FIVE
Wonder
When I was small the Pacific Ocean, where it met the wild and windswept beaches of Australia’s mid-east coast, was the chief energy in my world and in the world of my family. The beachfront was broad and long, the surf a constantly restless body of water full of rips and breakaways, changeable hour by hour. Our family would spill out of my father’s VW station wagon daily, each of us immediately charged or somehow expanded by the sea air and the space. My parents and older sister liked to walk and their figures would recede far into the distance while my brother and I loitered and drifted on the shoreline, constructing complex dug-outs and castles in the sand, and chasing each other along the water’s edge. We lived, then, in a house with no television or internet and our childhood story worlds were rich with fantastic, adventurous yarns of humans and animals pitted against the unpredictable elements: storms, tides, the struggle to find shelter from the wind.
For my brother and me, still emerging from the dream-state of early childhood, the ocean was a source of both wonder and fear. We learned to stay afloat and later to swim in water that regularly sought to drag our bodies down, to consume us, tossing us to the surface only when it was ready and we had been exposed as pathetic things, punished for our need for air. It gave us what we called the Washing Machine Treatment, reminding us constantly of our smallness and insignificance in the broader world. On good days, the surf kept us buoyant and carted us along like champions, gifting us with speed. It was a giver and bearer of creatures and treasures, both frightening and awesome. We became collectors of curiosities, large and small, foreign and familiar – clothes, shoes, smoothed glass, shells, driftwood. It all came home with us, crowding into the family station wagon with our mess of salt-encrusted limbs and the wet and deliriously happy family dog.
Even at that age, I knew that somewhere across that ocean we adored was The Rest of the World. I would stare into the broad horizon and wonder about all the things I was yet to discover, or that were yet to discover me. When I started kindergarten I relished learning in the local three-room school, in which every child and family were known to one another. But I somehow associated knowledge with the great beyond. The only thing separating our school from Old Bar Beach was a straggly strip of Crown land dotted with coastal heath. If you took off at lunchtime (strictly forbidden), you could scoot along the sandy track at the base of the school oval in minutes, and then you were right there: facing the vast empty blue horizon, wondering.
TO WONDER IS TO MARVEL. IT ALLOWS THE POSSIBILITY OF BEING openly amazed by knowledge or the very possibility of knowledge. Children, in particular, cannot seem to help it. ‘Why don’t we see two things with our two eyes?’ asked the children at the experimental Malting House School in Cambridge in 1924. ‘Why do ladies not have beards? Why can’t we see the stars in the day time?’ Almost a century later, I record a similar list of queries asked of me by my son, including the simple and provocative – ‘What is life for?’ – voiced over a breakfast of oats and full-cream milk one autumn morning when he was six.
Perhaps some of us are more inclined to wonder about things than others. A smaller number again take to the task of wondering with such seriousness that it gives the act a paradoxical sense of purpose. Certainly, British author and scholar Marina Warner is an example of the latter. ‘Alice falls down the rabbit hole,’ she writes in her essay on the topic of curiosity, ‘but after that she wants actively to know what’s happening around her.’ Of course, women, in particular, have a tendency to fall, or rather, to be marked as having fallen. And gender plays a particular role in wonder as we know it. It is no accident that Lewis Carroll decided Alice should be a girl protagonist, for example, as I shall come to discuss later. But first, let me articulate a few questions of my own: What does it mean to wonder? How does something become wonderful to us? And is our sense of wonder central to our capacity to change who we are?
There are few contemporary thinkers more curious about wonder than Marina Warner. The first of her essays to strike a chord with me was itself a collection of curiosities. Titled ‘Out of an Old Toy Chest’, it begins with reference to Charles Baudelaire’s essay on childhood toys, specifically their capacity to spark and enliven the childhood imagination, and yet also to profoundly disappoint us, to remind us abruptly of our own mortality the moment our imagined narratives for them lose their sense of vitality. ‘But where is the soul?’ asked Baudelaire of his own childhood playthings. Where indeed? echoes Warner in her essay. Here, her commentary on the children’s books Pinocchio and The Velveteen Rabbit works as a tantalising preface to a more complex discussion of the whole question of make-believe. The essay amply demonstrates Warner’s scholarly capacity for research, and for artfully written prose, but in reading her essay I recognised a fellow traveller’s deep-seated interest in the nature of the imagination. In ‘Out of an Old Toy Chest’ Warner discovers things. She picks up such things (ideas, objects, ideas about objects) and sets them before us, holding them up to the light until all their potential colours glimmer and glint with possibility.
The experience of reading ‘Out of an Old Toy Chest’ set me off on a quest to read more extensively and fully into Marina Warner’s body of work, a collection that fuses classicism and popular culture, journalism, history, memoir, literary criticism and fiction. She has published more than twenty sole-authored books to date, along with many more essays, articles and reviews. Throughout my reading of her work I have been intrigued by her inclination to marry the well-equipped scholarly researcher’s quest for knowledge with a genuine capacity to marvel. Like those of the children at the Malting House School, which she has written about in her work, Warner’s questions disarm and intrigue: ‘Is it possible to be curious by mistake?’ she asks. Her abiding theme circles fairly constantly around the topic of make-believe. ‘How and why does the fantastic keep surfacing in us?’ she ponders. And, ‘What might stories and convictions – both marvellous and true – do both for us, and to us?’
DURING THE ENGLISH SUMMER OF 2014, HAVING TRAVELLED halfway around the world, I found my way to Warner’s modest double-storey terrace at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in London’s Kentish Town. Her tiny English garden extending in an L shape from the front of the house was an attractive mess of late summer flowers. When I rang the doorbell, it took several minutes before I heard footsteps descending the stairs and hall inside, and just as I was beginning to reconsider the address, Warner opened the door. She was a slight woman in her late sixties, and gracious in her welcome. She had been expecting me.
We entered a hallway crowded with interesting objects: mostly artworks and books. Just by the front door was a long and very thick plait of rope, something reminiscent of a 19th-century sailing ship, except surely too beautiful to be merely functional. The piece was set in a long glass frame. Later I would discover it is a part of a series by Warner’s son, the sculptor Conrad Shawcross: a meditation on the passing of time.
In the kitchen upstairs, Warner served us tea in delicate cups – her latest op shop discovery. We talked briefly about tea and about our shared experience of teaching creative writing in a university setting, and then, to begin our discussion proper – to talk about wonder – she led me along another crowded hallway and up a second flight of stairs to her study. Heavily populated with towers of books, the generous room led to a small terrace overlooking the front garden. It was a beautiful and relaxed setting. There was sunshine and a light breeze and as Warner began to talk her deep-seated curiosity and intelligence, along with the sheer breadth of her knowledge, impressed me once more, as has happened so often while reading her books.
