And if the women leave the colony altogether, they will leave everything they know behind them. If they fight for justice, and demand some measure of control over their lives, they reject another colony teaching: Women are supposed to be submissive to men. If they fight in a physical sense, they violate a core tenet of their faith: Mennonites are pacifists. But their other options represent significant departures from their Mennonite identities, at least as those identities have been defined by the men who run the colony. Toews’s cast has already discarded the first option the only thing more intolerable than what has already happened to them is for them to do nothing in response. They have two days to decide upon one of three options. It is August’s job to listen to the women talk. He can read and write, and the women cannot, so one of their number, Ona, has asked him to take minutes for their meetings. The women tolerate him because the other men believe he is effeminate, and because he is the community’s schoolteacher. A former prisoner, he returned to the colony years after its bishop excommunicated his parents.
They keep a record of their turmoil through an amanuensis, August Epp, who is the novel’s narrator. Toews did not write a play, but Women Talking often reads like one the women fight with one another, and rage at men and God, and debate matters of religion and identity. When the men leave to post bail, the dissenting women meet in a barn to discuss the options the bishop did not give them. But no doctrine can make the women stupid. The religious dictates of Molotschna give men all the power. WOMEN TALKING by Miriam Toews Bloomsbury, 240 pp., $24.00 Eve acts of her own volition only once, and it is to disobey God and bring man down with her into dust. Perhaps they were haunted by the first judgment. What the women thought of Paul, about his pronouncements or their own place in the world, the Scriptures do not say. Let the women learn in silence, he said, or they will disrupt the church. It was a life sentence, but he was not the first man to pass it. Wives should submit to their husbands, Paul wrote to the first Christians. Not an animal, but not the first human, either, Eve is defined by her function. Called woman because she was taken out of man. Eve, man’s rib, the first wife, the mother of all living.
The anonymous authors of Genesis said that Adam named her, too. God named the man, and the man named the animals, and then God gave man a bride. Let him have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps. Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, the Lord God said.
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