Wives in Revolt

When a woman turns to salt

“Lot’s Wife”

The Sunday Letter #51

“Almost every woman in the story of Jesus is called Mary,” writes Marina Warner in the London Review of Books. Sure, some of the gospel writers added a last name or a husband’s title here and there to distinguish them, but “more commonly, the Marys have combined and then divided, only to fuse again” with the other women in Jesus’ circle. There’s the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, then there’s Mary Magdalene, who has come to represent “the sinner we should aspire not to be and the saint we should desire to become.” The two extremes of women’s representations in the bible, the Madonna and the Whore, tied together by one name. 

Then there was Sarah, the barren wife of Abraham who eventually gives birth at the age of 90 to a son named Isaac, the same son that Abraham nearly sacrificed for his God before an angel interfered. Her biblical age of death was 127 years old, and when she is mentioned in the New Testament, it is to praise her steadfast faith and obedience to her husband. 

Consider Lot’s wife, unnamed for her sins. Lot was the nephew of Abraham who welcomed God’s angels into his home in Sodom after they were sent to destroy it. But when the men of the village surround the home in an attempt to assault the angels, Lot attempts to offer his virgin daughters to the townsmen instead, only for them to continue to revolt. So the angels force Lot, his wife, and their daughters away, telling them to leave Sodom without turning back. Sulfur and fire rain down as God renders the people and their plains entirely barren as punishment for their wickedness. But then Lot’s wife turns back, and as the story goes, becomes “a pillar of salt.” 

Why did she turn to face Sodom while fleeing? For the same reason Orpheus turned to face Eurydice: a lack of faith. Of course it is the wives in both stories who perish, banished from whence they came for someone’s sins, even if they were not their own.

*

“As a mother you learn what it is to be both martyr and devil,” Rachel Cusk writes in her 2001 motherhood memoir A Life’s Work. To be both is to be a walking contradiction, as most mothers are, especially those selfish enough to have needs of their own. A decade later, in the divorce memoir Aftermath, Cusk writes, 

“I read somewhere that a space station is always slowly falling back to earth, and that every few months or so a rocket has to be sent to push it back out again. In rather the same way, a woman is forever dragged at by an imperceptible force of biological conformism; her life is relentlessly iterative; it requires energy to keep her in orbit. Year after year she’ll do it, but if one year the rocket doesn’t come then down she’ll go.” 

It was Cusk I thought of as I read Emily Gould’s recent personal essay about her near-divorce. Like Gould’s essay, Cusk’s work was maligned for daring to cross the boundary between private and personal that so many women writers before them have also had to navigate. 

“In the summer of 2022,” the essay begins, “I lost my mind.” Gould recalls losing her apartment at the same time her husband was preparing to publish a book. She turns to drinking as her mental state deteriorates along with her marriage, entering a sort of mania as she becomes convinced she needs to leave her husband. She resents the success he’s earned as a writer as a result of her taking on the majority of the household labour, and she leans into erratic behaviour in search of the freedom that eludes her. 

One day, he confronts her for her inattention, and she leaves, only to be told by multiple doctors that she needs to check herself into a psychiatric hospital immediately. So she enters an institution, but even after stabilizing she finds that she still wants to leave her husband. “I wondered if my marriage would always feel like a competition,” she writes, “and if the only way to call the competition a draw would be to end it.” 

She recalls a previous winter; her husband had been in Ukraine reporting on the start of the war, and in her anxiety she snuck out to borrow a cigarette from a neighbour. In retrospect, she senses that the first seeds of mania were sowed with that transgression: “Leaving the children, smoking the cigarette, resenting Keith for putting himself in harm’s way and going out into the greater world while I tended to lunches, homework, and laundry as though everything were normal.” 

Gould turns to literature for answers, combing through Heartburn and Aftermath (“the literary divorce bible”) for signs to confirm what she already believes to be true. “She makes the case for the untenability of her relationship by explaining that men and women are fundamentally unequal,” she writes of Cusk. “She posits that men and women who marry and have children are perpetually fighting separate battles, lost to each other.” 

Gould recalls how jarring it felt to read a description of her child’s birth from her husband’s point of view ahead of his novel’s publication. A fact-checker from The New Yorker calls to verify the details of an excerpt from his novel. “Had a geyser of blood shot out of my vagina? I didn’t actually know.” She mentions off-handedly, “In case you’re wondering, Keith has read this essay and suggested minimal changes.” She mentions the effort involved between married writers to “love each other despite the underlying thrum of competing ambitions.” 

Eventually, Gould and her husband seek to reconcile. She notes that while he would have to forgive her cheating and financial irresponsibility and “having a mental breakdown,” she would have to forgive his taking her for granted and “usurping the time and energy and brain space with which I might have written a better book than his.” 

