Minkgirl Muses

I AM AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF

One of the luxuries I allowed myself when we moved to London was the exorbitantly expensive shipping of four boxes of books. Choosing which books to bring, which to store, and which to give away was my very first moving task, one that I completed with the fortuitous assistance of my friend A. A is a writer herself – a brilliantly imaginative and poetic playwright in fact, so I felt secure in accepting her recommendation on each volume’s fate – “Script Analysis? Boring. Haven’t cracked it since grad school. Chuck it. The Playwright’s Voice? Well that’s important. Put that one in the ‘Take to London’ box.” And so we proceeded shelf by shelf with a miraculous rapidity and confidence that I experienced in no other part of the gruesome packing process.

When the books finally arrived 6 weeks after we did, I was ecstatic. I unpacked them and strew them about the living room (where they still sit as I haven’t managed to procure a bookshelf yet), and I’ve already dipped into the pile quite a few times – Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island has provided a humorous sense of perspective about our adopted culture. Ellen Gilchrist’s book of short stories Light Can Be Both Particle & Wave has been a faithful old friend on my nightstand – one whose characters and phrases I enjoy slipping on like a favorite bathrobe. Peter Brook’s Empty Space is as full of revelation as it was nearly 20 years ago, when I first read it in college.

And last week – due to an impulse that I have forgotten – I picked up Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. I also discovered this book in college – probably in a Women’s Studies class. And reading it makes me as angry now as it did then. Ms. Woolf acknowledges simply that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” and then goes on to prove in her slim volume just how impossible achieving these resources has been for her sisters throughout the ages. One could apply her maxim to nearly anything creative that a woman might aspire to: a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to paint, to play the violin, to design buildings, to make theatre.

I guess I picked up the book because the longing for a room of my own has snuck up on me again – a dull unavoidable throb. Even now, in this time of not working, this “sabbatical” time, where I have no responsibilities to the outside world, and am expected by no one to produce anything on any kind of deadline – even now, I barely have enough time to think half the thoughts I want to think, much less make anything creative. When all is said and done, I have about 10 hours a week to myself, 10 hours to spend as I choose. Of course the temptation is huge to get a jump on the laundry, to just pick up the house for a few minutes before I sit down to write (because I think better with less clutter), to take care of those errands that are so hard to get done with Gman in tow, etc. etc. But even when I avoid all domestic temptations and use my time to its best advantage, it still isn’t enough – I’m still racing out the door 10 minutes late to pick up Gman because I wanted to read one more chapter, write one more page, look up one more interesting thing on the internet. And I never get back to any of it. I always think I will, that I’ll come home and sneak back to the computer while Gman is playing, that I’ll make a quick dinner and use the extra time to read just a bit more, write one more email – but it never happens. My thoughts are always left unfinished. My intentions left unfulfilled. It turns out that being a housewife is nearly as time consuming as being a working mother. And of course since I’m not actually producing anything with this time, it’s hard to argue for more time. And how much would it take anyway, before I would feel intellectually and spiritually sated – 20 hours a week, 40 hours, 60 hours? How much solitude, how many moments to look out the 3^rd floor window at the sky and the tree branches flickering, how many hours of reading and writing in my journal would be enough to make me feel fulfilled? I could noodle away a life with introspection and creative musings and internet research. And still never actually make anything.

And that is why I am so angry with Virginia Woolf – why she terrifies me so. Not only does she reproach me with her sheer miraculous creative output – but she also describes in her witty side-ways prose the deep and historical circumscription of women’s lives – how and why it is that we will always achieve less.

“If only Mrs. Seton and her mother and her mother before her had learnt the great art of making money and had left their money, like their fathers and their grandfathers before them, to found fellowships and lectureships and prizes and scholarships appropriated to the use of their own sex…we might have looked forward without undue confidence to a pleasant and honourable lifetime spent in the shelter of one of the liberally endowed professions. We might have been exploring or writing; mooning about the venerable places of the earth; sitting contemplative on the steps of the Parthenon, or going at ten to an office and coming home comfortably at half-past four to write a little poetry. Only, if Mrs. Seton and her like had gone into business at the age of fifteen, there would have been – that was the snag in the argument – no Mary…for, to endow a college would necessitate the suppression of families altogether. Making a fortune and bearing thirteen children – no human being could stand it.”

Okay, now I don’t have thirteen children, and I do recognize that individual women are accomplishing a great deal – I hold as friends a whole slew of women who are doctors, lawyers, teachers, entrepreneurs, scholars and managers of companies. But. Still. As a group, we still do not achieve what men do – mainly because of the baby question, and the simple inescapable fact that someone has to raise the darn things.

“First there are nine months before the baby is born. Then the baby is born. Then there are three or four months spent in feeding the baby. After the baby is fed there are certainly five years spent in playing with the baby. You cannot, it seems, let children run about the streets. People who have seen them running wild in Russia say that the sight is not a pleasant one. People say too, that human nature takes its shape in the years between one and five. If Mrs. Seton, I said, had been making money, what sort of memories would you have of games and quarrels? What would you have known of Scotland, and its fine air and cakes and all the rest of it? But it is useless to ask these questions, because you would never have come into existence at all.”

Yes, it is useless to ask these questions, to keep protesting – as I have for much of my life – how unfair it is to be a woman. It is a topic that I have endlessly bored Lord Limescale with. It is my favored form of whinging (fabulous British word for whining), and I can’t seem to stop doing it. I know my life is very very good, much better in nearly every way than woman of even one generation ago. But. Still. I cannot stop longing for the space and time (and money) to test my imagination fully, to see what might be possible if I could just sit still long enough and THINK.

Be well.

Labels: Career Anxiety, Creative Process, Creative Women

# posted by Christine Young @ 4:22 AM