Re-membering an Interrupted Conversation: the Mother/Virgin Split *
Kathy Miriam
The Abundance Ethic of Female Friendship
...if you want to think, you must see to it that the two who carry on the dialogue be in good shape, that the partners be friends. The partner who comes to life when you are alert and alone is the only one from whom you can never get away—except by ceasing to think.
Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind
Peter Berger has written that "reality hangs on the thin thread of conversation." 1 Female friendship is conversation. The reality of our lives is woven of this sacred thread: in and through friendship we can become our Selves. There is a delicate ecology to be recognized wherein the life of female friendship exists. This ecology requires a tension between the necessity of being with and for others and the primacy of being with and for oneSelf.
The philosopher Karl Jaspers implies this tension in his idea of existential communication. According to Jaspers, a Self becomes a Self only through communication. "I am only in communication with another... to be myself I need the other..." 2 A tension between what Jaspers names "solitude" and "union" is involved: "Communication always takes place between two people who join but remain two, who come to each other out of solitude and yet know solitude only because they are communicating." 3
The philosopher Hannah Arendt enriches the concept of solitude, distinguishing it from loneliness. Arendt's idea is that solitude is a state of being together with oneself, what she calls "the two in one." Solitude is a conversation of the Self with the Self; it is essentially a friendship with the Self. Solitude is distinct from the state of loneliness in which the self remains one, feeling in need of another for completion. 4
The solitude where we converse alone with our Selves is known through union between friends. Real friendship originates in this solitary conversation and will inspire this conversation to continue originating. The solitude known through union is "that human situation in which I keep myself company," where I am never lonely unless I "cease...to think." 5
The tension between solitude and union is part of an ecology of female friendship. This ecology is created by women acting out of an intuition of their own abundance, what I would call an abundance ethic. It is a system of relationships, a conversation of elements, that is grounded in an abundant ever-renewable source, namely the Self who always has more to say to herSelf. This ecology has been disturbed by a system, man-made, that is based upon a scarcity ethic. According to this ethic there is never enough of the female Self to go around, as she is divided up as a resource for male use. The patriarchal ordering of reality locates the source of all vital being in an agency external to the Self. In a world of which man is the center women have been defined as existing for man, for the child. This is a dynamic of women's interaction with reality that is blatant in hetero-relations. 6
In female friendship this dynamic is played out more subtly when a woman locates the source of her own being in another woman. This occurs when a woman disbelieves the primacy of the Self and her ability to be the original and abundant source of her own inspiration. It occurs when the tension between solitude and union is broken, and perceived as an opposition. Consequently there is both a loss of authentic solitude and authentic union: I become dependent upon union with another in order to feel alive. Solitude becomes loneliness. I feel barren, incomplete without the other while union with a friend overwhelms my sense of solitude. A false choice is experienced: I can be in union and thus feel inspired but lose a sense of my Self or I can maintain my Self at the cost of intimacy itself.
When set in opposition to one another, solitude and union are each deprived of their original authenticity. They are lost in distorted reflections of themselves. The "choice" between these reflections is rooted in a patriarchal model of female "creativity," one that dis-locates the Self as the center of creative power. This model, because it re-centers women's power in the agency of an external authority, disrupts the abundance ethic of female creativity and friendship and imposes upon female consciousness a scarcity ethic.
According to male definition, female "creativity" is pro-creation whereby a woman generates and sustains lives other than her own. If a woman refuses to procreate the cost is creative vitality itself. She is identified as barren-but further, she is not really real; she is an inauthentic woman. In either case, women are identified as inexhaustible resources for male needs.
The basic patriarchal model of female creativity can be seen as a "choice" between mother and virgin. The mother is the authentic woman; the virgin is the inauthentic, or not yet authentic. woman. The double meaning of the virgin is important. On the one hand, the virgin is potential for male conquests, the conquest which will make her lose her virginity and make her into mother. This virgin is the "beautiful" young maiden, the muse to inspire male works. The meaning of being virgin in patriarchy is powerfully expressed by Luce Irigaray:
'Virgin' means one as yet unmarked by them, for them. Not yet a woman in their terms...Not yet penetrated or possessed by them...A virgin is but the futUre for their exchanges, their commerce, and their transports. A kind of reserve for their explorations, consummations, and exploitations. 7
On the other hand, the virgin's status of being not yet related to men is threatening because there is the potential that the virgin will choose to remain virgin; she can choose to turn to her Self as the wild reserve for her own explorations. Men work to prevent that choice by constructing dreadful images of the virgin who remains outside of hetero-relations.
When a virgin chooses not to be initiated into the world by men or when she is rejected, she is perceived as sterile. Her sterility is seen alternately as impotent or dangerous. The sterile virgin is the impotent old maid, the dried-up and ineffectual maiden aunt. However, she is also the poisonous, vampire lesbian teacher 8 or the monstrous female artist who loses health and beauty in proportion to the attention she concentrates on her own work. 9 In her monstrous aspect, the sterile virgin is a corruptive influence: she is dangerous because she can corrupt younger virgins. She can infect them with the desire to remain virgin.
