90 Second Narratives
Season 7: “Community”
Episode 9: “Community in Loneliness”
Sky Michael Johnston:
Hello and welcome to 90 Second Narratives. I’m your host, Sky Michael Johnston. Our storyteller today is Dr. Fay Bound Alberti, a Reader in History at the University of York. Here she is with her story, “Community in Loneliness.”
Fay Bound Alberti:
The story that I want to tell you is about loneliness. In my book, A Biography of Loneliness, I wrote about Sylvia Plath, the writer who like Virginia Woolf wrestled with loneliness. Virginia Woolf, whose dates were 1882 to 1941, talked about her deliberate alienation from others in order to reach the bottom of the vessel and to see the world differently. Like Plath, who lived from 1932 to 63, Woolf found creativity in loneliness, but she also found the constraints of domesticity and the mundanity of woman’s life made her lonely. So, in both women’s writing we find the expectations of gendered behavior stifling. Both Woolf and Plath had challenging upbringings marked by loneliness and separation, but Plath focused on wanting to escape loneliness—an escape that found impossible because she believed it to be loneliness as a disease of the blood. She felt she could never be free from loneliness and in all of her writing that comes through.
Yet, Plath like Woolf recognized the uses of loneliness, not mere solitude, as a way of evading some of those cultural expectations. “God, but life is loneliness,” Plath wrote, “despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of parties with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear, and when at last you find yourself able to pour out your soul to another person,” she said, “you stop in shock at the words you utter, they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small, cramped dark inside you for so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment, and companionship, but the loneliness of the soul, and its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.”
I would argue that in addition to seeing loneliness as somehow part and parcel of human experience and linked to creativity and the experience of being human, its also important to look at the historical aspects of loneliness, that it is part and parcel of modern society with its fragmentation and separateness, the expectations that it places on people to be independent, to be self-sufficient, to thrive without community. Needed other people is almost depicted as a kind of weakness. And in the end, both Plath and Woolf found community as well as creativity in loneliness. Knowing that other people were lonely too, other women experience loneliness too, was a great comfort to Sylvia Plath. And through writing they entered a community of creative women and writers who were somehow able to stand against the isolation that was so necessary to write.
Sky Michael Johnston:
And Dr. Fay Bound Alberti has many more incredible insights into the history of loneliness in her book, A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion, published in 2019 by Oxford University Press. Click on the link in the episode description to see more about her book.
Thank you for listening. Please join me again in one week for 90 Second Narrative’s seventh “Season of Stories” episode. And then come back every Monday to the podcast that gives you “little stories with BIG historical significance.”