Reviews - Carolyn Gage

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Published on

November 15, 2015

Suffragette: The After-Story

Lesbian History Reviews

I just went to see Suffragette, the period drama about the militant phase of the British Suffrage Movement, and, of course, I wanted to share my thoughts.

First, there is a justified viral campaign to protest the complete—and I mean complete—absence of persons of color in the film. In 1913, Britain was coming out of their heyday of global colonization, and, as a result, there were entire communities of color in London. There was an especially large Indian community, including the Indian princess Sophia Duleep Singh, who fought not only for women’s suffrage but for the liberation of Indian women. It is interesting to note that three decades earlier, a suffragist named Catherine Impey founded Anti-Caste, which has been described as Britain’s first anti-racist journal. In its pages, the editor attempted to speak “with” rather than “about” people of colour, a dynamic with which white political leaders are still struggling more than a century later.

Anyway… with all the attention to historical accuracy about the details of women's tailoring, and with all the photo ops of processions, meetings, rallies, factory interiors, and street scenes… surely central casting could have and should have paid more attention to diversity.

So there is that.

And then, of course, the perennial absence/closeting of the lesbians. Not surprisingly, there were many lesbians in the Suffrage Movement in both England and the US. One of Emmeline Pankhurst’s daughters, Christabel, was the subject of many suffragist crushes, and had lengthy relationships with Annie Kenney and with Grace Roe. The composer Ethel Smyth dedicated two years of her life to the movement. She wrote openly about her passion for women and had a crush on Emmeline Pankhurst. (See my blog on Ethel Symth.)

But in spite of the a-historical absence of diversity in the film, there is much to admire. It features a working-class heroine. It does not flinch from the subject of rape and sexual harassment in the workplace in an era when women had no legal recourse whatsoever. It dramatizes the consequences of women having no rights of ownership over their own children. The central character is evicted from her home because of her activism, and then her husband, unable to provide care for the child, puts him up for adoption without her knowledge or permission.

For me, the most exciting part of the film is the coming to consciousness of the central character. We see her waking up from a deep sleep. We see her beginning to see what could be possible. We see her excitement in bonding with other women and in executing acts of civil disobediance—most notably blowing up the Prime Minister’s summer home.

And, then of course, there is the punishing routine of repeated incarceration, the police violence meted out at rallies, the horror of the force-feeding of hunger strikers. In an effort to shape a concise dramatic arc, the film begins to focus on a cat-and-mouse dynamic between the heroine and the police inspector assigned to neutralize the movement. He has been given the injunction not to allow any of the suffragists to become martyrs.

The dramatic climax of the film is the death of Emily Wilding Davison, the suffragist who ran onto the race track at the Epsom Derby and attempted to attach a “Votes for Women” banner to the King’s horse. She was trampled to death.

The film ends with the “victory” of the Suffragists having achieved the desired martyrdom. The story went around the world and thousands turned out for the funeral procession. This is presented as the happy ending for the film, the moment that turned the tide. Just before the final credits, text appears to inform us of the historical timeline for women’s suffrage, and for other laws, including women's right to own their children.

But here's my biggest concern: The film absolutely implies that the women’s activism, and especially their tactical move to destruction of property, resulted in the granting of suffrage.

This is not true. At the height of the incarcerations and force-feedings, World War I broke out. In what many, including myself, considered a stunning betrayal of not just the suffrage movement, but of feminism, Emmeline and Christabel called an immediate halt to all militant suffrage activism. Emmeline turned her brilliant organizing skills toward recruiting women for industrial production and encouraging young men to enlist. She was a prominent figure in the “white feather campaign” to shame and stigmatize able-bodied men who were not joining up. Later on, she would become a member of the conservative and classist Tory Party.

Finally, at the end of the war, Parliament passed an act that would enfranchise women over the age of thirty who met minimum property qualifications. This was specifically in recognition of the fact that women had been pressured into filling men’s industrial jobs during the war and, after that, it would have been ludicrous to maintain the fiction that they were too frail or feeble-minded to be entrusted with suffrage. It was their reward for doing as they were told.

What is my point? My point is that history does not support the theory that women’s escalating activism for the vote brought men in power to their knees. It did not. Women’s abandonment of their own agenda and participation the most patriarchal of patriarchal horrors was what turned the tide.

My point is that women’s movements do not follow the same trajectories as men’s movements. If there were no gay men, and the entire queer movement had been composed solely of lesbian and bisexual women, I do not believe that we would have ANY of the legal gains that we have today. In fact, I believe that the movement, as with the Suffrage Movement in both England and the US, would have resulted in increased marginalization and suffering. Today we are seeing our hard-won abortion rights being eroded by cat-and-mouse games. Today, poor women in some areas have great difficulty in arranging for abortions, because of laws about waiting periods, restrictions on where abortion clinics can operate, and the expenses that these new laws entail.

My point is that lobbying men should be a last resort. We should organize ourselves around efforts to provide for our needs without needing to petition men in power. By all means, get women elected into as many positions as possible, but the rush for equal participation in patriarchal institutions is what led to Pankhurst’s abandonment of the movement.

And, much as the movement recognized the significance of having a martyr, Emily Wilding Davison died with a ticket in her pocket to a women’s dance that night. She did not plan to martyr herself, but to celebrate her victory in the company of women. That is the movement I want to commemorate.
Published on

June 3, 2015

Review of Lady of the Moon

Lesbian History Reviews

Ada Dwyer Russell always intrigued me. She was a turn-of-the-century actress and lesbian with a Mormon background. If that isn't enough... she also turned down persistent proposals from her staggeringly wealthy lover Amy Lowell. And she was no spring chicken, either. Ada was forty-nine when she met Amy... an ominous age for a leading lady in an era before Social Security, food stamps, or subsidized housing.

