Dancing at the Edge of the World

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  There may be a sympathetic portrait of a woman writer with children in a novel written by a man. I have read versions of this paper in Rhode Island, Ohio, Georgia, Louisiana, Oregon, and California, and asked each audience please to tell me if they knew of any such. I wait in hope. Indeed, the only sympathetic picture of a woman novelist in a man’s novel that I know is the protagonist of Diana of the Crossways. Meredith shows her writing novels for her living, doing it brilliantly, and finding her freedom in her professionalism. But, self-alienated by a disastrous infatuation, she begins to force her talent and can’t work—the script apparently being that love is incidental for a man, everything for a woman. At the end, well off and happily married, she is expecting a baby, but not, it appears, a book. All the same, Diana still stands, nearly a century later, quite alone at her crossways.

  Invisibility as a writer is a condition that affects not only characters but authors, and even the children of authors. Take Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whom we have consistently put to bed with a spaniel, ignoring the fact that when she wrote Aurora Leigh she was the healthy mother of a healthy four-year-old—ignoring, in fact, the fact that she wrote Aurora Leigh, a book about being a woman writer, and how difficult one’s own true love can make it for one.

  Here is a woman who had several children and was a successful novelist, writing a letter to her husband about a hundred and fifty years ago, or maybe last night:

  If I am to write, I must have a room to myself, which shall be my room. All last winter I felt the need of some place where I could go and be quiet. I could not [write in the dining room] for there was all the setting of tables and clearing up of tables and dressing and washing of children, and everything else going on, and … I never felt comfortable there, though I tried hard. Then if I came into the parlor where you were, I felt as if I were interrupting you, and you know you sometimes thought so too.6

  What do you mean? Not at all! Silly notion! Just like a woman!

  Fourteen years and several more children later, that woman wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin—most of it at the kitchen table.

  A room of one’s own—yes. One may ask why Mr. Harriet Beecher Stowe got a room to himself to write in, while the woman who wrote the most morally effective American novel of the nineteenth century got the kitchen table. But then one may also ask why she accepted the kitchen table. Any self-respecting man would have sat there for five minutes and then stalked out shouting, “Nobody can work in this madhouse, call me when dinner’s ready!” But Harriet, a self-respecting woman, went on getting dinner with the kids all underfoot and writing her novels. The first question, to be asked with awe, is surely, How? But then, Why? Why are women such patsies?

  The quick-feminist-fix answer is that they are victims of and/or accomplices with the patriarchy, which is true but doesn’t really get us anywhere new. Let us go to another woman novelist for help. I stole the Stowe quotation (and others) from Tillie Olsen’s Silences, a book to which this paper stands in the relation of a loving but undutiful daughter—Hey, Ma, that’s a neat quotation, can I wear it? This next one I found for myself, in the Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant, a fascinating book, from the generation just after Stowe. Oliphant was a successful writer very young, married, had three kids, went on writing, was left a widow with heavy debts and the three kids plus her brother’s three kids to bring up, did so, went on writing…. When her second book came out, she was still, like Jo March, a girl at home.

  I had a great pleasure in writing, but the success and the three editions had no particular effect upon my mind…. I had nobody to praise me except my mother and [brother] Frank, and their applause—well, it was delightful, it was everything in the world—it was life—but it did not count. They were part of me, and I of them, and we were all in it.7

  I find that extraordinary. I cannot imagine any male author saying anything like that at all. There is a key here—something real that has been neglected, been hidden, been denied.

  … The writing ran through everything. But then it was also subordinate to everything, to be pushed aside for any little necessity. I had no table even to myself, much less a room to work in, but sat at the corner of the family table with my writing-book, with everything going on as if I had been making a shirt instead of writing a book…. My mother sat always at needlework of some kind, and talked to whoever might be present, and I took my share in the conversation, going on all the same with my story, the little groups of imaginary persons, these other talks evolving themselves quite undisturbed.

  How’s that for an image, the group of imaginary people talking in the imaginary room in the real room among the real people talking, and all of it going on perfectly quiet and unconfused…. But it’s shocking. She can’t be a real writer. Real writers writhe on solitary sofas in cork-lined rooms, agonizing after le mot juste—don’t they?

  My study, all the study I have ever attained to, is the little second drawing-room where all the life of the house goes on …

  —you recall that she was bringing up six children?—

  … and I don’t think I have ever had two hours undisturbed (except at night when everybody is in bed) during my whole literary life. Miss Austen, I believe, wrote in the same way, and very much for the same reason; but at her period the natural flow of life took another form. The family were half ashamed to have it known that she was not just a young lady like the others, doing her embroidery. Mine were quite pleased to magnify me and to be proud of my work, but always with a hidden sense that it was an admirable joke …

  —perhaps artists cast off their families and go to the South Sea Islands because they want to be perceived as heroes and their families think they are funny?—

  … a hidden sense that it was an admirable joke, and no idea that any special facilities or retirement was necessary. My mother would have felt her pride much checked, almost humiliated, if she had conceived that I stood in need of any artificial aids of that description. That would at once have made the work unnatural to her eyes, and also to mine.

