It has taken me another seven years to understand the flow of these dreams and to see them finally as expressions on a symbolic and sometimes archetypal level, of the progress of the life of my woman’s soul from girlhood into a measure of maturity and understanding. It has taken me all these years to clearly understand the nature of the crisis I underwent, believing as I did that it was solely about my move here into the country and the loss of intimate companionship and my independent and fun-filled (although also filled with travails) way of life.
In fact, the numinous figure of the dwarf woman, who looked rather like my first mother-in-law, a truly wonderful woman, and whose apartment looked like my mother’s house, was a figure representing maturity. I believe she was offering me the emotional peace and wisdom of old age. She was telling me, Your youth is over, this is what is left, and I refused it, as most of us do. It is hard to leave behind the passions of youth, the unremitting hope and the constant sense that a great and marvelous adventure waits just around the corner. I was not ready then, seven years ago.
I feel that I ought to acknowledge the woman-goddess in these dreams, but like so much else about them, I am not sure what to say. I have read enough books by feminist authors to know that a good many women have taken such a figure with great seriousness and are now followers of the Goddess, in the same way that others are Christians or Hindus. I resist taking this figure so literally, and as I reject all forms of organized religion, and detest theology, I can hardly join a new church, no matter what I might think or do in privacy, no matter that it might at last celebrate womanhood.
I’ve attended exactly one feminist ritual, rather by accident when I happened to be in Toronto on Hallowe’en and a friend invited me. What was most satisfying about it, I thought, was to be with women who, with a mutual sense of awe and pride and humility, were accepting and celebrating their womanhood. At this gathering one of the women present told us about another, larger gathering she had attended where one woman couldn’t stop giggling as the group went about its rituals, till the leader grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her: “Do it right!” she demanded, through clenched teeth. It’s a small step, I thought, but it ends in the Inquisition. Let us, in our newfound understanding, pride and strength, not repeat the errors of men.
And yet, there is a feminine soul which for centuries has been kept in chains, prettied up and trotted out on special occasions where it is dutifully admired, condescended to and then dismissed, never allowed to blossom into its full, breathtaking beauty and power. It has been twisted and warped, resulting in horrors like cosmetic surgery and anorexia, and the idiocy of the cult of youth. Even today in most places in the world women are, at best, second-class citizens and, at worst, slaves. I believe without a shred of doubt in the existence of this soul, and I believe, too, that there is an archetypal feminine soul, existing in that mythical world, the world of dreamtime, which we reach at last in dreams and waking visions and which informs our lives as women every day. This, I believe, is what we must tap in to; this is what we must keep our hearts and our souls tuned to, for it is the truth as nothing else is.
This personal crisis, this major dreaming, these books I read culminated on a more practical level in the writing of Luna. I had begun thinking about this book late in 1984 and finished the final draft in April 1987. It was first published the spring of 1988 and fell out of print fairly quickly, where it remained till this year. Of all my books, to this day, it is the one I am most often asked about by people—ninety percent women—who have read it or who want to read it.
When I began Luna I might have, at that juncture, gone back to the book about women I’d tried to write seven or so years earlier whose protagonist was an urban career woman, but I didn’t. Instead I chose to write about rural women, about women who led traditional lives, because I thought that the themes I was dealing with would be easier to find and elaborate on in lives which were still close to those women had been leading for several thousand years: giving birth to children and nurturing them into adulthood, the growing and preparation of food for the family, making the family’s clothing, being homemakers, women who lived inside the home and marriage, without outside careers, in an enterprise—the farm or ranch—which was necessarily jointly undertaken by all family members.
Much of this life is lived out-of-doors, in the garden, on horseback, in half-tons driving across or parked in wheat or hayfields or pastures, and at social events which are much more often held out-of-doors in the country than in the city. As I’ve said, in rural life the sense of Nature all around one is an integral part of the life, as is the constant study of sky and weather, fields and hills. And the rhythm of Nature becomes part of one: the endless cycle of Nature, the rising and setting of the sun each day, the monthly lunar cycle, the seasons, the births and deaths and rebirths, as seen in farm animals, in wild animals, in gardens and fields. A rural woman can feel so much more strongly herself as a part of Nature than a woman in the city can because Nature’s example is all around her, and her rhythm is the rhythm of the feminine.
The women of Luna are, like me, trying to understand the meaning—the size, shape and boundaries—of their lives as women. They are struggling to delineate the place that mother-hood has or should have in their lives, not merely as women, but as persons, as human souls in the universe. So I began with the idea of a female creator and all that that might entail, and by delving into prehistory and mythology, I structured the book so that it is a re-creation in modern form of the Greek Mysteries.
