Chelsea Swan

Abstract

This essay explores the divided self and its impact of the female artist, girlhood as the site of gender training and the splitting of oneself, the construct of gender and the systems that uphold it, how female artists have explored concepts of the self, and how the self can be re-unified in order that female artists can create art. Women’s inability to express themselves as artist is due to the divided self which is a result of gender constraints and training. These gender expectations are both a historical situation and an ongoing system forced upon women in girlhood. Women should be freed from these constraints in order that art should no longer support the gender divide based upon false constructs. Art should be truthful and should in fact represent the full scope of human experience. Freedom for women to create as a whole self, and represent themselves with honesty, would also alleviate gendered expectations of male artists. Attempting to conform to expectations and create work can result in mental tears and fissures and has been the downfall of many female artists. Women must be women to destroy the self, create monstrous art, and explore the self and experiences to be artist.

Keywords

Women, Selfhood, Girlhood, Woolf, Artist

Main body

Introduction

The “Divided Self” is a term coined by psychiatrist R.D Laing (2010) indicating a split between the outer self and the inner self. Where the self is divided there is no solid centre on which to hold, no foundation from which to build oneself, and therefore the self is in a constant state of acting and re-establishing. If one is unable to say who they are, what they like, and is exhausted by the consistent act required by society then there is no mental space or time with which one can pursue life and art. Any attempts to pursue art will be inconsistent and erroneous, an act consistent with the desire to project a certain self.

This essay will discuss how the divided self in women is the result of training in girlhood, and societal gender expectations, and how women artists must reconcile the self to create art with truth, otherwise it will be redundant, decorative, a lie. Women have been held back from self-expression and from creative pursuits for the majority of history. The ‘art world’ predominates the expression of half the population and makes the other half object. Women come to believe they are decoration and not the originators as the system recreates itself continually. Women do not see themselves reflected in art by men, or women who ‘play by the rules’ of the art world, and they are taught to shun anything that represents women’s truth. The system of art pre-eminently supports the caging of women’s bodies and minds. This has led to a lack in representation, and role models for women and young girls.

Argument

Although we may see Virginia Woolf as an accomplished writer, she felt a battle to achieve a freedom in expressing her realities. Woolf (1995) stated that she was able to kill The Angel in the House but was unable to express the body in her work. When Woolf speaks of the Angel in the House, she is referencing a poem by Coventry Patmore (2013) that portrayed the ideal wife, instituting a social ideal that women of the time were held up to, expected to be devoted and submissive, passive, and powerless, meek, charming, graceful, sympathetic, self-sacrificing, pious, and pure. In Professions for women Woolf states “Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing.” (1995, p.4) However, when writing about the body and passions she states that she loses her train of thought as she has been trained to not shock “telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved.” (1995, p.8). Woolf sought to express the social reality and the inner reality at once, everyday experiences made flesh, an expression of the self, whole and solid, to speak of the feminine forbidden, to speak the truth and that truth to be oneself.

Much of the creative act is a desire to find answers. In her writing Woolf highlights the difference between the interior and society, characters often forced to behave in a way that is opposite to desire, to satisfy others and conform to expectations. Happiness and fulfilment are out of reach when so much of the true self is required to remain hidden. This is a hindrance to the creative act which Virginia Woolf felt and tried to work through and destroy in her writing. In A woman of letters Phyllis Rose argues “there was some connection between the outbreaks of Woolf’s illness and her feeling that in being a writer she was doing something her family and society did not fundamentally support …to be loved she must be like her mother … Therefore, after producing each work of art, she feels excessively unlovable” (1978, p. 169). To tell your truth, to go against social training, is to tear yourself apart, to cause a mental split, a sense of dreaming, a disassociation. It is important for women to reconcile the self and speak openly and honestly through their work, so as not to damage themselves in the creative process.

Women of Virginia Woolf’s time were raised under strict censure.As a preparatory time for womanhood, girls were encouraged to play up to ideals, follow rules and adopt characteristics which would help them be ‘good’. Girlhood, written in 1869, is an etiquette guide (Franingham, 2022) which makes clear that to be talented in anything other than womanly duties was to be judged and found wanting. To be prideful, to have fun, to smile, were sins against what one should be. Girls were to be punished for thinking, dreaming, for exercising their mental powers, for having even that small amount of autonomy. Simone de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex, (de Beauvoir, Borde, 2015) discusses how women are conditioned to assume their roles, unable to achieve more as they are endlessly striving to perform an unnatural state forced upon them. Girls are gradually brought to terms with their otherness, inferiority, and the demands that occupy a women’s role, opposed to the supposed natural and innate state of manhood. Beauvoir argues that women are mysteries to themselves, as young girls are given dolls to incarnate the self, the alter ego, in an object outside of themselves. Entirely interior, the outer self is like the doll, a representation, “a figurine with a human face”.  “The doll represents the whole body and, on the other hand, is a passive thing. As such the little girl will be encouraged to alienate herself in her person as a whole and to consider it as an inert given” (de Beauvoir, Borde, 2015, pp303-304). The result is that there is a divorce between her properly human condition and her feminine vocation, and “she is too divided internally to enter into combat.” (de Beauvoir, Borde, 2015, p.381)

