Folly (24 page)

Although progressive writers like Gilman and Glaspell date back to the turn of the century, when utopian socialist ideals were particularly strong, the most prolific period for leftist fiction was the Marxist-influenced 1930s. Novels written by women during that period conformed in some ways to male-authored proletariat literature: they tended to present noble working-class characters and clichéd villainous owners in a simple story line marked by extreme realism and verisimilitude. The protagonist journeys from political unawareness to social consciousness; in other words, the self is conceived in collective, not individualistic terms. Oftentimes, a plot structured around multiple stories and a collective protagonist undermined the bourgeois emphasis on the individual self. One entire subgenre of this leftist fiction was the strike novel,
in which the industrial action functions as a symbol of social transformation, the subjugation of the individual to the masses, and the vision of ongoing work for a better society. The 1929 Gastonia strike, which produced the powerful and romantic figure of Ella May Wiggins, had a strong impact on novelists. Significantly, women wrote four of the six novels inspired by Gastonia, including
Gathering Storm
by Dorothy Myra Page (1932), which was unique in having central African-American characters and celebrating a multiracial work force—in this way anticipating the conceptualization of
Folly
fifty years later.
¹⁰

Particularly characteristic of and unique to leftist feminist novels of the 1930s was their equal emphasis on class and gender, their intermingling of public and private. In general, proletarian realism written and theorized by men made no place for the working-class woman as subject, although she might function as adjunct or symbol. The great accomplishment of leftist feminist writers was, as Paula Rabinowitz puts it, to give equal expression to love and hunger, in other words, to represent forces of oppression and resistance that affect women as workers and as mothers and lovers.
¹¹
Their novels were structured around a set of tensions between public and private realms: “between the longing for love and emotional fulfillment and the will to give oneself to one's work. . . . [or] between the ideal of community and the needs of the individual.”
¹²
When Folly abandons her dream of owning a home for that of creating a cooperative mill, she is struggling with the same conflicts that have marked progressive feminist fiction for over half a century.

Proletarian fiction, including the strike novel, flourished through the mid-1940s and then, under pressure from the growing conservatism and anti-communism of the post-war era, fell into disfavor. As literary criticism emphasized aesthetic over political concerns and as McCarthyism purged radicals from academic and literary institutions, the idea of working-class literature came to be seen as either dangerous or naive. The progressive social movements of the 1960s and 1970s did for a time restore interest in leftist fiction, inspiring novelists like Marge Piercy and Alice Walker and reviving interest in earlier writers like Tillie Olsen and Agnes Smedley. But as Brady herself has pointed out, the feminist movement failed to develop a sustained commitment to the lives of working-class women. This failure is reflected in the relative paucity of fiction about their lives. And the dominance of postmodern theory in the past decade has also brought into question the value of literary realism and verisimilitude, arguably the most appropriate style for progressive fiction. In 1982,
Folly
stood as a fascinating anomaly: a political, working-class, lesbian realist novel.

IV

In addition to belonging to the tradition of leftist feminist fiction,
Folly
is firmly a part of the genre of lesbian feminist literature that began to appear concurrently with the growth of a new lesbian political movement in the late 1960s. Isolated examples of explicitly lesbian novels had appeared prior to that era, such as Radclyffe Hall's notorious
The Well of Loneliness
(1928) and Gale Wilhelm's overlooked
We Too Are Drifting
(1935). The 1950s and early 1960s saw the curious publishing phenomenon of the lesbian pulp genre: trashy soft-porn novels often written by and for men, but also including competent, lesbian (or lesbian-friendly) authors such as Ann Bannon and Valerie Taylor. In many ways these two authors paved the way for the first examples of a lesbian literary culture developed in the context of the women's liberation and gay liberation movements. Such works as Isabel Miller's
Patience and Sarah
(1969), Rita Mae Brown's
Ruby fruit Jungle
(1973), and Monique Wittig's
Les Guérillères
(1969) quickly became lesbian classics, inspiring the publication of at first dozens and then hundreds of additional novels and short stories. In addition, lesbian feminist poetry, theater, and songwriting flourished during the decades of the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s, as I write this afterword, lesbian and gay presses and journals continue to provide the infrastructure for a burgeoning lesbian publishing industry.

As we have seen, Maureen Brady was a part of this phenomenon as early as 1977, publishing stories and plays in literary journals and her novels with alternative presses, establishing a feminist press herself, reviewing in feminist newspapers, and even writing about mainstream novels from a lesbian feminist perspective. As a member of this lesbian feminist community, she saw herself as part of the process of bringing lesbian voices and lesbian experience out of the closet of silence and ignorance. Francie, the presumably autobiographical protagonist of
Give Me Your Good Ear,
is left pondering her first attractions to women and is at the brink of coming out when the novel closes; in
Folly,
the author takes her characters a good deal further.

In my own study of the lesbian feminist novel, I suggest that three major themes predominate in the genre: creating a lesbian identity (coming out), establishing a relationship, and forming a community.
¹³
Folly
explores each of these themes, as well as the countertheme that undercuts the idealistic tendency inherent in each of these, that of the differences that separate women. Brady is particularly astute in her representation of the complexities of that simple lesbian and gay catch phrase, “coming out.” It may seem to some readers that everyone in
Folly
comes out (or comes close): Folly falls in love with Martha, Lenore names herself “lesbian” and seems to be on the verge of forming a relationship with Sabrina, Mary Lou agonizes over her own sexual identity, and Martha is able to reveal her secret to at least Folly and Lenore. We see that the coming out theme in the novel is carried through on both the personal and political levels. A woman may come out when she has her first lesbian sexual or romantic experience, as Folly does, or she may be said to be in the process of coming out when she investigates her feelings for women in contrast to men, as Mary Lou does. In a political or social context, however, a woman who knows already that she desires women must come out to herself or to others. When we first see Martha, for example, she is at ease with her lesbian identity, but no one knows except herself. Her coming out process includes identifying herself as a comrade (or “family”) to Lenore and as a lover to Folly. Lenore, in her turn, has been in a relationship with Betsy for years without naming herself lesbian: “She didn't like the idea of Betsy calling herself names, but in spite of not liking the idea, she was drawn to the word:
lesbian
” (23). As Lenore becomes comfortable “calling herself names,” she also develops a personal pride and visibility reflected in her circulation of the book
Sappho Was a Right-On Woman
to any woman in Victory who will take it.

