Kathleen Jaeger
A "French Connection:" Reading Ruth Suckow
in the Light of Isabelle de Charrière
As we move into the twenty-first century we read once again that Ruth
Suckow's reputation has suffered over the years (Contemporary Authors
407), that, according to Barbara A. White, she "has been labeled a
'Midwestern regionalist,' " whose work "is practically unknown" (qtd.
in Contemporary Authors 407). Reviewers have complained that Suckow is
"too domestic, too focused on the family and household affairs," that
her choice of material and approach are too "feminine" (DLB 294-95).
Nonetheless, because critics have correctly noted that Suckow's work
opposes the need for individual expression and self-development to the
rigidity and resistance of small-town tradition (Short Story Criticism
388), it is also correct to note that her representation of character
and development of theme allow her stories to transcend the narrower
designation of "Midwestern regionalism" (Short Story Criticism 388).
In fact, if we were to substitute the English gentry and country living
of the eighteenth century for rural Iowa in the 1920's, it would not be
too difficult to imagine that we are reading Isabelle de Charrière's
Lettres de Mistriss Henley, for example, for Suckow focuses both on the
woman trying to survive in a patriarchal society and the "little
nothings" of daily existence as do Charrière, Mme de Riccoboni, Jane
Austen, and other women writers of an earlier "feminist" tradition.
Suckow's works are filled with women, and men and children, who are
ordinary beings living ordinary lives dominated by work, commitment to
family, struggles, desires, and disappointments. Susan ("Susan and the
Doctor"), Mollie ("A Great Mollie"), Daisy ("A Start in Life"), Bess
("Home-coming"), Winifred ("What Have I?"), Bert ("Midwestern
Primitive"), Bea ("Visiting"), and Sam ("Uprooted") are examples of
Florence Haxton Britten's "the little people, the sparrows of life"
(qtd. in Short Story Criticism 391). Isabelle de Charrière, the
francophone author of noble Dutch birth who writes in Colombier,
Switzerland between 1784 and 1805, chooses similarly to represent a
variety of women, and men, in her various novels. In this essay I look
particularly at young Mistriss Henley, and Mr. Henley (Lettres de
Mistriss Henley), but also at Marianne de la Prise (Lettres
neuchâteloises), and Mme Melvill and Sir Walter Finch (Sir Walter Finch
et son fils William).
The questions for Charrière, Riccoboni, and Austen, and for Suckow, are
questions of identity. Each constructs characters who struggle to elude
the confines of gender and sexual stereotyping, characters who struggle
with definition in a search for self expression. It is therefore not
surprising to have Clarence Andrews tell us that, in reference to the
short story, Suckow rejects Poe's classic definition (a story which can
be read at one sitting) and "any definitions which began, 'The Short
Story is . . .' " (Omnibus x). This rejection of definition (as well
as that of the "standard woman" [Oehlschlaeger 113]) anticipates
unquestionably Julia Kristeva's rejection of the definition of woman in
which she states that "Woman cannot be. There is really no question of
using the verb "to be" (qtd. in Jaeger 229). Kristeva's concept of
the marginalized in society is the equivalent of Suckow's female
characters who are "left out of the oration" (qtd. in Oehlschlaeger
1).
Suckow places herself clearly in the aforementioned "feminist"
tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by "wittily
assailing," in the words of Fritz Oehlschlaeger (112), gender
stereotypes:
The assumption holds of a standard Woman, correctly situated inside
the household, important but submissive, keeping her cellar stocked
with home canning--an American pioneer version, more robust if less
lovely, of the lace-capped Victorian lady seated in her low chair,
occupied with needlework, lifting her dovelike gaze at the entrance of
her lord and master . . . (qtd. in Oelschlaeger 112-13).
Charrière's Mistriss Henley states in a letter to her husband that her
importance lies not in her individual talents or unique being as woman
or wife, but solely in her ability to "do her duty" to maintain the
Henley household [Jaeger 17]).
The question of female identity, of which Suckow picks up the earlier
threads, is frequently represented by the importance of the woman's
room--the place in which she perhaps most easily or most readily
expresses herself. It is the relationship of Suckow's female character
to her room that becomes the focus for the reader. The description, the
words spoken, the feelings and emotions revealed by the woman as she
places herself in her room underscore the degree to which she has
achieved, or failed to achieve, a sense of self.