We can deduce that the split in the inner and outer self occurs during girlhood, taught to conform is to hide behind the wall of femininity. To avoid harm, criticism, and ridicule a gender performance must begin. For women of colour there is yet another set of rules, training, and othering that further displaces the self. Whereas for men coming of age means to reach their final state, to enter the world as a solid entity, problematic in its own way, for a woman to come of age means to successfully repress and come to terms with the games and rules that dictate womanhood. For much of history, to come of age meant to hide thoughts, impulses, individuality, creativity, and intelligence. This is the legacy that is ingrained in our society and can still be seen on the toy shelves. Having women artists equal in opportunity and selfhood to men not only grants a wider and more vivid view of the spectrum of the human experience but also leads to greater opportunities for all to fully express themselves.

Judith Butler further questions this training. In Gender Trouble (1999) she claims that gender may be instable and indeterminate as we are largely socially constructed. Gender feels natural, but it is not essential. You do your gender, but you are not your gender, it is an act of performativity in that it is a phenomenon that is being produced and reproduced in time rather than an innate expression. In her essay phenology and feminist theory (1988) she speaks about the mundane way in which social agents constitute social reality through language, gesture, and symbolic sign to constitute the illusion of an abiding and gendered self. She also argues that the actors themselves come to believe and perform their belief, reproducing the historical situation, where “possibilities are necessarily constrained by available historical conventions” (Butler, 1998, p. 521). In short, that to “be a woman is to have become a woman, to compel the body to conform to the historical idea of woman, to induce the body to become a cultural sign, to materialise oneself in obedience to a historically delaminated possibility, and to do this as a sustained and repeated corporeal project” (Butler, 1998, p. 522). She also states that “those who fail to do that gender right are punished” (Butler, 1998, p. 522). This does not mean that gender is not real but that the way in which the genders are differently trained is not innate and therefor gender should not be determining factor whose training causes a divide in the self. When talking about Marilyn Monroe, Gloria Steinman states that she was an icon with such intensity because she represents the non-threatening childlike sexuality that ‘immature men want’ but also that women fear, to be completely vulnerable and childlike while also aggressively sexualised. Steinman also argues women are co-conscious beings with multiple selves, playing roles as it is easier than to try to break free, avoiding external punishments (Ross, 2022). Artificiality and roles are what we are rewarded for, and it is hard to let go as there is little evidence we will be loved, rewarded and salaried if we do.

There is a necessity in confronting the requirements of societal expectations of gender, its limitations, and its resulting alienation, as well as its flawed foundations. In What we are told not to talk about Nemko Ali (2020) discusses the way in which women’s bodies are hidden and shamed. Not just in terms of sight but also in terms of data, medical research, education, and even believability. We live as objects without access to our own object self. This feeds back to Woolf’s statements and fear of expressing the bodily experience. Invisible Women (Criado-Perez, 2020) also talks about the way in which women have been unstudied and ignored by those who create and control data, making women objects of inconsequence, depriving women of the selfhood and self-determination privileged to male bodies. The lack of data also opens opportunities to invent biological and psychological facts on which to base women’s nature and rights. With men as the default, and women as atypical, bias and discrimination are inherent, “[T]he male experience, the male perspective, has come to be seen as universal, while the female experience-that of half the global population, after all-is seen as, well, niche.” (Criado-Perez, 2020, p.12) distorting the female experience and denying women the control and ownership of their own narratives. This is in essence the problem of the divided self, a true self and a lie self. We feel broken in our truth and so we become part of the system to make women invisible lest we be seen and caught in the horror of being unable to fit the ‘correct’ mould.

