baby talk

Joni Mitchell, Hélène Cixous, gender essentialism, and resenting the 'girlhood essay'

It’s a miracle — after two long years, Joni Mitchell’s music is back on Spotify. I virtually haven’t listened to her since then, which isn’t to say I love her any less than I did when I first discovered her at the age of thirteen. My record collection is back home at my parents’ house, and (more to the point) I was not willing to fork out for Apple Music when I can remain on my family’s Spotify Premium plan for free. Because I’m cheap. Needless to say, I have been playing all my favourites on loop: Ladies of the Canyon, Clouds and of course, Blue. The latter holds an almost mythical status in the sphere of women’s singer-songwriting: NPR put it in pole position in their list of the 150 Greatest Albums Made by Women; it was the highest-ranked female-written album on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Everyone has written about it. Everyone loves it. You’d think there’d be nothing left to say.

I do think Blue offers the most stunning portrait of female interiority, which is to say it is simply my favourite example of the infinite iterations of art by women about their own lives, rather than something sweeping and prescriptive which points to an essentialist Female Experience writ-large. It’s something that really bothered me about the viral post about Taylor Swift ‘perfectly [encapsulating] through her lyrics the interior lives of women.’ Acting as if Swift is the new prophet of l’écriture féminine, and not a product mass-marketed at women that inevitably reduces girl-/womanhood to its most generic, cookie-cutter denominators for the widest reach and profitability, is one thing. Especially when there are so many more searing, heartbreaking, expansive examples not only of the subjectivities of womanhood, but of humanity in general, in the music of Joni, or Kate Bush, or Stevie Nicks. Cixous herself wrote:

But what strikes me is the infinite richness of their individual constitutions: you can't talk about a female sexuality, uniform, homogeneous, classifiable into codes - any more than you can talk about one unconscious resembling another.¹

So where does this compulsion for women to flatten the ‘infinite richness of their individual constitutions’ come from? Perhaps it is in a desperate attempt to feel less alone: in a man’s self-evident individuality, does he sacrifice the ability to connect with others, leading to the much-discussed ‘male loneliness epidemic’? I’m not convinced, and in any case, I’m wary of giving any credence to the cult of relatability. While particularly online Young Adult authors kick up a stink about children having to read classic novels in school which supposedly tell them nothing about their own lives (“so buy mine instead!”), one of the songs by Joni that moved me most was ‘Little Green,’ about the pregnancy that she eventually gave up for adoption. I was fourteen when I first heard it, and I sobbed and sobbed for an experience that was not mine, one that was so alien to me, which many women bear witness to but is by no means an inherent hallmark of womanhood itself. It is not a perfect encapsulation of the inner lives of women — it is one account of a life of a woman, in a world where women are made and not born. Art that forces us to extricate our eyes from our navels, to see out into the world instead of turning inwards, to recognise the possibilities rather than an exhaustive checklist of things we must do and think and feel, is what forces us to really grow. It is gratifying, to find someone singing your own thoughts, but it anchors us to the rest of humanity to be made to feel something we have never lived. Child with a child pretending… how hard it must have been; how alone she must have felt. I did an English presentation on the necessity of safe, free and on-demand abortion not long after. 

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Asking ‘do men have someone like that?’ is another thing: of course they do, but at the risk of repeating the obvious, they are ranked at the top of ‘Best Songwriter of All Time’ instead of having their own gendered list. In Joni Mitchell: Fear of a Female Genius, Lindsay Zoladz asks 'Is the very idea of a canon—or “greatness,” or even “genius”—inherently male, and if so, should women chuck all those words and ideas out the window and look for new ways to talk about and value the art they make?’ Intentionally or not, the idea is Cixousian. One of the central tenets of The Laugh of the Medusa is a rejection of the premise that a language constructed and centred around men could ever accurately represent female subjectivity. Men are afforded the language of ‘greatness’ or ‘genius’ or ‘canon,’ while we fall over ourselves to claim scraps: ‘best female songwriter,’ ‘best album written by a woman,’ ‘girl rage,’ ’girl dinner,’ ‘girl math,’ concepts not qualified by a gendered description so much as they are made diminutive by it. We only use it as an adjective because we’re so used to delineating a separation between the default and the feminine, the Serious and the Unserious. It’s insulting. I want to write, to be angry, to calculate, to eat and be full the way a man, in all his defaultness, would without thinking. In her much-cited What Women Know, Ursula Le Guin asks, ’why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?’²

