Eve's Alexandria

Forbidden Places

Léonie was bursting with English words. She ran upstairs to the bathroom, covered her head with a towel and spoke to the cold white wall.

I'm glad she's dead. She had to die. She took too long dying. I'm glad she's dead.

The house was very still. It listened to her. It was making up its mind what to reply.

Although it was nominated for the Booker Prize, Michèle Roberts' delicately unsettling Daughters of the House (1992) was not a book I'd heard of when I picked it up off a bookshop shelf a few years back. I bought it partly, I confess, out of curiosity about the author rather than the book; Roberts once taught Jo, (occasional) fellow Alexandrian, on a Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia. Still, it was a gamble that paid off; while I often find contemporary literary fiction a bit of a chore (as I've noted here before), Roberts' resonant themes and skilful narrative knife-twisting made this a novel to luxuriate in.

It begins with a marvellously descriptive opening passage (which reminded me quite strongly of White is for Witching, although of course Roberts' novel came first) of a family home in Normandy:

It was a changeable house. Sometimes it felt safe as a church, and sometimes it shivered then cracked apart.

A sloping blue slate roof held it down. Turrets at the four corners wore pointed blue hats. The many eyes of the house were blinded by white shutters.

What bounded the house was skin. A wall of gristle a soldier could tear open with his bare hands. Antoinette laughed. She was buried in the cellar under a heap of sand. Her mouth was stuffed full of torn-up letters and broken glass but she was tunnelling her way out like a mole. Her mouth bled from the corners. She laughed a gutteral laugh, a Nazi laugh.

I love this sense of the house as something alive, something barely contained that has to be "held down" by its roof, and "bounded" by the body and the memory of an old occupant. "Safe as a church" is, re-reading this passage in light of what happens later in the novel, a rather ambiguous phrase. The shuttered windows as blinded eyes is a wonderfully creepy image, again giving this house a (looming omnious) personality of its own, and leading into the second part of the opening, which introduces our first viewpoint character - a woman who has convinced herself to not see, and thus to forget, so many of the layers of painful memory in the house:

The house was strict. The rules indicated the forbidden places. Chief of these was the bedroom at the back on the first floor, at the top of the kitchen stairs.

The rules said you musn't go there. It was for your own protection. Each time Léonie tried she had to halt. The terror was so strong. It pushed her away, wouldn't let her come near. Behind the terror was something evil which stank and wanted to fix her in its embrace. Better to flee, to clatter back across the bare plank floor of the landing, find the headlong stairs and fall down them. Better to stay at the front of the house.

If you're getting the impression that Léonie might be a touch unstable, you'd be right; although we later learn that she lives in this house with her husband and two daughters, I found it hard to imagine how any sort of domesticity worked in her life, given that almost any time we see her in the narrative's present, she is alone, secretive, and thinking obsessive thoughts. And when I say obsessive, I mean disturbingly violent:

Léonie was waiting for Thérèse to arrive. She longed for her, like a lover. Her mind bristled with knives. She imagined the edge of the blade, silvery and saw-toothed. Its tip vanishing into Thérèse's soft flesh.

Again, I like this - the fond misdirection of "like a lover" leading into the "bristle" and sharpness of violence, before we swing back into the softness of (vulnerable) flesh. This is an unsettled mind. As she waits for Thérèse, these images intensify. Léonie looking at herself in the mirror and having a flash of disorientation ("Which of us is which?") has an air of predictability to it - it probably won't surprise you to learn that there is a photo from when the pair were girls in which their faces are "a smiling blur", impossible to tell apart - but again Roberts, I'm pleased to say, proved to have wrongfooted me:

For twenty years she had cohabited peacefully with her reflection, peering at it to check she'd got what she thought she'd got. Yes, she existed, the mirror told her over those years: with her smooth surface, fresh gilding, only a little tarnish. Now that other one was turning up, to disrupt her steady gaze.

When she looked at Thérèse, what would she see? She supposed they had both aged. If she smashed her fist into Thérèse's face, would she hear the crack and splinter of glass? She wondered whether Thérèse's sheltered life had kept her looking young. When they were both sixteen she had been pleased to make comparisons. She had better legs than Thérèse, a sharper clothes sense, a more fashionably slender body. When Thérèse arrived she would be able to carry on that old war.

The mirror is not (just) a convenient prop, but something that has fed Léonie's obsession for years. For both women, physical appearance and the body are central to self-identity and insecurity - especially, but not only, with regards to how they related to each other. And, again, there's the carefully jarring use of violence to jolt me out of what seems to be a familiar trope. When Thérèse arrives, her first sight of Léonie is as "a woman with angry eyes under a shining fringe", peering out of the house at her; then Thérèse, too, reopens the body-image war, measuring her own "lean stomach, flat hips" against Léonie's more generous physique, and watching Léonie mop her plate with bread while reflecting that her own body "obey[s] her now".

It comes as little surprise to learn that the two girls shared a difficult adolescence together, in Normandy during and after the Second World War: Thérèse as a resident of the house, Léonie as a regular guest there (a reversal of the situation in the story's present). The novel follows the unravelling of the house's secrets as the pair meet again for the first time in some years, and each is irresistibly led to recall episodes from the claustrophobic village world of their youth. The key event is the long, slow death from cancer of Thérèse's mother, Antoinette, which leaves the two girls with considerable mental and emotional scars. Much of the story is essentially a study of how they respond to the grief, body-horror and pious terror that Antoinette's dying awakes in them - a process mirrored, although in their youth the girls barely realise it, by the efforts of the whole village to come to terms with (or, more commonly, deny) the suffering of the German occupation.

