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Feminist Writing: Working with Women's Experience Author(s): Frigga Haug Source: Feminist Review, No. 42, Feminist Fictions (Autumn, 1992), pp. 16-32Published by: Palgrave Macmillan JournalsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1395126Accessed: 09-05-2015 18:51 UTC

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FEMINIST WRITING: Working with Women's Experience Frigga Haug

For some years black and feminist would-be revolutionaries have also been trying to influence the curricula outside their ghetto. A favourite object of attack are the lists of books, knowledge of which many American high schools require from students in their first and second semesters. (J. von Uthmann, in FAZ, 19.2.92)

The author mentions Cscandalous' examples like the inclusion of Sappho, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf on the official curriculum. The thought that makes the author shudder, the improvement of the world through literature, gives us cause for hope.

Here, my interest in recent feminist literature is concerned with the following questions. How is knowledge, as the precondition of the capacity for action, made possible, and why is it that today feminist writing takes up this task in an exemplary way? Novels *om the 1980s by Marge Piercy, Barbara Wilson and Sarah Schulman form the basis of my reflections. Model analyses refer to two novels by Marge Piercy.

Experience and theory

The political project as problem of knowledge and mediation The theoretical level appears appropriate to the search for knowledge. The concept, by abstracting from multicoloured diversity provides an understanding of the issue, present information about what is essential provides orientation and allows a great deal to be disregarded and certain things to be retained. Experience, interest and commit- ment are part of the process of abstraction. The feminist critique of traditional concept-formation aims above all at the neglect of female experiences and the consequent false universality of theory and

Feminist RevFew No 42, Autumn 1992


Feminist Writing 17

categories, and in particular at the androcentrism of centuries of occidental theory.

The wearisome problem that follows from such a critique is the necessity of expressing women's experiences, of finding concepts, of reconstructing theories, of renewal. Contained within that there is, among other things, the problem of establishing a relationship at all between the levels of experience and theory. We have been trying for more than a decade, with work on memory in various women's projects,l to close the gap between female experience and theoretical understanding. The work is difficult and advances only very slowly.


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By contrast, a glance at recent feminist literature makes me feel as if I'm flying. Whole continents of women's experience are being opened up. So I take an interest in such literature in order to gain knowledge as much as for pleasure, and ask in what way women's experiences are worked up, brought to speak, and what new theoretical knowledge can be gained in this way.

There is also the further attraction that, at the level of literature, insights and knowledge are much more easily conveyed than at the level of theory. Or to quote Barbara Wilson (in connexion with thrillers):

One of my initial reasons for wanting to write mysteries was that I was politically involved in a lot of things. I thought it would be interesting to combine politics with an entertaining genre, so that you could have people discussing something in your novel, and the reader instead of putting the book down and saying, Oh, this is too didactic, would keep tuloing the pages. (McIntosh, 1991)

Literature and experience 1: the family In what follows I shall proceed by first of all determining on a theoretical level the context which, in my opinion, finds expression in the novel. Irrespective of whether the authors themselves actually construct their novels in such a way as to translate theoretical knowledge into experiences, I present the individual experiences in the literature translated into theoretical theses. In a third step I test which other insights, which displacements of problems become possible with the route through literature.

The two themes, the experiences dealt with in the novels, are family and abortion, two equally old and by now somewhat leathery themes of the women's movement, but ones which have been thoroughly worked through theoretically.

Marge Piercy, for example, in her novel Fly Away Home (1986), writes about the difficult process, as a woman, of achieving individuality. It is common in the women's movement to understand the family form as fundamentally a prison for women. Theoretically we could formulate it like this, that 'women must overthrow the bourgeois nuclear family, in order to establish their personality' (Haug and Hauser, 1988: 59). But theoretical insight into the limiting form does not connect simply to liberatory, mould-breaking practice. Even where analytical theses do, happily, intersect with personal experience, individual women do not necessarily succeed in linking their desires with their thoughts. The liberatory theses become literally unconvincing. Our theoretical assumptions refer to the construction of women as subjects, to the relation of separation between public and private, to the family as form of reproduction and the division of labour secured by it and vaguely to an overarching social structure.

