自分の部屋を持ちなさい

「僕はAndroid」だ。

それでclubhouseに部屋を持てない。（iPadで入ることができたのだが、まだ始めていない。）

「僕はうなぎ」「彼はたぬき」「彼女はキツネ」
米津の「迷える羊」というアルバムに、「馬と鹿」という曲を見つけた時、ちょっと笑った。動物づくしをしたいわけではないのだが。実は、彼はAndroidだったので、clubhouseに入れなかったらしい。

冒頭のフレーズは、ある女性作家が、「女性」と「小説」について質問された時、答えた言葉だ。男性との差別に苦しむ女性、創作を志す女性に対するアドバイスだ。

　「自分自身の部屋を持ちなさい。そして、お金も。」

興味深いのは、彼女がこのエッセイで紹介している、かつて、女性は自分の才能を発揮することが、いかに困難だったかをしめす、次のようなエピソードだ。（若干、補足が必要なのだが、それは後日。）

シェイクスピアには、Judithという、彼と同じように才能に溢れた妹がいた。兄のように学校に行くことを許されず、両親に望まぬ結婚を押し付けられた彼女は、家出をしてロンドンに出て、兄と同じ役者の道を目指す。ただ、その道は厳しかった。

ある冬の夜、彼女は自殺する。彼女は、Elephant ＆ Castle 郊外の、今はバスが通っている十字路の近くに埋葬された。

　「自分自身の部屋を持ちなさい。そして、お金も。」

僕にとっても、いいアドバイスだと思う。

---------------------------------------------

Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say. Shakespeare himself went, very probably,—his mother was an heiress—to the grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin—Ovid, Virgil and Horace—and the elements of grammar and logic. He was, it is well known, a wild boy who poached rabbits, perhaps shot a deer, and had, rather sooner than he should have done, to marry a woman in the neighbourhood, who bore him a child rather quicker than was right. 

That escapade sent him to seek his fortune in London. He had, it seemed, a taste for the theatre; he began by holding horses at the stage door. Very soon he got work in the theatre, became a successful actor, and lived at the hub of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing everybody, practising his art on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the palace of the queen. 

Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her　brother's perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers. 

They would have spoken sharply but kindly, for they were substantial people who knew the conditions of life for a woman and loved their daughter—indeed, more likely than not she was the apple of her father's eye. Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly but was careful to hide them or set fire to them. Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighbouring wool-stapler. 

She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart? 

The force of her own gift alone drove her to it. She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer's night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen. The birds that sang in the hedge were not more musical than she was. She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother's, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. 

Men laughed in her face. The manager—a fat, looselipped man—guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting—no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. He hinted—you can imagine what. She could get no training in her craft. Could she even seek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight? 

Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways. At last—for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the same grey eyes and rounded brows—at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so—who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?—killed herself one winter's night and lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.