OUTLINE  (jump to)

• Statement of the Problem

• Training with Planned Parenthood

• The Drama Surrounding Amy’s Pregnancy

• The Breakdown of my Moral Superiority

• Soft spots in the Recent Official Teaching

• The Early and Recent Tradition of the Church

• Soft Spots in the Bishops’ Pastoral Letter

• Whether the Bishops Are Soft on Men and Hard on Women

• Hazards Involved in the Manufacturing of Consent

• Theological Honesty Regarding Abortion

• Conclusion

• Whether Birth Control Produces Abortions

During my twenty-five years of teaching in Catholic seminaries, my uneasiness regarding the issue of abortion never went away. Reading right-wing Catholic pamphlets, I was alerted to “the alarming growth of the abortion industry” and to the unsavory hints that American public life was on the slippery slope toward sanctioning sterilization of the unfit and elimination of the unproductive.  My wake-up call came, however, when I became an uncover agent within Planned Parenthood. Here, then, is where my story must begin.

Training with Planned Parenthood

In the early 70s, when the abortion frenzy was first taking shape within sectors of my Church, I decided, as a committed Christian, that talk was cheap and that it was time for me to take action. Having been trained in Catholic Action, I decided to infiltrate the system and to produce change from the inside. In my mind, the Planned Parenthood Federation was the archvillian. I saw this group as responsible for promoting cheap and easy abortions as part of their women’s rights agenda. Hence, by way of bringing a religious leaven to this group, I decided to act as a volunteer abortion counselor within the very structures where women were flocking to decide the future of the life in their wombs.

Planned Parenthood provided me with the required four two-hour sessions of training. During this period, no one asked me anything regarding my religious affiliation or invited me to explore my gut feelings regarding abortion. At first I was puzzled by this. But then it became clear that Planned Parenthood was not interested in what I thought or felt; rather, they were focused on whether I was capable of empathetically entering into the mind and heart of a woman coming to me for counseling who was traumatized by “her” unexpected pregnancy.

Next I discovered that I had misjudged Planned Parenthood for “advocating” (even pushing) abortions. Again and again, my trainers enforced the idea that the decision belonged to the would-be mother. I was trained how to assist women whose only difficulty was overcoming the shame and the hesitancy of telling their boyfriends and their parents that they were pregnant. Others needed help because they were in the morass of not knowing who the father was. Still others were unsure whether, for the sake of their child, they could commit themselves to a man whom they judged to be a bad father.

Gradually, I came to discover that Planned Parenthood was bent upon respecting the whole panorama of emotional, social, economic, religious, and institutional aspects of deciding how to respond to an unplanned pregnancy. My trainer kept insisting that my task was to allow the would-be mother to accurately assess her “inner resources” and her own “ethical intuitions” in the face of her own condition and that of her unborn child. Even those coming in with a firm commitment to having an abortion, my trainer insisted, needed to be gentle helped to tell their story of how they became pregnant and how they arrived at their choice of abortion. Planned Parenthood knew that a hasty and unreflective decision could later cause much suffering to all concerned. Making a safe place for women to tell their stories was at the heart of what my trainer expected of me.

Then my practice as a counselor began. I was surprised and humbled to have women half my age or twice my age telling me their deepest secrets, and I was very much aware that they were telling me this as a man. Every case was absolutely unique. A 16-year-old got drunk at a house party and decided to lose her virginity in the bedroom with, as she said, “a guy that I didn’t even like.” An older woman near menopause was devastated by a pregnancy at a time in her life when she was physically exhausted by raising four girls and was counting the days until they were all “out of the house.”  Each of these women made a slow and painful decision. In the end, both decided to accept the new life growing in their wombs and to rely upon their inner resources to make the best of a less-than-ideal situation.

The Drama Surrounding Amy’s Pregnancy

Then an attractive women of 28 whom I shall call Amy came to see me. She told me that she was two months pregnant. A flood of tears followed. She kept berating herself saying, “How could I have been so stupid.” Gradually her whole story poured out. She had married her high school sweetheart immediately following graduation. Kevin, their first and only child, was conceived a few months later. Then, unexpectedly, her husband began drinking more. Verbal and then physical abuse followed.

He openly boasted of having sex with other women. After the birth, little changed. He seemingly resented all the time and attention I gave to Kevin. When the beatings continued, I gradually got the courage to escape. I started my life over in another city since no one in my family would believe that the beatings were unprovoked. The folks in a local Catholic Church took me under their wing. They became my real family. First, they found me a place in public housing and helped me get on welfare. Then, they helped me with tuition at a community college. Just as I was completing my associate degree, Kevin started in kindergarten, and I got my first job as secretary to the Dean at the local Catholic seminary. I was riding on cloud nine. I rented a small home near the seminary so I could walk to work. I got off welfare.  Small groups of seminarians would often visit me after supper and play with Kevin. Everything was perfect.

Then a heaving rush of tears and repeated laments, “How could I have been so stupid,” followed. I kept quiet. From experience, I knew full well that she would continue in her own due time. Anything I might say would just slow down the flow of grief and distract her from the thread of her story.

Then I met Frank, a first-year seminarian. He was a real fine gentleman, and he had a hundred ways of making Kevin laugh. Frank, used to stay on a bit after the other seminarians went back to study. Innocent hugs led to innocent kisses. Frank was so innocent . . . I mean inexperienced. He never had a girlfriend to call his own, so he kind of pretended that I was “his girl.” I told myself that I was doing this for his sake. But I was lonely, and finding a man who was gentle and kind–so different from all the other men I have known–was a surprise and a joy for me. I was so needy myself that I couldn’t see that I was playing with fire.

More heartbreaking tears. Then she slowly told me of that “tender night” they had their first experience of sex together. “Frank gave no thought to using a condom. Besides, I felt I was in the infertile part of my cycle. But I was sadly mistaken.”

So what were Amy’s options? As she saw them, they were as follows: (a) Tell Frank and possibly ruin his life and his calling as a priest. (b) Tell Frank the child belongs to another man and bear the weight of the punishment for fornication that was sure to follow:

At the seminary, they’d fire me at the drop of a hat. Then I’d have to move away. Kevin would be heartbroken at losing the only family he ever had. Then, when the baby came, I’d be unable to work and be back on welfare, trying to put my life together so that I could maybe rise up again somewhere down the line.

In the end, she decided to tell Frank that what they did was wrong and that he must never come over again. She decided to have an abortion without telling anyone. But then a new struggle ensued: “Could God ever forgive me if I killed the life in my womb?”

Amy felt trapped. There were no happy solutions. Every choice she might make was strewn with dangers for all concerned. Slowly and tearfully, Amy decided to go ahead with an abortion “in order to protect the life that I’ve made for Kevin and to keep the respect of my adopted family at my church.” As for God, she felt that “somehow God knows how much I have suffered already and, being a kind Father, he wouldn’t want Kevin and me to suffer any more.”

As for Frank, Amy decided that she had been a “damn fool” and that, in the future, she would never again get involved with any man, and surely not with a seminarian.

The Breakdown of my Moral Superiority

Witnessing women like Amy broke down my sense of moral superiority.  She came to me confessing her sins, resolving to amend her life, and asking God for forgiveness. I honestly don’t know whether Amy felt at peace with herself and her God after her abortion. She never came back. I have no doubts, however, that she confessed her sin to a priest with the same tears and anguish that she had shown me. I can’t say, in all honesty, whether she made the best possible choice. All I can say is that, in fear and trembling, she made her choice. In the end, I can only be certain that she was right about God being “a kind Father.”

After many hours of reflecting upon Amy, I began to realize that the official Church is anything but a kind father. The official Church has no heart for listening to and making a safe place for listening to women like Amy. The official Church offers moral absolutes and moral condemnations–positions which, I am ashamed to say, I once cherished myself because they confirmed my need for absolutes and gave me a sense of moral superiority. My so-called moral superiority, however, was a terrible sham–an affront to God and to the women like Amy whom I imagined that I was somehow appointed to guide. Following my stint at Planned Parenthood, my blinders were gone. In fact, I saw clearly that if the truth had come out, the seminary Rector would have immediately fired Amy sending her into oblivion. Frank, meanwhile, would have been privately shamed, given a year of probation, and then sent on to be ordained. In the end, therefore, I recognized the awful truth that the moral climate within the seminary would assure that men guilty of fornication were secretly protected while the guilty women were shunned and made to suffer all the public consequences. Even before I began to explore the moral underpinnings of the Church’s position on abortion, therefore, I had to acknowledge that I discovered that there had been a moral perversion in my heart and in my Church.

Soft spots in the Recent Official Teaching

My attention now turns to the absolute assurance of the Catholic bishops that every abortion is an act of murder. The foundation stone of this judgment is the clear and certain knowledge that “human life begins at the first moment of conception.”  Any injury directed toward the fetus, consequently, must be judged as harm directed toward an innocent human being. Destroying the life of the womb, therefore, would be morally indefensible and no circumstances could possibly alter this absolute norm.

At first glance, the official position seems airtight–without “wiggle room” as the editor of NCR observed. Yet, upon examination, I have discovered that the entire moral argument is seriously flawed. This is so for three reasons:
(a) The official position would make God himself an abortionist;
(b) The first eighteen hundred years of the church’s tradition argues against its most recent position; and
(c) The official position is ill-conceived and disastrous when used as a guide for pastoral or political practice.

Whether God Produces Abortions

By way of beginning, consider the biological fact that many fertilized ova never succeed in being implanted in the placenta and thus are flushed out during the time of the woman’s menstrual period. Dr. Robert T. Francoeur, professor of human embryology and a Catholic, states his findings as follows:

Scientists estimate that in the five to six days following union of egg and sperm, between one-third and one-half . . . spontaneously degenerate and are reabsorbed or expelled. In the second week, 42 percent of the implanted [eggs] . . . abort. In the third and fourth week, 15 percent of the remaining [eggs] . . . abort. In the fetal period, one third of the remaining fetuses spontaneously miscarry.[3]

If someone holds that human life exists at the first moment of conception, it must then follow that one has to suppose that God designed a reproductive system that destroys nine “human beings” for every one that s/he brings to birth. Given the high rate of failure, one might even be forced to think of God as functioning like an abortionist.

One might escape this blasphemy by suggesting that God’s providential wisdom deliberately makes provisions for defective ova to be expelled and die. Death, in this case, would be preferable to allowing embryonic deformities to grow to full term. Instances are known, for example, when women had spontaneous abortions that expelled a two-headed or a legless infant. Even supposing this “providential design” argument is basically sound, however, raises the question as to whether humans are permitted–nay, even obliged–to cooperate with God in this process. If God enables abortions in instances where gross deformities or chromosome abnormalities are present, then humans should willingly imitate God in supporting this same course of action.

A few decades back, for instance, it was discovered that women taking thalidomide during the early months of their pregnancy gave birth to severely deformed children.[4]   In resent times, the depleted uranium that has been scattered as dust by the U.S. military operations in Iraq has likewise produced an alarming increase of embryonic deformities in both humans and sheep. Since medical science is now able to detect such deformities through ultrasound and other means, might it not follow that when God’s providential design fails, humans are not only permitted, but they may even be commanded to imitate God by deliberately aborting severely deformed fetuses.[5]

Some might argue that natural or spontaneous abortions display a mysterious aspect of divine providence while humanly induced abortions are tainted with the sin of “playing God.” The failure of this line of argumentation is that, in a hundred different ways, humans already routinely “play God” throughout the medical field. Even such a simple device as eyeglasses is a human intervention directed toward remedying what nature has failed to provide. During the virulent 1885 outbreak of smallpox in Montreal, Catholic priests urged the faithful to avoid being vaccinated because such a medical intervention was an affront to God who alone had the right to give and to take life.[6] Catholic parents, however, eventually ignored their pastors because they saw how much their own children suffered due to the disease while Protestant parents who overwhelmingly welcomed the vaccine were spared such heartbreaking losses.[7] Today, even heart and kidney transplants are routinely used to sustain and prolong the life of those who, in many circumstances, have deliberately abused the heart and liver that God gave them. Modern medicine can even seemingly prevent death.[8] It is entirely specious, therefore, to argue that humans are never permitted to play God. On the contrary, if God designs the human reproductive system to produce spontaneous abortions in order to weed out fetal deformities, then it would seem incumbent for persons of faith to imitate God in this matter in just the same way that Catholic parents of Montreal were assured that God wanted them to use “artificial” means to protect their children from the prolonged suffering inflicted by smallpox.[9]

The Early and Recent Tradition of the Church

The second difficulty is that the bishops’ position that human life exists “from the first moment of conception” is of very recent origin. So, too, is the application of the penalty of excommunication to all abortions. In fact, one has to wait until 1588, to find the first instances of this, and, even then, it lasted for only three years. Thus Pope Sixtus V, in his campaign to stamp out prostitution in Rome, decreed that the penalty of excommunication was to be applied to every abortion. Three years later, this was modified by his successor, who argued that in those instances where no homicide or animated fetus was involved, excommunication would constitute an excessive penalty. Then, after another three hundred years, Pius IX in 1869 ignored the pioneering embryonic studies being undertaken in his day and imposed excommunication as the penalty for every abortion since he [wrongly] regarded every abortion as murder.[10]

In 1917, when canon law was revised, canon lawyers decided to make universal the discipline of excommunicating abortionists while turning a blind eye to the politically motivated excommunications Pius IX imposed on all members of the newly established Italian government. The 1983 revised code kept this ruling and expanded it (#1398). As things now stand, anyone knowingly procuring an abortion (at eight days or eight months) is automatically (without any inquiry and without due notice) excommunicated along with anyone who knowingly assists[11] in the process (e.g., husband, friends, doctor, nurse, administrators and attendants at the abortion center).

