Tag Archives: social prejudice

A Feminist in the Four Hundred: A Well Behaved Woman

25 Monday Mar 2019

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Review: A Well Behaved Woman, by Therese Anne Fowler
St. Martins, 2018. 392 pp. $28

In 1874, Miss Alva Smith, Southern belle of good name but a lost cotton fortune, puts herself on the New York marriage market, much the way gambler with a limited stake visits a casino. She snags William K. Vanderbilt, who must be counted quite a catch, having more money than even he knows how to spend. But it’s not love or even physical attraction that motivates her, only the financial considerations that will save her three sisters, their invalid father, and herself from destitution, and William’s apparent liking for her. Bad idea, you say? Marry in haste, repent at leisure?

Alva Vanderbilt, duly attired for her costume ball in March 1883 (courtesy nyhistory.org via Wikimedia Commons)

Well, yes, and as a Vanderbilt, there’s plenty of leisure around, about two hundred pages’ worth, in this case. By that time, Alva has learned a thing or two about her husband and the high society she was so eager to join. The first lessons are brutal. William’s notion of sex is lift the nightgown, push hard, grunt, roll off, and return to his own room. The day their first child is born, he gives Alva an extravagantly expensive bauble “for her trouble,” and goes off to inspect champion horseflesh for purchase. After all, as he says, he has nothing better to do.

Alva shouldn’t be too surprised. As the impecunious Miss Smith pursuing William in the dining room of an upper-class watering hole, she senses that she herself might as well have been a horse:

The other marriageable girls were too lovely, all of them, those rose-milk complexions and hourglass waists and silks that gleamed like water in sunlight. The Greenbrier resort’s dining room was filled with such girls, there in the company of clever mothers whispering instructions on the most flattering angle for teacup and wrist, and sit straighter, smile brightly, glance coyly — lashes down. The young men, who were outnumbered three to one, wore crisp white collars and linen coats and watched and smiled and nodded like eager buyers at a Thoroughbred market.

Yet, as Fowler painstakingly reveals, the results of this successful husband hunting aren’t all bad. Alva enjoys many of the things William’s money buys — physical comfort, fine clothes and jewels, beautiful homes that she helps design (and for which she has a gift), protection from life’s hazards. The Gilded Age comes alive in these pages, with its shockingly conscienceless opulence while hunger and hardship stalk New York; the social cabals involving who can snub whom and feel righteous about it; and the assumption, embraced by both sexes, that women are ornaments, hearth warmers, and social arbiters but never, ever thinking, independent-minded people with their own inner lives or interests. I like how Fowler’s drawn the two major characters, and though I can’t say I like William, I do get that he feels a dynastic weight on his shoulders and acts accordingly. Unfortunately, others suffer from his self-inflicted wound, because he’s a man incapable of reflection or questioning his prerogatives.

You know that Alva’s different from her cohort, that within her lurks a social reformer, a sympathetic person, perhaps even a democrat, and the narrative implies that had the field been open to her, she could have trained as an architect. The first scene of A Well Behaved Woman shows Miss Smith touring a tenement with seven other upper-class ladies and displaying a singularly receptive, empathic reaction. I love this scene, and Fowler’s clever to introduce Alva that way. Two hundred pages is a long time to wait for consciousness, and the author is giving the reader something to hold onto during the interim.

But I’m not sure the tactic succeeds. I understand Fowler’s commitment to a slow burn, because Alva has been taught all her life that an outwardly brilliant marriage is all any woman could (or should) want. I agree that her inchoate dreams for wider horizons shouldn’t lead her in another direction too soon or too easily. Further, the payoff, when it finally comes, does satisfy, and Alva’s subsequent actions justify the author’s contention that this socialite was an ardent, practicing feminist.

