On the Literary Nonfiction of Nancy Mairs: A Critical Anthology

PALGR AVE M ACMILLAN’S CRITICAL STUDIES IN GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND CULTURE Highlighting the work taking place at the crossroads of sociology, sexuality studies, gender studies, cultural studies, and performance studies, this series offers a platform for scholars pushing the boundaries of gender and sexuality studies substantively, theoretically, and stylistically. The authors draw on insights from diverse scholarship and research in popular culture, ethnography, history, cinema, religion, performance, new media studies, and technoscience studies to render visible the complex manner in which gender and sexuality intersect and can, at times, create tensions and fissures between one another. Encouraging breadth in terms of both scope and theme, the series editors seek works that explore the multifaceted domain of gender and sexuality in a manner that challenges the taken-for-granted. On one hand, the series foregrounds the pleasure, pain, politics, and aesthetics at the nexus of sexual practice and gendered expression. On the other, it explores new sites for the expression of gender and sexuality, the new geographies of intimacy being constituted at both the local and global scales. Series Editors: PATRICIA T. CLOUGH is Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. Clough is on the editorial boards of Women’s Studies Quarterly, Body and Society, Subjectivity, Cultural Studies/Critical Method, Qualitative Inquiry, and Women and Performance. Clough is the co-editor of Beyond Biopolitics: Essays in the Governance of Life and Death (with Craig Willse, 2011); author of The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (with Jean Halley, 2007); Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (2000); The End(s) of Ethnography: From Realism to Social Criticism (1998); Feminist Thought: Desire, Power and Academic Discourse (1994). R. DANIELLE EGAN is Professor and Chair of the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at St. Lawrence University. Egan is the author of Dancing for Dollars and Paying for Love: The Relationships between Exotic Dancers and their Regulars (2006) and co-author of Theorizing the Sexual Child in Modernity (with Gail Hawkes, 2010), both with Palgrave Macmillan. She is also the co-editor of Flesh for Fantasy: Producing and Consuming Exotic Dance (with Katherine Frank and Merri Lisa Johnson, 2006). She is on the editorial board of Sexuality and Culture. Titles: Magnus Hirschfeld and the Quest for Sexual Freedom: A History of the First International Sexual Freedom Movement Elena Mancini

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Queer Voices: Vocality, the Uncanny, and Popular Music Freya Jarman-Ivens On the Literary Nonfiction of Nancy Mairs: A Critical Anthology Edited by Merri Lisa Johnson and Susannah B. Mintz The Aesthetics of Cute in Contemporary Japanese Art Yoke-Sum Wong [forthcoming]

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On the Literary Nonfiction of Nancy Mairs A Critical Anthology Edited by

Merri Lisa Johnson and Susannah B. Mintz

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ON THE LITERARY NONFICTION OF NANCY MAIRS

Copyright © Merri Lisa Johnson and Susannah B. Mintz, 2011. All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–11370–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: September 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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This book is dedicated to Nancy Mairs for the pleasure of her narrative company and for giving so many of us the courage to say the next hard thing.

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Contents

ix

Preface: Hello and Goodbye Nancy Mairs

xiii

Acknowledgments Introduction; Or Two Ways In On Writing toward Trust Susannah B. Mintz

3

On Feminist Intellectual History Merri Lisa Johnson

7

New Essays 1

On Difficult Gifts: A Biographical Portrait of Nancy Mairs Hayley Mitchell Haugen

2

On Writing in a Collaborative Spirit: Nancy Mairs’s Ethic of Community Susan G. Cumings

43

On Depression Narratives: “Hence, into the dark, we write . . . ” Hilary Clark

63

On the Rhetoric of Gloom and Joy: “In turbulent love with the world” Susannah B. Mintz

79

On Nancy’s Husband George: Masculinity, Disability, and Sex after Cancer Margaret Rose Torrell

97

3

4

5

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CONT ENT S

On Embodied Theology: Sacraments of the Body in Ordinary Time and A Dynamic God Jenny Bangsund

115

Foundational Statements 7

Autopathography: Women, Illness, and Lifewriting G. Thomas Couser

8

“Making Up the Stories as We Go Along”: Men, Women, and Narratives of Disability Madonne Miner

145

Transforming the Tale: The Auto/body/ographies of Nancy Mairs Susannah B. Mintz

161

9

10 Dismembering the Heterosexual Imaginary: A Feminist Cultural Anatomy of the Infidelity Narrative in Nancy Mairs’s Remembering the Bone House Merri Lisa Johnson Notes on Contributors

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133

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Preface Hello and Goodbye Nancy Mairs

When I first learned that a collection of critical studies of my essays

was going to be published, I laughed, partly in delight but also in derision. I was inclined to say, along with the French nobleman Michel de Montaigne, who originated the form in the sixteenth century, “Thus, reader, myself am the matter of my book: there’s no reason thou shouldst employ thy leisure about so frivolous and vain a subject.” Throughout my studies for an AB, an MFA, and a PhD, I had written countless critical pieces about a range of literature from the poetry of the Exeter Book to Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor, taking both the works and my criticism of them very seriously. Why would anyone expend similar effort on my scribblings? Very quickly my amusement turned to chagrin. I realized that in laughing at this undertaking, I demeaned my own work, of which I am proud, and even more importantly, I demeaned my readers, most of whom I don’t know and over whose responses I have no control but to whom I owe my life as a writer. The appropriate response, which rapidly overwhelmed me, was gratitude. Not for readers’ critical insights—I haven’t yet read any of these essays nor will I until after the book is published—but for their simply being there, over all these years, keeping me company as I’ve explored the human condition and my place in it. We’ve covered a good bit of territory, readers and I, in the quarter of a century during which I’ve carried out the task I set for myself at the outset: deciphering a woman’s life. When I wrote my first essay, “On Touching by Accident,” as an assignment for a class in nonfiction writing taught by Edward Abbey, I had no idea I had found my

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x

P R E FA C E

own true form. For my MFA, I had concentrated on poetry, and I had won the Western States Book Award in poetry for my first book, In All the Rooms of the Yellow House. Well, I was a poet, am a poet; I still consider writing poetry the truly important literary work. But if I’d continued, I think I’d probably have remained a pretty conventional poet. The essay freed me. Until I began teaching freshman composition, I had read very few of these pieces of nonfiction, short and reflective, designated by Montaigne essais, which means “trials” or “attempts”—and then only as school assignments. I wasn’t taken by nonfiction in any form: I wanted story and song. But in the process of selecting material for my classes, I came upon Loren Eisley, Joan Didion, John McPhee, Virginia Woolf, Lewis Thomas, E.B. White . . . . Not to mention Montaigne himself. Such models! But I still hadn’t thought of writing essays myself. Once I got started, I took to the form, loving its spaciousness and flexibility. Within it, I can write poems—sometimes quite long ones—but because I don’t use enjambment, people don’t recognize them as poetry and pull away in the fits of anxiety poetry seems to arouse today. I can use fictive techniques of description, characterization, and dialogue. But the form also accommodates the techniques of disquisition of which my academic training has given me mastery. I can snatch an idea, often at random, and worry it like a terrier until I get to the core of it. An event, an experience, an emotion can be explored for as long as it takes to expose its significance. At first, I had no thought of publishing the essays, either individually or in a book. Then an instructor at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference suggested the idea, and the director of a small press asked whether he might submit them to the first Western States Book Award competition, where they received honorable mention. They came in this way to the attention of an editor at the University of Arizona Press, who asked to take a look at them and then offered to publish them. After a delay to enable me to use them as my doctoral dissertation, Plaintext: Deciphering a Woman’s Life, they appeared in print. I was so ignorant about the process of getting published that I didn’t recognize until some time later just how lucky I was to have it unfold so smoothly. Although I have suffered disappointments, on the whole my luck has held and I’ve had more than my share of it. Over the years, I have discovered that just about everything in my experience interests me, from the monumental (disability, death, divinity) to the miniscule (the lesser goldfinches feeding upside

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P R E FA C E

xi

down on nyjer seed in my backyard). I want to tunnel into it all and extract every grain of meaning I can find, even if I risk having the tunnel collapse and smother me. Like Montaigne, “I have proposed to myself no other than a domestic and private end: I have had no consideration at all either to thy service or to my glory.” But I also agree with one of my least favorite essayists, Ralph Waldo Emerson, leaving aside his virulent gender bias, that the thoughtful writer discovers “in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of All minds” and “the deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his wonder he finds this is the most acceptable, most public and universally true. The people delight in it; the better part of every man feels—This is my music; this is myself.” “How can you write so personally?” I am often asked. Sometimes the question is tinged with disapproval (shame on you for writing about such intimate matters), more often with a writer’s curiosity (how can I do it too?), and most often with astonishment (can anybody really say such things aloud?). I can only answer, “I don’t know.” One of the commonplaces of advice to a beginning writer is “write what you know,” and perhaps I have taken the advice more literally than most. I have always hated having information withheld, and my mother was a champion withholder, so maybe my candor is merely a reaction formation. But I think the source of my openness lies deeper than that, functioning as reassurance to myself and readers that human life is (so far at least) sustainable and possibly even significant. I have the gift of language. How many times readers have said to me, “You’ve put my feelings into words”! My heart lifts each time, because then I know I’m putting the gift to its proper use. Because I take my subject matter from quotidian life, it is all but inexhaustible. However, I am not inexhaustible, and my writing life seems to have come to an end. Nothing has brought this reality home more than the struggle I have had writing this brief essay. Advanced MS has left me quadriplegic. Instead of using a keyboard, which I mastered when I could no longer write on legal-sized yellow pads with black fountain pen, I must now use speech-recognition software, with which I make a great many mistakes that have to be corrected as I go along. I find dictating unnatural, frustrating, and tiresome. Because my short-term memory seems less and less sharp, by the time I reach the end of a sentence I have often forgotten what I set out to say. I can no longer write fluently but only by fits and starts. I can’t begin to envision producing an extended piece of work.

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The publication of this book is well timed then, validating my work just as I stumble toward silence. I am enormously grateful that the writers here chose to spend time with me, and I hope that readers will appreciate their reflections and words. And by the way, even though I’ve fallen mute, every element in the All continues to fascinate me. I’m still writing, only in invisible ink.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the series editors, Patricia Clough and

R. Danielle Egan, for believing in the project and bringing it to the attention of Palgrave. We also thank the anonymous reader and our editor, Burke Gerstenschlager at Palgrave, whose suggestions for improving this volume and endorsement of the project from its early stages have been invaluable. Support from the University of South Carolina Upstate and Skidmore College helped to make possible some of the reprinted material, and we are grateful to The University of Michigan Press, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, and a/b: Auto/ Biography studies for permission to reprint four foundational articles in the scholarship on Nancy Mairs. Thanks also to Kelly DempseyLittle at Skidmore and Beth TeVault at USC Upstate for technical advice and assistance. Merri Lisa Johnson thanks Robert McRuer, Margaret Price, and Bethany Stevens for welcoming her into the scholarly world of disability studies; and Leslie Heywood, Susan Strehle, and Robert DeMott for heartily encouraging the study of contemporary women’s memoir in graduate school when more traditional subject areas might easily have been imposed; and the many students who have made the outrageous, insightful, stubborn, amazing statements in class that made me long for a critical anthology on Nancy Mairs. Thanks, too, to Susannah Mintz, for her gracious labor and fine-tuned diplomacy as coeditor. And to Austin Haney Johnson for his gracious labor and fine-tuned diplomacy as my spouse. Susannah B. Mintz would like to thank Melora Wolff, Martha Wiseman, and Terry Diggory for ongoing conversations about memoir and disability. G. Thomas Couser has been an enduring source of friendship and guidance in both of those areas; his work continues to inform and inspire. Thanks to the many students whose enthusiasm for creative nonfiction has made teaching Nancy Mairs so rewarding for so many years, and to Lisa Johnson,

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ACK NOW LEDGMENT S

for asking me to share the ride. Thanks to Michael Belanger, for everything. Our greatest appreciation is for Nancy Mairs. We’re honored to offer this collection of essays in tribute to her importance in our lives as teachers and writers. We dedicate the volume to her.

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Introduction; Or Two Ways In

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On Writing toward Trust Susannah B. Mintz

Nancy Mairs began her literary career in 1984 with the publication

of a book of poems, In All the Rooms of the Yellow House. At that time, nearly thirty years ago, feminism was in a period of transition from its second to its third and more eclectic wave; “disability studies” was not an established discipline in the humanities; and personal essay, though long practiced, had not yet been dignified by literary scholars as a form worthy of study. Mairs’s last published essay collection, A Dynamic God, appeared in 2007 in a very different social and literary milieu—one to which, as the essays included here attest, Mairs herself has contributed a great deal of intellectual and artistic energy. Few contemporary authors have made such exhilarating use of personal essay as a means of expression, combining intimate selfdisclosure with trenchant social and political critique and a gift for complicating received ideas with personable good nature. Critics of Mairs can be hard-pressed to uncover aspects of her work, from thematic imagery to rhetorical device to structural choices, that Mairs herself has not already commented upon within any given essay. She is, alongside her easygoing style, an accomplished scholar, well-versed in feminism, psychoanalysis, disability studies, theology, and literary history, and her essays tend toward a form a self-reflexivity that is unusual in creative nonfiction. The telling of any story is inevitably also an act of theorizing the telling, especially because so much of what Mairs wants to communicate is (to reprise two of her own adjectives) indecorous and impolite. That conceptual layering is part of what we hope to have revealed in this collection, the way any piece by Nancy Mairs works as a kind of ars scribendi, teaching its readers just how capacious an essay can be. We have thus also been concerned to demonstrate the impressive range of Mairs’s interests as an essayist. To frame her career as marked by significant shifts in certain social, activist, and academic movements is to suggest just how important Mairs has been for

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SUSANNAH B. MINT Z

more than a generation, and to situate her in a deservedly central place as a writer who trades in some of the prickliest topics of her moment—but also, with equal seriousness, in the smaller realities of simply being human. Disability rights, medieval misogyny, euthanasia, the permutations of love, adultery, terrorism, depression, suicide, parenthood, the American West, undercover frauddetection, French feminism, sin and redemption, Virginia Woolf, Roman Catholicism, making lunch, the varieties of death, multiple sclerosis, masculinity, foreign travel, pet ownership, writing in all its struggle and joy . . . what contemporary literary essayist has traversed such an eclectic and vital set of subjects, making tangible the abstract and abstruse, and treating with reverence the individual and mundane? In her commitment to collapsing hierarchical distinctions, Mairs is perhaps our most democratic of literary essayists, catholic in the comprehensive sense. She makes anything her subject because everything matters to our understanding of, and respect for, the varieties of human experience. Hers is thus not a disinterested or ironic noticing; the essayist Mairs is always also the person, deeply involved in the well-being of anyone, any being, about whom she writes. A broadly conceived audience is vital to that project, and Mairs has never sacrificed the geniality and compassion that are the hallmarks of her style—even when, as in a collection such as Waist-High in the World, her express purpose is to provoke nondisabled readers to consider the world from the height of a wheelchair. Whatever the context, diverse as her topics are, some part of Mairs’s imagination is trained on the entanglements of language and the body. This is perhaps the most abiding and defining characteristic of her work, from the section of In All the Rooms of the Yellow House entitled “Biograffiti”—prose poems in which bodily selves are subject to the inscriptions of ideology—to “Last Words,” the final essay of Dynamic God, in which Mairs addresses her readers (as is her wont) as if they were fully present to her, a bodily writer in the company of others. It is the operation of discourse on embodiment that matters to a discussion of how we react to the death of pets no less than to the death penalty, the fact of being embodied that propels an essay on wheelchair accessibility in British monuments as much as one that details the mysteries of grace and faith. Again, few popular writers so informed about the history and dissemination of ideas maintain so consistently a theorized understanding of embodiment. Mairs’s essays are body stories not because their author has and frequently writes about MS, but because she reminds her readers that there is

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O N W R I T I N G T O WA R D T R U S T

5

no self, and thus in effect no culture, no law, no theory, no belief, no writing at all, without a body. Reading Mairs is in this sense always to be called upon by Mairs to become aware of the body one is—and also the body one isn’t—as we sit and hold a book, read her in Braille, listen to her on tape, discuss her as a devotee in the company of others. And yet, Mairs is far from pedagogical in tone or intent. That is her signature talent, to teach without condescension or didacticism. To the contrary, she is impeccably humble (almost dutifully so, as the good girl she tells us she grew up trying to be) about the limitations of her unique perspective. She is only Nancy Mairs: a middle-class, white, straight, female, Catholic PhD with MS and depression, a husband and children, past lovers and a bevy of cats and dogs, a community of fellow believers and a host of authors she loves to read. These are identity markers of the body and of the mind, each significant to the person and the writer Mairs is, but the additive logic of the list is false. Selfhood emerges, Mairs would insist, not from the piling-on of features to some stable and prior core, but from the particular—and also peculiar—simultaneities of any individual life. A reader first coming to Mairs will often remark on the startling honesty of that approach. The sense she creates of a curious person trying to engage a group of friends in lively conversation can be unexpectedly disarming, even unsettling; students have sometimes protested that Mairs’s claims do not pertain to them, that her manner of reaching out from the page as if to grab hold—not so much aggressively as passionately—inspires resistance more than a willingness to consider a question from an alternative position. In this, she is like Hazlitt more than Montaigne, her essays more social commentary than lyric meditation. Yet the subject is always the self. As Hazlitt details the pleasures of hating others, for instance, only to turn with excruciating precision to the self’s own intense dislike of itself, so does Mairs always implicate herself in the various systems (marriage, patriarchy, ableism, advertising, and so on) that she critiques for their oppressive power. What is discomfiting about “On Hating” is that Hazlitt so exactly captures the mechanism of projection, that he denies his readers the luxury of obscuring that miserable core of self-loathing; it is precisely the turn inward he makes toward the end of the essay that allows readers to reappraise their firmly held convictions of their own kindness or psychological transparency. In Mairs’s work, too, the crucial moment comes when we understand we are being encouraged, rather than coerced, to follow a most supportive guide into difficult territory.

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A deceptively small but thematic word throughout this volume, represented by our titles, is “on.” Mairs, following Montaigne (and, of course, Hazlitt, among many others), has had a penchant for titling her essays with that innocuous preposition as a way of signaling their occasional origins and unpretentious aims. An inquisitive writer may muse intelligently on any subject, delighting in the oddities and urgencies of desire or antipathy, lamenting with witty if searing accuracy our self-congratulatory habits, and moving ever forward to the next essay because it is the writer’s prerogative (or maybe responsibility) to let nothing elude her witness. Perhaps the better preposition to account for Mairs’s trajectory as an essayist would be toward, in the sense that, refusing complacency, she is always writing with the expectation that language has the capacity to effect change, starting with the mind of any one reader. But “on” suits our purposes here because it emphasizes an important equivalence; these essays “on the literary nonfiction of Nancy Mairs” are concerned to investigate the full scope of the writer’s style and subject matter just as Mairs does her own experience—“on being a scientific booby,” for example, no less than “on uttering the unspeakable” or “on living behind bars.” “On” conveys movement too, of course. At the end of the Carnal Acts essay called (with quintessentially unapologetic candor) “I’m Afraid. I’m Afraid. I’m Afraid,” Mairs writes that “you can’t transform what you haven’t grasped.” The two have always been thoroughly entwined for Mairs, her work a testament to the kind of deep knowing that must precede, fear notwithstanding, any attempt at transformation that isn’t temporary or merely superficial. The process is fraught with challenge, but the potential rewards are both psychological and literary. The speaker of an essay who announces herself as afraid invests readers with trust that they will receive her in an emotionally as well as aesthetically generous way. Readers, in turn, are invited to share in the exhilarating if often terrifying enterprise of figuring out what it means to be alive. And Mairs has never wavered in her conviction about the worthiness of that task. “I’d better get on with it,” she says of a life—and of a career spent writing a life— characterized not only by its fair share of anger, grief, shame, and physical struggle but also by pleasure, discovery, and joy, “because it matters.”

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On Feminist Intellectual History Merri Lisa Johnson

I want to give her the courage to say the next hard thing, without fear of ridicule or expulsion if she strays across the borders of good taste, good sense, or good judgment demarcated by a tradition she has had no part in forming. I want her to do the same for me. This is what we can all do to nourish and strengthen one another: listen to one another very hard, ask hard questions, too, send one another away to work again, and laugh in all the right places. —Nancy Mairs, “Voice Lessons,” Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer

In teaching the Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies on my campus over the past several years, I find first-year college students to be generally receptive to feminist encouragements to find voice, to speak of difficult truths, to express themselves honestly, to break silences imposed by family or culture, to transgress taboos. I point to the same cluster of quotations from the same great feminist intellectuals each semester, and my selections would be familiar, I think, to most women’s studies professors in the United States. First, there is “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” by Audre Lorde whose words flood me with urgency: “I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.” Then, there’s bell hooks, in “Talking Back,” on the risk and dare of speaking when not spoken to: “Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible. It is that act of speech, of ‘talking back,’ that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is the expression of our movement from object to subject—the liberated voice” (9).

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8

MERRI LISA JOHNSON

Third comes Adrienne Rich the poet in “Diving into the Wreck,” where she plunges into the damage done to her own subjectivity, equipped with camera and knife and the book of myths in which women’s names do not appear. And next is Adrienne Rich the essayist on the politics of location and the body as a place in history, arguing for a radical feminist labor, “not to transcend this body but to reclaim it,” and her call for the particularity of lived experience: “scars, disfigurements, discolorations, damages, losses, as well as what pleases me.” She brings the reader’s attention to what is local and specific: “To say ‘the body’ lifts me away from what has given me a primary perspective. To say ‘my body’ reduces the temptation to grandiose assertions” (10). I am less certain that women’s studies professors regularly include Nancy Mairs among these major names in the feminist literature of coming to voice, and one modest goal of this book is to propose her work as an important part of this picture of U.S. American feminist intellectual history. While Mairs’s essay “On Being a Cripple” is widely taught in composition courses, as well as in courses on advanced rhetoric, creative nonfiction, or feminist disability studies, the relevance of this essay, and other vital essays by Nancy Mairs, to the Women’s and Gender Studies curriculum is perhaps underappreciated. Yet her words resonate with comparably urgent calls to action and connect in important ways to central tenets of feminist thought. One of her most recent essays, “Sex and the Gimpy Girl,” published in 2009, is not only a clear call-back to Mairs’s own essay “On Being a Cripple” but also references Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl, a text that took sex-positive feminism to the (white, middleclass, heterosexual, able-bodied) masses in 1963.1 In “Sex and the Gimpy Girl,” Mairs recounts her experience of coming of age in the 1960s and being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1972, at which point she was instructed “not to get pregnant” and “not to take birth control pills,” conditions her neurologist did not recognize as untenable. This personal detail, along with the trip to the gynecologist in 2008 that prompted these recollections because of the ongoing problems with lack of access (non-automated clinic doors, sign-in sheets on counters over the heads of women in wheelchairs, standard examining tables not equipped for lowering and tilting to allow wheelchairbound women to move or be moved from chair to table), is Mairs’s point of departure for an argument about the ableist dimensions of our sexist society that infantilize and pathologize women with disabilities in order to cast them as “damaged goods” rather than hot commodities (6).

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The structure of the argument intentionally and self-reflexively duplicates the process of coming to consciousness as a feminist, as Mairs recalls that her graduate studies in feminist theory led to a shift in her perspective so that she “came to recognize not merely that [she] was far from unique but that there wasn’t an original word in [her] life-story” (5). She uses the same movement between personal details and social patterns of discrimination to reveal the difference between abnormal bodies and bodies that “have something ‘wrong’ with them”—a judgment call that “depends,” Mairs explains, “on one’s point of view”: From a doctor’s perspective a disability is wrong because it deviates from the ideal norm built up during years of training and practice. But for the patient, disability simply is the norm. There is nothing wrong with me. In fact, for a fifty-five-year-old woman with multiple sclerosis, I’m just about right. I am occasionally ill, of course, being a mere mortal, but my disability itself is not a sickness. It’s part of who I am. And I’m far more likely to thrive if you don’t regard me as sick at my very core. (7)

In drawing connections between personal details (from Mairs’s own life, as well as from the lives of other women with physical disabilities), “Sex and the Gimpy Girl” reveals the reprocentric bias and essentialist assumptions about womanhood inherent in gynecological care, as Mairs sees “the emotional dimension of [a young friend’s] case” simply, in her word, “botched” (10), as if desire itself—for sexual intimacy or for children—somehow evaporates naturally for women who cannot reproduce. Her advocacy in this essay for recognizing the sexual agency of women with disabilities concludes with a call to personal and collective voice: Women with every kind of disability must learn to speak forthrightly about their needs and appetites even when society appears to ignore or repudiate their feelings. The nondisabled must accustom themselves to hearing their utterances without judging the “rightness” or “wrongness” of their realities. (10)

On this familiar feminist and vintage Mairsian note, “Sex and the Gimpy Girl” recalls Mairs’s 1990 volume of essays, Carnal Acts, where the author admits to “winc[ing] at the possibility [she] might be thought rude,” noting that a “man’s sneer shrivels me,” and then follows this moment of confiding in the reader in a way that hits home with many traditionally college-age women (18–25), especially

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in the still polite U.S. southeast, with a gathering up of feminist audacity: “I guess that’s just what I’m going to have to be: rude. Because if women are ever going to be really heard, people (including women themselves) are going to have to get used to the sound of their voices and to the subjects they believe worth discussing” (52). This statement rings out with force and represents an important part of feminist intellectual history—the literature of silences and the voices that break them. Placed in dialogue with hooks’s essay “Talking Back,” the dimensions of race and class that shape this literature can be recognized and used to prompt classroom discussions about their shared connection to the frequently misconstrued slogan the personal is political, which means that our personal lives and individual experiences are shared with others in patterns shaped by larger sociohistorical and political forces. Perhaps more importantly, the two essays can be used to address the different forms patriarchal control takes across these cultural lines, as hooks explains that black women’s speech is subordinated into soliloquy, talking into thin air without expectation of audience or respectful responses, not into silence (6). These differences can be brought to the surface of the texts and classroom discussions as a way to teach the feminist concept of intersectional analysis, as speech and silence fragment into many unique interrelated forms of power and powerlessness. This particular essay by Mairs, originally published as a newspaper column in 1987, builds momentum toward its final thrilling lines: So I, for one, intend to keep telling the truth about my life as a woman: what I see, who I love, where I hurt, why I laugh. And you? Tell me, out loud, who are you? (52)

The direct address brings Mairs back into an interesting kind of harmony with the black feminist essayists cited above, sounding especially similar to the haunting command of Audre Lorde a decade earlier at the 1977 Modern Language Association’s special panel on “Lesbians and Literature.” Lorde asked her audience members and later her readers, What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am a woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I

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am myself—a Black woman warrior poet doing my work—come to ask you, are you doing yours? (41–42)

Who are you? Are you doing your work? These questions continue to matter, and they matter in fresh ways in the lives of WGS students today, in this era of postindustrial faux-feminist neoliberal economic depression. Like Lorde, Mairs also links the suppression of voice with the relinquishment of bodily agency and erotic pleasure. The entanglements of speech, power, will, and embodiment are nicely conveyed by a passage from “On Uttering the Unspeakable,” where Mairs extends her reflections on the rude, the polite, and the corresponding deliberation between what is right versus what is socially sanctioned: “For a number of people, . . . my writing appears to function as the verbal equivalent of sprawling with my legs spread or exposing my bosom (if only I had such a thing) in a tight, low-cut black sweater” (55). Wedding honest speech with sensuous embodiment, Mairs imagines “giving tongue to her own delight and desire” (60) instead of, as she phrases it in a later essay, “carry[ing] your genitals like a sealed envelope” (86). The titular essay of Carnal Acts grows blunt with this mission. Hearing the frantic whispers of earlier generations of women shushing her, Mairs again owns the fact of her socially constructed anxieties about body and voice: “Be my personal skepticism as it may, however, as a cultural woman I bear just as much shame as any woman for my dark, enfolded secrets. Let the word for my external genitals tell the tale: my pudendum, from the Latin infinitive meaning ‘to be ashamed’ ” (86). Her response to the injunctions against women’s embodied speech is as simple and direct as it is hard-won: “Speaking out loud is an antidote to shame” (91). I picture the 1929 Man Ray photograph “Hand on Lips” that shows a woman’s fingers hovering near her lipstick-sealed mouth, almost saying something but not quite—so similar to the cover image of Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer, Mairs’s 1994 volume of essays, with a caption under it that reads, “What we aren’t permitted to utter holds us, each isolated from every other, in a kind of solipsistic thrall” (Carnal Acts 92). Mairs so beautifully evokes the lost meanings of “the personal is political” in this passage: “Without any way to check our reality against anyone else’s, we assume that our fears and shortcomings are ours alone” (92). Mairs cites canonical feminist philosophers Virginia Woolf and Helene Cixous in this essay (their ideas about writing the body can be placed, mosaic-like, next to hers to widen the intellectual and cultural landscapes when teaching the literary nonfiction

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of Mairs), along with those she doesn’t cite but who give tongue to similar desires, such as hooks, Lorde, and Rich, as already noted, as well as working class lesbian author Dorothy Allison, whose contributions to sex-radical feminism hum with comparable urgency when she refuses to wear the coat made for her by the world, even when that world calls itself feminist (Two or Three Things I Know for Sure 71) and when she makes less figurative remarks about the role of personal and embodied life writing in feminist intellectual history: “Class, race, sexuality, gender—and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other—need to be excavated from the inside” (Skin 35). In such esteemed company, Mairs’s words take on heft and import as part of a cultural movement. Her memoirs and personal essays perform important and exemplary feats of feminist cultural work, first by presenting the private details of one woman’s embodied, gendered, phenomenological experience as products of a particular social history, and then by steadily resisting the affect of shame that seals the lips of many women (and some men) who quietly resent the lived insults of asymmetrical gender roles: No one is going to leave me speechless. To be silent is to comply with the standard of feminine grace. But my crippled body already violates all notions of feminine grace. What more have I got to lose? I’ve gone beyond shame. I’m shameless, you might say. You know, as in “shameless hussy”? A woman with her bare brace and her tongue hanging out. . . . I speak as a crippled woman. At the same time, in the utterance I redeem both “cripple” and “woman” from the shameful silences by which I have often felt surrounded, contained, set apart; I give myself permission to live openly among others, to reach out for them, stroke them with fingers and sighs. No body, no voice; no voice, no body. That’s what I know in my bones. (96)

This movement from embodied speech and sensual self-reclamation to the fact of her body as deteriorating from multiple sclerosis creates a fortuitous and pivotal passage from Mairs’s place in the intellectual histories of writing the body and apprehending the personal as political to a more recent turn in feminist theory toward writing the disabled body in order to reveal this supposed niche interest as one that, in fact, implicates all women, all bodies. In 2002, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson published a paradigmshifting article that called for feminist theory to integrate disability into its methodological commitment to intersectional analysis. In short, intersectional analysis approaches subject matter with attention

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to the specific lived experiences and injustices produced by the intersections of various axes of identity (and institutional power), typically listed as race/class/gender/sexuality, coordinates that are sometimes extended to include nationality, age, and other categories of difference and differential power relations. The category of dis/ability and the ability/disability binary are less frequently incorporated into feminist thought, as Garland-Thomson argues (2). This is especially so, I would add, at the introductory level of a WGS curriculum (or even in cornerstone upper-level courses in many undergraduate programs), despite the fact that “feminist issues . . . are intricately entangled with disability—such as reproductive technology, the place of bodily differences, the particularities of oppression, the ethics of care, the construction of the subject,” and so on (Garland-Thomson 2). The embodied philosophies of lesbian feminists and black feminists (and black lesbian feminists) cited above were formed in response to dramatically wrong accounts of the authors’ lives and bodies, and in changing the available stories of race, gender, class, and desire, these women also radically changed the way feminists produce knowledge, establishing new guidelines for the production of more accurate records of reality. Likewise, the embodied philosophies of feminists with disabilities make transformative contributions to the kinds of knowledge available to the reading public, and scholars, notably Garland-Thomson, are leading the field of feminist thought toward an awareness that dis/ability is as fundamental as social constructs of gender, class, race, and sexuality to contemporary formations of identity and privilege. “To borrow Toni Morrison’s notion that blackness is an idea that permeates American culture,” Garland-Thomson explains, “disability too is a pervasive, often unarticulated, ideology informing our cultural notions of self and other. Disability—like gender—is a concept that pervades all aspects of culture: its structuring institutions, social identities, cultural practices, political positions, historical communities, and the shared human experience of embodiment” (4). From this perspective, the inclusion of Mairs among the most noteworthy essayists of intersectionality is of clear value. It isn’t the case, however, that feminists need to add a disabled woman to the mix of readings by black women and lesbians, a thorny matter that requires a bit of explanation before returning to Mairs’s place in feminist intellectual history. The add-and-stir model has been roundly rejected by feminist scholars of critical race theory as a misrepresentation of intersectionality, a position echoed by GarlandThomson as she steers readers away from apprehending her argument for integrating disability into feminist theory as an “additive”

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model (4). Rather, the lens of disability offers an opportunity to introduce students to the concept of intersectionality along a less commonly analyzed axis of embodied identity in ways that defamiliarize and thereby (paradoxically) clarify this complex idea, revealing as well how intersectionality differs from the depoliticizing rhetoric about diversity characteristic of the current neoliberal trends in mainstream U.S. culture.2 Garland-Thomson contends that integrating disability into feminist intersectionality shifts the conceptual framework to strengthen our understanding of how these multiple systems intertwine, redefine, and mutually constitute one another. Integrating disability clarifies how this aggregate of systems operates together, yet distinctly, to support an imaginary norm and structure the relations that grant power, privilege, and status to that norm. (4)

The minds of feminist scholars and WGS students become more supple and skilled at recognizing the simultaneity of oppression shaping the gendered conditions of their lives through this practice of viewing subjects such as the beauty industry, media culture, or female sexual agency through the lens of the ability/disability binary, a lens that reveals the relationship among sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, and ableism as they spiral into each other to reinforce the normalizing and marginalizing pressures at work on individual bodies. Garland-Thomson illustrates this claim about the simultaneity of oppression in intersectional analysis by extending the work of feminist cultural studies scholar Susan Bordo on “the too-muchness of women” to the field of disability studies where the excesses and monstrosities of femininity can be seen to overlap with the fearsome bodies of people with disabilities. Furthermore, Garland-Thomson presents the writing of Nancy Mairs as working at this very intersection to “challeng[e] the premise that unusual embodiment is inherently inferior” (7). Referencing one of Mairs’s more overtly activist texts, Waist-High in the World, Garland-Thomson proposes that such narratives have the capacity to reorganize the feminist philosophies that undergird intersectionality. In writing the truths of her body, Mairs “can offer us a critical positionality called sitpoint theory, a neologism . . . that interrogates the ableist assumptions underlying the notion of standpoint theory” (Garland-Thomson 21). The goal of this critical positionality would be to reveal the arbitrary, illusory, and potentially damaging lines drawn around what is considered normal (i.e., desirable, appropriate, predictable, privileged) embodiment.

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Through this sitpoint theory, the apparently or supposedly nondisabled do not “try on” the disabled body to see what it feels like to be non-normative. Rather, they cultivate an awareness of themselves as already plausibly implicated in the ability/disability system and as already plausibly disabled (some perhaps through invisible disabilities such as scoliosis or clinical depression, others perhaps through culturally defined non-normative femininities such as the butch lesbian or woman of color, two versions of womanhood marked historically as grotesque, monstrous, deformed). This is not to say that lesbians and women of color are disabled, or that their embodiments and the power differentials that define them are analogous to disability. More precisely, this more robust apprehension of intersectionality makes clear how systems of power (again—racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and ableism) operate to marginalize bodies simultaneously through multiple languages of bias, so that each facet of bias is refracted through all the others, and, in Garland-Thomson’s argument, the disabled body (like the raced body, the gendered body, and so on) “acts as a synecdoche for all forms that culture deems non-normative” (4). The disabled body is a body whose variations or transformations have rendered it out of sync with its environment, both the physical and the attitudinal environments. In other words, the body becomes disabled when it is incongruent both in space and in the milieu of expectations. Furthermore, a feminist disability theory presses us to ask what kinds of knowledge might be produced through having a body radically marked by its own particularity, a body that materializes at the ends of the curve of human variation. (20)

If the disabled body can be imagined as a state of being out of sync with one’s culture, rather than a state of pathology, wrongness, or pitiable inferiority, the stigma of the category “disabled” weakens, allowing people to entertain more comfortably the possibility that they belong in that category, and to understand that the category is not stable or inherently bad. The massive nature of the conceptual shift Garland-Thomson describes cannot be overstated, and Mairs’s first-person narratives are, as Garland-Thomson herself asserts, fitting vehicles for such a watershed moment in the university classroom. These reorientations of feminist theory (e.g., sitpoint theory) and contributions to feminist intellectual history (e.g., writing the body; the personal is political) speak to a rather uncomfortable question faced by many feminist memoirists and essayists, a question Nancy Mairs addresses in her preface to the present critical anthology: How can you

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write so personally? The shame, disapproval, and envy that congregate inside the question have the power to silence or embarrass the woman writer who risks her own personal embodied truths on the public page, and Mairs continues her life’s work in “Hello and Goodbye” to take these risks and thereby to model risk-taking for other women by asserting once more that the personal, the direct, the shameless, the naked telling of one’s life details stems from her faith that something significant can be mined from them, that life itself is significant. It is hard to want to add anything to this moment of luminous optimism, but if I were to add something it would be that this belief system is derived not only from Mairs’s reflections on mortality, theology, and spirituality but also from her longstanding commitment to late twentieth-century feminist principles about the value of a woman’s voice, the struggle for female subjectivity, and the urgency of producing socially situated (counter-)knowledges about the bodies, lives, and desires so often relegated to the physical and conceptual margins of a culture. Mairs modestly suggests that her fearless self-revelation may simply be a reaction formation in response to her secret-savvy mother, but it can (indeed, should) also be approached as a recommitment to and recalibration of intersectionality and standpoint epistemology, two cornerstones of contemporary feminist social theory. This view stands at quite a distance from the original conception of this critical anthology. The call for papers solicited essays that would round out the existing scholarly responses to the literary nonfiction of Nancy Mairs by addressing topics other than disability. This view of thematic distinctions between disability and “other” issues is in direct contradistinction to the way the anthology actually came together, and to the understanding of intersectionality presented in this introduction. With the argument about integrating disability into feminist theory in mind, the new essays written for this collection can be seen as instances of what is meant by disability studies as a critical positionality that reveals “other” subjects, subjects that don’t seem immediately to be “about” disability—for example, masculinity, spirituality, rhetoric, aesthetics—in counterhegemonic ways that are no doubt shaped indelibly by disability. The embodied knowledge of Nancy Mairs on these subjects, in other words, will necessarily be refracted through her lived experience of disability, so that the disabled body becomes a source of methodology, as well as a medical condition and social location.

I want a prose that is allusive and translucent, that eases you into me and embraces you, not one that baffles you or bounces you around so

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that you can’t even tell where I am. And so I have chosen to work, very, very carefully, with the language we share, faults and all, choosing each word for its capacity, its ambiguity, the space it provides for me to live my life within it, relating rather than opposing each word to the next, each sentence to the next. —Nancy Mairs, “Essaying the Feminine,” Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer

A brief preview of the upcoming chapters demonstrates the complex refractions of abstract ideas through the lived experience of disability. The six new essays can be read usefully as pairs. For instance, Hayley Mitchell Haugen’s “On Difficult Gifts” offers a portrait of Mairs as an activist for a wide range of social causes, some having to do with disability and some not. Haugen, whose writing is highly accessible, may prove to be a popular “way in” for student readers in need of a general introduction to the subject of Nancy Mairs. Haugen focuses on the embattled lines explored by Mairs between being an individual activist and being a representative of a community, raising questions about female subjectivity and agency, and about the ways the self may be subsumed under various group labels (e.g., woman, disabled) despite the preferences of that particular individual. In contrast, Susan Cumings’s “On Writing in a Collaborative Spirit” highlights the sophisticated evocations of community in Mair’s writing through an active and palpable relationship between her narrator persona and the persona of the reader inserted deliberately and powerfully by Mairs into her texts. These two chapters could be usefully framed by debates in contemporary feminist social theory about identity and community, strategic essentialism and social construction, agency and structure. Hilary Clark’s chapter, “On Depression Narratives,” conducts a highly detailed close reading of several pieces of writing by Mairs that narrate a single period of her life when Mairs fell into a clinical depression and was institutionalized. Clark contends that Mairs appears to take a uniquely unflinching approach to narrating her most psychologically painful states, but that her delivery encodes her own ambivalence toward these experiences, inadvertently revealing traces of shame and embarrassment for the mental illness she seeks to destigmatize. Yet “On the Rhetoric of Gloom and Joy,” by Susannah B. Mintz, reframes these emotionally layered textual moments as a different kind of narrative event, one in which there is no pure state of depression or joy in life, only efforts at grappling with the difficult, messy, amazing, meaningful stuff of self-knowledge, embodied consciousness, and relationships with

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others. The two chapters establish the groundwork for a multi-vocal and multi-perspectival inquiry into questions of tone, theme, and the overall dominant impression of Mairs, which will in all likelihood vary from reader to reader. In these deliberations over tone and effect, Mintz and Clark can also be cross-referenced back to Haugen, whose earlier chapter briefly addresses Mairs’s distinction between “victim art” and “victim dreck,” two categories that could be discussed in class in terms of the aesthetic expectations and readerly preferences that give them shape and traction. What constitutes art? What constitutes dreck? How does Mairs answer these questions as a reader, and how does she navigate these categories as a writer? Is there something ambivalent in her language on “the literature of personal disaster” or in her deployment of the contested term “crip lit”? How and why do Mairs’s distinctions of quality among autopathographies differ from those of disability performance artist and memoirist Terry Galloway, whose prologue to Mean Little Deaf Queer describes losing her heart to “the crappy ones” for “the dim glimmerings of feelings sincere and raw within a tangled wreckage of inchoate ramblings and obvious lies” (x) that comprise the whole “fecund democracy . . . of half-coherent loser[s] getting their say” (xi)? The politics of aesthetic pleasure can make for high-energy classroom debates that push students to go back to the words, the textual moments, the passages that moved them or turned them off, and to recognize in their own value judgments a political structure that predisposes them to like or dislike a text or an author, a question that tends to come up in undergraduate responses to Mairs, as I note in “Dismembering the Heterosexual Imaginary” (reprinted in this volume). G. Thomas Couser’s article on the genre of “autopathography” (also reprinted in this volume) would be a valuable scholarly frame for such coursework. As a feminist essayist, Mairs may be expected by students who have not yet read her work to present orthodox views of sexism in her treatment of body image, marriage, and religion, yet Mairs never lapses into predictable ideological positions. Her treatment of acquaintance rape, for instance, tackles a perennially thorny issue from a slant angle, negotiating her outrage at Caleb’s assault on her and her bemused memories of an earlier Nancy who simply laid there, passively, while her ex-boyfriend “butted at [her]” (“On Not Liking Sex” 91). In statements such as “A good feminist always hates her rapist, I suppose, but I cannot hate mine,” Mairs’s departure from the usual feminist syntax on this controversial subject matter may raise eyebrows, but it is also guaranteed to refresh classroom

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conversations about sex and power (“On Loving Men” 120). The last two new chapters of this anthology—Margaret Torrell’s “On Nancy’s Husband George” and Jenny Bangsund’s “On Marriage, Church, and Being a Feminist Catholic”—explore similarly unorthodox positions in feminist cultural studies. Torrell demonstrates Mairs’s compassionate and counterhegemonic construction of George, observing that Mairs pushes herself to evolve from early representations of her husband as a shadowy patriarchal presence to later representations of him as a complex persona with a life beyond his role as her husband, with a flexibility and faithful capacity for companionship as well for the betrayals of infidelity, and, finally, with his journey into disabled embodiment and the alternative masculinities produced by this physical state. Torrell’s chapter intersects in interesting ways, as well, with the reprinted article by Madonne Miner on gender differences in disability narratives by women and by men, and also with my reprinted article on critical heterosexuality studies as an important analytical lens through which to view the whole body of writing by Nancy Mairs. In the same way that Mairs endeavors to grapple authentically with questions of self and other in the context of marriage, she can also be seen to work toward a genuine rapprochement between feminism and one of its traditionally perceived others—religion—as Bangsund demonstrates, bringing together a number of key volumes by Mairs on religion with key passages from feminist and liberation theology to reveal the broader philosophical context of Mairs’s reworking of the feminist Catholic identity apart from a reductive view of this identity as paradoxical. The patriarchal role of the church and of God are cast in the same increasingly compassionate and curious light illuminating the patriarchal role of husband. This revelation of power as complex and negotiable makes Mairs (to repeat an earlier point) an ideal candidate for introductory WGS courses, and Torrell and Bangsund provide detailed maps of these areas of inquiry as undertaken by Mairs. Taken as a whole, the critics included in On the Literary Nonfiction of Nancy Mairs examine many kinds of unspeakables in Mairs’s oeuvre—disability, to be sure, as well as depression, assisted and attempted suicide, adultery, lesbian desire, activist politics, and more—all the stuff of the impolite that Mairs reveals in order to disrupt the fixed routes of our cultural narratives and to widen the parameters of what can be said about a life. Furthermore, our interest extends beyond the what of Mairs’s essays to the how, identifying the aesthetics of the unspeakable and drawing pointed connections to the lived protests it enables. In meticulous interpretations of style, tone,

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theme, and form, each chapter considers one or more of the following interrelated questions: ● ● ●

●

●

How does Mairs negotiate her difficult topics? What are the intentions and effects of her blunt language? How does she use language and story to manifest her lived reality and original perspective on the page, despite the gravity of existing cultural narratives that would insist she tell it otherwise? How does she resist the many truisms, maxims, clichés, and apologias that usually accompany the unspeakable? And, finally, how might we use her as a model in the classroom to guide students—of autobiography, of feminism, of disability, of literature in general—toward the same provocative combination of bold ethics and subtle aesthetics?

The essays in this volume approach such questions in ways that respect the depth and reach of Mairs’s production, drawing substantially on the overlapping theoretical contexts of feminist autobiography studies, feminist existentialism, feminist phenomenology, feminist epistemology, feminist formalism, and materialist feminist aesthetics. Although her work has been analyzed intelligently by scholars in the context of disability studies, Mairs herself has asserted that she is not Ms. Multiple Sclerosis. She argues, in contradistinction, that cultural products “taking disability as [their] major premises exclude the complexities that round out a character and make her whole” (Carnal Acts 32). Without diminishing the importance of Mairs’s contributions to disability studies or the relevance of this theoretical paradigm to her oeuvre, this collection foregrounds a broad range of undertheorized aspects of Mairs’s work in order to recognize the author’s contributions to feminist social theory in the domains of family, community, church, and literary activism. Emphasizing in particular the transgressive potential of literary nonfiction, the essays included here address the full scope of Mairs’s subject matter—from gender and sexuality to religious practice, mortality, masculinity, mental illness, and social activism—in addition to questions of aesthetic innovation and form. We hope the collection operates not as the final word on Nancy Mairs but as a call for a new generation of readers to engage this author with their own proliferation of words, insights, bodymemories, and critical rejoinders. This is not a static celebration of an author. It is an invitation to wrestle with her. She is a tough customer, remember. She can take it.

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Notes 1. For a persuasive reevaluation of Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl in the context of feminist intellectual history, especially in relation to the slogan the personal is political, see Deborah Siegel’s Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild. 2. For more on the distinction between critical feminist multiculturalism and neoliberal rhetorics of diversity management, see Jane Ward’s Respectably Queer: Diversity Culture in LGBT Activist Organizations (especially chapter two, “The Mainstreaming of Intersectionality: Doing Identity Politics in a Diversity Culture”).

Works Cited Allison, Dorothy. Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1994. ———. Two or Three Things I Know for Sure. New York: Plume, 1995. Galloway, Terry. Mean Little Deaf Queer: A Memoir. Boston: Beacon, 2009. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory.” NWSA Journal 14.3 (2002): 1–32. Gurley Brown, Helen. Sex and the Single Girl. New York: Giant Cardinal, 1963. hooks, bell. “Talking Back.” Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Boston: South End, 1989. 5–9. Lorde, Audre. “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley, CA: Crossing, 1984. 40–44. Mairs, Nancy. “On Being a Cripple.” Plaintext: Deciphering a Woman’s Life. New York: Harper and Row, 1986. 9–20. ———. “On Not Liking Sex.” Plaintext: Deciphering a Woman’s Life. New York: Harper and Row, 1986. 79–92. ———. “On Loving Men.” Plaintext: Deciphering a Woman’s Life. New York: Harper and Row, 1986. 107–23. ———. “Hers Columns.” Carnal Acts: Essays. New York: Harper Perennial, 1990. 31–52. ———. “On Uttering the Unspeakable.” Carnal Acts: Essays. New York: Harper Perennial, 1990. 53–63. ———. “Carnal Acts.” Carnal Acts: Essays. New York: Harper Perennial, 1990. 81–96. ———. “Voice Lessons.” Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer. Boston: Beacon, 1994. 15–33. ———. “Sex and the Gimpy Girl.” River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative 10.1–2 (2008–2009): 3–10. Rich, Adrienne. “Diving into the Wreck.” Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi. New York: Norton, 1993. 53–55.

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Rich, Adrienne. “Notes towards a Politics of Location.” Women, Feminist Identity, and Society in the 1980’s. Ed. Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz and Iris M. Zavala. 7–22. Siegel, Deborah. Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild. New York: Palgrave, 2007. Ward, Jane. Respectably Queer: Diversity Culture in LGBT Activist Organizations. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt UP, 2008.

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New Essays

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Chapter 1

On Difficult Gifts: A Biographical Portrait of Nancy Mairs Hayley Mitchell Haugen

Imagine a woman writer with multiple sclerosis, who, after being

arrested for protesting nuclear bomb testing, returns to her home in Tucson, Arizona, rolls up to her desk in her wheelchair, and begins an essay about her day. What does she title her work? “Disability and Political Activism”? “Disability: A Personal Experience”? If the woman is Nancy Mairs, neither title will do, for as her work detailing her experience as a disabled woman attests, Mairs resists a split between the personal and the political. It is a stance that has historical ties to the feminist thinking she has embraced throughout her writing life. In “Disability and Feminist Perspectives: The Personal and the Political,” Carol Thomas compares the personal narratives that emerged from the women’s movement and became popular in the 1970s and 1980s to the narratives that emerged from the disability rights movement and have been popular since the 1990s. Thomas finds that narratives by women with disabilities “ ‘give voice’ ” to their authors, “something that feminists identify as a key political act: making the personal political” (68). However, not all scholars and activists within the disability community agree that life writing can effect political change. Aware of this contention within the field, Thomas explains that the disagreement echoes critical questions about the “place of the personal” in the U.S. women’s movement (68). Thomas contends that this similar “anti-experiential position [within the disability community] ignores the tremendous social and political gains made by a movement—the women’s movement—which placed personal experience at the very heart of its theoretical concerns and political actions” (74–75).

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Like the feminist essayists who came before her, Mairs centers her personal experiences within her theoretical concerns and political actions. Mairs has been writing for over twenty years about depression, agoraphobia, and multiple sclerosis (MS) and is, therefore, in a position to resist social constructions of disability and to advocate for more positive, more authentic views of disabled bodies. Whether focused on nuclear bomb testing in the desert, the portrayal of disability in the media, access to public buildings, or euthanasia, Mairs’s essays have become her vehicle for political engagement with U.S. culture, and they are the means through which she insists on legitimacy and representation for people with disabilities. Though many of her essays—especially those in collections such as Waist-High in the World—do speak broadly for those within the disability community, Mairs’s work remains grounded in the personal. Socially conscious in their scope, even Mairs’s most activist-minded essays are autobiographical, insisting on the value of her singular experience, her life as an individual. From a literary perspective, this feature of Mairs’s work continues the bloodline of the U.S. tradition of autobiography—a tradition that celebrates individual experience. From a social movements studies perspective, however, the singular voice of her work has interesting implications for those disability scholars who remain unconvinced of the political power of the disabled autobiographer. Mairs does not eschew the power of community action, but her work reminds us that communities are made up of individuals with unique needs and experiences. Begin to see the individual, her work suggests, and we will begin to embrace the whole. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has discussed the ways in which disability functions concurrently with other systems of representation. She convincingly argues that since Aristotle—who, she reminds us, considered women “mutilated males”—Western thought has “long conflated femaleness and disability, understanding both as defective departures from a valued standard” of able-bodied maleness (“Integrating” 78). Indeed, Thomson reiterates, Western culture has made a habit of adopting the “language of deficiency and abnormality” to devalue women in particular, and to represent women, people with disabilities, and people of color as “dependent, incomplete, vulnerable, and incompetent” (79). Nancy Mairs, however, refuses to allow this kind of cultural representation to structure her own reality. She fights against the devaluation of women in her work by exposing the discrimination she has encountered. Refusing the efforts of others to dismiss her existence, she writes about her own life, thereby

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legitimizing her life experiences in a culture that assumes her life is without meaning. In turn, she contributes to the growing discourse on disability and the body. In 1987, Mairs was invited by the New York Times to write a short series of “Hers Columns” and so was offered an opportunity to express her concerns over the representation of women with disabilities to a broad audience. Collected in Carnal Acts, the first several of Mairs’s “Hers Columns” describe her search for representations of herself—a forty-three-year-old, crippled woman—in U.S. media, especially film, television, and advertising. Mairs’s essays offer readers this representation, but her efforts to depict disability experience more truthfully than the media do not proceed unhindered. Before—or at least while in the midst of—giving us the intimate details of her life as a woman living with chronic illness and disability, Mairs must eschew the familial and societal taboos that forbid or devalue that project. Although Mairs experiences this kind of silencing first within her family, for women it is a comprehensive cultural condition. She argues in Carnal Acts that “discursive constraints function most stringently to repress the feminine in human experience” (58). Mairs encounters this cultural repression first-hand as the only female MFA student in a poetry workshop at the University of Arizona when her own writing is marked as irrelevant. She recalls that the male members of the group assured her that her work was not merely technically sound, but “brilliant,” but that it also was not very “interesting” (59). “The same group had gone wild, a couple of meetings before, over another member’s poem about his first visit to a whorehouse,” she explains. “I got the message: whorehouses are interesting; wifehood, motherhood, even mistresshood are not” (59). The experience, she recalls, almost convinced her to stop writing; even though she decided not to stop, in producing Carnal Acts in the mid-1990s she still sensed a pervasive lack of interest in writing by women: “In college workshops and editorial offices, at writer’s conferences and reviewer’s desks, women’s words continue to be devalued” (60). Even her own mentors and editors have wondered aloud when she would “get around to some ‘real work,’ ” she says, “by which they seem to mean something perhaps less personal and certainly less ‘limited’ by feminist perspective” (62). This response leads to the misrepresentation of women, Mairs argues, or it leads to women writers “depicting not their own experiences but male pornographic fantasies of feminine experience” (60). Instead of pandering to this limited view of women, Mairs encourages women authors to write truthfully about their bodies—whether they be disabled or not—as she did in the essays of her début work, Plaintext.

