Layered Voices / "Women Talking"

Item

Title
Layered Voices / "Women Talking"
Creator
Sjerven, Emma
Date Created
2024
Description
This framed print combines two craft techniques to represent the layered and assembled dialogues that structure Miriam Toews’s Women Talking (2018). The linocut print of a horse looking backwards is an illustration that the illiterate women draw when they gather for their first meeting, symbolizing their option to “leave” the colony (Toews 6). The typeset excerpt is the final two lines of a hymn that the women sing to remain unified in their shared trauma (29). Together, these elements merge different communicative forms to visualize the gathered voices in the text and how the voices come together in harmonious ways to create unity in times of uncertainty. The print is encased in a black frame, which signifies the limited nature of the women’s voices as they are mediated by August. While making this object, I considered the form of the novel and how perspectives are relayed to readers through August.

EMMA SJERVEN ON WHAT THIS CRAFTED OBJECT TEACHES US:

Women Talking by Miriam Toews (2018) explores the value of voice and connection in a Mennonite colony riddled with gender conflicts and violence. Female voices often go unheard in Toews’s fictional colony of Molotschna; Ona Friesen, a spinster impregnated by one of her rapists, acknowledges this fact as the women consider how to respond to the men’s assaults against them, saying, “We are women without a voice” (56). Yet the women’s meetings in the hayloft over two days reflect how the assemblage of dialogue and perspectives creates power and unity among the colony’s minority.

Published as Toews’s seventh novel, Women Talking was praised for its commentary on feminist themes and religious traumas, establishing Toews as a profound former-Mennonite author. While some Mennonite scholars have praised Toews’s work as “reflective of Mennonite culture,” others note that her attribution of “modern attitudes and sensibilities to a group of women who are decidedly separatist” is concerning, considering that Toews is now an “outsider to the community” (Völz 101, Glista 97, Fernandez-Moralez 102). In this way, Toews’s work is somewhat polarizing because it may not accurately reflect the fierce religiosity usually found within women in Mennonite communities. In 2022, the novel was adapted into an Oscar-winning film directed by Sarah Polley, who deliberately excluded any mention of the word “Mennonite” in her film, as she believed the patriarchy is an issue that does not solely affect Mennonites (Glista 98). Polley also noted that both her and Toews’s characters would not “identify as feminist” because it is “outside their realm of experience and knowledge” (Fernandez-Moralez 103). Despite these contradictions from scholars and the film director, the pervasive theme of female power and unity against patriarchal standards remains central to Toews’s work (Oyler para. 7).

When considering what to create for my final project, I reflected on my crafted objects created during our workshops and how these pieces may work in conjunction with each other. I considered my linocut print of a horse with its back turned, looking back at where it came from, and my typeset hymn that the women sing together (Toews 6, 29). I realized that these elements of the texts I once innocently created share a commonality: they are communicative forms for the women. Combining these objects helped me consider the novel’s form, and, as a result, my final framed print merges different communicative frameworks that appear throughout the novel to conceptualize the layering of voices that structure the text.

While neither linocut nor letterpress printing explicitly appears in my novel, the history of women’s roles in these media is important to consider and contributed to the embodiment of my work. Linocuts have long been used as artistic media, often appearing in women’s works (Cassidy 18). Linoleum was a medium that was available to women and was used to create detailed coloured prints (18). Contrarily, women were historically less active in letterpress printing. As Claire Battershill notes, “women could run the feeding of a steam press, but not actually operate it” (9). As I created my typeset excerpt on the Vandercook press, I understood the irony with which I, as a female maker, was undertaking an activity that women, like those in Toews’s novel, could not. The embodiment of these crafts contributed to my understanding of my positioning as a female crafter connected to a text about women who are unable to read but can communicate in other ways.

As I created my linocut during our workshop, I considered the way that my physical position as a maker—dominating, controlling, and configuring the lino—mimicked the physical actions of the men in the colony. At times, the aggression I used to remove the excess lino contradicted the symbol of hope and bravery that my carved object represented. As I etched a symbol drawn by the women, I understood that my embodied experience added another "layer” to my project and my interpretation of the text.

Furthermore, the illustration of the horse carries a double meaning: it symbolizes power in that the women use it to represent their brave decision to “leave” the colony, but it also represents how the men view the women of Molotschna (Toews 6, 21). In various instances throughout the text, the women acknowledge how they have been treated similarly to the animals in the colony. One of the colony matriarchs, Greta Loewen, notices this comparison, commenting that they “have been preyed upon like animals; perhaps we should respond in kind” (Toews 21). By literally drawing a symbol to represent one of their options, the illiterate women repurpose the meaning of the horse, an animal, to associate its being with their personal voices and future choices.

