The Dance of the Mothers by Millicent Dillon (review)

Reviews 185 stories, Le Guin writes about the people who find in Klatsand a place to visit, live, die, or recover from the death of a loved one. Her focus is less on events than on people, and as in Fowler’s novel, we see some of the same characters from different points of view. Le Guin also makes main characters of those otherwise marginalized in the existing body of literature—housewives, wait­ resses, junior college professors. But the stories are linked not so much by recurrent characters as by the ocean, which courses beneath the narrative layer with a restless, powerful rhythm. Le Guin most frequently examines the rela­ tionships between generations of women, as in “Quoits” and the lovely “Hand, Cup, Shell.” The book’s luminescent centerpiece, “Hernes,” is a long, non­ linear narrative about four generations ofwomen in a Klatsand family and is as good as any fiction Le Guin has written. While Searoadand Sarah Canaryare quite different in style and content, they similarly reflect recent feminist and New Historicist thought. For instance, in both the authors playwith and overturn literary expectations. Fowler hilariously subverts chivalric traditions by making the object of the chase in Sarah Canary grotesquely ugly, an incarnation of European intellectual conceptions of woman as uncivilized and nonsensical. The quest that moves the plot falls apart when Sarah Canary vanishes, much to the guilty reliefof those who pursue her. Throughout Searoad, but particularly in “Hernes,” Le Guin reshapes our sense of language and narrative, frequently adopting what she calls “the mother tongue”—the language of the household as opposed to the language of the academy. She also dispenses with the straightforward, hero-oriented narrative thrust of much canonical literature. Rather than heroic deeds, her characters cope with the true burdens of life—maintaining a household, nourishing relationships, tending the dying. Both authors are profoundly aware of those who have been dispossessed by Western expansionism. By bringing to our attention the people forced into the margins of the Western mainstream, they call into question the history of the West as it is presented in textbooks. Both make plain the voices of some of those who have until recently gone unheard. AMYCLARKE University ofCalifornia, Davis TheDance ofthe Mothers. By Millicent Dillon. (Dutton, 1991. 181 pages, $18.95.) In order to dance, dancers must have space to move; clearing space to move constitutes the matter of Millicent Dillon’s novel. In this narrative of explora­ tion, four women encounter physical and spiritual boundaries as they seek to use the power of dance to assist them in negotiating control over their lives. The land before these women is circumscribed by a series of barriers: 186 WesternAmerican Literature personal and traditional expectations are chief among the obstacles each woman must confront. The concept offemale as bound by tradition is depicted in Dillon’s novel by an image of an old woman clinging to the back ofa younger one in a dance whose direction comes from the power of the old woman. The implication is that the diminished strength of age is still strong enough to push down the younger woman’simpulse to release herselffrom the female cycles of giving, bending, and moving to the demands of others. The time-bound and space-bound life patterns of the dancers are culturespecific : these are white women struggling with unsatisfactory relationships with others—their relationships with men are unsatisfying and they are spiritually disconnected from other women. Their unsuccessful attempts to release them­ selves into new forms stem from the unwillingness to believe themselves capable of renewal. Unlike, for example, the female exchanges in Navajo myth where the cyclical pattern of Changing Woman and White Shell Woman suggest complementarity, the movements of the women in Dillon’s novel propose insularity and disconnection. Ninta, the dance mistress, must face her own incompetence to meld her ability as performer and as teacher. Ultimately, her standards of perfection for her dancers and for herself are elusive, for she is unable to capture the fluid movements that she postulates and, not surprisingly, she is unable to communi­ cate them to her students. Ninta’s rigidity foils her ability to defy gravity and time; consequently, her efforts...