Printed in the Fall 2018 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard., "From the Editor’s Desk" Quest 106:4, pg 2
In his article for this issue, Jay Kinney uses a funny word: essentialist. What could it possibly mean? The belief in essentials? The opposite of existentialism?
The answer to both is yes, but the term has come to have a very specific meaning, and it’s not a nice one. It’s often used in feminist discourse to describe the long-held views that women possess certain essential and universal characteristics, such as caring, nurturing, mothering, and so on.
These seem to be good things, so why is essentialism bad? Because (as the theory goes) it is simply a set of assumptions that have been long held about women. It has little or no intrinsic truth, but is simply a matter of cultural enforcement. It is a dogma that has been used throughout history to relegate women to second-class status.
Even from this brief introduction, it’s obvious that we are again confronted with the great debate about nature versus nurture. Essentialism would claim that there are certain characteristics—including gender characteristics—that we are born with; there is no getting rid of them. The opposite view holds that virtually all gender characteristics have been imposed by society on the infant, which, as John Locke argued, is a tabula rasa—a blank slate.
Certainly cultural norms do dictate gender roles in many respects. All the same, I find it too extreme to attribute the characters of men and women solely to cultural accretions. Sometimes, in fact, it appears that gender differences are too easily blurred, and what is true for one sex may not be true for another.
Joseph Campbell famously wrote about the hero’s journey, and many have assumed that the heroine’s journey is more or less identical except for some changes in pronouns. But as Campbell himself noted, this is essentially a man’s journey: departure from home, heroic quest and deed, return to home in triumph. In her insightful book Jane Eyre’s Sisters: How Women Live and Write the Heroine’s Story, Jody Gentian Bower explores a feminine equivalent: what she calls the myth of the Aletis (from the Greek alētēs, or wanderer), the wandering heroine. “The Aletis is not a hero,” Gentian writes. In fact she is almost the diametric opposite of the hero. “The heroic quest is a circle back to home,” for example, but “the Aletis wanders, moving on again and again, . . . before finding or creating her true home somewhere altogether new” (emphasis Bower’s).
Along the same lines, I think that the emotional life of the male has been misunderstood by seeing it too much in the light of feminine emotion. The male is stereotypically rational, the female stereotypically emotional, so, it is assumed, men often do not have access to their emotions. But I think this is not entirely correct. Instead, I would say, male emotions are not fundamentally relational, as they appear to be for women (of course I am talking in generalities here). Masculine emotions seem to have much more to do with allegiance.
We can easily see allegiance in its positive sense: the medieval knight’s allegiance to the chivalric ideal; the soldier’s to his flag or monarch; even the company man’s allegiance to his corporation. Most of these involve standards of conduct that are praiseworthy: loyalty, reliability, honor, duty.
Of course there are also negative aspects to emotional allegiance. A man can have just as much dedication to a false ideal as to a good one, or his dedication to his ideal may crush all other virtues. In Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlhaas, the title character’s search for justice deteriorates into vengeance. Fanaticism is a result of aberrant allegiance.
Today there is a great deal of material on the distorted ideal of the male in American culture. Supposedly many men cannot express their emotions, or can only express them in negative ways. No doubt this is true to some extent. But if you look deeper, you can see that in many cases, men’s emotions are not seen (by themselves or others) because they do not look like women’s emotions. Even when men are genuinely isolated from their emotions, it is still a question of allegiance—here to an ideal, however mistaken or constricted, of the stoic, imperturbable male.
Thus, I think, a great deal of damage has been done by facile assumptions that men’s and women’s spiritual journeys are the same or that their emotions are the same. Further damage has been done by the assumption that all roles are inherently repressive. Many people free themselves from conventional roles (including those of gender) only to feel themselves straying and rootless. Or they are simply put in a catchall category of the “weird” or the “nonconformist.” These of course are just roles too, and are equally unlikely to enable others to embrace a person’s true self.
As Barbara Hebert points out in this issue’s “Viewpoint,” liberation from roles and identities is possible, but it does not come by refusing them or rebelling against them. It comes from the realization that we are not our roles. As a matter of fact, we are not our bodies either, no matter what sex we ascribe to them.
Richard Smoley