I tried to let this go past without comment, but it's stayed with me throughout the day. And the more I thought about it, the more it bothered me.
Not for the positive sentiment that serving others can be a positive thing - precisely because no one was ever saying it couldn't be - but for how badly it mangles what it purports to be responding to.
No one ever said that the men who were only able to produce art because of other people labouring for them had had no pain or done nothing good. And no one ever said that those who supported them were always resentful and unwilling.
The point is that when people who weren't men had great tragedies and great powers of creativity, they were not supported to go off into the wilderness and explore their creative impulses and philosophies to their greatest depths.
And then we are compared to those works. And those works often PRESENT philosophies in which great works can be achieved on their own. This post is so... dishonest about what is being argued for.
Some of y'all haven't read A Room of One's Own, and it shows.
Shakespeare had great tragedies in his life, such as the death of his son Hamnet, and those obviously inform his work. But what, Virginia Woolf asks us, of Shakespeare's sister?
What would have become of the middle class woman with Shakespeare's upbringing and talent? She certainly would have been laughed out of the theatre.
We know that. Not just because of the remarks made by men of the time that a woman acting would be like a dog standing on its hind legs. But also because we can see the few, very few examples of women DID manage to write at the time, and how hard it was for them
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, with all the privileges that brings, was a philosopher and writer. She wrote the first science fiction novel. And she wrote plays. And she was ridiculed for it, and men tried to bury her existence. Despite a very supportive husband, she was widely regarded with derision as the Mad Duchess. While I wouldn't say her plays are remotely as good as Shakespeare, it's not as though she had the advantage of friendship with Kit Marlow. To be a playwright in Shakespeare's time was a collaborative effort, bouncing ideas and lines off your actors and other writers. We can see in the folios how much the plays changed from performance to performance. They weren' static. That was a novel concept just starting to be introduced by the printing press. But who collaborated with Margaret? Who batted frenzied ideas around with the Duchess?
Not Shakespeare's peers. And likely not many of her own class either.
Or try Aemelia Lanyer on for size. First woman poet to be published in the English language and her poems BLAZE with talent and pain and power.
But it was only possible because she had a female patron who supported her work, and they were both cut adrift in an inheritance dispute. You can hear it when you read The Description of Cookeham - the country house in which she and her patron briefly lived and for a while, she was free to write as men were. But it's a poem of loss.
Because they lost Cookeham. Because there is never the same financial security, and thus peace and room to work unburdened, as there is for men.
And no it's not the case that all men have it perfect and easy, but a fuck of a lot more of them have mothers or wives or sisters who will support them as they pour out their pain into the pages than there are fathers or husbands, or brothers who will do the same for a woman or non-binary person.
Woolf notes that you can see it in the cracks of the work women write. A moment in Jane Eyre where Jane thinks longingly of all she might do if she were free like a man that Woolf sees as flawed because it is not the character speaking, but the author, pouring out her pain.
Because women were always forced to write AROUND their duties, often in fear of getting caught. They could never polish freely to the same extent as men. Even Jane Austen had no study to retreat to, but would cover her pages with embroidery to hide them when she was interrupted by visitors.
It's not merely ignorant but insulting to be told that in critiquing the circumstances in which men wrote, partly supported by the labour of women, we are in some sense dismissing THOSE WOMEN. That in acknowledging that labour we are disparaging it.
This is some trad wife bullshit.
Noting that the labour of women that supported the great works of men has gone unrecognised is NOT to dismiss that labour. Nor is it invalid to critique a man who wrote ruggedly individualistic works while quietly supported by a woman, just because he had also supported others and suffered grief. That argument DOES NOT scan.
A person - anyone - needs a room of their own and a place of safety in which to write to fully explore their creative ideas.
As I lay in bed too sick to either work or write I feel this more strongly than ever.
Privilege is multifaceted, and it has never denied that those with one privilege may suffer in other ways, nor that they can do good works and support others. The critique of privilege is DOUBLY important when this is so, because those people STILL benefit from the STRUCTURES that support them over and above those who suffer the same tragedies without that support.
When Shakespeare is thrown into depression by the loss of his son he is still held up in all the myriad ways that a comfortably well-off, educated, middle-class white man in Elizabethan England can be. When Aemelia and her patron are set adrift because she and her patron are of the wrong gender, they have no one to turn to. No salvation. And we have far fewer poems by Lanyer than we do by Shakespeare, for all that many speculate she is the dark lady of his sonnets (I know, there are other speculations, but she is one).
With all the wealth and prestige of a Duchess, Cavendish's plays were only performed at home. It's not that she wasn't known in the theatrical world - it's said that when Cavendish went to the theatre to watch a play, everyone else in the audience was there to watch Cavendish, because of her eccentric reputation, but she could never be one of the Lord's Men. She could never see her works performed at the Globe. Never drink Kit Marlow under the bench.
Massive structural machines were (and still are) in play to see that it is far easier for men to have what they need in order to think and create handed to them.
THAT is the critique. THAT is the point.
Not that no one should ever support their loved ones while they write. For the most part, that's the only way for creatives to get started in having a career as opposed to a hobby.
The point is that it is MASSIVELY more common for women to quietly support men without recognition while they go off and write books that ignore the existence of women than it is for women or non-binary people to be supported by their loved ones to go off and do something creative.
It's always worth checking, when you're hot and angry that someone is beating down on your fave, that YOU are in fact beating up a real opponent, and not a straw person.
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