Miss Ballenger's Library

    Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. The Witch of Blackbird Pond. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. A Wrinkle in Time. Johnny Tremain. Sounder. I, Juan de Pareja. The Bronze Bow. Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze. And Now Miguel. Island of the Blue Dolphins. The Secret of the Andes. I was introduced to—and read—all of these books in Miss Ballenger’s 5th grade classroom library in Portage Park School on the northwest side of Chicago in the 1971-72 school year. Miss Ballenger, in my memory 50 years later, is a stern, solid woman, always clothed in a dress like my grandma would wear, nylons, and shoes with sensible heels. I’d say she was toward the later end of middle-age, but I was 10. What did I know? She was an adult. She might actually have been 35. But what I do know is that underneath her often frowning exterior was a vital imagination. For how else could she have known what I needed to read? How else could she have picked the keys to broaden my world, opening my mind’s eye to varied periods and places in history, different cultures, as well as to the friendships I needed with fictional adolescent girls like myself? 

    I discovered all of these in the pages of books on the shelves of the three bookcases set up in the front corner of our classroom, right near the tall windows that overlooked the playground. The shelves formed walls around a bright, multi-colored carpet with large, poufy pillows strewn on it. We could sit there reading after we’d finished work; we were invited to choose a book for quiet reading time or to take home with us; and weekly—I think on Friday afternoons—Miss Ballenger would read to us from one of the novels on the Newberry Award list, and we would play Newberry bingo, placing dried peas on cardboard grids she’d made with the title of a different award-winning book in each square. 

    Immersing myself in the novels I named above, I learned about a boy living in the Jim Crow South in the late 1800s (Sounder), about a boy living in Revolutionary War-era Massachusetts (Johnny Tremain), about life in Peru, China, Spain, and first century Palestine (Secret of the Andes, Young Fu, Juan de Pareja, and The Bronze Bow, in which Jesus was a character). This might explain my continued love for historical fiction. I was introduced to fantasy—another genre I still pivot toward—with A Wrinkle in Time, and to girls my age who had similar worries and questions as I in Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg. Oh, to get away from home, live in a history museum, and solve a mystery, like Claudia in Konigsburg’s novel! She and Margaret became my good friends. 

    Over the years, a number of these books have made the American Library Association’s list of challenged and banned books: Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret for being “sexually offensive and immoral,” according to some parents in Alabama and Wisconsin in the early 1980s and in other places at other times; The Witch of Blackbird Pond for allegedly promoting witchcraft; Sounder for use of the n-word. A Wrinkle in Time has been challenged frequently over the years from different angles. According to Carnegie-Mellon University’s Banned Books Project, “These challenges focused mainly on the book’s blend of religion, the supernatural, and science, and has been criticized both for being too religious and for being not religious enough.” And I know that these classroom library books’ contribution to a multi-cultural education is part of what so many conservative parents and politicians want to shield children from now. 

    But I am still, to this day, grateful to Miss Ballenger for not bowing to any pressure there might have been out there in the early ‘70s and for allowing me to read them all. Exposure to her classroom library for 9 months during very formative years of my life had a strong influence on me, but did not magically transform me into the liberal/progressive person I am and have been for decades. I know from spending too much time on Facebook that many of my fellow students at Portage Park School, like me, developed liberal/progressive politics, but many have embraced Donald Trump’s new conservatism. Those who sat in Miss Ballenger’s classroom, with those books in the corner, during their fifth-grade year were apparently not stopped from adopting MAGA politics. I also know that this is just one of the many issues that divides Americans today, but just what are Ron DeSantis and the many legislators, school board members, and parents of Florida, who are making Florida teachers box up their classroom libraries, so worried about? Yes, Florida children might have their worlds and minds expanded into vistas of which their parents and governor don’t approve. And maybe they would like it. But, maybe they wouldn’t. I find it sad that these children—for a while at least—won’t have the freedom to find out by having a wonderful year like mine, back in 5th grade, sitting cross-legged on one of the big pillows in Miss Ballenger’s classroom library.

Me and Nancy Drew and the Kitchen Saint--Creative Non-Fiction

 

Me and Nancy Drew and the Kitchen Saint

By Cathy Colton

My bangs are sweat-shellacked to my forehead on this Tuesday. The Pippi Longstocking braids Mom insists on at least keep my hair off my neck. I chew on the tip of one of them while sitting sideways in the over-stuffed chair, my sunburned legs dangling off the side, so I can face the screen door while I read. And wait. At least a whisper of a hot breeze finds its way in while Nancy, Bess, and George speed down the country road in Nancy’s convertible coupe, their long hair whipping around their faces as they hash over the clues they discovered in the barn. I’m not sure exactly what a coupe is, but I want one when I’m old enough to drive. And I want hair that can whip around freely, not hang in submissive braids that droop next to my arms.

