Tell Me a Riddle (59 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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utterance,'' a "mission," "a true action of the creative power," but the sordid intervention of a "greasy" impresario refracts these spiritual claims and collapses them. There is no third or mediating way out of the paradox that the apparently romantic aspirations have a sordid reality, while humdrum domestic life is, instead, the real sphere of divine mission. Here, as in
Aurora Leigh,
class questions subtly shift the ground: the preindustrial farm in which all participate, the family work in unity and interdependence, is clearly better than the protocapitalist exploitation of artist/woman by impresario/man, a relationship all too suggestive of prostitute to pimp. Reunited with family, baby, and husband, Hetty thanks God that she was purged of selfishness, willful dreams, and her delusive claims to talent. "A woman has no better work in life than the one she has taken up: to make herself a visible Providence to her husband and child" (19). God is usefully recruited to bolster the solution. The public sphere is tempting but shallow; the transcendent "Self" without ties is desolate; the private sphere, rather than stultifying and "mawkish," is a cozy and ennobling realm of human love (15, 8). The either/or ending of love versus vocation is created with a newly honed edge in this tale. Although it does offer a pointed vocabulary of critique, the narrative just as pointedly discredits it.
Kate Chopin's
The Awakening
(1899) summarizes these nineteenth-century motifs, working them allusively, testing their limits, considering how they might be broken.
12
The way the life of the artist can be mistaken for the life of the demimondaine, the way "the children" come in and are narratively presented, and an allusion to the sacredness of home ties by a woman suffering in childbed are motifs shared with Rebecca Harding Davis. The death of Edna Pontellier as an artist figure is a plain statement that the character rejects the binary, either/or convention of love versus vocation. However, the fact that her rejection of complicity takes the form of suicide attacks the binary division between selves only by the monism of obliteration. Chopin hints that there might be some socially plausible, if marginalized, third way open to Edna, who is too attached to her privileges of class (the dovecote, the smart set) and gender (her beauty) to pursue it. In this narrative the binary choice still has force, but not finality; the
 
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main character cannot experiment further and punishes herself for her mixture of ambition to transcend feminine norms and complicity with them by an act (swimming) that both celebrates and destroys that awakening. . . .
The Story of Avis (1877)
by the prolific American writer Elizabeth Stuart Phelps takes up the challenge of
Aurora Leigh
to examine the relation of a woman to artistic vocation after the declaration of love and the marriage that conclude Browning's poem. This deft book is formed like a quilt of neatly fitted and boldly colored discoursessentimental, realistic, and, of course, allegorical (the death of a bird [Latin: avis] given to her future husband for safekeeping).
Avis is another of the large-spirited and gifted artist heroes torn between human energy and feminine ideology. Phelps's version of a tragicomic wedlock plot will show that marriage and vocation should not be combined for women.
Successfor a womanmeans absolute surrender, in whatever direction. Whether she paints a picture, or loves a man, there is no division of labor possible in her economy. To the attainment of any end worth living for, a symmetrical sacrifice of her nature is compulsory upon her. I do not say that this was meant to be so. I do not think we know what was meant for women. It is enough that it is so.
13
Women are trained to a personality, formed by social constraints that compel an undivided commitment to one path; allusions to the psychological economy of romance makes change seem impossible. Avis argues that even a woman of genius cannot break the imposed pattern of sacrifice, of an either/or choice. Her future husband claims that a talented and dynamic woman painter, once married, would be able to create and housekeep in fair and equal balance. He is, not incidentally, feckless, although persuasive. The book is built to test their opposing propositions; Avis ''wins" the argument by losing her art, a plot mechanism that recapitulates the double bind of femininity and vocation.
Shrewdly observed details of daily life in a household that does not compromise its bourgeois solidity make the novel a study in frustration.
14
Not only the arrival of children but, in
 
