by Maria Tatar
Women who tell their stories candidly are risk takers. There may be some therapeutic gain in telling all, but the risk may not always be worth the reward. What would happen if the Afghan woman’s husband were to awaken from his coma and reveal that he had heard the entire story of her suffering, along with her awareness of what is described as his sterility as well as her sexual betrayals in order to become pregnant? That question is answered (spoiler alert!) by the end of the novel, when it becomes clear that the wife’s confessions have not softened her husband’s heart. The patience stone, in this case, does not burst in empathetic identification but instead is animated by homicidal rage, averted at the last moment by the wife’s use of the dagger that had once hung on the wall with her husband’s portrait. The Afghan woman in The Patience Stone finds her voice. Telling her story endows her with agency, enabling her to defend herself from her husband’s murderous assault.
Walter Crane, illustration for the Grimms’ “The Robber Bridegroom,” 1886
The Brothers Grimm included a tale in their Children’s Stories and Household Tales that reprises the British “Mr. Fox” and gives us a final tableau in which a scene of storytelling turns into a kangaroo court. Encouraged by her fiancé to tell a story at the wedding feast, the young woman in “The Robber Bridegroom” frames her narrative as a dream:
“Very well,” she replied, “I will tell you about a dream I had. I was walking alone through the woods and came across a house. No one was living there, but on the wall, there was a cage, and in it was a bird that sang:
‘Turn back, turn back, my pretty young bride,
In a house of murderers you’ve arrived.’
Then it repeated those words. My dear, I must have been dreaming all this. I walked from one room to the next, and each one was completely empty. Everything was so spooky. Finally I went down to the cellar, and there I saw a woman as old as the hills, her head bobbing up and down. I asked her: ‘Does my betrothed live here?’ She replied: ‘Oh, you poor child, you’ve stumbled into a den of murderers. Your betrothed lives here, but he is planning to chop you up and kill you, and then he’ll cook you and eat you up.’ My dear, I must have been dreaming all this. The old woman hid me behind a big barrel, and no sooner was I out of sight when the robbers returned home, dragging a maiden behind them. They gave her three kinds of wine to drink, white, red, and yellow, and her heart burst in two. My dear, I must have been dreaming all this. Then they tore off her fine clothes, chopped her beautiful body into pieces, and sprinkled them with salt. My dear, I must have been dreaming all this. One of the robbers caught sight of a gold ring on her finger and since it was hard to pull off, he took an axe and chopped it off. The finger flew through the air up behind the big barrel and landed in my lap. And here is the finger with the ring still on it.”
With these words, she pulled it out and showed it to everyone there.
The robber turned white as a ghost while she was telling the story. He jumped up and tried to escape, but the guests seized him and turned him over to the law. He and his band were executed for their dreadful deeds.
Telling stories to inanimate objects and broadcasting injury to a public audience have a long and venerable folkloric history. This is not Scheherazade engaging in a storytelling practice that entertains and instructs, keeping the king animated in ways that delay her execution, teach her husband the value of empathy, and lead him to an understanding of the entire range of human emotions and behaviors. We are in the here and now, and broadcasting injury and harm—telling all—proves to be more than cathartic. It can also secure social justice and punish treacherous women and barbaric men. But it is also not without risk.
Technology and Talk: From ELIZA to Twitter
Today we continue to talk to things, perhaps not in the form of stoves and stones, but in the shape of hard, metallic objects that seem to patiently, and sympathetically, listen to our stories. New technologies have made it possible to tell our stories to maximum dramatic effect in interactions with machines. Back in 1971, Joseph Weizenbaum developed a software program called ELIZA. The irony of naming the program after Eliza Doolittle will not be lost on older generations of program users. The 1956 Broadway hit musical My Fair Lady, based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 stage play Pygmalion, tells of a language professor named Henry Higgins who is determined to prove that he can elevate a woman to a higher social rank by changing the way she speaks. Controlling women’s speech continues to be supremely important, then as now.
