This article originally appeared in T&S Issue 37, Summer 1998.
May Sarton has long had a devoted feminist readership. Wondering why she felt no urge to join it, Meryl Altman took a closer look at the boom in women’s memoirs. She concludes that while they satisfy a market demand, they no longer have much to do with feminist politics.
It seemed a perfect match. Here were two books by May Sarton, one called Journal of a Solitude, on sale for a quarter apiece just as I was starting my long-awaited sabbatical, which I had arranged to spend mostly by myself in a small New York apartment. I’d never read May Sarton, but I’d always looked forward to doing so one day; she seems to have a cherished place in the lives of some friends whose judgement I respect. (There’s a very nice black and white postcard of her, looking dignified but foxy, which lots of people seem to have pinned up by their desks.) I knew many women consider hers an exemplary, a brave, even an enviable life. I guess I’d been saving her, and finally the day had come.
So when I took this book to bed with me, I was expecting a nice, soothing draught of inner peace, lit by a dawning lesbian-feminist consciousness and punctuated by insights I could use to fortify me in any struggles against loneliness, or petty tedium, that might arise. Instead I was up most of the night in a rage, partly against Sarton, but mostly against whatever it is in some of my friends — and in the state of feminist criticism and feminism generally — that has elevated a minor, self-involved, over-achieving writer with a tin ear and no sense of how to tell a story to the status of a beloved (and beleaguered) heroine. I am supposed to be writing about Simone de Beauvoir, but it’s slow going; a friend to whom I rage on the phone suggests I might find it simpler to write about Sarton. (She thinks my reverence and gratitude toward Beauvoir are impeding me.) So I try, and realize that this is part of my larger project, too: to see how second-wave feminism took up prefeminist writers (Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, Mary McCarthy), what they had and maybe still have to teach us, and what we made of them. For good or ill.
One feminist reason for valuing solitude, at least as a temporary state, is that it can teach self-sufficiency, self-reliance: in both emotional and practical terms. It can free us from dependency — which Beauvoir called women’s curse — the intellectual timidity, the self-defeating behavior, the frustration that can result from believing one constantly needs the help of others, particularly of the Man. ‘A room of one’s own’ is, to say the least, a feminist touchstone. Virginia Woolf introduced this resonant image to stand for a woman’s economic independence, which she saw as essential to free the woman writer from caring too much about the judgements of others. (Material independence must precede intellectual independence, which you need if you’re going to write anything worth reading.)
Sarton’s Journal has much to say in praise of solitude, which Sarton seems to feel is her ‘real life,’ her deep self, something she needs in order to write poems — but it doesn’t actually show us very much solitude, either in Woolf’s sense or more colloquially. Sarton always seems to be flying off to give a reading somewhere, or bowing to the pressure to spend hours answering letters from her adoring fans, or having friends to stay, which means shopping, cooking dinner, sharing some perfect moments with them looking at a sunset or a fringed gentian, and then, sometimes, blowing up at them because other people are too much pressure, are a ‘collision,’ an interference with her real life. She spends a great deal of time worrying about bad reviews, and being bitter that when there are so many friends of the work’ among ordinary readers, the literary establishment ignores or disparages her.
Also, people seem to keep dropping in. Some of these are adoring fans. It took me a long time to figure out that others (not to put too fine a point on it) are servants.
The Sweat of Others
Part of Sarton’s achievement, as she celebrates it in her earlier memoir, Plant Dreaming Deep, is supposed to be the creation of this beautiful world of solitude, this perfect poet’s house with its wonderful gardens, a place where her whole life can mean. She spoke there (quite unselfconsciously) about wanting to invent her own mythology, her own mystique. Here she explains that she wrote Journal of a Solitude partly to correct the impression of perfection in Plant Dreaming Deep, wanting to include the loneliness and the anger, to undo the myth that her readers found there. Fair enough. But what she doesn’t correct, or even seemingly notice, is that much of this achievement, this creation, is actually accomplished by the sweat of others. ‘Dear Perley Cole’ did most of the heavy lifting and pruning; ‘Dear Mildred’ comes in to clean the house; ‘Dear Gracie Warner’ does the weeding, and her dear parents mow the meadow… The people who actually live in Nelson don’t seem to interrupt her solitude any more than the dog does, or the flowers do. (Could it be that they work for her because they are poor and unemployed?)
Somehow the tone with which Sarton takes these ‘dear friends’ to her bosom makes it worse. Thank god living so close to nature keeps them from becoming vulgar, she says. ‘A few moments of desultory conversation with dear Arnold Miner, when he comes to take the trash, may calm an inner storm.’ In later journal volumes, ‘dear Nancy’ appears to do the typing, organize all the files, answer some of the letters…One must assume she paid these people. At least, I hope she did. But is there a clearer example of bad faith than believing that your cleaning lady is a member of the family? At the very least it demonstrates a profound lack of understanding about ‘what work is.’ It may be great fun to order hundreds of bulbs from catalogues, exhausting and exhilarating to put them in, to weed the beds…But one wouldn’t want to actually mow. Nothing poetic about that.
Now, I must acknowledge one major limitation: I don’t know or care much about flowers or gardening.. I mean, I like them well enough but… I’ve been aware for years that when I read French I simply skip over certain words, the meaning of which I have never had enough curiosity to learn, and register only ‘name of a flower … name of another flower … name of a tree … name of a bird, in the tree…’ It took May Sarton, with her long ecstatic lists of such things, to make me realize that the same thing is true when I read in English. It would take a much finer writer to correct it, to make me actually see something or other. But where a real nature writer would have been concerned to show me what she saw so that I too might be amazed and awestruck, Sarton simply recalls that she felt ‘a stab of pure joy’ — and often leaves it there (35). I find this self-congratulatory to the point of arrogance — does she think the trees and flowers need her to confer specialness on them by her arrangements? But yes, they do: I am reminded that ‘nature’ and ‘garden’ are (in literary theory anyhow) antagonistic opposites.
