24
PARTISAN REVIEW
daughters by continuing the sorry work into another generation?
Nor is it their female strength which the wives are proclaiming by
their large act of submission, but some sense of their own lack of
femininity-and what makes them confuse femininity with inviola–
bility? What would seem to have been outraged in these women,
whatever their marital experience, is some instinct of sexual self–
protection....
October 26
It would be interesting to chart the relationship between the
health of American middle-class women and the availability of serv–
ants. We are constantly being told that our class is doomed by its
inability to hire domestic help, that the servant shortage spells the
end of feminism. But are we not the healthier for being without serv–
ants to lean on? This morning, for instance, I awoke with a miserable
throat and pains in my muscles. All I wanted in the world was to
stay in bed and be taken care of. But then who would take care of
J.? So I pulled myself up and about my domestic business, and by
noon I was completely recovered! Is this what my father meant
when he used to talk about the poor being better off than the rich
because they couldn't afford ill-health? I always thought he meant
that the poor were of a coarser fiber than the rich and therefore less
subject to their ills....
Whenever I consider the domestic problem I think of Jane
Carlyle's witty but painful chronicle of household woes. For a long
time I took her complaints at the full value the Carlyles themselves
gave them: how awful for such sensitive spirits to have to endure
housepainters, movings, chickens in the next yard, incompetent serv–
ants. But although the further I myself go in domesticity the more
harassing I find the ordinary business of living, I am no longer
willing to indulge the Carlyles in their excessive sensibility. A deli–
cate spirit may be the price one pays for a superior poetic power
but it must not be looked upon as a validation of one's gifts, but
only as a nuisance.
Not that I go out of my way to wash dishes or translate the
vexations of civilization into spiritual benefits. But I refuse to feel
that I am less a person because I am so much "used up"-if the
