New Book Alert: Joy: The Art of Making Tofu An Autobiography by Simon Boreham; Heartwarming and Heartbreaking Book of Love, Loss, Grief, Joy, and Tofu

New Book Alert: Joy: The Art of Making Tofu An Autobiography by Simon Boreham; Heartwarming and Heartbreaking Book of Love, Loss, Grief, Joy, and Tofu

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews 

 Simon Boreham's memoirs, Joy: The Art of Making Tofu: An Autobiography is a lovely, moving, and heartbreaking and heartwarming book about Boreham's 59 year marriage to his wife, Dawn and her death in 2021. 

The book begins shortly after Dawn's death as Boreham wrote his memoirs. Even from the beginning, he wrote of the aching memories of going through a house and the things that he and Dawn once shared and suddenly carried many beautiful and painful memories. The white-framed mirror that was her favorite. The porcelain vase with a crack that they bought at their Greystones home in Torquay. The handbag that she took to the hospital. All things under normal circumstances might have been overlooked and ignored that now carry significance and emotional weight. This chapter alone carries Boreham's grief, sadness, and his loving happy memories in a few short pages.

Boreham recounts Dawn's death with her hospitalization from angina and the painful seemingly endless waiting with their children, Catherine and Jason especially because they couldn't be in the hospital room with her because of the pandemic. Boreham combines this with other memories such as when he and Dawn entered the restaurant business in the 1970's and '80's and when he wrote a poem called "The Crying Man." This effect of going from one memory to another even at one point switching the point of view to the second person talking specifically to Dawn is how a person's mind works when it goes through deep stress and grief. It flickers from one memory to another when the current situation becomes too painful and wanting the person to still be there. 

Boreham keeps his and Dawn's years alive through great recall and detail. He talks about his middle class upbringing with his parents, Sybil and Mike, moving through several countries because of his father's career at Barclays Bank. Sybil and Mike eventually settled in the U.K. in 1959 until her death from cancer in 1976. Their happy but doting marriage was a detriment because as Dawn pointed out, she couldn't live up to their expectations for their son so they rarely visited the couple. In fact after Sybil's death, Mike fell apart and moved to South Africa. Boreham writes them as a couple insulated by their reserve and love for each other and their son. It was admirable because it gave Boreham an example of a happy marriage, but they were still standoffish towards Dawn.

Boreham captures his childhood with multiple senses and delightful memories such as the various books that he and his mother read together, Sybil's perfume, his grandparent's tomato garden, Boreham's crush on Disney's Snow White, and his father carrying him after a dog bit him. He also writes about his time in a boarding school that was structured with rules, upperclassmen who teased the younger ones, and a few loyal friends. These memories depict a man with a nice childhood and sometimes difficult youth that filled him with knowledge, thoughts, encouragement, and security. Things that he aspired towards in his marriage. In fact, his main act of rebellion was moving to Canada in the early 60's only to return to a steady life.

In contrast, Dawn was a very opinionated young lady. The second of three children, she was considered her father's favorite. As compared to Boreham's parents, Dawn's parents got along with her husband. In fact, Boreham thought of his mother-in-law Elizabeth as a second mother. Elizabeth, called "Dizzy Lizzy," was something of a character who responded to her son in law's poems with letters decorated with matchstick cartoon characters. She actually had an affair with Boreham's father which continued after both their spouses died. While Boreham and Dawn outwardly supported it, they still felt uncomfortable. While not outright stated, Elizabeth's open hearted eccentric personality may have inspired her daughter's outspoken unconventional nature 

Instead of the private school upbringing of her husband, Dawn attended a Catholic state school. When a nun constantly berated her, Dawn pulled her wimple off. When her sister saw cane marks on Dawn's legs, she and her younger brother were pulled out of that school. This showed Dawn as the type of woman who was more forward in her personality than her reserved husband. It was a strange attraction of opposites that proved compatible for over five decades of marital happiness.

In 1962, Boreham met Dawn while he was working in the hospitality industry and she was a hotel receptionist. He remembered what she wore and where they went those passionate first weeks before he left on a misadventure in Germany. He returned to England and Dawn began a love affair that lasted 59 years.

He remembers Dawn being the type who initiated the emotional response, but letting Boreham think he was leading her. When he kissed her during their dating, Boreham realized that Dawn expected and wanted him to.

Dawn's spirit comes alive in her widower's writing. She was high spirited, sociable, outspoken, intuitive, strong willed, outgoing, and joyful. She loved jazz, dancing, flowers, experimental cooking, and occasionally horse betting, and drinking single malts while quoting Robert Burns. This is told by a man who is still in love with his wife even after she left this world. The sharp grief may recede and be pushed back at times but he will always remember who she was and what she meant to him.

The Boreham's experiences in parenthood contain moments of humor like when their son Jason swallowed a cupboard key and anxiety like when he had fragile health and needed heart and kidney operations during his infancy. Many parents would relate to these situations.The Boreham parents were able to pass their tremendous love for each other to their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.

