Feminine, singular: a syllabus
A syllabus on feminist solitude in writing and cinema
Foreword
This syllabus marks the third and final entry in my series on women writers, or what initially began as an Alice Munro book club. Here is where to find part one—about Munro, her complicated legacy, and Who Do You Think You Are—as well as part two—a review of Hannah Regel’s new novel The Last Sane Woman. Both novels intimately focalise women’s inner lives: they privilege memory, intrusive thoughts, private anxieties, ambitions, and desires that might shrivel under a more public glare. Sometimes these affective, philosophical elements come above literary elements like ‘plot’ or ‘event’, creating the effect of distance between the protagonist and those around them; the narrative is cocooned by the singular mind and body, caught up in observing itself and others very closely. This detachment from a traditionally ‘objective reality’ creates a space for reflecting on and problematizing the conditions of the protagonist’s lives.
Such modes are a preoccupation of a great deal of post-1960s women’s writing, and this dovetails with what has been another concern of mine, that is: the affordances of solitude for women, trans, queer, and gender-marginalised folks, and how these are mined by literature and art.
For instance, it has been said that narratives of masculine solitude posit individual escape as a return to the freedom felt before familial obligation and the routine of the domestic sphere; by contrast, feminist narratives of escape tend to posit the freedom of solitude as unprecedented, as a discovery rather than a return.1 Moreover, such narratives might imagine an undoing of normative gender rather than its calcification. I want to insist on the potential of this last point in order to chafe against some of the binary assumptions of the former: how does solitude relate to being unwatched, unknown, anonymous, and undisciplined, and what does this free us up to become instead? How is feminist solitude transformative, then, rather than merely individualist or indulgent? And how do feminists negotiate the social politics that attend solitude—such as privacy, interdependence, loneliness/isolation, safety, and rest? So many narratives that have had a canonical place in feminist literature or film imagine solitude as a place of complex freedom, a reprieve from gendered labour, a space to shed socially-conditioned performances of gender or beauty, and even a quasi-utopian location for organising life otherwise. But many of them also interrogate the tensions between the individual and the community, or the ways in which they are inseparable.
What you will find below is not a comprehensive or conventional academic syllabus, but more like a compilation of starting points, recommendations, itches to scratch that could unfurl further thinking or questions. I’m also happy to hear what suggestions you might add to this list. Thanks for reading and see you next week (when I’ll be getting back to my usual bi-weekly schedule).
Literature
In the 1980s, feminist critics began tracking the trend of the novel of self-discovery—a successful genre of women’s writing wherein a (usually white, bourgeoisie) woman moved from integration in normative social life into alienation or separation from it, followed by radical political awakening. While this teleology depends on classed and racially specific privileges of innocence/ignorance to begin with, there is a fascinating way in which literature has long explored detachment from one’s typical life as an opportunity for re-imagining the social in liberatory new ways.
Matrix, Lauren Groff
Groff’s take on the French mystic and writer Marie de France sees a remote abbey of outcasted nuns as a locus for life beyond the surveillance of patriarchy and the court. In her isolated community, Marie moves through the roles of authoritarian tyrant, sympathetic maternal figure, and queer lover, searching for how to live in community and how to live otherwise. Groff’s prose is also so, so alive here.
Bonus: Agatha of Little Neon, Clare Luchette (also about queer nuns, but this time in post-industrial Buffalo. Radiant, sad, funny, tender, not to be overlooked.)
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson
Jackson’s short 1962 novel tends to be known for its ‘unreliable narrator,’ but what I was most taken by is her portrait of isolation. Sisters Merricat and Constance are reviled by their small town and so seldom leave their large house, spending their days in the woods with the family cat, baking for their uncle, gardening, and practising sympathetic magic. The novel is a complex exploration of privacy, inheritance, gender, disability, and violence—one that defends otherness, but does not provide easy answers about its protection.
The Cost of Living, Deborah Levy
In her second memoir, Levy gives us scenes of everyday life after her divorce. Particularly special is Levy’s account of making over her cold and decaying flat—a kind of room of one’s own for the 21st-century, especially given how the cultivation of space and time is so important to being at once a mother, woman, and writer. Very observant and hopeful.
Bonus: All Fours, Miranda July (now known widely as the great menopause novel, the great divorce novel, the great queer woman artist novel, July’s latest is undoubtedly her masterpiece and I gobbled it up. Like Levy’s, it also involves a very funny interior design/remodelling project.)
Lote, Shola von Reinhold
In Lote, an itinerant researcher/artist called Mathilda searches for any archival traces of a group of Black visionaries embedded among the Bright Young Things of the 1920s. Mathilda is drawn to their hedonism, decadence, and queerness, a pull that delivers her to an artist’s residency/academic cult in Scandinavia. Von Reinhold suggests that Mathilda and her subjects of inquiry do not belong in the spaces where their official archival traces reside and so imagines the contrasting, unofficial places where they might be honoured instead: secretive retreats, stolen collections, quiet friendships. After reading, check out this roundtable published in Public Books.
