Art and Ardor

by Cynthia Ozick

  I will not forget the appalling laughter of the two mocking debaters. But it was not so appalling as the laughter of the young men and the young women in the audience. In the laughter of the historian and the psychologist I heard the fussy cry—a cry of violated venerable decorum, no doubt—of the beadle who chased Virginia Woolf off the grass in 1929. But what of that youthful mockery? Their laughter was hideous; it showed something ugly and self-shaming about the nature of our society and the nature of our education—and by “our education” I do not mean the colleges, I mean the kindergartens, I mean the living rooms at home, I mean the fathers and the mothers, the men and the women.

  In this country the women, by and large, are at home. Let us consider that first. Most of the women are at home. Why are they at home? Well, plainly because they belong there. They are there to rear the children, and if they have a whole lot of children (in our country they have an amazing number of children, without regard to the diet of algae they are imposing on their children’s children), there will usually be a helpless baby. The mother is at home to take care of the helpless baby. That is right and reasonable. Everyone agrees—Nature agrees, the father agrees, Society agrees. Society agrees? That is very interesting. That too is an idea worth examination. It is very useful for society to have the mother at home. It keeps her out of the way. If, say, she stopped at only two children (but if she stopped at only two she would be in danger of reducing the birth rate, which now rivals India’s), those two might be half-grown, and safely shut up in a school building most of the day, by the time she is thirty-five. And if she were thirty-five—a young, healthy, able, educated thirty-five—with no helpless baby to keep her at home, and most of the day free, what would she do? Society shudders at the possibility: she might want to get a job. But that would never do. Why, if you counted up all the young, healthy, able, educated, free women of thirty-five, it might come to nearly half the population! And, as things stand now, there are not even enough jobs for the other half of the population, the truly breadwinning half. And what about all those three-quarters-grown persons we call adolescents? Society shudders at them too: the economy is an inn with no room for adolescents and women. But if it will not allow adolescents and women to share in its work (how can it? so much of the work is done by machines), society must at least provide something else to keep the adolescents and women occupied, if only artificially. So, out of the largesse of its infinitely adaptable lap, it gives women knitting and adolescents transistor radios to dance to. (And for the adolescents of even mediocre capacities—here there is not so much discrimination by sex—it comes up with colleges, and fraudulent debates, and more dancing.) Society provides a complete—and in essence custodial—culture for each group it is forced to keep out of the way. It is a culture of busywork and make-believe and distraction. Society is very clever and always has been. Once upon a time, before machines, women and adolescents were needed and used to the last degree in the economy. Women were not educated because an unautomated house requires a work horse to maintain it, and a woman who cannot read or write is somehow better at hauling water in from the pump than one who can. (Why this should be, only the experience of society can explain.) But now society—so long as we fail to renovate it—can furnish work for only a quarter of the population, and so the rest must be lured into thinking it is performing a job when it is really not doing anything beyond breathing.

  That is why there are in our society separate minority cultures for adolescents and for women. Each has its own set of opinions, prejudices, tastes, values, and—do not underestimate this last—magazines. You and I are here concerned only with the culture of women. Society, remember, is above men and women; it acts in men and women. So you must not make the mistake of thinking that the culture of women is the conspiracy of men. Not in the least. That is an old-fashioned, bluestocking view of the matter, and it is erroneous. The culture of women is believed in by both men and women, and it is the conspiracy of neither, because it is the creature neither of men alone, nor of women alone, but of society itself—that autonomous, cunning, insensitive sibling of history.