Let us remind ourselves how Piercy writes about the same context. First of all we meet Daria, a good-looking, happy, successful woman of the American middle class who is approaching middle age. She is on a


Feminist Writing 19

flight home from a television broadcast in which, as usual, she skilfully presented her recipes (how as a working mother do I prepare, in only twenty minutes, a tasty and attractive meal for my family or my guests?) to her family (husband and two nearly adult daughters). Again and again she tells herself how happy she is, what a wonderful family she has, in contrast, for example, to her mother, who used herself up for her family, allowed herself to be dominated and deceived by her husband and was always unhappy; who put aside the finest things for a possible other life, who bided her time for so long, that she died waiting. Daria herself married up. Since then the movement has been inexorably upwards, for example into ever-larger houses. Social life too (rep- resented by discerning guests at suppers exquisitely prepared by Daria) is satisfying. There is no resentment on her part at having to prepare all these meals, on the contrary, she loves it; it makes her important. Page after page familiarizes us with the happiness ofthe family. Good temper and cheerful considerateness are presented to us at such length, until the interminable nullity, boredom, dreariness and untruthfulness of this idyll overwhelms us as a kind of pain at words and reading. Then her husband's decision comes like a bolt of lightning from a clear sky: he hands the family a whole pile of expensive Christmas presents (his wife for example, gets two dressing-gowns at once) plus the application for a separation. The pace of the novel changes. The wife's initial despair turns into the woman's self-doubt: what has the other woman got that I haven't got? This feverish curiosity develops in two stages. The search for the other woman, which actually does take place as an undercover chase through streets and cafes and the discovery of whom does not lead to anything of interest, turns into an investigation of the actions of the man, who becomes more and more a stranger the closer she gets to him. She has to admit that she really has never been interested in him- so that his reproach was true - in what he, as a successful lawyer, did outside the family home. Looking for money spent on the lover, she finds huge amounts of money moved between accounts, a large proportion even using her maiden name, and for which she has no explanation. The original jealousy turns into an assiduous investigation of his deeds in the world of business and politics. The woman steps out of the private sexual relationship and begins to understand gender relationships as relationships of production in general, as a system which permeates the whole society.

The man comes back one more time, proceeds entirely as a matter of course to the former common bedroom and bed, and she, just as straightforwardly, trusts his desire for a particularly extravagant dessert, which she spends considerable time preparing; because of the subsequent impossibility of shared enjoyment this proves, however, to be a foolish waste of time.

Piercy works with the ambiguity of words. Daria finds allies in other people whom the man also deceived - tenants, whom he did everything in his power to turn out of their homes - and with whose help she uncovers extremely nasty property deals, going as far as the tacit


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acceptance of murder. Being well brought up, she asks the tenants demonstrating against her husband's company into her home, so that she can prevent the disturbance coming to the attention of the neighbours and so avoid unpleasant gossip. Black people, the un- employed, the poor and the parents of large families behave so incongruously in her orderly living-room with its thick carpet, that after a while she herself no longer fits in.

In her search for the truth not only does the husband in his business deals, which he embarked upon after he was unsuccessful as a candidate for political office, become ever more unfamiliar; she recognizes herself as someone who, in her hunger for security and safety and the harmony of her home, has helped to produce that terrible outside world full of calculation and sordidness. In the rest of the novel she changes everything: her relationship to herself and others and to the world; the shape of her life - more than thirty people a day go in and out of her new apartment, which is much smaller than her house was; her relationship to her daughters, to her new partner and the balancing of her activities - she takes her job seriously and in contrast to before also counts what she earns, because she depends on it; indeed, even her well-brought-up, well-tempered self is transformed into a more vulgar, impetuous and passionate person. She even learns to exercise violence, where it is necessary.

Literature and theory If we consider literature not according to the criteria of aesthetics or literary theory, but as material from which social scientific knowledge can be gained, then our theoretical presuppositions about the field in which Piercy writes will be expanded, deepened and shifted in a number of ways.

There is first of all our conception that women's feelings for or against the family are contradictory and that therefore clear decisions and actions are made impossible. Piercy writes differently about feelings. The principal character lives the individual emotions one after the other. At first there is only consent, comfort, approval and pride - contrary feelings are shifted on to the historically earlier person of the mother. That the daughter is happy in the same form in which the mother only experienced unhappiness, allows the reader to undermine in advance the possible attitude of understanding happiness and unhappiness as something for which people are themselves entirely responsible, and that the point, therefore, is to pose against the experience with the happy parental family one's own quite different happy family. Happiness is as deceptive as the husband is a deceiver. Yet Piercy does not incite us to recognize the feelings of happiness, jealousy and of being deceived as false and to be denounced. On the contrary, she demonstrates that they can be pacified within the family form, as long as the form itselfholds, and that they only turn against the individual as false hopes at the point of inevitable rupture. In another


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order which breaks the moorings and appropriations of the family, however, they acquire a different strength and a different significance. No element, no dimension is simply dismissed as incorrect, but all change their value for the principal character and her life. This is the second thesis.

