On the eve of my birthday, I re-read Katherine Larson’s Radial Symmetry in bed, an eye on the clock. In times of stress or anticipation, I turn to poetry. I wasn’t particularly stressed with the prospect of becoming older but I waited, just the same, for that symbolic tick to confirm a sense that has been growing lately: these are precious days! That same evening, an old friend had risen from the past to send me a line from a John Ashbery poem via email. The feeling is a jewel like a pearl.
A dear friend had just a baby a few days earlier. I visited my friend and the baby; they were such a beautiful pair sitting in a rocking chair by an open window. The baby was so new, just a few days old, all soft bones and bow lip. The baby rested in the crook of my friend’s arm, she a new mother. The feeling is a jewel like a pearl.
Presently I am more the mollusk, grinding away at sand. There are lots of things to decide, next steps: parenthood, professional choices and positioning, of choosing where and how to sacrifice in order to get a little closer to the life you imagined. I’m grateful for the choices I do have. My day job, which involves gender justice reveals daily that women worldwide are poorer, less represented in government, more likely to sacrifice [food, water, employment] for family than men and on top of it all, experience appalling levels of violence.
Lately, I've been searching out women writers. I’ve recently finished Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater and Cynthia Ozick’s very slim novella+story The Shawl. Both evidence a style distinct from the men who are feted and canonized. The writing is emotional, indirect, relational, given over to seeing the environment as reflective of interior life, teetering towards subjective reality. The narrators in both books are women who recognize that their lives are shaped by factors out of their control. They act out, are perceived as crazy. They very well might be crazy, though that’s beside the point.
In The Pumpkin Eater, Mortimer writes from the vantage of Mrs. Armitage (not even a first name!). Mrs. Armitage is the wife of Jake Armitage, a successful screenwriter. She is also the mother to a sprawling brood of children from past, failed, marriages. Over the course of the book, Mrs. Armitrage discovers her husband’s philandering and she has a breakdown, for which she’s sent for psychological counseling, fed pills, and convinced to undergo sterilization. At the end, she admits that not all of these events have occurred but she has “tried” to be truthful. What is undeniable is that Mrs. Armitrage struggles with the duties bound up in marriage and motherhood. The story is rife with domestic details: ‘I had ordered no milk or bread, no cornflakes, flour, butter, cocoa, cat food, assorted jellies, biscuits, bacon, honey cake, salad cream, sugar, tea, currents, chutney, tomato ketchup, gelatine, cream of tartar, soap…’. The list is crushing. Mrs. Armitrage identifies herself as mother and a wife—and all the while recognizes (bitterly) how insufficient those roles are in satisfying what she wants. When the family is threatened, her life begins to disintegrate. Her story is emotional, even desperate, but never hysterical. “It’s what you do that matters, the reason is just…nothing,” Mrs. Armistrage exclaims to an ex-husband. She is oppressed by the timeless sense that intention, interior life, is of no value in a world where action alone is valued.
The Shawl includes the eponymously titled short story and the novella, Rosa. Both center on Rosa Lublin, a woman whose daughter, Magda, is pitilessly murdered by concentration camp guards. Rosa survives. In Rosa, Rosa Lublin reappears, this time in Miami. She is an elderly woman, in ‘recovery’ after making the news for laying waste to her antique shop. A shawl, once worn by Magda, reappears in Rosa’s life in Miami, permitting Rosa to fantasize that Magda lives and challenging Rosa’s chance for new friendships and new life. The Shawl is astounding. It is written in the brittle style of myth, of a story that should not be true. Rosa is more linear, more giving though the language is as efficient, the rage as palpable, as in its prequel. Fury permeates Rosa’s life, blurs objective reality with fantasy. “Before it is a dream. After is a joke. Only during stays. And to call it a life is a lie,” Rosa tells stranger-turned-suitor, Persky. Rosa is unable to reconcile all she has lost – Magda, her life as a mother, the unidentified sorrows of surviving the concentration camp – with a future in which everyone else wants her to live.
While both these books were emotional, frustrated etc., I don’t mean to give the impression that I understand them representative of any kind of women’s experience-monolith – just that they are different voices and recognizable voices, speaking to issues I’m thinking of. The thing these books give life to is what my day job in gender justice tells me daily: culture, history, creates multitudinous sites of subtle structural violence, against which individual aspirations – love, hope, relationships – play out. In the world of fiction, that lesson is leavened by only one ingredient – reason, as Mrs. Armitrage would say.
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