The Downfall of the Everything Woman
One of my good friend’s mom’s, who became perhaps my friend as well, when I was younger was an anthropology professor who spoke four languages (including Korean, and once she called one of my dad’s students over the phone and when he met her he couldn’t believe that she wasn’t a Korean herself). She traveled everywhere all the time for conferences and was dedicated to all of her students and was really just this sort of beaming light of awesomeness. As a twelve year old, I remember seeing her as my role model - I was gonna be just like her. Not an anthropologist, but I assumed at that point an astrophysicist or mechanical engineer or something, but I would also spend my days working and working, but also having a family and having cool hobbies and having an quirky minimalist style (walls white, furniture bright!) and maybe an artist on the side, doing everything possible. I saw her as an Everything Woman, and I wanted to be that too. Not just a renaissance man, but really an Everything Woman.
I was the overachiever kid. I still am, although being surrounded by Uni kids can make you forget how insanely overachieving we all are really. Esther is going through life and everything has been good, and still is good. On the outside, she’s still perfect-A, poetry, academic girl. On pg. 83, she describes how she doesn’t want to get married because she needs a constant excitement and change in her life. She can’t be content sitting still and always needs to be doing something, an obsession that will perhaps be both of our downfalls. Everything is good but only because we’re always running to keep up with ourselves.
We see how Esther is breaking down though, realizing that she doesn’t know what she wants and that she’s perhaps just been on a hamster wheel her whole life. Like Esther, I’ve never really failed yet. We talk about the importance of failure a lot, and I’ve had my fair share of smaller losses and whatnot, but nothing big. But the perfection becomes terrifying because eventual failure seems inevitable, you just don’t know when it will be. It’s as if you were in a pool, treading water and you were being watched. And you kept going, past ten minutes, past twenty, to the point that people were really amazed at how good you were at treading water. But if you’ve ever tired to do that you know there’s nothing quite as dull and monotonous and painful as treading water (maybe except swimming itself), and you know you can’t go forever and you’re just waiting for the moment that your legs give out and you drown.
The other part of the crippling nature of perfectionism is being female. What Plath portrays so well is the pressures associated with it. It was one thing to be the renaissance man and another to be an Everything Woman, as she always had to live in opposition to what was normal. Even perhaps when she wanted calm, that would never exist. To be the professor meant to give up something else, like family or fun. Or vice versa, to settle for a husband and kids meant to lose a job. Even though this novel was written in the 1950s, I think that the notion that somehow managing both a family and the kind of career I would like are simply not compatible is still around. This is why Esther doesn’t want to settle for a husband and kids, and this is honestly probably why I also hate hearing babies cry. Maybe this is why the thought “I’m not like other girls” is one that girls have. Because being a girl really freaking sucks when you start thinking enough about it, or at least cynically.
I had a moment over winter break when I started thinking about being female and as much as I’ve consciously known by gender, its true meaning never fully hit me. The scene of the baby being born perfectly captures this feeling; Esther walks around a male-dominated world all the time, but it’s not until this moment in the hospital that she sees how fully masculinity dominates society. And however equally you think you get treated, the world is never what it seems and you’ve just been playing a game. And that realization is as grotesque and dehumanizing as the language she uses. At least this realization was for me. It really does kind of feel paralyzing, almost like drowning to have these realizations. Being, or trying to be, the Everything Woman comes with its downfall, its inevitable sense of falling, drowning, being stuck in a tornado, however it can be put.
I was the overachiever kid. I still am, although being surrounded by Uni kids can make you forget how insanely overachieving we all are really. Esther is going through life and everything has been good, and still is good. On the outside, she’s still perfect-A, poetry, academic girl. On pg. 83, she describes how she doesn’t want to get married because she needs a constant excitement and change in her life. She can’t be content sitting still and always needs to be doing something, an obsession that will perhaps be both of our downfalls. Everything is good but only because we’re always running to keep up with ourselves.
We see how Esther is breaking down though, realizing that she doesn’t know what she wants and that she’s perhaps just been on a hamster wheel her whole life. Like Esther, I’ve never really failed yet. We talk about the importance of failure a lot, and I’ve had my fair share of smaller losses and whatnot, but nothing big. But the perfection becomes terrifying because eventual failure seems inevitable, you just don’t know when it will be. It’s as if you were in a pool, treading water and you were being watched. And you kept going, past ten minutes, past twenty, to the point that people were really amazed at how good you were at treading water. But if you’ve ever tired to do that you know there’s nothing quite as dull and monotonous and painful as treading water (maybe except swimming itself), and you know you can’t go forever and you’re just waiting for the moment that your legs give out and you drown.
