#walkwithwordsmiths

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Part Three: Margaret Atwood

“Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size…For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks” – A Room of Ones Own by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf discusses the phenomena of shrinking women and the prison of the looking glass that patriarchy entraps women within; Margaret Atwood fashions fictional worlds that encompass this idea through the hardships of strong female leads.

Published in 1969, The Edible Woman helped establish Atwood as the renowned literary figure she is today through the feminist themes that are woven through out all of her works.  Infamous for her literary fiction such as The Handmaid’s Tale, Alias Grace, Cat’s Eye and the Blind Assassin, Atwood has recently come out with a collection of poetry. Titled, Dearly, readers get a more intimate glance into Atwood’s personal world, but I personally wasn’t as moved as I had hoped I would be.

While The Handmaid’s Tale and the Testaments have had an enormous impact on the literary canon for both the past and present, my favorite work of Atwood’s is The Edible Woman. It may not be her best, or most exciting, but there is a strange comfort in the mundanity of the prose that reminds me of the first time I read it when I was in high school. Numerous parallels could be made between The Edible Woman and The Bell Jarfor both style and content. The slow unraveling of both protagonists’ minds shapes the narrative as their point of view becomes unreliable. The comparison between these works captures the impalpable quality of how impactful a novel can be even if one could make the argument that nothing eventful really occurs throughout the plot.

The main character, Marian, is somewhat unlikeable. She is plain and submissive to those in her life, encapsulating this virtuous air of femininity that society expects her to exude. Yet, her slow transition into insanity provokes a strong sense of what it looks like to change beneath the surface and have no one notice. Her eating disorder progresses drastically until she can barely eat anything at all, yet Atwood manages not to sensationalize any of these red flags as we are immersed into the main character’s mind. The separation between the mind and body becomes blurred as Mariam begins to hallucinate while balancing the feminine urge to perform to her peers. There’s a consistent disassociation between her inner and outer worlds in the way Marian has surface level interactions with those closest in her life, until she meets a mysterious man who challenges these superficial conventions that control her sense of self. Ultimately, this dichotomy leads to the deterioration that splits her from herself completely.

Her foil character and roommate, Ainsley (her name means to be one’s own meadow), challenges Marian with her controversial views of gender roles, marriage, and raising a child. After tricking a man into impregnating her, Ainsley reveals her homophobic views on masculinity and challenges Marian’s views on sex. Marian fiancée and male friends communicate the sexist views of the 1960s, leaving her place at the table of conversation as empty as her stomach.

I’m sure many people would find the Edible Woman quite boring. However, the upside of having a somewhat bland narrator allows for the world building to come through to concentrate more on the cast of characters and how they contrast the narration. It reminds me of how many argue that Holden in Catcher in the Rye has an unlikeable and dry style of voice, yet I think that’s what makes the plot come together in a unique way. All in all, Margaret Atwood offers a unique perspective in each of her works about how culture informs a woman’s sense of self that has crafted her as one of the ultimate wordsmiths of today and the past.

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Blog Post #8: Carmen Maria Machado

Carmen Maria Machado may be the most inspiring author I’ve read this year. Her two works published by Graywolf Press, Her Body and Other Parties and In the Dream House, have altered any literary convention I once looked up to. Her experimental style integrates a narrator’s inner world with the subjective realities of their external worlds, bringing the reader into the process of navigating how these two spheres collide.

In the Dream House reveals the lack of representation for queer domestic violence and how societal perceptions of abuse are shaped by gender roles. Machado delves into her personal traumas in her memoir when she was living with a partner that verbally abused her and made her concept of safety a fantasy. The secret keeping of abuse and the gradual mental breakdown that occurs crumbles the home they share and Machado’s sense of reality. Machado manages to bend time and space to convey how memory tampers with trauma and our sense of selves. She also integrates these themes throughout her short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties.

My favorite piece of Machado’s work is her short story “the Green Ribbon.” I remember being deeply affected by this story when I was a child before I was old enough to truly understand its deeper meaning. It follows a young married woman with a green ribbon tied around her neck all her life and the only thing she keeps from her husband is why. He tolerates this boundary their whole life until she finally concedes on her death bed to allow him to remove the ribbon, and to his surprise, her head. Machado reconstructed this story that has always stuck with me by interweaving the harsh realities of a woman’s sexuality and how finite a woman’s choices are, even modernly. I was amazed when it was the first thing that I read by Machado and that the first short story in the collection played off this folklore. Machado retitled “the Husband’s Stitch.”