Besides the Boreham's marriage, this book is about their experience in the food business. Like many entrepreneurs, it took some time for the duo to find their niche. They went from a high-spend fish restaurant, to a steak and fish place. In 1989, two years after Boreham was let go of his job they purchased Dragonfly, an organic whole food manufacturing business. 

Their specialty was tofu which at the time was not widely made and sold except in family owned shops in Asia. The duo learned the hard way about the difficulties of making food by themselves without a factory and personnel. They found themselves quite busy making and delivering food only taking off for two weeks between Christmas and New Year's.

Boreham also writes of the toll that starting their own business worked on their marriage especially between two obstinate individuals who believed that they knew what was best. This is evident when after an argument, Dawn, fed up with her husband's high handedness, engaged in a one-woman strike and walkout leaving her husband to finish the clean up. After that he learned to accommodate her personality to his and that her solutions might be different but they weren't always wrong. Their time running Dragonfly helped strengthen their relationship by working towards a goal and implementing their diverse personalities to the end product.

Naturally the final chapters are filled with moments that tug at even the most immovable heart strings. Little moments are captured such as when they bought an antique turquoise pot that was too big to fit anywhere but Dawn just wanted to buy it anyway because the colors represented meaning and life. A pot that would eventually become the funeral urn to carry Dawn's ashes and was big enough to also hold the ashes of their late dog and Boreham when his time comes to be with them. Talk about meaning.

In the end, Boreham writes through his grief in keeping his wife's memory alive but still enjoying the life that he still has. He still can enjoy writing, and bonding with his children, grandchildren and great granddaughter, studying Eastern philosophy and other uplifting sources, and finding joy and happiness around him.

While Joy: The Art of Making Tofu is a sad book about grief and loss, it is also funny and moving as it tells of the memories of a happy marriage, and to find joy in not only those times but the remaining time that we have left.

Weekly Reader: Home Front Girls by Suzanne Hayes and Loretta Nyhan; Moving and Sweet Novel About Long Distance Friendship Between WWII Wives

 

Weekly Reader: Home Front Girls by Suzanne Hayes and Loretta Nyhan; Moving and Sweet Novel About Long Distance Friendship Between WWII Wives

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews 

Spoilers: 

Wartime can make the strangest alliances and friendships. People who would never befriend or even associate with each other from different backgrounds, places, and statuses become allies, simply because they are fighting an enemy army or are at home while friends or family members are doing the fighting.

That is the situation found in Suzanne Hayes and Loretta Nyhan's Home Front Girls, a moving and sweet novel about two American women of different ages, classes, backgrounds, and parts of the country who become pen pals while their husbands fight in WWII.

Glory Whitehall, a young mother from Rockport, Massachusetts whose husband, Robert, is fighting overseas receives one of several addresses, presented by her church, to write to other military wives. Glory selects one with the lovely name of "Garden Witch." 

The "Garden Witch" is in reality Rita Vicenzo, a professor's wife from Iowa City, Iowa whose husband, Sal, is also fighting.

On the surface, the women would have nothing in common. Glory is in her 20's, has one young child and is expecting another, and is from a wealthy family. Rita is in her 40's with an adult son and is from an immigrant family.  Over two years of love, humor, tears, marriage, enlistment, anxiety, rekindling of romance, tested fidelities, and tremendous agonizing loss, the two unlikely women become best friends united by their grief and worry.

As the Readers peer into Glory and Rita's correspondence, they learn how similar and yet how different their lives really are. Both of them are worried about their husbands fighting and both feel isolated within their communities because of that anxiety even though they are surrounded by intrusive but well meaning gossipy neighbors, trying to be helpful but not always helpful female friends, and family members, especially children, with problems of their own.

As with many of the women whose husbands were fighting in WWII, the deuteragonists try to maintain brave supportive faces as they work, create victory gardens, use their ration coupons, attend military support rallies and fundraisers, and raise their children. However, by writing to each other, another woman who has been in the same situation as them, they can convey their worst fears and anxieties. They can let their guards down and reveal their vulnerabilities that they keep hidden from the people around them.

The book also explores their different issues and how they deal with them and help each other. Glory is younger and more impetuous. With Robert gone and two small children, she clings to her childhood friend, Levi. Levi has been a close friend to Glory and Robert and since he has a bad heart, he can't serve in the war. He helps Glory and becomes a surrogate father to her children. It isn't too long before Levi starts expressing feelings that he wouldn't normally express if Robert weren't around. Glory gives into her loneliness and deepest emotions and reciprocates her feelings towards Levi, despite Rita's objections. Glory finds in Levi someone to share her heart aching loneliness, the need to be with someone, that she has felt since Robert's been away. 

Rita also has problems of her own, particularly concerning her adult son, Tobias. Tobias has been romantically involved with a bar owner's daughter, Roylene. Things become more complicated when Roylene becomes pregnant and Tobias enlists before they are married. Despite her own reservations about the situation, Rita provides emotional and physical support to Roylene, becoming a mother figure to her and defending her status as an unwed young mother. Rita relates to Roylene's status as an outsider. She knows what it's like to be judged by a small town so she provides Roylene, the support that she needs.

