Mukherjee suggests, through Jasmine/Jane/Jyoti, that perhaps we are reborn many times during our lives in one body—as opposed to being reborn to a new life in a different body—or at least that this is possible. I absolutely agree with this unexpected assertion and have found my own life to work very much in this way. The narrator tells us that Jyoti was not Jasmine, that Jasmine isn't Jane, and wonders onto which identity to put herself as a murderer or herself as a victim of rape (127). I think about this kind of thing a lot—how some of my previous selves don't seem like me now, me today.
(Different versions of me, different lives that I have lived include: Tally in an Emory sorority, M-tal to students at Cate, Meghan-Tally in braids in a Colorado mountain town, Meggie the daughter of my mom. There are others.)
Jane joins Mary Webb, who believes she has been reincarnated multiple times, at a luncheon because Mary sees Jane as a kindred spirit of sorts, trusting that she, too, believes in reincarnation (perhaps just because she looks Hindu and perhaps because she simply seems a certain way). Jane says, "When the waiter leaves, I tell her that yes, I am sure that I have been reborn several times, and that yes, some lives I can recall vividly" (126). A few minutes later, she continues, "'Yes,' I say. 'I do believe you. We do keep revisiting the world. I have also travelled in time and space. It is possible'" (127). Mary is talking about being different people in different bodies, different times, different places, while Jane is talking about being different people in one body, in different times and different places. She re-inhabits her own body as different people or different versions of herself all the time.
After Jane finds out that Professorji is actually not a professor but a procurer and seller of human hair, she tells us, "Nothing was rooted anymore. Everything was in motion" (152). She seems to have the sense that boundaries are fluid, that everything both is and isn’t at the same time. She is obsessed by questions about her own existence; she has to be.
"I feel at times like a stone hurtling through diaphanous mist, unable to grab hold, unable to slow myself, yet unwilling to abandon the ride I'm on," Jane says (139). Then: "An imaginary brick wall with barbed wire cut me off from the past and kept me from breaking into the future. I was a prisoner doing unreal time" (148).
Jane’s sequence of rebirths or reincarnations presents a paradox: they make everything and nothing possible. She can be someone new, but she is not entirely in control of who that someone will be. She feels consigned to this fate, in a way, and yet she understands her own adaptation and reinvention as a mode of survival, an utter necessity.
Sometimes this is positive, even though it is surprising and out of her control. Unexpectedly, Wylie and Taylor’s gecko jumps onto Jasmine at their apartment in New York, and Jasmine says, "Truly I had been reborn" (163). Jyoti would never have been able to embrace this happening, but Jasmine can. Jasmine adapts and survives, and this brings small lagniappes as well as traumas, depending on the day.
I have not survived nearly as much as Jane; nor have I adapted nearly as much. Yet I have survived and adapted through various mutations. Maybe being reborn or reinvented is a shedding of skin. The old skin dies and comes off, and a new person is revealed underneath—both the same and different.
Thursday, 12 May 2011
Thursday, 21 April 2011
On Celebrating the Mythic Feminine
Eve Ensler (intentionally or unintentionally) chooses the mythic feminine, the way of the chalice, in the writing of her masterpiece, The Vagina Monologues.
The idea of the mythic feminine, represented by the symbol of the chalice, is that traditionally (in myth and other stories and in all relationships and social interactions), a feminine approach has been inclusive, open, collective, collaborative, and pluralistic (while the mythic masculine approach, represented by the blade, has been singular, conclusive, and hierarchical).
By incorporating many voices, styles, modes, stories, and fragments, Ensler chooses the mythic feminine. To tell this story, she relies on the power of many, including herself but also much beyond herself.
I love how Ensler's form imitates and reflects her content; this very pluralistic message thereby becomes even more powerful because it both promotes and practices pluralism.
The idea of the mythic feminine, represented by the symbol of the chalice, is that traditionally (in myth and other stories and in all relationships and social interactions), a feminine approach has been inclusive, open, collective, collaborative, and pluralistic (while the mythic masculine approach, represented by the blade, has been singular, conclusive, and hierarchical).
