Longings Cries Out To Be Freed From Stereotype

The Longings of Women

by Marge Piercy

Ballantine

$22.00

455 pp.

Virginia Woolf once wrote that what women really wanted was a room of their own. Marge Piercy, in her latest novel, The Longings of Women, echoes that sentiment. Yet where Woolf infused her writing with the powerful appeal of a yearning for feminine creative space, Piercy identifies this fundamental instinct as a fear of losing material possessions.

Piercy explores the lives of three women of distinctly different backgrounds, temperament, and social class. Leila, the Cambridge academic who supports her director husband despite his frequent philandering, is the common tie that binds the rest of the book together. Finding herself with an unfilled space in her life after the death of her best friend, Leila decides to write a book about Becky Burgess, a young woman suspected of inciting her teenage love-toy to kill her husband. Meanwhile, Mary, Leila's housekeeper, desperately conceals the fact that, at 61 years of age, she finds herself living on the street after her husband leaves her for a younger woman.

With the exception of the fairly predictable revelations leading up to the murder of Becky's husband, the novel ignores plot development in order to concentrate on an internal examination of the lives of these women. Each chapter is devoted to the viewpoint of one of the three characters, a device that is evidently supposed to subtly reveal a fundamental longing for autonomy common to the women despite their superficial differences.

What is in fact revealed is that Piercy undercuts her own theme through stereotyped characters and sanctimonious preaching. Instead of an uplifting search for spiritual independence, the key to being female, according to Piercy, is financial security. These women don't need space, they need a condo.

Marriage in Piercy's world is a negative institution which allows the men to exploit and trap the women. Portrayed as perfect housewives, whose only thought in life was to make their respective husbands happy and content, the women are of course blameless for the subsequent break-up of their marriages.

The men in this novel all come across somewhere between Al Bundy and Arnie, lazy, selfish and shallow, ditching their long-suffering spouses for a newer model at the first hint of trouble. The only stable relationships in this novel are maternal or between women, either as friends or lovers.

Piercy attempts to show the vulnerability of modern women, but instead depicts her female characters as essentially helpless, clinging to their husbands with whatever skills they can for fear of being left with nothing. Even Leila, supposedly the independent-minded professional, spent decades making excuses for her husband's frequent affairs with younger women. She only divorces him when he goes as far as moving in with his pregnant girlfriend.

Mary's major purpose in the novel is to serve as a looming warning to the other characters. She demonstrates what can happen when a woman loses her husband, and thus her financial security.

The ominous threat of insolvency hardly appears to be a uniquely feminine one, nor does it define the common female experience. Piercy's error was in trying to generalize, for in doing so, she falls into the trap of stereotyping. Human relationships are much more complex than Piercy is willing to admit, and her black and white view of the world leaves us longing for women of substance and complexity.