My question: Why would an aging B- or C-list actress choose the backbreaking and impecunious life of a touring performer over a retirement of ease and privilege with the woman she loved?

And here allow me a little ironic digression. It is likely that Amy first saw Ada in the role she created of Mrs. Wiggs from the play Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. Believe it or not, the play was an adaptation of a book that was the second best-selling novel of 1902... an inane melodrama about how wonderful it is to be poor, with the widow Wiggs elevating optimism to the level of lunacy. ("My but it's nice an' cold this mornin'! The thermometer's done fell up to zero.") I wonder if the irony was lost on Amy Lowell...? (A digression from the digression, there is a hilarious Youtube clip from a filmed version of the play with Zazu Pitts and W.C. Fields... )

ANYWAY... history gives us no answers, just clues. We know Ada turned Amy down more than once. We know that Amy was persistent to the point of bullying, and that when Ada did eventually agree to move in with Amy on her Boston estate, Sevenels, she insisted that it be for a trial period of six months, and that she would work and be paid as Amy's assistant, receiving the same amount of money she would have earned had she continued to tour as an actor.

Ada had married at 30, birthed a daughter, and permanently separated from the husband a few years later-- although she never divorced. Having the status of a married woman would have been very helpful in a profession where single women were automatically presumed promiscuous, but we don’t really know why Ada never divorced. Perhaps, the husband was uncooperative. What we do know is that, at some point or points, Ada must have put up one hell of a fight to be on her own, to work for a living—especially in theatre, and to pursue her lesbianism openly enough to attract a lover like Amy Lowell.

And Amy Lowell was, frankly, a piece of work. I spent a lot of time studying her, as I adapted her writings for an evening of theatre. She emerges from letters and journals as a frustrated, spoiled-but-neglected, misunderstood child who developed into an intensely controlling and domineering woman.

What I conclude is that Ada, having escaped the tyranny of the Mormon church and conventional marriage/motherhood, could see the potential bondage of becoming financially dependent on Amy. She certainly experienced firsthand Amy’s abusive treatment of servants, often intervening. No doubt, she was concerned that it might only be a question of time before Amy would begin to see her--and treat her--as a social inferior.

Her fears appear to have been unjustified. Amy retained a respect bordering on worship for Ada for the rest of her life. She makes references to Ada in her poems as royalty, as a Greek goddess, and as a Madonna figure.

So all of this is a long lead-in to a review of the soon-to-be-published Lady of the Moon. It’s in intriguing volume that is divided into three parts: the poems of Amy Lowell (with a special focus on the ones that were written for and about Ada), an essay about Amy by lesbian superheroine/historian Lillian Faderman, and a series of poems by contemporary lesbian poet Mary Meriam, poems imagined in both Ada and Amy’s voices.

It was a delight to revisit Amy’s poems. And Lillian Faderman’s essay (originally published in Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women From the Renaissance to the Present) illuminates them with historical context as well as a refreshingly lesbian perspective on Amy’s many critics. Amy was attacked, of course, for being a woman, for using her privilege to advance her interests (something men are expected to do), for being “mannish,” and for being fat. The poet Witter Bynner coined the term “hippopoetess” in reference to her, and Ezra Pound made sure that the epithet made it around the world. In response to this harassment, Lowell gave the world her prose poem, “Spring Day, Part One: The Bath.” She invites readers (and critics) to to envision her naked in her bathtub:

“The sunshine pours in at the bathroom window and bores through the water in the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish-white. It cleaves the water into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright light. Little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of the water and dance, dance, and their reflections wobble deliciously over the ceiling; a stir of my finger sets them whirring, reeling. I move a foot, and the planes of light in the water jar. I lie back and laugh, and let the green-white water, the sun-flawed beryl water, flow over me..."

And she puts her lesbianism right in their faces too… Here are some excerpts from her most explicit lesbian poem, “The Weather-Cock Points South.”

"I put your leaves aside,
One by one:
The stiff, broad outer leaves;
The smaller ones,
Pleasant to touch, veined with purple;
The glazed inner leaves.
One by one
I parted you from your leaves,
Until you stood up like a white flower
Swaying slightly in the evening wind…

…The bud is more than the calyx.
There is nothing to equal a white bud,
Of no colour, and of all,
Burnished by moonlight,
Thrust upon by a softly-swinging wind."

The final section of the book fills in many of the gaps in the story unfolded in Amy’s poems. Here Mary Meriam gives imagined voice to Ada and Amy in a series of expressive poems, mostly in the sonnet form. I have a special appreciation of the sonnets that reference Ada's life in the theatre:

“Daydreaming dim-lit corridors backstage,
I use the laughter, clinking, faint perfume
Of memory and fantasy to gauge
The time and distance to her dressing room…”

or…

“ … The play will end,
And then, what gesture will the world permit?
The players bow. The house begins to wend
Its way outside. I walk against the flow…”

Amy Lowell’s life and work have been treated with dismissal, with contempt, and with wild projection and distortion. Lady of the Moon returns her to us as a lesbian… and as a Muse. It is a testimony of the kind of blossoming that a woman can experience, especially a gender non-conforming lesbian, when she is fully seen and fully loved by another woman. I think of the great gentling influence that Ada had over this prickly and deeply damaged woman.