By incorporating many voices, styles, modes, stories, and fragments, Ensler chooses the mythic feminine. To tell this story, she relies on the power of many, including herself but also much beyond herself.
I love how Ensler's form imitates and reflects her content; this very pluralistic message thereby becomes even more powerful because it both promotes and practices pluralism.
A New Paradigm: Real Beauty
In her closing chapter of The Beauty Myth ("Beyond the Beauty Myth"), Naomi Wolf, as Wollstonecraft did, calls for a revolution. One of the points on which the revolution will hinge has to do with women choosing to see, love, appreciate, and celebrate other women. I'm encouraged. We can do this. Women I know already do this. Actually, all through the last chapter, I was thinking of my mentor, Gaby Edwards.
Gaby is the embodiment of "seeing other women as allies rather than competitors" (282). She has "compassion for [herself] and other women for our strong feelings about 'beauty,'" and is "very gentle with those feelings" (276). She makes "joy, rowdiness, and wanton celebration as much a part of [her] project as hard work and bitter struggle... by rejecting the pernicious fib... [that is] called postfeminism, the pious hope that the battles have all been won" (281). Her sexy performance in the famous red dress at Breakthrough comes to mind!
Gaby helped me see and believe that: "The best that 'beauty' offers belongs to all of us by right of femaleness", that "A woman wins by giving herself and other women permission", and that "A woman-loving definition of beauty supplants desperation with play, narcissism with self-love, dismemberment with wholeness, absence with presence, stillness with animation" (285, 290, 291).
She constantly mentors and supports colleagues and friends--male and female--acknowledging that "it is also in men's interest to undo the myth" (289). Gaby started a Gender Task Force, bringing women and girls together through the Independent School Gender Project and later bringing men and women together on gender issues as part of that action-based Force.
Gaby lives out Wolf's appeal to do with "what we decide to see when we look in the mirror", choosing to see a powerful, beautiful person, and in doing so, inspiring others to choose this way of seeing ourselves (291).
Most of all, I think of Gaby when I think of Wolf's call to:
"explore[e] more useful role models than the glossies give us. We are sorely in need of intergenerational contact: We need to see the faces of the women who made our freedom possible; they need to hear our thanks. Young women are dangerously 'unmothered'--unprotected, unguided--institutionally and need role models and mentors" (283).
She has been my personal mentor professionally and personally for years and the mother (not to mention wife and grandmother), friend, teacher, supporter, colleague, and mentor to hundreds, if not thousands, of men and women, boys and girls for decades (which would sound ridiculous if it weren't just TRUE), changing one life at a time, inspiring collective, loving, collaborative relationships, and thereby changing the world by shifting what is often a toxic paradigm towards one that is whole and lovely for all of us.
Other lines I love:
--"Let us start with a reinterpretation of 'beauty' that is noncompetitive, nonhierarchical, and nonviolent" (286).
--"To protect our sexuality from the beauty myth, we can believe in the importance of cherishing, nurturing, and attending to our sexuality as to an animal or a child" (279).
--"Let us charm one another with some of that sparkling attention too often held in reserve only for men: compliment one another, show our admiration" (287-288).
Gaby is the embodiment of "seeing other women as allies rather than competitors" (282). She has "compassion for [herself] and other women for our strong feelings about 'beauty,'" and is "very gentle with those feelings" (276). She makes "joy, rowdiness, and wanton celebration as much a part of [her] project as hard work and bitter struggle... by rejecting the pernicious fib... [that is] called postfeminism, the pious hope that the battles have all been won" (281). Her sexy performance in the famous red dress at Breakthrough comes to mind!
Gaby helped me see and believe that: "The best that 'beauty' offers belongs to all of us by right of femaleness", that "A woman wins by giving herself and other women permission", and that "A woman-loving definition of beauty supplants desperation with play, narcissism with self-love, dismemberment with wholeness, absence with presence, stillness with animation" (285, 290, 291).
She constantly mentors and supports colleagues and friends--male and female--acknowledging that "it is also in men's interest to undo the myth" (289). Gaby started a Gender Task Force, bringing women and girls together through the Independent School Gender Project and later bringing men and women together on gender issues as part of that action-based Force.
