Breanna Claire
Against History
I read [history] a little as a duty; but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all, it is very tiresome; and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.
- Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
I visited Washington before I visited Seneca Falls. I can hardly be faulted for it. Washington is a fantasy city, with castles figurative and literal; where holy relics of progress and of tradition compete for our adoration; where great events, and the heroes that made them happen, are immortalized in Elysian fields of wide green spaces for the legs of the outer child, and the mind of the inner child, to run. Here is where the naked human soul is baptized in the waters of American history, and clothed in an American flag T-shirt; and where the boy or the girl is made into a paleontologist or a politician, an astronaut or an art historian. In Seneca Falls, history is wedged between a defunct church and a pizzeria. This is not a travesty, but a testament. Here history was not so much made as overcome.
Had I not lived less than 200 miles away, and had parents willing to drive me, I might not have been to Seneca Falls at all. I was 16, and I had chosen Elizabeth Cady Stanton for an assignment to read a biography of a famous woman. Research was quite optional, as was the oral presentation at the end of the project. Most students opted out, demonstrating the economy of effort so characteristic of schoolchildren, but I eagerly went forward, perhaps because the teacher stipulated that the presentation was to be given in the first person. I don’t remember what I told the class; all I remember was the peculiar thrill I felt in referring to Elizabeth Cady Stanton as “I.” I might have gotten a more memorable thrill yet had I given the presentation in women’s clothes, but in high school in the nineties, boys only wore women’s clothes on once- or twice-annual “Crossdressing Days,” and then only if they wore their deviation from social norms as a badge of honor every day, or if they were sufficiently assured of their manhood to wear a dress without self-consciousness.
Next to the visitor center in Seneca Falls is a dark granite wall with water flowing over its surface, like newly liberated tears that won’t stop. The flowing water allows the visitor’s face to be reflected in the stone. Inscribed on the wall are the words of the Declaration of Sentiments, adopted in Seneca Falls in 1848, the quietest revolution of that revolutionary year. “The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.”
The same year the delegates at Seneca Falls thus characterized history, Marx and Engels proclaimed that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” I read the Communist Manifesto a year after my visit to Seneca Falls, and thus began my dalliance with radical politics, which bore nothing but the most bitter fruit. Political ideologies, rooted in abstruse economic theories, lead one into head-spinning intellectual neuroticism, while the women’s rights movement, like all movements for civil rights, is rooted in observations as plain as day. Marx and Engels jumped the gun; there can be no class-conscious action as long as a class makes divisions among itself. “Can man be free if woman be a slave?” Shelley asks. I too jumped the gun, diving headfirst into political flapdoodle, stuffing myself with abstract propositions as if to fill a gaping void at the heart of my self.
I also read the Communist Manifesto the same year I read my first Jane Austen novel – the former rigidly dividing humanity into two antagonistic classes, the latter a delightfully sympathetic portrayal of a mechanics of the heart that transcends class divisions. While I was enraptured by Austen, for years I devoted more thought to Marx and Engels, a classic case of the squeaky wheel getting the grease. There are fewer injustices greater than that anger speaks with a louder voice than love. We demand change without while bowing to the status quo within. Literally and figuratively, we go to Washington before we go to Seneca Falls.
Washington is perhaps the only city in the world to be designed as a graphic representation of history. It gives history a shape: the triangle that connects the Capitol, the White House, and the Washington Monument; the triangle, which has signified stability ever since the Renaissance, as in the paintings by Leonardo and Raphael at the National Gallery. It gives history a direction; the Mall stretches westward from the Capitol, like the nation itself, scattering behind it the debris of history in the form of museums and monuments. And this history is given a frame; the Mall is flanked by avenues named Independence and Constitution, the two contradictory ideals on which the nation was founded – “constitution” literally meaning “putting together.” The Declaration of Independence asserted self-evident truths, and eleven years later, the Constitution came as an admission that those truths were not so self-evident after all, and needed to be codified into law. Now we find ourselves in need of further codification, answering the questions not anticipated by the cabal of white gentlemen in Philadelphia more than two centuries ago, as we try to fill in the blanks in the Constitution as though not trusting each other enough to apply our laws with decency and good sense. Aside from a single amendment granting them the franchise, women remain one of those blanks. But have they been left out of the Constitution because only men were expected to do the governing, or because only men needed to be governed?
