Abstract
This manuscript pairs Margaret Atwood’s poem ‘Marsh Languages’ with Luce Irigaray’s recent philosophical text In the Beginning She Was. By doing so, an important conceptual resonance emerges between the two texts on the status of the loss of a maternal language and more broadly of the founding Mother at the origins of Western thought. Advancing a feminist poetics and ethics of the maternal, with its roots in nature, Atwood and Irigaray’s works are at odds with the enlightened language of our western masculine time, which seeks to disinherit its roots or to uproot itself. Atwood’s appeal in her poem ‘Marsh Languages’ reverberates with Luce Irigaray’s argument in In the Beginning She Was, which is that it is necessary for western philosophy to return to the marshes, so to speak, to return to the Presocratic philosopher-poets in order to discern how the logic of Western truth (via the male master-disciple) formed, and consequently discredited and covered over, a ‘she – nature, woman, Goddess’. Engaging with Greek myth (Hesiod’s Muses, Plato’s cave and mother-daughter duo Persephone-Demeter), Atwood as poet and Irigaray as philosopher interrogate and contest our western patriarchal tradition, for its erasure of ‘she – nature, woman, Goddess’, and suggest that the ethical implications of this silencing and forgetting have led to corrupt, destructive crisis-level relations, e.g. between humans, between humans and gods and between humans and nature.
In her poem ‘Marsh Languages’, Margaret Atwood writes: ‘The dark soft languages are being silenced:/Mothertongue Mothertongue Mothertongue/falling one by one back into the moon’ (1995: ll. 1–3). The maternal imagery invoked by Atwood in relation to language and to nature is clear: these allegedly inferior, archaic mother tongues are falling back into whence they emerged – the moon, a symbol of fertility and cyclic time, not the time of history, progress, binary logic and linearity. In this poem, maternal time, with its roots in nature, is at odds with the enlightened languages of a Western masculine time which seeks to disinherit its roots or to uproot itself. The ‘language of marshes’ (Atwood, 1995: l. 4) is Atwood’s call for us to return to ‘the language of the roots of rushes tangled’ (1995: l. 5), to return to that maternal life-giving aspect which is being silenced, and to question who is doing this silencing. Atwood’s appeal in ‘Marsh Languages’ aptly captures the ethos of her collection Morning in the Burned House (1995) as a whole, and reverberates with Luce Irigaray’s philosophical argument in In the Beginning She Was (2013). Both Atwood and Irigaray interrogate and contest the Western patriarchal poetic-philosophical tradition for its forgetting of (in Irigaray’s phrase) ‘she – nature, woman, Goddess’ 1 (2013: 2). The implications of this silencing and forgetting have led to destructive, crisis-level relations between humans, between humans and gods and between humans and nature. 2 Reading Atwood and Irigaray together therefore reveals a feminist criticism of the Western patriarchal literary/philosophical tradition, recovers a woman-centred mythic, ethical and poetic discourse and reconceives a relation between humans and nature.
In pairing Atwood’s poem ‘Marsh Languages’ with Irigaray’s In the Beginning She Was, an important conceptual resonance on the loss of a maternal language and more broadly the loss of the founding Mother or goddess at the origins of Western thought emerges. 3 Both writers mourn the loss of a poetic language that is linked closely with the usurpation of a mother tongue by its masculine philosophical counterpart; the loss of a poetic maternal language coincides with both a disregard for nature (a prominent concern in all of Atwood’s poetry) and the implementation of hierarchal binary oppositions proposed by and favouring the masculine mythological-philosophical order. Atwood and Irigaray challenge, in Irigaray’s terms, ‘the destruction of female ancestry, especially its divine aspect’ within patriarchal culture by retrieving the feminine ‘other’ through poetic and philosophical revisitings and rewritings of Greek myth (1994: 100).
This article is divided into three vignettes which articulate Irigaray’s and Atwood’s feminist challenges to mythology found in the early Greek poetic-philosophical tradition: the role of Muses in Hesiod and the Presocratic philosophers (inspiration and erasure of the feminine-maternal-nature); the role of the cave and poet in Plato’s Republic (condemnation and concealment of the maternal-feminine-nature); and the mother-daughter Demeter-Persephone myth in the Presocratics and Homeric Hymns (violence and separation of the feminine-maternal-nature). Additional quotations from Atwood’s poetry serve as guideposts in each vignette to encourage further reflection and connection between the two texts under discussion, especially in relation to the (im)possibility of articulating ‘she – nature, woman, Goddess’. Stylistically, the article engages the poetic and the philosophical by oscillating between both traditions, between Atwood’s ‘Marsh Languages’ and Irigaray’s In the Beginning She Was. The comparison undertaken here thus aims to express the oft-overlooked philosophicalité of Atwood’s poetry and the overlooked literariness of Irigaray’s philosophy.
Before delving into the analysis that follows, however, some preliminary comments on the existent scholarship on these writers, especially in relation to the Greeks, and the strategies and limitations of this article are necessary. This study expands upon and updates established scholarship that reads Atwood’s work through an Irigarayan lens; however, unlike most critics, I discuss Atwood’s poetry, not her fiction, and I shift the focus away from earlier Irigarayan texts such as Speculum of the Other Woman ([1974] 1985) and This Sex Which Is Not One ([1977] 1985). My argument is especially informed by Charlotte Beyer’s (2000) study of ‘Marsh Languages’, which identifies Atwood’s poetic feminist revisionings of myth, female spirituality, nature and language as they intersect with Irigaray’s ideas on the same topics, but Beyer’s work predates the publication of In the Beginning She Was. 4 This article therefore contributes to feminist literary scholarship by comparing ‘Marsh Languages’ specifically and Atwood’s poetic corpus generally, particularly other poems in Morning in the Burned House, in relation to In the Beginning She Was – a text that strongly resonates with, yet develops, the theorisations of the feminine-maternal found in Irigaray’s most well-received writings, e.g. Speculum of the Other Woman and This Sex Which Is Not One.
Despite receiving little scholarly attention, In the Beginning She Was is Irigaray’s most successful revision of the Greeks, with a particular concentration on the Presocratics. This ambitious text re-examines the Greeks in relation to the origins of Western thought, the ‘patriarchal constructions of reality’ (Yorke, cited in Beyer, 2000: 277) and an erasure of the feminine-maternal. In the Beginning She Was also showcases the subversive poetic style associated with Irigaray’s most influential works, particularly Speculum of the Other Woman. 5 As for scholarship on Irigaray’s conception of Ancient Greek philosophy, the most important book, Rewriting Difference: Luce Irigaray and ‘the Greeks’, edited by Elena Tzelepis and Athena Athanasiou (2010), precedes In the Beginning She Was. Nevertheless, central ideas found within this volume can readily be adapted and updated to illuminate the project set out in Irigaray’s recent work.
