Sad Women: A Look2 Essay on Anita Brookner
At first, I meant to write a treatise on happiness, but only as a kind of anti-history.
—Anne Boyer, Garments Against Women
Recently, I’ve had a case of Anita Brookner-itis—by which I mean a propensity to read and reread her twenty-four novels despite the aching sadness they leave in the pit of my stomach. Given her emotional impact, I wonder whether I should simply stop reading her. Is it healthy to risk staring—like Narcissus—into the depths of this sorrow? In a recent New York Times column, Leslie Jamison warned against the dangers posed by women’s sadness. Jean Rhys, Sylvia Plath, and Virginia Woolf, she writes in “Cult of the Literary Sad Women,” all contributed to the “afflicted woman trope” with its romanticization of solitary pain. “If sadness once struck me as terminally hip,” Jamison writes, rejecting her own adolescent infatuation with pain, “then I’ve arrived on the far side of thirty-five with a deepening appreciation for the ways pleasure and satisfaction can become structuring forces for identity as well.”
And I’ve arrived on the far side of sixty-five with a deepening sense of anger at the way people stigmatize the sadness of women. Call me Narcissus: I’ll risk my health and stare into the pool.
Brookner started publishing fiction in 1981, when she was fifty-three. An art historian specializing in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French art, Brookner was teaching at the Courtauld Institute when she embarked on her prolific if belated literary career. For a while, she published a novel each year. Critics have pointed out the narrow range of her novels (set in the economically comfortable world of Kensington flats, shopping at Harrods, and vacations in France), the recurrence of similar characters (introspective, lonely, sexually deprived, carefully groomed protagonists; their damaged, often selfish, ill or widowed parents; and their more vibrant foils) and plots (a romance that fails to materialize, narrowing possibilities, the onset of old age). Where there’s any hint of a happy ending, it’s low-key and tends to involve future writing projects: A Start in Life, A Family Romance, Look at Me, and Providence all feature characters who write and plan, at novel’s end, to write more. But this future is taken up as a second-best substitute for the romance that failed to materialize.
Brookner’s apparent fixation on unhappy women has irritated some of her readers. After her Hotel du Lac won the Booker Prize, Anthony Burgess and Gore Vidal in Horizon described the ideal Booker Prize candidate as a slim novel about “menstrual cramps in a hotel in Switzerland.” Michiko Kakutani’s 1992 review of A Closed Eye is headed “Mousy, Sniveling Heroine Finds her Fantasy Cad.” And Peter Kemp, in a review of Lewis Percy titled “The Mouse that Whinged,” calls Brookner a writer of “migraines, flushes, and female malaises.” Surely unhappy men obsessed with their own frustrations and uncertainties would not be dismissed in such terms, reduced to their leaky, disordered bodies.
Not only did Brookner know she was annoying her readers, she seems to share their annoyance. In interviews, she bemoans her isolation and blames herself for being sad. “I have said that I am one of the loneliest women in London,” Brookner told Shusha Guppy. “People have resented it—it is not done to confess to loneliness, but there it is.” Of Look at Me, one of her most powerful novels, she told James Haffenden, it’s “a very depressed and debilitated novel, and it’s one I regret. When I published it, a very old friend of my mother’s summoned me and said, ‘You are getting yourself a bad reputation as a lonely woman. Stop it at once.’” In a 2002 interview, Brookner rejects her work in its entirety, particularly her early novels: “They’re morbid, they’re introspective and they lead to no revelations.”
But that’s precisely the point. Godot doesn’t arrive. Brookner is Beckett transformed into a novelist of manners. Replace his stark sets with a comfortable London flat, add a few more characters, and you have a Brookner novel. Her characters are better dressed and fed, but similarly trapped in the repetitive, self-contradictory narratives they tell themselves, through which they attempt (and fail) to make sense of the world. The plots are similarly static, with time evident through the aging bodies of the characters rather than through their moral growth or the reader’s increased understanding. The protagonists’ hunger for love, like Estragon and Vladimir’s expectation of Godot, can never be satisfied because underlying both is the same desire for a meaning that is simply not there.
