Weekly Short Story Report: "A&P," John Updike

As the news of John Updike's passing trickles down into obituaries, then appraisals, then annoying comment threads in which it is argued that feminist lit crit should just disappear because what matters is not whether John Updike created worthwhile, convincing fiction but whether he was "true to himself," whatever that means, oh and also he is no longer alive so let's just rush him into the canon already because you don't want to speak ill of the dead or anything, one story is mentioned, over and over, as his finest: "A & P."

By sheer coincidence, "A & P" is now available online! Also, I had been planning a weekly short story critique! Novels: they are too big for blog posts, guys. So, let's read, shall we?

In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I'm in the third check-out slot, with my back to the door, so I don't see them until they're over by the bread. The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs.

So it begins. Enjoy the prose here: its prosody ("sweet broad soft-looking"), its visual quality ("two crescents of white"), its command of the telling detail ("where the sun never seems to hit," the vulnerability of the hidden implicit there). Note that this is an Updike piece not entirely written in Updike Voice, except (you'll see later) when Updike decides he can get an effect by slipping into it. Oh, and also: OMG half-nekkid ladies! Sweet!

I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts giving me hell. She's one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I knowit made her day to trip me up. She'd been watching cash registers forty years and probably never seen a mistake before.

By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a bag -- she gives me a little snort in passing, if she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.

This is the passage which directly follows the opening, quoted above. What is interesting here is how the (young, desired, so far speechless) girls in their bathing suits are followed directly by an older woman who is described in the most unflattering terms possible. She's old (if "about fifty" is old), still given to sexual display (the rouge) in defiance of the fact that this particular man does not find her attractive, she confronts the narrator for making a mistake, and she is thus a witch, a hag, a bitch, for no other reason than that she apparently wants the narrator to do his job.

She isn't the last woman the narrator will denigrate over the course of "A&P": in fact, every single woman in the story, including the bikini girls, will come under fire. Those three, however, exist in a different space: the inevitable criticism balanced with worshipfully purple prose about their bodies. They are desired and therefore spared, more or less. However, in order to praise them, Updike has to present each and every other woman in his fictional universe as inherently undesirable, ugly, and bad. He praises certain women as exceptional in order to degrade women as a gender, or maybe it's the other way around; either way, it's a narrative technique that Updike used over and over again in his work. And the women he praises at first usually turn out to be the most dangerous and terrible of all, as we shall see here, in due time.

There was this chunky one, with the two-piece -- it was bright green and the seams on the bra were still sharp and her belly was still pretty pale so I guessed she just got it (the suit) -- there was this one, with one of those chubby berry-faces, the lips all bunched together under her nose, this one, and a tall one, with black hair that hadn't quite frizzed right, and one of these sunburns right across under the eyes, and a chin that was too long -- you know, the kind of girl other girls think is very "striking" and "attractive" but never quite makes it, as they very well know, which is why they like her so much -- and then the third one, that wasn't quite so tall. She was the queen.

Note how the narrator is miraculously able to infer the entire social order and relationship history of these girls based on simply watching them for no more than a few seconds - not talking to them, not seeking their input, not even overhearing them as they speak to each other. Male authority over female truth, the narrator's authority over fictional truth, the author's authority over his fictional world: they blend so seamlessly into each other, lending legitimacy to each other, that we almost take the narrator and Updike at their words before we realize what Updike has done.

Note, too, how precisely their rankings in this imagined hierarchy correspond to how attractive the narrator finds them. He (and Updike?) naturally imagine that, as he values them, so do they value each other. Female value is located solely in the desirable body; a flaw in female beauty lessens female worth. At least the chunky one has a nice can; the tall one (Updike's fiction has more than a few short, self-conscious male protagonists - just saying*) is "the kind of girl other girls think is very striking and attractive but never quite makes it, as they very well know, which is why they like her so much." Aside from his apparently telepathic insight into the lives and thought processes of women to whom he has never spoken (and I imagine this is what people are referring to when they speak of Updike's "insights into mundane life," since it is such an eloquently regurgitated cliche about female competitiveness, shallowness, and bitchery) note what "making it" means here: being wanted by men like the narrator. Does she want? Does she have preferences? Does the narrator or author at any point attribute desire, meaning preferences for specific people or types of people, to this sexualized character? No. She needs to be wanted. That is what success is supposed to be, for women. That is all it is.

Blah blah, narrator gets implicit boner, blah blah, purple prose that breaks the rules the author has set for his narrator's voice ("this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the light"), blah blah other women are disgusting ("house slaves in pin curlers," all other women in swimsuits wear shorts too and "are usually women with six children and varicose veins mapping their legs and nobody, including them, could care less"), blah blah, more boner, blah... Oh, look! Men!

"Oh Daddy," Stokesie said beside me. "I feel so faint."

"Darling," I said. "Hold me tight." Stokesie's married, with two babies chalked up on his fuselage already, but as far as I can tell that's the only difference. He's twenty-two, and I was nineteen this April.

"Is it done?" he asks, the responsible married man finding his voice.

Amazing, isn't it? Within three short paragraphs, this character has been given a voice, personality, and history, complete with relationships and implicit psychological conflicts. Is he a boy, or a man? A responsible husband and father or a kid who can leer at asses and make dirty jokes with his friends? We don't know, and neither does he. We know he struggles. After all, he's only twenty-two. The distance between Stokesie and the narrator is alternately far smaller and far larger than it appears. The narrator feels it too.

We are halfway through the story and no female character has had a line of dialogue. Or a distinct motivation. Or a name. Just thought I'd let you know.

Lengel comes in from haggling with a truck full of cabbages on the lot and is about to scuttle into that door marked MANAGER behind which he hides all day when the girls touch his eye. Lengel's pretty dreary, teaches Sunday school and the rest, but he doesn't miss that much. He comes over and says, "Girls, this isn't the beach."

