I Am Subject: Sharing Our Truths to Reclaim Our Selves

By Diane DeBella

As a teacher of writing and Women’s Studies, I have spent many years studying the lives and works of women writers. I Am Subject: Sharing our Truths to Reclaim Our Selves is a memoir that combines my own history with the words and experiences of other writers to examine the issues that perplex contemporary women. This work conveys women’s experiences by weaving together memoir, literary texts and criticism, and student reflection. Simply knowing that others have struggled can bring women out of isolated suffering to a deeper sense of awareness and understanding. Our early interpersonal relationships, combined with the societal and cultural messages we receive, influence all of our subsequent actions, including our sexual experiences, our intimate relationships, our decision to have children or not have children, our career choices, and our tendency to deal with life’s challenges either constructively or destructively. I Am Subject provides a safe space for women to increase their awareness regarding where they have come from and where they are going as they move forward into the next stages of their lives. It is my hope that those who read these words will sit with them, give thought to how they might apply to their own lives and the lives of women they know, and begin their own conversations regarding how to best turn increased awareness into action.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9780988770379

Book preview

www.iamsubject.com

Acknowledgments

I am extremely grateful for the help and encouragement provided by my present-day muses: Amber, Erika, and Sarah. I couldn’t have completed this project without you.

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

My Muses

CHAPTER 1: Casting Stones

CHAPTER 2: Other Fathers, Common Trends

CHAPTER 3: Today’s Fathers: How Far Have They Come?

CHAPTER 4: The Mother’s Role

CHAPTER 5: Mothers Today

CHAPTER 6: The Impact of Dysfunction: Using Sex to Fill the Void

CHAPTER 7: Women and Sex Today

CHAPTER 8: Cowboys and Other Weaknesses: Searching for Father Love

CHAPTER 9: This is What Women Have Always Done

CHAPTER 10: Sugar-Coated Motherhood

CHAPTER 11: Imposter Syndrome

CHAPTER 12: Having it All or Losing Everything?

CHAPTER 13: Motherhood Today: Proceed With Your Eyes Wide Open

CHAPTER 14: The Role of Depression in the Lives of Women

CHAPTER 15: Turning to Addiction

CHAPTER 16: The Pain of Self-Doubt

CHAPTER 17: Internalizing the Lessons

CHAPTER 18: My Own Lessons Learned

CHAPTER 19: Letting Go and Breaking the Cycle

CHAPTER 20: Coming Full Circle

Postscript

Notes

Additional Sources

Selected Works

Discussion Questions

About The Author

Preface

We need to share our truths. In this work, I’m not attempting to address every woman, and the issues I discuss are not problems that can be applied to all women’s lives across the globe. However, because I have been able to find common ground with women of different races, socio-economic backgrounds, and nationalities who lived centuries before me, I do believe that there are many women who will identify with some of the issues raised.

This work is intended to provide a safe space for women to increase their awareness regarding where they have come from and where they are going as they move forward into the next stages of their lives. And while it begins to propose some possible action steps, it is not my intention to provide comprehensive solutions within these pages. It is my hope that those who read these words will sit with them, give thought to how they might apply to their own lives and the lives of women they know, and begin their own conversations regarding how to best turn increased awareness into action.

I also acknowledge the generation gap. I know that younger women who are writing about gender issues today often think that women who came before them are out of touch. This makes perfect sense; I couldn’t always understand what motivated the women of my mother’s generation. But when I studied those women, I was able to identify common threads in the tapestry of their lives that weaved through my own. Of course younger women have a different perspective given their unique time and space in history; there can be tremendous changes in the lives of women from one generation to the next, and that is a good thing. Yet I would argue that we have more in common than we realize. That, after all, is the point. If we believe that our own generation is misunderstood by those who came before us, we can often miss vital life lessons that are there for the taking—lessons that could prevent some of the pain we experience as we struggle to define our own paths.

I have studied these lessons, and what I have found is this: there are risk factors that seem to transcend different time periods, social classes, races, and ethnicities. Many of these factors come into play as a result of family dynamics very early in our lives when we have little or no control over them, yet they can significantly influence whether or not we are ever truly comfortable in our own skin. For example, the relationship with our fathers is a key factor, in addition to having strong female role models, particularly when our father is absent, abusive, or just not supportive. Early interpersonal relationships, combined with the societal and cultural messages we receive, influence all of our subsequent actions, including our sexual experiences, our intimate relationships, our decision to have children or not have children, our career choices, and our tendency to deal with life’s challenges either constructively or destructively. So while each woman’s experience is ultimately her own, and I understand that there is always a danger in overgeneralizing, I will take that risk in this work. I will share my life lessons and the lessons I’ve learned from the women who came before me, in order to help others form a better understanding of where they have come from, and how that increased awareness can provide a solid foundation from which they can face the future confidently with their eyes wide open.

