Reading Women's Worlds from Christine de Pizan to Doris Lessing: A Guide to Six Centuries of Women Writers Imagining Rooms of Their Own

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Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Royal Library - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-28

Reading Women’s Worlds from Christine de Pizan to Doris Lessing

10.1057/9780230118812 - Reading Women's Worlds from Christine de Pizan to Doris Lessing, Sharon L. Jansen

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The Monstrous Regiment of Women: Female Rule in Early Modern Europe. Queenship and Power, ed. Carole Levin and Charles Beem. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Debating Women, Politics, and Power in Early Modern Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Anne of France: Lessons for My Daughter. Library of Medieval Women, ed. Jane Chance. 2004. The Monstrous Regiment of Women: Female Rule in Early Modern Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.


Recent Books by Sharon L. Jansen


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A Guide to Six Centuries of Women Writers Imagining Rooms of Their Own

Sharon L. Jansen


Reading Women’s Worlds from Christine de Pizan to Doris Lessing


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reading women’s worlds from christine de pizan to doris lessing Copyright © Sharon L. Jansen, 2011. All rights reserved.

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: 978–0–230–11066–3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jansen, Sharon L., 1951– Reading women’s worlds from Christine de Pizan to Doris Lessing: a guide to six centuries of women writers imagining rooms of their own/Sharon L. Jansen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–230–11066–3 1. Literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. Women in literature. 3. Personal space in literature. 4. Privacy in literature. I. Title. PN471.J36 2011 809’.933522—dc22 2010040753 Design by MPS Limited, A Macmillan Company First edition: April 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the British Library Board for permission to reproduce the image of Christine de Pizan in her study (BL MS Harley 4431, f. 4), to Harriet Garnett for permission to reproduce Vanessa Bell’s cover image for Virginia Woolf ’s 1929 Hogarth Press edition of A Room of One’s Own, and to Judith A. Martinez for permission to quote from Valerie Solanas’s 1967 selfpublished edition of SCUM Manifesto. Grateful acknowledgment is also made to the Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College, for supplying a photograph of their copy of Virginia Woolf ’s 1929 Hogarth Press edition of A Room of One’s Own, and to The Andy Warhol Museum, for supplying a photograph of the first page of Valerie Solanas’s 1967 SCUM Manifesto, a copy of which is in their archive.


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.


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For my dear friend, colleague, and confidant Tom Campbell, without whom this book would never have been written


Dedication


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Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Royal Library - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-28 10.1057/9780230118812 - Reading Women's Worlds from Christine de Pizan to Doris Lessing, Sharon L. Jansen

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List of Figures

viii

Acknowledgments

ix

1

Reading Nafisi at the YMCA

1

2

I Have a Dream: Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies and Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own

9

We Need to Talk: Conversation in Moderata Fonte’s The Worth of Women and Marjane Satrapi’s Embroideries

43

Design for Living: Women’s Communities in Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure and Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies

71

3 4

5

Paradise Lost: Men in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and Doris Lessing’s The Cleft

6 Hell Hath No Fury: Rage in Arcangela Tarabotti’s Paternal Tyranny and Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto

101 129

7

Madwomen in the Attic: Madness and Suicide in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen”

161

8

Brave New Worlds: Sexual Slavery in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Slavenka Drakulic˙’s S. A Novel about the Balkans

187

Still Crazy after All These Years: Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran

213

9

Bibliography

223

Index

237


Contents


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2.1 2.2 6.1

Christine de Pizan in her study Cover of Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own First page of Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto

19 21 143


List of Figures


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For more than thirty years, I have guided readers through some of the most well-known texts of the Western canon: The Iliad and Agamemnon, Beowulf, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Wyatt and Surrey’s Petrarchan sonnets, Shakespeare’s plays, Milton’s Paradise Lost. I am not always successful—one recent student, encountering Beowulf for the first time, told me that she found the warrior to be as “loathsome” as the monster Grendel. Even so, that unfortunate experience didn’t deter her from taking another literature class, this one focusing on the work of women writers—when we read Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies, my Beowulf-loathing student suddenly fell in love with literature. Reading Women’s Worlds from Christine de Pizan to Doris Lessing: A Guide to Six Centuries of Women Writers Imagining Rooms of Their Own is a book about books, a guide that explores a dream landscape women have shared over the centuries—an imagined “women’s world.” In undertaking this task, I am deeply indebted to the students I have taught over the years, many of whose insights about texts are included here. Without them, this book would simply not have been possible. On a more personal note, I am indebted to Professor Thomas J. Campbell, who has been a friend and colleague for more years than I care to count. As I indicate in my dedication, I would never have attempted this project without his encouragement and support. Many people have been uncommonly generous with their time and resources as I have been engaged with this project. I am particularly indebted to Henrietta Garnett, not only for her permission to reproduce Vanessa Bell’s cover art for Virginia Woolf ’s 1929 A Room of One’s Own but for her many kindnesses; to Karen Kukil, at the Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College, for her speedy response to my request for help in acquiring a photograph of this cover art; to Auste Mickunaite and Sandra Powlette, both of the Permissions Department at the British Library, both of whom went beyond the call of duty in helping me with the Christine


Acknowledgments


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x

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Acknowledgments


de Pizan image included here; and to Matt Wrbican, archivist at The Andy Warhol Museum for his willingness to answer my many, many questions about Valerie Solanas and the Museum’s copy of her SCUM Manifesto. And, finally, my deepest thanks to all of those at Palgrave Macmillan with whom I have been privileged to work, especially Brigitte Shull, my editor, and Lee Norton and Joanna Roberts, her editorial assistants.


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I

can remember the exact moment when everything changed—when the unrelated bits and pieces from a lifetime of reading suddenly shifted, rearranged themselves, and fell into unexpected place. It was as if I had twisted the smooth, round barrel of a kaleidoscope and watched as the individual shards of color dissolved and then resolved into a new and unexpected pattern. And yet, even now, I am still a little disappointed, because it hardly seemed the right place for such a revelatory moment. There’s always something going on at the Lakewood Family YMCA, but it’s hardly the ideal spot for an epiphany. I also remember that I wasn’t exactly in the right frame of mind for sudden insight. Although it was just a couple of days after Christmas, I wasn’t in a festive mood. I was feeling old and resentful. A graying baby-boomer, I was slowly recovering from a knee injury, which meant I was facing the mindnumbing boredom of another session on the recumbent bike. In my mind there is only one thing worse than pedaling madly to nowhere: pedaling madly to nowhere in front of a bank of TVs tuned to ESPN and ESPN2. And that, unfortunately, was exactly what I could look forward to on most days at the Y. I could always take a book, of course, but that still posed a dilemma, since I wasn’t convinced that any physical activity I could perform while reading actually counted as exercise. I recall hesitating before I left the house that day, but in the end, since I prefer guilt to anything involving men, balls, and nets or goal posts, I grabbed a paperback off my desk at the last minute and headed out the door before I could change my mind. Although the Y wasn’t busy on that just-after-Christmas afternoon, the air inside was still warm and thick, heavy with the smell of chlorine. As the outer doors closed behind me, I left the twenty-first century and stepped into a disco inferno, the sound system frantically spitting out one 70s dance song after another. I caught the end of “Carwash” as I dug the Y card out of my gym bag, and by the time I had checked in and grabbed a towel, we


CHAPTER 1


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Reading Women’s Worlds

were all “Kung Fu Fighting.” I climbed through the humid air to the second floor, and, just as I got my bike adjusted perfectly, the Bee Gees were reminding me that, when the feeling was gone and I couldn’t go on, it was tragedy. Only then did I look at the book I had picked up on my way out the door: Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. For a while, as I pedaled gingerly, warming up my stiff knee, I ignored Nafisi’s book entirely. It was, as I said, just after Christmas, and I was finding plenty of amusement in watching the people around me. But then, intrigued by the cover illustration of two veiled women, their eyes downcast, I opened the book: “In the fall of 1995, after resigning from my last academic post, I decided to indulge myself and fulfill a dream. I chose seven of my best and most committed students and invited them to come to my home every Thursday morning to discuss literature.” So began Reading Lolita in Tehran, and so began my awakening. In the midst of the Islamic revolution in Iran and under the increasingly repressive regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini, Azar Nafisi dreamed of escaping the world in which she lived by creating a world where she could find the freedom she had lost. She had been warned by her friends that “withdrawing” into the world of her imagination “could be dangerous,” warned about the risks of cutting herself off from “the outside world” and “restricting” herself to “one room.” But Nafisi did not see her retreat as defeat or as restriction; rather, she wrote, “It entailed an active withdrawal from a reality that had turned hostile.” In her escape from one world—and in the simultaneous creation of another—she was liberated. In a room of her own, she escaped from the realities of life in Iran and found her own reality, her own freedom. And that’s what changed my world, for I had heard it all before. I had even read it before. Although I was busy pedaling to nowhere, I had finally arrived. Nafisi’s “memoir in books” had just transformed my own memories of books. *

*

*

What was it about Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran that led to my awakening on that December afternoon? It wasn’t that I identified with Nafisi herself, though there were some similarities. We were both in our fifties, both passionate about books, both dedicated to sharing that passion with our students. But she was the daughter of a politically prominent Iranian family—her father, Ahmad Nafisi, had been the mayor of Tehran, her mother, Nezhat Nafisi, one of the first six women elected to the national parliament—while I was the daughter of a man who was out of work more often than he went to work and a woman who was overworked by an endless series of minimum-wage jobs. The extent of my parents’ political


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involvement was voting in presidential elections every four years, though since my mother deliberately cast her ballot only so she could cancel out my father’s, even that involvement was less political than deeply personal. Nafisi came from an educated, cultured family. At one point she notes that for eight hundred years the Nafisis were hakims, “men of knowledge,” who had “prided themselves” on their “contributions to literature and science.” Her father wrote poetry, entertained his young daughter with elaborate stories from A Thousand and One Nights, and delivered a speech—in French—to Charles de Gaulle. My father, who hadn’t finished high school, thought there were only two life skills worth knowing, neither involving literature, though they did involve a bit of skill, if not science: he taught me how to parallel park beautifully and how to merge into freeway traffic seamlessly. He didn’t write poetry or tell stories, and the only speeches I ever heard him deliver were to me when I hadn’t finished my math homework—and they were delivered, emphatically, in English. Nafisi’s mother made “fabulous Turkish coffee,” “thick” and “bittersweet”; mine drank a cup of Sanka in the morning while leaning over the kitchen sink. In her own Tehran home, Nafisi prepared croque monsieur for her family; in mine, we made grilled cheese with Velveeta. My own struggle for an education, especially higher education, contrasted sharply with Nafisi’s experience. In my home, no one had ever been to college. My father had briefly thought about finishing high school and using his G.I. bill benefits after World War II but, as he liked to say, he decided to “major in billiards” instead. My mother was lucky to have finished high school—she was the first person in her family ever to have graduated, and I became only the second. For Nafisi, by contrast, access to education was assumed, an advantage that she did not always recognize or appreciate. Early in her book, we catch a glimpse of her at an elite private school in Switzerland. In the middle of her history lesson, she is called to the principal’s office: “There I was told that they had just heard on the radio that my father, the youngest mayor in Tehran’s history, had been jailed. Only three weeks earlier I had seen a large color photograph of him in Paris Match.” One “small compensation” for her father’s imprisonment, she writes, is that she did not “have to continue” her education; she happily abandoned her studies, left the exclusive Swiss boarding school, and returned to Iran. When her father was finally released from jail four years later, she traveled to the United States. There, I suppose, our lives do seem to have run parallel, at least for a time. We both studied literature in college and then went on to attend graduate school at large state universities. Nafisi received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Oklahoma in 1979; I received mine from the University of Washington a year later, in 1980. Maybe that’s when it




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becomes clear that our lives, despite certain superficial similarities, were never really parallel. Nafisi had left Iran when she was eighteen; after the shah was forced into exile, she was happy to go back and begin teaching English literature at the University of Tehran. I had also left home at the age of eighteen, but when I left, I knew I would never return. There are some advantages in a life lived with less privilege: I had no desire to return the way I had come, no remembered home for which I longed, no illusions about the past. But for Nafisi, it was different. She tried to go home; she had not realized yet that “the home she had left seventeen years earlier” was “not home anymore.” That would take time. And so it wasn’t like looking in a mirror when I opened Reading Lolita in Tehran. Nafisi’s story was not my story. Her book didn’t appeal to me because it offered me a flattering reflection of my own life. Her book, in fact, is explicitly not autobiography—it is, as the subtitle notes, “a memoir in books.” When I opened Nafisi’s book, it was my own reading that made a new kind of sense. What struck me so suddenly and forcibly that December afternoon in the YMCA was listening to her describe her dream. She decided to withdraw from the world and to retreat into a self-created world, a world not only separate from the world of men but a world populated only by women. This was a dream I had read many times. This was the creation story that women had been writing and rewriting for more than six hundred years. *

*

*

Perhaps the most widely known iteration of this I-have-a-dream fantasy is Virginia Woolf’s. Based on a series of lectures on women and fiction she delivered at Newnham and Girton colleges in 1928, Woolf’s now-classic A Room of One’s Own begins in conflict and opposition. The opening line suggests that there has been a debate underway for some time and that we, her readers, have somehow just arrived, a bit late, right in the middle of it. Things are a little heated. Woolf seems to have turned around and pointed her finger at us at the very moment we open the book. This immediate confrontation is unsettling: “But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what has that got to do with a room of one’s own?” The rest of this slim volume is Woolf’s response to the startling challenge posed at the outset. “I will try to explain,” she continues, offering her now well-known formulation: “a woman must have money and a room of her own.” Just over a hundred brief pages of exposition and explanation later, she reiterates her dictum: “it is necessary to have five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door.” The five hundred pounds “stands for power to contemplate,” the lock on the door of one’s own room “means the power to think for oneself.”


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From Azar Nafisi’s retreat in the heart of Tehran to Woolf ’s private room with a lock on the door, my mind caromed back to my own memories of books, which had suddenly begun to shift and realign themselves into a new order. I forgot my stiff knee and the chlorine-soaked air. Instead of the frantic disco beat and the rhythmic whizzing of the cardio machines around me, I could hear only the voices of women who had imagined rooms of their own, women who had dreamed their dreams long before either Virginia Woolf or Azar Nafisi were able to articulate theirs. And I began to see these imagined worlds not as a series of isolated, individual dreams but as one continuous—or, perhaps, recurring—dream, appearing night after night in the minds of women as they slept over the course of centuries. Not all of the pieces fell into place that December day at the YMCA, of course, but the pattern that I had not seen earlier had emerged, and I felt compelled to explore it for myself. Nafisi’s memoir in books focuses primarily on nineteenth- and twentieth-century English and American writers. My own memories begin with books from a much more distant past. They begin where the dream seems to have begun—or, at least, with the first woman I know of who told us about her dream. At the turn of the fifteenth century, Christine de Pizan took up her pen and recorded her construction of a refuge for women in The Book of the City of Ladies. We catch a glimpse of that same dream in Venice, in Moderata Fonte’s The Worth of Women. The thirty-eight-year-old Fonte finished her account of female retreat—a secluded garden in Venice shared by a small group of friends—on 1 November 1592. She died in childbirth the next day. Some sixty years later, the dream of a female retreat resurfaces. In a series of letters composed over the course of a few months in 1660 and 1661, Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, duchesse de Montpensier, and her correspondent, Françoise Bertaut, madame de Motteville, fantasize about delivering themselves from the “slavery” of their lives as women and establishing their liberty in a “rural Republic.” Of course, de Motteville concedes graciously, since her friend, the duchess, was “born to rule and to wear a crown,” it is only fitting that she be the one to preside over their empire, however small it may be. Small, too, was the female paradise envisioned by Margaret Cavendish just a few years later. In The Convent of Pleasure, she imagines a small group of women fleeing from the world of men and marriage and electing to join a convent. This is not to be a religious retreat devoted to prayer and self-denial but, as the title of the play indicates, a haven where they enjoy themselves by indulging in the pleasures that are routinely denied them as women. A similar venture is advanced by Mary Astell just at the end of the seventeenth century. But the title of her work—A Serious Proposal to the




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Ladies—signals an intention quite different than the one Cavendish’s Lady Happy has in mind. Lamenting the stunted minds that are the necessary result of women’s lack of education, Astell proposes a corrective. “Now as to the proposal,” she writes, “it is to erect a monastery” that will function for women as a place where they will find a “blissful recess from the noise and hurry of the world.” Here they can devote themselves to prayer, study, and self-improvement. And, more important, in their retreat they will find themselves liberated “from the rude attempts of designing men.” This retreat is not merely a room with a lock on its door—like so many of the dreamers here, Astell thinks big. And what about Teresa of Ávila’s interior castle? And Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall? Or Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s Herland, published in 1915, just a few years before Woolf delivered her lectures—in a women’s college— on women and fiction? And, since my reading has been as eclectic as Nafisi’s, my politics at times as revolutionary, I recalled the long-forgotten (in my mind anyway) SCUM Manifesto’s call for women to overthrow the government, to “destroy the male sex,” and then to establish their own brave new world. I hadn’t thought about that radical 60s polemic in years, but there, reading Nafisi at the YMCA on that afternoon in late December, it suddenly sprang to mind, along with an unlikely companion, the late medieval Assembly of Ladies. Was Valerie Solanas’s vision of an all-female utopia, where the wrongs that women had suffered for centuries were finally redressed, really all that different from the “true paradise” of Pleasant Regard, where women sought a refuge—and justice—far from the men who had deceived and betrayed them? I wonder now whether Nafisi and her students might have found their own struggles in late-twentieth-century Tehran mirrored in the complaints of the female petitioners in that fifteenth-century English dream vision. Through the course of my years of reading and teaching, I had never considered the link between all these works. Reading Azar Nafisi at the Y—who was herself reading Lolita in Tehran—made my own lifetime of reading make a new kind of sense. As I have thought more about the variations on the dream these women shared, I have come to realize that there is an ever-present shadow world hovering always in the background, perhaps a recognition that behind this dream there is a nightmare reality. If it is glorious freedom to withdraw from the world, even into confinement, it is hell when women are forced from the world and confined by their own fathers and husbands. In addition to the possibilities of the Convent of Pleasure or Millenium Hall, there is the nightmare world of women enclosed: Arcangela Tarabotti’s scathing account of being “buried alive” in a convent by her father, for example, or


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Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s brief story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” about a wife confined—for her own good, of course—to a small room for a rest cure. What a difference there is between a room of one’s own and a room with yellow wallpaper. If some of the names and titles here seem unfamiliar, it is no wonder, for the voices of many of these women writers were silenced for centuries. Let Christine de Pizan serve as an example. She was a widely known intellectual in her day, and The Book of the City of Ladies, completed in 1405, was translated from its original French into all the vernacular languages of Western Europe. Copies were sent from one aristocratic woman to another, often handed down from mother to daughter; after the advent of printing, Christine’s book was available to a wider reading audience. The Book of the City of Ladies was translated into English and printed by Brian Anslay in 1521, but his was to be the only English edition for more than 450 years— until Earl Jeffrey Richards’s English translation for Persea Books, published in 1982. Although there is a now a second edition of Richards’s translation, as well as several newer English translations, including a readily available Penguin version, I cling to my copy of that 1982 paperback. It’s falling apart. The pages have come loose from their binding and are now being held in place by an array of clips and fasteners. There are so many marginal comments, made over the course of twenty years of reading, rereading, and teaching, that Christine’s text is almost obliterated on some pages by all the scribbled marginal notes in pencil and in varying colors of ink with emphasis added here and there by yellow highlighter. Individual sheets of notepaper have been paperclipped onto some of the pages, and there are so many PostIts stuck on still others that the book is almost twice its original thickness. The whole is held together with a rubber band. I could easily get a new desk copy of the book—to be honest, I’ve already been sent two—but I cling to this ragged volume stubbornly, as if it is the only link between Christine de Pizan and me. I don’t want her to disappear again. Holding onto books as if they were some kind of talisman is exactly what Nafisi was doing in Tehran. As the Iranian Revolution grew in its intensity, she feared that her beloved books would disappear completely. To preserve them—and, perhaps, to preserve herself as well—she went on buying binges, grabbing indiscriminately any English books she could find on the shelves. The book, the physical object she could hold, signified a world to which she was desperately clinging. I think she would understand why I can’t let go of my copy of The City of Ladies. Like a dream itself, Reading Lolita in Tehran is neither chronological nor systematic. What unifies Nafisi’s reflections is not chronology but conversation— bits of her classroom lectures, remembrances of exchanges with friends, family,




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colleagues, and, of course, the intimacies shared by the small group of young women who join her in reading Lolita. There are also the hostile speeches of student radicals and religious polemic from the government. And, always, the voices that emerge from the books themselves—Lolita’s, Daisy Miller’s, Elizabeth Bennet’s. In what follows, I, too, have filled the pages with voices in conversation—my own observations and the reactions and reflections of my students, but most significantly, I have put these women dreamers and their texts in conversation with one another, pairing them in ways that reveal their distinctive voices even while they speak of the dream they share. The works I’ve chosen to include here reflect my individual, perhaps even idiosyncratic, choices, though I have read most of them with my students—as I said, this book reflects that moment when a lifetime of reading suddenly made a new kind of sense. I have made no attempt to be comprehensive or systematic; students who took my literature course called “Reading Women’s Worlds” a couple of semesters ago are still e-mailing me with new titles for me to consider, and every once in a while a colleague stops by my office with yet another great piece for me to read. A dear friend, who used to send my son books when he was young, is now sending me not just the names of books related to my topic, but the books themselves—a battered copy of Little Women, a book I haven’t read since my own childhood, a new paperback edition of Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Lately, when I have a few free minutes before class, I log onto the Literature Online database and browse the titles of critical articles that appear when I type “a room of one’s own” in the Quick Search box and then click “Go!” There’s always something new—right now I’m intrigued by an article that was published in April 2008 by Deniz Gündogan. The article, in Turkish, is entitled “Kurmaca Yazin ve Kadin,” and all I can tell from the LION record is that it compares Latife Tekin’s Gece Dersleri to Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own. I also see that among the 125 or so articles published in just the past five years, Woolf ’s book is compared to others written by Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, and Japanese writers whose names I do not recognize and whose books I don’t always find when I search at Amazon or Barnes and Noble. The possibilities seem as varied as readers themselves, and my hope is that this guide will not only introduce those readers to new titles they have not encountered before, but that it will also help them to read their old favorites in new ways. As for me, in the end, I will return to where it all began: Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran.


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I Have a Dream: Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

E

arly on in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf (or, rather, the firstperson narrator Woolf creates) travels through rainy London streets to the ultimate source for truth about any and every subject: she goes to the British Library, then housed inside the famed British Museum. She is determined to find the answers to the “swarm of questions” she has about women—she has “a thousand questions” but not a single answer. Surely the answers are there in the library, just waiting for her. “If truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum,” she asks, then where is it to be found? But her search for answers is in vain. Instead, in one of the most poignant phrases to be found in her book, Woolf describes her narrator, standing in the British Library, “looking about the shelves for books that were not there.” Looking for books that are not there. Even today, even now, as I sit in a room of my own, a room filled with shelf after shelf of books by and about women, I find this image impossibly moving. And yet the very book that might have changed everything for Woolf was there all the time, right on the shelf: the British Library owns a copy of Bryan Anslay’s English translation of Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies, published in 1521. The Library also owns a lavishly illustrated fifteenth-century manuscript anthology of Pizan’s works, including The Book of the City of Ladies, planned and produced in Pizan’s own workshop, probably under her personal supervision. The volume originally belonged to Isabel of Bavaria, queen of France, and contains a beautifully executed illustration of Pizan, on her knees, presenting the queen with this very copy of her work. Would everything have


CHAPTER 2


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been different if only Woolf had found The Book of the City of Ladies on the shelves that day in the British Library? I’d like to think so. If products are any indication, Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own is now a pop-culture icon. You can buy t-shirts, mugs, aprons, tea towels, and even deck chairs emblazoned with the title of Woolf ’s book—you might even be able to buy all these items at the Room of One’s Own Feminist Bookstore in Madison, Wisconsin, though I’m not sure about that. All these products, and more, are available online with a few mouse clicks and a credit card. You might have enjoyed the Roz Chast cartoon, published in the 26 May 2007 New Yorker, which “updates” Woolf ’s title—among other things, the twenty-first century woman is looking not just for a room of her own, but a room with “adequate ventilation,” “near a grocery store,” and not “please God” in Queens, all for “under $2000 a month.” You can buy a matted print of this cartoon for $125, a box of notecards for $29.95, a hooded sweatshirt, and, of course, a t-shirt, sized not just for women but also for men and children. Meanwhile, The New York Review of Books gallery displays five different David Levine caricatures of Virginia Woolf, from 1966, 1970, 1977, 1978, and 1980, but the Woolf t-shirt that first went on sale in 1983 isn’t offered any longer. There’s no reason to be disappointed, however. You can still buy a Levine caricature of Woolf on a postcard—in fact, two different postcard books include Woolf. She’s in the “Women Writers” set, of course, but I am happy to see that she’s also included in the series of “Writers” postcards, and either collection is a bargain—twenty cards cost just $9.95. Woolf is one of thirteen caricatures included in the David Levine 2010 calendar. She is also one of the writers pictured on the David Levine mousepad, available for $12.95. Cartoons and caricatures published in the New York Times and in The New York Review of Books may suggest Woolf appeals just to elitists or to snobs, but all the t-shirts and mugs show that her reach extends far beyond the realms of Manhattan and academia. Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? opened on Broadway in 1962. I was only eleven then, and just fifteen when the 1966 film version, starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, played in theaters. I was too young to see the movie but old enough to conclude that Virginia Woolf must be a terrifying figure. In fact, Albee’s title, if not the play itself, seems to have generated a lot of anxiety about Woolf. Even so, Masterpiece Theater invited Virginia Woolf into the living rooms of American homes in 1991, airing Eileen Atkins’s one-woman dramatization of A Room of One’s Own. Woolf’s life and work have also inspired a few feature films—Orlando was released in 1992, Mrs. Dalloway in 1998, and Nicole Kidman won an Oscar for her portrayal of Woolf in The Hours, released in the United States in 2003. Not that these have necessarily been huge box


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office hits—more of my students know that Madonna and Rosie O’Donnell starred in A League of Their Own than recognize the allusion to Woolf in the film’s title. Still, this 1992 Penny Marshall film proves that it’s not just snobs who love playing with Woolf ’s title. I admit that we academics do seem to be particularly fond of this sin—the allusion to Woolf has become something of a staple of critical essays about women writers. Sally Alexander’s “Room of One’s Own: 1920s Feminist Utopias” (2000), José Esteban Muñoz’s “A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in New America” (2008), and Turgay Bayindir’s “A House of Her Own: Alice Walker’s Readjustment of Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own in The Color Purple” (2009), to name only three examples, show how irresistible Woolf ’s title is. And yet it’s not just literary critics—there is Deborah Felder’s 2005 A Bookshelf of Our Own: Works That Have Changed Women’s Lives and Deborah Owens’s 2009 A Purse of Your Own, a finance book for women. In 2007, to commemorate its thirtieth anniversary, the Canadian journal A Room of One’s Own shortened its name to Room, but added the tagline “A Space of Your Own” to its print cover and online logo. A recent exhibition at the Centre Pompidou (Paris) features “A Room of One’s Own,” a display of the work of several women artists “exploring the notion of private space, weaving new connections between mental projections and exhibition space.” In Istanbul, “Room of One’s Own” is the title of the first exhibition of 2010 at the Outlet Independent Art Center and features the work of eight Turkish women artists. Woolf ’s title is so popular that “a room of one’s own” even has an entry in Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of Allusions, and the online Urban Dictionary defines “Virginia Woolf ” as “FemmeNazi lesbian psycho bitch whore who wrote books such as A Room Of One’s Own.” (With a click of your mouse you can get this definition on your own “custom Urban Dictionary mug” for $19.95). There’s also “A Doghouse of One’s Own,” a blog post from the “Spanish Inquisitor.” One reader of the piece wonders whether this is a pseudonym for “Virginia Wolf,” but the Inquisitor identifies himself as a “55 year old, white, married male, a lawyer by trade, living in America, and an atheist.” As all of these products and references indicate, Virginia Woolf ’s book is thoroughly embedded in the popular imagination, but it wasn’t always this way. A Room of One’s Own, published in 1929 by Woolf ’s own Hogarth Press in England and by Harcourt Brace in the United States, sold well. As Woolf notes in her diary, her “next year’s income” had been “made” by the book’s sales. But, despite the book’s popular success and the range and significance of Woolf’s literary output, interest in her work began to wane after World War II. Like so many women writers before her, Woolf all but disappeared.


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If any single work can give us a glimpse of her “official” status and reputation some twenty years after her death, it may be the multivolume Oxford History of English Literature. J. I. M. Stewart’s Eight Modern Writers, published in 1963, includes a chapter on James Joyce, born in 1882, the same year as Woolf, and a chapter on D. H. Lawrence, born three years later. But Woolf is not one of Stewart’s select “eight.” In more than six hundred pages of literary history, he mentions Woolf’s name only three times, once noting the influence of Joyce’s Ulysses on Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and a second time citing the “revealing absurdity” of her view of Joyce himself. (The third reference, from Stewart’s introduction, remarks that Woolf dismissed the Edwardian novelists and poets writing before the First World War because they represented the “thick dull middle class of letters.”) But today, although new books go out of print faster and faster, there are at least six editions of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own currently available at Amazon, and all the literary critics in the world can’t account for those numbers. In being lost before she was found again, Woolf resembles no one so much as Christine de Pizan, with whom I have paired her in this chapter. In her lifetime, Pizan was a well-known writer and intellectual. At the turn of the fifteenth century she participated in the querelle des femmes, the socalled debate about women, by engaging in a lively battle of the books with prominent scholars and royal officials. Around the year 1400, a treatise praising the very popular but deeply misogynist dream vision Le Roman de la rose was circulating in Paris. Pizan objected publicly to this praise; by 1402, more than twenty documents, including letters, sermons, and polemical treatises debating women’s worth had appeared. Pizan’s own efforts to defend women were included in the illustrated manuscript collection she presented to the French queen, now on the shelves of the British Library. Over the course of the next twenty years, Pizan produced an extraordinary body of work in verse and in prose, including scores of lyric poems in a variety of forms, a biography of Charles V of France, a manual of good conduct for the French dauphin, a book of “teachings and moral proverbs” for her son, a treatise on warfare and military arts, a series of works on politics and good government, philosophical reflections on the mutability of fortune and the “prison” of human life, a conduct book for women of all social classes, the only contemporary French poem on Joan of Arc’s 1429 victory at Orléans, and the book for which she is now most well known, The Book of the City of Ladies. These works earned Pizan an international reputation. She was fully engaged with the newly emerging humanism of Italian scholars. She was invited to join the English court of Henry IV, and to Milan, to the ducal court of Giangaleazzo Visconti, a dedicated bibliophile, although she chose to remain in France. Her works were presented to


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and collected by powerful men, including the English duke of Bedford and the earl of Salisbury and the French dukes of Berry, Burgundy, and Orléans. (It was the duke of Burgundy, Philip the Bold, who commissioned Pizan’s biography of his brother, Charles V, king of France.) Pizan also presented copies of her book to influential and powerful women. As we have seen, one contemporary manuscript copy of The Book of the City of Ladies is illustrated with a picture of Pizan presenting an anthology of her work to the French queen, Isabel of Bavaria. Valentina Visconti, the duchess of Orléans (and the daughter of the book-loving Giangaleazzo), and the dauphin of France and his wife, Margaret of Burgundy, also owned copies of The Book of the City of Ladies. In succeeding generations, Anne of France, Anne of Brittany, Louise of Savoy, Margaret of Austria, and Marguerite of Navarre—all of them politically powerful women—had copies of The Book of the City of Ladies or of Pizan’s conduct book for women, The Treasure of the City of Ladies, or of both. Anne of France’s copy of The Book of the City of Ladies illustrates particularly well the circulation of Pizan’s text among generations of women, since Anne, who functioned as virtual king of France for eight years during her brother’s minority, inherited her copy from her mother, the French queen Charlotte of Savoy, who owned several of Pizan’s works; in composing a series of lessons for her own daughter, Suzanne of Bourbon, Anne relied at least in part on Pizan’s The Treasure of the City of Ladies. As another example of the way women passed along Pizan’s work, Isabel of Portugal, duchess of Burgundy, sent a copy of The Treasure of the City of Ladies to her niece, Isabel, the queen of Portugal; the younger Isabel commissioned the translation of the Treasure into Portuguese, while in 1518, another queen of Portugal, Eleanor, patronized the publication of the Portuguese text. As I have noted above, The Book of the City of Ladies was first translated into English by Bryan Anslay and published in 1521. But however significant Pizan’s books were to the women who received them, had copies of them produced and reproduced for one another, or who were able to read them when they were eventually printed, Christine de Pizan and her defense of women almost disappeared from view. Anslay’s was the only English translation of the text until 1982, when Earl Jeffrey Richards’s edition was published. A modern French translation was published by Éric Hicks and Thérèse Moreau in 1986. A quick check on WorldCat, the global catalogue of library holdings, reveals that you can now find copies of the book not only in French and English but also in Italian, German, Spanish, Catalan, Dutch, and Chinese—Pizan’s international reputation in the past twenty years has regained something of its fifteenth-century status. Although you can buy postcards of Pizan at the British Library Bookstore (a former


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student now studying in London just sent me one), you can’t yet buy a Christine de Pizan mug. You can, however, join the Christine de Pizan Society, you can subscribe to the Christine de Pizan newsletter, and you can attend international conferences devoted to Pizan’s life and work—such conferences have been held in France, the United States, Scotland, Germany, Italy (she was born in Venice), Austria, and Switzerland. But it’s more than their lost-and-found histories that link Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies and Woolf’s Room of One’s Own. Although separated by more than five centuries, both Pizan and Woolf argued that what was essential for women was a space of their own, and it is to their I-have-a-dream dreams that we will turn our attention now. *

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A Room of One’s Own began as a pair of lectures on women and fiction that Virginia Woolf delivered at two Cambridge women’s colleges in October 1928. Girton College had been established in 1869 as a college for women, Newnham in 1871 as a place to safely house young women traveling to Cambridge to attend a series of “Lectures for Ladies” inaugurated in 1870. Unlike Oxford, which admitted women fully to the university in 1920, Cambridge did not accept women’s “full membership” in the university until 1948; formal efforts to admit women to the university were defeated in 1887, 1897, and again, after World War I, in 1920. The very question of granting young women Cambridge degrees was deemed so offensive, in fact, that the protests of male students in 1897 resulted in significant property damage. Celebrating their exclusion of women in 1920, male undergraduates destroyed the college gates at Newnham. (The gates memorialized Anna Jemima Clough, an English suffragist who was the first principal of Newnham when it opened to house women attending the lectures “for ladies” at Cambridge.) Today you can read both Girton and Newnham’s proud histories on their websites, and at the Newnham site you can see pictures of the protests against women in 1897 and of the 1920 damage to the memorial gate. But neither college mentions Virginia Woolf ’s lectures in October of 1928 as part of its history. Among the “short biographies” of those “who have been significant in the history of the College” listed on the Newnham College “History” page, you will not find Virginia Woolf ’s name. Women are “all but absent from history,” Woolf noted in A Room of One’s Own. They are still absent. We find only “blank spaces on the shelves” in the most surprising places. From her two Cambridge lectures on “Women and Fiction,” Woolf produced a thousand-word essay published in the March 1929 issue of The


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Forum under the same title, “Women and Fiction.” The Forum piece is easy enough to read, and it is very informative, but it is not really memorable. Judged only by the Woolf we meet in “Women and Fiction,” no one would be afraid of Virginia Woolf, much less want to flaunt their allegiance to her on a t-shirt or coffee mug. To open the cover of A Room of One’s Own is, however, an entirely different experience. In spite of its current iconic status, most general readers are a little afraid of A Room of One’s Own, even though it’s appealingly short—just a little over a hundred pages in most printed editions, only fifty or sixty in popular textbooks like The Norton Anthology of English Literature or The Longman Anthology of Women’s Literature. Many students read just a bit of A Room of One’s Own, usually the third chapter, widely published today as “If Shakespeare Had a Sister.” My students eagerly anticipate reading “the whole thing,” but to begin at the beginning, to open the book to “Chapter One,” is a bit unsettling. Instead of the measured calm of the Forum essay (“The title of this article can be read in two ways”), the opening of A Room of One’s Own is disconcerting—it catches us off guard. “But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what has that got to do with a room of one’s own?” Surely this can’t be the beginning—we must have missed a page or two, or maybe an introduction or a preface. I remember this feeling of having missed something important the first time I read Woolf ’s book. In fact, I remember double-checking the paperback copy I was holding to make sure it was the whole book and not another selection or even a condensed version of the whole. As we read these opening words, we’re also immediately and uncomfortably aware that there’s an argument going on, or at the least a polite disagreement: “But. . . .” As much as we’d like to, we can’t avoid the conflict. And then suddenly there is Woolf herself—or is it Woolf?—stepping in to calm us. “I will try to explain,” she says. The Forum essay not only avoids any kind of conflict, but any real sense of Woolf at all—or, at least there is no “I.” The piece opens blandly: “The title of this article can be read two ways. . . .” All is carefully disguised by the impersonal (“it is necessary to,” “it is to be found in,” “it is extremely difficult to”) or carefully modulated by the inclusive “we” (“Why, we ask,” “we are asking questions to which there are no answers,” “Of our fathers we know always some fact”). In A Room of One’s Own, by contrast, the perspective shifts constantly. The first confusion is with the title—“a room of one’s own”—and in that opening question—“what has that got to do with a room of one’s own?” The indefinite pronoun is an obstacle for American readers. We’re not comfortable with “one.” It sounds a little affected, and when we try to use it ourselves, we get confused and quickly give up—“one needs a room of their own,” we might say or write. Despite


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these difficulties, we might reach out to “one” when we’re trying to sound important—or at least that’s what my writing students say when I ask them why they chose “one” instead of just writing “I.” Why does Woolf choose “a room of one’s own” instead of “a room of my own” or “rooms of our own”? If she had chosen either of these first-person pronouns, we would have known right where she stood. But where does she stand in relation to that demand for “a room of one’s own”? Still, the “you” and “we” of the opening line seem to give us something personal and direct to hold on to. The speaker addresses her readers (or are they listeners?) familiarly as “you,” and those readers/listeners represent a cohesive group who regard themselves as “we.” This “we” can be a little upsetting for male readers, who—maybe for the first time in their lives— feel that a “we” definitely does not include them. (By comparison, when E. M. Forster, Woolf ’s Bloomsbury friend and colleague, presented his paper entitled “The Feminine Note in Literature” to a Cambridge audience, he knew his audience was exclusively male: “We are going to talk about women,” he begins, “and very fortunately, none of them are in the room.”) Once we get past Woolf ’s “we,” which may—or may not—include us, we then encounter the calming and authoritative “I.” Our narrator answers her initial question with a simple declarative statement: “I will try to explain.” And yet this authoritative “I” is, on further inspection, anything but reassuring. Our speaker doesn’t present herself as an authority—she’s only going to “try” to explain. This “I” doesn’t know what the topic she has been asked to speak about means. “Women and fiction” might mean “women and what they are like,” or “women and the fiction they write,” or “women and the fiction that is written about them”—or it might even mean “that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together and you want me to consider them in that light.” Even if our narrator actually did know what she was supposed to be speaking about, she still doesn’t know what to say: “I should never be able to come to a conclusion,” she admits. As far as she is concerned, then, the problem of what “women and fiction” really means will remain “unsolved.” And so instead of delivering the lecture she was asked to deliver, she proposes telling her audience a story. But who is she? “Here then I was,” she says as she is about to begin her story, but even while asserting the value of her story, she undercuts its significance. Our first-person narrator is emphatically not Virginia Woolf, but someone else entirely, though we’re not exactly sure who: “call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please—it is not a matter of any importance,” our narrator says. By this point we’re not only a little confused, we’re also more than a little frustrated. The distinctive


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“I” of A Room of One’s Own seems to be so important, particularly when compared to the impersonal point of view of “Women and Fiction,” but its significance is denied even as it is being asserted. The command I’ve quoted above, “call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael,” is not only undercut by the disclaimer “it is not a matter of any importance,” but by the subordination of the whole inside parentheses: “Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please—it is not a matter of any importance) sitting on the banks of a river a week or two ago in fine October weather, lost in thought.” Our narrator who has come to no conclusions about “women and fiction,” who has nothing important to tell her listeners, no “nugget of truth” for them to write in their notebooks and then take away with them after her lecture, and who acknowledges that she has thus “shirked” her duty as a lecturer, is only sure of one thing: “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” All she has to offer is this opinion—and it’s just “an opinion upon one minor point.” To be sure, once we’re past this initial uncertainty, as we turn the pages that follow, we do forget our uneasiness. But whatever confidence we gain in our narrator and the “opinion” she offers us as we make our way through A Room of One’s Own is undermined as we reach the end. There, our narrator circles back to her beginning. She turns to her desk and picks up “the page headed Woman and Fiction,” at last having figured out where and how to begin: “the very first sentence that I would write,” she claims, “is that it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex.” But this isn’t where she began at all, we protest—that wasn’t her first sentence. Even at the end, Woolf refuses to let us get too comfortable. Woolf’s playfulness here, her creation of an “I” who is and yet who is not the author herself, who tells us where and how she will begin and yet doesn’t, is one of the most striking features A Room of One’s Own shares with Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies. Pizan too adopts the first-person narrator: “One day as I was sitting alone in my study surrounded by books on all kinds of subjects,” she begins. But as with Woolf ’s “I,” Pizan’s is confusing—her “I” both is and is not Pizan. The “Christine” of The Book of the City of Ladies may have a room of her own, a study where it is her “usual habit” to spend her days reading and writing, but this Christine is decidedly not the fearless debater who publicly disagreed with her male contemporaries’ views of women. This Christine is overwhelmed by the fact that “so many different men—and learned men among them,” so many “solemn scholars” of “deep and great understanding” who are “so clear-sighted in all things,” agree in their negative views of women. Although her own knowledge of women contradicts everything these “authorities” have had to say about them, she


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finds herself suddenly overcome by uncertainty. And thus Christine de Pizan becomes “Christine,” a first-person narrator who shares much with Christine de Pizan the writer, but who is a fictional character. In A Room of One’s Own we find ourselves challenged by that opening “but” and then plunked down into contradiction and contention; in The Book of the City of Ladies, we are plunged into existential despair. “Christine’s” self-loathing is palpable; although we are separated by more than six centuries, we can feel her rising disgust at her own female body. This Christine is no longer able to hold onto a single nugget of truth about what she “felt and knew” about women. Instead she concludes that God “formed a vile creature when He made woman,” and she is horrified that God has “made” her “inhabit a female body in this world.” Unable to offer her listeners a conclusion, Woolf ’s “Mary Beton” (or Mary Seton or Mary Carmichael) offers, instead, a story. Unable to offer readers the truth about women in her own voice, Pizan offers, instead, the story of “Christine.” Of course what’s most obvious is that Woolf ’s “Mary Beton” does not have a room of her own. In order to write—or to undertake any artistic or intellectual creation—a woman must have that room and the means by which to sustain herself. Women are, in Woolf ’s words, “locked out.” Men have all the “safety and prosperity,” women all the “poverty and insecurity.” But five hundred years earlier, “Christine” did have that room, and the kind of solitude and security that “Mary Beton” did not. The Book of the City of Ladies begins with a seemingly independent woman alone in her study, surrounded by books on every subject, but it is here, inside the safety and security of her study, that “Christine” is most vulnerable. Having a room of one’s own, even a room with a lock on the door, is still not enough. We might pause here to see how contemporary images illustrate the positions of both writers, one inside and one outside. Perhaps the most well-known illustration of Christine de Pizan is found at the beginning of the manuscript collection of her works now in the British Library. In this author portrait, Pizan has chosen to present herself sitting at her desk, a book open before her. She is in a room of her own (see Figure 2.1). We see Pizan through an arched doorway that is open to us. She is at work, pen in hand, with a little dog at her feet. The open door seems to invite us to join her. We can see a sliver of a closed door on the right, but that door seems to lead outside. A tapestry covers the far wall. A column supporting the arched doorway cuts off our view of the fourth wall, which may lead from Pizan’s study to the rest of the house. As I sit here now, at my desk in my own room, I am looking at a framed postcard that reproduces this image. At the beginning of The Book of the City of Ladies, this is exactly where we see “Christine.” She is working in her study.


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Figure 2.1

Christine de Pizan in her study (BL MS Harley 4431, fol. 4)

Source: © The British Library Board, MS Harley 4431, fol. 4


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Contrast this image of Pizan in a room of her own to the cover of the 1929 Hogarth edition of A Room of One’s Own (see Figure 2.2). In this image, Vanessa Bell’s illustration for the cover of her sister’s book, we see an empty room. To be honest, I find it hard to sort out this image. At first glance, I think it looks like a tiered wedding cake, but when I look more closely, I notice that this image, too, represents a room. In fact, we are again looking through an arched doorway into a room. But instead of seeing Woolf or “Mary Beton” at her desk in this room, we see that the room is empty. No, that’s not right either. Looking again, we see that there is a raised platform with a desk on it, and on the desk we see a clock. Or maybe the platform represents a stage with a podium on it. Maybe the clock is there to tell us that this is the podium moments before Woolf arrives to deliver her lecture on “Women and Fiction.” In either case, Woolf is not in this room. She is locked out. Before we go much further, I must note that, however confused we may be by Woolf ’s “Call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael, or by any name you please,” it’s even more tricky to avoid confusing “Christine,” the character in The Book of the City of Ladies, with Christine de Pizan, the author of The Book of the City of Ladies. For whatever reason, the many students with whom I have read Pizan’s late-medieval book have a lot of trouble maintaining the distinction—they prefer identifying the creator with her creation. By contrast, they have no trouble with the concept of the persona when they are reading Dante. It’s perfectly clear that the “I” of the opening lines of the Inferno (“Midway in the journey of our life / I came to myself in a dark wood, / for the straight way was lost”) is a literary character, Dante’s fictional “second self.” No student who has ever read The Canterbury Tales confuses the naïve doofus named “Geoffrey” who is telling us the story of the Canterbury pilgrims with the Geoffrey Chaucer who is the author of the book. Readers hugely enjoy the joke of that Chaucer, the writer who puts into the mouth of “Geoffrey” the pilgrim a tale that is so awful that his fellow travelers interrupt him and make him shut up. The master storyteller who gives “himself ” the worst story of the bunch—get it? They do. But they don’t want to make the same distinction between “Christine” the character and Christine de Pizan the writer. I suspect my students understand perfectly well the difference between “Christine” and Christine, but they don’t want to. Maybe the resistance to accepting “Christine” as a fiction and “Mary Beton” as the first-person narrator of A Room of One’s Own is really a testament to our emotional identification with these books. I am pretty sure I overwhelm my students when I tell them how finding The Book of the City of Ladies changed my life. I was a French major in college and focused


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Figure 2.2

Cover of Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own (Hogarth Press, 1929)

Source: Cover Art by Vanessa Bell © Estate of Vanessa Bell, Courtesy of Henrietta Garnett. Photo Courtesy of Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College


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on medieval literature in graduate school while earning my Ph.D., but I was a grown woman, a working professional teaching at a university, when I first discovered Pizan’s book in Earl Jeffrey Richards’s 1982 translation. Reading Pizan’s book now, more than twenty-five years later, I find tears still welling up at the very end, when “Christine” turns to address all of womankind— women “from the past as well as from the present and the future.” I feel as if she is speaking directly to me and as if we bridge the gap of the six hundred years that separate us when she commands me to “be well-informed in all things” and exhorts me to “make liars” of all the men who “accuse” women of weaknesses, failings, and incapacities. I am not the only academic of a certain age who gets emotional about Pizan—of her reaction to her first encounter with The Book of the City of Ladies, noted historian Natalie Zemon Davis writes that it was “a stunning revelation.” In order to share Pizan’s book with her students in the 1970s, she resorted to “mimeographed excerpts” of her own translations. Susan Groag Bell, a Stanford scholar who has written about sixteenth-century tapestries produced to illustrate Pizan’s book (a set of which was owned by Elizabeth I of England), has said that “Christine de Pizan gets under your skin. Once she has been discovered, there is no forgetting, it is not possible to be free of her.” And it’s not just female academics of a certain age. Student readers react to Pizan’s fresh voice in much the same way. One of my students who was honest enough to admit to me that she has never experienced “the pleasure of reading” and that she just doesn’t find books something that she “can really get into” wrote that her encounter with The Book of the City of Ladies was different. It was “fascinating,” she said, a book that she could not only see herself “enjoying,” but “even as one that I might read outside of class.” In the same way, and despite all their initial fears of Virginia Woolf, readers take A Room of One’s Own personally as well. One of the most unlikely of such readers was a student enrolled in a course I taught in the fall of 2008: he was one of only five men in a classroom of thirty-five students; he was a last-semester senior who had registered for my class, “Reading Women’s Worlds,” because it was the only one he could get into; and if all that wasn’t enough, he was, as he told us all on the first day, one of Sudan’s “lost boys,” a former child soldier and then a refugee who now found himself in a sleepy suburban classroom in Tacoma, Washington. We spent the first two weeks of the semester discussing A Room of One’s Own. In the last hour of the second week of class, I screened the old Masterpiece Theater dramatization of the text. My VHS tape was worn, and it was a bootleg copy anyway, recorded right off the original TV broadcast in 1991. The color was bad, and the sound a little muddy, but watching Eileen Atkins on the screen made me forget that the classroom was too hot and


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too crowded. Hearing Atkins voice Woolf ’s words made me forget my students’ coughing and fidgeting. Since I still get choked up at the end of the video, I left the lights off when it was over and started to rewind the tape in the dark. As the students were packing up their books and stumbling out of the classroom, I saw my student approaching me. I assumed he had a problem—I knew he was having trouble affording his textbooks, and he had already told me that his reading was going slowly. As it turned out, though, he wasn’t coming to me with a problem. He was glowing, excited about Woolf and about A Room of One’s Own. He was so excited, in fact, that he was wondering if I could make a copy of my tape for him to give to his sister. She too had left Sudan, but she wasn’t living with him, and he wanted to send her this as a message from a brother to a sister. He wanted her to stay in school no matter how difficult she was finding it. Although I was pretty sure it was illegal, I had my old tape converted to a DVD copy for him to send to his sister. Virginia Woolf and Christine de Pizan can make you do funny things. Maybe the voices are what appeal to us. For all of the confusion about who is speaking, The Book of the City of Ladies and A Room of One’s Own are both conversational in tone. In The Book of the City of Ladies, in the depths of her despair, “Christine” suddenly finds that she is no longer alone in her room; three powerful women have joined her, and they undertake the process of her reeducation. The rest of the book, more than 250 pages in the paperback edition that I love so well, is really one extended conversation between “Christine,” the student, and her three teachers. Woolf ’s book, too, is conversational—there are six chapters, suggesting something of a written text’s formal divisions, but like an intimate conversation between friends, A Room of One’s Own meanders, it doubles back, it repeats itself. This can frustrate readers who want their nugget of truth; they expect A Room of One’s Own to have a point and to make it, not to circle around it, and certainly not to avoid it. In the last pages of the book, Woolf begins to draw this extended conversation to an end: “Let us agree then,” she writes, “that a paper read by a woman to women should end with something particularly disagreeable.” But then the tone of the conversation changes dramatically. Her peroration, for that is what she calls it—“every speech must end with a peroration”—is as moving as anything Cicero himself might have delivered. A Room of One’s Own is filled with all of the starts and stops and digressions of a real conversation, but it ends, much to our surprise, as a classical oration. As a work of literature, just what is A Room of One’s Own supposed to be? An informal talk or a formal oration? A lecture we hear or a text we read? Fiction or nonfiction? In writing about A Room of One’s Own, my


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students persist in calling Woolf ’s book a novel, and sometimes I think they’ve got it correctly identified—it isn’t a lecture or an essay but a story. Complicating our difficulty in categorizing “it,” A Room of One’s Own exists in multiple guises—it was first a lecture, then an essay, and finally, in the form in which we have received it, a carefully revised book published in the year following the “Women and Fiction” lectures at Newnham and Girton. While its final iteration is presented to us as a unified whole, a small book with six chapters, it still pretends to be the transcript of a single lecture delivered at the imaginary “Fernham” college. The six chapter divisions might indicate that we should read A Room of One’s Own as a series of independent, carefully focused essays. (The third chapter is, for example, often extracted from A Room of One’s Own and presented as a complete piece, “If Shakespeare Had a Sister.”) And, although Woolf creates a fictional narrator for this final incarnation of her book, “Mary Beton’s” story seems to be very close to Woolf ’s own story. Maybe A Room of One’s Own is an autobiography. Woolf herself is not much help. In her diaries Woolf calls the form “half talk half soliloquy” at one point, then an “essay,” maybe even a “brilliant essay?” in another (the question mark is hers). She writes that she is afraid A Room of One’s Own will “not be taken seriously,” so she decides she will call the finished version “a trifle,” for “so it is.” It has “much work in it”— she refers to it as “that much corrected book”—and yet, in letters written just after A Room of One’s Own was published, she refers to it slightingly as “my little book.” A Room of One’s Own is a rousing feminist call to arms, though Woolf is afraid that she will be “attacked” by her critics as “a feminist & hinted at for a sapphist” and that “there is a shrill feminine tone in it which my intimate friends will dislike.” It’s hard for us to pin down just what A Room of One’s Own is because Woolf deliberately blurs its genre. I think there is still another way of reading A Room of One’s Own. Throughout the hundred or so pages of her book, Woolf repeats her claim that women have no history. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf compiles a history of women for women, or at least the first draft of such a history. Woolf ’s offhand instruction to call her Mary Beton, Mary Seton, or Mary Carmichael may signal her intentions to us. These Marys seem to recall bit of history—Woolf ’s pseudonyms are often identified as allusions to the “four Marys,” Queen Mary Stuart’s maids of honor, all four of them named Mary. If Woolf has this bit of history in mind, the first problem is obvious—Woolf doesn’t name four Marys, just three of them. The second problem is less obvious—the Scottish queen’s four Marys were Mary Beaton, Mary Seaton, Mary Fleming, and Mary Livingston—no Mary Carmichael among them.


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This doesn’t mean Woolf is a bad historian. It shows exactly the problem of women’s history that Woolf is addressing. History is confused. “If I were rewriting history,” she says at one point, slyly reminding us that history, as it has been written, represents only an edited version of the past. In her view, “history” is a story that needs rewriting. Woolf begins her revisionist history with the hard struggle of women for higher education. Most obvious is the poverty of the women’s colleges when compared to the rest of the Cambridge colleges. It’s not just the terrible lunch that “Mary Beton” is served, although every reader remembers the prunes and custard she was offered for dessert. But, in bits and pieces, Woolf provides the history of those colleges through her allusions to their founding mothers, including Anne Jemima Clough (1820–92), whose gates were vandalized by male students in 1920, Emily Davies (1830–1921), who founded Girton College in 1869, and Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928), the Cambridge classicist (and an early student at Newnham), who actually appears, indirectly, in the first chapter of Woolf ’s book, described as “a bent figure, formidable yet humble,” a “famous” scholar, “J--- H--- herself.” In her explanation of why women’s colleges are so poor, Woolf comments that it “is only for the last forty-eight years that Mrs. Seton has had a penny of her own.” Here Woolf embeds another crucial piece of women’s history, for she is alluding to the Married Women’s Property Act, which finally gave women legal ownership of the money they earned or inherited. Whatever money this “Mary Seton” might have had, it was not her own, to do with as she pleased. In revealing that she had earned money by “addressing envelopes,” “reading letters to old ladies,” and “teaching the alphabet to small children in a kindergarten,” Woolf ’s “Mary Beton” also instructs us: “Such were the chief occupations that were open to women before 1918.” But “thanks to the toils of those obscure women in the past, of whom I wish we knew more,” Woolf ’s narrator tells her listeners how much women’s working lives have changed. The Crimean War “let Florence Nightingale out of her drawing-room,” and the First World War “opened the doors to the average women some sixty years later.” She also refers to the act that “gave” votes to women. The 1918 Qualification of Women Act extended the vote to British women over the age of thirty, but they had to meet certain minimum property qualifications. The Equal Franchise Act, extending to women the same voting rights as men, was passed in Parliament on 2 July 1928. Three months later, in October, Woolf was at Newnham and Girton to deliver her lectures. Woolf ’s narrator tells us that women are “all but absent from history,” that history “scarcely mentions” women, by which she means “the historian’s view of the past”—in other words history as it has been written by men.


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Slowly but surely, bit by bit, indirectly rather than head on, she writes back to that history, offering a history of women for women, from Cleopatra to Gertrude Bell, the writer and archaeologist who worked in Cairo during World War I and in Baghdad after the war. Bell died in 1926. The most famous passage in A Room of One’s Own, that third chapter often anthologized as “If Shakespeare Had a Sister,” famously asks “why no woman wrote a word” of all the literature produced during the reign of Elizabeth I (she’s here in Woolf ’s revision history as well) and answers it by saying that the circumstances of the life of Shakespeare’s sister would have led her to suicide. Yet Woolf “rewrites” Judith Shakespeare’s sad tale by providing us a history of women writers: from Sappho and Lady Murasaki through Margaret Cavendish, Dorothy Osborne, Anne Finch, Aphra Behn, and Fanny Burney, then on to writers whose names may be more familiar, like Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Mary Anne Evans, who wrote as George Eliot, and finally to one of Woolf ’s contemporaries, Rebecca West, the mention of whom extends Woolf ’s history of women writers to the end of the twentieth century. West died in 1983. Woolf ’s “Mary Beton” asserts that “we think back through our mothers if we are women,” adding that it’s “useless to go to the great men writers for help.” In A Room of One’s Own, even while telling us we have no mothers to think back through, she points us in the right direction. Woolf tells us that women writers in the nineteenth century had trouble because “when they came to set their thoughts on paper,” they “had no tradition behind them.” They couldn’t look to men—men wrote men’s sentences, and the “shape” of their work was made “out of their own needs for their own uses.” For Woolf, words and sentences fail women, and history does too; in the “Women and Fiction” essay published in March 1929, just months before A Room of One’s Own, Woolf notes that history, as it had been written, was the story only of “the male line, not the female.” History, as men have written it, is fiction, and if she attempts to pursue this history any further, a woman will find “only further fiction.” To write a history of women, you need to “turn history wrong side out.” In A Room of One’s Own, is Woolf turning history “wrong side out”? Like Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own, Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies also represents blurred genres. Completed in 1405, it is her most emphatic defense of women, the sic probo of her debate with her male contemporaries. The Book of the City of Ladies is also an allegory, like Dante’s Divine Comedy, which Pizan has read. Her choice of this genre is important, because, like Dante, Pizan uses allegory as her organizing principle. The crisis of despair and self-loathing that we witness at the outset of her book is brought on by men—she is in a room of her own, but she


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is surrounded by books authored by men. Their voices overwhelm her, their combined “authority” undermining what she knows to be true about women. From Aristotle, Aquinas, and Augustine to Virgil, they are the opposition she must overcome. At the moment of her deepest despair, three women come to her aid. These formidable women introduce themselves as Lady Reason, Lady Rectitude, and Lady Justice, and although they have come to “console” her, they’ve also come to educate her or, rather, to reeducate her, substituting their voices for the male voices that have overwhelmed her. Pizan’s male contemporaries imposed distinctly “female” virtues on women, enjoining them to be chaste, silent, and obedient. Pizan substitutes three quite different female virtues, embodied in “Christine’s” three instructors: women are reasonable creatures, morally upright, and capable of being just. “Christine” has a job to perform as part of her reeducation. Lady Reason, Lady Rectitude, and Lady Justice have come to tell “Christine” that it is her task to construct an entire city for women. Men are not the enemy, but men have failed women. Their fathers, husbands, and sons have neglected them, abandoning them to “a war in which women have had no defense.” It is up to “Christine” to provide this defense by building a city that will protect them—indeed, the task “has been predestined” for her. The book Pizan writes becomes that virtual city. Pizan’s City of Ladies “will never be destroyed.” Its eternity is not a matter of faith but a matter of reason. Lady Reason tells “Christine” that the City of Ladies may be “stormed by numerous assaults”—I think the disappearance of Pizan and her book for so long is one of those assaults—but it “will never be taken or conquered.” In the first part of The Book of the City of Ladies, “Christine” is full of despair. This “Christine” is childlike in her ignorance, and Lady Reason addresses her most frequently as “daughter,” sometimes even as “dear daughter” or “fair daughter.” In the second part of The Book of the City of Ladies, as “Christine” builds the “noble mansions” and “wide streets” of the city, she is supervised by Lady Rectitude, who provides a history of women who “do what they are supposed to do.” As is fitting (“right”), these women are exemplary daughters, sisters, wives, and mothers. These “upright” women are no less important than their exceptional sisters; there can be no “greater adornment in the City than women of good character.” In this part of the book, Lady Rectitude refers to “Christine” as “friend,” “dear friend,” or “most dear friend.” At the end of their conversation, Rectitude finally addresses “Christine” by her name. In the last part of The Book of the City of Ladies, as “Christine” is completing the roofs, towers, and spires of the city, Lady Justice instructs her by providing a history of Christian saints and martyrs, holy women who have justly chosen to suffer rather than to deny


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their faith. Many of my students are horrified by the saints’ lives included here (one student recently wrote, “This creeps me out!”). In this last section of Pizan’s book, Justice addresses “Christine” exclusively by name. The allegory of the building of the city of ladies is the framing narrative in Pizan’s book: she must take up the “pick of cross-examination” and the “trowel” of her “pen.” She must “mix the mortar” in her “ink bottle” so that she can “fortify the City.” The city will go up on the “flat and fertile plain” of the “Field of Letters,” where “all fruits and freshwater rivers are found and where the earth abounds in all good things.” Her building project underway, supervised by each of the three women in turn, “Christine” asks questions—why do so many men treat women so badly? Why don’t women have a place in the administration of the law? Why don’t women have a role in politics and government? Why are women so ignorant? Can they be educated? Can they perform any useful social function? “Christine” is not read a lecture. Instead, Lady Reason, Lady Rectitude, and Lady Justice contribute to her education by telling stories of women and their accomplishments. These biographical stories, scores of them, are embedded into the story of the frame. Pizan’s allegory thus allows her to experiment with another popular contemporary genre, the so-called frame-tale narrative, a collection of stories held together by a framing story, like Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, the story of a group of men and women fleeing the plague who tell stories to one another to pass the time, and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the story of a group of pilgrims traveling to Canterbury who devise a story-telling competition to entertain themselves while they are en route. Just as she combines allegory and the frame-tale narrative in The Book of the City of Ladies, Pizan also plays with the genre of dream vision, a popular narrative form in which a troubled soul falls asleep and has a marvelous dream, the telling of which occupies the bulk of the story. Upon awakening, the dreamer finds that through the dream he—or she—has found a way out of difficulty. Pizan is a master of the form; her Book of the Road of Long Study and her autobiographical Vision are both dream visions. But in The Book of the City of Ladies, she subverts the form—like the Dante who wakes up to find that he has lost his way, our narrator is not asleep. She shudders “as if wakened from sleep” when the three formidable ladies appear to her, but her experience is not a dream. She is fully awake. Yet The Book of the City of Ladies is something more than a reworking of books written by men, an “awake vision” like Dante’s Divine Comedy or a collection of stories like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. It is also a history of women. In compiling her history of women, Pizan, like Woolf, is rewriting it; more specifically she writes to revise the work of male writers who had


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previously “given” women a history. One target is Giovanni Boccaccio’s history of women, a collection of biographies entitled Famous Women, but the women whose stories he tells are often more “infamous” than “famous.” Chaucer, too, compiled a history of women in The Legend of Good Women. But it’s not a subject—good women—that his narrator really seems to enjoy. He tells us that he’s been assigned the task by the God of Love as penance for writing Troilus and Criseyde, which showed women’s inconstancy in love. Perhaps the most insightful comment I’ve heard about such male-authored histories of women came not from literary critics but from a student reader. Several years ago a young woman in my Chaucer class was flipping through the biographies of “good women” in her copy of the Riverside Chaucer—Cleopatra, Thisbe, Dido, Medea, Lucrece. In a moment of enlightenment, she blurted out, “Wait a minute, wait a minute! Is Chaucer saying that the only good woman is a dead woman?” By contrast, Pizan rewrites the history of “good” women as it had been recorded by men like Boccaccio and Chaucer. In her counternarrative, Pizan compiles a history of women by telling stories of powerful goddesses, mythological heroines, great poets and inventors, influential queens and regents, Christian saints and martyrs, and her own remarkable contemporaries. One example will show how she works to create her revisionist history. The story of Medea, most famously the subject of the eponymous tragedy by Euripides, is also included in both Famous Women and in The Legend of Good Women. According to male writers from Euripides to Boccaccio and Chaucer, this “good” woman is “famous” for having murdered her two small sons in order to revenge herself on their father, Jason, who has abandoned her and taken up with a younger woman. Pizan reclaims Medea from such male-authored versions of history. Medea’s story is introduced in the first part of The Book of the City of Ladies as an example of women whom God has blessed “with the privilege of the virtue of high understanding and great learning.” Here “Christine” asks Lady Reason whether women’s minds are even capable of learning, since so few women seem to know very much. Reason points out the obvious: “if it were customary to send daughters to school like sons,” then women would “learn as thoroughly and understand the subtleties of all the arts and sciences as well as sons.” Lady Reason follows this social critique with a long series of examples of educated women. Among many others, she cites the example of Medea; without Medea’s great learning, Jason would never have been successful in his pursuit of the Golden Fleece. Medea’s story is continued in the second part of The Book of the City of Ladies, when Lady Rectitude is educating “Christine” by providing a history of exemplary daughters, sisters, wives, and mothers. Medea as an exemplary


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daughter, sister, wife, and mother? As her story was told by men, Medea betrayed her father to help Jason, killed her brother to help Jason, and punished Jason, her husband, by murdering “his” sons. But as Lady Rectitude tells Medea’s story, she focuses on Jason’s perfidy—he has promised to marry Medea, but he breaks his promise, leaving her for another woman. There is no fratricide much less infanticide: “Medea, who would rather have destroyed herself than do anything of this kind to [Jason], turned despondent, nor did her heart ever again feel goodness or joy.” Medea can thus excel in learning, surpassing most women with her accomplishments, but she also does exactly what she is supposed to do as daughter, sister, wife, and mother. What unifies Pizan’s tour de force experiment with multiple genres is the continuing presence of the voice of Pizan’s narrator, “Christine.” In the beginning of the book, Pizan creates a second self who is weak and full of doubts. The fictional “Christine” describes herself initially as a “simple and ignorant student,” one whose “feeble sense” and “weak feminine body” are incapable of performing the job assigned to her. But as she builds the walls of the city and is instructed by Lady Reason, she grows stronger and begins to identify herself as “I, Christine.” The simultaneous assertion of the fictional second self and the first self, the strong, confident intellectual, occurs two-thirds of the way through the first part of The Book of the City of Ladies, just after Lady Reason’s story of Medea, almost as if Medea’s rehabilitation has emboldened “Christine.” And then “I, Christine” begins to sound as a refrain throughout the narrative. We hear it more and more frequently as “Christine” reclaims her identity, ultimately merging “Christine” with Christine. Fractured no more, she concludes The Book of the City of Ladies in her own voice, addressing us, her readers, directly. This is our refuge, a city she has built for us, and she hands it over to us. I would be ignoring something important if I didn’t pause a moment here to address one significant change in the last section of Pizan’s book. I have just claimed that the distinctive voice of “Christine” is what holds together the three separate sections of her history of women, and that’s the truth, but it’s not quite the whole truth. The distinctive voice of “Christine” is noticeably silent throughout the last section of The Book of the City of Ladies, which is primarily Lady Justice’s extended monologue. I wish it weren’t so, because I miss “Christine,” and so do my students, one of whom wrote that the third section of Pizan’s book “was really not what I had hoped or even thought of.” “I was expecting such a huge girl-power finale,” she laments. But many student readers are not disappointed—although sometimes I suspect that they go to great lengths with their analysis simply to alleviate my disappointment. I recently looked through a folder of pieces I’ve especially enjoyed over the years of


