Last week or so I read this interview by Amanda Montei with writer Rebecca Woolf and was struck by many things discussed, but particularly this line:
I am many women and have been many women and will continue to be many more. They do not fit neatly into each other, but they nonetheless co-exist and the fact that the wires are messy and unstructured is the whole point.
I spent many years separating my experiences to make a more palatable story. I’m not going to do that anymore.
Over the past few years, I’ve been thinking about, noticing this linearity a lot. Plot, story, propaganda, identity—all require certain formulas, require certain constraints. Even writing this on my computer—with clear, stylized, established typeface, made to look as if the printed, published word is happening instantaneously as I write. The illusion of print, that there is no need to rewrite, or rethink. How much does that inform what I write as opposed to when I sit down to actually write—the slowing down of the pen, the surprise of accident in misunderstanding my own messy handwriting. Can that happen in spaces where there are proscribed ways of communicating?
And the hero story is no different, the familiar linear narrative. The ways we compartmentalize and storify our memories, our lives, our identities reassuringly into a model of the (almost always white male) hero—who struggles, overcomes, acts, and returns, only to set off again. We are conditioned to identify with the universality of this story over all others. It’s a good story—sometimes it’s a truly great story. But it is one way of telling a story that gets mistaken for a universal—which will always leave many out.
Adriana Caverero, in her book Relating Narratives, writes:
…the tradition which, by ignoring uniqueness, celebrates the glorious accomplishments of Man, is the same tradition that consents only to human beings of the male sex the ability to recognize themselves in this abstract universal.1
These types of linear narratives become a part of us, part of our self-talk—we try to explain mistakes or events we wouldn’t have wished as making us stronger for the next step, adventure. We talk of pushing on, moving forward, doing, looking for adventure elsewhere—and perhaps waiting, hoping for our story to be told. But that can only really happen once death has placed a punctuation mark on it, when a full story can be realized from start to finish.
Cavarero, in her collection of essays In Spite of Plato2, writes about this, in the contrast between Odysseus and Penelope’s experience of story and time:
The time of action, then, is characterized by the new and the unexpected. Nevertheless this action is the consummation of pressing events following one after the other. It is destined to bring on stage the things that last only a brief moment before being consigned to oblivion…Obviously the time of action does not belong to the home…the home provides a point of departure and return…
Narrative is selective and unreliable, no matter how reliably we attend to accuracy. What happens outside of those linearities we create, that we follow, is what life actually is. Messy, unstructured, multiple.
I’ve never been all that comfortable with the word wife applied to my identity. I think because I felt a sense of erasure—but in truth, there’s also a sense of erasure in being introduced as daughter, sister, mother. They all place priority on the other who I am in relationship to—a sense of a claim on me by another that without my name attached, feels marginal—I feel consigned to the margins of the story.
It doesn’t help that the word wife has an etymological history as simply the name for a woman—nameless, in relationship to men. Wife. Husband is also interesting and telling—literally, a man with a house, property. At one point there was a companion term to wife-as-woman for man, in the term of man as wer—which left English in the 13th century and now is left in hints, like in the word werewolf.
Part of my discomfort with wife is of course deeply rooted, no doubt. The dismissive derision of old wives’ tales doesn’t help. Nor do the tropes we learn about wife and how domestic life is never a place for heroes. No hero story is of a wife.
In some countries in Europe wife became a derogatory term. From wif came wifman—the origin of woman. And so wife, when no longer used for all women, somehow became a negative or derisive term in Dutch and German, similar to the softened kind of slang as ‘babe’ but also ‘bitch.’
And so old wives’ tales aren’t necessarily tales told by old wives—they were also simply any old woman’s tale—just the words of women, married or not. Not to be listened to. Women who brewed beer, knew plant lore and made medicines for their families, birthed and helped birth the children of other women, sold bread, spun wool and wove cloth so men could sail across oceans in their own hero stories. Those women. It’s so deeply rooted.
Marina Warner, in From the Beast to the Blonde, relays advice from the First Epistle to Timothy by Saint Paul on the improper speech of women:
above all, Timothy, must not listen to ‘profane and old wives’ fables.’ (4: 7). Even younger widows, too, warns Paul, ‘are not only idle, but tattlers also and busybodies, speaking things which they ought not.’ (5. 13) He fears gossip as well, and observes that young widows’ behavior will give rise to talk unless they remarry.3
Paul had another blow on women’s speech:
A woman ought not to speak…Nevertheless she will be saved by childbearing.
As Warner writes, “The womb redeems the tongue; vulgarly speaking, a wombful excuses a mouthful.”
Warner writes how gossip and fairytales were told and retold by women—the original Mother Goose, the Old wife, the Nan or Grandmother at the hearth, spinning and sharing the stories of a different time and place, outside of time:
Children, of whatever rank, who play around the women gossiping are learning the rules of the group; fairy tales train them in attitudes and aspirations.
