What DOES a Woman Want?

In The Mermaid Chair, Jessie Sullivan moves through what you could describe as a second “coming of age.” She has come upon a threshold in which she has to let go of who she is in order to become someone new– a woman who is complete in herself. Jessie’s real problem, I think, has to do with a broken connection to herself, to the place inside that is her true autonomous ground.

A lot of women come upon this threshold at a certain point in their lives; it is in some ways a developmental rite of passage. If they can navigate it– and it often means traversing deep places in the feminine soul– they find a profound inner freedom, one that involves inner autonomy, creative expression and self-development. I wrote about my own experience of searching for this ground in my book The Dance of the Dissident Daughter. Writing about Jessie’s struggle, I was able to draw upon my strong feeling about women’s journeys to self-commitment.

Jessie’s particular journey to herself was, perhaps, unusual. For a long time she wasn’t even aware of what really motivated her, that her longing for Whit grew out of a longing for something essential in her own soul. By the time she woke up to it, she had “caused a brilliant wreckage,” as she put it.

While I was writing, I remembered the famous conundrum that Freud grappled with. “Despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul,” he wrote. “I have not been able to answer.. . the great question that has never been answered: What does a woman want?” I realized that in some way The Mermaid Chair is my own attempt to answer this unanswerable question with this: A woman wants love and she wants freedom- and she wants them at the same time. In the end, Jessie’s struggle was all about that.