Neither the wifely and maternal Plath nor the spinster Moore would have fit the bill of Freudian “normalcy.” Moore’s avoidance of marriage, her George Washington getup, and her decision to hang out with the Big Boys of modernism (Pound, Williams, Eliot, et al.) made her classically neurotic from a psychoanalytic perspective. And Plath’s passion to become “a triple threat woman, wife, mother and writer” put her, too, at odds with established fifties ideals. After her death, in fact, she was to be accused by the psychoanalytic critic David Holbrook of “false male doing.”38
In the fifties, psychoanalysis seemed “modern,” while as a discipline sexology evoked such fin de siècle figures as Havelock Ellis and Richard von Kraft-Ebbing. Yet many of Freud’s disciples reinforced Victorian notions of femininity, whereas Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues subverted some traditional ideas of female sexuality. Ironically, too, a number of the leading experts translating Freudian psychoanalysis to Americans were women playing the penalizing role of Serena Joy in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, disciplining other women to submit to their (grim) anatomical destiny. Both sides focused for the most part on white women and both fixed on organs rarely discussed before in American letters: penises, vaginas, and the clitoris.
Once experienced as liberating, Freudian ideas became strangely punitive by this decade, with Freud’s descriptions of female psychosexual development used to diagnose as mentally disturbed anyone who deviated from his definition of femininity. The psychiatrist Marynia Farnham can be viewed today on YouTube in a clip from a 1950s newsreel in which the narrator intones with archaic phrasing, “Strongly against careers for women is Dr. Marynia Farnham.”39 Coauthor with the journalist Ferdinand Lundberg of the best-selling Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (1947), she sternly argues that abandoning traditional roles has made women, their husbands, and their children unhappy. (We see footage of an unattended kid almost hit by a car, kindergartners playing with fire.) Eschewing the conventional roles that she promotes, Farnham is costumed as a specialist—white coat, stethoscope, short-cropped hair, in a hospital office, with a seated secretary dutifully taking shorthand. During a period when women were a tiny scattering of tokens in the medical establishment, she attributes all the ills of society to women working outside the home as professionals or laborers.
Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, widely read in the fifties, claims that women who have deserted homemaking for the labor force have made themselves and their society sick. For they themselves have been sickened by “the feminist complex,” a pathology of epic proportions. Specifically, they are “afflicted with a severe case of ‘penis-envy.’ ” 40 Angry feminists, “hostile to women,” encourage women to “commit suicide as women and attempt to live as men.” According to Lundberg and Farnham, the rampant penis envy induced by the reign of feminism dooms women to sexual dysfunction. The “apparently new” phenomenon of “frigidity” arose and became complicated because “mere orgasm can never be the entire sexual goal for a satisfactorily functioning woman.” Not orgasm but babies must be her aim: “for the sexual act to be fully satisfactory to a woman she must, in the depth of her mind, desire, deeply and utterly, to be a mother.” A woman who does not desire to become a mother or who seeks pleasure in “the sex act” itself is doomed: “Women cannot make its immediate pleasure an end in itself without inducing a decline in the pleasure.” 41
Those who cling to the “infantile sexual activity” centered on “clitoral stimulation” are guilty of “a denial of femininity” that accounts for most “marital sexual difficulties.” Schooling intensifies the problem: “The more educated the woman is, the greater chance there is of sexual disorder” that will impair her offspring. Needless to say, the “unmarried mother . . . is a complete failure as a woman,” as is the spinster. The neurotic married mother produces delinquents and criminals when she is “rejecting” or “dominating”; she produces castrated “sissies” when she is “over-affectionate.” Most of these disorders are attributed to women’s “morbidly intense ego-strivings.” 42
As one historian of American sexual thought has noted, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex simplified the theories of Helene Deutsch “for a popular audience.”43 In The Psychology of Women (1944), Deutsch laid the foundation for Lundberg and Farnham’s screed against feminism by establishing the three defining traits at the “core” of “the feminine personality,” a temperament that finds its contentment at home with hubby and babies: “narcissism, passivity, and masochism.”44 This core feminine personality arose from Deutsch’s alarming revision of Freud’s view that girls become envious when they see the clitoris as an inferior penis.