In the words of Faderman, Ada was “overseer of the estate, wifely president over Lowell’s table and cocktail parties, virtual bodyguard, governess to Lowell’s ill-mannered youth persona, literary assistant, and consultant. [Ada] critiqued Lowell’s poems, read page proofs, supervised her secretaries, soothed her ruffled feathers over bad reviews or literary disputes, soothed the ruffled feathers of others when Lowell had been too brusque with them, got rid of intrusive guests, and even coached Lowell in preparation of the dramatic monologues she read in public…”

And in Amy’s poetic tributes to Ada we see how it was actually Ada, all those years, folding back Amy’s stiff, protective leaves, revealing the inner sweetness of her lover, proving “the bud is more than the calyx.”

Footnote: Ada, by the way, outlived her younger lover by nearly thirty years, dying in 1952. Turns out she had good reason to be leery of wealthy people. Even though Amy had done all the legal work to leave her partner a lifetime interest in her estate, the surviving Lowells still found a way to evict her from Sevenels.

Another footnote: The book has a trailer!

And if you are interested in my dramatic adaptation of Lowell's work... Amy Lowell: In Her Own Words.
Published on

May 24, 2015

Sharon Doubiago's Poem, "The Visit"

Incest Reviews

One of the earmarks of an unrecovered survivor is black-and-white thinking.. right-and-wrong, good-and-evil, victim-and-perpetrator. We don’t inhabit the gray areas of life. They feel too threatening. In fact, the gray areas are not gray at all to us. They are victim-blaming or perpetrator-apologist.

Period.

So now, I come to a consideration of my friend Sharon Doubiago’s recent, powerful and brilliant long poem, The Visit.

The Visit is not just written in the gray area; it is a kind of cartographic experiment in the mapping of that contested terrain.

Doubiago is writing about her complicated relationship with Jack Retasket, a Native American/ Canada Shuswap-Lillooet survivor of Kamloops Indian Residential School, where he was imprisoned from the age of five until he ran away at thirteen. In 2004, Retasket was arrested and convicted of sexual violation of his girlfriend’s daughter, who was under twelve at the time. Under Megan’s Law he received a mandatory sentence of fifteen years in the Oregon penitentiary.

Doubiago is also writing about so much more. She is writing about Neil Goldschmidt, former governor of Oregon, who sexually abused the thirteen-year-old daughter of one of his campaign workers. The abuse went on for years, officially ending when the girl became legally recognized as an adult at seventeen, but the dynamic continued until she was twenty-seven. By the time his crime was exposed, the statute of limitations had run out.

Doubiago is also writing about her own father, who raped her at seven and who continued to sexually abuse her until she was twelve and reported it to her mother. She has written a compelling, two-volume memoir about this relationship: My Father’s Love: Portrait of the Poet as a Young Girl, and My Father’s Love: The Legacy, Portrait of the Poet as a Woman.

Doubiago is also writing about the novelist and activist for humanitarian causes Michael Dorris, who adopted three Native American children, and later committed suicide rather than face trial for the rape of his children.

She writes about the mass execution of aboriginal children at the Mohawk Residential School in Ontario.

She writes about the torture and murders of teenaged girls Jennifer Esson, Kara Leas, Sheila Swanson, and Melissa Sanders… their bodies found in the Oregon woods.

She writes about how US soldiers scalped the vulvas of Native women in the Sand Creek Massacre. She writes about Megan Kanka, the raped and murdered seven-year-old after whom “Megan’s Law” was named. Megan’s Law, which was applied to Retasket--no parole, no probation.

Doubiago is not glossing over the horror. She is not apologizing or justifying. Even, as I write these sentences, I sense my resistance to believing that a gray area is possible. There are only two columns in my ledger and I am itching to move those sentences to the victim column or the perpetrator one. Not because I fancy myself a judge. But because I am terrified of becoming complicit (again?) in my own abuse. I am terrified of deconstructing boundaries that I excavated with literally bleeding and self-mutilated hands, and then built from the ground up against the Sisyphean forces of self-doubt and shame.

Sharon has a boundary too, and I am sure that it was just as painfully built. She refuses to lose her compassion. She treats the gray as a warrior’s path:

… to know your enemy is temporarily insane
as in Aikido, the Japanese spiritual practice
of defending the self while at the same time
protecting the attacker from injury
in his temporary insanity

to find freedom as a woman
to fold not to the fear…

In the ninth section of the poem, “The Last Time I Saw Him,” she writes of the murdered teenaged girls:

this tied naked to the tree
freezing, reliving
your stupid little mistake, just
getting into his truck
to prove
you don’t mistrust him

Those lines strike a nerve. In my younger years, I hitchhiked. And I did it a lot. I needed to prove that I could. I needed to have those precious years of vagabonding so seminal (yes, seminal) to the later oeuvre of male writers like Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams. I would insist on having those years. But, of course, I didn’t; I couldn’t. Because, as the protagonist of my play Crossing the Rapelands narrates, “… when a young woman stands on the side of the road and sticks out her thumb, she automatically enters the Rapelands. And wherever she may think she’s going, it’s always the Rapelands.”

Or, in the words of activist and author Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “Men have always gone on the road or off to sea without consequences. They are heroes from Ulysses to Kerouac. A woman who ventures forth on a quest is considered a deserter.”

