Dancing at the Edge of the World

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The hilly wooded lands open out wider and wider now. Fewer hedgerows. After Noyle we are in the wide-open rolling chalk-pale plowlands of Wilts. Golden-fleeced sheep on the high hills. An army van: Caution Abnormal Load.

  We go high-flying along an A road, vast rolling dun-gold greeny-brown pale plain all round, puffy receding clouds above, honey sunlight on hay rolls and sheep flocks.

  It’s clouding up quite fast.

  We turn off to Avebury—what luck, to see Avebury again! A picnic on the outer dike, and then a quick run around the great Circles of the Stones, while Barbara rests in the car. Caught by pelting rain at the stones that I call the King and Queen at the end of the outer row, we huddled against the Queen in our baby-blue and baby-green Pac-A-Macs, and she sheltered us. We then refuged in the National Trust shop and bought a tea-cozy sheep and a Kendalls Mint Cake, and came out to silvery running sunshine and cloud-shadows, and photographed like mad. I sit now in the car in Marlborough High Street to write this, while Barbara and Charles grocery-shop.

  Then up, up, up the Berkshire Downs across the high, wide, autumnal land, across the old Ridgeway, to the downs’ end and overlook above the whole Valley of the Thames: flat and full of business of mankind all the way to the hazy horizon.

  Over the hills and a great way off,

  The wind will blow your top-knot off.

  And so back to Oxford, to Barbara’s house.

  THE FISHERWOMAN’S DAUGHTER

  (1988)

  I read the first version of this paper at Brown University and at Miami University in Ohio, and revised it heavily to read at Wesleyan College in Georgia. Then I wrote it all over again to read at Portland State University. I have a feeling I read it somewhere else, but can’t reconstruct where. When I went to Tulane to be a Mellon Fellow—to be precise, a quarter of a Mellon—I rewrote it again, and that version, which I pretended was definitive, appeared in Tulane’s series of Mellon papers, under the title “A Woman Writing.” Asked to give the talk in a benefit series in San Francisco, I decided to include more about my mother, whose writing life was lived in the Bay Area; and that led to another full revision.

  In preparing the manuscript of this book, I came to the immense folder containing the five—in places identical, in places widely differing—typescripts of the talk; and I thought, “If I have to rewrite that thing once more I will die.” So I merely included the latest version, without rereading it. My ruthless editor would have none of that. “Pusillanimous woman,” she said, “what about all the bits you left out?” “What about them?” I snarled. “I think if we just put them together it will work,” said she. “Show me,” said I, craftily. So she did. I hope it does.

  What pleases me most about the piece, after so much work on it, is that I can look on it at last as a collaboration. The responses from the various audiences I read it to, both questions in the lecture hall and letters afterward, guided and clarified my thinking and saved me from many follies and omissions. The present re-collation and editing has given me back the whole thing—not shapely and elegant, but a big crazy quilt. And that was my working title for it when I first began gathering material: “Crazy Quilt.” That name hints again at collaboration, which is what I saw myself as doing as I pieced together the works and words of so many other writers—ancestors, strangers, friends.

  “ ‘So of course,’ wrote Betty Flanders, pressing her heels rather deeper in the sand, ‘there was nothing for it but to leave.’ ”

  That is the first sentence of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room.1 It is a woman writing. Sitting on the sand by the sea, writing. It’s only Betty Flanders, and she’s only writing a letter. But first sentences are doors to worlds. This world of Jacob’s room, so strangely empty at the end of the book when the mother stands in it holding out a pair of her son’s old shoes and saying, “What am I to do with these?”—this is a world in which the first thing one sees is a woman, a mother of children, writing.

  On the shore, by the sea, outdoors, is that where women write? Not at a desk, in a writing room? Where does a woman write, what does she look like writing, what is my image, your image, of a woman writing? I asked my friends: “A woman writing: what do you see?” There would be a pause, then the eyes would light up, seeing. Some sent me to paintings, Fragonard, Cassatt, but mostly these turned out to be paintings of a woman reading or with a letter, not actually writing or reading the letter but looking up from it with unfocused eyes: Will he never never return? Did I remember to turn off the pot roast? … Another friend responded crisply, “A woman writing is taking dictation.” And another said, “She’s sitting at the kitchen table, and the kids are yelling.”

