Pieces of literature and art that I have grouped together in my head are: Night and Day by Virginia Woolf, Le Passage by Kay Sage, 'Sow' by Sylvia Plath, Corregidora by Gayl Jones, 'Again and Again and Again' by Anne Sexton.
There is a limerick by Sage which captures the spirit that I believe these works have in common:
R.S.V.P.
If I were free and you were free
with no one to ask and no one to see,
and we could do what we wanted to,
what would you want of me?
I’ll answer for you, and you answer for me;
if you were free and I were free,
you wouldn’t do what you think you would,
when everything’s easy, one is good
and you wouldn’t want to, once you could…
Now you answer for me.
The poem is both chatty and incredibly oblique. As a limerick, it also possesses a certain rigidity, but there are no surprising rhymes in it - no humor - and its mystery comes from the ugliness of its rigidity (mystery and not mysticism or mystique). I believe that this is the same quality that emerges from the hardness of Sage’s paintings - warped, injured - as terror.
I assumed that this essay was about suicide and women artists until I read Andrea Long Chu’s surprising review of Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Parade. Reading it gave me an opportunity to reconsider, which I did, and then I began to feel that using these writers’ womanhood as the axle for my thinking was intellectually lazy (!), a phrase that I haven’t found useful in years because I think of it as intellectually lazy. More precise to identify something as an ideologically driven reflex or (non-)position. I say non-position because my belief is that ideology makes us benign and does so specifically by inviting us to refrain from acting.
In other words, by writing this essay about ‘women artists’ committing suicide, I was really actually choosing not to write it. There is no way to take an ideological position, as it turns out, because they have all already been taken… To write this article in that way - which I still am not sure I am not doing - would have been to conclude at the outset that some women are committing suicide because they are women, which is the boring (deadening?) notion that I was and am, at the same time, attempting to write against. I was trying to find another explanation…
But I see where I’m going with this. The question (still obscure) seems to me to have only two possible answers, and both are devastating. Who would prefer the dilemma, with which I guess we are all saddled, of essentialism versus repressive social conditions? There are no good options, when it comes to gender, and so my solution was to dance on the head of a pin. But it is becoming clearer to me now that that, too, is a form of essentialism, perhaps even archetypal…
I am still talking about ideology. It is ideology that gives us only two options - to recognize and reinscribe or to risk becoming ourselves unrecognizable, as many thinkers and writers have suggested and shown. Essentialisms in general seem to be strong examples of ideologically driven reflexes. Essentialism is so handy; in a very real way, as a thinking and, dare I say, a literary device, it seems always to be at hand. Is that the meaning of ideology? A thought that you start to have, but then find was already there? A thought that is lying in wait?
I am right now reckoning with the fact that ideology is the truth of my femininity, obviously. Femininity is a place to hide and also a place to rest, and I know that this is a cop-out. But I want to live, and I have found that I cannot do it with the sense that I believe so many women (?) artists (?) live with of misrecognition and humiliation. In an intimate relationship, this is the sense of being overlooked. Out of one, it is loneliness, violence, isolation.
Many women I know have thought that they were being chosen, when in fact they were being overlooked. I can see this in the portrait that Cusk paints of the artist Celine Paul in a profile which Andrea Long Chu describes as ‘baffling.’ I can see this in Nancy Yanes Hoffman’s short paper1 on the life and poetry of Anne Sexton, whose truly brilliant work I deeply dislike: “Her desire was to be joined to another in love. Each time that love was disappointed, she was left with her own insufficient resources — left, finally, rowing toward God” (210).
To return to dancing on the head of a pin, I am now going to quote a few excerpts from the first draft of this paper and examine their ideological underpinnings. It is an astonishing relief to realize that I can do something like this - something so silly. I want to remember that to allow oneself to draft something gives one a sense of power, which is the opposite of perfectionism. There is freedom in language, and that freedom is the product of time.
“I am concerned about women who make art. I am concerned about women wrecking their lives to make art. In some ways, I don’t understand why this concerns me. It seems like such an archaic problem. Who is doing much of anything right now? And why should I care also? I mean, the kind of wreckage that I am talking about is a personal choice.”
What I like about this part is the fact that I was puzzled. What I don’t like is the ‘concern,’ which is the reason why I was puzzled. Being a woman who is ‘concerned’ about ‘women’ feels like talking about nothing. Does that make sense? It feels like the reinscription of a discourse that, as an eighteen-year-old, would have made me want to peel off my skin and jump out of a window and still makes me feel that way today. Invoking it, I see, was my attempt, using language, to somehow stay in my body, which, come to think of it, is perhaps the way to begin an essay, to begin any form of writing or speech. Perhaps at the outset we must always try to do the impossible and fall back on what we know. Perhaps falling/failing/faltering is always the first step. I’ll leave it there. Perhaps it would behoove me and us to make less of a meal out of faltering and move on, not knowing what we are going to say or do next.
1Funny (not ha-ha funny) to compare the titles of the texts joined in the piece in which Nancy Yanes Hoffman’s paper appears. The “Two Perspectives on Anne Sexton” are Hoffman’s “A Special Language” and Jeffrey L. Lant’s “Another Entry in the Death Notebooks.”
2.6.25
Notes
Hoffman, Nancy Yanes, and Jeffrey L. Lant. “Two Perspectives on Anne Sexton.” Southwest Review, vol. 64, no. 3, 1979, pp. 209–19. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43468286. Accessed 26 May 2025.
Sage, Kay. The More I Wonder. New York, Bookman Associates, 1957.