The girls, p.1
The Girls, page 1
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Introduction copyright © 2023, Kathleen Rooney
All rights reserved. This introduction or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
First Belt Publishing Edition 2023
ISBN: 978-1-953368-49-2
Belt Publishing
13443 Detroit Avenue, Lakewood, OH 44107
www.beltpublishing.com
Book design by Meredith Pangrace
Cover by David Wilson
Contents
Introduction by Kathleen Rooney
The Girls
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
About the Authors
Introduction
What could be simpler than the game Old Maid, a basic affair where cards are matched in pairs and the player stuck with the unmatched card at the end is the loser? The implications of the game and its name could hardly be clearer: to end up as an unmarried, childless woman is to lose out on all that life has to offer—to be a prim, fussy person, sexless and repressed and pitied by others.
Even now, in the twenty-first century, when more adults, both men and women, are going through life unattached by matrimony than ever before, women who never marry still find themselves pegged—sometimes by peers, sometimes by family, and almost always by pop culture—as odd or eccentric at best, pathetic and rejected at worst. Not winners.
Which is why, a century after its initial publication, Edna Ferber’s deft, affectionate 1921 novel The Girls refreshes us with its exuberant focus upon not one but three old maids. From the very first page, Ferber breezes us into the lives of her titular women:
It is a question of method. Whether to rush you up to the girls pell-mell, leaving you to become acquainted as best you can; or, with elaborate slyness, to slip you so casually into their family life that they will not even glance up when you enter the room or leave it; or to present the three of them in solemn order according to age, epoch, and story. This last would mean beginning with Great-Aunt Charlotte Thrift, spinster, aged seventy-four; thence to her niece and namesake Lottie Payson, spinster, aged thirty-two; finishing with Lottie’s niece and namesake Charley Kemp, spinster, aged eighteen and a half—you may be certain nobody ever dreamed of calling her Charlotte. If you are led by all this to exclaim, aghast, “A story about old maids!”—you are right. It is.
Ferber, who never married and had no children herself, even dedicates The Girls to her dear friend Lillian Adler, another old maid and fellow spinster, albeit one “who shies at butterflies but not at life.” That latter phrase, “but not at life,” turns out to be thematically crucial, for this is absolutely a book about old maids, but it is not the dreary narrative a reader might first expect.
These three women, though unwed and child-free, are not isolated but enmeshed in their families, friendships, and surrounding communities. Granted, to greater or lesser extents, each finds herself within a sexist and claustrophobic societal atmosphere in which any little act of self-assertion can feel like a leap from a precipice. Yet Ferber is not interested in cautionary tales of shrinking violets, favoring instead women who, out of necessity or desire or both, discover that meaningful work and recognition outside the home can unlock the door to a meaningful life.
Early on, while living in Chicago during the Civil War and in its immediate aftermath, practically under house arrest by her parents after a perceived romantic indiscretion, the eldest Charlotte—lively and passionate yet suppressed by her respectability-obsessed Victorian mother—finishes sewing a phenomenal quilt, one that “became quite famous; a renowned work of art.” Visitors, the narrator tells us, ask Charlotte about its progress, “as a novelist is sounded about an opus with which he is struggling or a painter his canvas,” prompting the quilter to explain, “This one has a purple satin center, you see. I always think purple is so rich, don’t you? Then the next row will be white uncut velvet. Doesn’t it have a sumptuous sound! Next blue velvet and the last row orange-colored silk.” This precious object and its method of composition—patches and colors that repeat and intersect to create a bigger pattern—resurface throughout the book, becoming an analog for Ferber’s nimble and elegant assembly of her own saga. Moving back and forth through time, she highlights the rhymes in the lives of the elderly Aunt Charlotte, the middle-aged Lottie, and the galoshed and rebellious young flapper, Charley. It is the similarities and differences among these three women and their love for one another that provides the thread that binds the narrative.
Quilts, historically considered to be the product of women’s work, have almost always been viewed as a lesser art form than the traditionally male-dominated pursuits of painting, sculpture, and even literature, as Ferber, a so-called “woman novelist,” was well aware. And she uses Aunt Charlotte’s quilt as a recurring reminder of the perils of undervaluing not just women’s labor but women themselves. When at last Charlotte completes her masterpiece, “lined with turkey red and bound with red ribbon,” she lets her friends persuade her to exhibit it at the fair, where it takes first prize. “A day of great triumph for Charlotte Thrift,” the narrator sums up, adding that “the prize was a basket worth fully eight dollars.”
In her review of Eliza McGraw’s 2014 book, Edna Ferber’s America, Lori Harrison-Kahan observes how the author was scorned both for being a woman and for being a Jew, noting that “a chorus of critical voices, most of them male” dismissed Ferber’s “crowd-pleasing plots as well as her hyperbolic, though accessible, writing style.” F. Scott Fitzgerald refused even to “read her wildly popular stories, derisively labeling her one of the ‘Yiddish descendants of O. Henry.’” In his 1960 Partisan Review essay “Masscult and Midcult,” Dwight Macdonald offered his notorious assessment of middlebrow writers, stating that their work “really isn’t culture at all” but “a parody of High Culture”; he placed Ferber at the top of his “list of writers who should not be taken seriously.”
