The Women's Room (87 page)
Some days I feel dead, I feel like a robot, treading out time. Some days I feel alive, terribly alive, with hair like wires and a knife in my hand. Once in a while my mind slips and I think I am back in my dream and that I have shut the door, the one without a handle on the inside. I imagine that tomorrow I will be pounding and screaming to be let out, but no one will hear, no one will come. Other times I think I have gone over the line, like Lily, like Val, and can no longer speak anything but truth. An elderly man stopped me the other day as I was walking along the beach, a white-haired man with a nasty face, but he smiled and said, ‘Nice day, isn’t it?’ and I glared and snapped at him, ‘Of course you have to say that, it’s the only day you have!’
He considered that, nodded, and moved on.
Maybe I need a keeper. I don’t want them to lock me up and give me electric shock until I forget. Forget:
l
th: the opposite of truth.
I have opened all the doors in my head.
I have opened all the pores in my body.
But only the tide rolls in.
By Susan Faludi
In the late sixties and early seventies, as the modern ‘women’s liberation movement’ was inspiring thousands of American homemakers to take a hard look at their crabbed domestic existence, female novelists were also casting a newly critical eye over the suburban doll’s house. But while the soul-searching by real-life women often led to real and even radical life changes – whether it was changing the locks on violent husbands or charging into unwelcoming male bastions – their fictional counterparts were, in many ways, not nearly as bold, passionate or determined. A gap developed between women’s lib and women’s lit. The heroine of the early feminist novel – with some exceptions – was no feminist firebrand. Frequently befuddled, a little dopey, and a lot doped – a state generally induced by a combined overdose of Valium and vacuuming – she was less the Medea than the Ophelia of Long Island, half dead and adrift in the backyard family pool. ‘All the housewives are mad,’ novelist Nora Johnson concluded ruefully, after rereading nineteen products of the genre for a 1988
New York Times Book Review
retrospective on women’s liberation fiction.
Johanna Davis’s Camilla screams in her sleep, is carted off for psychoanalysis, and on the last page starts sleepwalking. (Her baby’s first sentence is ‘Mommy koo-koo.’) Anna Wulf’s breakdown in
The Golden Notebook is
a famous paradigm of the ravages of patriarchy. Maria Wyeth narrates from a mental hospital; Penelope Mortimer’s nameless heroine ‘goes off her nut in Harrods.’
The ‘liberation’ of the dotty suburban heroine was, typically, of the meek ’n’ mild, non-threatening variety. Either she descended further
into derangement and that ultimate act of self-destruction, suicide – following the well-trod path of doomed literary heroines who awaken to their true selves only to pull the plug – or she rebelled, sort of, by hopping into bed with a man-not-her husband (or many men, in the case of Erica Jong’s Isadora). The latter option, however, often backfired, plunging the heroine into even deeper despair and, sometimes, back to option one. At best, she returned to the split-level ranch demanding a more assertive version of housewifery. The timorous Tina Balser of Sue Kaufman’s
Diary of a Mad Housewife
, for instance, stumbles, more blindly than boldly, into an affair – with a misogynist who turns out to be an even bigger jackass than her husband – before returning to the well-appointed, airless household of Dr and Mrs Balser. She takes her big stand at the novel’s end. ‘It was a giant step for me,’ she confides, ‘… for the first time in my life I was being completely realistic, without any gratuitous masochism thrown in: I’d had enough of mucky messes; I knew what I meant to have and be, and I was going to go after it.’ Yippee and about time, the weary reader sighs, only to find out that her ‘giant step’ is the teeny resolve not to tell her (equally adulterous) husband about her affair. When he offers her a divorce, she declines. In the final scene, insomniac and alone in her designer kitchen, the pseudo-transformed Tina smashes the glass of her kitchen clock to liberate a trapped cockroach. The bug uses its newfound freedom to scuttle directly back to the wallboard, ‘where it vanished,’ Tina observes, ‘down a hole in the plaster between the tiles – damaged but undaunted – home to wifey and the kids.’
