by Robin Morgan
(MELPOMENE has risen to her feet and moved slowly toward THALIA during the above speech. Now she throws back her head, the dark veil of her hair streaming out behind her, and from her bared throat issues a soundless laughter so terrible that all THE MUSES but one cover their ears to escape it, and avert their gaze from her face. Only THALIA, rapt at the sight of her sister glistening through thalian tears, leans closer to listen. Below, THE POET shudders again, and darts a glance over her shoulder; then, her known world seems for an interminable second to splinter into a vast space as if her skull had just burst through a narrow corridor into light such as she had never dreamt. The spheres sing at her with the familiar buzz of a cat’s purr and everything seems arriving and departing at once, coming too near and going too far and THE POET suddenly flings up her arms and stares above her at her own dark garret rafters and she sees them, she can see them, for one moment in her brief eternity they show themselves to her as clearly as her own handprint: Tragedy and Comedy, identical twins, laughing and weeping each in the other’s arm.
THE POET, stunned, falls to the floor, unconscious. TERPSICHORE floats down to her and, while softly speaking to THE POET and her own Muse Sisters, raises THE POET, slowly awakens her, and moves her gradually and gracefully back to her desk)
TERPSICHORE My Daughter Martha Graham has spoken of the divine fallacy, by which she says she means that which is eternal, the continuation of the spirit. She notes that although the Brontë’s lived in the “period of the pointed foot,” they kept up their relationship with death. The divine fallacy means the joyous error, as well; that which fools call ugly, un-pretty art. I think of the Native American blanket into which the woman maker deliberately weaves a conscious mistake, to let the soul out. The result would otherwise be static, dead. “The one thing perfection lacks is the struggle to achieve it. This is perfection’s thirst for consciousness.” Blake must have meant this when he wrote “Energy is eternal delight.” Movement, not stasis. The reach, not the grasping.
POLYMNIA Is this not the quality all governments fear in the artist? The Central Committee has always tried to bully the artist, and the Board of Directors has always tried to buy her. The former attempt is simply naïve: the artist is involved in what to her (or him) is an effort to tell some portion of a difficult truth, to relate some detail of an intricate vision—and this will never jibe with any party line. The latter approach, while cleverer because it attacks self-preservation, is also co-opted ultimately by its own co-optation: in buying and selling the artist, the Board cannot stop some fragment of the artist’s message getting through, however encoded, and this too is disseminated, creating in turn and in time the genuine “market” for the authentic “product”—to use the Board’s terms.
CALLIOPE Either way, as long as there exists a human spirit, there will be artists blessedly doomed to express it—despite the campaigns of all governments to order and categorize even, or especially, that part of it which cannot be expressed.
CLIO Marx himself knew this, you know, and unlike so many of his followers, he respected it. In “The Writer’s Profession,” he wrote: “The writer in no way regards his (sic) works as a means. They are ends in themselves; so little are they a means for him and others that, when necessary, he sacrifices his existence to theirs and, like the preacher of religion, takes as his principle: Obey God more than men …” I refer you, Sisters, to Literature and Art: Selections from Their Writings, by Marx and Engels, International Publishers, New York, 1947, page 63.
URANIA Clio dear, no one finds the thoroughness of your scholarship more laudable than I, but sometimes I fear you overdo.
EUTERPE I want to return to something we spoke of earlier, in passing. Objectification. It’s such a scorned word among the Daughters who are feminists—and for excellent reasons which we all now know. But in the context of art? I wonder. I wonder if there are not some moments when the political and artistic sensibilities do not at heart antagonize. I say at heart because we know and already have spoken of the superficial way in which patriarchal thought has divided the two, to the detriment of both. I have a particular reason for this concern.
URANIA I think all art is in some way intense objectification. To attempt distilling the “reality” of something into art is to set it apart, study it from all possible angles with what Keats called negative capability, make it one’s own (or part of one’s own) vision—
POLYMNIA —or become part of its vision—
URANIA —yes indeed, and to scrap some segments of it and totally invent others, all this in the process of molding the vehicle to give reality a new reality which simply did not exist before. There is no being faithful to some appearance of truth that others claim to see, only to the truth the artist cannot avoid seeing.
