Virginia Feito's MRS MARCH

 Good old John Berger wrote the perfect encapsulation of what's going on at the heart of Virginia Feito's exquisitely tense and uncomfortable novel of the American mid-century, Mrs. March:

Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed is female. Thus she turns herself into an object of vision: a sight.

Mrs. March -- we don't learn her first name until the last sentence of the book; even when we flashback to her childhood and see her as a little girl desperately trying to earn her ice-queen mother's faintest sign of approval, she is referred to as Mrs. March -- is a walking, talking example of the consequences that these facts about our culture have on women*. A child of incredible privilege, raised by elite parents in the upper echelons of New York Society, Mrs. March has never had the faintest notion that what they declared to be good and important and true could be anything but. And while a slight scandal attached to her marriage to one of her professors, in which she would be (gasp!) a second wife, at least her husband is a professor, and a famous novelist, and handsome, so he's at least kind of a catch. But, of course, our Mrs. March has, in marrying her novelist, taken on an internalized competitor in the form of the First Mrs. March, this novel's first act of doubling its unpleasant-yet-internally-oppressed heroine.

This overwhelming pressure tightens up every passage of this book, written in a third person narration so tightly focused on Mrs. March's point of view and innermost imaginings that it might as well be first person. From beginning to end, the text crackles with the tension between how she feels other people see her and how she wishes to see herself. No room at all is left for how she might actually look or, god forbid, just be. She isn't so much conniving, as the nude women in art about which Berger made his famous remarks, with the forces that turn her into a sight as pre-emptively performing all of the physical and emotional labor necessary to turn herself into a sight before anyone else can. Her internal critic is the most ruthless I've encountered in literature, maybe ever; even when she manages to break free of it for a moment to enjoy, say, a stolen cigarette, her attention is still on what other people would think of her could they see her sneaking a smoke in her beautifully appointed en suite bathroom during her own party -- or rather, the party she organized to celebrate her husband's latest achievement.

 Even before an inciting incident at her favorite bakery sends her into new spirals of paranoia, self-doubt and impotent anger, we have seen her holding an internalized debate with herself over the impact of her decision to wear a pair of kidskin gloves out on her errands.

...they were a very distinct color for gloves: a sort of mint-green. She would never have picked that color out, not once believing she could pull such a thing off, but she thrilled at the fantasy that strangers, when they saw her wearing them, would assume her to be the kind of carefree, confident woman who would have selected such a bold color for herself.

This is a highly characteristic passage, as it turns out; we're treated to variations on it throughout. This makes for some exhausting reading, but this book is about a lot more than just a person struggling with an externally imposed ideal for herself; she is also struggling with the possibility that her husband, a famous novelist, has just ruined both her public persona and her private sense of self, what little of that there is. For as she stands in line at the bakery admiring the idea of herself those mint-green gloves have given her, her husband's latest novel is creating a sensation all over New York City (and thus, naturally, the world). Concerning the plight of a prostitute named Johanna who is so miserable and pathetic that her clientele consists of men who essentially pay her not to sleep with them, this new novel is supposedly his portrait of Mrs. March. Oh, not that Mrs. March is a prostitute or anything so vulgar, just that, supposedly, he has given his pathetic literary prostitute all of Mrs. March's quirks and mannerisms. Supposedly.

It is only when the bakery's owner mentions this to her while packaging her order that Mrs. March realizes this. Characterisitically, Mrs. March concludes that she can never patronize that bakery again, a decision she will make over and over throughout the novel because she simply refuses to handle misperceptions or misunderstandings at all, let alone directly. Many of these situations could be cleared up by a moment's honesty and a moment's courage to speak up to clarify or contradict what's been said to her (or, more often, what she has assumed she can infer via round-about means was said about her behind her back), but Mrs March, Mrs. March won't even read the new novel for herself, even though she used to be her husband's first reader. She prefers to imagine that her husband has cruelly dissected her character and laid out her every flaw, neatly lableled and impossible to gainsay, upon a table for the vulgar masses to see and titter over.

