Eve's Striptease by Julia Kasdorf
"Eve's Striptease" by Julia Kasdorf is a poetry collection that explores themes of femininity, cultural identity, and the complexities of womanhood through the lens of the poet's Mennonite background. Kasdorf, raised in a Mennonite family in Pennsylvania and later living in urban settings such as New York City, reflects on her experiences straddling two distinct cultural environments. The collection is divided into two parts, with the first section, "First Gestures," addressing pivotal moments in a woman’s life, including sexual and spiritual awakenings, while the second part, "Map of the Known World," connects personal narratives to broader themes of heritage and motherhood.
Kasdorf's work does not attack her Mennonite roots but rather seeks to understand and articulate the female perspective within a patriarchal context, providing a sensitive portrayal of women's experiences. Her poems are rich with imagery and emotional depth, often employing personal anecdotes to draw connections between generations of women. Throughout the collection, she emphasizes the importance of giving women a voice, allowing them to navigate their own narratives amidst societal expectations. "Eve's Striptease" ultimately serves as both a reflection on individual identity and a tribute to the collective stories shared among women in a faith community.
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Eve's Striptease by Julia Kasdorf
First published: Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998
Genre(s): Poetry
Subgenre(s): Lyric poetry
Core issue(s): Faith; freedom and free will; Mennonites; women
Overview
To appreciate Julia Kasdorf’s poetry fully, one must know some family history. Her parents left the Mennonite enclave of the Pennsylvania valley to raise their daughter in the Pittsburgh suburb of Irwin. The family attended a Mennonite church in nearby Scottsdale. As a child, Kasdorf spent the academic year in this urban environment but enjoyed summer holidays in the company of more traditional relatives in the valley. This bifurcation allowed Kasdorf to straddle two cultures and observe both from the perspective of an outsider looking in. Stories relayed to her by relatives during those summers reappeared as poems in her 1992 collection Sleeping Preacher. The poems in Eve’s Striptease, though less overtly related to the Mennonite life, still resonate with the emotions of those stories, although the setting has shifted. Many of the poems in the later volume are based in New York City, where the poet lived for a decade as an adult.
While the label “feminist Mennonite” may seem an anomaly, the term suits Kasdorf well. She examines the male-dominant practices of her religion (and of American society at large) through the female lens and reconstructs authentically the scenes she views. Neither anti-Mennonite nor anti-men, she does not rant about injustices against women; she reports them with honesty and sensitivity as part of the vast spectrum of female experiences she explores in her poetry. In Eve’s Striptease, she writes about interiors and exteriors, about houses and people, about the visible marks on the body and the less visible scars on the soul. Most important, she gives women voices.
Eve’s Striptease is arranged in two parts that together encompass varied life experiences. The opening section, titled “First Gestures,” includes poems commemorating a number of firsts: sexual initiations, spiritual awakenings, and the acquisition of cultural knowledge. In “A Pass,” a girl recites “forgive us our trespasses” at a church service, possibly a funeral, remembering simultaneously the time a man molested her by slipping his hand up her dress. The multiple meanings embedded in the title suggest the passing of the spirit from one realm to the next, the sexual pass, and the victim’s commutation of her molester’s sin. She has not mentioned her defilement to anyone—less an act of forgiveness than the product of shame. The memory links inextricably with death in her mind: “Of course, it sets me back,/ as each death resurrects/ the memory of other deaths/ and you must return to mourn/ your full store of passings afresh.” The death of her innocence is freshly relived with each recollection.
In “Mother Love” a wife postpones childbirth, perhaps indefinitely, to her own mother’s chagrin. She notes that “Ancient Hebrew texts used the same word to name Adam’s toil and Eve’s labor/ pains: humanity’s curse is work/ toward no certain end.” It is the uncertainty of marriage, as well as parenting, which makes her hesitate, and she acknowledges wryly that had her own parents hesitated, she would not be in this predicament—that is, wondering when or if to bear children.
