Spinster (20 page)

In Carol DeBoer-Langworthy's opinion, the tragic irony of Neith Boyce's life is that her desire to not be trapped by marriage led
her into one so untraditional that it became her primary subject, ultimately limiting her career. The scholar Ellen Kay Trimberger believes that both parties “feared the sexual merging of a standard, bourgeois marriage,” and that, rather than oppress or drain Neith, Hutch's many infidelities were something of a mutual aphrodisiac.

Both seem very good insights to me, but I'd like to add one more: it wasn't Hutch who was too progressive for his time—that was Neith. Hutch was too conventional.

It took me a while to realize this. Back in 2000, Carol had given me a mimeographed copy of Hutch's out-of-print memoir,
A Story of a Lover
, a deeply personal account of the couple's marital difficulties in 1906–1908 (that famous “seven-year itch”); by then they had three children under the age of five. When the book was published in 1919, it was immediately ruled obscene and all copies were confiscated. A censor-worthy relationship debrief by a sensitive intellectual? Sign me up.

Boy, did I have it coming. Hutch's reflections are so myopically one-sided, so nauseatingly self-important, so righteously certain that his wounded feelings and sexual urges are, in fact, the exact center of the universe, that I began to understand why Neith was perfectly content for him to gad about exhausting other women. (Even the
New York Times
reviewer dismissed it as “the history of the love life of a self-conscious neurasthenic.”) Halfway through I gave up.

When I picked it up again ten years later, however, I was able to recognize Hutch's self-centeredness for what it was: a chronic case of culturally sanctioned male entitlement.

The word
feminist
didn't come into popular use until 1913, but both Neith and Hutch believed in and worked for women's rights. Indeed, for them and their compatriots, feminism was integral to the larger project of human freedom in general. Their friend
Floyd Dell's essay “Feminism for Men,” published in the popular radical journal
The Masses
in July 1914, is so good that I can't help quoting it at length. Here's how it opens:

Feminism is going to make it possible for the first time for men to be free.

At present the ordinary man has the choice between being a slave and being a scoundrel.

For the ordinary man is prone to fall in love and marry and have children…. He wants to see them all taken care of, since they are unable to take care of themselves.

Yet, if he has them to think about, he is not free…. The bravest things will not be done in the world until women do not have to look to men for support…. [But] men don't want the freedom that women are thrusting on them. They don't want a chance to be brave…. They want to give food and clothes and a little home with lace curtains to some woman.

Men want the sense of power more than they want the sense of freedom…. They want someone dependent on them more than they want a comrade. As long as they can be lords in a thirty-dollar flat, they are willing enough to be slaves in the great world outside….

In short, they are afraid that they will cease to be sultans in little monogamic harems. But the world doesn't want sultans. It wants men who can call their souls their own. And that is what feminism is going to do for men—give them back their souls, so that they can risk them fearlessly in the adventure of life.

Hutch believed these sentiments and worked hard for them; intellectually, both he and Neith were radically ahead of their contemporaries, able to think and talk about class and gender relations and analyze their emotional lives at an exceptionally high level. But Victorianism was the air they breathed, and emotionally
Hutch was too deeply a man of his time to be able to let go of his selfishness. For all his talk of equality, he was perfectly comfortable putting his career—and sexual proclivities—front and center while Neith stayed home taking care of their children, and then, when she claimed to be too tired for or simply not interested in pursuing her own sexual extracurricular activities, he pouted and sulked, as if, on top of everything else, he was owed this, as well.

For years I believed that because Neith's books had never made a mark, they mustn't be very good, that her
Vogue
column was the most important thing she'd ever published—as a cultural artifact, not literature—and that her life was, therefore, more instructive than her work. Which is to say, it took until very recently for me to get around to reading her books—and what I found there astounded me.

Neith Boyce's novels are not mere curios; they're fascinating examinations of love and marriage through the eyes of a New Woman. My favorite is her third,
The Bond
, published in 1908, about the marriage between Teresa, a sculptress, and Basil, a painter, that is obviously based on Neith's own.

Teresa is an independent woman in her twenties—after getting married, she even keeps her bachelor rooms (which sound suspiciously like Neith's) just in case she needs some time to herself. She's not a suffragist, though her Aunt Sophie—who is herself married but believes all women should be financially independent of their husbands—thinks Teresa's consciousness will eventually awaken. “With your intelligence, you are sure to come 'round to us sooner or later,” she says one day. “There's nothing like marriage, too, to make one see clearly the real position of woman. When you do see it, Teresa, you will want to stand up for your sex.”

