Castration in 'The Temple of My Familiar' by Alice Walker

Two stories in Alice Walker's 1989 novel The Temple of My Familiar discuss castration.

The first is an origin myth of womb envy that leads to misogyny.

"What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears. I am speaking here of man's mind. The men both worshiped and feared the women." The men try "to show their worshipful intent" and bring the women "feathers, bones, bark for dyes, animal teeth and claws" (since the women are mostly vegetarian and don't cultivate hunting skills). The men finally observe "that some of the children the women were making bore a striking resemblance to themselves," and the men raise the boys. Finally they discover "that the life that woman produced came out of a hole at her bottom! But not the hole man also had." The men chose to become priests, "that they could be the ones through whom life passed! They began to operate on themselves, cutting off and flinging away their maleness, and trying to fashion a hole through which life could come." The men died, and they learned to "cut off the balls," and "not the whole of the genitals," and to abandon the task of creating "the hole through which life passes." Instead: "What they remembered was that they must be like women, and if they castrated themselves at a certain age — the time of puberty, when they chose or were chosen for the priesthood — they could sound like woman and speka to the universe in woman's voice." This was the meaning of being a priest in those days. With these castrations, their pain seemed to last longer than women's pain in childbirth, and they complained and resented women, developing "hatred of woman."

Mr. Hal tells a story:

"Lulu was the name Lissie had had when she was part of a harem in the northern pan of Africa... how happy she was in the harem, because themaster was old and sickly and had hundreds of women it tired him just to see, not to mention to try to do anything to, and Lissie (Lulu) had had two lovers. One of them was another woman in the harem, named Fadpa, and the other was one of the eunuchs, named Habisu, whose job it was to keep the women from running away. They used to all sit around and plot about how to run away together, but Habisu was afraid to leave the safety of the harem, and he liked the sweets the women shared with him and the colorful clothing he got to wear. He was from a poor family, and he thought it wasn't such a bad thing to give up his nuts for such pleasant room and board. Now I don't know whether this was really the truth or whether Lissie was committing slander on poor Habisu." Eventually Lulu and Fadpa "became devoutly religious" and "could perform miracles." They prayed for their freedom for 80 years and were finally freed from the harem at ages 96 and 103." In a different part of the story, later, he says: "I could see in her [Lissie's] eyes the hundreds of times she had suffered in giving birth, and I swore it would never happen again, and my desire for her, for sex with her or with any woman, died, and I became a eunuch myself. I just knew I would never be able to deal with making love to a woman ever again."