For instance, Anne-Emmanuelle Berger, writing on Irigaray’s Marine Lover, argues that her ‘recourse to Greek mythology […] deals with origins and does not cover over the violence at work in any world ordering (kill rape rob). [M]ythology is recalled against philosophy, that is, Socratic philosophy, in an attempt to uncover what this philosophy […] has obscured and expelled from its sight’ (2010: 67). Fellow contributor Judith Still similarly ‘insists on the crucial importance of Greek mythology to our understanding of sexual difference’ (2010: 150). Irigaray’s position rejects a masculine philosophical tradition (Logos) which conceals and denies the role and language of ‘she – nature, woman, Goddess’; she suggests it is necessary to return to the Greeks if we want to make sense of sexual difference today. This scholarship recognises the importance of the Mother in relation to Irigaray’s sexual difference feminism, a point which is underappreciated in most criticism.
Like Irigaray’s philosophy, Atwood’s feminist poetry, as prominent scholars such as Sharon R. Wilson and Christine C. Keating contend, takes up the Greek maternal/goddess trope to challenge the erasure, silencing and denigration of women and nature within Western culture. For Keating, a ‘feminist revisionist mythology’ distinctly emerges because ‘[t]he past is forever present to Atwood who uses archetypes associated with “The Great Mother” to transgress time and space in a transformative poetry that links the ancient psyche with the present consciousness’ (2014: 484). 6 Evoking the ‘well-known and submerged aspects of the Great Goddess or Mother Goddess’ (Wilson, 2000: 215) within Greek mythology plays an essential role in Atwood’s oeuvre.
Included in Morning in the Burned House (1995), Atwood’s last major poetic collection of the twentieth century, ‘Marsh Languages’, ironically, contributes to the early stages of what will become Atwood’s most overt feminist criticism of Greek mythology: The Penelopiad ([2005] 2007), a retelling of Homer’s Odyssey from Penelope’s perspective. Morning in the Burned House, however, also signals Atwood’s most explicit poetic appraisal of Greek myth, with poems that rethink the sexual objectification and exploitation of women. 7 As a whole, the collection disrupts traditional mythical discourse by centralising the points of views of disparaged female figures such as Helen of Troy and Daphne. Though there are no explicit references to Greek mythology in ‘Marsh Languages’, the poem, like Irigaray’s In the Beginning She Was, repeatedly invokes imagery of the maternal, nocturnal and natural: cave, marsh, myth, memory, mortality, house, violence, language and women’s sexuality. That Atwood explores the feminine-maternal-goddess in terms of the Greeks in her wider work, and that the mother/nature/myth – that ‘Mothertongue Mothertongue Mothertongue’ (l. 2) or ‘cave language’ (l. 11) – appears in this specific poem, thus creates the connection I use to frame my analysis of ‘Marsh Languages’ in relation to the same themes found explicitly in In the Beginning She Was. Pairing this poem and philosophical text therefore contributes to a new feminist way of reading the divine feminine-maternal as it relates to Greek myth and nature in both Atwood and Irigaray.
While my analysis is comparative in nature, salient differences between Irigaray’s and Atwood’s work, particularly with respect to perspective and gender, exist. For instance, while the speaker or ‘I’ in philosophical texts is presumed to be the author, in poetry this is not the case. Typically, one cannot assume a poem’s ‘I’ corresponds with the poet, which is not the same as saying that important arguments about the poem’s philosophical or political position, such as espousing an eco-feminist perspective, cannot be made. 8 As for gender, Irigaray’s thinking verges on essentialism, while Atwood’s does not. 9 One might then question whether reading Atwood’s poetry through an Irigarayan lens imposes a binary gendered logic onto ‘Marsh Languages’ that is not inherent to it. I believe the fact that Atwood and Irigaray have routinely written from within and against the Western tradition for what they perceive as the denigration of the feminine-maternal within patriarchal language and culture justifies this analysis. Consistently challenging phallogocentrism in their works, they have each sought new definitions for the feminine-maternal and nature, ones that are not defined in relation and in opposition to the masculine. For Irigaray and Atwood, then, considerations of race, class, sexuality and other aspects of identity are superseded by gender (Stone, 2006: 48). Despite neither writer seemingly making room for non-binary gender nor an intersectional feminist identity in their respective texts, they nevertheless seek a conception of woman/feminine/maternal beyond the binaries of phallogocentricism. The inability to explore fully the consequences of sexual difference in relation to other aspects of identity such as race and sexuality is a limitation not only of these specific texts but also of both writers’ complete works.
This study proposes that if we can move beyond the universalising, essentialist rhetoric of Irigaray’s corpus, and to a lesser extent that of Atwood, then we can begin to tease out of these texts invaluable re-evaluations of a future feminine-maternal that seeks new connections between humans and between humans and nature. Revisiting the Greeks’ symbolic representations of the feminine-maternal is essential to both writers’ political projects: reconceiving poetic-philosophical language. For instance, Irigaray’s subversive poetic writing style, e.g. notably using mimesis to parody sexual difference in Freud and Plato in Speculum, 10 challenges the Western patriarchal, philosophical tradition for strategically attempting, yet ultimately failing, to stereotype and exclude the feminine-maternal as Other(ed). As such, her feminist style reimagines nature, mother–daughter contiguity, female identity and our future. Atwood’s playful figurations – likening Helen of Troy to a contemporary exotic dancer – meanwhile undermine patriarchal authority and gender expectations. Atwood, more discernibly than Irigaray, accepts gender as a construct, as her poetic examinations of unruly women throughout history suggest. By contrast, Irigaray looks to Greek figures such as Antigone or Persephone as manifestations of the feminine-maternal condemned – ironically, to dwell in caves (Irigaray and Marder, 2016: 35) – and excluded a priori by patriarchal life/politics. Both writers, however, are invested in redressing the blame or punishment women have incurred in the past for attempting to thwart Western patriarchal society, beginning with the Greeks. It is this legacy of Western patriarchal culture, in which the feminine-maternal is stereotyped, subjugated and exiled, that we have inherited and continue to uphold in the twenty-first century, the consequence of which has been not only environmental destruction but also social injustice.
