Review Post 25 - Short Women

I'm all for gender equality, so after regaling you with my experiences of two novellas by male writers, it's time for a couple written by women. These ones were purchased rather than borrowed, but as they come from the incredibly affordable Wordsworth Classics range, I was happy to splash out the few dollars they cost me. Of course, the big question is how the ladies' efforts compared to those of the two Nobel Laureates. Allons-y...

*****

The first of the two novellas is Edith Wharton's slim classic Ethan Frome, and when I found out that the introduction in my version wasn't much shorter than the actual story, I was not a happy bunny. Luckily, as has been the case with the other books of hers which I have read, I was very pleasantly surprised and had forgotten about the injustice of the lack of pages by the end of the story. Set in 19th-century rural New England, it is a story within a story, where a visitor to a sleepy, isolated town sets eyes upon the gaunt figure of Ethan Frome and, on learning sketchy details of his life, becomes fascinated by the taciturn farmer. On being caught in a snowstorm, he is invited into the Frome house, and it is at that point that Wharton throws us back a quarter of a century, and the real story begins.

The main part of the book describes Ethan's life, living with his older wife, Zeena, and her engaging and beautiful cousin, Mattie, on his farm. It becomes clear that Ethan has fallen for Mattie and that she is not adverse to him either. However, in the background, lurking like a vengeful zombie, is the awful Zeena, a hypochondriac who subtly gets into the mind of her husband and cousin, poisoning the atmosphere of the house and squeezing out what joy her two younger companions have left in their lives. You may have noticed that I wasn't particularly fond of old Zeena...

Wharton expertly creates a psychological prison, leaving Ethan flailing around blindly for a means of escape - but there is none. With no money, he can't countenance leaving his sick (in many senses of the word) wife, and he tortures himself thinking of what could be and what should never have been. The bleak, mid-winter New England landscape which the writer conjures up adds to the feeling of gloom and oppression, both real and imagined. When Zeena unexpectedly takes her cruelty to new heights, Ethan and Mattie, driven into a corner, suddenly make a decision which will alter their lives for good...

And then... Then we return to the present day where a surprise awaits us at the Frome farmhouse. And it's a good one.

Despite its brevity Ethan Frome is an excellent story, gripping and thought provoking, and in Zeena, Wharton creates a remarkable literary villain. Despite the best efforts of the academic writing the introduction to my copy, who has a lot of sympathy for Zeena, a woman who has no real choices in a time and place where women had little opportunity to improve their lot, I was content to boo and hiss and hope that the roof would fall on her head. Now Wharton, on the other hand, I have a lot of time for. Three out of three so far for a writer I hadn't even heard of a couple of years ago: that's a good strike rate in anyone's language.

*****

The second of my short ladies is Virginia Woolf, another (fairly) recent discovery of mine, whose books I have enjoyed immensely so far. I was a bit worried about this one though, and, for the first couple of pages, I thought my misgivings were justified, with a mind-bending switching of voices from line to line which was... well, just annoying, quite frankly. However, it settled down quite quickly, and The Waves turned out to be a thoroughly absorbing read.

There is no plot as such, which may come as a bit of a surprise to some. Instead, Woolf was writing to a rhythm, switching between the minds of her six protagonists, allowing us to see what's going on in their heads, what they are really thinking. The nine chapters follow the six from their childhood at a school near the sea to old age, and each one takes the characters further on their journey though life. At first, the voices are bewildering, clamouring, almost identical, but they quickly take on their own nuances, developing into individual personae. The characters appear to speak directly to the reader rather than to the others present at the moment, at times rendering the style similar to a Greek tragedy or a Shakespearean play. Look, just read it, and you'll see what I mean...

The flow of the characters' progression from childhood towards death is contrasted with descriptive pieces preceding each section, in which Woolf depicts one day of sunshine over the coast. The first piece captures the glories of sunrise and the first mention of the waves, and as the book progresses, so does the day, with the sun beaming out at the height of its powers when the characters are in the prime of their lives and beginning to crawl back towards the horizon as old age approaches.

The six main characters are thought to represent people in Woolf's life: family, friends, lovers. However, it is also said that they actually represent different facets of the writer's own personality, allowing her to explore the different sides of her life, revealing all of her true colours. The Waves is obviously one of those books which you have to read about before actually reading...