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For Mairs, to write truthfully about the body is to write, in part, of its failings, to represent her disabled body as it is, not according to cultural fantasies of what it should be. The essays in Plaintext raise topics that Mairs returns to time and again in her later collections: depression, suicide attempts, electric shock treatments. Clearly, hers is a “body in trouble,” as she later describes it, a body that because of increasing debility from MS tends to trip and to drop things. She describes herself as a woman who “lurches around the house and crashes to the floor in front of [her children’s friends], who gets attacks of anxiety in the middle of stores and has to be cajoled into finishing simple errands” (Plaintext 66), to such an extent that her life often seems to her a “series of small failures to do as [she] ought” (12). Mairs is as truthful in describing her body’s difference from accepted norms as she is in speaking about the feelings of shame she has over her body’s failures. In reconsidering Plaintext, however, Mairs admits that she did not realize that in writing truthfully about her body she was breaking new ground for women writers. She writes later in Carnal Acts: If I had known it, I suspect I’d have been too intimidated to make a peep. At that point I knew only that I’d spent most of my life baffled and in pain over events and feelings that, I was just beginning to sense, weren’t peculiar to me. But because they existed in the realm of the linguistically impermissible, I hadn’t been able to speak of them aloud and, in sharing them with others, ease their weight. (60)

Yet Mairs’s inclination toward speaking the truth through involvement in social issues has rarely wavered. As documented by her local Tucson newspaper, the Arizona Daily Star, Mairs organized one of 160 national “Poets Against the War” readings to protest the United States’ impending war with Iraq in 2003, moderated panels on anticensorship at the Tucson Poetry Festival in 2000, spoke for the National Organization for Women conference in Tucson in 1997, and even participated in a forty-eight-hour reading marathon to benefit the Tucson Area Literacy Coalition in 1994. Mairs’s social activism is also, of course, recorded in her own essays. In Ordinary Time, for example, she notes that after college she eventually became aware of her own “erratically increasing awareness of and commitment to social justice” (72). Her activism began with opposition to the Vietnam War—a “path that would one day lead beyond simple opposition to radical pacifism,” she explains (76). Later, she joined Citizens for Participation Politics, a group of politically minded Catholics she met

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while at the University of Arizona. Eventually, Mairs admits that she was moved to reject her Congregationalist upbringing and to convert to Catholicism at age thirty-four in part because of her particular Catholic community’s commitment to action (80). In Tucson, anyway, she found that the nuns and parishioners alike volunteered on farms and in jails and ran for state legislature (86). By the time she was in her forties, Mairs was immersed in social activism, and her essays, likewise, strive to instruct readers of the ways in which the disabled body can be used as a political body. In her essay “Faith and Loving in Las Vegas,” for example (from Carnal Acts), Mairs writes of marching for the first time in protest against nuclear testing in the Nevada desert. In her wheelchair, she crosses the line into the private property of the Nevada Nuclear Test Site with a small group of able-bodied protesters, including her husband, George. It is the first time in over twenty years of activist work that she and George have ever “committed civil disobedience,” and they are “glad to be surrounded by loving and oft-arrested friends,” for they, too, expect to be arrested for their actions (67). When the Nevada deputies begin to handcuff the protesters, however, they bypass Mairs. As a wheelchair user, Mairs has known not only the stigmatizing effects of this very visible symbol of her disability, but also its ironic power to render her invisible. Physically situated beneath the notice of others, wheelchair users, she says, occupy a space “literally outside the field of vision of those in the center, so that the latter trip unawares and fall into the laps of those they have banished from consciousness unless these scoot safely out of the way” (Waist-High 59). Even when using her Amigo, a three-wheeled electric scooter that decreases her level of fatigue and offers her a greater range of mobility, Mairs senses herself to be invisible. Riding her scooter, she feels reduced “to the height of a seven-year-old, with a child’s attendant low status” (Carnal Acts 89). In crowds, she adds, she sees nothing but buttocks; when accompanied by a friend, service people (such as a gate agent at an airport) will address questions to an accompanying friend of hers rather than asking Mairs directly. The effect is that she often wants to “shout to the lofty world, ‘Down here! There’s a person down here!’ But I’m not by their standards, quite a person anymore” (89). In an effort to assert both her personhood and her political beliefs, Mairs tells the deputy in the Nevada desert that she would like to be handcuffed along with the others, but he explains that the sheriff has told him not to take her along on the bus to jail with the other detainees: “ ‘We can’t take you in there,’ ” she recalls him saying, “ ‘We can’t

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handle the wheelchair on the bus’ ” (68). She informs the deputy that she can walk the short distance to the bus, and he reluctantly agrees to cuff her. She is pleased with her actions, but she has a brief moment of fear when she worries that the deputies left behind with her wheelchair will “punish” her by vandalizing it (she asks them to take good care of it, and they promise her they will [68]). Fellow protesters also take a special interest in Mairs as she is led past the holding pen area. They cheer her on, and although at first she feels “inwardly embarrassed” for what she interprets as the non-disabled mistaking her as a hero because of her disability, she later feels that she has at least put her crippled self to good use: “People with able bodies sometimes mistake cripples for heroes,” she explains. “They forget that I’m doing just what they’re doing, only more clumsily. Such self-deprecation denies, however, my real use to them as an emblem of the value of this action. What they are doing is hard. My presence assures them that it is not too hard, that all of us can do whatever we must, here, now, and wherever else we are called” (72). Mairs represents herself here as a symbol of moral, rather than physical, strength during the protest for the able-bodied; in doing so, she also inadvertently becomes a symbol for the disability community. She cannot divorce herself from her ailing body, and because of this, her trespassing means something different to her than to the others. “My crossing the line bears another kind of weight from theirs,” she writes. “It is not a straightforward individual act of civil disobedience. Like it or not, I cross not foremost as a private citizen, but as a representative of those people who, despite their disparities, get lumped as the result of their physical disabilities into a single class” (73). Whether or not other people with disabilities would want to be associated with Mairs in her act of civil disobedience does not matter. She believes that whatever she does reflects on them nonetheless (73). Such a conviction creates moral conflict. Although she is at the test site with the express purpose of breaking the law, she is also aware of herself as a representative of people with disabilities, and in this role she feels “constrained to be a ‘good cripple,’ cheerful and patient, so that whoever might roll along in my wake someday will find the way eased: a stance wholly at odds with the disobedience I am here to practice” (73). Mairs’s decision to protest the nuclear testing is an individual one, but she understands that her actions may have reverberations within the disability community, a realization that is tied to her increasing personal connection with that community and her continuing concerns over the representation of people with disabilities in the United States.

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By the time Mairs published Carnal Acts in 1996, she was a wellestablished poet and essayist, and she had become known within and as a spokesperson for the disability community, being asked to lecture at MS conventions and publishing her essays in journals marketed to people with disabilities. Two years after the publication of Carnal Acts, Mairs also played a political role for the disabled at the national level, as one of seven plaintiffs to bring suit against the Greyhound bus company for noncompliance with accessibility statutes of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. (As a result of the suit, the federal court ruled that Greyhound and all bus carriers must make their fleets accessible with the installation of wheelchair lifts by 2012.) As suggested here, Mairs’s public persona has become, in part, one of a disability rights activist, and this extends to her literary persona as well. “Opening Doors, Unlocking Hearts,” from Waist-High in the World, for example, articulates her activist goals: “As a disabled woman,” she writes, “I find that my physical and social environments send the message that my presence is not unequivocally welcome or vital. I am not looking for reassurances just now. I want to change the world” (88). Although Mairs does indicate the recognition that through her writing she has become a representative for other people with disabilities, she does not always embrace community-based language and thinking, clearly rejecting, for instance, the group-speak that sometimes emerges from within the disability community. As she explains in “Challenge: An Exploration,” another essay from Waist-High in the World, the penchant for using generalized euphemisms to describe disability experience indicates a discomfort with “confront[ing] the radical transformations of our bodies” (101). For this reason, Mairs writes, “I call myself a cripple. I do so because the word is the most accurate and precise I’ve found, meaning that I no longer have full use of my limbs” (101). Mairs addresses this issue of naming earlier in her standout, oftquoted and anthologized essay “On Being a Cripple,” from Plaintext, where she notes that she is aware that “people—crippled or not— wince at the word ‘cripple,’ as they do not at ‘handicapped’ or ‘disabled.’ Perhaps I want them to wince. I want them to see me as a tough customer, one to whom the fates/gods/viruses have not been kind, but who can face the brutal truth of her existence squarely. As a cripple, I swagger” (9). Despite the social turn toward politically correct labels for marginalized groups of people, Mairs’s calling herself a cripple helps her gain control over her self-representation, and it likewise politicizes this construction of herself. Disability scholar Simi Linton agrees that words such as cripple, gimp, and freak, when used

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by people with disabilities, have “transgressive potential”: “They are personally and politically useful as a means to comment on oppression because they assert our right to name experience” (16). Mairs explains that she uses the word cripple only to describe herself, for “society is no readier to accept crippledness than to accept death, war, sex, sweat, or wrinkles” (“On Being Fair” 10). And by “society,” Mairs refers not only to able-bodied Americans, but to many people with disabilities as well. This point plays out in an interesting conflict narrated by Mairs when another woman with MS reads an excerpt from “On Being a Cripple” and takes issue with Mairs’s appropriation of the term. Calling Mairs at home, the woman encourages her to embrace a euphemism for her disabled status instead. “ ‘In our group,’ ” the woman explains, “ ‘we refer to ourselves as the physically challenged. It suggests a much healthier attitude’ ” (Carnal Acts 101). Mairs allows that everyone has the right to describe him- or herself as he or she sees fit, but she admits that even though her own attitude is often in need of a cure, she does not think that a “dose of language like ‘physically challenged’ ” can do the trick, “for the simple reason,” she writes, “that I have no idea what that phrase means” (101). Her elaboration on this point is worth quoting at length: The purpose of a word is to identify a phenomenon precisely and distinguish it from all other phenomenon. And though, when I’m faced with one of the pigeon-toed shopping carts at the Safeway which, with all my strength I can barely wrestle up one aisle and down the next, I know that I’m physically challenged, I don’t see how that phrase distinguishes me from anyone else who works hard or plays hard—from, say, the latest climber struggling up the face of Mount Everest. And, lurching along from ice cream to paper towels, I am different from that woman in her parka and goggles, face cracked and blackened, setting out on the last day’s exhausted plod to the summit. Not better, or worse, but different. And I have to recognize that difference, not disguise it, in order to live authentically, that is, according to my true self. (102)

For Mairs, then, a sense of difference is pivotal to authentic selfknowledge, especially as she considers her position within culture as a whole and not merely within the disability community. Therefore, although her essays can certainly speak to the concerns of people with disabilities, readers never venture far from the understanding that her work first speaks to her own emotional and physical concerns. Although undiluted and political, Mairs’s essays remain personal, and

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they do not, as shown, always embrace the language of her marginalized community; instead, they maintain that essential connection to her individual, singular self. Mairs’s focus on this kind of singular experience speaks to both her role as a disabled American autobiographer and the role of the growing canon of disability literature in general. She has expressed a worry about the increased production and publication of memoirs by the ill and disabled, questioning publishers’ eagerness to snatch up anything remotely similar to other works that have achieved both critical and commercial success (she names William Styron’s Darkness Visible and Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted as examples), in the hope of discovering more diamonds in the rough. She wonders, “besides me, does anyone read it as literature? Can one? Should one? How? And do I want to risk the possibility that, in the process of being studied generically, varied and distinctive literary projects (my own among them) may become ghettoized as ‘crip lit’?” (“Victim” 20). Clearly, Mairs’s concerns reiterate her desire to be read as an individual, not as a member of a victimized community who create what others have pejoratively referred to as “victim art.” Mairs maintains, “I have a clear reason for redeeming victim art by holding the literature of personal disaster to the standards I value in other literature: nobility of purpose, intellectual stringency, linguistic precision and grace, freshness of insight, moral significance. Works that wholly miss the mark aren’t victim art but victim dreck” (20). Mairs expands on these ideas in her essay “The Literature of Personal Disaster,” published in Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer. Here, Mairs considers what is at stake for the writer of personal disaster: Choosing to speak publicly about affliction is risky for both men and women but for different reasons: for the woman, because the behavior (public utterance) is culturally impermissible; for the men, because the condition (physical or mental weakness) is proscribed. . . . Clearly the woman who undertakes to publish a book about her miseries, or about anything else, has already decided to transgress, at whatever cost, the taboo on female speech; thus she has resolved the crucial issue before beginning her project. But the man, who is expected to speak publicly but not to expose his infirmities, may have to struggle with this conflict of (self) interest in the writing itself. (128)

The self-interest Mairs references is key to understanding her own autobiographical projects, for it is through exposing herself that she attempts to legitimize her existence and experience. She claims this

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not only as a goal, but also as a responsibility of her work: “Those writers who seek to console and hearten must make themselves and their anguish wholly transparent, revealing not illness as metaphor but illness as illness, in order to persuade the skeptical reader, through the very writing, that survival (at least till the last page) is possible” (129). The stakes of writing about illness and disability are not just personal but also literary, and Mairs strives in her own work to meet the same standards of literary merit by which she judges other disability narratives. In particular, she explains that the best narratives of disability are not written out of self-pity; they also have aesthetic value that texts of a more documentary nature do not have. Indeed, she argues, “the writing about personal disaster which functions as literature tends not to be ‘about’ disaster at all”; these writers “transcend their separate ordeals to speak generally, and generously of the human condition” (133). In her own work, Mairs has strived consistently to reach varied audiences, as in the last essays of Carnal Acts, which not only “provide a rough but accurate sketch of what can go on in an MS family” but also present that experience as “universal enough, in style if not in detail, to be recognized by people unaffected by MS” (15). Here Mairs is addressing all readers, not only those with disabilities (MS in particular), and she wants those readers to understand that MS is not a death sentence, and that she can have (indeed, has had) a life full of rewarding experiences. In this way, she breaks cultural stereotypes of what others expect her to be capable of, offering a counter-narrative to cultural expectations that her life should be otherwise. As Mairs reminds us, “even a woman too crippled to tie her own boots or drive a car can, at least if she has a partner who shares her sense of plenty, find a place in the vast web of transactions that binds and sustains the human family” (Ordinary Time 167). Although Mairs’s experiences break with societal expectations (as well as with the hardships lived by many other women with disabilities), she insists that she does not want to be read as a heroic survivor in a war against illness. Lamenting reviewer Nicholas Christopher’s description of her work as a “valiant battle against multiple sclerosis,” she explains that she “hated the way he reduced the existence I have painstakingly constructed to the corpses and smoldering rubble of a battlefield and set me, a heroic figure, wounded but still defiant in the middle of the waste: another silly story of the sort little boys make up for their Transformers and GI Joes. . . . I am only doing what I have to do. It’s enough” (Carnal Acts 18). Mairs does not depict herself as the heroine of her life. She does not read or write her life as a quest narrative—as the patriarchal

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model encourages—with its crises, climax, and resolution. And yet her work, despite her best efforts to encourage readers to view her otherwise, does provide a heroic figure for other women with disabilities who are looking for disabled role models. Mairs has noted the scant representation of women with disabilities in the media, and there likewise remains a lack of realistic representation of women with disabilities in literature. This point has been taken up by a number of scholars of disability. In her essay “In Search of a Heroine: Images of Women with Disabilities in Fiction and Drama,” for example, Deborah Kent recalls her search as a blind teenager for authentic disabled heroines in literature to whom she could relate, heroines for whom happy endings did not rely on being cured of their disabilities or illnesses, or for whom “true validation” was not a “gift that could be bestowed only by a man” (92). What Kent finds as an adult surveying over thirty novels and plays is that this heroine rarely exists. She acknowledges that “a number of women with disabilities have written autobiographies” about their disability experience but concludes her essay with the hope that more women with disabilities will begin to feel more free to translate their life experiences into fiction and drama (110). Kent’s call for more fictional representations of women with disabilities by women with disabilities is worthy, but Kent too easily dismisses the cultural value of autobiographies. In Mairs’s work, for instance, we find the heroine Kent has been seeking since her youth. Mairs refuses to look upon her lot with pity, and she maintains a positive but realistic outlook about her life. Furthermore, she disproves the cultural narrative that insists there are no traditional happy endings for women with disabilities: she marries; she has two children of her own and adopts another; she works and is actively involved in her church and community; and she becomes a loving, albeit often frustrated and weary, caretaker to numerous others (both human and animal) who drift into and out of her household throughout her adult life. Although fraught with the difficulties she encounters while performing these tasks as a disabled woman, Mairs’s essays advocate for the unquestioned acceptance of women with disabilities in whatever roles they perform. She discourages our thinking of her as heroic because part of her activist stance is to prove that the actions she performs daily are as ordinary for her as they are for millions of other disabled and able-bodied people alike. She is heroic, then, only in light of the fact that this representation has not been culturally accepted. By continuing to write about her daily life in her essays, Mairs continues her campaign for the kind of legitimacy

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that will ultimately change Americans’ views about the disabled. And this is Mairs’s “valiant battle.” Whether she is talking about the accessibility of public toilets or Americans’ attitudes toward people with disabilities, Mairs is willing to write about topics that others are often ashamed to discuss. She is not embarrassed, for example, to relate encounters with nondisabled people who have treated her as though she is simply depressing, a blight on the landscape. One cab driver, she writes, actually berates her, saying that people like her (people who need assistance with a wheelchair) shouldn’t be out riding in a cab but back at home where they belong. In sharing such experiences, however painful, Mairs exposes the “aversions” many people have toward the disabled— attitudes, she writes, “that in subtler forms, poison the atmosphere like a fine gray mist, indiscernible but for the headache and lassitude it induces” (Waist-High 101). These sentiments make Mairs all the more determined to “roll out among” the nondisabled more frequently— both literally and, more broadly, by covering a greater distance in her writing. “I want people to grow accustomed to my presence,” she adds, “and to view mine as an ordinary life, less agreeable in some of its particulars than theirs but satisfying over all” (104). She argues, “If it is possible and pleasant for me and my kind to enter, the world will become a livelier place. You’ll see” (106). Mairs has certainly contributed to that liveliness by offering her own perspectives not only on issues of access or attitude, but on more volatile and publicly debated issues such as abortion and assisted suicide. In these, as in her other essays, Mairs’s experience as a woman with disabilities remains steadfastly visible at the forefront of her arguments. In her essay “Learning from Suffering,” for example, published in Christian Century, Mairs evaluates the practice of assisted suicide in the United States and its proponents, such as Dr. Jack Kevorkian, commonly referred to in the press as Dr. Death. In light of Kevorkian’s crusade for mercy, she cautions readers not to accept the widely held view that the chronically (even terminally) ill and the disabled consider their lives unnecessary. “As a person with a disability,” Mairs writes, “I am assumed by many to lead a life without worth, and plenty of them would be glad to help me end my misery” (448). She explains that medical personnel, professionals trained only to cure the body, often look upon incurable disabilities such as her degenerative multiple sclerosis as “hopeless,” and that even some neurologists express a “distaste” for her neurological disorder in their refusal to treat MS patients (481). Doctors do not, it seems, want to take on patients they will be unable to cure. Mairs suggests that this

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stance is supported in a culture that “commonly confounds social value with economic productivity” (481). Unable to hold or acquire jobs, many Americans with disabilities, she argues, find that their lives are rendered “fruitless” by a society that considers its disabled citizens to be a drain upon its resources. In an extreme example of this stance in action, Mairs notes that Americans with disabilities have even reported being required to sign do-not-resuscitate orders before receiving hospital care (481). In a slightly earlier essay published in The Nation called “On Being Fair to Strangers,” Mairs argues that this rather unfair attitude is encouraged when public figures such as Christopher Reeve, “on prime-time television, with all the money in the world to pay for round-the-clock personal care, [suggest] that public resources were being wasted on maintenance for people with disabilities, specifically those with spinal-cord injuries, that would be better spent finding a cure” (30). Mairs argues that the attention Reeve received in the press because of his celebrity may have had negative ramifications for other Americans with disabilities who are seeking equality over the race for a cure. She explains, A great many people with disabilities are considerably less eager to be cured in some hypothetical future than to find, right now, a reliable and affordable aide to help them perform a bowel evacuation every other day. Indeed, some resent society’s relentless drive to fix them, implying as it does that they are defective and thus undesirable as they are. . . . Calamity, even terminal illness, does not necessarily engender a desire for death, as many hospice workers can attest, although accompanying poverty, helplessness, intractable pain, rejection and abandonment may. Something is fishy when a society accepts that a particular segment of its members naturally prefer to be dead. (30)

The cultural assumption that people with disabilities are defective and undesirable, or that they prefer to be dead, ties back to Mairs’s position on assisted suicide and also abortion, for in both practices, as she argues in her essay “Freeing Choices,” the “mute message—that one is an accident that ought not to have happened—is communicated” (Waist-High 112). In concurrence with her stance on abortion, Mairs has asserted that she remains adamantly pro choice on the matter of assisted suicide, though the question of “choice,” she reminds readers, “is vastly more complex than politicians, legislators, and religious fundamentalists make it” (Waist-High 113). Part of that complexity stems from the fact that Mairs looks at these political issues from within the folds

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of personal experience. As a depressive who has attempted suicide on more than one occasion, Mairs makes the point that she now must monitor herself carefully for symptoms suggestive of a “downward spiral” back into the depths of depression. Learning to acknowledge these symptoms and curtail the attendant suicidal tendencies, Mairs writes that she has “spent a good deal of my life struggling to deny myself the death to which [assisted suicide] activists would like to guarantee me the right” (Waist-High 114). In particular, she questions suicide rights activists’ use of the term “rational suicide” to distinguish between the kinds of people the right-to-die movement proposes to advocate for. Supposedly, by proposing to help facilitate only “rational suicides,” irrational suicide attempts such as the ones Mairs herself made would be prevented. Mairs argues, however, that through her own “intimacy with self-destructive urges,” she has come to understand that “suicide becomes imperative only when one loses sight of all other alternatives. . . . Since hopelessness is a distinctive symptom of depression, which is an emotional disorder, actions carried out in a despairing state seem to me intrinsically irrational” (Waist-High 116). The social construction of disability in U.S. culture is another concern underscored by Mairs in the moral and ethical debates about such heated issues as assisted suicide: I think it is very, very important to distinguish “disability,” which is a social construct rather than a medical diagnosis, from some of the circumstances associated with it, often by people who have little direct knowledge of physical and mental limitations and their consequences. Like all negative terms, “disability” is part of a binary, existing in relation to a privileged opposite: that is, one is “disabled” only from the point of view of another defined by common social values as “able” . . . .“I” am disabled, then, only from “your” point of view (and “you” from “mine”). Whoever gets to define ability puts everyone else in place, which (human nature tending to define one’s own as the proper place) then becomes other, outside: a cheerless and chilly spot. (Waist-High 13–14)

Considering these values as shaping influences on the social construction of the disabled and the question of assisted suicide, Mairs argues that “behind the view of death as a ‘right’ to be seized and defended lurks the hidden assumption that some lives are not worth living and that damaged creatures may be put out of their misery” (120). And although she admits to wanting to be in charge of her life—and her death—her experience as a woman with disabilities in a society that

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does not accept disability strengthens her belief that no amount of state or federal regulation of assisted suicide “can eliminate the subtle pressure to end a life perceived by others to be insufferable” (121). “If ideally, I ought never to have [been] born,” Mairs explains, “and if my dependent existence creates a burden on those who must care for me, then don’t I have not merely the right but the obligation to die? How can I honorably choose otherwise?” (121). Although she is aware that some disabled or terminally ill people clearly do want to die, Mairs encourages readers to more readily embrace the fact that many more actually enjoy their lives quite a lot. They do not view themselves as hopeless cases, and they reject those who cannot imagine their worthy lives beyond their disability. Describing those who subscribe to this view—including herself— Mairs explains, We tend to repudiate the medical model of disability, which views us as sick and in need of a cure, and the mechanical model, in which we are broken and require repair. We see disability as a social construction. It’s the assumptions and insensitivities of the majority that assign limits to bodies and minds that work in “deviant” ways. Some would go so far as to say that society at large is responsible for dis-abling us, and that with more ramps, texts in Braille, interpreters and other such modifications we would live just as easily in the world as anyone else. (“Learning” 481)

In refusing to view herself as in need of repair, Mairs proves that “despite her disability” she is fully present in her life. And although her disability may cause both emotional and physical suffering, this suffering, in and of itself, is not, she argues, “an aberration or an outrage to be eliminated at any cost,” as the medical model of disability implies (482). Suffering, she says, “strikes me as intrinsic to the human condition. I do not like it. I’m not asked to like it. I must simply endure in order to learn from it. Those who leap forward to offer me aid in ending it, though they may do so out of the greatest compassion, seek to deny me the fullness of experience I believe I am meant to have” (481). Indeed, much of the strength of Mairs’s activist essays resides in the proof of this fact—that she is capable of enjoying the fullness of experience—by detailing the varied life experiences she does have, convincing us that the act of fighting against her suicidal tendencies and choosing to live her disabled life constitute an “honorable choice” despite her fears, her physical pain, embarrassment, and personal difficulties. Whether she is writing about the personal difficulties she

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has faced as a woman with disabilities or the personal joys she has experienced in the same body, Nancy Mairs’s motivation for writing is the same as any writer’s: to connect. Her desire, she says, is to “contact others, to share my experiences with them, to stir them to recognition of the similarities that underlie their experiences and mine, to illuminate and delight in and laugh over the commonplaces of human life” (Bone House 6). Mairs is aware, however, of the inherent dangers of focusing too much on her disability in her writing, and she consistently strives to connect the lessons she has learned as a person with disabilities to the U.S. culture that exists beyond the wheelchair ramp to her home. Always concerned about the cultural messages embedded in her work and the work of other writers with disabilities, Mairs laments that many autobiographical accounts of illness and disability “concentrate so fully, almost claustrophobically, on the singularities of disabled life that they fail to reflect the ways in which such life is indistinguishable from any other sort: fueled by the same appetites, fraught with the same anxieties, replete with the same delights.” In “Plunging In,” the opening essay for Waist-High in the World, Mairs writes, My hope is that, in scrutinizing some of these elements common to the human condition—among them adjustment to change, body image and sexuality, the need for both independence, and nurturance, the ceaseless search for equality and justice and pure pleasure—through the lens of my own experiences and those of people I know well, I can bring to life their particular significance in terms of disability. (11–12)

And in speaking of disability as a facet of the human condition, Mairs often reminds us that disability—in one form or another—is something that most Americans will likely contend with at some point in their lives. With the twenty-first century’s sophisticated medical technology and a life expectancy that has increased by more than thirty years since the early twentieth century, more Americans who are born with or develop illnesses and disabilities will survive, Mairs says, “living longer and more publicly than ever before” (17). Thus, she writes, “my interest in this subject, though intensely personal, is by no means private. Something without precedent is taking place, and we need a theoretical and imaginative framework for evaluating and managing the repercussions” (17). Mairs is correct. Something without precedent is taking place—for not only is the theoretical framework she calls for emerging through

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the field of disability studies, Americans with disabilities are emerging from the margins of U.S. culture, legitimized, in part, because of a relatively new and growing genre of American autobiography. Whether we call works in this genre “pathographies,” “autopathographies,” “auto/body/ographies,” or just “life writing,” first-person singular works by Nancy Mairs and others for whom illness and disability are as central and essential to their writing as they are to their daily routines are changing the way we view people with illnesses and disabilities—both in literature and in our lives. And this is the power of autobiography, a power magnified by Mairs’s essay collections, where time and again we meet her singular, though multiply constructed, self. Speaking of and for herself, Mairs insists on the value of her life and thereby asserts disability legitimacy, connecting with her audience, essay by essay, one reader at a time. Works Cited Associated Press. “Tucson Suit Sparks U.S. Ruling on Bus Access for Disabled.” Arizona Daily Star 21 March 1998: 1B. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory.” Gendering Disability. Ed. Bonnie Smith and Beth Hutchison. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2004. 73–103. Kent, Deborah. “In Search of a Heroine: Images of Women with Disabilities in Fiction and Drama.” Women with Disabilities: Essays in Psychology, Culture, and Politics. Ed. Michelle Fine and Adrienne Asch. Philadelphia, PA: Temple UP, 1988. 90–110. Linton, Simi. Claiming Disability. New York: New York UP, 1998. Mairs, Nancy. Carnal Acts. Boston: Beacon, 1996. ———. “Learning from Suffering.” Christian Century May 6, 1998: 481. ———. “On Being Fair to Strangers.” Nation Oct. 28, 1996: 30. ———. Ordinary Time: Cycles in Marriage, Faith, and Renewal. Boston: Beacon, 1993. ———. Plaintext: Deciphering a Woman’s Life. New York: Harper, 1987. ———. Remembering the Bone House: An Erotics of Place and Space. New York: Harper, 1989. ———. Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer. Boston: Beacon, 1994. ———. Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Non-disabled. Boston: Beacon, 1996. ———. “Victim Art and Victim Dreck.” Women’s Review of Books 13:10/11 (1996): 20. Thomas, Carol. Female Forms: Experiencing and Understanding Disability. Philadelphia, PA: Open UP, 1999.

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Chapter 2

On Writing in a Collaborative Spirit: Nancy Mairs’s Ethic of Community Susan G. Cumings

Much has been made of Nancy Mairs’s determination to “speak

the unspeakable,” her “transgressive” assertions of identity as a fully embodied, and fulfilled, crippled1 woman addressing such forbidden topics as religion, sex, and clinical depression (Ordinary Time 8, 25). Like countless other “scribbling women”2 before her, Mairs has encountered both indirect (cultural/conventional) and direct (confrontational) discouragements for her explorations of a textual self. Indirectly, she inherits, of course, Western critics’ definitions of autobiography as individual and public, recorded retrospectively in chronological prose (Gusdorf, Lejeune). Many feminist scholars have criticized this “public” tradition because “women, for obvious social reasons, have traditionally had more difficulty than men about making claims to their own public importance . . . The housewife seldom offers her life to public view” (Spacks 112).3 The stress on individuated identity has likewise been taken to task. Nellie McKay argues that “for those outside the dominant group, community identity permits the rejection of historically diminishing images of self imposed by the dominant culture” (175). Nancy Mairs seems precisely to value taking strength from community. She quotes Rosemary Radford Ruether that “it is almost impossible for an individual alone to dissent from this culture,” that “alternative cultures and communities must be built up to support the dissenting consciousness” (Ruether 128, qtd. in Mairs, Voice Lessons 23), and she praises as “adventurous young scholars” her PhD committee members who encouraged her to write a genre-defying, often-autobiographical “original literary dissertation” (which was to become Plaintext) (Voice Lessons 35). Thus encouraged, she has persisted—despite continued exposure to the

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direct scorn of fellow graduate students (mostly male poets secure in the public appropriateness of their identity and writing [Voice Lessons 22]), other professors, and, once she began to publish, some reviewers and family members as well. Mairs carries on because she defines herself as a writer. In this, she does not believe that her life or ideas are set stories waiting in her head to be told, but rather that the process of writing creates her: The only way I can find out [why and how I’ve done things] is through language, learning line by line as the words compose me. (Ordinary Time 1, italics added)

She also shows the power she accords to texts once they are created by noting in the preface to Carnal Acts that whenever she begins to lack courage or finds herself drifting toward “politer” or more “palatable” subjects, she rereads her own essays, for “if writers can’t take courage from their own work, why should they expect others to?” (10). Such a question reasserts the notion that she creates and recreates, forms and fleshes out a self through her texts: through the process of writing, and again through re-encountering texts as writer/reader. There is, it seems, also a prohibition against an unapologetically embodied woman writing with sustained and critical intellectual engagement. This essay will examine Mairs’s struggles to express herself as what I will call a “reading writer,” how her situation and re-creation of a key experience connecting writing with mutually sustaining community implicate us, too, in her ethic of collaboration, and how Mairs reinforces this ethic by illustrating for us the interweaving of discursive and physical activism in service of the community she seeks. With several published books and a number of awards (including an NEA fellowship) under her belt, when Mairs undertook to write Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer, she sought to rectify what she believed to be a past injustice. Having allowed an otherwise encouraging—and no doubt market-savvy—editor to persuade her to remove a good number of scholarly references (and attendant footnotes) from her first post-dissertation memoir, Remembering the Bone House, she felt it was time to bring them back. So the introductory essay of Bone House is reprinted in Voice Lessons in its fuller original form, with intertextual conversations and philosophical references, as well as a few reflective additions. Offering a sustained engagement of contemporary French philosophers in particular (Lacan, Cixous, Bachelard, and Merleau-Ponty, for example), Voice Lessons is thus arguably her

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most “intellectual” book,4 an argument further borne out by the fact that it is the only one of her books with an academic-style “Works Cited” section at the end.5 Bone House was not her only manuscript to be cut in this particular way either: apparently Plaintext and Carnal Acts also originally contained too much “scholarly” material and suffered similar excisions, as she notes in Voice Lessons (8, 158–59) and Carnal Acts (4). Her mention of the cutting is brief in the main text of Voice Lessons, almost as if she is shrugging it off: she can afford to be generous with that editor now, since she has finally been able to get the original published. In Carnal Acts, Mairs is less offhanded concerning the exclusion of her literary-critical-philosophical work, however, admitting to being “stung” by “the implicit message that the interest of publishers and audiences could only be piqued by part of me: the damaged part” (Carnal Acts 4). But again, she attempts to shrug it off, reassuring herself that “a writer always writes with her whole being” anyway (ibid.). It is in a long footnote that accompanies the restored text from Bone House in Voice Lessons, though, that we are given a more explicit and more revealing exploration of what it meant to have such a work cut (and, we now realize, cut and cut again). This is the passage that originally inspired the present essay: a footnote about footnotes. In it, she responds with righteous indignation to the assumption that her readers would be only “marginally literate” and willing to purchase only those texts that were “generic” or “safe” (Voice Lessons 158). More important, perhaps, though, is the expression of genuine pain, which provides a key clue to how she views herself: as a reading writer. Although [the publisher’s] editorial judgment, identical to that of the editor of Plaintext, was probably correct—given that her task was to develop marketable books and that the people drawn to personal narratives, especially ones involving chronic illness, may well not put up with feminist reflections, replete with footnotes, about literary themes—I felt torn as “life” was thus severed from “literature.” (158, ftnt. 1)

The use of the words “torn” and “severed” together connotes a violent and wholly unnatural separation and is indicative both of the degree of emotional pain Mairs experienced, and of what she desires to create in place of such rupture: a textual self in all its wholeness. For her, the wholeness of this self can neither be represented nor even brought into existence if an aspect as crucial as literary relationships is forcibly removed. Her insistence on representing textually this multifaceted wholeness stems from two deeply held beliefs: one, that she

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comes into both understanding and existence itself through writing, and two, that encounters with text, engaged acts of reading, have the power not merely to inform but ultimately to alter one’s subjectivity. “Writing has always formed the core of my identity, the means whereby I saved and shaped my life,” Mairs writes in Waist-High in the World (9). For a “clinical depressive with suicidal tendencies,” as she describes herself (A Troubled Guest 136), the idea of the words composing her is not a rhetorical fancy but has a real-life practicality to it: she writes herself into existence instead of sending herself, through overdose, into oblivion. Engaging in the act of writing is thus not only a creative or academic exercise (in either sense of the term), but also a literal refutation of her suicidal impulse, a (re)creation not just of a textual “Nancy” but of her living counterpart as well. For thirty years I’d been muttering and moaning: I want so much to write I could just die. If I kept merely wanting to write, it appeared pretty likely that I would die. Instead, I reached for a pen. I don’t mean I took up writing as a therapy . . . I’ve never been much interested in this aspect of it6 . . . I didn’t want to mend my life [after months in a mental hospital]. I didn’t want to restore my life to its old order. I’d gone through my chaos and dissolution . . . I was ready to write another life: out here, on the edge, in the wild. I have. I go on. (Voice Lessons 69–70)

Mairs reiterates the connection between writing and literally staying alive in Janice Dewey’s 1999 documentary Nancy Mairs: Waist-High in the World. Lamenting a progression in her multiple sclerosis that seemed to push writing beyond her physical capacity, Mairs says with audible anguish, “I, who always put every experience into writing, who made the experience bearable by putting it into writing: this is an experience so unbearable that I can’t get it into writing . . . it’s a sign of a kind of end . . . I don’t have the energy . . . to be the writer anymore” (Dewey, 44:30–45:04). Equating death with the cessation of writing far more than the cessation of breathing, Mairs goes on to express a desire simply not to wake up (Dewey, 50:20). In a scene filmed later, however, we learn that she has been offered a grant to write a book of essays (which becomes 2001’s A Troubled Guest); Mairs tells Dewey that on receiving the news, she remarked only half-jokingly to husband George: “Then I guess I can’t kill myself just yet,” to which he replied, with characteristic directness, “No, you can’t” (Dewey 51:16–52:20). Her self, newly born (to use Cixous’s phrase), is constituted through its practice of writing as an ongoing demonstration and embodiment

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of its identity as a writer who is actively engaged with the writings of others, and through whose writing other readers might come to engage more fully with the world. Stacey Young once hazarded the observation that “people can become free only to the extent that they are able to imagine ways of living that facilitate that freedom” (207). Mairs uses her writing in service of her freedom, or, as she once put it, “I am forever publishing brave statements that I must then make good on if I am to be a woman of my word” (Voice Lessons 127); she imagines a possible version of herself as brave, creates a brave textual persona, then works to live up to it, that is, to experience the change she has first had to imagine. Never one to stop at the solipsistic for long, however, she writes not only to enable herself but also to aid others, “[assuring them,] through the very writing, that survival . . . is possible” (129, italics added). Mairs continuously reasserts her identity as an intellectually engaged reading writer. In her footnote about her editors’ excision of her scholarly writing, she continues, The source of my distress went deeper, I think. I perceived in my editor’s rejection of my more academic writing the message that the only part of me I could interest readers in [ . . . ] was the damaged part. Now physically, there isn’t very much left of me. To be whittled away intellectually as well strikes me straight through with grief and fear. And defiance. I am more than a slowly crumpling heap of flesh, and I think about more than its awful failure (though I think about that more than I would wish). In fact I think most—now, as I have nearly all my life—about literature. I could not possibly write without the texts that give texture and context to my existence. (159)

While readers may note that she uses the same phrasing, “the damaged part,” as she does in Carnal Acts, in the “footnote” version she goes to greater lengths to analyze the impact of such a perceived message. Note how she pauses to insert the aside—“now, as I have nearly all my life”—in order to emphasize that she is growing more cerebral not merely to compensate for her body’s failure. The details may be changing, but she has always been, and remains, both body and mind, inseparable, and thus the exclusion of mind in favor of foregrounding body alone seems not only to perpetuate one of the West’s most pernicious dualisms but also to deny her a core part of her being, and one of the longstanding grounds of her selfhood. Indeed, her literary relationships—exposing her to new ideas, giving her courage by being themselves courageous, shaping her sense of self by “giving texture and context to my existence”—are the means by which Mairs

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initially began to recognize how a sense of community empowers one to be a strong individual, doing one’s best work. She describes Voice Lessons, then, as illustrating the process whereby I’ve constructed myself as a writer in relation to some of the (m)others whose writing has aroused me and nurtured and chastised me, each one drawing me on, teaching me to love her, to love myself in her, to love myself, to love: To write. (Voice Lessons 7, italics added)

The bent toward connection both to texts she has read and to readers who engage her own writings is explicit through all of Mairs’s work, and as long as she is keeping herself alive (through writing), she is doing so in a “collaborative spirit” (8), not only with and through the “mothers,” but also with another implied partner: a you, to and with whom she writes, who will be the next person to be not only sustained but also challenged by the texts s/he reads. Mairs explores this relationship explicitly, musing on how her view of her imagined reader gives shape to her texts, and recalling that she had to “unlearn” the lessons of her early writing teachers that neither “I” nor “you” had any place in good writing (11). Having reclaimed the possibility of positioning both I and you as actors in her texts, she will also use performative language to make them co-participants in her ethic of community. To the consternation of some editors and reviewers, Mairs usually likes to encourage her readers to enjoy a good deal of freedom in how they approach her texts. After all, she trusts them; she sees them as intelligent beings and recognizes that the pleasure and use people draw from reading are as much particular to the reader as they are to the texts engaged. She suggests a variety of “ways in” to Remembering the Bone House (xiv) and tells readers of Carnal Acts to “pick and choose” which essays to read, and in what order (6). She analyzes her own situatedness as reader (she is the product of “puritanical academic training”) when explaining her own habit of reading “in dogged linear fashion,” but precisely because she has reflected critically on where her preferences come from, she feels no need to impose them on others (“I don’t see why anyone else should adopt the same strategy”) (ibid.). Collaboration in both meaning making and pleasure, content and aesthetic experience, is what she is after here: “you know, as I don’t, what you prefer to read; [so] we should collaborate, it seems to me, in order to get for you as much pleasure as possible” (ibid., italics added). This is a very performance-style approach, in that, like

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a live performance, a successful outcome depends not only on the material or delivery but also on attentive involvement on the part of the recipient. It is interesting, then, that she should direct readers of Voice Lessons, her book about becoming a writer, with a heavier hand, strongly encouraging (though still refraining from dictating) that this time readers “begin at the beginning” (4). What would we miss if we didn’t? The earlier essays in this book, she tells us by way of justification, “lay out both personal experiences and theoretical premises on which the later essays rest” (ibid.). In other words, we’d miss the foundations, both personal (situated, embodied) and theoretical, on which everything else is built. Given this cue that this time the way in which she begins the book is crucial to the whole story it tells, here is where she begins: Voice Lessons 1. PEAR TREES (Voice Lessons 15)

The “number one” (“1.”) foundation of Mairs’s achieving a writing voice, which she indicates by the placement of these words, originates under the pear trees, that is, among the group of women poets that met under said trees on a series of Mondays one summer at a place called Skimmilk Farm in rural New Hampshire. (Of course, the pear trees themselves have symbolic value, bearing a womb-shaped fruit, a symbol of female fertility.) This group, as she will go on to tell, provided an atmosphere and modeled a practice that enabled her, finally, to write from her own life, with freedom of subject matter and of genre and voice in which to express it. When she wrote about her own embodied, female life experiences (“the babies, and the blood,” 22) instead of trying to emulate “muscular . . . gritty . . . guy talk” (22, 33), the men in her university poetry workshop said “yech” (22); the women of Skimmilk Farm listened and discussed. When, over time, she discovered she was better able to express herself through personal essays, that is, in prose rather than poetry, the women of Skimmilk Farm did not protest as she anticipated the academics would. “In the ivory phallus,” Mairs tells us, “the genres are like armed camps, and transgressing their boundaries can result in swift expulsion” (24); at Skimmilk Farm, they listened with open minds, asked probing questions, and laughed “in all the right places” (ibid.).7 What happened to, for, and with Mairs under the pear trees had been a fundamental, crucial, sine qua non experience undergirding

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her ability to be a writer (which is the purported topic of Voice Lessons) and so in a very real sense gave her the tools with which to stay alive. However, precisely because that gift is so important, she does not want to relate it solely through retrospective prose narrative. As the section progresses, she goes from being narrator (and character, “recipient of benevolence,” let’s call her) to modeler of the practice, to performer and thus re-creator of such life-enhancing community through the performative recruitment of her readers. The analysis I will now offer of Mairs’s not-to-be-missed pear tree lesson depends on concepts borrowed from the ethnography of speaking, among them performance, performativity, and “breakthrough into performance.” Language (or the putting to use of any code) is considered performative when, in addition to being a vessel or medium for conveying content, it enacts or accomplishes something (Austin 5–7). Richard Bauman, in his book Verbal Art as Performance, extrapolates from Austin, suggesting that performance represents a transformation of the basic referential [ . . . ] uses of language. [ . . . In] artistic performances of this kind, there is something going on in the communicative interchange which says to the auditor, “interpret what I say in some special sense; do not take it to mean what the words alone, taken literally, would convey.” (Bauman 9)

This renders the auditor an active participant, a collaborator without whom full meaning-making will fail. Mairs simulates through her text the quality of what we might call “live” performance, a situation of exchange where success depends not only on the content and/or means of delivery coming from the performer (writer/speaker), but ultimately also on the degree and character of responsiveness in the audience (readers). Furthering her exploration of how the women poets of Skimmilk Farm heard her into speech, then, Mairs demonstrates what she learned.8 She shifts from past-tense retrospective narration to presenttense assertion, recasting herself in the role of supportive and active listener to others, doing in turn for them what the women under the pear trees did for her: “Let the masters of the written word cling to their bodiless principles . . . For myself, I want another model. I want to hear this poem by this person on this muggy August morning under the pear trees” (Voice Lessons 24, italics in original). This assertion, both literal and metaphorical (as signaled by her shift into present tense), argues for the place of the particular, the singular (this

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person, this poem), and the situated (this muggy August morning). Such attention provides a gateway both to introspection for the writer (the always-evolving story that is the writer’s own) and to connection with the reader, who should in turn find ways to explore the connections and differences made manifest through the text. And so, as the listener, Mairs continues, “I want to know what [this poem] is doing in the life of her work, and in my life as well” (25). Other writers, readers, and, above all, her own listening orchestrated by the practice of writing itself have been necessary to Mairs as she has sought the possibility of a viable multifaceted selfhood. Though this writing community is literal in Mairs’s life, it moves also into the realm of the symbolic for her audience. “And really, what more can we—as writers, as artists, as human beings—do for one another?” she asks, moving from the particular (writers) out through broader categories (artists, human beings). Finally, lest we be left with any possibility that this is still only about her pear tree friends, she turns to her readers with a direct message and lets this watershed experience in her life turn into the central metaphor of her ethic of community. Drawing the “you” into whom she so often writes a “we” in which we all belong, she gives us our pathway: This is what we all can do to nourish and strengthen one another: listen to one another very hard, ask hard questions, too, send each other away to work again, and laugh in all the right places. (Voice Lessons 25)

This passage is crucial not only for what it says, but also because it uses a clearly discernible shift in voice in which to say it. Through these alterations of perspective, meaning, and voice, readers experience a “breakthrough into performance” as defined by Dell Hymes in his influential essay of that name. At such moments there is a distinct communicative shift, a change of key, to use the musical term, or, as Goffman, Romaine, and others usefully explain, a change in footing: readers no longer stand still in the same place as they did before this moment but are drawn into relationship, into a space more intimate and more demanding of their participation, which is what lets such an utterance achieve all its levels of meaning. When we hit this passage, we—as Mairs’s readers—are no longer allowed to remain passive or unresponsive. By her combined form of direct invocation and call to action, Mairs will no longer allow us not to be affected by our encounter with her. This differs from other rhetorical uses of “you” in her texts, where, although she is reminding us of

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her awareness that we are there, what is most often required of us is little more than a mental nod of assent. When she asks, “Your baby bunny wasn’t chewed up and swallowed, hind legs last, by your Irish setter, Pegeen?” (Bone House 10, Voice Lessons 118), at best we need only respond reflexively “well, no,” because the answer is obvious. A predictable answer comes with repetition, not with performance; the latter has by definition both a social and an emergent or unfolding quality (Hymes 13). When Mairs shifts from her past personal story to this hortatory present, telling us “this is what we can all do for one another” and enumerating what is needed, she brings into being a dynamic, emergent relationship between writer/speaker and reader/ audience, because suddenly, as the italics insist, we all become/are a part of this “we . . . all,” and the answer to the implied question is not obvious this time but will be personal and varied for each one who receives it, each time.9 Moreover, there is no textual warning before this call, so we have no chance to hide or dodge the questions. I? I could give courage? She is telling us we can. Not you this time, but we, for she is there too, as are others. She has told us, based on her own experience, that providing such a combination of support and challenge is a profoundly life-affirming thing to do. We are left then with saying either yes or no, changing our practice or admitting that we will (likely) not; however, either response demands reflection and has the potential to produce movement. This ethical model of self-in-community—where each person takes responsibility for making space for others, asking hard questions and giving “the courage to say the next hard thing, without fear of ridicule” (Voice Lessons 25)—is in keeping with the autotheoretical style in which Mairs does nearly all of her writing, a profound example of discursive activism, of using language to attempt to create movement and change. Although not every moment in Mairs’s texts is equally performative, her writings consistently exhibit a commitment to reflecting on her own situatedness and the dynamics produced in the engagement of others both like and unlike herself. Autotheories, as Young defines them, go beyond simply telling untold personal stories (important as that task may be) by bringing sustained and critical attention to the political forces that interact in and help shape those stories. This fits Mairs, who says for her part that the work lies not simply in releasing, but in scrutinizing the details (Carnal Acts 94), for “without a theoretical frame, [autobiographical scenes remain] purely private concerns” (Voice Lessons 36). The political practice of autotheoretical texts is thus twofold. First, in shifting back and forth between narrative and critical analysis, such texts not

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only reflect their authors’ politics of location and interconnectedness but practice it as well, demonstrating through their observations an understanding of how one’s perspective (shaped in part through one’s position/s in the social structure) must be understood as situated and contingent, and one’s position/s must be examined openly and critically in order to acknowledge and probe how position/s inform one’s claims. Mairs writes, for example, not only of her growing ability to articulate the particular effects in her own life of the societal oppression of both women and persons with disabilities, insights that permeate even her earliest works, but also of her discoveries, prompted by encounters on which she reflects, of the ways in which she, though marginalized as female and “cripple,” is privileged in multiple ways by class status, race, education, and myriad other factors. She illustrates and comments on this in several passages of Carnal Acts, including one where she acknowledges the importance of her time in the emergency ward of a city hospital in Los Angeles, because seeing other patients there who were radically different from and multiply less privileged than her gave her “a livelier sense than I’d ever had before of the existence of worlds absolutely other than, and perhaps inimical to, the one I occupy and generalize from” (Carnal Acts 13, italics added). A persistent willingness to probe both one’s situatedness and the claims that come out of one’s particular position/s is crucial to the project of bringing suppressed or marginalized perspectives into fuller view; attentive autotheoreticians (as with any theoretical practice) are aware that there are always mechanisms at work to simultaneously empower and disempower in what Young refers to as the “nexus of cross-cutting discourses” (70) that make up our society. The autotheoretical mode is not simply expository or theoretical writing, however, but is also by definition a project of discursive activism, that is, of activism undertaken through verbal and written speech. Its practitioners will persistently enter into public conversation in order to change the terms of what is permissible for public discussion and will continuously expose the critical epistemologies (their own and others’) underlying both the impositions of and challenges to the discursive “rules.” This insistence on being included is not at the cost of silencing others, of course. Quite the opposite: it intends precisely to reverse existing silences, to open spaces not only for this one self but also for further actors to enter into the conversation, recognizing that each of them in their own turn will have an effect on the overall communal gathering, shifting once again (and again, and again) the ground on which we play, the shape and character of the discursive playground.10 This is a serious business, despite my use of the word play. Well-being,