The volume’s title poem, “Eve’s Striptease” is told from a daughter’s perspective as she and her mother shop for wedding night lingerie. The prospective bride acknowledges both excitement and dread, and though she is not as innocent as her mother might have been at this moment, it is from her mother that she has been given the freedom to desire. Caged-bird imagery in the poem suggests fear, not of the daughter’s forthcoming sexual surrender but of the surrender of self that marriage might require. Describing the intensity of her escalating sexual desire, the narrator provides a delightful image of Eve stepping out of Adam’s ribcage: “. . . it feels like my sternum might split/ like Adam’s when Eve stepped out, sloughing off ribs.” The title of the second half of the volume, “Map of the Known World,” echoes a theme begun in the very first poem. In “First Gestures,” the narrator asks the reader to “imagine your life drawn on a map.” The poems in the second half sketch out such a map, with lines connecting persons and places and eras. An ongoing motif in the volume is the connection between mothers and daughters. “Coat of a Visiting Nurse” describes an adult daughter dressed in her mother’s well-worn coat and vicariously experiencing her presence. The article of clothing connects the country road her mother once navigated on visits to rural patients and the New York City sidewalk the daughter strolls, conspicuous in the “stiff oatmeal coat,/ which she grew too stout/ to button and had to pass on.” What has also been passed on, as the poem implies, is a heritage of industrious women. The coat is not just outerwear, but innerwear; the persona has donned her mother’s fortitude.
An homage to the enduring spirit of Mennonite women, “Thinking of Certain Mennonite Women” appears late in the collection. Three vignettes of young Mennonite girls at vigorous play—clinging to a windmill, dancing in a garden, jumping from a swing—relieve the narrator of her adult sorrow and serve as examples for living. The final lines speak to the poet’s own craft and connect her task to theirs:
When I wonder
Christian Themes
A shared set of beliefs and values and an established pattern of living are often what distinguish a religious community such as the Mennonites. While the link between spiritual heritage and personal history is not overt in Kasdorf’s poetry, it is a constant presence. The Mennonite culture stresses community accord and discourages dissent. To speak as an individual voice from out of the collective, as Kasdorf does, is rare. Kasdorf has not been sanctioned for her poetry—indeed she has received a great deal of support from Mennonite members—but she is not without her critics in the community. Certainly Kasdorf’s reception suggests an increased degree of acceptance for individual creative expression among the Mennonites. As she herself has observed in interviews, the stories were always there; they just were not written down.
There is a reverential quality to many of Kasdorf’s poems that allows them to exist as lyric prayers in the tradition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Gerard Manley Hopkins. While a comparison between an American Mennonite poet of the early twenty-first century and two late Victorian British poets of the Catholic faith may seem conveniently interdenominational, it must be noted that female voices in Mennonite literary history are scant and recent. Thus, Kasdorf is at the forefront of Mennonite poets twice over. In an interview with Sheri Hostetler, Kasdorf noted that she did not want to write bitterly about her Mennonite culture despite the tears that accompanied some of the stories her relatives shared with her in her childhood: “Take that pain and . . . make it beautiful. That’s what transforms it into poetry.” This generosity of spirit pervades her poetry, removes the shame, and makes even the tragic honorable.
In her poetry Kasdorf both honors the traditions and transcends the boundaries of her Mennonite heritage. She has given voice to women’s experiences within and outside the community and has bridged divides between religious practice and literary expression. The relationship of the Mennonite artist to his or her community was the subject of Kasdorf’s dissertation at New York University and has resurfaced in essays and poems appearing in The Body and the Book (2001). Obviously Kasdorf’s topic is a lifelong case study and grist for future poetry.
Sources for Further Study
Birky, Beth Martin. “’Sloughing off Ribs’: Revealing the Second Sex in Julia Kasdorf’s Poetry.” Mennonite Quarterly Review 77, no. 4 (October, 2003): 589-611. Compares Kasdorf’s presentation of the female body and related issues of identity to the philosophy espoused in Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex, 1953).
Birky, Beth Martin. “When Flesh Becomes Word: Creating Space for the Female Body in Mennonite Women’s Poetry.” In Migrant Muses: Mennonite/s Writing in the U.S., edited by Ervin Beck and John Roth. Goshen, Ind.: Mennonite Historical Society, 1998. Works by three Mennonite poets are evaluated in terms of their depiction of the female body.
Fisher, John. “Eve’s Striptease: What’s in a Name?” Mennonite Quarterly Review 77, no. 4 (October, 2003): 579-588. Relates the biblical Eve to the lives of contemporary Mennonite women and to female characters in Kasdorf’s poetry.
Hostetler, Sheri. “Poet Julia Kasdorf: Straddling Two Worlds with Stories.” MENNONOT 4 (February, 1995). In an interview, which comments on Eve’s Striptease as a work in progress, Kasdorf shares her philosophy of poetry and explains her connection to the Mennonite faith.
Wright, David. “The Beloved, Ambivalent Community: Mennonite Poets and the Postmodern Church.” Mennonite Quarterly Review 77, no. 4 (October, 2003): 547-548. Examines attitudes toward contemporary Mennonite poets, including Jeff Gundy and Kasdorf, in the light of postmodern theory.