Going Too Far (45 page)

ART AND FEMINISM: A ONE-ACT WHIMSICAL AMUSEMENT ON ALL THAT MATTERS

The following feminist “entertainment” emerged from a collage of writings jotted in fits and starts over a long period. At times these notes were motivated by the thrill of realizing a feminist culture was coming into being. At other times they were motivated by anger—at censorship (see “International Feminism: A Call for Support of the Three Marias” p. 202), or at ignorance, or at dogmatism. Yet how much more often I have reveled in the proliferation of women creating art. In poetry alone, even a partial list of names chosen almost at random hints at the diversity: Alice Walker, Joan Larkin, Kathleen Fraser, Dolores Prida, Honor Moore, Michelle Wallace, Louise Bernikow, Yvonne, Marge Piercy, Marilyn Hacker, Audre Lorde, Margaret Atwood, Susan Griffin, Fran Winant, Alta, Leah Fritz, Ntozake Shange, Dianne Di Prima, June Jordan—the words of these women and many others have exploded across the consciousness of an American reading public composed largely, though not exclusively, of women. Still others, like Eve Merriam, Josephine Miles, Ruth Pitter, Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser, Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, Carolyn Kizer, Elizabeth Jennings, Laura Riding, and of course the silver-tongued ghosts of Plath and Sexton—these are the “womandarins,” the more established poets. Of differing generations and consciousnesses, nonetheless these are the women who were carving in English the pain of being female even before they themselves could actually name that pain; whittlers, as it were, of their own transformation shining back at them in the runes of their feminist poet daughters.

This feminist renaissance, not content with its creative artists, has also produced feminist scholars who are researching
and reclaiming older forms of women's art. I am indebted for the references in this “Amusement” on the background of quilting to Patricia Mainardi (herself a painter), whose comprehensive study “Quilts: The Great American Art,” first appeared in
Feminist Art Journal
, Winter, 1973, and to Carol Edelson, whose article “Quilting: A History,” was published by Ms. in December 1973. The continuing research done by Rachel Maines and her colleagues at the new and feminist Center for the History of American Needlework (5660 Beacon Street, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15217) will doubtless prove, in time, that Penelope was a perfectionist artist who unwove her tapestry at night merely to revise; the suitors, and Odysseus for that matter, had nothing to do with it. I want to express publicly the grateful excitement I have felt upon reading
Feminist Art Journal—the
interviews with women who are poets, painters, sculptors, and composers; the eye-opening retrospectives on medieval women artists; the analyses of women architects, and film-makers. I am grateful, too, to Meg Bogin for her book
The Women Troubadours
(Paddington Press Ltd., New York, 1976), recently published and already a basic resource which inspired part of the following piece.

Nor does my gratitude restrict itself to new feminists, for without the voices of those who sang earlier, we could not exist. I think of so many women whose different insights have been of incalculable worth: I think of Susan Sontag—the intellectual integrity of her prose; and of Mary McCarthy, whose genius for fiction encompassed a dazzling feminist sensibility—this, decades ago, and alone. I thank them. I think of Dorothy L. Sayers, who in a thoughtful book called
The Mind of the Maker
(1941; Living Age Editions, Meridian Books, New York, 1960) posed the privileges and griefs of the artist in such a way as to impress me deeply; her terms were of her background and her time—Christian and patriarchal—but her perceptions were her own, and so organically feminist, radical, and daring as to be ours. I thank her, too.

I even must thank, on this occasion, those who have irritated me into the gall of various statements hazarded in this “Amusement.” I mean certain dear sisters who have sent me terribly sincere and sincerely terrible “political” poemlets. I mean that feminist (who claimed to be an art student, yet) who inspired in me a giddy consternation when I heard her pronounce Daphnis and Chloe “Daphne and Chloe, those great lesbian lovers.” (I waited for her to acknowledge Hero and Leander as her gay brothers, but clearly she'd never heard the names.) I'm grateful to the woman who organized a conference workshop entitled “Poetry as Yoga Practice”—thus making me realize how bad things really were. (A kind soul, surely she
meant well, but would she, I wonder, have called a workshop “Brain Surgery as Yoga Practice”? “Thermonuclear Dynamics as Yoga Practice”? Even “Learning French the Berlitz Way as Yoga Practice”? I think not—yet the art, craft, and
science
of poetry is at least as exacting as any of the above—and merits as much courtesy, if not respect.)

