“Will you wife me?” That means — make me breakfast, tea and water me, so I can pursue intellectual work. An active verb, interchangeable, regardless of gender. In reality, John wifes me far more than I wife him. A sort of paralysis has set in since we moved again and he does the great majority of the cooking and wifing. I know how lucky I am. How every morning I wake up enveloped in support and love. How John considers it way more important that I have a successful day writing than anything else. He allows me my moods, my myopia.
Scott would be so furious that Zelda wouldn’t pick up after him. She was as slobby as he was. “During the spring of 1920, Fitzgerald tried to be a writer in the confusion of hotel rooms. Zelda was not interested in housekeeping,” a biographer writes. Her recipe entitled “Breakfast” published in a cookbook of celebrity wives. As always, a punchline:
See if there is any bacon, and if there is, ask the cook which pan to fry it in. Then ask if there are any eggs, and if so try to persuade the cook to poach two of them. It is better not to attempt toast, as it burns very easily. Also, in the case of bacon, do not turn the fire too high, or you will have to get out of the house for a week. Serve preferably on china plates, though gold or wood will do if handy.
Later, her poor housekeeping was actually considered symptomatic of her illness. Her “reeducation training”—the disordered or “schizophrenic” woman needed to be reindoctrinated into her role as the good wife, the good mother.
By contrast, the woman writers of the following generation unconsciously internalized this lesson. They might have been a generation of women allowed to be free when they were single, but once married they were plunged into all the traditions. They became, again, the angel in the house, echoing the Victorian woman. Like Adele Ratignolle in The Awakening, knitting woolen booties for her babies while in the sweltering summer heat.
When I beg John to sabotage the Internet somehow (dismantle our modem, find hiding places for the cord), I am almost maniacally productive with housework. Although I still seldom leave the house. The existential absurdity of a Jeanne Dielman, the filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s Belgian housewife and prostitute played by Delphine Seyrig, the endless repetition and do-over of banal domestic chores.
Sylvia Plath and her elaborate meals sketched out, so proud of her meringue. The “exquisite, elaborate, labor-intensive dinner parties and holiday celebrations” of Mary McCarthy. She like some sort of domestic goddess — and the two apocalyptic fights between her and Wilson were over these sorts of details, the first big one dealing with blue sheets, which Mary had purchased and were some sort of departure from the traditional white sheets. I can’t really figure out exactly what happened, but the fight triggered a breakdown, landing Mary in the mental ward with a black eye (continuing the tradition of his friend Scott, Wilson checked himself into a hotel in New York during the course of her treatment).
Every week John and I watch a TV show called The Good Wife on my laptop. It stars Julianna Margulies as the wife of a disgraced Chicago state’s attorney who in the aftermath of his sex scandal is forced to develop a public face for the cameras, while inside she is undergoing the agonies and joys of transformation, as she begins to work again as a lawyer and have an identity outside of this Chicago Clintonesque power couplet. The actress is fantastic in the role. Her manicured face like some sort of Kabuki mask that she only occasionally lets fall. Which makes the cracks and fissures, some sign of an emotional tempest, all the more tantalizing.
Jeanne Dielman with that violent gesture of destruction at the end — the perfect housewife inevitably snaps.
I have begun to buy cut flowers with abandon. “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” Orange tulips at the table. The most decadent rhonoculus in a vase at my desk. I never quite understood why there were such detailed descriptions of flora in Southern novels. Zelda’s descriptions of flowers in Save Me the Waltz are so lush and voluptuous, I am struck reading it again by the associative brilliance of her novel. But living here, in early spring, with everything so — florid and gorgeously overgrown, I understand it. I cannot take in enough beauty, the flowering trees, all so vivid in creams and poignant magentas and golds and pinks. Spiky blossoms and little crunchy blossoms. Forsythia a yellow so intense it makes one happy to behold — I have branches in a vase on the floor. And the trees are blooming. Everything is blooming. Cherry blossoms and magnolias and dogwoods. I go around examining all of the textures.
When we are together on the weekend I can truly live here. This weekend hiking on a trail in the Duke forest, and then in the evening the Kronos Quartet playing Steve Reich compositions. And afterwards we wandered around Duke’s campus and even though my eyes were itchy and my throat scratchy from allergies I took in all of the vividness. And John and I dressed up — over-dressed in a way — there is something wonderful about the experience of being overdressed. I wore my new striped dress with the bustle in back, and John wore a striped blazer and tie. We post pictures we take of ourselves on Facebook. Terribly in love with ourselves, like Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg mugging in front of the mirror in Godard’s Breathless. So ridiculous and vain, like the Fitzes. Look at us. Look at our perfect, seamless lives.
The eventual revolt from life that appears at the surface to be a polished magazine ad: Esther Greenwood scattering her Bloomingdales wardrobe out of the window from the New York high-rise. Zelda burning her dresses in the bathtub.
And I a smiling woman.
Mary McCarthy and Elizabeth Hardwick refused to see the category of WIFE as containing or defining them. Like the Bloomsbury women with Mrs. Eliot, they ignored the mere “wives” at the Partisan Review cocktail parties. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique came out in 1963, the same year as Rich’s Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, documenting the unspoken paralysis among neighborhoods of college-educated housewives. I’m imagining McCarthy or Hardwick did not feel that Betty Friedan was speaking to them, that they transcended that status because they were writers. Yet feminism as it sprang up in the suburbs and between housewives was partly about others recognizing a pain that was internal, invisible, a quotidian suffering. The wideness and monotony of the day. What Friedan called “the problem that has no name.” A paralyzing unhappiness on the inside. The Colgate smile on the surface.
These women thought they could do it all — there was no need for feminism. Hardwick’s moralizing take on Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House—fine, leave the husband, but couldn’t she take the children? The mocking tone of Hardwick’s essay she wrote on Simone de B’s The Second Sex, which begins in an ecstatic sneering list: “Vassal, slave, inferior, other, thing, victim, dependent, parasite, prisoner — oh, bitter, raped, child-swollen flesh doomed to immanence!” No one could be more exacting or more cutting than Hardwick in her essays — Lowell who wrote of his wife’s acidic prose: “your shrill invective/scorched the traditional South.”