I don't want to discuss the nature of either the house's or the village's secrets in too much detail; instead, I'd like to finish with a few words on the religious atmosphere of, and the nature of religious observance in, the wartime and post-war village. An intense - and often non-conformist - religiosity pervades the layers of the story, and shapes the way that the villagers understand events. Both Thérèse and Léonie offer private prayers regularly and fervently - Thérèse, notably but not exclusively, for fear that her recently dead mother has gone to purgatory - and their emotional disturbance over Antoinette's death and the oppressive, furtive air that replaces her finds expression in a series of visions of a woman in red, out in the forest.

Word spreads, and - for reasons she does not fully understand until many years later - a popular folk-religious notoriety comes to attach itself to Thérèse. There are night dances in the woodland; it cannot, of course, be allowed to last. Older men, sources of traditional authority, are distant, absent or adverserial figures in the story. Thérèse's father certainly offers no comfort to his bereaved daughter, for example, and when Léonie has her first period, it falls on Thérèse to show her what to do, and how to destroy the evidence of this burgeoning womanhood (together they burn makeshift sanitary towels after use, and then present themselves for dinner, scrubbed clean and carefully innocent: "Proper jeunes filles. Which meant having secrets").

The parish curate is no exception to this rule. Instead of seeking to heal the communal distress bubbling up through this fledgling cult, the curate greets this challenge to his authority with the great stomping foot of Patriarchy - rousing Thérèse to rage:

The theme of the sermon was reverence and obedience. Waywardness of certain elements of the youth in the parish. Authority of our Holy Mother the Church vested in me. [...] Undesirable elements of individualism and mysticism, undesirable attempts at originality, to be weeded out. Adolescent frailty and need of guidance. Saint Paul and Saint Augustine on women.

Thérèse sweated with shame. She stared at her lap where her hands, gloved in tight white net, gripped her missal. If she pressed very hard then her mouth would not open to scream. Torrents of fire would not tumble out to force fire down his throat, torch his tongue. She was red and liquid and dangerous. She would damage that priestly flesh, oh yes, scorch it, she would tear his head very slowly from his neck and laugh as the blood gushed. She would shut him up, trample him down, stop up his mouth forever with hot red mud.

Again, there is a compelling and instructive contrast between the passive obedience expected of young women towards male authority figures - even when such a male authority figure has, it transpires, made a mockery of his moral standing through his collaboration with the German authorities during the war - and the visceral, cathartic violence that this particular young woman imagines inflicting upon him. A heady, disconcerting story.

~~Nic

Diplomatic Wives

[Isabel] was attracted as much by the life as by the man. "If I were a man, I would be Richard Burton," she once wrote in a letter to her mother; "but being only a woman, I would be Richard Burton's wife ... I long to rush around the world in an express; I feel as if I shall go mad if I remain at home."

Long has Katie Hickman's Daughters of Britannia (1999) haunted my to-be-read shelves; nine years or so, in fact, which is longer than I've kept a separate TBR pile (which became a shelf, then shelves, and now, um, bookcases). As I've noted before, here, because I read so much non-fiction material for my job, I tend to gravitate towards fiction for leisure reading; as a rule, I get through less than a dozen extra-curricular non-fiction books a year. Which seems even more of a shame when I think of what an enjoyable read Daughters of Britannia turned out to be, when I finally brought it out of the doldrums.

Daughters is not ground-breaking, heavy-weight history - indeed, in some ways (which I'll come to) it feels a little old-fashioned - but it is a meticulous, elegant and above all sympathetic look at the under-sung foot-soldiers of British diplomacy since the early modern period: the wives and daughters of the state's ambassadors abroad. Hickman, herself a daughter of diplomats, takes a thematic tour through the experiences of over 100 different women living between the seventeenth century and the present, discussing common topics - travel, settling in, hosting, illness, etiquette, loneliness - with a lightly comparative, but predominantly narrative and anecdotal, touch.

Hickman reconstructs these women's stories from their own accounts, as much as possible - and indeed as necessary (women are little mentioned in source material, especially from the pre-modern period, that they did not write themselves). She quotes liberally from their letters and journals. These are predominantly, as she notes, private sources, and thus perhaps less obliged to be 'diplomatic' about events and conditions than the public narratives left behind by their menfolk. In so doing, Hickman is able to evoke the world behind the official facade, in terms of both its hardships - which were considerable, particularly when it came to travel and settling in - and some unexpected adventures. I particularly enjoyed the account of Ann Fanshawe who, in the mid-17th century, was on board a ship bound for the Ottoman Empire when it was attacked, and who had absolutely no intention of remaining below decks while her husband was in danger; having been locked in her cabin, she

knocked and called to no purpose, until at length a cabin boy came and opened the door. I all in tears desired him to be so good as to give me his blue thrum-cap he wore, and his tarred coat, which he did, and I gave him half a crown; and putting them on, and flinging away my night's clothes, I crept up softly and stood by my husband's side as free from sickness and fear as, I confess, from discretion; but it was the effect of that passion which I could never master.

Nor was Ann (who also found time to give birth to no fewer than fourteen children) the only woman to use man's clothing to secure greater freedom of movement for herself; in 1799, Mary, Lady Elgin, disguised herself as a man in order to attend a reception with the sultan Selim III in Constantinople (with, we're told, the help of Ottoman officials). In the later 19th century the redoubtable Isabel Burton, meanwhile - already quoted at the head of this post - preferred men's much more practical clothes for travelling in Syria with her husband, despite the approbation this earned her in some quarters. Before setting out to join him abroad, she also, rather brilliantly, hunted down a fencing teacher and demanded lessons: "So that I can defend Richard when he is attacked", as she put it.