One hopes that these men, if they were still alive, would be embarrassed at having made such fatuous statements. Regardless, these guys were missing out. Ferber’s writing is a delight, and now, with Belt Publishing’s reissue of The Girls, more readers will get the opportunity see that.
This three-protagonist story relies on a masterful omniscience, which skips like a stone across Lake Michigan, hopping thrillingly from mind to mind. Set in 1916 but published in 1921, so too does the narration capitalize on the insights available to its slightly retrospective perspective. For instance, when a minor character says of World War I, “We’re a peace-loving nation. … We simply don’t believe in war. Barbaric,” both the narrator and we know how tragically incorrect she is. Moreover, when the narrator mentions the struggle for suffrage, we are aware, as the women are not, that they will finally be granted the right to vote in 1920, after the novel ends but before it gets published. Ferber delivers this deep sociohistorical sweep with a deceptively light touch that enhances the novel’s underlying seriousness while also keeping the plot moving along.
Near the book’s surprising and satisfying conclusion, Lottie tells her kindred Charlottes about a man she met in Paris during the Great War. Of this man’s most attractive quality, she declares, “They call it a sense of humor, I suppose, but it’s more than that. It’s the most delightful thing in the world, and if you have it you don’t need anything else.” Ferber displays this quality in abundance, as well as plenty of that “anything else.” Because here’s the thing: this book is funny, but with a genuine generosity of spirit that never reduces even its most ridiculous figures to total buffoons. The dominant outlook feels loving and compassionate. And its gentle mockery of its major and minor characters’ blind spots and foibles blends with its profound understanding.
Ferber perfectly captures the unfulfilled feeling within so many conventional people and the petty tyranny a forcefully normal family member can exert over those in her orbit, from Great Aunt Charlotte Thrift’s authoritarian mother to her sister, Carrie Payson, who is Lottie’s mother. The latter, in addition to fairly running Lottie into the ground with her domineering demands, is “the sort of person who does slammy flappy things in a room where you happened to be breakfasting, or writing, or reading; things at which you could not express annoyance and yet which annoyed you to the point of frenzy.”
Through a gradual accumulation of events and encounters, Ferber shows how a bit of resistance and freeth
Certainly, Ferber’s approach—critical but forgiving to individual people and America at large—stems largely from who she was as a person and the way in which she moved through the world as a feme sole. A firsthand expert on the old maid lifestyle herself, Ferber was never known to have had a romantic or sexual relationship. But far from being a sad, sere figure whom life was passing by, she was vibrant, indefatigable, witty, and successful, a member of the Algonquin Round Table in New York and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1924 for another wonderful Chicago novel, So Big. She saw that book eventually adapted into one silent picture and two talking ones. Her 1926 novel Show Boat was made into the famous 1927 musical, and Cimarron (1930), Giant (1952), and The Ice Palace (1958) were all adapted into films as well.
Born in 1885 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to a Hungarian Jewish father and a German Jewish mother, Ferber lived a peripatetic youth throughout the Midwest, including Chicago for a year when she was three, Ottumwa, Iowa, from 1890 to 1897, and Appleton, Wisconsin, where she graduated from high school and became a reporter for the Appleton Crescent before moving to Milwaukee to write for the Sentinel. She returned to Chicago around 1910, where, similar to the Thrift girls, she lived with her mother and sister in furnished apartments and hotels on the city’s South Side. There, as she later put it, “Chicago stories tumbled, one after another out of my typewriter. New Year’s Eve in a Chicago Loop hotel … a woman buyer in a Chicago department store … a clerk in a cut-price shoe store. They were stories of working people, of the Little People, of those who got the tough end of life.”
Although she had settled in New York by the mid-1920s, she returned to Chicago frequently and continued to draw upon its people and neighborhoods, including in The Girls, which, in its span from the Civil War to World War I, uses its three Charlottes to depict and critique the city’s conventional, status-driven social circles.
Beset by anti-Semitism, especially in her early life, Ferber depicts that prejudice and others—including classism and anti-Blackness—unsparingly in The Girls. Many characters either engage in unthinking intolerance themselves or, due to the strictures of feminine deference, fail to subvert such biases, at least at first. Ferber’s frank descriptions of class stratifications, ethnic divides, and sexism illustrate how these snobberies and preconceptions shape not only individual lives but the life of a metropolis.
At one point, Lottie drives downtown in the family’s “ancient electric” to help her unusual-in-her-profession friend, Judge Emma Barton, rehabilitate a wayward girl. She catches “her breath a little at the spaciousness and magnificence of those blocks between Twelfth and Randolph. The new Field Columbian Museum, a white wraith, rose out of the lake mist at her right.” Ferber notes that Lottie “always felt civic when driving down Michigan,” which enhances the marvel we feel a few pages later when Ferber writes just as convincingly about “all that vast stratum of submerged servers over whom the flood of humanity sweeps in a careless torrent leaving no one knows what sediment of rich knowledge.” With subtle characterization and wry sympathy of tone, Ferber shows in The Girls that the underestimated often have a richer life than anyone who fails to look closely might suspect, and that there are fates far worse than never marrying a husband and sacrificing oneself to a nuclear family.