Let us take the character of Bess Gould in Suckow's short story,
"Home-coming." In many ways Bess would seem to be a woman sure of her
own identity. She has traveled ("They wanted to hear about her life in
foreign countries" [Omnibus 37]); she is attractive and
self-confident. Suckow tells us that Bess was " . . . pretty enough
still, and so very well-groomed and well-dressed that she wasn't at all
afraid to meet her old friends. She showed that she had traveled. What
an interesting, unusual life she had led--one of their own girls!"
(31).
The climax of this home-coming for Bess has been to see her old beau,
Charlie, once more, and during an afternoon drive it appears that their
easy companionship, their sense of belonging to each other has put the
world "back into its own right orbit" (Omnibus 44). Bess is "lost in
the ecstatic breathlessness of the swing of the world back to where it
belonged" (44). Her eyes no longer have that "bright absence" (44)
which her children always "recognized as one of the personal, unfathomed
expressions of their mother's face" (45). Yet, this is a return to an
identity that Suckow characterizes as "Bess and Charlie." Bess states
that "she had never been walking just in her own path" (45), but had
"taken a strange turning" (45). Here Suckow is ambiguous. Do we
define "her own path" as the "Bess and Charlie path" or as something
else? Is there simply a "Bess path"? We read that Bess is eager to
escape her aunt's leisurely conversation and "get into the shelter of
her own room" (48). Imagining her husband's and children's response to
the events of the home-coming, she anticipates the gentle jesting, and
then, that "the two of them would demand her at once in her old
relationship as mother and wife" (49). Bess's room, her shelter,
assumes momentarily the full, and only, expression of a self that is
other than mother and wife: "Her childhood, her girlhood, were unknown
to them. It was only in this place--this little room with the maple
trees outside--that she was still Bess Gould" (49).
But, Suckow seems to change direction again from an identity which is
"Bess and Charlie," then "Bess Gould," to one which is "Bess and Mac"
(the husband). Bess's room is one to which she cannot return--it will
be lost to her through time and distance--and we wonder whether she will
be lost to herself, subsumed in the role of wife and mother.
Charrière's Mistriss Henley, who has no room that is hers, only a room
in which hangs the portrait of Mr. Henley's deceased first wife, finds
this to be true even before the birth of her expected child and
complains bitterly: "Not a word about me, my health, my pleasure; the
only thing that mattered was this child which didn't exist yet" (qtd.
in Jaeger 120) . It is curious, within this context of wife/mother vs.
self, to see that Bess has named her son Gould, as if to perpetuate her
own identity within him. However, it is doubtless disappointing to Bess
to realize that "He was hers, but there was nothing of her girlhood in
him, nothing of Charlie, nothing of this place" (49).
And so, ambiguously again, Bess begs for Mac, her husband, to come:
"Take me away with you. Be everything. Make it up to me. Don't let me
die away from home" (50). It is with a definite sense of tragedy that
we read these lines for Bess Gould, the girl/woman in the room with the
maple trees outside, will indeed die. And yet she asks for death of
self by asking her husband to "be everything." Bess defines herself
completely through her relationship to Mac. The eighteenth-century
Mistriss Henley expresses a similar death wish to a friend: "In one
year, in two years, you will learn, I hope, that I am reasonable and
happy [a submissive, dutiful wife] or that I am no longer living" (qtd.
in Jaeger 22).
The tension produced by the conflict of wife and mother vs. self is
clearly discernible to the reader in Suckow's "The Resurrection." The
adult children and the frost-bearded grandfather and widower of this
short story evoke once more Suckow's concept of a "Bess-Charlie path" or
a "Bess-Mac-children path" in their wonderment at the woman who had been
their mother and wife. Suckow tells us that the old man "felt a kind of
fear" to see the spirit of this woman take over for "She had lived their
life for so long--never her own" (Iowa Interiors 198). Clara, Lil, and
Jennie, the adult daughters, are bewildered and yet obliged to see that
their mother's "essential self, overlaid, neglected, for years upon
years, had taken radiant, calm possession. . . She who had been so
simply Mother, had she, too, been something other than she seemed?"