Let me be clear: I was lucky. Yes, I escaped some dangerous situations by using my wits, but I had the good fortune of encountering only those run-of-the-mill, would-be assailants. I never ran into the Ted Bundies, the Edmund Kempers, the Bobby Jack Fowlers, the Winston Moseleys, the Gary Ridgways, the Robert Pictons, the Albert DeSalvos of the world. I never ran into those men who had already formulated a plan, who were on lock-and-load.

getting into his truck
to prove
you don’t mistrust him

Yes, I did that. Not for their sake, but to prove something to myself, to the world. Gray. Painfully gray. Not victim-blaming. I gambled. I survived. But, no, I never had the freewheeling Kerouackian adventures, filled with bravado and brio. On the other hand, my decade of traveling behind enemy lines did forever change my perspective and the direction of my writing.

I realize about my mother
culture’s silence and denial
my sister, our girls not mourned
all the girls every day down through time
every day of my girlhood, a girl dead in the paper
stuffed in trash cans, car trunks, dumped along the LA river.

Sharon Doubiago loved her father, and she never reported his crimes to the authorities. And neither did her mother.

Paranoia of my boundless compassion, my vow
never to lose it. My proving
I don’t mistrust you.

That paranoia… the price of abstaining from judgment, the civil cost of “innocent until proven guilty.” The gray just this side of "beyond the shadow of a doubt."

Here is where I engage with the Poet. I refuse the burden of that paranoia. I have opted for a compassion-ectomy. Yes, the excision of that organ may compromise the heart or limit my humanity, but what of the Spirit? Has compassion, like other organs, evolved for the preservation of the gene pool, indifferent to the suffering of individual females, because our evolutionary function is, after all, egg-carrier and incubator. Compassion for our enemies, the inseminators, will inevitably facilitate that all-important access that perpetuates the species. I distrust my instinct for compassion. It has betrayed me too many times.

In excruciatingly honest detail and the heightened language of a master poet, Doubiago chronicles atrocity after atrocity in her paradoxical quest to resolve her feelings for Retasket. The Visit is a revisit to the landscape of her childhood. The evidence against men, against males, against this particular male is overwhelming for this reader.

Doubiago quotes survivor and novelist Rafael Iglesias:

It was 20 years after I was sexually misused before I understood what my molester had actually done to me: he had permanently associated my first experience of sexual pleasure with my having no say in the matter. That, I believe, is the true meaning of rape.

Witness for the prosecution if ever I heard it… but wait! I read the footnote. (The poem has five pages of them.) The quotation is from the essay, “Why I Chose to Work with Roman Polanski.”

Gray. Again.

Doubiago’s poem activates my fragmented selves. My jury room comes alive. There are those of me who can’t remember, who pore over names and dates looking for clues of what happened to them. There are those of me who got into his truck… maybe as many as 500 times, and over 10,000 miles. They look down at their shoes, at their tough little hiking boots… confused. There are those who married a good, a safe man… and those who made us leave him. There are those who, like Madame DeFarge, keep their own counsel through the proceedings, knitting peacefully in the corner. And there are those who understand that she is coding the names of perpetrators in her knitting, names slotted for the guillotine. And once that reign of terror begins, will any of us be safe?

My friend Sharon invites every single one of my shattered selves to the table. She gives us all the floor. And she has left us some jury instructions, specifically, the definition of “amnesty”--forgiving, not forgetting.

The deliberations go on longer than the poem. They’re still going on, or hadn’t you noticed? I believe that Doubiago is counting on a hung jury, a retrial. But, for better or worse, I am gunning for a conviction.
Published on

May 2, 2015

Elana Dykewomon. Word.

Reviews

“Like the generations before us, when we were in our twenties, we thought we were going to change the world. Unlike the generations before us, we also thought we were going to change the word—that changing the word was going to be our instrument for changing the world. We were going to change the word “woman.” From woman to women, from women to womyn (wimmin), from womyn to lesbian, from lesbian to dyke to amazon, from outsider to compañera, from competitor to sister.”

These are the words of Elana Dykewomon. Yes, "Dykewomon." She led the way in being the change she wanted to see.

And she is back, with a new book of poetry with the perfect title, What Can I Ask? This is a collection of new poems and selected poems from previous publications.

But, before I talk about the poems, I want to go back to that in-your-face name that Elana gave herself. She wrote, “… I changed my name, hoping to keep myself honest. I changed my name so I would be in a constant state of self-examination about my motives in writing, so I would have to write as a member of the community in which I placed my heart and cunt, as a participant with a particular talent.”

She wrote that in 1991. Nearly twenty-five years later, I would say that she has indeed kept herself honest. And prolific. Elana has authored two novels, Riverfinger Woman (1974) and Beyond the Pale (1997 and reprinted in 2009); a collection of short stories, Moon Creed Road; and four collections of poetry, They Will Know Me By My Teeth, Fragments from Lesbos, Nothing Will Be As Sweet As The Taste, and What Can I Ask?

You have to know who you are to be honest, and you also have to know your seducers. Elana has identified herself as fat, lesbian, Jewish, and separatist, and she is aware that “…capitalism seduces us from the Right; humanism seduces us from the Left.” She explains that, for her today, separatism means “holding a radical analysis of power relations.”

On to the poems…

In “Unravel Then,” Elana writes how her father taught her the names of the constellations when she was a child—names derived from Greek mythology. She wonders about renaming them to represent Pete Seeger with his guitar, or Barbara Jordan lecturing Congress… or the Seven Lesbian Poets (you’ll have to read the poem to see the roster!). Her father’s response?

"... you’ve suffered for a long time. Stop
suffering. Accept this sky. We’ve
tamed the night, haven’t we? You should know
from your mythology

when you pick at a thread
the whole
starts unraveling."

