On my 17th birthday, in a small Michigan town much like the one depicted in The Waters, I sat between my grandmothers as they reminded me that each of them had married at 17. Of course, one of them laughed, she hadn’t stayed married for long. I knew this; she had left that husband within a year for reasons on which she never would elaborate. What the women who surrounded me, raised me, made sure I knew was that men were necessary but dangerous. Love them? Sure. But a smart woman would count only on herself.
This is to say that Whiteheart, Bonnie Jo Campbell’s setting for her novel, is familiar to me. I recognize this place, and the silence between its men and women, the way you know your hometown in a dream, even though the details have been amplified, the logic twisted in ways that make perfect sense as long as you sleep.
As the book opens, the matriarch of the Book clan, Hermine “Herself” Zook, lives on a tiny island in the middle of The Waters, raising her granddaughter Dorothy “Donkey” Zook alone. Her three daughters have scattered, seeking their various fates in the wider, and seemingly less enchanted, world. Hermine banished her husband, Wild Bill, decades ago for an undisclosed sin, forbidding him or any other man from setting foot on the island. The intent is to protect the Zook women from the careless cruelty that the men in the story seem doomed to repeat. But, as Campbell writes at one point, “the absent father was the father, after all.” The story, as well as the town, remains haunted by Bill’s absence.
When Rose Thorn Zook comes home to the island to attempt once more to mother the daughter she surrendered to Herself, she sets in motion a chain of events that will lead to a crisis for the entire community. The whole town will be forced to reckon with the disconnection and lack of balance between the men and women of Whiteheart.
The language Bonnie Jo Campbell uses is as fecund and lush as the setting for the story. The lines that title each chapter take on their own form, a poem of sorts. They feel like scripture for a pagan form of worship venerating women’s knowing. Like any good spell, the incantation itself sounds like music, making it a sensuous joy to surrender to the magic.
Key to our understanding of this tale is the curse with which Herself sent Wild Bill away. He should “live as a woman.” Late in the novel, he muses on the page, “What does that mean?” To live as a woman, in the world represented here, means to care, to nurture, to heal, but also to accept that humans are part of the natural world. Death is as much a part of nature as life is. Poison can be part of a cure. Again and again, we see the animals, plants, the land itself, respond to the women of the Zook family — they are not separated from the fauna and flora that surround them.
The sense of visceral menace flows through the narrative, humming at a higher frequency when the men appear. It is an expectation for me that any story that contains witches, snakes, and an old woman who holds women’s secrets will also contain men whose wrath may destroy it all. These men are clumsy, disconnected from their own nature and Nature in a larger sense. These men live in restless exile from their own highest selves, and they know it. They have forgotten how to be soft; their own tenderness shames them and that shame curdles into rage. Their carelessness and blindness to others repeatedly cause harm. It is no accident that they are fixated on guns and religious righteousness — this place that Campbell writes of is not exactly our own, but it operates on many of the same principles.
The central question of the novel is this: Can the men of Whiteheart do as Herself demanded and learn to “live as a woman”? In other words, can they learn to listen to the world? Can they stop crushing mushrooms, wildflowers and young women underfoot in their blindness and arrogance? Can they stop insisting on control, self-righteously certain that they know the mind of God? Can they lay down the goddamn guns and allow themselves to nurture instead?
More urgently, can we?
