Instead of creating powerfully, women often adapt/shrink our creative powers to the depressing task of pleasing those who are boring us to death.— Mary Daly, Pure Lust
http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2013/04/happiness_is_a_feminist_issue
To create a convincing shopgirl identity, then, involved detaching my feminist self and replacing it with a smiley face. I was nudged into these norms of being, sometimes explicitly: “You need to smile more”. At other times I picked up cues from my environment that told me acting a certain way would produce bigger sales, which in turn would lead to financial rewards and positive encouragement from my peers. Actively managing one’s emotions and surveilling one’s self for bad feelings became a daily practice necessary to work productively and efficiently. What results is not a self devoid of emotion but a self full of emotions deemed appropriate, in this case “happy” emotions. However, these emotions were often quite distinct from how I actually felt on a day-to-day basis.
[…]
Happiness is increasingly a project of self-management, and not only for the shopgirl. The government’s interest in measuring our well-being and the growth of organisations such as Action for Happiness have reinforced the belief that happiness is an attainable object that we all deserve to pursue in the name of autonomy and self-empowerment. But whose happiness are we working towards? And is happiness even something we should desire? Happiness is often attached to particular objects, like getting married, having children, a steady job and a mortgage. An unmarried, childless, irregularly employed woman may not sit so comfortably in this vision of happiness. The legacy of the female hysteric and the persistence of depression diagnoses in women suggests that happiness is not always an easy object for women to attain. Just as the shopgirl is trained into conducting herself appropriately, to silence our unhappiness is to become complicit in validating a way of life that might be contrary to our ideals as feminists.
So what would a happy feminist future look like? I suggest it should involve the exploration of a form of happiness that did not work towards certain objects, that did not silence itself, that did not seek to avoid or overcome unhappy feelings. It might mean being a troublemaker, ruffling feathers and brushing people the wrong way. It might mean seeing depression not necessarily as pathological but in some cases as a form of resistance to conventional norms. It might mean encouraging the shopgirl to stop silencing her bad feelings and salvage her unhappiness as a political statement. It means claiming happiness as a feminist issue.
http://bookssnob.wordpress.com/2010/06/04/the-rectors-daughter-by-f-m-mayor/
Pushed about from pillar to post, belonging to no one, Mary’s life appears a shadow next to those of the married, busy, fulfilled women she is surrounded with. The quiet, desperate sadness that fills her days is amplified by the fact that everyone around her is so busy with their own happy and exciting lives that Mary is all but forgotten, and her unhappiness goes unnoticed. Worst of all, she must watch Mr Herbert and his wife’s unconventional, explosive, yet happy marriage unfold before her, forever wishing she were the one he had loved enough to marry. It was this juxtaposition of the emptiness and fullness of what a woman’s life can hold that pained me the most. Like Mary, I wondered at the unfairness of how some can have everything they dream of, and others nothing. Even if, as Mary does, you force yourself to make the best of things, that raw pain in your heart that lets you know you are not truly content can never really go away.
I felt Mary’s pain all the way through this searingly honest portrayal of a life that did not hold the promise its heart dreamed of. I so wanted Mary to be loved, I so wanted her to have the children she desired, and the home and husband of her own she longed for and would have so enjoyed. But it didn’t happen, and I couldn’t bear it, largely because, as I said earlier, I fear this fate so much for myself (yes, despite only being 24!). This is such a brilliant book, worthy of being a classic, really, in that it so perfectly encapsulates how limited unmarried women’s lives could be before the advent of feminism, as well as being such a tenderly, movingly written portrayal of the often stark, disappointing realities of life.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/mar/02/sylvia-townsend-warner
For the first half of Townsend Warner’s novel, Laura looks set to follow their example. A tomboy in childhood, she is soon “subdued into young-ladyhood”, and after the death of her parents she joins the London household of her unimaginative brother, Henry, where she becomes the spinster “Aunt Lolly”, slightly pitied, slightly patronised, but “indispensable for Christmas Eve and birthday preparations” – an embodiment, in other words, of an old-fashioned female tradition for which her up-to-the-minute niece, Fancy, who has driven lorries during the war, has fine, flapperish contempt. But Laura has depths unsuspected by her deeply conventional relatives, and with her move to Great Mop she grows ever more subversive. She quietly rejects her family. She refuses to be defined by her relationships with men. She breaches the social barriers between gentry and working people. And, though she enjoys being part of the Great Mop community, her intensest pleasures are solitary ones. Again looking forward to Virginia Woolf, the novel asserts the absolute necessity of “a room of one’s own”, and Laura gains a clear-sighted understanding of the combined financial and cultural interests that serve to keep women in domestic, dependent roles: “Society, the Law, the Church, the History of Europe, the Old Testament . . . the Bank of England, Prostitution, the Architect of Apsley Terrace, and half a dozen other useful props of civilisation” have robbed her of her freedom just as effectively as have her patronising London relatives. It is this analysis that informs her conversation with Satan near the end of the novel, in which she unfolds her memorable vision of women as sticks of dynamite, “long[ing] for the concussion that may justify them”. If women, Townsend Warner implies, are denied access to power through legitimate means, they will turn instead to illegitimate methods – in this case to Satan himself, who pays them the compliment of pursuing them and then, having bagged them, performs the even more valuable service of leaving them alone.
We can find relationships that can serve us and that are good for us,” she explained. “We don’t have to stay in something if it’s not the right relationship. If something doesn’t work you don’t stay there and I think Carly knows that for herself.
