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Page 264
5. Although, by its focus on closure, my interpretation emphasizes the relations of romance, this work, like
Jane Eyre,
has a powerful subtext of female love-hate relations among the women of all three social classes. Especially the tie between Marian Earle (''a monumental Madonna") and Aurora is discussed by Nina Auerbach,
Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 151.
6. Cora Kaplan is admirable on this point, as on many others in her introduction.
7. In another reading, it is heterosexual romance that becomes a metaphor for creative identity. For Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, Romney is first the interior, self-hating critic and then a "dramatic projection of... blind faith" in oneself."
"Aurora Leigh:
The Vocation of the Woman Poet,"
Victorian Poetry
19, 1 (Spring 1981): 48.
8. But this was also a shocking affirmation, for it violated "the social and public silence of women after puberty which was central to the construction of femininity in the nineteenth century." The Marxist Feminist Literature Collective, "Women's Writing: Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, Aurora Leigh," in
1848: The Sociology of Literature,
ed. Francis Barker (Colchester: University of Essex, 1978), p. 202.
9. Elaine Showalter,
A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 152.
10. Fanny Fern [Mrs. Sarah Payson (Willis) Parton],
Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time
(New York: Mason Brothers, 1855), p. 333.
11. Rebecca Harding Davis, "The Wife's Story,"
The Atlantic Monthly
XIV, 81 (July 1864): 1-19.
12. Kate Chopin,
The Awakening
(New York: Capricorn Books, 1964).
13. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,
The Story of Avis
(Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1877), p. 126.
14. Indeed, in a notable conduct book, a sister writer deplores Phelps's sympathetic depiction of Avis's dilemma, insisting that even an "emancipated schoolgirl" still needs practical knowledge of womanly, domestic tasks. With sharply selective citation, she makes Avis's complaints seem self-indulgent. Marion Harland,
Eve's Daughters, or
 
Page 265
Common Sense for Maid, Wife and Mother
(New York: J. R. Anderson and H. S. Allen, 1982), p. 326.
15. The same kind of ending is visible in Rebecca Harding Davis,
Earthen Pitchers
(1873-74), which offers similar motifs: the ruining of female talent, the insensitive but ill husband (here he is blind), the heritage in the child.
16. Phelps was presenting a compensatory analysis of her own family. Her exacting and punctilious father had, in her view, stifled the ambitions and spirit of her talented mother, a writer, whose name the eight-year-old Elizabeth took in tribute after her mother's untimely death. The bond between Avis and her daughter takes on an extra dimension in the biographical context, in which the author, a daughter, did feel she was completing her mother's thwarted work. For the biographical information, see Christine Stansell, ''Elizabeth Stuart Phelps: A Study in Female Rebellion," in
Women: an Issue,
ed. Lee Edwards, Mary Heath and Lisa Baskin (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1972): pp. 239-56. About this, Phelps wrote, "Her last book and her last baby came together, and killed her. She lived one of those rich and piteous lives such as only gifted women know; torn by the civil war of the dual nature which can be given to women only." Cited from Phelps [Ward],
Chapters from a Life,
1897, in the Afterword by Mari Jo Buhle and Florence Howe to
The Silent Partner
(1871) (Old Westbury: The Feminist Press, 1983), p. 362.
17. Because Avis cites
Aurora Leigh,
it is likely that the subject of her painting was inspired by these lines in Barrett Browning: "Or perhaps again, / In order to discover the Musethe Sphinx, / the melancholy desert must sweep round, / Behind you as before"
(AL,
70).
18. Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
The Yellow Wallpaper
(1899) (New York: The Feminist Press, 1973).
19. That powerful and loving doctor/lawgiver is a recurrent figure in women's writing, as in their lives, for he sums up the fascinated ambivalence of male culture toward the ambitious female as speaking subject: Freud and "Dora"; S. Weir Mitchell and Gilman; Otto Rank and Anais Nin; Freud and H. D. He recurs, transposed, in the Sir William BradshawSeptimus Smith tie in Woolf's
Mrs. Dalloway.
20. "That one sex should have monopolized all human activi-
 
