Book Review: Claire-Louise Bennett's "Pond"

Claire-Louise Bennett's Pond is an extended riff on interiority. One might be tempted to say female interiority, but by that logic, we should talk about Beckett's male interiority, or Proust's, or Joyce's. The femaleness of the narrator pops out at us because of the world we live in, while she herself remains stubbornly uncategorical. Described both as a novel and a short story collection, Pond isn't really either, but it's not not those things. It's a liminal work, one that deadpans its way into the cracks and fissures between consciousness and subconsciousness and taps almost uncomfortably deeply into the more swollen parts of the psyche. 

There is no plot and hardly anything in the way of even an isolated event. We are firmly embedded in the hyperconscious and unapologetic mind of a person for whom solitude and contemplation constitute the fabric of life; she gardens haphazardly, paints her bathroom, reads Die Wand, irons a boyfriend's shirt, tries to order oven knobs that are no longer being manufactured, and takes long, solitary walks. She lives in an ancient cottage, alternately cozy and ramshackle. Perhaps an academic, she gives little insight into her professional life, few friends or lovers acquire names, and she remains difficult to picture. Narrative is denied; thought is both substance and structure. It is not so much that we are listening to a stream of consciousness, but rather that we woke up one fine day inside of this woman who applies the most rigorous intellectual reasoning to domestic life and shows only the quirkiest, most gimlet-eyed concern for what other people think, or really her concern is more like curiosity, a wondering inquiry into whether someone will do something or react in a particular way and whether she can compel that action. When she throws a party, she is distressed when a person other than the one she imagined sits on an ottoman. Or, perhaps 'distressed' isn't the right word.

The right word might be 'nettled.' The emotional tenor of Pond tends to hew closely to the sorts of feelings that we experience daily, but rarely grant much importance. Instead of shrugging off passing observations, dreams, strange and seemingly uncompelled imaginings, the tiny sensations that together add up to a realization that one is alive, the narrator leans in, hard, and confronts them, examines them with microscope or telescope, her choice of closeness or remoteness as much whimsical as anything else. 

This sort of writing by anyone will be prone to accusations of navel-gazing and pretension. When the writer is a woman, it will be prone to even harsher accusations of frivolity, self-indulgence, and insipidity. Given the politically charged atmosphere, a defender of this 2015 debut might try to erect a shield of feminism; they wouldn't be completely wrong - it is still quietly revolutionary for a woman to live alone, to treat boyfriends as pleasing but relatively unimportant, to pursue her own, unsanctioned course - but they also wouldn't be completely right. Pond is a slantways book. It is a book in which vegetables, pond scum, cows, bikes, and blankets drift almost into the way of being characters, while people take on the semblance of leaves blown by the wind, dirt clinging to a boot, radio music carried on the air: notable, but no more important than things. Food, both prepared and eaten, the intrusions of animals into human space and humans into animal space, cleaning, both the body and the abode, are the most overt themes.

In essence, this strategy of slippage is a rebellion against "appearing to be located... that's what I object to, and somehow wish to dispel." It is a book that takes place in a specific cottage, in a specific network of country lanes, ponds, cow pastures, highways, gardens, and grocery stores, and the narrator herself is unquestionably specific, and idiosyncratic in her tastes. But, she won't stay still, either physically (her peregrinations are one of the threads by which the reader follows her) or mentally. Restlessness dominates. This quality allows the book to evade genre distinctions, without forcing a rejection of any particular genre, but it also allows the narrator to elude capture. We can't see her, but there's an uncanny, almost queasy feeling that she can see us. This discomfort, this slippage between being seen and being heard keeps the book insistently liminal, insistently not and yet not not. This is why the sign that marks the pond 'Pond' so irks and irritates the narrator, because "invariably this vital process is abruptly thwarted by an idiotic overlay of literal designations and inane alerts so that the whole terrain is obscured and inaccessible..." The narrator, though conscious of the potential violence that accompanies every woman, like a second heart beat, will not be designated, will not be the subject of warnings, but by the same token, she will erect no flag and storm no enemy. Definition destroys as effectively as an executioner's ax. Pond is murkily undefinable, but it hides in its depths fascinating, wiggling creatures, spiky reeds that puncture or break, rich earth where treasure is buried. 

