I AM NOT A MUSE
Juliet Fraser

I AM NOT A MUSE.

Silent. Passive. In service of another’s creativity.

I AM NOT A MUSE.

A woman. A body. Animated only by the male gaze.

No. There is too much baggage here. From the nine goddesses of the Greeks, Dante’s chaste infatuation with Beatrice or the self-mythology of Gala-Dalí, since time immemorial the artist-muse relationship has been gendered and wildly unequal. As Germaine Greer wrote,

‘The muse in her purest aspect is the feminine part of the male artist, with which he must have intercourse if he is to bring into being a new work. She is the anima to his animus, the yin to his yang, except that, in a reversal of gender roles, she penetrates or inspires him and he gestates and brings forth, from the womb of the mind.’1

She doesn’t mean literal intercourse, incidentally; rather, a psychic penetration. But after the creative act, how do we find our couple? He lies back to admire his seminal new work and she is, what? Flexing an aching wrist?

Second-wave feminists did sterling work challenging the metaphor of the muse, and along with it many other dreadful archetypes. In her essay ‘The Re-Vision of the Muse’, looking specifically at the poetry of Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn and Olga Broumas, Mary J. Carruthers observes that:

‘Poetic tradition has not given women a language in which they can readily imagine their lives with integrity and completeness. From muse to mother to mistress, women in poetry supply what is missing to men. They are the Other term in the universal dichotomy of oppositions between which the male universe swings…’2

How to escape this dichotomy? How to create a new language? For many female artists, the solution has been to annex the metaphor rather than abandon it, to become both muse and midwife to their own creative practices. As the feminist art historian Josephine Withers said of Lynda Benglis, ‘No longer a handmaiden, mistress, or model, she has become her own inspir