Anniversary Issue Fall 2006

Marilyn French on her new novel, In the Name of Friendship

In 1977 The Women’s Room sparked controversy and forever altered the consciousness of a generation of women. Now, almost thirty years later, Marilyn French brings us In the Name of Friendship. Her Circle Ezine talks with the author about feminism, politics, and friendship in the new millenium.

Q: The book is set in the year 2000. Was there any significance to writing it at the opening of a new millenium?

A: Yes, there was great significance. When I wrote The Women’s Room I wanted to tell the truth about the 1950s. After feminism arose, things changed for women. I wanted to complete that circle, to show that things have changed for, at least, educated women.

Q: In what way have things changed for women?

A: Since feminism, women can befriend each other. Feminism has increased this tendency. When my mother was young, she couldn’t be in public alone without a man—not even to have a cup of coffee. It’s still that way in Russia, though foreigners can have a social life. But for the most part, women today have the freedom to be social with one another.

Q: Do you think the current conservative political climate is a threat to such freedoms? Should we be on guard?

A: I am very concerned—and not just for women, but for men as well. The issue of child bearing is central to women’s freedom, and I do think we are facing the possibility of a reversal of Roe vs. Wade. Women still don’t have control over their bodies. Abortion is our only guarantee.

Q: Some people feel that the current generation of young women is not fully aware of this threat, that a sense of entitlement has led to complacency. Do you think young women are prepared for a fight?

A: I don’t know about that. I do think that girls feel more entitlement than the older generation, particularly that they feel entitled to their sexual experiences, to the experience of pleasure. Popular culture has fostered that. One image that comes to mind is that of a stripper. Some people consider this a powerful image for women, but I don’t agree. Perhaps I am getting too old (laugh). Popular culture views women as objects. I have to wonder, does a woman get real pleasure from that?

Q: Do any of the characters in your book feel entitlement?

A: No, none of the characters feel entitlement.
Q: You said that your goal for this book was to come full circle from the past. How did you go about creating characters to achieve this goal? Were the women modeled off of anyone?

A: They weren’t modeled off of anyone in particular. They are a combination of traits. And I love these women. I loved every day of working on this book. I was almost sad when I finished it. I miss them. They are my children.
Q: Do you consider this latest work is your masterpiece?

A: Well, my friend suggested that it is. But I’m not sure. I really can’t speak to that. I love all of my children.

Strange Big Moon, The Japan and India Journals: 1960-1964 by Joanne Kyger

North Atlantic Books, Berkeley
c.2000

Anne Waldman’s introduction to Strange Big Moon describes Joann Kyger’s journal, part travelogue, part poetic and personal introspection, as a “surprisingly, surreptitiously, feminist tract as well.” Living and writing as she did, however, with and among the greatest male writers of both the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat movement, Kyger’s exertion of such a strong yet subtle female presence becomes a clear necessity in her pursuit of a poetic voice. Newly married to poet Gary Snyder and relocated to Kyoto in January of 1960 (when her journal begins), Kyger is almost immediately struggling to retain her sense of voice and self. The snatches and fragments of poetry found throughout the journals, however, bear little of the insecurity exposed here; rather, they are the foundations upon which Kyger, upon her return from Japan, would later complete and publish a seminal collection, The Tapestry and the Web. Adopting an approach similar to that of her San Francisco Renaissance predecessors Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, Kyger draws upon history and myth in an imaginative remembrance of women before her—women who lend Kyger the experience to maintain control of art and domesticity alike. Kyger becomes preoccupied with the power of weaving (a historically female occupation), and echoes of the above excerpt resound in Tapestry’s re-writing of Penelope and the Odysseus myth. Returning to Walden’s assessment of Kyger’s “surreptitious” feminism, it is fascinating to watch it shine forth as, with passing years, young Joanne develops a foothold in her own domestic experience with Gary Snyder and simultaneously redefines her male predecessors’ poetic ideologies to plant and justify incredibly powerful women at the heart of lyric history.

Collected Sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay

HarperPerennial. New York, 1988

Not long after making her debut upon the world of American literary modernism, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s frank voice and deft talent earned her work canonical status, while delineating herself as a “national symbol of the modern woman.” In both her poetic and personal life, however, Millay’s modern womanhood is clearly an identity in transition, liberated from Victorian mores and yet enamored with the romanticist legacy of her literary predecessors. It is the fusion of these two spheres, the amalgam of modernity and tradition, for which much of Millay’s poetry is most admiredŸ and nowhere are the results more gloriously evident than in her impressively broad collection of sonnets.

