Having just written and performed a play about a severely-abused, nineteenth-century, domestic servant, I was intrigued to discover that a book has been written about Virginia Woolf's relationship to the women who cooked and cleaned in her various homes. The book is Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury by Alison Light.

Before I talk about my responses to this remarkable book, I want to explain what I was trying to do with my play about the servant--which, by the way, is titled Lace Curtain Irish. It's a one-woman piece, and the one woman is Bridget Sullivan, who was a live-in cook and maid in the home of Andrew Borden of Fall River, Massachusetts. Yes, the Andrew Borden who was the recipient of eleven of the famous "forty whacks" presumably delivered by his daughter Lizzie's axe. The premise of my play is that Bridget was the actual wielder of the much-celebrated and conspicuous-in-its-absence ax (or hatchet).  Everything in the trial transcripts  supports that theory, as well as what is known about the habits, attitudes, history, character, and personality of LIzzie Borden.

Obviously the crime was frenzied and spontaneous--an act of passion. (The Bordens were each dead on the first blow.) Murders that are motivated by desires to inherit generally involve either long-range planning (cumulative doses of untraceable poision) or felicitous  opportunities (finding oneself alone with the victim on the edge of a cliff at night). Crimes involving overkill generally are triggered by immediate and overwhelming circumstances... like abuses of power and/or outright sadism.

Bridget had just been vomiting in the yard on the hottest day of the summer when her mistress, Andrew's wife, gave her the order to wash every window in the house, upstairs and downstairs, inside and out. In 1892, this entailed ladders, buckets, trips to an outdoor pump,brushes, and rags. Not surprisingly, Bridget had only washed a window or two before the arrival of the police and the discovery of Mrs. Borden's mutilated corpse.

One of the first actions by the police was a lock-down of the house. No one was allowed to leave. Oh, except the "Irish girl." She was allowed to leave the house to stay with a friend, taking with her an uninspected bundle of possessions. After all, she was just the maid.

What caught my attention was the fact that Mrs. Borden had been stricken with a bout of vomiting just the day before, and had taken to her bed. In other words, she had good reason to empathize with Bridget's distress and physical debilitation. Why would she insist on a chore that certainly could wait a day-- or even a week?  There can be only two answers: sadism or staggering classism. She either delighted in tormenting Bridget or else she considered the "Irish girl" to be of a different species than herself-- a species impervious to heat and illness, and whose responses were either lazy malingering or ungrateful attempts to cheat her employer out of a day's labor!

Reading Mrs. Woolf and the Servants opened my eyes to the fact that Abigail Borden's attitude toward Bridget was far from unusual. In fact, it reflected prevailing attitudes among the privileged classes of England. Servants were expected to work for little more than room and board. They bought their own uniforms, worked from sunup to sundown, and only had two days off a month. Frequently, the kitchens and washrooms where they worked were in basements, and their rooms were cramped and inadequately heated and ventilated. (Bridget's room was under the eaves and must have been stifling the night before the murders.) Often the servants were assigned names at the whim of their employers who were too lazy to learn their real names. (Bridget had been called "Maggie.") Without pensions or insurance, they relied on the patronage of their employers for support in old age and in sickness. Employers, then as now, had strong incentives to "let go" older workers, in order to avoid the fiscal responsibility for their retirement.

In spite of this appallingly exploitive situation, employers expected loyalty and gratitude from their servants. They saw themselves as role models and mentors for their servants, introducing them to a life of refinement and morals that working-class folks presumably could not be expected to find among their peers. Employers felt entitled to enter a servant's room at any time, and to search their possessions without permission. All of this was for the good of the servant, of course.

This world changed, however, and Virginia Woolf lived through the transitional time. When she and her sister Vanessa moved from the family estate to Bloomsbury, they left behind many of the rigid class roles and formal rituals of their Victorian girlhoods. What they did not leave behind, however, were the servants. But in Bloomsbury, there was no need for the liveried fleet of gardeners, coachmen, personal valets, parlor maids, cooks, charwomen, etc. There would only be a maid and a cook. The uniforms and the hated white caps were gone. The servants could say "Miss Stephens" instead of "Madam." Occasionally, they were even invited to eat with their employers. The middle-class youth of Bloomsbury considered themselves artists, bohemians, radicals, socialists.

