4. Edith Stoner Is a Person, Not a Problem

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should note that Erin is herself a novelist. She’s read and admires Stoner. But every time I mention the book (which is a lot) she offers the same observation: “There’s a great novel to be written from the point of view of Edith Stoner.” This is her diplomatic way of expressing what most women feel about Stoner, which is that it is, in its own quiet way, a deeply sexist book.

There’s no doubt that Edith Stoner deserves her own novel, with all the privileges of understanding that a female-centered telling might provide (think The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys). Nor is there any doubt that her rendering fits snugly within a tradition of female hysterics and vindictive schemers that dates back to Medea and Clytemnestra, Lady Macbeth and Ophelia, Bertha Rochester and good old Mrs. Havisham.

I happen to be writing in the midst of the furor over the Supreme Court nomination of Bret Kavanaugh, a man whose history includes multiple allegations of excessive drinking and sexually humiliating women. I mention him because the Senate hearing at which he and one of his accusers, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, testified was such a dismal reminder that most stories in our culture center on the fury of wounded men. The magnetism of such figures has infiltrated our literature, our popular mythology, even the ostensibly somber task of vetting a judge for our highest court. This is why the media narrative that emerged from the hearing focused on the sneering, tear-stained rant of a judicial frat boy and his rage-drunk Senate wingmen, not the wrenching testimony of a woman Kavanaugh plainly assaulted.

This is the culture unleashed by the election of 2016, a culture sowed not just by whitelash, but its less celebrated corollary, dicklash. Consider the battle cry that unified the Republican National Convention, “Lock her up!” which has since become a Pavlovian response among those constituents whose broader mission is to criminalize female volition and ambition. Male rage doesn’t just erase female trauma. It runs our country.

I am making this unpleasant excursion into the realpolitik because it has everything to do with Edith Stoner, and why she’s become an even more problematic character over the years.

In so doing, I want to step briefly outside the domain of the novel to discuss the author himself. This is germane because Stoner is clearly his most autobiographical novel. In fact, Williams crafted a hero who represents an idealized version of himself. Stoner is humble, devout, principled, self-sacrificing, and (above all) blameless.

Williams shared some of these virtues. He was a devoted teacher and scholar. But by all accounts, most notably the new Shields biography, he was also a solipsist. He drank too much, conducted affairs, and put creative work before family. In short, he behaved with the impunity characteristic of the straight white male writers who came of age after World War II. His professional life was spent in the predominantly masculine preserves of academia. The women in his life served as support staff. Their job was to admire, encourage, and tend to the kids. Not surprisingly, men hold all the power in his novels.

Edith Stoner is the glaring outlier. And it’s clear from the archival record that Williams struggled to bring her to the page. His agent, Marie Rodell, immediately flagged her portrayal as troubling. In the cover letter sent to one editor, she carefully noted, “This is not a final draft; John wants to do more with the wife’s motivations.” Rodell was no feminist; she had resigned as Betty Friedan’s agent after reading The Feminine Mystique in manuscript.

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Williams did labor to provide a deeper understanding of Edith. He pauses, in the midst of Stoner’s headlong courtship, to fill in her backstory. We learn that Edith grew up in a formal and loveless home, her father vain and distant, her mother embittered and smothering. An awkward adolescence, during which she grew a foot in a single year—reaching a height “near that of a grown man”—intensifies her natural shyness. “Her moral training both at the schools she attended and at home, was negative in nature, prohibitive in intent, and almost entirely sexual.”

But Williams clearly felt he had to do more to explain the extremity of her subsequent behaviors. Thus, midway through the book, we depart from Stoner’s perspective for the first and only time, to follow Edith home after her father’s suicide. It’s an unnerving trip.

At the funeral, Edith is “curiously unmoved.” As her father’s casket descends, she lowers her face into her hands for several minutes—but her face is expressionless. After the burial, she spends several days in her childhood room. Callers assume she is secluded in grief, and her mother assures them that Edith and her father were “much closer than they seemed.”

Edith is not grieving. She walks about the room “as if for the first time, freely.” She sifts through her childhood possessions, “fondling them, turning them this way and that,” then sorts them into two piles. Anything directly or indirectly related to her father she destroys. She burns the letters and clothes and pictures and even the stuffing from her dolls. Then she pounds the clay and porcelain heads of these dolls “to a fine powder” and sweeps the remains into a pile, which she flushes down the toilet.

It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to infer what Williams is getting at with all this, that Edith’s father sexually abused her in some manner, and that this unprocessed trauma triggers the fanatical antagonism we see her exhibit toward her husband and daughter. She embodies an odd inversion of the standard patriarchal formula: female rage erases female trauma.

That’s the math. And while some part of me admires the lucidity with which Williams dramatizes the psychological aftershocks of such trauma, another part of me can see the author straining to justify his portrayal of Edith as a monstrous hysteric.

Ultimately, this revelation underscores the novel’s masculine bias. Its basic message is that the world is seeded with abused woman and if you unwittingly woo one she will afflict you for the rest of your life. We are back in familiar province of Bertha Rochester and Miss Havisham, where female “madness” is not worthy of literary exploration, but serves instead as an obstacle to male fulfillment.