I found so much in the traditional life that was and is beautiful, where the nurturing role of the feminine is allowed to flower fully, where in a city it cannot as easily because of the dispersal of energy inherent in city life, because of the impossibility of raising a family on one working-class income so that the woman has to hold down a job outside the home too, and because most people have no little plot of land to grow things for their own use. I had decided Luna would be about modern-day women who still lived a traditional life, but I was also thinking about my own life and my own struggle to find a fulfilling and appropriate way to live and, also, my mind was full of the lives of my mother, my grandmothers, my aunts and my sisters and female cousins.
I thought about my friends in the city and their struggles to juggle home and family and career, and of the general destructiveness and pain of divorces which were so commonplace there, of the whole generation of children being raised in poverty and with only one parent. It began to seem clear to me that if women had gained in personal freedom and self-determination by abandoning or being forced off the land, for one reason or another, and out of that traditional life, they had lost some valuable things too, the chief one being a stable support system in which to raise their children in peace and security, a terrible loss from which society, I believe, has not yet begun to feel the full and awful effects.
Nonetheless, if the traditional life had been so right for women, then why did so many of those who still lived it often hope for something better for their daughters? Certainly the traditional life had its bad side: subservience in women and their denial of it, abuse of women’s dependence by men, who sometimes turned their wives into something close to slaves, and who used them as objects on which to take out their frustrations and rage. Less often, where formal power is denied women, the rare one will use the power inherent in her femininity to keep the children submissive and the husband frustrated in his masculinity. Far more often, though, the situation is one of men merely taking for granted the woman’s complete and self-denying dedication to him, the children and the farm. It is out of situations like these, I think, and the incessant round of work, that women dream of better things for their daughters.
Though our mother was never subservient, nor our father domineering, I tried to think more specifically what was missing from my mother’s life, most of which she had lived in the traditional way, from raising chickens and a huge garden to making our clothes, from little overalls to run aroun
d in when we were little to our high school graduation dresses. She worked too hard and never had enough time for the books she loved; she had more children than she wanted, although she did not ever want to lose one of the children she had. She wanted to have more education than she had been able to acquire as a young woman during the Depression and she wanted more art and music and theater in her life, a little more glamor, a little more ease. More to the point, I don’t think she would disagree when I say that she had a dream of a different life wherein she might find more fulfillment for herself as a person, an individual. None of these are evil things to want; they are not even unreasonable. And all of these are themes among the women of that generation in Saskatchewan.
Even while I deeply admired the women around me, I doubted that I would be happy in that traditional life which while it had a certain clear nobility to it, also had too much potential for making a virtue out of the inherent possibility of martyrdom, a way of life for women and an attitude for which I have no admiration at all. And it seemed plain it wouldn’t give me the opportunity to try out all my gifts, all the things which I thought I had it in me to be or, at least, that I wanted to try out, whether I failed or I succeeded. For many of us life is bigger than the round of gardening and diapering and cooking that takes up so much of the life of a traditional woman. Womanhood is bigger even than that; I want a part of the bigger life, as it seems men have.
What I didn’t realize then was that I wasn’t the only one struggling to make a life for myself in a world which was so abundantly fulfilling to the men but, no matter how much they loved their families and rural life, in a lot of largely unacknowledged ways was stifling to many of the women. Women, too, have intellects, and instrinsic in the human brain is a vital, lively and unkillable curiosity, an absolute need for new and interesting sights, sounds, ideas, a need for challenges and for intellectual growth. We were geographically very isolated: we couldn’t take university classes whether for credit or not; we couldn’t go to art galleries, lectures, concerts, plays, even movies were hard to get to; if we had professions, other than teaching or nursing, they couldn’t be pursued without moving to town or city; we couldn’t keep up with fashions or extend and deepen our knowledge of the vibrant, exciting world of urban women, which, whether we fully approved or not, meant being able to take an equal role in sports, politics, business and the professions.
We did not all feel completely fulfilled by helping with the traditionally male work of seeding or combining, or swathing hay or baling it, or cutting out or chasing cows, but did it because we felt it our duty and because we wanted to see our husbands happy and the enterprise succeed. (I couldn’t help but notice that if it was our duty to help with the men’s work, the men were rarely seen in the kitchen helping can vegetables or diapering the baby or sewing the daughter’s graduation dress.) And the rural, traditional life means that women work all day long for the sake of other people—people they love, it’s true, and whose happiness is their happiness—and have to steal any time for themselves for activities not a part of homemaking. Because genuinely free time is in such short supply, there isn’t time for an individual woman to search out and learn about what would be a fully satisfying activity for her, if it were possible to find such activities within her geographic range. Besides the problem of time, there is the problem of discretionary income. On a ranch or farm any discretionary income—of which there is less and less these days—tends to be turned back into the business, for new machinery, more land, farm buildings or livestock, to pay the omnipresent debt, or given to the children so they can go to the city for more education, or to start them on their own places.