Focusing on the way Atwood and Irigaray challenge conceptualisations of the feminine-maternal within Western culture – inspiration and erasure of the maternal/feminine/nature; condemnation and concealment of the maternal/feminine/nature; and violence and separation of the maternal/feminine/nature – is unintended ‘to suggest the existence of an innate, essentialist association between women and nature which would seem to position women statically in a dualistic hierarchy’ (Beyer, 2000: 291). This is a common and legitimate concern amongst feminists: by positioning women as closer to nature than men, i.e. ‘Mother Nature’, one either reverses the hierarchy or reifies stereotypes and false social constructions that keep women in subordinate positions in patriarchy. Though this article does not develop a specific eco-feminist stance, it does propose via Irigaray and Atwood that we must take seriously the destruction of our natural world by ‘redefining nature (and female identity)’ (Stone, 2006: 50). Reading Atwood’s and Irigaray’s specific texts relationally and within their broader literary/philosophical contexts not only reveals a feminist analysis of the patriarchal Western philosophical-poetic-mythic past but also gestures towards a feminist future that might emerge if we were to seriously re-examine and question these origins.
Hesiod and the Presocratics: ‘The stand-in/for the Muse who couldn’t come herself’
Atwood and Irigaray strongly suggest that it is necessary for Western philosophy to return to the marshes, so to speak, to return to the Presocratic philosopher-poets to discern how the logic of Western truth (via the male master-disciple) formed, and consequently discredited and covered over, a ‘she – nature, woman, Goddess’. 11 Classical myth references explain how ‘the ancient female words of the maternal, nature-centered world’ were problematically replaced by ‘the eventual domination of the male-centered world of power, politics, and authoritarianism’ (Keating, 2014: 487). The relation between poetry and the lost Mothertongues in Atwood’s poem parallels Irigaray’s argument that ‘she – nature, woman, Goddess’ is the one who in the beginning inspired the master, the sage, with the truth, despite Western philosophy’s increasing attempts to conceal this event (Irigaray, 2013: 36). In Presocratic poetry (6th to 5th century BCE), for example, this invocation of song appears in the Muses of Hesiod’s Theogony, with the opening line ‘Let us begin our song with them’. 12 Both Atwood’s and Irigaray’s writing propose that the Muses served as poetic inspiration prior to an erasure of the maternal/feminine/nature by a masculine philosophical order.
Daughters of Zeus, the Muses wash their bodies and dance on the great and holy mount of Helicon: ‘Thence they arise and go abroad by night, veiled in thick mist, and utter their song with lovely voice, praising Zeus the aegis-holder’ (Hesiod, [c. 700 BCE] 1914: ll. 1–25). Note the poet’s claim that the Muses travel in darkness, ‘fluid that has been left in the darkness of Western culture’ (Irigaray, 2013: 104), veiled, singing their ‘dark soft languages’ (Atwood, 1995: 1). The Muses came, whilst Hesiod was shepherding, and they taught him ‘glorious song’ ([c. 700 BCE] 1914: ll. 1–25). Hesiod’s education by the goddesses is as passive recipient: he is given a laurel shoot, after which the Muses ‘breathed into me a divine voice to celebrate things that shall be and things there were aforetime; and they bade me sing of the race of the blessed gods that are eternally, but ever to sing of themselves both first and last’ ([c. 700 BCE] 1914: ll. 29–35). The Muses for Hesiod insist on a cyclic return, resonating with Atwood’s image of the moon as a goddess – that ‘old bone‐faced goddess, old original’ (‘Half-hanged Mary’, in 1995: ll. 23–25).
Both Atwood and Irigaray evoke the maternal imagery of the moon found in Greek mythology such as the ‘Homeric Hymn to Demeter’ (Anon., [c. 600 BCE] 2018) and Hesiod’s ([c. 700 BCE] 1914) Theogony. Keating reminds us that ‘Atwood uses the symbol of the moon to reconnect to the female psyche that embraces the environment as her own as a child of Mother Earth’: ‘The moon and only the moon, with its ability to transform, can give us the language we need to transform into a living maternal society’ (2014: 498). In particular, they espouse a connection to the goddess Hecate (the goddess who assists Demeter in finding Persephone after she is abducted by Hades), a virgin dressed in hunting garb, associated with protecting mothers and mothering (Carter, 1979: 329), and allied with the natural environment – the latter of which both Irigaray and Atwood claim is being threatened and destroyed. Inspired by the Greeks, the moon re-symbolises nature and the maternal for these contemporary feminist writers.
Not only is the moon, like the Muses, the beginning/source of creativity, but she is also the ending – again suggested by Atwood’s imagery in which several Mothertongues, Muses if you like, fall back into the moon, a birthplace, a womb-substitute for the holy mount Helicon, from presumably where these Mothertongues emerged. Hesiod keeps his promise, for under the tutelage of the Muses, he names them at the beginning and the conclusion of his Theogony. The poem concludes by completing its cyclic nature: ‘But now, sweet-voiced Muses of Olympus, daughters of Zeus who holds the aegis, sing of the company of women’ (Hesiod, [c. 700 BCE] 1914: ll. 1021–1022). That the Muses complete the poetic cycle does not have the same bitterness for Hesiod as it does for Atwood. Atwood is deeply troubled by the fact that the ‘dark soft languages’ (1995: 1) of the Muses are being lost primarily because they are not being invoked, heard or sung anymore.
‘Surely in your language/no one can sing’
In ‘Marsh Languages’, a similar lament appears: ‘The languages of the dying suns/are themselves dying’ (Atwood, 1995: ll. 19–20). 13 Depicting the moon as a dying sun further articulates the disappearance of the moon-goddesses-poetesses, those ‘light-bearing goddess[es] of the night’ who are eclipsed by the ‘darkening of the moon’, brought about only by ‘the sun’ (Olkowski, 2010: 38). Poetry, the moon-lit Muses, may in fact be endangered, but this is a regrettable situation and prophesies catastrophic human and environmental loss.
Atwood’s poetry, as with Irigaray’s theory, nevertheless also holds women accountable for environmental ruin: these works do ‘not deny the possibility of women’s complicity, as part of the culture which kills and excludes. In other words, women are not defined as innocent victims of patriarchal practices’ (Beyer, 2000: 290). Yet, these texts do examine the historical linking of the natural with the maternal and reflect on the perceived threat of the feminine, nature, spirituality to patriarchal culture, which results in the ‘victimisation of the feminine “other”, and the excess that she is seen to represent’ (Beyer, 2000: 289). Rewriting myth to recuperate the maternal ‘other’ and to challenge the poetic-philosophical tradition is thus a major strategy that Atwood and Irigaray adopt in reconceptualising Western society to protect, respect and preserve nature.