On my last visit to the capital, at the corner of 15th Street and Constitution Avenue, in the shadow of the Washington Monument, I saw a bandstand topped by a banner reading “Bans Off Our Bodies.” It was another attempt to use art to drive history, rather than consigning art to be dragged along in history’s wake. On those rare occasions when art does affect the course of history writ large, it is usually in the form of exorbitant spending on art having unintended, dire consequences, like Pericles building the temples on the Acropolis, instead of strengthening Athens’s defenses, just before the Peloponnesian War, or Pope Julius selling indulgences to pay for the labor of Michelangelo and Bramante on the eve of the Reformation. Can art shape the course of history positively and deliberately, or will it never be more than a sideshow? When the Supreme Court, tuning out the music, finally did put its bans on women’s bodies a few weeks after my visit, the Speaker of the House, as a gesture of dissent, read a poem. And what did it avail? Politics is the zero of civilization, nullifying whatever other human invention it is coupled with, from art, to religion, to mass culture.
Art is for commiserating, not for making change. Art is for the spurned lover, the destitute ascetic, and the persecuted outsider. When utilized by those in power, it is perverted into propaganda. It is a testament to the greatness of the Old Masters that their work endures, that something redeeming can be distilled from it, that the faint voice of the creative individual is heard emanating from its depths, long after the patrons who commissioned the work for their own aggrandizement have been forgotten. Art is not so much a history as it is a consolation prize for those left out of history; it is to be found hidden in the corners of history, if only one can tear one’s attention away from the gaudy, hectoring monuments in the center. Except with the help of a blindfold, no visitor to Washington can see the museums before the monuments. And a blindfold is no attire for doing one’s civic duty.
I heard my intellectual calling in Washington at age 14. My family and I initially only planned to see the usual items of childhood interest: dinosaur skeletons, spacecraft, giant pandas, First Ladies’ ball gowns. But when we were left with some extra time after seeing the National Archives – how long, after all, does it take to look at a few pieces of parchment? – our curiosity was aroused by a concrete doughnut on the other side of the Mall, standing out from the tired piles of some revival or another of which we had had our fill. It was called the Hirshhorn Museum, the Smithsonian’s collection of modern art, and inside was a challenge to every received notion of not only how to depict the world, but even how to look at it. Just because those buildings may be farther away than those trees doesn’t mean one must paint them smaller. “L’exactitude n’est pas la vérité,” as Matisse said. A feeling can be more real than a physical appearance. The artworks at the Hirshhorn seemed not to be inert artifacts, but to take root within my soul and live on. The other museums provided information, but here I learned what could be done with it.
But I mostly only learned what men did with it, which often involved putting art at the service of one ideology or another: the Fascism of the Futurists, the Leninism of the Constructivists, the Communism of late Picasso, the commodity fetishism of Warhol. In art, as in history, left-wing revolutions alternate with right-wing revolutions, a dialectic without synthesis. While more women, people of color, and queer people are being acknowledged as important artists today, they have largely accepted the existing paradigm of art as the jealous little sister of politics, content to be but one tiny whitecap in an ocean of shouting. And so, as I have aged, and shed much of my youthful privilege, and as the actions of politicians seem to diverge more and more from the sentiments of art, I am less easily impressed. Cubist facture and Surrealist automatism are all right for an upper-middle-class teenager, but sooner or later, in art as in life, the ontological questions must be addressed. Art offers a different perspective, but as yet no new course of action.
Art is not the problem; the problem is that we have too much art, and not enough artists. No artist is ever “ahead of their time”; even the most avant-garde artists trail in the dust of history’s “great men,” and the art historian is like a sportswriter covering a junior varsity team. Keats warned of what would happen when poetry was imitated rather than created, when “men were thought wise who could not understand” Apollo’s glories.
Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead
To things ye knew not of – were closely wed
To musty laws lined out with wretched rule
And compass vile: so that ye taught a school
Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit,
Till, like the certain wands of Jacob’s wit,
Their verses tallied. Easy was the task:
A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask
Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race!
We might well substitute “politics” for “poesy”; we are held fast by musty laws and wretched rule of a more literal kind. Whether reading poems, citing Constitutional law, or invoking traditions made hazy by the diffusion of light out on history’s horizon, politicians continue to resuscitate ghosts, and shelter in ruins. Traditions are no more a nation than a few crumbling columns and a fragment of a pediment are a temple.
