Again with the late-night ramblings.
Feb. 1st, 2011 01:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marcellinafuriosaThe other day as I was walking from the train station to work a breeze blew into my face and fluttered the pashminas on the rack outside the Tibetan Boutique, and it was definitely a spring wind, not a winter one. So I am keeping my chin up despite the incipient snow, and the probability that the sore throat that's sticking around is the beginning of a cold and not just a reaction to dust or something like that (my mother is feeling sick, too. How we are to shovel tomorrow, and where we're to put it, I do not know.)
I got sucked in by this. There is much good stuff on it. Chilling Thing: the editor of the website quotes passages out of her letters and diaries during the bleak period when she was writing "Mistress Pat" and they could have come out of the later letters or diaries of any twenty of the nineteenth/early twentieth century women who turned a compulsion for storytelling into both their art and their livelihood* (probably plenty of men who wrote, too, of course, but I am a Deborah Jenkyns-style reverse sexist and anyway have read a lot more about the lives of women who wrote than the lives of men who wrote, at least during this period). Author after author, letter after letter, you get entries like this: "Kept on at the new book. There's very little joy in it these days, but I mean to persevere as long as the strength is in me. I am lonely. I am depressed. I am ill. I get letters, sometimes, from the people I love, but everyone's so far away (and so many are gone forever.) I am tired. I am homesick. I am stuck in a rut grinding out what I know will sell because otherwise I will be without a living. I'm afraid I've lost my talent. Would anyone notice? My head aches. My hands are cramping up. I don't see an end to it." As CFW said (she had a wicked sense of humor) "Why do literary women break down so, and...act so? It almost seems as if only the unhappy women took to writing."
Probably there are as many varieties of Writer Heaven as there are writers. Woolson would be able to hear again and all the angels would sing for her, Montgomery could do anything she liked without family repercussions, LMA could climb the highest tree in Paradise and feel the wind in her hair and then when she came down all her sisters would be waiting for her, Jean Rhys would never run out of pretty new dresses, Mrs Gaskell would have all her children safe and happy around her, and all of them would get a damn good explanation.
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ETA: In the cold light of day, my vision of Writer Heaven looks rather infantilizing. (Maybe my own idea of Paradise is somewhat infantile anyway, but that's another whole can of worms.) The main thing is that they'd be free and happy and peaceful and comfortable (so many of them were chronically ill.) And that they'd get a damn good explanation. And a respectful audience. They would have a respectful audience.
*They're different from the ones who could just turn it into an art and weren't under a financial burden. And they're different from the Marian Yules who could write, and wrote to put bread on the table, but didn't have that "I have to tell stories, and tell them this particular way, or I will shrivel up and die" spark in them and would have been just as happy with any other respectable means of earning a living. They were caught on these two prongs all the time between doing their duty to their talent and writing what would sell so they could send their sick sisters to the mountains- it's worse than it was for Reardon, because there's this added element of "she did it but she shouldn't have." Plenty of people (well, his nasty brother-in-law) tell Reardon he's a failure and a weakling, but nobody tells him he's a freak.
I got sucked in by this. There is much good stuff on it. Chilling Thing: the editor of the website quotes passages out of her letters and diaries during the bleak period when she was writing "Mistress Pat" and they could have come out of the later letters or diaries of any twenty of the nineteenth/early twentieth century women who turned a compulsion for storytelling into both their art and their livelihood* (probably plenty of men who wrote, too, of course, but I am a Deborah Jenkyns-style reverse sexist and anyway have read a lot more about the lives of women who wrote than the lives of men who wrote, at least during this period). Author after author, letter after letter, you get entries like this: "Kept on at the new book. There's very little joy in it these days, but I mean to persevere as long as the strength is in me. I am lonely. I am depressed. I am ill. I get letters, sometimes, from the people I love, but everyone's so far away (and so many are gone forever.) I am tired. I am homesick. I am stuck in a rut grinding out what I know will sell because otherwise I will be without a living. I'm afraid I've lost my talent. Would anyone notice? My head aches. My hands are cramping up. I don't see an end to it." As CFW said (she had a wicked sense of humor) "Why do literary women break down so, and...act so? It almost seems as if only the unhappy women took to writing."
Probably there are as many varieties of Writer Heaven as there are writers. Woolson would be able to hear again and all the angels would sing for her, Montgomery could do anything she liked without family repercussions, LMA could climb the highest tree in Paradise and feel the wind in her hair and then when she came down all her sisters would be waiting for her, Jean Rhys would never run out of pretty new dresses, Mrs Gaskell would have all her children safe and happy around her, and all of them would get a damn good explanation.
.
ETA: In the cold light of day, my vision of Writer Heaven looks rather infantilizing. (Maybe my own idea of Paradise is somewhat infantile anyway, but that's another whole can of worms.) The main thing is that they'd be free and happy and peaceful and comfortable (so many of them were chronically ill.) And that they'd get a damn good explanation. And a respectful audience. They would have a respectful audience.
*They're different from the ones who could just turn it into an art and weren't under a financial burden. And they're different from the Marian Yules who could write, and wrote to put bread on the table, but didn't have that "I have to tell stories, and tell them this particular way, or I will shrivel up and die" spark in them and would have been just as happy with any other respectable means of earning a living. They were caught on these two prongs all the time between doing their duty to their talent and writing what would sell so they could send their sick sisters to the mountains- it's worse than it was for Reardon, because there's this added element of "she did it but she shouldn't have." Plenty of people (well, his nasty brother-in-law) tell Reardon he's a failure and a weakling, but nobody tells him he's a freak.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-01 07:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-01 09:23 pm (UTC)And absinthe!
And bathhouses!
And f*ck this, I'm going to Italy!
Or, if you were broke, joining the Gold Rush or working your way across the Atlantic on a tramp steamer!
Nineteenth century men had *options*, dammit!