From the point of view of the wife, the husband appears as good, considerate and in order as long as she remains within the given order. But he can also ensure that she has to get out of the given order. As soon as he leaves her and gives the family notice - whereupon he also immediately wants to sell the house because it's too big- those actions of hers which were previously valued as normal become absurd, superfluous, wrong. On her shopping day she does not know how much she should buy and why. She learns to live with a feeling of constant pain. Piercy draws the familiar into processes of transformation and so shows how lessons can be learned. In the scene in which the tenants threatened by her husband appear in a small demonstration in front of her house, the concept and feeling of neighbourhood are transformed. The five people first of all introduce themselves as the Save Our Neighhourhood group. ";What neighbourhood? I don't understand." One thing she was sure of was that they weren't her neighbours.' Even this brief remark shows the concept of neighbour to be a class concept and Daria knows that she is on the opposite side from those tenants who are not her neighbours. Piercy strengthens this certainty by a carefully distanced description of the individuals from Daria's point of view and the subsequent loss of ambiguity, resulting from their attack on her neighbourhood. The 'fat woman' says, "'We're bringing your shame home to you. You ruin our neighbourhood, so we're going to cause a little trouble for you in yours . . . Come on guys, let's make some noise."' (Piercy, 1986:106) The concepts 'at home' and 'neighbourhood' are not simply class concepts, nevertheless they are antagonistically occupied. Belonging determines what is proper to any person. So Daria immediately knows what she has to do. Piercy shows us that this knowledge is something she owes her husband. And although the latter is in the process of withdrawing himself from her life, she seems more than ever called upon to produce this intact world of'at home' and 'neighbourhood'.

She did not want them parading in front of the house. Ross would be absolutely furious. Everybody on the street had doubtless seen them already and registered the information on the instantaneous gossip radar of the neighbourhood . . . It was her duty to defuse this scene . . . She must get supper started and she must deal quickly with them. Ross would be pleased by her quiet and efficient handling of a potentially nasty situation. She would disarm them by showing she had nothing whatsoever to hide. She would do the last thing they expected and thus lighten the confrontation and incidentally get them out of view of her neighbours. 'Look, I insist there's been a mistake, but why argue out here? Come inside and let's sit down and talk.' (106)


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Daria employs the acquired phrases of politeness and decency. In her inner dialogue she assures herself not of her own feelings, but of the necessity of her actions in terms of the anticipated feelings of her husband. It's important not to make him angry or, rather, the other way round, to make him happy. His evening meal has to be made. Where her own will is mentioned it has already distanced itself from the domestic neighbourhood which is now defined as gossip-laden and as an instance of control. Daria does her well-brought-up best, she turns the demonstrators into guests and invites them in. Piercy, in this short scene, shows how the Cweapons' which this woman, who made a good marriage, still wants to employ on her husband's behalf and for his protection, are, in a crisis, turned round against her. Inviting the not-neighbours into her own home, in order to hide them from her neighbours, becomes the beginning of her transformation into one of the others. Wherever she now develops feelings, she must interrogate herself, since, right after she allowed the strangers into the intimate sphere, it turns out that 'Ross' is far from Chappy', but on the contrary viewed this action as a further instance of estrangement, and reason for him to spend the night away from home. She needs more information which she can only find with the help of these demonstrators. She opens her eyes and sees that the longed-for return of the normality of career, growing wealth and power is a deception at the cost of the lives of other people, including herself. Her participation in only his life at home gives him the possibility of sealing the squandering of other lives into the foundation of his progress. By being blind to the world, insofar as it was not her home, she contributed to circumstances in which the lack of housing, indeed the absent right to home and life for many, was part of business calculation. By renouncing herself, renunciation becomes an attitude which he, the husband, can demand of anyone and everyone, without him even noticing it. She must escape her innocence, in which she remains guilty of not being a living person. Only at the court proceed- ings, as indignation rather than despair determines her feelings, does she learn that his estimation of her work as TV cook was as low as her own, a circumstance that led her to carefully plan such activity around his daily timetable; she cooked and froze small portions in advance, if she had to leave him Cunprovided for'. He, on the other hand, simply used her earnings for daily expenditure, so that at the time of the divorce his own income, untouched by everyday concerns, also appeared as property saved by, and due to, him alone, as foundation of his power. She recognizes too late that he could always check what she earned and spent, but that she never knew what he did, either financially or otherwise. Even the banal accusation from everyday married life, that one party is not 'interested' in the other does not, for example receive literary confirmation as being quarrelsome and superfluous. Rather, Piercy shows that the accusation is not only justified, but that just such uninterest contains the possibility of everyday wrongdoing. Here, too, insight is gained by shifting the usual order in which accusations and feelings are cultivated. So we do not learn about the context of the active


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reproduction of oppression, that, for example, women have the wrong feelings, nor that they simply co-operate in the history of domination. Nevertheless, through the binding of life hopes and emotions to the form of the nuclear family, these so indispensable desires for happiness and the longing for life are turned into callous forerunners of unhappiness and renunciation of life. This affects not only individual women but is itself a condition for exploitation and injustice to flourish in general.

