From Marge Piercy’s poem, “For Strong Women,” I’d guessed she might be Enneagram style Eight. But her
autobiography Sleeping with Cats suggests she's more
likely
to be style Two.
Piercy describes herself as having taken care of people surrounding her much of her life – including earning a living for herself and the rest of the people in a ménage à quatre in her second marriage. This level of responsibility could also be true of style Eight, but the group marriage arrangement might be a better fit for style Two’s murky sexual boundaries (as would her attraction to the writer Colette).
Also, Piercy bemoans – in a way that conveys a sense of betrayal – the fact that people have abandoned her when she needed them, which is less likely to be style Eights' complaint. Here's a fascinating passage about adopting two cats after her Siamese died:
“Woody [her third husband, Ira Wood] and I pursued an ad in the
Boston Globe.
There we found heaps of Burmese... in piles of rich dark brown
fur cuddling one another, except for two exiles: two big sable
cats she said were three months old, but I could tell they were
six or eight at least... A male at stud had escaped from his
cage and impregnated his daughter... Woody had fallen in love
with them at once... Woody named the male Jim Beam, and I named the female
Colette. I have always loved Colette’s writing. Jim Beam was
immediately interested and friendly, but Colette hid under a
chair... I captured her, held her and licked her like a mother
cat. She was astonished and began to purr. From then on, except
when she was angry with me, she was my cat. She fell in love
that night. It was hardly sanitary, but it conveyed affection
and trust in a language she understood.”
Licking a kitten, the way a mother cat
would, captures much we need to know about style Two, and is the kind
of metaphorical behavior that helps identify core Enneagram
patterns.
But I don't know Marge Piercy, and don't intend this to be a definition of her personality, only to provide examples of how we begin to make good guesses about someone's Enneagram motivations.
But I don't know Marge Piercy, and don't intend this to be a definition of her personality, only to provide examples of how we begin to make good guesses about someone's Enneagram motivations.
