Women Under the Influence

BELLA ABZUG, unmarried pregnant girls, Radcliffe women in Harvard classrooms, successful women and, potentially women who don't use feminine hygiene spray deodorants, all have one thing in particular in common. They all commit what Patricia Meyer Spacks identifies as the "ultimate feminine sin" of conspicuousness. They fail to remain in the background as women are supposed to do, with veils concealing their faces and faces concealing their thoughts.

Nowhere is the sin of conspicuousness committed more outrageously than among women writers. In the fictive worlds they create and in the act of their own writing, they put women in the foreground--acts of deviance, therefore conspicuous, and acts of defiance, therefore political. Spacks's excellent book, The Female Imagination--by far the most comprehensive treatment of women writers to date--examines this highly suspect group of women, In so doing, it unavoidably concerns itself with power because that is what the female imagination ponders: how to combat the external powers constraining it and how to use it to create an independent and self-determined power.

The female imagination is hardly a new topic for comment. In chauvinist circles, women's imagination is usually spoken of as a charming commodity, fanciful and flighty, and lacking in rigor. The "woman's point of view" is considered to yield delightful and unexpected (because illogical) associations which form a fine complement to the more dependable logic of men. In feminist circles, the nature of the female imagination has been debated on more egalitarian grounds. There was a time when feminists regarded as counter-insurgent any effort to posit an imagination different from man's. More recently, however, women have come to note the distinction between nature (which is human) and experience (which has gender). Spacks uses the term "female imagination" in this sense to refer to women's responses to their particular situations, situations which take on special meaning because they are circumscribed in patterned ways.

Spacks starts out on firm social psychological ground by postulating that "minds learn their sex" by learning what constitute acceptable responses to given situations. Her purpose is to determine the continuities that exist in women's responses in writing during the past three centuries. Her discovery is that the similarities in response--mainly anger--seem to be a result of the similarities in the cultural conditions women have been confined to.

Her method is the close--sometimes too close--analysis of prose texts of some 50 female authors. Her critical eye scans the writings of women ranging in talent from Ellen Glasgow to Virginia Woolf, in commitment from diarist Arvazine Cooper to Simone de Beauvoir, and in vision from the inventor of Ma Kettle to the creator of Martha Quest.

THERE IS NO glorification of women writers or characters here. Spacks criticizes Esther Greenwood for the self-indulgent aspects of her madness and turn-of-the-century author Mary MacLane's failure to follow up her claim to genius with appropriate evidence. However, her criticisms are sympathetic, placing women in their historical-cultural contexts. She exposes the successes and failures of women as they try to overcome the situations in which the find themselves. These many misadventures, Spacks suggests, are merely different responses to the same reality, that of powerlessness.

The book is nominally organized around seven themes common to women's lives. These themes all reduce to one major theme, that of power--the contradictory attractions of power and passivity, the role of caretaker and the woman's devious attempts to turn it into a powerful role, woman's retreat into writing to compensate for the power she lacks in the real world.

Insofar as the book has any kind of climax, it is the middle chapter on "The Adolescent as Heroine." It is not surprising that most fiction dealing with women, especially that written before this century, casts the adolescent as heroine: for centuries, adolescence was the climax and turning point of a woman's life, the time when she married and took on another--a man's--identity. But more significant is the potence of adolescence as a metaphor for woman's condition. Women, like adolescents, are frustrated in their desire for autonomy; they are encouraged to remain children; their attempts at self-definition are never so desperate. Spacks reserves her strongest language and most poignant metaphors for elaborating this argument:

Female rebellion may be perfectly justified, but there's no good universe next door, no way out, young potential revolutionaries can't find their revolution. So they marry in defeat or go mad in a complicated form of triumph, their meaning the inevitability of failure. More vividly than older women in fiction, they express women's anger and self-hated and the feeling that there's no way out. Pain is the human condition, but more particularly, these books announce, the female condition... The women novelists who depict their plight find in it constant images of challenge aborted or safely contained: the general fate of female challenge.

The special sympathy with which Spacks pursues this particular line may reflect a special interest in adolescents, in particular, her students at Wellesley College. The impetus for the book grew out of an undergraduate seminar on women's literature. From the student comments she quotes from the seminar, we learn that she was impressed with their conflicts and their desire for role models, which they sought in their sex's literature and in their professor.

IT WAS SOMEWHAT IRONIC--although possibly appropriate--that bookstores in the Square were pushing The Female Imagination for Mother's Day. Most of the writers Spacks critiques seem to have found motherhood a destructive condition--a cause for utmost ambivalence in virtually all women. The beautiful woman dreads that pregnancy will disfigure her. The career woman fears that motherhood will distract her. And the growing woman fears that motherhood will enslave her. Spacks again finds that an adolescent, in this case. Esther Greenwood from The Bell Jar, sees most explicitly the destructiveness which this particular kind of creativity can cause:

When she sees the woman give birth in pain, Buddy tells her that the mother has received a drug to make her forget her suffering. Esther reacts with further horror: "I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again," ...the pain of motherhood focuses with special clarity her fear of life, representing the ultimate way in which women serve men.

Virginia Woolf was upset with the way women seemed only to write from anger. But, as Spacks points out, anger is their strength, the energy fueling the female imagination. Too much of this fuel can cause a backfire, of course, and Spacks finds fault with Kate Millett for this reason. Indeed, those who enjoyed the rage in Millett's writing may be disappointed with Spacks's detached style.

Unlike earlier women who wrote about women, Spacks appears to write less from a sense of personal injustice than from a recognition of the contradictions inherent in the condition of women, and of women writing about women.

She serves the needs of many women who are beyond the knee-jerk angry stage and now seek analyses of their anger and models of how to put it to positive work. Most of the female characters in the works Spacks studies are negative models--descriptions of people women don't want to be, the victims of anger and frustration. 'To work and to love" is a prescription which was seldom made for these women, whose fate instead was to go mad and to die.

The best model in the whole book is Spacks herself, as the comments from her seminar students demonstrate. Their view of her as one of few whole women seems to surprise Spacks, who apparently doesn't think of herself as such an anomoly. Even without her students' testimonies, it is apparent from the sensible, good-natured tone of her prose--as, for example, when she is describing her one-time defensiveness at being accused of sending her daughter to school with dirty underwear--that she is a secure and aware woman.

THE CONFLICTS many women write about are not specific to women, as Spacks notes. Men as much as women aspire to integrity, love and autonomy. But the impediments they face are not those of a world created by another for them. Men are rather the victims of their own world; they are alienated by conditions they created themselves. This is why the first existentialists were necessarily men: it is impossible to experience the dread and anguish of having total responsibility to define one's essential self until one in fact has this responsibility, which is itself the corollary of total freedom. It is possible that a feminine existentialism is emerging, marking a new fold in the female imagination. Indeed, as more and more women today are learning--and Radcliffe women are chief among them, as are the Wellesley women quoted by Spacks--there is anguish in opportunity. But as long as this opportunity exists for the conspicuous few, the issue in women's writing will be power, the energy will be anger, and the vision will be integrity.