Facing the tall pine pole, totally focused on its function, Ruth was endeavoring to bring to life the Cheyenne Sun Dance. “Whenever the Cheyenne came together,” she said, “it was common to see men torturing themselves.” She herself had no trouble imagining the glistening bodies of the braves, swinging in the baking heat and rising dust, and she wanted her students to see the image, too. With her head leaned back, she pointed up, to the long strips of rawhide that dangled from the top of the pole. “Sometimes they would retire to a lonely hill where they were pierced and tied and suspended from poles, poles just like this one.”
Moving on, Ruth stopped in front of an illuminated case that held ceremonial objects, including a knife and a dozen sharply pointed wooden pegs. “Dr. Grinnell, in When Buffalo Ran, gives us the only concrete description we have of what happened at the start of the Sun Dance.”
She opened a thin book to the passage she had marked:
A suppliant goes out to a lonely part of the prairie on the day selected, accompanied by the person who is to tie the thongs for him. Pins and knife are consecrated by prayer and held toward the sun and sky.… He is then tied to the pole by means of wooden pins driven through the flesh.
Some of the students gasped. The wooden pegs, arranged so neatly in the case, had suddenly taken on a new meaning.
“It’s important to note,” continued Ruth, “for the Cheyenne, the use of torture in the Vision Quest, is strongly established.”
“Excuse me, Mrs. Benedict,” someone said.
Ruth turned to see who had spoken.
“Mrs. Benedict? About these rituals,” and then the girl said something Ruth didn’t quite catch.
Ruth looked at the girl who had asked the question.
“Mrs. Benedict, can you give us the names of other anthropologists who’ve done the studies?”
Smiling quizzically, Ruth groped to retrieve the girl’s name—it was Margaret Mead. The truth was Ruth could give this student many references if only she’d heard her question clearly, but she hadn’t. A childhood case of the measles had left Ruth partially deaf. Usually she was able to compensate by lip-reading but in the dim light of the exhibition hall this was impossible.
Now, unaware that Margaret—her question unanswered—felt snubbed, Ruth walked on to the next display case. Nodding toward a set of steel pins, she said, “The Blackfoot practiced another custom called ‘Feeding-the-sun with-bits-of-one’s body.’ According to Dr. Wissler, ‘The skin is pricked up by a splinter or sharp knife, and a coin-shaped piece cut from beneath.’”
The hall was quiet as the students, understanding what the inherent use of the steel pins must have been, took notes.
Not one of them, including the girl who radiated such purpose, could have guessed that their teacher had not arrived at her topic by chance. Ruth’s interest in the infliction of self-torture was rooted in her own life experience, brought on by a cascade of tragedies that had overwhelmed her childhood.
* * *
Ruth Benedict had been born Ruth Fulton in New York City in 1887. Her father, Frederick Fulton, a homeopathic physician who specialized in the study of tumors, was stricken with a debilitating illness by the time she turned one. As best the medical experts could surmise, Dr. Fulton had been infected with a mysterious bacterium while working in the operating theater. Within two years he was dead. Ruth retained only one memory of him as a “worn face, illuminated with the translucence of illness and very beautiful.”
Ruth’s mother Beatrice—left to care for Ruth and a newborn daughter—descended into a prolonged state of mourning. She had little energy for a child who was not responsive to direction. Not realizing that Ruth’s inattention was caused by impaired hearing, Bertrice was quick to interpret her behavior as willful disobedience.
For her part, Ruth resented her mother’s “cult of grief” and reacted by throwing tantrums. Her mother was determined to subdue Ruth’s violent temper. Their struggle, which went on for years, culminated in an event that had an almost medieval quality when, according to Ruth, her mother “forced her to kneel with a candle on a cold floor until God granted her prayer that she would never again lose control of her temper.”
It was around this time that Ruth established a rule for herself that was to persist throughout her life. She made it a “taboo” to express emotion in front of anyone, even when she was in physical pain. Maintaining a distance from other human beings made her feel comfortable. She was to say that during childhood she couldn’t remember “any longing to have any person love me.”
