Sister Souljah

It was to be Torcuil Crichton's journalistic transfiguration. Around noon on January 17, Crichton, a lowly reporter for Glasgow's Sunday Herald, a small Scottish newsweekly, entered the Covent Garden Hotel in London. The hotel's quintessentially English touches make it a favorite among visiting celebrities, and Crichton had gone there to interview the American feminist author Naomi Wolf, on tour for her new book, The Treehouse: Eccentric Wisdom from My Father on How to Live, Love, and See. Wolf had started the day with a radio interview that included a bruising encounter with feminist icon Germaine Greer, and Crichton was, by his reckoning, about the fifteenth of Wolf's 15 British book-tour interviews. So, sitting down with her in the hotel's faux- Edwardian library, Crichton anticipated a weary, canned session; predictably, they chatted about Scotland, her past work, and her book. Hoping to draw her out on her recent divorce, he spouted about his own breakups, a tactic that only yielded cliched sympathy. As his time drew to a close, Crichton remembered Wolf's radio appearance, and he asked if any of Greer's insults had wounded her. Staring off into the distance, Wolf replied that critics' barbs no longer mattered, because now she answered to a higher authority."Are we talking about God?" Crichton asked. "Yeah, God," Wolf said. She elaborated: "I actually had this vision of--of Jesus." And that, needless to say, is when the interview really began. Wolf's story went like this: Several years ago, while in therapy for writer's block, Wolf was asked to try a classic deep relaxation technique, where she imagined walking down a flight of stairs. When she reached the bottom and opened the door, there he was: Jesus, with a holy light radiating out of him, the light of absolute perfection and powerful love. In the vision, Wolf wasn't her usual zaftig, constantly commented-upon physical self, but rather a 13-year-old boy. The vision taught Wolf several lessons: that God cares about each and every one of us; that we are born with knowledge of our own soul, which, like Plato once taught, we forget and have to re-remember in order to realize our life's mission (in her case, to spread the gospel of feminism). That we can all, if we try, be like Jesus--radiant, loving, perfect. The revelation made tears run down her face, she confessed to Crichton. Crichton left the Covent Garden believing he had the scoop of his career. A famously ultra-liberal Jewish feminist turning to Jesus--and that delicious 13- year-old-boy part! "This latest confessional ... will be the icing on the cake, plunging her into fresh controversy over her beliefs and her integrity as a feminist," he wrote, breathlessly, in the Sunday Herald. Though Wolf apparently remains a Jew, at least by her own reckoning, Crichton predicted that her admission might even "trigger a theological battle between the American Christian right and the Jewish lobby over the ownership of her soul." But, disappointingly, although it was picked up in some British and Australian papers, Crichton's bombshell didn't make much of a splash in the States. The whole episode, he explains on the phone, remains a sort of unsolved mystery: Why did Wolf select him to deliver the news of her revelation? And why didn't Americans care? Most inscrutable is the vision itself. In her 1991 breakout book, The Beauty Myth, Wolf was a traditional, rigorously academic, angry feminist polemicist. Now she is a bar mitzvah-age boy visiting with Jesus. What the hell happened? When I contacted Wolf to find out, she seemed a little uncomfortable, in the manner of one trying desperately to stave off a p.r. disaster: She sweetly declined to chat, because she was "swamped with deadlines"; then, under increasing pressure, she fired off a two-sentence statement on the strictly ecumenical nature of her vision. Then, like Jesus himself, she left me with only her works. But, as I looked back at her books, a hint emerged, a little mustard seed of an answer. And, far from representing the slow onset of total lunacy, this seed is a parable of feminism. Naomi Wolf, as she tells it in The Treehouse, grew up in hippie San Francisco with a powerful belief in the magic of things like God, poetry, romance, and beauty. As a student at Yale, she began to develop as a poet (enough, she alleges, to elicit some now-famous heavy breathing from Harold Bloom). But, while at Oxford on a Rhodes, she writes, she became "radicalized," or persuaded to scorn touchy-feely, literary fluff for the harsh realities of the world: injustice, exploitation, the oppression of women. Poetry was just the kind of girly, inward-looking, powerless activity that men wanted women to pursue, and she decided then and there that she wanted to use words in a more polemical way to effect real change. Shortly after leaving Oxford, Wolf wrote The Beauty Myth. That debut book-- which raged against the male power structure that enslaved women to an unattainable beauty standard--became a runaway best-seller. When it was published, critics and enthusiasts alike read it as a statistics-based screed, pumped full of dense feminist theory. And, for