What Do Women Want? (18 page)

The writing of a book may be seen as the muse working through the voice, hand, and will of an individual creator, but that individual creator must labor hard indeed to be worthy of serving as a vessel to the muse. She is a stern taskmistress and will withdraw her favors from the lazy, the slovenly, or the self-pitying artist. Nature, on the contrary, is all-forgiving. Any womb, any woman, may be the vessel for continuance. Assent is hardly even necessary: only a healthy womb and the will not to deliberately destroy the fetus.

How much more passive pregnancy is than creativity! Creativity demands conscious, active will; pregnancy demands only the absence of ill will. Maybe the desire to compare them arises from the artist’s ancient wish that creativity be as effortless, easy, and unconscious as the creation of a fetus. Or perhaps the male artist’s desire to compare the two arises out of his yearning for the female capacity to create life. Like most forms of envy, it is useless. One might as well envy the hummingbird for being able to stand still in midair, or the flounder for having two eyes on one side of its head. Whatever joys there are in pregnancy (and there are many), they are not the joys of consciousness. Pregnancy is perhaps most enjoyable to the intellectual woman precisely for that reason.

This was certainly true for me. All my life, until I became pregnant, I had mistrusted my body and overvalued my mind. I had sought a very high degree of control over my body. I never became pregnant, not even “accidentally,” until well after my thirty-fifth birthday, having spent a year or more consciously wishing for pregnancy and trying to become pregnant. Before that I had dreaded pregnancy as a loss of control over my destiny. I had fantasies of death in childbirth, the death of my creativity during pregnancy, the alteration of my body into something monstrous, the loss of my intelligence through mysterious hormonal sabotage, of my energy, my creativity, my looks.

But I should have known that the ruler of the cosmos is nothing if not a joker—and all the opposite things happened. For the first time in my life, I controlled my weight effortlessly; my face grew thinner, my skin clearer, my eyes brighter. I never felt sick or lacked energy. I worked as hard at my writing as I ever had in my life. In fact, I worked with greater consistency. I wrote a whole book of poems, continued productively writing the novel I’d begun a year before becoming pregnant, even undertook a grueling book tour in my fifth and sixth months of pregnancy. Certainly I worked as hard as I did partly to undercut the myth that pregnant women are somehow incapacitated (or else “too fulfilled” by burgeoning life to need creative work as well), but mostly it was a case of genuinely feeling wonderful and very much myself (now liberated from the gnawing anxiety that I would never have a child). Whatever pregnancy “fulfilled” in me (and I do not underestimate that fulfillment at all), it was of a wholly different order than the one I seek through my creative work.

Pregnancy felt particularly good to me, I think, because it was an affirmation of life for a romantic who, like most romantics, had once worshiped death. At twenty-five I wished “to cease upon the midnight with no pain,” with Keats and Sylvia Plath, but by thirty-five I had turned away from the idealization of poets who died of tuberculosis or had committed suicide, and I wanted to prove to myself that both poets and women could be survivors. It was a turn from infatuation with martyrs to respect for survivors, from worshiper of sickness to affirmer of health. And having a successful, easy pregnancy was a way of telling myself that the core of my being was healthy and could confer life not only upon myself but on others as well.

Since the nineteenth century, artists and intellectuals in our society have worshiped illness, as if it were illness that propitiated art rather than art that conferred a temporary reprieve from illness. This is one unfortunate legacy of nineteenth-century Romanticism. It also implies that the mind can be nourished only at the expense of the body: the opposite of the classicist’s pursuit of healthy mind in healthy body. Critics sometimes fault artists for being too prolific, as if creativity were a material substance, a sort of natural resource that could be depleted by too wanton use. In fact, the contrary is true. Both creativity and health are self-replenishing; the more they are used, the more they regenerate and flourish.

