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A review by christytidwell
The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women by Sally Miller Gearhart
2.0
"There are no words more obscene than 'I can't live without you.' Count them the deepest affront to the person." This idea is presented in the opening chapter of Sally Miller Gearhart's The Wanderground and, based on this, among other elements of that first chapter, I thought I might like this book. This does turn out to be an important idea in the book, but ultimately I could not get into The Wanderground. There are a couple of reasons for this.
The first is that The Wanderground, well, it kind of wanders. It does have a narrative, but it lacks a narrative drive or structure to help propel the reader through the text. In the end, there are only two reasons to keep reading the book: 1) enjoyment of the New Age-y spiritual tone of the book (I did not enjoy this), or 2) the (as it turns out, vain) hope that the source of the hill women's psychic powers and supernatural abilities (flying, communicating psychically not only with other humans but also with animals and trees and rivers (what.), and somehow preventing men's penises, technology, and weapons from working outside the limits of the city) would be explained. Eventually, Gearhart does describe more of the history of these hill women, who live in scattered communities throughout the countryside, reproducing themselves somehow without men (also not clearly explained if at all) and spending a lot of time guarding their borders and communing spiritually. But this history comes too little too late to make this a compelling narrative. And it still lacks some crucial details. How did the technology stop working? Magic? This isn't presented as a fantasy book but as a science fiction book, so I kept reading for explanations and feeling frustrated when I didn't find them.
The second reason I couldn't really get into the book was more ideological. There are some neat ideas within the wandering and the vagueness, but even those are often couched in problematic or troubling language. This book, written in the late 1970s, is born from a particular moment and particular tradition of feminist thought, one that I have never been able to endorse fully. At best, I have only been able to recognize why this approach might appeal to others and why it might seem, in the short term, useful. This type of feminism focuses primarily on "female nature" and the special gifts of women. It is essentialist (all women share this nature and these gifts and men do not), divisive, and can be harmful, both to the feminist movement and to human relationships.
Gearhart mostly seems to endorse this brand of feminism, but she does provide a brief critique of this idea as well. She has one of the benign male characters say the following:
"Just like every woman from the dawn of time. You demand your holy isolation from men so you can develop your unique female powers, but you are threatened to the core by the suggestion that we [men:] have equally unique powers--don't even whisper that they might be equally valuable."
This is an interesting response to the difference feminist insistence on the value of women's experience as somehow not only unique but also integral to women's being and value; however, it is not really followed up on, either in the discussion in which this statement is made or in the narrative. The tension presented here is allowed to just kind of fade into the background of the book as the final chapters move on to deal with a different issue.
In that final chapter another promising yet problematic idea is presented. The task of these women as they see it is to save the mother, the planet from ecological destruction and violence. Their task is this:
"To work as if the earth, the mother, can be saved.
To work as if our healing care were not too late.
Work to stay the slayer's hand,
Helping him to change
Or helping him to die.
Work as if the earth, the mother, can be saved."
Despite my discomfort with Earth Mother rhetoric generally (seeing women as close to nature in a way that men are not has a long and troubling history) and despite my dislike of the casting of men as slayers (this casting is made even more clear contextually before this chant), I do really like the idea of working as if it's not too late, working to make things better even if success is not certain.
The first is that The Wanderground, well, it kind of wanders. It does have a narrative, but it lacks a narrative drive or structure to help propel the reader through the text. In the end, there are only two reasons to keep reading the book: 1) enjoyment of the New Age-y spiritual tone of the book (I did not enjoy this), or 2) the (as it turns out, vain) hope that the source of the hill women's psychic powers and supernatural abilities (flying, communicating psychically not only with other humans but also with animals and trees and rivers (what.), and somehow preventing men's penises, technology, and weapons from working outside the limits of the city) would be explained. Eventually, Gearhart does describe more of the history of these hill women, who live in scattered communities throughout the countryside, reproducing themselves somehow without men (also not clearly explained if at all) and spending a lot of time guarding their borders and communing spiritually. But this history comes too little too late to make this a compelling narrative. And it still lacks some crucial details. How did the technology stop working? Magic? This isn't presented as a fantasy book but as a science fiction book, so I kept reading for explanations and feeling frustrated when I didn't find them.
The second reason I couldn't really get into the book was more ideological. There are some neat ideas within the wandering and the vagueness, but even those are often couched in problematic or troubling language. This book, written in the late 1970s, is born from a particular moment and particular tradition of feminist thought, one that I have never been able to endorse fully. At best, I have only been able to recognize why this approach might appeal to others and why it might seem, in the short term, useful. This type of feminism focuses primarily on "female nature" and the special gifts of women. It is essentialist (all women share this nature and these gifts and men do not), divisive, and can be harmful, both to the feminist movement and to human relationships.
Gearhart mostly seems to endorse this brand of feminism, but she does provide a brief critique of this idea as well. She has one of the benign male characters say the following:
"Just like every woman from the dawn of time. You demand your holy isolation from men so you can develop your unique female powers, but you are threatened to the core by the suggestion that we [men:] have equally unique powers--don't even whisper that they might be equally valuable."
This is an interesting response to the difference feminist insistence on the value of women's experience as somehow not only unique but also integral to women's being and value; however, it is not really followed up on, either in the discussion in which this statement is made or in the narrative. The tension presented here is allowed to just kind of fade into the background of the book as the final chapters move on to deal with a different issue.
In that final chapter another promising yet problematic idea is presented. The task of these women as they see it is to save the mother, the planet from ecological destruction and violence. Their task is this:
"To work as if the earth, the mother, can be saved.
To work as if our healing care were not too late.
Work to stay the slayer's hand,
Helping him to change
Or helping him to die.
Work as if the earth, the mother, can be saved."
Despite my discomfort with Earth Mother rhetoric generally (seeing women as close to nature in a way that men are not has a long and troubling history) and despite my dislike of the casting of men as slayers (this casting is made even more clear contextually before this chant), I do really like the idea of working as if it's not too late, working to make things better even if success is not certain.