This must have been enormously confusing for the servants. With the old upstairs/downstairs boundaries gone, where were the new ones? No one seemed to know. The Woolfs would host political meetings in their home which the servants would attend as fellow socialists... at least until it was time to cook dinner. In spite of her repeated attempts to include working-class characters in her books, Virginia would usually end by editing them out of the final revision, acknowledging her near-total ignorance about their lives.

Two things stand out to me from reading about Woolf and her servants:

1) The time when Virginia's cook ordered her out of her room and Virginia pitched a fit.

2) The fact that two of her servants appeared to have been in a relationship of primary intimacy during the eight years when they lived under Virginia's roof and shared a bed in their room together.

The first stands out because Virginia Woolf is famous for her 1929 treatise,  A Room of One's Own, where she argued passionately how women's creativity had been and was continuing to be stunted by their lack of access to a room that was their own. So here we have Nellie Boxall, thirty-seven years old, who has been living with and working for Virginia for eleven years... for five pounds a year, working 341 days per year... and Virginia, who is fighting with her, enters Nellie's room. What does Nellie do? She orders her out. And what is Virginia's reaction? Does she applaud her for defending her territory? Here is Light's description:

"Nellie had got above herself; in reality the room was not 'hers.' Being treated like a servant was so painful and humiliating that Virginia went straight to Leonard and determined to sack Nellie by Christmas. The 'famous scene' was relived in her imagination many times. She found herself muttering  and rehearsing arguments, unable to work, sick and shivery, trembling with anticipation at the day... when she would give Nellie a month's notice. She wrote in her diary as if possessed, copying out replies to Nellie, speaking their parts..." (p. 193.)

Wow. Just wow.

And then there is the fact that Nellie Boxall and Lottie Hope came together to work for the Woolfs in 1916. Nellie was twenty-six and Lottie was a year younger.  These two young women lived, worked, and slept together in a shared bed at Hogarth House for eight years. Before that, they had lived and worked together in Roger Fry's home for five years. Virginia fired Lottie in 1924, but Nellie stayed on for another ten years. In 1941, both of the women moved into a rented home of their own, which Nellie eventually bought,  and where they lived together for another twenty-four years, until Nellie's death. The two were inseparable, being seen together at weddings, funerals, holidays, visiting.

Nellie was the stouter, the butch. Lottie, rumored to have gypsy blood, was the more glamorous. Lottie had been a foundling, raised in the Home for Deserted Children, and Nellie, the youngest of ten, had been orphaned at twelve. Nellie's relationship with Lottie was protective and maternal. They shared a bedroom from the time they were twenty-one until they were thirty- four, and then again from fifty-one until seventy-five. It was an enduring love.

Did Virginia Woolf notice? How could she not? More to the point, what did Nellie and Lottie make of their employer who was not even ten years older then them? Virginia Woolf was a study in chronic discontent, in parsimony, in eating disorders... And then there was her sexless marriage with Leonard--something that would have been difficult to hide from the servants. And friendships? Virginia took malicious delight in writing scathing inventories of her closest women friends in her diaries, and she often peopled her novels with hateful caricatures of them. In the end, she took her own life.

In spite of their oppression, it was  Nellie and Lottie who managed to find a room of their own and to fill it with loyalty and loving companionship. Too bad Virginia never took a page from their book.

Yesterday I listened to an interview on NPR, celebrating the twentieth-year anniversary of the iconic film Thelma and Louise. Why was it iconic?  Because they killed a man. Yep. They killed a man… a rapist actually.  You know, an “enemy.” Oh, wait… am I allowed to say that? They rob a convenience store and blow up a truck, but it’s killing a man that really does it.

Anyway, Terry Gross was interviewing Callie Khouri, who had written the screenplay. And, of course, they were talking about the ending of the film. The killing of the man was iconic, but it was the ending that enabled the iconicity.  Rather than be arrested, the two women drive off the edge of the Grand Canyon together. Callie, in the NPR interview, gives her take on this ending: “They got away.” Perhaps, the more accurate  response is the statement she made when picking up her Oscar in 1992: “For everyone who wanted to see a happy ending for Thelma and Louise, for me this is it.” Yep. And there's a connection. If they hadn't driven off the Grand Canyon, Khouri would never had gotten the Oscar. In fact, the film would never have gotten made.

