Hetero-patriarchy may seem, at first glance, to be an overarching theme of this novel, as Stein claims it’s the story of one family’s progress—through grandfathers and grandmothers, parents and children. But, in fact, the devastating failures of heteronormative marriages in TMOA starkly contrast with the successes of women to women relationships, romantic, platonic, and familial, and with the mutual support women characters offer one another.
From the very beginning, the narrator knows the reader will assume that the stereotypical oppressed woman of the nineteenth and twentieth century has a predictable path already planned for her, one where she is groomed to become a wife from the moment she is born. This would lead inevitably to the trap of an oppressive marriage where said wife is constrained from achieving marital happiness through mutual affection, sex and love. This plot/plight could typify many a popular “women’s novel.” And we begin TMOA with the promise of this narrative arc, through Julia Dehning:
And so those who read much in story books surely now can tell what to expect of her, and yet, please reader, remember that this is perhaps not the whole of our story either…for I am not ready to take away the character from our Julia…so reader, please remember, the future is not certain for her.
Yet the narrator warns us that sweet, sweet Julia, the very image of the ideal, submissive, American woman, the “crude virgin safe in her freedom,” is not to be so quickly trusted, for Julia is already suspicious of the heteronormative patriarchy she is born into. “[F]or even with her well guarded life she had found the sickened sense that comes with learning that some men do wrong.”
In Stein’s Paris notebooks where she scribbled much of the brainstormed, first draft of TMOA, she riffs on marriage in a passage that doesn’t make it into the novel’s final draft: “They expect to find in these weak husbands the love and support they had at home and then this springs an eternal tragedy.”[i] What does show up in the novel is this: “Every one, then, as I was saying… have in them their way of being attracted by women and by men.” This distinction does not refer to men being attracted to women, or women being attracted by men, but rather leaves an ambiguous space open for the attraction to exist in multiple realms. It seems clear from these early drafts, and from the novel itself, that Stein was never interested on putting a successful heterosexual marriage on display. She was hell-bent on deconstructing it.
These views against an oppressive heteronormative marriage follow Julia Dehning around, as the narrator discusses her romantic life in an indirect way, hinting constantly at the inevitable failure of marriage—“Loving is alright as a beginning but then there is marrying and that is very different.” Women follow a dangerous path when they deviate from prescribed norms of heteropatriarchy, but having lesbian experiences or even tight-knit friendships that give women agency over their own bodies and sexuality are obvious threats to patriarchy, threats to masculine power. The joke’s on the hetero men, though, because these women all have “resisting being” within them, and they know how to use it. So, although women in TMOA are often described as mild and content, they are nearly always successful at resisting the patriarchal ideals coming at them from all angles (sons, fathers, brothers, husbands).
These ideals make the way that sexuality is constructed through heteronormative relationships very different for men versus women in the novel. Masculine heterosexuality is presented, often with disgust, as leaving no room for a woman’s freedom. The narrator points out: “Loving is good, and the girl has to be pleasing to him, but it needs coaxing, arranging, flattering, teasing, urging, a little good-tempered irritated forcing, or else the man will forget all about his loving.” Here the narrator packs women’s sexuality into a nice, tight box of irony. Woman becomes girl, effectively stripping her sexual agency from her by diminishing her age, demeaning her maturity and stomping out her right to make choices. A woman must present her sexuality to a man in a heterosexual relationship in the correct way, and do it persistently enough to keep his attention, otherwise, “he will forget all about” it.
David Hersland II, for example, bolsters his personal power and sexual dominance through the feelings of superiority he experiences when comparing his success to other men, but his masculine sexual energy doesn’t come across in the same way as women’s in the text. David has a rather aggressive sexuality-in-practice. “Women could never give him any such feeling to have inside him. If they [women] had power in them, he would brush them away from around him”; but if a woman “held her power” it was due to her “brilliant seductive managing, and so there would not be aroused in him any desire of fighting nor brushing her away.” Where Hersland gets to retain his sexual freedom, any woman he desires falls on a double-edged sword. On one side, the woman is allowed to unleash her sexuality in the form of manipulative power over Mr. Hersland, or over men in general. Yet, the other stabby side of the sword condemns her for being sexual and forces her to hide her desire if she is to be socially (or sexually) acceptable. Unfortunately, this depiction of Hersland’s sexuality is only one disappointing example of how easily the responsibility for the failures of heteronormativity fall on women’s shoulders.
