The endings of Victorian literary texts authored by women (The Awakening, “The Yellow Wallpaper”) mirror the endings of these women’s lives — they were shuttled into suicide or madness, both painful, horrible ways out, which also removes their subjectivity so intensely fought over. This madness or suicide becomes a form of communication denied to them.
My students who were always enthralled by suicide. They wanted to know all the dirty details. Virginia with rocks in her pockets. Sylvia with her head in the oven. They shiver, they tsk, but with curious glee. With the children in the next room? The end of The Awakening: But what about the children? Edna, think about the children. This overdetermines their reading.
Yet how we memorialize, memorize, these women, their last days. The anniversary of Sylvia’s death is celebrated annually online within this female blogging subsubculture. The writer Bhanu Kapil and I when meeting for the first time in real life at a conference communing about the physicality of Virginia Woolf as she is in the water, her body. I tell her then about Unica Zürn’s body laid out after jumping from the balcony of Hans Bellmer’s sixth-floor Paris apartment, he had just dumped her after his stroke, which also mimics the movement of the little girl’s suicide fantasy in her novel Dark Spring, the tiny body in the grass, which strangely mirrors the aesthetic of Bellmer’s dolls: “a wish to conserve the tragic and precise trace of a falling naked body, from the window on the sidewalk, as a strange object.” We choreograph these movements, we graft them onto our own body.
On our blogs we share references, figures. I know these women know, bodily, Woolf ’s last letter to her husband. Or Edna walking into the sea. I don’t think this is just some fanatic adoration or uninformed romanticism by some grown-up goth girls who later became poets and fiction writers — I think there’s recognition embedded in this, the realization of these women’s struggles in their material lives to even make the work, and a decision to memorialize how this struggle ended, as opposed to erasing or demonizing this last act, and prevent it from completely writing over the life or the work.
How could Zelda have escaped her institutionalization? She could have left and moved to Italy — but how would that have been possible? She could have escaped perhaps if she fought against the very way that she was being defined — but the life of a psychiatric patient is to be systematically dehumanized and then made over, rewritten — one learns to acquiesce in order to get out, to survive. Even if women in traditional roles in this era could rebel against their schooled selves, trained to experience shame and guilt for going outside of bounds, like Zelda arguably did, for a time, they couldn’t escape society, in the form of their husband, the doctors, their mothers. They couldn’t escape judgment and discipline.
A woman was not allowed to be moody or silent or sullen. Or to abandon the keeping of the house, the keeping of the husband. T.S. Eliot could face the immense disapproval of his parents when he ditched his dissertation at Harvard and set about to be a Great Poet. Yet these were not dreams most women, especially in traditional roles, could often voice out loud.
In The Awakening, both the husband and doctor alarmed at Edna’s pale peakedness, her excitable state, after spending a whole day painting, choosing to be alone and with her work as opposed to obeying social rituals like house calls. In women, this is seen as a sign of illness.
I do not challenge the idea that there was a feverish tinge to Zelda’s practice, bordering on obsession. I’m not arguing that she wasn’t in some form of distress, that she didn’t have some mental health stuff going on. But I think we choose to call it pathological. Don’t we also romanticize this sort of obsession in the history of art and literature?
In Flaubert’s house, servants and everyone in the household tiptoed around him in the AM while he worked, until he rang the bell, his cursory unspoken cue, a servant would run up and hand him a glass of water, which he’d drink, and a newspaper, which he scanned. Then he’d pound on the wall, his mother would come and sit and converse with him, a happy helpmate, lunch, a long leisurely walk, then the Work, met with trembling and awe by the others, evenings of society and reading out loud to his writer-friends, the occasional excursions to Paris to fuck his mistress. This is before he ever published a thing. Except something in a local paper. He was milked and fed and cultivated and allowed. He was encouraged, and enabled, to become Flaubert. Same with Tom. He was allowed to write “The Waste Land.” Waited on hand and foot by Vivie once at home. His nerves tended to, his absolute exhaustion treated. (She nursed him through several collapses, when she collapsed he would perennially send her away.) Although he did work constantly, too much, everything was spiritually in the service of his eventual great art, the Bel Esprit, Ezra Pound’s monetary campaign to allow him to be a writer. Save the Poet. And lines built upon lines. That is how one writes. Slowness. Wait. And in the isolation of that room, a belief in oneself that could be construed as monstrous. In one’s own Eventual Greatness. No little voices that wormed through to whisper in one’s ear: Sick Sick Sick. What is seen as signs of great Artistry in a man can be seen as alarm in a woman’s behavior. So besides the isolation of the room that all writers and artists suffer under, there is an active campaign against women to pathologize their struggle, their torment, or to have this done for them. (The narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” feeling she wouldn’t feel so nervous and fatigued, if she didn’t always have to struggle against the husband, the good sister-in-law, society, if she was given permission to be, to not have to hide her writing.)
There’s this idea in the Fitzgerald legend that Zelda VOMITED out Waltz, unlike Scott’s painstaking refinement of Tender. She is read as an outsider writer (so really mad, not just operating in that world of romanticized madness). Her writing characterized by obsession, by excess, by mental illness. There is another Zelda character in Tender, the 30-year-old American painter at the Swiss clinic, a scaled she-monster, body burning with eczema. Of this artist Scott writes: “She was coherent, even brilliant, within the limits of her special hallucinations.”
Yet Henry Miller can write his brilliant, associative, song of himself, unfettered, read as great literature. The Beats are allowed their benzedrine.
The female mode of possession is read as Sylvia’s blood jet — such a feminine image, the menstrual blood spewing, the cut of the wrists. The burst of creativity, the obsessive drive, will always be read as unmedicated, disordered, dangerous.
In Waltz Alabama’s dancing is depicted as a sort of mysticism, which David (standing in for Scott) both jealously fetishizes and then scorns. While blocked in the process of writing Tender, Scott resented his wife’s productivity. She remembers, in a letter: “I worked constantly and was terribly superstitious and moody about my work…I lived in a quiet, ghostly, hypersensitized world of my own. Scott drank.” With the aid of her doctors he pathologized Zelda’s artmaking, removing any subjectivity or raised consciousness in her breakdown. In his characterizations of her to her doctors and in his fictional portrayals, he provides his defense, an argument against the possibility of the woman artist. Again, from Tender, the doctor decides the woman’s case: “The frontiers that artists must explore were not for her, ever. She was fine-spun, inbred — eventually she might rest in some quiet mysticism.” And yet I think this period of intense artmaking for Zelda was filled with absolute lucidity. Yet this is not how she’s been mythologized or remembered. “You were going crazy and calling it genius.” Scott said to her.