The method by which Piercy allows her figures to gain knowledge is, in a way, through social disaster. Old feelings, explanations, actions and ways of behaving are inappropriate in altered constellations. Daria - as in the scene quoted above - has more and more often the feeling that she no longer knows 'the right thing to do', or that when she does 'the right thing', something wrong comes out of it. She begins to lack credibility in every way, even though earlier her credibility as wife was never at issue, was not in itself a value. Only in the community of deceived tenants can words and feelings, attitudes and actions be developed as belonging together, as being her own at all. The husband literally has to get out of the house for her not to exclusively reflect his anticipated expectations, but to develop a standard of her own. So we learn that there is a relationship between one's own regard for oneself and the disregard of others and, therefore, that the inability to respect oneself does not cause rebelliousness against the disrespect of others. However, the inability to form an individuality of one's own and to assert it with self-confidence is of no consequence, as long as it remains enclosed within the diverse demands of the family. In this way, Piercy seems to indicate that the relationship between the sexes stands protectively in front of, and makes us blind both to self-recognition, and to recognition of gender relations in society. So the phrase that love makes blind, enters life in this displaced way.

For a while, there was a debate, particularly within the socialist women's movement, as to which class or stratum married women really belonged: to that of their husbands or, rather, since they do not dispose of their husband's assets at all, to the next lowest group or even to the exploited? Although such questions were posed for political and strategic reasons, they were fundamentally academic and had no consequences. But Piercy shows, both in the novel outlined above, as well as in others, that questions as to social belonging can nevertheless be very practical ones. For her marriage and the subsequent step-by- step upward climb in status, Daria, the principal character in Fly Away Home has acquired the corresponding manner. Appearance, temper- ament, education, way of speaking, desires and feelings, they are all fitted together as if fixed in the mould of the family. Since, despite professional activity in the social world, almost nothing of that really belongs to her after her husband decides he wants a divorce, all these dimensions stand around her like foreign bodies, or turn their activities against her, as with the problem of the demonstrators brought into the house. Her manner has literally lost its function, just as she has become property without an owner. So she joins together with others, who are


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propertyless and own nothing. The predictable male recourse to her as a possibly ownerless piece of property is first of all made impossible, since she moves in with a woman, a Puerto Rican with a child, who has been made homeless by the machinations of Daria's former husband. Piercy shows, through frequent changes of position of 'property' and its varying meaning, that a woman only becomes mistress of herself if, together with other propertyless people, she tries to achieve access to the property ofthis world (insofar as it is needed-for housing, for example). In other circumstances, in which use is the general regulator, ownership as means of power and domination becomes property in a pathetic sense. To that extent, Piercy does not make things so simple for us, by taking up a position against property or for the propertyless. Instead, she suggests contesting property in its existing form. And strategically, she seems to suggest that, for women, alliances should not be looked for in the dominant culture and its representatives, but with all those who have dropped out of the dominant patterns or have not been admitted to them in the first place. In other novels she deals with the various groupings of the left from the 1960s to the 1980s, with hippies, draft dodgers, terrorists, socialist students. Frequently her central char- acters have come out of a diverse ethnic mixture, in which their beauty is ascribed to the share of groups especially discriminated against - for example, Jewish-Asian or American Indian-Irish, Black-Chinese and so on.

The numerous additional and displaced theoretical dimensions of our theme of women's oppression and family form do not themselves emerge as theses, but as a narrative about a particular woman's life. That makes it lively and provocative. But does this not at the same time demonstrate a certain arbitrariness and limitation which therefore still means it is far removed from real knowledge? Or put another way: does this not pose once again in a quite exemplary fashion the problem of just how theoretical insight can be gained from individual experience? Piercy does not provide us with an answer to that. After all, she's writing literature and not an academic paper on the subject. But we can derive one possible answer from the ordering of the literary material. The novel is written in such a way that it invites taking up a relationship, as woman, with the central character Daria. At the same time it is made impossible for this to take place as simple identification, because Daria constantly finds herself in new constellations, in which her old ideas, wishes and desires are radically altered and take new forms. That simultaneously distances identificatory engagement. As untypical as Daria's actual life is, in comparison to other women's lives, it is nevertheless typical in the various aspects of thought and feeling, which means that readers can occupy a different subject position. What links us as women to the central figure is the common fact of women's oppression and hence the necessary and easy readiness to look for solutions. Perhaps we can describe the tension which enters the novel in this way as the fascination of solidarity. Piercy allows her principal character, Daria, to experiment with her life. Consequently, readers can


