A painful pursuit of happiness

In her 1977 novel, "The Women's Room," Marilyn French raged against men and had her protagonist find a kind of happiness in earning her Ph.D. in English lit at Harvard, and in a circle of friends as angry as she was.  In her final novel (she died in May, 2009 at age 79), her protagonist finds happiness by insisting that she will be happy and by returning to what some would consider very traditional feminine roles of raising and cooking food.

"The Women's Room" sold 21 million copies worldwide, striking a spark with women who felt abused in misogynistic marriages or furious because their husbands had dumped them for younger women.

It's a classic of feminist literature, although a very bleak one. In the ‘70s, the media discovered the male midlife crisis, which often involved acquiring a new "trophy wife," to replace the one who helped them achieve some success. Apparently they had not heard about millennia of tribal life, which often included polygamy, or about concubines or the mistresses of many royals.

The contrast between French's first and last novels reminds me of nothing so much as the famous Freud quote: "The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'" (From Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, by Ernest Jones, 1953.)

Love Children (from The Feminist Press at the City University of New York), is set in the  '60s and up to 1976. French has dropped her protagonist, Jess, back into traditional women's roles -- farming and cooking a la Alice Waters-- to find her bliss. There's nothing wrong with farming and cooking, so I'm left wondering a few things: Is she being ironic? Was what she wanted all along just for women in those traditional fields to get a full measure of respect? Does she want us to notice that different women, and men, at different times in their lives, might want something new?Jess is an interesting character. Born in 1953, she'd have been 23 as the book ends -- perhaps a bit young to have packed in all the experience French recounts. But there is a lot of chronological confusion here, which could have benefited from some heavy editing and fact-checking at the Feminist Press. For instance, Jess is convinced that it was her generation alone which stopped the Vietnam War.

There were many reasons that war ended, and many people involved in ending it, including the-then chairman of the Bank of America, Louis B. Lundborg. In 1970 he told the country "An end to the war would be good, not bad, for American business. War is, as we would say in business, a low-yield operation." Then we got serious about getting out.
As she approached 80, French was interviewed on the PBS program Life 2. She said there were compensations for growing old, that one is no longer bound by the anguishes of youth. "Adolescence... the first job... not knowing how to act, not knowing how people felt about you, wondering if you fit in or not." At a certain age, you no longer care, she says. "What is there to be afraid of anymore?"That's a comforting thought, and it's a shame it isn't better expressed in "Love Children."