Twisting at Mad

Here is a chapter from my thesis from New College in Sarasota, FL Chapter IV: The Ink of Progress

Looked at from one vantage point, the project of discovering and making available the lives and works of women is one of myth-making-the creation of a tradition that can sustain women personally and give them a rich and lively social world. Setting down a record with energy and love is the primary task. But to be strong, this record must be

accurate. (Ascher, xxiii)

As long as patriarchal society controls prevailing images of a "woman," her expression of self and her assumption of subjectivity are challenging to patriarchal power: women's writing is women's resistance. Leaving an accurate record, one that details women's full, energetic, creative lives, is an act of transformation.

Coming to voice and moving towards resistance require knowledge of oneself. By thinking about and listening to her experiences and ideas in the space of writing, a woman may more readily hear the voice within her silences.

I write these words to bear witness to the primacy of resistance struggle in any situation of domination; to the strength and power that emerges from sustained resistance and the profound conviction that these forces can be healing, can protect us from dehumanization and despair. (hooks, Talking Back, 8)

The emphasis on writing in this chapter is not meant to detract from previous or additional pathways to voice, but merely illustrates the power of the written word in the struggle for voice and in the creation of an honest history of women's lives. The dominant culture has for centuries said that women should not write, that this is "man's work." With little encouragement for women writers, it is unlikely that women's work will be seriously discussed or considered.

Women will write. They always have written. This writing, however, has hardly been encouraged or, until relatively recently, well-received; the notable exceptions being those women whose works have been deemed marketable in light of publishers' conceptions of what the reading public desires from women authors. Throughout her work, bell hooks speaks about the lack of serious non-sexist criticism of women's words.

Surely the absence of a humane critical response has tremendous impact on the writer from any oppressed, colonized group who endeavors to speak. For us, true speaking is not solely an expression of creative power; it is an act of resistance, a political gesture that challenges politics of domination that would render us nameless and voiceless. As such, it is a courageous act-as such it represents a threat. To those who wield oppressive power, that which is threatening must necessarily be wiped out, annihilated, silenced. (Talking Back, 8)

To write as a black woman in a society built around straight white male privilege and subjectivity is to act against such annihilation. With a culture that would hear women of color into speech, words of resistance and the struggle against racism and sexism become part of the public dialogue and, more importantly, part of the public perception of "women" as a self-defined group. Women's writing constructs a public perception, a counter-image, of women as contributors and creators.

The desired power hooks speaks of is not power over another or over oneself; it is the power and the possibility to tell a story, to define subjectivity, and, again, to create history. This is the power to be free. Women must be allowed to write as an act of self-education and as an important gesture of resistance to those who wish them to remain "nameless and voiceless."

Because society has been reluctant to view writing women as professional women, we have misplaced or lost many words, ideas, and stories. "Compared to men writers of like distinction and years of life, few women writers have had lives of unbroken productivity, or leave behind a "body of work" (Olsen, 178). In "Student Metaphors for Themselves as Writers," James McDonald details classroom exercises encouraging students to think about their voices and abilities as writers. He asks them to think of metaphors that describe their relationship to writing. He gives the students time to think the metaphors through and to commit them to words. Through these metaphors, ideas about each student's position, self-image, and abilities are explored.

The two "Metaphors of Silence" McDonald quotes are from female students. One sees herself as "an alligator because 'it opens its mouth but nothing comes out.' Another sees herself as a mockingbird who 'can only repeat the songs of other and never sing a song of its own'" (63). By talking about their silences, these women begin to break them. A radical transformation has not occurred here, but a first step towards recognition has taken place. Through writing and thinking about their voices, they begin to understand their silences. Each gives her own fears and silence a voice while raising the consciousness of her peers, her professor, and, most importantly, herself.

Those who are uncomfortable, or less skilled, tend to write metaphors of "fear and courage" at one level, and metaphors of "silence" at a more extreme level(63). The level of silence is "more extreme" because it questions whether speech or voice is possible. Metaphors of "fear and courage," at the very least, involve voice as a possibility. In writing, it becomes important for women to use that fear to propel themselves into sustained creativity. In "Transformation of Silence into Language and Action," Audre Lorde writes:

We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us. (44)

The fear does not vanish. Writers learn to cope with it: to learn that the fear is inevitable and to choose to write anyway. It is vital that women know that writing is an option, a possibility, and a path to voice that they are capable of using. It allows for exposure and has the added benefits of creating identification, helping others break silence, and combating fear.

