Motherhood and Creativity - A Symposium
Welcome to our Symposium on Motherhood and Creativity - More Organic Than It May Appear. We are stunned by the quality of pieces we’ve been able to curate from mothers who are are writers and artists, and are very pleased to be able to host this conversation.
The conversation first appears in the print magazine, with pieces from Suzanne M. Wolfe, Shemaiah Gonzalez, Lindsay Younce Tsohantaridis, and Jody Collins. But first, an introductory reflection from Dappled Things editor in chief, novelist, and mother, Katy Carl.
As editor in chief of Dappled Things, I am delighted to see the magazine showcase this collection of voices arising from a group of serious, productive creatives who also just so happen to be mothers and Catholics.
As this category description includes me also, I hasten to add that I did not initiate the project. The topic was first raised, and most strongly championed, by our web editor Fr. Michael Rennier. Amid friendly, lively discussion, his was the voice most consistently affirming that artistic accomplishment by mothers merits further, and better quality, attention than it has generally received.
But why? For myself I admit I find the idea of the “artist-mother,” the “mother-artist,” on its face a limiting one. All the various mental constructs I have of her inspire resistance. No such self-concept accompanies me when I write fiction. What is this nebulous quiddity being found in, or projected on, to artist-mothers? What is it we are being seen as, here, exactly?
Why is a label even necessary? For comparison, no concept lies closer to hand than that of our sometimes fraught relationship to the term “Catholic artist”—an intersection of identities already explored, deeply and often, in this space. Some resist such a label; others embrace it. What one artist rejects as limitation, another rediscovers as liberation. Anyone who accepts the term must take it with its freight of meaning or not at all, although we may and must also work to delineate how and to what extent we concur with its frequently found connotations.
Similar anxieties, too, may attend both labels, and for similar reasons. We can, and I do, dismiss out of hand any voice raised to doubt the worth of the artist-mother’s aspiration. Surely we need make no special plea for the quality of her work nor any apologia for the legitimacy of her pursuit. As for the productivity of her application, is that even so surprising as some seem to think? What is this “it” people refer to, when they parrot the phrase “I don’t know how you do it”? What is the content of their imaginary, here? Why don’t we evince equal surprise, as perhaps we should, over the success of Catholic father-artists, who find time to support, lead, and guide their families while also practicing their craft at high levels? I take equal delight in a good novel by a man as in one by a woman. In my practices as reader and fictionist I lean on the strong shoulder of Jane Austen, as she temporarily borrows Henry Tilney’s voice to affirm that “in every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence is pretty fairly divided between the sexes.” So is domestic and emotional labor, in many households where both husband and wife strive to provide well for their families while also living up to contemporary Catholic ideals of marriage and parenthood. That a man should find time and balance to create under such constraints is at least as surprising as that a woman should, for reasons both too complex to do full justice here and yet also frankly obvious after a moment or two’s good solid thought.
Then, too, women writers of my generation—whether Catholic or not, whether or not carrying the postmodern autonomous anxiety over fertility and its consequences—may possibly decline to share Virginia Woolf’s agitation over the status of women in fiction, at least in part because we feel so fortunate not to have shared, either, Woolf’s particular sociohistorical circumstances: her position’s social pressures, her individual illness, the Edwardian hothouse longueurs that would have sweltered any imagination and, arguably, warped as much as they nurtured hers. One hopes she would have been pleased that writers of our generation could live free of the spiritual polio that (she thought) crippled, for example, a Charlotte Brontë: “She will write in a rage where she should write calmly.” Not that we are all so free of anger now: but perhaps we have, if only in the greater comfort and convenience of modern life, at least the possibility of finding our way past anxious fury, false dichotomy, and distorting imagery, to a place where rage is, finally, unnecessary.
Again, speaking only for myself, and leaving to one side the contemporary problem of ownership of one’s time that looms before both the married and un-, those parenting and those not—I have found not conflict but profound confluence between motherhood and art. The same habits of mind that parenting demands—perception of fine detail, attention to others’ moods and needs, the “blessed rage for order”—also serve the artist well.