  Oliphant was a proud Scotswoman, proud of her work and her strength; yet she wrote nonfiction potboilers rather than fight her male editors and publishers for better pay for her novels. So, as she says bitterly, “Trollope’s worst book was better paid than my best.” Her best is said to be Miss Marjoribanks, but I have never yet been able to get a copy of it; it was disappeared, along with all her other books. Thanks to publishers such as Virago we can now get Oliphant’s Hester, a stunning novel, and Kirsteen and a few others, but they are still taught, so far as I know, only in women’s studies courses; they are not part of the Canon of English Literature, though Trollope’s potboilers are. No book by a woman who had children has ever been included in that august list.

  I think Oliphant gives us a glimpse of why a novelist might not merely endure writing in the kitchen or the parlor amidst the children and the housework, but might endure it willingly. She seems to feel that she profited, that her writing profited, from the difficult, obscure, chancy connection between the art work and the emotional/manual/managerial complex of skills and tasks called “housework,” and that to sever that connection would put the writing itself at risk, would make it, in her word, unnatural.

  The received wisdom of course is just the opposite: that any attempt to combine art work with housework and family responsibility is impossible, unnatural. And the punishment for unnatural acts, among the critics and the Canoneers, is death.

  What is the ethical basis of this judgment and sentence upon the housewife-artist? It is a very noble and austere one, with religion at its foundation: it is the idea that the artist must sacrifice himself to his art. (I use the pronoun advisedly.) His responsibility is to his work alone. It is a motivating idea of the Romantics, it guides the careers of poets from Rimbaud to Dylan Thomas to Richard Hugo, it has given us hundreds of hero figures, typical of whom is James Joyce himself and his Stephen Dedalus. Stephen sacrifices all “lesser” obligations and affections to a “higher” caus
e, embracing the moral irresponsibility of the soldier or the saint. This heroic stance, the Gauguin Pose, has been taken as the norm—as natural to the artist—and artists, both men and women, who do not assume it have tended to feel a little shabby and second-rate.

  Not, however, Virginia Woolf. She observed factually that the artist needs a small income and a room to work in, but did not speak of heroism. Indeed, she said, “I doubt that a writer can be a hero. I doubt that a hero can be a writer.” And when I see a writer assume the full heroic posture, I incline to agree. Here, for example, is Joseph Conrad:

  For twenty months I wrestled with the Lord for my creation … mind and will and conscience engaged to the full, hour after hour, day after day … a lonely struggle in a great isolation from the world. I suppose I slept and ate the food put before me and talked connectedly on suitable occasions, but I was never aware of the even flow of daily life, made easy and noiseless for me by a silent, watchful, tireless affection.8

  A woman who boasted that her conscience had been engaged to the full in such a wrestling match would be called to account by both women and men; and women are now calling men to account. What “put food” before him? What made daily life so noiseless? What in fact was this “tireless affection,” which sounds to me like an old Ford in a junkyard but is apparently intended as a delicate gesture towards a woman whose conscience was engaged to the full, hour after hour, day after day, for twenty months, in seeing to it that Joseph Conrad could wrestle with the Lord in a very relatively great isolation, well housed, clothed, bathed, and fed?

  Conrad’s “struggle” and Jo March/Lu Alcott’s “vortex” are descriptions of the same kind of all-out artistic work; and in both cases the artist is looked after by the family. But I feel an important difference in their perceptions. Where Alcott receives a gift, Conrad asserts a right; where she is taken into the vortex, the creative whirlwind, becoming part of it, he wrestles, struggles, seeking mastery. She is a participant; he is a hero. And her family remain individuals, with cups of tea and timid inquiries, while his is depersonalized to “an affection.”

  Looking for a woman writer who might have imitated this heroic infantilism, I thought of Gertrude Stein, under the impression that she had used Alice Toklas as a “wife” in this utilitarian sense; but that, as I should have guessed, is an anti-lesbian canard. Stein certainly took hero-artist poses and indulged an enormous ego, but she played fair; and the difference between her domestic partnership and that of Joyce or Conrad is illuminating. And indeed, lesbianism has given many artists the network of support they need—for there is a heroic aspect to the practice of art; it is lonely, risky, merciless work, and every artist needs some kind of moral support or sense of solidarity and validation.

