Teresa's Reviews > Heroines

For me this is a continuation of a revelatory work I read years before Goodreads: The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. (Elaine Showalter’s A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx is another in this mode.) While the Zambreno is also informed by years of knowledge and research, it’s less of academic writing, and much more personal and impassioned in tone. It grew from Zambreno’s personal blog, itself a form of writing that’s disparaged—never mind her topics, which were also criticized. As well as sharing themes, Heroines’s fragmented nature reminded me of Tillie Olsen’s Silences. All of these works provoked the same feelings and reactions in me: deep interest; and appropriate anger over the suppression of women’s voices.

Zambreno’s particular concentration is on her beloved “mad wives,” the (supposedly) mentally ill women whose partners stopped them from writing. Many times these more famous individuals (all men except for a mention or two of Gertrude Stein) used their partners’ stories for their own writing: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald being the prime example. A collusion of men (husband and doctor) kept Zelda from writing, even when she was at her calmest and the alcoholic F. Scott was at his most emotional. (The excerpt from their transcribed conversation is heartbreaking, as to Zelda.) This type of controlling behavior seems never-endingly relevant, as is the double standard concerning the determination of a mental illness.

(I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my discomfort over the use of a gendered word I detest, one used here to describe Flaubert’s lover. I understand the word might be the “best” word—I registered one instance where it probably was— but, in general, I fail to understand why the word I just used (“lover”) isn’t used in lieu of a word that has no male equivalent.)