I thank those who were honestly surprised at my answer to their question about influences on my work: the Metaphysical Poets of the seventeenth century, especially Donne and Marvell; and Pitchford and Raine and Jeffers and Wylie and Crane and Mew and Yeats and Plath and so many others the list could go on for hours. In prose: Kafka and Faulkner and Eliot and the Brontes, Austen and Hawthorne and Cather and James and Olsen, to be admittedly eclectic. In theater: the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, and Shaw, Sophocles, Anouilh; Sartre, too, and Bagnold and Hellman. And Brecht. And Williams. And all such lists are ludicrous.

My listeners were thunderstruck. I had cited some men. In certain feminist circles it is not yet fathomed (for understandable if maddening reasons) that there has been a peculiar synchronicity even in some male artists (fine ones, that is), a symbiosis between art and real understanding of
all
human beings. Henry James' female characters are more profoundly feminist, to me, than Isadora Wing. Furthermore, I'm afraid that if I am forced to choose between Donne's complex braiding of respectful misogyny and uxoriousness on the one hand and some new volume called
Riding the Red Rag to Amazon Nation
on the other, I shall not be un-Donne. If, in our expectable nationalist phase, we feminists forget that the most sublime art is mercilessly sexless, raceless, and ageless, then we shall be in danger of losing sight of our own eventual goals—and what is perhaps even worse, we shall never produce great artists, or we will destroy those we do produce.

Successful revolutions are as well known as their recently overthrown previous regimes for treating two groups in particular with especial vengeance: revolutionaries and artists. On a bad day I can look at the Feminist Movement and see some alarmingly familiar tendencies, despite all my self-assurances, that we shall do this differently. (Another way of saying “It can't happen here”?) Artists, a feisty lot, have generally responded to suspicion from others with a manner defiantly calculated to provoke such suspicion all on its own. We do get shot, of course. We also get the last word, albeit one uttered posthumously.

Can women artists and feminist revolutionaries change all this? Tune in next century, if there is one. If you find on your futuristic tele-screen klutzy statues in town plazas memorializing
conveniently massacred feminist artists whose works are no longer available, you'll know that nothing much has changed.

On good days, I know you won't find this nightmare, though. On good days, I know that god, whether or not she's a feminist, is at least an artist.

THE AMUSEMENT

Cast of Characters:

(
in order of appearance
)

THE POET

The Nine Muses
:

URANIA
, the Muse of Cosmic Science

THALIA
, the Muse of Comedy and the Pastoral

EUTERPE
, the Muse of Lyric Song

POLYMNIA
, the Muse of Sacred Song

TERPSICHORE
, the Muse of Dance

ERATO
, the Muse of Love Poetry

CLIO
, the Muse of History

CALLIOPE
, the Muse of Epic Poetry

MELPOMENE
, the Muse of Tragedy

THE POET

The Time
: The Present

The Place
: Rafters above
THE POET
'
S
desk

(
As the Curtain of our consciousness rises, we see
THE POET
sitting at her desk. She is hunched over her typewriter, and something about the curve of her shoulders bespeaks a certain weariness, yet she peers, squinting, at the ceiling, and her expression is one of apprehension. Above her, assembled in various postures and perches
,
THE NINE MUSES
float, cushioned on their own portable ectoplasm. With the exceptions of
MELPOMENE
and
POLYMNIA, THE MUSES
are all chattering animatedly at once
)

URANIA
(
raising her voice to be heard above the amiable din
) Sisters, Sisters! Please, can we have some order? There is a most important subject under discussion at tonight's meeting. We have a full agenda, and we really must begin.
(THE MUSES
settle down
) Thank you so much for your cooperation. (
Then, a bit sternly, to
THALIA
,
who continues whispering to
TERPSICHORE)
I said THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION. (
THALIA
accepts the rebuke and is silenced
) Now. Let us start, as ever, with The Toast.

