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The Art of Pamela Dodds

2/16/2015

2 Comments

 
The art of Pamela Dodds is many—many!—things. What I want to write about in this blog is what her art is to me, as a lesbian, as a survivor, and as a playwright who focuses on both of those identities.
Picture"Showing" from the Family Secrets series
Dodds’ art tells secrets. In fact, she has a whole series of paintings titled “Family Secrets.” For example “Showing.” When a child is pregnant. Notice the loving attention to the details of a girl’s bedroom… teddy bear, rabbit-eared bedroom slippers, ticket stub in the mirror. Notice how Dodds puts us in her position. The painting is the reflection in the mirror. She makes us be that pregnant teenager. Wow. The pregnancy is only going to become an issue when it begins to show, hence the title. In the realm of family secrets, it is the showing—the making visible—that is framed as the betrayal.

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"Dressing" from the Boston series
Dodds trades in silences as well as secrets. As a playwright, I am not allowed to spend much time in silences… but when I can find a way to do it, I always take advantage. Why? Because there is power in those moments when one cannot find the words, or when the speaking of them is taboo. There is tension and power, and Dodds exploits both.

For me, as a lesbian, the silences between a couple are especially poignant. Nothing personifies the power of this silence better than Dodds’ painting “Dressing.” In this painting, there is an inter-racial couple who appear to be dressing up for an evening. In other words, getting ready to show off their coupledom in public. The white woman, still in her slip, is helping her partner on with her dress. The painting has a stillness for me that feels as if the moment has been frozen in amber. Now, perhaps this is a projection on my part, but when I look at this picture, I feel that there is a nearly unbearable tension between the women, a tension arising from what cannot be spoken. I look at the picture and I wonder if there is infidelity, or just boredom. Or has the racism and patriarchal values of the outside world become internalized, undermining and overwhelming their attempts to be intimate? All of the above… or none?   
Picture
IV from "Night House"
Perhaps, because I am a story-teller, I found Dodds’ drawings especially compelling. These are presented in a series titled “Night House.”  The series are then subdivided into four separate series, each of which tells a story: “The Visit,” “The Bound Child,” “Guardian,” and “Waiting Up.” You can tell just by the titles that these are also fraught with silence and secrets.

In these drawings there is a young woman and a child, or perhaps the child was the young woman. The visit triggers a trip to the basement, and then we meet the “Bound Child.” This is followed by the presence of a benign female guardian who watches by the bed. And then we see the young woman waiting up… and the loop of drawings circles back to the visit. Again, it may be the playwright in me, but I find story in this series. It’s a repeating story, the story of recovery. The sudden glimpse or intuition (aka “the visit”), which sets off the search for one’s own secrets, which leads to discovery of abuse/trauma. This discovery reveals the what was missing: the guardian. Or maybe, it leads to the correction of this absence. The arrival of the guardian lays the foundation of security which can open the survivor to the possibility of that initiating impulse personified in the visit. Rinse and repeat. This is my life. And someone, miraculously has drawn it.
Picture"Memory's Witness"
This theme of recovery is also present in her series of relief prints titled “Memory’s Witness.” In this series, there are two fantastical female figures. Instead of feet, they are rooted in the ground. This is the source of their despair and also their hope. They are earth-bound, real, part of nature. There are helicopters that interrupt their Edenic existence. And then the bombs begin to fall. There is an aftermath of trauma and grief. And then… regeneration. I like that this series, all about roots, is woodcuts.

Picture
"V" in the Tether Series
Lesbians…  She has two series, “Ebb” and “Tether,” that appear to be explorations of lesbian relationships breaking up and broken up. The bond between the women in “Tether” is an interesting one. Sometimes it is a support, other times it appears to be a hindrance or oppression. And sometimes, it’s difficult to tell which is which.  
Picture
"Drift" from the Ebb series
And then there is “Ebb.” There is a “Flow” print, where the two women face each other in a floating limerance, and then the undertow, the drift, the riptide, the depths of separation. I can chose to return to “Flow” or experience the series as a linear breakup. Whichever I choose, I find it cathartic to see the pain of separating from a lover to graphically, and lovingly depicted. It is a healing work. I think all of Dodds’ art is healing. I think that’s her intention.
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“Undertow” is a work-in-progress. This is a “a narrative suite of relief prints combining printed carved figures with printed natural woodgrain.” She has completed four of the proposed 9-12 prints. It seems to me she is taking some of her themes from “Ebb”and “Tether,” and realizing them in a different medium and in greater detail. For example, in “Undertow” the two women appear to be underwater. One of them appears to be reaching out to the other in a rescuing gesture, but the other is rejecting that gesture. The swirling patterns of the natural woodgrain are brilliantly realized representations of sky and sea, alive and impersonal, the perfect medium for her exploration of the figures.

