Waveform

Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women

Marcia Aldrich

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780820350196
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

Waveform celebrates the role of women essayists in contemporary literature. Historically, women have been instrumental in moving the essay to center stage, and Waveform continues this rich tradition, further expanding the dynamic genre's boundaries and testing its edges. With thirty essays by thirty distinguished and diverse women writers, this carefully constructed anthology incorporates works ranging from the traditional to the experimental.

Waveform champions the diversity of women's approaches to the structure ofthe essay—today a site of invention and innovation, with experiments in collage, fragments, segmentation, braids, triptychs, and diptychs. Focused on these explorations of form, Waveform is not wed to a fixed theme or even to women's experiences per se. It is not driven by subject matter but highlights the writers' interaction with all manner of subject and circumstance through style, voice, tone, and structure.

This anthology presents some of the women who are shaping the essay today, mapping an ever-changing landscape. It is designed to place essays recently written by women such as Roxane Gay, Cheryl Strayed, Margo Jefferson, Jaquira Diaz, and Eula Biss into the hands of those who have been waiting patiently for something they could equally claim as their own.

Contributors: Marcia Aldrich, Jocelyn Bartkevicius, Chelsea Biondolillo, Eula Biss, Barrie Jean Borich, Joy Castro, Meghan Daum, Jaquira Díaz, Laurie Lynn Drummond, Patricia Foster, Roxane Gay, Leslie Jamison, Margo Jefferson, Sonja Livingston, Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, Brenda Miller, Michele Morano, Kyoko Mori, Bich Minh Nguyen, Adriana Paramo, Jericho Parms, Torrey Peters, Kristen Radtke, Wendy Rawlings, Cheryl Strayed, Dana Tommasino, Sarah Valentine, Neela Vaswani, Nicole Walker, Amy Wright

LESLIE JAMISON

Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain

The young woman on the bus with a ravaged face and the intense eyes of some beautiful species of monkey ... turned to me and said, “I think I’m getting a sore throat. Can you feel it?”—Robert Hass, “Images”

We see these wounded women everywhere: Miss Havisham wears her wedding dress until it burns. The bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress. Belinda’s hair gets cut—the sacred hair dissever [ed] / From the fair head, for ever, and for ever!—and then ascends to heaven: thy ravish’d hair / Which adds new glory to the shining sphere! Anna Karenina’s spurned love hurts so much she jumps in front of a train—freedom from one man was just another one, and then he didn’t even stick around. La Traviata’s Violetta regards her own pale face in the mirror: tubercular and lovely, an alabaster ghost with fevered eyes. Mimi is dying in La Bohème, and Rodolfo calls her beautiful as the dawn. You’ve mistaken the image, she tells him. You should have said “beautiful as the sunset.”

Women have gone pale all over Dracula. Mina is drained of her blood, then made complicit in the feast: His right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood.... The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk. Maria in the mountains confesses her rape to an American soldier—things were done to me I fought until I could not see—then submits herself to his protection. “No one has touched thee, little rabbit,” the soldier says. His touch purges every touch that came before it. She is another kitten under male hands. How does it go, again? Freedom from one man is just another one. Maria gets her hair cut too.

Sylvia Plath’s agony delivers her to a private Holocaust: An engine, an engine/Chuffing me off like a Jew. And her father’s ghost plays train conductor: Every woman adores a Fascist/The boot in the face, the brute/Brute heart of a brute like you. Every woman adores a Fascist, or else a guerrilla killer of Fascists, or else a boot in the face from anyone. Blanche DuBois wears a dirty ball gown and depends on the kindness of strangers. The bride within the dress had withered like the dress. Men have raped her and gone gay on her and died on her. Her closing stage directions turn her luminescent: “She has a tragic radiance in her red satin robe allowing the sculptural lines of her body.” Her body is allowed. Meaning: granted permission to exist by tragedy, permitted its soiled portion of radiance.

The pain of women turns them into kittens and rabbits and sunsets and sordid red satin goddesses, pales them and bloodies them and starves them, delivers them to death camps and sends locks of their hair to the stars. Men put them on trains and under them. Violence turns them celestial. Age turns them old. We can’t look away. We can’t stop imagining new ways for them to hurt.