Queenie blushes, though maybe it's just a brush of sunburn I was noticing for the first time, now that she was so close. "My mother asked me to pick up a jar of herring snacks." Her voice kind of startled me, the way voices do when you see the people first, coming out so flat and dumb yet kind of tony, too, the way it ticked over "pick up" and "snacks."

What the... another named, speaking, male character with an actual past and personality! Things are getting CRAZY up in this here A&P! And a woman speaks for the first time in the whole entire story! (There are only three lines of female dialogue, so enjoy them.) And, miraculously, as soon as she speaks, the narrator finds a reason to dislike her! Her voice opens up the possibility that she has a personality, one which may not be solely based around the wild desire to gratify the narrator with her body. Since women's worth is primarily derived from their bodies, of course, that voice is "flat and dumb," but how can you expect a woman to have a mind worth engaging? It is also "tony," meaning rich, meaning that she possesses power that the (working-class or at least lower-middle-class, we assume) narrator does not, which makes her a threat... oh, I'm sorry, I mean "a bitch." I forget that men are never scared of the women they demean, and that misogyny is never directed at a woman because she seems stronger or smarter than the men who seek to diminish, intimidate, or humiliate her; that would be ridiculous, because how could a boy ever be threatened by a lesser order of life? My bad.

"We want you decently dressed when you come in here."

"We are decent," Queenie says suddenly, her lower lip pushing, getting sore now that she remembers her place, a place from which the crowd that runs the A & P must look pretty crummy. Fancy Herring Snacks flashed in her very blue eyes.

Geez, listen to her, all "having opinions" and "resisting authority" and "expressing anger" and absolutely for sure because the narrator is psychic somehow thinking that she's better than people like him. I hope she doesn't turn out to be a bitch like all the rest.

A word, here: the question of John Updike's misogyny is not about whether or not his male characters call his female characters "bitches" and "cunts." Those gendered insults are misogynist, but there are a thousand ways to frame them; their appearance does not automatically render a text sexist. The question of John Updike's misogyny is definitely not about whether his male characters are sexually attracted to women, or sexually active with women. The idea that feminists are somehow offended by male lust itself is an ancient and idiotic straw man argument that is barely worth addressing here. Here I go, anyway: desire does not presuppose that a woman's only worth lies in her ability to gratify a man. Desire does not presuppose that failing to gratify a man is some sort of character flaw, nor that the female party in a sexual exchange is always less than fully human, some sort of unknowable but undoubtedly inferior Other that one should not even really desire to know. Desire does not presuppose that sexual activity makes a woman worth less and a man worth more, while holding the paradoxical position that women who are not sexually active are cold, cruel bitches who are refusing to give men what they need and want and deserve. There are a thousand ways to desire. Desire is not misogyny. Misogyny appropriates desire and promotes the myth that one cannot exist without the other; then, because people like desire, it promotes the myth that people who oppose misogyny also oppose desire; thusly, it communicates that misogyny is itself desirable because it makes pleasure possible. This is untrue, but it is definitely part of why the question of whether Updike's work is misogynist is so regularly confused (by non-feminists) with the question of whether he wrote about sex.

So, the question of John Updike's misogyny is not and has never been about sex. The question is: what position do women hold in his fictional worlds? How are female characters created and deployed? How is their reality conveyed, and (since he strove for realism) is it consistent with the actual reality (the motivations, the inner lives, the choices and actions) of women? What function do women serve in Updike's work? Here is one answer:

The girls, and who'd blame them, are in a hurry to get out, so I say "I quit" to Lengel quick enough for them to hear, hoping they'll stop and watch me, their unsuspected hero. They keep right on going, into the electric eye; the door flies open and they flicker across the lot to their car, Queenie and Plaid and Big Tall Goony-Goony (not that as raw material she was so bad), leaving me with Lengel and a kink in his eyebrow...

Ah, yes, the "reward me for my 'unselfish' actions on your behalf with sex, since I do not actually care about you, but about my boner" move. Always a winner. But do the girls respond appropriately? Do they fall all over the hero in a beswimsuited orgy of sucking and fucking, or at least ask him out on a date, or at least praise him to the skies? I mean, he'd even take the fat one or the ugly one! He's not asking for much here, just that they realize they exist for his gratification and be appropriately grateful for his not insulting them, or at least not insulting them aloud! And they do not, they are not, they fail!

I just saunter into the electric eye in my white shirt that my mother ironed the night before, and the door heaves itself open, and outside the sunshine is skating around on the asphalt.

I look around for my girls [MY?! - Ed.], but they're gone, of course. There wasn't anybody but some young married screaming with her children about some candy they didn't get by the door of a powder-blue Falcon station wagon. Looking back in the big windows, over the bags of peat moss and aluminum lawn furniture stacked on the pavement, I could see Lengel in my place in the slot, checking the sheep through. His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as if he'djust had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.

Note the text's final disgusting woman, a screaming young wife with children. The narrator has risked his all due to his desire for women, and those women have betrayed him. The ones he wants, he can't get; the ones he could get, the ones other people have gotten, are awful. The text's assortment of aging or married women are not placed in the story accidentally: they are what the bikini women will be, in time. Women are bitches for not gratifying male desire; women who gratify male desire are, or will be, bitches. Desire leads to relationship leads to marriage leads to children; desire leads from the screaming young wife to the house slave in pin curlers to the hag who ought to be burned; women are a trap, women are a tragedy, women, put bluntly, are just plain bad. Oh, how hard, how very hard it is to live in this fallen and woman-infested world.

Misogyny? That's putting it lightly. Yet if I rejected every book with undertones of misogyny or sexism, my list of total books read and enjoyed would diminish by at least half. Sexism is an undeniable part of history and culture, hence of the literary landscape, and you know what? I love to read. I love to read D.H. Fucking Lawrence, folks. I have no problem with putting up with sexism if the work is decent. Yet in this story, the clumsiness, the self-indulgence, the overdone symbolism and straining for deeper meaning and liberal substitution of cliche for character or insight, the unevenness of the basic craft, the absolute lack of any innovation in terms of technique or insight by which the author might hope to justify these obvious flaws... John Updike was a misogynist, sure. That's only a part of why he was a bad writer.