Although gender throughout history has not been as stable as one might think there is a historical basis for the way in which gender roles are now understood. Women’s history of the world (Miles, 1993) highlights how the version of history we are given is biased. Women have been at the centre of society and held much higher and more central roles than we have been led to believe. The history of the world has been manipulated to distort the facts in favour of those who are currently in positions of power. This not only takes women’s power, their narrative, and lets them believe in their weakness and inferiority as fact, but it also leaves women without role models. Even now, the media uses a one in a million, tokenistic approach to women’s success. How can we be wholly and truthfully ourselves when our history is absent, shaky, altered. The once and future sex (Janega, 2024) discusses how medieval thinkers, casting Eve’s shadow over women, derided them as oversexed sinners, inherently lustful, insatiable, and weak. Unless a nun, a woman was to be the embodiment of perfect motherhood. Women were under pressures and beliefs that were unrealistic and unkind.

The Self Illusion (Hood, 2013) would argue that, scientifically speaking, there is no solid self, that it is a composite of interactions and memories and repeated beliefs and behaviours. However, philosophically, and psychologically, there is a self, and for many women it is all they have. The self may not be scientifically solid but that does negate that human experience consists of the self, which, for the most part, women have been unable to express, taught that to not conform results in catastrophe as in The Yellow Wallpaper (Gilman, 2021) or in House of Mirth (Wharton, 1997). You can be true to yourself, search out freedom’s equal to men, and lose it all. The female malady (Showalter, 2001) demonstrates how women were expected to fit definitions based on ipso facto science. Any desire for humanity or equality determined to be a deviation, requiring concealment, and self-loathing for a lack of ability to be ‘normal’. In 1879 Maudsley cited the period of girlhood and its confines and other restrictions and contradictions as the origin of hysteria (Showalter, 2001, p.130). Charles Mercier stated that “few women pass through this period of their development without manifesting signs of disorder” (Showalter, 2001, p.131) Women feeling broken from the outset would have to self-delude to remain sane. “Mental breakdown, then would come when women defied their “nature”” (Showalter, 2001, p. 123). Hysteria was linked with feminism, those fighting to be equal, “More independent and assertive than “normal women”” (Showalter, 2001, p.145) hoping to scare them back into the home. A real threat considering the consequences of mental disorders. As suffering was caused by efforts to deny one’s own desires and to stifle oneself daydreams became a substitute for intellectual nourishment.

In Art Monster Lauren Elkin (2024) argues that Women’s art making can be halted not by just external forces but by internalised warnings, and that they must make monsters of themselves, or create monstrous art to break free of social restrictions. In the text she sites Judy Chicago; “we as women have learned to see the world through men’s eyes and learn to identify with men’s struggles” (Elkin, 2024, p.18) leaving women in the position of trying to appropriate patriarchies language or rebelling against it. Women’s art reveals this ‘working out’ of the self and the attempt to find a language to do so as the male ‘traditional’ falls short. Emily Dickinson’s poems are acts of self-actualisation, a drive to exist outside of her mind, to make a mark on the page, reflecting a profound curiosity about the concept of the self, its limits, and its relationship to the body (Walker, 1983). Her poem the body grows without (Walker, 1983) explores the dichotomy between the physical and inner realms. The body, representing the external and tangible, is described as “convenient,” suggesting its ease of perception and manipulation. In contrast, the spirit, representing the internal and intangible, is portrayed as seeking concealment, suggesting its elusive and often hidden nature. This is almost opposite to Woolf’s problem as Dickinson seems more comfortable with the outer than the inner. Sylvia Plath also related to Woolf as she felt the pressure of the Angel in the House, and equated this to her mother, in all probability the feminine ideal to which she felt compared and the conductor of her training in how to be ‘good’. She felt fear at not being like her mother, however, “where Plath sought originality, her mother valued conformity” (Clark, 2022, p.21), and “When Sylvia herself became a mother, she would try to emulate this vision of “the Angel in the house.” But she would rail against it as an artist.” (Clark, 2022, p.41). She longed for male privileges and felt frustrated at hearing about life second hand. In Marjorie Perloff’s article, taking the stance of Plath’s novel being semi-autobiographical, she says, “If we take the division of Esther’s self as the motive or starting point of the novel’s plot, the central action of The Bell Jar may be described as the attempt to heal the fracture between inner self and false-self system so that a real and viable identity can come into existence” (1972, p.507).