To program ELIZA, Weizenbaum used what are called the nondirected aspects of Rogerian therapy, which famously advocated unconditional acceptance of a client/patient’s views in order to promote the uninhibited expression of feelings. “How do you feel about that?” was the classic response to any declarations of abuse, mistreatment, and victimization. ELIZA of course has no real understanding of her user’s statements, but “she” is able to generate a variety of leading questions that encourage the sharing of intense feelings and create an affective bond with an entity that conveys a (false) sense of responsiveness and empathy.
Tech guru Sherry Turkle has observed that those who use the program “want to tell it their secrets.” Once there is even “the smallest gesture suggesting [ELIZA] can empathize, the instinct to talk, reveal, and confess sets in.” “I have watched hundreds of people type a first sentence into the primitive ELIZA program,” Turkle adds. “Most commonly they begin with ‘How are you today?’ or ‘Hello.’ But four or five interchanges later, many are on to ‘My girlfriend left me,’ ‘I am worried that I might fail organic chemistry,’ or ‘My sister died.’”57 Once given the opportunity, most users willingly commit to dialogic engagement with an inanimate object, a modern-day patience stone that promises therapeutic emotional release. Of course the promise of complete discretion should be factored in to the confessional impulse Turkle describes.
The value of telling your story, beyond its use as evidence, has become clear in a variety of ways in the criminal justice system. Many states have passed amendments creating the opportunity for victim impact statements. “Not everyone finds relief in a courtroom, but many people who have endured a violent crime or lost someone they loved report feeling tremendous catharsis after having the chance to describe their suffering in court. Those who worry about the practice say that there should at least be better, fairer, and more clearly enforced rules about doing it.”58 Telling your story, in settings private and public, can go beyond therapeutic release to become part of a fact-finding effort to secure justice for all, paving the pathway for the kind of restorative justice that has found many advocates today.
The Greeks have a story still told today about a woman named Maroula, whose children are murdered by a treacherous mother-in-law. The crime is blamed on the children’s mother, and the enraged husband orders his wife’s hands cut off and sewn into a sack with the bodies of the children. Maroula is banished from the kingdom and wanders from one region to the next with the sack tied around her neck. One day, she meets a monk, to whom she tells her story, and the monk brings the children back to life and joins Maroula’s hands to her arms. The truth reaches the husband as well, in the form of a story. Justice runs its course when the tale is told a third time at a banquet, where the assembled guests pronounce judgment on the villainous woman: “They reached a decision to put her in a barrel of tar and set fire to it on the sea.”59
Women have always spoken up and acted up, but, as we have seen, they were often silenced in ways that forced them to channel their feelings by confiding in artifacts associated with women’s work. In acts of desperation, they talked to themselves or to inanimate objects, discovering that justice could come only when a male intermediary listened in and made things right. Today, we have developed new technologies and new courtroom procedures that enable the telling of stories. Social media platforms provide public outlets for airing grievances and exposing injustices. In a short time span, we have established an alternative system that at times rivals our legal
institutions in its power to shame, punish, and chasten—to conjure Nemesis. ELIZA may promise confidentiality but Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram ensure maximum exposure. The premium on storytelling, along with all the attendant anxieties about reliability and concerns about hearing one side alone, has never been higher. The challenges that lie ahead remind us of the vexing complexities implicated in the difference between telling a good story and telling one that is true. As always, aesthetics and ethics dance a tango in dramas, real and embellished, that are compelling, unsettling, and sometimes maddeningly enigmatic at their core.
