Tales of Gutsy Women
NEUFELD, ALICE
Tales of Gutsy Women Bluebeard's Egg and Other Stories By Margaret Atwood Houghton Mifflin. 281pp. $16.95. Reviewed by Alice Neufeld Associate professor of humanities, Suffolk Community...
...too painful" for male sensibilities...
...Hurricane Hazel" focuses on the 1950s, the decade that invented the concept of being a teenager...
...She is the poets' muse, and like any self-respecting goddess is primarily concerned with worship...
...In unveiling her mother's secrets, the daughter reveals the significance of veils: What is hidden may be commonplace, even silly, but the fact that it is held back is extraordinary...
...Looking back upon the episode from an adult perspective, the narrator notes that for all the changes she has since undergone, she remains essentially the same: "I always missed men...
...She is late in getting home...
...she has low standards...
...When she says In Coming Issues Barry Gewen on Martin Amis' "The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America" and James Reston's "Washington' Max Apple on Philip Roth's "The Counterlife' no, they look at her in that slightly glazed way...
...Loulou's poets see her as an archetype incarnate, and compete to peg her essence: "chthonic," "geomorphic," "the Great Goddess," "the great mattress...
...She's beginning to think...
...Loulou also sustains the spiritual life of the house...
...Women and men inhabited separate spheres, and so much was unspoken that "unmentionable" runs like a leitmotif through the mother's funny anecdotes...
...Atwood never fails to root her characters in the particulars of time, place, psychology: a divorced man visits his anorexic niece in the morning and dines with an anorexic girlfriend at night...
...Her poets are hungry, as usual, and though they can see that something is wrong, they clearly do not want to know what it is...
...A lady would sit silently when her skirt was soaked with "cat pee" rather than bring up "pee of any sort...
...Her family protests the loss of the girl they used to know...
...The way to do was to step out of them with one foot, then kick them up with your other foot and whip them into your purse...
...even better than sex...
...How can she tell...
...In recalling "Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother," a daughter contrasts her own world with a bygone one where "guileless flirtation was possible" and life was "likethe Japanese haiku: a limited form, rigid in its perimeters, within which an astonishing freedom was possible...
...right on the street, and before you knew it they" d be down around your galoshes...
...When the mother talks about her daughter, she shows a desperate need to take their similarity for granted: "It is part of my mother's mythology that I am as cheerful and productive as she is, though she admits that these qualities may be occasionally and temporarily concealed...
...Yet Atwood's women, gutsy, smart, ruthless as laughter, manage to make the best of their lives...
...maybe she has only their word, their words, for herself...
...even when they meant what is usually called absolutely nothing to me...
...But then, Loulou has never slept with a man she did not consider good in bed...
...Bluebeard's Egg and Other Stories is an anatomy of the melancholies of our day, told in a voice that helps to dispel them...
...Underpants," loosely fastened with buttons in those days, were tailor-made for farce: "There you would be...
...Despite such distaff prudishness, mother believed that men were the more delicate sex...
...The dark is the color of the times, turned bleak by the brittle and bristling relations between women and men...
...Self-sufficient, Loulou retains her sexual independence...
...She tells them to "piss off," yet her resistance to their definitions consumes her energy and feeds self-doubt: "What, underneath it all, is Loulou really like...
...Loulou cannot be made into a thing, exalted or hellish...
...Such things could only be discussed when the kitchen became a harem...
...Reviewed by Alice Neufeld Associate professor of humanities, Suffolk Community College Margaret Atwood's deadpan humor lightens the troubles that darken her stories...
...The poets, however, are too busy discussing "the language"—amystical entity of religious significance—and refuse to pay any attention to her needs...
...Loulou...
...Whether the verse her votaries turn out "in such profusion" is "any good" is a question on which she has "no opinion...
...Decked out in a "rustcolored smock, so heavy with clay" and an "Indian-print" skirt, she pounds a primordial "wedge" of the stuff to the accompaniment of The Magic Flute, divinely transforming it into life-sustaining vessels...
...I got quite good at it...
...Loulou is behind on her income tax...
...invariably her name is the first thing they fall in love with: "They ask whether Loulou is short for something...
...Maybe she is what the poets say she is, after all...
...Ultimately, the one secret mothers and daughters keep from each other is the reality of their differences...
...Her magic is human, and it would make her feel a lot better if the poets would treat her as a mortal creature who worries about taxes...
...She deemed "the secret depths of human nature, the sordid physicalities...
...Her older brother speaks "as if Buddy were a stray dog it would be my duty to send to the Humane Society if the owner could not be found...
...the proceeds from the sale of her casseroles and cups pay the mortgage and feed her household of hungry poets...
...Reify thepizza," they say, twitting her verbal limitations— and, unwittingly, naming her malaise...
...At one time or another each of the domestic poets has been her lover and/ or husband...
...Her father reacts to Buddy's phone calls by nervously snapping " his first two fingers together like a pair of scissors" to indicate that she "was to cut it short...
...or the Domestic Life of the Language" is a tour de force about the needs of modern day woman, a battleof-the-sexes update...
...The title character is a successful potter...
...a mother tries to lose herself in play with her little girl to block out thoughts of her husband, his girlfriend, her own lover, and his wife...
...Any suggestion that the daughter has become a stranger would make for intolerable anxiety on both sides...
...All that matters is what they are writing about her...
...A 14-year-old Canadian girl takes up the challenge, finding a boyfriend named Buddy who is "cute"—a quality that "counted for a lot" in teenage culture...
...Still, when they don't Loulou does not despair...
...Radicals mostly when it comes to the truth—even as it shifts palpably, without deference to their dignity—these women take their independence with them whenever they go out, risking discovery and inviting the transformations that come with growth...
...This look is her favorite part of any new relationship with a man...
...She makes them feel safe, she knows, and resents having to go out in search of an accountant who will "make her feel safe.' As her impatience with the poets mounts, she decides to seduce the accountant she finds...
...though all the poets have been good in bed...
...For me, I was to discover, there was no such category as absolutely nothing...
Vol. 70 • March 1987 • No. 3