Rita and Glory's lives change as they encounter death and injury from war. That's when their strengths are truly tested and they depend on not only their own resourcefulness and independence, but the love of the people around them and each other to get through the ultimate hardship of the war.

What makes this book's writing style is the way in which it was constructed. According to the Reader's Guide, Home Front Girls was written via emails between Hayes and Nyhan with each woman taking each character. Hayes, being younger, took the more free spirited and flirtatious Glory while Nyhan, being older took the view of the sardonic and opinionated Rita. In fact, like their characters, Hayes and Nyhan never physically encountered each other during the work of the book. They met after the book's publication and have since met other times (as their leads eventually do as well solidifying their friendship).  Knowing that the book was written similar to how the characters lived, physically separate but emotionally close adds a sense of unmistakable duality between creators and their creations.

Home Front Girls is a novel that explores the deep friendship that women share as they support each other through stress and happiness, whether getting through war or writing a book.

New Book Alert: The Adventures of George and Mabel: Based on An Almost...Well You Know by Stefanie Hutcheson; The Darling Duo's Third and Final Installment Ends on a Heartwarming, Touching, and Even Tearful Note

 

New Book Alert: The Adventures of George and Mabel: Based on An Almost...Well You Know by Stefanie Hutcheson; The Darling Duo's Third and Final Installment Ends on a Heartwarming, Touching, and Even Tearful Note

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews 

Spoilers: George and Mabel Harrison are this year's Maggie Elizabeth Harrington. Similar to the protagonist of D.J. Swykert's novels which I reviewed last year, George and Mabel are a couple of characters that I have gotten to know through various stages and have loved them through these stages. I have enjoyed them so much that I am a little tearful reviewing this, their final installment The Adventures of George and Mabel: Based On An Almost..Well You Know. Once again, their author Stefanie Hutcheson gives us a few stories that are not long on plot but are vast in character and charm. The Reader will sigh in delight, smile in pleasure, and finally shed a tear when the book is closed knowing that the journey of the Darling Duo has finally come to a moving and satisfactory end.

Like any well-written character, just when The Reader thinks that they know everything about the Harrison's, Hutcheson throws another bit of information to add to the depths of their personality. We are aware of the Duo's love of music and penchant for quoting song lyrics and know of their travels such as (in this volume) a spontaneous and crowded Labor Day trip to Myrtle Beach. We now learn that Mabel combined her love of music and traveling to collect music boxes. They include ones from Colorado that play "Rocky Mountain High" and "The Song Remembers When," one of LA that plays "LA International," and one of the Golden Gate Bridge that plays "Come Monday." (not "Dock of the Bay"  or "San Francisco, Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair"?). For Mabel's 43rd birthday, George surprises his wife with a music box of the Eiffel Tower that plays "Leaving on a Jet Plane" foreshadowing a bigger surprise: tickets for two to Paris. (Altogether now: Awwww!) 

These additions to their character are not meant to be earth shattering. Instead they are stimple nuanced layers that help The Reader understand them. It's almost like getting into a conversation with George and Mabel and The Reader says to George, "I didn't know you used sleight of hand with a gumball machine ring and a real diamond ring to propose to her." They are the couple that you always learn something new about them

As with the previous volumes we also learn about the Harrisons' friends and family and how their influences shaped George and Mabel into the man and woman that they would later become.  A tender WWII-era love story between George's aunt and uncle foreshadows how important finding that soul mate becomes to George and how he knows when he finds her.

Mabel gets a high school-era tale of peer pressure. When she is involved in a drink driving accident, her popular girl clique abandons her. As an adult, Mabel retains loyalty to the true friends who stuck by her even into adulthood.

Because of this being the last volume, there is a sadness present in this one, over the others. One of the darkest and best stories in all three volumes, serves as a wrap around to this volume by carrying over various alternating chapters with the rest of the text. The reason why the Harrison's never had children is revealed in an emotional story. What could be a life of regret and loneliness becomes a heartwarming story of sacrifice and forgiveness, especially when George has to make the decision to not only save the woman that he loves but the one who nearly causes much destruction in their lives. 

This story and an epilogue set in the near future end things on a tearful, but ultimately uplifting note. To borrow the famous quote that has been roaming the Internet, I don't cry because their story is over, I smile because it happened.

Classics Corner: Daisy Miller and Washington Square by Henry James; Two Very Different Female Protagonists Reveal Henry James’ Gift of Capturing the Female Psyche

Classics Corner: Daisy Miller and Washington Square by Henry James; Two Very Different Female Protagonists Reveal Henry James’ Gift of Capturing the Female Psyche

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews

Spoilers: In a previous review of A Turn of the Screw, I wrote about Henry James’ interest in the psychology of his characters.

This is particularly felt in his female characters. Even though he was a male author, he had no problem plowing through the depths of the female mind and how women felt about their roles in society and their individuality. In most of his works, the female characters are the most interesting such as the Narrator of A Turn of the Screw, Wings of the Dove’s Kate Croy, and Portrait of a Lady’s Isabel Archer (my favorite James book which will be reviewed on a future date.).

