The Love Children

admin — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 08:56:00 +0000

spoiler alert
On May 4, 2009, I visited Jezebel, one of my favorite blogs, only to find out that Marilyn French had passed. She was one of the first feminist thinkers to open my eyes to issues surrounding womanhood, the dominance of patriarchy, and expectations of the female gender. I read_ The War Against Women a_ few years after it was published in 1992, and it ended up being one of the most affecting books in my life. I felt inspired to fight against the rather conservative view of the role of women. I also have a very dear memory of watching 1980 film The Women’s Room (based on French's 1977 novel) with my mother years ago and feeling angry and frustrated with the seeming futility of being a woman, with the injustice of it all.

Needless to say, I had rather high expectations for French’s final novel, The Love Children. While I was certainly entertained in terms of the story, the book seemed eerily listless, more like Marilyn French lite. I was utterly enamored with the two previously mentioned books, but sadly, this novel fell short in areas where these previous ones criticized sharply.

The novel’s main character, Jessamin Leighton (called Jess) ,is followed through adolescence to adulthood. Even though Jess is supposedly part of a generation free of gendered oppression, her interactions with her peers and her family tell another story. The novel opens on the fourteen-year-old Jess who runs with a band of rebellious teens of the same age, they wax philosophy on their societal ideals and fantasize with hearty, but understandable, naïveté. Jess heads off to a small-scale liberal college where she takes to dating both men and women, but specifically begins dating Chris, who spreads awful rumors about her. Jess responds by focusing on her coursework and transferring to another college rather than defending her honor. Again, she is put in a situation with a professor who gives her an “F” and is the victim of offensive name-calling, but she chooses not to respond.

Jess leaves college for a rather patriarchal commune called Pax where she and her friend Sandy reunite with their high school friend Bishop. Pax reveals itself to be an awful setting when the leaders deem the women “communal property,” and Jess leaves only to find herself pregnant and working at a restaurant (an interesting choice of career for the character). Without spoiling the conclusion, I will say that Jess ends up meeting a gentleman and, shall we say, happy ending?

Jess’ character, compared to other figures in French’s previous literature, reveals a rather fragile and passive spirit. Certainly, she chose to remove herself from toxic situations, but she lacks a confrontational fortitude that other French characters possess. French kept me turning the pages, but I regretfully found myself in a state of mystification and disappointment.

Written by: Erin K. Murphy, October 16th 2009

The Women's Room

admin — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 17:17:00 +0000

By Marilyn French

Penguin

Marilyn French’s The Women's Room, first published in 1977 and republished this year (a re-release ironically in the works before French’s death last May), has been touted as one of the most influential novels of the second wave of feminism. The book reads like a combination of a personal journal and a traditional novel. It is the most intense, real, and painful story I have ever read—except maybe for Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation, which I read when I was a clinically depressed teenager, and which made me feel a little better because I knew I wasn’t as crazy as Wurtzel. But the women in French’s novel are not crazy—they are “normal” (whatever that means) women struggling to exist with integrity in a world that systematically disparages and oppresses them—and this makes The Women's Room a lot more heartbreaking because there is no trace of an excuse to justify, so to speak, the suffering.

This is primarily the story of Mira’s life, from childhood through late adulthood between the 1950s and the 1970s, and that of her female friends. Mira is a white suburbanite in the U.S. who discovers early on the harrowing destiny she is up against simply because she is a woman—regardless of her racial and class privilege. Mira then chooses to do her best as she trudges through it, refusing to efface herself as much as she can in the process.

We think we—you and I reading this—have it hard. (And we do.) All the same, let’s remember this: we have access to the Internet, we are literate, we can easily find and contact fellow feminists for a sense of community, we are not always thought of as ridiculous and selfish for wanting to prioritize ourselves before (or refuse altogether) marriage and children, and we have the possibility to do this. This puts us ahead of, I don’t know, ninety-five percent of all women on Earth, and certainly ahead of even the most privileged, well-to-do, and educated white women in the U.S. just thirty years ago—women who were buried beneath so much systematic antagonism they had trouble breathing.

This book wounds the reader—or, it wounded me—in part because so much in it remains recognizable to even the most privileged of us today. Today. I know my mother went through comparable circumstances when she had me in Argentina in the 1980s, and even later, even in the U.S. Some of what Mira’s experiences during young adulthood happened to me too, and I remember having the very same reaction as she does despite her young adulthood and mine stretching a span of about forty years. I find this difficult to grasp and to accept: as a feminist during the third wave of feminism, I faced some things that ought to have been long gone. This makes The Women's Room relevant even today.

The intertwining stories encompass a staggering amount of women’s lives throughout numerous decades and vast territories. French also untangles precise impressions and sensations into expanded, detailed descriptions and dialogues that open the way for the reader to delve into the characters and feel for them and everyone like them. To understand intimately the minutiae of what it was like to be them, and especially Mira, in uncountable ways. French has a power few writers enjoy: she can capture half-thoughts and emotions and iron them out so that they are clear and communicable. She has amazingly put into words sensations I have had and found utterly ineffable. This book is full of little gifts like this.

The Chicago Tribune did not exaggerate when it wrote that The Women's Room is “a book you’d like to give to twenty women (and perhaps anonymously, twenty men).” I am not exaggerating either when I say that twenty or forty would be too few, and that I wish everyone I can think of at this moment would read this book with the consideration and mindfulness it completely deserves.

Written by: Natalia Real, September 9th 2009