Dodds has also done two book projects. As a writer, I found both of these fascinating. They brought to mind the words of
author and activist Toni Cade Bambara: “I’m trying to break words open and get at the bones, deal with the symbols as if they were atoms. I’m trying to figure out not only how a word gains its meaning, but how it gains its power.”

The first book project is titled "Language for a Faltering Mind."
The project was inspired by Dodds’ residency in Catalonia. In her words:

“As I grappled with the meanings of words, their nuance, their references, I was impressed with the power and political weight of language, and the significance of language as a touchstone of identity for the Catalonian people… In my contemplative walks, I happened upon the naturally formed bark fragments that fall from the trunk of the Plane (Platan) tree, ubiquitous in Spain. These unique forms struck me as hardly different from the letterforms that we collect and arrange into words to create meanings – meanings that can only be understood if one has the key of comprehension. I gathered, inked and printed these natural shapes, combining them in the manner of a potentially comprehensible language, as booklets and charts.”


Picture
That alone would have made a fascinating project, but Dodds combined it with a second experience:

“Coming home, I observe an aging relative who is losing her grasp of the English language, the only language she knows; and with it, the specificity of her relationships and human connections… Visiting her with notebook in hand, I gathered her utterances as I had the fragments of tree bark.  I printed quotations of her collected words, and paired each one with a composition of printed bark fragments.  The combination of the printed text with the printed tree bark, each with their spacings and layerings whether of meaning or form, represents for me, an alternative linguistic exchange, a continuing dialogue.”

Picture"I Have a Feeling That I Want to Go Home"


Her second book project, Chronique Analytique / Analytic Chronicle, is a collaboration with Québec printmaker Diane Fournier. It is an abecedary... or alphabet book. Pamela describes the concept:

"Each letter is represented by a French and English word of same or similar meaning. Diane and I wanted to make imagery about experience, ideas, and perspectives, so we chose nouns for concepts, qualities, and states of being - not things. To create the work, we each separately drew images in response to the chosen words in a spontaneous, stream-of-consciousness manner and later combined the images through serigraphy... The result is a single, layered, complex image to represent each word.
Picture
O and P ("origin" and "possibility")
What I appreciate about Dodds’ work is that spends her time playing in the spaces in between.... in the silences, in the secrets, in the places where language is constructed and where it disintegrates. Her trauma narratives are not linear, but cyclical. She has an acceptance that communicates grace. My plays are tales of revenge and retribution. Her canvas is broader than mine. She chronicles a journey, where I am focused on the mapping and navigation.

I have a special appreciation for her work that deals with relationships between women. It reminds of the words of the lesbian poet Adrienne Rich:

“The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.”



Please visit Pamela Dodds' website, to see more of her art.
Picture
Pamela Dodds working on "Undertow"
2 Comments

The Marital Rape in Gone With the Wind and Other Lies

2/14/2015

3 Comments

 
PictureThe marital rape in Gone With the Wind
(Originally published in On the Issues)

Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone With the Wind, was a battered wife.  She kept her first marriage a secret from the press, because the court records for the divorce contained a harrowing account of her husband's attempted rape of her.  It was a graphic account wildly at odds with the famous marital rape scene which provided the dramatic climax of the romance between Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler in Mitchell's famous novel. How could her readers surrender themselves to the thrill and passion of the fictionalized account after reading about the real Rhett ‑‑‑ a jealous and violent alcoholic named Red Upshaw whose assault left Peggy Mitchell hospitalized for two weeks?

