The Creative Feminine and Her Discontents: Psychotherapy, Art and Destruction
by Juliet Miller
152pp, Karnac, £19.99
You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. If you don't want to starve, a certain ruthlessness becomes necessary. You may not want to own the bloodiness involved in killing, plucking and drawing your own chicken, or butchering your own pig, but you'd probably be prepared to dice onions with a sharp knife and mince parsley. Similarly, if you had a garden or allotment, you'd dutifully hack and slash at weeds and brambles. This sanctioned destructiveness can give the mildest-seeming person great inner satisfaction. No need to come out publicly about one's sadistic impulses if there is vegetable chopping or shrub pruning to be done. Magically, the angry feelings, channelled through practical technique, loving and attentive, may produce beauty.
That happy result depends, of course, on whether you've chosen your work or feel obliged to do it. Perhaps bad cooks and gardeners have too much anger rather than too little. The cook who reduces the vegetables to sludge may be venting her exasperation at having to produce daily meals whether she feels like it or not. The gardener who concretes over the wilderness may be fed up with doing most of the nurturing in the family. Burning the dinner may mean wanting to change the world. Feminists since Mary Wollstonecraft have known this. I'd love to add that cooking well means being a better revolutionary, but that's probably idealistic.
Juliet Miller's intriguing and inspiring study pushes a long tradition of feminist inquiry further, arguing that men and women approach creative destructiveness differently in certain respects. Cultural tradition still blesses certain forms of creativity for women, such as motherhood, far more than others, simultaneously labelling anger unfeminine. As a result, women may have a lot of trouble articulating ambivalent feelings around motherhood, hate as well as love, and around harnessing anger as a necessary part of making anything at all.
We tend to split artists off from the rest of the population. Miller resists this split, pointing out that artists deal with love, desire and rage just like anyone else, and that the rest of us, juggling work and domesticity, may long to be creative as well but feel barred from it. The resulting feelings of envy may get buried, then resurface in unhelpful ways. Miller implicitly makes the case that art is not a luxury, a hobby, an indulgence for the comfortably off, but a necessity for all of us. Art floods the culture, may come packaged as consumption, sometimes indistinguishable from ads or porn, but for its makers can be a way of challenging, resisting and subverting cultural norms of human experience, bourgeois or indeed feminist. The successful artist is someone whose desire to create, love of her materials and capacity to work very hard are allied to her understanding of the need for rupture. For a writer who wants to produce good, original work, not just cosy re-hashes of what's gone before, for example, this means being willing to break up language, grammar and form in order to make new linguistic shapes out of the debris. One has to accept internal chaos and breakage as part of the process.
This requires the capacity to tolerate one's own insecurity, one's own violent impulses. If, however, a woman artist thinks that violence, and indeed sadism, are purely masculine qualities, she may feel stumped. She may well lose confidence in her capacity to produce good work on her own terms. Miller suggests that the route towards producing the androgynous, transcendent ideal of good work may differ for men and women, since double-standard structures of thought still label women as mainly nurturers, damned if they do, damned if they don't.
She believes in the value of the inner life, its complex connection with our outer life in the world. Making the case for art, she makes it also for psychotherapy, suggesting that the talking cure offers a safe space in which to test out, acknowledge, explore and cherish the feelings so often labelled negative. She invokes the Jungian idea of archetypes, forms of psychic energy available to both sexes, which crop up in visual form in fairytales as well as in religious traditions. For example, the goddess Kali, uniting creative and destructive impulses, may well be more inspiring to women than that impossible ideal, the Virgin Mary, the sexless mother.
On the other hand, Miller is aware of the dangers of assuming that allegorical figures represent historical truth. The book ends exhilaratingly with a study of two very different sculptors, Louise Bourgeois and Cornelia Parker, both ambitious, successful, much admired. Bourgeois courageously uses autobiographical material to poke angry fun at patriarchs. Parker steamrollers silver and blows up garden sheds. Miller's book packs its own powerful and joyful punch and makes provocative reading. Michèle Roberts's The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene is published by Vintage.