MARINA WARNER WAS BORN IN LONDON IN 1946 AND SPENT her early childhood in Egypt, where her father ran a Cairo bookshop. As an adult, she would identify her father as Creole but when she was a child he and his family seemed to her more English than the English, a characteristic no doubt influenced and sharp-ened by having ‘descended from a long line of Empire servants’ who were active as plantation owners in the Caribbean. Warner’s mother was Italian and Catholic – the marriage approved of by the extended British family, reports Warner, because Italian women were reputedly ‘beautiful and voluptuous’ and conscious of their ‘obligations towards men and children’. Cairo had a reputation for being the cultural capital of the Arab Middle East during the 1950s and a childhood spent in an expatriate bookshop there at that time no doubt lent itself more than most to stumbling across mythologies and curiosities. When the family prepared to return to England, via Belgium, Marina was sent ahead to St Mary’s School in Ascot, a Catholic boarding school. She later studied French and Italian at Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford, and began publishing her writing while still a student. She graduated in 1967 and as a journalist posted several influential articles from war-torn Vietnam – although she says her shyness with people made journalism challenging. Nevertheless, she still credits that early career choice with sparking a lifelong interest in going out into the world as an observer.
An early and deep interest in gender inspired Marina Warner’s first major publications, which focussed on iconic heroines and the myths and cults surrounding them. While still in her twenties, she published her first biography, of the late 19th-century Chinese empress, Tzu-Hsi (The Dragon Empress, 1972). This was followed by a cultural biography of the Virgin Mary (Alone of All Her Sex, 1976), and then an extensive work on Joan of Arc (Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism, 1981). Warner cites the work of anthropologist Shirley Ardener as a key early influence on her writing. Ardener’s work, first published in the 1960s, demonstrated the way in which so many ethnological records completely excluded women’s experiences, perhaps because women were not accessible to visiting male anthropologists or, more often, because their knowledge and opinions were simply not considered meaningful, and were therefore not sought in the first place. Ardener identified women and children as muted groups because of their structural absence from the historical cultural record. This struck a deep chord with the young Warner, who set herself the task of retrieving, or as she says, ‘overhearing’ such voices.
‘I became very interested, very committed to this idea of women’s voices, and I found that you can sort of pick up echoes of female interests, female anxieties, in fairytales. Hope is a very strong element that drives fairytales. These are stories of largely oppressed individuals or oppressed groups. Some of them are male, but a lot of them are women, and the stories are stories of a possible way out through resourcefulness, or through cunning and high spirits.’
Warner’s 1994 Reith Lecture series focussed on the monstrous in myth and fairytale and the ways in which the monstrous haunts the contemporary imagination. She later extended her focus on myth and mythology with books on fear, phantasms, metamorphosis and transformation. In the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, Warner began work on a major book celebrating The Arabian Nights, published as Stranger Magic in 2011.
The premise of the Nights, of course, is that Scheherazade is the latest in a long list of wives to a sultan who has made a habit of killing his women. Along with her sister, Scheherazade devises a plot to tell a string of enchanting stories to her husband, each instalment beginning in the evening and finishing on a cliffhanger at dawn. The sultan’s desire to know what happens next thus prevents him from immediately having his latest wife killed. ‘The technique of the book and the technique carried by the figure of Scheherazade is one of opening the sultan’s mind. He’s emblematic of the ignorant person: the ignorant, lock-in, raging man who wants to kill all he doesn’t understand,’ Warner told an interviewer for The Rumpus. ‘She’s telling stories to save her life,’ she said to me. ‘So survival is the actual manifest problem.’
I want to come back to Scheherazade later, for this business about oppression and hope is central to women’s experiences of wonder.
‘WONDER IS THE FIRST OF THE PASSIONS, ACCORDING TO some thinkers’, said Warner in the gentle light of Kentish Town’s late summer and in response to the first of my questions about how wonder might be best understood.
‘I wonder means I ask or I enquire or I wish to investigate, but I’m also struck by wonder, when I’m, as it were, struck speechless by awe and astonishment. So there are these two poles.
‘For me, there’s a definite gender implication as there is for all the virtues and vices. You can pretty much line them up on one side and the other. It’s changed a bit since feminist gains and activity, but still, you know, what’s assertive, confident speech in a man is strident, shrill, excessive, indignation in a woman. In a woman, it’s called gossip and garrulousness. In a man it becomes eloquence and pre-eminence, confidence.
‘And with curiosity it is exactly the same: curiosity is a scientific virtue on the male side; on the female side it tends to be identified as the sin of Eve. The problem with Bluebeard’s last wife is very complex: the fairytale is about a serial killer and the victory is given to the young woman who overcomes him in the end, the last of his wives who manages not to be killed and succeeds in bringing him down. In that sense, it’s a kind of parallel to Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights: the serial killer of women is confounded by a woman. There are some versions of the Bluebeard story where the last bride is a trickster, but that angle has generally been lost, and she’s presented as a passive heroine who is rescued by her brothers. The fairytale, after it was published very widely, became a moral lesson for women not to disobey their husbands and not to show curiosity, fatal curiosity like Eve; it’s a warning not to use the key to go into the bloody chamber.
‘So the story sort of flipped over upside down in terms of its moral. When Walter Crane, who was a socialist and a rather marvellous upholder of good causes, illustrated it, I think at the beginning of the 20th century, he put a tableau of Eve eating the apple behind Bluebeard’s wife using the key. So even he saw her action as disobedience. There’s an element of play, an element of irony, perhaps. But nevertheless, curiosity on the whole was seen as a female weakness from the classics onwards. There’s a treatise by Plutarch on curiosity which follows one he wrote on garrulousness and both of them are labelled women’s vices. He was developing a strand in ancient Greek philosophy that the Creator’s works were the Creator’s works and that therefore it was hubristic, beyond the reach of human beings, to enquire too far into this perfect system. But there was a countervailing trend as well, because great works of classical science on the nature of things were also produced in which philosophers definitely try to understand the mysteries within us.’ She paused for a moment.
‘Have you seen my essay on curiosity?’
I HAVE.