*UPDATE: I have been informed that Updike was, in fact, tall. Of course, he is also being reported as "handsome," so. What can I say? He writes like a small man. 

The Sad Ballad of Phyllis and Betty

You know, reader, when I want well-informed, thought-provoking, responsible essays on gender as it pertains to literature (or literature as it pertains to gender) there is one publication to which I turn: the New York Times Book Review. KIDDING! Ha ha ha, woo boy, sometimes I crack myself up.

I read Bitch, of course, which published an article roughly nine billion years ago about NYTBR's tendency to ignore major new feminist works or assign them to obviously hostile reviewers, and its tendency to assign more space to writers who embrace feminist backlash (because that's "edgy" now; think of it as the old-people version of Vice) than to writers who embrace actual feminism. Bitch will no doubt be pleased to note that its article, despite being nine billion years old, is still totally true! For what did NYTBR publish, in this week's edition, but an essay on the life and work of Phyllis McGinley?

They published several other things, actually, some of which might have been good. I couldn't tell! I was unable to read them, because I had been blinded by the terrible, terrible essay on Phyllis McGinley!

Who is Phyllis McGinley? Why is there an essay about her in the New York Times Book Review? Why are she, and the essay, and the essay's author, all so crazy? I will let the essay's crazy author, noted television critic Ginia Bellafante, explain it in her own creepily approving words:

[McGinley lived] contentedly for a number of years as a wife, mother and well-known poet in Larchmont, N.Y., writing reverentially of lush lawns and country-club Sundays in The New Yorker, Harper’s and elsewhere... McGinley’s light verse sought to convey the ecstatic peace of suburban ritual, the delight in greeting a husband, in appointing a room, in going to the butcher. Anticipation pervades her work, the feeling of something quietly joyful about to happen — beloved friends coming for dessert, perhaps.

Have you barfed yet? Get it out of the way now, because this essay ("Suburban Rapture!" Is its title!) is dead set on sickening you, being as it is about how mind-blowingly great it was to be a suburban housewife in the 1950s. History students among you may recall the 1950s, along with most of the 20th century, as a time when women had precious few viable options other than becoming housewives, and even the ones that did work (or had to work, due to social marginalization and corresponding poverty - I'm not discounting that) were relegated to menial, low-paying positions with little to no hope of advancement, due to pervasive, unchecked, institutionalized sexism and racism, which were of course inextricably bound to each other and also to class! Ginia Bellafante, apparently not into this whole "history and also actual well-documented fact" thing, seems to recall the 1950s differently: as a blissful Eden, from which women were expelled when they ate from the Tree of Wanting an Actual Freaking Choice. To demonstrate how very lovely it all was (we grow good people in our small towns!) and how the elitist lib'rul media (referred to here as the "contemptuous... literary and intellectual class") just doesn't get it, she has chosen to utilize the marginal and deservedly forgotten McGinley.

The facts of McGinley's career are as such: the lady churned out a lot of crap. It was extremely commercial crap, mind you - so very commercial, in fact, that some of it was used in actual commercials, as in her many catchy jingles. She was your basic ladyhack (not to be confused with your basic Ladyhawke) and, as a ladyhack myself, I cannot judge her for cranking out women's magazine articles, children's books, and light verse that was... well, about what you would expect from a writer of commercial jingles. I can, however, judge the Pulitzer committee for awarding her a prize in 1961, a gesture which I can only interpret as proof that the nascent second wave was making a great deal of gentlemen very uncomfortable, and that they felt the need to placate the bevaginad masses by rewarding a token female who knew her place and stuck to it - er, I mean, "exhibited a uniquely feminine sensibility." For here is a sampling of the timeless, Pulitzer-worthy verse of Phyllis McGinley:

A lady is smarter than a gentleman, maybe,
She can sew a fine seam, she can have a baby,
She can use her intuition instead of her brain

... She can write sexist poems that drive you insane!

Ginia Bellafante insists (and insists, and insists) Phyllis McGinley loved being a suburban housewife, and so did lots of people, so it's just plain silly that people keep insisting that women who became housewives when it was the only economically rewarding, unstigmatized choice for women did so because it was the only economically rewarding, unstigmatized choice for women. Ginia Bellafante just doesn't understand why Betty Friedan "dismissed" McGinley as "one of the housewife writers." I mean, as Ginia Bellafante points out in her own piece, her entire career and aesthetic was about being a housewife, so you can see why that was a completely unmerited attack!

This piece is really miraculous, in that any given line has the capacity to inspire epileptic rage fits, as in, "Having married happily at 33, she loved domesticity the way a woman can only when it has come late to find her," which manages to imply within a mere 22 words that (a) "domesticity," meaning marriage and babies, is the only thing that can make a woman complete and happy, (b) women who don't have it are failures, and women who get it should be simperingly grateful, (c) THIRTY-FUCKING-THREE is late to find it, or, I'm sorry, to be found by it, since we obviously don't have any choice in the matter and can only hope to be chosen by that one very special boy, who can evaluate and reject women as if we were avocados he were squeezing for ripeness in the fucking supermarket, for he is Man, Master of All Things. Jesus, and they wonder why we drink. However, I would rather skip right over most of the piece, and deliver to you its creamy, poisonous center, which goes like this:

“A liberal arts education is not a tool like a hoe . . . or an electric mixer,” McGinley wrote, dismayed at a world she thought was conspiring to make women feel as though any acquired erudition would be wasted in a life of riffling through recipe cards. “It is a true and precious stone which can glow as wholesomely on a kitchen table as when it is put on exhibition in a jeweler’s window or bartered for bread and butter.” She went on to dismiss the already benighted suggestion that Bryn Mawr was a threat to what ought to get done in a kitchen. “Surely the ability to enjoy Heine’s exquisite melancholy in the original German,” she wrote, “will not cripple a girl’s talent for making chocolate brownies.”

