Silences (44 page)

*
W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Damnation of Women” again.

*
Written in 1850; collected in 1868. In embryo it is Rebecca Harding Davis’s “The Wife’s Story,” as well as
Story of Avis.

**
Known to us in our time because of Virginia Woolf’s reference to it.

†
Such efforts—such trying—do fight for both. But the battle, continued throughout her daughter’s
long lifetime, is still to be won. The bounteous, productive, and successful Elizabeth Stuart Lyon Phelps never had children.

*
“. . . Again I feel as I used to when the children were sick, after the cause for real anxiety had passed and I stayed close by them, did everything for them, did not even think about my own work and was concerned only with being near them, physically, spiritually. Tending
them back to health. This glorious feeling then of reconquest, the profound sense of happiness overlaying the lingering tremors of anxiety; they will stay; I shall keep them.”

—Käthe Kollwitz, a diary entry, in her fifties

*
Of Woman Born,
not yet published at time of this writing.

**
Circumstances that still few mother-writers have.

†
Diary,
Käthe Kollwitz, Life in Art.
Integration: that word
“other.”

*
Diaries and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz.

Virginia Woolf and the Angel

            
It was she who used to come between me and my paper . . . who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her.
^*

But Virginia Woolf never killed that aspect of the angel “extremely sensitive to the needs and moods and wishes of others”: she remained—an essential part of her equipment
as writer (“I think writing, my kind of writing, is a species of mediumship; I become the person”). And—as is evident in Woolf’s diary and the reminiscences of those close to her—was usually characteristic of her personal relationships as well.

More important to remember, Woolf recognized in the angel an artist-being having to be expressed for and through others; understood her human value in
a patriarchal structure (had herself been a beneficiary).

In
Mrs. Dalloway
and
To the Lighthouse,
(Mrs. Ramsay) enduring portraits of women constricted to the angel (and shown in their true powerlessness, division, exhaustion, narrowness), she celebrated—in anguish—their creative power (“making the moment something permanent . . . [making] the individual more whole and present”); their active
professional qualities (“Domestic life is a
profession
and should be
paid;
motherhood is an exacting task.” “The difficult
arts
of family life”); their longings, latencies; their having to find fulfillment vicariously in varied
contributions to others at a time when achievement for nearly all women could be only through others. She did not see them as submissive, passive, nor despise them for
their constricted development. She knew, that born into her mother’s generation, almost inescapably her capacities and life would have gone as theirs; that in her own generation, too, she was an exception—and that chancily; barely.

Some Manifestations of the Angel, 1800–1970:

The Answering and Echoing Movements

            
. . . the exceeding sympathy, always ready and always profound, by which
she made all that one could tell her reverberate to one’s own feelings by the manifest impression that it made on hers. The pulses of light were not more quick nor inevitable in their flow and undulation than were the answering and echoing movements of her sympathizing attention.

—Thomas De Quincey on Dorothy Wordsworth, 1827

A perfect mother’s life—the life of a perfect wife

            
She
is no more of an angel today than she had always been; but I can’t believe that by the accident of her death all of her unspeakable tenderness is lost to the beings she so dearly loved. . . . One can feel forever, the inextinguishable vibration of her devotion. I can’t help feeling that in those last weeks I was not tender enough with her—that I was blind to her sweetness and beneficence. . . .

                  
When I came back from Europe I was struck with her being worn and shrunken, and now I know that she was very weary. She went about her usual activities, but the burden of life had grown heavy for her, and she needed rest. There is something inexpressibly touching to me in the way in which, during these last years, she went on from year to year without it. If she could only have
lived she should have had it, and it would have been a delight to see her have it. But she has it now, in the most complete perfection! Summer after summer she never left Cambridge—it was impossible that father should leave his own house. The country, the sea, the change of air and scene, were an exquisite enjoyment to her; but she bore
with the deepest gentleness and patience the constant loss
of such opportunities. She passed her nights and her days in that dry, flat, hot, stale and odious Cambridge, and had never a thought while she did so but for father and Alice. It was a perfect mother’s life—the life of a perfect wife. To bring her children into the world—to expend herself, for years, for their happiness and welfare—then, when they had reached full maturity and were absorbed in
the world and in their own interests—to lay herself down in her ebbing strength and yield up her pure soul to the celestial power that had given her this divine commission.

—Henry James in his
Notebooks,
after the death of his mother (1882)

William Butler Yeats, “On Woman”

                    
May God be praised for woman

                    
That gives up all her mind,

                    
A man may find in no man

                    
A friendship of her kind

                    
That covers all he has brought

                    
As with her flesh and bone,

                    
Nor quarrels with a thought

                    
Because it is not her own.

Sparing Him, And So On

            
Ida, I want you if you can to come to me. But like this. We should have to deceive Jack. Jack
can never realize what I have to do. He helps me all he can but he can’t help me really and the result is I spend all my energy, every bit, in keeping going, I have none left for work. All my work is behindhand and I can’t do it. I simply stare at the sky. I am too tired even to think. What makes me tired? Getting up, seeing about everything, arranging everything,
sparing him,
and so on. That
journey nearly killed me, literally. He had no
idea
I suffered at all, and could not understand why I looked “so awful” and why everybody seemed to think I was terribly ill. . . .

—Katherine Mansfield (a letter to her friend, Ida Baker)

Katherine Anne Porter, on being asked:

            
. . . But haven’t you found that being a woman presented to you, as an artist, certain special problems?
It seems to me that a great deal of the upbringing of women encourages the dispersion of the self in many small bits, and that the practice of any kind of art demands a corralling and concentrating of that self and its always insufficient energies.

                  
I think that’s very true and very right. You’re brought up with the . . . curious idea of feminine availability in all spiritual
ways, and in giving service to anyone who demands it. And I suppose that’s why it has taken me twenty years to write this novel; it’s been interrupted by just anyone who could jimmy his way into my life.

—Writers at Work, The Paris Review Interviews

*
“Professions for Women.”

▴
ONE OUT OF TWELVE, P
. 34

Virginia Woolf’s vision of the future

            
I think of Sussex in five hundred years to come. . . . Things will have been scorched up, eliminated. There will be magic gates. Draughts fan-blown by electric power will cleanse houses. Lights intense and firmly directed will go over the earth, doing the work. . . .

                  
. . .
And then there was the sudden dancing light, that was hung in the future . . . “Look, I will make a little figure for your satisfaction. . . . Does this little figure advancing . . . to the economical, powerful, and efficient future when houses will be cleansed by a puff of hot wind satisfy you?” . . . We cried out together: “Yes, yes,” as if affirming something, in a moment of recognition.
^*

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (
Women & Economics
[1898],
The Home, Its Work and Influence
[1907]) is the pioneer and still almost the only exponent of ways whereby “this technologically and socially obsolete, human-wasting drudgery” could be eliminated (the essential angel freed), while still preserving human maintenance-of-life satisfactions where they are intrinsic. But as free, voluntary, expression
of the self, not life-consuming necessity.