This development from 1869 to 1983 represents neither the practice nor the understanding of the earlier eighteen hundred years. Three points:

1. Christians, following upon their Jewish elder brothers/sisters, have always respected life in the womb as “fashioned by God.” Nonetheless, a distinction was always made between the “unformed” character of the early embryo and the “formed” fetus.[12] Augustine, for example, concluded that an early abortion could not be termed “a homicide” because, he argued, “there cannot be a living soul in a body that lacks sensation due to its not yet being fully formed”[13] (On Exodus). Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, regarded the first embryonic stage to be vegetative, the second stage to be animal, and the final stage to be rational (human) by virtue of receiving an immortal soul imparted directly by God (On the Truth of the Catholic Faith 2.89). The significance of these distinctions is that the unformed fetus, to be sure, had the potential for becoming a human being, but it was not yet so.

Seen from this vantage point, one could call forward a chorus of bishops extending over eighteen hundred years who would both caution and challenge recent bishops for having neglected and distorted their own Catholic tradition by speaking and acting as if the distinction between “unformed” and “formed” does not exist.[14]

2. The notion of delayed ensoulment was confirmed in the dogmatic decrees of the Council of Vienne (1312) and has never been officially repudiated by the Vatican. Even in the 1974 Declaration on Procured Abortion prepared by the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) one finds an acknowledgment that the precise moment of “ensoulment” was uncertain. The document then went on to argue that, given this uncertainty, embryonic life must be respected as “human” in every earlier stage. But this leads to absurdities surrounding the fate of the hundreds of thousands of human embryos cryopreserved in liquid nitrogen at fertility clinics.[15] The catch here is that, even according to Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, human ensoulment was ontologically impossible prior to the final stage of embryonic development.[16] One cannot have operations of the soul functioning unless the body is sufficiently well developed to permit their operation.

Seen from this vantage point, one could call forward a chorus of bishops extending
before Augustine and over a thousand years after him who would fault the 1974
CDF study because it wrongly supposes that ensoulment could take place during
the first trimester.

3. Women throughout the long history of the church have occasionally suffered spontaneous miscarriages at various times in their nine-month gestation periods.  While these miscarriages often occasioned intense grief for the mother, her family, and her friends, the Church never judged that the aborted substance (even in the third trimester) merited rites for the dead or a Christian burial.
Furthermore, up until the end of the 18th century, “the law of the Roman Catholic Church forbade one to baptize an aborted fetus that showed no human shape or outline.”[17] Thus, even when Catholic couples experienced grief and uncertainty shrouded the moment of ensoulment, the Church expressly forbade conditional baptism to be used in cases when ensoulment was precluded.

Seen from this vantage point, one could call forward a chorus of bishops extending over eighteen hundred years who would challenge our recent bishops and urge them to reexamine the long practice of the Church regarding rites for the dead and conditional baptism.

Some may object at this point that change has occurred and will continue to occur within the teaching of the Catholic Church. In some instances, change was both prophetic and necessary. Consider the long struggle (a) against the mutilation of pregnant women (2 K 8:12, 15:16; Hos 13:16) and the “dashing of infants against the rock” (Ps 137:9) during times of war; (b) against the brutalities and divine sanctioning of slavery; and (c) against the practice of denigrated Judaism and of holding all Jews as responsible for the death of
Jesus. In the case of abortion, however, since the Catholic bishops have not even acknowledged that they have overturned aspects of the long Catholic tradition.  It is not clear whether they have inadvertently stumbled upon their present position or whether they have found weighty reasons for overturning those long-established Catholic traditions that would argue against them. A conscientious Catholic might therefore respectfully ask, “What does the current Catholic hierarchy know today that all the bishops, saints, and theologians in past generations seem to have missed?” As of yet, this is unclear.

Soft Spots in the Bishops’ Pastoral Letter

The U.S. bishops, in their pastoral letter, Living the Gospel of Life
(LGL), have endeavored to act as faithful shepherds in spelling out how the Gospel of Jesus Christ impinges on a whole host of issues surrounding the respect for life. When carefully read, however, no one can but notice that, among the respect for life issues, abortion remains their principal focus of attention.  When abortion is treated, however, the bishops fail to cite any evidence from the bible or from the earlier Catholic tradition to the effect (a) that human life begins at the first moment of conception or (b) that abortions (at whatever
stage) are to be uniformly treated as murder. The closest that the bishops come to an exploration of the Catholic tradition is in their appeal to the Fifth Commandment.

Those (political officials) who justify their inaction on the grounds that abortion is the law of the land need to recognize that there is a higher law, the law of God. No human law can validly contradict the Commandment: “Thou shalt not kill” (LGL).

The Fifth Commandment, as is well known, does not object to (a) the killing of ants that have invaded one’s home, (b) the killing of farm animals being slaughtered in preparation for eating, or (c) the killing of aggressors attacking ones children. Hence, even before one examines the case of abortion, one has to acknowledge that the intent of the Fifth Commandment only becomes clear when it is situated within the extended context of interpretation to which it properly belongs.

As things now stand, the bishops are clearly involved in circular reasoning.  They begin by defining abortion as the “direct killing of the innocent” (LGL). This definition is far from being neutral. The definition implies that abortion ought to be equated with “killing.” The bishops never use descriptives such as “the termination of a pregnancy.” It follows from their very definition, therefore, that the Fifth Commandment applies. What the bishops have done, consequently, is to so skew their definition of abortion as to preclude any discussion or discernment in the matter.

The Vatican defines abortion as “any method used to terminate human life from the moment of conception until birth.”[18] This definition of abortion is so broad that it would seemingly require that a medical doctor allowing a fertilized ovum to dry out on a petri dish has committed an abortion. So does any woman using an IUD while having intercourse with her husband.[19] Moreover,
as in the case of the bishops’ definition, the Vatican definition is circular. It presupposes, in its very definition, that “human life” begins at the first moment of conception. This very definition blocks one from taking seriously the long Catholic tradition that human life could not exist prior to ensoulment, and that ensoulment could not take place prior to having a “formed” body. Thus, here again, one has an example of circular reasoning.

When the great Church Father, St. Augustine (d. 430 CE), searched the Scriptures and examined the medical/philosophical treatises of his day without coming to any firm conclusion on the matter of the time of ensoulment, he wrote as follows:

When a thing obscure in itself defeats our sagacity, and nothing in Scripture comes to our aid, it is not safe for humans to presume they can pronounce on it (Letter 190.5).

Our current bishops, however, appear to consider themselves as an exception –they presume to pronounce on it. The scope of their case against abortion, however, evaporates the moment it is examined. In brief, the Fifth Commandment was never applied to embryonic life in its early stages for the very simple reason that “human life” did not yet exist. Moreover, the use of circular reasoning based on definitions that block our access to the older Catholic tradition
is a disservice. No matter how one stands on the issue of abortion, all sides should be willing to agree with Augustine that God’s creation in the womb remains a mystery, and it is futile for the bishops to “presume that they can pronounce on it.”

Whether the Bishops Are Soft on Men and Hard on Women

The Church has always been quick to decry adultery and fornication. In the case of men, however, there has always been a puzzling leniency when it comes to men fornicating with slaves and prostitutes. St. Thomas even allowed that prostitutes had to be tolerated lest a greater evil arise, namely, that men would rape virgins and wives (deeds that had social consequences). Even military chaplains attached to the U.S. army routinely turn a blind eye to the centers of prostitution surrounding military bases around the world. The women called upon to release the pent-up sexual urges of young soldiers are often impoverished girls exploited by pimps who force them to have abortions whenever it pleases them.

As a case in point, Cardinal John J. O’Connor was a respected navy chaplain for 27 years prior to his appointment as bishop in 1979. He had worked his way up to the rank of Rear Admiral in the Navy and, following his consecration as bishop, he was assigned to the Military Vicariate. Would not many Catholics be scandalized if they knew that Bishop O’Connor never
had anything to say about the evils of prostitution surrounding the naval bases in the Phillipines; hardly a week passed when the bishop was not making headlines regarding the evils of abortion?[20]

I raise these issues here because, while there are noteworthy exceptions, our bishops, as a group, display a keen interest in regulating women whereas they manifest a surprising neglect when it comes time to morally challenging men.  Had Amy gone ahead with her pregnancy, she would have been expelled from her seminary position and dishonored in her church while, at the same time, the offending seminarian would have been given a private slap on the wrist and continued on to ordination. Likewise, the African priests guilty of sexually abusing nuns under their pastoral care continue in their profession while the nuns they impregnated are expelled from their orders. And, in Bosnia, the scandal is that a Catholic doctor giving RU486 to a women who had been systematically raped and tortured would be officially penalized with automatic exclusion from the sacraments while the Serbian soldiers responsible for these crimes would seemingly get off scot-free. In brief, it is difficult not to notice that the cycle of the victimization of women continues unabated within the patriarchal structures of my Church.

In the ancient Greek manuals of medicine, one finds a carefully delineated description of how to find and to prepare drugs that abort a fetus. Abortion, consequently, was always to some degree available and practiced during the last two thousand years. Never, in the history of the Church, does one find a time prior to our own when automatic excommunication was attached to women having
abortions. At the first ecumenical council at Nicea in 325, the bishops imposed an automatic three-year exclusion from the community for soldiers who had killed barbarian terrorists in order to protect the security of the Roman Empire. Fourth century bishops saw clearly that the shedding of human blood was abhorrent to
the Lord and, accordingly, they required Christian soldiers to exclude themselves from the eucharistic assemblies in order to enter into a three-year period of repentance and rehabilitation following their military discharge. If bishops today required a three-year automatic excommunication for returning soldiers from Iraq and Afganistan, then it might make sense to include in this group those women who had abortions  in the second trimester. If this were to be done, however, they might have also wanted to include all those involved in the rape camps of Bosnia and the dens of prostitution surrounding army bases in the Phillipines. And, to retain an even hand, American priests who had sex with minors and African priests who had sex with nuns might also benefit from automatic three-year excommunications. As things now stand, however, the only public crime clearly and repeatedly identified by the bishops is abortion, and the Catholic hierarchy comes off as obsessed with the ideal of eliminating all abortions “from the first moment of conception.” Have the bishops never noticed that they are hard on women and soft on men when it comes to sinning?  And, if they have not noticed this, is it not high time that conscientious Catholics bring this to their attention?

Hazards Involved in the Manufacturing of Consent

Let’s face it, women having abortions are easily silenced. As long as the bishops continue to believe that abortion is the greatest (and maybe even the only) crime against the unborn, then they can be assured that they have the moral high ground and that their hands are clean. After all, no bishop will ever be accused of having an abortion.

Yet, the soft spots of this position will eventually show through. If the bishops want Catholics in public office to bring their faith to bear upon public life (NCR 5/23/03), then the bishops would appear to be asking public officials to persuade the people in an arena where the bishops themselves have not been particularly successful. In the 1988 Guttmacher Institute survey of ten thousand abortion patients, for example, among the 37% who declared a religious affiliation, Roman Catholic women had the highest rate of abortions. This is very revealing, and one would think that (if nothing else) the bishops would want to examine their own house:

(a) Why does the church with the most absolutist position show the most dismal record when it comes to compliance?
(b) How is it that Catholic women choosing to have an abortion continue to identify themselves as Catholic?
(c) If bishops have been so ineffective in persuading their own people, what line of argumentation do they suppose politicians might employ that would guarantee their success?

Maybe persuasion, however, is not what the bishops really have in mind. Maybe they want Catholics in public office to canvas support for legislation that would limit (maybe even outlaw) abortions. At this point, the bishops need to decide whether they really want to establish a political “moral majority” destined to impose its will on an “immoral minority.” Bishops also need to decide whether they want legislators to champion a “no exceptions” stance such that abortions would be criminalized even in the case of rape or incest.

Anytime that a bishop begins to attack a public official regarding his/her abortion policy, therefore, the politician might do well to soften this attack by asking the bishop some very simple and very direct questions about whether “persuasion” or “legislation” should be the focus and whether the final goal is to criminalize every abortion, everywhere–no exceptions.[21] Then, both bishops and politicians will at least come to grips with the complexity and the messiness of regulating public morality. The long-awaited dialogue may then finally begin.[22]

The manufacturing of consent has its hazards. To begin with it fractures the possibility of any genuine unity of outlook and purpose among the Catholic faithful.  The pro-life sector of Catholics continue to judge candidates for public office on the single issue of abortion and to organize rallies,  protests, and acts of civil disobedience bent upon bringing the crime against the unborn to a complete halt. The pro-abortion sector of Catholics, meanwhile, feel that their bishops have blinded their eyes to the pastoral aspects of abortion and have withdrawn their gaze from the horrendous anti-life agenda found in sweat shops, in first-strike wars, in tax reductions favoring the rich, in public policies discriminating against the poor, in a market economy that subverts human and community values to corporate profits. If the bishops were to be honest, they would draw back from their engineering of consent in the matter of abortion and begin to listen to all sides and start to address the divisions that their own policies have created among the faithful.  In effect, they might then become true pastors who would build bridges of Gospel consensus and programs of united action that would have the prospect of healing many evils that now exist in our society.

