Women in Dark Times Read online

  For Mia Rose

  Just imagine, it was precisely those bruises on my soul that at the next moment gave me the courage for a new life.

  Rosa Luxemburg to Leo Jogiches, 1898

  Darkness is a better form of freedom.

  Thérèse Oulton, in conversation, January 2013

  Contents

  Preface

  Introduction

  I THE STARS

  1 Woman on the Verge of Revolution

  2 Painting Against Terror

  3 Respect

  II THE LOWER DEPTHS

  4 Honour-bound

  III LIVING

  Introduction

  5 The Shape of Democracy

  6 Coming Home

  7 Damage Limitation

  Afterword

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Plate Section

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Preface

  It is time to return to what feminism has to tell us. It is time to make the case for what women have uniquely to say about the perils of our modern world. The case cannot, however, be made along the lines that have become most familiar. We cannot make it only by asserting women’s right to equality or by arguing that women are qualified to enter the courts of judgement and the corridors of power. Those claims are important but they tend to be made – loudly, as they must be – to the detriment of another type of understanding, less obvious but no less vital, that makes its way into the darker spaces of the world, ripping the cover from the illusions through which the most deadly forms of power sustain and congratulate themselves. This we might call the knowledge of women. In its best forms, it is what allows women to struggle for freedom without being co-opted by false pretension or by the brute exertion of power for its own sake.

  I say ‘women’ but of course I mean ‘some women’. No feminism should claim to speak on behalf of all women. In these pages, I will be following the paths of individual women who have taught me how to think differently, and who can help us forge a new language for feminism. One that allows women to claim their place in the world, but which also burrows beneath its surface to confront the subterranean aspects of history and the human mind, both of which play their part in driving the world on its course, but which our dominant political vocabularies most often cannot bear to face. We need to draw on women’s ability to tell that other story, to enter that domain and then return to tell the tale. We need, I will argue here, a scandalous feminism, one which embraces without inhibition the most painful, outrageous aspects of the human heart, giving them their place at the very core of the world that feminism wants to create. Certainly it will be a different world from the one that feminism is meant to aspire to – sane, balanced, reasoned, where women are granted their due portion. Not because these aspirations should not be met, nor because we want a mad world, but because women have the gift of seeing through what is already crazy about the world, notably the cruelty and injustice with which it tends to go about organising itself.

  That the personal is political has become a well-worn feminist claim. In the beginning it rightly drew attention to the way that women’s private and family lives were soaked in the ugliest realities of patriarchal power. But if the claim has faded somewhat, it might be because it shied away from the most disturbing component of its own insight – which is that once you open the door to what is personal, intimate, you never know what you are going to find. The innermost lives of women do not just bear the scars of oppression. If the women of this book are for me types of genius, it is because of the way that, as part of their struggle to be fully human, they invite us into the gutter, allowing – obliging – us to look full on at what they, in their dreams and nightmares, have had to face (unspeakable thoughts unspoken, in Toni Morrison’s famous phrase).

  So this book is also a plea for a feminism that will not try to sanitise itself. We need to go back to the original wager – that the personal is key – and give it a new gloss. Feminism should make it a matter of principle to tell the world what it has to learn from the moment when we enter the landscape of the night. I know that, for many, politics can only be effective – can only be politics – by asserting its distance from this domain. In fact, it has been the strength of modern feminism to mess with the idea of a cleaned-up politics by bringing sexuality on to the table. In a way I am simply taking it at its word, and asking: What happens when we push that feminist insistence on the inner, private dimension of political struggle to the furthest limits of conscious and unconscious life?

  To pursue this question into our time I have found myself in some very dark places, where women suffer in ways that are often unseen. In this I am following another vital strand of modern feminism for which making visible the invisible histories of women has always been a key task. It has felt crucial to do this, as a type of caution, as a way of reminding us of the worst that a still patriarchal world is capable of. Honour killing – the fact of it, its prevalence in modern times – stands as a glaring rebuke, perhaps the most glaring, to those who would argue that the task of feminism is done, to the idea that women today are free, that sexuality – so this argument runs – is something that women today control and dispose of at will. Nothing could be further from the picture of sexuality offered here. All of my stories make it clear that sexuality always contains an element beyond human manipulation, however free we think we are. To assert otherwise is a type of daylight robbery which knocks the humanity of all my women down by at least a notch.

  Attributing honour killing to ‘other’ (less civilised) cultures or communities is in fact, I will argue, one way of keeping that bland, evasive image of Western sexual freedom intact. Women are not free today – not even in the West, where the inequalities are still glaring. Certainly it must be one of the goals of feminism for women to be freer in their sexual life. But we must be careful not to exchange an injustice for an illusion. We are nowhere more deceived than when we present sexuality not as the trouble it always is but as another consumable good. Honour killing is the cruellest modern exemplar of how the sexuality of women can provoke a patriarchal anguish which knows no limits in the violent lengths it will go to assuage itself. But we kid ourselves, as everything in this book will confirm, if we think that human fear of sexuality, and then the hatred of women which is so often its consequence, is something that the so-called reason of our modern world can simply and safely dissipate.