Two of his most prominent female characters are also in two of his shortest works: Daisy Miller, the protagonist of the novella of the same name and Washington Square’s Catherine Sloper. These two women couldn't be more different in terms of appearance, thoughts, actions, and their relationships. However, in their different ways, they both question and challenge their roles as women and maintain their individuality in a society that frowns on that individuality, especially from a woman.

Daisy Miller is a pretty American flirt taking the obligatory “Grand Tour” of Europe with her mother and brother. In Switzerland, Daisy meets Winterbourne, an American student.
Winterbourne is captivated by Daisy’s beauty and free spirit. She doesn't mind going to sites without an escort (even though it's forbidden for young ladies of her stature) or making statements that would be considered impertinent. When Winterbourne says that he is afraid to introduce Daisy to his domineering aunt, she taunts him. “You shouldn't be afraid. I am not afraid.”

Daisy captivates Winterbourne because she is rebellious, even though she is masquerading as a typical single young woman of her status. She appears to be no different than any other young woman of her age. At one point Winterbourne's aunt confuses her with the other women at the hotel they are staying in. Winterbourne however detects there is something different about her. She doesn't hide behind the etiquette rules of courtship and outright tells Winterbourne how she feels about him.
When Winterbourne tells her that he might go to Rome to visit his aunt in the winter and if he has time he may see her, Daisy says “I don't want you to come for your aunt. I want you to come for me.”

Daisy knows what the courtship rules and rituals are supposed to be. She is supposed to visit relatives, act demure and docile, and wait for her man to show. But by outright telling Winterbourne what she has in mind, she shifts the balance of power during a courtship in her direction.

Daisy's name plays into her character. A daisy is a spring flower and like the season, Daisy Miller is a breath of fresh air and represents new life, new experiences, and new ways of doing and thinking. However, Winterbourne's name suggests the opposite. He is winter, cold, and reliant on old ways and traditions. While winter turns into spring, the two are never together and James’ novella says the same about its two protagonists.

Daisy and Winterbourne's incompatibility reaches its head when they are in Rome. Winterbourne's conservative outlook towards men and women clashes with Daisy's more liberal free spirited ways. He does not approve of her familiarity with an Italian man, Giovanelli and constantly asks if the two are engaged. At one point, he tells her that he doesn't want her to speak to Giovanelli, Daisy sarcastically says “Do you think I mean to use signs?” She is puzzled why this American man feels that he has to have power over her. He keeps warning her to stay away from Italian men because they may take her flirtations the wrong way.

However, he is less concerned about her virtue than he is about his ownership over her.
He is jealous of her flirtations with other men and thinks that Daisy should behave like a respectable woman of her day.

The irony is that Winterbourne himself doesn't exactly have a stellar reputation for fidelity. At the beginning of the novella, his mind is on an unnamed foreign lady. Then at the end after his relationship with Daisy comes to an end, his mind is on another foreign lady. Winterbourne is a product of his time. He lives in a world where the rules are made by men and to enforce women to follow them. Rules that men don't necessarily follow themselves.

Daisy is someone who is so youthful and brings the promise of spring, that winter and age are not on her mind. She behaves very recklessly and puts her health at risk when she accompanies Giovanelli at the Coliseum at night, despite the warning of yellow fever. After she and Giovanelli are caught at the landmark by Winterbourne, she succumbs to the illness and dies.

This trip could be considered a thinly veiled metaphor for a sexual encounter. Daisy had been repeatedly warned not to be alone with Giovanelli so when she succumbs to temptation, she pays for her encounter with her chastity and her life. (Perhaps the yellow fever is a metaphor for syphilis). However, Giovanelli is never seen as predatory and the people that warn her such as Winterbourne and his aunt are filled with the snobbery and hypocrisy of their day. (Remember, Winterbourne's foreign ladies?) Giovanelli even clears Daisy's name posthumously by saying that they were never engaged and that she was completely innocent. So if it was a warning against young ladies having sexual encounters with foreign men, why does it include this curious detail of Daisy's innocence?

There are some hints that Daisy's death is a result of the patriarchal society that surrounds her. She is looked upon as a “Madonna-Whore” by the male characters, particularly Winterbourne. In Geneva, he sees her in purely virginal terms as a young harmless innocent who is all whites and yellows and girlish charm. He defends her from his aunt by saying that her actions are harmless and that she is merely a flirt.

In Rome however, Winterbourne is constantly suspicious of her behavior. All of the traits that he once loved about her, such as her outgoing nature and blunt speech, are now sources of irritation when they are given towards other men. Instead he sees her as someone treacherous who is inviting trouble. Winterbourne doesn't believe Daisy when she says that she and Giovanelli were not engaged, until Giovanelli confirms it until after her death. In Winterbourne's eyes, Daisy corrupted the image he had of her, so she is guilty until proven innocent.

