Response to Wife Beating and the Written Page

The association between women and the blank page as obstacles and adversaries reminds me of other instances where the color white is associated with women and mystery, like Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (where a strange woman all in white is encountered at night and is found to have escaped from an asylum) and the myth (or half myth) of Emily Dickinson always wearing white for mysteriously symbolic reasons.

Whether the latter is true or not, Dickinson did associate (wearing) the color white with mystery and knowledge in her poetry, which, at least in part, does seem to evoke the idea of the writer and the blank page as well:

(307)

A solemn thing – it was – I said -
A Woman – white – to be -
And wear – if God should count me fit -
Her blameless mystery -

(761)

From Blank to Blank --

A Threadless Way

I pushed Mechanic feet --

To stop -- or perish -- or advance --

Alike indifferent --

In this light, Melville’s white whale is itself a blank page which fights for survival in resisting violent inscription, and one might even ask whether writing is a necessary, natural, and moral act, whether forcing fiction onto empty space is not violence which will only beget violence, whether a text determined to conquer the blank page is not a kind of crippled Ahab doomed to fail in his mad quest?

(761)

If end I gained

It ends beyond

Indefinite disclosed --

I shut my eyes -- and groped as well

'Twas lighter -- to be Blind --