You may reasonably ask why, when so disappointed, I not only finished the book but went on to write about it. In fact, it’s even worse. I promptly went out and acquired nine or ten of her other books, which are lying about the apartment as I write, and which I have been reading more or less continuously despite the fact that they are almost indistinguishable from one another. They are sort of soothing, in the way that watching the weather channel is soothing. Or in the way one reads the back of the New York Times, taking in (without really taking in) the marriage and death notices of people one has never heard of, and about whom one actually finds out almost nothing. (Also, I’m enough of a scholar and enough of a feminist that to judge her without reading more of her work seemed unfair.) In fact Journal of a Solitude now seems better to me in comparison with the others — at least there was admission of anger and failure there, and one senses (though one does not actually see) a human being behind the posing. The later journals seem written for an audience that knows and loves her already; and of course any honest journal of an elderly, ill person will be composed largely of symptoms and visits to doctors … See The House by the Sea (1977), Recovering: A Journal (1980), At Seventy: A Journal (1984), After the Stroke (1988), Endgame (1992), Encore (1993), At Eighty-two (1995) (all published by Norton).
But my god. The style
A friend is never just a friend, always ‘a dear friend’; people, and (more and more toward the end) pets are ‘such a comfort,’ ‘such a help.’ A good letter or a good book is a ‘blessing’; a sunset is ‘heavenly’ or ‘glorious’; a gift or a meal is ‘lovely.’ Italics and exclamation points abound! This woman, who had been practising the craft of writing for some forty years, and had occasionally taught it to others, is capable of beginning an entry with ‘What a beautiful day!’ or ending a paragraph with ‘How true!’
And surely a serious writer would be embarrassed to include so many photographs of herself, feeling her words should stand for her, should stand on their own? (But this seems to be one thing her devoted readers long for. There’s a whole industry of picture books: young May, old May, May with each different pet, May with flowers, the house in Nelson, The House by the Sea, the table set for dinner…)
AND my god, the animals. This is after all the same May Sarton who wrote The Fur Person, an almost unbearably arch little tale about a Gentleman Cat who finds his perfect home with two ‘old maids’ and becomes civilized, whose inmost thoughts are represented by little doggerel songs. (And this was not meant to be a book for children.) Even in Journal of a Solitude, she does not fear the cutesy-poo. ‘[H]ow marvellous it was to come home to dear shabby Cambridge [Massachusetts], to uneven brick sidewalks…to dear Judy [ex-girlfriend] and the pussies!’ (51-52) She spends the winter interacting with a truly wild cat, feeding it, trying to teach it to trust her, elevating it to the status of some sort of symbol (though I’m not sure of what). Then, in a (to me) inexplicable and outrageous move, at the end of the book, she calls in a ‘gentle, kind man’ from the Humane Society to have this cat — which now trusts her enough to let itself be caught — taken away and euthanized, seemingly because she is wild and mangy and her many untidy litters have become a nuisance.
Sarton makes us privy to a certain amount of agonizing about this, but never quite explains why it was necessary. (At the very least, she could have had the damn thing neutered and then set it free.) This is the country, and in the country one finds any number of semi-wild barn cats making their own way, as this cat had done quite successfully before Sarton interfered with it. Again I find the arrogance breathtaking. No, Sarton doesn’t care about animals as such; what she likes is having a (controllable) pet, a satisfying aesthetic object to incorporate into her best of all possible worlds. Maybe like gardening this sort of ‘love’ for animals reveals a strong desire to play god — and maybe it is better for people who feel this desire strongly to have pets and gardens rather than children, or students. Or lovers. And maybe I’m reduced to feeling such deep outrage on behalf of an anonymous cat because Sarton never really tells us what is happening between her and ‘X,’ or indeed what has become of her life with ‘dear Judy.’
Placemats and Pot Plants
But I really ought to like this woman better. I’m like her in many ways. For example, I can’t write even a memo or a letter to the editor if there’s anyone else in the whole BUILDING (let alone in the room); I’m capable of letting a whole beautiful day be ruined by the interruption of a distressed student, or even the arrival of a telephone repairman, at the wrong moment, just when I am trying to concentrate. I like a good meal, and a pretty set of placemats, as much as the next person. My irritation at May Sarton’s (unmarked) class privilege comes ill from me, since I am similarly situated. My cat and I are pretty close, and I’m as capable as the next lesbian of elevating a piece of random feline behavior into a whole anthropomorphic Freudian bildungsroman. She is small and grey and her name is Rose. But why should you care about that? In fact, why should you care about me at all? So why is she so sure that people will want to read endlessly about May Sarton setting the table, changing the sheets, staring blissfully at an amaryllis? And why is she right?
Maybe some of my (obviously disproportionate) rage comes from the fact that the underlying question of her life (at least as she states it) is of passionate interest to me, and perhaps to many women. It has been phrased in many ways: how to balance work and life, achievement and relationality, find the necessary solitude and centredness and yet have fruitful, not-wholly-selfish interactions with others; how to bring some control and order and balance into one’s life without becoming a control freak. More gracefully, as Simone de Beauvoir put it in The Prime of Life: ‘how was I to reconcile my longing for independence with the feelings that drove me so impetuously towards another person.’) I am always very interested to meet people, in life or books, who seem to be managing this — and there are some.
But I don’t think Sarton is one. For one thing, they don’t talk about it all the time, and she does.
For another thing, I think she’s a terrible liar. And she almost doesn’t have to do the work of lying: she has chosen a style that lies for her. (Lazy as well.) She writes about her inmost being — ’how my life can mean’ — in the style of a bread-and-butter letter. Now there is a biography of her by Margot Peters, which tells us some of the things Sarton left out — multiple love affairs, angry betrayals, unreasonable demands on other people, fits thrown in restaurants — but this is not really my point: the mythologized self Sarton creates in her work is not only not like ‘the real Sarton’ — it’s not like anyone who ever lived. Why take up the genre of truth-telling if you’re not interested in telling the truth? And what of the readerly need to be so fooled?