Another vivid example of this failure is in Martha Hersland’s romantic experience with a youthful crush that a boy her age develops for her: “One little boy wanted her to do loving . . . but this was not very much of a success for Martha then had a nervous feeling and was not very daring.” Suggesting their lack of relationship success was due to Martha not acting daring enough “to do loving” with this boy places blame on her character and reminds young women of their place and plight. This persistent trope of the double bind women face in choosing either modesty or sexual adventurousness, where both are required of her, teaches boys like the one in this passage that they are in a win-win situation. Only the girl, whose purpose is to please him, can fail.
Martha’s subsequent experiences with men do not differ much from this experience with the young boy. Martha’s husband Phillip Redfern, for example, is at first infatuated with her; their relationship lasts three years before they marry. Soon after, however, Redfern realizes that all of Martha’s personality “proved sufficiently inadequate to his needs.” She was everything, but not for long and not for him. When Redfern becomes a professor of philosophy, he soon leaves Martha for the reticent Miss Dounor, who has been in a relationship with Miss Charles, the dean of the college. Miss Charles, dismayed at Redfern’s interference, tells Martha (not Phillip) that it’s her job to keep her husband in line (even as he is cheating on her) in order to protect Miss Dounor’s reputation. “’He is dishonorable, all his action is deceit,’ she [Martha] said to herself again and again but she found no comfort in the thought.” The narrative then suggests that while Phillip possesses the power of charm and masculine privilege, Martha becomes only, dangerously, a woman out for vengeance. “Redfern was a man too much on guard to fear surprise and with all his experience was too ignorant of women’s ways to see danger where danger really lay.”
Redfern, earlier described as a champion for women, is finally a cheater “gone altogether wrong,” a man “always wronging everyone.” But Martha—that Martha!—ends up “studying and striving and travelling and working” when she is out of her marriage to Phillip. From the time Martha sees a man hit a woman with an umbrella in her childhood, she wants to become an educated woman, one who understands why men and women act the way they do. Although Martha’s marriage to Redfern ends as a complete failure for him, his reputation in ruins, Martha goes on to better things than Redfern, fulfilling the feminist prophecy that began with that umbrella. And, thus, a marriage is narratively deconstructed with the woman not only surviving, but thriving.
The marriage at the center of the plot (such as it is), the one that joins the novel’s two central families, is the one between Alfred Hersland and the woman who could be characterized as the ultimate resisting being, Julia Dehning. We learn, after many dark hints, that this union doesn’t last. While early on Julia “liked it a little then” their marriage “went on to come to be quite soon a beginning of a long ending, a long dividing of themselves from living with each other any more in being living.” Alfred and Julia’s marriage unravels more slowly across the novel than most of the other relationships, over mountains of repetition, through valleys of fading romance. There is barely any sign of attraction, despite their having two children together.
Having married Alfred at a young age, encouraged by her mother and her storybooks to marry, Julia is only later able to cultivate friendships with a large group of people, one of them being David Hersland, once her brother-in-law. Having gained her independence, Julia almost marries again, with William Beckling, but Beckling has a chronic illness and does not want to burden Julia with it. Julia lives a long life full of friendships (so many names!) and time with her two children. Alfred, in stereotypically toxic-masculine fashion, does not see his children often, nor does he have any other children after remarrying—to Minnie Mason. In opposition to the marriage plot of the stereotypical women’s novel, Julia’s marriage, which appears at first to be the focal point of the novel, ends long before the novel’s resolution—and her happily-ever-after, like Martha’s, clearly comes after the marriage ends.
There is only a single central male character whose sexual orientation and romantic life are completely ambiguous, thus challenging the heterosexual norm. Coincidentally, David Hersland III, reflective and thoughtful, is often described in his section as level-headed. The narrator points out repeatedly in multiple variations that David, “would have liked all his living to feel beauty in any kind of woman.” It is not clear whether David is incapable of feeling beauty in any kind of woman, or if he just hasn’t met a woman he can fall in love with. Either way, this David acts as a contrasting figure to his father and many of the other aggressively heterosexual males in the novel.