Some girls may find the clitoris an “inadequate outlet,” Deutsch concedes, but others find it “so rudimentary that it can barely be considered an organ”: “the little girl is frequently ‘organless’ ”; “it is simply not there!” This “genital trauma” persists because “the vagina—a completely passive, receptive organ—awaits an active agent to become a functioning excitable organ.” The adolescent girl must navigate between “the Scylla of having no penis and the Charybdis of lacking the responsiveness of the vagina.” 45
According to Deutsch, pain is inseparable from pleasure in “coitus,” which is “closely associated with the act of defloration, and defloration with rape and a painful penetration of the body.” She defends herself against her peer Karen Horney, who criticized Deutsch for believing that “what woman ultimately wants in intercourse is to be raped and violated; what she wants in mental life is to be humiliated.” 46 But Horney is right: Deutsch does claim that “the ‘undiscovered’ vagina is—in normal, favorable instances—eroticized by an act of rape.” Inevitably for Deutsch, “the intellectual woman is masculinized; in her, warm intuitive knowledge has yielded to cold unproductive thinking.” Caught within a “masculinity complex,” the ambitious woman, like “the sadistic witch,” displays a “surplus of active-aggressive forces” that should be attributed to “the girl’s genital trauma.” 47 Regardless of the personal sources of Deutsch’s views,48 as in the case of Marynia Farnham a female professional was instructing other women to eschew professional aspirations. For women, curtailing other women’s rights—in this case, their economic, educational, and erotic rights—turned out to be a gainful business.
While the psychoanalysts viewed the clitoris as a puny penis or as nonexistent, the sexologist Alfred Kinsey defined it as the usual source of female orgasmic pleasure. Less theoretical than empirical, Kinsey’s 1953 Sexual Behavior in the Human Female judges the frequency of orgasm—resulting from a range of activities—to be the best measure of sexual activity. In direct opposition to Freudian thinkers, Kinsey questioned the existence of “ ‘vaginal orgasm,’ ” which, he argued, “is a physical and physiologic impossibility for nearly all females.”49
Kinsey’s table of contents lists his massive investigations into women’s sexual behaviors, although over the years critics have questioned the representativeness of his sample. Were all the people he interrogated “average,” or were they subject to what skeptics dismissively called “volunteer bias”?50 How many midcentury women would be willing to talk honestly about erotic intimacies? Still, the very number of interviews he recorded subverts the Freudian idea that there is a single model for female sexuality. And the book, dedicated “To the nearly 8000 females who contributed the data,” does stress that “many males do not understand that [the clitoris] may be as important a center of stimulation for females as the penis is for males.” It also emphasizes that “it is difficult for most males to comprehend that females are not aroused by seeing male genitalia,” a reminder that retains its relevance.51
The outcry following the publication of Kinsey’s best-selling Sexual Behavior in the Human Female expressed shock about his findings that eventually resulted in his losing funding from the Rockefeller Foundation.52 Especially scandalous was his report on the numbers of women engaged in sex before marriage and in adulterous affairs during marriage. Yet Kinsey’s findin
gs illuminate what we know about most of the literary women of the fifties whose lives and letters we investigate here. Neither Plath nor Rich, neither di Prima nor Lorde, were “virgins” when they married. And many letters mailed to Kinsey expressed gratitude. His documentation of women’s responsiveness to masturbation, fantasy, and interpersonal contacts before, during, and outside marriage clearly appealed to a culture fascinated by the steamy eroticism of A Streetcar Named Desire and Peyton Place, the crooning of Frank Sinatra, the sexual gyrations of Elvis Presley, the voluptuous performances of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield.
