The following is an edited excerpt from Unaccustomed Tenderness: On Airless Spaces by Hannah Proctor, a new essay featured in Airless Spaces by Shulamith Firestone — out now.
Airless Spaces is characterized by thwarted characters, stifling atmospheres and small rooms. At first glance, Shulamith Firestone’s second and final book seems not only airless but cramped and constricted, like one of the many strip-lit institutional rooms that appear on its pages. Its claustrophobic, thumbnail narratives rarely gesture to a world beyond themselves; time barely passes. Published in 1998, Airless Spaces makes a striking departure from the grand scales, zooming velocities and sweeping temporalities of Firestone’s audacious first book, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. Was Airless Spaces a response to the failures to achieve the feminist revolution proposed by her earlier work?
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In short fragments alternating between the first and third person, Airless Spaces introduces a litany of struggling and often medically sedated characters. Holly, involuntarily hospitalized, hopes to ‘crash, that is sleep all day and night to escape her imprisonment’ but instead finds herself unable to sleep at all, while Bettina with ‘nerves worn to rag ends without even a blink or two’ is so wired that she wants to ‘jump out of her skin’. Lucy nearly faints when her dose of Trifalon is increased and feels ‘old and ready to die’, wishing she could ‘faint all the way, blackout, and never wake up again’. Once out of the hospital and back into the world, there is little, if any, sense of recovery: not only do many of Firestone’s characters end up back in hospital, but her stories focus relentlessly on the intense difficulties encountered when discharged former patients – many of whom feel lost without the frustrating yet consoling rhythms, routines and ‘juvenile quasi-activity’ of the hospital – attempt to reestablish their daily lives [read excerpts from these short stories, here].
Incapacity, indecision, inertia – the depressive psychic experiences recounted in these pages are characterized by an empty stuckness.[1] Rachel emerges from hospital ‘fat, helpless, unable to make the smallest decision, speechless’. Shopping, dressing, reading, writing, folding, washing, caring, filing, talking, wanting, masturbating, crying, waiting; back at home after the hospital there are so many things that it is difficult or impossible to feel or do. Even committing suicide would be too decisive. Instead, Firestone describes a blank yet ‘lucid’ form of seclusion with ‘nothing to be secluded for’. One of the book’s shortest chapters describes a woman who receives an experimental treatment for cancer which is effective but she then realizes: ‘There was nothing, noone in her life for her to reach out toward’.
These stories cannot be read as having any neat causal relation to Firestone’s involvement with, and withdrawal from, the women’s liberation movement. In contrast to The Dialectic of Sex, Kathi Weeks notes, ‘the author of Airless Spaces is no longer an agent, or by this point even a subject, of feminist history.’[2] Yet there are occasional glimpses of Firestone’s relationship to the women’s movement and to her status as a theorist and activist within it. A character called Rozzie, who like Firestone studied at art school in Chicago, describes some of the antagonisms and ‘coups’ within factions of New York Radical Feminists that led to her losing touch with some of her old friends, while in the closing section, ‘Suicides’, a chapter is devoted to a photographer who, before killing herself in her bathtub, had taken a picture of the unnamed narrator alongside other women from the movement in which she ‘read as the leader of the group’.
In ‘I Remember Valerie’, Firestone reflects on brief encounters with Valerie Solanas, author of the infamous 1967 SCUM Manifesto, who was imprisoned for attempting to kill Andy Warhol in 1968. Firestone describes going to visit Solanas at home, following her release from an institution for the ‘criminally insane’, out of curiosity rather than sympathy.[3] Later she encounters Solanas begging on the street and a friend tells her they had seen Solanas ‘covered with sores and wearing only a blanket.’[4] She only hears of her again when she reads her obituary. Firestone’s depiction of Solanas as an isolated madwoman, who died alone in obscure circumstances, seems to almost anticipate the descriptions of her own death that focused on individual psychic unravelling. Her account refuses to articulate what significance she attaches to these memories, but it nonetheless demonstrates her continued concern with the legacies and public status of the women’s liberation movement – of which, she claims, Solanas was never a part. ‘I Remember Valerie’ concludes with a mention of Mary Harron’s 1996 Solanas biopic I Shot Andy Warhol, which she says she didn’t see.
