He says: ‘In the year after I arrived, the women described dreams they’d been having, and then eventually, as the pieces fell into place, they came to understand that they were collectively dreaming one dream, and that it wasn’t a dream at all.’ The horrors do not stop there, however. The way in which August relays the case demonstrates its horror. If the women don’t forgive the men… the women will have to leave the colony for the outside world, of which they know nothing.’ August reflects: ‘And when the perpetrators return, the women of Molotschina will be given the opportunity to forgive these men, thus guaranteeing everyone’s place in heaven. The men were moved, at the insistence of the police, into the closest city for their own protection, and a crucial moment has been reached in the case. He is a victim of the colony, but in a very different, and less violent and intrusive, way.įocus is given to the case throughout indeed, the novel is set over a two-day period which feels pivotal for the women. August is both part of the group, working as he does as the women’s scribe, and separate from it, due to his gender. The use of a male mouthpiece here was a simple plot device, but a remarkably interesting one.

August, whose parents were excommunicated when he was twelve years old, lived away from the colony for some years, attending school and University in England, and is therefore able to bestow knowledge upon the women. The minutes of the meeting are recounted by our narrator, a teacher named August Epp, the only male character who features in a positive capacity in the novel. Eight women, who represent three generations from two families, the Loewens and the Friesens, ‘meet secretly in a hayloft to decide how to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm.’ This concept is a simple yet all-encompassing one.

The women’s accounts were ‘dismissed as “wild female imagination”.’ Many men accused them of making up stories in order to mask the adultery which they were so obviously committing… Later, though, it was confirmed that eight men from the closely related gene pool of the colony ‘had been using an animal anesthetic to knock their victims unconscious and rape them.’ In 2011, the men were convicted, but in 2013, it was reported that sexual abuse was still occurring within the community.Īs in the real community, Toews’ women are illiterate, and have little to no concept of the world outside of their own community.

In the remote Mennonite community of Melotschina in Bolivia, between 20, more than one hundred girls and women were ‘knocked unconscious and raped repeatedly by what many thought were ghosts or demons’. Women Talking is a fictional representation of a true and shocking story it is Toews’ ‘imagined response to these real events’.

Miriam toews novels