“Could the therapist help us overcome what I knew to be true,” Gould writes, “that we’d gone into marriage already aware that we were destined for constant conflict just because of who we are?”

*

In the original version of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” the Sea King’s youngest daughter wishes to become a human after catching her first glimpse of the world above. She falls in love with a prince from afar, and saves him when he nearly drowns. For the chance to be with him, she gives up her beautiful voice in exchange for human legs that will forever be in pain. Others warn her again and again about the price of becoming human just to win another’s love:

“But think again,” said the witch; “for when once your shape has become like a human being, you can no more be a mermaid. You will never return through the water to your sisters, or to your father’s palace again; and if you do not win the love of the prince, so that he is willing to forget his father and mother for your sake, and to love you with his whole soul, and allow the priest to join your hands that you may be man and wife, then you will never have an immortal soul. The first morning after he marries another your heart will break, and you will become foam on the crest of the waves.”

“I will do it,” says the little mermaid, resolute. 

But in a tragic misunderstanding caused in part by her muteness, the prince marries another woman instead. As the little mermaid is about to die, her sisters rescue her, having exchanged their hair for a dagger which, if used to kill the prince, will allow her to return to life in the sea. But sneaking into the prince’s room at night, she finds she cannot kill him. Instead, she flings the knife “far away from her into the waves; the water turned red where it fell, and the drops that sprouted up looked like blood.” She turns to cast one last look at him before throwing herself into the ocean, dissolving into a salty sea foam. 

*

In Julie Phillips’ The Baby on the Fire Escape, she writes of the poet Adrienne Rich, whose own frustration at the demands of artistic motherhood led her to feeling like “a monster–an anti-woman.”

But the ‘monster’ has since been reclaimed courtesy of Jenny Offill, who launched a decade’s worth of discourse in 2014 with Dept. of Speculation. In the autofiction-ish novel, Offill’s stand-in writes that she wants to become an art monster, the kind of woman that concerns herself with art above all else. In contrast to Robert Nozick’s conception of the utility monster, the art monster converts feminine greed and maternal neglect into creative output. 

In a recent interview in Dirt, writer Kate Zambreno rejects the art monster cliché, a preoccupation belonging only to “white rich women…the brownstone leisured class.” Still, an entire school of classification has sprung from the discourse, with Lauren Elkin recently publishing an ode to art monsters such as Hannah Wilke, Ana Mendieta, and Audre Lorde. Defined as art that is “at once highly personal and political,” monstrous art is, per The New Yorker, “rooted in experiences of the body and a determination to break down binaries.” 

In the Dirt interview, Zambreno mentions that her husband has edited her work throughout the course of their 20-year relationship, despite a “terrible bedside manner when he’s editing.” She suggests that this may have contributed to her Zelda Fitzgerald obsession, hinting at a tendency for “genius” husbands to edit and steal the words of their wives.

“I was really enraptured and destroyed by this idea of this editor-write relationship that was so gendered,” Zambreno notes before mentioning that she doesn’t show her husband everything, at least not anymore. “I keep it really private now…the writing space, the notebook space is my privacy. And it always has been.”

*

In A Life of One’s Own, Joanna Biggs explores the lives of nine women writers through the lens of her own painful divorce. From Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath to Toni Morrison and Elena Ferrante, Biggs reflects on what it means to create a life of freedom through art:

“I had so many questions: could you be a feminist and be in love? Did the search for independence mean I would never be at home with anyone, anywhere? Was domesticity a trap? What was worth living for if you lost faith in the traditional goals of a woman's life? What was worth living for at all–what degree of unhappiness, lostness, chaos was bearable?”

Perhaps every generation of women faces this quandary, wondering how to navigate the personal in the political. 

“Perhaps this is what neuroscientists are getting at when they refer to the flow state, which happens when you're deeply absorbed in doing something…but often making art,” Biggs writes,“Perhaps it is about going mad.” Biggs argues that fiction allows women to cross the boundaries they’d otherwise abandoned in favour of becoming wives and mothers.

“A man has been termed a microcosm,” Biggs quotes Mary Wollstonecraft, “and every family might also be called a state.” Wollstonecraft died five years after the publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, when her daughter Mary was only eleven days old. Wollstonecraft was 38. 

In living with her deceased mother’s name and the feminist legacy it carried, the younger Mary walked the line between death and resurrection long before she came to prominence for writing Frankenstein. When she eventually married the poet Percy Shelley, she was so traumatized by her encounters with motherhood and loss that she refused to name her most iconic creation:

“This nameless mode of naming the unnameable is rather good,” Shelley remarked…She herself had no name of her own. Like the creature pieced together from cadavers collected by Victor Frankenstein, her name was an assemblage of parts: the name of her mother, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, stitched to that of her father, the philosopher William Godwin, grafted onto that of her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, as if Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley were the sum of her relations, bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh, if not the milk of her mother’s milk, since her mother had died eleven days after giving birth to her, mainly too sick to give suck.” 

