Flaubert equally callously broke it off with his mistress. He was able to distance himself, devote himself, become a mystic/monk for the work, closing off from the demanding, desirous woman. She is merely the handmaiden for his possession. The high priestess of emotion. The Muse, as she was known. The goal for these men was to become a perfect artist. To transcend one’s own suffering. The artist in the view of both Eliot and Flaubert needed to be impersonal, a god figure, although they both drew from real life. “Passion does not make verses; and the more personal you are, the weaker,” Flaubert writes in a letter to Colet. In Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotions, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” An escape from whose? Hers. Her personality is too strong. SHE is a “personality,” not an author. Eliot and Flaubert’s theories of writing that also played out in their personal philosophies of how to live one’s life. Like an elaborate defense. Art is best if depersonalized.
These men, fetishizing and vampirizing the excessive (in their texts) while disciplining and punishing her in real life.
She is raw material. Too raw, too open, too needy, too emotional.
These writers and the cult surrounding them often represent the writer’s possession as some sort of genderbending alchemy. That these literary geniuses have somehow been filled with Women, the madwoman or woman in love (a sort of madness) as conduit. Deleuze and Guattari, who worshipped the madwoman as metaphor, this ideal state of the “Body without Organs,” their term the “becoming-woman” (they use as examplars of this the male modernists, Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence, and the rest). “The first task of the revolutionary, they add, is to learn from the psychotic,” from the introduction of D&G’s Anti-Oedipus.
(Their policeman named Deleuze.)
Flaubert becoming the hysteric, this is the magic trick Baudelaire praises him for in his review of Madame Bovary (“To accomplish the tour de force in its entirety, it remained for the author only to divest himself [to the extent possible] of his sex, and become a woman.”)
What does Flaubert’s own proclamation—“Madame Bovary, c’est moi”—mean? A pretense at androgyny, channeling — he becomes woman, temporarily. This is the model of writing the novel from which women have been excluded. Fitzgerald saying he is “half feminine.” The genderbending Tiresias in “The Waste Land.” There is a desire to own, to vampirize, by assuming and colonizing one’s fictional creations.
They represent their process as a pregnancy. That image of Henry Miller in Tropic of Cancer, carrying around underneath his shirt that bowling ball of a book, like a cancerous tumor, people give up their seats to him on the train because of the book he is carrying around with him, that book he is about to birth so ecstatically. Nietzsche, who thought of writing as a “spiritual pregnancy.” (Although writing elsewhere that the best cure for an intellectual woman with pretensions to write would be actual pregnancy.) Artaud’s daughters of the cunt (although he would stop speaking to his women friends once they became pregnant).
I am now taking prenatal vitamins because of my thinning hair. Stress, maybe the veganism. When I buy them I feel everyone watching me — am I paranoid? — I feel the cashier at Whole Foods giving me a special look.
If Molly Bloom was a real woman writer, she would probably be dismissed as mad and unnecessarily pathologized. We glorify our male literary hysterics who often channel women and condemn our female literary hysterics. They can play women, fetishize her excesses. Make fun of her frivolity. They don’t have to be women. A colonizing or appropriating of the feminine.
The model of the writer as one possessed. Nietzsche writing frenzied nineteen hours a day and practically blind. (He went mad too, his mad letters, bursting out into the street, throwing his arms around the flogged horse.) Flaubert furious at his desk. Kerouac type type typing. He had his wifey to feed him split pea soup and coffee and benzedrine.
If you are a woman — the flames are seen as too close. The flames of Virginia Woolf. One must not overstimulate. Charred. (They called Viv and her friends “Char-flappers.”)
Virginia writing of her fatigue from penning the “mad parts,” the Septimus Smith scenes in Mrs. Dalloway. Leonard was sure her “episodes” came from overwroughtness. Like how Flaubert was exhausted writing Emma’s torment? Different somehow. He was never told to stay away from BRILLIANCE. He was never warned that it would make him ill. Even though he was also ill. Sometimes quite ill. Yet somehow treated differently. Never warned that to write another self as if it is your own is a form of self-destruction. (The police in different voices: mother, father, doctor, husband, one learns to swallow these voices, like knives.)
Virginia hearing the birds singing in Greek.
To become so possessed by a character you begin to play the part. A sort of Method Acting that is also a conjuring up. Jean Rhys POSSESSED by Bertha, who she first calls Antoinette Cosway. In the novel Rhys unravels what led to her being renamed, being destroyed, going mad, madness in her novel as the death of the self (by the patriarchal Mr. Rochester, her Lloyd’s of London banker, all the English men with their terror of emotional scenes that terrorize Rhys’ women). “I live with [Antoinette] all day and sometimes dream of her at night! An obsession!”
Possession and obsession. She read Jane Eyre several times as a young girl when she first arrived from England. It haunted her. “That’s only one side — the English side” she has said of the mad Creole heiress Charlotte Brontë paints in such a grotesque.
Later in life Jean Rhys also acting out the part, the crazy lady in Cornwall, getting into physical altercations with neighbors. Drunken scenes.
(Wherever we live I am convinced the neighbors know about me. I can see it in their eyes when we pass silently on the stairs.)
Compose yourself. Compose yourself. How were they composed? A HAG-iography — the biography of a female criminal not a saint. (Bertrand Russell who wrote to Lady Ottoline Morrell, his mistress and Bloomsbury hostess whom he later threw over for Viv, of Eliot’s wife: “She is a person who lives on a knife edge, & will end as a criminal or saint — I don’t know which yet. She has a perfect capacity for both.” Of course he was being disingenous, as he was shagging her still lovely bones at the time.)
Virginia writing her demonology of Vivien(ne): “She was as wild as Ophelia — alas no Hamlet would love her, with her powdered spots…” In reading Viv’s bio I’m struck by how Virginia in her journals served as Viv’s contemporary biographer, along with the journals of Lady Ottoline Morrell, who was caricatured herself as a lovesick hysteric in D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. Morrell and Woolf both intellectual women who suffered from and were diagnosed according to all of the gendered categories of mental illness of the time, and went through numerous treatments for their revolving physical maladies. Their diagnoses and doctors were some of the only things these women shared with one another, swapping them like recipes or diets, passing around a dis-ease.