The Uses of Darkness

Laurie Brands Gagné

Description

Laurie Brands Gagné believes the image of God as stern Father or Judge has done much damage over the centuries and has engendered a sense of shame and guilt, especially in women. She sees our own civilization as one that is cut off from the natural world and from the precious part of ourselves that is earthy and sensual. In The Uses of Darkness: Women's Underworld Journeys, Ancient and Modern, Gagné explores women's journeys through the underworld to reclaim the wisdom and sensuality contained in these stories for heirs of the God the Father tradition. She looks at the ancient stories of Inanna, Demeter, and Psyche and the reflections of these archetypal figures in the work of women such as Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, Mary Gordon, Virginia Woolf, and Etty Hillesum to illustrate that the alternative tradition these journey stories represent has much to offer modern Christians. Gagné successfully demonstrates that only by turning to confront the mystery that has been obscured by the image of God as stern Father or Judge can a woman raised in the Christian tradition acquire a sense of self strong enough to integrate experiences of profound loss. Most importantly, by drawing on the wisdom of the goddess tradition, both men and women are able to effect a more meaningful reappropriation of Christianity. Gagné's examination of the dark experience of the underworld in the goddess tradition discovers the elements of all spiritual journeys: self-transcendence followed by self-transformation. Anyone who has struggled with love and loss and whose spirit has been suppressed by the image of God as Judge, yet who will not reject Christianity, will benefit from this work.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Themes
• Subjects
• Women
• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 31 août 2000
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268159580
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

