A New Kind of Family Life

...Because Sam couldn't do that And neither could your father" Ironically Gordon Schiller, the stern head of the household while Abigail is growing up, seems to follow the ecclesiastical line by treating her as if he shai ed a Church view that girls "weren't made in God's image Girls were meant to stay home with then babies and raise them, even the latest Pope said that was true " He expresses these sentiments in the late 1970s and early '80s, when the passion that marked the feminist movement in the '60s was slowly fading, and U S and European women were working to convert their political gains into concrete social and academic opportunities Given their successes, Gordon's views today sound at first practically antiquated That they have not been permanently superseded, though, is suggested by the 1990s backlash against feminism This amounts to a renewed effort to suppress the women's struggle for equal nghts at a point where it might be said to have secured some gains in the job market and in child care options Ansay's depiction of the sort of male mentality that sparked the struggle—and of its effect not only on Gordon's children but on his wife as well—is in this sense very timely The "problem that has no name," as Betty Friedan memorably chnstened it in her 1963 classic, The Feminine Mystique, in any case haunted many middle-class white women in the 1950s, despite their relatively privileged status compared with other American women It becomes a part of Sister the fall that Abigail starts junior high school and Therese Schiller begins working part-time at a small advertising company "I just want something that gives me the same satisfaction your job gives you," she tells her husband, a successful car salesman and decorated World War II veteran 15 years her senior Her self-assertion hurts his pride and enrages him He insists that his wife s place is in the home, that she is neglecting her children by working When Sam begins committing crimes and Abigail falls ill with symptoms that include exhaustion and a constant desire for sleep, he blames Therese Indeed, he traces all the family's misfortunes to her absences from the house Therese holds on to her job anyway, convinced it is nght for her to do so, and ends up running the agency Yet she internalizes the guilt her husband tries to make her feel, especially since the same reproaches are voiced by her own mother—who is still blaming herself for the deaths years before of Therese's older sisters, Mary and Elise They were killed in a fire at a cannery where their widowed mother sent them to work, and she is certain they died for "a reason' To signify that the cannery, or any workplace outside the home, was no place for women Abigail is allowed to stay with her grandmother for several months during her childhood illness In the new situation she gains self-confidence, accepting herself as she is, and discovering a love formusic and religion She also becomes her grandmother's substitute daughter, replacing the dead Ehse She learns to play Ehse's piano and, influenced by her grandmother's church congregation, begins to see her musical talent as a gift from God Ansay convincingly describes Abigail's "awakening" (she previously literally slept most of the time) to a world of delight in music and religion, of faith in a God one is responsible to but from whom one can expect protection and care As narrator, Abigail draws her audience into an atmosphere of absolute security and community, and asks them to identify with her "If you've never been inside a Catholic church, I'll show you what it's like to go there, believing, into the cool dark air with only the light from the sacristy to guide you I want you to be here with us I want you to feel what 1 feel, a teenage girl towering over her grandmother at the back of this small Wisconsin church I want you to be here with us I want you to feel what we feel You cannot imagine a time when this feeling of absolute purpose will leave you You cannot imagine losing your faith You cannot imagine the loneliness' The novel goes on, however, to pursue precisely that trajectory—from absolute purpose in life to loss of purpose Abigail first loses her faith in her parents, and compensates with music and religion But what is left when faith in God is gone...

...Vinegar Hill (1994), and her collection of short stories, Read This and Tell Me What it Says (1995...

...The question is a central one in Sis-ter At the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, where she studies music for one semester before abandoning the program, Abigail finds herself questioning her assumptions about God and religion "I'd been raised to believe that every last thing in our lives happened for a reason, and these reasons were born like seeds in the infinite mind of God [But] what was the meaning of my brother's disappearance [or] my own musical talent, which, I knew now, was neither extraordinary nor miraculous...

