{"id":409,"date":"2010-05-07T13:38:36","date_gmt":"2010-05-07T20:38:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/julijasukys.com\/?p=409"},"modified":"2010-05-07T13:47:34","modified_gmt":"2010-05-07T20:47:34","slug":"life-blood-louise-de-salvo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/julijasukys.com\/?p=409","title":{"rendered":"Life-blood: Louise DeSalvo"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Louise DeSalvo, “A Portrait of the Puttana<\/em> as a Middle-Aged Woolf Scholar.” Between Women: Biographers, Novelists, Critics, Teachers and Artists Write About Their Work on Women<\/em> (Routledge, 1993), 35-53.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I love this essay for many reasons. <\/strong><\/p>\n

1) It’s a seriously learned text written in a light and readable first-person voice.<\/p>\n

2) It tells a story about being a woman that doesn’t reduce our existence to beauty (or lack thereof), procreation (or lack thereof), or our relationships (or lack thereof) to men.<\/p>\n

3) It’s about the pleasure of archival work and falling in love with a woman writer who lived long ago.<\/p>\n

4) It’s about growing up in an immigrant family and making your way intellectually in the language (and culture) of the new land in a new way.<\/p>\n

5) It’s about how Virginia Woolf can save your life. Still now, in 2010.<\/p>\n

I came to Virginia Woolf embarrassingly late in my life. By the time I discovered her, or rather by the time I re-read her in a frame of mind that allowed me to be deeply moved, I was in my thirties and had a small child.<\/p>\n

Louise DeSalvo describes a similar experience. Her essay starts: “I am thirty-two years old, married, the mother of two small children [. . .].”\u00a0 Travelling to England on research with a friend, and without her family, she and her companion represent “[t]he next generation of Woolf scholars, in incubation. We are formidable” (35).<\/p>\n

The essay explores the role of women among DeSalvo’s Italian parents and their peers, and their relationship to food and men. Both, she warns, tell you a lot about what was expected of her and the many ways in which she was a disappointment.<\/p>\n

First: women who care about their families, she says, make fresh pasta every day — a process that takes hours, and ends up enslaving the person saddled with the task.<\/p>\n

Second: women who do anything without their husbands are puttana<\/em> — hence the essay’s title, and the opening scene on the plane.<\/p>\n

Instead of a dutiful, stable, ever-cooking mother, DeSalsvo becomes a “whore,” a woman who lives her own life alongside her husband and children. A woman who does things without her man.<\/p>\n

She narrates her own experience of the dichotomy of woman-writer (or woman-creator) that Woolf wrote about in her essay A Room of One’s Own<\/em>, and the hope this text continues to offer to the despairing and frustrated among us.<\/p>\n

She tells about loving a child and a husband, and at the same, loving reading, writing and writers.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, this is an essay about how literature can change us in fundamental ways. For many of us, writing is no hobby or even profession. It is our vocation, our life-blood, the very thing that keeps us alive.<\/p>\n

“Woolf taught us that writers are human beings, that writing is a human act, that the act of writing is filled with human consequences for a society and for its readers. No ‘art for art’s sake.’ Instead, ‘art for the sake of life'” (52).<\/p>\n

[Photo: jspad]<\/p>\n

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