Heilbrun and Anxiety of Authorship

To be honest, I completely misinterpreted Carolyn Heilbrun’s essay when I first read it. For some reason, I mistook her to be positing that the cultural limitations that restricted a woman’s agency gave her a different kind of agency all together. I came at this with a sort of hindsight bias. Now that women have come much closer to equality, I saw the filtered writing of oppressed women as making a statement in itself. By not expressing how they truly felt, the women were making a point. This is a nice analysis from my retrospective, but it is really not relevant to the agency of women writers during the time that they lived. They undoubtedly wanted to exercise their agency, but were restricted. Their lack of agency is not a type of agency in itself, it is simply an injustice.

Once I came to understand that Heilbrun was expressing her frustration with the lack of a strong female writing tradition, I began to make connections. Women have always been subjugated into the role of passivity. Heilbrun is calling for a new subject position to be filled by women in literature. She wants a new tradition in which women can assert their power and their true opinions without being seen as shrill. Women who did assert themselves had their authority undermined by such derogatory descriptions. Heilbrun acknowledges this and expresses serious concern.

As soon as I understood this, I noticed that Heilbrun’s ideas closely paralleled those of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s regarding anxiety of authorship . Gilbert and Gubar explain Harold Bloom’s “necessarily patriarchal” concept of anxiety of influence (Gilbert and Gubar 47). He uses the term to describe the challenges that a writer (in his case, a poet) faces when creating. It is the writer’s job to invalidate his forefathers. (Note the term forefathers). He must be aware of the tradition that precedes him and improve it in order to make a name for himself. This desire to be better creates a sort of anxiety. The problem with this idea, however, is that it is only relevant to the male writer. A long tradition of notable writing exists…from male authors. There is much writing foundation to reference and build upon…for male authors. There is a place for a long line of…well, you get the idea. Gilbert and Gubar’s point is that the female writer isn’t even given the chance to experience this anxiety. There is no tradition for her to build upon, no predecessors to invalidate. This creates a whole different realm of anxiety in itself. The woman writer experiences an anxiety of authorship, the fear that she cannot create at all. Why wouldn’t she fear this? No woman has accomplished it before, so how in the world can she? The female writer must overcome this devastating anxiety to assert herself and her voice.

There is no doubt in my mind that Gilbert and Gubar are expressing just how Heilbrun feels. This is the anxiety that the women she speaks of face. What I find most interesting is that Heilbrun’s Writing a Woman’s Life was published after Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic. For some reason, I immediately assumed the chronology was the other way around. To me, it seems like Heilbrun is expressing what troubles her most and Gilbert and Gubar are theorizing that an almost identical fear. They even attempt to provide a solution to this struggle, asserting that women writers must kill the docile and aesthetic ideal through which they were killed into art. However, Heilbrun clearly found not solace in this solution, as it is far from simple. This ideal has been ingrained into the minds of women throughout all of history. I can almost picture Heilbrun reading Gilbert and Gubar’s words and feeling so helpless. By saying this, I do not mean to perpetuate this crippling picture of feminine weakness. Rather, I can sympathize with her dismay. We are aware of this injustice but we are unsure of how to overcome it. She must have found the task of overcoming the anxiety of authorship impossible, at least in the present cultural climate, and I can understand that.

Gilbert and Gubar paint a picture of a social landscape in which women in literature are defined by their place in one of two categories: the angel and the monster. There is no middle ground. The ideal woman is a model of “selflessness and purity of heart”, she is an angel (Gilbert and Gubar 22). The monster woman is she who asserts herself and her power. She proves to be a threat to male authority so she is demonized in hopes of discouraging her and other women who behave like her. Women who attempted the pen were cast in this role of the monster or freak. They did not belong. Gilbert and Gubar assert that the female writer must kill these stereotypes in order to break free of the anxiety of authorship and to be a strong and independent female writer.

It is clear, however, that this was so incredibly difficult for women. These polar female archetypes were present all around and even pervaded much female writing. This is how the female writer understood herself to be, and so she incorporated it into her work, unconsciously perpetuating the stereotype. This is what Heilbrun discusses. Women automatically edited their autobiographies to be pleasant rather than truthful, to fulfill the role of angel rather than, God forbid, monster. The cultural limitations that women must break free of are so implicit to their understandings of the world and their place in it that women continue to perpetuate it, often unknowingly. While Gilbert and Gubar call for women to “kill the angel [and the monster] in the house”, Heilbrun finds no answers as to how the female writer is to do this (Gilbert and Gubar 17). This is what troubles her.

Making this connection has helped me better understand Heilbrun’s message, but it obviously has not provided me with any answers. I have gotten no further than she has and I find myself looking for something more.

--Morgan

Afterthought: For a good literary depiction of anxiety of authorship, look at Virgina Woolf's character Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse. She seems to overcome it in the end, finishing her painting. This underscores Woolf's bold feminism. Her book A Room of One's Own would also make for exceptional further reading.