The bitterness of women artists’ success
Leila's desire to position herself as an outcast is further underlined by her self-sabotaging of her own success. She is not the ‘normal’ figure of a woman as victim. Leila becomes victimized and abused not because of her determination to create but because she becomes a successful artist. The social conventions of success place extra pressures on Leila - women are not supposed to win, to achieve the heights reserved for the male genius only. Leila is strong and modern enough to fight for her need to create but she remains weak in so far as she is not able to enjoy her achievements. Her first public victory brings her nothing but bitter embarrassment and the feeling of being punished for her success. In her self-sabotaging mind, like an archaic woman, just as she becomes an emerging artist, Elmore leaves her.
I had fulfilled my destiny as an artist and a woman, and to punish me for that, Elmore had left. p.64/III
He couldn’t bear it, and neither, it seemed, could Leila. At fifty-five Elmore worried a lot - his heart, his penis, his career, all were failing - and on the top of it all Leila seems to be ‘on the top of the world’. Evidently the prevailing mode here is the ironic uncertainty in the repetitive seem, which is further boosted by the subversive second-thought put in brackets.
It is much earlier, during her MA years, when Leila experiences the bitterness of her success. One of the four things she learns at MA is the Romantic persistent myth of the artist, as something still valid for America in the late 1980s: ‘an artist was always an outcast and a rebel in bourgeois America - no matter what anyone said.’ Whenever Leila wants the freedom to do her work, she ends up at ‘this lonely pass’. She left Thom to have babies with Elmore, and left Elmore because eventually he ‘sulked every time she put brush to canvas’. Leila needs to let Dart ‘peel off’ because she wouldn’t do drugs with him anymore which leads her once again to that lonely pass. The topos of the lonely pass seems to embody the blues and the rage of any creative women. Yet E. Jong is definitely aware that her creative woman is caught at a particular moment by the strangeness of this historical moment. In this unique moment in which it is obvious that nobody prepared this generation of women, the baby boomers, for all the changes that have overtaken them as women, because nobody knew how to prepare them. They wanted to have it all - work and love, paintings and babies - and they have had it, but they have paid a price: the price of loneliness and isolation. (p.139/IX)
Leila’s generation of women were experimenting with a new life pattern, one never tried before in all of history. No wonder they felt so lost, ‘alternatively like pariahs or like pioneers’. These are the women artists who were breaking every female taboo - putting their creative lives, their self-expression, ahead of the demands of the species. No wonder Leila feels like ‘a traitor’ to Elmore, to Dart. If it were 1920 or 1945, Leila would never have left Thom Winslow and pursue ‘twins and twin careers in Chianti’. And if it were 1930 or 1955, she would never have left Elmore and wound up with Dart. The negative connotation of traitor here carries the ‘self-sabotage myth’ even further. The lives of their mothers and grandmothers simply did not apply. There are no rituals for them. They had smashed the old and not built the new [Campbell 1995]. They had ‘unraveled the past and not woven the future’. Even through the typical women’s imagery of fibers and entanglement there comes the suspense of the haunting question of how to make this rite of passage:
How to do it? Ah - the question of the century. p.140/IX
That is exactly the issue that bothers E. Jong most while re-creating the emerging identity of the new woman artist. It seems that Jong’s particular approach is keen on evoking the historical background at which Leila’s artistic life is set clearly. Besides being ‘comforting’ to see one’s life as part of a historical process it ensures a broader perspective to the contemporary myth of women artists. No wonder the word ‘victim’ is controversially related to both negative and positive sides. Leila is partly a victim to her own addiction, partly a victim of her own talent and fame, but she is partly a casualty of history: ‘too many women born and not enough men, no life patterns for any of us to live by, the family breaking down and being replaced by - what? Nothing.’ p. 140/IX
However Leila is perfectly aware that at the fin-de-siecle men are just as lost and lonely as women. Men are vulnerable as well with all their vulnerability ‘hanging so nakedly between their legs’. Even in the slightly degrading language one could feel the positive touch and understand why men cannot be blamed for being disaffected with the whole female sex. Frightened of their mommies, of shrieking women - ‘all they ask is a little softness and tenderness from us’ -165/X. No wonder armies of screaming women on the march terrify them. While reflecting on this issue Leila is definitely sure she would react with terror and with rage if she were a man. In her sane mind she knows she would. As usual Leila is not at all short of humour and joy when she is to handle the issue of men/women struggle. From the high level reflections on the historical process we are back to the basics:
They (Men) expected nurturance and got a kick in the balls. They expected us to be warm bodies in bed, cups and cup bearers, baby bearers - and then they had to listen to kvetch about our blasted creativity. They wanted what they had always had: a warm tush in bed. How could a still life of maenads and crystal ever replace a warm tush in bed? The Warm Tush Theory: All history could be traced to the longing for the warm tush in bed.