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ties, called them 'man's work,' and managed them as such, is what is meant by the phrase 'Androcentric Culture.''' Referring to the difficulty of even naming "our androcentric culture" in a convincing way, Gilman remarks, "It is no easy matter to deny or reverse a universal assumption."
The Man-Made World, or, Our Androcentric Culture
(New York: Charlton Company, 1911), pp. 25, 21.
21. Raymond Williams, "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,"
New Left Review
82 (November-December 1973): 9.
22. A veiled citation from ibid.
23. The gloss is Emily Dickinson, 435. "Much Madness is divinest SenseTo a discerning Eye / Much Sensethe starkest Madness / 'Tis the Majority / In this, as All, prevail / Assent and you are same / Demuryou're straightway dangerous / And handled with a Chain"
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson,
ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960), p. 209.
24. As early motherhood and the strains of domesticity, added to a well-meaning but awkward marriage, overtaxed the ambitious Gilman and contributed to her breakdown, it was not more injunctions to domesticity and femininity that she needed. But this is what S. Weir Mitchell offered his female clients. Mitchell's treatment reflected nineteenth-century attitudes, inducing conformity with the duties of womanhood rather than exploring the conflict and anger within the individual. This point is made by Mary A. Hill,
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist, 1860-1896
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), p. 149. In S. Weir Mitchell's home city there is, near 16th on Walnut Street, a plaque commemorating his accomplishments as "physician, physiologist, poet, man of letters" adding, "He taught us the use of rest for the nervous."
25. Gilman,
The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography
(1935) (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), pp. 96, 121.
26. After her own first marriage, she sank into a profound depression, which lifted almost the instant she separated from that husband, but whose effects lasted in what she perceived as a compromise of her abilities. Earlier, Gilman has seen her parents' marriage as "a long-drawn, triple tragedy," and said "mother's life was one of the most painfully thwarted I have ever known"
(Living,
p. 8). Her mother was a pianist who sold the instrument to pay her bills; again
 
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the thwarted mother as artist motivates the achievements of the daughter. Gilman felt that it was possible to combine marriage, motherhood, and vocation, but in her specific case, ''it was not right." This may stem from the self-denial and deprivation to which she subjected herself.
27. Alice Walker, "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens," in
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens
(San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), p. 241.
28. In Alice Walker's story "Everyday Use," the maternal heritage of quilts belongs to the down-home daughter, who will use them and who has the skills to replenish the stock, not to the urban chic daughter, who, discovering her rural roots, wants to hang the quilts on the wall and alienate them into quaintness. The story is a revisionary telling of the Jacob-Esau story, in which the matriarch works to equalize the "portion" of both sisters, when the more favored quick child has schemed to take part of that heritage although she does not honor it.
29. Where the writer is also concerned to show the artist completing the work of the thwarted father, the father will come from a historically marginalized, nondominant group. For example, in Doris Lessing's
The Golden Notebook,
the parental couple is transposed to Mother Sugar, Anna's analyst, and Charlie Themba, a (correctly) paranoid African leader. This use of parental figures often involves a distinct rewriting or an idealization, for example, using characters who are surrogate parents or grandparents, generationally displaced, or otherwise reassembled.
30. Virginia Woolf,
To the Lighthouse
(1927) (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1955).
31. It is striking how, in
Moments of Being,
the maternal and the visionary moments are both expressed in the image of a translucent dome of light: the "globular, semi-transparent" early ecstatic sensations, the "arch of glass" that domed Paddington Station, burning and glowing with light.
Moments of Being,
ed. Jeanne Schulkind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), pp. 66, 93. So Mrs. Ramsey at that preoedipal moment of yearning (associated with both hieroglyphs and bees) ends as "the shape of a dome" (80).
32. Virginia Woolf,
A Writer's Diary,
ed. Leonard Woolf (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1954), pp. 102, 105.
33. How to achieve this ending was the subject of Woolf's entry on 5 September 1926, which interestingly reveals that in the
 