Autoethnography can be one way in which women artists explore the self-divide. Returning to Girlhood Mellissa Febos (2022) uses her own narrative to produce essays which focus on the ways that society conditions girls to cater to the needs and desires of others, while losing their true selves in the process. In doing so she also mirrors the readers experiences and offers them the opportunity to reflect on their own conditioning. This is cathartic, for the reader and the writer, and gives hope for the breaking of cycles. It also reveals why books like The Girls (Cline 2017), Lolita (Nabokov, 1992), My Dark Vanessa (Russell, 2021), The Ophelia Girls (Healey, 2021), and The Virgin Suicides (Eugenides, 2023) are popular as the reader can feel united and seen in shared experiences. We observe as young girls go through a tearing apart of the self to be as desired, reflecting and dissecting well known feelings from a safe distance. Sophia Coppola’s films also explore this dreamy, romanticized side of girlhood, and the darkness underneath it. She understands the performance and the requirements that are instituted for the girl to begin her act of womanhood, using feminine semiotic language and objects, rituals, and worlds to relate the girlhood experience and its traumas/ dangers. In her book on Girlhood in art Claire Marie Healy (2023) argues that this period can be understood as less of a prescribed length of time and a more as a way of seeing “that never really leaves us” (Healy, 2023, p13). Women are in a state of perpetual girlhood, never really allowed to grow up, unless they confront the training that has occurred. Girlhood, as a time of chrysalis, is so fraught with decision, pressures, dangers, and instability it becomes a tether for the female artist, an area of inquiry that consistently returns. Girlhood is the origin of the question why am I like this? Where does this pain come from? Why as a woman do I have to be treated this way? The work is an act of acceptance, protest, and coming to terms with that splitting of oneself. The historic self is re-processed through the adult mind, one stronger, better at defending one’s selfhood. It also offers the artist the opportunity to work through the wider social, cultural, and political circumstances, as well as the participants of the system. It makes the intangible experience a tangible foundation on which to build a whole self.

In Body work Melissa Febos (2022) explores how autobiographical writing can help one face regrets and trauma and extract meaning from the “pliable material” of memory. “In Praise of Navel Gazing” she affirms the importance of women airing their stories of abuse and thereby challenging the power structures that aim to keep victims silent. She argues that this can help women in reclaiming their own story and that “By convincing us to police our own and one another’s stories, they have enlisted us in the project of our own continued disempowerment.” (Febos, 2022, p.20). In I love Dick Kris Kraus (2016) is unapologetically honest and true to the self, freed from morality and the desire to be unproblematic, enjoying disfunction, and not adhering to societies ideas of womanhood. She says: “I’m moved in writing to be irrepressible…I’ve fused my silence and repression with the entire female gender’s silence and repression.” (Kraus, 2016, p.210). There is a power in releasing the self, ugly and beautiful, not for a gaze, but just in truth. In ILD her obsession, the interior is far more fascinating to her than the reality and the exterior, but they are not separate, they are interconnected and interdependent. Louise bourgeois Passage Dangereux (1997) combines objects of her pastwith her own sculptures to present a narrative about a young girl going through different rites of passage. “Passing through the cell, the viewer is confronted by objects that all have something to do with childhood and puberty, with the gradual awakening of awareness – a time of development that is fraught with danger” (Küster, 2011, p.115). 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. Relating to girlhood it is fraught, fragmented, requires interpretation, and is displayed in a way that asks us to see, asks us to understand, and imbues items and moments with significance, to try to make sense of it but also to constrain and diminish its power. Her works are acts of self-therapy, coping with crisis, and a performance of the self and memory. Tracey Emin’s My Major Retrospective (1963 -1993) exhibition was an account of her life, an act of catharsis, a statement on self, and on what her practice would be about, delving into history, experiences, and memory, to reconcile and express who she is now. 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, and yet, it misses 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, are separate to the solidity of the objects, the two are not the same. The title, suggests an artist much later in her career, making it clear that events of significance have already occurred. Now, she has simply to continue making the work. Looking back at her practice through time you can see how she has changed upon her experiences and how they have defined who she is and what she makes. In Johnathan jones book he states, “These memory museums confront you with who she is, where she comes from and the scars that she bears” (Jones, 202, p.15) stating that “Emin’s memories are a dangerous place to wander” and that “She never walks away from an emotion or a memory” (Jones, 202, p.16)

Conclusion

Another solution could be to return to the ideas of performativity found in Butlers writing and apply it as a lens through which to view artistic production. Much of what I have written focuses on the divide of the inner and outer self and therefore reinforces it. Viewing women’s art through a lens of performativity, that not only encompasses gender, but also ethnicity, social class, nationality and so on, could be key in encompassing the totality of a person, expressing the inner and outer self simultaneously as an act of performativity.

