Uninvited Intimacy

It took me over an hour to get home today. I left my jacket at my work area, and had to ride the shuttle back from the parking lot. Today I worked at the farthest end of the property. It is a long ride, and I was annoyed at the situation I’d put myself in. Not just forgetting my jacket, but also for a thousand tiny acts of self-sabotage and cowardice. In other words, I was on a dingy work shuttle and having a small mood swing.

As the shuttle swung out around the grounds, other people shuffled on. A small group of women boarded, already mid-conversation. The main speaker was a plain woman with a round belly, a bulbous facial mole and frizzy hair. Though at first glance, I disliked her, I warmed up to her as she told her story.

“She came up to me and called me a dumb ass in front of my crew for going out into the rain. I don’t know what science class she went to, but I’d rather be in my car with four rubber tires that standing around with a bunch of metal and lightning flashing everywhere. And she called me a dumb ass in front of my crew!” She gestured emphatically, tossing her gold hoop earrings and feathered hair, “So I told her, ‘Don’t you never call me outside my name again in front of my crew!’”

An interesting turn of phrase, I thought. “Outside my name,” as if any other reference would be demeaning, no matter what the intent. What an individualistic perspective.

The woman’s audience still listened appreciatively, so she continued, “On top of that, she spreads other people’s information. If you wanna talk to me in hypotheticals and not use no particulars or names, I’ll roll like that, but when she starts talking, I just wave my hand and say ‘I don’t know and I don’t want to know.’”

And I thought, “Good for you, she sounds like an idiot.”

The next stop was crowded, and a wiry woman in her forties sat across from me, and addressed the young man who had boarded with her, seated next to me. “She had been messing with them both, but she went to the funeral.” And though I should have been moved immediately by the statement, both by the thought of having to decide whether to attend a loved one’s funeral despite one’s indiscretions, and also by the weary demeanor which betrayed the woman’s loss—I was not so empathetic. My first uncensored thought was, “Oh, this is going to be good.”

“She was there when you got there?” Said the sleepy-eyed young man beside me.

“No, I was here. They told me. They asked her to leave, but she didn’t, so they called the cops. You know she (her emphasis and gestures indicating a different female) went and picked up his things from the courthouse and his cell phone was bloody where he’d been returning her text message. There was a message that hadn’t been sent, ‘I love you, Mom.’ But it hadn’t been sent.”

Here the boy murmured some affirmative, and it crossed my mind that I shouldn’t be looking directly at her as I listened to her story. I looked to the head of the bus where three young men just out of their teens were sitting, dressed slightly too stylishly to be at work. One made eye contact, which I did not break and did not smile. Unnerved, he looked back at the speaker, a blonde with a new baseball hat. “I mean, I like her or whatever, but-“

Now the woman across from me started talking again, “Public Menace is what they got her on. She probably got out in a few hours.” She barely shrugged. “The director of JCYC (Jefferson County Youth Services, indicating that the deceased person was under 18, or just over) made a copy of his transcript with the 4.0 grade point average and framed it and gave it to her.”

“Was is a shotgun?” This guy next to me was a soft touch, I think.

“No, that was just gossip. It was a .38. He had it on him, and tried to fight him, but he wouldn’t fight. His face was all scratched up. So the guy shot him in the chest, then twice in the back as he ran away. The shotgun was just rumors.”

As the sleepy boy next to me drawled out some response, the conversation from the head of the bus became more animated. The blond was deeply expressive and waved his hands, “And she tried to kiss me but I was like, ‘No!’ and backed her off of me.”

“He used to come over when he was just a kid and sit on my counter with these cowboy boots and kick on my cabinets with them. He liked the sound, but it made me so mad,” She said without displeasure, smiling absently. “He was banging up my cabinets.” As she looked warmly into the space by my feet, the boys at the head of the bus laughed loudly at some unrelated joke.

Shortly, the shuttle pulled up to the guard shack, and after so many stories of intrusion, and the drain of unwanted intimacy with others, I was the first to stand up to go, clinging my sweater to me tightly as I walked through the metal detectors and to my car.