CLIO This should not mean, by the way, that the artist is therefore given license to trample over the sensibilities of others—although patriarchy has deliberately misread it this way, at least in the cases of Gauguin, Beethoven, legions of others, mostly men.
EUTERPE So we are agreed then that to insist art represent reality is absurd. To insist that art not represent reality is equally ridiculous: both attitudes muzzle and thus destroy art.
THALIA And think of what they do to reality.
ERATO Real relationships, occurrences, emotions—these are hardly ignoble for being real; that is their beauty and their power. But they are still only the pegs on which the poem hangs, the triggers that fire the play, the skeletons which must be clothed with the novel’s flesh. They are grains of sand in which the artist cannot help but see the universe entire.
URANIA This is why the artist usually assumes that the (sometimes willful, sometimes all unconscious) distortions in her depiction of any real relationship are at least as valid as any other view of it—including the other person’s or even some third “objective” view. Now if that is classic objectification and a political sin, then art has just been purged from the revolution.
CALLIOPE Wait. Perhaps it is objectification, and art alone has a right to it, since art alone does it with no motive to impress or oppress, but only with an intent to hazard being subjective about something (therefore objectifying it) in order to break open a new view of it.
CLIO Being subjective always runs this risk. Men have said to feminists, to our own Poet below, “When you talk about men as a class you objectify me.” Thus, at one move, they deny their own initiating act of self- and other-objectification, and deny her her self-defense—the validity of her subjectivity (only one validity among many, I grant, but one not to be denied).
TERPSICHORE Mostly, I think, the artist objectifies herself, himself. The process from life into the page or canvas or song or mime or block of marble implies a standing back from it, a critical viewing of it—
ERATO —and at the same moment an involuntary love for it that drives forth the act of creation and recreation.
THALIA Emotion anticipated in tranquillity?
POLYMNIA It’s possible, my dear. Our Poet down there “objectifies” herself in her poems. And then she sometimes discovers that the portrayal in the poem is more honest than she could have admitted to her realistic self. How many times she has written the prophetic poem she could not herself fully comprehend at the time of its writing!
CALLIOPE Clearly the “stuff” of any relationship, any insight, any shard of intellect or emotion, anything, is material for the Work. Nothing is beyond use. This is an earned right, though, hard-won by those who take art in dead earnest—and who are trying to reject patriarchal license to be gratuitously cruel. No one, in any event, will be able to get it all “in.” What a touching thought that would be.
CLIO In most cases what will be “in” won’t have any presence in the actual world at all. But the art will then teach reality what it should contain.
EUTERPE You make it sound as if that were the job of art.
URANIA The purpose of the lilies of the field?
(There is gentle, knowing laughter aripple among
THE MUSES at URANIA’S question. It is an old subject, a family joke)
CLIO Ah, dear Daughter Poet! If you and your sister rhetoricians of the feminist movement could manage to objectify the patriarchy with half the relentless accuracy of the artist facing her subject matter; if you could manage to objectify one another with half the love that moves the artist as she objectifies her content; if you could create your alternatives with half her discipline—
POLYMNIA —that would be grace.
CLIO —that would be a revolution.
CALLIOPE Before grace or revolution, there must be song. Before song there must be remembrance, before remembrance meditation. Melete. Mneme. Aoide. The Daughters are learning. They think back. They are remembering, reclaiming their own. From Hrovtsvitha’s medieval mystery plays to Sor Juana’s lyrics. From the frescoes of dancing priestesses on the sunken island of Thera to the metal cubbyholes of Nevelson. From the troubadour verses of the Countess of Dia to the chiseled fury of the young Lena Horne. They are beginning to remember. They are beginning to connect.
MELPOMENE Many remain forgotten, disowned, misunderstood, misclaimed.
EUTERPE (bursting out with it) One of my dearest ones is still disowned and I cannot think why!
URANIA Euterpe, darling gentle Euterpe, how unlike you! What is it? Which of your dearest? Who can you mean?