McGinley’s point, an eternally divisive one, was clear: a woman who enjoyed herself as a wife and mother should not submit to imposed ambitions.

Fair enough! If you have absolutely no goals in life other than to get married and have babies, no-one should force you to discover a cure for cancer, or to make any use whatsoever of your education. However, if you do have other goals, a life spent doing nothing but making chocolate brownies would be pretty goddamn tragic. That, one suspects - and hears, from women who survived the era - was the more common scenario. And, hey, good news for ladies whose brains are capable of comprehending something other than the fine points of selecting lawn furniture: it turns out that having ambition does not automatically make you barren or unlovable! You can, in fact, have a career, a marriage, and a baby, or a career and marriage with no baby, or a baby and career with no marriage, or whatever else your heart desires. It's just strange that the women who tell us otherwise, the women who insist and insist and insist that being a wife and mother to the exclusion of all other things is an honorable and beautiful route that is not in any way limiting or likely to drive you out of your mind - women like Phyllis Schlafly, Phyllis McGinley, Caitlyn Flanagan, and the woman who seems to just love them all, or at least to be unable to frame an incisive and well-merited critique of their message, TV critic Ginia Bellafante - are only able to reach us with this message because they have, well, jobs.

--- AND NOW, THE SECRET PRIZE ---

I know, right? This post was freaking huge! I've decided that whenever I write a bonkers nutso long-winded thing like this, I should reward people who make it all the way through, as with the Cracker Jack prizes which are maybe the only reason on Earth to eat Cracker Jack, which is sticky and gross. Therefore, I present to you: women's education in the McGinley Age. Strangely, none of them seems to be studying Heine!

Sense and Sensibility: It Is Not Everyone Who Has Your Passion For Dead Leaves

Anyone who takes it upon herself to write lady business book reviews must, sooner or later, file a piece on Jane Austen. (It is a truth universally acknowledged! Ha, NO.) Austen seems to be the ultimate Chick Writer: canonical, virtuosic, indisputably important in terms of both technique and influence, yet widely mocked or ignored outside her circle of avid fans, simply because she wrote about, well, girly stuff. When I tell people that the three writers I admire most, as Voices, are (a) Joan Didion, (b) David Foster Wallace, and (c) Jane Austen, people who know Didion and Wallace tend to agree, or at least to respect the sentiment, but Austen... she's some sort of proto-chick-lit writer, isn't she? And: I'm surprised to know you read her. I always thought that she wrote sappy romance stuff.

Yikes.

***

Austen's fans, it must be said, have not helped her case: the sheer amount of sentimental crap "based on" or "inspired by" Jane would be enough to scare away any serious reader. Even worse, Austen has been accused of inventing chick lit itself. Better clear this up now: like Shakespeare, Jane Austen wrote plots that people felt comfortable "adapting" to suit their own tastes, with mixed results. Shakespeare has Ten Things I Hate About You and She's the Man, amongst others; Austen has Bridget Jones' Diary and Clueless. BJ did, in fact, spawn the current mass of chick lit, but Austen is no more responsible for that than Shakespeare is for Amanda Bynes. In my experience, people don't tend to denigrate or avoid Shakespeare because of She's the Man. They do, however, feel perfectly justified in avoiding Jane Austen because of Bridget Jones.

The saddest thing about this is that the people who are most appalled by contemporary representations of Austen - people who shudder at the cozy, syrupy, suburban, anti-intellectual horseshit on display here,* let's say - are the people who might most enjoy her work. The woman was anything but cozy. Here, for example, is a passage from one of her personal letters:

Mrs. Hall of Sherbourn was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright -- I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.

This sentence demonstrates everything that made Jane Austen great. Note, for example, how carefully it's plotted: there is a lengthy, twenty-eight word set-up, during which Austen lulls us into a false sense of security with her proper, subdued, nearly journalistic language ("Mrs. Hall of Sherbourn was brought to bed yesterday," who what where when), followed by a shockingly brutal four word punch line, the full impact of which is not felt until the final word. See how effortlessly she shifts between the three voices in the sentence: restrained and declarative ("Mrs. Hall of Sherbourn," etc.), breezily conversational ("I suppose she happened"), and stone-cold cruel ("husband"). Note, too, the role of punctuation: the quiet, steady rhythm of the commas, followed by the dash -- like a comedian pausing for a beat before the laugh line -- and then the quick, unresisted rhythm of the payoff. Even at her most casual, Austen was never less than totally in control of her technique.

Also, careful readers will note that this is a dead baby joke. About an actual dead baby. At its father's expense. So, there's that.

***

So, where to start? Pride and Prejudice is Austen's most charming book; Emma represents the perfect balance between her early, goofy work and her later, more serious endeavors. Still, my favorite Austen book has always been Sense & Sensibility. Since it is, among other things, a book about the liabilities of good taste, it seems like a good introduction for a skeptic.

The book opens with a scene that would not be out-of-place in a fairy tale: a father, on his deathbed, makes his son promise to provide for his stepmother and three half-sisters. The son, deeply moved by his father's dying words, pauses only to consort with his wife ("To be sure... [an annuity] is better than parting with fifteen hundred pounds at once. But, then, if Mrs. Dashwood should live fifteen years we shall be completely taken in") before obligingly taking all of their money and kicking them out of their house. Thus disinherited, the mother and daughters move to a dismal little cottage in the middle of nowhere. The four women have only one hope of escape or financial betterment: someone's got to marry a rich dude, quick.

