As a mentor, Carolyn strenuously rejected what might in this context be called the nurturing or even mothering model. She did not lavish attention on her students, the way Manhattan mothers hover over their children with self-sacrificial zeal. Carolyn used to tell the story that years ago she had instituted a system at home where each member of the family, including the children, was responsible for preparing dinner once a week, a practice that sometimes produced peanut butter sandwich meals, and so be it. In many ways, this was analogous to how she treated her graduate students, much to my satisfaction. Her professional, mature mentoring style offset the often infantalizing dynamic of graduate training. From a strictly feminist point of view, I had felt alienated by Ruth Perry’s paradigm of “mothering the mind” as well as Julia Kristeva’s metaphor of writing with maternal breast milk. A woman with no desire to play the role of mother, I needed what I considered to be a less reactionary model of feminist mentoring. This has been especially important to me in my work at Barnard, as women’s colleges are all the more susceptible to falling into the trap of mothering their students, thereby arresting their development as independent thinkers. Far from feeling neglected as a graduate student, I learned from Carolyn’s example that my job as a feminist was to pay attention to my own work, without worrying too much what others thought of it, because valuable work, not nurturing intentions, would best advance the cause of women.
Both A Room of One’s Own and Writing a Woman’s Life locate subjectivity in work. In Woolf’s famous account of Chloe and Olivia, the fact that they “shared a laboratory together” has the potential to change not only the course of literary history but also the lives of the actual women who will enact and write this new history. There is, of course, an apparent irony here. Chloe and Olivia are fictional characters, thus reflecting postmodernism’s contention that the self itself is a fictional construction. But this irony is now anachronistic. Almost a century of feminist work has transformed fiction into fact, at least for the woman who has, as Heilbrun puts it, ceased “automatically offering her services as cook and housekeeper and child watcher.” Chloe and Olivia are now the very real women who people the pages of Writing a Woman’s Life, women like Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich and Käthe Kollwitz, for whom work “marks the end of fantasy” and the beginning of a “stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying” life. Even Amanda Cross, Carolyn’s nom de plume, was a real woman who rose at five in the morning to write mystery novels, before her children arose, before she transformed, when the clock struck nine, into Professor Carolyn Heilbrun of Columbia University. If Amanda Cross suffered from the “anxiety of authorship,” she faced it down on a daily, even hourly basis. Though no doubt gripped with fantastic fears, just like the rest of us, Carolyn Heilbrun the writer managed to allay her fears with work. This is her most valuable gift to me. Whenever I feel paralyzed by the blank page, on a daily, even hourly basis, I think of Carolyn’s existential example, and I pick up the pen and write.
Is there a self in this memoir, or in any memoir? At the risk of sounding naïve to poststructuralists (and Carolyn would definitely counsel throwing caution to the wind), I would assert that there most definitely is a self – the one who rises at five in the morning to write, and dashes off forms to save time to write, and eats peanut butter sandwiches for dinner in order to write some more. Like Eliot’s “extinction of personality,” Barthes’ “death of the author” may constitute another plot, postmodern this time, to rob us of ourselves. Though this memoir does not pretend to present “a coherent life,” as Woolf describes her biography of Roger Fry in “A Sketch of the Past,” it does “sum up and make a knot out of innumerable little threads” connecting Carolyn Heilbrun with myself. It does present, through emblematic scenes, a record of the very real acts of very real women, not postmodern “paper-authors” but existential authors of their own lives. Far more than a theoretical construct or critical stance, feminism is an action. Feminists do things, thereby defying the prescribed sphere of passivity. Little wonder, then, that Carolyn’s death was also an act, something she authored rather than something that happened to her. This final act was, I think, an assertion of the personal, the autonomous, the right to choose to be or not to be, all the things her life continues to embody in her work, and in the work we are able to produce and the lives we are able to live, thanks to her.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Image-Music-Text. Ed. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1977.
—. “From Work to Text.” 1971. Textual Strategies. Ed. Josue V. Harari. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979.
Cixous, Hélène and Catherine Clément. The Newly Born Woman. 1975. Trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.
Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. 1920. New York: Methuen, 1960.
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. “Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship.” The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.
Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Toward a Recognition of Androgyny. New York: Knopf, 1973.
—. Writing a Woman’s Life. New York: Norton, 1988.
Perry, Ruth and Martine Watson Brownley. Mothering the Mind: Twelve Studies of Writers and Their Silent Partners. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1984.
Stein, Gertrude. “As A Wife Has A Cow A Love Story.” 1926. A Stein Reader. Ed. Ulla E. Dydo. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1993.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989.
—. “A Sketch of the Past.” Moments of Being. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.
