my parents had stories to tell, their sides in an unending feud, one which grew more violent and more consuming as time passed, so that when my father was suffering from advanced dementia, my mother thought he was smirking at her, planning a new round of insults.
Despite these difficult years, and difficult lessons, my four brothers and I gained some good lessons, as well. My brothers and I all acquired a great love of books and language from them.
In addition, we learned about the importance of service for the public good. My father’s parents met walking a picket line for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. My grandfather was a cutter, my grandmother a finisher in a shirtwaist factory. Both hoped to improve the loathsome conditions in New York’s sweatshops. One of my father’s uncles was active enough in the Wobblies to be deported during the infamous Palmer raids of the 1920s.
My mother’s father was the doctor in the small Illinois town where she grew up. He refused a job offer from the Mayo Clinic at the height of the Great Depression because he would not leave his community without medical care. He died at the age of fifty-one; he was recovering from surgery, but the old man who had trained him had fallen on the ice, and my grandfather went out into the snow to carry him to bed. My grandfather died shortly after that from the exertion this put on his heart, but seventy years later, people in his small community remember his service and his charity.
It was years before I learned a name for the domestic model in which I was reared, but in reading Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, I found I had grown up under the wings of the Angel in the House. This is the formal name for an unnatural vision of women described by Coventry Patmore in his 1854 eulogy to his wife’s self-abnegating nature. Even without Patmore’s name for her, this angel has blighted women’s lives for a long time (“he for God only,” Milton wrote of Adam and Eve, “she for God in him”).
The struggle with the angel was a constant for nineteenth-century writers. Elizabeth Barrett Browning confronts her head-on in “Aurora Leigh,” her epic about a woman who heroically finds her poetic voice. Barrett Browning, escaping her father’s house for Italy with Robert, living there an extraordinary second life as the friend and chronicler of Italian revolutionaries, and as a vehement anti-slavery advocate, may have done better than most in ridding herself of this monstrous spirit.
On the other hand, I have an uneasy feeling that the angel helped kill that very gifted novelist, Elizabeth Gaskell. In addition to writing such important works as Mary Barton and North and South, Gaskell was a devoted mother. She kept up a major correspondence with a wide circle of friends (including French and German scientists), ran social welfare programs in Manchester—and died of heart failure at fifty-five. That she wrote any fiction at all seems unbelievable; that she wrote four major novels—novels which deserve pride of place with Bleak House or David Copperfield for their powerful social commentary—is truly “a staggering work of heartbreaking genius.”
In a world where women’s roles were narrowly defined, Victorian writers sought ways either to retreat from these definitions, or to find other sources of nurture and recognition. Illness was one escape route: taking to bed seemed to be a useful strategy for Victorian artists trying to avoid a life of domestic slavery: Barrett Browning did it, and the great writer-explorer Isabella Bird was always so ill in her father’s Edinburgh house that she couldn’t get out of bed—until the day came to board a trans-Atlantic steamer once again. Bedridden, she died at home in 1904 at the age of seventy-three; if she’d headed to Antarctica, she might have lived another twenty years. Emily Dickinson avoided domestic responsibilities by hiding in cupboards. I’ve always admired the enterprise of these pioneering women.
In “Professions for Women,” Woolf says the domestic angel also hovered between herself and her vocation as a writer. She describes the angel as “Intensely sympathetic. She was utterly unselfish. She sacrificed herself daily . . . she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but . . . sympathized always with the minds and wishes of others . . . .” The angel told Woolf:
“Be tender, flatter, deceive, use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure.” [Woolf says she] turned on the angel, caught her by the throat, and did my best to kill her . . . had I not killed her . . . she would have plucked the heart out of my writing.
Unfortunately, the wretched angel didn’t die so easily, for Woolf, or the rest of us. She has very long wings which keep flapping over us. The contemporary rock/folk singer Jonatha Brooke even sings, “I cannot kill the angel in the house.”
Contemporary moral and political pundits proclaim that women’s failure to meet the angel’s high domestic standard has caused the fall of America. Former Republican Whip Tom DeLay blamed the shootings at Columbine High School on two things: teaching evolution in the schools, and women working outside the home. After the World Trade Center was attacked, religious figures on the Republican right announced that God was punishing America for, among other things, the women’s liberation movement.
The angel kept me from a sense of a writer’s vocation, or, indeed, any vocation when I was a child, and she still comes flying around my head, telling me not to be selfish, to give myself over to domestic or public duties first, that my writing, like Jo March’s, can wait.
In the diaries of Midwestern farmwomen from the 1880s through the 1930s, their loneliness is a topic they revert to constantly: their loneliness, and the fact that their life on the farm was one of unremitting drudgery. With no one to talk to, no one to enter into their concerns or understand their needs, they often became psychotic. In fact, during that period, there was something of an epidemic of farmwomen burning down their own homes, often killing husbands, children and themselves in the process.
I wasn’t so lonely that I had to burn down the farmhouse where I grew up, but I was lonely enough to turn to fiction for my friends. I had that imaginary inner life that I suppose helped me become a writer, but it wasn’t a very comfortable place to live. I didn’t have the kind of enterprise that sent Barrett Browning or Isabella Bird to their beds, but I did retreat into daydreams, a world of interior narrative: as I washed dishes, I was a Russian scientist pretending to be a dishwasher while hiding from the KGB, or I was the improbable beloved of an improbably urbane British nobleman—someone along the lines of Percy Blakeney. Sometimes my dreams seemed so real that I could spend a whole day inside them, not noticing where I was or what I was doing.
When I was a teenager, both parents wanted to use my words to make their points—my mother demanding poems describing her entrapment, my father stories proclaiming his unlauded glories. I dutifully created both. But beyond that my writing roused so little interest that my mother told me my father burned all my childhood papers in some housekeeping frenzy or other. I kept hoping she got it wrong. Before they died, I spent hours hunting through their attic for some story, some diary, a remnant to connect me with my past, something that might tell me what dreams I used to have. Nothing comes to light.
How did I survive this upbringing? How did I become a writer?
These were questions that I tried to answer for an essay in a collection called Family Portraits, published by Doubleday in 1985. In company with writers far more distinguished—I. B. Singer, for one—I was asked to write about the family member who most influenced and supported my writing voice. I thought of my mother, who was a great reader and story teller, I thought of my older brother, who taught me to read and write, but I could think of no family member who cared that I wrote. Instead, my fantasy of writing had been a daydream so private I never shared it with anyone. So I wrote an essay about my Golden Retriever Capo, who stayed with me day and night while I labored on my first novel. Doubleday didn’t want an essay about a dog.
I thought again, and wrote about my mother’s cousin Agnes. Doubleday liked Agnes, and included her in the collection.
Among other things, I wrote:
The summer I turned ten, on one of her abrupt visits, Agnes learned I was writing a story. She asked me to read it to her. She sat in the living room and listened with total attention. It still seems unbelievable to me that a grown woman could really want to spend an hour hearing a young