Tell Me a Riddle (60 page)

Read Tell Me a Riddle Online

Authors: Tillie Olsen

Tags: #test

BOOK: Tell Me a Riddle
12.71Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 253
her double, the muted subtext with its unsaid meanings. ''Much Madness is divinest Sense" here. But from the standpoint of "Much Sensethe starkest Madness" that is, from the perspective of normalcy, her statement demanding freedom for the muted meanings looks like irrationality and delusion.
23
By an ending that calls attention to interpretive paradigms and powers, Gilman highlights the politics of narrative.
The autobiographical sources of this short story have been well-documented, from the breakdown itself to the infantalizing rest cure, prescribed by an eminent Philadelphia doctor.
24
As Gilman was massaged and fattened, she could "Have but two hours' intellectual life a day. And never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live." "The Yellow Wallpaper," dramatizing the mental cruelty of that dependent inactivity, was written with an explicitly didactic purpose-"to reach Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and convince him of the error of his ways."
25
It is less noted that the inspiration for this story parallels the provocation of
The Story of Avis:
a compensatory defense of a thwarted mother and a highly critical eye cast at the institution of heterosexual romance and marriagein Gilman's case both the marriage of her parents and her own first marriage.
26
The motif in which the maternal parent becomes the muse for the daughter has more than fictional status; we can trace it through the biographies of women authors from Virginia Woolf and H. D. to Alice Walker. In a Woolfean essay, Walker "thinks back," tracing the sources of her art to the parent whose artistry is vital.
Whatever she planted grew as if by magic, and her fame as a grower of flowers spread over three counties. ... And I remember people coming to my mother's yard to be given cuttings from her flowers; I hear again the praise showered on her because whatever rocky soil she landed on, she turned into a garden. A garden so brilliant with colors, so original in its design, so magnificent with life and creativity, that to this day people drive by our house in Georgiaperfect strangers and imperfect strangersand ask to stand or walk among my mother's art.
27
 
Page 254
Judging from the evidence in Gilman, Phelps Ward, Woolf, and Walker, there seems to be a specific biographical drama that has entered and shaped
Künstlerromane
by women. Such a narrative is engaged with a maternal figure and, on a biographical level, is often compensatory for her losses (which may themselves be imaginatively heightened by being remembered by her child). The daughter becomes an artist to extend, reveal, and elaborate her mother's often thwarted talents. ''No song or poem will bear my mother's name" (240). Still, "perhaps she was herself a poet," summarizes Walker, "though only her daughter's name is signed to the poems that we know" (243).
The younger artist's future project as a creator lies in completing the fragmentary and potential work of the mother; the mother is the daughter's muse, but in more than a passive sense. For the mother is also an artist. She has written, sung, made, or created, but her work, because in unconventional media, is muted and unrecognized. The media in which she works are often the materials of "everyday use" (to borrow a phrase from Alice Walker), and her works are artisanal.
28
The traditional notion of a muse is a figure who gives access to feeling or knowledge that she herself cannot formulate. In contrast, this maternal muse struggles with her condition to forge a work, usually one unique, unrepeatable workan event, a gesture, an atmospherea work of synthesis and artistry that is consumed or used.
By entering and expressing herself in some more dominant art form (poem, not garden, painting, not cuisine, novel, not parlor piano playing) the daughter can make prominent the work both have achieved. Mother and daughter are thus collaborators, coauthors separated by a generation. Because only the daughter's work is perceived as art within conventional definitions, it will challenge these formulations of decorum, so the mother or muted parent too can be seen as the artist s/he was.
29
This intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical defense of the mother becomes involved with the evocation of the preoedipal dyad, matrisexuality, or a bisexual oscillation deep in the gendering process. In these works, the female artist is given a way of looping back and reenacting childhood ties, to achieve not the culturally approved ending in hetero-
 
Page 255
sexual romance, but rather the reparenting necessary to her second birth as an artist.
In the nineteenth-century texts sampled here, heterosexual ties and the marriage relation come under considerable critical scrutiny, but no change in narrative modes occurs. In twentieth-century texts, the proportion of successful artist figures increases, by virtue of a keen change in the terms of the conflict between role and vocation. Instead of meaning marriage, motherhood, and housewifery, ''role" comes to mean the filial completion of a thwarted parent's task. The daughter artist and the blocked, usually maternal, parent are, then, the central characters of twentieth-century women's
Künstlerromane.
The maternal or parental muse and the reparenting motifs are strategies that erode, transpose, and reject narratives of heterosexual love and romantic thralldom.
Precisely this is at stake in Virginia Woolf's
To the Lighthouse,
which concerns Lily Briscoe's long development, revealed through the interrupted process of completing her painting over the ten years in which the novel is set. The painting, a vivid formulation of the novel's themes in an imaginary plastic structure, is "about" a mother and child, Mrs. Ramsay and James, or even Lily herself, poised between strong opposing forces representing male and femaleMr. and Mrs. Ramsay. The creation of that dynamic poise has been the central aesthetic struggle for Lily.
30
Because of her double and contradictory status, Mrs. Ramsay exists twice in Lily's painting, first as one of the two conventional sides that must be balanced, but then as the inspiration for the revelatory stroke in the middle. For Mrs. Ramsay is central to the two systems: she is the stereotypical feminine side of that dichotomy between male and female which will be superseded, yet at the same time she is the final line at the center of the painting: the dome of the mother-child dyad, the lighthouse of quest-love, the wedge-shaped mark of life infused with the void of oceanic death . . . .
By the midpoint of the novel, both of the traditional endingsmarriage and deathhave occurred, a sharp critical statement on Woolf's part that clears the ground of any rival solutions to Lily's plot. The third part of
To the Lighthouse
surpasses these classic resolutions, moving beyond the
 