  And that last is the image I shall pursue. But first let me tell you my own first answer to my question: Jo March. From the immediacy, the authority, with which Frank Merrill’s familiar illustrations of Little Women2 came to my mind as soon as I asked myself what a woman writing looks like, I know that Jo March must have had real influence upon me when I was a young scribbler. I am sure she has influenced many girls, for she is not, like most “real” authors, either dead or inaccessibly famous; nor, like so many artists in books, is she set apart by sensitivity or suffering or general superlativity; nor is she, like most authors in novels, male. She is close as a sister and common as grass. As a model, what does she tell scribbling girls? I think it worthwhile to follow the biography of Jo March the Writer until we come to that person of whom, as a child and until quite recently, I knew almost nothing: Louisa May Alcott.

  We first meet Jo as a writer when sister Amy vengefully burns her manuscript, “the loving work of several years. It seemed a small loss to others, but to Jo it was a dreadful calamity.” How could a book, several years’ work, be “a small loss” to anyone? That horrified me. How could they ask Jo to forgive Amy? At least she nearly drowns her in a frozen lake before forgiving her. At any rate, some chapters later Jo is

  very busy in the garret … seated on the old sofa, writing busily, with her papers spread out on a trunk before her…. Jo’s desk up here was an old tin kitchen …

  —the OED says, “New England: a roasting pan.” So Jo’s room of her own at this stage is a garret furnished with a sofa, a roasting pan, and a rat. To any twelve-year-old, heaven.

  Jo scribbled away till the last page was filled, when she signed her name with a flourish…. Lying back on the sofa she read the manuscript carefully through, making dashes here and there, and putting in many exclamation points, which looked like little balloons; then she tied it up with a smart red ribbon and sat a minute looking at it with a sober, wistful expression, which plainly showed how earnest her work had been.

  I am interested here by the counter play of a deflating irony—the scribbling, the dashes, the balloons, the ribbon—and that wistful earnestness.

  Jo sends her story to a paper, it is printed, and she reads it aloud to her sisters, who cry at the right places. Beth asks, “Who wrote it?”

  The reader suddenly sat up, cast away the paper, displaying a flushed countenance, and with a funny mixture of solemnity and excitement, replied, in a loud voice, “Your sister.”

  The March family makes a great fuss, “for these foolish, affectionate people made a jubilee of every little household joy”—and there again is deflation, a writer’s first publication reduced to a “little household joy.” Does it not debase art? And yet does it not also, by refusing the heroic tone, refuse to inflate art into something beyond the reach of any “mere girl”?

  So Jo goes on writing; here she is some years later, and I quote at length, for this is the central image.

  Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and “fall into a vortex,” as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace. Her “scribbling suit” consisted of a black woollen pinafore on which she could wipe her pen at will, and a cap of the same material, adorned with a cheerful red bow…. This cap was
a beacon to the inquiring eyes of her family, who during these periods kept their distance, merely popping in their heads semi-occasionally to ask, with interest, “Does genius burn, Jo?” They did not always venture even to ask this question, but took an observation of the cap, and judged accordingly. If this expressive article of dress was drawn low upon the forehead, it was a sign that hard work was going on; in exciting moments it was pushed rakishly askew; and when despair seized the author it was plucked wholly off and cast upon the floor. At such times the intruder silently withdrew; and not until the red bow was seen gayly erect upon the gifted brow, did anyone dare address Jo.

  She did not think herself a genius by any means; but when the writing fit came on, she gave herself up to it with entire abandon, and led a blissful life, unconscious of want, care, or bad weather, while she sat safe and happy in an imaginary world, full of friends almost as real and dear to her as any in the flesh. Sleep forsook her eyes, meals stood untasted, day and night were all too short to enjoy the happiness which blessed her only at such times, and made these hours worth living, even if they bore no other fruit. The divine afflatus usually lasted a week or two, and then she emerged from her vortex, hungry, sleepy, cross, or despondent.

