Dancing at the Edge of the World

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The greatest enabler for me was always, is always, Virginia Woolf. And I quote now from the first draft of her paper “Professions for Women,”11 where she gives her great image of a woman writing.

  I figure her really in an attitude of contemplation, like a fisherwoman, sitting on the bank of a lake with her fishing rod held over its water. Yes that is how I see her. She was not thinking; she was not reasoning; she was not constructing a plot; she was letting her imagination down into the depths of her consciousness while she sat above holding on by a thin but quite necessary thread of reason.

  Now I interrupt to ask you to add one small element to this scene. Let us imagine that a bit farther up the bank of the lake sits a child, the fisherwoman’s daughter. She’s about five, and she’s making people out of sticks and mud and telling stories with them. She’s been told to be very quiet please while Mama fishes, and she really is very quiet except when she forgets and sings or asks questions; and she watches in fascinated silence when the following dramatic events take place. There sits our woman writing, our fisherwoman, when—

  suddenly there is a violent jerk; she feels the line race through her fingers.

  The imagination has rushed away; it has taken to the depths; it has sunk heaven knows where—into the dark pool of extraordinary experience. The reason has to cry “Stop!” the novelist has to pull on the line and haul the imagination to the surface. The imagination comes to the top in a state of fury.

  Good heavens she cries—how dare you interfere with me—how dare you pull me out with your wretched little fishing line? And I—that is, the reason—have to reply, “My dear you were going altogether too far. Men would be shocked.” Calm yourself I say, as she sits panting on the bank—panting with rage and disappointment. We have only got to wait fifty years or so. In fifty years I shall be able to use all this very queer knowledge that you are ready to bring me. But not now. You see I go on, trying to calm her, I cannot make use of what you tell me—about womens bodies for instance—their passions—and so on, because the conventions are still very strong. If I were to overcome the conventions I should need the courage of a hero, and I am not a hero.

  I doubt that a writer can be a hero. I doubt that a hero can be a writer.

  … Very well, says the imagination, dressing herself up again in her petticoat and skirts, we will wait. We will wait another fifty years. But it seems to me a pity.

  It seems to me a pity. It seems to me a pity that more than fifty years have passed and the conventions, though utterly different, still exist to protect men from being shocked, still admit only male experience of women’s bodies, passions, and existence. It seems to me a pity that so many women, including myself, have accepted this denial of their own experience and narrowed their perception to fit it, writing as if their sexuality were limited to copulation, as if they knew nothing about pregnancy, birth, nursing, mothering, puberty, menstruation, menopause, except what men are willing to hear, nothing except what men are willing to hear about housework, childwork, lifework, war, peace, living, and dying as experienced in the female body and mind and imagination. “Writing the body,” as Woolf asked and Hélène Cixous asks, is only the beginning. We have to rewrite the world.

  White writing, Cixous calls it, writing in milk, in mother’s milk. I like that image, because even among feminists, the woman writer has been more often considered in her sexuality as a lover than in her sexuality as pregnant-bearing-nursing-childcaring. Mother still tends to get disappeared. And in losing the artist-mother we lose where there’s a lot to gain. Alicia Ostriker thinks so. “The advantage of motherhood for a woman artist,” she says—have you ever heard anybody say that before? the advantage of motherhood for an artist?—

  The advantage of motherhood for a woman artist is that it puts her in immediate and inescapable contact with the sources of life, death, beauty, growth, corruption…. If the woman artist has been trained to believe that the activities of motherhood are trivial, tangential to the main issues of life, irrelevant to the great themes of literature, she should untrain herself. The training is misogynist, it protects and perpetuates systems of thought and feeling which prefer violence and death to love and birth, and it is a lie.

