Of all of the pieces we've read this week-- Bradstreet, Cavendish, Fern-- Grace King's The Balcony stands out to me for several reasons. First, it places the woman writer in a supportive context of other women, in contrast to Fern's depiction of distracted, daytime demands of motherhood. Second, it suggests a unique relationship between story-telling/talking and writing -- that women find the same freedom and meaningful respite in an evening conversing on the balcony with one another that the "ennui of reading and writing books" cannot convey.
This piece also tries to make a case for women's writing springing from a particular way of being-- a similar mothering sensibility that Cavendish alluded to in her poems "Each story is different, or appears so to her... And so she dramatizes and inflects it, trying to make the point visible to her apparent also to her hearers. " Men are explicitly excluded from this process.
I think primarily that this piece is trying to relate how powerful and desirable it is to be at the center of this closed, intimate, social universe. The children are "not even afraid of God" under this meeting of the woman hivemind. The influence of shared "experiences, reminiscences, episodes" among women on the balcony is gathered and impressed upon the world not through writing, but through enveloping and shaping the minds of the next generation.
Well said. The balcony is a place of unique power, community, and creativity--a place where women find their voices, rather than have them surpressed.
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