If Bertrice hadn’t been so preoccupied she would have realized that her daughter was withdrawing deeper and deeper into her own world. She was, however, focused on the need to make a living and, as a single mother, was pursuing the only career open to women—teaching. All of her sacrifice seemed worth it when—in 1905—her two daughters were awarded full scholarships to attend Vassar College.
Vassar, the preeminent institution of higher education for women, was situated on the Hudson River, two hours north of New York City.
In order to get there, Ruth and her sister Margery took the train to a depot in the gritty industrial town of Poughkeepsie, and from there were conveyed by carriage past several mansions perched high above the Hudson. Their driver made a point of letting them know that these estates belonged to American royalty, families not unlike the Roosevelts and the Vanderbilts. Later, Ruth came to understand that the college administrators, who had been entrusted with the sacred task of turning out finished ladies, were intent on guiding their charges toward a version of that gilded future.
At Vassar, sequestered within a medieval quad, shaded under old-growth pines, the girls were fed a curriculum that included Greek, Latin, history, and a smattering of the sciences. It was just enough education to enable a young woman to shine in high society before she matriculated to her real career, that of becoming the wife of a wealthy man and the mother of his children.
In 1911, two years after graduation, Ruth moved out to California to stay with Margery, who by now was married and living in a modest bungalow near Pasadena, a town to the northeast of Los Angeles.
The arrangement suited them both. Ruth was adrift, and Margery needed help caring for her two babies. There, amongst citrus groves and stately mansions, Ruth observed yet another culture that was built on wealth and power. Within a year she had secured a job teaching English literature at the exclusive Miss Orton’s Classical School for Girls.
It was during this period that Ruth began to keep a journal. In it she acknowledged her fight with anxiety and depression saying, “I seemed to keep my grip only by setting my teeth and playing up to the mask I had chosen.” In another entry she elaborated on how her mask functioned:
What was my character anyway? My real me was a creature I dared not look upon—it was terrorized by loneliness, frozen by a state of futility, obsessed by longing to stop. No one had ever heard of that me. If they had they would have thought it was an interesting pose. The mask was tightly adjusted.
It was in this journal that Ruth constantly returned to her concern over the future. The problem, as she saw it, was that she had been born a woman. She bemoaned the “terrible destiny” that dictated what her quest must be—finding the “right man.” She mocked her circumstances, saying, “we women … have not the motive to prepare ourselves for a ‘life-work’ of teaching, of social work—we know we would lay it down with hallelujah in the height of our success, to make a home for the right man.”
Yet, in spite of all her defiant words, Ruth was still held in the yoke of society’s conventions, consumed with the question that invariably loomed up in the life of a young woman: when would she make the transition from maidenhood to marriage? Or, heaven forbid, would the unthinkable occur, would she miss this crucial passage, only to be relegated to the category of “old maid” or “spinster”? For in Ruth’s universe, these were the only terms that were available to describe a woman over the age of thirty who had failed to secure a husband.
> One evening, on the way home from school, Ruth walked several blocks with Miss Van Rossum, another teacher at the Orton School. The street lamps had just come on, then the lights inside the bungalows followed. Miss Van Rossum sighed. “There are so many homes. There ought to be enough to go around.”
Ruth surveyed the houses, glowing with life and movement inside. It was a far cry from what Van Rossum would find when she arrived at her rented room.
That night over dinner with Margery and her husband, Bob, Ruth brought up the unmarried teachers she’d met at Miss Orton’s school.
“I don’t want to end up like them,” said Ruth. “The spinsters.”
Margery looked up from her plate. “Why should you?”
“There are three at school,” said Ruth.
Margery laughed. “It’s your course in old maids.”
“It really isn’t a joke at all. It’s quite tragically serious,” said Ruth. “They retell all their old conversations with men, ones that they had twenty years ago. Conversations that of course might have developed into love affairs, if they’d allowed the men the liberty.”