Gaby lives out Wolf's appeal to do with "what we decide to see when we look in the mirror", choosing to see a powerful, beautiful person, and in doing so, inspiring others to choose this way of seeing ourselves (291).
Most of all, I think of Gaby when I think of Wolf's call to:
"explore[e] more useful role models than the glossies give us. We are sorely in need of intergenerational contact: We need to see the faces of the women who made our freedom possible; they need to hear our thanks. Young women are dangerously 'unmothered'--unprotected, unguided--institutionally and need role models and mentors" (283).
She has been my personal mentor professionally and personally for years and the mother (not to mention wife and grandmother), friend, teacher, supporter, colleague, and mentor to hundreds, if not thousands, of men and women, boys and girls for decades (which would sound ridiculous if it weren't just TRUE), changing one life at a time, inspiring collective, loving, collaborative relationships, and thereby changing the world by shifting what is often a toxic paradigm towards one that is whole and lovely for all of us.
Other lines I love:
--"Let us start with a reinterpretation of 'beauty' that is noncompetitive, nonhierarchical, and nonviolent" (286).
--"To protect our sexuality from the beauty myth, we can believe in the importance of cherishing, nurturing, and attending to our sexuality as to an animal or a child" (279).
--"Let us charm one another with some of that sparkling attention too often held in reserve only for men: compliment one another, show our admiration" (287-288).
Thursday, 7 April 2011
On Violence: "The Numbers Are Staggering"
Wolf shocks me every time with this part (154-162) of her chapter on "Sex" (131-178).
She quotes Margaret Atwood on asking "women what they feared most from men" and "men the same question about women", to which women replied, "'We're afraid they'll kill us'" and men, "'We're afraid they'll laugh at us'" (153).
We're afraid they'll kill us?! (Death strikes me as much worse than humiliation, though I recognize that no one wants to be humiliated.)
Could this really be how things are?
I'm sorry to say that I think Wolf and Atwood are right in this reflection of women's fears. I have seen (and felt) it all my life with at least two close friends as victims of sexual violence in high school and even more in college, including an encounter with Rufinol myself--thankfully, a close call from which I was generously spared (though I woke up with stitches in my face and no memory of hours of the previous night's party and after hours).
The shame and fear and guilt for women and girls around issues of sex and violence has pervaded my life and the lives of women and girls I know and have known.
I wish I could say otherwise.
The memories, encounters, humiliations, sufferings, and other manifestations dwell in a part of my mind that is mostly fragmented, nonverbal, and full of images:
The electrical tape around women's breasts in the first porn film my sister and I accidentally saw.
My mom giving me my first razor. Slicing one leg along the shin.
Walking around Boston late at night in my grad school neighborhood, clutching pepper spray.
Seeing girls pinned and zipped and painted into tutus and makeup and buns as a kid in ballet.
My friend (and our graduation speaker) in high school getting raped while visiting her sister at college.
Hearing about 'the date rape fraternity' freshman year at college.
Hearing freshman girls referred to as 'fresh meat'.
Wolf saying, "[Women] cannot discuss this harm without shame" (148).
My sister saying, "God was punishing you for wearing that outfit."
Wolf writes: "It can change so that real mutuality--an equal gaze, equal vulnerability, equal desire--brings heterosexual men and women together" (152).
She also says, "Love freely given between equals is the child of the women's movement, and a very recent historical possibility, and as such very fragile. It is also the enemy of some of the most powerful interests of this society" and "Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so" (142, 143).
I share her concern about what has "[made] women violent toward ourselves", about men's and women's "separate versions of loneliness", about the selling of "sexual discontent", but I do believe we can undo (with hard work and a lot of gumption) much of the training that has brainwashed us, that we can choose to see and learn to see other men and women and ourselves as richly complex, authentically beautiful, and increasingly free human beings (142, 143).
She quotes Margaret Atwood on asking "women what they feared most from men" and "men the same question about women", to which women replied, "'We're afraid they'll kill us'" and men, "'We're afraid they'll laugh at us'" (153).
We're afraid they'll kill us?! (Death strikes me as much worse than humiliation, though I recognize that no one wants to be humiliated.)