The story travels the ups and downs of Teresa and Basil's relationship, along the way mapping out an argument for and
against marriage. Aunt Sophie is staunchly against the institution (she considers it, on principle, “a hideous state of bondage”). Basil is more moody and Hutch-like. During some gloomy rant he pronounces monogamy a foolish idea that we all waste an enormous amount of time trying to live up to. “Sex ought to be divorced from emotion,” he says. “They don't belong together. We've sentimentalized the thing till we don't know where we stand.” He thinks women are to blame. “Women naturally sentimentalize [sex], and we've let them set the tone for our whole society.”

Teresa works out her own philosophy during a flirtation with a handsome young man named Fairfax. He represents the idea that marriage is an institution necessary to the health of society, and for raising children, and that “mere personal relations” are a very small part of it. She disagrees, arguing that one should marry because common interests and social relations “help the original relation—they're in the line of its natural growth.” That original relation, the “bond” of the book's title, is her central concern; she even comes to think that she and Basil might have been happier if they hadn't had children. Ultimately Teresa realizes that, though she values her independence, the connection she shares with Basil is bigger than anything else. “He might be unfaithful,” she thinks to herself,

but she never could [be]. How strange was that bond, deeper than will, deeper than any sympathy of mind, taking no account of the many things in him that she deeply disliked…. It was infinitely more than a physical bond, it was a passion of the soul. How strange and how terrible!

The bond's strangeness was what made it all worthwhile. Toward the book's end, sitting outside beneath the moon, Teresa feels “with deep pleasure the tumult of the night, and, with something that was not pain, the tumult, the exciting uncertainty of life.”

Marriage today has come a long way from Neith's time, but one aspect that hasn't changed at all is its fantasy of certainty. It's true that the per capita divorce rate has dropped from its all-time peak in 1981 of about 5.3 divorces per 1,000 people—but even so, today nearly half of all marriages end in divorce. It's amazing, really, how deftly we hold in our collective consciousness this disconnect between what we want marriage to be and how so many marriages actually turn out. Freedom is unbearable. We opt again and again for the sugarcoated confinement of matrimony, a promise that life will work out just the way we want it—without that promise, false as it may be, the institution's many encumbrances might be impossible to bear.

I have come to think that one of the main reasons Neith married Hutch is because she suspected that her innate introversion and desire for stability and order would eclipse and distort her fierce autonomy—that, left alone, she actually would, in a sense, become a “dotty spinster,” insofar as that means turning away from the world instead of sating her curiosities by living in it; in her case, a romantic partner was an escape hatch back to reality. Too, there was the matter of her being a woman in an oppressively sexist society, and Hutch was not only a chronic extrovert, but also a man: he could open doors to places and people and ideas more readily than she could. For her, then, marriage was a way toward more questions, more uncertainty—whereas for Hutch it was a way of maintaining his traditional male privilege while supplementing it with extracurricular adventuring that he did on his own.

This willingness of Neith's to exist inside the ungraspable strikes me as the bravest stance of all.

In August 2001, nearly a year to the day after moving to New York, R came back to the apartment in Brooklyn, where I'd been
living with my brother all summer, and we emptied it out, reclaiming what had originally been our own and divvying up our shared possessions—lots of coffee mugs, basically.

As in Neith's time, renting even a studio was beyond my means, but unlike her I didn't have the midway option of a boardinghouse, which struck me as particularly unfortunate, given my indifference to cooking. So, though the last thing I'd ever expected to be doing at twenty-nine was living again with a roommate, there I was, in a convertible one-bedroom just north of Murray Hill, a neighborhood of loud Irish bars frequented by the kinds of frat boys I'd made a point of not knowing in college. But it was within walking distance of school, and the treetops leaned so close to the building that in summer the windows were crowded with bright green leaves. My roommate took the living room for himself and gave me the official bedroom, which had space enough for a big writing desk against one wall, a friend's cast-off IKEA sofa against another, and a bed in between.

My first night there I stayed out at a party until four o'clock in the morning, and when I got off the 6 train at Twenty-Eighth Street an eerily empty yet still-open McDonald's beckoned like an urban mirage. Back on the sidewalk I threw away the bag, peeled off the warm paper wrapping, and bit into the most delicious Big Mac I'd ever eaten. I chomped and strolled as slowly as I could, prolonging the delectable realization that waiting for me at home was nothing but an empty bed into which I'd crawl naked and drunk and stinking of fast food, disgusting nobody but myself.

