Kate Millett Disappears

Millett said that she created “Terminal Piece” because “it could not be written.” The failure of language again: Is it because language is itself a social system and therefore ultimately untrustworthy? Is the art work, with its autonomy and silence, the only place where individual reality can be safely revealed? Yet it is language that defines our humanity: what outraged Millett the most about her institutionalization was that she had been deprived of the opportunity to speak. No one had consulted or properly examined her. Her will, the same will that had argued and battled so fiercely for change, was suddenly of no account. She had been given no voice—as though mental illness had cast her out of the language economy and placed her on the level of objects and animals. This terrifying reduction in status revealed the conformity that is the basis of language. Later, she wrote feelingly about depression, the refusal to engage that is a kind of revenge against that conformity. By turning away from engagement and explanation, “Terminal Piece” attains a melancholy autonomy. The mannequin is alone, but, in a fragile and temporary way, she is free. Whether the bars are keeping her in or keeping us out, there are no other people around her.

In an essay about her work as a sculptor, Millett wrote that the whole orientation and purpose of her life changed in the course of a few moments in the late nineteen-sixties, when she read a newspaper paragraph reporting the torture and murder of Sylvia Likens, the teen-ager whose story she would tell, years later, in “The Basement.” There could be no better illustration of Millett’s visionary and political integrity than this fascinating claim. It shows us two things: first, what a world without moral compromise might look like, and, second, how vulnerable the uncompromising mind is to breakdown and persecution. That Millett could not accept the continuation of normal life in the face of the aberrant murder of a stranger is evidence of her formidable sense of justice. Yet, more than that, in imagining Likens’s experience, Millett came face to face with the inextinguishable nature of evil. This robust existence of evil, as evidenced by the teen-ager’s suffering, removed in one stroke Millett’s willingness to make a bargain with life. One might almost say that it drove her mad, if madness is the revolt of the mind against the body that contains it. It was, in other words, Millett’s imaginative sensibility, more than her political one, that made Likens’s murder intolerable to her: the idea of the body as an object, susceptible to being caught, caged, and tortured, overwhelmed, in her mind, the body as a valued and socially defended subject. What Millett grasped was that female identity—and, indeed, the identities of all victims of social or institutionalized power—lay somewhere between the two. Whereas her writings articulated the concerns of femininity as a political condition, her work as a sculptor unequivocally confronted the terror of the body as an object.

In the same essay, Millett reflects on some occasions of showing her works, occasions on which she could not help acknowledging that the sculptures themselves experienced some of the body’s vulnerability. During one exhibition of “Terminal Piece,” a friendly but drunken crowd attempted to “rescue” the mannequin, freeing her from her cage and seating her stiff form among them while they caroused. Millett plays the good sport in describing this amusing and profoundly troubling event, noting that the non-precious nature of her materials opened her works to a degree of communal “play”; yet it is not much of a leap to see an element of mob violence in the crowd’s actions, the frenetic nature of destruction that triggered Millett’s deepest fear of the social contract. Like Sylvia Likens, the mannequin is at the mercy of the group, whose members can inflict the inchoate and ungrasped violence of their own being on her at will. In this case, at least, the mannequin has a defense: she is not “there”; she has already vanished, leaving a simulacrum of herself behind. Is this disappearing trick the summit of objectification or a mystical release from it? This is a fundamental question asked by “Terminal Piece,” one that extends into death itself.