Could this really be how things are?
I'm sorry to say that I think Wolf and Atwood are right in this reflection of women's fears. I have seen (and felt) it all my life with at least two close friends as victims of sexual violence in high school and even more in college, including an encounter with Rufinol myself--thankfully, a close call from which I was generously spared (though I woke up with stitches in my face and no memory of hours of the previous night's party and after hours).
The shame and fear and guilt for women and girls around issues of sex and violence has pervaded my life and the lives of women and girls I know and have known.
I wish I could say otherwise.
The memories, encounters, humiliations, sufferings, and other manifestations dwell in a part of my mind that is mostly fragmented, nonverbal, and full of images:
The electrical tape around women's breasts in the first porn film my sister and I accidentally saw.
My mom giving me my first razor. Slicing one leg along the shin.
Walking around Boston late at night in my grad school neighborhood, clutching pepper spray.
Seeing girls pinned and zipped and painted into tutus and makeup and buns as a kid in ballet.
My friend (and our graduation speaker) in high school getting raped while visiting her sister at college.
Hearing about 'the date rape fraternity' freshman year at college.
Hearing freshman girls referred to as 'fresh meat'.
Wolf saying, "[Women] cannot discuss this harm without shame" (148).
My sister saying, "God was punishing you for wearing that outfit."
Wolf writes: "It can change so that real mutuality--an equal gaze, equal vulnerability, equal desire--brings heterosexual men and women together" (152).
She also says, "Love freely given between equals is the child of the women's movement, and a very recent historical possibility, and as such very fragile. It is also the enemy of some of the most powerful interests of this society" and "Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so" (142, 143).
I share her concern about what has "[made] women violent toward ourselves", about men's and women's "separate versions of loneliness", about the selling of "sexual discontent", but I do believe we can undo (with hard work and a lot of gumption) much of the training that has brainwashed us, that we can choose to see and learn to see other men and women and ourselves as richly complex, authentically beautiful, and increasingly free human beings (142, 143).
Friday, 1 April 2011
On Being Complicit Most Days
Growing up in the Southern Bible Belt of the United States and in a fundamentalist sect of Protestant Christianity (although it was lovely in plenty of ways), I found myself constantly frustrated and undermined by manifestations of patriarchy (at home, in church, and in society) and eager to rebel... but I didn't rebel--at least not very drastically or admirably.
My default mode is to comply. (Isn't everyone's--or nearly everyone's?)
I dreamed of writing a (dystopian) short story I still haven't written, one in which all of the cultural norms I grew up with were exactly the same but the genders swapped. Guys in the story, not girls, would wear tight clothes, get groped, looked at, commented on. Girls, not guys, would inherit the family name and ring (from their moms), complete with the Roman numeral at the end. From time to time, stories about guys, not girls, getting raped would abound--and girls getting off the hook as the perpetrators because of their powerful moms in courtrooms and government offices. Preachers would be women. Men would be silent in church. And on it would go.
I was angry, and I think anger was appropriate. Sometimes I'm angry still... but on my better days, I want not a world that counterattacks and counter-assaults men but a world that honors and protects both men and women. THIS is why, I would say, Margaret Atwood's narrator in The Handmaid's Tale prizes "forgiveness". (Perhaps in order to begin, we must forgive others and forgive ourselves.)
I haven't read Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth since college and wasn't sure what to expect from it nearly a decade later. And I must confess, I'm still pretty smitten.
Reading this, I am reminded of something visiting writer Nii Parkes said to my Modern World Literature: Africa class last semester: "We are impoverished by thinking in one dimension."
Wolf reminds me of many ways in which, unwillingly, unknowingly, I am still a slave, still limited by a single perspective on beauty, femininity, and womanhood. (What does it mean to teach this book while wearing lipgloss? Why do I feel less duplicitous when I'm wearing Converse (though still part of mainstream culture) than when I'm wearing heels?)
"Women are so well schooled in the beauty myth that we often internalize it," Wolf writes. "Many of us are not yet sure ourselves that women are interesting without 'beauty'" (84). Am I guilty of this? If I am really what Wollstonecraft would call a "rational creature", would I seriously have read The Beauty Myth while getting a pedicure the other day?
