Killing the Angel in the House ~ Virginia Woolf

In “Professions for Women,” Virginia Woolf carries the image of the Angel in the House from the beginning to the end. The Angel is the phantom that represses her and attempts to force out imagination and creativity. Woolf describes the Angel as being pure, selfless, and sympathetic, but is ultimately forced to kill her in order to preserve her writing career.
Virginia Woolf described the angel as: immensely sympathetic, immensely charming, utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily ... in short, she was so constituted that she never had a mind but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all ... she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty.Literary critics of the time suggested that superior feminine qualities of delicacy, sensitivity, sympathy, and sharp observation gave women novelists a superior insight into stories about home family and love. This made their work highly attractive to the middle-class women who bought the novels and the serialized versions that appeared in many magazines. However, a few early feminists called for aspirations beyond the home. By the end of the century, the "New Woman" was riding a bicycle, wearing bloomers, signing petitions, supporting worldwide mission activities, and talking about the vote.Feminists of the 20th century reacted in hostile fashion to the "Angel of the House" theme since they felt the norm was still holding back their aspirations. Virginia Woolf was adamant. In a lecture to the Women's Service League in 1941, she said "killing the Angel in the House" was part of the occupation of a woman writer.

Extract from 'Woman as Custodian of Life' by Ann Baring

I have enjoyed the work of Ann Baring for a few years now. Her work on the Goddess and the feminine principle is wonderful. Her videos are well worth checking out especially the ones on the tragic split in the Western psyche. I believe that many sensitive women channel this wound and struggle with the pain of it. Here is an extract from Ann Baring's essay 'Woman as Custodian of Life'.

 So what is the present focus of the feminine principle? I believe it is to put us in touch with what has been lost to consciousness, to relate us to the deep sources of our psychic life and draw up from these depths the living waters which nourish and sustain the soul. The recovery of the feminine principle is the key to the transformation of our world culture from decay and disintegration and progressive regression into uniformity, banality and brutality, into something longed for and extraordinary. 

----- Woman's own awakening to the realization of her value is part of the recovery of the feminine principle. It is as if a momentous birth is taking place in the collective psyche of woman. This birth may be experienced as something that is deeply perplexing and difficult as well as something exciting and challenging. As woman gives birth to herself, to her unique individuality, to the emerging awareness of her value as woman (not an imitation of man), the feminine principle will also emerge in the consciousness of humanity which for so long has suffered from its repression and rejection. Woman, whose essential nature is to respond to suffering and need, is now responding to life's own need and is experiencing herself as the vessel of transformation in which a new consciousness is being born. If anyone personified and lived this process of birth and awakening for the whole world to see, it was the late Princess Diana. Tragically, she did not live to realize how significant and important her contribution was.
----- There is a Hasidic saying which goes: "When the moon shall shine as bright as the sun, the Messiah will come." Woman through her struggle to understand herself and to articulate the highest values of the feminine principle, could begin to make the moon shine so that it softens the sun-brightness of our present consciousness. In accepting her depression, her suffering, her loneliness, her longing to outgrow the inarticulateness and powerlessness of her past existence, she may accomplish something truly heroic and extraordinary for life, something which humanity in centuries to come will recognize and cherish. Each woman who gives birth to herself and responds to what life is asking her to accomplish, contributes to the survival of our species and the diminishment of human suffering.
----- For this reason, nothing is of such value or of such importance as woman's rescue of herself. This is something very difficult for woman to accept because in the past the whole impulsion of her nature has been to respond to the needs of others. The fact that she herself is in greatest need of her own help, support and understanding is the very first step in the direction of polishing the moon. It will only shine as brightly as the sun when woman has become Orpheus to her own Eurydice and has rescued herself from "the powers of the underworld" which symbolize her unconsciousness of her value and her bondage to the subservient pattern of the past.

VIDEO TALK HERE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ckie9Kt2KcM

The Lady of Shalott by Lord Alfred Tennyson is one of the prime examples of a fallen woman in the Victorian Era.

