The Wife Monsters and Me

Why are ambitious wives in novels figured as dumb or evil or both?

Art Monster

“My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead.” So laments the narrator—a wife and mother struggling to write her second book—in Jenny Offill’s 2014 novel Dept. of Speculation. By the end of that year, the year I met the man who would become my husband, the quote had become—on Tumblr and in year-end literary round-ups and during after-work, pre-dinner drinks with other women—a kind of mantra, summoning at once the unfairnesses foisted upon us by gender and the monstrous choices we might yet proudly and selfishly make. (These lines have, in the two-plus years since the novel was published, retained their cultural and emotional cache: The quote surfaces in Rufi Thorpe’s excellent essay on writing and motherhood.) “Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things,” Offill’s narrator continues. “Nabokov didn’t even fold his umbrella. Véra licked his stamps for him.”

When Offill’s novel was published, I was working as an associate editor at a publishing house, feeling keenly the burdens imposed not by marriage but by an all-but all-consuming job. I wasn’t licking anyone’s stamps, but I was still mailing things for my boss. I found time, now and again, to write—this was my actual ambition, as I had only recently begun to admit to myself—but the hours had to be stolen: a subway ride spent reading a novel I was hoping to review instead of a proposal on submission; a Saturday afternoon spent typing up notes from an interview with a writer instead of editing a manuscript. From this particular perspective, marriage to someone who might help support me, emotionally and monetarily, seemed less like a constraint than it did a release.

By the time I met my husband, I’d left the publishing house and was working as an assistant editor at a monthly magazine. The job was less demanding, but the escape hatch my then-boyfriend seemed to offer remained tempting. He lived in Massachusetts; if I left New York to move in with him, my financial responsibilities would immediately decrease—both because we’d be splitting rent on a one-bedroom, and because I’d no longer be able to soothe my professional frustrations with thirteen-dollar glasses of rosé. They’d decrease so dramatically, I calculated, that I’d be able to write pretty much full-time.

My husband and I discussed this, even before we were formally engaged. All the time I was spending in New York at work and at parties and at work-related parties I would, in Massachusetts, spend reading and writing. It was precisely by becoming a wife that I would be allowed to become an art monster. All my husband would have to do was continue working: Stamps are all stick-on these days, and besides, there’s email.

This was the plan, anyway.

Wife Monster

Around the time I got married, I learned that New York Review Books Classics was reissuing two novels about men seduced by women who then destroy them: Jakob Wasserman’s My Marriage, about a novelist whose life is ruined by a delusional, impractical wife, at once strong-willed and over-eager to please; and Elliott Chaze’s Black Wings Has My Angel, about an ex-con who falls in love with a money-hungry prostitute (she robs him, early on in the novel) and ends up on death row.

The books, when considered together, suggested that independent-minded women in relationships existed only at extremes: Either their over-investment in the subservient role became its own kind of power play, or they were manipulative minxes waiting for the right opportunity to steal from their sexual partners. Armed with this observation—gathered before I’d read either text—I conceived of an essay that would try to explain why, for so much of literary history, ambitious wives had to be figured as dumb or evil or both.

I read Black Wings first. Because Chaze’s novel is in the hard-boiled tradition, it took me more than a hundred pages to glimpse the sincerely grim portrait he paints of Virginia, the female protagonist, beneath his male hero’s gratuitously cynical soliloquies. (“She looked,” the narrator, Tim Sunblade, remarks of Virginia early on, “less like a cooker of breakfasts than anyone I ever knew.”) Just over halfway through the novel, Tim robs an armored car—mostly so he’ll remain “a big bad lad” in Virginia’s eyes. The job goes south, and Tim has to kill a man; this bothers Tim noticeably more than it does Virginia. Once they’ve escaped to the mountains and relative safety, Tim spies Virginia in the back of the armored car. “She was sitting on the floor, naked, in a skitter of green bills.” The corpse of the man Tim killed is “still simpering in death” beyond her. The scene is overtly sexual, and Tim, we understand, is no more than a middleman; in Chaze’s vision, money is the true object of Virginia’s lust.

I remember putting the book down queasily. I am not a stupid woman, but I am a suggestible one. While I knew there was a difference between splitting rent with your partner and asking him to commit a felony on your behalf, Virginia and I had, I feared, something in common. Virginia used her man for money; wasn’t I using my man’s money for art?

