The Women's Room (Virago Modern Classics)

by Marilyn French

  In fact, men are central to many women’s lives in puberty and early adulthood, when sexual identity is being explored. At this time, women are central to many men, too. But as we grow older, our work – whatever it may be – occupies most of our time and thought. ‘Love’ moves to a secondary or even tertiary position in our universe. The convention of male centrality was built into the novel, a form that emerged in a period in which man-made laws forced women into economic, political, and social dependence upon men. Women’s achievement of independence in these areas is still new, and since women continue to be expected to take total responsibility for rearing the young, independence remains a difficult and risky enterprise. The same male desire that created laws making women dependent on men appears in men’s adamant continuing refusal to accept responsibility for raising children, and often, for maintaining themselves and their living spaces – something all male animals do except man. Both acts foster the illusion of control, to which the masculine principle is dedicated. And again, forcing dependency on women serves to silence them, contains and gags radical criticism. Making men central to women’s lives serves to exalt men, to make them pivotal to all life, which they are not: millions of women and children live without men.

  But perhaps the major taboo in art, especially that created by women, is the suggestion that the male is not, by nature or desert, superior to the female. It is permissible – at least for men – to show a male as evil, ridiculous, or weak; but not to suggest that men as a class have no right to the authority or status they claim. The single belief that all world religions and nation-states share, whatever their deity or economic system, is in male domination. To challenge the assumption that men are, by nature or divinity, entitled to superiority over women is to challenge the core of almost every society in existence. Feminism challenges that core: if you believe that women are human beings who matter as much as men, you cannot accept that men are superior to women, whether morally, physically, intellectually, or politically. The Women’s Room challenges belief in male domination directly, and this challenge has led to attacks on the author as a ‘man-hater’.

  When I was asked, in 1977, what I would wish for The Women’s Room, I said I wished for a world in which no one would comprehend it because women and men had found a way to live together in felicity. Unfortunately, despite many easements on female life in the west, the world’s ethos has moved in the opposite direction – toward more hostility between the sexes. So severe is the situation today that I can imagine a time when novels like this one will not be allowed to be published. It is therefore still brave of Virago to publish it, even after all these years.

  Marilyn French, 2006

  CHAPTER ONE

  1

  Mira was hiding in the ladies’ room. She called it that, even though someone had scratched out the word ladies’ in the sign on the door, and written women’s underneath. She called it that out of thirty-eight years of habit, and until she saw the cross-out on the door, had never thought about it. ‘Ladies’ room’ was an euphemism, she supposed, and she disliked euphemisms on principle. However, she also detested what she called vulgarity, and had never in her life, even when handling it, uttered the word shit. But here she was at the age of thirty-eight huddled for safety in a toilet booth in the basement of Sever Hall, gazing at, no, studying that word and others of the same genre, scrawled on the gray enameled door and walls.

  She was perched, fully clothed, on the edge of the open toilet seat, feeling stupid and helpless, and constantly looking at her watch. It would all have been redeemed, even translated into excitement, had there been some grim-faced Walter Matthau in a trench coat, his hand in a gun-swollen pocket, or some wild-eyed Anthony Perkins in a turtleneck, his itching strangler’s hands clenching and unclenching – someone glamorous and terrifying at any rate – waiting for her outside in the hall, if she had been sitting in panic searching for another way out. But of course if that were the case, there would also be a cool and desperate Cary Grant or Burt Lancaster sliding along the walls of another hallway, waiting for Walter to show himself. And that by itself, she thought mournfully, feeling somehow terribly put upon, would have been enough. If she had one of them, anyone at all, waiting for her at home, she would not be hiding in a toilet booth in the basement of Sever Hall. She would have been upstairs in a corridor with the other students, leaning against a wall with her books at her feet, or strolling past the unseeing faces. She could have transcended, knowing she had one of them at home, and could therefore move alone in a crowd. She puzzled over that paradox, but only briefly. The graffiti were too interesting.

  ‘Down with capitalism and the fucking military-industrial complex. KILL ALL FASCIST PIGS!’