EUTERPE (trying to become calm again but babbling) It’s pained me for so long. I mean Elizabeth Barrett, who is unregarded and unread by our feminist Daughters. I reread her work the space before yesterspace, and that of my other Daughter Emily Dickinson. And Sisters, I must admit to you that I was shocked. The scandal aside, Rebecca Patterson’s theory and that of J. E. Walsh does bear itself out: Emily did repeatedly plagiarize Elizabeth. Or perhaps not plagiarize because it’s hard to know for certain whether Emily wanted those poems published or kept hidden, as exercises, perhaps, but copy she did—whole phrases, lines, and images galore.
THALIA Euterpe, do go slower, you sound like me. What theory? Rebecca who? And J. E. what?
CLIO (ever ready with the footnote) J. E. Walsh, The Hidden Life of Emily Dickinson, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1971. Rebecca Patterson, “Elizabeth Browning and Emily Dickinson”: article in Educational Leader, July 1956. Also, Ms. Patterson’s book, The Riddle of Emily Dickinson, Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1951.
EUTERPE (controlled, but still angry) The ethics of the rather overwhelming “influence” Emily claimed from Elizabeth aside, I find myself curious about the resurgent interest expressed by feminists for Emily, concurrent with resurgent contempt for Elizabeth. Why, why, I wonder?
ERATO Perhaps because Emily never married and Elizabeth did (and in a great and literary love affair, no less)? Perhaps because Elizabeth bore a child (a son, no less)?
TERPSICHORE Really, Erato, I fail to see the connection. I mean not between the husband and the son, but the connection between them and her literary reputation among feminists.
THALIA Darling Terps, how innocent you are. This is politics. Isn’t this what you meant earlier, Euterpe? About art and politics being antagonists? Erato is wondering whether Elizabeth is held in disregard in feminist circles as a symptom of that antithetical feminism which rebels against all imaginable “traditional” roles—even when chosen freely and acted upon creatively.
CLIO It is an antithetical feminism which, in a sense, would like women to become as men.
TERPSICHORE (with an evocative shiver) Ohhh. How distasteful.
EUTERPE It infuriates me that the male literary establishment has for a century snickered at Elizabeth (and to some extent at her Robert, too, as “the henpecked Browning”); this cabal has buried her best work, sniped at her political activities, and granted her fame only on the basis of her love poems to him (a “proper” subject for a woman)—which happen to be superb love poems, I might add. And now the Feminist Movement perpetuates this very image. Oh! What do they know of Elizabeth’s book-length verse novel, Aurora Leigh, which Ruskin said was the “greatest poem in the English language”? It was Aurora Leigh which the Daughter Susan B. Anthony carried with her like a bible on her lonely tours of campaigning for women’s suffrage. Yet by her feminist sisters today Elizabeth is forgotten. Not so Emily, despite the regrettable fact that Emily did not borrow Elizabeth’s feminist consciousness along with her metaphors—
URANIA Euterpe, don’t you think you’re being a shade unfair?
EUTERPE If I am, it’s time someone was, on this subject. No, Urania, don’t reproach me. Emily’s feminist sensibilities are at best uneven. It’s hardly that I begrudge Emily her place as a major American poet; she is my own cherished Daughter and I love her—and frankly, certain work of hers stuns as no other can. But I do think it a fair question to have our Scribe down there challenge her sisters with: Why are feminists rushing to claim Emily and still ignoring Elizabeth? Because they wish to imitate the male literary mandarins? Look to it, I say.
THALIA I have another theory, actually. I think it’s the fault of that inane play The Barretts of Wimpole Street. It’s been adapted into movie versions and late-show television reissuings and so has leaked its odious, inaccurate, and sexist bias into the popular imagination.
MELPOMENE There is a simpler explanation yet. Few read Barrett any longer, except in valentine editions of excerpts from her sonnets. Many of the Daughters are lazy. They condemn in ignorance.
CLIO Our Poet must urge her sisters on this issue.
ERATO Our Poet needs no urging to do so, Sisters. She feels for Barrett that sympathy sprung from identification—she is a poet, married to another poet. And she is a feminist. Her griefs and joys are not so different from Elizabeth’s.