The other part of the crippling nature of perfectionism is being female. What Plath portrays so well is the pressures associated with it. It was one thing to be the renaissance man and another to be an Everything Woman, as she always had to live in opposition to what was normal. Even perhaps when she wanted calm, that would never exist. To be the professor meant to give up something else, like family or fun. Or vice versa, to settle for a husband and kids meant to lose a job. Even though this novel was written in the 1950s, I think that the notion that somehow managing both a family and the kind of career I would like are simply not compatible is still around. This is why Esther doesn’t want to settle for a husband and kids, and this is honestly probably why I also hate hearing babies cry. Maybe this is why the thought “I’m not like other girls” is one that girls have. Because being a girl really freaking sucks when you start thinking enough about it, or at least cynically.
I had a moment over winter break when I started thinking about being female and as much as I’ve consciously known by gender, its true meaning never fully hit me. The scene of the baby being born perfectly captures this feeling; Esther walks around a male-dominated world all the time, but it’s not until this moment in the hospital that she sees how fully masculinity dominates society. And however equally you think you get treated, the world is never what it seems and you’ve just been playing a game. And that realization is as grotesque and dehumanizing as the language she uses. At least this realization was for me. It really does kind of feel paralyzing, almost like drowning to have these realizations. Being, or trying to be, the Everything Woman comes with its downfall, its inevitable sense of falling, drowning, being stuck in a tornado, however it can be put.
I really feel this. I feel like a lot of people at Uni can also relate because we've been told all our lives how good we are and how getting good grades and getting awards is what makes us good and then that becomes absolutely exhausting and sometimes really ingenuine. It becomes so so hard to differentiate your accomplishments from your identity, which is what I think Esther is going through and a lot of people, especially women, relate to. As a woman in the 21st century to me it kind of feels like I have to do everything perfectly to help represent women well and be like "see? look how great and awesome and badass women are" but that makes it hard to accept not being able to do everything and showing weakness and just overall not great things. It's a complicated thing to grapple with.
ReplyDeleteThis is so true! Like there are so many things that interest me, but it feels like you have to pick just one and run with it forever. It's like your life is just your career, and you only get one career and you have to be the best in that one narrow field. But maybe you can be like a fig tree instead, where you're grounded by your sense of self (roots) and you support yourself through one career (trunk) but then you can zoom out in other directions to follow other passions (branches).
ReplyDeleteBeing female further complicates this picture, especially for Esther but also for us, to some degree. For women, having kids/marrying someone/starting a family is like a whole other fig tree of responsibility that we have to grapple with. It's wild to think about.
I think you point out a brilliant double-standard at play here. When a man fails, it's because of the circumstances, the situation, something that was out of his control. When a woman fails, it's because she is a woman and that's how women are. Therefore, I think women are more likely to be overwhelmed with the pressure to be perfect, because we're not only representing ourselves, but our entire gender. A crude example of this that I've experiences is Sports in Uni PE. I remember hating sports so much because the boys would always dominate the game. If a boy ever passed to a girl and the girl dropped the ball, he would never pass to her again. However, if a boy passed to another boy and he dropped it, this boy would still be passed to again.
ReplyDeleteI've never related to something so much. As much I want to get married and have kids one day, I was thinking about the fact that if I do get married and I do have kids, my career will probably be put on hold because there's just no way that I would be able to juggle all of that. I would be the one that would probably have to take care of the kids and eventually I would have to end up staying home and I don't want to end up like that. I don't want to just throw all the years of studying I did because I have to fulfill a role that society has put on me. Not only that, but working moms are looked down upon because "oh she doesn't care about her children" or "oh she's leaving her poor husband to do all the work with the children" and it's frustrating because I have heard women saying this about other women and it's so messed up because I shouldn't have to be the one that is in charge of everything. Why is it that men should only focus on their work?? I don't know, it's just this idea makes me so mad that women have so many responsibilities to uphold while men barely have any.
ReplyDeleteI definitely relate to the feeling of wanting to do everything but also not being able to do everything. I hate how Esther, and women in general, have to chose between raising their children and pursuing their career. I also felt like in school, it's a lot easier to be an overacheiver and be an everything women but once you grow older and have to get a career, you feel forced to confine yourself since you can't do everything. In school, Esther could excel at all her classes and everything was very systematic for Esther but once Esther leaves schools she's forced to confront the choices she has to make in life. She can't continue to do everything or simply pursue the next scholarship.
ReplyDeleteReading this hit me hard - I relate to this so much, and I definitely see the connection between perfectionism and being female. I feel like there's so much more pressure on women to be perfect that there isn't as much for men - like you have one chance to this perfectly and if you mess up once, your value of a person is worse. The fear of actual failure is also a constant one - it feels inevitable, and it hasn't happened yet, but it's bound to happen one day, and so we're just waiting in fear for it to happen. I saw this experience reflected in the book more honestly and in detail than in any other book I've read.
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