Lulu is the perfect 1950’s housewife. She has respectable manners, is an excellent hostess, and maintains a perfect household. The women of her neighborhood operate in lock step. They have a weekly schedule for cleaning, entertaining, shopping, and all aspects of wife-hood. They know better than to stray from this routine lest they be perceived as… odd. Lulu tries to bury her thoughts questioning this life, hide her actions considered subversive in the dark of sleepless night. She prepares her famous jell-o salads and plays cards with her neighbors. She refills cocktail glasses and attends her husband’s work parties to schmooze his boss for a promotion.
But like women of the time, Lulu is not able to receive help for her mental health after a tragic loss of a child. She spirals into paranoia, projection, and black-outs. In this, her husband, her doctor, and her neighbors fail her. Is this woman insane? Does she need a lobotomy? She presents as simply too troublesome and would be better suited if she were meek, mild, and quiet.
“He wanted the solution to be so simple, a modern convenience that could snap me back to normal.”
Meagan Church, The Mad Wife
A Mad Wife by Megan Church is a profound representation of the illusion required of housewives and women that everything is perfect. This expectation has weight. The path that the main character takes towards self-love and reconnection to those who love her is incredible. Based on several true events and the accounts of women’s lives, this novel almost reads as nonfiction. Church stated she was inspired by Sylvia Plath’s own words and found many other women’s stories of sufferings in silence, harsh irreversible medical treatments, and medical misunderstandings.
Stories like these educate and remind me how long and how deeply women have suffered and remained small so as to not effect a man’s life or image. It’s extremely important to keep these stories alive as a warning to not slip back into these policies and aesthetics. With the rise of the “trad-wife” influencer, we must remember that “perfect” housewife and “perfect” family and “perfect” kids need room to be allowed to be messy and have emotions and struggles.
“Stories have a way of finding us at just the right—or sometimes the most fragile—moment. This one is steeped in history, woven with grief and longing, and tangled in the complexities of the human mind. It explores the weight of silence, the ache of the unseen, and the shadows that linger in the spaces between what is known and what is lost.”
Meagan Church, The Mad Wife
Art has a role to play in the trajectory of ideals. Giving a visualization to certain values can cause culture shifts over time. By bringing these stories to life, we continue to address needs for social change and building deep empathy. Telling, showing, sharing the real stories of women, even fictionalized, continues to broaden the understanding of what diversity there is in just being alive. We can identify bits that we can relate to while seeing other bits that are so wildly different and come to an understanding that hey, that’s ok, that’s what it is to be human.
As a visual medium artist, I also connect so deeply to words. I love books and poems and speeches and lyrics. I guess this is what some call “thought daughter” aesthetic. Which is kind of why I wanted this blog, to get back to writing as a form of expression and interlock it with physical artworks. I will continue to share the art forms that I am enjoying, disliking, learning from, and being influenced by along with my own processes, experiences, and journey. As this book reminds me, I’m free to share the good and the bad times.