Elana returns to this business about threads in “A lesbian’s prerogative:”

"It’s a lesbian’s prerogative to run her hand down the seam
            across the seam of need
            and stick her finger in
            where the stitch is loose

a lesbian prerogative
            to pull at the thread, rip it apart
            demand the womyn
            start over"

Ah, yes… that demand. It’s what gave separatists a bad name. The demand to start over, with lesbians at the center. The demand to stay honest. It is and it was a heavy demand. It came at a price. Here is Elana again in her masterpiece about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire:

"A Law of Physics"

Saturday, March 25,1911

One body falling alone is its own weight
times distance.
Two bodies falling alone are their own but
if they hold hands
their weight is multiplied.

Here’s a for instance:
Two girls are on a ledge.
The building is burning.
There are nets below.
The girls are young and for the purpose
of this example
thin and frightened.
It is eight stories to the ground.
The net can hold 90, 120, 150 pounds
times the distance but
holding hands
they become 11,000 pounds on impact.
The net breaks.
No one knows the price
of comfort,
how much they loved each other
and expected, by jumping,
neither to live nor die
but fly
released
from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.

What Can I Ask: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014 by Elana Dykewomon is published by Sapphic Classics from A Midsummer Night's Press and Sinister Wisdom.
Published on

February 16, 2015

The Art of Pamela Dodds

Reviews

The art of Pamela Dodds is many—many!—things. What I want to write about in this blog is what her art is to me, as a lesbian, as a survivor, and as a playwright who focuses on both of those identities.

Dodds’ art tells secrets. In fact, she has a whole series of paintings titled “Family Secrets.” For example “Showing.” When a child is pregnant. Notice the loving attention to the details of a girl’s bedroom… teddy bear, rabbit-eared bedroom slippers, ticket stub in the mirror. Notice how Dodds puts us in her position. The painting is the reflection in the mirror. She makes us be that pregnant teenager. Wow. The pregnancy is only going to become an issue when it begins to show, hence the title. In the realm of family secrets, it is the showing—the making visible—that is framed as the betrayal.

"Dressing" from the Boston series

Dodds trades in silences as well as secrets. As a playwright, I am not allowed to spend much time in silences… but when I can find a way to do it, I always take advantage. Why? Because there is power in those moments when one cannot find the words, or when the speaking of them is taboo. There is tension and power, and Dodds exploits both.

For me, as a lesbian, the silences between a couple are especially poignant. Nothing personifies the power of this silence better than Dodds’ painting “Dressing.” In this painting, there is an inter-racial couple who appear to be dressing up for an evening. In other words, getting ready to show off their coupledom in public. The white woman, still in her slip, is helping her partner on with her dress. The painting has a stillness for me that feels as if the moment has been frozen in amber. Now, perhaps this is a projection on my part, but when I look at this picture, I feel that there is a nearly unbearable tension between the women, a tension arising from what cannot be spoken. I look at the picture and I wonder if there is infidelity, or just boredom. Or has the racism and patriarchal values of the outside world become internalized, undermining and overwhelming their attempts to be intimate? All of the above… or none?

IV from "Night House"

Perhaps, because I am a story-teller, I found Dodds’ drawings especially compelling. These are presented in a series titled “Night House.” The series are then subdivided into four separate series, each of which tells a story: “The Visit,” “The Bound Child,” “Guardian,” and “Waiting Up.” You can tell just by the titles that these are also fraught with silence and secrets.

In these drawings there is a young woman and a child, or perhaps the child was the young woman. The visit triggers a trip to the basement, and then we meet the “Bound Child.” This is followed by the presence of a benign female guardian who watches by the bed. And then we see the young woman waiting up… and the loop of drawings circles back to the visit. Again, it may be the playwright in me, but I find story in this series. It’s a repeating story, the story of recovery. The sudden glimpse or intuition (aka “the visit”), which sets off the search for one’s own secrets, which leads to discovery of abuse/trauma. This discovery reveals the what was missing: the guardian. Or maybe, it leads to the correction of this absence. The arrival of the guardian lays the foundation of security which can open the survivor to the possibility of that initiating impulse personified in the visit. Rinse and repeat. This is my life. And someone, miraculously has drawn it.

This theme of recovery is also present in her series of relief prints titled “Memory’s Witness.” In this series, there are two fantastical female figures. Instead of feet, they are rooted in the ground. This is the source of their despair and also their hope. They are earth-bound, real, part of nature. There are helicopters that interrupt their Edenic existence. And then the bombs begin to fall. There is an aftermath of trauma and grief. And then… regeneration. I like that this series, all about roots, is woodcuts.

"V" in the Tether Series

Lesbians… She has two series, “Ebb” and “Tether,” that appear to be explorations of lesbian relationships breaking up and broken up. The bond between the women in “Tether” is an interesting one. Sometimes it is a support, other times it appears to be a hindrance or oppression. And sometimes, it’s difficult to tell which is which.

"Drift" from the Ebb series

And then there is “Ebb.” There is a “Flow” print, where the two women face each other in a floating limerance, and then the undertow, the drift, the riptide, the depths of separation. I can chose to return to “Flow” or experience the series as a linear breakup. Whichever I choose, I find it cathartic to see the pain of separating from a lover to graphically, and lovingly depicted. It is a healing work. I think all of Dodds’ art is healing. I think that’s her intention.

