Chelsea Swan

Title (ish?) Killing the Angel in the house, aligning the inner and outer self in the works of Tracey Emin and Louise bourgeois (In the hope a title will give me better self-control)

Virginia Woolf speaks of killing the Angel in the house, something she believes she was successful in doing in her writing; however, she also speaks of being able to be honest about the lived experience, her bodily experience as a woman, in her writing, and her failure to do so (put in quote here). Simone de Beauvoir, in her philosophical work The Second Sex, discuss the divide woman must live by, that of an inner non gendered self and an outer self which is constructed upon social and cultural requirements. Judith Butler speaks of gender performativity, a way in which we are not our body, but we do our body, as part of a system in which women construct, are constructed by, and are actors within a system of gender norms and expectations. We can deduce that this split occurs as part of the training and trauma women receive during the period of girlhood, taught to conform, to hide their real selves behind the supposably protective wall of femininity. To avoid harm, criticism, ridicule, and being shunned by society a gender performance must begin. For women of colour there is another set of rules and training and setting apart that must be reconciled and further displaces the self. For men coming of age means to reach their final state, to fully actualize themselves, to enter the world as a solid entity ready to receive all they have been promised. This is in itself problematic and toxic but is not the aim of this essay. For a woman to come of age it means to successfully repress and come to terms with the games and rules that dictate womanhood.

To create the self for a woman is to create the other within a patriarchal system. This is achieved consciously and unconsciously and the repression results in a mental state in which we are battling ourselves, second guessing ourselves, hiding ourselves, and feeling at odds with who we are supposed to be and what we are supposed to want. To not conform results in catastrophe as in the House of Mirth (1905) by Edith Wharton in which the main character Lilly is lead to her demise by making the mistake of wanting something other than what she is supposed to want, used by better players of the system, and making social mistakes. You cannot partially participate, if women do not conform wholly the system will begin to disintegrate, and so to protect itself it destroys you.

The woman artist has an inevitable return to the period of girlhood as they attempt to reconcile who they are inwardly, that bodily truth Woolf speaks of, their true selves, and the person they were trained to become, coming to terms with and confronting the expectations and traumas that they had to go through to divide the self. We can hear this dismantling of experience and attempts to work through the divide in the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson (quotes). It is not a uniquely modern problem, or a uniquely feminist, or post-feminist approach for female artists to find catharsis and the self through their work (example needed here). This division of the inner self and the requirement of an outer self creates a tension and a problem which must be solved by the artist to be reconciled as one person. An artist must know themselves to create honest and truthful work no matter what its themes or subject matter are.

Girlhood, as a time of chrysalis, so fraught with decision, pressures, dangers, and instability becomes a tether for the female artist, an area of inquiry that consistently returns in works and becomes a ground zero, a centre, around which the work is built. Girlhood is an experience, a point of inquiry, the origin of the question why am I like this? Where does this pain originate? Why as a woman do I have to be treated this way? It opens up the work to anger, confusion, rebellion, play, and fantasy, as well as semiotic languages created in order to codify and hide the true self (inner self) so as to be palatable, acceptable. The work is a cathartic process to explore in safety, to accept, to explain, to protest, to come to terms with, to rage about, that splitting of oneself. It becomes proof. It makes the intangible experience a tangible foundation on which to build a whole self. The historic self is re-processed through the adult mind, one stronger, more reasonable, more critical, more reflective, more understanding, better at defending one’s selfhood. It also offers the artist the opportunity to work through their own concept of the self, the lived experience, and the wider social, cultural, and political circumstances, as well as the participants of the system. What is innate and what is conditioned. The artist can also organise, create, rewrite, and open up their own narrative. To illuminate.

I wish to apply these ideas to the works of Louise Bourgeois and Tracy Emin. I have chosen these two artists as they are both narrative creators and artists who use their lived experiences, attempting to find truth in their work. The time which Bourgeoise was creating work spans post first wave and post second wave feminism and although Bourgeoise did not identify as a feminist artist her work speaks to the mundane lived experience of womanhood in the same way Emin does but in a quieter tone. This could be because of the time in which she inhabited and the social requirements. Emin came out into a world in which she could be bolder, although not consciously, standing on the shoulders of the work created by feminist artists during second wave feminism. They show the landscape of the steps that have been taken to lead us to this point in time and the availability we now have to our own narratives in our work.