Bodily health and artistic creativity were seen as complementary, not opposing, characteristics by the Greeks and Romans, and it was only when the scourging of the flesh came to be considered of spiritual benefit by the medieval Christian church that we began to move toward the modern attitude that mortification of the flesh somehow encourages the creative powers of the mind. The nineteenth-century worship of suicidal or consumptive poets, alcoholic and insane creators, is a twisted outgrowth of the medieval view that the mind can flourish only at the expense of the body.

Women inherit a double legacy of mistrust in regard to the body. First, they share the Western Christian heritage that dictates chastity and mortification of the flesh as prerequisites to the spiritual life. But they also inherit the medieval church’s primitive attitude toward womankind, childbearing, and the female body. For a woman artist, the choice of physical robustness coupled with fertile creativity has been particularly fraught with all sorts of practical difficulties. We tend to forget that until the advent of dependable birth control (which is less than a century old), childbearing was not optional for women. Except for the deliberately abstinent or accidentally sterile, pregnancy was too compulsory to be experienced as a
choice
. But even after the advent of birth control, complex social and psychological forces conspired to make all but the most adamantly individualistic women marry, then bear children for most of their adult lives. Pregnancy could hardly be seen as an affirmation of life and health when it was so compulsory, so full of dangers for mother and child, and so
constant
. It often did herald the end of other forms of creativity. The fact that many women artists avoided pregnancy like the plague and then referred to their books or paintings as their “children” is hardly surprising.

I belong to one of the first generations of women artists for whom pregnancy is
not
compulsory. Despite the psychological pressures for motherhood that still exist, not to mention the ubiquitous threats to reproductive freedom, I and my contemporaries are free to look at creativity and maternity in wholly new ways.

Jane Austen and George Eliot did not have that option. Even Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf were not really able to regard childbearing as a choice. The legacy of Victorian womanhood was too close and too frightening. In Wharton’s time and Woolf ’s, the only way for a woman artist to combat the Victorian stereotype of “the angel in the house” was either to play the devil or to claim that they were mothers of books, not children.

For years I was determined not to have a child because the women writers I admired most had avoided maternity. If childlessness was good enough for Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, and Virginia Woolf, it must be good enough for me. Yet the desire for a child gnawed at me. Images of childbirth kept bursting forth in my poems. Precisely because I was so afraid of childbearing, I was drawn to it. Only by doing the things I feared the most had I progressed in my life. Having a child seemed to me a rite of passage I would be a coward to avoid. What point was there in having passed a whole incarnation in a female body without experiencing all the potentialities of that body? It would be like being incarnated as a bird and never flying. Still, I hesitated. Childbearing had always taken too much of a toll on women. It had always meant jeopardizing the things writers needed most—peace, quiet, the lack of interruption. It had meant diluting passions that one wanted undiluted for one’s work. It was not only the drudgery of childbearing that seemed threatening, but the pleasures. Babies are most distracting when they are most delightful. Besides, it had taken me years to free myself of the guilt I felt toward the men in my life when I shut myself away to write. How could I ever deal with the guilt created by a creature who would actually need me for its physical survival?

Of course, there was no way to solve all these dilemmas in advance. I would have to take the plunge and find the answers later. I would have to give up my constant need for the illusion of control. Control of the future is a delusion anyway, since the future always defeats our most carefully made plans. I came to the conclusion that whatever was lost by introducing this element of uncertainty into my life would be more than repaid by the new experiences and insights it might bring. By thirty-five I knew that art cannot exist without life. Plenty of artists who were careful to limit their lives (in the hope of screening out all interruptions) wound up with nothing to write about at all.

I tried to hedge my bets as best I could. I did not become pregnant until I found a man who I thought really wanted to share all aspects of child rearing with me, and I waited for a time in my life when there was enough money for help. Whether this made me cowardly or prudent, who can say? All I know is that I did the only thing I could do at the time. For the first thirty-five years of my life, writing was so much more important to me than anything else that I would not risk
any
turn of fate that might jeopardize my own still shaky self-confidence as a writer. It had taken me years to form the
habit
of writing, and I wasn’t about to give up that necessary daily meditation. Women who bear children
before
they establish serious habits of work may never establish them at all, however easy their economic circumstances may be. Having been defined first as mothers, they may never be able to see themselves in another light, and the demands of their children may always drown out the demands of their books.