The shrill alarm shreds the air. The Wait is over. I shove my book mark between the pages and sprint to the kitchen to shut up the timer. Grandma pants a bit as she pulls her aproned self up the stairs and in through the wide-open back door. “Why the Good Lord sees fit to make it so hot this early in the morning already I’m sure I don’t know,” she complains. But the Good Lord isn’t the one who set the oven in the cramped kitchen to 375 degrees an hour ago. The buttery aroma, though, is the subtly more powerful force that accosts me as I pull down the oven door, and my mittened hands present the counter with a sheet of cream-colored thick triangles of perfection. I step onto the stool to reach for the container of powdered sugar. My job is to sift just the right amount of powder onto each piece of shortbread. “Wash your hands first,” she tells me, pouring sugar into the metal sifter.

The scents from that long-ago kitchen live on in my memory years after Grandma is gone. My sisters and I have tried to re-create her shortbread. Many people bake the Scottish pastry; it even sits in boxes on shelves of grocery stores, but none melts in the mouth in just the way Grandma’s did. Her recipe—best as I can recall—was to cream the butter and keep adding in flour until “it feels right.” But only decades of holding to the sacred ritual of Baking Tuesdays—no matter the level of heat and humidity of those Tuesdays in a Midwestern July--could grant one the instinct for something born in a Scottish coal mining town, later to be passed down to the wives of sons born in Illinois mining country.

My husband, I suspect, married me in part to secure an “until death do us part” spot in the family of this old woman who sent the visitors she especially liked home with a hefty care package of her baked goods. And she liked Steve, who made her laugh with his off-beat stories. “Here, I’ll add a few more to the tin. You give this to that young man of yours,” she’d say as I readied to drive back to Chicago.

I never did get that coupe; my hair is short; it’s been going on thirty years since I’ve eaten Grandma’s shortbread. But, I still enjoy sitting in a summer breeze reading a mystery novel. And I can still feel the powdered sugary butteriness melt in my mouth. It was that good. 

My Best Books Read in 2019 List

For the first time in three years, I met my Goodreads Reading Challenge, clocking in a bit before midnight on New Year's Eve with the 45th book I'd read. I pushed myself to read more poetry and more non-fiction books over the course of the year, so am dividing this list into three sections: Best Fiction, Best Poetry Collections, and Best Non-Fiction that I read. Here goes--

Best Fiction Read in 2019:

#4 The Story of Arthur Trulov, by Elizabeth Berg (2017)

I loved this book—so full of heart, empathy, humor, and pain, but pain that can be helped through with genuine kindness. Its take on living life, dying, and keeping the dead close--in a healthy way--is hopeful. I realize this can make the book sound saccharine, but it’s not. Arthur and Maddy are such quirky, well-drawn characters, such very real people, I would enjoy being with them. The book reminds me of Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove, another wonderful story about an elderly man and his relationship with a younger character.

#3  Us Against You, by Fredrik Backman (2018)

This is another wonderful book from Swedish novelist, Fredrick Backman, who—with great sensitivity—takes us back to Beartown in the aftermath of the painful, violent events of the last book (Beartown) about this small Swedish hockey town. Once again, he shows us the worst and the best in people, as the town continues to wrestle with the aftermath of its star teenaged hockey player being accused of sexual assault. The novel recognizes that “there are both good and bad people living here, and that makes us complicated, because it isn’t always so damn easy to see the difference” (364). Both Maya—working to heal from and grow after she was assaulted--and Benji—the former best friend and team mate of Maya’s attacker, who wrestles with his sexuality in a place where men are to be macho--are portrayed with such depth and understanding. They are two people I would like to know and felt I would miss once I was done reading.

#2  Lilac Girls, by Martha Hall Kelly (2016)

I found this to be an emotionally devastating, but highly engaging and important historical novel. I learned much, having never before heard of the young Polish women imprisoned at Ravensbruck Concentration Camp after their arrests in 1941 for participation in the Polish Resistance. “The Ravensbruck Rabbits” were operated on in horrific “medical experiments” by Nazi doctors, including the real-life Herta Oberheuser, one of the three narrators of the novel, whose cavalier, matter-of-fact expressions of anti-Semitism and complete disregard of the women she tortured and mutilated was too much at times, and I had to step away from the book. The voice of Kasia, a fictionalized camp survivor was my favorite of the three leads, and I was always glad to get back to her after the evils of Herta’s perspective. Kasia’s story was so terribly sad, while also admirable for her strength and honesty. The third narrator was Caroline Ferriday, an actual American philanthropist, who did much work with and for French war orphans and the Ravensbruck women. I’m glad to have learned about her, too. The novel is a well-researched and -written journey into hard history that’s crucial to keep alive. 

