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A Radical Geography of Love
Let it
be
Like wild flowers,
Suddenly, an imperative
of the field...
--YEHUDA
AMICHAI
For years, without knowing why, I
have been drawn to maps of the desert, drawn by
descriptions of the winds and the wadi--dry
watercourses that suddenly fill with rain. I began
following an ancient story about love told in North
Africa in the second century, written in the coastal
city of Carthage, carried into Europe as the winds
carry the desert sand, falling like rain into a
tradition whose origins lie in the birth of tragedy,
coursing through the centuries like an underground
stream. Set in the landscape of tragedy, this story
leads to the birth of pleasure.
Maybe love is
like rain. Sometimes gentle, sometimes torrential,
flooding, eroding, quiet, steady, filling the earth,
collecting in hidden springs. When it rains, when we
love, new life grows. So that to say, as Moses
coming down from Sinai said, that there are two
roads, one leading to life and one to death, and
therefore choose life, is to say in effect: choose
love. But what is the way?
I picked up the
ancient road map of love at a time when
relationships between women and men were changing.
The waves of liberation that swept through American
society in the second half of the twentieth century,
freeing love from many constraints, set in motion a
process of transformation. In a historic
convergence, the civil rights movement, which
galvanized a moral consensus against enslavement,
was followed by the anti-war movement and the
women's movement, initiating a conversation about
freedom that included freedom from long-standing
ideals of manhood and womanhood. For a man to be a
man, did he have to be a soldier, or at least
prepare himself for war? For a woman to be a woman,
did she have to be a mother, or at least prepare
herself to raise children? Soldiers and mothers were
the sacrificial couple, honored by statues in the
park, lauded for their willingness to give their
lives to others. The gay liberation movement drew
people's attention to men's love for men and women's
for women and also men's love for women who were not
the objects of their sexual desire and women's love
for men who were not their economic protectors. In
the 1990s, for the first time since suffrage,
women's votes elected the president, more women were
gaining an economic foothold, and wealth began
shifting into the hands of young men who bypassed
the usual channels of advancement. The tension
between democracy and patriarchy was out in the
open.
Democracy rests on an ideal of equality
in which everyone has a voice. Patriarchy, although
frequently misinterpreted to mean the oppression of
women by men, literally means a hierarchy--a rule of
priests--in which the priest, the hieros, is
a father. It describes an order of living that
elevates fathers, separating fathers from sons (the
men from the boys) and placing both sons and women
under a father's authority. With the renaissance of
women's voices in the late twentieth century, with
sons questioning the authority of fathers,
especially with respect to war, with the revolution
in technology reducing the need for a priesthood by
providing direct access to knowledge, the
foundations of patriarchy were eroding.
I was
searching at the time for a washed-out road. Picking
up the voice of pleasure in men's and women's
stories about love and also among adolescent girls
and young boys, I came to the places where this
voice drops off and a tragic story takes over. The
tragic story where love leads to loss and pleasure
is associated with death was repeated over and over
again, in operas, folk songs, the blues, and novels.
We were in love with a tragic story of love. It was
"our story."
If we have a map
showing where pleasure is buried and where the seeds
of tragedy are planted, then we can see an order of
living that was presumed to be natural or inevitable
as a road we have taken and trace alternative
routes. Piecing together an ancient love story with
the findings of contemporary research, I found
myself led into the heart of a mystery and then to a
new mapping of love. This book is a record of that
journey.
In the mid-1980s, I began a study
with women and men whose intimate relationships with
one another had reached a point of crisis. People
were asking new questions about love, finding their
way alone and together across a shifting societal
and psychic terrain. More women were speaking openly
about their experiences of love, saying what they
knew about pleasure. The double standard, or what
Freud had called "a double
morality," had led to "concealment of the
truth, false optimism, self-deception and deception
of others" on the part of both women and men.
The poet Jorie Graham's questions became everyone's
questions:
How far is true
enough?
How far into the
earth
can vision go and
still be
love?
A search
for truth was uncovering a buried history, revealing
the extent to which neither men nor women felt
authentic. How had this happened? Where had they
split with their souls, their desires, their
connection to each other?