(197). The answer to this question must be yes for, in spite of the
cooking, the mending, the "doing for them," and the fact that "they had
never thought of her as a person in herself--She had been Mother, and,
then, Grandma" (197), the girls remember a few extraordinary moments:
"Only a few times, when they were children, they had caught her, just at
dusk, sitting alone by the kitchen window staring out at the grey light
behind the apple trees; and had crept away, feeling awed and very
lonely" (197). And, the girls would indeed feel lonely because the
woman staring out into the shadows is a new (to them) and different
identity--she represents in "The Resurrection" the "personal, unfathomed
expressions" of Bess Gould in "Home-coming" (Omnibus 45). Although
Mistriss Henley does not have precisely apple trees behind which to
catch the evening light, Charrière tells us that she does exhibit a
singular silent passivity:
I feel best when I can watch the leaves appear and begin to unfold . .
. I don't know anything of myself, I know nothing in depth; but I
admire this Universe, so full, so animated . . . I watch and hours pass
without my having thought of myself nor of my childish woes (qtd. in
Jaeger 19).
As Florence Haxton Britten so aptly notes, Suckow skillfully conveys to
the reader the "implacability of a life in which living is a burden that
must be shouldered afresh each day and mere being is carrying on"
(Short Story Criticism 391)--a theme which the eighteenth-century
Charrière has realized as well.
Suckow's "Visiting" and "Uprooted" present noticeable parallels with
the Lettres de Mistriss Henley. In "Visiting" the reader becomes aware
of the young wife's fear and insecurity in her own identity at the very
outset although this is not Suckow's primary focus here. Bea is "sure
that Mother Mason was one of those perfect housekeepers" (Omnibus
140). The room which Mr. and Mrs. Mason are to occupy becomes much too
small and plain in Bea's eyes: "Their nice luggage, and Mrs. Mason's
well-dressed opulence, had seemed to absolutely overflow their little
bedroom" (143). We might say that young Bea's sense of self shrinks in
size just as her bedroom appears to shrink when confronted with the
father/authority figures of her in-laws. Ironically, and unknowingly to
Bea, Mrs. Mason experiences also a discomfort or tension in being out of
her own room: "Perhaps she could make the beds. She felt guilty about
their visit . . . She was so strange and out of place. She was almost
afraid to turn around" (151).
Bea's feeling that she has contributed little of value or worthy of
respect to the household she has established with Dale is evident to the
reader. She worries about the "coop of a bungalow" (Omnibus 140) in
which they live. She expresses dismay at her sunburn, supposing that
"the girls Dale's mother knew at home all had nice complexions" (141).
Looking at her reflection in the mirror, she sees "everything that was
wrong instead of what was right" (141). The baby, however, with his
"pink freshness, his warm smell of ironed clothes," (141) is her one
positive contribution to this household, and Bea's struggle to maintain
her sense of self climaxes in a sudden, wild outburst: "They can't say
that you aren't nice, anyway! They can't say that if Dale had married
their old Margaret he'd have you!" (141).
Mistriss Henley is not so fortunate, however. She, like Bea, has
contributed little of value to the Henley household. The portraits, the
elegant old furniture and wall-coverings, the embroidery of the
armchairs in the Henley home have all been selected or provided by
relatives or the first Mistriss Henley. The one possession which the
young Mistriss Henley has brought to Hollowpark is her beloved and
beautiful angora cat. But, in the Henley household, the superb cat is
treated in a condescending manner and eventually runs away (Jaeger
13-14). Thus, Suckow's Bea, although experiencing threats to the
integrity of self, maintains a balance in her life--the presence of her
child--that is denied Mistriss Henley.
The character of Sam in "Uprooted" is much like Mr. Henley. He is the
reasonable son and reasonable husband who assumes the position of
authority at the family gathering. Like Mr. Henley, who refuses a post
in Parliament rather than leave his comfortable estate of Hollowpark,
Sam cherishes the comforts of home in Omaha: "He could not get settled
on the bumpy springs of the great orange-plush chair where he was
sitting. Sam had grown used to easy- chairs" (Iowa Interiors 88); and,
"The vision of a large leather chair at home, in which the hollows were
his own, filled him with home-sickness. It was a terrible thing for a
man to be so uncomfortable" (97). Sam does not understand his mother's
need for her personal belongings, which help to define the woman she is,
just as Mr. Henley does not recognize Mistriss Henley's need to have her
own furnishings and thus not be a stranger in her own room (Jaeger
12). Although each is keenly aware of his own discomfort, neither man
comprehends the woman's discomfort. We appreciate Suckow's irony,
therefore, when Sam muses, finally, "Lord! He would be glad to get out
of that hotel and back to his own home again" (107).