Susan Sontag has described the heyday of a “nihilistic and sentimental” nineteenth-century logic that found appeal in female suffering: “Sadness made one ‘interesting.’ It was a mark of refinement, of sensibility, to be sad. That is, to be powerless.” This appeal mapped largely onto illness: “Sadness and tuberculosis became synonymous,” she writes, and both were coveted. Sadness was interesting and sickness was its handmaiden, providing not only cause but also symptoms and metaphors: a racking cough, a wan pallor, an emaciated body. “The melancholy creature was a superior one: sensitive, creative, a being apart,” she writes. Sickness was a “becoming frailty ... symbolized an appealing vulnerability, a superior sensitivity, [and] became more and more the ideal look for women.”

I was once called a wound dweller. It was a boyfriend who called me that. I didn’t like how it sounded. It was a few years ago, and I’m still not over it. (It was a wound; I dwell.) I wrote to a friend:

I’ve got this double-edged shame and indignation about my bodily ills and ailments—jaw, punched nose, fast heart, broken foot, etc. etc. etc. On the one hand, I’m like, Why does this shit happen to me? And on the other hand, I’m like, Why the fuck am I talking about this so much?

I guess I’m talking about it because it happened. Which is the tricky flip side of Sontag’s critique. We may have turned the wounded woman into a kind of goddess, romanticized her illness and idealized her suffering, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t happen. Women still have wounds: broken hearts and broken bones and broken lungs. How do we talk about these wounds without glamorizing them? Without corroborating an old mythos that turns female trauma into celestial constellations worthy of worship—thy ravish’d hair/Which adds new glory to the shining sphere!—and rubbernecks to peer at every lady breakdown? Lady Breakdown: a flavor of aristocracy, a gaunt figure lurking lovely in the shadows.

The moment we start talking about wounded women, we risk transforming their suffering from an aspect of the female experience into an element of the female constitution—perhaps its finest, frailest consummation. The old Greek Menander once said, “Woman is a pain that never goes away.” He probably just meant women were trouble. But his words work sideways to summon the possibility that being a woman requires being in pain, that pain is the unending glue and prerequisite of female consciousness. This is a notion as old as the Bible: I will greatly increase your pains in child-birthing; with pain you will give birth to children.

A 2001 study called “The Girl Who Cried Pain” tries to make sense of the fact that men are more likely than women to be given medication when they report pain to their doctors. Women are more likely to be given sedatives. This trend is particularly unfortunate given the evidence that women might actually experience pain more acutely; theories attribute this asymmetry to hormonal differences between genders or potentially to the fact that “women more often experience pain that is part of their normal biological processes (e.g., menstruation and childbirth)” and so may become more sensitive to pain because they have “to sort normal biological pain out from potentially pathological pain”; men don’t have to do this sorting. Despite these reports that “women are biologically more sensitive to pain than men, [their] pain reports are taken less seriously than men’s.” Less seriously meaning, more specifically, “they are more likely to have their pain reports discounted as ‘emotional’ or ‘psychogenic’ and, therefore, ‘not real.’”

A friend of mine once dreamed a car crash that left all the broken pieces of her Pontiac coated in bright orange pollen. My analyst pushed and pushed for me to make sense of the image, she wrote to me, and finally, I blurted, My wounds are fertile! And that has become one of the touchstones and rallying cries of my life.

What’s fertile in a wound? Why dwell in one? Wounds promise authenticity and profundity; beauty and singularity, desirability. They summon sympathy. They bleed enough light to write by. They yield scats full of stories and slights that become rallying cries. They break upon the fuming fruits of damaged engines and dust these engines with color.

And yet—beyond and beneath their fruits—they still hurt. The boons of a wound never get rid of it; they just bloom from it. It’s perilous to think of them as chosen. Perhaps a better phrase to use is wound appeal, which is to say: the ways a wound can seduce, how it can promise what it rarely gives. As my friend Harriet once told me, “Pain that gets performed is still pain.”

