A Feminist New Yorker Short Story by Lauren Groff

 Lauren Groff's short story "Annunciation" in the Feb 7, 2022 New Yorker is probably about as feminist as it gets, although not so much in terms of third wave "intersectionality." This is a woman-focused story in which men, to the extent they only vaguely appear, are disinterested, ineffectual, distant or in two cases, while no longer present, clearly malevolent. It's a story in which a woman can do a man's work and in which women rely on each other for support. 

Before going further, I need to say that "a clanger" created a hurdle for me at the start.  In her third sentence, Groff describes her unnamed heroine running in the hills above Palo Alto, California, as "the mist falls in starched sheets over the distant hills, the ones that press against the Bay."  I'm very familiar with that region and there are no hills the protagonist can see that "press against the Bay."  The south bay is surrounded by flat lands with big freeways running through them. The hills are well back from the water.  

But most readers probably wouldn't be that familiar with the terrain and I suppose one can write this off to artistic license.  "Annunciation" is a work of fiction after all.

Groff's story begins with a woman graduating from a college in New England. No one in her large family attends and as a result, with little money, she gets into an awkward old car given to her by a grandfather and heads west, ending up in a San Francisco youth hostel.  Although the story ends late in the protagonists' life, that's almost the last readers hear of her original family. At one point, the protagonist's mother does tracks her down, but their reunion is very short-lived. Graff's heroine has no need for her mother.

After the brief stay in San Francisco, the protagonist finds a job down the Peninsula in Redwood City ("Climate best by Government Test," although that isn't mentioned in the story) and takes a low-wage clerical job in a government welfare agency. There she befriends a down-and out co-worker, a victim of domestic violence who lives with a young daughter in a Volkswagen Vanagon -- in one of the wealthiest areas of the U.S. 

Groff's heroine has also found cheap housing close to her job in the compound of a strange, somewhat spooky woman who eventually dies of the law of unintended consequences, sending Groff's heroine on her way. 

The two connections mentioned above -- they seem to fall short of real friendships or relationships -- are described in great detail by Groff, but in the end, neither one goes anywhere. This is not "sisterhood" feminism. 

From here, readers are suddenly taken to a point significantly later in the life of Groff's heroine -- in Italy where readers are told she is now living a life of "grace," fundamentally a Christian concept, but in this case associated with such things as birds singing amid "beauty."

In the interim, readers learn that the woman in question created a family of her own and while it "has become my true north," it is one from which she apparently episodically flees. -- thinking good things about this behavior because she has so far always eventually returned.  No mention of a husband, but she claims to be a mother who "sees her children fully." One wonders if they see it that way, but readers learn nothing of them.

One thing she likes about Italy is that she is surrounded by a thousand Madonnas, with a thousand different faces" (in churches), all unnamed, but wearing "the particular mortal face of a woman the artist loved."  One supposes that's the way she would like to think of herself. 

In the usual New Yorker interview, one learns Groff struggled with versions this story for a decade, apparently because she had no idea where it was supposed to go. Then she made a bet with another writer on who could first write a short story with a happy ending (a rarity readers are told) and voila!

Grace, wherever it came from and for whatever reason Groff's protagonist was worthy of it, is where it's at. And who needs men?

Amen, those of a feminist persuasion might say.

Culture and Identity: "The Last One" by Fatima Daas

Although there is considerable controversy about this, the ancient Greek rhetorician Isocrates (436-338 bce) is credited with advancing the idea that culture can trump other markers of identity.

This was at the time when Philip II of Macedon, not a Greek but a person with Greek leanings partially as a result of three years of early education in Thebes, was about to embark on conquests that, under his son, Alexander the Great, would "Hellenize" much of the then-known world.

"Our city has so far surpassed other men in thought and speech that students of Athens have become the teachers of others, and the city has made the name "Greek" seem to be not that of a people but of a way of thinking, and people are called Greeks because they share in our education rather than in our birth," Isocrates said in one of his writings. 