Focusing once more on the relationship of self to room, we note that
Suckow's representation of Bert Statzer in "Midwestern Primitive" is
extremely interesting. There are references to two bedrooms as the
story unfolds: Bert's "best bedroom," which is a guest room off the
parlor, and her "old room" upstairs, presumably the room she shares with
her husband, Arlie. The bedroom off the parlor is the one in which Bert
takes great pride and to which she has contributed much time and
energy. For that reason she is quite happy to usher into this room her
women dinner guests from Des Moines so that they may take off their
hats. Suckow tells us that Bert had "fixed it up with furniture she had
enameled herself, and white curtains with green ruffles, and she had put
the stencil on the walls" (Omnibus 254). On the other hand, her "old
room" upstairs, the one which is truly hers and to which she must lead
the gentlemen guests to wash up, evokes quite different feelings: "She
was ashamed to take them up to her old room, full of horrid old
furniture . . . was afraid too as she sped up the stairs ahead of them .
. ." (255). The "horrid old furniture" in the Statzer upstairs
bedroom corresponds to the "velvet and tapestry wall coverings sewn by
an ancestor, the large, awkward chairs covered in fabric embroidered by
the same ancestor" (Jaeger 11) that Mistriss Henley dislikes so.
Neither Bert nor Mistriss Henley feels comfortable or happy in her own
room although Bert would seem to have the advantage since she has
decorated the guest room herself. However, the expression of self is in
reality a false one, and we are obliged to see an ironic and pathetic
truth in Bert Statzer. The bedroom of which she is so proud is not hers
but merely a "Model Bedroom" for all--the furniture, the ruffled
curtains, the stencil on the walls--are "after the plan of the Model
Bedroom she had seen in the household magazine for which she had taken
subscriptions last winter" (255). The little fringed pink crepe
napkins, the chicken Bert serves, and the salads, which are "too
beautiful to be eaten" (257), bring disappointing and "low-toned"
(257) responses: "Well, this is familiar . . . Standardization. I tell
you it gets into all corners" (257). These efforts by Bert Statzer are
imitations of a model and not expressions of her own identity. Sadly,
she fails to see this for, in reference to the napkins, she states that
they "were exactly the kind that were used in all the tearooms now!"
(257). It is only her own home-made ice cream (and, ironically, the
home-made dandelion wine and unique efforts of her midwestern,
"primitive" mother) that inspire compliments from the Des Moines guests
(259-66).
Charrière's Mistriss Henley is likewise deprived of recognition for her
own efforts at self-expression, but not through any Bert-like attempts
at imitation. A pair of pretty shoes and a little hat decorated with
flowers are gifts for her step-daughter, but Mr. Henley objects, saying
that the shoes will prevent his child from running freely and the
artificial flowers are an "unpleasant contrast to the simplicity of the
countryside" (qtd. in Jaeger 13). Thus, Mistriss Henley is left
craving appreciation, like Bert, but in this case for her truly
individual creative efforts to please a child.
Both Suckow and Charrière reflect on the role of circumstance in
allowing women to realize wholly an individual identity. Suckow
introduces us to Winifred Serles in "What Have I?" Winifred's innocent
venture into a poor part of town forces her accidentally to come face to
face with an elderly woman with ragged hair, a "sunken face," (Omnibus
207) and teeth which are "a few hideous tusks" (207). Winifred's
reaction is to feel "homesick for the comforts of her own lovely room"
(207), as if this lovely room were necessary to tell her that she also
is lovely, as if the room would define her, would tell her just who she
is. Shortly afterward, looking into her mirror in her own room,
however, she questions, "What was herself in this image, with its
charming colors, against the dim background?" (207). Is she even as
worthy or as strong as the old woman? Winifred's husband, Alton, legal
counsel to one of the town's leading citizens, has been involved in a
cover-up to maintain his own position, but this has allowed another man
and his wife (Frank and Lenora Hood) to lose everything. Suckow tells
us that knowledge of this affair is now, to Winifred, a "vision of old
roots and rotted foundations" (208). She wonders if indeed she had not
escaped the fate of the other wife, would she "learn what she really
had?" (208).
