, she feeds her writing life on the discards of her life. She has been told that she must be a full-time writer to write the big stuff, the real stuff, the great novels! But she is also told that such a phenomenon does not yet exist in her country. Most writers here are other things: teachers, editors, call center agents, corporate people.
She is always writing on the run, in the dark, on the fly, in secret, in stops and starts. In fact, she has become so good at writing this way that she can do it while driving, while doing the grocery, while thinking about Jane Austen and wondering what kind of a writer would she be if there were no husband, no children, no public?
She suspects that we are all like the writer Virginia Woolf: half-mad, hearing voices all the time. She suspects the voices are all the characters she started but never quite finished. She thinks, with all her heart, that like Virginia, we are all abused in some form or another, for as women we are constantly abused by the notions of what we are supposed to be.
This woman writer remembers that life-defining moment watching, of all things, the Ms. Universe pageant! She was only in her 20s at the time and the finalists were asked their final question: “What do you think is the essence of a woman?” Even then she knew that the question was problematic and misleading. Like the word, nature, essence presumed an unchanging quality to the phenomenon. It meant that because “woman” had essence, if it did not have that essence, then it would not be woman. She feared the answers of the five finalists, knew herself to be bigger than whatever else others may think of that word. “It’s just a word after all!” she wanted to scream.
She thinks that Virginia got it all wrong. To write fiction, one doesn’t just need money or a room, although she does acknowledge that money is power. More than anything, one needs to figure out what a woman wanted before Adam came along, or before the snake came along; or before God came along and told us what had to be done. Surely there is something wrong with the story that, because God was lonely, he made Man; and because Man was lonely he made Woman? Did everyone presume Woman was not going to be lonely? Maybe she bit into the apple not just because she was tempted but because the apple was good and made no demands upon her. It is too much to be responsible for having lost Eden! No woman, or man, should have that much power.
Sometimes this woman writer is given a glimpse of what this dream undefined might be. It looks simple; attainable, even. Just a room, herself and that lone request: Tell me a story.
