Gina Berriault, “Around the Dear Ruin,” and Joy Williams, “Honored Guest” (Or, no, women characters do not have to be “likable.” Why are we still having this discussion?)

In recent weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about that persistent question of the likability of women characters in literature (sometimes referred to as “relatability,” given that we all like to imagine ourselves as generous, honest, thoughtful, etc…and we particularly like to imagine women as generous, honest, thoughtful, etc…).  

It’s no longer so much of a mystery to us that women are often disliked not for their weaknesses but for their strengths: charisma, ferocity, a desire to have a large effect on the world, a passionate sense of justice and duty, and the ability to be coolly amused in the face of patronizing attacks and to refrain from apologizing for being the smartest one in the room. I particularly like these sorts of women: many of us do, but this is not a universal preference. 

Clara, in Gina Berriault’s “Around the Dear Ruin” and Lenore, in Joy Williams’s “Honored Guest,” could be considered unlikable in a very different way: they are openly venal and narcissistic, they take from everyone around them, and they are part of a splendid tradition of memorable, fierce literary women. There are some spectacular examples of first-person, not necessarily entirely reliable, problematic women—Claire Messud’s narrator, Nora Eldridge, in The Woman Upstairs, and almost any narrator written by Otessa Moshfegh.

These two short stories—the Berriault told by another character and the Williams by a closely attentive third-person voice, are about women who refuse to relinquish their obdurate and consuming sense of self, even in extremity. The stories are intense in their subject matter, even intimate, but with one layer of remove in the telling.  And these characters are complicated and in many ways endearing. Nobody here is Aunt Lydia (Aunt Lydia as Margaret Atwood portrays her in The Handmaid’s Tale), no one is willfully wreaking harm in service of her own or others’ agendas.

Gina Berriault, “Around the Dear Ruin”

In Gina Berriault’s “Around the Dear Ruin,” from her collection Women in their Beds, Clara is desperately ill (from a botched, backstreet abortion, as we’ll learn much later in the story), and tells her brother, Eddie, the story’s narrator, to send away her merchant seaman husband, a recent acquisition married for his money. He’s just come home from sea after six weeks away: they’d been married only a week when he left:  “Tell him I ate poisoned pigs’ feet!” she cried in a desperate whisper. “It’s called botulism. Tell him I died, Eddie,” she begged. “I’ll pull the sheet over my head and he’ll go away.”

She’s demanding, unkind, insightful. She says about Leo, her new husband, “All he desires is to identify himself with artists. He married Clara Ruchenski because she’d had an exhibition in some dank little gallery and sold a painting once a year.” 

What the character offers is a quality of compelling belief in herself, and what the narrative voice offers is richness and compression of detail (in earlier published versions of the story, the paragraph below had many more frills, explanatory clauses). It replicates something of Clara’s hypnotic effect on everyone around her. 

Imposed upon me as I ran down the two flights of stairs was the memory of all the delicacies Clara had been serving the past few weeks, the Sunday evenings I came to supper—things bought with Leo’s money, like Italian pastries, lobster and crab, crème de cacao. The uneasiness I’d felt when partaking of that food struck at me now on the dim stairs like an accomplice Leo had left there. But I found justification for her exploiting him by recalling that all our years had been lean ones. In the town of Monterey, our father still sat in taverns, his duck pants colored by oil paint and spilled brandy. At sixteen Clara had come up the coast to San Francisco and modeled at the art schools to pay for her tuition. A plain girl, long-waisted, heavy in the legs, she had seemed, contrarily, to be burning incense to herself. Wrapped in a Japanese cotton kimono and wearing copper earrings like cymbals, she would ascend the dais, and the dropping of the kimono was always graceful and positive. Two years ago, when I graduated from high school and followed her, I arrived just in time to make the acquaintance of Mark’s father, with whom she had been living for six years and who disappeared a few weeks after I met him. Small, dark-eyed, he had reminded me of a Shetland pony—any child could own him. All he left behind was a packing job in a ceramics shop and, like a guest departing, a copy of a highly literate quarterly containing two pages of his poetry. Leo Brady, a seaman with allegiance only to artists and a desire for talented women, came on the scene a year ago and had bided his time until another of her affairs had frayed and torn. The marriage, on her part, was an act of panic. The week he spent with her before his ship sailed she was drunk day and night, a half-nude, hanging-haired drunkenness that he mistook for celebration. My recall of these things and my sympathy for her absolved me of the guilt of complicity, leaving me free to slip out unburdened into the cool evening and to forget even her and her fever. 