  This is a good description of the condition in which the work of art is done. This is the real thing—domesticated. The cap and bow, the facetious turns and the disclaimers, deflate without degrading, and allow Alcott to make a rather extraordinary statement: that Jo is doing something very important and doing it entirely seriously and that there is nothing unusual about a young woman’s doing it. This passion of work and this happiness which blessed her in doing it are fitted without fuss into a girl’s commonplace life at home. It may not seem much; but I don’t know where else I or many other girls like me, in my generation or my mother’s or my daughters’, were to find this model, this validation.

  Jo writes romantic thrillers and they sell; her father shakes his head and says, “Aim at the highest and never mind the money,” but Amy remarks, “The money is the best part of it.” Working in Boston as a governess-seamstress, Jo sees that “money conferred power: money and power, therefore, she resolved to have; not to be used for herself alone,” our author’s author hastily adds, “but for those whom she loved more than self…. She took to writing sensation stories.” Her first visit to the editorial office of the Weekly Volcano is handled lightly, but the three men treat her as a woman who has come to sell herself—true Lévi-Straussians, to whom what a woman does is entirely subsumed in woman as commodity. Refusing shame, Jo writes on, and makes money by her writing; admitting shame, she does not “tell them at home.”

  Jo soon found that her innocent experience had given her but few glimpses of the tragic world which underlies society; so, regarding it in a business light, she set about supplying her deficiencies with characteristic energy…. She searched newspapers for accidents, incidents, and crimes; she excited the suspicions of public librarians by asking for works on poisons; she studied faces in the street, and characters good, bad, and indifferent all about her…. Much describing of other people’s passions and feelings set her to studying and speculating about her own—a morbid amusement, in which healthy young minds do not voluntarily indulge—

  but which one might think appropriate, even needful, to the young novelist? However, “wrongdoing always brings its own punishment, and when Jo most needed hers, she got it.”

  Her punishment is administered by the Angel in the House, in the form of Professor Bhaer. Knowing that she is soiling her pure soul, he attacks the papers she writes for: “I do not like to think that good young girls should see such things.” Jo weakly defends them, but when he leaves she rereads her stories, three months’ work, and burns them. Amy doesn’t have to do it for her any more; she can destroy herself. Then she sits and wonders: “I almost wish I hadn’t any conscience, it’s so inconvenient!” A cry from the heart of Bronson Alcott’s daughter. She tries a pious tale and a children’s story, which don’t sell, and gives up: she “corked up her inkstand.”

  Beth dies, and trying to replace her, Jo tries “to live for others”—finally driving her mother to say, “Why don’t you write? That always used to make you happy.” So she does, and she writes both well and successfully—until Professor Bhaer returns and marries her, evidently the only way to make her stop writing. She has his two boys to bring up, and then her two boys, and then all those Little Men in the next volume; at the end of Little Women, in the chapter called “Harvest Time,” she says, “I haven’t given up the hope that I may write a good book yet, but I can wait.”

  The harvest seems indefinitely deferred. But, in Rachel Blau Du Plessis’ phrase,3 Jo writes beyond the ending. In the third volume, Jo’s Boys, she has gone back in middle age to writing, and is rich and famous. There is realism, toughness, and comedy in the descriptions of her managing the household, mothering the teenagers, writing her chapters, and trying to avoid the celebrity hunters. In fact this, like the whole story of Jo the Writer, is quite close to Louisa Alcott’s own story, with one large difference. Jo marries and has children. Lu did not.

  And yet she undertook the responsibility for a family, some of whom were as improvident and self-centered as any baby. There is a heartbreaking note in her journal4 for April 1869, when she was suffering a “bad spell” of mercury poisoning (the calomel given her to cure fever when she was a nurse in the Civil War made her sick the rest of her life):

  Very poorly. Feel quite used up. Don’t care much for myself, as rest is heavenly, even with pain; but the family seems so panic-stricken and helpless when I break down, that I try to keep the mill going. Two short tales for L., $50; two for Ford, $20; and did my editorial work, though two months are unpaid for. Roberts wants a new book, but am afraid to get into a vortex lest I fall ill.

