Lib, it turns out, is ideally suited for the task. Skeptical of the girl’s miraculous powers, she quickly becomes obsessed with exposing her—though she cannot decide whether the girl is running the sham alone, or in collusion with her family. Mentally she refers to the girl as “the little fraud,” and to her father as “the grand showman behind the scenes.” Though a nominal member of the Church of England, Lib is effectively an atheist, a modern woman who believes in nothing more transcendent than the scientific method. To her, rural Ireland is an ignorant backwater littered with obscure Catholic sacraments and the pagan superstitions that preceded them. She shudders at the mystical rituals of the O’Donnell house—putting charms on the butter, setting out saucers of milk to keep away the fairies—unable to fathom the credulity of her hosts. “Is there nothing the Irish won’t swallow?” she asks herself.
Ireland in the 1850s was a land of poverty and disease, still reeling from the potato famine of the previous decade. The novel, much to its credit, eludes the visions of cozy Éire that live so quaintly in the North American imagination in favor of something closer to a historical reality—particularly as it might be seen through the prejudices of a well-off Englishwoman (Lib describes the country as “one endless, waterlogged mire”). Donoghue was born in Ireland and lived there until she was twenty, and she deftly re-creates the country’s historical landscape. The book is impressively textured with the breadth of her voluminous research. She knows, for instance, that residents of thatch-roofed houses were obliged to keep a fire going even during the heat of the summer to keep the roof dry and preserve the timbers; and that a Grub Street journalist would not compare a fasting eleven-year-old girl to a mere “circus freak,” but rather a “Feejee mermaid at a raree-show.”
Though Donoghue is a prolific and longtime author of historical fiction, she has become best known for a project that diverged from her larger body of work—the contemporary novel Room, which tells the story of a sexual prisoner confined with her five-year-old son to a garden shed with only a television and a collection of homemade toys to entertain them. Despite the sensationalist premise, the novel can be read as a rather moving metaphor for the isolating experience of modern motherhood. (The book sold more than two million copies and is now a major motion picture that earned Brie Larson Best Actress at the 2016 Oscars.)
Like Room, The Wonder is also about motherhood, though it approaches the subject from a more oblique angle. At the beginning of the novel, Lib is as skeptical of familial love as she is of the fairies. In fact, it disgusts her. Whenever Anna’s mother embraces her daughter, the nurse can hardly tolerate the display of affection. She feels it is “something out of grand opera, the way she [barges] in to make a show of her maternal feelings twice a day,” and “the whole performance [sets] Lib’s teeth on edge.” She maintains a safe—which is to say scientific—distance from Anna, keeping watch from a straight-backed chair and carefully logging the child’s daily intake, which consists solely of teaspoons of water.
Devotional fasting might seem an odd novelistic subject in an age when such inclinations, especially in adolescent girls, are regarded as more clinical than spiritual. But Anna displays none of the obsessive behaviors characteristic of girls with eating disorders. The child passes her days serenely reading scripture and whispering prayers. She is quick-witted and laughs easily, and seems—at least at first—to have genuinely transcended her need for food. Curiously, it is Lib who displays the hypervigilance so common in anorexics. She keeps obsessive notes throughout the day and regards her own eating and sleeping habits with a kind of monomaniacal precision. If the pair were transported to a contemporary landscape, it would be the nurse, not the adolescent, keeping a food journal and wearing a digital bracelet to tally calories.
To be sure, the English nurse’s presence in this tiny Irish hamlet foreshadows the inevitable global triumph of the modern over the ancient, of systemized Protestant efficiency overtaking the drafty world of Catholic superstition. Lib changes Anna’s sheets each day like clockwork, measures the girl’s walks with the punctiliousness of a railroad conductor, and checks off each performed duty in her notebook with the exactitude she learned from Nightingale in the Crimea. Nightingale herself appears sporadically throughout the novel, in flashbacks. Donoghue’s version of the historical figure—Miss N., as Lib calls her—seems to owe no small debt to Strachey’s biography. She stands as a parody of ironclad proceduralism, a woman whose contact with the world of men and science has irreparably damaged her nurturing instinct. “Miss N. warned against personal affection as much as she did against romance,” Lib recalls. “Lib had been taught to watch for attachments in any form and root them out.” When a fellow nurse at Scutari complained that they weren’t allowed to follow “the prompts of the heart—to take a quarter of an hour, for instance, to sit with a dying man and offer words of comfort,” Nightingale replied with a coldhearted appeal to efficiency: “Don’t listen to your heart, listen to me and get on with your work.”
