Heroines

Kate Zambreno

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780062364951
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études relatives au genre

A manifesto for "toxic girls" that reclaims the wives and mistresses of modernism for literature and feminism.

I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order?pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature."
? from Heroines

On the last day of December, 2009 Kate Zambreno began a blog called Frances Farmer Is My Sister, arising from her obsession with the female modernists and her recent transplantation to Akron, Ohio, where her husband held a university job. Widely reposted, Zambreno's blog became an outlet for her highly informed and passionate rants about the fates of the modernist "wives and mistresses." In her blog entries, Zambreno reclaimed the traditionally pathologized biographies of Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, and Zelda Fitzgerald: writers and artists themselves who served as male writers' muses only to end their lives silenced, erased, and institutionalized. Over the course of two years, Frances Farmer Is My Sister helped create a community where today's "toxic girls" could devise a new feminist discourse, writing in the margins and developing an alternative canon.

In Heroines, Zambreno extends the polemic begun on her blog into a dazzling, original work of literary scholarship. Combing theories that have dictated what literature should be and who is allowed to write it?from T. S. Eliot's New Criticism to the writings of such mid-century intellectuals as Elizabeth Hardwick and Mary McCarthy to the occasional "girl-on-girl crime" of the Second Wave of feminism?she traces the genesis of a cultural template that consistently exiles female experience to the realm of the "minor, " and diagnoses women for transgressing social bounds. "ANXIETY: When she experiences it, it's pathological, " writes Zambreno. "When he does, it's existential." By advancing the Girl-As-Philosopher, Zambreno reinvents feminism for her generation while providing a model for a newly subjectivized criticism.

Part 1

2005

We have just moved back to Chicago from a year spent in London. Most days I cannot be alone in my little red office, my hermitage on Hermitage Avenue in the Ukrainian Village neighborhood, trapped like a Trappist, as Djuna Barnes quipped of her monkish isolation at Patchin Place in the Village, in the years after Paris, after Thelma Wood and Nightwood. I am trying to learn how to be a serious writer and write important books, yet I cannot deal with all of the silence. All summer accompanying John to the Newberry Library, limping in my new sandals, bathing my bleeding sweaty feet in the downstairs sink like I am some homeless woman, changing the bandages that melt off in the heat. I sit in Washington Square Park and write in my notebook, unable to last for long taking notes in one of the library’s reading rooms. John’s job is to sit in a glassed-off cell and watch people to make sure they don’t steal any rare books. I escape downstairs to the visitors’ room, observing people as they buy Snickers and sodas from the vending machines. I am always unable to endure institutional settings. I usually find more alienation in the deadly quiet of such environments, like the girl-opposite of the narrator in Sartre’s Nausea. A flâneuse, I stroll around the Gold Coast and go in and out of shops, buying nothing, maybe a lipstick at Marshall Field’s, feeling the cool of the AC alternate with the heat of outside.

Yes, this is when I first became enthralled by the mad wives, my eternal reference point; when I began reading the lives of these women often marginalized in the modernist memory project. They have been with me for as long as I have tried to write—like ghostly tutors. Never having taken creative writing, save for one disastrous workshop as a journalism undergrad, I felt alone and friendless in the process of attempting to create myself as a writer. Minus a community, I invented one. “I entered into alliances with my paper soulmates,” writes Hélène Cixous in her essay “Coming to Writing.” These women served as an invisible community—like in Susan Sontag’s play Alice in Bed, about the brilliant letter writer and diarist Alice James (sister-of-Great-Men, Henry and William), except I’m the neurasthenic, and they are all hovering over me. Or like in Judy Chicago’s 80s installation The Dinner Party, where she lays out place settings for famous heroines both real and fictional.

My invisible community—yes, they too were made invisible.

I recently saw Chicago’s installation at the Brooklyn Museum, and what struck me was how cheap the silverware seemed. And yet the tapestries were so lovingly and laboriously woven.

2009

Akron, Ohio. John has been hired to curate and organize a small collection of rare books at the university here, the centerpiece of which was the gift of a rubber industrialist, who owned a great deal of the book collectors’ canon—a few early Shakespeare folios, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, two first editions of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The position is tenure-tracked (which, in the rules of marital chess, trumps a fairly satisfying slate of adjunct work back home in Chicago—King takes Queen).

The wife will just have to find something, of course. Adjunct, adjunctive.

We live in a squat Victorian building near the university. We move in sight unseen (this has become a habit for us). The adjacent building and ours are the only apartment complexes on our rather suburban street. Backyards littered with all the paraphernalia of childhood, as Esther Greenwood observes with a shudder in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Children with their shattering screams. Vivien(ne)’s line added to “The Waste Land,” should be delivered in your best imitation Cockney screech: What you get married for if you don’t want children.

My office is the apartment’s solarium framed by light and windows. At first I thought, yeah, alright. A sort of writing retreat. A room of one’s own. All that. Virginia Woolf prescribed the bucolic of the country. A calm respite from the city’s hysteria. (I was so panicky all the time where we last lived, on 18th Street in Chicago, a man murdered on our street the week we moved out, children playing calmly near his chalk outline. Always our moves seem like sudden, frantic escapes, not properly considering the next because we are so anxious to remove ourselves from the former.)

