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[Apr. 7th, 2006|06:20 pm] |
Themes and issues of BIRDCAGE
So many of the ideas I have for Laments From A Birdcage come from studying the book Literature & Gender , a set book for the A210 Approach to Literature. It’s editor, Liz Goodman, introduces the following important themes and issues in women’s fiction namely,
1. ‘The role of the domestic in women’s lives – conflict between nurturing and creative activity
2. Writing as a form of work long denied women – lack of higher education for earlier generations -
3. The impact of gender based oppression on women’s views of themselves and their ways of representing themselves in writing.’ (Goodman. Literature & Gender, p109)
I read the work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, Alice Walker, Carol Churchill, Susan Glaspell, Aphra Behn. What came out strongly in these writings was this conflict – between what is expected of women and what women expect for themselves. I started to see certain common images and key themes.
I became fascinated by what Elaine Showalter terms ‘the female malady’ in her book Women Madness and English Culture. I read a lot of The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar(1978). Both these books raise the question can madness be a deliberate means of escape? A form of women’s ‘liberation’(Goodman, p.110) A ‘subversive strategy’ to break free from their oppression.
I thought about the life and work of Elizabeth Siddal 1834- 1862. Siddal was a talented artist who committed suicide. She was ‘among the first to paint the sad and mysterious ‘The Lady of Shallott’ 1853 (Goodman p.111) The work captures the isolation felt by a woman working without outside inspiration.. She sees in the cracked mirror of ’her own solitude and captive imagination’ only madness and horror. (Goodman. P.111) A dangerous state as the suicides of such talents as Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Siddal and Charlotte Perkins Gilman so tragically portrays.
I saw this theme of madness and confinement running through all women’s literature from Jane Eyre to Color Purple. Feminist critics believe it relates to ‘the conflict between artistic and domestic sensibilities’ and is ‘the subtext of the lives and work of creative artists of all kinds, not only literary women’ .(Goodman: p. 111)
Elaine Showalter in her introduction to ‘The Female Malady’ suggests that, ‘madness is the price women artists have to pay for the exercise of their creativity in a male dominated culture (p.4) (Small ‘Madness as a theme in women’s literature’ Literature & Gender p. 114- 136).
I know this begs the the question Is sex REALLY relevant? Take the work of Scott – Collins and Dickens –and what about mad suicidal writers who were male like Hemingway? All I can answer to that is this. Having ‘gone mad’ and been hospitalised on several occasions – once involuntarily- I think I can speak with a certain authority on the subject of hysteria and near madness in women.
Juliet Mitchell in ‘Women: The Longest Revolution’( 1984, p290)says this,
‘the woman novelist must be an hysteric. Hysteria is the woman’s simultaneous acceptance and refusal of the organisation of sexuality under patriarchal capitalism. It is simultaneously what a woman can do both to be feminine and to refuse femininity, within patriarchal discourse. And I think this is what the novel is: I do not believe that there is such a thing as a womans voice. There is the hysterics voice which is the womans masculine language(one has to speak ‘masculinely’ in a phallocentric world’) talking about feminine experience.’
The connection of female creativity and madness helped me to identify certain images – archetypes – patterns of behaviour that keep coming up in my life and work as a woman. It helped me to identify my rage, which is the strong energy source of my writing.
Ginnyfly |
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| On Writing |
[Apr. 4th, 2006|03:17 am] |
Every day be prepared to spend at least two hours staring at a blank screen. Every day type several hundred words and delete most of them. Every day as soon as your eyes come unstuck grab a pen and write utter nonsense for at least 15 minutes.
You may contemplate eternity, stage a domestic drama on pluto or construct deathless prose on the mating habits of the dodo but you may not use words like tummy-nice- really or toilet. Once you have written your answer to War and Peace put it away for at least five years. By then, hopefully, you will have developed sufficiently as a writer to recognise it for what it is – mostly tosh.
