The Seven Ages
Hosmer, Robert E. Jr.
BOOKS The midwife arrived too late No doubt a good many American readers have never heard of Eva Figes, and that's a shame, for her fiction often reveals an insightful and-creative mind at...
...Hyped as "a new sort of historical novel, a remarkable blend of history, folklore, and the poetic imagination...
...A diatribe against male physicians...
...Robert E. Hosmer...
...It could be any one of these depending on where your eye lands and what your ideological preference might be...
...and how many lists of hollyhock, mugwort, fenugreek seeds, and quince kernels can we stomach...
...As a result, her own fiction often lacks standard plot structure...
...There she listens to aged Granny Martin...
...Is this a novel...
...Figes's first six novels are essentially fables of identity, whether personal, racial, sexual, or artistic...
...Yet with Waking (1981) and Light THE SEVEN AGES Eva Figes Pantheon, $13.95, 186 pp...
...First, Figes has not given us a smooth, subtlely crafted narrative...
...at the same time her sti provides the author with ample oppo nity to detail the traditions and metho of midwifery and catalogue the content...
...One woman will call to Emma from a pile of burning leaves...
...The Seven Ages is moving in ite sense of the author's palpable concern for her sisters of other times and places, hsx discernment of a community of suffering, both diachronic and synchronic, *at is in need of healing...
...Though readers of Figes's fiction have eagerly awaited her new novel, it wasn't worth the wait, for this latest fiction is indeed a disappointment...
...BOOKS The midwife arrived too late No doubt a good many American readers have never heard of Eva Figes, and that's a shame, for her fiction often reveals an insightful and-creative mind at work...
...Eight novels, three scholarly studies, and an autobiography have followed...
...Such repetition might be justified in exchange for some significant pleasures of the text, but they are not to be found here...
...Description of the birth process, again and again, reveals the first two faults...
...In very age the themes remain the same: women have been tortured and victimized, their reproductive rights and independent integrity unreeognized and violated...
...In a story-wit] a-story, Granny tells the tale of Ma the midwife, a folk healer who told 1 story of the unfortunate Judith, rap while out in the fields gathering medn nal herbs...
...The story of Judith, told in Chap Two, is instructive and revealing, child during World War II, Emma sent to stay with cousins at some disti from London...
...Both are concerned with the promise and pain of time passage...
...A series of short stories...
...While Figes's purpose in.creating a feminist counterpoint to Shakespeare's seven ages of man is admirable, she's already done that, and in far better style, in Waking...
...Born in Berlin, she fled to England in 1939...
...Though it be carping, one also feels the lack of wit and irony in The Seven Ages, neither ruled out simply by the serious nature of the subject matter...
...Each voice calls from a particular historical period — early medieval, Chaucerian, Renaissance, Puritan, eighteenth-century, Victo Edwardian...
...24 April 1987: 249...
...Coincidence, used sparingly, can be an effective dramatic device, but here its repeated use only gives the impression that the novelist has no other narrative strategies...
...Rather, it is a most unsatisfying effort with technical flaws that may cause the reader serious problems...
...A committed feminist whose Patriarchal Attitudes: Women in Society is a classic study of woman's subjugation by man, Figes's opposition to traditional sexual role definition runs parallel to her pronounced dissatisfaction with traditional forms of fiction...
...From 1952 until 1967 she worked as an editor for several publishers, married, and had two children...
...with honors) in 1953...
...And so she became a storyteller...
...moreover, an unreliable narrator coupled with a dense, allusive prose style sometimes complicates matters...
...medicine, the male science of unnatufll bleeding and cutting...
...In Light, a novella limning one day in the life of the French Impressionist painter Claude Monet, Figes's prose, at once impressionistic and sensuous, has an evocative power sufficient to make light the chief character in her work, as it was in Monet's...
...1983) Figes achieved an artistic maturity of distinction, refining her craft and modulating her voice without abandoning the intensity of her beliefs...
...Figes's fiction is experimental, intricate, and challenging...
...A catalogue of herbal lore...
...Oppressed, often aged, and usually female, the protagonists of these novels endure, rather than live in, haunted worlds of social isolation...
...Raped five more times bearing a child in every case, Jad supplies graphic illustration for FigeS^ great theme...
...248: Commonweal Consideration of The Seven Ages in aesthetic terms uncovers a number of flaws...
...In Chapter Two, Margery the midwife recognizes that po•lofts and herbs are not enough to soothe ™6 pain of a woman in labor: Margery understood this, that however much faith she might have in her arsenal of potions and amulets, it could never be enough, Particularly for a first birth...
...of the midwife's medicinal basket...
...there she excelled in studies and won a scholarship to read literature at Queen Mary College, London, from which she received a B.A...
...Unfortunately, Kges has established the very criteria by Which she fails here...
...Her narrative powers helped to divert not only the unfortunate victim, but the attendant women, who were less likely fo question her methods on occasion if suitably entertained...
...The symbolism, say of the chessboard in Chapter Four, meant to create thematic resonance and provide narrative linkage, is trite and ineffective...
...Moreover, repetition, excess, and coincidence detract from the narrative...
...the chronology is both confused and confusing- Chapters are rambling and discursive, begging for the blue pencil...
...A history of female folk-healing...
...Indeed, the reader of The Seven Ages may justly question Figes's methods and feel sufficiently cheated of entertainment to echo Cleopatra's cry, "Give me to drink mandragora...
...Waking chronicles that hazy period between sleep and full awakening at seven times in the life of an unnamed, solipsistic female narrator...
...Each speaks of the exf ence of childbirth, for that proce luminates the humiliation and often i necessary pain endured by women have been turned into reproduct mechanisms, often against their will,men...
...And so it goes in the course of the novel...
...men have been ft!* victimizers, both sexually and medically folk medicine, the female art of nattiflf healing, is superior to profession...
...another will speak from the pages of an old diary found in the attic...
...These are novels of poetic lyricism, both clearly descended from Virginia Woolf s great experimental novels...
...Seven voices for seven ages" might be one way of describing both the content and technique of this novel...
...Emma is not the protagonist in this novel, but the medium through and to whom the other voices speak...
...Though Figes can succeed in crafting a moving novel that charts the pain-wracked course of a failing elderly man (Winter Journey, 1966), she can fail, as in the cases of Konek Landing (1969) and Days (1974), by burdening her narrative with heavy-handed allegorizing and ideological stridency...
...a third will be moved to recite when a box of sepia photograph* IS brought to her...
...a narrative progression of intense beauty," it is, in truth, none of these...
...Without denying the altogether too frequent validity of the first two charges, a perceptive reader may easily and logically respond, "not this again...
...Ultimately, the question is one of form...
...The first voice we hear is that of the contemporary Emma, a midwife who has retired to a cottage in the English countryside...
...Figes's narrative powers do not help to divert the reader who may feel like the unfortunate victim...
...The breakup of her marriage led to her writing her first novel, Equinox (1966), after which she left publishing to devote her full energies to writing and translating...
Vol. 114 • April 1987 • No. 8