  Alcott used the same word Jo used for her passions of writing; here are a couple of journal passages comparable to the “vortex” passage in Little Women.

  August 1860—“Moods” [a novel]. Genius burned so fiercely that for four weeks I wrote all day and planned nearly all night, being quite possessed by my work. I was perfectly happy, and seemed to have no wants.

  February 1861—Another turn at “Moods,” which I remodelled. From the 2d to the 25th I sat writing, with a run at dusk; could not sleep, and for three days was so full of it I could not stop to get up. Mother made me a green silk cap with a red bow, to match the old green and red party wrap, which I wore as a “glory cloak.” Thus arrayed sat in a grove of manuscripts, “living for immortality” as May said. Mother wandered in and out with cordial cups of tea, worried because I couldn’t eat. Father thought it fine, and brought his reddest apples and hardest cider for my Pegasus to feed upon…. It was very pleasant and queer while it lasted….

  And it is pleasant to see how the family whose debts she slaved to pay off, and which she strove so to protect and keep in comfort, tried to protect and help her in return.

  Like so many women of her century, then, Lu Alcott had a family, though she did not marry. “Liberty is a better husband than love to many of us,” she wrote, but in fact she had very little liberty, in the sense of freedom from immediate, personal responsibilities. She even had a baby—her sister May’s. Dying from complications of childbirth, May asked the beloved older sister, then forty-eight, to bring up little Lu; which she did until her death eight years later.

  All this is complex, more complex, I think, than one tends to imagine; for the Victorian script calls for a clear choice—either books or babies for a woman, not both. And Jo seems to make that choice. I was annoyed at myself when I realized that I had forgotten Jo’s survival as a writer—that my memory, except for one nagging scrap that led me to look up Jo’s Boys at last, had followed the script. That, of course, is the power of the script: you play the part without knowing it.

  Here is a classic—a scriptural—description of a writing woman, the mother of children, one of whom is just now in the process of falling down
the stairs.

  Mrs Jellyby was a pretty, very diminutive, plump woman, of from forty to fifty, with handsome eyes, though they had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off…. [She] had very good hair, but was too much occupied with her African duties to brush it…. We could not help noticing that her dress didn’t nearly meet up the back, and that the open space was railed across with a latticework of stay-laces—like a summer-house.

  The room, which was strewn with papers and nearly filled by a great writing-table covered with similar litter, was, I must say, not only very untidy, but very dirty. We were obliged to take notice of that with our sense of sight, even while, with our sense of hearing, we followed the poor child who had tumbled downstairs: I think into the back kitchen, where somebody seemed to stifle him. But what principally struck us was a jaded and unhealthy-looking, though by no means plain girl, at the writing-table, who sat biting the feather of her pen, and staring at us. I suppose nobody ever was in such a state of ink.5

  I will, with difficulty, restrain myself from reading you the rest of Bleak House. I love Dickens and will defend his Mrs. Jellyby and her correspondence with Borrioboola-Gha as an eternal send-up of those who meddle with foreign morals while remaining oblivious to the misery under their nose. But I observe also that he uses a woman to make this point, probably because it was, and is, safe: few readers would question the assumption that a woman should put family before public responsibility, or that if she does work outside the “private sphere” she will be neglectful of her house, indifferent to the necks of her children, and incompetent to fasten her clothing. Mrs. Jellyby’s daughter is saved from her enforced “state of ink” by marriage, but Mrs. Jellyby will get no help from her husband, a man so inert that their marriage is described as the union of mind and matter. Mrs. Jellyby is a joy to me, she is drawn with so much humor and good nature; and yet she troubles me, because behind her lurks the double standard. Nowhere among Dickens’ many responsible, intelligent women is there one who does real artistic or intellectual work, to balance Mrs. Jellyby and reassure us that it isn’t what she does but how she does it that is deplorable. And yet the passage just quoted is supposed to have been written by a woman—the character Esther Summerson. Esther herself is a problem. How does she write half Dickens’ novel for him while managing Bleak House and getting smallpox and everything else? We never catch her at it. As a woman writing, Esther is invisible. She is not in the script.