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teaching this book, and a surprising number of them offer my students’ reflections on the meaning of “Christine’s” silence. One student writes that the first two sections of the book represent “question and answer sessions,” and that, in the last, “Christine” does not have to interrupt with questions because all of her questions have been “fully answered.” In a similar vein, her classmate notes that “Christine seems to have grown out of her ‘childlike’ state of being and has developed and matured under the guidance of the other women.” Yet another student reader suggests a change of tone in the third part of the book—Lady Reason and Lady Rectitude were “inspirational,” while Lady Justice is “more cautionary.” “Christine will have to defend her city,” she writes, and “Lady Justice prepares her for that.” To that end, “Christine’s” silence is “appropriate,” because it shows she is paying Lady Justice her full attention. Another argues that Pizan no longer needs “Christine” to speak so often because “Christine the character” has already been established with enough “personality and authority” that she can simply listen as Lady Justice “reinforces the message of Reason and Rectitude.” One last student I will quote here scolds me a bit: “Just because the tone changes does not mean that the work loses its merit. To the contrary, though Book Three is not as witty and amusing as the first two, it is no less interesting or insightful.” At the end of The Book of the City of Ladies, just as we might have despaired of hearing the voice of “Christine” again, Lady Justice draws her monologue to an end. The City of Ladies has been completed, and its doors are open to all the women “who have lived, who are living, and who will live.” “So I turn it over to you,” she says to “Christine,” and then, “Farewell.” In this moment, the voice of “Christine” is heard again, this time thanking the three women for their help. But then, seemingly a fictional character no longer, a new Christine turns to address us. Her city represents a radical reordering of society—the city is not just for women born into the nobility. In Pizan’s city, “ladies” are not born but are made—this city is to house all women, past, present, and future, all women, “whether noble, bourgeois, or lower-class,” who are true ladies, by which she means women who “cultivate virtue,” who are “well-informed,” who “flee vice,” and who will “increase and multiply our City” by their ability “to rejoice and to act well.” The Book of the City of Ladies ends, then, with the voice of “Christine” and the voice of Christine de Pizan having become one. Just as the whole of Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies is a response to history as it has been written by the male “authorities” whose views of women overwhelm “Christine” at the outset of her story, the voices of male authority both provoke the story (and history) Woolf offers in A Room of One’s Own and provide Woolf a way of shaping her response. Our narrator is in Cambridge (or, in her fiction, “Oxbridge”), enjoying a beautiful late


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October afternoon. She might have stayed “lost in thought,” she tells us, but a single idea moves her. She begins walking, focused on her thought, but finds that her path is suddenly blocked by a man. She has dared to walk on the grass, and the horrified, indignant “Beadle” stops her. She cannot walk on his grass. Like Christine de Pizan before her, who had trespassed into men’s territory when she wrote to defend women, Woolf ’s narrator had been “audaciously trespassing” into the territory protected by men and reserved for men—the beadle (an officer of the college) and the other “fellows and scholars” of the college. Turned away, Woolf’s narrator then heads across a quadrangle to a “famous library.” There, too, her way is blocked by a male authority; she is informed that a woman may not enter the library unless she has a letter of introduction or is accompanied by a man, a “fellow” of the college. In these first two instances, men have physically restrained her; in the third, the mere thought of a man is enough to block her. Leaving the library, she hears an organ playing in a chapel. Here she conjures up the image of a man—the “verger might have stopped me, demanding perhaps my baptismal certificate, or a letter of introduction from the Dean.” But there is no verger to stop her. The mere thought of him is enough: “I had no wish to enter had I the right.” At the outset of A Room of One’s Own, male authorities have overwhelmed our first-person narrator. It’s not just their presence or their books—it is what they represent. The beadle, the librarian, the verger: they represent institutions, institutions reserved for men. The opposition at the beginning of the first chapter leads to the insight at its ending—women have been locked out. From the specifics of “Mary Beton’s” experiences at Oxbridge, we turn next to her reflections on them in London. This reflection leads her to the “swarm of questions” she hopes to answer at the British Library. There our narrator does find books about women, but they are all written by men. More male authorities. And she comes to realize what gives men their authority: these are books by “men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women.” More important than all these books on the shelves in the British Library are the books that are not there, the books that were not written by Shakespeare’s sister. In the pages that follow, we move from a focus on the fictional Judith Shakespeare, who didn’t write, to women who did. Like “Christine,” our narrator is undergoing the process of reeducation. In reclaiming women writers from obscurity and beginning to put their books onto the previously empty shelves, our narrator is also growing stronger. “I refuse to allow you, Beadle though you are, to turn me off the grass,” she cries. “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”


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Having begun her reclamation project, “Mary Beton” turns her attention to “books by the living.” Here “Mary Beton,” herself a fictional character, creates another fictional character, “Mary Carmichael.” The fictional second “Mary” has created her own fiction, Life’s Adventure. In this chapter, distanced by layers of fictional creations, Woolf lays out her own theories: of writing, of reading, of understanding and interpreting. At the end of this discussion, our narrator (whoever she is) reminds us of all the male authorities who stand between the writer and her work. “I saw, but hoped that she did not see,” our narrator relates, “the bishops and the deans, the doctors and the professors, the patriarchs and the pedagogues all at her shouting warning and advice. You can’t do this and you shan’t do that! Fellows and scholars only allowed on the grass! Ladies not admitted without a letter of introduction!” “Mary” the narrator urges “Mary” the novelist on—don’t stop, don’t look right or left, and you might just make it. In the final chapter of A Room of One’s Own, we no longer see male opposition. Instead of the “swarm of questions” our narrator had as she entered the British Library, just one remains. If men and women’s bodies are different, if they are male and female, are their minds different? Men write differently than women do, their books “celebrating male virtues” and “enforcing male values”; the “emotion with which these books are permeated is to a woman incomprehensible.” The “nugget of truth” to which this has all been heading is Woolf ’s argument that the true artist, man or woman, must “use both sides of his mind equally.” A very few men were able to do this—Shakespeare, for example, and Keats. But it is “fatal” for “anyone who writes” to “think of their sex.” The writer must get beyond sex to create—the conditions for creation “must be freedom” and peace. With this recognition and assertion, as she draws A Room of One’s Own to its end, Woolf abandons her narrator. Just as in The Book of the City of Ladies, when “Christine” is merged into Christine, Woolf ’s “Mary” disappears. “Here, then, Mary Beton ceases to speak,” Woolf announces. The oppositions and confrontations of the initial “but” are recalled: “You have been contradicting her and making whatever additions and deductions seem good to you.” Now there is room for no more disagreements. To affirm the truth that she has found and must convey to her readers, “I will end now in my own person.” And so Woolf returns to where A Room of One’s Own began, that “minor point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” That literal demand is now examined for its symbolism: “five hundred a year stands for the power to contemplate,” “a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself,” the room for the freedom to think for oneself. Without meaning to, I found myself writing “oneself ” there, in that last sentence. Ordinarily I would have used


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“a woman needs a room to think for herself ” or “women need rooms to think for themselves.” I never use “one,” at least not until today. Even if I can’t explain it, I think I understand Woolf ’s title now. *

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In juxtaposing Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies and Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own, I have focused on each writer’s imagined safe haven. I have examined the formal features of each text—voice and point of view, genre, structure—as well as on the way readers respond to these texts, and on something of the books’ shared lost-and-found status. But what we also see, more fundamental even than their shared dream of women having a space of their own, is their articulation of the disadvantages and obstacles that women face. Behind all the masking and unmasking, in addition to all playfulness and experimentation, even more than their efforts at reclaiming a history for women, these works share a passionate defense of women. Women are not a different (and subordinate) species, not the binary opposites of men, not Aristotle’s defective and “deformed” male or Thomas Aquinas’s “monster in nature.” In her despair, “Christine” cries out, “I detested myself and the entire feminine sex, as though we were monstrosities in nature.” After her failed search in the British Library, “Mary Beton” concludes that men present woman as “an odd monster.” She is the “most discussed animal in the universe.” How many books have been written about the “mental, moral and physical inferiority of women”? Meanwhile, men can confidently “say to themselves as they go into the room, I am the superior of half the people here.” “Mary Beton” knows the difficulty of combating such attitudes “if, unfortunately, one has no training in a university.” And so another critical issue. Are women “capable of education or incapable,” she wonders. “Christine,” too, has doubts about whether women can be educated. Are women capable of “great learning?” she asks Lady Reason. Do women have a “clever enough mind” for education “because men maintain that the mind of women can learn only a little.” Since Reason has told her that women are “reasonable creatures” with minds capable of “conceptualizing and learning, just like men,” “Christine” wonders “why don’t women learn more?” Institutions of learning exclude women—in Pizan’s fifteenth century, and still in Woolf ’s twentieth. Despite her exclusion from the university, Pizan was educated with care by her father (over her mother’s objections). Virginia Woolf ’s aunt, Barbara Stephen, studied history at Girton College from 1891 to 1894; in 1913, she was elected to the Girton college council, and in 1927, just the year before Woolf ’s lectures, Lady Stephen published a


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history of the college’s founding, Emily Davies and Girton College. Woolf ’s cousin, Katharine Stephen, was vice-principal and then principal of Newnham; her biography is included among those of “individuals who have been significant in the history of the College” on the Newnham website. But not all women are so lucky. Woolf ’s father did not provide his daughters with a formal university education. Woolf can only see Newnham and Girton from the outside and imagine having a room of her own on the inside—as she does in her brief short story, “A Woman’s College from the Outside.” At Newnham College, in rooms of their own, young women experience the “rightness of things”: “such is the power of names written upon cards pinned upon doors.” To be at Newnham is to find that “after the dark churning of myriad ages here was light at the end of the tunnel.” The young women Woolf imagines experience that light—but Woolf herself did not. In both Pizan’s day and Woolf ’s, not only educational institutions but all social institutions disadvantaged women—economic, legal, political, and religious. Even in the most intimate of social institutions, the family, women suffer. “Men are masters over their wives,” Pizan writes; Shakespeare’s sister “would certainly have gone crazed” or “killed herself one winter’s night,” Woolf concludes. In marriage, “how many injuries, how many cruelties, insults, humiliations, and outrages have so many upright women suffered?” Pizan asks. In the British Library, Woolf ’s narrator reads in the History of England that “the daughter who refused to marry the gentleman of her parents’ choice was liable to be locked up, beaten, and flung about the room, without any shock being inflicted on public opinion.” Such critical issues link The Book of the City of Ladies and A Room of One’s Own. There are also some echoes I was surprised to find, some kinds of eerie parallels that haunt me. I am at the end of my chapter, and yet I can’t seem to let go of them. At the outset of Pizan’s work, her narrator, the fictional “Christine,” is so overcome by the voices of male authorities that she is plunged into the depths of despair. As a sign of her wretchedness, she tells us that her head is “bowed in shame.” This gesture is repeated by Woolf. Overburdened by the weight of the “prejudices and passions” aroused by the topic of women and fiction, her narrator “bowed [her] head to the ground.” Another uncanny point of comparison is the way each writer reinterprets an object that has long been associated with female vanity. In Pizan’s work, Lady Reason wields not a scepter but “a shiny mirror.” This is not so that she can look into it constantly, like Snow White’s wicked stepmother, needing the constant reassurance that she is the “fairest one of all.” Rather than satisfying a narcissistic need, the mirror is a means to self-worth: “no one


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can look into this mirror, no matter what kind of creature, without achieving clear self-knowledge,” Lady Reason tells “Christine.” By means of a woman’s mirror, “the essences, qualities, proportions, and measures of all things are known.” Woolf too—is it just by accident?—reinterprets the meaning of the metaphor. In A Room of One’s Own, a mirror is not a looking glass in which women seek and find their own reflections. In Woolf ’s handling of the metaphor, women themselves are the mirrors into which men gaze: “Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.” And one other shared feature, a delightful way of rendering the voices of male authorities mute. In The Book of the City of Ladies, Pizan silences men with a breezy kind of dismissal. At one point, Lady Reason suppresses the name of Eustace Deschamps, one of Pizan’s contemporaries, by referring to him as “the man—I cannot remember which one—who tries to prove in his work, De philosophia, that it is not fitting that some men have revered women.” In another spot, just a few pages on, Lady Reason refers to “some pope—I don’t know which one.” And just a bit farther on, “But in refutation of what this proverb says, [sic] (which someone, I don’t know whom, invented deliberately to attack them). . . .” I could add more examples, but you see how Pizan is working here. Imagine my surprise when, at the beginning of A Room of One’s Own, Woolf ’s “Mary Beton” remembers an essay by Charles Lamb: “he wrote an essay—the name escapes me.” And again, “I thought of that old gentleman, who is dead now, but was a bishop I think. . . .” Separated by more than five hundred years, both women resort to the same sly device to chide men for their self-importance and their assumed authority. At the turn of the fifteenth century, Christine de Pizan already has a room of her own, and she has found that a room is not enough. She offers women an entire city—it’s an audacious act. Her fifteenth-century daring still shocks twenty-first century readers. My student readers are electrified by the opening scene of The Book of the City of Ladies, with its description of despair and self-loathing. Instead of finding “one nugget of truth,” a student wrote that she found “sparkling diamonds of truth” in Pizan’s book. In addition to the alternative history Pizan offers readers, she offers some readers an alternative faith. In experiencing this book for the first time, a group of my students recently focused on a passage early on, where Lady Reason tells “Christine” that “of the three noble ladies whom you see here, we are as one and the same, we could not exist without one another; and what the first disposes, the second orders and initiates, and then I, the third, finish and terminate it.” While I compared this passage to a description of the classical fates, one


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of whom spins the thread of life, one who measures it out, and one who cuts it, my students weren’t buying it. They read these lines as Pizan’s bold proposal of a new Trinity, a reading they persisted in maintaining and that they supported by focusing on the building of the City of Ladies as a new creation story—“Now a New Kingdom of Femininity is begun,” Lady Rectitude confidently asserts. My students pointed out “Christine’s” remarkable response to Lady Rectitude, a few pages on: “And I, Christine, replied to all of this, ‘Indeed, my lady, what you say is as true as the Lord’s Prayer.’” Once they had identified what one student called Pizan’s “religious daring,” there was no stopping them—despite what the New Testament epistles might have to say about women preaching and teaching, Pizan’s Lady Reason says it is her job to “straighten out men and women when they go astray.” “I come to them quietly in spirit and preach to them,” she tells “Christine,” adding, “I teach them what to do and what to avoid.” A few pages later, “Christine” tells us she falls onto the ground in front of the women, not just on her knees but “completely prostrate,” and prays to them. Lady Reason undertakes a radical reinterpretation of Genesis for her pupil. “I don’t know if you have already noted this,” she says to “Christine,” but woman too was created in the image of God, and besides, unlike Adam, she was created in Paradise and not of the “vile matter” from which Adam was formed. Eve was made from the “noblest substance” that had ever been created, “from the body of man,” not from dirt. God in no way made women inferior to men—women are made of the right stuff. In the second part of The Book of the City of Ladies, Lady Rectitude composes something of a “woman’s bible” for her pupil, first by suggesting that the sibyls were greater than any male prophet. “Pay attention,” Lady Rectitude insists, “What greater honor in revelation did God ever bestow upon any single prophet, regardless of how much God loved him, than He gave and granted” to female prophets. Indeed, as Lady Rectitude tells it, the sibyl Erithrea not only foretold the fall of Troy but the whole of Jesus’s life, from the announcement of his birth to Mary to the final Day of Judgment. Instead of Isaiah and Jeremiah, Lady Rectitude focuses attention on Deborah (Judges 4–5) and Anna (Luke 2:36–38), and she also calls “Christine’s” attention to Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, identifying her also as a prophet: “without the spirit of prophecy, Elizabeth would not have known that Mary had conceived of the Holy Spirit.” Instead of the wisdom of Solomon, Rectitude stresses the “superior understanding” of the queen of Sheba, who is introduced to us by her name, Nicaula, in the first part of The Book of the City of Ladies and who is discussed here as a prophet by Lady Rectitude. Mary Magdalene isn’t only a mourner who finds Jesus’s tomb empty—she’s the


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apostle to the apostles. At Lady Justice’s invitation, the Virgin Mary leaves her heavenly home to “rule and govern” the newly constructed City of Ladies. Pizan’s role in all this is remarkable. Like Moses, she will take up the “just cause” of women and deliver them “from Pharoah’s hands.” Like Jesus, she has been “predestined” to save women who have been “following the example of suffering which God commands.” “Christine” is the savior whose job is to redeem suffering womankind and lead them into paradise. Christine de Pizan’s audacious vision seems to inspire a corresponding expansiveness and boldness in her readers today. Virginia Woolf ’s book inspires readers as well, though what strikes me is that her much reduced demands often seem to produce not the audacity of hope but disdain for her audacity. This small-minded resentment takes an interesting form. Today it’s hard to ridicule a woman who only asks for a room. But there is still a kind of contempt when it comes to the money. How dare she insist on the money? Maybe this pettiness is the result of jealousy. In the past thirty years, Virginia Woolf has gained more than a room in the academy— there are courses and seminars, journals and conferences, cascades of scholarly articles and books. When the Encyclopedia Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World series was first published in the 1950s, there was no work by Woolf included among the fifty-four volumes, but by 1990, when the second edition was published, To the Lighthouse had become a “great book,” making an appearance in volume 60. Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse are on Time magazine’s list of “All-Time 100 Novels,” published in 2005. A room where you can produce novels like these? Maybe. But that five hundred pounds attracts a different kind of attention. In his 1991 introduction to the Masterpiece Theater dramatization of A Room of One’s Own, Alistair Cooke (who was a student at Jesus College, Cambridge, when Woolf delivered her lectures and who had women friends who attended them), chuckles a bit about Woolf ’s “tremulous voice” as she read the more than one hundred pages of her lectures, the first, at Newnham on Saturday, October 25, the second at Girton the next day. He undercuts Woolf ’s accomplishment by imagining how “memorable” the occasion might have been “if Woolf had been as fine and funny an actress as Eileen Atkins.” He subtly undermines A Room of One’s Own by classifying it as a “feminist tract”—a “seminal” (nothing Freudian there) text, to be sure, but a “tract” nonetheless. And he dismisses Woolf ’s claim that a woman needs five hundred pounds as a “preposterous condition.” He translates the sum for the convenience of his American audience—five hundred pounds represents $50,000 dollars! Of course that was in 1991. Depending on which kind of index you use to compute its relative value today, that $50,000 in 1991 translates to between $79,039.28 (using the Consumer Price Index)


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and $120,503.66 (using the relative share of the Gross Domestic Product) in 2008 dollars, the latest figures I could find. Cooke’s claim isn’t all that far out of line when you see the way others have interpreted Woolf’s economic demand for American readers. If you spend a bit of time looking at what various critics have written about the value of that five hundred pounds—and I have—you will see that his figures are actually somewhat modest. The calculations I’ve seen run from $185,000 to $300,000. No wonder so many people sound a little resentful. But where do such sums come from? None of the critics I’ve read explains how the dollar amount has been calculated, so I decided to try my hand at translating Woolf’s five hundred pounds into today’s dollar. I went first to the National Archives (UK) website. Once there, I accessed the online currency converter, which allows me to “Convert old money into new.” Since Woolf was writing in 1928 and 1929, I ran the number (five hundred pounds) twice. The result: “In 1925, £500 would have the same spending worth of today’s £14,985”; “In 1930, £500 would have the same spending worth of today’s £16,710.” Converting today’s pounds (GBP) into dollars (USD) is fairly easy and straightforward—there are many convenient and reliable tools online. The result? Virginia Woolf was asking for somewhere between $24,000 and $27,000 a year. She didn’t ask for or expect a life of guaranteed luxury, a way of life far beyond what most men and women experienced in England in 1929 or can expect today, in 2010. The five hundred pounds does not represent a fortune—Woolf’s narrator specifically condemns “the instinct for possession,” and “the rage for acquisition.” The five hundred pounds is just enough to get by; or, as “Mary Beton” puts it, “five hundred pounds a year will keep one alive in the sunshine.” The calculations I’ve done here are important in coming to terms with Woolf ’s demands in A Room of One’s Own, but Woolf also makes it clear that the sum of five hundred pounds is a metaphor—as she tells us, “the five hundred a year stands for the power to contemplate.” I think the five hundred pounds serves yet another function for Woolf. I argue that in naming that specific sum, the five hundred pounds, Woolf alludes to Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, linking A Room of One’s Own to Astell’s design of a single-sex retreat for women, which we will look at in some detail in Chapter 4. Woolf asserts that “we think back through our mothers if we are women.” I think the sum of five hundred pounds is yet another instance of Woolf creating that tradition for us. *

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I Have a Dream

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In the early fifteenth century and still in the twentieth, women faced huge obstacles—familial, social, political, legal, intellectual, economic, and religious


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ideologies disenfranchised them, excluded them, rendered them powerless, and even denied them their fundamental humanity. Such barriers could seem insurmountable. Both Pizan and Woolf begin their defenses of women with their first-person narrators brought to the brink of despair, heads bowed in shame. The remedies they devise—a city of ladies and a room of one’s own—symbolize the conditions that must be met in order for women to overcome the handicaps they face. Pizan’s city and Woolf ’s room are intended as metaphors—but what metaphors they are. At the turn of the fifteenth century, Christine de Pizan imagined a great city built by women for women, a place where, in the company of other women, every citizen of the city would find herself supported and appreciated. In choosing the title of her work, Pizan emphasized the allegorical nature of her city, specifically echoing the title of Augustine’s masterpiece, The City of God. In his fifthcentury treatise, Augustine had contrasted the earthly City of Man to the spiritual City of God, offering salvation to those true believers who, as men and women forced to live out their lives in this material world, nevertheless chose to live as Christians in the heavenly city. Whatever the fate of Rome, those who elected to live as citizens of the City of God would ultimately find salvation. A thousand years later, Christine imagined her City of Ladies as a spiritual refuge for women who suffered daily in the City of Men. What interests me is that, five hundred years on, Woolf had so much more limited demands. Rather than a great city, constructed by women, peopled by women, ruled by women for the benefit of women, where she could live and work in the company of other women, Woolf concerned herself with the individual woman who would work in solitude. In devising a metaphor that would represent what women needed, or were entitled to, Woolf was limited only by her imagination—and yet, even so, she chose something so very circumscribed. She asked for a room, and just a room, of her own. I’ve used these two works, The Book of the City of Ladies and A Room of One’s Own, to frame our reading of women’s worlds. Christine de Pizan’s work is the earliest example I know of that imagines a single-sex retreat for women, while Woolf ’s is perhaps the most well-known example of the genre. Read individually, they are impressive and revealing, but read together, they represent something much more: they offer us a female narrative tradition that is in striking contrast to the male tradition. In her defense of women, Pizan notes again and again that men have controlled the stories that are told. As Lady Rectitude points out, “whoever goes to court without an opponent pleads very much at his ease.” It remains for a “new book” to be written—one that “in accordance with the truth would uncover other data.” For her part, Woolf maintains that “masculine values” have shaped literature: “This is an important book, the critic assumes,


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because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room.” The literary canon is filled with stories of war and conquest, with tales of exploration, exploitation, and domination, with the journeys of “running boys” who “light out for the Territory.” Whether the story is about sailing home from Troy, down the Mississippi, or into the heart of darkness, the pen has been held by men. Pizan and Woolf represent an alternative story—they allow us to glimpse a quintessential female narrative, the story of a journey that has been quietly underway for more than six centuries. Chapter 2 Notes: Suggestions for Further Reading Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies is available in two excellent paperback editions. I have used Earl Jeffrey Richards’s edition here, originally published in 1982 by Persea Books; the revised edition (New York: Persea Books, 1998) contains the foreword by Natalie Zemon Davis that I quote in this chapter. An excellent translation by Rosalind Brown-Grant is also published by Penguin Books (New York: Penguin Classics, 2000). If you’d like to try reading Pizan’s book in French (and I encourage the effort if you’ve ever studied the language), the 1986 translation of Le Livre de la cité des dames by Éric Hicks and Thérèse Moreau (Paris: Éditions Stock) is still in print; ordering online is very easy. Selections from Pizan’s work, including The Book of the City of Ladies, are also available online at http://www.pinn. net/~sunshine/march99/pizan3.html, accessed 6 December 2010. The British Library makes available over three hundred images of Harley MS 4431, the anthology of works of Christine de Pizan presented to Isabel of Bavaria, queen of France; the online gallery is at http://www.pizan.lib. ed.ac.uk/gallery/, accessed 6 December 2010. (The manuscript’s organization and contents are described at http://www.pizan.lib.ed.ac.uk/context. html, accessed 6 December 2010.) The Bibliothèque nationale de France also makes a fifteenth-century manuscript of Le Livre de la cité des dames (BN MS Fonds français 607) available for online viewing at http://gallica. bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b6000102v/f1.image.pagination.r=le+livre+de+la+ cite+des+dames.langEN, accessed 6 December 2010; like the Harley 4431 manuscript, this was likely produced in Pizan’s workshop, under her supervision. For Christine’s life, times, and work, see Charity Cannon Willard, Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works (New York: Persea Books, 1984). Perhaps no other English speaker is more responsible for Pizan’s “renaissance” than Willard (1914–2005). Reflecting on her work on Pizan in the period right after World War II, Willard writes about meeting one other


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scholar who shared her interest: “he claimed that we were the only two people in the United States interested in Christine.” In this chapter, I have relied on the text of A Room of One’s Own published by eBooks@Adelaide: http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/ w91r/, accessed 6 December 2010. Several paperback editions of Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own are in print. I like the edition published by Harcourt Brace with a foreword by author and critic Mary Gordon (New York: Harcourt Brace, First Harvest, 1989). At the end of this chapter, when I refer to the plot of “running boys” who “light out for the Territory,” I rely on Gordon’s essay on the particularly American version of the male quest narrative: the “good boy” who is fleeing civilization (like Huck Finn, the hero escapes civilization by deciding to “light out for the Territory”) and the “dead girl” who is the civilizing dead weight the running boy is escaping from; see her “Good Boys and Dead Girls” and Other Essays (New York: Viking, 1991). If you would like to compare A Room of One’s Own with the essay “Women and Fiction” published in The Forum, you can access the complete text of the essay via Google Books. Woolf ’s brief short story, “A Woman’s College from the Outside,” which I have quoted from in this chapter, is available from Project Gutenberg at www.feedbooks. com/book/1394.pdf, accessed 6 December 2010. The first full-length biography of Virginia Woolf was published by her nephew, Quentin Bell, in 1972. His Virginia Woolf : A Biography is still in print today (New York: Harcourt Brace, First Harvest, 1974). Unlike other members of her family, male and female, Woolf did not attend a college at Cambridge. For an account of one young woman’s desperate struggle for a university education in the early twentieth century, I recommend Vera Brittain’s autobiography, Testament of Youth, which includes a moving account of the first awarding of degrees to women in Oxford in 1920.


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We Need to Talk: Conversation in Moderata Fonte’s The Worth of Women and Marjane Satrapi’s Embroideries

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n our last chapter, we examined the way Christine de Pizan and Virginia Woolf incorporated the symbol of the mirror into their respective works. The mirror is most often associated with female vanity, and both Pizan and Woolf write back to this stereotype, reinterpreting this image for their readers. For Pizan, the mirror is not about female self-love but a powerful symbol of self-knowledge, wielded by Lady Reason. For Woolf, women are not looking into mirrors but are, themselves, the mirrors into which men gaze in order to see their own reflections—their images pleasingly amplified to appear “twice [their] natural size.” The two works we’re examining in this chapter, Moderata Fonte’s The Worth of Women and Marjane Satrapi’s Embroideries, draw on yet another female stereotype for their I-have-a-dream fantasies: women’s love of talk. Fonte and Satrapi both show us what happens behind closed doors, when women gather together and engage in a lively, spirited, and private conversation. In these books, the first from the late sixteenth century, the second from early in the twenty-first, women’s speech is celebrated rather than suppressed. In both books, women can speak most freely only when they are in rooms of their own, rooms where there are no men present at all. In The Book of the City of Ladies, the misogynist view that women talk too much is addressed early on, when the character Christine asks Lady Reason why men have slandered women. “My lady,” she says, “men have burdened me with a heavy charge taken from a Latin proverb, which runs, ‘God made women to speak, weep, and sew,’ which they use to attack women.” I’ve added the italics here, to show that Pizan takes this attack


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personally. She responds to these misogynist charges against women through the voice of Lady Reason, who tells “Christine” that women were “endowed” with the “faculty of speech” by the Creator himself, implying that men who fail to appreciate women’s divine gift of speech are either ignorant that women, like men, have been created in God’s image, or they are maliciously trying to silence women anyway. In one of Pizan’s characteristic dismissals of male “truths,” Lady Reason deliberately undercuts their authority. The names of those responsible for such nonsense aren’t even worth remembering, she notes, “but in refutation of what this proverb says, [sic] (which someone, I don’t know whom, invented deliberately to attack [women]), if women’s language had been so blameworthy and of such small authority, as some men argue, our Lord Jesus Christ would never have deigned to wish that so worthy a mystery as His most gracious resurrection be first announced by a woman. . . .” Jesus chose to appear to Mary Magdalene after his crucifixion rather than to one of his male apostles—indeed, he commanded her to announce his resurrection to the others. In her reply to Lady Reason, “Christine” again responds personally: “All those who are jealous of me would do best to be silent if they had any real insight, my lady.” And picking up the story of Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb, she notes that “some foolish preachers teach that God first appeared to a woman because He knew well that she did not know how to keep quiet.” “You have spoken well when you call them fools who said this,” Reason replies. “It is not enough for them to attack women. They impute even to Jesus Christ such blasphemy.” Although Lady Reason goes on to show the valuable role of women’s speech throughout the New Testament, Pizan’s feminist defense of women’s words could never drown out the voices of male authorities who universally condemned women for talking too much. Classical authors like Ovid and Juvenal savagely satirize the dangers of women’s speech. In his Amores, for example, Ovid assumes the voice of an old whore tutoring a young girl in the tricks of her trade. A woman can rely on the power of her speech to deceive an unsuspecting man. “Beguile with sweet words,” the older woman advises, “and blandish while you despoil him.” Juvenal’s sixth satire is a comprehensive and brutal catalogue of all women’s failings, including their talkativeness. He condemns women for their insatiable sexual appetite and their domineering behavior, and to those terrible flaws he adds that a woman might even dare to speak her mind or offer her opinion. If she does, watch out: “Critics surrender, professors are lost; the whole crowd is silent. / No one can get in a word edgewise, not even a lawyer, / No, nor an engineer, not even another woman”! “Such is the force of her words,” Juvenal continues, that the “syllables” flow “in torrents,” making a “din like that when pots


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and kettles are rattled.” ( Juvenal may well be the source whose name Lady Reason suppresses here—his misogynist dicta, or “sayings,” were collected and widely used in the Middle Ages, a favorite source of Boccaccio, for example, whom we met in the last chapter.) Like the Latin proverb “Christine” asks Lady Reason about, the Old Testament book of Proverbs also warns men about the dangers of talkative women—their lips “drip honey,” and their speech is “smoother than oil.” A talkative woman is “bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword.” Her words can lead a man astray, for “she does not keep straight to the path of life.” “Her ways wander,” and she is so willfully ignorant that “she does not know it” (Proverbs 5:1–6). The New Testament pastoral epistle to Timothy, commonly attributed to the apostle Paul, enjoins women to silence not once but twice in the space of two verses: “Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent” (1 Timothy 2:11–12). The Church Fathers concur. In his commentary on Timothy, for example, St. John Chrysostom (his eloquence earned him the honorific, which means “golden-mouth”) said Eve had “ruined everything” for Adam—and for all mankind—the minute she opened her mouth. In his vigorous denunciation of sexuality and marriage in Against Joviniam, St. Jerome concludes that the only way for a man to avoid a “contentious woman” (is there any other kind?) is just to get out: “She floods his house with her constant nagging and daily chatter, and ousts him from his own home.” Indeed, the very book that triggered Christine de Pizan’s despair when she picked it up in her study, the Lamentations of Matheolus, lists “jangling” as one of woman’s chief faults: “the birds will stop singing and the crickets in summer too before woman finds the strength to hold her tongue.” A nagging wife subjects her husband to a verbal “torture” that is “worse than the torments of hell, with its chains, fire, and iron,” while her deceptive “linguistic sophistry” leaves the “poor wretch” defenseless. A man’s only defense against the danger of a woman’s tongue is not to marry. Perhaps the most familiar example of the threat of women’s speech—and the lengths to which men will go to control it—is Shakespeare’s “comedy,” The Taming of the Shrew, written between 1590 and 1594, at just about the same time Moderata Fonte completed The Worth of Women. The shrew of the title, Katherina, needs to be tamed not for her disobedience—after all, she does exactly what her father orders her to do and marries Petruchio—but because she talks back to men. Her speech earns her a general opprobrium; any man, even a servant, is free to insult her and threaten her, and Kate is defenseless except as she lashes out with words. For her speech, she is judged to be “a fiend of hell,” “stark mad or wonderful froward” (perverse or disobedient). Petruchio, the husband her father selects for her, has come to “wive it wealthily in Padua”;


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once married, he takes Katherina home, where he proceeds to starve her, deprive her of sleep, and threaten her with physical violence (though, to be fair, while he beats his servants in her presence, he doesn’t strike her). Katherina’s younger sister laughs at her sister’s predicament when she learns that Petruchio has taken Kate home to his “taming school.” Petruchio himself says he intends to train his “falcon” in order to “make her come, and know her keeper’s call.” But Kate resists her silencing, protesting to her husband, Why, sir, I trust I may have leave to speak, And speak I will. I am no child, no babe; Your betters have endur’d me say my mind, And if you cannot, best you stop your ears. My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, Or else my heart concealing it will break, And rather than it shall, I will be free, Even to the uttermost, as I please, in words. (1.4.73–80)

In the end, of course, Kate loses her bid to “be free,” even if all she had was her freedom “in words.” She shows her submission to her husband by offering to place her hand “below” his foot, “in token” of her “duty” to him. In recompense for her lost freedom, she earns a kiss. But Kate’s submission to Petruchio, proving to him and all the rest of Padua that she has been tamed, is noteworthy because she is anything but silent—she actually makes the longest speech in the play, forty-five uninterrupted lines, a speech that earns her the admiration of her father, her husband, and all the other men who hear her. This speech earns her their approval because she is no longer free to say what she feels. Rather, she is saying what men want to hear. *

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Just as Shakespeare was finding humor in silencing an outspoken woman, Moderata Fonte was celebrating women’s freedom to speak. We know little about what in particular might have prompted her to write The Worth of Women, but her daughter tells us that the book was finished on the day before her mother’s death; it was “brought to the present stage of completion the very day before her death in childbirth, so that she was unable to reread or revise it.” A biographical sketch of Fonte written by Niccolò Doglioni, her friend, uncle, and mentor, supplies a few more details. He notes that Fonte died on the morning of All Souls’ Day (2 November, the day following All Saints’ Day) in 1592. He also says that, on the “very day before she died,” she had finished the second part of the work “which she had titled The Worth


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of Women.” Whatever the specific prompt that caused her to begin her book in the first place, Fonte’s son indicates that his mother’s purpose in writing served a larger end. She intended to write back to men for all the “undeserved abuse, both spoken and written,” that they had “long showered on women”—men who “never believed they would ever have to suffer any punishment that corresponded even partially to the severity of the offense.” What his mother accomplished is extraordinary: “here we see, contrary to all expectations, a woman restoring her sex to its rightful honor and, moreover, exalting women to the skies by the power of her pen.” Born in Venice in 1555, Fonte published at least two substantial works before her marriage, Il Floridoro, a verse romance, in 1581, and a verse narrative, The Passion of Christ, in 1582. The composition of these works dates to the period when Doglioni was her guardian. Before she joined his household, he writes, “her talent had been lying buried, but I immediately recognized it and determined, as a lover of excellence, to reveal it to the world.” He not only encouraged her, but he says he “started arranging for the publication of her works.” Her marriage in 1583 and the pregnancies that soon followed disrupted her literary career. Doglioni seems to suggest that after her marriage she no longer had the time for writing: “[Moderata Fonte] was extremely good at running her household . . . so good, indeed, that her husband scarcely needed to give it a thought and confessed on several occasions that he had no idea what it felt like to have the responsibility of a home and family, for she took everything out of his hands and did it all herself. . . .” Perhaps it is the lack of a room of her own—a room with a lock on the door—that prompted Fonte to create a private space for women as a retreat from the demands of men and marriage. The retreat we see in The Worth of Women reproduces something of the defense we saw in The Book of the City of Ladies. The space Fonte’s women occupy is smaller than the city Pizan imagines, but, like the City of Ladies, their private retreat is both in the world and yet separate from it. In this private space, the women who are privileged to gather together are protected. Fonte’s “city of ladies” is a walled garden inside a palazzo along the Grand Canal of Venice. The garden is enclosed by the walls of the palazzo, while the palazzo is enclosed within a city that itself is well defended. In fact, Fonte’s work begins with a paean to the “most noble city of Venice,” la serenissima, a city that “lies wondrously” on the sea that “surrounds her,” behind walls and fortresses that “guard her,” and within gates that “enclose her.” This Venice, emphatically figured as female, is a unique city “as everyone knows”; she is “both adored and respected, both loved and feared,” a city notable for “the remarkable freedom enjoyed by its inhabitants.” These citizens, male and female alike, are worthy of admiration: the “courage,


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good sense, and courtesy of the men are remarkable, as are the beauty, intelligence, and chastity of the women.” We are not exactly sure who is speaking here—in praising the “uniqueness” of Venice, a republic, the unidentified narrator proclaims that “ours is a city as free as the sea itself,” a place where “incredible peace and justice reign” due entirely “to the careful foresight and skill of those who govern the city.” This first-person narrator is never identified—are we to assume it is Fonte herself? While the city of Venice is undeniably real, the women who gather together in this “truly divine city, abode of all celestial graces and perfections,” seem to occupy a kind of once-and-future moment: “there was once not long ago (and indeed there still is) a group of noble and spirited women,” our narrator begins, as if to emphasize the fantasy of what follows. The seven women “often steal time together for a quiet conversation; and on these occasions, safe from any fear of being spied on by men or constrained by their presence, they would speak freely on whatever subject they pleased.” Thus “stealing” a moment of freedom in a city that has just been described as “free as the sea itself,” the seven “noble and spirited” women we meet are emblematic of the very restricted status of women not only in the republic of Venice but virtually everywhere in Western Europe. Lack of freedom and restricted status link the women of Fonte’s sixteenth-century Venice to the women in Marjane Satrapi’s stories of contemporary Iran. In her graphic memoirs Persepolis and Persepolis 2, Satrapi introduces readers to the lives of women behind the veil; Persepolis begins, in fact, with a section titled “The Veil.” The first frame of the book shows us a small, frowning girl, arms folded, staring straight at us. Above her, the narrative commentary reads, “This is me when I was 10 years old. This was in 1980.” In the next frame, the narrator has zoomed out to show us the same little girl, or at least a small sliver of that girl, now just one in a line of nearly identical figures: “And this is a class photo. I’m sitting on the far left so you don’t see me. From left to right: Golnaz, Mashid, Narine, Minna.” Despite what our first-person narrator tells us, we do see a bit of her, the side of her veil and a bit of her arm, but our narrator needs to tell us where she is (or is not) in the picture, because in their veils the small girls all look much alike. In Embroideries, however, Satrapi focuses not on women behind the veil, which erases their individual differences, but on the lives of women behind a closed door, which reveals them. This world, too, is small—it is, in fact, a single room, though it’s not a room of their own. For the women gathered together in Satrapi’s Embroideries, this is a room that is theirs only momentarily—there is a door, but there is no lock on it. The story begins, in fact, with a brief “prologue,” which shows us a mixed gathering, a number of men and women seated


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around a table. The topmost speech on the page immediately tells us that the group has just finished a meal: “It was really delicious! Thank you.” We can’t see who has spoken this line, however. As we look at the image on the page more closely, we see that only a half of the table has been drawn—we are looking at an image on the right-hand page, the recto. The person who has spoken, the other half of the table, and the remainder of the group, which we would have expected to see on the facing page, aren’t in the picture. In response to the unidentified speaker, one man, who is drawn in profile, replies, “It’s the Missus who should be thanked. A true gourmet.” A smiling woman wearing pearls responds to the compliment: “Satrapi flatters me.” At the bottom of the page, a first-person narrator helps to sort out the identities of two of the speakers: “My grandmother called my grandfather Satrapi, never by his first name. She said one must respect one’s husband.” (The indefinite pronoun “one” is interesting here, given our speculation in Chapter 2 about Woolf ’s use of the same pronoun in “a room of one’s own.”) As we turn over the page and look now at the image drawn on its reverse, the verso, our narrator continues establishing time and place. “After lunch, the men left as usual to take a nap,” she explains, “and the rest of us, the women, started to clean up.” As we hear the grandmother address our narrator in the single line of dialogue on the page, we learn the narrator’s name is “Marji.” Instead of conversation, the rest of the page is filled with two images. The first, in the middle of the page, is a line of women, their arms filled with dishes and leftovers as they clear the table. The small black figures are drawn in profile and are almost indistinguishable—the only way we can tell them apart is by looking carefully at the differences in their clothing and their hairstyles. The image at the bottom of the page couldn’t be drawn more differently. Instead of black silhouettes, we see two men staring straight at us. Their faces are in close-up. We can identify the grandfather, Satrapi; he was drawn in detail on the preceding page, as he was sitting at the dining table, and we recognize him here. But the second man looking at us from the bottom of the page is so close to us that we can see only part of his face—as if a camera has zoomed in so much that everything below his eyes is no longer in the frame. The next few pages focus on the relationship between Marji, her grandmother, and the samovar, which occupies a prominent place inside the room the women will briefly occupy. Marji tells us that the women “gather around” the samovar and the tea it contains, because the occasion and the tea allow women “to devote themselves to their favorite activity: DISCUSSION.” But this is not idle chatter: “This discussion had its own purpose.” In the half-page below this narration, we see the “purpose” of


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women’s conversation clarified by Marji’s grandmother: “To speak behind others’ backs is the ventilation of the heart.” Turning the page, we see a tray holding nine cups of steaming tea, the tea Marji has been asked to prepare, and, below that, the expectant faces of eight women looking at us. Now that they are alone in the dining room, they are drawn with careful detail so that we can see their individual features. Because there are only eight women looking at us, and we can see that Marji has filled nine cups, we have been manipulated into an interesting position as we view this image; it seems as if we have become the missing ninth tea-drinker, as if we are looking into the faces of these women from Marji’s point of view. But any momentary confusion or discomfort we might feel here is erased by the image on the right-hand page; there Marji steps into the frame, holding the tray out to one of the room’s occupants. We are now in a more familiar position—once again a “reader” of a book rather than a participant in the story. Turning the page, we see a woman drinking tea as the narrator tells us that “we began a long session of ventilation of the heart. . . .” On the right-hand page, we see that the prologue has ended and that the session that will follow represents the substance of the remainder of the book. This title page is illustrated with an embroidery frame holding a piece of work on which the word “Embroideries” appears. The thread dangles from the completed –s, and when we turn the page we see that same thread, looped around and around itself, and the embroidery needle. It is as if Satrapi is referencing the very Latin proverb that so troubles “Christine”: “God made women to speak, weep, and sew.” Satrapi deliberately plays with female stereotypes—women’s speech, their tears, and their needlework. (The women sharing their stories in a room that is momentarily their own do cry at times, but mostly they laugh.) Their situation is much like that of the women in Fonte’s book—the women have secluded themselves in a small room, inside the walls of a private home, itself located inside the embrace of the city of Tehran. They are speaking “behind others’ backs”— that is, they are free to speak because there are no men present. The nine women in the group represent a range of ages and experiences. Our first-person narrator, Marji, is clearly the youngest present, but she is not a child. She is a young woman, and in the prologue her grandmother advises her about how to attract men—and since Grandmother Satrapi has been married three times, she seems to know what she is talking about. Rather than introducing us immediately to the remaining seven women, Satrapi allows us to learn who they are as their conversation continues. Three generations of the Satrapi family are involved in this discussion. In addition to Marji and her grandmother, we discover that the group includes Marji’s mother, Taji, and an aunt, Parvine, a widow. Parvine reveals that


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when she was thirteen, she was married off to a man fifty-six years older than she was; she ran away from him on her wedding night and sought the protection of her aunt. Four years later, her old husband died, leaving Parvine a widow at the age of seventeen. (Maybe, since she had run away before her old husband could consummate their marriage, Parvine is only technically a widow.) At her husband’s death, she inherited “a small piece of his fortune”; although she had resisted all pressures to return to her elderly husband, she nevertheless received this inheritance “because his family had decided that’s how it should be.” Her inheritance was her equivalent of Woolf ’s five hundred pounds; it was enough money that Parvine could follow her dream of becoming a painter. We also meet Amineh, who tells us about her marriage, a love match that didn’t turn out very well; she’s been separated from her husband for thirty-eight years, she admits, but she is not lonely. She tells the group about her many lovers. Also in the group are a neighbor, Azzi, and her sister; Azzi had agreed to an arranged marriage in order to escape Iran. Despite her sister’s caution (Azzi thought her sister was just being jealous), Azzi accepted a proposal from the family of a man living in Switzerland. He came to Iran, married her, and spent his wedding night with her; he left the next day, taking all her wedding jewelry, and two months later asked for a divorce. She still laments her lost virginity—and her lost jewelry. Satrapi never tells us the name of Azzi’s sister, nor do we learn the name of another married woman, who shocks us by admitting that, although she has had four children, she has never seen or touched a man’s genitals. The other women in the group don’t believe her, but she explains, “He came into the bedroom, he turned off the light . . . And then, Bam! Bam! Bam! And voilà, I was pregnant! What’s more, I was granted four girls. So I’ve never seen penises.” Marji’s grandmother consoles this unnamed, younger woman: “Quite honestly, you haven’t missed a thing,” she says. To which another unnamed woman, who seems to belong to Grandmother Satrapi’s generation, replies, “You’re one to talk. May I remind you that you got married three times!” Parvine chimes in here with her own comment on Grandmother Satrapi’s marital career: “I never really understood how it was possible to marry three times. Just one marriage was enough to make me realize that living with a man was unfeasible!” Amineh gets the last word in this exchange. “You must pay close attention when choosing your future husband,” she says, “Don’t marry with your heart but with your brain.” Although Satrapi allows three of her nine characters to remain nameless, they are not unidentifiable. They are distinguished not only by Satrapi’s detailed drawings, but by the individual stories they tell. In fact, I think this namelessness is critical to Satrapi’s strategy here—the women are nameless,


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but they are not anonymous. We overhear them in the most intimate of conversations. We learn, for example, how the mother of those four daughters has experienced sex. And the unnamed woman who knows so much about the three marriages of Grandmother Satrapi shares with us her valuable life experience, which has taught her that marriage is “like roulette”: “you win some, you lose some,” but even if you have married for love, marriage “can still go bad.” We may not know their names, but we know the women themselves. The women in Fonte’s group, gathered in that walled garden in Venice, also represent various ages, and they have similarly varied experiences of and attitudes toward marriage. The Worth of Women begins as a reunion. The women are gathered at the home of Leonora, where they are joined by the newly married Helena, who has just returned to the city. Adriana and her daughter are the oldest and the youngest women present in this group of friends. Adriana is introduced as “an elderly widow”—she is “past fifty”!— and she is accompanied by her unmarried daughter. This girl, aptly named Virginia, is dubious about marriage, although her widowed mother suspects her daughter will not be allowed to avoid it: “your uncles have decided you must marry,” Adriana warns Virginia, “you’ve inherited such a fortune and it needs to be in safe hands.” The newly married Helena is still “captivated by the charms of her new husband.” Cornelia and Lucretia are also married women; Lucretia, the “older” wife, seems to represent the ideal (her name recalls the Roman Lucrece, the moral exemplum of the perfect wife), while the younger Cornelia, may be intended to represent the real. She wishes men would go away and leave women alone. The learned Corinna is also unmarried, but she is determined never to marry. While Adriana may not be able to resist social pressure to marry off her daughter (“I really don’t know what else I can do with you”), Corinna impresses us with her ability to resist marriage no matter what. In addition to the “elderly widow,” Adriana, is Leonora, a young and rich widow who is determined never to remarry: “I’d rather drown than submit again to a man! I have just escaped from servitude and suffering and you’re asking me to go back again of my own free will and get tangled up in all that again? God preserve me!” These women are not separated by the differences in their marital status or by their varied attitudes to men; as women, they join together, without the presence of men. Freed, if momentarily, from male control and authority, they find support in the company of women, even if their “city of ladies” is reduced to the confines of Leonora’s home, surrounded by the walls of her Venetian palazzo. Before moving on, it’s important to say something here about this palazzo, for in more ways than one it represents a “city of ladies.” Fonte presents this


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house as a kind of female Paradise, complete with a garden. Her visitors, in fact, make this identification. Adriana asks, “[W]hat paradise is this? You have a real paradise on earth!” Cornelia agrees that Leonora’s home is “a paradise”— especially because it’s a place where “food and drink are on offer.” In this Paradise, they are free: “Praise God that we are free to do just as we please, even tell jokes . . . to make each other laugh, with no one here to criticize us or put us down,” as Cornelia describes it. In this case, however, Paradise was not created by God but by a woman. As Leonora explains to the group of assembled women, “this house, together with this garden, belonged to an aunt of mine.” Her aunt had refused to marry, “and so, on the good income she inherited from my grandfather (and thinking nothing of the expense, for it was her greatest delight) she transformed this garden into the beautiful state in which you see it now.” After her aunt’s death, Leonora inherited the house and the garden. Leonora’s palazzo thus represents property and money that have escaped male control. Here is a female economy that challenges male institutions—money should be transmitted from one man to another through marriage and not, as in the case of Leonora and her aunt, escape male control and fall into the hands of women. Both The Worth of Women and Embroideries, then, share their focus on women and conversation. These books, written by women, take us into a woman’s world and let us hear what women say when they are speaking freely. True “ventilation of the heart” can only take place when women are behind a closed door and in the company of other women. Marji’s family and friends in Iran would surely agree with the women in Leonora’s garden, who are very clear on this point. Only when they are “safe from any fear of being spied on by men or constrained by their presence” can they “speak freely on whatever subject they pleased.” As Cornelia says, women are free only when there are no men “to criticize us or put us down.” “Praise God” that they have a few moments of freedom “to do just as we please,” even if it is just telling “jokes” in order “to make each other laugh.” In Lucretia’s words, “we are only ever really happy when we are alone with other women, and the best thing that can happen to any woman is to be able to live alone, without the company of men.” If the perfect wife can express such a sentiment, we shouldn’t be surprised at the relief of the widow who has been freed from the restraining presence of a husband. “I derive the greatest happiness from living in peace, without a man,” Leonora proclaims, adding, “we all know what a marvelous thing freedom is.” Five hundred years later, Marji’s Aunt Parvine is, like Leonora, “saved” by her aunt; her aunt’s freedom as a widow “allowed her to think and to act for herself.” Her aunt is able to shelter Parvine when the thirteen-year-old bride runs away from her sixty-nine-year-old groom.


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When her husband dies four years later, the seventeen-year-old Parvine decides she too will remain a widow. In their writing, both Fonte and Satrapi experiment with what Virginia Woolf’s narrator in A Room of One’s Own is most interested in reading. As “Mary Beton” picks up Life’s Adventure, the imagined novel written by “Mary Carmichael,” she settles down “with a notebook and a pencil” in order “to make what [she] could” of the novel. She reads somewhat critically and increasingly unhappily until she is struck by one sentence: “Chloe liked Olivia.” “Do not start,” she tells us, and “Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.” Here Woolf cautiously addresses the topic of same-sex love and desire—a critical element of some women’s worlds, but which, for a moment, we will put to one side, to pick up again in Chapters 4 and 5. What Woolf goes on to describe here, in the guise of “Mary Beton,” is not only the possibility of a lesbian relationship but the potential for female intimacy. “Chloe liked Olivia,” she repeats, “And then it struck me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature.” “Mary Beton” recalls the “splendid gallery” of “fictitious women” in the literature she has read, “And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. . . . They are confidants, of course. . . . They are now and again mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men.” What intrigues “Mary Beton” is the possibility that “Mary Carmichael” is about to show us something else. “For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been,” she says, adding, “I wanted to see how Mary Carmichael set to work to catch those unrecorded gestures, those unsaid or half-said words, which form themselves, no more palpably than the shadows of moths on the ceiling, when women are alone, unlit by the capricious and coloured light of the other sex.” This “vast chamber” where “nobody has yet been” is exactly where Fonte and Satrapi take us. Although they begin by identifying each of their characters in relationship to men—daughters, wives, widows, divorcées—they create spaces where, for a brief period of time, the only really important relationships are those between women. *

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One remarkable feature of the free zones that Fonte and Satrapi create is that each writer chooses a form that at first seems hostile to women. During her writing career, Fonte wrote and published works in genres that were more open to women writers in the late sixteenth century—verse romances, lyric


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poetry, and religious narrative, for example—but for The Worth of Women she selects a genre that not only silenced women but that usually excluded them altogether. The Worth of Women is a literary dialogue, an extraordinarily popular Renaissance form perhaps best known by its preeminent example, Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier. Like Renaissance comedy and tragedy, the literary dialogue looked back to the ancient Greeks for its model, to Plato’s dialogues, in particular, which largely excluded women. In the Republic, the characters Socrates and Glaucon debate women’s ability to act as guardians in the utopian “republic,” and although “Socrates,” of course, wins the argument (yes, some women are capable), no women are present at this debate. In Plato’s Symposium, the character Diotima of Mantinea plays a role, although it is not clear whether she is a historical figure, like his “character,” Socrates, or the female personification of wisdom. Still, she gets to participate in the conversation. By comparison, there are no women present in most Renaissance literary dialogues. Castiglione does include women in his fantasy, but they are largely silent, even when the conversation takes a break from its discussion of the perfect courtier to design the perfect lady of the court, a female parallel to the court gentlemen. In The Worth of Women, Fonte turns the tables on her male contemporaries. Not only are men silent, they are completely absent. In the absence of men, these women don’t design a perfect man to fulfill their dreams, nor do they feel any need to defend women—women’s “worth” is a given, signaled by Fonte’s title. While the “worth of women” is not debatable, the “worth” of men is, so these friends decide to entertain themselves by debating the good and bad qualities of men. They decide that Adriana should divide them into two groups and then assign each group to argue one side of the debate. Since the newly married Helena is still so starry-eyed about her husband, Adriana decides she will speak “in defense of men.” One of my recent students felt sorry for Helena during the ensuing debate: “I couldn’t help but feel bad for Helena because she was a newlywed who was happily married but had to listen to all her women friends tell her that her husband was probably just like all evil men.” Also defending men is Lucretia, whose name signals she is the perfect wife; her namesake, the Roman Lucrece, is raped by Tarquin, and in her shame—and to spare her husband—she commits suicide. Adriana also puts her daughter in the position of defending men—perhaps because Adriana knows that Virginia is likely to have a husband of her own soon. Opposing them will be Leonora, in whose home they are free to speak their minds, young Corinna, who has already convinced us she can resist pressures to marry, and Cornelia, jaded by her experience of men and marriage. As a participant in the fifteenth-century debate about women, Christine


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de Pizan felt she had to defend women against men’s condemnation; in the sixteenth century, Fonte changes the subject and constructs a debate wherein women must defend men against women’s condemnation of them. After a wide-ranging and laughter-filled conversation, as the day draws to a close, the women gathered in Leonora’s garden have come to no agreement except that, in Corinna’s words, “if men could have heard what we’ve been saying about them, how many much worse things they’d say about us in return.” This takes the sting out of their day’s activities, or at least it should—women have listened to men talking about them for centuries without getting in a word edgewise. It seems only fair that women should get to speak without interruption for a day. Adriana also speaks for everyone when she says that their debate isn’t one that can be “settled in a hurry.” Evening is drawing near, so she suggests that the women “call it a day” and “postpone” the rest of the debate until the next day. As the women rise to leave, they agree to return to their Paradise the next morning—in time for breakfast. When they have returned to Leonora’s garden the next day, Corinna reminds them of the question that Lucretia had raised just as their debate ended the previous evening: why is it that, “even though men are a thoroughly bad lot, as we women proved in so many different ways, many women—decent, sensible women—still love them very deeply.” The second day’s talk covers many more subjects than men and marriage. Indeed, the conversation is dominated by the learned Corinna, in much the same way Lady Justice takes over the final part of Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies. But as the second day of their freedom draws to a close, the women know that they have to return to the world the way it is and not the world as they’d like it to be. And it is Lucretia, named for the noble Roman Lucrece who is one of Boccaccio’s “famous women” and one of Chaucer’s “good women,” who voices this reality. Even though men are as “flawed” as her friends have demonstrated, “with things the way they are in the world, it’s still preferable to have their protection and company than to be without it.” In the world as it really is, men are responsible for “assassinations, usurpations, perjuries, . . . blasphemy, gaming, gluttony, and other such vicious deeds. . . . Not to mention the murders, assaults, and thefts. . . .” And then there is their “ingratitude, faithlessness, falsity, cruelty, arrogance, lust, and dishonesty.” Women are “assailed,” “abused,” and “cheated” of their money, their honor, and even their lives by men, who “humiliate” them and “do all they can to harm and annihilate” them—but, even so, it’s still better for a woman to put up with one man, a husband, than to have “every man” against her. Leonora observes that “men are rotten for the most part”—but having reiterated her


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unequivocal position about marriage, she equivocates: “nothing of what I’ve said has been intended to offend good men” (however few they may be), but “it’s all been directed toward converting bad men.” Even so, she can’t resist adding, “if only they’d listen.” In her “debate about men,” Marjane Satrapi also chooses something different, adopting the form of the graphic novel. Exactly what to call the illustrated narrative genre is itself a subject of lively debate. The very term—graphic—is ambiguous. For contemporary Americans, graphic can refer to the visual, something drawn or painted, as in the construction “graphic arts.” But graphic can also mean something violent or explicitly sexual. Satrapi’s Embroideries is graphic in both senses of the word, as one of my students noted, perhaps unintentionally, when she commented that “Satrapi’s memoir was much more racy and graphic than Fonte’s.” As a reader unaccustomed to “reading” such narratives, I had trouble with the form at first, blasting quickly through the first graphic novel I picked up, paying attention only to the words and ignoring the pictures entirely. I completely failed to see their interrelationship. Although a few of my students are obsessed with Japanese manga, many student readers have an experience similar to mine when faced with the graphic medium for the first time. After her initial encounter with Embroideries, one student admitted that “this was a new type of book for me to read. Not being familiar with the comic style of graphics, this book was hard to get used to during the first several pages.” Another expressed similar hesitations: “As a college reader I am not used to reading any type of graphic novel, much less analyzing it.” “But after reading Embroideries,” she continued, “I don’t find it any less important than any of the other books I’ve read. Both structurally and thematically I can see how this book is just the same or even better than others more scholarly, and I think it can surely be compared with books like The Worth of Women.” As a reader, and like many of my students, I had to learn to slow down when I picked up a graphic narrative. I had to get over the idea that a graphic narrative didn’t have much content—a reaction one of my students had as well, when she compared the heft of Fonte’s The Worth of Women to the much slimmer Embroideries. “The Worth of Women was about twice the size of Embroideries,” she wrote, “making it feel like there was not as much substance to Embroideries.” Although not every reader will appreciate the graphic narrative—that last student concluded that the graphic form was “pointless,” for example—for others, reading a graphic novel is a transformative experience. “The instant I picked up this book,” one student recently commented, “I experienced for the first time non-stop reading. (Shhh! Don’t tell my teachers.)”