Feminist Writing 2S

constantly use sections oftheir own lives as a comparison and enter into productive discussion with the novel. Equality and inequality mean that readers gain a similar distance to themselves and their experiences, insofar as this is the process of development of the principal character of the novel. Individuality is gained as reflexive attitude. So women who have been gripped can turn into women who grasp something.

For us as social scientists there further remains the methodological question of how theoretical knowledge can be acquired from experience. It is presumably correct that theoretical work with experiences is required in order to derive something generalizable from them. This difficult and wearisome work seems to be solved differently by women writers. They write down even experiences in such a way that what is worth demonstrating stands out clearly, irrespective of whether the stories as a whole are fiction or directly autobiographical. To that extent literary writings are material which virtually force themselves upon theoretical work. The new feminist literature dealing with the urgent problems and questions of the women's movement is a stroke of luck, especially for feminism, which has to catch up on and work through the female experience of centuries.

Literature and experience 2: appropriation of the body and abortion

You shall make for yourself no ideal, neither an angel in heaven, nor a hero in a poem or a novel, neither one dreamed or imagined by the self; but you should love a man as he is. For nature, your mistress, is a strict godhead, which visits the raptures of maidens upon women unto the third and fourth age of the sentiments.

As antiquated as many of these words of Schleiermacher may sound, they have lost none of their topicality if we really turn our attention to the question of women's nature and women's feelings. Let us take a second example, also by Piercy, her early novel Braided Liues. Again the theme is the formation of female identity. Piercy writes, 'The core of falsity in the search for love: a woman gives herselfto a man as if that got rid of the problem of making an identity, with a most personal god to reward, pardon or damn.' (Piercy, 1983: 349)

For me it is the story of the possible and impossible appropriation of one's own (female) body and in this way a book about abortion.

Although in the novel we are taken back to the problems of girls growing up in the 1950s, while today's generations are likely to have a greater ease and naturalness in relation to their bodies, the problem gains topicality from the recent discussion around paragraph 218 (the paragraph of the German legal code dealing with abortion). The issues of abortion have for years been bogged down in the polemics of the ruling parties: whether and at what point foetuses can be said to be living beings, whether murder or the protection of unborn life should have


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priority, whether the decision of the 'mother' against the 'child' is to be allowed at all. While from the other side there sounds, like an echo, the political response of feminism, that a woman's body is her own property, and that therefore she has a right to abortion.

Piercy begins, in a way, by turning the question round, and so with the problem that young women first of all have to appropriate their bodies, in order to live in them. The novel descnbes the apprentice years of Jill, a girl from a poor family, who goes to college with a grant so that she can escape the restrictions of home and become a poet. Here she can breathe, learn, think and write. She shares a room with her beloved


Feminist Writing 27

cousin and hears about the latter's relationships with the other sex for so long, till both are convinced that without the appropriate sexual experiences she is probably not normal. This seems all the more likely, since from an early age she already enjoyed physical, sensuous games with other girls, including her cousin. She did not understand this as sexuality. There begins the drudgery of first cinema visits with male students, who don't interest her, and finally the intervention of the cousin, who looks for a poet for her. In between come the efforts to make the body look right without any money. The proper fitting bras with the little breast enlarging baskets have to be stolen. The summer draws on endlessly with, on the one hand, increasing closeness and, on the other, the impossibility of finding a room in which the sexual experiment can be carried out. Finally the holidays come and the borrowed car, which, however, requires introductions to each set of parents. After doubts as to whether she is deformed, since at first sex is impossible, changing to the conviction that premarital sex is disparaged because it was not made clear in time how boring and painful it is, to regular 'love' in a hiding-place in the woods, which brings with it consuming longing for love to the point of self-sacrifice, the first college year passes.

