The Wild in Each Other
On marriage, muteness and the other 'm' word.
“Could we try again?” my husband asks.
“Try what?”
“The conversation about your hormones.”
“Sure,” I say, bracing myself.
I deliver a communiqué from a foreign land - the peaks of progesterone, unpredictable oestrogen ranges, deep wells of rage and the occasional clarity of fast, unburdened thought rivers. I speak a hybrid scientific-embodied language that connects my experience to his medical terminology. He reflects the dispatch, clarifying the detail, wanting so much to understand.
“But the median age for perimenopause is 45 and you’re years from that,” he says.
And so it goes, he speaking the language of facts and figures, diagnoses and logic, me translating my experience, and both of us working hard to hear the other. Somewhere, somehow, we find an intersection, and we pause there, however briefly, to share the moment.
“A marriage is among the most private of landscapes. It is also the most demanding if both parties are to maintain their individuality and equipoise. How do you contain within a domestic arrangement a howling respect for the wild in each other?”1
Muted
Anthropologists Shirley and Edwin Ardener, conducted research into the silence of women in patriarchal societies in the seventies. They created a diagram of two circles, largely overlapped, with small crescents of non-overlap in each. One circle represents the dominant element of the culture, Men. The other represents the muted element, Women.
The Ardeners were fascinated by the role that language played as a manifestation of male authority. They proposed that there were dominant modes of expression in any society, and to be heard and heeded, individuals must use them. Alternative (individual) modes of expression were not heard. To be understood, non-dominant members must suppress their own mode of expression in favour of the dominant mode and are therefore ‘muted’.
Muted does not necessarily mean silent: 'the important issue is whether they are able to say all they would wish to say, where and when they wish to say it' (E. Ardener).
This Muted Group Theory2 (MGT) is more about power than gender. It informs how power functions in speech, language and writing. The dominant language is shaped by scientific evidence, logical reasoning and literal fact. It defines the lines of the box and tells us if we are in, or if we are out. It is the language of the coloniser, the conqueror, and the lawmaker. We all speak it, and write it - we’ve been raised and schooled in it.
(There is so much more I could write here about muted groups - all the women who do not have a voice across the world and closer to home. There are degrees of muteness and mine is nothing compared to theirs. This is, however, an attempt to write my experience.)
The Muted Text
One of the reasons I no longer attend church is connected to language. I returned to the church of my childhood at the beginning of the year for a very special service in which my father was involved. Having been away from that environment for many years, I was struck by how masculine the language is: Father God; Father, Son and Holy Spirit; King of Kings. The Christian experience is likened to a battlefield, where weapons are forged against us and victory is ours.
When I raised this with a dear friend, he said that God was neither masculine nor feminine. Why then, I asked him, did we never, ever refer to God as Mother? What symbols of feminine divinity can young women in that environment believe in? What female archetypes do they have? They do exist, of course, but the historical birthplace of our religion is patriarchal, so we have to read between the lines to find the muted text. We have to unlearn, and I am grateful for authors like Sue Monk-Kidd and Terry Tempest Williams, who helped me to read the old stories differently.
“The transgression of Eve was an act of courage that led us out of the garden and into the wilderness…She exposed the truth of what every woman knows: to find our sovereign voice often requires a betrayal. We just have to be certain we do not betray ourselves….The snake who tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit was not the Devil, but her own instinctive nature saying, Honour your hunger and feed yourself.”3
This reading of the text is not the dominant narrative, and it transformed my thinking. Eve walks away from perfection. How could she still want more? It cannot be a flaw in our design, it must be an essential component of womanhood to long for things beyond what we see and know - to long for the wild.
“It’s impossible not
to remember wild and not want to go back.”4
Animal, Bestial, Primitive
American author, Ursula Le Guin, studied the Ardeners’ theory. However, she was more interested in the two slender crescents outside the shared civilised area of overlap. She calls them ‘the wilderness’. She argues that men’s wilderness is known to all, it is the stuff of legend - voyages of discovery, rugged adventure and the like. But women’s wilderness is a mystery to most.
“The experience of women as women, their experience unshared with men, that experience is the wilderness, or the wildness, that is utterly other…That is what civilisation left out, what culture excludes, what the dominants call animal, bestial, primitive, undeveloped, unauthentic - what has not been spoken, and when spoken not heard - what we are just beginning to find words for, our words not their words: the experience of women.”5
The experience of women is varied. We hold down jobs, hold together families, hold our children’s hands. We bleed, miscarry, give birth; marry, divorce, remain single. We field school WhatsApp messages, write reports and deliver speeches. We run companies, wash knickers and make love. The language of the wild crescent Le Guinn speaks of is not in the public discourse; it is the dialect of hearth and home. It’s entirely subjective, heart-centred, and emotional. It is less a way of talking and more a way of listening. It is the craft of storytelling and the song of our childhood; it is silence - chosen, not inflicted.
This is what Le Guinn calls the “mother tongue”. The native language we all, regardless of gender, first spoke in the home before we were taught the language of power and progress. I realise that while I speak it with my women friends, my mother and my children, I self-censor in public, with most men and, occasionally, with my husband.