I have written about Thelma and Louise before. It’s in a paper titled “Ugly Ducklings:  How I Came To Write a Play Where the Lesbian Doesn't Kill Herself.”

"Consider the 1990 film Thelma and Louise.  They are survivors of male violence. They are outlaws.  They have killed a would-be rapist.   They are on the run.  And finally, they indulge in a passionate, lip-locked, lesbianic kiss. [which is filmed so poorly this was the best screenshot I could get...] Now, in the lesbian paradigm, that would be the turning point… the beginning of their journey out of the nightmare:  They kiss, they look at each other, they yell “yee-haw”—and then they get down to the business of survival:  They ditch the car.  Duh.  They dye their hair.  Duh.  They go underground on any one of the dozens of women's lands all over the US.  They're in Arizona, right?  They could go to A***.  Or A***** J*****, which is an entire village of lesbians.  They get healthy.  They heal.  They make love. They change their diets.  They do yoga.  They dance under the full moon.  They build a hay bale house.  They go to the women's festivals. They make their own clothes or just don't wear any.  They get wilder and more politically clear-eyed every minute.  They dedicate themselves to women, to the environment.  They have a zillion delicious options.   But, in the movie, they go off a cliff.  In the patriarchal paradigm that is all they can do after that kiss.  Lesbianism is the fate worse than death.  The movie may be dated, but it is still one of the very few that dares to depict girl buddies who retaliate against perpetrators.  The ending is not accidental, nor is the timing of the kiss—coming after the decision to commit double suicide."

I would not have had such a strong objection to the ending, if it had been depicted with the same attention to detail as, say, the blowing up of the truck. You know… the car making impact, rolling and bouncing down the canyon, the screaming terror on the faces… and finally the still shot of the carnage. But that’s not in Callie’s screenplay. What happens? The screen goes blank.  You know… death, transcendence. That romantic high-school fantasy that promotes so much youth suicide.

No, show the reality, or don’t go there. How many girls and women have taken their lives because of the romance of the white screen, the belief that this would be their triumphant escape… or how, as Callie Khouri might put it, they could get away?

Okay, Thelma and Louise is nearly a quarter-century old. Did it spawn two generations of girl-buddy, road pictures where the women unapologetically kill their enemies and go on to live happy, predator-free lives the way male protagonists do? No, not really. There are women who kill a-plenty in films these days, but they don’t kiss each other. They dress for the male gaze. Their idea of liberation is seducing the men who can’t keep up with them.

Yesterday, Beyoncé “dropped” her newest video: “Girls Who Run the World.” Iconically speaking, she’s got some interesting visuals… an army of men coming after a renegade band of women in what appears to have been a global gender massacre. The men have the usual arsenal of firearms, but of course, the women have that secret weapon that brings them all to their knees... oh, wait, our knees... what?  Anyway, the women have that pornographic fantasy thing…  the clothing, the moves. Beyoncé’s response to armed aggression is to “drop it like it’s hot” and crawl across the floor twitching her pelvis. In a lyric that says it all, she whispers, “Hope you still like me…”

I know, I know. This is mainstream media. Why am I wasting my time even writing about it? Well… I will tell you. Because I just want to point out the hijacking, the disconnect. It’s one thing to present women as brainless fembots whose only ambition in life is to fulfill male fantasies. It’s another to begin with an acknowledgement that women are targets and prey and that we don’t like it, and then to attempt to glorify capitulation as empowering resistance. I’m talking about that damned white screen and the nincompoopery of crawling around on the floor.

Because women are, unfortunately, watching. And girls are watching, too. Teaching is going on. Callie Khouri is interpreting for us--at the Oscars, on NPR. “This is what escape looks like.” “This is what winning looks like.” But here’s the thing. You have to be alive to escape. Yeah. I know… radical.  And you have to defeat your opponent/enemy in order to win. Unclear about what that means? Try “beat, conquer, rout, trounce, crush, thrash, whip, wipe the floor with, make mincemeat of, clobber, slaughter, demolish.”

Callie made a film the same way Beyoncé made her video: hoping that the men who control the industry, and the women who are subject to them, will still like her. And they did and they do and I don’t. If you want to know what real resistance looks like, read my plays.