The Blasted Creativity Theory: All history of the contemporary myth of women artists could be traced in it, as well as the story of Any Woman’s Blues. Perhaps the longing is to have it all - the warm tush in bed and the maenads and crystals together. At some point the answer seems to be within reach - sailing to the Trobriands islands, the Isles of Love, as they were called in the twenties. It is Julian, Leila’s spiritual alter-ego, who believes that the formula of the deserted island myth could save them - the artists from the hostility of the outcasting world around. Although Julian is conscious that the Isles of Love are ‘just another noble-savage myth’ he still dreams of going there. Julian is so influential while persuading Leila to join him that he makes her think of ‘the layers of myth-making - Gauguin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Melville, Michener’. Despite the long run of their friendship Leila will eventually disagree with Julian and his utopia. She will stick to the deserted island in her mind. Even by thinking of the twins Leila could be reminded of her lonely place. As a mother of two Leila often envied them - their self-sufficiency, the fact they were never lonely. United against the world, they go to school, to Daddy’s, to Mommy’s. As their mother she is glad for their connection but it leaves her out ‘in some deeply painful way’. Sometimes Leila wished she had a singleton for company. Jong extends these longing further through the mythical implications of the numbers 1 & 2.
One is the indivisible number. But one is lonely. Two is divisible but unafraid. 221,2/XIII
Her own oneness and loneliness is what Leila is struggling to come to terms to. In her crystal clear period she is usually described in the silo alone, looking over the hills of Connecticut and painting. Sometimes in bliss, sometimes in despair. This duality of the artist’s loneliness is something you cannot communicate to another living soul. Perhaps that is the reason why Leila decides not to fall in bed with the Waynes and Darts of this world. Then what is there left for her but this ‘endless solitude before the easel.’ Leila both loves and hates it. She needs to live in this dual state of mind as she needs to thank God for giving her a livelihood out of this solitary bliss, and to curse God for ‘the gut-wrenching loneliness of it’. At parties she misses this blissful solitude, but at the same time she thinks she’s missing ‘Life’ by not going to the parties. This controversial artistic identity of Leila will prove to be her truest one, the much sought-after social identity of hers. Here is the self-portrait of Leila that could give us another insight to the innerside of her social personae.
Me, at the easel, overlooking the hills, smelling the primal turpentine smell, stoned on my own solitude and the woodsy aroma of the solvent, of the hydrocarbon high of the painting alone and the low of knowing I may be alone for the rest of my life. 183,4/XI
The zeugma effect conveyed through the use of ‘stoned on’ with different fields of reference could contribute a lot to the care-free and joyful perception of Leila’s portrait. Alongside with the touch of self-irony Leila is yet earnest to build up a self-portrait of a self-empowering woman artist who is beginning to love herself. It is not only Leila but her work that is lovable, too. People love her work because of the joy and the life force that comes through. Her work is really abundant in life and emotions. But anyway for Leila the essence of her life is her art.
That is why she needs to fight for her right to create and succeed. She knows that the struggle between art and life is a never-ending one. She knows that it is difficult enough for the man who is not ‘indentured to the species very survival’. But for a woman, who is socially enslaved, this struggle is a ‘true dilemma and conundrum, never to be resolved - until, perhaps, the freedom of menopause that Emmie talks about’- p.122/VII. From the hint on the much misconceived issue of the menopause E. Jong is further enlightened to summon the chthonic deities who are driving the course of this archaic female struggle to create [Orenstein 1994]. Her woman artist is acutely aware that every canvas she has ‘seized from the chaos’ has been done on the expense of the chthonic deities who ‘cry out for blood, blood, female blood and childbirth at any price’. Then E. Jong is able to claim that any woman producing any painting should get combat pay - ‘for the battle waged in the sky between Rhea and Zeus’. Can we project in this summoning of Rhea and Zeus - the supreme deities of the creativity myth in the Greek Pantheon - the need for validation in a world in which being a woman is not in itself enough validation? Is this Jong’s way of validating womanhood and creativity.
I would never have an abortion because I see every egg as an incipient human life, and I could no more destroy one than I could rip apart my own canvas. p.123/VII
Perhaps Leila Sand is an artist who is learning to validate herself in every facet of her creativity both as a mother and an artist, both in her social and personal aspirations.
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998