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What is so different in a graphic novel or narrative, like Embroideries or Satrapi’s earlier Persepolis memoirs, is that both images and words are used to tell a sequential story. While telling stories through pictures has a long tradition—largely illiterate medieval Christians could “read” Bible stories through the medium of stained glass windows, for example—many contemporary readers only encounter this words-and-picture combination in picture books for children and on the newspaper comics page. But if you look carefully, you’ll see these are more than simple texts—just think of the unforgettable classic Good Night, Moon, for example, or my favorite Margaret Wise Brown picture book, The Runaway Bunny, which has remained in print since 1942, when it was first published. The text in Brown’s children’s books is simple, while the illustrations are richly detailed and saturated with color. Or just pull the Sunday funnies out of the newspaper and examine them to see how they work. You’ll begin to see how sophisticated the medium is and how well you understand its complex vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, even if, like me, you usually toss that section of the paper (along with the sports page) right into the recycling bin. Most comic strips tell their stories through a sequence of panels, a series of images with carefully drawn borders. There are a variety of points of view reflected—the individual characters in a strip are experiencing the story as it unfolds, and their conversation appears in dialogue balloons or boxes. But we can also “hear” what the individual figures are thinking through thought bubbles. I don’t remember anyone giving me a lesson in the difference between a balloon with a point or an arrow, which links the dialogue to the speaker, and a bubble with little dots or puffs, which functions like a soliloquy, allowing us to hear what a character is thinking. I just seem to have assimilated the difference. The comics often include narrative commentary—which represents a different perspective than that of the characters inside the story. And sometimes there are metacommentaries on the strip’s action—a footnote, for example, or the sudden appearance of a tiny figure offering observations on the story in the panel or the strip. Recently I attended a lecture on my home campus by Hillary Chute, then Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, who called such elements “paratextual notes.” I love that term—“para” from the Greek para, meaning “alongside,” “beyond,” or “beside.” With its origins in the comics form, the graphic novel has seemed both masculine and juvenile, a genre dominated by adult male artists and produced for adolescent male consumers, at least until recently. In her review of Embroideries, published in the 25 June 2005 Guardian, Maureen Freely gets right to the point about the origins and associations of the graphic narrative’s form: “It is haunted by the ghosts of superheroes and generally


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assumed to be easy reading for sluggish children.” But women writers like Satrapi have commandeered the graphic narrative and deployed it to serve their own ends, often using the graphic medium as a way of making visible what is usually invisible and thus making public what is usually private. In her Persepolis narratives, for example, Satrapi shows us the experiences of Iranian women carrying on their lives behind and beneath the veil, while in Embroideries she takes us into the private world of women momentarily freed from the veil. The difference is clear in the way the narratives are drawn. In the two Persepolis books, Satrapi uses the more familiar comicstrip format, telling her stories through a series of sequential images. In these books, all of the images are carefully contained by borders and separated by empty spaces, the so-called gutters, the white spaces between the panels in each strip and between the tiers of strips on a single page. In Embroideries, we have no strips, no panels, no tiers, no gutters. The images have no frames. We are in a different territory here, one where the narrative knows no boundaries. Even so, this is a black-and-white world. One of the features that is most obvious about comics (and of picture books like Good Night, Moon or The Runaway Bunny) is their color—whether it’s the Sunday adventures of the Peanuts gang, the brilliant colors of Marvel’s Hulk or Spiderman, or the autobiographical books in Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor series. But Satrapi draws in black and white—I would argue that the stories she tells are so graphic (there’s that word again), that they need no added color. What I mean here may be best illustrated by the story from which the title of the book Embroideries comes. The stereotype that links women and needlework is recalled by the book’s title—we assume that the women who gather together will be working with needle and thread, that instead of an American quilting bee, the Iranian women are working together cross-stitching pillowcases or dish towels. But Satrapi conjures the stereotype only to dispel it. These women are definitely not keeping their hands busy with needlework as they sip tea and gossip. The “embroideries” of the title are surgical procedures—a “full embroidery” is a cosmetic surgery that makes a sexually experienced woman into a “virgin” again. Instead of being reborn, she is restitched. In Amineh’s words, “Today’s girls are no longer virgins before marriage. They do everything like men and get sewn up again to get married! This way, everyone is happy!” The mother of four who has never seen her husband’s genitals knows all about a “full embroidery” (“Just because she’s never seen a penis doesn’t mean she doesn’t know anything about anything!”), but she also tells the group about a “partial embroidery,” a procedure that tightens up the vagina. Parvine wonders, “Why suffer torment to satisfy an asshole?” Certainly this question is apt, but an “embroidery,”


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whether full or partial, is yet one more example of the way women are able to maneuver around the strictures of male control. Satrapi’s colorful narratives stand out against the stark black and white of her images. Freed from social conventions and masculine expectations, the women in Venice and in Tehran are able to talk freely. Although they occupy spaces that are extremely limited—a walled garden, a small dining room—there are no boundaries to limit their speech. In Fonte’s The Worth of Women, the first day’s conversation explores every aspect of the women’s lives and loves—one of my students recently commented that she thought Fonte’s text was like “an elegant sixteenth-century Sex in the City.” The women praise Leonora’s garden, they complain about men, they recite poetry, they discuss the plight of women who are forced into prostitution by the dire circumstances of their lives, they compare the relative guilt of Adam and Eve for the Fall, and they illustrate the realities of “traditional” marriage. Their discussion raises some of the same issues we identified in our examination of Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies and Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own. One of the first topics they tackle, for example, is women’s subordination to men. If women’s “worth” is assumed, and if men’s weaknesses and faults are so obvious, then, why, Virginia asks, “are they our superiors on every count?” To which the scholarly Corinna replies, “This pre-eminence is something they have unjustly arrogated to themselves. And when it’s said that women must be subject to men, the phrase should be understood in the same sense as when we say that we are subject to natural disasters, diseases, and all the accidents of this life.” Women are “subject” to men just as they are subject to the effects of an earthquake or the bubonic plague. Fonte’s women also tackle the biblical rationale for women’s inferiority. In fact, Corinna sounds as if she is channeling Christine de Pizan. When the “good woman,” Lucretia, chastises Corinna for her contempt of men, reminding her that “men were created before us and . . . we stand in need of their help,” Corinna replies, “Men were created before women, . . . but that doesn’t prove their superiority—rather, it proves ours, for they were born out of the lifeless earth in order that we could then be born out of living flesh.” As her analysis continues, her explanation sounds as if she had spent time with “Christine,” helping her construct the City of Ladies: “And what’s so important about this priority in creation, anyway? When we are building, we lay foundations on the ground first, things of no intrinsic merit or beauty, before subsequently raising up sumptuous buildings and ornate palaces.” The women’s discussion of the institution of marriage is brutal. Men’s despicable treatment of their wives is common knowledge. “It’s such a


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common, everyday occurrence,” Corinna asserts, “that it’s unnecessary to recite examples of it: they’re almost all the same.” Fathers grudgingly provide their daughters dowries “for them to buy themselves a husband.” The system that passes wealth, in the form of a dowry, from one man to another is also suspect. With that money, a woman “could live like a queen” without a husband. But when she gets a husband, “she becomes a slave, and loses her liberty and, along with her liberty, her control over her own property, surrendering all she has to the man who has bought her, and putting everything into his hands. . . .” According to Cornelia, when a woman is married, “she takes the yoke on her shoulders.” For her, to be “married” is to be “martyred, more accurately.” Later that day, Leonora “writes” a history of women, embedding in the conversation a list of female worthies. Fonte’s The Worth of Women thus reproduces the history Pizan wrote for women in The Book of the City of Ladies—but her need to recreate it shows how difficult it is for women to progress. As Woolf is to observe in the early twentieth century, women have no tradition, no history. They have no mothers to think back through. Fonte’s women are keenly aware of how “history” fails them. Together they sketch out a past for womankind, beginning with women from ancient history, including the Amazons and Sappho, Judith and Cleopatra. Instead of a history of famous men, they also focus on the history of women whose names have been obscured, the “women of Sparta,” the “women of Carthage,” and “the women of Rome,” while not forgetting those few women whose names history has preserved, like Dido, Portia, and Zenobia. It is impossible for women to write and record their history if they have no education. Fonte herself had received the “appropriate” education for a sixteenth-century woman of her class: she was sent to a convent. There, Niccolò Doglioni tells us, she received instruction in the “things they usually teach in such places”: basic literacy, needlework, and music. While she was “showered with love and kisses” by the sisters who were delighted with her “lively intelligence,” once she left the convent school, she had to cobble together an education for herself. Her grandfather did keep her “supplied with books to read and study, as far as she was able,” but he gave her brother a real education, enrolling him in a prestigious grammar school, a school where the sons of the wealthy elite were introduced to a Latin curriculum. According to Doglioni, “when her brother came home from school,” Fonte would waylay him, and “pester him to show her and explain to her what he had been taught that day, and she would so fervently impress what he said on her memory that she retained a great deal more of what he had learned than he himself.” Having thus received the better part of


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her education at secondhand, Fonte answers the question “are women capable of education” with a resounding yes. When the women reconvene on the second day of their conversation, they embark on a dazzling display of female erudition. No topic is too obscure. Together they compare and contrast female and male friendships, discuss war and peace, and create a virtual encyclopedia of knowledge, including disquisitions on astrology, clouds, rain, birds, hunting, fish, travel, cities, animals, medicine, fruits, nuts, flowers, vegetables, grains, lawyers, and painting. They add to their history of women in the same way that Christine de Pizan does, by discussing their worthy female contemporaries. And they do, of course, discuss fashion. Although she does not silence her companions, Corinna does take the lead role in this second day’s conversation, a kind of sixteenth-century Hermione Granger. Corinna’s prominence here suggests to many of my student readers that Fonte has created the character Corinna to represent herself. Like Pizan, Fonte uses the multiple voices of the dialogue form to explore women’s varied positions in society. Through these voices Fonte is able to explore traditional views of woman’s nature and status. But Fonte does not write herself into her conversation, and given the multiple voices we hear, it is impossible to know which voice, if any, expresses Fonte’s own views. We may wish to identify Fonte with the spirited and independent-minded Corinna, but the form that Fonte has adopted, the literary dialogue, deliberately resists such identification. In reading this text with students, I am impressed by their desire to hear Fonte’s voice despite her many evasive maneuvers. Although they may be convinced, ultimately and grudgingly, to resist identifying Fonte with Corinna, they refuse to give up on seeing Fonte’s presence in that walled garden. Fonte teases us with her presence—is Fonte the first-person narrator who praises Venice at the beginning of The Worth of Women? Is she the one who introduces us to the “noble and spirited women” who “steal time together for a quiet conversation”? Is she the one who describes the beautiful walled garden for us? “I shall not attempt to list the countless lovely and varied carved urns filled with citrus trees,” someone says—is that “I” Fonte? “And the fruit!” exclaims that same voice: “I shall not attempt to describe it.” That voice—that first-person narrator who does not identify herself— then offers an extended description of a beautiful fountain that occupies the central place in this female paradise. Here a bit of explanation is in order. “Moderata Fonte” is actually the pen name our writer has given herself. She was born Modesta Pozzo—in Italian, her birth name means a “humble, unassuming [modesta] well [pozzo].” But she playfully recreates herself as “Moderata Fonte,” the “well-regulated [moderata] fountain [fonte].” My students—sometimes the very ones who resist distinguishing between “Christine”


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the character and Christine de Pizan the writer—compare Fonte’s act of self-creation to the way Christine the writer writes “Christine” the character into her work. My students insist that the “lovely fountain” standing “in the middle of the garden, constructed with indescribably rare and meticulous workmanship” is “Moderata Fonte,” placing herself in a central position in The Worth of Women. “Seriously now, how cool?” one student wrote recently, adding, “I think I’m just a sucker for symbolism.” My students’ solution is a beautiful answer to the vexed question of our search for Fonte in her book. I wish I had thought of it myself. It’s much easier to see Satrapi in her graphic narratives because she draws herself into them. Her illustrations aren’t realistic, but they’re realistic enough—if you put the author photo of Marjane Satrapi on the back flap of the paperback edition of Embroideries next to the drawings of “Marji” in Embroideries, you will see the similarity immediately, down to the carefully placed mole on the right-hand side of her nose. This mole seems to link the generations of women in Marji’s family—we see it on her grandmother’s face and on Aunt Parvine’s face. One page even presents the three women in three images drawn one below the other, with Grandmother Satrapi at the top of the page, Parvine in the middle, and Marji on the bottom. Take out your pen, draw three lines linking their faces, and you’ve begun a family tree, but one that depicts women’s ancestors and descendants instead of men’s. And yet in calling her drawn self “Marji,” Satrapi maintains that distinction between herself as writer and the character she creates for herself. The nine women in Iran discuss many of the same topics that Fonte’s women discuss in Venice. Most obviously, they love to talk about sex and love, men and marriage. And, just as Fonte’s women recognize that education is key, many of Satrapi’s characters focus on their desire for education. Parvine, for example, takes the small inheritance she receives after her elderly husband’s death and leaves Iran; “I went to Europe to realize my dream of becoming a painter,” she explains. Her education is sexual as well as artistic: “It’s there that I knew love,” she says. Amineh too found herself becoming “educated” in Europe. She finally tracked down her husband in Berlin, but she decided “all that he’d learned of western culture was to slick back his hair” and “to kiss on the right and the left. . . .” She spent the next year trying to fill her days by taking classes at the Goethe Institute during the mornings and dance classes at night. She took a lover too, and learned enough from him to leave her husband. In another story, Marji’s mother, Taji, tells her friends and family about another friend’s daughter who had just graduated from high school when she agreed to marry a forty-one-year-old man she’d never met because he “has lived in England for the last 25 years.” His “seven houses” in London and “two in Monaco” seemed to offer the eighteen-year-old an escape—well,


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that and the fact that the prospective groom is described as a “a multimillionaire.” The girl married her groom, and once in London, she was educated—there she learned that her husband was a homosexual. Azzi, too, looked to Europe for a freedom and an education; the man she agreed to marry lived in Europe, where she wouldn’t have to wear the veil anymore, and he promised her she could continue her education there. “To be free!!!” a friend exclaimed, “What more could you want?” While the women in Tehran talk, the samovar is the object around which they gather, as the fountain is the focal point for Fonte’s women. If Fonte the woman is embodied by the fountain in Leonora’s walled garden, Marji is established as the keeper of the samovar. Her grandmother gives her the crucial role in the making of tea and Marji, as she tells us, “I took care of it morning, noon and night.” She tells us about the crucial role the samovar plays in women’s lives: “Everyone gathered around this drink in order to devote themselves to their favorite activity.” And that activity, as we have seen, is “DISCUSSION.” Marji’s job is to “cook” the tea until it reaches “its proper strength.” Her skill earns the praise of all of the women who gather around: “Ah, finally!” one exclaims, “What timing!” adds another. There are oohs and aahs from everyone as she serves the tea from the tray she has carried into the room. Marji’s tea conjures up the stories the women tell while Satrapi’s pen and ink capture their stories on the page. *

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In their “recording” of women’s conversations, both The Worth of Women and Embroideries challenge our notions of narrative storytelling. Both books have a beginning, a middle, and an end, of course—the women gather and their conversation begins, the women must depart and their conversation ends. But these narratives are not linear. Instead, like real conversations, they meander forward, then they digress, they repeat themselves, they circle back, then leap ahead. This is more obvious in The Worth of Women, where the women decide to focus their conversation by debating about the relative merits of men and then take up sides, one group to defend men, the other to attack them. But throughout their conversation, the women realize that they have “lost track” of their debate and agree to double back to pick up the argument where they have left off. Student readers are sometimes frustrated by the “directionless” nature of all this talk. What’s the point? Where is all this headed? In despair, one student reader lamented, “There is no break! And it just drones on and on.” Another student in the same class, who sat just a few desks away, seems to have grasped something of Fonte’s point in the women’s “unfocused” discussion: “I would keep agreeing with


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what they were saying and never come to a conclusion,” she wrote, adding, “It was hard to choose a side because they all had meaningful statements.” Satrapi’s graphic narrative is much shorter, so there is less time to realize that the conversation is really going nowhere, but here too the story “proceeds” by recording a series of stories, told one after another and linked only loosely by free association and shared experiences. One student, grappling with the format of the graphic narrative, linked the varied images of Satrapi’s pages with the unfolding discussion. “Not being familiar with the comic style of graphics,” she wrote, “this book was hard for me to get used to during the first several pages.” She missed the chronology of more conventional storytelling. But then she began to see that a linear format would have “limited her [Satrapi’s] options.” “Satrapi did a fantastic job with mixing up the layouts of each page,” she concluded, “Rarely were two pages ever the same. This technique made her story all the more interesting to read. It was almost like trying to follow a puzzle or decipher a code.” And yet, at the end of both of the books, as readers we’re left with the reality that we wind up exactly where we began. What does this say about the purpose and value of women’s conversation? In the last chapter of A Room of One’s Own, after our narrator has finished reading “Mary Carmichael’s” novel, she picks up a second novel, this one by “Mr. A., who is in the prime of life and very well thought of, apparently, by the reviewers.” In beginning his book, she contrasts her experience of reading Life’s Adventure with her experiencing of reading Mr. A’s novel: “it was delightful to read a man’s writing again. It was so direct, so straightforward after the writing of women.” As an example of men’s writing, it showed “freedom of mind,” “liberty of person,” and above all, “such confidence in himself.” But “after reading a chapter or two,” the narrator observes a “shadow” falling across the page, a shadow “something like the letter ‘I.’” Further reflection leads her to conclude that “Mr. A’s” novel—and all those like it—represent “some purely masculine orgy.” “Do what she will,” Woolf writes, “a woman cannot find in them that fountain of perpetual life which the critics assure her is there. It is not only that they celebrate male virtues, enforce male values and describe the world of men; it is that the emotion with which these books are permeated is to a woman incomprehensible.” In her essay “Women and Fiction,” Virginia Woolf, writing as herself and not as “Mary Beton,” is more specific: before a woman can write as she wants to, as she needs to, she faces many obstacles. The “form of the sentence does not fit her,” she says, because “it is a sentence made by men.” When it comes to writing a novel, a woman must have “the courage to surmount opposition”: men are the arbiters of convention, and masculine values “prevail there also to a very great extent.” When she sits down to


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write, a woman will discover that “she is perpetually wishing to change the established values—to make serious what appears insignificant to a man, and trivial what is to him so important.” Women writers have begun to make those changes: “women are beginning to explore their own sex, to write of women as women have never been written of before; for of course, until very lately, women in literature were the creation of men.” In both Moderata Fonte’s The Worth of Women and Marjane Satrapi’s Embroideries, we see women writers writing women. Woolf argued that, to make the novel a genre suitable for expressing herself, a woman needed to “change the established values.” In the two works we’ve been examining in detail in this chapter, the writers have manipulated their respective genres “to make serious what appears insignificant to a man, and trivial what is to him so important.” In the literary dialogues of the sixteenth century, like Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, for example, male authors substituted polite conversation for the sic-et-non dialectic of the medieval Scholastic argument, but the end was still the same: to prove a point, to win the debate, to decide once and for all “yes” or “no.” In Fonte’s dialogue, by contrast, no conclusions are reached—the point of the women’s conversation isn’t to win an argument, even though the women are divided in sides to debate pro and con. In fact, the argument itself is often forgotten in the conversation. Repeatedly the women realize they’ve “lost” their way, but in the end their conclusion is inconclusive. The whole debate about the “worth” of men and marriage is deferred while Corinna recites a long poem about romantic love—and then the women go home. In Satrapi’s graphic narrative, there is even less of a “point”—there is nothing to debate, no argument at all. There is no single story that unfolds in a linear fashion, no cause and effect. The purpose of the discussion is, as Marji tells us, “ventilation.” Like the women in Fonte’s walled garden, the women in the Tehran dining room keep circling back in their conversation. One of the most significant ways Satrapi’s Embroideries resists the chronological sequence of events that unfolds in the conventional narrative is not obvious at first, but once you look carefully at each page, you see that there are no page numbers. To try to negotiate your way through this book becomes difficult without the familiar numeric markers, and when you talk about Embroideries with someone else, as I do in class, it’s hard to make your point with reference to the book. As you flip through the pages looking for the image you’re trying to find, you find something else instead, and you’re distracted by the new image. Your conversation about the book becomes as free-flowing as the conversation in the book. Instead of the chronology of numbered pages or the linearity of the comic strip, Satrapi has unbound the images on her pages. Rather than the


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left-to-right, top-to-bottom sequencing of panels, Satrapi loves to embed circular images in her narratives. She may place all nine women in a circle on a single page, for example, or, in one memorable spot, create a circle of Parvines in the middle of the page, each of her faces responding to a different woman in the group around her. But perhaps the most memorable of Satrapi’s yonic images appears at the end of a story Marji tells about her friend, Shideh, who tries to practice a little love magic on her boyfriend by preparing him a special cup of tea. The final drawing shows Shideh’s speech as a spiral of words when her boyfriend rejects the love potion:

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If men’s stories are filled with discovery and conquest, of boldly going forward where no men have ever gone before, then the stories in The Worth of Women and Embroideries may well represent the quintessential female journey—in both books, the women end up exactly where they started. In Venice, the seven women who gather in Leonora’s walled garden find Paradise for the brief two days they have together; but in the end, as the sun is setting, they must leave this female paradise. And so, Fonte concludes, “the women all took their leave of one another and went off to their respective homes.” In Tehran, nine women gather in a dining room after a


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noon meal. The men go off for naps, but after the women have done the dishes, they find their bit of paradise gathered around the samovar. The space is theirs only temporarily—just as Grandmother Satrapi is advising Azzi to “stop sniveling” about her lost virginity, Marji’s grandfather abruptly enters the room—there is no lock on the door to keep him out. Marji’s grandmother responds abruptly. “Go back to sleep, you,” she says. But as we turn the page, we see he stays—for two more scenes occupying the next two pages. Grandmother Satrapi is not smiling in the close-up image on the first of these pages. “Go on, go to sleep!” she says again, adding, “It’s better for you.” In the second image, we have zoomed out, and we see Amineh and another of the room’s female occupants, hands folded, both sitting on a sofa. Grandmother Satrapi is standing, arms folded, staring at her husband. “Go on!” she repeats. At last he turns to go, and a two-page spread shows us all nine women, once more in silhouette, but this time, instead of a small line of women in the middle of the page, as in the earlier representation at the beginning of the book, the line of women spreads out all the way across both pages. Instead of being distinguished only by their clothing and hair, we have come to know them so well that we can tell them apart—and we can also see that they are laughing and still engaged in conversation, facing each other in pairs. Only Grandmother Satrapi is not talking—she’s staring at her husband, her arms still crossed across her chest. Significantly, the samovar itself appears on the far left of the two-page line of women, its puff of steam a reminder of the “ventilation of the heart” that’s taken place in the room. One of the few men in my class obviously identified with the predicament of Grandfather Satrapi, who is clearly unwelcome in this women’s world. My student decided that the image “represents the long walk that Satrapi made through all of the women back out of the room. . . . It also shows how outnumbered Satrapi was in the room.” In her take on this image, another student is quick to note that there is no text on this page: “there are no balloons or words because the focus is on the only man walking away,” she writes. But there is one more image in Embroideries. As we turn over the righthand page of this two-page image, we see that the focus is not on the women who remain in the room but on the man who has left it. The last scene shows us not the women with whom we’ve spent so much time, but Grandfather Satrapi. His final comment, “When the snake gets old, the frog gets him by the balls,” is cryptic, but whether you read it as the moral of an Aesop-like fable or as a bit of Freudian imagery, it’s clear that he feels out-matched by the combined force of nine women. Still, as one student notes, “I think the last page is a reminder that although these women might think and talk like they live in a women’s world, the reality is that they do not.” This final image,


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“the last thing that will be seen,” another student decides, “is like when the director pans out during the end of a film. . . . Satrapi the author is taking this graphic novel that is about a ‘women’s world’ and bringing the audience back to the real world. The man is the one who is highlighted at the end and in glorious black-and-white.” And so, it is Grandfather Satrapi who dominates the end of Embroideries. In the end, Marjane Satrapi focuses not on women and their stories but on the patriarch of the family, the owner of the home in which we have been privileged to spend so much time. Like the women who occupied it so briefly after dinner and over tea, we are only temporary inhabitants of this space, just visitors to this makeshift women’s world. Chapter 3 Notes: Suggestions for Further Reading Moderata Fonte’s The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men, edited and translated by Virginia Cox (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), makes Fonte’s work accessible in English for the first time. The Worth of Women was originally published in 1600, but like Christine de Pizan before her, Fonte and her work disappeared. In her introduction to her edition, Cox notes that “there is evidence of an acquaintance with her writings in the works of several writers of the first half of the seventeenth century.” But after about the middle of the seventeenth century and “until very recently, Fonte’s writings appear to have attracted little serious critical scrutiny. . . .” As in the case of Pizan, “Her modern critical rediscovery began in the 1970s, under the impulse of the feminist movement.” A modern critical edition of Il merito delle donne, edited by Adriana Chemello, was published in 1988; Chemello’s Italian text is available online at http://www.intratext.com/IXT/ITA3097/ (I Edizione IntraText CT), accessed 13 December 2010. Cox’s edition of The Worth of Women is a volume in the University of Chicago’s series, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Each volume in the series begins with an introductory essay, “The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: Introduction to the Series,” by two of the foremost scholars of the early modern period, Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil, Jr. This introduction provides an invaluable survey of the prevailing attitudes toward women (“The Misogynist Tradition, 500 BCE–1500 CE”) and of the early modern efforts to dismantle those misogynist views (“The Other Voice, 1300–1700”), including a brief discussion of Christine de Pizan’s role in this reassessment of women, their potential, and their place in society. Marjane Satrapi’s Embroideries, translated by Anjali Singh, is available in paperback (New York: Pantheon Books, 2005). Her two earlier graphic


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memoirs, Persepolis and Persepolis 2, are also published by Pantheon; you can buy them individually, as a boxed set, or in a single-volume The Complete Persepolis. I highly recommend watching Satrapi’s 2007 Oscar-nominated film, Persepolis, while you’re reading Embroideries. There’s an American-language version, but why not see the original, in French (with English subtitles), if for no other reason than to hear the wonderful performances of Catherine Deneuve as Marji’s mother and Danielle Darrieux, whose film career began in the 1930s, as Grandmother Satrapi. Aside from the essay by King and Rabil, noted above, one of the best sources for medieval attitudes about women is Women Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts, edited by Alcuin Blamires with Karen Pratt and C. W. Marx (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Although the classical and medieval sources I’ve used here are available in a variety of translations (many of them easily accessible online), I’ve quoted from Blamires’s anthology. For similar views about women at a slightly later date, see Suzanne W. Hull’s Women According to Men (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 1996) or Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540–1640 by Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985). All three books are still in print, and used copies are widely available. In an essay on women and the literary dialogue, Virginia Cox writes about the absence of women from Renaissance literary dialogues like Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier. She notes that there is no previous text that would have “prepared Castiglione’s readers for the novelty of the appearance of women in a dialogue whose style and structure proclaim its affiliation to the hitherto exclusive masculine . . . tradition. The importance of this fact for our reading of the Cortegiano can hardly be overemphasized.” On women’s silence in male-authored dialogues, Cox notes, “Where modern readers are struck by the silence of Castiglione’s women speakers, his contemporaries would have been more likely to be struck by the fact that there were women present at all” (386). Her essay, “Seen But Not Heard: Women Speakers in Cinquecento Literary Dialogue,” is found in Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, edited by Letizia Panizza (Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre, 2000), 385–86. Two other excellent discussions of women’s absence from literary dialogues are Valeria Finucci’s The Lady Vanishes: Subjectivity and Representation in Castiglione and Ariosto (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), and Janet Smarr’s Joining the Conversation: Dialogues by Renaissance Women (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005).


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Design for Living: Women’s Communities in Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure and Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies

I

n each of the women’s worlds we’ve examined up to this point, whether it’s the imaginary City of Ladies, the not-yet realized dream of a room of one’s own, or the temporary, ad hoc occupation of a garden or dining room, we have seen no planned communities. Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies is carefully constructed and organized, but what will women do with themselves once they are safely protected behind the city’s walls? If women should ever have a space to themselves for more than a few hours or a couple of days, what will they turn their attention to when they’ve talked themselves out? And even if a woman has a room of her own, she can’t write all the time. How will women occupy themselves when—or if—they achieve a space of their own? In pairing Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure and Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, we will find answers to these questions. In this chapter, we are narrowing our focus chronologically and geographically. The dreams Cavendish and Astell articulate are separated by a matter of decades rather than the centuries that separated Pizan and Woolf or Fonte and Satrapi—Cavendish is the older of the two, born in 1623, Astell the younger, born in 1666, seven years before Cavendish’s death. Both are Englishwomen, yet they have an even closer geographical connection. Margaret Lucas married William Cavendish, the first duke of Newcastle, while Astell was born in Newcastle and spent the first twenty years of her life there—her biographer notes that Astell was “sure to have


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known” Cavendish’s work and her “interesting voice” as a writer. More significantly, they also share an extreme political and religious conservatism, which complicates the feminist positions they articulate and the women’s worlds they each create. Despite these obvious though perhaps coincidental similarities, it would be hard to find two women who are personally more different. Margaret Lucas was born to a wealthy family whose social position secured for her a place as lady-in-waiting to Queen Henrietta-Maria, the French-born wife of King Charles I; when the queen fled the strife-torn country in 1644, Margaret Lucas left England with her. In Paris with the English court-inexile, Lucas met and married William Cavendish, a widower some thirtyfour years her senior. The young Margaret was noted for her extreme shyness and her beauty, William for his wealth and his loyal service to the king. After their marriage, the couple spent the remaining years of the English Civil War and the period of the Commonwealth on the continent, moving to Antwerp in 1648; after the execution of Charles I in 1649, William Cavendish was barred from returning to England, and his estates were confiscated. Margaret returned to London in 1651, where she worked tirelessly with her husband’s younger brother to save some of the Cavendish family’s wealth. She went back to Antwerp in 1653 and remained there with her husband until the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 allowed them to return to England. Cavendish’s literary career began in 1653, with the publication of her first poems and “philosophical fancies,” and continued until her death in 1673. Unlike most women of her day and certainly of her class, she published what she wrote, she made sure her authorship was proclaimed on the title pages of her books, and she displayed engraved images of herself in frontispieces inside the covers. She did not limit herself by writing only in genres “acceptable” for those few women who did publish in the early seventeenth century, lyric poems, devotional works, and personal letters, for example. In all she published fourteen books, including two volumes of plays, a number of philosophical and scientific works, a utopian romance that has often been called the first work of science fiction in English, a biography of her husband, the 1667 Life of William Cavendish, and her own autobiography, A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life. Her recent biographer, Kate Whitaker, notes that “[i]n the first forty years of the [seventeenth] century fewer than eighty books by women had been published in England—making up only one-half of 1 percent of all books.” Cavendish wrote and published as if she were trying to make up the difference all by herself. She died at age fifty, survived by her much older husband, who buried her in Westminster Abbey and then published a tribute


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to her, Letters and Poems in Honor of the Incomparable Princess Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle in 1676. Mary Astell’s life and career were markedly different from Cavendish’s. Although she was the daughter of a well-to-do Newcastle coal merchant, a member of the gentry, Astell lived most of her adult life in genteel poverty and privacy. She received no formal education (nor did Cavendish), the family’s declining resources spent exclusively on her younger brother’s schooling at the Royal Grammar School. When her father died, he left assets of about five hundred pounds, which had to secure his son’s future and provide support for his wife, his twelve-year-old daughter, and his own unmarried sister. The sum was enough to secure an apprenticeship with a local lawyer for his son, but he left no money for a dowry for his daughter. Instead, three Mary Astells—his sister, wife, and daughter—lived together in one household. When Astell’s aunt died in 1684, she and her mother were left in debt and with no future prospects in sight. Four years later, Astell’s life took an unexpected turn. There was no court appointment and no wealthy husband to rescue her and offer her a dazzling life of privilege. Instead, almost unimaginably, Astell determined to make a life for herself. At the age of twenty-one and unaccompanied by any friend or family member, Astell made the trip from Newcastle to London, ultimately settling in Chelsea, where she was to spend the remainder of her life. Aside from the work that Astell published between 1694 and 1709, few records of that life survive. In her groundbreaking biography of Mary Astell, published in 1986, Ruth Perry notes that when she first started to research Astell’s life, “only four of her letters had been preserved in the two great libraries of Britain, the Bodleian at Oxford and the British Museum, and these had been saved because they had been addressed to prominent men of the period. . . .” During her research, Perry was able to locate a few more letters and “fragments,” saved not because they had been written by “the celebrated Mary Astell,” but because they had been addressed to wealthy and influential recipients. At the time of Astell’s death in 1731, no one published “letters and poems in honor of the incomparable Mary Astell”; no one saved her manuscripts, her correspondence, her books, or her papers. There are no surviving likenesses of Astell. She was not buried with the famous and the great in Westminster Abbey but quietly in the burial ground at Chelsea Old Church. The exact site of her grave is unknown; today her name is on a plaque inside the church. In addition to the work, what survives is Astell’s singular life. While almost all women of her class married, Astell deliberately chose not to marry. That she remained single is not the inevitable consequence of her lack of a dowry, the means with which to secure a husband, but rather the result of Astell’s


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own conscious decision. Astell thought long and hard about the institution of marriage; the results of her analysis, Some Reflections on Marriage, were published in 1700. In that series of “reflections,” she examines what marriage means for women. “If all men are born free,” she famously asks, “how is it that all women are born slaves?” In London, and without the benefit of family connections, a wealthy husband, or a secure financial future, Astell was surrounded and sustained by women friends, companions, and supporters. I suppose this is what most distinguishes Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell from our point of view here. For all her public life in London and the many celebrities the Cavendishes entertained, Margaret Cavendish spent much of her time alone with her husband at Welbeck Abbey, in Nottinghamshire. Her husband was her only real friend, companion, and supporter—he was, as well, her teacher, mentor, patron, and most enthusiastic audience. For Margaret Cavendish, there was no City of Ladies, at least not in real life. But in her imagination, she created and recreated “cities of ladies,” imagining a female academy, an Amazonian commonwealth, a utopian fantasyland ruled by an empress, and the Convent of Pleasure, which is our specific focus in this chapter. By contrast, Astell spent her life in a “city of ladies,” supported by a circle of nurturing women friends—indeed, Chelsea has been described as “very much a female enclave when Astell settled there.” Much like Christine de Pizan two centuries earlier, Astell engaged in public debates, through her publications, with a wide range of male “authorities,” including churchmen, politicians, philosophers, and literary men like Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, publishers of The Tattler, and Jonathan Swift. She devised only one refuge for women, the subject of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of Their True and Greatest Interest, first published in 1694. Astell may not have produced as many different works as Margaret Cavendish, but her bookseller, Richard Wilkin, certainly kept busy—A Serious Proposal to the Ladies went through five editions. Most important, the all-female space Astell envisioned was not just a metaphor, a product of her imagination or a daydream on paper—she attempted to realize the women’s world she proposed. *

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If you’ve encountered Margaret Cavendish before, it may be the same place I first did—in the pages of Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s One. There, after her discussion of the fictional Shakespeare’s sister, Woolf describes several Englishwomen writing before the eighteenth century, Margaret Cavendish among them. Woolf ’s profile of Cavendish is memorable, but not kind. “What a vision of loneliness and riot the thought of Margaret


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Cavendish brings to mind!” Woolf exclaims, “as if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death.” Woolf acknowledges Cavendish’s “passion for poetry,” but she concludes that her writing is “disfigured and deformed.” Disfigured and deformed by her “rage,” disfigured and deformed because “no one taught her.” When the students in my literature classes read Woolf ’s description of Margaret Cavendish, they laugh—until they realize that they’ll be reading Cavendish later in the semester. Inspired and encouraged by her husband, Cavendish wrote about virtually everything that interested her. She published two collections of poems, epistles, dialogues, and “fancies” in 1653; she gathered more of her essays, reflections, poems, and opinions into a collection she titled The World’s Olio, published in 1655, the same year she published The Philosophical and Physical Opinions. In addition to her narrative fantasy, The Blazing World (1666), she also began to write plays, eventually publishing nineteen dramas in two separate volumes, starting with Plays and Orations of Diverse Sorts, which appeared in 1662. In two of the plays in this collection, Bell in Campo and The Female Academy, Cavendish experiments with the idea of a “world” inhabited solely by women, but her most fully drawn exploration of an all-female space is The Convent of Pleasure, included in her 1668 Plays, Never before Printed. As The Convent of Pleasure begins, Cavendish focuses our attention on the marriage marketplace—like Shakespeare’s Petruchio, the young men we see in the opening scene of The Convent of Pleasure hope to “wive it wealthily”—and “if wealthily,” then “happily.” We don’t see any women at all onstage; rather, we see three young gentlemen meeting up at a critical juncture in their individual lives and in the larger life of their social world. The first of these young men asks the second why he is looking “so sadly.” The second, Tom, responds that he has been at the funeral of Lord Fortunate. He’s not grieved by the death of Lord Fortunate, however, but at the fact that Lord Fortunate’s money will pass to his only heir, a daughter. Lady Happy will be “very rich.” A wealthy heiress might seem to offer a wonderful prize for three unmarried gentlemen, but Cavendish quickly shows us why an heiress represents a threat to men, regardless of their wealth or social status. When wealth escapes patrilineal lines of descent and comes into women’s hands, it endangers all men. According to the first young man, who has money at his command, an heiress like Lady Happy represents a financial loss: “If she be so rich, it will make us all . . . spend all our wealth in fine clothes, coaches, and lackeys to set out our wooing hopes.” The third young man is a younger brother, and he has no wealth to lay out in the hope of acquiring a wealthy heiress. But, as this unfortunate


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young man makes clear, even men with no money to spare will risk the little they have or the little that they can get their hands on. They will “undo” themselves “upon bare hopes, without probability.” According to these young gentlemen, Lady Happy is “handsome, young, rich, and virtuous,” but the only “virtue” that seems to matter to them is her wealth. As the young men exit the scene, Lady Happy and one of her attendants enter. The servant reiterates Lady Happy’s manifold gifts, describing her as “young, handsome, rich, and virtuous.” Lady Happy immediately shows herself to be witty and determined, as well, but these qualities seem to have no value in the marketplace of marriage. Madam Mediator, making her entrance, expresses her fear that Lady Happy will remove herself as a commodity from the marriage exchange. “Surely, Madam, you do but talk and intend not to go where you say,” she remarks, adding, “surely you will not encloister yourself, as you say.” But the rumors that Madam Mediator has heard are true—taking herself out of circulation is exactly what Lady Happy has in mind. It is clear that Lady Happy has thought a great deal about the institution of marriage and what it means for women, and her conclusions constitute a thorough indictment of “traditional marriage,” at least as it is experienced by women. Even if she “should marry the best of men,” a woman will find “more crosses and sorrows than pleasure, freedom, or happiness”; even marriage to a good man will impose on her “a greater restraint than a monastery.” And “since there is so much folly, vanity, and falsehood in men,” finding a “good” man is not so easy. Lady Happy has concluded that women shouldn’t endanger themselves by marrying; the only thing they stand to lose by refusing to marry is endless “trouble” and “vexation.” Instead, she means to retire from the world but, as she makes clear, her withdrawal into the convent she has planned does not mean she is giving up all the pleasures of the world. She reasons, at some length, about the folly of a “rational creature” who would deny herself the enjoyment of life. “What profit or pleasure” can there be in a life of self-denial, she asks. Here, through the logic of Lady Happy’s analysis, Cavendish challenges long-standing Christian ideals of abstinence. In her convent, Lady Happy will avoid the “cares and vexations, troubles and perturberance of the world,” but she will not sacrifice its joys. When Lady Mediator suggests that the greatest pleasure of women is men, Lady Happy is quick to disagree. “Men are the only troublers of women,” she asserts. The only women “fit for men” are women who are “poor,” lacking the “means to buy delights and maintain pleasures.” If a woman can afford to remain single, she would be “mad to live with men, who make the female sex their slaves.” Lady Happy vows that she “will not


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be so enslaved.” She is “resolved to live a single life and vow virginity,” but her convent will not be “a cloister of restraint but a place for freedom,” a place where the senses will not be denied but “pleased.” Like the “ladies” who withdraw into Pizan’s City of Ladies or the women who gather to enjoy themselves in Fonte’s walled garden, Lady Happy suggests that she will find her greatest freedom only when she is most strictly enclosed. But Lady Happy will not be alone in her retirement. While Pizan counts as “ladies” all good women, Lady Happy is more choosey—she will invite “noble persons” of her sex to join her in the Convent of Pleasure, but they must be unmarried, and she will include only as many as she can afford to maintain “plentifully” and only those “whose births are greater than their fortunes.” In the world she is determined to leave behind, young women must have money to find husbands; in the brave new world Lady Happy is creating, young women will not have to buy themselves a place. Lady Happy has inherited so much money that she can afford to invite into her convent those women whose birth is greater than their assets. Lady Happy will be offering full scholarships to the twenty young women who fulfill the requirements for admission to the Convent of Pleasure. The Convent of Pleasure alternates between scenes inside the convent and the action of the men who are outside its walls. The design of Lady Happy’s institution ensures women’s complete privacy—as Madam Mediator explains to the young men who are all dressed up in their “wooing accoutrements” with no place to go, there is “not so much as to a grate” that will offer them a view of the women inside Lady Happy’s “cloister.” In fact, Lady Happy has made sure no men will ever be needed in her convent; she has arranged for women to function as “physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries,” and she has reserved the role of priest and confessor for herself. In addition to her twenty companions and the female professionals she has appointed, she has also allowed a “numerous company of female servants” to enter the convent, and they will perform all the necessary services to maintain it in perfect order, thus offering “no occasion for men” to enter her establishment ever. This all-female world isn’t restricted to a single room or a walled garden, however—its substantial grounds encompass “gardens, orchards, walks, groves, bowers, arbors, ponds, fountains, springs, and the like.” And Lady Happy has taken care not only of the design of the property surrounding the Convent of Pleasure but also of the comfortable interior space. She describes, in great detail, the lavish appointments of the interiors, the sumptuous fabrics, the exotic fragrances, and the beautiful accessories, all of which will change with the seasons. Meanwhile, outside the convent, the unhappy men consider a few desperate ways of breaking up the convent, like setting it on fire, for instance.


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The “foolish” women in their “retirement” have so “vexed” the young men that they even contemplate disguising themselves as women, hoping to get into the convent that way, although they quickly conclude that such efforts would be fruitless—even dressed as women, their behavior and their voices would give them away. “We shall never frame our eyes and mouths to such coy, dissembling looks and pretty, simpering mopes and smiles as they do,” Monsieur Adviser concludes. Monsieur Facile thinks they could pass for women if they dressed themselves as “strong, lusty country wenches” and worked as cooks, dairy maids, or laundresses, but the men soon realize that even if they disguised themselves in the appropriate outfits, their inability to cook, milk cows, or starch women’s collars would still give them away. Even though the gates of the convent have been firmly secured, Lady Happy ultimately decides to admit one more woman into her select group. According to Madam Mediator—who, as her name suggests, is somehow allowed to pass between the women’s world of the convent and the men’s world outside—a “great foreign princess,” “a princely brave woman truly, of a masculine presence,” has arrived and has been admitted into the Convent of Pleasure. Inside their pleasure palace, and in order to entertain themselves, the women decide to divide themselves into couples—some of the young women have adopted “masculine habits” in order to facilitate a masquerade in which they “act lovers’ parts.” The Princess and Lady Happy make up one of these happy couples and swear themselves to friendship. In the language of Renaissance love poetry, the Princess asks Lady Happy to be her “mistress” while she, dressed as a young man, will “act the part” of Lady Happy’s “loving servant.” Lady Happy is so pleased at the prospect that she bursts out into a couplet: “More innocent lovers never can there be, / Than my most princely lover that’s a she.” The women enclosed in the Convent of Pleasure have thus divided themselves into same-sex couples—even while one member of each pair has dressed herself as a man so that the couples look like heterosexual partners. Cavendish’s loving female couples settle themselves down to be entertained by a play-within-a-play. In the sequence of brief scenes that follow, Cavendish shows us poor women whose alcoholic husbands beat them, middle-class women whose husbands ignore their businesses and waste their time and money in taverns, and well-born ladies whose husbands spend their money on gambling and whores. We see one woman pregnant and sick, one woman groaning with the pangs of childbirth, one woman who labors for three days to give birth to a stillborn baby, and another whose child has died. We see an old lady whose son has abandoned her, and a “fair young lady” who is threatened with rape. This “entertainment” has an admonitory function, and the women inside the Convent of Pleasure are quick to learn their


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lesson: “Marriage is a curse we find, / Especially to womankind; / From the cobbler’s wife we see / To ladies, they unhappy be.” Cavendish’s seventeenthcentury play thus vividly illustrates women’s sufferings in marriage—which were described by Christine de Pizan in her fifteenth-century The Book of the City of Ladies and by Moderata Fonte in her sixteenth-century dialogue, The Worth of Women. But the women who have retired into the Convent of Pleasure have devised a way to avoid the dangers of marriage, childbirth, and motherhood. And in their refuge inside an all-female world, they have not only avoided pain, they have found pleasure. More significantly, Cavendish dares to imagine a radical alternative to marriage: since men and marriage cause only pain and suffering, perhaps a woman can fill her emotional and sexual needs with another woman. Lady Happy finds herself erotically drawn to the Princess and poses a critical question to herself and to us: “But why may not I love a woman with the same affection I could a man?” At first, believing “nature is nature and still will be,” Lady Happy resists her growing attraction to the Princess. She sees her desire for another woman as unnatural: Nature “will punish me for loving you more than I ought to love you,” she warns the Princess. But the Princess, although she is still dressed as a man, takes sex and gender out of the question of desire and its fulfillment. “Can lovers love too much?” she asks Lady Happy—“Can any love be more virtuous, innocent, and harmless than ours?” Once Lady Happy replies that she hopes not, the Princess suggests that they “please” themselves as lovers always have, by embracing and kissing. Although the Princess says that their kisses will “mingle souls together,” what we see, according to Cavendish’s stage directions, is a physical joining of two women, one of them dressed as a man, holding “each other in their arms” and kissing. This isn’t a kiss on the check, either. The Princess comments, “These my embraces, though of a female kind, / May be as fervent as a masculine mind.” Lady Happy and the Princess then act out a pastoral frolic, dancing around a maypole—Cavendish isn’t a very subtle writer. At the end of their celebration, the Princess says she wants to live out her life in Lady Happy’s favor: to “be possessed” of Lady Happy’s “love and person” is the “height” of her ambition. Lady Happy responds that she can “deny” her beloved neither her “love nor person.” They then bind themselves into a same-sex alternative to heterosexual marriage. “We shall more constant be,” Lady Happy asserts, and “in a married life better agree” than opposite-sex lovers. “We shall agree,” the Princess responds, “for we true Love inherit, / Join as one body and soul, or heavenly spirit.” But at this critical moment their happy idyll is rudely and abruptly interrupted—Cavendish breaks off her play and turns her pen over to her husband. Instead of further action,


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a consummation of the love between the Princess and Lady Happy, a joining of their bodies as well as their souls, we find a poem that is clearly labeled “by my Lord Duke.” William Cavendish’s verse, inserted into his wife’s play at this critical moment, reminds everyone, characters and audience alike, that “couples” must be “draw[n] by holy Hymen’s law.” The stage directions indicate that the “scene”—the pastoral scene and our newly married lovers—“vanishes,” and we see the “Princess,” no longer with her beloved but alone on stage. In a soliloquy, the “Princess” berates herself for wearing a petticoat and for abandoning “her” kingdom for a “beautiful mistress.” Before we can make sense of the Princess’s words, we see another extravagant production inside the Convent of Pleasure, this one featuring the Princess dressed as Neptune and Lady Happy as a sea goddess. In a hint of what is to come, “Neptune” declaims, “I am sole monarch of the sea, / And all therein belongs to me.” As this scene “vanishes,” and the final act of the play begins, Lady Happy is reunited with her Princess, still “in man’s apparel,” but Lady Happy remains completely silent when the “Princess” suddenly reveals that “she” is really a he, not a princess but a prince who has come to get himself a wife to take back with him to his kingdom. Madam Mediator is shocked and titillated at the same time—“O, the Lord!” she cries out, “I hope you will not bring an army to take away all the women, will you?” But Lady Happy, so adamantly outspoken about her opposition to marriage in Act 1 of the play, says nothing. Her female lover has just revealed “herself” to be a man who has gained Lady Happy’s love through trickery and disguise, but Lady Happy remains silent. The Prince immediately begins to make wedding plans—evidently the joining of body and soul he had acted out with Lady Happy when he was a she isn’t sufficient now, when he is a he. Lady Happy, once so active in deciding, organizing, and taking charge, is passive and acquiescent. She speaks only once in the entire fifth act, her three brief and inconsequential lines introducing a new arrival, Lady Virtue, to the Prince. Meanwhile, the Prince is busy dismantling Lady Happy’s Convent of Pleasure. He divides it into two parts, designating one part for virgins, the other for widows, deciding that he will in the future fund what is now his institution out of his own “bounty.” He gives the last word in the play to a fool who has somehow parachuted in from another of Cavendish’s plays, The Bridals, and landed here, just in time to speak an epilogue. The Convent of Pleasure is now Cavendish’s most popular and widely read play, and it’s not hard to see why—when same-sex marriage is a reality in Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Spain, and South Africa, and legal in five states in the United States, Cavendish’s play offers a dazzling representation of an alternative


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“reality” in its first four acts. I have taught The Convent of Pleasure many times in an English literature course designed for core credit for nonmajors, and students love it. After reading Virginia Woolf ’s comments about Cavendish in A Room of One’s Own, my students are at first wary when it comes time to read the play—all that stuff about Cavendish as a kind of mutant vine, like kudzu, covering and strangling everything in her path— but Cavendish quickly wins them over. Without props, costumes, or rehearsals, students enjoy “acting out” scenes they select from the play. Whether the play “works” as a dramatic production is never a question for these readers, at least not until the play returns Lady Happy to the “real” world, silences her, and puts the disposition of her all-female institution into the Prince’s hands. The play’s end dampens the fun. What are we to make of the dismantling of Cavendish’s Convent of Pleasure? Last fall I had the pleasure of teaching Cavendish’s play for the first time in a senior seminar with a select group of English majors, including Jake K. M. Paikai, one of the very best students I’ve known in more than thirty years of university teaching. Bringing a keen eye, stage experience as a drag queen, and well-developed theoretical perspectives to his reading of The Convent of Pleasure, Jake argued that, rather than challenging patriarchal realities by presenting an alternative to normative society, as many critics claim, Cavendish’s play serves only to reinforce those gender norms. In his analysis of The Convent of Pleasure, Jake concluded that the play plays with the “protolesbian conceit” of love between women, but that, despite Lady Happy’s internal debate and the Princess’s persuasive advocacy, love between women is never shown to be “as honorable or as pleasurable” as heterosexual love. Rather, it is, “the cause of deep trouble.” In his senior thesis, Jake introduced a metaphor—escape velocity—as a way of visualizing the trajectory of The Convent of Pleasure. “Escape velocity,” he wrote, “is defined as the minimum velocity an object must have in order to escape the gravitational field of the earth . . . without ever falling back. Plainly put, it is the minimum speed needed to break free.” In applying this metaphor to The Convent of Pleasure, Jake demonstrated that Lady Happy cannot “make a true escape.” She tries to break free from the gravitational pull of social norms, but the play shows her “tumbling backward” into her “proper social orbit.” In the end, as we have seen, she is claimed as a wife, effectively silenced, and forced to witness the dismantling of the alternative world she created. I love the way this metaphor suits Cavendish’s play—in withdrawing from a world dominated by men, the women in The Convent of Pleasure escape for a brief period of time, but they haven’t yet achieved escape velocity. We want them to succeed, but in the end they wind up right back where they started. In the same way, Cavendish herself seems to be trying


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to reach escape velocity in her writing. Ambitious for herself, and boosted by a loving and supportive husband, she tries over and over again to break free from social restrictions that limit her access to the intellectual, political, and social world occupied by men. She addresses herself to men in her dedicatory prefaces and letters, demanding, rather than soliciting, their attention. She analyzes their books in her own, thus creating a dialogue with them, whether they choose to engage with her or not. She shocks the crowds by her gender-bending apparel, she manages to insert herself into the all-male ranks of the Royal Society, and she creates and recreates alternative worlds where women are in charge, frequently writing back to male playwrights, including her husband. But despite all her efforts, Cavendish never gets the respect, acceptance, and audience she seeks. In the end, like Lady Happy, Margaret Cavendish fails to achieve escape velocity. *

*

*

Some fifteen years after Cavendish’s death in 1673, Mary Astell set out from Newcastle and headed toward London. In the independent and satisfying life she was able to craft for herself, Astell achieved what eluded Cavendish. Astell escaped the pull of all the forces that held women fast in their traditional roles as wives and mothers. Most remarkably, Astell refused to believe that biology is destiny. In rejecting marriage, she claims the independence that Woolf would later represent as having a room of one’s own with a lock on the door. Astell refused to concern herself with fashion, fripperies, or gossip, the subjects that were usually reserved for women’s attention; she focused, instead, on the contentious political, religious, and intellectual issues of the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth century. Today you will find her works published in series like Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought or in volumes with titles like Margaret Atherton’s Women Philosophers of the Early Modern Period or William Kolbrener and Michal Michelson’s Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith Rather than the “fulsome flatteries” of admirers, which she warned women against, Astell often incurred mockery and satire from men whose ideas she challenged, but she had to be taken seriously. She couldn’t be dismissed or ignored, and she certainly couldn’t be disregarded as the petted darling of a foolish husband, as Margaret Cavendish was. Perhaps nothing can better illustrate the differences between Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell than the physical form of their books. Cavendish’s volumes are lavishly produced, and she often reproduces her image as a frontispiece in her publications, including her 1668 volume of plays, the collection that includes The Convent of Pleasure. Inside the cover of Plays, Never before Printed, a reader encounters


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a two-page spread. On the left is an image of Cavendish. The engraving presents her as a piece of sculpture; she is looking out at us from an arched niche. Her flowing robes conceal much of her figure but not her rounded breasts. Despite the multiple folds of the robe, which she lifts up provocatively as she invites our gaze, we can see that she is posed contrapposto, standing with her weight on her left foot, her right leg bent, her shoulders and torso slightly turned to face forward. This is a pose we find often in Renaissance sculpture—we see it in Michelangelo’s David, for example—and Cavendish’s pose in the classically inspired setting of this frontispiece looks almost like a mirror image of that famous sculpture. But instead of gazing serenely away from the viewer, as Michelangelo’s David does, Cavendish is looking out of her image on the page and directly at us. She is flanked by Minerva, the goddess of poetry, and Apollo, the god of poetry, music, and the arts. The pedestal on which she stands is inscribed with a fulsome praise of the author. On the right of the two-page spread, juxtaposed to the frontispiece, is the title page. In addition to claiming authorship of her “plays, never before printed,” Cavendish’s status is proclaimed: she is “the thrice noble, illustrious and excellent princess, the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle.” The simple title page of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, published by Mary Astell in 1694, stands in stark contrast to Cavendish’s elaborate twopage opener. Of course there is no engraving of the author—Astell was not given to self-display. But notice the careful way that Astell positions A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of Their True and Greatest Interest. She makes no demands; instead she offers her readers a solution, a suggestion, really, just a “proposal.” She is also quite careful not to challenge men; in her title, she restricts her audience to women, or, more accurately, to women only of a certain class, to “ladies.” In The Book of the City of Ladies, Christine de Pizan had redefined the social category of “lady” to include all good women, but when Astell makes her proposal to “ladies,” she means women who are . . . well, . . . women who are rather like herself, women who are gentlewomen by birth. Nor does Astell claim authorship, though she does identify the book’s author as a woman; this proposal is made to women by a woman, who proclaims herself to be “a lover of her sex.” In contrast to the proud self-display of Cavendish’s frontispiece and title page, the author of A Serious Proposal carefully restricts—or pretends to restrict— her audience, she minimizes her intentions, and she relinquishes her “authority,” that is, her claim to authorship. But make no mistake. A Serious Proposal to the Ladies is a radical manifesto cleverly disguised in the most innocent of forms, a simple letter, written by a woman and addressed to women. Today, unfortunately, it is not easy to read A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. Only brief selections from Astell’s first and most influential


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published work are available online; more surprisingly, neither the venerable Norton Anthology of English Literature nor the Longman Anthology of British Literature includes even a brief selection from A Serious Proposal to the Ladies in their hundreds of pages. Two other widely used college textbooks also avoid Astell’s first book; The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women includes a very short passage from Astell’s Serious Proposal, the Longman Anthology of Women’s Literature a bit more, about four pages in total. Patricia Springborg’s edition of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, published by Broadview Press, is certainly very affordable, but it reproduces the spelling, punctuation, and capitalization of Astell’s late-seventeenth-century prose, and Springborg’s introduction and textual notes focus her edition far more on the needs of the academic specialist than the general reader—which is unfortunate, because I have seen Astell’s text transform first-time readers. In order to use A Serious Proposal to the Ladies in class, I’ve worked and reworked my own typescript of Astell’s text over the years, normalizing the spelling and the punctuation, for example, and adding explanatory notes to help students make their way through Astell’s original. Even so, students still complain bitterly when first confronted with Astell’s prose—but I think most of them, in the end, find the effort worthwhile, and for a few of them, Astell’s Serious Proposal is life-changing. The unfamiliarity of Astell’s prose style, the very length, shape, and balance of her sentences, makes a reader slow down and consider more carefully her points; this slower pace, in turn, leads to the kind of self-reflection Astell advocates for her female readers. We encounter the difficulty in A Serious Proposal at the very outset. Astell opens her “proposal” using the familiar greeting of the personal letter— “Ladies,” she begins, and we feel immediately comfortable. But after that simple and direct greeting, inviting us to continue, we are confronted by a formidable chunk of prose. Here are the first few lines of Astell’s opener in their original 1694 form: Since the Profitable Adventures that have gone abroad in the World, have met with so great Encouragement, tho’ the highest advantage they can propose, is an uncertain Lot for such matters as Opinion (not real worth) gives a value to; things which if obtain’d, are as flitting and fickle as that Chance which is to dispose of them. I therefore persuade my self, you will not be less kind to a Proposition that comes attended with more certain and substantial Gain; whose only design is to improve your Charms and heighten your Value, by suffering you no longer to be cheap and contemptible.


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For today’s reader, these two “sentences” present a daunting obstacle. No currently available edition of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies addresses the complication of Astell’s prose—the sentence structure, the vocabulary, the


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punctuation, the spelling, the oddities of capitalization. The texts of Astell’s contemporaries—Daniel Defoe’s, for example, or those of Jonathan Swift— come to us in carefully edited and annotated “normalized” versions inviting inexperienced readers into the prose, offering them every aid to ease their task. But there is no comparable treatment of Astell. I’ve read a dozen or more online and print versions of this opening passage, and not one of them edits Astell’s prose for a modern reader. Not one of them even provides a gloss for Astell’s reference to “profitable adventures.” And what I’ve quoted here represents only the first few lines of a paragraph that extends for a page and a quarter in Springborg’s edition. Readers are discouraged, not because Astell is too difficult but because the conventions of writing have changed between the seventeenth century and the twenty-first, and they aren’t given the tools they need to deal with Astell’s prose. So we’ll take it slow and easy here and start off with a close reading of Astell’s opener. Astell begins her “serious proposal” as if it is a personal letter, but after addressing the “ladies” to whom her correspondence is addressed, she moves directly into a very different context, framing her proposal in terms of profit and loss. At the outset, she presents us with an extended dependent clause, and where we would expect a comma, linking that initial, dependent “since” clause to the main clause of a complex sentence, we find a period instead. So, once we understand the relationship between the first “sentence” and the second, we can begin to look more closely at the way Astell begins her proposal. At first, she gestures toward the political, economic, and social situation in which she and her readers find themselves. Her reference to “profitable adventures” acknowledges the economic forces driving global politics in 1694. Capitalism, mercantilism, the expansion of trade and commerce, the rise of the money economy, the growth of banking, the development of new business organizations like joint-stock companies—all of these contribute to the Commercial Revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Since all of these new economic engines have encouraged the multiplying of so many “profitable adventures,” or ventures—business opportunities for which there are no guarantees, and ventures which, even if “successful” in financial terms, are of relatively limited value when more carefully considered—then Astell is herself convinced the time is right to address women with her own “proposal” for increasing their value in the marketplace. It’s a canny strategy for arguing on behalf of women’s advancement, though not one we often associate with Mary Astell, whose quiet life and restrained habits would seem to take her out of the crass world of buying and selling. And yet, Astell was not immune to the lure of money to be made. Although so few of her letters have survived, those that do are filled


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with references to new joint-stock companies like the Mississippi Company, established in 1684, and the South Sea Company, established in 1711. Astell knows that the wealth promised by such ventures is of limited value; “I wish we were as diligent in improving our talents the right way,” she writes to Lady Ann Coventry in 1720. “I wish we were as diligent in making sure of a treasure that faileth not, for which everybody may be adventurers and obtain it with less anxiety and pains than is daily bestowed on uncertain riches,” she observes a month later, adding, “So purblind [obtuse, dim-witted] are we as not to look beyond the present trifles, though they bear no proportion to the future everlasting treasure.” And yet, while she laments the public’s fixation on making money—“This new way of multiplying gold and silver takes up everybody’s thoughts and conversation”— and in spite of her own misgivings, she invests in the South Sea Company, whose famous bubble burst in 1720. And so, in 1694, as she endeavors to attract the attention of the ladies she addresses with a scheme for their “advancement,” Astell puts her proposal to them in the most current of terms: like the “profitable adventures” her female readers are no doubt aware of, Astell’s own “proposition” will result in “certain and substantial gain” for those who invest. In the remainder of the opening paragraph—some three hundred more words—Astell lays out the advantages of her proposal. Her goal is to “heighten” the “value” of her readers, though Astell is careful to distinguish between the “real worth” of what she is offering and the “cheap and contemptible” products that women are usually sold. Throughout her proposal, beginning here, Astell contrasts the true worth of a woman’s “immortal mind” and her “inward beauty” to the superficial trash, or “tinsel ware,” she is usually offered. So much of what a woman has been taught to value in herself—her physical beauty, her stylish clothing, her social grace—is “flitting and fickle,” entirely subject to chance and change. These are “trifles,” Astell points out, not objects that are “truly valuable”; they are just the kind of stuff that “every mean person who has but money enough may purchase.” What Astell offers, instead, are “such ornaments as all the treasure of the Indies are not able to purchase”: “in a word,” she promises to “render” her reader “the glory and blessing of the present age and the admiration and pattern of the next.” Astell is well aware that she sounds like a salesman—“I shall not need many words to persuade you to close with this proposal,” she writes, confident that “the very offer is a sufficient inducement.” The epistolary form allows her to address her reader directly and familiarly: “Since you cannot be so unkind to yourselves as to refuse your real interest, I only entreat you to be so wise as to examine wherein it consists,” she urges. But be careful


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before you buy. You must be “prudent,” she warns her readers, and “take care that cheating hucksters don’t impose upon you with deceitful ware.” She wants to close the deal, she wants women to take up her proposal, but she also wants them to shop wisely, and while she assures her reader that she is not capable of the “set-offs of rhetoric,” her sales pitch is offered in a particularly well-crafted metaphor. “This is infinitely more worthy your debates than what colors are most agreeable or what dress becomes you best,” she writes, and then, sounding for all the world like Christine de Pizan’s Lady Reason, she turns her readers’ attention to that symbol of female vanity, the mirror. “Your glass will not do you half so much service as a serious reflection on your own minds,” she advises, “which will discover irregularities more worthy of your correction and keep you from being either too much elated or depressed by the representation of the other.” Astell is ambitious for her readers—“Why are you so preposterously humble as not to contend for one of the highest mansions in the court of heaven?” she asks. But just as women must learn to distinguish between outer and inner beauty, they must also be convinced to devote their time and attention to making the most of their lives. In another of the compelling images in her proposal, Astell asks, “How can you be content to be in the world like tulips in a garden—to make a fine show and be good for nothing?” As the pace of her prose picks up here, Astell sounds like a woman who is about to achieve escape velocity: Let us abandon that old and, therefore, one would think, unfashionable employment of pursuing butterflies and trifles! No longer drudge on in the dull beaten road of vanity and folly, [where] so many have gone before us, but dare to break the enchanted circle that custom has placed us in and scorn the vulgar way of imitating all the impertinences of our neighbors. Let us learn to pride ourselves in something more excellent than the invention of a fashion and not entertain such a degrading thought of our own worth as to imagine that our souls were given us only for the service of our bodies and that the best improvement we can make of these is to attract the eyes of men. We value them too much and ourselves too little if we place any part of our worth in their opinion and do not think ourselves capable of nobler things than the pitiful conquest of some worthless heart.


Design for Living

I’ve taken the time to quote this passage in its entirety not only because I want to give readers a taste of Astell’s compelling prose, but because this particular passage has such an amazing effect on readers. In today’s commercial culture, young women are bombarded by powerful messages that tell them they need to be thin and blond in order to be loved, that equate their value as women with the size of their breasts, and


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that tell them they have to have all the latest fashions—and shiny hair—in order to be successful. Astell’s proposal—despite its tangled prose, the enormous paragraphs, the eccentric capitalization and punctuation—hits hard. It speaks volumes to the young women I see in my classrooms. They know what it’s like to be immersed in a world that is always trying to sell them some kind of “tinsel ware.” They know how hard it is to focus on their inner worth when fashion magazines, music videos, movies, and television commercials insist that how they look is what really counts—and that, no matter how tall, thin, blond, and sexy they are, they’ll never be tall, thin, blond, and sexy enough. Young women may be aggravated by the difficulties posed by Astell’s text, and they may be frustrated by having to work so hard to follow her argument, but they are never bored. Once they get into the rhythm of Astell’s prose, they can begin to appreciate her prickly tone: “Pardon me the seeming rudeness of this proposal, which goes upon a supposition that there is something amiss in you which it is intended to amend.” And then there are her tart jabs at those who are specifically excluded from her letter addressed “to the ladies”: “Even the men, as exact as they would seem and as much as they divert themselves with our miscarriages, are very often guilty of greater faults, and . . . considering the advantages they enjoy, are much more inexcusable. But I will not pretend to correct their errors, who either are—or at least think themselves—too wise to receive instructions from a woman’s pen.” And Astell is full of exhortations, encouraging women to “the most eminent pitch of heroic virtue”: “Hither, ladies, I desire you would aspire. It is a noble and becoming ambition, and to remove such obstacles as lie in your way is the design of this paper. We will, therefore, inquire what it is that stops your flight, that keeps you groveling here below . . . when you should be busied in obtaining empires.” Women are “capable of the best,” and Astell challenges them to be their best: “there is therefore no reason they should be content to be ciphers in the world, useless at the best, and in a little time a burden and nuisance to all about them.” To be ciphers in the world—to be nothing, to count for nothing, to be useless. But above all, readers find in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies a text that speaks to their lives. If women are foolish and imprudent, it is not because of their inherent weakness as women—it is because they have been kept in ignorance. As she builds to the specific remedy she proposes to women, Astell spends a great deal of time exposing the “mistakes” of women’s education: “Women are from their very infancy debarred those advantages with the want of which they are afterwards reproached, and nursed up in those vices which will hereafter be upbraided to them.” Aren’t you cute, we coo to our daughters. Act like a lady, we admonish them. Be nice. Smile. Don’t


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cause trouble. Don’t get angry. Not only have women been “content to be in the world like tulips in a garden,” in Astell’s words, but their souls have been “suffered to overrun with weeds, to lie fallow and neglected.” Astell views women’s minds as fertile ground just waiting to be developed: “The soil is rich and would, if well cultivated, produce a noble harvest.” In leaving women in ignorance, men are “unskillful managers” who “not only permit but encourage noxious weeds.” Like Margaret Cavendish, Astell refuses to blame women for their seeming ignorance, but she has no sympathy for a woman like Cavendish— women are deceived by the kind of “tinsel ware” they are offered, in particular the kinds of “plays and romances” of which Cavendish was so fond and that she produced with such abandon. The “froth and emptiness” that are offered to women, in the guise of educating them, make it impossible for them to “rate everything according to its proper value.” The loss is significant: When a poor young lady is taught to value herself on nothing but her clothes and to think she’s very fine when well accoutered, when she hears [it said] that it is wisdom enough for her to know how to dress herself so that she may become amiable in his eyes, to whom it appertains to be knowing and learned, [then] who can blame her if she lay out her industry and money on such accomplishments. . . . When she sees the vain and the gay making [a] parade in the world and attended with the courtship and admiration of all about them, no wonder that her tender eyes are dazzled with the pageantry and, wanting judgment to pass a due estimate on them and their admirers, longs to be such a fine and celebrated thing as they!

Try reading this passage aloud to yourself the next time you sit down to watch the red-carpet arrivals before the Academy Awards or turn on the MTV Video Music Awards. Having “discovered the disease” and its “cause,” Astell now stands ready to suggest a cure. Her proposal is to “erect a monastery” for women. This may sound uncannily like what Lady Happy had in mind when she constructed her Convent of Pleasure, but nothing could be further from Astell’s mind than the “froth” to which Lady Happy devotes herself. Astell’s “monastery” for women is to be a “religious retirement,” a sanctuary. Caught up in the “parade” and pageantry of this world, where even beliefs are “taken up as the mode of the country” and then laid down “in conformity to the fashion,” women are offered “another world”: one where they can take a deep breath and think. “Vanity and folly” ruin the “frame of our minds” so that nothing “solid and substantial will stay in”; meanwhile, “the hurry and noise of the world” mean that “we have little time and less inclination


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to stand still and reflect on our own minds.” This is another aspect of Astell’s proposal that readers find compelling. Astell’s “city of ladies” is a “retreat from the world” where women will find both respite and remedy. Safely out of the relentless pace of the world of getting and spending, women have time for reflection, they have the opportunity for gaining a real education, and they can learn self-discipline. This may not seem as if it is a message that would resonate with young women today, but, in her very first published work, Astell proves herself to be an accomplished saleswoman. Although she tells us at the outset that her proposal doesn’t need “the set-offs of rhetoric,” and although she will end by apologizing for a piece that “is but a rough draft and rude essay,” look at the way she sweeps us along in a series of paralleled clauses: You are, therefore, ladies, invited into a space where you shall suffer no other confinement but to be kept out of the road of sin; [a space where] you shall not be deprived of your grandeur, but only exchange the vain pomps and pageantry of the world, the empty titles and forms of state, for the true and solid greatness of being able to despise them. You will only quit the chat of insignificant people for an ingenious conversation, the froth of flashy wit for real wisdom, idle tales for instructive discourses. [You will quit] the deceitful flatteries of those who, under pretense of loving and admiring you, really serve their own base ends for the seasonable reproofs and wholesome counsels of your hearty well-wishers and affectionate friends, which will procure you those perfections your feigned lovers pretended you had and kept you from obtaining. . . . All that is required of you is . . . to be as happy as possibly you can and to make sure of a felicity that will fill all the capacities of your souls!

It is here, as they leave behind the “profitable adventures” clamoring for their attention in their daily lives, that women will be able to “amass huge treasures” of real worth—not the trashy “tinsel ware” that glitters, sparkles, and deceives, but the kind of “fortunes” that really matter. Rather than Lady Happy in her Convent of Pleasure, Astell offers a “Happy Retreat” that is a true paradise—indeed, it is “such a Paradise as your Mother Eve forfeited.” Safe in the company of other women, women will not need to worry about how to “increase” their “fortunes” but will be able to “enlarge” their “minds.” Women will exchange “noise and trouble,” “folly and temptation,” for peace and a “noble, . . . virtuous, and disinterested friendship.” This is not to say that the routine Astell prescribes is particularly appealing to her twenty-first-century readers. Astell has in mind a life dedicated to daily prayer and contemplation—by which she means something far more rigorous than making a few sun salutations and finding the quiet place within. Rather, women should dedicate themselves to acts of devotion, like


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fasting, and to performing acts of charity, like nursing the sick and helping the poor. But the “one great end” of Astell’s retreat is to be women’s education. She wants women to “furnish” their minds “with a stock of solid and useful knowledge” and argues that women, like men, can “employ” their “thoughts” on worthwhile subjects, “and not unworthily bestow them on trifles and gaieties and secular affairs.” Women, like men, can devote themselves to Truth and Good. In detailing the advantages of her proposal, Astell reiterates the dangers for women of remaining “in the world” where they are surrounded by vanity, “continually supplied with variety,” and bombarded by “a constant scene of temptations.” All of these are, she insists, a waste of time—time, “a treasure whose value we are too often quite ignorant of until it be lost past redemption.” Living in the world, we are pressed for time, in a “continual hurry,” and never have a moment “for thoughtfulness and recollection.” Sounding for all the world as if she were our contemporary, besieged by a constant barrage of e-mails, text-messages, and tweets and unable to disconnect her iPhone from its 3G network, Astell observes, “We are so busied with what passes abroad, that we have no leisure to look at home . . . to rectify the disorders there. . . .” Living in retirement relieves us of the “tyranny” of the “arbitrary sway” of “custom,” it “very much redeems our time,” it affords us the space “to know and reflect on our own minds,” and it certainly will “reclaim us from the immoderate love of earthly enjoyments.” But, above all, in allowing women to spend time with one another, the all-female society found in such a retirement offers a woman “the best opportunities” of finding another “beloved person” and of “contracting the purest and noblest friendship, a blessing, the purchase of which were richly worth all the world.” Such a “particular” friendship is “the richest treasure” to be found in this world, “the choicest jewel in our celestial diadem.” In her Serious Proposal, Astell does not stage the deep and profoundly satisfying love between women as a tease, the way Cavendish does in The Convent of Pleasure, “correcting” the relationship between Lady Happy and the Princess at the last moment, lest we be tempted to join them. The intimate, enduring bond that Astell describes is possible only between women, not between a woman and a man. Only two women are possessed of “a sympathizing disposition, the make and frame of whose souls bears an exact conformity to each other and, therefore, one would think, were purposely designed by Heaven to unite and mix.” Astell describes a union between women that represents an alternative to heterosexual marriage: “What should hinder them from entering into a holy combination to watch over each other for good, to advise, encourage, and direct, and to observe the minutest fault in order to its amendment, the truest effect of


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love being to endeavor the bettering of the beloved person?” There is nothing better for women in this world than the “holy combination” of this kind of union. Although some women—women like Astell, perhaps—will choose to retire from the world on a permanent basis, finding a satisfying emotional bond with another woman, Astell knows that most young women would return to the world, and so she focuses on the social value of her proposal. Once they have been properly educated, most women will marry and devote themselves to raising their children, which they will now be prepared to do well. Others who choose to return to the world may not have the opportunity to marry—in which case, they should also devote themselves to rearing children. Such women “cannot have a more pleasant and useful employment than to exercise and increase their own knowledge by instilling it into these young ones, who are most like to profit under such tutors.” Despite offering such tangible social benefits, Astell is aware that “ludicrous wits and pert buffoons” will make fun of her earnest hopes for women—but she insists that they have “nothing to show for their pretenses to wit but some scraps of plays and blustering nonsense.” She, however, is persuaded of “better things,” that she will “one day see this religious retirement happily settled and its great designs wisely and vigorously pursued.” In one final plea, she invites her readers to share her vision: There is a sort of bravery and greatness of soul which does more truly ennoble us than the highest title, and it consists in the living up to the dignity of our natures, scorning to do a mean, unbecoming thing, in passing indifferently through good and evil fortunes without being corrupted by the one or depressed by the other. For she that can do so gives evidence that her happiness depends not on so mutable a thing as this world but, in a due subserviency to the Almighty, is bottomed only on her own great mind. This is the richest ornament and renders a woman glorious [even] in the lowest fortune—so shining is real worth that, like a diamond, it loses not its luster though cast on a dunghill.

