K. K. Sunalini
Strength of Women in Anne Tyler’s
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, If Morning Ever Comes, Celestial Navigation and Ladder of Years
Feminist literary criticism gained impetus in the United States from the development of the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s, one of whose seminal texts was The Second Sex (1949) by the French existentialist Simon de Beauvoir. Betty Friedan’s popular and accessible book The Feminine Mystique (1963) was also influential. In the wake of its publication, there was the formation of the National Organisation of Women (NOW), the founding of the feminist magazine edited by Gloria Steinem, and the grassroots formation of women’s consciousness raising groups for discussion, self-help, and political action, culminating in the unsuccessful attempt to pass an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Bill of Rights of the Constitution. This burst of activity inspired a global movement that has resulted in international women’s conferences, the passage of United Nations resolutions on the rights of women and children, and indigenous movements against female genital mutilation and other practices that affect the status of women in other parts of the world.
Feminist literary criticism is one aspect of this broad spectrum of activity. As an American phenomenon, such criticism burst into public view with the publication of Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970), which attacked the sexist stereotyping of women in works by such male authors as Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer. Next, the history of women’s writing began to be seriously reconsidered as female authors previously considered “minor” by male academics were promoted to first class status and a gynocentric theory of literature was developed. Some of the initial explorations were Patricia Meyer Spack’s The Female Imagination (1975), Ellen Moer’s Literary Women (1976), Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1977), and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Mad Woman in the Attic (1979).
Anne Tyler may not seem to focus on feminist issues in her fiction, but her work concerns itself with the lives of women, and women are the matrix of feminism. Although her characters may not be politically involved, they are nevertheless women, and the issues that concern them are therefore feminist issues even though Tyler herself may not be consciously writing feminist fiction. Tyler looks at the lives of women who take their turn with the restrictions, limitations and possibilities that their particular generation imposes.
Doris Betts in “Tyler’s Marriage of Opposites” takes up the issue of feminism and praises Tyler’s characters who “survive and persist beyond crisis during their long, steady, three-meal-a-day after maths” (Betts 2). Tyler’s women characters do not rebel; they do not strive for independent lives and careers; they are generally oblivious to the strong feminist issues. Given those conclusions for her fictional women’s lives, given Tyler’s disinclination to take up political feminist issues in her fiction, given her dismissal of defined gender differences between writers and given the absence of a strong protest against the patriarchy, it is indeed easy to exclude Tyler from those dedicated to and sympathetic with a strong feminist stand. Betts, however, sees that staying married and staying at home may require more courage than many care to admit. The present article seeks to analyse Anne Tyler’s novels from feminist point of view.
She wrote her first novel If Morning Ever Comes, from the point of view of a young man who returns to visit his family home, which is inhabited by three generations of women, including six sisters. Alice Hall Petry hailed If Morning Ever Comes as a feminist novel because it portrays a family of strong women who bond together without seeming to need a family patriarch. Anne Tyler avoids the label “feminist” and has distaste for fiction that is self consciously political or ideological. The feminist critics have investigated her portrayal of changing gender roles in the American family in her fiction. Some have censured her for ignoring the progress the women have made since the feminist movement began and for falling back on traditional gender expectations. Tyler insisted on the primacy of roles of mother and spouse which is certainly old-fashioned if not anti-feminist. Her work shares the subject matter of the feminist revolution but not its attitudes. In her novels and stories, fathers are often absent, dead or run away. Her happiest visions of human life as well as her stiffest are of extended families. Tyler’s women are the strong centres of the home, but strength is not always benevolent; her women are neither achievers nor strong models. Though they easily manage their domestic life they often become terrifying vixens, driving their husbands and children from them. Her characters, like Mrs. Emerson and Pearl Tull, are cold and sexless.
