[In the following essay, Anderson maintains that Sarton is an invaluable model for young women writers.]

Women in fiction, like women in our culture, usually find, and sometimes lose, their identity in institutionalized relationships such as marriage and motherhood, waiting to see what their men and their children will demand them to be. If they break out of these molds, they usually turn to the business world, a world defined by males, to find their success. Few writers provide women with any models for relationships or ways of life and work outside those which have been codified and sanctified over the years. May Sarton's work, however, is resplendent with new models. Her women characters are alone, forging thoughtful and meaningful lives for themselves, not waiting to be defined in terms of a mate or a nine to five job. Miss Sarton examines valid relationships that women can form, especially with other women, which are outside the usual relationships available to them—women talking, playing and creating together meaningfully. She deals with woman's work and the necessity of integrating womanhood, the total self, into that work so it can become a source of joy and fulfillment. The women who are main characters in three of Miss Sarton's novels establish their own identity by breaking through the molds of standard relationships for women to form new and regenerative ones with others. They rely on themselves as sources of strength, and make full use of their talents in their work.

Two of the novels, Joanna and Ulysses and The Small Room, begin with the breakup of a standard relationship for women. Joanna has become a mother to her father and a prisoner in her home. She has worked in an office, kept the house going and nursed her father for years. Now at thirty she is breaking the mold for a month's holiday, to paint. Lucy Winter, in The Small Room, is also leaving an institutionalized relationship; her engagement is broken. She is on her way to the woman's college where she has taken her first teaching job. Both women must forge new relationships in which to grow. Both must face their aloneness, begin to define themselves as solitary entities, and to find new relationships which will enrich their lives.

In a third novel, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, Hilary Stevens, a seventy year old writer, reviews her life for two young interviewers. The important relationships for her have each been short lived but intense. Her story is a series of comings together and partings. For most of her life she has lived alone; the best in her has been drawn forth by the brief relationships she has formed with others. In this novel, Miss Sarton dramatizes the great importance of woman's relationships as means to fertilize her creative powers. The seeds of Hilary's creative works, books of poetry and two novels, have blossomed through a variety of personal relationships. Her three year marriage, the only institutionalized relationship Hilary entered, resulted in no writing at all. Marriage was a shelter, a safety to her, a long holiday from herself. Selfhood was “submerged in the great primal darkness” (p. 39) of union. Once when she allowed her husband, Adrian, to see her inner powers, he admonished her for her intensity. “You take everything so hard, Hilary. …” (p. 41) The other important relationships in her life have been “instruments of revelation,” “epiphanies,” (p. 97) for her. In her governess, Phillipa, in an understanding friend, Willa, and even in memories of her long dead mother, Hilary perceives, though only briefly, the passionate inner selves which they submerged in order to function in the culturally acceptable roles as job holders, proper wives and mothers. From moments of intimate contact, Hilary learns to develop rather than to hide the powerful personality within her.

From Phillipa she first learns to direct her emotions, specifically her “crush” on the governess, into works of art rather than to expend them futilely in self pity. Through the deep friendship she forms with Willa, Hilary develops a tight control over her own feelings in her poetry. Willa is a woman who entertains frequently. She listens and questions, drawing from her guests their best thoughts and revealing their talents. Her own inner life is never revealed at these gatherings. From memories of her own mother, a woman who shunned any show of intense passion or thought, Hilary senses that she, like her daughter, was meant to be an artist. But to fit the institutionalized roles of wife and mother, she forced herself to reject her own inner life.