And as for asking her husband directly whether he did or did not base his pathetic prostitute character on her, heaven forfend, for just as Mrs. March has been raised to value appearances over everything in her own conduct, she has also absorbed, chiefly from her mother, the idea that marriage is the ultimate venue for what good old David Foster Wallace has memorably referred to as "appearance poker" and not a place in which to be vulnerable, confiding, anything less than perfect. To ask him about her suspicions would be to invite conflict, and there is no place for that in her perfect tableau of marriage. She did not win the prize of becoming his second wife by contradicting him!

Armed/burdened with her gloriously imperfect understanding of what's becoming of her world, her psyche begins to fracture in at least two very interesting but painful-to-read ways. First, she starts hallucinating, that people have started calling her Johanna, that damning exterior evidence of her failings as a housekeeper** like cockroaches and dead pigeons are appearing and disappearing in her immaculate Upper East Side apartment, and later alternate versions of herself; later she starts imagining not only that her husband has, in fact, exposed her to public ridicule via his ever-more-popular new novel, but has also developed a secret life as a murderer. The collection of "evidence" she gathers to support all of these delusions would stagger the imagination even of your average Q adherent, but since she never confides a single thought to anyone, she struggles along with all of it until, of course, it all starts manifesting in her outward behavior, for which she actually starts to experience actual consequences.

Before things get really bad, though, they get occasionally, though uncomfortably, funny, as when Mrs. March spots a copy of the offending novel in someone's grocery cart at the store and steals it, not to read for herself (she has easy access to the thing at home, of course), but to destroy it, so at least one total stranger in New York City won't be a witness to her shame.

I haven't felt this uncomfortable since the one and only time I watched Darren Aronofsky's harrowing Requiem for a Dream and watched Ellen Burstyn's amazing portrayal of physical and psychic breakdown in the person of Sara Goldfarb. Mrs. March's experience never gets so phantasmogorical as this clip, but it still kind of encapsulates the intensity of what she does endure -- all without any drugs at all.

So, as I said on Twitter earlier this month, if the Ellen Burstyn plot in Requiem for a Dream was your favorite but you wish it took place in the 1970s and was about a novelist's wife, this is your book. Mrs. March, as I said, doesn't resort to drugs, but she also doesn't have anyone in her life who would be willing to intervene with her if she did, or to correct her about what is probably just a giant heap of narcissism and misunderstanding.

Which makes her tale every bit as tragic as Sara Goldfarb's, though Mrs. March perhaps seems less deserving of our sympathies. For Mrs. March is never a likeable character; by the time we see her fussing that her son's Christmas play has been canceled due to a blizzard, not for his sake but because 

It frustrated Mrs. March, too, that the costume she had worked so hard to get the seamstress to finish on time would never be seen by the other children's mothers, who surely hadn't made their sons' and daughters' costumes out of the finest merino wool (italics mine).

-- we have already decided that she is White Privilege, The Woman. And of course her child is simply part of her performance of perfect femininity; she almost admits to herself early in the novel that she only had Jonathan to prove that she was better than the First Mrs. March, who only gave their husband a selfish, jet-setting daughter, and to get one over on her sister, who married well but never had children, and maybe, too, to finally win some approval in their mother's eyes by giving her a grandchild. Not because she, you know, wanted a kid or anything.

I make this sound like a hate read, and maybe in part it is; Mrs. March is Upper Class White Privilege Barbie, so her misery threatens always to become our entertainment. But this is where Virginia Feito is maybe a genius of a special kind, for while she can't make us (or, at least, me) feel sorry for Mrs. March, by novel's end we completely understand why she is the way she is, and maybe, just maybe, we gain an new appreciation for what first and yes, even second wave feminism achieved, for all that Mrs. March would have deplored both movements. We still carry a version of that same internal critic carping at us, but we've developed tools to keep her negativity at least somewhat in check, and have removed a lot of the stigma around the tool that could have done Mrs. March the most good of all: therapy. For as she has shown us by novel's end, a Mrs. March who chooses to act instead of merely appear is capable of some surprising things; it's left to us to imagine, and maybe to mourn, what she might have been capable of if she'd allowed herself to act all along.

*Whether assigned female at birth or not.

**Well, supervisor of a professional housekeeper.