Widows as an anomaly — treated like the disabled

The only two stills of Katy Murphy as Jenny Wren on-line that I could find (Sandy Welch’s BBC Our Mutual Friend out of Dickens)

The Bustle in a House
The Morning after Death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted upon Earth –

The Sweeping up the Heart
And putting Love away
We shall not want to use again
Until Eternity – Emily Dickinson

Dear friends and readers,

As I read Scarlett Beauvalet-Boutouyrie’s Être Veuve sous l’Ancien Régime together with another book I’ve just started, Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, I’m struck by how widows and the disabled are treated by society at large similarly. A version of “normalcy” which is not true is enforced on both groups.

What is striking is this “normalcy” is false: the normalcy depends on believing most people conform to a stereotype of normalcy that is male, cheerful, fully-employed (with good pay) and living in a pair (with children). The recent move of GBLT people to marry is a move to “normalize” themselves into this stereotype, and the permission given them is due to their presenting it as part of “regular” people’s norm. The normalcy depends on believing that women (or men) alone is an anomaly when they were very common across the centuries most unions broke up quickly as early death was common and nowadays with everyone living a much longer life again, widows are again common — added to now with the ability of many women never to marry and yet be self-supporting, separated and divorced women. BB shows how widows have been erased and falsely represented to make them appear like the stereotype, or (as with disabled people) given traits many people don’t like or fear (domination, resentment, needling, overt depression) or are outlawed (for women overt sexual aggression).

The disability itself presented in an exaggerated light. I watched Temple Grandin, the movie, last week, and while the performance of Clare Danes, the central actress was stunningly persuasive — especially as someone she the real person could not possibly be, part of this came from the continual exaggeration.

Clare Danes as Grandin in the movie

It was asserted Temple’s other traits were as important as her disability, but that’s not what the movie did: it made the disability traits huge and thus “othered” the central figure. So in Dickens who has disabled characters, they are presented as grotesques. Not the movie was not well-meaning and with much to recommend it: among other things, it showed how Grandin’s mother was blamed and then pressured into putting Grandin into an insitution. Today mothers are blamed as much as ever and pressured to mainstream or marginalize their child. In fact as Lennard J. Davis (Enforcing Normalcy) shows, disabilities of all sorts are spread throughout the US population and by middle to older age we all have some form of disability. Mental disabilities are the misrepresented, and least understood — because most common most feared, and stigmatized.

Jenny Wren by Marcus Stone (one of the original illustrations to Our Mutual Friend)

Well, I’ve decided partly I don’t want to pretend all is fine and well and I am semi-happy or cheerful – that’s what widows do or they fall silent – this erases the group, “normalizes” them — like revamping a disability. And that a number of destructive stereotypes about older women are not at play here — some of them not admitted to, like sexual demands or shunning. There is a real parallel between the way widows are still represented and disabled people stigmatizing or erasing: an important argument in Etre Veuve is B-B’s demonstration that today in France widows are more erased than ever before because of new sexual stereotyping — and wife abuse is rampant there too, as Mary Trouille wanted to show (but was not permitted by the publisher). As I refused to lie about the cancer misery so I’m telling it like it is — what life is like for the widow and as far as I dare how others treat here — now wanting to expose the capriciousness and cruelty of the DMV towards vulnerable populations.

How strong social taboos are. On Wompo for a short while a woman poet whose husband had died of cancer was aggressively advertising her blog as about real grief, the real experience of cancer and now widowhood, as “not staged” and arguing on her right to do this, on how sincere she is, but she has ceased for a time: one problem was that she was asking for money (to build an organization she said) and when she did not get this kind of overt validation, seems to have stopped.

It’s very pretty here and now getting hot. Yesterday it reached 80. It takes little time. Cherry blossom and flowering trees are everywhere. To me it brings home how Jim is not here now that everything is renewing and how the daily life of the earth is beautiful which I never much particularly thought about as such before and do now because he’s missing it.

Sylvia