Piercy describes the apprentice years as a time of constant worry about the problems of the body and the consequences of sexual love. This with reference to the position which studying occupies, to the organizing of rooms and meeting places, to the perception of other people, to self-presentation, and in between the terrible monthly question, whether one is pregnant, and the almost insoluble questions of actual pregnancy. The dominance of the body pushes into the background the question of how a love affair between two people can be given shape. It becomes altogether impossible to pose because of the exaggerated notions of morality of the parents' generation, who link the loss of virginity with the necessity of marriage. As little as Jill wants to marry, she knows that her boy-friend's rejection of marriage is nevertheless also proof that he does not love her.

An abortion is at the centre of the novel. Here Piercy presents this theme of public parliamentary debates and simultaneous private silence as female tragedy. (Piercy, 1983: 172ff)

It begins with an act of control. Jill is at home during the holidays. She wakes up, her mother is standing over her dressing-table, calendar in hand. "'Jill, are you with child?"' Unconvincing attempts at reassur- ance: "'Only thirty-two days - it's because of the turmoil."' Her mother needs only a few words, because as a woman she speaks from experience. Piercy allows her to express this placing within the female tradition both as a matter of pride and as knowing judgement. "'You're regular like all my family."' Jill retreats into a placeless resistance. "'If you try to make me marry him now, I leave this house."' The threat is at once no threat at all, and yet to some extent there stands behind the words the possibility of disappearing altogether. "'I want an abortion."' Her mother summons up the counter-arguments of morality and law. She mixes them with class experience and with subordination to


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patriarchal power. "'Doctors are dirty, they charge a fortune and they blackmail you. It's against the law, you can go to jail. Your father would kill me. They butcher you . . ."'

Against such overwhelming power there stands maternal authority and centuries of women's experience. "'I'll tell you what to do."' Her mother's teaching speaks of survival in subordination and of its secret: the space of self-determination which remains within surrender is violence against the self. Consequently she begins her instructions with a reminder of the daughter's weakness, which must now be overcome. "'You've always been a weakling and a coward. Sickly since you were seven. You'll have to do this for yourself. You'l1 do what I say or I'll wash my hands of you."' The threat draws the daughter into the chain of women, to whose violence she must surrender, if she wants to escape that other violence which issues from men and state. The mother uses the threat of male paternal authority against male medical power, about whose false cash motives she knows from female experience. If the daughter gives her body to those specialists, she will betray her to her father, who will allow nature to take its proper course. "'I'll tell your father and he'll make you have it."' Her mother knows that the situation is actually hopeless: the alliance against women consists of money, law, experts, paternal force and female nature. The most essential strength women need is for the struggle against their own nature, in comparison to which the other forces seem almost harmless. Piercy seals the entry into this women's struggle with short sentences, which sound like the initiation to an ancient ordeal. "'Don't think it's easy. It's hard, hard,"' says her mother. And "Tou'll see that I'm strong enough,"' replies the daughter and places herself under the authority of the mother, by repeating her words, "'Tell me what to do."'

In what follows Piercy does not describe in detail what advice the mother gave, but she presents Jill's struggles with and about her body like the struggle with the dragon in heroic legends, in which youths have to become adults and at the same time free themselves and others - usually maidens. But unlike them, Jill's struggle was not with an external foe, but takes place in her own body, in which a fate wants to come to pass at her expense, and against which will power is not enough, simply because she is no longer a maiden. It's easier for her to kill herself, than for her body to cease being a home for something else. Appropriately Piercy chooses the form of the inner monologue and sets the individual words in futile oppositions: Jill waits until the bath tub has filled with hot water.

I sit on the toilet seat staring at my belly smooth and flat from harsh laxatives. Under the cushion of fat lurks the womb, spongy fist that will not open while in it cells dinde and dinde. The steam swirling hot from the tub smothers me as this body goes its animal way.

Jill has to remind herself that the animal, in whose clutches she feels herself to be, is her own self as woman. With her genderization all earlier hopes of being human become ludicrous phantoms.


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I seldom felt feminine. I felt neuter. An angel of words. I could imagine myself a Hamlet, a Trotsky, a Donne. I thought I was projects, accomplishments, tastes: I am only an envelope of guts. This is what it is to be female, to be trapped. This sac of busy cells has its own private rhythms of creation and decay. Its viruses and cancers, its 28-day reminders of birth and death. My body can be taken over and used against my will as if I were a hall to be rented out. Hot baths with Epsom salt, hot baths with penny-royal: I am parboiled and still pregnant . . .

Shakespeare had Hamlet walk in a graveyard and philosophize there on the transience of life and the takeover of the dead by worms. How can the hero overcome death? In the banality of the bathroom Piercy shows that for women death is in their lives, they themselves are vessels of unceasing growth and therefore of constant dying. So they enter history as species being. Jill continues talking to herself:

Like my mother to cuddle a dark-haired girl-child and suckle it on my frustration and beat it for my hunger and bind it for my loneliness. To sacrifice myself for a girl-child whom I will try to teach to sacrifice herself, a chain of female suffering.