  This had been answered. ‘You simplify too much. New ways must be found to kill pigs: out of their death new pigs spring as armed men sprouted from the bulls’ teeth planted by that mcp Jason. Pigs batten on pig blood. The way is slow and hard. We must cleanse our minds of all the old shit, we must work in silence, exile, and cunning like that mcp Joyce. We must have a revolution of sensibility.’

  A third party entered the argument in purple ink:

  ‘Stay in your cocoon. Who needs you? Those who are not with us are against us. Anyone who supports the status quo is part of the problem. THERE IS NO TIME. THE REVOLUTION IS HERE! KILL PIGS!’

  Writer No. 2 was apparently fond of this booth and had returned, for the next entry was in her handwriting and in the same pen: ‘Those who live by the sword die by the sword.’

  Wild printing in the purple felt-tip followed this in great sprawling letters:

  ‘FUCKING CHRISTIAN IDIOT! TAKE YOUR MAXIMS AND STUFF THEM! THERE IS ONLY POWER! POWER TO THE PEOPLE! POWER TO THE POOR! WE ARE DYING BY THE SWORD NOW!’

  The last outburst ended that symposium, but there were others like it scrawled on the side walls. Almost all of them were political. There were pasted-on notices of SDS meetings, meetings of Bread and Roses, and Daughters of Bilitris. Mira withdrew her eyes from a crude drawing of female genitalia with ‘Cunt is Beautiful’ scratched beneath it. She presumed, at least, that it was a drawing of female genitalia, although it looked remarkably like a wide-petaled flower. She wasn’t sure because she had never seen her own, that being part of the anatomy that did not present itself directly to the vision.

  She looked at her watch again: she could leave now. She stood and from force of habit turned to flush the unused toilet. On the walls behind it someone had printed great jagged letters in what looked like nail polish. The red enamel had dripped and each stroke had a thick pearl at its base. It looked as if it had been written in blood. SOME DEATHS TAKE FOREVER, it read. She drew her breath in sharply and left the booth.

  It was 1968.

  2

  She washed her hands vigorously, also from force of habit, and combed her hair, which was arranged in careful curls. She stood back, examining it in the glaring light of the lavatory. It looked a strange color. Since she had stopped dyeing it last year, it had grown out not just grayer, but with a mousy brown tinge, so she had been tinting it, and this time it had come out perhaps a bit too orange. She moved closer to the mirror and checked her eyebrows and the blue eye shadow she had applied only an hour before. Both were still okay.

  She stepped back again and tried to see her whole self. She couldn’t do it. Ever since she had changed her style of dress – that is, ever since she had been at Harvard – her self refused to coalesce in the mirror. She could see bits and pieces – hair, eyes, legs – but the pieces wouldn’t come together. The hair and eyes went together, but the mouth was wrong; it had changed during the past years. The legs were all right, but didn’t go with the bulky shoes and the pleated skirt. They looked too thin under the thicker body – yet she was the same weight now she’d been for the past ten years. She began to feel something rising in her chest, and hastily looked away from the mirror. This was no time to get upset. Then she turned back jerkily, looking at nothing, pulled out her lipstick an
d applied a line of it to her lower lip, her eyes careful to look at nothing but the mouth. In spite of herself, however, her eyes caught her whole face, and in a moment her head was full of tears. She leaned her hot forehead against the cool tile wall, then remembered that this was a public place full of other people’s germs, and straightened up hurriedly and left the room.

  She climbed up the three flights of ancient, creaky stairs, reflecting that the ladies’ room was in an inconvenient location because it had been added long after the building was erected. The school had been planned for men, and there were places, she had been told, where women were simply not permitted to go. It was odd. Why? she wondered. Women were so unimportant anyway, why would anyone bother to keep them out? She arrived in the corridor a little late. No one was left in the hallway, lingering, loitering outside the classroom doors. The blank eyes, the empty faces, the young bodies that ten minutes earlier had paced its length, were gone. It was these that, passing her without seeing her, seeing her without looking at her, had driven her into hiding. For they had made her feel invisible. And when all you have is a visible surface, invisibility is death. Some deaths take forever, she found herself repeating as she walked into the classroom.

