The Heroine with 1001 Faces

by Maria Tatar

  “That story.” That is the refrain of Anne Sexton’s retelling of “Cinderella” in Transformations, the volume of poetry that rewrote the Brothers Grimm. Like Sexton, artists and writers reach into the past, revising and reenvisioning but, at times, also inventing rather than reinventing. In recent years, we have learned that some of the first artmakers were women.

  We do not know exactly who painted the aurochs, horses, deer, and woolly mammoths on the walls of caves in France, Argentina, Africa, and Borneo, but a new study suggests that nearly three-quarters of the famous hand stencils and handprints were made by women. Working in a variety of media, with images when there were no words, with stitches when there were no pens, with tapestries when there was no parchment, women told stories, even when speaking out came with high risk. Theirs are the voices I have tried to capture in this book, and they continue to speak to us today, reminding us that silence is rarely golden, that curiosity kept the cat alive, and that from caring comes courage.

  As I began to explore the lives of the authors discussed in earlier chapters (“Add more context!” my editor urged), it dawned on me that living through a war was not at all unusual, serving as a rule rather than an exception. Writing during a pandemic led me to pay more attention to letters and diary entries drafted during times of crisis far more bleak than 2020. I recall, in particular, reading a biography of Astrid Lindgren and how she invented Pippi Longstocking in 1941, two years after the outbreak of World War II. Lindgren kept a diary and wrote, on September 1, 1939, about the German invasion of Poland. She was trying hard to curb the instinct to hoard, and limited herself to a few items, including cocoa, tea, and soap. “A ghastly depression has fallen across everything and everyone,” she wrote. “Lots of people have been called up. They’ve banned private cars on the roads. God help our poor, mad planet!”9

  In those dark times, Astrid Lindgren invented Pippi Longstocking in order to entertain her daughter, who was ill and confined to bed. Influenced not just by E. T. A. Hoffmann and Lewis Carroll, Lindgren also found inspiration in a figure who set foot on Swedish soil in the early 1940s—the Man of Steel known as Superman. “Yes, she was a little Superman right from the word go—strong, rich, and independent,” Lindgren declared in a 1967 interview. Lindgren felt a surge of optimism when she imagined a generation of children who could be “merry, breezy, and secure in a way no previous generation had been.” After all, what is the “cause of all evil” but “the sulky naysayers, the pig-headed, the privileged, and the selfish,” for their underdeveloped souls have no capacity for “generosity or human compassion.” In the midst of a “ghastly depression,” Lindgren found an antidote to evil in the generosity, compassion, and buoyant spirits of the next generation.

  Women do not just live through wars.10 They were at or near the front lines as soldiers, spies, resistance fighters, and medics. Many ventured onto the battlefield disguised as young men. Conservative estimates suggest that somewhere between 400 and 750 women fought in the U.S. Civil War. Heavy uniforms concealed body shape enough that sixteen-year-old Mary Galloway, to cite one famous example, could hide her gender. Only when she was wounded at the Battle of Antietam and treated by Clara Barton for a chest wound did her actual identity come to light.

  As nurses, women saved countless lives while providing care for wounded soldiers. Committed to risking their own lives to heal and sustain life, they often encountered fierce resistance when they step out of the domestic arena to assist in war efforts. If battle promoted the desire to vanquish foes, it produced an equally powerful drive to care for the casualties of war, even when the wounds were as horrific as the ones produced by the heavy artillery, poison gas, and other military machinery of World War I. “Gashes from bayonets. Flesh torn by shrapnel. Faces half shot away. Eyes seared by gas; one here with no eyes at all,” as the young American Red Cross nurse Shirley Millard wrote about the men in her care.11 Nurses fought to bring food and medical supplies to soldiers, scrubbed floors to improve sanitation, monitored fevers, and provided comfort in ways large and small.

  The real-life stories of nurses alone could fill the pages of a different book. The exact number of nurses serving in the U.S. Civil War is not known, but it is more than likely that five to ten thousand women, like Louisa May Alcott, offered their services as trained professional nurses or as attendants assisting medical staff and offering comfort to the injured. It had taken the Crimean War (1854) with all its destructive energy—one historian described it as a “notoriously incompetent international butchery”—and the miraculous arrival of Florence Nightingale at a British military hospital in Scutari (today Üsküdar, in Istanbul) to lay the foundations for the modern profession of nursing.12 When Nightingale arrived with a team of thirty-eight woman volunteers and fifteen nuns, she was shocked by official indifference to the appalling conditions in the barracks. Wounded soldiers lay in beds still wearing their blood-stiffened uniforms. The floors were covered with soiled bandages and caked body fluids. Medicine was in short supply, and there was no equipment to prepare food for patients. Implementing hand washing and making other improvements in hygiene and sanitary conditions, Nightingale, with the help of her staff and support from the British Sanitary Commission, which she summoned to Scutari, reduced the death rate among combatants (largely from typhoid, cholera, and dysentery) from 42 percent to 2 percent.