For Louise bourgeois I have chosen the work Passage Dangereux (1997) in which she combined objects trouves (when looking for translation it included the terms lost and found but also sharp and imaginary) with her own sculptures and presented a narrative about a young girl going through different rites of passage. She recalls childhood but also the life cycle, the mother, nature, impermanence, guilt and punishment, symbolic elements, fragility, needlework (relating to the family’s history of tapestry but also damage and repair and violence) as well as her father who betrayed her, and the fear of sex. I see this as relating to girlhood as it is fraught, fragmented, requires interpretation, and is displayed in a way that asks us to see, asks us to understand, asks the audience to see the significance and the pain and the anger and the fear. As an act of catharsis, she has contained it, all at once and all together, to try to make sense of it but also to constrain and diminish its power to control her narrative. She has killed the angel in the house, the work is not feminine and cannot be read as such, I mean a man probably could, but it is not the ideal feminine. She has also told her truth, but is it her whole truth, the use of symbolic language could be seen as a barrier to such. Has she fully reconciled the self? She quite often changed her stance of what a work was about and played with the audience. (I need to look at this work more and how it applies to Woolf’s definition)

For Tracey Emin I will look at My Major Retrospective (1963 -1993). As someone born much later than Louise Bourgeois, and post second wave feminism there is much more of a foundation, although not solid, on which to build her practice. Louise bourgeois’ work comes towards the end of her artistic development and is a culmination of thinking. For Tracy Emin this work was the beginning and in order to start as she meant to go on she knew she must delve into her life in order to reconcile who she is and what she wanted to say. In this work you can see the desire of the newly emerging artists to lay everything out on the table and say this is who I am this is myself and this is my work. For the work to be all-encompassing. The work of Emin has gained in sophistication and subtlety but the core themes of confession, reconciliation, coming to terms, and experience are all there. What this earlier work misses is a solid sense of self. She is still fractured, separate pieces, artefacts, searching to be assigned a self, some form of cohesion. The inner experience, emotion, reaction, as separate to the solidity of the objects, the two are not the same. The title of the exhibition would suggest that rather than being at the beginning of her career significant works had already occurred and she had already been formed as an artist through these experiences. All was left now was for her to continue making the work. The exhibition included teenage diaries, souvenirs, toys, and memorabilia. It was an account of her life, an act of catharsis, and a statement on self. (also need to look at this work more)

Books Read

• The House of Mirth Edith Wharton
• I love Dick Chris Kraus
• (Pretty much any of the books on my girlhood reading list blog post have probably added to my thinking)
• Virginia Woolf (all of but can be narrowed down to places in which she actually references the Angel in the house) – need to go back to the essay on killing the angel in the house, also go back to the poem the concept was based on by Coventry Patmore
• Silvia Plath (See the blog post where I annotated her poems)
• Strangeland Tracey Emin
• Tracey Emin Johnathan Jones
• Louise Butler Ulf Kuster
• The poetry of Emily Dickenson

Books to Read

• The Ethnographic I Carolyn Ellis
• The Once and Future Sex Elenore Jenega
• Autoethnography as Method Heewon Chang
• Girlhood Marianne Farningham
• Invisible Women Caroline Criado Perez 
• What we’re told not to talk about Nimko Ali

Books Halfway Through

• Girlhood Mellissa Febos
• The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir (re-reading)
• Gender Trouble (Judith Butler)
• The Self Illusion Bruce Hood
• The Women’s History of the World Rosalind Miles
• Art Monsters Lauren Elkin

I’m aware that my interest in girlhood shines through more in this text than I intend in the essay. The essay is intended to apply Virginia Woolf’s statement about the Angel in the house to these two works rather than focusing on girlhood. I often see things as connected and as girlhood is my interest area, I cannot help but stray towards that. However, 4000 words would not be large enough for me to stray this deeply. I am aware that I need to narrow down the areas I look at and look at those areas more deeply in the essay rather than trying to say everything all at once. There is a lot of work to be done and I will probably come out at 10,000 words before I reduce it down to the 4000.

As with Virginia Woolf to try to be an artist, to try to tell your truth, to go against your training is to be constantly tearing yourself apart. To cause a kind of psychosis, a mental split, to make yourself feel happy and fulfilled and then to be filled with shame and guilt and judgement. To always be not good enough, a failure, and to have to fight twice as hard as the men just to be able to be that failure of femininity on the radar of the creatives.

Before you can put your finger on it there is a sense of an I dreaming or am I real. Fantasy daydream disassociation