Some time ago I agreed to read and review “Wo(men) and Bears: The Gifts of Nature, Culture and Gender Revisited,” an anthology edited by Kaarina Kailo, who is a Finnish feminist. Many books exist about the relationship between bears and humans, but no others are like this. It is circumpolar, often polemic, and cross-media, including prose, poetry and art.
Bears, more than other animals, lend themselves to stories about the “Other,” either stories of transformation or stories of intimate relationship or both. Seals as “selkies” are popular along the coastlines and foxes appeal to the Japanese while wolves are also shapeshifters, and there are American Indian stories about women who run with horses. The stories are often ways of covertly reflecting on gender politics, esp. the abusive kind that trigger fantasies of either escape or retribution.
Of the two bear stories out of a huge personal stash of incidents, memories, and tales that I ponder, one is in this book. It’s Marian Engel’s novel written in response to a wager that she could not write a book about a relationship between a woman and a bear that realistically portrayed sex. The novel, called simply “The Bear,” is famous in Canada and taught under the guise of the bear symbolizing nature. (So that’s all right -- the bear is a symbol!) Both bear and woman are isolated, somewhat abused, and atypical, qualities that lead to intimacy.
The other one, I’m pretty sure, is from Anne Cameron’s “Daughters of Copper Woman,” which doesn’t appear to be included. It’s about a tribal woman who lives alone in the forest where she is spied on by a glossy bright-eyed black bear. It turns out that the bear has fallen in love and wants to “marry” her. She’s okay with that. The bear then discloses it is female. The woman ponders a bit, then says, “okay.” I like it because it evokes several boundary transgressions at once.
The great advantage of having a bear for a lover (and the male versions are almost all grizzlies) is that they are capable of taking revenge on abusers, though the bear is often killed by men in the end. But sometimes the woman’s story is that SHE becomes the bear and often she gives birth to cubs. Once some idiot shot a small cub and brought it to Bob’s taxidermy shop, wrongly thinking he would be sympathetic. I came in unknowing and Bob turned to put the cub -- about the size of a human one-year-old -- into my arms. For a moment I thought I was holding a sleeping human baby.
Relationships with bears go back to the very dawn of human stories and may have even -- I’m thinking now with the evidence in the newspapers -- been about relationships with Neanderthals. I don’t know about stories involving gorillas but I loved Molly Gloss’s “Wild Life” about the woman who joined a family of Susquatch. I’ve been intrigued to learn about the category of gay men who are called “bears,” big hairy guys who dress like lumberjacks, though I don’t know any specific stories. The attraction to this form of power may go back to childhood when a child is hefted overhead by an adult male quite unlike its mother.
But this book is called “Wo(men) and Bears,” specifically focused on the feminist dimension in the context of theory. In fact, for me, the least appealing part of the book is the “Introduction” which lines out the theory in a formal way, using a lot of word-play in the way that Mary Daly used to address religion. It’s not that I disagree with the politics so much as that I don’t have the concentration to keep all the signaled nuance of quotes, dashes, back-slashes, and so on straight in my head. It is jargon and no doubt useful to the initiated. Easy to just skip it.
The actual art is appealing and suggestive (ahem). The several bibliographies are invaluable and range over many contexts. I thought it was wise to end the book with a straightforward reality report from Maureen Enns, a writer, photographer, artist, and professor who joined Charlie Russell (not the cowboy artist -- both these people are contemporary residents of Alberta, Canada), in the far north and east parts of Russia primally connected to the American continent. The partners rescued cubs from captivity and restored them to freedom on a broad and watery land so packed with salmon that bears have no need to stalk people. Charlie’s fishing expeditions often included the bears: a fish for you and a fish for me, both mammals standing upright to their waists in water. This peaceful coexistence was ended by predatory humans, who first “eat” the animals and then (we project into the future in this location) eat the land.
What this tragedy brings alive is the difference between living beings as categories compared with the individually known creature with an internal life of its own, which is often a view suppressed by politics. Indeed, Kailo reports difficulty in just finishing the book because her collaborator’s income was compromised by politics. The array of theoretical studies triggered in the Seventies seems to be dying back.
Since I’ve lost my connection to the original request for a review, I’ll just send this to Inanna Press (http://www.yorku.ca/inanna/) which defines itself as Essential Reading for Feminists the World Over. It’s in Toronto (read “elitist, sophisticated, urban, privileged”) which raises hackles among prairie bears, but prairie feminists know they need every resource they can find to survive in a man-centered environment.
As an “everythingist” rather than a feminist or even a humanist, I’m still aware that for sharp analysis one must often study the part as separated from the whole or risk missing many points of view and contingencies. I believe, in fact, that one of the key elements of this feminist body of theory is knowing and accepting that there are valid ways of being in the world that may be virtual or in conflict. I believe the key, like the report from Maureen Enns, is actual lived-out reality in the sensory world with real bears. As a Bibfeldtian both/and thinker, it is the tension between the reality and the theoretical that produces valid plans for action. And we must act, even if caught between woman and bear, or we will have no world left.
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