Illustration: Sara Singh
In Outline, the first book in Rachel Cusk’s astonishing trilogy of novels, the narrator, Faye, has dinner in Athens with a celebrated feminist author. Angeliki apologizes for arriving late: She has only just escaped from a reception plus a quick detour to put her son to bed. She has been away from him, she says, as a consequence of her international book tour. Her novel, which concerns a painter who feels torn between her children and her desire to be free, is very popular in Poland, where she met a journalist whose lifeless egalitarian marriage had left her so ugly and serious that she was barely recognizable as a woman at all. Angeliki has discovered that her own husband and son do not need her the way she once thought they did, and this distance from their need has made her reconsider her own freedom. She does not want childbirth to be her greatest act of creation, but neither does she wish to become a desexed professional who loses touch with her female essence. The painter in her novel fails to resolve this dilemma, ultimately diverting all her artistic energy to her children.
The scene unfolds like nearly every other scene in Outline: Someone talks, Faye listens. The latter, a divorced novelist of few biographical details, serves as a kind of Grecian urn into which her conversation partners eagerly pour the metaphors that rule their lives, delivering reflections on art, marriage, and family in the same tone of Spartan clarity. Critics hailed the Outline trilogy as a reinvention of the novel, though Cusk saw it as the natural evolution of her long-standing preoccupations. For the first 20 years of her prolific career, Cusk largely wrote domestic novels about young women who long to shelter in, and escape from, the trappings of bourgeois family life. Saving Agnes, Cusk’s debut from 1993, opens with the image of a house sinking into the earth. The same themes animate Cusk’s nonfiction from this period. Her 2001 memoir, A Life’s Work, was savaged by the British press for its frank portrayal of the desolation of early motherhood. Then, in 2009, Cusk divorced the father of her two daughters — an experience she later described as a devastating expulsion from the possibility of narrative. “We’re not part of that story any more, my children and I,” she writes in her 2012 memoir, Aftermath, peering with envy and disgust into the lives of her suburban neighbors. “We belong more to the world, in all its risky disorder, its fragmentation, its freedom.” Out of this dispossession emerged Faye, a recessed female presence whose exile from domesticity allows her — supposedly — to view life with greater objectivity.
The results are extraordinary. Faye is not absent, like Godot; she is withheld, like a judgment, and through Cusk’s ingenious structure of reported monologues, Faye becomes the most substantial of all the characters in the trilogy. But the claim to objectivity bears the bruise of exaggeration. Divorce or no, Faye is still a bourgeois British woman who quietly goes from having a loan on her countryside home to being an honored guest at literary festivals across Europe. The parallels with the author’s own life were both intentional and carefully repressed. In effect, Cusk wished to have it both ways. She wanted Faye’s emotional distance and biographical vagueness to place her in a more authentic relationship to truth. Yet she wrote Faye as specifically female voice, one which spoke through the narrative vacuum that Cusk had come, through divorce, to associate with all women.
Now Cusk’s gender politics have taken center stage. Her new novel, Parade, is a small clear prism of a book that refracts the lives of half a dozen artists all named G, most of whom are fictionalized versions of real artists like Louise Bourgeois and Norman Lewis. There is an abiding interest in formal experiment: Cusk flings abstract nouns onto the page with little mediation by plot or character, much as the action painters once did with their paints. The risk in this approach is producing what the art critic Harold Rosenberg once called “apocalyptic wallpaper,” on account of its cheap facsimile of depth. “In formlessness she discovered power, and also a freedom from limitation,” a narrator says about their mother in Parade — a beautiful sentence until one realizes that any of the nouns could be rearranged without injuring the impression that one is reading an awful truth. As in Cusk’s previous novel, the feverish melodrama Second Place, the old themes of domesticity and maternal guilt have returned in full force — but now their delivery is cold and explanatory, to the extent that much of Parade reads like catalogue copy for an unseen art exhibit. In a telling echo of Angeliki’s novel in Outline, the only G without a clear historical counterpart is a talented female painter whose professional success separates her from her young daughter. With this G, Cusk poses a question that has obsessed her for years: Can women make art?