It was not all swashbuckling, of course; a lot of it was hard work, hardship, and (for some) simple boredom. Hickman has much to say about the difficulties of pre-modern travel - about which more below - and the dislocation involved in moving one's family to another culture in times when journeying abroad was hardly common, and reliable information about your destination not easy to come by. How to even begin preparing for months or even years in a land you had never visited and knew nothing about? By the late nineteenth century, at least, help was at hand - although perhaps 'help' belongs in scare quotes, given the extracts Hickman quotes from Tropical Trials (1883) by one Major S Leigh Hunt, who considered women to rank alongside "the dusky African" and "the heathen Chinee" in terms of her natural resilience in the face of change:

Many and varied are the difficulties which beset a woman, when she first exchanges her European home and its surroundings for the vicissitudes of life in the tropics. Few can realise the sacrifices they will be called upon to make in taking such a decided step; many home comforts, and the host of nameless social fascinations, so dear to a woman's heart, are to be given up, while the attractions offered by the irresistible "day's shopping," the box at the opera, a few of our summer recreations, and nearly all our winter amusements, must be temporarily relegated to the list of past pleasures.

This sudden and complete upset of old-world life, and the disturbance of long existing associations, produces, in many women, a state of mental chaos, that utterly incapacitates them for making due and proper preparations for the contemplated journey.

And so on. Being a good Victorian flower, the poor mite could naturally be expected to swoon upon taking ship for her journey; Hunt thus prescribes that only men wave her off, since female friends on board before departure would only make her worse, presumably lacking stiff upper lips.

As Hickman's study shows, there is truth in Hunt's words, however paternalistic its source; it would be an exceptional person - male or female - who did not feel any trepidation at the thought of such a sharp break with the familiar as a lengthy posting overseas in a time before mass communications, cheap and fast international transport, and a strong measure of cultural globalisation. These people truly were leaving behind everything they knew; homesickness is rather harder to stave off when your only contact with the only land you have ever known is a letter every three or four months, at best. But I share Hickman's preference for Annie Steel's The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook (1888; its popularity was such that it ran to 10 editions), which recommends "whisky, water and a little wholesome neglect" for 'hysteria', rather than infantilisation.

I can only assume that coming from a culture which believed as strongly in its own superiority as Victorian Britain - one which had no real room for the notion that other ways of life were not simply defective - made the transition that much harder. This is not something that Daughters of Britannia delves into explicitly, unfortunately, although - pleasing to my historian's heart - we do get a clear sense of how and why experiences varied over time. Changing mores meant that Victorian women had a more difficult time than their counterparts from the more liberal ages of the 17th and 18th centuries; their behaviour and responses were hedged about with more limitations than had been the case previously. The sort of shocks that a woman's naturally delicate constitution could (or should) bear had contracted considerably in the age of steam and bustles.

Where Hunt is hilariously unhelpful is his list of items essential for the well-to-do Englishwoman going abroad, if she was to maintain proper appearances. Alongside sensible suggestions like mosquito nets, he includes a knife-cleaning machine (?) and half a dozen pairs of lace curtains, plus enough clothing to sink the ship carrying her hence, including "several full-sized silk gossamer veils to wear with your topee" and "a most liberal supply of tulle, net, lace, ruffles, frillings, white and coloured collars and cuffs, artificial flowers and ribbons". "[P]retty little wool wraps to throw over the head," he adds, "and an opera cloak, are requisities which should not be overlooked." Annie Steel, for her part, notes that "a woman who wishes to live up to the climate must dress down for it", eschewing ribbons and lace although still stipulating at least one "civilized evening and morning dress" (this was the empire, after all).

Things were little easier on arrival. The role of the diplomat's wife was, for a long time, not clearly defined; much depended on the host country and the period. One extreme is seen through Harriet Granville's time in post-Napoleonic Paris, a glorious but exhausting whirl of balls and soirées ("The height of my earthly aspirations is to be allowed to abstain from pleasure", she wrote, half-despairingly, to her sister in 1825). Other women had the opposite problem, finding themselves little more than appendages, their duty requiring them to be by their husband's side without necessarily giving them much to do; as Lady Mary Elgin's story indicates, a wife's official tasks could, on some assignments, be extremely limited. Sometimes this was imposed by the culture being visited; Hickman notes that in both Soviet states and post-revolutionary China, very few individuals were permitted to interact with foreign embassies' staff, leaving ambassadors' families with few outlets and little to do to alleviate boredom.

For others, the isolation was more self-inflicted. This is one of the areas in which I felt Hickman was perhaps a little too kind to her subjects. She acknowledges that Mary Sheil, stationed in Persia in the middle of the 19th century, was a snob and a prude in her aversion to contact with local women, but elsewhere she shows more indulgence - and the odd unfortunate turn of phrase, as when she discusses the

privations suffered at the turn of this century by that redoubtable Scotswoman, Catherine Macartney, who in her seventeen years in Kashgar, in Chinese Turkistan, saw only three other European women.

Goodness, the indignity! Yes, granted, this was the late 19th century, with all the attendant self-absorption and bigotry that came with being British (as discussed above), but for a modern author to call the lack of European company a "privation" - even if the women of the Chinese court did find her enormous shoes hilarious against their own bound feet - is a sympathetic gesture too far. Macartney's attitude is a fascinating artefact - apparently she never stirred herself to learn a local language at any point during those seventeen years - but I'm not sure its lonely consequences are something for which she is to be pitied.

To the extent that these women did have an expected role, it lay in organisation and entertainment. Wives were expected to represent their country and their husbands by hosting receptions, charming important local guests, and generally making it all look effortless - a pressure that increased with the shifting cultural mores of the Victorian era, and was policed ever more strictly with the move into the newspaper age, as Lady Susan Townley discovered to her cost in the late 19th-century US.

It was delicate work, and in some cases vital to an ambassador's success; Victoria Sackville, for example, had to play this role for her unmarried father in the late 19th-century United States, since high-status American women of the period simply "did not attend entertainments in households where there was no hostess to receive them". Victoria's daughter, Vita Sackville-West, was able to leverage her own, much higher status into a refusal to accompany her husband Henry Nicholson on his missions abroad (instead she travelled to visit him in Persia on a couple of occasions). But for the majority of wives this was not an option; marriage to a diplomat, increasingly, meant marriage to the diplomatic service.