And so it was that I reverted to my pre-cohabitation housekeeping habits, cooking as infrequently as possible and basically cleaning nothing ever, until the sink was so full of dirty dishes I had no choice but to wash them, thinking contentedly to myself,
Yes. Just a few years like this. Then I'll fall in love again and really settle down
.

Credit 5.1

Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1925

A woman and a man are sitting on a daybed in her small, spare apartment near Washington Square. It's late on a winter night in the 1920s, the early years of Prohibition. Red coals smolder on an iron grate, and the orange flames of a gas streetlamp flicker through the bare window. The quilt's silky garden of pink and burgundy roses is barely discernible in the shadows.

Abruptly she stands and sets her glass of bootleg gin on the
floor. Her long navy dress feels and looks heavy as a nun's habit; in the dark he can't see the way it nips her narrow waist. He wonders if there's a lamp.

She lifts her hands to her throat, and a frill of lace at each wrist frames a face flushed from talk and drink. All down her front is a row of velvet buttons, which she starts to undo.

Her fingers take an eternity. They are as smooth and pale as ivory. One, two, three; finally, her neck is free. Four, five, six; her tender, freckled décolletage can breathe again. Seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven; her dress drops to the floor. Her bare tiny body is cool and luminous in the firelight, copper hair a blaze of tousled curls.

This is the silent motion picture that sprang to mind, fully formed, when I read somewhere that seeing Edna St. Vincent Millay undressed for the first time was a sight from which no man could recover. Soft-focus erotica, early-twentieth-century style.

For weeks I replayed the scene. It was better than being there myself; this way I was both seducer and seduced.

In all my daydreaming about being alone I'd somehow overlooked that in this century being single means “dating,” which means having sex with people you don't know very well, which, after years of confining my personal life to long-term relationships, felt alarmingly public, as blatantly on display as the giant half-clothed teenagers pouting from billboards in Times Square.

That anyone who wasn't a prepubescent boy or a turncoat monk could be so enraptured by the sight of a woman undressed—particularly of the small, petite variety—was a tantalizing thought. It even bolstered my ego. Before New York, I hadn't particularly noticed my smallness, but here in this city of tall, angular sylphs it was easy to feel like a short squat sack of flour, a fire hydrant, a tree stump, the clumsy fly that the long, ectomorphic praying mantis eats for lunch.

This is not to say that I was some Little Red Riding Hood about to brave the dark forest of womanhood—besides, I reject the
definition of “sexual awakening” as a one-off thing, confined to a finite period in a person's life. By now, thirty years old, I'd had at least seven so-called awakenings: my first explorations with B in high school upstairs in my childhood bedroom; that time, right after B and I broke up, when C rowed us to the middle of the Merrimack River, dropped anchor, and rested my head on a vinyl seat cushion so I could see the black night full of stars as he lowered his head between my legs; the propulsive need to have sex anywhere, anytime, after finally losing my virginity to J my sophomore year of college, before I'd met W (I'd believed my mother when she said teenagers were too young to handle sexual intercourse, and I waited as long as I could), most memorably and often in the backseat of his Volvo station wagon; the headlong, unquenchable rapture of my early years in love with W; nights on the vacant tar roof of L's building in Oregon, dizzy with disbelief over the ingenious ministrations of his thumbs. Each time, I thought sex couldn't get any better, that I couldn't learn anything new, and then someone would come along—another C, this time in Boston, and the candlesticks crashing off the mantel as we careened across his living room and down the hall and into his bedroom—and then R, a whole different world of discovery, this time slow and sensual, and even the sad waning of desire, its own kind of awakening.

It was the duality of the Edna anecdote that entranced me. Surely her suitor was no innocent, but a grown man well versed in free love. He'd reacted, I decided, to the intoxicating contrast between Edna's darkly cloaked inaccessibility and sudden, willful nudity—the quintessence, it seemed, of her own sexuality and that of post-Victorian America itself.

Was something so subtle even possible here in this epoch of coed dorm rooms and group houses, androgynous baggy T-shirts and constant sharing of the bathroom? If I could bottle that blend of circumspection and carnal pleasure, could I break my habit of
serial relationships and learn how to be a woman for whom sex and love is a crucial part of life, but not its summation?

When I searched my library, however, I couldn't find a single passage that sounded remotely like the scene that, I was forced to conclude, I'd presumably invented.

