Guest Blog: Playwright Elinor Cook On The Hero, The Lone Woman and PILGRIMS

I was keeling towards the mid-point in my thirties, an age at which female aloneness is no longer socially sanctioned, and carries with it the whiff of strangeness, deviance and failure - Olivia Laing, The Lonely City

I'm reading a lot of books at the moment by women in their late thirties and early forties. Women who are unattached, childless, somewhat prickly. Grief-stricken (Helen MacDonald in H is for Hawk), or alcoholic (Amy Liptrot in The Outrun) or simply lost (Olivia Laing in The Lonely City). 'Difficult' women. Women who are not quite cut out for a society that still says, firmly: find him. Marry him. Have his baby. Women who immerse themselves in extreme situations - taming a wild hawk, retreating to an isolated cottage on an Orkney island, roaming the streets of New York alone - and who do these things unapologetically, without the need to justify or explain.

The lone female is still an unnerving prospect. She is a disconcerting figure, slightly threatening. What defines her if she isn't prepared to be defined by the people around her? Is it selfishness that makes her reject her biology? Won't she regret it when she's old and stooped and there's no one to look after her or feel obliged to her? To say nothing of the kind of danger she's exposing herself to, the predators lying in wait. A woman on her own is an unprotected thing, yet in possession of strange, uncomfortable powers.

And yet we're completely at ease with the lone male. He is as natural to us as breathing. He is The Adventurer. The Soldier. The Hero. He is there throughout history: voyaging and colonising and starting wars. He is there in our folk tales, woven into the fabric of our songs and stories, standing on the deck of a ship and bidding farewell to a woman who wonders why she can't be on the ship too.

He is there in our literature. He's Homer, he's Byron, he's Orwell. He is piled up on the tables of Waterstones, staring out at us from our screens, crooning to us from our radios. He is glamorous and troubled and preoccupied - and he just wants to be free. Free to plunge into the wilderness and gain a better understanding of The Self.

The wilderness has long been the preserve of men. It plays into a particularly romanticised kind of masculinity: the urge to stare at an unbroken horizon, build your own cabin, kill your own food. The ultimate individualistic dream, convincingly packaged as an urge to reconnect with nature, 'get back to the land'. It's a luxury impossible to countenance for most, save those with an abundance of those other luxuries: time and money. In other words, it's about power.

I wrote my play Pilgrims because I wanted to interrogate this fantasy, and to ask why it is that women are still so often pitted as the anchor to men's restlessly roaming ships. To ask how far money and power enables that fantasy, and how far it has shaped all our stories. To find out what happens when you yank women away from the domestic, the biological, the emotional (so often the only terrain we are permitted) and try to find an alternative to the linear storyline, the hero's tale.

Yet in writing in I've had to confront my own romantic attachment to that hero: his obstacles, his conquests, his pain. Those insidious tentacles reach back a long way. There is still so much to agitate at, dismantle, unpick.

But it feels like something is shifting - slowly, finally. The lone woman is no longer as strange or shameful as she once was. She can keep dead mice in her freezer to feed to her hawk; she can lie in wait for the corncrake; she can tramp the New York streets and stare down the people who pity her solitary path. She can disrupt the accepted storyline and reclaim the land. Her freedom is still limited - until we radically look at the way relationships, and childcare in particular, are conducted then this will always be the case - but it is there. Just.

Elinor Cook's Pilgrims features as part of HighTide Festival's 10th Anniversary programme, running 8-17 September. It then travels to The Yard (20 September-15 October) and Theatr Clwyd Cymru (18-29 October)

Watch a video about Pilgrims below

To post a comment, you must register and login.