#1  Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens (2018)

Feeling like a tapestry that weaves elements of To Kill a Mockingbird, Mary Oliver’s poetry, and Bastard Out of Carolina in with Owens’ own rich imaginings and naturalist’s knowledge, this survival tale/love story/mystery/ode to the wilds of coastal North Carolina is at the top of my list of books read this year. This is such a beautifully written and soulful book. Kya will stay with me for a long time. Can’t recommend it highly enough.

Best Poetry Collections Read in 2019:

#4  The Tradition, by Jericho Brown (2019)

I fortunately happened upon this when wandering through CLC’s library because I needed a break from grading. Brown’s language is harsh and beautiful, and he is unsparing and compassionate and justly angry in his reflections on the violence to which too many marginalized people in our society are subjected, too often by those in official power: “I will not shoot myself/In the head, and I will not shoot myself/In the back, and I will not hang myself/ With a trashbag, and if I do,/I promise you, I will not do it/In a police car while handcuffed/Or in the jail cell of a town/I only know the name of/Because I have to drive through it/To get home…” (“Bullet Points” 16). 

#3  1919, by Eve Ewing (2019)

Chicago-based poet and sociologist Eve Ewing crafts wonderful, informative, and deeply thoughtful poems to pass on the history of the 1919 riots in Chicago that were sparked by white rage at an African-American boy drifting across the invisible line in Lake Michigan that divided a black from a white beach. Lasting more than a week, leaving 38 dead and hundreds injured, the racial violence in Chicago was joined by that in other cities across the U.S. in what got dubbed “Red Summer.” Ewing draws connections backward to the Great Migration from the South to Chicago and forward to the police killing of Laquan MacDonald and its aftermath through the trial, and eventual conviction, of the police officer who murdered the African-American teen. Powerful history and poetry.

#2  If They Come for Us, by Fatimah Asghar (2018)

Like Ewing’s book, Pakistani-American Asghar’s collection reflects back on history (in this case her grandparents’ experience in Partition in 1947) and connects it to her experience as a child and adolescent immigrant in New York, with some particularly powerful expressions of her bad treatment at the hands of classmates after 9/11. I used some of her poems with my Women in Literature class this fall; the students really liked them.

#1  On Earth We are Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong (2019)

I’m cheating here as this is actually Vietnamese-American poet Vuong’s first novel. It’s an affecting, largely biographic, story, written as a letter to his immigrant mother who suffers from war-induced and domestic violence trauma that she re-inflicts onto her son, a young man exploring his sexuality in the midst of a challenging, yet also loving, context. As much as I liked the story, I more loved getting lost in his absolutely gorgeous and poetic use of language. So, I put this in my poetry list because it is poetry, and it balances out my lists to four books each.

Best Non-Fiction Read in 2019:

#4 Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town, by Nick Reding (2009)

While I disagreed with some of Reding’s underlying assumptions and some solutions his reporting leads him to, I learned a lot from this book about the history and effects of meth and about the messed-up ways the US government has, and has not, worked to deal with it. He draws connections that make a lot of sense: between the rise of big agriculture companies and the concomitant exploitation of workers, the rise of big Pharma, and the growing influence of lobbyists and de-regulatory zeal on Congress. His detailed portraits of people he interviewed extensively and came to know were compelling.

#3 Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, by Patrick Radden Keefe (2019)

A deeply reported book about the tragedy of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, specifically centered around the disappearance and presumed murder in 1972 of Jean McConville. Keene introduces us to a wide-ranging cast of folks from the IRA, the British Army, and others. He writes with empathy, and I came to feel that I knew these people well. I learned a lot.

#2 Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, edited by Roxanne Gay (2018) 

Much truth and a lot of pain are spilled in these pages by the group of honest and brave writers Gay brought together. I could relate to what too many of them wrote, which is partly why it took me so long to get through the book. But, it’s thought-provoking and well worth a slow read.

