[Ebook reviews] - The Cook and the Carpenter

The five novels I've chosen to focus on here have all been hailed as feminist lesbian "classics." They're significant books (not to mention fun to read) that capture the fervor of the early movement - the excitement of coming out as a lesbian and a feminist, the difficulty of working collectively with women of differing racial, economic and social backgrounds, and the triumph of initiating a myriad changes in male-dominated society. As Maureen Brady writes in her new introduction, the spirit of the mid-seventies told women to "seize the power to create what you want/need now and do it." These novels exemplify the best of that "do-it-yourself" feminism.

The same fervor helped create new outlets for publishing women's words, books too earnest, too honest and, most often, too lesbian for mainstream presses. These books were not only thematically innovative, but, in June Arnold's words, were "developing away from plot-time via autobiography, confession, oral tradition into what might finally be a spiral. Experience weaving in upon itself, commenting on itself, inclusive, not ending in final victory/defeat but ending with the sense that the community continues."

Arnold's own work was an attempt to "phrase what has never been.". She wrote The Cook and the Carpenter after her involvement in the short-lived takeover of the New York Fifth Street Women's Building on New Year's Eve, 1970. The story details the creation of a similar women's commune. Arnold replaces gendered pronouns with "na" and "nan," announcing on the first page of the original edition that since "it is no longer necessary to distinguish between men and women...the reader to know which is which."

In her perceptive introduction to the new edition, Bonnie Zimmerman calls this novel "one of the best fictional representations we have of the mood and daily activity of the moment in history that birthed feminism and lesbian communities"; yet it is also valuable as a delineation of the complexities of early women's liberation, the struggles among movement women as well as between women and the rest of the world: "'It's about big and little, isn't it?' The cook was little and the carpenter was big. Their own group was little and the men threatening to come Saturday were big."

The cook, free-spirited and empathic, and the carpenter, stoic and intellectual, form a couple in love until the arrival of Three, a professional activist, upsets the balance of their relationship. With Three's help, the commune occupies an abandoned elementary school, only to be arrested. In jail, the women witness the collapse of their individual differences in the face of judicial authority, for "whereas previously they had all felt that their group of women, coming together from different spheres, lives, ages, had meant that any conclusion the group reached had the validity of convergence, now...[t]hey were no more than a single gritty-eyed headache in the life of a giant." This revelation transforms the commune, and while the narrator drops the pretense of non-gendered pronouns, the cook and the carpenter begin to define love as "carrying each other's runes" rather than as "singing a song together even though one of them couldn't carry a tune."

Arnold's second Daughters novel, Sister Gin, also focuses on women's activism through the lives of the Shirley Temples Emeritae, a band of elderly women who take justice into their own hands by placing bound, gagged and partially-clad rapists and sexists on public display. The protagonist, Su McCulvey, a conservative book review editor for a small North Carolina newspaper, faces menopause with the help of her brazen alter ego, Sister Gin, ghostwriter of "sassy" book reviews left surreptitiously in Su's desk drawer. In her afterword to the new edition, Jane Marcus argues that Arnold uses menopause as a metaphor for "the rebirth of the female self." "The change" initiates other changes in Su's statically perfect life: dissatisfaction with her rum-and-Tang-drinking lover, Bettina; an affair with 77-year-old Mamie Carter Wilkerson; and coming out as a lesbian to her mother, who responds as a proper Southern lady should: "Now, Suan... You're just saying that because you don't want to have children."

After Su is fired for running radical reviews of women's press books, she lapses into temporary alcoholic self-pity, but finally creates a new identity through writing and political involvement. Although the novel proposes the utopian ideal of "one untouchable safe sea of women," like The Cook and the Carpenter it also stresses the recognition of women's differences. The novel ends as Sister Gin advises Su to let Miss May, a Black woman, write her own story about her sister's rape by a white man: "You just can't speak for Miss May, that's all. Let her go on out the door. And she doesn't need you to hold it for her, either."

While Sister Gin portrays menopause as middle-aged liberation, Elana Nachman/Dykewomon's Riverfinger Women invokes the excitement of young women discovering that they can love other women, despite society's enforcement of heterosexuality: "In 1967 we still wanted to repeat the same straight story. But we knew even then, in our careful duplications (toasters, laundry, feeding the cats, a whole inventory of living together), that we were pornographic because we were both women."

Riverfinger Women was the first novel to feature "nice Jewish girls" who also happen to be lesbians. Set against the romantic rebellion of the late sixties and seventies, the novel fuses drugs, politics and rock and roll with newfound lesbianism at a New England boarding-school. Inez, trouble-maker and intermittent narrator, runs the school newspaper and cuts class with impunity, yet fears being different from the other girls. For Inez, being "a queer" is worse than being ugly or heterosexually promiscuous, for if you were a lesbian, you "weren't a girl at all." Inez' nemesis is Peggy Warren, blonde theatre major; yet Peggy and Inez become close through their mutual friend, Abby. The novel follows their three-way friendship through tremulous lesbian frolics, anti-war demonstrations, gay bar culture and a dope-smuggling adventure that leaves them rich enough to pursue their mutual dreams.

The most stylistically experimental of all the Daughters novels, Bertha Harris's Lover offers a theatrical cast in an operatic script reminiscent of Virginia Woolf's Orlando. Historical, mythical and fictional characters promenade across the page, joined not by plot but by a fairytale language: "Goats, water, monkeys: then she was born." Harris patterned the novel, she explains here, after Yvonne Rainier's ethereal dance, The Mind is a Muscle: Rainier's work "was a world unto itself. I wanted to make one of my own like it." Daughters published the novel because it represented a female avant-garde, not "a feminist and lesbian content or sensibility"; still, in its representation of lesbianism as an unquestionable choice for women, Lover expressed the politics of 1970s feminist lesbianism and gained a popular following.