Narrative in general tends toward the teleological: we expect an ending that retrospectively bestows whatever preceded it with meaning—whether it’s Godot arriving, or Jane Eyre saying “Reader, I married him.” Brookner returns again and again to the tantalizing promise of such a resolution, one her characters yearn for. In Providence, for example, Kitty Maule, a scholar specializing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French literature, is in love with medieval historian Maurice Bishop, a Catholic who believes in “providence” and sees his life as a working through of God’s will. Although Kitty, an atheist, believes no such thing, she is shattered when Maurice’s “destiny” turns out to involve her student rather than herself. In Undue Influence, Claire hopes for “a life’s journey with the perfect partner.” In Fraud, Anna Durrant dreams repeatedly of a cake that falls away to reveal the ring that is her destiny. But Brookner’s protagonists never do marry Mr. Right. In literature, Brookner said in her final interview, you find “justice,” but in life, the body takes precedence—imposing itself via sexuality, illness, or decay. In life, “you’re tied to mortality. And there is no escape. Age is the final betrayal.”
And books are the first betrayal, immersing readers in narratives ruled by that secular version of providence, authorial control. In Brookner’s first novel, A Start in Life, Ruth Weiss, a scholar of French literature, has had her life, according to the opening sentence, “ruined by literature.” “Cinderella shall go to the ball,” her nanny used to tell her, but Ruth is no Cinderella. “The ball had never materialized.” She winds up alone, having lost both the man she loved and the man she married. Thirty years later, the narrator of The Bay of Angels (2001) opens similarly by complaining that the fairy tales she read in childhood failed to prepare her for life: “I accepted as part of nature’s plan that after a lifetime of sweeping the kitchen floor, I would go to the ball.” The marriage plot for Brookner, like the Christian’s notion of providence, offers the illusory solace of teleology. “The novels she had read in her studious girlhood,” Thea May thinks to herself in Visitors (1997) “all ended with a marriage, for that was how the reader wanted them to end, believing that marriage was the conclusion of the story.” Failed romances—and outlived ones, as in the case of widowed protagonists like Thea—dramatize the yawning gap between characters’ illusions and the world’s indifferent materiality. So existential angst is one explanation for these characters’ sadness: in the absence of a given purpose, they struggle to produce meaningful lives for themselves.
Not everyone struggles, however. A few attractive, energetic people pass through the Brookner landscape provoking wonder in the more constrained protagonists. Alix and Nick in Look at Me all but hypnotize Frances Hinton, who is drawn to their energy and sexual dynamism, the ease with which they get what they want. Brookner endows Betty and Frederick in Family and Friends with the odd adjective “ludic”; some, like Sally Beamish and Mousie in Misalliance, are “pagan”; others, like Alix and Nick’s friend Maria, tend toward the carnivorous. In Fraud, Brookner writes of Vicki, the narrator’s victorious romantic rival: “attractive principally because she was greedy, her greediness was intimately bound up with, even redolent of, sexual appetite.” Such characters act on their desires or, at the very least, disguise their frustrations and whistle a happy tune. As the indomitable Aunt Dolly says in A Family Romance, “Always let them think of you as singing and dancing.” They’re fleshy and flashy, while the protagonists are petite, self-contained, carefully dressed, and lonely.
So why do some characters suffer more than others from what would seem to be an inescapable part of the human condition? Why do the sad characters, despite their relative wealth and privilege, seem so uncomfortable in their own skins? They’ve been accused of being anachronistically repressed Victorians, clinically depressed, or just plain perverse. Anna Fisher-Wirth reads them more sympathetically, as victims of a Kristevan “melancholia”: an insatiable longing triggered by separation from the mother—at birth and again on entry into the symbolic order. Some manage to ignore this loss and be happy; for Kristeva, however, Fisher-Wirth points out, those outsiders who are “absent from other people’s meaning, alien, accidental with respect to naive happiness” are the ones with insight into the “true nature of Being,” their sadness a product not of illness but lucidity.