#1 Educated, by Tara Westover (2018) 

I hadn't been particularly compelled by all the hype over this memoir of a woman raised in a survivalist Mormon family in Idaho, a young girl when the federal government stand-off with Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge occurred. But, my book club voted to read and discuss it, and so I took it out of the library. I was not prepared to be so drawn in to Westover’s story of familial abuse and self-education when kept from school, of serious injuries that could not be treated by doctors in a medical establishment her parents would not trust, of gaslighting, yet also of her deep love and beautiful descriptions of the mountains and countryside in which she lived. Even though my background as an urban, mainline Protestant, public school-educated child and teen is so very different than hers, I found myself being able to relate to a number of her struggles and experienced a range of powerful emotions while reading. In this way, my #1 non-fiction book and #1 novel (Where the Crawdads Sing) are similar, and I am back full circle…

"Burning Down the House"

June 12, 2019

"Handmaid's Tale" Season 3, Episodes 1-3 (Spoilers)

At the end of “Useful,” the third episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, Season Three, June speaks a line that comes from Margaret Atwood’s novel: “Mother, wherever you might be, you wanted a women’s culture. Now there is one. It isn’t what you meant. But, it exists.” In these first three episodes of this season—released all at once by Hulu last week—the theme of gendered power struggles emerges as a central one. Some Gileadean women claim their right to make choices, dare to stage conflict with the men, and form the sort of nascent women’s culture that might please June’s radical feminist mother of the Time Before. The Commanders must reassert their much more powerful authority, while the women speak out—verbally and through other means—to assert theirs, despite the danger exemplified by the bodies of Marthas swinging from above as the Handmaids walk in pairs to the grocery store. The most striking examples of these power struggles are between June and Commander Lawrence and between Serena and Fred Waterford.

The first episode, “Night,” begins where Season 2 left off: June is running down a road in the rain, her sturdy leather boots pounding the concrete as she leaves the car taking Emily and Nicole away from Gilead. Her newfound conviction and sense of power, forged from the self-determining move of making a CHOICE, gather strength as she talks through what she has done—first to God and then to her infant daughter: “I have reasons. There are always reasons. I’m sorry, Baby Girl, Mom has work.” A woman in Gilead choosing her work is most definitely not what the regime has in mind. When she soon comes upon Lawrence, he asks her, “Are you insane?” She tells him that she can’t leave without her older daughter. “You can,” he says. “I won’t.” To push him to take her to the McKenzies’, where Hannah now lives, she reminds him how he has transgressed: “They could put you on the wall. Even a Commander.” “Spunky,” Lawrence observes. And does as she asks. This lays out the first gendered power struggle and what struck me as the big mystery of the beginning of the season: what’s up with Joseph Lawrence, and what motivates him? Why is he helping handmaids escape and taking June to see her stolen daughter? 

June is trying to figure out the same thing. Is he operating out of a sense of guilt and a conscience? But, as the three episodes gather momentum, the possibility of a benevolent motivation behind June’s new Commander’s actions appears to dim. He likes Emily, admires her intelligence, and thinks she might somehow prove useful to the world so lets her get out; he allows the Marthas to stage parts of their operation in his house because “you have to let the rabble rousers blow off a little steam.” Yet, he also berates a Martha for having a stained dress because she’s sopping up wine that he spilled onto the floor, and instructs June to bury the body of the shot Martha with the objectifying order to “clean it up.” He humiliates June at a meeting of Commanders after observing that women can be “fun.” Lawrence, at this point, strikes me not as guilt-ridden or sometimes compassionate, but as thoroughly capricious; he engages in these seemingly disparate actions as a way to assert just how powerful he is and just how powerful he gets to be--simply because he is a man. He does what he does—whether helping someone or harming someone—because he can. Because he is an architect of the society. In Gilead, the rules are made by the Commanders, not for them.  

He makes “logical” and “rational” choices about who dies, who lives, who gets to go where, all based upon his metric of Use. June posits that he is feeling guilty about how his spreadsheets turned out to be actual human beings; she wants him, it seems, to be capable of such a human emotion. But he sets her straight: “How tempting it is to invent a humanity for anyone at all,” he tells her, as they discuss his “binders full of women,” most of whom will get sent to the Colonies to die, but five of whom can be plucked to serve as Marthas. He reveals that their humanity is meaningless to him. His plan to make the planet habitable again for children like June’s daughter and to repopulate it is based on a series of equations, not concern for people, and certainly not concern for women as people. His rubric for who is deserving of being a mother also has to do with his notion of usefulness: Mrs. McKenzie is worthy because she made care packages for orphans, a useful activity; June is not worthy because she had an affair, married a previously married man, and worked an outside job editing “esoteric books” rather than be with her child at all times. None of these things are useful to him, so she loses her daughter to the useful Mrs. McKenzie. Interestingly, unlike most others in power in Gilead, he does not quote the bible to argue against adulterous relationships and for women’s traditional roles. It’s about his own category of “use” and his consultation of Darwin’s Descent of Man.There’s a “scientific,” “rational” reason behind all he does. 