I deliberately waited to get my own reactions down before I read May Sarton: A Biography by Margot Peters. It’s not a classic hatchet job — in fact, it’s a pretty good read, and well-substantiated as such things go — though die-hard Sarton fans will undoubtedly hate it. It did confirm my suspicions that the myth leaves a lot out … Still, Sarton herself alludes to a certain amount of conflict with others. It’s just that she says it in the tone of voice that means we’re not supposed to believe it — it’s troubles talk, self-criticism meant to elicit ‘oh, no, you’re not a bad person’ from the person on the other end of the phone. Most readers have apparently complied.
A Small Cat Fight
Page after page of Sarton’s memoirs are absolutely unrelieved by irony or humour of even the gentlest sort; when she does criticize someone (usually for disturbing her concentration or undervaluing her work) she often manages to turn it into a ‘blessing’ by the end of the paragraph. Curiously, the one disagreement Sarton does not omit or gloss over or moralize is her conflict with the poet and critic Louise Bogan, who at one time was her friend, but who never publicly supported Sarton’s work in the way Sarton wanted (Bogan was the poetry critic of the New Yorker, respected by the literary establishment in a way Sarton never was.) Bogan was a relentless reviser of her own work, and was bothered by Sarton’s sentimentality; she had the gall to write to her friend, Ruth Limmer, that ‘I had her take out two mentions of “kittens” from one poem. “Cats,” yes, “kittens,” no.’ And Ruth Limmer had the gall to reprint this letter; this calls forth a passionate outburst years later in Sarton’s After the Stroke against Bogan’s ‘patronizing,’ ‘condescending’ attitude. Sarton defends herself by ‘setting the record straight’ — she did not after all remove the kittens; she reprints the poem itself, which is sweet enough to satisfy any admirer of The Fur Person, and wretched enough by any poetic standards; and finally she ‘forces’ herself to believe — against her own generous impulses, we’re supposed to think — that Louise’s behavior was motivated throughout by jealousy of May!
The contrast between them is illuminating. Noone would ever think of calling Bogan a saint (no Carmelite convent could use her tormented, cryptic work in their meditations, as apparently Sarton’s writings have been used). And few have called her a great poet (though she is). It would also be quite problematic to call Bogan a feminist; she was deeply ambivalent about being considered a ‘woman writer,’ and (like Sarton, in fact) was unable to appreciate the openness and anger of younger poets like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. But that’s not the issue here. While Bogan was a far, far better writer — more intelligent, more controlled, more technically and musically skilled, more original, ruthless against clichés, able to communicate an insight (as opposed to merely recording that on Tuesday she had one)—she ‘produced’ much less than Sarton, and is now nearly forgotten; her fine autobiographical writing is only known because Ruth Limmer published a well-edited selection of it after her death. Bogan’s voice was a bitter, incisive one; usually unhappy, sometimes suicidally depressed, she pushed away sentimentality and self-pity by mocking it in herself as well as others. But lacking Sarton’s assurance of her own ultimate importance to the universe — what I have called Sarton’s arrogance — Bogan was blocked and stopped. Did Sarton after all have something Bogan lacked, something ‘the woman writer’ (whoever that fabled beast may be) actually needs? Is this the need that her journals answer in so many? (And what does it say about me if I prefer self-defeating modesty — a traditionally feminine virtue, after all — to world-beating self-assurance?)
Redeeming Features?
I must in fairness grant one claim that is made on Sarton’s behalf: that especially in her novels she has written with honesty and dignity about ageing — the problems and the strengths — showed that older people have feelings and thoughts and sexuality, and that our culture treats them shamefully. She does deserve praise as an early raiser of issues other writers avoided, or were afraid of, including lesbian love and the problems of the wife and the woman artist. But perhaps I can grant this claim and still admit that I find the novels, too, unreadable, for some of the same reasons.
Probably her best book is As We Are Now (1973), presented as the journal of Caroline Spencer, who has been confined to a nursing home against her wishes. The brutality of the situation is clear enough: the smell of urine, the hostility, the bad food, the absence of sympathy. The Yellow-Wallpaper stuff — having to deal with people who treat you as though you are crazy, when you know you’re not (but how can you really know you’re not?) And it is not hard to feel the indignity of having all one’s usual occupations, books for example, taken away, of having to beg for notepaper and hide letters, of no longer being able to choose one’s companions or in the last extremity to choose solitude. Moreover, in contrast to many of Sarton’s other books, something actually happens.
Unfortunately, part of what Caro minds most is being shut away with people who are not her sort, not her class, dirty men who don’t read or think. We are meant to love Caro, not just for her toughness, but for her gentility, which I can’t stand. It is as though Sarton assumes that these characteristics will automatically be seen as positive by all readers, she assumes a shared set of values. Something called a ‘tray cloth’ seems to be very important — Caro actually falls in love with Anna because she has found a clean one to replace the ugly plastic mat. Any pleasure I might take in seeing an older lesbian ‘represented’ is taken away by the triviality of this, and by the unexplored and embarrassing class dynamics of this relationship.
The House by the Sea also deserves some credit for honest portrayal of the difficulties of watching someone one has loved fade off into Alzheimer’s. But if the published journal stresses the tragic side of May’s later relations to Judy, another aspect appears in a letter:
I am really worried by her inability to focus on anything…I have never loved her more — such a dear companion — but her presence here does not relieve me of any responsibility and that is, frankly, what would be good right now. She three times put out tray cloths rather than place mats when setting the table — each time I carefully and patiently explained the difference and showed her where each group is laid in the drawer — but this kind of thing is humiliating for her and hard on me.
Oppression by means of a tray cloth? I find it hard to understand, hard to take.
