Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading

by Maureen Corrigan

  But Bly was rescued, and her first-person account of the horrendous treatment of Blackwell’s inmates, some of whom were locked away simply because they couldn’t speak English, predated Geraldo Rivera’s exposé of Willowbrook State School by some six decades. In 1889 Bly went on to best the record of Jules Verne’s hero Phileas Fogg by traveling around the world in a breathless seventy-two days. The famous picture of her from that trip shows a pretty, wasp-waisted young woman, demurely outfitted in checked traveling skirt and jacket and carrying a carpetbag. Bly might have circled the globe unchaperoned, but she did so properly cloaked in the protective mantle of late-Victorian ladyhood.

  Then there are the early-twentieth-century sports marvel Babe Didrikson Zaharias, and that blond and glamorous “just one of the boys” photographer Margaret Bourke-White. Other standouts are the African plantation owner Isak Dinesen and World War I nurse and outspoken women’s rights advocate Vera Brittain, both of whose autobiographies (Brittain’s mournful Testament of Youth particularly) inspired me when I discovered them in my early twenties. Strangely, in fiction as opposed to real life, female daredevils are scarcer; furthermore, the ones that do exist are almost exclusively the product of male writers’ imaginations and their risk-taking is usually erotic in nature. In 1722, three years after he created the ur-survivor, Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe gave readers Moll Flanders, whose picaresque adventures as a prostitute, society lady, thief, and convict he tried to pass off as a true-life autobiographical account. Flanders was a kind of eighteenth-century reincarnation of the Wife of Bath, Chaucer’s immortal gap-toothed, much-married sensualist. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra also insinuates herself into this hip-swiveling sorority of literary Mae Wests, as do, I suppose, William Makepeace Thackeray’s Becky Sharp and Henry James’s and Edith Wharton’s bevy of more pallid social adventuresses such as Daisy Miller, Undine Spragg, Madame Merle, and Lily Bart.

  The Brontë sisters’ far less curvaceous creations—Jane Eyre, Catherine Earnshaw, Shirley—outrageously defy convention, but with the possible exception of Jane’s flight from her aborted wedding to (the still-married) Rochester in which she stumbles through a storm on the moor, their physical adventures don’t really qualify, in the traditional sense, as “extreme.” Jane Austen’s Catherine Morland, the impressionable young heroine of Northanger Abbey, wanders, every other page or so, into secret passages and ghostly chambers, but this Gothic novel is too much of a send-up, too much on the order of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, to seriously qualify as an “adventure.” In fact, with the exception of Nancy Drew, who was the initial creation of a man, Edward Stratemeyer, but whose series life and escapades were sustained throughout the next two decades by women writers, I can’t think of very many other female-authored women of adventure in fiction—certainly not before the onset of the Second Women’s Movement, and even then . . . who?

  The thought of Nancy Drew reminds me that the two places where swashbucklers in skirts have long thrived have been in the “can’t-get-no-respect” genres of juvenile and detective fiction. The juvenile-fiction connection makes sense: before the fall into adolescence, it’s easier for girls to get away with acting as tomboys. There’s Astrid Lindgren’s fearless anarchist, Pippi Longstocking, Dorothy from L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline, and the whole fairy-tale crowd of female high-wire acts—Little Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks, Fa Mu Lan—many of whom have been gussied up and diminished into girly-girls by Disney. Almost from its very inception, detective fiction has sanctioned curious women to gamble with their lives and enjoy the male thrills of exploring the unknown and hunting down prey. A relentless quest for fresh variations on the old formula certainly had something to do with the literary introduction of female detectives, especially in the pulp serials. Maybe the fact that most crime stories end up restoring and affirming the prevailing social order also gave mysteries more leeway to experiment with unconventionally daring heroines: to all appearances, at the end of these tales, everyone— victims, criminals, and detective—is put back in their proper place. With few exceptions, the careers of many turn-of-the-century female detectives ended in marriage.

  The fact that many detecting women have been figured as “unawakened” adolescents like Nancy Drew or “over-the-hill” busybodies like Miss Marple has also made them less threatening to the status quo. Sure, there has always been the occasional married female snoopster—Agatha Christie’s Tuppence (of the twinkly Tommy and Tuppence series) or Dashiell Hammett’s Nora Charles (hitched to fellow boozehound Nick)—but they’re deviations from the norm. Until feminism electro-shocked the formula in the 1970s, the prevailing attitude toward female sleuths was most eloquently voiced by Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Congratulating his secretary and part-time detecting partner, Effie Perine, on an assignment she’s just completed, Spade rasps, “You’re a damned good man, sister.” 1 In other words, to be a credible detective, a woman had to become an honorary man.

