Words and Power: Four Stories of Women and the Unseen World

University of Southern Maine USM Digital Commons Stonecoast MFA Student Scholarship 2020 Words and Power: Four Stories of Women and the Unseen World Elisabeth Brander University of Southern Maine, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/stonecoast Part of the Creative Writing Commons Recommended Citation Brander, Elisabeth, "Words and Power: Four Stories of Women and the Unseen World" (2020). Stonecoast MFA. 125. https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/stonecoast/125 This Open Access Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Scholarship at USM Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Stonecoast MFA by an authorized administrator of USM Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Words and Power: Four Stories of Women and the Unseen World A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF FINE ARTS UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN MAINE STONECOAST MFA IN CREATIVE WRITING BY Elisabeth Brander 2020 THE LTNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN MAINE STONECOAST MFA IN CREATIVE WRITING May 20,2020 We hereby recommend that the thesis of Elisabeth Brander entitled Words and Power, Four Stories of [4/omen and the Unseen World be accepted as partial fulflrllment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts JI\ Advisor Nancy uol@ 77"-¿"aa' Çeaz- Reader Th.odo.u Go., A I !t Director o J Þ Accepted Dean, College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Adam-Max Tuchinsky Abstract Stories do not appear out of nowhere. Every story is \ryoven from preexisting threads of inspiration: history, mythology, tales that have already been told by another. Each of the four stories in this thesis engages in dialogue with an older narrative: "A Fistful of Letters to Change o'Three the World" focuses on the development of the printing press in Western Europe; Feasts" tells the Greek myth of Erysichthon from the perspective of Erysichthon's daughter, Mestra; "Evening Faces" is a modern critique of the patriarchal society portrayed in the l lth-century Japanese novel The Tale of Genji; and "Hoshiko" is inspired by the cat demons of Japanese folklore. These reinterpretations aim to show the malleable nature of storytelling by focusing on different themes than their source material, with particular emphasis on female agency and power. 111 Acknowledgements Many people have supported and encouraged me during my two years at Stonecoast. I am deeply grateful to all of the faculty for offering their keen insight into my writing; special thanks go to Robert V.S. Redick, Tom Coash, Theodora Goss, and Nancy Holder, who each acted as one of my mentors. Thanks also go to my cohort for their camaraderie and endless encouragement as we waded through the trenches together; to my family, for always having faith in me; and to my cat, Malefica, whose penchant for running across my keyboard taught me the importance of never leaving a V/ord document unattended. IV Table of Contents Preface. I V/ords and Power: Four Stories of Vy'omen and the Unseen World A Fistful of Letters to Change the World 13 Three Feasts 59 Hoshiko r2t Bibliography l4t v Preface When I was growing up, my favorite novel was The Neverending Storyby Michael Ende. In the first chapter, Bastian Bathazar Bux steals the titular book when he is seized by the desire to possess a story that never ends-the "book of all books," as he puts it. He desires the book because he believes that it offers the opportunity for eternal escape into the magical land of Fantasia, where he can follow the story of Atreyu and Falkor without ever needing to turn the last page. But Bastian is important to Fantasia not only because he is a reader, but because he is a storyteller. During the second half of the novel, he wanders through Fantasia spreading stories as he goes, and the land flourishes in response. I empathized with Bastian the storyteller as much as I empathized with Bastian the reader. Like him, I always had stories running through my head on a near constant loop. I don't remember when exactly I began to write them down. I know it was at some point in elementary school, because I still have fragments in drafts, mostly written in my large, loopy cursive: glimpses of fairies living under the frozen ponds in westem Wisconsin, elves wandering through mythic landscapes reminiscent of Middle Earth, my pet gerbils chattering to each other as they passed the time in their cage. But the truth is, none of those stories ever went anywhere. And the notebooks full of half-developed ideas I carried around in high school and college never went anywhere, either. I wasn't a serious writer, not really. I knew that I liked the visceral experience of laying words on paper-I'm a devoted fountain pen user, and I love the sensation of a smooth, wet nib gliding over paper-but my stories had the tendency to run dry at a I certain point, like a stream that overflows its banks during the spring thaw and is reduced to nothing more than a trickle by summer. The ideas swirled through my brain at afairly constant rate, but I never brought any ofthem to fruition. My career provided the spark I needed to find my voice as a writer. I spend my days working as a rare book librarian, and one of my favorite aspects of the j ob is that it gives me easy access to primary sources all I have to do is walk outside of my office, and I can pull books that are hundreds of years old off the shelf. Flipping through them is a delight. There's always something strange lurking in their pages, like an index entry for "doves free from adulterie" or a woodcut depicting a man sitting still with a beatific smile on his face as a richly dressed surgeon saws through his leg. And while professional historians might see those as a window into the past, a means to understand how people and lived and what intellectual and social forces shaped the world at a given moment in time, I looked at them and saw stories waiting to be told, not just in the sense of "bringing history to life," but in using them to create entirely It wasn't only the contents of the books that drew me; it was the books themselves. There were more stories lurking within the actual construction of the book, in the vellum bindings, the hand-drawn manicules pointing at passages some long-dead reader thought were particularly important; the inscriptions written on title pages saying that "this book was given to me by Mary Coake" or the occasional irreverent doodles that would never be tolerated by modern reader, but that provide insight into the bored minds of yesteryear. The study of the book as a physical object has become increasingly prominent in the field of history over the past decade or so, but I think it's also time that the stories inherent in books become part of the fictional landscape, as well. 2 I finally decided to take my writing seriously about two years after I began working as a rare book librarian. At that point I was going through something of a quarter-to-third-life crisis-I was settled in my job, the city of St. Louis was no longer new to me, and my mind grew restless, searching around for the next challenge. I still kept my notebooks and fountain pens with me, faithfully recording any stray bit of inspiration that drifted through my brain, and I decided to enroll in a two-week creative writing seminar offered at the institution I work for. By the end of it, I knew two things: thatl could actually see a story through to completion, and that I wanted to push myself further, see how much I could actually accomplish with my writing. That two-week institute led to taking semester-long classes, led to the decision to seriously consider pursuing an MFA, led to Stonecoast. The short stories I wrote for the summer institute and in those first classes were deeply rooted in my work as a librarian. I wanted to tell the story of the woman whose dissected body occupies pride of place in the 16th century frontispiece of Andreas Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica, who is usually reduced to nothing more than a historical footnote in discussion of the history of anatomy; or explore the ethical dilemmas posed by using an anatomical atlas whose author was an avowed Nazi who almost assuredly used victims of political terror in his research. These stories could function as straightforward historical and literary fiction, but my love of the fantasy genre led me to insert aspects of the uncanny into my writing. The history of the book and the history of medicine both contain unsettling elements-a lTth century recipe for the essence of man's brains can cure epilepsy; books bound in human skin can be either gruesome extensions of corporal punishment or mementos of friends Ja and family-and I wanted to find ways to incorporate these threads of the strange and uncanny into my writing. My interest in print history and my desire to insert traces of magic into the world come together in the novelette "A Fistful of Letters to Change the World." On the one hand, this story is deeply rooted in the real-world development of the printing press in 15th century Germany.

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