Irigaray concedes that some Presocratics like Parmenides do allude to a beyond discourse, a mysterious her; 14 however, with others, particularly Heraclitus – and here Atwood seems to be in agreement because Heraclitus constitutes her only poetic reference to a philosopher – she vanishes (2013: 3). 15 For Irigaray, though Heraclitus famously employs conjunction as opposed to disjunction, he nevertheless initiates the loss of ‘she’ because he fixates on the binary pair operating within Logos and the master is no longer inspired by a goddess. Heraclitus tells us that ‘Logos is eternally valid’ (cited in Wheelright, 1964: 19) and ‘It speaks through him’ (Waterfield, 2009: 32). The result is that ‘discourse closes upon itself […] it becomes possible that conversation and dialogue take place between oneself and oneself, within or between the same one(s), and truth and language begin to speak from themselves, on an other who is in the beginning feminine – nature, woman, or Goddess’ (Irigaray, 2013: 3). The presence of the ‘she – nature, woman, Goddess’ at the beginning of early Western poetry is evident, but slowly she has been replaced by the logos of the Western philosophical tradition.
In Irigaray’s theory, the Muses symbolise ‘something other than [men’s] discourse, a beyond for which they have no words, and above all no logic […] a beyond in which wonder, magic, ecstasy, growth and poetry mingle, resisting the logical link that is imposed on words, on sentences, on the world’ (2013: 2–3). The Muses and goddess which linked poetry, philosophy and religious thought amongst other arts and sciences in Greek Antiquity are replaced by the master, ‘the masculine teacher’ (Irigaray, 2013: 37) of philosophical thought – the speaker’s ‘my teacher’ (l. 2) (Atwood, 1984) in Atwood’s ‘After Heraclitus’ – demonstrated by attacks on Homer and Hesiod by the Presocratic thinkers Pythagoras, Xenophanes and Heraclitus (Adam, 1908: 4) and then culminating in Socrates’ various criticisms of poetry, the Muses and Homer in Plato’s Republic ([360 BCE] 1888). 16 However, one might reasonably object that Atwood is also critical of Homer’s poetry, particularly his depiction of women in the Odyssey. Atwood’s poetry, though, is concerned with the misogynist content, not the form of Homer’s poetry, whereas Irigaray takes on the Presocratics’ and Plato’s philosophical criticisms of poetry via philosophy.
Together, these ‘strategies constitute a powerful challenge to the dominant discourse, and to patriarchal notions of spirituality, gender, and the divine’ (Beyer, 2000: 277). The relationship between philosophy and poetry might be conceived as competing lovers of wisdom: for the philosophers, truth can only be achieved through a self-referential discourse of prose, logic and reason, while for the poets, truth remains mythos, always outside of and beyond discourse: veiled, ‘evoked only by the poet’ (Irigaray, 2013: 25), ‘something’ the Muses, the marshes, the poets ‘are whispering, / something we can’t quite hear’ (‘The Poets Hang On’, in Atwood, [2007] 2009: ll. 59–60). Revealed through their differing approaches to myth, the correct pursuit of Truth that philosophers, alone, purport to undertake, is for the poets, as Atwood and Irigaray contend, nonsensical. 17
Plato and the cave: ‘He cannot believe without seeing,/and it’s dark here’
In mapping out his utopia, Plato, in The Republic’s Book X, references an ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy. 18 He cites poets satirising philosophers as beggars and yelping hounds. Cleverly, in ‘The Poets Hang On’, Atwood inverses this claim and satirises the poet begging on the street corner: ‘The poets hang on. It’s hard to get rid of them, / though lord knows it’s been tried. / We pass them on the road / standing there with their begging bowls’ (Atwood, [2007] 2009: ll. 1–4). Ventriloquising Socrates, Atwood continues: ‘Go away we say – / and take your boring sadness. / You’re not wanted here’ ([2007] 2009: ll. 38–40). Socrates ultimately determines that the republic is morally better off without poets, so he relegates them to the polis’ outskirts – begging. Exiling poetry, poet-teachers or guides, and banishing the Muses, however, means, in Atwood’s words, that she remains mired ‘in the ooze’ ([2007] 2009: l. 6) or trapped ‘inside the warm core of the bone’ ([2007] 2009: l. 8). 19 The exiled Muses are imprisoned, and not only do they not visit the disciple as in the case of Hesiod any more, but the master, like Socrates or Plato, does not send his disciple to her either, 20 and so she, the poet-teacher, remains a distant presence acknowledged in early works like Hesiod’s; but as the source of discourse, of teaching, of inspiration and wisdom, she has all but since been forgotten, which is ironic given that the Muses’ mother is Mnemosyne.
What are the poetic-philosophical implications for concealing and sealing off ‘she – nature, woman, Goddess’? Irigaray and Atwood suggest that when the feminine-maternal remains outside of discourse, the dialogue between man and woman as two, separate but together, is discarded in favour of the one, the same. Irigaray writes that it becomes only ‘possible’ for conversation to ‘take place between oneself and oneself’ (2013: 3). The creating of an alternative reality, a phantom pregnancy, is completed according to the masculine logic; a logic that Atwood recognises has dire environmental consequences: ‘the selfish nature of the modern world is to make a deity of itself’ (Keating, 2014: 499): it is man’s attempt to give birth, perhaps a symbolic substitute for giving birth by reproducing himself. In ‘Marsh Languages’, Atwood writes of ‘marrow cells twinning themselves’ to characterise replicating or duplicating oneself at the cost of losing the other so that ‘pathways of hidden light in the body fade and wink out’ (1995: l. 9). Thus, man’s birth is deceptive, and, counter-intuitively, Irigaray argues that ‘man does not differentiate himself enough from the maternal world’ (2013: 131), which results in misogyny and a sacrifice of sexuate identity, that is, an identity not defined by reproductive functions. His monotheistic god, his discourse, his wisdom and his truth appear by parthenogenesis: ‘He claims to have been created by a master or a God of his gender: origin and end of his journey’ (Irigaray, 2013: 52). But what is so threatening about the feminine that one must give birth to oneself and forget and erase the mother, the other, who in the beginning gave birth?