To Ask the Hard Question is Simple, But…
Again I am haunted by the feeling that I ought to like these books because they speak of things I care about in a new way. My friend Amy likes and teaches The Small Room (1961) because it is the only book she knows that presents college life, and teaching, in a realistic way, from the English teacher’s point of view. And indeed it does. How can one ever feel fully prepared? How close should one become to one’s students, when is this helpful and at what point does it become a tyranny? What can and should be done for students ‘at risk,’ in psychological trouble? That some of the characters are apparently lesbians, and that no fuss is made about this by them or anyone, is noteworthy for the date.
And yet for me this book too is spoiled by smugness, by Sarton’s apparent unwillingness to provide Lucy, her heroine, with humanizing flaws. She admits elsewhere — though admits may be the wrong word, since she doesn’t see it as a problem — that in the books based on real people she has known, she did not include any feature of their character that would pain them or their families to read about. (To me this comment says worlds about the famous ‘honesty’ and ‘integrity’ of the writer.) I think here, and in a number of other novels, she identified so fully with her protagonist that she was unwilling to include any feature that would pain her to read about herself, just as in the journals.
The novel I am ‘supposed’ to like best was the one I came closest to throwing across the room. In Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965), two young writers, Peter and Jenny, drive to New England to interview the seventy-year-old poet, who bears a a striking resemblance to the Sarton of the mythology, a sort of flashing Delphic oracle who also makes sandwiches and tea. The interview form insures that this book too is ‘talking heads,’ interspersed with flashbacks and Hilary Stevens’ inner questionings, framed by two conversations with her teenaged neighbour, Mar, who is coming to terms with being a gay man. In fact, the book is less a novel than a lecture; obviously we are meant to spend the book in the same state of reverent, breathless awe as the young people who have come to interview her, we are meant to admire a sensitive, genteel, much-wounded, but still brave heroine.
And clearly many readers do admire her. Why can’t I? Is it because of the way the dialogue, the emotions twitch about: a character cannot maintain a consistent emotional state, or way of speaking, for more than a page? Is it that while she does reflect on, and relive, the emotional storms of an emotionally stormy life, nothing and no one seems to seriously question her status as tortured genius impelled to seek one Muse after another?
And yet she does say straight out, to Mar and then to the interviewers, and then show us in the flashbacks, that she has loved women as well as men. In 1965 this was not nothing. It was also not nothing to be willing to take as the book’s ‘problem’ the difficulties of the woman writer.
Yes, the question is important; but I don’t find the answers satisfying, or even lucid, possibly because she frames them in terms borrowed from Robert Graves’ The White Goddess. When she talks about things like ‘the masculine side of her talent,’ I’m simply not sure what she can possibly mean. Unless she really does mean that women can’t write well and stay ‘women.’
Real Problems in Real Life
I can think of two equally early lesbian novels, Jane Rule’s Desert of the Heart (1964) and Claire Morgan’s The Price of Salt (1952), whose characters actually live, make choices, face real problems in a social world… Sarton has said she was trying, with Mrs. Stevens, ‘to say radical things gently.’
Here’s the whole quote:
an original book, ahead of its time, written when I was fifty-five. Because of it, I have become a sort of hero. I have lost jobs because of that book….
I have been trying to say radical things gently so that they may penetrate without shock. The fear of homosexuality is so great that it took courage to write Mrs Stevens, to write a novel about a woman homosexual who is not a sex maniac, a drunkard, a drugtaker or in any way repulsive; to portray a homosexual who is neither pitiable nor disgusting, without sentimentality; and to face the truth that such a life…is rarely happy, a life where art must become the primary motivation, for love is never going to fulfil in the usual sense.
Sarton has a point; the self-congratulation grates but is partly merited. But ‘such a life is rarely happy…love is never going to fulfil’?— a strange thing strikes me: she might be describing The Well of Loneliness, which is almost 40 years earlier; which has some of the same literary faults; but even with all its turgid sentimental melodrama, its hideously moralizing ending, etc., The Well (I suddenly discover) has a certain literary (and thus a persuasive) strength Mrs. Stevens does not: it actually hangs together …
Others have remarked that in creating a lesbian heroine who was not crazy or deviant, who looked and thought and gardened much like other older middle-class women, Sarton was building a bridge to the ‘ordinary’ reader who might not have much contact with lesbians. And this seems to have succeeded; as Margot Peters says, ‘perhaps no other lesbian writer has been more admired by the heterosexual community’ (367). (Is this good?) One critic observes with disarming naivete that ‘in refusing to categorize Sarton as a lesbian writer, we are freed to embrace the lesbian in ourselves’ (and then goes on to misread Adrienne Rich): clearly ‘ourselves’ are heterosexual… Yes, in 1965 most of the available literary representations of lesbians were found in lurid pulp paperback fiction, and many of the lesbians shown there were evil and deviant. But at least they were alive; and sexual; had jobs; fought; felt; worked in the world. There is an honesty about the cheapest Ann Bannon book that is missing here.
So OK, all these issues, like the ‘how should one live’ questions raised by the journals, matter to women and thus matter for feminism, and maybe Sarton was the first to raise them. But she’s hardly the only available voice now. How can I account for her staying power? (I found all four novels, and others, on the shelves in a massmarket bookstore.) I am beginning to suspect that what keeps May Sarton in print is not the same thing that keeps A Room of One’s Own and Adrienne Rich’s essays and poems on syllabi and in feminist hearts. I think it’s the same thing that makes a bestselling industry out of treacly tripe like ‘Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much.’
As We Really Are Now
If I go into a mainstream bookstore, I find rack after rack of non-fictional, personal writing, mostly by women, some of it by feminists. (Mainstream critics call this the ‘memoir boom.’) This should make me happy, but… As one of my lesbian students said, ‘it’s great that there are so many gay books in the big mall bookstores, but it feels odd to find oneself between self-help and recovery.’ The memoir is coming to replace the novel and also the work of serious political analysis. I’m most familiar with the American scene, but I don’t think this can be written off as simply another American disease — one of the most troubling examples I’ve come across was Rosalind Coward’s Our Treacherous Hearts.