*

In The Cut, Rebecca Traister asks why everyone is suddenly so eager for marriage to make a comeback. “It’s not just the think-tank-economist-columnist class prescribing the marriage cure,” Traister writes, “It’s also hard-right commentators and politicians pushing policies aimed to re-center (hetero) marriage as the organizing- principle of American family life by reversing the progress — from legal abortion to affirmative action to no-fault divorce — that has enabled women to have economic and social stability independent of marriage.”

Of course, this isn’t new. Traiser argues, “Over centuries, everyone from clergy to presidents has surveyed the challenges facing this country — income inequality, housing shortages, struggling children, chronic unhappiness — and presented marriage as a panacea, one that has conveniently contained women and conferred additional benefits on men.”

Is it any wonder that the artist wives of today find themselves in revolt?

“My husband asked me not to write about him after we split up,” Róisín Lanigan writes in The Fence. “We were still together then, me and my husband. ‘Oh my god, I obviously won’t.’ I said. ‘We won’t split up anyway. Shut up, that’s so stupid.’ Later I think about how this is also a weird thing for him to have asked me because he of all people knows I make promises I don’t keep.”

*

In a recent interview, literary critic Merve Emre argues that “good autofiction isn’t just transcribing the life that you have. Good autofiction is realizing you can be a character in your own life…by writing about yourself as a character.”

“Do we have to fictionalize everything?” the interviewer, Sara Fredman, asks in response. “Fictionalizing is one approach,” Emre argues, while the other is “just relentless sublimation. You don’t have to write an essay about your marriage and your divorce. You can just write a piece of criticism…and you can betray so much about yourself and still not be exposing or betraying others.”

Emre points to Elizabeth Hardwick, who uses “criticism as a form of sublimation” to reveal bits of her life. Yet just a moment later, Emre also mentions an evening in which she was taking a meeting at home when her husband walked in, “just babbling about something or another, and my editor was like, ‘can’t you just push him out of a window already?’“ 

It’s a remarkably undercut moment from a known-image architect such as Emre. She allows herself to become an imperfect character in her own life, building on her self-image as a work-obsessed wife that occasionally forgets her own husband’s name. And in case you were wondering, of course she has her own snark page. Then again, maybe all adventurous women do.

*

As with all personal essays that go viral, the reaction to it has eclipsed its actual substance. It’s a typical cycle: in 1983, Nora Ephron publishes an account of her husband’s affairs in Heartburn, only to be lambasted for crossing the boundary of the personal into the public through her art. In 2019, CJ Hauser writes The Crane Wife about rejecting the trappings of domesticity, only for another writer to argue that Hauser was being reductive about marriage as a whole. In 2022, Isabel Kaplan writes about identifying with Nora Ephron, only for another writer to respond with charges of gender essentialism.

In a 2020 essay for The New Inquiry, Jamie Hood writes, “I wonder both if there is an intelligible ontological status to the kind of wifedom I’m imagining and also if it is even possible for the subject who is entirely attendant to the subjectivities of others (wife as inextricable from her husband’s discrete personhood, mother as inextricable from the needs of her children) to be, finally, considered a subject in some deeper metaphysical sense.
” Hood asks if heterosexual desire “can only and ever be a dead remnant of a racist and misogynist structuration of desire within a system built on commodity fetishism.”

And yet.

“I can’t help myself,” Hood writes, “I want to be undone by love.” 

*

In a new essay, “Housewife Demonology,” Hood writes that she no longer wishes to be a housewife, musing instead that “any garden looks like Eden if you’re barred from entry.” As she argues, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was about the writer’s “sense that the woman who loves men must make of these men gods. It is by such worship she’s able to concede to, rather than be destroyed by, a social order in which she is ‘condemned to dependence.’”

And yet we’ve been taught to keep silent about going mad, and about the “structural indoctrination” that supersedes our self-esteem and feminist instincts. In fact, “if the Twitter threads and think pieces are to be believed, any humiliation we experience at the hands of men only ever results in a revelation of our own responsibility for this degradation,” Hood argues.

“In the literary world, a turning of the tides against the personal essay and memoir genres over the last few years has also meant that, should we dare to speak or write about these humiliations, we’ve failed to “get over” them appropriately, or we’ve un-self-critically been co-opted by the Trauma Industrial Complex. The bootstrap mentality of such arguments adores silence. Then, every third hour, we must supplicate ourselves before another recapitulation of the viral post: “Are straight women ok?””

But Hood refuses to take a cynical outlook: “Why shouldn’t we want every pleasure? Why shouldn’t we dream a sea change?”

And so a woman turns to salt.