For each woman, coming out, whether privately or publicly, is a way of coming home. The metaphor of home is, perhaps, the single most pervasive trope in lesbian literature. In an eloquent passage, Folly explains to Mary Lou that, to her, coming out is like a long, winding journey “home where you wanted to be” (174).
Home where you wanted to be:
this is what Folly experiences with Martha, what Mary Lou reaffirms with her mother. A literal home with Folly and her children is what Martha longs for after Daisy's death. Home in Victory is also what Lenore discovers by the close of the novel; as she writes to Betsy, “You say you're learning a lot by being so far from home, but here I am learning there are other worlds right down the street in Victory” (156). And a home for the workers is precisely what Folly envisions in the collective factory: an environment that eliminates the separation between public and private spaces, that brings the warmth and human values of home into the sterile and dehumanizing factory. What may be envisioned in other lesbian novels as a bar or utopian community takes shape here as the Women of Victory Co-op Mill.

This urge toward community, whether based on gender, sexual preference, or class, is powerful for characters and author alike. But for the author, the urge has had both positive and negative consequences.
Brady writes of her tension “between the desire to write what must be written because it is true to my experience, and the desire to be part of a group, whether that group is the lesbian community, the lesbian literary subculture, or mainstream society. . . . By around 1982 [the publication date of
Folly
] I began to experience being an insider in this community as restrictive; while it was buoying me in some aspects, it seemed to suffocate me in others.”
¹⁴
The consequence for Brady, as we have seen, was to slow her career as a writer. Does this conflict reflect itself in the novel? The lesbian “community” pictured there is simply too new and undeveloped to manifest as yet the tensions and conflicts that must inevitably occur. But I believe we can see Brady's awareness that “home” can exclude the outsider as readily as it includes the insider. The theme that carries the weight of difference is racism. No matter how suggestive the relationship between Lenore and Sabrina, in fact the community of known lesbians in Victory is an entirely white one. This is but one manifestation of Brady's exploration of racism as I will discuss below.

As a lesbian novel, then,
Folly
shares a number of qualities with the rest of the genre, but it is unique in a number of others. On the one hand, certainly, it is a lesbian coming out novel, it incorporates a romantic subplot, and it hints at the idealism and utopianism that marks the entire genre. But most lesbian novels, including those published up until now, tend to avoid such traditional political subjects as union organizing and strikes and ignore or minimize the class (and race) issues that are central to
Folly.
In a sense, lesbian feminist novels—overwhelmingly romances—have been little more successful in expressing the mutual demands of love and hunger—the personal and the political—than were the leftist novels of the 1930s, although they err on the opposite side. A very few novels, such as Valerie Miner's
Blood Sisters
(1981) and Barbara Wilson's
Ambitious Women
(1982), do defy this norm. And certainly, race and racism have been central to the texts published by women of color since 1980, including, for example, Paula Gunn Allen's
The Woman Who Owned the Shadows
(1983) and Gloria Anzaldúa's
Borderlands/La Frontera
(1987). Overall, however, in its blending of lesbian and leftist themes, its attention to the lives of working-class women, and its concern with racism and divisiveness,
Folly
stands with a small but select group of politically progressive lesbian novels.

V

I suggested above that realism is the literary form most likely to be employed by politically progressive writers. It is also the case that the large majority of lesbian novels are written in an intentionally realistic
mode, although theirs is likely to be a romantic realism in which verisimilitude masks wish fulfillment. But certainly, neither the politically progressive nor the lesbian feminist novel has made a striking use of experimental, non-representational, postmodern literary techniques. The aim of each genre is to represent reality, to tell the truth, to capture experience, to stress content over aesthetic form, and to teach lessons of empathy and understanding. Hence, it is valuable to look at the place of
Folly
within the realist tradition.

Realism, a literary method associated most closely with the great English and European novels of the nineteenth century, has been defined by George Levine as “a self-conscious effort, usually in the name of some moral enterprise of truth telling and extending the limits of human sympathy, to make literature appear to be describing directly not some other language but reality itself.” It is “a mode that depends heavily on our commonsense expectation that there are direct connections between word and thing.”
¹⁵
In other words, realist writers contend that there is a reality outside language, that language is about that reality, and that the writer can use language to describe events and experiences as accurately as her or his skill allows. As a literary style, realism is opposed both to romance (in which language is used in a realist manner to express fantasies and desires) and to postmodernism (which denies all three of the above premises).

Maureen Brady is primarily a realist writer. Although an often elegant and imagistic writer, she uses language not for its own sake but to represent as faithfully as she can the thoughts and behaviors of women the reader may feel she knows or believes herself to be. For Brady, Folly, Lenore, and the other characters have the weight of real people who come into focus, live their lives, and then move on. In
Folly,
Brady does not experiment with plot, narration, character, or style. Most importantly, Brady's intention as a writer seems always to be to tell the truth as she understands it. None of this is to say that Brady (or any realist) is simply writing lightly fictionalized journalism. For Brady, what matters is the truth and reality of her imagination, as well as the representation of the external world.