Theological Honesty Regarding Abortion

What would theological honesty sound like? To begin with, it would allow that Jesus and the Catholic tradition could be explored without the blinders of propaganda.  The bishops, for example,  might begin with a honest starting point somewhat like the following:

The life taking shape in the womb of every mother is the life of a potential human person. Neither the Scriptures nor Catholic tradition provide any standard by which to judge the exact moment of ensoulment when the fetus becomes a human being. The tradition is clear, however, in signaling that this ensoulment cannot occur until the organic form of the fetus has reached a stage of development wherein human operations are possible. Thus, one can safely say that ensoulment does not take place during the first trimester and that there is honest uncertainty when it occurs during the second trimester.

Catholic tradition has always insisted that “human life” goes beyond animal life in so far as a human experiences intellect and free will.  Even on these grounds, there can be no possibility that the mind of the developing fetus can think and decide during the first trimester.  This does not mean that the heart is not beating.  It surely is.  But the beating of the heart is an automatic function that facilitates the growth of the fetus. The beating of a heart is not a sign of human life any more than a beating heart in an earthworm or a rabbit is a sign of human life.

Going beyond this, however, the bishops might want to speak forcefully of the
respect due to embryonic development because of the eyes of faith:

The organic development of the embryo deserves our respect because, in the eyes of faith, the womb is the mysterious workshop wherein a unique human being is being fashioned by God out of the genetic material that the mother and father have contributed. Advances in modern science can lead us to a sense of wonder as to how the individual fingers, eyes, and arteries take shape during the course of embryonic development. Hidden from science, however, is the capacity for interiority, for self-awareness, for thoughts, for dreams, for imagining–aspects of interiority that take a particular shape in each precious human existence. Hidden, too, is the process whereby every unique human being fashions their own sense of self and sense of calling under the care of the family, the neighborhood, the society, and the divine milieu in which they live. As science reveals the awesome mystery surrounding embryonic development, religion reveals the process whereby God, the designer and creator of human life, goes on to continue to make his/her presence felt in our personal lives.

Relative to the larger fabric of embryonic dangers:

In times past, the seed planted in the fertile womb grew without any awareness on the part of parents that they could alter its development. Modern science, however, has made us aware that smoking, alcohol, and drugs have very adverse organic effects on the fetus and, in some cases, either temporarily or permanently interfere with the growth and development of the fetus itself. Even beyond this, a mother without an adequate diet, without an adequate sense of security, without clean earth, water, and air cannot hope to shield the fetal development in her womb from the adverse conditions to which this life and her life are being  subjected. Care for the environment, therefore, and care for the agricultural and social milieu have their impact upon fetal development. Anyone who narrowly manipulates public protest and distorts true religion by shaming and discriminating against women seeking abortions without paying attention to the entire fabric of embryonic dangers posed by modern society cannot be seen as a true friend to the unborn.

Relative to abortions, the following might be added:

Under normal circumstances, a pregnant woman remains bonded to her partner, her family, and her community. The new life within her womb is joyfully anticipated to develop into a new personality, a new dream, and a new adventure in their interwoven lives.

Many women, despite even heroic efforts on their part, have found themselves pregnant in circumstances that are a far cry from the ideal just explained.  Her partner, her family, and her community may even be antagonistic, troubled, broken, abusive, or otherwise unwilling to welcome the potential new life.  Thus, the woman may conclude that she would be negligent to bring a child into these circumstances. At times, she may make an informed and moral decision to carry her child to term but then to give it up for adoption in a family that is ready and willing to nurture a new life. Alternately, the woman may make a moral decision to ask a doctor to aid her to expel the embryonic organism growing in her womb. In this process, those who see the hand of God at play in the womb will naturally recognize that severe and weighty reasons are needed before producing an abortion.

Nine out of ten embryonic organisms are expelled by natural processes during the first trimester.  Such “abortions” are designed by Nature/God by way of bringing a safe end to those organisms not fit for human existence outside the womb.  A woman who seeks an abortion likewise makes a prudential judgment that the life within her womb will not be able to find a safe and secure place outside her womb.  These are critical choices that need to be seriously undertaken for they imitate God’s design in providing for spontaneous abortions.

In the first trimester, no abortion [spontaneous or intentional] at this early phase is tantamount to a death of a human being.  This is why the Church never had funeral rites when spontaneous abortions occurred. On the other hand, the Church community is aware that there can be deep personal and familial grief occasioned by such abortions.  This is not because a human being has been destroyed, however.  Rather,  the grief is occasioned by the shattering of the hopes and expectations that a normal, healthy babe would have been born to us.

Every abortion, whether spontaneous or deliberate, thus brings those involved into some form of a grief cycle.  Rather than suppress this grief,  those struck by grief  should look forward to those times when they are ready to share their stories and their tears within circles of trusted companions.  Such sharing is a sacramental ritual that promotes healing and knits together those bonds that may have been shaken by the tragedy of loss.  In these shared tears, persons of faith will undoubtedly find the consolation of God.

Conclusion

In this essay I have endeavored to come to grips with our bishops’ anti-abortion agenda. I myself explained how I originally naively endorsed the position of the Catholic bishops. During the course of my infiltration of Planned Parenthood, however, women like Amy forced me to downsize my absolute moral norms and to prioritize the complexities of caring for women troubled with unexpected pregnancies.  Following upon this, three critical soft spots in the bishops’ position were considered.

Until such time as these soft spots are openly and honestly addressed, it will never be clear to what degree the bishops are theologically grounded and pastorally sensitive when it comes to the issue of abortion. And, until this foundation is established, it is disingenuous for bishops. . .

(a) to spend millions of dollars on slick ad campaigns,
(b) to support right-wing Catholic groups that picket abortion clinics, and
(c) to deride Catholic politicians because they refuse to impose a theologically dubious and pastorally disastrous program for the criminalization of abortions during the first trimester.

One must also keep in mind that the Catholic Church practically stands alone in its certainty that every act of abortion is “intrinsically evil” and that “human life exists from the first moment of conception”.  If these assurances were as evident as the hierarchy makes them out to be, then it is puzzling that most other Christian churches offer their people moral guidance without entering into these dubious absolutes.[23]

After all is said and done, there are strong reasons to suspect that the Catholic bishops have prematurely entered into manufacturing consent for a very controversial and inflammatory cause for which they have failed to do their historical and theological homework in advance. They neglected their homework and still expect to get good grades. The Lord who called them to be pastors in his name can hardly be pleased with their negligence.

More to the point, Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels is remembered as the man who challenged his disciples to cease and desist from exercising their presumed male prerogative of interfering with and controlling women. If the bishops were truly bent upon protecting the life of the womb, they would be taking on the U.S. government respecting the massive number of birth defects due to depleted
uranium.[24] One can only be ashamed that Read Admiral Bishop John O’Connor so openly confronted politicians on their abortion record while he passed over in silence the sexual exploitation of impoverished women by U.S. soldiers. It is so easy and natural for men to further humiliate and victimize those women who suffer in a society designed by men and for men. Borrowing the words of John Paul II, I would say this is “the most serious wound inflicted on society and its culture by the very people who ought to be society’s promoters and defenders.”[25]

The time has come for Jesus to again oppose his disciples by sternly telling them: “Let her alone; why do you trouble her?” (Mark 14:6).

Lesson One

Children’s Literature, Ideology and Society

You may like to begin with a two-minute meditation.

1. Find your relaxed position and, breathing normally, close your eyes and welcome into your space each person you’ve met during this course in Day #1 – your co-participants, your facilitator/moderator and all the people you may have spoken to or included in your assignments.
2. Continuing to breathe, extend your attention to parents and grandparents around the world – those who right now are getting ready to tell their children or grandchildren a story, a fairy tale, a legend.
3. On the next in-breath draw into the circle all women and men who are making courageous and creative efforts to heal and transform our world. Extend gratitude and support to each one.
4. And, finally notice yourself: your presence, your participation, your giftedness and courage are essential to this circle. Draw the healing breath into yourself.
5. When you are ready, open your eyes and return to the computer monitor and click on the black arrow below.

Buddhist singing bowl (click to listen) The learning circle is now open.

Introduction

Before embarking on the study of those children’s stories which have been chosen because of their specific relevance to female socialization, it is worth spending a little time looking at the immense importance of literature and of narrative in general in forming attitudes, influencing opinions, and especially, within societies of every period, of inducting children into currently desired thought patterns and behavior. In order to illustrate this, particular use will be made of some of the oldest surviving stories of all, fairy tales.

This course is based on English and some Indian literature, but its approach and conclusions apply equally to children’s literature in other countries. In the future we aim to extend the course material with examples and applications taken from children’s stories in various parts of the world. With this inter-cultural experience in mind, this first lesson provides the opportunity to analyze an Italian and a Chinese fairytale as an option (See Exploration 1.8 and 1.9 below).

Lesson One has been designed to explore how and why folk stories [fairy tales] were/are important for understanding ourselves. Prior to the period when we had radio and television, we had story tellers. We will be examining three versions of Little Red Riding Hood that come from the 1500s, 1669, and 1812. There are dramatic differences between each of the three versions and yet a common thread–a young girl in danger. What did parents, in each of these three historical epochs, want to communicate to their young daughters through these oral stories? This you will discover!

[Note: Dr. Pat Pincent is an expert in exploring the deep meanings of children’s stories.  This course content was designed and presented by her.  Dr. Aaron Milavec assisted Dr. Pincent in designing a course where everyone became a Sherlock Holmes bent upon the examination and interpretation of significant clues and probative questions.]

The Importance of Narrative

One of the primary qualities that distinguish human beings from other animals is surely the ability to use language to refer to objects and people who are not present, and to describe events that happened in the past. One of the most important ways of doing this is the use of story. It seems probable that all ages and cultures have used story as a means of telling new generations about the past and educating children about desired codes of behavior. Story telling seems to have been important to human beings even before writing became a means to preserve the tales; the cave-art of the Neolithic people provides evidence of the importance of imaginative material which transcended the immediate physical present, while artifacts and paintings from all over the world give hints of a rich substratum of story which has not been handed down to us. Among the earliest surviving instances of story which have been preserved are the myths about the Egyptian gods, the early tales from the Indian sub-continent, and the classical Greek epics of Homer. In the context of children’s literature we also remember the short fables, with a moral, ascribed to Aesop.

Exploration 1.1 <– Click here to post your reply.
Why do you think that learning by story-telling is so important to human beings? When and how has it become important for you personally? Post and offer feedback.

Having read these questions, you’ll naturally have ideas, hunches, and deep thoughts that you want to share. Imagine that you are sharing these with trusted friends.

How do you share your thoughts with your learning circle? [Note: These functions only work for enrolled participants.]

1. Begin by clicking on the “Exploration 1.1” that will always be found just prior to the questions. (You can also find Exploration 1.1 listed as “1.1” in a table at the very bottom of this page. You can, as an alternate, click on this as well.)
2. Step 1 opens a new window in which you will find the questions repeated. Click on “Reply” found in the lower right corner. This opens a blank text box awaiting your response.
3. Type your reflections into this blank box. Don’t think that you have to do research so that your responses are “perfect.” Rather, risk writing spontaneously what you believe and feel about the issues at hand.
4. Feel free to experiment with the various features of the textbox editor. Be daring! You won’t be able to break anything. From time to time, you might want to add a JPG picture to embellish your response.
5. Click on “Post to Forum” when finished. You are free to change the subject line if you wish and to provide, in its place, a short apt title of your choice.
6. You can always go back and edit your former posts. When it comes to editing your own ideas, however, this is not encouraged. Let your raw self-expression stand. If you need to, add a few lines saying how your mind has changed and why.

In the best of classrooms, everyone has something to teach and everyone has something to learn, including the professor. The most critical role that the professor plays is often to make a safe place in her classroom wherein women can find their true voices and to express them freely. The bonding that takes place in the virtual classroom must accordingly be joined with a shared sense of respect and mystery in the face of co-learners struggling to become their authentic selves even when they have for so long been beaten down and forced to adapt roles that conceal their true voices.

Ideology, Society and Gender

The word ‘ideology’ has often been used pejoratively by those who want to suggest that a political framework (with which they disagree) is being used in a doctrinaire way to influence behavior and, in particular, the way that children are being indoctrinated. [In the social sciences, “primary socialization” is the phrase used to convey the indoctrination of children.] In fact, of course, all of us have our own ideologies that become particularly influential on our words and behavior when we are unaware of them. As well as the beliefs of individuals, all societies, today and in the past, have ideological assumptions which are most powerful when they are not questioned. This often applies most forcefully to assumptions that are made about gender. It seems always to have been in society’s interest to convey specific roles for women and to indoctrinate girls into accepting these roles.

In the post-modern era, story telling was the normal way that parents socialized their children and prepared them to learn the social messages that would be necessary for them as adults. In your own upbringing, your mother almost certainly used fairy tales to accomplish this task. Her choice of fairy tales was undoubtedly influenced by her own recognition that those tales delighted her when her own mother (your grandmother) selected stories told from her own mother (your great-grandmother) going back to the time when such stories were oral treasuries not yet printed in books.