Part of me longs to be the kind of woman I encountered here and there while living in Colorado and California: smart, articulate, sporty, confident, makeup-free, flats-wearing, ever at home in the core of my own body, ever the owner of my own body. (I'm talking Lisa Holmes. I'm talking Gaby Edwards.)
But, as Eve Ensler reminded me some weeks ago at a lecture in Nottinghill, I am much more complicit than that in our culture of violence against the body, as most of us (maybe all of us) are complicit in much of the violence around the world. (Ensler pointed out her own complicity in being addicted to her iPhone while the wars in the Congo have been brought on by competition over the materials in our computers and phones, yet both ironically and admirably, Ensler has been working with victims of rape in the Congo.)
In her "Culture" chapter, Wolf describes the insidious, toxic dual nature of women's magazines: on one hand, they empower and inform and bring together, while on the other, they covertly but aggressively deliver a subconscious assault on women and girls, leading us to hate our bodies and ourselves.
Wolf writes, "The obligatory beauty myth dosage the magazines provide elicits in their readers a raving, itching, parching product lust and an abiding fantasy" (70). And near the end of the chapter, she calls it a "beauty addiction" (85). I can't pretend to be free of this. Nor, however, can I use guilt as an excuse to leave texts like this out of the curriculum. So for all of my students out there, I know I'm hardly a model of singular commitment against the workings of the beauty myth, but I want you to know what it is, to know that it exists, and to see it--even if that means seeing it yourself or seeing it in me.
Thanks to Wolf and others, I can see how guilt has been systematically engineered into the myth itself, effectively silencing us further. So as Jean Kilbourne enjoins at the end of "Killing Us Softly 4", I can "choose" to move beyond guilt. We all can.
My default mode is to comply. (Isn't everyone's--or nearly everyone's?)
I dreamed of writing a (dystopian) short story I still haven't written, one in which all of the cultural norms I grew up with were exactly the same but the genders swapped. Guys in the story, not girls, would wear tight clothes, get groped, looked at, commented on. Girls, not guys, would inherit the family name and ring (from their moms), complete with the Roman numeral at the end. From time to time, stories about guys, not girls, getting raped would abound--and girls getting off the hook as the perpetrators because of their powerful moms in courtrooms and government offices. Preachers would be women. Men would be silent in church. And on it would go.
I was angry, and I think anger was appropriate. Sometimes I'm angry still... but on my better days, I want not a world that counterattacks and counter-assaults men but a world that honors and protects both men and women. THIS is why, I would say, Margaret Atwood's narrator in The Handmaid's Tale prizes "forgiveness". (Perhaps in order to begin, we must forgive others and forgive ourselves.)
I haven't read Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth since college and wasn't sure what to expect from it nearly a decade later. And I must confess, I'm still pretty smitten.
Reading this, I am reminded of something visiting writer Nii Parkes said to my Modern World Literature: Africa class last semester: "We are impoverished by thinking in one dimension."
Wolf reminds me of many ways in which, unwillingly, unknowingly, I am still a slave, still limited by a single perspective on beauty, femininity, and womanhood. (What does it mean to teach this book while wearing lipgloss? Why do I feel less duplicitous when I'm wearing Converse (though still part of mainstream culture) than when I'm wearing heels?)
"Women are so well schooled in the beauty myth that we often internalize it," Wolf writes. "Many of us are not yet sure ourselves that women are interesting without 'beauty'" (84). Am I guilty of this? If I am really what Wollstonecraft would call a "rational creature", would I seriously have read The Beauty Myth while getting a pedicure the other day?
Part of me longs to be the kind of woman I encountered here and there while living in Colorado and California: smart, articulate, sporty, confident, makeup-free, flats-wearing, ever at home in the core of my own body, ever the owner of my own body. (I'm talking Lisa Holmes. I'm talking Gaby Edwards.)
But, as Eve Ensler reminded me some weeks ago at a lecture in Nottinghill, I am much more complicit than that in our culture of violence against the body, as most of us (maybe all of us) are complicit in much of the violence around the world. (Ensler pointed out her own complicity in being addicted to her iPhone while the wars in the Congo have been brought on by competition over the materials in our computers and phones, yet both ironically and admirably, Ensler has been working with victims of rape in the Congo.)