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even continued physical survival, is at stake. Yet, if the moves are done well, there is a joyful unpredictability, too, that allows challenge, creative response, and growth. Discursive activism as a linguistic strategy draws on the power of language itself as both generative and performative. Mairs herself recognizes that such discursive acts not only challenge social taboos but more specifically also work to undermine the power of the “linguistically impermissible . . . to constrict my life and the lives of others” (Carnal Acts 61–62, italics added). In addition to practicing a politics of location and interconnectedness that underscores the situated origins of all claims (the world “I occupy and generalize from”), autotheory also exposes a second key aspect of this pairing of subjectivities and epistemologies, for what is implied through this engaged and engaging reflective process is that perspectives can change, that subjectivities themselves, and even the categories on which they are based, are shifting. The work of autotheoretical writers, Young contends, not only demonstrates that “people’s understanding and the actions that follow from that understanding are not completely determined by [what is thought of as] their identity” but also attests to the “power of the discourses they have encountered to alter their own subjectivity” (Young 70, italics added). In a general sense, Mairs speaks in this vein in her essay on finding voice, remembering with gratitude her discovery that she could choose to write without taking on the guise of a traditionally male narrator so heavily favored by mainstream publishers “thanks to the bravery and honesty of [certain] women writing before me and beside me” (Voice Lessons 106–107). This invocation of those “writing before and beside me” illustrates the point that it matters what writers themselves have read, because both for good and for ill they have been affected by these discursive encounters. “For me, thinking about literature and thinking about life aren’t separate, or even separable acts,” we can remember Mairs saying (Carnal Acts 4). The belief in the salutary nature of such a process of engaged encounter is then the second core belief that fuels autotheoretical writers such as Nancy Mairs, for they see the potential of their writing both to describe their own changes as influenced by textual encounter and to create texts that make change happen in and for others. The idea that textual encounter can alter subjectivity is evident in the way Mairs engages with her church community’s lectionary (Gospel) readings, which in turn is in keeping with my response to her call to community: Each time a reading comes round again, as it will every three years, I can’t just receive it, I must engage with it, let it work on me, until it

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reveals its significance, not to all people everywhere for all time but for me right here, right now, or fails to ring true and spurs me to explore alternatives. In this way, although the words remain constant, each passage may yield fresh insight every time it returns. (A Dynamic God xi)

This passage shows three things: (1) Mairs’s belief in the performativity of texts—that meaning is not inherent in the text but is made in/ through a text’s encounter with a particular, situated reader; (2) her willingness to engage and potentially be changed by the text; and (3) a recognition that each new time she engages a text, she is doing so as someone who is already a different self than she was on the previous occasion, and so the performative interaction will not yield the same result. Articulating marginalized perspectives is thus not the point, but the strategy of autotheory is. If subjectivity can be and is altered through encounters with (new forms of) discourse, this is one among many strong reasons, I argue, why Mairs fought so hard to have the theoretical excursions excised from Remembering the Bone House reinstated in Voice Lessons. It would not be a complete picture if she did not show these encounters and the changes they provoked. Moreover, Young’s explanation of the desire of autotheoretical texts “to use discourse to affect positively the subjectivity of their readers” (70) describes well how Mairs uses her discursive activism to embody her ethic of community through her writing. It is seen in microcosm in even the simplest invocation of a “you” in her texts, a reminder that she writes to connect but flourishes when she goes full out into hortatory rhetoric, calling that “you” into community to join “I” and others, known and unknown, to become an “us,” to act as “we,” because as the details of her own life attest, such community creates broader positive change. Mairs states quite clearly in her Prelude to Voice Lessons that this bonding of the writer’s I with the reader, you, is the erotic connection where writing rests, the embodied, sensorial, relational moment where a you (reader) is drawn into a relationship with an I (writer, as represented in the text), and that in the wake of this, both have new work to do (Voice Lessons 11). It must be stressed here that when Young speaks of affecting positively the subjectivities of readers, this is a political statement with global, not just personal, implications. Encounters with autotheory are not about a “warm fuzzy” effect for the reader: though possible, it is equally likely that one might be made distinctly uncomfortable while engaging honestly with the challenging analyses that

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autotheories present. The positive processes involved here are thus akin to the coalition-building work advocated by Bernice Johnson Reagon, in that neither can be done in complete comfort and safety.11 Encounters with others must be allowed to be risky and uncomfortable if they are to be productive. Nor is fame the writer’s goal, but only “a bothersome intrusion between oneself and the work one has chosen to do in the world,” as Mairs puts it; “the work I have chosen demands connection, not separation: writing, weaving and mending relationships, serving people in need” (Voice Lessons 108). The positive for which autotheorists strive, then, is the greater good—that these writings might lead a reader to thoughtful engagement of her/ his own places in the many oppression/privilege hierarchies with the goal of tilting those relationships toward greater social justice. All of this should not suggest, however, that Mairs’s activism is uniquely discursive, nor that textual encounters are the only or most transformative ones. To close, I will examine what I call Mairs’s “dual activisms,” the discursive and the physical, demonstrating that for Mairs personally, these two work in mutually constitutive ways in service of her ethic of community. In “Nicey Nancy and the Bad Buffaloes,” an essay in A Troubled Guest on corresponding with and interceding for death row inmates, Mairs mocks by her very title the presuppositions she held when she began. Through this admittedly difficult interaction, she comes to believe that the connection between living beings ultimately transcends the categories in which we may fall (shy writer from sheltered background versus brutal killer abused since infancy, for example). She owes this insight to the marriage of discursive and direct physical activisms; she will find meaning not just through sitting at home and writing letters to inmates, or letters on their behalf, or essays about them for us, but also through traveling to attend clemency hearings, speaking against the death penalty, and by her physical, embodied presence bearing witness that “their deaths do not belong to us” even when there is little hope of diverting a capital sentence once it has been prescribed (172). We see this same dual activism—both embodied and discursive—in the Carnal Acts essay “Faith and Loving in Las Vegas,” in which even such direct actions as trespassing and getting arrested do not complete their activist mission until it has been brought into language. “Faith and Loving” deserves closer scrutiny for its demonstration once again that much of the power of autotheoretical texts derives from their critical attention to and insistence on situatedness, embodiedness, and process (Young 69). It also stands alone in Carnal Acts because it is the only piece written “not to fulfill an assignment but purely to

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give me the chance to fix and reflect upon an event that moved me profoundly” (Carnal Acts 10). To “fix” the event is to organize and shape it into narrative; to “reflect” on the event is to then examine the subjectivities and epistemologies involved both in the event as it came to pass and in its subsequent translation into text. The bare bones of the story are that she and her husband, George, joined a group who trespassed at a U.S. government nuclear weapons test site “to protest the deadly provocative desire [that such] explosions signify” (66). Seen by guards as a cripple in need of gentler treatment, Mairs was not initially arrested and handcuffed with the others. After pleading for inclusion, she was sent onto the transport bus with the others, though the climb stretched her to the far limits of her physical capacity at the time (68, 69). These are the “facts.” But Mairs then pulls back to take a broader view, considering the span of her adult life and reflecting critically on the shifting identities and relationships that allowed her to move from the “safe” forms of protest of her younger self such as painting posters and attending candlelight vigils (70) into more direct (albeit still insistently nonviolent) social action such as this. She suspects, she tells us, that her new willingness to risk arrest stems from no longer having young children who, dependent on her, would be placed in jeopardy by her decisions. This observation demonstrates her autotheoretical practice of attentiveness both to social position and its dynamic, changing nature, illustrating Young’s observation that autotheoretical texts differ from straightforwardly autobiographical accounts and from the experience-sharing that took place in CR groups in that they not only place personal experience within political contexts, but they also conceive of those contexts as multiple and shifting. (Young 14)

Mairs takes into account the position from which she enacts her current protest while understanding why a former self, situated differently (more able-bodied, but also more directly responsible for the well-being of others), would not undertake then what her current self does now. The growing, changing, moving self-in-relation is thus well represented in this essay.12 Mairs then also goes on to engage interpretations of these events that differ from her own. Starting as always with the “facts,” she describes her embarrassment when others began to cheer as she staggered forward on unsteady legs to board the bus and receive her arrest citation. “People with whole bodies sometimes mistake cripples for heroes,” she begins; “they forget that I’m just doing what they’re doing, only more clumsily” (72). Making an effort

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to view the situation through the eyes of the others, though, she comes to understand it in its larger societal and symbolic context: Such self-deprecation denies, however, my real use to [the other protesters] as an emblem of the value of this action. What they are doing [i.e., this act of civil disobedience] is hard. My presence [and physically awkward participation] assures them that it is not too hard, that all of us can do whatever we must, here, now, and wherever else we are called. This seems a good enough use to be put to. (72)

Even the phrasing of this last line, “a good enough use to be put to,” though appearing like a casual toss-off, is significant: Mairs, who is always careful with word choice, avoids here any suggestion that her crippled body’s symbolic value is a “gift” to this ad-hoc community. Refusing the hierarchization implicit in the notion that she might have a gift to bestow, she allows herself to be put to use: an exchange takes place between equals who participate in something together, one happening to take the role of potentially useful thing, the rest the role of putting that thing to use to further the goals they and she all share. In this passage, by seriously engaging the others’ reading of her body, offering as it did a counter-interpretation to her original, selffocused one, Mairs allows the others to take, albeit unwittingly, the role of askers of hard questions who send Mairs away to work again, until she comes up with something better, something that is, in the end, more in keeping with the ethic of community she professes.13 And when she tells us that “all of us can do whatever we must,” she is again allowing readers to be drawn into a community of “us,” this time moving from an ethic of community to the broader ethic of justice, commissioning us to do what we can in service of what we believe to be right, and to feel that no matter the obstacles, it is within our abilities to act. I have sought to show that Nancy Mairs engages in a variety of means of action, with varied but consistently present expectations for each of those means to contribute to lasting cultural change. Her practices of direct protest, whether legal (speaking at death penalty clemency hearings) or illegal (trespassing at a nuclear test site), are premised upon only slim hope for actual change, hope so meagre that sometimes Mairs prefers to name them not as activism at all but as acts of conscience, as “witness” (A Troubled Guest 168). Nonetheless, because even witness has the potential to contribute to that “cumulative impact” (Young 18) that brings about eventual change, each is still worthy of the efforts we put into it. However, her practice of

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discursive activism is on a different level; of the many forms of action in which she engages, this is the one the goals of which she knows through her own experience as a reading writer are entirely, imminently realizable. As one whose selfhood depends upon and is constructed and expressed through writing, Mairs offers not only personal narrative but also sustained and well developed discussion of the politics that interact at the site of her personal experiences. Such discussion asks others where they stand in relation to her (situated) observations, and how their own situatedness in the aforementioned “nexus of cross-cutting discourses” that make up our society (Young 70) informs how they see the world, the claims they make based on that vision, and the ways in which they are able or willing to engage the differing visions of others. To be informed in such ways allows by definition more openness to the discourses of other, differing subjectivities, because those too are now understood to be situated and contingent and thus do not impose but simply present themselves for engagement. Removing the sense of threat in difference displaces one of the roots of the deployment of power and control, shattering harmful silences and hegemonic impositions. Making use of her audience, knowing first-hand (through reading courageous writers and through working with the poets under the pear trees) that the readerwriter exchange has radical transformative potential, Mairs also enacts restorative community through drawing her readers performatively into a space of mutuality and potential. “This is what we all can do for one another,” she says, and we can feel a touch of awe behind this practical assertion, manifest in the declaration of our positive empowerment. With the tools now in our possession, how can we fail? And although it will require work, it is neither insurmountably complicated nor overwhelmingly painful but involves laughter and promises a life-giving sense of both uniqueness and belonging. Mairs’s writing encourages the transgression (even the abolition) of many boundaries: identity boundaries (artificially separating writer, mother, cripple, wife, feminist, Catholic, mental patient, intellectual, activist), writer-reader boundaries (historically forbidding the identification in print of either an “I” or a “you”), genre boundaries (separating poetry from prose, or “academic” from “popular” [or “marketable”] writing), text-life boundaries (not only because writing about literature and writing about life are not separable acts [Carnal Acts 4], but also because we falsely assume that acts of writing produce only static artifacts when they have the potential to break through into performance, creating spontaneous live interactions

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leading to positive social change). By undertaking to narrate, interrogate, model, and performatively create communities of justice, she passes on the certain knowledge, borne of experience, that endeavors undertaken—personally or collectively—in a collaborative spirit are highly likely to succeed. Armed with such knowledge, we in turn may both foster such community and continue to engage from that place in whatever forms of activism move us, certain that our worlds are changing for the better. Mairs has said that the writer’s task is to make literature “constellations of language that make sense of, and celebrate, what it is to be human” (Carnal Acts 61–62). Her ethic of community suggests that the best purpose we have as humans, one that is within our reach, may be to encourage the energetic mix of creativity, wholeness, hard work, and a striving for justice, elements that collectively form what we may call peace. “One cannot make the world’s peace, by its very nature, in solitude,” Mairs reminds us. “Peace must be woven intentionally, meticulously, clasped hand by clasped hand, across the desert spaces between us” (78–79). Her works help us feel that this is possible, and her joy lets us see that it is worth it. Notes 1. I follow Mairs’s own choice of the term cripple; see “On Being a Cripple” (Plaintext, 9–20). 2. The term is Hawthorne’s; Mairs reclaims it as an ironic badge of honor. 3. See also Heilbrun, Smith (1987, 1993). 4. It is also, as I will show, where she most clearly articulates her ethic of community, turning to simple, directive language to deliver a lesson in mutual aid. 5. Ordinary Time and A Troubled Guest do offer suggestions for further (general) reading. 6. Mairs also disassociates writing from therapy in Carnal Acts (61). 7. They thus provide the sort of refuge in the company of sameness Bernice Johnson Reagon allows is necessary periodically for one’s health, albeit only if inhabited temporarily; see my discussion of Reagon’s coalition politics, below. 8. Nelle Morton’s phrase “hearing into speech” describes engaged, empathetic listening among women that does not require the speaker to be eloquent but gives uninterrupted time for whatever honesty the speaker most needs to express (1985:128). 9. No matter how many times Mairs asks, I, as a reader, will never have had a setter named Pegeen, but each time I read Mairs’s encouragement to community, I respond to the call to intentional engagement

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10. 11.

12.

13.

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in ways particular to the time and place in my life and the communities of which I am a part. I echo here Ledbetter’s call for greater inclusivity on the “literary critical playground” (6). As mentioned earlier, Reagon does allow that taking periodic refuge with our similar peers may, especially for minorities, be a temporary means of gathering strength, because “when somebody else is running a society, and you are the one who would be put out to die, it gets too hard to stay out in that society all the time” (541). Skimmilk Farm provides this for Mairs: among women, away from the overprivileged men at her university (and those women who behave like them), she is nourished and emerges better positioned to engage difference and not be shut down. We see a similar sense of the time-boundedness of any self (and any views a self might hold) in her preface to the 1995 reissue of Remembering the Bone House, where she explains that although she sees in retrospect some “glaring holes” in the perspectives expressed in this text, she has declined to alter it, preferring it be reissued as it first was written, “trusting that it remains, in the best faith I could command, what I knew when I knew it” (xii). Remember, we can all do this: “listen very hard, ask hard questions, send each other away to work again” (Voice Lessons 25).

Works Cited Alcoff, Linda. “Justifying Feminist Social Science.” Feminism and Science. Ed. Nancy Tuana. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. Austin, John L. How to Do Things with Words. Ed. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà. 2nd Ed. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1975. Bauman, Richard. Verbal Art as Performance. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1977. Dewey, Janice L. Nancy Mairs: Waist-High in the World. Video Documentary. 2003. Limited distribution; available through the U of Arizona Library archives. Genette, Gérard. Figures III. Paris: Seuil, 1972. Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1974. Gusdorf, Georges. “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography” (1956). Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980, 28–48. Heilbrun, Carolyn. Writing a Woman’s Life. New York: Ballantine, 1988. Hymes, Dell. “Breakthrough into Performance.” Folklore: Performance and Communication. Ed. Dan Ben-Amos and Kenneth S. Goldstein. The Hague: Mouton, 1975, 11–74. Ledbetter, Mark. Victims and the Postmodern Narrative, or, Doing Violence to the Body: An Ethic of Reading and Writing. New York: St. Martins, 1993.

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Lejeune, Philippe. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil, 1975. Mairs, Nancy. Plaintext. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1986. ———. Remembering the Bone House: An Erotics of Place and Space. 1989. “With a New Preface.” Boston: Beacon, 1995. ———. Ordinary Time: Cycles in Marriage, Faith and Renewal. Boston: Beacon, 1993. ———. Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer. Boston: Beacon, 1994. ———. Carnal Acts. Boston: Beacon, 1996. ———. A Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories. Boston: Beacon, 2001. ———. A Dynamic God: Living an Unconventional Catholic Faith. Boston: Beacon, 2007. McKay, Nellie Y. “Race, Gender and Cultural Context in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road.” Life/Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography. Ed. Bela Brodzski and Celeste Schenck. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988. 175–88. Morton, Nelle. The Journey Is Home. Boston: Beacon, 1985. Reagon, Bernice Johnson. “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century.” 1983. Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology. Ed. Margaret Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins. 4th Ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2001. 540–46. Romaine, Suzanne. Bilingualism. 2nd Ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Disputed Questions: On Being a Christian. New York: Orbis, 1989. Smith, Sidonie. A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. ———. Subjectivity, Identity and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. Spacks, Patricia Meyers. “Selves in Hiding.” Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism. Ed. Estelle C. Jelinek. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980. 112–32. Young, Stacey. Changing the Wor(l)d: Discourse, Politics, and the Feminist Movement. New York: Routledge, 1997.

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Chapter 3

On Depression Narratives: “Hence, into the dark, we write . . . ” Hilary Clark

“My life is a lesson in losses. I learn one at a time.”

Thus Nancy Mairs concludes about her life with chronic depression

and multiple sclerosis.1 The tone of her essays is always like this— blunt, no-nonsense, witty—they rarely lament and never whine, even when recording the signs of progress of her MS and embarrassing accidents such as incontinence and falls. As Mairs recalls in “On Being a Cripple,” “Early on I vowed that, if I had to have MS, by God I was going to do it well. This is a class act, ladies and gentlemen. No tears, no recriminations, no faint-heartedness” (15). Any confessions to feelings of shame about her disabilities are ironically framed. For instance, she writes, “I cannot view these lapses without shame. My life often seems a series of small failures to do as I ought” (“On Being a Cripple” 12). It could only be ironic, and bitterly so, to see a disabling, life-transforming illness in terms of failure to observe proprieties. Mairs treats chronic depression and its place in her life in the same ironic manner. Her early essays “On Living behind Bars” and “On Touching by Accident,” both in Plaintext (1986), recount episodes of depression, hospitalization, and suicide attempts; in later essays and in her memoir Remembering the Bone House (1989), she returns to these themes to explore, as she puts it in “On Living behind Bars,” “the structure of my dis-ease, the ways in which I had shaped my desires and disappointments into the depression that frames my way of being” (150). Like MS and other aspects of her life—being married, bearing and adopting children, becoming a Catholic—depression receives a deft, often droll treatment. As confessions, however, her

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writings on depression are not always funny. To invert Leonard Cohen’s lines in his poem “Anthem,” there are cracks in Mairs’s controlled, upbeat writing through which the darkness gets in.2 In the context of recent disability theory, this experience of darkness—of suffering in disability and chronic illness—is not much emphasized. It seems to have been subordinated to a view of disability as a social construction produced by an oppressive ableist society. To talk about what one has suffered and lost no longer seems quite decent from this perspective. However, the reality is that depression involves suffering, and this psychological pain should not be subordinated to the philosophical and activist mission of freeing from the stigma of disability in general and of depression in particular. A close reading of Mairs’s essays reveals the difficulty of achieving balance between these two concerns. In A Troubled Guest, Mairs writes, “Perhaps because I have embraced a faith with crucifixion at its heart, I do not consider suffering an aberration or an outrage to be eliminated at any cost . . . It strikes me as an element intrinsic to the human condition” (146). Knowing this, and knowing she “must simply endure in order to learn from [depression]” (146), Mairs nevertheless also writes to mitigate her own suffering. Although as an autobiographical writer she writes in the confessional tradition, aspiring to convey the truth of a life of depression, she simultaneously finds ways to deflect this truth, and thereby to manage the shame of confessing to an illness that remains highly stigmatized. Thus I argue that her work should be read symptomatically. In its stylishness and colorful use of metaphor, her writing is not always what (following Susan Sontag) she might like it to be: “wholly transparent, revealing not illness as metaphor but illness as illness” (“Literature of Personal Disaster” 129). Rather, in its work of integrating a life her narrative style is haunted by disintegration, shame, and loss, “haunted by what its ostensible mastery excludes” (Zimmerman 478).3 Indeed, in “The Literature of Personal Disaster,” Mairs asks with both mock and real distaste why, over the years, she has written so much about living with depression and MS: “Why do I, and others like me, write this stuff?” (125). Writing essays is therapeutic, she replies: “into the dark, we write” to survive (135).4 Yet the following analysis resists this recuperation of writing as antidepressant and focuses instead (in true depressive fashion) on the textual moments where Mairs—an author who conveys and models enlightened understanding of disability and its social meanings—lets the darkness in, moments where her metaphors and other rhetorical strategies convey the loss and shame that she might wish them to control.

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Mairs’s chief metaphor for living with(in) depression is conveyed in the title of the essay “On Living behind Bars.” The essay contains a moving narrative of one woman’s quest to come to terms with depression, agoraphobia, and the life-or-death necessity of writing itself. Mairs shapes “On Living behind Bars” around illness, crisis, and provisional recovery; she explores the meaning of a life torn open at intervals by suicide attempts. Shame is a recurring theme. Mairs writes of shame in order to counter the silence imposed on disability, mental illness, and the female body in general: “I can subvert [shame’s] power . . . by acknowledging who I am, shame and all, and, in doing so, raising what was hidden, dark, secret about my life into the plain light of shared human experience” (“Carnal Acts” 92). However, writing against shame is not as straightforward as Mairs indicates in this neat divide between the secret darkness of shame and the shared light of communication. She claims that in thus speaking up she has gone beyond shame: “I’m shameless, you might say. You know, as in ‘shameless hussy’? A woman with her bare brace and her tongue hanging out” (96). Many readers take great inspiration from this passage, but shame is not so easily surmounted. Shamelessness is not freedom from shame, in fact, but rather a symptom or mask of shame; it is “shame displaced” (Wurmser 261), a point Mairs acknowledges elsewhere: “Frankness itself functions as a kind of screen . . . because it deflects rather than kindles curiosity” (“The Writer’s Thin Skin” 138). This paradox is not just another psychoanalytic conundrum. Writing, or art in general, can certainly ease the suffering of shame, but it often does so by “screening” or not showing directly. Showing a “bare brace,” like confessing to suicide attempts and psychiatric hospitalization, conveys a struggle against shame, not a triumph over it. The struggle is ongoing, knotted into the language and rhetorical strategies of the text. Mairs’s metaphors and wit involve both showing and hiding, reproducing on a narrative level the very ambiguity that characterizes the affect of shame. The title phrase “On Living behind Bars” bears revisiting in light of this textual ambiguity. The image suggests the circumscribed life of an animal in a cage or an inmate in a prison cell where movement and freedom are limited. However, the first sentence contradicts these associations: “In truth, the windows and doors were not barred” (125). This contradiction is surprising, but the reader realizes quickly that Mairs is referring to a psychiatric hospital, Metropolitan State Hospital in Waltham, Massachusetts, which— although not barred—imprisons its inmates as much with medication and lack of stimulation as with locks on the doors. Looking back

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at a younger, frightened self in 1967, the more experienced essayist writes that her psychotherapist “turned [her] over to the keepers of madwomen where whatever trouble I might cause could be closely contained” (126). Although the ward she is locked into does not abuse its patients openly, nonetheless she is forced to eat a “horrid, lumpy” dietary supplement (135)—either that, or IV feeding—to compensate for her weight loss. After six months she begins to look forward to her release, successfully negotiating a return to work. One might think the prospect of release from hospital a happy one, but immediately after meeting with her boss, Mairs tries to kill herself: “In a seamless movement I then drove home instead of back to Met State. . . . and swallowed one Darvon after another” (138). She is taken back into hospital, where “the terrible, complicated, demanding world . . . [is] kept at bay” (125). Sometimes freedom is terrifying for the hospitalized patient, especially for one, like Mairs, suffering from agoraphobia. Prison bars are not the worst fate a person might face. When a woman’s “trouble” with her traditionally defined “normal life” has not been addressed, this life of being a good wife and mother becomes another sort of prison. As Mairs concludes of this transition, “I did not . . . get well. I got functional, which is another condition altogether. . . . My ignorance of the difference . . . almost cost me my life” (147). Like other women’s literary narratives of mental illness, “On Living behind Bars” resists reader expectations for a contrast between the terrible inside of the hospital and the wonderful outside of everyday life, working instead toward the more nuanced position that psychiatric institutions can feel oppressive, but life on the outside may itself constitute an overwhelming challenge. At the end of the essay, with the young Mairs out of Met State but still behind the bars of chronic depression, the penal metaphor appears in a literally positive light: Mairs provides a view of her prison cell as a room of her own, equipped at its “precise center . . . [with] a desk holding a black fountain pen, a bottle of black ink, and a stack of yellow legal-size pads, some of which are inscribed in a round black hand” (154), where the windows admit “wide bands of light” (153). However, this consoling image of imprisonment as freedom does not displace a statement made just before: “All the bars are in place, and the cement of guilt and disappointment is harder than any of the tools that I’ve found in here with me have been able to chip” (153). Could it be that the black fountain pen, black ink, and yellow paper (or now a computer)—even if placed at the “precise center” of a life, writing and rewriting it—are not enough to chip away the cemented

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years of “guilt and disappointment,” a life of losses “learn[ed] one at a time”? A necklace of beads that has been broken and restrung provides another hopeful metaphor for a life with depression, as positive as that of the prison cell letting in light. At the opening of “On Living behind Bars,” the author reflects on the attendant memory losses produced by her electroconvulsive therapy treatments at Met State: This narrative will be full of . . . gaps and lapses, because during the latter part of my stay my brain was zapped twenty-one times. . . . What I have left are mostly random images, some in remarkable detail and clarity, but few embedded in any logically continuous context. I had once, many years later, a string of black clay Mexican beads on a nylon thread that snapped suddenly, in the middle of a class I was teaching, scattering little fish and birds and balls every which way. My students scrambled, retrieving many of them, and my foster son restrung them, in a new pattern necessitated by the missing pieces, into a shorter necklace. (125–26)

The hope expressed here is that, although depression and its treatments disrupt identity and the linear narrative of a life, one can redeem one’s losses by rearranging the pieces. Mairs positions this hopeful creativity as a core trait of her art: “I [have] begun to concatenate my experiences into patterns distinct from the narrative ground in which they are embedded: This process I call essay-writing” (127). The essay form allows the writer to make sense of the trauma of psychiatric hospitalization and to retrieve from the past what she can, restringing her life from the perspective of time lost and the maturer understanding gained. However, this creative power is not wholly transformative. Although “one can, to some extent, recover one’s losses, . . . the bits that roll under the shelves, into the corners, out the door are gone for good” (126). One is working with fewer memories, less of a life, than before and must make do with the remnants. Recalling Mairs’s point in “On Being a Cripple,” there is no possibility of “view[ing] these lapses without shame” (12). One must be resourceful in accounting for these gaps (in one’s life and curriculum vitae) to others. Although Mairs implies that such lacunae often characterize a woman’s life— “six months in a mental hospital in an odd way has rendered me normal,” another “Mrs. Middle America” (149)—this “normalcy” is usually kept hidden. Thus the metaphor of the broken and restrung necklace allows Mairs to acknowledge loss while at the same time asserting the possibility of making sense of it through the patterns and sequencing of the essay form.

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Studying the patterns that emerge from these altered “concatenations” of her life, Mairs devotes the final pages of the essay to the significance of chronic depression in her life. New metaphors emerge here. For instance, while depression can break the thread or narrative of a life, it is also itself a thread that has “twist[ed] itself into the fibers of my existence, a continuous strand of unusual tensility . . . woven into my way of looking at the world” (149)—a tough thread that she cannot tug out without unraveling her identity. Depression frames and disrupts, but it also rescues. She calls it “the life ring that kept me from going down in a sea of womanly graces,” considers it the adolescent girl’s “response to the struggle not to go under . . . sinking into acceptance of that [feminine] space which crabbed and cramped me. I will not be the little woman, my depression cried” (141–42). Personified, her mood disorder speaks here as a bit of a feminist, celebrating depression as protest but perhaps glossing over the lethargy, apathy, and despair that characterize acute episodes of this condition. The narrative freedom derived from the reorganization of events in a non-chronological fashion also allows Mairs to change the darkness-to-light ratio from one text to another. In her memoir Remembering the Bone House: An Erotics of Place and Space, Mairs reworks the story of a woman’s life told in her earlier essays, taking up the thread of depression again in a longer but still not linear narrative that emphasizes the painful experiences of depression. The memoir begins in 1979, when she is married with two children and has been diagnosed with the MS that will accompany her through life. The narrative begins by isolating a moment that encapsulates the presence of illness in her past, her present, and her future: “On a glittering August morning in 1979, at the edge of a salt marsh in Kennebunkport, Maine, I made a psychic sick” (1). The psychic is unable or unwilling to do a reading of her client’s life. While this opening uses humor to manage a painful and frightening experience, the psychic’s headache and blurred vision are nevertheless presented as significant omens of psychological (and eventually physical) deterioration: “Although I didn’t know it yet, I was already spiraling into a full-blown depressive episode, and by the same time a year later I would be almost lost” (3). The psychic’s symptoms prefigure the author’s illnesses, revealing more of the future than she realizes. As in “On Living behind Bars,” the memoir sets Mairs’s struggle with depression in the context of a whole life, one marked significantly by the death of the author’s young father when she was a small child. This loss can be situated among the other family dynamics (her marriage,

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her postpartum difficulties) that trigger Mairs’s major depressive episodes. In Remembering the Bone House, Mairs retells the story of her breakdown that is narrated in “On Living behind Bars.” In this more comprehensive autobiographical context, the story of panic, breakdown, hospitalization, and attempted suicide takes up less narrative space, but similar thematic connections are drawn between symptoms of agoraphobia and depression and the familial and social contexts that produce them. The symptoms are characterized primarily by the author’s guilty conflicts over traditional feminine roles—wanting to work outside the home yet feeling the siren call of motherly and wifely duty—at a time, the late 1960s, just before the second wave of the U.S. women’s movement made the public aware of this dissatisfaction and guilt as commonplace. The memoir’s new version of events differs from the earlier essay in using dreams and dream logic to evoke the surreal psychological theater of these internal conflicts. At points during the hospitalization narrative, dreams are recounted without being framed as such, without being differentiated from the ongoing account, creating a disorienting effect. Mairs writes, for instance, “I am a character in a Victorian novel . . . I have a yapping little terrier for a Seeing Eye dog, whom I don’t like” (205), a quirky detail amidst an otherwise familiar territory: Nancy signs herself into Met State and stays for six months, swallowing her medicines and an overdose of Darvon while rejecting occupational therapy and most food (210). Yet as in a dream, this familiar territory is now estranged, as if viewed through a fog or a layer of water. Mairs calls the past “an oneiric house” (14), using a term from filmmaking to indicate the dream-state her memoir occasionally utilizes. This dreamy and at times nightmarish retelling of her institutionalization emphasizes eyes and vision problems foreshadowed by the psychic’s headache and blurred vision at the outset of the memoir. Her husband George is her “only consistent connection with that outside world,” but “even his edges are blurred” (206). Among the other inmates she feels “like a transparency among transparencies, insubstantial figures smeared against the ward’s green walls by the light seeping through the small-paned windows” (206–7). She and the others swallow “translucent green” pills and “dissolve slowly, slowly, swimming through murk . . . round and round, poor and drab as guppies in a muddy tank” (207). These alterations resulting from the dream-work of memory and revision make this retelling more disturbing in tone and imagery than “On Living behind Bars.” In this new context of murky vision, Mairs foregrounds her inlaws’ “shame at [her] condition,” evident in their failure to visit her at

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Met State (206). Shame and disturbed vision go together in important ways: shame involves broken eye contact and thereby reduces connection with another person (Nathanson 138). Shamed, feeling defective, one drops one’s eyes before the condemning eye of the other. Thus Mairs’s dream of disliking the Seeing Eye dog is apt: shame looks away before the all-Seeing Eye of the norm yet still judges with it—perceiving the self as deficient or, in Erving Goffman’s term, “spoiled.” The detail of the Seeing Eye dog could also suggest that the dreamer is blind; she cannot see (or avoids seeing) herself being judged as deficient. Against these figures of self-judgment, Mairs asserts, one must continue to write, even if the shame is never quite contained and one sees oneself metaphorically as a muddy guppy. The shamed self is a disintegrating self. A dialectic of disintegration and reconnection is particularly well illustrated in Mairs’s prose poem “Parts” from In All the Rooms of the Yellow House (1984). As in a dream—one as unpleasant as the dream of the Seeing Eye dog—a woman walking begins to lose or relinquish her body parts: She began to let go. At first she released just the forefinger of her left hand . . . [then] she let the whole hand go. Then the other. Piece after piece, as her stride lightened and then ceased. When she became aware of her lightness, she looked down and was startled to see that her whole body had disappeared. . . . Along the sidewalk behind her were the various parts. (44)

In a matter-of-fact manner, she “return[s] along the sidewalk, picking up the pieces and attaching them” (44). This process could be seen as a metaphor for writing itself, which repairs the breaks of the past, but the gruesome image should not be so easily explained away as a positive transformation. Just as (as Mairs acknowledges in “On Living behind Bars”) some beads from the broken necklace roll away, lost for good, in “Parts” the pieces of the body that fall off undergo significant (and not entirely positive) alterations. For instance, “The little finger of the left hand had been slightly mashed by a careless boot” (44). Writing or symbolization in general can be understood as a process of reparation both atoning for and repairing what one has broken, a process essential for the reintegration of the guilty self (Klein); nonetheless, this process is imperfect and cannot (and perhaps should not) prevent the cracks and breaks of a depressed life from showing. There are many ways to take control of shame, to pull back from “the edge of the world,” from falling “into a void even blacker

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than the one that kept medieval sailors in charted waters” (“On Touching” 22). In “On Living behind Bars,” the agoraphobic narrator pulls back from that black void by developing the extended metaphor of imprisonment; prison may lock one in, but it also keeps bad things out. The essay “On Touching by Accident” counters anxiety by constructing a literary paradox of life in death, and vice versa, against the ironic backdrop of Halloween festivities, providing another good example of the humorous depression narrative that attempts to fix the darkness of psychological damage and yet does not entirely contain it. Here Mairs recounts a single event, a failed suicide attempt, in the light of a chance encounter, not unlike the encounter with the psychic at the opening of her memoir. The essay allows her to return to the incident, both evoking and containing its mystery by composing it as a kind of parable. Among witches and pirates, the suicide-to-be puts on a “plum blazer” and goes to a Halloween party as herself. Returning home, planning her death, the woman on the verge of swallowing handfuls of Elavil finds herself interrupted by a knock on the door. She opens it and finds that her visitor is a clown in a “pink ruffled suit” (23)—an adolescent, as it turns out, who has been drinking too much beer and needs to pee. The little clown eventually runs off, and Mairs returns to the business of her suicide. This accidental conjunction of two strangers is perfect material for Mairs’s ironic touch, but there are hints of abjection conveyed by an external perspective on the suicide attempt (that of her husband, who discovers her after eighteen hours), a horrified viewpoint that resists transformation by the essayist’s magic wand, the black fountain pen. Despite the author’s controlling wit, the body speaks its shame: After a few hours on a heart monitor and the obligatory psychiatric interview, I was pronounced a survivor and sent home. I had at some point roused having to go to the bathroom and, unable to get even to my hands and knees, had dragged myself around my apartment, battering my body and smearing the floor with blood and urine; but I heal quickly. Before long the bruises faded and the scabs fell off. (23–24)

Most interesting here is the immediate reassertion of control upon the mention of the body’s unconscious behavior and loss of control over its functions. Unlike the little pink clown who finds a bathroom in time, the semiconscious woman—who has also been drinking beer, in order to get the Elavil down “three by three” (23)—does not make it and “smear[s]” her bodily fluids on the floor. These are ugly and embarrassing details, but a brisk semicolon intervenes after “blood

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and urine,” forcefully turning the reader’s head from the sight of her smeared body and battered knees to the reassurance of her efficient process of healing. Not only does healing come, it comes “quickly,” the signs of abjection fading “before long.” Mairs plays the clown’s double here—twinned in the colors they wear and the beer that they drink, as well as their shared need to pee—forcing humor and distraction into a painful narrative passage and thus containing the excess of the suffering body. Despite the presentation of the incident as a sort of parable, the moral of this tale cannot be easily summed up. Mairs offers ongoing rumination in place of the usual conclusion, writing, “I return to the thought of it, amused and puzzled and more than a little anxious about its significance” (21). Thus she distances herself from the event and describes her feelings about the memory in her characteristically complex way, both honest and defensive. She is anxious, yes, but the single phrase “more than a little anxious” both adds to (“more than”) and takes away from (“a little”) anxiety. The little clown reappears, evoked as a kind of lucky fairy, and the essay ends with a dreamy kind of wonder (the house of the past remains oneiric): She entered my life so lightly this child, needing only a place to empty her bladder so that she wouldn’t disgrace herself, at just the moment when I was planning to leave, though she couldn’t have known that. And I wonder whether I have done just the same thing myself, wandering through some other’s desolation in my costume—tight jeans, soft shirt, dusky velveteen blazer, cane—needing some quick favor on my way. How many times? And when? (24)

In meditating in this way on chance conjunctions and on “what if” scenarios, Mairs closes this essay on depression and suicide just as she titles it: speculatively, with a rhetorical displacement of the bodily abjection she acknowledges just once in the essay—in passing. In a later essay, “Carnal Acts,” Mairs returns to the same suicide attempt, presenting it quite graphically—“my hair matted, my face swollen and gray, my nightgown streaked with blood and urine” (94)—because, Mairs asserts, suicide must be thus conveyed in the language of “real life.” It “simply refuses to be spoken of authentically in high-flown romantic language. It’s too ugly. Too shameful. Too strictly a bodily event” (93). Yet the double gesture of the brisk semicolon again takes back the bodily shame, this time in the form of a sentence insisting on laughing at and with the suicide: “And, yes, too funny as well, though people are sometimes shocked to find

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humor shoved up against suicide” (93). Her memoir likewise reenacts this turn to humor. Ignoring the reader’s potential squeamishness, she gives more graphic details about “trying to get up and go to the bathroom. I couldn’t stand, couldn’t even kneel. I squirmed forward using my feet and elbows, and when they were all bloody I turned over and scooted on my back, battering the knobs of my spine” (253). Amid the awful details, the colloquial word “scooted” skews the horrific scene to comedy. Even if there is something funny about suicide (or at least botched attempts at suicide), the turn to humor here is also, I contend, a shame response, a deflection away from the blood and the battering. In A Troubled Guest (2001), a more recent book, Mairs meditates on death—perhaps the most shameful bodily event of all—focusing mostly on a sequence of family deaths. She was present at the last moments of her mother, her stepfather, and her foster son who was shot and eventually taken off life support. In this book she dwells particularly on the moment of passing, when the familiar person becomes an uncanny corpse. Of her mother’s moment, she writes, We sat silently, gazing at the still form—paper-pale skin, gaping cyanic lips—that had been Mother and now suddenly, inexplicably, was not. Mother was gone. . . . Mother was there—wasted and sedated, to be sure, but recognizably herself—and then she wasn’t. (52–53)

It is in this book on the disintegration of others, not of Nancy Mairs, that the author comes closest to the kind of writing she defines as desirable in “Carnal Acts,” a writing that speaks “authentically” of the bodily event, staying with it, not turning away. Although she must draw, still, on figurative language—“paper-pale skin,” “cyanic lips”—to convey the pallor of the dead body, I think here she is writing more directly into the dark than she does in “On Touching by Accident.” Writing of her son Ron’s death, she notes that, just after his passing, the nurse offers to lift Ron’s head so George can remove the silver chain from around his neck: “later he realized that she had wanted to make sure Ron’s brain didn’t spill from his skull, and he was grateful” (188). There is both horror and restraint here, but no evasion, and the scene gains extra impact in this way. Given this example of writing simply into the darkness of others’ deaths, why is there, in writing of herself, such a sparkling array of rhetorical or defensive devices for keeping anxiety at bay? Although Mairs endeavors to write “into the dark” of depression, why does she sometimes draw back from this darkness? Part of the answer resides in the nature of language itself, particularly of techniques such as

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metaphor, which as tropes turn away from literal meaning. In writing of her own desire for death, it is not surprising that she draws upon images that both approach and turn away from the unspeakable referent—the body of the suicide. Thus, in “On Living behind Bars” the prison metaphor conveys some of the qualities of depression—its rigidity and frequent impregnability (by medication and other treatments), its tendency to make one withdraw from others into smaller and smaller hiding places. At the same time, however, the metaphor exceeds its referent. Mairs’s essay begins with a prison (the hospital) for “madwomen” and ends with the fairly comfortable cell of the writer’s depression as an existential condition, a condition without which—as implied in the writing desk, paper, and ink at the very center of the cell—she might not write essays at all. Likewise, when we read in “On Touching by Accident” that depression is a black void or uncharted waters (22) presumably full of monsters, we see its emptiness and terrible otherness. However, the medieval sailors who so feared those waters are domesticated in this essay into the kissing pirate and devil at the Halloween party—the “harlequins and witches and men with gigantic bosoms and miniskirts” who flirt with the diabolical subtext of Halloween and then go home, take off their costumes, and sleep it all off. A metaphor, then, can expand to include everything or, as in “On Touching by Accident,” can be deflated wittily. In either case, while tropes hint at the unspeakable suffering of suicidal depression, they must turn away from it to do so. Like metaphor, the essay form itself, in its traditional open-ended, exploratory form, writes around and near and sometimes directly into the dark and yet does not emerge with a neat “nugget of truth” (Woolf 4). If Mairs swerves from the truth, she approaches it in the roundabout way of her chosen genre, through loops and digressions, through the minor but fascinating character, exemplary scene, or telling incident that have always characterized the essay. This struggle for and against the truth has traditionally characterized the confession itself as the predecessor and “authorizer” of modern autobiography. Leigh Gilmore argues that “authority in autobiography springs from its proximity to the truth claim of the confession,” which is “a form in which telling the truth or not telling the truth can meet with dramatic and occasionally fatal results” (55, 58). Women have been burned as witches, and innocents executed after forced confessions. In Michel Foucault’s formulation, “The confession is a ritual of discourse . . . that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who

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requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile” (61–62). In committing herself to telling the truth of her life, a writer who lives with disabilities faces not only a sympathetic and admiring readership (as Mairs certainly does) but also the occasional hostile reviewer and, more importantly, her own internalized authority that both compels the confession and judges it severely: “Telling the truth may be a form of punishment, as well as an effort to stave it off” (Gilmore 55).5 Mairs’s writing over the years has been her own 1001 Nights, both a pleasure and an unrelenting compulsion: as she puts it, “I have to write. If I avoid that mandate, I wind up trying to kill myself” (“On Keeping Women In/Out” 104). For us, her compulsion to confess is both a source of enlightenment and a reminder of how tricky it really is to speak without shame the truth about suffering. In fact, Nancy Mairs aims beyond personal confession; she writes to investigate and condemn the social norms that exacerbate depression in women, the norms of femininity against which women are forever measuring themselves and finding themselves wanting (in both senses). Her essays are exposés of the ableist and sexist norms that threaten to render her, and women in general, defective. At base, however, her essays are always personal, achieving their general insights on the basis of her own experience. As exposés, the essays expose the self: the brilliant feminist work they do on the sources of women’s shame derives from personal shame; they draw their power from the anxiety of self-exposure and, paradoxically, from the rhetorical strategies that defend against this anxiety. The chief of these, besides vivid metaphor, is Mairs’s wit. Humor is a powerful defense against shame (Nathanson 449). As feminist and other comedians show, however, humor that derives from shame can help one defend the integrity of the self. Likewise, if autobiography as “self-representation” (Couser 352) counters silent shame, it does so by drawing on its enduring emotional power. In emphasizing rhetorical defenses, I am not saying that Mairs, in her stylish wit, is any less insightful or courageous as a writer. Her essays have been inspirational for many women, whether they share the author’s disabilities or not, and the implication of this argument points to the difficulty of narrating depression, not to shortcomings in this author’s works. Her essays participate in the tradition of feminist autobiographical writing, having the goal of bringing women together, promoting insight into the devaluation of the marginalized and oppressed. Rita Felski summarizes this view of autobiographical writing: “Like consciousness-raising, the confessional text makes

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public that which has been private . . . in its pursuit of the truth of subjective experience . . . and encourage[s] reader identification” (84). Felski also argues, however, that women’s personal writing—like writing by other “oppressed groups”—is marked by “conflicts and tensions,” ambivalence: “The act of confession can potentially exacerbate rather than alleviate problems of self-identity” (88). From a feminist perspective, Mairs’s essays, like women’s memoirs in general, serve a mentoring role. As Janet Mason Ellerby says of such memoirs, they “show us how to tell our truths. . . . The memoir offers a threshold from which we step into the dynamic, complex experience of real women’s lives where we are not passive observers and from which we do not reemerge unchanged” (xx). Against those who would shame both her and other women—the psychiatrists, doctors, nurses, and bureaucrats that populate her essays—Mairs has continued to write, insisting and showing that chronic illness has personal meanings beyond the perspective of biomedicine (Kleinman 3–6). Yet this writing as practice of feminist enlightenment is also grounded in the darkness of suffering and shame. It conveys the reality of depression while attempting to “draw a magic circle” around it, to practice a “magical control” (Wurmser 297–98). For her readers, the author’s charm lies precisely in this all-too-human ambivalence.

Notes 1. “On Being a Cripple” (19). Strictly speaking, Mairs is referring here to multiple sclerosis. However, I will argue that she presents depression as loss as well. 2. Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”: “There is a crack in everything. / That’s how the light gets in.” 3. Zimmerman is referring to Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon (New York: Scribner, 2001), not to Mairs’s work. However, he leads up to Solomon with a similarly “symptomatic” reading of Mairs’s “On Living behind Bars” (476–78), and I think the term “haunted” applies just as much to Mairs’s work as a way to understand the defensive strategies she deploys. 4. At least in Plaintext (1986). Eight years later, in Voice Lessons, Mairs claims that she did not “[take] up writing as therapy. Although I don’t doubt that writing can have remedial value, I’ve never been much interested in this aspect of it, maybe because I associate it with my months in a mental hospital” (69). As Mairs claims in “On Not Liking Sex,” essayists are allowed to change their minds: their texts “do not end but revolve and reflect and spin out new constellations of meaning day after day, page after page” (92).

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5. I have looked at this problem of ambivalence in confession in the eighteenth-century poet William Cowper’s memoir on his madness, or Adelphi. See “ ‘Repenting Prodigal’: Confession, Conversion, and Shame in William Cowper’s Adelphi.”

Works Cited Clark, Hilary. “ ‘Repenting Prodigal’: Confession, Conversion, and Shame in William Cowper’s Adelphi.” Depression and Narrative: Telling the Dark. Ed. Hilary Clark. Albany, NY: SUNY P, 2008. 55–65. Cohen, Leonard. “Anthem.” Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993. 373–74. Couser, G. Thomas. “Quality-of-Life Writing: Illness, Disability, and Representation.” Teaching Life Writing Texts. Ed. Miriam Fuchs and Craig Howes. New York: MLA, 2008. 350–58. Ellerby, Janet Mason. Intimate Reading: The Contemporary Women’s Memoir. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2001. Felski, Rita. “On Confession.” Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1998. 83–95. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. 1978. New York: Random House, 1990. Gilmore, Leigh. “Policing Truth: Confession, Gender, and Autobiographical Authority.” Autobiography and Postmodernism. Ed. Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore, and Gerald Peters. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1994. 54–78. Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963. Klein, Melanie. “Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse.” 1929. The Selected Melanie Klein. Ed. Juliet Mitchell. London: Penguin, 1986. 84–94. Kleinman, Arthur. The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition. New York: Basic, 1988. Mairs, Nancy. A Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories. Boston: Beacon, 2001. ———. “Carnal Acts.” Carnal Acts: Essays. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. 81–96. ———. In All the Rooms of the Yellow House. Lewiston, ID: Blue Moon and Confluence, 1984. ———. “The Literature of Personal Disaster.” Voice Lessons 123–35. ———. “On Being a Cripple.” Plaintext 9–20. ———. “On Keeping Women In/Out.” Plaintext 93–105. ———. “On Living behind Bars.” Plaintext 125–54. ———. “On Not Liking Sex.” Plaintext 79–92. ———. “On Touching by Accident.” Plaintext 21–24. ———. Plaintext: Essays. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1986.

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Mairs, Nancy. Remembering the Bone House: An Erotics of Place and Space. Boston: Beacon, 1995. ———. “Sex, Death, and the Crippled Body: A Meditation.” Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. Ed. Sharon Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. New York: MLA, 2002. 156–70. ———. Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer. Boston: Beacon, 1994. ———. Waist-High in the World: A Life among the Non-Disabled. Boston: Beacon, 1996. ———. “The Writer’s Thin Skin and Faint Heart.” Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer. Boston: Beacon, 1994. 136–49. Nathanson, Donald L. Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self. New York: Norton, 1992. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. New York: Harcourt, 1989. Wurmser, Léon. The Mask of Shame. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1994. Zimmerman, Lee. “Against Depression: Final Knowledge in Styron, Mairs, and Solomon.” Biography 30.4 (2007): 465–90.