I mention this because it is an important idea for many modern nation states, in particular -- in this instance -- France, which much like Isocrates in ancient Athens, came to believe French culture superior to most if not all others.

A few years back, for instance, the man then serving as France's Minister of Education, denounced "intersectionality," an outgrowth of the feminist movement, as in conflict with French republican values.

While Kimberley Williams Crenshaw, a Black American feminist, is credited with originating the term in the late 1980s to explain different layers of oppression experienced by women of color, intersectionality has since come to be a way of parsing out what, in the current era, are all-important questions of personal or social identity. According to Wikipedia, this includes such things as race, gender, sex, sexuality, class, ability, nationality, citizenship, religion, and body type.  

One other thing worth noting before continuing: a person's perceived intersectionality can be viewed either in positive or negative terms.

That's a very lengthy introduction to a few comments on a book called "The Last One," which, according to the New York Times, created quite a sensation in France where it was originally published. Written under an assumed name by a young lesbian Muslim woman living in a Paris suburb, the protagonist attempts to sort through her multiple and sometimes conflicting strands of identity both to find her true self and to reconcile those strands of identity with what it means to be French.

"Representation and identity are fraught topics in France, a country that prides itself on a universalist tradition that unites all citizens under a single French identify, regardless of their ethnicity or faith," Julia Webster Ayuso, reviewing the book in The Times, said. That's at least in part because too much focus on individual identity can be seen as a threat to social cohesion, the NYT review noted.

In other words, collective culture trumps individual notions of identity if you are French, more or less along the lines of the notions but forward by Isocrates.

"If you want to be French today, a fully French citizen, you have to give up one of the fragments of your identity," the author of "The Last One," called Fatima Daas, told the NYT.  Perhaps more than one, it might seem.

"The Last One" is apparently divided into a number of chapters, each of which considers one strand of the protagonist's identity. Some, such as her sexual orientation and her Islamic religion, are in conflict with each other as well as, perhaps, with a general cultural overlay. There's arguably nothing particularly new about that, but overall, the book, available in English, is perhaps an illuminating read in our current identify-focused culture. 

A Couple of Reasons to Read "Hello, Goodbye" by Yiyun Li

 Did you meet someone in your first year of college who became a friend for life?  Are you a parent who has difficulty, or memorably had difficulty, dealing with the wisdom of young children?

If the answer to either of those questions is "yes," you might enjoy Yiyun Li's short story in the Nov. 15, 2021 edition of The New Yorker entitled "Hello, Goodbye."

The story, like a lot of  contemporary literary fiction, doesn't go much of anywhere at the end of the day, but it's well written. It's a partial exploration of certain interpersonal relationships as opposed to a tale that ends in the resolution of a plot or a set of issues.

The friendship is between two women, Nina, a daughter of Chinese immigrants, and Katie, who is apparently white and of European descent. Brought up in Kansas and Indiana, respectively, they went to U.C. Berkeley and ended up saying in California, both working in marketing (of course) for Silicon Valley firms. This was back in the late 1990s.

After that backdrop, the story jumps 20 years or so forward, into the current pandemic. Nina has a couple of precocious young daughters and a reliable, but boring husband. Katie, who has never had a child, wants to get out of her marriage to a wealthy jerk considerably older than she is and arrives on Nina's doorstep in need of help. Nina tries to balance her friend's needs with those of her children, the latter exacerbated by the pandemic and her husband's rather passive attitude toward parenting. 

If that sounds interesting, perhaps because you can identify with one or more aspects of the situation, I recommend "Hello, Goodbye."  The dialog in particular is good. If not, forget it. 

Perhaps the most memorable sentence in the entire story comes near the beginning. It goes as follows: "Nina was 27, not helplessly young, yet far from being trapped in a mildewed marriage, as she tended to believe many middle-aged women were." Readers can decide for themselves the extent to which she may have ended up in one. 