And so at last, after some 18,000 words, Astell draws her proposal to its close. This is, she says, just a “rough draft and rude essay.” It might have been “made much more beautiful by a better pen.” But, “imperfect as it is,” she is optimistic—“she who drew the scheme is full of hopes. It will not want kind hands to perform and complete it.” Even so, it might all just be a waste of time; “if it miss,” she writes, “it is but a few hours thrown away,” just “a little labor in vain.” But even so, not all is lost because it will show “how much she desires your improvement.” In the end, Astell reminds


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us of her epistolary form in her closer, signing herself, “Ladies, your very humble servant.” Astell’s Serious Proposal to the Ladies proved not to be a waste of time. As Ruth Perry notes, Astell’s proposal “caught everybody’s attention from the start”: it “was read and talked of from Pall Mall to Grub Street.” What drew so much attention weren’t Astell’s arguments for women’s education, or the fact that these arguments were made by a woman—an English translation of Anna Maria von Schurman’s Whether a Christian Woman Should be Educated had been published in 1659, and Bathsua Makin’s An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen in Religion, Manners, Arts, and Tongues in 1673. Men, too, had supported education for women, sometimes even suggesting that a kind of college for women be organized. In 1684, George Hickes, the bishop of Worcester, had made such a pitch in a sermon, suggesting that his parishioners consider organizing a college for women, “much like unto those in the universities for the education of young men.” But Astell was arguing for something different, something more—an all-female institution, a place of retreat where women secluded themselves from the competing demands of the larger society and concentrated their attention on themselves, a place where they would not only learn to value themselves and know their true worth, but where they would receive this education from other women. From our point of view, in looking at the way women have imagined “rooms” of their own, Astell’s Proposal marks a critical moment—Astell wasn’t writing fiction or creating a metaphor. She was outlining a plan of action, not imagining a Convent of Pleasure. More remarkably, she aimed to make her community of women a reality—by all accounts, a wealthy benefactor contemplated donating £10,000 toward the foundation of the institution Astell proposed before the money was withdrawn, evidently because of the “popish” character of a religious retreat. Astell turned her attention instead to establishing a school for girls, to be housed on the grounds of the Chelsea Royal Hospital; her school opened in 1709 and was, in Astell’s words, “always to be under the direction of women.” In the four decades she spent in Chelsea, Mary Astell lived in a virtual city of ladies, not avoiding men but finding the “richest treasure” of true intimacy only with her close female friends, among them Lady Catherine Jones, Lady Elizabeth Hastings, Lady Anne Coventry, and Elizabeth Hutcheson. She also offered encouragement and support to a generation of younger writers, including Judith Drake, Lady Mary Chudleigh, Elizabeth Elstob, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. In her most important works, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies and Some Reflections on Marriage, published in 1700, Astell identified with women, passionately defended them, and suggested an


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alternative way of life for them. In living what she believed, she worked tirelessly to make her “serious proposal” a reality in women’s lives. *

*

In working on this chapter, I have found some unexpected connections—shifting perspectives can reveal new details. One startling discovery was of a possible link between Margaret Cavendish and Christine de Pizan. In a provocative essay I stumbled on by accident, Cristina Malcolmson argues, quite convincingly, that William Cavendish acquired British Library MS Harley 4431 when he and Margaret were living on the continent—if you remember, this is the lavishly illustrated collection of her work that Pizan presented to Isabel of Bavaria, queen of France—and that the Cavendishes brought the manuscript back to England with them in 1660, at the time of the Restoration. Although we know Margaret Cavendish did not speak or read French herself, we also know that her husband read French works to her and translated them for her. Malcolmson believes that Margaret Cavendish thus knew about Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies, but because Cavendish never mentions Christine de Pizan in her writing, Malcolmson concludes that Cavendish “preferred to have no rivals,” that she might have regarded women writers like Pizan “less as precursors and more as liabilities.” I am not so sure. Once we know that Margaret Cavendish might have been familiar with Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies, it gives new meaning to her writing and rewriting of her own “cities of ladies.” Cavendish doesn’t have to mention Christine de Pizan by name—her work itself acknowledges the powerful effect Pizan’s imagined women’s world had on her. And working on this chapter also unearthed a new connection—for me, at any rate—between Margaret Cavendish and Virginia Woolf. I discovered that Woolf had spent a lot more time thinking about Margaret Cavendish than I realized. Woolf’s reflections on Cavendish in A Room of One’s Own were all I had ever read, but those comments were a kind of second draft for Woolf—she had first written at some length about Cavendish a few years before her lecture on women and fiction to the young women of Newnham and Girton Colleges. In 1925, Woolf collected a number of her previously published essays and reviews in The Common Reader—and there, along with reflections about letters written by the Paston women, who lived around the time of Chaucer, and essays about the poet and playwright Letitia Pilkington (c. 1708–1750) and the novelist Maria Edgeworth (1767–1817), Woolf wrote at some length about Margaret Cavendish. Woolf is familiar not only with Cavendish’s biography of her husband, but her Poems and Fancies, the rich mix of The World’s Olio, her “female orations” and “philosophical letters,” and her plays. “[H]er poems, her plays, her philosophies, her orations, her discourses,” Woolf wrote, “all those folios and quartos in which, she protested,


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her real life was shrined—moulder in the gloom of public libraries, or are decanted into tiny thimbles which hold six drops of their profusion.” In this essay—published three years before her Cambridge lectures in 1928—Woolf is more nuanced about Cavendish. Not that she is unabashedly glowing in her praises of Cavendish, not at all. But she does not condemn her with that horrible image, the ugly cucumber vine smothering the roses and carnations. Woolf sees and seems to appreciate the “wild streak” in Cavendish that is “for ever upsetting the orderly arrangements of nature,” and she is quite insightful about the reasons why Cavendish drew upon herself such heaps of public “ridicule.” “People were censorious,” Woolf notes, “men were jealous of brains in a woman; women suspected intellect in their own sex.” Even though “her philosophies are futile, and her plays intolerable, and her verses mainly dull,” there is something more to be found in Cavendish’s writing. Woolf can’t quite resist or dismiss Margaret Cavendish: “One cannot help following the lure of her erratic and lovable personality as it meanders and twinkles through page after page. There is something noble and Quixotic and high-spirited, as well as crack-brained and bird-witted, about her.” Despite everything, “the vast bulk of the duchess is leavened by a vein of authentic fire.” But, above all, Woolf is cautious about what happens when a writer is isolated. Margaret Cavendish secluded herself with her husband: “they lived together in the depths of the country in the greatest seclusion and perfect contentment, scribbling plays, poems, philosophies, greeting each other’s works with raptures of delight, and confabulating, doubtless, upon such marvels of the natural world as chance threw their way.” Again and again, as she considers Margaret Cavendish, Woolf comments on her “solitude,” her training, “at once so cloistered and so free”: “Welbeck was the best place for her, and her own company the most congenial,” a place where Cavendish “could apply herself uninterruptedly to her writing.” Woolf recognizes that such isolation is dangerous—it may have been that “this solitude” is the very thing that harmed Cavendish. Woolf’s observation here leaves me wondering about the prospects for a woman writer behind the locked door of a room of her own. And then there’s Virginia Woolf on Mary Astell—no, don’t look through A Room of One’s Own, thinking you’ve missed something. Woolf does not mention Astell at all in A Room of One’s Own, but the more often I read and reread Woolf ’s book, the more I was convinced that the ghost of Astell was there, with Woolf, as she was shooed off the grass by the angry beadle, as she searched the shelves at the British Library, as she wondered what might have happened to Shakespeare’s sister. And so I looked further. And there it was, in the first chapter of Woolf ’s Three Guineas, published in 1938:


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that tradition, poverty and ridicule could put in its way, existed too among women. To prove this let us examine one life only—the life of Mary Astell. Little is known about her, but enough to show that almost 250 years ago this obstinate and perhaps irreligious desire was alive in her; she actually proposed to found a college for women. What is almost as remarkable, the Princess Anne was ready to give her £10,000—a very considerable sum then, and, indeed, now, for any woman to have at her disposal—towards the expenses. And then—then we meet with a fact which is of extreme interest, both historically and psychologically: the Church intervened. Bishop Burnet was of opinion that to educate the sisters of educated men would be to encourage the wrong branch, that is to say, the Roman Catholic branch, of the Christian faith. The money went elsewhere; the college was never founded.

Woolf ’s source for this information was a biography of Astell published in 1916, Florence M. Smith’s Mary Astell. At some point after Smith’s biography of Astell was published in 1916, then, Woolf had begun to read about Astell, and in 1936 or 1937, she was writing about Astell. Looking back again at A Room of One’s Own, where she mentions Anne Finch (1661–1720), Dorothy Osborne, Aphra Behn (1640–89), Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806), Fanny Burney, and, of course, Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters, I wondered why Woolf hadn’t included Mary Astell. All that stuff about “thinking back through our mothers.” Where was Astell? She may not have been a writer of fiction, but surely she was a “mother” that Woolf would want us to think back through. And then it struck me. Woolf is so specific about that five hundred pounds—five hundred pounds that “stands for the power to contemplate.” Why five hundred pounds, why that specific sum? But there it is, in Astell’s Serious Proposal. You won’t find it if you’re reading snippets from an anthology or bits and pieces online, but it’s there, near the very end, almost as an afterthought, when Astell is dealing with objections that might be raised against her proposal: “Who will think five hundred pounds too much to lay out for the purchase of so much wisdom and happiness?” she asks. Astell specifies five hundred pounds as the exact sum a woman entering into her proposed religious retreat should contribute as an endowment to the institution. It is a significant sum, although Astell argues that for most families it can “be easily spared with a daughter”—it’s smaller than a dowry, after all, Astell points out. It’s a nice, round sum, that five hundred pounds, and if that were the only thing linking Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own to Mary Astell, I’d think it was just a coincidence. But that isn’t the only thing. All through A Room of One’s Own, Woolf seems to be echoing Astell. Here is Mary Astell on men and their place in society: “Have not all the great actions that have


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been performed in the world been done by men? Have they not founded empires and overturned them? Do not they make laws and continually repeal and amend them? Their vast minds lay kingdoms waste, no bounds or measures can be prescribed to their desires. War and peace depend on them, they form cabals and have the wisdom and courage to get over all these rubs which may lie in the way of their desired grandeur. What is it they cannot do?” And here is Woolf: “His was the power and the money and the influence. He was the proprietor of the paper and its editor and sub-editor. He was the Foreign Secretary and the judge. He was the cricketer; he owned the racehorses and the yachts. He was the director of the company that pays two hundred per cent to its shareholders. He left millions to charities and colleges that were ruled by himself. He suspended the film actress in mid-air. He will decide if the hair on the meat axe is human; he it is who will acquit or convict the murderer, and hang him, or let him go free. With the exception of the fog he seemed to control everything.” Here is Mary Astell on the way men decide what is “important”: “Histories are writ by them, they recount each other’s great exploits and have always done so. All famous arts have their original from men, even from the invention of guns to the mystery of good eating.” Here is Woolf: “. . . it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are ‘important’; the worship of fashion, and the buying of clothes ‘trivial.’ And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room. A scene in a battlefield is more important than a scene in a shop—everywhere and much more subtly the difference of values persists.” Here is Mary Astell: “yet the mind is free, nothing but reason can oblige it, ’tis out of the reach of the most absolute tyrant.” And here is Woolf: “I refuse to allow you, Beadle though you are, to turn me off the grass. Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” And then, there is this, from Mary Astell’s preface to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters, one woman writer offering her tribute to another: “Let us offer her the palm which is so justly her due, and if we pretend to any laurels, lay them willingly at her feet.” And here is Woolf: “Jane Austen should have laid a wreath upon the grave of Fanny Burney.” And again, just a few lines later: “All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn.” So why didn’t Virginia Woolf mention Mary Astell in A Room of One’s Own? She didn’t need to. I am convinced that, in writing about a woman’s


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need for a room of her own and five hundred pounds a year, Woolf was paying tribute to Astell’s “serious proposal”—that in writing A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf was laying a wreath upon the grave of Mary Astell.

In this chapter, when I am quoting from seventeenth-century English texts, I have silently normalized the spelling, punctuation, and capitalization of the originals. Margaret Cavendish’s work is no longer “congealed in quartos and folios that nobody reads,” to quote Virginia Woolf. The complete text of The Convent of Pleasure is available online through the English Prose Drama FullText Database at http://www.letrs.indiana.edu/cgi-bin/eprosed/eprosed-idx? coll=eprosed;idno=P1.0066, accessed 8 December 2010. (Her other plays in which she imagines all-female worlds, Bell in Campo and The Female Academy, are also included in this database.) Several of Cavendish’s plays, including the two-part Bell in Campo, are published in Anne Shaver’s The Convent of Pleasure and Other Plays (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); this is an excellent anthology for those wishing an affordable volume of Cavendish, and it works particularly well for classroom use. Cavendish’s plays are often dismissed as “closet dramas,” intended only to be read—they are too badly written, too long, or too wordy to make good stage plays. (I wonder how many of the critics who conclude that Margaret Cavendish’s plays are too bad to be staged have ever tried to read her husband William’s plays.) But Margaret Cavendish scholars are making sure her plays are not only read but staged, even if to somewhat limited audiences. In 2003, for example, members of the Margaret Cavendish Society Conference, meeting at Chester College, attended a live performance of scenes from several Cavendish plays and viewed a full-length film of The Convent of Pleasure. The Convent of Pleasure was also presented at the Sixth Biennial International Conference of the Margaret Cavendish Society in Hamilton, Ontario, in 2005. The Sheffield University Drama Society performed scenes from Bell in Campo at Bolsover Castle for the Margaret Cavendish Society International Conference in 2007—you can see more than a dozen photos from that production posted on Flickr, the popular image-sharing website. Several scenes from Bell in Campo are posted on YouTube as part of a group project for a college literature class entitled “The Battle of the Sexes.” A Margaret Cavendish Performance Project DVD, Margaret Cavendish—Plays in Performance, includes scenes from The Convent of Pleasure and The Female Academy along with selections from other Cavendish plays.


Chapter 4 Notes: Suggestions for Further Reading


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Aside from the plays, other works by Cavendish are also widely available. An electronic version of Cavendish’s utopian/science-fiction fantasy, The Blazing World, is available through the Pennsylvania Digital Library, A Celebration of Women Writers, at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/ newcastle/blazing/blazing.html, accessed 8 December 2010. This narrative is also available in Kate Lilley’s excellent paperback edition, The Blazing World and Other Writings (New York: Penguin Books, Penguin Classics, 1994). A sampling of Cavendish’s nondramatic work is available by following the links at the Luminarium website: http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/ cavendish/cavendishbib.htm, accessed 8 December 2010. The full text of Cavendish’s biography of her husband can be found in the digital library at Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/stream/lifeofwilliamca00newcuoft/ lifeofwilliamca00newcuoft_djvu.txt, accessed 8 December 2010. For a carefully selected and well-presented anthology of Cavendish’s work, see also Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader, edited by Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson (Peterborough, Ontario [Canada]: Broadview Press, 2002). The frontispiece and title page of Plays, Never before Printed described in this chapter can be seen at an online exhibition posted by the Rare Book & Manuscript Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, posted online at http://www.library.illinois.edu/rbx/exhibitions/chez_exhibit/popular. html, accessed 8 December 2010. For a biography of Cavendish, see Katie Whitaker’s Mad Madge: The Extraordinary Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, the First Woman to Live by Her Pen (New York: Basic Books, 2002). Today Margaret Cavendish might be best pleased to know that her Female Academy has a real-world incarnation. Lucy Cavendish College, named in honor of Lucy Caroline Lyttleton, who married Lord Frederick Cavendish, in 1864, was founded as part of the Cambridge University in 1965. Lucy Cavendish College proudly describes itself on its website as “the latest and perhaps the last women’s college to be founded in the United Kingdom.” In the fall of 2009, Lucy Cavendish College celebrated its history with an exhibition entitled “Rooms of Our Own: The Female Academy from Margaret Cavendish to Lucy Cavendish College.” Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies is available in paperback, edited by Patricia Springborg: A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Parts I and II (Peterborough, Ontario [Canada]: Broadview Press, 2002). Springborg’s edition includes a reproduction of Astell’s 1694 title page. (The title page from the 1696 edition is posted online at a variety of sites.) A short extract from the Serious Proposal is included in The Longman Anthology of Women’s Literature, edited by Mary K. DeShazer (New York: Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers, 2001). Selections from the second part of Astell’s


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Proposal, added to the 1697 edition, are included in Margaret Atherton’s Women Philosophers of the Early Modern Period (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1997). Brief selections of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies are available at several online sites. See, for example, a passage from Springborg’s edition, available through Luminarium at http://www.luminarium.org/eightlit/astell/ proposal1exc.php, accessed 8 December 2010. While the complete text of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies is not available online, the entire text of Some Reflections upon Marriage can be found through the Sunshine for Women library at http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/book-sum/astl_mrg.html, accessed 8 December 2010. The only full-length biography of Mary Astell is still Ruth Perry’s The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986)—the book is no longer in print, but it’s fairly easy to find used copies online. A lovely photo of a German street sign, “MaryAstell-Straße,” is posted on Flickr.


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Paradise Lost: Men in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and Doris Lessing’s The Cleft

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he fictional world created by Margaret Cavendish and the sanctuary for women proposed by Mary Astell show us the joy and intimacy that are possible in all-female communities. Like Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies, Moderata Fonte’s walled garden in Venice, or even Marjane Satrapi’s dining room in Tehran, Cavendish’s Convent of Pleasure and Astell’s “Happy Retreat” offer a refuge for women who wish to withdraw from a world dominated by men. But in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, published in 1915, and Doris Lessing’s The Cleft, published almost a hundred years later, in 2007, we see something quite different. For the first time in our reading, we see an alternative version of women’s worlds, not as places where women have secluded themselves from men but as entirely separate spheres where men are unknown. In these two novels, we glimpse a prelapsarian world at the very moment before “paradise” is lost—and we witness not the fall of man but the fall of woman. *

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The notion of an all-female society, a tribe or kingdom or nation where women live free from male oppression, can be traced back to the very beginning of the Western European tradition, with references to Amazons in The Iliad, where they are described as antianeirai, or “those who go to war with men.” Homer’s description isn’t quite accurate, because the Amazons, led by their queen, Penthesilia, haven’t exactly gone to war with all men, but with Greek men— they’ve entered the Trojan War on the side of the Trojans. Writing several centuries later, in the fifth century BCE, the Greek historian Herodotus describes the Amazons as androktones, that is, “killers of males.” In The Suppliant


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Maidens, the Greek playwright Aeschylus refers to them as both “mateless” and “flesh-devouring.” Although the Greeks are ultimately victorious when they battle the Amazons (as only one example, Achilles kills Penthesilia, the Amazon queen), there is something primal about these descriptions of women warriors, something that seems to represent a male fear of female power and dominance that is deep and ineradicable. These are women, but not-women: they live without men, and they go into battle against men. The Amazons’ difference is marked by their mutilation of their own breasts; according to most accounts, the Amazons remove their right breast in order to make pulling a bow easier. The Amazons thus represent something unnatural, something monstrous—as one classics scholar has observed, “Wherever the Amazons are located by the Greeks, . . . it is always beyond the confines of the civilized world. The Amazons exist outside the range of normal human experience.” Most horrifying, at least from the male perspective—which is the only one we have for centuries—are the Amazons’ reproductive strategies. While they live without men, they still need men in order to keep their race from dying out. Thus they give men a taste of their own medicine—the Amazons use and discard men for their own sexual purposes. According to some accounts, the Amazons travel among neighboring peoples, choose suitable sexual partners, and “mate” with them. Once the women become pregnant, they leave. In other accounts, the Amazons were said to keep men taken prisoner in battle as sex slaves, killing them when they no longer have use for their prisoners. In order to ensure that they remain an all-female society, the Amazons were believed to kill male infants that they gave birth to, generally by abandoning them to the elements; if they kept male children alive, the boys were blinded or otherwise mutilated and then used for reproductive purposes when they were old enough. Pulling together many of these strands in his history of “famous” women, Giovanni Boccaccio, whom we last saw in Chapter 2, calls the Amazons “the daughters of Mars.” He claims that their story is “foreign to our experience”—thereby emphasizing the status of these warrior-women as “other.” When their story begins, in Boccaccio’s account, they are the victims of the “pillaging and robbing” of hostile invaders who kill most of the men who fought against them. Pillaging and robbing are clearly not something Boccaccio would identify as “foreign to our experience.” What is “foreign,” rather, is what happens next: the women fight back. The women of this distant and “wild” land join with the few men who have survived the invasion, and they all go to war against the invaders. Victorious, they continue their war against their neighbors; “eventually,” Boccaccio writes, the women decide that “if they entered into relationships with foreign males, they would be slaves rather than wives; they also felt able to wage


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war by themselves. Hence, by common accord, they attacked and killed all the husbands who had survived. . . .” Notice how illogical Boccaccio’s account is here—fearing that other men might enslave them, they kill their own surviving husbands? Despite the illogic of this action—which Boccaccio tries to smooth over by adding that the women killed their surviving men “so as to remove the appearance that a kinder fate had been reserved for those women whose spouses Fortune had saved from the . . . massacre”—Boccaccio continues with the story as it had been told since the time of Homer. To ensure their survival, Amazon women “took turns sleeping with men of the neighboring regions and returned home as soon as they became pregnant.” Male infants were killed immediately after their birth, while “females were carefully brought up for military service.” The right breast of all girls was “withered by means of fire or medicine,” the left remaining “unharmed, so that they would be able to suckle their future children.” Boccaccio stresses the alien nature of the Amazons—“their concerns, however, were different than our own,” he notes, again emphasizing that the Amazons exist outside the boundaries of civilization. The Amazons “hardened the young girls and prepared them to acquire a man’s strength.” These warrior-women “became an object of terror to all.” As an all-female society, the Amazons are viewed as monsters, their monstrosity made visible by their mutilation of their own breasts, symbolic of their nurturing role as mothers. They are monstrous because they not only refuse marriage but they exploit male sexuality for their own purposes. They are monstrous because they rid themselves of their male children and “harden” their female children. It is against such accounts of the Amazons that Christine de Pizan reacts so vehemently in The Book of the City of Ladies. As if to emphasize the pervasiveness of this male fantasy of unnatural female behavior, Pizan spends a considerable amount of time refuting it. After “Christine” has “set” the first stone in the foundation of the City of Ladies, Lady Reason tells her, “Now we must lay many more stones to advance our edifice.” These “stones”—laid immediately after the first, thereby forming part of the essential foundation of the city—are Lady Reason’s revised accounts of the Amazons. She begins by providing a counternarrative of the origins of the Amazons. These are not women who turn cruelly on their own husbands but women whose husbands, sons, fathers, and brothers have been killed in battle. In these dire straits, they assemble “courageously” and decide what to do by taking thoughtful “counsel among themselves.” To preserve their independence—their goal is to “maintain their dominion by themselves without being subject to men”—they do not kill the old men and young


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boys who have survived, but they do banish them. Now unified as an allfemale warrior force, and instead of devoting themselves to rampant slaughter, becoming “an object of terror to all,” they exact “a most fine revenge for the deaths of the men whom they loved.” In order to maintain their “succession” and their freedom from men, the Amazons must travel into neighboring lands “during certain times of the year.” They don’t take men captive and keep them as slaves, nor is there any suggestion that they engage in sexual tourism either, as Boccaccio implies. They seek out men only out of necessity. When the Amazons give birth to male children, the babies are not killed but sent off “to their fathers.” The Amazons raise their daughters themselves. Following this founding narrative, Lady Reason details the long line of Amazon queens, including Lampheto and Marpasia, the first two queens, who rule jointly, and Marpasia’s daughter, Synoppe, who succeeds her mother. But to name all the Amazon queens, “one by one,” would “bore readers,” Lady Reason says, so she names “a few important ones,” including Antiope, Orithyia, and Penthesilia. After she relates the death of Queen Penthesilia, Lady Reason draws her history of the Amazons to a close: “And thus,” she tells “Christine,” “this kingdom of women, founded and powerfully upheld, lasted more than eight hundred years. . . .” Their supremacy represents an unprecedented—and unmatched—achievement: “[I]n all the dominions which have existed in the world and which have lasted as long,” she tells “Christine,” “one will not find more notable princes in greater numbers nor as many people who accomplished such noteworthy deeds than among the queens and ladies of this kingdom.” Just as Pizan felt she needed to write back to male-authored accounts of the Amazons, Moderata Fonte also incorporated an account of the Amazons into The Worth of Women. Early in the first day’s conversation in the walled garden in Venice, Leonora argues that “if women do not bear arms, that isn’t because of any deficiency on their part; rather, the fault lies with the way they were brought up.” She submits, as “proof ” of her argument, Penthesilia and other Amazon warrior-women, but she is also aware of how female military prowess and accomplishment have been manipulated by men. The achievements of “warlike women” have always been filtered through male writers, but “not even the history written by men has been able to suppress” their “memory.” During their second day’s conversation, Fonte’s women, sequestered in their “city of ladies,” again recall the Amazons. This second reference emphasizes the male fear that has always shadowed accounts of female warriors. “If only those times were still with us,” exclaims Leonora. “I’d like to see us women arming ourselves like those Amazons of old and going into battle against these men. At any rate, it’s generally believed that


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there are more women than men in the world, so our greater numbers would compensate for the disadvantage of our physical weakness. . . .” In turning to Herland and The Cleft, we need to keep this long tradition in mind—for more than 2,500 years, the dominant view of an all-female society has been expressed in a chorus of disapproving, sometimes even horrified, male voices. Women’s voices are raised in defense of the Amazons, but they have been largely shouted down amid all the angry expressions of outrage. And so it is very satisfying to take up two novels that show us peaceful societies of women. In the first of these novels, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 Herland, we see a mirror image of human society, a kind of alternative reality—Herland is an ideal female state that has developed parallel to but completely isolated from the “real” world, dominated by men. There is no strife, no bloodshed, no violence, and no “plunder” in Herland, for the simple reason that there are no men. The women of Herland thus have no need to be warrior-women. In this peaceful, harmonious land, there are no male gods either; rather, there is a Maternal Pantheon of female gods and, in particular, Mother Earth. The women live in harmony with their land, eating only the “fruit of motherhood”—eggs and seeds. Nor do the women of Herland need men for reproduction; the continued existence of Herland is due to parthenogenesis, or “virgin creation,” one generation of women giving birth to the next without any need for male assistance whatsoever. But, after two thousand years of isolation and independence, Herland is suddenly invaded by three men, and what once was an all-female Paradise is lost forever. In The Cleft, which was published just a few months before Doris Lessing won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, we see an alternative view of the origins of “man,” a creation story that begins with a world inhabited solely by females. These distant human ancestors, called Clefts, live outside of time—or, more accurately, they live in a world that is timeless. Like the women in Herland, the Clefts reproduce by parthenogenesis. But the Clefts find their peace and tranquility disrupted forever by the unexpected birth of an infant they see as a “monster.” This monstrosity is the first male child ever born, and after him come more and more. The all-female world of the Clefts is lost forever—and soon the Clefts lose their ability to reproduce without men. Lessing shows us the gradual shift from matriarchy to patriarchy. *

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Perhaps the most unexpected element of these stories is that, while both novels are about women’s worlds, both accounts of these female spaces are narrated by men. The use of this male point of view raises interesting questions for us as readers. What do we make of a woman writer who describes


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an all-female world from a male point of view? In the fall of 2008, reading Gilman’s novel with a group of students, I wasn’t prepared for their response to this question. Classes began that semester on September 9, and we didn’t start Herland until November 13, a little more than halfway through the term. The first student to respond to the novel that day was bursting with energy, and when I asked her why she was so excited about Herland, she replied that it was because she was “relieved” to “finally” read something from a male point of view. Notice that I put the words “relieved” and “finally” in quotation marks, but I can’t swear to the fact that these were the words she used. I was so shocked that I might not be remembering what she said correctly. But that is essentially what she meant, and I noticed that a surprising number of female students in class were shaking their head in agreement with her: it was such a relief to read a story told from a male perspective. Now I admit to being not altogether rational on this subject. A decade ago, when I turned fifty and realized that there were only so many books I could reasonably expect to read before I died, I made a vow to myself that I wasn’t going to spend any more time reading books by or about straight white men. I had spent most of my life reading books by and about men. In fact, as a student, I had a reading experience much like the one Virginia Woolf describes in A Room of One’s Own when she looks around the library shelves for books that aren’t there. I studied French and English literature as an undergraduate and English literature for a Ph.D., and throughout the years of my academic reading career, 1968 to 1976, I had never read anything by a woman writer earlier than Jane Austen. Today, as someone who teaches medieval and Renaissance literature, I teach many books that wouldn’t qualify under my new reading code, but when I made my vow, I wasn’t talking about books that I read and teach for a living. I meant the books that I read for pleasure—the books I read while I’m on the treadmill at the YMCA, the books I use to read myself to sleep each night, the books I stack up in preparation for summer vacation. I was going to spend whatever time I had left reading books by and about women. So I wasn’t altogether sympathetic when my student expressed her opinion. After only nine and a half weeks of reading books written by women about women, my student and many of her classmates had had enough. I tried to turn this into a “teachable moment.” If you’re so tired of hearing women’s voices, I suggested, imagine what it would be like to be Christine de Pizan, who heard only men’s voices. Imagine what it was like for her to hear male “authorities” from Aristotle, in the fourth century BCE, to Boccaccio, in the fourteenth, telling her that women were inferior to men, deformed or incomplete, creatures incapable of reason. I urged them


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to use their experiences reading women’s worlds for nine weeks and try to imagine the way they would respond if they’d heard only men’s voices not for a few weeks but for centuries, millennia even. The harder I tried, the more they resisted. This kind of resistance may well be key to understanding why Gilman and Lessing construct male narrators for their stories. Have they calculated that the description of an all-female world will be more welcome—or seem more credible—if told from a male point of view? Are readers, like my students, less resistant to the views and opinions of male narrators? In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, our male narrator identifies himself as Vandyck Jennings. He is a social scientist—in describing who he is, he focuses on what he does. His training is in studying human societies, social structures, and social activities—though, while telling us that “sociology’s my major,” he adds, “[y]ou have to back that [the study of sociology] up with a lot of other sciences, of course. I’m interested in them all.” Van is thus a man of science, and this self-description seems to be enough to establish his bona fides as a reliable narrator. But, even as she gives us a “rational” man of science as a narrator, Gilman teases us. We are forced to rely on our narrator’s memory rather than on any evidence he can produce. Any “proof ” of his experience has vanished—so much for evidence-based science. “This is written from memory, unfortunately,” he tells us. “If I could have brought with me the material I so carefully prepared, this would be a very different story. Whole books full of notes, carefully copied records, firsthand descriptions, and the pictures—that’s the worst loss.” And so we must take a leap of faith—at the very beginning of the novel, we are asked to trust our narrator’s memory, even though we have no reason for doing so. And we must go on believing him, even though he tells us “I never was good at descriptions anyhow.” In The Cleft, our narrator is also something of a social scientist, though he lives long before the academic discipline of sociology is formed. He, too, focuses on human society, comparative social organization, and the sociology of gender, but he identifies himself, first, as a historian, then as a “scribe” and “researcher.” But he also insists that who he is really isn’t relevant: “What kind of man I am is not really of importance. . . .” “What my real name is I shall keep dark,” he adds. In the first few lines of The Cleft, where the narrator describes an ox-cart carrying wine and olives, refers to “house-slaves,” and tells us that one of those slaves, Marcus, is wearing a tunic, we realize that our narrator is living in the ancient world, probably Rome. We learn that our narrator was at one time a senator, and midway through the novel, the narrator’s wife, Julia, warns him that he may lose his house to Nero—who was emperor of Rome from 54 CE until his death in


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June of 68. At the very end of the book, our narrator refers to the eruption of Vesuvius and the death of his “old friend,” Pliny. Pliny the Elder, a philosopher and naturalist, died on 25 August 79, trying to rescue survivors during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Thus we can put together time and place for the narrator’s composition of his story. In fact, both narrators—Gilman’s Vandyck Jennings and Lessing’s unnamed Roman historian—are writing history. But they are writing history of that which has been deliberately suppressed, and there are limits to what they can, or will, tell us. In Van’s case, although he says that “the rest of the world needs to know about that country,” he refuses to tell us where that country is. He has his reasons for keeping the location of Herland a secret: “I haven’t said where it was for fear some self-appointed missionaries, or traders, or land-greedy expansionists, will take it upon themselves to push in. . . .” We also learn at the end of the narrative that he has promised the women of Herland “not in any way to betray the location of this country.” Our Roman historian has a more difficult task on his hands. He has become the keeper of a trove of secret documents, a “parcel or packet of scrolls” that has been passed down, from one man to another, over the course of time. The story told in these documents “has been on the back shelves of libraries, or languishing in scholars’ shelves for a long time”; this dangerous information has been “inaccessible to anyone but the trusted custodians,” one of whom is our narrator. “Why am I in a position to tell you about this material?” he asks. “It is because I have preserved, guarded and watched over it now for a long time.” And thus his reliability as a narrator: “I am establishing my credentials here, right at the beginning of my story.” In revealing that which has been hidden, he is trying to make a coherent whole out of “ancient scrolls and fragments of scrolls, loose and disordered scraps of paper in the old scripts that were the first receptacles of the transfer of ‘the mouth to ear’ mode of the first histories. A great pack of the stuff. . . .” Unlike Van, who deliberately conceals the location of Herland, the Roman historian does not know where the story he tells originates. The sources seem to describe an island, but the narrator can’t quite locate the place where the human species originated. “Where was this island?” he asks. “How large an island? Like Sicily? No, too small, surely. Perhaps Crete?” As a historian, the Roman narrator knows that history as it is written is not necessarily an accurate account of the past. While noting that his own, new history is “solidly based on fact,” he nonetheless reminds us that “what I am about to relate may be—must be—speculative.” Sounding for all the world like Virginia Woolf or Mary Astell, Lessing’s Roman historian admits that the story he will be telling “has little in common with what is taught our children as truth.” There is an “official story,” which is, of course, the version


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of history that men have recorded, and then there is the version of history preserved by women. As one of the “official warders of the forbidden truth,” it has been his responsibility to suppress women’s stories, their “history.” But the “sheer absurdity” of male-authorized history has motivated him to pen a counternarrative, the “true” story of the female origin of the human species. What the narrator offers is an alternative creation story: in the beginning were the Clefts. They were a sea people—according to their own history, their origins were in the sea, and the sea, somehow, “made” them. There is nothing particularly subtle about the name of these all-female creatures, our ancestors, the Clefts, but at least this is not a name that has been given to them by the Roman historian. The Clefts have named themselves: “there in front . . . they had smooth flesh, a neat slit, fringed with soft hair.” These female creatures lived in warm caves clustered around a sacred rocky structure that was “the most important thing in [their] lives,” a “clean cut down through the rock and under it is a deep hole.” This is The Cleft. Around it grow red flowers. At the appropriate time of the month, when the “moon is at its biggest and brightest,” the Clefts climb up to this rocky fissure and cut the red flowers. As “the water flushes the flowers down through The Cleft, from top to bottom,” the Clefts collectively experience their regular menstrual flow. According to their history, preserved in their memories and passed down from one generation to the next, “We are The Cleft, The Cleft is us. . . .” And, somehow, there were “babies being born. They were just born, that’s all, no one did anything to make them.” This is the secret history that has been suppressed for so long—that, in the beginning, before there was time and before there were myths and legends, there were only females. “Perhaps it has been felt that an account of our beginnings that makes females the first and founding stock is unacceptable,” our male narrator observes, adding, “In Rome now, a sect—the Christians—insist that the first female was brought forth from the body of a male. Very suspect stuff, I think. Some male invented that—the very opposite of the truth.” Our narrator knows that the “truth” of human history “has little in common with what is taught our children as the truth. Which is, of course, that we males were first in the story and in some remarkable way, brought forth the females. We are the senior, they our creation. Interesting indeed when you look at the anatomies, male and female. How, in our official story, is it explained that males have no apparatus for bringing forth and nurturing? It is not explained.” Out of the collection of the fragmentary documents that are now in his possession, the Roman narrator begins to construct his new history of human origins. He has texts to work with, transcripts of an oral history. The Clefts had preserved their histories by a method the narrator describes


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as “female”: “the memorizing of a history, an account, preserved in the memories of the Memory, and passed down to the succeeding generations of memories.” And so we begin to see how women’s history has been suppressed—women’s history is remembered, passed down from one woman to another, over the course of generations, while men’s history is written. The power of the pen is emphasized here—the surviving documents of women’s history are written transcripts of an interrogation by, as our historian says, “one of us—that is, the males . . . of a She, or Cleft.” And thus even women’s history has become the property of men. Not only transcribed by men, this women’s history is also supplemented by male versions of the same events. As he begins to write “The History,” our narrator actually starts with a male-authored version of events, one that juxtaposes “us” (“There were three of us boys”) and “them” (the Clefts). In fact, our first description of the Clefts is from this male perspective, and it does not give us a favorable impression of these female ancestors of us all: “At first we thought they were seals. . . . [W]e were disgusted. Those large pale things rolling in the waves, with their disgusting clefts, which we saw for the first time, and as we looked, from the cleft of one of those slow lolling creatures emerged a bloody small-sized thing. We saw it was a tiny cleft. . . . We ran and we vomited. . . .” Once he has begun “The History” with this male description of the Clefts, the narrator stops, backs up, and begins again, this time from the Clefts’ own accounts of their origins. Now the tables are turned. The Clefts describe themselves as “beautiful”—“We are nice to look at, like one of those shells we can pick off a rock after a storm. . . . I am beautiful, just like The Cleft with its pretty red flowers.” From their perspective, it is the males who are disgusting: “No wonder you cover yourselves, there, but we don’t have to. . . . [Y]ou are all bumps and lumps and the thing like a pipe which is sometimes like a sea squirt.” The Clefts’ own “history” presents difficulties for a historian, however. The Clefts do not think of themselves individually but collectively. They are all Shes, and in their communal society, they have different roles but no names. As one of these Clefts says in the oral history preserved by the Memories, “Each cave has the same kind of people in it, a family.” Rather than a male and a female, a husband and wife, a father and mother, the families of the Clefts included “the Cleft Watchers, the Fish Catchers, the Net Makers, the Fish Skin Curers, the Seaweed Collectors.” Any further distinction, like an individual name, is unnecessary: “why did it matter if several people had the same name? You can always tell by looking at someone, can’t you?” Another of the difficulties faced by our Roman historian is that the Clefts have no sense of time. This was not a difficulty for the Clefts: “we lived in a kind of dream, a sleep, everything slow and easy and nothing ever


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happening but the moon being bright and big, and the red flowers washing down The Cleft.” But this timelessness is a problem for the historian, whose own exasperation and incredulity are clear; they “did not know when their kind had first crawled from the waves to breathe air on the rocks, and they were incurious. They did not think to wonder or ask questions. . . .” The Clefts were not interested in knowing the where, when, how, and why of things. They couldn’t locate their own beach, they didn’t know (or care) when they began as a people, and they didn’t know how they gave birth or why things began to change—“They lived in an eternal present,” the historian concludes. But one day things do begin to change—after countless generations of female Clefts who give birth, somehow, to more female Clefts, one Cleft gives birth to something different. “It was not the first Monster that shocked them,” the historian writes. But “when they saw the second or third or succeeding babes with the clutch of protruding flesh there in front where they had smooth flesh, a neat slit, fringed with soft hair. A horror . . . and then another . . . and then another. . . .” For the Clefts, these new and different babies become the “Monsters.” Here Lessing turns the tables on Aristotle and on all the male authorities who followed him. In On the Generation of Animals, Aristotle had described the female as a defective male—“we should look upon the female state as being as it were a deformity,” he writes. It is this prevailing Aristotelian view of woman—as monsters in nature, as incomplete or deformed males—that overwhelms “Christine” at the outset of The Book of the City of Ladies. But here, at last, we see that view turned on its head; in The Cleft, female is the norm. Compared to this norm, the male is abnormal. Being male—having a penis—is the deformity, and the male babies born to the Clefts are thus monstrous. As he writes his account of the Clefts, our Roman historian begins his history just as the first Monsters are born. Thus the history of the Clefts isn’t really their history after all—the history of the Clefts only begins at the moment when the all-female society of Clefts is lost forever. The story of Herland, too, begins with the arrival of males and the disruption of an all-female society. In fact, as we have seen, the novel begins with Vandyck Jennings’s first-person narration. We will be seeing the women of Herland not as they see themselves but, as in The Cleft, as they are seen by men. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel here takes the form of a maledriven adventure story—the first chapter, in fact, is titled, “A Not Unnatural Enterprise.” What is “not unnatural” is that three men, Van and his two companions, set out on a journey of exploration and discovery: “this story is about that expedition,” Van informs us. What could be more “natural” than a story of male adventure? Van, as we have seen, is a sociologist, a man of science. The second member of the trio is Terry O. Nicholson. In Van’s


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words, Terry is “a man’s man, very much so.” He is “rich enough to do as he please[s],” Van says, and what “pleases” him is the thrill and excitement of exploration. Aside from having the money to pay for his adventures, Terry also has what is necessary to undertake a modern expedition of discovery: namely, boats, cars, and a plane. (In addition to their vehicles, the explorers are also well supplied with essential male accessories: “guns, of course,” “a good stock of cartridges,” and knives.) The third member of the group is Jeff Margrave, “born to be a poet,” but “persuaded” by his parents “to be a doctor instead.” While the three are taking part in a scientific expedition, they hear rumors of a land inhabited by women only. Since these stories are all told by the “savages” they encounter during their expedition, Van, Terry, and Jeff are at first somewhat dubious. The “savages” refer to this “strange and terrible” place as “Woman Land,” or “Plenty People—All Women.” Our adventurers laugh at “the stuff that savage dreams are made of,” but they are intrigued by these stories of “a land of women—no men—babies, but all girls.” And so, they decide that they will return home when the expedition they’re on is over and then come back, on their own, to see if they can find this “undiscovered country of Strictly Amazonian nature.” Jeff, “a tender soul,” has romantic dreams about this land; as Van describes it, “I think he thought that country—if there was one—was just blossoming with roses and babies and canaries and tidies, and all that sort of thing.” Jeff is the sort of man who “idealized women in the best southern style. He was full of chivalry and sentiment, and all that.” Terry, however, “had visions of a sort of sublimated summer resort—just Girls and Girls and Girls.” By contrast, Van regards his own motivations as more scientific than personal— he’s interested in a culture that is “built on a sort of matriarchal principle.” He doesn’t think they’ll find an all-female society, but, rather, one where men “have a separate cult of their own . . . and make [the women] an annual visit—a sort of wedding call.” Notice, here, how Van has based his “scientific” view of what he will discover on a version of the old stories of the Amazons. Naming is a male privilege in Herland. Our three American explorers are disdainful of the names the “savages” use to identify the land of women, but their own names are just as trivializing and condescending. They set out looking for a place they call, at first, “Feminisia” and then “Ladyland.” Ultimately, it’s Terry who comes up with the name that sticks, “Herland.” As for the women themselves, the three men are amused by the foreignness of their names. Terry is reduced to childishly making fun of Zava by referring to her as Java, Mocha, Coffee, Chickory, and Postum. The men are also troubled that the women of Herland have no surnames—Van thinks each mother


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should want to identify her own daughter by giving her child her own name, a family name. It’s a matter of “personal pride.” Terry is cruder, wondering why mothers don’t “sign” their children. Unlike men, however, the women of Herland don’t think of their children as possessions; as they point out, they are “all one family,” so they have no need of claiming a kind of individual ownership through naming. They want each child to have her own name. And the views of these enlightened American males about what a “country of women would be like” are equally patronizing. Terry believes that the women “would fight among themselves. . . . They always do. We mustn’t look to find any sort of order and organization.” Terry is a predator; for him, “women were just so much game and homely ones not worth considering.” His self-regard leads him to predict that any women they find will find him irresistible. “You’ll see,” he says, “I’ll get solid with them all—and play one bunch against another. I’ll get myself elected king in no time— whew!” Jeff, as the romantic, disagrees. Almost as if he is ventriloquizing Mary Astell herself, Jeff predicts that Herland “will be like a nunnery under an abbess—a peaceful, harmonious sisterhood.” According to Van, Jeff always puts “rose-colored halos on his womenfolk.” For his part, Van “snorted derision” at Jeff ’s idea and replies, “These are just women, and mothers, and where there’s motherhood you don’t find sisterhood—not much.” Believing himself to be “highly scientific, of course,” Van focuses his attention on the “physiological limitations of the [female] sex.” These adventurers do find Herland, and, once there, must reassess their views of women. The land they find is a highly organized, well-run land of plenty with a long history. As the women relate their history to the three men who have invaded their world, we can see that “their” history is a reflection of “our” history. At “about the time of the Christian era,” the country was not isolated but “in contact with the best civilization of the older world.” They had all the markings of a civilized people—“ships, commerce, an army, a king.” (As a civilized people, they were also the right color; Van determines that they were “of Aryan stock,” most certainly “white,” though, as a southern people, “somewhat darker” than “our northern races.”) Like other “civilized” male societies, they were polygamous and kept slaves. But this long-ago nation suffers what Van calls “a succession of historic misfortunes”; that is, they are “decimated by war.” And then, while engaged in a vicious war, the army is separated from its homeland by an earthquake that fills in the mountain pass that was the only access to their land. The women left behind are thus “walled in.” Once those left behind realize that the men will never return, the slaves seize power and kill all the old men and boys left behind by the army. But, like the Amazons of legend, the women gather together and kill their former slaves, who had become


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“their brutal conquerors.” And so, there were only women remaining in the “beautiful high garden land.” They succeed in making a paradise for themselves—in Van’s eyes, they created “a very practical little heaven.” As Van notes, the surviving women were all “harem-bred.” It was their “sister-love” that sustained them. For the next “five or ten years,” the women “worked together, growing stronger and wiser and more and more mutually attached, and then the miracle happened.” This “miracle” is a virgin birth: one of the young women becomes pregnant and gives birth to a child. This girl is “a direct gift from the gods,” but she is also gift of the “mutual attachment” of the surviving sisterhood. Thus, although Gilman emphasizes the asexual nature of this birth, it is also somehow the result of a deep and abiding love between women. After that first birth, the same young woman “bore child after child, five of them—all girls.” When these original five “Daughters” reach the age of twenty-five, each of them, in turn, bears five daughters, called “New Women.” These “parthenogenetic” women are the founding mothers of Herland, which has had an unbroken history for two thousand years. Like the Clefts, then, the women of Herland have no need for men in order to reproduce. But in both of these novels, asexual reproduction gives way to heterosexual reproduction. In the oral histories preserved by the Clefts, they record what happens even though they do not understand how or why it happens. The birth of the first Monster is followed by a second and a third. At first the Clefts abandon these monsters, as they do other deformed babies, exposing them on a special rock, but then the Clefts try to “fix” a Monster by cutting off its “squirt,” and “it” dies. Although their intentions were good, this is the first act of human cruelty. “We are not cruel people,” the Cleft history continues, adding, “There is no record of any of us doing cruel things—not until the Monsters were born.” At this point, the Roman historian intrudes into his story of the Clefts, adding his own reactions: “The first Monster was seen as an unfortunate birth fault. But then there was another, and another . . . and the realization that it was all going to continue. . . . [T]heir treatment of the Monsters themselves— well, it does not make for pleasant reading. . . . I am a Monster and cannot help identifying with those long-ago tortured infants, the first baby boys.” Failing in their efforts to “fix” the Monsters, the Clefts resume abandoning them, leaving them to die. But the Monsters don’t die. They not only survive but thrive, living not on the Clefts’ beach but in a forested valley. They are afraid of the Clefts and jealous—because the “Clefts had the power of birth, but they did not.” These males, who call themselves “Squirts,” are “tormented by the demands of their maleness, but did not know what it was they yearned for.” The two communities live in uneasy


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tension until a group of Squirts comes upon a young Cleft one day. And then a second act of cruelty and violence—the Squirts act on their “instincts” and take the Cleft captive, binding her and then raping her. This is a very difficult passage to read—“The mass rape went on, it went on, they were feeding hungers it seemed they could never sate.” The Cleft dies as a result of the Squirts’ brutal assault. Although they did not mean to, “they had killed.” “This was the first murder committed by our kind,” the historian writes, again identifying not with the female Clefts but with the Squirts—“our kind.” Soon after this horrible first experience of male-female sex, another young Cleft, “driven” by “an imperative,” finds a Squirt, “and in a moment she and this alien were together, and his tube was inside her and behaved as its name suggested.” In his account of how the Clefts “lost” the ability to reproduce, the historian once again makes his own biases clear. Notice the verb: “the females had relinquished their capacity to become impregnated by a fertilising wind, or a wave that carried fertility in its substance; they did not become impregnated at all, except by the males.” I added the italics here—the historian’s “relinquished” suggests a willing giving up of their powers of reproduction on the part of the Clefts, but the Clefts have not willingly given up anything. They lose the ability to become pregnant on their own. This loss of reproductive agency marks a shift in the relative power of the females and the males; the Clefts “painfully” realize that they are now “reliant on the males.” This truth is suddenly “evident.” And when they “lost their power to become pregnant,” our narrator concludes, “that must have been a relinquishing of belief in themselves, and how could that not have been painful?” As the “secret” history of human beings unfolds, the narrator shows not just the development of the sexes and sexuality—male and female, man and woman—but also the beginning of gender, masculinity and femininity. The men are hard, strong, and active, the women soft, weak, and passive. There had been no real concept of motherhood among the Clefts—babies were simply born and grew. Clefts who had given birth “suckled any babe around that needed it, there was not then such a feeling of mine, or not mine, among these ancient people.” But now, with male and female, masculine and feminine, the “fierceness of mine” takes hold. And families are made, families of mother, father, and child. Some of the new infants were “passive, easy, seldom cried, staying where they were set down.” These were girls. Others “did dangerous and foolish things.” These were boys. As we have seen, the Clefts’ first experience of heterosexual sex comes in the form of male violence and sexual assault. In Herland, each of the three male explorer-invaders expresses his sexuality in a different way. After learning about the world “outside,” the women of Herland ultimately


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decide to link themselves with the male world, represented by Van, Terry, and Jeff. Before we go any further, I must admit that I don’t find this part of Gilman’s novel persuasive. The women of Herland have lived with the kind of physical and emotional intensity that Astell describes in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies: “They loved one another with a practically universal affection, rising to exquisite and unbroken friendships. . . .” Why they decide to abandon their own harmonious, fulfilling way of life, substituting their mutual devotion for the limitations of an exclusive relationship to one man, isn’t at all convincing. In part, their decision is shaped by male deception. Van, Terry, and Jeff are offering the women of Herland an apple from the tree of knowledge—and it’s a rotten apple. Van knows that they haven’t been honest about “their” world and its valorization of heterosexuality, marriage, and the individual family. “None of us were willing to tell the women of Herland about the evils of our own beloved land,” he admits. “It was all very well for us to assume them to be necessary and essential, and to criticize—strictly among ourselves—their all-too-perfect civilization, but when it came to telling them about the failures and wastes of our own, we never could bring ourselves to do it.” The women’s decision is also influenced by their own assumptions. Worshipping Sisterhood and Motherhood as they do, the women of Herland believe that Brotherhood and Fatherhood must be equally glorious. As a way of bringing about a New Hope for their people, the women of Herland decide that marriage, representing a “New Tie with other lands,” is thus a worthy endeavor. To use the old Roman historian’s words here, the women of Herland decide to relinquish their self-sufficient method of reproduction and gamble on the unknowns of heterosexual reproduction. But it is not an easy transition. Van encounters a real difficulty in establishing a tradition of marriage in a place where no tradition exists—there is nothing “natural” about this institution, he discovers. The women of Herland think always of the whole community: “‘We’ and ‘we’ and ‘we,’” he says in exasperation. And because the women of Herland live communally, it’s hard for them to see the advantages of a being “alone” in a home with a man. Since the women of Herland focus their entire lives around their children, they also find it preposterous to think of placing a man at the center of all their thoughts and actions. But “the big point” of difference, the difficulty, is the sex act itself, or, in Van’s words, “in the very nature of the relation.” Living in harmony with nature, the women of Herland think that the only purpose of their “new tie” should be reproduction. This is no problem for Jeff; Van dismisses him by saying that Jeff has become “thoroughly Herlandized.” Jeff’s marriage is not at all a “traditional” marriage because Jeff “worship[s] Celis,” the young woman who is his partner.


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“I cannot say [he behaves] ‘like a man,’ but more as if he wasn’t one,” Van says. Terry has the opposite problem. He is never reconciled to the values of Herland. Sick and tired of “this everlasting mother-mother-mothering,” Terry grows more and more angry—Alima, the young woman to whom he is married, has shown no femininity, which he defines as “submissiveness, . . . that natural yielding which is woman’s greatest charm.” What his wife will not grant him willingly, Terry decides to take by force: “Terry put in practice his pet conviction that a woman loves to be mastered, and by sheer brute force, in all the pride and passion of his intense masculinity, he tried to master this woman.” Alima has no trouble at all in fighting him off—although utterly peaceful, the women of Herland are incredibly agile and very strong. But Van is not without sympathy for Terry, recognizing that he is within his “rights” as a husband; “In a court in our country,” Van remarks, “he would have been held quite ‘within his rights,’ of course.” Although Alima wants Terry killed, the wise women of Herland, with the advice of “Over Mother,” decide to expel him instead. Which brings us to Van’s marriage. He tries to use logic to convince his wife, Ellador, that sex is enjoyable, that its sole purpose is not reproductive, but she is not convinced. “Do you mean . . . that with you, when people marry, they go right on doing this in season and out of season, with no thought of children at all?” she asks. Although she listens patiently to Van explaining that the act of sex can serve a “higher, purer, nobler” purpose, as an expression of devotion between two people, she responds by gently “stroking” Van’s hair “in a gentle motherly way.” Van finds himself “amazed,” however, not at Ellador’s change of mind but of his own. He finds that “my ideas of what was essential had changed, that my feelings changed also.” He began his search for Herland in an attempt to discover a new land. At last he realizes that he has found more than he bargained for. His journey of discovery has resulted in a bit of self-discovery: “I found an endlessly beautiful undiscovered country to explore, and in it the sweetest wisdom and understanding.” Van’s journey of discovery has also made him aware of the “painful defects of my own land.” At the core of his recognition is a gender ideology he has now been forced to examine. His epiphany sounds like he has been reading a bit of Mary Astell (Virginia Woolf hadn’t yet addressed herself to the young women of Newnham and Girton in much the same language):


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When we say men, man, manly, manhood, and all the other masculine derivatives, we have in the background of our minds a huge vague crowded picture of the world and all its activities. To grow up and “be a man,” to “act like a man”—the meaning and connotation is wide indeed. That vast background


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The word “women” means “the sex.” That’s it. But Van ultimately learns to love Ellador on her terms, not his. “I found that ‘loving up’ was a very good sensation,” he says, “It was like—coming home to mother. . . . It was a sense of getting home; of being clean and rested; of safety and yet freedom; of love that was always there.” Even so, after Terry is expelled from Herland for his attempt to rape Alima, Van decides that he must leave with him, ostensibly because it’s not safe for Terry to go alone. His allegiance to Terry seems to be stronger than his love for Ellador, his learning to “love up,” and the safety and freedom he has found in Herland. When Ellador decides to go with her new husband, Van is momentarily guilty because he still hasn’t been entirely truthful about the state of “his” world. “Our teaching about the rest of the world has given them all a sense of isolation, of remoteness, of being a little outlying sample of a country, overlooked and forgotten among the family of nations. We had called it ‘the family of nations,’ and they liked the phrase immensely,” Van writes. But Ellador is not relinquishing her citizenship in Herland. It’s easy to read her decision to go with Van as turning her back on Herland, becoming, in effect, a “traditional” wife in a “traditional marriage,” following her man wherever he leads. Instead, if we look carefully, we see that Gilman has given us a twist on the typical male adventure story of the “running boy” who leaves home in order to explore a new land—and to avoid the responsibilities that a man must assume when he has a wife and children. Terry, Jeff, and Van have set out on an adventure, but they are not returning to “civilization” having conquered a brave new world. If we read carefully, we will see that Ellador is the novel’s real adventurer—she is setting off on a woman’s voyage of discovery. While Celis remains in Herland and devotes herself to “her Great Work”—that is, having a child with Jeff—Ellador has taken upon herself the challenge of visiting “the Rest of the World.” We learn that the women of Herland haven’t been fooled by the three men’s carefully edited versions of their country and its inhabitants—the women have figured out that “there is still much disease, often contagious,” in the outside world, and they know that “there is still, in varying degree, ignorance, with prejudice and unbridled emotion.” They also know that “there is still unrest and


is full of marching columns of men, of changing lines of men, of long processions of men; of men steering their ships into new seas, exploring unknown mountains, breaking horses, herding cattle, ploughing and sowing and reaping, toiling at the forge and furnace, digging in the mine, building roads and bridges and high cathedrals, managing great businesses, teaching in all the colleges, preaching in all the churches; of men everywhere, doing everything— “the world.” And when we say women, we think female—the sex.


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sometimes combat.” Ellador is not abandoning Herland to follow Van—she is leaving in order to learn everything she can about his world and then to return to Herland and report on what she has discovered. Nor will Herland be open to the Rest of the World, vulnerable to its exploitation. Van and Terry must promise “not in any way to betray the location of this country” until they have received permission—and until Ellador has returned. And so, Gilman’s novel begins as yet another male adventure story, but ends in a quite different way, with an intrepid woman setting out to explore, survey, judge, and report on a strange and “savage” country. As readers, we are only too well aware of what she will find in “our” land. Adventure comes to play a role in the story of the Clefts as well. We don’t know how much time has passed—how much time since birth of the first Monster. But with the passage of time, Cleft and Squirt have become female and male, then she and he, and then Maronna and Horsa. Eventually there is a pivotal “confrontation” between the two groups, women and men, and our historian tells us that there are “two versions of this scene,” one from women’s oral histories, one from men’s. Driven by a desire that the women cannot understand, Horsa and his men decide to set out on “a long expedition,” but from Maronna’s point of view, their plans are foolish, “lacking in forethought.” If all the men leave with Horsa, the women will be left unprotected, defenseless against the dangers of wild animals, and, without men, “there would be no more babes, no more people.” Horsa has also decided to take some young girls with him on his journey—if he does, they will surely become pregnant, and then what? And he plans to take along a few children; how will he keep them safe? “He had not thought, that was all,” explains the historian—his perspective is interesting here, because the Roman historian projects himself right into the mind of the long-ago man named Horsa. “This confused him, the sheer force of it,” the historian continues, “these accusations . . . made him stubborn and resisting, but he could not today tell her he wasn’t listening, and that she always nagged and complained, because he was secretly thinking that she was right.” Nevertheless, in spite of his doubts, Horsa sets out boldly on his journey of discovery. He wants to find whatever it is that is out there, he wants to go anywhere that isn’t where he is now. He “wanted to find another land, other shores, other—people?” And so he departs, taking with him all the men, all the boys, and some of the girls. But as his journey goes on and on, Horsa is forced to admit what he knew all along, that Maronna was right. Some of the girls who accompanied the adventurers became pregnant, they had their babies, and then “the long balmy beaches where they camped and feasted, male beaches, full of mostly men, heard the wails of infants. Horsa was appalled, and so were all the young men. This is what they had run


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away from—wasn’t it?” Horsa considers the possibility of returning home, but none of the men want to do that: “journeys are to get somewhere, find something, to discover, take possession. . . .” Although Horsa and his men press on, suffering one calamity after another, Horsa never finds the new world he sought. Ultimately his grand quest takes the bedraggled, suffering adventurers right back where they began. “Can’t you see The Cleft,” a young girl asks Horsa, pointing to the landmark she has recognized. “And indeed, the great cliff of The Cleft stood up above the trees, not so far off. The men stared. Yes, it is The Cleft. That meant. . . .” Horsa knows that he will have to face Maronna, but before he reaches the familiar beach, he sees “white clouds coming out of The Cleft” and hears “the thud-thudding of several explosions.” He realizes that some of his “mad men, his brave young men” have run ahead of him, back to the beach from which they originally departed—the thuds Horsa hears are the sound of The Cleft being destroyed. When she sees Horsa, Maronna is inconsolable. She cannot understand such wanton destruction. “We’ve been here always, always,” she cries, “We are born here. You were born here. You were born in that cave up there.” As she sobs, Horsa knows that he must lead her, the rest of the women who had been left behind, and his own weary men away from the only home they have ever known. Like Adam and Eve, expelled from Paradise, Horsa and Maronna are both in shock as they turn to go. But in this revised Creation story, it is Adam, not Eve, who is at fault. She is “full of anger,” he is “guilty, in the wrong”: “Maronna screamed and went on screaming, and at last her voice went hoarse, and she stood silent, looking, but really looking at him. He was trembling, he was limp with the grief he genuinely did feel, because her agony of grief was telling him what an enormity he had committed. And she saw this, understood it.” In this moment of understanding, when Horsa feels “loved and forgiven,” his “restless mind” turns toward a new journey. He will find them a new home. “She will understand, yes, she’ll come with me, we’ll go together, I’ll make a ship better than any we’ve made, and we’ll land together on that shore and. . . .” Here the historian’s account of the secret past ends. “The explosion of The Cleft is both the end of a tale and the beginning of the next,” he writes. “Historians who wrote long ages before me agreed on that—and so let it be.” *

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The Cleft is a complex piece of postmodern fiction, a playful but challenging search for “truth” that is constantly reminding the reader that truth is not to be found and may not even exist. On some level The Cleft seems to represent a very old narrative form, one that we first saw when we examined


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Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies; like Pizan’s work, The Cleft at first looks like a very traditional frame-tale narrative with allegorical elements. A storyteller, in this case our Roman historian, is telling us a story (about his life), into which is embedded a series of stories (about the Clefts and the Squirts). These individual stories come to represent something larger, a kind of universal allegory of womankind and mankind. And yet, even as it assumes this guise, we can see that the narrative strategy of The Cleft is far more complicated. We encounter a historian who is not only compiling a history out of previously recorded “histories,” but who is also theorizing history—that is, our narrator is writing a history while simultaneously writing about the writing of history and about the partial and contingent nature of any single account of history. There is “history”—that is, all of the events of the past—and there is “History”—the past as it has been constructed and written. While weighing and balancing his evidence, our historian is also reflecting on his own role as a historian. He knows that he can’t help identifying with the males—the Squirts—as he tries to tell the untold story of the Clefts: “The female kept records, and I cannot bring myself to write down all that is there; and the male kept records: and I do bring myself to write down what is there.” This modern frame-tale narrative is filled with details that call attention to its constructed nature. Early on in his story, our self-conscious narrator offers a warning to his readers: “Some of the reported events are abrasive and may upset certain people,” he says. And so, “People wishing to avoid offence to their sensibilities may start the story on p. 29.” At one point, a fair way into his narrative, the historian stops, refers to the difficulty of his task (“To make a history from this kind of material is not easy”), and then starts over, from the beginning (“Now I again begin my tale.”). Later he refers to two variations of the same story: “The girls’ description of the day was irritated, exasperated, but the boys’ account only said the girls ‘were complaining as usual.’” Then he writes, “This is what happened.” How does he know? What is his source for the “real” story? How does he make one “truth” out of two competing narratives? In another spot the historian identifies “one event, referred to as the Men’s Rage, the Women’s Rage, depending on the gender of the speaker.” And later on, “We have versions of this scene, both from the men’s and women’s histories.” He inserts episodes of his life to clarify incidents in his sources, suggesting their relevance with comments like “This is to the point, I think” or “Once again I have to intervene” and “And now I really cannot stop myself from intervening again.” And then there are the random asides that dot the narrative, like this one: “We Romans must assume sex took place, but is it possible that a time will come when Rome will be criticized for making too much of sex?