Beyond this story, Her Body and Other Parties interweaves sci-fi narratives with mesmerizing protagonists in worlds not too far off from our own. The stories have pandemic-like concepts with women slowly fading away, a medical procedure that alters women’s bodies leaving behind a ghostly presence, and a narrator who can hear the thoughts of pornography actors. Each are detached from reality in their own unique way, yet the magical elements and experimental themes reinvent a new kind of reality that belongs to each protagonist.

All of Machado’s work is rooted in psychological suspense and dreamy horror that somehow relates back to feminist realities in both her fiction and non-fiction. She has become my favorite writer from this year because of her abilities to blend genres and craft plots that are relatable even in the strangest of horrific realms. I’ve wrote a lot about Carmen Machado this semester already and I’ve told just about all of my friends to read her. Regardless of if you can’t relate to the queer content, her poetic prose builds worlds that draw you in even if you’re not entirely sure where you are.

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Madeline Miller

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Part 6: Franz Kafka

When I was studying abroad, I visited the Kafka Museum in Prague where upon entry the viewer is confronted with a fountain with two statues of naked men facing each other and urinating. While I’m unsure of the exact reasoning behind the installation, the nonsensicalness echoes Kafka’s experimental reputation as a writer. While I was traveling, I was also taking a class on the elusive author of The Metamorphosis. We read his short stories and novels such as The Trial and The Castle, which were a trial itself to get through if I’m being honest. After taking the class, I discovered that Franz Kafka’s short stories and parables don’t get enough attention.

At the start of The Metamorphosis, there is an epigraph called “Before the Law.” It foreshadows the themes hopelessness and bureaucracy that is central to the work and Kafka himself. In the parable, a lost man from the country travels to see “the law” until he approaches an open doorway. He wants to go through, however, the gatekeeper explains that no one is allowed entry. He repeatedly asks to enter only to be met with dismissive replies. The country man attempts to bribe the gatekeeper with all his belongings, which the gatekeeper takes but continues to refuse him. The man waits outside the doorway until he is an old man on his last dying death. Right before he sinks into the afterlife, he asks the gatekeeper why he has never seen another person come to the doorway to seek the law as he has. The gatekeeper replies "No one else could ever be admitted here since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it." The story symbolizes the invisibility and inaccessibility of bureaucracy, and of power itself.

There is a universal sense of surrealism and confusion imbedded into each of Kafka’s works. The pretentious qualifier that makes something “kafka-esque” are dark themes of unfulfillment, the intangibly of bureaucracy and strange happenings that go unexplained. While his protagonists are somewhat empty and bland, it allows for his plots to reflect the strange society and systems to the reader. With mysteriously bland protagonists in bizarre settings, there is an outsider quality tethered to each of Kafka’s works that reveal who he was as a person. As an author, Kafka took experimental risks to defy society’s traditional systems of order. However, in his personal life he was nowhere near as bold.

At the Kafka Museum, a series of his private letters to friends, family, and his excessive number of fiancées were put on display. Even though he was engaged four times, Kafka was never married. After going down was a dark stairway illuminated only by red ominous lighting, the basement of the museum hung his intimate writings in a black room with pictures of his loved ones and literary creations. One of the central and heartbreaking figures to Kafka was the strained relationship he had with his judgmental father. In particular, the uncompassionate father figure in The Metamorphosis mirrors this relationship. Included in these displays at museum was one of his most famous writings titled “Letter to His Father”. Reading over one hundred pages long, Kafka wrote this to his authoritative father to confront him about being a disappointment of a son to him and their ruined their relationship. As painful as the letter reads, his father served as a consistent character throughout most of his fiction and the letter allowed readers to truly know the interworking of Kafka.

After the Kafka Museum I visited his home in Prague. The front door was barely large enough to walk through. Referred to as the Golden Lane, the strip of tiny homes is ironically painted with bright colors of yellow, red, and blue. I took with my frame hunched over in one of the doorways, to convey its smallness and inaccessibility to pass through.

I wrote a short story expanding on Kafka’s parable “Before the Law,” about what it would be like to pass through the threshold and the possibilities of what could lay beyond it. It remains one of my favorite parables because of its mystery and elusiveness. He continues to be a source of inspiration to me because of how different he is from most of the other writers I idolize. I admire how directly the writing of Kafka encapsulates the oppressive systems of bureaucracy and the lack of identity that results in being just another cog in the machine.

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Part 5: Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison asserted that she did not need permission to write but she did need it to be successful at it. Morrison didn’t think of herself as a writer until she was thirty and had her third book published, Song of Solomon. Only after being a senior editor at Knopf for eighteen years did Morrison decide to focus solely on her writing, yet she dismisses the idea that her editing helped her writing or vice versa.  

