Kate Bush and her women

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@ifi.uio.no>]

This  article was recently published in the Norwegian magazine
"Vagant". "Vagant" is an arty magazine with, I would guess, a very
small circulation. I am Norwegian, the article was written in
Swedish and I have translated it to English. The translation is problaby
pretty horrible, but I think it is might be readable. I think it's
an interesting article. 



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"this house is full of M-M-MADNESS"

An article about Kate Bush and her women 
	by Johann Grip


	To begin with a (rhetorical?) question: In our culture, is 
there a specifically female literary tradition that differs from
a typically male, patriarchal tradition?
	If there is, then what does it look like, and what would this have
to do with Kate Bush?
	According to the authors of the book "The Madwoman in the
Attic" (Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gaber, New Haven/London 1979)
the first question has to be answered affirmative. Starting from
the 19. century authors Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and the later
Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, they can trace a
distinctly feminine literary tradition with "pictures of entrapment and
escape, fantasies of mad "twins" that play the roles of anti-social
surrogates for an unselfish I, metaphors for physical pain
in frozen landscapes and a furious inner - these patterns are
recurring throughout this tradition, together with manic
descriptions of illnesses as anorexia, agoraphobia and 
claustrophobia" (s.xi).
	And why should just female authors be haunted by these
metaphors and fantasies? According to the same book: "Confined in
an overwhelmingly male-dominated social architecture, these
literary women were trapped in the literary constructions that
Gertrude Stein called 'patriarchal poetry'" (s.xi).
	A literary woman in the 19. century doesn't only live in a house 
owned and built by men, "she was also hindered and enclosed by the 
Palaces of Art and Houses of Fiction that male writers authored."
	With these women the serious and difficult attempts
to redefine the womans place in art, fiction and society 
started.
	Something this specifically female literary tradition had
to do was to examine the ruling metophors that has described an
excluding, wholly male process of creation, in which the women has
been tied up in either angelic or monstrous shapes. One is tempted
to cite a few lines by Norman O. Brown as an example of this
picture of women: "Poetry, this sexual act. Sexuality is poetry. 
The women is our creation or Pygmalions statue. The women is 
poetry; (Petraca's) Laura is in fact poetry." (The Madw., p 13).
	Using this feminist theory, I will take a walk through Kate
Bush's landscapes and try to show how such an investigation of
traditional (patriarchal) metaphors and attempts to break free of
them is staged in a excellent fashion.
	The journey starts on the first record Kate Bush produced
on her own, "The Dreaming" (-82), on the last track of the album,
"Get Out of My House."


_THE HOUSE OF FICTION_

In "Get Out of My House" the listener/reader finds "pictures of
imprisonment and escape." Here we meet the Woman's ambigous attempt to
lock herself in her own house and at the same time trying to lock 
the Man, the male, outside. The Man is drawn to, and controls,
the outside world.

	"When you let the door was (slamming)
	 You paused in the doorway
	 As though a thought stole you away
	 I watch the world pull you away"

The Woman has acquired this metaphorical house and key. She is 
full of "anxiety" over this crime to the patriarchal tradition. 
She locks the door. However, she has to pay dearly for this
victory. She has stepped into her own trap. She has her own house,
but she has lost the world:

	"I'm barred and bolted.. and I
	 Won't letcha in"

Has the woman in "Get Out of My House" really conquered her own
woolfian house, from which she can develop her distinctly feminine
universe? No, the scenario is a bit more complicated than that:

	"This house is as old as I am
	 This house knows all I have done"

This house, that becomes a picture of the woman herself, is

	"(This house is) full of m-m-m-my mess
	 This house is full of m-m-mistakes
	 This house is full of m-m-madness"

It is a house that still is "built" by men, and as architects
they have defined the house's/the Woman's shape and being. 
Against this monstrous binding the Woman has to oppose by 
dressing up in the masculine metaphor of aggression:

	"This house is full of, full of, full of, full of fight"

A fight both inside the Womans house and with the Man from the
outside, who acts as the seductive Devil's Advocate of the tradition, 
and who tries to force his way in into her fictive house with 
promises and threats:

	"Woman let me in
	 Let me bring in the momories
	 Woman let me in
	 Let me bring in the Devil dreams"

The attemps to acquire the Womans fictitious house seems to fail:

	"I will not let you in
	 Don't you bring back the reveries
	 I turn into a bird
	 Carry further that the word is heard"

But don't be fooled. The Womans attempt to escape as a bird is just
going to bring her out into a world controlled by men. And this
romantic metaphor, the bird, does not have sufficient force. It's
song does not have the force to resist the Man. The Temptor suggests this
when he in the shape of air tries to bind the bird/the Woman with a
(cold) kiss, the binding touch of love:

	"I turn into the wind
	 I blow you a cold kiss
	 Stronger than the song's hit"

Yet the Woman resists in an ironic manner. She decides to enter a
strange compromise:

	"I will not let you in
	 I face toward the wind
	 I change into the mule
		'Hee-haw'
		'Hee-haw'"

Into a mule. Both the Man and the Woman has in fact been transformed 
into this mixture of different elements. This would suggest
that no-one has won, that none of them has managed to kill the
other, because "As we will show, the images of 'angel' and
'monster' have been so everpresent in the male litterature that
these images have also penetrated women's writing to such a degree
that women definitly have 'murdered' one or the other figure" (p.
17).


_"IS THERE SO MUCH HATE FOR THE ONES WE LOVE"_

"What concerns all the nonsense that Henry and Harry were talking
about, the necessetiy of "I am God" to be able to create (I assume
they mean "I am God, I am not a woman") - this "I am God", that
mokes the creation to an act of loneliness and pride, this picture
of God that creates heaven, earth and sea, this is the picture that
has confused women." (Madw., Anais Nin, p. 3).
	In "Running up that Hill/Deal with God," the first song on
Kate Bush's latest record "Hounds of Love/The Ninth Wave" (-85), we
meet a scenario not unlike the one proposed by Anais Nin. We here
meet the Woman who would, very much, like to arrange a swap with
God or somebody in a similar position:

	"And if I only could
	 I'd make a deal with God
	 And I'd get him to swap our places"

A swap like that would make the woman able to control the outer
world, from which she locked herself in in "Get Out of My House."
And she would no longer run away from something, escape, she would
run with aim, with direction.

	"Be running up that road
	 Be running up that hill
	 Be running up that building"

This song, that I will refrain from exploring in greater depth
due to the length of this article, describes a Woman, "free"
from "anxiety".

In the next song, "Hounds of Love" we meet this Woman's direct
opposite, the mirror image, let us call her an innocent Snow
White. The opening line of the song is not written on the lyric 
sheet. It says  "Symmetry! It's coming," and I think it suggests 
an attempt to "repair" the previous song's - in the patriarch's 
eyes - dangerous wishes.
	Here we meet Snow White, as we have chosen to call her, as
an innocent child, filled with fear as to what the outer world
(dominated by men) has to offer:

	"When I was a child
	 Running in the night
	 Afraid of what might be
	 Hiding in the dark
	 Hiding in the street"

Then the text returns to the present where we meet the Woman,
confused by what Anais Nin called "this image of God as lone
creator of heaven, earth and sea, this is the picture that has
confused the woman."

	"I've always been a coward
	 And I don't know what's good for me"

This Woman is chased by the Hounds of Love, a repressive love that
strives to keep her down by pointing out that her will is not
independant. By doing this the woman, in my eyes, is transformed into 
a "Monkey of the Working Class," or, I should say, into a different
kind of bird than we are going to meet later - not into "this
Blackbird" - but into a parrot. The Woma