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.

Bella DePaulo's SINGLED OUT #OneBookAtATime

I'm tempted, this time around, to just share all the passages I highlighted, but that would just be lazy, and would probably somehow confirm some of you in your stereotyping of older single women as selfish and flippant and useless and whatnot. Heh.

For yea, I am one of those, unashamedly in my 40s and not only unmarried but uninterested in changing that, and I've been the target of every single (heh) one of the crappy remarks, employment practices, interrogations and dismissals Bella DePaulo calls out as a sneaky form of prejudice she names "singleism." But I did not turn to Singled Out: How Singles are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After for a categorical list of injustices to get steamed up over, nor did DePaulo intend the book as any kind of call to arms (though she does devote a chapter towards the end to imagining, maybe a little wistfully, what an America that did not discriminate against the never-married, the divorced or the widowed might look like); that last bit of the subtitle, in white lettering on the cover, is key. For while we do get a laundry list of ways in which daily, if not hourly, encounters with "smug marrieds" can be emotionally and psychologically draining, in which popular media (fictional and "reality") dismisses categorically the idea that choosing not to hunt down a spouse is in any way valid (or possible), in which the government denies singles the right to designate a beneficiary for their Social Security checks in the event of their deaths but lets widowed spouses keep on getting paid for life, in which businesses routinely demand that singles pay extra to subsidize their cheaper-per-person couples rates for travel and dining and entertainment, in which employers assume that just because one is not married one is always free to work the extra hours or take the unwanted business trip (and not only that, but really owes it to married co-workers not to tear them away from their all-important families) -- that is not, by a long shot, all that we get.

What we also get is someone who doesn't take media reports of half-assed scientific studies at face value (DePaulo is herself a scientist). She looks at the data herself, shows it to us, and in the process debunks most of the popular mythology that says marriage is better for one. For instance, she finds in study after study purporting to "prove" that married people are happier and healthier that the data was "cheated" -- those happy healthy people who got counted as married were only the ones who were still married. All those divorced and widowed people got clumped in with the never-marrieds, and, let's be honest, dragged our numbers way down. When the data was broken into four, rather than two, categories (still-married, never-married, divorced, widowed) the still-marrieds come out on top, but by a negligible margin (and, interestingly, in one study that did not, as most of these do, look at just a single snapshot of time but instead over a good long period of subjects' lives, on average those "still marrieds" had started out marginally happier to begin with). Who's next happiest? Oh, look, the never marrieds. But all those "how to find a spouse" and "case for marriage" and "single people suck" crusaders rarely, if ever, mention that.

And, too, the book is loaded with anecdotes about unmarried lives, with or without children, which positively brim with unrecognized quality of life -- Condoleeza Rice's, for instance; David Souter's (the book was written before Elena Kagan joined the Supreme Court, but I bet she is a part of DePaulo's pantheon now!); Ralph Nader's; Barbara Walters'. What would our world have been like without them taking on the demanding and challenging roles they did?* And how do you think it feels in interview after interview to always be asked (usually by a "smug married" journo) if it doesn't all feel kind of hollow without a special someone to share it with? And if the high-achieving single in the hot seat says something along the lines of "anything but hollow" well, he or she is just in denial or doesn't understand what he or she is missing, and probably isn't mature enough anyway.

Unsaid, most of the time, is that hey, the married person doesn't understand what he or she is missing, either.

But so, once again, I'm part of the choir being preached to, here. I am sometimes lonely, I'll admit, but it's not the lack of a spouse I feel so much as the lack of intimate friends in close proximity; the city in which I live is a profoundly heartlandish one, in which life is centered around the spouse and kids and offers little to those without them but doing time in a bar, and I've had difficulty establishing relationships in which I'm anything more than a casual once-in-a-while pal, someone to see a movie with once or twice a year but otherwise on whom it's perfectly okay to cancel last-minute because hey, I didn't have to hire a babysitter or whaever. I have wonderful friendships all over the world, even in other parts of Wyoming, but the city where my job is considers non-marrieds like me to be all but lepers, and that's even before it's discovered that I'm "not even trying." Which, contrary to smug married belief, does not mean I've given up; just that I've never really considered OMGGOTTAFINDAHUSBAAAAAAAND just for the sake of HAVINGAHUSBAAAAAAND to be much of a priority. Should I actually find someone who makes me want to give up my single life, that's fine, but I find the idea that I should devote my time and energy to finding someone who wants to shackle me to be patently absurd. To say nothing of finding someone who wants to knock me up; that's easy (and anyway, there's such a thing as Zero Population Growth, in which I fervently believe and furthermore believe I should practice what I preach).

Someone, and I'm pretty sure it was Theodore Sturgeon in his wonderful novel Godbody, once observed that people who hate being alone do not consider themselves good company. I first read that book when I was a teenager, and I think I probably took this message (one of the many many wonderful and wise things Sturgeon shared in that and his other writing) very much to heart; I have cultivated myself to be good company for myself -- and I have also developed a talent for enjoying strangers -- some of my favorite memories are of random conversations in airport bars or on trains or in line at a coffee bar or walking my dog. I seem very good at reading people and finding common ground with them, enough to make them smile for a moment or a few hours. Would I have this talent, I wonder, if I'd spent most of my life hunting down and then focusing to the exclusion of everyone else on a husband who must be, by contemporary dogma, "my everything" (and will expect that of me in return)?

Would I have the time and attention to spend on my friends' children when they need a break from being someone's spawn or student and just want to be a person for a little while? Or just need a little help with some science homework?

And this is not even mentioning the online relationships I've established, many of which go back decades, that I value deeply.

Is there a tinge of whining to DePaulo's book, as some have complained? Yes. But she is very careful not to even appear to equate singleism with all of the serious civil rights/discrimination issues that have beset us as a society (racism, homophobia, misogyny, etc), and seems more interested in teasing out why treating singles as they so often get treated is still okay (perhaps the last remaining prejudice it's still okay to have, though fat shaming is still awfully common even among people who consider themselves enlightened and tolerant), and what the cumulative effects of these subtle annoyances and expectations might be over a life time -- and how remarkable and awesome it is that single people manage to be happy anyway. It takes more guts and fortitude, she says, to be single in a "matrimaniacal" society than to do the expected, conformist thing and get married. Which, now I just want to race home to my worrying (still married) (to each other) parents (both their daughters are now gleefully in their 40s and unattached) and crow to them about how their lack of grandchildren and sons-in-law is actually proof of how awesome they were in raising us; we both grew up self-sufficient, brave, strong, capable and emotionally mature enough to enjoy life without the need for A PARTNER. And anyway, from a ZPG standpoint, our family is already in the red (our cousins have not only replaced themselves, but the two of us, too, and one more to spare).


But so anyway, the next time you see a couple of early middle aged broads yucking it up at a riverside diner or in the local hot springs or having coffee and none of us happens to be wearing a ring on that finger, maybe withhold your certainty and judgment -- and your humblebragging pity -- for a moment. There are lots of ways to live a life. And lots more ways to be happy than just sharing a bed with somebody for a few decades. But if you must make a faux-friendly remark about it, be prepared to be patronized back in return. Poor little marrieds, like Linuses and their blankies, will they ever grow up? We don't really want to bust out rhetoric like that, but push us and we just might.

Go, Bella, go!

*DePaulo has some somewhat tart remarks about some what-might-have-beens that the choice to put spouse above country/public sphere duty prevented, namely: President Colin Powell.