In The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar explore the struggles faced by women writers in the nineteenth-century and the dynamics that attempted to silence their voices and control their pens. Women were defined, both in literature and in society by male conceptions of who and what they should be. Gilbert and Gubar argue that women in literature were cast into two roles, "angel" or "monster," and that an escape from these constructions was necessary for women attempting to write "a literature of their own" (Showalter).

Since both patriarchy and its texts subordinate and imprison women, before women can even attempt the pen which is so rigorously kept from them they must escape. . .those male texts which, defining them as "Cyphers," deny them the autonomy to formulate alternatives to the authority that has imprisoned them and kept them from attempting the pen. (13)

Claiming subjectivity along with experiences outside of these roles resisted women's literary and societal confinement and was a great cause of mental anguish for women engaged in such escape. Though it was challenging for women to resist male definition and move into autonomous voice, Gilbert and Gubar hold that "women themselves have the power to create themselves as characters, even perhaps to reach toward the woman trapped on the other side of the mirror/text and to help her climb out" (16).

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a nineteenth century feminist writer, detailed her own struggle to "climb out" in The Yellow Wallpaper (1892). The narrator of the story feels that she is ill, but her perception is dismissed by her husband and her brother, who are both physicians. They believe her to be hysterical and she is "forbidden to 'work' until she is well again" (10). Confined to a small room in her husband's house, the narrator writes in spite of this sentence to silence and the weakness brought by apparent "postpartum psychosis" (Gilbert and Gubar, TMITA, p.89).

The narrator becomes obsessed with the rotting yellow wallpaper in the room to which she has been confined. She continually watches and thinks about the patterns, eventually seeing a woman trapped inside. The women move about, trying to escape. "I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before" (16). The woman in the wallpaper, full of expression, is the narrator's trapped voice. The narrator is at once trying to climb into her own sense of subjectivity and to climb out of the restrictions placed upon her voice.

Such restrictions were hardly uncommon in the nineteenth century. In The Diary of Alice James, a nineteenth-century woman diagnosed as "hysteric" shows the importance of creating and documenting her truths by her own means and with her own valued perceptions. Alice James's diary is interesting both for its content and for the ways in which we have come to understand the context for her writing. As the younger sister of philosopher William James and the novelist Henry James, and the only daughter in the family, Alice occupied an interesting, though delicate role as woman and as muse.

Her father viewed women as personifications of virtue, innocent purity, [and] holy self-sacrifice. Boys has to learn to be good through suffering and the interesting use of perception, but girls were good by nature and could dispense with interesting ideas. (Strouse, xiii)

"Self-sacrifice" constitutes objectification and voicelessness regarding the "interesting use of perception." Her older, more famous brothers, along with Robertson, the youngest, "had always disappeared to play games that were not for girls" (Edel, 5). These were the "games" of education, of exposure, of free inquiry, and of risk. Her brothers' many accomplishments aside, Alice was a writer in her own right. It was only after her parents were gone and her brothers were away, their cast images of Alice lessening in intensity, that Alice was able to start her diary. Leon Edel, in the preface to the 1964 edition of the diary, explains that Alice lived in relation to her family, but still had her own writing life. "I have retold Alice's life not as part of her brothers' lives . . . but as a life possessing its own-in this case distinctly muted-drama. The diary itself completes the portrait" (x).

Alice James is a valuable contribution to nineteenth-century literature and to any discussion of silence. Her writing, an exploration of self and environment as well as a commentary on the happenings of the day, shoes Alice to be a creative, humorous, and literate woman. Her diary is a recognition of what had previously gone unrecognized: that she was a rational, thinking, feeling woman, capable of understanding her situation as well as others' perceptions of her supposed "illness."

I think that if I get into the habit of writing a bit about what happens, or rather doesn't happen, I may lose a little of the sense of loneliness and desolation which abides within me. My circumstances allowing of nothing but the ejaculation of one-syllabled reflections, a written monologue by that most interesting being, myself, may have its yet to be discovered consolations. I shall at least have it all my own way and it may bring relief as an outlet to that geyser of emotions, sensations, speculations and reflections which ferments perpetually within my poor old carcass for its sins; so here goes, my first Journal! (Gilbert and Gubar, 973).

This "geyser of emotions, sensations, speculations and reflections" is her energetic and amazing voice bursting forth. Alice James writes because she cannot stand the rotting, the aging, of her too-vibrant perceptions. Her resistance comes in moving mast what she calls her "sins" By writing she transforms herself into one who honors her world instead of stifling it.