Here are a few of the many reasons which might be suggested for this choice of material:

• · The fascination of children from all periods for fairy tales, which have the tendency to focus on timelessly relevant symbols rather than everyday settings. This means that they have dated much less than any other form of literature.
• · Their use of representative characters identified by their functions or relationships (kings and queens, merchants, hunters, stepmothers, sisters, etc.) rather than by any individual quality other than being good or evil means that children can easily be inducted into the listening to stories through them.
• · They tend to use vividly symbolic colors and settings, such as ‘red as blood’, the ‘dark forest’. This again makes them easy to approach for the young child.
• · They have been profoundly influential on all subsequent children’s literature, and patterns and characters from them, as well as explicit intertextual allusions, can be identified in virtually every classic children’s text.
• · Partly because of their antiquity, they frequently raise questions about gender roles and prejudice against certain groups of people; such questions are perennially relevant.
• · They appear in a number of different versions, and are still being rewritten today; children’s experience of literature is still likely to start with these stories, even though the medium of presentation, through video or CD Rom, may differ from the past.
• · The similarity between the elements of fairy tale and dream has encouraged the psychoanalysts towards a variety of creative interpretations of these stories, and they are sometimes used in therapy.

Peter Hollindale (1988, summarized in Stephens 1992:9-11) identifies three aspects of ideology as represented in literature:

• · That which is explicit in the text (and consequently can often be detected, at least by competent readers);
• · The writer’s unexamined assumptions, which readers may find themselves sharing, unless they are alert to this possibility;
• · That which is inherent within language, which again may remain invisible to readers, especially if the reader’s language is of the same period and social group as that of the writer.

Purpose: We shall go on to look at a small selection of fairy tales as a particular illustration of how European society undertook the social indoctrination of their children. You will be invited to stretch your powers of examination and to detect the clues necessary to decipher the ideological aspects that prevail in every piece of literature (as noted by Hollindale above). These same skills, needless to say, will equip you to surface the tacit logic and subtle messages that exists in every form of modern media: jokes, movies, plays, advertisements, novels, comics.

Exploration 1.2 Consider your own particular experience.
1.2a What fairy tales or ancient legends were dear to you as a child? Among these, what was your favorite?

Note: Sometimes our experiences of childhood are blocked during our normal daily activity. If you find yourself unable to easily answer these first two questions, you might want to close your eyes, clear your mind, and imaginatively travel back in time to that familiar place with that familiar person reading childhood fairy tales to you. If you try this and it doesn’t work, then skip this for the moment and try this traveling back in time again just as you are close to falling asleep at night. By morning, you usually will find what you need. Then return to post and offer feedback. In any case, go ahead now and return later when some stories have come to mind.

1.2b What was the most exciting moment in the story? What feelings were evoked?
1.2c How was your imagination carried away into seeing yourself within this story?
1.2d What was happening in your life then or later that might help you account for your own special attachment to this story?

History of Fairy Tales

The origins of fairy tales are lost in the mists of antiquity, but there is no reason to think that the tellers of these stories originally had children particularly in mind as their listeners. The earliest collections specifically addressed to the young tend to date from the seventeenth century. Notable amongst collections which are still extant are those of Charles Perrault (1628-1703) and the Brothers Grimm (Jacob, 1785-1863 & Wilhelm, 1786-1859); other early collectors of fairy tales were also French. The original fairy stories of Hans Christian Andersen (1805-75) and Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), and a few others of their contemporaries such as John Ruskin, are also well-known but we shall not be looking directly at them here. We shall however look briefly at a few contemporary versions of fairy tales, to examine the changes that they have made to suit different preconceptions about gender roles.

Red Riding Hood

Exploration 1.3 Recall the story of Red Riding Hood (abbr.:RRH). [Don’t make any attempt to read it. Just let your memory recall what it will.] If you have never heard the story or have forgotten the details, then examine the full text of Perrault RRH or, better yet, enjoy listening to an oral performance of Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood, click black arrow to listen.

1.3a What appears to you to be the most exciting moment in the story? What feelings are evoked? How does repetition function in the story?
1.3b Try to imagine how parents used this narrative to prepare their daughters to face some real dangers that existed. What might these real dangers be? How were their daughters socialized to save themselves from these dangers?
1.3c What sort of parental messages were being conveyed through this story?

Now here is the fun part–giving and receiving feedback.

1. Once you post your own reflections for 1.3, the reflections of one or more of your learning partners will appear. Click on them and read them quickly.
2. Feel free to thank others for what you find helpful, to pose clarifying questions, to link your story to theirs. To do this, use steps 2-5 above.
3. The best and the easiest kind of feedback is to offer readback lines. To do this, click on the “Reply” button at the bottom right. Then pick out a phrase or sentence in what your co-learner wrote that strikes a resonate cord in you. Highlight it with your mouse and copy it (Ctrl-C). Then move your cursor into your reply box and paste it (Ctrl-V). Repeat this process a second or third time if you feel so inclined.
4. The beauty of readback lines is that it offers a silent affirmation (a) that these words have special meaning for you as well and (b) that you are thankful that she shared such words with you. Give your feedback lines a short title and post them.
5. Make it a practice to offer feedback lines for two or three of your co-learners each time you post your own reflections. If you are the first to post, then you will need to come back in a few days to offer feedback lines to those who had not yet posted.
6. Now you can relish how others have responded to your post. Responding to feedback received with a sincere “thank you” or “that was helpful” note is always rewarding for the one who honored your work enough to puzzle over it. Clarifications or expansions can also be asked for when needed.
7. For the moment, don’t try to critically analyze or to challenge someone’s post. Limit yourself to using readback lines as the preferred mode of feedback. In subsequent weeks, these alternate forms of feedback will be introduced.

Now make yourself a cup of tea or step outside for a moment just to clear your mind. Return and read a much older and much stranger version of this same story: “The Story of Grandmother.” [If you wish, you can read the story out loud and imagine your mother telling this version to you.]

Exploration 1.4 When you click on the title, “The Story of Grandmother,” your browser will jump to the story. Use your back-button to return to this page. In this way, you can move back and forth with ease should you need to reexamine the story while probing the same questions (1.3a-1.3e) that you used above. Instead of RRH, one now has “a little girl.” Instead of a “wolf,” one now has a bzou (=werewolf=man+wolf).

1.4a What appears to you to be the most exciting moment in the story? What feelings are evoked?
1.4b What does “a little girl” do to save herself? Is this a wise or a foolish course of action?
1.4c Does “a little girl” save herself all by herself or does she necessarily call upon the help of someone more powerful? Why is this part of the story so different from Perrault’s later version?
1.4d Try to imagine how parents used this narrative to prepare their daughters to face some real dangers that existed. What might these real dangers be? How were their daughters socialized to save themselves from these dangers?
1.4e How does “The Story of Grandmother” function differently from Perrault’s later version? How does a parent in the 17th century decide what story is best suited from their daughter?

Although it is difficult to be certain about the origins of ‘The Story of Grandmother’, Jack Zipes (1986:229) suggests it may reflect ‘a social ritual connected to sewing communities: the maturing young woman proves she can handle needles, replace an older woman, and contend with the opposite sex.’ Even more to the point, however, the girl keep her cool under pressure to disrobe. Her repeated non-threatening questions stall for time and, not unlike modern programs for disarming the malace/erection of her would-be rapist/killer, engages her assailant in conversation. One could argue that her willingness to follow directions in small things gives her the psychological edge required to press her need to pee outdoors despite the wolf’s reservations. When granted, she is on her way to safety. Against a superior adversary, her cool, her cunning, and her swiftness saved her from a fate worse than death.

Charles Perrault’s version

“The Story of Grandmother” [text printed at the bottom] circulated in various forms in French society going back to the fourteenth century. The story, as yet, has no “red cape” and no near-miraculous rescue by “a woodsman.” These elements came later, as you are now aware.

Charles Perrault (1628-1703) [text printed at the bottom] turned his attention to folk tales only after turning 63. In the fashionable French salons of his day, “for amusement, someone would take a simple traditional tale, such as an old peasant woman might tell in the kitchens, and remake into in a `moralized,’ succinct, witty story purged of all coarseness” (Wikepedia). Perrault, in his turn, took these amusing and anonymous folk tales and published them for the first time in 1669 under the subtitle, “Tales of Mother Goose.” In so doing, he inadvertently began a new literary genre, the fairy tale. Such stories circulated in literary salons and, with time, as literacy advanced, served to reshape the stories that mothers routinely told to their daughters.

You can now see how the little girl gets her familiar name, Little Red Riding Hood, because of the garment her grandmother had made for her. In this narrative, gone is the slow undressing and gone is the request to pee outdoors. Yet, with these elements gone, Perrault had to allow that the foolish girl didn’t have sufficient wits to escape. Thus, the wolf eats her up. And there is no one to rescue her! This is a black tale indeed. According to Catherine Orenstein:

Perrault cloaked his heroine in red, the color of scandal and blood, suggesting the girl’s sin and foreshadowing her fate. Her chaperon [Fr.], or hood [in English], also took on the tale’s lesson, acquiring the meaning in English, which it already possessed in French, of one who guards girls’ virtue. For good measure, Perrault added an explicit rhyming moral admonishing demoiselles — that is, young ladies of society — to remain chaste:

Little girls, this seems to say,
Never stop upon your way,
Never trust a stranger-friend;
No one knows how it will end.
As you’re pretty so be wise;
Wolves may lurk in every guise.
Handsome they may be, and kind,
Gay, and charming — nevermind!
Now, as then, ‘tis simple truth —
Sweetest tongue has sharpest tooth!

Moral: Girls who converse with a wolf come to a bad end. A “wolf” in this case is the sweet-talking, cool-looking guy who has the sexual appetites of a wild animal. “In the French slang, when a girl lost her virginity it was said that elle avoit vû le loup — she’d seen the wolf” ( Orenstein). In the earlier story, the girl meets a werewolf–a man-like creature that can turn into a wolf. Thus, from the very beginning, the reader was not forced to imagine that wolves could speak. Rather, the girl meets a man who has the instincts of a wolf (deception, greed, lust). (www).

The Brothers Grimm’s version

More than a century later, the Grimm Brothers [text printed at the bottom] gathered together German folk stories and published them in 1812. Their emphasis was initially upon authenticity:

The Brothers Grimm thus did for German readers what Perrault did for French readers. One might imagine that publishing oral folk tales would have had the effect of standardizing what children heard to the degree that growing literacy increasingly inclined mothers to read the stories to their children rather than to tell them by oral memory (as was the earlier practice). But this was not so for the Grimm Brothers (as indicated) quickly published a freely edited popularization of their collected fairy tales in an attempt to increase the appeal of these narratives to children. Historical authenticity thus yielded to the drive for increased sales. Look in any bookstore today and you will be hard put to find two versions of any fairy tale that are exactly the same.

1.5a What appears to you to be the most exciting moment in the Grimm revision? What feelings are evoked?
1.5b What does RRH (=Red Cap) do to save herself? Is this a wise or fooling course of action?
1.5c Does RRH save herself all by herself or does she necessarily call upon the help of someone more powerful? Is this a calculated part of her action plan or just a happy accident?
1.5d Try to imagine how parents used this narrative to prepare their daughters to face some real dangers that existed. What might these real dangers be? How were their daughters socialized to save themselves from these dangers?
1.5e What sort of parental messages were being [overtly or covertly] conveyed through this story?
1.5f In view of modern circumstances, what version would you want to read/tell your own daughter or granddaughter? Explain.

The Grimms’ first version in 1812 suggests that the young girl needs protection which can be provided by a suitable man, a kind of father figure, who will defend her from predatory males. It reflects something of the patriarchal assumptions of their nineteenth century background. Magical elements are also increased that further remove the tale from the real world. Real wolves do not eat their victims whole nor do their victims remain alive after they have been eaten. Without the introduction of these magical elements, even the woodsman has no prospect of saving Red Cap.

The Grimms follow this with a second version in 1815: In this revision, Red Cap is on her guard and runs ahead to warn her grandmother that a wolf is on his way. The wolf cannot open the door, so he jumps on the roof, but the grandmother places water in which sausages have been boiled into a big trough in front of the house, and the wolf, enticed by the smell, falls into it and is drowned. Thus, in the second version, cunning and quick action by the grandmother are affirmed, and Red Cap ends up combining her forces with her grandmother to win the day. The second Grimm version does away with magical elements and demonstrates that an old woman may have accumulated some wisdom which she can pass on to a younger generation.

The fact that the Grimms’ first version is probably the best known suggests that until recently, this kind of protection of the young female, rather than either letting her develop her own resources or learn from female wisdom, seemed the most true to life. The Perrault version in which the girl and her grandmother perish is surprisingly long-lived, however, perhaps reflecting the childish desire to be frightened by ‘the big bad wolf’.