(THE MUSES
all float to a standing position and raise brimming goblets which are suddenly manifest in their hands
.
POLYMNIA
leads them in their ritual, which they chant with great dignity
)

ALL THE MUSES
(
in unison
) To The Mothers from whence we, Creatrices of all creativity, have been created. To the Old Ones who began us all. To Melete, She who is Meditation. To Mneme, She who is Remembrance. To Aoide, She who is Song. To the Three, who became the Nine, who became the soul of the world.

(
THE POET
shudders with awe. Something ancient and chilling is so palpable in the room that she pulls her shawl tighter about her shoulders
)

URANIA
Let us begin our meeting, then. The central concern tonight—

THALIA
(
interrupting
) I apologize for the interruption, Urania, but I must lodge two teensy protests. First, garrets. Can we never find a more comfortable meeting place than a garret?
(CLIO
   
opens her mouth to reply, but
THALIA
burbles on
) I know, I
know
, darling Clio. I realize the situation of most artists on this particular barbarous planet. Didn't my own beloved Mozart starve to death here? Didn't my gem Dorothy Parker have to survive by writing Hollywood screenplays here? But when are we going to
do
something about this situation?

URANIA
Thalia, this is a subject for another whole meeting. Please—

THALIA
And then there's this abominable wine. (
She holds her goblet at arm's length, eyeing it with contempt
) It isn't that I'm a hedonist, you know, but there
was
a time when we could get a decent ambrosia for our meetings.
This
stuff isn't a fitting refreshment for us; there's no ecstasy in it. It merely gets us tiddly—and you all know Melpomene when she gets tiddly: Ms. Morbid herself. I mean, with all due affection, Melpie—

EUTERPE
Thalia dear, Melpomene does
not
become morbid. As for you, though, you are permanently in a tiddly state, you irrepressible wag. Oh, Thalia, do
try
to be kind. And quiet.

THALIA
Very well, quiet perhaps. (
She smiles at
EUTERPE)
For you, Euterpe. But kindness I can't promise. That is too often a form of hypocrisy, which isn't in my nature. I'm a country girl at heart.

POLYMNIA
Sisters. (
There is a solemn quality in her bearing which seems to command everyone's attention
) I suggest to you that, loving banter aside, we have a sacred duty to perform here. The issue we are to examine could be called “Art and Feminism” or “Female Culture” or perhaps “Women and Art” or a thousand other such titles. Indeed, the title is less significant than the urgent need for our concern; this subject is of vital importance to our children below, in particular our precious Daughters.

TERPSICHORE
Well, then, let's do begin. What shall our form be tonight? Shall we go around the room in personal testimony, or have a Chair, or shall we do free-floating space? I prefer the last; I think we do it so well.

ERATO
Oh, I agree. After all, we're not doing C-R in a strict sense this meeting, so we needn't hew to personal testimony. Terpsichore's right. Besides, free-floating
feels
so good.

(
There is a chorus of approving comment for use of the free-floating form of discussion
.
CLIO
interrupts, waving a cautious finger
)

CLIO
      I would remind you all that our past experience with free-floating discussion, while at times most fruitful, has not been without difficulty. Certain of us tend to dominate the conversation. Terpsichore, on the other hand, says very little (although her gestures are of course so eloquent), Polymnia retires almost completely into meditation, and Melpomene sits quietly in some dormer cranny and weeps without uttering a sob. This
has
happened, you know.

URANIA
A valid point, Clio. Perhaps we should have a firmer structure. I think a Chair would be an excellent idea—

THALIA
I
don't. Sorry to be a bucolic bother, but it's almost always either Chair or Testimony, Testimony or Chair, and I get bored. Are we the Muses or not? De we create creativity or not? Also, we always wind up with either Urania or Clio as the Chair. I'm too naughty, Euterpe's too gentle, Polymnia too contemplative, Terpsichore too nonverbal, Erato too excitable, Calliope too long-winded, and Melpomene too severe. So it's Clio or Urania. Poor things, they've both been Chairs so often we could upholster them and have a matched pair—Louis Quatorze, I think.