Did this fetishization of the erotic have consequences as troublesome as Freudian psychosexual theory—equating sexual success with appropriate climaxing? It was no coincidence that Hugh Hefner and his Playboy clubs were longtime supporters of Kinsey’s research.53 “Pussies” and penises, not heads and hearts, seemed to matter most both to the Freudians and the Kinseyites. Yet in a society that increasingly celebrated women who were sexy “playmates,” by the end of the fifties 25 percent of women with children were working outside the home.54 But even for the most diligent young working women, the culture of the period posed knotty problems.
Want ads in newspapers were gender-specific, with most of the employment available to women clustered in low-status, low-paying, or service-oriented jobs: “pink-collar” jobs as secretaries, receptionists, telephone operators, or sales clerks, with luckier women working as teachers or nurses. On the financial front, single, divorced, or widowed women could not get financial credit. What we now call “reproductive freedom” was barely existent. The so-called rhythm method of birth control produced quite a few babies, and illegal backstreet abortions killed quite a few women.55
In fact, the classic picture of the tranquilized fifties belies the furious though sometimes furtive resistance of women who never bought into the fantasy of docile femininity or women whose surface conformity masked deep dissent. The decade that shaped the gender roles dramatized in the twenty-first-century television series Mad Men produced a number of singularly determined and eccentric mad women who would make their mark on history. Although the bourgeois, white society in which Plath, Rich, Moore, Farnham, and Deutsch were each embedded may have been the hegemonic culture of the fifties, it was hardly the only one. Neither the Freudians nor the Kinseyites seem quite to have grasped the social, intellectual, and racial complexity of the world in which they promoted their ideas.
2
Race, Rebellion, and Reaction
WHILE PLATH AND RICH were dutifully studying at Smith and Radcliffe, then bearing children, and, for quite some time, stifling their rebellion or simply confiding it to secret journals, bohemians, Beats, and Blacks were protesting the pieties of midcentury America. In 1955, their dissatisfaction rose to a howl in Allen Ginsberg’s poem of that name. Gay, Jewish, left-wing, and disaffected, Ginsberg made himself heard from coast to coast when he protested what he considered the horrific state of things:
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!1
But even before Ginsberg’s rant enthralled an increasingly wide circle of dissidents, there were young women who struggled to escape the clutches of a culture that they defined as soulless.
DIANE DI PRIMA AS A FEMINIST BEATNIK
Like Plath, Diane di Prima was born to immigrant parents (di Prima’s were Italian) in 1934 and performed brilliantly in high school—in her case, Hunter College High School, a highly selective public school for girls in New York City. And like Plath, di Prima was encouraged to go on to an equally elite college, Swarthmore. But there the resemblance ends. Though di Prima might as well have been Plath’s double—same age, same kind of background—she was defiantly, stubbornly opposite.
Where Plath wrote, for the most part, exuberantly about her time at Smith, di Prima hated Swarthmore, “the pretentious, awkward intellectual life, clipped speech, stiff bodies, unimaginative clothes, poor food, frequent alcohol, and deathly mores by which I found myself surrounded.” Nor did she find solace in most other options open to her. “Nine-to-five was a prison; family was prison. Cold intellect of campus, another prison.” Seeking, like her early idol John Keats, the life of art and “the holiness of the heart’s affections,” she chose “the life of the renunciant . . . outside the confines and laws of that particular and peculiar culture” of the fifties.2
Dropping out of college, she left home and settled into an impoverished but freethinking bohemian life on New York’s Lower East Side. In her fictionalized autobiography Memoirs of a Beatnik, di Prima recalled “a strange, nondescript kind of orgy” with Allen Ginsberg, who slid “from body to body in a great wallow of flesh”: “It was warm and friendly and very unsexy—like being in a bathtub with four other people.”3
Di Prima had no feminist vocabulary to draw upon. However, she knew perfectly well that the poetry scene she had entered was male-defined, sometimes “pompous, self-righteous,” but she has claimed that “we walked together on the roads of Art. . . . And seeing it thus made it possible for me to walk among these men mostly un-hit-on, generally unscathed.” While Plath—like so many of her contemporaries—was seeking boyfriends, lovers, or potential husbands, di Prima defined the men around her as “friends and companions of the holy art.” 4
