It is a dream that is yet to materialise.
Do you remember the beginning of Middlemarch? The prelude in which she talks about the young St. Theresa of Avila, walking out hand-in-hand with her brother, to seek martyrdom? Where she speaks of Theresa's "passionate, ideal nature" not being content merely with the stuff of romance novels and "social conquests" but demanding "an epic life" of its own: "..some illimitable satisfaction, some object that would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self"? Yes, I knew you'd remember it. Well, this is what the film (forgive me, I haven't read Gilbert's book) led me to think about: why the story of a woman forced on a painful (and of course, cinematically picturesque!) journey of self-discovery seems to speak (at least to other women) universal? Is it, as Eliot says, that there have been many such Theresas who have felt and wanted so much and "with dim lights and tangled circumstance tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement"? Who like Julia Roberts' character, Liz, have poured themselves into their relationships, children or work, but who despite their efforts never yet seemed to have found their object - their epic: only "a life of mistakes" in which "their struggles seem," not least to themselves, "mere inconsistency and formlessness"? I know I have witnessed this sense of failure and lack of fulfilment in the women around me: sisters, friends, myself. Is Theresa's epic longing, then, the archetype of female experience? Is the frustration and sense of loss that Eliot describes an inevitable consequence of women's desire to, in modern parlance, "have it all"? A somewhat depressing picture, but it is certainly the crisis point at which Gilbert's self/character finds herself.
When we meet Liz at the beginning of the film her friend has just had a baby and we are led to think that it is this that she wants, that her sense of dissatisfaction and her misgivings about her husband are biological and maternal: will he be a good father? does he even want children? However, it soon becomes apparent that the box that Liz keeps under her bed harbours not illicitly bought baby clothes for that anticipated happy arrival but travels books on Bali. Hers, then, is not the commonly conceived yearning of clock-ticking, broody womanhood, not the desire to participate in Life by giving birth to it, but something more abstract, something nameless and unknown - perhaps it is what Eliot refers to as a "vague ideal." An ideal perhaps of happiness, completion and fulfilment and something which many women, happy mothers or wives, may too find themselves at a loss for. For, as her friend points out, having children is like getting a tattoo on your face: "you have to be committed," for it is going to change you outwardly, and inwardly, but is not necessarily going to beautify what was already there. To have a tattoo on your face, in my experience, like piercings, you have to be pretty damn attractive in the first place to carry it off. In the absence of (certainly, children as) a solution and in her desperation to know what this unknown thing is, Liz - not unlike Theresa and, no doubt, the many other Theresas that have come after her - turns, to God and prayer.
But, if it is not babies that women are all secretly yearning for, is the St. Theresa phenomenon - what Eliot describes as a passion alternating between "a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood" - truly an issue of gender? I know there are men have felt lost or at some point or another have reached a point of crisis. Eliot's portrayal of the poor plight of women can after all be reasonably explained by the pre-emancipation society in which she was writing. Women, such as herself, might aspire to do good work but were circumscribed by their status as dependant daughters and wives, intellectually and morally inferior, to be only helps (or hinderances) to their men or by channelling their creativity through motherhood. In Gilbert's modern tale, meanwhile, the women are stronger, more independent; it is Liz's ex-husband who is emotionally dependent on her, and the men who are at a loss for the lack of their children. Yet, I cannot help see the single-mindedness with which the men in my life pursue their work: the cliche that men can only think of one thing at a time sometimes appears, sadly, to be only too true. And is what those men who do drift through life experience what Eliot is speaking of here: the vague yet common yearning for something cannot be attained? Is there such a thing a modern male Saint Theresa, "foundress of nothing, whose loving heartbeats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed"? Or does Eliot, and Gilbert's book/film speak of such a subject or, at least, state of experience that is essentially female?
