Reinterpretations of the Goddess
I finally finished reading Kidd’s Dance of the Dissident Daughter. I tried to read it about five years ago and couldn’t—I’m not even sure why. Maybe it seemed too new age to me. I have taken such a long journey to get where I am now—in college I was one of those (now really annoying) women who walk around saying (really annoying) things like, “oh, I’m not a feminist, I like men opening doors for me.” I really said that. How I could have shut off enough of my brain to reduce a movement that works for gender equity to opening doors, I don’t really know. Well, maybe I do know—I certainly have by now had enough experience teaching students in my women’s studies classes that just because the media represents all feminists as demonized bitches doesn’t mean that’s what feminism is.
I don’t think I really meant it, though—I think I was just afraid of being labeled a feminist. I do remember very clearly a male intern at Dupont, where I was working as well, getting a much larger raise than I did when we both got married, because he would be supporting his family, and well, I wouldn’t. I evidently made a substantial note of this fact, although I seem to recall my primary reaction at the time as being pleased that I got a raise myself. So while I certainly wasn’t a feminist in college, I had my (very strongly suppressed) leanings. I stopped leaning and started standing firm in graduate school (although my women’s studies classes still were pretty scary). Maybe the first time I tried to read the Kidd book I still just wasn’t ready for it.
I will probably need to read it again in a few years. I borrowed it before, but this time I went out and bought my own copy so I can—and I also ordered one for our library. (Wonder where they’ll shelve it?) I still had some issues with the book. I was really disturbed by how Kidd defines daughters in the book. Early on she writes that “A daughter is a women 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” (42). I kept waiting as she defined dissident daughter for her to repudiate this definition, but if she did, I missed it. Defining daughterhood as related to this cultural father just that one time really hit a wrong nerve for me—it’s not that I don’t agree there’s this cultural father—I do—or that I don’t think women often define themselves as daughters in this way. I was just disappointed to see that conception of the daughter in the book: how can one be a dissident daughter when being a daughter is defined this way? Can we not be daughters of our mothers too? I will hopefully get over that—it was a single sentence worded in a way that resonated badly with me.
But I was a little tickled at myself too when Kidd starts talking about her initial reactions to the word “goddess”: “It’s hard to describe the sort of anxiety the word created in me, as if the word itself were contraband. It seemed to violate a taboo so deep and ingrained, I felt stabs of irrational fear just reading about it, as if any minute witch burners from the sixteenth century might appear and carry me off” (72). I understand that feeling very well indeed (particularly last semester when I had jury duty and was reading a critical history of breastfeeding in the courthouse waiting room—when the cover of the book showed a bare-chested woman squirting breast milk into her baby’s mouth a foot or two away. That book wasn’t about the Goddess, but certainly I was aware that the people around me were wondering what on earth I was reading—many raised eyebrows, although the only person who talked to me about it was a nurse who was very supportive of breastfeeding, so that was positive).
I built myself a shrine last semester, in fact after reading Kidd’s novel The Secret Life of Bees. I wondered if it would last, because it’s just this small accumulation of objects on a pewter plate, and I really couldn’t imagine that Will wouldn’t pull it all apart or even that I wouldn’t find it something that clutters up my world even more. But it’s still around, and I’ve added one or two things to it (although it is a major pain to dust). A sand dollar, a silver fish button, a piece of Indian pottery that I found one of the few times my father took me walking around his hunting club with him. My favorite things are my mother’s jade Buddha from an old necklace she used to wear all the time and a frog, also jade, I think—a small beautifully carved frog, very stylized, that I bought years ago because when I read the card, it talked about the frog as a fertility symbol—and that was when I had first started wanting children. I find myself getting up in the mornings and choosing something to hold for a few minutes. It seems more like prayer than what I used to think of as prayer. The last few years have been hard in a number of different ways, and during those years I have started to think of myself as very much an outsider—which is how I used to feel. But it feels different being an outsider now—it’s something perhaps I am starting to own. Being outside means sometimes being alone, not being a part of what others are. Not always a bad thing, once you get over the painful part. Maybe the fact I can read this book now means that I’m starting to understand my own path (how new age is that?). One final quote from the book:
In the beginning we wake to find ourselves like transplanted saplings trying to subsist in an unnatural, unfriendly (patriarchal) ground. We discover ourselves becoming sapless inside, going dry in the places where the feminine soul arises, animates, and nourishes our lives. We know that in order to save our lives as women, we have to find new ground. So we set off in search of the feminine ground inside the circle of trees. We put down roots. And if we are patient, if we are true to ourselves, if we are willing to see ourselves through the growing seasons, an inevitable thing happens. We become hearty women who have our own ground and our own standing, sturdy as oaks after the winds. We become women who let loose our strength, whose truth, creativity, and vision fly like spores into the world. (198)
I don’t think I really meant it, though—I think I was just afraid of being labeled a feminist. I do remember very clearly a male intern at Dupont, where I was working as well, getting a much larger raise than I did when we both got married, because he would be supporting his family, and well, I wouldn’t. I evidently made a substantial note of this fact, although I seem to recall my primary reaction at the time as being pleased that I got a raise myself. So while I certainly wasn’t a feminist in college, I had my (very strongly suppressed) leanings. I stopped leaning and started standing firm in graduate school (although my women’s studies classes still were pretty scary). Maybe the first time I tried to read the Kidd book I still just wasn’t ready for it.