  The culture of women consists of many, many things—products as well as attitudes, but attitudes mostly. The attitudes generate the products, and the products utilize the attitudes. The most overriding attitude is summed up in a cult word: “Home.” (Notice that builders do not sell houses, they sell homes—a case of attitude and product coalescing.) But what does “Home” mean? It means curtains, rugs, furniture, a boiler in the cellar, magazines with dress patterns and recipes and articles full of adulterated Freud, a dog, a box of cereal bones for the dog, a kitchen floor that conscience insists must be periodically waxed, and so forth: but mostly, of course, it means “Children.” And “Children” are not regarded as incomplete or new persons, as unformed destinies, as embryo participants in the society; above all, they are not regarded simply as children: they are a make-believe entity in themselves, a symbol of need and achievement, just as the dog biscuits (not real bones) are a make-believe entity in themselves (does the dog think they are real?). “Children” as a concept have, in their present incarnation, a definite function, which is to bolster the whole airy system of make-believe. “Children” are there to justify “Home”; and “Home” is there to justify a third phantom entity—the heroine of the fairy tale, also an invention and an abstraction, the “Homemaker.”

  In this sense, neither “Home” nor “Children” nor “Homemaker” has any reality at all. All are dissemblances, fables, daydreams. All are abstractions designed to give the prestige of sham significance to a fairy tale. Nothing here is in the least related to living persons or to life itself. “Home” and “Children” and “Homemaker” are fabrications in the same sense that a bank is a fabrication: we pretend we are passing something called money, but meanwhile a bookkeeper (that is, a computer) is simply balancing the columns in an account book, more on this side of the line, less on that side. If we should all insist on exchanging metal again, the bank fabrication would dissolve. And when the “Children” grow up a little, refuse to be players in the game of gauze, and insist at last on being real persons, does “Home” dissolve, does “Homemaker” dissolve? Only partially. Because now society steps in and sweeps up the remains under the heading of “Womanhood.” The children go away, the dog dies, the house wears out, but “Womanhood” is eternal. Its possessor, the creature in whom “Womanhood” is immanent (divinely, as it were), has her magazines to prove her reality—her reality, mind you, as a concept called “Woman,” endowed with another concept called “Womanhood”; she has the benevolent chorus of society to prove it, she has the bearded psychologist and the professor of history to prove it, she has the laughing girls and boys to prove it.

  They “prove” it, perhaps—the Ptolemaic system was also in error, and its proofs were magnificent—but they do not justify her. No fabrication can be justified. Only a person can be justified. A person is justified by the quality of her life; but a daydream is not a life, no matter how many propose to declare it so.

  This is our “problem”—the problem of a majority’s giving its credence and its loyalty to a daydream. And it is a bigger problem than any other we know of in this country, for the plain and terrifying reason that we have not even considered it to be a problem. Whenever the cliché-question is put, “What is the number one problem in America today?”, the cliché-answer comes: “Civil rights—the Black Revolution.” Scarcely. The solution to that problem is there—we have only to catch up to it, with all our might. If the debate at my college had dealt with civil rights it would have been serious, passionate, and argumentative. We had a Vietnam teach-in: it was serious and passionate and argumentative. But until now no one has been serious and passionate, and certainly no one has been argumentative, concerning attitudes about woman. Once a problem has been articulated, the answer is implicit; the answer is already fated. But this problem was never articulated; there was no answer, because no one ever asked the question
. It was a question that had not yet found its incarnation. Its substance was, on every level, the stuff of primitive buffoonery.

  Virginia Woolf is the artist-pioneer, the Margaret-Sanger-as-bard, so to speak, of this social question. Among artists she has no successor. Not until art has seized and possessed and assimilated this question will it begin to interest the scientist-humanists.

  But what are the components of the question? Perhaps they can once again crudely be set out, though they are so old and so tiresome, though we have no poet to speak them forth once and for all, though we handle them with the weariness of overuse. Here they are: no great female architects, painters, playwrights, sailors, bridge-builders, jurists, captains, composers, etc., etc. Everyone knows that list; everyone can recite it at length, now and then hesitating to allow for a Saint Joan or an empress or an influential courtesan or a salon wit. But the list of omissions is long, as long almost as history, or, to use a more telling simile, as long almost as the history of the Jews.