In the revised and expanded edition of Collected Sonnets, Elizabeth Barnett quotes Millay’s own assessment of the sonnet’s dual virtues in her preface. Referring to Wordsworth’s poems, Millay writes, on the one hand, that she loves the sonnet as “a peculiarly, a magically beautiful form of poetryŸ” but one which also, “like a sharp‘tongued wife, pulled Wordsworth together, made him pull up his socks, told him to shut up, when he had finished what he had to say.” The duality possible within such a form, at once exacting in its strictures and tailor made for the fancy of romanticism, is evident even in Millay’s tone shift here—the elegance of her first statement, and the frank efficacy of the second.

The principle carries over to sonnets from collections such as A Few Figs from Thistles and The Harp Weaver, where form and verse of traditional grace contain an honesty of voice and experience peculiar to the modern woman and, until penned by Millay, unfamiliar to the sonnet’s repertoire. At times, Millay’s frankness is almost cold in its utter rejection of the gendered standards associated with her chosen form: within the same mould into which Shakespeare and Petrarch poured words to immortalize love and beauty are found Millay’s “I shall forget you presently, my dear,” or the stinging “I, being born a woman and distressed” Œ“…urged by your propinquity to find your person fair,” yet “Think not for this, however…I shall remember you with love, or season/ My scorn with pity,—let me make it plain”).

Redemption by Kay Langdale

Transita. Oxford
November 2006

Kay Langdale’s debut novel is, in the simplest of terms, an account of love and marriage. Avoiding entirely the clichés of romance or “chick-lit” genres, however, Langdale’s approach in crafting Redemption is refreshingly, compellingly alternative. Six women—wives, daughters, a grandmother still a virgin, an unwed mother of sixteen, an aging mistress—inextricably but unknowingly bound to one another, are compelled by coinciding circumstances to determine and face the truths of their married lives. Beginning with Sarah, a middle‘aged working mother whose happy but familiar life with husband Michael is threatened by a fantasy desire which, when combined with opportunity, tempts her to consider an affair, Langdale subsequently winds her narrative between and within the lives of Kate, Isobel, Martha, Sheila, and Judith. With each new perspective comes a fuller understanding of characters at once varied and connected, of experience unusual yet utterly believable, and an ultimate collected realization of what it means for each woman to be, and to have, a marriage partner.

Langdale’s work derives its greatest strength from the confluence of an elegant, adept use of language and a singularly insightful evocation of the mature female psyche. Spread as it is between six women, who stand united as much by their flawed and honest humanity as by the workings of Langdale’s plot, that insight lends the novel a resonant validity—one which, I imagine, would suffer had Langdale chosen a narrower scope, and the delineation of a single heroine. In light of Redemption’s ultimate argument for marriage made in the face of social challenges and modern skepticism, the novel’s structural effectiveness takes on thematic significance as well. For the work*’ breadth of understanding and accrued wisdom, resulting from an intent focus upon female honesty, proves the strength of a sustained bond to redeem misuse or abuse of marriage vows, and even transform that bond to the greater empowerment of each woman’s individuality.

Haweswater by Sarah Hall

Harper Collins. New York
October 2006

First impressions of both the setting and synopsis of Haweswater promises the reader an English historical romance soaked in social and geographical commentary, reminiscent of Elizabeth Gaskell or, according to The Independent, Hardy and Lawrence. Despite the clear applicability of these comparisons, however, Sarah Hall’s debut novel, together with a fierce heroine and surprisingly unique locale, defy categorization as merely one amongst their predecessors. Something about Hall’s creation, lying perhaps in its comparative modernity (the novel is set in 1936) or the strangely violent, animalistic nature of her protagonist’s independence—but most likely an amalgam thereof—lends it a compelling distinction unlike most prior novels of its kind.

Haweswater takes its name from a dam construction project, begun on the site of a tiny and rustic outpost of anachronistic existence located in the far north of England’s Lake District. The village of Marsdale nurtures its erratic own (as showcased by the Lightburn family, upon whom much of Hall’s background narrative is centered) in relative isolation. Then a representative of Manchester City Water, herald of modern industry and innovation, breaks into the Marsdale enclave with the news of the intended reservoir; and Janet Lightburn, a blue-blond anomaly of a woman with a dangerous energy that seethes beneath an oddly feline aspect, takes up immediate defense of her home against the stranger. Somewhat predictably, Janet’s quarrel with outsider Jack Liggett soon evolves into a passionate, secret, and scandalous affair. What is thoroughly unpredictable, however, is the way in which Hall crafts and unveils their fate, increasingly and inextricably linking both lovers to the land and water from which their passions are born and made.

Allusions to Hardy and Lawrence automatically portend a tragic end for Janet Lightburn (as do Hall’s own early indications her heroine’s penchant for self-destructive behavior). But again, this author evades her forefathers’ trademark sense of futile hopelessness. She evokes an organic connection between Janet and the wet earth she works, lives and loves upon with an almost mythic vitality, one which is spread to Liggett, born within Janet’s brother Isaac, proves all-consuming in each case—and yet strangely, reconcilably so by the novel’s end.