What can be found below is an excerpt from what was originally a private letter from me to a friend of mine. She is a writer living in Los Angeles with whom I have been exchanging letters on literature – at times highly intensively – over the past four years. The reason for why I decided to publish it – only partly though – here is not because I think it will be read and understood by the people who visit my blog. The intention behind this publication is simply to state the current context of my intellectual orientations. Since this letter succeeded so brilliantly to express the quintessence of my thoughts regarding literature, I have come to regard it as an independent piece. This independent statement I have given the following name:What it feels like for a girl
What impressed me most about the structure of [the idea for your novel] was how Gracie’s mother reacts when she finds out about everything. (And you’ve picked the most excellent name for the main character – from Grace, but still not exactly Grace, but in the form of the smaller, minor, more local and human ‘gracie’.) Twist the world around in this book; twist it and show how all of our personal relationships can be turned inside out, how what is seemingly “right” doesn’t always have to be the opposite of “wrong”, and how evil can come presented to us in the nicests of forms. I think it would be awesome if you don’t let it show in the beginning what exactly [her best friend] Sarah constitutes of, if her turn on Gracie can come as sudden on the reader as it does on Gracie herself. You can play with appearances in this novel, because what the main idea really constitutes is nothing but a reversal of everything it involves. And it should be! Reverse the notions of good and bad, reverse the notions of right and wrong; show just exactly how strange and non-absolute our world, our culture, our time really is! You’ve got the perfect foundation for this in [the main character] Gracie – who will come to face the harsh facts of real life for which she was not prepared by her culture and her upbringing. In what Sarah’s dad [the photography teacher at their school] does to her she will come face to face with the fact that our culture – and, in the end, our world and the history of mankind – has prepared nothing else for the woman but the place of a server, of someone who has to be “a good girl” and (always, always) please the man; any man. And what does the “good girl” do when she’s faced with the weakness of a man? She keeps her mouth shut.
But you’ll go further, and that’s where the strongest part of your story lies – Gracie will turn against her upbringing, against her culture, the beliefs and standards and norms that she was brought up on and in which she is forced to live her life; and when she does so, everything should – naturally – come tumbling down. Because we have been taught that if we destroy things, then they are destroyed. But in a new notion of destruction we might find construction. The old notion of destruction comes from the fact that we were taught to think this way, to think that outside of the “good girl” image there is nothing but evil, wrong, darkness, an eternal loneliness and apartness from family, Church (or whatever floats you boat, really), etc. And when she does stand up for herself she will come to find that her greatest ally really was what she initially thought to be her greatest enemy – her mother. This is where the key of your idea lies; in the portrayal of this relationship.
Our culture has yet to tell the story of the relationship between mother and daughter. The real relationship, the reality of it, in it and behind it. Our literature has been solely focused on our relation as human beings to the Father – and to whom ever, in which we choose to portray the Father and his specific traits. We can pick God and He’ll be the object of our frustration with human and earthly life, but we can also choose Nature and still we will unconsciously objectify it in such a particular way that it will lack any female features whatsoever, except those “absolute” ones that we choose to give “Her”, because in our culture femininity is still undiscovered. It is a grey area; a zone of human life we have yet to explore in detail. We must free ourselves of the male experience and replace it with female experience. Because the Father is always distanced from us, as he is [distanced] from natural life; he doesn’t produce life, he doesn’t carry it; he cannot distinguish his children from the children of others. When we choose to focus on the male experience we also choose to disconnect ourselves from the concept of nature, of family, of belonging and of intuitively feeling what it is “to be”.
The past week I have been preparing very intensively for an exam I’ll have to take already tomorrow, in the subject of “History and Philosophy of Science”. It might sound like the most boring subject, and it was the whole year while I was actually taking the class, but now that I’ve been forced to read all of these theories and smart thoughts as presented by big, old philosophers throughout the history of mankind, my eyes have been opened. All of the philosophers included in the questions necessary to learn by heart in order to pass this exam are men. Only one woman enters, and she enters only at the very end of it, and then only because her ideas were close to those of another man: Julia Kristeva wrote something reminding of the ideas of Roland Barthes. But what else Julia Kristeva did and said that was productive for the humanistic thought, for literary theory – all of this is left unsaid. She might as well not have existed. Anyway. During this intensive studying of all of their ideas – most of them were Germans, not surprisingly, since German culture for centuries wanted the woman to stay in the kitchen with the kids and only come out on Sundays in order to pay her respects to God in church – I have realized that they are all searching for what it means “to be”, “to exist”, “to be human” in the wrong place. They are all focused on language; and claim that in language is everything and that outside of language there is nothing. But why do they claim this is so? Because the language of humans have been shaped in such a way that it is indeed all you need in order to experience what it is to be A MAN.
Everything concerned with male identity can be found in our language.
Our language cannot properly retell the female experience because this was never its intention in the first place. And neither have women in our history, in our culture found this a necessity to ask from language, because in our female experience there is so much that we cannot explain, that is understood without words, that lay outside of language. In Swedish language, for example, there is yet to be invented a proper word for the female reproductive organ. This is subject for huge public debate in Sweden, and has ultimately led to the artificial invention of one for dictionaries, to be used also in magazines and papers and books. But this does not change the fact that our language initially did not have the NEED for such a word, because this word was not an actuality to men and men are the inventors and the keepers and the modificators of language. The female experience is not in need of a language of its own and of its own words; because what it means to be a woman is not at all what it means to be a man – when you are a man you are distant from the reality of life because you in yourself are the end of yourself; the final destination, so to speak. The man can see himself as the subject of something because in him there is nothing reminding of eternity, nothing connecting him with nature, with the continual process of living and producing life.