The patriarchal images of mother and virgin present the following "choice" to a woman:
1. She will "create," be really-real and connected to the world, but lose her potential autonomy. Or
2. She will remain autonomous, un-related to men, and thus be considered useless, deprived of creative vitality and the world itself.
The mother-virgin construct is a model of hetero-relational interaction with the world that invades female friendship. "Mother" and "virgin" are two basic modes of interacting with reality that have been set in opposition to one another by male meaning-systems. I wish to explore the ways women have lived out the consequences of embracing either type: mother or virgin. I will turn to women's literature as a primary source for understanding how women have internalized and/or exorcized the images of female creators which the culture presents to them.
The Mother/Virgin Opposition
The Mother
The love—the passion of tending—had risen with need like a torrent and like a torrent drowned and immolated all else. But when the need was done—oh the power that was lost in the painful damming back and drying up of what still surged but had nowhere to go.
Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a RiddleAnd the one doesn't stir without the other. But we do not move together. When the one of us comes into the world, the other goes underground. When the one carries life, the other dies. And what I wanted from you, Mother, was this: that in giving me life, you still remain alive.
Luce Irigaray, And the One Doesn't Stir Without the Other
The mother represents union without solitude. In patriarchy this is literally played out in a mother's life, one deprived of solitude. A mother's existence raises the question: What happens to experience that is not reflected upon? Hers is the prototypical "unexamined life." The mother's domain is that of experience, of acting, cut off from thinking. In the mother role, man has exploited the power of the doer. "Choosing" motherhood, women "choose" to be a doer in the only way available to them.
As a doer, the mother's most striking virtue and capacity is that of "love" and "attention." Sara Ruddick makes this point in an article entitled "Maternal Thinking." Drawing from Iris Murdoch, she writes,
The capacity [of attention] and virtue [of love], when realized invigorate preservation and enable growth... Attention and love are fundamental to the construction of "objective reality" understood "in relation to the progressing life of a person," a "reality which is revealed to the patient eye of love"..."The task of attention goes on all the time and at apparently empty and everyday moments we are 'looking,' making those little peering efforts of imagination which have such important cumulative results." 10
The mother is intimately engaged with the conditions of existence. She has the power of "ordinary vision," 11 the "loving eye" which presupposes the independent growth of the reality which is seen. 12 The power of the mother can be seen in the social activist who focuses her attention on the conditions of existence in order to effect change in those conditions. She does her work in relation to the "progressing life" of a society or community. The identification of the mother and the activist has been imaged by Virginia Woolf in her archetypal mother-figure Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. Mrs. Ramsay, in the time left over from the awesome task of creating her family's reality, is a charity worker. Social activism is another possible manifestation of mother's power as a doer, and like the mother, her deeds are effective to the extent that she understands the "cumulative results" of her work, that is, the process of how things come into being, the day-by-day business of making any relationship real. Mrs. Ramsay's power to create relationships is most obvious in her arrangements of marriages; her influence is irresistible to the young people around her. "[She would] insist that [Lily] must, Minta must, they all must marry... 13 "The mother, like the activist, insists on forming "unions."
Sara Ruddick, still drawing on Murdoch's idea of love, calls the maternal attitude a "selfless respect for reality." 14 Indeed, what could be the mother's Self-centered respect for reality becomes, within a patriarchal framework, selfless. Because a mother's intelligence is fully absorbed in realizing a habitat where others can grow, she can forget to return to her native habitat where the life of her own mind can flourish—the solitude where experience is put in order through reflection.
The old woman in Tillie Olsen's Tell Me a Riddle poignantly illustrates the impact that the loss of solitude has upon a mother's life. Eva is a mother who, now that the children have grown up and left, turns to her new solitude like a long-denied gift: "Never again to be forced to move to the rhythms of others...Being able at last to live within." 15 It is through "living within," in conversation with the Self, that the conditions of existence can be surpassed. Reality itself can be transformed by the inventiveness of the mind that conspires with the realm of possibility-and can hence originate new actualities. This mind can, in effect, create the world-as-such. As Olsen writes of Eva, "...her family, the life in it, ...had seemed the enemy: tracking, smudging, littering, dirtying, engaging her in endless defeating battle..."(77). A similar danger can threaten the social activist's work. The social activist who is cut off from visionary thinking can become consumed in warding off social decay in lieu of creating new social realities. She can lose the potency of her lucid attention to the conditions of existence. She can indeed become a mother, "cleaning up" after "the boys" whose game-playing leaves an endless trail of social debris.