  3

  Perhaps you find Mira a little ridiculous. I do myself. But I also have some sympathy for her, more than you, probably. You think she was vain and shallow. I suppose those are words that could have been applied to her, but they are not the first ones that spring to my mind. I think she was ridiculous for hiding in the toilet, but I like her better for that than for the meanness of her mouth, which she herself perceived, and tried to cover up with lipstick. Her meanness was of the tut-tut variety; she slammed genteel doors in her head, closing out charity. But I also feel a little sorry for her, at least I did then. Not anymore.

  Because in a way it doesn’t matter whether you open doors or close them, you still end up in a box. I have failed to ascertain an objective difference between one way of living and another. The only difference I can see is between varying levels of happiness, and I cringe when I say that. If old Schopenhauer is right, happiness is not a human possibility, since it means the absence of pain, which, as an uncle of mine used to say, only occurs when you’re dead or dead drunk. There’s Mira with all her closed doors, and here’s me with all my open ones, and we’re both miserable.

  I spend a lot of time alone here, walking along the beach in any weather, and I think over and over about Mira and the others, Val, Isolde, Kyla, Clarissa, Grete, back at Harvard in 1968. That year itself was an open door, but a magical one; once you went through it, you could never return. You stand just beyond it, gazing back at what you have left, and it looks like a country in a fairytale book, all little patches and squares of color, fields and farms and castles with turrets and pennons and crenellated parapets. The houses are all cozy, thatched-roof cottages, slowly burnishing in the afternoon sun, and the people who live in castle or cottage have the same simple outlines and offer themselves for immediate recognition. A good prince or princess or fairy has blond hair and blue eyes, and bad queens and stepmothers have black hair. I think there was one girl who had black hair and was still good, but she’s the exception that proves the rule. Good fairies wear blue gauzy tutus and carry golden wands; bad ones wear black and are humpbacked and have big chins and long noses. There are no bad kings in fairyland, although there are a few giants of unsavory reputation. There are lots of wicked stepmothers and old witches and crones, though. When I was a child, fairyland as it appeared in the books was the place I wanted to live, and I judged my surroundings according to how well they matched it: beauty was fairyland, not truth. I used to try to concentrate hard enough to make fairyland come true in my head. If I had been able to do it, I would gladly have deserted the real world to go there, willingly abandoning my parents. Perhaps you call that incipient schizophrenia, but it seems to me that that’s what I did in the end, lived in fairyland where there are only five basic colors, clear lines, and no beer cans cluttering up the grass.

  One reason I like the Maine coast so much is that it allows so little room for such fantasies. The wind is hard and cold and raw; my face is a little chapped all winter. The sea pounds in and no matter how many times I see it it excites me the same way the skyline of New York does, no matter how many times I see that. The words are trite – grand, powerful, overwhelming – oh, it doesn’t matter what one calls it. The thing is as close as I can come to a notion of God. The sheer naked power of those great waves constantly rolling up with such an ominous rumble, hitting against the rocks and sending up skyfuls of white froth. It is so powerful and so beautiful and so terrifying at the same time that for me it is a symbol of what life is all about. And there’s the sand and the rocks and all the life they foster – snails, mussels. I often smile to myself, calling the rocks snail tenements, shellfish ghettos. They are, you know: the snails are more crowded together there than the people in Hong Kong. The sand wasn’t designed for easy walking, and the gray Maine sky seems to open out into the void itself. This sky has no notion of – it can never have been in – brilliant lands where olives grow and tomatoes turn blood red and oranges shine among the green leaves of trees in front yards behind white stucco walls dusty under the sun, and the sky is nearly as blue as the sea. Here, everything is gray: sea, sky, rocks. This sky looks only to the north, to icy poles; you can almost see the color fading and fading as the sky arches northward, until there is no color at all. The white world of the Snow Queen.