I am told, rather abruptly by the head of the English department here, that I am not qualified to teach literature. Male professors with no interest in the subject teach women’s literature instead. I am reminded of my lack of a terminal degree. (Why does the idea always feel like a death?)

I find work teaching Introduction to Women’s Studies, writing SUFFRAGE on the board to bored and sometimes bemused and occasionally bitter faces. Packed classrooms. A campus diversity requirement. The university here is alarmingly Christian—a megachurch dubbed The Chapel, one of the university’s benefactors, sits on the edge of the campus. One of their ministries is a Pray Until You’re Straight program called “Bonds of Iron.” The working conditions here are much worse than in Chicago—it is illegal for part-timers to unionize in Ohio, so I have no office or even much of a communal workspace, and the pay is dismal.

As soon as we land here I begin wishing ardently to get out of this black-and-white Midwestern landscape, a town formerly industrious, its factories now sit like the vacant, rotting husks of industry. The sad Wizard of Oz window display for Christmas in one of the emptied downtown storefronts. Clark Gable once worked here in one of the tire factories—it was a step up from his father’s farm but he too left for dreams of grandeur. Who wouldn’t leave? Everyone asks: Why? About our move. The economy, you know. I mumble. A great job. (I want to really say: I DON’T FUCKING KNOW. But I don’t. I tell the mutual lie of marriage.)

The nearby Cuyahoga Valley is beautiful in its autumnal blaze. But the city itself so often Midwestern gothic. Strange sightings. The woman wandering into the Radio Shack with a half-eaten hot-dog in one hand, fingering the merchandise with the ketchup- and mustard-stained other. Another woman padding down the emptied-out Main Street with duct-tape over her face, clutching a Big Gulp (John observes: the kidnapped on her lunch break). We bond more intensely in our mutual dystopic vision. (Our favorite shared writer of the moment is Thomas Bernhard, when we first met it was Beckett.) A different sort of alienation than when we lived in London, or moved back to Chicago.

I am an alien here. My short cropped hair and my black Joan of Arc jacket, shiny from years of wear, the interior all torn out and replaced, a remnant from our splurges on his student loans in London department stores. I feel myself stared at in the grocery store, on campus. I’m also going through a butch phase, all tight men’s jeans, perhaps a sartorial revolt from my new, more feminine role. John is stared at too with his longish hair and darling dandy vests. He does not care. Although most days I don’t even leave the house, and lounge around in what I’ve been sleeping in for days, in the blink and the glare of the outside world I do not often wear my faded and cherished articles of clothing. Except when we make regular trips to Chicago to visit my father or occasional ones to New York. I feel they would be wasted here. This wasteland.

I have become used to wearing, it seems, the constant pose of the foreigner.

Chicago now our pilgrimage, which we once wanted so desperately to escape. In Chicago, New York was our Moscow, like in Chekhov’s Three Sisters. It is our pattern: we forget so soon what made us want to flee, we cover it over with nostalgia, Zelda writing her novelist-husband wistfully of their honeymoon days while in the asylum. This shrine we build to our own shared origins. Viv’s shrine to Tom, once he had abandoned her, next to her framed picture of Sir Oswald Mosley, head of the British Union of Fascists. (Does every woman, really, love a fascist?)

I’ve tried to block out the local uproar dealing with Akron native LeBron James leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers. I’ve always found it pernicious, how those in the Midwest criminalize those who leave, as though it were some rejection of their own lives. Unlike the ambivalence towards their now-prodigal son, rock musician Chrissie Hynde of the 80s group The Pretenders is a much loved celebrity here. “Chrissie” this. “Chrissie” that. The vegan Italian comfort food restaurant she owns in town has become our culinary sanctuary.

As a girl I remember reading an interview with Chrissie Hynde in Rolling Stone about how she left this city in Ohio when she was young and moved to London. I remember thinking of her as this example of what I could do myself one day. That I could leave Chicago, leave the family, leave the Midwest. And I did. For a little bit. But now I am back here. The eternal return. (To write, perhaps, is to always return.)

So many of the gods of modernism hailed from the Midwest. Scott Fitzgerald from St. Paul. Ezra Pound fired from the college in Indiana. Tom Eliot of the lofty Eliots of St. Louis. And they all escaped, to Europe—they became expatriate, cosmopolitan. They managed to shed their origins, their Midwestern skin. Hemingway years earlier attended the same high school in Oak Park, Illinois as my father and his siblings. God, I idolized Hemingway when I was in journalism school. Now I hate his guts because of how he demonized Zelda in his memoir A Moveable Feast. And for how he treated his wife Hadley. She, summarily dismissed.

(I am now in another union. It is a union of forgotten or erased wives. I pay my dues daily.)

In Cleveland the local bibliophilic society explicitly prohibits women from joining. John attended a meeting at the invitation of his colleague at Oberlin. (I was not happy.) One of those quasi-secret societies of rich white men with bizarre rituals, held in some grand Victorian home. The series of tableaux that begin Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, her treatise on the material conditions that could allow a woman to write, to write well. Her scenes illuminating women banned from the grounds and libraries and luncheons of the fictional college Oxbridge, to show that a woman of her time would be banne...