Circumstances are not the same for these two women, Winifred Serles and
Lenora Hood; one dwells "in the pleasant places ordained for her"
(Omnibus 208), and the other must suffer the consequences of her
marginalized position in Battle Bluff society. Charrière's Sir Walter
Finch (Sir Walter Finch et son fils William), writing in his journal to
his young son, states that "Circumstances reveal women [and] put them
finally in their place, whereas men are destined to be known, then named
to positions of which they are often not worthy" (qtd. in Jaeger
100). Marianne de la Prise (Lettres neuchâteloises) demonstrates the
truth of this statement for she utilizes circumstance to not only
assist the pregnant seamstress, Julianne (she has become Julianne's
confidante), but also to cement her relationship with the young man
involved, Henri Meyer (Jaeger 179-82). Lenora Hood is in a position
to reveal her true self--she must cope with the loss she suffers and
show her strength; Winifred Serles, however, escapes circumstance, like
Sir Walter's men who are "destined," and does not yet know who she is or
"if she really had anything" (208).
The earlier feminist tradition to which I refer in the beginning of
this essay is one in which women authors choose to represent the
conflict between the individual self and the role and image of "woman."
In some female characters role and image are overwhelming, and the
conflict remains internal. In others the woman finds a way, utilizing
circumstance, for example, to assert her individual self. One of
Suckow's strongest, most assertive females is doubtless Mollie
Schumacher from "A Great Mollie."
Mollie does not seek shelter in her room in the "old-fashioned house at
the edge of town" (Omnibus 209) in the manner in which Bess Gould
does. Nor does she question her identity by looking in a mirror as
does Winifred Serles. (She does, however, resemble Bert Statzer in her
distaste for her situation: " . . . again she was impatient because
they kept on living in that old-fashioned house at the edge of town
where they couldn't even have city water or a furnace--things everybody
had nowadays!" [209]). Nonetheless, Mollie Schumacher is an assertive
female--she chooses the freedom of her old Ford as her "room" of
self-expression and takes to the open road. Mollie's identity is fully
realized when she is free, "when the road stretched long and smooth,
when the fields were fresh and the sky was blue, when the engine hummed
noisily and the fenders rattled" (210).
Happiness would seem to be evidence that Mollie is not bound by
feminine norms, and that she is creating options for herself through her
job as a traveling saleswoman. Suckow describes Mollie's attempts to
create:
"She squeezed the steering wheel with both hands and felt that she loved
the old rattletrap. She was so happy that she sang. She drove on and
on and on, trying new roads, pretending that it was because she was
enterprising and looking for new customers" (210).
Charrière's Marianne appears as happy as Mollie in her undertaking of
the seamstress's situation and her own new relationship with Henri
Meyer. Marianne writes to her friend, Mlle de Ville: "I am happy now;
I'm even content with the pain I've had; I would have paid even more
dearly for the satisfaction I have, the place which I occupy: for now I
am like a [male] friend . . ." (qtd. in Jaeger 182).
Mollie "pays" in a sense for her choice of work as well. It would
appear that Luisa and Charlie do not totally approve of her "masculine"
career for Suckow tells us that she had "stolen into the kitchen . . .
when Luisa wasn't around" (Omnibus 210) to make her sandwich of
homemade bread and summer sausage that would be her lunch on the road.
Mollie seems, in effect, to be an androgynous being, one who enjoys
tinkering with motors and farm implements and cider presses, who "ate
with gusto" (217), who "ought to have been a man" (stated admiringly,
but also disapprovingly, by Mate Bell [21]), but whose eyes had " . . .