James recognizes writing for oneself as an act of control, away from the "Cures" imposed upon her. Writing is also a place for her to "combat loneliness." In recording her world, James not only gave herself something to do, she formed a relationship with a vital companion: herself. Much in the same way fiction writers create characters based on their own lives (Angelou, Lorde, Hong Kingston), James weaves a life in words defining an adventurous and subjective self. "Because she fought to define for herself what it meant to be Alice James, she gave posterity a way to think about who she was" (Strouse, xv). Choosing to write brings awareness of self. This self, especially as a woman writing in the nineteenth-century, has resistance to typical and normalized roles at its deepest core.

There remained in Alice the long-formed need to assert herself and the old articulateness that could not, in reality, be silenced. "The only thing which survives,: she concluded, "is the resistance we bring to life, not the strain life brings to us." (Edel, 5)

Again, Alice writes against the strain. Her resistance, her choice to live rather than to accept a too-early death, will not be silenced-though it is clear that is what is expected of her. Alice resisted in the best ways she knew. She lived with the presence of death and wrote in the shadows of :"hysteria." In the diary, she is preoccupied with her death, but insists on documenting a sustained expression of her life.

To a woman whose father had placed negative value on female intelligence and whose family suspected that one person's success was

purchased by another's failure, addressing posterity, even in this covert way, seemed a dangerous undertaking. (Strouse, 275)

Her only choice, as she saw it, was to communicate honestly and eloquently with herself. Like the work of her brothers, The Diary of Alice James is in wide circulation. Her work has endured in spite of the circumstances begging her silence.

James documents her resistance by telling stories from "that geyser." Similar to James's chronicling of her life are portions of the memoirs of Virginia Woolf. In A Writer's Diary, Woolf foresees the later use if her own memoirs.

In spite of some tremors I think I shall go on with this diary for the present . . . . I fancy old Virginia, putting on her spectacles to read of March 1920 will decidedly wish me to continue. Greetings! My dear ghost; and take heed that I don't think 50 a very great age. Several good bricks can be written still; and here's bricks for a fine one. (23)

Words written in 1920 were meant to inspire her to keep writing in her later years. Writing her experience gives a woman a map to follow and from which to understand her life; the journeys she has been on, the goals she is moving towards, and a trail of subjective and creative moments. At the heart of this journey is the ability to perform the act of writing.

In Silences, Tillie Olsen quote Nathaniel Hawthorne as he speaks of his desire for :the sense of perfect seclusion which has always been essential to [his] power of producing anything" (154). This sense of seclusion continues to be rare for many women. Women have been denied the pen and this place of seclusion through sexist educational and social practices, through restricting access to books, and through canonical indifference to women's contributions as writers. In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf, in her discussion of "Shakespeare's sister," explains the limits imposed on a woman writer of Shakespeare's ability during his era. After a brief synopsis of the possibilities open to William Shakespeare because he is male, Woolf explains what was possible for his "sister" Judith.

Meanwhile, his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother's perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers. Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly, but was careful to hide them or set fire to them. Soon . . . she was betrothed . . . cried out that marriage was hateful . . . Men laughed in her face . . . she found herself with child . . . killed herself one winter's night. (80-84)

Alas, Shakespeare's "sister" is without the raw materials to gain an education and the necessary encouragement for the words and ideas that she forms and is forced into her own too-early death. Women's place is not with the pen, but with the playpen. In Judith's day, the construction of women as deferential and ignorant taunted her intelligence. Like the voice that is always present beneath silence, the literate woman's ability to write is present as well, yet gender roles and male "superiority" depend on such abilities being distracted and interrupted.

It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity; spasmodic, not constant toil. . . . Work interrupted, deferred, relinquished, makes blockage-at best lesser accomplishment. Unused capacities atrophy, cease to be. (Olsen, 19)

What women need to write is freedom from incessant, relentless and restrictive roles and the ability to have a "Room of One's Own." The room that is frequently built for a woman in the world, is one confined not by the "perfect seclusion" of a space for self, but, rather, a room fortified by gender-based expectations and assumptions. It is in just such a "Room of One's Own" that Jo March, of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, is able to explore a creatively vibrant literary "vortex." Jo March is an important literary character no only because of her story and its deep reflections of Alcott's own life, but because of the countless women who have read this book and identified with Jo's struggle to be the kind and gentle daughter while respecting a creative and highly subjective rage boiling inside. This is what Elaine Showalter, in the introduction to the 1989 edition of. This is what Elaine Showalter, in the introduction to the 1989 edition of Little Women, calls "the tension between female obligation and artistic freedom" (ix). Jo is raised to believe in the constructed docility and subservience of women. Her desire to adhere to this image of what she should be conflicts with her desire to live a full, active life.