“She leaves the relationship as soon as she finds out he’s married, she doesn’t try to get him to explain to her why he did it or say that he was going to leave his wife [Leslie Mann] for her.
“She just really owned it and said I have to get out of here and says the same thing to her [Leslie’s character] – you can’t change this person.”
“She is self-possessed and she knows what’s good for her,” Cameron added. “I think it’s important that that’s reflected.”
Neither does she have a fixed opinion on motherhood. “I’ve never said never to anything in life. If I wanted kids, at any point in life, I would have them. But I’m certain that if at any point I wanted a child, that child would find its way into my life, whether through adoption, or through being in a relationship with somebody who has a child. I can’t see the future, but one thing I do know is that I’m not childless. I have a ton of children in my life. I can have a kid any second, if I want. All my friends would be like, ‘Sure, come and get them,’” she says with a laugh.
“I also, by the way, have a lot of girl friends who don’t have children. It’s not like I’m the spinster who didn’t have a child. I just didn’t do that in life, and I’m OK with that. I know the choices I made. I know why I made them. I’m very much a person who lives in the moment. When you come from where I do, there are so many ways my life could have gone.”
Wonderful analysis of Lolly Willowes here:
http://furrowedmiddlebrow.blogspot.com/2013/04/sylvia-townsend-warner-lolly-willowes.html
The novel became a surprise bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic when it was published in 1926 (it was the inaugural selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club). This might in part have been because there were so many unmarried women in the post-World War I years—“women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded”—who could relate to the character’s situation and savor her fantastic refusal of the role of demure, helpful, but largely invisible spinsterhood (a refusal, without doubt, that was—and still is—considerably harder to pull off in reality). In fact, another highly entertaining novel about a woman similarly resisting repressive social norms (though not by selling her soul), Rose Macaulay’s Crewe Train, appeared the same year.
[…]
When I returned to the novel a year or so later for a fourth (or was it fifth?) reading, I started imagining that a third possibility might exist (and this is where it may have gotten a little academic and egg-headed, but I still wonder about it, so I’ll share it here regardless). I started wondering if Warner was really doing something pretty postmodern—if she might be intentionally leaving the “reality” of the novel in doubt in order to focus instead on the whole idea of fantasy itself—of (in this case) a woman’s fantasy of escaping from a rigidly-controlled and ultimately male-dominated culture in which her only value could be as a wife and mother or as a permanent babysitter and domestic servant. Maybe she was questioning the politics of this escapism (Warner herself sympathized with Marxism and might well have been suggesting that fantasizing doesn’t make the world a better place)? Or maybe she was questioning if it was even possible to escape in any meaningful way from the culture we live in?
After all, whether Laura is dreaming comforting dreams or whether she really becomes a witch, it strikes me that the life Laura chooses for herself is really, when you think about it, only a sort of lonely, wide-open prison instead of a socially enforced, tightly constraining one. When her nephew Titus becomes engaged to be married, Laura thinks of the engagement as a business transaction, an engagement between the country estate Titus already owns and the woman he is about to own. She has no understanding of—or, perhaps more accurately, no trust in—romantic love—or, for that matter, much of any other kind of social interaction. Laura’s escape from society and social oppression has been a (surely somewhat bittersweet) escape from any meaningful human interaction whatsoever!
http://agiddything.booklikes.com/post/605746/post
Warner exquisitely captures the torture of wanting something different, something more, but being aware that anything “more” or “different” will only ensure that you find yourself completely shut out. And moreover, that you will feel bad about it yourself because you have failed in some way.
Being a person, in this world, is a failure. It is a failure to be always and ever living up to what one should be doing, which, after all, as Lolly achingly feels over and over again- isn’t such a problem when someone just wants you to wind the yarn, or just help mend this one sheet. But eventually the dust settles and Laura (who tries and tries again to emerge from behind Lolly) grows so tired of it that taking to her bed ill for two weeks is a blessed relief- all the understanding of her desire to do nothing (which is the only coded way she can express her real desire for independence) that would not have been there otherwise is hers. It offers even more understanding of the “fashionable” invalid of the era.
Now that the art principles have been lost, has luring men become our only standard for beauty in dress? Young women may imagine that sex appeal is the single most important public identity a woman can attain. Living in an age when the only standard of female attractiveness is hotness, and when every detail of life is offered up on Facebook, young women find it normal that the whole world, not just their sweetheart, their gynecologist, and their mother, should know the exact shape of their bodies.
But if men do not feel compelled to have the world pass judgment on every inch, why should we? The early Dress Doctors were so pleased at the thought that the modern woman faced such a world of possibilities. No longer did she have to dress solely to attract a husband. If the Dress Doctors looked around at womankind today, they would wonder why so many of us are determined to appear ready to seduce at all hours of the day. Don’t we have anything else to do?
Today’s culture seems to have little appreciation for what years of living can do for you. We all know that growing older usually makes you less of an idiot. But there’s little sense today that age might endow you with sophistication, dignity, grace, stateliness, and wisdom. Or that we might aspire to dress in a way that expresses all these qualities.
— Linda Przybyszewski, The Lost Art of Dress, pp. 277-278
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/19/sheila-heti-how-should-a-person-be-interview
Written from 2005 – when Heti was 28 – through to 2012, the book explores the messiness, self-consciousness and doubts of young women who have been told the world offers them unprecedented opportunities, but find themselves working as unpaid interns, living in grimy bedsits and dating loser men.
thebitterbabe 