I hate my job.

“You look sweaty,” the truck driver said as she lifted the heavy package over her head. Surprised by the voice, the girl dropped the package. At seventy pounds, more than half her weight, it thudded on the floor of the truck dangerously close to her foot. Inhaling deeply for calm, she turned to the middle aged man and answered, “It’s hot in here,” as she steadied herself to lift the package again.

“You should learn to be cool.”

“This is heavy, do you plan on giving me a hand?”

“Oh, no, I have to go straighten out the truck.”

He scuttled off, his little legs crablike under his boxy frame, as she heaved the box into its place. Her hands throbbed with bruises yet to surface when she knelt down to pick up the packages, but she had to work fast enough to keep the boxes coming into the truck from piling up and crushing her. Finally some inscrutable event spurred her manager to release her in a suddenly magnanimous tone.

She drank her water as she left, the old timers eying her suspiciously, as if drinking water were a sign of weakness. “Baaaa, sheep,” she thought to herself, and reminded herself that she would never be in their position. The shuttle pulled up outside her building, filled with the usual suspects. First there was the young man with the long Mohawk, tied at the nape of his neck, then the quiet middle aged man with bulging eyes, then three teenagers who spoke in non sequiturs and compared leg hair.



She refrained from rolling her eyes until she hopped off the shuttle, and filed into the guard shack to pass through the metal detectors. She triggered the first alarm, and it beeped plaintively, not even earnestly. She dropped her keys and wallet into a bucket and passed through the through the second one, again triggering the alarm. The machines were conspiring against her. A large woman with a scar over her brow ridge stepped out with a wand, waving it over her figure ominously. First her arms, then her chest, then down to her hips, where her belt triggered the alarm.

“Oh, that’s my belt.”

“Take it off.”

“What? I’ve never had to do this before.”

“Are you ready to take off your belt yet?”

“Fine!”

Grabbing her belt, she loosened the prongs and dropped her pants around her ankles, stepping out and toward the dyke with the wand.

“Oh, and my bra! It’s an underwire,” and off came the shirt as well, thrown onto a pile with the pants.

“Mam, this is really unnecessary.”

“Oh no, It’s ok. You’re just doing your job.”

Now naked except for her work boots and dirty leg warmers, she walked back through the metal detector without triggering it. Grabbing her clothes, she walked out the door. Stunned and amused, the other guards looked at the big woman, red in the face and frustrated, who stepped back to her area by the wall.

“Bitch,” she muttered, just as the girl walked back through the door and through the metal detector, still naked.

“Forgot my keys,” she said with a smile, giving the woman a stare which she did not return

Family, Sacrifice and Literary Endurance

While exploring the lives three authors set before me, I found that all three writers were unfortunate enough to have fathers who were destructive influences in their lives. I feel that this was less a coincidence than a shared impetus to write and strike out on their own as creative individuals. The atypical home lives only added to the revolutionary character of their writing, which at the time it was written, was incendiary just because it existed. It is the criticism they endured that was the main form of commentary on their station in life, and on their writing. The sacrifices of marginalized artists can be significant, and in the cases of writers Mary Wollstonecraft, Felicia Heman, and Dorothy Wordsworth, their respective sacrifices are inextricable from their adult familial strategies.

Wollstonecraft was the most personally assailable. Fittingly, her writing is also the most audacious of the three writers. A Vindication of the Rights of Women was not only business-like prose, but also addressed to Tealeyrand, Bishop of Autun, who was handling a case for public education of both sexes at the time. Further, she avoided marriage for most of her life and lived what would be a rather scandalous life, even now. Though her relationships were sometimes experimental, she still suffered from the same injuries as married women at the time. Her lover Imlay left her in Revolutionary France with a newborn, prompting her to attempt suicide (Masters of British Literature, pg. 145). The desertion echoes Felicia Hemans’s experience both as a child of a wandering man, and the wife of one. In their own ways, they all tried to construct substitute adult familial arrangements.