Jo's ambition was to do something very splendid; what it was she had no idea, but left it for time to tell her; and meanwhile found her greatest

affliction in the fact that she couldn't read, run, and ride as mush as she liked. A quick temper, sharp tongue, and restless spirit were always getting her into scrapes, and her life was a series of ups and downs, which were both comic and pathetic. (38)

With her splendid and much adored mother as an example, Jo learns that she must control her urges to be active and vivacious. In discussing her tendency to lose her temper and fly in the face of virtue, Jo again tries to understand through her mother's example.

"You must help me, remind me and keep me from flying out. I used to see father sometimes put his finger to his lips, and look at you with a very kind, but sober face; and you always folded your lips tight, or went away; was he reminding you then?" (80-81)

Reminding her that silence is a virtue and that the quiet of women must be taught by women, Mr. March enlists his wife to teach "natural" silence to her young daughters. Not quite voiceless, Mrs. March does have her own "distinctly-muted" voice. Marmee, modeled on Alcott's own mother, was also expected to adhere to a patriarchal code of docility. When Jo confronts her about her occasionally visible anger, Marmee explains the struggle.

"I've been trying to cure it for forty years, and have only succeeded in controlling it. I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo; but I have learned not to show it; and I still hope to learn not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do so." (273)

Thus the chain of silence and repression is set to continue. His control, a simple gesture, takes precedence over her will to speak and possibly leave her daughters with the sense that they may be able to speak in the face of male-acquired or male-stolen authority.

Yet Jo writes anyway.

Louisa May Alcott was not unlike Jo March. Both are literary women in the nineteenth-century, and both learn to write for profit. Alcott represents a woman whose voice was ever-present. She had the talent and the ability to produce strong, provocative literature. Likewise, Jo works tirelessly on her writing in hopes of bringing money to the family. With an absent father, Jo assumes the role of provider, selling her work at any creative cost. Jo, like Alcott, eventually profits from the pen, but only after great creative sacrifice and manuscript mutilation.

So with Spartan firmness, the authoress laid her first born on her table, and chopped it up as ruthlessly as any ogre. In the hope of pleasing every one, she took every one's advice; and, like the old man and his donkey in the fable, suited nobody (278).

Though the tone here appears to be of humorous exaggeration, the even is indicative of women's place as writers. It is permissible for Jo March to write, but she must write in the image of those around her. Alcott also had to go through a significant struggle with her publishers in order to appease the moral codes of the day. Both are women who are allowed to write, but their creative words must be confined and, in a sense, silenced into what the patriarchal editors, speaking for a moralistic society in need of shelter from strong woman writers, feel to be appropriate.

Though as Showalter notes, some feminist critics of the novel see this action of marketing and self-promotion at the expense of pure creativity as problematic, it actually places Jo and Louisa May Alcott in the realm of what was realistic for them in their time.

Their choices were limited. Both wanted to see their work in print, and Jo desperately wanted to support her family. Each of these women did what they were able to do as female writers in the nineteenth-century. There is no doubt that their untouched work was strong, interesting, and creative, yet they had to work with the system to achieve the desired goal of monetary support. Can current scholars fault them for living in an age where women's writing was hardly encouraged, except for its occasional marketability.

Through all the Jo's of the future who will continue to read their own lives in the story of Alcott's Little Women, the independent Jo lives and writes, not as the unattainable genius, Shakespeare's sister, but as a sister of our own. (Showalter in Alcott, xxviii)

Due to culturally enforced positions of virtuous daughter, doting wife, and selfless mother, women have not been allowed the time and space to learnt he power of writing. Yet despite these traditional limitations, women have written both widely and well.

Though what they wrote was unauthorized, women blazed away anyway. Though what they painted went unrecognized, it fed the soul anyway. Women had to beg for the instruments and the spaces for their arts, and if none were forthcoming, they made space in trees, caves, woods, and

closets. (Estés, 5)

Under such conditions, by writing about herself, by spending time to engage in critical self-reflection and expression, a silenced woman's important contributions become visible. Writing elucidates self, bringing silence to the surface. It is in this important space of self-creation that it becomes finally comprehensible that such creation

must take precedence over the construction of women that has domination and sexism as its core benefits. In breaking silence with writing, not only is silence ending, but a vital record may be left or sent to readers, families, and others.