The plot centers, therefore, on the two daughters of marriageable age, Marianne and Elinor. Marianne is passionate, gorgeous, and deeply in thrall to the fashionable Romantic sensibility of her age. Elinor, on the other hand, is smart and funny, and a substantial amount of her time is spent mocking Marianne's exquisite taste. Here are the sisters:

"How does dear, dear Norland look?" cried Marianne.

"Dear, dear Norland," said Elinor, "probably looks much as it always does at this time of the year. The woods and walks thickly covered with dead leaves."

"Oh," cried Marianne, "with what transporting sensation have I formerly seen them fall! How have I delighted, as I walked, to see them driven in showers about me by the wind! What feelings have they, the season, the air altogether inspired! Now there is no one to regard them. They are seen only as a nuisance, swept hastily off, and driven as much as possible from the sight."

"It is not every one," said Elinor, "who has your passion for dead leaves."

"No," Marianne replies, "my feelings are not often shared, not often understood." It is this statement, infuriating as it may be, which provides a key to the novel. Marianne, like every teenager, hipster, and/or LiveJournal user who ever walked the earth, believes that her feelings are unique and special, though they are anything but; because she's not polite enough to conceal or control them, she assumes that those who do have no feelings at all.

On to the marrying. Elinor falls for the dependable, kind-hearted, deeply boring Edward Ferrars, whereas Marianne falls for the not-at-all-boring Willoughby, whom she meets when he arrives in the rain (!) on a stallion (!!) after she has taken a fall (!!!) and carries her in his arms (!!!!!!infinity!) back to her house. After a promising start with Elinor, Ferrars becomes unaccountably cold and distant, which is just oh so much fun for Elinor, especially considering the fact that Willoughby and Marianne are by that point so passionately, demonstratively in love they might as well be fucking in the town square. It gets even better when Elinor learns the reason for Edward's coolness: he is, in fact, secretly engaged to someone else. But while Elinor is forging bravely ahead with her broken heart, like the good little soldier that she is, Marianne learns that Willoughby is - you guessed it - secretly engaged to someone else. At this point, Marianne loses her shit entirely, and the novel's true theme comes to the forefront.

Sense & Sensibility is not a comedy about marriage, although marriage is involved. It is not even a comedy about money, although money, as always, has a lot to do with it. It is simply this: a comedy about sadness, and how to get through it intact.

***

By this point, I have written some words that may freak you out: marrying, in love, secretly engaged. This, you are thinking, is that sappy romance stuff! Fear not, good reader: Austen's characters, much like actual humans, do in fact care for each other, struggle to find committed relationships, and fuck up as much or more than they succeed. However, Austen - that lifelong virgin - never takes a particularly sentimental view.

Austen was a comic genius precisely because she combined a freakishly keen understanding of human nature with an icy detachment. Unrestrained passion, in Austen's work, is always either a moral failing or a lapse in judgment. Like Shakespeare, she wrote happy engagements, but no happy marriages; her novels end, tellingly, with her protagonists' weddings, and one always gets the sense that, if her protagonists stay happy together, it will be an exceptional accomplishment. Witness this charming little scene from Sense & Sensibility, between husband, wife, and mother-in-law:

"You and I, Sir John," said Mrs. Jennings, "should not stand upon such ceremony."

"Then you would be very ill-bred," cried Mr. Palmer.

"My love you contradict every body," said his wife with her usual laugh. "Do you know that you are quite rude?"

"I did not know I contradicted any body in calling your mother ill-bred."**

"Ay, you may abuse me as you please," said the good-natured old lady, "you have taken Charlotte off my hands, and cannot give her back again. So there I have the whip hand of you."

Charlotte laughed heartily to think that her husband could not get rid of her; and exultingly said, she did not care how cross he was to her, as they must live together.

So that's marriage. What about babies - dear, sweet little babies? Well, as we've established, if they're dead, they're fair game. On the living-baby front, the Dashwoods are initially disinherited, through a baroque, typically Austenian system of entailments and endowments, due to their great-uncle's fondness for just such a creature, who possessed "such attractions as are by no means unusual in children of two or three years old; an imperfect articulation, an earnest desire of having his own way, many cunning tricks, and a great deal of noise." The affection of mothers for small children is also a frequent object of derision. One gets the sense that Austen had no patience for anyone who couldn't keep up a steady stream of sparkling banter, and that children were therefore beneath her notice.

So, marriage, out; babies, out likewise. How did she feel about puppies?

Oh, dear God, let's not even get into how she felt about puppies.

SPOILER: It wasn't good.


***

So, as the men fade out of the picture, to be regained or replaced as necessary, we are left with the two sisters - Elinor and Marianne, Sense and Sensibility - and their ongoing argument about the nature of sorrow.

This dialogue has been going on since the first pages of the book, actually, ever since that weirdly bracing passage in which Marianne and her mother respond to Mr. Dashwood's death by "[giving] themselves up wholly to their sorrow, seeking increase of wretchedness in every reflection that could afford it, and resolv[ing] against ever admitting consolation in future." You have a choice, Austen is saying. Master your grief, or else it will master you.

Elinor, who believes there is honor in fighting through the pain, conceals not only her sadness, but its cause: she tells no-one about Edward's engagement, and befriends his loathsome fiance. Marianne, faced with the same problems, stops eating, sleeping, and even speaking. Here, Elinor finally confronts her:

Elinor could no longer witness this torrent of unresisted grief in silence.

"Exert yourself, dear Marianne," she cried, "if you would not kill yourself and all who love you. Think of your mother; think of her misery while YOU suffer: for her sake you must exert yourself."

"I cannot, I cannot," cried Marianne; "leave me, leave me, if I distress you; leave me, hate me, forget me! but do not torture me so. Oh! how easy for those, who have no sorrow of their own to talk of exertion! Happy, happy Elinor, YOU cannot have an idea of what I suffer."