Led by an awareness
of this disconnection, I began to explore the roots
of what seemed a pervasive trauma. Trauma is the
shock to the psyche that leads to dissociation: our
ability to separate ourselves from parts of
ourselves, to create a split within ourselves so
that we can know and also not know what we know,
feel and yet not feel our feelings. It is our
ability, as Freud put it in Studies on
Hysteria, to hold parts of our experience not as
a secret from others but as a "foreign
body" within ourselves.
The foundational
stories we tell about Western civilization are
stories of trauma. Oedipus is wounded and abandoned
by his parents, who drive a stake through his feet
(hence the name Oedipus, which means "swollen
foot") and give him to a herdsman with
instructions to leave the baby on a hillside to die.
Saved by the herdsman, Oedipus is fated to kill his
father, Laius, and marry his mother, Jocasta--a fate
decreed by Apollo as retribution for Laius' having
sexually violated a young boy.
The
Oresteia, Aeschylus' trilogy about the
founding of Athenian democracy, tells a story so
horrible it is almost unspeakable. Atreus, the
father of Agamemnon (the king who will lead the
Greek army to Troy), had a brother Thyestes, who ran
off with Atreus' wife. In response to this loss and
the blow to male honor it carries, Atreus invites
Thyestes to a banquet and serves him his children,
cut up and cooked into a stew. Athenian democracy is
the civic order created to contain the seemingly
endless cycle of violence that follows in the wake
of this trauma. The Oresteia links the
establishment of democracy with the reinstatement of
patriarchy, as Orestes, Agamemnon's son, is
acquitted for the crime of killing his mother at the
first recorded trial. Athena (born from the head of
Zeus) casts the deciding vote in his favor, giving
priority to fathers by saying: "The death of a
wife who killed her husband is bad, but not so bad
as the death of a father and king."
In
the Book of Genesis, the trauma is the expulsion of
Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden; it too leaves
a legacy of violence and betrayal. Cain, the son of
Adam and Eve, murders his brother Abel. In the story
of Noah, God brings a flood to wipe out this history
and start over, but the residue of trauma returns in
Noah's drunkenness and incestuous sexuality. Jacob,
with the help of his mother, steals his brother
Esau's birthright. And Jacob's son Joseph is sold
into slavery by his brothers, who envy his
relationship with his father.
In these
foundational stories, a trauma occurs in a triangle
composed of two men and a woman. When we focus more
closely on what actually happens, we see that a
father or a husband's authority is challenged.
Oedipus is wounded by his father and mother because
he is fated to kill his father; Atreus is betrayed
by his wife and his brother; Adam and Eve disobey
God. What follows has the cast of tragedy, as if
what happens had to happen. The order of the
triangle has been challenged (father over son, man
over woman), and a man, wounded in his love,
responds by unleashing a cycle of
violence.
Perhaps patriarchy, by establishing
hierarchy in the heart of intimacy, is inherently
tragic, and like all trauma survivors, we keep
telling the story we need to listen to and
understand. At the same time, we look for ways to
break what quickly becomes a vicious cycle,
searching for "a new truth...[that would]
establish the whole relation between man and woman
on a surer ground of mutual happiness." The
quotation is from The Scarlet Letter, where
Nathaniel Hawthorne's narrator makes the observation
that the new truth must be brought by a woman,
echoing a thought that, once spoken, becomes
inescapable: the presence of women in a democratic
society contains the seeds of transformation--a
second coming, a new beginning, a civilization that
is not patriarchal. This is the radical geography of
love, the wildflower seeded from generation to
generation, the messiah perpetually in our
midst.
In Greek, the word for
"soul" is psyche; it also means
"breath" or "life." This ancient
word carries the wisdom that we are more than our
genetic makeup, more than our life histories, more
than our cultural lineage. Whether conceived as a
divine spark or as part of the natural wonder of the
human being, the soul is the wellspring of our minds
and our hearts, our voice and our capacity for
resistance. But Psyche is also the name of the young
woman in the ancient story about love.
