who will love a little sparrow?

GUIDELINES + ABOUT + MARY + LILITH + EVE

Whether or not women are oppressed (they are)

Does blogging on your Tumblr count as activism (it doesn’t)

Whose feminist praxis is better (this one isn’t for me to judge)

If the depiction of Lilith this season was misogynist (it was)

If turning Mambo Marie into a man was racist, homophobic, and misogynist (it was)

If Adam 2.0 had a personality (he didn’t)

Whether or not Mary Wardwell is canonically a closeted lesbian (she is)

What Lilith’s astrological signs would be if she had any (I have no idea)

                 there is something to be said, truly there is, about new england’s hospitality but this, ah this goes above and beyond hospitable, affable manners. this is entirely different - and entirely unexpected. It is forced upon her with a gracious and old fashioned cordiality tissaia cannot spurn lest she prove to be the disrespectful one. the words, the downpour of words and facts streaming in different directions under the pull of ms wardwell’s erratic thoughts encountering the obstacles of memories deviating them further and further away from their destination, would be enough to sweep her away if it weren’t for the woman herself. birdlike in her mannerisms. not exactly frail but wary and aware in the way small birds are when they know they are being watched.

she fits. here. the town is almost a pastiche, some illustration brought to life and filled with near cartoonish characters inhabiting picturesque streets, quaint houses and fairytale-like woods. and mary wardwell simply, exquisitely fits in. oh yes, there is some sort of dignity about her, a simple and sober elegance in the way she carries herself. tissaia angles her head to alter her vantage. in the way you hide herself, she amends. in the way she burrows behind an old cardigan, an eclectic collection of trinkets and other singular curiosities, and a rather impressive compilation of books (oh and maps, apparently) talking is easy to her, recounting lore and fragments of history that would all but be lost if it weren’t for her scholarly devotion comes naturally. being on the receiving end of observation, however, unnerves her.

 “there were witch trials here?” 

tissaia moves a few inches in an unusual display of physical enthusiasm. it’s barely a step in the teacher’s direction but it is enough to knock a small pile of books over. they topple down from the corner of a most offensively cluttered desk (how does she manage to navigate this place is beyond her) down to the equally busy paper basket. “my apologies.” inwardly rattled by what feels like an overwhelming mess, she experiences a greater level of discomfort now that she is picking the books up to place them back where they belong in a neat little pile, each tome perfectly adjusted to the one under it. there now, stop. count. she takes in a breath, counts to ten, pulls on the sleeves of her coat.

“i would very much like to see this house.” the smile that ensues isn’t disingenuous but it is strained by the effort demanded by her presence in this office. “shall we?”

         “Oh, please don’t worry about...” But Ms. de Vries is already stacking the books, in a pile so geometrically ideal that it almost embarrasses Mary, makes her want to go about adjusting everything to right angles. Having reached out to take care of the mess, she falls back as Tissaia completes her task, blinking, then smiling as the words come: I would very much like to see this house. Really? The Winover Farmstead? There’s a flutter of excitement, and a twitch of nerves: the odd sites of Greendale seem to impinge on her more deeply now, as though all that’s happened has peeled a layer of her away, left the sensitive underskin open to the elements. She hopes Ms. de Vries won’t notice.

        “Yes, yes. Let me just get my coat.” She crosses to the stand by the door, taking down her scarf, chattering as she winds it around her neck, drawing a fold up over her head to shield her hair: “It really is such an intriguing spot. It’s so unfortunate that the house is no longer standing. Of course, it’s not farmland anymore there. You’ll see when we get there--of necessity they’ve made a little... Park, I suppose, out of it, but the rest of the area is quite developed, lots of new buildings. I should say, newer, new to the Puritans, at least.” She smiles to herself at that, slipping on her coat, doing up the buttons. “Let me see. My purse. We can take my car, of course."

        As they emerge from her office into the school hallway, Mary switches off the light in her office and locks the door. “I’m surprised you didn’t know about our witch trials, Ms. de Vries. But I suppose it’s not really... Publicized, in quite the way of, oh, Salem. Greendale remembers, but we don’t advertise. There were thirteen executed witches here. All women. But I suppose you could have guessed that. There’s been a few books published on it but mostly local presses, I would be happy to loan them to you, if you were interested. And at the historical society we have quite a few documents from the time period, although most of the major holdings went to, hmm, the university.”

