Women have pursued dangerous animals for the same reasons they’ve built relationships with men. For entertainment, for friendship, for support. For love. For … more? A woman entering into an affair with a bear is a wild thought, but one supported by tales of human-animal connections told throughout history.
You likely grew up hearing bedtime stories of women romantically entangled with creatures. Greek myths such as Leda and the swan and Europa and the bull; fairy tales such as “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Frog Prince.” Indeed, there are so many tales that fit the woman-animal-romance description that folklorists group them in the category “Animal as Bridegroom.” More recently, you might have seen the Oscar-winning film “The Shape of Water,” in which a woman falls for an amphibian, or read Rachel Ingalls’ novella “Mrs. Caliban,” about the exact same thing but published 35 years before the movie came out.
The women in these stories choose their beasts ecstatically, desirously, because picking the animal means getting to leave society behind. Frequently in this kind of story, the women are trapped by domestic drudgery. If they’re partnered, they’re housewives and stay-at-home moms, tasked with endless chores; if they’re single, they’re lonely librarians or debt-saddled graduate students, stuck at their desks. Their worlds are man-made, consisting of cake mixes and emotional labor. They’re not afraid of men — they’re tired of living in a patriarchy.
So they decide to get away from the world of men entirely. They go for the bear. Perhaps the finest, and most shocking, example in this animal-as-bridegroom category is the 1976 novel “Bear” by the Canadian author Marian Engel. Toward the end of her main character’s torrid affair with this animal, Engel writes: “[F]or one sharp, strange moment she could feel in her pores and the taste of her own mouth that she knew what the world was for. She felt not that she was at last human, but that she was at last clean. Clean and simple and proud.”
Certainly you should not walk in the footsteps of these fictional women, but you’ve got to consider their point. There’s a world out there, if only in fiction, where women have found an existence that’s cleaner, simpler, more free. Bizarrely, it comes with an animal lover, but what can I say? Myths and fairy tales are strange.
The stories we tell each other about beauties and beasts offer a reframing of the question of man versus bear. Instead of comparing one fear against the other, we weigh our desires. In your life, will you choose the lesser evil or the greater thrill? Think of the TikTok question this way: If you’re alone in the forest, are you focused on getting out, or would you like to see what’s possible when you venture deeper in?
文章来源:Los Angeles Times
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