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At what point does a once facilitating partner (an “enabler“) mutate into a crazy wife, a self-deluded presence like Zelda Fitzgerald or T. S. Eliot’s first wife, Vivienne — an albatross to be schlepped along and jeered at by one’s hardhearted or snobbish friends (like Hemingway, who cast Zelda as a castrating villain almost from the moment he met her, and Virginia Woolf, who in her diary characterized Vivienne as a “bag of ferrets“ around her husband’s neck) until she is summarily ejected and sent to the loony bin, whether she belongs there or not. (According to Carole Seymour-Jones’s recent biography of Vivienne, “Painted Shadow,“ Vivienne’s brother, Maurice, made a guilt-ridden admission shortly before he died in 1980 that his sister “was as sane as I was. . . . What Tom and I did was wrong.“)

Der Artikel geht auch auf das Dilemma der „Muse“ für kreative Frauen ein – mit einem Gedicht zum Thema von Verna Safran:

The graces are always women, never men, / So on my pedestal I stand, with itching toes / Posing as Mother Mary or as Magdalen, / And wondering how you look without your clothes. / By candlelight, my dear, I pick your brains; / When I’m alone, I put you in quatrains.‘ / Daphne Merkin, NYT *) 28.7.02