Review of Elaine Neil Orr’s Dancing Woman

Elaine Neil Orr ‘s Dancing Woman is a masterfully crafted novel of discovery, healing, and the transformational power of art. With elegant prose that lingers after the final page, Orr explores universal existential questions: “What am I here for?” What is my purpose?” “Do I have a destiny? If so, what is it?” “Where do I belong?”

These are not easy or simple questions, and Orr does not offer simple or predictable answers. Instead, the novel provides a thought-provoking meditation on what it means to be human.

In her search for answers, the protagonist, Isabel Hammond, is reminiscent of Zora Neale Hurston’s Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God. For both Janie and Isabel, relationships are central to their search for meaning and purpose in their lives. Their stories differ, but both women’s stories are told with lyrical language and compassion while acknowledging hard truths, conflicts, and contradictions.

Isabel’s story is also a meditation of longing and desire, in the vein of the more contemporary Fire Sermon by Jamie Quatro. But, while religion is central to Quatro’s protagonist, Maggie, while Isabel has little use for religion, and focuses her search on uncovering an “underground spirituality.” 

As Isabel, an expat living in Kufana, Nigeria, navigates her way in a country dramatically different from the Virginia home of her childhood, she grows to love Nigeria, but often finds herself challenged by the culture so different from her home. For example, she initially resists hiring a “house manager,” a young man who also serves as her guide and companion as she investigates the surrounding area. She wants to explore the surrounding countryside alone and finds herself trying to “correct” Daniel, the Tiv house manager, on meal preparations and household chores. She also finds herself wanting to “save” a young girl from an early marriage before understanding the culture and the girl’s mother’s way of assuring her daughter’s future. 

Orr was born and grew up in Nigeria, but also has deep roots in the American South, so it is no surprise that place is as important as the characters and the story in this novel. Much of her writing is a love letter to Nigeria, and Dancing Woman pays homage to the country with vivid descriptions and sensory details. 

As the novel opens in February, 1963, Isabel and her husband, Nick, an agricultural engineer with USAID, have been living in Nigeria for about a year. During that first year, Isabel had suffered a miscarriage. Nick’s work is both demanding and rewarding, but Isabel has no work of her own. While Nick’s works takes him out of town for extended periods, Isabel begins her search for a purpose for her own life.

“She had just turned twenty-one and had escaped from every ordinary thing that might have held her down to arrive at this exotic, fire-lit place of dreams,” Orr writes. But what are Isabel’s dreams?

Isabel had grown up in a working class family, her father, an Italian immigrant, and her mother both worked at the small pharmacy that they owned. As a child, Isabel had struggled with where she belonged. The girls from a neighboring more affluent neighborhood looked down on her because her clothes were not as nice and her house not as big as theirs. Even after a Sunday school teacher selected Isabel’s first painting of a fountain of living water to display, the wealthier girls were not impressed.

But Isabel continued painting, encouraged by Angelica, a woman from Cuba that Isabel met when she was twelve years old. Angelica’s teaching also provided a metaphor for Isabel’s life. “You see, it’s watercolor,” Angelica said. “It’s like life. Nothing can be taken out once it is put there. So you paint in washes and do the most detailed work last.”

In Isabel’s backstory, we learn that when she was just seventeen, Isabel met the charming and handsome Nick the summer before his junior year in college. “He was bold as well as good-looking and he had an air of goodness about him,” Orr writes. “She had the sense that wherever he went, he would be easy in himself, sure of what he heard and saw. She also knew that attachment to a successful man was her surest insurance against a life like her mother’s, which might have been far worse if her husband, Isabel’s immigrant father, hadn’t been smart enough to land a scholarship that put him through graduate school and fortunate enough to receive a small inheritance that allowed him to open his pharmacy.”

As Isabel fell in love with Nick, she continued to pursue her painting, enrolling at Hollins College as an art education major. But in her sophomore year, a Famous Artist shattered Isabel’s passion for painting when he pronounced her work “soulless.” Isabel had looked forward to the visit from the Famous Artist and was pleased that one of her works had been chosen for his critique.
“In the auditorium, in front of every art student in the school, in front of the faculty and the dean, the visiting professor had found nothing good in her work. “Predictable. This bird is never going to fly,” he pronounced.

That incident, a male authority figure dismissing a woman’s work, is all too familiar to many women, even in the twenty-first century. I was reminded of my own story. As a young journalist, I almost quit the work I loved after a famous writing coach’s words and predatory actions shook my confidence. Like Isabel, I began to doubt the worth of my work.