This can be conservative but it can also—and often is—subversive: it cuts across class and gender. Such stories can warn girls of the evils of a lecherous ogre, a disguised wolf. Fairy tales often subvert received social ideas, which is why women and children, particularly, thrill to them: beasts become handsome princes, beggars become princesses, and old women become fairy godmothers. And about gossip, Warner writes:
gossip carried knowledge of secrets, of intimate matters—including illicit information about sex, contraception, and abortion which threatened the official organs of the Church, the law, and science. Gossip includes mother-wit, and mother-wit knows a thing or two that They don't know, or rather that They don’t want to be known.
Fairy tales appeared in the printed word long before the brothers Grimm took up the task as a way to form a proto-nationalism. Women, in fact, were some of the first to write these stories down.
The literary women who wrote fairy tales, the sophisticated milieu in which ‘Cinderella,’ ‘The Blue Bird,’ ‘The Subtle Princess,’ and ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ were produced, mounted a critical attack on many prejudices and practices of their day, which confined and defamed women in their view and coarsened the minds and manners of all members of society. Paradoxically, gossip was one of the battlefields on which they engaged their enemies, one of the weapons they seized. The culture of the salons in the second half of the seventeenth century fostered the art of conversation as one of the foundation skills of civilization.4
While I wince at Warner’s use of the word civilization, I do like the point she is making—that these stories, like Penelope at her loom, weaving and unweaving—create a different space, a different type of story that is relayed, retold, added to, improvised. Where women can relay magic and find strength and a history in their collective voice. Cavarero writes, again In Spite of Plato:
…women are assigned a place, a role, a time, and a function, by differentiation as a figure of inferiority and lack…but precisely for this reason, she also becomes a figure who denies and disrupts the time and place assigned to her….This space which she carves out from day to day is home, is rootedness; it is the space where a woman stays close to herself. Here women belong to themselves completely and absolutely. Their sense of belonging comes first, and this makes other things possible…It displaces the patriarchal order, setting up an impenetrable distance between that order and itself.5
The salons that arose around the same time in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of France—at a time when many writers began putting fairy tales in print for the first time—were predominantly presided over by women.
The Marquise de Rambouillet (née Catherine de Vivonne de Savelin, 1588-1665), began to tire of court life and instead invited guests to attend her at home. There she had them come to her bedroom where she essentially held court, had guests tell stories, real and imaginary, gossip, exchange news, theorize and argue, engage in conversation. Favorite guests sat beside her bed and the wall—the ruelle or alley, which became the word for such salons. Warner writes:
This arrangement of social space, both public and private at the same time, was presided over by women and it lasted until the [French] Revolution….the ruelles were the sphere of women, where they presided over the spoken word and its uses.
Attesting to the power of such salons, the grammarian Claude Favre de Vaugelas noted, in a work dated 1647, that ‘in case of doubt about language, it is ordinarily best to consult women.’
Fairy tales, like old wives’ tales, gossip, and other talk attributed dismissively to women became a form of protest in an era when the modern novel didn’t yet fully exist, when the printed page was still somewhat of a recent technological invention. And in their subversion of love over arranged marriages, or of the usurping of class and disregard for other social rules—or the disregard altogether of heaven and hell with a world of goblins, ogres, witches, and the supernatural—fairy tales became a target of the intellectual over the vernacular, of those who believed only Latin and Greek were the texts suitable to learn from. When Charles Perrault defended fairy tales in his work, he was refuting those who believed in the supremacy of the ancients over the local, vernacular, and the contemporary. The infantilization of fairy tales was a way to oppress the tales that were actually being told and retold by the populace—an elite dismissal of their value as nothing but tales for the naivety of children.
I was thinking through all of this as I also read more about feminism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and learned of the feminist salon Heterodoxy. Despite many of the still very present Victorian strictures placed on women, there were women who gathered in Greenwich Village secretly, creating a salon similar to those in the seventeenth century France. Begun in 1912, the founder, Marie Jenney Howe, named their salon Heterodoxy, as the one requirement to become a member is to not be orthodox in opinion.
The salon began in before World War I, discussing suffrage, birth control, abortion access, journalism, politics, anarchy, communism, socialism, politics, literature, art, philosophy. They kept no record of their meetings in order to give space to free ideas and free discussion, to doubt and disagree openly. Howe created it as a feminist space, noting that other salons included men—which made it hard to talk over, interrupt, correct or otherwise assert opinions without being labeled “stubborn or strident,” according to work by Joanna Scutts:
It’s enough to be, as one member puts it, ‘women who did things, and did them openly.’ It’s enough to simply show up.
The heterodites were well-educated women, with degrees in law, medicine, science, as well as journalists, writers, dancers, artists, businesswomen, actors, psychoanalysts. And while predominantly white, there was at least one African-American woman, Grace Nail Johnson, who was a member.
The list of women members is something that would easily be called extraordinary—but it’s more accurate to say that this is a wide-ranging list, and not by any means the only women active in feminist, civil rights, politics, and other advocacy work in the early twentieth century. What is extraordinary is that so many of us never know anything about them all. Women who resisted marriage, restrictions on divorce, motherhood without support, women who were enormous contributors to labor—protesting, bearing witness and reporting—who fought misogyny and spoke about the wrongs of society and how it affects them and others.
