And the Papin Sisters were on their menstrual periods, allegedly. THEY WEAR THE RED GARBS OF CRIMINALS. A line reworked from The Maids. Hormones also blamed for Sylvia offing herself as welclass="underline" It was all PMS! I once read in an article. How humiliating.
Can you imagine? She is bleeding Ophelia, not a tortured Hamlet. All of Vivien(ne)’s problems always blamed on her menstrual periods. Virginia too had difficult periods.
One day a seething thing. The next a cramped girl-child moaning while John brings me tea. What Simone de B calls the half-alienation of a woman.
The Michael Hastings film, Tom and Viv, pins the Eliots’ train-wreck of a marriage almost entirely on Viv’s hormones and drug use. From the IMDB description of Tom and Viv stickered on my Netflix envelope: “In 1915, T.S. (Tom) Eliot and Vivienne Haigh-Wood elope, but her longstanding gynecological and emotional problems disrupt their planned honeymoon.”
That second failed honeymoon at the sea. That scene in the film. The red-stained white sheet in the honeymoon suite. Miranda Richardson in her flapper bob is on her knees: I disgust you. She internalizes this shame, like she is some aberrant criminal. Willem Dafoe as proper Tom is absolutely mortified. He flees the scene. The film is awful caricature, but so is much of the Eliot mythography. From Vivien(ne)’s biography: “While a distraught Vivien locked herself in her bedroom and apparently damaged the room.” It’s confusing. Seriously, it’s some blood. (What is Eliot’s objective correlative here?) As confusing as Rochester explaining to Jane Eyre that his first wife Bertha turned out to be vulgar and sluttish, and we’re supposed to believe this gives him some moral license to lock her up in the attic.
Flaubert thought his mistress and confidante, the poet and artist’s model Louise Colet, was vulgar as well. She was known in the artistic circles of 19th century Paris as the Muse. He wrote to her: “Don’t you feel everything is currently dissolving into the humid element — tears, chatter, breast-feeding. Contemporary literature is drowning in women’s menses.”
Oh, the mess. The fucking mess. Maybe that’s it. The untidiness of it all. The threat that spills out. The excess that cannot be cleaned up, controlled. And yet Eliot channeled this excess, his horror of it.
In his poem “Ode” written three years after his marriage, maybe circling around that traumatic scene: “When the bridegroom smoothed his hair / There was blood upon the bed.” He was horrified by her repulsive femininity. Its excesses. Her brother to Michael Hastings in an interview: “Viv’s sanitary towels always put a man off.” Embedded in this is the idea that a woman is nature, violence, instability. Hysterical — originating from her womb. (The chanting of “Ode”: “Succaba eviscerate/Torturous.”) Succuba — the first wife, like Lilith. She is a demon, bent on unmanning him. Clytaemnestra paving Agamemnon’s murderous homecoming with crimson tapestries. He the Fisher King. These figures continue in “The Waste Land.” All the violence of the act. Raped Philomela with her tongue torn out.
Eliot’s ancestors who judged the witches at Salem.
All these literary patriarchs who thought they were doctors too. A corroboration.
Tom asked Leonard, Virginia’s husband, whether he should give Viv writing exercises, if that would help her spirits. (I’m sure Virginia loved the comparison.) Viv who possessed such a wit and talent for words. Leonard said yes, but not to overdo it. He kept his wife on a strict diet of writing only one hour a day, following the advice of her doctors, when she was recovering from an episode, or a breakdown.
Illness marked a pause in her writing, noted one of Virginia’s biographers. Partly self-censorship, a desire to scratch out one’s days, most likely also this strict regimen (she was now watched over, disciplined).
She was advised to spend four hours a day gardening.
Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, who believed strongly that to be a happy woman, to not be nervous, one must “live as domestic a life as possible” and “never touch pen, brush, or pencil as long as you live.” This is the advice he gave Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The character in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is lectured to do nothing. No society, no work. (All I want to do is work, Zelda would beg in those last years.) The popular ideology of the time dictated that nervous ladies should not be overstimulated — that is what made them nervous to begin with. In the Victorian era it was thought detrimental for a woman (a wife) to have a lively imagination, to use her mind. This was thought to make her sick. A way to take away the power from the burgeoning New Woman with her desire and demand for public and personal freedoms, convince her she’s ill. To be seen primarily as an invalid is to be invalidated.
The woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a writer. She writes as a means of survival. To fight against her utter isolation and invisibility. She keeps a journal she must hide.
Yet it’s so impossible to shut out all the voices. Not only: no one will read you (Nietzsche: non legor, non legar.) But: you are mad. When you are told that you are ill, that is something you internalize. Days I worry, wonder — what if I’m not a writer? What if I’m a depressive masquerading as a notetaker? Is this the text of an author or a madwoman? It depends perhaps on who is reading it. Who has read it first. For once you are named it’s almost impossible to struggle out from under the oppression of those categories — it is done, it is done at a price, and the price is daily, and it is on your head.
This is something Woolf was intimately familiar with — the threat always, of madness, of being read as mad, as incoherent. She distanced herself as much as possible. Tunneled her experiences of madness into her Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway, his mad letters, not hers, not her. Septimus reflected her own fears of not being intelligible. Although of course she had also the experiences of Clarissa as the patient-patient, encouraged by her paternal husband to go to her womb-tomb of a child’s room during the day to take a nap, the experience of being fragile in the air after days in a daze, after an extended illness. The contained Clarissa versus Septimus Smith — he is the one who jumps out of windows.
COMPOSE YOURSELF. What does this mean? You must COMPOSE YOURSELF. They were undisciplined women. That is the storyline. To be disciplined and write of the undisciplined.
My sisters, my mistresses, the spiders stalking the center of the web. I circle them, I weave their tales (or unweave the tales spun about them), I wrap my silken webs around them, I devour them. My black widows, sometimes they leave widowers, they hang themselves by their own threads.
When the shame and guilt sets in — they must distance themselves from their demon-others.
During the rest cure, women were completely isolated and weren’t allowed to write — they were given little scraps of paper and little nubs of pencils, little supplicating messages like what Zelda wrote Fitzgerald in the asylum, censored, so women learned what to write, how to behave, often penitent, tranquilized, after an “attack.”
From Virginia: “I want to see you, but this is best….It’s all my fault…I am grateful and repentant.” Also Virginia’s wan, weak suicide letter. In the archives at the British Library. A scrap, like a furtive missive at a rest home. “I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been,” she concludes. “You know I am ill and an endless drag on him,” wrote Viv. Sylvia who writes, “Ted is my salvation. He is so rare, so special, how could anyone else stand me!” An apologia for their earlier scenes since censored.
I go see a therapist off the highway in nearby Canton, Ohio, who tells me I have an “adjustment disorder.” She tells me this in the first appointment after what is called a diagnostic interview, when I answer questions on a list. Crying jags. Yes. Throwing things. Yes. It’s unnerving, this new model of your basic mall psychology, one goes to a therapist in distress, to be heard, to work something out, not to answer yes or no about family history, it is this feeling of being placed inside of a box, that makes me long for the patient-narrated model of the talking cure, however patriarchal. It makes me long for exorcisms, for at least the push of the priest’s hands. She must diagnose me, she says, for insurance reasons. I go look up “adjustment disorder” online in the DSM-IV, the fourth version of the diagnostics manual that is the bible of psychiatric classification. According to it, I have exhibited “marked distress that is in excess of what would be expected from exposure to the stressor,” that has caused a “significant impairment in social or occupational (academic) functioning,” although at least my stressor is “identifiable.” I am technically disordered but not really mad, at least not medically. It’s temporary, instead of one of the other more stigmatized categories on the Axis I, which is why it’s so often diagnosed. Yet I am mad, I am furious, I do not want to live here. Insurance will pay for therapy once a week. It will not pay to get me out of here. Co-pay of $30. For a limited time — five months only.