What does the narrative’s long silence about his sexuality or romantic history do to the perception of David and the question of his identity? What does it do to the concept of a married and successful man? David, the novel’s central masculine character, does not fulfill the stereotypical expectations of his father and of American culture more broadly—making money, marrying a woman then expecting her to take care of him until he dies. David is pretty clear on everything in life except women: “he was pretty completely wanting to be needing to be feeling that any woman that could ever be existing was in some way a really beautiful thing.” Then, later, “Certainly he was not completely wanting to be seeing any woman who is existing.” He’s not sure he wants to be with women, let alone take “ownership” of a woman like many of the male characters surrounding him, though he does briefly have a love interest with feminine pronouns. Then he dies.
The power dynamic the novel depicts in these heterosexual relationships differs sharply in platonic, familial, and romantic relationships between women. Relationships between two women tend to work out even when the relationship has been put under immense strain, and sometimes these relationships occur as a result of a heteronormative marriage falling apart.
When Mrs. Hersland lives near the Shilling sisters, we find that each one of the three women has an “emptiness” in them, a “hole” that ought to be filled. “It will never be known about them whether they had been made so from the beginning, whether something had been left out in each one of them…that should have been inside them.” The narrator continues:
And so one could not come to any certain judgement of them, one could never be so sure about them, that they had something queer inside them. It is easy to see how this puzzling quality of them would awaken in Mrs. Hersland who was almost always now with them, the always possible most important feeling that was quiet until then inside her.
Could this most important feeling lying dormant within Mrs. Hersland until now be um, I don’t know, queerness? While she had “a very little such [important] feeling with her husband when she was first married to him” she found “a little more in her feeling with the Shilling family in her hotel living.” But it was “strongest in her” with “Madeleine Wyman who was for her the one who in all her living was the one whom she had power over.”
Perhaps the most intriguingly queer representation in the novel is in the frequent repetition of Mabel and Mary’s story. When Mary, a strong and confident single woman, becomes pregnant, jeopardizing her respectable reputation, her good friend Mabel stays by her. Six months into her pregnancy, Mary miscarries, so Mabel takes care of Mary in her despair. Mary can’t explain her feelings to Mabel, but she is apparently falling in love with her, idolizing her with the repeated refrain, “angel Mabel, Mabel is an angel.” The narrator tells us that, “Mabel was everything she wanted and that was enough for her feeling,” but that Mary “always wanted Mabel more than Mabel wanted her.” The unexplainable love Mary has for Mabel, a love she has to keep completely secret and safe inside of her, is a writer’s resistance to patriarchy. Queer folks have always existed, and existence is not resistance, it’s a human right. However, the fact that the novel features this story, retelling it matter-of-factly, from several angles, is an act of resistance. Certainly, coming from a woman writer of the time, it is an overt challenge to the heteropatriarchal order.
And the honesty of the story’s ending is breathtaking: “Mabel Linker had her lover, Mary found ingratitude then in her, things got so that they could no longer live together.” Mary’s story is familiar: painfully navigating her sexuality and her feelings for Mabel, in the end, she loses the woman she loves to a heterosexual relationship, one that represents what Mary wishes she could nurture with Mabel. As Mary tries desperately to stop Mabel’s marriage to a younger man, their relationship crumbles. Mary is eventually set to marry the father of the child she lost. Perhaps it’s an act of love, but more likely it’s a full submergence of her own emotions, a trade-off to live a more acceptable life. The two women can’t keep away from one another, though, and the novel can’t let them go—so they come back to dressmaking and form a successful business together. The novel allows them a space, regardless of their husbands, to remain faithfully close, providing steady support in one another’s lives, as the women of TMOA do.
And that’s a wrap! Or, an un-wrap, of the patriarchal rules that governed the lives of so many artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, woven through individual characters’ stories in Stein’s thick novel. Today, when it is not (quite) so necessary to hide what makes us who we are, we may find ourselves relating to the Mables and Marys, the Young Davids, the Mrs. Herslands and the Julias of TMOA. We discover courage and resistance in them, as they explore their uncertainty about existing within the parameters of the worlds they negotiate. Many heard that same reassuring voice while reading Stein’s work at a time when she walked through the gardens and streets of Paris. Stein appeared on the literary scene ready to kick the “normal” relationships aggrandized in romantic novels out the door. And she did—to the best of her ability—within the parameters she felt safe adhering to in a society not yet ready for “brother singulars” and folks with “a little queerness” in them.
[i] This quote was taken directly from Stein’s first written manuscript of The Making of Americans (Beinecke Library, Holograph manuscript #1 [YCAL MSS76 Box 40] accessed 1.72019)
