“Your job will be to suppress everything suppressible” said T.S. Eliot to John Hayward, his literary executor. Kate Zambreno's Heroines recounts the numerous acts of suppression experienced by modernist women, wives and mistresses of the Great Male Authors of that time. The account of how these women’s art and work were stifled, their emotional outcries condeming them as mad, their letters and journals becoming controlled by their husbands’ literary estate speaks for a great silencing. Zambreno became entranced by these shadow lives flitting behind, around, and in the major works of modernism and sought out their stories. Reading the literary works by these marginalized women revealed a community that shared her own feelings of anxiety, while reading the letters, diaries and histories of these women presented the manner by which women’s writing has been minimized and dismissed. Zambreno's text is therefore an appeal to reconsider the way the literary and culture establishment has censored the mistress-muses of modernism.
Her research is thorough and she shares endless fascinating and disturbing anecdotes from the lives of Zelda Fitzgerald, Vivien(ne) Eliot, Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary McCarthy, Virginia Woolf, Anais Nin, June Miller, Sylvia Plath and many others, about the silence demanded of them. Her task is to make them Heroines, to help her reader see them as potential heroines when the established narrative has most of them diagnosed as mad (schizophrenic or depressed), crazy emotional tyrants to their suffering artist husbands. Here the Woolfs are the exception, as Leonard “wifes” Virginia and tends to her needs, maintaining the regime of her various rest cures. Here too, though Virginia must depend on Leonard for permission to write since “stimulation was seen as bad for a woman’s moral character.”
Vivien(ne) Eliot, who changed the spelling of her name and took on pseudonyms in a desperate quest for identity, published “satirical and sometimes savage portraits of the popular kids in the Bloomsbury set” under the name Fanny Marlow. T.S. Eliot eventually confessed to the offended group that his wife was the mysterious columnist in Criterion and promised never to publish her again. A rejection from another journal destroyed Vivien(ne)’s tender confidence, who would thereafter only jot notes in her journals. Convinced she could not write, her lifelong physical ailments increased and so did her emotional intensity. Though she cared for him during his breakdowns, Tom would have her hospitalized to free himself of the burden, regarding which Virginia Woolf wrote, “this is the bag of ferrets around Tom’s neck,” while Bertrand Russell wrote his mistress Lady Ottoline Morrell, “She is a person who lives on a knife edge, & will end as a criminal or a saint–I don’t know which.” Perhaps curiosity led him to drop Lady Ottoline for an affair with Vivien(ne), making Vivien(ne) the only woman to have slept with two Nobel winners, as Zambreno notes. When Tom received an offer to go teach at Harvard, and wanted to leave without her, the Bloomsbury set “gleefully” helped Tom escape. Distressed Vivien(ne) tried to place an advertisement in The Times: “Will T.S. Eliot please return to his home, 68 Clarence Gate Gardens, which he abandoned September 17th, 1932.” When she was found six years later wandering the streets of London, her family had her permanently hospitalized.
Zelda Fitzgerald, on the other hand, asked to be hospitalized to escape Scott. When she chooses to dance rather than tidy after Scott, or tend to their baby, she is interned in Switzerland for “obsessional illness” and “incipient egomania” but it is there that she writes Save Me The Last Waltz. When she returns, Scott is trapped by writer’s block and needs her memories and witticisms to spark his own work as she had always previously provided. She resists in order to complete her own novel, which she submits for publication to his horror. He steals at least one of her journals. She locks her writing in a drawer. He is outraged that her story about her time in the asylum might get published before his Tender is the Night, which addresses the same subject. He campaigned to suppress her script, but instead managed to review and cut any parts he wanted. He insisted that any writing ideas she had “will have to be submitted to me.” One would like to read the 114 page account of their final conversation recorded by a stenographer with a psychiatrist present in which it is decided that if Zelda can not write masterpieces like her husband than she ought not bother. F. Scott says “I am the professional novelist, and I am supporting you. That is all my material. None of it is your material.” She asks to be hospitalized but he insists she is not insane, that she must tell him her stories of madness. His inconsistencies and demands are exhausting, and Zambreno’s quotations are some of the best parts of this book. Zelda eventually manages to be institutionalized, where she spends the rest of her life, dying in an asylum fire.
Elizabeth Hardwick described Zelda “as the paragon of the unhappy woman,” but had no sympathy for the less resilent. Married to the poet Robert Lowell, she saw her own writing success as a rejection of any difference between the sexes (as did Mary McCarthy about whom Zambreno also writes). In her essay on Sylvia Plath, Hardwick wrote “every artist is either a man or a woman and the struggle is pretty much the same for both” though she also admits that having children means relinquishing a focus on writing for the woman. People who are gifted find time she insists, as Sylvia Plath did by waking at 4am to write in the morning quiet. Jean Stafford, Lowell’s first wife, would return home from her job at The Southern Review to make him, and any other poets belatedly waking from their hangovers, lunch, despite which she still wrote. Hardwick likewise sacrificed for him, quitting teaching jobs when he needed to move, tending him through his depressions, even as she knew he had endless affairs. She moved to London for his work, where he left her after 23 years of marriage for Lady Caroline Blackwood. She dreaded how biographers would interpret “Lizzie” in Lowell’s award winning The Dolphin that shamelessly presented their intimacies, but Hardwick insisted that her marriage was the best thing that had ever happened to her. Their marriage over, as she left London, she slipped him the note: “If you’ll need me, I’ll always be there. If you don’t, I’ll not be there.”