I began reading my first Morrison book alongside a collection of interviews titled Toni Morrison: Conversations which spans decades across her career in interviews and gives an intimate glance into who she is beyond a writer. While Morrison’s work delves into serious and intimate subjects, she keeps her personal life under lock and key. In one interview, she revealed that her sons disliked growing up with a mother as a writer, and she admits her craft demands being absent. Additionally, the one subject she continuously refused to speak on was her divorce. Many of her narratives explore the inter-personal relationships with African American men and their place in society throughout history. While many of these male characters aren’t always painted in the best light, there is a complexity to each that makes them real. While Morrison is a private person naturally, I wonder if any of her characters are based off of her relationship with her ex-husband and if it could be the deeper reason for her secrecy.  

I started reading Morrison’s first novel,The Bluest Eye, alongside this collection of her interviews which allowed me to meet her through a unique lens. I learned from Conversations that Morrison was misnamed when she gained literary notoriety after submitting the manuscript for The Bluest Eye under the nickname that the editor knew her by, “Toni.” In different interviews, she discusses the consequences of not being able to choose how the world first received her, as she spent the majority of her life as Chloe Anthony Wofford. I’m sure the pressure to have a consistent pen name after the success of her first novel was a vital factor in why she chose to continue to publish under her nickname. Yet, Morrison examines how she has reclaimed this lack of control on her own terms.

Learning about Morrison’s writing process was especially interesting to me as she has an extremely thorough process for fleshing out a new narrative. Morrison specializes in dialogue. Conversations allowed me to hear directly from the author how much care goes into crafting each voice and how lengthy of a timeline that can be. She writes that a character becomes real to her when she falls in love with them. The task of telling these character’s stories unfolds as she gets to know them better. One of the most impactful aspects of Morrison’s process to me was that not writing is an important part of the developing the idea. She explained that once she was thinking about writing a book for three years and even though she didn’t write a word of it at the time, it was still an important part of its creation. It’s comforting to know that quality over quantity was always the priority for Morrison and that being patient with oneself is integral while discovering what a new piece of writing can be. 

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Part Four: Sylvia Plath

Before I read Sylvia Plath, I knew of her suicide.

It’s unfortunate how many famous writers don’t attain the happily ever after readers would for them. Even more interesting is that most of these emotive writers don’t write those types of stories anyway.

The legacy of Plath’s tragic demise has often been confused with Virginia Woolf’s suicide, who filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself in a river. Plath is known for “sticking her head in the oven,” after sealing the room off with wet towels from her sleeping children in the next room because of the failure of her marriage. I find it equally disturbing and strange that many people conflate these women not for their incredible talent but because of their heartbreaking ends.

Incidentally, Virginia Woolf had a large influence on Plath’s work and served as a major role model for her. Woolf was born fifty years before Plath, yet for both authors their mental health journeys informed their literary works. Evidently there was no medical help available for either of these struggling women who were labeled to have “hysteria” rather than real mental disorders. Plath had numerous suicide attempts, her first one at the age of twenty which she survived and was sent to a mental institution where she received electro-shock therapy. Her experience largely informed the narrative arc of The Bell Jar which follows Esther Greenwood as her mental state slowly expires. Esther’s identity largely hinges on being successful academically and when she no longer has anything to bring her fulfillment, she decides to spend the summer writing a novel. There are drastic parallels between Plath and her main character as they attempt to cope with their mental health. The Bell Jar was published in 1963 and was Plath’s only published novel which remains an essential staple in the canon

Plath is also extremely well known for her poetry, specifically from her two famous collections Ariel and The Colossus. I’ve read some of Plath’s poetry before, but I haven’t sunken my teeth into it as much as I’d like to. The Colossus was Plath’s first collection of poetry, and she wrote Ariel at the end of her lifetime shortly before she committed suicide. An unviersal theme present throughout her work is surviving the confines of womanhood at a time where mental disorders were denied, and a woman’s voice was rarely believed.

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Part Two: Virginia Woolf

On summer days before the pandemic, I’d take the six uptown to 69th street and sit on the bench adorned with Joan Didion’s husband name. I felt myself trying to open the gate to who she was, fingering the wooden slates beneath me. I wondered when the last time she sat here was.

I people watched for a while, allowing my body to be present as my mind wandered. As I surveyed the passing faces shuffling in and out of Central Park, I recognized every individual experiencing their own reality and how different each much be from my own. I wondered what each person was thinking if they wrote in their head as I did when I walked. I stood up, continuing down the path deeper into the park.

