feminism

[REVIEW] Ways of Looking at a Woman by Caroline Hagood

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(Hanging Loose Press, 2019)

REVIEW BY PATRICIA GRISAFI

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In Ways of Looking at a Woman, Caroline Hagood wonders how motherhood has changed her as both a person and a writer: “When I feel overcome by my post-birth transformation, I imagine my body as a written form and try to guess its genre.” But after childbirth, a singular genre doesn’t seem to work anymore. So she turns to hybridization, which feels like a more authentic way to articulate the condition of being woman, object, mother, and writer. As a result, Ways of Looking at a Woman is a smart, honest, funny, and endearing lyric portrait of the artist as a fragmented and reconstituted entity.  

Hagood uses the hybrid text as a way to discover and create identity. And like identity, just when you feel you have a grasp on her narrative, it slips away and transforms into something else. This is part of the immense pleasure of the book—that it contains multitudes. Part film theory, part personal essay, part poetry, Ways of Looking at a Woman toys with our expectations of how each of these genres should operate. The themes that tie the text together—gazing and consuming, mothering and being mothered, creating and destroying, and confessing and withholding—are elucidated by quirky anecdotes. Here is the writer as watcher of junk TV and connoisseur of junk food, the writer as a woman who is exhausted by her children but still finds time to ponder postmodernism on the toilet. “Mostly I didn’t write a memoir because nobody wants to read something called The Subtle Art of Writing While Covertly Watching a Zombie Movie, Playing Make-believe with a Tantrumming Kid, and Eating Taquitos,” Hagood explains.

Like the title alludes, Hagood’s text feels like what might happen if Wallace Stevens and Laura Mulvey had a rambunctious child who delights in finger painting with food all over the study. There’s a loopy energy to Hagood’s prose that feels very much like motherhood manifested. Her book is serious but doesn’t take itself too seriously. You have to love a writer who is comfortable enough to invoke both Reality Bites and Derrida in a way that is not obnoxious — and put both of them on the same theoretical level. This happy marriage of high and low is an engaging feature of Hagood’s book. We all know the academic who can and will name-drop theorists into conversations about cat litter, but Hagood’s invocations don’t feel showy or performative. The meshing–actually, obliterating—of hierarchies is part of the goal here. Once we realize that hierarchies, much like genre and static designations, confine us, we can be liberated and create something explosive and new.  

Organized as a thesis (Hagood wrote the book while working on her doctoral dissertation), Ways of Looking at a Woman adopts an academic form while also poking fun at academia. Riffing on the cliche of women’s inherent mysteriousness, Hagood jokes in the “Methodology” section: “So I needed to study women, but I wasn’t good at statistics…Besides, I like women, and have found that to dissect them with numbers and figures was to forget that.” Sometimes, the analysis kills the joy or distracts us from the inherent pleasure of the text — and sometimes, Hagood writes, prevents us from fully inhabiting the work: “I started wanting to use ‘I’ in the dissertation where it didn’t belong. On every page, Caroline kept popping up—making lewd gestures behind a footnote, mooning me from behind a piece of particularly dry text.” Here, Caroline’s impertinent insistence is on not just making the text her own but actually becoming the text. This is not just a dissertation, a body of work–it’s a literal body. A woman’s body.  

Ways of Looking at a Woman is a feminist text. It’s a story of becoming, transmutation, trauma, and women’s work that often goes unseen or under appreciated: cleaning tiny nails, washing food off the walls, giving birth itself (the way Hagood describes birth is perfect: “this purple creature of tenderness suddenly came exploding out of me and I got to keep it). In one of the most stunning parts of the book, Hagood crashes body horror into feminist theory, commenting on the inherent amalgamation of womanhood: “Women have felt this monstrousness since the beginning of time, but I just went the extra step and literally became a monster. One fateful day I became literature. It was beautiful, astounding even as my skin became fragile and see-through, became diaphanous pages. I transformed into the hybrid I had always been half-woman, half-writing.” In this book, Hagood becomes Frankenstein’s creation or even Dorian Gray—her body as art and experiment, containing difficult truths about humanity.

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Patricia Grisafi, PhD, is a New York City based freelance writer and editor. Her work has been featured in Salon, The Guardian, Vice, Narratively, The Rumpus, Self, Bustle, Ravishly, and elsewhere. Her short fiction appears in Tragedy Queen: Stories Inspired By Lana Del Rey & Sylvia Plath.

Facing the Bull

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BY JILL TALBOT

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“You all die at fifteen.”

—Diderot

Fearless girl statue fights trump meme culture, flat screen TV in the clinic getting a new pace maker—half of us have gone backwards, half forwards, another half to Mars where they can now plant potatoes, halibut and dollar store haircuts. But for now the statue stands proud. I wonder when they’ll pop her cherry.

Millions of Facebook shares, girl statue faces bull. What bull, I thought, but this is a lie, at first I felt like a happy face emoji because that’s what all the cool feminists told me I should feel, then a nagging wrench that something was not quite right—of course it wasn’t. A girl of about seven or eight with her hair back in a pony tail wearing a summer dress—this is now the symbol of the power of my voice, my choices? Honestly, I’d rather be the bull facing her.

Meme culture teaches girls can be anything. When you’re a girl you can believe what you’re taught, if you can work through all of the mixed messages … The tampon commercials declaring you’re powerful beyond measure, now here’s how to hide your shame, the soap commercials declaring all girls beautiful, as if that’s the one thing we’ve been waiting to hear our whole lives and needed capitalism to tell us, a president peeping in the change rooms of Miss Universe pageants, condom advertisements declaring the best sex ever requires hours of grooming and hair removal because he deserves it.

Sometimes I feel like I am a bull facing the seven year old me who thinks that she can rule the world, that she will go into business because the thought of doing something devoid of power and control didn’t enter my head—that was how I survived childhood. One day I would beat those with power by becoming them. Rich, of course. But still looking good in a dress … Fearless girl statue, the article was titled, but I thought that courage must involve fear, facing something dangerous without fear is child-like naiveté—as is the statue.

When I was the size of the statue, I fought boys in arm wrestling and usually won, I played war video games, I never wore shoes in summer, I loved math and wasn’t too cool to admit it, I read everything I could find. I thought tampon commercials were the bull.

I stare at the clinic TV as paramedics rush in. I want to ask them if we can watch  something more uplifting like Orange Is The New Black.

Now it’s been agreed that the statue will remain. The symbol of women’s empowerment—a frozen child who will never grow up. Bronze, probably Caucasian though it is hard to tell.

A petition to make the statue permanent goes viral, some of us don’t get a choice in the matter. A more ideological crumbling symbol would’ve been a woman facing the bull head on, or perhaps a post-it-note on the bull’s head—sorry, I’ve got better things to do today. When I was a child I would’ve taken you on because I was fearless. As a young adult I would’ve taken you on to prove something. Today I think I will go read a novel.

But none of those would be me. I didn’t say it was me, I didn’t say anything, they didn’t say you could speak.

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Jill Talbot attended Simon Fraser University for psychology before pursing her passion for writing. Jill’s work has appeared in Geist, Rattle, Poetry Is Dead, The Puritan, Matrix, subTerrain, The Tishman Review, The Cardiff Review and PRISM. Jill won the PRISM Grouse Grind Lit Prize. She was shortlisted for the Matrix Lit POP Award for fiction and the Malahat Far Horizons Award for poetry. Jill lives on Gabriola Island, BC.