I wander downstairs to the exhibits, where there is a glass case devoted to Chang and Eng, the pair of conjoined twins first coined as Siamese, who apparently settled on a farm in North Carolina after their circus days, married sisters and fathered a team of children. I wonder how that worked (apparently the brothers would visit a different sister each night, but I don’t know whether they both fucked her or what).
At the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, below the cased-in plaster molds of the dying Eng brothers, their gray hairs sticking out from the plaster, lies their two livers, lovingly entertwined in formaldehyde. Apparently one of them died (Chang? Or Eng?) and even though they rushed to separate them the other one slipped into a coma and died shortly after.
In the Duke Gardens, we sit and watch the black swans. They are always together, they seem to have arrived in pairs.
Merce Cunningham on life without John Cage: “On the one hand, when I come home at the end of the day, and John’s not there. On the other hand, I come home and John’s not there.”
The incestuous dyad of marriage. In Roland Barthes’ book of literary aphorisms about romance, A Lover’s Discourse, one category is “engulfment,” citing Goethe’s Werther and his fatal love. A lack of boundaries between the two.
“I am engulfed, I succumb.”
R.D. Laing writes of this as well, the feeling of being drowned within another, all the ground laid for him for the formation of a schizoid personality.
Dicole: how Nicole and Dick sign their names in Tender. (This is a common trope of fanforums — two characters referred to by their combined names, as if by the crush of other people’s desires they become welded into one singular entity.)
In Zelda’s companion novel of marriage, Save Me the Waltz, she depicts the couple’s love as narcissistic and submerging, in one early scene the heroine Alabama explores inside the brain of her beloved, through one ear. Alabama wavers between experiencing both the dizzying ecstasy of the dyad, as well as the struggle towards sovereignty, the desire to disentangle. Unlike Fitzgerald’s novels there’s a self-consciousness in the Zelda figure that she is playing a part. In Waltz we get a sense of the heroine’s daily insurrections, her loneliness and apartness.
“Yes — but David, it’s very different to be two simple people at once — one who wants to have a law to itself and the other who wants to keep all the nice old things and be safe and loved and protected.”
In The Company She Keeps, McCarthy writes of the loss of self through these relationships, through marriage, by existing through men. From McCarthy’s foreword: “‘When did you have it last?’ the author adjures the distracted heroine, who is fumbling in her spiritual pocket-book for a missing object, for the ordinary, indispensable self that has somehow got mislaid. It is a case of lost identity.”
I need to become more independent, I realize. It is nothing John does, really, it is me, I am on his time when we are together, he sets the hours and the minutes, he sets the alarm, I wake up when he does, when he can wake me, he is up first, I am always asleep…On weekends when I am still supposed to write it is so much better, so much easier, to lie in his arms, dizzy after making love, just luxuriating in each other.
I’ve always been in awe of Plath’s schedule, how she saved herself, she saved herself as she lost herself, awaking at 4 am every morning, before the other roles of her life began.
That scene in The Awakening always speaks to me, the one where Edna refuses to go to bed with her husband when he tells her it’s time. The sign of her first awakening, her coming to consciousness. Such a minor yet potent rebellion. It is after she goes swimming the first time. The disentangling of the self from the “we.”
“She perceived that her will had blazed up, stubborn and resistant. She could not at that moment have done other than denied and resisted.”
My students always read The Awakening like a romance novel, the young women especially, they want things to work out between Robert and Edna, they want those crazy kids to get together like it’s Twilight or something, like they’re star-crossed lovers. And I have to tell them that that isn’t the point, that the book is actually an anti-romance novel, that it’s actually Edna’s downfall, this voluptuous falling in love. Her love affair clouds her mind from this attempt at self-reliance. She does not go to Paris alone. She drowns instead. For some reason it’s harder for young women to not be destroyed by love, to disentangle themselves enough in order to take themselves back as subjects, as authors, of their own narrative.
Perhaps Edna in The Awakening wouldn’t have started to paint, seriously, without her solitude. (What does it mean to paint seriously, to write seriously? It is all about self-identity, and discipline, this audacity to believe that what one could possibly create is worth sharing with the world.) In Chopin’s novel, Edna begins to see herself as both a sovereign person and an artist because her husband has left the vacation island to go to work. So she spends the summer in unusual circumstances, alone and with a community of women (as well as with Robert, her eventual lover).
So many of these modern women became artists in isolated settings. They did this to rally against the existential crisis that a traditional marriage can be — the man allowed to go out into the world and transcend himself, the woman reduced to the kind of work that will be erased and forgotten at day’s end, living invisible among the vestigial people of the afternoon.
The Bovaries trapped in the provinces, desiring to radicalize. Zelda taking ballet lessons while in Delaware.
While stuck in Kentucky the Baroness begins to write the story of her life. Like Scott with Zelda, her husband belittled her efforts, probably as manipulation, the fear of no longer having her and her words as raw material.
Then there’s the other type of solitude, which Edna experiences in the second half of The Awakening, set in New Orleans — finally alone walking around a city, experiencing an endless stimulation. There is something about the experience of being thrust into the world, alone, not as a pair, having surprising encounters.
Viv who began writing stories while strolling around Paris, there was a fear, yes, a terror of being alone, but also this heightened consciousness, a starting to work through who she was as a subject propelled into the world.
In Paris Zelda stimulated by all the art she sees, the salons.
Jane limping elegantly through the streets of Paris, carrying under her arm Le Deuxième Sexe. She spent the majority of this second stage of their honeymoon alone.
The Bowles journeyed to Panama on a freighter for the beginning of their honeymoon. They didn’t travel light. “With them they had two wardrobe trunks, twenty-seven suitcases, a typewriter, and a record player.”