How to Read an Unquiet Book
What's a quiet reader to do with dragons, girl power, and centuries of patriarchal oppression?
The kids and I are back to school today after a week of spring break, and you can be sure I made time for plenty of quiet reading over the past seven days.
Or unquiet reading, depending on how you look at it.
When I changed the name of this newsletter to “Quiet Reading” last November, I wrote on the About page,
Literary criticism is sometimes offered as an argument at a conference table. What if it were practiced like choral singing at evensong? What happens if the responsive reader compounds the energy of a text that “gets” this human struggle; adds another voice, spreads the song a little farther?
None of you kind people have challenged me yet with what may be the obvious question: Ahem, Quiet Reader, what do you do with all the unquiet books? Does one sing cantatas about Desdemona’s murder? What is the tune of Hamlet’s indecision or Beloved’s haunting? What energy, exactly, does a sane person want to “compound” from books that witness cruelty and suffering?
I am going to suggest a path into an unquiet book in search of something I will call its heartsong. This is all very unscientific. It may feel like groping in a dark cave. We are going ahead with it anyhow to see where we land.
The book that raised these questions for me this past week was the novel Damsel by last week’s guest author
. As Evelyn wrote in this newsletter,At first glance, Damsel doesn’t seem like a quiet story. Both the book and the Netflix movie are about a young woman from a poor land who accepts a marriage proposal from a prince, only to discover she’s destined to be sacrificed to a dragon.
But beneath the surface of the fiery anti-fairy tale is a story about the power of mothers and their daughters—biological daughters, stepdaughters, lost daughters, and adopted ones.
Those may be the sympathetic, positive themes, but Damsel is as much a glorious take-down of patriarchy as last summer’s pink revelation, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie.
Is a quiet reader obliged to overlook unpleasantness, as Maxine Hong Kingston’s family overlooked the inconvenient pregnancy of the No-Name Woman from The Woman Warrior and suppressed her story? If so, doesn’t that mean quiet reading turns back the clock, leaving oppression unchallenged?
Damsel is not quiet about patriarchal oppression. Therefore, it presents us with an excellent opportunity to clarify an important point: quiet reading does not mean looking away from unpleasantness. It searches for another “layer” of meaning after (but not in place of) critique.
Quiet reading is the twice-baked potato of literary encounters. Bake a book once, and notice its social messages, power structures, and critique (such as its exposé of patriarchy). Then froth up the tasty bits, put them back in the nutritious skin, and bake them again to crisp the outside and warm the middle. Mmm, delicious. For a twice-baked book, social roles and power messages come wrapped in a second layer of meaning. (It’s a fair point that some readers only eat the inside of the potato, but they rob themselves of much of the value, don’t they?) We’ll come back to this second layer. First, let’s open the steamy middle of the spud, tasting Damsel’s critique of patriarchy.1
Unquiet bits
Like the Barbie movie, Damsel (the novel) resists simplification. What I am calling patriarchy is not, in Damsel, simply the result of a male power-grab. The ritual of feeding princesses to the dragon of Aurea began 800 years ago, we learn, for the noblest of reasons. Men and women continue the tradition at a psychological cost, sometimes experiencing doubt about their role, sometimes cracking under the horror of it. More than once in its history, consequential authority is practiced in Aurea by females.
Complex as are all the characters and their relations to gender and power, several factors make the governing system of Aurea patriarchal. First, the only way for a woman to have power and security in this society is through her willingness to countenance the sacrificial death of other females. Second, for centuries, certain males have had the power to choose which women live or die in Aurea. Third, when a woman does gain power, it is only because of her relation (marriage) to a prince or king — a relation that depends on his choice not to kill her.
There is more. In Aurea, independence of mind is a trait that will get a woman thrown to the dragon. Prospective princesses are wooed under false pretenses, their “choices” limited by key information never disclosed to them. Marriage presents itself to single women as a gateway to love, acceptance, and companionship, which for Aurean princesses is not actually on offer. Crucially, Elodie’s marriage separates her from her community; against her habits and inclination, she is forced to act alone.
As a newcomer to Aurea, Elodie marvels that the ruling family seems only to bear sons, never daughters. And so in 800 years, no one has asked whether the dragon finds princes as tasty as princesses. Aurea is unsafe for girls and women for reasons that never threaten boys or men.
Damsel “gets” the horror of any girl or woman’s discovery that a plot has been laid for her simply because of her sex, having nothing to do with her own lovely designs. Whether a male or female reveals this plot to her, it is a plot reserved under patriarchy for females.2 Elodie could be any girl/woman who finds herself fighting (because of her sex or gender) for bodily integrity, access to her community, a light to see by, or her life. Any of these privileges may also be taken from a heterosexual man (say, one convicted of a felony, assaulted, or murdered), but not because of his gender.