It is a false question. Yet Cusk treats it with fatal solemnity. The artist Georg Baselitz, whose upside-down paintings appear in Parade, told an interviewer in 2013, “Women don’t paint very well. It’s a fact.” One should call this what it is — crude misogyny — and crush it underfoot. Instead, Cusk obscures it under thick layers of weak mysticism, much as Baselitz once painted over his pictures with a deadening black paint. That, on balance, female artists face more institutional obstacles than male ones, that they are more likely to be unjustly reduced to their particularity by critics, that the gender division of labor continues to take an enervating toll even on many affluent white women — none of this can be denied. Nor is any of it the subject of Parade, which is given over to cryptic pronouncements about the “violence underlying female identity.” For years, Cusk has warned ominously of the “confusion of male and female values” that has accompanied women’s gains in political equality with men — a typical example of the inscrutable private language that has allowed her flatly essentialist views about gender to pass for the feminist avant-garde. We learn in Parade that the female condition is “unlasting yet eternal,” that behind its “volcanic cycles of change” there lies something “darkly continuous” yet “unknown.” The female artist, we are told, must reckon with “the mystery and tragedy of her own sex.”
What Cusk really means is that women must make art about being mothers. If they refuse to do this, they are effectively neutering themselves, disavowing their “female biological destiny” in the doomed pursuit of “male freedom.” The latter appears to be identical with regular freedom in every way except that, when exposed in a woman, it is proof of a grotesque and self-defeating identification with men. One cannot, I think, have a high opinion of women if one is to believe this. It is like defining the air as male and bravely refusing to breathe.
The wild young painter G marries a lawyer she meets at a gallery opening. He disapproves of her: In this, she recognizes a form of heterosexual authority that she craves. G adapts to his life, lets him rule over her, and becomes pregnant with his daughter. “A dreadful truth, the truth of her female caste, came slowly and inexorably into view, with its smouldering fires of injustice and servitude,” writes Cusk. G’s husband, taking off work, claims their daughter for his own, while G is marched back into the studio to pay the bills. She feels inferior to her male colleagues; she makes one female friend, another painter, noting with discomfort that this friend lacks any “desire for male freedom and prestige.” Then G’s husband goes away to care for his dying father, and for the first time G feels free of his influence. She becomes warmer, more maternal, making pancakes for her daughter and allowing her into her studio; she imagines what it would be like not to work. One day, G’s daughter looks up and casually asks why men need to exist at all. The question horrifies G, who realizes that a world without men would be a world without the freedom she desires. “Men are great,” she answers, though she cannot say why.
The story of G has the quality of a parable or a fairy tale. It contains the broad strokes of Cusk’s theory of the woman artist. It seems that, in claiming her freedom from the sphere of need, the woman artist must learn to pass as an “honorary man.” Yet she remains attached, as if by umbilical cord, to the home life she tries to leave behind; ultimately, she is consumed with rage at her emasculated husband and guilt over her abandoned children. Cusk regards this as a dead end for the female artist. “A book is not an example of ‘women’s writing’ simply because it is written by a woman,” she claims in a 2009 essay on Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf. “Writing may become ‘women’s writing’ when it could not have been written by a man.” But what such a “female sentence” would look like is deeply unclear. Genuine women’s writing, Cusk argues, would abandon any claim to “equivalence in the male world” and concern itself “with what is eternal and unvarying, with domesticity and motherhood and family life.” Evidently, to paint a female painting, the woman artist must integrate her need to express herself artistically with “the very roots of female identity: continuity, stability, the capacity to nurture.” In short, she must let her child into the studio.
