Going Too Far (49 page)

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 Poet 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.

URANIA
And how inevitable that, if they have not even any species-loyalty left, they should treat other creatures, other living matter, with still more contemptuous cruelty than they reserve for their own kind?

MELPOMENE
The Daughters know this better than anyone else at present. It is their burden. They have only begun to utter this burden aloud.

POLYMNIA
Let it be sung, this new word. For the word is miraculous. Not for nothing have all patriarchal religions realized this, locked the word into silence and then murdered any who tried to speak it aloud. The origins of poetry were religious and ecstatic. Poets were one with seers, the bard and the pythoness singing with a single voice. Think, Sisters. Think, Daughters: The power of spiritual frenzy is sufficiently threatening all unto itself, but think of the danger to every enforced system of order should such a mystery again be
reunited with intelligent expression
—and wake and stretch and move and come alive in a form that is intricate and beautiful, even as it was of old.
There are worlds not even we can understand until they have been spoken. Not until we—any of us—recognize that we have said precisely what we mean do we know what we meant, after all.

EUTERPE
The dawn is trickling in at the window, Sisters. Castalia calls.

TERPSICHORE
Oh! We must fly. And we're not
finished
.

THALIA
We never are, you know. It's typical of us. But it's kept us going for a thousand thousand thousand years.