One quite traditional function of the memoir is the political recantation, and Coward is not the only example of this; there’s an awful book by Anne Roiphe, mother of the egregious Katie, which similarly claims that ‘we feminists’ erred in devaluing the family. In these and other examples, the memoir genre seems to be called into being by the need to correct another genre called ‘theory,’ which is said to be incapable of bearing women’s truth (and apparently unreformable).
Still, the impulse to memoir has feminist roots, in the idea that every woman’s life matters, every woman’s life is interesting, everyone has the right and the ability to tell her own story rather than being an ‘object’ in someone else’s book. Some might argue that certain issues (incest, domestic abuse) can really only have full impact when aired in this way. And some of this writing is very good. At one time, the very existence of such books would have seemed a miracle. ‘What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?/ The world would split open.’ (These lines from ‘Kathe Kollwitz’ may be all most feminists know of Muriel Rukeyser, a wonderful poet of war, sexuality, and struggle, whose work is almost as hard to find as Louise Bogan’s.)
Well, the world has split open. What did we find inside?
Looking back over classics of autobiographical writing from the first phase of 1970s feminism, I am struck by the representation of chaos and conflict (external and internal), the fear and sometimes the presence of what feels like madness (Kate Millett, Jill Johnston, Robin Morgan). And the sense that it is important to give things their real names, even when cruel, to ‘call people on things,’ which importantly includes criticizing oneself when one has behaved badly. Now, I do not blame Sarton — who was already in her mid-fifties, and a formed writer, when these books appeared — for not changing in that direction. But the fact that Sarton is still very much in print, and very popular, seems to suggest that at least some women reading now have voted against chaos and in favor of meditations upon the sea and a beautifully set table with a centerpiece of … oh, never mind what flowers they are. The point is that Flying, Lesbian Nation, and the others were shaped by a consciously political intention to change the world (not just the self) by showing what was wrong, by showing lives lived on the edge with all the pain and all the energy. I find the same shaping intention, the same intensity, and the same willingness to present problems that are not yet solved, in novels of that moment such as Marge Piercy’s Small Changes.
A Change of Agenda
Today, most memoir writing is either not shaped at all — telling the story is meant to be its own justification — or (more problematically) is shaped by the need to tell the new master narrative, about coming to terms with one’s ‘toxic parents,’ working through denial, overcoming addiction, reclaiming one’s ‘inner child.’ In these stories, what needs to change — or what has changed already, making the triumphant memoir possible — is not the world, but the self.
A recent book I have found helpful in thinking about this is Elayne Rapping’s The Culture of Recovery. She looks at all kinds of ‘12-step’ program meetings, paperback books, TV movies, and other manifestations of the self-help movement, also at talkshows that popularize and promote this brand of therapy and use a similar language. It is almost impossible now, she says, to discuss for example interpersonal problems, or weight, or drinking, without falling into the language of addiction and codependency: this is ‘the mental wallpaper that decorates our days and nights.’ Rapping is less unsympathetic than some other feminist commentators to these movements; she underscores that the pain expressed is real and choking, that the problems are real and cannot be solved by injunctions to keep a stiff upper lip or pull on one’s bootstraps. (It doesn’t do an anorexic any good to hear that women are starving in China.)
Rapping sees many similarities between what goes on in 12-step programs and feminist consciousness-raising, and feels this is a success for which feminists should take credit — we haven’t been marginalized, we’ve been (partially) adopted by virtually everyone. And yet of course she makes the central criticism that others have: where feminism was a movement for social change, to uncover underlying causes and address them, this is about staying in the same place, it is individual and not collective, no collective consciousness can come out of it and the groups are not really groups any more than an aerobics class is. Ironically the groups she feels work best are the old-fashioned (mainly male) AA groups, where there is a focus on changing behavior. In the more female dominated groups, such as Overeaters Anonymous and Co-dependents Anonymous, the emphasis seemed more on ‘fostering selflove’ then on analysing and changing damaging behavior, let alone placing one’s life in a social context. ‘Sometimes speakers would just get up and shout ‘Me! Me! Me! I matter!’ to group applause.’ Where participants in AA gain group affirmation by going a certain number of days without a drink, the CODA group member is encouraged to take inventory of occasions where she ‘sets some time aside for herself, just to have fun.’
And of course Elayne Rapping is troubled too by the steps themselves: ‘We admitted that we had become powerless over alcohol (or love addiction, or whatever it may be) —that our lives had become unmanageable; Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity; Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care and direction of God as we understood him,’ etc. That mental work like this has helped, and even saved the lives of, many people (particularly alcoholics) is not in doubt. But whether a willed and ritualized passivity is compatible with any version of political consciousness and will is another story.
Rapping’s final chapter, ‘The Diseasing of Politics,’ addresses the impact of self-help discourse on present-day activities within feminism and the left in ways that parallel my own analysis. She gives a particularly telling account of some feminist ‘speak-outs’ about rape and body-image issues: where once such events would have ended with a call to action and a plan for collective resistance, the events she attended seemed curiously depoliticized, seemed to see personal transformation as an end in itself (to be achieved either on the spot, through the simple act of speaking out, or through further therapy). I too have sat with some discomfort at these events, which now tend to be organized by campus counselling rather than by independent feminist groups (or indeed by women’s studies): the stories are heart-rending, gut-wrenching, and at the end of the event there seems to be nowhere to take them, nothing to do. But my unease, and Rapping’s, should not be confused with the rantings of Katie Roiphe and others to the effect that speakouts are simply bitch sessions or elevated whine-fests about problems that don’t actually exist. Rather, where Roiphe and others are critical of what they call ‘victim feminism,’ which wallows in oppression (which Roiphe minimizes by calling it ‘self-pity’) rather than building ‘self-esteem,’ Rapping is bothered by an absence of recognition that rape ‘survivors’ have actually been victimized by someone, that oppression, male power, exist and can’t solely be addressed by therapy. I agree. Speakouts, and healing therapy, are essential, but sometimes they don’t seem (anymore) to point out clearly that the person who has the ‘problem’ is the rapist, and that this should be addressed not by therapy but by punishment. (In the case of so-called eating disorders, I am almost willing to utter the feminist heresy that talking about the problem has made it worse.) But problematic as these events have sometimes become, their continued existence is a good sign in a dark time; and an absence of psychological closure, given that the material situation has not in fact been assuaged, may be a good sign as well.