Walking east along the Mall, past the American history museum, I saw people in twos, threes, and fours holding placards expressing their opinions on the issue of the day, fragments of a once-united crowd gathered in front of the Supreme Court. What does one do after a demonstration is over? Go for a coffee? Or a beer? After shouting at a marble edifice for a few hours, with the anguished fury of a prophet of the apocalypse, the transition back to the usual activities of life is bound to be jarring. But herein lies the real power of the protest. One can hardly expect the neogods behind the Neoclassical façades to pay any heed to the buzz of the crowd outside, but this hive of humanity sweltering in the heat of a late spring day, and the heat of the political moment, is where friends are made. I would have a similar experience later that summer with other genderqueer people while we waited in a hallway to see a lawyer to help us change our names. Between the stories we shared, and the fears we expressed, one or another of us would remark that we didn’t expect so many people to be there. It is a lonely feeling to be genderqueer, just as it is a lonely feeling to sense the coming downfall of the nation’s institutions when everyone else seems to want to maintain the illusion of normalcy. So I say, those who protest together should visit the bars together afterwards. There is no need to go back home or to the hotel to drop their placards off; they can leave them at the museum, to be kept in storage until hindsight can measure the consequentiality of their action. A couple dozen newfound friends in this bar, a couple dozen more in that – hundreds of scorned prophets of democracy occupying bars all the way down the block.
I myself would be at a bar later that night, where I met a woman who was a painter, a singer, and a bartender. I regard the last of these as the finest art form of the three, as it is the one that most elicits openness and empathy. She said she could feel people’s pain. True friends are made not to stop crying, but to have someone to cry with. Cultivate friendship first, before taking on the thorny matters of the age, and we may just find that in commiseration is change.
Friendship provides reinforcement against politics’ inevitable invasion of the soul. It is useless to avoid politics, since politicians have a vested interest in forcing as many people as possible to choose sides. Like a dying star, politics expands ever outward in search of new fuel, incinerating everything in its path, until it becomes a political statement simply to exist. The chief problem with the politics of self-interest is not that it is selfish, but that it is short-sighted. It will not do to say, “This law does not affect me; therefore I have no opinion,” as each historical event sets in motion an unforeseen chain. First, the Jacobins killed the king, then they killed the supporters of the king, then they killed everyone deemed not to sufficiently oppose the king, and before long, the erstwhile leaders of the movement lay dead. Therefore, the discerning student of history takes a broad look at the past. For its first quarter century or so, the Smithsonian’s collections were all in one building. Perhaps some reintegration is necessary. The natural history and American history museums are next-door neighbors; they could be joined by a connecting wing, designed by some imaginative architect in a style fusing the International Style glass box with the Paleolithic mammoth-bone hut. The entrance to the American presidents exhibit would be guarded by a chest-thumping taxidermied gorilla. A Picasso would hang next to a peacock with fanned-out tail feathers, with enormous letters stenciled on the wall above reading, “Why have there been no great women artists?” Visitors on their way to see the World War II fighter jets would pass through a display of stone clubs and flint spear points, with wall text mooting competing theories on when and why people began to make war. Then we would be keenly aware that every tradition was once a novelty, and that every institution deemed “natural” is nothing of the sort. Women had abortions before there were governments to restrict them. What binds us now began as a choice.
As a society can be traced back to the choices that set its course, so can an individual be traced back to the choices that determine their character. In that spirit, I was keen to take in the Smithsonian’s exhibit about girlhood, the laboratory in which society experiments with different ways to make women; the time when creativity is crushed, and conformity is cultivated. Artifacts showed the various ways girls have been stripped of their creative agency. A typewriter that helped girls follow what was once their best path to economic independence. A checkered miniskirt that nearly got a girl suspended from school. Lewis Hine photographs of girls in textile mills. A container of toxic whitening powder to lighten black girls’ skin. But also included were examples of how girls assert their creativity, before they can be fed through the meat grinder. A Depression-era dress made from a flour sack. Boards and helmets of teenage professional skateboarders. Drawings of mermaids’ tails by a transgender girl. The exhibit was not divided in two; relics of freedom and relics of subjugation were freely arranged, and rightly so, because a girl’s creativity is not dependent on the materials, but on the mixture. By understanding the reagents of femininity, she can turn them to her own purposes, and formulate her own compounds. The exhibit was fittingly open-ended; visitors were invited to fill out cards just before exiting the gallery, and to display them on shelves, giving their own opinions about girlhood. On a card that asked, “What do you tell the world through your clothes?” I wrote,
That I believe in my own beauty.
That I want to radiate my love.
That my life is a work of art.
That being born with a male body is not an obstacle to being a beautiful lady.
Another card asked, “What do politicians need to know about girls today?” Many of my fellow visitors didn’t even need the whole card. Among the more laconic responses were, “My body my choice,” and “Pro-birth is not pro-life.” Another visitor had written, “They need to know that women get louder and stronger every day until we get the rights we deserve. They need to know that a woman’s body is not an object to be used and discarded. They need to know that women need to decide about their own bodies.” I maintain that the righteousness of a revolution is inversely proportional to the length of its manifesto. Even a protestor’s sheet of posterboard is a waste of forest, to say nothing of the Communists’ long-winded historical apologia.