  … “We think back through our mothers, if we are women,” declares Woolf, but through whom can those who are themselves mothers … do their thinking? … we all need data, we need information, … the sort provided by poets, novelists, artists, from within. As our knowledge begins to accumulate, we can imagine what it would signify to all women, and men, to live in a culture where childbirth and mothering occupied the kind of position that sex and romantic love have occupied in literature and art for the last five hundred years, or … that warfare has occupied since literature began.12

  My book Always Coming Home was a rash attempt to imagine such a world, where the Hero and the Warrior are a stage adolescents go through on their way to becoming responsible human beings, where the parent-child relationship is not forever viewed through the child’s eyes but includes the reality of the mother’s experience. The imagining was difficult, and rewarding.

  Here is a passage from a novel where what Woolf, Cixous, and Ostriker ask for is happening, however casually and unpretentiously. In Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone,13 Rosamund, a young scholar and freelance writer, has a baby about eight months old, Octavia. They share a flat with a friend, Lydia, who’s writing a novel. Rosamund is working away on a book review:

  I had just written and counted my first hundred words when I remembered Octavia; I could hear her making small happy noises….

  I was rather dismayed when I realized she was in Lydia’s room and that I must have left the door open, for Lydia’s room was always full of nasty objects like aspirins, safety razors and bottles of ink; I rushed along to rescue her and the sight that met my eyes when I opened the door was enough to make anyone quake. She had her back to the door and was sitting in the middle of the floor surrounded by a sea of torn, strewed, chewed paper. I stood there transfixed, watching the neat small back of her head and her thin stalk-like neck and flowery curls: suddenly she gave a great screech of delight and ripped another sheet of paper. “Octavia,” I said in horror, and she started guiltily, and looked round at me with a charming deprecating smile: her mouth, I could see, was wedged full of wads of Lydia’s new novel.

  I picked her up and fished the bits out and laid them carefully on the bedside table with what was left of the typescript; pages 70 to 123 seemed to have survived. The rest was in varying stages of dissolution: some pages were entire but badly crumpled, some were in large pieces, some in small pieces, and some, as I have said, were chewed up. The damage was not, in fact, as great as it appeared at first sight to be, for babies, though persistent, are not thorough: but at first sight it was frightful…. In a way it was clearly the most awful thing for which I had ever been responsible, but as I watched Octavia crawl around the sitting room looking for more work to do, I almost wanted to laugh. It seemed so absurd, to have this small living extension of myself, so dangerous, so vulnerable, for whose injuries and crimes I alone had to suffer…. It really was a terrible thing … and yet in comparison with Octavia being so sweet and so alive it did not seem so very terrible….

  Confronted with the wreckage, Lydia is startled, but not deeply distressed:

  … and that was it, except for the fact that Lydia really did have to rewrite two whole chapters as well as doing a lot of boring sellotaping, and when it came out it got bad reviews anyway. This did succeed in making Lydia angry.

  I have seen Drabble’s work dismissed with the usual list of patronizing adjectives reserved for women who write as women, not imitation men. Let us not let her be disappeared. Her work is deeper than its bright surface. What is she talking about in this funny passage? Why does the girl-baby eat not her mother’s manuscript but another woman’s manuscript? Couldn’t she at least have eaten a manuscript by a man?—no, no, that’s not the point. The point, or part of it, is that bab
ies eat manuscripts. They really do. The poem not written because the baby cried, the novel put aside because of a pregnancy, and so on. Babies eat books. But they spit out wads of them that can be taped back together; and they are only babies for a couple of years, while writers live for decades; and it is terrible, but not very terrible. The manuscript that got eaten was terrible; if you know Lydia you know the reviewers were right. And that’s part of the point too—that the supreme value of art depends on other equally supreme values. But that subverts the hierarchy of values; “men would be shocked….”

  In Drabble’s comedy of morals the absence of the Hero-Artist is a strong ethical statement. Nobody lives in a great isolation, nobody sacrifices human claims, nobody even scolds the baby. Nobody is going to put their head, or anybody else’s head, into an oven: not the mother, not the writer, not the daughter—these three and one who, being women, do not separate creation and destruction into I create / You are destroyed, or vice versa. Who are responsible, take responsibility, for both the baby and the book.*

  But I want now to turn from fiction to biography and from general to personal; I want to talk a bit about my mother, the writer.