That the female artist has a child is treated as an established fact in Parade. Of feminism, Cusk knows very little, and she is eager to prove it. In the essay on Woolf we encounter the preposterous claim that there is “no public unity among women”; more recently, Cusk has said that she is too old to think of gender as “open to examination.” (She is 57.) In a baffling profile of the painters Celia Paul and Cecily Brown from 2019, Cusk is so convinced in advance that her subjects must be professionally crippled by their own biology that she takes it upon herself to break their legs. “Motherhood is an inextricable aspect of female being,” she declares after Brown quite sanely suggests that parenting and painting might make irreconcilable demands on one’s time. “It is one thing,” Cusk writes, “to choose not to have a child at all, but if you can do both, be both, then surely the possibility of formulating a grander female vision and voice becomes graspable.” The assertion is brittle and accusatory. How can one avoid concluding that any female artist who refuses motherhood as her subject, much less her life, is essentially betraying herself? (In general, Cusk is clueless on politics: An essay on Brexit ends with the idea that everyone should be more polite, like Jesus Christ.)
One senses that Cusk is berating herself. In one essay in Aftermath, she recounts how her ex-husband — like G’s husband, a lawyer turned photographer — performed the bulk of the domestic responsibilities while she, like G, wrote novels to pay the bills. In that arrangement she discovered a false equality: She gave up her “primitive maternal right over the children,” while her husband saw his contribution merely as “helping.” In her own assessment, the marriage was doomed because its egalitarian structure forced her to deny the “long pilgrimage of pregnancy with its wonders and abasements, the apotheosis of childbirth, the sacking and slow rebuilding of every last corner of my private world that motherhood has entailed.” Instead, Cusk reverted to the “adulterated male values” she had learned from both her father and mother — professional ambition chief among them — while forcing her husband into the role of housewife. “My notion was that we would live together as two hybrids, each of us half male and half female,” she writes. But Cusk grew to hate her husband’s dependence on her and influence over the children, and she began to feel like neither an honorary man nor an authentic woman. “I am not a feminist,” she concludes. “I am a self-hating transvestite.”
A startling metaphor! The essay in question was first published in 2011 — one of the last years before the idea of transvestism would be drained of any remaining metaphorical potential in English letters and reduced to a sheer monstrosity. Cusk has never told us what she thinks of her fellow transgender people, though one is free to guess. What we do know is that her fiction is chock-full of female characters who harbor, or are accused of harboring, a secret desire to be men. The desperate writer in Second Place admits to disguising herself in the “borrowed finery” of masculinity, to the extent that “some aspects of me do seem in fact to be male.” An overqualified teacher in Arlington Park had “forgotten she was a woman” until she met her husband, while the breadwinning wife of The Bradshaw Variations “craved it, her opposite, masculinity.” In The Lucky Ones, a feminist columnist tells a housewife that she wants to be “the same” as men; the housewife is disturbed. The erstwhile crush of In the Fold now has a “coarse shadow of black hair” on her upper lip; her sister-in-law speculates that she “doesn’t actually want to be a woman.” One night, the eponymous heroine of Saving Agnes has a dream: “She had found herself in possession of a giant penis like an elephant’s trunk and was forced to bundle it up beneath her skirt like a dark and terrible secret and walk around in mortal fear of its discovery.”
What to do with all these troubled hermaphrodites? “I always thought it was better to be a man, and I wanted to be a man my entire life,” Cusk told her fellow novelist Sheila Heti in 2020. There is nothing immoral, irrational, or even unusual about penis envy — it is generally better to be a man, as far as history is concerned — but Cusk has taken this desire and pathologized it so intensely that it has turned her into the paranoid custodian of an idiosyncratic gender fundamentalism. Men must be men; women must be women. A character in Parade remarks of the sculptor G that she “treats both sexes as doomed by gender, as almost interchangeable in that sense, so that a third sex emerges in which the man and woman have merged into each other and become neutral.” This G is clearly based on Bourgeois, who late in life created a series of sculptures of two nude human figures intimately embracing. In one such piece, made of polished aluminum, the two figures are almost entirely mummified in the tentaclelike coils of hair coming from one of their heads. This hermaphroditic mass with its suggestion of the simultaneous presence of male and female parts — this is the horrific fate that we are to believe awaits every female artist who tries to claim male freedom for herself.