‘She – nature, woman, Goddess’ threatens the master-disciple’s world with plurality and fecundity. She unlocks the truth of false-speaking masculine subjects – collapses their artificial shelter, universe, a logic (hierarchical and binary) which is intended to duplicate natural reality (Irigaray, 2013: 4), but of course, this so-called natural reality is man-made. The feminine-maternal life-giver must be usurped in the Western tradition; 21 her dark soft languages must be silenced and replaced by an illegitimate, incestuous (Irigaray, 2013: 128–130; 145), singular line – this clears the way for paternal genealogy (Irigaray, 2013: 127) and hierarchy directed by ‘a God in the masculine – a God who sets his absolute entity against the fluidity of the neuter, and also the proliferation of words, of things, of gods. Thus, a God, unique and in the masculine, has occupied the place of the ecstasy opened and safeguarded by her’ (Irigaray, 2013: 5). In this logic of sameness, a closed circuit begins and ends with a masculine God (replacing Hesiod’s Muses), which Irigaray in other works like ‘Women on the Market’ calls a masculine ‘hommosexualite’ (1997: 175): ‘she – nature, woman, Goddess’, banished to the marshes, ‘recedes into darkness’ (2013: 38); she sinks into the moon.
Both Atwood and Irigaray lament the vanishing of ‘she – nature, woman, Goddess’ at the expense of the aforementioned masculine economy and articulate the interaction with the other, like the master’s with the she who inspired him, as unutterable. This is why the poet’s role is vital. Atwood contends that ‘the poet can recreate reality by using a new language, a new myth that is earth-centered, female-centered, embracing, not rejecting, our life source. The moon symbolizes the imagination’s ability to bypass our current self-destructive culture and give us the ability to recreate a world that the ancient female cultures proved possible’ (Keating, 2014: 499). Meanwhile, Irigaray writes that ‘the paths of education are mapped out by the master for an entry into a logos at the service of whoever knows how to manipulate it. Abandoning the mystery of life – never utterable by anyone, evoked only by the poet’ (2013: 25). While Plato’s Socrates contemplates banishing the poets (ironically in highly poetic language), Irigaray equates this move with losing the inexplicable: the access to which, she contests, we have via the poet, not the philosopher. 22 The poet, to be sure, as an inspired conductor, a Sybil, does not have immediate access to the mystery, the ecstatic beyond contradictions – and in this thinking, Irigaray and Plato agree. But, contrary to Plato, Irigaray supports the maternal evoked by the poet which ‘favours the values of life, of generation, of growth. It is based on unwritten laws that do not clearly distinguish civil order from religious order’ (2013: 127). Like Atwood, Irigaray maintains that the poet who evokes/invokes the Muse(s) is necessary for a society to be ethical. As if rewriting Irigaray’s sentiment that ‘Man settles himself in his house of language, cut off from the real and from the other as real’ (2013: 4), in Atwood’s titular poem ‘Morning in the Burned House’, the father’s house, the house of language, is burned down. Could a ‘morning in the burned house’ of language gesture towards an alternative future language, a future Mothertongue that might emerge?
If Plato attempts to stamp out Homer’s dangerous influence on Greek society, then Irigaray and Atwood attempt to revive the poet’s worth in our society. Irigaray suggests ‘that poetry alone can celebrate or sing’ (2013: 53) a counter-truth, the feminine, to the masculine-master one constructed according to binaries, hierarchies and singularity. For Atwood, the speaker’s identity, the I, is made realisable or realised in language, but it comes at the cost of denying and differentiating oneself from the Other. In ‘Marsh Languages’, Atwood writes: The sibilants and gutturals,/the cave language, the half-light/forming at the back of the throat,/the mouth’s damp velvet moulding/the lost syllable for ‘I’ that did not mean separate,/all are becoming sounds no longer/heard because no longer spoken,/and everything that could once be said in them/has ceased to exist (1995: ll. 11–18).
Atwood’s search for a non-singular identity, a metaphor for the child in the mother’s womb, maps onto the marsh as womb. The transition from mother’s time to father’s time, marked historically by the Presocratics, for Atwood and Irigaray necessitates that the individual figuratively excises the mother, that is to say in Irigarayan terms murders the mother. At the same time, however, reviving the feminine does not necessitate patricide. These theorists are not suggesting Western culture replace patriarchy with matriarchy. After all, many poems in Morning in the Burned House relay the speaker mourning the loss of her father. Janice Fiamengo notes that ‘Although sexual tension and feminist anger are present’ in the collection, the usual ‘daughterly resistance and aggression’ (2000: 155) towards the father are visibly absent. That being said, Atwood’s elegiac poems, like ‘Marsh Languages’, nevertheless still draw attention to ‘the loss of the mother’ and the ‘traditional elegy’s exclusion of the maternal’ (Jamieson, 2001: 49, paraphrasing Sacks). A return to the mother, ‘the prohibited maternal body’ (Murphy, 2001: 59), is a return to the marsh, replete with excess, jouissance, fluids, blood, milk and an ‘undefined flow that dampens, wets, floods’ (Irigaray, 1995: 64). Because ‘Western culture associates the mother with contagion and contamination […] madness and death’ (Irigaray, cited in Murphy, 2001: 59), Irigaray insists that we must turn towards the mother and facilitate ‘a maternal order or culture’ (2013: 127). Can we begin speaking in ‘marsh languages’? 23
‘Nearly mute, flinches when touched,/is afraid of caves’
Atwood’s references to ‘the sibilants and gutturals,/the cave language’ (1995: ll. 10–11) also evoke Plato’s infamous ‘Allegory of the Cave’ in Book VII of The Republic and Irigaray’s reading of Plato in Speculum of the Other Woman in which she likens the cave to a womb (hystera) (1985: 243). 24 For Plato, the language of the cave is semblance and shadows. Socrates asks one to imagine men sitting, chained, in a dark cave; they watch shadows on the wall in front of them, which they believe are true representations of the objects because they know not otherwise. When a prisoner of this dark world is forced to make his way to the cave’s opening, however, he is born into a world of light wherein the sun becomes an image of the Form of the Good (Irigaray, 1985: 253); he quickly realises the shadows of the cave have been merely false representations. The prisoner-turned-philosopher grasps that his prior understanding and knowledge of the world has been wrong; now he is enlightened, but any attempt to convince his former fellow prisoners will fail, ultimately because of fear and an overall consensus, based in ignorance, that leaving the cave is dangerous or harmful.