But, of course, she does. Everyone, in fact, has some idea of suffering: Elinor, obviously, but also Mrs. Palmer, whose husband cannot get rid of her, and Mr. Palmer, who cannot get rid of his wife, and Mrs. Dashwood, who is allowed about three pages to grieve for her husband, and even Edward and Willoughby, engaged to women they don't love, out of duty (in Edward's case) or for money (in Willoughby's). For most of the book, in fact, Marianne scorns the advances of one Colonel Brandon, who turns out to have survived not only the forced severance of his first engagement, but his first love's pregnancy by another man, her early death, and her daughter's subsequent seduction and impregnation by Willoughby, who of course also happens to be dating the girl he has a crush on, all of which he is too much of a gentleman to mention. In this context, what stands out is not Marianne's pain, but her selfishness. This, however, is something you can never communicate to Marianne, or to anyone like her. This is also the reason that, as the book winds to a close, Elinor is in a sickroom, tending to Marianne, whereas Marianne is in a coma, nearing death.

***

At this point, there are the obvious questions: whether Marianne lives, whether Edward is ever loosed from the clutches of his dread fiance, whether Willoughby is punished for his actions (which are really the same as Edward's, but we the readers historically do not care - Willoughby is a dick!), and whether the surprisingly attractive Brandon ever gets his rocks off with a lady half his age. To these, I say: THIS IS JANE AUSTEN, DUH. Comedies are tragedies that don't happen. Jane Austen wrote comedies. This, I trust, you know. But here, in one of the most delicate and quietly devastating conclusions of any novel I've read, she revisits Willoughby - and all the blind youthful love he represents - shortly after Marianne marries someone else:

That he was for ever inconsolable, that he fled from society, or contracted an habitual gloom of temper, or died of a broken heart, must not be depended on—for he did neither. He lived to exert, and frequently to enjoy himself. His wife was not always out of humour, nor his home always uncomfortable; and in his breed of horses and dogs, and in sporting of every kind, he found no inconsiderable degree of domestic felicity.

For Marianne, however—in spite of his incivility in surviving her loss—he always retained that decided regard which interested him in every thing that befell her...

And among the merits and the happiness of Elinor and Marianne, let it not be ranked as the least considerable, that though sisters, and living almost within sight of each other, they could live without disagreement between themselves, or producing coolness between their husbands.

So, there you have it. Love fades, or you learn to live without it, and everyone - villains, heroines, stoics and Romantics - ends up sort of, kind of happy, or at least not that sad. There is the real beauty: Jane Austen, notorious writer of sappy, girly, sticky romance, ends her novel, not with a wedding, but by saying, basically, You can get over anything - and, hey, it could be worse.

* Oh, God, don't click on that link. I have to include it, if only to address the fact that it exists, but I fear anyone who sees it will be forced, as I have been, to scream, cry, or vomit up his or her intestines.

**So, for the record, Austen can pull off not only a dead baby joke, but also a "yo momma" joke, when called upon to do so. And, okay, Jane Austen film adaptations invariably suck, because the actors overplay everything (it's deadpan humor, people, DEADPAN!) and the writers sap and sex the books up beyond recognition, but there is one golden exception to that rule, which is that Mr. "Your Mother Can Suck My Ass, Dear" Palmer is played in Emma Thompson's S&S by... Hugh Laurie. Fucking House. He's unsurprisingly perfect in the role. Probably not so very perfect that you should actually watch the movie, which does tend to blow, but hey: want to see a picture of Hugh Laurie wearing a silly hat? I know you do! Here goes:

Valley of the Dolls: Thrilling Climaxes

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Little Women: There Will Be Germans. Oh, and Pap.

Let me preface this with a warning: there will be numerous spoilers for the plot to Little Women.

SPOILER: there is no plot to Little Women.

Not a plot in sight! The girls grow up, get married, have babies, and sometimes die. (SPOILER!) Then again, if you are a girl, you know this already.

For those who were spared: Little Women is about four sisters, the Marches, who live in Civil War-era... oh, let's say New England. You would think it would be impossible to tell a story about Civil War-era American life without really mentioning slavery, or the Civil War! You would be wrong. This probably says something about the domestic sphere vs. the public sphere, or the female experience of war, or about trying to create a sense of common national identity in 1868 (they do hate on the British a bit), but it also says something else: B-O-R-I-N-G.

The March sisters are poor, although it's a Jane Austen kind of poverty, consisting as it does of having only one servant (horrors!) and having to take up genteel professions. They spend a lot of time telling anecdotes, having adventures (like that one time Jo goes over to the neighbor's house, or that other time Jo goes over to the neighbor's house, or that time when, you won't believe it, Jo actually goes over to the neighbor's house - man, these girls are crazy!) about which they tell anecdotes, and, of course, extracting a moral out of every single anecdote that they tell. In the absence of any discernible conflict, Alcott relies on the time-honored practice of separating her female cast into opposed yet complimentary Personalities (TM).

Let's see, you've got the sheltered one:

The boyish one:


The annoying, self-centered, if-she-mentions-clothing-one-more-time-I'll-smack-her one:

And the old one:

The book is basically devoted to explorations of how these Personalities(TM) develop, make choices, get married (or die, SPOILER), and learn life lessons. If you do not shudder at the phrase "life lessons," as I do, it has evidently been a while since you read Little Women.

I am being negative. That is not nice. So, let me throw in something positive right up front: I think it is very impressive that Louisa May Alcott managed to write an enduringly popular novel, since she apparently never spoke to another human being in her life. In every scene in which the girls are gathered, the dialogue follows a distinctly unnerving pattern, which goes like this:

Meg says something,
then Jo says something,
then Beth says something,
then Amy says something else.

The order sometimes varies, but the weird spelling-bee effect of the whole arrangement never dies. Let's not even touch on the things that they actually say. ("All the married people take hands and dance around the husband and wife, as the Germans do, while we bachelors and spinsters prance in couples outside!" I've never had a wedding, but if I had, and the guests had suggested "prancing" or doing anything "as the Germans do," I would have closed the reception hall down and sent their gifts back unopened. Not the March sisters. They love German prancing. They prance the shit out of that German business. They are prancing balls over at the March place. )

So: let's rattle off the list, shall we?

