Vol. 47 No. 2 1980 - page 312

312
PARTISAN REVIEW
cally. The ever-informative blurb tells us that Leslie is "modeled on the
governess heroines of nineteenth-century fiction ," Honor a " beautiful
low-born innocent putting on absurd high-born airs." But the points
of the unlikely triangle hardly connect on this or on any other basis.
Bernard divulges his unhappy childhood to Leslie and they briefly
"straighten" each other out. Leslie hovers platonically over Honor
until her symbolic name loses its aptness, and then steps in to moralize.
Only the story of Leslie and Val, perhaps the real germ of the novel, has
the touch of living if excessively pulsating flesh. Other characters may
be filling in time and space for Ms. Piercy, as they do for Leslie, who
does somehow persuade us of Her own existence, if of little else.
Certainly not that the karate class she agrees
to
take for the women's
school attractively prefigures the shape of things to come. Although, by
holding hands at the start, Leslie's lady-students break sweetly with the
"ritual that men have developed," and a karate chop must be saluted as
more positive than palmistry, one senses Ms. Piercy's doctrinaire iron
hand in the velvet glove.
To sum up the messages so far from these Pilgrim Mothers (and
the novels are reducible
to
messages): Lexie wins through by accepting
"that ultimate seriousness in which she's the full
h~lf
of humankind";
Leslie firmly rejects half of humankind, but finds she can exploit it
while working undercover for the daughters ' revolution. Edna O'Bri–
en's Nora, lacking American spunkiness, lets the side down. A loser
from the start of the novel and of her life, she hangs out the dampest
psyche of all. She speaks from a British prison cell that epitomizes the
masculine harshness of a world that is putting her on trial for the
murder of her young lover, a contemporary of her own son.
I Hardly
Knew You
consists of the testimony she will not be allowed to give in
the dock, and would be ruled out of court in any case. As Nora pleads
for the fault being more in woman's stars than in herself, she takes us
on the routine conducted tour of past life and loves.
It
is, however,
difficult to accept that her panic-stricken smothering of Hart (symbolic
name?), when he has an epileptic fit during love-making, is either
interpreted or justified by her cruel treatment at the hands of father and
husband.
Although the special pleading in this novel receives no critical
check whatsoever, Nora's contrasting weakness for sons and lovers
modifies the antimale bias, and evokes the more traditional novel of
female sensibility usually associated with Ms. O'Brien. Being Irish as
well as a woman has afforded her fiction with grounds for complaint
that might be keenly felt by the most unliberated lady. (Ireland is less
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