Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading

by Maureen Corrigan

  Christine’s story is an extreme example of an extreme female adventure in caring for the elderly. Most of the friends I have these days would dismiss her decision to remain with her dying father as an exercise in Catholic masochism. I feel both identification and dread when I think about her. I understand her decision as partly the consequence of, yes, being a good Catholic girl but also being an only child (and, particularly, an only daughter) and, on top of all that, being the transplanted offshoot of an Old World culture in which the family always came first. Christine’s self-sacrifice reproaches and terrifies me—terrifies because I can almost see myself swaying a little too close to the edge of that particular chasm into which many good, dutiful daughters have fallen. Almost, but not quite. When my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer early in my graduate-school years, I traveled every weekend up to New York for months to help her through the ordeal, but I refused to take a leave of absence from school, which is what she asked me to do. I felt, rightly or wrongly, that I would never get back into that graduate-school world if I left it; that I would lose my fellowship and drift into becoming another one of those adult daughters living at home, one day taking care of her parents. And, even though Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, the Brontës, and plenty of other literary women were adult caretaking daughters living at home who still managed to find time to write in between changing the bed linen and cooking supper, I knew that no Pride and Prejudices—or even book reviews—would be written in my parents’ apartment in Sunnyside.

  So, to my low-grade-but-still-extant shame, I shrank from that particular female extreme adventure. But lots of women, literary and civilian, haven’t and still don’t. Because caretaking is such an unappealing and enervating adventure to write about, it’s hard, once again, to find whole novels or memoirs devoted to the subject. Accounts of the deadening ordeal, however, are sometimes tucked into the corners of larger narratives written by women. In one of the early chapters of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, for example, the novel’s young heroine, Lucy Snowe, reluctantly agrees to become the companion of a Miss Marchmont, an elderly single woman of means who’s crippled by rheumatism. What other options, after all, does the orphaned Lucy have? Even so, she hesitates to commit herself to a life of self-denial spent in Miss Marchmont’s sickroom. Her description of her time there—in between the declarations of devotion to the compelling Miss Marchmont—reads like an extreme adventure in keeping her nerves steady and her panic tamped down while she’s entering a sensory deprivation chamber:

  Two hot, close rooms thus became my world; and a crippled old woman my mistress, my friend, my all. Her service was my duty— her pain, my suffering—her relief, my hope—her anger, my punishment—her regard, my reward. I forgot that there were fields, woods, rivers, seas, an everchanging sky outside the steam-dimmed lattice of this sick-chamber; I was almost content to forget it. All within me became narrowed to my lot. 3

  Miss Marchmont conveniently expires and releases Lucy from her prison, but the numbed Lucy says she would have “crawled on” 4 with Miss Marchmont for twenty years if fate had decreed otherwise. That verb choice is significant, I think, because it intensifies the impression that this whole chapter creates of caretaking as an underground life— one that threatens to break the health and spirit of the caretaker herself.

  Nice girls don’t whine and Lucy is a nice girl, so her description of her time spent nursing Miss Marchmont is mournful rather than complaining. By social necessity, I think, the complaints or even cries of female desperation in literature have been encoded. And few writers have been better at transmitting subversive messages about the extreme adventures of womanhood through an enigma code of deceptively childlike vocabulary and black humor than one of my all-time favorite twentieth-century poets, the still-underappreciated Stevie Smith. Because Stevie’s writings and her life contain so many contradictions, labels always fall short. Toss out the interpretation and she arches backward at the crucial moment. Her peculiar poems are simple, complete with lines that rhyme, rhythms borrowed from the nursery and hymnal, and illustrations—in the tradition of William Blake and James Thurber—composed of loopy doodles. But a host of classical, literary, historical, and theological references lurks beneath the naïveté.

  Stevie herself affected childishness; to call her “Ms. Smith” would be to address the adult she only sometimes pretended to be. By most accounts, she was a startlingly plain woman who cultivated a preschool image with her Buster Brown fringe and homemade smocks. She lived from age six till her death at sixty-nine in the same house in the dowdy London suburb of Palmers Green. For many of those years, she nursed her beloved maiden aunt, Margaret Annie Spear, whom she immortalized in her poetry as “the Lion of Hull” or, simply, her “Lion Aunt.” Before illness and old age set in, Lion Aunt cosseted Stevie. She warmed Stevie’s bedtime glass of milk every night and was fiercely proud of her niece the poet—although her own appreciation of art extended only to the parish theatricals. Perhaps that tone deafness to poetry was a good thing, because if Lion Aunt had been a perspicacious reader, she might have sensed the insurrectionist messages expressed through the notoriously wicked wit of Smith’s work.

