The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [93]
Seen this way, eighteenth-and nineteenth-century literature, especially that written by women, was anything but old hat. Against tremendous odds, without anyone giving them the right to take up the pen or a proper education, women such as Anne Finch, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontës, and Emily Dickinson had taken up the pen anyway, not only joining in the grand literary project but, if you could believe Gilbert and Gubar, creating a new literature at the same time, playing a man’s game while subverting it. Two sentences from The Madwoman in the Attic particularly struck Madeleine. “In recent years, for instance, while male writers seem increasingly to have felt exhausted by the need for revisionism which Bloom’s theory of the ‘anxiety of influence’ accurately describes, women writers have seen themselves as pioneers in a creativity so intense that their male counterparts have probably not experienced its analog since the Renaissance, or at least since the Romantic era. The son of many fathers, today’s male writer feels hopelessly belated; the daughter of too few mothers, today’s female writer feels that she is helping to create a viable tradition which is at last definitely emerging.”
Over two and a half days Madeleine and her new friends attended sixteen seminars. They snuck into a cocktail party for an insurance underwriters’ convention and ate free food. Anne kept ordering sex on the beach at the Hyatt bar, and giggling each time. Unlike Meg, who dressed like a longshoreman, Anne wore floral dresses from Filene’s Basement, and heels. On their last night, back in her room, Anne laid her head on Madeleine’s shoulder and confessed that she was still a virgin. “Not only Taiwanese!” she cried. “But a Taiwanese virgin! I’m hopeless!”
As little as she had in common with Meg and Anne, Madeleine couldn’t remember having a better time. The entire weekend, they didn’t once ask if she had a boyfriend. They just wanted to talk about literature. The last morning of the conference, the three exchanged addresses and phone numbers and had a three-way hug, promising to stay in touch.
“Maybe we’ll all end up in the same department!” Anne cheerily said.
“I doubt anybody’d hire three Victorianists,” Meg said matter-of-factly.
On the way back to Cape Cod, and for days afterward, Madeleine felt a rush of happiness every time she remembered Meg Jones calling them all “Victorianists.” The word made her fuzzy aspirations suddenly real. She’d never had a word for the thing she wanted to be. At a rest stop she put four quarters into a pay phone to call her parents in Prettybrook.
“Daddy, I know what I want to be.”
“What?”
“A Victorianist! I just went to the most incredible conference.”
“Do you have to specialize already? You haven’t even started grad school.”
“No, Daddy, this is it. I know it! The field is so wide open.”
“Get in somewhere first,” Alton said, laughing. “Then we’ll talk about it.”
Back at Pilgrim Lake, at her desk, she tried to get down to work. She’d brought most, if not all, of her favorite books with her. Her Austen, Eliot, Wharton, and James. From Alton, who still had connections at the Baxter library, she’d managed to score a huge stack of Victorian criticism on long-term loan. After doing the requisite reading and making additional notes, Madeleine began trying to condense her thesis into a publishable size. Her Royal typewriter was the same one on which she’d typed her honors thesis. It was the same typewriter on which Alton had typed his college papers. Madeleine loved the black steel machine, but the keys were beginning to stick. Sometimes when she was typing quickly two or three keys would glom together and she