In her "Culture" chapter, Wolf describes the insidious, toxic dual nature of women's magazines: on one hand, they empower and inform and bring together, while on the other, they covertly but aggressively deliver a subconscious assault on women and girls, leading us to hate our bodies and ourselves.
Wolf writes, "The obligatory beauty myth dosage the magazines provide elicits in their readers a raving, itching, parching product lust and an abiding fantasy" (70). And near the end of the chapter, she calls it a "beauty addiction" (85). I can't pretend to be free of this. Nor, however, can I use guilt as an excuse to leave texts like this out of the curriculum. So for all of my students out there, I know I'm hardly a model of singular commitment against the workings of the beauty myth, but I want you to know what it is, to know that it exists, and to see it--even if that means seeing it yourself or seeing it in me.
Thanks to Wolf and others, I can see how guilt has been systematically engineered into the myth itself, effectively silencing us further. So as Jean Kilbourne enjoins at the end of "Killing Us Softly 4", I can "choose" to move beyond guilt. We all can.
Thursday, 10 March 2011
BIRDS. BIRDS. BIRDS.
Sometimes my boyfriend calls me his 'bird'. Men in England do this, it seems. For unexplainable and irrational reasons, I kind of like it.
But there's something to this bird thing. In women's literature, it's EVERYWHERE...
Mary Wollstonecraft writes, "Confined in cages like the feathered race, [women] have nothing to do but to plume themselves, and stalk with mock majesty from perch to perch" (62).
In "A Jury of Her Peers", Susan Glaspell describes Minnie Foster as a bird (through the voice of Martha Hale) saying, "She was kind of like a bird herself. Real sweet and pretty, but kind of timid and--fluttery. How--she--did--change."
Maya Angelou famously wrote I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
The sirens, of course, in Homer's Odyssey are bird-women, seducing men to their death's with their unearthly voices.
Goddesses in all kinds of ancient cultures--including the goddess Lilith, for example--have been associated with birds.
What's the deal?
I grew up not liking birds. My mom likes birds and flowers and all kinds of pretty, delicate things (as did her mom), so generally, I avoided them, choosing not to identify with this part of my maternal inheritance. I tended to think of birds as silly, dirty, annoying, insignificant creatures.
I'm beginning to change my mind.
The coexistence of delicacy and power in some birds reminds me all too much of the human condition, including its female half, of course.
And though birds preen and nest and feed, some of the 'womanly things' in which I've never (yet) become especially interested, they also SING. They also FLY.
http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://fineartamerica.com/images-medium/digital-photography--the-bird-woman-munir-alawi.jpg&imgrefurl=http://fineartamerica.com/featured/digital-photography--the-bird-woman-munir-alawi.html&usg=__k1PRfTdvoO9OuQ6DIfniXmC6PB4=&h=397&w=600&sz=35&hl=en&start=23&zoom=1&tbnid=3_pFbXRGmoV1VM:&tbnh=133&tbnw=180&ei=xJZ4TdyFPI694AbT0YGcBg&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dwoman%2Bbird%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26biw%3D1257%26bih%3D592%26tbs%3Disch:10%2C718&um=1&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=230&vpy=169&dur=330&hovh=183&hovw=276&tx=156&ty=86&oei=upZ4TeHKAcfEtAaOzJD6Bg&page=2&ndsp=21&ved=1t:429,r:15,s:23&biw=1257&bih=592
http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJNdUyeSAY59GIG9binf5KHxNUgDRXdH5R4rnudlZP3yT4g7St3Hhe_xqbzeuoSQryI-Cyu4yPuCpxRKTQJzBTD3GL5EWsmHs5I1IiWF_46elcHg9BUC2pnVdSi2tL1lgN1-VD2OCwgn_R/s400/Grayson_entryno1_BirdWoman+8x8-web.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.tafalist.com/2010_03_01_archive.html&usg=__zTHIJgpmyHaVef8uyLIrxKX4NTA=&h=365&w=400&sz=75&hl=en&start=205&zoom=1&tbnid=ozAQbMK0YgkS4M:&tbnh=131&tbnw=142&ei=Tph4TdO7O8uR4gatjezOBQ&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dwoman%2Bbird%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26biw%3D1255%26bih%3D582%26tbs%3Disch:11%2C4480&um=1&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=981&vpy=109&dur=5540&hovh=214&hovw=235&tx=185&ty=116&oei=NZh4TamrFsSBswbmooTsBg&page=10&ndsp=23&ved=1t:429,r:22,s:205&biw=1255&bih=582