Tyler’s strong women characters are endowed with endurance and ability to manage hardships and difficulties. There is much to admire the women characters of Anne Tyler from proper and moneyed Roland Park matrons of Baltimore – Mrs. Emerson (The Clock Winder) and the various Peck women (Searching for Caleb) – to sharp street wise characters like Murriel Pritchett (The Accidental Tourist), Ruth Spivey (Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant) and Rita diCarlo (Saint Maybe). Her principal women characters are shockingly alone, and when one or two of them do join the company of other women, the experiences are brief and do not represent life-long friendships. For most women characters in Tyler’s fiction, marriage or at least the semblance of marriage is assumed. A few women characters like Jenny Tull and Agatha Bedloe pursue education and professions. The majority of Tyler’s women characters, however, does not seek professions and generally show little interest in things intellectual. Over and over, these women characters are forced to rely on men to provide the money needed to support them and their children. And the marriages in general do not appear to be sensible choices. In studying the array of women characters in Tyler’s fiction one finds women who are basically tied to home and children without the remarkable life and career that Tyler herself enjoys as a novelist, short story writer, reviewer and critic.
Theme of desertion is unique in Tyler’s ninth novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, published in 1982, which received P.E.N / Faulkner Award, and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. The story traces 50 years in the life of Pearl Tull, who after being deserted by her husband raises her three children. The focus at first is Pearl Tull, 85 and dying, whose ruminations on her sickbed centre partly on a moment 35 years ago when her husband Beck Tull, a travelling salesman, announced he was clearing out for good, partly on the years of her ferocious labour that followed this catastrophe. As a single parent working as a checkout clerk at a grocery store, Pearl struggles to nurture and civilise the three children she has with her husband in her late 30s. After Beck Tull’s eventual desertion she staunchly carries on as if nothing has happened. She acts cool and crisp towards neighbours who drop into shop. In her Baltimore neighbourhood she is thought to be unfriendly, even spooky, the witch of Culvert Street. Unperturbed by her neighbours’ speculations and criticisms, Pearl remains aloof and detached from her community. She defensively develops a rigid claustrophic family style. She has no friends, does not talk with customers at the store where she works; does not encourage her children to bring friends home. For years, in her stubborn pride, she refuses to admit to her children that their father had left them – the abandonment is simply never mentioned as such during the time they were growing up. Besides this steely silence, Pearl encourages an unhealthy self-sufficiency and iron discipline. She simply wants to get on with the practical, everyday things that matter, such as caulking the windows and weather stripping the doors. By keeping the house maintained and repaired, Pearl could more confidently hold her own world together.
Tyler makes it clear that Pearl has no friends in the neighbourhood or at work. In focusing on the day-to-day life of Pearl Tull, Tyler has uncovered the realism ignored by male fantasies about wandering adventures. Tyler exposes the emotional pain and hardships faced by those left at home. She is faultless and displays competence and a valour that deserves to be admired. As conventional and as faithful as Penelope, she waits longingly for 30 odd years for the return of her wandering husband. She succeeds and survives quite well without her husband. Nevertheless Pearl does not know that in her endurance lies her feminist struggle against oppression.
Whether Tyler consciously sets out to write a “feminist” plot is a superfluous argument, but what cannot be denied is that she creates characters like Mrs. Hawkes and Pearl Tull who exhibit great endurance as single parents shaping the lives of their children single-handedly and that makes them feminist characters. They do not have a man to point out their shortcomings.
Anne Tyler’s favourite novel, Celestial Navigation is about a vulnerable male and a strong female. Mary Tell seems to thrive on desperate situations; she is a risk taker and a survivor. She comes to Jeremy Pauling’s house, having left home, eloped at sixteen with her small daughter at her side. As Mary explains, she has rejected her parents, religion and their way of life as stultifying. Later Mary leaves her husband Guy Tell for the same reason. Now having fallen in love with a man who is separated from his wife, Mary Tell awakens to the dismal authority of the situation her gambling ways have created, “If things don’t work out with John, I have nowhere to go. This is the first time I have really thought about that I am entirely dependent on a man I hardly know. I have no money, no home, no family to return to, not even a high school degree to get a job with and no place to leave Darcy if I could find a job. I did not know if I am eligible for welfare” (73). Perhaps nowhere in Tyler’s fiction do we watch a woman so painfully aware of her powerlessness to change her situation as Mary Tell when she faces her limited resources and options. Her alternative for a number of years is Jeremy, her husband.
