Kate Zambreno - Heroines

She was supposed to fuck a god high up on his mountaintop, but she refused. She wouldn’t listen to Apollo’s reasoning. So he cursed her, a life sentence. He said, Sure, you can live forever, as many grains of sand in your hand, but that young lovely body will be gone, you will wrinkle up into nothingness. Who will love you now? Who will listen?

Eventually her body was kept in a jar, and then there was only her voice left.

Only her voice left.

And then not really her voice at all.

The rhythm of my madwomen’s lives: a long scream followed by absolute silence.

At the beginning, I think of endings.

The mad wives of modernism who died in the asylum. Locked away, rendered safe. Forgotten, erased, or rewritten. Vivien(ne) Eliot, whose alter ego in her writing was Sibylla, the voice in the jar that begins her husband’s poem “The Waste Land.” Zelda Fitzgerald, the tarnished golden girl of her husband’s legend, who burned to death in an asylum fire in Asheville, North Carolina. All that remained to identify her: a single charred slipper. Jane Bowles stroked out, later buried in an unmarked grave in Málaga, Spain, while her husband Paul never stopped writing.

Sitting at the mouth of my cave, I string together fragments on paper. My scraps scattering to the wind if unread.

Out of this narrative will emerge a chalk outline. It is the body of a woman.

These fragments I have shored against my ruins.

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.)