Daughters of Saturn: From Father's Daughter to Creative Woman

by Patricia Reis

Although feminists have turned prodigious energies toward describing mothers and daughters, the father-daughter relationship remains conspicuously ignored. In Daughters of Saturn, Patricia Reis explores various aspects of this relationship with a particular focus on the father's effect on a woman's creative life. Beginning with the myth of Saturn, the archetypal devouring and melancholic father, she explores the many ways that Daughters of Saturn have come to name their experience and have used language to tell their stories.
Through myth, dreams, and women's experiences, Reis creates a map marking a journey from life in the Belly of the Father through the First Gate of Awakening. She documents women's resistances and rebellions against the dominant culture of patriarchy, the treacherous Battlezone of Culture, and records the lives of four women writers - Emily Dickinson, H.D., Sylvia Plath, and Anais Nin - outlining their struggles and strategies to live creative lives. Reis marks the trails into what she calls "The Wildzone", a place that has existence outside the law of the fathers; a woman-centered ground of being and knowing.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction

288 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1995

About the author

Author Patricia Reis is a Midwesterner at heart. In the mid- 1800s, her German immigrant ancestors pioneered a farm in southwestern Iowa and their portrait gave her this story. She has lived on both coasts and currently resides in Portland, Maine where she is active in Maine Writers and Publishers. She spends six months of each year in Nova Scotia.
Reis holds a BA in English Literature from the University of Wisconsin, an MFA from UCLA and a degree in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara. She also main- tains a private practice of psychotherapy for women.
Reis’s memoir, Motherlines: Love, Longing, and Libera- tion (SheWrites Press, October 2016) won a gold medal for memoir from Independent Press Publishers. Along with numerous essays and reviews, she has published several non- fiction books. Women’s Voices, includes her in-depth inter- view with naturalist and writer, Terry Tempest Williams; The Dreaming Way: Dreamwork and Art for Remembering and Recovery (recently translated into Korean, 2019); Daughters of Saturn: From Father’s Daughter to Creative Woman (1995, 2005) with a forthcoming Russian translation.

Reviews

[Eleanor Cowan · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Submission to one's situation, one's relationships, one's job,
is also antithetical to creative work. Dutiful daughters,
compliant wives, deferential employees, do not create,
they resign themselves to their situations. They surrender,
not to the creative fires within, but to the demands of the
life of servitude the culture has created for them." Pg. 75

Carefully and with great compassion, Reis explains that extrication from the muzzles of father-rule is tangled by another power; that of love. Daughters, sisters, mothers and wives love the fathers, brothers, sons and husbands who were, under patriarchy, socialized to oppress, repress, sexually abuse and infantilize women.

Reis explains how tragic it is when mothers themselves become "actual embodiment and executors of the repressive patriarchal system."

Reis quotes a statement made by Virginia Wolfe in 1928:

"Women have served all these centuries as
looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power
of reflecting the figure of a man at twice his natural size." Pg. 164

Reis is firm in her last chapter containing but a single, determined page. It is called "Possibility."

Eleanor Cowan, author of : A History of a Pedophile's Wife: Memoir of a Canadian Teacher and Writer

[Mical · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a big fan of Jungian mythology dream talk and this has a good healthy dose. Mix it with the creative process as a form of personal spiritual growth and I can't but help give it five stars. Written clearly and easily understood.