Olsen's character remembers the power that was drawn from her in mothering. "The love—the passion of tending—had risen with need like a torrent... But when the need was done—oh the power that was lost in the painful damming back and drying up of what still surged but had nowhere to go." (92) As procreators, women are made dependent upon the need of others for the activation of their own power; with the loss of that need, their power falters, perpetually unrealized. But, as Eva thinks further,
Surely that was not all, surely there was more. Still the springs, the springs in her were seeking. Somewhere an older power that beat for life. Somewhere coherence, transport, meaning. If they would but leave her in the air now stilled of clamor, in the reconciled solitude, to journey to her self. (93)
The "older power" within Eva is the meaning-seeking faculty of the mind, the only power that can give coherence to an otherwise meaningless ebb and flow of experience. Mothers are prevented from making meaning of their experience. Their lives show what Olsen calls in another context "the cost of discontinuity," 16 and what Michelle Cliff has named the "resonance of interruption." 17 In Tell Me a Riddle, the patriarchal interruption of female thinking is aptly described in the flash-back scene of Eva, a young mother, trying to read in her only time of solitude, the late night hours, only to be interrupted by the sexual advances of her husband: "Don't read [he would say]...that had been the most beguiling of all the 'don't read, put your book away' her life had been."(76)
"Don't read" is a patriarchal message to women that is literal, so to speak, and metaphorical. Female illiteracy is one manifestation of women's worldlessness: it is an indication of women's inability to assign a meaning to the world that would point beyond that day-to-day struggle to survive in the world which engulfs the minds of so many mothers. 18 In Olsen's story, Eva's youth was given to a quest for this meaning. Before she was a mother, Eva was a political idealist who generated visions of humankind in the midst of a world "dark, ignorant, terrible with hate and disease."(122)
Olsen's story is partly about the tragic betrayal experienced by people who, in their youth and the youth of the century, believed in humanity. "That world of their youth...how was it that living in it, in the midst of corruption, filth, treachery, degradation, they had not mistrusted man nor themselves; had believed so beautifully, so...falsely?"(122) Olsen writes about those whose belief, many decades later, was betrayed-proved false-by "the monstrous shapes of what had actually happened in the century."(120) But Tell Me a Riddle is also the tragedy of a woman's death. Eva was betrayed not only by the particular conditions of history but by the conditions of a woman's existence as a mother in patriarchy. The tragedy of Eva's death is the patriarchal betrayal of a woman's power to fully use her mind, to fully imagine her Self.
The tragedy of Eva's death reveals the implications that the patriarchal split between thinking and experience has for women's lives. Eva's body is consumed by cancer, an apt metaphor for the consumption of the Self that mothering in patriarchy brings about. When a mother exclusively attends to the experience of others, her experience of her Self can "die" of neglect. In other words, when she neglects to focus her "loving eye" upon her own Self in the reflexive activity of thinking, she will cease to be visible/real to herself. Her experience, deprived of meaning, will atrophy. Eva's cancer-atrophied body symbolizes the cumulative result of years of moments of inattention to and from her Self.
To deprive a woman of her capacity to think is to prevent her from communicating the reality of her experience: to cut off the conversation with the Self through which a woman could tell a coherent story, to her self and to other women, including her daughters. This story, once heard and understood, would inspire women to reject and transcend the female experience as it has been lived in patriarchy. The goal is to prevent women from rejecting the role of mother along with the mother's self-less respect for "reality," i.e., her acceptance of patriarchy as the world-as-such.
But in Olsen's narrative of this woman's death, there is more than tragedy, for it is in Eva's dying that she fiercely re-possesses her solitude, uttering fragments of her girlhood ideals in a final, death-bed story. Eva's ability to tell her story, as she is dying, is a triumph that surpasses, without obscuring, the tragic dimension of her death. Her triumph is one of female integrity, because, after a life-time that had excluded her solitude, Eva dies essentially in the company of her Self. She dies in conversation with herself, speaking, chanting, singing the vital remnants of a life that did not include her husband or children.
Eva journeys to her Self when dying. Olsen evokes this journey as a spiritual transformation. Eva's dying is given the metaphor of flight. She grows "like a bird," weightless as if finally relieved of the burden that the world itself becomes for a mother in patriarchy. She encounters an "other-world." This "other-world" is the presence of all the life Eva had stored up within herself for years to think about, but had not until her moment of dying released into being-as thoughts. The world that Eva encounters in dying is not one that is liberated from experience but rather one that is freed to be experienced as thought. Because it has been denied for so long, this thought-(out)-world emerges as a story that seems fragmented. However, this story holds a special coherence for one who is listening, namely Eva's granddaughter Jeannie who has been present at her sickbed.
Jeannie attends to her dying grandmother with wonder, in sharp contrast to the guilt-ridden grief of Eva's husband. She becomes suffused with a mysterious joy: "her face so radiant, her grandfather asked her once: 'You are in love?' (Shameful the joy, the pure overwhelming joy from being with her grandmother... )."(116) As Erica Duncan writes, Jeannie is "the voice of Tillie Olsen singing hope.” 19 This voice is that of a listener, and the telling of Tell Me a Riddle is also an act of deep hearing, the ardent hearing of a life that has gone unsung in this world. Jeannie hearkens to the vibrant notes of a conversation resumed after years of interruption—Eva's dialogue with her Self. In Jeannie's account of this dialogue, she transforms her grandmother's moment of death into a visionary promise.
She is not there, she promised me. On the last day, she said she would go back to when she first heard music, a little girl on the road of the village where she was born...they dance, while the flutes so joyous tremble in the air... (125)
When dying, Eva returns to her virgin Self, free to imagine the world and able to dance to the music of her own mind. The promise of this original freedom is communicated to, and through, her granddaughter, who "puts to words the music the dying woman heard but never spoke." 20
The "music" of women's own thinking, the way we would compose our lives, has been in discord with the patriarchal order. In order to free the Self from the mother-role, it is essential that we hear back into communicable form the lost conversations that our mothers might have carried on with themselves.