Or, as Jessica Wheeler puts it, writing of Brookner in the Yale Review of Books, the sadness “simply reflects the way things are.” But the novels themselves suggest these unhappy protagonists are no more insightful than their happier peers. Yes, they are intelligent and introspective, able to generate convincing accounts of their own and others’ motives; but they are so often wrong! They misjudge what others want from them and fight desperately to fit in—as Harriet does with her school friends in A Closed Eye and Frances in Look at Me. It would be reassuring to say they’re sad because of their superior insight. But I don’t think we can settle in such reassuring territory. Their sadness is inseparable from an excruciating sense of difference, which is itself irreducible to a single explanation: a mystery for which the standard non-explanation is, “it must be genetic.”
Ultimately, I want to suggest, this sense of difference—as a random, given aspect of her heroines’ embodiment whose impact must be dealt with but which can’t be changed—makes more sense if read through the lens of disability studies. A discipline that invites us to accept differences rather than pathologize or “fix” them, disability studies challenges standard notions of health, normality, and success. Ask not what’s “wrong” with a person in a wheelchair, for example, but what’s wrong with the community that fails to provide wheelchair ramps. Do I risk my “health” when I let Brookner’s fiction affect me? Perhaps there’s an aspect of that “health” worth undermining. Women like Frances (Look at Me), Kitty (Providence), Anna (Fraud), Elizabeth (The Rules of Engagement), and Jane (A Family Romance) expose, through their difference, a social system the rest of us take for granted and whose exclusions we reinforce with our unthinking fluency. Perhaps, in other words, we should be interested less in what’s “wrong” with Brookner’s unhappy women and more in how the system from which they feel excluded operates.
Realizing, in Look at Me, that she will never join her friends Nick and Alix as equals, partnered and satisfied as they are, Frances thinks, “I could not even side against them. I was not of their number, that was all. The moment at which I recognized this difference was the ultimate sadness, and I felt all my assumed certainties dropping away from me as if they had been fashionable clothes which I had perhaps tried on in a shop and then regretfully laid aside, as being…not suitable.” Frances’ difference is a given, apparently from birth: “I was not of their number, that was all.” Her effort to belong has been a kind of disguise—a trying on of peer-approved clothes that she can’t quite carry off.
The “ultimate sadness” for Frances is her acceptance of what amounts to a semiological disability—an inability to send and receive the subtle clues by which we fit in. People’s bodies, clothing, and gestures in Brookner’s fiction send off signals. The able-bodied and the lucky converse fluently, in full control of the signals they send. But Brookner’s protagonists fail to communicate clearly. Take Elizabeth in The Rules of Engagement, for example. She is sexually alive, but men seem not to pick up on her availability until she literally strips off her clothes. “I was not the kind of woman who sent out the right messages,” she explains. “This puzzled and saddened me, but I accepted it. I was quite nice-looking, and I thought I behaved like everybody else, but I began to suspect that women are either instantly recognizable as potential lovers or somehow fail the test in ways so subtle that there seems no possibility of adjustment.” Blanche Vernon in Misalliance knows she is misunderstood: “her neighbors thought her unapproachable and therefore did not approach her…she was so intensely occupied in her attempt to resolve inner contradictions that she rarely noticed the signals she gave out.” She worries she is becoming “untranslatable.”
This lack of communication works both ways: others misinterpret them, and they misinterpret others. One of the most powerful aspects of reading Brookner is our investment in the main characters’ sometimes mistaken accounts. Aligned with their viewpoint, whether through first- or third-person narration, we’re sucked into their version of events and only gradually grow to question its validity. They’re not unreliable narrators; they retain their moral authority and we never get any clarity on where or why they went astray. We only sense they may be wrong in how they read others or even themselves. The impact on the reader is claustrophobic and frustrating. Frances gets Nick, Alix, and most urgently James wrong. Kitty gets Maurice wrong. Thea notes that she’s good at reading others because she reads so much, but she spends the novel unsure of whether she can trust her young houseguest Steve, and we’re not sure if she should either. Rachel in A Friend from England thinks she has more insight into life than Heather, only to realize (at the same moment we do): “I was guilty of an error. It was not Heather who was endangered, but myself. I felt shame, penury, and the shock of truth.” Anna in Fraud berates herself at the end for her stupidity in believing she’d be rescued: “I blame no one, only myself. I shouldn’t have been so credulous, nourishing my hopes in secret. I went along with it, I suppose I thought it was the well-behaved thing to do. And one deception prepared me for all the others.” Harriet in A Closed Eye thinks she’ll eventually have her “grand adventure” with Jack. Claire in Undue Influence thinks she might wind up with Martin. And right up until the books’ last lines, they might be right. But then they’re not.
Even their decisions about their own future plans turn out to be provisional. Dwelling in interpretive uncertainty, thinking and rethinking their predicaments without arriving at insight: these are the characters that drive Brookner’s critics bats. Weeping women are OK: from Niobe to the Mater Dolorosa, from Dürer’s Melencolia to Picasso’s Weeping Woman, women’s tears have been accepted as legible signs of shared grief. It’s illegible, apparently causeless unhappiness that gets on people’s nerves. Of Jane in A Family Romance, Susan Heeger writes in the LA Times, “She prompts the desire familiar to the veteran Brookner reader to throttle her until her eyes pop while screaming, ‘Do something! Defend yourself!’” Brookner’s characters don’t so much whinge and snivel as think obsessively about what they want and can’t get—keeping up appearances while resigning themselves to being misunderstood and marginalized.
The phrase “rules of engagement”—not only the title of one of Brookner’s novels, but also a recurring trope in her fiction—suggests where Brookner’s interests lie: in the unspoken conventions by which successful people live, and for which outsiders like Anna feel themselves “unprepared.” The “rules of engagement” govern clothes, home decor, bodily gestures, conversation: they are the signifying systems through which people construct their status and relationships. “There are at least two types of people,” American poet Anne Boyer writes in Garments Against Women: those “for whom the ordinary worldliness is easy” and those for whom it is difficult, who don’t know how to hold their arms, find food, endorse checks, or “give to the world what it will welcome or reward.” Where is the community, Boyer asks, for those apparently alien beings, “for whom the salaries and weddings and garages do not come?” Brookner is asking much the same question. They’re an unlikely pair—Boyer’s breast cancer, rage, poverty, and underemployment have nothing in common with Brookner’s restrained elegance and successful career as an academic and writer. But Boyer writes of the societal systems that generate exclusion—capitalism, gender, and fashion—in ways that illuminate Brookner.
Boyer uses the word opaque for those whose being doesn’t lend itself to transparent accounting. Brookner’s protagonists—while differing from Boyer in their wealth and privilege—tend toward this opacity, existing outside the dominant economy, based as it is on productivity and fungibility. Sexuality and labor are supposed to work like currency—as something you exchange in return for something else—marriage, wealth, happiness. But Brookner’s women often don’t labor at all or lose their jobs. A few teach and/or write, Frances catalogs images, Zoe copyedits, and Claire works (briefly) for a clipping agency. But in the shopping mart of the world, their currency fails to buy them what they want—whether love or family. “We were in the triumphalist 1980s,” Brookner’s narrator says in The Rules of Engagement, “when it was almost indecent for a woman to be bereft and to yearn. I felt at one with all those people on the sidelines of life.” These women don’t need to work, but their wealth only serves to estrange them.
“This is a deeply, quietly, savagely perverse book,” Maureen N. McLane writes of Boyer’s Garments Against Women: “‘perverse’ in the sense of turning away: from the given, the mandated; from ‘things conferring authority,’ the logic of property, capital, productivity, the obligation to be happy, to be ‘working on yourself,’ to want things.” The same could be said of Brookner’s opus. Her characters begin by wanting to fit in but generally refuse to “work on themselves”—to improve their attitude, go to more parties, move into better-lit apartments, take the doctor’s advice, or buy fashionable clothes.