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I think so. But, then, this is an old man talking.” Rather than a single, linear narrative, Lessing offers her reader alternative, nonlinear possibilities. Lessing’s use of an unnamed narrator is deliberately tantalizing—our nameless historian teases us with his authorial identity. “I had had things published, had been noticed,” he tells us, then adds, “but never under my own name—which might astonish you, did you hear it.” He plays with his readers in other ways, as well, inserting commentaries that seem very much like the kind of paratextual notes we see in graphic narratives like Marjane Satrapi’s Embroideries. A “Note by Historian” is added in one place, for example—is this note for us, his reader, or for the historian himself? There are also bracketed interpolations into the narrative, added and signed by the historian: “[The long hair is my invention, based on a mention of long hair from ages after this time. Perhaps the earliest Clefts were as smooth as seals, but then grew long hair in obedience to some imperative they were hardly conscious of. Historian.]” And another: “[This historian is allowing (her) tears, though none was ever recorded in any document we have.]” He comments on the accuracy of his translations, as in this parenthetical assertion: “(Many: that is the word they used).” And on the accuracy of the vocabulary in his sources: “It is recorded that Maronna and Horsa were ‘reconciled’ that night. I wonder what the original word was?” Lessing’s male narrator ultimately finds no truth—in fact, he avoids it. At the very end of his story, as he describes the eruption of Vesuvius and the dust and debris it has left behind, he does experience a moment of enlightenment: “it occurs to me now to wonder if a careful search around all the coasts of the islands of our sea might reveal once whitened rocks that we would agree were the site of that old story, Clefts and Monsters.” He could search, and he could perhaps find the site, but it “would be of only a sentimental interest.” He is resigned. The explosion of The Cleft “is both the end of a tale and the beginning of the next.” Vesuvius, we can assume, is both the end of a tale and the beginning of the next. The historian’s tale is both the end of one tale and the beginning of the next. Like Horsa, we are all traveling in circles. Critics disliked The Cleft when it was published. Although the blurbs on the hardcover edition are, not surprisingly, full of praise, and the paperback edition is emblazoned with a golden seal proclaiming “Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature,” the reviews when the book was published were, almost without exception, negative. Perhaps the most basic criticism is that, for a novel, The Cleft demonstrates an “infuriating absence of character and plot,” in the words of one reviewer. Another is equally blunt: “it is not merely a flawed novel or a failed novel. It is an actively bad novel.” Yet another reviewer asks, “What is Doris Lessing up to here? Is she sticking a finger in


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Freud’s eye? Turning the tables on the misogynist patriarchy? Or is she ridiculing those feminists who persist in claiming her for their own? Can she be serious?” Another seems to answer these questions: “The Cleft’s tiresome narrative and its ridiculous and even hurtful take on gender relations have been politely ignored. A few pieces have gestured at the novel’s ‘controversial’ approach to women and men but have made no real attempt to explicate the ways in which it is controversial. So let me be blatant: its [sic] controversial because it’s reactive and ultra-conservative; because it peddles stereotypes as archetypes and because it takes a position so violently (and fashionably) antifeminist that it must make any woman (and any man) boil.” And yet, for all its complexity, confrontation, and contradiction, The Cleft offers my student readers a narrative they love. It’s not just the male voice. They negotiate the “characterless” and “plotless” novel with surprising ease, noting the mesmeric quality of the prose style. For readers who usually resist “long” reading assignments (anything much over twenty or so pages), they have no trouble finishing the 256-page novel in four days—one of the balkier readers in one class proudly claimed to have read the entire book in one sitting. Unlike the critics who couldn’t figure out whether Lessing was ridiculous or reactionary or both, my students maneuver through the novel’s formal complexities without a problem, and they don’t worry too much about what Lessing’s intentions might have been. At the end of The Cleft, the unnamed historian links his own world to the lost world of the Clefts— and student readers, encountering The Cleft right after Herland, can tease out the relationship between these two accounts of Paradise Lost. They even point to a particular passage in Gilman’s novel that signals the very direction Lessing is heading in The Cleft—in puzzling over the difficulties he faces in introducing the women of Herland to courtship and marriage, Van observes, “They had no exact analogue for our word home, any more than they had for our Roman-based family.” Doris Lessing is neither advocating old gender divisions nor valorizing them—she is taking them back to their roots, back through the “Roman-based family,” her Roman narrator and his family, to one possible beginning. A prefatory note signals this intention; having recently read a “scientific article” that claims “the basic and primal human stock was probably female, and that males came along later, as a kind of cosmic after thought,” a firstperson narrator—is it Lessing?—is intrigued. This “idea” proves itself to be “grist to an already active mill” for this narrator, who has already “been wondering if men were not a younger type, a junior variation.” One thing leads to another: “Brooding about the whole question [“Is Nature trying something out?”] sparked off speculation and then that spinning of the imagination that can lead to the birth of stories. Here is . . . what might


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have happened. . . .” As if this isn’t warning enough about what is to come, there are two more prefatory elements—an epigraph by Robert Graves, “Man does, woman is,” and a passage from James Elroy Flecker’s poem “The Golden Journey to Samarkand” that illustrates the Graves epigraph. The merchants on the golden journey in Flecker’s poem “travel not for trafficking alone,” but “for lust of knowing what should not be known.” “With a shout,” the merchants eagerly begin “the Golden Journey to Samarkand,” leaving their inconsolable women behind: “It was ever thus. / Men are unwise and curiously planned.” A lone woman cries, “They have their dreams, and do not think of us.” Thus, through layers and layers—the prefatory note, the epigraph from Graves, the passage of Flecker’s poem, the Roman historian’s reflections and interpolations—we travel back, to the story of the Clefts. If The Cleft is deceptively complex, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland is deceptively simple. And short—Herland is a very quick read, just 143 pages in the Signet Classic edition I use in class. Like Lessing’s novel, Herland is devoid of the stuff that we have come to expect in a novel, an incidentfilled plot. As our narrator admits, “It is no use for me to try to piece out this account with adventures. If the people who read it are not interested in these amazing women and their history, they will not be interested at all.” As this disclaimer suggests, the voice of the male narrator is immediately engaging and deceptively honest—any resistance we might have to a “history,” much less to a suspiciously “feminist” history, is thus diverted. We are safe with Van and his account of Herland. As his “history” unfolds, we learn about this perfect and harmonious world. As we have seen, the women of Herland have no need for men at all, but they are willing to abandon their self-sufficiency and give men and marriage a try because. . . . Because why? We are swept along by Gilman’s simple prose and quickly moving story without really wondering why. And before we know it, Ellador is in the plane with Van, ready to take off. We know all the horrors she will be facing in his world—not least of which is world war. What complicates the simple utopianism of Herland is that, as I have said, it is so unconvincing. I’ve generally given my students an imaginative writing assignment following our last discussion of Gilman’s novel. What happens to Van and Ellador when they leave Herland? That’s the writing assignment—continue the story. Not one student has ever written a happily-ever-after addition. We just can’t imagine Ellador’s journey of exploration turning out well for her. Her reasons for leaving Herland are never clear. She’s hardly motivated by the chance to boldly go where no woman has gone before, nor is she setting off armed and dangerous, like an Amazon queen intent on vanquishing her enemies or forcing them to give her their


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sperm. My students’ responses always end up with despair and death—in their imaginative continuations of Herland, Ellador usually winds up just like Shakespeare’s sister. And although some students may be “relieved” to “finally” hear a male voice, I can’t remember a single one who continued the story from Van’s point of view. They write as Ellador. But the problem is not with Gilman’s Herland—it’s with the way her story of Herland has been shaped for us by her modern editors. The story was originally published not as a novel but in serial installments in Gilman’s own literary periodical, Forerunner, beginning in January 1915. As the twelve installments of Gilman’s account of the peaceful, harmonious world of Herland appeared, the horrors of the “great war” were already mounting up: in January, German zeppelin attacks on England begin, and poison gas is used in the trenches; in March, at Neuve Chapelle, British suffer 13,000 casualties to advance a mile and a quarter; in April, the battle of Gallipoli begins; in May, a German submarine sinks the Lusitania; in September, in one offensive on the Western Front, the British and French lose 142,000 men, the Germans 141,000; in December, the Allied forces begin to withdraw from Gallipoli—after 46,000 men died and 219,000 were wounded. These twelve monthly installments correspond to the twelve “chapters” that today comprise Gilman’s “novel.” But these twelve installments are not the end of the Herland story. In January 1916, without any break in publication, Gilman continued the story of Van and Ellador, publishing twelve more installments, under the title “With Her in Ourland: Sequel to ‘Herland.’” There is no break at all in the action. The story for the month of January 1916 begins exactly where the December 1915 chapter ended: “The three of us, all with set faces of high determination, sat close in the big biplane as we said good-bye to Herland and rose whirring from the level rock on that sheer edge.” Van looks once more at the paradise he and Ellador are leaving, again calling the land a “garden” but now christening Herland with a new name: “Wonderland.” The first thing Ellador encounters in Ourland, meanwhile, is war—after arriving in England she visits hospitals where wounded soldiers are suffering, and then she persuades Terry to fly her over the battlefields where she sees the horror of trench warfare. In Van’s words, she “sees the ruins, ruins everywhere.” In the monthly installments that appeared over the rest of 1916, Gilman uses Ellador’s perspective on “our” land to advance her own social critique— she begins with Ellador’s reactions to the horror of war and moves on to pointed observations on the nations of the world (and on the United States, in particular), on the status of women in society, on forms of government, on economic systems and economic disparities, on race and religion, and on


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newly emerging reform movements, the peace movement and the women’s movement, for example. In the end, although Van is “allowed to print the previous account of our visit [to Herland],” he is not free to publish the location of Herland. Instead, Van and Ellador leave “our” land and return to Herland, but they are not abandoning the rest of the world to misery. Instead, Ellador has two new hopes. After having seen the miserable realities of the world outside of Herland, she becomes a kind of evangelist, dedicating herself to educating the women of Herland about the outside world; her first hope is to recruit them for a new and greater calling, the relief of that world. And so we see the young women of Herland—“earnest eyed, of boundless hope and high purpose, planning, as eager missionaries plan, what they could do to spread to all the world their proven gains.” The “other new Hope” is more personal—Ellador and Van are expecting a child. The December 1916 installment ends, “And in due time, a son was born to us.” Only in Gilman’s 1916 installments do we see Ellador’s motivations and see just why the women of Herland decide to reestablish contact with the outside world. Ellador is not leaving with Van to follow her lover. Her decision is not because of her “complete absorption” in him, as Van himself admits: “She loved me—that I knew, but by no means with that engrossing absorption so familiar to our novelists and their readers.” Rather, Ellador is functioning like an “ambassador sent on an important and dangerous mission. She represented her country, and that with a vital intensity we can hardly realize. She was to meet and learn a whole new world, and perhaps establish connections between it and her own dear land.” In addition to representing her country, Ellador also represents womankind: as she tells Van, “I understand that men are different from women—must be, but I am convinced that it is better for the world to have both men and women than to have only one sex, like us. We have done the best we could, we women, all alone.” But, most significantly, her expedition, on behalf of the women of Herland, is the mirror image of the Western European voyages of “discovery,” characterized by their brutal conquest and exploitation of who and what was “found”: “We have made a nice little safe clean garden place and lived happily in it,” Ellador says, “but we have done nothing whatever for the rest of the world.” Her mission is to see how the women of Herland “may be of service to the rest of the world.” This crucial aspect of Herland is missing in the way we now encounter the text. Gilman never published the twelve installments in the 1915 Forerunner as a single, book-length narrative. Herland was published for the first time as a novel in 1979—introduced by Ann J. Lane and published by Pantheon Books, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s twelve serial installments became Herland: A Lost Feminist Utopian Novel by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. While Lane’s introduction to Pantheon’s Herland discussed Gilman’s


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narrative in relationship to the continuation of the story in “Ourland,” the crucial link between the two was lost—lost because its 1979 “book” form made Herland seem complete, and lost because Herland continues to be published as an independent, complete novel, a whole story when it is, in fact, just the first half of the story. For a thoughtful reader—especially one who has traced the long tradition of women dreaming about rooms of their own—Herland just doesn’t make a lot of sense. We need the second half of Gilman’s narrative—With Her in Ourland—to make the circle complete. *

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In the end, the most intriguing link between Herland and The Cleft is their variation on the theme of Paradise Lost—the all-female societies we encounter in Herland and The Cleft are ultimately destroyed by the arrival of men. In neither case have women sought an end to their edenic existence. Changes are forced upon them, despite their own best efforts. The women of Herland have always known about the outside world, and they have made every effort to maintain their separation from it. It is not easy for Van, Terry, and Jeff to force their way in, but once they are there, in Herland, they change everything. Ellador may be optimistic about her mission to change “our” land, but the safety and security of Herland have been breached. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was herself a tireless social activist, and she believed that education and exhortation could bring about real change—but now, some ninety-five years later, Ellador’s determinedly optimistic mission to save us from ourselves seems to have been doomed from the start. As we encounter it now, we are left to conclude that Herland was lost for nothing. As for the Clefts, they too resisted change, at first trying to “fix” the monsters born to them. When their desperate efforts to correct these strange freaks of nature failed, they tried to ignore them, abandoning them to their own fate on the rocks far beyond the comfortable beaches that always made up the homeland of the Clefts. But these males survived, thrived, and eventually destroyed the only home the Clefts—and the males themselves—had ever known. If, as I have suggested, the dream of having a room of their own shared by women writers from Christine de Pizan to Azar Nafisi and Marjane Satrapi represents a quintessential female narrative, it is clearly a narrative of retreat—from the harsh realities of a male-dominated world, from physical oppression to personal liberation. Although the physical spaces they occupy may be tightly constrained—a dining room, a garden, a small study—they offer women the greatest possible intellectual and spiritual freedom. In Herland and The Cleft, we can look back to a time “before” such a retreat was necessary. We can catch a glimpse of Paradise. But once men arrive on


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the scene—by accident, in both cases—women are forced out of their safe havens and into a world that is not of their own making. Having lost paradise, their descendants are left to their dreams of regaining it.

The classicist quoted on p. 102 is Peter Walcot, Emeritus Professor in the Cardiff School of History and Archaeology. See his “Greek Attitudes towards Women: The Mythological Evidence,” Greece & Rome, 2d ser., 31, no. 1 (1984): 37–47. This article is available through JSTOR, if you have access. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland is available online through Project Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/32, accessed 11 December 2010 or through eBooks@Adelaide at http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/g/gilman/charlotte_perkins/herland/, accessed 11 December 2010. It is also available in several affordable paperback editions, often published with other Gilman texts, especially short stories. In class, I use the edition edited by Barbara H. Soloman, Herland and Selected Stories (New York: New American Library, Signet Classics, 1992). Soloman’s introduction to Gilman’s life and work is excellent. Like this Signet edition, several other paperback anthologies include Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which we’ll be examining in Chapter 7. Doris Lessing’s The Cleft was published in 2007 (New York: HarperCollins). In early 2008, Lessing won the Nobel Prize in Literature. A paperback edition, sporting the Nobel logo, was published under the Harper Perennial imprint in 2008. In making a distinction between “history” and “History” on p. 121, I am following Gerda Lerner, Women and History, vol. 1: The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). The continuation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story of Herland is available in Mary Jo Deegan and Michael R. Hill’s accessible With Her in Ourland: Sequel to Herland (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1997), but it is not easy to find the twenty-four installments of Gilman’s Herland story in one continuous narrative. Minna Doskow’s Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Utopian Novels: Moving the Mountain, Herland, and With Her in Ourland (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999) is now out of print, but a new edition of Herland, edited by Beth Sutton-Ramspeck (Peterborough, Ontario [Canada]: Broadview Press, forthcoming), will contain selections from With Her in Ourland.




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Hell Hath No Fury: Rage in Arcangela Tarabotti’s Paternal Tyranny and Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto

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he quotation I’ve alluded to in this chapter’s title is incorrect—like so many of our favorite lines, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” is actually a misquotation. The original is found in William Congreve’s 1697 tragedy, The Mourning Bride, when the “beauteous” Zara, a captive queen, turns her anger on the man who has deceived and betrayed her. Vowing revenge, she warns him that “Heav’n has no rage, like love to hatred turn’d, / Nor hell a fury, like a woman scorn’d.” But Zara’s anger is quickly forgotten when she thinks that the man she loves is dead—in her despair, she kills herself. Women’s anger has always made for great entertainment—consider Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra, for example, or “Kind-Hearted Geum-Ja,” the title character in South Korean director Park Chang-wook’s 2005 film, Lady Vengeance. Congreve’s tragedy offers just one literary example of the way female anger has been staged for our terror and delight over the centuries. Taken as a prisoner of war by the king of Granada, Zara seems to be safely under male control, but even as she is triumphantly displayed as war booty, she is still considered a threat to the king and his royal authority. Her passions—in particular, her rage—are identified as foreign, barbaric even, while Almeria, the king’s daughter, is presented as Zara’s dramatic foil. Both women are in love with Alphonso, the prince of Valencia, and both will do anything for him—it is Almeria, in fact, who has secretly married the prince, her father’s enemy—yet the two women are presented as mirror images of one another. As Alphonso tells Almeria early in the play, “She’s the reverse of thee.” In Congreve’s Granada, Almeria is as good as Zara is


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bad—their degree of separation is indicated by the alphabetical distance between their names. Zara is the dangerous “other,” marked out by her race (she’s a Moor) and by her rage. She herself refers to her “savage breast” and her “barbarous rage,” while Alphonso justifies his manipulation of Zara by referring to her “blind rage.” In the end, Zara’s “hellish rage” leads her to suicide, while Almeria is rewarded by a happily-ever-after ending with Alphonso. What’s important to note here is that Zara’s anger in no way endangers Granada. She may be furious, but she’s also powerless. We are no more comfortable with female anger today than Congreve’s seventeenth-century English audience. In the last decade or so, we have experienced a media frenzy about a supposed new breed of “mean” girls, mad, bad, and dangerous to know. The public response to this threat is schizophrenic. On the one hand there are all the books warning us about rabid packs of girls who threaten civilization as we know it: Mean Girls: Facing Your Beauty Turned Beast; Mean Girls: 101 ½ Creative Strategies for Working with Relational Aggression; Mean Chicks, Cliques, and Dirty Tricks: A Real Girl’s Guide to Getting through the Day with Smarts and Style; Means Girls Gone: A Spiritual Guide to Getting Rid of Mean; Girl Wars: 12 Strategies that Will End Female Bullying. . . . I could go on—these are just the first few titles that pop up on Amazon when I search for books by entering the keywords “mean” and “girls.” On the other hand, when it comes to the subject of mean girls, there is also the public titillation. Like Congreve’s audience, we love the spectacle. In addition to all the books, study guides, message boards, and related products identifying the problem (and selling us the solutions), we are encouraged to sit back and enjoy the show—the movies, the music, the games, the websites. Thousands of clips of “mean” girls fighting each other are posted on YouTube, where girl-on-girl aggression is served up in irresistible and salacious two-minute videos for our entertainment. These aren’t porn films or almost-porn music videos, either, although they might as well be, judging from some of the messages posted in response to each clip. These are movies of six-year-old girls in cute t-shirts fighting on the playground by the jungle gym. And then there are the ubiquitous Bratz dolls—slutty mean-girl playthings designed for four- to eight-year-olds. Before a copyright case ended production, there was a lot of public hand-wringing about these “brats” and their dangerous influence on little girls, but we still bought them for our daughters—the dolls reportedly earned between $405 million and $777 million in the years from 2001 to 2008. The message about female anger is so contradictory that Rachel Simmons, author of one of the most influential of the early “mean girl” books (Odd Girl Out, 2002), has now published The Curse of the Good Girl (2009). Instead of focusing on the continuing dangers posed by mean girls, this book warns us


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of the harm suffered by smiling, polite, and self-sacrificing “good” girls. In her Newsweek article “You Are Your Own Glass Ceiling,” senior writer Jessica Bennett spoke with Simmons about “why good girls finish last.” It turns out that women in the workplace “are too afraid to ask for what they deserve.” But Bennett’s Newsweek article was accompanied by a photo gallery of “Female Ambition: 11 Powerful Women Who Make Men—and Other Women—Squirm.” How’s that for a mixed message? As we read about the ways women undercut and devalue themselves in their professional lives, we can see what happens to them when they are ambitious and successful. Images of mean girls like Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Anna Wintour, and Martha Stewart are deployed to scare the hell out of us. I am not suggesting that there aren’t mean girls out there. But for every TV Bridezilla, throwing a rhinestone-studded sandal at her wedding planner (or groom), there are at least five other simpering brides on camera who confess that they want to be princesses on their wedding day. As for the young women I see in my classrooms? I’m not anxious to see them start throwing punches, but I do wish they’d get angry once in a while. There is so much for them to be angry about. But whatever they are really feeling, they remain polite. They smile. And they are almost always nice. In this chapter, by contrast, we will be examining two writers who are not so nice, a seventeenth-century nun and a twentieth-century pamphleteer and playwright. Reading their work—Arcangela Tarabotti’s Paternal Tyranny and Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto—we can see for ourselves how deeply troubling female rage can be. *

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Arcangela Tarabotti and Valerie Solanas regard women’s worlds from entirely different perspectives. Arcangela Tarabotti writes from an all-female world—she’s a Benedictine nun, living in the convent of Sant’Anna in Venice. But she’s not there because she wants to be. In the opening passage of her work, she tells us who has put her there and why: “Men’s depravity could not have devised a more heinous crime than the wanton defiance of God’s inviolable decrees. Yet day in and day out, men never cease defying them by deeds dictated by self-interest. Among their blameworthy excesses, pride of place must go to enclosing innocent women within convent walls under apparently holy (but really wicked) pretexts.” Men “force women to dwell in life-long prisons, although guilty of no fault other than being born the weaker sex. . . .” Valerie Solanas, on the other hand, writes from maledominated society, but this is not where she wants to be. She wants to create a world exclusively for women. The opening sentence of her work tells us


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why and how: “Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civicminded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex.” Despite their many and obvious differences, what unites Arcangela Tarabotti and Valerie Solanas is their profound anger and their fearless expression of their rage. From Christine de Pizan through Mary Astell, we have seen women’s lot equated with suffering. Whatever dreams about an all-female space they may share, the writers we have examined have accepted the necessity of women’s suffering, at least in this world. In The Book of the City of Ladies, Lady Reason points out to “Christine” that women must follow “the example of suffering which God commands.” Like Jesus, they have “cheerfully suffered” the abuses of men and the hardships of marriage, and they must continue to do so, despite the virtual shelter offered them by the City of Ladies. Their unearned suffering will be redemptive, but they will find their recompense in the next world, not in this one. The women in Moderata Fonte’s garden in Venice can make jokes about the suffering women experience at the hands of men, their fathers and husbands and brothers, but the harsh reality of women’s lives is never far from their minds. As the widow Leonora says, “I’d rather drown than submit again to a man! I have just escaped from servitude and suffering and you’re asking me to go back again of my own free will and get tangled up in all that again? God preserve me!” Mary Astell’s Some Reflections on Marriage offers an unblinking assessment of the kind of suffering women can expect to endure in their lives. And even in the midst of comedy, the specter of tragedy is never far away—as they enjoy their freedom in the Convent of Pleasure, the young women in Margaret Cavendish’s play “entertain” themselves by watching a series of scenes that vividly illustrate the suffering of women’s lives. A few women, like Lady Happy and her companions, may have the resources to opt out of the system, but most of them—like Lady Happy herself, as it turns out—cannot. Oddly enough, the young women I see in my classrooms are horrified by such attitudes—suffering is not something they are willing to tolerate, much less to embrace. I say “oddly” because I teach at a university with a Lutheran tradition, and most of my students call themselves Christians of one sort or another, while a few of them even profess themselves to be “godly” women. Although Jesus should thus be a model for them—the preeminent example of unearned suffering and its redemptive value— I rarely find a student, godly or otherwise, who is willing to see any role whatsoever for suffering in her life. Students are appalled by Book 3 of


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The Book of the City of Ladies, with its focus on women who choose to suffer and die for their faith, the saints and martyrs of Christian tradition. These young women have heard Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech a million times, so many times, in fact, that they don’t really hear it any more—“I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. And some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.” You’d think that if they’re appalled by all this embrace of suffering, my students would be ready for a little righteous anger. You would be wrong. It’s hard to say which is more shocking today, Arcangela Tarabotti’s Paternal Tyranny or Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto. I was in college when the Women’s Liberation movement was born, when the newly formed National Organization for Women celebrated Mother’s Day by demanding “Rights, Not Roses,” when a group of New York feminists protested by burying a dummy of “Traditional Womanhood” at a peace rally in Washington D. C., when Angela Davis was on the FBI’s list of the “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives,” and when a group of lesbian radicals began publishing The Furies, a “lesbian/feminist monthly.” In the midst of all of this, in early 1967, Valerie Solanas began selling mimeographed copies of her SCUM Manifesto on the streets of New York. Even though I know the context out of which she wrote, I still take a deep breath before I open up my slim copy of Solanas’s work. I know what to expect, but she still takes my breath away. It’s no surprise, then, that when unsuspecting students open their copies of Arcangela Tarabotti’s Paternal Tyranny, they are astonished at what they find. Tarabotti’s text, edited and translated by Letizia Panizza and published by the University of Chicago, is a beautifully produced book. The cover image of Mary Magdalene, from a seventeenth-century painting by Elisabetta Sirani, is of a lovely young woman with a solemn face, her hair mostly covered by a veil, eyes upturned beseechingly. The cover image seems to suggest that what we will find inside is another account of female sorrow and suffering—which is what we do find, at least in part, because Tarabotti has suffered. But contrary to our expectations, she is not suffering silently. Her anger is as white-hot today as it was more than 350 years ago, her searing words almost scorching the pages. As one young woman recently wrote in her initial response to reading Tarabotti’s Paternal Tyranny, “You can almost feel the heat radiating from this book.” Another commented that Tarabotti “is on a fiery rampage!” The experience of encountering


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Tarabotti can also be intimidating. “For most of the first book,” one young woman wrote a few semesters ago, “I was afraid that she was going to jump out of the pages and start screaming. . . . I was sure she was going to yell at me!” But not every reader is quite so intimidated. “Truthfully, I didn’t really enjoy the last two books [Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies and Moderata Fonte’s The Worth of Women],” one very honest young woman wrote in the fall of 2006, “but I am actually enjoying this one. I’m glad that Tarabotti’s passion . . . is very strong.” “This book is absolutely fascinating!” another wrote, adding, “I enjoy her very direct and pissed-off mode.” Here’s one final response that I love: “Paternal Tyranny was a book that, for lack of better words, ‘rocked me.’ I was stunned with the bluntness of [Tarabotti’s] words . . . and often overwhelmed.” Readers respond to Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto in remarkably similar ways. I have never taught the manifesto in class, but I offer it as a possible topic for group projects, and it generates wild enthusiasm. None of my student readers has felt threatened or enraged by Solanas, maybe because they have opted to read the manifesto rather than having it assigned. For whatever reasons, they are ready to engage with her. Interestingly, I have found that the most eager readers in class are often male—on one memorable occasion, three different groups of students selected the SCUM Manifesto as their first choice for their group-project topics, and after a lively rock-paper-scissors tournament, a jubilant group of three men emerged victorious. They were committed, diligent, and receptive readers of Solanas, and their multimedia presentation was a model of collaborative work. They produced a great handout (I have to think the indefatigable mimeographer in Solanas would have been impressed), generated an engaging PowerPoint (yes, it is possible), and screened well-chosen video clips from Mary Harron’s 1996 film about Solanas, I Shot Andy Warhol. And speaking of Harron, she describes her own first encounter with the SCUM Manifesto: “I bought a copy and read it on the subway, an experience that literally changed my life. Nothing I read had ever affected me so profoundly.” Female anger like that expressed by Tarabotti and Solanas seems to defy categorization, and it’s interesting to see the way readers struggle to come to terms with texts like Tarabotti’s Paternal Tyranny and Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto. We have already grappled with the notion of blurred genres in relationship to Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies and Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own, with the way women writers like Moderata Fonte and Marjane Satrapi appropriate “male” genres in The Worth of Women and Embroideries, with the subversion of the genre of the male adventure story in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, and with the rewriting of the Creation story in Doris Lessing’s The Cleft. We should not be


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surprised, then, at the difficulty we may encounter in trying to categorize the work of Tarabotti and Solanas. It’s as if they are defying us, daring us to try to slot them into any kind of conventional literary category. They will not be contained. Panizza tackles the difficulty of establishing genre at the outset of her introduction to Tarabotti’s text. “Tarabotti cannot be placed in any conventional literary slot,” Panizza warns us; “her writings, including this one, both elude the usual categories and mix features of many of them.” Panizza suggests multiple ways of classifying the text: “Paternal Tyranny is predominantly an invective against the oppressions of patriarchy; but it is also a treatise on the evils of forcing young girls into a life they are not suited for, a psychological autobiography on the torments of childhood and adolescence in the Venetian family of her day, a confession to God of a soul’s suffering, a literary critique of major texts of contemporary misogyny, a feminist commentary on the Bible, and finally, the first manifesto about women’s inalienable rights to liberty, equality, and universal education.” It’s interesting that Panizza concludes by offering the manifesto as a possible genre for Tarabotti’s Paternal Tyranny since we are pairing it with Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto in this chapter. The manifesto is a genre with which we have some familiarity if not comfort. Most often we think of the Communist Manifesto, but the manifesto is a flexible genre—witness the recent publication of Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, Diana Balmori’s The Landscape Manifesto, and Bernard DeVoto’s The Hour: A Cocktail Manifesto. And you thought the manifesto was reserved for radical politics! The Oxford English Dictionary defines manifesto as a “printed declaration, explanation, or justification of policy issued by a head of state, government, or political party or candidate, or any other individual or body of individuals of public relevance.” By extension, manifesto can also refer to “a book or other work by a private individual supporting a cause, propounding a theory or argument, or promoting a certain lifestyle.” Aside from having paired it with Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, I think there’s a certain symmetry to identifying Paternal Tyranny as a manifesto, since the etymology of the word points to its Italian origins, from the Italian manifesto, an adjective (“manifest,” or “evident,” from the verb manifestare, “to show,” or “to demonstrate), and it’s a word that makes its first appearance in English in 1620, just a bit before Tarabotti lets loose with her Paternal Tyranny. But there are other possibilities for Paternal Tyranny that Panizza doesn’t explore. I think Tarabotti’s work might be considered a polemic. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the polemic as a “controversial argument; a strong verbal or written attack on a person, opinion, doctrine,” and I particularly


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love the fact that the word comes from the ancient Greek, meaning “warlike” or “hostile.” There is also one of my favorite genres, the rant, which seems to me today to be usually gendered female, the connotations negative. The rant, however, is a venerable form: an “extravagant” speech, “a long, angry, or impassioned speech; a tirade,” again according to the OED. The origins of word are from the fourteenth-century Dutch randten, a verb, meaning “to talk foolishly” (hmmmm), or “to rave” (yes!). When I was growing up, my mother was particularly given to the rant as her literary form of choice, and she always described herself as “ranting and raving.” Even then I could have told her that she was being redundant—but I wouldn’t have dared. There is a way in which all of these possibilities can help to shape our understanding of Tarabotti and her text, but each is somehow insufficient. She defies our attempts to control her and relegate her text to some “safe” category. Rather, her text seems sui generis, literally, “of its own kind.” In a literature course, we talk a lot about genre, about the way understanding what sort of thing we are reading shapes our expectations of it. After exploring Panizza’s suggestions about genre with them, I ask my students to try to classify Tarabotti’s text—their comments are both revealing and instructive. One student who’d taken a more traditional literature class with me—“Masterpieces of European Literature”—had had a good introduction to Aristotelian genres, the narrative (exemplified by Homer’s The Iliad), the dramatic (Greek tragedy and comedy), and the lyric (Sappho and Catullus). I was particularly interested, then, in seeing what she might make of Tarabotti’s Paternal Tyranny. “‘At a loss’ is a good way to describe my feelings in trying to establish any sort of genre for Tarabotti’s writing,” she began. But after expressing her uncertainty, she plunged into her response, deciding that Tarabotti “writes almost as if [Paternal Tyranny] is a journal.” My student had her own connections with the form: “From personal experience, journal writing is not something for which too much thinking works very well. Journaling is a way of expressing feelings that may be overwhelming or confusing. It is a relaxing, almost cleansing experience, and a healthy way to deal with bottled-up energy and feelings.” Like this young woman, many students seem to see themselves in Tarabotti’s text. Another student, one of the two young men in a class of thirty-two, himself something of a poet, admitted that he “struggled through this book almost to the last page. Tarabotti states, ‘I may not have carefully selected thoughts, but they are at least genuine and sincere.’ After reading this, I readjusted my interpretation of the book. Before I was confused by the ranting. . . . Now I look back at the literary work not as a novel or structured argument, but an emotional release. I look at this


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book now in the same way as a poem, or a song.” A young woman questioning her faith thought that Tarabotti was “in many ways writing a tirade”—another great genre!—but ultimately decided that “Tarabotti, like Luther, is writing a thesis . . . , a public declaration of her opinions about her religion.” Yet another student, herself enrolled in a creative nonfiction course, decided that “[a]s much as I try to separate myself from the idea, I keep looking at Tarabotti’s Paternal Tyranny as a sort of extended personal essay.” “A personal essay is a speaker’s take on an issue often explained or augmented by experiences that they have been through, seen happen or heard about,” she wrote, explaining, “The evidence isn’t fact; it’s life experience. . . . [P]ersonal essays often move the same way the mind does. There’s always some sort of connection, but it may not be furnished with traditional transitions and trigger words. The jump makes sense to the author. . . .” But for pure inventiveness when it comes to defining Tarabotti’s genre, I have to go with the student who wrote, “I . . . think that this is an invectobioconfestoise (invective, autobiography, confession, manifesto, and treatise all squished together). . . .” Valerie Solanas, on the other hand, is very clear about genre—she is writing a manifesto. On the title page of her 1967 self-published edition, she describes her manifesto as both a “presentation” of her “rationale” for action and her outline of a “program” for action. Even so, many readers either prefer to ignore her or think they know better, though Solanas herself, responding to the “lies and distortions” about her appearing in the media, did describe the Manifesto’s rationale and program as a “two-part treatise” in a 1977 interview with the Village Voice. Perhaps her effort to redefine the Manifesto as a treatise was intended to tame it a bit, but it must also have been a way of fighting back to those who chose to discount it or to belittle it. In his preface to his 1968 Olympia Press edition of Solanas’s manifesto, S.C.U.M. (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto—a version of her work that Solanas rejected—Maurice Girodias, better known for publishing novels like Lolita, Candy, and Naked Lunch, referred to Solanas’s work as “this little book” and called publishing it his “contribution to the study of violence,” by which he meant not so much the work as the woman who wrote it. Not much better is the word “diatribe,” used by Betty Roszak and Theodore Roszak to describe the SCUM Manifesto in their 1969 Masculine/Feminine: Readings in Sexual Mythology and the Liberation of Women. Indeed, even today, the wildly popular “free-content,” collaboratively written, and infinitely recopied and repeated Wikipedia calls the SCUM Manifesto a “feminist tract.” Ouch. Whatever its genre, Solanas’s work was largely written out of feminist history. Robin Morgan included selections from the Manifesto in her 1970


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Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement (misspelling Solanas’s name as “Solanis”), and Germaine Greer wrote incisively and sympathetically about the manifesto in The Female Eunuch, published the same year. But as second-wave feminism became less radical and more mainstream, Solanas tended to disappear. Now-classic references like Yale’s 1990 The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (1203 pages) and Bloomsbury Publishing’s 1992 Guide to Women’s Literature throughout the World: From Sappho to Atwood, Women’s Writing through the Ages (more than 5,000 entries) ignored Solanas as they helped to shape an emerging canon of “women writers.” Even today, the self-proclaimed “landmark” American National Biography, which “offers portraits of more than 17,400 men and women—from all eras and walks of life—whose lives have shaped the nation” (I’m using the 2000–09 online version) mentions Solanas only in its entry on Andy Warhol and describes her only as an “aspiring actress” who was angry that “Warhol had neither filmed a script of hers—a vehemently anti-male diatribe—nor returned it to her.” Talk about genre issues—Solanas’s Up Your Ass is not a diatribe or a “script,” but a play, a comedy, described in Alisa Solomon’s 2004 Village Voice review as a “bitterly hilarious, anti-hetero sex romp.” More recent feminist scholarship has begun to reinstate Solanas to women’s history and literature, but this recovery has also redefined her SCUM Manifesto, referring to it as “a socioscientific thesis,” “a radical feminist document” (I love the oxymoron of “radical feminist” and “document”!), a “species of autobiography,” “a kind of anti-memoir,” and even as “confessional.” Third-wave feminist Jennifer Baumgardner, coauthor (with Amy Richards) of her own manifesto, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (2000), relegates the SCUM Manifesto to another kind of genre altogether. Uncomfortable with the idea of calling it a “feminist classic,” she calls it “an artifact, a relic from the . . . revolutionary sixties.” In an extended analysis of the “contemporary recuperation” of Solanas and her manifesto, Breanne Fahs discusses the ways a series of editors and publishers have tried to “control” the Manifesto by “marketing and contextualizing” it. Fahs notes that the 2004 Verso edition “furthers the cause of ‘making Solanas official’ by situating the manifesto within the context of contemporary theory and assigning her a place alongside Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Judith Butler, Sigmund Freud, Johannas Wolfgang von Goethe, and Karl Marx.” I suspect Solanas would have hated this. Solanas spent her life rejecting such associations. “Read my manifesto and it will tell you what I am,” she said, proclaiming her existential isolation. Tarabotti, too, resisted efforts to make her Paternal Tyranny “safe”—or at


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least most of them. Although she published her Convent Life as Paradise in 1643, her Antisatire in1644, a collection of letters in 1650, and a defense of women, Women Are of the Human Species, in 1651, the year before her death, she could not manage to get Paternal Tyranny and its companion volume, Convent Life as Hell, printed. Denied a more conventional role as a mother, Tarabotti referred to her literary productions as her children. She calls Paternal Tyranny her “first offspring,” and she asserts its legitimacy—it is her “true offspring”—even while she acknowledges that it will be dismissed as “the offspring of a deranged mind.” In a preface to her reader, published in the 1643 Convent Life as Paradise, Tarabotti mentions having completed Paternal Tyranny, and her printer advises the reader that he will soon be publishing it. Despite her hopes and his confidence, however, the work did not appear. As an indication of the many difficulties she faced in trying to get her work published, Tarabotti ultimately decided to rename her firstborn, and Paternal Tyranny became Simplicity Betrayed. This is the title under which the book was eventually printed, in 1654, two years after Tarabotti’s death. Even then, it was published not in Italy but in Leiden, and not under Tarabotti’s name but an anagrammatic pseudonym, Galerana Barcitotti. While Tarabotti struggled to get her first book, her “true offspring,” into print, the manuscript of the text circulated among friends, writers, and intellectuals. It must have caused some outrage and indignation, even among these supporters, because her Convent Life as Paradise seemed intended to mollify offended readers, chief among them Giovanni Francesco Loredan, founder of a prestigious Venetian literary academy. According to Panizza, Tarabotti “was the only woman writer in Venice to enjoy [Loredan’s] company, support, and financial patronage.” All the more notable, then, is the way Tarabotti tackles Loredan, his work, and his misogyny in Paternal Tyranny. In changing the title of her book, we can see Tarabotti’s carefully calculated efforts to soften her attack. As Panizza points out, the new title “comes straight out of Eve’s speech to God in Loredan’s L’Adamo [The Life of Adam, his most famous work].” There, in her own defense, Eve had said that her semplicità, “simplicity,” or innocence, had been ingannata, “deceived,” or betrayed, by the serpent. Tarabotti characterized this renaming of Paternal Tyranny as its “rebapti[sm].” Like Tarabotti, Valerie Solanas first circulated her SCUM Manifesto herself, though not necessarily among friends, supporters, and patrons. She sold mimeographed copies of her 1967 self-published text on the streets of Greenwich Village, charging women a dollar for a copy and men two dollars. Like Tarabotti, she worked hard to establish herself as a writer and to have her work published. She signed a contract for a novel with Maurice Girodias in August 1967, but in the fall, desperate for money and having made no progress on the novel, she asked him to accept the SCUM


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Manifesto in its place. After he agreed, she seems to have had second thoughts and was unhappy with the new contract he offered, but eventually she reconciled herself to the deal. “M.G.,” she wrote, “I don’t intend to write the novel. You can publish ‘SCUM Manifesto’ in it’s [sic] place. The ‘SCUM Manifesto’ is now yours, to have & to hold—forever.” When Girodias did publish Solanas’s manifesto in 1968, it wasn’t necessarily because of the quality of her work, but because its author had gained notoriety for more than her literary ambitions—Girodias rushed his Olympia Press version of Solanas’s manifesto into print after she shot Andy Warhol on 3 June 1968. Girodias wrote a preface to the work himself, adding to the Manifesto a commentary, “Wonder Waif Meets Super Neuter,” by Paul Krassner, an editor and publisher of the alternative monthly, The Realist. Krassner’s essay further emphasized the link between Solanas and Warhol, another way of capitalizing on the shooting. On the back cover of the book, Girodias reproduced the front page of the New York Post, with its blaring headline, “Andy Warhol Fights for Life.” Still profiting from Solanas’s notoriety, Girodias published a second edition in 1970, this one with a forward by the critic and academic Vivian Gornick; a London edition was published by Olympia Press in 1971. Solanas resented the editorial changes Girodias made to her manifesto. As only one example, although she had identified SCUM as the “Society for Cutting Up Men” on the title page of her manifesto, the title was (and remained) SCUM Manifesto. In his 1968 edition, Girodias had recast the title as “S. C. U. M. (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto.” Solanas was quite insistent about “SCUM” without the periods: if, in men’s view, women are “scum,” then she will be scum with a vengeance and capital letters. In an attempt to reclaim her authorship and to reassert authorial control over her text, Solanas resorted to guerilla warfare. Laura Winkiel reports that, in 1970, Solanas checked out Girodias’s edition of her text from the New York City Library and used this library copy as a way of writing back to Girodias. On the front cover, she crossed out her own name, as author, and wrote in Girodias’s. On the jacket cover’s blurb about Vivian Gornick and her preface (“A new preface by Vivian Gornick serves as a brilliant commentary and introduction to this new edition”), Solanas added “flea” after Gornick’s name and inserted “would-be” before “brilliant.” On the back cover, Solanas tackled the sensational promotional material detailing her shooting of Warhol by defacing it and then rebutting it. After Olympia Press went bankrupt in 1973, the copyright of SCUM Manifesto reverted to Solanas. In 1977, she produced another self-published edition, proclaiming, “This is the CORRECT Valerie Solanas edition” and adding an introduction “by Valerie Solanas.” Mary Harron quotes the


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“sparkling advertisement” that Solanas wrote for her new edition: “Olympia Press went bankrupt and the publishing rights to SCUM Manifesto reverted to me, Valerie Solanas, so I’m issuing the CORRECT edition, MY edition of SCUM Manifesto.” Generously, she adds that “I’ll let anybody who wants to hawk it—women, men, Hare Krishna; Daughter of the American Revolution, the American Legion.” Slyly, she adds, “Maurice Girodias, you’re always in financial straits. Here’s your big chance—hawk SCUM Manifesto. . . . Andy Warhol, peddle it at all those hot shit parties you go to. . . .” Finally, she adds, “Minimum orders for peddlers is 200. No credit, no discounts. I don’t like arithmetic. And don’t have gang wars over territories—that’s not nice.” Still other versions of the SCUM Manifesto were to come. In 1983, the London-based Matriarchy Study Group produced its version, a collation of the 1977 Solanas “CORRECT” edition and the Olympia Press edition. This “combined” edition was republished in the 80s and 90s by the Phoenix Press (London, attributed to Valerie “Solonas”), by Ball & Chain Publications (Lewisburg, Pennsylvania), and SCAM Press (Australia). In 1996, AK Press (San Francisco and Edinburgh, Scotland) reprinted the Phoenix Press edition and added a biographical essay by Freddie Baer; this edition was reprinted in 1997. In 1996, Marry Harron and Daniel Minahan reprinted the 1968 Olympia Press edition in their I Shot Andy Warhol, the published screenplay of Harron’s 1996 film of the same name—their publisher, Grove Press, now claims to own the rights to Girodias’s Olympia Press edition. But there seem to be a welter of claims and counterclaims about Solanas’s copyright. If Grove claims the rights to the 1968 version, AK Press and Freddie Baer assert their rights to their edition, although their copyright page seems to suggest that the copyright of the manifesto itself is still owned by Solanas. The 2004 Verso hardcover is harder to sort out. On the copyright page, we read “This edition first published by Verso 2004 / Introduction © Avital Ronell 2004 / All rights reserved.” Meanwhile, there are multiple copies of the manifesto posted online with little regard for copyrights and permissions. But according to the United States Copyright Office database, the copyright holder for Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto is Judith A. Solanas Martinez, Valerie Solanas’s sister, who renewed Solanas’s 1967 copyright in 1997. Which leaves us wondering. Which text represents the “real” SCUM Manifesto—Solanas’s mimeographed sheets, with their unique section breaks, paragraphing, punctuation, and emphases, or the Olympia Press editions or her reclaimed and reprinted 1977 edition or one of the many editions published in the 1980s and 90s or Verso’s beautifully designed, clean pages, set in Berhold Baskerville type, printed on yummy-feeling paper with big, white margins? Here, for example, is the opening paragraph of the manifesto in the self-published 1967 edition: “‘Life’ in this ‘society’


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being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of ‘society’ being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and eliminate the male sex” (see Figure 6.1). The opening paragraph of the 1968 Olympia Press edition is subtly, yet critically, different: “Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civicminded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.” Solanas’s quotation marks around “life” and “society,” indicating her ironic meaning, are gone, and the final item in her series has been altered. Has the second “eliminate” been changed to reduce repetition or to emphasize the violence of the manifesto? Is the change Solanas’s or Girodias’s? We don’t know. The Matriarch Group’s edition, which is said to be a “collation” of the 1968 Olympia Press version and Solanas’s 1977 “CORRECT” edition, doesn’t make its editorial decisions clear. The Verso Press edition relies on Olympia Press’s 1971 London edition. *

*

*

Tarabotti and Solanas both worked tirelessly to get their work into print. After much effort, Tarabotti eventually found a printer, but then rejected his efforts because there were too many errors in the pages he produced. She was finally pushed to rename her “firstborn” in order to secure its printing, but even that didn’t result in the book’s publication. Solanas, too, eventually found a publisher, but then she rejected Girodias’s edition of her work, in particular his fiddling with her title. So what was it that Tarabotti and Solanas fought so hard to control? What was so threatening about the contents of Paternal Tyranny and the SCUM Manifesto—so dangerous that the texts needed to be ignored, suppressed, or otherwise contained and neutralized? The answer to these questions is clear: both texts were blazing indictments of male dominance in all its forms. The “paternal tyranny” revealed in Tarabotti’s text is comprehensive. She exposes “fathers” in all their manifestations—and their overwhelming hypocrisy. “What liars you men are!” she rails, “You cruel, inhuman men, forever preaching that evil is good and good is evil.” Men “glory” in their strength while they “wage war among [themselves], killing one another like wild beasts.” “This”—that is, killing one another—is “where [their] strength lies.” Although she does not address her own case here—she is not writing about her own life—she has been betrayed by her own father, forced into a convent and into the monastic life not because of an avowed


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Figure 6.1

First page of Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto (1967)

Source: Founding Collection, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. Photo Courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum


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vocation but because it is convenient for him not to have to provide a dowry for her. She writes out of her situation but does not focus on her own situation. Instead she condemns all fathers like her own (and there are plenty of them) who similarly enclose their daughters against the daughters’ wishes, denying them what she regards as their God-given free will and forcing them to live as perpetual prisoners. Nothing is worse than the “utter barbarity of fathers against their own daughters,” she writes, although they “veil their baseness with lying phrases.” Fathers deceive their daughters by saying “they would only too gladly bestow generous dowries on them, but they could never be sure that their daughters would be happy . . . for so many untoward events could befall them, of which this evil world is only too full.” But all this is “pretense and open prevarication,” words pronounced by a “lying, flattering tongue.” Fathers are only too happy to shut their daughters away and forget about them. And then Tarabotti sinks in the knife: “He would never think, of course, of shutting himself up among monks, even if he were beaten black and blue. . . . [H]e preaches withdrawal and chastity for the ones he compels to enter. At the same time, footloose and fancy-free, he strives to enjoy every possible delight, drowning himself in a thousand vices.” Her condemnation of fathers extends to the “fatherland” and to the fathers who govern Venice—they “defile” Venice, complicit in this “hideous iniquity of immuring women against their will.” They act solely out of “political expediency”—state authorities are complicit in the sacrifice of women in the economic and political interests of their families. Tarabotti also condemns priests—in their roles as “fathers”—as well as the institutional church itself, controlled by those “holy impeccable fathers, gathered in the sacred consistory,” and the Fathers of the Church, like St. Jerome, who provided the theoretical framework for women’s “inferiority” and warned about the “dangers” they pose to men. She condemns all maledominated social institutions, in fact. Men conspire to deny women an education—“So shameless are you that while reproaching women for stupidity you strive with all your power to bring them up and educate them as if they were witless and insensitive.” They deny them the legal rights they have “usurped over them so presumptuously.” Women have no economic rights whatsoever, defrauded of their rightful inheritances and denied any share in family wealth. This scathing repudiation of men and their “fatherhood” is echoed in Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, the first two-thirds of which is her “rationale” for the “program” she then outlines; the manifesto contains an extended survey of the atrocities perpetuated by men against women. Like Tarabotti, Solanas blames men for war, which she claims is a man’s only way of proving “to the


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entire world that he’s a ‘Man’”: “proving his manhood is worth an endless amount of mutilation and suffering, and an endless number of lives, including his own—his own life being worthless, he would rather go out in a blaze of glory than plod grimly on for fifty more years.” Men are responsible for the economic system, by which means they not only “supply” themselves “with the delusion of usefulness,” but they also control others. By the “manipulation of money and of everything and everybody controlled by money,” they control “everything and everybody,” most particularly women. Men are also responsible for the “suppression of individuality,” for “reducing the female to an animal,” for isolation, for suburbs, and for the “prevention of community.” Without a sense of right or wrong, and with no conscience whatsoever, “the male feels a need for external guidance and control,” and has thus “created authorities—priests, experts, bosses, leaders, etc.—and government.” And, of course, “he sees to it that all authorities are male.” Men have “invented” philosophy and religion, which serve only to oppress women. And, since men can find no happiness on earth, they “invented Heaven.” Men have also, of course, invented their superiority over women—since they are “utterly cowardly” themselves, men “project their inherent weaknesses onto women” and then “label them female weaknesses.” Men are exclusively responsible for racial, ethnic, and religious hatreds. They have invented “higher education” as a way “to exclude as many as possible from the various professions.” They create “great art” only in order to prove that they are superior to women. They prevent friendship and create sexuality, “a gross waste of time.” And the major way of controlling and manipulating everyone and everything, she asks? “Fatherhood” is her answer. In order to “preserve [their] delusion of decisiveness, forcefulness, always-rightness, and strength,” men manipulate and control their children. They don’t love their children—they only offer them “approval” if they are “good.” But, really, “Daddy only wants what’s best for Daddy,” his own “peace and quiet.” As she concludes, “The effect of fathers, in sum, has been to corrode the world with maleness. The male has a negative Midas touch—everything he touches turns to shit.” Men promote distrust and inflict ugliness on the world (“ugly buildings . . . billboards, highways, cars, garbage trucks, and, most notably, his own putrid self ”). They could solve “the problems of aging and death,” but they don’t, “prefer[ring] virile, ‘manly’ war and death programs” instead. Indeed, after seeing the lists of the wondrous accomplishments men take pride in—lists such as those in Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own, Mary Astell’s Reflections on Marriage, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland— we find a similar kind of list, with a Solanas twist, in the SCUM Manifesto. Solanas’s list contains a “few examples of the most obnoxious or harmful”


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rapists, politicians and all who are in their service (campaigners, members of political parties, etc); lousy singers and musicians; Chairmen of Boards; Breadwinners; landlords; owners of greasy spoons and restaurants that play Musak; “Great Artists”; cheap pikers; cops; tycoons; scientists working on death and destruction programs or for private industry (practically all scientists); liars and phonies; disc jockies; men who intrude themselves in the slightest way on any strange female; real estate men; stock brokers; men who speak when they have nothing to say; men who sit idly on the street and mar the landscape with their presence; double dealers; flim flam artists; litter bugs; plagiarizers; men who in the slightest way harm any female; all men in the advertising industry; dishonest writers, journalists, editors, publishers, etc.; censors on both the public and private levels; all members of the armed forces, including draftees (LBJ and McNamara give orders, but servicemen carry them out) and particularly pilots (if the Bomb drops, LBJ won’t drop it; a pilot will).

I’ve used Solanas’s 1967 self-published edition here. Notice the extraordinary way she uses punctuation—using the semicolon to link rapists and politicians, for example. Her use of juxtaposition—rapists, politicians, and “lousy singers”—is brilliant. And in her last parenthesis, notice her capitalization of “Bomb”—a stylistic preference that the 1968 Olympia Press edition retains, but that disappears from later versions. For Solanas, women are the only true creators: “In actual fact, the female function is to explore, discover, invent, solve problems, crack jokes, make music—all with love. In other words, create a magic world.” Solanas is not particular about her audience—she sold her manifesto to anyone who would buy a copy, although she did charge men twice as much as she charged women. Tarabotti, however, is very specific about her readership. Alone among the writers we are examining here, Arcangela Tarabotti addresses herself exclusively to men. And she is not shy about it. In a prefatory address to her male readers, Tarabotti insists that her anger is not personal (“my heart has never had any personal reason for growing angry against the male sex”), and she assures them that she does not attack all men—“Stricken by a guilty conscience, some men will say that I speak with excessive temerity about all men in general. They are greatly mistaken.” While “not all women are good,” neither are “all men” bad. But once you turn to the text itself, time to duck and cover: “What liars you men are!” She addresses her male readers directly: “you liars,” you “monsters,” “you cruel men—I am tempted to say butchers,” “you deceivers,” “you . . . tyrants


kinds of men, suggesting something of the “accomplishments” in which they take such pride:


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from Hell, monsters of nature,” “you madmen,” “you wicked dissimulators in religious disguise,” “you bloodthirsty butchers.” She does pause to take a break here and there, in one spot addressing the rulers of Venice as “Most Eminent, Serene, and Illustrious Lords”; in another direct address she exhorts, “Ponder my words, judicious Reader.” But these are momentary returns to decorum. Quickly it’s back to “you fools” and “Satan’s pimps” and “O brutes” with “your heart[s] of stone” and “you fathers, brothers, and relatives of enslaved nuns, who resemble so many Nimrods.” If Tarabotti writes in the first person and directs her fiery rage at her male readers, Solanas is, by contrast, downright cold—her anger is icy hot. Nor is she writing from the first-person point of view but from an impersonal and “impartial” perspective. In her 1971 commentary on Solanas’s manifesto, Vivian Gornick identified Solanas’s feelings as “black rage.” In her 2003 Village Voice piece, “SCUM Goddess: Who’s the Villain? Who’s the Saint?” C. Carr reflects that “what lives on after all these years is Solanas’s Medea-like fury. . . .” Solanas is angry, I agree, but the tone of the Manifesto is matter-of-fact, closer to Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal than Tarabotti’s fiery invective. Solanas is both cool and mordantly funny. And she is fond of the laid-back—“groovy” is one of her favorite adjectives. The SCUM woman is not only groovy, but also “completely cool and cerebral,” although Solanas challenges her readers’ notions of angry and calm, hot and cold. Solanas writes that SCUM “is against half-crazed, indiscriminate riots. . . . SCUM will never instigate, encourage, or participate in riots of any kind or any other form of indiscriminate destruction.” When SCUM strikes, she warns, “it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade.” This last observation introduces a kind of hunting metaphor that is distinctly Solanas’s. She repeatedly asserts that men have “reduc[ed] the female to an animal,” although she herself employs such images, at times referring to women as “animals” or “chicks,” for example. But men are the real animals—in reality every man is “a scared rabbit,” “a leech, an emotional parasite,” driven by “the need to disguise his animalism.” Men “pose their nothingness problem, which horrifies them, as a philosophical dilemma, thereby giving stature to their animalism, grandiloquently label their nothingness their ‘Identity Problem,’ and proceed to prattle pompously on about the ‘Crisis of the Individual,’ the ‘Essence of Being,’ ‘Existence preceding Essence,’ ‘Existential Modes of Being’, etc., etc.” Men have tried to make women into animals, and they think they have been successful, but since they themselves are the animals, “SCUM will coolly, furtively, stalk its prey and quietly move in for the kill.” And thus she threatens men with a shiv, an icepick, a knife—all, by the way, powerful phallic symbols turned against men rather than wielded by them. Notice how radical a move


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Solanas makes here—for millennia, men have deemed women to be less than human, but here Solanas reverses the terms of the debate. While Tarabotti’s most powerful metaphors are those that describe women forced into convents as perpetual prisoners, condemned “as if they were criminals sentenced to life imprisonment,” “locked up forever in dungeons,” or, more ominously, as “buried alive,” “entomb[ed]” and “condemned . . . to a living hell,” she also deploys images of women as hapless creatures, ensnared in traps set by men. Throughout her work, she refers to the daughter “incarcerated” by her father as “a pretty little bird” who is “entangled in a net”; once she “trapped in a treacherous net, robbed of its precious liberty,” the “unfortunate bird is shut up”—the convent is her “cage,” and if she is imprisoned “in a golden cage” and “fed on dainty morsels,” a caged bird “nonetheless is always watching, seeking with its beak to create a gap for an escape to freedom.” Because men have treated women like animals, they have become “bloodthirsty butchers”—once an animal has been caught, the next step, surely, is to slaughter it and prepare it for consumption. Although men have preyed on all women, and especially on their own daughters, Tarabotti, like Solanas three hundred years later, goes on to argue that men are the real animals. Men’s behavior is not “holiness,” as they like to think, but “bestiality.” Men “grow hair” on their faces, “thus imitating wild animals.” Tarabotti goes on to argue that men are, in actuality, even worse than animals—“man is more savage than any brute,” she observes. Women “tear themselves apart, victims of a rabies caused by [their fathers’] criminal bites.” At the very end of Paternal Tyranny, she writes, “Only in the human species does the male, only the male, more ruthless than any wild beast, more cruel than any monster, torment the body and perhaps the soul of his own flesh and blood, ruled and blinded by greed. He buries them alive in a tomb.” And yet, in spite of her anger at men’s depravity and her ardent defense of women, Tarabotti has no real solution to offer. At one point, early on in Paternal Tyranny, she reminds her male readers that their daughters, no less than their sons, are their “flesh and blood,” and suggests that to “join them at least in more modest marriages” is an alternative to forcing them into convents. Tarabotti does not see marriage as a solution to the problem of paternal tyranny, however, and is particularly well aware of the fact that marriage, too, can be a living hell for women—as often as they force superfluous daughters into convents, fathers compel daughters to marry against their wishes. “The father must not and cannot marry off the daughter who wants to be a virgin,” Tarabotti argues, “nor should she be obliged to respect his determination, and he cannot oblige her with violence to profess the


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[marriage] vows against her own free will.” Tarabotti later suggests that women should be allowed to live a “withdrawn life in their own homes.” Even if their fathers deny them a modest dowry, women have the strength of character needed to “live with a simplicity and unworldliness”—they can live as single women, without being forced into a convent or a marriage. By falsely professing vows she does not freely choose, a woman condemns herself to eternal damnation. Tarabotti also suggests that men may act because they are afraid of women, recalling the Amazons: “Are you afraid of women in our world multiplying? What cowards!” But she cannot find strength or comfort in this memory of fearsome warrior-women: “These are no longer the times of the brave Amazons, who discreetly killed their male children so as not to be their subjects,” she admits. There is an “intricate labyrinth enclosing [women],” and Tarabotti can find no way out. Thus the labyrinthine circularity of Paternal Tyranny. Tarabotti follows the threads of her rage wherever they lead her, but wherever she goes, it is never the right way, the way to lead her out of the mess she is in. “Let me now return to my main point,” she says just six or so pages into Paternal Tyranny, and then, later on, “But let me return to the path from which I have digressed. . . .” Near the end of Paternal Tyranny, after a direct address to the Virgin Mary, she observes that the “devotion owed” to Mary “has made me digress.” Students notice Tarabotti’s dilemma and respond to it personally. Writing in the fall of 2007, Chrissy McDaniels, a student I was fortunate to have in several classes during her academic career, reflected on Tarabotti’s “shock, disgust, anger, and humiliation.” Chrissy suggested that the circularity and repetition of Paternal Tyranny “reflects Tarabotti’s sense of helplessness and despair.” “There is so much that she needs to say,” Chrissy wrote: “Can you imagine being confined to a convent by your father . . . ? Can you imagine what it must feel like to be thrown away. . . ?” For Chrissy, Tarabotti’s “organization” of the Paternal Tyranny into three books and her references to the “main point” and “the path from which [she] has digressed” are all “really a façade.” She is her father’s daughter—her own desperate way of concealing her pain behind this façade “mirrors” her father’s concealing his own selfish motives in sending his daughter to a convent. Another student’s comments also reflect on this personal attachment to Tarabotti and her text. “When reading this book, I would imagine that she was talking to a friend and venting about what horrible things she has been through,” she wrote, adding, by way of clarification, “When I am angry and feel the need to vent to a friend, I go on and on, repeating everything about three or four times.” Another student observed, “Actually, at the end of this book, I felt as though my head were spinning into another dimension. After the circles that she


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created in the book and following them, my mind was spinning. It took me quite a bit of time just to get my head to settle down [to look for] the pattern to her writing. . . . But maybe that is how Tarabotti’s mind was working at the time she wrote this book. I wonder if her head was spinning in circles with the injustices of life at the time, just as my head was spinning with her literary works.” And then this student added one further comment that breaks my heart: “While reading this book, I continually felt rushed, as though if I finish the book too late that the end will be gone.” While Tarabotti can see no way out of her situation, Solanas proposes a way out. Like Tarabotti, she recalls the Amazons—at the outset of her manifesto, she declares that it “is now technically possible to reproduce without the aid of males . . . and to produce only females. We must begin immediately to do so.” She comes back to this Amazonian project later, saying that “it doesn’t follow that because the male, like disease, has always existed among us that he should continue to exist.” (As Doris Lessing prefaces The Cleft with a note about males as a kind of “cosmic afterthought,” Solanas begins her manifesto with a declaration of man’s biological inferiority—“The male is a biological accident,” his “Y [male] gene is an incomplete X [female] gene. . . . In other words, the male is an incomplete female. . . . To be male is to be deficient. . . .”) But, while Solanas’s manifesto is most often read—and remembered—for her shiv and her icepick and her knife, her actual proposal for creating a women’s world is by means of a brilliantly simple and largely nonviolent plan. Women should just quit participating: women “could acquire complete control of this country within a few weeks simply by withdrawing from the labor force, thereby paralyzing the entire nation. Additional measures, any one of which would be sufficient to completely disrupt the economy and everything else, would be for women to declare themselves off the money system, stop buying, just loot and simply refuse to obey all laws they don’t care to obey.” Their combined refusal to participate would overwhelm the system: “The police force, National Guard, Army, Navy, and Marines combined couldn’t squelch a rebellion of over half the population, particularly when it’s made up of people they are utterly helpless without.” If women “refused to have anything to do with any of them”—with any man, all men—“the government . . . and the national economy would collapse completely.” But Solanas is dubious that women could act with solidarity—too much separates SCUM (“dominant, secure, self-confident, nasty, violent, selfish, independent, proud, thrill-seeking, free-wheeling, arrogant females”) and Daddy’s Girls (“nice, passive, accepting, ‘cultivated,’ polite, dignified, subdued, dependent, scared, mindless, insecure, approval-seeking” women), but she’s got a plan for that too: “A small handful of SCUM can take over


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the country within a year by systematically fucking up the system.” SCUM will become what Solanas calls “the unwork force, the fuck-up force.” SCUM women will “get jobs of various kinds and unwork.” They will simply “refuse to obey all laws inappropriate to a truly civilized society.” “Fucking up the system,” she argues, will bring it down and bring it down fast. I am at once struck by the simplicity of Solanas’s plan and of her prescience. In 1967 Solanas already knew the critical role of the media and of new technology in SCUM’s program of fucking-up and unworking. The key to her plan was the need to “take over the airwaves—radio and TV networks.” We now know the effect of emerging technology in social and political movements—witness the role of the Internet in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (2004), the uploading of political protest videos on YouTube by Sudanese dissidents (2008), and the use of Twitter in the Iranian political protests of 2009. Who needs a radio station or a TV network? Imagine Valerie Solanas today, armed with an iPhone instead of a shiv, and with access to Facebook instead of a television station. Once the complete system collapses, Solanas actually sees that there is no need for the icepick or the shiv: “After the elimination of money there will be no further need to kill men; they will be stripped of the only power they have over psychologically independent females.” Women can then get on with it, “it” being the fulfillment of their “agenda for eternity and Utopia”: “women will be busy . . . completely revamping educational programs so that millions of women can be trained within a few months for high-level intellectual work that now requires years of training (this can be done very easily once our educational goal is to educate and not to perpetuate an academic and intellectual elite); solving the problems of disease and old age and death[;] and completely redesigning our cities and living quarters.” As women “become accustomed to female society and as they become absorbed in their projects, they will eventually come to see the utter uselessness and banality of the male.” What Solanas foresees is a kind of female intimacy that will link women together, and however improbable it may sound, in this she recalls Mary Astell’s view of female intimacy and same-sex bonds. In diagnosing the problem with male-dominated society, Solanas argues that “Love can’t flourish in a society based on money and meaningless work; it requires complete economic as well as personal freedom, leisure time, and the opportunity to engage in intensely absorbing, emotionally satisfying activities which, when shared with those you respect, lead to deep friendship. [Male] ‘society’ provides practically no opportunity to engage in such activities.” For Solanas, love is friendship, and it can “only exist between two secure, free-wheeling, independent, groovy female females, since friendship is based on respect, not contempt.” And so, when women no longer need men for anything, not even for


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reproductive purposes, “it goes without saying that we should produce only whole, complete beings, not physical defects or deficiencies, including emotional deficiencies, such as maleness.” Thus the possibility of creating a world inhabited solely by women. But Solanas doesn’t stop there. “Why produce even females?” she asks. “Why should there be future generations? What is their purpose? When aging and death are eliminated, why continue to reproduce? Why should we care what happens when we’re dead? Why should we care that there is no younger generation to succeed us?” Women can achieve “total control of the world,” they can eliminate men by ceasing “the production of males,” but they should quit producing women too. A world populated only by women would be better than the world as it exists, controlled by men, but the ultimate goal of that women’s world is its complete rejection of the very last vestige of patriarchy—the production of the next generation. Arcangela Tarabotti and Valerie Solanas both spent a significant amount of their lives physically confined. Tarabotti inherited a physical disability from her father, which enabled him to make her disappear, for all practical purposes. As Panizza notes, Tarabotti’s lameness gave her father a reason for deciding she was “unmarriageable, fit therefore only for the convent”— although the “same condition had not prevented him from marrying.” Tarabotti was first sent to the convent of Sant’Anna as a boarder when she was eleven, but she was forced to remain there after she reached marriageable age. With no way out, she became a Benedictine nun, in 1623, when she was nineteen. The three monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience determined the way she would live inside the walls of the convent for the rest of her life. She died in 1652, just four days after her forty-eighth birthday. The additional Benedictine vow of stability meant that she would not only remain inside the same convent for life but also that she would remain inside its walls after her death—the vow of stability required her burial inside the walls of Sant’Anna. Thus, for Tarabotti, the all-female world of the convent, forced upon her, became both a prison and a tomb. Valerie Solanas, too, spent time in institutions. After her mother remarried in the 1940s, Solanas refused to stay put in the Catholic boarding school in which she was enrolled. By the age of fifteen, she had left home and was living on her own. She graduated from high school and then put herself through the University of Maryland at College Park, where she was a member of the honor society. After her 1958 graduation, she entered the graduate program in psychology at the University of Minnesota. But she didn’t stay long and left the program to travel. Mary Harron calls the years between the time Solanas left Minnesota and the time she showed up on the streets of New York the “missing years.” Despite Solanas’s academic


