Free Silences by Shelly Fisher Fishkin Page B

responsibility, I mean and desire it to be responsibility for the deepest and innermost essence of the loved reality [writing] to which I am inseparably bound”; and who also said, “Anything alive that makes demands, arouses in me an infinite capacity to give it its due, the consequences of which completely use me up.” These were true with Kafka, too, yet how different their lives.When Rilke wrote that about responsibility, he is explaining why he will not take a job to support his wife and baby, nor live with them (years later will not come to his daughter’s wedding nor permit a two-hour honeymoon visit lest it break his solitude where he awaits poetry). The“infinite capacity” is his explanation as to why he cannot even bear to have a dog. Extreme—and justified. He protectedhis creative powers.
    Kafka’s, Rilke’s “infinite capacity,” and all else that has been said here of the needs of creation, illuminate women’s silence of centuries. I will not repeat what is in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, but talk of this last century and a half in which women have begun to have voice in literature. (It has been less than that time in Eastern Europe, and not yet, in manyparts of the world.)
    In the last century, of the women whose achievements endure for us in one way or another, * nearly all never married (Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, Sarah Orne Jewett) or married late in their thirties (George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Brontë, Olive Schreiner). I can think of only four (George Sand, HarrietBeecher Stowe, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Elizabeth Gaskell) who married and had children as young women. ** All had servants.
    In our century, until very recently, it has not been so different. Most did not marry (Selma Lagerlof, Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, Gertrude Stein, Gabriela Mistral, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Charlotte Mew, Eudora Welty, Marianne Moore) or, if married, have been childless(Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, H.H. Richardson, Elizabeth Bowen, Isak Dinesen, Katherine Anne Porter, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker). Colette had one child (when she was forty). If I include Sigrid Undset, Kay Boyle, Pearl Buck, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, that will make a small group who had more than one child. All had household help or other special circumstances.

    Am I resaying the moldy theory that women have no need, some say no capacity, to create art, because they can “create” babies? And the additional proof is precisely that the few women who have created it are nearly all childless? No.
    The power and the need to create, over and beyond reproduction,is native in both women and men. Where the gifted among women (and men) have remained mute, or havenever attained full capacity, it is because of circumstances, inner or outer, which oppose the needs of creation.
    Wholly surrendered and dedicated lives; time as needed for the work; totality of self. But women are traditionally trained to place others’ needs first, to feel these needs as their own (the “infinite capacity”); their sphere, their satisfaction to be in making it possible for othersto use their abilities. This is what Virginia Woolf meant when, already a writer of achievement, she wrote in her diary:
                 Father’s birthday. He would have been 96, 96, yes, today; and could have been 96, like other people one has known; but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books;—inconceivable.
    It took family deathsto free more than one woman writer into her own development. * Emily Dickinson freed herself, denying all the duties expected of a woman of her social position except the closest family ones, and she was fortunate to have a sister, and servants, to share those. How much is revealed of the differing circumstances and fate of their own as-great