Why the discrepancy between the two accounts?  Because Peggy Mitchell belonged to a society that attached more importance to myth than to reality
--a society deeply invested in glossing the horrors of its recent history of slavery for the sake of glorifying a romantic epoch that never existed.  This was a society that, in 1936, had still not come to terms with Appomattox.  She also belonged to a society that sacrificed its daughters religiously on the altar of Southern womanhood
--fetishizing them sexually, infantilizing them socially, and stunting them intellectually and artistically, all in the name of chivalry.

PicturePeggy Mitchell, tomboy.
Peggy Mitchell, an inveterate tomboy, had not gone down without a fight.  A regional outsider and a mediocre student, she had dropped out of Smith College after her freshman year, when her mother died.  Her attitude, which she expressed to her brother, was, "If I can't be first, I'd rather be nothing."

Returning home to Atlanta, she attempted to carve out a niche for herself aso a rebel among the city's debutante daughters.  But Peggy underestimated the forces she was up against when she challenged the authority of the Debutante Club's senior committeewomen. The last straw had been her uninhibited exhibition of apache dancing at the annual charity ball.  It was traditional for the debutantes at the end of the season to receive their invitations to join the Junior League, the equivalent of initiation into "high society," but when the letters went out, Peggy's name had been left off the list. The omission had been doubly insulting, because several of her relatives were in the League. 

But Peggy found that her Junior League ban had not hurt her popularity with men, a fact she enjoyed flaunting to the women who had snubbed her.  She took to bobbing her hair, wearing short flapper skirts, and drinking her dates under the table at the Peachtree Yacht Club, a social club that had nothing to do with boats.


PictureMitchell with her rebellious friends in 1920
Like the heroine of any good romance novel, Peggy Mitchell threw in her lot with love and adventure.  Defying her father and brother and flouting social convention, she married Red Upshaw, as likely an anti‑hero for her plot as any of the sons of the South. Red, a devastatingly handsome rake with a reputation for womanizing, had dropped out of college--where he had  been a football hero and a star student ‑‑‑ in order to bootleg liquor.  But there had been more to Red than just the outlaw image.  He was the only boyfriend of Peggy's who ever encouraged her rebelliousness, laughing at her risque jokes and never criticizing her for drinking or smoking.  It was obvious to Peggy that the two of them were meant for each other.

But real life is not a novel, and as the spunky heroine of her own script, Peggy Mitchell never dreamed that her daredevil marriage would end in attempted rape, a face disfigured with cuts and  bruises, a sordid divorce, and a swift retreat into a safe, but suffocating second marriage.

Picture
Mitchell marrying Red Upshaw, the inspiration for Rhett Butler. He is fifth from the left. Note the rebellious flapper headbands.
PictureAnother picture of Red
Before this second marriage, she made one more attempt to emulate the heroines of a romance novel. The winter after the assault, she booked passage for Cuba, planning to work her way  to the Canal Zone, Honolulu, and Tahiti.  

But she was totally unprepared for the sexual predation that awaited the single woman travelling alone. If chivalry was not dead in upper-class Atlanta, it certainly  was in the streets of Havana, and the flirtatious charm that she had assumed as part of her personality was now a distinct liability.  She aborted the trip, returned home, and married John Marsh.

And John was a good rescuer.  But rescuers exact a price, and although he was neither a violent nor a passionate man, John Marsh had pressured Peggy to quit her job as a star reporter for the Atlanta Journal.  Peggy had fought hard to get the job, and letting go of it would not be easy.  Childless by choice, she had enjoyed the fast pace, the challenging assignments, and the social life of a journalist.  But even as a staff reporter, she had not been able to escape the stigma of her gender.  She was frequently required to write stories like "Should Husbands Spank Their Wives?" or "How A Perfect Lady Refuses A Proposal." The one time she had been given free rein to write a series profiling some of the strong women in Georgia's history, the paper cancelled the articles.  It seems that her real‑life heroines had been too "mannish," too unladylike, and too violent for the readers' tastes.

After leaving the Journal, Peggy embarked on a career as a professional invalid, developing agoraphobic symptoms and a number of physical conditions, both diagnosed and undiagnosed, that were to plague her for the rest of her life.

Picture
Mitchell's fantasy "bad-boy-turned-respectable-family-man."
Outnumbered, wounded, and badly demoralized, there was nothing to do except to sound a retreat.  And so Peggy Mitchell turned inward to the world of her imagination, where she could live all the romance her heart desired through her impetuous and indomitable alter‑ego, Scarlett O'Hara.  And for seven years she did just that.