A few years ago at a dance, in the context of a conversation I no longer remember, I remarked to the table of couples Peter and I were sitting with, “This life is great for men, but it’s killing for women.” There was dead silence around the table, I never knew if because of embarrassment at my speaking aloud a taboo sentiment or, as I thought, more likely because every couple at the table had had long, anguished, and ultimately unresolvable conversations in the dark of night about that very subject. Indeed, what man would give up his farm or his ranch and a life he loved merely because his wife was less than fulfilled? But it was many years before this fact came home to me as closer to universal rather than as merely my own problem, at least in this sense of women needing personally fulfilling activities, and a little more variety and stimulation in daily life.
As I read and wrote and dreamt, it began to seem clear to me that all our women’s lives in this century were false to the extent that we had only one model for life and it was the one devised by males for us, and that we were lost and twisted and at sea and would not find our own strength, the rightness of our lives, and the beauty of our womanliness until we found out who, in our deepest female essence, we are. Now the story of Persephone began to seem to me to be a story about not only my life but lives of all women, stolen away from girlhood and our mother’s protection into the world of men, of Eros, never to be persons in our own right. I thought that if women are often petty and small-minded on occasion and bicker endlessly with one another in ways less characteristic of men, it might be because we have no dignity in our womanhood and never say to ourselves, I am a woman, as men say, I am a man, to remind themselves of the nobility and courage this image requires of them. I did not think our subjugation would end until each of us were able to say from the depth of our soul, I am a woman, meaning, I am half the universe, I am made in the image of the goddess, as men at least for the last five thousand years have been saying, I am made in the image of God.
Women experience the world differently than men do. Experiencing it differently, we know different things about it than they do, we experience life differently, and if left alone to try it, we would live it differently. And as a writer I thought, We haven’t yet told our stories out of the fullness and uniqueness of our femininity. We haven’t yet told the truth about our lives. Until we tell the truth out loud, no matter how humiliating or painful or at variance with society’s version, we will not come to know what we are, what is truly our world of experience, and through that, what our roles should be, what we can be.
That was one result of my long sojourn in the metaphorical wilderness—I began to believe I had to write out of that deep, abandoned, forgotten, ignored and discredited place in myself where surely I would find what there was in me that was wholly woman. I thought, The only way to find out what a woman is and might be is to speak only the truth out of one’s own feelings. I had been tending toward what is dismissively referred to by scholars as “confessional” writing as it was. Now I thought, I am a writer; why else would I write except to express how I experience the world? I wanted to cut away what I had been taught, I wanted to shut my eyes and close my ears and my door and only write from the deepest part of myself, to say how things seem to me, what I honestly think about my life and the lives of women, or further, what I honestly feel before thought, about the world and my experience in it. I would use the material around me, but I would see it with my own eyes, hear it with my own ears, sense it with my own body.
Because I was writing a novel about women’s lives, one of the issues I examined with seriousness was why it was I felt I could not have friendships of the kind I’d had in the city with women in the country. What was it I had talked about with my old friends that I couldn’t find anybody to talk with in the same way here? The conversations with my city friends, for one thing, had a high degree of intimacy even in friendships of very short duration, acquaintanceships really, which here, as nearly as I can tell, seem to take years to build. That was one difference. The other was subject matter. My city friends and I had talked about feelings, more than anything, I think. With great subtlety, shades, nuances, of feeling and emotion were dissected and laid bare. All this to a degree that my country friends would regard as obssessive and peculiar, perhaps going too far, going beyond the limits of good taste where privacy is concerned on the on
e hand, and on the other, approaching triviality, even wasting time when there is work to be done.
Perhaps there is no more to it than that—beyond, of course, the unavoidable fact that all my urban friends were part of the university environment where talk is highly valued as the means of exploring ideas and developing them, where one might display one’s wit and articulateness to mutual joy, where talk is an art form. But while urban academic people believe anything can be said, and would be better for it, rural people tend to take the opposite view, feeling much is better left unsaid, and that judicious silence has, on occasion, a greater eloquence, is the greater good. Even on “coffee row,” where talk is, as they say, cheap, this style of conversing prevails.
I am a writer; I am a thinker, and sometimes a talker. Nothing seems full and real to me until I have either talked about it or, as is most often the case, written it out, crossed it out, written it again and again and again till it makes sense to me. I will always go too far, say too much, examine nuances too minutely for everyday life. Also, I see now that my expectations were wrong in the first place; those old tête-à-têtes came out of a different way of life, different expectations and experiences, a different fabric of day-to-day life. Thirdly, those virtually obssessive conversations were, I think, all of us, each of us, working out our own destinies in the way available to us in such a milieu. That was how we did it, but it is not how country women do it.
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