Irigaray ‘reads men’s attempts to peep outside the cave by turning their back to it in order to get a glance at the shining truth, as an allegory of the willful masculine repression of maternal origins’ (Berger, 2010: 64). Irigarayan scholar Rachel Jones clarifies that ‘by positing the eternal Forms as the only true reality and the origin of all that is, Plato’s metaphysics displaces our actual beginnings in birth […] In this way, the horizon of metaphysical thought obscures the more primordial horizon that orients human beings in the world, namely, our relation to our maternal origins’ (2011: 47). To function logically, this myth denies the mother and our maternal origins any power, whilst ‘re-appropriating her generative powers’ (Jones, 2011: 49). Put differently, the Forms, as the alleged origin of all things, become substitutes ‘for the womb’ (Jones, 2011: 51), for the mother and the maternal origins of our being. This results in realising that ‘the Forms themselves are already a copy: an idealized mimicry of maternal origins’ (Jones, 2011: 71), which according to Plato’s thinking cannot be acknowledged if the Forms are the true origin of everything. The consequences of Plato’s myth, Irigaray argues, are that it ‘chains us in a metaphysics that prevents us from turning back to the significance of our maternal origins’ (Jones, 2011: 52) and forces us to disavow that these origins as mother/matter make the Forms possible.
Summarising Irigaray’s position, Jones writes that Plato appropriates the maternal in three ways: 1) the cave as a womb ‘support[s] an account of philosophical education as a kind of intellectual and spiritual re-birth’; 2) the Forms as origin replicate and rob the mother of her generative power; and 3) the materiality of the cave/womb supports the existence of the Forms (2011: 59). The journey of the prisoner-rebirthed-philosopher entails paradoxically leaving the cave to go ‘back to the origin as the sun/Forms’ (Jones, 2011: 59), which displaces, erases and replaces our maternal, material, nature, origins. Irigarayan theorist Dorothea Olkowski poetically calls this event the power of the moon as maternal life-giving being eclipsed by the paternal sun as death (2010: 35). For Atwood, too, the she-moon ‘has been our ever-present maternal guide in the patriarchal darkness; yet, we have been blind to her’ (Keating, 2014: 498), as if we have been witnessing a continuous ethic-poetic total lunar eclipse. Olkowski writes: ‘In the cosmos set in motion by the Goddess, it is the luminous moon and moonlight that form the background against which the sun and the cosmos stand out, light being the fruit or flower of the night’ (2010: 38). Plato’s cave, Olkowski further suggests, is founded on the suppression and erasure of the moon-goddesses’ (r)effulgence: ‘And the wandering Goddess of All Things, stripped of her lunar reflection, is the wet-nurse, made invisible, dragged down to the dark and invisible realm of the death-sun, the intelligible realm’ (2010: 40). If in Speculum Irigaray moves from Freud back to Plato, and from the Forms back to his cave/womb to discern when maternal origins were degraded and a respect for sexual difference was sacrificed in the Western tradition, then in In the Beginning She Was she suggests that this movement did not take us far enough.
One must return to the Presocratics for insight into male-dominated philosophy and the moment when maternal origins, difference and plurality became supplanted by paternal origins, oneness, sameness and that which birthed Plato’s cave. Adding complexity to the womb metaphor, Atwood’s ‘Marsh Languages’ compares the cave to ‘the mouth’s damp velvet moulding’ (1995: l. 13). Unlike Plato, she seeks not an escape from this alleged prison-world of semblance but rather a return to it. Her poem demonstrates that dwelling in the cave, the hystera in which Hesiod’s Muses travel, the marsh, is not a place of ignorance or anti-philosophy but rather a fertile space in which expressing connectedness, rootedness, in language, like poetry, was/is possible. Plato’s cave philosopher, amongst many things, by putting into place certain binaries such as dark and light, Falsehood and Truth, paternal/maternal, suggests the symbolic death of poetry.
The Republic, Plato demonstrates, must not be a city of darkness, of ignorance, of corruptive poetry or the wild(er)ness of the feminine-maternal.
25
Though Irigaray does not use the term wilderness, which seems specific to a North American setting, the patriarchal Western polis is threatened by a feminine wild(er)ness that is over-powering; hence the need to tame, to darken, to consume and to silence her. In this work (Irigaray, 2013: 31), and in Through Vegetal Being (Irigaray and Marder, 2016), Irigaray recounts being excluded from the city because of her philosophical-poetic writings. She reflects in Atwoodian terms that this exile has had the propitious result of her returning to nature: it ‘has allowed me to survive, or better, to discover what life itself is’ (Irigaray and Marder, 2016: 115). Survival is a dominant theme in Atwood’s poetry too, as Beyer, analysing Morning in the Burned House, claims: Her writing reflects an experienced organic connection to the earth, and particularly to the wilderness which emerges as a trope for femininity […] There is a sense of urgency, or desperation, in Atwood’s nature poems: humans need to acknowledge their connection with nature in order to survive, and to nurture respect and empathy for nature. This lived spirituality is perceived as a process, and cannot be owned or bought (2000: 293).
Demeter and Persephone: ‘We have lived among roots and stones,/we have sung but no one has listened’
For Atwood and Irigaray, the West’s failings and loss correspond with the fact that ‘We lack a language by which to discern, in ethical terms, the right relationship of human beings to themselves, to one another, and to the natural order’ (Schmidt and Marratto, cited in Hengen, 2010: 139). 26 The search for precisely a new language has been of course one of Irigaray’s central projects, e.g. Je, Tu, Nous: Towards a Culture of Difference ([1990] 1993), Democracy Begins Between Two ([1994] 2001) and To Be Born (2017). Building on arguments made in Through Vegetal Being (2016), Irigaray’s eco-feminism in To Be Born radically questions the obsession with discourse as constituting human being, that is to say, ‘which makes us born from the word itself’, in the Western tradition (2017: 710). Instead, she looks to non-Western theories of the self and the practices of silence and breathing, which she deems as better aligned with nature and our natural belonging (Irigaray, 2017: 710). She writes: ‘taking refuge in the vegetal world also revealed to me some aspects of the beginning of Greek culture that we have forgotten, something that encouraged me to pursue a criticism of our past Western culture […] starting […] from life itself and its necessary sexuation’ (Irigaray and Marder, 2016: 20). Consider again Hesiod’s claim that the Muses ‘breathed into me a divine voice’ ([c. 700 BCE] 1914: ll. 29–35) with Irigaray’s belief that nature formed ‘a sort of aerial placenta, in which I remained sitting for hours, and the trees or other plants purified my breath without asking for anything in return’ (Irigaray and Marder, 2016: 36). For Irigaray, breath, as it intersects with voice, constitutes a necessary challenge to Western thought and necessitates a change in our relation to life, spirituality and to each other.