Many of these women were journalists who won national awards for their groundbreaking work. Many of these women wrote at a time when women journalists were still not allowed in courtrooms—or were only just being allowed in, let alone as jury members. But many of these women journalists were only first offered beats that were felt appropriate to the modesty of an age breaking free from Victorian ideals.
When they did demand to write work on criminal cases, or politics, they were thought too emotional, and deemed “sob sisters”—a term coined by Irvin S. Cobb, the highest-paid journalist in the world at the time. He said it in regard to the women who were covering a very public murder trial, at a time when women were only recently allowed in the courtroom. The term became widely used by 1910 for stories written by women who focused on the human interest in a story, using ‘emotional’ language. Like the fairy tales told and written by women, it was a term of derision, to denote amateurism. Mary Margaret McBride, who wrote for the New York Evening Mail, hated the term, reportedly saying unsurprisingly that
The assumption that I was good for one type of story made me feel like a sort of second-class citizen.
The linear narrative needs an end—it’s why a hero’s story can only truly be told after he is dead, after the full story can be told. It can be immortalized in the retelling, but it remains in a type of suspended space, a suspended finitude. And if it is not told, it rests in oblivion. Cavaerero writes:
But in the weaving room, these women neither separate their philosophy from the body to grant it eternal duration nor entrust their experience of finitude to death in an arrogant desire for immortality. The world of ideas and the sea are not theirs. Having let men go forth to their adventures at sea, they stay together quietly, exchanging looks and words rooted in the individual wholeness of their existence, now so evidently gendered in the feminine that this life shared in a common horizon allows every woman to recognize herself in another woman.6
Penelope’s metaphor resounds through all of this—the women at tasks of weaving, spinning, cooking, making, sustaining, telling the tales of life, retelling them, relaying news, sharing advice—weaving and unweaving to create a space between public and private, out of time, “a space that is impenetrable to the motives of the world, a hearth of one’s own.”7
Through all of this is a type of storytelling—like the women gothic writers and storytellers relaying stories of ghosts who haunt at the margins of the real to seek justice for the oppression and violence they faced in life—that lives outside the linear narrative. The salons held by women in earlier centuries were places where women found space to hold tension between the public and private. Fairytales and gossip and old wives’ tales and salons were all places to create stories of protest, subversion, magic, and warning.
We do need those roots that form in conversation, that allow not a linear following of action after action, but reflection and thought joined in a collective voice. That’s what I keep thinking about reading through these works, about how we don’t have to abandon the linear stories that become immortal, but we can’t also lose sight of infinity—that through that origin of spoken word story, there is something wise and tested—warnings to heed, rules to overturn. Italo Calvino found this, saying that in fairy tales he heard the
voices of the people, he had discovered the knowledge of another way of being, the fruits of struggle and hope…the possibility of holding a storehouse of narrative in common could act to enhance our reciprocal relations, to communicate across spaces and barricades of national self-interest and pride.8
Maybe that’s what we’re all trying to do as writers and readers here—to find conversation outside of gatekeepers, finding a way to reach one another and reflect, share our stories—raw and unpolished, rambling perhaps and unfinished, rule-breaking and protesting—weaving and unweaving to make a space where there are not heroes and villains, but a type of collective storehouse of knowledge that can be shared and retold in different ways
Angela Carter, that fantastic writer of fairy tales herself, said
Ours is a highly individualized culture, with a great faith in the work of art as a unique one-off, and the artist as an original, a godlike and inspired creator of unique one-offs. But fairy tales are not like that, nor are their makers. Who first invented meatballs? In what country? Is there a definitive recipe for potato soup? Think in terms of domestic arts. ‘This is how I make potato soup.’….9
Messy, imperfect, repetitive, wise, erudite, gossipy—not siloed into genre, linearity, section and ending, but continuing ad infinitum. There will always be rules in need of breaking. But we can only do that if we share and re-tell what we learn, know, hear, and imagine.
Cavarero, Adriana. Relating Narratives: storytelling and selfhood. 2000. Routledge, London and New York. p. 58.
Cavarero, Adriana. In Spite of Plato: a feminist rewriting of ancient philosophy. 1995. Polity Press, Cambridge.
Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde: on fairy tales and their tellers. 1995. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Warner, p. 49
Cavarero, ISOP. pp. 16-17
Ibid. p. 30
Ibid, p. 18
Warner, p. 414
Ibid, p. 418
With in a herd of deer you will find that the female matriarch is the story teller. The story has to be a story because it is also the time keeper and a place holder, so much information that it needs a story to hold it all together. In the case of the female matriarch this is a story of what ripens when and where. What food will be available at what time of the year and what place and how that fits in with the other places. To tell the story she takes her herd through the journey of it and of course the discourse is always shifting depending on the weather, the environment, the other players who wander in and out. The patriarch of the herd has his role, but it’s not the weaving of knowledge that feeds and sustains and keeps the herd alive. That is the matriarchs job and it is her job to pass it down, to tell the story over and over so that this knowledge is not lost.
This is truly truly brilliant. Thank you SO much for these articulations. They are giving me life right now. #medicine #brilliance #truth