Chelsea Swan

In Art Monster Lauren Elkin talks about Virginia Woolf and The Angel in the house Woolf was aware that the world was made-up of men and that she would have to please to avoid giving offence and be able to continue as a writer. Elkin talks about being “groomed to be appropriate, exacting, friendly, and accommodating, as pretty and as small as I could make myself, yet filled with rage at not being allowed to take up more space in the world”. This then leads into how women’s art making can be halted not by just external forces but by internalised warnings that the woman is entering dangerous waters, as we have been trained that it is terrifyingly easy to inadvertently make a monster of oneself by not being the feminine, we are expected to be.  As Judy Chicago says “we as women have learned to see the world through men’s eyes and learn to identify with men’s struggles, a man doesn’t have the vaguest notion of identifying with ours” which leaves women in the position of forever trying to appropriate patriarchies language or rebelling against it.

Elkin talks about how she believes that it is artists of second wave feminism that came closest to Woolf’s proposition of finding ways to articulate their experience as bodies. Letting the body speak through art. Wolf argued at the end of Three Guinies the if our stories are to be truly our own then we need to invent new worlds and new methods. However, work that is considered narcissistic or decorative is dismissed, and we are caught between contradictions in trying to find our artistic language. There is judgement from both men who want the traditional and women who want the shocking and new. “The 1970s saw concerted attempts to speak as a woman, to make art as a woman” while also arguing against any innate femininity.  While there may not be any essential woman or essence of femininity it does not mean that women are not trying to grapple with what it means in their own times to be a woman through the formal properties of the work itself. There is an instability around femininity and gender and by creating work we can start to tell the truths of our own bodies and dismantle the un-truths. To understand or express something about what it is to be embodied and socialised as female. I deeply hope that men do the same and try to discover in themselves what it is to be male without gender constructions. I am aware that masculinity is much more prize and much more fearful of its own distruction. To understand or express something about what it is to be embodied and socialised as female.

There are also points when Elkin touches on the mental turmoil produced by the woman’s conditioning and expectation.  “And against this life indoors so much violence, so much tearing of wallpaper, gnawing at bedposts, frantic flapping of wings”. Women’s lives permeated the walls of the places in which they lived, they made their homes reflect themselves as it was the only legacy they had to leave and decorated it with embroideries to express themselves through the only artistic endeavours that they were allowed. We need to reconcile the conflict between what society expected of women and what is expected of artists. In her notes and cuttings Virginia Woolf believed the repressive institutions could and will be brought down by the steady collection and cunning of deploying facts. In her war book or three Guineas she wanted to root the narrative in the real world rather than the imagined world of the novelist or in female emotionality. She believed that she had enough evidence to bring down the world of patriarchy which she saw as the roots of fascism in the family and in private property. She believed that patriarchy was inherently violent that it invades and colonises, exploits, rapes, divides, and punishes. She believed that women were fighting the tyranny of the patriarchal state as others were fighting the tyranny of the fascist state.

When Woolf speaks of the body I believe she meant the truth to be within herself, to be present, to be able to be honest about how things felt, the interconnection of the social reality and the inner reality, the narrative, those everyday experience made flesh within a person and felt holy and then turned out for the world to see. To me this is the drive towards the reconciliation of the divided self in women’s art and I believe that what Woolf was driving forwards was an ability to say the unsayable, to speak the truth and that truth to be oneself.

I think this also means speaking the unspeakable to oneself, of admitting to oneself the omissions that one must adhere to live as a woman. The body is the shell of the experience containing the mind, performing the rituals, the whole rather than the parts the body can represent the truth in ways that semiotic language and symbolic language cannot. Abstraction can speak of feeling but the body speaks of feeling and action, it speaks of the whole rather than the parts. There is poetry to abstraction, but it is removed from reality. It is mind not mind and body truth.