3 July 2017
Since the day I learned to read as a child, I have been an avid devourer of books. I started Harry Potter in second grade and never looked back, read the kid’s section dry at the local library, and reorganized my class bookshelf in sixth grade just for fun. I was, by all accounts, a massive nerd. This followed me into my teenage years and is true now – literature has been and is still one of the great influencing factors of my life.
What has taken me a little longer to suss out, however (at least in any kind of organized way) is how literature has been one of the great influencing factors of my life as a woman.
To begin with, in my junior year of high school, I wrote an essay on Chris McCandless and Into The Wild.
For those of you who are not familiar with the story: in the early 1990s, Chris McCandless, a recent college graduate, sold most of his belongings and became a vagabond – hiking, hitchhiking, and canoeing his way across most of the western half of the United States. Ultimately, he made his way to Alaska, where in an attempt to live off the land he ended up starving to death in a backcountry shelter.
His story, picked up by reporter Jon Krakauer, became the subject of a book and later a movie, both titled Into The Wild; it generated a huge amount of discussion and controversy, with some accusing him of arrogance, naivete, and pure stupidity, and others lauding him as an example of the enduring American spirit. In the end, all this really did was turn him into something larger than life, a symbol of individualism and a deep, life-giving connection to nature.
The thesis of my junior-year essay proclaimed that McCandless represented “inner strength of will, individuality in a world so often focused on conformity, and the old American ideals of self-reliance and adventure” and furthermore that “McCandless’s character, bright and enigmatic, serv[ed] as a reminder of important values that are so often lost in today’s society.”
It resurfaced in the forefront of my mind recently, when I found myself thinking about the “why” of it. Why did my 16-year-old self, who had next to nothing in common with Chris McCandless and knew next to nothing firsthand about the “old American ideals” that I wrote about, idolize the story so much?
To me it is obvious – I have been dreaming of travel from a very young age, and as someone who has also always had a deep fascination with the grittiness of the outdoors, McCandless’s story was the epitome of everything I aspired to: the freedom of the open road, the journey of self-discovery, the beauty of the hidden highways and byways of the country.
This has been a main theme of my interests and reading choices for as long as I can remember. Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses and Blood Meridian, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet and The Island; my love of horses and not-so-secret desire as a child to be a cowboy when I grew up, my insistence that I learn how to throw a punch, tie a trucker’s hitch, run faster than all the boys at school, and not cry when I fell and scraped my knee. These are things I have always understood about myself.
However, for a very long time (almost as long as I can remember enjoying the feeling of salt in my hair, and the vanilla scent of the Jeffrey pine), I have struggled with something that I always considered to be entirely separate from the interests and characteristics that I just described. It is this: a deep sense of dissatisfaction, of a powerful and directionless anger that manifested itself as shyness and uncertainty, and later as sarcasm and cynicism.
I used to have frequent dreams in which I would be trying to do something – running, climbing, finding someone in a crowd – but I couldn’t manage to do it because my body would feel as if it were mired in quicksand. This, I think, is a good representation of my personal underlying experience as a child and as a teenager: all of the things I wanted to do the most I subconsciously knew might be much more difficult for me simply because I was a girl.
Sylvia Plath, speaking across the decades, gets to the heart of the issue at hand better than I have ever been able to:
Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.
(From The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)
This has always been at the heart of that directionless anger and dissatisfaction that I have felt for so many years of my life. I have, by all accounts, been incredibly lucky: I was born into a family that never doubted my worth simply because I was born female, and who have encouraged me to grow to my full potential; I have grown up in a place where my rights are somewhat closer to equal and protected than many places in the world; and I have an innate stubborn contrariness that makes it almost a reflex to reject the opinion of anyone who doubts my capabilities or potential (this quality, though most likely headache-inducing to my parents when I was younger, is something I now consider to be one of my greatest and most dubious survival instincts – when all your other chips are down, nothing motivates like pure spite). However, I have still never been able to avoid the fact that I am a woman in what remains largely a society structured in favor of men, a society that in its very nature tells me that I am not good enough, and no matter how emancipated I am consciously, I have never been truly free of it.
This is what it means to me to be a woman in America, steeped in its myths and histories. The American mythology – especially that of the American West – is one of vastness and expansion, of testing oneself against the forces of nature, of finding one’s way past where the maps end, of venturing into the regions labeled only “Here be dragons” both in a geographical and psychological sense. As Elizabeth Gilbert writes in The Last American Man,
…the classic European coming-of-age story generally featured a provincial boy who moved to the city and was transformed into a refined gentleman… [while] the American boy came of age by leaving civilization and striking out toward the hills. There, he shed his cosmopolitan manners and became a robust and proficient man. Not a gentleman, mind you, but a man.
And that’s just it, isn’t it? This American mythology, everywhere you look, every direction you turn, is about men. Men, men, men, blah, blah, blah – where are the women? Where are the women? Probably home cooking grits over an open fire, barefoot and pregnant with their ninth child, hands shading squinted eyes as they stand in their doorway and look out over the open prairie, waiting for their men to come home – if you buy into the myth that today’s America was built on.
