...the real source of all my troubles and bad moods is my egotism and my idea that his whole life, his thoughts, and his love must belong to me.

And yet one ought to have something else to love as well, just as Lyova loves his work, so that I could turn to it whenever he is cold to me...I can see it quite clearly now, for I have nothing else to occupy my mind; he of course, is too busy to notice all the details of our relationship.

Tolstoy's diaries mesmerize the reader into a weird state of catatonic horror.

I have always been told that a woman must love her husband and be honorable and be a good wife and mother. They write such things in ABC books, and it is all nonsense. The thing to do is not to love...

I want nothing but his love and sympathy, and he won't give it me; and all my pride is trampled in the mud; I am nothing but a miserable crushed worm, whom no one wants, whom no one loves, a useless creature with morning sickness and a big belly, two rotten teeth, and a bad temper, a battered sense of dignity, and a love which no one wants and which nearly drives me insane.

For Tolstoy, the grim treadmill just continued; age brought no respite, maturity no fulfillment.

I am so used to living not my own life but the life of Lyova and the children that I feel I have wasted my day if I haven't done something for them...It is sad that my emotional dependence on the man I love should have killed so much of my energy and ability; there was certainly once a great deal of energy in me...

Upon reaching the George Eliot entries, few readers will have cause to question the author's observation that "Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age."

Middle age assumes a more engaging aspect for the women who damn the conventions of their male oppressors in a bid for a more human reality. In the section entitled Work, Virginia Woolf writes:

Perhaps Bob T. was right in his poem when he called me fortunate above all--I mean in having a mind that can express--no, I mean in having mobilized my being--learned to give it complete outcome,...that I have to some extent forced myself to break every mold and find a fresh from of being, that is of expression, for everything I feel or think. So that it is when it is working I get the sense of being fully energized--nothing stunted.

The truth of the matter seems to be that human beings--even those with breasts and vaginas--often expect a great deal more from life than any series of relationships with other human beings can be reasonably expected to provide. The nationally reknowned German graphic artist Kaethe Kollwitz once wrote:

...What he (her husband) always speaks of, what seems to him still the sole worthwhile goal of our long living together--that we should grow together in the deepest intimacy--I still do not feel and probably never will learn to feel.

Are not the ties with the boys also growing slacker? I almost think so. For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying--I am obliged to finish it. This seems to me to be the meaning of all the babble about culture. Culture arises only when the individual fulfills his cycle of obligations...

A meditation on our own society's obstacles to the individual's even defining her cycle of obligations yields a vision of our barbarism which both shocks and humbles.

IN POWER, one finds a revealing analytic perspective on some of the dynamics of that barbarism. Here the fusion of the personal and the political and the creative application of structural analogy would bring Karl Marx himself to orgasm. From Mary Boykin Ches nut, a nineteenth century wife of a southern slaveholder: