Ruth Revisited

This week I finished reading A.C. Wise's novel, Wendy, Darling. It's a fleshing out of the Peter Pan story, but takes place in Wendy's adulthood. My favorite aspect was its psychological darkness, incorporating the bleak history of "female hysteria" and playing on the idea that stories from youth often hold inverse meanings for us in adulthood. It's also a story of how the process of retelling fairytales is a necessary resolution to childhood wounds. Healing can't happen for Wise's characters without the addressing the darkness.

Fairytales, folklore, mythology, and other traditional stories are revisited often because they are archetypal. We tell and retell stories that capture quintessential human dynamics. Yet stories told to children are often unsubtle about which character the listener is supposed to see themselves as. Most stories aren't inherently bad, but they are boring if they're unrelatable, disappointing when we find out we can't mirror the hero or achieve the moral, and abhorrent when told as devices of subjugation. Reimagining poorly presented stories is cathartic for me, and I hope it can be for you too. 

Disney was and is a juggernaut of storytelling in the lives of many American kids, so I'm going to talk about some Disney stories. But I watched very little TV growing up. Instead, I was raised on excellent books (albeit almost exclusively Euro-centric), took an interest in Greek mythology, and though it wasn't of utmost interest to me, I was schooled in Biblical lore at length. 

In contrast to texts like the Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer's Odyssey, or Beowulf, I learned the context and morals of Biblical texts as divine truth with heavy implications for my 21st-century life. The Bible contains a variety of genres and it's lazy storytelling to teach it all as literalist historical record. I'm hardly against emotional storytelling or the hope and expectation that good stories change lives. But using emotional telling of Bible stories to control behavior is an abuse of story. 

I understood in no uncertain terms as a child that if I didn't accept and emulate the correct moral of a Bible lesson, I would receive just punishment in the present world and the eternal one. Most sermons for adults follow the same format. Many Bible teachers I've encountered would bristle at me calling Bible stories fables, and yet they tell Bible stories with an explicit interpretation of what the listener is supposed to take from it. By contrast, when Jesus began to speak publicly, he relied on retellings ("you have heard it said, but I say...") and consistently baffled his listeners about what the takeaway of his parables should be. His storytelling remains interesting. 

In addition to uniform moralizing, Bible stories are often taught or emphasized to girls in different ways than boys. Lack of egalitarian storytelling isn't a uniquely religious vice. Gendered marketing and narrative control is as present in Disney and secular publishing as it is in religious teaching. It's such a cruel twisting of our desire to see ourselves in the stories we consume. While men aren't untouched by gendered marketing and indoctrination, girls and women frequently read books beyond those marketed purely to women, whereas boys and men tend not to read books marketed to women.

A.C. Wise's Wendy, Darling is called in multiple places a "feminist retelling." I hate that feminism is a genre. A class of books that needs a name to differentiate them not only from "regular" books, but also from other books "for women." I hate that books that feature women beyond their capacity as sexual moons reflecting the sun of normalcy are classified as political (bad), extreme (bad), or simply extremely niche - of interest only to women who are as bad (political, extreme) as the books they read. I'm not the first to hate this, and secular publishing has made feminist stories a bit more mainstream if only for monetary reasons: marketing a book as feminist might attract feminist readers, a voracious bunch indeed. Less so with Christian spiritual material, and since that's so intertwined with my own history with stories, I assume this isn't a topic overtrodden among people who might be reading. 

Wendy, Darling is indeed from the perspective of two female characters. It is full of these characters' thoughts and feelings throughout the events that take place. Many of these thoughts are unabashedly angry about abuse suffered at the hands of men. There is also hurt felt by men from men, and by women from women. A primary female character experiences abuse and goes on to tell three people in her lifetime that she didn't like it. I'm a feminist, I liked this book, and the reviews that call it a feminist retelling are positive reviews. It's just really shitty that a book by a woman, from the perspective of a woman who is upset about being mistreated, is categorized as feminist. 

Disney has worked their people overtime to update the Princess cannon. Before I disembowel their efforts, I admit that I've seen very few of the reboots. I was so excited for Mulan, but Disney ruined it by making a deal with a genocidal tourist bureau in order to film it. I watched the Beauty and the Beast live action one (I remember nothing about it, so it was at best completely forgettable), and I think I watched the most recent Cinderella one, purely for Cate Blanchett and her wardrobe. All of the live-action reboots are remakes rather than retellings, so maybe it's lazy criticism to expect more than a lazy reimagining. 