One summer Hilary rents the house of a now dead woman. She comes to know the woman whose peace of mind is reflected in her home. Hilary senses the importance of creating surroundings which will mirror one's own inner life, as much to remind herself of her identity as to reveal herself to visitors. Hilary buys a home, and lovingly tends her garden, her cat and turtles, creating peace and order in her home as in a poem. Miss Sarton comments that “no man would have done that.” (p. 148)

Another relationship Hilary forms reveals two important points which Miss Sarton repeatedly makes: first that intense friendships between women bring forth their creativity, and that sexual relationships are not nearly so valuable to individual growth as the culture assumes them to be. Hilary deeply loves her friend Dorothea, a woman with a scientific, “anti-mystic” approach to life. Her cynical and statistical views are the opposite of Hilary's; they operate from different spheres. What matters most to Hilary matters not at all to Dorothea. While their friendship remains just that, Hilary learns to cut her poetry to the sparest, writing sharp, clear lines. But when the women live together in a homosexual relationship, once more Hilary's poetry stops. She is content to make curtains, arrange flowers and stay close to home. Miss Sarton indicates that living with others in sexual relationships is debilitating to personal growth. At best, as in the marriage of Hilary and Adrian, creativity goes to sleep. At worst, as with Dorothea, love becomes a “devastating, destructive rage,” demanding so much psychic energy that the truly creative talents wither.

In Joanna and Ulysses, Joanna, like Hilary, is an artist. On her vacation island she develops her talents to their fullest after forming a warm attachment with a donkey which she buys to save him from the brutal beatings of his driver. Her tenderness, pity and concern for all things has long been scorned by her father as a woman's foolishness. The men on the island, whose livelihood comes from driving donkeys for the tourists and their luggage, feel the same scorn for Joanna's caring. They can never come to terms with her motives for buying the sorely misused donkey, nor understand her matelessness. The donkey, which she names Ulysses, becomes a symbol for the natural, sensual self, the joy that has been locked away in Joanna. Their relationship, like the human ones Miss Sarton portrays, is not always easy or free from the annoyances and demands which any contact makes on an individual. When Joanna is eager to paint, Ulysses munches the precious flowers of a neighbor or wants to be fed or to play. But she learns to leave the donkey tethered when she paints. She returns to him when her work is done, and is enriched by his joy. Freedom to retreat from any relationship, to turn to solitude¹ and to work, is a necessary aspect of the life styles which Miss Sarton presents.

The contacts in these novels have all the drawbacks of real relationships; yet they enrich the characters and draw forth their inner resources. The donkey's delight in the simplest pleasures, in eating or in a friendly nuzzling, reminds Joanna that tensions are not necessary, that a truly simple life based on fulfilling basic needs, can bring joy. Joanna forms a relationship with a pet, as does Hilary Stevens. Miss Sarton indicates that some relationship with the natural world—with animals or with the soil—is necessary for drawing out the natural in the self.

At home Joanna's painting has been quite amateurish; her inner self has been long submerged. And at first on her holiday she limits herself, portraying only tiny crannies, small portions of the lovely village where she stays. However, during the holiday, she gives freely of her tenderness and concern, releasing the traits that even she has come to scorn as foolish. She accepts herself and the fact that for her caring and for her solitude she may seem odd to those around her. In accepting these parts of her personality and life style, she becomes more herself and as a result is able to see and thus to paint the essence of the whole village.

On her arrival home, Joanna must hide Ulysses in the basement or her father will send him away. She is again hiding her inner self. But her painting has become real and her talent is recognizable. Her father and others admire her work. Her self esteem grows, so that when Ulysses is discovered she is able to give him to a donkey driver; the relationship ends. Joanna can carry on her work with a new dignity.

Miss Sarton repeats this pattern of life, of a woman alone, learning through her relationships with others to make full use of her own creative talents, in The Small Room. Lucy Winter leaves her lover and must, like Joanna, accept her aloneness and forge new relationships. As she comes to Appleton College, she studies the models of established relationships around her. There is the marriage of a delightfully cynical New Englander, Jack, and a passionate and powerful Italian woman, Maria. There is the long-standing friendship of two older women: Caryl Cope, academic genius and star teacher at Appleton, and Olive Hunt, a trustee of the college whose strength and power is money. There is Jennifer Finch, a wise and gracious teacher who is “owned” by her aging mother, and Hallie Summerson who lives alone and has made a warm home in which to entertain her friends and colleagues. All these women except Maria Beveridge live without men. Their relationships are explored, and some of them rent asunder, in the dramatic question of the novel. This question is to define the most valid relationship between teacher and student. It becomes a question that not only Lucy, but the whole college must answer when Jane Seaman, Caryl Cope's most brilliant protege plagarizes an article. Forced to produce more and more by her own desire for approval, and by Caryl's eagerness to develop her intellect, Jane is pushed to cheating. By recognition of her own guilt in Jane's troubles, Caryl comes to feel that the education process must involve more than developing the academic aspect of a person. Her admission that Jane may have come to her for understanding and not just for books, causes a final rift in her friendship with Olive who has steadfastly refused to vote that the college hire a psychiatrist as part of its faculty. Miss Sarton suggests that it is the intelligence of the aging Caryl which allows her to change her views and accept the education of the total person, while Olive, who has relied on her wealth rather than on her inner resources, is set in her character mold and so demands only academic excellence from the students.