The excerpt of the hymn I chose to include appears in the final two lines of the first stanza of a hymn called “Work, for the Night is Coming.” Traditionally, this hymn is sung in religious contexts and signifies the work that man does for God before night falls (hymnstudiesblog). In the novel, the women sing the first stanza before they briefly adjourn during their first meeting: “The women join hands and sing…” (Toews 29). I chose to print the final two lines of the hymn because I interpreted them as hauntingly relevant to the women’s situation. The men’s “work” (raping the women) has been done, and they have left the women damaged. In their singing, and in the specific hymn they choose to sing, the women communicate a message of unity to one another that, despite the brutality they endure, sisterhood prevails. This interpretation of the hymn, like its inclusion in my final print, adds yet another layer to the text.

While the women congregate in the hayloft under the agreement that the attacks they have endured merit vengeance, they deliberate their choices thoroughly, often disagreeing with each other about what their decisions mean and how their ultimate choice will be perceived by those around them. Salome Friesen, a woman who nearly killed her rapist in self-defence, vigorously defends the choice to “stay and fight,” asking her fellow women, “Is this how we want to teach our daughters to defend themselves—by fleeing?” (Toews 40). Her question is then contradicted by a clarification from Mejal Loewen, who points out that the women are “not fleeing, but leaving” (Toews 40). Such contrasting dialogues and perspectives structure the text and informed my final print. The text assembles the varying perspectives of the women about the same issue, layering them, which demonstrates how differing viewpoints can come together to tell one cohesive story. Similarly, my final object works to conglomerate these communicative forms into one print, symbolizing the cohesion of voices that emerge about a shared issue.

The structure of the text itself “echoes oral features of Plautdietsch,” the traditional Mennonite language the women speak, operating as both “repetitive and additive” (Völz 101). I reflected on this aspect of the form of my text as I created my final object. My print is the product of three attempts at the placement of the linocut stamp and typeset print. To ensure that my print was of good quality, I repeatedly stamped my linocut; I could not achieve a print to my liking, so I had to try again, adding more ink one time, shifting my stamp a bit to the right the next time, and so on. I learned that, like the process of assembling my final project, the text itself is both turbulent and monotonous. The seeming unreliability of August as the narrator of the text (he often admits to missing parts of the conversation: “I am not able to hear or keep up with every detail” [Toews 22]) contributes to its instability, while the construction of the book (its entirety made of dialogue and a singular perspective) contributes to its repetitive nature. These contradictory elements work to form the text—and ultimately contribute to the formation of my print. While the horse and hymn represent different forms of communication, when combined, they represent communication throughout the novel as it is connected to the larger theme of unity among women.

I used a black matte frame as a symbolic object to represent the framing device and voice that are used throughout the text. While the novel explores themes of feminism and centres the women’s perspectives and reactions to the attacks, August serves as the vessel for the women’s voices, keeping the novel’s perspective “deliberately limited” (Glista 97). The thick black frame both encases and looms over my print, serving as a reminder that though the novel prioritizes the voices of the women, patriarchal perspectives remain pervasive and dominate the colony.

The completion of my crafted object allowed me to consider not only the structured form of the text (how it is told through a singular perspective and created mostly of dialogue) but also how illustrations and hymns are communicative forms that, once combined, create a cohesive work representing a central theme within the novel. Furthermore, completing this final object helped me understand that crafts themselves have voice—though not in the way that we traditionally think of voice. Illustrations via linocuts communicate the author’s thoughts about a particular subject, while hymns via letterpress printing resemble the unity that is found in song and words. Though the women initially believe they do not have a voice, my project demonstrates that the other media they engage with generate a sense of power among them (Toews 56).
References
Battershill, Claire. “Historicizing” in Women and Letterpress Printing 1920-2020: Gendered Impressions. Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Cassidy, Jillian. “Eileen Mayo: Her Prints, Posters, and Postage Stamps.” Women’s Art Journal, vol. 24, no. 1, 2003, pp. 17-22. https://doi.org/10.2307/1358802

Fernandez-Moralez, Marta, and Maria Isabel Menendez-Menendez. “Sarah Polley’s Take on the Me-Too Moment: Adapting Women Talking to the Big Screen.” Adaptation: The Journal of Literature on Screen Studies, vol. 17, no. 1, 2024, pp. 95-114. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/10.1093/adaptation/apad037

Glista, Victoria. “Miriam Toews’ Women Talking and the Embodied Life of Feminist Nonviolence.” Contemporary Women’s Writing, vol. 17, no. 1, 2023, pp. 95-109. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/10.1093/cww/vpad021

Oyler, Lauren. “Murderous Thoughts: Lauren Oyler reviews Women Talking by Miriam Toews.” London Review of Books, vol. 40, no. 22, London Review of Books, 2018. https://www-lrb-co-uk.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/the-paper/v40/n22/lauren-oyler/murderous-thoughts.

Toews, Miriam. Women Talking. Vintage Canada, 2018.

Völz, Sabrina. “Review of Women Talking–Miriam Toews.” Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, 2020, pp. 101-102. https://doi.org/10.62192/japas.v08i1n12

“Work, for the Night is Coming.” Hymnstudiesblog, 9 December 2008, https://hymnstudiesblog.wordpress.com/2008/12/09/quotwork-for-the-night-is-comingquot/
Site pages
Home

Linked resources

Items with "Relation: Layered Voices / "Women Talking""
Title Class
Women Talking Image