‘ “Curiouser and curiouser”, cries Alice, when she finds herself “opening out like the largest telescope that ever was!”’ the essay begins, quoting directly from Lewis Carroll. ‘With her feet disappearing beneath her and her neck stretching till it strikes the roof, she takes the tiny golden key and opens the little door to Wonderland.’
In this essay, titled ‘Contradictory Curiosities’, Warner identifies and expands upon several key characteristics of curiosity. The first is that curiosity involves rupture – of accepted standards, of cordoned-off or taboo subjects, of known experience. The second is that it involves agency, and it is here that she poses the question of whether one can be curious by mistake. The answer is no, argues Warner. Someone who is curious has agency. Questions drive some of the best dramatic narratives forward but at the centre of those questions is a narrative agent: the curious, often tormented, central character or subject. Her third key point is that curiosity is a form of resistance. It’s almost as if the more a curious character is stifled by convention, by the establishment, by patriarchy, the more curious she becomes. Because of this, curiosity can turn up some unexpected and wholly transformative results. Finally, and perhaps most intriguingly, says Warner, at the core of the curious experience is enigma. It cannot be otherwise.
‘Alice, of course, is the great questioner’, Warner told me. ‘She’s a sort of reluctant questioner. When she’s in Wonderland she keeps not understanding what’s going on and asking very fundamental questions. The adults don’t want to explain, you know: “A thing is a thing”; “A word is what you want it to mean”.
‘She’s a figure of the writer or the questor, somebody who doesn’t assume they know things.’
‘It’s interesting that she’s a young girl,’ I prompted, ‘given the point you were just making about curiosity as a culturally gendered characteristic.’
According to Warner, it is in fact, no accident. The casting of a young girl in the role of the curious and reluctant explorer was a decision on Carroll’s part intended to mock a tradition that saw curiosity as a vice young girls were prone to indulging. Warner sees Carroll’s curious collection of poetic animals in the Alice books as a deliberate nod towards the natural history tradition and the scientific quest to catalogue and to know.
In her essay on the topic, she paints a portrait of Lewis Carroll as a man who belonged to an era in which science had begun to challenge quite radically our ideas about what it means to be human.
What is the flipside of wonder? Is it disappointment? I admit that disappointment was what I felt when I discovered as an adult, and via reading Warner’s work, that Lewis Carroll had taken hundreds and hundreds of photographs of naked girls. Little Alices, all: catalogued, collected, and in some way possessed. And she, Alice, one of the few girl protagonists to ever be permitted a genuinely interesting adventure.
‘Yes,’ Warner frowned at the mention of Carroll’s photographic collection. ‘Well, by the standards of today he definitely would be in jail. It was all so systematic, which is also characteristic of paedophilia. He photographed hundreds of children – boys too. Alice wasn’t by any means alone.’
WHEN I WAS SEVEN, LIKE ALICE, I EXPERIENCED A RATHER surprising rupture: our family suddenly packed up and moved to a regional town several hundred kilometres inland. The shift propelled me backwards, away from the coast, away from the world waiting for me beyond the ocean horizon. Lying in bed in the new house in the whispery quiet of Australia’s semiarid wheat fields, I grieved deeply for the night-time sound of the surf, a fierce, dependable beat that had helped me to sleep since I was an infant. Everything familiar to me, until then, had become familiar to the backdrop of the Pacific Ocean’s great, regular pounding rhythm. Surely this new landscape to which we’d been transported, a world without that constant watery heartbeat, could only be desolate and hopeless.
In the Central West New South Wales town of Dubbo, during the decade I lived there with my family, the area’s main business was agriculture, specifically wheat and sheep. The town was the regional centre for a number of state government offices. My father worked in such an office, for a regulatory body then called the New South Wales Forestry Commission. He managed the region’s state forests east to the Warrumbungles, north to the Pilliga, and west to Broken Hill. He was frequently out bush. But when he was home, we knew it.
The decade from the late 1970s onwards was a tumultuous period for our family and during that time I shifted from dreamy, imaginative child to rebellious, anti-authoritarian teenager. In my mind, our house in Ronald Street, Dubbo is central to all that took place then. A solid, double-brick house with red-tiled roof, the original building dated from the late 1920s, and was the oldest in our street. It was built with wide verandahs on three sides, in a country Australian tradition of that period, but over time all but the verandah facing the street were closed in. Here, my father placed a single armchair. It was his. The rest of our suburban block was mostly taken up by cheap, identical ‘fibro’ houses that had apparently arrived en masse in the 1960s in the form of state housing. Further up the hill was a Royal Australian Air Force base and it was populated with similar architecture: resolutely square domestic boxes painted in a range of pastel colours.
My father’s alcoholism reached its most desperate phase in the Ronald Street house. I didn’t have words then for a concept like patriarchy; I only knew my own quarter-acre block, the family within it. I wondered at my mother’s capacity to endure the unpredictable storms born of my father’s rage. Her patient endurance, not without occasional expressions of resistance, was the closest thing to the miraculous our agnostic household could have witnessed. The effect of my father’s unpredictability on me during those years was that I learned to tread carefully, to speak carefully, to focus on the virtues of silence, alongside considerable attention to the gendered art of gentle placation in the domestic space. This has had a lasting impact on me.
During the semiarid Australian summers the house in Ronald Street was hot all day and night. Relief came in the form of cool evening breezes, which you could only enjoy if you left the building. Sometimes my brother and I slept on narrow army stretchers under the Hills Hoist, gazing at the night sky through mosquito nets. Through this gauzed vista we saw shooting stars with such regularity that they continued to fall behind closed lids, a stellar backdrop to the fragile landscapes of our dreams.
It was from that house, aged eleven, that I covertly phoned the police for help late one Sunday afternoon. They came, and I opened the front door to them even as, at the far end of the house, the din continued. I was in fear for my mother’s life that day. I tried as best I could to explain the situation to the two officers in neatly pressed sky-blue shirts, these adults twice my height, standing there on the front verandah with holstered guns at their hips.
‘Are you the owner of the premises?’ they asked me.
‘No,’ I said, struggling with the relevance of the question as my father’s barely coherent shouting continued from the back of the house.
‘Who is the owner?’
‘My dad.’
‘Is he at home? Can you get him to come to the door?’
Yes, he was home, but did they seriously expect me to approach him on my own? Did they want me dead? I stood there with the big grey wooden door open, looking at the two strangers, incapable of forming an answer to their question.
‘I’m sorry, but without the owner’s permission, we’re unable to enter the house.’
Minutes later I was watching, confused, as the two police officers returned to their vehicle in the fading dusk light. They folded themselves neatly back into their seats, fastened their belts, and drove away. Then I closed the door on a dark hallway. My father’s anger raged, unabated.
