As I walk around Chapel Hill after meeting John for lunch, I think of Zelda as a new mother isolated in the “Ibsenesque” winters in St. Paul. She didn’t get along with most of the other country club wives. But also Elizabeth Hardwick in Iowa, living the life of the faculty wife. She became obsessed with a murder trial that she later wrote a true-crime sort of novel about, which I haven’t read.
Zelda and Elizabeth Hardwick, two Southern belles: one whimsical and excessive, spoiled and fragrant, the other intellectual and powdered, polite yet vicious. Both absolutely, indisputably brilliant.
But I can only describe Hardwick’s view of this other, famous, literary wife — who was also, famously, plagiarized by her husband — as a position of profound ambivalence. She calls Zelda “this strange, vulnerable girl from Montgomery, Alabama.” Yet even while herself experiencing the stuckness that can be living through a spouse, in her essay, ostensibly a review of Zelda’s biography — the biography was quite famous — Hardwick also sees Zelda as a “paragon of an unhappy woman.” Nancy Milford’s bio became a sort of cri de femme of the Second Wave when published, Zelda heralded by the first generation of American women’s studies students in the 70s as both a heroine of some resistance but mostly a glamorous victim, like a literary Marilyn Monroe. This leaves a bad taste in Hardwick’s mouth, the idea of the victim. The sense that if Zelda was not complaining, Milford is complaining in her stead. I measure her portrait of Zelda next to her portrait of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, whom she is rather in awe of (as she is with her contemporary Sylvia Plath) for her spectacle of destruction, but sees no “political or philosophical content to her unhappiness.” Hardwick imagines Hedda, like Zelda, as a rather stuck and unhappy wife, maybe the most common female character in literature. But at the time she was writing about these women Hardwick did not conceptualize their chronic unhappiness as political or philosophical.
Perhaps this is what obsesses me about Hardwick, besides being a huge fan of her writing. I am fascinated with how she situates herself as a writer and intellectual, gaining entrance into the male literary world, which involved a denial that she had to work twice as hard at being both writer and wife. Though she and Mary McCarthy struggled in volatile and often oppressive relationships (and she too was made a character), she was ultimately not destroyed, like Zelda and Vivien(ne) from the previous generation. Any mirror though with this generation of literary wives before is an uncomfortable one. I read her vocal ambivalence regarding feminism as a sort of internalized disciplining and punishment. This ambivalence both a deflection and identification with these women; she puts herself inside these narratives and distances herself from them. The sacrifice and eye-rolling over the bad woman, so as to redeem the woman writer in the male cultural industry, so as to validate her own fraught decisions. The martyr-wife, firmly steeped in self-abnegation.
Hardwick’s attitude towards Zelda also recalls the essayist’s ambivalent relationship to her contemporaries, like the poet Adrienne Rich, fellow housewife and neighbor in the Boston suburbs, who later left her economics professor husband in a spectacular controversy among the group. Her poetry collection, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, is the talking-back of the woman housewife paralyzed by impotence and futility, trying to write, to create herself. A dis-ease of unhappiness and a cloaked silence passed down among women isolated, each to their own roof, house, husband, empty routine. Hardwick so horrified by the metamorphosis of her former friend, who later came out as a lesbian, her friend who rallied to her defense in The American Poetry Review upon publication of The Dolphin (Lowell dismissed the review as “dogmatic feminism” and relegated Rich afterwards in his Harvard seminars to the category of “minor”). “She deliberately made herself ugly and wrote these extreme and ridiculous poems,” Hardwick remarked. Hardwick was most likely shocked by the anger in these poems. (Later in life though Hardwick expressed an admiration for Rich.)
It is the FURY of Sylvia Plath, another peer, that makes Hardwick in an essay on the poet both so enraptured and uncomfortable. Sylvia like a dybbuk-double. Sylvia who was Lowell’s student in his writing class at Boston University, along with fellow housewife-poet Anne Sexton. Sylvia who only took the mask off for her poetry. The striptease of the Ariel femme fatale persona, the burlesque of trauma. Plath’s housewife’s revenge. The head in the gas oven. A brilliant symbol of both the Holocaust and the contained housewife. The feminine mystique is to return back to the smile — Sylvia swallowed this and then spat it out, sarcastically—“And I a smiling woman.”
I have always been curious about the special ambivalence Elizabeth Hardwick reserved for Sylvia, with whom she socialized at dinner parties (in a journal entry Sylvia recalls meeting a “high-strung” Hardwick). The curiousness and yes admiration towards a woman seething with hate and anger, a betrayed wife with her fierce revenge. And yet Elizabeth too was the furious, abandoned woman, her voice so clear in The Dolphin poems, she is not only character but co-author: “Don’t you dare mail us the love your life denies.” Elizabeth Hardwick almost suicidal when reviews of the book came out. Dreading, she wrote Elizabeth Bishop, future biographies of Lowell theorizing the life of “Lizzie.”
In her essay on Sylvia, Hardwick reveals both a resistance to as well as a shuddering admiration for the woman who burned her husband Ted Hughes’s works in progress, his volumes of Shakespeare. Sylvia who allegedly wrote a revenge fantasy about their marriage and then burned it. She who burned. A femme fatale — fatal to others, to herself. Hurtling herself headlong off cliffs. She is Heathcliff and Cathy. Sickened on the moors. Hardwick finds a danger to such confessionalism, to her self-immolation:
Orestes rages, but Aeschylus lives to be almost seventy. Sylvia Plath, however, is both heroine and author, when the curtain goes down, it is her own dead body there on the stage, sacrificed to her plot.
Yet she also sees a victory in the Ariel poems, in the manuscript left on the desk, completed and in her chosen order, her last will and testament: “When she died she was alone, exhausted from writing, miserable — but triumphant too, achieved, defined and defiant.” The period Sylvia herself called THE BLOOD JET, the fervent fevered creativity that gave way to the Ariel poems, the flat, the phone, the snow, the mistress, the writing oh the writing she who was reading Oester-reich on demonic possession and she was possessed by her dybbuk channeling that femme fatale that voice, that eat-glass voice, Sylvia breaking free. These poems of glittering hate and demons breathing softly then screaming, screaming was her alchemy, her rebirth.
I think of Zelda — who saved herself for a time. She refused to show her husband her writing. She refused to destroy her pages. She refused to censor. Until she did. I think of Sylvia. She too saved herself at the end. She kept her writing from her husband, the fascist whom she loved. She devoured herself like the Sphinx at the end.
Yet perhaps taking oneself back as character is the ultimate revenge.
In her criticism Hardwick refutes the notion that women writers have a different lot than men. In her essay on Sylvia Plath Hardwick writes, “Every artist is either a man or a woman and the struggle is pretty much the same for both.” It’s amazing to me. When I think of Jean Stafford rising at dawn to work as a secretary at The Southern Review (Lowell was studying with Robert Penn Warren at Louisiana State), then coming home to prepare the boys lunch, the poets still lolling around hungover from the night before. And yet she still found time to write. Sylvia waking at four a.m., to be writer before wife. Typing up Ted’s poems. They were their husband’s secretaries, like Viv was to Tom. Yes, their husbands were more supportive of their wives as writers for the most part than the generation before (barring the Paul Bowles and Leonard Woolfs), Edmund Wilson locking Mary into a room to make her write the stories that would make her debut collection, but these wives were still expected to be the good wife and mother as well. Even Hardwick admits in her essay on Plath that being a mother meant one had to devote one’s energy to raising children in the first couple of years, not writing. I think her general attitude has to do with the philosophy of the time that to be a feminist was to complain. “People with a real gift for writing find the time, people with no talent complain all the time,” she once said.