“Undertow” is a work-in-progress. This is a “a narrative suite of relief prints combining printed carved figures with printed natural woodgrain.” She has completed four of the proposed 9-12 prints. It seems to me she is taking some of her themes from “Ebb”and “Tether,” and realizing them in a different medium and in greater detail. For example, in “Undertow” the two women appear to be underwater. One of them appears to be reaching out to the other in a rescuing gesture, but the other is rejecting that gesture. The swirling patterns of the natural woodgrain are brilliantly realized representations of sky and sea, alive and impersonal, the perfect medium for her exploration of the figures.

Dodds has also done two book projects. As a writer, I found both of these fascinating. They brought to mind the words of author and activist Toni Cade Bambara: “I’m trying to break words open and get at the bones, deal with the symbols as if they were atoms. I’m trying to figure out not only how a word gains its meaning, but how it gains its power.”

The first book project is titled "Language for a Faltering Mind." The project was inspired by Dodds’ residency in Catalonia. In her words:

“As I grappled with the meanings of words, their nuance, their references, I was impressed with the power and political weight of language, and the significance of language as a touchstone of identity for the Catalonian people… In my contemplative walks, I happened upon the naturally formed bark fragments that fall from the trunk of the Plane (Platan) tree, ubiquitous in Spain. These unique forms struck me as hardly different from the letterforms that we collect and arrange into words to create meanings – meanings that can only be understood if one has the key of comprehension. I gathered, inked and printed these natural shapes, combining them in the manner of a potentially comprehensible language, as booklets and charts.”

That alone would have made a fascinating project, but Dodds combined it with a second experience:

“Coming home, I observe an aging relative who is losing her grasp of the English language, the only language she knows; and with it, the specificity of her relationships and human connections… Visiting her with notebook in hand, I gathered her utterances as I had the fragments of tree bark. I printed quotations of her collected words, and paired each one with a composition of printed bark fragments. The combination of the printed text with the printed tree bark, each with their spacings and layerings whether of meaning or form, represents for me, an alternative linguistic exchange, a continuing dialogue.”

Her second book project, Chronique Analytique / Analytic Chronicle, is a collaboration with Québec printmaker Diane Fournier. It is an abecedary... or alphabet book. Pamela describes the concept:

"Each letter is represented by a French and English word of same or similar meaning. Diane and I wanted to make imagery about experience, ideas, and perspectives, so we chose nouns for concepts, qualities, and states of being - not things. To create the work, we each separately drew images in response to the chosen words in a spontaneous, stream-of-consciousness manner and later combined the images through serigraphy... The result is a single, layered, complex image to represent each word.

O and P ("origin" and "possibility")

What I appreciate about Dodds’ work is that spends her time playing in the spaces in between.... in the silences, in the secrets, in the places where language is constructed and where it disintegrates. Her trauma narratives are not linear, but cyclical. She has an acceptance that communicates grace. My plays are tales of revenge and retribution. Her canvas is broader than mine. She chronicles a journey, where I am focused on the mapping and navigation.

I have a special appreciation for her work that deals with relationships between women. It reminds of the words of the lesbian poet Adrienne Rich:

“The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.”

Please visit Pamela Dodds' website, to see more of her art.

Pamela Dodds working on "Undertow"
Published on

February 14, 2015

The Marital Rape in Gone With the Wind and Other Lies

Rape Reviews

(Originally published in On the Issues)

Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone With the Wind, was a battered wife. She kept her first marriage a secret from the press, because the court records for the divorce contained a harrowing account of her husband's attempted rape of her. It was a graphic account wildly at odds with the famous marital rape scene which provided the dramatic climax of the romance between Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler in Mitchell's famous novel. How could her readers surrender themselves to the thrill and passion of the fictionalized account after reading about the real Rhett ‑‑‑ a jealous and violent alcoholic named Red Upshaw whose assault left Peggy Mitchell hospitalized for two weeks?

Why the discrepancy between the two accounts? Because Peggy Mitchell belonged to a society that attached more importance to myth than to reality--a society deeply invested in glossing the horrors of its recent history of slavery for the sake of glorifying a romantic epoch that never existed. This was a society that, in 1936, had still not come to terms with Appomattox. She also belonged to a society that sacrificed its daughters religiously on the altar of Southern womanhood--fetishizing them sexually, infantilizing them socially, and stunting them intellectually and artistically, all in the name of chivalry.

Peggy Mitchell, an inveterate tomboy, had not gone down without a fight. A regional outsider and a mediocre student, she had dropped out of Smith College after her freshman year, when her mother died. Her attitude, which she expressed to her brother, was, "If I can't be first, I'd rather be nothing."

Returning home to Atlanta, she attempted to carve out a niche for herself aso a rebel among the city's debutante daughters. But Peggy underestimated the forces she was up against when she challenged the authority of the Debutante Club's senior committeewomen. The last straw had been her uninhibited exhibition of apache dancing at the annual charity ball. It was traditional for the debutantes at the end of the season to receive their invitations to join the Junior League, the equivalent of initiation into "high society," but when the letters went out, Peggy's name had been left off the list. The omission had been doubly insulting, because several of her relatives were in the League.

But Peggy found that her Junior League ban had not hurt her popularity with men, a fact she enjoyed flaunting to the women who had snubbed her. She took to bobbing her hair, wearing short flapper skirts, and drinking her dates under the table at the Peachtree Yacht Club, a social club that had nothing to do with boats.