Yet June will have none of it. She refuses, at first, to choose which five women are spared the Colonies, telling him she will not be a party to the regime’s actions. None of them deserve to die, she spits at him. Yet later, she reconsiders. Not because she buys into his project, and not because she is a submissive Handmaid, but because she comes to see that her choice of new Marthas—women who can fit into the Martha resistance network—could actually be useful. There’s a rationality to her choice of an IT specialist, a lawyer, an engineer, a journalist, and a thief. But, it’s a rational choice in the service of a humanitarian project—defeating Gilead. She does this because she cares, and is anything but capricious. This trilogy of episodes ends as it begins—with June and Joseph squaring off in gendered confrontation.

(The big question I now have about Lawrence is one that Aunt Lydia shares—how appalling to have to admit I share something with Aunt Lydia: what is wrong with Mrs. Lawrence? She tells June, “You can let me know if something unseemly is going on with him.” Last season I thought that he seemed to care about his wife, always referring to her as “my love.” Do I remember correctly that she was an academic before Gilead? Now I’m wondering what “unseemly” thing is happening, if he’s slipping her something to keep her in the state she is in. He puts pills on the tray of tea to be carried to her room. Are they a drug she actually needs or something he gives her to keep her weakened?)

Meanwhile, in June’s former household, Serena and Fred engage in their own dramatic power struggle. He is stunned when she comes in after the baby has disappeared and refuses his order to call 9-1-1. He wonders what she has done, and she tells him, “I did what was best for my child” (not “our” child). When June is returned, he sees that the two women were in on this together. At first, they fight: “You killed my baby,” Serena shrieks at June, lunging at her violently. June grabs onto Serena as she vents her own pain: “I have another daughter. You chased us in the woods and ripped her away from me. And she screamed. My baby screamed. I hope it feels like that!” But then she relents and soothes Serena: “She’ll be okay. She’s free.” The two women are a unit at this point, with a shared understanding of what it means to be okay that is diametrically opposed to Fred’s understanding of okay. Later, as Fred talks to Serena, he tries to re-establish the order he sees as proper, with him above his wife and handmaid. But, Serena tells him, “You don’t need to protect me.” “I’m protecting this house,” he replies. God made me master of an incredible woman.” But, Serena wants him to know she will not be mastered. She made the independent choice to send the baby away. “I drove you to desperation,” he almost pleads as he tries to regain his footing. But, Serena is acting on her own now, not as a proper wife.

Her next act casts her in the role of a vengeful god, with shades of the “madwoman in the attic” at Thornfield Hall and Carrie White at her ill-fated prom springing to mind. But while Serena is angry, she is not mad, nor is she out of control of her powers. She very purposely takes the solution meant for cleaning the stub on her hand where her husband had her finger chopped off, pours it on her marital bed/site of Gilead’s most sacred “Ceremony,” and sets a fire. Then she and June leave the house. June asserts the vengeful god interpretation of the fire-setting, citing from 2 Thessalonians 1. She speaks from memory, so doesn’t get it exactly right: “Lord Jesus, be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels. In flaming fire, he shall take his vengeance.” Then she adds her decidedly unbiblical coda, “Burn, motherfucker, burn,” as she stares up at the house (of which Fred is the unfortunate holder) in which she was so horribly oppressed. The actual verses 7 and 8, from the King James Version of the Bible, are: “And to you who are troubled rest with us, when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels. In flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.” 

June’s reference to this passage suggest her—and I think Serena’s—take on this act. It is vengeance for the Commander and this society following their perverted version of the biblical teachings, rather than the actual gospel. Serena is daring to pass judgment on her husband and the whole enterprise that she helped to create. She has come to read it differently, she who is not allowed to read and was injured as punishment for doing so. This is her strongest challenge of her husband and assertion of her right to be.

The regime’s interpretation seems to follow in the choice of song that plays after June’s invocation of divine wrath. As we see so many of the Commander’s artifacts of literacy (Scrabble board, books, papers) burn, Bob Geldof sings “Tell me why/I don’t like Mondays...” The song refers to Brenda Ann Spencer’s sociopathic explanation for why she shot up the playground of Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego in 1979, killing two adult school employees and injuring eight children. As Geldof once commented, the Boomtown Rats’ song gets at the senselessness of this crime. And, as June reflects in episode 3, as she gazes on the bodies of the hanged Marthas, they hang for heresy, “not for being part of the resistance, because officially there is no resistance. Not for helping people escape, because officially there is no such thing as escape.” And, officially there can be no such thing as a Commander’s Wife enacting vengeance upon him and calling out his heretical interpretation of Scripture. So, it must just be that she burned her bed, burned her house down for something as arbitrary as not liking Mondays. 