The stories of the women Zambreno has engaged are scattered across the pages of Heroines. A woman’s story will be introduced in one section, woven and compared to others, dropped and addressed again later, possibly multiple times. Composed of fragments, paragraphs and sentences stand alone but are gathered to develop themes and concerns. The first part presents the challenge that Zambreno and these modernist women faced to discover their own voice–Jean Rhys staying up one night filling exercise books with the story of her life, laughing and crying to hear it in her own words. The second part examines the difficulty in rejecting matrimonial or social expectations to be a mirror or muse–Katherine Mansfield who struggled to write when in a relationship and so lived apart from her husband most of their married life. For those familiar with the relationships of these modernist couples, the details that Zambreno highlights make compelling reading. Other readers may find themselves confused by these figures’ biographies since the chronology is scattered.
Across these stories and more, Zambreno makes the point quite clearly that “what is seen as signs of great Artistry in a man can be seen as alarm in a woman’s behavior.” Where the men are allowed eccentricities, breakdowns, passions for their art, the women are restrained from the same by requirements to be dutiful, loving, supportive wives to the great masters. The men are writing great works of literature. The women are scribbling away at the autobiographical. One of Zambreno’s main concerns is how a woman’s self-revealing writing has often been derided as a “girlish, self-involved act” because “memoir is a woman writer’s forbidden and often avoided continent,” though a review of women’s writings from the last forty years–from Maya Angelou to Brooke Shields to Joan Didion–argues this is no longer really true. Nevertheless, Zambreno hopes to liberate these women from their marginalized status as wives, by reclaiming their autobiographical writings as important and meaningful, not merely as surplus to inform the histories of their husbands but as works of literature in their own right. She weaves her experience into the narrative to perform the value of life writing that she is presenting.
It is not the personal stories she shares of reading or shopping, nor her particular brand of “girl” feminism, nor her strange argument against second wave feminism’s empowerment agenda, nor the lack of citation or clear referencing that undermined Zambreno’s presentation of these women’s lives. She strains the reliability of her narrative when she writes, “it is not lost on me the similarities in my current situation to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ which I teach. The husband named John. The gothic surroundings. The sense of being isolated, haunted. And I am: Unnamed Narrator. It’s really so Victorian I can’t stand it.” In the 21st century, in the United States there are few left who can argue their resemblance to the nameless narrator of Gilman’s classic text. Marrying your boyfriend to travel with him to his post-doc in London, working in a bookstore or as a freelance writer to contribute to the household income, considering graduate school but dismissing it in favor of your own free reading, no pressure to have children or tend home, rejecting doctor and therapist recommended medications are only some of the obvious dissimilarities. Kate’s husband encourages her to write, offering her a sunroom in which to write in peace while he pursues his full-time academic career. He supports her stance against psychotropics and psychological labeling. Though she is isolated in Akron, OH, she “escapes to Chicago” regularly, and is free to leave her writing room, and her house whenever she wishes. That her husband’s name is John and that she lives in a Victorian house are similarities too superficial to be convincing.
This passage, and others like it, make some of her distress at the lives suffered by the modernist women appear unnecessarily excessive. There are moments in these women’s lives that seem potentially manipulated or altered by the fragmentary telling composed within her intense reactions. Tying much of her contemporary feminist argument to modernist situations feels false when simple sympathy to these stories becomes radicalized empathy. Excessive emotions are not in themselves a problem for a reader, unless their disproportion makes them no longer believable, and puts the rest of the text in question. Such occurences in Heroines are unfortunate since they defeat an important argument for Zambreno that the excess of emotion women feel, then or now, is not only necessary, but valid because real and true. In many of her own examples, however, such excess seems peculiar and contrived.
In her own way, Zambreno has also used these women, as a catalyst to get more women writing. The book concludes with the message that “[i]f I have communicated anything to you I hope it is the absolute urgency to write yourself, your body, your own experience. The absolute necessity for you to write yourself in order to understand yourself, in order to become yourself. I ask you to fight against your own disappearance.” A poet that Zambreno admires, Audre Lorde, said something similar in “Silence Transformed into Language and Action,” first presented in 1977. Lorde saw then, as Zambreno sees now, that many women struggle to tell their own story. Heroines is full of interesting anecdotes about modernist wives and muses, but the question of why women remain silent today will not be answered in looking at those women whose lives were curtailed as women rarely face in the Western world today. Instead the issue remains a deeper one, requiring the arduous work of introspection that Lorde suggested thirty-five years ago when she asked her audience:
What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?
Zambreno is a talented writer clearly capable of offering her silent readers more than simply an encouragement to write. When she uses her emotional depths to consider why women (and men, since in my classroom I see as many men struggling to state their original truth as women) remain silent when the visible tyrannies are gone, she will have offered her readers a new, much needed, and gloriously outspoken Heroine.