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successes and her peripatetic way of life, a series of physical confinements was to follow. Like Tarabotti, Solanas found herself restrained and enclosed. As Breanne Fahs notes, Solanas’s “identity—and in particular, her body— became ever more subject to the constraints of biopolitical institutions.” On the night she shot Warhol in 1968, Solanas turned herself in to a policeman patrolling in Time Square; when she appeared before Manhattan Criminal Court Judge David Getzoff later that night, Solanas not only admitted to having shot Warhol, she waived a court-appointed attorney, claiming she could and would defend herself (“I want to defend myself. This is going to stay in my own competent hands”) and then asserting, “I was right in what I did! I have nothing to regret!” The judge struck her remarks from the record and sent Solanas to the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital “for observation.” Solanas was back in court on 13 June, this time with a lawyer, Florynce Kennedy, who argued that Solanas was being improperly detained; Kennedy’s writ of habeas corpus was denied, and Solanas was transferred to the psychiatric ward of Elmhurst City Hospital for evaluation. After her psychological evaluation at Bellevue, on 17 August 1968, Solanas was declared incompetent to stand trial, the judge in the case signing papers that transferred her to the custody of the “State Commissioner of Mental Hygiene.” By December Solanas was judged competent to stand trial and was released from Mattewan State Hospital; in February 1969, she was in court again, pleading guilty to charges of attempted murder, assault, and illegal possession of a gun—she had never denied her actions. When she appeared for sentencing in June, Solanas was acting as her own attorney. The judge offered her the chance to appeal the psychiatric report that she was now competent to stand trial. “I believe myself fully competent,” she replied— according to the New York Times, this response was uttered “defiantly.” She was sentenced to three years in prison, the judge directing that “credit for time she has already served be given”; Solanas spent the remainder of her sentence at the Women’s State Prison at Bedford Hills. Released in November of 1971, she was reportedly in and out of mental institutions for the next few years, although exactly when and where isn’t always clear. Biographer Freddie Baer indicates that she spent eight months in 1975 in South Florida State Hospital, while Mary Harron notes that Solanas was in New York’s East Village during the late seventies, when she produced her revised Manifesto. About Solanas’s confinements and incarcerations, Fahs’s comments are particularly thought-provoking: “An unfortunate circularity arises,” Fahs notes, continuing, “the shootings are thought to confirm her ideas within the SCUM Manifesto, just as her work is ghettoized as a product of her


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insanity.” In other words, she is crazy, so she wrote the SCUM Manifesto, which is the evidence that she is crazy; she is crazy, so she shot Warhol, which is the evidence that she is crazy. In reading and thinking about Solanas now, I am reminded of an earlier project of mine, a book about women rulers in the early modern period—one of the most frequently employed tactics of eliminating an “inconvenient” woman who inherited political power or who posed a political threat was to call her crazy and imprison her. Early modern history is filled with examples—the most wellknown of which is perhaps Juana la loca, Juana the Mad, the daughter of Isabella of Castile. Juana inherited her mother’s kingdom after Isabella’s death, but it wasn’t convenient for her husband, her father, or her son to lose control of the kingdom of Castile, and so she became not Juana the queen but Juana the crazy, imprisoned for nearly fifty years in the fortress of Tordesillas. There was considerable doubt among her contemporaries about whether Juana was mad, and that doubt remains among historians today, although we can never be sure. Was Valerie Solanas “mad”? Solanas herself seems to tease us, using the label that was used so often against her. In a 1977 Village Voice interview, for example, Solanas states at the outset that she “doesn’t want to get into a big interview, because I’m not into giving free interviews.” (You have to love the contradiction.) She says she’ll talk only to “the periodical that makes the highest offer that’s above a certain minimum that I have in mind.” Facing a degree of skepticism from her interviewer, she says, “Just say it’s crazy. Just say Valerie wanted to make this crazy remark and—you know, say that.” For Valerie Solanas, her shooting of Warhol was a moral act, not the product of derangement: “I consider that a moral act,” she says, “And I consider it immoral that I missed. I should have done target practice.” For her critics, especially men, she is clearly crazy, but her “idiot madness” is no excuse for her actions. In 1990, John Cale and Lou Reed, members of the Velvet Underground, released Songs for Drella, a tribute to Andy Warhol. Among the fifteen songs on the album is “I Believe.” More than twenty years after the shooting—and two years after Solanas’s death—there is no sympathy for Valerie Solanas, much less forgiveness: “And I believe life’s serious enough for retribution / I believe being sick is no excuse and / I believe I would’ve pulled the switch on her myself.” Even now, in his 8 January 2010 article on Andy Warhol, “Top of the Pops,” New Yorker critic-at-large Louis Menard obliterates Solanas the person, the writer, completely, reducing her life and work to a psychiatric diagnosis: “In 1968, a paranoid schizophrenic named Valerie Solanas shot Warhol and nearly killed him. . . .” Other kinds of labels applied to Solanas may also represent this pattern of dismissing or denigrating women who refuse to conform. She is often


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labeled as a prostitute, for example, but her cousin says that she worked as a waitress, not as a prostitute, to put herself through college, and insists that the stories about Solanas’s prostitution were perpetuated as a way of discrediting her work. Solanas’s mother, Dorothy Moran, interviewed in 1991, denied that Solanas had spent time in mental hospitals in the 70s. She claimed Solanas spent that time writing. For Mary Harron, writer and director of I Shot Andy Warhol, Solanas is not mad but deliberate—she “cut her moorings and separated herself from traditional feminine virtues.” Harron writes, “It made me wonder about blighted talents, vanished possibilities, and what might be lurking in the great host of humanity we call failures.” Harron sounds for all the world like Virginia Woolf, wondering about what might have happened if Shakespeare had a sister and deciding that she would have gone mad and killed herself. As for me, now that I have read and reread Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto while writing this chapter, I am struck at the visceral responses it still evokes, more than forty years after Solanas wrote it. While critical reassessment of Solanas’s Manifesto has begun, too many readers—like Cale, Reed, and Menand, for example—respond not to Solanas’s work but to her life. She is reduced to the events of 3 June 1968, and the SCUM Manifesto is read as if it were the mad ramblings of a female Unabomber rather than a carefully crafted text. I am offering neither a defense of Solanas here, nor am I closing my eyes to her act of violence. I am focusing, instead, on her text and on its critical reception. A few pages ago, I compared the tone of Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto to Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, and I’d like to come back to that comparison for a moment here. The savage satire of Swift’s “proposal” is shocking and provocative, yet this eighteenth-century text is a staple of the literature classroom—I first read it in high school, and it was assigned reading in several of my undergraduate and graduate literature courses. Swift’s Modest Proposal is read and taught as a conscious literary effort, a brilliant example of Juvenalian satire, perhaps inspired by the second-century Christian Father of the Church, Tertullian, and his Apology in defense of Christianity. In his “proposal,” Swift “advocates” infanticide and cannibalism—cooking and eating Irish babies—as the only logical means of curing deplorable social, political, and economic ills. Yet no one reads Swift’s A Modest Proposal literally—or, at least, they don’t read it literally for long, if the ridicule heaped on naïve high-school students in my 1967 high school classroom was typical. If you didn’t get it, you were an idiot. Although Swift’s life ended in debility, violence, and madness, that life—and his work—isn’t reduced to his debility, violence, and madness. Swift’s legacy is his writing—A Modest Proposal and Gulliver’s Travels, chief among his literary achievements. But Solanas is her “madness,” and the SCUM Manifesto is read as the primary symptom of this


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madness. Its craft—its satiric brilliance, its linguistic sparkle, its stylistic inventiveness (Solanas’s extravagant lists, for example, with their breathtaking juxtapositions)—is completely ignored. And so, with a nod to the savagery and violence of Jonathan Swift’s satire in his 1729 A Modest Proposal and in recognition of how much, improbably, Solanas’s manifesto shares with Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, I’ve come to think of her text as a kind of literary mash-up: A Modest Proposal to the Ladies. I don’t presume to speak for Solanas, but I hope she’d appreciate the gesture and the allusions. *

*

*

For Arcangela Tarabotti, forced confinement in an all-female space gave her both the education and the freedom she needed to write. A consecrated virgin, a bride of Christ, she gave birth to the “offspring” of her mind. But in 1660, just a few brief years after her death in 1652, the Holy Office condemned Paternal Tyranny and placed it on the Index of Prohibited Books. Her “recovery” in the late twentieth century has made her, in the words of her translator, Letizia Panizza, “a main figure of women’s history and the history of women’s writing.” Not only is Paternal Tyranny now in print, but almost all of Tarabotti’s works—her Antisatire, her collection of familiar letters, her defense of women (Women Are of the Human Species), Convent Life as Hell—are also in print or forthcoming, many of them translated into English for the first time. Valerie Solanas’s work suffered from its own kind of loss, suppression, and resurrection. She gave a copy of her 1965 play, Up Your Ass, to Warhol, who lost it. But Up Your Ass came to light in 1988— while preparing for a show at The Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh), George Coates found Solanas’s “lost” typescript—it was in a silver trunk owned by the photographer Billy Name. On 12 January 2000, Solanas’s play debuted in San Francisco; the production opened in New York in February 2001. Similarly, Solanas’s manifesto has been published, republished, and translated in the years after her death—a quick check on WorldCat, the world’s largest bibliographic database, shows that the SCUM Manifesto is available in Portuguese, Dutch, German, Spanish, Italian, French, and Hebrew translations. And at least one of Solanas’s ephemeral, self-produced copies of the SCUM Manifesto—Solanas’s work as she herself presented it— has, against all odds, survived. And it survives thanks to the man she shot in 1968. A mimeograph copy of her carefully typed (and copyrighted) 1967 SCUM Manifesto is in the archives of The Andy Warhol Museum. But we may never know the full extent of the loss of Solanas’s work. Before she began filming her movie about Solanas, Mary Harron visited the


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San Francisco hotel where Solanas died and interviewed a hotel employee who remembered Solanas in the years just before her death in 1988. According to Harron, “Once, he had to enter her room, and he saw her typing at her desk. There was a pile of typewritten pages beside her. What she was writing and what happened to the manuscript remain a mystery.” In a Village Voice article on the recovery of Solanas’s play, Judith Coburn reported that, after Coates “found” the lost typescript of Up Your Ass, he sent his assistant director to talk to Solanas’s sister. She was asked about “folk rumors” that Solanas had been heard typing madly in the Hotel Bristol before she died—had, in fact, been found dead still at her desk. Might more of her work resurface? Solanas’s sister reported that their mother “burned all of Valerie’s belongings after her death.” Yet it is possible to hope that there is more out there, that, against all the odds, another lost or misplaced typescript or carbon copy will turn up one day. Even so, despite the losses and against all odds, Valerie Solanas does live on. When she was interviewed in 1991, Solanas’s mother gave her daughter an identity that she was largely denied in her own lifetime—her daughter was a writer, Dorothy Moran insisted. Today, there is the slick new Verso edition of the SCUM Manifesto, but that radical identity Solanas dared to claim—writer—has survived in other ways, as witnessed by graffiti images captured by passersby and shared online. One image, posted in December 2006 on Flickr, the popular photo-sharing website, is from a bathroom stall somewhere in New York City. On the grimy, mustard-yellow door, near the hinge, is scrawled, “Read the SCUM Manifesto.” Another photo, this one part of a series of “Ivy League” graffiti images, was posted online in 2008. It offers first a command, in large letters, “♀—read the SCUM MANIFESTO.” In smaller letters, below, the writer offers her rationale: “our justified rage can be hilarious!” And then there’s the photo of another piece of graffiti, found outside a sex shop in Gothenburg, Sweden, and posted in 2009. This image is in stark black and white, black italic script, slightly blurred, on a white stucco wall: “Valerie Was Right.” I love these memorials—testimony to the enduring nature of Solanas’s work as a writer and to the survival of her anger and her humor. I can’t help thinking that these anonymous, guerilla-style tributes are more her style than a fancy hardback with a black dust jacket and hot-pink endpapers. Valerie Solanas still eludes the efforts of academics, feminists, and revisionist historians to tame her by making her mainstream. Having paired Solanas and Arcangela Tarabotti in this chapter, I am now wondering whether I should keep a felt marker in my bag and start scrawling my own graffiti messages wherever I go: “Read Paternal Tyranny,” maybe, or “♀—read Paternal Tyranny. Our justified rage can be hilarious!” I could write


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“Arcangela Was Right” in black script on white walls. And maybe I would dare to scrawl the most radical message of all: “Tarabotti was a writer.”

If you are interested in William Congreve’s tragedy, The Mourning Bride, the play is available through the OPENDB Network at http://www.opendb. net/ebook/mourning-bride/1035/read#list, accessed 11 December 2010. Arcangela Tarabotti’s Paternal Tyranny, edited and translated by Letizia Panizza, is part of the University of Chicago’s The Other Voice of Early Modern Europe series (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Panizza’s introduction provides ample background information for understanding Tarabotti’s life and work, in particular Paternal Tyranny. If you can read Italian, the Italian Women Writers Library website, sponsored by the University of Chicago, makes the entire text of Paternal Tyranny available at http://colet.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/iww/navigate?/projects/artflb/databases/ efts/IWW/fulltext/IMAGE/.55, accessed 11 December 2010. A brief biography of Tarabotti, an overview of her published works, and translated selections from many of her books, including Paternal Tyranny, are available online at Other Women’s Voices: http://home.infionline.net/~ddisse/ tarabott.html, accessed 11 December 2010. Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, published by San Francisco’s AK Press (1996; reprint 2001), is very affordable. The Verso edition of SCUM Manifesto, with an introduction, “The Deviant Payback: The Aims of Valerie Solanas” by Avital Ronell, is an impressive hardcover (New York and London: Verso Press, 2004). In my discussion of the SCUM Manifesto, I have referred to both of these printed versions, but when I have preferred readings from Solanas’s 1967 self-published edition, I indicate this source. I am deeply indebted to Judith A. Martinez, the copyright holder for Solanas’s work, for permission to consult and to cite this original version of her sister’s work, and to The Andy Warhol Museum for providing me with access to this edition. At least one other copy of this ephemeral, selfproduced typescript may survive; according to the WorldCat, Northwestern University Library holdings include a 1967 version of the SCUM Manifesto, published by Valerie Solanas, described as “21 leaves.” If you are interested in seeing the cover of the 1968 Olympia edition of Solanas’s manifesto, published by Maurice Girodias, there are several copies posted on Google Images. The text of Girodias’s edition is reprinted in Mary Harron and Daniel Minahan’s book, I Shot Andy Warhol (New York: Grove Press, 1996), which includes the screenplay for Harron’s 1996 bio pic, I Shot Andy Warhol.




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Donny Smith’s “Valerie Solanas,” a multimedia list of Solanas-related sources, is at http://204.9.137.73/docs/40920-scum-solanas.htm, accessed 11 December 2010. Many of the links on this site are no longer available, but the items that are listed and described can still be located with a search engine. Most valuable is the list of editions of the manifesto, which I have relied on here. A full-length biography of Valerie Solanas has yet to be written, but appended to the AK Press edition of SCUM Manifesto is a biographical essay by Freddie Baer, which seems to be the basic source for all discussions of Solanas’s life, and references to it occur in virtually all more recent writings about Solanas. In addition to the biographical essay by Freddie Baer, Mary Harron’s “On Valerie Solanas,” the introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, contains biographical information, including recollections by Solanas’s friends and family. The film itself is available on DVD. For their generous communications and clarifications about early printed versions of Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and about the original 1967 typescript, I am indebted to Zelli Fischetti, Associate Director, Western Historical Manuscripts Collection, University of Missouri – St. Louis, and especially to Matt Wrbican, Archivist, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. I offer my most sincere gratitude to Matt Wrbican not only for providing me access to the museum’s copy of Solanas’s 1967 typescript but for answering my many questions. He has been extremely generous with his time. I would also like to thank Greg Burchard, Rights and Reproductions and Photo Services Manager of The Andy Warhol Museum, for all of his efforts in providing me with a reproduction from Solanas’s original typescript. Three recent critical reassessments of Valerie Solanas and the SCUM Manifesto have been very important in the evolution of my thinking: Dana Heller, “Shooting Solanas: Radical Feminist History and the Technology of Failure,” Feminist Studies 27, no. 1 (2001): 167–89; Amanda Third, “‘Shooting from the Hip’: Valerie Solanas, SCUM and the Apocalyptic Politics of Radical Feminism,” Hecate: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Women’s Liberation 32, no. 2 (2006): 104–32; and Breanne Fahs, “The Radical Possibilities of Valerie Solanas,” Feminist Studies 34, no. 3 (2008): 591–617. These are excellent reconsiderations of Solanas and her work, but some caution is needed. Heller, for example, relying on Harron’s reprint of the 1968 Olympia Press version of SCUM Manifesto, concludes that “there is no reliable evidence that Solanas intended SCUM to stand as an acronym for the ‘Society for Cutting Up Men.’” Heller also cites an unpublished 1975 interview with Solanas that implies “Society for Cutting Up Men” was “the fabrication of her publisher, Maurice Girodias” (168). Although “Society for Cutting Up Men” does not appear in the text of the manifesto, Solanas did, in fact, identify SCUM with the Society for Cutting Up


Hell Hath No Fury


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Men—it’s right there, on the title page of her self-produced 1967 edition, following the title: “Presentation of the rationale and program of action of SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men). . . .” As is the case in scholarship, Heller’s suggestion that the “Society for Cutting Up Men” was Girodias’s invention is now quoted in subsequent essays, appearing in Fahs (607), for example. Similarly, Fahs herself indicates the University of Missouri at St. Louis Library has a “shorter version” of the SCUM Manifesto “from 1968 that preceded the full-length Olympia Press edition of the manifesto” (617 n45). But as Zelli Fischetti reports (telephone conversation, 8 February 2010), the three-page document the library has is neither dated nor attributed, and there is no indication at all of its source. Rather than an original typescript, the document appears to be a copy of some sort of print publication. The first of the three pages has a title (“Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto”) and a page number (41)—this page number alone suggests not that this is a “shorter version” of Solanas’s manifesto, as Fahs concludes (the entire manifesto is only twenty-one pages long in Solanas’s typed edition) but that, as Fischetti suggests, it is an extract that has been reprinted in an anthology or collection. (The document in the Western Historical Manuscripts Collection at the University of Missouri – St. Louis is in Collection 489, Women’s Studies Publications, Folder #184.) Unfortunately, there is nothing to indicate that Solanas had any part in selecting this extract nor in its publication. Using this three-page document, Fahs also notes the appearance of “unrelated sentences” in “the margins of her text” (“Tiny Tim is just another pretty face” and “Wallace Fer Presadint”) and says that Solanas “typically included unrelated sentences throughout the margins of her text” (607). However, there is no marginalia of any kind whatsoever in the 1967 typescript Solanas produced. I have not been able to consult the New York Library copy of SCUM Manifesto that Solanas marked up to see whether she added such marginalia there. (This volume, now held in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection, New York Public Library, was originally examined by Laura Winkiel, who reports on the markings in her “‘The Sweet Assassin’ and the Performative Politics of SCUM Manifesto,” in The Queer Sixties, edited by Patricia Juliana Smith [New York: Routledge, 1999], 82 n24.) Typing “Valerie Solanas” or “SCUM Manifesto” into Google Images produces a wide range of results—Valerie Solanas comics and cartoons, SCUM Manifesto cross-stitch embroidery samplers and “Valerie was right” barrettes, as well as the photos of graffiti I describe here, all of which are posted on Flickr.


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Madwomen in the Attic: Madness and Suicide in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen”

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n writing about women’s anger in our last chapter, I am reminded of the passage from The Taming of the Shrew that I quoted in Chapter 3, Katherina’s last desperate outcry before she submits to Petruchio’s “taming”: “My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, / Or else my heart concealing it will break. . . .” In that earlier chapter, as we saw, the sixteenth-century women who gathered in a walled garden in Moderata Fonte’s Venice were not silent, nor were their twenty-first century counterparts, the women in Marjane Satrapi’s Tehran, for whom talk functioned as “ventilation of the heart.” Like these fictional women, Arcangela Tarabotti and Valerie Solanas were also determined to “tell the anger” of their hearts, and although their hearts still may, in the end, have broken, at least it wasn’t from keeping their mouths shut. In this chapter, by contrast, I’d like to focus on what happens to women when they remain silent—when their anguish and despair are concealed and when their anger is unspoken. These are not untamed shrews, radical reformers, disposable daughters, or writers who need a quiet place to create. These are women we encounter every day of our lives. They are wives and mothers living lives of quiet—and untold— desperation. Like Jane Eyre’s Bertha Mason, Mr. Rochester’s first wife, they are madwomen hidden in plain sight. And most important, from our point of view here, in Reading Women’s Worlds, they have rooms of their own. The two short stories I’ve named in the title of this chapter, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen,” represent a critical pairing. I’ve linked works by these two writers before, in Chapter 5, where we compared Gilman’s Herland and


CHAPTER 7


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Lessing’s The Cleft, both of which focus on male disruption of women’s worlds. I didn’t plan on connecting these two writers again, and, in fact, I didn’t even realize I’d done so until this project was well underway. Rather than deliberately repeating the earlier pairing, I connected the two stories in this chapter because they span an important period in women’s history. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” was published in 1892, during the so-called first-wave feminist movement, when women sought full legal status, economic independence, and political rights, most notably the right to vote. Lessing’s short story was published in 1963, the same year Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique ignited the second-wave feminist movement by identifying “the problem that has no name” and exploding the myth of the happy and fulfilled homemaker. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is widely read today as both a representation of and a response to women’s status in nineteenth-century America. As many women sought to gain control of their lives, their property, and even their own bodies, they struggled against an ideology of “true womanhood” that venerated women (or, rather, middle-class white women), emphasizing their purity and their virtue and defining their happiness and fulfillment in terms of their unselfish performance of their roles as daughters, wives, and mothers. This “cult of true womanhood” is an American version of the Victorian ideal of the submissive and self-sacrificing wife and mother. The British “angel of the house” took her name from an 1854 poem by Coventry Patmore, who described the perfect woman’s complete submission to her husband and her absolute devotion to him, regardless of his treatment of her; he may be an “icicle” or a “stone” who offers her only an “impatient word,” and he may blame her for all of his mistakes, but she remains devoted, “gentle,” and forgiving, dutifully shouldering all the blame heaped upon her. In “To Room Nineteen,” written more than a hundred years after Patmore’s “The Angel of the House” and seventy years after Gilman’s short story was published, Doris Lessing shows us a twentieth-century woman still struggling with—and against—her stifling role as the angel in the middle-class British home. Like the unnamed narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Susan Rawlings is haunted by the ideal of “true” womanhood and devastated by her inability to sustain it. In this chapter, then, we will focus on these two stories and the two women in them, two wives and mothers, both of whom struggle against a pervasive ideology of “true womanhood.” It’s crucial to note that, in both stories, the central character occupies a single room. In the case of the unnamed narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a young wife undergoing a rest cure under the supervision of her physician-husband, the room that she must occupy, chosen for her by her husband, becomes a prison, a place where she is condemned to the psychological torture of a kind of solitary confinement.


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When she was a young wife and mother, before she became a writer, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was prescribed a rest cure. The specific nature of Gilman’s illness is not at all clear. Describing it some twenty-five years later, Gilman wrote, “For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia—and beyond.” In 1887, the twenty-seven-year-old Gilman consulted the physician Silas Weir Mitchell, widely recognized in the United States as the foremost authority on women’s health, and entered his sanitarium in Philadelphia. Describing her treatment there, she later wrote, “This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he sent me home with solemn advice to ‘live as domestic a life as possible,’ to ‘have but two hours’ intellectual life a day,’ and ‘never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again’ as long as I lived.” Gilman says that, like a good patient, she “went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came . . . near the borderline of utter mental ruin. . . .” She realized that doing nothing was the cause of her illness, not its cure, and so, “using the remnants of intelligence that remained,” she ignored Mitchell’s orders: “I cast the noted specialist’s advice to the winds and went to work again— work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite.” Returning to work, she wrote, meant “ultimately recovering some measure of power.” It is this very situation—suffering from the lack of work, with nothing to do all day, spending day after day in an isolated bedroom and night after night lying awake and aware—that we encounter the unnamed narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Like Gilman, the first-person narrator of her short story is under a doctor’s orders—in this case, the doctor is her husband. To ensure the “perfect rest” that he deems necessary for his wife’s recovery, her doctor-husband, John, removes her to an isolated country home and rigorously secludes her from all “society and stimulus.” He devises “a schedule prescription for each hour in the day,” one that has been carefully designed to take “all care” from her. As part of his patient’s cure, John gives his wife tonics, carefully


Her madness becomes her means of escape. For Susan Rawlings, the Mother’s Room offered her as a form of appeasement by her husband and children is equally a place of torture—she abandons this room and her “perfect” home in favor of a dismal, anonymous hotel room, Room Nineteen. Her suicide there becomes her means of escape. As each story makes vividly clear, occupying a single room isn’t the same as having a room of one’s own.


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monitors her activities, and rigorously controls her diet. She is allowed fresh air and moderate exercise (though the narrator indicates her husband “hardly lets [her] stir without special direction”), but no visitors—they would be too “stimulating”—and she is allowed no occupation of any kind. In our narrator’s words, she is “absolutely forbidden to ‘work’” until she is “well again.” There is nothing unusual about this prescription, nothing to suggest that John has any evil intentions—John is not like Charles Boyer in Gaslight, trying to drive Ingrid Bergman crazy. In fact, the narrator tells us that her brother, another well-regarded physician, concurs with her husband’s treatment plan. And yet we are unclear about the efficacy of this treatment. In the narrator’s words, “John is a physician, and perhaps—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course . . . )—perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.” She confides that her husband “does not believe I am sick!” Here the unnamed wife gets to the central problem of women’s “illness”: to be a woman is, by definition, to be sick. A woman’s anatomy and physiology— her reproductive system, and in particular her uterus—are the source of her congenital illness. Hysteria, a uniquely female disorder (from the Greek hustera, “belonging to the womb”), was first described by the Greek physician Hippocrates (ca. 460 BCE–ca. 370 BCE), and belief in his scientific “truths” about women’s physiology and health would persist into the twentieth century. As Laura Briggs reports in her extended analysis of hysteria and its treatment, “Hysteria in the nineteenth century was not a single disease or entity but entailed a profusion of symptoms. . . . ‘Hysteria’ and its variants neurasthenia and nervousness were part of the lexicon of psychiatry, neurology, obstetrics and gynecology and also of reformers cautioning about the dangers of cities or of women’s education or labor.” To indicate something of the prevalence of the disease among women, Briggs reports that George Beard, “its foremost theorist in the United States,” compiled a “catalogue of symptoms” in 1880 “that ran to seventy-five pages, and he counted it incomplete.” But at the same time that hysteria was believed to be both chronic and pervasive among women, it was also regarded with skepticism. Because they are female, women are apt to be liars and malingerers, pretending to be sick in order to gain attention or to avoid their household responsibilities— hence the popular association of hysteria with women’s emotional excesses and their imagined illnesses. The physician whose treatment Gilman had sought, Silas Weir Mitchell, believed his patients, “women of the upper classes,” were suffering from “unhappy love affairs” or reacting to the “daily fret and wearisomeness” of their lives. While the rest cure he devised was intended to protect the delicate female body from unnecessary shock and


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overstimulation, it was also intended to deny women the “pleasures” of being sick and to make being “sick” so unpleasant that, in Mitchell’s words, rest “becomes for some women a rather bitter medicine, and they are glad enough to accept the order to rise and go about when the doctor issues a mandate.” Thus the predicament not only of our unnamed narrator, but also of women like Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Medical “science” has determined that women (because they are women) are sick. At the same time, however, medical science has also determined that women are really not sick at all. This is the hopeless situation of the young wife in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Her doctor-husband has diagnosed her illness, and yet he does not really believe she is sick. Her own brother, the narrator acknowledges, “says the same thing.” And so, she asks, “[W]hat can one do? If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?” She has her own views: “Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.” But she is stuck. For the third time, she asks the same question: “But what is one to do?” Although she believes that if she “had less opposition and more society and stimulus” her “condition” might be—might be what? She never finishes that sentence. She never says whether her “condition” might be improved or might be completely cured if she had “less opposition” and “more society and stimulus.” Instead, she breaks off with a dash and finishes her sentence by saying that “John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition.” And then a curious final clause: “and I confess it always makes me feel bad.” The antecedent for the pronoun she uses there—it— remains unclear. Is “it” her condition? Is that what always makes her feel bad? Or does “it” refer to what her husband says about her condition? Is it her husband’s skepticism that “always” makes her feel bad? We never learn what has led to the narrator’s husband to diagnose his wife’s illness and prescribe a rest cure for her; all we know is that she has been diagnosed and is to be treated. As a woman, she is thus pathologized— the only relevant symptom disclosed in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is that she is female. The story begins with the couple’s arrival at an isolated country house that John has decided will be the perfect spot for his wife’s treatment. His wife is at first impressed by the house, which she identifies as a “colonial mansion, a hereditary estate.” But she is also troubled by it—“There is something strange about the house—I can feel it,” she says. The house is also isolated, “well back from the road, quite three miles from the village” and secluded behind “hedges and walls and gates that lock.” When the




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narrator shares her uneasiness about the house with her husband, he reacts peremptorily and angrily to what he sees as her childishness: “he said what I felt was a draught—and shut the window.” On arrival, the narrator is delighted by a downstairs bedroom that “open[s] on the piazza and had roses all over the window, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings.” This bright, cheerful room seems perfectly suitable for her convalescence, but her husband will not “hear of ” her choice of this room for herself, insisting that there is not enough air (there is only one window) and not enough room—not enough room for him, that is. He claims that there isn’t enough for two beds, suggesting not only that he plans to sleep in the room with his wife-patient, but also that there is “no near room for him if he took another,” suggesting that, then again, he might also choose to sleep elsewhere. Denied any choice in the matter, this grown woman, a wife and mother, is consigned to “the nursery at the top of the house.” It is a room that she does not like “one bit.” The room is large—it occupies “the whole floor nearly”—and it has several windows—“windows that look all ways”—so it has “air and sunshine galore.” But these pleasant details, which the narrator shares with us, making the best of her situation, are quickly undercut by other, not-so-pleasant, features of the room. Roses cover the windows in the downstairs bedroom, but the windows in the upstairs nursery are covered by bars. Even more curiously, there are “rings and things in the walls” of this room. The narrator thinks that these rings and “things” might have been affixed to the wall because the room was used as either a playroom or a gymnasium after its nursery days were over, but, in combination with the barred windows, the rings in the walls suggest something quite different to the reader. The room sounds like a cell in a madhouse—or a torture chamber. A little later we learn that, in addition to the “barred windows,” this room includes another fixture of a prison, “a gate at the head of the stairs.” Unlike the pretty downstairs room, the upstairs nursery is worn and grim. We learn that the floor is “scratched and gouged and splintered,” that the plaster of the walls is “dug out here and there,” and that the room is unfurnished except for a “heavy bedstead” that “looks as if it had been through the wars.” Somewhat later we learn that the bed is “immovable”— that it has been nailed to the floor. And still later, we learn that the bedstead has even been “gnawed.” There are no rose-covered windows and chintz draperies and bed curtains in this former nursery; instead, there is a canvas mattress on the bed. Most memorable, though, is the “repellent” yellow wallpaper referred to in the title of the story, “dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.” Its condition adds to the grimness of the room where the narrator must convalesce—the paper is partly


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“stripped off ” in “great patches” around the head of the bed and low down on the walls. In another reminder of the room’s supposed purpose, the narrator says the paper is in such bad condition that it looks “as if a boys’ school had used it.” The young wife is thus enclosed within multiple enclosures—an isolated house situated inside locked grounds, an upstairs room with barred windows accessed from a gated staircase. Beyond her physical isolation in a children’s room, a nursery, the narrator is also treated like a child. When she wonders why the house has been “let so cheaply” and why it has been “so long untenanted,” her husband laughs at her. (Her response here is telling: “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.”) But, even while laughing off his wife’s legitimate questions, he responds to her like a doting father who loves to spoil a favorite child—instead of answers, he makes extravagant promises. When she tells him she wants to leave the nursery and “go downstairs,” he says he will go all the way “down to the cellar” if it is her wish, and that he will “have it whitewashed into the bargain.” But he doesn’t do either of those things, of course. His wife is “a blessed little goose,” and he prescribes a quiet naptime for her: “he started the habit by making me lie down for an hour after each meal.” When his wife begs him to “let her go” so that she can leave the house and visit family, she is scolded, forced to defend herself to him as if she were a naughty child, and finds herself reduced to tears. Then “dear John” picks her up in his arms, exactly as if she were that naughty, crying child, takes her once more to the nursery, puts her to bed, and reads her a story. When she is unable to sleep, John asks her, “What is it, little girl?” When she begs to go home, he responds by reminding her of his authority (“I am a doctor, dear”) and speaks to her in the thirdperson: “‘Bless her little heart!’ said he with a big hug, ‘she shall be as sick as she pleases!’” Just like an adult raising a small child, John attempts to train his wife to control her “inappropriate” behavior. When she is angry at him—an anger she describes as unreasonable, showing clearly how she has internalized her husband’s view of her behavior—he tells her she lacks “proper self-control.” As we have seen, he won’t let her stay in the pretty downstairs bedroom, and even though he promises to change the hideous wallpaper she hates, the only thing he changes is his mind. Going back on his promise is part of her cure—to replace the paper would be spoiling her, “letting it get the better” of his wife. It would be harmful to indulge her in “such fancies.” Chastened, she “takes pains to control” herself. Instead of appreciating his wife’s writing, her “habit of story-making,” John says that it will only lead to “all manner of excited fancies” and that she should use her “will” and her “good sense” in order to “check the tendency.” Like a




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disobedient child, the narrator is forced into deceptions, the most critical of which is, despite doctor’s orders, her decision to continue writing. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is her story, written in haste and in secrecy. This “story” is composed of twelve separate narrative fragments, journallike entries written over the course of her three-month treatment. The most critical component of her treatment seems to be her isolation—her doctorhusband is away every day (and many nights), and our narrator has no other intimate, personal contact with anyone else. She is denied the company of friends and family. And yet, even in her extreme isolation, she is never entirely alone. She is always being watched and always subject to interruption. There is perhaps no more unlikely spokeswoman for the horrors of the young wife’s situation than Florence Nightingale. I say “unlikely” because I am assuming that many, if not most, readers are like me and still associate Nightingale with the sanitized biographies they read when they were children. I am embarrassed to admit that, aside from dim memories of childhood books, the only clear image I had of Florence Nightingale came from the 1936 film The White Angel, starring the dark-haired Hollywood beauty, Kay Francis. I should have known better, of course—the hint that there was something more to be known about Nightingale’s life was right there, all along, in Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own. “Among your grandmothers and great-grandmothers,” Woolf writes, “there were many that wept their eyes out. Florence Nightingale shrieked aloud in her agony.” Woolf adds a footnote here—“See Cassandra. . . .” But I had read past Wolf ’s signpost, completely overlooking it. Now, however, thinking about women’s worlds, I heeded Woolf ’s command (her use of the imperative, “See”!), read “Cassandra,” and was forced to reassess my childish views of the saintly “lady with the lamp.” Nightingale’s angry “Cassandra” was written before she was able to realize her goal of dedicating her life to meaningful work—it was written, in fact, when she was in the midst of the blackest despair. In her bitter reflection on the emptiness of women’s lives, Nightingale observes that women are “never supposed to have any occupation of sufficient importance not to be interrupted.” It is their “duty,” in fact, to be always ready, prepared to give up anything, at any moment, for “every trifler” who is “more selfish than themselves.” “Women never have half an hour in all their lives . . . that they can call their own, without fear of offending or of hurting some one,” she writes, and “[s]o women play through life.” Their time “is of no value”; instead they “are taught from their infancy upwards that it is wrong, ill-tempered, and a misunderstanding of ‘a woman’s mission’ (with a great M.) if they do not allow themselves willingly to be interrupted at all hours.” And so, to fill those numberless


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hours while they are waiting to be interrupted, women occupy themselves by “sitting in the drawing-room, saying words which may as well not be said.” They write letters to their friends. They busy themselves with needlework projects of varying kinds. They may play music or draw, but not seriously—such occupations are “only used by her as an amusement (a passtime, as it is called).” Imagine, then, the young wife’s situation in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” She is denied even the trifles that usually fill up women’s days—she has no one to talk to, no needlework or drawing to fill up the empty hours, no music. She is supposed to rest. But the narrator is never really allowed to rest. Even in her sickroom, she is always on edge, constantly expecting interruption. The first entries in her journal illustrate her desperate situation. The narrator begins her journal shortly after her treatment begins. She is still craving “congenial work,” and she has decided to continue to write “in spite of ” being forbidden to do so by her husband and her brother. She knows she must be “sly” about it or else she will have to face their combined “heavy opposition.” With nothing to write about, she describes the room she is forced to occupy, but just as she begins to focus on the wallpaper, the narrator abruptly ends her first entry—“There comes John, and I must put this away,—he hates me to write a word.” Two weeks pass before our writer picks up her journal again, only to be interrupted once more. The first part of this second entry records the meager events that have transpired in the narrator’s life since arriving at the house, but since she has no one to talk to and nothing to do, and since her sickroom is so bare and empty, she again focuses on the wallpaper. Just as she confides that she has begun to discern a “strange, provoking, formless sort of figure” in the wallpaper, she hears a footstep on the stairs and is once more forced to break off her narrative. The third journal entry, which is written shortly after July 4, is relatively brief. The narrator records her state of mind—she is “dreadfully fretful and querulous,” she “cr[ies] at nothing, and cr[ies] most of the time” when she is alone, and, as she admits, she is “alone a good deal just now.” With nothing to occupy her mind, she turns once more to the wallpaper: “It dwells in my mind so!” she says. Lying in the nursery’s “great immovable bed,” which she now realizes is “nailed down,” she follows the “pointless” and “interminable” pattern in wallpaper. This time, she ends her entry not because she is interrupted but because she is exhausted. “It makes me tired to follow it,” she writes, adding, “I will take a nap I guess.” The next three entries, the fourth through the sixth, further illustrate the effects of the isolation to which she is subjected. The entries are all fairly short. The narrator feels less and less able to write. She no longer knows why she is writing, she no longer wants to write, and, more critically, she




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no longer “feel[s] able” to write. Still she persists. Why she continues to write is crucial, however, and in her fourth entry she sounds much like Katherina, in her impassioned outburst to Petruchio. “I must say what I feel and think in some way,” the narrator says, because “it is such a relief!” Even so, “the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.” She is having trouble talking to her husband, even finding it “a great effort . . . to think straight.” The narrator is no longer focusing on the “outside pattern” of the wallpaper, she tells us, but on what lies behind—the “dim shape” that is slowly revealing itself as a woman, “stooping down and creeping about that pattern.” It’s not clear how much time passes between this fourth entry and the next, but the fifth entry is recorded when there are only three weeks remaining in her three-month-long course of treatment. After lying in bed all day, she is unable to sleep at night and finds it increasingly difficult to remain quietly in bed next to her husband—and so she gets up to touch the wallpaper. Even though she has gotten up “softly,” she wakes her husband up. John asks her, “What is it, little girl?” Although she begs him, once more, to leave the house, her husband refuses to go before their lease is over. Faced with her husband’s intransigence, the narrator returns to bed—and although her husband believes she has fallen asleep, the narrator tells us that she has not. She is once again transfixed by the wallpaper, lying awake for hours after her husband has fallen back to sleep. With nothing to interest her or to engage her mind, the narrator has become entirely absorbed by the yellow wallpaper. Without the “advice and companionship about [her] work” she craved from her husband, the narrator at first found distraction in the wallpaper. Although she hated it, at least it occupied her otherwise unengaged mind as she tried to follow the bewildering, patternless patterns in the paper. The narrator compared this to a childhood pastime: “I used to lie awake as a child,” she says, entertaining herself with the shapes and shadows in her darkened room. But those were happy games—the child saw a “kindly wink” in the knobs of a bureau and “a strong friend” in a chair. The wallpaper, by contrast, is neither kindly nor friendly; the narrator at first believes it exerts “a vicious influence” on her. By the fourth of July, however, her relationship with the wallpaper has begun to change—instead of hating the paper and fearing its influence, she is “getting really fond of the room in spite of the wall-paper.” Or, she adds, “Perhaps because of the wallpaper.” She becomes not only obsessed by the wallpaper, but begins to see in it secrets that are known only to her. As she writes, “There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.” What she alone sees is the shape “like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern.” As we can see at the end of the fifth entry, the wallpaper has


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become the narrator’s alternative reality—the place where she goes to escape. By the time she completes the sixth entry, the narrator has become “quite sure” that the figure in the wallpaper is a woman. The figure must be a woman’s because, like the narrator herself, the figure in the wallpaper is “subdued” and “quiet.” The narrator identifies with the situation of this subdued and quiet woman trapped in the wallpaper: “It keeps me quiet by the hour,” she writes. Her life is no longer empty and meaningless: “Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be,” she writes, adding, “You see I have something more to expect, to look forward to, to watch.” The wallpaper has something to tell her: “I don’t want to leave now until I have found it out.” Having found a purpose for her life, the narrator is eating better, and her husband attributes this improvement to his rest cure, though his wife knows better. “I had no intention of telling him it was because of the wall-paper,” she admits. Now, rather than begging to leave, she is afraid that her husband will take her away from her room before she can solve the mystery of the woman trapped in the wallpaper. She has also discovered a worn “streak” around the nursery, low down on the wall, at shoulder height above the baseboard, and she has decided that she must figure out “how it was done and who did it, and what they did it for.” In a subtle gesture to the original “madwoman in the attic,” Bertha Mason, the unnamed narrator’s literary antecedent, Gilman incorporates an allusion to the fiery conflagration in Jane Eyre—“I thought seriously of burning down the house,” the narrator confesses. After this shocking revelation, the narrator rapidly devolves—the subsequent entries in her journal are devoted entirely to the “developments” in the wallpaper. As the narrator suspected, there is a woman—or many women—imprisoned behind the pattern in the wallpaper. She is afraid that the woman trapped by and behind the wallpaper will never be able to escape because “nobody could climb through that pattern,” because “it strangles so.” But, with just two days left in her treatment, the narrator thinks she sees the woman outside, at least during the day. She recognizes the woman because she is “always creeping,” always “creeping along,” although “most women do not creep by daylight.” The narrator observes that it “must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight”—an admission that comes from own experience. The narrator tells us that she herself is unable to “creep” at night because “John would suspect something at once,” but she admits that “I always lock the door when I creep by daylight.” In the final entry in her journal, the narrator has come to identify completely with the woman she has discovered. Once appalled by the bare and dismal room, she is now happy that “there is nothing left but that great




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bedstead nailed down, with the canvas mattress we found on it.” Once confined to the nursery by her husband, she now locks herself in and throws the key out the window. There are now “so many of those creeping women” outside that she is happy to be inside. She is no longer the observer of the woman trapped behind the wallpaper—she is the woman trapped behind the wallpaper. “I wonder,” she asks, if the women now creeping around outside the house all came “out of that wall-paper as I did?” Once deprived of meaningful occupation, she now “must get to work.” She puts her shoulder to the streak worn into the wallpaper and finds that her shoulder “just fits in that long smooth around the wall, so I cannot lose my way.” Having found the way at last, she begins to crawl around and around the room. In the end, as her husband breaks into the room, she triumphantly announces her freedom. She has escaped her sickroom-prison: “I’ve got out at last,” she cries, “And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back.” The woman trapped behind the yellow wallpaper is not the only “other” woman in Gilman’s story. If a middle-class wife is incapacitated, no longer fit and able to fulfill her role as wife and mother, she can easily be replaced. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator finds her roles as wife and mother more than ably filled by two surrogates. The first is Mary, who is taking care of the narrator’s baby. Although she calls him “a dear baby,” the wifemother says that she “cannot be with him.” Being around her child makes her too “nervous.” Is there any correlation between the child’s birth and the mother’s illness? In her brief 1913 essay, “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’” Gilman describes the illness for which she herself was treated by Silas Weir Mitchell as a three-year long, “severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia—and beyond.” These three years correspond to the years immediately following the birth of Gilman’s child, which suggests to many critics that her illness might now be best understood as a kind of postpartum depression. It is thus interesting that the woman being treated by a rest cure in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is also a young mother, recently having given birth. (Her husband even threatens her at one point by telling her that if she doesn’t get better faster, he will send her “to Weir Mitchell”!) But, despite her inability to care for her child herself, the narrator does care for her baby—in fact, her “one comfort” is that her baby “is well and happy, and does not have to occupy this nursery with the horrid wall-paper.” If she had not been forced to stay in the former nursery, then her “blessed child” would have been consigned to this horrible room at the top of the stairs. “What a fortunate escape!” the narrator cries, seeing her own occupation of the room as a kind of sacrifice she has made to protect him. “Why, I wouldn’t have a child of mine, an impressionable little thing, live in such a room for worlds,” she observes, adding, “I never


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thought of it before, but it is lucky that John has kept me here after all, I can stand it so much easier than a baby, you see.” More ominous than the presence of Mary, who has taken over the care of the narrator’s baby, is Jennie, yet another “other woman” in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” If Mary has become a surrogate mother for the narrator’s baby, Jennie has taken on the role of surrogate wife to John, for she is now managing the household. In the second section of the diary, the narrator tells us that John’s sister, a “dear girl” and “so careful” in her attention to the wife, has assumed the household duties that the narrator can no longer perform. “She is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper,” the narrator informs us, adding an interesting detail: Jennie “hopes for no better profession.” We might wonder about this—certainly John’s sister represents the “angel” in this house, devoting herself to the running of her brother’s household. But we might also regard Jennie as yet another woman who is confined. The narrator’s description of Jennie as being able to look forward to “no better profession” might be read as her perfect suitability for the “profession” of wife, but we might also conclude that John’s sister will have no home of her own. Perhaps she will have “no better profession” than being a surrogate wife in her brother’s home. Perhaps she will be no other man’s wife and have no child of her own. Is she, like the narrator, trapped behind the yellow wallpaper? Part of what interests me about the role of John’s sister—and the possibility that she, like his wife, is confined and controlled by her brother—is that Jennie not only fulfills the role of surrogate wife in this story, but she also becomes a surrogate jailer. When John is not at home—and he is more and more frequently absent over the course of his wife’s treatment—his sister fills in for him, monitoring the patient and policing her activities. When she first introduces John’s sister, the narrator is clear that her sisterin-law is a rigid enforcer of her brother’s prescriptions. The narrator is careful not to let Jennie “find [her] writing,” for example. In the narrator’s words, “I verily believe she thinks it is the writing which makes me sick.” The narrator is only able to write in her journal when John’s sister is out. Because the nursery is on the second floor and has windows on all four sides, the narrator feels safe, thinking that, since she can “see [Jennie] a long way off,” she will be able to put away her writing so that Jennie can’t catch her in the act. But, even though she believes her vantage point in the second-story room will allow her to see Jennie well before she arrives home, the narrator is unexpectedly surprised in the act of writing. Jennie isn’t a long way off—she’s already in the house. “There’s sister on the stairs!” is the hurried conclusion to this entry. Is Jennie trying to catch the narrator in the forbidden act of writing? Or is Jennie’s interruption just one more




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reminder that, no matter what she is doing or how sick she may be, a woman is always just about to be disturbed? In either case we can sense the narrator’s desperation. She is constantly being watched. In the final section of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” form and narrative perspective shift radically and without acknowledgment. Up until this point, as we have seen, each section of the story is a journal entry—the narrator is recording events after the fact. But in the twelfth section, that pattern is broken. The narrator begins the entry by writing about the previous night: she had stayed awake, tearing strips of the paper off the wall. When Jennie arrived early in the morning of the last day, finding the narrator surrounded by the shredded paper, she tried to lure the narrator out of the room, but the narrator, once closed in, now locked her guard, Jennie, out. And in order to make sure that she would not be interrupted again, the narrator threw the key out of the window. At this point, however, the story shifts from its journal-like recording of past events into a confused present-tense narration. “I quite enjoy the room, now it is bare again,” she says. It “is pleasant” to “creep around as I please.” The point of view also shifts. Although the narrator retains her first-person “I,” she is also outside that narrative “I,” observing herself from the outside. She is herself and yet, at the same time, someone else. She has somehow managed to obtain a rope, and now, she says, “If that woman does get out, and tries to get away, I can tie her!” But she is “that woman”: “I am securely fastened now by my wellhidden rope.” She observes that the bedstead has been “gnawed”; then, in her frustration she becomes the one who is doing the gnawing: “I got so angry I bit off a little piece at one corner.” She is afraid of the woman behind the wallpaper, but “I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night.” Until John arrives, she creeps around the room on her hands and knees, her shoulder against the wall, secure in her direction at last. Again the point of view shifts: when she hears her husband at the door, she is no longer writing in her journal or telling us the story—rather, we are plunged into the action. John knocks, he pounds, he begs his wife to open the door, he threatens to break down the door. When the narrator calmly tells her husband where the key is, he retrieves it and unlocks the nursery door. We experience his horrified reaction: “What is the matter?” he asks, “For God’s sake, what are you doing!” We also see his wife’s triumphant response, suddenly shifted back into a past-tense narration: “I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder.” “I’ve got out at last,” she tells him, triumphantly announcing that she has escaped “in spite of you and Jane.” Here the unnamed narrator finally discloses her name—she is Jane. But at the same time that she names herself, she rejects her former identity. She


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is no longer Jane, John’s wife. Jane is the woman she used to be before she escaped, Jane is the woman who had internalized John’s standards and values, watching, judging, controlling, and confining herself. Jane is the woman who had recorded her thoughts and feelings in a journal. Jane is the woman who was trapped behind the yellow wallpaper. But the narrator is now free from her husband’s control, she is free from his sister, Jennie, who had been her brother’s enforcer, and, most important, she is free from Jane, her former self, the woman who had tried to conform to John’s expectations that she “control” herself. She is no longer trapped behind the wallpaper. Her last words in the story are spoken in triumph: “I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” *

*

*

Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen” is also a story of a madwoman in a room of her own. Like the unnamed narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Susan Rawlings is both wife and mother. And like the narrator of Gilman’s story, she discovers that her “identity” as a woman, her “indispensable” role as wife and mother, is, after all, utterly dispensable. Or, rather, while the roles may be indispensable, the woman filling them is not. And thus another paradox for “the angel in the house.” She is a wife and mother. She has no identity aside from her roles as wife and mother. And everything in the mid-twentieth-century world of “To Room Nineteen,” as in the world of the nineteenth-century wife and mother in Gilman’s story, has told Susan Rawlings that there is nothing more meaningful and fulfilling for her as a woman than being a wife and mother. And yet, as Susan Rawlings discovers, nothing is more easily replaced than a wife and mother. Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen” is written from an interesting perspective, one that plays with point of view. Like Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Lessing’s story employs a first-person narrator, though, unlike Gilman’s firstperson narrator, who is telling her own story, Lessing’s “I” is not Susan Rawlings—in fact, we never learn the identity of the mysteriously omniscient first-person narrator of “To Room Nineteen.” (In a striking way, this unidentified first-person narrator is much like Moderata Fonte’s “I” at the outset of The Worth of Women.) The first paragraph—just one sentence in length—introduces Lessing’s almost-invisible storyteller: “This is a story, I suppose, about a failure in intelligence,” the narrator begins, adding, “the Rawlings’ marriage was grounded in intelligence.” But who is this “I”? Although we never find out who this vanishing narrator is (this is the only time the narrator’s “I” appears in the story), the story of Susan Rawlings is told throughout from this narrator’s perspective. Indeed, the narrator of this




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story is truly “omniscient,” acting exactly like a god, or maybe an author, providing us the scene and the characters, introducing a complication that sets the story in motion for us, and then stepping back quietly so that we can see the action unfold, the narrator unobtrusively shaping our understanding of events as they transpire. Also like “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Lessing’s story is an anatomy of a marriage. As the narrator describes the life of Matthew and Susan Rawlings, it is fairy-tale perfect: a perfect couple, a perfect house in the suburbs, a perfect family (a son, a daughter, and then twins, a boy and a girl). When the opening exposition draws to a close, the perfect life of Matthew and Susan Rawlings is summed up in a brief paragraph: “And so they lived with their four children in their gardened house in Richmond and were happy. They had everything they had wanted and had planned for.” Rather than a premise for a story, this sounds exactly like the happily-ever-after conclusion of a fairy tale—“And so they lived happily ever after.” But this is the beginning of a story, not an end, and in the next paragraph the narrator signals that this is to be no fairy tale, with italics and ellipses preparing us for what is to come: “And yet . . .” The “and yet” that follows introduces the emptiness of it all. Despite the seeming perfection of the Rawlings’s life, there is a “certain flatness.” It’s important not to lose sight of the narrator’s role here. The narrator comments, “Yes, yes, of course, it was natural they sometimes felt like this. Like what?” The narrator then performs a quick dissection of this perfect middle-class marriage, revealing to us its inner workings. Matthew’s job is “for the sake of Susan, children, house, and garden,” all of which, of course, need to be supported by his job. And Susan must devote her “practical intelligence” to “Matthew, the children, the house and the garden— which unit would have collapsed in a week without her.” We might conclude this reciprocal state represents perfect balance and harmony, but the narrator compares their life to “a snake biting its tail.” Although marriage, family, and home might seem to represent all that is worth having, the narrator insists that they are not sufficient: “. . . there was no point about which either [Matthew or Susan] could say: ‘For the sake of this is all the rest.’” Neither their marriage, their family, their house, nor their love, “that was nearest” making it all meaningful, was enough. The sad reality they face is “that two people, no matter how carefully chosen, could not be everything to each other,” but to face this emptiness is too much: “even to say so, to think in such a way, was banal; they were ashamed to do it.” “So here was this couple,” our narrator writes, summing up their background, their situation, the emptiness that they cannot avoid but that they cannot admit: “So everything was all right. Everything was in order.


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Yes, things were under control. So what did it matter if they felt dry, flat?” But, of course, it does matter. The complication for this couple is as banal as the truths they are trying to avoid. One night Matthew admits to Susan that he has had a brief sexual encounter with another woman, a younger woman, and although the two agree that the “whole thing was not important” and “put the thing behind them,” this is what begins the unraveling of their “perfect” life. Matthew’s admission here might cause us to rethink, for a moment, what remains unsaid in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”—although the narrator’s doctor-husband may not be having sexual encounters with other women, he certainly seems, on reflection, to be unduly solicitous to his female patients. Although the point is subtly made, it is still made—after John’s initial concern about the beautiful downstairs bedroom not being large enough to accommodate him and his wife, we learn that he is frequently away from home. In only her second journal entry, made two weeks after arriving at her isolated retreat, the unnamed narrator comments her husband is away all day “and even some nights when his cases are serious” (italics added). His wife interprets this absence in the most positive way she can—she thinks his absence from her means that her case is not so serious. Looking back, we can also see that Jennie’s constant surveillance is necessary because of John’s constant absence. Even on the night before they are to vacate their rented home, John is away—he has, the narrator tells us, stayed “in town,” and won’t return until the day of their departure. While the point is subtle, it seems to me significant—for all of his solicitude, John is an absent husband. While John’s betrayal of his wife may be implied, Matthew’s is made explicit in “To Room Nineteen.” His confession to an affair represents the moment when Susan first realizes that a wife and mother can be replaced. At this point, Lessing’s story pivots, becoming a mirror-image of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Up to this moment, the narrator’s point of view has been from the outside looking in, describing Matthew and Susan and the situation in which they find themselves. But from this point on, when we see how casually one woman can be replaced by another, the story becomes Susan’s. We see events from her perspective. We share her confusion and suffering. “In that case,” the narrator asks us, carefully focusing our attention, “why did Susan feel (though luckily not for longer than a few seconds at a time) as if life had become a desert, and that nothing mattered, and that her children were not her own.” These feelings may at first last just a few seconds at a time, but they soon come to consume her. She is “more and more often threatened by emptiness.” Here we might pause for a moment and turn once again to Florence Nightingale, who rejected




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marriage as a plausible occupation for women. “Marriage is the only chance (and it is but a chance) offered to women for escape,” she writes in “Cassandra.” Women will find nothing in marriage but sacrifice—indeed, a “woman must annihilate herself ” in marriage, Nightingale concludes. A wife must dedicate herself completely “to the vocation of her husband; she fills up and performs the subordinate parts in it.” A man “gains everything by marriage”—a woman, nothing. “The intercourse of man and woman—how frivolous, how unworthy it is!” she writes. “Can we call that the true vocation of woman—her high career? Look round at the marriages which you know. The true marriage—that noble union, by which a man and woman become together the one perfect being—probably does not exist at present upon earth.” As if to illustrate Nightingale’s point, Susan Rawlings is forced to confront the emptiness of married life. She realizes that her own soul is not really hers: “I signed myself over, so to speak, to other people. To the children. Not for one moment in twelve years have I been alone, had time to myself. So now I have to learn to be myself again. That’s all.” In the twelve years of her marriage, the “essential Susan” has been “in abeyance, as if she were in cold storage.” “What, then, was this essential Susan?” the narrator asks, and then supplies the answer: “She did not know.” Susan clings to the belief that she will be able to recover the “essential Susan” when her youngest children, her twins, begin attending school. The “seven blissful hours of freedom” she will have while all four of her children are out of the house will restore her to herself, she imagines. But the reality, she discovers, is that these seven hours become just one more stretch of emptiness that she cannot fill. Instead of being able to find herself again, she loses herself completely, frantically filling up her “free” time with routine household chores, cleaning, cooking, and sewing. These are the very chores her housekeeper, Mrs. Parkes, has been hired to perform. Here is another indication of how meaningless her role as wife and mother is. Although she has given up her “own life” to dedicate herself to her husband and children, she has a housekeeper whose job it is to perform the mundane tasks that are supposed to “fill” Susan’s life. Nevertheless, she continues doing most of them even as she resents their claim upon her. As the story unfolds, Susan begins gradually to disconnect from her roles as wife and mother, but she is still unable to find the peace and quiet she needs. No matter where she goes, she is always interrupted, at someone’s disposal; “she was never, not for a moment of her day, alone. If she was in a room, [her children] would be in the next room, or waiting for her to do something for them. . . .” If she leaves the house, seeking quiet in the garden, Mrs. Parkes follows her out, wanting directions or instructions. “Yes,


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this was what was wrong with her,” Susan decides, “she needed, when she was alone, to be really alone, with no one near. She could not endure the knowledge that in ten minutes or in half an hour Mrs. Parkes would call up the stairs: ‘Mrs. Rawlings, there’s no silver polish. Madam, we’re out of flour.’” Susan begins looking for a room of her own, at first trying to find seclusion in her bedroom, but that is not enough, so she retreats to an unused room “at the top of the house.” Although Susan tries to reason with herself, tries to tell herself that her “state” is irrational, she becomes one more madwoman in an attic. Susan’s efforts to find solitude in a room of her own are defeated by a kind of conspiracy between her husband, children, and housekeeper. Her need for quiet and solitude are treated as a kind of childish whim, a family joke, and Matthew and the children treat Susan’s room as if it is a child’s room. Just as every child seeking privacy posts a “keep out” sign on his or her bedroom door, Susan’s children create a “PRIVATE! DO NOT DISTURB” sign for her room, a sign they create, “drawn in coloured chalks.” Her private space is christened as “Mother’s Room,” once more defining her not as an individual, as Susan, but erasing her identity. She is “Mother.” Although she has a room, it is not really a room of her own—from her “mother’s” room, Susan can overhear her husband, children, and housekeeper whispering about her as if she were an unreasonable child who needs to be humored. They “discuss” her room, “tiptoeing” around “like criminal conspirators.” Susan feels “even more caged there than in her bedroom.” The room does not serve her purposes at all—it serves the children’s ends, becoming “a valuable lesson” for them in “respect[ing] . . . other people’s rights,” and eventually she uses the room only to reinforce this lesson. The room isn’t a place where she can write a great novel or even scribble in a journal—the only work she does in the room is the family’s mending, though even this domestic task is interrupted by her children and Mrs. Parkes, who are free to come “in and out.” Although Susan herself “howled with impatience, with rage” on the inside, she smiles on the outside. The room becomes “a joke” between her and her husband. But she cannot get over her need not just for “a room or a place, anywhere, where she could go and sit, by herself,” but for a place where no one at all knows where she is. To this end, Susan introduces another woman into her home, an au pair, Sophie Traub. To show how easily replaced one woman is by another, Susan’s Mother’s Room is transformed into Sophie’s bedroom. Sophie understands her surrogacy perfectly: “You want some person to play mistress of the house sometimes, not so?” “Yes, that is just so,” Susan responds. Sophie easily joins the household. Susan quickly finds that Sophie and Mrs. Parkes are comfortable “talking and laughing”




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together in the kitchen, and Susan’s children quickly accept Sophie as a mother-figure, turning to her for physical comfort and for their emotional needs. In one memorable scene, Susan observes Mrs. Parkes, in the kitchen, wearing one of her own aprons, and Sophie, caring for Susan’s youngest child, who is ill. Just as Susan is about to enter the kitchen to comfort her sick child, Sophie picks up the little girl and cuddles her. As for Matthew, who had originally resisted the idea of hiring an au pair, he quickly finds Sophie “nice to have around the house.” Eventually, although Susan finds that she can still “play her part as mother and wife” when she needs to, she realizes that she has been replaced. Although Lessing’s story is published more than seventy years after Gilman’s, and although the second wave of the feminist movement is just about to break, Susan’s situation is not all that different than the unnamed narrator’s in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Susan is not given an immediate diagnosis of hysteria and subjected to a rest cure, but she knows that if she were to share her emotions with her husband, his first reaction would be to suggest that she was sick. “Perhaps you should see a doctor?” she imagines him asking. She must be sick—that would be the only way for him to explain his wife’s behavior. Somewhat later, unable to make Matthew understand what she is feeling, she winds up taking the easy way out, telling him, “I don’t feel well.” He is relieved. He can diagnose and prescribe for her, suggesting that all she really needs is the twentieth-century equivalent of a “rest cure,” a holiday. Later still, as the story nears its end, Matthew asks if she is really feeling well. Susan ultimately realizes that her husband has “diagnosed” her. And although Susan is not so obviously infantilized by her husband in this mid-twentieth-century story, we do see something of Matthew’s tendency to treat his wife as less than a fully grown woman, not only in his attitude to the “Mother’s Room,” with its “keep out” sign posted on the door and his complicity with his children in making Susan’s need for solitude into a kind of family joke, but also in the decision that she is “unreasonable” and that, like a child, she is “someone . . . that he had to manage.” The madness that overtakes the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” ultimately claims Susan Rawlings as well. Gilman’s narrator is forced into a room of her own, one that she does not voluntarily occupy, and her disintegration is revealed through her journal. Her efforts to preserve her sanity by writing, despite pressures to abandon it, are insufficient; instead she unwittingly records her descent into madness. Susan Rawlings, by contrast, observes her own incipient madness—for her, the way to save herself is by finding a room of her own, a place where she hopes to find the “real” Susan, the woman she was before she married and had children. At the beginning


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of “To Room Nineteen,” both Matthew and Susan are aware of the dangers that marriage and family pose for women. The narrator tells us that, every night “in the big married bed in the big married bedroom,” Matthew told his wife about his day—“what he had done, and whom he had met”—and she told him about hers, which is, the narrator parenthetically adds, “(not as interesting, but that was not her fault).” The narrator implies that, rather than regarding this as an equal exchange, Matthew merely tolerates his wife’s account of her day: “both knew of the hidden resentments and deprivations of the woman who has lived her own life—and above all, has earned her own living—and is now dependent on a husband for outside interests and money.” But their unspoken agreement is broken with Matthew’s infidelity. The first inkling of Susan’s struggle to maintain her sanity comes in her changed relationship with the perfect garden of their perfect suburban home. Once the “paradise” of her perfect life begins to unravel, she becomes more convinced that “something was waiting for her there that she did not wish to confront.” She is particularly fearful of the garden, and she comes to feel “as if an enemy was in the garden with her.” She isn’t quite sure of what the “enemy” is—“irritation, restlessness, emptiness, whatever it was.” Soon she is convinced that the enemy is a demon and that she is barely “keeping him off.” She even begins to pray: “One day she found herself kneeling by her bed and praying: ‘Dear God, keep it away from me, keep him away from me.’ She meant the devil, for she now thought of it, not caring if she was irrational, as some sort of demon.” One day she finally sees him, “sitting on the white stone bench” in the garden, poking and prodding “some kind of snakelike creature.” Once she has finally seen the devil (and the serpent) in her garden, she actually feels better. “Right, then, so I’ve seen him with my own eyes, so I’m not crazy after all,” she says to herself, “there is a danger because I’ve seen him. He is lurking in the garden and sometimes even in the house, and he wants to get into me and to take me over.” This aspect of Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen” bears an uncanny similarity to Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” As we have seen, the unnamed wife-narrator is at first drawn to the beautiful gardens of the secluded home where she is to be “cured” with solitude and rest. It is a “delicious garden,” as she first describes it, adding, “I never saw such a garden—large and shady, full of box-bordered paths, and lined with long grape-covered arbors with seats under them.” Indeed, the house and garden make her “think of English places you read about.” In her second entry, after two weeks in the rental house, the narrator writes that she loves looking at the garden from the window of her upstairs room, “those mysteriously deepshaded arbors,




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the riotous old-fashioned flowers, and bushes and gnarly trees.” She imagines that she sees people walking in the arbors of the garden and along a “beautiful shaded lane” that runs through it from the house down to a little wharf on the estate’s grounds. But as the story nears its end, the narrator comes to believe that the woman behind the wallpaper “gets out in the daytime”—“It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.” As she looks out her window, the narrator sees the woman on the path in the garden, “creeping along, and when a carriage comes she hides under the blackberry vines.” As the story reaches its end, the narrator sees countless “creeping women” outside in the garden. For the narrator, as for Susan Rawlings, the garden becomes the site where her inner struggles are made manifest. As Susan begins to fear what is waiting for her in the garden, she also becomes “possessed with resentment” that the freedom she expected to find when her children were all in school eludes her. She knows that she is consumed by resentment: “It was poisoning her,” she realizes. She is able to stand outside herself and see what is happening—“She looked at this emotion and thought it was absurd. Yet she felt it.” She begins to feel as much a prisoner as Gilman’s unnamed narrator, trapped in the room with yellow wallpaper: “She was a prisoner. (She looked at this thought too, and it was no good telling herself it was a ridiculous one.)” Ridiculous or not, she feels as if she were “living out a prison sentence.” And she begins to experience her life from a changed perspective, to stand apart from her life as wife and mother. While she can see what is happening, she cannot come to terms with it. She recognizes that she is “a different person. I’m simply not myself. I don’t understand it.” Although her encounter with the demon led her to believe that she was “not crazy after all,” that sense of her own sanity is quickly dispersed, replaced with an altogether different one: “my four children and my husband are driving me insane.” She grows more convinced: “she knew quite well she was mad. Yes, she was mad.” Brushing her hair before bed one night, she looks into the mirror and realizes “that’s the reflection of a madwoman.” As she plots her escape from her perfect home in the suburbs, her plans are made “with the cunning of a madwoman.” Like the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” she finds herself no longer sleeping securely next to her husband; instead, “she lay beside him, feeling frozen, a stranger. She felt as if Susan had been spirited away.” She rents a hotel room in London where she can just sit, empty her mind, and be alone. Five days a week, she travels to Paddington Station, goes to a nearby, seedy hotel, and rents a room for a few hours, Number 19. There she does “nothing at all”: she sits in a chair, and when it “had rested her,” she looks out the window, “treasuring her anonymity.” In Number 19, “[s]he was


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no longer Susan Rawlings, mother of four, wife of Matthew, employer of Mrs. Parkes and of Sophie Traub, with these and those relations with friends, school-teachers, tradesmen. She was no longer the mistress of the big white house and garden, owning clothes suitable for this and that activity or occasion.” There she was alone, “and she had no past and no future.” There, and there alone, she finds the essential Susan, the woman she used to be, and she realizes that “I’m just the same. . . . Yes, here I am, and if I never saw any of my family again, here I would still be . . . how very strange that is!” When she returns home each evening, she knows she will once more have to answer to “Mummy, Mother, Susan, Mrs. Rawlings,” but “she, Susan, or the being who answered so readily and improbably to the name of Susan, was not there. . . .” The real Susan remained behind in Number 19. Until she loses that room of her own. At first Matthew responds to his wife’s physical and emotional absence by his own kind of withdrawal, entering into another affair, this time not with a young girl but with a woman his wife knows. But eventually he has a detective follow Susan to find where she has been going during the week. Once Matthew has “searched her out,” invading and destroying her sanctuary, however grim, Susan can no longer find herself in Number 19—“the peace of the room had gone.” Without that room, she realizes that Susan—the essential Susan—no longer exists. And so she returns to Number 19 for one last time. She considers leaving behind a suicide note, but in the end she decides “not to trouble about it, simply not to think about the living.” She will not be missed—she knows her husband will quickly marry either the woman he is having an affair with or Sophie, “who was already the mother of [her] children.” (Women are, after all, interchangeable.) But Susan has found a way to escape—there, in the room that used to be her own, she turns on the gas, lies down on the bed, and commits suicide. *

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Two wives and mothers, two rooms. Two “escapes,” one through madness, the other through madness and suicide. Is it possible for a woman to avoid becoming a madwoman in an attic? Or, rather, is it possible for a wife and a mother to escape this fate? Even if she has a room of her own, a woman is still at risk. Confined to a room with yellow wallpaper, the wife and mother in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1895 short story goes mad. Deprived of her last refuge in Room Nineteen, the wife and mother in Doris Lessing’s 1963 short story commits suicide. As both stories indicate, it is difficult to kill the angel in the house. In January of 1931, just two years after A Room of One’s Own was published, Virginia Woolf addressed another group of women, this time not on




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the subject of women and fiction and on the necessity of a woman having a private, inviolable sanctuary, but under the title “Professions for Women.” Addressing the Women’s Service League, Woolf described her own deadly battle with the “angel in the house.” Since the women to whom she spoke were of a “younger and happier generation” and may not have heard of this terrible “phantom,” Woolf describes her; the angel is “intensely sympathetic,” “immensely charming,” and “utterly unselfish.” She is self-sacrificing, deferring always to “the minds and wishes of others.” This angel haunts Woolf: “When I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room.” “Be sympathetic,” she whispers to Woolf, “be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure.” Woolf has a room of her own—and, she has “a certain sum of money— shall we say five hundred pounds a year?” Having a space of her own and her own means of support allow her to do the unthinkable—she kills the angel in the house. Or, rather, she tries. It’s not quite clear whether she succeeds. “I turned upon her and caught her by the throat,” Woolf says. “I did my best to kill her.” This is an act of self-defense, for, Woolf says, “Had I not killed her she would have killed me.” It was a lengthy battle; when Woolf “felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo” on her page, she “took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard.” But has she really killed her? “It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality,” Woolf writes. “She was always creeping back when I thought I had dispatched her.” Woolf “flatters” herself that she had “killed her in the end,” but that doesn’t mean that the angel in the house is forever dead. As Woolf herself admits, killing—or trying to kill—the angel in the house “was an experience that was bound to befall all women writers at the time.” And if it was “part of the occupation of a woman writer,” it was surely a part of what she wrote. The unfortunate young wife in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” could not kill the angel in her house without losing her mind, and although the wife and mother in Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen” is living at the very dawn of the second-wave feminist movement, the situation is no better for Susan Rawlings. She loses the battle too.


