Cats Without Tails

Theodore Roszak's book is an important read and so intense that I find I must walk away from it every so often. I picked up a couple of books at the library from their $1. shelf that make a nice intermission from The Voice of the Earth. (I almost used the word "respite" but that would imply a suspension of punishment, which is not quite appropriate here.)

The two, which make for interesting reading in tandem, are: A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf and The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I've taken the title for this post from Mary Gordon's foreward to the Woolf book, which I want to encapsulate here today, and will save discussion of The Yellow Wallpaper for another time.

A Room of One's Own was published in late 1929. Feminist writing was no longer in vogue now that female suffrage had been achieved. Indeed it was seen as superfluous by a public that was focusing its attention on the Wall Street market crash and the world economic crisis.

Wolfe concerns herself here with the fate of the extraordinary woman.

Genius needs freedom; it cannot flower if it is encumbered by fear, or rancor, or dependency, and without money freedom is impossible. . . When the writer's personal grievances intrude, the art is muddied, cracked.

Instead, Wolfe believes good literature springs from the following: serenity, selflessness, and freedom from rage. She sums up the tenor of her time:

. . . we who live after the First World War have lost something beautiful, some necessary grace. We do not hum under our breaths; we are cats without tails; we are encumbered by our anger, our sense of doom, more important, perhaps, by our sexual self-consciousness.

Wolfe believed that lack of privacy and a tradition to follow were great impediments to women in the literary field.

Yet the hiddenness, the anonymity of women's lives has endowed them with a great beauty, and the challenge Woolf gives to women writers is to capture these lives in all their variety.

Gordon quotes Woolf as saying:

Above all, you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the everchanging and turning world.

The creative act is encapsulated:

What is important, what is essential, is that works of genius be created. In that writers' unhappiness interferes with their creation, one should be concerned with the happiness of writers. The important thing is that they must express reality; they must express their genius, not themselves. They must illuminate their own souls, but they must not allow the souls to get in the way of reality.

So this gives me something to think about in relationship to art in general and my creation of collage in particular. I see myself trying to self-insulate from a world without grace, as a cat with neither tail nor fur, thus unprotected and unable to exist in the mainstream. I am happy where I am, slightly removed by geographic location and refusal to participate in mass media and transportation.

I allow too much of the soul to permeate my work if I measure it by Virginia Woolf's standard. (Perhaps its legitimacy is lessened even further by my attempt to mould my own reality.) My personal grievances not only intrude, they are often the motivation behind a piece. But I am up to the challenge of capturing my life in all its variety both in my art and my blogging! And I am grateful to both Virginia Wolfe and Mary Gordon for their inspiration to examine my purpose for doing so more closely.