That said, however, it’s another question whether you actually care about Alva’s intricate, time-consuming machinations to make Caroline Astor accept the Vanderbilts as social equals. No doubt it’s true to life, but, as Alva’s African-American maid gently suggests, there’s prejudice, and then there’s prejudice. Moreover, Fowler proves her case early on that William K. Vanderbilt, like other men of his class, is selfish, tyrannical, and completely deluded as to the relationship between wealth and character. Piling on the evidence adds nothing new.
Consequently, whether A Well Behaved Woman will please you depends on your patience for the Gilded Age and its sins. It’s a well-written book, and Alva’s a worthy character, but I wonder whether Fowler could have told her story more effectively.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

A Tender Plant: The Ballroom

24 Monday Apr 2017

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Review: The Ballroom, by Anna Hope
Random House, 2016. 313 pp. $27

Ella Fay feels so oppressed by the Yorkshire textile mill at which she works that she breaks a window in a frenzied fit. For her crime, and because this is England in 1911–when the lower classes aren’t deemed to have feelings, let alone to be worth understanding–she’s bundled off to Sharston, an institution on the moors.

West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum, (later High Royds Psychiatric Hospital), was the model for Sharston. One of Hope’s forbears was an inmate, for a time (courtesy highroydshospital.co.uk, 2006, via Wikimedia Commons)

Sharston is a desperate place that mingles the mentally disturbed with people who only seem so or who plainly aren’t, and whose only offense is poverty. But no matter how they got there, they know that no one leaves except feet first, about which there are many terrible rumors and some hard evidence, for a few men are assigned to dig the common graves.

John Mulligan is one, a man weighed down by promises he broke and wrong turns he made. But he’s sensitive and intelligent–far more than the asylum officials who keep him locked up–and you sense that something within yearns to break out and, if necessary to break heads.

But Sharston has one redeeming activity. Though the men and women are strictly segregated, once a week, those who’ve behaved themselves are allowed into the ballroom to dance. Through John’s eyes, you see the anticipation:

The men on John’s side disappeared off to the washrooms, and when they came back they had scrubbed faces and hair spat on and smoothed down. You could taste their excitement, thick and sticky, filling the air and leaving room for little else. It disturbed the far-gone ones on the other side, who got restless in their chairs and moaned and shouted out. John sat himself in the corner and took small shallow breaths, trying not to let it in; it was a terrible dangerous contagion, hope.

John and Ella dance, and from that springs an unlikely romance. What a tender plant it is, their love, for, if discovered, it will be uprooted; and meeting outside dancing hours is strictly against the rules. But John contrives to write Ella letters and smuggle them to her. At first, he only describes the sky and trees he sees during his work, because he knows Ella’s shut inside, as are all the women, which he considers an outrage. But what he doesn’t know is that Ella can’t read, and that she must ask her friend Clem to help her. (Clem is short for Clemency, an ironic name, for she receives none.) So Clem becomes Fay’s scribe, deriving perhaps too much vicarious pleasure from her role and inevitably forgetting where the boundaries lie.

It’s a brilliant touch, but no less so the character of Charles Fuller, the assistant medical officer. Fuller believes in eugenics, and as the novel opens, he’s struggling against the main intellectual current of his scientific faith, which says that enforced sterilization is the only way to preserve England. Otherwise, the nation will be overrun by the poor, the unfit, and the mentally ill, too depraved to know better than their savage ways, or even to care. It’s blood-curdling to read this tripe–even worse to know that such luminaries as Winston Churchill actually agreed–but at first, Fuller objects, because he believes that he can “save” John Mulligan and burnish his own career by doing so. So he makes many observations about John, intending to write a paper contesting that certain promising asylum inmates may, in fact, be rehabilitated.

However, Fuller has a deeper conflict. He’s a repressed homosexual, and he believes that if he followed his desires, not quite expressed but tangible nonetheless, he’d be filthy, dangerous, and depraved. In other words, he’d be no better than Sharston’s population, whom he holds himself above with a tenacity that shows how inadequate he feels (and once you meet his parents, you know why). Consequently, since he can never follow his heart or be happy, he hates anyone who can. John and Ella, be warned.

