Refuge: A Review

Throughout "Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place," Terry Tempest Williams illustrates a line drawn between the men and women in her Mormon family. The Mormon religion is patriarchal, although the most effective spiritual practices in Williams’ work are the ones that take place among women. The relationship between Williams and her mother Diane becomes careworn as they prepare for Diane’s inevitable death. We are all going to die, but Diane has the rare opportunity to know when and plan accordingly. By the twentieth chapter titled “Western Tanager” we see that the cancer is taking its toll on Williams’s mother, Diane calls to her closest disciple. “Terry, I need you to help me through my death” (p.156). Diane does not go to her husband, but to the eldest of her children, the only daughter. After her mother appoints Terry to stay by her side, Williams consciously enacts small rituals to somehow help her dying mother.

An alb is a long robe made of white linen, worn by priests in the Catholic Church to represent the innocence of the priest’s soul performing mass; the priests who presided over my elementary school wore these for mass every Friday and Sunday. I see no difference in the power these vestments and the last dress Diane would buy with her daughter.Diane sees her body in the changing room mirror. Diane is thinner, the cancer beginning to physically take away from her, Diane does not see her body as her own anymore. Diane is shopping for a new dress in which she can dance with her husband before she is too weak to do so anymore. “I took the red suede chemise, size 6, off the padded hanger and handed it to her. She stepped into the dress and put one arm in, then the other, then buttoned the front and turned the collar up” ( p.198). Dressing rooms are places where we can be most honest with ourselves. The small room, with bright lights and a floor- length mirror allows you to take in yourself. This moment allows Diane to express herself, the dress makes her feel beautiful, it makes her feel like she is not dying. I have mentioned before that I believe Diane to be the voice of the prophet, acting as the “interrupter of the status quo” --of Matthew Fox’s six aspects of a ritual. I wonder if these women use clothing as a shield against the aspect of the “via negativa”--another of Matthew Fox’s aspect of ritual. That the colors Williams adorns herself within the 36th chapter “Avocets and Stilts” are used to fight the shadow side of her mother's approaching death. After all, you have to have a reason to get dressed. If a chemise has the ability to make us more prepared for the greatest trial of life, who is to say that it is frivolous, that clothes do not matter?

I have grown up around women, spending most family occasions with my grandmother, aunts, and my mother. I was always in the room when they were putting on makeup, reminding me of the women I idolized in old movies: Bette Davis holding court from her backstage dressing room in "All About Eve"; Joan Crawford gossiping in a department store ladies room in "

The Women;" Vivien Leigh pinching her cheeks in front of a mirror in Gone With The Wind . This way that some women dress is very similar to that of a religious ritual. The stepping into dresses, rather than into robes. The smell of perfume, instead of incense. I’m sure that many women prepare themselves as much as holy men, if not more.