(Katie Roiphe’s book The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus is yet another example of the replacement of research by anecdote — Roiphe famously doubts a decade of professionally gathered empirical statistics about acquaintance rape because neither she nor her friends experienced it directly. Of course my own discussion of this particular issue is also based on one small (and hopefully atypical) campus. Rapping’s picture confirms it, though since she herself uses ‘qualitative’ ‘participant-observer’ methods, there is still room for more quantitatively rigorous work on the issues she discusses.)
Indeed, this discourse is all around and it is easier to make fun of it than to know how to feel about it really. I had a student who wrote that the tragedy of Pecola, in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, was that she suffered from ‘low self-esteem.’ At first, this seemed like an utter trivialization of what the black women in that book suffered at the hands of others; I wrote in the margin, the problem is not self-esteem but racism and sexism. I felt the student was (without meaning to) using the buzzword both to distance her (white) self from any complicity in the sufferings of the characters, and also to identify them (reductively) with her own issues: worries about boyfriends, weight, etc. (These issues are real — they kill kids — and on some level they’re social, too. They’re just not what Morrison meant.)
Still in fact it’s not this easy. Because Morrison’s book is about how people feel. It’s about making us feel as bad as the characters feel, and then making us angry enough to do something. The term self-esteem seems to sanitize away the anger and the politics; so I’d say instead it’s about internalized racism and self-hatred. But maybe I’m just saying the same thing…Feminism did, does promise to help undo the damage to the self that living in our world causes. It does promise to heal the wounds. Maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe it has to.
The means or the end?
For a long time I’ve believed that women have to believe in themselves more, think better of themselves, deep inside, in order to work and live etc. A lot of how I was taught to teach writing depends on this, I have come to see — everyone can write well, it is just a question of affirming one’s own right to speak, finding one’s own voice, breaking down the blocks, recognizing things aren’t your fault etc. — see once again Woolf. But now I teach at a place where sometimes we are so worried about encouraging our students that we forget to challenge them.
An important American Association of University Women study of young women in the USA identified low self-esteem as a core reason for lack of ambition and direction, and loss of motivation — something I do observe in my female students. Interestingly, one sign of low-self esteem among young women the study found was that they attribute their successes to luck, where their male classmates attributed success to their own talents and/or hard work — even though the actual success of the women, measured by grades, was equal or better. I don’t dismiss this. But I also remember Adrienne Rich’s famous comment in ‘When We Dead Awaken’ — first delivered as a speech at the Modern Language Association — that in our professional success we should also remember the many women who failed through no fault of their own. ‘Every one of us here in this room has had great luck — we are teachers, writers, academicians; our own gifts could not have been enough, for we all know women whose gifts are buried or aborted.’ I and most of my students and colleagues have been lucky (for example, we didn’t ‘choose’ to have middle-class parents). It may be the young men who are wrong. Sometimes self-esteem is not the same thing as self-knowledge.
In any case, I have decided that it is possible for a book (even a supposedly feminist book), and by implication a writer, to suffer from blind spots attributable to dangerously high self esteem. Two recent examples are on my desk: The Year of Reading Proust, by Phyllis Rose; and The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty, by Carolyn Heilbrun. Both are ‘personal writing’ by professors of English who have been acclaimed for earlier works of feminist literary criticism. Heilbrun in fact is May Sarton’s literary executor, and was her friend, and has written more about her than any other academic critic; she was not blind to Sarton’s faults as a stylist (or her difficulties as a personality) — her piece on Sarton is the most perceptive chapter in this book. Yet she still seems to have inherited more than the copyrights.
Like Sarton’s work, these two books show that it is possible to engage in constant introspection, constant self-conscious reflection, without acquiring any distance or perspective on one’s life. We are asked to care about Carolyn’s dog, and Phyllis’s indecision about whether to get a dog, or what sort of dog to get; to bask in their wonderful supportive husbands, their intelligent independent-minded children who seem to always call them. I’ve already been to the hairdresser with May; now I have to go to the (MUCH more upscale) hairdresser with Phyllis. Oddly, as with Sarton the details seem to be almost entirely domestic, or maybe I mean feminine: cooking, cleaning, shopping, thinking about one’s weight. Heilbrun has retired; Rose seems to be eternally on leave. ‘A woman’s life’ seems to have shrunk. The only way I can account for Phyllis Rose is to surmise that she is trying to write like Proust. But Heilbrun seems to be trying to write like May Sarton and I believe she has succeeded.
Looking for feminism
Now again as with Sarton I find Heilbrun’s desire to show that an older woman’s life is not a desert, can be filled with new ideas, new plans, new friends, etc., praiseworthy and important. (And perhaps an important audience of older women, to which I do not belong, does find it interesting and empowering to read about the rhythm of her days, does identify with the success she claims: though I imagine few have had the resources to achieve it.) But Heilbrun also believes she is writing as a feminist, perhaps even as the representative feminist, and thus I find her complacency harder to take. Sarton enables, perhaps most of all Sarton’s success enables, a kind of lazy, self-absorbed personal reflection which is not connected either to actual research/findings/reality or to any actual political movement, but which takes on the voice of an ordinary (but informed) woman speaking to women about what women are. Clearly twenty years of feminist critique of the speaking subject have made no impression here.