http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://www.lzmosaic.com/images/mosaics/woman-with-bird-large.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.lzmosaic.com/woman-with-bird-glass-mosaic.html&usg=__KK77Sg_XoVW3t8WZmiQnj4W_Zq8=&h=1566&w=1280&sz=1323&hl=en&start=65&zoom=1&tbnid=R2I9DjE-p6Pt8M:&tbnh=133&tbnw=109&ei=Y514TZhGxOziBq-e3IMG&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dwoman%2Bbird%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26biw%3D1257%26bih%3D592%26tbs%3Disch:11%2C1539&um=1&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=622&vpy=227&dur=602&hovh=248&hovw=203&tx=123&ty=148&oei=NZh4TamrFsSBswbmooTsBg&page=4&ndsp=23&ved=1t:429,r:19,s:65&biw=1255&bih=582
But there's something to this bird thing. In women's literature, it's EVERYWHERE...
Mary Wollstonecraft writes, "Confined in cages like the feathered race, [women] have nothing to do but to plume themselves, and stalk with mock majesty from perch to perch" (62).
In "A Jury of Her Peers", Susan Glaspell describes Minnie Foster as a bird (through the voice of Martha Hale) saying, "She was kind of like a bird herself. Real sweet and pretty, but kind of timid and--fluttery. How--she--did--change."
Maya Angelou famously wrote I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
The sirens, of course, in Homer's Odyssey are bird-women, seducing men to their death's with their unearthly voices.
Goddesses in all kinds of ancient cultures--including the goddess Lilith, for example--have been associated with birds.
What's the deal?
I grew up not liking birds. My mom likes birds and flowers and all kinds of pretty, delicate things (as did her mom), so generally, I avoided them, choosing not to identify with this part of my maternal inheritance. I tended to think of birds as silly, dirty, annoying, insignificant creatures.
I'm beginning to change my mind.
The coexistence of delicacy and power in some birds reminds me all too much of the human condition, including its female half, of course.
And though birds preen and nest and feed, some of the 'womanly things' in which I've never (yet) become especially interested, they also SING. They also FLY.
Friday, 4 March 2011
Bits & Bobs on Vindication
I cannot believe Mary Wollstonecraft wrote this in the 18th Century; it is beyond comprehension. And how is it that so many of the issues she named and described remain prevalent over two hundred years later? (Was I really just reading something about a twenty-four-year-old Playboy bunny marrying Hugh Hefner and prancing around the Mansion in her skivvies?) I love how Wollstonecraft is both totally passionate and totally reasonable at once.
She calls for woman "to obtain a character as a human being" and tells us, frankly that she "must declare what [she] firmly believe[s]" (5,13). Right on, Mary. After all, we are human, as Atwood kept trying to say in spite of the Commander in her work of speculative fiction.
This part is equally passionate and reasonable at the same time: "When will a great man arise with sufficient strength of mind to puff away the fumes which pride and sensuality have thus spread over the subject?" (19) I often wonder the same thing. There is a paradox at work in this: men are stronger, it seems to me, when they are willing to put their own strength aside for a minute and consider the strength allowed women, in the past and now.
"Let it not be concluded that I wish to invert the order of things," Wollstonecraft is careful to say, acknowledging the fact that attaining equity and equality for women does not mean denying equity and equality for men--hence the words equity and equality, I should add (20).
Now I'm not so sure about this: "Her first wish should be to make herself respectable" as long as the focus of that respect isn't clear (23). If Wollstonecraft means respectable first to herself, if not then to others, then I'm on board. "Let her only determine, without being too anxious about present happiness, to acquire the qualities that ennoble a rational being" remains, in my mind, a worthy call for women and girls, should we also allow room for a fullness and wholeness of being in addition to rationality (29-30).
