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WOMAN AND NATURE -- THE ROARING INSIDE HER |
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PREFACE This is an unconventional book and so, it was felt, needed some preface. I began writing this book roughly three years ago, after I was asked to deliver a lecture on women and ecology. I was concerned that the ecological movement had often placed the burden for solving its problems, those that this civilization has with nature, on women. I said in that lecture that women were always being asked to clean up, and to this I added the observation that men consider women to be more material than themselves, or more a part of nature. The fact that man does not consider himself a part of nature, but indeed considers himself superior to matter, seemed to me to gain significance when placed against man's attitude that woman is both inferior to him and closer to nature. Hence this book called Woman and Nature grew. In the process of writing I found that I could best discover my insights about the logic of civilized man by going underneath logic, that is by writing associatively, and thus enlisting my intuition, or uncivilized self. Thus my prose in this book is like poetry, and like poetry always begins with feeling. One of the loudest complaints which this book makes about patriarchal thought (or the thought of civilized man) is that it claims to be objective, and separated from emotion, and so it is appropriate that the style of this book does not make that separation. Since patriarchal thought does, however, represent itself as emotionless (objective, detached and bodiless), the dicta of Western civilization' and science on the subjects of woman and nature in this book are written in a parody of a voice with such presumptions. This voice rarely uses a personal pronoun, never speaks as "I" or "we," and almost always implies that it has found absolute truth, or at least has the authority to do so. In writing this book, this paternal voice became quite real to me, and I was afraid of it. It sprang out at me in the form of recognized opinion and told me that the reactions I experienced in my female body to its declarations were ridiculous (unfounded, hysterical, biased). You will recognize that voice from its use of such phrases as "it is decided" or "the discovery was made." Much research went into the reconstruction of this voice: I tried to preserve its style and tone accurately. The other voice in the book began as my voice but was quickly joined by the voices of other women, and voices from nature, with which I felt more and more strongly identified, particularly as I read the opinions of men about us. This is an embodied voice, and an impassioned one. These two voices (though you will find more than two in the text) are set in different type styles; thus a dialogue is implied throughout the book. I begin the book by tracing a history of patriarchy's judgments about the nature of matter, or the nature of nature, and place these judgments side by side, chronologically, with men's opinions about the nature of women throughout history. From this philosophical beginning the book becomes more actual, treating of the effect of patriarchal logic on material beings. And so the first book, "Matter," continues the analogy drawn between woman and nature into explorations of the earth, trees, cows, show horses and women's bodies as we all exist in patriarchy. The second book is entitled "Separation," and beginning with the separation of a womb from a woman's body, lists and protests against all those separations which are part of the civilized male's thinking and living- mind from emotion, body from soul-and reveals that separation which patriarchy requires us to make from ourselves. The third book, called "Passage," finally separates our consciousness from the consciousness of patriarchy, and thus the fourth book is called "Her Vision: Now She Sees Through Her Own Eyes." In "Her Vision," all that we have seen in the first two books from the eye of patriarchy is now reseen. Thus the book is not so much utopian as a description of a different way of seeing. And so the section called "The Zoological Garden" is reflected in "Her Vision" as "The Lion in the Den of the Prophets." I had thought, in writing "Her Vision," that this book would be like a mirror, and hence tried to put the sections in the same order (except backward) as they appeared in the first two books. But this proved impossible. "Her Vision" would not be so constricted. While I was writing Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, the spaces I created within it began to be real for me; passing over into work on "Her Vision," I would feel as if I had entered a free zone, and breathe a sigh of relief. I hope the reader will enter these spaces as I entered them, moving through these ways of seeing with passion, and will hear the voices as I hear them, especially the great chorus of woman and nature, which will swell with time. And I hope the reader will know, too, though this is just a book and thus just a fiction, that the feelings which enter these words are very real, and that in this matter of woman and nature, we have cause to feel deeply. SUSAN GRIFFIN _______________ * I have purposely limited the scope of this book to Western civilization.
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