  And here I think of a curious analogy. Say what you will about the gifted Jews, they have never, up until times so recent that they scarcely begin to count, been plastic artists. Where is the Jewish Michelangelo, the Jewish Rembrandt, the Jewish Rodin? He has never come into being. Why? Have oppression and persecution erased the possibility of his existence? Hardly. Oppression and persecution often tend to reinforce gifts; to proscribe is more effective than to prescribe. Where then is the Jewish Michelangelo? Is it possible that a whole people cannot produce a single painter? And not merely a single painter of note, but a single painter at all? Well, there have been artists among the Jews—artisans, we should more likely call them, decorators of trivial ceremonial objects, a wine cup here, a scroll cover there. Talented a bit, but nothing great. They never tried their hand at wood or stone or paint. “Thou shalt have no graven images”—the Second Commandment—prevented them. And it is not until a very, very little while ago, under the influence of a movement called “Emancipation” or “Enlightenment,” that we begin to see creeping in a Chagall, a Modigliani, an Epstein, who have ceased to believe that art insults the Unity of God. It will be a long, long time before the Jews have their Michelangelo. Before a “David” can happen, a thousand naked Apollos must be hewn. (And Apollo did insult the Unity of God.) There must be a readied ground, a preparation—in short, a relevant living culture to frame the event.

  The same, I think, with our problem. Gifts and brains are not transmitted, like hemophilia, from the immune sex to the susceptible sex. Genius is the property of both sexes and all nations alike. That is the humanist view. The Jews have had no artists not because they have had no genius for art, but because their image of themselves as a culture inhibited the exercise of the latent gift. And all those nonexistent female Newtons and Bachs and Leonardos and Shakespeares (all? surely they would be very few indeed, so rare is genius of that degree)—they have had no more chance of leaping from the prison of their societal fates than any Greek slave, or a nomad’s child in Yemen today. The emancipation of women is spectacularly new. Emancipation does not instantly result in achievement. Enlightenment must follow. And the enlightenment has, for women, and especially by women, not yet occurred.

  It has not yet occurred even at the most expressive point of all—in the universities. It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions. And the ultimate humanist question, as we have seen, has not yet been expressed (my students had never in all their lives heard it put); the components of the unrealized question, as we have seen, are the experiences and needs and omissions and premises of a culture. A culture can have a seemingly unchanging premise, and then suddenly it will change; hence, among the Jews, Chagall and Modigliani and Epstein; hence, in literature, the early epistolary artists—Madame de Sévigné and Lady Mary—and then, close on their heels, the genius novelists, Jane and George. Literature was the first to begin it, since literature could be pursued privately and at home. But here let us listen to Elizabeth Hardwick: “Who is to say that Remembrance of Things Past is `better’ than the marvelous Emma? War and Peace better than Middlemarch? Moby-Dick superior to La Princesse de Clèves? But everybody says so! It is only the whimsical, the cantankerous, the eccentric . . . who would say that any literary work by a woman, marvelous as these may be, is on a level with the very greatest accomplishments of men.”3 I am not sure it is whimsical, cantankerous, or eccentric not to feel the need to make such distinctions, but even if the distinctions are justified—perhaps they are, I cannot tell—who is to say that Emma and Middlemarch and La Princesse de Clèves are not simply forerunners? In England Lady Mary preceded Jane. In France Madame de Sévigné preceded George Sand. Cultivation precedes fruition. Perhaps we cannot have our great women architects, painters, playwrights, sailors, bridge-builders, jurists, captains, composers, and so forth, until we have run-of-the-mill women in these roles, until all that is a commonplace—until, in short, women enter into the central stream of mankind’s activities, until woman-as-person becomes as flat and unremarked a tradition as man-as-person. Reproduction, trick it out as you will in this or that myth, is still only reproduction, a natural and necessary biological function, and biology, however fancied up with tribal significance and mystical implication, is not enough. Unless you are on the extreme verge of death, it is never enough just to keep on breathing.

