The Longings of Women by Marge Piercy
Trade Paperback, 176 pages
ISBN: 978-0-375-71140-4 (0-375-71140-6)
Marge Piercy, The Longings of Women
Reviewer: Diane Wiley, Tryst Short Story Editor
First, I have to make a confession – I am a lifelong fan of Marge Piercy. I first read her novel, Woman on the Edge of Time in college in the late 1960s, and I was hooked. It is a still incredibly relevant…It is a timeless classic.
Second, a word about her wordcraft – Marge Piercy is a tremendously accessible, clear and engaging storyteller. Her characters make sense. You never find yourself saying, “now why would she do that?” These are people you feel you may know or have met. The dialogue is clean and believable.
The Longings of Women is another incisive look by Piercy at the realities of our times. This is the story of Mary, Leila and Becky -three women who could not be more different, but whose lives intersect through chance – and how they all struggle in their own ways to make sense of the difficulties life has thrown them. They each long to survive…
Mary is Leila’s cleaning lady. In her sixties, she hides her terrible secret from everyone, her various employers, her children, shopkeepers at the malls, where she often rests, a security on the subway and at the airport, where she often sleeps. Having spent her life as a housewife and mother in an upper middle class suburban life, she is now homeless because her husband left her. She cleans people’s houses and watches their pets during the days, while living a precarious life at night when she has to find places to sleep and bathe herself. Keeping presentable and clean, staying out of the way of the police, occupying herself when not at work, eating decently – basic survival needs most of us take for granted are huge obstacles for her to overcome every day. Her precarious existence is threatened because of a series of events.
Leila is a successful professor in her forties. Her not-so-secret problem is that her husband of 25 years is a childish, selfish, bigger than life theater director who has to have affairs with young actresses to boost his unquenchable ego. Leila studies, writes and speaks extensively on abuse and violence against women and is asked by her publisher to write about a young woman who is charged with murdering her husband. She accepts the assignment and finds herself seriously challenged by her relationships with the families of the young woman, her lover and her dead husband.
Becky comes from a big family in a rough and tumble part of Boston. She has struggled to get out, although she loves her family and is devoted to them. She worked hard to go to school, to learn the mannerisms and trappings of the middle-class and finally married a young man from an upper class family who turns out to have no backbone and no ambition. After he loses his job, their life begins to fall apart and she is determined to not let him take her down with him. She gets involved in a community theater and meets a very young man who is infatuated with her. Her husband is murdered and as the police investigate, she and the young man are charged. (As I remember writing in my 4th grade book reviews, “Did she do it? You’ll have to read the book to find out!”)
Piercy’s work has always been concerned with class and gender and how they affect people’s lives – how do women understand their place in the world? What do they really “need” and what are they willing to do in order to find meaning? Unlike some writers of her generation, Ms. Piercy does not idealize women. Women are not heroines. They struggle, regardless of how affluent or poor they are. Sometimes their motives are pure, but most often, they try to navigate through the world, making choices that aren’t always good…
Above all, though, Piercy is a premier storyteller. She keeps you engaged, wanting to know what will happen next. I think part of why I enjoy her books is that the characters’ motivations make sense – you care about them, even the ones you don’t particularly like. They make the best of what they have, which often isn’t enough. While her male characters generally take a back seat to the women, they aren’t stereotypes and they aren’t villains. They just don’t get as much air time.
One of the themes that runs through Ms. Piercy’s writings is that of the importance of work to women, not just to survive financially, but also the need to feel good about ourselves. Her female characters, like most woman I know, want their jobs to have some meaning – regardless of what they are doing. They want to be competent and respected.
Another theme is that of women’s conflicts between their need to work in the outside world, to support themselves, be independent, and take care of their own emotional needs versus taking care of the needs of others, family and friends alike. I think that one of Ms. Piercy’s strengths is her ability to address this modern conflict within the feminist tradition without making her characters wooden or unbelievable. Marge Piercy is not a polemicist. She’s not an ideologue. Ms. Piercy provides no easy answers to the question of whose needs come first – yours or your child’s, your husband or lover, your mother, your friends. Life is complicated and each woman must make her own way.
Piercy is of the generation of women who first began writing during the feminist revolt of the sixties. She has been an inspiration to many women and men, because of her grounding in the realities of American life, including the disparities of social class. Her ways of seeing the need for change in women’s lives was never simplistic – there are no “oppressors” and “oppressed” in her work – there are only people who try to understand themselves in relation to the expectations of society and their expectations of themselves.
Ms. Piercy is now in her mid-seventies. She grew up in Detroit in a working class family when times were hard. She got a scholarship to the University of Michigan and was the first in her family to go college. She got a fellowship at Northwestern and earned an MA there.
Piercy was poor for years, living in Chicago in the late 1950s and working at part time jobs while she honed her poetry and her writing. She couldn’t get published. Her writing was about women and working class people, not the conventions of fiction at the time. She has said that she never really fit the expectations of women, she was too independent. She has always been very politically active – starting with civil rights struggles, the Viet Nam anti-war movement, the women’s movement. She remains active to this day. She is also incredibly prolific, teaching, writing fiction, non-fiction, essays and poetry. Hers is a unique voice. Her politics infuse her novels, but never get in the way of the story.
Ms. Piercy is a life long, unapologetic feminist. As she says on her website, “Why am I a feminist? I was born a woman. I can’t imagine not identifying strongly as a woman and not wanting things to be better and safer and more fun and less dangerous for myself and other women.”
These are the same goals that Mary, Leila and Becky each have. They long to be happy and safe, both physically and emotionally. Leila has fulfilling work, is financially comfortable, but has to find relationships which will sustain her after her son goes off to school and she loses her life-long best friend to cancer. Mary is entering the final chapters of her life and needs to find a way to support herself and to feel needed. Becky is the most complicated character. Fiercely trying to move up the social ladder, her legitimate longings for a secure, middle-class life and to “be” somebody have lead her to a very bad place indeed.
As these women navigate the relationships in their lives and try to sort out which needs they can fulfill and which are beyond their reach, the reader is drawn into their dilemmas. If there is a “message” here, it is that we are all caught in the web of where we come from, societal expectations, our own limitations and forces beyond our control. Yet we all have choices to make and it is in making those choices that we either make ourselves and those around us happy, or not.
Clearly I am a fan. Are there faults in Piercy’s storytelling? I’m sure a more critical person could find places where they could nitpick. But her books are not only always just a good read, they also have good “politics”. I adore books that make me think about how we as people are shaped by our society and how we can reshape ourselves, and in doing so, perhaps move our society towards a place where people can be good to themselves and others and build a better world. It’s a dream Marge Piercy stokes and nourishes in her novels, her poetry and her life. I thank her for it.
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Other wonderful Marge Piercy novels are, Woman on the Edge of Time; Dance the Eagle to Sleep; Vida; Braided Lives; He, She and It – really, there are too many to mention . Her poetry collection, To Be of Use, is one of my absolute favorite book of poems. Her memoir is Sleeping with Cats. She has recently published a new collection of poems, The Crooked Inheritance. Look for a review here soon.
Marge Piercy’s website is: http://www.margepiercy.com/books/novels.htm