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Chapter 4

On the Rhetoric of Gloom and Joy: “In turbulent love with the world” Susannah B. Mintz

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. —Joan Didion, The White Album

A s an author who ponders the big questions of life and death, Nancy

Mairs has made a career of writing relaxed, conversational essays that demystify traumatic events. Whether her focus is illness, depression, disability, suicide, adultery, murder, euthanasia, or the death penalty, Mairs grounds her essays in the tangible and frequently humorous rituals of daily life in a way that seems at once psychologically serious and rhetorically playful. Eschewing, on the one hand, a bygone ars moriendi tradition, and on the other the comic or transcendent plot common to disability and trauma narrative,1 Mairs offers an alternative framework for responding to difficult experiences as both arbitrary and inevitable, one that dignifies the process of grieving but is just as quick to emphasize the wonders and delight of a tactile, relational world. Focusing here on her 2001 collection A Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories, I want to address Mairs’s signature style through psychoanalytic theories of curiosity and work in order to understand what it means for Mairs, in her words, to “choose joy” (Waist-High 209). How does an author so acutely familiar with loss and sorrow manage to sustain, in the face of anguish, the possibility of renewal, plenitude, and pleasure? The rich stuff of the everyday assists Mairs in her effort to normalize for readers a world in which struggle coincides with enjoyment, and it is also evidence of her own openness to being interested in, and absorbed by, the world of experience. When Mairs turns her keen interpretive scrutiny to a series of harrowing events—the early death

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of her father, her own suicide attempts, her foster son’s unsolved murder—without sacrificing their local, concrete specificity, she renders them meaningful, but only ordinarily so. Rarely (if ever) does Mairs obfuscate harsher realities through a language of apology or transcendence, nor does she trade in trite realism (good can be authentically appreciated only if the bad is also squarely faced) or simply substitute optimism for self-pity. Death, like disability or depression, is no abstraction (it has tangible causes and consequences), but neither should it be explained away by the deflections of superstition, consoling platitudes, or politically correct language. Making gloom joyful without recourse to facile cheerfulness entails, in Mairs’s work, a dialectical process in which confrontations with dying, loss, and violence become the objects of narrative playfulness. The creative space of an essay becomes an arena of transformation—what D. W. Winnicott might have called Mairs’s holding environment or potential space2 —in which the writer can broach difficult topics in a way that reorganizes both the meaning of the subject and the nature of the self. Like the therapeutic session or the rituals of play and caregiving between parent and child, writing an essay allows Mairs not only to test the limits of her self-identity in relation to significant others (family, lovers, beloved objects), but also to observe the intrasubjective dimensions of self-as-object in intense emotional contexts. Reading Emily Dickinson from a similar perspective, Robert Rogers has argued that what he calls Dickinson’s poetic “sequestration” functions as “a tranquil ‘potential space’ where she can make contact with those aspects of her self and her relationships with important others by no means readily negotiated, at least by her, in ordinary social space” (151). The capacity to tolerate the solitude of that space of creative play derives from early object attachments. Mairs moves into the world through her essays in a more overt way than does Dickinson through poetry, but Rogers’s notion of sequestration might point to the intense inwardness, that concentrated thinking through, that defines Mairs’s prose. For Mairs, the response to any subsequent death seems predicated on the one originary death with which she began her life and, in the second chapter, initiates A Troubled Guest: that of her father. If we think of mood not simply as a reaction to events in the present moment but also as the unconscious recreation of several earlier states of being, a point made by Christopher Bollas (Shadow 101–2), then Mairs’s buoyant tone in much of this collection becomes all the more intriguing. “Death makes us who we are,” she declares (“A Necessary End” 7), but who we are is also, to quote Bollas again, “a process”

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(Shadow 60). Writing constitutes that process for Mairs—an ongoing trajectory toward self—and it is precisely in her textual habit of relishing the mundane (or, more specifically, of finding restorative if not inspirational meaning in the most somber of events) that Mairs displays an exuberant willingness to be surprised by life. Imaginatively engaged with her environment, Mairs demonstrates a kind of psychological curiosity that allows her both to recognize what isn’t there—to endure frustration and disillusionment when the world fails to match the expectations of fantasy—and then to make creative use of whatever is. This is curiosity as an “acknowledgment of loss” and the “sign of life,” in the words of Adam Phillips (Beast 15), and it produces essays that explore the sadder travails of human existence without sacrificing what Mairs herself underscores as “play” (“A Necessary End” 1). In this sense, her essays read as conscious analyses of experience, demonstrating what Phillips has called the “ecstasy of opportunity” (Beast 18), an emotional work that manages disappointment and reinvests the world with interest. Not despite but because of her proximity to extreme instances of loss and despair, Mairs is, as Phillips might say, “in turbulent love with the world” (Beast 39). Attachment to the world is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the essay Mairs writes about the anniversary of her “last suicide attempt,” “Reflections on an Anniversary” (133). That “last” is significant, because it reveals almost as an aside what we might not know about Nancy Mairs, that she tried to kill herself more than once. The embedded, ironic implication is that a younger Mairs kept trying to get something right—her own death—but failed; the word “attempt” connotes accomplishment and thus presence or even fullness, though a successful result of that effort would have been erasure. The history of repetition is important here because acknowledging the anniversary of the last failed effort becomes for Mairs an opportunity to consider her own ongoingness (without rejecting the legitimacy of choosing suicide, a point to which I will return). There is an ironic if subtle resonance, too, between her mention of multiple attempts and her emphasis in this essay on the fact that ethical positions evolve piecemeal, only as the result of multiple attempts to reason one’s way through complex and difficult territory. This is why, I think, the essay starts with a brief discussion of seasonal change, religious observance, Halloween, and the yearly recognition—if dressed up and deflected—of death. A description of southwestern climate, apparently instigated by the detail that the suicide anniversary takes place at Halloween, might seem peripheral at best, as if Mairs needed to ease herself (or readers) into the forbidden or

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“depressing” topics of suicide and euthanasia (“A Necessary End” 9). But when she tells us that she “wouldn’t get bored” even if “every day of the year [were] sunny and eighty-five degrees” (“Reflections” 131) and then goes on to enumerate the climatic particulars of Tucson, Mairs is doing more than clearing her throat. The focus in this essay may be suicide—perhaps the most inward-turning of acts—but Mairs keeps her attention partly outward, on continuous if subtle changes. As always, she is the passionate observer, situated in a world of vibrant specificity. Images of summer and winter rains, of “chrysanthemums of clouds trailing ribbons of lightening and rain,” of a “scorched desert floor” or a desert “carpeted with lupine and California poppies” (131) record a joyful awareness of the details of an environment that might seem undifferentiated to a less careful onlooker. They also convey the distinctive simultaneity of life and death in Mairs’s writing: “Even in the worst years, at least some of the cactuses and succulents flare great showy blossoms in yellow, vermilion, purple, and white” (131–32). Mairs doesn’t just “get through another day” (137), whatever her lingering depressive tendencies may be; on the contrary, her lush descriptions of nature evoke joy, emphasize cyclical repetition, and restore particularity to an outwardly homogeneous landscape. Such details also signal the need to slow down and think carefully through a different kind of cosmic question—not the climate in which one prefers to live but the legitimate conditions under which one might choose to die. If some people can’t understand why Mairs lives in Arizona, asking her if she’ll “miss the seasons” (131), Mairs herself replies with greater sensitivity to what motivates the kinds of choices we make in response to mortality and suffering. At the start of the essay, she offers a swift account of Halloween as a relative of the Christian All Hallow’s Eve, with roots in ancient Celtic and Aztec death rituals. This is not new territory, and Mairs is certainly not the first writer to notice either the interconnections between belief systems or the secularization of American holidays. The point of the brief foray into All Saints’ Day and El Dia de Los Muertos lies primarily in its portrayal of a human tendency to package death in a way that turns the dead into ominous specters or obscures the physical reality of dying altogether. “Having relegated the festivities to the realm of children,” Mairs writes of Halloween, “we can . . . avoid contemplating our mortality even once a year” (133). If we are to emerge from that sort of denial into consideration of a thorny question such as suicide, Mairs (that watcher of weather and the habits of local flora) suggests that we steel ourselves to the seductions of overarching truths, give greater credence to individual

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instances, and attune ourselves to the nuances of difference. A converted but “ ‘cafeteria’ Catholic” who likes to “pick and choose among the church’s doctrines” (139), Mairs asserts that “God expects us . . . to sort through moral issues one by one, teasing out their full consequences and implications, rather than following, like docile children, a set of rules” (139–40). It is a “terror” of death (147) that has us dressing up Halloween in costumes and candy, and Mairs suggests that the “diminutive and round-cheeked” ghoulies of October (133) become, by extension, those uncritical followers of doctrine who “fly on automatic pilot” (140) and shirk responsibility for ambiguity. There are no absolutes, then, no “single clear-cut rule that will relieve us of the anguish of thinking through” (141). Everything, in effect, “ ‘depends.’ ” (140). Such pronouncements align with the broad strokes of postmodernism and its repudiation of monological ideologies, but one might wonder how the essay overall assists a reader in the kind of “thinking through” suicide its author advocates. If there are no general principles (let alone rules of conduct) to be followed, what does the individual in despair find in the essay by way of assistance or assuagement? Is the very openness that Mairs exhibits in the piece a problematic invitation to suicide? Mairs must tread carefully on these issues, given the fraught nature of debates about suicide in the disability community and the fact that most U.S. disability rights groups—in particular the well-known organization Not Dead Yet—strongly oppose legalization of physician-assisted suicide. Many disability activists argue that suicide by a person with a disability (whether assisted or not) is never appropriately considered a voluntary or autonomous act, since even an apparently private anguish motivating the decision cannot easily be disentangled from the kinds of social prejudices and material disadvantages that affect the lives of people with disabilities in an ableist environment.3 Condoning suicide in this sense risks seeming to capitulate to the prevalent insult that considers life with disability to be worse than death. Opposing the option categorically, however, can seem to deprive the individual of the freedom to choose, thus perpetuating an awkward paternalism. Yet Mairs offers no verdict on these issues that would “remove [suicide] as a site of necessary struggle” (148–49), because the absence of a single guiding principle to legislate all sets of circumstances is precisely her point. Suicide may represent “pathological self-absorption” (138) and an “utter failure of love, its consequences invariably cruel” when done secretively and from a state of deep depression, but she also views it as a reasonable means of “sparing [her]self and those [she] love[s] from

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undue effort and expense in postponing [her] inevitable end” (141). In both of these pronouncements—suicide, paradoxically, as both a failure and a gesture of love—Mairs contextualizes suicide as an interpersonal event, what Richard K. Sanderson has called “a communication, . . . a self-dramatization performed before an audience.” Examining the memoirs of family members of suicides, Sanderson proposes that survivor narratives are “responses not simply to an experience but to a relational act” (35). In effect, Mairs writes a type of survivor narrative that responds to the communicative gesture of her own suicide attempt. Without drawing an untenable analogy between Mairs and the authors Sanderson treats—survivors in radically different ways—I see Sanderson’s analysis as a useful tool for underscoring the stress Mairs places on relationality, intentionality, and communication as core features of the psychodynamics of suicide. It is not that suicide is inherently right or wrong, Mairs argues (or, as she puts it, “in the abstract” suicide is both “right and wrong” [141]), but rather that it cannot be understood as an isolated act carried out by a singular individual. Other people are always implicated. Perhaps this is why “Reflections on an Anniversary” ends with a declaration—“let no one ever live or die without our consolation” (149; italics added)—that emphasizes neither suicide nor life as abstractions, but rather the notion of living and dying as processes and transitions, ones whose quality improves dramatically in the presence of meaningful relationships. In this, we can discern a refusal to mythologize death or sentimentalize life, as well as that expression of hope one comes to expect of Mairs. A self-described idealist (148), Mairs doesn’t locate hopefulness in denial of suffering (affliction is “intrinsic to the human condition” [146]), but in a “fullness of experience” (146) that might actually entail, under the right conditions, bringing oneself purposefully to an end. And so an essay that closes on the tricky question of legislation begins with “the flare of foliage” in autumn (131), those particulars of landscape and atmosphere that situate a writer in a unique moment of time and contemplation. Here is that typical taking-interest, that capacity to enlarge a question by taking into account its every implication—what Mairs refers to as relying on her “own powers of discernment” (141) and Bollas as the “personal elaboration” (Character 68) that marks the activity of a person “who is at play with a life issue” (Character 81). Even when advocating for the right to absent oneself from the world, Mairs leans toward that world and its ideas and inhabitants, propelling herself directly into that which not only vexes and troubles but also defines human experience. To grant others “our consolation,” then, suggests

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not only that as people trying to lead ethically conscientious lives we are charged with the responsibility of comforting each other through the travails of difficult experiences, including death, but also that we are responsible for “thinking something through” (Phillips, “Worrying” 48) with the utmost of our imaginative and intelligential selves. That is the true comfort, Mairs implies, we offer ourselves and others—the assurance that we will bring to any problem, any decision, a moral seriousness as well as a bedrock belief “in the essential goodness of human nature” (148). What I am describing as a characteristic forward motion also distinguishes “I Enter Orphanhood,” another essay in which Mairs extends herself, unexpectedly, toward rather than away from loss or absence. We might think of orphanhood as something that happens to a child, but Mairs’s “Enter” connotes deliberate action: it is the I who moves into a particular state of being, rather than the parents who leave. In fact, the thrust of this piece—which recounts the death of Mairs’s mother from lung cancer—has less to do with bereavement than with the author’s investment in ensuring the quality of her mother’s dying. This particular narrative feature would seem to align “I Enter Orphanhood” with other parental pathographies founded on “the myth of easy death,” a narrative paradigm that, according to Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, entails “the avoidance of suffering” and the “alleviation or elimination of pain” (112–13). Unlike some of the texts Hawkins studies, however, Mairs’s essay does not trade in “feelings of anger and resentment, fantasies of denial, or ‘selfish’ attempts to cling to one’s own life” (113). The pervasive through-line in this story of a mother’s dying is that death can be “orchestrat[ed]” in a “perfectly calm and natural” way—“companionably,” even (Mairs 50)— between parent and child. When death is handled straightforwardly, with honesty and good humor, entering the “new terrain” (54) of being parentless becomes a less frightening prospect. One might go so far, Mairs suggests, as to “cheer” death along (52). Hawkins remarks that “our cultural habit of denying death” has “disastrous” consequences, one of which is “our lack of any art of dying that would help the elderly who are terminally ill in accepting death” (116). “I Enter Orphanhood” reads as a kind of response to that deficiency. Mairs presents her mother as prepared for death in large part by stressing the fact that the decision to take herself off of the ventilator machine is her mother’s own, rational and uncoerced. The essay frequently lets Anne Cutler speak for herself in a way that shifts attention from Mairs as the controlling consciousness; she is but an observer of her mother’s experience, a respondent to her mother’s

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stated wishes.4 Mairs is fond of this structural and rhetorical strategy; it is one of the ways in which her writerly persona refuses to dominate a subject or appear to resolve difficult conflicts of perspective or attitude. In “I Enter Orphanhood,” for example, she transcribes a note her mother writes—“ ‘It’s okay, yes,’ she penned, unable to speak because of the tube. ‘I’m seventy-nine and I’m ready’ ” (43)— and records an exchange with her mother in which she explicitly cedes control of what will happen next: “ ‘What if I want to stop?’ Mother turned to me and mouthed one night. . . . ‘Mother, you’re in charge here,’ I said . . . ‘You say the word, and we’ll set things in motion’ ” (47). Later, Mairs again emphasizes that the choice to end life-support originates with her mother: “ ‘I hear you’re ready,’ I said, and she nodded. ‘Are you sure?’ She nodded again” (49). And finally, after Anne has died, Mairs quotes one of the nurses as saying, “ ‘I’ve never seen anyone die so fast.’ ‘You didn’t know Mother,’ ” Mairs replies. “ ‘She said she was ready’ ” (52). In the accumulation of such moments, the dying mother retains dignity and self-determination, counteracting whatever passivity or loss of personhood that might seem to result from her condition as an end-stage lung cancer patient who is “not going to get better” (49). If an “easy” death does appear in this essay, I would argue that it happens to the surviving family members as much as to the mother who dies. Again, Hawkins points out that many narrators of parental pathographies are openly resentful of the medical community—with its tendency to insist on technological intervention, its storied lack of compassion, its distracted or inaccessible practitioners—as if textual self-assertion might in some way assuage both grief and the sense of helplessness that illness and death can provoke. To some extent, in the abundance of quotes she compiles from her mother, Mairs does seem to be working hard to ensure that Anne speak “for herself” in a context where breathing tubes, blood-pressure cuffs, IV lines, and hospital personnel might combine to silence her. And in the amassing of statements by Anne that she is “ready,” there may also be a suggestion that Mairs herself was not. As G. Thomas Couser writes of parental accounts of euthanasizing terminally ill and disabled children, “even narratives . . . [that] set out to justify a decision, may leave haunting doubts in the minds of sympathetic readers. . . . [S]uch narratives may implicitly admit what they explicitly deny: that their authors are also haunted by their decision” (Vulnerable 137). Yet the atmosphere of “I Enter Orphanhood” is far from embittered or accusatory, despite reference to the obvious discomfort Anne is experiencing. To the contrary, Mairs makes her mother’s death an occasion for

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happiness. Gathered with her “large and noisy” family around the bed in which her mother has died just moments before, Mairs claims that “the joy that bubbled in me radiated from the others’ eyes,” and that “her death was Mother’s last, best gift to us, a final instruction in responding to all life’s exigencies with dignity” (53). Though the essay’s title signifies loss and solitariness, the milieu of the piece is, in fact, deeply communal, and the relationships it describes bring comfort and purpose. In this, “I Enter Orphanhood” seems a quintessential play space in which selves are both separate and connected, what Jessica Benjamin calls “the expressive space of resonance with the other,” “that space of creative interchange offer[ing] consolation” for loss (113). Mairs and her family members are depicted as aggrieved but not terrified by death, and they rally around Anne Cutler and each other both before and after that singular event in a way that emphasizes continuity of time and relationship rather than writing death as a mythically definitive rupture. As “Reflections on an Anniversary” attempts to resignify suicide, so does “I Enter Orphanhood” resignify death itself. Mairs tells us that her mother “was always making [her] wait for something: lipstick, nylon stockings, a black dress . . . Now I’ve got to wait to die. As an orphan, I have work to do” (55). Elsewhere, Mairs makes disability the normative term from which ableness is the deviation (in WaistHigh, she renames “people who lack [disabilities as] . . . ‘the nondisabled,’ since in relation to me, they are the deficient ones” [14]). Here, Mairs turns orphanhood into an experience one might eagerly await, or a state of being that requires a kind of energetic concentration and commitment, and renders death as something one can “do,” as if consciously and deliberately, something one might actually hurry toward (“ ‘Atta girl,’ ” Mairs says to herself as her mother’s heart rate drops; “ ‘you can do it!’ ” [52]). Not in the “hasty” way of one depressed or desperate, she would add (55), but simply because death is an integral part of natural life experience. This is no lugubrious melancholy or anxious “clinging.” The fact that the essay ends with the memory of a young girl’s excited anticipation of such tantalizing events as her “first sweet milky cup of coffee” or “first cocktail” (55) suggests an ongoing interest in what is new, even if that means living without the buffer of parents. This is what Winnicott understood as a vital “capacity to be alone,” a “going-on-being” that lets Mairs relinquish her mother, the primordial object, but then recathect the world, turning toward it with enthusiasm about getting work done. I would argue that “getting work done” also means to Mairs what Bollas calls self experiencing: “problematic encounters with the object

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world” that construct “idiomatic dispositions” (Character 30–31), characteristic ways of thinking, an “aesthetic” (21) or “itness” (51) of selfhood. The choices we make about what to do during a day, with whom/what to interact, even the ideas or perspectives by which we feel especially intellectually stimulated, both arise from and nourish the “unconscious matrix” (23) of subjectivity. Broaching, again and again, the subject of death operates for Mairs as a type of psychical work that brings her to the edges of self—to a contemplation of the end of self in death, or to the threshold of self made acutely tangible with the loss of the other—in a way that stimulates reinvestigation of who that self is, a project Mairs performs by thinking and writing anew. Hence the reiteration throughout these essays of her belief that death, although “deeply mysterious” (“I Enter Orphanhood” 52), precedes rather than forecloses a creative process. The loss of her mother does not simply change the status of Mairs’s personhood, making her an orphan in some factual, legalized sense; it also instigates an alteration in her “way of imagining reality” (Bollas 83). The imaginative work of death-in-writing compels revision to the self. It thus seems significant that Mairs installs the mother she lost in “I Enter Orphanhood” as both imago and speaking voice in the essay “Aftermath.” “Like an infant who finally grasps object permanence,” she writes, “I can carry the idea of Mother in my head. . . . [T]he mother who will never return remains with(in) me nevertheless” (“Aftermath” 59–60). The claim of object-constancy suggests a psychologically resilient self—one capable of moving on from grief to generate new engagements with the stuff of the world, with aliveness itself, we might say—and frames difficult experience as soothed by intellectual inquiry. Mairs consolidates what might be experienced as a shaky sense of orphaned selfhood by writing, and through a kind of textual overlap that presents self as doubled. She describes her mother’s death as the loss of a voice, “that basso continuo of [her] being since sixteen weeks into [her] gestation” (42), that was a formative component of her own identity. Although that voice may now be “stilled” (51), Mairs can restore its literal sound and psychological presence in the essay, quoting her mother directly in a way that figures Anne Cutler as a vital participant in, rather than passive victim of, her own dying. And there are the essays themselves, transitional spaces in which a writer mothers herself—or rather, to quote Adam Phillips, “foster-mothers one’s self, with one’s mind” (“On Composure” 44). Mairs’s mother “lives on” (“Aftermath” 77) because Mairs writes her into being, and that creative act also writes Mairs into an expanded, recalibrated selfhood.

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Writing in this way might be understood as a kind of play work, in Bollas’s phrase, the “to-and-fro” dynamic between people held in the intermediate space of imaginative, therapeutic, or intimate connection (Character 46). Mairs writes that because “the past exists nowhere but in our minds, its ‘reality’ is always only a construct” (“Regret, Revision, Release” 91), a post-structuralist axiom that serves her project of telling stories about the dead. In the fictive space of memory and curiosity, Mairs can resurrect her lost others, inventing what she wishes she knew more definitively from the dead themselves and so providing for herself “the answers to all kinds of questions [she] never knew [she] would ask” (“Aftermath” 60). This is one of the book’s foundational themes: “regret for all the stories I will never know because I failed to ask and listen before death cut them off” (“Regret, Revision, Release” 87). The collected essays in A Troubled Guest pose and answer questions, speak to as well as for those who can no longer offer their version of events. Because Mairs is so careful about writing the past “in the very best of faith” (“Regret, Revision, Release” 91), what matters here is less the ethical question of her mini-biographies than the psychological fact that forays into the past facilitate an invigorated self-discovery in the present. 5 Both Bollas and Phillips propose that passionate engagement with the world tends to diminish in adults, that we forget how to be invited by the object world toward instances of self-reflection and understanding. But what Phillips calls, simply, “interest” (see, in particular, the section “The Interested Party” in Beast)—by which he means a desire to translate or transform objects, a “fervent . . . looking forward to things,” an “imaginative plenitude” (Beast 15)—is precisely what propels Mairs’s style in this collection, in particular her penchant for narrating responses to absence, loss, and death, responses that were not just “natural” but specifically “humorous” (“Regret, Revision, Release” 93). This is what gives an essay such as “The Death of the Other,” in which she details the passing of a dozen or more family pets (including rats, snakes, and a tarantula), its charming but also genuine quality, or what makes “Lost Children,” about the particular anguish that attends the death of a child, sincere but far from maudlin. Such pieces exemplify two central tenets of A Troubled Guest: that “every death, everywhere, marks the loss of a specific being and must be mourned accordingly” (“Lost Children” 103), and that any death thus becomes “an occasion for praise” (“Death of the Other” 130). In the simultaneity of impulses to mourn and celebrate, to treat death in an intellectually critical but also tonally lighthearted way, Mairs can ironize a topic

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without sacrificing its dignity and honor attachments without sentimentalizing them. Hawkins argues of our postmodern moment that we have “no central, vital myth about death that can dictate an ‘art of dying’ ” appropriate to our realities (94). In their study of narratives of death and mourning, Lucy Bregman and Sara Thiermann make the same point about grief. Posing the question of what impels an author to write (it is explicit in the chapter title “Why Write a Personal Narrative?”), they suggest that in addition to bearing witness to traumatic experience, memorializing or “monumentalizing” the dead, and educating readers about the particular nature of a disease or condition, many authors seek specifically to redress the “lack of social space to mourn, or generally recognized guidelines for how mourning should proceed” (43). Mairs concurs. In a society that has “forbidden the expression of grief,” she writes, “we have no legitimate form for directly expressing and sharing” the pain of loss: “Why don’t we say to our children, ‘Cry! Cry! Cry!’ since their lives are filled with losses and the capacity for mourning these marks them as human?” (“Lost Children” 106–7). The essays in A Troubled Guest do narrate specific instances of ritualistic mourning, such as a family clustered around a gravesite or lighting a candle for a murdered son, but as a whole, the collection makes a slightly different case about how we might grieve most usefully. It is essentially a matter of resuming the type of “work” privileged by Mairs, the fullest possible application of creative and intellectual energy to finding out what things mean. Mairs frames the endeavor of A Troubled Guest as an extended meditation on the “myriad” questions raised by proximity to death (“A Necessary End” 12), offered to her readers as “sustenance” (14) and a gesture of “taking hands in the dark” (15). Both metaphors register her belief that writing nourishes through the process of communication and looks forward to a hopeful future as it investigates significant life events of the past. This eagerness to learn in the company of others lends a certain quality to Mairs’s work that we might think of as democratically educational; far from being didactic, Mairs clearly considers herself as a student of whatever subject she takes up in writing, and her essays are workings-through of that material, Montaignesque trials rather than conclusive treatises.6 In this sense, Mairs learns in her work as much as she teaches, and her method of finding out involves a kind of commitment to that task that Phillips might deem desire—without which, he states, “there is no learning” (Beast 70). If we understand “meaning [as] the polite word . . . for pleasure,” in Phillips’s terms (11), then it makes sense that

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Mairs’s “scrutinizing” of her painful and frightening experiences (“A Necessary End” 14) becomes inseparable from the obvious intellectual delight she takes in that inquiry and from the fullness of hope and companionship that so many of her essays capture. But learning is not just linked to pleasure; from a different perspective, Marshall Alcorn has proposed that that there is also no learning without grief. “[T]he work of teaching,” Alcorn suggests, is that of “managing the grief, pain and anxiety that is released by undoing attachments to old, comfortable ideas” (172). Grief, anxiety, and loss attend “any learning that significantly reshapes the motives and values of subjectivity” (175), and such psychical changes in turn “require mourning” (176). Mairs performs that management of her readers’ anxiety in part through the tonal and stylistic choices I have been exploring, and she also depicts herself in a state of getting over by giving over, learning death by reorganizing the stuff of self, her inner world. This process is perhaps most visible in the essay “Ron Her Son: Coda,” a reprise of an earlier piece included in the 1986 volume Plaintext. In the interval between the two essays, Ron is shot, possibly but not at all definitively by drug dealers, and Mairs must try to make sense of a death that is factually mysterious and peculiarly difficult because Ron was himself a difficult son. The learning that happens here has to do with the agonizing shift in ontological status that comes from being “the mother of a murdered child.” “I had turned into something quite different,” Mairs remarks of witnessing herself in the hospital cafeteria (a setting, she reminds us, quite familiar to her) as Ron lies in intensive care on life support: “I was not the woman who had come there before” (“Ron Her Son: Coda” 177). That sense of subjective dislocation—the mourning that comes with “undoing attachments” or rethinking values—can be discerned in the transition from first to second version of the “Ron” essays. In “Ron Her Son,” Mairs recounts her process of coming to terms with the role of parenting a severely troubled foster child; in “Ron Her Son: Coda,” she must narrate a second, more distressing alteration to her sense of herself, having lost Ron not in the ways the family might have anticipated (to his alcoholism, for instance, or even Mairs’s own depression), but rather through inexplicable and irrevocable violence. The earlier essay, refusing to “sentimentalize” the “generosity” of taking in an angry and remote teenager whose early life was comprised of a series of flagrant abandonments and abuses, admits that having Ron come to stay with the family “was awful”—“painful and maddening and exhausting for all” (“Ron Her Son” 44). A balder confession comes at the end. Asked whether she “regret[s] taking Ron

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in, whether [she’d] do so again,” Mairs writes, “Hard questions to face, the answers risky to the ways I like to think of myself. Because I did regret taking him in, many times” (54). Becoming Ron’s mother thus entails the uncomfortable shedding of a familiar notion of self. Becoming, subsequently, not-Ron’s-mother instigates a still more awkward and painful transformation. The narrator of the later essay is estranged from herself: she is “not the woman” she once was, but rather “something quite different” (“Ron Her Son: Coda” 177), a woman whose “voice” on the phone to a funeral director (188) she cannot reconcile with her own. Having once worked hard to redefine her idea of herself in relation to Ron, she must now become acquainted with an “other” (178) who is herself. Phillips writes, “selfknowledge is always a reconstruction,” and “it is always out of date” (Beast 69). Ron’s death exaggerates that sense of dislocation; Mairs must now define herself in relation to not-Ron, an unrecognizable relationship for which there is no precedent. This is the “psychoanalytic question,” as Phillips puts it: “ ‘If I’m not exactly what I think I am, then what else can I be?’ ” (59). But it is not just that someone has died, another loss incurred, that compels Mairs to rethink her relation to motherhood and to self. The confusing details of the murder also require that Mairs reorient herself toward a reality that defies explanation. Indeed, when she describes Ron’s death as “mute and meaningless” (191), Mairs suggests that one lesson learned from this painful experience is precisely that she must relinquish the hope that finding meaning in tragedy will assuage emotional pain—even the idea that tragic events can be understood as meaningful at all. What is undone here is not just the mother-child bond through the trauma of inversion— she outlives him—but also the very search for meaning that tends to organize Mairs as both a person and a writer. Mourning the loss of her son, she must lament too the conceptual vacuity at the center of the event: it simply makes no sense. What is learned in the end is the brute fact of having “to live with it” (191). I have been arguing that making meaning is what provides Mairs with psychological pleasure and characterizes her interest in the world; here, it is not that she gives up on that endeavor in any nihilistic or despairing way, but rather that this confrontation with death in its most violent, inexplicable guise forces her to accept a kind of discomfiting narrative limbo. Her impulse is to incorporate this death in some logical way into “the plot,” but how to do so with an event that eludes explanation? Too “stunned and stupid with grief” (190), she can only mourn.

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This is not to suggest that “Ron Her Son: Coda” is somehow misaligned with the psychological and cultural work performed by the book as a whole. In her analyses of Irish women’s history, Margaret Mac Curtain defines lamentation as “transforming the private grief of the mourner into the public expression of experiencing loss” (260). This final essay of A Troubled Guest is the most purely or immediately grief-stricken of the collection. Mairs offers readers a model of “moral and emotional labor” (186) in the face of death that authorizes anguish without sentimentalizing Ron’s complicated life or, conversely, seeking a kind of narrative “ ‘justice’ ” (181) as a way out of personal despair. And it is precisely Mairs’s refusal to impose closure on the story of Ron’s death that links this essay to her other work. Mairs has never been a writer who insists on purpose or point. To the contrary, she consistently resists the type of meaning-making that sanitizes more than it deepens our relationship to the fact that “things simply go wrong sometimes” (“Lost Children” 103). Dealing with—or more precisely, writing about—Ron’s death becomes an occasion to honor ongoingness (of Ron’s children, for instance, and Mairs’s relation to them). It is also, importantly, both description and reenactment of that “labor” that preoccupies a family deciding to remove life-support, and that conducts the essayist back into the world: because, as she writes elsewhere, death “is a life issue” (“Reflections” 141). In “radically alter[ing]” her way of “imagining reality,” to quote Bollas (Character 83), Ron’s death becomes an “element,” but emphatically not “an end,” in the plot of Mairs’s continuity (“Coda” 190). In taking the subject of death (and the grief that attends such loss) seriously but not rendering it a catastrophe, Mairs applies the rhetorical strategy that has distinguished her approach to disability throughout her collections. When she wonders, for instance, whether “bereavement [might] be viewed in ways that would make it wholesome, however painful” and worries that contemporary societal attitudes pathologize grief (“A Necessary End” 11), she reiterates the kinds of questions that have formed the basis of her extended inquiry into the personal experience and cultural figuration of disability. The idea that “grief in our society tends to be perceived as antisocial, disruptive of and even dangerous to the pursuit of pleasure and plenty that defines ‘happiness’ . . . as though it stood outside of life” (“Lost Children” 109) sounds very like the point Mairs has made repeatedly, following a generally constructionist model, that disability is construed as disorderly and estranging, a feature of experience to be suppressed and denied if it cannot be fixed. If Mairs elsewhere

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responds directly to the question Tobin Siebers has asked—what it would mean “to esteem the disabled body for what it really is” (“Disability” 750)7—the essays in A Troubled Guest represent a similar effort to esteem death or sadness or loss for what they are, which is to say, fully integrated in the story of life. The impulse to keep writing is a form of what psychoanalytic theory would understand as “appetite for life,” which Phillips, in turn, makes synonymous with a “relationship to hope” (Beast 65). And it is with nothing if not a fundamental hopefulness about life that Mairs renders difficult experiences significant but not determinative, phenomenologically real but also available to narrative revision. In the Goethe poem that prefaces A Troubled Guest and from which Mairs pulls her title, the speaker declares that “so long as you haven’t experienced” awareness of life’s inevitable endings, “you are only a troubled guest / on the dark earth.” It is the work of the book, as it is of Mairs’s own “life’s work” (“A Necessary End” 13), to help readers toward that uncomfortable acceptance. The particular challenge lies in making a somber enterprise somehow accessible to readers she wants to “laugh out loud at least once” (14). In the space between, or in the simultaneity of, “view[ing] death” with humor (14) and treating it as both psychological and writerly work lies playful self experiencing, exploration and curiosity, the desire to learn and the pleasure of “not knowing what one is doing” (Bollas, Character 77). Crafting essays that mull over the “mysterious transition” that is death (“Coda” 187), Mairs resolutely situates herself, and her readers, in the joyful possibilities of “now.” Notes 1. On the rhetorical paradigms that have conventionally structured disability narrative, see Couser, Recovering Bodies; Frank; Hawkins; Miner; Mintz; and Mitchell, “Body Solitaire.” 2. On the significance of these concepts to Winnicott’s brand of object relations psychoanalytic theory, see especially Playing and Reality. 3. On these debates cf. Battin et al.; Couser, “Life Writing as Death Writing” in Vulnerable Subjects; Gill; and Scoccia. The organization Not Dead Yet has also argued vehemently against legislation allowing physician-assisted suicide, such as the 1994 Oregon Death with Dignity Act. See www.notdeadyet.org. 4. In “Young and Disabled,” for example, from Waist-High, Mairs frequently disappears entirely as the controlling voice in deference to excerpts she compiles from letters written to Glamour magazine by young women with disabilities.

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5. On the ethics of writing about others in autobiographical contexts, see Eakin. 6. On Mairs and Montaigne, see the chapter “Essaying the Feminine: From Montaigne to Kristeva,” in Voice Lessons. 7. For a discussion of the potential limitations of the social constructionist position to disability identity politics, see Siebers, Disability Theory, chapter 4, “Disability Studies and the Future of Identity Politics.”

Works Cited Alcorn, Jr., Marshall W. “Ideological Death and Grief in the Classroom: Mourning as a Prerequisite to Learning.” Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society: 6.2 (2001): 172–80. Battin, M. Pabst, Rosamond Rhodes, and Anita Silvers, eds. Physician Assisted Suicide: Expanding the Debate. New York: Routledge, 1998. Benjamin, Jessica. Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. Bollas, Christopher. Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992. ———. The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. Bregman, Lucy and Sara Thiermann. First Person Mortal: Personal Narratives of Dying, Death, and Grief. St. Paul, MN: Paragon, 1995. Couser, G. Thomas. Vulnerable Subjects Ethics and Life Writing. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2004. ———. Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing. U of Wisconsin P, 1997. Eakin, Paul John, ed. The Ethics of Life Writing. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004. Frank, Arthur W. The Wounded Storyteller. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Gill, Carol. “Health Professionals, Disability, and Assisted Suicide: An Examination of Relevant Empirical Evidence and Reply to Batavia (2000).” Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 6.2 (2000): 526–45. Hawkins, Anne Hunsaker. Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 1993. Mac Curtain, Margaret. “Writing Grief into Memory: Women, Language and Narrative.” Back to the Present, Forward to the Past: Irish Writing and History since 1798. Vol. 1. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. 255–77. Mairs, Nancy. A Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories. Boston: Beacon, 2001. ———. Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled. Boston: Beacon, 1997. ———. Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer. Boston: Beacon, 1994. ———. “Ron Her Son.” Plaintext. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1983. 41–54. Miner, Madonne. “ ‘Making up the Stories as We Go Along’: Men, Women, and Narratives of Disability.” The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses

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of Disability in the Humanities. Eds. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997. 283–95. Reprinted in this volume. Mintz, Susannah B. Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P. 2007. Mitchell, David. “Body Solitaire: The Singular Subject of Disability Autobiography.” American Quarterly 52.2 (2000): 311–15. Phillips, Adam. The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites. New York: Vintage, 1998. ———. “On Composure.” On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993. 42–46. ———. “Worrying and Its Discontents.” On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993. 47–58. Rogers, Robert. Self and Other: Object Relations in Psychoanalysis and Literature. New York: NYUP, 1991. Sanderson, Richard K. “Relational Deaths: Narratives of Suicide Survivorship.” True Relations: Essays on Autobiography and the Postmodern. Ed. G. Thomas Couser and Joseph Fichtelberg. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998. 33–50. Scoccia, Danny. “Physician-Assisted Suicide, Disability, and Paternalism.” Social Theory and Practice 36.3 (2010): 479–98. Siebers, Tobin. Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2008. ———. “Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the New Realism of the Body.” American Literary History 13.4 (2001): 737–54. Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock, 1971. ———. “The Capacity to Be Alone.” The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. New York: International Universities P, 1958.

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Chapter 5

On Nancy’s Husband George: Masculinity, Disability, and Sex after Cancer Margaret Rose Torrell

The feminist memoirist is ever conscious of the dialogic relation-

ship between herself and the men in her life, ever negotiating the dynamics that arise from a combination of the particulars of private life and the vestiges of patriarchal systems. In Nancy Mairs’s oeuvre, some of these dynamics are revealed in the “unspeakable,” the telling absence of a full depiction of her husband, George; other dynamics are exposed when the repressed becomes “speakable,” when she re-imagines herself and in turn finds she must also reinvent George. This is a task that is both facilitated and complicated by George’s cancer and subsequent impotence, as well as by his confession to a longterm extramarital affair. George’s depiction complements Mairs’s own self-reinvention; whereas studying Mairs’s feminist self-construction leads to insights about women’s embodied experiences, probing her portrayal of George produces equally useful awareness of feminist models of male disabled experience. In this chapter, I am “curious about George”: curious about the way a feminist memoirist articulates masculinity via her husband’s presence (and occasional absence) in her life story. I am curious about the conception of that husband as disabled—impotent—in the work of a writer who asserts the benign human variation (to borrow a phrase made famous by Gayle Rubin) of her own embodiment against the rigid norms of patriarchal and ableist thinking. I am curious about using the genre of autobiography to move beyond questions about the construction of the self as it is articulated through relationship to others into more far-reaching questions about the

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ethics and aesthetics involved in the construction of those others. In essence, I am curious about whether an autobiography that has “counter-hegemonic potential” for the disabled writer’s self can also be emancipatory in its depictions of others in the text (Couser “Rhetorics” 78). Does Mairs use the construction of George as a foil against which to write her empowerment, especially because she is feminist, especially because patriarchal conceptions of heterosexual relationships guided their earlier years as husband and wife, especially because his body is marked by a disability that signals a fundamental loss of masculinity and power in the American cultural imagination? Or, if George’s portrayal, like Mairs’s self-portraiture, is emancipatory from a gender and disability studies perspective, how does Mairs rewrite the contradictory terms of his disabled masculinity? The construction of George as a persona in three of Mairs’s autobiographies—Remembering the Bone House, Ordinary Time, and Waist-High in the World—reveals an evolving sense of who George is in relationship to Mairs and relative to the shifting terms of gendered identity. George is not the main focus of these texts, of course; they are narratives of Mairs’s life perceived from diverse vantage points: Mairs as a feminist who by writing about her body “reclaim[s] the deed to her dwelling” (Bone House 7); Mairs as Catholic and feminist in addition to other contradictory identities who aims to “reclaim human [embodied] experience” from “secrecy and shame” (Ordinary Time 25); and Mairs as a disabled woman who maps out “not merely a habitable body but a habitable world: a world that wants me in it” (Waist-High 63). All of these texts work out social and personal issues of women’s empowerment, women’s embodied experience, and the lived realities of disability, but these three issues coalesce most powerfully in Waist-High. Likewise, there is a noticeable shift in the way George appears and functions across these three books. He is a stillshadowy presence in much of Bone House, serving primarily as a representative of patriarchy. He emerges, more visible and embodied even in slight mentions, in the later two texts, probably with good reason: the three narratives capture the developing story of George’s cancer, impotence, and the aftermath of his illness. The ending of Bone House records George’s second surgery to remove melanoma in some lymph nodes, as well as what appears to be one of the first instances of his sexual impotence. Ordinary Time opens in crisis—the poignant fear that George’s cancer, newly discovered in his small intestine, will be fatal, along with his confession of having a years-long extramarital affair—and unfolds amid the uncertainty of his body’s recovery and Mairs’s reconciliation with George’s infidelity. Waist-High chronicles

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George’s caregiving and the lived experience of his aging, impotent, surgery-scarred body in remission from cancer against the backdrop of Mairs’s candid construction of her own declining physical ability. George’s cancer and impotence are factors in Mairs’s ability to re-envision her embodied self and gendered social roles because her perceptions of George challenge fundamental assumptions about masculinity, ability, and power. Indeed, she presents George as a disabled man in ways that associate him with more flexible and liberating gender identifications. In examining George’s disabled masculine embodiment, I will draw from two theoretical bases: masculinity studies and disability studies. Both schools of thought deal with the body and with the gendered power relationships that govern embodied experience. Working at the intersection of these two frameworks allows for a more complex and comprehensive reading of Mairs’s transgressive conceptions of the male disabled body. This approach builds on but ultimately departs from the usual analytical focus on Mairs at the intersection of feminist social theory and disability studies. The foundational scholarship on Mairs is well represented by Madonne Miner’s article, reprinted in this volume. Miner demonstrates how Mairs’s conceptualization of her disability is articulated within “a gendered discursive field” that returns her to “stereotypically feminized issues of being, speaking, and shame” (285). Kristin Lindgren explores how Mairs’s disabled identity reframes the body-mind dichotomy so that she sees herself as wholly and consciously embodied. Susannah B. Mintz provides a focused study of Mairs’s rhetoric, tracing Mairs’s conceptualization of her disabled, embodied, “continually revisable” self and story “within a set of conflicting cultural narratives about chronic illness, female sexuality, and psychological health” (18). Mairs employs strategies that emphasize radical similarities and radical differences between her and her reader, according to Mintz, thereby normalizing but not generalizing her experience. The critical focus on women’s bodies is important, to be sure, but in isolation it can unintentionally reinforce the age-old dichotomy that enfleshes women while disembodying men. Londa Schiebinger articulates the problem: “By leaving male bodies unscrutinized, feminists have tended to reinforce the notion of the male as the unmarked sex, the human standard of perfection from which the female can only deviate” (14). This embodimentbased distinction powers sexual inequality by contributing to the transparency of male experience and implying that men can rise above bodily processes whereas women remain deeply connected to them; the distinction also functions as an infrastructure for ableist thinking

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because it establishes the primacy of not just the male body but of the male “able” body above all others. Thus, in addition to examining issues concerning women’s bodies, another way of troubling gender and ability hierarchies is to study the terms of male embodiment in general and disabled male embodiment in particular. From the perspective of gender theory, locating the male body in various experiences, forms, and conditions erodes the primacy of masculinity. As Susan Bordo argues, it is by “reading the male body through the window of its vulnerabilities rather than the dense armor of its power—from the ‘point of view’ of the mutable, plural penis rather than the majestic, unitary phallus” that insights about the gender domination of both women and men can be gained. It is possible to discern how “the formidable social, historical, and cultural actualities of male dominance” position “not only the female body but the male body as a place of shame, self-hatred and concealment” (“Reading the Male Body” 266). Because the spectrum of male bodies is compared to an idealized standard, the “real” male body often comes up short. Studying men as bodies introduces alternative models of manhood into the cultural imagination, exposing the able-bodied man to be just one type (as opposed to the ur-type) among many valid experiences of manhood. Without the model of the able-bodied man as the paragon of power and excellence, gender and ability binaries become less stable. George’s depiction in Mairs’s texts provides one example of how these binaries become unfixed through the male disabled body. A first stop in exploring the reconstruction of George is to examine the framework of Mairs and George’s early relationship; it is on top of this structure that rebuilding takes place. Mairs depicts her early marriage to George as one of gendered synergy: he constructed her and she him using social projections that were unfortunate for both of them, and definitely destructive to her. For example, toward the end of Remembering the Bone House and again at the beginning of Ordinary Time, Mairs discusses a review of Plaintext. The critic asks for a fuller portrayal of George because he “drifts” through her work, appearing as a rather one-dimensional “saint” who patiently puts up with her emotional and physical disabilities as well as her affairs. Mairs agrees, noting that the absence of such a depiction has everything to do with how she views herself: “I have consistently presented him as a saint. . . . Despising myself, I’ve grown convinced along with everyone else that only a saint could bear life with me” (Bone House 260). As the reviewer notes, George’s characterization is curiously marked by his absence, and this is notable in other works as well. He

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is almost not present at all in Plaintext, not even in the chapters that discuss Mairs’s emotional and sexual attachments to men. In Bone House, George is a somewhat muted presence. For example, when Mairs recounts sparse details from her months-long stay at Met State, she says she does not know the history of what happened to her there. George receives a mention as her forbearing, almost daily visitor; however, his account of her experience—or even that he has one—is conspicuously circumscribed in the narrative (212). Later, when Mairs moves into an apartment of her own, George’s response is likewise absent, although she admits him into her narrative as her helpmate during crises such as a medication overdose (251–55). His shadowy presence is possibly a matter of consequence; she did not have his permission to write freely about their marriage until Ordinary Time (106). In the wake of George’s admission of infidelity, Mairs is especially conflicted about this censorship, which put her in a position to expose herself fully while keeping George respectfully covered; notably, her ignorance of his affair contributes to his saintlike facade (Ordinary Time 27). His absence may also result from her need to develop a voice in isolation from his, muting his authoritarian voice while she discovers and strengthens hers. In his drifting, spectral presence in her earlier works, George performs the role of her “shadow” in a psychological sense. He functions as her alter ego, a foil against which she constructs herself and on whom she wholly relies. Part of George’s function in Bone House, in fact, is to enact a masculinity that is dependent on Mairs’s femininity; he plays the role of the strong, silent practitioner of “manly detachment” (Ordinary Time 29) against her role of the out-of-control, emotional, excessive “bitch.” She even senses that, at times, George may have manipulated her into playing that role as a means of preserving himself: “A person who conceives of himself as holding things together can fulfill his mission only if ‘things’ are threatening to blow apart. And if they don’t blow on their own, perhaps he’ll just strike a match . . . and set off the explosion he needs” (260). Thus, although she indicates that her difficult persona really does make a saint out of George, she also suggests that George’s saintlike appearance contributes to and sometimes causes her performance as a difficult woman. The synergy of this dual projection is reinforced by the configuration of their relationship as a seesaw: “You really can discount the person at the other end of the seesaw as a cold and crazy bitch or any other damned thing you please only so long as she stays in place” (Ordinary Time 130). Like the seesaw, their relationship depends on each partner’s willingness to act out the identity projected onto him or her.

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Further, the seesaw they are on is as indicative of the dynamics in their personal relationship as it is of the binary that holds together traditional visions of gendered relationships. Just as Mairs is compelled to conform to standard feminized roles involving mothering and domesticity that do not suit her as well as working outside of the house and writing, George is also pressured to fulfill the masculine role of always being able to fix problems and take charge, an impossible task. When Mairs refuses to accept the identity that had been projected on her, George is scared and lost, no longer having her as a point of reference for his self-image. The shift in Mairs’s perceptions of herself “inevitably undermined [George’s] own stance.” When the “cold and crazy bitch” on the other end of the seesaw “dismounts and wanders away, you’re left sitting on the ground with your jaw hanging. George scrambled to his feet and fled” (Ordinary Time 130). In this way, Mairs’s refusal to accept the roles she had been ascribed ruptures not just the synergy of their relationship but the established terms of George’s identity as well. He is depicted as startled and afraid of this shift. The traditional version of his masculinity is no longer operational without its feminine referent, and George flees the inoperable structure. But leaving this playground is ultimately a good thing. As Mairs backs away from the seesaw to “re-imagine” herself, she finds that she must also de-canonize George, stripping away the postures of manly power she had previously associated with him. As “I’ve begun to reimagine my self as a healthy woman, I discover I have to imagine George differently as well: no longer my saint, my perfect prince, my father come to earth again. Just George, my Scrabble partner, who for his own reasons takes some joy in being here, at home, with me” (Bone House 260–61). She wants to get to “just George” as an individual as opposed to George in a socially or personally ascribed role. As she muses about George’s confession of infidelity and the frailty of his health after the recurrence of his cancer, Mairs suspects that George too wants to be seen as “just George.” “He wants to be loved as he is,” she believes, apart from the ways he’s been “dreamed” of by family, friends, students, and so on. The identity Mairs envisions for George is predicated on his embodiment. The clarity of confessing to his affair leads to “another clarity . . . one that involves putting off sainthood and standing naked—bones jutting under wasted flesh, scars puckering arm and belly, penis too limp now for love—as a man” (Ordinary Time 28). George’s “standing naked . . . as a man” suggests a stripping away of socially inscribed masculine roles. Indeed, to be

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“a man” in this passage is to be embodied in a way that runs counter to the standards of hegemonic masculinity. Instead of the muscular, smooth, hard physique of privileged manhood, George is bony, “wasted,” “puckered,” “limp,” and yet still a man. In this way, the narrative asserts a different, possibly more genuine, model of male embodiment. Although in gender theory we might applaud such unmooring of masculinity, in disability studies, an important critical consideration has been to examine how disabled men maintain or repurpose the terms of hegemonic masculinity as a building block of their identity. As Adrienne Asch and Michelle Fine have noted, disability and masculinity tend to be fractious as combined identity categories: “our culture views being female and disabled as ‘redundant,’ whereas being male and disabled is a contradiction” (249). This is a sense echoed by Mairs: “the standards of social, moral, and emotional health in a patriarchal culture are so set . . . that for a woman sickness may be intrinsic to her existence” (Plaintext 141). By implication the male body takes on “health” as an essential characteristic. The contradictions between masculinity and disability occur especially when “masculinity” takes on the traits of “hegemonic masculinity” that are not often or easily accommodated by a disabled man’s body. As Paul McIlvenny defines it, “contemporary hegemonic masculinity in relation to the male body often emphasizes ability, superhuman strength and stamina, physical violence, unemotionality, hardness, autonomy, potency, assertiveness, authority, the abjection of other bodies (the feminine, the homosexual, the grotesque), and the shame of failure” (103). Russell P. Shuttleworth identifies similar “masculine expectations” that in part comprise hegemonic masculinity, such as “initiative, competitiveness, self-control, assertiveness, and independence,” noting that these are pervasive in men’s social and personal lives. Because they “symbolize male potency in the U.S. cultural imaginary,” they exclude men who do not exhibit these traits (or men whose bodies are socially read as not being able to exhibit them) from masculine identification (166). When hegemonic masculinity cannot be acted out, a range of responses occurs among individual men. For example, Daniel J. Wilson finds that some men in rehabilitation from polio reapply the ideals of hegemonic masculinity to their disability in what amounts to a struggle against the body (121). The outcomes of other studies address how disabled men redefine masculinity and utilize femininity in the roles they play. For example, disabled men in Thomas J. Gerschick and Adam Stephen Miller’s exploration may exhibit

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“reliance” on masculinity like the men in Wilson’s study do, but others “reformulate” masculinity, “shaping it along the [new] lines of their own abilities, perceptions, and strengths” (264–65) or “reject” masculinity, forming “alternative gender practices” on the grounds that the “societal conceptions of masculinity, rather than themselves, were problematic” (274). Shuttleworth’s study locates an even more fluid adaptation of gendered identity for disabled men. To be sure, “hegemonic masculine expectations” were a source of pressure for them, but the “development of a flexible gender identity” that “expanded their masculine repertoire . . . garnered them some success in establishing sexual intimacy with others” (175). Thus, although the ideals of hegemonic masculinity “restrict the expression of alternative masculinities,” especially among disabled men (Shuttleworth 166), many disabled men nevertheless locate the self in alternative versions of masculinity and move beyond traditional gender expectations. Mairs’s construction of George echoes this process, as she finds a way to write George as a disabled male body, notably impotent, that retains some significant characteristics of masculinity and at the same time readily takes on a more traditionally feminine gendered identity when necessary. As Mairs locates her disabled feminist self within and beyond stereotypical women’s roles, she likewise imagines George as an embodied and empowered man, resolving some of the contradictions inherent in disabled male identity. Moving in tandem with Mairs’s discovery of an empowered disabled woman’s identity, George’s embodiment as a man involves a redefinition of masculine embodied identity imagined through a collapse of gender and ability hierarchies. This de- and re-gendering process is visible in a very revealing sexual interlude depicted in Bone House and in a series of observations about George from Waist-High that elaborate on George as sensual caregiver and vulnerable lover. Mairs is fairly candid about sexuality in general, but one of her most vivid depictions is the sex scene between her and George, apparently newly impotent, that occurs as something of a grand finale to Bone House. She positions the scene among a montage of seemingly disconnected observations—Mairs’s fully emerged identity as a writer who demands a room of her own, her newly accepted view of herself as disabled woman, committed wife, and life partner of a man with cancer. This narrative position indicates that she is experiencing and writing about sex from the perspective of a newly empowered Nancy. From a feminist gender studies perspective, George’s impotence may be seen as a way to authorize Mairs at his expense, taking him down a notch, in a sense; however,

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recent theories of masculinity and disability suggest that they are both newly empowered. The aforementioned scene in Bone House enters into a dialogue with her comments about sex in Plaintext, so the Plaintext passage should be examined first. Mairs writes in Plaintext, “In sex, as in many other instances, I feel powerless” because, as both a disabled person and as a woman, “I am acted upon. I am the object, not the agent. I live in the passive voice. The phallus penetrates me; I do not surround, engulf, incorporate the phallus” (85). Mairs makes direct connections between the powerlessness associated with two different modes of embodiment: as a sexual woman, she is passive and objectified, unable to act on her own desire, but instead is subject to the desires and penetrations of men. As a woman with multiple sclerosis, her energy is biologically sapped and her social position is subject to marginalization. In both roles, Mairs merely repeats the proscriptions of patriarchal and ableist culture to which she is subject and unhappily finds herself in the passive, objectified, exposed position. The Bone House sex scene provides an answer to the problems identified in Plaintext. The alternative model of sex she has with George allows her to move beyond gender roles in a way that alleviates the problems of sexual disempowerment. Just as significantly, it also provides an alternative and rare vision of the vulnerable male sexual body. The scene begins in medias res, with Mairs in the highly active role of pressing her body against George’s back, reaching over to rub his “limp cock,” notable for its silken softness. “We’ve been trying to have intercourse,” she explains, “But he couldn’t get hard.” He had initiated the sex, but his penis, which “usually . . . pops up at the first caress” cannot be “coaxed” into her and instead “flop[s] in his fingers.” His impotence is a product of other physical ailments, an upset stomach (presumably a product of chemotherapy, although a direct link is not established), which causes a queasiness that “no amount of will power [can] overcome.” At her instruction, he rolls over. He assumes a submissive position—he “curls up.” Mairs continues to function as the active agent. His “recalcitrant cock cradled” in her hand, she says she could orgasm just by touching him. She vigorously “pushe[s] . . . hard” at his finger, which he has slid between her legs. With her hand, she manipulates his foreskin, describing her forward and back movement in language that approximates sexual intercourse, and this stroking causes him to thrust his buttocks against her. When his penis does harden, it is described in a process of becoming—it “is stiffening”—as opposed to existing in a finished, albeit temporary, tumescent state. With Mairs’s initiative, the interlude is a success