In the usual New Yorker author interview, Ms Li said that when it comes to relationships, she believes "muddling through" is better than wrecking things by opting for more extreme measures. The story is definitely in that vein.

Authors Don't Get to Decide How Their Books Are Read

The salient message in Katy Waldman's Feb. 11, 2021 New Yorker review of "Bina: a Novel in Warnings," goes as follows:

"Anakana Schofield’s new novel, 'Bina,' is almost as recalcitrant as its narrator; both demand, grouchily and wittily, to be taken on their own terms."

Good luck!

When an artist releases a work of art, while he or she may retain legal rights to it, it's in the public domain as to what, if anything, it means. There is absolutely no requirement that it be "taken on its own terms." which seems to imply a certain reading is required. But, Waldman had to come down somewhere in her review and that didn't appear to be easy since Bina, the character, is a grouchy old woman "aged out of economic value and conventional desirability."

"It’s tempting to interpret 'Bina' as a pointed challenge to the feminist marketplace: do you actually care about this lady?" Waldman asks. In other words, if one is a feminist, is one required to care about all women no matter how pedestrian or lackluster in nature? Among other things, does one have time for that?

Waldman is quick to point out that this is a novel of character, not a novel of plot, and in that sense is yet another child of literary modernism -- along the lines of "Casting Shadows" by Jhuma Lahiri, which  I talked about in my previous post.

The intimacy and directness of Bina's interaction with readers is the book's greatest strength and as a result, over time, she makes for great company, Waldman says. As is the case with "Casting Shadows," it's a window into a woman's world and may well be highly illuminating in that respect if one is interested in "getting women right" as male writers of fiction might be. 

But there is no need to take Schofield's writing on any particular terms.  Whatever you make of it is what it is. 

Ferrante's "The Days of Abandonment" Can Feel Out of Date

Emily Temple, a senior editor at Literary Hub, just published a recommended list of relatively short contemporary works of fiction entitled "The 50 Best Contemporary Novels Under 200 Pages." Sadly, my novella, Manhattan Morning isn't among them.

But that isn't why I bring this up. Rather, one of the books on Temple's list is "The Days of Abandonment," by Elena Ferrante, the author of a series of novels known as the Neapolitan Quartet.

"This is the real Ferrante. I mean, look, I love the Neapolitan series as much as everybody ... but in my opinion, this short novel about a woman unraveling is her true masterpiece," Temple says.

I am not a woman and therefor probably relatively unqualified to make the following observations, but I read this book and its depiction of a woman's place in a marriage struck me as out of date.

This is the story of Olga whose husband leaves her for a younger woman after 15 years of marriage, a distressing upheaval no doubt, but one that is particularly shattering for Ferrante's heroine because she feels her very identity has been wiped out.  That's because, and this seems particularly odd for an educated woman in a feminist-sensitive Western world, Olga has given herself over to her husband in totality on the believe that this is what love, in the context of marriage, is all about.

At a couple of points in the story, Olga enumerates lists of things that she did for her husband, starting with getting him through university and supporting him in his work life to the point where she had "made him what he had become." 

In the process, "I had put aside my own aspirations to go along with his," she says, noting that she "had had no work, any sort of work, even writing. for at least five years," as she took care of the house, the children and the family finances including the income taxes.

"While I was taking care of the children, I was expecting from Mario [her husband] a moment that never arrived, the moment when I would again be as I had been before my pregnancies, young, slender, energetic, shamelessly certain I could make of myself a memorable person."

Instead, she at one point spends several evenings searching through old photographs "for signs of my autonomy."

As she disintegrates, Olga feels not only the loss of her identity and sexuality, she most fundamentally feels increasingly vulnerable and, in the end, instead of remaking herself as an independent woman, settles for safety above all else in a relationship with an older neighbor.