the most part, it is. But there are also hints of an interest in the theological. She diagnoses modern women, for example, as suffering from a case of unquenched "spiritual hunger." This hunger manifests itself through an obsession with appearance (particularly skin care) that is exploited by the beauty-industrial complex--or, as Wolf calls it, the "Church of Beauty"--whose strict commands "crudely imitate medieval Catholicism." The Beauty Myth wants to destroy this false doctrine, because it harms women's sense of "self," a word that appears on nearly half the pages in the book. "[W]e can imagine, to save ourselves, a life in the body that is not value-laden," Wolf writes. But she is a little fuzzy on how to feed one's spiritual hunger once the Lancime gods are dead. Wading through Wolf's prolific writings after The Beauty Myth, it becomes clear that she envisioned her particular mission as fighting not for women's rights, but for a more vaporous notion of their selves. Mostly, this took common forms, such as praising the virtues of self-esteem, but she continued to flirt with the spiritual. (A friend of Wolf's who shared an office with her in the early '90s reports that she professed to see his aura.) In Promiscuities, she once again identifies a spiritual void in women's lives; this time, she attributes it to society's terror of the female libido. "[T]here is a terrible spiritual and emotional hunger among many women, including myself, for social behavior and ritual that respect and even worship female sexuality," she writes. But soon, Wolf started experimenting with a slightly more religious paradigm: Instead of saving selves, she would save souls. In a controversial 1995 New Republic article, she opined that, by failing to understand that abortion was a tragic act, liberal women were "in danger of losing something more important than votes; we stand in jeopardy of losing what can only be called our souls." She counseled women who have had an abortion to undertake "acts of redemption"--or what the "Jewish mystical tradition calls tikkun." These acts could be inspired by a variety of spiritual traditions: making "offerings to the fetus to help it rest in peace," as is the Shinto practice; or perhaps erecting "statues of the spirit guardian of children to honor aborted fetuses," as the Buddhists once did. Over the years, Wolf's brand of feminism has become increasingly hard to pin down. She's reversed her opinions to coincide with the feminist fads of the moment, from "victim feminism," to "power feminism," to a sort of New Age feminism: By 2000, she was helping to run an institute that hosts retreats on compassionate leadership and advising Al Gore, for $15,000 a month, to wear "earth tones" to better exude his steaming inner manliness. But, throughout this peripatetic journey, Wolf maintained--and nourished--her mystical bent, her interest in liberating not only women's bodies, minds, and paychecks, but also that final frontier for feminist transformation: their souls. By the time Wolf sat down to write The Treehouse, she had experienced fame, wealth, and social and political influence. And yet, she writes, during all those wildly successful years, something had been terribly wrong. The Treehouse is ostensibly a book about Wolf's father, a lovable, nutty poetry teacher who owns 20 old typewriters and instruments once used to scrape out a caliph's earwax. But, more fundamentally, it's about a cryptically described midlife crisis, whose ghostly, nameless presence hangs heavily over the book. "[My father] was eighty; and I was now forty; and for many reasons, I knew I had taken a wrong turn," she writes. This unspecified crisis, she goes on to explain, made her realize that, during all those years spent effecting change as an activist, she'd been neglecting her spirit. Or, as Jesus once put it, "For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" But is it really so surprising that Naomi Wolf arrived at this question? Or that feminism has? As Germaine Greer informed me, in a surly e-mail message responding to repeated inquiries, "Feminism has always treated the personal as political and vice versa." In the '60s, to build momentum for their movement, feminists worked to persuade their constituents that their unhappiness had a political cause, and thus a political redemption. But, since happiness isn't ultimately a political problem, it backfired and splintered the movement during the '90s, when it seemed the achievement of many of feminism's political goals simply hadn't made women as fulfilled as they expected. But Naomi Wolf really believed the goal of feminism could be inner happiness and satisfaction. And so she barreled on, right through to the end of the story, from selves to souls to her own soul to, well, Jesus. Wolf's vision is a little out there, but it has confirmed her mission in life, which, as she told Crichton, is to help women "remember what's sacred about them or what's sacred about femininity." That may have been an epiphany for Wolf, but it wasn't such a hot news scoop for Crichton. The American public didn't much notice. After all, what's less mysterious here than finding religion?