Versions by James Thurber and other modern writers reflect the much greater degree of independence of females today, and a dislike for implying that they need men to deliver them –- incidentally thus reverting to the situation in the earliest of these stories. Other modern versions of note include Roald Dahl’s verses in his Revolting Rhymes (1982), Angela Carter’s ‘The Company of Wolves’ (1981; not for young children), James Garner’s version in Politically Correct Bedtime Stories (1994) and Lane Smith’s ‘Little Red Running Shorts’ in The Stinky Cheese Man (1992). Finally, we have `Little Red Riding Hood Redux’ (2002) wherein the girl is more than prepared to protect herself and to put her would-be-protector in his rightful place. This also has inspired a video gaming version.

Exploration 1.6 In 2004, Ms. Magazine published an article, “Dances with Wolves: Little Red Riding Hood’s Long Walk in the Woods” by Catherine Orenstein. Click on the title and read the article (10-15 minutes). As you do so, take note of what discoveries you make that are important for you. When finished, post your two most important discoveries.
1.6 Optional alternative: Does your own culture have a story that parallels Little Red Riding Hood? If so, copy the story here or write a summary from memory. What is your gut response to this version?

When finished, take a break. Make some tea for yourself or take a five-minute walk or dance to your favorite music.

Summary 1.7: Then, coming back refreshed, quickly review your entire experience. Share your experience in four parts:

1.7a How many minutes did you use to complete Lesson One? Was this more/less time than you had expected? What changes can you make on your side to increase the satisfaction that you find in this learning circle?
1.7b In Lesson One, you experienced many processes: the opening ritual, the introduction (story telling and ideology), comparing and contrasting various versions of RRH, RRH Redux, the Ms article, feedback from co-learners. Name the three, in the order of their importance, that were most beneficial for you. Explain. Name any technical difficulties encountered. How did you solve them? For difficulties with chime or the video, click here. What help/improvement do you still require?
1.7c Are you at ease with giving and receiving readback lines? For how many participants did you offer readback lines? If more than 8, this is great. If less than 5, then please return to some interesting posts above and offer readback lines for a half-dozen more participants after posting this.
1.7d Overall (on a scale of +1 to +10), what is your satisfaction with Lesson One? Is there anything that the Instructional Team should include or remove from this lesson? Please explain.

As a closing treat, click twice on the image below to view a five-minute animated feature prepared by a student of l’école Supinfocom Arles based upon “Chaperon Rouge” (=RRH).  Go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyTDRzV9IcM to view.

[Reflections by Moderator: I found this little gem about a month ago. The animated film demonstrates great artistry with varied points of view, shadows, construction of the landscapes. RRH appears to pass through ruins (perhaps, exploring her past). Then as the sun begins to set, she falls into a troubled sleep and the phantoms of her past show up as “black snakes.” She is startled awake by her dream, but then the “black snakes” become real, frighten her (now in the waking state), and set her to running. The “black snakes” appear only to menace her while she is in the woods. In the end, she appears to find a refuge–but then suddenly, she is engulfed (perhaps, a symbol of the danger in grandma’s house, if, indeed, that is where she sought refuge).]

Congratulations!
With this, you have finished your first session. If no one has posted their writings as of yet, return in a few days, meet new members and post your responses to their writing.

Buddhist singing bowl (click to listen) The learning circle is now officially closed.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~end of case 1

Officially we are going to stop here. For those who might be interested and want to learn something more, I would suggest one or both of the following cross-cultural experiences:

1. Read “The Young Slave,” (a much older Italian fairy tale that resembles “Sleeping Beauty”) and compare it with the Grimm narrative. See Exploration 1.8 below.
2. Learn how children in Somalia are introduced into their cultural identity using memorized geneologies and the narrated stories of their grandmother. Click on the play arrow to hear Ayaan Hirsi Ali tell her personal story. Notice that Ayaan grew up in a predominantly oral culture wherein “memorized geneologies” served as her “identity card” and source of protection when traveling. Stories, meanwhile, gave her a “moral compass” to guide her on her way.

Sleeping Beauty

“Sleeping Beauty” and “Cinderella” represent two familiar children stories that deal with unjust oppression and ultimate vindication. This is a deep-seated and oft-repeated theme interwoven within the oldest narratives of every world religion. In our own day, this is the theme repeated in endless variety in our sitcoms and in our feature films. Stated briefly–virtue will triumph (even when, for the moment, the heroine is despised, beaten down, and overwhelmed with sorrow).

Your mission, should you wish to accept it, is to select either “Sleeping Beauty” or “Cinderella.” Having made your choice, you will then choose two versions of this narrative. Then you will be asked to do a comparative analysis of the two versions and to surface the ideological assumptions undergirding each. If you select “Sleeping Beauty,” just keep reading. If you select “Cinderella,” jump ahead to the heading with that name below.

Exploration 1.8 Read “Sleeping Beauty” as presented by Perrault (ignore the moral) and contrast it with the Grimm version. As a challenging cross-cultural alternative, you might want to read “The Young Slave,” (a much older Italian fairy tale that resembles “Sleeping Beauty”) and to compare it with the Grimm narrative.
1.8a Name two elements in each story that clearly indicate that it was oriented toward a culture different from our own?
1.8b Contrast the two versions from the vantage point of the rescue of the “sleeping beauty.” Explore how each version satisfies and/or annoys you.
1.8c Compare and contrast the two versions from the vantage point of the implied socialization of young women in traditional society? . . . in modern society?

Most readers of Perrault’s story are likely to feel that the section with the ogress-queen doesn’t really belong; it seems to have been adapted from an earlier story which provided a clearer link between it and the more familiar first section. I have included it here for completeness, but the chief reason for reproducing the story here lies in the role of the prince in appearing just when the sleeper needs him.

Apart from the trivial matter of whether there are 8 or 13 fairies/wise women, the main differences seem to me to be that in Perrault’s version (a) the king and queen are not enchanted but leave the castle in order to carry on their reign; and (b) the prince just happens to be there as the princess wakes up, rather than being an active agent in her reawakening. This may indicate that in Perrault’s more courtly society, he envisaged rulers as having an important role which could not be set aside simply because of their daughter’s situation. The less active role of the prince also seems to indicate his subordination, not yet being an active agent.

Both stories reflect the assumptions of their societies that a woman’s fulfillment is to be found in marriage, and that it is worth waiting until ‘Prince Charming’ comes along. This passivity (compare also ‘Snow White) has not been welcomed by modern writers, but in most instances rather than rewriting this tale they have produced other stories with princesses who are far from passive, sometimes rejecting princes who seem to have this expectation from them. See Zipes’ Don’t Bet on the Prince for examples of this.

Bibliography

Video

Red Riding Hood

Redux Riding Hood (Disney short)

Primary Texts

Any faithful version of the stories of Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty as retold by the Grimm Brothers and by Charles Perrault. Particularly interesting collections are:

Opie, I. & P. (ed.) (1974) The Classic Fairy Tales, Oxford: University Press

Philip, N. (ed.) (1989) The Cinderella Story: The Origins and Variations of the Story known as Cinderella, Harmondsworth: Penguin

Tatar, M. (ed.) (1999) The Classic Fairy Tales, New York & London: Norton

Zipes, J. (ed.) (2^nd ed. 1993) The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, London: Routledge

Secondary Texts

Lombardi, Esther, “Top 10 Books About Little Red Riding Hood”

Stephens, J. (1992) Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction, London: Longman

Warner, M. (1994) From the Beast to the Blonde, London: Chatto

Zipes, J. (1986) Don’t Bet on the Prince, Aldershot: Scolar

Zipes, J.(1997) Happily Ever After, London: Routledge

Optional Additional Reading

Garner, J.F. (1994) Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, London: Souvenir Press

Lurie, A. (1980) Clever Gretchen and other Forgotten Folktales, London: Heinemann

Storr, C. (1967) Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf, Harmondsworth: Penguin

[1] Here and elsewhere in this section I am making use of ideas also presented in material I wrote for the Distance Learning MA in Children’s Literature, and for the Foundation Certificate in Children’s Literature, both of Roehampton University.

The Story of Grandmother

unknown author

THERE was once a woman who had some bread, and she said to her daughter: “You are going to carry a hot loaf and a bottle of milk to your grandmother.

The little girl departed. At the crossroads she met the bzou [=werewolf] who said to her:

“Where are you going?”

“I’m taking a hot loaf and a bottle of milk to my grandmother.”

“What road are you taking,” said the bzou, “the Needles Road or the Pins Road?”

“The Needles Road,” said the little girl.

“Well, I shall take the Pins Road.”

The little girl enjoyed herself picking up needles [that had fallen from pine trees].

Meanwhile the bzou arrived at her grandmother’s, killed her, put some of her flesh in the pantry and a bottle of her blood on the shelf. The little girl arrived and knocked at the door.

“Push the door,” said the bzou, “it’s closed with a wet straw.”

“Hello Grandmother; I’m bringing you a hot loaf and a bottle of milk.”

“Put them in the pantry. You eat the meat that’s in it and drink a bottle of wine on the shelf.”

As she ate there was a little cat that said: “A slut is she who eats the flesh and drinks the blood of her grandmother!”

“Undress, my child,” said the bzou, “and come and sleep beside me.”

“Where should I put my apron?”

“Throw it in the fire, my child; you don’t need it anymore.”

“Where should I put my bodice?”

“Throw it in the fire, my child; you don’t need it anymore.”

“Where should I put my dress?”

“Throw it in the fire, my child; you don’t need it anymore.”

“Where should I put my skirt?”

“Throw it in the fire, my child; you don’t need it anymore.”

“Where should I put my hose?”

“Throw it in the fire, my child; you don’t need it anymore.”

[Upon getting into bed she said,]
“Oh, Grandmother, how hairy you are!”

“It’s to keep me warmer, my child”

“Oh, Grandmother, those long nails you have!”

“It’s to scratch me better, my child.”

“Oh, Grandmother, those big shoulders that you have!”

“All the better to carry kindling from the woods, my child.”

“Oh, Grandmother, those big ears that you have!”

“All the better to hear you with, my child.”

“Oh, Grandmother, that big mouth you have!”

“All the better to eat you with, my child!”

“Oh, Grandmother, I need to go outside to pee [urinate].”

“Do it in the bed, my child.”

“No, Grandmother, I want to go outside.”

“All right, but don’t stay long.”

The bzou tied a woolen thread to her foot and let her go out, and when the girl was outside she tied the end of the string to a big plum tree in the yard. The bzou got impatient and said: “Are you making cables?”

When he became aware that no one answered him, he jumped out of bed and saw that the little girl had escaped. He followed her, but she arrived at her house just at the moment she was safely inside.

Little Red Cap

By Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

ONCE there was a dear little girl whom everyone loved. Her grandmother loved her most of all and didn’t known what to give the child next. Once she gave her a little red velvet cap, which was so becoming to her that she wanted to wear anything else, and that was why everyone called her Little Red Cap.

One day her mother said: “Look, Little Red Cap, here’s a piece of cake and a bottle of wine. Take them to grandmother. She is sick and weak, and they will make her feel better. You’d better start now before it gets too hot; walk properly like a good little girl and don’t leave the path or you will fall down and break the bottle and there won’t be anything for grandmother. And when you get to her house, don’t forget to say good morning, and don’t go looking in all the corners.”

“I’ll do everything right,” Little Red Cap promised her mother. Her grandmother lived in the woods, half an hour’s walk from the village.

No sooner had Little Red Cap set foot in the woods than she met the wolf. But Little Red Cap didn’t know what a wicked beast he was, so she wasn’t afraid of him. “Good morning, Little Red Cap,” he said.

“Thank you kindly, wolf.”

“Where are you going so early, Little Red Cap?”

“To my grandmother’s”

“And what’s that you’ve got under your apron?”

“Cake and wine. We baked yesterday and we want my grandmother, who’s sick and weak, to have something nice that will make her feel better.”

“Where does your grandmother live, Little Red Cap?”

“In the woods, fifteen or twenty minutes’ walk from here, under the three oak trees. That’s where the house is. It had hazel hedges around it. You must know the place.”

“How young and tender she is!” thought the wolf. “Why, she’ll be even tastier than the old woman. Maybe if I’m crafty enough I can get them both.” So, after walking along for a short while beside Little Red Cap, he said: ” Little Red Cap, open your eyes. What lovely flowers! Why don’t you look around you? I don’t believe you even hear how sweetly the birds are singing. It’s so gay out here in the wood, yet you trudge as solemnly as if you were going to school.”

Little Red Cap looked up, and when she saw the sunbeams dancing this way and that between the trees and the beautiful flowers all around her, she thought: “Grandmother will be pleased if I bring her a bunch of nice fresh flowers. It’s so early now that I am sure to be there in plenty of time.” And when she had picked one, she thought there must be a more beautiful one farther on, so she went deeper and deeper into the wood.

As for the wolf, he went straight to grandmother’s house and knocked at the door. “Who’s there?” ” Little Red Cap, bringing cake and wine. Open the door.” “Just raise the latch,” cried the grandmother, “I’m too weak to get out of bed.” The wolf raised the latch and the door swung open. Without saying a single word, he went straight to grandmother’s bed and gobbled her up. Then he put on her clothes and her nightcap, lay down in the bed, and drew the curtains.

Meanwhile Little Red Cap had been running about picking flowers, and when she had as many as she could carry she remembered her grandmother and started off again. She was surprised to find the front door open, and when she stepped into the house she had such a strange feeling that she said to herself: “My goodness, I’m usually so glad to see grandmother. Why am I so frightened today?” “Good morning,” she cried out, but there was no answer. Then she went up to the bed and opened the curtains. The grandmother had he cap pulled way down over her face, and looked very strange.

