Ornament and Silence: Essays on Women's Lives

I re-read this book from time to time, the focus on different essays depending on where I am in my own life. The chapter on Virginia Woolf is one of the best essays on Woolf for this Woolfian scholar. Fraser describes how Virginia and Vanessa Stephen's father, Sir Leslie Stephen, wandered around their Victorian house weeping after his wife died. "I am a man without a skin," he said. He reportedly told his fragile, beautiful, and talented daughters: "When I am sad, you should be sad. When I am angry, you should weep." According to Fraser, Virginia Woolf believed her father "the model of the patriarchal family, with men given license to bully and rant while women and children submitted and served...." Fraser says Woolf believed that when such conditions are tolerated in private life, in public they can lead to fascism. "The tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other." Fraser interviewed the Russian ex-patriot Nina Berberova many times. Nina Berberova only became known to the English-speaking world in her eighties, and is a role model for those who hope to thrive to their final breath. Berberova was active, thinking, writing, and living on her own to her death at 92. Fraser quotes the questions Berberova poses to herself as a writer: "Did you try to look inside yourself, or did you play the victim and look to others to blame? ... Did you speak out and tell the truth? Were you bold in your work? .... Did you fulfill your promise, the talent you were born with? ...Were you cooperating with the life force, or were you willfully moving in the direction of suicide?" Also of interest is Fraser's reading of Edith Wharton. After describing an attempted rape in The House of Mirth, Fraser poses the possibility the author knew enough about such events to portray this scene and its impact on the heroine so vividly. As happens with so many young women, the character, Lily, feels shamed. "I am bad--a bad girl--all my thoughts are bad." She keeps the attempted rape a secret even from her best friend. Again, Fraser hones in on the secrets, the "ornament and silence" so many women continue to observe. "Lily, though a grown and sophisticated woman, is strangely spellbound, lonely, and unprotected, like a girl in an incestuous house," Fraser says. The other evidence the author might have been molested include her childhood illnesses, and in young womanhood, "symptoms of what her Victorian doctors called neurasthenia but which contemporary diagnosis often links to early sexual trauma. Panic attacks, breathing difficulties...migraines, debilitating depressions. .... Nausea so severe...she became incapable of eating." After citing the famous quote from Flaubert: "Be regular and ordinary in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you can be violent and original in your works," Fraser politely observes how easy it can be for some male artists and writers to pursue their art with mothers, wives, lovers, or daughters to cosset, co

I read this book looking for something and I found in it the most strong women I could ever know. An inspiration in every way to my young mind I will be changed forever by this amazing collection. Kennedy Fraser captures the essence of each of the women (and the few men) that she writes about. She's amazing, it's amazing.

I read this book at a time when a friendship I'd held near and dear ended irrationally and insensitively, my kids were growing into independent teens, but also a time when my 18-year marriage was coming into a state of profound comfort and happiness. However, I was also in the midst of finishing a college degree, working on writings I hoped to have published, and coping with the diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis. This book brought me down to earth, in a way, because I think we tend to look upon writers as a special breed of people with no personal difficulties, when quite the opposite is actually true. If nothing else, this book taught me that it could very well be my current travails that put me into print!