Just to the west, the newest addition to the Smithsonian, the Museum of African-American History and Culture, pushes boldly across 14th Street, invading the territory of the monuments, initiating a war between these two media of history, which is not a fair fight. A monument is art at its most dangerous, presenting in an instant a simplistic picture of history that takes hours in a museum or library to debunk, giving an air of timelessness to a fleeting, narrow view of history. It might have been worse; the original plan for the Washington Monument included a statue of George Washington in a quadriga. Needless to say, this would not have aged well; we prefer that the cultish authority of our presidents be glossed over with humility and populism. Monuments deify the imperfect, and bully anyone who would dare point out their imperfections. They glorify war under the pretext of commemoration. And they provide a false finality to histories with which we are nowhere near finished reckoning. It is much easier to carve into a piece of stone a message about the moral universe bending toward justice than to bend it ourselves. The only constructive service monuments provide is as a backdrop to protests, as a visible reminder of the hypocrisy of the government. One can only hope there will still be room for protests after all the monument building. The location of the “Bans Off Our Bodies” bandstand may someday be the site of a monument to our latest war. More fittingly, it could be the site of the American women’s history museum that has been approved by Congress. But while I don’t purport to speak for all women, I would less rather have a museum than a space for free expression. History is taking over the spaces we need to make a future.
We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as a civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.
- Thomas Jefferson, inscription on the Jefferson Memorial
The cliché exhorts us to learn from history lest we repeat it, but history has shown itself to be both professor and prison warden. There are those who learn from history for the express purpose of repeating it. If the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, it means there is plenty of injustice in the past to provide precedent and formula for the nefarious. Tyrants can hone their craft by studying the past just as well as those who resist them. Counterrevolutionaries can learn from the mistakes of their predecessors to better stave off uprising. And history itself is weaponized. Past failures of social reform movements are invoked to dissuade people from taking them up today. The lingering resentment of one war ignites the next. The imperial mindset outlasts the empire. Tradition is an excuse for continued ignorance, and wrongdoings of the past perpetuate misery in the present. The enslavement of Africans centuries ago touched off a vicious cycle of poverty and racism. The subordination of women in the past is used as justification for the current subordination of women. History, as they say, doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes, making it a candidate for the worst poem ever.
Politics is the business of forcing people to choose one history over another. History is not merely a series of facts, but an interpretation of facts, and in a society that fetishizes everyone’s entitlement to their own opinion, everyone is a historian. Someone who says, “Back in my day, men were men and women were women!” is a historian, if a crude and uncritical one. Historians, professional and otherwise, fight a proxy war on behalf of the politicians. Unable to penetrate the fortress of our political institutions, we take out our anger on soft targets. Some accuse teachers of indoctrination. Others vent their wrath on monuments to disfavored historical figures, the loftiest of low-hanging fruits, vandalizing them or calling for their dismantling. The defenders of the monuments accuse them of wanting to destroy history. Would that it were so!
The only way to escape the tyranny of history is to go to its very heart, which is the same as going into our own hearts. To look back to the point at which myth diverges from reality, culture from nature, choice from necessity, tradition from progress, and nationality, religion, and politics from humanity is to go back to the nursery and strip the blue or pink blankets from ourselves. Until then, we are not so much individuals as concretions of history; not so much living things as fossils, whole in body but dead in mind, trapped in the ever-thickening amber of history.
It does not take much time for a visitor to Washington to see the degree to which history is the clay of which modern humankind is sculpted. Washington is the place people go to reduce themselves to abstractions, to wear their ideologies on their sleeves, sometimes literally. Souvenir stands sell shirts and hats with mindless slogans to those who forgot to pack their own. Democracy is the ability to buy apparel insulting the President blocks away from the White House. No one on the Mall needs to shout bigoted invective at me; their clothing does it for them.
If some words and symbols unequivocally signal to me to keep away, others are ambivalent. What am I to make of the American flag? There is a fine line between the flag as the symbol of a 250-year-old nation and as the symbol of the nation as it was 250 years ago. When a fixed symbol is made to stand for a changing entity, something has to give. A flag is not only a symbol of a nation, but an emblem of tradition, which is when history is frozen at some point between the differentiation of humanity and the time when science and art expose the artificiality of such divisions. A person can trace their cherished traditions back to the point most advantageous to them, when people like them were masters, other people servants, and still other people thought not even to exist. It would be helpful if, instead of the current fifty-star flag, everyone displayed a flag with a number of stars commensurate with the period of American history for which they are most nostalgic. Instead, I must run Washington’s gauntlet of flags on flagpoles, flags on shirts, and flags on politicians’ lapel pins, unable to distinguish friend from foe, to reach the welcoming haven of the 17th Street bars festooned with rainbow-colored flags. If the rainbow flag isolates a moment in history, it is when God promised never again to destroy its creatures, before governments arrogated that role to themselves.
