BOOKS
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the self," not as "something happily given for clarity of dramatic
focus" but as "the projection and criterion of a social situation in
which we are inextricably involved." Hopestill is malformed because
the life into which she is born is a prison that confines her temperament;
and she is broken in the effort to break out of it. Her rebellion, after
much Bostonian simmering, finally takes the form of New York and
psychoanalysis ; but no good comes of it. The brew is apparently too
rich even for a protesting Boston debutante, and there follow, in order,
a liaison with a cad, a prospective illegitimate child, a marriage of con–
venience and concealment back into Boston society, a miscarriage ar–
ranged with the collaboration of a horse, and her consequent death–
presumably her one successful escape. It is this somewhat melodramatic
collision of society and temperament which conducts the novel to its
crisis; and all I can say of it is that is the one set of data in the novel
which seems to me unreal and unconvincing. Perhaps too much depends
on an unlikely contraceptive carelessness.
?
Against her is placed S.onie Marburg, the apparently non-auto–
biographical "I" of the book; and it is true that fot her too that Boston
society of which, as a poor child across the bay, she has dreamed as the
unattainable ideal becomes itself another prison. Yet the careful struc–
ture of the novel makes it as clear as it can that it is not specifically
Pinckney St., Boston, which makes her a prisoner, but rather the nature
of her temperament which condemns her to be a prisoner in
any
society.
The novel is divided in half; one half is devoted to her childhood as
the daughter of poor immigrant parents in "Chichester" across the bay
from Boston, the other
to
her progress in the drawing rooms of Boston.
The unity of the book lies essentially in the Proustian ironies of similarity
in diversity in the recurrenc s of e..._two ..Parts. And of diversity in
Similarity too. So Miss Pride, who begins as Sonie's fairy queen, "the
most generous woman in Boston," b ecomes the miser buying at bargain
rates the power over human life that her nature demands.
The people who shape her life are very different in their own per–
sonalities, yet where their lives become tangent to Sonie's own they
make recurring patterns. The two men she loves are superficially totally
different, yet both have a physical deformity and a deeper deformity
in their adaptation to life and to Sonie herself. There could hardly be
a greater contrast than between Sonie's slatternly and childish mother,
the prim and remorselessly competent Miss Pride, and the talented
and convivial Countess von H appel; yet there is something in Sonie,
some sense of duty and willful submissiveness, which makes her the
predestined complement to self-centered women who dislike men and
know, in their different ways, how
to
demand some compensation in
human society. Hence the apparent liberation when her mother's child–
ishness turns into insanity inevitably turns out to be another imprison-
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