Tell Me a Riddle (58 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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Page 245
the even more powerful statements of her allegiance to art and her meditations on craft, in Books II and V, which describe the upsurge of her passionate inspiration as the ''lava-lymph" (195).
Never flinch,
But still, unscrupulously epic, catch
Upon the burning lava of a song
The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age:
That, when the next shall come, the men of that
May touch the impress with reverent hand, and say
"Behold,behold the paps we all have sucked!"
(201-202)
Aurora Leigh
is irrepressibly rich in imagery of volcanoes and breasts, of maternal power to nourish; and by evoking the physical female, the poem claims both biological and cultural authority to speak.
6
Heterosexual love may have moral and ideological primacy in
Aurora Leigh,
as articulated at the end, but vocation, itself bound with maternal bliss and the power of love/hate relations among women, has textual primacy.
7
Vocation, asserted early and often, is, moreover, stated in the critical context of a beady-eyed analysis of female education for domesticity, acquiescence, and superficiality. Aurora's choice of vocation is made against the will of her closest relatives, including Romney. She asserts female right to a profession not because of financial exigency or family crisis, but out of sheer desire and for the sake of sheer power. Her ecstatic commitment to the vocation of poet and her achievement tend to make valid the ideology of striving and success that she embodies, joining that set of values to female possibility.
8
Between the beginning and the end, Romney and Aurora have exchanged roles, in a chiastic move that tends to make their marriage somewhat credible, despite the plot mechanism that has him involved with three women, representing three social classes and three female types. Aurora has seen the centrality of love, he the vitality of her art. While he had, in Book II, been the fountainhead of smugly discouraging statements about women as artists ("We get no Christ from
 
Page 246
you,and verily / We shall not get a poet, in my mind,'' 81), at the end he comes to recognize that her achievement was more vital than his in inducing the conversion experiences that are the real root of any social change. This readjustment takes shape in a distinct and punitive shock to his views. For Romney, like an escapee from
Jane Eyre,
is first rejected, like St. John Rivers, and then, like Rochester, blinded. This wounding of male heroes is, according to Elaine Showalter, a symbolic way of making them experience the passivity, dependency, and powerlessness associated with women's experiences of gender.
9
And, as in Brontë's
Shirley,
the rebellious lower orders express, in unacceptable form, the rancor and hostility of all the powerless, women included. For Romney's blindness is direct punishment for his political theories. A mean-spirited, animalistic rebellion causes the accident that blinds him. The poor have been so brutalized that their souls are nasty, unawakened, unspiritual; their true awakening will be brought about only by poetry and God, not by politics.
Because he can no longer continue these handicapped reformist activities, the private sphere of love and the cosmic sphere of religion become the world in which all his needs canmustbe satisfied. So the man is made to live in the "separate sphere," in the feminine culture of love and God. The creation of Romney's short-fall, his "castration" by the malicious verve of the unwashed masses, creates a power vacuum where the upper-class or upper-middle-class hero used to be. Aurora is then available to claim both masculine and feminine rewardsthe hero's reward of success and the heroine's reward of marriagein a rescripting of nineteenthcentury motifs that joins romantic love to the public sphere of vocation.
Shine out for two, Aurora, and fulfil
My falling-short that must be! work for two,
As I, though thus restrained, for two, shall love!
(389)
Since Aurora had offered to sacrifice and to be used (381), what more aggrandizing way to fulfill her desire for abasement than to demand that she do twice as often and twice as in-
 
Page 247
tensely what she has already proven she can do very well. Being an artist is, at the end, reinterpreted as self-sacrifice for the woman, and thus is aligned with feminine ideology. This work, then, created a powerful reference point, but it did not change the nineteenth-century convention of representation that saw the price of artistic ambition as the loss of femininity.
Most of the nineteenth-century works with female artists as heroes observe the pieties, putting their final emphasis on the woman, not the genius; the narratives are lacerated with conflicts between femininity and ambition. There are works in which the only reason for an artistic vocation is the utterly desperate and melodramatic destitution of the main charactersay a widow with young children, cast out from sanctimonious, petty family. Such is the case with Fanny Fern's
Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time,
published (in America) a year before
Aurora Leigh.
In this work, when a child asks, ''When I get to be a woman shall I write books, Momma?" the proper answer is clearly Ruth's "God forbid . . . no happy woman ever writes. From Harry's grave sprang Floy [her pen name]."
10
This statement may be taken as the mid-century base line of attitudes, in which a woman's entry into public discourse elicits a shudder of self-disgust and is allowable only if it is undertaken in mourning and domesticity.
Self-realization and ambition as a female crime, and the absolute separation of love and vocation are also grimly coded into a moral tale by Rebecca Harding Davis.
11
An older woman, Hetty, vividly discontented with the dullness and ordinary struggles of her life, is alienated from her new baby and from her husband. The focus of her discontent is her ambition to succeed in the public world with "fame and an accomplished deed in life" (10). The climax of this conflict comes in a sequence that we later learn is a hallucinatory dream of an artist's life. She is hissed on stage, sexually exposed, homeless, mistaken for a prostitute, and responsible for her husband's death from grief: surely an intense catalogue of punishments for the crime of ambition. This transposition of desire for vocation to shame and disgust is achieved by Davis's manipulation of the dual connotations of the artist as soul and body. At first her ambition is boldly justified as "the highest soul-

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