A definition, I think, of being oppressed, is being forbidden to externalize any anger.
I am beginning to realize that the patriarch decides on the form of communication. Decides on the language. The patriarch is the one who rewrites.
How did you inherit such violence? he asks. He is laughing. It is the way he unconsciously defends himself from conflict. When I exhibit intense emotion.
“The Sibyl, with frenzied mouth uttering things not to be laughed at, unadorned and unperfumed, yet reaches to a thousand years with her voice by aid of the god.”
It is this laughter that destroys me. “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage,” writes the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
But he is violent too. “In masculine hands logic is often a form of violence, a sly kind of tyranny,” writes Simone de Beauvoir. He tears me into rags and rages.
The Eliots’ violent fights in public. She liked to humiliate him in front of strangers. In one of Vivien(ne)’s stories her heroine Sibylla throws parcels down the stairs. “She hits Andre on the face with her umbrella. Having done it once she does it again. The whole world totters — it spins about her. She longs to destroy herself and looks wildly about but there is no window low enough from which to cast herself, no knife or weapon presents itself for her purpose.”
The hysteria of the marital fight — grabbing for any convenient weapon to use against oneself or against each other.
In one manuever I pantomine suicide — opening the window and making motions to climb out until John grabs me, embarrassed people might be watching. We are only on the second floor, he reminds me.
I think of Virginia: “A wife like I am should have a label to her cage. She bites!”
Yes, yes, that old familiar violence. No word or touch can cool it.
In Leonard Woolf’s intricate documentation of his wife’s moods, he repeatedly uses the word “violence,” Woolf’s biographer, Hermione Lee, observes. “She was occasionally violent with her nurses” “violent excitement” “violently hostile to me.” He doesn’t distinguish between behavior and the effects of her treatment which influenced her behavior (the prescribed “hypnotics” which in large quantities can lead to all the symptoms of mania).
“His language makes a deliberate effort to be unemotional, but uses terms like ‘raving mad’ and ‘insanity,’ ‘loss of control,’ ‘incoherent,’ and above all ‘violent,’ which seems involuntarily to introduce a code of reasonable standards of behavior versus intolerable lapses.”
Leonard Woolf’s notes on Virginia mirror Freud and Breuer’s case study of the teenage hysteric they named Anna O. In one state melancholy and anxious, in the other “she hallucinated and was ‘naughty’—that is to say, she was abusive…” Tearing buttons. Throwing things. Freud calls these rages “absences”—as if she was absent from her self. It must be illness, this violence. No other way to explain losing one’s shit. Although her life was one of monotony. A caretaker for her father. Such a bright girl so fucking BORED. (And yet this ennui was read as a sign of her hysteria, Dora’s deemed tedium vitae, also her “hysterical unsociability”).
In some ways socially sanctioned “illness” was the only way for HER to ever go outside the strict boundaries of behavior, to freak out, to lose it a little, to protest (although the protest was often silent and incredibly painful). She doubles herself — the angel, the monster. Of course the violence is then muted — she turns it on herself.
Compose yourself. Compose yourself. They are supposed to hold it in. To control themselves. Perhaps the fury is one’s own containment. If one wasn’t so contained, one wouldn’t be so furious.
“I found the emotionless condition a great strain, all the time. I used to think I should burst out and scream and dance,” writes Vivien(ne).
HE DO THE POLICE IN DIFFERENT VOICES
A high percentage of female artists and writers were labeled hysterics: “…doctors had noticed hysteria was apt to appear in young women who were especially rebellious.” They are the disliked “difficult” patients, the early precursor of the female schizophrenic or BPD girl, as opposed to the lovely, enervated neurasthenic.
Schizophrenia originally called dementia praecox. That praecox feeling, an annoyance or revulsion towards a patient that was seen as diagnostic.
Still now, a discomfort with a woman who rages.
Better to call the fury “The Thing.” It is the illness talking. It is allowed if we call it a possession — a spinning head. When she uses nasty language, when she throws a scene.
Where is it supposed to go? All of this fury? A woman’s anger: it must be contained, repressed, diffused.
Maybe Emma B. is pissed off. So instead of destroying something (not permissible) she sets off to systematically self-destruct. Or to try to live intensely. Or perhaps those are the same things.
Maybe these women were furious.
(She is mad, yes, but she is also ANGRY.)
What to make of Virginia Woolf’s insistence in Room that the “red light” of anger actually blocks a clear and receptive mind and hence thwarts good writing? When it is her political take-down of the lawmakers that gives Mrs. Dalloway its bite, or again in Room, the sneer against all of the Professor Xs.
Although Woolf perennially enacted such fury and revolt in her personal life, she obviously internalized the current ideology of mental illness, made clear in her thesis against anger in Room. Perhaps this is also why she distanced herself from the sickly, intense wife of the American poet. Viv is the id she wants to avoid, Tom the superego.
Also an internalizing of T.S. Eliot’s correcting philosophies. One must not act out in excess. The objective correlative. Not only how women should behave, but how writing should behave. Writing should be composed. Should be transcendent. In the calm communion with and recognition of one’s ancestors. And one has to somehow sacrifice the suffering man to make great art, to transcend one’s own state. There is some of this in Woolf’s concept of transcendence in art. In opposition Viv, the wife not the writer, the clever dilettante, was seen as all excess of emotions. Doomed to thingness, to the body, to immanence. Reduced to her blood, her bowels, her body. A tortured Molly Bloom, wondering at her hole.
I am also in communion with my ancestors. Writing towards these women is like engaging in a seance. I put pictures of my criminals on my wall, like Jean Genet in his jail cell in Our Lady of the Flowers. At night I love them and my love fills them with life.
When I moved to Akron I suddenly became fascinated with the Papin Sisters, those good girls who snapped and murdered their bourgeois mama-employer and the employer’s daughter. The two sisters, Christine and Léa, so connected they began to blot out the outside world. There was the alpha sister, who apparently said upon being carried away: In another life I must have been my sister’s husband! Then they became more estranged — the one grew more mad while the other more repressed, and by that I mean more sane. This reminds me of Eliot in his cool monk’s tower, Viv raging. The elder sister completely unraveled, died inside the asylum, while the other moved out, became a maid again (a bonne, a good woman), lived with their dreaded mother.
Their policeman who was named Deleuze.
Everyone was obsessed with them, even de Beauvoir and her lover Sartre (who saw them as victims of class warfare). Genet conjured them up in his play The Maids. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan used them for his case study of the paranoaic published in the Surrealist journal Minotaure. He made much of their brutal act of tearing out their victims’ eyes.