"Be nobody's darling; / be an outcast"
- Alice Walker
In The Baby on the Fire Escape, Julie Phillips introduces us to mother artists, writers, and poets who faced their complex lives as mother-artists with resilience. Letting us peek into the domestic and creative lives of Alice Neel, Louise Bourgeois, Audre Lorde, Doris Lessing, Alice Walker, Ursula Le Guin, and more we see them balance, struggle, abort, abandon, lose, love, nourish and fail their children all while making great work.
The mother-child relationship is one of the most impactful on human society. Yet, the depth of the mothering role is often diminished and polished for the comfort of the collective. There seems to be an unrealistic expectation that a mother should suppress her needs, wants, and desires for the sake of her family, or better yet, she is a natural nurturer and comes with the biological processes to give endlessly, wanting nothing in return. In this book, you will find women who claw their way out from under the weight of this institutionalized motherhood to create fiercely and burn brighter.
Institutions are established social mechanisms and significant cultural practices that regulate human behavior according to the needs of a community, not individuals. Thus, motherhood is not simply biological or innate; it is also a social institution that functions ideologically and politically.
"To destroy the institution [of motherhood] is not to abolish motherhood. It is to release the creation and sustenance of life into the same realm of decision, struggle, surprise, imagination, and conscious intelligence, as any other difficult, but freely chosen work." -Adrienne Rich
One thing an expectant mother most often fears is the loss of self. A new mother's interior world is in a state of grief over the loss of self, she must rebuild and reclaim herself, unfolding alongside her child's growing personality. A creative mother must own this sense of self. But the structures of society offer a crushing binary. You become invisible, a mom, a noun and not much more. Or you can do it all, be all to everyone - all the time, a solution that only isolates and leaves mothers in service to more than just their own children.
If motherhood demands so much of one's body, mind, and spirit, then how can a mother artist or writer live in thriving creativity?
"Art Moster" is a term coined by the writer Jenny Offill. An art monster is someone (primarily men) who lives for the work at the expense of everything else. This artist sacrifices nutrition, sleep, and relationships for the work. It is the image of the solo male, the tortured genius. A woman isn't allowed to be an art monster because a woman is so often defined and confined by her relationships. Because of her gender, she is tasked with the emotional labor of maintaining the children, partner, and parents. As one of my favorite authors, Toni Morrison, puts it, "All of my life is doing something for somebody else... Whether I'm being a good daughter, a good mother, a good wife, a good lover, a good teacher... The only thing I do for me is writing. That's really the real free place where I don't have to answer."
And once you become a mother, you are one of two things, sometimes simultaneously, you are 1. Invisible, or 2. Scrutinize with harsh judgment.
"The institution of motherhood finds all mothers more or less guilty" - Adrienne Rich
A creative pursuit takes everything. The mind, the physical space, the body... It is all in service to inspiration, to the work. As Gertrude Stein puts it, "It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much and do nothing, really doing nothing."
And because of this, there is a myth that art and motherhood cannot coexist. It is something that every female artist, writer, and poet has had to contend with, whether they had children or not. And it is something that many critics, writers, and artists, both male and female, still today are touting as truth. The status quo is that the nourishment a mother is expected to derive from motherhood is the joy of watching her child grow and change, an opportunity mothers themselves are often denied or punished for.
"Art is supposed to be about this kind of intensified experience of life... And that is totally what raising kids does to you, too... Everything becomes heightened, and the range of experience becomes so much greater. Your heart is so much more open. All of those things that we think of when we think about the artist's experience is embodied in this idea of having children." - Justine Kurland
Many artist mothers have argued that this relationship with their children has deepened their relationship with their art. That motherhood has broadened their range and given them a focus for creation. As writer Ursula Le Guin said it got her "closer to the bone."
"One day as I am holding baby and feeding her, I realize that this is exactly the state of mind so many male writers from Thomas Mann to James Joyce describe with yearning --- the mystery of an epiphany, the sense of oceanic oneness, the great yes, the wholeness. There is also the sense of a self merged and at least temporarily erased --- it is deathlike... Perhaps we owe some of our most moving literature to men who didn't understand that they wanted to be women nursing babies." -Lousie Erdrich, author
I believe that you could just as easily switch out the breastfeeding bit for the act of giving birth in the quote above. Because birth is also a death/life portal of total transformation and enlightenment.
The women in this book faced misogyny, racism, poverty, and prejudice yet at every turn they moved deeper into their creativity and fought for their autonomy. They clawed through the filth of our unjust and sick world and carved a way to thrive as best as an outsider can, to create their art, and to mother their children.
This book focuses mostly on writers and, as a visual artist, I would have loved to read more about artist-mothers. I would like to have spent more time with Louise Bourgeois. And I think excluding Ruth Asawa from these pages was a real miss! Asawa made her incredible sculptures at home with her children around her. That would have been a great addition to this book!
This is a book I truly loved reading and I highly recommend it if you are interested in art, feminism, art history, the creative processes, or radical depictions of motherhood. I also highly recommend this book if you don't read women authors or pay attention to women artists (wow, that's embarrassing!) Maybe reading this will shake you out of your culturally engrained bullshit, to respect the circumstances they created in, and value their powerful work!!
If you liked this, read these:
Nightbitch by Rachel Yodder
On Women Born by Adrienne Rich
9th Street Women
The Story of Art Without Men by Katy Hessel
Anything written by Toni Morrison
I will be adding many of the mentioned work to my to-read pile!!
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