A Mother's Writing (Touch)

    Something that has always fascinated me is women’s history. And by this, I mean the real history of women, because it’s far too easy to get caught up in what men think women’s history is or the perception of women’s histories, which is lives of pain and hurt and motherhood. Most narratives of women who fall outside of that, however, were the ones privileged enough to write, which Classen talks about quite a bit in his book. The section on women’s work, and women’s writing, made me think a lot about a faculty presentation I was blessed to have been able to see earlier this semester: Professor Polanichka’s presentation for the History Club on her research on Dhuoda.

 

    Dhouda is a noblewoman from medieval France born in roughly 800BCE; not much is known about her life except for her marriage to her husband, her two sons, and their fates. Her husband was thought to be treacherous so her eldest son was taken to live at court as a political hostage and her younger, barely after being born, was taken to live with her husband whilst he was at war so he could be protected. In response, Dhouda took to writing a manual to instruct her sons on how to act, and her hope was that if she could not be there as they grew, this text would be a model for their behavior. This text is one of the only texts from a woman to survive the Carolingian period.

 

    The reason I bring it up, and why Classen’s text reminded me of this talk, is because of the contents of Dhouda’s manual and the paradoxes it brings up within Classen’s statements on the nature of women’s writing. Writing in an intellectual way was considered a masculine activity, and yet Dhouda takes upon writing a manual in order to connect to one of the most feminine senses out there, which is motherhood. She does so in order to instruct her sons from afar; her goal was to be seen by her sons, as she was not able to see them in person. She talks much about God, and about how and why to honor him, making this manual a religious text.

 

    She could not touch her sons, so she wrote this to touch him. She used the skills she had, the ability to write she was allowed to have by her upbringings, in order to write this. Maybe it’s the writer in me, and the way I believe a little bit of someone’s soul can be placed within a text, that she bore her soul out for her children on text so that they would be able to hold her, even if she would never physically see them after they were both taken from her.