The wives in Mavis Gallant’s stories aren’t happy. In “The Flowers of Spring,” from 1950, a woman named Estelle visits her paralyzed husband, Malcolm, at the hospital. She feels sorry for him but also resentful and trapped, and she wonders whether the wives of other disabled men also feel “despair and discontent.” She’d “been a charming bride”; now, a few years later, she sees herself as a “delinquent wife.” She has no desire, despite the doctor’s entreaties, to discuss her husband’s condition.
First, here are five new stories from The Atlantic’s books section:
Many of Gallant’s characters are “strays,” as Vivian Gornick wrote last week. They are out of place in the world, supremely lonely, seeking something better or different in life. Three of the Canadian writer’s later stories, which appear in the collection Varieties of Exile, focus on a woman named Lily Quale, who agrees to marry a humdrum diplomat named Steve Burnet, despite not loving him. She trusts that Steve will get her out of provincial Canada—but although he makes good on his promise, taking her to live in Europe, Lily has no interest in spending her life tied down to this kind yet dull man, and she leaves him not long after they arrive in the south of France. Why is she willing to do something so reckless to get what she wants? Gornick observes that Lily lives in a time when a woman couldn’t make her way in the world alone. “Whatever the future held for her, she was bound to pursue it through a man in whom she aroused desire: the only card she ever had to play,” she writes. Some women used that connection to advance, as Lily does. Others, Gornick notes, spent too much time with “one Steve Burnet or another,” and the person they never became “hardened” inside them.
Women today might have more freedom and more choices than Gallant and her characters did—but the kind of burdenlessness that Gallant’s women seek can still be out of reach. Gallant herself yearned to be “perfectly free,” Gornick writes, and found that the only way she could do it was by living in Paris, where she “never felt at ease,” among people she never felt intimate with. She chose to have neither children nor a husband (after a brief youthful marriage) and was thus able to devote herself to her work. For her characters, freedom is more urgent than security; they make their choices without looking back.
But some women may feel more ambivalent. Even if these decisions are no longer as binary as they were in Gallant’s era, attaining total independence in the 21st century can still mean forgoing, or de-emphasizing, the kinds of attachments that place demands upon us—things such as marriage, children, and a steady career. And in this less black-and-white world, where women have the opportunity to balance family, work, and leisure, people who feel pulled toward multiple kinds of fulfillment may find that dedicating themselves to one over the other is less simple than it was decades ago. There are now more paths to choose from, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the choices are any easier to make.