No plot, as mentioned, but there are, of course, trillions of themes and motifs, much too many to even attempt to explore outside a doctoral thesis (and I'm certain a good few academics will have spent their PhD years on this particular work). Every reader will take something different from the book and will probably identify with one of the characters more than the others (or, at least, with their way of life). For me, it's Bernard's sad obsession with stepping outside life, avoiding the pressing constraints of civilisation, the rush, rush, rush, the must, must, must that fascinates me (like most bookworms, I am forever wanting to turn the outside world off for a time and exist suspended in a stress-free cocoon). Sadly, however magical the moment, eventually the bubble pops, and we are left to continue with our busy, busy lives.

This is an intriguing book and well deserving of its reputation. It needs to be read and reread; and I'm sure that that's exactly what I'll do.

*****

After a week of short fiction, it's time to hand out the prizes, and I would have to give this match to the ladies. Woolf played a very strong game and was ably backed up by her American partner, whose concision and precision made her a formidable protagonist. On the other side of the net, Garcia Marquez used his unorthodox style to great effect, his cunning and elegance making up for a lack of brute strength. Sadly, Naipaul, usually very strong, let his partner down slightly; a little off his game, I feel he didn't take this one too seriously - not bad, just not up to the level of this company.

Still there's always the chance of a rematch...

64 - 'The House of Mirth' by Edith Wharton

Some days, I feel just like Lily Bart.

OK, I sense that there may be a little scepticism out there in Bloggerland, so I will try to explain my ideas a little more clearly (I'm not promising that I'll succeed though). The way in which I feel my life is comparable to the tragic heroine of Edith Wharton's classic novel, 'The House of Mirth', is that... well, I mean... what I'm trying to say is... Hmm. This isn't working too well. let's go back to the start.

Lily Bart - who is a woman approaching the age of thirty in turn of the (twentieth) century New York at the start of this book, and definitely not a thirty-something book-reviewing hack living in the outskirts of Melbourne - has a problem, an unsolvable, unmanageable problem which is threatening to ruin her life. Born into, and a bright star of, New York's high society, Lily does not possess the independent means to allow her to continue her life in the rarefied air of this social stratosphere and, therefore, needs to use her considerable feminine wiles to snare a rich husband who will provide her with the status, and the money, to enable her to continue living in the way to which she has become accustomed.

Lily has the beauty, and the intelligence, to pull off this seemingly minor feat; however, she also possesses something more, a sense that there is more to life than the 'gilded cage' in which she and her acquaintances spend their endless rotations between the city and the country estates of the rich and famous. Frequently, on the cusp of persuading some rich gentleman to make a proposal, Lily's better nature causes her to shy away at the last minute, and the gentleman retreats, licking his wounds, until another bright young thing comes to... mend his broken heart (what did you think I was going to say?!).

As the years pass by, these opportunities become more scarce, and Lily, despite the brightness of her star, begins to slowly fall from the social orbit in which she has been travelling. A chance meeting with Lawrence Selden, a young man who, although part of the same social group, knows his way back out of its golden residence, hastens her spin away from her path towards happiness. The problem is that she does not have the necessary desire to wrench herself from the pull of high society's gravitational field once and for all and thus falls into a gap between the two conflicting styles of life (one probably inhabited by as many mixed metaphors as the previous couple of paragraphs).

I won't say how it continues from there ('there' actually being a very short way into the book...), but I would heartily recommend this book to anyone who likes good literature, and especially to anyone who thinks that Jane Austen's heroines can be a bit weak and insipid at times; you wouldn't catch Emma or Elizabeth behaving like Lily does.

Oh yes, me and Lily Bart. I think I can see an angle now (fittingly enough, an obtuse one). You see, I have devoted large parts of my time this year to my blogging, to the extent that my wife raises her eyebrow rather pointedly whenever she notices me logged on to the site (it may not sound much, but married men everywhere will understand the significance). I am doing my best to make my blog shine among the millions of other book blogs and carrying out all the manifest duties of the assiduous book blogger, including linking to other blogs, joining challenges and commenting on other people's posts. And yet...

... it all seems, well, a bit try-hard. I know that quality of writing is not everything and that a lot of leg-work is required if you are to attract the attention you want, but I am in the unfortunate situation of wanting the love and admiration (and the millions of comments and followers that certain other blogs have), yet unwilling to take the final step towards making a real effort. Like Lily, I shy at the final hurdle, having done most of the hard work, but pulling away from turning myself from the gentleman amateur blogger I currently am into the hard-nosed, advertisement-revenue-seeking, freebie-requesting, award-receiving, million-blog-adding professional that other people are quite prepared to be. I would (secretly) like to be the Bertha Dorset of the Blogosphere, but I am actually doomed to be poor Lily.