James himself meant the story to be a character study of the young American heiresses that he saw while in Europe who took the Grand Tour to see the sites and to marry a man of title and fortune. This was the era of American heiresses becoming titled ladies such as Winston Churchill's mother, Jennie. Many of these women experienced a wider world than they had seen before, but were required to set the standards for the American women at home. This experience of Americans abroad interested James and was a common theme in his works. He was fascinated by American tourist's insecurities of being from a young nation as compared to these Old World Aristocrats. The Americans in James’ works often struggled to compete with the Europeans and tried to behave according to their standards, even creating tighter standards of their own. In their drive to overcompensate, the American characters lose their authenticity and mannerisms that made them so unique in the first place.

Daisy is authenticity personified. She isn't afraid to be herself, a young flirtatious vibrant spring-like person. She lives for the present only for the moment. She is similar to a mythical character like Persephone who represent a promise of spring, youth, adventure, and rebellion. Unfortunately, youth cannot last forever and the young rebel grows into the older rule maker. For Daisy, that moment never comes.

It is unknown what Daisy may have been like had she settled into marriage and lived to an older age. Maybe she would be like Winterbourne's aunt, a snob looking down on the younger generation of women. Maybe she would be a scandalous figure with multiple marriages trying to recapture her lost youth. She never gets to that age. Instead, she burns out and dies young. Daisy Miller is unable to accept the compromise that comes with age. She cannot play by rules that tell her that she can't speak in a friendly manner to a man without suspicion or that she cannot go to monuments by herself or with her love interest. Instead of accepting the role that she has been given since birth and entering the winter of age, she remains spring-like and youthful forever by dying young.

Daisy concedes defeat the only way that she can and remain true and authentic to herself. She dies young.

Washington Square presents a different character and setting from Daisy Miller but also asks the same questions about the role of women in society. Catherine Sloper is the polar opposite of Daisy in many ways: plain where Daisy is beautiful, shy where Daisy is outgoing. Even the setting favors the internal claustrophobia of swank New York studies and parlor rooms rather than the exterior of old world European castles and monuments. However, Daisy and Catherine both are surrounded by the expectations placed on wealthy 19th century American women and in some ways that still surround women today. Both Daisy and Catherine also have their own ways of questioning and fighting against those expectations.

Catherine Sloper lives in a world that is devoid of emotion and is in favor of reason. She is dominated by her widowed physician father who takes pride in having an analytic mathematical mind. He boasts that he can take “a man's measure” by observation. He can guess the type of person by observing and analyzing their appearance and behavior, like an even scarier Sherlock Holmes.

Sloper is able to fully control and dominate his daughter by using his icy logical analysis.
He controls where Catherine goes, who she associates with, and makes clear that he has the final say in who she marries.

Standing on the opposing side of Dr. Sloper is Aunt Lavinia Penniman, Sloper's widowed younger sister. Romantic where Sloper is Reason, Warm where her brother is cold, Aunt Lavinia tries to steer her niece towards a more sociable nature, but her father commands that she must train the girl to be clever. (“You are good for nothing unless you are clever.”)

Using his measuring, Sloper reasons that Catherine is not beautiful, that goodness makes her insipid, so she might as well be smart. While Sloper's motivations to make Catherine learned and intelligent seems progressive for the day, he only sees Catherine as an object of his making and she can only go from one extreme (very beautiful, outgoing, and good) to another. (very plain, intelligent, and socially awkward). When Catherine reaches 18, Sloper is disappointed that Catherine isn't clever enough and that she doesn't seemingly fit the mold he built for her. He verbally abuses his daughter and considers her ugly and stupid.

Despite this, Catherine's aunts try to help her. Catherine's Aunt Marian Almond throws a party for her daughter's engagement and Aunt Penniman accompanies Catherine. The two meet Morris Townsend, a man-about-town who is handsome, but unemployable and living off of his sister and her family.
Morris and Catherine fall in love and begin courting to Dr. Sloper's chagrin. He bases his information on Aunt Almond's knowledge of Morris and his own observations of the man during interviews. He believes that Morris is a fortune hunter who has only one thing on his mind during his courtship: Catherine's money.

Catherine ends up caught between the two men. Morris demands that she stands up to her father and wait for him. Sloper tells her that he does not approve of her engagement and even threatens to cut her off if she marries him. He is so insistent that Catherine not marry Morris that he alters his will so that Catherine will not inherit money from him should she marry Morris. (He can't do anything about her mother's inheritance, however. That's still hers.)

Morris and Sloper's differing views clash when during an interview Sloper says that Morris belongs to the wrong category. Morris, however, insists that Catherine does not marry a category, she marries an individual. Sloper's intellectual reasoning sorts and categorizes everything and Morris has to remind him that human beings are not like that. They are individuals who contain multitudes and he and Catherine cannot be sorted.

Like he did with the characters in Daisy Miller, Henry James had fun with names. Instead of seasons, Washington Square uses mathematical and urban terms for description. The Sloper's family name is from an algebraic equation.The title Washington Square has a double meaning. Besides being a prominent area in New York City that was the height of wealth and sophistication at the time, the name “Square” is a geometric shape. Catherine and Sloper live in a world of mathematics, measuring and counting the world to fit the doctor's view.