Behind the scenes, wives were largely responsible for the organisation and financial management of a diplomatic mission; and, as embassies grew, for marshalling the growing staff of junior officials, dependants and servants. (Hickman, thanks to her family's history of involvement in the service, is particularly strong in giving an impression of the 'embassy family'.) Although Hickman does not view the organisational efforts of the wives through a feminist lens - opting instead for the more traditional language of We Know Who Was Really In Charge, Eh, Ladies? - she includes a telling quotation from Isabel Burton, who sounds like a proto-Betty Friedan when she observes,

Husbands ... though they never see the petit détail going on ... like to keep up the pleasant illusion that it is all done by magic.

(That way, she might have added, they can best convince themselves they're the ones doing the real work, and not trouble themselves too much with the thought of how much effort their wives were putting in.)

For much of the period under discussion, of course, diplomatic wives did not have to go it completely alone; servants are an omnipresent element of the accounts Hickman quotes, and not one of which she makes enough. I couldn't help but feel that, in places, this leads her to overstate the deprivation to which the wives were subject; while travelling through the extreme variations of climate, altitude and facilities of Central Asia in the early twentieth century was undoubtedly harsh for Ella Sykes, the fact that she had servants to draw her a bath every night probably made the whole thing rather more comfortable - especially compared with the experiences of, say, her servants. Likewise, dwelling on the fact that the Tully family spent thirteen months in quarantine in 1780s Tripoli during a plague outbreak seems a bit churlish when juxtaposed with the played-down admission that this was only made possible by the family's ability to pay locals to (risk their lives to) bring in supplies. They may indeed have suffered during those thirteen months; but thanks to their privileged position they at least survived, whereas 10,000 of the city's 35,000-strong population did not.

This said, one area of the diplomatic wives' suffering that is undeniable is the risk of illness from unfamiliar conditions and cuisine, and (especially) the strain of long-term travel. Elizabeth McNeill had to watch three of her four children die during her husband's posting took her to Persia in the 1820s and 30s, without the support network of an extended family around her. This was not unusual; Ann Fanshawe, too, lost both pregnancies and children on the road, but those who remained behind in England fared little better:

"In the latter end of this summer I miscarried, when I was near half-gone with child, of three sons, in two hours one after another," is one typically sanguine observation. "And my daughter Mary died in Hertfordshire in August."

The matter-of-factness of her tone is easily misconstrued. It was not that women were indifferent to the loss of their children; it was simply too common an occurence to merit much comment. Throughout her married life Ann Fanshawe was almost continually pregnant, an exhausting but not unusual state of affairs for a woman of that era. Between 1644, the year of their marriage, and 1666, when her husband died, Ann gave birth to a total of six sons and eight daughters, miscarrying a further six children (nine if you count the triplets).

Only five of these fourteen born children survived to the age of majority.

Daughters of Britannia comes recommended, then; as a historian, I wanted more dates and more context, more examination of the self-presentation of the women and the nature of the accounts they were writing, and certainly more on the lives of people outside the loftiest circles, but this is that rare popular history book that really benefits from the author's personal engagement with the topic. Hickman's comments on the more recent decades of diplomatic life - the changing social make up of the service, the development of correspondance journals for women to compare notes and keep each other's spirits up - make for a valuable counterpoint to the older anecdotes. Furthermore, her insight into the way prolonged absence shapes family relations - there is some rather poignant reflection of waiting for parental letters at boarding school - and how the habit of travel becomes wanderlust, helps to ground the historical material in emotional realities.

~~Nic

Memories of Love

I'm not a great one for thrillers.  So I surprised myself when I bought Before I Go To Sleep by SJ Watson for my Kindle.  It was an impulse thing; an unknown genre for an unknown media, or something like that.  It seemed fitting - a page-turner to get me through the transition period from paper to screen.  I'd read about Watson in various places, about how he attended one of the first Faber Writing Academy courses and turned out this novel, which has been translated into 20 languages already.  The movie rights have been bought by Ridley Scott, and filming is due to start later this year too.  Pretty impressive.  

The book has a ticklishly intriguing premise: What would it be like to wake up every day as a blank slate, without memories?   Christine Lucas survived an accident in her 20s that left her with a rare form of amnesia that means, twenty years later, she wakes up each morning with no memory of who she is or what her life has been like since adolescence.  She lives that single day as though it is her first as an adult, in a mist of confusion and panic only partially alleviated by the reassurance of her husband Ben.   He wearily repeats his explanation of their strange, curtailed life together, shows her photographs, gives her instructions.  Some days she is peaceable, accepting; others she is suspicious, disbelieving; always she is lonely and without a future.   She is perhaps the only person in the world truly living in the present, a devastating, enervating reality:

For me time stretches, is almost meaningless.  Years have slipped through me, leaving no trace.  Minutes don't exist.  I only had the chime of the clock to show me that time was passing at all.

It is the worst mid-life crisis ever and SJ Watson uses the implications of it to striking effect.  He asks: if this was your life how would you live it?  Who would you trust?  How could you love or maintain a personal relationship? Would there be a point in continuing to exist? 

Watson has Christine tell her own story, using the conceit of a diary which her doctor encourages her to write in each day.  He believes that it will help her to remember things for more than 24 hours at a time - which it does - but it also has the unintended consequence of uncovering inconsistences in the stories about herself that Ben tells her each day.  Sometimes he tells her she had a child, other times he denies it; another day he tells her that her best friend Claire emigrated to New Zealand, but the next day that he doesn't know where she is.   Christine becomes convinced that he is lying to her, but why? To protect her, or to protect himself, or for a darker reason altogether?  Her determination to uncover the truth becomes the central thread of the novel.