Fashion serves both writers as a way of thinking through their “perverse” alienation. Boyer points out the labor of seamstresses, wives, and sweatshop workers who make clothes, their work so undervalued that it’s cheaper to buy clothes than to make them herself. Fashion, which insists women dress differently each year, inserts women into an economy in which they are inseparable from their “purse[s]”—simultaneously defined by and hated for their identity as shoppers.
Brookner’s protagonists dress decorously but fail at fashion. In Leaving Home, when Emma Roberts shops at Selfridges, she spends too much on a dress she’ll never wear again: “I looked like a child dressed for a birthday party, and was shocked by my own unworldliness.” She contrasts herself with the other shoppers, who seem “confident and purposeful”; Emma herself is “too obviously ignorant of the game to be played, the prizes to be won.” It’s no accident that Frances in Look at Me refers to her failed effort to fit in with Nick and Alix as an outfit so fashionable she can’t carry it off. Blanche’s tasteful outfits in Misalliance are defined against the “temporary and impractical garments” worn by her “pagan” rivals Sally and Mousie. In Providence, Kitty resists the fashion advice of her neighbor Caroline. Mistaken for wealthy because of her clothes, Kitty wears the products of her seamstress-grandmother—elegant, tasteful, but immune to fads.
This tension between classic and trendy is at the core of Fraud, where Anna’s “sempiternal” brown corded suit fails disastrously to impress, compared with her rival Vickie’s short red dress with big shoulder pads. Worn in several different colors, the beautifully cut suit, along with Anna’s broad, innocent face, identifies her as out of touch. “I’m ridiculous,” Anna thinks. “Women don’t live like this anymore. …They go down into the marketplace, whereas I pay the price of staying out of it.” Unlike most of Brookner’s novels, however, Fraud actually ends on a positive note: Anna rejects her past, fraudulent self and plans a career designing clothes—reshaping, presumably, the “marketplace” she’d avoided.
Brookner’s protagonists may start out hoping to join the crowd—via marriage, work, or friendship—but generally settle for an outsiderhood that resembles invalidism, a “not altogether unpleasant limbo of reading and wandering, alternating between acceptance and bewilderment,” as Elizabeth describes it in Rules of Engagement. “I had lost my earlier purposefulness, and with it my decisive thoughts.” Opting out of teleology, she takes on a different relation to time:
I was not entirely inactive, or so I persuaded myself, for the time seemed to pass, as it does for everyone. But it was not the sort of time by which others reckoned. It was ruminative, attentive to change, to those alterations in the light, to tiny inconsequential happenings and accidents: that dead pigeon, a mess of dirty feathers, lying in the gutter, the warmer wind, a family shop being refurbished by its new owner, the smell of coffee from the open door of a café.
The sick, Virginia Woolf points out, drop from the “army of the upright” and “float with the sticks in the stream,” studying the sky, at liberty to see there something that “has nothing to do with human pleasure or human profit.”
Readers get annoyed with Brookner’s protagonists because they don’t like contemplating unhappy, lonely, or old people uninterested in curing themselves of their conditions. In a 2014 essay predating her New York Times column, Leslie Jamison wrote of growing up afraid of becoming a woman who “wallows” in pain, a “wound-dweller.” But women do suffer, she acknowledges in her “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain.” So the question is how to “represent female pain without producing a culture in which this pain has been fetishized to the point of fantasy or imperative?” Her essay, she concludes, provides no answers, but constitutes “a search for possibility—the possibility of representing female suffering without reifying its mythos.”
Brookner searches too. Frances Hinton of Look at Me is drawn to vivacious Nick and Alix because “I needed to know that not everyone carries a wound and that this wound bleeds intermittently through life.” But the sentence’s faulty parallelism suggests that any such unwounded state is an illusion. “I needed to know that not everyone carries a wound that bleeds intermittently through life” is one implied meaning. But as constructed the sentence breaks into two parts: “I needed to know that not everyone carries a wound” and “I needed to know that this wound bleeds intermittently through life.” In any case what she learns is that she at least does carry such a wound and it will indeed “bleed intermittently through life.” She will cope by maintaining her dignity and writing satirical novels.