  Stevie’s off-kilter poetry abounds with the inappropriate laughter of the Wise Child, splitting her sides over life, death, the existence of a benevolent God, and the wish of every “normal” woman to be a mother. Many of her poems’ titles sound like snatches of conversation Stevie presumably overheard while marketing in Palmers Green: “Was He Married?”; “I Could Let Tom Go—but What About the Children?”; “Do Take Muriel Out”; “Emily Writes Such a Good Letter.” Were the poems merely send-ups of suburban culture, they’d be boorish; instead, they ramble from their familiar points of origin into secluded zones of erudition and pathos.

  Her most famous poem, the macabre masterpiece “Not Waving but Drowning,” which she wrote in April 1953, has been read as an existential commentary on human isolation. That’s what Stevie would have called the “smug-pug” or “smartie” reading. The poem describes the ludicrous, life-threatening situation of a drowning man whose frantic signals for help are misinterpreted by the smiling crowd on shore as cheerful greetings. I think, however, if you don’t allow yourself to be distracted by the sex of the drowning victim (a cover?), the poem also can be read as a vivid dramatization of the solitary, weighty situation of good “daughterly” caretakers like Stevie herself:

  Nobody heard him, the dead man,

  But still he lay moaning:

  I was much further out than you thought

  And not waving but drowning

  Poor chap, he always loved larking

  And now he’s dead

  It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way

  They said.

  Oh, no no no, it was too cold always

  (Still the dead one lay moaning)

  I was much too far out all my life

  And not waving but drowning.

  I imagine Stevie returning every night from her secretarial job (she worked for more than thirty years as a private secretary to an aristocratic publisher) to that house in Palmers Green. She waves and smiles at the neighbors—puts a good face on—as she walks up to the door, enters, and once again takes up the slow nightly routine of being a companion and, eventually, nurse to her elderly aunt. Throughout her life, Stevie was susceptible to “drowning” in depression. Not surprisingly, given her overburdened routine, many of her poems restlessly reenact a fantasy of escape: the spinster whose wind-propelled hat lifts her away to a desert island; the typist who leaps, during lunch break, into a Turner painting; the poet who longs for Coleridge’s “Porlock Person” to interrupt her thoughts and carry her out of life. Stevie herself would have been an ideal reader for all those male extreme-adventure tales that are currently so popular—although I can’t quite imagine her reading Into Thin Air and the rest of that thrilling but undeniably self-aggrandizing and sweaty canon without chortling.

  Do the women’s writing
s I’ve just surveyed constitute high-risk “adventure” tales? Certainly they did to the women—real and fictive— who lived them. But the impediments to their recognition as adventure literature are obvious. As I’ve said, most of these female extreme adventures in child rearing or caretaking aren’t glamorous. Then there’s the problem of location, location, location—three words that are as crucial in literature as they are in real estate. I think a lot of women’s extreme-adventure stories have been categorized as something else— melodrama, tales of sentiment—because the women involved meet their challenges inside a parlor, kitchen, or bedroom, rather than outside on some blasted and barren ice floe or wide, empty sea. There’s also a difference in what exactly is being risked: men usually gamble with their lives; lots of women, too, face physical risks, but more typically the emphasis in their stories is on the threatened loss of their sanity and their sense of self. The struggles described in this literature are often internal and psychological, rather than life-and-death contests in Technicolor. And there’s another odd fact that emerges once you begin to look at these male and female extreme-adventure tales in aggregate: men tend to seek adventure in packs, while women are isolated by their trials. Ironically, for all the feminist lit-crit theorizing about how women form their identities and experience their lives in community, the female extreme-adventure tale is imbued with a deep sense of seclusion—no wonder the extreme-adventure heroine fears a loss of sanity. Even Crusoe had Friday for company, and Stanley his Livingston. But the girls go it alone.