Learn to listen in to other people’s conversations without appearing interested. But change the names of your characters to protect the innocent and avoid a courtcase.Suspect your neighbour of everything – from sodomy to murder. Learn to observe closely but be discrete. Focusing your penetrating writer’s gaze through your neighbours window as they eat Sunday tea can cause offence. Be prepared for this.
Adverbs are out - as are extra adjectives and avoid purple prose like the plague. It may bring tears to your eyes and other lovely feelings of pride and achievement but it bores the pants off the reader.
Everywhere you go carry a notebook and pen. Try writing authentic details on road rage in the middle of the traffic during the rush hour. Another useful exercise is to talk to yourself while out walking. This can help you develop your voice and your characters – as well as your reputation for being barking mad. |
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| The life and Times of A Carrot |
[Apr. 3rd, 2006|07:23 pm] |
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you try being a carrot it is not a happy existence after struggling through heavy clay as a seedling there might be a few happy days while you enjoy the novelty of rain and sun and being a carrot seems fairly ok then all the other seedlings start pushing and shoving talk about overcrowding and does god come outside and thin us out does he hell if we ever see of him at all he has a vodka martini in his hand while he talks about the lawn mower its always left to the goddess to come and sort us out thats the first a carrot gets to know about fear one minute you are talking to your neighbour about carroty things like the dreaded fly and then next minute he is snuffed out of existence just as he was about to give his opinion about winter savoury which they say keeps the df out of the way then there’s the awful root ache growing pains like you would not believe and if you have to put up with heavy clay like i do you might as well wilt and call it a day but i am a tough number and according to the parsley who’s been there years – pompous perennial – i should make a decent boiling carrot i had not heard about boiling and the parsley took great pleasure in telling me how the goddess would skin me alive cut me into pieces and put me in water so hot it would turn me soft i cannot believe it i know she has to be ruthless when it comes to thinning but i never had her down as that sadistic you better believe it continued the parsley because after that they eat you they put you in their great red mouths and grind you into pulp why don’t you pick on someone your own size said a nearby lettuce and don’t forget whats going to happen to you – i happen to know that god bought her a magimix with a knife so sharp it will turn you into parsley sauce that shut up the parsley but listen hear young feller continued the lettuce you have to face up to the facts of life you know it’s no good turning yellow be a brave little seedling and keep your leaves up you have to enjoy life while you can so i did my best to be a brave little seedling and my root grew long in the sunny weather then one morning about a week later i was in deep conversation with the lettuce about the meaning of the word vegetarian you are seriously telling me i said that some people think its cruel to eat animals but they think its ok to eat vegetables don’t we have feelings if you cut us do we not bleed i was quite proud of that remark till the parsley said i was plagiarising the lettuce was just about to verbally squash the parsley when the goddess appeared and twisted his head off i bet every vegetable in the garden heard the scream don’t worry said the parsley looking a bit green he will grow back again oh good i replied but you will be long gone laughed the parsley |
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| Experimenting with the 2cnd person |
[Apr. 3rd, 2006|01:56 pm] |
I've been experimenting with the second person avoiding punctuation and find it amazingly liberating. Somehow it seems to free up my memory
llanilltydfawr
you loved living with auntie and uncle after mum died you loved the mountains and the woods and best of all you loved the sea it taught you to swim by shipping you on its waves back to the shore where auntie sat eating an egg sandwiches and laughing as you came out of the water half blind from the sun and spray you loved playing in the freshwater stream that fed into rock pools sharp with limpets loved to feel the hot pebbles under your feet as you tip toed to the tea hut for a wagon wheel you loved riding in the back of uncle’s flat bed ford in winter sitting on top of the driftwood he collected for kindling rolling home to roast lamb aunties tapioca pudding she was the only person who could cook it properly with lots of milk and butter and nutmeg and mr stead who came every Sunday because auntie thought he was lonely after his wife died you even liked going to chapel and listening to mr evans threaten hell and damnation to all those wild ones who sneaked into the local cinema bad luck for all of us because the manse was next door and every saturday you’d see him watching for sinners but when he sang cwm rhondda in welsh we forgave him everything.