I only know that I am grateful to have been born into a time when it was possible for a woman to delay childbearing until other life patterns were firmly established. We have to acknowledge that in many ways this is the best time for women the world has ever known. The discrimination against us is still rampant and virulent. Given how many practical obstacles stand in the way of most of us doing creative work at all, the malignity with which that work is often treated is nothing less than criminal. But the fact that we can choose when and whether to bear children has improved our lives to a degree unthinkable for the thousands upon thousands of mute, toiling, laboring generations of women. The very fact that no generation before ours has really been in a position to challenge the lie that creativity and maternity are one and the same makes us privileged beyond any earlier generations. And that privilege rests almost entirely upon motherhood remaining a choice. Choice is the key to all our freedoms—even the freedom to dwell seriously on the meaning of pregnancy and childbirth. As long as motherhood was constant and compulsory, women could not examine motherhood honestly, nor could men resist idealizing it.

I think we have never quite considered the implications of the fact that most of the literature about pregnancy and birth has been written either by men or by women who forswore childbearing in order to do their creative work. Even after women writers began to be mothers as well as writers, they often resisted writing directly about their experiences, for fear of male chauvinist criticism (“Don’t wear your ovaries on your sleeve”) or for fear of seeming trivial. Pregnancy and childbirth were often considered minor, foolish, “female” subjects. Women writers who aspired to the heights of Parnassus often disdained such subjects as their male mentors had taught them to. So the lie that creativity and maternity were somehow interchangeable continued unchallenged for generations. Even in our own day, it has been insufficiently examined.

Neither the women who denied the childbearing urge in order to create books, nor the men who had wives to bear children for them, were in a position to chart the terra incognita of pregnancy and childbirth. Both were prejudiced parties, partisans of the party of childlessness. Women who had children because it was inevitable also lacked the power to examine their fate. Trapped first by their own bodies, then by society, how could they not feel fury at their helplessness, however much they may have loved the infants they produced?

Now we stand at a literary crossroads made possible entirely by childbirth having become a choice. All efforts to withdraw that choice must be seen as efforts to put women back into the mute rage from which we have so recently emerged. What untold wonders would world literature contain if it told the story of pregnancy, childbirth, and childbearing as well as the story of childlessness! What untold stories might we hear if mothers as well as fathers were able to relate their tales? The history of world literature has often been the literature of the white man, the childless white woman. How different it looks now that mothers are writers, too! A book’s creative demands on its author end at the moment of completion—while a baby begins to call forth true creativity only after it emerges from the unconscious Eden of the womb.

—MAE WEST

 

 

 

The perfect man
—for any woman—is the man who loves her constantly and fucks her frequently, passionately, and well; who adores and admires her; is at once reliable and exciting; an earthly Adonis and a heavenly father figure; a beautiful son, a steady daddy; a wild-eyed Bacchic lover and a calm, sober, but still funny friend. Can you find all these attributes in one man? Not bloody likely! And if you find them, will they endure for all the various passages of your life? Not bloodly likely.

Given this problem, what’s a woman to do? Having two or three men simultaneously would seem to solve the problem—if it didn’t create so many logistical snafus. What happens, for example, when lover number one and lover number two decide to arrive on the same train for the same weekend? What do you do about birthdays and Christmas? Or Hanukkah, for that matter? A partial solution to this problem is to have one WASP and one Jewish lover—with perhaps a Zen Buddhist or an atheist thrown in for good measure so holidays can be staggered. But then you stagger, too. Because the fact of the matter is that nobody can spend 100 percent of her time getting laid, arranging to get laid, administering TLC to a variety of men with a variety of needs. And what woman worth her salt wants to be involved with a man whose needs she cares nothing about?