The Dance of the Dissident Daughter Read online

  Someone had brought along a Native American drum, and she began to beat it as we wound through sea oats and darkness. On the beach we gathered driftwood and built a fire, then sat around it. The women began to sing, laugh, tell stories. They talked about their lives as women, their struggles to “bring forth an authentic female life.” There was an awful lot of talk about the “Great Mother” (whoever she was) and being connected to the earth and the moon (whatever that meant). I hugged my knees tight and didn’t say a word.

  As their sense of feminine celebration rose, and since these women were being their instinctual selves and nothing else, a whole lot of them got up and danced. They twirled and swayed along the border of waves. Treading into the water, they dipped it up with their hands and tossed it toward the sky, letting it fall around them like wedding rice.

  Playing and dancing, casting fluid shadows on the beach, they looked half-real to me, like mermaids who’d swum ashore and found their legs. I sat dazed by the whole thing. It was like landing on Venus.

  I don’t think I’d ever felt so awkward, bewildered, or unsettled in my life, yet I was mesmerized. These women were embodying an experience of their femininity I knew nothing about. They seemed to truly love their womanhood. They didn’t appear to doubt their thoughts and feelings as women. Instead they seemed naturally themselves, self-defined, self-connected.

  Then almost against my will I flashed back to that day at the monastery six months earlier. Father Sue, I thought. It had never been so clear to me as then how far I had drifted from my feminine instinct, how much I had lost my way as a woman.

  I remembered recognizing at the time that I needed to birth a new life, one that had something to do with loving my female self and finding my way back to the deep authenticity of it. I’d tried over the last few months to suppress the memory, but here on the beach with these women the need to suppress it left me completely. I knew I could not ignore this journey. I did not want to.

  Someone who’d danced far down the beach found a huge sea turtle shell that had washed ashore, and she came back to share her find. I trekked down with a small group to inspect it. We stared at the hulk of shell while water lapped around our bare ankles. “I feel like the shell is a gift to us,” a woman said. “A sign.”

  Another woman who was a student of ancient mythology told us that the turtle was a feminine symbol of strength and wisdom. “Did you know that in some ancient cultures the turtle shell was considered the base and support of the universe? It was said the whole world axis sat on her back.”

  Silence fell as we stared at the carapace, ink-gold beneath the moon. One by one the women began to dance again, dipping to brush their hands across the shell as they circled it, as if they were touching the source of feminine support, wisdom, and strength.

  It was a ritual of deep beauty that I could only watch from the edge. But when the women finally walked back up the beach, I lagged behind just long enough to brush my hand across the shell.

  Acts of Naming

  After I returned home from the conference, I had a talk with my friend Betty. We’d met at a women’s luncheon five years earlier and had become good friends. That evening I poured out my story to her: the awakening that was trying to unfold in me, the resistance I’d felt, the experience at the monastery, what had happened to me on the beach. I said it out loud to another woman. Besides scrawling words in my journal, this was my first real act of naming my experience.

  She listened, nodding. Finally she said, “I don’t know why we haven’t talked about this sooner. My awakening began over a year ago.” As we talked we discovered we had something profound in common: a journey to find our female souls.

  After that we began to meet regularly to talk about our lives as women. We met all summer and into the fall and on and on. It became a mutual process of self-discovery. We debated ideas in books we were reading, pondered new contexts of spiritual meaning for women. Together, over time, we named our lives as women, named our wounds, named our sacred realities. To say it very simply, we helped each other.

  Going to another woman for help can be a breakthrough act, because throughout history women have been programmed to turn to men for help. We might go to other women for solace, for “domestic wisdom,” but for solutions and insight, to find out how the world works and how to name reality, many women tend to go to men. To male experts, teachers, fathers, husbands, older brothers, priests, and ministers. Certainly we can find real help there. I have been encouraged and blessed by enlightened men. But it alters something inside a woman when she begins to turn also to women, to see women, and therefore herself, as namers of reality.

  My experience on the beach and my discussions with Betty gave me the courage to begin to see myself and other women this way.

  To name is to define and shape reality. For eons women have accepted male naming as a given, especially in the spiritual realm. The fact is, for a long time now men have been naming the world, God, sacred reality, and even women from their own masculine perspective and experience and then calling it universal experience. As feminist culture critic Elizabeth Dodson Gray points out, this naming tended to benefit men’s needs and concerns and in lots of cases to oppress women. Was it such a wild thought that women might start naming God, sacred reality, and their own lives themselves?

  I wondered how the world might have been different if women had been equally involved in the act of naming. How might sacred experience be different? How might we as women be different? Would there be a feminine wound for us to name and heal?

  Naming allows a woman to embrace her own experience, to utter her female truth, perhaps for the first time. Since my waking had been precipitated by an encounter with feminine woundedness (as it frequently is for women), that summer I began the process of naming by acknowledging and expressing the feminine wound in myself.

  In an interview, novelist Alice Walker says,

  You think you can avoid [pain], but actually you can’t. If you do, you just get sicker, or you feel more pain. But if you can speak it, if you can write it, if you can paint it, it is very healing.24

  I began to paint pictures of my wounded female life. Through the summer I painted images that were painful and even startling to me. As I painted, deeply buried emotions boiled to the surface.

  They were emotions that for many years had influenced my behavior in unconscious but profound ways. Unacknowledged feelings about our womanhood operate like the so-called wizard in Oz who sits hidden behind the curtain pulling strings, creating large, unwanted, sometimes frightening effects. Not only do they control our lives in unwanted ways, but unfelt feelings stay in the body “like small ticking time bombs,” says Christiane Northrup. “They are illnesses in incubation.”25

  A lot of women have told me, “I don’t really know what I’m feeling half the time.” Perhaps that’s because when uncomfortable feelings come, we push them aside. After a while, we’ve blocked them so well, for so long, that they no longer get through at all.

  Once we begin to acknowledge wounded feelings, though, it’s almost a relief. We may feel like Dorothy when her dog, Toto, drew aside the curtain, exposing the man who was scaring everyone with his behind-the-scenes machinations. We can see then what has been controlling a lot of our life. We can see where the self-doubt, the silencing, the drivenness, the need to fulfill collective expectations come from. But most of all, in seeing the wound for what it is, we take charge, just as Dorothy, seeing the Wizard for what he was, mobilized herself to stand up to him.

  I found myself painting a woman without feet, a woman without a mouth, a woman without hands.

  Why these mutilated women?

  In painting my female life without feet, I was uncovering an inability to “stand” firmly on my own feminine ground, to “stand up to others” or “stand up for” myself. Several years after I painted those images, I was visiting the High Museum in Atlanta when I came upon a striking sculpture of a pair of feet. Just feet from the ankles down. They w
ere surrounded by a field of large glass spheres that appeared to be oversized teardrops. The title of the work was Mother.

  So there are our feet, I thought, in this bed of tears. I felt the artist Kiki Smith had captured the universal severing of women from their female “standpoint.”

  In painting a woman without a mouth, I was revealing to myself a female life unable to adequately voice the Feminine Self, which is always a woman’s truest voice.

  The woman without hands spoke to me about a life severed from the power to grasp one’s deep life as woman, to hold onto one’s inherent power. One day that summer while browsing in a small shop, I happened upon an illustration of the Virgin Mary drawn in detail except for one thing. She had no hands.

  As I looked at the print, I realized that over the long course of church history, Mary had been the closest thing Christianity had to an archetype of the Feminine Divine. For many she filled the vacuum in the divine image and came to represent the feminine “side.” She was referred to as Queen of Heaven, Lady All Holy, Sovereign Mistress of the World.26

  Yet at the same time Mary was portrayed as a humble, submissive, untainted virgin, the lowliest of handmaids whose compliant response was, “Let it be done to me according to your word,” a response women have mirrored in virtually every relationship in their lives.

  In the Baptist tradition we’d prefaced most conversations about Mary by saying, “She was just a woman,” emphasizing her lesser place. In fact, if the Christmas story hadn’t been read once a year in the Baptist churches I’d attended, it would have been easy to forget Jesus had a mother at all.

  In the shop that day, I remembered the one and only experience with Mary I’d had as a child. I was spending the night at the home of a Catholic family, and on the mantle in the guest bedroom was a porcelain statue of Mary. Standing upon a sliver of crescent moon, she was a mystery that called up an inexplicable rush of feeling. I experienced what I suppose could be called the magnetic pull to the Feminine Divine. With a gesture of spontaneous adoration, I reached out and touched her, whispering the only words for her I knew: “Hail, Mary.”

  Later I questioned my veneration of the feminine figure. I felt as though I’d eaten a forbidden fruit.27

  As the memory faded, I stared at the handless Mary in the picture. The omission of her hands made me wonder: Was the handless Sue I’d been drawing connected to the handless Mary? Did a wounded and diminished feminine life emerge in part from a wounded and diminished Feminine Divine? Did reclaiming my feminine hands have something to do with reclaiming a feminine divinity? It was a thought wildly new to me. I could do nothing at the time but tuck it quietly away.

  I simply went on doing the only things I knew to do at this point in my waking—acknowledge and express my feminine experience as best as I could, mostly through art and journaling. And I went on saying it out loud to Betty, who received it with the tender words, “I know, Sue. All of us down deep know.”

  FACES OF DAUGHTERHOOD

  One morning when summer had nearly burned itself out, I woke to the sound of rain. I went to my study and sat before my sketches and paintings of the wounded female life—the handless, footless, mouthless women. For months I’d been acknowledging my feminine wound, but now I felt a need to let it go or at least symbolize its going in a ritual of foretelling.

  When the rain stopped, I burned the drawings one by one on the patio then stared at the heap of cinder left behind. It was this sight—the small lump of cinder and aftermath—that filled me suddenly with a need to understand how the feminine wound had affected my life. What sort of ash and fallout had it deposited? What patterns had it instilled?

  I bent down and touched the cooled cinders, letting them move through the sieve of my fingers, aware that the next part of my awakening lay in probing those questions, going even deeper into the act of naming myself. Or was it an unnaming I was about to take up? Sometimes you have to unname something before you can define it for yourself.

  The morning after I burned my pictures marked a pivotal moment in my unnaming. As I stood in the garden picking what was left of the tomatoes, an awareness splintered into my thoughts: I am grown, with children of my own. But inside I am still a daughter. A daughter is a woman who remains internally dependent, who does not shape her identity and direction as a woman, but tends to accept the identity and direction projected onto her. She tends to become the image of woman that the cultural father idealizes.

  My simple self-confession was a deceptively powerful one, for in making it I took my first distinct, albeit tiny, step away from identifying myself as a dependent person. I began to observe myself as daughter instead of merely being one.

  After that it became increasingly clear to me that much of the way I lived and related as a woman and many of the female patterns in my life were, in fact, hidden adaptations to the feminine wound. They were the many faces of my daughterhood.

  A wound to the psyche often causes the same response as a wound to the body: compensation. For example, if you severely injure an ankle, the connective tissue or fascia in that area will remold around the trauma, trying to compensate for the damage. You may begin to walk a little differently, to favor the other side ever so slightly. If this keeps up, over time your posture will change. Whole new patterns of maintaining your structure will emerge as bones, soft tissues, and tendons realign themselves.

  We respond to the feminine wound in a similar way—by making subtle but in the long run profound postural shifts in the psyche. Our psyches begin to realign and remold to compensate for the damage, usually favoring the “other side.” For instance, if the feminine “ankle” is crippled, we learn to shift our weight to the “standpoint” of strength. That is, we compensate by identifying with and supporting male dominance. We become good daughters to the cultural father.

  One of the more delicate phases in the waking process is accepting how we’ve been complicit. Simone de Beauvoir pointed out, for instance, that women themselves condition their daughters to serve the system of male primacy. If a daughter challenges it, the mother will generally defend the system rather than her daughter.28 These mothers, victims themselves, have unwittingly become wounded wounders.

  Women need to attack culture’s oppression of women, for there truly is a godlike socializing power that induces women to “buy in” or collude, but we also need to confront our own part in accepting male dominance and take responsibility where appropriate. I knew I would have to come to grips with how I’d bought into patriarchy. I would have to look hard at my own daughterhood.

  Cultural Blueprints

  Early that autumn, my husband and I traveled to New York, where we visited an exhibition of Magritte’s paintings. In one painting an ordinary-looking man in a suit was holding a brush and painting an actual woman into existence in his living room. It was as if he were God and she were Eve at the moment of creation. Almost completed, she stood there waiting for the next stroke of creation.

  Wait a minute, I thought. Just how is Everywoman’s life created? How much of my life did I allow to be painted into existence by church, culture, and male attitudes? Down deep, was my life as woman self-conceived and self-created as an original and unfolding work from my own hands, or was it contrived according to hidden blueprints?

  Carolyn Heilbrun has written about the “scripts” for womanhood that are handed to women to live out, culturally defined scripts that are written in advance and passed to females from birth.29 And historian Gerda Lerner writes that men and women live on a stage, acting out their assigned roles. The play can’t go on without both of them, she says, but

  the stage set is conceived, painted and defined by men. Men have written the play, have directed the show, interpreted the meanings of the action. They have assigned themselves the most interesting, the most heroic parts.30

  By blindly following the script, we tend to become what Ursula K. Le Guin calls “male constructs” or, in Madonna Kolbenschlag’s words, “formula females.”31 It is sor
t of like filling in a paint-by-number canvas, creating ourselves within the outline of stories, wishes, and mindsets projected onto us by a faith and culture that have been shaped and regulated by men. By blindly following the script, we forfeit the power to shape our own lives and identities.

  I studied Magritte’s painting. It all went back, of course, to Adam and Eve, to the idea of woman being fashioned out of man or out of the male rib. If woman was formed from man, in his image, to be his helper, then her life and roles emerged from him and revolved around him—or so said this mindset.

  Sandy moved on to the next painting, but I remained. After a while he came back. “What’s so fascinating about this one?” he asked.

  “I was just wondering, when it comes to my life, who holds the brush?”

  He looked at the picture, then back at me.

  I hadn’t said much to him about my awakening; I knew how uncomfortable, how resistant he might be. But standing in the middle of the museum, I told him a little of what was happening to me. That I was experiencing an awakening, that this awakening was spiritual, and that it was feminist.

  There was a long pause. That may have been the first time I used the word feminist out loud in relation to myself. Along the way, I’d decided that I cared passionately about the essence behind the word, that being a feminist was nothing more than aligning myself with the cause of equality and justice and fullness of personhood for women.

  “Feminist?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Well, I guess that will be okay,” he said, sounding a little like he was talking to a teenager who’d just asked to take the car out for the first time. Sounding, too, like he was trying to convince himself. Then he asked me where I wanted to go for dinner.

  I felt like I’d been given some kind of permission I hadn’t asked for and then been dismissed. Right then I finally found the words to tell him why I was fed up.