on monsters
Is womanhood at odds with the kind of obsession society praises?
I’ve been haunted by a particular genre of TikTok video lately: that of the day in the life of a high-achieving housewife. The woman in question is usually both attractive and intelligent, and narrates her life to us, the audience, with a candid mix of humility, resignedness, and optimism. She lives in an extravagantly expensive house. She has cute children, probably two or three, whom she shepherds to school and to their extracurricular activities. She has help, a nanny and/or a housekeeper. She cleans, she sometimes cooks, she arranges flowers, she buys things. In short, she uses her intelligence and competence to enable her husband’s life. In the particular video I’m thinking of, the woman ends by saying that this wasn’t necessarily the life she aspired to have, but her husband’s (important! high-flying! much praised) career has required a lot of sacrifice. And she’s realized, in the end, that she’s realizing her dreams by helping him realize his.
Reader, watching this made me want to scream and keep screaming. Maybe it’s true that this woman has a great life, an enviable life. I certainly wouldn’t deny that she’s incredibly privileged. But I also think that it’s important to realize that helping someone achieve their dreams is not the same thing as achieving your own. Or put another way, making someone else the focus of your ambition is not the same as having a self-centered, work-centered ambition. The two are different. One is selfish, the other is selfless. And lately I’ve been thinking: why is it so difficult—maybe impossible—for women to put their art and work above all else in their lives?
One example: the number of women who cook vastly outnumbers the number of men who cook. And yet less than 10% of Michelin-starred chefs are female. I believe this is because, as Jenny Offill put it, women rarely become art monsters. From Dept. of Speculation: “My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.” Instead of being Nabokov, women become Vera: relegated to playing the supporting role in someone else’s life.
When we look at history, so many great men of art and science have pursued their passions brazenly, navigating the world tunnel-visioned with the help of a woman, oftentimes women.
There are so, so many of these men freckled throughout history. Paul Erdős, a renown mathematician characterized by his eclectic genius and all-consuming obsession with math, didn’t butter his own toast until he was an adult. There are several stories recounting how he often offloaded domestic or non-math related tasks to the women in his life.1 He was so productive that mathematicians created the Erdős number to denote the collaborative distance between an academic and Erdős (many of the most successful mathematicians have a median Erdős number of 3).2 The man worked more hours than he slept.
T. S. Eliot, Samuel Clemens, and Tolstoy had their wives review and edit their manuscripts. F. Scott Fitzgerald stole his wife’s writing and passed it off as his own.3 In other words, he betrayed his love’s trust for his greater love: writing.
All of these prolific geniuses in devotional service to their craft were monsters. Writer Claire Dederer: “[t]he female writers I know yearn to be more monstrous. They say it in off-hand, ha-ha-ha ways: ‘I wish I had a wife.’ What does that mean, really? It means you wish to abandon the tasks of nurturing in order to perform the selfish sacraments of being an artist.”4
It’s very telling how ‘wife’ is used here — a feminine partner is defined as a role of service, assistance. A wife is the antonym of a monster in this context. For a male art monster (or more generally: a craft monster), his female counterpart serves as an extension of him making sure the roads of his megalomania are slick and unblocked. He’d never see marriage as an obstacle to his craft because his concept of it would be one that would center around his obsession, be secondary to it. Charles Darwin created a pros and cons list to help him decide whether to marry Emma. He was worried about how marriage would impact his work, citing a con as “terrible loss of time” and a pro as “someone to do the housework”.5 He questioned whether marriage would prevent him from being monstrous. Now I’m thinking about Thomas Bernhard’s Wertheimer6, a tortured pianist who held his sister captive to become his personal page-turner. When she up and left, he felt betrayed. Up until his death, he was plagued by the thought: how could she not sacrifice her life for my legacy? Again, could a female Wertheimer believably exist even in fiction?
Kafka’s hunger artist7, a masochistic performer whose life and craft were one, was a monster. He was the quintessential male artist, his existence was fueled by a personal distaste and took nothing else into consideration. He lived a singular existence that revolved around his preferences, his craft and its audience.
I don’t think Kafka’s hunger artist could’ve been a woman. He was selfish and women aren’t allowed to really, truly be. Both by society and by themselves. Look, I know that both men and women love, but what we’re allowed to love and the intensity with which we’re allowed to love differ wildly. Women of genius swelter under what I like to call the uniquely gendered spotlight. They face criticism unrelated to their art or the content they produce because they are doing something human as a human with an asterisk, as society sees it: a woman. Women can’t sideline the future roles they’re ascribed-at-birth (motherhood, wifedom) for their craft without consequence. Dederer again:
“This is what female monstrousness looks like: abandoning the kids. Always. The female monster is Doris Lessing leaving her children behind to go live the writer’s life in London. The female monster is Sylvia Plath, whose self-crime was bad enough, but worse still: the children whose nursery she taped off beforehand. Never mind the bread and milk she set out for them, a kind of terrible poem unto itself. She dreamed of eating men like air, but what was truly monstrous was simply leaving her children motherless.
[…] As a female writer, you don’t kill yourself, or abandon your children. But you abandon something, some nurturing part of yourself.”
Dederer mentions Lessing and Plath but I’m also thinking of Martha Argerich, one of the greatest pianists alive. Years before I knew her story, I’d listen to Argerich and wonder what she let fall wayside to achieve such greatness. She admittedly failed her firstborn Lyda in pursuit of her craft, her daughter Stéphanie documented her unconventional practice of motherhood in the film Bloody Daughter. In it Stéphanie poses the question to her mother: “often people say it’s impossible to be a mother and to lead an artist’s life, do you think it’s possible?” Argerich replies “I don’t know,” and goes on to say that in a couple (presumably consisting of a man and woman), it’s especially difficult. What Argerich likely meant is what Dederer wrote of — that being a wife or a mother is seen as being at odds with any other role that might transcend it. Existing in service of something other than a human being is incompatible with womanhood as it has been defined.
Argerich’s later, more successful attempts at mothering during the height of her career were made possible with the help of a cohesive community. A group of friends, artists, and au pairs who stayed at her homebase to help with childrearing while she was on tour. Maybe that’s what it takes.
From a profile on the artist Celia Paul, Rachel Cusk writes:
“Can a woman artist — however virtuosic and talented, however disciplined — ever attain a fundamental freedom from the fact of her own womanhood? Must the politics of femininity invariably be accounted for, whether by determinedly ignoring them or by deliberately confronting them? The latter is a fateful choice that can shape an artist’s life and work; but does the former — the avoidance of oneself as a female subject — inevitably compromise the expressive act?”
When any kind of performer is a woman, a new dimension is added to the way her performance is both received and anticipated. When men make art about their lives, it’s seen as honest and urgent (see: Karl Ove Knausgaard). When women make art about their lives, it’s sidelined as art that focuses on “female interiority” or (somewhat disparagingly) “women’s fiction.” If women’s creations are overshadowed by their pre-ordained woman-ness, it’s not a surprise that great women’s greatness is. It’s not yet possible for a woman to create and do so passionately, without concern for much else, outside of the gendered spotlight but maybe it will be.