When I was a teenager I had "The Lady of Shalott" (poster from the Tate Gallery) by Pre-Raphaelite painter John Willam Waterhouse on my wall. I always loved the achingly romantic melancholia of the painting (based on the poem of the same name by Alfred Tennyson)  and yet disturbed by the inevitable tragedy. There are many excellent essays on the poem and it is hard to get hold of some of them. I have included an extract from one below by Meg Mariotti. This painting features in my memoir as a metaphor for many things. It is very evocative of a certain aspect of female experience which I explore. 

Tennyson's poem of "The Lady of Shalott" (text) relates the story of a woman cursed to remain inside a tower on Shalott, an island situated in the river which flows to Camelot. No others know of her existence, as her curse forbids her to leave the tower or to even look outside its windows. Instead, a large mirror within her chamber reflects the outside world, and she weaves a tapestry illustrating its wonders by means of the mirror's reflection. As the poem progresses, the Lady becomes increasingly aware of the love which abounds in the outside world, and she tires of her lonely existence in her tower, saying she is "half sick of shadows". Then seeing Sir Lancelot riding down to Camelot, the Lady leaves her loom to look down on him directly from her window, which immediately fulfills the curse. Her tapestry begins to unravel and the mirror cracks as she recognizes the consequences of her impulsive action. She flees her tower and finds a boat in the river which she marks with her name and loosens from its moorings. She dies before her boat reaches Camelot, where she would have finally found life and love, and Lancelot muses over the beauty of this unknown woman when the inhabitants find her body. The tragic love illustrated by Tennyson's poem appealed to the Pre-Raphaelites and their followers as one of the themes they favored most, and over fifty depictions of her story exist from the latter half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth (Poulson 173). The Lady of Shalott "had become, by the end of the nineteenth century, a concept rather than even a narrative archetype; she is a romantic idiom, a quotable catch-phrase". Many aspects of "The Lady of Shalott attracted Pre-Raphaelite painters, including its emphasis on:

spiritual nobility and the melancholy of the more sorrowful aspects of love, such as unrequited love, particularly the embowered or isolated and therefore unattainable woman; the woman dying for love; the fallen woman who gives up everything for love; the special "tainted" or "cursed" woman; and the dead woman of unique beauty" (Nelson, Victorian Web)

A must-watch for creatives! Dr. Jordan Peterson on creative people and their struggle in this life

In case you thought you were just crazy... being creative in a world of conservatives will drive you crazy!! And apart from your creative nature, what enhances your creativity? According to Peterson early trauma followed by restriction (a restrictive atmosphere)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxGPe1jD-qY&t=23s

The Price of Freedom!

Some seek to dominate and others seek to be dominated. I seek neither. My drug is freedom; freedom to be myself, freedom to express myself after a long time imprisoned in others' fear and pain. In many ways I have been incarcerated in my various accommodating roles. I now choose to step out of these roles in a bid for a more authentic life.

"If you want to stay alive, stay authentic" as Dr. Gabor Maté says. 

Alas I have found that the wild and free open heart attracts dominators and drainers not freedom-lovers. Most people seem to get triggered by my desire for my own freedom. I refuse to play it small though. And if my playing it big; big heart, big ass, big ideas, big head (if you will) triggers people then so be it. That is their problem not mine. I am hurting no one in my vulnerability nor in my strength and I respect your freedom as long as it does not block mine. I am prepared to be disliked and disapproved of in my bid for freedom. I am prepared to pay the price in my bid to take up more space. 

Besides I like to be alone. Solitude is my muse. The wilderness is my muse. As I wrote in one of my lyrics 
"I don't need no-one to define me, 
  no I got all I need inside me." 

I refuse to live a psychologically restricting and limiting life on everyone elses’ terms anymore. My primary relationship is with myself and so I choose to reconnect with myself after years of abandoning myself. I accommodated everyone else at the expense of myself. I now choose to suit myself more and to be kind and empathic to me. The rest will follow. Being kind to others starts by being kind to myself.

In Deborah Levy's excellent new memoir 'The Cost of Living' she tells the story of every woman throughout history who has expended her love and labour on making a home that turns out to serve the needs of everyone but herself. On her quest for personal freedom she writes "Freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs."

The price of freedom is high but the cost of slavery is higher...

Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich, 1973

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

The Madness Factory

The Madness Factory

I grapple in the slaughterhouse of my soul, the human abbatoir
Madness is a bloody business like birth, primordial
I run through the corridors, blood on the walls
I wrestle with figures of darkness from the depths of my core
My life hurtles headlong and I am hurled into the abyss
I sit and watch the horror hell reel unfold
I line up in the madness factory, locked in
And wait to take uppers, downers, sleepers, smokes

Madness is like living in a Picasso
Surreal, distorted, unknown
I am a deranged Ophelia in the day room, damned
And handing out minutes instead of flowers
Am I a giant hallucinating head or am I a girl?
Mouths agape and souls on fire
Meet chaos and terror in my eyes
Inertia reigns in the madness factory, chattering
Where terrible truths can no longer live the lies

In the acute unit cul-de-sac
We all get the barbiturate blues back
When we kiss madness (those crazy lips) on the mouth
Until the madness factory spits us out, year after year
With diagnoses and certificates
We hit the street to crash back in, driven by destruction
We are cruising for a chemical crucifixion
Madness spins and gathers momentum
‘She’s had a relapse, a voice, a vision
He’s got his claws in again!’

Depressive, psychotic, neurotic, lunatic!
Spewing fear and fury in the snake pit
Warning high voltage!
I am a catastrophe in my nightie, stripped down to
Kill or be killed, madness doesn’t mind
Who does the time or who pays the bill 

Madness claims the empty space and takes up
Residence in my head
How the hell did the devil get back in my bed?

Artists live on the shores of the Great Unknown
Navigating it like tentative explorers in uncharted waters
Like archaeologists before a dig stroking their chins
Standing around the chasm where the comet hit
Observing the wreckage, like voyeurs
Map a waking dream in the madness machine
Like psychiatrists map the battle strategy out
Like war generals and imperialists of the mind
Creativity’s understudy awaits
Like a flame or a double edged blade
Like warrior poets and literary tigers
Turning brutality into poetry, prose
Painting the void
Eyes ablaze  

But I jumped in, devoured, swallowed whole
I stole the show!
Two nurses talk me down
And madness grins back, a toothless grin, from oblivion
Beckoning; wider, wider
Come on you bastards, you cowards!
Come on in!

Copyright © 2018. All Rights Reserved. G.Q Humphrys
 

An apocalyptic memoir of madness

Can you remember what you were doing in the summer of 1999, the last summer of the century?

I can. I was bonkers and I have the case notes to prove it. I was 27 years old and though I didn’t die with the twentieth century and join the ‘almost rock star 27 Club’, I nearly did. Some seven months before I was starting to lose my mind and left London and my beloved burgeoning music career to unravel in Ireland.

Then on the 25^th of June, 1999, disintegrating on the west coast of Cork, I attempted suicide. Later that day I was admitted to the medical ward and referred for psychiatric review.

The next day I was admitted to the acute unit where I subsequently stayed under observation for five and a half weeks, 36 days in total.

There, parts of me, fragments of selves, neuroses and identities, traumas and conflicts, complexes and defences, fought and fell away, as we hurtled towards the millennium where I imagined we would be wearing intergalactic silver space boots in a UFO cult led by Buck Rogers and Bjork singing Spaceman by Babylon Zoo.

I didn’t want to end up in such a nightmarish 2000 AD scenario in a century with too many zeros. It felt like my identity would be cancelled out, I would be a nobody and all I had worked for would be ground zero. I was a twentieth century hangover dreading New Year's Eve.

This is an apocalyptic memoir for Generation X, for those of us who straddle the old century and the new; for those of us who remember The Muppets, The A-Team, The Blues Brothers, Jaws, Chips, Hart to Hart, Wonder Woman, Popeye, Cindy, Barbie and Bettie Page, Snow White, Elvis’s white jumpsuit, Marilyn’s white dress, Ministry’s sampled guitar riffs, Madonna’s gold conical bra, Jim Morrison’s leather trousers, punks, Goths, shoe-gazers, ravers, Dadrock, the MGM lion roaring through a semi-circle before movies, the little dog looking into a large gramophone on classical vinyl records, the swastika, the atom bomb, Einstein and Don Johnson in a pastel pink suit talking into a huge mobile phone. 

Written in direct yet dreamy surreal “Gráinnesque” tone and style this confessional memoir of madness confronts raw emotional truth and has the hallmark of any true survivor; dark gallows humour.