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for both of them. “For once I’ve got the wet spot on my side,” says George. Mairs, her hand wet with “sweet, slippery semen,” coats George’s buttock and comments that sleeping in the wet spot (and the traditionally feminine subordinate position it represents) is not so bad. “Till it gets cold,” responds George in the lightly humorous ending to the scene that pictures him experiencing what Mairs might typically feel post-sexual intercourse (271–72). The scene reverses several gender traits that are commonly associated with heterosexuality and that Mairs found distasteful in Plaintext. Being in the position to touch as opposed to being touched, for instance, marks a transfer of power that hearkens back to her experience in an earlier relationship: touching the clothed erection of her date, she feels “the confused sense of control and largess doing it to him confers” (141). This female sexual subjectivity is a psychological puzzle that Bordo records as well; in touching the male member, she becomes “a subject” herself (Male Body 66). Mairs takes on other traditionally masculine traits as well. She is the active partner, and he the passive one. His “stroking and sucking” may have revved her desire, but it is her orchestration that leads to orgasms for both of them. He may slip his finger between her legs, but it is her thrusting that completes his motion. His body is “curled up” and his penis is associated with a cluster of adjectives that suggest anything but hardness and virility. In fact, his member is soft in both external texture and internal constitution. In Plaintext, Mairs dislikes the linguistic positioning of herself as the one to be penetrated as opposed to the one who engulfs and surrounds. In the Bone House scene, she repositions herself: she literally engulfs George’s penis with her palm and stimulates his foreskin in a description reminiscent of intercourse, but she is not penetrated by the penis itself. The use of her hand—an active agent of strength—and not her vagina (as a passive recipient) rewrites the power dynamics of the encounter. George’s body penetrates and engulfs itself through his wife’s handiwork with his foreskin. He is associated with other stereotypically feminine characteristics as well, such as being too sick to complete sex (women may have headaches; he has a stomach ache) and while he can no longer command his body to perform—no amount of his will power can finish the act—it is her desire and direction that leads to their completion. Moreover, his body is leaky and excessive. It leaves its mark both on itself (via Mairs’s final stroke of his buttock) and on the bed. George’s masculinity was maintained, according to Mairs’s view in earlier passages, by keeping his body from such leakiness, whether emotionally through his “manly detachment” or physically through not being able to even

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talk about bodily fluids: “Natural events like peeing and coming were for him unspeakable” (Bone House 172). He even rushes off into a bathroom without explanation in the middle of “making passionate, though fully clothed, love” during their initial courtship stage so that he could “ejaculate without suspiciously wetting his clothing” (172). The ending scene finds George a long way from these insecurities and control issues, and as Mairs anoints him with his own ejaculatory fluid, she performs a type of christening of his newly born masculinity, one that bears close ties to the body. Linguistically as well as physically, she has moved into the more masculine role of active agent while he is written in the more feminine role of penetrated, passive, and excessive. From a disability studies perspective, again, the concern is that in rewriting George’s masculinity as a vulnerable form of embodiment Mairs inadvertently enforces her own self-empowerment at the expense of George’s disempowerment. The reading of the sex scene above very nearly suggests this to be true, as stereotypes of the disabled man as feminized, weak, soft, out of control, and unable to perform in bed are mobilized. This interpretation suggests that although she herself struggles against proscriptions of gender and ability to form a strengthened image for herself, she denies George the same status. However, it is my contention that this feminized/acted-upon position is not necessarily a bad thing. Mairs’s portrayal of George anticipates the recent turn in disability studies toward understanding alternative models of masculinity adopted by well-adjusted disabled men who experience sexual intimacy. Shuttleworth’s study of fourteen men with cerebral palsy, noted briefly above, provides a useful theoretical basis for an alternative reading of George in the Bone House sexual encounter. To be sure, I hesitate to make direct connections between George, a man with cancer and impotence, and the men with cerebral palsy from Shuttleworth’s study since their lived experiences are clearly distinct from each other. In part this possibly strained comparison is necessitated by the dearth of information about disabled masculinities in general and about experience with impotence in particular, but Shuttleworth’s astute theories are, in fact, highly applicable to the way Mairs constructs George in the scene. Shuttleworth writes that “the development of a flexible gender identity of several of these men” marked a pathway to “success in love” (175, 166). Men who “were more apt to feel comfortable in letting the nondisabled other [in Mairs’s case the differently disabled other] do some of the more physically demanding work in their romance . . . and/or with the logistics of positioning for sexual intercourse” were, in the scope of the study,

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the most successful in having sexual intimacy (175–76). Shuttleworth concludes, “The example of these men lends support for the view that gender identity is not fixed but is situationally constructed. Moreover, using the body in alternative ways and emphasizing alternative ideals that diverge from those associated with strict hegemonic masculinity were not sexual liabilities but rather sexual assets for these disabled men” (175). The characteristic reading of the feminized/impotent male—that he lacks agency, that he is asexual, that he is abnormal—is based on an interpretive outlook that draws on patriarchal assumptions about male bodies and power. The act of acknowledging and reaching beyond those culturally conditioned assumptions allows new readings of male bodies to form. Thus, to read the Bone House scene as disempowering George is to view his feminization through the very patriarchal lens Mairs rejects in her literary nonfiction. When the value judgments that associate masculinity with power and femininity with disempowerment are exposed as social fictions, an even more expansive reading of the scene emerges: Mairs and George enjoy the culmination of a sexual interlude that occurs only because both partners are willing to imagine gender roles as free-floating, unmoored from their usual identification with man or woman and, therefore, to be used as tools toward an alternative and satisfying sexuality. In addition to a rewriting of these psychosexual scripts, Mairs’s description of George’s penis is similarly transgressive. Historically speaking, the penis makes a rare and relatively misleading appearance in literature: the erect, virile, penetrating member. Jørgen Lorentzen notes that although the women’s liberation movement set in motion discussions about the woman’s body, her multiple sites of eroticism, and her experience of a sexuality that is both physical and emotional, a similar exploration and expansion of male sexuality has not taken place. As a result, male sexuality is thought about according to “the simplest logic: seduction—erection—penetration—orgasm— withdrawal . . . And that is all” (71). The result upholds gender hierarchies and promotes a one-size-fits-all model of male sexuality. For feminist scholars such as Bordo, this “cultural cloaking” of the penis has the effect of supporting the fiction of patriarchal hierarchies—“within dominant constructions of masculinity, the penis remains private and protected territory” (267). For Lorentzen, the lack of depictions of the male body “uncloaked” also creates a fiction about male sexuality that denies men’s bodies plural sites of sexuality and that leads to a disconnect between sex and emotion for men (80). In this context, Mairs’s depiction of George’s flaccid, desired, and exposed penis is a radical

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revisioning of the sexual male body and the disabled male body—one of the few in literature. As Mairs “reclaims the deed to her dwelling” as an embodied woman, she also, in keeping with the metaphor, brokers a corporeal housing contract for George as well. In Waist-High Mairs continues to legitimize alternative erotics against cultural pressure to prize heterosexual penetrative sex as the ideal. Mairs articulates an alternative erotics between bodies— her increasingly immobilized self in need of George’s assistance and his mobile, impotent body that provides her intimate care. In doing so, she constructs for their relationship a connection between sexual affection and caregiving that imbues the act of caregiving with sensuality. Despite the usual assumption that “a sexual relationship cannot be sustained when one partner provides routine care to the disabled other,” there is “an erotic charge” in even “mundane interactions” (53–54) between her and George: “His ministrations, combining skills with sensuality, reassure me that this is the body he has loved since he first set eyes . . . on it thirty-five years ago” (49). Thus, the way Mairs reimagines roles during their sexual encounter in Bone House carries into their everyday life in Waist-High. Able to detach gender from biological sex, they can use gender roles as tools that contribute to a sensual closeness in their relationship, and these tools can be adjusted in response to the conditions of their bodies. As Mintz writes, the alternative erotics in Waist-High are less about “the limitations of her or George’s body parts than of a perception of sex as exclusively genital, male-directed, missionary, or even orgasmic” (43). It is this cultural construction of sex that Mairs writes against. Furthermore, Mairs’s depiction of George in the caregiving role contradicts other cultural scripts about male embodiment as detached and non-nurturing. The portrait of George in the opening of WaistHigh is wonderfully genderbending. He is busily making dinner and answering the phone while Mairs watches the news and talks with a caller until he’s got dinner ready. This situates him in domestic space—he is both cook and secretary as well as nurturing intercessor as he announces the caller’s request to Mairs. As Mairs becomes increasingly immobilized due to multiple sclerosis, George’s role as caregiver extends to lifting her out of bed, dressing her, taking her into women’s restrooms, and more—“he rubs in lotion and sprays on scent, clips nails and stray hairs, wrestles stockings onto my rubbery legs” (48). Such caregiving activities have been historically associated with women’s social role. As Barbara Hillyer finds, “Women’s role conditioning strongly reinforces our behavior as caregivers, encouraging us to be devoted and self-sacrificing, to subordinate willingly

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our own needs to those of the person we care for.” She suggests that women are expected to fulfill roles as the caregivers of husbands and children, and that this role is nonreciprocal (177). That George is depicted in such a role validates a configuration of gender that is not often acknowledged as culturally available. In fact, R. W. Connell argues that depicting men in the position of caregivers is a type of “re-embodiment” for men and, therefore, an avenue to “social justice” paved with the work of locating “different ways of using, feeling and showing male bodies.” Caregiving carries with it “an important bodily dimension” that includes physical touch and tending to the other person’s corporeal needs, including handling bodily fluids. “To engage with this experience,” according to Connell, “is to develop capacities of male bodies other than those developed in war, sport or industrial labour,” and “it is also to experience other pleasures” such as body-to-body contact (233). George manifests the male body as comfortable in the counter-hegemonic role of nurturer, at ease in domestic space. Importantly, it is Mairs’s disabled body that is the impetus for and producer of George’s caregiving. Her body and George’s body in her text thus contribute collaboratively to expanding the “capacities” of male bodies beyond those usually attached to hegemonic masculinity. Finally, an analysis of George as alternative hetero-masculine embodiment might move productively from the vulnerable penis to the penetrable colon. The description of his colonoscopy in WaistHigh continues to engage gender roles in inventive ways. It also holds a metatextual meaning worthy of close attention. Mairs’s stated purpose for this scene is to support her critique of the body/mind duality that has been reinforced by Euro-American culture. She argues that at one time the body/mind split may have been more appropriate: “Before advances in medical technology began permitting us to illuminate and scrutinize our mysterious mute inner reaches, the terrain beneath the skin might well have seemed alien, even wholly separate from our ‘true’ being. No longer” (41). Medical tests that supply pictures of our body’s interior space make this hidden terrain visible so that it can no longer be conceptualized in isolation from psychological consciousness. Curiously, instead of providing as evidence the example of her own medical tests, she recounts—in vivid writing— the details of George’s recent colonoscopy: I sat in the corner and watched on a television screen as a minute camera zoomed through the glistening roseate chambers of his large bowel, thereby becoming one of the few women in the world who can

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truly profess that she knows and loves her partner both inside and out. In fact, since George slept through the whole procedure, I can now claim to know him more fully than he knows himself. (41)

The gender play in this depiction of George’s body-on-view is considerable. The interiorizing of George places his male body in a position that is frequently associated with the woman’s body. George is prone and anesthetized while his insides are projected on a television screen and viewed by his wife. His “roseate chambers,” suggestive of a vaginal opening, are probed while he remains in a passive state. His placement recalls women’s vulnerable positions during childbirth and sex, as well as the female body’s intimate exposure in the media, as he is even broadcast on a television screen with Mairs (and, by extension, her readers) as his audience. Significantly, Mairs does not give George access to this interior view of himself. George is asleep during the procedure and so Mairs claims to have more knowledge of George’s body than he does. This would contradict her point that medical tests give the individual knowledge about his/her body’s interior, helping to merge that person’s conceptions of body and mind. It is Mairs, not George, who is privy to that insider’s view and the knowledge that accompanies it. This rupture in argument strategy is coupled by an omission: the notable absence of the medical professionals running the colonoscopy. Mairs’s configuration as the sole viewer has the effect of removing George’s body from objectification through the medical paradigm (George as a body to be studied and “fixed”) and reseats it so that George as a body is objectified by Mairs’s gaze and by her writing about it. Both the rupture and omission place Mairs in authority over George. She is the one to see inside his body and so she has the knowledge to understand him as a body, not as a mind that controls the body. The scene is a metaphor for her act of writing itself. Mairs, like the camera, probes George’s inner reaches and broadcasts them for others to see while he himself remains inert and absent, denied this chance to know himself inside out. He is also not present for the interpretation of those results—whether it is a medical report or Mairs’s report of him in her texts. After all, the conception of George in the autobiography is Mairs’s (and her reader’s), not necessarily his own. Supplying a snapshot (or better yet a moving video) of George’s interior, Mairs’s narrative stresses the primacy of George’s body as opposed to his consciousness. We, along with Mairs, explore his inner reaches, thus bearing witness to his embodiment. Earlier she has had to rely on the veracity of his body to expose his hidden, internal

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persona. In a scene from Bone House, for example, what he expresses as he awaits surgery and what his body conveys are two very different states. Mairs notes that he is “perfectly composed,” not appearing frightened or concerned. However, his body betrays him: “his cock gave him away. It crawled all the way up into the bush between his legs, almost out of sight. I was shocked” (268). It is his body that reveals the emotional state he does not articulate. He is understandably scared, but because he does not convey this outwardly, he exhibits a type of emotional strength in the face of adversity that is associated with hegemonic masculinity. Intimate knowledge of George’s body provides her a glimpse of him under this facade. Having recourse to his body—as opposed to his words—allows Mairs to read him beyond the surface of his “manly detachment,” with greater accuracy and also with greater humanity. In a similar way, forging a conscious connection between George and his body as she does in many of the scenes discussed here is a primary way of getting to “just George,” not only George as a man who is influenced by hegemonic narratives about masculinity and disability, but also George as a person who, through Mairs’s own emancipatory narrative of him, represents alternative models of experiencing gender and disability that turn out to be a better fit for him. His portrayal, like Mairs’s, suggests the benefits of unfastening the components of gender that conflict with personal identity as it shifts over time as opposed to imagining a body that is completely detached from gender. Connell discusses the theory of gender “recomposition” that is applicable here. Instead of moving toward “degendering” so that gender differentiation and, therefore, the concept of gender become extinct, Connell suggests the model of “recomposing” gender so that gender identifications become freely available to use independent of biological sex: “The idea is to recompose, rather than delete, the cultural elements of gender.” According to Connell, “The result would be a kind of gender multiculturalism” (233–34), whereby individuals retain the components of gender that complement their identity. Such a result is possible only if the terms of both men’s and women’s embodied identities are interrogated— not from a theoretical angle that upholds ableist thinking about the body, but from a perspective that incorporates insights about the eventuality and normativity of disability for both men and women as Mairs does. Mairs’s adjacent constructions of George and herself provide a glimpse of what such a “gender multiculturalism” might look like and how it might be enacted in the everyday context of marriage.

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In the search for less contradictory intersections of masculinity and disability, Mairs’s alternative constructions of George are important to examine. His depiction may at times be inflected with remnants of hegemonic masculinity that Mairs addresses, but more often than not, Mairs seeks an identity for him removed from such hierarchies, the image of “just George.” Her work takes gender hierarchies to task and re-envisions gender, disability, and sexuality in creative, nonoppressive ways. In Mairs we have an example of bodies that function as Shirley Newman conceives of them: bodies are “not only produced or constructed by social power but also . . . potentially resistant to that power and productive of other ideologies and other social powers” (416). The introduction of George’s cancer and impotence allows for the gender play in Mairs’s work that at times levels out, at times subverts, at times unroots both gender and the ability hierarchies. At the end of Unruly Bodies, Mintz calls for “better stories” about disability, “a greater circulation of tales that yield new knowledge about the entanglements of gender, sex, impairment, age, motherhood, [and following Connell’s lead, let’s now add fatherhood,] discourse, family, work, and memory” (214). Shifting focus from the autobiographer’s self to the construction of others in her narrative is one way to unearth such stories. Works Cited Asch, Adrienne and Michelle Fine. “Nurturance, Sexuality, and Women with Disabilities.” The Disability Studies Reader. Ed. Lennard J. Davis. New York: Routledge, 1997. 241–59. Bordo, Susan. The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. ———. “Reading the Male Body.” The Male Body: Features, Destinies, Exposures. Ed. Laurence Goldstein. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996. 265–306. Connell, R. W. Masculinities. Berkeley: U of California P, 2005. Couser, G. Thomas. “Conflicting Paradigms: The Rhetorics of Disability Memoir.” Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture. James C. Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2002. 78–91. Gerschick, Thomas J. and Adam Stephen Miller. “Coming to Terms: Masculinity and Physical Disability.” Men’s Lives. Ed. Michael S. Kimmel and Michael A. Messner. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1995. 262–75. Hillyer, Barbara. Feminism and Disability. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1993. Lorentzen, Jørgen. “Masculinities and the Phenomenology of Men’s Orgasms.” Men and Masculinities 10.71 (2007): 71–84.

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Lindgren, Kristin. “Bodies in Trouble: Identity, Embodiment, and Disability.” Gendering Disability. Ed. Bonnie G. Smith and Beth Hutchison. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2004. 145–65. Mairs, Nancy. Ordinary Time: Cycles in Marriage, Faith, and Renewal. Boston: Beacon, 1993. ———. Plaintext. Tuscon: U of Arizona P, 1983. ———. Remembering the Bone House: An Erotics of Place and Space. 1989 Boston: Beacon, 1995. ———. Waist-High in the World: A Life among the Non-Disabled. Boston: Beacon, 1996. McIlvenny, Paul. “The Disabled Male Body ‘Writes/Draws Back’: Graphic Fictions of Masculinity and the Body in the Autobiographical Comic The Spiral Cage.” Revealing Male Bodies. Ed. Nancy Tuana, William Cowling, Maurice Hamington, Greg Johnson, and Terrance MacMullan. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002. 100–25. Miner, Madonne. “ ‘Making up Stories as We Go Along’: Men, Women, and Narratives of Disability.” The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability. Ed. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997. 283–96. Reprinted in this volume. Mintz, Susannah B. Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2007. Neuman, Shirley. “Autobiography, Bodies, Manhood.” 1991. Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1998. 415–28. Rubin, Gayle. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” 1984. Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. Ed. Carole S. Vance. London: Pandora, 1992. 267–319. Schiebinger, Londa. “Introduction.” Feminism and the Body. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. 1–24. Shuttleworth, Russell P. “Disabled Masculinity: Expanding the Masculine Repertoire.” Gendering Disability. Ed. Bonnie G. Smith and Beth Hutchison. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2004. 166–78. Wilson, Daniel J. “Fighting Polio Like a Man: Intersections of Masculinity, Disability, and Aging.” Gendering Disability. Ed. Bonnie G. Smith and Beth Hutchison. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2004. 119–33.

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Chapter 6

On Embodied Theology: Sacraments of the Body in Ordinary Time and A Dynamic God Jenny Bangsund

One of the persistent themes running through Nancy Mairs’s body

of work is the goodness of the human body. As she recounts the foibles of her own body, she bids her readers to reconsider all bodies, approaching this task as a kind of prophetic endeavor, wherein she calls attention to the glory and humility of embodiment. At the conclusion of Mairs’s frequently anthologized “Carnal Acts,” she proclaims her own body in the midst of her writing and personal relationships: “I give myself permission to live openly among others, to reach out for them, stroke them with fingers and sighs” (305). Mairs’s essays fill numerous volumes with this connection between embodiment and relationship in her consistent celebration of human mutuality that disrupts established hierarchies such as sexism and ableism. In Ordinary Time, her 1993 volume that traces her development as a Catholic feminist, she moves at the same time through the story of her marriage—a tumultuous narrative of bodies variously encumbered by mental illness, infidelity, cancer, degenerative disability, parenthood, and religious rhetoric. Her most recent volume, A Dynamic God (2007), further presents the body and bodies of a faith community embracing one another and the material acts of mercy and justice. These two volumes, in particular, concentrate Mairs’s affirmations of the body as the core of her theological inquiry and the reconciliation of her Catholic and feminist identities. The marriage she recounts in Ordinary Time serves as the model of the mutuality of care that sustains her spiritual vision and extends into her representation of the community in A Dynamic God; this care takes shape as an

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authentic witness to the communion of bodies and spirits that renews the traditional understanding of what it means to dwell together as the Body of Christ. In both Ordinary Time and A Dynamic God, Mairs draws on theological practices shaped by liberation theology in the late twentieth century. Readily confessing that she is no theologian, Mairs nevertheless articulates key tenets of Christian faith and Catholic tradition addressed by feminist theologians and voices associated with liberation theology in the Latin American tradition, two movements that emphasize the significance of social context as the core of human spirituality. In Ordinary Time, in particular, Mairs mentions the work of feminist theologians Rosemary Ruether and Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, whose work negotiates the realm of Catholic feminism by proposing feminist models of leadership and relationship that serve as transformative challenges to institutional religion in Western tradition. Further, in A Dynamic God, Mairs is quite specific in explaining how her own community of faith is deeply rooted in liberation theology movements that confess a preferential option for the poor apart from the hierarchical structures of the institutional Roman Catholic Church (15). The movements in Latin American and feminist liberation theology share with one another and with Mairs’s work an ongoing concern with the body itself and with the material world as an expression of goodness and a site of wholeness that ought not to be dismissed, degraded, or devalued. In her summary statement addressing feminist liberation theology, Mary Grey claims that one of the two primary methods at work in feminist theology is an approach “built on antidualist, liberating, justice-making categories, which express the key notions of revelation in embodied terms” (97). This attention to the body draws together the seemingly disparate discourses of feminism and Catholicism, particularly in the significance of the incarnation and the celebration of the mass, disrupting the dualism that seems to separate traditional religious practice from progressive political action. Further, the ongoing work of liberation theologians continues to emphasize the potential for the fulfillment of divine promise in the present historical moment through such actions of justice and mercy that address the needs of human bodies and draw human beings together in right relationship. Most of all, however, the purpose of liberation theology from which Mairs draws inspiration is the message that divine life emerges in the midst of material reality and relationships between human beings. In what many consider to be a founding document of Latin

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American liberation theological discourse, Gustavo Gutiérrez plainly states that “The encounter with God takes place in the encounter with our neighbor; it is in the encounters with human beings that I encounter God” (74). The necessarily material practice of the Gospel, Gutiérrez and others repeat, leads to the redemption of the earthly existence. Mairs’s own statement of faith about redemption follows from this understanding. She asserts, “Jesus is not making a promise here. He’s stating a reality: the Kindom of God is in our midst, whether we can perceive it or not” (Dynamic 110). In similar fashion, Mairs refocuses attention from the abstractions of spirituality to material necessities, pointing out early in Ordinary Time that “a book of personal essays written from the viewpoint of a Catholic feminist isn’t going to get either you or me into heaven or, for that matter, into hell. Nothing here will lift us out of this world; on the contrary, I hope that you will plunge as I have done, ever deeper into earthly existence, where we are needed” (12–13). Further, in A Dynamic God, Mairs emphasizes her lack of concern for the formal tenets of dogma and her commitment to right thinking connected to right action. In this, Mairs’s proposal echoes Catherine Mowry LaCugna’s new vision for Christian community as “a true community of stewards, where orthopraxis (the practice of truth) would finally have coincided with orthodoxy (right opinion about the mystery of salvation), the whole range of human experience would be incorporated into our praise of God” (“God in Communion” 107). Mairs appreciates the reach of this work beyond the practices of the institutional church, “making real the Kindom of God here, now, as promised by the Jesus of the Gospels” (Dynamic 15). Mairs depends on the language of family rather than hierarchy— using Kindom rather than Kingdom—to describe the relationships among the members of the faith community in order to illustrate the material reality of their relationships of care for one another beyond the immediacy of the American nuclear family. The departure noted in the shift from the discussion of Kingdom—the traditional language drawn from the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ teaching and proclamation about the fulfillment of God’s reign on earth—to the rhetoric of Kindom radically alters the context in which to speak of God’s presence and work in the world. Mairs admits her own slow progress in making this shift, musing in Ordinary Time that she likes the term “the Commonwealth of God—the shared well-being it holds—but its general usage is too narrowly political. And so I settle, unoriginally but happily, for all the resonances of the Community of God” (182). Since the publication of Ordinary Time, however, Mairs has adopted

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the Kindom rhetoric, expressing her initial discomfort with the term by noting that it is “too cute and touchy-feely to be used seriously” but acknowledging that it has nevertheless grown on her. She explains, “If God is, among the many things God is, Abba (and Amma) for us all, then we are spiritual siblings as surely as mitochondrial DNA shows us to be biological ones. In which case, we would do well to stop behaving like a dysfunctional family and find ways to strengthen one another” (Dynamic 121). The Kindom of God refocuses attention from abstract concerns with divine expectation and rule to the embodied experience of human beings in the world. The invocation of divine presence among human beings, Mairs contends, requires incarnation. All of her work centers the reality of embodiment as an often ignored condition of being human, and in the explorations of that embodiment, Mairs draws connections between the feminine body and the disabled body. Although Mairs explores at length the consequences of the body in relation to social identity in volumes such as Waist-High in the World, she frames this connection in explicitly theological contexts in Ordinary Time and A Dynamic God, referencing her experience as a gendered, disabled, constrained, and sometimes suffering body as a prelude to broader considerations of theological embodiment defined by mutuality—the relationships of bodies with other bodies—as the fundamental task of Christian life. Mairs begins Ordinary Time by remarking on the ostensible oxymoron she proposes to live as a Catholic feminist, noting the historical and contemporary misogyny of the institutional Roman Catholic Church—and she wrestles with the illogic and rational conundrums Christian belief presents to her: I know plenty of lucid, sensible, right-acting, liberal or even radical— and feminist—Catholics, so obviously I haven’t chosen an outright impossibility. But you’ll have to admit that there’s something murky and numinous right at the heart of the Christian mythos, especially in the emphasis on incarnation given it by Roman Catholicism, which no amount of reason can get around: a God who put on a body and walked around in that body and spoke to us from that body and died as that body and yet somehow did not die then or ever but lives on in our bodies which live in God. It’s not the easiest story in the world to swallow. Then, to make matters worse, early on the story got into the wrong hands, the hands of some very anxiety-ridden and powergreedy men, many of whose fingers, white-knuckled, still contort and crush it, and in this mangled condition it has been used to kill millions of women and to cripple and confine countless more. (Ordinary 3)

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The only way, she suggests, to get over the illogic and the misogyny and the violence is to recognize the body at the heart of the Christian story and to embrace it. She admits in A Dynamic God that many people have experienced a history of guilt and despair traced to Christian practice, even to what she refers to as her “chosen Catholicism,” but at the same time, Mairs indicates that Catholic tradition—especially with its incarnational emphasis—refreshes her perspective on the Gospel: “that we bear God into the world, in all God’s complexity, and so God is always with(in) us, to be welcomed time and again” (41). Such a task undertaken in the framework of Christian belief concentrates the inclusiveness at the heart of Christian teaching. The centrality of the body to the life of faith that literally bears God into the world elevates the language of embodiment even above typical discussions of incarnation in Western theological tradition. Perhaps Mairs’s own narrative of multiple sclerosis has trained her to concentrate on the centrality of the body to human experience—or perhaps her consciousness of female sexuality and the experiences of living in a feminine body have schooled her attention to matters of the body; but in Ordinary Time, her own bodily experience is portrayed in conjunction with her husband’s, and together they take shape as a theological model formed by duress and even suffering. Mairs draws on the narrative of George’s melanoma rather than on her own body in such a way that her readers are forced to consider bodies-in-relationship as the central figure in her portrayal of the mysteries of Christian belief and practice. She claims this as her own approach to spiritual autobiography, explaining in the introduction to Ordinary Time: The premises of my life have left me no choice. At the time I signed the contract to write Ordinary Time, my attention was given over to the exigencies of my husband’s chemotherapy. “If God is going to be present to me,” I recall reflecting one evening as George hunched in spasms over the pink plastic basin that accompanied us home from the hospital and remained within easy retrieving distance for months . . . “she’ll simply have to wade through the mess chemotherapy is currently making in our lives. I can’t scramble away from it up to some loftier plain.” Mine is, perforce, a practical expertise. (6)

The “practical expertise” Mairs asserts here is part of her attempt to qualify herself to engage the questions of theological identity in and through life in the church; she claims the privilege of mutuality in the priesthood of all believers rather than reifying the hierarchical authority as a means of unifying her feminist self with her Catholic

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faith. Mairs sets out to engage questions of what is properly included in theology and what is excluded from it precisely because of her disregard for qualifications that—like the persistent dualism that divides body from mind—set the realm of theological or religious narrative apart from the embodied narrative of the mundane and ordinary. The contexts for this story of theology and marriage spin outward from Mairs’s own rebellion against what she calls “the territorializing of the holy” that determines “Here God may dwell. Here God may not dwell” (Ordinary 10). She contends that such a distinction “contradicts everything in my experience, which says: God dwells where I dwell. Period,” even in the midst of the messy, painful exchanges of bodies in relationship (10). And she cautions her reader to attend to the contingencies of bodies that require choices that constitute the Christian practice of charity—the divine command to love. To love is to choose to love, Mairs makes clear, and to choose to love is to choose to enact and embody love in practical terms that honor the body. This ethic of the body becomes a form of spiritual practice that begins with the recognition of one’s own body and its limitations. Such an ethic of the body requires care, which serves as an inheritance of the model of Christian charity in the practice of corporeal works of mercy that Mairs describes both in Ordinary Time and in A Dynamic God. This principle of care functions as an important element of any economy that endeavors to support the nurture and development of human beings. Mairs’s own experience of body limited by MS also articulates the needs of care that invalidate the traditional liberal democratic notions of individualism and independence. In The Disabled God, Nancy Eiesland explains that Mairs’s expression of disability also becomes the expression of community, making it “very clear that a body, perhaps especially a disabled body, is not a space one occupies alone” (41). This conjunction of bodies at the point of care signifies not only the dependency relation between caregiver and charge that philosopher Eva Feder Kittay outlines repeatedly in her work, but also the relationship between bodies conjoined in marriage, particularly as Mairs addresses both her and her husband’s physical need in Ordinary Time. The cultivation of the virtue of care within the affectionate bonds of marriage necessarily underpins the attention to another’s body in the circumstance of vulnerability and need—that moment when care is most required and the labors of care most difficult. This virtue, of course, is revealed in that moment when Mairs connects to her own project of spiritual autobiography, that “practical expertise” grounded in concrete action and sustained by the commitment, virtue, and affection of marriage.

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In her dedication to narrating the goodness of the human body, Mairs does not hesitate or shy away from sexuality in general or from revelations of her own erotic experiences that pre- and post-date her diagnosis with MS. Rather, Mairs presents her experiences candidly with an eye toward drawing out the connections between the erotic pleasures of the body and the challenges and limitations of a disabled body. This attention to the erotic disabled body grounds Mairs’s work in the community of bodies brought together in conjugal relationship. Her awareness of sexuality as a means of self-identification connects to the sacramental representation of marriage in Catholic tradition wherein erotic expression defines the self through its encounter with the other, though Mairs’s articulation of this is not restricted by the boundaries of the heterosexual model. Most of Mairs’s account of her erotic body remains within the conventional boundaries of marriage, though the narrative of eroticism within that marriage has been modified by her experience of MS and George’s impotence. Mairs refuses to present any part of her narrative as asexual, however. Much of what seems to shift Mairs’s perception from the typical perception of the nondisabled world is her unwillingness to depart in any way from language of and about the body. Mairs experiences sexuality as a fundamental part of human relationships and as a key definition for her own identity because sexuality is the expression of the body itself and functions as a mechanism that demands attention to the body. When Mairs attends so deliberately to her own and to George’s body, she extends the potential of the erotic beyond the strict bounds of intercourse; the eroticism she describes is not one of individual climax but of shared satisfaction achieved through the sincere and mutual encounter between bodies. Mairs connects the physicality of this relationship to the abstraction of theological questioning that graces her spiritual life, addressing a divine presence in the midst of her understanding of marriage. As she makes the claim, however, she also dismisses it, a double gesture she attributes “to a persistent Protestant intractability,” explaining, “I have an uneasy relationship with the miraculous. In fact, the notion of a miracle as an act of God for my benefit, which seems to underlie the use of the word by the devout, embarrasses the hell out of me” (Dynamic 29). This admission paradoxically lends credibility to Mairs’s articulation of the embodied miraculous as she notes that her life with George “is made possible by a miracle, George having survived metastatic melanoma for some years now, and even though the wailing infant in me petitions constantly Dear God please please don’t ever let him die and leave me, I prefer not to look on his good health

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as a special favor from the Almighty” (Dynamic 29–30). Miraculous existence notwithstanding, Mairs’s experience is rooted in her celebration of the body and in the fulfillment of relationship, while her ambivalence toward divine intervention derives from an underlying sense that divine presence does not mean a state of perfect security. Mairs recognizes that perfection (of the body or of relationships) is not part of her theological formula, and she consistently reminds her readers that any virtue of love or care requiring choice also allows for the failure of that choice. Her notion of sin—and she uses the direct language to name her own actions and the actions of others—defines it precisely as that failure, an act “that frays or severs the bonds of love between me and my fellow creatures, between me and the God present to me through those creatures” (Ordinary 126). The reality of her own sin and need for repentance makes Mairs conscious of the potential for others to sin against her and for her call to enact divine grace for another and to forgive. Indeed, in what seems to be a paradoxical circumstance, Mairs’s own sin empowers her to understand and forgive when she learns of George’s marital unfaithfulness. She reminds her readers of her own indiscretions: “I’m not that [virtuous] woman. I’m the other one, the one whose accusers dropped their stones and skulked away. I’ve desired other men, slept with them, even loved them, although I’ve never felt married to one. I guess I took my girlhood vow literally: I have always thought of marriage as something one did once and forever” (Ordinary 19–20). In this regard, George’s betrayal stings but does not threaten her ability to respond with love and forgiveness. For Mairs the betrayal is accounted for not merely in terms of sexual infidelity but also in terms of the presence of relationship and its apparent fracture or erasure. She claims that the incident seemed most threatening to her in her dependence on George as somehow constitutive of her own self: “For almost thirty years, except during a couple of severe disintegrative episodes, my presence to George has kept me present to myself. Now, at just the moment when cancer threatens to remove that reassurance of my own reality from my future, it’s yanked from my past as well. Throughout his sweet stolen hours with Sandra, George lived where I was not” (Ordinary 24). As she works through this psychological loss, Mairs returns to the value of mutuality, even when comprised by the shared experience of sin, and explains how such intimacy highlights the possibilities of grace: One of the elements that drew me into the Catholic Church was the concept of grace, although I’ve never been able to make more than

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clumsy sense of it . . . I am moved—but not persuaded. I am simply incapable of grasping an abstraction unless I can root it experientially, and nothing in my experience has revealed quite how grace works. Until now. The uncontingent love and forgiveness I feel for George, themselves a gift of grace, unwilled and irresistible, intimate that grace whose nature has eluded me. (Ordinary 31)

Her depictions of married life as a model for theological understanding grounds what could otherwise remain a theoretical discussion of grace and forgiveness. In musing on her youthful imagination of marriage, she determines, “I might have found another way to God. I might have found a better way to God. But I did not. My spirit has been schooled in wedlock” (Ordinary 106). The embodied intimacy of marriage evokes the sacramental intimacy of Eucharistic celebration in its celebration of divine life. The representation of marriage as sacramental relationship is not free from problems, particularly when hierarchical representations of marriage impinge on Christian representations of the divine-human relationship, as the church presents itself as the Bride of Christ. On this point, Mairs interrupts her own depiction of marriage as a practice of embodied theology with a wry aside: Listen, guys, you can take it from me, being a woman in our society, even a purely symbolic one, is not all that hot, and any spousal relationship, whether human or divine, which is structured in terms of “heads” and “subjects” violates the radical mutuality of realized love, both ours for one another and Christ’s for us. Better we should drop the wedding imagery altogether, corrupted as it is by centuries of inequity, and think of ourselves in terms of identity: not the Bride but the Body of Christ. We enact Christ. Through us Christ enters the world. Christ needs us in order to become present even as we need Christ to give our enactment of that presence significance. This is real love we’re talking about, passionate, reciprocal, incarnate. In a church modeled on such love, matrimony becomes truly holy. (Ordinary 133)

And here it is not only matrimony but also the truly holy that pervades the relationships of all believers—of all bodies—in communion with one another in such a way that the holiness of the body can be recognized as a sign of the sacramental presence of God in the midst of the human. That is, human personhood mirrors divine personhood, which LaCugna explains, “is to be by nature in relation to other persons. Each divine person is irresistibly drawn to the other, taking his/her existence from the other, containing the other in him/

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herself, while at the same time pouring self out into the other” (God for Us 271). The revisions proposed by feminist theology confirm the need to reshape the typical understanding of Christian marriage so that it better reflects this mutuality and equality, and Mairs’s narrative of marriage illustrates these theological ideas even when it does not directly cite them. As Mairs further draws out the comparisons between the intimacy of marriage and the celebration of the Eucharist, she demonstrates her commitment to this mutuality that does not distinguish but rather draws all bodies together in their common experience as bodies. In addressing the sacrament of holy communion, she explains that it is nourishment “freely offered to anyone who’s famished . . . . I don’t partake because I’m a good Catholic, holy and pious and sleek. I partake because I’m a bad Catholic, riddled by doubt and anxiety and anger: fainting from severe hypoglycemia of the soul. I need food. . . . God doesn’t place conditions on the hungry. She feeds first and asks questions later” (Ordinary 89). This image of the Eucharist as the free and unreserved sharing of the body of Christ in and to the body of Christ models the excesses of love available within the bonds of Christian community—that is, the church—as well as within the intimate bonds of marriage. The superabundance in the Eucharist parallels the overwhelming grace and forgiveness Mairs identifies in the experiential ground of marriage that directs the bodies involved toward one another and toward the body of Christ as the figure by and in whom they are shaped. Mairs explains this mystery within the context of that sacramental—Eucharistic and marriage—celebration: “ ‘The Body of Christ,’ George says, placing the wafer on my tongue. The words both describe this scrap of bread and affirm my identity: a double mystery. I eat the Body of Christ. I am—we are all—the Body of Christ. Nourished by God, we must bear God into the world and give God away with ourselves” (Ordinary 139). The examination of the body in the context of broader experience encourages, as Susan Ross points out, “careful scrutiny of our theological and symbolic heritage [that] will work to transform the ways in which we live out the Christian belief that Christ lives among us, in the flesh and blood of the church” (207). When the church strays from its recognition of “flesh and blood” as the determination of its life, it departs from the revelation of sacramental possibility in human lives. From Mairs’s perspective, this recognition of God in the bodies of those around us serves as the foundation for life in and as the Community of God (Ordinary 186). She claims that “what changes in the course of Holy Communion is not these elements but the

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communicant, whose body is nourished, if only infinitesimally, by them, and whose spirit is strengthened and sustained by the awareness once again of taking God in in preparation for living God out” (Dynamic 12). The cyclical motion of “taking God in” and “living God out” moves on the axis of the bodies of individuals willing to extend themselves in relationship to one another and willing to commit themselves to the disciplines that both taking in and living out require. Mairs does not distinguish the tasks of taking in and living out from the experiences and expressions of mundane life and relationship, just as she does not separate the erotic from the mundane in her understanding of marriage. Just as Mairs constructs her relationship with George in terms of her understanding of divine activity in her life and in the world, she introduces more fully the Eucharistic community with whom she associates as the body of believers who both embrace one another and enact God. One of Mairs’s key emphases in A Dynamic God is the articulation of this community as the priesthood of all believers, subverting typical notions of hierarchy in Catholic tradition and calling, instead, for relationships within a worshiping community that extend the mutuality of marriage she earlier spoke of in Ordinary Time. Eschewing the pitfalls of power in a hierarchical system, she remarks, “Safer for the souls of all us believers to take literally the radically democratic phrase ‘priesthood of the people,’ recognize that we are by virtue of our existence, with or without our assent, consecrated to the Holy, and accept our sacerdotal lot” (Dynamic 11). Mairs again refuses to delimit the extension of the holy, either in terms of place or person, and her confession of “the priesthood of all believers” draws not only on her Protestant heritage but also on her understanding of the prophetic Gospel message that radically revises social systems and breaks down the boundaries between the privileged and those previously excluded. By emphasizing this unity among all members of the faith community, Mairs shifts the focus from the typical feminist critique of the church that prohibits women in positions of ecclesiastical authority to the potency of a community gathered around the Eucharistic table. In emphasizing the privilege of embodiment itself within her worshiping community, Mairs explains how their sacramental celebration is not simply about the traditional elements of bread and wine but has become a series of potluck festivities held in one another’s homes: “At the end of the service, we assemble a groaning board. Everyone contributes a dish. Sometimes the variety of offerings is a little offkilter—one evening, I recall, we ate nothing but dessert—but we

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have never gone hungry. This is an important part of our gathering” (Dynamic 21). The warmth of the atmosphere Mairs illustrates here departs from the typical representation of church life in Western theological tradition, which is most often characterized by a more isolated, individual experience. At the same time that Mairs offers this as a critique of religious experiences common in the United States, she also emphasizes the reality that the Eucharist is as much about feeding the hungry and meeting the needs of the body as it is about the spiritual mystery of divine presence. The juxtaposition of holy communion with community potluck is not necessarily foreign to all weekly services, but many churches in twenty-first-century U.S. society have foregone the sharing of food as an extension of—and confirmation of—the sacramental celebration. Beyond the potluck itself, Mairs highlights the presence of the community in the context of homes and households that host the gatherings in the context that reiterates the relationship between church and family she traces in Ordinary Time. Throughout A Dynamic God, Mairs confirms her understanding of the faith community as family, calling it both “our spiritual home,” and clearly addressing its members, saying, “you are our family” (14). Though this language is historically connected to theological formulations of the church, it has lost its potency in ecclesiastical circles as the hierarchy and bureaucracy of institutional religion have sometimes overshadowed the familial relationships and needs of practical as well as spiritual care from one another and not merely from ordained clergy. Maris’s proposal to her own community that they speak the Eucharistic prayer together illustrates the belief “in a true priesthood of the people” and, at the same time, extends the authority for sacramental participation to all in the mutuality of the meal (16). When the people of faith gather around the table to pray together in the incarnational moment, the people themselves not only invoke the body of Christ in the sacramental elements but also are themselves transformed into the body of Christ—also called the family of God. This emphasis on community is hardly new to the theological formulations of Christian faith, as LaCugna argues: “The point of trinitarian theology is to convey that it is the essence or heart of God to be in relationship to other persons” (“God in Communion” 106). Revisiting for a moment the rhetorical recognition of the relationship represented by Kindom discussed above, this embodied theology limits the potential for the triumph of ego and the proclamation of self-sufficiency that denies the fundamental needs of care mutually experienced in the bodies of the people gathered together at

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the Eucharistic—and potluck—table. The vision of the church as egalitarian community rather than hierarchy foregrounds God’s presence substantiated by the care demonstrated by its members for one another and for the whole of creation. This view of the church’s ministry necessarily transforms the church from a self-centered, closed structure to an outward-reaching, expansive community. The representation of true personhood within this context of community “is neither autonomous nor heteronomous but theonomous: The human person is named with reference to its origin and destiny in God,” LaCugna claims (God for Us 290). Eiesland’s description of Mairs’s conversion account illustrates this notion of personhood that moves between the autonomous and the heteronomous, noting that Mairs’s “is a conversion of body, begun in the real presence of those who call her to herself and to others. Her turning toward God is a process of settling into the Body of Christ. . . . [which] also necessitates a habit of ‘turning toward and taking in’ their real, lived experiences” (45). The recognition of self-inrelationship emphasizes Mairs’s understanding of salvation not only within but also for community: “Salvation is not an individual matter, and Jesus Christ is nobody’s personal savior but the savior of all the world . . . Until the well-being of every person everywhere is fostered according to his instruction, we are all lost” (Dynamic 74). Mairs’s conversion and recognition of salvific activity in her own experience are grounded in this reality that the presence of Kindom and the outreach of community form in the radical inclusiveness that brings about hope and fulfillment for all. In the contemporary project of liberation theology, this remains the key concern, that the mutuality of community brings forth the liberative actions that “are not only glimpses of the future but eschatological actions making parts of the future present now” (Isasi-Díaz 100). The proclamation of Kindom and community is, as Jesus claims in Luke’s Gospel, that “the kingdom of God is among you” (17.21) and, as written in the Gospel of Thomas and as Mairs cites it, that “the Father’s imperial rule is spread out upon the earth, and people don’t see it” (qtd. in Dynamic 122). The sacramental presence of Kindom and family relationships grounded in radical care for one another shape the narrative of self and of relationship to which Mairs returns again and again in her essays. Mairs presents her own autobiographical project as part of her articulation of what it means to be embodied. The stories she tells are the family stories and the stories of grace and forgiveness that are the obligation of family life. And for Mairs the story of family life is

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necessarily an earthly story, the way the Christian story originated: “Like the ‘original Christians’ . . . I focus on putting myself in right relationship with God and God’s creatures in order to bring about the Kindom of God on earth, which is the only place where I can be certain that it might exist. Whether or not there is a sweet hereafter I’ll find out in the sweet hereafter” (Dynamic 6). The presence of the Kindom of God on earth, as Mairs emphasizes it, requires the responsibility of embodied human beings to bring about the communion that reveals the sanctity of all creation. This circumstance dependent on the responsive will of human beings appeals to Mairs, as she explains using the notion of vocation, saying she is “drawn by the concept that not only did we need God but God needed us” (Dynamic 37). God’s need of us in this formulation does not signify any lack in God but illustrates the expansive presence of God in and among human beings who work out the divine presence in the expressions of the body. The theological discussions of Ordinary Time and A Dynamic God provide a particular focus for Mairs, but they ought not to be considered distinct from her other work, since what these volumes accomplish is the further clarification and proclamation of the shape of the body at work in the world as a sign of human being formed imago Dei. Mairs reflects on this truth as the “singular absolute” of her existence in the declaration that “God is here. And here, and here, and here. Not an immutable entity detached from time but a continual calling and coming into being. Not transcendence, that orgy of self-alienation beloved of the fathers, but immanence: God working out Godself in every thing” (Ordinary 11). This insistence on the immanence of God draws upon the notion of relationship and embodiment that proclaims the goodness and wholeness of human existence when we extend the reach of our bodies toward one another in relationships that enact the sacramental reconciliation presented in the Eucharistic moment. The recognition of this goodness—this “Godding, not Godness or Goodhood. What she does. How she does it” (Ordinary 11)—is the activity by which we define ourselves most fully as selves, when we enact the holy in our selves and witness it in one another. And God’s revelation of God’s self comes only in bodily action, never merely in the intellectual assent, since “faith is above all a commitment to God and the neighbor. . . . ‘To do the truth,’ the gospel text requires, and that is proper to Christian truth” (Gutiérrez 65). The marriage of the practices of social justice to the acknowledgment of pervasive divine life serves as the foundation on which Mairs establishes her spiritual autobiography. The recognition of the sanctity of

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relationship and action takes shape in a truth revealed, Mairs claims, in one’s bones. She concludes “Carnal Acts” with the interdependence of voice and body, saying, “No body, no voice; no voice, no body. That’s what I know in my bones” (“Carnal” 305), locating truth in the deepest structure of her body. This correlation appears again in her musing about what might come about in her body and her marriage and her world—all of which encounter degenerative threats—when Mairs acknowledges that “the future promises more afflictions than delights. . . . Still, something tells me—I don’t know what, I can’t explain what, it’s just a feeling I have in my bones—that I’m supposed to stay for it all” (Ordinary 229). The commitment to life in her body comes from her body itself—and the life she leads necessarily depends on the bodies of others who together support and sustain the Body of Christ. Works Cited Eiesland, Nancy. The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability. Nashville: Abingdon, 1994. Grey, Mary. “Feminist Theology: A Critical Theology of Liberation.” The Cambridge Companion to Liberation Theology. Ed. Christopher Rowlandson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 89–106. Gutiérrez, Gustavo. “Toward a Theology of Liberation.” 1968 Liberation Theology: A Documentary History. Ed. Alfred T. Hennelly. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990. 62–76. Isasi-Díaz, Ada María. “Solidarity: Love of Neighbor in the Twenty-First Century.” Mujerista Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002. 86–104. Kittay, Eva Feder. “When Caring Is Just and Justice Is Caring: Justice and Mental Retardation.” Public Culture 13 (2001): 557–79. LaCugna, Catherine Mowry. “God in Communion with Us.” Freeing Theology: The Essentials of Theology in Feminist Perspective. Ed. Catherine Mowry LaCugna. San Francisco: Harper, 1993. 83–114. ———. God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life. San Francisco: Harper, 1991. Mairs, Nancy. “Carnal Acts.” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Ed. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. ———. A Dynamic God: Living an Unconventional Catholic Faith. Boston: Beacon, 2007. ———. Ordinary Time: Cycles in Marriage, Faith, and Renewal. Boston: Beacon, 1993. Ross, Susan A. “God’s Embodiment and Women.” Freeing Theology: The Essentials of Theology in Feminist Perspective. Ed. Catherine Mowry LaCugna. San Francisco: Harper, 1993. 185–209.

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Foundational Statements

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Chapter 7

Autopathography: Women, Illness, and Lifewriting G. Thomas Couser

The word “pathography” first caught my attention not in its clini-

cal context, in which it simply refers to writing about illness, such as case histories, but in a review by Joyce Carol Oates of David Roberts’s recent biography of Jean Stafford. There Oates adapted the clinica1 term to denote—and to denigrate—what she described as “hagiography’s diminished and often prurient twin, [whose] motifs are dysfunction and disaster, illnesses and pratfalls, failed marriages and failed careers, alcoholism and breakdowns and outrageous conduct” (3). According to Oates—not entirely a disinterested party, since, as a famous writer, she is sure to be a biographer’s subject eventually—we are in the midst of an outbreak of diseased biography that dwells obsessively on its subjects’ (psycho)pathology. This may be true, and it may be regrettable. But we are also—and the two phenomena may be connected—in the midst of a flowering of what I call “autopathography,” autobiographical narratives of illness or disability. The texts I have in mind range from journals to essays to full-life narratives, but most lie in a middle range of “single-experience” autobiographies. Disease may remain in the background, as when serious illness stimulates reassessment of a whole life, but usually it is squarely in the foreground, as when the narrative is coextensive with the illness. Among the writers I have in mind here are Emmanuel Dreuilhe (Mortal Embrace), Audre Lorde (The Cancer Journals), Nancy Mairs (Plaintext, Remembering the Bone-House, and Carnal Acts), Robert Murphy (The Body Silent), Oliver Sacks (A Leg to Stand On), May Sarton (After the Stroke), Eileen Simpson (Reversals), William Styron (Darkness Visible), John Updike (Self-Consciousness), Barbara Webster (All of a Piece: A Life with Multiple Sclerosis), and Paul Zweig (Departures).

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If “pathography” is for Oates a symptom of cultural pathology, the development of autopathography is for me a sign of cultural health—an acknowledgement and an exploration of our condition as embodied selves. One of the notable and salutary features of this recent trend is the prominence of women writers in it. Yet despite the fact that we are in the midst of intense theorizing about women’s bodies, and despite signs of a new interest in literature and the body,1 not much critical attention has been paid, as far as I am aware, to the emerging autobiographical literature of illness and disease, much of which has been written by women. I wish to speculate about lifewriting, illness, and gender in somewhat general terms, then discuss two books by women afflicted with multiple sclerosis, Barbara Webster’s All of a Piece: A Life with Multiple Sclerosis and Nancy Mairs’s Plaintext. It is obvious, upon ref1ection (though most of us rarely reflect upon it), that we have our being in the world, and act upon it, through our bodies and only through them. As Jonathan Miller has pointed out, Of all the objects in the world, the human body has a peculiar status: it is not only possessed by the person who has it, it also possesses and constitutes him [sic]. [As a result], . . . it is hard to give an intelligible sense to the idea of a disembodied person. . . . Our body is not, [then] something we have, it is a large part of what we actually are. (14)

Though our selves and our lives are fundamentally bodily, the body has not, until recently, figured very prominently in lifewriting. This may not be surprising, because, to quote Miller again, “The immediate experience of the human body is something which we take for granted. We perceive and act with it and become fully aware of its presence only when it is injured, or when it goes wrong” (10). Exactly: injury and illness (and aging) remind us, in various unwelcome ways, that we have bodies, that we are bodies. When the subjects of lifewriting are afflicted by sufficiently serious illness or disability, those conditions do find their way into the texts. But except when illness threatens life or ends it, traditional biographers usually treat it as an interruption of the life that is their proper subject. Autobiographers are better situated than biographers to report on the bodily lives of their subjects, but until recently they have seemed disinclined to do so.2 Illness has been as studiously ignored, or repressed, in lifewriting as has the body, and for the same reasons.