  By now, Reader, you’ve probably thought of some real and fictive exceptions to this theory of mine—and so have I. John Bayley’s memoir Elegy for Iris, about caring for his wife, Iris Murdoch through her struggle with Alzheimer’s; Philip Roth’s extraordinary memoir Patrimony, about nursing his aged father in his last illnesses. Just as women sometimes live out male adventure plots, these men endured and recorded an adventure that’s more traditionally female.

  “Reader”—that cozy form of direct address beloved of the nineteenth-century novel and most closely identified with the famous ending of Jane Eyre—flew into my head a second ago because, just as soon as I began reflecting on the essential ingredient of solitude in women’s adventure tales, I thought of Charlotte Brontë, the author of the two most encompassing and traumatic female extreme-adventure tales of all time.

  All three of the literary Brontë sisters were poets of solitude—not surprising, given their childhood in that parsonage out there on the moors; the early deaths of their mother and the two eldest sisters; and the dubious guidance of their volatile father, Patrick. Anne and Emily certainly captured the call of the wild and lonely in their novels, but Charlotte was the sister who ventured the deepest in exploring the terrors of utter isolation. I’m not talking about just the physical experience of being all by your lonesome; no, Charlotte Brontë shoves her readers into the dark prison house of self and throws away the key. In Jane Eyre, she relents and finally opens the door; by the time of writing Villette, Brontë had grown more courageous as a writer, or maybe more merciless. In that novel, which is almost unbearable to read, she lets the key to the cell slip through her fingers and sink into the void. Brontë rivals her American literary soul mate, Edgar Allan Poe, in treating readers to the vicarious horrors of being buried alive, of sensing the walls slowly closing in, of being bounded on all sides by icebergs towering out of a frozen sea, like those miserable crewmen on the Endurance, Ernest Shackleton’s doomed ship.

  In both Jane Eyre and Villette, this waking nightmare is gendered: it’s one that only women suffer. The sensitive and intelligent—but undeniably plain—heroines of those amazing novels describe for us a particularly traumatic version of a female extreme adventure that is by no means restricted to the nineteenth century but whose terrors have faded somewhat for contemporary women thanks to the saving social interventions of the First and Second Women’s Movements. I’m talking here about the extreme female adventure of the marriage market. Fortitude, wits, and, above all, keeping one’s nerves steady in an isolated, time-sensitive contest: these are the defining features of the marriage-market extreme adventures that are reenacted, fictively, in the parlors and pump rooms of so many nineteenth-century British and American novels written mostly by women. (Henry James, of course, is the great male master of this subject.) If a young woman didn’t successfully come through the ordeal, she could expect a death-in-life future of second-class citizenship as a female dependent—years spent outside the home as a governess or companion or immured inside the family manse caring for elderly relations; playing the stern or doting aunt to hordes of nieces and nephews; and, quite possibly, at the end of her life being turned out of the ancestral pile when her father died and the male heir claimed his inheritance.5 To me, as a semi-active, semi-autonomous feminist reader, the most chilling aspect of the nineteenth-century marriage-market extreme adventure for women was that the “contestants” had to remain, at least outwardly, still. To be observed plotting or maneuvering an eligible man of means into your clutches would be to forfeit the game—and one’s demure claims to ladyhood—at the outset. In Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, scheming, or being seen scheming, was what destroyed Lily Bart.

  Whenever I read accounts in nineteenth-century novels of young female characters reining themselves in and waiting breathlessly for a male partner to take notice of them, I think of that scene in the middle of the first James Bond movie, Dr. No. Bond, played definitively by Sean Connery, is asleep in his Caribbean-island hotel room when something on his leg—a tickle? a soft tentacle?—awakens him in the dead of night. He spies a roundish lump moving up under the white sheet that covers his leg. Instantly, Bond knows that in order to save his life he must remain absolutely still. The lump moves up, out from under the sheet, and onto his chest. Bond sees that it’s a tarantula. The tarantula moves onto his neck, his cheek. Bond remains still. At last, the tarantula crawls off the bed and Bond leaps up and squashes it. To save their lives in the extreme adventure of the premodern marriage market, women had no choice but to remain, like Bond, immobile while their lives hung in the balance.