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Chapter 7 Notes: Suggestions for Further Reading The title of this chapter, “Madwomen in the Attic,” pays tribute to the groundbreaking work of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, whose 1979 The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century


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Literary Imagination (2nd ed., with a new introduction by Gilbert and Gubar, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, Yale Nota Bene, 2000) changed forever the field of literary studies. In their reading of the great novels written by Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, and George Eliot, to name only the most familiar examples, Gilbert and Gubar argued, “by projecting their rebellious impulses not into their heroines but into mad or monstrous women (who are suitably punished in the course of the novel or poem), female authors dramatize their own self-division, their desire both to accept the strictures of patriarchal society and to reject them. . . . [T]he madwoman in literature by women is not merely, as she might be in male literature, an antagonist or foil to the heroine. Rather, she is usually in some sense the author’s double, an image of her own anxiety and rage” (78). The most memorable of these madwomen is Jane Eyre’s Bertha Mason Rochester—locked away in the attic in a room of her own. The women who are the principal characters in both Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s and Doris Lessing’s short stories find themselves occupying solitary upstairs rooms—and they both are slowly going mad. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is widely available online, but in different versions. The most significant variation is in the section divisions of the story itself. In their textual analysis of Gilman’s short story, Daphne Ryan Allen, Jennifer Palais, and Kristen Tracy carefully examine the publishing history of “The Yellow Wallpaper” and argue convincingly, on the basis of Gilman’s own manuscript, that there should be twelve sections in the story (“‘But One Expects That’: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and the Shifting Light of Scholarship,” PMLA 111, no. 1 [1996]: 52–65). Accordingly, I recommend the e-text version of Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” that is available at the University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/ toccer-new2?id=GilYell.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/ modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=all, accessed 12 December 2010. Gilman’s brief essay, “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’” written and published in the October 1913 issue of her Forerunner magazine, is appended to the text of the story at this site. The short story is also included in the affordable Signet Classics edition I noted in Chapter 5, Herland and Selected Stories, edited by Barbara H. Solomon (New York: New American Library, Signet Classics, 1992), as well as in other readily available Gilman anthologies. Solomon’s introduction includes a description of Gilman’s illness and treatment by the American physician Silas Weir Mitchell. Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen” was originally published in A Man and a Woman (1963); the story is also included in her 1978 collection, To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories, volume 1 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978).




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Used copies of this 1978 collection are widely available online, but Flamingo Modern Classics has reprinted the entire collection (2002), and new copies of this reprinted Lessing anthology are very affordable. The story is also widely anthologized in collections like The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, edited by Richard Bausch and R. V. Cassill (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), now in its seventh edition. The complete text of Coventry Patmore’s narrative poem, “The Angel in the House,” is available online at Project Gutenberg: http://www. gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/anghs10.txt, accessed 12 December 2010. For an excellent survey of women’s complicated relationship to medicine and doctors, see Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English’s 1978 For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women, revised and republished, with a new foreword and afterward, in 2005 (New York: Random House, Anchor Books). Particularly important is Chapter 4, “The Sexual Politics of Sickness,” which discusses the nineteenth-century view of women and illness and, specifically, the rest cure, as devised by Silas Weir Mitchell. Ehrenreich and English include references to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s own diagnosis and to “The Yellow Wallpaper” in this chapter. Also extremely useful, particularly for its linking of hysteria not only to class but to race, see Laura Briggs, “The Race of Hysteria: ‘Overcivilization’ and the ‘Savage’ Woman in Late Nineteenth-Century Obstetrics and Gynecology,” American Quarterly 52, no. 2 (2000): 246–73. Conventionally dated to 1852, Florence Nightingale’s “Cassandra” was privately published in 1860, in the second volume of her Suggestions for Thought to Searchers after Religious Truth. It was not widely available until 1928, when it appeared as an appendix to Ray Strachey’s The Cause: The History of the British Women’s Movement. Nightingale’s essay is now available in Myra Stark’s Cassandra, an Essay by Florence Nightingale (New York: The Feminist Press, 1979). The text is also available in Cassandra and Suggestions for Thought by Florence Nightingale, edited by Mary Poovey (New York: New York University Press, 1993). The 1936 film starring Kay Francis as Florence Nightingale, The White Angel, is not currently available on video or DVD, but you can occasionally catch it on Turner Classic Movies. Virginia Woolf ’s “Professions for Women” was read aloud to the Women’s Service League in 1931 and published in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942). The essay is available online through eBooks@ Adelaide: http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91d/chapter27. html, accessed 12 December 2010.


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Brave New Worlds: Sexual Slavery in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Slavenka Drakulic˙’s S. A Novel about the Balkans

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irst in Arcangela Tarabotti’s Paternal Tyranny and then again in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” we encountered a critical difference when it comes to a woman having a room of her own. If she is forced into this space, whether it is an entire “women’s world,” like a convent, or just a single room, like a nursery with yellow wallpaper, then it is a hell on earth, a place where a woman’s dream of freedom turns into a nightmare. In this chapter, we will examine two versions of women’s dreamworlds gone horribly wrong. In the first, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a woman finds herself confined to a single, bare room at the top of the stairs; she is a “prisoner,” although she is supposed to believe that she is one of the lucky ones. “Where I am is not a prison but a privilege,” she is told. In Slavenka Drakulic˙’s S. A Novel about the Balkans, a woman is locked into a special “women’s room” inside a prison camp for women and children. She too is one of the “lucky” ones—she lives through her ordeal. I first read The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, shortly after it was published, but I never put it on a syllabus, and although a fair number of students in recent years have chosen to work with Atwood’s novel for group projects, I must be honest and admit that I never reread the book myself. It wasn’t until I started work on this project that I forced myself to read The Handmaid’s Tale for a second time. As for Drakulic˙’s S. A Novel about the Balkans? Several years ago, a friend and colleague to whom I had mentioned my plans for Reading Women’s Worlds said I should definitely consider Drakulic˙’s book. After we finished our conversation, I immediately went online to order S. I could tell from the description posted on Amazon that my colleague was right—the


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book was perfect for my study of women’s worlds. And there were a slew of five-star reader reviews. But, in spite of my colleague’s recommendation and, later, my own students’ testimony to the power of Drakulic˙’s novel, I put off buying it. I didn’t want it on my shelf. To be absolutely honest, I didn’t even want the book in my room, not in my office on campus, where I spend so many hours, and certainly not here at home, where I am working now. It is still tempting for me to avoid writing about the brave new women’s worlds in The Handmaid’s Tale and S. Struggling with a project that was growing larger by the day—and with a manuscript that was already far longer than I could send to my editor—I was recently complaining to my sister about the prospect of writing this chapter. When she heard my quick summary of The Handmaid’s Tale and S. A Novel about the Balkans, she said they sounded too depressing. Her solution to both my problems was just to cut this chapter. Who needs it, she asked me. For a moment, I wanted to believe she was right. Who needs it? But I knew she was wrong. We all need it. *

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In describing The Handmaid’s Tale, first published in 1985, Atwood consistently resists calling it “science fiction.” For Atwood, “science fiction” is a genre for “books with things in them that we can’t yet do, such as going through a wormhole in space to another universe.” Atwood prefers the term “speculative fiction,” which “means a work that employs the means already to hand, such as DNA identification and credit cards, and that takes place on Planet Earth.” Or, as she says in a recent interview in Wired magazine, “Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see.” This is a crucial distinction, for the world we see in The Handmaid’s Tale is not filled with Klingons, cyborgs, or cylons. It is a world that, in Atwood’s words, “we could actually do.” In fact, it is not a world that we could do, it is a world that, as Drakulic˙’s novel illustrates, we do do. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the narrator’s first-person account of her life covers a few months, from spring to late summer. If we puzzle out the time cues the narrator embeds in her narrative, the novel seems to be set in 1992 or 1993. In Slavenka Drakulic˙’s S., there is no puzzle to be solved about when the novel takes place. Each chapter—each horrible abuse S. suffers— is clearly dated. Her suffering takes place between spring and fall of 1992. Most eerily, then, Atwood’s 1985 “speculative” novel imagines a situation that is all too real in Drakulic˙’s; the “future” of The Handmaid’s Tale is the historical reality of S. A Novel about the Balkans. Read together, these novels don’t simply intersect. Rather, they are two versions of the same story. Fiction and “fiction” are hard to distinguish.


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Both novels tell the stories of women who have lost their identity and their autonomy during wartime. While each of the books focuses on the experiences of a single woman, these individual women are not unique— they are representative of what womankind has been reduced to. They are Everywoman. The narrator in The Handmaid’s Tale is no longer an individual with her own hopes and dreams. She offers us only one brief physical description of herself, halfway through the novel, and even then she is utterly nondescript: “I am thirty-three years old. I have brown hair. I stand five seven without shoes.” We cannot picture her in our mind—she can hardly picture herself. “I have trouble remembering what I used to look like,” she says. And our narrator has no name. She is called “Offred,” a patronymic. She belongs to Fred, she is “of ” Fred, she is Fred’s. Although she remembers the name she bore before she became Fred’s property, she suppresses it: “I must forget about my secret name and all ways back.” Indeed, she seems to recall Virginia Woolf ’s desperate search for books that are not there when she writes, “I too am a missing person.” In S., the narrator is also a missing person; she refers to herself only by her initial. She is just a letter, nothing more. She is twenty-nine years old, and, like Offred, she presents herself as utterly nondescript. She tells us at the very outset of the novel that her face is “a clear, unmarked, ordinary face.” She has smooth skin and brown eyes. As one woman among hundreds of imprisoned women, she realizes that each one of them has “ceased to be a person.” Instead of individuals, “they have been reduced to a collection of similar beings of the female gender. . . .” At the end of the novel, now living in Stockholm, S. asks her psychologist whether she can change her name. “Do you think that is possible?” the psychologist asks. In answer to that question, she remains S. Although Offred claims she will someday reclaim her name, she never does—in the end, just as S. does not change her name, Offred remains Offred. Stripped of their names and identities, Offred and S. have been reduced to their bodies, which are no longer their own. Their bodies belong to men. In The Handmaid’s Tale, during a time when most women are sterile, our narrator has a viable uterus. She is a “two-legged womb,” and her body has been claimed as a critical national resource—she is a Handmaid, a woman whose sole purpose is to produce a child for a childless Wife. At her current “posting,” Offred is imprisoned in a room at the top of the stairs, a room where she sits night after night and waits to be called downstairs for the highly ritualized monthly Ceremony, when the man to whom she now belongs will try to impregnate her. Although she is the only occupant of the upstairs room, she refuses to call it a room of her own. It is “not my room,” she insists, “I refuse to say my.” In S., our narrator is also imprisoned,


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held along with eight others in a “women’s room,” a room where they wait night after night to be “chosen” by soldiers who will rape them; S. calls this room “a storehouse,” a room “where female bodies were stored for the use of men.” Their bodies now belong “to somebody else—to the army, to the leader, to the nation.” For the soldiers in this camp, who control the bodies of the women interned there, impregnating women is just one more weapon of war. Like Offred and the other Handmaids, S. and the women in the women’s room “cannot hide from the men at whose disposal they lie. Here women no longer have the right to say no.” When she becomes pregnant, S. describes herself as “an enormous receptacle whose sole purpose of existence was to feed the voracious cluster of cells.” Although The Handmaid’s Tale is set against a background of war, we hear few of the specifics. The United States has become the Republic of Gilead— Offred alludes briefly to the “catastrophe” of the mid 1980s when the president was assassinated and the Congress was eliminated. This was a violent military coup, a terrorist attack perpetrated by a shadowy Christian fundamentalist group calling itself the “Sons of Jacob,” although, as Offred notes, these homegrown rebels “blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time.” The army declared a state of emergency and suspended the Constitution. Newspapers were censored, and freedom of movement was restricted—roadblocks were set up and passes were required to travel. But no one objected: “Everyone approved . . . since it was obvious you couldn’t be too careful.” Although new elections were promised, they never materialized. The transition from democratic republic to militant fundamentalist theocracy was quickly and ruthlessly effected—Offred asks herself how it happened, but the answer is clear enough. Although she says everyone was “stunned” at the turn of events, there were no protests and no riots: “People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction.” Offred’s own inaction reflected the larger apathy; for the next few years after the President’s Day Massacre, she and her husband followed their usual routine, getting up in the morning, going to work, coming home. They had a child together, a daughter. Although there were news stories reporting on the terrible changes underway—women “bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with, as they used to say”—these were stories “about other women.” “We lived, as usual by ignoring. . . . We lived in the gaps between the stories,” Offred says. She sees the final “catastrophe,” the sudden reordering of society along Old Testament principles, only in personal terms— she lost her job and her bank account, her marriage was dissolved, she was arrested, and her five-year-old child was “confiscated” by the state and reassigned to a new, “morally fit” couple. Three years have passed since the traumatic day she became a prisoner of war, but that war continues. The


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threats to Gilead are both everywhere and nowhere. “This is the heart of Gilead,” Offred tells us, “where the war cannot intrude except on television. Where the edges are we aren’t sure, they vary, according to the attacks and counterattacks; but this is the center, where nothing moves.” About this never-ending war Offred observes, “First, the front lines. They are not lines, really: the war seems to be going on in many places at once.” At one point she hears from another Handmaid that the war “is going well.” Later she catches a few brief moments of a television newscast and hears that army has captured “a pocket” of Baptist guerilla fighters in the Appalachian Mountains. Rebels also include Catholics and “the heretical sect of Quakers.” Offred craves these glimpses of the world outside her room, but she is skeptical about what she hears—“who knows if any of it is true? It could be old clips, it could be faked. But I watch it anyway, hoping to be able to read beneath it.” Although the US title of Slavenka Drakulic˙’s S. locates the action in a specific geographical place—the subtitle is A Novel about the Balkans—the novel is as vague about the particulars of its wartime setting as The Handmaid’s Tale is about the endless war in the Republic of Gilead. The novel begins in the “village of B.,” someplace in Bosnia, when S. sees soldiers entering the village. We don’t know why, nor does S. tell us. In fact, S. reacts with the same kind of apathy that Offred demonstrates—it isn’t until she sees armed men enter the village that S. recognizes any danger. “It is only then that it occurs to her that she could have fled,” she says. She could have left when she first heard about gunfire in Sarajevo. “Why had she stayed in the village,” she asks. “Why had she waited, what had she been hoping for?” But even while the armed soldiers approach, she waits. When the door of her apartment is finally kicked in by a young man, when she realizes that “there are no more obstacles standing between her and war,” she still does not react. Instead, she offers the man a cup of coffee. We know that the villagers are Bosnian, and we learn that the armed men are Serbian, but we are offered no specific details about the tensions in the region following the breakup of Yugoslavia or about the campaign of ethnic cleansing in eastern Bosnia. We learn only that, after the soldiers enter the town of B., the villagers are herded into a gym, where the women and children are separated from the men, who are led away and shot. “No one asks any questions,” S. tells us. “No one resists. Why not? It is as if they are all in a state of numbness. Is it because of the stuffy air, because of the mugginess?” She says that she is shocked by the village women’s “submissiveness” and “their willingness to obey orders without question,” yet she is as passive and mute as the rest. After their fathers, husbands, and sons are killed, the women are put on a bus and transported to a prison


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camp. During the months she is there, first in the general camp and then in the “women’s room,” S. hears little about the war. Although the women are desperate for news of their loved ones, they hear only rumors, scraps of information passed from one woman to another that may or may not be true. We will not learn about the history of the Bosnian War by reading Drakulic˙’s novel. But we learn all we need to know by witnessing the horrors of war suffered by S. As the struggle in Gilead is reduced to the experiences of Offred, the Bosnian War is distilled into the life of S. What is most immediately arresting about the way these novels unfold is the way Atwood and Drakulic˙ play with time. Each novel spans a relatively brief few months and seems at first to develop chronologically. In the beginning of The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred tells us that the garden is filled with spring blooms—the daffodils are fading, their flowers replaced by showy red tulips. It is May. As the novel proceeds, the tulips are replaced by irises and bleeding hearts. Halfway through the novel we learn that it is summer, with Offred noting that “strawberries are in season.” Finally, in the last few pages of the novel, we learn that it is almost autumn. “Today there are different flowers,” Offred says. They are the flowers of late summer, “daisies, black-eyed Susans, starting us on the long downward slope to fall.” These time cues are easy to miss, but they are there, along with Offred’s references to spring rains, summer heat, the Fourth of July and Labor Day. The book is divided into sections, too, which also seem to impose a recognizable chronology on the story: there are fifteen numbered parts, in which “Night” alternates with daytime activities like “Shopping” and daytime locations that seem familiar, like “Household.” In each of the “Night” sections, Offred is alone in her empty room at the top of the stairs (this pattern is broken just once when, instead of “Night,” the section is entitled “Nap”). But if we examine the titles of the alternating sections, Offred’s experiences seem less and less familiar as the novel progresses. What kind of activity is “Salvaging”? And where is “Jezebel’s”? We move from the familiar to the unfamiliar as the novel unfolds and we travel more deeply into the brave new world of Gilead. If we hold fast to the organization suggested by this table of contents, The Handmaid’s Tale seems, then, to focus on the events of seven days and nights over the course of the few months spanned by the novel. But once we begin reading, we can see that the simple chronology is not so simple after all. The story jumps back and forth in time, as Offred remembers her past—these memories are of her mother, of her childhood, of her college life and friends, of her affair with the already-married Luke, of his divorce and their marriage, and of her daughter (whose name we never learn). There are also memories of the more recent past—of her “retraining” as a


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Handmaid, of events she has experienced in the three years since, of her previous “posting” in another household. As we read, we experience a kind of vertigo, a dizzy slipping between the present and the past, before and after. It’s not so much where we are that is confusing, it’s when we are, as we experience Offred’s stream-of-conscious narration, her mind moving constantly backward and forward as something she is experiencing triggers a memory of the past. Because Offred’s story is related in the first person and in the present tense, we seem to experience the events she relates along with her. We are there, with her, in her empty room during the long nights when she can’t sleep. We are with her in bed during the monthly Ceremony as she lies between the legs of the Commander’s Wife with the Commander on top of her. But as we read, we slowly become aware of the constructed nature of Offred’s story. We are not, after all, experiencing these events as they happen to her. What we have, instead, is an approximation, an account that may—or may not—correspond to what really happened. “I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling,” Offred says. “I need to believe it. I must believe it.” Why is it so important to her? Because if it is a story, then she is its author—“If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it.” As she quickly notes, however, this “isn’t a story.” Then, just as quickly, it is: “It’s a story I’m telling, in my head, as I go along.” “But,” she adds, “if it’s a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don’t tell a story only to yourself. There’s always someone else.” And another twist: “Even when there is no one.” At this point, reeling from the narrator’s contradictions, we encounter something new. The narrator suggests that she is writing a letter, addressed to us: “Dear You, I’ll say. Just you, without a name.” Yet the letter she addresses to us is not a letter she expects will ever be delivered: “I’ll pretend you can hear me. But it’s no good, because I know you can’t.” But I can hear you, we want to shout, breaking through the words on the page to the author of those words. We can hear her—it is Offred who cannot hear us. Later Offred stops midway through one story and offers us another, saying, “I am too tired to go on with this story. I’m too tired to think about where I am. Here is a different story, a better one.” A few pages on, she reveals that the story she is telling us “is a reconstruction. All of it is a reconstruction. It’s a reconstruction now, in my head . . . rehearsing what I should or shouldn’t have said, what I should or shouldn’t have done, how I should have played it. If I ever get out of here—.” At this very moment, offering us a reason to hope that she has, after all, escaped, she reminds us of her narrative as fabrication: “When I get out of here, if I’m ever able to set this down, in any form, even


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in the form of one voice to another, it will be a reconstruction then too, at yet another remove.” A few pages later, she tells us she imagines killing the man whose Handmaid she is, imagines “the blood coming out of him, hot as soup, sexual, over my hands.” Then she stops. “In fact I don’t think about anything of the kind,” she says. “I put it in only afterwards. Maybe I should have thought about that, at the time, but I didn’t. As I said, this is a reconstruction.” She rewrites—or retells—the scene, then tells us that this revision “is a reconstruction, too.” “I don’t want to be telling this story,” she tells us on another occasion. And on another, “Here is what I’d like to tell.” In XIII, a “Night” section almost at the end of her story, as she is relating events to us, she suddenly stops and tells us, “I made that up. It didn’t happen that way. Here is what happened.” But after telling us what really happened, she once more disrupts her narrative and says, “It didn’t happen that way either. I’m not sure how it happened; not exactly. All I can hope for is a reconstruction. . . .” As if aware of the effect of all of this on her reader, she later apologizes. “I wish this story were different,” she says, “I wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better light.” And, she adds, “I’m sorry there is so much pain in this story. I’m sorry it’s in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force.” She seems to suggest that the story she is telling is something she cannot control. In her words, “there is nothing I can do to change it.” And, “I don’t want to be telling this story.” In fact, the entire narrative of The Handmaid’s Tale takes on a totally unexpected aspect just when we think it’s over. Against all odds, Offred may be liberated—on the last few pages her story abruptly ends when she is escorted to a waiting vehicle. Is she being arrested or escaping? Even she does not know: “Whether this is my end or a new beginning I have no way of knowing,” she says. She remains curiously, frustratingly apathetic: “I have given myself over into the hands of strangers, because it can’t be helped.” We are ultimately left with uncertainty: “And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light.” Unsettled—and maybe a bit frustrated—by this inconclusive conclusion, we turn to the “Historical Notes” that follow. We expect these notes will include Atwood’s comments about her novel or that they are reflections appended by an editor—just what we find at the end of Drakulic˙’s S., interestingly, where we find Michael Ignatieff ’s “Introduction to S. A Novel about the Balkans” and Drakulic˙’s own commentary on S., recorded in an interview. But the “historical” notes at the end of Atwood’s novel are something altogether different. What follows Offred’s unfinished story is a “partial transcript of the proceedings of the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies,” dated to


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June 2195. The transcript records the speech of a keynote address by Professor James Darcy Pieixoto—in which we discover that we have not read an unmediated account of Offred’s experiences as a Handmaid. Rather, the account we have just read, which we thought was the work of Offred, is another reconstruction. “Her” story has not just been transmitted through male hands, it is the recreation of two male scholars—it has been transcribed, edited, annotated, and published by Pieixoto and his Cambridge colleague, Professor Knotly Wade, who is responsible for the naming of Offred’s story. He has titled it The Handmaid’s Tale, “in homage,” we learn, “to the great Geoffrey Chaucer.” What is the effect of this narrative frame on Offred’s account of the horrors of life in Gilead? It not only distances us from her story, it undermines our faith in it—if it is just like one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, it is fiction and the “person” who created it is also a fiction, a female character created by a male author. And somehow we are, today, reading a transcript of a speech to be delivered more than two hundred years in the future. The character of Offred and the truthfulness of her story are further reduced in this narrative frame by the overt misogyny of Pieixoto, who jokes about the pun in Wade’s title (“I am sure all puns were intentional, particularly that having to do with the archaic vulgar signification of the word tail; that being, to some extent, the bone, as it were, of contention in that phase of Gileadean society of which our saga treats. [Laughter, applause.]),” who undercuts the credibility of the tale’s supposed author (“This latter appears to have been a somewhat malicious invention by our author”), who refers patronizingly to the story itself (“This item—I hesitate to use the word document. . . .”), and who discounts the extent of her suffering with “humor” (“our author refers to . . . ‘The Underground Femaleroad,’ since dubbed by some of our historical wags ‘The Underground Frailroad.’ [Laughter, groans.])” Pieixioto ends his address on The Handmaid’s Tale by asking members of the audience, “Are there any questions?” We have questions, lots of them, but we have no opportunity to ask them. Like Offred, we find ourselves silenced. And because we cannot ask questions, we receive no answers. There are plenty of questions at the end of Drakulic˙’s S. as well. One of the most surprising points of comparison between The Handmaid’s Tale and S.—a comparison I certainly was not expecting when I first thought about pairing up these two books—is that Drakulic˙’s novel shares with Atwood’s the use of a narrative frame. In the novel’s opening section, S. is in the Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm, Sweden, where she has just given birth to a child. It is March 27, 1993. “This is supposed to be her son,” S. thinks, but she doesn’t claim the baby as hers. She has given birth to him,


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but “to her this is simply a nameless little being who after nine months has come out of her body. Nothing connects them anymore.” Her body has “temporarily hous[ed] it, like a rent-a-womb.” She is “relieved” because her “entire past has spilled out of her body with this child.” After the few pages that introduce us to S. in the Swedish hospital, we are shifted back in time, to May of 1992. The bulk of the novel, some 180 pages, follows S. from the time soldiers enter the “village of B.,” in Bosnia and send her to an internment camp for women, through her imprisonment in the women’s room, where soldiers carry out a program of systematic rape, to her eventual release and transfer to a refugee camp, from which she is sent to Sweden. In the last chapter we return to the Karolinska Hospital once more. S.’s hours in the Swedish hospital comprise, then, the narrative frame for the rest of the novel. The point of view in this novel is curious—the events are and are not narrated from S.’s perspective. She is consistently referred to in the third person—she is “S.,” “she has given birth,” “she is free,” “her” past is now gone. The narrator thus seems to be on the outside, telling us S.’s story. All the same, the story is told from S.’s point of view—the narrator is not outside S., but inside her head, thinking and feeling, and the events in the novel, in the frame as well as in the inset narrative, present and past, are related in the present tense. This split point of view, this “I” who stubbornly remains “S.,” is critical to our understanding of the narrator. As she tells us herself, she “feels present one moment and absent the next.” She “slips in between two realities.” Given this fractured point of view, the novel’s UK title is significant: As If I Am Not There. Drakulic˙ addresses the strange doubled consciousness within the novel itself, almost as if she is explaining her narrative strategy to us; as S. is preparing to leave her apartment, for example, Drakulic˙ writes that S. “feels a kind of disbelief rather than sadness, as if she is still not certain that this is all happening to her. She knows that she is rambling around the apartment, picking things up. At the same time, however, she feels as if the real S. is standing off to the side, quietly watching her.” Later, when she is confined in the women’s room, S. observes that the other women “think it is a good joke, to talk about yourself in the third person, as if you were a doll or an actress about to take on a new role.” Throughout the embedded narrative, however, the third-person point of view is disrupted by italicized first-person reflections: “All of us would have preferred to return to the past if only we could,” “The only thing I learned in the camp was the importance of forgetting,” “But even after what had happened . . . I still did not entirely believe what she had said,” as only three examples of these narrative intrusions. These seem to be comments on past events, representing a narrative point in the future. In one such reflection,


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the narrator says, “Perhaps that happens to people in wartime,” and in another, “At the time I was still hoping that winter would not find me in the same place.” In yet another, the first-person narrator notes that “to this day” she feels grateful for a small act of kindness she experienced in the internment camp. Our sense is that this narrative “I” is S., looking back and thinking about the past; this identification is made explicit in one of these italicized passages, although in this passage the point of view is, again, in the third-person: “It seems to her now as if there was a time when nothing was happening in the camp. It was work, eat, sleep. And it was hot. . . .” Since all the narration—the narrative frame, in Sweden, as well as the inset narrative, in Bosnia—is in the present tense, it is hard to negotiate these moments of reflection, these moments of looking backward. They seem to represent yet another time—not the months in 1992 when S. is held as a prisoner in the internment camp, not in the framing narrative, when S. is in the hospital during the night of March 27–28, 1993, but some still later time, after the novel has ended. The point of view is further complicated by startling moments when we do not see events from S.’s perspective at all but from some other point of view entirely. As S. confronts the young soldier in her apartment at the very beginning of the inset narrative, for example, we experience her fear: “Will he hit her?” she wonders. We see the soldier as she sees him: he is young, he is holding a rifle, he seems to be blushing. But then, suddenly, we are in his mind, and we see the scene from his point of view: “Now that he has a rifle, he no longer needs to knock. He sees the girl staring at him, her body tense. He considers pointing his gun to frighten her even more. But he changes his mind. . . . [H]e is satisfied.” And then there are reflections beyond any of the characters inside the novel, like this one, where the third-person narrative shifts to the second person within the same sentence: “Only later did S. learn that there are countless kinds of pain, that physical pain usually passes and that you can distance yourself from it if you can learn how.” Whose viewpoint does this reflect? Just as the story of S. seems to extend beyond the boundaries of the novel, it seems as well to encompass points of view beyond those of S. herself. That may explain why we have so many unanswered questions at the end of this novel too. Just as Pieixoto’s provocative “Are there any questions?” leaves us without answers at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, S.’s actions at the end of this “novel about the Balkans” seem utterly perplexing. After having given birth to a baby conceived while she was being held in the women’s room in Bosnia, a child for whom she feels “nothing but animosity,” a child whom she refuses to touch and whom she has decided to give up for adoption, S. inexplicably claims that child. This baby is a product of systematic rape—S. has


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been subjected to so many acts of brutal rape by so many different men that she does not know which particular assault might have resulted in her pregnancy. After she learns that she is pregnant, S. tells us that “there was nothing she hated more than this creature.” Feeling the “foreign body” grown inside her, she “would see their faces looming over her, the faces of the men, of his fathers. Nameless men, usually drunk.” Her pregnancy makes her “hate her own body.” She hopes, in fact, that the child will be stillborn. After the child’s birth, she feels nothing. The child is “no concern of hers. It had nothing to do with her any more.” She refuses to touch or to nurse the infant. The unexpected milk that flows into her breasts, filling them, surprises her. “She had not counted on this,” she tells us. The “sudden pressure in her breasts” not only surprises her, it seems also to be the trigger for the embedded narrative that follows the opening pages of the novel—like the baby, the memories seem to spill from her body. We return to the narrative frame for only a few pages at the end of the novel. Hours later, when she still has not touched the child, the crying baby is picked up by her roommate, Maj, a Swedish woman who has just given birth to a little girl. Unable to understand S.’s rejection of her newborn, Maj begins to nurse him. While watching Maj feeding her child, S. reflects that the baby’s life will be “unfair,” completely “determined by the way he was conceived.” Adopted by a happy Swedish couple, he will have “a new identity,” but it will be “a false one.” Even if she were to do the unthinkable and keep the child, S. knows that her life, and his, would also be a fabrication—she would have to “invent for the child a father, a family, a past.” Either way, she realizes, the “children of war are . . . doomed to grow up living a lie.” Which lie would be “better for the child,” she asks herself, “the one the adoptive Swedish mother will tell him, or the one she, his mother, would tell him.” S. decides that “only one of these stories would mean victory over the horror of war”: “Only his mother could show him that the hate from which his life emerged can be transformed into love.” And so S. picks up the baby and begins to nurse him. The novel thus seems to end happily: “S. feels his little body utterly relax. She draws him closer. Tears stream down her face, her neck, her breasts.” And yet, even before we finish the last page, we realize that the story ends in contradiction. S. will never be able to tell this child the truth about how he was conceived—how, then, will she “show him” that hate borne of war can be transformed into love? In the interview that follows S. in its Penguin edition, Drakulic˙ notes that she knows of only two cases where Bosnian women kept the babies that were born to them as a result of the rapes they experienced during the war, and she adds, “I have a feeling that these women live very much in the past. They are lucky if they manage to live in the present at all.” As if unaware of the implications of what Drakulic˙ has just said, the


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interviewer comments that the “ending of S. is quite hopeful.” Drakulic˙ disagrees. “I am not convinced that this ending is so hopeful,” she says; “The consequences of accepting a child conceived by rape are grave. The child will have, in a way, a completely false identity and the mother will be responsible for it. . . . Really, what do you tell such a child as he or she is growing up? The truth? Imagine the child’s horror.” Reiterating that the end of the novel “is certainly not simply optimistic,” Drakulic˙ concludes, “I would say that the end of the novel can be interpreted in several different ways.” But she suggests no alternative interpretations. How are we to understand S.’s final gesture? And what are we to make of S. A Novel about the Balkans? We are left with questions. The question-and-answer interview that follows the novel does not really address our questions, much less answer them. *

*

*

Whatever interpretations Drakulic˙ might have for the ending of her novel, and whatever Atwood might make of critical assessments of her novel’s “postmodern textuality,” its “metafictional strategies,” and its “multilayered irony,” we are examining these two novels for what they have to say about women’s worlds. In both cases, as we have seen, our narrators occupy rooms of their own, but they are not rooms the women have chosen for themselves. They are rooms in which Offred and S. have been imprisoned. Like the young wife in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Offred occupies a bedroom at the top of the stairs. Downstairs are more bedrooms, a sitting room, a kitchen, all the rooms we expect in a home, but her room is isolated from these communal spaces, and she is alone in the room she occupies for much of the day. The room is bare—white walls, white curtains, an empty wardrobe, a single bed. This is a room she describes as “a waiting room” because she spends most of her day there, a “[l]ady in waiting.” “I am a blank,” she says, “between parentheses. Between other people.” Through a small window, she can look out of her room, but she cannot get out. Inside her room, she has nothing to do. She has no books to read, no pen or pencil, and no paper, so she can’t write, as the young wife does in Gilman’s story. (In the Republic of Gilead, women are no longer allowed to read or to write.) Alone in her room, Offred cannot watch television, listen to the radio, play games, embroider a pillowcase. She can only lie in her bed, staring at the ceiling, or look out of the window. In many ways, then, she is being subjected to the same kind of rest cure that is imposed on the young wife in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” “There’s time to spare,” Offred says: “This is one of the things I wasn’t prepared for—the amount of unfilled time, the long parentheses of nothing. Time as white sound.”


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Also like a woman undergoing a rest cure, Offred is subjected to a rigid schedule. Her exercise is carefully controlled, limited to one morning walk, when she is paired with another Handmaid, Ofglen. They guarantee one another’s good behavior—either may be a spy, watching for inappropriate behavior, listening for inappropriate opinions. Offred’s food is carefully monitored—she is fed bland and uninteresting, but healthful, meals on a tray in her room, like a hospital patient or a schoolgirl. In fact, looking at her tray at noontime one day, Offred remarks that it is a “schoolchild’s lunch.” Her fear of madness, hysteria, and suicide is always present in her empty room, but she clings to her sanity. “I am sane,” she says at one point, recognizing that “[s]anity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.” Although she knows other women—other Handmaids—have gone mad or have ended their lives, she hangs on desperately, repeating her “bedrock prayer”: “I am, I am. I am, still.” S. too struggles with her fears of madness and suicide, which are everywhere around her in the internment camp. In the women’s room, she has no way to fill her empty days. Early in her imprisonment, just after her arrival, S. is assigned a task, nursing the sick. “She feels better immediately, less scared,” S. says. “She had feared idleness. . . . That is the easiest way to lose your mind.” On learning that there is a room inside the camp’s administration building, the so-called women’s room, where some of the youngest and prettiest women are transferred, S. decides that the “best thing would be to keep myself invisible.” But keeping busy and trying to remain “invisible” to the guards doesn’t guarantee her safety. One day, a guard grabs her, and a group of soldiers brutally assault her. She later awakens in a small room, its floor covered with mattresses and blankets, its windows nailed shut by slats of wood and covered by tablecloths. This is the women’s room, a “storehouse of women.” The women imprisoned there are at their captors’ disposal. This room, too, is a kind of waiting room, since the women have no occupation aside from waiting in fear. The passing of time is marked only by the meals delivered to them. As S. tells us, the “residents” of the women’s room “have to learn that for them there are no clearly defined borders between day and night. The girls sleep or nap by day. At night the fear in the room is tangible.” The women can hear vehicles driving into the camp, they hear men’s voices and footsteps, then they are dragged from the women’s room. The soldiers “come almost every night.” More disconcertingly, they sometimes come for women during the day as well, “upsetting” the women’s “fragile routine.” In the women’s room, S. learns that there is “no order” to the men’s visits and that “there is nowhere to run or hide.”


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Trapped in the women’s room, S. watches M. keep track of the women who are taken away by soldiers and fail to return. S. understands the reasons for M.’s record-keeping: “She is afraid she would go crazy otherwise.” Another woman “sits in the corner, rocking back and forth for long spells, humming a nursery rhyme.” S. comments that her “connection with reality has now been broken.” A. is taken away from the women’s room one night, but when she is returned the next day, “she is no longer A.” As S. describes her, “She looks like her but [the women] realize that this is no longer A., that A. has left the body standing in front of them. . . . A.’s body is still alive, but A. is dead.” Although the nine women are imprisoned in a tiny room, they remain separate. “It is no use talking,” S. says, because “each of the women is alone with herself.” For S., survival becomes finding “some inner chamber within herself where she can lose all awareness of self, of where she is and what she is. . . . So that she is not present, not there.” She learns from her experiences the hard truth that “a woman’s body never really belongs to the woman. It belongs to others—to the man, the children, the family. And in war time to soldiers.” What may ultimately save both S. and Offred from madness and suicide is their ability to disconnect from their bodies. Surrounded by a gang of men who brutally rape her, S. feels “momentary pain,” but then she tells us that she feels “nothing more than a thrust.” She turns her head away: “As if I am not here, she thinks. As if I am gone.” After she gives birth to the child in the Swedish hospital, S. is still disconnected from her body, still “bothered by this sense of being split in two.” Although she has been relieved of the “burden” she has been carrying, she “does not yet feel that she is in possession of her body, that she is in complete control of it, that she is now herself.” She fears that she will have “to live like that, with this crack that cannot be closed.” In the same way, during the Ceremony, Offred disconnects from her body. She closes her eyes. Although she tells herself that she is not being raped—“nothing is going on here that I haven’t signed up for”—she removes herself from what is happening to her. To use S.’s words, it is as if Offred is not there. In her own words, Offred says: “the Commander is fucking. What he is fucking is the lower part of my body.” But Offred no longer occupies that body; she has learned a way of “existing apart from the body.” As she describes it, and the pronoun shift here is critical, “One detaches oneself. One describes.” In addition to their ability to disconnect, both women are complicit with the men who control them. In Offred’s case, the Commander “invites” her to his room at night—she says she feels “like a child who’s been summoned, at school, to the principal’s office.” Inside his own household, ironically, the Commander is also consigned to his own room, his study. It


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is a room filled with books and thus it is a “forbidden” room where “women do not go,” not even his Wife. Offred isn’t clear about what the Commander really wants from her, but they spend their time playing Scrabble, and the Commander watches her doing what is forbidden to women, like reading a magazine or a book. He even allows her to write one night, handing her a pen and a notepad. “The pen between my fingers is sensuous, alive almost. I can feel its power, the power of the words it contains. Pen Is Envy.” On another occasion, the Commander provides her with makeup and a sequined costume and takes her to a brothel-like nightclub called Jezebel’s. But even though she is never altogether certain about what the Commander wants or expects from her, Offred perceives his action as a sign of weakness, and she is prepared to exploit it. His need gives her a certain amount of power, no matter how small. “What does he want?” she asks herself. She knows that each meeting is “a bargaining session, things are about to be exchanged.” Whatever it is the Commander wants, “I’m not giving anything away: selling only.” As for S., she is summoned from the women’s room by the Captain in charge of the internment camp; he “invites” her to his office. Like Offred, S. sits across the desk from the man who controls her fate. She fixes on the pencil and “dazzling blank” sheet of paper placed carefully in front of him on the desk. S. also finds herself playing a game with the Captain—not a game of Scrabble, but a game of flirtation. “Are you free this evening,” she asks him, and then sees that he “accepts the game.” S. feels that this “game of seduction makes the situation easier for her.” Like Offred, she waits to see how she can turn his “weakness” to her “advantage.” If the Commander is seeking something more “normal,” more like times past, with Offred in his study, the Captain, too, would like a respite from the reality of the women’s prison camp. S. understands that she has been summoned in order “to amuse him so that he can forget he is in some camp in the Bosnian mountains.” And so S. plays the game—her motivation is simple. In her words, she “wants to take advantage of this unexpected opportunity to improve her situation.” She doesn’t ask herself whether what she is doing is “right.” She eats dinners with the Captain, she watches television with him, and she sleeps in his bed, where the sheets are fresh and clean. But just as Offred must return to her room at the top of the stairs at the end of every evening with the Commander, S. must return to the women’s room. Although Offred and S. have both been singled out by the powerful men who control their lives, we see through their experiences that women are nevertheless interchangeable. As “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “To Room Nineteen” illustrated so clearly in our last chapter, women are forced to accept the reality that one woman can easily be replaced by another.


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A woman’s role as wife and mother is valorized even as it is rendered meaningless. The most blatant kind of substitution in the two novels we are examining in this chapter is in The Handmaid’s Tale, where the Handmaid is a surrogate for a Wife—a Handmaid’s sole function is to provide a childless couple with a child. A uniform erases her individuality. Each Handmaid wears an identical long-sleeved, ankle-length red dress, which fully covers her body, and a white wimple, which covers her hair and obscures her view while making it almost impossible for others to see her face. (All the women of Gilead wear uniforms that signal their class—blue for Wives, green for Marthas, household servants, brown for Aunts, responsible for training Handmaids and policing them.) When the Commander takes Offred out one night to Jezebel’s, he simply replaces one uniform for another, giving her a sequined, feathered costume to wear. A Handmaid is a Handmaid. A whore is a whore. Handmaids are also rotated regularly. Offred tells us that she has had a previous “posting,” and she knows that there has been an Offred before her—another woman occupied that single bed in the white room at the top of the stairs, another woman lay between the legs of the Commander’s wife during the monthly Ceremony, another woman played Scrabble with the Commander in his room. Offred is under no illusions that she is special—“I knew I was dispensable,” she says. Later she observes, “It’s my job to provide what is otherwise lacking. Even the Scrabble. It’s an absurd as well as an ignominious position.” She feels the presence of the previous Offred in the room at the top of the stairs that she refuses to call hers; “I feel her presence,” she says, “my ancestress, my double.” In Drakulic˙’s S., the most graphic example of women’s interchangeability is their indiscriminate rape by soldiers. The women are not individuals to these men—they are bodies to be used and abused. In the camp, women “exist . . . only in the plural. . . . Nameless, faceless, interchangeable.” Clothing plays an interesting role in this novel as well. The uniforms of Handmaids are specifically designed so that they can neither see nor be seen. In S., the women also wear clothing that obscures who they are. When they left their village, the women were allowed to bring a few personal items with them, and S. had packed not only a few shirts and sweaters but also two distinctive items, a red summer dress and a pair of Italian leather shoes. These are her “best possessions,” she tells us, the shoes so new that they “still smell of fine leather.” But she never wears these items, not even when she spends her evenings with the Captain. They remain in her backpack. Instead, she and the women wear clothing that they find in the women’s room—blouses and skirts and pants that belonged to women who had once occupied the women’s room but who have since disappeared. S. describes some shoes, for example, white summer sandals and a pair of black pumps


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with high heels. “Whose shoes are those,” she wonders, noting that these are “shoes that belong to another world.” In the women’s room, S. is like a ghost, wrapping herself in the garments of the dead. Later, when she is a refugee, she wears a huge coat given to her by the Red Cross, obscuring herself in the oversize garment. When S. has passed through the refugee camp and been resettled in Sweden, G. takes her home and gives S. some of her own pants, tops, and dresses. S. is still wearing someone else’s clothing to hide her identity—even after she has left the women’s room, she is “like a little girl trying on her mother’s clothes.” In their exploration of identity—and the loss of identity—both Atwood and Drakulic˙ play with the use of masks, in particular the use of makeup as a mask. In the Republic of Gilead, all such symbols of female vanity have been eliminated. But when he takes her to Jezebel’s, the Commander not only expects Offred to wear the purple sequined-and-feathered costume he gives her, he supplies her with makeup—lipstick, eyeliner, and mascara. Although these are all forbidden items, Offred nevertheless feels what she calls “the childish allure of dressing up.” Donning a costume and covering her face with makeup are liberating, if only for a moment. If Offred finds a momentary freedom in her tawdry costume and smeary makeup, S., too, can find a kind of freedom in disguise. Just as the faceless and nameless women who pass through the women’s room leave behind their shoes and clothing, they also leave behind makeup, which S. seizes on. By applying eyeliner and lipstick, she realizes that “she can conceal herself . . . and assume a role.” She finds that the makeup allows her “to don a mask.” By wearing someone else’s clothing and painting her face, S. discovers that she “can become someone else,” if only for a little while. Atwood and Drakulic˙ also introduce into their novels a symbol that we have seen before in our examination of women’s worlds, the mirror. Although Offred tells us that “there are few mirrors” in Gilead, the reality is that mirrors are everywhere—just not where she can look into them clearly or directly. There is no mirror in her room, and the mirror has been removed from the bathroom she uses, but there is a great, round mirror in the hallway of the Commander’s house. The winged headpiece that Offred wears keeps her from looking directly into the mirror, however, and in any case, it is a convex mirror. When she manages to catch a glimpse of herself, her reflection is “a distorted shadow, a parody of something.” On another occasion, Offred describes seeing her face in this mirror as something “distant and white and distorted.” Once, walking down the stairs with the Wife, Offred says, “I see the two of us, a blue shape, a red shape, in the brief glass eye of the mirror as we descend. Myself, my obverse.” There is an oval mirror in the drawing room of the Commander’s Wife as well,


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though it is over the mantel, and Offred is unable to see herself in this mirror at all. She is merely a stand-in for the Wife, her “obverse,” and thus she has no reflection at all in the drawing room’s mirror. The mirror is also used to show how indistinguishable one Handmaid is from another; when Offred parts from her daily companion, Ofglen, she describes her by saying that she is “like my own reflection, in a mirror from which I am moving away.” There is a “black-mirror wall” in an elevator Offred rides every month to her medical examination, but she cannot see herself reflected in this mirror; she sees only the back of the head of the male Guardian who rides up the elevator with each Handmaid. When she is wearing the costume and the makeup provided for her by the Commander, he “holds a large silver-backed hand mirror” for her to look into. She recognizes it as his Wife’s, noting that he “must have borrowed it from her room.” But when she looks into the Wife’s mirror, she does not recognize the face she sees as her own. The one place where Offred has direct access to a mirror is in Jezebel’s, where the women’s room is filled with mirrors. Offred understands why: “You need to know, here, what you look like.” But here, her face is covered with the makeup she is wearing, and she does not recognize herself in the reflection she sees in the glass. At the very end of the novel, just before she steps into a fate that remains unclear to her (and to us), Offred alludes to this most potent of symbols when she recalls the woman who was her predecessor, the Offred who occupied the room at the top of the stairs, as her “double.” Offred observes that she was never alone in that room. “There were always two of us,” she says. The mirror is less prevalent in Drakulic˙’s S. but no less potent. S. first looks into a mirror in the framing narrative, which takes place in a Swedish hospital where she has just given birth. Staring at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, she observes that “her face has not been changed”; she does not recognize this face because “[n]othing can be seen on it.” Looking into this mirror triggers a memory of the first opportunity she had to look into the mirror after her release from the women’s room; she “remembers the moment precisely.” In the refugee camp where she had been transferred, she saw her face in the dimly lit common bathroom. She did not “like the fact that her face did not show how much she had changed”: “How could you survive what she had gone through and have it leave no external trace, mark you only from within?” But now, looking at her unmarked face in the mirror in the Swedish hospital, S. thinks that it is better to have “an innocent face like this” because “it will be easier for her to lie to people about herself.” She opens up a jar of face cream (a simple pleasure denied Handmaids!) and observes, “How wonderful it is to have face cream and a mirror again. And a face in the mirror.”


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There was a bathroom in the “women’s room” inside the prison camp, but the mirror there had been removed—like Offred, S. tells us that she could see where the mirror had once hung over the sink. “Perhaps it is better this way,” she thought, “perhaps it is better for her not to see herself, not now.” If she were able to see her reflection, she might have “a certain sense of security, of self-confidence.” But whatever reflection she might see there would be unrecognizable: “there is no point in looking at your own face unless you can actually recognise it. S. does not want to recognise herself.” But when S. finds a cosmetics bag left behind by a previous occupant of the women’s room, she discovers that it also contains a small mirror. She uses the mirror to apply red lipstick and black eyeliner, as we have seen. With her “made-up face,” she is happy to look into the small mirror and feels “liberated.” Her reflection is a “discovery”: “she can conceal herself like this and assume a role.” If the symbol of the mirror in The Handmaid’s Tale and S. A Novel about the Balkans reminds us of the complex ways that Christine de Pizan and Virginia Woolf reinterpreted this stereotypical sign of female vanity, these novels also remind us of other features we have seen as we have explored women’s worlds. As in “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “To Room Nineteen,” the women in these two novels are infantilized—to name only one of the many parallels in The Handmaid’s Tale and S., when women are first gathered together into groups, they are held in school gymnasiums. For their reprogramming, the Handmaids are sent to the Red Center, a former high school, still filled with the desks, chairs, and tables of the students. The women eat off trays in the school cafeteria, and they sleep in the gym, lined up like kindergartners at naptime. (The women use the restrooms in this former school as well, asking permission from the Aunts before they can be excused, but the mirrors over the sinks have all been removed.) Stripped of their identities and shadowed by fear, adult women are treated like children. Handmaids walk two-by-two, paired up with a partner. “You are spoiled girls,” they are told by their minders, the “Aunts” who are indoctrinating them as Handmaids. Told to keep quiet, Offred says, “we hush like schoolgirls.” When she is first “invited” to the Commander’s room, she stands outside the door of his study, “feeling like a child who’s been summoned, at school, to the principal’s office.” For S. and the rest of the women in the village of B., the school gymnasium represents a collection point, the place where they are held until they are herded into a school bus, to be transported to the women’s camp. Once there, the women are not only treated like children, they regress to a childish state. After S. is gang-raped and beaten, one of the soldiers forces her to open her mouth while he urinates. She “coughs and throws up,” but


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after the soldier slaps her and tells her to swallow, she does what he commands “as obediently as a child.” When she is in the women’s room, the old woman who feeds the women exhorts them to “Eat, children.” She also tells their fortunes, making the women laugh “like schoolgirls during recess.” One woman “falls asleep, like an overwrought child,” another, in her madness, begins rocking back and forth, “humming a nursery rhyme.” When S. sleeps in the Captain’s bed, she says that she tries to “make herself as small as possible, to transform herself into a child, virtually to disappear.” But being as small as a child will not keep a woman safe during a time of war—in fact, being a child does not guarantee safety. The soldiers rape little girls as well as adult women. Although it “never occurred to S., not even for a moment” that a child would be at risk, she learns otherwise when an eleven-year-old girl is raped: “S. does not want to know any more. But she was still just a child, S. keeps saying, as if her words had any meaning.” Grown women can be treated as children (and children as grown women), but women are also treated like animals in these novels, a theme we examined in Chapter 6 when we discussed the writing of Arcangela Tarabotti and Valerie Solanas. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred repeatedly uses animal metaphors to describe herself. At one point, for example, while she is waiting for the Ceremony, all bathed, fed, and dressed, Offred tells us she feels “like a prize pig.” On another day, while walking with Ofglen, the two decide to vary their homeward route; Offred compares herself to a laboratory rat, observing that even a “rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.” During one of her clandestine meetings with the Commander in his room, she describes feeling like a kitten; on another occasion, he dangles a magazine in front of her “like fish bait,” while on yet another evening she says she is “like an attentive pet, prick-eared and eager to perform.” After learning from the Commander that his previous Handmaid had committed suicide, Offred interprets his attitude about this other Offred: “If your dog dies, get another.” Such metaphors occur throughout Atwood’s novel, but the most graphic is not Offred’s own characterization of herself as a pet or a lab animal but in Professor Pieixoto’s crude sexual pun, equating Offred’s “tale” and her tail. The references in S. are less specific but more brutal and graphic, expressed in terms of hunting. When S. describes her initial gang rape, for example, she is the prey of the soldiers who surround her, whom she describes as “hunters”; she “has been caught in a trap like a wild beast,” she says. Confined in the women’s room after this rape, she describes the women as “crowded together like animals.” Lashing out at a soldier who has burned her with a cigarette, she “tries to justify” her action—it will cause repercussions for all the women in the women’s room—by saying that “she did it instinctively, like an animal defending itself.” When the Captain “accepts the game”


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that she offers him: “S. feels the more superior, as if she is the cat and he the mouse, rather than the other way around.” What is particularly significant about such references, it seems to me, is that both Offred and S. have internalized this sense that they are animals, pets or prey. They are not described as animals by the Commander or the Captain, not by the Sons of Jacob or the Serbian soldiers. Rather, they describe themselves as animals. As women they have been treated as less than human by men, and as women they have come to see themselves in these terms. In their own words, in Offred’s first-person descriptions of herself and in S.’s dual voice, merging third-person narrative with first-person perspective, women are no longer human. When we examined Arcangela Tarabotti’s Paternal Tyranny and Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, we saw such language turned on its head—Tarabotti and Solanas initially described women as prey, hapless animals hunted and trapped by men. A woman is “a pretty little bird,” in Tarabotti’s words, for example, and a “chick,” in Solanas’s. But in their fury, Tarabotti and Solanas refigure the metaphor. Men, not women, are the real animals. For Tarabotti, men are beasts. Solanas takes it a step further—if men are animals, “SCUM will coolly, furtively, stalk its prey and quietly move in for the kill.” But, in the nightmare worlds that Offred and S. occupy, there is none of the anger that fuels Tarabotti and Solanas. Men treat women like animals—and so women have come to think of themselves as animals. While thus recalling issues and themes we have seen in the works we have so far examined, The Handmaid’s Tale and S. A Novel about the Balkans introduce additional considerations into our ongoing discussion. Most critical, I think, is the way the women who populate these women’s worlds do not form mutually supportive relationships. This is nowhere more clear in S. than in the fundamental distinction that separates S. from all of the other Bosnian women with whom she is imprisoned, not only those in the women’s room but all of the rest of the women in the internment camp. Over and over again we are reminded that S. is an educated woman, a teacher and a woman from the city. The other women—all of them—are peasants, villagers, uneducated. Although, as a woman, she is one of them, she nevertheless remains separate from them. This difference—her sense of herself as somehow caught up in a group that should not include her—may contribute to the complicated narrative perspective we see in Drakulic˙’s novel. S.’s class seems also to play a role in her relationship with the Captain—S. believes that the Captain “chooses” her because she is the only educated woman in the camp. “You are an educated woman,” he says to her, asking her how, then, she happened to be in the village of B. on the day when she was captured. It was simply a matter of chance. In another


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example of the interchangeable nature of women, S. describes herself as “standing in for an acquaintance who was on maternity leave.” She was a substitute—a substitute teacher. Whatever the reason for the Captain’s choice of S., her special status as the woman who spends time with the Captain is another kind of separation, not only from the women in the prison but also from the small group of women in the women’s room: “Of course, S. stands out. She is marked by him having chosen her.” S. believes that the other women “envy and despise her for it.” They continue to be raped, night after night, but she is left alone, the Captain’s exclusive property. Ironically, her social superiority results in her moral inferiority. S. realizes that she has become a sort of prostitute. The other women have no choice. She “sells” herself for warm food and clean sheets. In The Handmaid’s Tale, women are kept apart by class distinctions. Rather than developing any sense of sisterhood, women are divided by this maleimposed system. The Commander actually has four women under his roof, his Wife, his Handmaid, and his two Marthas, women who perform all the household tasks, including washing, cleaning, and preparing the meals. At a large gathering that includes both Wives and Handmaids, the meeting opens with, “Good afternoon, ladies.” Offred interprets for us: “It’s ladies instead of girls because of the Wives.” Wives hate the Handmaids in their homes and in their beds; the Commander’s Wife envies and despises Offred, at one point calling her a “slut.” For their part, the Handmaids both despise and fear the Wives they serve. Although Offred craves some kind of companionship with the two Marthas, they are distrustful of her. She is an additional burden—more work for them—and she has not successfully fulfilled her role at her posting. She isn’t pregnant. The Aunts are the most problematic class of women in Gilead, responsible for reprogramming women in the Red Center, coercing them to accept their role as Handmaids; the Aunts police the women in their care and savagely punish those who refuse to submit. The Aunts thus function as enforcers for male authority—as women, they can go where men cannot go and ensure obedience not only among Handmaids but also among Wives. For their efforts they have a few privileges. Most notably they are allowed to read—during one official gathering of women of all classes, an Aunt stands on the stage with a crumpled piece of paper in her hand, preparing to make an announcement. In front of a huge gathering of women, she slowly unfolds the paper and reads the message it contains to herself. “She’s rubbing our noses in it, letting us know exactly who she is, making us watch her as she silently reads,” Offred says. She is “flaunting her prerogative. Obscene, I think.” I need to address one final element of both of these novels before drawing this chapter to an end. Even more than Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Doris Lessing, whose short stories include male characters and whose novels have


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male narrators, Margaret Atwood and Slavenka Drakulic˙ both demand that we consider men’s positions in relationship to the brave new worlds they have created. In The Handmaid’s Tale and S. A Novel about the Balkans, the physical power of men over women is expressed in their absolute control of women’s bodies. And yet, even while we experience sexual slavery and degradation from the position of Offred and of S., women imprisoned in rooms of their own, we nevertheless see that men are also imprisoned in this system. The totalitarian theocracy of Gilead justifies its subjection of fertile women, forcing them to conceive and bear children for the ruling Commanders and Wives, on the authority of the Old Testament, in particular Sarah’s command to Abraham that he give her a child, conceived with her slave, Hagar (“You see that the Lord has prevented me from bearing children; go in to my slavegirl; it may be that I shall obtain children by her,” Genesis 16:2) and Rachel’s command to Jacob that he give her a child, conceived with her “maid,” Bilhah (“Here is my maid Bilhah; go in to her, that she may bear upon my knees and that I too may have children through her,” Genesis 30:3). In Bosnia, the use of systematic rape as a weapon of war by the Serbian army is also “justified”; forcing Muslim women to bear “Christian” babies is a way to achieve ethnic cleansing. But despite these “justifications”—and the complete control of the Commander and the Captain over Offred and S., respectively—we see that their power is not absolute. The system controls them as well. In Gilead, the monthly Ceremony has nothing to do “with passion or love or romance.” The sex is prescribed, routinized, actually, and if there is no pleasure for Wife or Handmaid, there is none for the Commander either. “The Commander, too, is doing his duty,” Offred observes. The Ceremony demands that he remain fully clothed and forbids any kind of intimacy or caress. As if craving some kind of more personal contact, the Commander asks Offred for a kiss one night after their game of Scrabble. She demonstrates her power by giving him a passionless, closed-mouth touch on the lips. The trip to Jezebel’s offers another glimpse of his empty life—he has dressed Offred in an approximation of “sexy,” taken her to a forbidden place, plied her with alcohol, and then gone with her to a hotel room. Again, he shows that he wants more than the Ceremony. “I thought you might enjoy it for a change,” he says to Offred, but she does not respond: “I lie there like a dead bird.” Against our will, we do feel sympathy for the Commander in this scene. He is vulnerable, and we pity him. And even more astonishing, Offred feels pity too—being hurried off to an unknown fate at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, she sees the Commander and describes him as looking “worried and helpless.” “I still have it in me to feel sorry for him,” she says. As for S., she is under no illusions about the Captain. He is good-looking and clean; S. remarks on his nice hands. He addresses her formally and asks


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her to tell him about herself. But she knows what he is: “The person who is the commander of this camp cannot be anything but a criminal, even if he personally has never killed anyone, thinks S.” He has complete power over her—indeed, over all the women in the camp—but, even so, “is that enough?” she wonders. Although she knows that she “should hate him,” she does not. S. gradually realizes that the Captain is lonely and that they share one desire: “the desire for neither of them to be where they are.” Whether S. feels pity or not, she does recognize that the Captain is also a kind of prisoner. When she is finally released from the camp, S., like Offred, looks back—at the administration building that houses both the women’s room and the Captain’s office. What is she hoping to see? Before the bus in which she and the other women are crowded together pulls away from the camp, she “thinks” she sees the Captain at the window, but she turns her head away. She leaves, while he must remain. How curious—both women, Offred and S., as they are released from the rooms in which they have been held captive, look back. And through their eyes we glimpse once more the men who have had such power over them, but who remain behind, suddenly powerless. *

*

*

There is something more in both The Handmaid’s Tale and S., something that goes beyond the sexual exploitation of women’s bodies. In the context of women’s worlds, the Republic of Gilead and the “women’s room” somewhere in Bosnia seem to represent a kind of macabre joke that represents more than the nightmare opposite of women’s dreamworlds. It is as if men are “giving” women exactly what they have asked for. You want a room of your own? You can have it—a room of your own at the top of the stairs. You want a City of Ladies? Here it is—an entire female community, kept “safe” behind barbed wire. In this context, the complicated framing narratives of both The Handmaid’s Tale and S. take on new meaning. Women have “escaped” the nightmare worlds where they have been imprisoned. Offred has been liberated from her imprisonment as a Handmaid, S. freed from the women’s room. But even when they are no longer physically imprisoned, Offred and S. are still held captive. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred’s story is controlled by men—transcribed, edited, disseminated, and interpreted by male scholars. We don’t know what her fate was when she was taken away from the Commander’s home—but two hundred years later, in 2195, we know she has not escaped from male control. She is as much a prisoner of male power and “authority” as she was when she was in her small, empty room at the top of the stairs. For S., too, escape is ultimately impossible. She is no


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longer in the women’s room. In fact, she’s far away from Bosnia, relocated in Sweden. Delivered of her child, she feels the burden of the past “spilling out” of her body along with him. Free of the baby, she is no longer haunted by her fear that she will, someday, see in his face the face of one of the men who raped her. But in picking up this child, she also takes up the burden of the past. She does not take a new name. She will not begin a new life. She will not close her mind to the memories of the men who raped her; indeed she now says that “she must not forget.” She may no longer be confined in the women’s room, but she will remain a prisoner of what happened to her there. Chapter 8 Notes: Suggestions for Further Reading First published in Canada in 1985, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is still in print, available from Random House in both hardcover (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Everyman’s Library, 2006) and in paperback (New York: Anchor Books, 1998). For Atwood’s comments on the difference between science fiction and speculative fiction, see her article, “Aliens Have Taken the Place of Angels,” The Guardian, 17 June 2005, available online at http:// www.guardian.co.uk/film/2005/jun/17/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror. margaretatwood, accessed 13 December 2010. Also available online is Scott Thill’s 20 October 2009 Wired magazine interview with Atwood, “Margaret Atwood, Speculative Fiction’s Apocalyptic Optimist,” available at http:// www.wired.com/underwire/2009/10/margaret-atwood-speculative-fictionsapocalyptic-optimist/, accessed 13 December 2010. A movie version of The Handmaid’s Tale, with Natasha Richardson as Offred, Robert Duvall as the Commander, and Faye Dunaway as the Commander’s Wife, was released in 1990. Although students are always upset at the way the film version changes the novel, they nevertheless enjoy watching it, if for no other reason than to express their outrage at the differences between the movie and the book. Slavenka Drakulic˙’s S. A Novel about the Balkans was published in 1999 in the UK as As If I Am Not There. When it was published in 2000 in the United States by Viking Penguin, it appeared with the title S. A Novel about the Balkans. A paperback edition (New York: Penguin Books, 2001) is now available.