I turned, for contrast if not relief, to My Marriage. Virginia is an ambitious woman; her counterpart in My Marriage, Ganna, is an ambitious wife. It is precisely the unrealistic extravagance of Ganna’s efforts as a wife that doom her attempts at homemaking. She becomes a nightmare version of a domestic goddess—a kind of domestic gorgon. She’s a terrible cook, burning meat until it “looks like charcoal.” She hires and fires a series of incompetent maids, one of whom has syphilis. She refuses to send her children to public school, buys a plot of land, sets up a school of her own, and then loses control of that school in a costly power struggle with her co-investors. She drives her husband, Alexander, first to infidelity, then to divorce and financial disaster.

The narrative is written in the first person, from Alexander’s perspective, and was based on the author’s own marriage; unsurprisingly, it is a one-sided account. It seemed to suggest that a woman with desires—even if those desires were pegged to an understanding of her husband’s needs—was bound to commit errors. It also seemed to suggest that, whatever a woman’s errors, her male partner, too, would be punished for them, even more severely than she herself. There was no way, I thought frantically, to have desires and a husband; if I didn’t want to ruin the latter, I would have to forgo the former.

Perhaps this will surprise no one, but: Reading these books back-to-back as a newlywed was a spectacularly bad idea.

Breakdown 1: Maiden Name

One of my last acts as a single woman was to print my then-boyfriend’s surname in the box marked “last name after marriage” on our application for a marriage license. Eight weeks later, when our marriage certificate was issued, my husband’s last name became, legally, my own.

For several months, this fact existed in a vacuum; I could essentially ignore it. Then I tried to register my car in my new name and was rebuffed: I couldn’t, it turned out, register a car under a name different than the one under which I was insured. I called my car insurance provider: They wouldn’t insure me under a name different than the one on my driver’s license. I went to the Registry of Motor Vehicles: They wouldn’t issue me a driver’s license under a name different than the one on my Social Security card. I googled the nearest Social Security office: It was already closed for the day.

These were discouraging setbacks, to be sure. The bureaucratic loopholes I was being asked to jump through were annoying, even aggravating, and time-consuming besides. I would have been amply justified in going to a bar and ordering myself French fries and a fourteen-dollar gin martini. What I actually did was go home and collapse onto the floor, sobbing.

“Maybe you don’t actually want to change your name?” my husband, Will, gently suggested when I was capable of holding myself upright again.

Of course I did, I insisted, snot still streaming from my nose.

And yet: The next day, I didn’t go to Social Security. I went to Middlesex County Probate and Family Court and paid $180 to legally reclaim the maiden name I couldn’t convince anyone, least of all myself, to let me relinquish.

It was just as My Marriage had prophesied. My first wifely move had gone awry: I’d tried to take my husband’s name, and he’d ended up comforting me as I hyperventilated. Like Ganna, I was trying to be a quote-unquote good wife. Also like Ganna, I was actually being a pain in the ass.

Breakdown 2: Manic Garlic-Chopping

And no wonder. Despite the decades that separated us—My Marriage is set in the years before and after World War I, and was published in the 1934—my idea of what it meant to be a wife wasn’t so far from Ganna’s. I was haunted by the marital tropes I knew best, those I’d inherited from history and pop culture: A wife is supposed to decorate the home and keep it clean; she is expected to cook for her husband and bear him children. I knew these gendered expectations to be ludicrous; this did not prevent me from worrying about whether I was capable of meeting them.

I knew myself incapable of decorating and uninterested (for the moment) in bearing children, so I focused on cooking and cleaning. Assuming responsibility for these tasks seemed a price I should be happy to pay, given that my husband’s job was allowing me to stay home and work on my minimally remunerative writing. Unfortunately, for reasons I was unable to fathom, those two tasks began to occupy the whole of my day. At least an hour every morning was spent folding clothes, washing dishes, hand-vacuuming crumbs. I insisted on adjusting the books and Altoid tins and stray pens on the chest that served as my husband’s bedside table, making sure each object was parallel to, or at right angles with, every other. I developed an interest in dust. Our apartment wasn’t even particularly messy—but sloppiness, which had always annoyed me, had suddenly become intolerable; every unfolded shirt sat in silent, wrinkled judgment on me, a comment on the wifely competence I was suddenly invested in proving I had.

It would be 11 or so by the time I finally sat down at my computer, my fingers pruney from the dishwater. By 11:30, I’d be on a cooking website, trying to find a dish for that night’s dinner that involved both grains and leafy greens. Will, a high school English teacher, would get home at 4:30 or 5, having worked eight hours. He’d find me on the couch, filled with self-loathing, writing emails; a question like “How was your day?” made no sense to me. I couldn’t have told him where the day had gone, much less speak to its quality.

“When do you want dinner?” I’d reply, like some bespectacled Stepford wife, my powers of communication corroded, my interests narrowed, almost against my will, to the domestic sphere.

