Dryads

There are plenty of legends about women turning into trees but are there any about trees turning into women? Is it odd to say that your lover reminds you of a tree? Well she does, it’s the way her hair fills with wind and sweeps out around her head. Very often I expect her to rustle. She doesn’t rustle but her flesh has the moonlit shade of a silver birch. Would I had a hedge of such saplings naked and unadorned.

In this passage, the narrator compares Louise to a tree. The narrator compares Louise’s flesh to the shade of tree bark and says her hair fills with wind the way leaves rustle in the fall. This passage is unusual because the narrator is unsure of the commonality of this comparison. “Is it odd to say that your lover reminds you of a tree?” is the narrator’s central question in this passage and the reader’s immediate reaction is to say yes. At least, that was my first reaction. Comparing women to anything always hints of objectification to me, even when the comparison is to something beautiful, like in nature. On second reading, however, this question is not so outlandish because trees are quite common to women- both provide life and beauty to humans. I believe this passage is not just about the similarities one can draw between the beauty of a woman and the beauty of a tree but also about the abilities both have to provide life and the narrators newfound understanding of this. The narrator is asking us to reexamine identity and our bodies as they relate to nature. The narrator wishes to have a tree as “naked and unadorned” as Louise, signifying that the narrator is more interested in trees turning into women than women turning into trees, as questioned in the beginning of the paragraph. In Queer and Now, Sedgwick talks about how queer youth develop attachments to cultural objects as a mean of finding queer representation where there is none while the narrator only develops attachments to objects in nature when viewed as a representation of women. The narrator’s life focuses on lovers where they do not exist while queer youth focus on LGBTQ representation where there is none.

The narrator is going against the norm by asking this question, as it is more common for women to turn into trees in legends, such as the tales of dryads (tree nymphs) who turned into trees to resist the advances of male gods such as Zeus. The narrator seems to be comparing Louise to a dryad and therefore zirself to Zeus. Given that Zeus was always chasing after women and goddesses and our narrator seems to move equally fast from lover to lover, this comparison to Greek mythology might not be too far off.