The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (2 page)

INTRODUCTION TO THE 20
^th
ANNIVERSARY EDITION

March 7, 2016

When I realized
The Dance of the Dissident Daughter
was about to turn twenty years old, I pulled it off the shelf and read it again. Now and then over the past two decades, I'd referred to various passages in the book, but the last time I'd actually read
Dissident Daughter
from beginning to end was shortly before its publication in 1996. Now, as I relived the seven-year journey described in these pages, I wished I could go back and speak to the thirty-eight-year-old who wrote that the bottom had fallen out of her womanhood. With her religion and spirituality colliding into feminism and her realization of what she'd lost within patriarchy breaking through to her, she set out on a search that seemed unknown and terrifying, one she feared, rightly so, would blow open her safe, comfortable, circumscribed world.

It was somehow easy to think of this younger self as “her.” She was me, but not me. Such is the mystery of aging—the way we outgrow our past selves, yet carry those selves inside of us. Rereading
Dissident Daughter,
I was struck by how vulnerable, uncertain, hesitant, and alone my younger self had felt as she struggled to wake up. I also appreciated how close she'd come to never taking the journey at all.

In my novel
The Invention of Wings,
my characters Sarah and Angelina Grimke, inspired by real nineteenth-century abolitionists, fight for a woman's right to speak, not just in parlors to other women where they've been confined, but publicly in churches, lecture halls, and legislatures. They demand to have a voice in the world and are swiftly attacked, censured, excluded, silenced, and reviled. They don't know it, but they're about to light a fuse for
women's rights in America. At the height of backlash against Sarah and Angelina, as they waffle on the threshold between retreat and courage, I have their friend Lucretia Mott send them a message containing four words:
Press on, my sisters.

Of course, it was I who wanted to say these words to my characters, and even though my experience in
Dissident Daughter
cannot begin to compare to Sarah and Angelina's struggle, these were also the words I wished I could have said to my younger self.
Press on.

On a spring day in 1994, I copied a quote by Anaïs Nin on a card and propped it on my desk for inspiration. It said: “The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.” So began
The Dance of the Dissident Daughter
. As I wrote, I often paused, thinking,
Oh, I can't possibly say that,
and then saying it anyway.

When the book came out, it was to a little splurge of controversy. Twenty years ago, misogyny within churches, denominations, and religious groups was often, in the words of scholar April DeConick, a
holy
misogyny. That is, it was sexism mandated by scripture, church doctrine, or divine decree. It can be terribly hard to change dictates that come from on high, especially when
God
is perceived as doing the dictating. The very idea of integrating feminine imagery and language into conceptions of the Divine and of confronting the exclusion, silence, and devaluation of women within religion could easily create a firestorm. Since 1996 there has been an evolving feminine and feminist awareness within churches, and many progressive strides have been taken. But sadly, holy misogyny continues to this day in some traditions, now framed as a “separate, but equal” policy reminiscent of segregation, causing me to wonder if religion might just become the last patriarchal stronghold.

The Dance of the Dissident Daughter
sparked heated, sometimes scathing reactions, including public accusations of heresy, boycotts of my lectures, and a plethora of derisive letters in my mail
box. One of the more memorable began:
Dear Whore of Babylon
. It was the “Dear” part that made it so indelible.

In the midst of all that protest, however, came a vibrant groundswell of support from other women, as well as some men. I received hundreds of letters from women telling me that the story in
Dissident Daughter
had become a catalyst for their own awakening. Others expressed how the story had articulated and validated their own experiences. I recall one letter from a seminary student, who wrote that while
Dissident Daughter
wasn't allowed to be displayed openly in the school's bookstore, it was sold from beneath the counter and that every female student she knew had carried one out in a brown paper bag. Women created Dissident Daughter groups and weekend retreats in which they met to tell their stories and support one another. After my novel
The Secret Life of Bees
was published in 2002, women showed up during my book talks clutching
Dissident Daughter
. Invariably, they would stand during the Q&A and give little testimonials about how it had impacted their lives. And these days, marvel of marvels, I hear from the daughters of women who read the book twenty years ago.

In the first introduction to the book, I posed a question: “Once you wake up, can you wake up any more?” Two decades later, it seems appropriate to ask the question of myself again. Had I continued to wake? Now, more than ever, I'm aware of the difference the procreative season in
Dissident Daughter
made in my life, how it went on waking me.

My first experience of continuing to wake began with a longing to bring women together. Aware of how adept women can be at midwifing one another's deepest life, my friend and colleague Terry Helwig and I created workshops, sanctuaries, and symposiums for women in which they could hear and be heard. We were motivated by a need to reach out, but reflecting back upon those four years of gatherings with their rich kaleidoscope of voices and
stories, braveries and breakthroughs, I realize that I was continuing to come into “being” as well. I was solidifying my own feminine spiritual ground, testing my voice, bearing witness to my story, and learning how to carry my new consciousness out there into the world.