Gilead and the patriarchy are by no means burned down yet. The Commanders still have the power, but as June muses about these men at the end of episode 3, she lets us know that the women are not done: “We watch them, we please them, we know them that well. We know their nightmares. And that’s what we’ll become one day. Nightmares. And we’re coming for you. Just wait.” 

Blessed be the fruit of those nightmares.

"Burst!"--Review of Dietland, by Sarai Walker

December 31, 2018

Sarai Walker’s 2015 novel Dietlandis a rageful, thoughtful, and funny kick-in-the-nuts of the patriarchy, written with much artistry and awareness of feminist theory. (In her afterword, Walker calls out feminist philosopher Sandra Bartky—one of my grad school professors—as an influence.) This book was written before Trump’s presidential campaign and the reveal of his “grab ‘em by the pussy” philosophy, before the Harvey Weinstein scandal exploded and Tarana Burke’s decade-old hashtag was commissioned for wider use, before #Time’sUp, before Christine Blasey Ford’s charges of sexual assault against Brett Kavanaugh threw us all back again to the Anita Hill testimony against Clarence Thomas, before both Brittney Cooper and Rebecca Traister published their books about the rage of black women (Cooper’s Eloquent Rage) and of a broader, historical group of women (Traister’s Good and Mad), before Women’s Marches and pink hats and feminist women and men taking to the streets and others wakening to feminism. . . . Before all of that, this book came out, and then Marti Noxon adapted it for television—which is what got me to read it. Despite all those ‘befores,’ this is the perfect book for this moment. It follows Alicia “Plum” Kettle as she comes to terms with--and celebrates--who she is, rather than continue to yearn for the acceptance of a fat-shaming, misogynist culture that could never appreciate and love her. Walker also juxtaposes Plum’s story of internal, emotional work and her friends’ cultural projects against the violent anti-rape culture work of the vigilante group Jennifer, raising the question, what is the appropriate response to violent acts against women and a millennia long culture of violent misogyny?

Working as a ghost-writer for a teen beauty magazine, fronting for a skinny, caustic woman who won’t even let the very heavy Plum have space in the office, she receives a mysterious summons to the basement Beauty Closet run by Julia, who—we discover later—is actually working on an expose of the beauty industry, seeking to undermine it. She also is gifted with the book Dietlandby Verena Baptist, daughter of the late diet plan mogul whose Baptist Plan Plum used to be a devotee of. Verena destroys her mother’s empire and ideology and uses her fortune to run a feminist collective of women working to fight the patriarchy in a variety of non-violent ways. Among those Calliope House supports is the former teen TV star, Marlowe, who threw it all in to live her life looking the way she wants to look and wrote a book called Fuckability Theoryafter TV execs fired her for cutting her hair and gaining weight. To remind her of what she was told by a man in her last television meeting, she sports a tattoo that declares, “women don’t want to beyou, men don’t want to fuck you” (137). While going through Verena’s and Marlowe’s “New Baptist Plan” for her, Plum wrestles with whether to give up her planned gastric surgery and life of starving herself and start living on her own terms: “I was hungry for everything, for food and for life. It was odd to think that a pill could take that away, or that I had ever wanted it to” (213).

In contrast to the language and image-based cultural work done by the Baptist-sponsored feminist collective is the vigilante work of Jennifer, the anonymous group that kills rapists and other exploiters of women, and in dramatic fashion attempts to exact both accountability and revenge. To them, the “language” of violence is the only language that these habitually violent misogynists could possibly understand. While I stand actively on the non-violent side of this debate, I can’t deny emotionally pumping an inner fist at some of Jennifer’s actions. And, while I think Walker is also ultimately on the side of non-violence, she also deeply understands those who think differently.  She makes the women behind Jennifer into compelling characters with tragic and completely understandable reasons for their actions. As the female Air Force captain who first flew bombing missions in Afghanistan and then the plane out of which the bodies of murdered rapists were dropped in the U.S. desert said, “This is a different war, not an official one, but who decides which wars are legitimate” (227)? Walker’s depictions of Plum, of Julia, of Soledad, of Leeta dramatically illustrate the ways that women in our culture must always wrestle with multiple identities and negotiate split selves: fat girls, immigrant girls, angry and grieving moms, adolescents unsure of how to be—all can be symbolized by the tension our lead character expresses between herself as Plum and herself as Alicia. 

