I thought that the general aversion to dragons was stupid. It was just a thing that happened. There was no reason to get embarrassed about it. Still. I didn’t like looking at it. I didn’t like the attention that Beatrice had given it. It was too embarrassing. Too female. I felt ashamed in ways that I couldn’t explain. It was as though she had drawn pictures of naked breasts. Or soiled sanitary napkins. [p. 151]
When Alex (not Alexandra, thank you) is four years old, the little old lady down the road turns into a dragon. Of course Alex doesn't initially understand what's happened: dragoning is a shameful, feminine thing, no more a topic of polite conversation than menstruation. True, dragoning -- the transformation of woman into dragon -- has been happening since at least the 1890s, and it's becoming more frequent in 1950s America. (I am not sure whether it also happens elsewhere in the world: the focus of this novel is small-town America.) And then comes the Mass Dragoning of 1955, in which more than six hundred thousand American women are transformed in a single day. This imense metamorphosis is also known as the Day of Missing Mothers, though -- according to a scientist quoted later in the novel -- many of the women were not mothers, and some 'were women by choice, and by the great yearnings of their hearts, and were not labeled as such at birth, and yet are women all the same.' [p. 247].
Alex remains human, as does her mother. But her Aunt Marla -- big, bold, trouser-wearing, auto-mechanic Aunt Marla -- has become a dragon, and Marla's baby daughter Beatrice becomes Alex's 'sister'. 'We were adjusting to the loss of my aunt while also pretending that I had no aunt. This sort of thing gets exhausting after a while.' It's not Alex's first encounter with adult attempts to reshape memory: when she was younger, her mother disappeared for months, and Alex was never really told why. When her mother returned she was a stranger, and Alex was too young to understand illness, surgery, cancer ...
I read When Women Were Dragons on two levels, and (unlike Barnhill, who balances the personal and the broader stories impeccably) I can't keep both in focus at the same time. Firstly there's a story about the transformative power of rage, about misogyny and prejudice in 1950s and 1960s America, about Alex (a brilliant mathematician, like her mother) being castigated for making the boys in her class look bad, about some of the dragons coming back from wherever they've been to help with civil rights and disarmament. But secondly, there's a story about a little girl whose memories are assailed on all sides by adults who won't or can't talk about what happened, who expect her to forget fear and trauma. "I learned to be silent; I was given no context, no frame of reference, no way in which to understand my experience, and the adults in my life hoped I would forget, and by doing so, nearly forced me to forget." [p. 272] Reading that sentence brought tears to my eyes, because that was also my experience when my mother was seriously ill during my childhood.
When Women Were Dragons is full of rage, but also full of humour: full of misogyny, but also full of women helping those who need help, paying it forward. (One of my favourite characters was the redoubtable librarian, Mrs. Gyzinska.) The monsters here are men, including Alex's father, though there are of course exceptions. The love affairs are, I think, all between women. And there's a sensibility that I associate with the dreams of the 1960s, the hopes for love and peace and an end to war, the idea that peaceful protest can change the world. (Oh, the placards they carry: 'MY BODY, MY CHOICE declared the sign held by one dragon. OUR LIVES ARE BIGGER THAN YOU THINK read another.' Hmm, sounds familiar ...)
Kelly Barnhill's afterword is an inspiration: "I, along with the rest of America, listened with horror and incandescent fury to the brave, stalwart testimony of Christine Blasey Ford... I thought I was writing a story about rage. I wasn’t. There is certainly rage in this novel, but it is about more than that. In its heart, this is a story about memory, and trauma. It’s about the damage we do to ourselves and our community when we refuse to talk about the past. It’s about the memories that we don’t understand, and can’t put into context, until we learn more about the world." [p. 337] Barnhill has previously published fiction for younger readers: I hope she is moved to write more for adults, too. I believe we need more joy, more rage, more humour, more hope. And more dragons.
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