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Reading Airless Spaces in the twenty-first century, I was struck not so much by the book’s anachronisms but by how apropos to the present it seems, as well as by the forms of sociality and care it does contain beyond first appearances. For all the daily defeats and difficulties Firestone describes, and for all the failures of friendship and connection it documents, Airless Spaces is not a book that could be characterized as either solipsistic or detached from broader social conditions. Steeped in regret yet resisting sentimentalism, the book coolly yet sympathetically describes the lives of marginalized people struggling to survive. Her ‘losers’ are the kinds of people who are rarely either literary protagonists or idealized political subjects, but whose experiences, Firestone’s book quietly insists, should not be ignored. It is full of unreturned phone calls, lost rolodexes of addresses, failed flirtations, undeclared loves, the deaths of estranged friends, incorrect invitations, unattended funerals. Despite all the loneliness it surveys, many people appear in Airless Spaces: people living on disability benefits, alimony and pensions; people struggling to pay their rent; people living in trailer parks or apartments with broken faucets that can’t be repaired. Failed writers and painters. Dead poets. The elderly, the sick, the disabled.
These people, though often isolated, are frequently dependent on the state or on their friends, family and neighbors for support. Though Firestone’s stories are descriptive rather than prescriptive, their emphasis on both waged and unwaged forms of care speak to contemporary Marxist feminist work on mutual aid, reciprocal care and social reproduction. Home health aides, social workers, nurses, security guards, caregivers and immigration officials appear alongside friends and acquaintances, embodying chosen and coerced forms of interdependency and isolation, reciprocity and withdrawal, antagonism and compliance, resignation and resistance, kindness and violence.
In ‘Hospital’, Corinne lets her body go limp while psychiatric hospital workers and security cops force her into a shower. Airless Spaces may not demand or depict militant organized resistance, revolutions or grand alternatives, but it never accepts the social hardships it charts. Roberta, awaiting the prick of a blood test needle, resolves that ‘she would never get used to it’, while Bettina steals the thermostat control dial so she can moderate the ward temperature to make her insomnia more bearable. Fleeting moments of softness flash up in otherwise hard lives: ‘Unhappy and unloved’, Leon Feldsher – who lives in low-income housing and receives disability benefits for his depression – asks his home support worker for a hug, while Karen’s ninety-seven-year-old grandmother – who attempted suicide after her husband died – ‘shed tears at the unaccustomed tenderness of gesture when Karen tucked in her old light blue comforter up around her chin’.
The story ‘Stanley Moss’ is narrated by a woman who describes the writing of her friend, a philosopher:
It was a philosopher’s look at love, but (I have often regretted) I was put off by page 2, a long argument asserting that Marx was madly in love with his wife Jenny. I did not read any further, not understanding what difference this made in any serious philosophical argument.
This parenthetical regret seems to invert her previous disregard of love as negligible, unserious, irrelevant to revolutionary political thought. Filled with loss, loneliness and failures of connection, Airless Spaces insists on taking love seriously by exploring the uneven damage inflicted by an unjust and oppressive world inimical to loving.
- Hannah Proctor, Unaccustomed Tenderness: On Airless Spaces, taken from Airless Spaces by Shulamith Firestone.
Shulamith Firestone’s visionary first book The Dialectic of Sex dared to look at how feminism could shape the future. Finding herself drifting into a new ‘airless space’ after her experience of New York City radical feminist groups, Firestone wrote her first work of fiction.
Airless Spaces portrays the psychic suffering, bureaucratized poverty and small crises of everyday life. In a series of vignettes about institutions and identity, Airless Spaces follows characters in psychiatric wards and out in the streets of New York City to move beyond the spectacular and frightening surfaces of institutional spaces to record acts of cruelty and kindness.
With an accompanying Reader featuring contributions by Laya Firestone Seghi, Lourdes Cintron, Susan Faludi, Chris Kraus, Lola Olufemi and Hannah Proctor.
[1]: Sianne Ngai observes that the stories that comprise Airless Spaces ‘focus on what we might think of as depression’s autonomy: its power to kill off all other affective attachments, its ultimate indifference to its object.’
[2] Weeks, p. 745.
[3] Firestone, Airless Spaces, p. 130.
[4] Firestone, Airless Spaces, p. 132.