I criticized Hope’s previous novel, Wake, for the shallowness of the male characters. Nothing could be further from the truth in The Ballroom. Fuller, John, and John’s friend, Dan Riley, are complete people, and several minor male characters come across strongly as well. I think Hope relies too heavily on coincidences, of which one’s okay, but three’s a crowd. Similarly, Fuller’s behavior doesn’t always seem consistent with his character, as if his erratic boomerangs served the author’s purpose too conveniently. And, as usual, I wonder why Hope needs her prologue, which, also as usual, compromises the tension somewhat.

Nevertheless, The Ballroom is a marvelous novel, full testimony to the power of love, and I highly recommend it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Guardian Angel: Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse

28 Thursday Apr 2016

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Review: Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse, by Faith Sullivan
Milkweed, 2015. 439 pp. $26

Had Sinclair Lewis believed in or owned the milk of human kindness, he might have written Main Street more like this novel. Main Street would have been a lesser book, bereft of its cynicism and merciless social edge. But that’s not a knock on Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse, which has its own pleasures, one of which is that Sullivan believes firmly in that precious milk, even as she describes a similar strain of small-mindedness.

Sinclair Lewis's hometown of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, is proud of the fact today (2012, courtesy Kirs10 via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Sinclair Lewis’s hometown of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, is proud of the fact today (2012, courtesy Kirs10 via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

When Nell Stillman’s husband dies, leaving her almost destitute with a baby son to care for, she’s not as bad off as she could be. The late Mr. Stillman was a selfish, insensitive brute, so she’s well rid of him, but it’s the early twentieth century, and as a widow in Harvester, Minnesota, she has few socially acceptable choices. Not only that, the town is blessed with many people who have nothing better to do than let her know when she’s made the wrong ones. But Nell has a gift for tolerating human frailties, which earns her friends and protectors. More importantly, the third-grade teacher is quitting her job, and Nell has a teaching certificate.

Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse has no plot to speak of, just an account of Nell’s experiences, told in bitty, episodic chapters. I dislike that approach, which seems superficial at times and geared toward a tag line, as if I were watching television instead of reading a book. But Sullivan makes it work reasonably well, and it’s easy to sympathize with Nell, who struggles to find solace despite many painful experiences. For one, she’s nearly fired because of what a young woman she hired to look after her child may or may not have done. For another, her son, Hillyard, known as Hilly, is aptly named for the life he must climb through; a more genial, caring, gentle boy you couldn’t find, but he’s meat for the town bullies, and Nell suffers with him.

You’ll notice that these are two good, kind people, the live-and-let-live type who readily draw others to them. All Nell’s friends are like that too, more tolerant than the average, and you can tell them right away, as if they were the ones wearing the white hats. That’s both a blessing and a curse to a novelist, I think. You want to read about these kind people, but they don’t always seem real. Nell, Hilly, and those who smile on them appear to have no flaws, whereas the bullies are, well, just bullies, irredeemable and inexplicably mean, deserving no fuller portrayal or explanation.

Sullivan shades this black-and-white picture to some extent by throwing plenty of sorrow at the good folk. But there’s a limit to how far that goes. I admit, Sullivan tells her story skillfully, but it’s not hard to guess what will happen. I like this novel for what it is, a commentary on Midwestern morals of the past century, but I kept wanting to see Nell betrayed by someone who normally shouldn’t have. Instead, she’s betrayed by just whom you’d expect. I wanted more scenes like the one in which Hilly receives a hero’s welcome returning from the Great War, and things go horribly awry because a friend of Nell’s overreaches. Sullivan creates a wrenching moment, a perfect capsule description of what’s wrong with Harvester. But true to form, the friend apologizes profusely, realizing exactly what she’s done, and nothing like that ever happens again.

The title comes from Nell’s love for literature, especially the social comedies of P. G. Wodehouse, whose titled eccentrics and British preoccupations are worlds away from small-town America. That’s why Nell adores these books; they lift her out of herself and banish her troubles for a while, and there’s no greater compliment than that. Nell even has imaginary conversations with Wodehouse, as she does with the people in her life who’ve died, and those talks comfort her as well.

