From Tressy to The Wild Mother: Inside and Out of Consumer Culture
Born in the early 1950s, when the postwar baby boom was in full swing, I was part of the first generation of American children to grow up with television and to be regarded and targeted as consumers of everything from breakfast cereals chock full of marshmallows to baby dolls that cried real tears and wet their diapers.
I was also the daughter of an Episcopal minister. Despite the reputation of the Episcopal church for being well-heeled, my father did not hold with the view of some Protestants that material wealth was evidence of God’s favor. Rich people, so far as I knew, had a hell of a time squeezing through the needle’s eye (which I did not know was a gate in Jerusalem) into heaven on their fat camels. A proponent of the Social Gospel and a Civil Rights activist, my father ministered to an economically and, for that time, racially diverse congregation. The parish also had its share of garden-variety eccentrics. With no effort or virtue on my part, I learned to accept people for who they are not for what they own.
I was not immune to the allure of consumer culture, however. At age nine or ten, I must have begged for a Tressy doll. (I never had a Barbie. I suspect my patrician mother considered Barbie vulgar. Most of my toys were stuffed animals made by Steiff, never plush or cute, but handsome and durable.) But I did get my Tressy doll. When you pressed a button at her waist, hair from the crown of her head could grow to waist length or be spooled back in. Tressy came with a booklet illustrating different hairstyles and how they could be paired with different outfits — which you would presumably save your allowance or pressure your parents to buy. I don’t remember much about the hairstyles or clothes because…
My Tressy didn’t wear clothes.
She ran around naked with her hair (at full length) her only covering. I suppose she got along well with my Steiff lions and tigers and lived in the jungle with them. I don’t remember much more about Tressy’s doubtless brief lifespan. But for turning a doll, designed to train me to be a consumer of fashion, into a naked wild woman, I need give no credit to my buttoned-up, ethical parents. The idea was all mine.
Twelve years later, after a rebellious adolescence (which included being kicked out of a progressive boarding school for nudity), I began writing my first novel, The Wild Mother, a fairytale based on apocryphal legends of Adam’s first wife, Lilith. The story was inspired by a short piece in a feminist anthology that posed the question: what if Lilith and Eve became friends? What if they formed an alliance? My Eve, Eva Brooke, professor of fairytales, was a downtrodden, very human woman. Lilith, in contrast, lived in the Empty Land with a tribe of wild women, who — guess what? — wore no clothes. In winter they augmented their cloaks of long hair with mud and leaves.
Naïve and confident, I assumed The Wild Mother would be accepted by a mainstream publisher (I didn’t know of any others) and take its rightful place on The New York Times bestseller list. I never anticipated years (and years) of rejection, all with the same message: This book does not fit any known genre or marketing category. It is not fantasy sci-fi but has fantasy in it. It has adult characters and child characters on equal footing, but it is not a children’s book nor does it fit the YA category. There is no place for this book on our list. In short, no one knew how to sell it as a consumer good to consumers.
I was not a purist. I was looking for experience and opportunity. I accepted a ghost-writing gig, helping to complete an abandoned novelization of an awful film script about a Marilyn Monroe look-a-like. I don’t remember much about the story, except that I had one of the villains repent and become a cross-dressing male nurse. (In this case, no one cared, as long a manuscript was turned in.) On the strength of that ghost-writing, I was offered a chance to take over a series about a woman surgeon. I read the first few books in the series and proposed that in the next one the surgeon should have a patient die under her knife. She would then abandon her medical practice to become an herbalist. And since she had already had every conceivable heterosexual affair, I figured it was high time she fell in love with a woman. The editor responded: What are you trying to do to my nice lady doctor? Not so naïve anymore, I willfully refused to understand that I was not being asked to advance plot or deepen character but to churn out a predictable product that could be marketed with a minimum of effort and expense.
I did not get the job.
Instead I went on writing what I wanted to write, always attempting to break into the mainstream, always receiving the same rejections. Thanks to several independent publishers, who face challenges similar to those of the artists they champion, I’ve been able to connect with a grassroots readership. I’ve also been lucky to find other forms of paid work and to have a supportive family. I have found (and helped to found) a number of communities where being different is the norm. I live in a region rich in alternative entertainment and agricultural. I have choices about what to consume that are not available to most people in most places. Creating an organic, homegrown culture — and then protecting it from corporate takeover — takes a village and then some.
Not every joy is social. I do have a backyard where I can run around naked. Alas, I have very little hair. If only I could locate that button….
Elizabeth Cunningham is best known as the author of The Maeve Chronicles, a series of award-winning novels featuring a feisty Celtic Magdalen. Her first mystery novel, Murder at the Rummage Sale, will be published by Imagination Fury Arts in August, 2016.