It is very polished, simply constructed and narrowly focused.  And, as you can imagine, somewhat repetitive   as Christine has to re-establish each and every day who she is by reading the diary.  We become nearly as weary as Ben as we listen to her ask the same questions, make the same mistakes and assumptions over and over.   We get a sense of how barren her life is.  Because, she is not just without memory.  She is without a sense of geography - she doesn't know whereabouts she lives - and has no awareness of politics, society or pop-culture.  There is no government in her world, no international news (except for a brief illusion to the Afghanistan war); no literature, film, music, television in her life.  She has no idea what the internet is.  Unlike the rest of us she can't just Google what she doesn't remember.  Her world is almost entirely limited to the environs of her suburban home, which is sparse, impersonal. 

Christine takes well to diary writing though, with a novelist's eye for detail, and this alleviates the boredom a reader might otherwise feel.  The unexciting meals she and Ben eat, the cheap digi-print canvases on their walls, are revealing; their ordinariness makes them all the more terrible. This seems suprising at first.  How is it possible for a woman with no memory to articulate herself so thoroughly?  But Watson neatly explains her eloquence away: it turns out that before her accident Christine was a published novelist, and was working on her second book.  The diary becomes an outlet for her frustrated creativity, supposedly tapping into some essential writerliness in her being, and it comes to stand in place of her unfinished work.  Even Christine realises the potential conflict implied: if she is a creative writer, then perhaps the diary is also made up?  At one point she doubts herself: 'Perhaps my vision was not memory but invention.  Perhaps, without a true history to hold and ponder, my mind had created one of its own.'   She can create a narrative to fit whatever she chooses to believe on any single day, building up the truth (or a version of it) incrementally.

A shame then that Before I Go To Sleep is so predictable.  The truth Christine is seeking seems desperately obvious to the reader, so obvious that I was expecting a twist to end all twists to thwart it.  But no, the ending pans out pretty much as I predicted 25% of the way in, even down to the ambiguous final sentence.  There is some pretty blunt narrative symbolism for memory loss along the way too - locked boxes, roundabouts, empty pages - which feels learnt.  Like it has been schooled into the book rather than grown organically out of the themes.  Overall there is a polished reserve to the story; it feels like the product of a lesson in how to write a thriller.   One, come up with the mother of all central conceits; two, write the rest.  I'm not surprised about the film deal - it has all the directness and moral ambivalence of a Hollywood movie.  I wish it every success, even though it wasn't really for me.

~~Victoria~~

A Very Short Review of Feminism

Caitlin Moran's How to Be A Woman made me determined to be a better informed feminist; and to read more classics of feminist thought and theory.  The exact opposite, in fact, of what Moran anticipated or intended when she wrote her book: pop-culture feminism has sent me running back to more academic ground.  Not that I take much persuading to read books about or by women.  And yes, I appreciate that this determination is not helping me fulfill my new year's resolution to 'Read More Men'.  But I'm working on that seperately.

Years and years ago (pre-blogging) I had a feminist summer and read The Second Sex, The Feminine Mystique and The Whole Woman back-to-back.  I remember feeling very passionately about them at the time, but feel as though I have retained very little salient detail (although perhaps they ingrained themselves so much in my psyche that I can't now seperate what I read and what I believe?).  So I decided that before rushing to make a new reading list I needed to situate myself, get some co-ordinates and take advisement on the history of the womens' movement.  Hence, A Very Short Introduction to Feminism by Margaret Walters.   It was on my Kindle within 20 minutes of finishing How to Be A Woman.

Like all the Very Short Introductions, Walters' book is a whistlestop overview of her subject.  How could it be otherwise in a little over a hundred petite pages?  It takes a chronological approach, beginning with womens' struggle for access to spiritual power in the early medieval period and racing right through to the late 20th century.  The 'history' chapters are the best, i.e. the ones that tell a story that Walters herself was not a part of.  She pares down her story very cleanly while introducing a whole swathe of lesser known writers and thinkers on women's issues: so it's not just Aphra Behn and then Mary Wollstonecraft and then John Stuart Mill, but also Mary Astell, Marion Reid and William Thompson.  But from the early 20th century onwards - as the feminist movement becomes bigger, more complex - the weakness of the Very Short Introduction mold becomes clear.  There just isn't enough space to tease out the characters and the implications, even though a quarter of the book is given over to second-wave feminism.   I sense that Walters simply had too much to say about a subject she knew so very well.  It is always easier to write succinctly about something you know less about. 

Strangely it is the late 20th century that gets particularly short-shrift.  Although this book was written in 2005 it gives the distinct impression that feminism ended in the  mid-1980s.  There is very little here on the third-wave, except a very brief discussion in the afterword.  Instead we get a strange rambling chapter about feminism world-wide.  This seemed pretty pointless to me.  Throughout Walters' had focused almost exclusively on feminism in Britain and, to a lesser extent, North America.  Trying to shoe-horn all feminism elsewhere ever into 2000 words seemed insulting and, given the stated geographical bias of the rest of the book, unnecessary.  Much better to have had a proper discussion of 'post-feminism'.

No matter, the book pretty much did what I wanted it to: it gave me a list of other books to read and a historical framework to sit them in.  What most surprised me was how much I did already know, despite never having made a concerted effort to read widely around the subject.  I must have absorbed such a lot during my other reading.  I've already downloaded some samples of books from the Further Reading section onto Dory (my Kindle) and started reading Anne Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho as a fiction companion.  Radcliffe is mentioned by Walters' as a revolutionary novelist, who changed the status of women's writing in the late 18th century, but I've never read her.  So far, lots of pensive mountain scenes and a soon-to-be orphaned heroine.  I sense it's going to be a lot of fun.