Like the heroine of any good romance novel, Peggy Mitchell threw in her lot with love and adventure. Defying her father and brother and flouting social convention, she married Red Upshaw, as likely an anti‑hero for her plot as any of the sons of the South. Red, a devastatingly handsome rake with a reputation for womanizing, had dropped out of college--where he had been a football hero and a star student ‑‑‑ in order to bootleg liquor. But there had been more to Red than just the outlaw image. He was the only boyfriend of Peggy's who ever encouraged her rebelliousness, laughing at her risque jokes and never criticizing her for drinking or smoking. It was obvious to Peggy that the two of them were meant for each other.

But real life is not a novel, and as the spunky heroine of her own script, Peggy Mitchell never dreamed that her daredevil marriage would end in attempted rape, a face disfigured with cuts and bruises, a sordid divorce, and a swift retreat into a safe, but suffocating second marriage.

Mitchell marrying Red Upshaw, the inspiration for Rhett Butler. He is fifth from the left. Note the rebellious flapper headbands.

Before this second marriage, she made one more attempt to emulate the heroines of a romance novel. The winter after the assault, she booked passage for Cuba, planning to work her way to the Canal Zone, Honolulu, and Tahiti.

But she was totally unprepared for the sexual predation that awaited the single woman travelling alone. If chivalry was not dead in upper-class Atlanta, it certainly was in the streets of Havana, and the flirtatious charm that she had assumed as part of her personality was now a distinct liability. She aborted the trip, returned home, and married John Marsh.

And John was a good rescuer. But rescuers exact a price, and although he was neither a violent nor a passionate man, John Marsh had pressured Peggy to quit her job as a star reporter for the Atlanta Journal. Peggy had fought hard to get the job, and letting go of it would not be easy. Childless by choice, she had enjoyed the fast pace, the challenging assignments, and the social life of a journalist. But even as a staff reporter, she had not been able to escape the stigma of her gender. She was frequently required to write stories like "Should Husbands Spank Their Wives?" or "How A Perfect Lady Refuses A Proposal." The one time she had been given free rein to write a series profiling some of the strong women in Georgia's history, the paper cancelled the articles. It seems that her real‑life heroines had been too "mannish," too unladylike, and too violent for the readers' tastes.

After leaving the Journal, Peggy embarked on a career as a professional invalid, developing agoraphobic symptoms and a number of physical conditions, both diagnosed and undiagnosed, that were to plague her for the rest of her life.

Mitchell's fantasy "bad-boy-turned-respectable-family-man."

Outnumbered, wounded, and badly demoralized, there was nothing to do except to sound a retreat. And so Peggy Mitchell turned inward to the world of her imagination, where she could live all the romance her heart desired through her impetuous and indomitable alter‑ego, Scarlett O'Hara. And for seven years she did just that.

Peggy Mitchell reinvented herself in the pages of her historic novel. She rewrote life the way she thought it should have been, and she did it persuasively: The dashing and sexually charismatic alcoholic really *was* the right man after all. The attempted rape was only the natural surge of an animal passion that would sweep up both husband and wife and carry them beyond their pride and their personalities to some transcendental realm of psycho‑spiritual bonding. The philandering, alcoholic bootlegger only needed the responsibilities of fatherhood to transform him into a sober and upstanding citizen. And when the heroine found herself suffering from the after‑effects of the night of passion (a later miscarriage of the fetus conceived that night), her penitent husband kept watch night and day outside the door of the sickroom, racked with guilt that he should have been the cause of her pain, and waiting anxiously for word that she might forgive him.

In reality, passion had had nothing to do with the attempted rape. The marriage had been a disaster from the honeymoon. Possibly in a move to curb Red's violence, Peggy had insisted that they both live in her father's house. Married in September 1922, they were separated by July. Three months later, Red drove up unexpectedly to the door. Peggy spoke with him briefly and then invited him into the house. In the divorce deposition, Peggy stated that "Mr. Upshaw demanded his connubial rights after striking me with his fist upon my left arm..." She refused on the grounds that she feared he would treat her in a "cruel and inhumane manner." Her counsel stated that he "jerked her against the bed, causing her to be bruised all over her body." Peggy fought him off, screaming for help. Bessie Berry, her housekeeper, appeared in the doorway as Red was leaving the bedroom. Peggy, in tears, ran after him, yelling at him to get out of the house. At that, her husband turned around and punched her full in the face.

Unlike Rhett, Red did not set up a vigil outside his wife's sickroom door.

Instead of going to the hospital, Red paid a visit to his friend John Marsh, who would soon become Peggy's second husband. He asked John to serve as a go‑between in negotiating an agreement whereby he would not contest a divorce, if she would not file criminal charges.

Peggy, unlike Scarlett, did not awake the next day to the realization that she loved her husband. She woke up with two black eyes, a sense of terror she was to carry with her for the rest of her life, and a sense of profound humiliation. Far from hoping her husband would visit, she purchased a small pistol and kept it on her bedside table until receiving news of Red's death years decades later. Red never found redemption or sobriety in married life. A vagrant alcoholic, he died a hideous death in 1949, leaping from the fifth floor of a flop‑house hotel in Galveston.

Why the lies? How could Peggy Mitchell bring herself to glorify a scenario that had been the most traumatic and degrading episode of her life? Perhaps the question is not "How could she?" but "What else could she do?" in an age before Oprah, where could she have gone to tell about her experience?

Mitchell's fantasy aftermath of marital rape.

