Wring Around the Collar

Life is too short to spend reading 470 page novels about subjects that have been written dry before. We know too much about the placid suburbia of the '50s and the upheaval of the '60s. Even feminists--or perhaps, especially feminists--are tired of reading epics of raised consciousness and multiple orgasms. Least of all we need another book set at Harvard. Even if it does have a promising opening scene set in the bathroom of Sever Hall.

Marilyn French's first novel, The Women's Room, entwines all these overworked themes and setting. Only, as the frustrated reader surprisingly discovers, somehow it works. Just as you reach the point of nausea over a suburban kitchen dialogue, or read one more Harvard grad student gripe, French's narrator intervenes, letting you know that she too is bored.

The narrator has no name but she is mysteriously connected with the characters, Suspicions of what the connection is compel you through the book. You need to know why this woman is spending her time strolling in solitude along a Maine beach, why she is spending her summer remembering, why it all began 40 years ago, with Mira.

Mira is the central character in this book. She spent her childhood on a leash in her suburban backyard. (At age five, Mira had taken off all her clothes and toddled to the store. Her parents didn't much like the idea of roping her up but didn't think they had much of an alternative.) She is a bright, lonely child who skipped ahead several grades in school and read Nietzsche while her girlfriends giggled over boys. In college Mira comes into her own, speaking her thoughts and expressing her curiousity. The reader resents, as Mira did, the male students' assumption that she is as free with her body as she is with her opinions. But we are less surprised than Mira when after a night spent dancing giddily in a bar, a friend has to whisk her away and lock her up to prevent a gang rape.

The book is built on two circles of women; first Mira and her housewife friends in the '50s and later, Mira's grad student classmates at Harvard. Though the lifestyles and concerns of these two groups differ radically, both sets of women are forced to acknowledge that in twenty years, little has changed. The first group marries, almost automatically.

The Harvard group, despite their perennial cry of "What am I doing here?" are freer. Some are married, two are divorced, one is gay. But underneath all that '70s liberation, we know that it is all the same. With or without a doctorate, it is shit and string beans.

French is neither the first nor will she be the last to voice these views. Her realizations, or rather those of her characters, all of whom come across as believable people instead of polemical mouthpieces, at first seem trite and backward looking. The housewives meet daily for coffee, constantly interrupted by clamoring children. They turn their husbands' selfishness into a joke, but refuse to acknowledge their oppression. Identifying with these women is difficult; if anything, they represent the lives of our mothers, lives that we have rejected.

The Women's Room rises above bitter nostalgia and feminist rhetoric. French's true-to-life characters and her persuasive narrator aid her in this. In addition, she ties the women's experiences to the nation's. Poltical caucuses, not the supermarket, become the meeting place for the women. When the Harvard women gather for coffee, they talk of Vietnam, not laundromats. Some of the characters, like Mira's friend Val, become deeply, almost obsessively involved with the peace movement. Mira becomes serious about attending the meetings only after she meets an attractive man at one.) In addition to the politicized sphere in which the women move is the underlying awareness of violence. Some blood spilled out of the peace movement itself, some flowed from the battered skulls after the Harvard strike. Then there was that day in 1970. Val strolled through Cambridge, sun shining, resolving to leave her meetings and take walks more often. At home, she is standing over a pot of spaghetti sauce chopping vegetables into it. She turned on the kitchen TV:

The sauce was simmering, it smelled delicious, she picked up the pot to smell it--she always did that and then somebody was saying it, she heard him say it, it couldn't be, but he was saying it was, she turned around to look at the screen, it couldn't be, but there it was, there were pictures, it was happening right before her eyes, she couldn't believe it, and then the picture stopped and someone was talking about a dirty shirt collar and talking about something else as if there were anything else to talk about and she heard this screaming, it was ungodly, it was coming from the back of her head, she could hear it, it was a women screaming in agony, and when she looked, there was blood all over her kitchen fllor.

Val stopped screaming and cleaned up the spilled sauce. Then she sat down and thought about Kent State. And motherhood. Shit and string beans for this.

A few days later, Mira, Val and their friends marched to the Boston Common in a huge protest against the United States invasion of Cambodia. The group returned to Val's and turned on the news, awaiting some recap of the event. They were interrupted by a phone call from Val's daughter Chris, a freshman in college. She had been raped. Violence had come full circle since Mira's night in Kelly's Bar.

The rape destroyed Val. She placed little value on her daughter's chastity but a great deal on her safety, her integrity, her right to be a person--all of which the rape defied. In her political discussions Val had avoided saying "the system." But in the case of the rape there was no sidestepping the word. The system was men, and the system was guilty--cops, doctors, attorneys, as well as the black youth who pled guilty and the judge who sentenced him to six months for battery. Val recalled her liberal sympathy for the black boys in the line up and realized she'd never feel it again.

The Women's Room's sense of hopelessness and of dissipated anger would be easy to shrug off in a poorly constructed book. But French is convincing, depressingly so. A reader must make a conscious and deliberate attempt to convince him or herself that French's power is not the only truth. For French ultimately serves the same purpose Val does for her friends. While she does not expect you to accept all of what she perceives, she forces you at least to consider it.

If the '50s housewives are our mothers, the novel's Harvard group are our sisters. They partially escape the kitchen, but only partially. The rare husband willing to help wash dishes expects constant and eternal gratitude in return.