For many women, motherhood is a brief hobby in a life full of other interests and occupations. It can be startling to encounter someone who casually notes that her only child has grown to adulthood with evident relief that the experiment in mothering is at an end. Even for these women, it seems motherhood can have a profound effect on their patterns of work. Or, perhaps, it is not so much that motherhood shapes them, but that womanhood suggests an approach to being that inspires a certain kind of work. The way that many women work is not incidental and the evidence of the particular talents of the feminine mind are more common than we realize.
Take for example the novelist Elizabeth Strout. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Strout revealed, like so many writers, her childhood was one of isolation and boredom with extended access to the outdoors. There seems no more fertile ground for a life of the mind than the glory and discomfort of being sent outside for long afternoons with nothing to do. But that’s besides the point. For our consideration today, let us look at Strout’s writing of her first novel while caring for her young daughter and teaching at community college.
With the competing demands of this stage of life, Strout did not have extended writer retreats to hone her craft and polish her opus. The Wall Street Journal reports,
Ms. Strout says she never writes anything from beginning to end. She learned during her years of teaching and raising her daughter to write in scenes. “I often had only two hours every three days to work, so I had to make the most of it,” she says. To give each scene “a heartbeat,” she transposed whatever emotion felt most pressing in her own life at the time, even if it was “nothing more than hoping a babysitter wasn’t late.” She would then figure out how to connect the strongest scenes together. This helps explain the episodic nature of her work—“Olive Kitteridge” is a novel made up of short stories, the Barton books are a mosaic of quietly meaningful moments and observations—and also its emotional acuity. As Lucy Barton observes: “I feel I know a true sentence when I hear one.”
The article seems to imply that motherhood influenced Strout’s approach to fiction, but it may not be despite but because of. The confines of motherhood create structure, urgency, and efficiency in creative pursuits that have inspired many women to produce a lifetime of work in between the tedious necessities of caring for small children and running a household. Certainly, as in Stout’s case, the confines of this lifestyle influence the product of the creative outlet: short episodes, small paintings, strung together into a mosaic.
And yet, absent the children and the trials of daily living, would the art look different? We are told that misogyny is the only obstacle preventing the genius of women bursting forth in its full and superior glory. However, decades after women have been liberated from their domestic drudgery in the high court of public opinion we have yet to meet Ms. Mozart, Ms. Picasso, or Ms. Shakespeare. While we wait on the edge of our seats for the dawn of feminine genius, we may be missing the real thing before our very eyes. It could be that what women do best is weaving an intricate array of small portraits and scenes into an interconnected whole. Rather than forging a cosmos unto itself, a veritable epic and self-contained masterpiece, the feminine mind moves toward the material of embodied particularity.
Think of the women who didn’t have children but worked this way: George Eliot was not chasing after young children and wiping snotty noses (granted she was housekeeper for her father in his years as a widower but there is just no escaping domesticity for millennia of women!). Eliot was not burdened in some of her most fruitful writing years with the care and feeding of children, and yet, her great works, such as Middlemarch, are a series of intense portraits, vivid moments, interwoven characters, and intimate revelations. Hers is not an epic, and the work of very few women is likely to be.
While there is no telling from the interview with Strout, it is possible, like so many other women, that her writing did not develop despite the confines of maternity but because of. In the strictures of a life beholden to the care of someone else, discipline becomes more urgent and work can be refined.
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