|
I was also inspired, around that time, by the film version of Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods.” I still prefer to listen to the soundtrack at top volume, marveling at the poetry of Sondheim’s rhyming and timing. Lilla Crawford singing the part of Little Red in “I Know Things Now” expanded my mind to the layers that exist beneath what I thought I knew about a ‘simple’ story. It’s a micro example of what Sondheim does on the macro level with this play, looking at how seemingly different stories intersect…and what it provides is not a sense of boredom from repetition, but instead a deepening of what each story element has to offer: the woods grow broader and take on more meaning, as does the red cape, the evil mother figure, the girl in search of definition… In Writing a Woman’s Life, Carolyn Heilbrun observes that “…married women, powerless in their marriages, joined with the patriarchy in isolating those who dared to live out other plots. Was marriage always in such danger of becoming unappealing to women that the whole society had to contrive to keep the fiction of its desirability alive and intact?” We take it for granted that marriage, like many of the things that are supposed to ‘define’ a woman, is a tradition that promises security. But it was - and still can be - not safety or freedom, but one of the most dangerous threats to a woman’s well-being and autonomy. Somewhere in history, the story had to be made that it was safe. The wolf had to eat the Grandma. In a poem that goes into the dark territory of grief, where remembering a dead loved one can bring danger to the periphery of the life I’m still living, I too had to be willing to be swallowed, and in turn to swallow the things I feared to say. Imagine a Woman is a book about speaking those things aloud, silently, on the page, as I slowly unfold the meaning of all the stories I’ve been told, and the ones I long to tell. Publishing this book means I finally get to give them volume, reverberation, Sound. As I heard them come through inside my head, now I can give them to you to read, imagining how they might sound in yours.
|