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Virginia Woolf has commented incisively on the discrepancy between the “facts” of life and the “fictions” of literature: Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and desserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, . . . when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia; lyrics to tooth-ache. But no, with a few exceptions, literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and nonexistent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane—smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness, until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul (it is said) escapes. But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record. People write always of the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come to it; its noble plans; how the mind has civilised the universe. They show it ignoring the body in the philosopher’s turret; or kicking the body, like an old leather football, across leagues of snow and desert in the pursuit of conquest or discovery. Those great wars which the body wages with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncome of melancholia, are neglected. Nor is the reason far to seek. To look these things squarely in the face would need the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth. Short of these, this monster, the body, this miracle, its pain, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of the wings, into the raptures of transcendentalism. (9–10)

I quote this passage at such length not just because of its extraordinary beauty, nor simply because the subtlety of its argument defies paraphrase, but because it provides at once the theory and the practice of a body-centered prose. The long, sinuous sentences, with their pronounced, yet organically fluctuating rhythms; the intricate patterns

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of antithesis and alliteration; the heavy reliance on sensuous images to convey ideas—these stylistic features enact the linguistic equivalent of the mediation of the body, precisely what Woolf claims has been denied by the canon. Thus, any cutting, no matter how “surgical,” must implement a privileging of idea over image, sense over sound, that the prose takes pains to discredit. Indeed, Woolf’s metaphor of the mind kicking the body like a football across wastelands in pursuit of conquest, wittily demonstrates that embodiment may lurk even in language that purports to efface it. Her tropes and images deconstruct the valorization of mind over matter; her style brings us literally to our senses. Though Woolf’s remarks are not concerned explicitly with lifewriting, they are certainly relevant to it.3 Especially to the predicament of the female autobiographer, for her account of the suppression of illness in literature has as its subtext the domination of discourse by masculinist assumptions. For Woolf, the valorization of health over illness is a function of the Western privileging of mind over body, the tendency to deny the body’s intervention in intellectual and spiritual life. And Woolf’s characterization of the domination of mind over body in terms of traditionally masculine, aggressive pursuits— warfare, discovery, conquest, and even civilization (as a process. rather than a condition)—suggests that the suppression of bodily illness as a literary subject is related to the valorization of “male” over “female” experience. Her countercharge is that the (masculine) canon has not dared to face the body squarely. The irony engendered by the passage is that it takes a woman to declare, not the emperor’s nakedness, but his corporeality and thus his vulnerability to “feminizing” illness. To paraphrase the title of a well-known essay by Sherry Ortner, Woolf raises the question: Is female to male as body is to mind and illness is to health? Ortner argues that the universal subordination of women is rooted in the association of women more closely than men with nature, which in turn is based on the characterization of women as more defined—and thus confined—by their anatomy, especially its reproductive capacities. Following de Beauvoir—perhaps too closely—Ortner states: “It is simply a fact that proportionately more of a woman’s body, for a greater percentage of her lifetime, and at some—sometimes great—cost to her personal health, strength, and general stability, is taken up with the natural processes surrounding the reproduction of the species” (74). Though bodily ills usually entail a degree of marginalization, this form of marginalization has been largely ignored by literary theorists—in favor of the marginalization of race, class, gender, and

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sexual preference. But when illness strikes women, it may echo and expose the marginalization of gender. Something like this happened to Audre Lorde, who was already marginalized by gender, race, and sexual preference when she was afflicted with breast cancer. Lorde did not require disease to raise her consciousness, of course; rather, her feminism enabled her to respond to breast cancer in an unorthodox way. For example, she treats the prosthetic device she is expected to “put on” after surgery as a further mutilation of her womanhood rather than the reconstruction of her identity it is supposed to be. And in The Cancer Journals she constructs her own racial and gender mythology with which to counter her disease. The marginalization produced by disease is sometimes temporary, sometimes permanent; sometimes, of course, disease threatens not merely to marginalize but to obliterate the self. Multiple sclerosis lies between extremes: while it is rarely life-threatening, it is always disability. According to Nancy Mairs, the disablement can take a variety of forms: During its course, which is unpredictable and uncontrollable, one may lose vision, hearing, speech, and the ability to walk, control of bladder and/or bowels, strength in any or all extremities, sensitivity to touch, vibration, and/or pain, potency, coordination of movements—the list of possibilities is lengthy and, yes, horrifying. (Plaintext 11) 4

MS, then, may involve a deadening of sensation, an inability to react to external stimuli. It may also involve sensations that have no origin in the outside world; according to Barbara Webster, “moving one’s head in a certain way [may produce] a sometimes severe sensation of electrical shock. [Or one may have] a sudden sensation of water pouring down the back of a leg” (37). Since it is, as Mairs reminds us, literally a failure of nerve(s), multiple sclerosis threatens to put its victims out of touch with their bodies and thus with the world. By depriving the afflicted of control over their bodies, it may alienate them from their bodies. But like any illness, it also perversely reminds the afflicted of their embodiment; the body is brought to mind precisely because the body refuses to mind. Multiple sclerosis, then, can radically disrupt the usual relationship among body, mind, and world. At first reading, it may seem that Barbara Webster and Nancy Mairs adopt antithetical responses to their disease, with Webster choosing to withdraw from her own body into cerebral analysis of her condition, while Mairs struggles to retain her foothold in the world by rooting her texts in the concrete details of sensuous experience.

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Certainly, the writers’ styles are worlds apart. While Mairs’s writing is informal, candid, concrete, and playful, Webster’s is formal, reserved, abstract, and impersonal. Webster’s manner is intellectual, deliberate, and distanced; her organization topical and recursive rather than narrative and chronological; her focus often on society rather than on her self. For these reasons, her book may seem to acquiesce in the alienation of mind from body that MS threatens to precipitate. However, Webster is emphatically not, to quote Woolf’s sardonic description of the usual retreat from the body, “tapering into mysticism, or ris[ing] . . . into the raptures of transcendentalism” (10). Rather, she works to indicate what her bodily experience implies for all of us. Doing this involves challenging certain generic conventions of content and of form. For example, contrary to the reassuring testimony of most of the MS narratives Webster has read, she finds the disease affects not just her body, but also her identity and self-image, not just her self, but her relations with others and the culture that formed her: “dealing with MS on a purely physical level was a way of avoiding the necessary conclusion that one’s very self is at issue and at stake in any real adjustment” (28). The persistent abstraction of her style may enact not a retreat from her bodily impediments, but rather her denial that MS is solely, or even primarily, a matter of physical symptoms. At the very least, her all-too-obvious symptoms cause others to react to her as diseased or disabled; like any stigmatic or stereotypical characteristic, they tend to obliterate the subject’s individuality. And she readily admits that her self-perception is at times in danger of being infected by cultural stereotypes. Similarly, though the recursiveness of her book is at times frustrating, it serves to indict the comforting linearity and cozy closure found in narratives that culminate in cure or complete adjustment. Such linearity tends to deny the reality of MS, which is incurable and whose relapsing-remitting pattern tends to keep the afflicted figuratively as well as literally off balance. To Woolf, the overlooked value of illness for the writer lies in its alteration of vision and the consequent disclosure of hitherto “undiscovered countries.” Webster’s diagnosis confirmed that she had, as she suspected, been living in an “undiscovered country,” and it located that country on the map. By giving her condition a name, diagnosis gave it reality. As there is no definitive test for MS, diagnosis involves making connections among symptoms dissimilar in nature and widely separated in time. Because of its difficulty, diagnosis often comes years, even decades, after the first symptoms are experienced. For all these reasons, diagnosis may be epiphanic; it makes sudden sense of

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mysterious, intermittent, and apparently unrelated symptoms.5 In this case, it also vindicated Webster’s previous account of her symptoms (hitherto dismissed or doubted by her family and her doctors); thus, it retroactively endowed her own incipient life-narrative with authority and credibility. But Webster’s book is ultimately less concerned with her discovery of the country of the diseased than with her disclosures about the country of the “healthy,” in which most of us reside most of the time. The title of her first chapter, “Wrestling with a Phantom,” might have served as the title of the whole book for two reasons. First, although it is a “watershed” in her life, diagnosis did not make her phantomlike disease easy to grasp, let alone to “pin down.” Second, once she is officially pronounced ill, she finds herself at odds with a phantom as formidable as her hard-to-diagnose disease—cultural attitudes toward those in her situation: “disease does not fit in the American world view and, in fact, conflicts so sharply as to create a situation in which comfort requires that it not be seen. Disease is, in fact, an affront” (64). Webster neither denies not claims to transcend the physical facts of her condition; rather, she sets out to interrogate cultural (mis)constructions of disease. The opening scene of her book, in which she is jostled by impatient elderly American tourists at Luxor airport, stands as a paradigm of differing cultural attitudes toward disability: They wanted to know exactly when the flight was leaving and the answer, of course was always the same—Insh’allah (“God willing” or “when God wills”), which infuriated them. . . . Faced with a total inability to control what was going on, they were going to extreme lengths to foster their sense of being in control. They seemed to think that continually fighting for a place in this largely illusory line would get them to Cairo faster. My friend and I, on the other hand, having accepted that we had no control in this situation, were beginning to revel in that feeling. (2)

Though it occurred outside her country, this incident crystallized her sense of her alienation within her native culture. (Perhaps it afforded her special insight into her own culture because it happened on foreign soil.) In any case, even as it painfully reinforced her sense of disability and marginalization, this episode also enabled her to diagnose her culture’s illness. As I have suggested, Mairs’s stance is very different from Webster’s. Whereas Webster guards her privacy, blocking any voyeuristic impulse in her readers, Mairs is inclined to flaunt herself, exploiting voyeurism

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for her own purposes. Typically, rather than cloaking her condition behind a more general term (“disabled”) or a euphemism (“differently abled”), she insists upon calling herself a “cripple.” Closer to the “more primitive, more sensual, more obscene” language that Woolf called for (11), Mairs’s style is concise, witty, ironic: “As a cripple, I swagger” (Plaintext 9). Perhaps because her form of multiple sclerosis is more serious than Webster’s, she is more forthright about its debilitating and demoralizing effects. In any case, her graphic description of her lurching gait emphasizes the physically disabling and cosmetically disfiguring effects of the disease: My shoulders droop and my pelvis thrusts forward as I try to balance myself upright, throwing my frame into a bony S. As a result of contractures, one shoulder is higher than the other and I carry one arm bent in front of me, the fingers curled into a claw. My left arm and leg have wasted into pipe-stems, and I try always to keep them covered. When I think about how my body must look to others, especially to men, to whom I have been trained to display myself, I feel ludicrous, even loathsome. (17)

The body figures far more prominently in Mairs’s writing than in Webster’s. But Mairs is similarly, perhaps even more acutely, aware of the cultural construction of her condition—as is evident in the last sentence quoted. Like Webster, though in different ways, Mairs tends to read her condition as culturally as well as physically determined. This is especially true of the many afflictions she suffers in addition to MS. In the final and climactic essay in Plaintext, “On Living Behind Bars,” she catalogues ailments dating from her adolescence (well before the onset of MS): migraines, disabling menstrual cramps, colds, hay fever, rotting teeth, dizziness, nausea, and abdominal pain (129). As an adult, she also suffered from agoraphobia and from depression severe enough to result in a six-month confinement in an asylum (and several suicide attempts).6 In “On Keeping Women In/Out” and especially in “On Living Behind Bars,” she reads her “madness”—her depression and her agoraphobia—in early adulthood as a symptom of her predicament as a woman—especially as a woman writer: We have had to hide while menstruating, cover our heads and swaddle our bodies, lower our eyes, hold our tongues. Not by accident has the process of giving birth, perhaps the most active of human endeavors, been euphemized by a verb used always in the passive, “to be confined.” Ours has been a history of confinement, in the childbed, in the

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crinoline, in the kitchen, even (if all other safe harbors fail) in the asylum. . . . We’ve known where we belong. And if we’ve tried to trespass over the threshold, our hearts have knocked, our mouths have gone dry and our skins damp, our lungs have shriveled, our bowels have let go. There’s nothing like the symptoms of agoraphobia for keeping a woman in her place. Let me tell you. Nothing. (103)

Nothing, one is tempted to reply, but the symptoms of MS, which confines her more consistently than her agoraphobia. But Mairs is not so much concerned with the literal confinement that is increasingly her lot as with her literary confinement, the circumscription of her talent by her conditioned sense of a woman’s place. Thus she hastens to add that the confinement of agoraphobia is not conducive to writing. On the contrary, the agora is symbolic, “any area perceived as part of the patriarchal domain. For that reason, writing causes me as much anxiety as any other incursion into masculine activity” (103). She is not safe from agoraphobia even in “a room of her own”; rather, in the space reserved for and dedicated to writing, agoraphobia may assume its most subtle and insidious form. Although Mairs never characterizes MS as a psychosomatic or culturally caused disease, she does see a parallel between the loss of power attendant upon MS and the passivity of her position in intercourse. She wonders, “to what extent is multiple sclerosis merely the physical inscription of my way of being in the world? In sex, as in the rest of my life, I am acted upon. I am the object, not the agent. I live in the passive voice” (85). Paradoxically, however, illness may have helped to make Mairs a writer. Insofar as she discovered some of her major themes, the larger patterns of her life, in coming to terms with disease, especially with MS, her confidence, mobility, and authority as a writer have been inversely related to her physical mobility. Although writing is obviously no cure for MS, Mairs suggests that it may help to alleviate some other, more transient ills: I have had time to translate my madness into the rituals that keep me alive as well as dying. But at least I know now that depression and agoraphobia are metaphors, codes in the cultural text in which I am embedded. Not entities. Not the inevitable fate of the woman who trespasses onto the page. I’m a writer. If I can make the change, I’m sure as hell going to revise them out of this script. (105)

Her characterization of life here in terms of script, of disease in terms of cultural codes does not trivia1ize them; rather, it serves to render her life-text more amendable, more amenable to revision. It is

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a strategy based in a conception of her writing as a vital art in the etymological sense. According to Ortner, women have been ill situated with regard to men because they are thought to be particularly, or peculiarly, embodied. According to Woolf, illness has not been a prime literary subject in part because of a masculinist valorization of the mind over the body. If women and ill people are both marginalized in different ways, then sick women are doubly marginalized. With recent developments in autopathography, then, we have a return of the doubly, or perhaps triply, repressed—an overt, unembarrassed, unapologetic representation, of the ill, female body. If illness is a literary no man’s land, it may be, by default, a terrain available for women to map, a zone in which to rehabilitate the body as a literary subject, and a site on which to challenge the conventional domination of mind over body. By acknowledging their illnesses and exposing the cultural components of their disability—subjecting their cultures to lay diagnosis—Mairs and Webster demonstrate that “ill” women may be well-equipped to reconceptualize the relation between psyche and soma, to write the life of the body as well as the life of the mind. Notes This article originally appeared in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 6 (1991): 65–75. 1. According to Elaine Scarry, “the human body is at the present moment a special site of attention and concern. As a historical phenomenon, there is nothing surprising about this: the very extremity of the skepticism about the referential capacities of language in the past decade made it almost inevitable that at the moment when language was finally reconnected to the world, the primary site of reconnection would be not just this or that piece of material ground but the most extreme locus of materialization, the body. The body is both continuous with a wider material realm that includes history and nature, and also discontinuous with it because it is the reminder of the extremity of risks entailed in the issue of reference” (xx–xxi). 2. An exception might be the subgenre of athletes’ autobiographies, which is, of course, dominated by males. But here the focus is not so much on the body as on the sport, or even the career of the athlete. In any case, this genre tends to characterize the body as submissive to the will, an efficient tool, rather than to reflect on it as a medium of selfhood. 3. Woolf does not in her essay—or elsewhere, as far as I know—leave a full or detailed record of the daily drama of her body. Her essay is about being ill, not about her being ill. But her “Sketch of a Life”

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begins with her disturbing sense of shame about her own body, and the roots of that shame in her having been sexually abused as a child. 4. Typically, she adds, “One may also lose one’s sense of humor.” 5. Because it depends on the establishment of relationship among disparate and discrete events, diagnosis, itself a major life-event, may encourage the habit of seeing large-scale patterns. In any case, Mairs describes her own writing in terms equally apt for the process of diagnosing MS: “Only recently have I begun to concatenate my experiences into patterns distinct from the narrative ground in which they are embedded: This process I call essay-writing” (Plaintext 127). 6. The relation between MS and depression, if any, is unclear. Mairs puts it this way: “I am immobilized by acute attacks of depression, which may or not be physiologically related to MS but are certainly its logical concomitant” (Plaintext 13). It is worth noting that before MS is diagnosed, its victims are often diagnosed as clinically depressed. Webster was referred to a psychiatrist, and caught in a diagnostic double-bind, she reluctantly agreed to see him: “The fact that I would not admit that I was clinically depressed (and I think in retrospect it is clear that I was not) confirmed them in their belief that I was. . . . I found the whole situation very depressing indeed, and it was difficult to maintain a sense of integrity in the face of all this disapproval and certainty” (8).

Works Cited Dreuilhe, Emmanuel. Mortal Embrace: Living with AIDS. Trans. Linda Coverdale. New York: Hill, 1988. Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Spinsters Ink, 1980. Nancy Mairs. Carnal Acts: Essays. New York: Harper, 1990. ———. Plaintext. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1986. ———. Remembering the Bone House: An Erotics of Place and Space. New York: Harper, 1989. Miller, Jonathan. The Body in Question. New York: Random, 1978. Murphy. Robert. The Body Silent. New York: Holt, 1987. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Adventures in Abandonment.” Rev. of Jean Stafford: A Biography, by David Roberts. New York Times Book Review 28 Aug. 1988; 3.33. Ortner, Sherry B. “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” Woman, Culture, and Society. Eds. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1974. 67–81. Sacks, Oliver. A Leg to Stand On. New York: Summit, 1984. Sarton. May. After the Stroke: A Journal. New York: Norton, 1988. Scarry, Elaine. Introduction. Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons. Ed. Elaine Scarry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, I988. Simpson, Eileen. Reversals. Boston: Houghton, 1979.

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Styron, William. Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. New York: Random House, 1990. Updike, John. Self-Consciousness: Memoirs. New York: Knopf, 1989. Webster, Barbara. All of a Piece: A Life with Multiple Sclerosis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. Woolf, Virginia. “On Being Ill.” “The Moment” and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt, 1948. 9–23. Zweig, Paul. Departures. New York: Harper, 1986.

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Chapter 8

“Making Up the Stories as We Go Along”: Men, Women, and Narratives of Disability Madonne Miner

This is the important point about the stories we tell ourselves about our lives. We make them up as we go along . . . We can’t select every event and detail, of course. We can’t decide, for instance, whether or not someone gets MS. MS just happens. But—and this is the exciting part—we can choose how we will respond to that happening, what kind of role we will give it in the story we’re making up as we go along. —Nancy Mairs, “Good Enough Gifts” The less evident social aspect of stories is that people do not make up their stories by themselves. The shape of the telling is molded by all the rhetorical expectations that the storyteller has been internalizing ever since he first heard some relative describe an illness, or she saw her first commercial for a non-prescription remedy, or he was instructed to “tell the doctor what hurts” and had to figure out what counted as the story the doctor wanted to hear. —Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller

A rthur Frank’s observation—“people do not make up their stories

by themselves”—complicates but does not contradict Nancy Mairs’s claim that “we make up our stories as we go along.” Mairs’s “we,” surely, is no simple, essential self. Rather, this we includes a range of voices speaking through any individual storyteller; we are shaped from and by relatives’ stories, commercial narratives, medical interpellations, and countless other tales in which we find ourselves. Striving to create ourselves in stories, we simultaneously are created by stories; this curious tension speaks to and of the postmodern human condition—and reminds us of the importance of attending to stories.1

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This importance has not been lost on scholars working in the relatively new area of disability studies.2 Early on, disability critics asked: “where are we to find stories that speak of disability?” In the mid-1980s, scholars Leonard Kriegel, Deborah Kent, and Paul K. Longmore each published essays describing representations of disability in fiction, drama, television, or film. Each expressed dismay over the stories he or she found: stories that yoke disability to criminality and social isolation, that highlight dependency and suicidal tendencies, that speak, most often, from the perspective of the nondisabled. Both Kriegel and Kent concluded their essays with pleas for stories by men and women who are themselves disabled. Not long after Kent’s essay appeared in print, two collections of writing by women with disabilities were published. Those collections represent the next phase in disability studies: that is, the publication of works by disabled authors.3 As I write this essay, I can call upon recently published disability narratives by Nancy Mairs, Andre Dubus, John Hockenberry, Cheri Register, May Sarton, Molly Haskell, Anne Finger, Reynolds Price, Irving Zola, William Styron, Oliver Sacks, and others.4 Following in the wake of these stories are critical questions similar to those that readers of other minority literatures have been asking in recent years: what unique point of view does this new literature express? does the experience of disability result in particular types of narratives? how does this experience “write” those who undergo it? how might the disabled writer rewrite this experience? how might readers identify a “disabled writer?” how might this writer identify him- or herself? The contemporary critical reader of disability narratives soon becomes entangled in postmodern/poststructural discussions of nature and narrative, biology and culture, bodies and books. A particularly insightful contributor to these more recent discussions is Arthur Frank, sociologist, heart attack and cancer patient, and author of The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. In The Wounded Storyteller, Frank approaches stories of illness and disability as opportunities for patients to resolve moral problems of postmodern identity. He suggests that patients may become themselves in the stories they tell: “Those who have been objects of others’ reports are now telling their own stories. As they do so, they define the ethic of our times: an ethic of voice, affording each a right to speak her own truth, in her own words” (xiii). While we might question Frank’s seemingly uncritical acceptance of the possibility of speaking one’s “own truth” in one’s “own words,” his claim that the “ethic of voice” is the ethic of our times seems beyond question. As

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divided and troubled as this voice may be, its existence is apparent in an outpouring of stories from subjects previously muted or voiceless. Frank listens to the stories of numerous patients, discerns typical narrative patterns, and challenges readers to see how many of the stories require their tellers to shape themselves anew. Frank’s analysis of illness and disability stories is remarkably insightful; his careful employment of nonsexist prose is admirable. But Frank does not go far enough in pursuing the implications of his own insights, especially with respect to the ways in which rhetorical expectations, and hence, possible “self-stories” written out of disability or illness, vary depending upon a subject’s history of embodiment within discourses of gender, race, and sexual orientation. Frank argues, for example, that “self-change seems remarkably unrelated to gender” (130) and cites stories from Audre Lorde and Robert Murphy—both of whom call upon metaphors from ancient cultures to represent their new selves—to substantiate his claim. Postmastectomy Lorde identifies herself with Amazons; Murphy, paralyzed in a chair, compares himself to the stationary myth-telling shamans of Peru. Murphy’s metaphor wouldn’t work for Lorde, just as hers wouldn’t work for Murphy, not simply because of the differing nature of their losses but also because of the differing discourses and rhetorical expectations that have shaped and continue to shape this white man and black woman. Frank repeatedly alludes to the “culturally elaborated” nature of bodies and selves, but he does not pursue the implications of different cultural elaborations of women’s and men’s bodies, bodies of color and white bodies, as these cultural elaborations intersect in narratives of illness and disability. In the pages that follow, I look closely at two disability narratives, highlighting ways each narrative’s representation of disability takes place within a gendered discursive field. These discourses color narrated experiences of the texts’ subjects both before and during disability. In focusing on gender, I neglect other, equally important features affecting narrational possibilities/identity possibilities, but I also avoid the temptation (to which I think Frank falls prey) of ascribing all representational choices to a subject’s experience of illness or disability alone.5 Sidonie Smith observes that the autobiographical subject, “coming out of a complex experientially based history . . . speaks not from one overdetermined position within the webs of discourse . . . [but rather becomes] ‘multiply designated,’ severally situated within diverse, sometimes congruous, often competing, even contradictory discursive fields” (21).6 In this essay, I analyze intersections between two discourses—gender and disability—as

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these discourses contribute to the construction of the narrative projects of Andre Dubus and Nancy Mairs. To preview my argument: in telling stories of their losses (Dubus, of his legs to an accident; Mairs, of her stability and partial mobility to multiple sclerosis [MS]), Dubus and Mairs initially seem to employ traditionally gendered narrative paradigms. Where Dubus repeatedly returns to stereotypically masculinized questions of agency, responsibility, and guilt, Mairs concerns herself with more stereotypically femininized issues of being, speaking, and shame. When Dubus tells his story of throwing a woman out of the path of an oncoming car, he focuses upon his decision to act and upon guilt and anger consequent to that act. In contrast, when Mairs tells her story of living with MS, she focuses upon being a woman, being a cripple, and how this being implicates her in a system of shame. Narrating their tales, each gives voice to stereotypical expectations; each articulates the culture’s discourse with respect to male and female bodies. But as we look more carefully at these disability narratives, it becomes clear that the stories actually move in different ways. Dubus’s narrative repeatedly returns to the site of loss, because for Dubus, this site simultaneously represents presence. Although the accident robs Dubus of the use of his legs (and, by implication, of an independence and mobility conventionally associated with “manhood”), Dubus’s activity during the accident speaks of his male presence as agent and actor; that is, the recitation of this tale reaffirms Dubus’s manliness and heroism. Overtly, Dubus’s narrative never challenges gender roles; instead, its narrator returns time and time again to a story that allows him to position himself as “a man among men, and among women.” In contrast, Nancy Mairs’s story of loss attendant upon disability actually becomes a story of gain. Prior to the onset of MS, Mairs suffers discontinuities between her self and cultural expectations for female selves. She is uncomfortable and uneasy as a midcentury white American woman, a woman who wants to write, a woman who wants to establish a public voice. As MS pushes Mairs further away from model womanhood, she happily chucks such models and begins to delight in the liberatory possibilities of stepping out of bounds, of pushing the envelope. Rather than mourning losses, Mairs glories in new opportunities. Rather than looking backward, she looks forward. Ironically, Mairs’s disability stories suggest that her disease frees her from a subordinate gender position; in contrast, Dubus’s stories betray the keen loss felt by a man accustomed to privileges of a superordinate position, a man who deems himself

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no longer qualified to hold this position but who remains emotionally and psychologically caught within the confines of a traditional gender system. In substantiating my thesis, I take cues from Mairs and Dubus with respect to semantics. Both writers elect to identify themselves as cripples, and I shall do the same. Mairs declares her preference for this term (“a clean word, straightforward and precise”) in her essay “On Being a Cripple” (9), where she also notes that the word tends to make people wince—and she wants them to do so. Unlike Mairs, Dubus does not explain his choice, but he repeatedly enacts it. Throughout the essays in Broken Vessels he elects to describe himself as crippled, a man wounded and injured, a man whose body is a “living sculpture of certain truths” (194).

Readers of Dubus’s essay collection, Broken Vessels, come to the first full account of Dubus’s crippling in a short piece entitled “Lights of the Long Night.” Here, and then in later essays, Dubus provides details of an accident that occurred on the morning of July 23, 1986. Driving north on Route 93 from Boston Dubus notices a car stopped in the lane ahead of him. To check on the situation of the driver, he pulls to the left of the car; he observes Luz Santiago, with forehead bleeding, near the driver’s side door. When he stops to help her, she says, “There’s a motorcycle under my car” (“Lights” 129). Fearing that Luz has run over a cyclist but also fearing that she is in danger of shock, Dubus walks Luz and her brother Luis, a passenger in Luz’s car, to the left side of the highway. As the three get to the side of the road, another car’s lights appear on the highway, headed north. Dubus waves to the car, hoping to get more help. Apparently this motorist doesn’t see him; coming upon the stopped cars, the driver of the oncoming car swerves toward Dubus, Luis, and Luz. Dubus notes that the driver turns toward them: “Then I was lying on the car’s trunk and asking someone: What happened?” (“Lights,” 130). Although Dubus cannot remember in detail what happens between the time he realizes the car is going to hit them and when it does so, he meticulously pieces together what must have happened: he must have pushed Luz Santiago away from the car, sacrificing himself in order to save her. Filling in the gap, we have the evidence of Dubus’s wounds and the testimony of Luz. But more important to Dubus is a personal sensation, a conviction: “I knew, from the first moments in the stationary ambulance, that a car struck me because I was standing where I should have been; and, some time later, in the hospital, I

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knew I had chosen to stand there, rather than leap toward the guard rail” (130). “I knew I had chosen”—with these words Dubus revises what might have been an account of an accident into an account of choice; we move from horror story to heroic story. Certainly, Dubus is victimized by the oncoming car; but he also asserts himself as agent in confronting this car. Reiteration of choice assumes a central position in Dubus’s narrative of the accident. In the concluding paragraph of “Lights,” Dubus tells us several times that Dr. Wayne Sharaf, the doctor who worked on him and on Luz after the accident, confides that Luz told him Dubus had pushed her away from the car. Dubus thanks Sharaf: “I said: Now I can never be angry at myself for stopping that night. He said: Don’t ever be. You saved that woman’s life” (131). Why this repetition? In one of the epigraphs with which this essay begins, Nancy Mairs suggests that we “make up” the stories of our lives as we go along. Dubus’s stories of his crippling reveal a tremendous desire to envision himself as acting, as doing something. Within Dubus’s narratives, to be a man is to be an actor; this action may result in the loss of limb, perhaps even of life, but such losses are minor in comparison to the loss of manhood associated with agency’s alternative: passivity. It is perhaps not surprising then, that when the post-accident Dubus finds himself in decidedly passive positions (when his body is being worked on by his physical therapist, for example), his thoughts turn toward cultural models of agency—specifically, toward the military forces. He conjures up “memories of myself after my training at Quantico, those times in my life when I had instinctively moved toward action, to stop fights, to help the injured or stricken, and I saw myself on the highway that night, and I said: Yes. It makes sense. It started as a Marine, when I was eighteen; and it ended on a highway when I was almost fifty years old” (“Broken Vessels” 172). Marines learn they must move: “Don’t just stand there, Lieutenant . . . Do something, even if it’s wrong” (“Broken” 173). Dubus does do something, and, then, having lost most of the use of his legs as a result of this doing, constructs narratives that foreground the doing instead of the loss. In other words, while the result of his act may have been an “unmanning,” the act itself positions him as man beyond question. Focusing on that act and on the antecedents to that act, Dubus encourages us to recognize (misrecognize) him according to ideology’s interpellation of him as an autonomous male agent.7 What about a second desire repeatedly articulated in Dubus’s narratives: the desire to avoid feeling angry with himself? Most obviously, it is Dubus’s choice to stop at the scene, to throw Luz out

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of the way, that leads to his crippling and to potential feelings of anger with himself. In conversations with Doctor Sharaf, Dubus uses Sharaf’s reassurances to reassure himself; her life was worth the sacrifice of his legs. But this explanation of Dubus’s desire to ward off self-destructive anger doesn’t go far enough in accounting for the essays’ repetitions of Dubus’s fear of anger and guilt. If we look again at Dubus’s story of the accident in “Lights of the Long Night,” we find that although Dubus acts with absolutely the best intentions, his actions contribute to a combination of factors that make the accident possible. Quite probably, there wasn’t a right way to do things that night on Route 93; and Dubus did the most important “right thing” by pulling over in the first place. But curiously, as Dubus narrates what happens after he pulls over, he leaves open the possibility of his own contributory negligence. For example, rather than pulling into the breakdown lane when he sees Luz Santiago’s stalled car, Dubus pulls ahead and to the left, into the speed lane. Having parked, partially blocking the lane, he approaches Luz, who asks for his help. She says there’s a motorcycle under her car, but Dubus imagines a dead cyclist and so also imagines that Luz is in danger of shock: “I had to get Luz off the highway and lie [sic] her down” (“Lights” 129). This series of mistakes, of misapprehensions, precipitates Dubus into the position of military leader: “We walked in a column: I was in front, Luz was behind me, and Luis was in the rear” (129–30). When an oncoming car swerves to avoid Luz’s car, and then toward the blinking lights of Dubus’s Subaru, Dubus, Luz, and Luis are sitting ducks. Dubus is not culpable. But Dubus’s essays suggest that he isn’t fully convinced of his innocence. Assuming the position of “the man,” of the leader, Dubus assumes responsibility for bad decisions as well as good ones; both his account of the accident and his insistence upon shoring up a case for the defense suggest that numerous decisions were made. Arthur Frank notes that disability stories often involve repetition and recollection so as to “set right what was done wrong or incompletely” (132). Dubus never consciously talks about what was done wrong, never suggests that marine imperatives might be incomplete, but the stories he tells undermine such imperatives, revealing their gaps and inconsistencies. Essays in Broken Vessels, with their repetitions, elisions, and apparent meanderings, describe to us the high costs of being a man. In these essays, we see that a man must act, but in doing so, he runs the risk of harming others and thereby harming himself. He has the opportunity of writing himself into a hero’s role; but this role, as

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evidenced by Dubus, is an increasingly problematic one. If a hero’s acts result in his own death, the narrative works; but when the hero remains alive, he may very well find himself crippled by doubts and angers that follow upon making a choice about where to stand, about what to do.8 Ironically, Dubus’s tales work against the overt value system of their teller; where Dubus clings to the values of traditional manhood, his essays call these values into question.

Throughout essays in Broken Vessels, Dubus describes a man becoming a cripple. The essays of Nancy Mairs, in contrast, more often describe a woman being a cripple. Arthur Frank points out that during illness or when confronted with disability, “people who have always been bodies have distinctive problems continuing to be bodies” (28). Dubus and Mairs invoke different strategies for responding to these problems: the former emphasizes the decisiveness of his pre-accident body; the latter represents her body as it is now—in its almost laughable unreliability, social unconformability, and outspoken volubility.9 We can get a sense of Mairs’s approach by examining her essay “Carnal Acts,” included in the anthology Carnal Acts and written in response to a student’s request that Mairs talk about disability and writing. Where Dubus casts his story as one in which he initiates action, Mairs positions herself quite differently; something happens to her and she reacts, adjusts. Actually, Mairs puzzles over the nature of this presumed “happening,” wondering whether an external agent is at work or if this something is her. In the account of her MS, Mairs initially figures the disease as a ghost who haunts the house of her body, an alien invader who trips her up and weighs down her body with weariness. Then she retracts these figures: “But of course it’s not [an alien invader]. It’s your own body. That is, it’s you” (“Carnal” 84). No exorcism, no ghost busting: “it’s you.” Early on, Mairs does struggle against the ramming of her self “straight back into the body I had been trained to believe it could, through high-minded acts and aspirations, rise above” (84). Very quickly, however, she recognizes that to reject this body as herself is to concede to a Western European convention that subordinates body, treats it as “other,” and marks it as that for which we must feel shame. She also realizes that the very idea of “rising above” one’s body, of presenting the body as other, runs parallel to this convention’s conception of men rising above women and of male “culture” asserting superiority over female “nature.”10 Meditating on, in, and

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from her bodied self leads Mairs away from the struggle to transcend body and toward the struggle to accept body. Throughout her essays, she presents herself/her “self” as body—a body to be attended to, not denied: “What I am saying is that I must now attend to my body— both in the sense of ‘fix the mind upon’ and ‘watch over the working of’ it—in ways that I never dreamed of and that you may still find foreign” (“But First” 5). To be a female, crippled self in late-twentieth-century America, such a self conventionally will be tutored in shame. Not surprisingly, the subject of shame (rather than of anger) occupies much of Mairs’s essay “Carnal Acts.” As Mairs explains, American culture gives her many reasons to feel this emotion. First, she fails to live up to the ideals for a woman of her generation. She observes, “I was never a beautiful woman, and for that reason I’ve spent most of my life (together with probably at least 95 percent of the female population of the United States) suffering from the shame of falling short of an unattainable standard” (“Carnal” 87). With dark hair, flat chest, and narrow hips, Mairs doesn’t come close to the Marilyn Monroe ideal of 1950s femininity. When the symptoms of MS become worse, Mairs’s failure is exacerbated: “The real blow to my self-image came when I had to get a brace . . . it meant the end of high heels. And it’s ugly” (88). So shamed is she by this lightweight piece of plastic molded to her foot and leg that Mairs for many years wears trousers. She comments, “The idea of going around with my bare brace hanging out seemed almost as indecent as exposing my breasts” (88). Respectable women protect onlookers from any sight of difference, whether that difference be a braced leg or a flat chest. But despite losses associated with MS, Mairs continues to “expose” herself in public venues. As fatigue takes more of a toll on her, Mairs comes to rely upon yet another “shameful” aid: an Amigo, a three-wheeled electric scooter. She characterizes her reaction to this aid as one of ambivalence. The Amigo lessens her fatigue and widens her range but “also shouts out to the world, ‘Here is a woman who can’t stand on her own two feet’ ” (89). We might compare Mairs’s experience of her Amigo to Dubus’s experience of his wheelchair. While both machines telegraph to the world, “this person cannot stand on his or her own two feet”—somehow this message conveys different things about a man (and to a man) than it does about and to a woman. Mairs sees her electric cart as signifying failure (according to conventional gender stereotypes), while Dubus can position his chair to signify success. Her Amigo says she is not a beautiful woman, while his chair says he is (and has been)

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a powerful, active man. 1 certainly do not intend to suggest that Dubus feels unambivalently positive about his chair, but his remarks in Broken Vessels imply that there are discourses available to him that do not associate wheelchairs with shame. For Dubus, the chair functions first as a signifier of his willingness to lose his legs by acting on someone else’s behalf; second, it functions as a machine over which he exerts control. We can better understand how these machines suggest different things about men and women if we look at a passage from Dubus’s essay, “A Woman in April,” which suggests that men in wheelchairs retain a conventional social standing unavailable to women similarly situated. Crossing Lincoln Center plaza, Dubus notes an especially lovely woman about forty feet away. He says to the friend pushing his chair, “ ‘Skipper . . . Accidently push me into her’ ” (“Woman” 142). She turns, smiles, and says with a softness in her voice: “ ‘I heard that’ ” (142). Dubus senses that although her first response may have been “instinctive anger or pride,” when she sees him in a wheelchair, she feels “not pity but lighthearted compassion” (143). And while we too feel positive about what Dubus terms “the infinite possibilities of the human heart” (144), his essay, quite unintentionally, speaks to Mairs’s predicament: she will never be the woman striding across the plaza of Lincoln Center, attracting the appreciative attention of men like Dubus. Note how Dubus describes this woman: “She wore a dark brown miniskirt . . . she strode with purpose but not hurry, only grace” (142). While grace is out of the reach of both Dubus and Mairs, only the latter will feel shame upon not being able to achieve it; culturally, only the latter is held and holds herself responsible for such an achievement. We might parallel Dubus’s portrait of the woman in the miniskirt to a self-portrait provided by Mairs in the middle of “Carnal Acts.” There, Mairs writes in excruciating detail about giving a reading at the University of Arizona. Having smashed three teeth in a fall on her concrete porch, she wears temporary crowns; at a dinner prior to the scheduled reading, the crowns fly off, and Mairs must read in public with her smashed teeth: “So, looking like Hansel and Gretel’s witch, and lisping worse than the Wife of Bath, I got up on stage and read” (90).11 Despite the shame she’s been tutored in, despite the lessons she’s received about hiding her female body weakened and misshapen by disease, Mairs eventually defies all such strictures; she strides and holds up her head in the very act of telling stories about herself as crippled. Foregrounding the way her body differs from conventional expectations for women’s bodies, Mairs refuses shame. As a whole, Mairs’s narrative, speaking as

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forthrightly as it does about misshapen female bodies, challenges conventional gender expectations (she will not “suffer and be still”) while that of Dubus continues to enact them. Telling the story of her lost teeth and found voice provides Mairs with a transition into the second part of “Carnal Acts.” Having discussed her “disability,” which encompasses “shame” as well as MS, Mairs shifts the focus of her attention to a discussion of voice. As Mairs observes, the two topics are intimately intertwined; she copes best with her disability by “speaking about it, and about the whole experience of being a body, specifically a female body, out loud, in a clear, level tone that drowns out the frantic whispers of my mother, my grandmothers, all the other trainers of wayward childish tongues: ‘Sssh! Sssh! Nice girls don’t talk like that’ ” (91). To avoid shame, one must abandon the “nice girl” routine and utter the “hidden, dark secret[s])” of one’s life. Mairs does so. She tells us about her early, maudlin prose voice, a voice “that had shucked off its own body” and is so vaporous that Mairs abandons all prose writing for nearly twenty years. She tells us how she comes to her new voice when she returns to prose after a suicide attempt, writing about this particular bodily event in an essay that does not gloss over her matted hair, gray and swollen face, nightgown streaked with blood and urine. Knowing the rules of “polite discourse,” she knows she should keep quiet; but her voice wins out, and she produces at least two accounts of this failed suicide attempt. These accounts exemplify what Mairs now sets as her task: “to scrutinize the details of my own experience and to report what I see, and what I think about what I see, as lucidly and accurately as possible” (“Carnal” 94). Given her identity as a crippled woman, her experience cannot avoid the body; Mairs states emphatically that her voice “is the creature of the body that produces it . . . No body, no voice; no voice, no body” (96). This last set of parallels sums up the argument of “Carnal Acts,” as it not only reiterates the claim that if one is bodiless, one can have no voice but also introduces the claim that if one doesn’t use her voice, then one doesn’t exist. Before bringing “Carnal Acts” to a close, Mairs observes that “[p]aradoxically, losing one sort of nerve has given me another. No one is going to take my breath away. No one is going to leave me speechless” (96). Yes: MS is a loss, but in Mairs’s stories about her self, this loss results in a gain of another sort. Mairs’s disease, which demands that she attend to her body, gives her an understanding of her own embodiment as a woman, as a cripple. When, many years earlier, Mairs learned that she had MS, she started a poem with the

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line, “ ‘My body is going away,’ ” imagining her body fading “to the transparency of amber” (“But First” 5). She was wrong. As she says, this body “has, on the contrary, grown thicker and more opaque over time. It looms in my consciousness now as it never did when all my gestures were as thoughtless as yours perhaps still are” (5). Mairs comes to be her body not only because MS demands this of her but also because of her history of female embodiment; Mairs’s experience of the intersection of gender and disability pushes her to insist on her own opacity—over and against any cultural claims of feminine transparency.

Arthur Frank suggests that one “rises to the occasion” of being ill or disabled “by telling not just any story, but a good story” (62). The narratives of both Dubus and Mairs are remarkably good disability stories, but they are radically different stories. I’ve argued in the preceding text that an important causative factor of these differences is the differing gender histories Dubus and Mairs bring to their experience of disability. Prior to his accident, Dubus need not think much about his male body. He does, of course, think some about this body; he writes about being scrawny as a young man, about being bullied, about joining the marines—“destined by my body and my feelings about it” (“The Judge and Other Snakes” 61)—but in none of Broken Vessels’ essays does he reveal anywhere near the bodily preoccupation that Mairs documents as a facet of American womanhood in Plaintext, Carnal Acts, Remembering the Bone House, and Voice Lessons. Female bodies, like bodies of color, homosexual bodies, and disabled bodies, are positioned culturally so as not to forget their embodiment. We might say that Mairs has had more practice than Dubus in shaping a story from her body; it really should come as no surprise then, that her “self-story” throws off convention more readily than his and that it looks with faith toward the future, while his invests more belief in the past. Mairs emphasizes what she has become; Dubus, what he was. Relying on a sample of two, I can make no large claims about autobiographical narratives of disability—except to say that when negotiating this relatively unanalyzed terrain, storytellers bring their bodies—with all of these bodies’ complex rhetorical and cultural histories—along with them. Arthur Frank says, “[t]he stories that ill people tell come out of their bodies” (2). It is up to disability scholars to show how varied the discourses shaping these bodies, and their stories, really are.

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Notes This article originally appeared in The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability (Ed. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, U of Michigan P, 1997), 283–295. 1. For at least the past three decades, minority critics (feminist, black, lesbian and gay, working class) have issued similar reminders. Much of the early work of such critics was devoted to finding, publishing, and analyzing stories that spoke of the lives of women, of people of color, of lesbians, and of working class people. A second phase of this work moved away from “image analysis” to the production (and reproduction) of stories by members of these minority groups; “the authority of experience” was invoked repeatedly in support of this narrative production. More recently, critical work has addressed itself to questions about stories’ roles in identity construction and identity politics and in contestations of “authority” and univocality. 2. However, as I argue later, most scholars still do not pay enough attention to the plurality and power of discourses affecting who we are and the stories we tell. 3. See Fine and Asch; Brown, Connors, and Stern; Saxton and Howe. 4. I am grateful for Mairs’s essay “The Literature of Personal Disaster,” which provided me with an initial bibliography; and for Frank, Wounded Storyteller, which offered a marvelous supplement. 5. I do not want to leave the impression that Frank consistently ignores the range of discourses across which we construct ourselves. He notes, for example, that “[d]isease happens in a life that already has a story, and this story goes on, changed by illness but also affecting how the illness story is formed” (54). Later, too, he argues that “the plurality of the self that is reclaimed needs to be noted. The issue for most ill people seems to be keeping multiple selves available to themselves” (66). 6. Similarly, Belsey emphasizes that subjectivity “is linguistically and discursively constructed and displaced across the range of discourses in which the concrete individual participates” (61). Belsey’s articulation is problematic in itself: where is “the concrete individual”? can we locate him or her outside of the range of discourses in which he or she participates? 7. In clarifying ideological interpellation, Belsey observes: “people ‘recognize’ (misrecognize) themselves in the ways in which ideology ‘interpellates’ them, or in other words, addresses them as subjects, calls them by their names and in turn ‘recognizes’ their autonomy” (61). 8. In positioning himself as the “subject” of the accident story, Dubus becomes not only a “ ‘center of initiatives, author of and responsible for its actions,’ but also a subjected being who submits to the authority of the social formation represented in ideology as the Absolute Subject (God, the king, the boss, Man, conscience)” (Belsey 61, original emphasis).

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9. Granted: Dubus writes about a crippling that occurs in a moment and with which he has lived for only a few years. Mairs writes about a crippling that occurs gradually and with which she has lived for many years. As such, Dubus and Mairs actually conform to a larger pattern with regard to sex and the etiology of disability: males are far more likely than females to become disabled as the result of injuries and amputations; females tend to become disabled as the result of chronic illnesses such as arthritis and multiple sclerosis. See Lonsdale 37. 10. Sidonie Smith describes this split in her discussion of Western European Enlightenment subjects: “Discourses of the universal subject assume reciprocities of self and soul, and they assign the ‘tremulous private body’ to marginal status at the periphery of consciousness. Such peripheralization allows the greatest possible space in which self and soul can commingle, free of biologically determined influences. But since female identity inheres in woman’s embodiment as procreator and nurturer, the female subject inhabits mostly that colorful margin; or rather, a colorful marginalization of embodiment fills her self and soul” (11). 11. Sidonie Smith, discussing women’s contestation of conventional gender roles, notes: “To the degree that woman contests such roles and postures by pursuing her own desire and independence from men, she becomes a cultural grotesque” (16). In giving her speech with broken teeth, Mairs embraces the grotesque, validates it as one path to liberation.

Works Cited Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. London: Methuen, 1980. Brown, Susan, Debra Connors, and Nanci Stern, eds. With the Power of Each Breath: A Disabled Women’s Anthology. Pittsburgh, PA: Cleis, 1985. Dubus, Andre. Broken Vessels. Boston: D. R. Godine, 1991. Fine, Michelle, and Adrienne Asch, eds. Women and Disabilities: Essays in Psychology, Culture, and Politics. Philadelphia, PA: Temple UP, 1988. Frank, Arthur. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1995. Gartner, Alan, and Tom Joe, eds. Images of the Disabled, Disabling Images. New York: Praeger, 1987. 31–47. Kent, Deborah. “Disabled Women: Portraits in Fiction and Drama.” Gartner and Joe, Images. 47–63. Kriegel, Leonard. “The Cripple in Literature.” Gartner and Joe, Images. 31–47. Longmore, Paul K. “Screening Stereotypes: Images of Disabled People.” Social Policy 16 (1985): 31–37. Lonsdale, Susan. Women and Disability. New York: St. Martin’s, 1990.

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Mairs, Nancy. “The Literature of Personal Disaster.” Voice Lessons. Boston, MA: Beacon, 1994. 123–35. ———. Carnal Acts. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. ———. “On Being a Cripple.” Plaintext: Deciphering a Woman’s Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1986. Saxton, Marsha, and Florence Howe, eds. With Wings: An Anthology of Literature by and about Women with Disabilities. New York: Feminist, 1987. Smith, Sidonie. Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century. Bloomington, IN: U of Indiana P, 1993.