The Virgin
She waits for each and other,
She waits for all men born,
Forgets the earth her mother,
The life of fruits and corn.
And spring and seed and swallow
Take wing for her and follow
Where summer song rings hollow
And flowers are put to scorn.
--Homeric hymn to PersephoneInstantly with the force of some primeval gust... there issued from him such a groan that any other woman in the world would have done something, said something-all except myself, thought Lily, girding at herself bitterly, who am not a woman, but a peevish, ill-tempered, dried-up old maid, presumably.
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
It is not coincidental that historically, many women who have chosen the life of ideas and art have been unmarried or childless. The practical truth is that, as a mother and/or a wife, the woman is rare who has energy left over for the life of her mind.This phenomenon has been bolstered by a patriarchal myth of thinking's corruptive effect upon women. This myth presupposes a definition of authentic female creativity as procreation. It perpetuates the idea that thinking has a degenerative effect upon women's so-called "fertility." Such an idea was expressed in the "medical" opinion of men like Dr. Edward Clarke who warned young women in 1872 that "... the rigorous intellectual exercise of a Harvard education would seriously threaten their future reproductive capacity." 21 This basic idea has been translated into a dualism that places those powers associated with mothering, such as the "passion of tending" discussed above, in opposition to those powers associated with the virgin's existence.
Essentially, the virgin, because she is potentially unabsorbed by hetero-relations, has the solitude in which to think for her Self. However, a virgin's existence—when cut off from the powers of the mother—raises the question: What happens to thinking that cannot return to the world, thinking without consequence? What happens to an idea that is not realized—made real?
The solitude of the virgin has the potentiality and the potency of "extraordinary vision." (See footnote 11, above.) She can envision beyond the given structures of the world-as-such; she can imagine a reality other than patriarchy. She is a seer and in history has been an artist, a writer, a philosopher, and a nun. Autonomous and independent from men, she can relate on a primary level to other women: she can be, and has been, Lesbian.
However, when cut off from the mother-mode of interacting with the world, the virgin cannot return to the realm of experience. In a way different from the mother, the virgin's experience is meaningless. The mother is considered to be an "experienced woman" by the male standard that defines female experience as (hetero)sexual. "Sexual" is the category that includes all experience that is intercourse with men. A virgin, as the term is used in high school and elsewhere, is "inexperienced."
The virgin has no real experience according to male meaning-systems. Because she is an inauthentic woman or a not yet authentic one, the virgin is called upon to prove that she exists by providing documentation of her experience—or its lack. Traditionally this has been played out in the patriarchal ritual that demands proof of a woman's virginity as her sale-value for husbands. According to this reality-test, it is her proven lack of experience that makes her eligible to be initiated into her authenticity by men, i.e., made into a "real woman." In this case, the virgin is merely potential for male conquests, her solitude a temporary wilderness soon to be plowed. In House of Mirth, Edith Wharton illustrated the tragic plight of this kind of virgin in her heroine Lily Bart. As Marilyn French points out in her introduction to the 1981 edition, Lily Bart is barter for men, and her exceptional beauty raises her market value. 22 She has been raised to make herself an ornament, to be fastened within settings made and owned by men, and, as a wife, to glitter there as the crowning sign of a husband's social status. The showplace of high society is the only framework of worldliness available to Lily. Similarly, the social set-up of marriage has been defined as the only mode of intercourse with the world available to women. Lily Bart fails to prove her "virginity" for this market-exchange when she becomes the victim of gossip and is subsequently stained with "associations." Her social fall from grace is predicated on the loss of her "social virginity."
For a virgin who chooses to affirm her dissociation with hetero-relations, to shun marriage and childbearing and/or men altogether, as is the case with a lesbian, there is still the danger of being trapped by the male meaning-systems that demand "intercourse" as the proof of her reality. A virgin who chooses to define her experience in primary relation to other women does not exist within such meaning-systems. She faces a void if she seeks her reflection there, and has known the existential crisis of doubting her own experience of the world. 23 She is faced with the task of creating a new way to organize this experience. Considering the difficulty of this task it is not surprising that some lesbians have been trapped into a reactive posture of demonstrating their experience, i.e., of providing proofs of their existence according to patriarchal criteria of female authenticity. One example of this is the uncritical representation, in words and other media, of lesbian "sexuality." By "uncritical" I mean that there has been a value placed on sexuality for its own sake; the fact of sex between women has often been offered as, in itself, a criterion of real lesbian experience, devoid of the critical analysis that would explore the connections between sexual passion and other forms of what Janice Raymond has called "gyn-affection." 24 This uncritical representation of lesbian sexuality is another form of intercourse with male meaning-systems. It continues to subscribe to the patriarchal standard of authentic female experience as sexual. It is another variation on proving our virginity according to patriarchal reality-tests: on the one hand, we prove we are not virgins, i.e., that we are (sexually) experienced because we relate to women sexually. On the other hand, by offering sexuality as a proof of lesbian existence, we are proving our lack of intercourse with men and thus, in roundabout fashion, our virginity on traditional terms.
