feminist blogs

Back in 1992, when I was a resident at Kate Millett’s art colony for women, I made the acquaintance of a very wonderful poet and fiction writer named Emily Ballou. Shortly afterward, Emily moved to Australia, where she has since received rave reviews for her work. Presently, a Google search of Emily.Ballou +Australia yields 471 hits, many pertaining to her quite well-received debut novel, Father Lands, but damned if I still can’t track down an email address for her, much less any references to a specific piece of hers that I’d love to re-read, which, if I recall correctly, was called Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton Making Love. (And damned if the last postal address I have for Emily is many years old. Nonetheless I’m determined to re-track her down sometime very soon.)

Lacking Emily’s actual source material, and also having such a fuzzy recollection of the piece itself (for that matter, I may not have read it in 1992; it could have been in a subsequent mail exchange, ca. 1998), I can’t adequately explain what I originially found in it, that resonated so much for me. Perhaps it was the title alone, conjuring as it did a healing act of love between two brilliant American women poets, now lost to us: curses of suicides. The notion that the misogyny-borne self-hatreds of women, absorbed by most of us to one degree or another - but most especially by women artists - could be ritually discarded, in art as well as in life, in such a redemptive way. (And despite the typically divisive notions of gender and sexual orientation; we might do well, here, to remember Adrienne Rich’s essay Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence; how it demonstrated the extent to which homophobia is at least as destructive for heterosexual women as for lesbians and bisexual women.)
In any event, I had cause to think of Emily’s writing last night, as I watched a fascinating movie, Tom & Viv, on the life of T.S. Eliot’s first wife, Vivienne. In the years since this film came out, Carol Seymour-Jones has published a biography of Vivienne, Painted Shadow, which I’m going to have to get my hands on now. The following is from the book jacket:

By the time she was committed to an asylum in 1938, five years after T. S. Eliot deserted her, Vivienne Eliot was a lonely, distraught figure. Shunned by literary London, she was the “neurotic” wife whom Eliot had left behind. In The Family Reunion, he described a wife who was a “restless shivering painted shadow,” and so she had become: a phantomlike shape on the fringe of Eliot’s life, written out of his biography and literary history.

This astonishing portrait of Vivienne Eliot, first wife of poet T.S. Eliot, gives a voice to the woman who, for seventeen years, had shared a unique literary partnership with Eliot but who was scapegoated for the failure of the marriage and all but obliterated from historical record. In so doing, Painted Shadow opens the way to a new understanding of Eliot’s poetry.

Vivienne longed to tell her whole story; she wrote in her diary: “You who in later years will read these very words of mine will be able to trace a true history of this epoch.” She believed (as did Virginia Woolf) that she was Eliot’s muse, the woman through whom he transmuted life into art. Yet Vivienne knew the secrets of his separate and secret life — which contributed to her own deepening hysteria, drug addiction, and final abandonment: the tragedy of a marriage that paired a repressed yet sensual man with an extroverted woman who longed for a full sexual relationship with her husband.

From what I gathered from the film, Vivienne suffered from something along the lines of endometriosis, PMS, literary and social passions, and (perhaps) a touch of bipolar disorder, all of which could have been managed (in artistically meaningful ways), were it not from that other source of her perennial suffering: Victorian-era patriarchy. And this got her locked up - for good. (Interestingly, it is revealed at the end of the movie that her most difficult symptoms became non-existent after menopause; nonetheless, she remained, until her death from heart failure, committed to the mental institution.)

Beyond this, the film’s subtext around Virginia Woolf was most fascinating to me. Woolf had evidently characterized Vivienne Eliot as “this bag of ferrets” hanging around T.S. Eliot’s neck; they were rivals of a sort, with Woolf being an esteemed colleague of Tom Eliot, and Vivienne being “merely” Tom’s wife, with literary aspirations of her own, which went unrealized all the while she had performed ably (if also chaotically) as her husband’s “Muse.”

At some point, Vivienne makes some snarky comments about Woolf, to the effect that Leonard Woolf, Virginia’s husband, had her in and out of loony bins all the time.

It gives me such sharp sadness, that Virginia Woolf, while realizing much success as a writer, ultimately caved into the aforementioned, typical-of-female-artists self-hatred and ended her life; Vivienne, by contrast, was stripped of nearly all the (still limited) freedoms Woolf had enjoyed, and died not by her own hand, but of some pretty simple heartbreak.

Thus, this disembodied, retroactively redemptive notion of Vivienne Eliot and Virginia Woolf making love.

If they had not been so mired in their rivalries…

If they had not been so worn down by patriarchal repression…

If they had not been so tethered to the literary men in their lives…

They very well might have loved and healed one another, and not died in separate, but viscerally connected, tragedies of suicide and heartbreak.