These fictional feminist heroines, for the most part, took the route of the roach. Maybe they emerged at the end more aware of their diminished lives and less medicated than their pre-consciousnessraised selves, but they were still on the inside looking out; they were still clambering along the wallboards. Like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s wife-patient in
The Yellow Wallpaper
, they succeeded in stripping away the flowery wall coverings, but they hadn’t burned down the house. They were madwomen who did not yet know how to be
mad women
, how to turn that internal impoverishment and discontent into constructive and political anger, how to create lasting change for themselves and other women. They were disturbed but they didn’t disturb the peace. They were aggrieved angels, not avenging ones. When they did damage, it was only to themselves.
Not surprisingly, these novels didn’t bring out the blood instinct of the status quo guardians of the media. Critics on the whole found
the works to be ‘poignant’ or ‘touching,’ but not dangerous. And why should they have? Not only were the heroines a resigned and dispirited bunch, they tended to invoke a similar hopeless spirit in their female readers. The format of these books was still, by and large, that of the stock traditional ‘women’s novel,’ with a weepy wispy lady flailing ineffectually at Fate, breaking a few kitchen appliances perhaps, but never straying far beyond the picket gate (or the gate of the mental hospital). She analyzed her life, but she didn’t act on her analysis in any politically meaningful way – and she didn’t inspire you to act, either. If you were like me, you arrived at the final page and closed the book feeling vaguely disturbed and headachy, but not exactly ready to charge the ramparts. So what if, in the climactic scene, the housewife/feminist heroine raised her voice to her husband? In the final chapter, she came home. And that’s what you remembered.
Where, in this period, was the fiction equivalent to Betty Friedan’s
The Feminine Mystique?
What novelist dared to drop the literary bomb on the ‘comfortable concentration camp’ of the American suburbs? Ironically, fiction has historically served as the venue in which female writers feel freer to be political, to challenge the system (witness
Uncle Tom’s Cabin)
, but in this case the most politically outspoken of the housewife-cum-feminist writers wielded their pens in the nonfiction category. It would take nearly a decade and a half after the publication of Friedan’s throwing-down-of-the-dustmop classic before female suburbanite readers would receive its counterpart in novels. When at last the book came, women from the suburbs turned it into an instant bestseller – and the reviewers turned it into a favorite text for denunciation. While the critics were willing to stomach a ‘liberated’ depressed heroine, they couldn’t abide an angry one. Or maybe what they really couldn’t abide was the response from millions of women, who read Marilyn French’s
The Women’s Room
and found themselves seething and politicized and identifying with the rage of other women long before the final chapter.
The title of
The Women’s Room
is, notably, in the plural. French’s tale is no one-woman suburban soap opera; it is a novel in which the narrator grabs us by the arm and hauls us up and down the block, to one home after another, and demands that we see for ourselves the ways in which, over and over, suburban housewives of the fifties and sixties came to ‘live out a half-life,’ as French describes it. We are served up not a solo psychological portrait but an essentially political document, in which are exhibited the recurrent signs of dessicated and
‘dwindling down’ lives, languishing behind every well-watered front yard – evidence that, by its multiplicity, its sheer repetition, shifts the blame for this community-wide crime of human diminishment from internal mental aberrance to external social forces. One woman might be mad, but how could all of them be? There must be another answer, French was telling us, and that answer must be political.