I want this to change, so, my husband and I commit to make the path by walking. On his days off, we drop the children at school and we hike until pick up. It is neutral territory, vast and unexplored (by us). I manage a few paragraphs in my mother tongue: the vulnerability of my book in the hands of those who will decide its fate; the strangeness of my own body; the bittersweetness of the children thriving away from me. I am heard, there, on the peak of Benwiskin, that crests like a wave above Mullaghmore. When we surrender our need for dominance, certainty and control, the soft space of solidarity opens and love reveals the other as they are, the one we chose, the one we choose still.
Public Speaking
I have a friend in business and politics. We talked about Muted Group Theory and whether women need to adopt the dominant mode of expression to be heard. I asked whether he had experienced women speaking in their native tongue during public discourse. “No,” he said. “Never.” What would it sound like? I wondered. Like Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke performing a haka to protest a controversial bill in New Zealand’s parliament, perhaps. Fierce and authentic.
When I want to read my mother tongue, I reach for Sinead Gleeson’s Constellations for the language of trimesters, health, motherhood; I look to Sharon Blackie to reimagine a country for old women; Machan Magán for Focail na mBan (Fock-eel-nu-van), a philavery of Gaelic words for vaginas, wombs and periods; and I read the poets: Denise Levertov, Medbh McGuckian, Mary Oliver and, a current favourite, Alice Kinsella, who wrote When, a poem inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s If, but for women.
At an event in Sligo last week, Hayley Kilgallon, author of Unladylike: A History of Ladies Gaelic Football, talked about a letter published in the Sunday Independent in the sixties by ‘Cork Farmer’. He wrote that women should not attend the Gaelic matches in Croke Park as they were taking up important space. The following week, the paper was full of responses from the women who washed the kits, made the sandwiches, and raised money for the club - if anyone deserved a spot in the stands, it was them. These Irish mammies fought for their right to take up space as supporters, and paved the way for their granddaughters to play the game. They spoke out, they were heard, and things changed. The Ladies Gaelic Football Association (LGFA) was formed in 1974, and today has a membership of nearly 200,000.
“When women speak truly they speak subversively - they can’t help it: if you’re underneath, if you’re kept down, you break out, you subvert.”2
The Sentence Does Not Fit Her
How can I, schooled in the dominant tongue, break out?
“Before a woman can write exactly as she wishes to write, she has many difficulties to face. To begin with, there is the technical difficulty - so simple, apparently, in reality, so baffling - that the very form of the sentence does not fit her. It is a sentence made by men.” 6
I love how Virginia Woolf transformed the sentence. In an act of punctuated rebellion, she used commas, semi-colons, dashes and ellipsis to create stream of consciousness passages that flow with wild abandon. What if I tried that?
“Among the many voices is my voice. At times I hear it so clearly, so distinct among the shouting, bad advice and hallelujahs, but something shifts when I lift my pencil: whispers from the deep, those demons of self-sabotage intent on derailing the whole thing. It is in that half-light between thought and sentence that I lose my nerve completely and wrestle against stacked odds to maintain my courage; to say: “This is my experience; this is how it is for me,” and write it as boldly as I can on the page where no-one can rub it out.”
I see my responsibility as a woman and writer as two-fold: to explore the wild crescent of my experience here, at this time, in this body, with this deep spiritual connection to place and its stories; and, to write about it.
The language I use is rooted in the earth. It grows from silence and the ability to listen. It is cyclical, recognising the seasons as opportunities to try and fail, to integrate death, and rebirth, the bloom and the harvest. This is language as witness, hard-won and capable of great healing. Most importantly, it is the flow and I am simply conduit working hard to get out of the way.
My finished novel, which is out for consideration with publishers at the moment, is the fictional story of three women. They are the evolution of all the women I am and could be, the women I know and those I wish I knew. It is the product of my searching, listening and paying attention to the experience of women in the place I am from. It is a book, but I hope it is just the opening sentence of a story that will improve in the telling.
A Basket of Bread
As my husband and I make maps to navigate our forties, we view the landscape with excitement and trepidation. We don’t know what lies ahead, but we do know this can be a hard one for lots of couples, partly because of the changes women go through. ‘The Change,’ as it is known, can also be a reckoning, a time to take stock after the intense early childrearing, career-building years. What is the lay of the land? What have we accumulated that needs to be abandoned? Can we revise our roles? As women, we pioneer this change, but society does not champion our cause. It is viewed as something to bypass, outwit or master through diet, exercise and a positive outlook. But what if we viewed it as an invitation? Yet another threshold on our journey as women that has a profound impact on our partner, children, extended family and community. If ever there was a time to press the unmute button, it’s now.
I think of the closing lines of Denise Levertov’s poem Stepping Westward, one of my favourite poems on womanhood and our shifting identity:
“If I bear burdens
they begin to be remembered
as gifts, goods, a basket
of bread that hurts
my shoulders but closes me
in fragrance. I can
eat as I go.”
When we walk the mountains of Sligo, I remember my burdens, naming them as gifts and laying the ones down that are too heavy to carry. My experience is redolent of give-us-this-day-our-daily-bread, cooked with the best intentions by people I love, but I have places to go, and need to keep moving. I will honour my hunger and feed myself; I will become proficient in my mother tongue; I will meet my husband along the way - forever.
Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muted_group_theory.
Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds.
Mary Oliver, from Green, Green is my Sister’s House.
Ursula Le Guin, ‘Woman/Wilderness’, from Dancing at the Edge of the World.
Virginia Woolf, from the essay, A Room of One’s Own.
You are such a courageous writer - we need your words, Bethany ✨
gorgeous resonant words