Meg March, the oldest, is boring. She wants to get married and have babies, and then she does. The dude - a German tutor - is poor, which is kind of a problem, except that it isn't. So, um, check!

Beth March is the simple child that they keep locked in the basement. She's so shy that she can't talk to anyone outside of her immediate family, she rarely leaves the house, and her only interests in life are her piano, her many cats, and her collection of creepy, disfigured dolls.

"There were six dolls to be taken up and dressed every morning, for Beth was a child still, and loved her pets as well as ever; not one whole or handsome one among them... [as one had] no top to its head, she tied on a neat little cap, and, as both arms and legs were gone, she hid these deficiencies by folding it in a blanket, and devoting her best bed to this chronic invalid. If anyone had known the care lavished on that dolly, I think it would have touched their hearts... She brought it bits of bouquets; she read to it, took it out to breathe the air, hidden under her coat; she sung it lullabys, and never went to bed without kissing its dirty face."

Boy, that sure touched my heart... WITH EVIL! SHE'S EVIL! Anyway, Beth dies. There is some business involving tending to the poor and a lingering case of scarlet fever. After wasting away for approximately seventy-five percent of the book (and taking lots of belladonna for her health) she finally kicks off.

This leaves us with two well-drawn characters in the book, Jo and Amy. Before we get into that, however, let us pause to consider the dark, throbbing heart of Little Women: Marmee.

Marmee is the girls' mother. She is terrifying. When you live at Marmee's house, you don't get presents for Christmas: you get inspirational Christian tracts. Actually, you get the same tract, purchased four times. Marmee could have gotten you other presents, but preferred to give you the same incredibly disappointing item over and over, just to rub it in your face. You don't get breakfast; you give your breakfast away to the German family down the block. (Again with the Germans!) Do you miss your dad, who is away in the war? Well, Marmee has a story for you. It's about the time she met a guy whose four sons were killed in that very war, and how you are all selfish shits because your father isn't dead. One of the most heartwarming/creepy scenes in literature comes when Marmee advises Jo on how to deal with emotions:

"I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo; but I have learned not to show it; and I still hope to learn not to feel it... I've learned to check the nasty words that rise to my lips; and when I feel that they mean to break out against my will, I just go away a minute, and give myself a shake, for being so weak and so wicked."

That's right, Jo - just swallow it, SWALLOW IT, push it all down into your gut until it becomes a black cyst of rage threatening to burst at any moment, pulsating with hatred for yourself, your husband, your disgusting spawn, and god WHO KNOWS WHAT you could do when it's finally unleashed, WHO KNOWS, you could just TAKE THE BELLADONNA and DROP IT INTO THEIR SOUP, they'd never suspect you, no-one would suspect you, who would suspect DEAR OLD MARMEE, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA.

Back to Jo and Amy. They are the two most disappointing daughters, and therefore the most interesting. Amy is every girl you've ever hated. Her priorities include (1) her hair, (2) her clothes, and (3) being popular, which has a lot to do with hair and clothes, she would like you to know. She's spiteful, manipulative, shallow, none too bright, and overwhelmingly fond of herself. This isn't a hard character to draw, but it is surprising how well the portrayal holds up, with certain little details (after the girls get the books, Amy's only reaction is "I'm glad mine is blue," as if she can't find anything worth remarking on other than the color of the binding, because, you know, it's a book) seeming true even when very little else does. It is easy, even enjoyable, to dislike Amy as her creator intended - not least because she is mean to Jo.

About Jo: oh! My God! There is so much going on there! Endless papers have been written about Jo - as feminist, as queer, as portrait of the artist, as tragic figure - and, to be frank, you need a lot of papers to sort Jo out, for Jo is complex. Here are a few things you need to know: (a) Jo refers to herself as "the man of the house," and responds to someone saying "he's a stubborn fellow" with "so am I," (b) Jo says she will never get over being born a girl and not a boy, (c) Jo's "gentlemanly" or "boyish" demeanor is referred to throughout the book, (d) Jo uses slang and other forms of language ("can't do that" instead of "I can't do that," for example) that are gendered male, (e) Jo is disgusted by the prospect of marriage, and when a boy kisses her, she backs away in a manner that is not at all flirtatious, but actually freaked out, (f) Jo insists that the boy address her as "my dear fellow," (g) Jo insists that her income will be earned rather than married into, and that her happiness will depend on her professional success, and (h) Jo gives up all of this by the end of the book, and it is crushingly sad.

The one thing that everyone remembers about the second half of Little Women, aside from Beth finally dying, is that Jo turns down her friend Laurie's proposal of marriage and ends up with some ancient German (!!!!!) who convinces her that she is a shitty writer and should give it up, even though she is well-published by that point. Laurie ends up married to Amy. This pisses people off to no end. What no-one remembers is that Jo never had any romantic interest in Theodore "The Fellows Called Me Dora" Laurence. She wanted him to marry Meg. When he kissed her, she apologized and said they shouldn't drink together any more. The Laurie and Amy thing came about because Louisa May Alcott wanted to annoy people; she was incensed that, after Jo had explicitly stated her distaste for marriage (and possibly dudes?) 5,000 times, her readers kept writing her letters that went like "OMG can Jo & Laurie get married they r meant 4 each other!!!!" Laurie marries the most insufferable March sister for the same reason that Jo gives up her career to get with the AntiSexy: Louisa May Alcott was fucking with you. You wanted Jo and Laurie to get married? Fine! They do! To the worst imaginable partners! Suck on that.

