3 SERIOUS LADIES
October 28th, 2007Jane Bowles, Sylivia Plath and Ruth Fainlight
“In one sense, she was the perfect wife—I teased her that they might have served as the models for a nineteenthcentury marriage manual. Sylvia exhibited this same streak of obsessive domesticity. And I recognised it in myself. Regardless of all else, we were the product of the culture of the United States of America in the first half of the twentieth century, good examples of then-current ideas of femininity; also perhaps, we shared profounder self-destructive traits. Jane glorified in what she termed ‘feminine wiles.’ She was a shrewd and delighted observer of women in action, and a very successful player of those games. Sylvia tormented herself with impossible goals of domestic achievement. “Whether the artist can be a young woman/ is the first question”—not, please note, whether a young woman can be an artist—was the theme of much of my early poetry (and the first lines of a weaker example). The three of us struggled with the dichotomy of being writers’ wives as well as writers, and were maimed in our separate ways.”