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sharply executed scenes, their behaviorseductive tantrums outside the studio doordramatizes the conflicts that daily impede the practice of her talent. Her paints grow dusty; domesticity encroaches constantly. Then the home itself falters: one child dies, the husband is invalided by tuberculosis, the marriage is an alienating stalemate. The author's attention shifts to the prevention of the spiritual and emotional divorce she has so cunningly suggested, as if Avis would be dishonored as a character if she could not recapture love or respect for her husband. With this shift of attention, the burden of the novel falls on the wedlock plot, and the
Bildung
of the female artist is put aside. But even her husband's death does not set Avis free. In a conservative scene of surrender, the character discovers that being married had ''eaten into and eaten out the core of her life, left her a riddled, withered thing, spent and rent" (447). She can no longer create, for her genius has been used up in love; she is reduced to teaching art school. This mercantilist view of the psychic economy of women suggests that a fixed amount of energy exists in her life; what is spent is never replenished or recreated. Hence the either/or choice persists and controls the character.
The book ends by the generational displacement of the mother's ambition onto her daughter.
15
The mother reads her child the story of the Quest for the Holy Grail, and we understand that while the first generation (Sir Lancelot) failed, the second, purer generation of seekers will achieve the quest. The thwarted mother bequeathes her ambition to the child, and that emergent daughter becomes, as we shall see, the main character of the twentiethcentury
Künstlerroman.
16
Avis's two major art works embody the conflict between vocation and love. One is the catalyst for her marriage, a portrait of her future husband. The other is the sphinx, a work of a thwarted artist, encoding both the powers and failures of her genius.
17
In the sphinx is depicted the muted, riddling, and inarticulate drive of woman artists in particular and of women in general, suggesting vocation and its erosion, potential speech and actual silencing, the whole "mutilated actuality" of her career (150).
In a number of works that center on female artists, characters from the conventional heterosexual love plot . ..
 
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make strong demands for conformity to exactingly interpreted feminine roles. Both lover and maternal figures compel the processes of silencing and thwart the preternatural articulateness of the female artists. In the nineteenth-century works, the husband or suitor is the major problem for the artistic career. The husband/suitor's concerted disapproval of the artist's vocation
(Aurora Leigh,
until the end), his lack of sustained understanding of the nature of her needs
(The Story of Avis),
his view of wife as bourgeois possession
(The Awakening)
and his controlling of her artistic and intellectual activity (as we shall see in ''The Yellow Wallpaper") are some of the motifs.
The major modulation from the nineteenth- to the twentieth-century
Künstlerroman
involves the position of heterosexual love and the couple within the narrative. The romance plot, which often turns into a stalemate, is displaced in twentieth-century narratives and replaced by a triangular plot of nurturance offered to an emergent daughter by a parental couple. Whenever the heterosexual bond remains central to the main character, she is usually a "thwarted mother" type of artist. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" may be taken as a transitional work; the nurturing that the potential artist receives is a form of social and emotional control, repressive tolerance at its shrewdest. But Gilman's text is transitional because, instead of submitting to the complicity or battered resignation we see in works like
The Story of Avis,
Gilman's hero performs the act signaling a shift in female narrative politics, the critique of narrative and ideology by writing beyond the ending.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" is an obdurate account of the conflict between an artist's calling and external constraints, telling of the literal entrapment of a potential writer in the room in which she is suffering from a breakdown.
18
Her journal of self-analysis (the work is constructed as a diary) is written furtively, under her husband's ban. The external controls on the woman's activity are very persistent, so her creative energy is baffled except for one completed documentthe text we hold.
The room of her imprisonment epitomizes the doubled public and private power characteristic of the social pressures brought to bear on women. As the marital bedroom, it recalls
 
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love and trust; with its bars and fixed furniture, it mimics such impersonal corrective institutions as jails and asylums. In the double character of the husband/doctor, Gilman has expressed this nexus of patriarchal love, power, and force; he combines the professional authority of the physician with the legal and emotional authority of the husband.
19
The cause of the character's worsening depression is writtenand with the proper eyes can be readin the yellow wallpaper of the sickroom and in the diary secretly kept by the woman.
The symptoms have a double impact, involving her fixation on the wallpaper and her decoding of it. In the inability of the trained professional to read her symptoms (but in his power to enforce his interpretation), in the ability of the untrained patient to understand the semiology of her illness (but her powerlessness to have her reading credited), Gilman has constructed a dramatic statement illustrating the difficulty of the muted group* to ''deny or reverse a universal assumption."
20
When the ill woman makes the climactic separation of the wallpaper's front pattern and its hidden female figure, she makes the crucial analytic distinction between a muted ("creeping") woman and the "central, effective and dominant system of meanings" in her society.
21
By making the wallpaper pattern represent the patterns of androcentric society, Gilman underscores the dailiness and omnipresence of the universal assumption of male dominance, its apparent banality and harmlessnessjust one modest feature of home decor. But like any system of social and ideological dominance, it is pervasive, extensive, and saturating.
22
All who live within this fixed pattern of institutions and values are affected by it, no matter what their social benefits or sufferings or how "careful" they are; Gilman reports that "the paper stained everything it touched" (27).
At the ending, depending on one's interpretive paradigm, two contradictory opinions about the main character can be held. The conflicting judgments are simultaneously present, as the narrator, tearing the wallpaper, tries to release
* Ed. note. In anthropological thought, as brought into feminist literary criticism by Elaine Showalter, a "muted group" is a group silenced by its lack of access to social power.

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