Woman as Writer: Guilt and Identity in Pat Lowther's Poetry
Margaret Atwood
once put it bluntly: it is “too much of a strain to fit together the
traditionally incompatible notions of “woman” and “good at something”” (Second
Words 193). The archaic
incompatibility of ‘woman writer’ is no more, and yet there lingers problems of
identity for the female wielding the pen.
The attachment to gender expectations and woman’s role as ‘housewife’
results in the female writer’s guilt complex in identifying as something other
– or simultaneously as - ‘wife’ or ‘mother.’ Pat Lowther’s poetry, specifically How Can I Begin, Poetry, and On
Reading a Poem Written in Adolescence, reflects a strain against ‘feminine
sensibilities’ and explores the problem of the identity of the woman
writer. There are some basic
elements in being a woman writer that are problematic: the movement away from
traditional constructions of gender role and the guilt associated with this
departure; the binaries of ‘male writer’ and ‘female writer’; and the complicated
identity of woman writer.
Lowther’s poetry questions these vexing qualities of female writing and
addresses the possibility that ‘feminine sensibilities’ are constructed rather
than implicit in women’s writing; woman’s identity as writer goes beyond a
basic evaluation of ‘gender’ or ‘sex’, and yet these identities are essentially
inseparable.
Lowther’s
poem How Can I Begin seems to
question just that: how can a woman begin to write without seeming bogged down
by her sex? The poem addresses the
concealment involved in being a woman and being a writer. For the woman on the brink of the
feminist movement, there is a sense of guilt in writing, in the departure from
the traditional role of woman as mother or housewife. This sense of guilt is explored in Margaret Atwood’s Second Words, in the essay On Being a Woman Writer: Paradoxes and
Dilemmas. She says “anyone who
took time off for an individual selfish activity like writing was either
neurotic or wicked or both, derelict in her duties to a man, child, aged
relatives or whoever else was supposed to justify her existence” (191). A woman writer was one who did writing
in her own time, after all of her domestic duties was satisfied, her husband
was fed and her child was in bed.
Women would write at night, and the writing was considered a hobby,
never a serious endeavor. Thus,
the woman writer was seen as supplementary, as a novelty of sorts; the woman who
wrote was a deviant from tradition.
This stigma of deviancy and neglect evidently manifested itself as a
sort of guilt in the woman writer.
Augmenting this guilt, Lowther asks “How can I begin? So many skins of
silence upon me” (1-3), as she attempts to peel away the layers of expectation
heaped upon her as ‘woman.’ After
a tradition of being silent and compliant, it is a process to begin, to form
words underneath the weight of expectation. It is a struggle to begin to speak for the silent women
before her – the memory of these women have become a callous concealing her own
identity. As Atwood explains,
“These writers accomplished what they did by themselves, often at great
personal expense; in order to write at all, they had to defy other women’s as
well as men’s ideas of what was proper” (Second
Words 191). After struggling
to separate the ‘woman’ from ‘writer,’ it is no wonder that so many female
writers felt a sense of guilt; they felt they were not only betraying their
families, but also themselves.
Identity as
woman is often in part defined by the ability to give life, but her identity is
formed more complexly than that. Lowther employs an extended metaphor in order to explain the
duality of a woman’s identity. She has “become accustomed to walking like a
pregnant woman carrying something alive yet remote” (5-9). Pregnancy is exemplified here as not
only a signifier of life, but symbolizes woman as creator; as an extension of
biological pregnancy, as a writer, she carries with her vibrancy and life, just
as she would carry and give life to a child. Pregnancy then gains a double meaning: as a signifier of
creative life, and as an expected duty of woman. Her thoughts, “though less articulate” (11), are formed as a
child is formed, beginning with a “skeleton” and waiting for “unpredicted flesh
and deliverance” (14-15). The
articulated thoughts are likened to the growth of a fetus, implying a sort of
unity between creation of life and creation of art. Gertrude Stein once used this same metaphor of child/writing
to demonstrate the creative process, although she argued that, “you have a
little more control over your writing than that; you have to know what you want
to get” (Gertrude Stein Remembered 155). There is a space between woman as basic
live-giver, and woman as creator; creation, in an intellectual sense, involves
control and cognitive function, while any ‘brainless’ woman could bear a child,
as she is biologically built to do.