 In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf forces the internal and the external to converge on her walk along “Oxbridge.” She toggles between the maze of her own thoughts about history, gender equality, and a woman’s place within literature as she walks down a physical path, experiencing life as she simultaneously analyzes it. She is famous for her quote, “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Woolf explores the importance of women writers through the scope of what it was like breaking through this glass ceiling during the 1920s. She asserts that “For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.” Poverty is an intrinsic part of the oppression of woman and why literature was male dominated for the majority of history. And yet, the power of words of women still managed to make its presence known despite all odds.

One of my favorite quotes from A Room of One’s Own is that “women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size…For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks” (36).  Woolf immortalizes the role of women in fiction and in domestic roles by displaying how these social hierarchies reinforce the powerlessness of women. I believe her tone is generally neutral, or emotionless because that was the only way that she could be heard. To separate oneself from one’s sex requires a worldview that is beyond themselves; Woolf’s perspective allows her to transcend the unjust time period she was born into. Instead of harping with cynicism, she looks toward the prospect of when the voices of future women writers will create more opportunities for the next generation.

Something Woolf and Didion share is the idea of genderless writing. During Didion’s journalistic rise during the 1960s, she approaches complex topics of the world with a similar judgement of impartiality that made her gain her rightful position as a key figure in literature. An important distinction within this concept of genderless writing is that this inherently is skewed towards gaining male approval in the landscape of literature.

In today’s terms, “genderless writing” takes on a whole new meaning as our culture and people become less binary. At the time, Woolf was criticized for her writing being too “flowery” or emotional. However, this is what makes her writing strong in my opinion. Didion managed to avoid that critic as she has learned from the women that came before her. Today, I think this concept is still important for the purpose of separating one’s identity from their writing in order to understand the world beyond just our experience within it.

When I’m in Central Park, I walk with Didion. When I need to be present, I walk with Woolf. I’m inspired by the way they have created a space for my words and taught me what to do with them. I pass their names on the covers of Central Park readers and stroke their binds as I walk through the library. I’ll write to them in my mind and sit where they sat until I can learn enough to walk like a wordsmith on my own.

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Part One: Joan Didion

When I first moved to New York, I’d imagine myself walking down Park Ave and bumping into Joan Didion. Somehow, she is both young and old in my memory; her face reminiscent of her youth in the 1960s paired with the well-deserved wrinkles of the present. Today, at the age of eight-six, she remains frail yet strong. Didion maintains a pleasant balance of grace, wit, and formidability which her writing perfectly coalesces.

Didion has written an incredible amount in the last sixty years between her novels, essays, articles and more. The first thing I read by her was The White Album, which is a collection of essays revolving around the era of 1960’s panic and the vibrant spirit of her homeland of California. One of my favorite lines from this book is “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” which foreshadows much of what she talks about in her later memoirs. Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem takes on similar themes of capturing the magic of Hollywood as well as investigates more personal topics such as “On Keeping a Notebook,” “On Self-Respect,” or “On Morality.” No matter what she writes, Didion manages to be a reliable narrator for various eras of the past, painting the complexities of these ages with both care and precision.

One of my favorite threads that Didion weaves throughout her work is her ability to create an intimate portrait of a topic while not asserting too much of herself into a piece. Joan Didion represents a great example of what Virginia Woolf has coined as “genderless writing.” The definition of what that means is a very different discussion today, but nevertheless, sixty years ago it was still extremely difficult for women to ascend within industry let alone one based on sharing one’s voice as a woman. I think Didion’s style has been shaped by wanting to be taken seriously as a writer which has inevitably been impacted by the need at that time for women’s writing to be “unemotional.” She managed to assert her poignant opinions amidst a time of massive social change and unrest which makes her career even the more impressive.

My personal favorite within Didion’s body of work is her memoir A Year of Magical Thinking. It has received massive critical acclaim and was even adapted to become a Broadway show in 2007. The topic of the book revolves around the sudden death of her husband and the way grief distorts the chronology of time. A Year of Magical Thinking encapsulates Didion’s first year without her husband and she utilizes writing this book as a way to cope and process the reality of having their life together abruptly cut short. She manages to represent how death can make the brain imagine fictional, sometimes magic, things during times of suffering despite writing style being direct and logical.

Six years after A Year of Magical Thinking, Didion wrote Blue Nights about the death of her adopted daughter. While both of these books are extremely heartbreaking, Didion stuns me in her ability to traumatically lose her family and still write in a detached yet intimate way about her life. Didion’s documentary, The Center Will Not Hold, harnesses this complex equilibrium that is her writing to me; she manages to be vulnerable without being overtly emotional.  While she remains one of the most renowned literary figures that I look up to, I also admire her as a person for her strength and resilience.

Joan Didion serves as the first member on our walks with wordsmiths. Occasionally, this will entail literal walks but also a walk through these author’s mind as they carve a path through my own.