You'd be hard-pressed to find another writer in the history of American letters whose physical presence had as profound an impact on men and women alike as Edna St. Vincent Millay's. To know her was to be seduced. It is a rare account, written either during her lifetime or after, that doesn't include a close, even near-erotic description of her petite stark white body (she stood at five feet one inch), flaming red hair, mystifying gray-green eyes, and entrancingly sonorous voice. Picture Natalie Portman crossed with Julianne Moore, but not nearly as pretty as either, as Edna had the power to lure people into believing her gorgeous even though she wasn't, exactly.

In a world that continues to presume that women can either be beautiful or brainy, Edna holds the dubious distinction of being among the first to prove (in the public eye, that is) the two poles reconcilable. Born in 1892—twenty years after Neith, twenty-four years before Maeve—she was blessed with not only uncommon genius but also a fragile prettiness that proved a useful passport. By the time she was coming of age, the popular image of the strong, independent New Woman was being eclipsed by the girlish, superficial Flapper, and her own version of femininity—a radiant amalgamation of desirable and unthreatening—was the perfect midpoint. It was an advantage Edna was happy to use. In the spring of 1912, having just turned twenty, she put the finishing touches on her 214-line poem “Renascence” and submitted it to a prestigious poetry contest,
The Lyric Year
. When the editor, a
man, responded with a letter praising her verse, she replied with a photograph of herself. He asked if he could keep it.

Let's just say Edna lost out on the top prize but emerged the true victor. Appearing alongside the winners in a commemorative anthology published that fall, her poem incited a public sensation that biographer Daniel Mark Epstein ranks on par with that of the publication of “The Waste Land” and “Howl”: readers fought over the verdict in letters and newspaper columns; the winner deemed himself unworthy and, Epstein reports, “excused himself from the awards banquet.”

This was a big deal for anyone, but perhaps especially for a young woman with a hardscrabble background such as hers. Edna's mother, Cora, left her husband in 1900, and filed for divorce a year later, less than two weeks before Edna's ninth birthday. Though broken marriages weren't unheard of by the turn of the century, they remained exceedingly uncommon; between 1870 and 1900 the annual number of divorces went from 11,000 to 55,751, which was still less than 1 percent of the population (compared to 1981, when the country topped out at 1,219,000 of them). The increase was incredibly significant, however, not only in terms of sheer numbers, but because wives empowered by changing property and child custody laws filed the majority of those suits; most women who sought divorce were either those with enough assets who wanted to protect themselves from financial ruin, or those fleeing abusive husbands.

Legal rights didn't translate to social acceptance, however. A woman who filed for divorce was often criticized for not putting aside her girlish dreams of happily ever after and accepting reality for what it is, even if reality meant violence. In those instances when circumstances were felt to have called for divorce—in the eyes of, for instance, temperance-influenced types who supported liberalizing divorce laws so that women would be protected from drunk husbands—the divorcée didn't get another dream, another
way to really
want
to live. Being a wife and mother wasn't just plan A; it was the only plan. To live otherwise meant to live without a template, consigned to the margins, discouraged from seeking a new and different happiness.

Edna's father wasn't a bad or violent man, simply a very ineffective and unreliable one. After leaving him, Cora brought her three small girls down to Newburyport, where they bounced between the homes of Cora's siblings before returning to Maine in 1904, when the divorce was finalized. Cora was a fiercely intelligent and hardworking woman who made her living traveling along the coast selling her services as a practical nurse and weaving hairpieces, which required leaving her daughters alone at home in Camden for long stretches. The only house she could afford was in the poor section of town, at the foot of Mount Battie, where the itinerant millworkers lived. According to her biographer Nancy Milford, Edna wrote explicitly about these experiences only once, in a notebook where she describes herself and her sisters, Norma and Kathleen, “flinging themselves against the front door, to close it and bolt it” against the unfamiliar men lurking outside.

Though an excellent student, Edna had no money for college, so after she graduated with honors from Camden High School in 1909, she stayed home for several years writing poems and confiding her dissatisfactions to her journal. In 1911 she started to draft “Renascence,” which uses the topography of that little coastal burg—the mountains and bay islands and apple trees—to dramatize one woman's spiritual oppression and mystical rebirth.

What came next is so good as to seem apocryphal. In August 1912, three months after she'd submitted “Renascence” to that
Lyric Year
contest—and three months before the editor's verdict—she attended the end-of-season staff party at Camden's Whitehall Inn, where her sister Norma worked as a waitress. There was dancing and a masquerade competition, and then everyone
gathered around the piano to sing. Norma asked her sister to recite “Renascence.”