The
USES
of
DARKNESS
The
USES
of
DARKNESS
Women s Underworld Journeys, Ancient and Modern
LAURIE BRANDS GAGN
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
All Rights Reserved
http://www.undpress.nd.edu
Copyright 2000 by University of Notre Dame
Published in the United States of America
The author and publisher are grateful to HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., and Faber Faber Limited, London, for permission to use brief excerpts from the following sources: The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath edited by Ted Hughes. Copyright 1960, 1965, 1971, 1981 by the estate of Sylvia Plath. Editorial Material 1981 by Ted Hughes. Ariel by Sylvia Plath. Copyright 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965 by Ted Hughes. Crossing the Water by Sylvia Plath. Copyright 1971 by Ted Hughes. Winter Trees by Sylvia Plath. Copyright 1972 by Ted Hughes. We are grateful to Alfred A. Knopf, a Division of Random House Inc., for the use of 16 lines from The Colossus and Other Poems by Sylvia Plath. Copyright 1962 by Sylvia Plath.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gagn , Laurie Brands, 1951-
The uses of darkness : women s underworld journeys, ancient, and modern / Laurie Brands Gagn .
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-268-04305-1 (alk. paper) - ISBN 0-268-04306- X (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Feminist theology. 2. Christian women-Religious life. I. Title.
BT 83.55 . G 34 2000
230 .082-dc21
00-009069
eISBN 9780268159580
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1984 .
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail] .
To all my students in Women s Journey at Trinity College of Vermont, whose honesty, enthusiasm, and willingness to share their underworld journeys have been an immense encouragement to my writing of this book .
Contents
PREFACE
ONE
The Alternative Tradition
TWO
Inanna, Demeter, and Psyche
THREE
The Child and the Hag: Sylvia Plath
FOUR
The Child and the Mother: Joan Didion, Mary Gordon, Virginia Woolf
FIVE
The Woman and God: Etty Hillesum
SIX
The Goddess Trajectory to Christianity
NOTES
INDEX
Preface
Jung has taught us that the soul expresses itself in a universal language of symbols. What we think we know and feel, he maintains, can be at odds with what our dreams and our artistic creations reveal about ourselves. To be whole, we must claim the figures of our symbolic expressions and interpret their meaning for our lives.
The first time I read the Sumerian story of the descent of the goddess Inanna into the underworld, I felt a shiver of recognition. In the figure of Ereshkigal, awesome hag-queen of the underworld, I encountered the form of my own buried rage. Though my upbringing was Catholic, in the symbol-system I had acquired, it seemed the central figure was a remote sky-god. The hag archetype was not included-except as something evil. The pre-Christian story allowed me to feel what I hadn t known I was feeling.
Discovering my soul s resonance with stories from the goddess tradition, which has its roots in our prehistoric ancestors worship of the divine as feminine, gave me the idea that I could come to know myself-my buried self-by exploring that tradition. My initial conception of the book was a simple comparison between ancient stories portraying certain archetypal figures in a woman s psyche-not only the hag, but also the mother and the child-and their modern-day parallels. In Sylvia Plath s poetic persona, I could see the figure of Inanna. Novels by Joan Didion, Mary Gordon, and Virginia Woolf, like the Demeter-Persephone myth, all highlight the interplay of the mother-figure and the child-figure. Etty Hillesum s account of her spiritual journey-with its impetus in her soulful attraction to another-makes her a modern-day divine child or Psyche.
In writing the book, I soon realized that my interpretation of these ancient and modern stories was influenced by my own story, my own personal myth. My own story was one of love and loss. I never tell that story in the book, but, as subtext, it gives coherence to my treatment of the stories I tell-or re-tell. The underworld journey or experience of death that every story portrays I relate to as an experience of loss and in every case I am asking, How does one come through loss? Asking this question enabled me to see how the Inanna-Demeter-Psyche sequence of stories forms a progression: Inanna s rage only scratches the surface of what a woman is capable of in relating to loss and death; Demeter s acceptance and Psyche s trusting self-surrender disclose real spiritual depth.
When I turned to an investigation of the modern stories, I had to confront my residual fear of the sky-god of my childhood. Modern women seem to have further to go in integrating loss and death than their ancient counterparts. The self of many modern women has been damaged by the shame and guilt engendered by the image of God as stern Father or Judge. When someone like Sylvia Plath experiences loss, her overwhelming feeling is one of unworthiness, of failure. Modern women get stuck in the underworld, I found, when their incipient sense of inadequacy becomes active self-hatred. This tendency is expressed, archetypally, by the killing of the child. Only by turning to confront the mystery that the image of God as Judge obscures can a woman raised in a patriarchal religious tradition acquire a sense of self strong enough to integrate loss. The image from the goddess tradition of a woman giving birth to her divine child can brace a woman for this ordeal.
What is illustrated so beautifully by Etty Hillesum s story is the way that being in touch with your divine child-with your connection to the Living God-makes real, i.e., transcendent love possible. Etty notes that before she had a relationship with God, the passion she sometimes felt for others was a desperate clinging. The knowledge of ourselves as related to God, she found, makes us capable of a pure passion. When someone is capable of a pure passion is when she can see how love and loss, love and death go together. This is the central insight of the ancient story of Eros and Psyche. When Etty enacts it, by letting go of the man she loves just because her love for him is transcendent and points beyond him to a life in love with God, she thinks she is doing something Christian. Working with Etty confirmed my belief that drawing on the wisdom of the goddess tradition can help modern men and women make a meaningful re-appropriation of Christianity.
Much work has been done by Christian feminists in recent years to free the Christian tradition and theology from patriarchal distortions. 1 I think of my work as contributing to that effort. But whereas the usual approach for a feminist theologian is simply to critique these distortions from a more authentic spiritual standpoint, I have tried to retrace the steps by which a person might come to attain such a standpoint. One s spiritual journey can only begin with the experience of the Holy, the conception of God one has. If that conception is idolatrous, it can be left behind only by personal spiritual growth; rational argument is little help. My approach demonstrates the religious significance not just of the higher standpoint but of every groping gesture in its direction.
On a more universal plane, this book speaks, I believe, to the primitive religiosity of many people today. Modern intellectual culture, perhaps, is secular, but popular culture (which, especially in America, affects all of us more than we might care to admit) is riven with the kind of longings that, on examination, prove to be religious. The longing I zero in on is the desire for a true love-that ancient fairy tale, 2 as Virginia Woolf calls it, that inspires young people to dream and makes their elders dissatisfied. However sturdy the fabric of our lives in terms of work and relationships, the heart s longing for someone or something worthy of devotion creates a rent in the fabric. The image of a true love that most people have, at least initially, is too dependent on sensible beauty to qualify as an image of God and hence, their desire is more erotic than spiritual; this is what makes us primitives. Yet if we are willing to go to the root of our longing, 3 as Carol Flinders puts it, we find that its origin is deeper than erotic desire. If we persist in the task of coming to know ourselves, coming to know our hearts, our longing becomes manifest as a truly transcendent orientation. The women s stories I explicate represent stepping stones on the path to this discovery.
The book is structured similarly to a course, The Woman s Journey, Ancient and Modern, which I have been teaching at Trinity College of Vermont for the past twelve years. Though the vast majority of students in the course have been women, the occasional male student has professed to find the course material relevant to his life experience. One of them said, This isn t the woman s journey; it s the human journey-from a woman s point of view. On the other hand, I recently gave a talk on the material presented in chapter four and one of the men in the audience commented, This is exactly the kind of thing that men today need to hear, but are unwilling to hear. I didn t write this book for women; I wrote it for myself. It stands to reason that anyone who has experienced love and loss and struggled with loss; anyon