Strategies for Silencing: Tales about Shutting Down Storytelling
Our word for silence comes from the Latin silentium, meaning “quiet, still, calm,” a condition of being free from noise. But there is a strong bifurcation of meaning embedded in the term. When we use “silence” as a verb, it signals something imposed or inflicted, yet “silence” is also golden (as the Tremeloes sang in their hit song from 1967), a condition of serenity associated with physical and spiritual well-being and with doing no harm. With the writer Rebecca Solnit, we can think of “silence as what is imposed, and quiet as what is sought,” thereby reserving “silence” (especially in its verb form) for a coercive form of behavior, one that ranges from the violent cutting out of tongues to the illocutionary force of a command to shut up.60
Our own culture has provided us with all too many instances of purchasing the silence of women who have been the victims of sexual assault. In an interview described in Catch and Kill, a detailed account of efforts by Harvey Weinstein to pay hush money to the victims of his criminal behavior, film producer Alexandra Canosa told the book’s author, Ronan Farrow: “He creates the situation in which your silence will benefit you more than speaking out will.” On the nondisclosure agreements Weinstein’s team of lawyers prepared, Rosanna Arquette observed, “He’s gonna be working very hard to track people down and silence people.”61
In Know My Name: A Memoir, Chanel Miller wrote about her sexual assault on Stanford’s campus as well as about her victim impact statement, published online by BuzzFeed. She described in vivid detail the treatment of sexual assault cases in a court system designed to protect perpetrators. “For years, the crime of sexual assault depended on our silence,” she wrote. “The fear of knowing what happened if we spoke. Society gave us one thousand reasons; don’t speak if you lack evidence, if it happened too long ago, if you were drunk, if the man is powerful.”62 Her story led not only to changes in California laws but also to the recall of the judge hearing the case, revealing the strength of extrajudicial testimony in deciding guilt and innocence and appropriateness of sentencing.
“How to Silence a Victim”—that is a chapter title in She Said, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s account of how they broke the sexual harassment story “that helped ignite a movement.” It quickly dawned on the two reporters that, in order to move beyond the “he said, she said” problem, they would have to find hard evidence for the veracity of the autobiographical accounts to which they had become privy. And it was finally in nondisclosure agreements that they found that evidence, ironically the very legal documents designed to mute claims of sexual assault and harassment. The settlements and confidentiality agreements had evolved out of a legal apparatus developed by teams of lawyers more invested in earning high payouts than in getting stories out to the public: “Cash for silence; that was the deal.” For lawyers working on contingency and taking as much as one-third of the client’s award as their fee, the incentive was to settle out of court, avoiding the possibility of losing their case and getting nothing, as well as the risk of having a client withdraw a claim for fear of humiliation in a courtroom setting. The result was a system that “enabled the harassers instead of stopping them.”63
The next chapter will take up the stakes in women’s storytelling and explore the profound commitment of tales told in the Voice of the Mother (to reprise Ursula Le Guin’s term) to revelation, resistance, and restoration. But first I want to consider how the folkloric imagination can, paradoxically, be invested in silencing as much as it promotes talk. In three tales—one from Kenya, one from Japan, and one from Russia—a counter-discourse to women’s storytelling emerges. The tales are shocking enough to warrant inclusion, for they tell us much about the vulnerability of those who use stories to transmit wisdom, counsel, and values.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion states epigrammatically in The White Album, and the stories women have told give us a rousing confirmation of that view. The “shifting phantasmagoria” of actual experience, Didion adds, demands a “narrative line,” along with a “sermon” and a “social or moral lesson.” In other words, we instinctively try to learn from the stories we tell, and the past is not worth talking about unless there is some kind of takeaway for those hearing about it.64 All the more important to ask: Who tells, who listens, and to what end?
With the phrase “in order to live,” Didion captures something more than survival. Stories give our lives meaning, nourishing us and nurturing connections. Recall how Philomela’s story reveals how women have made their stories heard, often in the form of a simple cry for justice. The possibility of having a voice is inserted into the silent spaces of women’s work (spinning, sewing, and weaving) and of Philomela’s tapestry. When she turns into a bird, Philomela will sing a song of lament, becoming a proxy for the poet’s voice. In some ways, the story of Philomela and Procne reveals a powerful form of storytelling envy, for Ovid is unable to put lived experience on display through image and song, as Philomela does. He can only tell the story secondhand. But that is also, of course, his great good fortune and privilege.
