In Search of One's Own Middle Ground

THE IFS ARE OUT, leaving only the whats and the hows. No longer will anyone dare ask a Radcliffe woman if she will work after graduation the only legitimate question is what she will do, where and when. But beside the assumption of a career lurks the ominous shadow of a husband, the how of the future, for the now so dog-eared question has yet to be answered satisfactorily: how to combine a full career with a family, removing the need to opt for one or the other.

There are of course a multitude of possibilities, the most alluring of which is that, rather than transform women into men, or men into women, we all become men-women (or women-men) and that traditional sex roles be abandoned for the more natural in-between. But despite the ideal of a halcyon middle road, where men and women may co-exist on equal but functional terms, no model yet exists for it. For the most crucial factor in shedding a role is to establish one's own identity and individual requirements, for which there can be no set pattern.

For women who arrived in New York City 20 years ago, seduced by the city's promise of adventure, exotica, success and love, the need to choose was for more rigid and the assumptions not so clear. As Rona Jaffe '51 describes in The Best of Everything, published in 1958, for three young women the search for a path to follow meant a struggle with hurt, frustration and most saliently, compromise.

In her new novel. The Last Chance, Jaffe updates those women, describing a year in the lives of four women verging on 40, all friends from the past; each of them faces the same dilemna of marriage versus career once again, and for the last time each attempts to discover what it is she wants and how that goal can be attained. The women who 20 years ago took a deep breath and gulped down bourbon have matured to white wine, but in their new sophistication they remain as drawn to New York's lure as ever, continually drifting deeper into its magnetic but violent anonymity.

Each woman seeks to smash the mold she dwells in: Margot, whose career as a TV newswoman makes her a friend to all New York, but who passes her time in lonely solitude...Ellen, the epitome of the surburban housewite (complete with anorexic daughter) who conquers her boredom with a chain of lovers...Nikki, who takes the middle road and finds a New York career and a Connecticut family each jealous of the other...and Rachel, who serves her husband as social secretary until she grows tired of small-talk dinner parties and sleeping until noon.

As one might infer from these character outlines, The Last Chance is almost too delicious a novel to take seriously, to read any other way than curled up in bed late in the night, never looking away from the pages until the last savory morsel has been devoured. But toward the end of the meal, as depression threatens to dampen the reader's enthusiasm, the stark reality behind the lascivious, B-rated fluff emerges.

DOOMSA YERS--those who have written off the feminist movement--conclude that women will never contentedly pave that middle road, and Jaffe's novel seems at first to concur. While there is some rose-colored light in the distance--at story's end, one of the women commits her depression to psychiatry, and another accustoms herself to life alone--still, one winds up returning to her stable but dreary domestic existence. And the fourth is dead. The internal clashes, debates, resolutions and decisions have not yielded the dreams of 20 years past, and even the second chance is not enough.

Hours of agonizing soul-searching lie behind each of the conclusions these four frustrated females have reached. Every move is preceded by an involved discussion of personal motiviations, as though each woman acts in a vacuum, untouched by the outside world. The rationale is always clear; when Nikki decides to embark on her first affair after leaving her husband and moving to the city alone, she thinks to herself, even as she is led to the bedroom, "Obviously there was nothing to do now but go through with it. It was what she wanted, she might as well admit it. She'd sensed it was going to be somebody eventually; how lucky that it was this man who was so attractive and sexy and seemed to like her." Every action by every man and woman who touches on the four central figures is explained away, forcing the weight of consequence on to the victims themselves.

It's a warning though -- this intensity turned inward, which blinds the soul-searcher to her environment. Each woman considers herself in her freedom to be the lone master of her fate. Not until the end of the novel does reality finally break through the walls of introspection surrounding them, as the spontaneous violence of New York abruptly proves personal deliberation and longterm planning to be less than omnipotent.

Each of them had wanted control of her own destiny, and had moved toward it, unaware that her destiny was really stalking her. That had to be the only explanation. And yet none of them could really believe it, even now. They had all made choices. That had to have some meaning. They could not believe choices were meaningless. Three of them were still alive....Even she, at the very end, had made a choice.

Literary critics often condemn an author for sloughing off responsibility on to karma or fate, and placing it with the characters themselves. But at best, people can control only their internal feelings -- and for all there is the omnipresent threat of the outside world, always readying itself for an attack. And Jaffe draws on this potential for violence to condemn 'modern' women who spend hours bemoaning their nebulous fate, who have forgotten how to step back, out of their walled-in worlds and realize that the most crucial goal is to find happiness and strength within themselves.

Its an old idea, for sure, but reiteration tends to reinforce its credibility, warning that before women dwell on how to live with a man and a career, they must first learn to live alone. That is Jaffe's How.