Maureen Brady's Give Me Your Good Ear focuses less directly on lesbian life. Instead it centers around the protagonist, Francie's, repression of a memory of the night her mother stabbed her father, the abuse that precipitated the murder, and the community's reaction to the murder in an interpretation that preserves gender hierarchy. The novel opens with Francie as a young girl playing "crack the whip" and the game becomes a metaphor for the chain of oppressive gender roles women hand down from generation to generation. To break free of this dangerous game, Francie must confront her mother with her father's murder and acknowledge her own lesbianism.

Give Me Your Good Ear broke ground in its chilling portrayal of both the physical and psychological dynamics of sexual abuse. As Jacqueline St. Joan pointed out in her afterword to the original edition, "The violence [in the novel] is murder/self-defense justifiable homicide by a woman against a man who has humiliated and violated her. This is clearly not the kind of violence that the male presses find marketable." Yet the novel was also rejected by early lesbian presses for focusing on the character's mother-daughter relationship rather than her coming-out experiences. While understanding that these presses were concentrating on works that made lesbian lives visible, Brady believed in the importance of her novel and, with Judith McDaniel, established her own press, Spinsters Ink, to publish it.

These new editions should certainly be welcomed for sustaining the imaginative work of earlier feminists; yet they also exemplify the difficulty of constructing a shared feminist legacy. In particular, the editorial essays that frame each of the four novels originally published by Daughters, a controversial press in its own day, contain contradictions, inconsistencies and gaps that readers must negotiate in their search for feminist origins.

Daughters, Inc. was founded by June Arnold and Parke Bowman in 1973, funded by their considerable resources, and until its demise in 1979 published nineteen of the most experimental novels found in the feminist lesbian movement, as well as one non-fiction anthology and two children's books. Arnold and Bowman declared that feminism would ultimately lead to full-scale political and social revolution and that women's presses were not merely alternatives to trade publishing but were "the mainstream and the thrust of the revolution.". More precisely, according to Bertha Harris' tell-all introduction to the new edition of her novel, June Arnold believed in feminist revolution; Parke Bowman was only interested in running Daughters "as if it were Random House." As a former Daughters editor, author and confidante, Harris has a lot to say about her publishers. At best comic, at worst bitter, she portrays Arnold and Bowman as cruel and paranoid elitists who used women to advance their own goals: fiction in Arnold's case, business in Bowman's.

Apart from Harris' apparent willingness to acquiesce in their schemes, the most fascinating aspect of her tale is its detailing of a serious feminist attempt to give "Random House" a run for its money. Daughters promised its authors above-industry advances while assuring them that their books would never go out of print. (Harris received a $10,000 advance for Lover, not a large amount for a mainstream publisher, but significant for a feminist press.) Yet despite the investment of their impressive personal funds, they were undercapitalized. They also failed, says Harris, to understand that books were a luxury for many women, and felt betrayed by the movement's inability to sustain its own publishers. And they consistently alienated their own allies by making editorial decisions without authorial consent or by compromising their professed political beliefs in separatist, women-centered publishing. (Harris doesn't mention the controversy for which Daughters received the most criticism, their 1977 licensing of paper-back rights for Rita Mae Brown's bestselling Rubyfruit Jungle to Bantam Books for $250,000, an action many denounced as "selling out.")

Harris' vituperative expose marks quite a contrast to Jane Marcus' adulatory Afterword to Sister Gin, which presents Arnold as a literary foremother worthy of canonization, and to Bonnie Zimmerman's admiring portrait of Arnold in the Introduction to The Cook and the Carpenter as "too far ahead of her time and too idiosyncratic to be popular with either the mainstream or the lesbian reading public." Less flattering than Marcus and Zimmerman, but more forgiving than Harris, Nachman/Dykewomon in her Afterword to the new edition of Riverfinger Women paints yet another picture of Arnold as the shrewd editor willing to compromise her feminist vision to accommodate marketing expediencies. (Unlike Harris, Nachman/Dykewomon never received more than $3,000 total for Riverfinger Women, probably because she was a young, unpublished writer. The significant discrepancy in their payments raises questions about Daughters' concept of "sisterhood.")

All these writers, even Harris, express regret that Arnold died before her time, alienated from the movement she felt had betrayed her vision, her work virtually unknown to feminists in the 1980s and '90s. Zimmerman, Marcus, Harris and Nachman/Dykewomon all represent themselves as Arnold's successors - Zimmerman, who has borrowed phrases from Arnold's novels for titles of her own critical works, going so far as to declare, "I am truly one of June Arnold's literary daughters."

Now these literary daughters are literary mothers, at least in their roles as executors of a creative legacy passed on to new generations of feminist readers. Like the characters in the novels, each editor tells her version of the story, leaving the reader to piece these partial truths together into some larger narrative, or, perhaps more advantageously, to read them side by side. As Arnold's tongue-in-cheek blurb, ascribed to the Cook on the original jacket of The Cook and the Carpenter suggests, feminism has room for more than one version of any story: "I couldn't have said it better myself, though I would have said it differently."

In her 1974 review of The Cook and the Carpenter in the Village Voice, Bertha Harris wrote that "the art women are making is no less than revolution." In the last 25 years, we've learned that revolution does not happen overnight. New editions of works from former presses like Diana, Persephone, Shameless Hussy and the Women's Press Collective would preserve the ideas of early second-wave feminism, and inspire new writers to search for fictional strategies that express women's lives today. My only complaint about these new editions is the omission of original material such as authors' comments or afterwords, and I urge publishers to take care not to obscure their books' initial context in this way.