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And that’s if you accept my reading of Edith as the victim of abuse. Lots of readers don’t. To them, she is merely as a contrivance, a cardboard villainess whose central narrative purpose is to burnish her husband’s virtues. I can’t argue with this interpretation. The physical descriptions of Edith render her more puppet than person. Her carriage is so stiff as to make her “every movement seem reluctant and grudging.” The sharp bones of her face stretch her pale skin “as upon a framework” and her makeup is so thick that she appears to compose her features daily “upon a blank mask.”

Williams infantilizes Edith. Her tantrums, her irrational projections, and her anarchic sexuality register as the behaviors of the very young. Like a toddler, she has only two modes: tyrannical and trivial. She either tortures her kin or pokes at clay. Because Edith displays no adult sense of volition, she is to be pitied rather than reviled.

But there is another possible portrait of Edith Stoner, one faintly visible beneath the author’s energetically chauvinistic brushwork. What if Edith Stoner’s rage is justified? What if her behavior is, in part, a rebellion against a life of marital and domestic entrapment? If the reader were allowed to consider the courtship from Edith’s perspective, for instance, it would be hard to conclude that she actually wants Stoner’s romantic attention. In fact, Stoner decides he loves Edith, not based on the content of her character but some set of romantic notions cribbed from literature. He then pursues her relentlessly, with almost no consideration of how she might feel.

Lost in all of this is the possibility that Edith might want some say in her own destiny, to choose a suitor she desires, or even to choose a life that doesn’t involve suitors at all. Williams acknowledges Stoner as an intruder upon Edith’s privacy. But based on their interactions, the courtship itself is the unwanted intrusion. Her muted reactions to his advances are not the result of ambivalence or even neurotic cogitation, but forced obedience.

Even if you don’t believe Edith was molested by her father, it’s possible to recognize her odd behaviors—shunning Stoner at the wedding, throwing up after their first copulative act—as arising from the simple fact that she doesn’t love or desire the man who has insisted on becoming her husband. Haven’t most brides, across the ages, felt as Edith does? The difference is that she refuses to quietly bend to the patriarchal yoke.

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I’m not trying to defend Edith’s hostilities. But I am suggesting that her conduct can be seen as an attempt to defend her sovereignty. The novel casts her artistic efforts as absurd. Her role is to sweep the hearth so that her husband can do meaningful work in the world. When she rejects this role, she is reduced from a person to a problem.

Here again, it’s useful to remember the author’s attitudes about gender. Williams sought out women who pledged allegiance to him, and his goals. He moved from one marriage to the next, often with intervening affairs, entirely preoccupied by his status among the other men within his academic and literary circles. In Edith Stoner, he created a woman powerful enough to repudiate this arrangement, to defy her husband, to relegate him to housework, to impose her own sexual agenda. Edith doesn’t defer; she dominates. She doesn’t nurture; she destroys.

Although I don’t think this would have occurred to Williams consciously, his damning portrayal of her amounts to a punishment.

Such is the fate of female gender rebels in literature. Male authors inevitably transmute feminine rage at male oppression into a frenzied wrath that threatens everyone, innocents included. Call it the Lesson of Medea. Spurned by a cheating husband, she slaughters her romantic rival then her own children.

The effort to render Edith more plausible, in other words, didn’t involve scaling back the scope of her cruelty, or (more ambitiously) plumbing the pain that prompts her wrath. We get only intimations of an abusive childhood. The lesson here is that female rage is the inevitable result of some disfiguring trauma lodged in the past, as opposed to, say, the systematic oppression that is every woman’s present.

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If Edith was abused as a girl, it becomes much easier to understand her phobic reaction to her daughter’s birth, as well as why she would eventually take possession of Grace from her doting father.

But what if she was simply bred into obedience by damaged parents and imagined having a child would salve an otherwise miserable marriage? What if she discovered, upon the baby’s arrival, a redoubled sense of entrapment? Wouldn’t that be enough to explain her post-partum retreat? Instead, her rejection of Grace becomes her ultimate depravity. What kind of mother can’t summon love for her own baby?

This question obscures the unsettling truth that all women have complicated feelings about motherhood, especially mothers. The rigors of pregnancy, the trauma of child birth, the sleep-deprived tedium of infancy—what sane person wouldn’t have qualms? I cop to a certain sensitivity on this subject, because my own mother spent her life processing these feelings as a mother of three children, and as a psychoanalyst. She eventually wrote a book called The Monster Within that explores women’s fears of giving birth to monsters, which she understood as an extreme expression of maternal ambivalence.

But maternal ambivalence, like feminine rage more broadly, has always been a crime that dare not speak its name, and one therefore spring-loaded with force of its own suppression. Only in the past few decades have novelists begun writing female characters who give voice to their anger, and many, predictably, have had to deal with the literary version of dicklash.

My favorite recent example is Claire Messud’s 2014 novel The Woman Upstairs, a fierce soliloquy delivered by a school teacher named Nora Eldridge. Nora is not one of the “madwomen in the attic” who get so much play, but a dutiful daughter who has spent her entire life muzzling the murder in her heart. “Don’t all women feel the same?” she demands. “The only difference is how much we know we feel it, how in touch we are with our fury.”