Morris's name is a contrast to the Sloper's mathematically precise world of facts, figures, and sorting. His last name Townsend, reveals him to be a man-about-town and all of the social obligations that come with that role of attending parties and befriending the wealthy elite, a world that Sloper deprives her from. The second half of Morris's name “-end” suggests an end to Catherine's current life and either the decline of her relationship with her fiancé or her father.

Both Sloper and Morris want to own Catherine. Sloper manipulates Catherine's courtship in ways that are in his favor. He orders Morris's sister not to let him marry Catherine. He takes Catherine to Europe solely with the intention of making her forget about Morris. His hold on Catherine is not out of concern for her welfare or that Morris will break her heart. It is out of a selfish obsessive need to control her and to prove himself right.

Like Sloper, Morris has a desire to own and possess Catherine but uses different means. He writes passionate letters to Catherine extolling his love. He tries to convince her to be more sociable and surrender to him.Like Sloper, Morris, too, manipulates a relative. He makes arrangements with Catherine's Aunt Penniman to meet Catherine at her house.

While Morris is more emotional than the intellectual Sloper, he is no less domineering to his fiancée. He constantly insults and gives Catherine ultimatums forcing her to choose between him and her father.

Even Aunt Penniman has her own stake in this. She subtly encourages the romance to continue as if to experience it vicariously. She allows them to meet at her apartment and when Catherine is terrified of her father, Aunt Penniman suggests that she lay in bed and fake an illness to appeal to his sentimental nature. Her romantic nature seems to be inspired by the literature of the time and she tries to shape Catherine and Morris into the romantic couple of her dreams who are torn apart by cruelty but elope and live happily ever after.
Sloper, Morris, and Aunt Penniman see in Catherine what they want to see: an obedient daughter, a loving fiancée, or a passionate romantic. They don't see her for a full woman.

The irony is that Catherine does not hate any of them, especially Sloper and Morris. She does not risk upsetting her father nor ending her engagement. The expectations that others have bestowed upon her have starved her for affection. She willingly submits herself to their control rather than lose them. When they force her to submit to them, she cannot make up her mind because she doesn't want to lose the people whom she believes loves her, but in reality want to own her.

Sloper is right that Catherine and Morris's engagement does not work out but not solely for the reasons that he believes. When Morris learns that Catherine will not inherit her father's money, he breaks things with her. However, his decision is made easier by Catherine's indecision. The indecision is caused by the intense pressure Sloper puts on her. In preventing his daughter's marriage to someone he deemed unsuitable, Sloper becomes part of the reason that the engagement ends.

Sloper's control over Catherine works all too well. The end of her engagement becomes the end of Catherine's emotional outlook. She becomes a creature without emotion, one solely of intellect and reason. She becomes every bit the mathematical analyst that her father was. She becomes Daddy's girl.

Catherine learns the lessons from her father so well that when he suggests that she get married to other men, she refuses. Her heart is not only broken by her failed engagement. It is shattered beyond repair. Sloper feels his age and wants to have a grandchild to inherit and create a legacy. However, Catherine will not allow this, so she refuses to marry or have children.
Sloper squashed Catherine's emotions. Now he has to live with what he has created and knows that his family line will die with him and Catherine.

Catherine's lack of emotion continues long after her father's death when she inherits his money. She is a serious, analytical woman deprived of any feminine institutions. She refuses to play the game of courtship. Even when an older Morris proposes to her again, she flatly turns him down. She knows that her love for him or for anyone else has died.

However, Catherine still has regret and sadness over what her life has become, shown by the final moment when she holds onto her needlework as “if for dear life.” She knows what she has become, but she can't change. She is unable to change.

Instead of dying young, Catherine rebels against the institutions of marriage and primogeniture by aging into permanent singlehood. In claiming her own independence from the people who want her to become the Catherine that they want, Catherine chooses not to marry at all. Her independence is at the expense of emotional connections and she claims it by living in solitude and regret.

Daisy Miller and Washington Square gives us two women who use different means to rebel against the rules of courtship and family. One plays the game, but concedes defeat by dying young. One enters the game, but ultimately chooses not to play at all.

Weekly Reader: All The Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation; Put Your Hands Up for the Ultimate Guide to Unmarried Women in 21st Century America

Weekly Reader: All The Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and The Rise of an Independent Nation; Put Your Hands Up For The Ultimate Guide To Unmarried Women in 21st Century America

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews

Who is gonna rule the world? Single girls!

Okay, I promise I will stop quoting Beyoncé. But Rebecca Traister’s nonfiction book All The Single Ladies gives an account of a growing phenomenon: Unmarried Women who remain unmarried or have late in life marriages.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau the number of unmarried women, in 2017, is 53.2 percent, outnumbering married women. According to Traister “For young women, for the first time it is as normal to be unmarried as it is to be married, even if it doesn't always feel that way.”

Since she learned in 2009 that American marriages fell below 50 percent, Traister realized that by the time they hit their mid-thirties many of her female friends remained unmarried. So she began a nearly ten year study of women who no longer required men “to put a ring on it.”