Page 256
endings they propose, to brother-sister links, to male-female friendship, and, even more, to a vision that overwhelms all the binary systems on which the novel has been built. The final stroke, the placement of Lily's last line, an abstraction of the mother-child dyad wedged into the divided picture, makes her work emotionally complete and aesthetically unified. The either/or division between masculine and feminine reaches a both/and resolution in the art work of the female artist, who joins oedipal to preoedipal materials and expresses the hive, dome, and secret hieroglyphs of matrisexual passion.
31
This synthesis of polarities is even recorded in Woolf's response to her text: on one hand she can characterize it as a ''hard muscular book," yet she can also see it as "soft and pliable, and I think deep . . . .
32
In the first part of the novel, Lily opts for the pure quest plot of artistic ambition. . . . Yet Lily cannot finish her painting, not because "women can't paint, women can't write"Tansley's taunt and an external goadbut because she has split her formalist vision from her emotional life (238). Woolf further insists that Lily's painting can be completed only if she immerses herself in vulnerability, need, exposure, and grief, only through empathya set of feelings usually called womanlyand not through exclusive attention to aesthetics in a vacuum. The point is illustrated in the later scene with Mr. Ramsay, when "The sympathy she had not given him weighed her down. It made it difficult for her to paint" (254). In short, the painting can be achieved only through the fusion of love with quest.
The love here is not of the classic novelistic kind: Lily's helpful and genuine admiration for Mr. Ramsay's boots, saving him from yet another depressive attack, is hardly a prelude to their courtship. But love it is, alluding to familial love, friendly love, comradely ties, some "of those unclassified affections of which there are so many" (157). She helps him without dissolving into romantic thralldom or powerful self-abnegation, an important distinction from Mrs. Ramsay's way. Not only in offering affection to him but in admitting vulnerability to love and loss in herself, Lily is able to complete her painting. Thus love enables quest; quest is given meaning because of love. The two arcing and interconnected actions that complete the
 
Page 257
novelMr. Ramsay's sail across the bay with his children and Lily's completion of the paintingare both journeys that had been becalmed until love, grief, and need were admitted....
33
On the last page of
Surfacing
(1972) by Margaret Atwood, the narrator hovers between past and future, between her dead parents and her unborn child, between meretricious commercial art and the art she promises to make.
Surfacing
also shows an emergent daughter who focuses the heritage of both parents in order to bring herself to maturity. The man in the book, a woodsy impregnator, is set aside when his task is done. The art work is a ritual performance piece that the protagonist constructs in order to gain access to her parental, Canadian, mythic (especially matriarchal) roots. Through this performance ritual, she sloughs off the victimization and deadness of nationality and gender. Alone in the wilderness, the protagonist choreographs visions of her parents, dreams, and symbolic acts, like eating or not, into a unity both aesthetic and transformative. The ritual functions in this character's life much as Lily's painting did, closing the past and readying the self for the future. The liminal ending in which the narrator crosses over into love (for her unborn child) and achievement (her unborn art) mingles quest and love; the acceptance of female rolethe pregnancy was deliberately soughtis, like the scenes of empathy in
To the Lighthouse,
the enabling act.
34
Despite any use of the words ''mother" and "daughter'" to characterize the preoedipal implications of this reparenting, some of these figures are either displaced by some generations or are not the biological daughters of the mothers they seek. The generational displacement in the twentieth-century works covertly announces that the mother might be less than inspiring. Hence the mother may die in the story, as she does in Woolf and Tillie Olsen. In Christina Stead's novel
The Man Who Loved Children
(1940), the daughter artist Louie has even murdered Henny, her mother, with Henny's complicit understanding. Louie then emerges from her family, having broken the grip of the two embattled parents, escaping beyond the frame of the book in a liminal ending: "I have gone for a walk round the world."
35
The death or generational displacement of the mother in plots involving a daughter artist may be

Other books

Move to Strike by Sydney Bauer
Naughty In Nice by Rhys Bowen
Nothing More Beautiful by Lorelai LaBelle
Heat by Jamie K. Schmidt
The Sword-Edged blonde by Alex Bledsoe
Dawn of Swords by David Dalglish, Robert J. Duperre
Pestilence: The Infection Begins by Craig A. McDonough