The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter

Woodman’s first book, developed from her Zurich diploma thesis, published by Inner City Books in 1980 under the honorary patronage of marie-louise-von-franz. The study reads obesity and anorexia nervosa as somatic expressions of the repressed feminine in twentieth-century women — neuroses whose symptom is the body itself. Its architecture moves from experimental ground (Jung’s Association Experiment applied to obese women), through Jung’s concept of psyche and body, through three case studies, to its theoretical center in the chapters “Loss of the Feminine” and “Rediscovery of the Feminine” — the latter closing with “The Mystery Cult of Dionysus” as the classical ground of the feminine’s restoration.

The obese woman, in Woodman’s reading, lives in identification with the Father — she has “accepted the patriarchal values and rejected [her] own body, and with it [her] own shadow” (Woodman 1980, p. 121). Her obesity is at once a refusal of feminine reality and an unconscious attempt to redeem the Father by carrying his darkness. The cure is not behavioral but archetypal: “her entrance into her eternal and divine seed-bearing body” (Woodman 1980, p. 122). Owl is load-bearing because it inaugurates the method Woodman will carry across her whole corpus — the reading of the symptomatic body as a theological and archetypal text.

Concepts introduced or developed

Cited by

marion-woodman (throughout her later corpus)