With this novel, Walker challenges women receptive to feminism to wrestle with our multiple selves, our desires, our fights with the Powers-that-Be and to decide on our best way to “Burst!” in the terms of the iconic Baptist Diet Plan ad. So, read this, think, enjoy, rage, be challenged. On her website, Walker says she’s working on her second novel, which will be “even more bonkers” than Dietland. I look forward to reading it.

In a Lonely Place: a 70-Year Old Noir Novel for the #MeToo Moment

February 4, 2018

“He scraped through the damp sand to the center house, two stories, both pouring broad bands of light into the fog. There was warmth and gaiety within, through the downstairs window he could see young people gathered around a piano, their singing mocking the forces abroad on this cruel night. She was there, protected by happiness and song and the good. He was separated from her only by a sand yard and a dark fence, by a lighted window and by her protectors. He stood there until he was trembling with pity and rage” (170).

Dorothy B. Hughes’ 1947 novel In a Lonely Place was re-published in 2003 by CUNY’s Feminist Press as part of its Femmes Fatales: Women Write Pulp series. Though narrated in third person, the perspective comes from within the head of Dix Steele, a lay-about WWII vet with a vicious sense of entitlement--to the material things he thinks he should be able to possess without working and to the women he believes he should possess without their consent. It is his deep sense of being owed something that feeds his need to rape and kill. There is a police investigation of the murders of young women in L.A., with Dix’s good friend from the war in the role of a chief investigator. But, because we only see what Dix sees, know what he knows, and access his thoughts—and he is highly enamored of himself and his ability to avoid being caught—it is hard to tell when exactly the police are on to him. So, this novel does not function like a police procedural, where we see for ourselves what the investigators are doing and thinking. In this case, the gaze onto the cops, and everyone else, is Dix’s, not ours.

While this can be disconcerting and uncomfortable and enraging in turn, there is an art and a purpose to the author’s method. Hughes--as the blurb on the back cover states--“peels the layers off American masculinity and stunningly undoes the conventional noir plot.” (And, I would add to this assessment that it is American white masculinity on which she focuses her laser. Though race never explicitly enters into the novel, it doesn’t have to, for everyone in it is white, and the attitudes that ooze out of Dix’s pores are those of white supremacy as well as male supremacy.) She also revises the femme fatale in significant, important ways, but in the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won’t say more about that except to urge you to read for some very cool kick-assery on the part of a couple of the female characters.

Every so often, some writer or film maker or painter or activist will do this peeling back and revealing as part of her or his work. Sometimes, whole groups in a community or in the country will speak or march or organize or create hashtags for social media as part of this work, to point to what is both obvious and also pushed below the surface. It is happening again, which is what makes the book feel even more relevant now than when CUNY decided to re-publish it.

I read this novel in early 2018, in the midst of #MeToo, in the context of so many women speaking out about sexual harassment and assault, of numerous powerful men losing their positions as a result of the entitlement they clearly feel: entitled to disparage women, to propose sex in exchange for some work-related favor, to masturbate in front of women, to “grab them by the pussy,” to force their hands into girls’ vaginas under the guise of medical treatment. In this context, a pulp novel that “peels layers off American masculinity,” that lays out how misogyny works in a fictional character can mean something different than it meant in 1947. This is not to say that Harvey Weinstein, Louis CK, Donald Trump, Larry Nassar, or any of the other men whose hyper-entitled behaviors toward women in their circles have been central to this moment are the same as a serial killer, but the underlying attitudes that lead Dix Steele to the most extreme misogynist behavior are completely related to those of the contemporary men we have had to focus on this past year. All of them are on a misogyny continuum.

While reading In a Lonely Place, we are privy to Dix’s disparaging thoughts about the woman who cleans his apartment, thoughts predominantly stemming from what he deems to be her unattractiveness. All he needs is the 1-10 ranking scale for women, and he’d sound like Donald Trump at numerous times on the campaign trail. Laurel, the woman Dix declares is beautiful and whom he supposedly loves, is—he tells us, with characteristic sexism--“meant to be displayed” (109). Later, when she disappoints him, he resorts to a deeper, yet still not uncommon, misogyny: “There wasn’t any girl worth getting upset over. They were all alike, cheats, liars, whores. Even the pious ones were only waiting for a chance to cheat and lie and whore. He’d proved it, he’d proved it over and over again. There wasn’t a decent one among them” (165). Now that Twitter has doubled its character limit, he would fit right in with a certain category of social media troll with that one.  After reading a newspaper account of one of his murder victims, Mildred Atkinson, Dix concludes that “she had led a very stupid life. Grade school, high school—Hollywood High but she was no beauty queen—business college and a job in an insurance office. . . . She played bridge with girlfriends and she once taught a Sunday school class. . . . The only exciting thing that had ever happened to her was to be raped and murdered” (41). No woman’s life, apparently, is worthwhile, unless it has been marked and appropriated by a man.

