Snow White Doesn’t Want to Wake Up: The Romance Reader by Pearl Abraham and The Bearded Mother by Anne Halley

Nilsen Gökçen

Nazmi Agil

Patriarchy has proven to co-opt much of the strategies that are intended to

fight against it. Thus the success of some resistance strategies as being

potentially subversive to patriarchal authority is open to debate. Pearl

Abraham’s first novel The Romance Reader portrays such a strategic choice of a

protagonist caught at the junction where her gender, ethnicity, and religion

place her. Rachel belongs to an immigrant Chassidic family in which she is

traditionally expected to transform her role as a dutiful daughter to that of a

wife and mother. Rejecting the choice awaiting her, Rachel takes refuge in the

world of romance whereby she shuts off the reality that presses upon her. In

this alternative world where everything revolves around “love” and most things

happen in accordance with her heart’s desire, she feels a sense of control over

the flow of events. The clear character definitions and the pre-established

plots peculiar to the genre create a safe haven which gives her the illusion that

there she can act with complete liberty and as the subject of her deeds.

However, by doing this she also freezes herself in time, thus annihilating the

possibility of transforming action. Because, the well-drawn frame which is the

source of illusion is also the source of new limitations. Hoping to attain control

over the temporal flux, she identifies with the heroines, who enjoy a suspension

of time at its prime. And yet this is a dry season, a frozen climate where there

is no growth up into the actual world. The experiences of the romance world are

bound to remain useless unless they serve as rehearsals of a challenge against

the pressures lurking outside.

In her refusal to integrate with the system Rachel chooses to deny, rather than

defy, tradition. Identifying with romance heroines, she creates only an illusion

of freedom while inadvertently continuing the gender role that has been

allocated to women. On the one hand, claiming to “write the book of her life,”

she assumes the subject position and asserts her personhood. On the other,

however, this act serves only to imprison her in the text and further suggests

her choice of inertia over subversive action and the frozen state of written

word over the dynamic possibilities of life, a choice conflicting with her gender’s

life-affirming potential.

The answer to how to be the subject of the text and avoid imprisonment in it

comes from a Jewish woman poet Anne Halley. Her Bearded Mother achieves a

re-reading and demystification of patriarchal myths and legends. The poetic

voice in her poems does not connote the denial of experience and the freezing of

time; on the contrary, Halley suggests the alternative of celebrating the

dynamic flow of time and waking up from the dream to claim a female space in

the world of reality.