something defenseless in their warm darkness. When she was pleased, or
touched, they misted over" (212). Mollie possesses the masculine
qualities of Charrière's Marianne, yet the feminine eyes/
characteristics resemble more closely, perhaps, those of Mistriss
Henley, and limit her possibilities. Just as Mistriss Henley will not
be able to go to London--she has, of her own free will, chosen a husband
who will not leave his home--Mollie will not free herself to go to
Chicago to help Dorrie Parker in her beauty shop. Charrière's Mme
Melvill (Sir Walter Finch et son fils William) seizes circumstance and a
chance for happiness by accepting Mr. Delaware's proposal of marriage
despite the fact that the proposal was intended for someone else
(Jaeger 125). Mollie is inclined, nonetheless, to sacrifice self for
Luisa and Charlie. She states, referring to the Chicago move, "Well, I
think I'll do it, . . . if only . . . Oh, well . . . if it wasn't for
Charlie and Lu. They needn't think they can stop me! But, I don't know
. . . if they should really feel bad about it--if I thought they
couldn't get along without me . . ." (222).
Mollie's hesitation to act, when thinking of family responsibility,
recalls that of Mistriss Henley. In her disappointment that Mr. Henley
has not shared with her the offer to go to London, the sacrifice of self
which Mistriss Henley experiences as she quietly accepts his decision is
expressed in "strangely neutral, . . . impersonal phrases" (Jaeger
21): "Nothing could seem more natural to me, my lord . . . I admire
you, my lord . . . I have nothing more to say, my lord" (qtd. in
Jaeger 21). With these words we easily visualize the lace-capped
Victorian woman juxtaposed to her American counterpart, here Mollie
Schumacher--the stereotype that Suckow refuses, but that Mate Bell
values:
If Mollie had any real sense about things, she'd marry some farmer
around here--a widower, somebody who needed a good, strong wife and
would be glad to have her . . . or else she'd make up her mind to
settle down where she was, with Luisa and Charlie, and attend to things
at home (Omnibus 219).
The sadness which creeps into Mollie's character, and which overrides,
finally, her free and unencumbered spirit is one of self-sacrifice ("She
could do anything for anybody but herself" [Omnibus 230]). As Mary
Jean DeMarr states, "Talented women are always left unsatisfied, for
they cannot fulfill their dreams of independence and self-sufficiency
and also have rich, personal lives. They must choose . . ."
("Darkness" 112). In the end Mollie will represent the "American
pioneer version" not only of the "lace-capped Victorian lady," but also
of the eighteenth-century Mistriss Henley, who is supposed to make the
widower, Mr. Henley, happy once more at Hollowpark.
Thus, to read what Frank Paluka defines as the "diverse and probing
delineations of the feminine psyche" (qtd. in Contemporary Authors
408) in the works of Ruth Suckow, and to argue that, "in [their]
exploration of the universal condition," they have a "significance that
reaches beyond [their] regional appeal" (408) is to acknowledge at once
their transcendence of place and time. To read the stories of Ruth
Suckow in the light of the eighteenth-century Francophone, Isabelle de
Charrière, yields further evidence that Paluka is correct.
Works Cited
Andrews, Clarence. Introduction. A Ruth Suckow Omnibus. By Ruth
Suckow.
Iowa City: U of Iowa Press, 1988. ix-xvi.
DeMarr, Mary Jean. " 'The Darkness of the Moment' : Two Short Stories
by
Ruth Suckow." Midamerica 21 (1994): 112-21.
_____ "Sexual Stereotypes in Ruth Suckow's The Kramer Girls."
Midamerica 19
(1992): 61-73.
Jaeger, Kathleen. Male and Female Roles in the Eighteenth Century: The
Challenge to Replacement and Displacement in the Novels of Isabelle
de Charrière. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1994.
Oehlschlaeger, Fritz. "A Book of Resolutions: Ruth Suckows's Some
Others and
Myself." Western Literature Association 2 (1986): 111-21.
"Ruth Suckow." American Short-Story Writers, 1910-1945. 2nd series.
Dictionary of Literary Biography. Ed. Bobby Ellen Kimbel. Detroit:
Gale Research, Inc., 1991.
"Ruth Suckow." Contemporary Authors. vol. 193. Detroit: Gale
Research Co.,
2002.
"Ruth Suckow." Short Story Criticism. vol. 18. Detroit: Gale
Research Co.,
1995.
Suckow, Ruth. A Ruth Suckow Omnibus. Iowa City: U of Iowa Press,
1988.
_____ Iowa Interiors. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926.
_____ Some Others and Myself. New York: Rinehart & Company, 1952.