Another form the lesbian demonstration of existence has taken is a spate of confessional writings and discussions in which we relate our experiences to one another without self-consciously transforming these experiences into art, ideas, or critical social analysis. In other words, as a lesbian, the virgin has often related her experience without truly reflecting upon it. The ethic that underlies this confessionalism is one that places a value on experience-as-experience, cut off from the thinking that gives experience its coherence.
When a virgin's solitude is permanent, her thinking can become sterile, as it remains disconnected from and unaffected by the conditions of the world. The portrait of the "old maid" Miss Kilman (kill-man) in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway aptly depicts this specter of sterility. In stark contrast to Lily Bart, Miss Kilman is devoid of the "beauty" that would give her value for male bartering; she has scanty means of hetero-relational intercourse with the world. Miss Kilman is physically "plain," "clumsy," "poor," and a religious fanatic. Miss Kilman is also educated. However, because she is a woman, and poor, the sphere for using her intelligence and skills is limited to tutoring the young daughter of a rich family. Miss Kilman is the virgin deprived of the world; she feels a "...violent grudge against the world which had scorned her, sneered at her, cast her off, beginning with this indignity-the infliction of her unloveable body which people could not bear to see." 25
Miss Kilman "embodies" the belief in the corruptive influence of thinking upon the female body, a belief evidently internalized to some extent by Woolf. According to this belief, thinking in women corrupts the essential self, defined as physical (reproductivity), while for men it is the flesh that corrupts the essential self, defined as the thinking ego. Miss Kilman cannot conform to male-defined femaleness. She compensates for her "deficiency" by taking on the definition of the male essential self. Embracing male religious ideals, namely Christianity, she is obsessed with the effort to overcome "the flesh." This asceticism is a virgin's attempt to preserve the reality of her mind. She preserves this reality only by renouncing the world that has renounced her. She safeguards her virginity from a world perceived as defiling-a world which would make her "female," i.e., motherly. Miss Kilman is seen by a fellow Christian as "a soul cut out of immaterial substance; not a woman, a soul." (203) But this soul is hungry: "It was her way of eating, eating with intensity." (197)
The virgin, cut off from the mother, can be known by her unsated hunger. The virgin's hunger is the hunger of a soul, an intelligence, for the world. When isolated from the world, the virgin is starved, her intelligence stunted. As Andrea Dworkin writes,
Intelligence is a form of energy, a force that pushes out into the world... (I)t must have consequences that matter... Isolated, intelligence becomes a burden and a curse. Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the body can use. 26
The starvation of the virgin is partly the consequence of the limited way in which female intelligence is allowed to nourish itself on the world. Dworkin writes, “Traditionally and practically, the world is brought to women by men; they are the outside on which female intelligence must feed. 27 The virgin may consciously starve her Self in order to reject this form of intercourse with the world. This virgin has been called "anorexic;" she is the woman, usually young, who literally starves her own body, sometimes until death, in reaction to the constraints of being female in this culture. Martha Yates has pointed out that a woman may starve herself in an attempt to stop being fertile for men. 28 Critical studies have suggested that the anorexic woman attempts to reject her "femaleness;" female body curves diminish with weight loss and menstruation often ceases altogether. 29 The virgin starves her Self into sterility.
The virgin's sterility is a specter of women's disengagement from hetero-relations as the primary form of intercourse with the world. Her starvation is the consequence of her failure to imagine and/or carry out some other form of acting in the world. The starved, sterile virgin is worldless. The death of an "anorexic" woman is a consummate form of this worldlessness, symbolically expressing the idea that the alternative to femaleness in this culture is death. As I have said above, the woman who is not mother in this culture is not considered truly alive.
The virgin is starved when her disengagement from the male world becomes isolation from the world itself. However, starvation originates in an appetite, one that is repressed or denied and unfed. The specter of the sterile virgin points to the magnitude of an original female hunger. The primary "phallacy" concerning the starved, sterile virgin, that her sterility is the state of being deprived of men, that her hunger is for them. On the contrary, the original hunger of the virgin is for a life that is apart from men and the male-controlled world in fundamental ways. It is women's hunger to think ourselves into the world on our own terms, to realize our existence as we would imagine it. Andrea Dworkin writes that "the world is anywhere where thought has consequences." 30 Women hunger for a reality that would show the consequences of our thought, where our thought would be real. In classical philosophy, the faculty of thinking, the intellect, was called an appetite of the soul. Our appetite for the world is the same as our appetite for the life of the soul. Patriarchy, severely limiting the range of this life for women, has starved us. Mostly, women have been starved by feeding others, men and children, with the lifeblood of their own minds and bodies.
Women's inner, abundant source of being has been tapped as an inexhaustible resource for male use. What creative life exists within us that is not useful to patriarchal projects is considered excess—waste. The female imagination is excessive to the male imagination: women who think are "creatures of excess." 31 Sterility is men's concept for the woman whose energy cannot be drained into the role of procreating; they call "sterile" the woman whose creativity a-bounds her assigned role.
