Guernica: Looking at that relationship, here is Nora making these painfully miniature pieces, dollhouse dioramas with an almost pathological attention to detail, while Sirena is sprawling in her artistic expression. From Nora’s eyes, we see her as the Artist, the epitome of the imagination unbound. But she is also depicted as a monster. Is the message here that we have to draw on a certain selfishness to be artists?
Claire Messud: I think there’s no question that there’s a reason why small children make great art and why slightly bigger children don’t. And it’s because small children don’t worry about what anybody else thinks and slightly bigger children start to worry about these things. So, we can call it selfishness, but I think these are often names that make us feel better: you know, wow, I would never be that selfish. But it certainly takes some single-minded commitment, whether that’s selfishness or selflessness I don’t know.
Having both a son and a daughter and watching them as they grow, you see it just in the way girls interact and the way boys interact. There’s a reason why trainspotters are not girls, there’s a reason why there’s the myth of the slightly autistic male genius, there’s a reason why Gertrude Stein believed that her self-presentation was male. One could argue that was Susan Sontag also. The things that we associate with femaleness are not the single-minded, exclusive pursuit of a vocation, whether it be art or anything else. It is not a model that is widespread in our culture, it’s not something we think of for women. More here.