In and Against the Personal Essay

A Personal Essay about Personal Essays

It is November and I am braced against the cold on the patio of UCL’s postgraduate bar in wintry Bloomsbury, drinking a Spanish lager and discussing South Korean feminism. It is evening on the first day of a Marxist academic conference I’m attending, where earlier that day I’d presented a paper on the Marxist historian’s neglect of domestic servants as a category of the working class. One of the conference’s organisers comes by and says hello to me and the PhD student I’m talking to, and asks us about our work. She says it’s great to see young women entering the field of Marxist academia, which I can understand. Marx can definitely be a boys club. I admit to her that I consider myself more of a feminist academic than a Marxist one (though definitely a Marxist Feminist). I haven’t read very much Marx, I’ve only recently nailed down the concept of dialectical materialism and I couldn’t give you a good definition of commodity fetishism with a gun to my head. Somewhat to my surprise, she smiles and tells us she hears that a lot.

I almost feel embarrassed to have said it. Of course, I do primarily consider myself a feminist, but I do engage in Marxist analysis and my research largely focuses on women as workers, which is very Marxist. Why do I feel the urge to cordon myself off, to qualify myself as a Marxist Feminist academic instead of a Marxist academic? I tell myself it is because of my primary commitment to intersectional feminist justice, because Marxist academia has a patina of bearded old men who talk over you in universities and annoying young men who talk over you at the pub, because ideologically speaking I’m kind of more on the Bakunin side of the First International, but that’s not the whole truth. Part of it is an insecurity, as a young woman in an older and male dominated space, that I will misstep or misinterpret and look like I don’t know what I’m talking about. Feminism at least offers the reprieve of being a female dominated space where my footing does not feel so unsure on account of my gender. Even in the feminist sphere, however, a degree of this insecurity persists.

I am a feminist writer and I’ve never read The Second Sex. I’ve also never read The Feminine Mystique, or Sexual Politics, or Sister Outsider. This is a fact that embarrasses me. I’ve read Judith Butler and Lynne Segal and bell hooks and Andrea Dworkin and lots of excellent contemporary feminist work by excellent feminists with less name brand recognition, but there are still so many fundamental texts I haven’t opened. How can I claim to be a feminist writer, or a feminist historian for that matter, if I never finished A Vindication of the Rights of Woman? I sometimes feel there’s no way I can have any authority if I have not read everything, engaged with every feminist text, thoroughly understood every nuance of social reproduction theory or debates around sex work in the second wave. It is not the same anxiety that I feel in Marxist academia, which feels externally imposed, but one that seems more to come from within.

It is not just my own personal insecurity that perpetuates this feeling. Young women are very rarely considered an authority on anything, even when they are. As a young teen I memorised Nirvana track lists like German verb tables for fear that some grungy teen boy would accuse me and my Hot Topic t-shirt of being a poseur. Today I have friends doing very interesting and complex PhDs who have their work badly explained back to them by men in pubs with no background in the discipline. ‘Expertise anxiety’ is reinforced in girls from a young age, and stays with me still today. Feminism, however, feels like a different ballgame than Nirvana. I am a woman, so surely that gives one a leg up in terms of understanding feminism? In a sense yes, but therein lies the issue.

The only thing young women are allowed to be authorities on is ourselves. At 27 how could you possibly be an expert on anything besides going through a breakup or having an eating disorder or looking sexy and forlorn? This is reflected back to us through the publishing world– take the infamous The Cut essay, for instance. Look at the writing landscape here on Substack. In the world of books, look at Dolly Alderton, Kitty Ruskin, or Coco Mellors. Most book deals for women under 30 seem to go to blonde ladies talking about themselves having sex.* If they’re not talking about sex, they’re talking about trauma. Often, they are talking about sexual trauma. The most valuable thing a woman can offer is not her expertise but her vulnerability. Young women are continuously encouraged to put it on display for an audience of hungry internet voyeurs, whether explicitly or implicitly by what is reflected back to them in the media landscape.

This is particularly encouraged by the blurred line between self and craft that one must tread to be a commercially successful writer today. Book deals are given not on the merit of the work alone, but authors are now expected to have a sizable social media following. Parasociality is not only encouraged but potentially necessary to have a successful career as an online writer, especially as a young woman. Your audience must not only buy into your writing, but buy into you, and what better way to reinforce the parasocial bond than by sharing traumatic and intimate moments with your following?

