Sisterhood
The author of "The Women's Room" is back.
IN THE NAME OF FRIENDSHIP
A Novel
  (Anthony Russo) |
By Marilyn French
Feminist Press. 407 pp. $24.95
I can remember to this day the exhilaration of reading Marilyn French's first novel, The Women's Room , when it was published 30 years ago at the height of the women's movement. Deliberately aimed at a wide popular audience, The Women's Room was both a compelling feminist soap opera with plot twists mirroring the ways women had begun changing their lives and a communicator of challenging, cutting-edge ideas. It read like news from the front, and in its empowerment-seeking characters -- a group of bright, frustrated, politicized women in Cambridge, Mass. -- you couldn't help seeing yourself and all the women you knew, at least if you were white and relatively privileged.
The four close friends French writes about in her sixth novel, In the Name of Friendship , are a decidedly less fiery bunch. As they sit on wicker chairs piled with cushions on an elegant glassed-in porch in Steventon, an imaginary New England village named after Jane Austen's birthplace, they are able to say, in the year 2000, "Things are entirely different for women today" -- a statement that will be reconsidered to some degree over the course of the novel but essentially not contested.
French's circle of friends includes women of different generations: Maddy, 76, started a successful real estate business in her fifties after having raised four children; Emily, 70, the only single woman in the group, is a talented but virtually unknown composer; Alicia, 50, having lived in the shadow of her brilliant psychiatrist husband since her early twenties, is quietly trying to become a historian; the youngest, Jenny, 30, is a struggling painter, married to a successful 55-year-old artist, her former teacher.
I had expected French's new novel of ideas to be about the kinds of older women I could more easily identify with now -- women, married or not, who had gone to work and fought for careers; women who had left their husbands back in the 1970s and raised children alone; women now dealing with loneliness, health problems, uncertain economic futures. But French's women are a rather rarefied group. Exceedingly well-versed in feminist theory and women's history, they venerate Emma Goldman, Emily Dickinson and Eleanor of Aquitaine and celebrate their profound friendship every March 25, on Lady's Day, the pagan new year, by dancing with each other.
However none of the three married women ever opted (or was forced) to become self-supporting or to contribute to a struggling household; even the life of the unmarried composer has been eased by the house she inherited from her family. Sitting on Jenny's porch, with no financial worries hanging over them, it is easy for them to congratulate themselves on their beautiful absence of competitive spirit. (There seem to be no poorer women with fewer choices in Steventon; they all live in Bridgeport, where Emily's niece has opened a free maternity clinic.)
What the four friends exemplify is less the condition of women today than the problems that beset today's novelists when they write about bourgeois characters -- people who are fortunate enough to have everything needed to survive in a comfortable manner but who wish they could be happier than they are, people who could get what they want without paying terrible penalties for breaking rules. Jenny would like to have not only a gallery but also a baby; Maddy feels she missed out on developing herself intellectually; Alicia yearns to assert herself more and is rewarded by an unlikely book contract and her husband's acceptance of their gay son; Emily has embraced the solitude that enables her to create but longs for her wayward niece, Clea, whom she once mothered but who has not been in touch with her for 14 years. At this wretched point in history, such stories of individual self-actualization seem far less charged with meaning than they used to.
The characters in The Women's Room raged about the never-ending chores of childcare -- one phrase, "shit and string beans," still stands out in my mind. Yet the women of Steventon greet the birth of Jenny's baby with ecstatic dancing, for no act is more important than bringing children into the world. Thinking of her own mother's generation, Emily reflects, "The women were more miserable than the men because the men had the upper hand. But the women had more pleasure in their lives, because they loved their children so much." As traditional women living in a brave new world of extended choice, the four friends joyfully discover that there are new kinds of families in which to raise children when Clea reappears with a 14-year-old daughter and a gay black partner. But French also sees female friendship as familial in an important spiritual way: "Some invisible things couldn't be measured, not yet, at least: . . . The surges of feeling that permeated her community of friends and buoyed them so that when they parted they were still riding the waves, sailing over the seas of their lives like angels."
Although this novel is only now being published in the United States, French completed it before we learned what the 21st century had in store for us. It is no fault of hers that time has hurled us with brutal speed into strange new psychic territory, making the kinds of story lines that once fed our dreams seem painfully thin. From our present vantage point, the year 2000 seems nearly as distant as Jane Austen's era -- a halcyon period we can return to only in escapist fiction. Jenny's baby, like my own granddaughter, is born only months before Sept. 11, 2001. Only five years afterward, I find it increasingly difficult to look into my granddaughter's eyes without thinking of polar ice caps crashing into the sea. Will the choices she and her generation make when they grow up have to do less with self-actualization than with sheer survival?
Wherever we are headed, God help us, I doubt we will find ourselves in Steventon. ·
Joyce Johnson is the author of the memoirs "Missing Men" and "Minor Characters."