And now for the Voice of the Father, a few counter-narratives to the tales of caution and courage told by women among women. Is it any surprise that the first documented folktale tells a story about a false accusation of sexual assault? In the thirteenth century BCE, there was a story called “The Two Brothers,” with one brother named Baîti, the other Anupu.65 It is Anupu’s wife who tries to seduce her brother-in-law, and when her advances are rebuffed (Baîti generously promises not to rat her out), the wife reports to her husband that Baîti assaulted her, going so far as to produce bogus injuries. The story ends with Anupu learning the truth, killing his wife, and throwing her corpse to the dogs. This inaugural tale of a fabricated accusation mingles with a range of folktales that offer a counter-tradition to what dominates the folkloric repertoire.
“Tongue Meat” is a story found in African countries on the eastern part of the continent, at the crossroads of Islamic traditions and tribal cultures. The version printed below was collected in the 1960s in Kenya, as part of a project to preserve oral storytelling traditions. It reveals just how vital storytelling is to human well-being. Disguising its narrative energy with an unappetizing title, it materializes the need for story. But, in a stunning move, it also invests men alone with the power to tell stories—to speak, to sing, to nourish, nurture, and heal. In the contrasting fates of the two wives, we have a clear sense that we need stories in order to live, but in this case, men alone understand the “secret” power of stories and pass that secret on to each other.
A sultan lived with his wife in a palace, but his wife was unhappy. With each passing day she grew thinner and less animated. In that same town there lived a poor man whose wife was well nourished, healthy, and happy. When the sultan heard about the couple, he summoned the poor man to his court and asked for his secret. The poor man replied, “It’s very simple. I feed her meat of the tongue.” The sultan summoned a butcher and told him to buy up the tongues of all the animals slaughtered in town and bring them to him, the sultan. Every day he sent all the tongues to the palace and ordered his cook to bake and fry, roast and salt these tongues in every known way and to prepare every tongue recipe ever written down. The queen had to eat those dishes three or four times a day, but it did no good. She grew ever thinner and was faring poorly. The sultan now ordered the poor
man to exchange wives, to which the poor man grudgingly agreed. He took the thin queen with him and sent his own wife to the palace. Alas, there she lost more and more weight in spite of the good food the sultan offered. It was clear that she would not thrive at the palace.
The poor man, after returning home at night, would greet his new wife, tell her about the things he had seen, especially the amusing things. He told her stories that made her shriek with laughter. Then he would take his stringed instruments and sing her songs, of which he knew a great many. Until late at night he would play and amuse her. And lo! the queen put on weight in a matter of weeks. She was beautiful to look at, and her skin was shining and taut, like that of a young girl. And she smiled all day long, remembering the amusing things her husband told her. When the sultan summoned her back, she refused to return. So the sultan came to fetch her and found that she had changed and was happy. He asked her what the poor man had done, and she told him. Then he understood the meaning of meat of the tongue.66
Long before therapists and how-to manuals courted the attention of troubled couples, folktales offered up wisdom about how to make a marriage work. But they also did more than that. “Tongue Meat” is a story that resonates in powerful ways with other tales about tongues, tales tragic and hopeful, catastrophic and confident. “This is exactly what stories can do,” as one critic puts it: “they fold all of their tellers and places together—and therein lies their mystery and their magic.”67 We have a tale in which we hear first about tongues severed from animals—as a reminder of stories in which the same can be done to torture humans, who can be robbed of the power of speech, communication, and healthy partnerships. In “Tongue Meat,” the husband controls language, using it as a device to add weight to his wife and to make her more beautiful. And it is he who is able to go out into the world and return with amusing stories, telling “about the things he had seen,” in all the places she is unable to be. The Kenyan tale offers wisdom and truth about how stories entertain and invigorate but it is also a reminder of how—like Ovid in ancient times, the Brothers Grimm in Germany, or Andrew Lang in England—those who wield the power to speak and write are able to appropriate and claim ownership of storytelling. It is hard to imagine why Angela Carter, who gathered together stories about “wise” and “clever” women, included this particular tale in her Book of Fairy Tales, for the two wives have little agency and are instead freely exchanged between the two men, who transmit a lesson about the power of storytelling to keep a wife “beautiful” and “happy.” On the other hand, there is also a cautionary logic to its inclusion.