then the letter telling you they were coming to get you so you got your bike and rode through ham woods to say goodbye to ladislav to ham castle where he crowned you with primroses and told you he would love you forever then you dragged the bike across the cliffs to say goodbye to the stripy sea and the heady honeysuckle what do you do when they tell you are going home to live with your new stepmother you go at least you do at eleven years old it was raining when you left and you were crying as you said goodbye to chloe who knew she would not see you again she licked your face and you knew she was crying too saying goodbye to auntie and uncle who gave you the best year of your childhood was the hardest of all so now you’re stuck in the midlands with a solid steel bitch who makes you take the kitten you found to the rspca – to be put down but you don’t go you sneak down shady lane and let it free to take its chances it probably died went wild but you hoped someone would find it and give it a good home. you spend your days avoiding the bitch reading walking around the city after school anything to get away from her tight mouth her angry eyes and fat bottom nights were the worse when you heard her complaining to your father about your latest crimes she never had a good word for you once she tried to make you cut the lawn with a pair of scissors and smacked you across the face when you refused is that why you turned into a rebel remember the tight throat and chest when your father was in hospital she was nice to you and you were scared to breathe in case you broke the magic peace. as soon as he came out it the bitch was back
I’ve never forgotten this dreadful woman. Maybe this exercise will exorcise her!For years she’s lived in my head and for years my favourite way of going to sleep was planning her painful murder. |
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| Finding A Voice |
[Apr. 1st, 2006|10:41 am] |
Hi All
For the past week or two – I’ve not been able to read creative fiction. I’ve found reading other people’s work exhausting. This has been very frightening as I’ve been a voracious reader since I was a child. I’ve been worried that I have the symptoms of some dreadful illness. Yesterday I felt really ill- bad back and stomach – probably due to too much digging and heavy lifting. Finally gave in to partner’s command and went to bed but was incapable of any kind of sustained mental activity. So between dozing I read my notebooks and was amazed at the number of characters I’ve created since the A174 course in 2004.
Last night I could not sleep so I tried reading Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. A book I’ve picked up and put down many times. It’s a brilliant – depressing very angry patchwork of a book with this personal free floating narrator.. I kept reading a bit and then dozing with her words in my head.
This morning in the bath –All the women I’ve created came together and I saw my theme. I saw them as aspects of me – of you – of all women. They are all women in emotionally or physically abused by men. Leila and the soldier who terrorises them for a day, Cerridwen who loses her only son thanks to the ministrations of a drug dealer – Rita Miles who witnesses the physical abuse of her mother by her father and runs away at 15 to escape his sexual assault. In the stories I’ve written so far there is much anger and revenge against men. Gillian betrayed by her father after her mother dies turns delinquent to destroy him. Cerridwen puts a bomb through the letter box of the heroin dealer and Leila castrates the soldier while he is still conscious. All the characters I’ve created suddenly started to tell me their stories and then I suddenly had a narrator. The woman in the wheelchair. My mother who suffered from disseminated sclerosis and was confined to a wheel chair throughout my childhood. My clearest memory of her was her love for her budgie –they were two birds in a cage.
So now I think I can understand what has been happening to me mentally. My creative side has been saying enough input – now we need to work on what we have. I am sharing this because I’m discovering how important notebooks are. It’s like gardening. You don’t see the fruits of your labour for a long time – maybe not for ten years or more. I remember when I first started keeping a writer’s notebook seriously I thought, Why am I doing this? Writing just sketches – and characters in search of a story - What is the point? I think am beginning to learn that a book begins with just one word. A painting with just one brush stroke.
Poem of the Day
Song For Ishtar
by
Denise Leverton
Her great shining shines through me
So the mud of my hollow gleams
And breaks in silver bubbles
She is a sow
And I a pig and a poet
When she opens her white
Lips to devour me I bite back
And laughter rocks the moon
In the black of desire
We rock and grunt, grunt and
Shine. |
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