Room-inations
“At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.”
—Writer Rose Macaulay, quoted in Lapham’s Quarterly. More recently in “Wit & Wisdom” in The Week, July 3, 2020.
Lists
Every woman who makes a list
has a poem in her heart
she is afraid to write for
fear of seeming foolish.
Lists are safer—
so satisfying to check off and complete.
But when her chaos comes upon her
in the bathroom, sobbing,
her unwritten poems
scream out for life.
—Carolyn Ibbetson Street, Issue 12, Nov. 2002.
The Angel in the House
“And while I was writing this review, I discovered that if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after the heroine of a famous poem, The Angel in the House. It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her. You, who come of a younger and happier generation, may not have heard of her—you may not know what I mean by the Angel in the House. I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life.
She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught, she sat in it—in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all—I need not say it—she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty—her blushes, her great grace. In those days—the last of Queen Victoria—every house had its Angel. And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room. Directly, that is to say, I took my pen in my hand to review that novel by a famous man, she slipped behind me and whispered: ‘My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure.’ And she made as if to guide my pen. I now record the one act for which I take some credit to myself . . . I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defense. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing . . . Thus whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had dispatched her. Though I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the struggle was severe; it took much time that had better have been spent upon learning Greek grammar, or in roaming the world in search of adventures. But it was a real experience . . . Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.”—Virginia Woolf
The Better Angel in My House
Rosie never shouts, “Clean up, clear up!” —only, “Let’s play!”
These rooms with
promises of simplicity—
of life without clutter
and of elegance—
suck me in every time.
For years, these photos kept shouting at me,
“This is what your life should look like!”
“The 'what should be’
never did exist,
but people
keep trying to live up to it.
There is no
'what should be,’
there is only what is.”
—Lenny Bruce
I’ve seen ads all my life urging women to redecorate their homes.
These ads urged me to spend money on what supposedly everybody else needs to be happy.
I am not saying that it cannot be fun creating a laundry room.
But, how many women Martha-Stewart their way through their lives and homes satisfied with less than they could be?
How many women who could be writers, artists, sculptors, and film makers get encouragement for pursuing their art?
Growing up, none of the ads I saw encouraged me to be an artist.
What if if—even once—I had seen an ad like this one?
Lenny Bruce says, “There is no ‘should be.’ There is just ‘what is.’”
What is my “what is?”
Have I really asked myself that question?
“As Rebecca Solnit recently wrote in The Mother of All Questions, ‘…we are given a single story line about what makes a good life, even though not a few who follow that story line have bad lives. We speak as though there is one good plot with one happy outcome, while the myriad forms a life can take flower—and wither—all around us.’ One legacy of the pandemic may be less judgment of the child-free. The life we can all build together after that is yet to be imagined.”
--From Culture: “One Legacy of the Pandemic May Be Less Judgment of the Child-Free: The coronavirus could change lingering cultural assumptions about what makes for a full and happy life.” by Samhita Mukhopadhyay, Atlantic, August 5, 2020
This is my teeny kitchen.
There is almost no counter space, so often things are in a jumble.
For so many years of days, I felt all I did was clear up—
tried to put each thing in its proper place.
Putting each thing in its proper place—over and over!
Was I trying to find my proper place in the world?
Or, keep myself in my place?
What is my proper place?
It never happened and I was often angry and sad.
This recent ad targeting young girls shouts,
“Females are responsible for keeping the house clean!”
“No matter our passionate vows to reject the model, the majority of us play out the role we learned. A mother’s victimization does not merely humiliate her, it mutilates the the daughter who watches her for clues as to what it means to be a woman. Like the traditional foot-bound Chinese woman, she passes on her affliction. The mother’s self hatred and low expectations are the binding rags for the psyche of the daughter.” —Our Mother’s Daughters by Judith Arcana, p. 13.
“Avis left the unfinished sketch or painting patiently. She said, ‘By and by. After a while. I must wait a little…’ Women understand—only women altogether—what a dreary will-o-the wisp is this old common… ‘When the fall sewing is done, when the company is gone, when we have got through the whopping cough, when I am a little stronger. Then I will write the poem, learn the language…or master the symphony, then I will act, dare, dream, become.’” —Story of Avis by Elizabeth Stuart Lyon Phelps, p. 187 (from Tillie Olsen’s Silences, p. 208).
Women are taught to use their creative energy to redecorate their homes—
keep them free of the mess of true artists.
Why are we surprised there have always been more male than female artists?
Women—come out of the “closet of your dreams” into your dream as a artist!
Women! Remember!
Cezanne’s studio