Peggy Mitchell reinvented herself in the pages of her historic novel.  She rewrote life the way she thought it should have been, and she did it persuasively:  The dashing and sexually charismatic alcoholic really *was* the right man after all.  The attempted rape was only the natural surge of an animal passion that would  sweep up both husband and wife and carry them beyond their pride and their personalities to some transcendental realm of psycho‑spiritual bonding.  The philandering, alcoholic bootlegger only needed the responsibilities of fatherhood to transform him into a sober and upstanding citizen.  And when the heroine found herself suffering from the after‑effects of the night of passion (a later miscarriage of the fetus conceived that night), her penitent husband kept watch night and day outside the door of the sickroom, racked with guilt that he should have been the cause of her pain, and waiting anxiously for word that she might forgive him.
PictureThe reality of marital rape
In reality, passion had had nothing to do with the attempted rape.  The marriage had been a disaster from the honeymoon.  Possibly in a move to curb Red's violence, Peggy had insisted that they both live in her father's house.  Married in September 1922, they were separated by July.  Three months later, Red drove up unexpectedly to the door.  Peggy spoke with him briefly and then invited him into the house.   In the divorce deposition, Peggy stated that "Mr. Upshaw demanded his connubial rights after striking me with his fist upon my left arm..."  She refused on the grounds that she feared he would treat her in a "cruel and inhumane manner."  Her counsel stated that he "jerked her against the bed, causing her to be bruised all over her body." Peggy fought him off, screaming for help.  Bessie Berry, her housekeeper, appeared in the doorway as Red was leaving the bedroom.  Peggy, in tears, ran after him, yelling at him to get out of the house.  At that, her husband turned around and punched her full in the face. 

Unlike Rhett, Red did not set up a vigil outside his wife's sickroom door.

Instead of going to the hospital, Red paid a visit to his friend John Marsh, who would soon become Peggy's second husband.  He asked John to serve as a go‑between in negotiating an agreement whereby he would not contest a divorce, if she would not file criminal charges. 

Peggy, unlike Scarlett, did not awake the next day to the realization that she loved her husband.  She woke up with two black eyes, a sense of terror she was to carry with her for the rest of her life, and a sense of profound humiliation.  Far from hoping her husband would visit, she purchased a small pistol and kept it on her bedside table until receiving news of Red's death years decades later.  Red never found redemption or sobriety in married life.  A vagrant alcoholic, he died a hideous death in 1949, leaping from the fifth floor of a flop‑house hotel in Galveston.

Why the lies?  How could Peggy Mitchell bring herself to glorify a scenario that had been the most traumatic and degrading episode of her life?  Perhaps the question is not "How could she?" but "What else could she do?"  in an age before Oprah, where could she have gone to tell about her experience?

Picture
Mitchell's fantasy aftermath of marital rape.
Marital rape was not even recognized as criminal.  There were no shelters, no crisis hot lines, no rape advocates, no literature on the subject, no television talk shows.  Although her family had disapproved of the marriage, they considered divorce the ultimate disgrace.  Peggy's friends had all warned her against Red,  so she was understandably reluctant to appeal to them for support, at risk of hearing how she had "made her bed and could lie in it."P eggy and Red separated with no closure.  He didn't visit the hospital, he failed to show up in court, he didn't call, he didn't write.  She never saw him again.

Writing, like all art, can be an attempt to resolve contradictions that cannot be reconciled in life.  And certainly Mitchell's life was fraught with contradictions:  A tomboy with a lust for adventure, she had been compelled to act out the role of dutiful daughter and southern debutante.An avid journalist, she had been sidelined on the "women's page;" the daughter of a militant suffragist, she had been shamed and abused by her mother. An enthusiastic collector of erotic writing, she expressed a profound aversion to male sexuality.  Raised on stories about the glory days of the Confederacy, Peggy Mitchell could hardly reconcile these with the poverty and explosive racial tensions in the Atlanta of her girlhood.