What I am writing about here is not new. It is something that many have struggled with and written about before: it is a matter of representation on a cultural level, and this is where literature comes into the picture once again. Larger-than-life literary heroines are much harder to come by than their male counterparts, and although this discrepancy wasn’t consciously apparent to me as a child, it still left its underlying mark. All the “Great American Novels” I devoured as a child and as a teenager presented the ultimate double standard: they spoke of freedom and selfish excess and daring exploits, but nowhere in their pages did I really see myself. As Kelsey McKinney writes, “while the male characters of literature built countries, waged wars, and traveled while smoking plenty of illicit substances, the women were utterly boring…Literary girls don’t take road-trips to find themselves; they take trips to find men.” (x)
How does one approach womanhood in a society that provides no space for it? Even today, in a world that has progressed in leaps and bounds since the last century, there are no archetypal road maps for womanhood that include something other than marriage and child-bearing. (The archetypal road maps for men are often no less problematic, but at least they try to include things like, oh, I don’t know, individual agency).
It is true that there are plenty of female heroines and female writers, and I loved these too. Annie from The Magic Tree House series comes to mind as a childhood influence, as does Hermione Granger, and there was always Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, the Bronte sisters – women who did manage in some respects to join the Western canon of literature – but there was always the sense that the “greatest” of these novels, the truly canonized ones, were the realm of men. “Girls,” as Soraya Chemaly writes in an article from last year, “learn to filter their existences through messages of…cultural worthlessness” (x) . While the Holden Caulfields and the Sal Paradises of the world were out having grand adventures, I would always be peering in from the outside, my nose pressed up against the unfriendly glass.
The turning point for me was twofold: recognizing this as a source of my own anger and dissatisfaction, and realizing that I personally no longer needed to find acceptance or companionship in the arms of the Western canon of literature. I have read the pages of so many of these “canonized” novels until the paper wore thin, and I have truly loved them for their historical significance and for their entertainment– but this is my middle finger to all the “Great Literature” that has ignored again and again the stories of women whose hearts and minds contain a vastness of spirit that would make the wide-open spaces of the American West look frail and insignificant.
And these women exist – they exist. Writers, archaeologists, historians, mountaineers, pilots, and everything in between: the Mary Kingsleys and Nellie Blys of the world, the Harriet Tubmans, the Isabella Birds, the Gertrude Bells, the Anne Bonnys and Ching Shihs and Robyn Davidsons and the multitude of others left forever unnamed and unrecognized, a line of women stretching both backwards and forwards as far as time goes. These women were intelligent, passionate, thrifty, clever, and, above all, determined to get their way by any means necessary in a world which provided no road maps for their lives and attempted to thwart their every step. This is the legacy of the female traveler, one that I hope to honor every single time I step out into the world. Women, lacking a map, have become their own cartographers, time and time again.
I hope the ghost of Sylvia Plath is somewhere out there and that somehow these words make their way to her, because we have done it. My god, we have done it, against all odds, and we will continue to do it – mingle with road crews and sailors and soldiers and barroom regulars; speak as deeply as we can; sleep in open fields and travel west and walk freely at night, albeit with keys clenched between fingers just in case, but walking nonetheless.
I am able to travel with relative freedom through my life and the world because a legion of women before me each individually decided that they would do the same, that they had worth and strength and value, and they were the ones that pushed and pulled and bullied the world into becoming the kind of place where I can climb on a plane alone, walk around foreign cities alone, wear pants and refuse to ride my horse sidesaddle, get an education equal to that of my male peers, vote, and never be disgraced for any of it. This is a gift that has been given to me because of the circumstances of my birth in time and place; I consider it my duty to do what I can with my life to add even the tiniest contribution to that great collective push towards a better world, for the women and girls now who do not have the freedom that I have, for all the women and girls of the future.
So: if you can’t find the story you want to read, write it. Better yet, live it. Travel. Speak loudly; laugh deeply; be angry; take up space on the train and don’t apologize for any of it. Make your entire fucking existence a Great American Novel, and canonize yourself until society catches up, so that no daughter or granddaughter or great-granddaughter of mine – or anyone’s – ever has to feel the same sense of directionless anger that I have felt, and can instead look about the world she lives in and see her own potential for greatness foretold everywhere she turns.
Notes & suggestions:
I cited, very briefly and somewhat without context, an article by Soraya Chemaly that I would highly recommend for further reading on a topic similar to this essay. The article, published in 2016 and titled “Does Your Daughter Know It’s OK To Be Angry?”, discusses the existence and nature of anger in women – what causes it, how it is expressed (or not expressed), and the detrimental effects of a culture that disapproves of female anger and the subsequent suppression and sublimation of that anger. It’s a good, quick, & relevant read, and one that I suspect will strike many women as altogether familiar.
SGBRSH 