  Even Pride and Prejudice, that sunniest, most beloved nineteenth-century novel about courtship and marriage, is rimmed with dark shadows—fearsome alternative tales of the horrors that would befall women who marry unwisely or not at all. The marriage of the Bennet parents is itself a catastrophic case study in the consequences of marrying in haste (a mistake that the Bennets’ boy-crazy third daughter, Lydia, is genetically programmed to repeat, running off, as she does, with that charming and shallow soldier of fortune, Colonel Wickham). Here’s part of a passage where the all-knowing wry narrator of Pride and Prejudice “reads” Elizabeth’s mind on the subject of her parents’ marriage:

  Had Elizabeth’s opinions been all drawn from her own family, she could not have formed a very pleasing picture of conjugal felicity or domestic comfort. Her father, captivated by youth and beauty, and that appearance of good humor, which youth and beauty generally give, had married a woman whose weak understanding and illiberal mind put an end to all real affection for her. Respect, esteem, and confidence, had vanished for ever; and all his views of domestic happiness were overthrown. But Mr. Bennet was not of a disposition to seek comfort for the disappointment which his own imprudence had brought on, in any of those pleasures which too often console the unfortunate for their folly or their vice. He was fond of the country and of books; and from these tastes had arisen his principal enjoyments.6

  Mr. Bennet is a man, so he can remove himself from his family for long stretches of time. Indeed, throughout Pride and Prejudice, he’s described as hibernating in his study; in other words, he uses reading as a means of escape. His marriage is a disappointment, but it is not his destiny. That’s why his detached amusement at his wife’s overly obvious attempts to engineer a “good match” for their daughters comes off as a bit sadistic: he can afford to laugh; it’s left to the inept Mrs. Bennet to shove her daughters into
the lifeboat of a respectable marriage—even though she herself, at least subconsciously, knows how leaky such a marriage can be. But not to marry is a fate worse than death. Certainly that’s the fear fueling the grotesque marital surrender of Elizabeth Bennet’s best friend, Charlotte Lucas. Charlotte’s panicky decision to wed the smug and sexually unappetizing Mr. Collins could have so easily been Elizabeth’s own that it reads like a noir alternative to it. Mr. Collins first proposes to Elizabeth, and then, when she declines his offer, within a few short days he turns around and proposes to Charlotte, who accepts him. Elizabeth is stunned by what she perceives as her girlfriend’s “humiliation.”7 But the dowdy Charlotte doesn’t possess Elizabeth’s signature advantages of a “fine pair of eyes” and a witty tongue. She’s not likely to receive other offers. Unlike Mr. Bennet, Charlotte walks into this dreadful marriage with eyes open, armored in pragmatism. “I am not romantic you know,” Charlotte tells Elizabeth. “I never was. I ask only a comfortable home; and considering Mr. Collins’s character, connections, and situation in life, I am convinced that my chance of happiness with him is as fair, as most people can boast on entering the marriage state. ” 8

  One can almost hear in that speech the creak of the coffin lid closing. Alas, poor Charlotte, we knew her well. And, in fact, Charlotte does become diminished, growing quieter and more deferential, after her marriage. But will “fine eyes” and a talent for clever repartee be enough to rescue Elizabeth from a different, solitary kind of social entombment? Some months later when Elizabeth pays a visit to the now married Charlotte, she’s patronized and pitied by Mr. Collins, who, in his moronic way, embodies the prevailing view toward superfluous single women. Creak. The scariest part of Pride and Prejudice is that section where Elizabeth and her beautiful older sister, Jane, are walled up in their house, all hopes for a union with Darcy and Bingley (Jane’s inamorato) lost. (I do, by the way, mean to use that adjective scary, even though it doesn’t seem to accord with the overall tone of Pride and Prejudice. Austen, after all, was a great reader of Gothic novels, and she even wrote one herself: Northanger Abbey. Because of the life-and-death dramas that are publicly enacted in them, those bright rooms at Longbourn are as fearsome, in their way, as the creepiest Gothic dungeon.) And the absolutely scariest pages within that long suspenseful section are those where Elizabeth at last encounters Darcy again: first, in the parlor of the Bennets’ house, Longbourn (when he and Bingley come to pay a visit after their strange absence), and then, in the dining room of that house a few evenings later. Like Bond, Elizabeth—arguably the most spirited, the most resourceful, and the most confident heroine in all of nineteenth-century literature—can only hold her breath and wait during these decisive meetings whose outcome will determine whether she “lives” or “dies.” The emotional power of these drawn-out passages is cumulative, but even in this snippet from the second meeting, a reader can see how very painful—and imperative—it is for Elizabeth to maintain her position of passivity: