The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (9 page)

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 sort 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.

The more I talked, the angrier I got. People were starting to
stare, so we left and I got angry in the taxi. I railed about what had been done to women. He got defensive. He railed back. At some point I realized he'd become a target for my anger, an anger I had kept tightly bottled. It wasn't fair to him, and yet I needed him to hear me. I wanted so badly for him to understand, and I couldn't make it happen.

During awakening, volatility often lies just beneath the surface of a woman's relationship with her partner. In our case it was created by hurt and blaming on my part, fear and resistance on his. Men's resistance often grows out of their fear—fear that everything is going to change, that women's gain is their loss, that women will “turn the tables on them.” Men need to become aware, but blaming them doesn't help. It only polarizes. Eventually I came to see that what's needed is to invite men into our struggle, to make them part of our quest.

If Sandy and I had been more sensitive to what lay behind the other's reaction, if we'd picked our time wisely and listened,
really
listened to the other, we may have avoided such scenes. But frankly, it may not be possible to completely avoid the clash of feelings that accompanies powerful transitions. Sometimes the exchange may be calm and fruitful, but often it's a wild taxi ride.

Sandy and I made our peace, but it would be a while before I mentioned my journey again.

Flying home from New York, I thought about the painting. I thought about it over and over. In that curious and exotic way that an “unteacher” appears only when the student is ready, the Magritte painting appeared and opened several revelations to me. First, our lives as women are not always as self-created as we might assume. And second, once we are caught in the pattern of creating ourselves from cultural blueprints, it becomes a primary way of receiving validation. We become unknowingly bound up in a need to please the cultural father—the man holding the brush—and live up to his images of what a woman should be and do. We're rewarded when we do; life gets difficult when we don't.

Back home, I read these words by Jungian analyst Sylvia Perera:

What has been valued in the West in women has too often been defined only in relation to the masculine: the good, nurturant mother and wife; the sweet, docile agreeable daughter; the gently supportive or bright achieving partner. This collective model is inadequate for life; we mutilate, depotentiate, silence and enrage ourselves trying to compress our souls into it just as surely as our grandmothers deformed their fully breathing bodies with corsets for the sake of an ideal.
³²

Over the next few months I began to probe the feminine scripts that had been imprinted on my life.

Gracious Lady

During a visit to my childhood home in Georgia, I bumped into a school friend, and we relived the time during our adolescence when we'd gone to charm school. It was taught by a dramatic woman we called Miss Belle. It was her task to teach us the art of the female life. This involved learning how to set a formal dinner table, use crystal salt bowls instead of shakers, sit in a chair with ankles crossed, walk and pivot in high heels—the beauty pageant walk, we called it. We learned to pour tea, we learned the proper way to take off a summer glove, and we learned a lot of things a lady would never say and do. We discovered how to win boys by letting them open the pickle jar, whether it was too hard for us or not, and by asking boys questions we already knew the answers to.

My friend and I recalled these things with a laugh. “I was at a luncheon once where the host actually used those crystal salt bowls,” I told her. “I got confused, thought they were sugar bowls, and spooned salt into my iced tea. When I saw what I'd done, you know the first thing that came to my mind? Miss Belle.”

“I know,” my friend replied. “She's been looking over our shoulders our whole lives.”

Later I came upon Gloria Steinem's oft-quoted line, “We are all trained to be female impersonators,” and I thought again about those hours in charm school.
³³

Learning to play the Gracious Lady had started way back there with Miss Belle and probably even before her.

In the film
Fried Green Tomatoes,
Evelyn Couch lives out the Gracious Lady, though she's a little too dowdy to pull it off in the manner of crystal salt dishes and beauty pageant walks. Evelyn is a proper and passive woman who is forever accommodating and being sweet, trying to do the right thing and meticulously playing by the rules of culture.

In her perky curls and lace collars, she uses her girlish charm and laughter to glide past life's unpleasantness. She visits her husband's aunt at the nursing home, bringing candy, and her smile hardly wavers when the old woman throws it and her out of the room. At the grocery store, a young man runs into her, almost knocking her over, and
she
apologizes. When a driver usurps a parking space she has been waiting for, she courteously swallows back her anger and continues to circle the lot. When she makes a perfect meal for her husband, setting the table with flowers, she sighs but acquiesces when he takes his plate to the chair before the television.

In one of the film's more hilarious moments, Evelyn attends a women's consciousness-raising group at the insistence of a friend who hopes it will instill some power into Evelyn. The leader gives each woman a mirror and tells them they are going to explore their femaleness, the source of their strength and separateness—their vaginas. Falling back in her chair, shocked and flustered, Evelyn makes a nonoffending exit, offering her girdle as an excuse. (Indeed, wearing a girdle is an interesting metaphor of a woman tightly controlled by conventional expectations.)

It is not until she meets old Mrs. Threadgoode that she begins to question the stereotype she's living. No Gracious Lady herself, Mrs. Threadgoode dyes her hair lavender and tells Evelyn stories about a firebrand girl named Tawanda (actually Mrs. Threadgoode herself), who never put on airs and who broke every social rule that confined her true female self.

Inspired, Evelyn discards the lace collars and the Gracious Lady constraints. We witness her ram a car that has stolen her parking place, shouting, “Tawanda!”

While I don't recommend ramming cars, in lots of ways the energy of Tawanda is the cure for Gracious Ladies, those children of Miss Belle, whose real selves are suffocating inside strictures of properness, charm, sweetness, and social convention.

Church Handmaid

One afternoon during the same visit to my hometown, I drove by my childhood church, speculating on a certain question: What would happen if I brought feminism into my spiritual life?

On impulse, I parked the car beside the church and found a side door open. Maybe I was trying to understand why the question I'd asked turned my hands into warm puddles. Maybe I was trying to recapture an attachment to an old pattern of faith I could feel slipping away. To shore it up. To pat it like a child pats a sand castle at the first hint of tide.

I entered the sanctuary, hoping it would purify my doubts, but all I could seem to remember in there were sermons about the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man and especially that devastating sermon about Eve and the chalkboard with the downward-pointing arrows.

I wandered into the educational building, found a child's classroom, and sat in one of those miniature chairs. My knees pushed up toward my chin. I felt like Goldilocks in the chair that was too small.

I thought how I'd started out in a nursery down the hall. My grandfather and father were both Baptist deacons. My mother taught children Sunday school and headed the social committee, making sure there were platters of food for all our fellowships. My grandmother had given devotionals at the Women's Missionary Union. Growing up, I'd attended this church three times a week for services.

I think sometimes a childhood place can lean so heavily on your growing up that later, when you are grown, you find it has become part of your internal geography. This church was such a place. But it came to me suddenly and without question that I
must leave the Baptist world. I sat still on the little chair and breathed in and out very slowly, taking this in.

A goldfish bowl sat on a piano across the room. It was empty of fish and water, but I saw almost immediately the metaphor it represented. For so long the Baptist world had been both my goldfish bowl and the water I swam in. I'd come to think of it as the whole realm. I'd grown used to seeing everything through that water. It had never occurred to me that it was possible to leave. At a deep level, I'd not known I could make such a large choice.

It sounds silly, but at the time leaving this realm seemed as daunting to me as leaving the goldfish tank might have seemed to a goldfish. I wondered if I could survive outside the safe perimeters I knew so well. And I was not even thinking at that point about taking my leave from the entire church. I wasn't yet thinking about learning how to breathe in brand new spiritual environs, in a feminine realm where the old breathing mechanisms don't work at all.

Despite the growing disenchantment women experience in the early stages of awakening, the idea of existing beyond the patriarchal institution of faith, of withdrawing our external projection of God onto the church, is almost always unfathomable. It's that old the-world-is-flat conviction, where we believe that if we sail out on the spiritual ocean beyond a certain point we will fall off the edge of the known world into a void. We think there's nothing beyond the edge. No real spirituality, no salvation, no community, no divine substance. We cannot see that the voyage will lead us to whole new continents of depth and meaning. That if we keep going, we might even come full circle, but with a whole new consciousness.

Operating with the world-is-flat mentality, I was only thinking at that moment of going over to the Episcopal Church, which seemed to me to be a much larger fish tank.

I tried to picture myself explaining to my husband, my family, my friends that I was exiting the Baptist Church. It was way too much for the imagination. Not remotely possible. I got up from the too-small chair and left.

The following Sunday, home again, I returned to my own church. The deacons sat together on the front pews. All of them, I noticed, were men. The ministers—three more men—sat in huge chairs up front. I looked from one stained glass window to another. Most of the figures were men.

As the service began, I became acutely aware that every hymn and biblical passage used only masculine pronouns, as if that was all there was. Until then I had accepted that when it said
men
and
brotherhood,
that somehow meant me, too. But now, in a place much deeper than my head, I didn't feel included at all.

I realized that lacking the feminine, the language had communicated to me in subtle ways that women were nonentities, that women counted mostly as they related to men.

Until that moment I'd had no idea just how important language is in forming our lives. What happens to a female when all her life she hears sacred language indirectly, filtered through male terms? What goes on deep inside her when decade after decade she must translate from male experience into female experience and then apply the message to herself? What does the experience imprint inside her? Does it keep exclusive maleness functioning inside her, at least at the level of experience and symbol?

Sitting there, I thought of all the times I'd listened to ministers and Sunday school teachers extol the virtues of women who were subject to men, extensions of men, helpmates to men—women who lived as pale shadows of their true selves.