Anne Tyler’s thirteenth novel Ladder of Years begins with a newspaper headline. “Baltimore Woman Disappears During Family Vacation”. The accompanying news item includes the few facts related to the sudden disappearance of Cordelia Grinstead, whose eyes are blue or gray or perhaps green. Then Tyler circles back to let the readers see the circumstances that trigger Delia’s unpremeditated decision to vacate her current life – without even saying good-bye.
One of the primary feminist themes in this novel is the importance of female bonding. In Bay Borough, Delia forms a friendship with Belle Flint, whose incongruous name suggests a combination of traditional feminity and a steely will. More significant is Delia’s encounter with Ellie, the television anchorwoman and mother of Noah, the young boy whom Delia is hired to care for. Like Rosemary, Ellie is “the other woman,” and Delia watches her on television with some of the same curious fascination that she had about Rosemary. Delia makes contact with Ellie and they have a heart-to-heart conversation in which they share some of the burdens of womanhood in contemporary society, “funny how men always worry ahead of time that marriage might confine them. Women don’t give it a thought. It’s afterwards it hits them” (Tyler 1995 228).
Delia uses her new capacity for woman-to-woman conversation when she returns to her home in Baltimore and discovers her daughter Suzie in crisis over her wedding. Suzie tells her mother what bothers her about her fiancé Driscoll, complaints strikingly similar to those that Ellie voiced about Joel and that Delia harbours about Sam. For example when Suzie tells Driscoll she has decided to call off their marriage ceremony, he closes his eyes for a moment and then – acting as if Suzie has said nothing important – leaves to go to dress for the wedding. At the end, it becomes clear that Delia has strength, as do Suzie, Eliza, Linda and Eleanor. Perhaps no other aspect of women’s lives has been more discussed and emphasised in the feminist movement than the plight of women against the traditional power of white male patriarchy. From the repressive legal and social codes under which Edna suffers in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) to the wives in Anne Tyler’s novels, women struggle for independence and equality. Some of Tyler’s women characters struggle but in the end get and accept the closed in life of family and household duties. Tyler’s works do not explicitly state strong feminist positions, and generally as Dorothy Faye Sala Brock notes, Tyler’s, “works are largely free from feminist grievances against society. As a rule, Tyler’s books do not concern themselves very much with either sex or politics, nor with sex as politics” (1985 21). Anne Tyler exposes her male characters’ failings, but without anger or bitterness. She does not consider herself a political feminist.
Tyler is not a typical feminist author in the sense that she is not strident. She does create strong women characters, such as Muriel Pritchett (The Accidental Tourist) and Justine Peck (Searching for Caleb), but she invariably tends to place them in traditional roles as wives and mothers. In 1989 she reported that she does not care for novels written in the early 1970s by “the really strident, bitter, look-what-men-have-done-to us women writers who were popular at that particular moment. Certainly I don’t hate liberated women as such; I assure I’m one myself, if you can call someone liberated who was never imprisoned” (Petry 18-19).
References
Brock, Dorothy Faye Sala. Anne Tyler’s Treatment of Managing Women. [Dissertation]: Denton: University of North Texas State, 1985
Tyler, Anne. Celestial Navigation New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974.
------, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. New York: Berkley Books, 1983
------. If Morning Ever Comes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964.
------. Ladder of Years. New York: Ballantine Books, 1995.
Petry, Alice Hall, ed. Understanding Anne Tyler. Coloumbia: University of South Carolina, 1990.
------. Understanding Anne Tyler. Coloumbia: University of South Carolina, 1990.
------. “Tyler and Feminism.” Anne Tyler as Novelist. Ed. Dale Salwak. Iowa City: University of Iowa press, 1994. 33-42.
------. Critical Essays on Anne Tyler. New York: G. K. Hall, 1992.