I had forgotten, it seemed, how to drive; or rather, the degree of responsibility that driving entails suddenly seemed unmanageable to me. Why was everyone else not likewise crippled by this realisation? … On that wide grey unfamiliar road, swept along in the anarchic tumult of speeding cars, every moment all at once seemed to contain the possibility of disaster, of killing or being killed: it was as if driving was a story I had suddenly stopped believing in, and without that belief I was being overwhelmed by the horror of reality. The river of cars plummeted on, relentless and unheeding. But the fact of myself, of my aloneness, had somehow been exposed. — Rachel Cusk, “Driving as Metaphor”
Last week I went north for five days. I had planned this trip alone, the first time by myself on a mountain in about five months, after an intense summer of departures and reunions and starting a new job, which is an onslaught of new faces and voices. On the first day, slipping under the futon on the tatami after walking some 10 miles along the coast, I realized I had made a grave error: I wasn’t alone at all. Rachel Cusk was there, and she had a lot to say.
The British writer followed me around all week. Yes I could have closed Coventry, her essay collection about “choices, womanhood and art,” I could have stuck it in the hydration slot deep in my backpack, made it hard to retrieve, left her searing probes for another time. But it kept sneaking its way back to the front pocket, the one that’s really easy to reach.
I have never felt so liberated and so trapped by a single writer. Proust comes somewhat close, but his cage is specific: The prison of desire. But reading Cusk over that week, on mountains, in a ryokan, by a bridge, on the shinkansen, suddenly I felt wholly paralyzed. I could no longer see anything, not my hands, not my hiking boots, not my own critical ideas or work, as anything other than a product of the patriarchy. Every individual eyelash on my face, every piece of art I had ever been moved by, seemed to be part of a grand design to keep me in my place. I have often privileged beauty over truth, and suddenly beauty started to look like a massive lie. I felt betrayed. Over the course of the book, everything—being a great artist, being a good parent—started to look both completely empty and also just impossible.
I thought of a line from Elif Batuman, in her profile of the French film director Céline Sciamma, which CB had recommended to me: “Art wasn’t doing whatever you wanted. Art was discipline, and discipline was a kind of bondage.”
The book pressed down on me, but I couldn’t stop. I knew Cusk wasn’t going to tell me how to be free—but I felt that if I kept going, she would give me the words, the best words, through which to see and understand the prison of femininity. Tell me, I said to the writer, how to be OK with this.
She didn’t.
In “Shakespeare’s Sisters,” an essay about A Room of One’s Own and The Second Sex and the meaning of “women’s writing,” Cusk describes a story by Doris Lessing, in which the narrator goes every afternoon to a room in a seedy hotel, to be free of her family and just lie on the bed. Finally, she kills herself there. “In Lessing’s story the room—the room of one’s own—is death, death of female reality, death as an alternative to compromise.”
Marianne: Your mother will let you go out alone tomorrow. You’ll be free.
Héloïse: Being free is being alone?
Marianne: You don’t think so?
Héloïse: I’ll tell you tomorrow.
— Portrait de la Jeune Fille en Feu
That alternative to compromise is the jumping off point for the beginning of A Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Sciamma’s 2019 romance set in the early 19th century. Off-screen, a woman has thrown herself onto some seaside bluffs in Brittany rather than be married off, thus setting into motion the events of the story. It starts with the death of one female reality, but gives life to a love free of the male gaze. In so far as that is really possible: The set-up of the lovers meeting is that Marianne has been hired to paint Héloïse’s portrait without her knowing, and if her Milanese suitor likes it, Héloïse has to marry him. It’s Marianne’s artistic and professional duty, the very thing that gives her the freedom not to marry, to spend all day staring longingly at Héloïse. And it’s her finely honed gaze that dooms her love and builds the ship that will send Héloïse to her prison.
In the profile, Batuman writes about her first gay relationship, which started when she was 38, when she met her current partner, and about seeing this film: “For the first time, I realized the extent to which my ideas about womanly comportment—about the visual and auditory effects you were supposed to produce when you were, say, having sex, or driving a car, or writing a novel—came from movies. Such behavior, which had felt appropriate and legible in the presence of a real or an imagined man, now felt fake and insane.”
Or as Cusk puts it, “It was as if driving was a story I had suddenly stopped believing in, and without that belief I was being overwhelmed by the horror of reality.” But for “driving,” I would substitute “everything.”
What do you do when you wake up from a dream and find yourself driving down a road in a foreign country, when suddenly the rules start to look insane, and everything seems fatal? Halfway through the movie, I put my shoes on and go for a walk. I listen to acoustic Björk and wander the empty streets. I smell the glossy abelia, look at Jupiter, watch a massive toad lumber across the pavement, take some cups someone has put out for collection.
Oh, sorry, were you expecting this to end well?