~~Victoria~~

The Fifth Wave

Caitlin Moran is rallying women for a fifth wave of feminism, apparently.  The third and fourth waves - not over yet; and just begun - can both get lost and be damned.  And this fifth wave of feminism won't be about marching, or protesting, or theory.  All that is, like, so 20th century.  Instead:

We just need to look it [by which Moran means 'All The Patriarchal Bullshit'] in the eye, squarely, for a minute, and then start laughing at it.  We look hot when we laugh.  People fancy us when they observe us giving out relaxed, earthy chuckles.

Phew, what a relief - being a fifth-wave feminist will make people fancy us!  Feminism and hotness will finally be combined as we throw our heads back and have a good giggle about domestic violence, rape and female genital mutilation, and all the other pressing women's issues of the day.

Or not.

Because How to Be A Woman isn't a book about any of those things, and I'm being (slightly, but seriously) facetious.  These aren't the feminist issues Moran is encouraging us to solve by 'simply pointing at it, and going 'HA!'', thank goodness.  They, and many other subjects high on the feminist agenda, don't feature here, in a book much publicised as The Female Eunuch for a new generation (unfairly I think, because it raises false expectations).  This is strictly pop-culture feminism: it's all about body hair, plastic surgery, celebrity culture and the size of your handbag or your underwear.  It is the ridiculous social norms surrounding such subjects that Moran is encouraging us to laugh at.  And laugh I did, all the way through her sweet, funny, knowing, infuriating and sometimes just plain wrong book.

Moran is a columnist for The Times, and has worked as a journalist for nearly 20 years, making her debut in Melody Maker when she was just 16 years old.   How to Be A Woman is a typical columnists' book, comprised of a dozen or so bite-size chapters, each one a balanced dose of personal anecdote, hyperbole and invective, with some jokes thrown in.  Her jokes are good; and the invective is often funny too, not to mention insightful. For example, I particularly appreciated the chapter about body hair, and her paean to 'a proper muff. A big, hairy minge.  A lovely, furry moof that looks - when she sits, naked - as if she has a marmoset sitting in her lap.'   The tirade against the fashion for waxing, and strange, hairless, sore 'lulus' is spot on, tracing its origin to the practicalities of porn and teasing out why the issue is a feminist one and shouldn't be dismissed as a hygeine or fashion choice.  Namely because, as pubic hair is increasingly seen as unfeminine and unnatural, it leads to intense pressure on women to conform to a stereotype, with real financial (not to mention psychological) implications:

I can't believe we've got to a point where it's basically costing us money to have a fanny.  They're making us pay for maintenance and upkeep of our lulus, like their a communal garden.  It's a stealth tax. Fanny VAT.

Of course Moran is right: all feminine body-norms, which require intensive upkeep, force women to engage in an endless, and pointless, cycle of expensive 'treatments' and 'product applications'.   Even the vocabulary suggests a sort of medical intervention, which women have to undergo just to remain recognisably female.  You can't help but smile when Moran suggests that, on the contrary to current distaste, one of life's great pleasures is:

Lying in a hammock, gently finger-combing your Wookiee whilst staring at the sky... By the end of a grooming session, your little minge-fro should be even, and bouffy - you can gently bounce the palm of your hand off it, as if it were a tiny hair trampoline.

Shame that she goes on to say that her pro-pube position doesn't extend to other sites of female body hair: legs, eyebrows, upper-lip, armpits.  All of these are 'of aesthetic concern - and not really part of The Struggle' as a consequence.  Wrong wrong wrong. Since when was feminism not about aesthetic concerns?  Moran seems to have forgotten her own arguments about the negative impact of arbitrary aesthetic norms a few paragraphs earlier.  Later in the book she uses a simple test to identify sexism.  Basically, it's sexism if only women are being asked to modify their behaviour to conform to a societal norm.  Armpit hair, or lack thereof, falls into this category methinks.   Signs of such frustratingly inconsistent thinking pervade the book.

Also, throughout there runs a general disdain of academic and theoretical feminism.  This disdain is generally directed, as far as I can tell, at anyone writing about feminism and *not* laughing about it.  But there is very little evidence that Moran has read much in the way of feminist discourse.  The only name-dropped feminist is Germaine Greer, who pops up repeatedly to be venerated or refuted; otherwise it's just Moran against 'those feminists'.  You know, the ones that aren't telling it like it is.  Amongst these feminists are all feminist historians.  Moran has some particularly strong views about the non-contribution of women to history, and how this has brought us to a pube-waxing, hand-bag toting pass.  She says 'most sexism is down to men being accustomed to us being the losers.  That's what the problem is.  We just have bad status.  Men are accustomed to us being runners-up or being disqualified entirely.'   Which is all well and good.  But our views diverge on why this might be: Moran says it is because women have been losers.  In fact, we've been pretty rubbish all along:

For even the most ardent feminist historian, male or female - citing Amazons and tribal matriarchies and Cleopatra - can't conceal that women have basically done fuck all for the last 100,000 years.  Come on - let's admit it.  Let's stop exhaustingly pretending that there is a parallel history of women being victorious and creative, on an equal with men, that's just been comprehensively covered up by The Man.  There isn't.  Our empires, armies, cities, artworks, philosophers, philanthropists, inventors, scientists, astronauts, explorers, politicians and icons could all fit, comfortably, into one the private karaoke booths in SingStar.  We have no Mozart; no Einstein; no Galileo; no Gandhi. No Beatles, no Churchill, no Hawking, no Columbus.  It just didn't happen.

All of which makes me think that she doesn't understand a) the concept of feminist history, b) the basics of feminist theory, and c) the patriarchy.  I can't remember ever seeing a feminist historian cite the Amazons as paragons of feminine achievement, or making claims for a 'parallel history' or a massive conspiritorial cover-up of women's achievements.  The point, again and again and again, is the limitation of women's sphere of influence, agency or power structures and access to education. Feminist history is, most often, about understanding the ways in which women lived and operated within these bounds, and negotiated their place in the world.  Sometimes this means highlighting their previously unrecognised achievements; other times in highlighting their chronic lack of creative, political or intellectual outlet. 