Well, before I have Margaret Atwood screaming about a generational feminist backlash, let me say that I grew up firmly in doubt that the common yearning of womanhood existed within me, so repelled was I - and still can be - by the fact of small children and babies; and I was rather secretly scornful of those school friends that went from one relationship straight into the next as if their life depended on the daily mouth to mouth resuscitation of their boyfriends. On the contrary, I grew up on Little Women, with many quite clear and strong ideas about the rights and roles of women: that they should not be reduced to merely sexual or biological objects, but seen as the intellectual and social equals of men. Along with Eliot I would have taken exception to the suggestion that "the blundering lives," of women so described "are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women," that we are too frail-minded to know our wants and work methodically and systematically to achieve them. That we cannot even decide on what to wear, or to know without asking whether our bums look big in this! I would still argue vehemently, along with Mary Ann Evans (aka George Eliot), that (with the exception of myself, who is far and away the most indecisive specimen ever to have stood in the cereal aisle trying to decide between Fruit and Fibre and Weetabix) this is not so. We may appear by the "sameness" of our clothes and coiffure (a word not used nearly enough in modern English speech in my opinion), over which we are constantly lingering and changing our minds, to be generally silly and trifling, but (as the chivalrous Eliot leaps to our defence) women are chock full of more infinite variety than they would outwardly appear. "Feminine incompetence" cannot be gauged by testing whether or not we can count to three, damn it! But, despite our limitless variation, the indefiniteness remains: unseen - within. It is not something that can be measured - perhaps not anything rational (heaven forbid it might be!) - but, rather, it is something felt.
I myself felt - no, in feeling knew - at the tender age of 17, that far from wishing to settle down to life in a small town, I wanted out. However, here already, I can feel my adolescent militant feminism (again) coming unstuck: I wanted 'out' but what did I think I was opting 'in' to? I wanted more, I told myself, but more of what? I would have replied in frustration, something different still without precisely knowing what that meant. And so, I studied and went to university and there acquired a lot more vague ideals and a few concrete ones about what life could - and therefore necessarily would - be. However, in the years since, I admit to having Dorotheaed: to having suffered the same intensity of an abstract desire that Eliot's (and Gilbert's) protagonist does to do or make something of this Life, to participate and almost be absorbed into it, and the attendant frustrations and bitternesses of feeling that I have failed, that it is, perhaps, a task that is doomed to fail because it comes not from a place of reason but emotion. That it is something visceral, something felt, and barely expressible. And it is this fact that has led me, much against feminist ideals and popular thinking, to surmise whether this is not then the experience of the "common yearning of womanhood" - not for babies, but for something that also cries out from the centre of oneself; a place of viscera, the emotions and spirit: a whole world inside of ourselves. And whether therefore Eliot is not, despite writing 150 years ago, entirely right. Is the modern woman search to have it all failing because it is not even about jobs and children, handbags and husbands? Is it not something else entirely that we are reaching for, and in that case what is that? Can it even be found or it is a search without end: unattainable?
Elizabeth Gilbert's message may at first sight seem more optimistic than George Eliot's. However, both heroines, after a first failed marriage into which they poured all their resources of love, hope, kindness, patience, generosity..., find fulfilment first in and through themselves and then with another. Perhaps this is what that yearning desire is for: union - a sense of oneness or completion. Maybe we go wrong by thinking the answer is to love others first, something we in the West are taught is generous and selfless: to give of ourselves to others, like the sacrifice of Christ or the young Theresa of Avila setting out for martyrdom. But, martyrdom. Perhaps it is as a Chinese husband and father told me lately of his most earnest wish for his daughter, that the most important thing is not to seek to love others but to hope to be loved by them, to work to be the kind of person people love. If the lack of agency seems selfish, indulgent, arrogant, (and I confess it did to me at first) let me suggest that loving others can be a selfish act: we love them that they might love us; we say it that they will say it back. But the quest to be loved must surely start with ourselves, not in a calculated or manipulative way, but in the earnest desire to be the person you would love to be and love to love. That you do love. Perhaps it is in the self that we find the everything else that we were searching for, when we realise that we had it - it was right here - all along. It was us.
Well, that is just a little something I'm working on anyway.