Margery and Bob exchanged glances.
“One is supposed to believe they’re not old maids by necessity. All except Miss Van Rossum,” said Ruth. “She told me no one ever let her suspect that he was ever even interested. It’s she who is really tragic.”
Ironically, just at the point Ruth was calculating the odds of becoming a spinster, she was also fending off the attentions of a serious suitor. His name was Stanley Benedict, the older brother of Agnes Benedict, a friend from Vassar.
Stanley was a professor of biochemistry at the Cornell Medical College in Manhattan, and his field of research—the ability of chemicals to inhibit the growth of cancer cells—bore an uncanny similarity to the work her father had done with his own patients.
After Ruth had left for California, Stanley had taken up the challenge, bombarding her with letters. Yet it was precisely this ardor, so strongly expressed, that frightened Ruth. She remained unyielding and impassive.
Much like Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt—that fleet-footed virgin—she embodied a quality of inaccessibility.
And then, writing in a letter, Stanley demonstrated that he had an understanding of the real Ruth, the one she hid from the world:
And Ruth—your mask is getting thicker and thicker—I could see that it is—and that’s all wrong.… You shouldn’t have to wear it at all, for it’s certain to grow to be a part of you if you do—and then you’ll be altogether alone, and it’s so wrong for you Ruth.
* * *
In June of 1914, Ruth Fulton returned to New York to marry Stanley Benedict. She was twenty-seven years old.
In some ways, married life turned out to be more agreeable than Ruth ever dreamed possible. The demand for intimacy—which had terrified her during the courtship—was gone. Stanley was so engrossed in his work he barely had time to spend with her, and when he did, he didn’t expect her to engage in a cloying or demonstrative show of affection.
They settled down in Bedford Hills, a bedroom community within commuting distance of New York City. On weekdays, Stanley traveled into the city, to his research lab. Ruth envied the intensity with which he threw himself into work, which contrasted so greatly with her own vague restlessness, or what she called “the ennui of life without purpose.” She spoke to Stanley about her discontent:
Last night Stanley and I talked. We hurt each other badly, for words are clumsy things, and he is inexorable.… I said that for the sake of our love—our friendship, rather—I must pay my way in a job of my own. I would not, would not drift into … boredom.
Stanley didn’t understand why she was so dissatisfied, and said “whatever the job,” she might find it would not hold her.
Then, after several years together, when she still remained childless, she began to obsess over having a baby. This yearning frightened Stanley, who warned her that a child wouldn’t fix things.
Finding herself more and more distanced from Stanley, Ruth turned to writing, completing several biographical sketches about “restless and highly enslaved women of the past,” including one on Mary Wollstonecraft, an eighteenth-century advocate for women’s rights. She was unable to find a publisher for any of them. Then, in 1919, Ruth drifted into a course that was being offered at the progressive New School for Social Research in lower Manhattan. The class, taught by Elsie Clews Parsons, a well-married patron of avant-garde causes, was called “Sex in Ethnology” and it opened Ruth’s eyes to what was a brand-new field of study—anthropology. The next semester, Ruth enrolled in a second class, this one given by Alexander Goldenweiser, a provocative thinker who was not afraid to relate the study of cultural behavior to psychoanalysis.
Ruth’s experience at the New School stirred something in her that she had been seeking without ever realizing it—a connection with a community of individuals who shared her worldview. Finally a discipline had presented itself that she wanted to pursue.
With the encouragement of Parsons and Goldenweiser, Ruth sought the advice of Franz Boas, the head of the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University and the acknowledged leader in the field.
* * *
By 1920, Dr. Franz Boas had been directing ethnographical doctoral dissertations for nearly twenty years, ever since he’d introduced anthropology as a field of study at the university. During that span of time he’d shaped an entire generation of ethnographers, men who accepted his idea that it was crucial to make a record of cultures and languages that were on the verge of extinction. Beginning in 1908, he’d helped his most promising disciples secure jobs at universities and museums across the continent. They in turn disseminated his ideas and many, like Alfred Kroeber, at the University of California at Berkeley, established their own anthropology departments.