Turning to writing for the closure she needed, one of the first orders of business was to exorcise her guilt at the failure of the marriage.  In the novel, Rhett is not blamed for the rape.  He is depicted as being driven to it by Scarlett's provocations, and by her not‑so‑secret love for Ashley Wilkes, a married man.  In reality, Peggy had been notorious for playing multiple boyfriends off against each other, and she was known to brag about her ability to tease her dates into a frenzy of sexual frustration.  Also, like Scarlett, she fancied herself in love with a man she could never have.
PictureThe one who got away
Clifford Henry had been a friend of Peggy's brother, a lieutenant and a recent Harvard graduate.  He was a gentle, philosophical man, and it was their shared love of literature that formed the bond between him and Peggy. Before going overseas, Clifford had given Peggy his ring.At Smith, Peggy's romance with an "older man" at the front was a subject of envy for her dormmates.  She would share his long, but impersonal letters with the other girls.  The friendship was a sincere one, and when she received news that he had been killed at the front, Peggy had been genuinely grieved.

Four years later, at the time of her marriage to Red, Peggy apparently came to the realization that Clifford Henry had been the one true love of her life.It is not known why she shared this insight with her new husband, but it may have provided  Red with an excuse for his violence.  But Peggy's "one true love" had been even more inaccessible than Scarlett's.  Not only was Clifford dead, but one biographer suggests that he might have been gay.

In Gone With the Wind, Scarlett is scapegoated and punished ruthlessly, both for her flirting and for her infidelity.  For Margaret Mitchell to have justified compulsive flirting as a learned response to a social milieu that systematically stripped women of the power to direct the course of their lives, she would have needed a feminist perspective which was still 50 years in the future.  For her to know that the battering was not her fault, she would have needed to hear the voices of other battered women.  For her to receive validation for the criminality of rape by her husband, she would have needed the legislative reform spurred by activists against domestic violence.  And for her to understand her attraction to dispassionate men and platonic affairs, she would have needed the critique of compulsory heterosexuality which could only emerge from a visible and vocal lesbian culture.

Picture
But Margaret Mitchell did not have these things.  She had a typewriter, and a desperate need for closure.  Battered women have powerful stories to tell;.when there are no appropriate outlets, they tell them any way they can.

Some tell the story in their bodies, with chronic illness or injuries.  Some tell their stories through chronic exhaustion or mental debilitation.  Other women keep telling the story with their lives, pitifully seeking closure in abusive relationship after abusive relationship.  And some women tell their strongest stories with their lies, with their denial. 

These are the women who stand in the subways, one hand on the strap and the other clutching a romance novel.  These are the women who spend the whole afternoon watching soap operas ‑‑‑ the women who buy regency novels by the gross, reading one after another, sometimes as many as three in one week.

It doesn't matter that the plots are indistinguishable, that the main characters are all the same ‑‑‑ in fact, that's the point.  These novels and soap operas, if read or viewed frequently enough, provide a pseudo‑reality, a closure of sorts ‑‑‑ as long as they never end.What lies behind the romance addiction ‑‑‑ the compulsion to hear over and over the stories of love at first sight, of beauty taming the beast, of Cinderella rising from rags to riches, of Sleeping Beauty being awakened with a kiss?  The answer is horror, the horror of lifetimes ‑‑‑ hundreds of thousands of women's lives ‑‑‑ wasted, destroyed, sold into slavery by lies and lies and lies passed down from grandmother to mother, from mother to daughter. 

Romance literature is Western mind‑binding, female emotional castration.

Romance is the legacy of our colonization as women, which we pass on to each other in the blind belief that it will ease our bondage.  Instead, it perpetuates it, because the woman invested in romantic fantasy will interpret her degradation as the result of a personal failing, instead of a deliberate goal of a male dominant culture.  Like Peggy Mitchell, she will devote her energies to protecting the secret of her "failure" and to promoting the very myth that robs her of identity. Scarlett O'Hara could afford to put off reality; she could always think about it tomorrow.  But for real women, today is all we have.
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 Footnotes:

1.  On file, Superior Court, Fulton County, Georgia, dated July 16, 1923, presented as evidence on June 17, 1924 from Anne Edwards, Road to Tara: The Life of Margaret Mitchell (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1983), p. 102.

Bibliography:

Edwards, Anne. Road to Tara: The Life of Margaret Mitchell (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1983).

Mitchell, Margaret.  Gone with the Wind (New York: Macmillan, 1936).

Pyron, Darden Asbury.  Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
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