This base traditional definition of ‘woman’ is based on the biological
function of woman, or, “tota mulier in
utero: she is a womb” (de Beauvoir 3). Lowther seems to be suggesting a transcendent ability in woman in relation
to, but superseding, her basic biology; She possesses the ability to write and
create in a way uniquely female, but the ‘femininity’ of her writing does not
degrade the quality or integrity of the writing. She pleads “I would ask you: learn as I learn patience with
mine and your own silence” (19-22).
The “you” addresses a culture with archaic notions on femininity and the
woman’s role in life, as well as the men who have silenced women in the
past. She asks for silence in
return, as she attempts to begin to separate woman from her pre-determined
identity.
Part of the
trouble of defining the woman writer is in her relation and comparison to a male
writer. The binaries of male/female
direct our attention to sex, and in simply naming the writer as ‘woman,’ she
becomes the other; the ‘woman writer’ is the other to ‘writer,’ or male. Atwood notes the tendencies of critics
to say, “You think like a man,” she is told, with admiration and unconscious
put-down” (Second Words 193). In this comparison, “good equals male,
and bad equals female” (197). This
‘othering’ of the female sex is nearly inseparable from the definition of the
woman writer; it places the woman on the other end of the scale from the male,
demanding that we judge each side’s work according to the sex of the writer.
Lowther’s Poetry plays with the
binaries of male/female, employing such adjectives that follow the trite
descriptors of each sex, such as “weak” for female and “aggressive” for male. She says, “Firebombs are in the mind but
so is love, its soft flowering explosion” (7-9). The entwined imagery of both violence and tenderness suggests
a sort of androgynous poetry; the woman’s mind is considered “soft,”
“flowering” and full of “love,” while “firebombs” and “explosions” suggest a male
aggressiveness. The following
stanza continues the fusion of the sexes, as she claims, “Such violence is my
work’s intent. Come walk with me” (12-14). The desire for “violence” suggests not physical violence or
aggression, but an aggression of attitude in her writing. This desire to be considered ‘male’ is
partly in attempt to make such male/female distinctions obsolete, but also
seems to suggest that the male/good female/bad prototype is ingrained in even
the woman writer’s mind.
The role of the
reader or critic also reinforces these binaries. Ruth Robbins explores this aspect of ‘woman writer’ as existing
among other writers in Literary
Feminisims. She notes that it
is, “rare that the woman writer was treated as a woman writer (unless the term
was used pejoratively) or that she was placed in the supportive context of
other woman writers, rather than always being measured up against the men”
(71). The division of the male and
female writer is based on the assumption that the female writer is doomed in
her deviancy; as she attempts to be like men, or to write like men, she removes
herself from being ‘woman.’ Poetry comments on this need to act or
write like men in order to be taken seriously. Lowther says, “Armour yourself with ice; no lesser shield
will do. I’ve tried your customed mail of linked complacencies, and know”
(20-24). She acknowledges the difficulties
in identifying oneself as female writer, sardonically recommending that the
woman writer “armour” herself, or sheath herself in male demeanor in order to
be accepted as ‘writer’ amongst other writers. An armour of “ice” suggests the transient and ephemeral
qualities of the adoption of male writing techniques; “ice” implies
impermanence and coldness, or impersonality, which will not outlast or overcome
the intrinsic ‘warmth’ or concern of the feminine writer. She puns “mail,” demonstrating her
awareness of the restraints on the female writer by the male writer’s critique
and gaze. Thus, female
subjectivity is considered a flaw, and male objectivity a superior way of
writing or observing the world.
Atwood further comments that a woman’s work was never reviewed without
mention of her ‘feminine sensibility,’ while ‘maleness of male poets never
seemed to matter (Second Words
195). When Lowther says, “I
practice love and war,” she is responding to ‘feminine sensibility’ and
‘maleness’ simultaneously, thus taking gender out of the equation; she has
taken a stance against the traditional notion of adhering to one gender
category, commenting on the multiplicity of the writer identity.
The
complex identity of ‘woman writer’ lies in the aggregation of the two
identifiers. As Virginia Woolf
once wrote, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write
fiction” (A Room of One’s Own
4). This “room” is not strictly
meant as physical space, but rather as an ‘identity.’ Separating identity and gender is not a simple task; Simone
de Beauvoir also assigned herself the task of discovering what it means to be a
woman. She wondered, “If the
female function [as a womb] is not enough to define woman, and if we also
reject the explanation of the ‘eternal feminine,’ but if we accept, even
temporarily, that there are women on the earth, we then have to ask: what is a
woman?” (The Second Sex 5). The problem of identifying woman is
fraught with traditional guilt and deeply rooted stereotypes of overt
sentimentality and subjectivity.