A cottage feels like the ideal place to be in a cold, snowy night — if the circumstances were different, she could almost imagine herself reading by the fire with a warm cup of coffee as snow fell outside in a place like this.  It was most certainly an interesting place — && the number of books caught her attention; she wondered what sort of things the woman named Mary was reading.

She follows her into the kitchen, appreciating both the comforting heat of the stove and Mary’s chatty nature. There was something about her, Lou couldn’t yet decipher what — something that drew her in, even as a perfect stranger.

“No, it’s fine… I’ve just had dinner… But please don’t let that stop you, if you’d like to eat”

“We had one, growing up — I’m from California and it made the kitchen so stuffy and hot… I was thrilled when they changed it to a more modern one, my mother not so much — quite an old fashioned woman. I say we must get on with the times, don’t you agree?”

She thanks Mary for the coffee, starting to drink it. It would likely keep her up all night, but that’s probably for the best — it would be quite the drive back to Boston once the snow settles. Better to be prepared.

“What sort of project?” Curiosity always took the better of her; the question Mary asks makes her a bit nervous - or embarrassed, but since she did just invade the woman’s home && was drinking her coffee, Lou decides to answer “Well… I suppose I did make it your business, barging into your house in the middle of the night… My husband and I, we— well, we got into a bit of a fight.” Her cheeks involuntarily turn red “I suppose I needed space to think, breathe… Ended up driving a little longer than intended, though”

        “A fight,” Mary repeats, “I see.” Well, she’s put her foot in it already, hasn’t she? Louisa’s face is red, a nervous flush behind her coffee cup. Mary wishes she could soothe it away, tell her, really, I know just how it is, sometimes our loved ones are the most insufferable people in our lives, and all we want to do is run, someplace new, someplace we aren’t ourselves--“Yes--I do understand.“ She nods, sips her own coffee. “It can be... So difficult,” she says, “to think quite clearly, when we’re troubled in our minds, and our hearts.”

        She takes another sip. “My project--well. Let me see. There was a writer who--I hardly remember, but he said something like, the most merciful thing in the world is that the human mind can’t correlate all its contents--something along those lines. Well, I’m correlating--” she smiles ruefully--”or trying to. This is rather--oh, is the word I’m looking for... Esoteric? There was an elder of Greendale who lived here from, oh, 1650 or so, and he was a very prolific writer of letters. He wrote about the, hmm, about the witch trials we had here in the 1690s, when he was already middle-aged and considered venerable--in his forties, can you imagine--and those letters are quite interesting, but I’m reading a few from earlier. There were...”

        More coffee, to clear her throat. “Quite a lot of thinkers, here, quite a lot of learned men--no Cotton or Increase Mathers, but our own peculiar group, and several of his letters were about their meetings and discussions, which were on theological subjects, but also town politics. Now, you understand, these things weren’t separate in the least. Religion and the law and the whole society went quite hand in hand--as they do today. So the references he makes fly quite fast and thick and some of it seems to be transcriptions of their conversations, done in a sort of shorthand, and I’m...” She laughs a little.

On my analysis, misogyny’s primary function and constitutive manifestation is the punishment of “bad” women, and policing of women’s behavior. But systems of punishment and reward—and conviction and exoneration—tend to work together, holistically. So, the overall structural features of the account predict that misogyny as I’ve analyzed it is likely to work alongside other systems and mechanisms to enforce gender conformity. And a little reflection on current social realities encourages pursuing this line of thinking, which would take the hostility women face to be the pointy, protruding tip of a larger patriarchal iceberg. We should also be concerned with the rewarding and valorizing of women who [ ... ] enforce the “good” behavior of others, and engage in certain common forms of patriarchal virtue-signaling—by, for example, participating in slut-shaming, victim-blaming, or the Internet analog of witch-burning practices.

And

Misogyny frequently involves morality take-downs or the unforgiving shaming of women for their (real or supposed) moral errors. Misogyny also subjects women to what I have come to think of as a kind of tyranny of vulnerability- by pointing to any and every (supposedly) more vulnerable (supposed) person or creature in her vicinity to whom she might (again, supposedly) do better, and require her to care for them, or else risk being judged callous, even monstrous.