  Her maiden name was Theodora Kracaw; her first married name was Brown; her second married name, Kroeber, was the one she used on her books; her third married name was Quinn. This sort of many-namedness doesn’t happen to men; it’s inconvenient, and yet its very cumbersomeness reveals, perhaps, the being of a woman writer as not one simple thing—the author—but a multiple, complex process of being, with various responsibilities, one of which is to her writing.

  Theodora put her personal responsibilities first—chronologically. She brought up and married off her four children before she started to write. She took up the pen, as they used to say—she had the most amazing left-handed scrawl—in her mid-fifties. I asked her once, years later, “Did you want to write, and put it off intentionally, till you’d got rid of us?” And she laughed and said, “Oh, no, I just wasn’t ready.” Not an evasion or a dishonest answer, but not, I think, the whole answer.

  She was born in 1897 in a wild Colorado mining town, and her mother boasted of having been born with the vote—in Wyoming, which ratified woman suffrage along with statehood—and rode a stallion men couldn’t ride; but still, the Angel in the House was very active in those days, the one whose message is that a woman’s needs come after everybody else’s. And my mother really came pretty close to incarnating that Angel, whom Woolf called “the woman men wish women to be.” Men fell in love with her—all men. Doctors, garage mechanics, professors, roach exterminators. Butchers saved sweetbreads for her. She was also, to her daughter, a demanding, approving, nurturing, good-natured, loving, lively mother—a first-rate mother. And then, getting on to sixty, she became a first-rate writer.

  She started out, as women so often do, by writing some books for children—not competing with men, you know, staying in the “domestic sphere.” One of these, A Green Christmas, is a lovely book that ought to be in every six-year-old’s stocking. Then she wrote a charming and romantic autobiographical novel—still on safe, “womanly” ground. Next she ventured into Native American territory with The Inland Whale; and then she was asked to write the story of an Indian called Ishi, the only survivor of a people massacred by the North American pioneers, a serious and risky subject requiring a great deal of research, moral sensitivity, and organizational and narrative skill.

  So she wrote it, the first best seller, I believe, that University of California Press ever published. Ishi is still in print in many languages, still used, I think, in California schools, still deservedly beloved. It is a book entirely worthy of its subject, a book of very great honesty and power.

  So, if she could write that in her sixties, what might she have written in her thirties? Maybe she really “wasn’t ready.” But maybe she listened to the wrong angel, and we might have had many more books from her. Would my brothers and I have suffered, have been cheated of anything, if she had been writing them? I think my aunt Betsy and the household help we had back then would have kept things going just fine. As for my father, I don’t see how her writing could have hurt him or how her success could have threatened him. But I don’t know. All I do know is that once she started writing (and it was while my father was alive, and they collaborated on a couple of things), she never stopped; she had found the work she loved.

  Once, not long after my father’s death, when Ishi was bringing her the validation of praise and success she very much needed, and while I was still getting every story I sent out rejected with monotonous regularity, she burst into tears over my latest rejection slip and tried to console me, saying that she wanted rewards and success for me, not for herself. And that was lovely, and I treasured her saying it then as I do now. That she didn’t really mean it and I didn’t really believe it made no difference. Of course she didn’t want to sacrifice her achievement, her work, to me—why on earth should she? She shared what she could of it with me by sharing the pleasures and anguishes of writing, the intellectual excitement, the shoptalk—and that’s all. No angelic altruism. When I began to publish, we shared that. And she wrote on; in her eighties she told me, without bitterness, “I wish I had started sooner. Now there isn’t time.” She was at work on a third novel when she died.