I don’t remember exactly what happened next, or how the balance of the day and evening ended, but I know that I never phoned the police from my father’s house again. This incident changed me. It changed the way I saw the world and the place of myself and my mother within it. I know that the way the New South Wales police respond to domestic violence call-outs has changed enormously since I was a child, but at that time the response given me at the Ronald Street doorstep was standard practice, and the message I read from it was clear and long lasting: he has the right.
I think I retreated then, double-time, to the world of the imagination. Wonder nurtured me. It saw me through my bewilderment and beyond it. It led me, perhaps miraculously, towards a richer, more subtle form of resistance and, eventually, understanding.
SOMETIMES WE READERS STUMBLE UPON A PIECE OF WRITING that disarms us, that seems to simultaneously strip away our knowledge or understanding and compound it. The philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas posited that fear and wonder are two sides of the same coin. The suddenness of wonder’s revelation can be a kind of shock, he said, for it reveals to us something about the depth of our ignorance. This sense of lack brings us face to face with fear. Yet, paradoxically, the flush of recognition – of not knowing – that accompanies a moment of wonder can also serve to motivate us, to nudge us to begin a journey towards knowledge. In this way, although it may startle us, wonder is also a cause of pleasure. Looking back, the source of my own determination to find hope through or beyond the dark decade of the worst of my father’s violence is mysterious to me. How did I not lose my sense of wonder altogether? ‘Hope,’ writes theologian Sophia Vasalou in Wonder: A Grammar, is ‘a form … of vulnerability, though a vulnerability that constitutes an achievement, asserted in the face of possible despair’.
I have experienced the feeling of being disarmed more than once while reading Marina Warner. Immersed in Signs and Wonders: Essays on Literature and Culture (2002), for example, I was deeply affected by her essay, ‘Saint Paul: Let Women Keep Silent’.
Of all the saints whose lives were chronicled and held up as examples during Warner’s years at St Mary’s School, Saint Paul seems to have had the most enduring and pervasive influence. The girls saw him as an adventurer, a real historical figure whose journeys were dramatic, transformative and purposeful, encompassing shipwreck and famine, imprisonment and near-death experience. Warner and her friends admired his heroics, and took to heart many of his teachings. She reports lying in bed at night and dreaming up for herself a future in which she is ‘intrepid, unstoppable, self-willed’. At the same time, however, it was from and through the doctrines of Saint Paul that the behaviours of women and girls subject to the institution of Catholicism were shaped and disciplined. The virtue of silence was firmly impressed upon them, for example, along with the benefits of patient endurance. I recognised this pattern. Some of the writings attributed to Saint Paul have since been used as an argument against the ordination of women: ‘Let the women learn in silence with all subjection,’ he wrote. Warner underlines the political implications of his call for silence among women: powerlessness, lack of agency, disenfranchisement.
She also contemplates the complex role of the nuns in shaping her own and others’ expectations about their future. There was a noticeboard, for example, in one of the school’s hallways where the successes of former boarders were announced. Such successes included marrying an Italian, and then bearing him a son. In the essay, Warner describes standing close beside one of the nuns she admired as they read together the noticeboard’s latest announcements. Beside her, the older woman’s body simply quivered at the news of a former student’s good marriage. Here is wonder written on the body: the raised eyebrows, the open mouth, a forgetful relaxation or subtle alertness in our carriage. Warner’s teacher’s joy was contagious: she couldn’t help but feel it too.
When I remind Warner of this scene as described in her essay on St Paul, she smiled in agreement. ‘What a strange role the nuns played, and in fact the whole discourse of Catholicism played, in your sense of how to be, and what you aspired to become,’ I posited.
‘Yes, well, I mean … the paradox,’ she said. ‘I didn’t really realise it until much later in my life, probably when I was writing that essay or around that time, that the nuns – and they seemed themselves unaware of it – held up for us a number of female heroines, mostly martyrs, but one of them was Mary Ward, who was the founder of my school’s order. Mary Ward was a truly remarkable woman who decided that women should be educated, and she wanted to found an order of female Jesuits. She suffered a double whammy – she was imprisoned by the Pope for overreaching ambition, and she was persecuted as a Catholic in England by Elizabeth. Yet, although we were told endlessly about the virtues of the school’s founder, we were also asked, always, to be modest, and above all not to assert ourselves. And, of course, to obey, and the people we were meant to obey were our fathers, and then our husbands.
‘Subjection, subordination, the entirely virtuous was inculcated by women who themselves had chosen lives of independent, intellectual courage. I couldn’t see the contradiction then, but I can see it now.’
‘Some of this must never leave you,’ I marvelled.
‘Of course, it was entirely formative. I went to boarding school at nine, and left when I was sixteen. I’ve never got away from it, but I have managed to think it through. I’m not a Catholic any more, but I do have sensations of guilt. In a way, my writing has been a very long therapy upon myself, which I think in a sense is a success.’
We both laughed gently at the idea of such a practice. It is not unfamiliar.
MY TEENAGE YEARS ARRIVED IN THE HOUSE IN RONALD STREET. I developed a penchant for self-absorption and experimented wholeheartedly with the art of noncompliance. Looking back, I do not like the person I was then. I was distracted, disloyal and often dishonest. I excelled academically, but found it difficult to conform to the institutional rules and regulations of the local high school. I sought out transgression in all its forms, made friends of the town’s punks and queers and misfits and felt profoundly grateful for their company. I experimented with alcohol and drugs, moving quickly through a brief enchantment with self-annihilation towards a cautious respect for the various manners in which intoxicants influenced perception. I climbed clandestinely out of my bedroom window at night, undertook bold and mostly successful campaigns to score drugs and alcohol for my friends, and hooned raucously along the backstreets in stolen cars with like-minded reprobates. I was curious. ‘Why conform at all?’ I often wondered. ‘How do people do it?’
My father’s house remained my father’s house. He forced my elder sister out of home at sixteen. She was taken in by family friends back on the mid-north coast, where she finished her final years at school. Meanwhile, my brother discovered motorcycles.
I struggled with how to be.
These were the years in which I remained loyal to my love of trees, particularly of climbing them. I climbed trees well into high school, beyond the point most other children had stopped. At sixteen, my favourite pastime was to skip school for the day and spend the hours clandestinely perched up a tree in a stranger’s back garden with a book. I scouted all of south Dubbo for suitable trees in sheltered backyards left vacant by the working week. I liked the way the heightened vantage point in the crook of a bough could lift you out of things, changing, however slightly, the way you perceived the world beneath. How many days could you take off school and still score enough of a grade to get you into university? It was a dare I set myself, a line I walked.