MELPOMENE I know her thoughts. She and her love have a bitter joke: they say the world requires of them that they play out the story of A Star Is Born or The Red Shoes—two minor films of undeniable poignancy. In both films, both members of each couple are artists; in one, the husband kills himself so as not to be an impediment to his wife’s career; in the other, the wife leaps to her death rather than obstruct her husband’s art. Our Poet and her poet have this bitter joke: they say the world requires of them that they play out one or the other of these stories; they say the world has made it clear to them it will not yet accept them both.
ERATO They are still trying. They love each other and their own work and each other’s work. Is that not something?
CLIO I also know her thoughts. She thinks of Clara Schumann and of Robert. She thinks of Sand and Chopin. She thinks of Virginia Woolf and of her Leonard. She thinks of Mary Ann Evans and of George Henry Lewes. She knows their thoughts.
THALIA And I know hers. Our Poet and Our Poet’s poet shared another joke when he was offered wealth and honor to divorce her and then write his Memoirs of Life with a Feminist. He turned the offer down. Our Poet and her poet share this joke beneath their garret eaves.
CALLIOPE I also know her thoughts. I read the letter K among her thoughts. She notices the letter is for Kenneth, and for Kafka, and for Kafka’s K., and for the old word kneccht—to know, to understand, and to connect. I see this Daughter tread the journey of the little girl in Andersen’s great tale “The Snow Queen,” Little Gerda who walked barefoot on ice across half of the world to claim her Little Kay, who was the victim of a glassy sliver in his heart which made it difficult for him to love. Wise Hans, our Son who wrote for children what adults should not forget. Little Gerda found her Little Kay and saved him into love. This too is feminism. I also know her thoughts.
EUTERPE I also know her thoughts. Listen to them. They spill over. “I affirm all of my transformations.” “We will be torn from one another and ourselves.” “Blessed Be, it is he I have chosen.” “Nothing is not enough.” “What have they done to us?” “Scorian lips can wear a dolphin smile.” “These are my people.” “Weaving for the weave’s sake.” “I know now they can never save me.” “I am come into my power.” “Beholding this, my one desire.”
URANIA Our Daughter P
oet is in no danger from which her own art cannot save her. Our Scribe merits no more attention from us for the present.
POLYMNIA All of the Daughters are in no danger so grave their own discovered art cannot save them.
URANIA They must discover that art then, speak that word, utter themselves. They have the holy gift of language, to be no longer abused. Language! When will revolutions learn to revere its power, not merely employ it? And if feminism is the first real revolution worthy of the name, then where are the signs that the Daughters love words, cherish language, and will take responsibility for it?
THALIA Well, I don’t think the epidemic misuse of “chauvinism” was a particularly auspicious beginning, myself.
CLIO “Insects. Vermin. Pigs.” Once the Nazis, more recently American New Leftists, and now some feminists have used the words to describe human beings. The aim of such language, conscious or not, is to dehumanize one’s enemies, the more easily to conceive of eradicating them.
THALIA Not to mention the indignity done to the animals whose names and sacred honors are so abominably misused!
CALLIOPE Could Hitler have “exterminated” so many persons had he not first linguistically transformed them into vermin? How, in this, is he different from the Symbionese Liberation Army, which called this country’s rulers “insects”? How different from those who call women chicks, foxes, birds, or cows? When, too, will people learn that even those they abhor are also human, that the human capacity stretches from miracle to murder and that it is human—no more and no less … except perhaps where it reaches through exact and honest language—then it is holy.
CLIO Nor is it any excuse to babble that Hitler’s sin was to call a powerless people insects and vermin, while radicals today, after all, use such appellations about the powerful (who “deserve” it). Such a recollection of history is based on amnesia. Hitler saw the Jews, quite contrarily, as extremely powerful—as that old familiar international conspiracy which was bleeding the brave Aryan races financially dry, as the scourge of the little people, the masses, the grass roots. Language, Language! How easy they seem to find it, even the Daughters, to give in to that desire to unrecognize the human as un-human, to forget who and what and why they are killing what they wish to kill.