Moran follows this utter lack of understanding with a strange, prolonged anecdote about how, when she was at Melody Maker, they could never find enough female musicians to feature; and maybe that was because there weren't any good ones until Lady Gaga.  It's all very silly, and slightly offensive, and definitely an unfair dismissal of the incredibly creative work of feminist historians (and female musicians) in exploring gender over the last 30 years. 

The real strengths of Moran's book - aside from the parts where she makes you roll about laughing about thongs, or botox, or the word 'boobs' - are often in her stories about herself, and particularly her relationship with her sisters.  These make the feminist idea of 'sisterhood' flesh, as Moran and her closest sister, Caz, talk through their shared experiences of womanhood, puzzling out such difficult questions as what to call their breasts and how to insert tampons.  The most powerful section of the book though, where Moran shows why it is that she is a writer at all, is the part about the births of her two children.  The first is 48 hours of pure trauma; the second is a quasi-spiritual experience, which she recounts quite beautifully:

I've been told to walk, and I do - I pace miles and miles, like I'm on my way to Bethlehem.  I use the hospital corridors like the world's slowest, fattest race track.  I walk for four hours, non-stop.  Oh Nancy!  I walk from St Paul's to Hammersmith for you, barefoot, quietly sighing, from Angel to Oval, the Palace to the Heath.  Your head is like a stone against bone - a quiet pressure I can't stop now, and neither can you. Gravity is the magic I couldn't find before, strapped to the bed, two years ago. Gravity is the spell I should have invoked.

So, yes, a book to read definitely, but this jury is still out on it's value to the 'fifth wave of feminism'.  I think I prefer riding out the third and embarking on the fourth because, while it is good to laugh at the silly fashions of 21st century life that niggle at women all day everyday of their lives, it is not enough.  No, not nearly enough.   If you choose to walk a few chapters in Caitlin Moran's shoes, I recommend a dose of Kat Banyard's The Equality Illusion soon afterwards to balance out.

~~Victoria~~

To the Last Breath

It was murder music, heat-and-sex music, and Nadia was leaping, whirling, sliding and tricking her way through those thousands of frozen Roman candle lights. She never once missed the heartbeat. Wherever she was, at whatever speed, that footspike came down dead on the beat, every time, over and over. I could hardly breathe.

In her characteristically insightful Afterword to Nicola Griffith's short fiction chapbook, With Her Body (2004), L. Timmel Duchamp notes that the three stories collected here portray "an exclusively female sexual economy". Both sexual desire and sexual agency rest entirely with Griffith's female characters; all the meaningful relationships (whether platonic or, more frequently, romantic) are between women. The effect is initially disconcerting, and it was only reading Duchamp's comments that helped me to pinpoint why: it was because the focus wasn't where I expected it to be, where I had been subconsciously trained to expect it. In a world where most visual stories - and quite a few found in books - don't even pass the Bechdel Test, reading tales that are wholly and unapologetically about women's desire, and in which women's desire for other women is taken as a given rather than as a deviation to be preceded by agonised soul-searching, certainly made for a few double takes.

But it was also enormously refreshing. In this, it has much in common with the other volumes I've read in the Conversation Pieces series from Aqueduct Press, some of which I've written about before (see here, here and here); not all are overtly feminist, but all start with the assumption that women are human beings with inner lives and agency, and work outwards.

As it happens, the opener, 'Touching Fire' (1993; available online here), is probably the least satisfying of the trio; while neither Kate, the narrator, nor her sometime lover Nadia do any angsting about whether or not they like girls, there is nonetheless a great deal of processing, and that hoary old lesbian cliche, true love blossoming within days of a first meeting. Still, there's a lot to enjoy before we get to the inevitable melodrama of the if-you-love-them-set-them-free ending. The fact that Nadia's dances-with-lasers performances are so dangerous they have been known to set buildings on fire is a fun touch, and there is a real poignancy to her gilded cage existence. Above all, the story soars when it looks at the transformative nature of physicality and lust. Kate's world-weary narration is our way in:

She was small, asian-dark, her dusty black hair cut in spikes and not an ounce of fat on her, but not frail, definitely not frail.

I had to ask her to move her feet so I could get the mop under the table.

"My name's Nadia," she said, "and I'm a National Treasure."

"Right," I said, because the customer always is.

It makes for a perfect contrast, though, with the sensuousness of the language she uses, increasingly, to describe Nadia ("she slid out of her chair like she was made of oiled snake, not woman, and left"). When Nadia dances, Kate's otherwise detached narration gets visceral: even watching a recording, she finds she is "crushing the remote control in my hands, bruising my palms", and is left "coughing up sobs from deep places I never even knew I had".

In 'Song of Bullfrogs, Cry of Geese' (1991; available online here), poignancy is the dominant note, but again there is a tug-of-war within the narrator, Molly, between willed distance from the world and (re)learning to live in it. The setting is an evocative post-apocalyptic dustbowl American south, with humankind is dying a slow death from what appears to be a form of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome:

I sat by the side of the road in the afternoon sun and watched the cranefly struggle. A breeze, hot and heavy as a tired dog's breath, coated the web and fly with dust. I shaded my eyes and squinted down the road. Empty. As usual. It was almost two years since I'd seen anything but Jud's truck on Peachtree.

Like last month, and the month before that, and the third day of every month since I'd been out here alone, I squashed the fear that maybe this time he wouldn't come. But he always did come, rolling up in the cloud of dust he'd collected on the twenty mile drive from Atlanta.