The Wall, Marlene Haushofer
While I had hoped to get to this book before this newsletter was finished, I admittedly haven’t had the time, though it has been on my shelf for two years. The blurb promises many things in my wheelhouse however: “While vacationing in a hunting lodge in the Austrian mountains, a middle-aged woman awakens one morning to find herself separated from the rest of the world by an invisible wall. With a cat, a dog, and a cow as her sole companions, she learns how to survive and cope with her loneliness. Allegorical yet deeply personal and absorbing, The Wall is at once a critique of modern civilization, a nuanced and loving portrait of a relationship between a woman and her animals, a thrilling survival story, a Cold War-era dystopian adventure, and a truly singular feminist classic.”
Bonus: I Who Have Never Known Men, Jacqueline Harpman (while I didn’t love this as much as others have, Harpman’s dystopian classic about women freed from an underground bunker after almost two decades is interesting as an experiment in writing about a subject who knows so little of the world that she takes nothing for granted.)
Quicksand, Nella Larsen
The underrated companion to her more famous novella Passing, Larsen’s Quicksand focalises Helga’s quest for beauty against the grain of both racism and racial uplift in the 1920s. Helga’s drive to move is at once a form of pleasurable motility/mobility and forced by her lack of belonging to any one community. As Helga travels between Harlem, Copenhagen, and the South, Larsen expertly thinks about tensions between the individual and the community through gender, race, and class, as well as through aesthetics, erotics, and desire.
Bonus: In Another Place, Not Here, Dionne Brand (similarly interested in the migration and mobility of Black women, as well as eking out pleasure and beauty in a hostile world, but here Brand is quite explicitly concerned with labour, immigration/borders, and political and social violence between Canada and the Caribbean).
Pond, Claire-Louise Bennett
Bennett’s style is the best thing about this short story collection—so few contemporary writers have as unique and intoxicating a voice as she does. To that end, Jia Tolentino described Pond in The New Yorker as “a work of fiction that will make you feel pleasantly insane.” Let the sound and rhythm of the text wash over you as you co-habitate with Bennett’s unnamed protagonist in an Irish cottage, fiddling with her stove, planting her garden, turning everyday moments into extraordinary reveries. As she told The Irish Times: “In solitude you don’t need to make an impression on the world… so the world has some opportunity to make an impression on you.”
A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
I hesitated to put this on the list since it’s really too obvious, but I do think it is one of those classics that often bears re-reading. Many of us think we know what Woolf is saying, including those who find it dismiss-able, but every time I return to this, I find it surprises me in new ways, challenges me, engages me in companionship or debate. For those unfamiliar (a.k.a. not literary nerds), this longform essay is the proto-text on the right to solitude as a reprieve from labour or judgment, and an argument for solitude as that which might allow women to write more expertly, inventively, and freely. Many of the other texts on this list make reference to it, or would exist very differently without its impact.
Theory
If I were teaching this as a proper course, I would admittedly do a better job of creating a theoretical overview, rather than this mish-mash of selections. But these still work as useful samples of thinking on the themes above, such as space, utopia, gathering, loneliness, and power.
“Of Other Spaces,” Michel Foucault
A classic essay where Foucault coins the term “heterotopia” to describe spaces that are somehow ‘other’ to the world, built on rules that distinguish themselves from everyday life or withdraw from it altogether. His list of heterotopias include bars, cemeteries, religious institutions, baths, brothels, and ships.
A Feminist Theory of Refusal, Bonnie Honig
Honig draws on Euripedes’ Bacchae, in which a group of women withdraw from the city of Thebes to drink, party, and plot, returning to the city to kill the king. Their withdrawal constitutes a rehearsal space of life at a different pace and with different values, supporting Honig’s claim that feminist refusal is an instigator of political transformation that offers alternatives to the status quo.
The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt
Though Arendt’s tome is not primarily known as a treatise on solitude, in her final chapter, she makes an important distinction between it and its more toxic cousin, loneliness. For Arendt, totalitarianism mines loneliness and isolation by infecting them with terror. Whereas solitude may be creative and furnish eventual connection, loneliness is the severing of connection, a state of abandonment that “destroys man’s ability to think.” This essay provides a great overview, alongside anecdotes from Arendt’s own life.
Outward: Adrienne Rich’s Expanding Solitudes, Ed Pavlić
Another volume that has sat on my shelf for two years (I actually bought this at the same time as The Wall), I’m interested in how Pavlić supposedly breaks down the binary between solitude and relation through his readings of Rich’s poetry. This received strong reviews and the pages that I have glanced at seem to also be quite beautifully written, with the poems tended to in exciting ways.
Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled, Michael Cobb
A contribution by one of my English professors at U of T! I haven’t read Professor Cobb’s book either, but it’s premise is one we have talked about: the supremacy of the couple form, the assumption of it as something compulsory to aspire to, and the stigmas of singleness. Indeed, for Cobb the figure of the single person is absolutely a queer figure in how they dislodge normative social, legal, and sexual relations.