  When Virginia Woolf read Florence Nightingale’s essay “Cassandra,” she described its author as “shrieking aloud in her agony.” That was before her service as a nurse. And why was Nightingale in such pain and cursed like Cassandra, given that she had been born into comfortable family circumstances? Not because of ineffectual prophecies but because of an “accumulation of nervous energy, which has nothing to do during the day.” Nightingale was tormented by the thought that the inability to exercise “passion, intellect, and moral activity” would doom British women of privilege to madness.13 For Nightingale, the nurse fighting to cure the bodies and souls of soldiers came to be the equivalent of the soldier out on the battlefield, and she tactfully avoided stating the obvious superiority of the former over the latter.

  Nightingale’s work was the inspiration for many Civil War nurses. Clara Barton, born Clarissa Harlowe Barton on Christmas Day in 1821 and named after the long-suffering heroine of Samuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa, was the most prominent among them. In the DC Comics Wonder Women of History series, which ran from 1942 to 1954 only to be replaced by features turning on beauty tips and strategies for getting married, Clara Barton was number two of seventy-one entries. “Ministering merciful aid upon bloody battlefields, unafraid of flood and famine and war, this Wonder Woman lived only to help others . . . yes . . . in the glittering firmament of American womanhood there is one star who will always glow brightest of all . . . she is—CLARA BARTON, ‘Angel of the Battlefield.’”14

  To overcome her shyness, Barton had worked as a teacher before moving on to the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, DC. After the Baltimore Riot of 1861, a conflict that resulted in the first casualties of the Civil War, Barton met members of a Massachusetts regiment at the railroad station in Washington, DC, and nursed thirty men who arrived there with nothing but the clothes on their backs. She collected supplies and used her own living quarters as a distribution center. In 1862 she was given permission to work on the front lines of the war and served troops at the battles of Harpers Ferry, Antietam, and Fredericksburg, among others, becoming known as the “Florence Nightingale of America.” After the war, she ran the Office of Missing Soldiers, an organization that helped to locate and identify soldiers killed or missing in action.

  On the other side of the Atlantic, there was the British nurse Edith Cavell, executed for treason by a German firing squad for helping some two hundred Allied soldiers escape from German-occupied Belgium during World War I. She may also have been part of an intelligence-gathering network for the British Secret Intelligence Service. “I can’t stop while there are lives to be saved,” she is said to ha
ve declared.15 Cavell became Britain’s most prominent casualty of the Great War. Recruited as a martyr in war propaganda, she was portrayed as “an innocent, unselfish, devout and pretty girl.” But the British prime minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, saw her as far more than that—as a fully realized lesson in patriotic valor—when he averred that she had “taught the bravest man among us a supreme lesson of courage.”16 In recent years, Cavell’s heroism has been commemorated, but mainly in shorter narratives aimed at young readers or for tourists visiting key geographical sites of her life.

  Florence Nightingale, Clara Barton, and Edith Cavell—these were the heroines celebrated in the era in which I grew up. That they are conspicuously absent from today’s pantheons of heroic women turns on the fact that nursing continues to be seen as an ancillary profession, one associated with menial tasks. Nurses are still seen as subservient to what were once the predominantly male authorities in the field of health care. The 2000 film Meet the Parents drove that point home when Gaylord “Greg” Focker, played by Ben Stiller, is mocked by his future father-in-law for choosing to work as a nurse. Nurses are associated with care, and their work is framed as domestic service and emotional labor that stands in sharp contrast to the scientific skill and expert knowledge required of doctors and scientists. As the British Royal College of Nursing concluded in a 2020 study of the profession, the nursing sector, staffed largely by women, continues to remain both undervalued and underpaid.

  The history of nursing bears out the fact that women, instead of being celebrated for their heroism, have been repeatedly penalized and punished for the extraordinary emotional heavy lifting they have performed in our social world. Nowhere is this more evident than in the fate of the many midwives, wise women, and female healers denounced as witches in times past. These women, laypersons whose healing powers came from collective wisdom passed down from one generation to the next (recall the old wives’ tales) and from firsthand experience, were easily dismissed as performing the devil’s work. It was in the interest of institutions, both secular and religious, to discredit competition coming from those who worked healing miracles through practices affiliated with sorcery. “The Inquisition,” as the cultural historian Thomas Szasz tells us, “constitutes, among other things, an early instance of the ‘professional’ repudiating the skills and interfering with the rights of the ‘nonprofessional’ to minister to the poor.” The medical establishment itself—which was engaging in practices such as letting blood, applying leeches, and prescribing opium and calomel (a laxative containing mercury)—was committed to excluding woman healers from access to training. They railed against the “worthless and presumptuous women who usurped the profession.”17 By the end of the nineteenth century, formally trained physicians, men educated at universities (in programs that sometimes lasted only a few months), had triumphed over folk healers, midwives, and other “quacks,” with the result that women were consigned to the subservient role of nurse.