Maybe this sort of maundering is basically harmless, even a pleasant way of passing the time — unless someone mistook it for what feminism is. In which case its lack of intellectual rigor or political edge become a problem. And people do make this mistake, especially with Heilbrun’s Writing a Woman’s Life, a leisurely, anecdotal ramble through the lives of some great women writers, including her own. It makes some good, basic points, such as that biographies of women tend to be bad because they over-emphasize romance and underemphasize achievement; it also has the strength of being readable and therefore teachable, which much feminist theory right now is not. Writing a Woman’s Life can also be read as a powerful apologia for bourgeois marriage, but it does not state this argument up front: it is largely indifferent to the convention that examples should be marshalled to prove a provable point. I suppose this is what she means when she says she is not writing theory. But how it is possible to spend several decades as a very public and, in some ways, courageous defender of feminism without noticing that feminism is meant to be a movement for social change?
The Story of Me
Within feminist criticism, the move to personal writing, the move to ‘I,’ felt tremendously liberating, as Heilbrun and many others report. And it actually was liberating. It brought down the myth of scholarly objectivity which had masked a large number of unsavory things, sexism among them. It made us possible. And similar things went on in other fields, in history, in philosophy, even (though only now) in classics. But now I feel like the whole genre is collapsing under its own weight.
At one time, writing the personal was harder, because it went against one’s training as a scholar and as a woman. Now, nobody is trained to do much of anything, and I am beginning to think writing the personal may actually be easier. Many who did have a public voice have simply moved over to the memoir shelf: leaving behind the need to respond to, to assimilate, the critiques of the subject that came not just from theorists but also from women of color, working class women, etc. Those who turned to ‘I’ have not always been careful not to let ‘I’ slip back into ‘we’ or ‘women.’ — in a way that evaded the critiques about middleclass etc., — or seemed to. But working class women and women of color have been in the forefront of the memoir, too. In fact, that ‘what do you mean WE,’ that ‘what about me?’ may be the origin of the use of memoir to correct feminist theory, to keep theory honest.
Where do these two strands come together? Somehow, to write the personal — in that first breakout from the stultifying academic voice — one claimed to be writing from the margins. Claimed to be breaking a silence. This was necessary, and it was true; but as it has solidified into a writing convention it can sometimes be embarrassing. Toril Moi wrote about Simone de Beauvoir as a woman writing about her marginality from a position of centrality. Now it is possible to claim a marginality one doesn’t (materially speaking) actually have, then say perfectly ordinary or even retrograde (Anne Roiphe, Rosalind Coward) things under the impression one is being radical, taking risks. A lot is said about risk-taking and vulnerability. But maybe this too can be subject to historical change; maybe Oprah has taken the edge off that risk. (Although especially for women, the risk of looking foolish is always there.)
Certainly the liberation of the personal voice has made possible this essay, made possible a certain tone of voice without which I probably couldn’t have written it. What after all have I been doing, if not writing about myself? If we (or at least I) can’t speak without speaking the personal in some form, further distinctions must be made. Suppose I listed some personal writing I do like, and tried to figure out why.
The personal is political after all?
When I think about memoirs or journals I admire, I can identify the shaping intention behind the pen. Of the many volumes of Simone de Beauvoir’s memoirs, my favorites are Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (the first one) and A Very Easy Death, the one about her mother. The first is concerned to show how an independent intellectual woman can grow and free herself from an utterly stifling milieu; it is also a testament to her friend who didn’t make it through, an attempt to keep faith with Zaza and with her own young (rebellious) self. A Very Easy Death is an indictment, though a gentle one, of institutionalized medicine and in a way a revolt against death itself. It’s also a critique of the way the mother was forced to live, a re-evaluation of the woman she was so angry at before. Both of course are intensely personal, and if we don’t come to care about the narrator and the other people she’s talking about we probably won’t care to finish reading. Even if we do we may find ourselves disagreeing, or even find her self-indulgent. But at least there are other characters (in Sarton there is only ever one). In fact the social world is dense, like a good novel’s. And there is always a social critique — things should be different, we should work to see death or adolescence fully and honestly so we can try to make it less awful. And while there is closure, there is no complacency here. There is no way of ‘coming to terms’ with Zaza’s death, or with the unfulfilled life of the mother. There’s no way to see a ‘blessing’ there, and no desire to pretend. To do so would be to betray her mother, her friend. (Compare Sarton on Judy: ‘How happy we are together in spite of her loss of mind!’ to Beauvoir’s unsentimental accounting of what she has lost, Beauvoir’s rage…)
Beauvoir’s memoirs are part of her political project, though implicitly so, and so it’s not surprising that there’s a lot of overlap in examples and analysis between them and The Second Sex (and the novels, which are also built around social issues, complexly so).
I can think of memoirs I like where I disagree with the conclusion but respect the author for trying to advance a point of view. I am not about to follow Alix Kates Shulman back to the land, but I respected her for struggling and carefully thinking through (as opposed to simply feeling through) what she was doing, as a feminist. I was fascinated by a book called Miriam’s Kitchen by Elizabeth Ehrlich, which uses personal writing (and even recipes!) to tell the story of how the writer’s mother-in-law came through the Holocaust. The book is structured around the Jewish holidays, and shaped by the writer’s eventual decision to become more and more Orthodox and observant as a good way to raise her children in a bad world. This is not a choice I would make, but I admired the point of view, and I learned some Jewish history.
Another example of a memoir I really admire is Audre Lorde’s Zami, even though Lorde is clear that she is not telling us everything about her life: there’s an explicit intention to revalue the lives of her parents, and to record lesbian history, we can learn certain things to do and not do as a movement and as individuals trying to build healthy relationships. And maybe my favorite is Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman, which measures memory against theory and comes up with something bigger than both. Steedman almost invents a new form and style in her concern to avoid oversimplification, to resist the reduction and objectification of working-class lives and in the interest of returning a true subjectivity to her mother and to herself.