There’s a marked hostility toward scientific expertise quickening beneath the pages of this story. In these moments the novel, despite its firm historical grounding, feels eerily modern. A similar skepticism animated Room—particularly in its latter half, where both the medical establishment and the media are regarded as intrusions into the domestic sanctum, the inscrutable world of mother and child. “Families all [have] their peculiar ways that [can’t] be discerned by outsiders,” Lib observes of the O’Donnells in a rare moment of generosity. It’s a sentiment Donoghue has also put forth in her nonfiction, one that undoubtedly appeals to mothers exhausted by the slew of authoritative yet conflicting prescriptions about immunization schedules, breastfeeding, and the like. The novel seems to be slyly advancing a case for the authority of maternal instinct over institutional logic, a defense of the sort of knowledge that arises intuitively. Reformers like Lib and Nightingale might have all the book knowledge at their disposal, but they don’t “get it” because they’re not mothers.
The Wonder is ultimately a story of transformation—the tale of a woman passing from one side of this divide to the other. Despite herself, Lib begins to enjoy her shifts with Anna. Walking with the child along the green and spongy bog, “the soft skin of Ireland,” Lib too becomes supple, and as the child’s health begins to fail she finds herself increasingly invested in her survival. As is often the case with awakenings, she hardly notices the changes taking place within her until someone else points them out. When she finally implores the doctor who hired her to consider force-feeding Anna, the physician attributes the breach of professionalism—a nurse advising her superior—to the fact that the child has stimulated Lib’s “dormant maternal capacity.”
Soon, Lib dispenses with her note-taking and finds herself resorting to maternal desperation. Despite her professed atheism, she begins praying for Anna’s life to be spared. “Lib [sees] the point of such superstition” for the first time: “If there was a ritual she could perform that offered a chance of saving Anna, wouldn’t she try it? She’d bow down to a tree or a rock or a carved turnip for the child’s sake.” When she decides to take drastic—and markedly unprofessional—action to save Anna’s life, her transformation is complete: “For the first time, Lib understood the wolfishness of mothers.” Suffice to say that Lib does become a mother by the end of the book, though she comes by it in a roundabout way.
Donoghue has presided for some years now over a literary empire that envisions motherhood as a kind of religion, and The Wonder stands as an unmistakable conversion narrative. It is the story of a woman denying, resisting, and ultimately accepting the call to nurture. Even within the context of Donoghue’s previous work, The Wonder is especially insistent—at times even polemical—on the nourishing effects of childbearing. Room dramatized motherhood as an essentially ascetic vocation: its heroine had been chosen in a unique capacity and hermetically sealed away from the world, hence the saintly imagery that populat
ed that novel and the frequent evocations of its protagonist and her son as Mary and the baby Jesus. But in The Wonder, motherhood is a universal vocation. It is a spiritual calling, one that, like Luther’s notion of salvation, is granted to all in equal measure and must nevertheless be discovered through personal awakening. Women who spurn the maternal impulse, the book suggests, are suppressing the power of the spirit within them, as unnatural as a young girl quashing her God-given hunger. In the end, the book makes explicit the inversion that was implied from the beginning: Lib is actually the one refusing sustenance by denying herself the gratification of familial love. “To fast was to hold fast to emptiness, to say no and no and no again,” she observes, near the end of the book. While the story itself is coy about the implications of this inversion, it’s tempting to read into Donoghue’s vast ecology of metaphors a troublesome import: that childlessness is a kind of starvation, a willful spiritual emptiness.