I turned my attention back to the fly. It kept right on struggling. I wondered how it felt, fighting something that didn't resist but just drained the life from it. It would take a long time to die. Like humankind.

Despite the narrator's self-imposed isolation - following the death of her partner, Helen, some years before - and that whole impending extinction thing, this is an intriguingly optimistic apocalypse. Perhaps it is simply that, in a world where the sheer exhaustion of giving birth is a regular killer, people lack the energy to be cruel to each other, but there is a strong sense that the crisis and trauma of the time has brought people closer together. Lacking individual strength, the survivors have been forced to help each other out more:

There's something about the human race: as it slowly died, those that were left became more needy of each other. It seemed that we all became a little kinder, too. Everyone pulled inward, to the big cities where there was food, and power, and sewage systems. [...]

The deaths have been slow and inevitable enough that those of us who are still here have been able to train ourselves to do whatever it takes to stay alive. It wasn't so hard to keep things going: when the population is so small, it's surprising how many occupations become redundant. Insurance clerks now work in the power stations; company executives check sewage lines; police officers drive threshing machines. No one works more than four hours a day; we don't have the strength. None of us shows any signs of recovering. None but the most foolish still believe we will.

The story is essentially a study in mourning and recovery; Molly spends much of the narrative in a state of carefully controlled dislocation, describing her actions in the most bald terms ("My arms and hips ached. I ran a hot bath and soaked for a while, until I got too hot, then went back to bed where I lay on my back and did chi kung breathing. It helped. The song of bullfrogs steadied into a ratchety rhythm. I slept"). She avoids emotional editorialising about anything but her continually reiterated desire to be left alone. She rejects what she sees as the empty hope of struggling to survive ("I saw no reason why we should struggle, just for the sake of struggling, when it would do no good. I am not a cranefly"), and lives only with her memories:

I woke up briefly in the middle of the night to the soft sound of rain and eerie chorus of bullfrogs. Even after two years I still slept curled up on one side of the bed; I still woke expecting to see her silhouette.

Gradually, both we and she come to realise that this retreat is also an avoidance of responsibility; Molly is an immunologist, and the memory of her inability to find a cure and thus save Helen has mutated into a fear of letting others down. The climactic outburst of overdue emotion, the necessary cleansing before Molly can truly let Helen go, and move on, is not the best piece of writing by Griffith - there's quite a bit of pounding on the ground and screaming "Why?!" - but Molly's overall trajectory from withdrawal back into life is sensitively and convincingly drawn. The repetition, at the end, of the line "I am not a cranefly" transmutes the sentiment from one of defeat to one of hope, as Molly finally comes to recognise the value of human community once more: "If I personally could not finish the research I intended, then those who came after me would", she notes; "If I struggled and failed, that was not the end."

Finally, 'Yaguara' (1994) goes for all-out, infectious sensuality in a vividly humid Central American jungle. The broad outline of the story is fairly clear from the opening lines; uber-straight-laced Jane Holford, we're told, became a photographer in order to "keep herself armored, inviolate, safe", "neither subject nor object but invulnerable observer". She is sent to Belize to photograph the Mayan glyphs at the site of an on-going excavation. Omnious climate abounds ("Wind, sly as a great cat’s breath, stole from banak to ironwood to Santa Maria pine, stirring hot perfumes"). Could it be that the "poised, unhurried, competent" lady will unravel, out in the wild?

Jane stumbled over a hidden tree limb. She fell to one knee, her nose seven inches from a log over which Azteca ants marched in an endless, silent line. And it was as if she had been looking at the world through a camera and had only just found the right focus. Everywhere she looked life leapt out at her: huge black carpenter bees buzzing around red melastoma flowers the size of roses; a leaf-frog, gaudy and red-eyed, peering from the depths of a sapodilla; the flicker of a geckos tail. And there were millipedes and rove beetles, silverfish and wood lice, and spiders spinning their silent webs to catch them. The air was luxuriant with rot, like the breath of a carnivore.

She stood up feeling hot and hunted and hemmed in. A snake slithered in the undergrowth. Her heart began to thump like a kettledrum. She licked salt from her lips, wondered how many different eyes were watching her from behind tree trunks or under leaves. A twig snapped under a heavy paw.

(Appropriately, I'm writing this review on a very humid day, albeit only by UK standards...)

She does, of course, but not in quite the way I expected; I refer you back to my introductory comments.

Jane's sole companion at the excavation is Cleis Fernandez, an archaeologist, and it swiftly becomes clear that Jane's much-prized privacy will not be an option; the two women must share a single corrugated iron shack ("Two bunks. No room into which she could retreat and close the door") with an all-too-public toilet. Worse still, Cleis makes (gasp!) assumptions about Jane, which Jane rejects irritably - within her own head:

"Especially mosquitoes. They carry botfly eggs and things out of your worst nightmares." Cleis had no idea about her nightmares, Jane thought.

Naturally - and with perhaps a shade too much exoticisation of the landscape (and by implication the people; although we meet only one local) - there are supernatural forces to be unleashed, namely the jaguar spirit of the story's title.

Just as in the other two stories, Jane's immersion in the world and her escalating attraction to Cleis is echoed in the increased awareness of her physicality; from the closed-off woman of the beginning, creeping carefully through the undergrowth in an effort to avoid being touched, Jane comes to be grazed and sweaty and present, feeling every thorn and leaf, and even the wall against her shoulders as she sits in the shack. "For the first time she was unclothed and not covered with a sheet", we're told, and it really does feel like a landmark; "She lay naked to the world, as an offering."

When Cleis, feverish one evening, cries out "The jungle is a siren", Jane silently agrees and drinks rum to keep herself from hearing it. There's a claustrophobic Heart of Darkness madness to the whole thing, and it comes as a relief  to reader and characters alike when Cleis and Jane finally succumb to their mutual attraction. Heady stuff.

~~Nic