Having the intellectual heft and perspective that Dorothy Holmes adds to our discussion is a great honor. Thank you Dorothy. She contributes a sense of the desperate and often violent defense of male feelings of power that leads to devaluation of women, women's feelings, and women's contributions to knowledge. Having someone to feel better than and superior to is so valuable to many, if not all, people that we all find the flaws in others that we reject in ourselves. If we feel weak, they are the weaker ones, if we feel dumb, they are dumber, and if we fear our own aggressive wishes, they are the provocateurs who unleash aggression.
Dorothy's deep understanding of the novel Where The Crawdads Sing speaks to her understanding of the rejection of the victim. In order to relieve our guilt at victimizing we need to think of those we hurt as not deserving our sympathy or help. We need to think of them as less human than we are and less deserving of our consideration.
I too loved that novel especially because the victim was rejected and deserted by her own family first. That made her unable to trust the few people who wanted to help her. Her bitter disappointment by a man who seemed to love her led to her killing him. And, I believe, that it was only after she deliberately murdered him that she could free herself of distrust enough to love someone else. The man she loved and married had also disappointed her, but he had not only taught her to read, he also taught her to value herself by respecting her scientific achievement. It was the respect that, I believe, enabled her to go on with her life. The wonderful achievement led her to accept the respect of others, to trust and to nurture. In this way the novel depicted the change in the coal miners wives when they became able to be the breadwinners in their families.
Why are women more resilient in their self-image than men? Why do men need to devalue women? I think that psychoanalytic theory has a
potential answer. The first person a baby attached to is almost always the mother or a female mother substitute. The mother has all the power. A girl can identify with this powerful mother. As he grows up, a boy must dis-identify with her in order to assert his masculinity. I think this is true in all societies we know of and that it may account for the almost universal devaluation of the feminine. For me, the riddle is why we women put up with it.
Here Janeway's assertion that men's response to feminine rage must be increased push for dominance, intensified attempts to devalue and denigrate women who stand up for ourselves and who make it clear that we want to be heard, listened to and responded to as people who are equally interesting and from whom others can learn. Dorothy has given us an example of the voice of a woman worth listening to and learning from.