Sometimes at night, as my father raged, I escaped to the park at the end of the street, climbed the highest tree and slept precariously in its uppermost branches. Beneath me, come closing time, the local drinkers shuffled home. One of them once pissed against the trunk of the tree I inhabited, oblivious to my presence. It still amuses me all these decades later that it didn’t ever occur to the gentleman to look up.
Most of the boys at school avoided me, during those years, for my skin was almost constantly blemished due to acne. I didn’t mind so much about the boys’ aversion to me. They didn’t interest me. But their schoolyard banter could be ruthless. I still remember the students in my year coming up with a list of pop songs, one to match each individual, as we approached graduation. Somebody made sure I overheard the one being contemplated for me: it was by the English band The Monks, and titled ‘Nice Legs, Shame About Her Face’. If you listen carefully to the lyrics, the song is intended as a joke on men who think like that, but I doubt this was the spirit in which my classmates chose it for me. The news of their choice of song both wounded me and redoubled my hope for some means of escape, not just from Ronald Street, but from the town itself. I didn’t know then, of course, that cruelty is in no way confined to particular neighbourhoods.
In 1986, as my final year at high school was about to come into view, there was an accident. My older brother was involved in a serious collision on his motorcycle just outside the town’s main shopping centre. The collision caused him extensive neurological as well as physical damage. He was flown to Sydney by air ambulance the same day, and would spend the next two years in rehabilitation wards.
I still remember walking into the emergency room at Dubbo Base Hospital to see him before he was transferred. Nic was deep in a coma and yet when I entered the room he knew it. The two of us were as close in that moment as we’d ever been.
‘Hey, Nic,’ I said.
‘Hey,’ he replied in the same casual tone.
I stood beside him, laid a hand on his lightly covered body, felt his heat. He’d taken the Washing Machine Treatment, but we were so, so far from the ocean, both of us. It would take a long time for him to be at all able again. He would have to learn, almost from the beginning, how one puts together a sentence. He would have to learn, over again, to walk.
Not so long after Nic’s accident, I too left Dubbo, albeit under less dramatic circumstances than either of my siblings. Within hours of completing my final high school exam, I was on the afternoon train towards the capital: Sydney. I would await news of a university place while couch-surfing through the summer in a drug-infused share house in Stanmore. I had with me some Antipodean literature – Janet Frame’s Owls Do Cry, Jessica Anderson’s Tirra Lirra by the River, Tim Winton’s An Open Swimmer – and with these in tow I commenced a journey that I hoped would finally re-unite me with The Rest of the World.
WARNER AND I FINISHED OUR TEA.
‘Wonder is a kind of enchantment, yes?’
‘That’s right,’ she said.
‘It’s the charm in storytelling, isn’t it?’
‘Wonder is enchantment. And the enchanted object is inside the text or the painting or the opera or whatever, the wonder is in it. There are evoked the effects of enchantment, the effects of wonder, but there’s also the wonder that you feel on the outside. So, there’s a symbiosis between the enchantment performed or described, and the charm, the state that it puts you in. And that state is really deeply interesting, because it’s neither belief nor suspension of disbelief. I mean, I’ve tried endlessly to get at this.
‘I don’t believe in fairies, but it doesn’t lead me to suspend my belief in fairytales. I just don’t believe in fairies. But I am caught up in something. And what is that something? Well, it’s hard to define.
‘I think that one of the reasons that one is caught up in this pleasure in childhood is that it is about escaping the conditions that constrain us. I mean, a lot of fairytales in which there is a happy ending are looking at circumstances that are full of suffering, but always (or usually) in the context that there is an alternative. It’s positing some sort of hope. The story is marvelling that, My God, something could be different. And that is why, I think, very strong enchantments take place in an opera like The Magic Flute. Mozart is a great artist of reality.
‘Now, I don’t know about Shakespeare or Mozart and their state of belief, but I think for us, there’s a central aspect of this kind of wonder literature which is emphatically something that we don’t have to believe in. There’s a great pleasure in that, there’s a freedom. Because it’s not a religious system, and it’s not a moral system. It’s actually got a lightness, and sometimes there’s sheer immorality.
‘Fairytales can be completely immoral worlds. And there’s luck and blessing. You might have a completely hopeless son who falls over his clothes because he’s too lazy to lift his long tunic and keeps tripping up, a completely idle good-for-nothing like Aladdin, but he gets rewarded. So, fairytale is an immoral place. Delinquency is a place literature can go. It’s pleasurably transgressive.’
WARNER’S ABIDING INTEREST IN THE VOICES OF WOMEN, AND in the silencing and oppression of our sex, has remained consistent throughout her career, and while the critical reception of her work has largely been tremendously positive, it is interesting to note the gendered nature of some of the more dismissive commentary. Journalist Nicholas Wroe, for example, begins a character portrait published in the Guardian in 2000 by declaring that Warner was rumoured to be ‘the prettiest undergraduate of her generation’ at Oxford during the 1960s. He then quotes from a review of her book on fairytales From the Beast to the Blonde, published by historian Noel Malcolm, also in the Guardian : ‘Once upon a time, there was a very clever girl called Warner,’ wrote Malcolm, ‘who read lots and lots of books. Every book seemed to connect up with every other book, and they all told her something about images of womanhood in cultural history.’ It’s impossible to imagine a man of Marina Warner’s stature and accomplishment being infantilised, objectified and belittled in quite the same way. Indeed, it seems sadly ironic that the very cultural traditions regarding women who dare to speak out that Warner has worked so hard to expose in her writing still circulate vigorously enough in contemporary culture to trip her up in supposedly serious reviews of that very work.
Warner has spent much of her career working independently of the academy, despite the quite scholarly nature of much of her work. I admire this about her. When I told her this, she confesses that the challenge of earning a living entirely from her writing over the course of several decades eventually became too difficult. Many of her books have been both critically and commercially successful, and she has garnered a string of visiting fellowships, awards and honorary doctorates, but when she became unwell and was unable to write for an extended period in the early 2000s, it had a significant effect on her livelihood. Like many freelance writers, she found herself without a safety net. In 2004, she took up an invitation to join the staff of the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre studies at the University of Essex, an institution known for its free-thinking, emancipatory values, and she began to teach both graduate and undergraduate students in creative writing. She would keep that appointment for the next ten years.