As much as I believe in the power of expanding a body of work and contributing more and more examples of the possibilities of a genre rather than restricting it — be it music, literature or Substack posts — I’m loath to contribute another girlhood essay to a site saturated with them. I don’t want my work, especially my personal essays, to be considered another intervention on girlhood. None of it is an ‘encapsulation’ of femininity, female adolescence or young adulthood. It’s my life, my own; I have ownership over it. I didn’t live a unique twenty-five years and write about some of it only for it to simply land into a repository of other unique stories that people consider homogenous. Part of me can’t decide whether I blame the men who force us down these restrictive creative avenues, or the women who play into them in such caricature fashion. Grown women who pretend the qualifier of ‘girl-‘ or ‘female’ is a form of liberation, because femininity isn’t inherently bad, but conveniently forget to let the men in their life know. I can’t help wanting to shake them, screaming Write something more interesting! Be more interesting! Take yourself seriously! Terrible of me, I know.

sorry to boost my own tweets but this one was topical

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It’s not just Joni. So many modern greats like Annie Ernaux and Donna Tartt, Mitski and Fiona Apple, are spoken about in crude generic terms characterised solely by aesthetic and gender essentialism rather than substance. Mitski is ‘depressed girl yearning music’ and ‘mother,’ a moniker she has explicitly said she does not appreciate; Apple is ‘unhinged girl rage,’ belying her rich tapestries of traumatic experience and anger; Ernaux is ‘autofiction,’ a newer generic categorisation that she rejects, where ‘women’s work has borne the brunt of misgivings about [its] legitimacy.’³ There’s nothing wrong with fitting a descriptor, and autofiction is admittedly a genre I love and think deserves better, despite the derision from authors who receive the label. At a point, however, getting hung up on it only reifies a woman’s place in ‘lowbrow’ genre fiction or genres of music, which will remain lowbrow and devalued, because they are occupied by women. There is no winning.

For Tartt, it’s 'dark academia,’ despite the point of The Secret History revolving around the danger of deluding yourself with empty aesthetic signifiers and intellectualism. Beauty for beauty’s sake is something Tartt is preoccupied with, evidenced in both of her best-known works, The Secret History and The Goldfinch. But what underpins both is proof that beauty and aestheticism must be tethered to something more, something human, if they are to be so meaningful as to outlive us: beauty without soul, without love, without care or pain or connection is fleeting and illusory. Richard Papen is so drawn in by the stunning mind of his professor and the old money splendour of his new inner circle that he is complicit in the killing of his friend. Theo Decker anxiously lies and schemes like his father, experiences a crushing nihilism redeemed only by the knowledge that his Goldfinch painting is safe in his possession — until his best friend Boris reveals that the package Theo has kept with him his entire adolescence does not contain the painting at all, as he stole it and made off with the profits. It is his life’s only glimmer of goodness, false and empty until the painting is returned to the authorities. I can’t help feeling as if a lot of this push towards empty aesthetic or generic posturing is simply a desire to belong to a kind of beauty with nothing behind it, something we don’t have to think too hard about but can make us feel good about ourselves. A misery only alleviated by something false, that ultimately makes us more miserable. It is hard to be a woman. But we must desire something more. We owe it to ourselves.