  All the women in this book are therefore issuing a warning. They are all reminding us of the limits of enlightenment thinking which believes that we can, with sufficient persistence, simply drive the cobwebs of unreason away. I do not want feminism to hitch itself to this wagon. Indeed, rather than the idea of light triumphing over darkness, my women suggest that confronting dark with dark might be the more creative path. If there is such a thing as a knowledge of women, this, I would venture, is where we should go looking for it.

  This book is intended to change the terms of feminist debate by giving women the task – already embraced by some – of exposing everything that is darkest, most recalcitrant and unsettling in the struggle for the better political futures we want, women and men, to build for ourselves. My aim is to persuade the reader of the ­brilliance of all these women in showing us how.

  Jacqueline Rose

  April 2014

  Introduction

  Life being how it is, isn’t necessarily how it is.

  Heshu Yones, killed by her father, London 2003

  It was the unpredictable in herself that she used.

  Eve Arnold on Marilyn Monroe

  This book begins with the story of three women who create their lives in the face of incr
edible odds. Whether they do so despite or because of those odds is a question which each of them embodies, a question they put as much to us as to themselves. It will also tell the story, more starkly, of the odds that women, in the worst of cases, can find themselves up against. For me, the three women are survivors, although the idea may at first glance seem strange, since each could also be said to have died before her time. They have everything to teach us about the complex reckoning – the traffic – between the cruelties of the heart and of the world. Each one belongs to the last century, in which prosperity and killing multiplied in ways previously unknown. In this book, death shadows the lives of women whose energy, whose fierce protest against the constraints and injustice of the modern world, is still exemplary today.

  I see them as artists, women who etch words and images out of living history and their own flesh. One most obviously perhaps – she is famous in her own way, but for many might also be the least familiar: the German-Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon, who poured on to the page – over a thousand gouaches painted in an extra­ordinary rush of two years between 1940 and 1942 – the colours and musical notes of her epoch in combinations and shapes never seen before or since. But Rosa Luxemburg, with whom I begin, was also an artist – a wordsmith who wrote poems, as well as painting, and whose political speeches and letters sing as much as they exhort, cajole and proclaim. In her work, the revolutionary potential of the first decades of the twentieth century is gifted with a language painstakingly crafted to its task. And Marilyn Monroe, contrary to the dismissals or even mockery she so often attracts, is also, I argue, to be seen and respected as a consummate performer, a brilliant artiste in whose hands – or rather across whose body and face – the dreams of Hollywood, in a post-war America straining under the weight of its own ideals, receive their most thorough and ultimately tragic exposure.

  All three are therefore truth-tellers who lay bare the ugly secrets of the consensus, the way of the world which the corrupt, powerful and over-privileged in the West never stop telling us – no more so than now – is the only way that the world must and always will be. The fact that they are women is key. If one of my aims in this book is to add their names to the already distinguished ancestry, the foremothers, of modern feminism, it is not because they saw themselves as feminists – they did not – but because I believe that each one of them, in the way they understood and negotiated the perils of their lives, has something urgent to say to feminism today. One thing they have in common is their suffering. But if each of them is stricken, they also make themselves the subjects of their own destiny (destiny as distinct from fate, which condemns all its players in advance). Each of them trawls the darkness of their inner life, where their own most anguished voices reside, in order to understand what impedes them but also in search of the resources to defy their own predicaments. If they attract me so deeply, it is because not one of them makes the mistake – as I see it – of believing that effective existence in the real world must come at the expense of the most painful forms of self-knowledge. Subject to violence, they also take their lives into their own hands. They are never – any of them – solely the victims of their history, even if that history finally kills them.

  Luxemburg begins the story. A Jewish woman born in Poland, she rose up the highest echelons of German socialist circles to become one of the most outspoken revolutionary voices of the early twentieth century. She was exceptionally versatile: revolutionary Marxist, propagandist, teacher and speaker; stylist and rhetorician; lyricist and word-artist; translator and linguist; painter and botanist; and, as I recently discovered, a passionate cyclist (together with Edith Cavell, who is famous as a nurse but less as a socialist, she participated in a six-day cycling event at Dieppe in the summer of 1902).1 Enthusiast of the 1905 and then 1917 Russian revolutions, she was the uncompromising detractor of her colleagues in the German Social Democrat Party, whose betrayal of revolution reached its crisis for her when they supported the munitions bill which heralded the start of the 1914–18 war. Frequently imprisoned – for insulting the Kaiser and then for her opposition to that war – she was murdered by government henchmen in 1919 after the failed Spartacist revolutionary uprising. The brutal suppression of that revolution has consequences still with us to this day. It was a moment of truth when ruined, defeated soldiers were able fleetingly to glimpse that they had been the victims of a capitalist, imperialist war which had put the workers of the world at each other’s throats. ‘Socialism or barbarity’ was Luxemburg’s famous slogan. After her death, barbarity would of course triumph. Out of the Freikorps that killed her would emerge some of the most fervent future supporters of Hitler.

