Feminine Mystique
By LEAH HAGER COHEN
A SHORT HISTORY OF WOMEN
By Kate Walbert
239 pp. Scribner. $24
Nearly everything about Kate Walbert’s new novel is wickedly smart, starting with the title: “A Short History of Women.” Does it connote modesty or grandeur? “Short” sounds modest. “History” sounds grand — grandiose, in fact, when affixed to a work of fiction. But “Women” clinches it: modest, then. After all, what more trifling subject could one elect to research? Such, at any rate, is the prevailing view in the world inhabited by Walbert’s characters — all five generations of them. One of the book’s accomplishments is that it persuades us that this sentiment holds no less currency in 21st-century America than it did in late Victorian England. But Walbert’s primary concerns — unlike those of some of her characters — aren’t political. Her writing wears both its intelligence and its ideology lightly. No manifesto, this is a gorgeously wrought and ultimately wrenching work of art.
Like her last novel, “Our Kind,” which was a National Book Award finalist, “A Short History of Women” consists of linked stories: in this case, 15 lean, concentrated chapters that hopscotch through time and alternate among the lives of Dorothy Trevor Townsend, a British suffragist, and a handful of her descendants. Several of the stories have been previously published; most could stand alone. Yet together they coalesce into more than the sum of their parts. It is Walbert’s conceit that while the oldest and youngest generations never meet, they share a legacy of echoes: objects and phrases that repeat mysteriously, and with increasing significance, across the decades. This spare novel manages, improbably, to live up to its title: it delivers what feels like a reasonably representative history of women - at least of white, Anglo-Saxon women, over the past hundred-odd years.
What is that history? What are its implications? And why should we care about them? Consider Virginia Woolf’s dictum: “This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room.” If you think this belief is dated, think again. Just two months ago, Joyce Carol Oates told The New York Times Magazine why violence is so often the subject of her fiction. “If you’re going to spend the next year of your life writing,” she explained, “you would probably rather write ‘Moby-Dick’ than a little household mystery.”
“A Short History of Women” ingeniously suggests the fallacy of the war/drawing room dichotomy. Its various settings include neither battlefield nor whaler, yet masculine power and influence pervade these pages, from Havelock Ellis, Charles Darwin and the “good men of Lloyd’s” in belle époque London to the young soldiers patrolling Dover Air Force Base in present-day Delaware. What’s remarkable is the way Walbert uses male preoccupations to illuminate the lives of her female characters — and there’s nothing “little” about them.
The most arresting and oddly affecting is Evelyn Townsend, Dorothy’s daughter, who opens the book by announcing, “Mum starved herself for suffrage, Grandmother claiming it was just like Mum to take a cause too far.” The year is 1914, and the War to End All Wars has recently begun. Evelyn’s father long ago “vanished in Ceylon.” Her mother lies dead “in her simple box, a lavender Votes for Women sash across her small, unquivering bosom,” while “bloated zeppelins” darken the sky overhead. Evelyn, age 13, is packed off to a girls’ school far north of London, “out of harm’s way,” where she’ll be taught elocution and Domestic Duties.
All this is reported with dispassionate, almost surgical precision. Evelyn is a stoic, apparently — or else shell-shocked, like so many of the newly returned soldiers. Or perhaps, as her grandmother puts it before sending her away, she’s simply “hard as rock.” But Evelyn’s cool dispatches are actually flooded with feeling, and flood us with feeling. Like an actor who knows that fighting back tears can evoke 10 times the pathos of dissolving into sobs, Walbert makes skillful use of restraint.
At school, Evelyn falls for the young new priest, Father Fairfield, who smokes and takes the girls sledding and “no longer believes.” To top it off, he reveals that he admired her mother: “A real hero she was. She would not compromise, he says. She did something, he says.” Evelyn’s tone is habitually terse, but in this instance her austerity is particularly moving, since we know Father Fairfield’s words must salve a terrible wound. (Everyone else, from the press to the hospital attendants to Evelyn’s own grandmother, has expressed only contempt for her mother’s act.) And Evelyn’s woodenness is not simply heartbreaking; at times, it sublimates into a kind of stark poetry, as when she reveals that after only a few months at the school Father Fairfield will be drafted, then “killed within his second week, but for now he stands before us beautiful and ruined and not yet dead.”
Now I must throw up my hands in despair: I’m running out of space, and the only thing I’ve addressed in a modicum of detail is the first chapter — a mere dozen pages! The trouble is that each chapter is like a slice of exquisite cake. But the reviewer’s predicament is the reader’s pleasure. I found myself going back time and again to reread whole paragraphs, not because they’d been obscure, but in the way one might press a finger to the crumbs littering an otherwise cleaned plate: out of a desire to savor every morsel.
So much is packed between this book’s covers that the “Short” of the title and the brevity of the chapters (two are no more than a page long) wind up feeling like a kind of trompe l’oeil. Here is Dorothy as a child in the late 1800s, witnessing the rape of her friend on a dirt road. Here is Evelyn as a professor of chemistry at Barnard, sharing a drink with a student on V-J Day. Here are Dorothy’s American descendants — including her granddaughter and namesake (a shaggy-haired iconoclast who might have stepped out of a Grace Paley story) mounting a solo protest against the Iraq war. In the next generation, Walbert gives us a divorced businesswoman who, surfing the Internet after midnight, accidentally stumbles across her mother’s blog, and a Manhattanite with three small children who spins “clay into pots and teacups and dessert plates” and compares anxieties with another mother during one marathon, wine-fueled playdate.
Nor is it only the main characters who come to life. If Walbert excels at miniatures, she’s fantastic at micro-miniatures: the homosexual World War I medic, a witness to the Christmas truce at Ypres; the female servant to whom the task falls of telling Evelyn that her mother is dead; the black maid issued an impromptu invitation to participate in her white employer’s consciousness-raising group. I’d gladly read an entire novel about any of these fleeting figures. But they’re not simply further evidence of the author’s skill. Each contributes something vital to what she is saying about our world. That is, about us — the ways we silence and are silenced, the ways we see and hear and grasp hold of meaning. Kate Walbert may work in miniature, but her scope is vast.
Leah Hager Cohen, the author of three novels and four nonfiction books, is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.
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