Page 268
original conception, Lily and her picture were secondary, and ''summing up [Mr.] R's character" seemed to be primary. The shift from a patrifocal narrative to one focused on balance between the generations and on the daughter's vision of the mother serves as further evidence of the thesis of this chapter
(Writer's Diary,
p. 98).
34. Margaret Atwood,
Surfacing
(Ontario: Paperjacks, 1973).
35. Christina Stead,
The Man Who Loved Children
(New York: Avon Books, 1966), p. 491. The book contains an imbedded art work-Louie's play, in an invented language, which depicts to her father a distinct, bitter message about the tie between Snake Man and his daughter: "You are killing me" (378).
36. See Jane Flax, "The Conflict Between Nurturance and Autonomy in Mother-Daughter Relationships and Within Feminism," and Judith Kegan Gardiner, "A Wake for Mother: The Maternal Deathbed in Women's Fiction," which discusses how "mothers in death embody the negative aspects of female personality and role," both in
Feminist Studies
4, 2 (June 1978): 171-89; 146-65.
37. Tillie Olsen, "Tell Me a Riddle," in
Tell Me a Riddle
(New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1960), p. 86.
38. The term
Sprechstimme
(literally "speech voice") is a distinctive form of writing for the voice in twentieth-century music. Grove's
Dictionary of Music and Musicians
defines it as a "kind of vocal declamation which partakes of the characteristics of both song and speech."
39. The same multiple populist inspiration, double artist figures, mother-daughter and father-daughter ties, and proliferating works of art occur in Margaret Laurence's
The Diviners
(New York: Alfred Knopf, 1974). By stories, ballads, and novels, the politically outcast Canadian strains-Celtic, French, and Indian-are synthesized and become oppositional to the powerful British minority.
40. Tillie Olsen,
Silences
(New York: Delta, 1979).
41. Doris Lessing,
The Golden Notebook
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1968).
42. In her analysis of artist novels, Gubar calls this "revisionary domestic mythology"
(The Representation of Women in Fiction,
p. 39).
43. The particularly privileged mother-daughter connection for creative women was verified in Bell Gale Chevigny's "Daughters Writing: Toward a Theory of Women's Biography,"
Feminist Studies
9, 1 (Spring 1983): 79-102.
 
Page 269
44. Judith Kegan Gardiner corroborates this connection between art and life, tracing it to fluid ego boundaries in women's psychological identity. ''On Female Identity and Writing by Women,"
Critical Inquiry
8, 2 (Winter 1981): 347-61. In considering stances plausible for a feminist poetics, Lawrence Lipking discusses several issues that this study has also put forth: the pressure on women of an injunction to silence, the personal, rather than objective, stake women have in analyses made of them, and therefore the lack of aesthetic distance and the attempt to build a poetics and a criticism based on affiliation, not authority. "Aristotle's Sister: A Poetics of Abandonment,"
Critical Inquiry
10, 1 (September 1983): 61-81.
45. Herbert Marcuse, "The Affirmative Character of Culture,"
Negations: Essays in Critical Theory
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), pp. 95-96. One might fruitfully compare the black aesthetic, as enunciated by Gwendolyn Brooks in her introduction to
Jump Bad,
an anthology of black poetry from Chicago. "These black writers do not care if you call their product Art or Peanuts. Artistic survival, appointment to Glory, appointment to Glory among the anointed elders, is neither their crevice
[sic]
nor creed. They give to the ghetto gut. Ghetto gut receives. Ghetto giver's gone."
Report from Part One
(Detroit: Broadside Press, 1972), p. 195.
46. Theodor W. Adorno, "Cultural Criticism and Society,"
Prisms
(London: Neville Spearman, 1967), p. 26.
47. William Morris, "The Lesser Arts" (also given under the title "The Decorative Arts," 1877), in
The Political Writings of William Morris,
ed. A. L. Morton (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1973), p. 32.

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