Bonus: David J. Getsy, “Queer Relations” or Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”
Film
Whether thinking about the Bechdel test or Laura Mulvey’s work on the cinematic gaze, women in film long appeared as man’s Other, with the heterosexual couple playing an essential role in narrative and visual desire. To represent women alone then marked a radical turn in feminist filmmaking—one which asks similar questions to our literary objects, but emphasises the register of the visual: what does it mean to be watched, or unwatched? To be performing for a gaze, whether diegetically or through the camera, or to be relieved of it? These films prompt new ways of seeing, in addition to scenes of wandering, adventure, rest, grief, and pleasure.
Wanda, dir. Barbara Loden (1970)
Barbara Loden’s iconic Wanda, in which the director also stars as the titular character, is a beautiful homage to a woman who is drifting, lost in some respects but free in others. Her attachment to men along the way is so ambivalent you might not call it attachment at all, though they use and need her. That Loden did not have the chance to make any further films is a major loss; her observational attention is patient, non-judging, and deep.
Bonus: Read Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger, an incredible short homage to Loden, this film, and her representations of marriage and abuse.
News from Home, dir. Chantal Akerman
Akerman is certainly better known for Jeanne Dielman, which was not long ago named the greatest film of all time by critics; however, News from Home—a documentary—renders aloneness in such a particular way, at once romantic and melancholy, and it is probably my favourite film of hers. Akerman reads letters from her mother aloud, sent to her while living in New York in the early 70s and trying to make films, while clips of the city go by (shot lovingly by Babette Mangolte). Vintage New York has never looked this good or this real—now whenever I am in the city, especially if I am by myself in the evening, I feel like this is the lens I see it through.
Bergman Island, dir. Mia Hansen-Løve
Though very much a film about couples, Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island is also about the potential or need for aloneness. Set in the cottage of Ingmar Bergman where a filmmaker husband and wife have taken a residency, it tracks the ways in which their ambitions and differences in fame, power, and desire split them apart. At a certain point, it also becomes a film within a film, as the protagonist begins to draw together the details for her next feature, about a woman going through heartbreak. It has beautiful settings, wonderful work from Vicky Krieps (though her role was originally meant for Greta Gerwig), and a terrific ABBA needle drop.
Losing Ground, dir. Kathleen Collins
I was recently reminded of this terrific gem when it played at the Paradise in Toronto as part of Saffron Maeve’s Contours series. It was particularly special to see on the big screen considering that when it came out in the 1980s, it was the first feature film to be directed by an African-American woman, but it did not get a theatrical release (and like Loden, Collins also died young). Losing Ground centers on Sarah, a philosophy professor, whose free-spirited husband begins to make her feel increasingly alone, or perhaps self-conscious about her need for aloneness, particularly in her work. It’s such a significant, smart, captivating, often funny film, and I’m hoping it continues to get more attention in years to come.
Showing Up, dir. Kelly Reichardt
Losing Ground endeavours to recuperate Sarah’s solitude or what some might even call her ‘uptightness,’ and Showing Up does something similar. The film’s protagonist Lizzy (Michelle Williams) is a cantankerous art school administrator whose own sculpting career is languishing while the people she works for eat up more and more of her time. Lizzy is grumpy and has a particular way of doing things, but the film never crucifies her for it or suggest she needs to change—she can be difficult, and her solitude is a resource rather than a deficit (there are never implications that she should be dating, or that her life is tragic). While many of Reichardt’s previous films are contemplative, grey, slow, and relatively serious, in her more recent work she has turned toward humour, and this film is wonderfully tongue-in-cheek about the art world, family, and trying to materialize the things you want.
Bonus: Portrait of a Lady on Fire, dir. Céline Sciamma
Documenteur, dir. Agnès Varda
A controversial claim: this is Varda’s best feature. It’s also very likely one that you haven’t seen, since it is seldom mentioned alongside her transformative classics like Cléo de 5 à 7, Vagabond, Le Bonheur, or One Sings The Other Doesn’t. Made during a period of separation from Jacques Demy in the 1980s, when Varda was living alone in Los Angeles with their 9 year-old son (who plays himself in the film), Documenteur is an autofictional gem, poetic both visually and in its dialogue, as well as a subversion of the ways in which L.A. tends to appear on film: here it is moody, working class, coarse, and seen through a kind of soupy fog—no Hollywood.
Bonus: Wild, dir. Jean-Marc Vallee or Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt
Thank you for reading No Outlet! If you liked this, you might enjoy some of my previous writing on gender in film, literature, and theory:
Biblically speaking, Eve/woman is created by God because Adam’s loneliness “is not good.” He knows solitude in a way that she does not, since she is created for the purpose of companionship.
you would love to know, if you didn't already know, that the playwright and director Annie Baker loves "Documenteur": https://www.criterion.com/current/top-10-lists/241-annie-baker%E2%80%99s-top-10