(Okay, okay I'll stop.)

Many single women, such as this Reader, often feel alone when they learn that many of their friends are married, in committed relationships, or have children. Traister says that it is more common than most women realize and that it shouldn't carry the social stigma that it used to.

She wrote, “The vast increase in the number of single women is to be celebrated not because singleness is in and of itself a better or more desirable state than coupledom. The revolution is in the expansion of options.....There are now an infinite number of alternate routes open; they wind around combinations of love, sex, partnership, parenthood, work, and friendship, at different speeds.”

In one chapter, Traister recalls single women who made an impact in history despite taunts that they were “sexless” and the percentages of unmarried women a “dismal spectacle.” Such notables as poet Christina Rossetti, novelists Anne and Emily Bronte and Willa Cather, medical professionals like doctors Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell and nurses like Clara Barton and Florence Nightingale, and social reformers like Jane Addams, Alice Paul, and Susan B. Anthony.

Traister also recognizes figures from the late 20th-early 21st centuries like Anita Hill who accused Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, the fictional television character Murphy Brown (Candice Bergen) who had a baby without a husband, and Sandra Fluke who testified about insurance regulations being proposed for buying birth control. All received criticism partly because of their unmarried statuses.

 According to Hill’s autobiography, her single status allowed her “detractors to place 'her as far outside the norms of proper behavior as they could.’” Then vice-president Dan Quayle accused the Murphy Brown storyline as “supposedly epitomizes today's intelligent, highly paid professional women was mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it another lifestyle choice.”

Fluke also met with antagonism particularly from Right-wing radio talk show host, Rush Limbaugh. He called Fluke a “prostitute” and “slut.” A writer at American Spectator called Fluke “The Modern Welfare Queen for the 21st Century.”

Even Oprah Winfrey, the currently highest paid entertainer, keeps getting pestered with questions about when she is going to marry longtime partner, Stedman Graham and have children. “If I had children, they would hate me,”Winfrey said. “They would have ended up on the equivalent of the Oprah show talking about me; because something (in her life) would have to suffer and it probably would’ve been them.” The stories of these and other women in the book reflect that even when single women make great strides in the world, the focus is often on their marital status and why they aren't married. (Imagine how many articles would be wasted about an unmarried female President of the United State’s wardrobe choices and why there's no First Gentleman.)

Traister explores many of the benefits single women have and their current options which are much larger than the days when women had no choice but to wait at home with relatives until she found a husband. Many areas, particularly cities are welcome towards single women. Traister realized this herself while living in Manhattan; she observed a fight between a straight male-female couple. She looked around the restaurant and saw that, except for the fighting couple, she was surrounded by women dining either in pairs or by themselves. A woman eating alone was no longer a peculiar sight, especially in the cities.

“Cities are chock-full of single people, male or female: never married, divorced, widowed and separated,” Traister said. “While more than 25 percent of people across the United States live alone, metropolises like Cincinnati, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and Denver boast single dwelling households that compromise more than 40 percent of their total populations.”

Among the reasons that single women chose urban landscapes is because of the variety of careers and people. Even as far back as the 19th century. “... New mills and factories especially in New England, actively recruited young women as cheap labor,” Traister said. “Improvements in infrastructure….made it easier for women to leave rural homes and head to growing cities to work as seamstresses and milliners, governesses, and laundresses.”

Urban life is still an appeal for modern single women, Traister writes because of variety and domestic infrastructure. “In metropolises, women are more likely to find a deep and diverse pool of romantic and sexual prospects, and to encounter a combination of community and anonymity that unburdens them of centuries of behavioral expectations,” she said. “Urban landscapes often physically force people of different classes, genders, races, and religions to mix and meet in the public spaces that they share with each other.”

One of the benefits that single women often have, Traister writes are deeper friendships with other women. After marriage and children, friendships often change as women find little in common with each other or less time to be together. During singlehood, women often find a tight group of friends to form a sisterly bond. (Think of the characters in the show, Sex and the City or the movie, Waiting to Exhale.)

Traister refers to two women, Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow who met at a Gossip Girl viewing party. The two shared a great deal in common including a love of independence. While both are heterosexual, Friedman describes Sow as “(her) emotional support, (her) everything.” The two have made plans for the future, including maintaining their friendship if they relocate.

“It is really important that my co-workers know (Friedman),” Sow said. “...I don't even think I say that she is my best friend because it's so much more to than that to me. She is the person that I talk to every day. She is my person.”

This sentiment “she is my person” is echoed in the series Grey’s Anatomy, created by Shonda Rhimes, an unmarried mother of three. In Grey’s, two female doctors share a close friendship and refer to each other as “my person.” Friedman and Sow are still good friends though Sow is single and lives in Northern California and Friedman lives in Los Angeles with her partner. The two women share a podcast called, “Call Your Girlfriend.”