This drama of resistance and surrender feels similarly of our time. Lib’s transformation is very much in tune with contemporary memoirists like Sarah Manguso and Rachel Cusk, who’ve come reluctantly to motherhood and borne witness to their own bewildered conversions. “I never wanted to be a mother,” Manguso writes in an essay for Harper’s titled “The Grand Shattering.” “I now look back at my old life, when I believed myself to be as happy and fulfilled as a person could be, with the same maternal pity I used to despise.” Motherhood, she writes, is “a shattering, a disintegration of the self, after which the original form is quite gone.” Even Cusk, who doesn’t find motherhood particularly miraculous, is adamant about its irrevocable alterations to the self. “To be a mother I must leave the telephone unanswered, work undone, arrangements unmet,” she writes in her memoir A Life’s Work. “To be myself I must let the baby cry, must forestall her hunger or leave her for evenings out, must forget her in order to think about other things. To succeed in being one means to fail at being the other.” Motherhood, we are so often told, is sweeping in its powers of transfiguration. It can make a woman more empathetic, more emotionally acute, more attuned to the injustices of the world. If one is to believe the rhetoric at this year’s Democratic National Convention, it can even make her a better president.
It is difficult in these days of wild and consuming transformation (and here, alas, I am speaking from experience) for the childless woman not to feel a bit like the reprobate stubbornly occupying the back pew, refusing salvation. Or like an anorexic, declining the nutrients that will sustain her. “Why am I starving, desperate, diseased upon it?” Nightingale wrote in her diary in one of her darker moments. It’s a sentiment that remains, a century and a half later, dismayingly easy to recognize.
Has motherhood always demanded such dramatic metamorphoses? Has it ever inspired such furies of doubt? It was not so long ago that Betty Friedan argued that feminism was built on the realization that women “couldn’t live…in terms of motherhood alone.” The promise of that foundational second wave was that a woman’s identity needn’t be consumed by the crèche, that she could have children without being wholly defined by her capacity to nurture. Of course, Friedan and her allies came of age in an era when motherhood was still understood as an essentially catholic undertaking, a destiny into which women were born and that rested on a tradition of unquestioned sacraments and collective expectations. Just as the Reformation introduced the necessity of personal transformation, it’s perhaps inevitable that motherhood, too—as the cultural imperatives for its existence have dwindled—has come to assume an aspect of sola fide, a faith that cannot be simply performed but felt, and must be justified constantly in every facet of one’s life. To become a mother, we are told, a woman must surrender everything, spirit and flesh. But most crucially, she must come to believe—in the importance of the task, and in her capacity to become a new being.
2016, The Los Angeles Review of Books
PURE MICHIGAN
If you live anywhere along the wide swath of the Rust Belt, you’ve probably seen the television spots. There are a dozen or so variants, but each ad begins in the same manner, with cinematic piano music and sweeping, aerial shots of lighthouses and crashing waves. They show beaches of unblemished Kalkaska sand and kids cannonballing off floating docks. The narration is reminiscent of the copy found in certain resort brochures in that it seeks not merely to describe the locale but to evoke an entire experience: “The perfect summer has a voice…” begins one. “It whispers one more game, one more swim, one more round.” The ads are paid for by Travel Michigan, a division of the state’s economic development corporation, and end, always, with the tagline “Pure Michigan.”
About a year ago, my husband and I, who have spent most of our adult lives in the major cities of the Midwest, moved to Muskegon, a small town on the western coast of the lower peninsula. The ads, which air regularly in Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Chicago, air here too. I suppose they’re trying to reach people who are passing through. Or maybe the ads are meant for us, the residents, as a morale boost of sorts, a reminder that life here is good. Muskegon is an old lumber town whose economic telos ended the day Chicago discovered steel, but it has persisted through several recessions and decades of industrial decline. I grew up here, and my husband and I moved back to be closer to family, though I suppose we were also drawn by the prospect of clean air and solitude, of freshwater swims along the eerie, Galapagos-like stillness of deserted beaches. On some mornings in early summer, the shallows along the shoreline are like glass, the water so clear it looks chlorinated.