Disney tends to girl-bossify its princesses, not liberate them. The protagonists' apparent awakenings to their imprisonment, impoverished servitude, lack of prospects, or just plain boredom is solved, with the occasional help of animals, by men and money. I'm not suggesting that liberative retellings do not include the benefits of romance, companionship, having one's material needs met, or even luxury. But with no exceptions that I'm aware of, the princesses positioned as role models in the Disney cannon shake off personal patriarchy (if that) and step into la-la-land. From stone tower to ivory tower, from fire to single-serving frying pan, pick your metaphor. It's grotesque that that's the moral of the story for little girls, and that adults continue to indulge in it. Disney is a capitalist cult dressed up as "a good time," but whoever named this dystopian nightmare Rancho Mirage at least has a sense of humor. 

It's a shame, because even in the origin stories of the Disney princesses, there's relatable content. Belle is imprisoned as collateral for her father's debt: that's dark, and it's certainly real-world (I can't remember if that's in the animated version, it's in the written version). But then her salvation comes from herself (yay, girl-boss?) through sweetly and bravely rearing a man-child who is literally disfigured by his own emotional smallness. Ironically, that is a story that many girls grow up to live. But a happy ending only comes to the heroine, imaginary or real, when her captor is transformed by her own terror and emotional labor. 

I think we could suffer a retelling in which Belle takes the talking candlestick and lights the curtains on fire. I want Belle reimagined as Valerie Solanas: a feminist writer, a jaw too clenched for fashion magazines, a woman who seethed against her prostitution, walking around with a loaded pistol in her handbag. If you've ever heard of Solanas, it's probably because she infamously shot Andy Warhol, an oddly antithetical footnote in the scheme of her agenda. The writer Claire Dederer said of Solanas, "her happiness was made safely impossible by the scope of her revolution." Isn't that an excellent summation of the plight of women whose role, whether chosen or imposed, is to "fix" the bad behavior of men?

Windsor Castle in 1992, by Susan Flantzer

This reimagined Belle is, I admit, no less palatable for a children's movie. I don't want to hide from my kids that abduction, debtor's prison, and sexual slavery are real, and moreover, that survivors don't typically end up in a ball gown. Yet I always wish I could wait a little longer until they find out about incessant violence against vulnerable people. It's impossible to write a liberated heroine or hero without telling what was vanquished in the process. Why do we tell stories that make the moral of the story "reach Heaven" (or Rancho Mirage), and don't look back? That's for girl-bosses, not feminists. 

The Bible has its own cast of princesses. Most of them aren't literally princesses, but there aren't a ton of female leads so the ones who do get airtime become well known to church girls. Many Biblical heroines were sexual slaves, prostitutes, or "promiscuous." Rachel, Tamar, Rahab, Esther, Bathsheba, Mary of Magdala, and the Samarian woman at the well, to name a few. Their stories aren't written from their perspectives (phew, not feminist!) so we don't know what degree of agency these women had in their situations or vocations. On top of that (unasked) unknown, the majority of religious and secular cultures vilify sex workers and blame victims, so whether a woman was forced into or choose sex is equally besmirching. With alarming regularity, stories about women in the Bible begin in the context of their grooming, purchase, or rape by the main character. Their sexual exploitation isn't the only thing we end up knowing about them, but it's always mentioned within the, at most, several paragraphs of their stories. Relatable. 

Ruth is nearly an exception. Hers is an objectively fascinating story, but it deserves a less misogynistic moral than it usually gets. Forgive me for this dry outline, I promise it will get juicier: Ruth was from Moab, a tribal kingdom believed to overlap with modern-day Jordan. The Moabites were on-and-off rivals of the Israelites. The Israelites were also tribal and one of their tribes was the Ephrithites. Multiple Israelite tribes lived in the region ruled by the Israelite tribe of Judah. During a famine in Judean territory, many families migrated to other tribal territories, and Ruth the Moabite married an Ephrithite immigrant in Moab.