Besides friendships, single women relish their time alone. Kitty Curtis, a hair stylist from New Jersey (who now lives in Florida) said that she had first felt scared of being alone after a bad relationship. She thought of entering another relationship but the feeling passed. “I really value my time alone, “Curtis said. “ I started to value not having another adult agenda of any sort, and I got cozy and comfy in my new life. It's just a really easy life being alone.”

One of the things Curtis enjoys is the ability to travel. “I felt like I was constantly having to pull somebody along into a dream,” she said. “....Now I feel like there's so much to see in the world, so many more things to do. It's so much more exciting than the combining my dreams with somebody else's.”

Some women make the same decisions that men do by waiting until they are settled in their careers, something they learned from their own pasts. Traister remembers that her grandmother had a career as a biology professor which she gave up to marry her husband and give birth to her daughter, Traister's mother. “She was always sick, had headaches and back problems,” Traister’s mother recalled. “She was obsessive about the floor; she scrubbed it three times a week on her hands and knees. She was not a happy lady; it was clear, even to me, as a kid.”

In 1958, Traister's grandmother received an offer to replace the deceased biology teacher. After asking her husband's permission, Traister's grandmother accepted the job. Her daughter saw an instant change in her mother's behavior. “When she went back to work, it was like night and day,” Traister's mother said. “She was busy; she didn't have to scrub the floor three times a week. She dressed up. She took more care of her appearance. She was happier. Everything about her changed.” Traister's mother learned that lesson well about finding meaningful work that she decided not to be a stay-at-home mother. She spent five decades as an English professor. “I love being everybody's grandmother and mother, and wife, and all of that-that’s wonderful,” she said. “But basically there's got to be something that's me and that's been my working life.”

“Every generation has struggled to overcome the generational obstacles set before the previous one, and often eliminates these obstacles for the next, “Traister wrote. Traister herself learned from her mother and grandmother. She had an accomplished career as a writer at large for New York magazine, contributing editor at Elle magazine, and wrote about women in politics, media, and entertainment from a Feminist perspective for New Republic and Salon. She wrote articles for The Nation, The New York Observer, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vogue, Glamour, and Marie Claire and a previous book, Big Girls Don't Cry about the 2008 election. She herself did not get married until she was 35 and had been a successful author. Traister describes her single years as beneficial to her eventual marriage. “I’d been heartbroken, afraid, jubilant, and bored,” she said. “I was a grown-up: a reasonably complicated person. I’d become that person not in the company of any one man, but alongside my friends, my family, my city, my work, and simply by myself.”

That's not to say that Traister writes only about the good things about being single. Sometimes she writes about the difficulties single women have especially impoverished single mothers. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics women still earn $0.78 for every $1.00 men make and the gap is wider for women of color.

Also certain factors like pay inequality, wage stagnation, and social policies favor married couples because of the assumption that men are still the primary breadwinners. According to Atlantic writers, Christina Campbell and Lisa Arnold, “Marital privilege pervades every facet of our lives.” Campbell and Arnold found that health, life, home, and car insurance cost more for single people than for marrieds. They also found “it is not a Federal crime for landlords to discriminate against potential renters based on their marital status.”

While there are options for women to choose single motherhood such as IVF, freezing embryos, adoptions, or giving birth without marrying, there are still grim stigmas associated with single mother-headed households. 42 percent of families headed by single mothers lay below the poverty line. Some of those families are headed by women who had their first child out of high school.

One of those was Pamela who was 17 when she gave birth to her first child. Her boyfriend was 34 and they decided to have the baby. She wanted to go to college partly to get away from her alcoholic father.

Pamela wasn't alone. Many of her fellow students dropped out of high school after giving birth. “Those that didn't graduate and the spouse wasn't around didn't go to college,” Pamela said. “They ended up working full-time jobs, at McDonald's or at a clothing store.”

Pamela graduated from New York College in 2004, and lived with her boyfriend without marrying him. She had a second child with her partner and they are still together but not married. She works as a legal assistant at the Office of the Bronx District Attorney and plans on going to law school.

Other problems associated with singlehood are emotional. There is the exhaustion of earning money and caring for the household. “For most working Americans the times off for honeymoons and paid leave after babies are pipe dreams,” Traister said.”....Single people and those without children often find themselves not only without the encouragement to take personal time off on their own; they often compensate for their colleagues’ breaks by making up the work, slogging through even more hours.”

Another emotional factor that is a detriment to single people is the loneliness particularly when they get older. When Frances Kissling watched over her dying mother, the unmarried Kissling was stunned by her mother's question, “who is going to do this for you?” “It knocked me on my ass,”Kissling said. “Oh my God, who is going to do this for me?” Kissling got her own answer when she was diagnosed with kidney disease and during therapy she realized she was alone.

Of course there is no guarantee that because someone is in a relationship or has children that someone will be cared for, Traister writes. “Those who take comfort that in getting married thinking they are evading a future of lonely decline do not often consider the very realistic possibilities of divorce, abandonment, or the early death of a partner,” Traister said.

All the Single Ladies is a very honest book about the good and bad of being single. While singlehood is not for everyone, it is no longer a status in which to be ashamed. This single lady isn't.