Marital rape was not even recognized as criminal. There were no shelters, no crisis hot lines, no rape advocates, no literature on the subject, no television talk shows. Although her family had disapproved of the marriage, they considered divorce the ultimate disgrace. Peggy's friends had all warned her against Red, so she was understandably reluctant to appeal to them for support, at risk of hearing how she had "made her bed and could lie in it."P eggy and Red separated with no closure. He didn't visit the hospital, he failed to show up in court, he didn't call, he didn't write. She never saw him again.

Writing, like all art, can be an attempt to resolve contradictions that cannot be reconciled in life. And certainly Mitchell's life was fraught with contradictions: A tomboy with a lust for adventure, she had been compelled to act out the role of dutiful daughter and southern debutante.An avid journalist, she had been sidelined on the "women's page;" the daughter of a militant suffragist, she had been shamed and abused by her mother. An enthusiastic collector of erotic writing, she expressed a profound aversion to male sexuality. Raised on stories about the glory days of the Confederacy, Peggy Mitchell could hardly reconcile these with the poverty and explosive racial tensions in the Atlanta of her girlhood.

Turning to writing for the closure she needed, one of the first orders of business was to exorcise her guilt at the failure of the marriage. In the novel, Rhett is not blamed for the rape. He is depicted as being driven to it by Scarlett's provocations, and by her not‑so‑secret love for Ashley Wilkes, a married man. In reality, Peggy had been notorious for playing multiple boyfriends off against each other, and she was known to brag about her ability to tease her dates into a frenzy of sexual frustration. Also, like Scarlett, she fancied herself in love with a man she could never have.

Clifford Henry had been a friend of Peggy's brother, a lieutenant and a recent Harvard graduate. He was a gentle, philosophical man, and it was their shared love of literature that formed the bond between him and Peggy. Before going overseas, Clifford had given Peggy his ring.At Smith, Peggy's romance with an "older man" at the front was a subject of envy for her dormmates. She would share his long, but impersonal letters with the other girls. The friendship was a sincere one, and when she received news that he had been killed at the front, Peggy had been genuinely grieved.

Four years later, at the time of her marriage to Red, Peggy apparently came to the realization that Clifford Henry had been the one true love of her life.It is not known why she shared this insight with her new husband, but it may have provided Red with an excuse for his violence. But Peggy's "one true love" had been even more inaccessible than Scarlett's. Not only was Clifford dead, but one biographer suggests that he might have been gay.

In Gone With the Wind, Scarlett is scapegoated and punished ruthlessly, both for her flirting and for her infidelity. For Margaret Mitchell to have justified compulsive flirting as a learned response to a social milieu that systematically stripped women of the power to direct the course of their lives, she would have needed a feminist perspective which was still 50 years in the future. For her to know that the battering was not her fault, she would have needed to hear the voices of other battered women. For her to receive validation for the criminality of rape by her husband, she would have needed the legislative reform spurred by activists against domestic violence. And for her to understand her attraction to dispassionate men and platonic affairs, she would have needed the critique of compulsory heterosexuality which could only emerge from a visible and vocal lesbian culture.

But Margaret Mitchell did not have these things. She had a typewriter, and a desperate need for closure. Battered women have powerful stories to tell;.when there are no appropriate outlets, they tell them any way they can.

Some tell the story in their bodies, with chronic illness or injuries. Some tell their stories through chronic exhaustion or mental debilitation. Other women keep telling the story with their lives, pitifully seeking closure in abusive relationship after abusive relationship. And some women tell their strongest stories with their lies, with their denial.

These are the women who stand in the subways, one hand on the strap and the other clutching a romance novel. These are the women who spend the whole afternoon watching soap operas ‑‑‑ the women who buy regency novels by the gross, reading one after another, sometimes as many as three in one week.

It doesn't matter that the plots are indistinguishable, that the main characters are all the same ‑‑‑ in fact, that's the point. These novels and soap operas, if read or viewed frequently enough, provide a pseudo‑reality, a closure of sorts ‑‑‑ as long as they never end.What lies behind the romance addiction ‑‑‑ the compulsion to hear over and over the stories of love at first sight, of beauty taming the beast, of Cinderella rising from rags to riches, of Sleeping Beauty being awakened with a kiss? The answer is horror, the horror of lifetimes ‑‑‑ hundreds of thousands of women's lives ‑‑‑ wasted, destroyed, sold into slavery by lies and lies and lies passed down from grandmother to mother, from mother to daughter.

Romance literature is Western mind‑binding, female emotional castration.

Romance is the legacy of our colonization as women, which we pass on to each other in the blind belief that it will ease our bondage. Instead, it perpetuates it, because the woman invested in romantic fantasy will interpret her degradation as the result of a personal failing, instead of a deliberate goal of a male dominant culture. Like Peggy Mitchell, she will devote her energies to protecting the secret of her "failure" and to promoting the very myth that robs her of identity. Scarlett O'Hara could afford to put off reality; she could always think about it tomorrow. But for real women, today is all we have.

Footnotes:

1. On file, Superior Court, Fulton County, Georgia, dated July 16, 1923, presented as evidence on June 17, 1924 from Anne Edwards, Road to Tara: The Life of Margaret Mitchell (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1983), p. 102.

Bibliography:

Edwards, Anne. Road to Tara: The Life of Margaret Mitchell (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1983).

Mitchell, Margaret. Gone with the Wind (New York: Macmillan, 1936).

Pyron, Darden Asbury. Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

Tags

Suffragette: The After-Story

Review of Lady of the Moon

Sharon Doubiago's Poem, "The Visit"

Elana Dykewomon. Word.

The Art of Pamela Dodds

The Marital Rape in Gone With the Wind and Other Lies