Deborah Levy on Becoming the Subject of Your Own Story
Photo Credit: Derek Midgley
We have a need to know how to locate ourselves in the world, how to orient when new chapters are thrust upon us, and how to navigate in dark times. Deborah Levy’s 2013 essay Things I Don’t Want to Know explores how her life has been coloured by motherhood, power, and exile. But long before Levy’s moving meditation on the subject, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique (1963) documenting the stories that hold women captive and sparking Second Wave feminism. Friedan writes,
“In the 1950s they printed virtually no articles except those that serviced women as housewives, or described women as housewives, or permitted a purely feminine identification like the Duchess of Windsor or Princess Margaret. ‘If we get an article about a woman who does anything adventurous, out of the way, something by herself, you know, we figure she must be terribly aggressive, neurotic,’ a Ladies’ Home Journal editor told me.”
However antiquated the perspective of the LHJ’s editor may now seem women today are still caught-up in a web of expectations that trap us. These expectations are not always explicit, and require de-coding. The iconic feminist and poet Adrienne Rich put it succinctly in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (1979) when she writes,
“Lying is done with words, and also with silence.”
The social structure mothers and non-mothers alike walk into as they mature is lyrically described in Deborah Levy’s “living autobiography” Things I Don’t Want to Know (2013). In a sentiment that precisely identifies the locus between a woman’s personal self and her writer self Levy writes
“When a female writer walks a female character in to the centre of her literary enquiry (or a forest) and this character starts to project shadow and light all over the place, she will have to find a language that is in part to do with learning how to become a subject rather than a delusion, and in part to do with unknotting the ways in which she has been put together by the societal system in the first place. She will have to be canny how she sets about doing this because she will have many delusions of her own. In fact it would be best if she was uncanny when she set about doing this. It’s exhausting to learn how to become a subject, it’s hard enough learning how to become a writer.”
Levy locates the source of this “subjecthood” in the use of language itself — in the ways in which language shifts and evolves, in the social fissures that open up in early motherhood, and in the slippery transformation of the self as it moves from a singular self into motherhood.
“I found myself thinking about some of the women, the mothers who had waited with me in the school playground while we collected our children. Now that we were mothers we were all shadows of our former selves, chased by the women we used to be before we had children. We didn’t really know what to do with her, this fierce, independent young woman who followed us about, shouting and pointing the finger while we wheeled our buggies in the English rain. We tried to answer her back but we did not have the language to explain that we were not women who had merely ‘acquired’ some children — we had metamorphosed (new heavy bodies, milk in our breasts, hormonally-programmed to run to our babies when they cried) into someone we did not entirely understand.”
How to expand the writer self, and thereby mitigate the threat that motherhood poses to both her ego and linguistic skill, is what Levy explores in Things I Don’t Want to Know, in part a response to George Orwell’s essay (1946) Why I Write,
“Perhaps when Orwell described sheer egoism as a necessary quality for a writer, he was not thinking about the sheer egos of a female writer. Even the most arrogant female writer has to work over time to build an ego that is robust enough to get her through January, never mind all the way to December.”
Expanding on this idea of growing her confidence against a considerable tide of animosity toward her female self in the world she writes,
“…to become a writer, I had to learn to interrupt, to speak a little louder, and then louder, and then to just speak in my own voice which is not loud at all.”
But she also cautions against looking too closely at the limitations of a woman’s life. While Levy is learning to speak louder she is also learning to examine not the injustices of her own life but to look ever-outward toward the world and the myriad ways in which it might surprise her. She cites Virginia Woolf’s admonition in A Room of One’s Own (1929)
“She will write in a rage when she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot.”
and then puts it her own way,
“A female writer cannot afford to feel her life too clearly. If she does, she will write in a rage when she should write calmly.”
Echoing Rich’s idea of silence and Levy’s suggestion that we grow toward our own narratives rather than quietly live out the prescribed path built for us upon somebody else’s words, Rebeca Solnit writes in The Faraway Nearby (2013), a narrative inspired by her mother’s battle with dementia,
“We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or hate, to see or to be blind. Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning. The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question them, to pause and hear silence, to name them, and then to become the storyteller.”
There is a sad connective thread between the experience of threat, exclusion, and distortion that Levy paints as the woman’s social place and the expansion, courage, and vision that seems to come forth from that broken, pallid place. Levy’s essay is a worthy counterbalance to Orwell’s Why I Write and beautifully articulates the condition of silence and voice in the institution of motherhood and beyond.