In the ever hotter air the thoughts get muddled into 'sick dreams'. Jill senses that the power which has taken up arms against her is, at the same time, love. Not simply that for her friend, that was merely the seduction she succumbed to, but that for the life growing in her and against her, that is, at the same time, her death.

Piercy also organizes the dramaturgy in this field through the banalization ofthe ordinary and Cnormal' questions. In the middle ofthis catastrophe of the recognition of being a woman, as body and for the rest of her life, the parents, the boyfriend turn up and continue discussing the problems of a possible marriage and particularly whether Jill's background is middle class enough for Mike's middle-class parental home. Jill's mother refers indignantly to the ownership of a small house and a well-looked-after car which is only two years old. So she withdraws from Jill's world, herself becomes a way that cannot be followed.

Jill has to bring the struggle to an end. Once more her mother calls upon her: "

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and gunshots of a Western arise. 'Don't cry out,' my mother warned me. 'Keep your mouth shut.' Squatting in the ruins of my old sanctuary, by force I open my womb.

Here Piercy brings together the ends of her story again. The small attic, which was retreat, place of her own, full of secrets and possibilities, the treasure from Jill's childhood, had become too cramped for her purpose. She needs more air to breathe, space to think, people with whom she can argue and 'change the world'. The way to the outside is, simultaneously, the way on which she recognizes what it means to be a woman, experiences herself as woman. The metaphors get in each other's way. In the too-small room she knows that there is another small room inside her, in which space of hers is being seized hold of. She must enter it, in order to step out of the chain of women's fates. The means is violence. There is no alternative. Jill almost loses her life in carrying out this action. What she did is therefore not a solution which can generally be recommended, but nevertheless necessary. Piercy fades in other female fates as impossible paths. There is the first much-loved school friend, who becomes a stranger to her when she marries at sixteen and has a child. Now she's in prison with a life sentence, because she shot the man who threw her child downstairs. There's the fellow student who has one child after another in order to hold on to the man who leaves in the end anyway. There's the other student who is expelled from college because she has sexual relations with women. And finally there is her great love, her cousin Donna, who wants to combine marriage and profession, has to have an abortion and dies as a result. The last shock puts an end to every dream. In fast forward motion Piercy now takes the still possible solutions to their conclusion: Jill has to abandon her own wedding, which has already been announced. Distraught she disappears for a while from any purposeful and sensible life; then she organizes an emergency service for women who have to abort because otherwise they cannot survive as human beings. One means that she employs on its behalf is the blackmailing of doctors who have carried out abortions illegally.

The book provides no final conclusion, but draws us into the various aspects of the possibilities women have of appropriating the female body and which must be discussed in relation to abortion. There is no simple way of growing into the body and becoming part of society with it. Questions of normality are at issue even with the first sensual stirrings which are related to another body. Cultural pressure especially from peers in heterosexual relationships soon raises questions of legality. In addition, both normality and legality are monitored by parents. The breaking of parents' trust is not only a moral question, it draws in new, much more dramatic areas of danger. Contraceptives are not safe; if abortion is illegal, it costs so much that for a long time one's whole life has to be dedicated to the organization of money, on top of the problem of the body and the painstakingly kept secret. The reality of pregnancies does not only put an end to the start of a possible life of one's own, it also


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teaches: in patriarchal culture the woman's body becomes a trap for her. But she can as little survive as a conscious sensual being without appropriating her own body as she can with it.

What remains? After all, the long years of struggle by the women's movement have at least made the possibilities of abortion easier, so that the measures to which Jill turned are no longer usual. Despite all the bigoted discussion of the restoration of the criminalization of any kind of abortion, the distress and practices of the generation of women described above belong to our history, and no longer to the present. And yet this novel about female apprenticeship reads like a condensation of the never changing questions about the female body and its appropriation by ourselves and by others. Solutions are still being fought for, in order to gain different dimensions of life: for love, without surrendering oneself, for the body and its sensuality, without thereby losing it or turning it, against one's will, into the mere bearer of further life, without oneself already having life yet.

