There is a period in many little girls’ lives, around the age of ten, where they go completely wild. Not in the sense of Girls Gone Wild, which depressingly clogs up the search results, but in the most natural sense of the word – feral and free.
Emily Bronte wrote in Wuthering Heights, 1847: ‘I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free.’
Catherynne Valente wrote in Deathless, 2011: ‘She knew herself, how she had slowly, over years, become a cat, a wolf, a snake, anything but a girl. How she had wrung out her girlhood like death.’
There is a period in many little girls’ lives, around the age of ten, where they go completely wild. Not in the sense of Girls Gone Wild, which depressingly clogs up the search results, but in the most natural sense of the word – feral and free.
Not every little girl experiences this at the same time. Not every little girl experiences this at all, and some little girls don’t get to be girls when they are little – womankind is not a monolith – but enough, I think, would recognise this phenomenon. I’m talking about the girls who become obsessed with horses, or wolves, or witches, and who knew themselves to be wild creatures like those. They vanish outdoors, hiding in trees, sticking their hands in the dirt, making potions from mud and sticks. They escape into complex worlds of their own imagining, shared between other little girls or solitary kingdoms.
I was one such little girl. I stopped brushing my hair and my long braid become tangled and matted and filled with sticks, which pleased me. My mother said I’d have to cut it off, which pleased me even more. I was made of scraped knees and bare feet that were steady over sharp rocks and my heart was a bird and, for a brief moment, very little scared me.
There’s a bit of anger involved. A strange mix of anger and joy. It’s at this point perhaps that girls become aware of how little patience the world has for the unremittingly scrappy. But we are beyond the world, untouchable, unconquerable and unafraid.
Of course, it passes. We age out of wildness and straight in puberty, where our anger is on ourselves, and our bodies, and our mothers, and I don’t know what else. We’re part of the world again, and sometimes we forget being wild altogether, and sometimes we remember it fondly like Cathy in Wuthering Heights, as something we cannot recapture: an innocence killed by the stressful minutiae of adulthood.