The conclusions I've reached, regarding the lives of women writers, are based upon thorough research and analysis of the texts that they have written about themselves. Ultimately, these are my own interpretations. I hope that readers will further explore the writings of these women in order to formulate their own unique life lessons related to these women’s lives and works.

Introduction

I teach at a local university, and one of the subjects I teach is writing. Knowing how to write—how to communicate effectively through language—is extremely important. Yet if I’m honest with myself, what I have a passion for teaching is not writing. It is life lessons—hard, painful, gut wrenching life lessons—that have taken me well over forty years to learn. When I think about the fact that I have spent so much of my time on this planet trying to get my head on straight, I get angry. Then when I realize that for centuries women have faced similar obstacles, yet each generation faces these same crises as if they are the first to do so, I want to scream in frustration. Every day on campus I see young women who are experiencing the same doubt, fear and pain I suffered twenty-five years ago as a young undergraduate. Often I wish I could just download my own lessons learned straight into their brains—perhaps they could then avoid some of the pain. Instead, I do the next best thing. I teach these lessons to them.

When I was an undergraduate, Women’s Studies was not offered as an academic discipline at my college of choice, James Madison University in Virginia; even if it had been, I was not aware—or awake—enough at the time to consider it. In fact, I discovered women’s literature on my own, after I graduated. I started out as a sociology major before switching to English. I changed majors after the comments made by one of my professors determined the path my career would take. Because this woman was such a positive influence in my life at a time when I had very few strong female role models, I know it’s important to tell the story of that moment.

In the spring of my freshman year, I entered Helen Poindexter’s classroom for the first time. I was taking her Survey of Prose Fiction class as an elective. Her boots were the first thing a new student noticed. They were rubber rain boots that reached almost to her knees—an accessory that most students would immediately poke fun at. Yet there was something about the way this professor carried herself that made one hesitate to snicker, even after discovering that her name was Professor Poindexter. Her flame red hair was always pulled back in a loose bun at the nape of her neck, and she spoke in a slow, deliberate manner with just a trace of a southern drawl. She learned the name of every student in her class, but unlike any professor I have ever known, she called her students by their last names only. I was Zazzali. Not Miss Zazzali, or even Ms. Zazzali. Just Zazzali. Although I had always loved to read, I hadn’t considered English as a major course of study. After all, I had no interest in teaching, and what else could I do with a major in English?

Professor Poindexter never explicitly interpreted literature for her students, or even suggested that there was only one way to interpret a novel or story. Instead, she asked probing, open-ended questions that allowed her students to truly examine their own ideas—ideas that she considered as valid as her own. It was this approach that led to many in-depth class discussions and a process of active learning that I had never before experienced in the classroom. There was true give and take between students and teacher, a refreshing change from being spoon-fed information that I was then expected to regurgitate back on exams.

Knowing that I was expected to share my own interpretations, I didn’t panic when it came time to take the first in-class essay exam. However, when she returned my work, self-doubt overwhelmed me. At the top of my essay, she had written, Please See Me in bold red ink. I hesitantly approached her after class, and my stomach flip-flopped as she began, Now Zazzali…why aren’t you an English major?

It was that question that changed the course of my four years at JMU, led me to graduate school, and eventually provided my exposure to some of the incredibly wise women writers who would shape my life’s work. Now, all these years later, whenever I enter the classroom to begin another semester, I give a silent nod of appreciation to Helen Poindexter. I can only hope that the passion I have for literature, for language, for women’s writing and expression, comes close to hers, and that I might be able to spark that same passion in the students who enter my classroom.

While I am certainly grateful to Helen Poindexter, I am not quite as grateful to the field of English. As an English major, I almost exclusively studied dead white men: William Shakespeare, Henry James, James Joyce, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allen Poe, Ernest Hemingway. I even took an entire course dedicated to Mark Twain. Women were conspicuously absent from the canon, which I thought meant that they weren’t writing, weren’t published, or simply didn’t matter. As a graduate student, having had my fill of dead white men, I ventured away from literature into the relatively new, hip, and at the time often maligned field of Rhetoric and Composition. Much to my dismay, I was immediately immersed in the study of yet more dead white men. However, when I was permitted those few credits of electives, I chose to study women—even though the few that were offered were dead white women, including the likes of Virginia Woolf. But it wasn’t until years later, after I had somehow survived countless personal mistakes during what I now refer to as my traumatic teens and twenties, and found myself an isolated, depressed, overworked thirty-something wife and mother, that I began delving into the lives and writings of generations of women I had never been exposed to in all my years of study.