There are so many poor assumptions here that the simplest may be the least obvious: It is not clear that Bourgeois’s couples always consist of a man and a woman. But Cusk can scarcely imagine a world beyond the heterosexual family. Divorce did not cure her of that weakness. The dissolution of a marriage is simply the closest that most middle-class women ever come to experiencing the social death of queerness. In Cusk’s case, it seems to have fed her belief that outside heterosexuality there lies only an unfathomable void. She regards her few gay characters with slow bewilderment. “It took Julian a long time to piece together the nature of their relationship, two grown men living in luxury together without a woman in sight,” she writes in Transit. This is the narrow sense in which Cusk can conceive of gay male life: as the absence of female dependency. Lesbians, meanwhile, are nearly unthinkable. In Outline, a famous lesbian poet reports an outlandish dream about a group of women who are too drenched in menstrual blood to go to the opera. Cusk has the poet conclude that the dream expresses the “disgust that exists indelibly between men and women” — and not, as one might also conclude, the cost of failing to imagine what women might have in common outside their biological destiny. The irony is that the poet, being a lesbian, should know perfectly well what else women might share.
Few readers will notice, I expect, that the titular parade of Parade is intended to be the Parisian equivalent of the Pride March. I myself would not know this had Cusk not volunteered it at a launch event recently. Yet now it is hard to miss the patronizing shift from march, with its residual connotations of political struggle and moral authority, to parade, which suggests frivolity and heavy traffic. As the sun sets on gay Paree, a groaning fleet of garbage trucks is dispatched to clean up the mess; behold, we are meant to think, the cost of freedom! Meanwhile, several heterosexual characters navigate their way through the chaos to a brasserie nearby, where they discuss whether the late artist G “missed the opportunity to love women.” What they mean by this, Cusk does not say. What is clear is that the queers, in their “fantastical costumes,” are now crowding up the restaurant. “It’s the parade,” says one woman apologetically, “that has confused everything.”
It is interesting to note that Cusk has looked to Beauvoir and Woolf for inspiration. Neither was heterosexual, and neither gave birth. Both pursued at certain points in their lives a kind of thwarted, ecstatic, sometimes tragic lesbianism that strongly informed their theories about female art. But there was an important difference between the two. When Beauvoir claimed that van Gogh could never have been born a woman, she meant that such a woman, having scarcely begun to posit herself as a free and authentic being, could never have taken the human condition onto her tender shoulders. When Woolf wrote that no woman in Shakespeare’s time could have possessed Shakespeare’s genius, she meant that a woman of the same raw talent and background would have lacked the money, education, and legal right to stride onto the stage of the Globe. Between these two arguments there lies an almost infinite gulf. The female van Gogh is the victim of an existential foreclosure, one that can be overcome only by a transcendent act of will that Beauvoir left perilously nebulous. By contrast, Shakespeare’s sister, as Woolf called her, is simply the victim of a shut door. It is no great mystery what keeps her on this side of it: Someone has gone and locked it.
Anyone genuinely invested in the fate of women artists must learn to separate, whenever possible, the material questions from the existential ones. To confuse them is disastrous. From the standpoint of history, there are many real reasons a woman might fail to be an artist — the unpaid reproductive labor she is often expected to perform within the home, for instance. From the standpoint of existence, however, there can be no barrier whatsoever: She is a human being. Early on in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf recounts a fictionalized encounter with the guardian of a university library who informs her that women are not permitted entry unchaperoned. “That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library,” Woolf tartly remarks. In this one sentence you will find more truth about the woman artist than in all of Parade. Cusk has surveyed those privileges historically appropriated from women by certain men — wealth, institutional power, freedoms of movement and expression — and mistaken them for the ontological enfeeblement of the female sex. Women have, I think, enough problems already; there is no reason to invent more.