Lower middle-class and middle-class suburban women who read
The Women’s Room
took their own political journey – a mental perambulation through their own subdivisions. They found that French might as well have been writing about their own block. By presenting us with the patterns, by showing us the wider landscape uniting our quarter-acre plots, she raised not only our consciousness but our blood pressures. I well recall returning home from college in my freshman year to the flushed and fuming presence of my mother, who had just finished
The Women’s Room
. She felt, she said at the time, as if French had taken up residence in our living room and transcribed every detail into a novel. Then she realized that the similarities were no coincidence, because what had happened to her had happened to the wife across the street and the one next door to her. They had all been had, or let themselves be had, and she was filled with the sort of anger that is peculiarly bracing, the kind of fury that fuels small and big changes. That summer, I picked up
The Women’s Room
and read it with indignation and a rising conviction that women of my generation must – and more important could – break the chain. For a work of fiction in particular, this was no small feat; in fact, it could be said that French’s novel inspired an outward-looking passion and commitment in its readers in spite of its being a novel. After all, while novels often express political ideas, how often has political fiction produced political action in our history? In the United States, the only other examples I can summon are Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, which turned popular opinion against slavery, and Upton Sinclair’s
The jungle
, a quasi-journalistic account of life in the meat packing plants, which led to the creation of the first worker health and safety laws. Both of these ‘novels,’ like
The Women’s Room
, produced anger and change, rather than despair and stasis. Stowe’s and Sinclair’s may have not been Great Literature, but then the authors’ allegiance from the start was to political engagement over aesthetic gymnastics. Sinclair aimed to make his mark on the assembly lines, not the literary salons. Likewise,
The Women’s Room
played its most important and formative role as an agent for social and political action. It helped inspire sisterhood, by bringing
women from the suburbs together by disclosing their commonly held grievances. It offered a political framework, by uncovering the gears and pulleys, the subtle social engineering of the fifties, that tried to reduce women and men to two-dimensional roles. And it gave women that ingredient essential to all social revolutions, large and small – a feeling of hope. By showing women that the ‘problem’ wasn’t all in their heads,
The Women’s Room
opened the minds of women to the possibility that their lives were subject to change. As the book’s heroine, Mira, observes of her new circle of female friends, met after she has fled the suburbs for graduate school and an autonomous fresh start: ‘Although we weren’t aware of this then, we had been brought together by our dislike of the same things – values and behavior we saw all around us at Harvard … But we were not so much unhappy as outraged, and our dislike, as we would come to realize, was the expression of a profound and positive sense of the way things ought to be.’
The Women’s Room
came late in the course of the modern women’s movement. Summit Books in America published French’s first novel at the close of the seventies, just as the media was declaring an end to the ‘feminist’ decade. It would have appeared to be bad timing on the part of the publisher, which was a fledgling imprint of Simon & Schuster
(The Women’s Room
, in fact, was its first title). After all, the press was full of trend reports on the demise of the feminist campaign. A
Harper’s
cover story had recently bannered the ‘Requiem for the Women’s Movement’;
The New York Times Sunday Magazine
had just decreed ‘Sisterhood Turns Sour’; and
Glamour
magazine had just advised its millions of female readers about ‘The Women’s Movement Stumbling to a Halt.’ Flying in the face of press predictions of feminism’s dire straits, French’s novel became a blockbuster overnight. Predictably, the book’s success inspired the media not to reassess their diagnosis but only to bury this key piece of counter-evidence in bile, ridicule and wildly inaccurate characterizations. The media’s hyperbolic response to
The Women’s Room
might ring a familiar bell for pop-culture consumers of the so-called ‘postfeminist’ nineties, who witnessed a similarly ludicrous media overreaction to the feminist
film Thelma and Louise
. Like the heroines of
The Women’s Room
, Thelma and Louise are self-described ‘outlaws,’ political actors who have transgressed the social bounds and won’t turn back – and who, by their example, inspired pride and passion in the mobs of women who flocked to the movie. The response from women drove media pundits (virtually all male) into a festival of name-calling and verbal temper tantrums. They declared
this not particularly violent cinematic depiction of two women’s flight from the law as ‘fascist,’ a ‘sow’ of a film, a ‘feminist cartoon,’ ‘viciously male-bashing,’ and likely to incite nationwide female violence against all manner of male creeps and cads. (No such luck.) The vitriol that the critics directed at
The Women’s Room
was equally excessive – and by its very excess, more revealing of the attitudes and fears of the critics than illuminating of the quality of the book itself. Underlying the relentless spewing bubbled two deep pools of resentment, one a response to French’s visible anger, the other to her visible success.