Ruth's Ephrithite husband died in Moab, along with her father-in-law and brother-in-law. The story says that Ruth and her husband had been married about 10 years before his death, but it seems as if neither Ruth or her sister-in-law who stays in Moab had children. There's no comment about that in the story, but I think it's interesting because it seems unusual. When the famine in Judah ended, Ruth's mother-in-law, Naomi, decided to return to Judah and Ruth insisted on accompanying her. 

Widowed and penniless, Ruth and Naomi were destitute migrants. To keep from starving, Ruth gleaned barley fields. This meant she picked up whatever scraps fell while the farm hands harvested the grain. In a retelling, she'd be taking aluminum cans out of public garbage bins. Ruth's story mentions several times that gleaning put her in a position vulnerable to harm. 

The first field Ruth gleaned was owned by a man named Boaz, who treated her kindly and turned out to be a relative of Naomi's deceased husband. When Naomi realized this, she told Ruth to keep to Boaz's fields for her safety. As time went on, Naomi coached Ruth in how to utilize other cultural and religious practices of the Judeans to improve the women's livelihoods. This culminates in Naomi encouraging Ruth to position herself as "available" to Boaz in what is a pretty strange and funny scene. Ultimately it plays out in success for everyone involved, not least because everyone seems to consent to the situation. Boaz agrees to fulfill a traditional Judean family benefactor role to Naomi by wedding Ruth and acquiring the ancestral lands of Naomi's deceased husband. Ruth and Boaz have a son together.

Just like Germanic fairytales with their elements of feudalism, animism/paganism/witchcraft, woodlands, mountains, and stone masonry, the familial, agrarian, and religious customs of Moab and Judea drive the events of Ruth's story. It definitely has the real-world suffering that make fairytales enduring and relatable. But we also get the exciting and satisfying elements of a rags-to-riches tale, romance, and the heroine acting in service to herself and others. It's a crying, blubbering shame that a story with such great bones is so often told to girls with a bizarre moral attached.

The most famous line of the story is delivered by Ruth as she joins Naomi in leaving Moab. Ruth tells Naomi, "Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God." It feels rare - rare between a woman and her mother-in-law, rare for its cultural and religious implications, rare in its absolutism (one could say extremism) that Ruth actually follows through on. I think it's what Christian pastors, missionaries, and parents desperately want to hear from everyone else. Why can't children and pagans be more like Ruth? 

Two things are typically held up to be emulated or venerated in Ruth's story: her intense loyalty to Naomi, and God's plan throughout Ruth's trajectory. The story text doesn't say this was all orchestrated by God, so that moral is definitely a perspective. Not false or bad necessarily, but requires "reading in." 

While Ruth is praised for extreme loyalty to Naomi and Naomi’s God, it required disloyalty (or at least separation) from her birth tribe, family, and religion. Some people would call that desertion and betrayal. Maybe she was desperate to leave, the story doesn't give that context. Ruth's loyalty is to what the storytellers perceive as good. The Israelites were frequently not the regional good guys, as the God of the Bible points out repeatedly elsewhere. It's also not a stretch of the imagination to read Naomi as miserable and conniving (though a kinder interpretation is grieving and in survival mode). I don't think less of these characters for their decisions, but I am puzzled by the unexamined moral of loyalty. 

Most fairytales conveniently end before the princess becomes a mother. I quite like reimagined narratives that introduce the princess as a mother. That was the most heartfelt and innovative feature of Greta Gerwig's Barbie movie. It's even more central in Wendy, Darling. In Ruth's story, we find out that "God enabled her to conceive," which, though not uncommon of Biblical fertility, is very specific phrasing and begs the question of why now and not before. Maybe she simply had enough food for the first time. What is much more unusual is a line that states that after Ruth's son was born, Noami took him in her arms and cared for him. If I were reimagining, I'd tease that out. 

The Bible isn't shy in calling Ruth a foreigner in Judah. The culture and religions of the Israelites and the Moabites often clashed. In fact, inter-cultural marriage was often forbidden to Israelite men because it was common for foreign wives to bring their pagan idols into Israelite households, which led to fracturing of Israelite religious practices. The primary Moabite deity was called Chemosh, and at least some facet of Moabite religion included human sacrifice. Human sacrifice was forbidden for Israelites, though they engaged in it too. 