Politics protects itself by generating a moral fog; it tells us that what we know in our hearts to be right is not always right, and what we know to be wrong is not necessarily wrong. Material self-interest is invariably the source of the exception; the Golden Rule is supplanted by the rule of gold. The original sin of this country was to replace the Declaration of Independence’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” with the Constitution’s “life, liberty, and property.” For the material self to dominate, the spiritual self must be silenced, and it is for this reason that politicians are indifferent, or even outwardly hostile, to the arts. The construction of a monument, or the reading of a poem at a press conference, far from promoting art by increasing its visibility, neuters it by narrowing its scope. Art serves a political cause at the cost of its greatest strength: its ability to inspire empathy. The human intellect is today employed only to change the players, when it could be changing the game.
I would like not to talk about politics, but that is a luxury I do not have. So I will do the next best thing: reclaim for morality what politics has stolen. Fitness for this task is quite independent of bourgeois notions of artistic skill. “Eloquence is dog cheap at the anti-slavery chapel,” Emerson remarked before the Civil War. So too at the abortion chapel.
Who will reassert the self-evidence of our truths? And how? Count me unimpressed with the growing number of women in elective office. To gain admission to the Neoclassical treehouse of the Washington boys’ club, they have had to play by the boys’ rules, begging for obscene sums of money from that other boys’ club, and making a fetish of power, guarding it, like Fafner’s dragon its gold, too assiduously to ever have occasion to use it. Politics is a natural career choice for the pathological; does it matter whether the overbearing neurotics be men or women? Is this the choice for which the suffragettes toiled?
Eighteen forty-eight gave rise to the last Romantic political tract: the Declaration of Sentiments; and the first Realist one: the Communist Manifesto. The former makes an appeal to people’s humanity; the latter concedes that people can only be motivated by material concerns. The former begins with the recognition of a moral mandate, the latter with a lengthy historical disquisition. The former ends with a call to gain new allies and organize future gatherings, the latter with a call to “forcible overthrow.” The Communist Manifesto has elicited more dramatic action in the years since, but has it achieved more results? Only that revolution is right which does not incite a counterrevolution, and only right means can achieve right ends.
“The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried,” Emerson wrote. That power is about to be tested, but neither the courtrooms nor the halls of Congress will be its proving ground. To battle for power with the power-hungry is a fool’s errand. Paintbrushes and pens are not weapons of war. And neither are we. Love precedes politics. A baby is cradled in its mother’s arms before being whisked away to be catalogued and categorized and weaned on algorithms. As a lofty tree is snapped in twain by a gale, while a frail reed endures whole, a chain of humanity held together only by sympathy withstands assault better than a line of rock throwers. Police have tools to unchain protestors from trees, but there are no tools to break the bonds of affection. Signs can be ripped from hands, but not love from hearts. As in the days of the Underground Railroad, the power of love will circumvent unjust laws where the frontal assaults fail. And who best to craft a society of mutual support than those who have looked out for each other of necessity for centuries? On my little card at the girlhood exhibit that asked what I wanted politicians to know, I wrote, “Your services are no longer required. We would like your resignations on our desk Monday morning. Girls will rule the world with LOVE.” Rather than cluttering up the Mall with another building, the women’s history museum might be housed at the Capitol, after it is done fulfilling its current function.
But for now, the Mecca of American women’s history is still in an unassuming small town in western New York. The Gould Hotel, a block away from the site of the Seneca Falls Convention, was fairly well populated on the weekend of my first trip there since high school, though I imagine most of the guests were there for the nearby wineries rather than the history. On my evening walk, I turned off the main street at Elizabeth Cady Stanton Park, and went down a flight of steps to get to a riverfront park affording a view of the old Seneca Knitting Mills, now being developed into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. On my way down the steps, I passed three boys loitering beneath the trees. They looked to be pre-teens, about the age when the boy starts to become the man, and therefore the age at which I began to lose myself. I kept my eyes straight ahead; it was still early in my transition, but I already had an intuitive sense of whom I could make eye contact with, and whom I should avoid. Some fifty yards on, and about half as far from the river, I heard a shout behind me.
“Are you a man or a woman?”
That is how it is to be a prisoner of history.