The specter of the solitary woman as barren and deprived is, in fact, a brazen reversal. The virgin is a woman who can exercise the option of thinking, of being with and for her Self. The activity of thinking, being the solitary conversation of the Self with her Self, is an abundance of Self, only excessive to a male mind-set.
When we fear our solitude as a specter of loneliness, it seems that what we dread is being barren—unproductive, infertile, not-alive. However, what we really dread is the fertile abyss that faces us as we disengage from the traditional structures that have bound us to and excluded us from the world. What we dread is the awesome task of creating new structures from this abyss.
In one way the inauthenticity and sterility of the virgin is an image that reflects women's refusal of the procreating mother-role and our potential ability to think our Selves beyond this role. However, in another way, the sterile virgin reflects the consequences lived by women who either cannot imagine themselves beyond this role, or who, having the imagination, cannot yet bring their thought of themselves into the world. Having dreamed themselves beyond the patriarchal structures of authenticity, they have not yet found a way to create their own structures of authenticity "on the boundary" of patriarchy. 32 The task of the virgin is to re-enter the world of experience with the "ordinary vision" that is demanded there.
The Original Integrity of Mother and Virgin
Do you want to keep to yourself? Remain...virginal? Preserve the inner Self? But it doesn't exist without the other. Don't tear yourself apart with choices that have been imposed upon you. Between us, there is no rupture between virginal and nonvirginal. No event that makes us women… . How can I say it? That we are women from the start. That we don't need to be produced by them… . That this has always already happened without their labors.
Luce Irigaray, "When Our Lips Speak Together"... the Father will have no great Earth-goddess, Mother and Maid in one, in his man-fashioned Olympus, but her figure is from the beginning... .
Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to the Greek Religion
The virgin/mother opposition reflects a "choice" that can splinter any single woman's sense of her own integrity. As a woman engaged in the journey of defining my Self "on the boundary" of patriarchy, I am attempting to live the tension(s) between the solitude where I do my own creative work and the union I create with other women in friendship. The virgin/mother opposites are images that reflect the degraded forms of these two modes of being when the tension between them is broken and they are set in opposition to one another. I find myself in the agony of "choosing" between the love of my Self and the love of a friend. This "choice" can be experienced as follows:
1) I flee solitude as a barren irreality. I embrace a false union as I cling to (m)others as the source of my own reality. I flee solitude as if my own presence to my Self were less real than my presence to others, or theirs to me. Or
2) I take on a false solitude—loneliness—as I embrace disconnected fantasies without truly thinking. At the same time I flee real union as if my sensitivity to the reality of a friend would deprive me of my Self, or as if her presence would overwhelm my own.
The virgin/mother opposites can be seen as mythic specters of the two sides of this "choice." These specters, however, have been incarnated in real women's lives and continue to present themselves as guidelines for our experience. As I have said earlier, the virgin/mother opposites are based upon the patriarchal definition of authentic female creativity as procreation. This means fundamentally that female autonomy is set in opposition to female authenticity: we are not real in the life we live apart from others, and if we relate to others we lose our sense of autonomy. This opposition has been played out in hetero-relations: mothers have had to sacrifice their autonomous Selves in relating to men and children. Women who choose not to relate to the world as mothers, i.e. virgins, are not recognized as really existing. This opposition has ruptured women's sense of their own integrity, defined as "an original unity from which no part may be taken." 33
In ancient myth, mother and virgin are originally one, two aspects, younger and older, of the same goddess. The mother-maid goddess is an image of the divinity of female wholeness—one from which no part can be taken away. She can be seen as a metaphor for the female Self within whom the solitary life of the mind and our power to unite creatively with the external world co-exists in an indivisible wholeness. This metaphor emerges in Virginia Woolf's novel about female creativity, To the Lighthouse. In the mother/virgin dyad of her characters Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe, Woolf revisions the mother/virgin opposites. In her creation of Lily Briscoe, a virgin and an artist, Woolf radically re-considers the virgin of her previous novel—Miss Kilman. For Lily, the triumph of her art and the triumph of her love for Mrs. Ramsay become inextricably connected. In Lily's figure, Woolf faces and refutes the "choice" between mother and virgin.
To the Lighthouse revolves around Lily's quest to create, fulfilled according to the novel's final words: "I have had my vision." Lily's vision is two-fold: on one level it is her painting and her artistic vision in general. On another level, Lily's vision is of Mrs. Ramsay, the quintessential mother-figure in the novel. Lily works on her painting as simultaneously she recalls, with fierce passion, the mother who is absent from her—Mrs. Ramsay who has died. This two-fold nature of Lily's vision reflects her quest to interact with the world as powerfully as a mother, without sacrificing the solitude where she can paint and think. Re-membering the power of the mother without repeating the mother's role is fundamental to the realization of the power of the virgin.
Like Miss Kilman, Lily Briscoe is unmarried, educated and without much income. Unlike Miss Kilman, Lily chooses not to marry; she chooses her work as a painter over marrying and of this decision she feels, "she had only escaped (marriage) by the skin of her teeth... it had flashed upon her... and she had felt an enormous exultation."(262) For Lily, virginity is a state of abundance, not one of deprivation; her solitude means for her the freedom to realize her thinking in works of art.
