i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

8 / The Subjects of the ArtistThe role Neel’s lectures and interviews played in the creation of a myth ofher life story is hardly exceptional. Art in general, and the artistic personality inparticular, have always been bound up with mythmaking. If Neel understoodthat a successful career would have to involve the “marketing” of a public personality,from which sources did she create her artistic persona? In this area,Neel, like other women artists, would have lacked role models. Women artistshave endured strong social pressure to construct their identity as “female,” toemphasize their womanliness despite their artistic talent. Yet without an image,an artist lacks substance. Without a myth, no fame validates one’s art. Womenartists have long understood that these strictures against unconventional behaviorhave served as a means of assuring that women would never fully be acceptedas artists. Because the breaking of rules of social behavior has been consideredsince the Renaissance to be a means of freeing oneself from outmodedartistic conventions, then women’s acceptance of conventional roles wouldperforce constrain the creative impulse. Virginia Woolf’s need to kill “TheAngel in the House”—the domestic self that is required to be sympathetic,charming, self-sacriƒcing—in order to become an effective writer has by nowbecome a feminist truism. During the 1920s, when Neel came of age, theAmerican poet Louise Bogan described the repercussion of women’s socializationas docile dependents: “Women have no wildness in them, / They areprovident instead, / Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts, / To eat dustybread.” Neel’s writing during this decade reveals that she had adopted thisfeminist view: “Oh, the men, the men, they put all their troubles into beautifulverses. But the women, poor fools, they grumbled and complained andwatched their breasts grow „atter and more wrinkled. Grey hair over a greydishcloth ...” 4 In her lecture at Bloomsburg State College in 1972, Neel putit even more directly. “In the beginning, I much preferred men to women.For one thing I felt that women represented a dreary way of life always helpinga man and never performing themselves, whereas I wanted to be the artistmyself!” 5Although one can hardly hope to assess the effect of Neel’s nervous breakdownat age twenty-nine on the subsequent course of her art and career, biographicalaccounts by Marcelo Pogolotti, the Belchers, and others suggest achange from a rather naive if rebellious young woman to a conƒrmed bohemian.6 After her total collapse, Neel adopted a stance of resolute oppositionto virtually everything that smacked of middle-class propriety or politics. Shecould have returned to her parents’ home to complete her recovery but choseinstead to summer in New Jersey with her friend Nadya Olyanova, throughwhom she had met Kenneth Doolittle. When, at the end of the summer, shemoved to Greenwich Village to live with the drug-addicted seaman who, as amember of the IWW, was also left-wing, Neel claimed citizenship in a “coun-