  I’ve loved reading about the exploits of many of these female adventurers, real and fictive, and relished the opportunity to (vicariously) compete, swagger, and spit alongside the boys, as they do. Maybe because I read so many new novels written by women and because I have a scholarly background in the nineteenth-century British novel— a genre in which women more than held their own with their male contemporaries—I began to think about the existence of a specifically female variant of the extreme-adventure tale. The female extreme-adventure tale, as I was beginning to discern it about eight years ago, was light on feats of derring-do and braggadocio, heavy on anxious waiting and endurance. The precarious situations described in these female extreme-adventure stories—childbirth, unwanted pregnancies, abortions (legal and illegal), abusive relationships, fatiguing caregiving—are ones that are faced almost exclusively by women. Their physical ordeals are augmented or even outweighed by heavy emotional burdens. Much space is devoted in these stories to the value of a woman quietly keeping her nerve through hours—sometimes years—of strain. And above all, it’s the quotidian quality of their pain that separates the women from the boys. Blinding blizzards and numbing frostbite, such as Jon Krakauer describes, last for a few hours, maybe days, and then, one way or another, the nightmare is over. In contrast, the torments particular to women’s extreme-adventure tales continue year after year. Climbing Everest looks like a snap compared with waking up every morning to, say, the enervating prospect of attending to an elderly invalid parent.

  I was really struck by the idea of a “women’s only” version of the extreme-adventure tale in the course of reviewing Anna Quindlen’s 1998 novel, Black and Blue, for The New York Times. Around the same time, like millions of other readers, I’d caught extreme-adventure fever from reading Krakauer’s books and The Perfect Storm. The contrasts between those books and Quindlen’s novel were obvious: hers is what would be traditionally labeled a “small story”—the saga of a battered woman who finally decides to take her ten-year-old son and flee from the sporadic violent rages and tearful apologies of her policeman husband. Black and Blue opens on Fran Benedetto’s suspenseful escape. Early one fateful morning, Fran chops off her long red hair with kitchen scissors, dyes it blond, and leaves with her son, Robert. Assisted by a member of an underground women’s rescue network, they drive to Philadelphia’s Thirtieth Street Station, and there they sit, waiting for another anonymous angel of deliverance to tell them what train to board to their new life. Fran and Robert eventually wind up in a garden apartment in Lake Plata, Florida, an American Nowheresville of strip malls and retirement complexes. Under an alias, Fran enrolls Robert in school and begins working as a home health-care aide. And she waits every day in fear that her husband will find them; she knows it’s only a matter of time.

  Fran’s story never feels like a story; rather, it reads like a series of compelling dispatches from an extremely courageous and harrowing life. It evoked many of the same responses in me that those male skin-of-their-teeth survival (or not)
stories did. So did Quindlen’s first novel, One True Thing, which chronicled the everyday horrors a young woman braves in nursing her mother, who’s dying of cancer. The heroines of Quindlen’s female extreme adventures don’t simply suffer silently and endure, as did most of their literary counterparts in the nineteenth century and earlier. Fran, in particular, comes to her own rescue by fleeing her abusive husband and creating a new life from scratch. Because of the changes wrought by the Second Women’s Movement, Quindlen’s characters (and their real-life equivalents) get to take action, talk back, and forge professional identities outside the private sphere of the home— without having to become male impersonators.

  I loved the vicarious thrills of the passages where Quindlen’s heroines get mad and get moving, but I found myself just as engrossed in the long, tense interludes where they simply have to endure. Thinking about the power of those narrative stretches made me think about earlier, prefeminist women’s stories—stories of extreme emotional and sometimes physical adventure—where, because the social options are so much more limited, the heroines have no alternative but to tough things out, silently. These female extreme-adventure stories have never been awarded the medals for bravery that the men’s stories garner; instead, they’re commonly regarded as the literary equivalent of the women’s movies or “weepies,” like Mildred Pierce and Imitation of Life, that used to be so popular with female filmgoers in the 1940s into the ’50s.

  Why the gender discrepancy in value? Well, female high-risk stories usually get lost within the larger, more muscular dimensions of the male genre. As that metaphor suggests, there’s a differing emphasis on physicality in male and female stories. The male adventure stories heave with exertion and bleed every few pages or so; women’s feats tend to be less Herculean and more Sisyphean in nature. Just like the mythical Sisyphus, who was doomed to push a boulder up a mountain, only to have the boulder roll down again and the process repeat itself over and over for eternity, many female “adventurers”—in literature and real life— face unremitting daily strains like tending families, children, elderly relatives, or the sick or the disabled. The most famous female adventure tale of them all featuring a handicapped child and a teacher’s day-in, day-out fight for her independence is that of Annie Sullivan, “The Miracle Worker,” and her extraordinary, “buried alive” student, Helen Keller. The Miracle Worker, as most stories in this specialized subgenre do, concludes on a note of triumph: after years of toil by herself and Sullivan, Helen is prepared to enter the workaday world. But ending, as they do, on the achievement of “normalcy,” these tales of endurance are much less flashy and spine-tingling than their male counterparts, which typically feature superhuman feats of achievement.