  Well, I said I was going to try to avoid fairy-tale fantasies, but I seem to be incorrigible. So I’m feeling alone and a little superior standing in this doorway looking back at fairy-tale land and almost enjoying my pain. Maybe I should turn around. But I can’t, I can’t see ahead yet, only backward. Anyway all of this is ridiculous. Because I was on my way to saying that Mira had lived all her life in fairy-tale land and when she went through the doorway, her head was still full of fairyland images, she had no notion of reality. But obviously she did; fairyland was her reality. So if you want to stand in judgment on her you have to determine whether her reality was the same as other people’s, i.e., was she crazy? In her economy, the wicked queen was known by her face and body shape, and the good fairy by hers. The good fairy showed up whenever she was needed, never took a dime for all her wand-waving, and then conveniently disappeared. I leave it to you to decide on Mira’s sanity.

  4

  I no longer try to label things. Here, where everything seems so arid and austere, the place teems with life: in the sea, in the sky, on the rocks. I come here to get away from a greater emptiness. Inland a couple of miles stands the third-rate community college where I teach courses like ‘Fairy Tale and Folklore’ (can’t get away from it!) and ‘Grammar 12,’ mostly to female students who aim to do well enough here to get into the state college and acquire teacher certification and the joys of the ten-month year. Wait, I think, just wait and see how much joy it holds.

  Look at those snail clusters on that rock. There are thousands of snails, and mussels too, among the heaped boulders, clustering together like inhabitants of an ancient city. They are gorgeous, they shimmer with colors they’ve had for thousands of years: red and gold and blue and white and orange. They all live together. I find that extraordinary. Each one occupies its own tiny space, no one seems to push around for more room. Do you suppose there are snails with too little room who just die? It is clear that their life must be mainly interior. I like to come here and stare at them. I never touch them. But as I look, I keep thinking that they don’t have to create their order, they don’t have to create their lives, those things are just programmed into them. All they have to do is live. Is that an illusion, do you suppose?

  I feel terribly alone. I have enough room, but it’s empty. Or maybe I don’t, maybe room means more than space. Clarissa once said that isolation was insanity. She never says anything carelessly, her words come out of her mouth like fruit that is perfectly ripened. Unripe fruit s
he doesn’t deal in: that’s why she is silent so often. So I guess isolation is insanity. But what can I do? At the one or two parties a year I’m invited to, I have to listen to academic gossip, snarling retorts (never made in fact) to the president, nasty cracks about the mediocrity of the dean. In a place like Harvard, academic gossip is pretentious and hollow, full of name dropping and craven awe, or else it oozes complacency, the invulnerability of the elect. In a place like this, where everyone feels a loser, the gossip is mean-minded and full of that kind of hate and contempt that is really disgust at one’s own failure in life. There aren’t many single people here except for a few very young male instructors. There are damned few women, none single, except for one sixty-year-old widow who does needlepoint at faculty meetings. I mean, not everything is in your head, is it? Do I have to accept total responsibility for my fate? I don’t think it’s my fault that I’m lonely. People say – well, Iso wrote (she would!) – that I should drive down to Boston on weekends and go to the singles bars. You know, she could do it and she’d find someone interesting. But not me. I know it. I’d meet some middle-aged swinger with a deep tan and sideburns (not quite a beard) and a mod suit (pink jacket, maroon pants) and a belly kept in by three hours a week at the gym or the tennis club, and I’d die of his emptiness even more than I’m dying of my own.

  So I walk the beach. I’ve been coming out here all year, since last September, with a kerchief tied around my head, blue jeans splashed with the paint I used to try to make my apartment a bit more livable, an embroidered poncho Kyla brought me from Mexico, and in the winter months, a heavy, lined nylon jacket over that. I know I am already pointed to, whispered about as a madwoman. It is so easy for a woman to seem mad if she once deserts The Image, as Mira did when she ridiculously went out and bought short pleated skirts because she was back in college. But on the other hand, maybe they are right, maybe I am mad. There aren’t too many people here – a few surfcasters, some women with children, people like me who just come down to walk. But they all look at me strangely.