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Chapter 9

Transforming the Tale: The Auto/body/ographies of Nancy Mairs Susannah B. Mintz

Adam had named so many but not this . . . —Karl Shapiro, “Mongolian Idiot”

In the first essay of her most recent collection, Waist-High in

the World (1997), Nancy Mairs poses again the question that has informed her writing for more than a decade: “Who would I be if I didn’t have MS?” (8). Not at all glibly rhetorical, the question lies at the center of Mairs’s autobiographical project, which attempts both to articulate the significance of a disabled female body in the construction of her identity and to invent an aesthetics of that multiply determined self. As she declares in the title essay of Carnal Acts (1990), for instance, writing emphatically about the inseparability of body and mind, “I speak as a crippled woman . . . No body, no voice; no voice, no body. That’s what I know in my bones . . . I couldn’t write bodiless prose” (96); and she answers her own question at the start of Waist-High in the World, “Literally, no body. I am not ‘Nancy + MS’ ” (8). Throughout her oeuvre, Mairs promotes the generative friction between these two hermeneutics of identity—body and text—as constitutive of her “I.” Her emphatic critique of Western culture’s proscription of female speech and demarcation of the “normal” body thus shares the concerns of feminist autobiography theory and contemporary disability studies, both of which have made use of post-structuralism to interrogate gender and disability as constructs in language. Combining the fragmentary, suspended nature of personal

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essay with an unstinting directness about her female, disabled experience, Mairs writes against two traditions: the “masculine” model of conventional autobiography, with its underlying ideology of stable, unified, and disembodied selfhood,1 and “the rules of polite discourse” (Carnal Acts 54; see also 60–61) that inhibit both women’s speech and the articulation of disabled experience. Essay collections allow Mairs to create heterogeneous “bodies” of writing that range through memory, experience, and location in a way that simultaneously suspends the progress-narrative of classic autobiographical prose and evokes the open-ended corporeal reality of living with multiple sclerosis.2 “I do not wish,” Mairs writes, “to produce an autobiography bound by the narrative conventions of temporal linearity” (Voice Lessons 115), and she claims always to write “as a body. . . . And it is this—my crippled female body—that my work struggles to redeem through that most figurative of human tools: language” (WaistHigh 60). Mairs thus eschews the “certitudes,” as Sidonie Smith describes them, that organize men’s lifewriting: “chronological time, individuality, developmental selfhood, myths of origins, the fixedness of identity, bodily wholeness, the transparencies of referentiality, the will to knowledge, the unified self” (Subjectivity 184). She disturbs the ideals of literary and cultural patriarchy, literalizing the fact of her own disrupted and disruptive body. While she consistently evokes the corporeal specificity of her disease, Mairs also brings into view the enormous influence of cultural myth and expectation, out of and against which subjectivity emerges as the performance of various “scripts.” The word is used repeatedly in her first collection, Plaintext (1986), where Mairs argues that identity is constructed by the internalized lessons of literature, popular media, and the hegemonic discourses of religion, medicine, and psychoanalysis—in short, by “all the fictions my culture would yield up to my scrutiny” (113). Access to the language of self-definition becomes particularly difficult for those with illness or physical impairment, marginalized by cultural standards of normality: “Like all negative terms,” Mairs writes in Waist-High in the World, “ ‘disability’ is part of a binary, existing in relation to a privileged opposite: that is, one is ‘disabled’ only from the point of view of another defined by common social values as ‘able’ . . . Whoever gets to define ability puts everyone else in place, which . . . then becomes other, outside” (13–14). To counteract the essentializing maneuvers of patriarchal discourse, Mairs presents a self that is both indeterminate and adamantly embodied, unfixed by cultural categories and resolutely bounded by the fact of disease. In this sense her essays are multiply

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subversive. By bringing her “crippled” female self into the domain of men and demanding that her readers see both its ordinariness and its radical difference, Mairs exposes the boundaries delimiting such oppositions as masculine/feminine, able/disabled as narrative fictions, and by denaturalizing cultural narratives, she shows bodies to be the sites of conflicts of power, written upon by repressive ideals. In his influential book Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing, G. Thomas Couser writes that personal accounts of disability are often motivated by the desire to “recover variously dysfunctional bodies from domination by others’ authority and discourse, to convert the passive object into an active subject . . . to invalidate the dominant cultural tropes of ‘invalidity’—to demystify and destigmatize various conditions” (291). The essay is particularly well suited to the representation of disability, Couser suggests, because its resistance to closure and resolution evokes the paradox of chronic conditions like Mairs’s MS—the stasis of a condition from which she will never recover coupled with the constant unpredictability of the disease. Mairs has explicitly characterized her purpose in writing essays as an attempt to challenge the ontological “otherizing” of gender and disability within masculinist symbolization (Mairs writes that her “ ‘I’ seems simply not to be the male-constructed ‘I’: It is more fluid, diffuse, multiplex” [Voice Lessons 86]), and to resist the seductions of culture’s acts of defining. “I write essays in the Montaignesque sense of the word,” she claims: “tests, trials, tentative rather than contentious, opposed to nothing, conciliatory, reconciliatory . . . their informing movement associative and suggestive, not analytic and declarative” (Voice Lessons 74–75). As a writer of feminist disability narratives—what she calls in Voice Lessons, “the literature of personal disaster”3 —that are concerned to explore the construction of bodies in language, Mairs situates herself at a complex intersection. If her essays transgress the generic conventions of autobiography in part by being so explicitly embodied, they also challenge cultural assumptions about the disabled body by showing it to be “not a discrete object but rather a set of social relations” (Davis, Enforcing 11), not an absolute biological category but a historically specific construction that enables and guarantees “normalcy.” At the same time, Mairs herself blurs the distinction between “body” and “language” as indicators of identity. As Helen Meekosha has suggested about contemporary self-writing, “the rigid dualism of either a socially constructed disability or a disability grounded in biology is being disputed in the subjective discourse” (175), and Susan Wendell argues similarly that “careful study of the lives of disabled

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people will reveal how artificial the line is that we draw between the biological and the social” (266). Mairs disrupts easy certainty about the gendered, disabled body by exploding the notion of unified selfhood and so reveals the “fictionality” of “disability,” the way corporeality is a “cultural text,” in Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s words, “that is interpreted, inscribed with meaning—indeed made within social relations” (Extraordinary Bodies 22). So too, however, does Mairs strive to “normalize” that body (Carnal Acts 125), to render it recognizable by the dominant culture and to provide a model for other people living with illness or disability. Mairs’s essays thus proceed as a series of dislocations, which invite but also refuse identification, which insist on the ordinariness of her daily life but never neglect to attend to its constructedness as “other.” It is the many conjunctions of Mairs’s work—corporeality with linguistic play, individual specificity with communal intimacy, formal disruptiveness with thematic unity—that make it philosophically provocative from the perspectives of both feminist and disability theory. But the choice of self-writing as a mode of resistance to social oppression has been questioned by disability scholars who object that the focus on the personal obscures larger political issues surrounding disabled experience. In the introduction to their anthology The Body and Physical Difference, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder concede that the social merit of work such as Mairs’s lies in “provid[ing] readers with an alternative perspective on what it means to live with a disability,” but they also worry that “first person narratives of disability have historically fed a public appetite for confessional writing” and “cannot singularly provide the interpretive paradigms needed to revise cultural understandings of disability” (10). And they cite Lennard Davis, who makes a similar point in Enforcing Normalcy: “by narrativizing an impairment,” Davis argues, “one tends to sentimentalize it and link it to the bourgeois sensibility of individualism and the drama of the individual story” (3–4). If such assessments reflect not just a concern that personal memoir works to perpetuate popular conceptions of the disabled as narcissistic but also a widespread skepticism about autobiographical nonfiction in general,4 they also seem to reiterate a more troubling indifference to self-writing that has, until recently, marginalized the production of female autobiographers. When Mitchell and Snyder write that Mairs’s work “shifts attention away from institutional pathology and social attitudes toward the individual’s experience of disability” and therefore “remains cloistered in the realm of personal affliction” (10, italics added), they imply that the first-person strategy inherently fails to

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engage or negotiate the complex cultural forces that constrain the disabled and nondisabled alike. Yet as Sidonie Smith and other feminist scholars of autobiography have argued, a woman does, in the very act of telling her own story, enter a political arena; and Couser counters that autobiography’s access to (or at least claim of) “personal autonomy” allows the disabled person to reauthorize his or her own subjectivity against an alienating medical establishment and the larger cultural ideologies that encode physical difference as both excessive and invisible (Recovering Bodies 182).5 But it is not simply as a model of “ordinary” or “self-actualized” living that Mairs is important as a disabled autobiographer. She has consistently incorporated into her essays the tenets of feminist cultural studies, so that they retrieve from transparency the intricate connections between subjective experience and cultural narrative. Indeed, Mairs’s “autobiographies” may be least personal when describing her implication in patriarchal stereotypes of feminine behavior, precisely because at such moments she challenges bourgeois claims of individuality or immunity to social conditioning. Not surprisingly, Mairs has written at length of her affinity for the uncontainable female body of Cixous, and her desire to breach the coercive (if also fragile) “binary structure of . . . Logos” through the explosive erotics of écriture féminine (Voice Lessons 74). French feminism provides Mairs with a vocabulary for the connection between the disruptive MS body and the disruptive form of the essay, as well as the kind of “I” she wants to create. In “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Cixous calls for a women’s writing that would manifest “the ebullient, infinite woman,” the woman of “luminous torrents” (246), and her imperatives are also Mairs’s: that the female author “write your self. Your body must be heard” (250), that “it’s with her body that [a woman] vitally supports the ‘logic’ of her speech. Her flesh speaks true” (251). And Mairs: “jouissance . . . Even its pronunciation suggests the untranslatable pleasure of the word: the lips pout and then stretch, the sound slips back from the tongue’s tip to be swallowed with a sigh. A word that happens to the body: writing” (Voice Lessons 47); “Feminine discourse is not the language of opposites but a babel of eroticism, attachment, and empathy” (42). This explicit alignment with the poetics of écriture féminine allows for many of the insights of Mairs’s dismantling of patriarchal constructions of the disabled body, but it also opens her to the same challenges leveled against Cixous and Irigaray—that such a politics of writing not only relegates women to the very bodies to which patriarchy had already consigned them, but also perpetuates the problematic

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and essentialized binary of masculine/feminine, even when (perhaps especially when) those terms are abstracted beyond their application to human bodies. Lennard Davis argues succinctly that “The disabled body is a nightmare for the fashionable discourse of theory because that discourse has been limited by the very predilection of the dominant, ableist culture. The body is seen as a site of jouissance, a native ground of pleasure, the scene of an excess that defies reason, that takes dominant culture and its rigid, power-laden vision of the body to task. . . . The nightmare of that body is one that is deformed, maimed, mutilated, broken, diseased. . . . Rather than face this ragged image, the critic turns to the fluids of sexuality, . . . the glossary of the body as text. . . . But almost never the body of the differently abled” (Enforcing 5). Yet it is the very fact of Mairs’s illness and her commitment to writing the disabled body that pushes écriture féminine beyond its own limits, and that makes of her work something far more culturally significant than self-indulgent “confession.” If the reckless, “crippled,” doubly otherized body does not always conform to the diffuse pleasures claimed by the Cixouvian body, if its excesses are real, rather than theoretical, then, as Rosemarie Garland Thomson proposes, “Disability, as a formal category, can pressure feminist theory to acknowledge physical diversity more thoroughly” (Extraordinary Bodies 24). The disabled body is precisely “the body that cannot be universalized” (24, italics added). Through the medium of her own physical condition, Mairs demonstrates the need to extend the “feminine” past a visionary sexuality of multiply potential eroticism that is fundamentally grounded in a notion of corporeal “normality” and essentialized femininity. The imbrication of semiotic readings of self with essays that posit the body as the locus of meaning is particularly evident in Mairs’s first collection, Plaintext. Here Mairs deploys the essay as an act of resistance to the power exerted on the body and at the same time attempts to rewrite the cultural myths that coerce women into positions of subservience and self-hatred. The Preface baldly sets the terms of the relationship between authorship of self and text: “A few years ago I almost died by my own hand, and when I woke from that disagreeable event, I recognized for the first time that I was fully and solely responsible for my existence . . . . These essays enact that responsibility . . . in the terms in which I can understand it: as a writer of my life” (Plaintext xi). To “write a life,” then, means not simply to record the stuff of its continuity, but to see textuality as a literal, and more literally life-affirming, body/self: “I have to write. If I avoid that mandate, I wind up trying to kill myself. It’s as simple as that” (104).

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The predominant texture in Plaintext is one of interwoven narrative, where the present moment of an essay, for example, will be interrupted by excerpts from Mairs’s own youthful diaries, or the insights of contemporary feminist theory pitted against such cultural “myths” as fairy tale or medical discourse. The corrective to the tyranny of patriarchal discourse, revealed by Mairs’s analysis of her own implication within its oppressions, is her tactically polyvocal style, heteroglossic within essays (conversing with different “selves” through diaries, old essays, photographs of herself, and so on) and destabilizing across essays (the book’s temporal looping, its refusal to collate individual pieces into a single life trajectory). In this sense she disproves what Couser has claimed about disability narratives generally—that they tend to be formally conservative, “rooted in [the] familiar solid world” of “pre modernist narrative conventions” (Recovering Bodies 294). In part, Couser implies, the restraint imposed on the formal may result from the very danger of the content, which is “transgressive” simply by giving voice to disabled experience. Plaintext proves its own initiating claim, that writing can be a threshold to radical self-renewal, specifically by contesting expectations of narrative continuity. The widely anthologized “On Being a Cripple,” from the first section of Plaintext, illustrates through juxtaposition the way in which subjectivity can be conceived as precipitating out of the friction— and the gap—between discourse and corporeality. The essay, which includes a gentle refusal of the obfuscations of more “politically correct” terminology such as “handicapped” or “differently abled,” is in part Mairs’s defense of “cripple” as the word she uses to identify herself (an Orwellian argument writ small6); she then goes on to provide a condensed history of her experience with MS. Despite the author’s protest that “I am not a disease,” “On Being a Cripple” does in fact explore the complicated ways in which cultural assumptions, which assign meaning to bodies according to narrowly conceived parameters of normalcy and beauty, enforce a sense of identity for the crippled, other body for whom the ideal is unavailable (17). While the essay remains for the most part in the present tense, being primarily a richly detailed account of the impact of MS on a current “I,” it does allude to past and future “Nancys” whose needs and suffering are not those of the speaking self (“At the beginning, I thought about having MS almost incessantly . . . . Gradually I came to understand that the Nancy who might one day lie inert under a bed-sheet . . . was not the Nancy I was at present” [18]). A single, unified “Nancy Mairs” disappears in Mairs’s refusal of the norm that would marginalize her, and in this multiplicity of selves, between whom likeness can be no more

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fully guaranteed by bodily continuity (since her physical state is everchanging) than by consciousness, desire, or memory. Being diagnosed with MS, Mairs suggests, literalized early on a “sense of self-alienation” that she already had as a young woman “well off the ideal” of femininity (17). As Mairs describes her, that ideal woman “seems to be between the ages of eighteen and twentyfive; her hair has body, her teeth flash white . . . she is trim and deeply tanned; she jogs, swims, plays tennis, rides a bicycle, sails. . . . Though usually white and often blonde she may be black, Hispanic, Asian, or Native American, so long as she is unusually sleek. . . . But she is never a cripple” (16). Mairs contrasts her own form: “My shoulders droop and my pelvis thrusts forward as I try to balance myself upright, throwing my frame into a bony S . . . . one shoulder is higher than the other and I carry one arm bent in front of me, the fingers curled into a claw. My left arm and leg have wasted into pipe-stems, and I try always to keep them covered” (17). What the cultural expectation makes metaphorical, then—that a woman who deviates from the standard is “monstrous” and unworthy of sexual attention—Mairs feels herself to embody in a far more actual and psychically damaging way: “When I think about how my body must look to others, especially to men, to whom I have been trained to display myself, I feel . . . loathsome” (17). Hers is a doubly “other” body, marginalized not simply from the hale and coherent body of masculinist culture but from the normatively beautiful body of conventionalized femininity as well. On one level, Mairs presents the body with MS as a freakish cultural other. Her self-description, in its repetition of images of unevenness, rigidity, and collapse, signals her distance from the perfect graceful solidity of the woman who engages in sports or has both the energy and the strength to “travel widely” or to prepare “meals that take less than twenty minutes.”7 Against her depiction of an exuberant, autonomous, outward, and unquestioned motion, Mairs renders her own corporeal state as grotesquely witchlike, a form that sinks and twists into itself and juts in awkward angles as if unable to abide by some metaphysical, even moral, straight-and-narrow. To the degree that this self-presentation seems startling—for its raw, uncomfortable physicality, and the way it makes visible the body’s paradoxes (its bony but also spongy interiority, the capacity to self-devour)—but also luridly exposing, Mairs plays on both the historical legacy of the freak show and a literary tradition of the grotesque, according to both of which the extraordinary body is a spectacle that confirms—and confers—normality.8 As Thomson posits, “the disabled figure operates as the vividly embodied, stigmatized other whose social role is to

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symbolically free the privileged, idealized figure of the American self from the vagaries and vulnerabilities of embodiment” (Extraordinary Bodies 7). Initially, then, Mairs’s description may work to validate some readers’ sense of able-bodiedness through her difference. She then surprises her audience into a double recognition—of their desire for the feminine ideal whose characteristics she has just detailed, as well as their own (unconscious) acquiescence to the ugliness of her otherized body—and thus underlines the cultural code that defines beauty and success by a single set of near-impossible criteria. But the power of that narrative is fierce, and when Mairs admits to succumbing to its rhetorical force (“I have always had an uneasy relationship with my body”), she invites a new sort of powerful identification (“like many women I know”) that brings her body back from the margins (16). At the same time, though, the physical experience of MS has other, more salutary psychological effects, and in the amassing of different examples, the essay writes a counter-narrative, not this time of idealized perfection, but rather of a more realistically ambivalent effort to occupy a body that offers both pleasure and despair. The listing of apparently mundane activity in an essay is typical of Mairs—she means thereby to insist on the similarities between her daily life and that of the “nondisabled”—but her speaking “I” seems always to emerge from the interaction between what she deems “the plenty and the privation” (13): I lead, on the whole, an ordinary life, probably rather like the one I would have led had I not had MS. . . . In addition to studying, I teach writing courses. . . . I have raised a foster son . . . and I am still escorting my daughter and son through adolescence. I go to Mass every Saturday. I am a superb, if messy, cook. I am also an enthusiastic laundress . . . I play a fiendish game of Scrabble. When I have the time and the money, I like to sit on my front steps with my husband, drinking Amaretto and smoking a cigar . . . This lively plenty has its bleak complement, of course, in all the things I can no longer do. I will never run again, except in dreams, and one day I may have to write that I will never walk again. . . . I have to select my clothing with care not so much for style as for ease of ingress and egress . . . I can no longer do fine stitchery, pick up babies, play the piano, braid my hair. I am immobilized by acute attacks of depression. (12–13)

Just as the woman of fashion magazines derives her mythic status through an always-implied contrast to “ordinary” women (the

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supermarket checkout line a kind of obligatory litmus test that reconfirms the average woman’s “inadequacy” 9), Mairs sets up another contrast here, which renders similarly visible the discursive fiction underlying cultural categories of meaning. In her first list, the details are organized to emphasize unthreatening regularity and a principled committedness to profession, parenting, and faith; but the speaker is also contradictory in a “normal” way, someone whose overtly feminized activities are punctuated by good liqueur and cigars. Tightly controlled and tonally subdued, the paragraph is nonetheless a veritable explosion of terms. “Domesticity” is no longer solely the domain of a constrained femininity (since women who do laundry can also drink and smoke a stogie), nor is it to be associated with mere drudgery (since its tasks can be enjoyed “enthusiastically” or even “messily”). Mairs calls into question, too, the legitimization of only those physical activities demonstrated by the magazine model as constituting “capability” and even “pleasure”; her own enjoyment of more quotidian action—specifically, the language with which the quotidian is celebrated—raises it to a level of achievement that requires a radical shift in perspective (as in the subject of Plaintext’s first essay, “On Having Adventures,” which remarks that “the minutiae of my life have had to assume dramatic proportions” [6]). No sooner, however, does the first paragraph challenge one’s easy acceptance of physical health as synonymous with an obvious and visible athleticism and propose an alternate vision of how one might experience embodied pleasure, than the following paragraph unsettles even that perhaps straightforward dichotomy. All that Mairs can’t do reminds her readers again of the fact of a body in failure, so that, retroactively, the small undertakings of her life are made to seem exquisitely vulnerable and therefore precious; a prior bravado seems to modulate into something that is not at all self-pity but rather a matter-of-fact awareness of inevitable decline. What emerges from this sequence of paragraphs seems far from a question of chiding others to appreciate the quaint simplicity of domestic rituals. Mairs “want[s people] to wince” (9); the force of difference sets even her own investment in the ordinary against the unpredictability of MS. Describing an “exacerbation”—a sudden, severe experience of symptoms that signals further neurological damage—suffered during a trip to California, Mairs writes that “the incident spoiled my self-satisfaction” and “renewed my grief and fury and terror, and I learned that one never finishes adjusting to MS” (19). At the same time, Mairs credits MS with a different sort of subjective change: “I have always tried to be gentle with my doctors. . . . I incarnate the

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limitation of their powers. The least I can do is refuse to press on their tenderest spots. . . . // This gentleness is part of the reason that I’m not sorry to be a cripple” (20). Mairs’s acceptance of always potential displacement—the way MS makes her other to herself in frightening but also gratifying ways—is embedded into the essay’s structural reluctance to proclaim a single self and prohibits readers as well from the appropriating moves of identification or sympathy.10 The dual aim of Mairs’s self-presentation—always both ordinary and extraordinary—is made explicit in a similar passage from Carnal Acts. She states, first, “I’m not . . . Ms. MS, a walking, talking embodiment of a chronic incurable degenerative disease. In most ways I’m just like every other woman of my age, nationality, and socioeconomic background” (32). Here she reaches outward in a way designed both to assuage the anxiety of the onlooker (despite surface appearances, she is “just like” anyone else, and thus knowable, readable) and to include herself as a part of “normal” society. But in talking about also being at the literal margins of that society, made unreadable by its constructions of health and beauty, Mairs reiterates her “refus[al] to pretend that the only differences between you and me are the various ordinary ones that distinguish anyone person from another,” as she proclaims in “On Being a Cripple” (Plaintext 10). While “advertisers . . . deny the existence of me and my kind” so that “the viewer won’t feel threatened by her or his own physical vulnerability” (Carnal Acts 33), the reader of Mairs’s essay is never allowed to participate in that kind of complacent “effac[ing]” of the disabled body. (As David Hevey asks, “when did you last see a picture of a disabled person? It almost certainly wasn’t in commercial advertising since disabled people are not thought to constitute a body of consumers and therefore do not generally warrant inclusion” [332]). “Imagine a life in which feasible others—others you can hope to be like—don’t exist,” Mairs continues. “At the least, you might conclude that there is something queer about you, something ugly or foolish or shameful. In the extreme, you might feel as though you don’t exist” (33–34). Though the fundamental message of these paragraphs is an inclusive one—that there should be accurate cultural models for all forms of human experience—their effect is to recall an equally fundamental difference, “the specificity that bodily existence confers” (Voice Lessons 49). Mairs may not resemble the cover model of fashion magazines, but the majority of her readers, she implies, won’t look like the model or Mairs. To become aware of the layers of disjunction is to begin to recognize the insufficiency of normative myths of beauty, female sexuality, and “normal” embodiedness.

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The four essays in the final section of Plaintext amplify these kinds of juxtapositions. Mairs uses the controlling metaphor of “script” or “tale” to expose and then circumvent cultural demands for closure and unity, as well as claims to knowledge and authority. Each essay locates itself at a series of provocative thresholds, between self and culture, between older and current selves, between women and men, between the allegedly separate “self” and “body.” Moving back and forth across these discursive boundaries where women, particularly women writers, are tenuously poised, Mairs becomes a bricoleur of self, allowing the interplay of voices and explanatory systems to create a kinetic energy of disruption. The essays are thematically linked, each focused on Mairs’s experiences as a newly married woman struggling with depression and agoraphobia, her rape by a high-school boyfriend, her determination to keep writing, her worsening condition with MS, and the impact of text (scripture, fairy tales, diaries, literature and literary criticism, sociology and psychoanalysis) on the construction of identity—but they excavate those issues from slightly shifted perspectives and illustrate them with different anecdotes and examples. Together the four essays fashion what Mairs refers to in another context as a “patchwork” version of a life that functions subversively to forestall expectations of wholeness or unified subjectivity. Such reiterations and overlappings exemplify Mairs’s use of a miseen-abyme method to suggest that the “truth” of the body or the self is endlessly interpretable and illustrate what Sidonie Smith has suggested about feminist autobiography—that it rejects the teleological model of a unified and universal speaker locating “proof” of itself in the past and speaks instead “to the future” with hope about the potential for change (Smith, Subjectivity 162). “The stuttering adventure of the essay,” as Mairs characterizes it (Voice Lessons 87), challenges masculine standards of both writing and identity because its mode is “contemplative, exploratory, even equivocal, not definitive. If there are absolute answers to the kinds of questions I can ask, I don’t know them” (Waist-High 17). This commitment to “not knowing” works strenuously to undermine the claims to authority of able-bodied, patriarchal culture. Mairs’s adolescent diaries, for instance, become a kind of anti-authority, proving the enormity of cultural expectation on identity-formation but also subverting the expectation of a continuous self- or bodytrajectory. By exposing the naiveté of the diaries’ trust in the marriage plot of romantic fiction, Mairs willingly bares her own immersion in fantasies about a stereotypical form of love, “shamelessly” presenting herself not as the individualist of men’s self-writing who bucks

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the system with scrappy ingenuity (one thinks, for instance, of the narrator of Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life), but as a poignant figure desperate for a sense of physical well-being that would match a fairy tale ideal. Her style of confession is thus less truth-telling than a form of self-parody that allows her to observe that younger self as other, a self to whose unthinking acceptance of cultural myth Mairs is no longer subject. Smith writes that women’s autobiographies “confron[t] the process of repetition whereby fixed identifications (‘woman,’ ‘black,’ ‘lesbian,’ etc.) authorize only certain performances of identity at the exclusion of others” (Subjectivity 157). Mairs performs a different sort of “iteration” here, one designed to weave and refract, break down and rebuild. In a sense, it is by making the self seem “incoherent” that Mairs represents her female/disabled subjectivity according to new rules of coherence.11 If there is no single story of the embodied self, or no single way to tell it, then the autobiographical mode loosens and slips into what Smith describes as works that embrace the “polyphonic possibilities of selfhood” (Smith, Poetics 58). Mairs’s essay collections reveal what Felicity Nussbaum and Shari Benstock refer to as “fissures of female discontinuity,” which challenge an autobiographical model based on a metaphysics of self-wholeness and narrative seamlessness.12 Mairs suggests instead that the tale of the disabled female life cannot be unbrokenly narrated, that indeed that “self” is constantly shifting to the side—into the next essay, into a new paradigm of meaning or understanding, a new phase of MS. In Waist-High in the World, Mairs writes that marginality “means something altogether different to me from what it means to social theorists. It is not a metaphor for the power relations between one group of human beings and another but a literal description of where I stand (figuratively speaking): over here, on the edge, out of bounds, beneath your notice. I embody the metaphors” (59). Her physical position becomes a way of re-vising a world that she views from “the slant of a wheelchair” (106). In this sense she counters narrative patterns common in men’s accounts of physical paralysis, which typically perpetuate a gendered dichotomy between the continued activity of the mind and the immobility of the body. In such memoirs as Reynolds Price’s A Whole New Life, for example, “Self-rehabilitation involves in large part redefining the self as more a function of mind and spirit than of the flesh” (Couser, Recovering Bodies 185). Madonne Miner contrasts Mairs with Andre Dubus’s account of paralysis in Broken Vessels, which, Miner writes, “repeatedly returns to stereotypically masculinized questions of agency, responsibility, and guilt” (285) and

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“reaffirms Dubus’s manliness and heroism” (286). Mairs’s self-representational project, far from denying the condition of the body, is to insist on it, lowering the “nondisabled” to her waist-high level in order to transvaluate the way the world is ordered and experienced. Mairs wants to assure her potentially reluctant audience that the prospect of seeing the world from her vantage-point—which is in itself a kind of metaphor for widening one’s vision to include the broadest range of embodied uniqueness—is a positive one, that the initially destabilizing effects of acknowledging difference are ultimately rewarding. “The more perspectives that can be brought to bear on human experience,” Mairs insists, “ . . . the richer that experience becomes. If it is both possible and pleasant for me and my kind to enter, the world will become a livelier place. You’ll see” (Waist-High 106). Waist-High in the World is thus composed as a record of the “consequences” (16) of difference on an individual’s ability to determine, represent, and experience herself. In a culture that privileges only the white, male, “able” body as the “neutral” and normative self, disability is both an emphatically particular embodied reality and a trope for disenfranchisement: “Disability is at once a metaphorical and a material state, evocative of other conditions in time and space—childhood and imprisonment come to mind—yet ‘like’ nothing but itself. I can’t live it or write about it except by conflating the figurative and the substantial, the ‘as if’ with the relentlessly ‘what is’ ” (58). At the “what is” level, Mairs writes of the practical matters of living with MS in a world constructed according to a single conception of normal physical mobility, and of the psychological damage such enforced, literal, marginality produces. The ideological “success” of this aspect of representation is, in turn, whether or not it allows Mairs to transform the “as if” from a culturally enforced conception of disability as the unpoliceable, uncontrolled body that threatens the nondisabled with both the promise of their own future failure as well as with the exposure of the fictionality of their privileged position. The disabled body, Mairs suggests, is simply one more form of human corporeality, but at the same time it might also serve as a liberating metaphor—for multiple perspectives, for resistance to oppression, for a way of making difference radically visible, not merely to reinscribe the “normal” body, but as and in itself. Mairs balks at language that reinforces the notion that “I myself—my thinking self—[am] no body, as though this disembodied self could speak not only for the body that it is not but for bodies in general,” and refuses “to divorce the speaking subject from her own corporal existence while permitting her to make free, in the chastest of senses,

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with the bodies of others” (Waist-High 40). Describing her own and her husband’s necessary efforts to “come to terms with” increasingly ill bodies (Mairs’s husband George has undergone radical treatment for melanoma), Mairs remarks that “the physical processes of a perfectly healthy person may impinge so little on her sense of well-being that she may believe herself separate from and even in control of them” (41). By representing her self as inextricably enmeshed with her “troubled” body, Mairs recalls intellect to the body. Such language also seems designed to make one become aware of one’s own physical interiority, to probe it experientially, to literally test one’s sense of self. The effect of her language is that one suddenly comes to inhabit a perhaps utterly unfamiliar corporeal self. Waist-High in the World frequently marshals such uncanniness. Again searching for language with which to render her body, Mairs writes, “Here is my troubled body, dreaming myself into life: a guttering candle in a mound of melted wax, or a bruised pear, ripe beyond palatability, ready for the compost heap. The images, though they vary, always bear the whiff of spoliation” (44). The attention to diffusion and loss of shape here, the sensation of a body rotting from within and easily indented from without, the sense of losing structure and solidity and even purpose (the candle that can no longer be lit, the pear destined for the garbage)—and, moreover, the implication that such instances of self-punitive naming might proliferate without end—all appear staged to evoke a flash of shock and pity, allowing readers to pull out of their bodies (if momentarily) so that the specter of Mairs’s failure, a failure both of the body and of the will (illness as deserved punishment for sin; low self-esteem as undignified selfabsorption) can be safely contained at the farthest possible distance from the reading self. The move is deft and strategic, because no sooner has Mairs encouraged that sort of differentiating move than she reels her audience in again, surely and inescapably: “Mostly I was, as I was trained to be, disappointed in myself . . . I could not imagine a body that didn’t require at least minor structural modification. // I still can’t, and neither can any other woman I know” (44, italics added). One is caught gawking at, disdaining, the shadow of the self.13 Mairs repeats this strategy of a layered (un)familiarity throughout her work because it militates against the alienating moves inherent to oppressive social configurations. Sex is one human activity she is particularly concerned to show the disabled body both engaging in and enjoying, and her discussion of this stands in obvious opposition to dominant cultural assumptions about the disabled and women alike: “Most people . . . deal with the discomfort and even distaste

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that a misshapen body arouses by dissociating that body from sexuality in reverie and practice. ‘They’ can’t possibly do it, the thinking goes; therefore, ‘they’ mustn’t even want it . . . I really do like sex. A lot. Especially now that the issues of power and privacy that vexed me then have resolved themselves with time” (Waist-High 51–52). Mairs protests here the mind-bending contradiction of inhabiting two mutually exclusive, and multiply oppressive, constructions: the asexualized, abnormal, sterile body of the disabled, and the inescapably sexualized, shameful female body of Western culture.14 She represents herself as mature and psychologically astute, as a woman of considerable patience and experience (“issues” have “resolved themselves with time”), as a woman no longer persuaded by culture’s tale of her own objectification and thus at ease with the fact of her body, eager for its pleasures—as, in short, more self-actualized than many “normals” (103). But once again the disabled body is both like and unlike, for Mairs’s story of the enjoyment of sex, newly discovered in “coming to terms” with her body, is always necessarily open-ended, bound up as it is with the ever-deteriorating condition of multiple sclerosis. Her narrative thus shifts course, as does the course of MS; the speaker who boldly claims to “like sex. A lot” and thereby conveys the impression of an active and ongoing sexual life is a momentary incarnation. As she goes on to explain, due to her husband’s impotency (a result of chemotherapy), she “will never experience [intercourse] again” (52). But while the inability to engage in the forms of sexual contact she likes “best of all” “shrouds” Mairs in “sexual sadness,” it does not preclude her from experiencing a multitude of highly charged erotic intimacies with George: “Whether for making love or not, our bodies—one twisted and nearly inert, the other scarified, both softening now with age and indulgence—instinctively seek each other out. Even our most mundane interactions bear an erotic charge. . . . [H]e may stroke my neck when he brings me a cup of coffee. And since my wheelchair places me just at the height of his penis . . . I may nuzzle it in return. We carry on a constant, often hardly conscious, corporeal conversation regardless of our other pursuits and preoccupations. Without my disability to throw us together thus habitually, our bodies might spend their days racing separately from one activity to another, coming across each other only in time to tumble into sleep” (53–54). It is disability, Mairs provocatively claims, that renders her “normally” sexual, disability that enlarges the experiential field to enable her to locate the extraordinary in the ordinary. What seems most stunning about this manifesto for the eroticism of quotidian chore is that Mairs

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is not so much describing actions that are radically different from what the nondisabled would routinely perform,,but rather a mode of perception that allows her to view those activities differently, investing them with meaning according to a different conceptual frame. In this way the passage stands as a dazzling exposure of the limitations of the world view of “able-bodied ness,” with its monological definition of the sexual, the erotic, the tender. In a “sociolinguistic system over which [women] have had relatively little power,” a “crippled” woman experiences what Mairs calls “a kind of double jeopardy. How can she construct a world that will accommodate her realities . . . ?” (58). The answer, fittingly, is both physical and linguistic. “If I want people to grow accustomed to my presence, and to view mine as an ordinary life . . . then I must routinely roll out among them” (104). Such “roll[ing] out” is, of course, enacted by every instance of self-representation in each essay in WaistHigh in the World (and indeed in each of Mairs’s collections). And just as Mairs “prefer[s] the self-defined ‘cripple’ ” (14) because it operates beyond the system of naming and meaning-making, so too does she rename “people who lack [disabilities as] . . . ‘the nondisabled,’ since in relation to me, they are the deficient ones. Already, in this way, I begin to reconstruct the world” (14). The subtlety of Mairs’s language is precise: “lack” is relocated in the bodies of the “normals,” transforming disability from its place of deviation or loss to something the absence of which might actually be mourned as a liability. At the same time disability is retrieved from the margins of threatening excess by being figured as “non”-deficient, successful corporeality. Disability becomes, particularly in Waist-High, a new sort of postmodern trope—for an ambiguity of selfhood that forces vigilance about not settling into the confinements of patriarchally defined identity categories. The essay “Young and Disabled,” for instance (a compilation of excerpts taken from a survey Mairs conducted of young women with disabilities) reads as an exhilarating cacophony of idioms, condensing the message that Mairs’s own self-writing has consistently tried to enact: master narratives that reduce subjectivity to the single attribute “disabled”—itself already the product of cultural narrative—are coercive and inaccurate. This is made provocatively clear as Mairs, herself one of the “disabled,” struggles to distill the self-representations of her respondents. “Their disabilities varied so widely that it was difficult—even deceptive—to generalize about such women,” she states, “who may have less in common with each other than they do with some nondisabled women and who may even be made uneasy by women with disabilities different from their

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own” (127–28). Thomson agrees, writing that “disabled people seldom consider themselves a group. . . . Only the shared experience of stigmatization creates commonality. Having been acculturated similarly to everyone else, disabled people also often avoid and stereotype one another in an attempt to normalize their own social identities” (Extraordinary Bodies 14–15). Mairs has a difficult task, then, in bringing together so many tales of disabled life without blurring their important differences. She navigates that problem by taking the position of facilitator rather than master-interpreter, quoting her respondents amply so that they speak for themselves, and intertwining her own voice with theirs as simply one other, and not the dominant, perspective. As Mairs says of this project, “I hope that, as these women speak, ‘disability’ will emerge as one element of their complicated personalities and not as a confining category” (128). The result is that the essay not only demonstrates the multiplicity of disabled experience, but also defocuses attention on Mairs as the “author” of and authority on the disabled. In a sense she relinquishes control even of the writing act, giving over the space of the essay to others’ voices, and by thus refusing to monopolize, she insists that the varieties of experience, which should and do proliferate, must be represented as such.15 In turn, what one understands of disability, femaleness, and identity is continually being unraveled and rewoven. The reading process mirrors, in this way, that necessarily continual revision of self that chronic illness causes: “After I learned that I had multiple sclerosis, the transitions I had to make, involving the development of a new sense of who I was and what I was good for, required mourning the loss of the ‘old me’ as I confronted a new one who seemed like a stranger. . . . With degenerative conditions like mine, self-definition may have to be revised in this way again and again as new limitations develop” (133). But the essay is not, finally, a piteous narrative of diminishment and loss. Rather it reinforces what Mairs has consistently argued about disability, that it is both private and communal, biological and ideological: “sickness forms only in relation to some standard of health which does not exist of itself in some fictional objective other world but which is created from the observations, responses, values, and beliefs of those ‘healthy’ subjects who seek to articulate it” (Plaintext 141), and as she reminds us in Voice Lessons, “I’m ever aware of my self as a cultural, not merely a personal, construct” (113). At the same time, she posits the possibility of shared experience, proposing that by “scrutinizing . . . elements common to the human condition . . . through the lens of my own experiences and those of people I know well, I can bring

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to life their particular significance in terms of disability” (Waist-High 11–12). By making her “self ” at once unique and ordinary, Mairs “contact[s] others,” “stir[s] them to recognition of the similarities that underlie their experiences and mine, to illuminate and delight in and laugh over the commonalities of human life” (Voice Lessons 109). The body can’t be rewritten, Mairs’s work implies, but how the body is read (and thus how one experiences being embodied) can be: “We can’t decide . . . whether or not someone gets MS. MS just happens. But— and this is the exciting part—we can choose how we will respond to that happening, what kind of role we will give it in the story we’re making up as we go along” (Carnal Acts 124). In the final essay of Waist-High, “Writing West: A Reclamation Project,” Mairs describes a request to compose a piece on being a western writer: “they want me to write a story essentially like other women’s stories with the trifling but possibly intriguing difference that I happen to experience whatever befalls me at the height of those women’s belt buckles. // But that’s not how disability works. . . . It does not merely alter a few, or even a great many, details in a life story that otherwise conforms to basic narrative conventions: the adventure, the romance, the quest. Instead, it transforms the tale utterly” (182). Transforming the tale has been Mairs’s fundamental “reclamation project” since her first collection of essays, through a bodily reality and an essayistic style that repudiate the very ground of Western subjectivity. To read her is to witness the extraordinary ordinariness of the body—all bodies, any body. Notes This article originally appeared in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 14. 2 (1999): 254–72. 1. There are many excellent summaries of both conventional autobiography theory as well as feminist divergences both theoretical and creative. See, for instance, Shumaker, Morris, Delany, Olney, Spengemann, Jelinek, Gunn, Benstock, and Smith. See also Neuman’s article, the first sentence of which proclaims, “Bodies rarely figure in autobiography” (293). 2. The exception to this is the 1989 Remembering the Bone House: An Erotics of Space, a more standardly chronological autobiography. Even in Bone House, though, Mairs deliberately disrupts a forwardly linear motion by looping backward in memory, hinting at future events whose full significance becomes evident only in view of the past, revisiting events from different perspectives, and focusing as much on the interior life of the mind as on external temporal markers.

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3. See the essay by that name in Voice Lessons, 123–35. 4. See Gutkind’s discussion of this issue in Creative Nonfiction, as well as Pollitt’s trenchant critique of “using oneself as a touchstone of political argument,” in “Solipsisters.” 5. See also Couser’s earlier article “The Embodied Self” (4). 6. But see Hillyer’s discussion of the delicate ideological issues surrounding the semantics of naming, particularly chapter 3, “Language and Biography.” See also Linton’s sections on “nice words” and “nasty words” in Claiming Disability. 7. Published in 1986, Plaintext predates the Kate-Moss era of emaciated supermodels. 8. The landmark study of the “freak” is Fiedler’s. See also Bogdan’s book Freak Show, and Thomson’s anthology, Freakery. 9. Thomson writes, “The normative female body . . . occupies a dual and paradoxical cultural role: it is the negative term opposing the male body, but it is also simultaneously the privileged term opposing the abnormalized female body” (Extraordinary Bodies 28). 10. Gunn argues that the autobiographical situation “puts the reader to work” in such a way that “the otherness of the text” is experienced, “keep[ing] the appropriative activity of interpretation from becoming expropriative.” “New understanding,” she continues, “allows neither assimilation (the reader’s takeover of the text) nor accommodation (the text’s takeover of the reader). Autobiographical response requires, instead, an integration” (20–21). 11. See Gunn, who writes that “autobiography completes no pictures. Instead, it rejects wholeness or harmony . . . as a false unity which serves as no more than a defense against the self’s deeper knowledge of its finitude” (25). 12. See Benstock’s “Authorizing the Autobiographical” and Nussbaum’s “Eighteenth-Century Women’s Autobiographical Commonplaces,” in Benstock’s anthology The Private Self. 13. On the notion that the body of the “freak,” which seems to “represent the absolutely ‘Other’ (thus reassuring us who come to gape that we are ‘normal’),” is in fact “a revelation of what in our deepest psyches we recognize as the Secret Self,” see Fiedler’s essay “Tyranny of the Normal” (152). 14. Compare Asch and Fine’s claim that “our culture views being female and disabled as ‘redundant,’ whereas being male and disabled is a contradiction” (249). 15. See Hillyer, who writes that “the complexity of our scrupulously individual statements can begin to form women’s movement. To repeat each woman’s story is essential, of course, but the next and crucial task is to attend to the ‘connecting exchange’ between them. Thereby we weave a more colorful, significant web, composed of many women’s stories, of many women’s words” (46).

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Works Cited Asch, Adrienne, and Michelle Fine. “Nurturance, Sexuality, and Women with Disabilities.” Davis, Disability Studies, 241–59. Benstock, Shari, ed. The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1988. Bogdan, Robert. Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” New French Feminisms. Ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Schocken, 1980. 245–64. Couser, G. Thomas. “The Embodied Self.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 6.1 (Spring 1991): 1–7. ———. Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1997. Davis. Lennard J., ed. The Disability Studies Reader. 1st ed. New York: Routledge, 1997. ———. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. London: Verso, 1995. Delany, Paul. British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century. New York: Columbia UP, 1969. Fiedler, Leslie. Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self. New York: Simon, 1978. ———. “Tyranny of the Normal.” Tyranny of the Normal: Essays on Bioethics, Theology, and Myth. Boston: Godine, 1996. 147–55. Gunn, Janet Varner. Autobiography: Toward a Poetics of Experience. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1982. Gutkind, Lee. “Style and Substance.” Creative Nonfiction 10 (1998): 1–4. Hevey, David. “The Enfreakment of Photography.” Davis, Disability Studies. 332–47. Hillyer, Barbara. Feminism and Disability. Norman, OK: U of Oklahoma P, 1993. Jelinek, Estelle C., ed. Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980. Linton, Simi. Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity. New York: NYUP, 1998. Nancy Mairs. Carnal Acts. Boston: Beacon, 1996. ———. Plaintext. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1986. ———. Remembering the Bone House: An Erotics of Space. New York: Harper, 1989. ———. Voice Lessons: On Becoming a Woman Writer. Boston: Beacon, 1994. ———. Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled. Boston: Beacon, 1997.

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Meekosha, Helen. “Body Battles: Bodies, Gender and Disability.” The Disability Reader: Social Science Perspectives. Ed. Tom Shakespeare. London: Cassell, 1998. 163–80. Miner, Madonne. “ ‘Making up the Stories as We Go Along’: Men, Women, and Narratives of Disability.” Mitchell and Snyder, 283–95. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder, eds. The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997. Morris, John N. Versions of the Self. New York: Basic, 1966. Neuman, Shirley. “ ‘An appearance walking in a forest the sexes burn’: Autobiography and the Construction of the Feminine Body.” Autobiography and Postmodernism. Ed. Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore, and Gerald Peters. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1994. 293–315. Nussbaum, Felicity. “Eighteenth-Century Women’s Autobiographical Commonplaces.” Benstock, 147–71. Olney, James, ed. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. ———, ed. Studies in Autobiography. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. Pollitt, Katha. “Solipsisters.” The New York Times Book Review. 18 April 1999: 35. Price, Reynolds. A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing. New York: Penguin, 1995. Shumaker, Wayne. English Autobiography: Its Emergence, Materials, and Form. Berkeley: U of California P, 1954. Smith, Sidonie. A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. ———. Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. Spengemann, William C. The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale UP, 1980. Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. ———, ed. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. New York: NYUP, 1996. Wendell, Susan. “Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability.” Davis, Disability Studies, 260–78. Wolff, Tobias. This Boy’s Life: A Memoir. New York: HarperPerennial, 1990.

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Chapter 10

Dismembering the Heterosexual Imaginary: A Feminist Cultural Anatomy of the Infidelity Narrative in Nancy Mairs’s Remembering the Bone House Merri Lisa Johnson

In a postmodern memoir of obsession titled I Love Dick (wherein

a man named Dick is the object of the author’s obsession, not an anatomical generalization, though the provocative slippage is surely intentional), Chris Kraus raises questions about how women’s use of the personal in art is interpreted. Describing her friends’ nonplussed reactions to her book project, she poses a question that resonates with my pedagogical concerns in teaching courses on gender and autobiography: “Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our own debasement? Why do women always have to come off clean?” (217). A few pages later, Kraus rejects reviews of a 1975 installation of Hannah Wilke’s photography that called it “a deeply thrilling venture into narcissism.” Pointing to the feminist truism, “the personal is political,” Kraus insists there is more to self-revelation than self-absorption: “As if the only possible reason for a woman to publicly reveal herself could be self-therapeutic. As if the point was not to reveal the circumstances of one’s own objectification” (221). When I teach the memoir Remembering the Bone House: An Erotics of Place and Space by Nancy Mairs, I approach the lectern equipped with passages like these to defuse the negative reactions I have come to expect, but it is an almost physical wrestling match to turn students’ eyes from authorial self-revelation to the circumstances of objectification, even when the author explicitly states social criticism as her autobiographical

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purpose, as Mairs does in the introduction to this fiercely political text. Jeanne Braham also writes about the challenges of teaching Mairs’s literary nonfiction, noting, “readers who touch her incendiary essays often come away with burned hands” (67). She contrasts Mairs’s polemical essays with more softly rendered scenes in Remembering the Bone House, a book Braham posits as more audience-friendly compared to “the gaping wounds hung out on the taut line of essay to bleed, as in Plaintext” (69). Yet responses to Mairs’s memoir tend to be mixed. There is always a handful of students (often but not always female) who fall in love with the book and walk around with dog-eared copies saying things like I don’t want lovers, I want poems or Your body is not a temple as if the phrases were secret code for their own struggles toward self-actualization. Invariably, however, there are other students (often but not always male) who condemn Mairs for her sexual encounters—specifically her infidelity—invoking the harsh language of misogyny, calling the author selfish and slut and whore, and turning their noses up in the air as if the book itself smelled of sex and dirt. These students dismiss her memoir as the unredeemable confessions of a narcissistic narrator, an uncanny echo of the negative reception in early reviews of Remembering the Bone House. A writer for the Chicago Tribune asserted that Remembering the Bone House “is weakest when it discusses Mairs’s physical and erotic development,” her language in these passages described as “tedious and all-too-familiar” (Heisler 6). The review ended with a dismissive harrumph: “This reader would have preferred to have heard fewer ‘tales of doomed love’ and more about [Mairs’s] affair with words” (6). Likewise, the reviewer for Publisher’s Weekly asserted the memoir “loses much of its zest because of her incessant repetition, in eventually wearisome detail, of her sexual adventures with many men and her brief affair with a woman,” concluding that “the lurid effects drown her poet’s voice and seem more exploitative than revelatory.” Whereas Braham presents Mairs’s work (alongside Audre Lorde’s and May Sarton’s) as an “alternative script,” a “lens of empathy,” and “a window flooding our own lives with light” (71), a reading that matches my own exuberant pleasure in the nonconformist stance of the narrative, there seems to be a piece of logic missing for other readers, as their moral and aesthetic condemnations constitute nothing less than a misreading of the book, overlooking entirely the social critique of romantic mythology embedded in Mairs’s tales of doomed love.

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Representations of romantic relationships constitute a major component of Mairs’s memoir, appearing as well in many of her essay collections, but neither the topic of romance nor the memoir has been subjected to sustained critical analysis.1 Thus far, scholarly treatment of Nancy Mairs has worked intently on explicating her essay collections at the intersection of gender theory and disability studies, producing an invaluable set of insights and terminology about the lived experience of the disabled female body and the formal aesthetics of feminist autopathography.2 Much of this material can be usefully redirected toward the lived experience of romance in Remembering the Bone House and the aesthetics of the feminist heterosexuality memoir. In the following reading, then, I extract insights from feminist disability studies and conjoin them with the emergent field of critical heterosexuality studies in order to offer a corrective lens through which the “lurid effects” of the memoir can be viewed more accurately as emergency flares sent up from a woman swamped by the riptides of infatuation, obsession, and abandonment depression.3 Furthermore, in grafting the language of feminist disability studies on to the scenes of extramarital affairs, I engage the cultural construction of the unfaithful wife as social cripple, contextualizing this construction among feminist dialogues about infidelity, illness, and female failures of all sorts as bodily languages of protest. A Rhetoric that Swaggers Susannah Mintz provides a key resource in understanding and teaching the work of Mairs with her article, “Transforming the Tale: The Auto/body/ographies of Nancy Mairs,” a densely sketched treatment of Mairs’s essay collections as feminist disability narratives characterized by heteroglossic excavations of the non-normative female body. Mintz’s description of Mairs’s confrontational rhetorical strategies lends itself well to my explication of infidelity in Remembering the Bone House. First, Mintz points out Mairs’s departure from the two most common authorial stances in texts about chronic illness—victimhood or triumphalism—praising the more authentic middle ground Mairs occupies. Mairs’s “counter-narrative” of illness relays the story of an “ambivalent effort to occupy a body that offers both pleasure and despair” (260). This ambivalence works as a wedge to open up new emotional spaces apart from the provided cultural scripts of disability. Second, Mintz persuasively argues that graphic descriptions of Mairs’s disabled body—with its drooping pelvis, uneven shoulders, claws for hands, pipe-stems for left arm and leg—are designed to

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startle the audience into recognizing its latent horror at the disabled “other,” even as the author “admits to succumbing to [the] rhetorical force” of this cultural narrative (260). Mairs casts her degenerating body in deliberately unappealing language—a bruised pear, a melted candle, all images of “a body rotting from within,” all “instances of self-punitive naming”—with images Mintz takes to be “staged to evoke a flash of shock and pity, allowing readers to pull out of their bodies . . . so that the spectre of Mairs’s failure, a failure both of the body and of the will . . . can be safely contained at the farthest possible distance from the reading self” (266). Third, in a “deft and strategic” move, Mairs “reels her audience in again” with casual asides about the process of socialization that leads author and reader alike to see the disabled female body in such negative terms, and, in Mintz’s words, “One is caught gawking at, disdaining, the shadow of the self” (266). The disabled female body, a “doubly, or perhaps triply, repressed” social element, according to G. Thomas Couser (73), typically remains hidden from sight and is draped in shame and revulsion—shadow material of an ableist culture and its able-bodied readers—yet Mairs consistently brings not only the body but the shame and revulsion into the light. Braham presents this shadow work as part of Mairs’s stance as a gender outlaw: “The ugly and the painful are precisely what she forces a reader to examine: because they appear with tormenting regularity in her life and because confrontational tactics free her from the emotional repressions she was taught to practice as a daughter, a woman, a wife, and a mother” (65). In surfacing this repressed material, Mairs mobilizes a social critique not only of the marginalized body of the disabled woman but also of the ideological strictures—of daughter, of woman, of wife, of mother—that prevent women from speaking honestly, earnestly, and authentically about our conscription into the dominant fictions of heterosexual gender roles. These three methods—(1) constructing a space of ambivalence in place of simplistic clichéd emotions, (2) staging readerly shock to provoke an awareness of our own dependence on problematic cultural narratives, and (3) guiding readers through the shadow side of their personal and cultural psyches where unsavory desire, fear of the other, and latent self-loathing reside—also structure Mairs’s counternarratives of heterosexuality. Mairs’s admissions of infidelity, in particular, represent staged confrontations with the reader’s embeddedness in the romantic imaginary, setting up the conditions for a demystification of romance as an ideological tool that perpetuates asymmetrical gender roles. This

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textual activism can be illuminated by critical heterosexuality studies (an outgrowth of feminist and queer theory that coalesced into a special subfield of gender studies in the mid-1990s). Chrys Ingraham, founding scholar of critical heterosexuality studies, initially developed the concept of the heterosexual imaginary in her call for a more comprehensive materialist feminist sociological theory. Drawing on Louis Althusser, Ingraham asserts, “The imaginary is that image or representation of reality which masks the historical and material conditions of life,” and, furthermore, “the heterosexual imaginary is that way of thinking which conceals the operation of heterosexuality in structuring gender and closes off any critical analysis of heterosexuality as an organized institution” (275, italics added). Ingraham later popularized this concept in White Weddings: Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture and in the critical anthology Thinking Straight: The Power, the Promise, and the Paradox of Heterosexuality. In Thinking Straight, Ingraham elaborates on the concept of the heterosexual imaginary, distinguishing between heterosexuality as a sexual orientation and heterosexuality as a category of social organization: By treating heterosexuality as normative or taken for granted, we participate in establishing heterosexuality—not sexual orientation or sexual behavior, but the way it is organized, secured, and ritualized—as the standard for legitimate and prescriptive socio-sexual behavior, as though it were fixed in time and space and universally occurring. (4, italics added)

In making visible the “prescriptive socio-sexual behavior” that constitutes institutional heterosexuality, Ingraham opens up the possibility of interrogating the way heterosexuality is practiced by men and women in a particular culture and historical moment, both in its dominant form and in individual departures from those norms. The identity category of the heterosexual, as Ingraham unpacks it, contains consenting individuals, those who “comply with the prevailing meanings and ideological messages that organize heterosexuality,” as well as dissenting individuals: “the badly behaved heterosexual—unemployed or dependent husband, sexually or physically violent male partner, crossdresser, polygamist, promiscuous wife, or marriage resister” (2–3). The “promiscuous wife” disrupts the heterosexual imaginary by unveiling its false messages of security, stability, and contentedness. Adulterers are included for similar reasons among a list of queer heterosexuals in Michael Warner’s The

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Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life to make visible the many heterosexuals who “find themselves at odds with straight culture” (38).4 Among the ideological components that comprise institutional heterosexuality, of most importance to my analysis of Remembering the Bone House is Ingraham’s description of romantic ideology: “Thinking straight is living in romance or the illusion of well-being that institutionalized heterosexuality promises[,] not in its realities” (4). Much of the distress, the acting out, the dishonesty, and the manic pursuit of new suitors in the memoir stems from Mairs’s immersion in this illusion, and the narrative itself highlights and problematizes the illusion of well-being, as do Mairs’s earlier essays “On Not Liking Sex” and “On Loving Men,” both of which anticipate and amplify the feminist cultural work of the memoir in its persistent contrast between the promises of romance and its lived realities. In the introduction to her memoir, “The Way In,” Mairs states directly that when she writes of the houses, scenes, and felicitous spaces of her past, she writes more generally of gender and narrative and rebellious energy: “I return to them, reenter them, in order to discover the relationships they bear to my own erotic development and thus perhaps—because I’m ever aware of my self as a cultural, not merely a personal, construct—to feminine erotic development in general” (7, italics added). Through this double-voicedness, Mairs pursues a political goal in an autobiographical idiom authorizing female readers to disidentify with narratives that position woman “as man’s Other” and to confront their own discomfort with the provided scripts and spaces of hetero-erotic development: “I invite you into the house of my past, and the threshold you cross leads you into your own” (11). Although Remembering the Bone House does not sustain an explicitly politicized voice throughout its autobiographical narrative, this introduction provides a theoretical framework through which all subsequent chapters can be rendered intelligible as enactments of feminist theory. For this reason, Remembering the Bone House could be construed as an autobiographical manifesto. According to the definition of the term by feminist autobiography scholar Sidonie Smith, this genre is dedicated to “restaging subjectivity” (156) and “troubling culturally authorized fictions” (160), a mode of writing in which “the individual story becomes the occasion for what [Nancy] Hartstock calls ‘standpoint epistemologies,’ analyses of specific confluences of social, psychological, economic, and political forces of oppression” (159). By invoking the word “manifesto” here, I mean to underscore the activist subtext of this memoir, placing it on par with Mairs’s essay