  If stories about women plugging away, day after day, sound more like a literary call to conscience than a pleasure to read, stories about caring for the elderly—or stories of the lives of old people and their struggles— have even less of the potential-bestseller aura about them. Getting old and infirm is way down on anyone’s list of favorite fantasies, and this fact is reflected in how few novels, short stories, or poems have tackled the subject. Yet, I think that aging and its attendant challenges and miseries are very much the stuff of real-life female extreme adventures as well as of a small group of novels and memoirs. Some not-quite-dead-yet Great Men have written about their declining years, but statistically, women far outlive men. Male reflections of old age—such as Tennyson’s “Ulysses” and “Tithonus” and W. B. Yeats’s masterpiece, “Byzantium”— tend to dwell on the loss of sexual potency. A downer, certainly, but there are other kinds of losses that must be braved, quietly, by the many women who tend their husbands through their last illnesses and then find themselves alone at the end of their own lives.

  A couple of years after my father died, I took my mother, who was visiting me in Washington, to a local senior club in an effort to get her connected to other retirees in our area. “Bring a partner and dance,” read the advertisement in our neighborhood newspaper. Like a lot of other adult daughters I know, I was now my widowed mom’s designated partner. We arrived at the social center and found that the club consisted of three beautifully turned-out women and one old man who had charge of playing what he called the “Victrola” and dancing, in turn, with each of the ladies. Female-with-female dancing was not done. The fact that this amiable old fellow was in such demand just gives further evidence of the essential unfairness of life when it comes to gender differences. My mom shyly danced a polka with this obliging man (“I thought he was going to keel over,” she whispered to me afterward), and then she and I made some excuse and fled—to have a drink at a nearby bar/restaurant. I remember thinking that day that I wouldn’t have the guts for what might lie ahead in my old age—searching for friends, maybe for another partner; dancing in the face of approaching death. Certainly that neighborhood Fred Astaire has his own story to tell, but he’s far outnumbered by all those patiently waiting Ginger Rogerses, who dance the same steps he does—but backward and wearing heels.

  The solo entry of women into the “extreme” landscape of widowhood and the attendant feelings of diminution or even invisibility is a tough subject only a few brave literary women have tackled. There’s Barbara Pym’s dour novel Quartet in Autumn, about four oldsters—two women, two men—who work in the same office, attempting to fend off retirement. Significantly, early in the story, one of these women—an avid novel reader named Letty—thinks about the fiction selection in her local library: “If she hoped to find [a novel] which reflected her own sort of life she had come to realize that the position of an unmarried, unattached, ageing woman is of no interest whatever to the writer of modern fiction.”2 When it was published, Pym’s novel was inevitably compared to one of the few others that have turned a cold eye on the subject of female aging, Muriel Spark’s rather sinister Memento Mori. In contrast, Agatha Christie wrote what is essentially an old-cat fairy tale in her Miss Marple series, which turned the invisibility of old women into an advantage for her master detective. Ditto for Christie’s American predecessor, Anna Katherine Green, in her 1897 mystery, That A fair Next Door, which introduced her snoopy spinster detective, Amelia Butter-worth. Autobiographical writers like M.F.K. Fisher, in a few posthumously published essays, and Kate Simon, in her last memoir, Etchings in an Hourglass, wrote bitter, vivid accounts of the disrespect and loneliness they experienced as elderly women dining and traveling solo. I asked a former editor and friend of mine who lives in New York and who likes to play literary parlor games to poll her wide circle of acquaintances for titles. So far, they’ve come up with A Lost Lady by Willa Cather and Simone de Beauvoir’s Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre. Almost every player started off by mentioning Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn.

  If aging isn’t a sexy topic for literature, neither is caring for the old and sick; yet that’s a job—I’d call it an extreme emotional, and sometimes even physical, adventure—that still primarily falls to women. When I was growing up in Sunnyside, it seemed as though every large apartment house contained at least one apartment tenanted by an elderly woman and her single adult daughter. Although I grew up and moved away, some of my cohorts remained behind to live at home, work in “the city,” and take care of their aging parents. The three-story apartment building next to the one I grew up in was owned by a Ukrainian couple with one daughter, Christine. They were hardworking people and devout Catholics. Since Christine was several years older than I, we played together only occasionally, but our mothers were friendly, talking to each other in a patchwork of Polish and Ukrainian. While Christine was in medical school, her mother died. Even after she became a doctor, Christine lived at home with her father in the small two-bedroom apartment that was a mirror image of our own. For the last several years of his life, her father was paralyzed; he needed Christine’s help to perform all the basic bodily functions. On several occasions he stopped breathing and Christine, using her medical skills, resuscitated him. For years she didn’t work outside the home a
t all; she just took care of her father—spelled occasionally by health-care aides and by the parish priest, who visited several times a week to administer Holy Communion. Nowadays, Christine works at a New York hospital and lives in that same apartment by herself. Word around the neighborhood is that she’s leaving the apartment house and all her savings to the local parish church when she dies.