108
WILLIAM ABRAHAMS
fictitious restaurant, neither can they be made to cross the Public
Garden at a diagonal and eat at Child's. As it is, the lunch at the Ritz
is
one more fact, like her lost virginity, to add to Dottie's
dossier;
the
sum of such facts
is
her character.
This process I have been describing is continuous throughout
the novel. Fact and pseudo-fact are juxtaposed at every level of
experience: when, for example, we are shown a girl brushing her
hair, we are told that she is using an Ogilvy Sisters' hairbrush. Does
it matter? Yes-that is, it matters to the character: she is a girl who
would
use such a hairbrush; just as another would wear "brown lizard
pumps," or another would buy furniture at Macy's Forward House.
All of Miss McCarthy's characters are caught up in the "thingness"
of existence; in
this
they are more representative of the age of advertising
than of Vassar.
Vassar dominates, however.
The Group,
it needs to be said, is
not
a novel about the 1930's, any more than it is
about
the public themes
(breast versus bottle feeding, etc.) that concern its characters. Rather,
as the title emphasizes, it is about the group, nine Vassar girls in the
process of becoming Vassar alumnae. First there is Vassar, which
is
its own version of Eden-a world without Adam-and afterwards
there is the world at large, a bleak panorama of attritions, compromises,
disappointments, defeated expectations, condescension, hostility, and men.
At the reception after Kay's wedding, one of the guests, a "radio man,"
ironically proposes a toast "To the Class of '33." "Tiddly as she was
Priss could tell that she and her friends, through no fault of their
own, had awakened economic antagonism. Vassar girls in general
were not liked, she knew, by the world at large ; they had come
to be a sort of symbol of superiority." And how unfair this is, for
"Priss herself was a dyed-in-the-wool liberal ; it ran in the blood. Her
mother was a Vassar trustee .. ." Miss McCarthy, herself Vassar '33,
in
her essay "The Vassar Girl" (1951) tells us how as a freshman
she was "filled with the pride and the glory of belonging to the very
best college in America. This feeling," she continues, "did not really
leave me during four years in college; Vassar has a peculiar power of
conveying a sense of excellence." It is the comedy and misfortune of
the group that each of them carries this sense of excellence (deserved
or not) into the world beyond Poughkeepsie. Vassar colors all their
experiences and determines their values. "He was more intelligent than
she was," one of them decides about a man who has asked her to
marry him, "but he had not had a Vassar education." Nevertheless, she
accepts
him.
Another, concerned that her husband is not succeeding
