Image as analytic tool, part 2
I started out writing fiction—short stories and then an attempt at a novel. Then, without having planned to, I found myself committed to write a nonfiction book about “shopping bag ladies,” and when I sat down to think about what its focus might be, the image of the witch popped into my mind. At the time I was doing a Jungian analysis, which uses dream images to investigate the contents of the unconscious, so it was natural to me to follow the witch image wherever it led. This method felt not just congenial but deeply satisfying; right away, I was hooked. An image constrains and focuses thoughts while still allowing great freedom in moving around within it: you can come at your material from many different directions without losing coherence, since the analysis acquires its form from the structure of the image.
A witch and her familiar
I used this method for both my literary nonfiction books:
- For The Women Outside, a study of homeless and marginal women, the witch figure.
- For Slaying the Mermaid, about women and self-sacrifice, Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Mermaid.
The Little Mermaid, illustration by Vilhelm Pedersen for H.C. Andersen's fairy tale
While in the process of developing my witch image, and feeling doubtful whether using a single image to organize an entire book was really kosher (what about logic? rational analyis?), I asked a panelist at an academic seminar about it. She recommended a book called The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, by Jonathan D. Spence, a historian. It was an academic study of a Jesuit missionary in 16th- and 17-century China, who undertook to teach the Chinese the European system of building a “memory palace” or mental construct of images, a method in use since classical antiquity to help people organize and remember large amounts of information. Adapting the memory palace theme to his book, Spence built each chapter around an image, as expressed by a Chinese character. He didn’t use his images in quite the way I was using mine, but his book made me feel much more comfortable about what I was doing.
Actually an image like my witch or mermaid is rather like a memory palace in reverse. In the original version, you build your palace as a way to store specific data. You add one room after another, and as you create them, you furnish them with objects, attaching a particular datum to each object. You can store different categories of information in different rooms. To remember your information, in your mind’s eye you move through the rooms and look around at the furnishings.
For me the process is precisely reversed. The image is already there, and my job is to explore it. As I move through it, I discover new wings, levels, ells—all sorts of additions, which furnish new components and additional layers of meaning for the conceptual structure of my book. Either way, I think, images are magical.
Image as analytic tool, part 1
When I first encountered the homeless women I wrote about in my book The Women Outside, I was struck by the way they talked. At that time, a large proportion of “shopping bag ladies” were former inmates of state mental institutions, tossed out into the “community” when a so-called reform emptied the hospitals but failed to provide adequate follow-up or care. On their own, these women couldn’t negotiate the bureaucratic requirements of the welfare system and wound up on the street. Years of institutionalization plus the disorientation induced by life outdoors gave their conversation a fragmented quality that reflected the shattering of their inner vision.
Trying to describe this in an article for a small feminist journal, I remembered Lila, a woman I’d met some time before on a visit to a small rural Texas town. On the wrong side of a piece of shelving paper, she drew me a family tree: roots, trunk, branches, leaves, and acorns. A squirrel sits on a root holding an acorn, and a pig roots for more acorns beneath the branches. Each branch, she told me, was a member of the family and the smaller branches were their children. Beneath the drawing she wrote a poem celebrating the “beautiful sweet world God created”—not excluding the “storms” and “broken hearts” introduced by the devil.
Together Lila’s tree and poem conveyed a marvelous wholeness of vision, setting her own family connections, past and future, into the larger natural cycle. By contrast, the images that the homeless women spilled out were jumbled shards of their real past or fantasy past, nightmare representations of unacknowledged rage or terror, bits and pieces of their daily lives, and dreams of a wished-for future that would never come.
My ideas about the family tree image developed as many ramifications as a real tree and turned into the conceptual structure of the article—my first use of an image as a method of analysis.
I thought: how does a tree work? The roots draw nourishment from the soil and the trunk sends it upward to feed the leaves and produce the fruit. So the tree represents wholeness and natural cycles. It diagrams the family’s roots in the past and its continuity in the present and into the future.
But to connect this image to the homeless women, I had to go further. The tree also represents the development of a single person: the self grows to fruition by tapping into nourishment buried underground and transforming it into a rich harvest. For the homeless women, this tree was cut off at the roots. They lacked that vision of wholeness, as though the vessel of self bearing the image of their tree had been shattered, with only the shards remaining.
My article went on to draw parallels between those outcast women and women inside society that no longer seem quite so valid to me. In fact the whole piece now feels rather over the top. But it taught me how to use an image to pursue meaning, one ramification at a time (as it were). From then on I had a tool that freed my imagination.