What stands out about this story is that, unlike any of the jokes in Little Women, it is actually kind of funny. In fact, it raises the question of how a woman willing to pull this sort of stunt could tolerate the pious, mealy-mouthed, intolerable dreck shoveled out by noted author Louisa May Alcott. Here is a pretty interesting piece about Jo March and young women's literature in the 19th century. It includes this little gem:

Alcott herself saw the book as a biographical and moral story about female coming-of-age, and feared its didactic, moral overtones rendered it boring (295). In response to one of the energetic young admirers who wrote to her praising the novel, Alcott replied, "Though I do not enjoy writing 'moral tales' for the young, I do it because it pays well" (Showalter 56-7). While she enjoyed the financial power (and to some degree the public recognition) that Little Women brought, the biographical evidence extant suggests that Alcott found little pleasure in the actual writing of the novel and tended to dismiss it, as well as the similarly-configured stories she produced after it for the same audience, as "moral pap" (Saxton 16).

Okay. You know what? I like this woman.

Lady Business Book Reports: Prolegomena

Once upon a time, in a magical land called Brooklyn, I got very drunk and ended up having a passionate discussion about Christopher Pike with someone I had just met. There were two dudes at the table, and one other lady. I don't know what we had been discussing before - politics? - but I do know that, up until that point, everyone had been involved. The second Christopher Pike came up, however, it was just me and the other girl, frantically trying to figure out who killed whom in Gimme a Kiss (so, this girl faked her death, because someone else read her top-secret sex diary, although she'd fictionalized the hot stuff because in reality her boyfriend was kind of a choad, and then he died trying to save her life, although she wasn't really dead, so WHOOPS, and then Fakey McNotDead's friend found her hiding out in a shack, and Fakey set her on fire for reasons that remain unclear, although I think the friend killed people too because Dead Choad had given her herpes and the herp had driven her mad, mad for revenge) while the dudes were like, "huh what why no let's go get some beer."

This is an extremely roundabout way of saying that I believe there are books in this world that most women have read. These books tend to overlap with the books that men don't read, or are encouraged not to read. It's not new or groundbreaking to point out that women buy books more often than men do, but books that are specifically gendered as feminine tend to receive a whole lot of scorn. (Scorn and terrible cover designs.) A man who writes a book primarily for other men (like, say, The Corrections, or All the Sad Young Literary Men, or any of the FUSWG canon) is perceived to be more serious and literary than a woman who writes primarily for other women. Virginia Woolf and Adrienne Rich both made this point, in their own ways: men can and do write for men with no difficulty, whereas women have to perform for both genders, or maybe just for the guys, if they're going to be taken seriously. Lots of girl-focused books (I refuse to utter the term "chick lit") are, in fact, poorly written, broadly stereotypical, and regressive - but then again, so is the work of Chuck Palahniuk and Nick Hornby, and as far as I can tell I may never stop hearing people praise those men.

I sometimes contribute to a blog for young women. The writing staff of that site once received an e-mail reminding us that we should be fun for guys as well as girls. I spent a while puzzling over that one. Then I turned in an article about birth control and waited for the site's male commenters to show up and call me a whore again. To be fair, they had a lot of fun with it! That's another sad fact about writing while female, one which several of my friends can confirm: write about sex, or clothes, or anything traditionally feminine, and people will call you a vapid slut. Write about the issues of the day, and people will call you a stupid bitch who should stick to writing about sex and clothes. Write about dieting: you're anorexic. Write about the pressure to be thin: you're a pig. Girl stuff isn't to be taken seriously - and it is allllways open to insult and ridicule - but God help you if you should try to cover anything else. That's man talk!

Anyway, I had a little epiphany about all this while watching Mad Men - specifically, a scene in which all the secretaries are huddled around a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover, giggling about the dirty bits, and Joan reflects ruefully that "men still won't read it." I have no idea whether this was accurate (I am thinking yes, based on other things I've heard and read) but it would make sense for women to be early adopters of Lady Chatterley, because, unlike other novels of infidelity, such as Anna Karenina (which was about wanting "passion," in some vague sense) or Madam Bovary (which was about some woman who'd been corrupted by reading too many sentimental novels), Lady Chatterley was very specifically about a woman learning how to get off. Admit it: at some point in your life, maybe when you were eleven or twelve years old, another girl passed you a dirty book in secret. Everybody knows basically how dude parts work - we certainly hear enough about them - but girls still have to take an active part in digging up information about their bodies. In the early sixties, a book like Lady Chatterley, despite its flaws, would no doubt have been used to aid in the investigation.

Women use stories socially - to form a basis of shared knowledge, to communicate things we're not supposed to know or discuss, to approach difficult personal topics, and to conduct all manner of lady business. Girls still probably get copies of Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret at puberty, and after one breakup, I received no less than three copies of Eat Pray Love. It was the first thing that women wanted to do for me: give me a book so that I could understand what had happened. They'd read it; they wanted me to read it; it was the book one read in such a situation. Oprah knows about this stuff. That is why she is rich.

Maybe it is the same for guys! Maybe they are all passing around worn Norman Mailer paperbacks with instructions to read certain passages, or providing each other with giddy recaps of their favorite Hardy Boys novels. I've heard (oh, okay, I've read) that sports, and talk radio about sports, provides sort of the same function: it's a space that is overwhelmingly male, and when dudes get together to talk about it, they're also, in some back-handed way, discussing masculinity. Is it better to stay with your team or your team's city, demonstrating loyalty, or to carve out the best possible deal for yourself, showing independence and assertiveness? Is it better to be a star player, or to negotiate your role on a team so that the team is winning more even if you're spending less time with the ball? Things like that, I take it, are what guys discuss in a sports context. Then again, I am not a dude, so I have no idea!

I am a lady, and I conduct lady business. So: because of all this, and because this is apparently my Winter of Projects (dear God, I love projects), I am taking it upon myself to read books of the girly variety, and to report on them. That, in case you were wondering, is why I have a copy of Little Women in my bag right now. Look - don't even start.