Are Women Always Ghosts?: A Review of Karen Salyer McElmurray's Wanting Radiance

The literary relationship between women and nature has a long history, with roots reaching to Genesis. Eve—Woman—tempts pure-hearted Adam—Man—into betraying the reason and logic of Eden and indulging the sweet fruit of nature. On the one hand, women are quite powerful—at least enough to tempt old pure-hearted Adam. They are witches, temptresses, mother nature herself, the giver of all life. On the other hand, associating women with nature in an industrialized patriarchal narrative justifies the masculinist conquest of both women and nature. This is why Carolyn Merchant argued that ecological stories are also feminist stories.

For instance, consider Olivia in Richard Power’s much-lauded Overstory. Olivia undergoes a transformative experience in which she is electrocuted, “dies,” and then is jolted back to life with the memory of “presences” and “beings of light.” They call on Olivia to protect an old-growth forest across the country. Along the way, she also grows detached from her human family, as if, post-death, her more-than-human kinship becomes more meaningful than her human one. Olivia acts as a medium for the desires of the sentient tree spirits who speak to her mostly in flows of emotion.

Olivia is certainly a powerful protagonist, both in terms of her more-than-human connections and her agency. However, her “magical qualities” almost flatten her into a Jungian archetype. Some critics, like Susan Balée, see Olivia as nothing more than an avatar rather than a multidimensional character. Her identity becomes so inextricable from her exceptional ability that she loses human complexity, risking reproducing the magical woman trope that others women even as it grants them special powers.

Karen Salyer McElmurray’s new novel Wanting Radiance wonderfully revises this trope. The novel follows two generations of fortune-telling women whose entangled lives form the foundation of a captivating plot intimately tied to place. Ruby Loving and daughter Miracelle Loving roam mountainsides, coal country, deserts, and towns forgotten by industrialization in search of something like love. The men they encounter, however, might be more interested in “buying up the land, timber, coal, paper but [ending] up owning next to nothing.” Their desire for extracting wealth by splitting mountains open and securing affection by asking women to “stay put” often precludes the love Ruby and Miracelle need. Despite each woman’s magic-like ability to read palms and tarot cards, communicate with spirits, their longing for love leaves them as vulnerable as mountains stripped by miners.

Both Ruby and Miracelle wander like ghosts, detached from place and yet deeply yearning for it. Even as they embody similar qualities as women in other eco-fiction, these qualities expose rather than protect McElmurray’s characters. In one moment, Miracelle confesses, “I didn’t know of what I was more afraid—roads out or all the roads leading inside,” and in another, she asks, “Are women always ghosts?” In many ways, their displacement—their disconnection from any place that feels like home—comes as a result of their relationship with the particular men in their lives.

As Susan Griffin reminds us, both womanhood and nature are terrifying to men, who hunger for the control of both. Ecofeminist fiction exposes the subjugation of both women and nature for being on the same “inferior” side of various colonial and capitalistic dualistic expectations (e.g., feminine/masculine, nature/culture, savage/civilized). McElmurray brilliantly collapses many of these binaries using the image of hands. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop, we have been told. Hands are how humans make a living. They are symbols of labor, survival. The cowboys in this novel use their hands to “move the earth.” In lyrical prose, McElmurray describes what men are capable of with their hands:

After [he and his logging crew had] been here awhile, mountains were split open like hardwood, and the scent drifted in the open windows at night. Musk. Tearing. A scent of blood and birth. And behind them the coal men left their machines. Earthmovers. Excavators. Extractors. Big machines with names of companies bold across them. Smyte. Black Diamond. Ruby would walk home from town some nights and see a huge shell of a thing that had taken a mountain’s insides in its wake. Prongs of a forklift, held out like empty arms in prayer.

In contrast to the extraction and separation at the hands of men, hands connect the novel’s women to each other as well as to place. “I saw lines of earth like lines on a palm,” Miracelle narrates. “My heart reached out for that earth-hand like I could study the past. Swirls and twists of roots, and fissures where nothing had grown back. Desolation, but the earth told lives.” Like Powers’s Olivia, Miracelle also seems to hear voices from the earth. Nightmares of “mountains opening up, swallowing other mountains” haunt her like the voice of her mother’s spirit. McElmurray creates tension from magic. The men often find themselves plagued by the loneliness of a flattened mountain or forest from which every tree has been ripped. Miracelle, meanwhile, only pretends to read cards and hands, undercutting the magical woman trope, and the tragic fate Ruby foresees renders her both powerful and powerless to the man she loved.

Part of what makes Wanting Radiance an important ecofeminist novel is that it is also many other things: a gothic love story, a murder mystery, a revival of Jerry Garcia’s bluegrass told by Flannery O’Connor. Voices from the grave haunt the broken hearts of lovers lost and dead. The prose sings the spirit of Appalachia, with sentences that evoke a fiddle’s voice or mandolin’s woody strum. One can taste the sadness of tragedy while at the same time admiring the scenery of “mountains soaking up the dawn daylight” or “wind settling in meadows underneath quiet stars.” Wanting Radiance is a song about the places that feel like home. Home we left behind. Home we head towards. Home we ruin because of how much we want it.