  Even woman’s differing muscular capacity—much is made of this, unsurprisingly—is, in the age of the comprehensive machine, an obstacle to almost no pursuit. It would be difficult to insist that a woman on board the sort of ship Conrad describes in that remarkable novella “Youth” would be as efficient as most male members of the crew; but muscle is no longer an issue anywhere. Evolution has now become, in Julian Huxley’s words, a “psycho-social process”—that is, man is now able consciously to contribute to his own development. He lives, Huxley writes, “not only in relation with the physico-chemical and biological environment provided by nature, but with the psycho-social environment of material and mental habitats which he has himself created,” and those habitats, include the muscle-augmenting machine and its incalculable influences. Might a woman have written “Youth”? Who would dare to say yes? In Conrad’s day—in the scope of technology a very short time ago—almost no woman and very few men could have the stamina to wrest out Conrad’s strenuous sea experience. Yet the machine widens experience for everyone and equalizes the physical endurance of men and women. A long journey is no longer a matter of muscle, but of jet schedules. Presumably it will become harder and harder to maintain that novelists who are women are condemned to a narrower focus than men because their lives are perforce narrower. The cult of Experience is, more and more, accessible to anyone who wishes to be lured by it: though it might well be argued that novels and poems grow out of something other than raw physical experience. “It is not suggested,” Elizabeth Hardwick continues, “that muscles write books, but there is a certain sense in which, talent and experience being equal, they may be considered a bit of an advantage. In the end, it is in the matter of experience that women’s disadvantage is catastrophic. It is very difficult to know how this may be extraordinarily altered.” Huxley’s self-propelled evolutionary view is more optimistic, though perhaps both views, Hardwick’s and Huxley’s, are at bottom equally irrelevant to the making of literature, which is, after all, as unknown a quantity as mind itself.

  The question is, then, I believe, a question touching at least peripherally on art. Not merely literary art, but all the human arts, including those we call science. And I have ventured that the question must be formulated as a humanistic issue, not a sectarian one, not a divisive one. Art must belong to all human beings, not alone to a traditionally privileged segment; every endeavor, every passion must be available to the susceptible adult, without the intervention of myth or canard. Woman will cease solely to be man’s muse—an It (as she is, curiously, for writers as disparate as Graves and Mailer, as she was for Freud)—and will ac
quire muses of her own when she herself ceases to be bemused with gaudy daydreams and romances—with lies reinforcing lies—about her own nature. She limits—she self-limits—her aspirations and her expectations. She joins the general mockery at her possibilities. I have heard her laughing at herself as though she were a dancing dog. You have seen her regard her life as a disease to be constantly tended and pacified. She does not yet really believe that she is herself accessible to poetry or science: she wills these into her sons, but not into her daughters. She surrounds herself with the devices and manipulations of an identity that is not an identity. Without protest she permits the intractable momentum of society to keep her from its worthiness and larger adventures, from its expressive labor. She lives among us like a docile captive; a consuming object; an accomplice; an It. She has even been successfully persuaded to work for and at her own imprisonment. No one can deny that imprisonment offers advantages, especially to the morally lazy. There have been slaves who have rejoiced in their slavery (think of the Children of Israel yearning day and night for the fleshpots of Egypt), and female infantilism is a kind of pleasurable slavishness. Dependency, the absence of decisions and responsibility, the avoidance of risk, the shutting-out of the gigantic toil of art—all these are the comforts of the condoning contented subject, and when these are combined, as they are in this country, with excessive leisure, it would almost seem that woman has a vested interest in her excluded role. If one were to bow to the tempting idea that her role has come about through a conspiracy (as it could not have, since custom is no plot), it would appear as though it were a conspiracy of sluggish women, and never of excluding men. The fervor and energies of the women who are not lazy, those rare activist personalities who feel the call of a Cause, are thrown pragmatically into the defense of that easy and comfortable role; the barricades of the pleasant prison are manned—no, womaned—by the inmates themselves, to prevent the rebels from breaking out.