The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd Page A

difficult when we don’t.
    Back home, I read these words by Jungian analyst Sylvia Perera:
    What has been valued in the West in women has too often been defined only in relation to the masculine: the good, nurturant mother and wife; the sweet, docile agreeable daughter; the gently supportive or bright achieving partner. This collective model is inadequate for life; we mutilate, depotentiate, silence and enrage ourselves trying to compress our souls into it just as surely as our grandmothers deformed their fully breathing bodies with corsets for the sake of an ideal. 32
    Over the next few months I began to probe the feminine scripts that had been imprinted on my life.
    Gracious Lady
    During a visit to my childhood home in Georgia, I bumped into a school friend, and we relived the time during our adolescence when we’d gone to charm school. It was taught by a dramatic woman we called Miss Belle. It was her task to teach us the art of the female life. This involved learning how to set a formal dinner table, use crystal salt bowls instead of shakers, sit in a chair with ankles crossed, walk and pivot in high heels—the beauty pageant walk, we called it. We learned to pour tea, we learned the proper way to take off a summer glove, and we learned a lot of things a lady would never say and do. We discovered how to win boys by letting them open the pickle jar, whether it was too hard for us or not, and by asking boys questions we already knew the answers to.
    My friend and I recalled these things with a laugh. “I was at a luncheon once where the host actually used those crystal salt bowls,” I told her. “I got confused, thought they were sugar bowls, and spooned salt into my iced tea. When I saw what I’d done, you know the first thing that came to my mind? Miss Belle.”
    â€œI know,” my friend replied. “She’s been looking over our shoulders our whole lives.”
    Later I came upon Gloria Steinem’s oft-quoted line, “We are all trained to be female impersonators,” and I thought again about those hours in charm school. 33
    Learning to play the Gracious Lady had started way back there with Miss Belle and probably even before her.
    In the film Fried Green Tomatoes, Evelyn Couch lives out the Gracious Lady, though she’s a little too dowdy to pull it off in the manner of crystal salt dishes and beauty pageant walks. Evelyn is a proper and passive woman who is forever accommodating and being sweet, trying to do the right thing and meticulously playing by the rules of culture.
    In her perky curls and lace collars, she uses her girlish charm and laughter to glide past life’s unpleasantness. She visits her husband’s aunt at the nursing home, bringing candy, and her smile hardly wavers when the old woman throws it and her out of the room. At the grocery store, a young man runs into her, almost knocking her over, and she apologizes. When a driver usurps a parking space she has been waiting for, she courteously swallows back her anger and continues to circle the lot. When she makes a perfect meal for her husband, setting the table with flowers, she sighs but acquiesces when he takes his plate to the chair before the television.
    In one of the film’s more hilarious moments, Evelyn attends a women’s consciousness-raising group at the insistence of a friend who hopes it will instill some power into Evelyn. The leader gives each woman a mirror and tells them they are going to explore their femaleness, the source of their strength and separateness—their vaginas. Falling back in her chair, shocked and flustered, Evelyn makes a nonoffending exit, offering her girdle as an excuse. (Indeed, wearing a girdle is an interesting metaphor of a woman tightly controlled by conventional expectations.)
    It is not until she meets old Mrs. Threadgoode that she begins to question the stereotype she’s living. No Gracious Lady herself, Mrs. Threadgoode dyes her hair