ADRIENNE RICH
given her for her protection. But when she assumes the place
and tone of man as a public reformer ... she yields
the power
which God has given her for her protection ,
and her character
becomes unnatural. . . . (emphasis mine)
23
It
was as
if
in answer to such sentiments that Olive Schreiner, in
1883, made her heroine Lyndall burst forth in response to her friend
Waldo's remark that' 'some women have power":
"Power! Did you ever hear of men being asked whether other
souls should have power or not?
It
is born in them. You may
dam up the fountain of water and make it a stagnant marsh, or
you may let it run free and do its work; but
you
cannot say
whether or not it shall be there;
it is there.
And it will act, if not
openly for good, then covertly for evil; but it will act . .. .
Power!" she said suddenly, smiting her little hand upon the rail.
"Yes, we have power; and since we are not to expend it in run–
nelling mountains, nor healing diseases, nor making laws, nor
money, nor on any extraneous object, we expend it
onyou .
You
are our goods, our merchandise, our material for operating
on.... We are not to study law, nor science, nor art; so we
study you .
T~ere
is
,~ever
a nerve or fibre in your man's nature
butwe know
It.. ..
For a moment, in this passage, Olive Schreiner brushes against a
somewhat different definition of power-but only for a moment. Her
Lyndall is a woman of intense energy, longing for education and for
"extraneous objects" in the form of ideas into which to pour that
energy. And she experiences herself as potentially malign,
if
that
energy is to be denied any outlet except the' 'appropriate duties and
influence of women." For centuries women have felt their active,
creative impulses as a kind of demonic possession. But no less have
men identified and punished such impulses as demonic: the case of
Anne Hutchinson is merely one example.
Besides men's power over us, and our own discernment of some–
thing denied and aborted in us, women have also felt man's
power–
fulness
in the root sense of the word
(potere, posse,
or
poulIoir-to
be
able,
to
be capable)-expressed in the creations of his mind. In the
torsion of a piece of music or the spatial harmony of a building, in the
drenching light of a painting, the unity and force of an intellectual
structure, we have experienced that
powerfulness
as the expressive
