His Perfect Wife
Page 33
Male artists, on the other hand, do not have to be 100 percent fathers before all else. We forgive them for being mediocre or even bad fathers in a way we never would a woman. Our bookshelves and art galleries are littered with works by men who have abandoned or neglected their offspring. In 1952, Hemingway’s youngest son wrote to him to say, “When it’s all added up, papa, it will be: he wrote a few good stories, had a novel and fresh approach to reality and he destroyed five persons…Which do you think is the most important, your self-centered shit, the stories or the people?”
History, of course, has chosen Hemingway’s stories, but it’s rarely so clear-cut for female authors. Accounts of Lessing almost always linger on the point that she left her ten-year-old son, John, and six-year-old daughter, Jean, in Rhodesia to pursue her writing career in England. She is often quoted as saying, “There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children,” and “No one can write with a child around,” but few journalists pay attention to the fact that she was forbidden custody of John and Jean, banned from returning to Rhodesia until 1980, and that her youngest son, Peter, lived with her for most of his adult life. It’s easier to paint her as terrible mother, 100 percent artist. Similarly, in relation to their children, Enid Blyton, Muriel Spark, and Rebecca West are all accused of madness, absence, and abandonment. Their achievements as writers must, it seems, be weighed against the maternal cost.
Much is being discussed at the moment about whether we can separate the art from the artist, whether it’s okay to enjoy good work (Annie Hall, House of Cards, Rosemary’s Baby) made by bad people. The same no doubt should be asked about artists who are bad parents, but at present it seems to only be asked of mothers. This double-standard is even more apparent when artists use their art to talk about the struggle between creativity and parenthood. In contemporary literature, we’ve seen praise heaped on Karl Ove Knausgård for his autobiographical novel series My Struggle. In the second, A Man in Love, he examines the difficulties of juggling writing and fatherhood, often detailing his shortcomings in the latter. Questions have been raised about the ethics of Knausgård writing about his family in such detail, but he’s received nowhere near the level of personal criticism Rachel Cusk did for her pregnancy and motherhood memoir, A Life’s Work. “Frankly,” one reviewer told Cusk, “you are a self-obsessed bore: the embodiment of the Me! Me! Me! attitude which you so resent in small children.” “Pure misery to read,” another wrote, “from the way she writes about her first child, God alone only knows how she allowed herself to bear a second.”
“To be myself,” Cusk writes, “I must let the baby cry, must forestall her hunger or leave her for evenings out, must forget her in order to think about other things. To succeed in being one means to fail at being the other.” This seems the very opposite of the message of Hein Koh’s Facebook post showing her breastfeeding her twins while working at her laptop. Which is no doubt why Cusk was accused of selfishness, postnatal depression, and exploitation. Again, fiction seems like a much safer place for writers to explore these ambivalences and ambiguities. The domestic noir genre prides itself on exploring the darkest edges of family life; and, at the point of marketing these books, plot points involving pregnancy and child-rearing are often held up as proof of how effective the stories will be at evoking a sense of suffocation. Why then is it so horrifying for a writer like Cusk to admit to the suffocation in nonfiction?
A huge part of the problem is that the structure of the question of whether motherhood kills creativity is based on the premise that as soon as a woman has a child she is expected be so overcome by her natural instincts that her previous devotion to her work will wane. Rarely do we flip the question to ask if an artist’s creativity will impact her maternal instincts. As such, we leave little room for women to admit they’re less than 100 percent mothers, or that having children isn’t their whole world. It seems unlikely that either Abramović or Emin would have felt the need to make their statements if they were male. The only reason for women with their level of professional success to defend their life choices is that we still live in a society where a woman without a child is perceived as lacking.
What would a world look like where we respected a childless woman’s ability to feel “complete”? Where both men and women were free to personally negotiate how they divided themselves between their work and their offspring? And where we allowed both sexes the space to admit, in life as well as in fiction, that having children is complex and hard and not always everything it’s cracked up to be?
Originally published by CrimeReads
About the Author
NATASHA BELL grew up in Somerset and studied English literature at the University of York. She holds an MA in the humanities from the University of Chicago and an MA in creative writing from Goldsmiths. She lives in southeast London.
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