At sixty-two years of age, Boas’s once black hair was gray and his right check was twisted by a palsy. In spite of the ravages of time, his “whole face and head had in them something aquiline, resolute, decisive and poised.” Although short of stature, his presence was formidable. His German accent and stern demeanor made him seem unapproachable. According to Alfred Kroeber, Boas went about the business of teaching with an “icy enthusiasm.”
Either in spite of that quality or because of it, graduate students gravitated to Boas. It was well known that he was able to perceive in them innate talents that even they did not know they possessed. He used his insight to match individuals with the topics that most interested them. Not only did this habit win him the undying loyalty of his students, it also produced good work.
When Dr. Boas first sat down with Ruth Benedict to discuss a possible area for graduate work, they agreed that for her initial research she would study diverse forms of religious experience. This could be done in the library. She need not go into the field, something she was reluctant to do. She could read the accounts that had been recorded by missionaries and the early ethnographers, some dating back as far as 1850, written by men who had spent time on the central plains, living among the Blackfoot, Cheyenne, and the Dakota. Several of the early ethnographers had even cultivated close relationships with “informants”—individuals who had been willing to provide information—who had taken them into the sacred circle so they could witness the Vision-Quest ritual in its purest form.
On most days Ruth worked out of the small reading room on the third floor of the Museum of Natural History. Usually she was the only student using the facilities. Government publications and dusty professional journals lined the shelves, each volume a dark olive green, with the date of publication printed on its spine. She came to appreciate this body of literature as a nearly complete account of Native American spiritual life, as it had been perceived by the first generation of ethnographers. Over time she began to recognize connections between apparently disparate tribes, covering a vast geographical area. A pattern emerged, which gave shape to her thesis that Plains Indians had used self-inflicted torture to a
id them in their quest to achieve a visionary experience.
* * *
Two weeks before Christmas of 1921, Ruth completed a lengthy paper called “The Vision in Plains Culture.” Her thesis boldly set forth the importance of the vision:
Not only the means of obtaining the vision … but the events of the vision itself … ceremonial procedure, healing powers, success in battle and control of the weather … were standardized over thousands of miles, east and west, and north and south.
The paper described the dynamic between the suppliant who sought the vision, and the Guardian Spirit who had the power to confer it. In some tribes, such as the Crow, this relationship was so intimate that the initiate believed the Spirit had “adopted” him. Ruth wrote movingly about the tenderness of this spiritual bond, saying, “The power that appears to the Crow addresses him in set words, ‘I make you my son.’”
Boas was impressed enough to suggest she send a copy to the American Anthropologist, the discipline’s most highly regarded journal.
* * *
Eight months later, on a hot morning in July, Ruth Benedict climbed the stairs to the fourth floor of Schermerhorn Hall, hoping to see Dr. Boas. His office door was closed, no light emanated through its frosted glass pane. As she turned to go, a voice stopped her.
“Mrs. Benedict, a letter came for you.”
It was Esther Goldfrank, the secretary who did all of Dr. Boas’s typing.
Reaching out, Ruth took the letter. She felt at once that the envelope had some heft to it. She noticed on the top right corner a long row of Canadian stamps. Dropping the envelope into her briefcase she descended the stairs. Only when she was outside did she examine it.
The return address indicated that the letter had been sent by Edward Sapir. She could hardly believe it.
The name Edward Sapir was well known to Ruth even though she’d never met the man. For the last decade Sapir had been in charge of ethnographic studies for all of Canada. A brilliant linguist, he’d mastered more than twenty of the Native American languages, a nearly impossible feat. At only thirty-eight years old, he was considered Boas’s most brilliant protégé.
Coming of Age Page 4