To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

subtle level, myth is real—or, creation is literal.
It matters very much what our myths
are; it matters very much what we create."
Orenstein conceives of visioning in a
shamanic sense, that is, creative visioning is
"literal" and has consequences in "real" life.
Thus, there is a relationship between
dreaming and waking, between artistic
visioning and living; between journeying
and understanding. Orenstein also distinguishes
feminist matristic art from feminist
art, to which it is obviously related.
Matristic art, she writes, acknowledges and
is based upon the "shift in Cosmogony,
mythology, spirituality, psychology and
history" resulting from the reclamation of
the Great Goddess as the center of creation.
Throughout the book, Orenstein
describes the "reflowering of the Goddess"
in art works created by a number of contemporary
women painters, writers and
performance artists, who use visual and
performance media to express an earthand
Goddess-centered vision of creation
and being. The connections between spiritual
belief, myth, and ethical practice as
well as the relationship between art and
religious expression are explored through
the prism of value shifts occasioned by the
feminist matristic vision in which the
Mother Goddess forms the symbol system
of the sacred. Numerous examples of works
by contemporary feminist matristic
painters, poets, and performance artists
serve to reinforce her contention that the
movement is fueling a late 20th century
"renaissance," in which matristic iconographie
images and ritual performance lead
to personal transformation and resacralization
of the Earth. Her ecofeminist perspective,
which she describes as a "fusion of
ethics, aesthetics, and politics in a global
ecological vision of survival both for
humankind and for all non-human life on
Earth," is Goddess-centered and womanoriented,
but not exclusively so. The feminist
matristic vision, she claims, does not
exclude anyone—male or female—but,
instead, makes the Planet Earth, rather
than humans, the central focus of life.
Mary Meigs' In The Company of Strangers
is a gentle book, a profound meditation on
aging, time, memory, creativity, life, friendship
and death. Written after the filming of
The Company of Strangers, released in 1990
by the Canadian National Film Board, it is
the story of the eight diverse women of the
cast; the two women directors; and the
magic space of the film itself.
If women's myths are to be found in the
mundane, in the area of "genealogy,"
described by Michel Foucault as recording
the singularity of events, seeking them "in
the most unpromising places, in what we
tend to feel is without history—in sentiments,
love, conscience, instincts," then this
"semi-documentary" film creates a magical
space in which a group of elderly women
and their bus driver emerge from the
matrix of ordinary lives to enter an imaginary
realm of connectedness and meaning.
With the skilled precision of a neurosurgeon,
Meigs runs her scalpel cleanly along
the interface of real life and myth, noting
where and how the two fuse and merge, the
process, and the effect of the process.
The film plot is simple: a bus carrying
seven elderly women, from "eclectic" backgrounds,
to a Golden Age retreat breaks
down while making an unscheduled detour
to find the rural childhood home of one of
the elderly women. The breakdown provides
the several days of isolation needed
for the group of strangers to become
friends, to devise practical solutions for
coping together, and to begin to confide in
one another. The old, abandoned house
and surrounding landscape of pond and
rolling, wooded hills becomes a pastoral
metaphor for old age, memory, life and
death as well as a "mother space," in which
necessities are provided. As Meigs writes,
the mist from which the bus emerges at the
beginning of the film "symbolizes the
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