Crushed by the critique and public criticism, Isabel hides in her room for days. It is Nick who provides comfort and support for her and her art, telling her that the Famous Artist had been wrong, that the critic is the one who is soulless. Just days after the critique, Nick proposes, telling her that he wants to work for USAID in Nigeria and wants Isabel to marry him and go with him. 

“For the first time she felt Nick might hold a miracle. She would have to take a risk, leave everything. She had always thought that was what she wanted. To start a new life somewhere, leave the past in inchoate inadequacy and invisibility, discover some means of expressing her soul, some wide connection that might begin in family but radiate out to rivers and plains.”

Isabel abandons her painting, drops out of college, and marries Nick, decisions that will inform her subsequent choices and growth.

Isabel, like the United States in the early 1960s, was poised at the beginning of a decade that would bring seminal changes to life in America. The 1950s decade of “Father Knows Best,” and women as second-class citizen was ending as women began sowing the seeds for equality. Not until June, 1966—three months after Isabel and Nick left Nigeria to return to the United States—would a group attending the third National Conference of the Council on the Status of Women establish the National Organization for Women. Nigeria also during that time period was undergoing political turmoil and unrest.

The struggles of both countries are reflected in Isabel’s inner explorations of her own life. She is falling in love with Nigeria while remaining committed to her deep roots in Virginia, especially her grandparents farm. 

Once in Nigeria, Isabel is still an “outsider,” an expat making her way in a country where she does not share the language or the culture.

The novel begins when Nick is working out of town and forgets about a party in Kaduna that Isabel was looking forward to attending, a chance to socialize with other expats and hear the musician pop star Bobby Tunde, son of a Nigerian father and British mother. The trip to Kaduna would mean an overnight stay in a guest house. Without her husband to drive her, she had no transportation to the party. Daniel, her house manager, arranges a ride for Isabel to the party with a couple of expats from the Netherlands, Elise and Hugo Van Dijk. Elise becomes Isabel’s closest friend and confidant, one of a circle of women, each unique in the lessons and gifts they provide for Isabel as she develops her vision and her purpose.  

The night of the party provides the novel’s first conflict. After falling asleep in her room, Isabel wakes and walks outside, listening to the rain. As she sits on the veranda outside her room, Tunde, who is in the room next door, walks out and joins her. Sitting together in the darkness and rain, Isabel and Bobby share an intimacy that leads to a night of passion. 

“She felt the way she did when she first learned watercolor, the swirling of paint on the page,” Orr writes. With Tunde, Isabel finds a kindred spirit who she believes understands her passion for painting. Tunde tells Isabel that music is his destiny, tells Isabel that painting must be her destiny, the thing that lies beneath the surface, what some musicians call “underground spirituality.”

The aim he says, is to bring the underground up. The night with Bobby Tunde begins Isabel’s excavation of self-discovery.

“The gray dawn was in her hands. She felt as wide open and undefended as a person can be, yet full of bliss, as if Tunde had given her herself, not taken.” He had indeed given her herself, not just in her renewed drive to paint, but a permanent connection to Nigeria.  

Back at her home, Isabel considers telling her husband about her infidelity. She loves Nick, and has no intention of leaving him or continuing an affair with Tunde. But she also does not like keeping secrets from her husband. She knows that telling him about her infidelity would cause him great hurt.  

As she struggles to keep her secret, Isabel returns to painting. She also buys a lemon tree, symbol of adoration and commitment, and plants it in her garden. While digging a hole for the tree, Isabel uncovers an ancient artifact that also serves as a portal to her inner desires and longings. The terra-cotta female figure is full-figured, substantial, with arms raised, her body dancing. One raised hand was broken at the wrist. Isabel feels an immediate connection to the dancing woman, cleans her, and hides her away in her home. She knows the statue does not belong to her and that she should relinquish it. 

When Daniel discovers the statue, he once again serves as her guide, her compass and tells her she must take the statue to the chief and let the chief decide what to do with the statue.

Reluctantly, Isabel takes the dancing woman to the chief who says that she may keep the statue until she discerns what it has to tell her. When she takes the statue back to her home, she realizes that she wants to be a serious artist, and that Tunde had awakened a deeper longing within her. But does the statue have to say to her?

When Isabel gives birth to fraternal twin girls and realizes one resembles Tunde, she continues her struggle of wanting to tell her secret and knowing the hurt it will cause. Telling Nick could end her marriage. As the novel progresses, Isabel grows and changes as she attempts to reconcile and balance the dualities in her life.

An exquisite and deeply satisfying novel, Dancing Woman explores the origins of creativity, the bonds and commitment of relationships, and how our relationships shape us. It also questions the constraints and responsibilities of our relationships.