Once again I ask myself the question, what knowledge this literary approach to female experiences has given me. Certainly I could now make a list of aspects whose relationship I had previously missed. The most important, however, seems to me to be the position of knowledge itself. This, as I read it from these novels, does not so much consist ofthe sum of new information, of results, new links and discoveries, but more of the way in which readers become involved. Knowledge, it becomes clear, can be nothing outside ourselves or won in itself, but is the process in which we are actively implicated. For example, through getting to grips with the second novel, Piercy suggests to me that with regard to the problem of the female body and its 'humanity' there are many open questions but not yet any real solutions. These cannot be sought in an exchange with the male sex, because in relation to this same female body it appears as a kind of executor of natural history or of morality and law, when, for example, whoever is involved is ready for marriage and fatherhood. Although the body belongs to each person individually, it is a problem for the whole female sex. Therefore it is necessary and also historical practice that women's experiences are passed on and that actions take place on that foundation. But these experiences are themselves set into the history of women's oppression and into natural history. Only slowly are women emerging from conditions of force. Again women are getting together and organizing emergency services, making use of existing knowledge and combining it with that regarded by them as useful. The legalization of abortion is still far removed from the solution of a sensual and liveable relationship of women to their bodies. Large-scale women's organisations remain necessary. Women's future has still to be won.

The knowledge which I was looking for is therefore: the novels stimulate readers to appropriate knowledge about themselves and their relationship to their bodies, in sexual relationships and their relationship to the world and to begin this process as a great debate. They are therefore an attempt to make conscious the history of female people.


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Perhaps one can agree with Sarah Schulman: 'Marginal people know how they live and how the people of the dominant culture live. But dominant culture people only know how they live. The people in power have the least information.' Schulman, it is true, writes about subcul- tures, about the marginalized, those who exclude themselves, about lesbians and gays; but Marge Piercy also teaches us, that in a society in which women do not belong to the ruling culture, precisely because it is a male one, the cultural alliance with all those who equally do not belong to the ruling culture is imperative. From this perspective part of the necessary knowledge about women and their place in society, as well as about human society as a whole, could be gained from feminist literature. One will read that the themes which the new feminist literature deals with can also not simply be understood and dismissed as women's themes. And yet today it requires women to take up these themes of life and death, of AIDs and politics, of war and fascism, of common crimes just as much as the uncommon ones, in an adequate way, that is, in terms of their real magnitude and significance for humanity.

Notes

Frigga Haug teaches sociology and social psychology at Hochschule fur Wirtschaft and Politik in Hamburg. She also teaches women's studies at Hamburg University and Marxism at the Free University of Berlin. She has been active as a socialist feminist for twenty years and an editor of Das Argument for almost thirty years. She has contributed to fifteen often col- lectively written books; ofthese, Female Sexualization was published in English by Verso in 1987 and Beyond Female Masochism in 1992.

1 See, for instance Haug,1987 and Haug,1992.

References

HAUG, Frigga (1992) Beyond Female Masochism: Memory-Work and Politics London: Verso.

HAUG, Frigga and others (1987) Female Sexualization London: Verso. HAUG, Frigga and HAUSEEt, Kornelia (1988) 'Zeit fur mich-uber das Privatisieren,

in HAUG and HAUSER edition, Subjekt Frau Berlin: Argument. MCINTOSH, Sheila (1991) 'Feminist mystery writer Barbara Wilson. An inter-

view' Sojourner: The Women's Forum May. PIERCY, Marge (1983) Braided Lives London: Pan.

(1986) Fly Away Home Harmondsworth: Penguin. SCHULMAN, Sarah (1990) 'Helen Birch talks to Sarah Schulman' City Limits

March.


Article Contentsp. [16]p. 17p. 18p. 19p. 20p. 21p. 22p. 23p. 24p. 25p. 26p. 27p. 28p. 29p. 30p. 31p. 32

Issue Table of ContentsFeminist Review, No. 42, Feminist Fictions (Autumn, 1992), pp. 1-125Front MatterEditorial: Feminist Fictions [p. 1]Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber" and the Decolonization of Feminine Sexuality [pp. 2-15]Feminist Writing: Working with Women's Experience [pp. 16-32]Unlearning Patriarchy: Personal Development in Marge Piercy's "Fly Away Home" [pp. 33-42]Are They Reading Us? Feminist Teenage Fiction [pp. 43-48]Sexuality in Lesbian Romance Fiction [pp. 49-66]A Psychoanalytic Account for Lesbianism [pp. 67-81]Mary Wollstonecraft and the Problematic of Slavery [pp. 82-102]ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 103-105]Review: untitled [pp. 105-108]Review: untitled [pp. 108-110]Review: untitled [pp. 110-111]Review: untitled [pp. 111-114]Review: untitled [pp. 114-115]

Noticeboard [pp. 116-120]Back Matter [pp. 121-125]

artº feminist writing - f haug

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