In 1989, Clarissa Pinkola Estes gave us Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. In 2021, Rachel Yoder gave us Nightbitch, a novel about one woman’s personal transformation into wholeness through her instinctual nature. I’m compelled to write this blog post because of a brief description of Marielle Heller’s film version of Rachel Yoder’s novel. The reviewer said only that the film Nightbitch is about how motherhood turns a woman into a dog.
As true as it is on the surface, to leave potential viewers and readers with this reductionist assessment is failing to understand both the novel’s and the film’s value. It is too easy to look away from Amy Adams as she morphs into this strange creature because the enchantment glamour creating our attraction to artificial beauty robs us of our experience of wildness. This glamour – more active in our culture since the spread of TV and all the screens to follow – also creates the illusion that we have no need for wildness, that it is gross and unnecessary.
Yet our loss of wildness is no small thing. It is the reason behind our undeniable climate crises. Lost wildness has also made our election of authoritarian strong men propped up by human fear possible all over our shared Earth Home. These murderous bullies have no relationship with the greater-than-human world beyond the intention to dominate it, to extract whatever they value, and to leave the rest, thinking they can rocket to Mars or the Moon and begin their exploitive, extractive ruthlessness once again. Some are creating schemes to replace wildness with a technological killing machine composed of so many seemingly unrelated parts it makes the Hydra of ancient times nothing but a silly creature easily outsmarted by Hercules and his nephew. Hercules is another strong-man-saviour myth popularized first by Greeks, who called him Heracles, and Romans, and then by North American culture’s cartoons and films.
When I first began this post, I explored my understanding of the human wildness archetypes as they manifest in human life. I began with scholarly examples because the defensive part of me needed to prove the absolute necessity of wildness in our lives. I’ve worked through that urge. This blog post is for people who already know how our relationships within the greater-than-human web are indispensable to our humanness, to our true nature. We cannot simply watch the world burn, and flood, and freeze, and bake when we have had our own experiences of wildness. Climate crises are personal to us; we know we – humans – have brought these climate crises on through our collective actions and our collusion with the corporations who have been saying since their inception “Hey, we’re here to make your lives better, more convenient, more . . . glamorous.”
When I was young and living in Windsor, teaching and doing what I could to make sense of an increasingly fractured world, a friend gave me a cartoon from the Detroit Free Press. I can’t remember the name of the cartoon, but in my memory, the sequence of pictures goes like this. First the character is sitting outside feeling beyond solace. Then she lies down and looks up at the sky. Then she rolls over and rests her cheek against the grass. Then she “tickles” the ground. When a flower springs up, her face radiates joy. The last panel says “You’re never lonely when Mother Nature loves you.” Now, looking back, I think I knew even then that was only a half truth. The corollary is also true: “You’re never lonely when you love Mother/Father Nature.”
Because of early circumstances that placed me in the greater-than-human world as a distressed toddler, I learned very early that Nature – a being I sensed even then to be all genders, species, and elements – loved and soothed me as the humans in my life could not. As a young adult feeling more and more enraged at the industrialized world’s destruction of the harmonies I’d been loving and being loved by for decades, I was surprised to learn many others didn’t share this experience. In fact, they thought my preoccupations with, value of, and respect for the world of dirt and water, growth and decay, weird.
It is weird, but only because the tech companies have all the media outlets through which to spread their authoritarian, strong-man, saviour myths. The only antidote I know for this endlessly cresting wave of false information is to build a raft of stories that remind us of the value of the wildness in the world, that power beyond human domination, stories like Nightbitch that remind us of the wildness in us, even when we smother it with cultural expectations and fear.
Read or see Nightbitch and draw your own conclusions about how motherhood became a catalyst for the artist-hero’s return to authenticity, to full flowering and fruit bearing, to wholeness. Yes, it’s story about a woman turning into a dog. And it’s a story about how our mammalian instinctive nature returns us to the night air that is the remedy for technology, to the fields of loam and possibility that are growing wildness all the time, to the forests of terror and joy beyond any device a human dreamed up and wants in our hands.
And if you need more stories about wildness and the value of the greater-than-human world, read Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Gaskell, and all the current writers of fiction who are creating a path through the horrors of technological industrializing strong-man domination to roots literal and figurative pulsing with life. Walk in a forest or wood and feel the truth. Nature does not belong to us. We belong to and within the great web of life that is defeating technology and its worshipers through the raging storms unbridled technological manufacturing creates. Let us align with this massive power, let us take action. Let us feel the anguish of loss. Let our losses galvanize us to action to protect the world’s wildness and our own.
Until next time,
Jane