Through language to the heartsong
The end goal of quiet reading, however, is never to show how an individual or group has suffered because of a social identity — the hasty, unfortunate conclusion that many people have drawn from the academic study of gender, race, class, and social power. There is so much more to works of literary and human scope, as there is more to a baked potato than the easily-forked middle. If we expect this in advance, we can spot the patriarchal critique and keep going from there. Is there any more to this story than observing the fault lines of human division?
The main story of Damsel is Elodie’s fight to overcome the plot laid for her because of her sex, but a key to the next layer of the novel’s insight may be found in its unconventional use of language. Evelyn Skye’s attention to language helps Elodie through not only her predestined patriarchal plot but also through a simple, binary story of gender and power.
Readers of this newsletter learned last week that Evelyn Skye’s daughter Reese created the dragon language called Khaevis Ventvis which provides so much distinction to Damsel and complexity to the mythic antagonist. But there is another way that Damsel uses language to tell its story. I refer to transitions between the artifice of fairy-tale-speech and the brisk, contemporary voice of an action novel.
If you read the novel (and I recommend that you do), you may find the characters’ speech unusually artificial. “ ‘My dear,’ ” says Elodie’s father to her stepmother on the sea voyage to Aurea, “ ‘I brought you your extra cloak.’ ” Damsel begins in a world where people wear cloaks and husbands pack them thoughtfully for the comfort of wives. I don’t know about you, but that’s a world I only know from books.
When Elodie meets Queen Isabelle of Aurea, her intended mother-in-law is anything but natural. “ ‘We exhort you to be at home in Aurea,’ ” pronounces the queen paradoxically to the bride and her family, as though anyone could be “at home” in a place of exhortation.
This artificial language may be partially explained by the knowledge that Skye’s novel was adapted from a screenplay first and is the more complex text of the two.
Different registers of language also place Damsel between the unnatural conventions of a patriarchal fairy tale — the kind where princesses are thrown to dragons without anyone questioning why this must happen — and the natural world where realistic, relatable characters live.
Some characters’ language changes during the novel, and with it, their relationships. One whose words begin in stilted clichés may be found in a late chapter speaking the natural prayer, “Please, please be safe. Please come.” The same character changes her style of movement as well as speech:
Never in her life had she run before, because it was undignified and she looked like a newborn desert goat still unsure of its limbs, but —- did not care right now. The only thing that mattered was getting to her girls as fast as she could.
Yes, Damsel is a feminist, revisionist fairy tale about the lengths a woman must go to in order to save her life from a deadly, patriarchal marriage plot. It is also a parable about the constriction of any confining script. You will cheer Elodie when language, imagination, and empathy empower her to break free of the most well-laid plot. Damsel is both feminist and humanist, plotting a path to the liberation of a trapped woman, which is to say a trapped human.
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As long as we live in a world of unquiet, we will have unquiet books.
Quiet readers do not limit themselves to conflict-free books, nor to heavy-handed readings that efface human complexity. Whatever the story, we tap the surface to find the seam that leads to its singing heart. Heartsong is more than identity or tribe. Everyone has it, and anyone can join it. Quiet reading vibrates between silent appreciation and the inclination to join the chorus.
What’s quiet about this is the recognition that any words I use to describe a well-told story will only get at part of it. Something will be left unsaid.
You might say with the author that Damsel’s heartsong is about “the power of mothers and their daughters.” You might say it’s about hard-won liberation from stories that confine us.
If you read the novel, you might find words for something I missed. That would be okay. With quiet readers, we’re not in competition to decide whose words will rule the world. We don’t toss each other to dragons.
Depending on how you eat a baked potato, it’s ok with me if you want to say the critical reading is the skin and the “heartsong” is the fluffy middle. The point is that there are two layers. Ain’t it true that some people start a potato from the outside, some from the inside, and some only eat one part? Go figure. Same with books.
Damsel does not ask about other genders, but non-binary folk may also identify with this experience of finding a plot laid for them by someone else because of gender.
"The end goal of quiet reading, however, is never to show how an individual or group has suffered because of a social identity" Yes. How did this ever take off?
My interpretation of the phrase, Quiet Reading, is to (as much as possible) try and read from outside and beyond one’s cluttered mental framework—a framework laden with biases, expectations, motivated reasonings, roadblocks, etc.—and allow the text to speak for itself, allow the text to blaze new trails of thinking, feeling, and imagining.
I have always eaten the skin of the potato. Always.