The Woman Upstairs isn’t about Nora’s anger, though. It’s about her despair: “Isn’t that always the way, that at the heart of the fire is a frozen kernel of sorrow that the fire is trying—valiantly, fruitlessly—to eradicate.”

This sentence crystalizes why the portrayal of Edith Stoner is so unsettling. She’s all fire, no kernel. Williams never bothers to explore her sorrow. The probing of the inner life remains a male privilege to the end.

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I confess that very little of this occurred to me when I first read Stoner, because I thought of my own upbringing as enlightened. My parents had met in medical school and both launched careers in psychiatry. On paper, they were equals. But at home, our mother was a second-class citizen: taken for granted, relied upon for domestic labor, often mocked. My professional life, such as it is, has been spent in newsrooms and classrooms where, until recently, there was no talk of gender inequity or diversity. Only in the past few years have I begun to reckon with all this.

More than anything else, my perceptions of the novel have been complicated by the thorny realities of my own marriage. There was a time, I’m afraid, when I made a habit of pinning our marital strife on the aftershocks of Erin’s childhood. I convinced myself that her “trust issues” arose from growing up in a home where she was strictly monitored but never effectively loved, where she didn’t feel seen or safe.

It’s taken me a dozen years and counting to recognize the truth: that her mistrust is, in large part, a function of my behavior: my self-regard, my efforts to manipulate her, my refusal to accept that her creative work matters as much as my own, that her feelings matter as much as my own, that she has an inner life as rich and complex as my own.

Part of the pleasure I took in reading Stoner, frankly, was that it allowed me to indulge in self-pity and dodge culpability. I flattened out my wife just as the novel does. Edith matters only in relation to her husband, first as the object of his fantasy and later a hindrance to his happiness. This is how most female characters function, and how most female humans have been treated.

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I want to grant here that many readers—myself included—experience the struggles of William Stoner as universal. In this sense, they transcend gender. The novel is about a long and painful marriage, in which one partner has been wounded in ways beyond healing. This is the true story of many marriages, though I would argue that both parties are inevitably damaged to some mysterious extent, and, in the case of heterosexual unions, that men are granted greater license to behave inconsiderately, even destructively, while women are expected to compromise and comply.

I do believe that John Williams struggled to depict Edith Stoner as a person, not a problem. He managed to craft a character unlike any other in all of literature—a roiling id of feminine entrapment. And there are fleeting but distinct moments of empathy toward Edith.

One occurs at the end of a party the Stoners throw for Hollis Lomax, a brilliant and disabled colleague who will become Stoner’s second great antagonist. Over the course of the party, Lomax gets drunk and confesses to his loneliness as a child, “the isolation that his deformity had forced upon him, of the early shame which had no source he could understand and no defense that he could muster.”

Before leaving, he walks over to Edith to thank her for the party. “Then, as if on a quiet impulse,” Williams writes, “he bent a little and touched his lips to hers; Edith’s hand came up lightly to touch his hair, and they remained so for several moments while the others looked on. It was the chastest kiss Stoner had ever seen, and it seemed perfectly natural.”

I don’t know exactly what this gesture means. But I have always suspected that the kiss is one of kinship, that Lomax instinctively recognizes the damage done to Edith during her childhood, the early shame against which she can muster no defense.

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It’s important, finally, to acknowledge that the Stoner marriage ends on a note of reconciliation. Williams writes of “a new tranquility” that comes between Stoner and Edith as he lies dying. This quietness, “like the beginning of love,” signifies that they have forgiven themselves for their marital failings. Stoner looks at Edith “almost without regret” and her face looks smooth and young in the soft light. “If I had been stronger,” he thinks, “if I had known more; if I could have understood. And finally, mercilessly, he thought: if I had loved her more.” He reaches out to touch her hand and she allows him to do so, waiting for him to drift off to sleep before withdrawing her hand. Given their history, this qualifies as an unprecedented gesture of tenderness.

The entire scene is astonishing, and it’s one I want ardently to believe. One senses Williams attempting to reapportion blame, to suggest that Stoner might somehow have loved Edith into selfhood. Which is kind of bullshit. The problem isn’t that Stoner didn’t love Edith, but that he never bothered to try to know her.

Williams wants to have it both ways, to consistently portray his hero as entirely powerless, at the mercy of his lunatic wife, but here, right at the end, to proffer Stoner as so noble that he accepts the failure of the marriage as his own. He could have saved his wife. It’s arrogance by way of self-effacement. There’s also that insinuating modifier: almost. Almost without regret he looks at her. The word betrays Stoner’s reckoning as incomplete. And so many unanswered questions. What was Stoner supposed to understand about Edith? What would more strength have accomplished, or more love?

The novel might well have devoted its energies to those questions, to dismantling Edith Stoner’s wrath and examining the world from her perspective, as a woman passed ruthlessly from one man to another and made ruthless in the process. But that novel has yet to be written. And my wife has dibs on it.