In the Bible, Israelite suffering is often a consequence from God for their cyclical abandonment of God's more liberative, less violent commandments. Consequences not infrequently took the form of domination by the Israelite's enemies and exile from Israelite territories. It's been suggested that the famine in Judah that Naomi's family fled was caused by another kingdom decimating Judean land. If I was modernizing Ruth's story, I'd touch on human-led climate devastation as a form of child sacrifice. 

The dynamic between Ruth and Boaz includes a truly strange scene, but by and large is....romantic?? Both are likable characters in the text and described as "of good character," "upstanding," etc. It's not hard to imagine them falling in love, and I do hope that was the case. They are friendly and respectful toward one another leading up to the odd benefactor initiation ritual. In this plan, Naomi tells Ruth to put on perfume and her best clothes, hide at Boaz's workplace until after dinner and when Boaz is fast asleep, "uncover his feet," lay down, and "he'll tell you what to do next." There is every interpretation you can imagine of what this means, and some you can't. I've seen everything from "his cold feet would wake him up and alert him to her presence," to "it's a euphemism for peeing," to "it's definitely sex." Whatever this scene is depicting isn't a well-documented ritual to gain a benefactor in Israelite culture. 

Whatever "uncovering his feet" means, Boaz wakes up and tells Ruth she's safe. In fact, there's this adorable line where he thanks her for coming to him instead of going after a younger, richer man. He also calls her "daughter," which I'm sure was an honorific, but is a bit weird. Then they lay there for the rest of the night (seems unnecessary after he's verbally assured her he'll take on the role of benefactor), and in the early morning he tells her to make sure no sees her leaving. You have to put your brain into a pretzel for this not to be sex. Ruth definitely agrees to the first part of the plan that Naomi lays out, and Boaz seems pleased to accept "his feet being uncovered," likely making this the most explicitly consensual sex scene in the Bible.  

For all the slut-shaming that goes unchecked in the Bible and its retelling, Ruth's sexy scene gets erased more often than criticized. Given the existing trust between Ruth and Boaz, the fact that they'd had non-cuddly conversations before, their known familial tie, and the known custom of the family benefactor, it seems like they could have had a day-time conversation about this without perfume and uncovered feet. The booty call as a venue for this economic agreement seems needlessly complicated, especially if Ruth and Boaz were willing to be married as part of the benefactor situation. What no one wants to say is that it kind of seems like Naomi pimped Ruth out. Ruth is put in an extremely vulnerable position, even though she has reason to believe Boaz won't harm her. Conversely, Ruth initiating sneaky sex to solicit economic stability from Boaz is manipulative. 

These days, feminists call sex in exchange for food exploitation. Events themselves aren't what make a story feminist or not-feminist. I can't rewrite Ruth out of a context in which women's bodies were repeatedly used as economic assets. It's awesome that Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz all seem better off through forming a new family together. Ruth sounds like a genuinely big-hearted and tenacious woman. But the book of Ruth wasn't written by her. We don't know if she was a spicy lady and liked Boaz, or if she stripped because she was hungry. It makes me sad that no one asked. 

In the moral delivered to church girls, Ruth is admirable for sacrificing herself on the altar of familial loyalty. That's very Beauty-and-the-Beastian. Ruth's agency is always assumed, despite the clearly desperate circumstances she was in, and I think it goes unquestioned because it's unquestionable that church girls want to sacrifice themselves for their families too. You know who isn't usually cited as a Bible princess? The judge and prophet Deborah, who agreed to help an Israelite general as long as history credited the military victory to a woman. An O.G. riot grrrl. 

A reimagined moral to Ruth's story is Ruth as a political ally. It takes humility and bravery to see someone in total despair, fighting a battle that isn't yours, and say, "I will dedicate my life to making your cause my cause." Unlike girl-boss princesses, Ruth's allyship puts her in genuine danger to alleviate oppression in her adopted culture, one in which she is called a foreigner. Boys can emulate that. Girls can emulate that with or without involving wombs. 

This week my 9-year-old son said, "it's kind of like all stories are real because real people thought of them." I retell Bible stories to myself because they were real in my history and I need to heal the old reality. Throughout this process, there is a great sob of grief that bubbles right below the words. I need only to read a book, live for a day, to find fodder for that bubble. To feed the bonfire of my imagination. To let a spark jump to the curtains. When I write, I burn stuff down. When I live, I try to be like my Ruth, making sure my cause is an adopted one, one that sets other people free too.