At the time of our meeting, Warner was only just emerging from a protracted dispute with the University of Essex over workload expectations and ideological differences. The dispute had led to a very public resignation. Not long afterwards, she published two essays in the London Review of Books.
The second of these, ‘Learning My Lesson’, moves from the particular example of neoliberal, commercialised management practices at the University of Essex to philosophical questions about the purpose of knowledge. Warner compares the university to other public assets, such as national parks: places created for the good of all citizens, and aligns her philosophy of teaching and of education with Seamus Heaney’s philosophy of poetry. Heaney has asserted that, ‘we go to poetry to be forwarded within ourselves’, expanding that our immersion in literature provides a kind of ‘foreknowing’ in and through which we recognise something we actually knew but couldn’t before now properly reach, never mind articulate. ‘Good knowledge,’ writes Warner, ‘requires inquiry on your part, your absorbed attention – and to be attentive to the point of self-forgetfulness also lightens discontents. So curiosity must be met by responsiveness – by listening, not silence.’ Warner favours difficult knowledge, and that form of learning that leads not so much to a solution but to a set of further questions. She quotes philosopher Bernard Williams, who has labelled this kind of learning ‘honestly difficult’. It is not the kind of learning, or the kind of knowledge, that flourishes in a culture of fear and compliance. ‘Something has gone wrong with the way the universities are being run,’ she concludes.
Some of these points go to the heart of the question of wonder, and in particular, to the question of its purpose. For Aristotle, wonder was merely a source of motivation, a state that compels us, usefully, towards knowledge, but that ultimately can and should come to an end. ‘All men [sic] begin by wondering that things are as they are,’ he wrote, but they ‘must end in the contrary and, according to the proverb, the better state, as is the case … when men learn the cause’. Understood this way, wonder dissolves behind us, like a bridge we willingly burn; it is weakened and then disposed of by a successful quest for progress (conquest). This is, in my view, a lesser understanding of the richness (endless) wonder might offer us, over and over again.
IN EARLY 1988, I WAS ACCEPTED INTO AN UNDERGRADUATE university program in the coastal, industrial city of Wollongong, 500 kilometres from home. I commenced in their School of Creative Arts, and like many full-time students, my day-to-day existence was precarious from then until I graduated, six years later, mainly due to poverty. And yet I was free from Ronald Street and from the high school environment in which I’d struggled to fully invest my understanding. I was, I suppose, emerging, at last, and there was much to discover. I took direction from and shelter in art and literature and music and poetry: Tracey Moffatt, Bill Henson, Barbara Kruger, Laurie Anderson, Italo Calvino, Margaret Atwood, early Peter Carey, and the overtly political and experimental work of the Sydney Women’s Film Group and the Sydney Women Writers’ Workshop. I remember copying out by hand and carrying with me Ania Walwicz’s short prose poem, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’:
I always had such a good time, good time, good time girl. Each and every day from morning to night. Each and every twenty-four hours I wanted to wake up, wake up. I was so lively, so livewire tense, such a highly pitched little. I was red, so red so red. I was a tomato. I was on the lookout for the wolf. Want some sweeties, mister? I bought a red dress myself. I bought the wolf. Want some sweeties, mister? I bought a red dress for myself. I bought a hood for myself. Get me a hood. I bought a knife.
I look back on my love for this prose poem and I am shocked by its call to violence, but for my late-teenage self carrying it around was not about a literal intention to knife someone. The poem gave me metaphorical armament. The poem gave me courage. I suppose I expected and anticipated violence from men and was surprised, over time, to discover that one could experience daily life without necessarily having to be confronted by it quite so directly, so incessantly, as I had expected upon first leaving home. It would take many years for me to get used to this discovery, and to trust men more fully, particularly intimate partners. I suppose a peaceful domestic life is something I am still getting used to, in my way. Thirty years later, part of me believes I may yet turn out to regret having put down the hood and the knife.
At university, I was drawn to learning, and especially to the disciplines of film and literary studies. I fell in love and was loved in return by a young Catholic boy from Sydney’s northern suburbs: gentle, poetic, companionable. I took fewer drugs. I drank less. I made good and lasting friendships with a genuinely diverse group of peers, and with several of my lecturers and tutors. And gradually, as the hours I spent in the university library began to eclipse all others, I discovered that perhaps I could write fiction: this was a new source of wonder to me. I gained confidence.
Even despite the gradual demise of the more liberal aspects of university education, identified correctly by Warner in her essay, and a period of reform which coincided approximately with my commencement as an undergraduate in Australia during the late 1980s, university changed me profoundly. There was the shock of the new, the carrying of intellectual and creative experience in and through the body, the blending of wonder and other emotions, the very possibility of new knowledge. I fell in love with all of these things. I am in love with them still.
WHEN I ASKED MARINA WARNER ABOUT HER ESSAY ON botanical artist Maria Sibylla Merian, titled ‘Hatching’, we entered into an enlightening discussion about knowledge and creativity and the relationship between art and science. Maria Merian’s work crystallises so much of what is at stake in each of these spheres. She was a pioneer in observing the world fully and attentively, creating insightful botanical drawings that influenced scientific knowledge.
A native of Germany, Merian married young, but the marriage failed and after a stint living with a religious sect, she refused to return to live with her husband, sailing instead to the Dutch Caribbean colony of Suriname in 1699 at the age of fifty-two. Merian travelled not with a male companion, but rather with her young adult daughter. She had made a lifelong study of insects and her trip to Suriname was part of a quest to discover another kind of spinning insect, something to substitute or perhaps to rival silk. Merian’s sketches had a significant impact on understandings of the life cycle amongst her natural science contemporaries. The folio of biological drawings that resulted from her two-year study in Suriname was titled Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium and was published in 1705. According to Warner, it is one of the earliest instances in which the term ‘metamorphosis’ was used in connection with insect life cycles. Merian’s work enabled many to look anew at the prevailing view of natural development, which still relied on Aristotle’s notion that it was the purpose of generative life change to aim towards greater and greater perfection. On the contrary, Merian’s documentation of some rather beautiful caterpillars showed how they might transform into very ugly butterflies. Further, her sketches disrupt the very idea of the contained, consistent and solipsistic (self-reliant) being. Warner’s writing on her work emphasises Merian’s role in demonstrating how dissimilarity, interdependency and reciprocity permeate the way an entity develops.
Plate XXVII from Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium.
Maria Sybilla Merian (1647–1717).