To the extent that Brookner’s protagonists “work on themselves,” their aim is a self-protection, not self-improvement. Like Fraud’s Anna in her “beautifully cut tan suit,” they are “determined never to be perceived as a victim,” no matter how they are riven by romantic yearning or bodily decay. “Those who survived and grew old,” Thea thinks near the end of Visitors, “were in a country without maps; she knew that. All that was left to them was to find some middle way, between acceptance and defeat.” Brookner’s heroines wind up on the cusp, both sick and well, elegant and opaque, wearing well-cut clothes as resistant to the vagaries of fashion as they are to interpretation.
Much like Brookner, in her author photos. Whatever the year, on the flap of each of her twenty-four novels, she wears a similar sixties-era bouffant with side-swept bangs, pouffed and beauty-parlor perfect. There’s a hint of a pout in the full, glossy lips, while the penciled eyebrows are skeptically raised. Carefully made up and untouched by tousling hand or breeze, she looks askance at the camera as if taunting us with her resistance to our expectations for what she ought to look like. In the Paris Review interview, Brookner talks of her sense of displacement, attributing it to her Polish-Jewish parents, “transplanted and fragile people, an unhappy brood,” and describes herself as “mal partie,” starting “on the wrong foot.” Elsewhere she says, “I don’t know where the melancholia came from; it was probably genetic”—a non-explanation echoed by Thea in The Visitors. Unhappiness plus opacity: Brookner’s self-presentation seems to mock the assumption—prevalent in wealthy capitalist societies—that we should each find what will make us happy—clothes? objects? Prozac?—and then buy it.
That resistance to self-help underlies Brookner’s resistance to feminism. Unhappiness, Jane suggests in A Family Romance, is not to be remedied: of the feminists she meets in the US she writes: “underneath it all, I sense a bewilderment which I in fact share. Will we be loved, will we be saved? And if so, by what or by whom?” Such passivity is, of course, a luxury available to the comfortably off whose very survival is not under threat. But Jane’s distrust of social change is also a helpful corrective in a society enamored of “self-help,” “wellness,” and “aging well.” Jonathan M. Mezl, in his introduction to Against Health, writes of “‘biomedicalization’ whereby biomedicine and technoscience conspire to define health as a moral obligation, a commodity, and a mark of status and self-worth.” In this environment, “the focus is no longer on illness, disability, and disease as matters of fate, but on health as a matter of ongoing moral self-transformation.” Look at me, Brookner’s characters say. I’m unhappy and confused. Don’t diagnose me or save me. Just acknowledge I’m here.
Critics have compared Brookner to Henry James, Edith Wharton, Jane Austen, and Barbara Pym. I began instead with Beckett, but I want to end with Proust—whom Brookner described as “marginal, observing”; who is unable to stop writing until he dies and whose narrator is unable to stop thinking. “An extraordinary athlete of self-vivisection,” disability studies scholar Sarah Mann-O’Donnell calls him, “effecting a perpetually incomplete yet desirable convalescence.” Rather than compensation for life’s messiness, Mann-O’Donnell argues, À la recherche du temps perdu offers a repetitive process of self-dissection that refuses “to have done with the horror of life” and resists “cure as resolution in health, uncovering the impossibility of both health and cure, and insisting on convalescence as ground for (creative) production.” Critic Angeline Goreau, writing of Brookner’s final novel Bay of Angels, wonders whether its recycling of old characters and plots is “some sort of obsessive compulsion to revisit past traumas, a wound that never heals?” I would argue that Brookner’s novels, whose protagonists accept their own woundedness while maintaining their dignity and insisting on their ability to survive, depict the middle ground Jamison seeks—between repudiating woundedness and drowning in it. Proust, the perpetual invalid who couldn’t stop writing, is, Brookner said, “very precious to her.” What she said of him, I would say of her:
He kept himself in a state of mind so hypnotic and dangerous that one approaches rereading him almost with fear…