In Lily, Woolf reconsiders Kilman's "hunger"—in a manner that shows Woolf to be more Self-conscious about the origins of virginal hunger. Lily's hunger echoes in the refrain of her cry for the dead Mrs. Ramsay: "to want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have—to want and want—how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!"(266) Lily longs for the dead Mrs. Ramsay in anguish at a world that her absence has made unreal. Lily's solitude teeters on the "extraordinary unreality" of a world deprived of the mother's harmonizing force, a world that has become chaotic, "... as if the link that usually bound things together had been cut..."(266) Lily is inspired to make the world real for herself again by the thought of Mrs. Ramsay, and the mother's way of seeing that comes to bear on the world as an active, enlivening force.
The power of Mrs. Ramsay was in her fertile attention to the ordinary situation, the miracle of her loving gaze: "Flashing her needles she assured him beyond a shallow of a doubt...that it was real; the house was full; the garden blowing." (60) Lily reveres Mrs. Ramsay's gift "to make of the moment something permanent," to order experience for those around her in arrangements so exquisite that they stay in the mind, "like a work of art." As Lily identifies it, Mrs. Ramsay's ordinary/ordering vision is the power of love. Lily also realizes that "Mrs. Ramsay had given. Giving, giving, giving she had died." (223) Mrs. Ramsay's power to love meant having something taken away from her—namely her Self: "So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent."(60)
Mrs. Ramsay manifested her Self in an array of appearances that made the world alive with meaning for those within the orbit of her love. Remembering the mother's power means for Lily recognizing and affirming a Self that lives apart from the rich variety of appearances that the mother pours her Self into; it means asking, "What was the spirit in her, the essential thing, by which, had you found a crumpled glove in the corner, you would have known it, from its twisted fingers, hers indisputably?" (76)
Lily's vision of Mrs. Ramsay is a spirit-calling by which the power of the mother is acknowledged by the virgin and carried on within her Self in a new way. In appreciation of Mrs. Ramsay's essential power Lily learns that the core of her creative vision exists in the ability "to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, it's a miracle, it's an ecstasy." (300) In other words, in truly creative vision, the miracle of imaginative thinking and rigorous attention to ordinary experience are not at odds with one another. Rather, the tension between them is the very life of creative thinking and creative acting. Before completing her painting, Lily sees a vision of Mrs. Ramsay "... relieved for a moment of the weight the world had put on her, staying lightly by her side..."(269) and then gliding off and across an Elysian Field-like valley. Lily's vision releases, frees the mother as she takes up the mother's work in a new way. In effect, Lily repossesses the "loving eye" of the mother whose gaze presupposes the vital independence of the reality seen, while refusing to sacrifice the "loving eye" which sees her Self. The conversation we have with our Selves in solitude is also the reflexive vision through which we see our Selves into reality. This Self-invigorating vision bears, not men or children, but works of art. At the same time it is through Lily's work, her art, that she achieves in a new way the work of the "loving eye" which attends to the situation at hand and invigorates the life of those around her.
At the completion of both the novel and Lily's painting, Mrs. Ramsay's husband and children land their sailboat at the lighthouse. Lily's process of painting has been in continual tension with this voyage, both in the structure of this last section of the novel as well as in Lily's consciousness. Lily thought about the voyage as she attended to her own work; her love was the moving force for bringing about the landing. Unlike Mrs. Ramsay's love, though, Lily's is defined by the fierce attention she gives to her own work.
The mother/virgin split is the separation and return cycle of procreation: as a virgin a woman must leave the mother behind, only to become mother and lose her virginity. Woolf, envisioning the female creator in Lily Briscoe, refused the cycle of procreation that places female autonomy in opposition to an intimate engagement with the conditions of existence. Refusing this false choice involves imagining an original integrity to mother and virgin.
This integrity means realizing my thinking in the world. It involves balancing the actuality of lived experience with the power to think of life as it might be. This integrity exists in an ancient conversation: spanning generations of women, it originates in the single life-time of any woman who always has more to say to her Self.
Reprinted from /Trivia: A Journal of Ideas 2/, Spring 1983
Notes
* Eds. note. In the interest of historical accuracy, and to evoke the remarkable vibrancy of the feminist print movement in the 1980s, we have retained the original references for this article, even though some of the publications referred to no longer exist. Whenever possible, we have supplied the titles of books in which the texts cited were later published.
1. Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Anchor Books, 1967, p.17.
2. Karl Jaspers, Philosophy, vol..I, trans. E.B. Ashton. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970, pp. 47, 51.
3. Ibid, p. 56.
4. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. I, Thinking, New York: Harcourt Brace Janovich, 1981, pp. 179-93.
5. Ibid, p. 185.
6. Janice Raymond has coined the term “hetero-relations” to “express the wide range of affective, social, political, and economic relations that are ordained between men and women by men.” “A Genealogy of Female Friendship,” Trivia 1, Fall 1982, p. 9. A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affection. Boston, Beacon Press, 1986.