  As for myself: I have flagrantly disobeyed the either-books-or-babies rule, having had three kids and written about twenty books, and thank God it wasn’t the other way around. By the luck of race, class, money, and health, I could manage the double-tightrope trick—and especially by the support of my partner. He is not my wife; but he brought to marriage an assumption of mutual aid as its daily basis, and on that basis you can get a lot of work done. Our division of labor was fairly conventional; I was in charge of house, cooking, the kids, and novels, because I wanted to be, and he was in charge of being a professor, the car, the bills, and the garden, because he wanted to be. When the kids were babies I wrote at night; when they started school I wrote while they were at school; these days I write as a cow grazes. If I needed help he gave it without making it into a big favor, and—this is the central fact—he did not ever begrudge me the time I spent writing, or the blessing of my work.

  That is the killer: the killing grudge, the envy, the jealousy, the spite that so often a man is allowed to hold, trained to hold, against anything a woman does that’s not done in his service, for him, to feed his body, his comfort, his kids. A woman who tries to work against that grudge finds the blessing turned into a curse; she must rebel and go it alone, or fall silent in despair. Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life: but no artist can work well against daily, personal, vengeful resistance. And that’s exactly what many women artists get from the people they love and live with.

  I was spared all that. I was free—born free, lived free. And for years that personal freedom allowed me to ignore the degree to which my writing was controlled and constrained by judgments and assumptions which I thought were my own, but which were the internalized ideology of a male supremacist society. Even when subverting the conventions, I disguised my subversions from myself. It took me years to realize that I chose to work in such despised, marginal genres as science fiction, fantasy, young adult, precisely because they were excluded from critical, academic, canonical supervision, leaving the artist free; it took ten more years before I had the wits and guts to see and say that the exclusion of the genres from “literature” is unjustified, unjustifiable, and a matter not of quality but of politics. So too in my choice of subjects: until the mid-seventies I wrote my fiction about heroic adventures, high-tech futures, men in the halls of power, men—men were the central characters, the women were peripheral, secondary. Why don’t you write about women? my mother asked me. I don’t know how, I said. A stupid answer, but an honest one. I did not know how to write about women—very few of us did—because I thought that what men had written about women was th
e truth, was the true way to write about women. And I couldn’t.

  My mother could not give me what I needed. When feminism began to reawaken, she hated it, called it “those women’s libbers”; but it was she who had steered me years and years before to what I would and did need, to Virginia Woolf. “We think back through our mothers,” and we have many mothers, those of the body and those of the soul. What I needed was what feminism, feminist literary theory and criticism and practice, had to give me. And I can hold it in my hands—not only Three Guineas, my treasure in the days of poverty, but now all the wealth of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women and the reprint houses and the women’s presses. Our mothers have been returned to us. This time, let’s hang on to them.

  And it is feminism that has empowered me to criticize not only my society and myself but—for a moment now—feminism itself. The books-or-babies myth is not only a misogynist hang-up, it can be a feminist one. Some of the women I respect most, writing for publications that I depend on for my sense of women’s solidarity and hope, continue to declare that it is “virtually impossible for a heterosexual woman to be a feminist,” as if heterosexuality were heterosexism; and that social marginality, such as that of lesbian, childless, Black, or Native American women, “appears to be necessary” to form the feminist. Applying these judgments to myself, and believing that as a woman writing at this point I have to be a feminist to be worth beans, I find myself, once again, excluded—disappeared.

  The rationale of the exclusionists, as I understand it, is that the material privilege and social approbation our society grants the heterosexual wife, and particularly the mother, prevent her solidarity with less privileged women and insulate her from the kind of anger and the kind of ideas that lead to feminist action. There is truth in this; maybe it’s true for a lot of women; I can oppose it only with my experience, which is that feminism has been a life-saving necessity to women trapped in the wife/mother “role.” What do the privilege and approbation accorded the housewife-mother by our society in fact consist of? Being the object of infinite advertising? Being charged by psychologists with total answerability for children’s mental well-being, and by the government with total answerability for children’s welfare, while being regularly equated with apple pie by sentimental warmongers? As a social “role,” motherhood, for any woman I know, simply means that she does everything everybody else does plus bringing up the kids.