Asked in an interview (re-published in her book "Frantumaglia," or jumbled fragments) if she would call "The Days of Abandonment" a feminist novel, Ferrante replied yes, and no.

"Yes, because it's sustained by the female reaction to abandonment, from Medea and Dido on. No, because it doesn't aim at telling what is the theoretically and practically correct reaction of the contemporary woman faced with the loss of the beloved man nor does it brand male behaviors as vile," Ferrante said.

Mario, Olga's husband, simply fell in love with someone else.

The Death of Jerry Herman and "Patricia"

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I have been attempting to have a neo-baroque operetta called "Patricia" composed.  This is an ongoing project, but if you would like to listen to demonstration recordings of two arias, you can find them here. Please feel free to comment on what you like or don't like about these songs, which have a feminist theme.

I mention this because Jerry Herman, the composer of "Hello Dolly" and other popular musicals recently died. As his obit in the New York Times noted, at a time when Stephen Sondheim and other contemporary composers were writing "dark, intricate melodies and witty, ambiguous lyrics, he (Herman) wrote song-and-dance music that stuck to the story line with catchy tunes and sunny phrases of hope and happy endings."

One of my gripes about contemporary opera is that it, like some contemporary musicals, doesn't have any memorable songs -- no melodies or lyrics that one can really remember or want to remember.  Indeed, it sometimes seems the singer comes last despite the fact that the main reason people go to the opera (as opposed to going to the theater, watching television or reading a book) is to hear great voices sing beautiful and/or powerful songs.

"There are only a couple of us who care about writing songs that people can leave the theater singing," Herman told the NYT at one point during his career.

Well, that's just what the composer with whom I am working and I are trying to do.

"A Doll's House" Resonates in the Opening of "White Teeth"

Back in 1879, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen shocked society with his play "A Doll's House," in which one of the chief characters, Nora Helmer, walks out not just on her husband, but on their three young children as well.

The idea that a woman could do such a thing provoked what James McFarlane, in an introduction to four of Ibsen's plays, described as "a storm of outraged controversy that penetrated far beyond the confines of the theater proper into the leader (opinion) columns of the Western press and the drawing rooms of polite society."

What prompted Nora's exit?  The realization that her husband, Torvald, had put his "honor," which is to say his standing in society, above his love for her. And by implication, since her children are the product of a union that was in her view not a real marriage, they are not hers.

This was so transgressive that, much to his disgust, Ibsen was forced to provide a different ending for German theaters.  In that ending, while Nora wants to leave her husband, she realizes she can't leave her children and the play ends with Torvald apparently then believing reconciliation is possible.

Over 100 years later, Zadie Smith's much-praised first novel, "White Teeth," opens with one of her main characters, Archie Jones, attempting suicide because his wife Ophelia recently divorced him.

Why is this such a humiliation for Archie?

"Generally," Smith's unnamed narrator tells us, "women can't do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past."

Women and Identity Politics

With the degree of misogyny evident in the last U.S. presidential election and with the on-going Hollywood-led sexual harassment scandals, one would think that just being a woman would suffice to be a member of a political identity group.

But no, it apparently gets more finely sliced than that with white women under attack along with white men in the prevailing U.S. culture wars that may increasingly determine political outcomes.

Here's a Washington Post story about a recent conference in Detroit attended by about 4,000 women. What struck me about it was the following paragraph:

Identity issues were a theme of many of the convention events, which included a workshop titled “Confronting White Womanhood,” for “white women committed to being part of an intersectional feminist movement to unpack the ways white women uphold and benefit from white supremacy.”

Unpack? Then what?

"Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk" by Kathleen Rooney

In an earlier post,  I wrote about Kathleen Rooney because she teaches a course entitled "The Writer as Urban Walker" at DePaul University in Chicago and my novella "Manhattan Morning" falls squarely into that genre.

To see how Ms Rooney handled the task, I just finished reading her novel "Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk," which fulfilled my expectations in most ways, but fell a bit short in one respect.