According to the website Examined Existence, Americans as readers do not rank well on the World Culture Score Index. Yet 2 million books are published every year. Even I can follow the logic of these numbers. Is it possible to be lost in a crowd of writers with unread books to sell? Women’s authorship, despite and because of the abundance of women’s writing, could be devalued. How might this novel, The Compromise, among the millions competing for agents, publishers, and readers, survive to adulthood?
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Clearly the early American feminists are at our progressive roots.
The much anticipated new film version of Alcott’s Little Women (1869) explores the theme of women as writers and their ambitions, from the perspective of contemporary values and Hollywood success. The Compromise addresses some of the same coming-of-age issues, women’s education and marriage, and takes on several more. My female characters’ attempts at self-sufficiency are met by harsher realities than genteel poverty.
Ungovernable Logic
In the next-to-last chapter, “The Foyer 1844,” the Columbian Female Academy has been shut down and the director arrested. Mariah learns about a murder in which she, unwittingly, had a part. Her savings are commandeered. There is no food, even the garden has been uprooted, and Mariah is alone through a difficult transition into married life. Unreality begins to tease her into the past and to reshape experience with an ungovernable logic, a young woman’s magical realism.
Somewhere upstairs, girls were practicing harmonies for “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” Their voices broke up in laughter. When I looked, nobody was there. Phantoms of the past? They receded into dust flurries and coalesced again. Scarlett Grundy was whispering to Eliza. Miss Ada was coming down the hall chasing young ladies with a stick. Girls were spinning, their dresses lifted like blossoms. Margaret was reading a book on the landing. The title “Nature” was emblazoned in gold. The letter N was growing roots around her hands and her hair. She looked at me and smiled.
Literally Unbound
The library had been a refuge, and reading offered liberation from servitude and drudgery.
In the scene that follows, the Gamble Library has been ravished and manuscripts are literally unbound. Mariah is confronted by words as if she again could not read. The library had been a refuge, and reading offered liberation from servitude and drudgery. Will the offer stand among the voices of women writers?
The tumbler fell in the lock and the heavy door swung open. The large rooms echoed strangely. I pulled back the heavy drapes. Every book was gone except for some paper scattered on the floor. They were hand-written leaflets and books, those young ladies copied from the writers they loved: Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Mary Wollstoncraft, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I grabbed them up and more hand-written paper fell out of their ruffled pages: Emily Dickenson, Abigail Adams, Margaret Fuller, Harriett Beecher Stow, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Louisa May Alcott. They fell from my fingers. A wind came up behind me, the room spun around, and the pages spoke in the broken and overlapping voices of girls.
Banish air from air - Divide Light if you dare.
You are something between a dream and a miracle.
Unbound pages flapped in my face then disappeared under doorways or into nothingness.
Arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken.
A reaffirmation of wholeness, an enunciation of liminality, a warning against the failure of reason, Mariah tries to grasp these words and is denied the satisfaction. In this alternate reality, Emily Dickenson’s poetry made its way out of Amherst to the girls’ academy in Missouri. The other speakers are Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Abigail Adams (above) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott (below). Does my character contain the fleeing copies?
With violence and disturbance in the natural world, we see a constant effort to maintain an equilibrium of forces.
In the true married relationship, the independence of husband and wife will be equal, their dependence mutual, and their obligations reciprocal.
The voices called me, speaking and flying wildly beyond my grasp. I stacked what I could carry on the kitchen table, unlocked my trunk on the porch, tore through the linens, chased the errant pages through the kitchen again, and found a way to bury those manuscripts in a false bottom.
I locked everything and held down the lid with my full weight. “I’m not dead yet, so you stay where I put you!”
The voices called me, speaking and flying wildly beyond my grasp.
Encoded Messages
The law, when its power is arbitrary and one-sided, is part of the story, our American story and this one I am forging. Witnessing the school’s closure, being arrested and humiliated, being suspected, being hunted for not paying fines and taxes, these actions risk wasting characters’ work and hard-won knowledge, and ours.
The center cannot always hold, not in the cold attics of women writers who have heard the messages that silence them. The reward is too small; the odds are against it; the problems are too great; the story is too weak; marketing is too important; the writer has the wrong look, age, and race to be marketed effectively.
Some things are worth fighting for. It takes constant effort in the mind and in society to right the wrongs. Clearly the early American feminists, informed by Transcendentalism, are at our progressive roots. They can be unbound and still flourish.