Between Women: Biographers, Novelists, Critics, Teachers and Artists Write About Their Work on Women (1993) is a collection of essays that show how these vital relationships are created and maintained and how a uniquely women-based literary tradition evolves. Each essay details one woman's special relationship with another woman's creative work and life. Women working empowers women to work-not only as writers, but as artists, musicians, and speaking subjects.

The study of other women is also a pursuit of inspiration and guidance. The subjects act as talismans in times of change, guides and mentors. They challenge, give ideas of comfort, serve as warnings. Some contributors are helped by their subjects in working through life crises or troubling relations with mothers, sisters, children, lovers, husbands and fathers. In turn, many of the essayists feel that they give to their subjects. Literally or metaphorically, they nurse, rescue, and memorialize. (preface, Between Women, xxi)

For one writer to rescue another is to save her own life as well. Each of the essayists in this collection leaves a path back to the creator with whom she has chosen to work. This has been especially relevant to Black women writers who, though coming from a long tradition of writing and storytelling, have been silenced out of textbooks and anthologies. Erlene Stetson, in "Silence:, Access and Aspiration," writes about the importance of uncovering Black women's literary tradition.

The need to rediscover and bring to consciousness the rich literary tradition of Black women writers is known to be urgent by teachers and

scholars who know the costs of effacing the fact that Black women, against extraordinary odds, have indeed been capable of literary creation. (245)

The tension of resistant voice comes in knowing a complete, a more accurate, truth and fearing what may be done with it. Once a silence is discovered, within the self or not, it becomes important to see how it has been damaging. In the case of women writing, and especially women of color, this silence has too-often shunned their creations, ignoring them to death.

By recovering individual writers into current thought, such as bringing long-hidden writers to our contemporary discussions, we make group recovery more feasible. In "revolutionary Black Women: Making Ourselves Subject" from Black Looks (19920 bell hooks explains the importance of breaking a writing silence:

More than any other genre of writing, the production of honest confessional narratives by black women who are struggling to be self-actualized and to become radical subjects are needed as guides, as texts that affirm our fellowship with one another. (I need not feel isolated if I know that there are other comrades with similar experiences. I learn from their strategies of resistance and from their recording of mistakes). (59)

Documentation and self-exposure bring a stronger sense of connection throughout the experiences of Black women. The words that hooks is asking for bring real experience, exposure of position, and clarity of representation. It is with these written words that truth may be told and passed down for the next generation of readers and writers:

their lives, their incredible survival in an indifferent-to-hostile world, teach me to understand my own personal experiences on a par and continuum with women's experiences across the centuries. They empower me to speak. (238)

Just as harmful images socialize women into unnatural silences, a positive, feminist, valued image of women may be taught as well. To transmit the power of women's words as opposed to the fiction that women do not or should not write is to engage actively in a feminist transformation. In "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action," Audre Lorde explains that communication, or moving beyond silence, is and act of teaching.

In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally

necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation, and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation. For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us. But primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone can we survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth. (22)

Teaching makes these words available for wider use. The documented words of women are an extended hand making it more plausible that the reader may someday extend her own. In a discussion of Emma Goldman, Alix Kates Shulman says, "I felt the encouraging hand and smiling nod of Emma behind me" (6). It is here that writing as an act of resistance and every day living merge. Writing is the creative claiming of subjectivity. To write, be it fiction, poetry, journalism, or another form, is to say, "I am allowed my own way." Again, if breaking silence is achievable through writing, it clearly takes many other forms. To speak, to sing, to paint, and even to move subjectively is the basis for resistance.

They Told Me This Was Freedom

room to write space

to search

tear-tense and

I am tentative,

less than,

a moment

before each word.

(What has followed is not flow.

What has followed is not flow.)

Bird-curious, I sit

near water the

wind blowing in

hot gelled glaze

towards toes.

Barely wet,

I'm paused.

I saw her at the locally owned, sparsely decorated, lesbian
run mexican cantina. The young woman in line had by
some type of luck or fortune made off with your sweet face.
She could not have been more you and not you at the
same time. Identity aside, my day was made. She. like you
did so many times, helped me find my breath-- helped my slow
eyes gain focus again. and turned a lunch I might have
taken for granted into a spicy nostalgia.

For Gammy on Her Eightieth Birthday