  When Luxemburg steps on to the public stage for the first time, launching what will be a brilliant career of public speaking, she slowly but surely takes the measure of her own power. ‘Not that I am all fired up and bursting with enthusiasm,’ she writes from Berlin to her grudgingly appreciative lover, Leo Jogiches, in 1898. ‘On the contrary I am quite calm and look to the future with confidence . . . I am sure that in half a year’s time, I will be among the best of the party’s speakers.’2 The voice, the effortlessness, the language – everything, she writes to him, ‘comes out right’, as if she had been speaking for twenty years (she is twenty-eight at the time). Luxemburg is collecting herself, finding her voice in what is of course essentially a man’s world. A small, Polish-Jewish woman with a limp, she is – metaphorically but also literally – drawing herself up to her full height. She will be the equal of every man she addresses, and more than the equal of the many male revolutionary pundits and stars, including Lenin, whom she will take to task in the course of her life. Quite simply, she conquers their world.

  At the same time, she has no doubt that what she brings to that world is uniquely her own. ‘Do you know what I have been feeling very strongly?’ she writes to Jogiches a few months later. ‘Something is moving inside me and wants to come out . . . In my “soul” a totally new, original form is ripening that ignores all rules and conventions. It breaks them by the power of ideas and strong conviction. I want to affect people like a clap of thunder, to inflame their minds not by speechifying but with the breadth of my vision, the strength of my conviction, and the power of my expression.’3 Fiery, intemperate, ruthless – Luxemburg could be all of these. But for Luxemburg, to be a political actor in the world is to usher into that world something as unpredictable as a new birth. Then she adds: ‘How? What? Where? I still don’t know.’ Appearances can be deceptive. Luxemburg’s hesitancy is the backdrop, the indispens­able companion of her poise. She is calling for a new language of politics, one which today is still met mostly with incomprehension or intolerance: a political vision that will not try to extinguish what cannot be controlled in advance or fully known. In this she is profoundly in tune with Hannah Arendt – from whose book Men in Dark Times I take my title – who, writing of totalitarian terror, describes the ultimate freedom as identical with the capacity to begin. Over such beginnings, she writes, ‘no logic, no cogent deduction can have any power because the chain presupposes, in the form of a premise, a new beginning’.4 It is therefore each new birth that totalitarianism hates. Terror is needed ‘lest with the birth of each new human being a new beginning arise and raise its voice in the world’.5

  Raising a voice in the world would of course be one definition of feminism – speaking out, protesting, clamouring loudly for equality, making oneself heard. ‘Find your voice and use it’ was recently described as the first lesson feminism has to learn from the suffragettes.6 Mary Beard has recently spoken publicly of the high price women pay for being heard.7 Patriarchy has been very efficient in countering the noise of feminism with epithets – ‘shrill’, ‘hysterical’ – intended to send women’s voices scurrying back, abject, underground. The famous backlash against feminism is, we could say, not just aimed at restoring the ascendancy of men in the material world, but also, and no less forcefully, directed at women’s speech. An outspoken woman is a thre
at, not just because of the content of what she says, the demands she is making, but because, in the very act of speaking, her presence as a woman is too strongly felt. Drawing language up from inside her, she makes the body as the source of language too palpable in her person, giving the lie to the delusion that the body is sublimated in our utterances, that we can hide our mortal flesh behind the words that we speak. On this, Luxemburg’s opponents were unapologetic. August Bebel, self-proclaimed feminist, wrote of her ‘wretched female’s squirts of poison’; Viktor Adler called her a ‘poisonous bitch . . . clever as a monkey’. On another occasion he more simply complained that she had ‘proved herself too much of a woman’.8 ‘We will hang her,’ he is reported as saying half jokingly after the 1905 Social Democratic Party in Jena. ‘We will not allow her to spit in our soup.’9 Women who speak out threaten and expose the limits of the human: vile liquid, animal, or both.

  One reason women are often so hated, I would suggest, is because of their ability to force to the surface of the everyday parts of the inner life – its visceral reality, its stubborn unruliness – which in the normal course of our exchanges we like to think we have subdued. For me this is also their gift. Today we read much about the over-sexualisation of women’s and young girls’ bodies, which is of course also a form of potentially lethal control: bodies that must be perfect, but which must also shrink to the point where they more or less disappear. I see this, however, as something of a decoy, or even a distraction. Such idealisation, such diminishment (the two extremes are inseparable) is a way of concealing another impossible, but no less sinister, demand: that our bodies should never remind us of our failings, of the limits to what we can fully command or know about ourselves, that the surface of the world should never bear the visible marks of what we all carry most disturbingly – physically but also in our dreams and nightmares – beneath. As if women, always potentially the bearers of new life, were being asked to smother the messy uncertainty to which every new beginning, if that is what it truly is, gives rise. ‘Something is moving inside me and wants to come out . . . a totally new, original form is ripening that ignores all rules and conventions.’