One semester I was asked to teach a British literature course, and after reviewing the text, which consisted of still more dead white men, I decided to add Mary Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth Barrett Browning to the syllabus, two women who happened to appear in the same anthology. It was then that my anger became palpable. How could I have obtained a graduate degree without being exposed to these women? Why didn’t their voices matter? As I began doing more research, which led to more reading, I found countless women with very similar life stories. In book after book, century after century, I discovered that women have been fighting similar personal battles over and over again. And all I kept asking myself, story after story, was why? Why weren’t their voices heard and shared within and across generations? Why hasn’t each generation of women truly learned the important life lessons put in writing by those who came before us? Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Adrienne Rich, Maya Angelou, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, bell hooks—each woman I studied led me to dozens more. These are the writers I wished I had studied in school. These women and their stories deeply resonated with me. At this point my studies and musings took on a life of their own, as I began to examine my own life as well as the lives and writings of creative women who have addressed themselves as subject throughout history.

As I read each woman’s works and studied each woman’s life, my own life changed. I developed a greater understanding of who I am, and what has made me this way. I realized I am not the first or only woman to live through the painful life experiences I have had, and that knowledge opened a new path for me. Today when I explore some of those same women’s works with students in an upper division writing course I designed titled Women Writers, I rejoice in the expansion of the literary canon. Students now have easier access to material written by women. What was for me a solitary journey is for them a group endeavor. The power of women’s stories, however, still resonates on an individual level, intensely connected to personal experience. One of my students eloquently expresses the importance of this collective journey:

Women’s stories can change the world. Though no two people’s experience of womanhood is the same, being a woman poses many of the same obstacles among women. To share your story means that you give other women foreknowledge of the dangers that undermined your path as a woman. As Adrienne Rich so beautifully stated, Until a strong line of love, confirmation, and example stretches from mother to daughter, from woman to woman across the generations, women will still be wandering in the wilderness (Of Woman Born 246). Women have a duty to one another to share their stories, no matter how painful or embarrassing, not only because of what we can offer, but because of what other women have offered us, often at the expense of their livelihood. We too often forget that there was once a time in which women could not share their experiences. Women have been sacrificing themselves to tell their stories so that we can be where we are now. To stop now would belittle the selfless deeds of these women. (Christina)¹

Christina’s words encourage me to openly declare that my story matters, too. What you are about to read is the result of fifteen years of research, over forty years of life experience, and my own lessons learned in the classroom. This work is my passion, and in these pages I can only try to do justice to the life lessons of the women who came before me, so that together we might positively influence those who follow us. My hope is that this work will provide insight into the complicated choices women make, and will offer a fresh perspective and positive alternatives for women to embrace in order to truly discover and pursue their genuine life paths. It is my dream that perhaps, through my insights and difficult lessons learned, and through sharing the life lessons of others, readers—including my own daughter—might never have to visit that dark place of self-doubt and loathing, and instead can make their way in this world knowing that their stories matter.

My Muses

They haunt me, which I guess is a good thing. If they didn’t, I would have given this up a long time ago. But they won’t let me. Sometimes just one of them comes, and whispers in my ear, Get to it. Stop putting it off. At other times there is a crowd, and they bicker with each other about me, as if I’m not even here. I hate it when they do that.

Virginia takes a quick, nervous drag from a cigarette, and begins shaking her head back and forth. No, she isn’t going to get it done. She isn’t.

Anne responds after downing half a martini, She needs to loosen up.

Charlotte thinks it may be the children who are distracting me, but Elizabeth pipes up, Hey, I had seven and I still got it done. No, she needs her husband’s support.

She needs more physical stamina to do it, suggests Mary.

What she needs is more independence, counters Kate.

Maybe I need you all to shut up! I shout, and with that, they grudgingly retreat back into the shadows of my mind.

One

Casting Stones

I love man as my fellow; but his scepter, real, or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even then the submission is to reason, and not to man.

~Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

I can see Mary, her head bent down against the pelting rain, as she paces back and forth across the bridge. With each step, her clothes become more and more drenched, and as they do, her steps grow slower. Her frenzied pace becomes a brisk walk, and then a slow, deliberate trudge, as her clothes, and her sorrow, weigh her down. Finally, she approaches the edge of Putney Bridge, and positions herself—unsteadily at first—atop the parapet. She raises her head. Her light brown hair is soaked black and hangs in strips across her eyes. She shivers from the cold, from fear, from dread. She takes a long, slow breath; her lips form a trembling Oh as she slowly and deliberately exhales, and jumps.

As a teacher of literature, I was always hesitant to present the life and works of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797). She was considered by many to be the founder of the women’s movement, and I certainly respected the courage it must have taken to speak out on behalf of the rights of women in eighteenth century British society. Yet I remained uncomfortable with the seeming hypocrisy that existed between her writings and the way in which she lived her life. Although Wollstonecraft longed for women to be taken seriously and to be treated with respect, she struggled in her personal life. She placed unrealistic demands on her female confidants, then pursued a married man, and at one point jumped off a bridge into the Thames because of another man’s infidelity. She married only after she became pregnant with fellow writer William Godwin’s child. Wollstonecraft viewed the institution of marriage as legalized prostitution, yet clearly she was not completely comfortable trying to live outside the boundaries of societal norms. As Mary