My
research has centered on listening for the voice of
the psyche as it speaks directly and indirectly, in
language and in silence--a voice often hidden in the
structure of a sentence. I developed a method to
guide this listening, inspired by the early work of
Freud and Piaget, by literature and music, and
spurred by the challenge of listening to women
within a cultural acoustic that distorts their
experience. I was drawn by the sound of an
unmediated voice, a voice that broke free, a wild
voice or what Kristin Linklater, an expert on voice
in the theater, has called "the natural
voice": the voice that carries rather than
covers a person's inner world. I found that in order
to hear this voice I had to create a resonance that
would encourage the impulse to speak, and also to
signal in one way or another my answer to the
implicit question that I was asked explicitly one
day by a woman who said: "Do you want to know
what I think? Or do you want to know what I really
think?" I became interested precisely in this
doubling of thoughts and feelings and in the
conditions under which we will reveal to others and
to ourselves what we know.
In the journal he
kept on his voyage to the Galapagos Islands, Darwin
sketched the variation he saw among finches,
collecting the first of the evidence that would lead
him to posit the mechanism of natural selection as a
way of explaining the origin and the extinction of
species. Modifications in the beaks of birds who had
migrated to a particular island in the archipelago
represented adaptations to the food source of the
island, making it possible for them to eat and
survive. Species, although considered to be
God-given, could arise and disappear through a
similar process of evolution.
Adolescent
girls became the Galapagos on my journey. With them,
I first glimpsed evidence suggesting that what
psychologists had taken to be human nature was an
adaptation to a particular human landscape. Talking
with girls, I heard and experienced sudden shifts
between not knowing and knowing, lassitude and
intense feeling, a cover story and an under-reality.
In girls' intricately layered stories of love and
betrayal, I saw evidence pointing to the origin of
dissociative processes--splits in consciousness that
were familiar to me, that became surprising only
when I realized that they occurred in response to a
break in relationship that girls experienced with
shock. It was like working on a geological fault,
the ground of relationship suddenly shifting and
girls marking the shifts, registering what was
happening, so that in their presence I found it easy
to distinguish the experience of relationship (being
in sync with another person) from what are often
called relationships. As I came back to a knowing I
had learned to distance myself from or discredit, I
saw girls beginning not to know what they knew.
Dissociation was an adaptation to a shocking break
in relationship; it was a way of holding a loss
often said not to be a loss, a way of holding a love
that quickly came to seem
incredible.
"Ourself behind ourself
concealed / Should startle most," Emily
Dickinson wrote, conveying the startling discovery
of a hidden self. "I hid myself within
myself...and quietly wrote down all my joys, sorrows
and contempt in my diary." This is Anne Frank.
In The Land of Look Behind, in the section
"Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to
Despise," in a passage called "Obsolete
Geography," Michelle Cliff, the Jamaican-born
poet, associates her twelve-year-old discovery of
pleasure (the taste of mangoes, the feel of water,
the stirring of longing within her body) with
watching a pig's throat being cut: "as her
cries cease, mine begin."
"If I
were to say what I was feeling and thinking, no one
would want to be with me, my voice would be too
loud," seventeen-year-old Iris says, half to me
and half to herself. And then looking straight at
me, she adds with an edge of defiance, "But you
have to have relationships." "Yes," I
agree. We had been listening to the honest,
outspoken voices of younger girls. "But if you
are not saying what you are feeling and thinking,
then where are you in these relationships?" It
is my question for girls and women; it is my
question for myself. Iris sees the paradox in what
she is saying: she has given up relationship in
order to have relationships, muting her voice and
concealing herself so that "she" could be
with other people. Her pleasure in these
relationships is compromised by her awareness of
having sacrificed herself, or pleasure takes on a
different meaning, referring to bodily sensations
that have become divorced from or a stand-in for the
pleasure of being a soul in a body living in
connection with others.
In suggesting an
analogy to Darwin's work on natural selection and
positing dissociation as a psychic mechanism that
serves an adaptive function on a cultural level, I
also noticed a difference. The self that girls and
women conceal, like the voice they mute or the
identity they are taught to despise, is a vital,
curious, pleasure-loving soul that also has adaptive
value. Dissociation is a brilliant although costly
way of ensuring this soul's survival. If
dissociation is also the psychic mechanism that
allows survival in patriarchy, an adaptation to the
splits in relationship among and between men and
women, the soul in its affinity to life and to love
will resist this adaptation.
Excerpted from The Birth of Pleasure by
Carol Gilligan
Copyright 2002 by Carol Gilligan. Excerpted by
permission of Knopf,
a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt
may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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