From time to time, I share Wollstonecraft's disdain for passionate and romantic, frivolous love as a kind of light and unworthy obsession. All those years ago, she was calling for a kind of partnership and mutual respect between men and women who love each other. "I love man as my fellow," she says (36). And: "The lordly caresses of a protector will not gratify a noble mind that pants for and deserves to be respected. Fondness is a poor substitute for friendship!" (24) I must admit to having enjoyed men's "fondness" from time to time over the years, but I certainly have better enjoyed their friendship and felt that their friendship was more substantial and therefore more meaningful.
Finally for now, I get pretty excited about what Wollstonecraft has to say about liberation. First: "It cannot be demonstrated that woman is essentially inferior to man because she has always been subjegated" (38). How can we know, in other words, what women are capable of? (This seems true to me even with regard to sports, for example. Too little time has past for us to yet fully see what women can do as athletes, at least when compared to men, who've been playing the same sports for much longer in most cases and, before that, whose bodies have been evolved for hunting and other quite physical enterprises.) "Liberty is the mother of virtue," Wollstonecraft proclaims (37). Amen, sister. Give me liberty, or give me death (or at least a kind of death, like there is for the narrator in The Handmaid's Tale). She notes, too, that "The women who have distinguished themselves have neither been the most beautiful nor the most gentle of their sex," reminding us that well behaved women rarely make history (25). Right-o!
She calls for woman "to obtain a character as a human being" and tells us, frankly that she "must declare what [she] firmly believe[s]" (5,13). Right on, Mary. After all, we are human, as Atwood kept trying to say in spite of the Commander in her work of speculative fiction.
This part is equally passionate and reasonable at the same time: "When will a great man arise with sufficient strength of mind to puff away the fumes which pride and sensuality have thus spread over the subject?" (19) I often wonder the same thing. There is a paradox at work in this: men are stronger, it seems to me, when they are willing to put their own strength aside for a minute and consider the strength allowed women, in the past and now.
"Let it not be concluded that I wish to invert the order of things," Wollstonecraft is careful to say, acknowledging the fact that attaining equity and equality for women does not mean denying equity and equality for men--hence the words equity and equality, I should add (20).
Now I'm not so sure about this: "Her first wish should be to make herself respectable" as long as the focus of that respect isn't clear (23). If Wollstonecraft means respectable first to herself, if not then to others, then I'm on board. "Let her only determine, without being too anxious about present happiness, to acquire the qualities that ennoble a rational being" remains, in my mind, a worthy call for women and girls, should we also allow room for a fullness and wholeness of being in addition to rationality (29-30).
From time to time, I share Wollstonecraft's disdain for passionate and romantic, frivolous love as a kind of light and unworthy obsession. All those years ago, she was calling for a kind of partnership and mutual respect between men and women who love each other. "I love man as my fellow," she says (36). And: "The lordly caresses of a protector will not gratify a noble mind that pants for and deserves to be respected. Fondness is a poor substitute for friendship!" (24) I must admit to having enjoyed men's "fondness" from time to time over the years, but I certainly have better enjoyed their friendship and felt that their friendship was more substantial and therefore more meaningful.
Finally for now, I get pretty excited about what Wollstonecraft has to say about liberation. First: "It cannot be demonstrated that woman is essentially inferior to man because she has always been subjegated" (38). How can we know, in other words, what women are capable of? (This seems true to me even with regard to sports, for example. Too little time has past for us to yet fully see what women can do as athletes, at least when compared to men, who've been playing the same sports for much longer in most cases and, before that, whose bodies have been evolved for hunting and other quite physical enterprises.) "Liberty is the mother of virtue," Wollstonecraft proclaims (37). Amen, sister. Give me liberty, or give me death (or at least a kind of death, like there is for the narrator in The Handmaid's Tale). She notes, too, that "The women who have distinguished themselves have neither been the most beautiful nor the most gentle of their sex," reminding us that well behaved women rarely make history (25). Right-o!
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