Thus, identifying oneself as a ‘woman writer’ is complex in the
separation of ‘woman’ from ‘writer;’ arguably, there is no style of writing
that is implicitly ‘female’ or ‘male.’
The othering of the ‘woman writer’ by her male counterparts and
society’s critique problematizes this separation; the world hesitates for the
‘woman writer’ to extend the role of ‘woman’ into the role of ‘writer’
indefinitely. Atwood poignantly
elucidates the identity problem, saying “no one comes apart this easily;
categories like woman, white, Canadian, writer are only ways of looking at a
thing, and the thing itself is a whole, entire and indivisible. Paradox: woman and writer are separate
categories; but in any individual woman, they are inseparable” (195). The identity of ‘woman writer’ is not
divisible like a math equation, nor is the span in which it reaches punctuated
as in a timeline; it functions on multiple levels.
Lowther
explores the discovery of identity in On
Reading a Poem Written in Adolescence.
She begins with “Couldn’t write then maybe but how I could love”
(1-2). This can be understood as a
reflection on personal youth and growth, but also collectively, “I” as
inclusive of all women. Lowther is
responding not only to the critics of female writing, but also her youthful
insecurities as woman and individual.
Again, the traditional stereotype of tender but brainless female is
provoked, but Lowther turns it on its head, making “love” into something
life-giving and nurturing. She
reflects, “When I said “Tree” my skin grew rough as bark” (3-4), ascribing an
innate connection between language and nature. The connection goes one further
in “all the leaves rushed shouting simmering out of my veins” (5-7). By breathing the word “tree,” she has
made the tree come alive; just as language is a part of her understanding of
identity, so is nature and beauty.
The imagery of ‘mother nature’ reinforces the concept of woman as
nurturer and giver of life, but Lowther has demonstrated that the woman’s love
is at the foundation of creation and thus of language. Put another way, because woman
possesses the innate ability to love mightily, she also innately possesses the
ability to create. Thus, there is
no need to separate the ‘woman’ from the ‘writer;’ they are identifiable as
functioning together. Atwood once
reflected on the anxiety of the woman’s need to choose between being ‘something,’
or being ‘woman.’ She recalls
“They were all assuring me that I didn’t have to get married and have
children. But what I wanted was
someone to tell me I could” (Great
Unexpectations xvi). Lowther echoes
this sentiment in the final lines of On
Reading: “Even now I can almost remember how many hands I had hooked in the
sky” (8-11). The imagery of hands
grasping in the air suggests endless possibility and optimism for the future,
not limited to woman’s traditional role of ‘housewife.’ “Multiple hands” represents multiple endeavors,
and limitless possibility. The role
that memory/temporality plays in the poem is intensified by the repetition of
“I can almost remember.” It is
suggested that it is not her ability for total recall, or objectivity, that is
essential in writing the poem, but rather the subjective, remembrances of shadowy
emotions from the time of her youth that is necessary for her creation.
Lowther’s
poetry and other literary feminist theory suggests that the concept of ‘woman
writer’ is indivisible from its parts, and yet that does not imply that
‘writer’ takes away from any part of being ‘woman.’ The anxieties associated with moving away from traditional
gender roles of women with the movement of feminism and the separation of ‘male
writer’ from ‘female writer’ contributes to a unique concept of ‘woman
writer.’ Rather than ascribing to
the archaic supposition that, “If a woman writer happens to be good, she should
be deprived of her identity as a female and provided with higher (male) status”
(Atwood, Second Words 198), there
needs to be movement towards an understanding of ‘woman writer’ as good in her
own right. Concepts of ‘woman’ and
‘writer’ need not be divided from each other, individually analyzed, then
mashed together again to form a sort of hybrid being seen as deviant in some
way; rather, the sex of the author should not inform the quality of the work,
whether the sex be male or female.
Lowther demonstrates her awareness of the tensions within identity as a
woman and as a writer, and yet makes it possible for the woman to remain
‘woman’ while also being ‘writer.’
Identity, then, is not based on a single signifier; rather it is the
summation of parts of a whole.