The other change I sensed in the wake of
Dissident Daughter
's publication was a small vacancy inside I hadn't realized existed. I'd studied ancient Goddesses, along with Christian and Jewish concepts of the Divine Feminine, but despite that, my understanding of God had evolved into increasingly remote abstractions—Divine Reality, the Absolute, the One. I believed then, and believe now, that God is ultimately beyond any form or image, but I began to understand that in order to relate to such a vast, amorphous presence, to find an intimacy with what seemed ungraspable, I needed a particular image. I needed a sacred feminine persona that could mediate that whole, huge mystery of holiness to me. My need was sort of like William Blake's vision of coming to see the whole world in a grain of sand.

It was about this time, as I approached fifty, that I got it in my head to go to Greece. I wrote extensively about my pilgrimage in
Traveling with Pomegranates,
which I coauthored with my daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor. It would be impossible to recount here the many ways the trip affected me; I will merely say that going to Greece was, in part, a search for spiritual belonging. I didn't exactly know I was seeking a feminine icon of devotion, but I began to find it in a cathedral in Athens while staring at a dark-skinned Madonna on the choir screen.

After traveling to Greece, I teamed up with Terry and Trisha Sinnott to take groups of women to Europe to explore the history, sites, and iconography of the Divine Feminine. While in France, I came once again upon the dark-skinned Mary. A powerful amalgamation of the Christian Mary and ancient Goddesses, the Black Madonna captured my imagination and fulfilled my longing for a sacred feminine image, one that particularly symbolizes the values I revere: compassion, inclusion, justice, creativ
ity, bravery, autonomy, dissidence, and reverence for the earth and the body. When I returned home from France, the Black Madonna traveled with me and took up residence in my life. She became my “grain of sand.”

Today, a painting of her hangs above my desk, presiding over my little creative precinct. Like all genuine icons, the Black Madonna is a holy archetype, providing me with a window into a larger, transcendent reality. She has also become a kind of muse, inspiring me to dig deep for my creativity. She is a big, world-mothering spirit, who compels me to try to do my small share to nurture a broken and glorious world.

I also felt a new form of creative expression stirring to life inside. I'm sure I would never have written any of my novels had it not been for
Dissident Daughter
. As I'd confronted the ways I silenced myself, facing my hesitancy to move beyond the confines of the world that shaped me, and slowly excavating my authentic voice, I'd begun to feel as if my writing reached some ending and now demanded a beginning. The spiritual journey in
Dissident Daughter
freed me, bringing an unexpected awakening. Suddenly, here came a long dormant desire to write fiction. I became consumed with creating stories. Women's stories.

Readers have pointed out that the themes in my novels seem to have grown out of
Dissident Daughter
. I often think of what an editor said to me after reading the book in the aftermath of reading my novels: “Oh, I see now where your novels come from.”

I'm reluctant to limit the themes in my work to one motif; every novel is a multiverse. But neither can I deny that at the heart of each of them is a feminine search for self, and to a lesser extent, a female community and feminine icons that both heal and reveal—a black Mary; a mermaid-saint; a spirit tree, a story quilt.

In
The Secret Life of Bees,
fourteen-year-old Lily, who has been wounded by a terrible loss, goes on a search for her mother, finding healing and transformation in the household of three sisters and a black Mary statue. In
The Mermaid Chair,
forty-two-year-old Jessie, with her marriage in disarray, goes on a search for au
tonomy and self-belonging. In
The Invention of Wings,
Handful, an enslaved woman and Sarah, a Southern aristocrat, each quest for a way to free themselves and voice their truths.

Looking back, it does not surprise me that so much of what has unfolded in my life during the last twenty years began with
Dissident Daughter:
the communities of women, the pilgrimages, the Black Madonna, the women's stories in my novels.

Today, a grandmother of three, married for over four and a half decades to Sandy, who appears often in these pages, I feel a kind of wonder—awe at how swiftly the years have flown, but mostly profound gratitude for
Dissident Daughter
's readers and the book's longevity. Why
has
a story about a woman's struggle for awakening and empowerment lasted? Why is the quest for the Divine Feminine and the female soul finding a new generation of readers? Perhaps it's because this struggle, this quest is still relevant. For all the progress we've made within faith traditions, the need to voice ourselves, heal feminine wounds, and reimagine the Divine in feminine imagery persists. As long as women continue to dig past patriarchal layers in pursuit of a truer, more vital part of ourselves, as long as we strive to tap our deepest creativity, as long as we yearn to be braver than we've dared, we will need stories. And the courage to live them.