The "Chloe Liked Olivia" Project

 

...a celebration of female friendship, sisterhood, love, and connection (both real and imagined)...

 

            The ‘Chloe Liked Olivia Project’ is an art concentration inspired by Virginia Woolf’s extended essay “A Room of One’s Own.” This non-fictional text, which features both fictional narrative and a fictional narrator, explores the roles of female writers and female characters in literary history. Many of the questions that Woolf proposes are inquiries that I, myself, consider during the creation of these art pieces. I aim for my artwork to convey the concepts and ‘re-imaginings’ that Woolf brings forth in the text.

            My favorite chapter in Woolf’s work, the very chapter giving root to this project, is Chapter 5. In this part of the text, Woolf’s narrator goes to her bookshelf and finds a novel (a fictional work) by Mary Carmichael. She considers Carmichael’s novel to be another installment in the lineage of female authorship. As she reads, she becomes utterly shocked by Carmichael’s prose and the rather bold statement this novelist makes; the narrator says,

 

“I may tell you that the very next words I read [in the book] were these-

‘Chloe liked Olivia…’ Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the

privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes

women do like women.”

 

The narrator never specifies the exact nature of the relationship Carmichael makes between Chloe and Olivia in their laboratory, but this one proclamation leads her to ponder over literary history. Thus, she realizes that this very lineage lacks in portrayals of female friendships/unions. Before the late eighteenth century, females of books were often jealous lovers in domestic warfare against other women over the attention of men. Relationships between women were simple, reductive. The narrator says, “All the great women of fiction were…seen only in relation to the other sex.” Literary history, with its stories of male friendship, loyal knights, kingly alliances, and comradery amongst warriors, forgets to mention the positive interactions that women have with other women. This is a rich part of a woman’s life left unexamined; her existence is certainly more than just to be a wife for a man.

 

            So, where are the female friends, soul mates, lovers of other women in the literature of the past? Where are they hidden?

           

            The ‘Chloe Liked Olivia’ Project gives visibility to the bonds that females create with other females. Sisters, lesbians, ‘bff’s’—these unions possess complexity. My art aims to expose the nuances that exist within female relationships. Whether it is a platonic friendship or an erotic romance, these bonds can be definite, ambiguous, or capable of crossing over boundaries marked to simplify the nature of a bond.

           

            Often, this project leads me to depict the female relationships that have inspired me in the literature that I love (and television and film as well). Literature, film, and television have improved in their portrayal of female unions, so my artwork tends to acknowledge these instances. There is a special elation in visualizing a female relationship I read about and bringing that vision to fruition by means of an art project. I have also found joy in making pretend relationships amongst females of different stories. I notice a common personality trait, a subtle similarity in the girls, and I merge their realities together. There is an excitement in imagining, for example, a friendship amongst a woman from a book set in Victorian England and a women, in a completely different book, living in a post-apocalyptic world. I can study a character and notice a certain brokenness in her, or a fiery passion, or a proclivity to falling blindly in love. Then I will correlate that personality portrait with another character I have esteemed or to whom I have related. Because of this, different books, movies, and shows can extend into each other, flowing fluidly and seamlessly as I imagine how female characters would interact. The bleak, wild, and windy moors of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights can meet the magical world of Arendale in the Disney film Frozen, for instance. Catherine Linton from the Brontë novel is an isolated girl just like Anna in the Disney tale. One lives a solitary life on the English moors while the other lives in a locked castle without any attention from her sister. Love and marriage are the only means to escape their weary lives, and they recklessly fall in love without discerning the moral character of the one to whom they show devotion. Just imagine…What if these two girls of different time periods, classes, and general worlds had some time to sit with each other and talk? What would they deduce about love? Could they learn from each other? I enjoy imagining their friendship and the stories that could arise! There are countless pairings that the imagination can create and my art explores these fictional groupings.

 

 

            As I merge different stories together, imagining the possibility of an interaction between their

heroines, I acknowledge Woolf’s assertion of the fluidity of literature—the notion that tales continue

from previous tales. When Woolf speaks of the Carmichael text in A Room of One’s Own, she sees the

story of Chloe and Olivia as a part of female literary history. Carmichael is an extension, a continuation

of Charlotte Brontë, of Jane Austen, of Lady Winchilsea, and of Anonymous (the writer who so often felt

obliged to hide her sex). Woolf states, “for books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging

them separately.” The novel in which ‘Chloe liked Olivia’ is a novel that continues the stories written by

Woolf’s literary fore-mothers. Literary history, with its male friendships, is also dominated by male

writers, yet Carmichael is another branch to the lineage of authoresses who spoke truthfully about

female bonds. She forms a place in a literary tradition where Aphra Behn, the Brontë sisters, and a

small number of other literary women eschewed the patriarchy of the male pen and claimed a

presence for themselves. My art, though made by a male hand, strives to reveal the very notion that

stories can be merged, adapted, and re-imagined. Stories are fluid, with possibilities…so an ending

isn’t definite; another story can continue it.

 

 

 

            A project such as this is important because it depicts females in a space where they are not defined by their relationships to men. They are in a space not as wives, girlfriends, fiancés, or mistresses of the night; they are women interacting with other women. Patriarchal society places females against females, pitting them in competition so often. In Pop Culture, for instance, magazines speak of female musicians as ‘battling to be the biggest pop diva.’ Regardless of musical styles, influences, or genre, Pop Culture writers display these females as in war to be Queen, simply because they have a vagina. It seems as though we can have a plethora of bands and male musicians, but only one reigning female—the girl with the jazz influence is thus up against the girl singing Dance Pop. This same idea of females antagonizing other females (willingly or unwillingly) trickles down to adolescents. Today, mean-girl culture reigns, with the meanest girl in school at the top of social hierarchy. Simply, girls are taught to hate other girls. The sisterhood and friendship between females is essential in feminism, for women must unite together into a strong front to ward off patriarchy and its oppressive forces. Yet patriarchal culture subverts Feminism’s chance to find vast strength in female bonds by keeping the females in constant battle amongst themselves. Women, like men, are perpetuators of patriarchy--they knowingly and unknowingly promote the very values that oppress them--but, when they form relationships with other women, they build a collective voice that fights back.

 

             The ‘Chloe Liked Olivia’ Project reveals my aims to celebrate female bonds, to create new stories, and to fight the patriarchy that oppresses us all.