The really challenging idea is not that female artists, when finally given all the advantages of male ones, will make art equal to that of any man but that women, when they are finally given all the advantages of men, may cease to be women altogether. One cannot say for sure: It has never been tried. But the metaphysics of sex will remain the pastime of fools and bigots until the full redistribution of wealth has taken place. I sympathize with Cusk’s fear: that material equality will result, even if only by accident, in the abolition of women. (I am surely fonder of them than she.) “Wouldn’t it be a bit boring if everyone was the same?” asks the skeptical housewife of The Lucky Ones. Even Woolf did not want to see the two sexes reduced to one — but this was because she longed for more sexual difference than the duality of male and female could provide. “If an explorer should come back and bring word of other sexes looking through the branches of other trees at other skies,” she wrote, “nothing would be of greater service to humanity.” One remembers that Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own shortly after her novel Orlando, whose eponymous hero changes sex with a kind of blithe serenity that could not be more foreign to Cusk’s self-hating androgynes.
Now it is true that Woolf called for women to write “as women write, not as men write.” By this, she meant that the classical literary forms — epic poetry, for instance — had been so clearly shaped by male experience as to be more difficult for a woman to bend to her will. Hence the cleverness of a writer like Austen, who found the novel “young enough to be soft in her hands.” This is perfectly sound: To the extent that the lives of men and women still contain many generalizable differences, one may justly speak of male and female sentences. But to ask the female artist to make art that only a woman could make is to ask her to make no art at all. As Cusk herself has suggested, the novel is a kind of objet trouvé, mute as a slab of marble; it takes a witness to make its cold neutrality catch fire. In itself, the sentence has neither sex nor gender — nor, for that matter, sexuality, race, class, religion, or nationality. Not a single blot of paint in the Tate Modern repels the female soul, though the £84 annual membership fee may dissuade some female wallets. “Literature is open to everybody,” Woolf writes. “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
I know Cusk knows this. She has made no secret of her admiration of art by men; half the G’s in Parade are male artists in whose work she has discovered something real or true. When the first G’s wife sees his upside-down paintings, she instantly feels that they elucidate the tragedy of female being. The paintings crush her; they are acts of unbearable authenticity and theft. A female novelist who visits G’s studio feels the same, exclaiming with remorse that she wishes she could write novels upside-down. “G was not the first man,” Cusk observes, “to have described women better than women seemed able to describe themselves.” But why should the theft go only one way? Cusk characterizes G’s breakthrough as casual and inadvertent, the product of a vague desire to “make sense of his time and place in history.” G’s wife consoles herself with the knowledge that the paintings would not exist if not for her own creation of a nourishing domestic environment. Yet it is G’s wife who, just by looking at them, impregnates the paintings with her own ideas about freedom and need. Even their annihilating force reflects the power of her mind. She steals the paintings every time she looks at them: They are hers.
To question the possibility of female art is, ultimately, to question the possibility of female thought. In both cases, one wonders how hard Cusk is really looking. She ends Parade by considering several oil paintings by the 17th-century Dutch painter Jacobus Vrel. In one, a black-clad woman sits in an otherwise empty room, hunched over a large tome in her lap, while through the dark window behind her one can just barely discern the beseeching face of a small child. For Cusk, it is a stunning portrait of female immanence, female withdrawal, female nonbeing — and painted by a man! “This woman was alone in a way that was nearly impossible to represent,” observe the narrators, who are mourning their late mother. But the woman’s chosen solitude, her indifference to the demands of domestic labor, has been represented quite clearly: She is reading a book. That we do not know what she thinks of it does not mean that female being is tragically excluded from the realm of freedom or narrative or identity. It just means she hasn’t told us.
Cusk, I’m afraid, is one of those rare writers whose genius exceeds the depth of her own experience. She has taken some fine observations about bourgeois motherhood under late capitalism and annealed them, through sheer intensity of talent, into empty aphorisms about the second sex. In so doing, she has wasted an enormous amount of energy on making the idea of female freedom unthinkable — an ironic choice for a writer who has achieved something like canonicity within her own lifetime. If Parade is women’s writing, let us hope it is the last of it. Another kind of novel is possible. When Angeliki tells Faye that she regrets not putting more about her characters’ “material circumstances” in her novel, I think we are meant to find this vaguely funny. But it’s a good idea! At least it would be better than banging on about female destiny while ignoring the lives of actual women. One must never mistake a defect of the imagination for a hole in reality.