Although the rules and confines, ways of acting out gender, may seem innate, they are not, and it is difficult to separate oneself from it, to view ourselves without the ‘performance’. 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. 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. The creation of the self is also the creation of the other. This is achieved consciously and unconsciously. 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. Women cannot be artists if their time is taken up with playing a part. It can also cause great mental distress holding oneself up to ideals while also breaking them. Freedom for a woman is a hard thing to win and requires a killing of the idea of self. The created self must die, most importantly the desire to please. Ingrained since birth, it must be cast off, and that is painful. It is a tearing and clawing, and can be humiliating, and degrading, feeling wrong every step of the way, with only a glimpse of hope that although it will be hard it will be freeing. While there may not be any essential womanliness or femininity it does not mean that women are not trying to grapple with what it means in their own times/ terms to be a woman. By creating work with themselves as the subject, and with openness and honesty, women can start to dismantle the un-truths. To understand or express something about what it is to be embodied and socialised as female, but also what is means to just be a person and express the human condition.

Bibliography

Ali, N. (2020) What we’re told not to talk about (but we’re going to anyway): Women’s voices from East London to Ethiopia. London: Penguin Books.

Butler, J. (1988) ‘Performative acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, Theatre Journal, 40(4), p. 519. doi:10.2307/3207893.

Butler, J. (1999) Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.

Clark, H.L. (2022) Red comet: The short life and blazing art of Sylvia Plath. London: Vintage.

Cline, E. (2017) The girls. London: Vintage.

Criado-Perez, C. (2020) Invisible women: Exposing data bias in a world designed for men. London: Vintage Publishing.

de Beauvoir, S. and Borde, C. (2015) The Second sex. London, Scoresby, Scoresby: Penguin Random House ; Penguin Random House Distributor ; United Book Distributors Distributor.

Edensor, L. (2018) Katherine Mansfield and conceptualisations of the self. Available at: http://nectar.northampton.ac.uk/12546/1/Edensor_Louise_Katherine_Mansfield_and_Conceptualisations_of_the_Self.pdf (Accessed: 23 September 2024).

Elkin, L. (2024) Art monsters: Unruly bodies in feminist art. S.l.: VINTAGE.

Emin, T. (2005) Strangeland. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

Eugenides, J. (2023) The virgin suicides. London: 4th Estate.

Febos, M. (2022) Body work: The radical power of personal narrative. New York: Catapult.

Febos, M. (2022) Girlhood: Essays. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing USA.

Franingham, M. (2022) Girlhood (classic reprint). S.l.: Forgotten Books

Gilman, C.P. (2021) The yellow wallpaper ; Herland. London: Macmillan Collector’s Library.

Hood, B.M. (2013) The self illusion: Why there is no ‘you’ inside your head. London: Constable.

Healey, J. (2021) The Ophelia girls. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Healy, C.M. (2023) Girlhood. London: Tate Gallery Publishing Ltd.

Janega, E. (2024) The once and future sex: Going medieval on women’s roles in society. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Jones, J. (2020) Tracey Emin. London: Laurence King Publishing.

Küster, U. (2011) Louise Bourgeois. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz.

Kraus, C. (2016) I love dick. Amsterdam: Lebowski Publishers.

Laing, R.D. (2010) The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. London: Penguin.

Miles, R. (1993) The women’s history of the world. London: Harper Collins Publishers.

Nabokov, V.V. (1992) Lolita. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Patmore, C. (2013) Angel in the House Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore. Hamburg: tredition.

Perloff, M.G. and Plath, S. (1972) ‘“a ritual for being born twice”: Sylvia Plath’s “The bell jar”’, Contemporary Literature, 13(4), p. 507. doi:10.2307/1207445.

Plath, S. (2006) The Bell Jar. London: Faber and Faber.

Rose, P. (1978) Woman of letters: A life of virginia woolf. London: Routledge and K. Paul.

Ross, D. (2022) What Gloria Steinem thinks about Marilyn Monroe, PBS. Available at: https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/marilyn-monroe-biography/61/ (Accessed: 23 September 2024).

Russell, K.E. (2021) My dark vanessa. London: 4th Estate.

Showalter, E. (2001) The female malady. London: Virago Press.

Walker, N. (1983) ‘Emily Dickinson and the self: Humor as identity’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 2(1), p. 57. doi:10.2307/464206.

Woolf, V. (1995) Killing the angel in the House: Seven essays. London: Penguin.

Woolf, V. (2013) To the lighthouse. Ware: Wordsworth Editions Ltd.

Woolf, V. (2013a) Mrs. dalloway. Ware: Wordsworth Editions Ltd.

Woolf, V. (2020) A room of one’s own. London: Penguin Books.

Wharton, E. (1997) The House of Mirth. London: Wordsworth classics.