The solitary reapers: Women and the search for creative solitude

 OF ALL THINGS denied to a woman, a solitary life must be the one that’s never really mentioned. Not having it—a chosen time of aloneness—might make one lonelier than one would have felt otherwise. That solitariness might be a gendered gift is to be found in the history of a word like ‘monk’: from Old English ‘munuc’, deriving from the Greek ‘monakhos’, mean­ing solitary; ‘monos’ is, of course, one, alone. Society’s permission—and indulgence—to a man held in that monosyllabic word: sure, stay alone. ‘Nun’, its female equivalent, has had a different etymological career. The Old English ‘nunne’ and the Latin ‘nonna’ were used as a respectful term of address for an elderly person, the sound perhaps originating from children’s speech. Notice the difference—the sociality in the early life of the word ‘nun’, an ad­dress coming from a family or community; the stark solitariness in ‘monk’. Both are monosyllables, both are marked by devotion to a religious order—one hears the sounds of domesticity in one; in the other one aches to hear some sound, even the sound of breathing or the heart’s walking.

This difference I’ve discovered in various props as I’ve grown older. It wouldn’t matter, these prehistories of creation and its relationship with the solitary life if they didn’t affect literary and art forms—someone polishing their lines at a writing desk, an­other writing at a dining table, the sound of something bubbling nearby on the stove. Charles Dickens’ long sentences—think of that long sentence from the opening chapter of David Copper­field—were composed at a writing desk in a room with what he called a ‘heavy door’, one that protected him from the ‘noise’ of domestic life. Contrast this with the form that comes from writ­ing at the dining table—Jane Austen rushing to her bedroom to write down a sentence or two while making breakfast; short sentences, marking the interruptions to thought, sprinting to ladle-duty; or longer ones, assembled together with the glue of semicolons; a young woman’s style marked by attendance to a bawling infant; sometimes one hears the whistle of the pres­sure cooker or a doorbell in the white space in poems. It must be this that led Audre Lorde, Beverly Smith, Cherrie Moraga and Barbara Smith to call their publishing house Kitchen Table Press?

That they should choose a place for eating, a space for discus­sions, for the community to stop by, for the name of a feminist publishing house seems natural—the woman would have to cre­ate her own community to write and to get published: their aim, Lorde and her co-founders believed, was that “as feminist and les­bian of colour writers, we knew that we had no options for getting published, except at the mercy or whim of others, whether in the context of alternative or commercial publishing, since both are white-dominated”. It was a natural progression—the lineage of women turning to architectural tropes for space, for writing and publishing space: Hogarth Press, named after Hogarth House, the house of her own; Kitchen Table Press, a place of eating and communicating (communication = community, and so on). Smith, later, in her appraisal of the Kitchen Table Press, would say: “Our commitment to publishing feminist and lesbian writ­ing has sometimes made our relations with our communities difficult and even painful, but the longer the press has existed, the easier it has become to get an intelligent and open response to this work, and we have been met with increasing interest and understanding …”. The books they published, just to name a few well-circulated titles, reveal the same impress of community, the ambition for sisterhood—Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology; I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities; The Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color; Cuentos: Stories by Latinas … The kitchen table, anthologies—the extension of space was natural and obvious: women coming together. It’s a history that Anita Desai records in her novel Fasting, Feasting: “It was actually wonderful to see what fertile ground the dining table was for discussion and debate”.

What, then, of the solitary woman? What, then, of the woman who must have “a room of her own if she is to write fiction”? I try to think of the first time I encountered the word ‘solitary’ in relation to a woman, a female artist. I wouldn’t have registered the adjective in the way I’m doing now, of course, but I couldn’t have missed it either—it was in a poem in school, possibly the first Wordsworth poem I’d read, in the Radiant Readers.

‘Behold her, single in the field,

Yon solitary Highland Lass!

Reaping and singing by herself;

Stop here, or gently pass!

Alone she cuts and binds the grain,

And sings a melancholy strain;

O listen! for the Vale profound

Is overflowing with the sound.’

THE POEM BEGINS with a call to see her, both as noun and adjective—she is a “Highland Lass”, but two words precede this, so that her characteristics are amplified even before we’ve actually seen her: “single” and “solitary”, as if emphasising was an urgent necessity. But that’s not enough—Wordsworth will not let us forget that she is solitary: she’s reaping and singing “by her­self”. ‘She cuts and binds the grain’, sure, but it is the other thing that she is doing that has attracted his attention. She is “singing by herself”. Would she have sung if she knew she had an audience, a lis­tener? “I never wrote when the chil­dren were around. I trained myself to write according to the academic timetable, starting as soon as they left for school and stopping when they came back. And I put any work in progress away during their vaca­tions,” writes Anita Desai, about her early writing life.

In this poem of four stanzas, the last three are spent on trying to give a sense of the effect of the girl’s singing, trying to guess the subject of her song, likening it to sweet sounds in faraway locations, ‘Hebrides’ and ‘Arabian sands’. Only the first stanza gives us a sense of the singer, the rest are about the lis­tener’s impressions of her singing. Was this a public performance? Did the singer sing to be heard? It is pos­sible that she was not only “singing by herself” but singing for herself. It is possible that this was the only space where she had the latitude to sing, to sing to practice and explore, to sing as one creates, to improvise without worrying about being as­sessed or judged by an audience.

It is this that the eavesdrop­ping listener cannot understand. Literary critics have told us that Wordsworth cannot understand the Scottish Gaelic of her song, and hence his words: “Will no one tell me what she sings?”. That seems like the most plausible reason, but it’s perhaps also possible that the solitary reaper did not intend for the lyrics of her song to be understood at all, who knows? This version of the solitary life that the woman has given herself in the Highlands might seem utopic today—but we are not allowed to forget that the woman is working as she sings: “reaping and singing”. The syntax ensures that we notice that this is her primary occupation: “reaping”; it’s in the title too, of course.

Women—poets, artists, singers, dancers, seekers—have had to be solitary reapers. It’s the solitary reapers that Virginia Woolf calls ‘Anon’: “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman”. We’ll never know the solitary reaper’s name just as we don’t the names of those who composed the lul­labies and children’s bedtime stories. “‘I’ is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being,” writes Woolf. It’s a phras­ing and philosophical proposition that I think of particularly when I encounter two kinds of positions: when I notice the miss­ing ‘I’ in women’s writing from the early modern period; the contemporary attack on women’s writing for being too ‘I-I-I-cen­tric’. “Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please – it is not a matter of any importance) sitting on the banks of a river a week or two ago in fine October weather, lost in thought,” Woolf continues in the next paragraph. She’s willing to give up all claims to her name, to the proper noun, for what is far more pre­cious—clever as she is, that phrase, of the most desired thing, comes at the end of the sentence: “lost in thought”. Whether the solitary reaper (“call me … by any name you please”, as Woolf says) in the Scottish Highlands or Virginia Woolf sitting on the banks of a river, that is all we seek between our cooking and cleaning and care-giving and childrearing and counselling and career-trekking—to create, to compose, to be comical; just a few moments of reckless solitude.