Discourse, logos and the ‘I’ for Atwood and Irigaray signal a Western masculine subjectivity invested in ‘a culture of uprooting’ from the ‘world of roots’ – nature and the feminine-maternal (Irigaray and Marder, 2016: 54): life is cut off from itself when discourse seeks to construct/appropriate/master the world (Irigaray, 2017: 725). Both philosopher and poet explore the ‘repressed prehistory of our culture, which Greek mythology reflects: a prehistory and an ontology appropriate to the recognition of alterity, divinity, and ethics’ (Beyer, 2000: 280). In seeking a language that might speak our physical and spiritual being differently, Irigaray turns to poetic philosophy and Atwood to philosophical poetry: both locate an alternative feminist living speech within the body. For example, within our masculine Western tradition an embodied feminine-maternal language is prevented. In ‘Marsh Languages’, Atwood writes, ‘The mouth against skin, vivid and fading, / can no longer speak both cherishing and farewell. / It is now only a mouth, only skin. / There is no more longing’ (1995: ll. 22–25). The asymmetrical pairings of ‘vivid’ and ‘fading’, ‘cherishing’ and ‘farewell’, disrupt the expected binaries such as vivid/dull, fading/brightening, cherishing/scorning and farewell/greeting.
The image of the mouth against skin also brings to mind a kiss, ‘a bodily encounter with the (m)other’, 27 and Irigaray’s description of the Korai – Ancient Greek sculptures of young maidens who exemplify the archaic smile: ‘closed lips, which touch one another’ (2013: 156). These statues ‘could be a good illustration of self-affection in the feminine’, but ‘[i]n later sculptures, the mouth is open and the lips no longer touch one another’ (Irigaray, 2013: 156). Open lips for Irigaray suggest the feminine’s problematic dependency on an external instrument (tool or other as tool) for self-affecting, which merely mimes man’s method: this framing resonates with Atwood’s thoughts in two poems from Double Persephone (1961) when she writes of women as ‘Statues’, ‘all with the same white oval face’ (‘Formal Garden’, in 1961: ll. 10–11), and ‘deceptive smile’ (‘Persephone Departing’, in 1961: l. 6). In ‘Marsh Languages’, Atwood contends that expressing one’s feminine self and sharing in and with one’s self has troublingly been replaced by another value system, another language, so that ‘It is now a mouth, only skin./There is no more longing’ (1995: ll. 24–25). Instead of life, she encounters ‘marbled flesh’ (‘Persephone Departing’, in Atwood, 1961: l. 7). Irigaray’s reference to the Korai and to Kore apply to Atwood’s thoughts on the same myth and on destruction and loss of desire. Irigaray explains that after Kore was abducted and raped by Hades, the god of the underworld, her mother’s (Demeter’s) grief and wrath came in the form of a famine. 28 Demeter, in both Atwood’s and Irigaray’s work, as the embodiment of ‘she – nature, woman, Goddess’, exhibits maternal, healing and nurturing as well as violent, vengeful and transgressive acts.
To appease the mother-earth-goddess, Kore returns to the womb/marsh biannually to live with Demeter (Irigaray, 2013: 156) – symbolised by the transition of the cold, barren winter to the lush verdure of spring. This Greek narrative dramatises a personal, familial, maternal tragedy – the loss of a daughter – which is retaliated by environmental catastrophe. Is Atwood suggesting that the recent volatile climate and environmental change we are experiencing are a sign of Demeter’s renewed threat? Her hysteria? Her plea for civility and reciprocity? A renewed call for her daughter to return to her mother, to the earth, to the cave, to the hystera, and to place her ‘mouth against [her] skin’ (Atwood, 1995: l. 22)? Or, has Demeter lost her power? After so long fighting to keep her open-mouthed daughter safe, are the mother-daughter duo ‘now only a mouth, only skin’ (Atwood, 1995: l. 24)? For Demeter, we in the West, each in our own way, god-philosopher-kings of death and the underworld, have finally gone too far, over-stepped our boundaries, stolen, looted and forgotten the mother-earth-goddess mysteries; Demeter, ‘the noblest of gods’, has been brought ‘into submission and […] work[ed] until exhaustion’ (Irigaray, 2013: 121). ‘She – nature, woman, Goddess’ has given up: ‘there is no more longing’ (Atwood, 1995: l. 25).
‘A language is not words only, / it is the stories / that are told in it, / the stories that are never told’
The crisis that emerges from this myth, for both Atwood and Irigaray, is that the feminine-maternal is non-representable.
29
Irigaray writes: An original silence underlies the noise of their [master-disciple’s] words. While one who still relates to her – or Her – knows the silence in speech itself [… I]f it is welcomed with trust and reverence in the depths of the self, it bears fruit, provided it be allowed to take root and grow without wanting to appropriate it, to make it one’s own (2013: 39).
Kathryn Van Spanckeren rightly reads ‘Marsh Languages’ as signalling a devastating ‘loss of biodiversity’; however, that the dying languages are gendered goes unnoticed. Instead, she argues that the poem ‘ends with a horrific vision of English as survivor’s tongue, a colonial world language, and of all human languages threatened by an unfeeling binary computer code’ (2003: 113). Reconceiving English as masculine, as a Fathertongue, that proverbial ‘empire on which the sun never sets’ as opposed to many non-English Mothertongues, however, is constructive for articulating the loss related to binary thinking exemplified in computer code. If the maternal origins of Western metaphysics can be appropriated, then perhaps Platonic metaphysics, the Good, the Forms, the Sun, the Father will be replaced by computerisation and technology. Like the father’s initial colonisation of the feminine-maternal and the ensuing refusal of negotiation or reciprocity between two genealogies, so too might Western patriarchy expect to experience erasure via robotics: ‘Instead there was always only/conquest, the influx/of language and hard nouns,/the language of metal,/the language of either/or,/the one language that has eaten all the others’ (Atwood, 1995: ll. 27–32). 31 For Van Spanckeren, ‘“Marsh Languages” explores the ways in which Western dualism and binary opposites (as in computer language and electronics) have eradicated all other, more organic languages’ (2007: 164). For Keating, this equates to western men ‘hav[ing] literally eaten the maternal culture’ by way of ‘myths that have put men as deities and authorities’ (2014: 494–5). The implicit Fathertongue consumes the Mothertongues, the sun consumes the moon, philosophy consumes poetry: glottophagy, deicide, matricide.