Sullivan’s novel has This Would Be Great for Book Clubs written all over it, which is perhaps a little precious. But I can also see that readers could pick up Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse and be cheered by Nell’s indomitable spirit, despite her losses.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Paying the Price: Terrible Virtue

04 Monday Apr 2016

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Review: Terrible Virtue, by Ellen Feldman
HarperCollins, 2016. 260 pp. $26

It’s a truism that very accomplished people make their families miserable. Such was the curse of Margaret Sanger, to whom the world owes a huge debt, but who scarred her husband and children, and whose character made her impossible to live with or work with. Ellen Feldman has tried to render this complex, great woman in fictional form, and she mostly succeeds.

Born in 1879 to an upstate New York family of thirteen children, of whom eleven survive, young Margaret realizes early on what has ruined her mother’s dreary life and decides she’ll grow up differently. She trains to become a nurse, and, while serving a largely immigrant New York City population, she repeatedly hears the same question from distressed, beaten-down women: How can I stop having more babies I can’t feed? But birth control is illegal–it’s just before the First World War–and giving advice about it through the mail is also a crime. Nevertheless, Sanger distributes pamphlets and magazine articles, and is duly arrested.

Margaret Sanger and her sons Grant and Stuart, around 1919 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

Margaret Sanger and her sons Grant and Stuart, around 1919 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

Naturally, the story doesn’t end there; it’s only the beginning. But how Sanger advances her cause, and at what cost, makes compelling reading indeed. Her husband, Bill, who suffers her many, many love affairs, is a frequent casualty. So are their two sons and daughter, who seldom see their mother, because she’s too busy to take care of them. Professing to believe neither in guilt nor regret, Sanger lets herself off the hook all too easily regarding the people close to her; her conscience seems to work only on behalf of the women desperate for her help.

If you’re thinking that this novel reads more like a biography (an assumption the jacket flap unfortunately underlines), that’s not quite accurate. Terrible Virtue packs plenty of tension, and, unlike life, there’s nothing humdrum in it. Feldman has deftly chosen what to include in her short narrative and what to omit, letting her marvelous prose do the rest. For instance, when young Margaret first climbs the hill in her upstate New York town to attend a boarding school, she sees a family of four playing croquet on a large lawn:

I knew no more children lurked in the house behind, though it looked big enough to accommodate a brood of eight or ten or a dozen. I knew it from the whiteness of their clothes, as immaculate as the conception fable the priest handed out to the parishioners at the bottom of the hill; and from the mother’s serene smiling face as she swung her arms and the sound of the mallet making contact with the ball cracked the quiet air. . . .The sight of that perfect quartet who had never scrapped for food or love or attention, who had never been humiliated before an entire class, who had never felt ashamed of anything, reached out and grabbed me like an arresting officer. And I was guilty as charged, of envy and pride and shame.

The reactions to what Sanger does lend Terrible Virtue part of its power. I particularly recall a gloating, nasty policewoman in a fox fur, who arrests Sanger at Planned Parenthood in 1916, the first birth-control clinic in the country, and takes pleasure in it. Throughout the narrative, myriad characters unwittingly expose their hatred for what Sanger represents, as if reproductive freedom stole something from them–to wit, as with the nasty policewoman, if the Brooklyn poor stopped breeding like rabbits, she could no longer hate them the same way. Terrible Virtue is therefore timely; this scene happened exactly a century ago, but when I read what many state legislatures are doing these days to women’s health clinics, I have to conclude we’ve learned absolutely nothing since.

What mars the novel, though, is Feldman’s choice of first-person voice–not that it’s a bad idea, but because she tampers with it. Sanger’s self-absorption and vanity come through loud and clear when she talks about her family, her movement, her struggles. Yet rather than let Sanger’s narrative voice tell the whole tale, the author drops in random, first-person perspectives from the people Margaret has hurt, which feel like jarring interruptions. Is Feldman afraid that readers really won’t understand that there’s another side to the story? If that’s the case, without breaking the narrative voice, she could easily have shown more of what Sanger chose to deny through scenes in which other characters object to what she’s done. I’m surprised that a fine writer like Feldman should have shown so little confidence in herself or her readers.

Terrible Virtue is worth your time.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.