I don’t think Joni wanted for her work to land on the ever-growing pile of Best Songs By A Woman, either. In a number of interviews, she has balked at the idea of describing herself as a feminist, adding that she would rather ‘go toe to toe’ with men herself on her own merit. I feel like she would hate to think of her work as a form of écriture féminine in the feminist sense, or as ‘girl music’ in the disparaging sense. But she also derided feminism in the West as ‘not feminism — it’s masculinism,’ avowing that she ‘prefers the company of men’ and that she is ‘too good [a musician] for a girl.’ Expecting artists whose primary concern is not leafing through fat volumes of theory to have coherent progressive politics is a big ask, especially those who were born in the midst of the Second World War. However, there’s something in it — paying lip service to femininity while repudiating it, wanting to be something more than a caged bird while bemoaning its liberation — that intrigues me, and which I don’t think can be explained away by internalised misogyny alone. 

I was introduced to Joni Mitchell by Led Zeppelin. As Zoladz points out, ‘Jimmy Page has gone on record saying that her music makes him weep’ (despite being a craven misogynist). Lore has it that Joni inspired my favourite Zep song of all, Going to California, while other male musicians have publicly lauded her for inspiring them, influencing their music, providing them with a different — feminine — perspective. Maynard James Keenan of Tool fame told MTV:

‘I grew up listening to Joni Mitchell. The melody is what I gravitate to – and it's my job to listen to what's happening when those guys [in Tool] go down these staccato, rhythmic, insane mathematical paths. It's my job to soften it and bring it back to the center, so you can listen to it without having an eye-ache.’

And I think that encapsulates the core of the age-old problem: why women have their own, lesser, leagues characterised by politically and artistically impotent softness; why art by women always has that caveat; why the discursive turn towards hyperfemininity as feminist liberation is an insipid cop-out that accepts Le Guin’s ‘baby talk’ as the proverbial glass ceiling, which will never be radical nor liberating. It’s no wonder Joni felt anchored to, while resentful of, her own womanhood. Is being an edifying artefact for male artists to mine for their own work all a talented woman can hope for?

In her brilliant 1999 interview, Ani DiFranco writes that Joni ‘has been personally disturbed by her own second-class citizenship [in the music industry] for many years, as well she should be.’ She also points out that ‘she waxes poetic about the nobility of women staying in the home […] This seems ironic coming from a woman who, at a young age, made the difficult decision of adoption for her child when confronted with the choice between motherhood and career.’ Joni’s PR managers were quick to question the veracity of this statement in response, gesturing to the ‘number of infinitely more significant reasons for Joni to have made the difficult decision that she did.’ Is it liberation for me, but not for thee? I don’t know. But Joni’s art seems to occupy the disjuncture between her own ideals of feminine performance for the eyes of men and romanticised domestic bliss, versus the gritty realities of her own life: pregnancy out of wedlock at 19 and subsequent abandonment by the father; domestic violence; having to work twice as hard as the likes of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Bob Dylan, or Leonard Cohen to be offered a crumb of their unquestioned success. I see echoes of this disjuncture in the various reactionary discursive slips that have reared their heads of late. The girls think they want to RETVRN to tradition, to be a stay-at-home wife and not to have to confront their own attachment to femininity or the male gaze, while claiming lazy moral justification in choice feminism, because nothing is that deep and being a girlboss is cringe and capitalist. What they need is to think a bit harder about the socioeconomic conditions that have led them to this point, and that softness, or hanging onto their girlhood, or girl dinner or whatever demeaning meme is in vogue is not going to come to their rescue. It is gender essentialism. It is late capitalism. It is fascism. Joni wants to feel blindly. She can’t help but think. She knows deep down that both are possible; desirable, even. And thank god for that.

‘To play, you want to be emotional and sensual; you don't want to be intellectualizing. But to go in and adjudicate [as a producer], you have to swing up and use intellect and clarity . . . then swing back into sensual mode. Because I'm a painter, I'm used to standing back and saying yes and no. I approach it like I do painting. Painters don't need producers.’

1. Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs, 1.4 (1976), 875–93

2. Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘What Women Know’, in Words Are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), pp. 81–87

3. Shirley Jordan, ‘Autofiction in the Feminine,’ French Studies, 67.1 (2013), 76–84, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/kns235