According to Recollections of My Life as a Woman, her 2001 memoir of New York in the fifties, she had many lovers. The first person with whom she fell in love was a woman named Bonnie, and the second was the African American poet LeRoi Jones. Even before these passionate affairs, though, she had decided at the age of 22 to have a baby: “I do remember . . . the words in my mind. That if I didn’t have a baby I was going to get sick,” she recalled in her memoir, adding, strikingly, “Not that I for one minute thought of including a man in my life, in my home. That was out of the question. . . . As far as I could see, all they were was trouble.”5
After giving birth to her first daughter, di Prima raised her while co-editing a literary magazine, The Floating Bear, with LeRoi Jones. Working in a Village bookstore, founding the Poet’s Theater with a group of friends, entering into a “marriage of convenience” with Alan Marlowe (it lasted six and a half years), she published her own poetry and eventually mothered four more children. Her relationship with LeRoi Jones was intense and vexed. When it began, she has written, “She defined herself as a duo: herself and the child. She defined herself as her work. . . . Stepped into the ‘love affair’ not knowing where it would lead.”6
Where it led might, from Plath’s perspective, seem disastrous, for Plath’s pride in her love match with Hughes was inextricably entangled with possessiveness, and she was enraged if her husband even walked down the street with an attractive “other woman.” But from di Prima’s point of view, it was essential to remain “self-defined in the midst of it all,” even infidelity. “Roi slept around, he lied. . . . He didn’t show up when he was going to, showed up unexpectedly, treated me like a peer, a queen, a servant. . . . All that went without saying I took it as it came.”7 And then, despite his protests—for he was already married, with two children—she bore his child, her second daughter, on her own.
He would “often call me Lady Day,” di Prima writes of her time with Jones, when they would make love to the music of Billie Holiday, “especially the fiercer, sadder pieces”; but she confesses, “At that time I was only half aware that the songs carried the bitterness, the dilemma of our ‘interracial’ love,” though she knew “there was no world where it was simply okay for us. Not for our black and whiteness. Not for me, a single woman with a child.”8 Her memory of her time with Jones, who would later change his name to Amiri Baraka
and in the sixties become part of the Black Arts movement, dramatizes the significance of African American culture in the fifties. For although popular narratives represent the world as having been lily-white, such a view is as deceptive as the mostly white offices of Madison Avenue.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS’S BRONZEVILLE
If Black people appeared at all in most fifties’ films and sitcoms, they were stereotyped as mammies or Uncle Toms. Yet it was in this decade that Gwendolyn Brooks, who was eventually to become the first Black woman appointed poet laureate of the United States, composed meticulously detailed portraits of a culture very different from the one chronicled in the poems of Phyllis McGinley or indeed in The Bell Jar. Her short poem “The Bean-Eaters,” published in 1959, captures a partnership in poverty and resilience: a couple who “eat beans mostly” with “tin flatware” on “a plain and creaking wood.”9 Brooks focuses not on the raptures of suburbia but on the problems—and pleasures—of her South Side neighborhood, Bronzeville, the Black ghetto in her hometown of Chicago to which many African Americans journeyed during the second Great Migration from the oppressions of the South to the possibilities of the North.
Brooks’s Bronzeville is more complex than McGinley’s placid suburbia. Her only novel, Maud Martha (1953), traces the coming-of-age of a girl who is distressed by being darker—“blacker”—than her older sister and darker, too, than the more “yellow” man who becomes her husband; in this way it prefigures Toni Morrison’s debut novel, The Bluest Eye, which tells a similar though more calamitous story.10 At the same time, however, in “Bronzeville Woman in a Red Hat,” Brooks wrote scathingly of the kitchen confrontation between two cultures—the world of the white bourgeoisie and the world of “bean-eaters” and Maud Marthas who have to become their domestic workers.
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