"The Blank Page" and the Issues of Female Creativity

Abstract

When the "Mona Lisa" was stolen from the Louvre in Paris in 1911 and was missing for two years, more people went to stare at the blank space than had gone to look at the masterpiece in the 12 previous years.-BARBARA CARTLAND, Book of Useless Information "The female genital, like the blank page anticipating the poem, is an absence, a not me, which I occupy."-SANDRA MCPHERSON, "Sentience," The Year of Our Birth Consider for a moment Ovid's story of Pygmalion: a king, shocked at the vices of the female disposition, creates a beautiful statue, significantly an ivory statue white as snow, with which he falls in love.Pygmalion brings his lovely statue presents, dresses it, bedecks it with jewels, fondles its curves, takes it to bed, and prays to Venus that his wife be (or be like) his "ivory girl."When he feels the ivory under his fingers soften, "as wax grows soft in sunshine, made pliable by handling," Pygmalion is astonished with joy: "It is a body!" 2 Not only has he created life, he has created female life as he would like it to be-pliable, responsive, purely physical.Most important, he has evaded the humiliation, shared by many men, of acknowledging that it is he who is really created out of and from the female body.Our culture is steeped in such myths of male primacy in theological, artistic, and scientific creativity.Christianity, as feminist theologians have shown us, is based on the power of God the Father, who creates the natural world of generation out of nothing.3

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