Catharsis, a wonderful thing (and nothing to do with a sibling's chest infection). I have purged my bitter feelings and am now ready to continue serenely with my blogging life. I love you all.

I apologise: I am nothing like Lily Bart.

49 - 'The Age of Innocence' by Edith Wharton

On a Facebook group I frequent, there was once a thread discussing the relative merits of Jane Austen and Edith Wharton. Not having read anything by Wharton, I refrained from commenting (unlike the carriageful of Austenites who used the thread as another excuse to praise Saint Jane to the skies), but I was interested by the few comments which actually mentioned the American author. So, when I was idly looking around my local campus bookshop... well, I think we all know where this is heading by now.

Having now read 'The Age of Innocence', I can sort of see why the comparison with Austen was made. The writer describes the close-knit society of 1870s New York with a similar scrutiny to Austen's view of the home counties at the start of the nineteenth century, penetrating the veil of breeding and form and observing the way people who don't really need (or want) to work spend their days. Just as a handsome soldier or blushing debutante were able to set tongues wagging in deepest Surrey, so too is the arrival of the prodigal daughter, Ellen Olenska, the catalyst for a thousand (mostly scandalous) private conversations in the American metropolis.

The differences, however, are far more intriguing. Unlike Austen's race-to-the-matrimonial-finish-line relationships, the happy couple in Wharton's book begin the story as newly affianced lovers, a point where their relationship begins (for the first time, perhaps...) to become interesting. On meeting and talking to the newly arrived Ellen, the cousin of his fiancee May, Newland Archer begins to examine the stifling social structure surrounding him through new eyes and starts to wonder whether he really wants to get married at all. The more he gets to know Ellen, and the more he becomes involved in fighting for her cause against the massed ranks of his new relatives, the less certain he is of his place in New York's fashionable milieu.

As Newland ponders the surroundings he has taken for granted all his life, the reader is sucked into seeing events through his (newly troubled) eyes. When, later in the book, we get the first hints of secrets being kept from our hero, this viewpoint renders the surprise we feel even more abrupt. Throughout the novel, Newland believes that he is in control of his actions, trying desperately to make the decision to break with his family and friends to be with the woman he really loves; it is only at the dinner party to send Ellen on her way back to Europe that he (and the reader) realises that there is no such thing as a secret among New York's upper echelons - and that there is very little chance of his being able to extricate himself from the position he has been groomed for from the cradle.

In fact, despite his constant protests about his fate, Newland may not be as different as he, and the writer, would have us believe. There are several hints to his normality, his 'averageness', in his behaviour, which he would have us consider as unique and different. Even when he is on the verge of running away with Ellen, he feels that their case cannot be compared to the tawdry affairs of his acquaintances; in fact, society knows (but decides to discreetly ignore) about his commonplace pulling against the reins of polite society. What seems like a frustrated rebellion against his family and friends may actually just be the normal doubts of a married man in an era where sex before marriage was not even to be hinted at.

To return to the comparison of Wharton with other authors, this novel brought to mind another English writer, one who wrote about London society at the same era as that of 'The Age of Innocence'. In his Palliser novels, and the excellent 'The Way We Live Now', Anthony Trollope neatly captured the lifestyles of the rich and famous of the day but was also able to accurately reflect the start of a change in the way people went about their daily lives. Just as Ellen Olenska causses turmoil in Manhattan, so too does Lizzie Eustace in 'The Eustace Diamonds'; the notorious bankrupt Julius Beaufort, a minor character in Wharton's novel, is reminiscent of the 'Great Financier' Augustus Melmotte in 'The Way We Live Now'. In comparison, Austen's tales of the rural upper-middle classes can seem a little tame and lacking in substance.

Twenty-odd years on from the bulk of the action in the book, Newland Archer looks back upon his youthful escapades, happy with his married life but still nursing regrets about what could have been. It is easy for the reader to see his marriage of convenience as a sham and to think that this kind of societal pressure is no longer possible; in the West, at least, this kind of semi-arranged marriage is no longer the norm. However, the ties that our community constricts us with are perhaps no less real today than in the New York of Wharton's novel. Can we really say that when we act we pay no regard to the possible reactions of our family and closest friends? In spite of the long gap separating our time from that of the unfortunate Newland Archer, the truth is that we can often be under as much unseen pressure as Edith Wharton's hero.