I will probably need to read it again in a few years. I borrowed it before, but this time I went out and bought my own copy so I can—and I also ordered one for our library. (Wonder where they’ll shelve it?) I still had some issues with the book. I was really disturbed by how Kidd defines daughters in the book. Early on she writes that “A daughter is a women 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” (42). I kept waiting as she defined dissident daughter for her to repudiate this definition, but if she did, I missed it. Defining daughterhood as related to this cultural father just that one time really hit a wrong nerve for me—it’s not that I don’t agree there’s this cultural father—I do—or that I don’t think women often define themselves as daughters in this way. I was just disappointed to see that conception of the daughter in the book: how can one be a dissident daughter when being a daughter is defined this way? Can we not be daughters of our mothers too? I will hopefully get over that—it was a single sentence worded in a way that resonated badly with me.
But I was a little tickled at myself too when Kidd starts talking about her initial reactions to the word “goddess”: “It’s hard to describe the sort of anxiety the word created in me, as if the word itself were contraband. It seemed to violate a taboo so deep and ingrained, I felt stabs of irrational fear just reading about it, as if any minute witch burners from the sixteenth century might appear and carry me off” (72). I understand that feeling very well indeed (particularly last semester when I had jury duty and was reading a critical history of breastfeeding in the courthouse waiting room—when the cover of the book showed a bare-chested woman squirting breast milk into her baby’s mouth a foot or two away. That book wasn’t about the Goddess, but certainly I was aware that the people around me were wondering what on earth I was reading—many raised eyebrows, although the only person who talked to me about it was a nurse who was very supportive of breastfeeding, so that was positive).
I built myself a shrine last semester, in fact after reading Kidd’s novel The Secret Life of Bees. I wondered if it would last, because it’s just this small accumulation of objects on a pewter plate, and I really couldn’t imagine that Will wouldn’t pull it all apart or even that I wouldn’t find it something that clutters up my world even more. But it’s still around, and I’ve added one or two things to it (although it is a major pain to dust). A sand dollar, a silver fish button, a piece of Indian pottery that I found one of the few times my father took me walking around his hunting club with him. My favorite things are my mother’s jade Buddha from an old necklace she used to wear all the time and a frog, also jade, I think—a small beautifully carved frog, very stylized, that I bought years ago because when I read the card, it talked about the frog as a fertility symbol—and that was when I had first started wanting children. I find myself getting up in the mornings and choosing something to hold for a few minutes. It seems more like prayer than what I used to think of as prayer. The last few years have been hard in a number of different ways, and during those years I have started to think of myself as very much an outsider—which is how I used to feel. But it feels different being an outsider now—it’s something perhaps I am starting to own. Being outside means sometimes being alone, not being a part of what others are. Not always a bad thing, once you get over the painful part. Maybe the fact I can read this book now means that I’m starting to understand my own path (how new age is that?). One final quote from the book:
In the beginning we wake to find ourselves like transplanted saplings trying to subsist in an unnatural, unfriendly (patriarchal) ground. We discover ourselves becoming sapless inside, going dry in the places where the feminine soul arises, animates, and nourishes our lives. We know that in order to save our lives as women, we have to find new ground. So we set off in search of the feminine ground inside the circle of trees. We put down roots. And if we are patient, if we are true to ourselves, if we are willing to see ourselves through the growing seasons, an inevitable thing happens. We become hearty women who have our own ground and our own standing, sturdy as oaks after the winds. We become women who let loose our strength, whose truth, creativity, and vision fly like spores into the world. (198)
posted by Lisa at 5/01/2005 08:08:00 AM
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