I wish I could say I saw my mania for what it was, even while I was in its thrall: a product of anxiety. But while I was often disgusted by the bourgeois pettiness of my concerns, that only made me believe more firmly that my failures were mine only, that basic human competency had escaped me. I never imagined that the people whose writing I admired might sometimes have messy homes, eat frozen pizza for dinner. Instead, I envied them their efficiency and their Cuisinarts.

One Friday night, while chopping garlic, I had a panic attack. Will was sitting at the kitchen table; I’d refused his offer of help, but asked him to keep me company. Partway through a sentence, I stopped myself; my forehead felt numb. I was having trouble getting air through my throat. The apartment was clean, the fridge was full of groceries I’d purchased, I was cooking dinner, and also I couldn’t breathe. I put the knife down. The one thought pulsing ever-faster through my veins was: Is this the rest of my life?

It was soon after this that I stopped spending time on the cooking section of The New York Times.

Party Monster

What experiences was I missing out on by playing at adulthood and wifely competence? I scrolled through Instagram, staring with unnatural intensity at the parties, work-related and otherwise, that continued in New York in my absence. These were events I’d mostly resented having to attend when I lived and worked in the city; now I craved the reassurance they offered. If no one at these parties was actively writing, they were all actively reminding each other and themselves that they were writers.

Before the armored car heist in Black Wings Has My Angel, Tim and Virginia briefly pose as a married couple. She manages to act the part for about six weeks; then he comes home one afternoon to find her “drunk as a lord” and watering the leaves of the trees in their front yard. When Tim tries to get her back in the house, Virginia points the hose at him. “For God’s sake don’t turn into a gentleman on me,” she tells him later, inside.

Looking at the internet, I understood: Everyone assumed I was a dull housewife. I was going to point the hose at myself and prove them wrong.

In my eagerness to throw myself into the solitude I imagined coupled life demanded, I’d forged few real bonds in my first months in Cambridge. Now, I texted and emailed every potential friend within an eight-mile radius: classmates from middle school I’d fallen out of touch with; people who knew people who knew people I knew; a guy from a writing class I’d taken and hated. Night after Night, I met strangers for drinks on an empty stomach. I’d drink quickly and walk home, more than tipsy, wondering if I’d be able to get any work done once I was back on my couch. I never was. Morning after morning, I woke up late and hungover, trying to remember: Did I have fun last night? Meanwhile, my husband woke up early and went to school and came home and graded and went to bed. We seemed, during this period, to be awake and in our apartment at the same time for no more than forty-five minutes a day.

Eventually I stopped trying to pretend I was anything like game. Perhaps, I reasoned, this could be ungentlemanly in its own way: refusing to drink with anyone other than the two or three people I actually liked.

Go West, Young Wife

The stories I’m telling here are almost comically mundane. For a while, I tried to pretend I liked cooking because I believed, per My Marriage, that I could do nothing second if I was not a good wife first. Later, I tried to manufacture an exciting social life because I believed, per Black Wings Has My Angel, that to appear conventional was to commit the gravest of sins. On the outside, I was, even to myself, irritatingly functional, performing a passable imitation first of a mid-century matron and then of a sloppy drunk; on the inside, I felt adrift and purposeless. Neither role made me happy, but it was also hard to tell that either was making me sad. The worst part was that I didn’t get enough reading and writing done. Reading and writing a lot had been my goal, but somehow it was one I had neurotically denied myself.

I write about all this as if it happened years ago; it didn’t. I got married in October of last year, moved to Cambridge in January. The kind of person I want to be, and how to make that person compatible with the fact of my marriage—these are problems I have not fully resolved.

Last month, my husband and I moved to St. Louis. I’m in graduate school now, getting paid to learn. While I’m here, I am determined to try to define myself not in relation to or in defiance of my husband or my wifely role, but in relation to myself. To examine the things I’ve written and the decisions I’ve made, and to try to do better. It sounds, I realize, selfish on the one hand and crippled by the language of self-help on the other. (It is in fact both, and impossibly lucky besides.) I organize my life my classes; I am relearning the satisfaction that comes from producing work.

Because it’s graduate school and I have time to read and write, I don’t feel the need to be quite so monstrous, as an artist or a wife. Because it’s the Midwest, we live in a two-bedroom apartment, and the second bedroom is my office. Will hasn’t licked any stamps for me, or folded any umbrellas, but he did build the desk I’m writing this from. Perhaps because he’s a man, it’s easier to see the desk in isolation: not the dutiful ministerings of a Vera, but a gift of generosity, given freely, to a partner, out of love.