While the Pure Michigan ads pay homage to places all over the state, a great deal of the footage features the western shoreline of Lake Michigan, from St. Joseph all the way to the Upper Peninsula. There are shots of canoes traversing the oceanic blue coastline along Sleeping Bear Dunes and of anglers roll-casting in shaded tributaries. The ads clearly convey that this is a place of water, and that the water is, as the tagline suggests, pure. “Water,” a deep male voice intones. “We take our showers with it, we make our coffee with it, but we rarely tap its true potential and just let it be itself, flowing freely into clean lakes, clear streams, and along more freshwater coastline than any other state in the country.” It’s not impossible to imagine the voice, coupled with aerial shots, as belonging to God himself.
In fact, it belongs to the actor Tim Allen, a Michigan native whose longtime role as Tim “the Toolman” Taylor established him as the quintessential father figure of Middle America, and whose warm baritone has lent the ads what Forbes magazine called a “ ‘mystical’ power.” (I suspect the effect only lands for some—my younger sister hears Buzz Lightyear.) The piano music is likewise lifted from the movies, from the sound track of the 1999 film The Cider House Rules. The song evokes the kind of autumnal sentimentalism that animates Starbucks ads and late-career Diane Keaton films.
The ads, which are now entering their tenth year, have proved the most successful tourism campaign in the state’s history. Every buck spent on the Pure Michigan ads has returned to the state almost seven dollars in tourism revenue, and the record number of visitors in 2014 was widely trumpeted as the fruit of the campaign. There are now Pure Michigan coasters, sweatshirts, tee tags, and boat bags. You can get a custom license plate emblazoned with the slogan. On Facebook and Instagram, users post photos of sunsets and buckets of ripe apples appended with the hashtag #puremichigan. The campaign has, in other words, radically transcended its initial effort to entice visitors to the state and has turned Michigan into a lifestyle brand.
When I was growing up in the 1990s, the major state tourism campaign was the more prosaic “Say Yes to Michigan,” which made it seem like the state was a proposition to vote for at the next midterm election. The campaign came about in the 1970s, when deindustrialization left Michigan with the highest unemployment rate in the country, and young people fled in droves to seek work elsewhere. (Ironically, that slogan is now best remembered by people of
my generation as the title of a song by Sufjan Stevens, who left the state for Brooklyn.) While the state’s economy has stabilized somewhat since that nadir, Michigan has been unable to prevent its educated youth from leaving. It is one of only four states in the nation that has fewer college graduates now than it did ten years ago.
I’ve long suspected that the Pure Michigan campaign owes its success, in part, to reaching those exiles—the state’s prodigal children. A friend of mine, who spent her twenties working a high-stress job at an advertising firm in Chicago, told me that on especially bad days, after an hour-long commute back to her basement apartment, she would hole up in her bedroom with her laptop and watch the ads, one after another, and weep with homesickness.
“Carpools, conferences, microwave dinners,” Allen intones. “They blur one into the next. We lose ourselves in the fog of everyday life, and drift away from what matters.” This is perhaps the most popular of the campaign’s television spots, “Lost and Found,” focusing on Michigan’s iconic lighthouses. It aired so frequently a few summers ago that I still know its copy by heart. According to Allen’s dulcet tones, the “fog of everyday life”—the fog of late modernity—can be dispelled by “the light of more than one hundred lighthouses burning through that fog, and beckoning us back to what’s real and true.”
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Michigan has recently been in the news for a more troubling kind of fog. In March 2016, Newsweek reported on toxic pollution in River Rouge, one of Detroit’s southern industrial suburbs. The city is a bleak landscape of gas flares and smokestacks, and its air and water have been besieged by an unholy legion of chemicals: benzene, sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, methanol, and ammonia. The main culprits are two DTE Energy plants and a large steel factory. The plants are so dirty they regularly burnish the sky a deep orange hue and emit so many asthma-inducing toxins that the neighborhood has spawned a bootleg market for cheap inhalers.
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