Source: Wikimedia Commons
‘There were elements of her selection and arrangement that were already creative narratives,’ Warner told me during our discussion. ‘And by creating these narratives she couldn’t prevent our engagement with her images on metaphorical lines. We can’t help but see in metamorphosis and change something further than the animal’s amazing capacity. She so often includes rotting, and the life cycle. She traps on a single page the idea of the life cycle, and the life cycle has repercussions in meaning. You can’t stifle them. And I suppose metamorphosis is a good word when looking at this problem of the literal and the figural co-existing. Because metamorphosis is the word Merian chose and it continued to be used in this scientific context. Maybe she and her contemporaries could have invented another word. Metamorphosis was a mythological word.’
When I looked up the etymology of the word ‘metamorphosis’, I discovered what Warner meant. This term, now so central to the language of biology, has been lifted directly from its home in classical mythology, where it is very much to do with magical transformation. As such, metamorphosis is an idea that runs counter to the Judaeo-Christian tradition of a unique, consistent sense of self. We can look at its co-option by science as an example of the strong but often fraught link between wonder as a form of bewitchment – a magical, quasi-religious experience – and wonder as a means through which to seek greater, fuller knowledge and understanding.
Examining Maria Merian, I have found myself reassessing the place of the botanical drawing in the greater scheme of things. I am struck by the way in which Merian’s sketches demonstrate metamorphosis not only as narrative, but as a process of becoming that arises through a particular ecology. In the world of the plant, the insect; in the world of the insect, the plant. As Warner helps us to appreciate, Merian’s was an unflinching gaze. Her close scrutiny takes in insect devastation and intra-species massacres: savage incidents in nature that she makes no attempt to gloss over or beautify. Warner argues that Merian’s capacity to look and ‘look hard’ is central to the wonder of her artwork. Through this exact attention, her work becomes both poetry and knowledge, art and science.
The connection between wonder and seeing can be traced a long way back. The Ancient Greek term thaumazein (to wonder) is related to the verb ‘to see’, a connection evident in the common expression ‘a wonder to behold’. It is found, too, in the corre-sponding term in Latin, admiratio, the root of which (mir) is also linked to sight. Almost a century after the first publication of Merian’s Surinamese sketches, the poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge would ponder the task of ‘awakening the mind’ from the lethargy of habit and custom by directing us to look towards ‘the loveliness and the wonders of the world around us’. This call to look differently at the ordinary was a hallmark of the Romantics, encouraging us to orient ourselves towards a quasi-spiritual gaze that might reveal ‘the miraculousness of the common’ as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it. Sophia Vasalou traces a tangled back-and-forth line from this strain of aesthetic wonder to the scientific wonder that dominated the natural sciences right through the 17th and 18th centuries. This entanglement was to have a long cultural life, she argues, ‘leaving a paper trail through the work of many of the philosophers’ including early 20th-century thinkers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Henri Bergson.
More recently, literary studies scholar Philip Fisher in Wonder, the Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (2003) laments wonder’s status as ‘the most neglected of primary aesthetic experiences within modernity’. Renewed interest in the history and philosophy of the emotions has sparked some interest in the position of wonder, but as Sophia Vasalou has argued, wonder ‘emerges as an emotion unlike others in every way’. Its neglect by contemporary theorists, she argues, is perhaps precisely because ‘it is too slippery to be responsibly handled’.
I BEGAN THIS CHAPTER WITH REFERENCE TO THE QUESTIONS asked by the Malting House children. ‘Why do ladies not have beards?’ Any parent can attest to childish wonder as a source of both amusement and, sometimes, profound discomfort. My son, aged nine as I conclude this chapter, is still full of questions. Many of them, befitting his stage of development, have taken a turn towards the macabre: ‘Would you rather die of drowning or of having your head chopped off?’
‘Which superpower would you prefer to have?’ he quizzed me on the way to school one morning recently.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘What about you? Which superpower would you choose?’
‘The power of the shapeshifter,’ Roland replied without hesitation, ‘so I could take any form’.
Later the same week he declared, ‘I’d like to have a go at being a girl. Also a bird, and a cat.’
I take some comfort in my son’s openness to imaginative play that sets aside, albeit temporarily, the traditionally masculine tendency to war, conflict, goodies, baddies, and endless forms of weaponry that are so regularly present in various role-play games in our small shared living space. I want to encourage this more in him, to draw this tendency out, to support it wherever it takes seed.
Destruction, extermination and annihilation are the goals of combat myths, argues Warner. ‘The association of magical power with weapons of destruction, not with philosophical wisdom, is problematic,’ she writes in an essay on the topic published in 2002. ‘Do the current mega-hits at the box office reflect anxieties and dreams, or do they shape them?’ Of course, the real answer is impossible to know, but her question certainly caused me to ponder the ways in which a tendency towards dualism (and the duel) robs us of the possibilities of more imaginative responses to the myriad challenges we face.
It seems to me that wonder – and hence transformation – has always been central to my desire to both write and read fiction. If I could answer my son’s question again, I would say that my superpower of choice is the narrative imagination. Importantly, though, it is a narrative imagination that is not disconnected from knowledge. As I have argued elsewhere, the urge to write something substantial in a way that requires imaginative effort, to shift ideas from fleeting feelings or impressions towards a more fully realised and complex creative work such as a novel, requires a certain disease, often a rather deep-seated sense of dissatisfaction: anger, confusion, disbelief, disapproval, or just an inkling, a subtle desire, for things to be, in whatever way, other than this. In this sense, fiction comes from the question of why. It comes from the question of how. It comes, therefore, from the embedded, lived experience of knowing intimately those circumstances that hold us down, that pressure us, that prevent us from taking flight. It comes, for me, from the hope that Warner has identified as being crucial to the fairytale, a hope born of resourcefulness, a hope that makes the very idea of transformation possible.
The Australian novelist Kim Scott, in response to the question of why he writes, has spoken of the pleasure of absorption – of ‘getting lost in the making of things’ – and this too, can be thought about as a practice steeped in wonder, for wonder paradoxically encapsulates what 18th-century philosopher Adam Smith called ‘an emotion or movement of the spirits’ that ‘exhibits all the painfulness of disorientation’ even as it has us ‘float’ or ‘glide’ with ‘effortless facility’ along what he calls the imagination’s ‘natural career’.