...A New Kind of Family Life Sister By A Manette Ansay Morrow, 228 pp $24 00 Reviewed by Carmen Birkle Assistant Professor of American Studies Johannes Gutenberg University author ' Women s Stories of the Looking Glass Abigail Schiller, the heroine and narrator of A Manette Ansay's new novel, resolves early in her first pregnancy not to follow the example her parents set "I don't want to raise my child the way Sam and I were raised, blue-for-boys and pink-for-girls, our assigned differences confirmed by the teachings of the Church " Ansay thus takes up a feminist line best articulated by Simone de Beauvoir, who observed that in a society where a particular mode of behavior is attributed to a biological sex,' one is not bom, but becomes a woman " Sister shows how societal doctrines enter the minds of children, and how some can gradually destroy a family The story begins in 1995, as Abigail's pregnancy regularly triggers traumatic memories of her formative years in a household with a domineering father, Gordon, a Catholic mother, Therese, and her younger brother, Sam The key to their relationships lies in the rearing Each Sunday young Abigail and her mother attend services in the congregation of her devout grandmother Gordon claims to be going to a larger, more "progressive congregation with Sam Most of the time the two end up skipping the service But the father-son outings fail to foster any bonding, instead, ultimately, they contribute to Sam's emotional and then physical withdrawal from the fami-ly Other factors in what becomes a domestic tragedy include Gordon's efforts to prevent Sam from becoming a sissy " The boy is forbidden, for instance, to play with dolls, or to sleep in his sister's bed when nightmares frighten him Gordon also frowns upon his son's doing dishes, playing indoors, or staying close to Therese As Sam enters adolescence, Gordon insists he accept that men have to be tough, to drink (once in a while), and to provide for families The teenaged Sam responds by associating with people he knows his father dislikes and becoming a small-time criminal He abuses drugs, breaks into houses, threatens a woman from the neighborhood with a knife, and even robs his own sister of the few valuables she owns On the night of August 5, 1984, after periodic brief absences, he disappears He is found dead in a dried up well in 1996 With the exception of Abigail's cousin Harv, almost all the males in Sister smoke and drink, drift away from their church, cling to rigid and stultifying conceptions of the roles of men and women, and are responsible for the destruction of their families Gordon Schiller himself finally moves away from his wife and home to a trailer park in Florida The women are different Therese, for example, nurtures Sam and Abigail equally, in accordance with her own private idea of faith "There were times when faith was the one thing I could give you," she tells Abigail toward the end of the novel, "the only thing your father couldn't control Nobody could, not even the pnests, not even the Pope or any of those men—and God knows they do try But I gave it to you I don't mean the Catholic Church, or even God, I mean faith The ability to believe to see beyond the place where you are Do you understand how important that is...

...I realized two things I no longer believed in the Church, and I didn't want to study music anymore " Yet she also realizes, "People want to believe' In 1995, what is left for Abigail to believe in is her own little family, the power of memory to create a useful past out of chaotic feelings and occurrences, and her mother's idea of preserving a personal faith independent of organized religion The Church, with its system of security and comfort, emerges in the end as an artificial construct In the same way that the Kentucky-born writer Bobby Ann Mason captures family life in the American South, Ansay paints a vivid picture of traditional values and their destruction in a small town in rural Wisconsin While Mason cares for the people she writes about but does not seem to believe in the development of new values, Ansay lightens the bleak picture by presenting a comparatively new kind of family life In it Abigail's suggestively-named husband, Adam—a construction worker and sculptor raised without religious beliefs—is the new man," ready to take ovei family chores, free from pieconceived notions of religion and gender Abigail renews her faith in the possibility of finding her own kind of "grace" as she taps memory to form her narrative But she finds, too, after the bnth of her son Joe, and the burial of her brother's re-mams three months later, that doubts persist In the light of Joe's birth, the doubts imply an almost cyclical grappling with ever renewed problems and difficult beginnings When Joe starts crying incon-solably on the day of the burial, Therese —seeing Sam's face, Abigail is convinced —speaks of the "terrible sound, when you hear youi child crying and you don't know what to do' Like Abigail, Ansay—aformei assistant professor of creative writing at Van-derbilt University—grew up Catholic in rural Wisconsin and stopped practicing religion at the age of 19 She is writing about what she knows best, and succeeds in bringing hei characters to life Herpor-trayal of several generations of women shows their connectedness but also their differences and the possibilities of growing away from fixed notions of gender She sides with the women, but not unconditionally, and finds some reconciliation with the men By emphasizing the importance of religion and faith for the maturation of a girl and young woman, Ansay evokes faint reminiscences of Mary McCarthy's Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood or even George Sand's My Convent Life She continues the line of these famous women authors she joined with her first novel...