This is also evident in the cults of personality that have emerged around Sylvia Plath and Anaïs Nin. Both are excellent writers, but more fetishised for the perceived romantic tragedy of their life stories. Nin was a diarist, so did invite this mythologising to a degree, but the internet seems much more interested in her as a sort of mentally ill yet fuckable baby deer than as a writer. Plath has suffered the same treatment for even more perplexing reasons. Her literary legacy is vast and impactful. She is one of the greatest poets of her time. Yet most mentions of her online are excerpts from her diaries (published posthumously, and without her permission**) on a good day, or reductive remarks about her abusive husband or death by suicide on a bad one. She has become shorthand for quirky depressed e-girl. There is nothing wrong with seeing yourself in others, with finding solace in the way they describe their pain, but to see women reduced to only their pain is a sad sight.

That being said, this is a gender (and capitalism) problem rather than a personal essay problem. The personal essay is not an inherently exploitative medium. It is a medium I love when done well. I enjoy the free associative nature, tying the personal to the theoretical. A badly written personal essay feels like a college application, but a good one is like a long and delicious post-dinner chat with your most interesting friend. My aversion is not to personal essays as a category. It is to the media landscape and attention economy that pushes young female writers towards it as a medium. I am inherently suspicious of it, of the way it values not the quality of writing but the tragedy or salaciousness of the narrative. I freeze up at the concept of including a personal anecdote in my writing, especially when I am writing about love and sex, because there are some things I do not want to put on the market. Some things I want to keep for myself. Not because I am a private person, but because I want to remain the observer, not the observed.

As a writer there is always some element of the self in your work. Your subjectivity is what makes the writing interesting. It is a paranoid and useless exercise to try to silo it off completely. I struggle with this defensive mechanism, and I don’t know how to strike the balance. So this is an attempt at redress, my attempt to reckon with a form I have been so resistant to. As a feminist I am instinctually wary of a structure which exploits women’s vulnerability, but I know that the exploitation is not inherent to the literary form. I try to think towards a feminist personal essay, but I struggle. Talking about the oppression you have experienced is inherently vulnerable, but vulnerability does not have to be exploitative. Does the answer lie in the audience? Or is it in the financial relationship? Perhaps the profit motive is what creates the exploitation?

And suddenly here we are, back at the Marxist Feminism from whence we came. And this is the key– your worldview is inherent in your work. Every essay I write is a Marxist Feminist essay because that is how I see the world. It is part of who I am. In that sense, every essay is a personal essay, too. In my undergraduate degree I studied journalism, and there was much discussion of objectively reporting the facts. We talked about whether objectivity was possible, but rarely stopped to consider whether it was useful.

American journalist Martha Gellhorn answered this question in her reporting on the Spanish Civil War, where she rallied against ‘all that objectivity shit’ in favour of capturing the day to day of life in war-torn Madrid. She did not write about Franco and the CNT anarcho-syndicalists, but about women waiting in line at the market, men shining shoes, and a boy who is killed, all in an instant, by shells raining down as his grandmother tries to hurry him home. She wanted you to know how it felt, and feelings are never objective. She wrote that ‘the people of the Republic of Spain were the first to suffer the relentless totality of modern war’, and that ’they were fighting for us all, against the combined force of European fascism. They deserved our thanks and our respect and got neither.’ We know her politics, we know her sentiments, and in her reporting they are acutely felt. The personal is political, the political is personal, and most other things are usually political and personal too.

Conceding that all essays are personal and subjectivity is key to good writing, I still feel a hesitation towards the truly personal essay. This essay might be as personal as I want to get. My mind is still very young and not fully formed and I feel like I still need to get the lay of the land a little, read a little more Adrienne Rich before I really commit to anything. Being a young woman is stressful enough without compounding it by getting vulnerable online right now. Maybe I will someday write about sex and trauma and the trials and tribulations of being a sensitive young woman, some day many years from now when I am protected by the distance and wisdom of old age. Maybe it won’t be as interesting then.

*Really I don’t think anyone under 35 has any business writing a memoir unless you’re like, Malala, but I digress.

**I read an interesting piece about the ethics of this on The Feminine Prose