WHEN WARNER AND I MET FOR OUR SECOND DISCUSSION of the topic of wonder, I reported to her the fashion among the buskers around Piccadilly Circus and the National Gallery in London. At the time, the squares were full of figures in fantasy costumes inspired by Tolkien or Star Wars characters that magically hovered a metre or two above the ground. They formed a kind of living statue, their hats upturned nearby to collect donations by coin.
‘Are they on a stand?’ Warner wanted to know.
‘They must be, but it’s not visible.’
‘Interesting. Well, they are living statues, yes. And I suppose the most famous progeny of the character of curiosities, in a way, is Madame Tussauds.’
Our conversation turned to the topic of skilful theatre practises, and to the long tradition in stagecraft of designing props and aids that instil in the audience a sense of awe and wonder. It is a tradition that goes a long way back.
‘We have this expression deus ex machina,’ explained Warner, ‘and that refers to the descent of the god or goddess in Greek tragedy. Medea at the end of Euripides’ play goes to heaven, you know, she flies off the stage in a dragon-drawn chariot. So that was probably imitated in some way, we don’t know exactly how. And in the ancient world in Egypt, you know, they were already creating automata – statues that moved, statues that spoke for ordinary religious purposes, you know, to create oracles for the priests to go inside, sometimes just as part of a cluster of mechanical wonders.’
Warner outlined the history of the water clock or clepsydra, as an example of an early scientific instrument that was designed to invoke a sense of wonder. This artefact has been dated to 338 bc in Persia, but there are examples of intricate water clock designs across ancient Babylon, India, China and the Greco- Roman period. In the medieval Islamic world, the polymath al-Jazari invented one of the most complex clepsydra ever documented. Developed in 1206, it included automata – five musicians, two falcons – and a complex system of pulleys and weights inside the structure. An inscription above the opening doors at the top of the clock reminded onlookers to revel in the glory of God.
Given the sweep of our discussion towards deus ex machina, I brought up the subject of the flying machine. The topic of flight is one about which Warner has written an evocative chapter in Stranger Magic.
‘Unexpectedly, there’s rather little flying in the classic body of European fairytales,’ Warner observed. ‘I mean, it isn’t a feature of “Red Riding Hood” or “Snow White” or “Cinderella”. There are witches who fly, and there are amazing journeys and, of course, objects fly. There’s a certain amount of uncanny activity, but the tradition now, that all fantasy involves easy flight, has become completely endemic, especially in film. In all of the latest fantasy films there are amazing scenes of flight (in Avatar, in The Golden Compass) because it can be simulated so well on screen. This is a post–Arabian Nights fantasy, because in the Nights the narrative delights in its own ability to move anywhere, and it does so, airborne.’
‘We have the expression “flights of fancy”,’ I suggested, ‘and there’s a sense that dreaming about flying brings with it a fluidity, an opening up of perspective.’
‘In The Arabian Nights,’ said Warner, ‘the characters really are flying. They don’t always need wings, and there’s no attempt at constructing complex flying machines. Flight simply happens. The jinn fly and magical objects levitate. The carpet, which doesn’t have such a profile in the original text, has become the principal motif of the Nights in the West (alongside Aladdin’s lamp). When I first gave a lecture about this, in Munich, and I suggested that the flying carpet was an intuition of aerodynamics that was far more accurate than Leonardo’s ornithopter, you know, his bird-winged contraption …’
‘It seems clumsy in comparison, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes! But the Munich audience was absolutely resistant!’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Yes, afterwards they came up to me and said, “Preposterous!” ’
For some reason we both find the offence implied in this reaction enormously amusing. Is it because it seems to demonstrate, at some basic level, a shocking failure of the imagination?
MUCH OF THE LITERATURE THAT PRIVILEGES WONDER HAS BEEN read as being against empiricism. Warner has argued that this should not necessarily be the case.
‘When Rousseau and Locke, the two great thinkers about education in the 18th century, condemned fairytales and myths and so forth as foolish fantasies and as nonsense, they wanted children to study the real world. They wanted children to go out and look at spiders’ webs and flowers and rainbows and actually be involved in the phenomena of nature that was observable, that was empirical. They thought that demons and goblins were the kinds of nonsense that nurses and foolish ignorant old women described to children to control and frighten them. In their own way, in a humanitarian way they had good intentions; they wanted to stop using stories to terrorise the young.
‘Sophisticated, post-Enlightenment cultures of human beings are expected to proceed empirically. I see myself as part of the Enlightenment tradition, but my argument has always been that we are simply a myth-making species in the same way that we are a language species, and our languages are metaphorical. We have a limited empirical language: a door is a door. But a metaphor of a door has a vast range of meaning. And that’s really the way that our minds communicate and are structured, and so my argument has always been: let’s find out about these imaginative structures and then, once we understand them better, then we can’t destroy them or expurgate them, but maybe we can think about them in ways that help rather than in ways that hinder.’
In a contemplative moment, Warner told me, ‘I feel, personally, that if religion could remain metaphysical it would be fine. I don’t share Richard Dawkins’ dislike of transcendental systems. I mean, I love Renaissance astrology. I think it’s an incredibly beautiful testament to the extraordinary inventiveness and imagination of the people of the past. I don’t believe a word of it, but it’s a marvellous creation. They believed it, or some of them believed it. But we’re in a different position to that now.’
FACED WITH THE ‘OPEN SEA OF ENDLESS QUESTIONING, strangeness and possibility’ that is wonder, it is perhaps not surprising that some have posited that wonder, like seasickness, is a passion to be endured. But as the nuns in Warner’s convent school demonstrated, framed by the work of Saint Paul, women have too often been actively and systematically discouraged from dipping a single toe into such an open sea. Questioning is not for the faint-hearted, nor it seems, is it to be too actively encouraged in those with nothing left to lose (witness, most recently, for example, the banning of the media from Australian refugee detention centres). As I finish writing this chapter, I remain deeply encouraged by Marina Warner and her thinking, by her capacity to go out into the world – of knowledge, of history, of mythology, of popular culture – and open it up to an examination that is in turns scholarly and imaginative, empathic and hopeful. I can’t help but think that her long therapy on herself – her writing – has also been of immense benefit to others. It is telling that Warner’s motivation began with a commitment to retrieving or ‘overhearing’ the voices of women, from Alice in Wonderland to Maria Merian, from Joan of Arc to the powerful and enchanting Scheherazade. For it remains the case that many women, like Scheherazade, are dreaming in order to find a way to live. Should certain structures restrict and confound us, we must not consider them utterly intractable. I began this chapter with the question of whether our capacity for wonder can actually change who we are. The answer, of course, is yes. Yes.