The phrase “beloved woman” comes up over and over in this novel, referring to the radiance that a woman exudes when a man has chosen to treasure her above others. Each time this coveted glow appears, however, Ferber presents us with an occasion to wonder: Could a woman be beloved in other ways? Not disdained or taken for granted based upon her ability to be selected by a husband, but loved more broadly, respected for everything else inherent to her being?
Kathleen Rooney
March 2023
The Girls
To
Lillian Adler
Who shies at butterflies
But not at life
Chapter I
It is a question of method. Whether to rush you up to the girls pell-mell, leaving you to become acquainted as best you can; or, with elaborate slyness, to slip you so casually into their family life that they will not even glance up when you enter the room or leave it; or to present the three of them in solemn order according to age, epoch, and story. This last would mean beginning with Great-Aunt Charlotte Thrift, spinster, aged seventy-four; thence to her niece and namesake Lottie Payson, spinster, aged thirty-two; finishing with Lottie’s niece and namesake Charley Kemp, spinster, aged eighteen and a half—you may be certain nobody ever dreamed of calling her Charlotte. If you are led by all this to exclaim, aghast, “A story about old maids!”—you are right. It is. Though, after all, perhaps one couldn’t call Great-Aunt Charlotte an old maid. When a woman has achieved seventy-four, a virgin, there is about her something as sexless, as aloof and monumental, as there is about a cathedral or a sequoia. Perhaps, too, the term is inappropriate to the vigorous, alert, and fun-loving Lottie. For that matter, a glimpse of Charley in her white woolly sweater and gym pants might cause you to demand a complete retraction of the term. Charley is of the type before whom this era stands in amazement and something like terror. Charley speaks freely on subjects of which Great-Aunt Charlotte has never even heard. Words obstetrical, psychoanalytical, political, metaphysical, and eugenic trip from Charley’s tongue. Don’t think that Charley is a highbrow (to use a word fallen into disuse). Not at all. Even her enemies admit, grudgingly, that she packs a nasty backhand tennis wallop and that her dancing is almost professional. Her chief horror is of what she calls sentiment. Her minor hatreds are “glad” books, knitted underwear, corsets, dirt both physical and mental, lies, fat minds and corporeal fat. She looks her best in a white fuzzy sweater. A shade too slim and boyish, perhaps, for chiffons.
The relationship between Charlotte, Lottie, and Charley is a simple one, really, though having, perhaps, an intricate look to the outsider. Great-aunt, niece, grand-niece: it was understood readily enough in Chicago’s South Side, just as it was understood that no one ever called Lottie “Charlotte,” or Charley “Lottie,” though any of the three might be designated as “one of the Thrift girls.”
The Thrifts had been Chicago South Siders since that September in 1836 when Isaac Thrift had traveled tediously by rail, sound steamer, riverboat, canal boat, lake ship, and horse wagon from his native New York State to the unkempt prairie settlement on the banks of the sluggish stream that the Pottawatamie Indians called Che-ca-gou. Their reason for having thus named a city after the homely garlic plant was plain enough whenever the breeze came pungently from the prairies instead of from Lake Michigan.
Right here is the start of Aunt Charlotte. And yet the temptation is almost irresistible to brush rudely past her and to hurry on to Lottie Payson, who is herself hurrying on home through the slate and salmon-pink Chicago sunset after what is known on the South Side as “spending the afternoon.”
An exhilarating but breathless business—this catching up with Lottie; Lottie of the fine straight back, the short sturdy legs, the sensible shoes, the well-tailored suit, and the elfish interior. All these items contributed to the facility with which she put the long Chicago blocks behind her—all, that is, except the last. An unwed woman of thirty-odd is not supposed to possess an elfish exterior; she is expected to be well balanced and matter-of-fact and practical. Lottie knew this and usually managed to keep the imp pretty well concealed. Yet she so often felt sixteen and utterly irresponsible that she had to take brisk walks along the lakefront on blustery days, when the spray stung your cheeks; or out Bryn Mawr way or even to Beverly Hills, where dwellings were sparse and one could take off one’s hat and venture to skip, furtively, without being eyed askance. This was supposed to help work off the feeling—not that Lottie wanted to work it off. She liked it. But you can’t act Peter Panish at thirty-two without causing a good deal of action among conservative eyebrows. Lottie’s mother, Mrs. Carrie Payson, would have been terribly distressed at the thought of South Side eyebrows elevated against a member of her household. Sixty-six years of a full life had taught Mrs. Carrie Payson little about the chemistry of existence. Else she must have known how inevitably a disastrous explosion follows the bottling up of the Lotties of this world.