“Oh, grandmother, what big ears you have!”

“The better to hear you with.”

“Oh, grandmother, what big eyes you have!”

“The better to see you with.”

“Oh, grandmother, what big hands you have!”

“The better to grab you with.”

“But, grandmother, what a dreadful mouth you have!”

“The better to eat you with.”

And no sooner had the wolf spoken these words than he bounded off the bed and gobbled up poor Little Red Cap.

When the wolf had stilled his hunger, he got back into bed, fell asleep and began to snore very very loud. A hunter was just passing, and he thought: “How the old woman is snoring! I’d better go and see what’s wrong.” So he stepped into the house and went over to the bed and saw the wolf was in it. “You old sinner!” he said, “I’ve found you at last. It’s been a long time.”

He levelled his musket and was just about to fire when it occurred to him that the wolf may have swallowed the grandmother and that there might still be a chance of saving her. So instead of firing, he took a pair of scissors and started cutting the sleeping wolf’s belly open.

After two snips, he saw the little red cap, after another few snips the little girl jumped out, crying: “Oh, I’ve been so afraid! It was so dark inside the wolf” And the old grandmother came out, and she too was alive, though she could hardly breathe. Little Red Cap ran outside and brought big stones, and they filled the wolf’s belly with them.

When the wolf woke up, he wanted to run away, but the stones were so heavy that his legs wouldn’t carry him and he fell dead.

All three were happy; the hunter skinned the wolf and went home with the skin, the grandmother ate the cake and drank the wine Little Red Cap had brought her and soon got well; and as for Little Red Cap, she said to herself “Never again will I leave the path and run into the woods when my mother tells me not to.”

Little Red Riding Hood

by Charles Perrault

ONCE upon a time there was a little village girl, the prettiest that had ever been seen. Her mother doted on her. Her grandmother was even fonder, and made her a little red hood, which she loved so well that everywhere she went by the name of Little Red Riding Hood.

One day her mother, who had just baked some cakes, said to her: “Go and see how your grandmother is, for I have been told that she is ill. Take her a cake and this little pot of butter.”

Red Riding Hood set off at once for the house of her grandmother, who lived in another village.

On her way through a woods she met old Father Wolf. He would have very much liked to eat her, but dared not to on account of some wood-cutters who were in the forest. He asked her where she was going.

The poor child, not knowing that it was dangerous to stop and listen to a wolf, said: “I am going to see my grandmother, and I am taking her a cake and a pot of butter which my mother has sent to her.”

“Does she live far away?” asked the Wolf.

“Oh yes,” replied Little Red Riding Hood; “it is yonder by the mill which you can see right below there, and it is the first house in the village.”

“Well now,” said the Wolf, “I think I shall go and see her too. I will go by this path, and you by that path, and we will see who gets there first.”

The Wolf set off running with all his might by the shorter road, and the little girl continued on her way by the longer road. As she went she amused herself by gathering nuts, running after the butterflies, and making bouquetes of the wild flowers she found.”

The Wolf was not long in reaching the grandmother’s house.

He knocked. Toc Toc.

“Who is there?”

“It is your granddaughter, Red Riding Hood,” said the Wolf, disguising his voice, “and I bring you a cake and a little pot of butter as a present from my mother.”

The worthy grandmother was in bed, not being very well, and cried out to him: “Pull out the peg and the latch will fall.”

The Wolf drew the peg and the door flew open. Then he sprang upon the poor old lady and ate her up in less than no time, for he had been more than three days without food.

After that he shut the door, lay down in grandmother’s bed, and waited for Little Red Riding Hood.

Presently she came and knocked. Toc Toc.

“Who is there?”

Now Little Red Riding Hood on hearing the Wolf’s gruff voice was at first frightened, but thinking that her grandmother had a bad cold, she replied:
“It is your granddaughter, Red Riding Hood, and I bring you a cake and a little pot of butter from my mother.”

Softening his voice, the Wolf called out to her: “Pull out the peg and the latch will fall.”

Little Red Riding Hood drew out the peg and the door flew open.

When he saw her enter, the Wolf hid himself in the bed beneath the counterpane.

“Put the cake and the little pot of butter on the bin,” he said, “and come up on the bed with me.”

Little Red Riding Hood took off her cloak, but when she climbed up on the bed she was astonished to see how her grandmother looked in her nightgown.

“Grandmother dear!” she exclaimed, “what big arms you have!”

“The better to embrace you, my child.”

“Grandmother dear, what big legs you have!”

“The better to run with, my child.”

“Grandmother dear, what big ears you have!”

“The better to hear with, my child.”

“Grandmother dear, what big eyes you have!”

“The better to see with, my child.”

“Grandmother dear, what big teeth you have!”

“The better to eat you with!”

With these words, the wicked Wolf lept upon Little Red Riding Hood and gobbled her up.

Moral

From this story one learns that children,

Especially young lasses,

Pretty, courteous and well-bred,

Do very wrong to listen to strangers,

And it is not an unheard thing

If the Wolf is thereby provided with his dinner.

I say Wolf, for all wolves

Are not of the same sort;

There is one kind with an amenable disposition

Neither noisy, nor hateful, nor angry,

But tame, obliging and gentle,

Following the young maids

In the streets, even into their homes.

Alas! Who does not know that these gentle wolves

Are of all such creatures the most dangerous!

Dances with Wolves

Little Red Riding Hood’s Long Walk in the Woods

by Catherine Orenstein

These days the social and sexual messages of fairy tales are no secret. Feminists in particular have long recognized that fairy tales socialize boys and especially girls, presenting them with lessons that must be absorbed to reach adulthood.

But what exactly are those lessons? We tend to think of fairy tales as timeless and universal, but in fact they express our collective truths even as those truths shift over time and place.

Take the story of Little Red Riding Hood, for example — a tale we all know well, though not as well as we think.

Once upon a time, “Little Red Riding Hood” was a seduction tale. An engraving accompanying the first published version of the story, in Paris in 1697, shows a girl in her déshabille, lying in bed beneath a wolf. According to the plot, she has just stripped out of her clothes, and a moment later the tale will end with her death in the beast’s jaws — no salvation, no redemption. Any reader of the day would have immediately understood the message: In the French slang, when a girl lost her virginity it was said that elle avoit vû le loup — she’d seen the wolf.

Penned by Charles Perrault for aristocrats at the court of Versailles, “Le petit chaperon rouge” dramatized a contemporary sexual contradiction. It was the age of seduction, notorious for its boudoir histories and its royal courtesans, who rose to power through sexual liaisons and were often celebrated at court; those who made it to the King’s bed might earn the title maîtresse-en-titre, official mistress.

Nonetheless, chastity was the feminine ideal, demanded by the prevailing institution of marriage — not the “fairy tale wedding” of modern fantasy, but the mariage de raison, orchestrated by parents for social or financial gain and often no more than a crass exchange of assets.

Hence the age of seduction was also an age of institutionalized chastity: Girls were raised in convents. By law a man could sequester daughters (or any female relatives) until marriage. Men and women alike could be disinherited, banished or even sentenced to death for the crime of rapt — meaning seduction, elopement or rape (among which the law made scant distinction). And young women were repeatedly warned of the dangers of unscrupulous suitors.

Perrault cloaked his heroine in red, the color of scandal and blood, suggesting the girl’s sin and foreshadowing her fate. Her chaperon, or hood, also took on the tale’s lesson, acquiring the meaning in English, which it already possessed in French, of one who guards girls’ virtue. For good measure, Perrault added an explicit rhyming moral admonishing demoiselles — that is, young ladies of society — to remain chaste:

Little girls, this seems to say, Never stop upon your way, Never trust a stranger-friend; No one knows how it will end. As you’re pretty so be wise; Wolves may lurk in every guise. Handsome they may be, and kind, Gay, and charming — nevermind! Now, as then, ‘tis simple truth — Sweetest tongue has sharpest tooth!

Though Perrault’s moral would eventually be eliminated from the fairy tale, his metaphor has survived to this day. Today we still use the term “wolf” to mean a man who chases women.

In the 19th century Red Riding Hood grew more discreet, and also acquired a man to safeguard her. A fatherly woodsman rescues Red from the beast’s belly and gives her a second chance to walk the straight path through life in “Little Red Cap,” published in 1812 by the German brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. This is the version of the tale that most people know today.

The Grimms did not faithfully preserve the lore of common folk, as they claimed in the preface to their first edition of Children’s and Household Tales. Rather, they adapted the tale for a new children’s audience, excising all erotic content along with Perrault’s incriminating moral. Their revision suggested spiritual rather than sexual danger, and stressed the most important lesson of the day: obedience. That lesson easily found purchase in the social landscape of Victorian Europe.

Not until the 20th century was the bowdlerized Red Riding Hood defrocked, so to speak, and redressed. Advertisements transformed the heroine, once a symbolic warning against the female libido, into an ode to Lust. Ripe young “Riding Hood Red” lipstick would “bring the wolves out,” Max Factor promised, in a poster-sized ad appearing in Vogue in 1953. A 1962 advertisement in The New Yorker offered Red as a glamorous femme fatale, on her way to Grandma’s in her “little Red Hertz.”

And, “Without red, nothing doing,” said a 1983 French advertisement for Johnnie Walker Red Label Scotch whisky, which showed a wolf bypassing a crestfallen girl clad in white. (Who wants to buy a drink for bleached goody-two-shoes?)

Storytellers from the women’s movement and beyond also reclaimed the heroine from male-dominated literary tradition, recasting her as the physical or sexual aggressor and questioning the machismo of the wolf. In the 1984 movie The Company of Wolves, inspired by playwright Angela Carter, the heroine claims a libido equal to that of her lascivious stalker and becomes a wolf herself. In the Internet tale “Red Riding Hood Redux,” the heroine unloads a 9mm Beretta into the wolf and, as tufts of wolf fur waft down, sends the hunter off to a self-help group, White Male Oppressors Anonymous.

The 1996 movie Freeway cast Reese Witherspoon as a tough runaway in a red leather jacket who is more than a match for the serial killer she meets while hitching her way to grandma’s trailer park. And about that macho wolf? A 1989 “Far Side” cartoon by Gary Larson cast the beast on a psychiatrist’s couch, in a floral nightgown. “It was supposed to be just a story about a little kid and a wolf,” he says, “but off and on I’ve been dressing up as a grandmother ever since.”

Modern fairy tales with strong heroines have abounded since the 1970s, when second-wave feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir, Andrea Dworkin and Susan Brownmiller pointed out how the classic fairy tales of Perrault and the brothers Grimm showcase passive, helpless, beauty-queen femininity. Such tales, they argued, made little girls long to become “glamorous victims.”

Since then, men and women alike have rewritten many of the classic tales to reflect more modern ideas about women. But few outside the field of folklore know that some of our most popular stories have oral roots that are strikingly different from the literary tradition and feature heroines who are far from passive. Little Red Riding Hood is such a case.

Folklorists trace the origins of tales the same way paleontologists study the origins of species: by collecting, dating and comparing samples, noting common traits that suggest common ancestry, and attempting to construct a lineage. In the mid-20th century, scholars and collectors found a substantial body of stories from France . All were remarkably similar in plot and many shared an abundance of details, including cannibalism, defecation, a striptease, and a bedroom encounter with a beast.

They lacked, however, the usual fairy tale moral scolding the heroine. And most of them shared one more remarkable element: a clever heroine who escapes by her own wits. One memorable version of the story genre ends like this: Lying in bed with the villain — this time, a bzou, or werewolf — the heroine pretends she has to relieve herself. The bzou tells her to do it in the bed, but she refuses —“Oh no, that will smell bad!” she says in another variation —so the bzou ties a cord around the heroine’s ankle and lets her out on the leash, tugging periodically to ensure she does not get away.

Once outside, however, the girl unknots the cord and ties it around a tree. With the bzou in belated pursuit, she escapes. Folklorists are now reasonably certain that this is how Little Red Riding Hood’s adventure was told many years ago, around the fire or in the fields, long before she found her way to print. . . .

But oral fairy tales were often told by women, to the repetitive rhythms of work, until spinning a yarn and telling a tale were one and the same. Spinning and sewing terms often appear in fairy tales — Rumplestiltskin spins straw into gold, Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger on a spindle, and in the oral ancestor of Red Riding Hood, the heroine meets her adversary at “the path of pins and needles.”

Such terms, symbolic of women’s work and skills, serve to remind us that these stories were once wives’ tales — that is, stories told by women — before that term came to mean a lie. Should it be surprising that a woman storyteller would cast her heroine as more clever than her adversary? Or represent female maturity in different terms from male authors of history?

If these stories came only from one city or country, perhaps one would begin by searching for a particular explanation in that particular locale. But as it turns out, Red Riding Hood’s empowered sisters have been found all around the globe — not only in France but throughout Europe and in lands as far away as China — which ought to make us broadly question our so-called timeless and universal stories about women, and our very notion of a heroine.

Catherine Orenstein is the author of Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale (Basic Books, 2002).

Why I bought a $1207 Ticket to China

by Aaron Milavec

Exceptional merit score received from other writers at FanStory

subtitle = Two brothers, two views of God and sex

by Aaron Milavec

Author Tools:

The author has placed a warning on this post for sexual content.