In her thoughtful Afterword to this Feminist Press reissue, University of Cincinnati professor Lisa Maria Hogeland begins with what she calls “the most difficult question of all: What feminist claims can be made for a novel that is narrated from the perspective of a serial rapist and killer of women?” (225). That question is required when a feminist press reissues a book, she says, and offers a number of answers to the question, including: Hughes doesn’t blame women—a mother, for instance--for Dix’s pathology like so many other works do; she does not in any way blame the victims and their behavior; and through her narration, Hughes takes us inside Dix’s misogyny in order to critique it. This leads to a suggestion by Hughes that “since sexual psychopathy or serial murder can be motivated by so little, there may be little difference between the serial killer (or the rapist, as feminists have long argued) and any other man. The novel is insistent that Dix is—or appears to be—‘normal’” (231). Hogeland then raises the question, “What, then, is the relationship between misogyny in its extreme forms and misogyny in its everyday forms” (231)? It’s all, as I said above, on a continuum.

Her question in 2003 takes me right back to my reading fifteen years later. The misogyny was not new in the 1940s; feminist discussions of it were not new then or in 2003; and, now in 2018, they are renewed. As more men who are just “normal” men—producers, comedians, politicians, doctors, restaurant and mall patrons, all those who led to the everyday, non-famous #MeToo moments of millions of us, fathers, husbands—are pointed at as displaying misogyny, this story, which reveals a misogyny that is both extreme and that which is quotidian, is more interesting than ever.  

Book Review: The Women in the Castle, by Jessica Shattuck

October 24, 2017

What happens when women’s stories of war are privileged over those of men? In Women in the Castle, Jessica Shattuck explores the lives of three very different German women during and after World War II: a resister, an at-first true believer and low-level collaborator, and a poor woman who marries up only to have her desired life violently interrupted. While the men were off fighting a war--or fighting those in their country who waged the war--the women stayed home to fight their own battles against hunger, against threats to their children, against the soul-crushing rapists of invading armies, against those who would deny the atrocities their own government and military were inflicting on millions of others, and against their own senses of guilt and shame. Shattuck delves more deeply and thoughtfully into the moral ambiguities of ordinary people living in Nazi Germany than in any other novel I’ve read. (The Book Thief is my other favorite that does this with success.) In the process, she asks us to consider important questions of what it means to be morally right, of what it means to be guilty, and of the role of compassion for imperfect friends in the midst of deciding these questions.

Marianne is a strong, intellectual woman, fortified by logical arguments and the knowledge that she is right about the evil of Hitler and the Nazis. Her husband and childhood friend are part of the July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler, and she is their helper. She also promises the men that if the plot fails, and they are killed, that she will look after their wives and children. After the war is over, but while the Russians and the Americans are still occupying the country, she manages to find two of the widows and their children. They all come to live in her family’s largely-ravaged castle and need to figure out how to survive, carry on, and live with the after-effects of rapes, executed spouses, and the growing revelations of all their country had done and they and those around them had not done.

The novel also pushes readers to consider the forces that stop people from speaking out and resisting early on, when something might still be done to halt a complete descent into authoritarianism, into genocide. I’m not one for glib comparisons of bad contemporary leaders to Hitler, but that doesn’t mean that politicians with authoritarian personalities and aspirations don’t need to be called out for their assaults on democratic institutions like the ballot, the press, and demonstrations. Looking back through this well-researched fiction to a horrific time, Shattuck shows us numerous people who were yearning for something: community, a return to a better time, a leader to set things right, and so were blinded at first, then willfully ignoring what was there, then often too fearful to act. And, then it was too late. In her depiction of those Germans who thought the posters, news reels, and stories of concentration camps were Allied propaganda, I could see those today who cry “fake news” whenever they come across a story not conforming to what they need to hear about their leader, their political faction. As one character reflects on what she will have to pay for during the rest of her life: “not only her inaction, but her self-deception, for narrating away evil while staring it in the face” (337).

The story of these women is a powerful and challenging one, offering a different perspective on Nazi Germany and the effects it had on everyday people. The women have much to teach us.