The Rewrite of a Canonical Novel This Reader Wants and Needs

From the critically acclaimed - Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea being the preeminent example - to the pop hit - Gregory Maguire's Wicked, not to mention everything else he's written - the rewrite of a canonical novel from the point of view of a secondary character, usually understood as somehow badly served by the text that is, of course, equally the site of the character's origin, has become a genre unto itself. Some authors even beat their scions to the chase and write their own rewrites, like Veronica Roth, whose Divergent trilogy has an appendage in an additional novel from the point of view of the love interest, a fourth book about a character nicknamed Four, entitled... Four. In part, this drive to deconstruct and reconstruct classic narratives has an obvious political impetus, whether post-colonial, feminist, sex-positive, body-positive, queer-positive, or whatever other valence the author might write from. But, the fact remains that many of these efforts are also ways to cash in on the craze for intellectual property, especially IP in the public domain.

Given that these novels generally respond to readers' frustration over the way a particular character is represented, I would like to throw my hat in the ring, as a frustrated reader, and offer to whichever novelist will take the challenge the rewrite of a canonical novel that I most want to read:

Authors, wordsmiths, scribblers, where is the novel written from the point of view of Miss Barker's cow? Elizabeth Gaskell devotes a mere two paragraphs to this fascinating and tragedy-stricken character in Cranford. This unfortunate cow belongs to the spinster, Miss Barker, who loves her like a daughter, but is unable to save her from losing all her hair in a lime pit. We never learn the name of this poor, benighted beast, only that she was possessed of "wonderful milk" and "wonderful intelligence" and can take a little comfort in the pajamas that her benefactress Miss Barker sews for her. Oh poor cow of Alderney origin! Oh poor cow, deprived of her own voice! Oh poor cow whom "the whole town knew and kindly regarded," who was pitied and smiled at in her misfortune! Oh woe is cow! Where is the novel that will restore to us this cow's story, so simply sketched by Mrs. Gaskell, who was more concerned with telling the tales of spinster ladies?

You think I am joking, but really, in this topsy-turvey age of imminent disasters of the bleakest sort, isn't a novel about a bald cow in grey flannel pajamas exactly what we need?

How One Vocabulary Word Demolishes the Integrity of "A Quiet Passion"

The long-gestating Emily Dickinson biopic, A Quiet Passion, garnered significant critical acclaim upon its release in 2016, with Terence Davies's direction, Cynthia Nixon's performance, and the film's overall 'poetic sensibility' earning especial praise. Whether one likes this film or not depends heavily on the viewer's tolerance for a distinctly artificial cinematic structure, far closer in feel to a theatrical performance in a stuffy, small room than the usual sumptuous opulence of a period piece. I could easily imagine an Emily Dickinson biopic remaining fixed within the four walls of the Amherst home where she lived, eventually, as a recluse, but in fact, Davies's film follows Emily to a concert and a schoolroom.

Rather than attempt to recapture the texture of everyday life, the fairly unruffled and uneventful unfolding of a unmarried woman's life in a small town, nineteenth-century setting, the film is made up of a series of tableaux vivants, scenes that function as miniature, but complete, dramas. For instance, the conflict of Dickinson's brother's desire to enlist during the Civil War and her father's adamant opposition plays out in one, long, elegantly structured scene. These dramatic set pieces are book-ended by interludes of montages of sunshiny flowers and bees, the narrow staircase, a pen scratching across a scrap of paper, and gauzy curtains, with Nixon narrating Dickinson's poetry.

I personally found A Quiet Passion all but intolerable and was frustrated by this greatest-hits approach to a poet who somehow both staunchly and elliptically resists definition. But, an antipathy to style, while it can have a solid and critically argued basis, largely comes down to a matter of taste. Davies's screenplay has a bigger problem and it becomes apparent with one historically absurd vocabulary choice.

In a scene in which Dickinson establishes her belief in proto-feminism and the abolitionist movement, Davies has her say, "Every fight about gender is a war." In part, such statements are symptomatic of a common rehabilitation of figures from the past. Dickinson, constantly misquoted or misunderstood, a beloved mainstay of literary Instagram, is folded into an easily digestible, twenty-first century feminist and anti-racist ideology. By putting twenty-first century into her nineteenth-century mouth, the need for mediation is side-stepped. It's undeniable that Dickinson was unconventional and rebelled against many of the strictures that held women captive to the whims of their male relatives. It's equally undeniable that she would never, under any possible circumstances, have said, "Every fight about gender is a war."

That's because Davies, politically correct to a fault, has Dickinson say "gender" instead of "sex." This piously panders to millennial feminism. The word "gender" did not acquire its current usage until the 1970s and the definitive split between "gender" as self-identity and "sex" as biology is even more recent. Although Judith Butler's extraordinarily influential Gender Trouble questions the rigidity of those definitions, her assertion that gender and sex are constructed rather than inherent has become increasingly accepted, at least in liberal communities.