  The artist with the least access to social or aesthetic solidarity or approbation has been the artist-housewife. A person who undertakes responsibility both to her art and to her dependent children, with no “tireless affection” or even tired affection to call on, has undertaken a full-time double job that can be simply, practically, destroyingly impossible. But that isn’t how the problem is posed—as a recognition of immense practical difficulty. If it were, practical solutions would be proposed, beginning with childcare. Instead the issue is stated, even now, as a moral one, a matter of ought and ought not. The poet Alicia Ostriker puts it neatly: “That women should have babies rather than books is the considered opinion of Western civilization. That women should have books rather than babies is a variation on that theme.”9

  Freud’s contribution to this doctrine was to invest it with such a weight of theory and mythology as to make it appear a primordial, unquestionable fact. It was of course Freud who, after telling his fiancée what it is a woman wants, said that what we shall never know is what a woman wants. Lacan is perfectly consistent in following him, if I as a person without discourse may venture to say so. A culture or a psychology predicated upon man as human and woman as other cannot accept a woman as artist. An artist is an autonomous, choice-making self: to be such a self a woman must unwoman herself. Barren, she must imitate the man—imperfectly, it goes without saying.*

  Hence the approbation accorded Austen, the Brontes, Dickinson, and Plath, who though she made the mistake of having two children compensated for it by killing herself. The misogynist Canon of Literature can include these women because they can be perceived as incomplete women, as female men.

  Still, I have to grit my teeth to criticize the either-books-or-babies doctrine, because it has given real, true comfort to women who could not or chose not to marry and have children, and saw themselves as “having” books instead. But though the comfort may be real, I think the doctrine false. And I hear that falseness when a Dorothy Richardson tells us that other women can have children but nobody else can write her books. As if “other women” could have had her children—as if books came from the uterus! That’s just the flip side of the theory that books come from the scrotum. This final reduction of the notion of sublimation is endorsed by our chief macho dodo writer, who has announced that “the one thing a writer needs to have is balls.” But he doesn’t carry the theory of penile authorship to the extent of saying that if you “get” a kid you can’t “get” a book and so fathers can’t write. The analogy collapsed into identity, the you-can’t-create-if-you-procreate myth, is applied to women only.

  I’ve found I have to stop now and say clearly what I’m not saying. I’m not saying a writer ought to have children, I’m not saying a parent ought to be a writer, I’m not saying any woman ought to write books or have kids. Being a mother is one of the things a woman can do—like being a writer. It’s a privilege. It’s not an obligation, or a destiny. I’m talking about mothers who write because it is almost a taboo topic—because women have been told that they ought not to try to be both a mother and a writer because both the kids and the books will pay—because it can’t be done—because it is unnatural.

  This refusal to allow both creation and procreation to women is cruelly wasteful: not only has it impoverished our literature by banning the housewives, but it has caused unbearable personal pain and self-mutilation: Woolf obeying the wise doctors who said she must not bear a child; Plath who put glasses of milk by her kids’ beds and then put her head in the oven.

  A sacrifice, not of somebody else but of oneself, is demanded of women artists (while the Gauguin Pose demands of men artists only that they sacrifice others). I am proposing that this ban on a woman artist’s full sexuality is harmful not only to the woman but to the art.

  There is less censure now, and more support, for a woman who wants both to bring up a family and work as an artist. But it’s a small degree of improvement. The difficulty of trying to be responsible, hour after hour day after day for maybe twenty years, for the well-being of children and the excellence of books, is immense: it involves an endless expense of energy and an impossible weighing of competing priorities. And we don’t know much about the process, because writers who are mothers haven’t talked much about their motherhood—for fear of boasting? for fear of being trapped in the Mom trap, discounted?—nor have they talked much about their writing as in any way connected with their parenting, since the heroic myth demands that the two jobs be considered utterly opposed and mutually destructive.

  But we heard a hint of something else from Oliphant; and here (thanks, Tillie) is the painter Käthe Kollwitz:

  I am gradually approaching the period in my life when work comes first. When both the boys were away for Easter, I hardly did anything but work. Worked, slept, ate, and went for short walks. But above all I worked.

  And yet I wonder whether the “blessing” isn’t missing from such work. No longer diverted by other emotions, I work the way a cow grazes.

  That is marvelous—“I work the way a cow grazes.” That is the best description of the “professional” at work I know.

  Perhaps in reality I accomplish a little more. The hands work and work, and the head imagines it’s producing God knows
what, and yet, formerly, when my working time was so wretchedly limited, I was more productive, because I was more sensual; I lived as a human being must live, passionately interested in everything…. Potency, potency is diminishing.10

  This potency felt by a woman is a potency from which the Hero-Artist has (and I choose my words carefully) cut himself off, in an egoism that is ultimately sterile. But it is a potency that has been denied by women as well as men, and not just women eager to collude with misogyny.

  Back in the seventies Nina Auerbach wrote that Jane Austen was able to write because she had created around her “a child-free space.” Germ-free I knew, odor-free I knew, but child-free? And Austen? who wrote in the parlor, and was a central figure to a lot of nieces and nephews? But I tried to accept what Auerbach said, because although my experience didn’t fit it, I was, like many women, used to feeling that my experience was faulty, not right—that it was wrong. So I was probably wrong to keep on writing in what was then a fully child-filled space. However, feminist thinking evolved rapidly to a far more complex and realistic position, and I, stumbling along behind, have been enabled by it to think a little for myself.