Our symposium contributors practice a diversity of arts. They are poets, essayists, actresses, visual artists, comedy writers, fictionists. Several speak openly of how their art and their maternity nurture one another. Where there is tension, it typically grows from popular misperception or from pressures common to all artists, not from any intrinsic opposition. The relation between the two aspects of character is, to use the phrase from poet Laura Reece Hogan that I’ve chosen as a title in the print edition, “more organic than it may appear.”
For the rest of this essay, I’ll speak to how our shared situation plays out in fiction, since that is the art I practice myself. Up until a few years ago, I might have said that women shared a certain cultural ascendancy in the writing world that could make particular attention to our voices feel like spurious oversolicitude. What, after all, could the body matter on the page? My early delight in books only grew on the strength of the observation that the body didn’t matter on the page. A glorious freedom—from the body, not for it—made itself available there that I could otherwise find only in prayer.
My inner Polaris on this issue was marked out early by Nadine Gordimer, who sums up succinctly my earliest and purest feelings on the matter when she says: “I question the existence of the specific solitude of woman-as-intellectual when that woman is a writer, because when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.” Zadie Smith likewise affirms the virtue of the maximum self-effacement that enables a writer to become anyone at all on the page, when she describes the experience of writing first-person narration—“The I That Is Not Me”—in her collection Feel Free:
Not to take yourself as a natural, unquestionable entity can lead you in turn to become aware of the radical contingency of life in general, its supremely accidental nature. I am Philip, I am Colson, I am Jonathan, I am Rivka, I am Virginia, I am Sylvia, I am Zora, I am Chinua, I am Saul, I am Toni, I am Nathan, I am Vladimir, I am Leo, I am Albert, I am Chimamanda—but how easily I might have been somebody else, with their feelings and preoccupations, with their obsessions and flaws and virtues. This to me is the primary novelistic impulse: this leap into the possibility of another life.
Yes: exactly. This necessary leap into a life not mine neutralizes entirely the question of a narrator’s, or an author’s, gender, body, appearance, social self. All such questions become secondary if not totally irrelevant to the appreciation of narrative. What matters most, will always matter above all, to me in a work of fiction is the quality of the writing, the degree to which it achieves Woolf’s persuasive desideratum: “Yes, one feels, I should never have thought that this could be so; I have never known people behaving like that. But you have convinced me that so it is, so it happens.”
Even so, always—upon discovering that a writer I admire is also a mother—I still find this little thrill, this zest of discovery: yes! another one! Pin this, too, on Woolf: I have to feel that the woman who makes literature as well as making life has beaten the odds. And still the writer-mothers of previous generations whose oeuvres I most admire have not typically spoken or worked as though on the defensive. Nor need they have done. Look at their sheer proliferation,* both in numbers and in output: Sigrid Undset; Toni Morrison, Caroline Gordon, Alice Thomas Ellis, Marilynne Robinson, Betty Wahl, Alice Munro, Lucia Berlin, Shirley Jackson, Zadie Smith,** Muriel Spark, Ursula K. Le Guin, Nadine Gordimer: one could further multiply examples. These women’s fiction flies far above the common run. Their readers may well feel, even if we can never prove, that they wrote as they did, and as finely as they did, because of, not despite, being childbearers. That a lifegiver’s art would be lifegiving need surprise no one.
My hope for this conversation is that it serves as a lifegiving gift, a blessing, and a permission slip to those artists and subcreators, whether they are mothers or not, who may have suffered—either implicitly or outright—under the weight of the falsehood You can’t make the kind of art you want to make, because it has nothing to do with what is expected of you or because people like you just can’t do that kind of thing. Short of real moral content—and I am talking matters listed in the Decalogue and the Beatitudes, not in the random opinions of strangers on the Internet—such false limitations exist exactly and only in order to be demolished.
Happy demolition! You can find the articles in our nonfiction section, both print and digital, and you can follow the conversation as it develops on our blog at Deep Down Things.
* I am all for reclaiming the word “prolific” in George Eliot’s sense of “fertile,” both literally and imaginatively.
** Smith is hardly “of a previous generation,” though her early and extraordinary debut—accomplished while I was still busy setting up my dorm room and clearing the small-town smog of illusions from off my field of vision—grants her automatic elder-statesman status for my generation of writers. Certainly I had the good fortune of coming up, though from a long distance away, in her shadow and under the fruitful anxiety of her influence.