Spinsters
“Spinster. I stink and remember.”
I reckon a sad amount of the pain of being jilted is just the social backlash. Having to see your pals again knowing that you would have been returning from your honeymoon on Saturday. What is the acceptable amount of time before your pals can offer you the gifts they have already bought? A bouquet of thorns.
The social world is left untouched by the Spinster, However. She is a jilted woman who was left so damaged by the abandonment that her whole life revolves around that one part of her history. If she were to receive the gifts, she would not open them. The dress will be hung back up, never touched or forgotten. The clock stops, or instead, she forgets how to tell the time. The crime scene will be preserved as it is easier to relive the trauma than accept the aftermath.
The noun Spinster is synonymous with adjectives like bitterness and hatred. These, in turn, create a woman who is lost, lost without a man. Not only do women experience a natural desire for kids, especially between 30 and 40, but we as a society look down upon older, single women. We assume they can not be fulfilled. The Spinster has no choice but to be a Spinster. Just as we are systematically taught to value capitalistic, empty pursuits, we are fed the lie that company necessitates contentedness. Marriage is an advert like any other. Commercialising your love… and the Spinster is a desperate actress needing a job. We teach women to want all this shit, and then when they do not get it, they can short circuit.
What interests me most is the preservation of trauma. Spinsters are not visible anymore; their complaints are no longer socially acceptable, so they deliberately misplace their insecurities onto contextually irrelevant scenarios with similar cores- bitterness. I mean, I may be talking shit, but I often talk shit, so you’ve just got to sieve through the debris until something shiny stands out. COMFORT IN TRAUMA, and that’s what is shiny.
See, the Spinster example is not your typical circular trauma. She is not reimagining the horror but as the culprit. No, the reconstruction is identical, the power relations persist, yet this is the most option she favours. Halting your life is better than ending your life, I guess. Single life without a man is a suicide?
I looked over some poems involving Spinsters, and they all have the same timeless element. Rarely is there a life beyond the jilting? I am not one for all these awful remakes of films that force women of colour and trans people into the cast. Mainly because they tend to focus too much on the casting, and the quality of the film suffers. However, I am pretty game for reshaping tropes. The Resilient Spinster. The women who survive and thrive. Maybe I’ll try and write poetry again!!! Because everyone fucking loves poetry, yea? As long as it remains real. That the person doing the jilting is not some cartoonish embodiment of evil but an authentically torn individual who cannot escape their cowardice. The pain that they cause cannot be diminished; it must continue to bruise souls. The only necessary change is the eventual rebirth through trauma; that is the shit I want to read about. Ensure the trauma is temporarily debilitating and comforting. The dress may still fit her, but it is no longer her style.
Cheers