This paragraph is primarily about Eddie’s sense of guilt and complicity in entering into Clara’s indulgence, her exploitation of the missing Leo. He’s the one who tries to justify her, but Berriault is not entering into that justification with him. Their years had been lean ones, but the life he’s recalling here is flat-out romantic, in the old way that artists’ lives once were (Bohemian, rather than entrepreneurial).  

And tucked in between their current luxurious pleasures and her drunken desperation after marriage is this incisive, memorable portrait:

“A plain girl, long-waisted, heavy in the legs, she had seemed, contrarily, to be burning incense to herself. Wrapped in a Japanese cotton kimono and wearing copper earrings like cymbals, she would ascend the dais, and the dropping of the kimono was always graceful and positive.”  

Clara has the mystery of self-regard, enough that she brings others into it, those who support her, yearn for her (husbands, brother, son…) She takes whatever she likes and brings it into a mythology and sense of her own necessity that persists no matter how desperate she becomes. 

Joy Williams, “Honored Guest”

Lenore, the mother in “Honored Guest,” from Joy Williams’s The Visiting Privilege, is also desperately ill: she and her daughter Helen both know she is dying. The close third person narration moves back and forth between the POV of her daughter Helen, her primary caretaker (though in the background there are others, whose names Lenore does not always remember), and Lenore herself as they navigate the unforgiving landscape of Lenore’s final days and oncoming death. 

The story begins and ends with Helen in her efforts to both help her mother and hold her at bay. Sometimes they shared dreams. She tries to carry out her mother’s commands in the face of her own bewilderment. Early on in the story, we get this explanation: 

Her mother was dying and she wanted to die at home, which Helen could understand, she understood it perfectly, she’d say, but actually she understood it less well than that and it had become clear it wasn’t even what needed to be understood. Nothing needed to be understood. 

And nothing can be understood, not in any practical way, but the more the story goes on, the more intensely we become part of the tangible bewilderment and the characters’ sense that something unknowable but urgent needs to happen. 

Lenore’s viewpoint feels disjointed sometimes, surreal. She can be cruel to Helen, so taken up with her own dying that she has nothing to spare for understanding what this must be for Helen. And she doesn’t seem, from any indications here, ever to have been one to spare her daughter or to move outside her own experience and feelings: 

Helen had made the horrible mistake of asking her what she wanted for Christmas one night and Lenore had said, “Are you stupid?” Then she said, “Oh, I don’t mean to be so impatient, it’s the medicine, my voice doesn’t even sound right. Does my voice sound right? Get me something you’ll want later. A piece of jewelry or something. Do you want the money for it?” She meant this sincerely. 

Lenore becomes tragic and roams her curtailed space or falls into dreaming, possessed by the feeling of crucial decisions she has to make: 

That night Lenore could not sleep. There were no dreams, nothing. High clouds swept slowly past the window. She got up and went into the living room, to the desk there. She looked with distaste at all the objects in this room. There wasn’t one thing here she’d want to take with her to the grave, not one. The dog had shuffled out of the bedroom with her and now lay at her feet, a slipper in his mouth, a red one with a little bow. She wanted to make note of a few things, clarify some things. She took out a piece of paper. The furnace turned on and she heard something moving behind the walls. “Enjoy it while you can,” she said. She sat at the desk, her back very straight, waiting for something. After a while she looked at the dog. “Give me that,” she said. “Give me that slipper.” He growled but did not leave her side. She took a pen and wrote on the paper, When I go, the dog goes. Promise me this. She left it out for Helen.

Then she thought, That dog is the dumbest one I’ve ever had. I don’t want him with me. She was amazed she could still think like this. She tore up the piece of paper. “Lenore!” she cried, and wrung her hands. She wanted herself. Her mind ran stumbling, panting, through dark twisted woods. 

Lenore has already left life behind. Nothing is of interest to her any more. The mice or rats in the wall have more life than she does, and she knows it. Williams’s short, precise sentences express the narrowness of her experience, the sense of being trapped in time, in waiting. The dog, still alive, full of desire for her slipper, irritates her. She doesn’t know what to do with him and feels she has to decide. Totally unsympathetic. She cries out her own name. Whenever she did so earlier in the story, Helen “would shudder and cry a little,” and Lenore may well pierce the heart of the most judgmental reader as well. No, she’s not the mother we may want her to be. She’s lost and wants herself back. The time in the story creates the odd, slow, painful endlessness of the end of life, when it’s not sudden, when there’s time to “prepare.” But how, and for what?  

In her extremity, her refusal to relinquish her self seems like taking a stand for life, for the force that we share. Reading these stories, I feel a kinship with these characters that goes beyond relatability. Whatever Lenore has been, whatever Clara has been, there’s a ferocity of desire in them, a will to hold on to their animal lives and their human wills, even when lost in the dark twisted woods, facing inevitable losses.