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Still Crazy after All These Years: Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran

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recurrent line in The Handmaid’s Tale is Offred’s observation that “[c]ontext is all.” A simple game of Scrabble, for example, a game that she says was once played only by old people and children “when there was nothing good on television,” has become something very different in the Republic of Gilead—it is “forbidden,” it is “dangerous,” it is “indecent,” and so it has become “desirable.” Context is all. A Latin phrase Offred finds scrawled inside the cupboard in her room—“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum” (roughly translated for her by the Commander as “Don’t let the bastards grind you down”)—is not, after all, a radical message left her by the previous Offred. “Here, in this context, it’s neither prayer nor command,” Offred realizes, “but a sad graffiti. . . .” Context is crucial for us here, too, in Reading Women’s Worlds, for it is in this context that we return now to Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. Nafisi’s memoir is not just about reading Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel, Lolita, but about reading it—“against all odds”—in Tehran. For Nafisi, too, context is all: “It is of Lolita that I want to write, but right now there is no way I can write about that novel without also writing about Tehran. This, then, is the story of Lolita in Tehran, how Lolita gave a different color to Tehran and how Tehran helped redefine Nabokov’s novel, turning it into this Lolita, our Lolita.” “Our” Lolita. Nafisi’s is not the Lolita of the library or the classroom but the Lolita of a small group of women who have secluded themselves in a room of their own. In the increasingly repressive Tehran of 1995, eight women—Nafisi and seven of her female students—decide to spend every Thursday morning in the living room of her home. Their Lolita is the product of this context. Indeed, Nafisi’s “memoir in books” begins and ends in this room where, for the better part of two years, these eight women cling to


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the freedoms that they are losing in the world outside their small retreat. The conversations within this room become a framing narrative for the stories Nafisi tells—“stealing” words from Nabokov’s Lolita, she addresses us: “I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we won’t really exist if you don’t.” This all-female space represents both their resistance and their reality. Nafisi is fully aware that “withdrawing into yourself” can signify loss and restriction and that—notice the pronoun here—“[w]ithdrawal into one’s dreams could be dangerous,” but she does not see their withdrawal as a retreat or a defeat. Nafisi argues that their decision to meet together in this room is a positive creation, “an active withdrawal.” “That room, for all of us, became a place of transgression,” she asserts. It is the only place where, as women, they can regain the freedoms that they have lost. Like so many women before them, they bravely follow the one course left to them. But living in a room of your own is not easy. Nafisi describes the “absurd fictionality” that “ruled” their lives: “We tried to live in the open spaces, in the chinks created between that room, which had become our protective cocoon, and the censor’s world of witches and goblins outside.” “Which of these two worlds was more real,” she wonders, “and to which did we really belong? We no longer knew the answers.” *

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Having now made our way through six centuries of writing by women who have imagined rooms of their own, we can see the way Nafisi’s book echoes so many of the themes we have examined together. There are the more obvious parallels—the status of women, the desire for education, the perils of marriage, and demands of motherhood—but I am immediately drawn to a passage, very early in her book, where Nafisi describes two photos of her students. In the first, each young woman’s individuality is obscured; “according to the law of the land,” each is dressed in a long black robe and a headscarf. They are entirely covered “except for the oval of their faces and their hands.” In the second, the women have thrown off their robes and veils: “Splashes of color separate one from the next. Each has become distinct through the color and style of her clothes, the color and the length of her hair.” This scene most obviously recalls the illustrations in Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir, Embroideries. When we first see them, the women gathered together are represented as a line of small black figures drawn in profile, each one indistinguishable from the next. But once they have closed the door on the dining room that has become their retreat, the women emerge as carefully drawn individuals, fully recognizable not only through their distinctive clothing and hairstyles but through their distinct voices and unique experiences. This is a literal depiction of a pattern we see over and over again as we read women’s


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worlds—in the world outside the City of Ladies, for example, women are all the same, monsters in nature, foolish at best and depraved at worst, mothers, wives, and daughters who must all be carefully controlled so that they remain chaste, silent, and obedient. But inside Pizan’s city, “womankind” emerges as a series of brilliant individual portraits of women who are reasonable creatures, capable not only of self-determination but also of great acts of courage and creativity. Outside the living room of her Tehran home, Nafisi observes that women “had become the figment of someone else’s dreams.” But inside that room, they become, if only temporarily, themselves: “We felt when we were together that we were almost absolutely free,” in Nafisi’s words. This is a paradox expressed by many of our writers—only when they are most restricted, enclosed within a room of their own, are women truly liberated. In The Worth of Women, Leonora observes that women can “speak freely” only when they are “safe from any fear of being spied on by men or constrained by their presence.” Only when they are behind the walls of Cavendish’s Convent of Pleasure or secluded in Astell’s “Happy Retreat” are women free from becoming the “figment of someone else’s dreams.” In Lady Happy’s words, her convent is not a place of “restraint,” but “a place for freedom.” For Astell, her proposed retreat is a place where women would be able to “shake off ” the follies of the world and “regain our freedom.” This is the same freedom that Azar Nafisi and her students experience every Thursday morning as they gather in a living room in Tehran Small details in Nafisi’s Reading Lolita take on new resonance in the context of reading women’s worlds. There is, for example, the male assertion of power by naming. Early on, for example, Nafisi comments on the way “Humbert pins Lolita by first naming her, a name that becomes the echo of his desires.” We think back to this observation some three hundred pages later, when one of the young women in Nafisi’s group reveals the way she has decided to resist such male control. Her daughter has an official name, a name recorded by the state and recognized by her family, but this is not her baby’s “real” name: “I have a secret name for her,” the young mother confides to Nafisi. Male efforts to “pin” women by naming them—thereby controlling and containing them—recall the three male adventurers in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland; rendered powerless in the land they “discover,” they nevertheless impose the name of Herland on it, as if, in the power of naming it, they can gain control over it. They are aghast that the women they encounter don’t “sign” their children, proclaiming their ownership of them with a surname. In the same way, the old Roman historian writing a history of the Clefts is disgusted by the Clefts’ failure to see the significance of names. Ironically, it is only as Clefts lose their all-female world that they “gain” individual names.


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If men assert power by claiming naming rights, they also deny women’s power by obscuring their names. Thus the women of the Republic of Gilead become Handmaids, known only by patronymics. Offred, Ofglen, Ofwarren—these are the names given to them by men. Alma, Dolores, Janine—these are the secret names preserved by women. We never learn Offred’s “real” name—her name is the key to her identity, a source of inner power (she describes it as an “amulet”). Offred keeps her name a secret, even from us; it is a “treasure I’ll come back to dig up, one day,” she vows. As I have argued, both Atwood’s Offred and Slavenka Drakuliç’s S. remain captive women, even though each is ostensibly “freed” from physical restraint: Offred and her story are controlled by male scholars, S. is held fast by her memories of the men who imprisoned and brutalized her. Perhaps hanging onto the secret of their names is the one thing that frees them, after all, from male control. In this way, we can also reassess the achievement of Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies and her detailed biographies of so many individual women, among them Nicaula— the woman deprived of her name in the Old Testament, referred to there only as the “queen of Sheba” and worth mentioning only because she had heard of the wisdom of Solomon. Pizan preserves their history for women by preserving women’s names—from Lampheto and Marpasia, the first Amazon queens, to the names of her own contemporaries, great women, like Jeanne d’Evreaux and Blanche of Navarre, both queens of France, and lesser women, like Anastasia, a young artist who works in Pizan’s atelier “painting manuscript borders and miniature backgrounds.” Yet another small detail in Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran takes on new meaning in the context of reading women’s worlds. The flood of conversation enjoyed by the women in Fonte’s The Worth of Women seems to flow from the fountain in the center of the garden, just as the world of the Clefts is centered in The Cleft and its flowing waters. The samovar is at the center of the conversation in Satrapi’s Embroideries, its presence stimulating the “ventilation of the heart” that the women share. The conversation among the women in Nafisi’s living room is also stimulated by a symbolic object, in this case a tea tray. Their conversation begins at the very moment when Nafisi enters the room “with eight glasses of tea on an old and unpolished silver tray.” “Upsilamba!” cries Yassi, one of Nafisi’s students—a word that is “one of Nabokov’s fanciful creations.” From that day on, the tea and the word, like Fonte’s fountain and Satrapi’s samovar, “opened the secret cave of remembrance.” And the mirror—from Pizan and Mary Astell through Virginia Woolf to Atwood and Drakuliç, we’ve seen how this potent symbol of female vanity is reinterpreted in women’s worlds. It’s here, too, in Nafisi’s living room.


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It’s significant that this is the room she chooses for her retreat. “More than any other place in our home,” she writes, the living room is “symbolic” of her life, of her “nomadic” existence, of her “eclectic taste.” It represents Nafisi more meaningfully than any of the “other, more deliberately furnished” rooms in her apartment. And so, in the first few pages of her framing narrative, Nafisi describes her living room carefully, noting that she always sits opposite “an antique oval mirror,” which was a gift from her father. She positions herself so that she faces this mirror, in which she is able to “see the mountains capped with snow, even in summer, and watch the trees change color.” Some three hundred pages later, as we return for one final time to her framing narrative, she once again mentions the mirror. This time, Nafisi emphasizes not what she can see reflected in the mirror, but what she cannot see. “Have you ever noticed,” she asks her husband, “how strange it is when you look in that mirror on the opposite wall that instead of seeing yourself, you see the trees and the mountains, as if you have magically willed yourself away?” We have seen this disconnection before—Offred, unable to see herself clearly reflected in any of the mirrors in Gilead, S., unable to recognize her own face when she looks into a mirror. Nafisi’s observation about looking into that mirror—it is “as if you have magically willed yourself away”— sounds as if it had come right out of The Handmaid’s Tale or S. A Novel about the Balkans. “I too am a missing person,” Offred remarks. S. feels “[a]s if I am not here. . . . As if I am gone.” “I became irrelevant,” Nafisi observes. But Nafisi’s observation sounds not only like the kind of disconnection we find in Atwood’s Tale and Drakuliç’s novel, it sounds remarkably like what we have read in Christine de Pizan and Virginia Woolf. Christine de Pizan becomes “Christine.” “Here then was I,” Woolf writes, “(call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please—it is not a matter of any importance).” “We are constantly pretending to be somewhere else—we either plan it or dream it,” says Nafisi. We plan and build a City of Ladies. We dream about having a room of our own, a Convent of Pleasure, a happy retreat in a supportive community of women. “Context is all.” The context of reading women’s worlds shapes and enriches our understanding of individual works, but I am more than ever aware, now, of how changing the context, even slightly, can alter our perceptions of those works. At one time or another, I have paired up the texts I’ve examined here in any number of ways, and even now, at the very end, I’m not sure that the pairings I have here represent the right way. I began my project not by pairing Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies with Virginia Woolf and A Room of One’s Own but with two late-medieval poems, The Assembly of Ladies and The Isle of Ladies, a link that emphasizes




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chronology and genre. Pizan was writing at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and these poems both date from the end of that century. “Christine” insists that her encounter with Reason, Rectitude, and Justice is not a dream, while The Assembly of Ladies and The Isle of Ladies are cast in the popular medieval form of the dream vision—the genre that Pizan subverted. As for Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran? I originally thought about pairing it with Marjane Satrapi’s Embroideries—nine women drinking tea in a dining room in Tehran, eight women drinking tea in a living room in Tehran. What else might these texts have revealed to us if we had read them together? My original plan was to pair Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies with the eighteenth-century novel it inspired, Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall, published in 1750. Then I shifted Millenium Hall, matching it up with Herland—if Herland represents Paradise Lost, Millenium Hall represents Paradise Regained. But what about matching Herland, published in 1915, with Amber Reeves’s 1914 A Lady and Her Husband? Why is one novel so widely read and reprinted, the other virtually unread and now long out of print? Then I shifted once more, pairing Reeves’s superb novel about a middle-class woman who leaves her home and finds her sanity and salvation in a rented room with Doris Lessing’s short story about a middleclass woman who leaves her home and commits suicide in a rented room, Number 19. At one point I paired Arcangela Tarabotti’s Paternal Tyranny with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” in a chapter to be called “Buried Alive.” I hadn’t seen at first the way Tarabotti’s incandescent rage burned in Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto—that didn’t come until much later. Each new pairing reveals something previously unseen even as it obscures something previously visible. We may not agree with Offred that context is “all,” but context does matter. As I read, considered, and reconsidered, I was convinced that there was a crucial difference between the dream that Christine de Pizan and Virginia Woolf shared and the nightmare that engulfed the narrator confined to a room with yellow wallpaper, the Handmaid imprisoned in a room at the top of the stairs, and S., taken prisoner during the Bosnian War. There was—there had to be—a difference between having a room of one’s own and being forced into a room that is emphatically not one’s own—it is “not my room,” Offred insists, “I refuse to say my.” I held fast to this belief for a long time. But lately I’ve come to the realization that there may not be as much of a difference as I thought. The women who find paradise in Leonora’s walled garden in Venice and those in the Satrapis’ dining room in Tehran have chosen to shelter themselves, if only momentarily, from the outside world. The women who retreat


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into the sanctuary proposed by Mary Astell may decide to remain there, or they may ultimately reenter society—the choice will be theirs. But the issue of choice isn’t as clear as I would like to think. Lady Happy plans to remain safely inside her Convent of Pleasure, forever separate from the men who carry on outside the convent walls, but those walls are breached, and her retreat is lost. The convent will remain a place for women, but Lady Happy will no longer be one of its occupants—the women enclosed within its sheltering walls will be placed there by men. Will the new inhabitants of the convent resemble Arcangela Tarabotti, who feels as if she has been buried alive? Forced into a convent, Tarabotti finds no pleasure in the life to which she has been condemned—for her, convent life is hell on earth. The Clefts lose their all-female world, and when The Cleft itself is destroyed, they are bereft. Their ancient way of life is destroyed by the very men to whom they have, against their wishes, given life. Despite their “choice,” it seems that women must always contend with men, even if they find respite in a room of their own. The women in Leonora’s walled garden have to leave their beautiful paradise at the end of the day. They must return to their fathers and husbands. The women who have enjoyed the “ventilation of the heart” in Satrapi’s Embroideries don’t have a lock on the door to ensure their privacy—Grandpa Satrapi bursts in on them unexpectedly, and although the women combine forces to kick him out of the dining room, the spell is broken. The image we are left with at the end is not of the nine women who have shared their stories with us but of the one man who has disrupted their flow. Susan Rawlings’s need for a space of her own is fulfilled by a room her husband and her children “give” her—it is not enough, it is not what she needs. The drab hotel room where she finds peace can offer her momentarily what is missing from a well-appointed, comfortable room in her husband’s home—but when he invades the grim last resort of a room to which she has retreated, she kills herself. Arcangela Tarabotti and the young wife in “The Yellow Wallpaper” are where they are because men have put them there—for their own good, of course. Tarabotti’s father assures her that she is in the convent for the good of her soul, while John’s wife is in her room with the yellow wallpaper for the good of her health. But in the end, “good” intentions don’t matter. Tarabotti remains in her convent, buried alive; Jane “escapes” into madness. Nowhere are the dangers for women more obvious than they are in Gilead and the “village of B.”—or, for that matter, in the Islamic Republic of Iran—where women have no choice at all. They occupy rooms of their own because there is no other place for them. As for Valerie Solanas’s vision of an all-female world? It’s possible to create a women’s world, but why bother? “Why should there be future generations?” she asks. “What is their




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purpose?” In the end, “Why should we care that there is no generation to succeed us?” It is in the context of such dire cases that we need to reconsider the whole question of agency when it comes to women’s worlds. Do any of these creations represent real female “choice”? Would any woman dream of having a room of her own if she were in possession of freedom, security, and independence? Already in the fifteenth century Christine de Pizan had a room of her own, but she was never really alone there. Her room was filled with voices of male authority—the City of Ladies would hardly have been necessary if the world of men weren’t so inimical to women. Five centuries later, Virginia Woolf (or her narrator) is still grappling with those same voices. “The shadow of the ‘I’” falls not only across the page of the book she is reading, it fills her room—even though she has a lock on the door. And in her Tehran home, Azar Nafisi is still “pinned,” like Lolita, by the mullahs, imams, and morality squads outside her living room. Inside this all-female space she may find “pause from real life,” but once the morning is over, she has to acknowledge the “repressive reality outside the room.” In the words of one of her young students, entering their all-female world is like “leaving the dark, dank cell she lived in to surface for a few hours into open air and sunshine.” But then, when the morning is over, she has to return once more to her “cell.” The truth remains that, even inside, the reality outside is always present—it “created and shaped our intimacies,” Nafisi writes. *

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Here, then, is the paradox we are left with. Dangers abound in a room of one’s own—to be sure, freedom and strength may only be found there, but despair, madness, and suicide are always there as well. And yet, despite all the dangers, having a room of one’s own still represents the best chance for salvation. In her 2007 Nobel Lecture, Doris Lessing seems to recall Virginia Woolf’s nowfamous essay when she poses what she calls “the essential question”: “Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you. . . ?” she asks. Like Woolf, Lessing is particularly focused on the needs of writers: “Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas—inspiration.” She continues, “When writers talk to each other, what they discuss is always to do with this imaginative space, this other time. ‘Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?’” Lessing’s words, read originally to members of the Swedish Academy in 2007, speak to us here, now, in a different context, one where women have struggled for so many centuries to find their place in the world: “And we, the old ones, want to whisper into those innocent ears. ‘Have you still got


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your space? Your soul, your own and necessary place where your own voices may speak to you, you alone, where you may dream. Oh, hold onto it, don’t let it go.’” For all of the dangers there might be, for all of the fears, hardships, and sorrows that they have suffered, women have been clinging to the dream of having a room of their own for more than six hundred years. For all the dangers there are, for all of the potential for loss and failure, for madness and despair, the message is still the same. That room is your best hope for salvation. In that room you will find freedom—the freedom to dream. Hold onto it. Don’t let it go. Chapter 9 Notes: Suggestions for Further Reading Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books was originally published in the United States in 2003 (New York: Random House); a Random House paperback edition (2004) includes a reader’s guide that offers questions for discussion and additional readings. In 2008, Nafisi published a follow-up memoir, Things I’ve Been Silent About: Memories of a Prodigal Daughter (New York: Random House); this second memoir, now available in paperback (Random House, 2008), is an excellent companion to Reading Lolita in Tehran. The text of Doris Lessing’s brilliant Nobel Lecture, “On Not Winning the Nobel Prize,” is available online at the Nobel website: http://nobelprize. org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2007/lessing-lecture_en.html, accessed 14 December 2010. The title of this lecture suggests the kind of sly humor and double meaning we see in The Cleft: it leads us to believe that Lessing’s address will include something of the anger (or disappointment?) of a woman who had been on the Nobel list for a long time (her first novel was published in 1946) but who had seen the prize go to others. (When she finally won the prize, Lessing was, at age eighty-seven, the oldest recipient of the award—and only the eleventh woman to be awarded the prize for literature since it was established in 1902.) But rather than detailing any personal grievance or disappointment, Lessing’s address speaks to the lack of opportunity for others, especially for those who don’t have even the barest of necessities—a blackboard or paper, for example, not to mention access to education. Like Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing is imagining all the books that aren’t there. For reasons of health, Lessing was unable to attend the awards ceremony at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm; therefore the lecture was presented




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by Nicholas Pearson, her publisher. In addition to the text of Lessing’s Nobel Lecture, the Nobel site offers a broadcast of Pearson’s delivery of the speech, and it also offers a number of other brief video documentaries, including an awards ceremony for Lessing in London in January 2008, where she received the Nobel, a documentary about her life, a telephone interview following the Nobel announcement, recorded on 11 October 2007, and an interview filmed in her London home on 14 April 2008.


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Rooms of Our Own: More Suggestions I have provided bibliographic information about all of the texts discussed in Reading Women’s Worlds at the end of each chapter. Rather than repeating that information here, this bibliography provides additional readings linked to the genres and themes of each chapter.

Chapter 2: I Have a Dream Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies is not the only late-medieval text that focuses on an all-female space. Two other fifteenth-century works, The Assembly of Ladies and The Isle of Ladies, also imagine women’s worlds. In The Assembly of Ladies, we encounter a “true paradise” for women called Pleasant Regard, presided over by Lady Loyalty. As these two names suggest, the narrative poem is allegorical, just as Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies. But unlike “Christine,” who insists that her encounter with Reason, Rectitude, and Justice is not a dream, The Assembly of Ladies is cast in the popular medieval form of the dream vision; the poem begins with an unidentified female narrator wandering in a garden. She falls asleep and dreams about Lady Loyalty, Pleasant Regard, and a great assembly of courtly ladies who gather there. The Isle of Ladies is also a dream vision, but in this poem, the dreamer is male; he falls asleep and “awakes” to find himself on an island inhabited only by women. Both poems date to the late fifteenth century, probably written between 1475 and 1500. The poems are available online, edited by Derek Pearsall: The Assembly of Ladies is at http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/assemtxt.htm, accessed 14 December 2010, The Isle of Ladies at http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/ islefrm.htm, accessed 14 December 2010. Pearsall’s text of both poems is also available in a fully annotated paperback prepared for classroom use: The Floure and the Leafe, The Assembly of Ladies, The Isle of Ladies (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, TEAMS Middle English Texts, 1997). Since the narrator of The Assembly of Ladies is female, the argument has been made that the author, like the dreamer, is female. About the question of female authorship, Pearsall concludes, “Women had occasion and good reason to write in


Bibliography


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Bibliography

Chapter 3: We Need to Talk Marilyn French’s now-classic novel, The Women’s Room, offers a wonderful companion reading for the conversations “recorded” in Moderata Fonte’s The Worth of Women and Marjane Satrapi’s Embroideries. Originally published in 1977, The Women’s Room anatomizes marriage and motherhood in 1950s and 1960s America and follows the emerging feminist consciousness of Mira Ward—the novel’s real strength lies not so much in its sprawling plot or in its character development as in the vivid conversations between Mira, her neighbors (stifled suburban housewives), and, as the novel progresses, her growing circle of female friends and acquaintances who share her emerging awareness of their common plight as daughters, housewives, and mothers. The novel is narrated by an unnamed woman who has “survived” all the events recounted in the novel but who is haunted by dreams of the past. (The novel’s title can be interpreted in a number of ways, but the first chapter begins with Mira, who has hidden herself in “the ladies’ room”—that is, the women’s bathroom.) French’s novel was reissued in a new Penguin paperback shortly after her death on 2 May 2009. Used copies of the 1977 original (New York: Simon and Schuster, Summit Books) are widely available; the 2009 reprint (New York: Penguin Books) contains a foreword by Dorothy Allison, a foreword by Linsey Abrams, and a new preface by French.

Chapter 4: Design for Living Among the many younger women whom Mary Astell inspired and encouraged is Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who was just a child when A Serious Proposal to the Ladies was first published in 1694. Montagu later wrote to her daughter about the effect that reading Astell’s proposal had on her—she dreamed about dedicating herself to following the course Astell outlined: “It was a favorite scheme of mine when I was fifteen, and had I then been mistress of an independent fortune, would certainly have executed it and elected myself lady abbess.” Astell and Montagu became personally acquainted at some point before 1718, because after Montagu returned from a trip to Turkey, where her husband had been ambassador, she knew Astell well enough to share with her a manuscript she had written during her travels. Despite Astell’s encouragement, Montagu’s so-called Turkish embassy letters were not published until 1763, the year after Montagu’s death and more than thirty years after Astell’s. In my reading I found one online source claiming that the British Library’s first edition copy of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies is “inscribed in Mary [Astell]’s handwriting to Lady Mary Montagu.” The British Library’s online


the fifteenth century, but not like this” (31). Although The Isle of Ladies imagines a world inhabited only by women, Pearsall argues that the poem articulates “a dream of male desire, in which the skill of women in deflecting men’s sexual drive . . . is overcome by the power of the God of Love, who operates here, as in the Roman de la Rose, exclusively to the furtherance of male sexual desire” (65).


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catalogue does note that this copy of Astell’s work is “inscribed by the author,” but I haven’t been able to verify whether this is an inscription to Montagu. I’d like to believe it is. From our point of view, the most remarkable of Montagu’s letters was written on 1 April 1717, addressed simply “To the Lady ---.” This letter, in which Montagu gives an account of her visit to a Turkish bath, has drawn attention for a number of reasons—The Norton Anthology of Literature includes Montagu’s letter in a “Norton Topics Online” unit on “Travel, Trade, and the Expansion of Empire,” for example, while other critics focus on the orientalizing, eroticizing elements of Montagu’s letter, in which “the sexuality of the Muslim woman is increasingly organized as a scopophilic experience, both voyeuristic and fetishistic,” in the words of one such academic reader. But from our point of view here, examining women’s worlds, Montagu’s letter can be read from a very different perspective. Montagu begins with a specific reference to the “new world” in which she finds herself in her travels, a world very different from that which she is used to, a world where, in her words, “everything I see appears to me a change of scene.” In Sophia, known for its hot baths, she decides to experience something of this “new world” for herself, though she must go “incognito,” as she tells her correspondent. She describes the baths as a series of five magnificent domed structures, open to the sky. They represent an exclusively female space, a world where women are safely secluded from the larger society outside, a world where they are watched over by a “porteress.” This is a busy place—the bagnio she visits is already full of women at ten in the morning. Inside the baths, however, Montagu is no longer “incognito,” since she is still wearing her “travelling habit,” thus identifying herself as a western woman—by contrast, the two hundred or so women secluded there are, in Montagu’s words, “in the state of nature, that is, in plain English, stark naked, without any beauty or defect concealed.” Certainly we can view this scene as a western European woman’s contact with the exotic “other,” or as Montagu’s “salacious need to penetrate these female domains and expose this activity for the voyeuristic pleasure of a male readership.” But our context here, focusing on women’s worlds, provides another way of interpreting Montagu’s account of her experience of the women’s baths in Sophia. In this context, her experience is one of a woman who has spent her life in a world entirely dominated by men, a woman who encounters an all-female space. Whether we use the image of a city of ladies, of “a room of one’s own,” or of a commonwealth of women, Montagu is showing us a real-world version of what Astell described as a “happy retreat,” a paradise, “such a paradise as . . . mother Eve forfeited.” Montagu herself makes this comparison explicit: “Yet there was not the least wanton smile or immodest gesture amongst them,” she writes, “they walked and moved with the same majestic grace, which Milton describes our general mother with.” The women occupy this privileged space only temporarily; like Fonte’s women in Venice or Satrapi’s women in Tehran, they must return to the world of men. But for a brief time, they share an absolute freedom and intimacy that will sustain them through all the hours they spend outside their refuge. If we look at Montagu’s experience in the Turkish baths from this new perspective, the


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encumbrance of her “travelling habit” and the “stays” that seem to keep her “locked up” inside it gain an altogether different significance. In describing the Turkish baths as a kind of Garden of Eden, inhabited by women “in a state of nature,” unburdened by shame or artifice, Montagu shows herself, by contrast, to be bound, literally and figuratively, unable to join in this community of women, forever separate from them. There is no “happy retreat” from the world of men for Montagu, no place to break free of the ties that bind her. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish embassy letters are available online through Project Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/17520, accessed 14 December 2010. An affordable paperback, Turkish Embassy Letters (New York: Little, Brown, Virago, 1994), edited by Malcolm Jack and with an introduction by Anita Desai, is also available. Selections from the letters are also widely anthologized in textbooks like The Norton Anthology of English Literature, for example. Mary Astell’s “serious proposal” for an all-female retreat had a powerful effect on a writer we did not mention in Chapter 4, the novelist Sarah Robinson Scott. In Millenium Hall, published in 1762, Sarah Scott creates a women’s world that embodies Astell’s proposal for a community where women could escape “the hurry and noise of the world”—and where they could also avoid men and marriage. At the same time, in unexpected ways, Millenium Hall prefigures some of the key elements in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and in Doris Lessing’s The Cleft, which we examine in Chapter 5. The full title of Scott’s novel is A Description of Millenium Hall, and the Country Adjacent: Together with the Characters of the Inhabitants, and Such Historical Anecdotes and Reflections, as May Excite in the Reader Proper Sentiments of Humanity, and Lead the Mind to the Love of Virtue. This title signals us that we will not be viewing events from the perspective of the women inside Millenium Hall but that we will see the hall and its “inhabitants” from the outside—we are presented here with something closer to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish embassy letters than to Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure. The point of view is sympathetic, but it is the perspective of an outsider rather than an insider. Most critically, as in Herland and The Cleft, this perspective is male—on the title page of the 1762 edition of Scott’s Millenium Hall, the author is identified as “a Gentleman on his Travels.” A male writer observes, records, and judges everything he sees. Our unidentified male narrator stumbles by accident upon Millenium Hall. He learns the history of the women who have created this all-female retreat through his conversations with Mrs. Maynard, a kind of reimagined Lady Reason, who instructs our narrator and responds to his questions with a series of illustrative stories about the hall’s founding mothers: “The History of Mrs. Mancel and Mrs. Morgan,” “The History of Lady Mary Jones,” “The History of Mrs. Selvyn,” and “The History of Mrs. Trentham.” Each of these embedded narratives represents a case study. In each, Mrs. Maynard anatomizes the relationships between men and women. We could distill her lessons to their most fundamental point: women are failed by everyone and everything. Mothers are nonexistent, wicked stepmothers abound, fathers either die or abandon their daughters, would-be suitors are seducers in disguise, and


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marriage is a trap or, worse, a living hell. A woman can only find truth, faith, comfort, and fulfillment in another woman, but the love of such a friend is a rare find. Most women are frivolous and faithless at best; more often than not, they prove to be vicious and dangerous as well. That the women of Millenium Hall find each other is truly miraculous. Millenium Hall is, as we are repeatedly told, a “paradise,” populated by a “heavenly society.” Scott’s novel is, I suggest, the story of Paradise Regained. But there is a difference here. Paradise has not been reclaimed by Adam and Eve but by Mrs. Morgan, a second Eve, and the partner of her soul, Louisa Mancel, along with the other members of their extended family, Lady Mary Jones, Mrs. Selvyn, Mrs. Trentham, and Mrs. Maynard. Born into the fallen world of men, the women of Millenium Hall have suffered and earned their redemption. They now inhabit a new heaven, one that they created for themselves. Millenium Hall is available in electronic form through Project Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/ etext/26050, accessed 14 December 2010. It is also available in Gary Kelly’s 1995 edition, published by Broadview Press (Peterborough, Ontario [Canada]). I am particularly fond of Walter M. Crittenden’s 1955 A Description of Millenium Hall by Mrs. Sarah Scott, an 18th Century Novel (New York: Bookman Associates) because it was the only copy I could find when I first looked to buy a copy of Scott’s novel—you can on occasion still find used copies of Crittenden’s edition at various online booksellers.

Chapter 5: Paradise Lost The legend of the Amazons has proven very popular over the centuries, not only among male writers. In addition to Christine de Pizan and Moderata Fonte, whom we discuss in this chapter, many other women writers alluded to—and struggled with—the idea of a kingdom of warrior-women. (In Chapter 6, for example, both Arcangela Tarabotti and Valerie Solanas incorporate such references.) But a few other writers might also be considered here. In an exchange of letters with Damiano dal Borgo, dated between 1438 and 1444, the Italian humanist scholar Isotta Nogarola (1418–66) writes to defend women against dal Borgo’s slights. In a letter addressed to Nogarola, he had made a thoughtless reference to the talkativeness of women. In responding to dal Borgo’s remark, Nogarola not only defends women, but she goes on the offense as well. As part of her refutation of dal Borgo’s insult, Nogarola reminds her correspondent of the Amazons: “Did not the Amazons increase their republic without men?” she asks him pointedly. “Did not Marpesia, Lampedo and Orythia subdue the greater part of Europe and occupy a number of cities in Asia without men? For so powerful were these women in their extraordinary knowledge and virtue in war that it seemed impossible for Hercules and Theseus to capture the Amazons’ arms for their king. Penthesilia fought like a man in the Trojan war among the bravest Greeks. . . .” But, although she cites the military skill of the Amazons and reminds dal Borgo of the extent of their dominion, Nogarola’s purpose is not to reclaim their state for


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women, even if it is, like Pizan’s City of Ladies, an imagined one. Nogarola wants only a victory over dal Borgo; “if you confess yourself beaten,” she says, “I shall congratulate you for having surrendered to me—a not insignificant victory.” Insignificant or not, Nogarola has a room of her own, and she intends to keep it. As one of her contemporaries notes, the remarkable Isotta Nogarola reads, writes, and receives her scholarly visitors in her libraria cella, her “little library”—she is not interested in constructing a city of ladies for other women. Her interest is in maintaining a place for herself in the res publica litterarum, in the republic of letters. Isotta Nogarola’s letters are available in a paperback edition, Complete Writings: Letterbook, Dialogue on Adam and Eve, Orations, translated and edited by Margaret L. King and Diana Robin, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). The humanist-trained Laura Cereta (1469–99) also briefly toys with the idea of an all-female kingdom, but she is not recalling the kingdom of the Amazons. Like Nogarola, Cereta is responding to a male writer; her correspondent has praised Cereta as unique among women, singling her out for her exceptional accomplishments. Cereta rejects this praise. The gifted and powerful woman is not extraordinary, she argues in her return letter, written toward the end of the fifteenth century; rather, Cereta argues, as a woman she comes from “a noble lineage . . . legitimate and sure.” She has descended from “an enduring race,” a muliebris res publica, a “republic of women.” Cereta suggests that, while men may occupy positions of political and social power, women have their own abilities, which may challenge, perhaps even frighten, men. “I shall make a bold summary of the matter,” she writes. “Yours is the authority, ours is the inborn ability. But instead of manly strength, we women are naturally endowed with cunning; instead of a sense of security, we are suspicious. Down deep we women are content with our lot. But you, enraged and maddened . . . are like someone who has been frightened. . . . Look, do you tremble from fear alone of my name? I am savage neither in mind nor hand. What is it you fear?” Laura Cereta’s letter is in Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist, translated and edited by Diana Robin, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Just as Margaret Cavendish was marching Lady Victorious and her Amazonian Army out onto the stage of her imagination, in Bell in Campo Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, duchesse de Montpensier (1627–93), and Françoise Bertaut de Motteville, an attendant at the court of Anne of Austria, exchange several letters in which they dream of fashioning an alternate universe. Montpensier, known to her contemporaries as la Grande Mademoiselle, was the first cousin of the French king, Louis XIV, and she had already had something of an Amazonian moment in her life. In 1648, when she was just twenty-one years old, she had plunged herself into the series of French civil wars known collectively as the Fronde. During the second phase of the civil wars, the so-called Fronde of Princes, Montpensier took command of one of the armies on the rebels’ side and took the city of Orléans. In July of 1652 she was in Paris during the battle of the Faubourg Saint Antoine; commanding the Bastille and its adjoining walls, she opened the gates of Paris to


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Louis II de Bourbon, prince de Condé, and his army, then saved the rebel leader and his troops by turning the guns of the Bastille against royal forces. Like the legendary Amazons, to whom she and her fellow frondeuses were compared, Montpensier had armed herself and gone to war; like the Amazons, too, she would establish her own state, at least in her imagination. But rather than imagining a kingdom of powerful warrior-women, Montpensier imagines establishing a “rural Republic” where she can reign as queen. In a series of letters exchanged between May of 1660 and August of 1661, Montpensier and Motteville design their perfect state. But theirs is to be no City of Ladies, a point that is clear from the outset. Montpensier’s imaginary republic is to be peopled by those “of the highest rank of both sexes.” While thus admitting both men and women to her retreat, she does propose one condition: “I would rather there were no married people and that everyone would either be widowed or have renounced this sacrament, for it is said to be an unfortunate undertaking.” Their focus on marriage is not frivolous. As we have seen, the institution of marriage is a constant concern for women dreaming about rooms of their own and cities of ladies. Both women recognized that marriage was an institution that destroyed women’s freedom and opportunity, no matter how high her place in society. It is a destiny that Montpensier herself had sedulously avoided. As she describes it, marriage is “this dependence to which custom subjects us, often against our will and because of family obligations of which we have been the victim.” Marriage “is what has caused us to be named the weaker sex”: “Let us at last deliver ourselves from this slavery; let there be a corner of the world in which it can be said that women are their own mistresses and do not have all the faults that are attributed to them; and let us celebrate ourselves for the centuries to come through a way of life that will immortalize us.” But, in the end, their debate about marriage is moot. The two women ultimately give up their dream of a “famous Republic.” In her last letter to Motteville, dated 1 August 1661, Montpensier writes that she is living quietly and in seclusion. “I do almost exactly what I would do if we were already in our retreat,” she tells Motteville, adding, “I read and I work at my needlework.” Her “most agreeable hours,” she writes, “are spent dreaming” about their plan. For the letters exchanged between Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, Duchesse de Montpensier, and Françoise Bertaut de Motteville, see Against Marriage: The Correspondence of La Grande Mademoiselle, translated and edited by Joan DeJean, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).


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Chapter 6: Hell Hath No Fury Although Arcangela Tarabotti finds convent life a living hell, convent life actually provided women with real opportunities to live—and flourish—in all-female “worlds.” Communities of female religious date to the earliest years of Christianity, and it is in these “cities of ladies” that we may see what women could accomplish when they occupied rooms of their own—for many hundreds of years, monastic life


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offered women intellectual, educational, political, and bureaucratic opportunities in addition to spiritual and religious discipline. In the Holy Roman Empire, for example, many ecclesiastical territories were ruled by princess-abbesses. Their imperial abbeys often functioned as small, autonomous states that could raise their own armies, coin their own money, establish their own educational systems, oversee their own economic concerns, and seat a representative at the imperial Diet; in some cases, the princess-abbess even had the right to vote at this assembly. Perhaps the most well-known of these ecclesiastical territories is the abbey of Gandersheim. (See Peter Dronke’s comments on the “small autonomous princedom” of Gandersheim in his Women Writers of the Middle Ages [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984], 55–57.) Much of the writing by women during the Middle Ages and Renaissance is the result of the opportunities afforded them in the convent; in addition to access to education, they frequently found male mentors and supporters, and they had time to devote to their intellectual pursuits. At Gandersheim, for example, the tenthcentury nun Hrotsvitha wrote a remarkable series of plays, verse saints’ lives, two epic poems (one on the history of Gandersheim and the other a history of the Saxon dynasty), and a short poem on St. John. (See Katharina Wilson, ed., Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: A Florilegium of Her Works, The Library of Medieval Women [Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 1998].) But, like Tarabotti in the seventeenth century, not all of these remarkable women writers entered into the religious life willingly. The extraordinary Heloise (c. 1100 or 1101–c. 1163 or c. 1164) tells her own story in the series of letters she exchanges with Peter Abelard. Like Arcangela Tarabotti so many centuries later, Heloise is compelled to become a nun. As she famously writes to Abelard, she enters the convent not because of her love for God but because of her love for him: “immediately at your bidding I changed my clothing along with my mind, in order to prove you the sole possessor of my body and my will alike.” In another letter she writes, “It was your command, not love of God, which made me take the veil.” Like Tarabotti, Heloise is filled with rage and despair—and she fears for her eternal soul. (See M. T. Clanchy, ed. and Betty Radice, trans., The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, rev. ed. [New York, Penguin Books, Penguin Classics, 2003], with an excellent introduction by Radice, viii–lxxxiv.) The Benedictine nun, visionary, mystic, musician, medical authority, preacher, poet, and advisor—often unsolicited—of popes and kings, Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), has become something of a medieval rock star, especially since the 900th anniversary of her birth in 1998. When she was a small child, Hildegard was “given” to the monastic life, as an oblate, by her parents—their dedication of their tenth and youngest child to the religious life was a kind of spiritual tithe. Hildegard seems to have been about eight years old at the time, and although she took her final vows willingly at the age of fourteen and certainly had a spectacularly productive intellectual, spiritual, and public life, she did argue strongly, many years later, against the practice of committing a child to the religious life until he or she has reached the “age of reason,” or consent. (For a sampling of Hildegard’s literary


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production, see Mark Atherton, trans. Hildegard of Bingen: Selected Writings [New York: Penguin Books, Penguin Classics, 2001]; the number of books by and about Hildegard of Bingen [and recordings of her music] is large, as a cursory check on Amazon shows.) For the writing of these medieval and early modern women, many of them women living in monastic cities of ladies, see the Boydell and Brewer series, Library of Medieval Women, and the University of Chicago series, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. While extraordinarily productive, not many of these women reflected on the particulars of their unique situation as women, occupying all-female worlds. But a couple of women religious do, and their work is worth considering here. A particularly interesting companion text for Arcangela Tarabotti’s Paternal Tyranny is Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle, written in 1577. Like Tarabotti, Teresa struggled with the restrictions and deprivations of convent life. In her Way to Perfection, for example, she addresses herself directly to God: “you did not abhor women . . . when you were on earth.” She asks, “Is it not enough, Lord, that the world keeps us enclosed and incapable of doing anything useful for You in public or daring to state truths that we weep in secret, for You to hear our rightful plea?” As one way of allowing women who are physically restricted and deprived to have a sense of freedom and plenty, she uses the metaphor of a journey to encourage the nuns whom she addresses in Interior Castle. To this end, she begins, “I began to think of the soul as if it were a castle made of a single diamond or of very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, just as in Heaven there are many mansions.” Addressed directly to her “sisters,” nuns at the convent of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, her Interior Castle encourages them to explore this castle—it is a journey of faith, accomplished through their prayers and meditations. This “interior castle” is the ultimate all-female space, at once both more than a room of one’s own and less—each woman finds a private world of her own, inside herself, waiting to be explored. Teresa of Ávila’s work is available in several recent versions at different prices and under slightly different titles, among them: Interior Castle: The Classic Book with Spiritual Commentary (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, Christian Classics, 2007), with a commentary by Dennis Billy; Interior Castle (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Dover Thrift Edition, 2007), edited and translated by Allison Peers; and Interior Castle: Or, the Mansions (Charleston, SC: Forgotten Books, 2007). A Classics in Western Spirituality edition, first published in 1979, is also still in print: Teresa of Avila: Interior Castle, translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press), with a preface by Raimundo Panikkar. The full text of Interior Castle is also available online through the Internet Sacred Text Archive at http://sacred-texts.com/ chr/tic/index.htm, accessed 14 December 2010. Another interesting companion for Arcangela Tarabotti is Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Born in San Miguel, Nepantha, two days’ travel from Mexico City, in 1648, the gifted Juana Inés de la Cruz de Asbaje read widely in her grandfather’s library and attended a local school for girls. She was sent to live with relatives in Mexico City and was ultimately introduced in the court of the viceroy. Refusing marriage and intending to further her educational and literary career, she entered the Convent of the Discalced Carmelites of St. Joseph in 1667, but ultimately professed her vows


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at the Convent of Santa Paula of the Order of St. Jerome in 1669, where she remained until her death. There, as Deborah Weagel writes, “Sor Juana had both a room of her own and money to live in relatively sophisticated surroundings.” As Weagel concludes, “in her own way Sor Juana succeeded in achieving some of Virginia Woolf ’s ideals much before Woolf.” For a revealing discussion of Sor Juana and her creation of a room of her own, see Weagel’s “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in Seventeenth-Century New Spain and Finding a Room of One’s Own,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 7, no. 1 (2005), available at http://docs.lib. purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1256&context=clcweb, accessed 14 December 2010. Margaret Sayers Peden’s anthology of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s work, Poems, Protest, and a Dream: Selected Writings (New York: Penguin Books, Penguin Classics, 1997) is a wonderful introduction to the rich variety of Sor Juana’s work. You may also want to explore the website of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Project at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~sorjuana/, accessed 14 December 2010.

Chapter 7: Madwomen in the Attic A fascinating variation on the theme of “madwomen in the attic” is Amber Reeves’s 1914 novel, A Lady and Her Husband. I first stumbled on a reference to this superb novel in a brief article, “A Room of Her Own,” by Margaret Drabble, who herself had just discovered Reeves’s A Lady and Her Husband: “The most curious and interesting section of this novel comes towards the end,” Drabble observed, when the novel’s protagonist, Mary Heyham, “leaves home secretly” (The Guardian, 2 April 2005, online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/apr/02/featuresreviews. guardianreview33, accessed 14 December 2010). If “The Yellow Wallpaper” shows us a young wife and mother, whose child is still a baby, and if “To Room Nineteen” shows us a woman married for twelve years, the mother of school-age children, Reeves’s novel shows us a woman whose children are grown. During the course of the novel, Mary’s first grandchild is born. The lives of these three fictional women thus offer us a broad view of a woman’s career as wife and mother. Although Mary Heyham seems to emerge intact from her submersion in these suffocating roles, the picture of marriage and motherhood that Reeves paints is not pretty. Unfortunately, Amber Reeves’s A Lady and Her Husband, first published in 1914 (London: W. Heinemann, and New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons), has never been reprinted. I read the novel by borrowing a copy through Interlibrary Loan, and if you have access to this service, I recommend discovering Reeves’s amazing novel for yourself. Although I had learned of Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen” from my friend and colleague Tom Campbell, to whom this book is dedicated, I am grateful to Margaret Drabble’s piece in The Guardian for drawing attention to the thematic link between Reeves’s novel and Lessing’s short story. Finally, one further suggestion for reading. “The Yellow Wallpaper,” A Lady and Her Husband, and “To Room Nineteen” all focus on middle-class wives and mothers seeking relief from the oppressive burden of ideological views of appropriate female behavior, crystallized in the ideal of the “angel in the house.” Simone de


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Beauvoir’s 1943 novel, L’Invitée, provides a fascinating companion reading to the texts we’ve examined in this chapter. The novel’s female protagonist, Françoise, has a room of her own—she has two rooms, actually, an office in which to write and a room in which she lives, relishing her privacy and independence. She also has meaningful work (she’s a writer) and an identity of her own. She has a lover, Pierre, but she has eschewed the bourgeois roles of wife and mother. Instead, she and Pierre have fashioned a life based on freedom and mutual respect. But into this harmonious relationship comes Xavière, a younger woman. Having a room—and a life—of her own does not keep Françoise from becoming a madwoman in the attic, but instead of turning on the gas and killing herself, Françoise turns on the gas and kills Xavière, who has become her rival. De Beauvoir’s first novel, L’Invitée, is available in an affordable paperback translation: She Came to Stay (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999). For a very intriguing reading of Simone de Beauvoir’s novels, see Alison F. Fell’s “The Perils of a Room of One’s Own: Space in Simone de Beavoir’s L’Invitée, Le Sang des autres, and Les bouches inutiles,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 39, no. 3 (2003): 267–77. Fell notes that in the same year that Woolf published A Room of One’s Own, advising women that they needed to have a room of their own, “twenty-year-old Simone de Beauvoir was savouring the delights of just such a lifestyle” (267). Fell argues that “Woolf ’s insistence on the necessity for women of a room of one’s own resonates throughout Beauvoir’s writing” and notes that the female characters in Beauvoir’s fiction demonstrate the “need to escape from the stifling limitations of spaces controlled by patriarchal power structures.” In rooms of their own, Beauvoir’s female characters fashion lives independent of conventional domestic roles. But Beauvoir’s female characters also show the danger that having a room of their own can pose for women. Such rooms can be sites of “imprisonment” and “siege.” They can also become places of “isolation and madness.” As we see in She Came to Stay, women’s rooms can be seen as “places of claustrophobic sequestration in which women suffer crises of existential anguish or insanity” (269).

Chapter 8: Brave New Worlds Margaret Atwood describes The Handmaid’s Tale as “speculative fiction,” a category that might well include Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and Doris Lessing’s The Cleft—indeed, sex, sexuality, gender, gender difference, and reproduction are among the most frequently explored themes in speculative fiction. Although I am not a reader of speculative fiction myself, I have found that an excellent source for exploring the genre is the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (http://www.isfdb.org/cgibin/index.cgi, accessed 14 December 2010). Over the years, a number of students who have read Atwood’s novel have suggested many science fiction, fantasy, and speculative novels with which it might be paired, including a number of groundbreaking feminist utopias originally written in the 1970s that are still in print: Joanna Russ’s 1975 The Female Male (New York: Beacon Press, 2000), Suzy McKee Charnas’s 1974 Walk to the End of the World and her 1978


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Bibliography

Motherlines (published together as The Slave and the Free [New York: Tom Doherty Associates, Orb Edition, 1999]), and Marge Piercy’s 1976 Woman on the Edge of Time (New York: Fawcett Books, 1985). All three novels show all-female alternatives to contemporary society, Russ’s Whileaway, Charnas’s Holdfast, and Piercy’s 2137. One of the more interesting comparisons to Atwood’s novel that students have brought to my attention is Sheri S. Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, Bantam Books, 1989). Like the Republic of Gilead, which has come into being after a “catastrophe” engulfs the United States, Tepper’s novel also takes place after a catastrophe, in this case a nuclear war. Set three hundred years in the future, the novel focuses much of its plot inside Marthatown, one of the all-female cities of Women’s Country. The Gate to Women’s Country weaves threads of Amazonian mythology into its plot—men still survive as warriors, living outside Women’s Country, but they mix with the women of Women’s Country during a special annual festival, and women who give birth to male children send them away to their fathers. There are also echoes of the Republic of Gilead in another group in Tepper’s novel, the fundamentalist Holylanders, a struggling, male-dominated society that practices polygamy and subjects wives to their husbands’ dominance and control. More recently, playwright Ann Marie Healy’s What Once We Felt premiered in New York (Lincoln Center LCT3, 9–21 November 2009) and then opened in Chicago (About Face Theater, 3 February–7 March 2010). Described by the playwright as “a terrifying and hilarious romp through the annals of genocide, suicide, bad art and good manners,” Healy’s play is also a work of speculative fiction, set at some point in the future (following a devastating “Transition”) and offering a dystopian view of a women’s world: a totalitarian society in which men have ceased to exist and in which women are able to reproduce without them. In Healy’s allfemale future, though, the kinds of class distinctions we see in The Handmaid’s Tale are maintained. Healthy women, known as Keepers, can download a baby from a catalog, while others, the Tradepacks, are regarded as “damaged” in some way, kept in menial positions, and not allowed to have a child.

Chapter 9: Still Crazy after All These Years In Marjane Satrapi’s Embroideries and Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, we see small groups of women who willingly restrict their freedom in order to gain their liberty, Satrapi’s family and friends enjoying their conversation in a dining room in Tehran, Nafisi and her students sharing their conversation in a living room in Tehran. I would probably not have read either of these books except for a student who wanted to do an independent study on women writers and filmmakers in Iran. She had taken my Chaucer course, and I don’t know why she thought I would be a good candidate for directing her independent study, but she was so enthusiastic—and persuasive— that I agreed. Although the independent study never materialized, I had already bought these two books, along with Satrapi’s two Persepolis comics. Without this student, her plans for an independent study, and my purchase of these books in advance of her independent study, my project here would never have taken shape.


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The number of films and books produced by Iranian women in recent years and now available in the United States is very large and growing all the time, but among them, two recent memoirs not only supplement the history of Iran offered by Satrapi and Nafizi, but also relate extraordinary stories of women forced into rooms of “their own.” In 2009, Haleh Esfandiari published My Prison, My Home, an account of her extraordinary ordeal in Tehran, where she had traveled to visit her elderly mother (New York: HarperCollins, Ecco, 2009). First subjected to what she thought was a car-jacking on 30 December 2006, as she headed to the airport to return to the United States, Esfandiari was arrested and sent to Evin Prison, where she was kept in solitary confinement for 105 days. In order to preserve her sanity and courage while she was being systematically interrogated and isolated, Esfandiari devises a rigorous daily schedule for herself, one filled with both physical and mental exercises, including the “writing” of two books in her imagination. By refusing to curl up and sleep her days away, Esfandiari avoids the illness, madness, and despair that she fears. Equally harrowing and informative is Roxana Saberi’s Between Two Worlds: My Life and Captivity in Iran (New York: Harper Collins, 2010). An Iranian-American working in Iran, Saberi was taken from her home on 31 January 2009 and imprisoned in Evin Prison, spending her first few days in solitary confinement. Sentenced to eight years in prison for espionage, she was ultimately released on 11 May 2009.


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Page numbers for illustrations are in bold face Amazons, as imagined by men, 101–3, 112; as reimagined by women, 61, 103–5, 113–14, 149, 150, 227–29, 234 “angel in the house,” 162, 175, 183–84, 232 anger. See women and anger The Assembly of Ladies, 6, 217, 218, 223–24 Astell, Mary (1666–1731), 108, 113, 117, 145 life and work, 71, 73–74, 82, 93–94 in the literary canon, 82, 83–84, 85 and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 224–25 Reflections on Marriage, 74, 93; women and suffering, 132 and Sarah Scott, 226 A Serious Proposal to the Ladies: 218; authorship and audience, 83, 93; education, 88–89, 90, 91, 92, 93; five hundred pounds, 96; genre, 83–84, 86, 92–93; marriage, 92; mirrors, 87, 216; reader responses, 84, 87–89, 93; religious retreat as women’s world, 5–6, 74, 89–91, 92, 93, 101, 113, 215, 219, 226; same-sex alternative to heterosexual marriage, 91–92, 116; structure and style, 84–87, 88; title page, 83

and Valerie Solanas, 145, 151, 156 and Virginia Woolf, 39, 95–98 Atwood, Margaret (1939–), 138 The Handmaid’s Tale: 213, 218; animal metaphors, 207, 208; autonomy, 189; complicity, 201–2; disconnection, 201, 217; fear of madness, 200; first-person narrator, 188, 193–94; genre, 188; infantilization, 200, 206; interchangeability of women, 202–3, 205; isolation, 189, 209; loss of identity, 189, 190, 204; masks and masking, 204, 205; men’s role, 209–10; mirrors, 204–5, 216; names and naming, 189, 216; narrative frame, 194–95; single room as women’s world, 189, 199, 211, 219; sexual slavery, 189, 201, 210; structure and style, 192–95, 199; war, 189, 190–91 science fiction v. speculative fiction, 188, 233–34 Ávila, Teresa of (1515–82), Interior Castle, 6, 231


Index

Beauvoir, Simone de (1908–86), L’Invitée (She Came to Stay), 232–33 Bell, Vanessa (1879–1961), 20, 21


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Index

Bertaut, Françoise, madame de Motteville (c. 1621–89), letters exchanged with Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, Anne-Marie-Louise, duchesse de Montpensier, 5, 228–29 Cavendish, Margaret, duchess of Newcastle (1623–73) life and work, 71–73, 74, 75, 81–82, 89 in the literary canon, 98–99 Bell in Campo, 98; and Lady Victorious, 228; as women’s world, 75 The Blazing World, 75 and Christine de Pizan, 94 The Convent of Pleasure: frontispiece and title page of Plays, Never before Printed, 82–83; Lady Happy as creator of the Convent of Pleasure, 76, 77; Convent of Pleasure as women’s world, 5, 6, 74, 75, 77–78, 80, 81, 101, 215, 219; reader responses, 80–81; same-sex alternative to heterosexual marriage, 78, 79–80, 81, 91; women in the marriage market, 75–76; women’s suffering in marriage, 76–77, 78–79, 132 The Female Academy, 98, as women’s world, 75 and Virginia Woolf, 26, 74–75, 81, 94–95 Cereta, Laura (1469–99), 228 Charnas, Suzy McKee (1939–), Walk to the End of the World and Motherlines, 233–34 Christine de Pizan. See de Pizan, Christine convents as women’s worlds, 229–32 Cruz, Sor Juana Inéz de la (1648–95), 231–32 Drakulic˙, Slavenka (1949–) author interview, 194, 198–99

S. A Novel about the Balkans, 218; animal metaphors, 207–8; As If I Am Not There (UK title), 196; autonomy, 189; complicity, 202; concentration camp as women’s world, 189–90, 211–12; disconnection, 196, 201, 217; first-person narrator, 196; genre, 188; infantilization, 206–7; interchangeability of women, 203–4; isolation, 208–9; loss of identity, 189, 190, 204; madness, 200–201; masks and masking, 204–5; men’s role, 210, 211; mirrors, 205–6, 216; names and naming, 189, 216; narrative frame, 195–96; point of view, 196–97, 198; sexual slavery, 189–90, 196, 197–98, 200, 201, 210; structure, 195–96, 197–98; war, 189, 191–92; “Women’s Room,” 189–90, 219 Esfandiari, Haleh (1940–), My Prison, My Home, 235 female anger. See women and anger feminist utopias, 233–34 Fonte, Moderata (1555–92) life and work, 5, 46–47, 61–62 in the literary canon, 69 The Worth of Women: 5, 79, 215; Amazons, 104–5; characters, 52–53; education, 61–62; first-person narrator, 48, 62–63, 175; genre, 54–55, 66, 79, 134; names and namelessness, 52, 61; reader responses, 57, 60, 62–63, 64–65; structure, 55–57, 62–63, 64–65, 66; value of women’s conversation, 53, 60–61, 62, 161, 216; walled garden as women’s world, 47–48, 52–53, 67, 77, 101, 218, 219, 225; women’s history,


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61, 62; women’s suffering in marriage, 52, 56–57, 60–61, 132 French, Marilyn (1929–2009), The Women’s Room, 224 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (1860–1935), 209 life and work, 127, 162, 163, 172 Herland, 6, 134, 145; arrival of men in all-female world, 111–12; characters, 107, 111–12; creation story, 113–14; first-person male narrator, 105–7, 108; genre, 111–12, 118–19, 134; Herland as women’s world, 101, 105, 113–14, 127–28; as history, 108, 124; loss of women’s world, 111, 119, 127–28; motherhood and mother love, 116–17, 118; names and naming, 112–13, 215; parthenogenesis, 105, 114; rape and sexual violence, 115–16, 117; reader responses, 105–7, 124–25; same-sex intimacy as alternative to heterosexual marriage, 114, 115, 116, 117, 123; sexual reproduction, 116–17, 126; structure and style, 124–27; women of Herland’s views of “traditional” marriage, 116–17, 118, 123; women’s history, 113–14, 117–18 “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’” 163, 172 With Her in Ourland, 125–26, 127 “The Yellow Wallpaper”: 7, 188, 199, 218; characters, 163, 164, 172, 173–75; first-person narrator, 163, 174–75; and garden, 181–82; “hysteria,” 164–65; infantilization, 167–68, 206; interchangeability of women, 172, 173–74, 202; madness,

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174–75, 180, 183, 219; motherhood, 172–73; physical confinement, 166, 167, 169; a room with yellow wallpaper as women’s world, 162–63, 165–67, 199, 219; sexual infidelity, 177; structure and style, 168, 169–72, 174 Healy, Ann Marie, What Once We Felt, 234 Heloise (c. 1100–c. 1163), 230 Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), 230–31 Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim (c. 935–c. 1002), 230 Hysteria. See women and medicine The Isle of Ladies, 217, 218, 223–24 Juana Inéz de la Cruz. See Cruz, Juana Inéz de la Lessing, Doris (1919–), 209 life and work, 105, 162, 221–22 The Cleft: 134, 226; all-female world, 101, 105, 127–28; characters, 107–8, 119; creation story, 105, 109–10; family, 110, 115, 119–20, 123; first-person male narrator, 105, 107–8, 121–22; as history, 108–11, 120, 121–22; loss of all-female world, 120, 127–28, 162, 219; males as “monsters,” 111, 114; motherhood, 119–20; names and naming, 110, 119, 215; parthenogenesis, 105, 114, 115; rape and sexual violence, 114–15; reader responses, 122–23; sexual reproduction, 115; structure and style, 120–22, 123–24; women’s history, 110 “On Not Winning the Nobel Prize,” 220–21


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Lessing, Doris (1919–)—continued “To Room Nineteen”: 202, 218, 232; characters, 175, 176, 178–79; first-person narrator, 175–76, 177; and garden, 181, 182; “hysteria,” 180; infantilization, 179, 180, 206; interchangeability of women, 175, 177, 179–80, 183; madness and suicide, 178–79, 181, 182–83; motherhood and mothers, 178, 179–80, 182–83; “Mother’s Room,” 163, 179, 219; Room Nineteen as women’s world, 163, 182–83, 219; sexual infidelity, 176–77, 181, 183; structure and style, 175–76, 177; and traditional marriage, 176–77, 178, 180–81 madness. See women and madness male reactions to women’s worlds, 68, 77–78, 80, 108, 112–13 marriage. See women and traditional marriage mirrors and mirroring, 129, 149, 177, 182, 204–6, 216–17; as symbol of female vanity, 35, 43, 87; stereotype reinterpreted, 35–36, 43, 206 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley (1689–1762) life and work, 224 and Mary Astell, 224–25 Turkish Embassy Letters, 97, 225–26 Nafisi, Azar (1947–) life, 2–4, 6, 7 Reading Lolita in Tehran: 2–4, 5, 7–8, 234; disconnection, 217; genre, 2, 4, 213; identity and individuality, 214, 215; living room as women’s world, 4, 213–14, 220; mirrors, 216–17; names and naming, 215;

narrative frame, 214; use of indefinite pronoun, 214; value of women’s conversation, 216 Things I Have Been Silent About: Memories of a Prodigal Daughter, 221 Nightingale, Florence (1820–1910) “Cassandra”: 168; drawing room as women’s world, 168–69; women’s suffering in marriage, 177–78 Nogarola, Isotta (1418–66), 227–28 D’Orléans, Anne-Marie-Louise, duchesse de Montpensier (1627–93), letters exchanged with Françoise Bertaut, madame de Motteville, 5, 228–29 Piercy, Marge (1936–), Woman on the Edge of Time, 234 Pizan, Christine de (c. 1364–c. 1430), 106–7, 218 life and work, 7, 12–13 in the literary canon, 13–14 and Margaret Cavendish, 94 The Book of the City of Ladies: 5, 9–10, 13, 56, 79, 217; Amazons, 103–4; City of Ladies as women’s world, 27–28, 36, 40, 47, 71, 101, 211, 215; as conversation, 23, 43–44, 45, 62; first-person narrator, 17–18, 20, 22, 30–31, 33, 62–63, 217; genre, 26–31, 121, 134, 218; illustration, 18–19; male “authorities,” 17, 31, 34, 35, 36, 44, 220; mirror as symbol, 35–36, 43, 206, 216; names and naming, 37, 216; reader responses, 20, 22, 30–31, 36–38; structure, 26–27; women and education, 29, 34–35; women and speech, 43–45; women’s history, 28–30,


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61, 62; women’s suffering in marriage, 35, 60, 132 Reeves, Amber (1887–1981), A Lady and Her Husband, 218, 232 Russ, Joanna (1937–), The Female Male, 233, 234 Saberi, Roxana (1977–), Between Two Worlds: My Life and Captivity in Iran, 235 same-sex bonds among women. See women and same-sex alternatives to traditional marriage Satrapi, Marjane (1969–) life and work, 48 Embroideries: 214, 234; characters, 49, 50–52, 53–54; dining room as women’s world, 48–49, 67, 68–69, 102, 218, 219; education, 63–64; first-person narrator, 63; genre, 54, 57–60, 63, 66, 134; names and namelessness, 51; reader responses, 57, 65, 68–69; structure, 64, 65, 66–69; title page, 50; value of women’s conversation, 49–50, 53, 64, 66, 161; women’s suffering in marriage, 53–54, 63–64 Persepolis (animated film), 70 Persepolis, Persepolis 2 (graphic memoirs), 48, 58, 59, 234 Scott, Sarah (1720–95) and Mary Astell, 226 Millenium Hall, 6, 218, 226–27 Simone de Beauvoir. See Beauvoir, Simone de Solanas, Valerie (1936–88) life and work, 138, 152–55 in the literary canon, 137–38, 155–56 and Mary Astell, 145, 151, 156 in popular culture, 157, 160 SCUM Manifesto: 6; Amazons, 150; anger, 132, 133–34, 147,

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161, 218; animal metaphors, 147–48, 208; audience, 146; condemnation of fathers, 144–45; creation of women’s world, 6, 131–32, 150–52, 219–20; genre, 134–35, 137–38; male “accomplishments,” 145–46; publication and editions, 139–42, 156; reader responses, 133, 134, 154, 157; same-sex bonds as alternative to heterosexual marriage, 151–52; structure and style, 142, 146, 147, 155–56 “speculative fiction,” 188, 233–34 suffering. See women and suffering Tarabotti, Arcangela (1604–52) life and work, 6, 131, 132, 142, 144, 152, 161 in the literary canon, 156 Paternal Tyranny: 6, 187, 218; Amazons, 149; anger, 132, 133–34, 147, 149–50, 218; animal metaphors, 148, 208; audience, 146–47; condemnation of fathers, 142, 144; convent as women’s world, 131, 148, 152, 156, 219, 229; genre, 135–37; marriage, 148–49; publication, 138–39, 142; reader responses, 133–34, 136–37, 149–50, 157–58; structure and style, 149–50 Tepper, Sheri S. (1929–), The Gate to Women’s Country, 234 Teresa of Ávila. See Ávila, Teresa of “true womanhood,” 162


Index

women and anger, 129–60 passim, 161 women and education, 29, 34–35, 61–62, 63–64, 73, 88–89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 135, 144, 145, 151, 156, 164, 214, 221, 229–32


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women as interchangeable, 172, 173–74, 175, 177, 179–80, 183, 202–4, 205, 214–15 women and madness, 35, 161–86 passim, 200–201, 219 women and medicine, 165, 186; hysteria, 164, 180, 186, 200; rest cure, 7, 162, 163, 164, 165, 171, 180, 186, 199, 200 women and men’s “history,” 25–26, 29, 96–97, 108–10, 117–18, 120, 121–22, 145–46 women and names, naming, namelessness, 16–17, 24, 37, 51, 52, 61, 110, 112–13, 174–75, 189, 215, 216 women and same-sex alternatives to traditional marriage, 54, 56–57, 60–61, 78, 79–80, 81, 91–92, 114, 115, 116, 117, 123, 151–52 women and speech, as female stereotype, 43, 44–46; stereotype reinterpreted, 43–70 passim, 161, 216 women and suffering, 35, 52, 53–54, 56–57, 60–61, 63–64, 76–77, 78–79, 132–33, 145, 177–78 women and traditional marriage, 35, 52, 53–54, 55–57, 60–61, 63–64, 74, 75–77, 78–79, 116–17, 118, 123, 132, 145, 148–49, 161–87 passim women and women’s history, 25–26, 28–30, 61, 62, 110, 113–14, 117–18 women’s world and autonomy, 6, 82, 103, 105, 162, 189, 220, 233 and community, 93, 101, 110, 116, 145, 211, 217, 226 and freedom, 2, 32, 33, 53, 77, 97, 104, 118, 127, 132, 148, 151, 156, 172, 178, 182, 187, 204, 214, 215, 219, 220–21 and isolation, 95, 138, 145, 167, 168, 169–70, 178, 182, 183,

192, 199, 201, 205, 220, 233 and male control, 6, 32, 52, 53, 60, 68–69, 80, 129–60 passim, 161–86 passim, 187–212 passim, 216 and paradox, 215, 220–21 women’s worlds as an alternative, all-female society, 101–28 passim, 131–32, 150–52, 219–20 as lost paradise, 101–28 passim, 219 as permanent shelter, 71–100 passim as prison, 129–60 passim, 161–86 passim, 187–212 passim, 219, 235 as retreat, 9–42 passim, 71–100 passim, 102, 213–22 passim, 226 as temporary occupation of a space, 43–70 passim, 225 Woolf, Virginia (1882–1941), 108, 117, 218 in the literary canon, 11–12 lectures on “Women and Fiction” at Newnham and Girton colleges, 14 on Margaret Cavendish, 26, 74–75, 81, 94–95 and Mary Astell, 39, 95–98 in popular culture, 10–11 4, “Professions for Women”: and the “angel in the house,” 183–84; and five hundred pounds a year, 184 A Room of One’s Own: 4, 10, 145, 168; as conversation, 23; cover illustration, 20, 21; first-person narrator, 15–17, 33, 217; five hundred pounds, 4, 33, 38–39; genre, 23–26, 134; male “authorities,” 31–33, 34, 35, 36, 220; mirror as symbol, 35–36, 43, 205, 216; names and naming, 16–17, 24; reader responses, 22–23, 38–39; a


242


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Index

243

marriage, 35, 60; women and speech, 54; women’s history, 25–26, 61 “Women and Fiction” (The Forum), 14–15, 65–66


“room of one’s own” as women’s world, 4, 33, 40; “Shakespeare’s sister,” 32, 155; structure, 23–24, 65, 66; women and education, 34–35; women and

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