Military terms such as ‘conquest’ and ‘metal’ further highlight violence against that which Irigaray calls ‘she – nature, woman, Goddess’, and signal a patriarchal campaign of force and death. Emphasising ‘Marsh Language[’s]’ form, Beyer elaborates: Towards the end of the poem the fluid, sensuous rhythm changes abruptly, into short, broken-off shards. This change powerfully illustrates the paradigm shift that the poem describes, and its effect on language and the whole way in which we perceive our being. The result is one of devastation – a brutal language without poetic and sensuous qualities, which is unable to represent feelings of desire, longing, or spiritual experience (2000: 294).
‘Whose is/that voice of a husk rasping in the wind?/Your lost child whispering Mother’
The Hymn notes that for familial/political reasons, Zeus promises Persephone to Hades. 32 Echoing her earlier work Thinking the Difference (1994), Irigaray argues that Zeus essentially honours his brother and betrays his sister; but more than this, Persephone is claimed to be Demeter’s and Zeus’ offspring – thus he betrays sister-mother-daughter in favour of the male genealogy. This marks a crucial moment in the transition from corporeality, Theia, moon and poetry to logos, history, sun and philosophy: from ‘matrilineality’ to patrilineality (Irigaray, 1994: 103). When Demeter realises Zeus’s betrayal, ‘a sharp akhos seized her heart. The headband on her hair she tore off with her own immortal hands’ (Anon., [c. 600 BCE] 2018: ll. 40–41). Demeter’s actions mirror the poetic shift – a shift from the maternal to the paternal, to the extent that Atwood’s ‘Marsh Languages’ and Irigaray’s In the Beginning She Was can be read as allegories of the rape of Persephone and her mother’s grief. 33 Furthermore, the allegory symbolises a rape of the environment and a rape of the maternal as well as the polis’s disbandment of Eleusis and Eleusinian Mysteries. As Gail M. Schwab corroborates, ‘The link between mother and daughter is shown here to be absolutely indispensable to the survival of the earth, the human race, and the gods’ (2010: 85). According to Irigaray and Atwood, feminists today must facilitate the bond between Mother(tongues)-daughter(tongues), inspired by Greek myth, and ‘project the lost utopia of relations between and among women into the future … to re(create) it ourselves’ (Schwab, 2010: 91), if we want to save poetic language, not to mention the environment.
Recalling the Mothertongues and ‘unearth[ing] the lost maternal voice’ (Keating, 2014: 485), Atwood’s revisionist poetry speaks to the power of language as feminist resistance. In this endeavour, Atwood and Irigaray distinctly link language with a political sense of space and a return to the maternal. The Mothertongue must originate in a cave, a hystera, a moon, a khôra. The master–disciple relationship, philosophers of the language of binaries and the logic of ‘either/or’ (Atwood, 1995: l. 26), but really One, revealers of the Truth and the Good, conceal that there are other truths. The NAS New Testament Greek Lexicon defines khôra as a space typically outside the polis – a marsh where Persephone dances and picks flowers – and as ‘a space lying between two places or limits’ (Thayer and Smith, 1999), a daughter-goddess in her mother’s, Demeter’s, womb. In attempting to establish a singular Truth, the philosopher creates his own falsehoods and shadows, he re-imprisons himself – he simply travels from one cave to another – but unawares? Arguably this is also Irigaray’s critique in Speculum. Language, both writers demonstrate, is extremely powerful. In the West’s time of late-capitalism, Atwood and Irigaray are convinced that a singular competitive, destructive language – the masculine language that is ‘eating all the others’ (Atwood, 1995: l. 27), can ‘no longer transmit a living energy’ (Irigaray, 2013: 31).
Conclusion: ‘The day is bright and songless’
Indirectly referencing Plato’s utopian city several times, Irigaray clarifies that ‘Only those who were useful for constructing his world survived: the guardians of the hearth or the city, the mothers of men or of gods. Those, thus who submitted to his desire, without exchange or dialogues with them – men remaining between themselves’ (2013: 65). 34 The hollow victory of this one imperialising logos over all others should be concerning, as Atwood too questions the devastating results that stem from losing one’s Mothertongues, and the ‘language of marshes’ (1995: l. 4). If we lose our language, do we lose the thing itself too? Atwood implies that indeed ‘everything that could once be said in them has / ceased to exist’ (1995: ll. 17–18), and thus we have a stake in revitalising our maternal heritage via language, especially poetry.
A recuperation of maternal genealogies, poetry and Mothertongues must be situated in relation and in respect to nature. Like the Western tradition, Atwood and Irigaray contrast nature with the urban, the unruly with the civilised, the dark cave of ignorance with the enlightened city; but unlike the city-dweller who imposes his law, dominates the natural world and takes nature for granted, the works here offer an alternative feminism that might rightly be referred to as eco-criticism. Irigaray and Atwood argue for a renewed, dialogical relationship with the other – with ‘she – nature, woman, Goddess’ – one that cultivates silence and speech differently, refusing to ‘appropriate and dominate the real’ (Irigaray and Marder, 2016: 59) and to silence the ‘Mothertongue Mothertongue Mothertongue’ (Atwood, 1995: l. 2). This meeting must take place between subjects: human and nature. Humans must return to nature, for the Muses know, as Irigaray claims, ‘this message cannot be openly shared in the city […] in broad daylight’ (Irigaray, 2013: 39); such ‘dark soft languages’ belong to the moon (Atwood, 1995: l. 3). Isn’t this the same journey the daughter makes back to her mother: ‘the girl Kore […] becoming a moon goddess’? ‘From sunlight to moonlight’ (Olkowski, 2010: 38)? The city contains the self-referential noise of the philosophical master-disciple, and thus as Irigaray and Atwood argue, we must seek out and fiercely protect an alternative space, a khôra, a future feminine language, a woman in the subjunctive future anterior – a yet to come – a poetics, which requires ‘the intimacy of the heart, a home, a sanctuary. A natural place […] a silent place’ (Irigaray, 2013: 39), a marsh – but we must seriously question whether ‘even the word for this has been forgotten’ (Atwood, 1995: l. 21).