After all I’ve said, how can I tell you about my scars? I’ve got a puckered white blister of tissue on my ankle where a doctor pulled out a maggot. I’ve got faint lines farther up, at the base of my leg, where I used to cut myself with a razor. I’ve got a nose that was broken by a guy on the street, but you can’t tell what he did because money was paid so you couldn’t. Now my nose just has a little seam where it was cut and pulled away from my face then stitched back together again. I have screws in my upper jaw that only dentists ever see in x-rays. The surgeon said metal detectors might start going off for me—he probably said at me though I heard for me, like the chiming of bells—but they never did, never do. I have a patch of tissue near my aorta that sends electrical signals it shouldn’t. I had a terrible broken heart when I was twenty-two years old and I wanted to wear a T-shirt announcing it to everyone. Instead, I got so drunk I fell in the middle of Sixth Avenue and scraped all the skin off my knee. Then you could see it, no T-shirt necessary—see something, that bloody bulb under torn jeans, though you couldn’t have known what it meant. I have the faint bruise of tire tracks on the arch of my foot from the time it got run over by a car. For a little while I had a scar on my upper arm, a lovely raised purple crescent, and one time a stranger asked me about it. I told him the truth: I’d accidentally knocked into a sheet tray at the bakery where I worked. The sheet tray was hot, I explained. Just out of the oven. The man shook his head. He said, “You gotta come up with a better story than that.”

Wound #1

My friend Molly always wanted scars:

I was obsessed with Jem and the Holograms’ rival band the Misfits when I was five and wanted to have a cool scar like the Misfits, which I guess was just makeup, but my mom caught me looking in the bathroom mirror ... trying to cut my face with a sharp stick to get a cool diagonal wound on my face....

Eventually, she got them:

I have two mouth scars from my bro’s Labrador (Stonewall Jackson, or Stoney for short) who bit me six years apart, first when I was six and he was a puppy, and then more seriously when I was twelve. I needed stitches both times, first two and then twenty-something.... I was very much aware that I was no longer ever going to be a beautiful girl in the traditional sense, that there was some real violence marking its territory on my face now, and I was going to have to somehow start high school by adapting my personality to fit this new girl with a prominent scar twisting up from her mouth.

She wrote a poem about that dog: “it was like he could smell the blood/in my mouth. Neither of us/could help it.” As if the violence was her destiny and also something ultimately shared, nothing that could be helped, the twisting of intimacy into scar. The dog was sensing a wound that was already there—a mouth full of blood—and was drawn to it; his harm released what was already latent. “He has been at my itching,” the poem goes, “and cleaned out the rot. Left me/mouthfull of love.”

Wound #2

A Google search for the phrase “I hate cutters” yields hundreds of results, most of them from informal chat boards: I’m like wtf? why do they do it and they say they cant stop im like damn the balde isnt controlling u. There’s even a Facebook group called “I hate cutters”: this is for people who hate those emo kids who show off there cuts and thinks it is fun to cut them selves. Hating cutters crystallizes a broader disdain for pain that is understood as performed rather than legitimately felt. It’s usually cutters that are hated (wound dwellers!) rather than simply the act of cutting itself. People are dismissed, not just the verbs of what they’ve done. Apologists for cutting—Look beyond the cuts and to the soul, then you can see whom we really are—actually corroborate this sense of cutting as personality type rather than mere dysfunction. Cutting becomes part of identity, part of the self.

A Google search for the phrase “Stop hating on cutters” yields only one result, a posting on a message board called “Things You Wish People Would Stop Hating On.” Seriously the least they need is some idiotic troll calling them emo for cutting/burning etc. “Emo” being code for affect as performance: the sad show. People say cutters are just doing it for the attention, but why does “just” apply? A cry for attention is positioned as the ultimate crime, clutching or trivial—as if “attention” were inherently a selfish thing to want. But isn’t wanting attention one of the most fundamental traits of being human—and isn’t granting it one of the most important gifts we can ever give?

There’s an online quiz titled “Are you a real cutter or do you cut for fun?” full of statements to be agreed or disagreed with: I don’t know what it really feels like inside when you have problems, I just love to be the center of attention. Gradations grow finer inside the taboo: some cut from pain, others for show. Hating on cutters—or at least these cutter-performers—tries to draw a boundary between authentic and fabricated pain, as if we weren’t all some complicated mix of wounds we can’t let go of and wounds we can’t help, as if choice itself weren’t always some blend of character and agency. How much do we choose to feel anything? The answer, I think, is nothing satisfying—we do, and we don’t. But hating on cutters insists desperately upon our capacity for choice. People want to believe in self-improvement—it’s an American ethos, pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps—and here we have the equivalent of affective downward mobility: cutting as a failure to feel better, as deliberately going on a kind of sympathetic welfare—taking some shortcut to the street cred of pain without actually feeling it.