  During the days of the 2020 pandemic, at a time when we were reminded on a daily basis of the courage of health-care workers, I was reading about heroines in the daytime and watching films late at night. There were two streaming series that brought the spring of hope into my heart. First, Madam Secretary, which, for all its focus on political intrigue and domestic mayhem, happened also to be filled with allusions to mythology and to the work of Joseph Campbell and Thomas Aquinas. Yes, the series was hopelessly optimistic about navigating through deadly serious political crises and social trauma, but its faith in family (in the broadest sense of the term), its investment in compassion and social responsibility, and its commitment to building caring relationships even among those not in the circle of traditional allies firmed my resolve to keep reading and writing, less as an act of scholarship than as an effort to acknowledge, credit, and memorialize women, real and imagined, from times past. Then there was The Queen’s Gambit, a series that opened, like many of the classics of children’s literature, in an orphanage, with a girl who serendipitously finds her calling and becomes a “master” through her own genius and, in the end, also through the support and friendship of good men and women, who become like family to her. Sometimes we can find comfort in the sentimental, the series affirmed, but it also recognizes that no one goes it alone and memorializes those who help along the way.

  It is here that I want to acknowledge the role models and mentors who made this book possible, each in a different decade: Theodore Ziolkowski, Dorrit Cohn, Jeremy Knowles, and Paul Turner. Bob Weil at Liveright worked his editorial magic on this volume in ways that are impossible to fully acknowledge. The many authors who have worked with him will understand the full depth of my gratitude to him. Amy Medeiros, Lauren Abbate, and Haley Bracken saw to it that the production process operated smoothly and efficiently. And Doris Sperber, as always, ensured that the work of word-processing gremlins was undone in each chapter.

  Audre Lorde’s famous declaration, to which I referred earlier, that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” was the guiding spirit of Hélène Cixous’s famous appeal to women, urging them to change the world by writing: “I shall speak about women’s writing,” she declared, “about what it will do.” For years, Cixous had not opened her mouth and spoken for fear that she would be seen as a monster. “Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn’t thought she was sick?” The pen was reserved for “great men” alone. Cixous’s manifesto echoes Adrienne Rich’s words about the silenced women of the past and Ursula Le Guin’s declaration about being sick of the silence of women. “We are volcanoes!” Le Guin declared, and when women begin to speak, there are “new mountains.” Women have, in some cases, lacked the language to speak of injustices and social ills, but the heroines in this volume crafted a powerful grammar and syntax for indicting those who harm, injure, and do wrong.

  “What do women want?” That was the question Freud asked and, in the same breath, declared himself unable to answer despite thirty years of research into the “feminine soul.” There have been many answers to that question, and in 1962, Helen Gurley Brown told us that she had everything she wanted, with her marriage to a motion picture producer, two Mercedes, and “a Mediterranean house overlooking the Pacific, a full-time maid and a good life.” I have tried to show that, when we look at women in our literary and cinematic culture today, there is a very different answer. Heroines are on quests, and the goals they set include knowledge, justice, and social connection. What drives them? Nothing more than the same spirit of inquiry and care that led Eve to take a bite of the apple, Pandora to open the jar, and Bluebeard’s wife to unlock the door to the forbidden chamber. They have been on my mind ever since I picked up my pen and began taking notes for this volume.

  On August 5, 2012, a NASA rover touched down on Mars. Its name? Curiosity. It has now been joined by a second rover, Perseverance. What will be the new names emblazoned on those rovers, nomadic space travelers that signal to possible extraterrestrial beings what it means to be human? The small-scale naming of rovers reminds us of the symbolic weight of language and how it can become the site both of self-congratulatory gestures and of subversive thought. Words change us. Writing transforms us. Now imagine a rover named Compassion and a second one named Care, a third emblazed with the word Justice. Would those names create an uproar? The women writers who dared to speak and shape new ways of thinking about our world also created new tools, less for dismantling what we have than for building rich new alternatives. They also displayed a shared solidarity in their passion for defining our aspirations, offering up a thousand and one possible ways to be a heroine. They have made it possible to reimagine the future, and they help us understand how care, empathy, compassion, and new forms of justice, driven by communal, grassroots efforts rather than institutional, top-down forces, are leading us to turn our backs on the heroic ideals we once embraced.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTI
ON

  1.Phil Cousineau, ed., The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2003), 109–10.

  2.Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, ed. Safron Rossi (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2013), 11.

  3.Campbell, Goddesses, 36.

  4.Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Signs 1 (1976): 875–93.

  5.As Sady Doyle puts it, “Magic is the voice of the marginalized responding to their oppression.” See Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2019), 220.

  6.Madeline Miller, Circe (New York: Little, Brown, 2018), 260.

  7.Hawthorne is quoted in Frank L. Mott, Golden Multitudes (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 122. On Naipaul’s remark, see Amy Fallon, “V. S. Naipaul Finds No Woman Writer His Literary Match—Not Even Jane Austen,” Guardian (June 1, 2011).

  8.Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992).

  9.On this distinction, see Robert S. Ellwood, Introducing Religion: Religious Studies for the Twenty-First Century, 5th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2020), 48–54.