Like Olive, Jack Beveridge insists on academic excellence as the only standard for a good education. But Maria, by the instinct of her passionate nature, recognizes Jane's inner torment and the need to deal with the totality of the student, her psychic and emotional as well as intellectual needs. Their marriage almost ends in divorce.

As Lucy tries to find her own answer to what constitutes a good education, all of the women meet again and again, at parties, on walks, on campus. Their conversations are not trivial but real and valid. They question the nature of excellence and of justice. They are women interrelating, concerned with their work and with each other. Jack Beveridge refers to the price of excellence. But Maria and the others insist on the joy of excellence. They see that fulfillment, not sacrifice, is the companion of excellence.

The college's decision to hire a psychiatrist, thus to administer to the total person, is mirrored in Lucy's development as a teacher. By allowing herself to form a relationship of kindly understanding with Pippa, a dramatic and sentimental student, Lucy draws out the girl's academic talents. Miss Sarton presents models of women who have established unions outside the institutionalized ones generally approved for them. She makes more joy, a richer more intense life a possibility for women. Through The Small Room, Miss Sarton indicates that long standing relationships such as marriage and the life long friendship between the two older women are debilitating. The briefer relationships such as those with students and colleagues retain the brilliance and intensity of a first love and enrich the individuals who form them far more than do those lasting ones the culture sanctions.

As in the other novels, Miss Sarton insists that meaningful relationships bring fruition to the creativity in the individual. Through her relationships with her colleagues, Lucy grows as a teacher. She begins, uncertain of her goals and methods, but by experiencing the problems of teaching and by contact with the people like Caryl and Hallie who hold opposite points of view about their work, Lucy is able to find her own most creative path as a teacher. Before The Small Room begins, Lucy has worked to earn a Ph.D. Her motivation is not academic or intellectual; it is done simply to be near her fiance while he finishes medical school. When she doesn't marry, but instead enters a profession, she must feel out the path between academic commitment and emotional commitment that will fulfill her own as well as her students' total needs. In one conference with a freshman comp student, Lucy asks the girl to rewrite a confused sentence. When she senses the panic in the girl, she allows her to revise later in her own room. Lucy wonders if she has been too easy; shouldn't she have insisted on excellence at the moment? But as the college determines to add psychiatric services to its other offerings, as Caryl Cope recognizes that she has turned her back on Jane's emotional needs, Lucy learns to accept her own sensitive, human response to students as a necessary part of her self as a teacher.

None of the valuable relationships in Miss Sarton's books are of lifelong duration such as marriage and motherhood. All begin, enrich and then end. Each individual, like Joanna and her donkey, becomes strong enough to go on to solitude, and to his or her own work. Hilary chooses to live alone, enjoying the brief but intense relationships which come and go in her life. Joanna remains in the house with her father, but her inner life and her painting are rich enough that she can live at peace with herself. Lucy decides to stay at Appleton, to regard teaching as her profession and, presumably, to live alone as do Caryl and Hallie.

Again and again Miss Sarton sets forth models of women who recognize their need for solitude in order to establish their own identity. They reject the roles that society has sanctioned for them. They do not wait to find themselves by finding a man to urge or shelter them. They accept themselves as entities; they interrelate with others in short term encounters from which they are free to return to solitude. From the interaction and from the times of solitude, they are able to develop their own powers to the fullest.

Note

1. This idea was derived from an unpublished paper by Susan Koppelman Cornillon