I would argue that Nietzsche was indeed right when he said: “Man is transition and death – always”. But we can’t say the same about woman, because about her only the following is true: “Woman is transition and life – always.”
What I’m suggesting is that we’re faced with a whole new issue here, and it is not limited to the question of equality anymore. Frankly, I’m tired of equality. I was tired of feminism already at the age of fifteen. I don’t think the answers to this question can be found in feminism, because I don’t believe that we can change who we are, and neither do I see a necessity for such a change. Maybe that’s a grim statement, but why go against nature when we actually have the privilege of going with her? Instead of trying to use a male – read: traditional – form for our female material, why not forgo the old form all together and create a new form? Let’s tell the truth about what it means to be a woman, let’s not shield the fact that we are the object anymore, let’s use it to our advantage instead. I’m okay with being the object, because I realize this is the truth of culture, history, language – all created by a subject which we cannot overthrow without becoming ourselves the subject. And when we argue that this must be done, what we are really saying is that to be female is to be inferior, whereas it is not inferior – it is simply SOMETHING ELSE. And in this something else we must learn to focus on our feelings, on our specific way of feeling as women.
To sum things up, I see my mission as a writer to tell – implicitly and explicitly – “what it feels like for a girl”.
It is as simple as that.
Before I’ve been almost only concerned with trying to make myself more male in my writing. I’ve written whole novels from the point of view of a male character, as if in this what I wrote would be worth more, as if that would make it more accepted, more reliable and ultimately more “true”. This was because I grew up in a world telling me exactly that this was the case. It is worth more to be more like a man. Being a woman means to be worth less, to be less important, to be the object of someone else and this person’s desires, intentions, goals. But what I feel is that it is now high time to reveal the power of being worth less – historically, culturally – by changing the notions of what a woman is allowed to do, how a woman is allowed to think, what a woman is allowed to be. I think that deep down men and women are different as biological creatures, but also I think that much of this can be explained by the cultural situations in which we find ourselves. Our emancipation must begin not with the suppression of femininity, but with the celebration of it. To help us do this we have the obvious at our hands: we must undress the notions underlying our behavior.
In your story I see a manifestation of the struggles a woman is faced with in our world today, the struggles that define her behavior. Her world is ordered by men, dictated by their weaknesses – and you’ve got all the three most powerful means of male suppression at your hands! 1) Her boyfriend was the cause for her having to tell lies to her parents, thus regulating her life and her behavior as the “object” needed for his “subjective” existence. 2) The photography teacher actually teaches her what it means to be woman when she has to “support” him and “acknowledge” him, and when she later also has to realize where the limits of her body are, and how this society is built up in the revelation of the fact that the man always, always comes first. 3) The most powerful, the most meaningful representation of what a man means in relation to a woman comes into your story in the form of the silent father, of the father who does not know, in the father from whom we – women – must hide our reality, since this male figure cannot handle it. In actuality, all men are weak. And our female behavior is meant to protect the men, to allow them to remain fragile personally, because – after all, both culturally and historically – they have so much else on their shoulders: the economical responsibility, the responsibility to make the rules, set the standards and create the world in which we live. So in order for them to be able to continue their “play” in the world outside, we shield and protect them from the real world, the world within.
I think the past week has answered my question: “Why are there no great female philosophers?” And why do I not feel the least need to express myself in the categories of philosophy? Because philosophy is a male practice which asks what it means to be human, how humans relate to the world, and it is only concerned with justification of the man – which in himself is pointless. The woman cannot ever see herself as pointless, and the questions which male philosophers pose seem trivial to her, because we know what life is. We are involved in the cycle of life, we have the whole universe inside of us; we are the creators of life, the keepers of life, the sole reason as for why wars must come to an end eventually. Have you ever wondered why women do not go to war? Only in the 20th century, and then mostly in Communistic countries (where the notion of equality took abnormal forms), did women go to war. Instead, throughout history in war women have always taken the role of healing the wounds of the soldiers. This is also our function in society as a whole – we heal the broken parts, we put together the end and the beginning, we answer the question “why are we here?” by – this might sound a bit vulgar – opening up our thighs for the man to enter into us.
On this subject I can speak for an eternity. For example, when I read the memoirs of [Yevgenia Ginzburg] who went through the GULAG system in Soviet times for 18 years, just as long as my new favorite writer Varlam Shalamov did, I was surprised to find that her memoir lacked so much of the “pain” that is evident on every page of everything Shalamov has ever written. I came to the obvious conclusion that women do not feel pain in the same way that men do; our bodies are stronger than men’s, we are more used to pain, and thus we prevail also in the terrible, appalling conditions such as starvation in which they perish. And this must also be included in our retelling of female experience.
If no one else will listen when a story is told in this way – our culture and our language at this point in history is still dictated mostly by men – then I promise you that in me you will have a faithful comrade. If the world will not understand, then I take it on my shoulders to write literary interpretations of your work. If you’ll be the writer, I’ll be your critic; I’ll be for you what the 20th century humanistic thought was for Dostoevsky. This said doesn’t mean that I won’t also write things myself. Just that I have also realized another strength in my artistic abilities – I have the ability to analyze! And also that I love analyzing stuff in cultural contexts.