7. Luce Irigaray, “When Our Lips Speak together,” trans. Carolyn Burke, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 6, no. 1, 1980, p. 74. This Sex Which is Not One. Cornell Univ. Press, 1984.
8. In Surpassing the Love of Men, Lillian Faderman discusses the spate of twentieth-century fiction which portrays the lesbian as a powerful woman, “...frequently in a position of authority over innocent girls. Almost invariably she is ‘twisted’… (I)n most cases her perversity has turned her into a vampire…” And she points out that “In twentieth-century novels of lesbian vampirism, it is not the victim’s blood that the villain lives on but her youth and energy, which the modern vampire requires to transfuse her aging, hideous, malcontented self.” New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1981, pp. 341, 343.
9. Andrea Dworkin discusses this phenomenon as follows: “George Sand… attributed her own lack of beauty in male eyes (and therefore her own) to her intellectual and physical activity… Reading and writing, especially writing, have been seen as the antithesis of beauty in the female, as deadly as cyanide.” Pornography: Men Possessing Women, New York: Perigree, 1981, p 116
10. Sara Ruddick, “Maternal Thinking,” Feminist Studies Vol. 6 no. 2 (Summer 1980), pp. 357-8. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.
11. Defining feminist vision, Janice Raymond has talked about the “ordinary faculty of sight” and sight that is “other than the ordinary faculty.” Our “ordinary vision,” according to Raymond, is a “keen recognition of the conditions of existence for women,” it is a “realism…[that].we obscure at our peril.” She points out that sustaining a tension between this ordinary faculty and the more “visionary” faculty of seeing involves asking, “How do women live in the world as men have defined/made it while imagining the world as we would create it?” Lecture, Advanced Integrative Seminar on Philosophy, Feminism and Friendship, UMass, Amherst, Nov. 15, 1982.
12. Marilyn Frye, “In and Out of Harm’s Way: Arrogance and Love,” lecture, Mt. Holyoke College, S. Hadley, MA, Dec. 2, 1982. Frye talks about the “loving eye” as a possibility for female-identified love. The loving eye “presupposes the independence of the beloved.” A woman with this eye ardently sees the reality of her friend; she is for the other’s Self-interest without sacrificing her own Self-interest. In fact, her loving attention to her friend “requires the discipline of Self-knowledge.” The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1983.
13. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955, p. 77. Subsequent references are from this edition.
14. Ruddick, p. 351.
15. Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle, New York: Dell Publishing Co, Inc, 1979, pp. 76-7. Subsequent references are from this edition.
16. Olsen, Silences, New York: Delacorte Press, 1978, p. 39.
17. Michelle Cliff, “The Resonance of Interruption,” Chrysalis no. 8, Summer 1979, pp. 29-37.
18. For a fuller discussion of the implications of female literacy and illiteracy, see Andrea Dworkin, “The Politics of Intelligence,” Maenad, vol. 2, Fall 1981, pp 8-23. Right-Wing Women, Perigee Books, 1983.
19. Erica Duncan, “The Hungry Jewish Mother, “ The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature, eds. Cathy N. Davidson and E.M. Broner, New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co. Inc., 1980, p.240.
20. Ibid.
21. Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres, New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982, p. 5.
22. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth, with a new introduction by Marilyn French, New York: Berkley Books, 1981, p. xxx.
23. See Marilyn Frye, “To See and Be Seen: Metaphysical Misogyny,” for a discussion of the non-existence of the lesbian in patriarchal reality. Sinister Wisdom 17, Summer 1981, pp. 57-70. The Politics of Reality.
24. Raymond, “A Genealogy of Female Friendship,” p. 7. Also see Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power” for a striking exception to most literature on lesbian sexuality. Lorde discusses the richly varied manifestations of female eroticism. New York: Out and Out Books, 1978. Sister Outsider, Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press Feminist Series, 1984.
25. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1953, p. 195. Subsequent references are from this edition.
26. Dworkin, “The Politics of Intelligence,” p. 9.
27. Ibid, p.10.
28. Martha Yates, “Violence and Violation,” Feminist Lecture Series, Boston College, March 17, 1980.
29. For a sensitive discussion of “anorexia nervosa” from a feminist perspective, see Kim Chernin’s The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness, especially chapter 4, “The Hunger Artist.” Chernin’s book is an illuminating inquiry into the metaphysical dimensions of female hunger. New York: Harper &Row, 1982.
30. Dworkin, “The Politics of Intelligence,” p.19.
31. I am thankful to Camille Norton for this phrase and insight. Conversation, Amherst, MA, Dec., 1982.
32. “Boundary living” is Mary Daly’s concept. See Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation, Boston: Beacon Press, 1973, pp. 40-43.
33. Janice Raymond uses this definition from Merriam-Webster in her discussion of integrity in The Transsexual Empire: the Making of the She-Male. Boston: Beacon Press, 1979, p. 163.
About the Author
Kathy Newman, now Kathy Miriam—having taken her middle name as a "proper" surname in 1986—is living, writing, making visual art, practicing yoga, and teaching philosophy, politics, and feminism in New York City. She is also involved with producing radical feminist radio at Pacifica Station, WBAI (The Joy of Resistance Show).