I used to cut. It embarrasses me to admit now because it feels less like a demonstration of some pain I’ve suffered and more like an admission that I’ve wanted to hurt. But I’m also irritated by my own embarrassment. There was nothing false about my cutting. It was what it was, neither horrifying nor productive. I felt like I wanted to cut my skin, and my cutting was an expression of that desire. There is no lie in that, only a tautology and a question: what made me want to cut at all? Cutting was query and response at once. I cut because my unhappiness felt nebulous and elusive, and I thought it could perhaps hold the shape of a line across my ankle. I cut because I was curious what it would feel like to cut. I cut because I needed very badly to ratify a shaky sense of self, and embodied unhappiness felt like an architectural plan.

I wish we lived in a world where no one wanted to cut. But I also wish that instead of disdaining cutting or the people who do it—or else shrugging it off, just youthful angst—we might direct our attention to the unmet needs beneath its appeal. Cutting is an attempt to speak and an attempt to learn. The ways we court bleeding or psychic pain—hurting ourselves with razors or hunger or sex—are also seductions of knowledge. Blood comes before the scar, hunger before the apple. I hurt myself to feel is the cutter’s cliché, but it’s also true. Bleeding is experiment and demonstration, excavation, interior turned out—and the scar remains as residue, pain turned to proof. I don’t think of cutting as romantic or articulate, but I do think it manifests yearning, a desire to testify, and it makes me wonder if we could come to a place where proof wasn’t necessary at all.

Wound #3

Recounting a low point in the course of her anorexia, Caroline Knapp describes standing in a kitchen and taking off her shirt, on the pretext of changing outfits, so her mother could see her bones more clearly:

I wanted her to see how the bones in my chest and shoulders stuck out, and how skeletal my arms were, and I wanted the sight of this to tell her something I couldn’t have begun to communicate myself: something about pain ... an amalgam of buried wishes and unspoken fears.

Whenever I read accounts of the anorexic body as a semiotic system (as Knapp says, “describing in flesh a pain I could not communicate in words”) or an aesthetic creation (“the inner life ... as a sculpture in bone”), I feel a familiar wariness. Not just at the familiarity of these metaphors—bone as hieroglyph, clavicle as cry—but at the way they risk performing the same valorization they claim to refute: ascribing eloquence to the starving body, a kind of lyric grace. I feel like I’ve heard it before: the author is still nostalgic for the belief that starving could render angst articulate. I used to write lyrically about my own eating disorder in this way, taking recourse in bone-as-language, documenting the gradual dumb show of my emergent parts—knobs and spurs and ribs. A friend calls these “rituals of surveying”; she describes what it feels like to love “seeing veins and tendons becoming visible.”

But underneath this wariness—must we stylize?—I remember that starvation is pain, beyond and beneath any stylized expression: there is an ache at its root and an obsession attending every moment of its realization. The desire to speak about that obsession can be symptom as much as cure; everything ultimately points back to pain—even and especially these clutches at nostalgia or abstraction.

What I appreciate about Knapp’s kitchen bone-show, in the end, is that it doesn’t work. Her mom doesn’t remark on the skeleton in her camisole. The subject only comes up later, at the dinner table, when Knapp drinks too much wine and tells her parents she has a problem. The soulful silent cry of bones in kitchen sunlight—that elegiac, faintly mythic anorexia—is trumped by Merlot and messy confession.

If substituting body for speech betrays a fraught relationship to pain—hurting yourself but also keeping quiet about the hurt, implying it without saying it—then having it “work” (mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Tiny Beautiful Things
• Girl Hood: On (Not) Finding Yourself in Books
• When I Was White
• This Is How I Spell My Body
• On Puddling
• birdbreath, twin, synonym
• Breaking and Entering
• Cat Stories
• Notes toward a Partial Definition of Home
• Dumb Show
• Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain
• Gun Shy
• White Boys
• Grip
• Portrait of a Family, Crooked and Straight
• TV Time in Negroland
• They Didn’t Come Here Cowboys
• We Regret to Inform You
• Here
• THIHACOIAAGT
• The Girl, the Cop, and I
• Readings
• There Are Distances between Us
• A Flexible Wolf
• Difference Maker
• The Truth
• Transgender Day of Remembrance: A Found Essay
• Light, from Faraway Places
• Good-bye to All That
• The Art of Being Born
• Permissions
• Contributors