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collections, Plaintext, Carnal Acts, and Voice Lessons, as a feminist intervention into hetero-romantic ideology. Connecting the memoir with Mairs’s well-known activist voice in her essays goes some way toward explaining why audiences might be divided in their responses to the book. Mairs reflects on the discomfort of telling people the subtitle: “ ‘An erotics of place and space,’ I tell them, waiting for the wince, the furrow, the grin—the responses vary, but plainly they all assume that I’m writing ‘a dirty book.’ Well, maybe I am” (7–8). Although Mairs belongs to the Audre Lordian tradition of revising “erotic” to mean bodily joy unrestricted to sexual intercourse and a reclamation of unity against the Cartesian division of mind from body, she knows from the outset that others will hear “erotic” as porn and reduce her memoir to a graphic sexcapade. But Mairs is no stranger to reworking the meanings of words, and this is not her first time “waiting for the wince.” In fact, this stoic stance appears in Mairs’s first essay collection, Plaintext, where her essay, “On Being a Cripple,” addresses the psychological and political uses of making audiences uncomfortable: People—crippled or not—wince at the word “cripple,” as they do not at “handicapped” or “disabled.” Perhaps I want them to wince. I want them to see me as a tough customer, one to whom the fates/gods/ viruses have not been kind, but who can face the brutal truth of her existence squarely. As a cripple, I swagger. (9)

Mairs wants her audience to wince because she advocates authenticity, a state that requires readers to witness pain, acknowledge impairment, and use words that are direct and precise instead of packing reality with the thick gauze of euphemism. Mairs is indeed a tough customer, and she urges readers to toughen up as well, to be strong enough to hear the truth about life as a crippled woman even when it is unattractive, even when it departs from the stories readers are prepared to hear. The same swagger accompanies her interventions into the narrative of heterosexual desire, causing some readers to wince at her brash revelations. The wince marks a sore spot, and many readers in the post-sexual revolution United States still get sore over the idea of a woman not being satisfied by married life or at least pretending at satisfaction through the self-discipline of hetero-monogamy. As critical heterosexuality studies pressures state-sanctioned forms of sexuality to admit their internal fissures and obfuscations, as the carnivalesque splendor of gay pride modulates into the assimilationist marriage

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equality movement, as colleges and universities fill with young women and men raised in the conservative post-Clinton backlash years, and as Remembering the Bone House reaches its twentieth anniversary but has once again gone out of print, the moment is ripe for a rereading of this memoir as a manifesto against the self-subordination of patriarchal marriage and romantic ideology. Through such a reading the full range of Mairs’s dissenting positions can be recognized, appreciated, and mobilized in the feminist autobiography classroom. Resisting the available feminist rhetoric on heterosexuality (roughly schematized as separatism versus collusion), Carol Smart asks “whether . . . women’s only choices are to opt out or to accept the dominant ideology” (169), as she calls for more nuanced feminist writing on heterosexual relationships: We know about the appalling abuse some women experience in heterosexual relationships, but we still know virtually nothing about how women in nonabusive relationships are negotiating their sexuality. . . . [U]ntil we can start to find this new way of speaking of heterosexualities and allowing ourselves to appreciate differences of meaning and experience, feminist theories of sexuality will remain strangely repressed on a most important aspect of the lives of many women. (176–77)

Remembering the Bone House takes up the project of narrating the negotiation of sexual desire and power in a nonabusive heterosexual partnership by acknowledging betrayals, frustrations, and epistemological conflicts with her husband without concluding that women must fully submit to institutional heterosexuality or opt out in order to achieve self-actualization. In refusing the usual limits on what can be said about marriage and desire (as Mairs has often refused limits on what can be said about embodied disabled femininity), Remembering the Bone House records resistance—doubt, alienation, anticlimax—as a key part of the romantic story, establishing, in Smart’s words, “an ambivalent relationship to institutional or traditional heterosexuality and a fluid identity which refuses to be trapped by a crudely defined notion of heterosexual identity” (176). Midway through the memoir, Mairs preserves a memory from her wedding that encapsulates this imperfect reiteration of institutional heterosexuality: On our way up the right-hand aisle, I catch my toe in my hoop and start to trip. You can see it in the picture: both of us laughing, the bulge of my left foot behind the hem of my dress, my upper body canted forward, George’s arm tensed underneath my clutching fingers

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to stop my fall. All the other photographs record the ceremonies and sillinesses of that day. This one depicts the way our lives are going to be. (181)

In this stutter step, a younger Mairs, Nancy, embarks on a journey into married life that will be marked by departures from the graceful performance of scripted heterosexuality. Although the image is included in part to introduce the impact of multiple sclerosis on her adult life, it also bears a metaphorical message about the long fall from romantic fantasy into grounded partnership. Along the way, the falling woman becomes the fallen woman, and it is this part of her story—the unfaithfulness—that calls for explication. If the reader winces, perhaps it is because he or she remains invested in the marital norms and romantic clichés Mairs disavows. Indeed, the reader’s sore spots map the very boundaries and booby-traps of this ideological minefield. Infidelitous Spaces Nancy’s adolescent crush on Caleb operates as the first moment of textual tension between compliant and dissenting heterosexual behaviors, or between Good Nancy (compliant with heterosexual norms) and Bad Nancy (dissenting from heterosexual norms). This thematic ambivalence opens with a euphoric schoolgirl chant, “Caleb. Caleb. Caleb. Caleb. This is how the inside of my head sounds for the better part of two years. Caleb this. Caleb that. Always Caleb. I repeat the name over and over, stupefied with the love of it” (125). Nine pages later, the elation drops away suddenly, and Mairs startles her readers with the flat statement, “I don’t stop loving Caleb, and yet I am perpetually unfaithful to him, with one boy after another, although none of the relationships has much significance” (134). Mairs’s delivery of her “irrevocable infidelity,” taken by some readers as cavalier, could be more accurately described as matter-of-fact, and it exemplifies the rhetorical strategy of staging a flash of shock in the reader. The nine pages between Nancy’s moony incantation and her admission of infidelity catalogs the sexual frustration, failed verbal negotiations, and basic emotional distance that characterize this relationship, with its “dark incommunicable core” of erotic antagonism (136). “We spend much of our lives clawing each other apart,” she recalls (133). Mairs also describes a deep depression during this period that finds her “praying to die almost as regularly as [she] brush[es her] teeth.” Reflecting on this time from the perspective of her memoirist’s eye,

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she writes about the commonplace trope in feminist writing of feeling trapped by certain social scripts: “I could, of course, run away and join the circus, not literally perhaps, but I could alter . . . my life. I don’t know that, however. I don’t yet know that I’m the author of my own life” (131). With these troubled reflections in mind, Mairs’s revelation that she was “perpetually unfaithful” to Caleb comes as less of a surprise, moving from readerly shock to, if not pity, then at least compassion. Furthermore, the passage can be used to prompt a discussion that moves beyond personal morality to broader problems of heterosexual courtship, as her unfaithfulness protests the inarticulate bodies required by adolescent hetero-genders and hetero-romance.5 Nancy’s affair with Avram during her marriage to George takes this critical stance into the arena of marriage, where she again expresses dissatisfaction with hetero-gender norms through unfaithfulness to her partner. The image of Nancy sewing in her living room, amid the sounds of her children playing, crafting an appearance of domestic womanhood while thinking privately about the man she danced with the night before, opens the narrator once more to reader disapproval. A patina of deceit may obscure the social critique in this scene. Mairs writes, “They think I’m concentrating on my mysterious craft. In truth, I’m feverish with sexual fantasy,” and then, “Under the folds of my long woolen cape, I’m trying to decide whether or not to have an affair” (221). Some readers may be too jarred by such admissions to follow the line of thought to the end of the paragraph, where Mairs looks back and recalls feeling “surprised by that onslaught of desire, and a bit outraged, as though my body were playing a trick on me, going all breathless and dry-mouthed over this stocky, rumpled man” (221). Two personae appear on this page: breathless Nancy and outraged Nancy. This duality is a well-known characteristic of autobiography. The young and naive self is described by an older, wiser narrator, or, in this case, the earlier romantically mystified self is described by a later self grounded by feminist critical thinking. Outraged Nancy (the author) guides the reader through the antics of breathless Nancy (the preconscious autobiographical persona), and the text operates as a mirror to reflect the antics of the breathless reader (because the threshold you cross is your own). Nancy’s desire for an affair, considered in isolation, is for many readers an unattractive quality. Considered in context, however, it manifests a widespread cultural concern by painting an autobiographical portrait of “the problem that has no name,” Betty Friedan’s famous phrase in The Feminine Mystique (a book Nancy reads early in her marriage) for the shadowy dissatisfactions of housewives beneath the

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culturally inscribed surface of domestic bliss. The page that precedes the Avram segment narrates Nancy’s decision to go back to work after the birth of her second child, a decision her husband (saintly George, as reviewers perceive him) welcomes with the verbal slap in the face, “Good, . . . You’ll be less bitchy” (218). When her mother and her husband’s parents accuse her of deserting their grandchildren, they invoke an ideological conflict Mairs conveys in an image of the female body like clay to be sculpted by the animal needs of children: “I can feel their disapproval like soft, sticky little paws pulling at me, patting me into place” (219). In this context, Mairs’s blunt statements— “I’m trying to decide whether or not to have an affair”—seem less about self-indulgence than self-preservation. They are the words of the “badly behaved” or dissenting heterosexual, inchoate expressions of a feminist desire for more fulfilling and capacious configurations of intimate partnership. Still, her level of consciousness about her motives is low at this point in her life, as she is tossed and capsized by thick waves of infatuation: “[M]y head is swamped with images: hot dancing, black curls, straps of undershirt glimpsed through broadcloth, hot dancing. . . . Avram, I say to myself. Avram. Avram. My breath catches each time my heart stumbles over the name. . . . I’ll leave myself open to whatever happens, I conclude” (221). Leaving herself “open to whatever” is hardly a passive state, but Nancy’s energy remains undirected. She wants more from life, but she’s not sure what or why, and she mistakes her incipient feminist consciousness for romantic longing. Mairs further disrupts the heterosexual imaginary by replacing the culturally preferred script of absolute repentance for her indiscretions with something less extreme: “Later in my life, I will feel some regrets about this affair, and about the ones that follow it. But I will never regret what my body comes to know of sensitivity and satiation in those hours wholly absorbed by sex” (223). Mairs holds another important duality together on the page with the words, “I will feel some regrets,” introducing a critical view of the affair without renouncing it entirely. This position bears the imprint of a long history of women’s literature in which protagonists—whose growth is generated by “a break not from parental but from marital authority,” as Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland assert in their treatment of the female bildungsroman—“grow significantly only after fulfilling the fairy-tale expectation that they will marry and live ‘happily ever after’ ”; Mairs’s affairs take on a particular cultural significance in light of their argument that “the novel of awakening is often a novel of adultery” (12). In refusing the most predictable

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postures of the female adulterer—repentance or bravado—Mairs establishes a more authentic middle ground I categorize as ambivalent heterosexuality, recalling Carol Smart’s call for stories from women with mixed feelings about their relationship to dominant forms of sexuality such as marriage, housewifery, motherhood, and monogamy. When Nancy and George work through her infidelity in therapy, the pain gradually modulates into a sense of fusion between them, and “the affairs shrink, shadowy and desiccated as neglected house plants” (244), disrupting the hysterical dominant cultural view of cheating as catastrophic. The Mairs’s marriage functions frequently in the memoir as a microcosm of gendered epistemological debate, reinforcing the theme of female awakening as a break with marital authority. Reading against the grain of George’s interpretations of her, Nancy bristles at “his Nancy-spent-six-months-at-Met-State-and-we’ve-got-to-takethat-into-account tone” (218), a way of discounting her perceptions based on her history as a depressive who spent time in an asylum. Furthermore, she problematizes the gender imbalance of emotional labor in their marriage, noting his unwillingness to participate in “emotional rescue” and his androcentric view of their arguments: “As far as George is concerned, if I feel upset, even at him, then I’ve got a problem I need to straighten out. He is capable only of right action, and if an action of his infuriates me, then I must be misreading it” (198–99). These distancing maneuvers have since been sociologically demonstrated as commonplace in traditional heterosexual marriages and are often intentional efforts by the husband “to foster . . . feelings of insecurity” in his wife, as Caroline Dryden documents in Being Married, Doing Gender: A Critical Analysis of Gender Relationships in Marriage (132). In response to her distress over her son Matthew’s incessant crying, which leaves Nancy anxious and “ready to jump out of her skin,” George tells her not to “worry so much” in a tone of “condescension,” and Mairs reflects on the sexist assumptions he brings to their conflict: “What he means by it is, I do not (or do not choose to, I’m not sure which) perceive a problem here, and therefore no problem exists. If Nancy perceives a problem where no problem exists, then she’s screwed up and may safely be ignored. He sees in the situation not a conflict to be resolved but evidence of a defect in my maternal character” (218, italics in original). This internal debate over whether a problem should be designated an interpersonal conflict or a defect in her character represents a key stage in Nancy’s pursuit of psychological and emotional maturity. Noting that George finds her difficult, and that her daughter Anne

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agrees, Mairs eventually comes to a clear epistemological revision of their way of seeing: But maybe, it occurs to me in a rush, I don’t have to be all that difficult. Maybe their treatment of me, and Mother’s before them, has thrown me into that architectural position, and I’ve been fool enough to occupy it all these years because it’s what everybody, including me, expected. Needed. Maybe I’m no more problematic at heart than any other spirited human being. (259)

In what could be a direct rebuttal of a male student of mine who announced in an online discussion board about this memoir, “Nancy Mairs is a selfish whore,” Mairs writes, I’m a madwoman, a bitch, a problem—the lexicon varies depending on the speaker but the message remains the same. People who demand that I play those roles. Who treat me as though I’m playing them both when I am and when I’m not. Surely I should be free to learn to think of myself not as a repository of misery but as an ordinary, decent, pleasant human being. (260)

Within the space of her memoir she documents the psychological struggle and political coming-to-consciousness that must take place before a woman achieves the author-ity to claim normalcy against charges of monstrosity leveled at her by family members and strangers alike. She thereby advances a feminist epistemology of situated knowledge, resistant readings, and transgressive postures. In making this argument, I respectfully part company with scholars who describe Mairs’s admission of infidelity as a “verbal flashdance that thrives on ‘showing off, scandalizing, or resisting’ ” (Siegel 169–70) and who perceive her authorial persona as “inclined to flaunt herself, exploiting voyeurism for her own purposes” (Couser 71). Such language sensationalizes the author’s presentation of this topic, skewing her personal reflections toward confessional flamboyance in an echo of the “lurid effects” noted in the Publisher’s Weekly review. With the first line of the book—“On a glittering August morning in 1979, at the edge of a salt marsh in Kennebunkport, Maine, I made a psychic sick” (1)—the memoirist forecasts powerful visceral reactions to her story. Whether it is a student calling her a whore, a reviewer calling her exploitative, or a scholar calling her an exhibitionist, negative receptions of the book can be linked in important ways to the political dimensions of disgust, a subject excavated masterfully by Laura Kipnis in Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy. After

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a thumbnail sketch of the historical transformation of economic class distinctions into broadly prescribed social manners, and social manners into psychological triggers of disgust and shame, Kipnis offers the following Marxist-feminist formulation of disgust as a political reaction: “When we say of something disgusting ‘It made me sick,’ this can be a physical fact, revealing just how very deeply these codes have become embedded in who we are. And how threatening to our very beings transgressions of manners can be” (136). Kipnis examines disgust as a tool that preserves the existing social hierarchy in her discussion of Hustler magazine, and her argument that Larry Flynt’s grotesque aesthetic “[s]ymbolically deploy[s] the improper body as a mode of social sedition” (134) explains why Mairs’s infidelity narratives provoke distaste in some of her readers. Like the class protest of Hustler’s beaver shots and political cartoons, the improper female body in Remembering the Bone House is deployed as a form of social sedition, violating the norms and taboos of middle-class femininity in a variety of ways, including the Rabelaisian pursuit—“bare-mouthed, bare-footed, bare-assed” (242)—of adulterous liaisons. When the psychic is unable to complete their fortune-telling session, claiming nausea and headache, Mairs meditates on this fact, positioning it as her motivation for writing this memoir: “I was disturbed by the psychic’s refusal, whatever its cause, to ‘read’ my life. Thanks to her denial, something about that life now seemed unreadable, alien, impermissible, as though I’d stepped outside for a minute, the door blew shut behind me, and I discovered that my key no longer fit the lock” (4). In writing a life that is unreadable because it is impermissible, Mairs resists the frame of reference that outlines the boundaries of the permissible by recording what feminist autobiography scholar Sidonie Smith calls the dissonance between traditional femininity (capital “W” Womanhood) and experientially based femininity (first-person narratives by lowercase “w” women): Framed through embodiment, the “proper” woman remains subject to man’s authority and theorizing because, if unmanned and misaligned, she will subvert the body politic. To the extent that woman represses the body, erasing her sexual desire and individual identity while embracing encumbering identities in service to family, community, and country, she positions herself as a proper lady who surmounts her negative identification with the body through selflessness. To the degree that woman contests such roles and postures by pursuing her own desire and independence from men, she becomes a cultural grotesque. (16)

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In presenting herself as a regretful but unrepentant adulterer— revealing the ambivalence of the married woman along with the freefloating sexual desire that is not extinguished at the altar as promised by the heterosexual imaginary—Mairs indeed becomes this cultural grotesque, a form of embodiment that manifests feminist critiques of traditional femininity. The posture of the improper woman in Mairs’s memoir recalls not only Kipnis’s work on the politics of disgust, but also her later polemic, “Adultery,” on marital infidelity as a protest against the “domestic gulag” of marriage and the surplus repression of our working lives under late capitalism, two concepts she brings together seamlessly in the phrase “surplus monogamy” (298).6 With this Marcusian vocabulary, Kipnis provides language through which to redeem the infidelity narrative in Remembering the Bone House: The workplace vocabulary (and the language of its critique) at least offers an idiom with which to reshape adultery from the object of a predictable moral/ethical response into—we hope—a more open and difficult question. Perhaps in the analogy of workplace protest we may find an idiom, like communism as theorized by Marx and Engels, through which to think about adultery as a form of social articulation, a way of organizing grievances about existing conditions. (294, italics added)

As “a counterlogic to the prevailing system,” infidelity becomes part of Mairs’s embodied feminist critique of male-dominant heterosexuality with its colonization of female sexuality, even though her serial adultery does not ultimately lead her out of the woods of heteroromantic ideology. Indeed, Mairs’s infidelity functions in much the same way illness has operated in women’s literature, presented by Diane Price Herndl in Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840–1940 as a “peculiar weapon” whose “ ‘victories’ [are] . . . mixed at best” (200). The roundheeled woman and the bedridden woman are both marked as invalid—not valid—and thus easy to discount. For both personae the bed of protest too easily becomes a prison. The Crippling Effects of Romance The infidelity thread is in fact not offered in the text as a true palliative. It may create a “felicitous space” where Nancy can preserve a sense of self apart from the corporate identity of marriage, but it also leads her on a chase for the eternal high of romance that ends precipitously in a suicidal abandonment depression.7 In presenting

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the affairs as constitutive of a resistant female subject and as detrimental to her mental health, Mairs further complicates her depiction of infidelity, pointing beyond the simplistic question “affairs—good or bad?” to the romantic illusions that motivate infidelity and disable female self-development. Returning to the scene between Nancy and Avram upon arriving at his apartment, a pattern emerges of contrasting romantic fantasy with lived reality—from the “shabby” environment (“the dusky light filtering through plastic window shades”) to the inadequate heroine (“I want to hide my skinny body, grayish in the light, the bony washboard of my chest, brown hairs sprouting around my nipples”) to the abrupt suitor (“Avram doesn’t seem inclined to inspect me, though. He pulls me down onto the prickly couch and enters me quickly”) (222). Mairs here engages the mode of the grotesque, refusing to imagine her adulterous body as the usual seductress; the female adulterer is neither monster nor goddess, just an ordinary girl who “want[s] to cry” as her imperfect nude body is exposed to the gaze of a man who might reject her. In refusing the option of airbrushing her image for the reader, Mairs resists the romantic idiom. The Avram segment ends significantly with a direct invocation of feminist consciousness about romantic ideology. Mairs recounts their wistful conversation about what might have been if only they hadn’t been married, then deflates this fanciful image: “But my words sound high-flown, romantical, false. We don’t belong to one another outside of fairy tales. And we live, except for these brief hours, outside of fairy tales” (223). The rejection of fairy tales is a staple of feminist literature. “I might leave my husband and children,” Mairs continues, “but I wouldn’t do so for him or for any other man. That’s not what this affair is about” (223). What is this affair about? Mairs asserts that her affair with Avram, like all her infidelities, is about writing. Her poetry depended for many years on “excruciating ardor,” “the kind of needy pain I always call ‘being in love’ ” (224), but her editor remarks that this explanation “doesn’t ring true,” and I have to admit I agree. When she declares, “I don’t want poems, I want lovers,” Mairs mystifies the romantic mythology at the root of both desires (225). What is it that makes a person want poems that depend on lovers she cannot have, if not romantic ideology? The courtly love tradition persists in embedding a misconception of love as a feeling of desperate, hopeless longing, an organization of emotion that, from a materialist feminist standpoint, redirects women’s anxieties about more concrete concerns such as financial resources, healthcare, job

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security, and egalitarian intimate partnerships into the misty haze of hoping to find the one. Mairs gestures toward this insight as she closes the Avram segment: “I will have several more affairs in the years to come, the last of which will almost kill me, but functionally, despite the variety of their delights, they are identical. . . . And then one day, I’ll give them up . . . I’ll stop reenacting tales of doomed love” (225). The future she describes represents an alternative happy ending, and indeed the memoir ends on a euphoric note of self-reclamation as her urge to write finally overtakes her urge to find new lovers. Students have recoiled from the lovers’ interchangeable portraits (“they are identical”) wishing Nancy cared more about each man she sleeps with, and they have pointed angrily at her admission that she does not feel the same pulsing romantic love for her husband George that she once did and therefore no longer writes poems about him, that she “can’t want him because [she’s] got him,” and that “his utility has ended, just as Caleb’s did before him, just as Avram’s would if he somehow managed to take me from my husband and children and regularize our relationship” (225). Her statements, though, cannot be reduced to a hetero-patriarchal moral evaluation of Mairs’s personal behavior; such an individualistic interpretation misses the point of the infidelity theme in this memoir. Rather, like a modern-day Madame Bovary, Remembering the Bone House approaches adultery as a more open and difficult question, indicting not the fallen woman but the cultural narratives of marriage and romance that would lead a woman to risk affairs that “almost kill [her]” (225). Mintz’s reading of Mairs’s diary excerpts in Plaintext powerfully contradicts readers who take Mairs to be calloused toward her romantic suitors or self-indulgent in her pursuit of them. Instead, the author is to be credited with the generous cultural work of “self-parody,” a stance “that allows her to observe that younger self as other, a self to whose unthinking acceptance of cultural myth Mairs is no longer subject” (264). Mintz’s analysis of self-parody in Mairs’s representations of her adolescent crushes in Plaintext can be applied productively to Mairs’s representations of infidelity in Remembering the Bone House. “By exposing the naivete of the diaries’ trust in the marriage plot of romantic fiction,” writes Mintz, “Mairs willingly bares her own immersion in fantasies about a stereotypical form of love,” appearing as “a poignant figure desperate for a sense of physical well-being that would match a fairy-tale ideal” (263–64). Mairs’s accounts of her affairs, like her descriptions of her crippled body, are admittedly startling (“I was perpetually unfaithful to him”), and they also, to

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borrow another phrase from Mintz, border on being “grotesquely witchlike” (“when his utility ended . . . ”). But the purpose of these admissions is to reveal her immersion in romantic ideology and to stimulate her readers to recognize and distance themselves from their own enthrallment to this story. In a brief segment near the end of the memoir that spins quickly through a cluster of affairs (with Saul, Rob, Luke, and Richard), Mairs reveals the real dangers of these dalliances, not to her marriage, but to her self. The affairs have provided a necessary escape— “marriage has strangled me, choked me on my own ashes” (201)—but they ultimately become another space in which to lose herself. They are presented as the wild casting about “for bodily experience” in a manic defense against her diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, leaving her “feeling, for a couple of years, like an electrical storm spitting sparks of sexuality almost randomly in all directions” (241). The core sensation, far from blissful, is that of fragmentation: “un-intact, broken up, broken into” (242). She announces with harsh self-parody, “I’m a cocky bitch, sure I can handle this sort of encounter without entanglement,” but she miscalculates: “Saul, it turns out, is the sort of man I could follow—bare-mouthed, bare-footed, bare-assed—anywhere and for as long as he wanted” (241–42). Her wry tone (“it turns out”) signals self-awareness as the author points out the psychological damage she accrues from one-sided attachments. After Saul, it is Luke who leaves Nancy spinning and impaired: “I hate the fact that because of a drunken kiss I have been obsessed by him for four days, not eating or sleeping or working efficiently” (243). Mairs describes the permanent imprint of romantic frisson etched into her memory of Luke, “a tiny exquisite scrimshaw on a yellowed ivory of passion” (243). Six years pass before her next affair, but the motivating factor of romantic illusion is there as well, precursor to a suicide attempt and marker of mental illness: “For now, I hold love on the back of my tongue, bitter pill of a word, bitter as poison, determined to die rather than spit it out. That’s just how crazy I am” (248). Mairs recognizes romance as a force that defeats her, even as it inspires poem after poem: I’m not sure that the loss of Richard causes me all this pain. The loss of self seems at the heart of it, a loss I never experienced with other lovers. . . . I want my self back, intact, untouched by Richard’s careless fingers. When I think of my scrawny, crippled body, kicked out of his bed, I feel as though I’d been stripped to the skin and then flayed. (251)

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The ideology of romance—with its feverish state of longing, its bitter pill of rejection, its sharp dissections of body and heart—is presented as her downfall more than once. In retelling the story of her teenage unfaithfulness to Caleb, Mairs embeds insights about the difference between romance and love derived from many years of marriage to George, years marked initially by turmoil but eventually calming into a rewarding and instructive partnership: I’m good at falling in love. I just don’t know how to endure the homely tedium of the postlapserian state. Years later, watching a film called My Dinner with Andre, I’ll be struck by one of Andre’s slightest comments. It’s easy to have affairs, he tells his friend Wally, because you learn through repetition just what is expected: the flowers, the phone calls, the wine. What’s hard is to be married, to go on with a relationship indefinitely, because you’re always going forward into the unknown. By the time I see this film, I can distinguish between the here-we-go-again loop-the-loop thrill of climbing on the roller coaster with yet another stranger and the genuine adventure of traveling one way forever, straight on out till morning, with the same old companion: a little more wrinkled, not so skinny, wearing glasses now, but still telling the same jokes and still laughing at the same ones you’re telling. When I’m with Caleb, though, I haven’t learned this kind of courage. I have to keep doing what I know how to do. (135–36)

Because Mairs reveals her first forays into chronic infidelity from this vantage point of hard-won knowledge about the difference between romantic euphoria and the stamina required by commitment, the pattern of cheating functions as an index of her evolving relationship to the romantic ideology at the center of the heterosexual imaginary. It is through the loop-the-loop thrill of romance that our culture secures consent from girls and women to a subordinate position within institutional heterosexuality, as Amy L. Best asserts in her analysis of the high school prom as a ritualized expression of romantic ideology: The promise of heterosexual romance in this space becomes a powerful ideological tool. The sheer delight and pleasure with which some girls spoke about these romantic interludes offers testimony of the productive power of the heterosexual imaginary. Heterosexual [male-] dominance is secured not through force but through pleasure. And girls actively participate in its reproduction. (204)

In her manic search for romantic pleasure with her many illicit lovers—Ayo, Josh, Peter, Avram, Saul, Luke, Richard—Nancy remains

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under the spell of institutional heterosexuality even as she seems to depart from it. Mairs fully recognizes this irony, subtly aiming her disregard not at the individual men she beds but at the system of love that set this series of affairs in motion. These men are not “people to be loved so much as they’re ciphers: of difference, of desire” (135). She needs these ciphers of desire because the Calvinist culture that bred her made female desire secondary, accessible only through male catalysts, especially in the form of new or unobtained lovers. Mairs writes more directly about romantic ideology as a crippling force in women’s lives in her essay “On Loving Men.” Referring to romance novels such as Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Gone with the Wind, among others, Mairs declares, “From these sources I learned of love. It was shattering. Women of otherwise remarkable grit and composure . . . capitulated before the passionate demands of men, turned their bodies and their lives over to them. For the winning of men they suffered; in the losing of men they suffered” (112). The love she learned from these sources—the love that “shook [her] frame so that [she] could hardly brush [her] teeth” (113)—sounds like the nerve disorder that prevents her from pulling on her socks without assistance. Mairs invites this reading, explicitly linking “the lexicon of popular romance” as it structured her early ideas of love with the lexicon of illness and disability: “The dark center is desire, which shakes and sickens me with malarial vengeance. By the time I loved Caleb, sex and health had formed an antinomy so absolute, and desire had so disseminated itself throughout my issues, that his very existence condemned me to chronic disease” (118). Later she describes “recurrent attacks of love, like fits of ague racking my joints and rattling my teeth in their sockets” (123), reiterating this paradigm of romance as illness. Pausing instructively over the word “crush,” Mairs notes, “true word: my adoration nearly squeezed the life out of me” (110). She concludes, “the systematic difficulties I face in loving men . . . lie not, as I once believed, in specific qualities or defects in my psyche but rather in my response to conventions imposed on my storytelling” (115). It is this move from “defects in my psyche” to “systemic difficulties” that turns her admissions of infidelity into critiques of romantic mythology. “Yet it did not occur to me for years,” she laments, “that the problem lay in the structural flaws in the tale itself, not in my always temporary failures to realize it perfectly” (121). Citing the rising divorce statistics of contemporary American culture, Mairs extends her personal story to the social problem of romantic ideology. She condemns “the high-pressure salesmanship in

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romantic expectations which teaches that a woman is an empty and idle vessel until she is filled up by ‘the ultimate love’ for a man,” and with it she condemns the individualizing analysis that leads women who are disappointed in love to “believ[e] that they’d got not the wrong information but the wrong man” (121). In a lyrical passage of incisive critique, Mairs goes on: They must have watched the same stages in plot development—exposition, complication, climax, dénouement—build repeatedly on the screen, on the stage, on the page, without understanding that life itself takes place completely outside such a framework in a concatenation of events almost indistinguishable in their significance—washing one’s hair, feeding the dog, opening draperies in the morning and closing them at night, eating bread and cheese for breakfast or for lunch or for dinner—and that no one is coming to gild these acts with glory. (121–22, italics added)

This last insight—that romantic magic is an illusion/delusion—is the most important bit of instruction in all her writing on the heterosexual imaginary, a belief system that depends on attaching, in Ingraham’s words, an “illusion of well-being” to the state of couplehood. With mounting indignation, Mairs offers a litany of the cultural authorities “who stood me at the doorway with my little trimmed lamp and told me someone was coming when no one was coming” (122). Mairs admits she saw this truth even as she proceeded to fall apart over men: “Even at the height of obsession, I always suspected that there were other things I might better be doing with my time. . . . I wish that I’d known then what I’ve only recently begun to know: that there is a difference between love and human sacrifice” (122). Her eventual ability to tell the difference models a potentially life-saving insight for female readers. When students turn away from the book—and not all students do—they are turning away from the spectre of Mairs’s failure. And who can blame them? It is a frightening sight, this demystification, and they need to turn away in order to protect their own investments in the cultural illusions of romantic bliss, female autonomy, and unfettered free will. Like the psychic who will not read her life, they complain of headaches and blurred vision and sling book bags over their shoulders asking to leave class early. It is too painful to puncture the delicate skin of utopian hetero-hope. The compensatory pleasures of romantic ideology are too valuable in this climate of economic recession, staggering student loan debts, and the deferred gratification of neoconservative religious fundamentalism. True love waits, but it better exist, they protest.

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Conclusion: A Weakness for the “Good Enough” Woman This issue of failure lies at the heart of the feminist cultural work of Remembering the Bone House. Mairs’s self-presentation as an unfaithful girlfriend and wife, like her self-presentation as a cripple, takes on an identity that has been culturally constructed as a failure, yet both failures can be reconceived as weaknesses in the norm, opening the norm itself to interrogation. Calvin Thomas offers this image of weaknesses within the norm in his introduction to Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality, a title that serendipitously captures the intersection of disability studies and heterosexuality studies. As a woman living with multiple sclerosis and a memoirist of feminist heterosexuality studies, Mairs is both literally and metaphorically “straight with a twist,” and her literary nonfiction “work[s] to mitigate, or militate against . . . those institutional, compulsory performances . . . [and] assist[s] in working the weakness in the heterosexual norm.” “If heterosexual norms are,” Thomas continues, quoting Judith Butler, “ ‘continually haunted by their own inefficacy,’ then perhaps the work of the straight theorist with queer aspirations is somehow to be that inefficacious ghost in the house of heteronormativity” (31). Remembering the Bone House is narrated by this inefficacious ghost, a straight theorist with queer aspirations, and her disruption of social norms rattles her readers’ chains repeatedly. Indeed, if thinking straight means, as Ingraham proposes, “to comply with the prevailing meanings and ideological messages that organizes heterosexuality” (3), then Mairs positions herself in front of the reader at a deliberately slanted angle. In this mission, Mairs engages in a similar kind of cultural work that feminist psychoanalytic theorist Kaja Silverman attributes to the Untitled Film Stills of performance artist Cindy Sherman. In these photographs, Cindy Sherman poses in various modes of femininity— the vamp, the starlet, the cheesecake shot—but in each frame the environment clashes with the female figure, undermining the poses with traces of the mundane (dishwashing detergent) or the working class (a scuffed door) or various other signals that the female figure does not fit—does not perfectly achieve the appearance to which she aspires. Silverman’s analysis of these images invokes the concept from D. W. Winnicott of the “good enough,” arguing that the series “make[s] available for corporeal identification not the ideal wife, nature girl, or femme fatale, but the ‘good enough’ equivalents of each of these” (225).

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“Significantly,” Silverman contends in language I would apply to Remembering the Bone House, “it is not these women’s ideal imagos with which we identify. . . . It is rather with the women themselves, in all their manifest distance from the mirror, that we are encouraged to form this psychic alignment.” “The case needs to be stated even more forcefully,” she persists, “it is because the protagonists of the Untitled Film Stills are shown to fall so far short of approximating their ideal imagos that we identify with them” (224). Images of Nancy Mairs in flagrante—not unlike the photograph of her walking down the aisle, catching a toe in her wedding dress and tripping—model the process of making peace with one’s “[in]elegant partial gestures and halfapproximations.” Furthermore, like the Untitled Film Stills, images of the unruly female body in Remembering the Bone House “do not withhold pleasure from us, but induct us into a new kind of pleasure,” the pleasure of establishing “a more improvisatory relation to the ideal” (225–26). Postscript: Re-membering Lesbian Desire in the House of Heteronormativity Although many sections of Remembering the Bone House overtly critique the marriage mystique, the dissatisfaction of wifework, and the conflict between the reproductive imperative and the urge to write, the text’s residual heteronormativity must also be acknowledged. The point of such a critique is not to blame Mairs for what she could not see, but to perform what Douglas Kellner calls in another context a “diagnostic reading,” parsing the multiple competing ideologies that shape a given text.8 In light of the non-normative or “queer” aspirations ascribed to this memoirist above, I would be remiss in not stating that same-sex relationships register in relatively conservative ways in this book. Mairs does not elaborate on the challenge to heteronormativity that her intermittent attraction to women encodes—an unexpected omission given her disgruntled recognition of heterosexist blindspots in her first book, Plaintext, where she writes, “True, I’m not lesbian, but thanks to the fundamental heterosexual bias of our culture no one would be likely to assume that I was” (“On Not Liking Sex,” 83). Despite the fact that lesbian desire comprises only a minor thematic thread throughout the memoir—holding the power to “dismember” more thoroughly, in Sarah Lucia Hoagland’s memorable figuration of lesbian ethics, “the existing schema” of hetero-romance (21)—the self-parody and critical perspective in Mairs’s descriptions of affairs with men disappear in her treatment of her one lesbian affair.

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As a child, Nancy reflects a heterosexist viewpoint typical of the 1950s era that shaped her. Homosexuality does not repulse her, but perhaps worse, it strikes her as impossible, unthinkable. When her mother works at a School for Exceptional Children, Nancy tags along and becomes close friends with Sarah, the daughter of another worker at the school. She spends the night at the school regularly throughout summer vacation and is an inadvertent audience of a love triangle that exposes her for the first time to lesbian relationships. Two women who teach at the school—Swift and Suzanne—fight with each other at night. Suzanne is married to Chaney but has fallen in love with Swift. “Nothing I’ve been told,” writes Mairs, “nothing I’ve read about, nothing my own body has experienced has revealed to me that a woman can fall in love with another woman, but Sarah assures me that it happens, that it’s happening to two women I know” (87). She is not put off by this fact, just surprised, and the boundaries of her knowledge follow from the cultural repression of homosexuality as an option for women who are dissatisfied with hetero-romance, heterogender, and hetero-domesticity. In describing a visit to her cousin’s wife, Mairs presents her longing for heterosexual marriage as a mixture of the unfamiliar and the inevitable: “I’ll admire and yearn for Emma’s domesticity, but I can’t imagine having it. Even later, of course, I’ll have that, too” (34). This “of course,” produced by the dominant culture, is exemplary in its unthinking consent to heterosexual marriage. Emma’s heterosexual domesticity is made visible and desirable, while lesbian domesticity is made invisible, even as it unfolds in late-night arguments right in front of her. At summer camp, she experiences yearly crushes on female camp counselors, but the young Nancy and the older wiser narrator Mairs both revert to the fiction of bodily truth as proof that these crushes do not constitute lesbian desire and are not equivalent to her crushes on boys: “I don’t want to touch Kitty’s breasts, to put my mouth on Josie’s. I don’t want not to, either. I just never think of it. Nothing about them triggers the catch of breath I used to feel at the sight of James’s bony wrists below his shirtsleeves. If I am ever aroused sexually by either Kitty or Josie, the sensations remain purely somatic, never seeping through into consciousness. It’s too late for that, or too soon” (111). If the social construction of heterosexuality is taken as axiomatic, as in materialist feminist theory, then the fact that the desire to touch Kitty’s breasts does not arise in Nancy—“I don’t want not to, either. I just never think about it”—points not to innate heterosexuality but to the cultural pedagogy of desire that trains her erotic responses to male bodies but not to women’s. Nancy

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has not learned the somatic grammar of same-sex eroticism, in which Kitty’s breasts and Josie’s mouth might signify as sexy like James’s bony wrists. In fact, her attention to the detail of a bony wrist lends itself to lesbian desire—is, perhaps, a subconscious displacement of lesbian desire—since heterosexual longing typically attaches to bodily difference, prompting men to eroticize a woman’s delicate features (her small wrists) and women to eroticize a man’s muscularity. Nancy’s adult affair with Ramona—whose wrists, by the way, with their “tiny bones, the pale skin over blue veins underneath,” make Nancy “feverish”—again inscribes sexuality with the false authority of bodily truth, as she points to her lack of knowledge and skill in order to claim a heterosexual identity: “I can’t make her come” (245). And again, this inadequacy does not verify her innate heterosexuality. It merely represents (un)learned behavior. Heterosexual eroticism too is (un)learned behavior, as any teenage boy who has failed to bring his girlfriend to orgasm can attest. Nancy, from a social constructionist standpoint, simply has not developed the physical skills and psychological spaces of lesbian desire. While she evokes a fluid sense of her attachment to institutional heterosexuality in her descriptions of affairs with men, she dismisses her affair with Ramona by invoking the stable sexual identity undermined in other parts of the memoir: “What I don’t comprehend yet is that I’m not a lesbian, and so this kind of talk [about running away together] is easy, fantastical” (245). The author capably critiques heterosexuality as a category of social organization—with its restrictive rules for female sexuality, its maledominant epistemologies, and its disabling posture of the pining woman—but leaves heterosexuality as an orientation unproblematized in the memoir. In “On Not Liking Sex,” Mairs calls her experience with Ramona “one of the most poignant affairs of my life” (83) and declares in Remembering the Bone House, “This is the closest I ever come to leaving George for another person” (245). To insist on her straightness in light of this fact is to adopt the cultural narrative of inborn and unchanging sexual orientation, an investment produced by the heterosexual imaginary. From a queer perspective, sexuality is a shifting arrangement produced in different ways at different moments in one’s life by various dynamics that arise with each new lover. Making the bisexuality of the narrator visible—and refusing to let her hetero-relations or her disavowal of the term “lesbian” eclipse the fact that she looks both ways (to borrow a term from bisexual feminist Jennifer Baumgardner)— deepens the queer commitments of the text. The erotic charge Nancy feels from her first contact with Ramona contradicts her claims to

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heterosexuality, creating a subversive opening in the text of heterosexual identity she labors to construct: “The watcher that squats eternally in one corner of my mind, groggy at this late hour with beer and cigarettes and old Rolling Stones songs, springs awake at Ramona’s touch and looks all around, startled, curious. When I stroke Ramona’s fingers, my heart thuds” (244). Nothing could be more straightforward (or queer) than this thudding heartbeat. Her bleak picture of what might have happened if she’d gone to San Francisco with Ramona—“inevitable bitterness: recriminatory shouts and hot tears and doors slammed shut, me stomping down the stairs and out into the street with my arm around some man”—perhaps protests too much, especially given Mairs’s lingering nostalgia: “Still, I love her always. My only woman. You just never stop loving someone you’ve loved like that, and you don’t want to, either” (245). It is up to the reader, more here than anywhere else in Mairs’s memoir, to “out” the latent critique, and to offer lesbian desire as another way to claim the deed to one’s female dwelling, reclaiming the female body and house from patriarchy by re-membering not one but two female bodies, a specter that haunts Mairs’s bone house as it has always haunted the house of patriarchy.9 In the introduction to Heterosexuality: A Feminism and Psychology Reader, Sue Wilkinson and Celia Kitzinger reflect on the legacy of Adrienne Rich’s landmark essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” noting, “More than a decade later, heterosexual women have still not produced any sustained theory about heterosexuality per se . . . , and we are aware of the irony that lesbians should be creating the space that heterosexual women have, apparently, been unable or unwilling to create for themselves” (3). Wilkinson and Kitzinger rightly point out the absence of sustained critical feminist heterosexual theory (an absence that is now being redressed by critical heterosexuality studies), but the feminist memoir has always provided this theory in the garb of personal narrative. As I have demonstrated elsewhere (Johnson 1999), autobiography works well as cultural critique because, as Sidonie Smith contends, “the very complexity of this experientially based history can be used to challenge, disturb, and displace the neat categorizations (and fragmentation/unification) of bodies” (130). Aside from the hetero-assumptions that enshroud lesbian sexuality, Nancy Mairs persistently displaces neat categories and disrupts expected narratives, leading the way in dismembering the heterosexual imaginary in the genre of literary memoir. Contrary to the early reviews, the tales of doomed love in Remembering the Bone House constitute some of the most aesthetically and politically satisfying passages of the book.10

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Notes This article originally appeared in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 27.2 (2008): 327–352. 1. Passing reference to romance and heterosexuality in Mairs appears in Jeanne Braham (69), Mintz’s Unruly Bodies (37, 43, 94), and Kristi Siegel (169–70). 2. In addition to reprinted articles in this volume by G. Thomas Couser, Madonne Miner, and Susannah Mintz, see also Lisa Diedrich’s article, “Breaking Down: A Phenomenology of Disability.” 3. The term “abandonment depression” comes from James Masterson’s work on adolescent psychology, which is based on John Bowlby’s groundbreaking studies of attachment behaviors among orphaned infants (Masterson 59). The concept of attachment styles has been applied as well to adult heterosexual romantic relationships, most notably by Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver. The depression Mairs experiences at the loss of her romantic obsessional targets can be usefully categorized as “abandonment depression,” a form of pathological mourning that stems from insecure or ambivalent styles of attachment and often follows from the addictive highs of serial infatuation. 4. For further discussion of adulterers as “queer,” see Warner (89). While the debate about using “queer” coterminously with “nonnormative” exceeds the scope of this article, Warner’s discussions of “hierarchies of respectability” (67) and the stigma attached to nonnormative sexualities (75) could provide excellent supporting material for a classroom discussion of Mairs’s representations of romance and sexuality. 5. For supporting materials on this point, see Lynn M. Phillips, Flirting with Danger: Young Women’s Reflections on Sexuality and Danger, a sociological study of “agency, confusion, power, desire, and the murkiness of consent” in late adolescent hetero-relations (10). 6. See also Kipnis’s full-length monograph on this topic, Against Love: A Polemic. 7. The concept of “felicitous space” is presented by feminist literary theorist Judith Fryer in her narratological study, Felicitous Space: Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. 8. Kellner defines “diagnostic critique” as an approach to cultural studies “that uses media culture to diagnose social trends and tendencies, reading through the texts to the fantasies, fears, hopes, and desires that they articulate” (5). This form of critique, moreover, “analyzes how media culture provides the resources for producing identities and advances either reactionary or progressive politics—or provides ambiguous texts and effects that can be appropriated in various ways” (6). A diagnostic critique is, I contend, equally useful for analyzing literary texts, including life-writing by women with disabilities, in

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order to read through the texts to the fantasies, fears, hopes, and desires they articulate. 9. My reading of the lesbian subtext of Remembering the Bone House literalizes Terry Castle’s critical conceit of lesbian desire as a taboo that appears in modern literature in the form of a “ghost effect” (31). 10. This article benefited significantly from suggestions made by the anonymous readers at Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, as well as from the opportunity to present a short version of the article at the Women’s Studies conference at the University of South Carolina in February 2008, and feedback from Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. Ultimately I could not have written the article without the push and pull of discussions about this memoir with my students in Gender and Autobiography at USC Upstate in Spring 2007 and at Coastal Carolina University in Fall 2005 and Fall 2003.

Works Cited Abel, Elizabeth, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland, eds. The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development. Hanover: UP of New England, 1983. Baumgardner, Jennifer. Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007. Best, Amy L. “The Production of Heterosexuality at the High School Prom.” Ingraham 193–214. Braham, Jeanne. “A Lens of Empathy.” Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries. Ed. Susan L. Buncker and Cynthia Anne Huff. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1996. Castle, Terry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Couser, G. Thomas. “Autopathography: Women, Illness, and Lifewriting.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 6.1 (1991): 65–75. Reprinted in this volume. Diedrich, Lisa. “Breaking Down: A Phenomenology of Disability.” Literature and Medicine 20.2 (2001): 209–30. Dryden, Caroline. Being Married, Doing Gender: A Critical Analysis of Gender Relationships in Marriage. London: Routledge, 1999. Fryer, Judith. Felicitous Space: Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1986. Hazan, Cindy and Phillip Shaver. “Romantic Love Conceptualized as an Attachment Process.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 52.3 (1987): 511–24. Heisler, Eva. “Inhabiting the Homes. We Build and the Bodies We Are Given.” Chicago Tribune April 23, 1989. 6. Herndl, Diane Price. Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840–1940. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1993.

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Hoagland, Sarah Lucia. Lesbian Ethics: Toward a New Value. Palo Alto, CA: Institute of Lesbian Studies, 1988. Ingraham, Chrys. “The Heterosexual Imaginary: Feminist Sociology and Theories of Gender.” 1994. Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women’s Lives. Ed. Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham. New York: Routledge, 1997. 275–90. ———. White Weddings: Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture. 1999. New York: Routledge, 2008. ———, ed. Thinking Straight: The Power, the Promise, and the Paradox of Heterosexuality. New York: Routledge, 2005. Johnson, Merri Lisa. “Theories Shaped Like Girls: Autobiography and Social Criticism.” Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines 18.3 (1999): 39–52 (Special issue: Autobiography and Critical Thinking). Kellner, Douglas. Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity, and Politics between the Modern and the Postmodern. London: Routledge, 1995. Kipnis, Laura. Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America. New York: Grove, 1996. ———. “Adultery.” Critical Inquiry 24.2 (1998): 237–89. ———. Against Love: A Polemic. New York: Pantheon, 2003. Kraus, Chris. I Love Dick. New York: Semiotext(e), 1997. 56–71. Mairs, Nancy. Remembering the Bone House: An Erotics of Place and Space. Boston: Beacon, 1989. ———. “On Being a Cripple.” Plaintext: Deciphering a Woman’s Life. New York: HarperPerennial, 1986. 9–20. ———. “On Loving Men.” Plaintext: Deciphering a Woman’s Life. New York: HarperPerennial, 1986. 107–23. ———. “On Not Liking Sex.” Plaintext: Deciphering a Woman’s Life. New York: HarperPerennial, 1986. 79–92. Masterson, James. The Search for the Real Self: Unmasking the Personality Disorders of Our Age. New York: Free, 1988. Miner, Madonne. “ ‘Making up the Stories as We Go Along’: Men, Women, and Narratives of Disability.” The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability. Eds. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997. 283–95. Reprinted in this volume. Mintz, Susannah. “Transforming the Tale: The Auto/body/ographies of Nancy Mairs.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 14.2 (1999): 254–72. Reprinted in this volume. ———. Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2007. Phillips, Lynn M. Flirting with Danger: Young Women’s Reflections on Sexuality and Danger. New York: NYUP, 2000. Publisher’s Weekly. “Review: Remembering the Bone House.” Feb. 17, 1989. 62–63. Siegel, Kristi. Women’s Autobiographies, Culture, Feminism. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. Silverman, Kaja. The Threshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge, 1996.

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Smart, Carol. “Collusion, Collaboration, and Confession: On Moving beyond the Heterosexuality Debate.” Theorising Heterosexuality: Telling It Straight. Ed. Diane Richardson. Buckingham: Open UP, 1996. 161–77. Smith, Sidonie. Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. Thomas, Calvin, ed. Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2000. Warner, Michael. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. New York: Free, 1999. Wilkinson, Sue and Celia Kitzinger, eds. Heterosexuality: A Feminism and Psychology Reader. London: Sage, 1993.

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Contributors

Jenny Bangsund is assistant professor of English at the University of Sioux Falls, where she teaches courses in the liberal arts core and American literature. Her interest in disability studies and religious studies informs her work with literary texts by Flannery O’Connor, Barbara Kingsolver, Ana Castillo, and others. Hilary Clark is professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. Her research areas include psychoanalysis and the literature of depression and trauma; she is working on an SSHRC-funded project on issues of poetics, narrative, and interpretation in case studies in British child analysis. Her recent work includes an edited volume, Depression and Narrative: Telling the Dark (SUNY Press, 2008), and a chapter on shame, death, and masks in The Shame of Death, Grief, and Trauma, edited by J. Kauffman (Routledge, 2010). G. Thomas Couser has retired from the English Department at Hofstra University, where he founded and directed the Disability Studies program. He is the author of American Autobiography: The Prophetic Mode (University of Massachusetts Press, 1979), Altered Egos: Authority in American Autobiography (Oxford University Press, 1989), Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing (University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing (Cornell University Press, 2004), and Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing (University of Michigan Press, 2009), as well as about fifty articles or book chapters. He is currently writing a book about contemporary American “patriography” (memoirs of fathers by sons and daughters) and a memoir of his own father. His most recent book, Memoir: An Introduction, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2011. Susan G. Cumings holds a PhD from Emory University, and was granted tenure in 2007 at Georgia College & State University, where

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she teaches in the English Department and is coordinator of the Women’s Studies program. Her primary field of study is autobiography and autobioexpression. She has also published essays on Jeanette Winterson and Toni Morrison, as well as several pieces of creative nonfiction. Her edited book, Imagination and the Public Sphere, will be published in 2011 by Cambridge Scholars Press. Hayley Mitchell Haugen holds a PhD in twentieth-century American literature from Ohio University and an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington, where she was awarded the 1995 Academy of American Poets Prize. She teaches American literature and creative writing as an assistant professor of English at Ohio University Southern in Ironton, Ohio. Her recent critical work appears in The Body in Medical Culture, and her poetry has appeared in Cimarron, The Charlotte Review, Kalliope, New Delta Review, Pearl, Poetry Northwest, Rattle, Spillway, Wordwrights, and elsewhere; she has also written numerous nonfiction books for Greenhaven Press/Lucent Books. Merri Lisa Johnson, associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, directs the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at University of South Carolina, Upstate, and teaches courses on feminist disability studies, gender and autobiography, critical sexualities, and gay and lesbian literature. Her most recent publication was Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality (Seal Press, 2010), and her former edited collections include Jane Sexes It Up: True Confessions of Feminist Desire (Seal Press, 2002), Flesh for Fantasy: Producing and Consuming Exotic Dance (with Katherine Frank and R. Danielle Egan; Seal Press, 2005), and Third Wave Feminism and Television (I. B. Tauris, 2007). Madonne Miner, dean of the Telitha E. Lindquist College of Arts & Humanities at Weber State University in Ogden, UT, has long been interested in feminist theory, disability studies, and American literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition to her book, Insatiable Appetites: Twentieth-Century American Women’s Bestsellers (Greenwood Press, 1984), she has published articles in a range of journals and collections. Susannah B. Mintz, associate professor of English at Skidmore College, received an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and her PhD. from Rice University. She is the author of Threshold Poetics: Milton and Intersubjectivity (University of Delaware Press, 2003) and Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women

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with Disabilities (UNC Press, 2007), and has written extensively in the fields of autobiography and disability in literature. Her creative work has appeared in such journals as Michigan Quarterly Review and Ninth Letter, and she is currently working on a study of literary representations of pain. Margaret Rose Torrell is coordinator of Writing Programs and associate professor of English at the State University of New York, College at Old Westbury, where she teaches courses in disability studies, women’s literature, English literature, and composition. Her work in disability studies focuses on the portrayal of disabled masculinity and community in women-authored texts. She has also written book chapters on critical pedagogy and other issues in education.

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