Wollstonecraft spent what appears to have been a good deal of her life pursuing men, not promiscuously, but with the devotion of a spouse. In a turn both ironic and fitting, her Wikipedia page is broken down chronologically, with each of her significant lovers given a heading. Wollstonecraft’s writing illustrates her understanding of the emotional economics of marriage in a way that indicates to me, that she was made keenly aware of the cost of dependency in an emotional sense as a lover.

Heman’s early abandonment by her father, and later by her husband indicates a woman who craved the stability of the family she had lost, and makes it easy to see why she withdrew to her family’s mantle. After the departure of her husband left her with five children, Hemans withdrew to her family’s mantle, a move which both provided security for her children and liberty for her to write. Establishing herself as an “affectionate, tender, and vigilant mother” in preface to her poetry along with residing with family protected Hemans from the sort of criticism that Wollstonecraft endure (Masters of British Literature, pg. 515). As well, Hemans did not write revolutionary prose, she is better known for her romanticized depictions of family and childhood. Psychologically, this may reflect her early life experiences, and a tendency to fantasize about better circumstances, but it also shielded her from the crossfire Wollstonecraft engaged in, a move which provided Hemans with comfort, but denied her the fury which made Wollstonecraft’s work enduring, if even in notoriety.

Heman’s poetry was less revolutionary in its message than for other reasons. Its erudite tone and commercial nature were threatening to the public in a time when women were strongly encouraged to decline commercial affairs and were almost totally denied education. Further, her poetry show poet-laureate aspirations, which not only threatened the men in the literary world, but also put her in direct competition with them in terms of merit, even if her gender blocked her from gaining the distinction. Heman’s poem Casabianca and “The Spartan Mother and her Son” are good examples of her appreciation for the military and patriotism. (Hermans and Home, pg 204)In that sense, Casabianca is fittingly her best-remembered poem. It combines the incendiary elements which made the critics of the time take note, as well as the softening aspect of a woman writing sentimentally about a child, enough to make it acceptable for public consumption.

Dorothy Wordsworth’s relationship with her brother was most intriguing of all three relationship constructs. Her attachment to her brother was very strong, and she shared some of the domestic duties with William Wordsworth wife, without appearing to incur any animosity for it (Masters of British Literature, pg. 279). During her life with him they worked as a pair, with her gathering imagery and journaling to provide her brother with material. Her Grasmere Journals might be the best example of this.

Though her familial arrangement likely drew attention at the time, the move was not so out of step with the thinking of the era. In the 1856 text “A Physiology of Marriage,” William Alcott asserts that the “leading design” of marriage, is “to form a brotherhood or sisterhood for life.” Though this was published around the time of Dorothy’s death, the times do not change so quickly that she could not have been embodying a nascent form of Alcott’s philosophy. Understandably, Dorothy has been least covered by critics. Of the three writers, he adhered most firmly to the feminine mold of the times, living most comfortably and gaining the least attention for herself. Fittingly, she has been the least investigated and dispersed.

In summation, I posit that the respective lifestyles of Wollstonecraft, Hemans and Dorothy Wordsworth were both an extension of their writing styles and also an influence on their enduring power. The more incendiary and direct Wollstonecraft is still better known than the other two writers, with Dorothy Wordsworth being least known. Working within the system allowed for a much more comfortable lifestyle, but didn’t garner the attention that gave Wollstonecraft and Hemans their relative celebrity. To end, their writing styles, familial strategies and enduring attention are all linked for these women.








Works Cited
Damrosch, David, and Kevin J.H. Dettmar, eds. Masters in British Literature. Peason, Longman, 2008
Lootens, Tricia. “Hemans and Home: Victorianism, Feminine “Internal Enemies,” and the Domestication of National Identity.” Modern Language Association 109 (1994)
Kelly, Gary, ed. Felicia Hemans. Broadview Literary. 2002: 211
Alcott, William. The Physiology of Marriage. Boston: Jewett. 1860: 13