When I was a young child, the story of salvation given to me by the Ursuline nuns at Holy Cross Grade School in Euclid, Ohio, was something so simple, so compelling, and so wonderful.  Adam sinned and we inherited the consequences: God’s grace dried up and the gates of heaven were sealed shut.  For thousands of years, people were dying, but no one was able to get into heaven.  Everyone was waiting for God to send a redeemer.  Then, Jesus finally arrived and died for our sins on the cross.  And, as my Baltimore Catechism so clearly demonstrated, at the moment that Jesus died on the cross, there, way up in the clouds, the gates of heaven were again being opened.  Finally the souls of all the good people who had died could enter into heaven and be with God for all eternity.

While the Catholic Church has not officially endorsed any specific soteriology,[i] the most popular by far is the theology whereby God forgives all sins due to the merits of Christ’s passion on the cross.

During my eight years at Holy Cross Grade School in Euclid, Ohio, I recall vividly how we knelt on the wood floor next to our benches every morning and faced the large crucifix above the blackboard as we recited our morning prayers.  On Fridays in Lent, we were herded into the church and confronted with an even more vivid reminder of

the drama of our salvation.  The Stations of the Cross consisted in fourteen graphically depicted sufferings of Jesus, which covered the sidewalls of Holy Cross Church.  At the beginning of each station, Fr. McMonigle, vested in his somber black cope, called out in a loud voice, “We adore thee, O Christ, and we bless thee.”  All of us children then dropped to our knees and answered in a deafening chorus, “Because by thy holy cross thou hast redeemed the world!”

The Limits of Forgiveness

Should the thousands of young women humiliated, raped, and savagely murdered in the Jewish wars (66-70 and 135-136 CE) or in the recent wars in Bosnia[ii] (1992-1996) be told that they must learn to kiss and embrace their perpetrators when the new age dawns?  Should the young men cut down in wars–especially those who died crying in pain as they slowly suffocated in their own blood–be told, at the time of the resurrection of the dead, that all wars were good and all wars were justified because everyone fought for what seemed to them a just cause and everyone was expected to follow orders?  Should those who spent their lives “weighing down with toil the oppressed” (Did. 5:2) and those who served as “advocates of the rich” (Did. 5:2) be granted equal and ready forgiveness along with their victims?  The members of the Didache would not have thought so.

Dostoevsky, in his Brothers Karamazov, tested his own objections to the fanciful preaching that Jesus “can forgive everyone for everything because he himself shed his innocent blood for everyone and for everything” (2.5.4) in the character of Ivan.  Faced with the innocent suffering of children, Ivan objects to the notion that Jesus (or anyone else for that matter) had the right to forgive, either now or at the final judgment, the torture inflicted on children.  Ivan provides Alyosha, his brother, many graphic examples culled from the daily newspaper.  One such tale he narrates is the following:

A little girl of five was abused by her parents, “descent and most respectable people, well educated and cultured. . . .”  Those educated parents subjected that poor little five-year-old to every conceivable torture.  They beat her, whipped her, kicked her till she was black and blue, all for no reason.  Finally, they thought of the ultimate punishment; they shut her up all night in the outside privy, in the cold and the frost, because she wet herself at night (as if a five-year-old, sleeping soundly like an angel, could excuse herself in time)‑-for this, they smeared her face with her excrement and forced her to eat it, and it was her mother, her mother who did this to her!  And that mother slept unconcernedly at night, oblivious to the sobs of the poor child shut up in that foul place!  Can you understand such a thing: that small child, unable even to comprehend what is being done to her, in the dark and the cold of that foul place, beating her little panting breast with her tiny fists, sobbing, weeping humble tears of bloodstained innocence, praying to “Dear Father God” to protect her. . . (2.5.4).

Only a pious, romanticized Christianity that mindlessly rhapsodizes about the unbounded love of God but has never felt the broken bodies and broken lives of the innocent victims of torture, of racial degradation, of systemic injustice would propose that everyone, no matter how heinous their crimes, need merely cry out for mercy in the face of the divine fire threatening to utterly destroy them and expect to be saved by Jesus.

The Jewish survivors of the Shoah (wrongfully called “the Holocaust”) are much more on target when it comes to the issue of forgiveness:

• (a) No one can forgive on behalf of another;
• (b) No one ought to forgive unless there is teshuvah (“turning around” and repudiation of past crimes);
• (c) Finally, even when forgives comes, there is an obligation never to forget the past lest such crimes be repeated.

The survivors of rape, incest, torture, spousal abuse, and of systemic injustice are likewise today wisely counseled to hold on to their rage since only by embracing it to its depth can they be healing of their victimization (see #12a).

For the innocent victims, there might arrive a moment for forgiveness, but this forgiveness cannot come too early or too late, neither can it be given too promiscuously or too parsimoniously‑-otherwise the very justice of God would be mocked.  If God is not committed to bring justice and to insure that “the gentle . . . inherit the earth” (Did. 3:7), then the entire community of the Didache would have to become a subversive organization bent upon devising means to bring justice in the face of a false god unwilling or unable to protect the victims of this world from the exploiters and abusers.

When the victims of the Shoah are raised from the dead and called by their heavenly Father to enter into his Kingdom that has finally arrived on the face of this earth, they will never go in if they see that God has chosen Nazi guards to hand out the invitations and to form orderly lines among the masses rushing to enter into Paradise. Accordingly it might rightly be said that only someone who has been unjustly victimized or someone who has wiped away the hot tears of those who have been victimized would be capable of discerning the thin raw echo of victimization that runs through the Didache and the Gospels.

Jesus’ Atoning Death and Solidarity With Victims

More than one scholar has noted that the Didache makes no reference to the efficacy of Jesus’ death in God’s plan of salvation.  For that matter, the Didache likewise refrains from casting any positive light upon suffering as such.  This may strike many Christians as curious since most Christians have become accustomed to accept the efficacy of Jesus’ suffering on the Roman cross as imbued with God’s mysterious plan of salvation.  Hence this issue deserves some consideration.  I frame my considerations within two test cases: (a) the suffering-death of my own mother; (b) the suffering-death of a million Jewish mothers.

The Suffering-Death of my Mother

By way of beginning, consider the following reflections upon suffering that my mother read from her prayer book while her pastor, Fr. McMonigle, was quietly reciting the Latin prayers that constituted the “Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.”  I specifically chose her prayer book because she used this during the seven years when she was bursting with health and during the last seven months of 1946 when her body was being eaten away by an inoperable cancer.

• “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. . . ” (Mt 5:5, 10-12).
• By sufferings we become like to Christ and His blessed Mother, our Lady of Sorrows. Suffering was the lot of all the saints.  Suffering is very meritorious.  Suffering intensifies our love of God.  Suffering has a refining influence upon our character. . . .
• Suffering is conducive to sanctity, for every sorrow, every trial, can be turned into a blessing. . . . Ignatius Loyola says: “If the Lord send you great tribulations, it is an evidence that he has great designs upon you, and that he wills that you become a saint. . . .”
• “The Son of God,” says St. Theresa, “has accomplished our salvation by the means of sufferings; He would by this teach us that there is no means more proper to glorify God and to sanctify our souls than to suffer” (My Prayer Book: 84-88).

Recently some Christian women have become alarmed by the distorted piety found in prayer books like the one used by my mother.  Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker stepped back from the sentiments named above and concluded that “Christianity [such as this] is an abusive theology that glorifies suffering” (cited in Heyward:384).  They accordingly tried to discover the source of this distorted theology fixated upon suffering:

Is it any wonder that there is so much abuse in modern society when the predominant image or theology of the culture is [a celebration] of “divine child abuse”–God the Father demanding and carrying out the suffering and death of his own son? (cited in Heyward:384).

Struggling to retain both their faith in God and their solidarity with victims, Brown and Parker ended up affirming categorically that “suffering is never redemptive and suffering cannot be redeemed” (cited in Heyward:384).

The great lie: “God loved your mother so much.”

At the time of my mother’s death, a pious aunt whom I greatly admired tried to console me by saying that, “God loved your mother so much that he took her early to be with him in heaven.”  As I pondered her words in the days follow the funeral, I discovered that her words upset me more and more. “How could God love my mother so much and, at the same time, to love me so little?”  Even as a little boy, I knew that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was transported, body and soul, into Heaven. “Why did God take my mother away from me?  He already had his own mother with him in Heaven. I, on the other hand, was very much in need of my mother.”

From that day forward, I slowly began to realize that God was not the “nice Guy” that everyone made him out to be.  I stopped praying to God entirely.  All my prayers were addressed to Mary and to my Mom in Heaven.

As a teenager, I realized that, for seven months, my mother suffered terribly before she died.  It was then that I slowly came to the understand that my aunt did not understand God at all.  Considering the terrible way that my mother slowly died, it was impossible for my aunt to say that “God loved your mother so much. . . .”  My logic was heart-rending and true: “When you love someone, you take care of them.  My God, as it turned out, did not take care of me.  He did not love me, and, he did not really love my Mom either.”

Even as a boy of eight, I sensed that I was moving into uncharted and dangerous territory.  I was confused. I was upset.[iii]  I felt cheated.  I felt abandoned.  My Baltimore Catechism had these words: “God made us to know him, to love him, and to serve him in order to be [after death] eternally happy with him in Heaven.”  The truth is that I wanted to go to Heaven solely in order to be with my Mom again.  I knew that she would immediately understand my “distrust” of God and that she would be able “to fix it.”  Until then, I had no interest in ever being alone with God.  If God could not patiently wait for another ten years—the years when I most needed my Mom—then why could I trust him to be remotely capable of making me “eternally happy”?  God failed me “big time” in 1946 and some future happiness “with him” seemed very unattractive and very unlikely. My Mom and the Virgin Mary knew what I needed; my God, on the other hand, appeared to me to be entirely clueless!

This darkness of the soul overshadowed me for the next eight years. Then, at the age of sixteen, the veil was lifted.  “God does not kill people because he wants to bring them (early) to Heaven.”

When I recall the events surrounding my mother’s death today, I notice how unprotected I was when it came to digesting the awful implications of my aunt’s remark.  I also came to realize how sensitive and thoughtful Christians can sometimes say dreadfully toxic things when faced with the enormity of the loss experienced by survivors.

A Million Jewish Mothers Die

Just to see how far some Christians have gone in order to extend the mystique of suffering, consider the responses made by highly educated Catholics to the extermination of the six million Jews during the Shoah (also referred to as “the Holocaust”).  Cardinal John O’Connor, acting as the Catholic Archbishop of New York, had this to say as part of his reflections upon visiting Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Israel:

The crucifixion and its enormous power continue mystically and spiritually in this world in our day and will continue to the end of time.  Christ . . . continues to suffer in his Body, the Church. . . . And this suffering has a purpose and an effect, as does ours if we conjoin it with his, if we “offer it up”. . . .  [Consequently] if the suffering of the crucifixion was infinitely redemptive, the suffering of the Holocaust, potentially conjoined with it, is incalculably redemptive (47-48).

Archbishop O’Connor was seemingly horrified by the mountain of shoes that were removed from the feet of mothers and children destined for the furnaces of the extermination camps.  Mesmerized by the infinite redemptive suffering of Christ, Archbishop O’Connor undoubtedly thought he was honoring the suffering within the Nazi concentration camps when he associated their sufferings as being redemptive in a way analogous to the sufferings of Jesus.  Many survivors of the death camps and their relatives (see Jacobs: 52-55) were neither flattered nor consoled by the Archbishop’s crude attempt to extend a Christian atonement theology to cover the enormity of evil involved in their loss.  The protesting Jews didn’t mind that Archbishop O’Connor wanted to sugar-coat the sufferings of one Jew (Jesus); but they were totally livid when he tried to take his warped Christian theology and to use it to sugar-coat the Nazi campaign that brought about the death of a million Jewish mothers.

Sorry to say, even John Paul II has flirted with applying a mystique of suffering to the Shoah.  When addressing the Jews of Warsaw on 14 June 1987, he spoke as follows:

We believe in the purifying power of suffering.  The more atrocious the suffering, the greater the purification.  The more painful the experiences, the greater the hope. . . (cited in Jacobs:53).

A year later, while visiting Mauthausen Concentration Camp, the Pope further observed that “the Jews [killed here] enriched the world by their suffering, and their death was like a grain that must fall into the earth in order to bear fruit, in the words of Jesus who brings salvation” (cited in Jacobs:53).

Such language is confusing and/or outright blasphemous in the ears of most Jews.  Does a Jewish father whose daughter has been conscripted to provide sexual favors to the German troops in the front lines tell his daughter that her suffering will purify her love, purify her body, purify anything?  Does a Jewish mother tell her little son who is about to be separated from her and to die a slow starvation in the transport trains that the more painful the experience, the greater hope he ought to have?  Hope for what?  Even popes, one can see, sometimes make silly and injurious remarks when they are blinded by an unexamined and unreflective doctrine that seemingly inflates the benefits of the sufferings of Christ.