And there are memoirs that I value simply because they have told me about things (places, experiences) I simply don’t know, that have showed me the limitations of my own experiences.
But you can’t learn anything from Sarton, you can’t even learn how to garden better… ‘Here I am and this is what and how I am’ — and that’s it. Apart from the changes the season makes to the gardening, the entries could be in any order at all. The point seems to be simply to use the voice, to make contact — and it stops there. This too seems to be the difference between real consciousness-raising, a real group that might get together to learn and accomplish something, and mere Oprah-speak. So perhaps I am not after all condemning the personal, condemning the memoir outright. Perhaps I am beginning to sketch the basis for a political criticism including that genre.
Starting to Stop
Suppose Sarton needed to feel an exaggerated sense of her own importance in order to work and be productive, needed to silence self-critique to the point where she really couldn’t revise at all. It may be that most women writers still need that, at least as an initial stage, to counterbalance the inner voices of woman-hating, to hold the mocker at bay. I hope it’s clear by now that I’m of two minds about this.
People talk about things as questions of ‘survival’ that are not (materially speaking) about survival at all. ‘I must have flowers about me’ — I guess Sarton wasn’t the only one who felt this way, though Beauvoir explicitly took it apart as a mystification of the feminine self, an attempt to substitute simple, static ‘being’ for actual doing. But, ‘I must get away from these toddlers for at least an hour a day’ — who could take exception to that? The rape crisis center puts up posters that say, ‘Tell Someone.’ In other words, ‘You! You matter!’ Maybe the feminist pronoun problem for the nineties is not, after all, the relationship between ‘I’ and ‘we.’ Maybe it’s the relationship between ‘me’ and ‘you,’ between ‘me’ and ‘she’ …
Suppose we gave ‘low self-esteem’ its old name back. Suppose we just called it woman-hating: remembering that this can be done quite effectively by women themselves. Problems that have no names need to get names. But some names are better than others. Suppose we gave back their birth names to the problems we have not solved: violence against women (not, ‘sexual miscommunication’); unfair divisions of labor (not ‘balancing home and workplace’); male power (not ‘male/female cultural differences’); racism (not ‘multicultural diversity’); poverty … justice denied … Then we can see that the ‘me’ discourse may not be (anymore) about solving them. That we’ve mistaken the first step (speaking out) for the whole journey; and we’ve forgotten key parts of speaking out: anger, analysis, action.
And yet, an overwhelming conclusion from all my questioning is that some form of feminist therapeutic of the self is necessary and valuable, some way of dealing with individual pain (including irrational pain) and individual pleasure has to be found or the movement cannot move.
But we haven’t found it yet. Perhaps the answer is that we are doomed to live in ambiguity, in compromise — but we are called to be saved, not by fantasy but by working for change. Not by complacency, but by irony. Not just by feeling but also by thinking.
Where does this leave poor May Sarton — whom this analysis hugely, unfairly overburdens with blame — and the readers who love her? I have written elsewhere that it is unfair to hold feminist writers to the standards of heroines. Much work on Beauvoir, on H.D., on Woolf is marred by this — by the initial overvaluation and the bitterness of the reaction as the researcher uncovers the feet of clay, the all too human failures to transform. In those cases, I saw and see this is a distraction from what really matters about them, why we care about them in the first place — the excellent writing, the attempts at honesty, and (at least for Woolf and Beauvoir) the feminist insight … with Sarton, with many memoirists who follow her trend, I can’t find these qualities.
One of the things I have been exploring here is whether it is permissible within a feminist context to say, ‘this book is bad, this is bad writing.’ Indeed it is easy to speak ill of the dead; it’s a different matter to be willing to give a living writer pain, especially when it is so hard to write a book at all. I’m not sure this worry is wrong. But does it come from feminism? Or from femininity (politeness, insecurity)? Am I just a nasty girl, an angry daughter? A bad sister?
But in the end, I cannot pretend this stuff is good enough. We deserve better. We have to be more demanding of our reading and ourselves.
References
May Sarton, As We Are Now (Norton, 1973); The Fur Person (Rinehart, 1956); Journal of a Solitude (Norton, 1973); Plant Dreaming Deep (Norton, 1968); The House by the Sea (Norton, 1977)
Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (Harper and Row, 1977); The Prime of Life (Penguin, 1974); A Very Easy Death (Penguin, 1983)
Ruth Limmer Journey Around My Room: The Autobiography of Louise Bogan. A Mosaic (Penguin, 1980)
Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart (MacMillan of Canada, 1964)
‘Claire Morgan’ [Patricia Highsmith], The Price of Salt (Arno Press, 1975, reprint of 1952 edition)
K. Graehme Hall, ‘To Say Radical Things Gently: Art and Lesbianism in Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing,’ That Great Sanity: Critical Essays on May Sarton, edited by Susan Swartzlander and Marilyn R. Mumford (University of Michigan Press, 1992)
Rosalind Coward, Our Treacherous Hearts (Faber and Faber, 1992)
Anne Richardson Roiphe, Fruitful: A Real Mother in the Modern World (Houghton Mifflin, 1996)
Muriel Rukeyser, ‘Kathe Kollwitz,’ Out of Silence: Selected Poems, edited by Kate Daniels (Triquarterly Books, 1992)
Kate Millett, Flying (Knopf, 1974)
Jill Johnston, Lesbian Nation (Simon and Schuster, 1973)
Robin Morgan, Monster (Vintage, 1972); ed. Sisterhood is Powerful: an anthology of writings from the women’s liberation movement (Vintage, 1970)
Phyllis Rose, The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time (Scribner, 1997)
Carolyn Heilbrun, The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty (Dial 1997)
Alix Kates Shulman, Drinking the Rain (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1995)
Elizabeth Ehrlich, Miriam’s Kitchen (Viking, 1997)
Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Sheba Feminist Publishers, 1982)
Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (Virago, 1986)