In the essay on The Second Sex her position is kind of like — yeah, okay, great, but who exactly is supposed to do the housekeeping? Mary herself fumed: “Feminism is ridiculous. Feminists are silly idealists who want to be on top. There is no real equality in sexual relationships — someone always wins.” Perhaps they felt they were pragmatists. Yet Hardwick later reversed, or at least altered, her eyerolling stance on both feminism and Simone de Beauvoir, a sort of latent or revived consciousness perhaps brought about by the end of her marriage. However, throughout Hardwick’s essays there’s this (Southern?) moral stance about this immutable category of womanhood, very feminine and almost fatalistic: that is just how things are, amazed at Sylvia’s fury or ruffled at Zelda’s torment. No patience for the less resilient.
And yet these women’s marriages were agonies. Jean Stafford’s mental breakdowns and alcoholism. Lowell was abusive and even broke her nose a second time, the first time being the disfiguring car crash. (He also most likely hit Hardwick.) Mary McCarthy’s breakdown four months into her marriage with Edmund Wilson, he allegedly kicked and punched her while pregnant (in their fights she hit back, perhaps sometimes she instigated it). Wilson demonized her as a hysteric during their messy divorce proceedings.
And then Elizabeth Hardwick, Lizzie, the long-suffering Penelope, always waiting for Robert Lowell to return from his manias and mistresses. Who gave up everything for him — even her teaching, which she loved, to move with him to London, but before that happened he fell in love with another, this time more permanently. Lowell who died in the cab en route to Kennedy Airport, coming back to his “Lizzie,” a much delayed homecoming. “West 67th Street,” please, carrying with him “Girl in bed,” the Lucian Freud portrait of a young Lady Caroline Blackwood.
A doubling — Caroline as a sobbing mess at Lowell’s abrupt funeral, she flew in from London and stayed with the first widow, who as always, with her firm unshaking hand, took care of everything, just as she flew to London to cut Lowell’s shoulder-length hair and have his clothes cleaned and pressed when he had to be institutionalized again. Before she left London she slipped him a note: “If you’ll need me, I’ll always be there. If you don’t, I’ll not be there.” Always the sacrificial wife. Hardwick once said to Lowell that she would kill herself if it would save him from his mental breakdowns. These cults these women formed to their godlike literary husbands that involved a suppression of the self — Viv, Zelda the generation before. Hardwick who said that her marriage, even in its humiliating denouement, was the best thing that ever happened to her.
What’s so infuriating and compelling about Hardwick’s criticism and some of her public reactions to her life with Lowell, as well as her two books written BC and AC (before and after Cal) is how they seemingly contradict each other. There is in both the early novel The Ghostly Lover and Sleepless Nights a nostalgia for a freer life when young, when one was a sovereign being. In her early work, reviewed by the Times as a “rather unformed Bildungsroman” there is such a spark of something else, a desire for life to be different, an ambivalence to the certainty of marriage that mirrors The Bell Jar, which Hardwick herself dismisses as a conventional schoolgirl novel.
It’s infuriating to think how coming-of-age-novels about the feminine experience are read and dismissed as chick lit or school-girl books or YA, etc., when Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, surely also a very unformed Bildungsroman, is still considered great literature. Carson McCullers, Shirley Jackson, Plath, all lumped into young adult. As if the female coming-of-age experience is somehow more frivolous or less rending than the male one. And how these works are seldom read as existential novels about girls who want to realize themselves, who want to be artists, and the desire not to have their future decided for them. Sylvia’s dark, distorted, Dostoyevskian vision in The Bell Jar, Esther decides not to participate, not to be the perfect image, and so she unravels.
Actually it’s remarkable how similar the two novels are — two bright young girls staying in a boarding house in New York City, flattened out by their future, by the idea of marriage, wanting to be artists. (Hardwick’s character is pursuing piano lessons, Esther Greenwood wants to write.) Of course Plath’s work has the rather more spectacular solution of breakdown and attempted suicide as a way out of the planned traditional role, as opposed to the character in The Ghostly Lover who at the end simply walks away from the certainty of being a bride into a more ambiguous future.
Zelda summering as a child in the mountains of North Carolina, where she was feted, safe. Her childhood where she was free to run wild, like Edna Pontellier remembering the exhilaration of running through the wild grasses of Kentucky. Esther Green-wood zipping down the ski hill in The Bell Jar.
In The Ghostly Lover, like in The Bell Jar, marriage is the eternal question mark, these girls in the boarding house pursuing bright futures while waiting, somehow, for the inevitable closing-off, and except for the terrible title it’s a beautiful book, with great psychological insight into the interiority of women. And an absolute lament for the shadow life of the traditional wife.
I follow John to work, in his wedding-cake of a building with the grand chandeliers. A take your wife to work day.
Please don’t leave me, I say in the morning, on these foul-weather days, these mean reds. Please don’t leave me alone to myself.
In the poem “Marriage?” Robert Lowell captures the voice of his new wife, Caroline Blackwood, lamenting her own abandonment. “I think about you every minute of the day./I love you every minute of the day/You gone is hollow, bored, unbearable.” He wrote Caroline as the mermaid in The Dolphin, his work about the abandonment of one marriage (to Hardwick now the hag), and the entanglement with another, “bright as the morning star or a blonde starlet.” Although she was a writer too, she hated being the muse, the blonde pensive girl in bed, the golden girl, the Zelda figure.
“Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.”
I’ve always found the language of the borderline personality diagnosis, a label assigned to women almost entirely, compelling in that it’s an identity disorder which is defined almost exclusively by not actually having an identity. As well as the intensity, the enormity, of one’s emotions. Zelda often saddled posthumously and anachronistically with this diagnosis by that great diagnostician, the Internet.
“Women diagnosed as borderline present a crisis in subjective feelings about themselves. They may describe feeling empty, unreal, numb, or even nonexistent.”
The borderline: an unstable, fragmented, even missing self.
Who Are You? — the title of Anna Kavan’s haunting inquiry into the loss of the self in marriage. Jean Rhys wished she had thought of the title herself for Wide Sargasso Sea. The 1963 novella is actually a rewrite of Let Me Alone, her earlier, more conventional novel published under the name of Helen Ferguson (taking on the surname of the husband she abhorred). In Let Me Alone the character Anna Kavan is stuck in the tropics with her bureaucratic jerk of a husband. In Who are You? Kavan, now taking as her author name the name of her previous heroine, rewrites Helen Ferguson’s 300-plus-page novel into an experimental novella as anorexic as the ice girl heroines of this later period. The controlling yet basically harmless husband becomes the sadistic “Mr. Dog Head,” whose favorite activities include raping his wife and bludgeoning rats with his tennis racket. The lonely wife Anna Kavan is now simply “the girl,” living in a nightmare she can’t escape, losing her identity in the stifling heat.