This interview is part of the “We’Moon Anthology Blog Tour.” What’s that? Well, We’Moon has just published a 30-year anniversary anthology titled In the Spirit of We’Moon ~ Celebrating 30 Years: An Anthology of We’Moon Art and Writing. This anthology includes the work of many of the authors who have contributed to their internationally acclaimed We'Moon Daybooks for the last three decades. They have invited some of us contributorss who have our own blogs to interview each other and then post these interviews on the blogs, which will be linked to their website.  An “anthology blog tour,” right?

 It was my great good fortune to be invited to interview We’Moon contributor Marna… so here goes:

Carolyn: What has been your connection with We’Moon?

Marna: I lived at We’Moon [We’Moon Land in Estacada, Oregon] from ‘92-’93, and helped produce the ‘92 and ‘93 calendars. My work has probably appeared in over a dozen We’Moons [daybooks] since, including this year for which I was honored to be invited to write the holy day writings. We’Moon [daybook] has been a great inspiration for my creative work, knowing that it was going out directly to other womyn and weaving into their lives.

Carolyn: What was it like living on the We’Moon Land?

Marna: I learned about solar and lunar rhythms… due to a donated library of astrology materials from Marcia Patrick from when she lived there. (She was one of the 13 womyn who cursed Wall Street back in the Second Wave.) … So many seeds of my current work and scholarship and spiritual practice are sourced in my We’Moon experience! I learned so much from living in intentional community with other woms, and had creative space to garden collaboratively, learn herbal medicine and gardening, cultivate relationships with the living ecologies and life of the land, a real opening experience! The womyn’s land movement and womyn’s earth-based spiritually have pivotally informed my work and life, inspiring us here in Portland [Oregon] to create for thirteen years a Womyn’s Temple and now inspiring me to heed the call to cultivate a land-based campus with sacred herb gardens, a Hygeian dream healing center, and designing certificate and eventually graduate programs weaving together earth-inspired (ecological) creativity, healing, and hands-on skills in service of earth regeneration.

Carolyn: Wow… Is there information about your work online?

Marna: Probably the more relevant website related to We’Moon is the work I am doing with  Moonifest, a micro-grant nonprofit for women, the arts, and Earth regeneration. Also the graduate institute at the intersection of ecology, creativity, and wisdom traditions I am designing as my doctoral project in Sustainability Education .

Carolyn: That’s a fascinating idea… offering grants of $130, and asking applicants how many of them they need. As a playwright who has often needed to produce my own work, I can confirm how much mileage a motivated artist can gain with just a little financial support. Sometimes, for me, the isolation was as large an impediment as the lack of funds. Getting a grant was kind of like being alone on a life raft and being signaled to by a passing ship. It was a comfort to know that I had been seen, that someone out there was aware of my coordinates. It helped me to know that someone would be coming eventually.  So, what about your second website?

Marna: It has two related informational websites, one related to Gaian Methodologies for research inspired by the living presence of the planet, and one I just developed last winter on Earth Empathy, which offers experiential learning adventures in cultivating planetary compassion (with riffs on spirit of place, body/planet, despair and justice work, and deep time). I am in the midst of developing a resource web page on feminist pedagogy and women's collaborations (Gynagogy), which will be released later in this summer.

Carolyn: I see your “Earth Empathy” site has a page titled “Hope,” where you link to a video of Joanna Macy, where she says, “… recognize that the anguish, the horror even, that we can feel over the devastation that we read about or see or experience—that it’s okay to feel that. We're tough. Because if we are afraid to feel that, we won't feel where it comes from, and where it comes from is love—our love for this world.” This is an issue I’m struggling with right now… the sense of becoming overwhelmed, especially with the situation of Fukushima… There is such a temptation to resort to denial or diversion. Your hope and your activism give me hope. Is there anything else you would like to add?

Marna: What I can offer about my experience both with We'Moon, the land and the Almanac, as well as my experience with the extended womyn's land communities, is to praise the deep fount of strength and nurture they have provided for my spiritual-ecological wholeness and deepening. The newly published We'Moon Anthology is a portal to the song streams of so many womyn artists and writers, sustaining us in hope and justice, what Joanna Macy refers to as the work of the hands, head and heart of the Great Turning. May we each receive this nurture and continue to weave these cultures of regeneration and inspiration and be woven by the spiral thriving of planetary Gaia herself. I look forward to celebrating the sixtieth anthology in another thirty years, 390 lunar cycles from now!