These are ideas that have not place in Emily Dickinson's world. In that world, the nascent feminist movement operates on an assumption that sexual difference - undifferentiated from gender difference - entitles women to certain rights and protections. Later generations would make the claim that women are entitled to rights and protections, regardless of sexual difference. The distinction between gender and sex is incoherent gobbledygook in the nineteenth-century context.

One could say that I'm nit-picking, that to claim that the use of one word demolishes the integrity of the whole film is an overreaction. Perhaps. But, this kind of usage collapses all of history into two categories: acceptable and unacceptable and presumes that what is current is somehow always fundamentally more correct than what is past. In order for Emily Dickinson to be politically acceptable, she has to be a soothsayer, capable of reading the next century's seminal works of feminist and queer theory without loosening her corset stays. This does Dickinson a disservice, this does feminist history a disservice, and frankly, it reveals a naive feminist positivism that permits the worst sort of condemnatory discourse, dividing all people into good people, who use the latest correct terminology, and everyone else, the people who good people are supposed to silence and shut down, rather than engage with and debate.

The choice of the word "gender," over the historically accurate "sex," renders A Quiet Passion emblematic of the historical blindness and hard-lining that threatens to calcify feminist discourse into a rigid set of applied standards. The poet who wrote of the past, "Her faded ammunition/Might yet reply," the poet who insisted that "To fight aloud, is very brave/but gallanter, I know,/who charge within the bosom,/the cavalry of woe," deserves to be met on her own terms, not ours.

Film Review: "The Girl in White" (1952)

Director John Sturges's most famous films - Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, The Great Escape, Bad Day at Black Rock, The Old Man and the Sea - are quintessentially masculine films about violence, prejudice, the bonds formed by men in confined spaces with each other and with nature, and dogged heroism in the face of despair. It's thus quite a surprise to see his name in inky curlicues scroll by in the credits of The Girl in White, a biopic of one of the first women surgeons in America, Emily Dunning Barringer. The film's steadfast and clear-eyed condemnation of the facilely paternalistic chauvinism that Emily experienced only heightens the surprise.

June Allyson is perfectly cast as Emily, anchoring the film emotionally without a single one of her famous crying scenes, and she is supported by Arthur Kennedy as her colleague and love interest and Mildred Dunnock as the female doctor who acts as her mentor. Based on Emily Dunning Barringer's more prosaically entitled memoirs, Bowery to Bellevue: The Story of New York's First Woman Ambulance Surgeon, the film is a textbook example of the Hollywood biopic, dutifully showing us a formative inspirational experience, a series of successes and setbacks, and, of course, a romance, repeating the formulas that earned Madame Curie, starring Greer Garson, seven Oscar nominations a decade earlier.

There's no question that The Girl in White lacks significant conflict, with a plot that can boast predictability more than anything else, but this isn't a film that attempts to draw the viewer in with suspense, thrills, or theatrics. Instead, it's a quiet, unassuming, but  staunchly focused chronicle of one woman refusing to back down before sexism. Emily's superior phlegmatically explains to her that women shouldn't be doctors since they tend to mix up emotions and facts, her lover complains as he proposes marriage that he doesn't want to come home to find out his wife is out on a house call, a colleague insists that for three thousand years, the only medicine any woman has ever practiced is midwifery. This sort of casual, soberly expressed sexism doesn't make for stirring drama, but it does enforce a sense of how deeply ingrained assumptions about women's capabilities and duties were at the beginning of the twentieth-century. The locus of the film is its emotionally calibrated dissection of the barriers that women doctors faced and this alone renders it an unusual, and precious, document of feminist history, however romantically interpreted.

That feminism, however, hearkens back to the feminism of the narrative's time, the suffragette movement that would ultimately win the vote for women in 1920. This was the movement that campaigned for women to have the right to divorce their husbands without losing custody of their children, to attend universities and earn advanced degrees, and to control their own earnings. The Girl in White is all but free of the common markers of twenty-first century feminism. Emily's victories are painstakingly and gradually earned as she proves herself a surgeon as capable as her male colleagues. The highs are not so very high, and the lows are not terribly low, but The Girl in White manages to be an uplifting experience without turning the world on its head, as though sexism could be defeated by one woman doctor's rescue of a dying patient. It is a sentimental film, in the very best sense of the word. I can think of few films of this period that offer a similarly wholesome, cleanly romantic pleasure, though it certainly has much to offer to happy readers of Anne of Green Gables and its sequels, My Brilliant Career, or Louisa May Alcott's Work. Today, we may not blink an eye at the idea of a woman doctor - after all, even the conservative Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer could make a film in 1952 that insists on the absurdity of barring women from medicine - and that fact ought to guarantee The Girl in White a place, if a minor one, in the cultural record of the victories that feminism has won.