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Leaving My Father's House: A Journey to Conscious Femininity
Leaving My Father’s House: A Journey to Conscious Femininity
Woodman’s 1992 collaborative volume (Inner City Books, Toronto) is, in her own description, the formal counterpart to her earlier work — the book in which she “integrated her ideas about femininity and masculinity with the form that contains them” (Simpkinson, in Woodman 1993, p. 131). The form consists of “two very feminine elements: collaboration and story” (ibid.). Woodman’s role was that of “a weaver, interlacing interpretative strands of the fairy tale with the women’s stories” — the fairy tale being “Allerleirauh” (Woodman 1993, p. 131).
The book braids Woodman’s reading of the fairy tale with three women’s first-person accounts (Rita Greer Allen, Mary Hamilton, and the pseudonymous Kate Danson) of dream and journal material, “each woman defin[ing] the thread of her myth through her dream imagery. Each struggled to free herself from bondage to patriarchal thinking whether in the university, the church, her relationship to her family, even her relationship to her own body” (Woodman 1993, p. 132). The unifying thread is “the process of becoming conscious of how we — both women and men — are driven and defined by negative masculine values, how we can heal our feminine nature, and ultimately how we can balance our positive masculine and feminine energies” (Woodman 1993, p. 130).
The book is the mature application of Woodman’s clinical theory to the patriarchal-daughter structure and the most concrete instance of the conscious-feminine writing in her own register.