The truth is that Golgotha and Auschwitz do have a common thread of interpretation but this has nothing to do with a distorted mysticism of suffering or with the forgiveness of the guilty due to the death of the innocent.  The common thread is that any system or person systematically dehumanizing others and using prolonged torture and slow starvation to make his/her point is acting cruelly and inhumanely.  Inflicting torture cannot be sugar-coated.  The screaming victims cannot be imagined as gaining for themselves or for others some mysterious benefit in this world or in the next.  One can only say that the torture should never have happened and that the survivors stand as a witness to the depth of sin in the world.  As for God, we should never even hint that God would encourage, allow, or make use of torture.  Rather, we can only say that this kind of stuff makes God cringe and to avert his eyes such that the torture victims themselves cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Edward Schillebeeckx, in his two-volume investigation on Christology, came to this same conclusion after investigation the whole gamut of biblical references pertaining to the suffering and death of Jesus.  By way of reflecting upon his findings, he wrote:

God and suffering are diametrically opposed. . . .  We can accept that there are certain forms of suffering that enrich our humanity. . . .  However, there is an excess of suffering and evil in our history. . . .  There is too much unmerited and senseless suffering. . . .  But in that case we cannot look for a divine reason for the death of Jesus either.  Therefore, first of all, we have to say that we are not redeemed thanks to the death of Jesus but despite it (1980:695; See also 724f, 729).

There is neither the time nor the place to develop how Schillebeeckx moves through the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures in order to arrive at this stark and unexpected conclusion.  It suffices, for our purpose here, to note that the Didache deliberately refrains from making any positive gesture toward the crucifixion of Jesus whatsoever.  My hunch is that the framers of the Didache, like contemporary Jews and like the young boy who lost his only mother, are repulsed by any notion of God that glosses over and makes torture acceptable.  Whether it is Jews being tortured by medical experiments in the camps, or Jesus tortured on a Roman cross deliberately designed to humiliate and prolong death, or the case of a young mother tortured by the cancer eating her body‑-there is no divine reason for any of these.  God cries out with the victim and tears his garments in grief as he does so.  Any other God cannot be said to be in solidarity with victims.

God Tears his Garments and Grieves for Jesus’ Death

The closer that one examines the passion narratives, the more remote the Christian theology of atonement becomes.  According to this theology, Jesus’ death on the cross is the brightest moment in salvation history.  According to the Synoptics, however, it is the darkest: “From the sixth hour, there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour” (Mt 27:45 and par.).  At the moment of Jesus’ death, my childhood catechism presents the imagined image of the Gates of Heaven being thrown open after having been locked ever since the sin of Adam and Eve.  According to the Synoptics, however, it is the temple veil that is rent in two “from top to bottom” (Mt 27:51 and par.).  In most instances, this rending of the veil has been interpreted to signal that the crime of the priests is so grievous that God abandons the holy of holies‑-tearing through the temple veil as he exits.  Such an interpretation fails to take into account that the disciples of Jesus in Jerusalem went to the temple daily to pray and to teach (Acts 2:46, Acts 3:1, Acts 5:42).  Seemingly they have not the slightest hint that the temple has been vacated; they pray and teach in the temple and experience the closeness to God as usual.

Other scholars have suggested that this tearing “originally represented Jesus’ death” and later became a “supernatural portent of Jesus’ deity” (Gundry 1994:575).  But what sense does it make to represent Jesus’ death symbolically when, in actual fact, the event itself, with all its gory details, had just been carefully narrated?  The Letter to the Hebrews makes an oblique reference to “the new and living way that he opened for us through the [temple] curtain” (Heb 10:20), but it would be risky to transpose the theology of Hebrews back into the Synoptics.

Following a suggestion of David Daube (23-26), a Jewish scholar, here is an interpretation that Christians have been prone to overlook:

One has to be aware of the modes of expressing grief then current among the Jewish people.  When a father of Jesus’ day would hear of the death of a son, he would invariably rend his garment by grabbing it at the neck and tearing it from top to bottom [see, e.g., Gn 27:34, Job 1:20, b. Moed Qatqan 25a, b. Menahot 48a].  This is precisely the gesture suggested by the particulars of Matthew’s text: “The veil of the Temple as torn in two from top to bottom” (27:51).  In truth, God is Spirit.  Symbolically, however, the presence of God within the holy of holies was rendered secure from prying eyes by the veil that surrounded that place.  As such, the veil conceals the “nakedness” of God.  It is this “garment” that [the] grief-stricken Father of Jesus tears from top to bottom when he hears the final death-cry of his beloved son.  Even for the Father, therefore, the death of Jesus is bitter tragedy and heartfelt grief (Milavec 1982:57).

This should provide my readers with a point of departure for reeducating ourselves how to distinguish various kinds of suffering, how to recapture our rage and indignation at the suffering of the innocent, and how to wrest the message and death of Jesus from being a soft-headed plea for submitting to evil and forgiving enemies under any and all circumstances.

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Endnotes

[i].Soteriology seeks to make sense of how God offers salvation to his/her people.  Jesus and his immediate disciples anticipated the coming of God from heaven to gather the Jewish exiles and to establish his kingdom on earth.  The Church Fathers preferred to think that the divine Logos had become human in order to establish that humans could, by successive stages, attain to that divinization to which they were destined by God.  During the medieval period, Christians were preoccupied with sin‑-Adam failed God in the Garden and accordingly, all his children were conceived in sin and destined for eternal damnation.  Jesus, the Son of God, however, became human such that a human could make complete satisfaction by his death on the cross for all the sins of the world.  Whether God is envisioned as bringing the kingdom or as restoring human access to divinization or as providing satisfaction for sins makes a big difference in how God is understood and how Jesus relates to God and to our salvation.  Interested readers might read Karen Armstrong, A History of God (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993).

[ii] During the Bosnian war, 50,000 Bosnian women faced gang rapes and forced impregnation in what became known as “rape camps.” Today there are 2,000-4,000 children born out of that war. The children born following these rapes are neither Serbian nor Bosnian; they are invisible. Now, as adults, they struggle to cope with the past and its consequences. Moreover, any hint of their existence in public life is reduced to a faltering silence.

In support of the ethnic cleansing strategy engineered by the Serbian authorities, genocidal rapes aimed to “plant the seed of Serbs in Bosnia” and produce little “Chetniks.” Also, it intended to prevent the captives and their families from returning to the region. A whole system was constructed – villages transformed into rape camps, gynecologists were on shift, and to avoid miscarriages and abortions, women were released only in advanced pregnancy.

[iii] What I felt at the age of eight was “raw anger.”  I couldn’t say this out loud, of course.  I was raised as a “nice boy.”  If someone does something nasty, one immediately thinks of getting ready to forgive.  No one was talking about times when it was permitted (nay, even necessary) to be “angry with God.”  Being a “nice boy,” I was raised only to “love God.”  So, my own rigorous religious formation refused to give me permission to be “angry with God.”  Thus, I was entrapped and crippled in the web of my own beloved faith tradition.

Quotes from the film:

The elders told us it [the unexplained pregnancies] was the work of ghosts or satan. Or that we were lying to get attention. or that it was an act of wild female imagination.

We were given two days to forgive the attackers before they returned. If we did not forgive them, we would be ordered to leave the colony and be denied entry to the kingdom of heaven.

It is part of our faith to forgive. We have always forgiven those who have wronged us; why not now?

I cannot forgive them. I can never forgive them.

We have been preyed upon like animals. We should respond like animals.

Just leave with the rest of the “do nothing” women.

Where I come from, where your mother comes from, we didn’t talk about our bodies. So when something like this happened, there was no language for it.

In that gaping silence was the real horror.

Why did my feet keep moving forward when hers couldn’t?

Perhaps we need to know more about what we are fighting to achieve rather than what we are fighting to destroy.

We’re women without a voice.

All we have is our dreams, so of course we are dreamers.

We know that we must protect our children, regardless of who is guilty.

Are you saying the attackers are as much victims as the victims of the attacks?

None of us have ever asked the men for anything, not a single thing.

Sometimes I think people laugh as hard as they’d like to cry.

How would you feel if, for your entire life, it didn’t matter how you thought?

When we liberate ourselves, we will have to ask ourselves who we are.

I love it. Isn’t that strange?

I won’t speak of it or anything else ever again.

I want to help, and I don’t know how.

Time will heal. Our freedom and safety are the ultimate goals, and it is men who prevent us from achieving those goals.

One day, I’d like to hear that from someone who should be saying it.

If I were married, I wouldn’t be myself. So the person you loved would be gone.

They made us disbelieve ourselves. That was worse than…

If God is a loving god, then he will forgive us himself.

I will destroy any living thing that harms my child. I will tear it limb from limb. I will desecrate its body and burn it alive.

I will become a murderer if I stay.

By A.O. Scott

Published Dec. 22, 2022  Updated March 6, 2023

Women Talking

NYT Critic’s Pick

Directed by Sarah Polley

Drama

PG-13

1h 44m

Every so often, “Women Talking” lets its attention wander away from its main concern (which is, as you might have guessed, women talking) to observe the hands of girls as they draw pictures, play complicated clapping and string-figure games or braid one another’s hair into intricate plaits. The grace and discipline of those activities, and the creativity they express, are woven into the film itself, which seems plain-spoken almost to the point of artlessness and turns out to be as layered and whorled as a hand-woven tapestry.

The women are members of an agrarian religious community that has kept its distance from modernity. An outsider’s pickup truck blasting the Monkees’ “Daydream Believer” is one of a handful of signs that this movie, directed by Sarah Polley from a novel by Miriam Toews, takes place anywhere near the present.

Toews’s book was suggested by actual events that took place from 2005 to 2009 at a Mennonite colony in Bolivia, but the film version doesn’t specify a location. That vagueness reflects both the universality of the story’s themes and what the women know of the secular world, which is very little. Though many of them can recite the Bible from memory, they haven’t been taught to read and write.

Their educations have been minimal, but their wisdom, acquired through farm and household labor, child-rearing, prayer and intuition, is vast. Or at least sufficient to spur the emergence of a powerful and sophisticated collective political consciousness. How they arrive at a clear understanding of their oppression and potential liberation is the film’s subject, a source of suspense, emotion and inspiration.

What the women are talking about is what some of the men in the colony have done to them. Or maybe not quite that: They all know that a large number of their husbands, brothers, relatives and neighbors have been sneaking into the bedrooms of women and girls at night, equipped with a spray used to tranquilize livestock, and raping their unconscious victims. A few flashbacks to the aftermaths of some of the attacks are sufficient to convey their horror. Now that the colony’s elders have admitted the problem and the secular authorities have gotten involved, the question is how to respond.

While most of the men are away, bailing the accused perpetrators out of jail, a group of women meets in a hayloft to hash out a course of action. The women of the community have already voted in a referendum offering three choices: do nothing — forgive, forget and hope for the best; stay and fight; or leave. The first option having been soundly rejected, they settle in to debate the other two, arguing the relative merits of exit and voice.

Many of the participants favor exit, but “Women Talking,” as its title suggests, is mostly voice — a weave of voices in varying arrangements of harmony and dissonance. The calmest and most measured, but also in some ways the most passionate and principled, belongs to Ona (Rooney Mara), who is pregnant. Salome (Claire Foy) and Mariche (Jessie Buckley), two mothers of young children, provide antiphonal chords of anger. Both are victims of male violence, but they often turn their rage on each other. Two older women, Greta (Sheila McCarthy) and Agata (Judith Ivey), offer sympathy, perspective and occasional grandma jokes, though the necessary spark of mischief comes from the younger generation, boisterously represented by Liv McNeil, Michelle McLeod and Kate Hallett.

There’s also a man in the barn, whose job is to take the minutes of the meeting. His name is August, and he’s played with appropriate sensitivity by Ben Whishaw. In the book, he is also the narrator, but Polley has replaced him with a woman whom it might be a spoiler to name, leaving August as a reminder that while not all men are monsters to women, every man is implicated in the arrangements of power that enable the monstrosity.

But the movie isn’t about the men. They are a blank that it’s easy enough to fill in, a set of facts implied in the words and silences of the women. Away from their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons, the main characters experience a comfort that is clearly familiar, and a freedom that feels new. Their personalities peek out from behind the scrim of their defined, taken-for-granted roles.

“Women Talking” compels you to think about their plight, but it also invites you to enjoy their company. It seems contrary to Polley’s democratic method to single out performances for praise, but I found myself coming back to the wit that percolates underneath Foy’s ferocity, the deep sorrow behind McCarthy’s patience, Ivey’s beatitude, Hallett’s rambunctious high humor, Frances McDormand’s heartbreaking silence and August Winter’s unaffected dignity as a gender-nonconforming character named Melvin.

And also the poetry of Polley’s images (shot by Luc Montpellier), which show the beauty of life in the colony. Following Toews — and the women themselves, whose faith informs their rebellion — Polley takes the religious life of the colony seriously, refusing to treat it as exotic or outlandish. The point of leaving isn’t to reject belief, but to reestablish it on a firmer, more coherent moral basis, to imagine “a new colony” of trust and safety.

That idea is by definition Utopian, and also consistent with the radical Christian tradition that the existing colony represents. The root of Protestantism, after all, is protest — against arbitrary and unaccountable authority in the name of a higher truth. “Women Talking” reawakens that idea and applies it, with precision and passion, to our own time and circumstances. The women don’t want pity or revenge. They want a better world. Why not listen?

Please add your own reflections below.