& jane bowles for lit seminar
forgot to keep posting these after I'd written them...oh well.
Though she wrote only one novella, one short play, and fewer than a dozen short stories over a roughly twenty-year span from the early 1940s to the mid-1960s, Jane Bowles has long been regarded by critics as one of the premier stylists of her generation. Enlivened at unexpected moments by sexual exploration, mysticism, and flashes of dry wit, her prose is spare and her sensibility skews the world and hands it back to the reader afresh.
Her only novel, “Two Serious Ladies,” is a darkly comic experimental study peopled with sly characterizations of men and women, dissatisfied with the emptiness of their neat little lives. Focusing on the separate emergences of Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield from their affluent, airless lives in New York and Panama into a less defined but intense sexual and social maelstrom, Bowles creates worlds out of the unexpressed longings of her characters adrift in their own lives. It is as if they have a sense of purpose obsessively directing them towards or away from their own comfort.
The two ladies referenced in the novel’s title, Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield can be said in a way to be trying to “find themselves” at a time when women's roles were severely limited. Both rebel against patriarchy and the accepted idea of what a woman should be. The two women are acquainted but their journeys to self-discovery are very different. Christina Goering is a spinster who takes a companion, Miss Gamelon, into her wealthy home. The two are bound by routine, solitude and often bitchy exchanges. Christina longs to escape and buys a house on an island. A male friend, Arnold, moves in with them followed briefly by his father.
Frieda Copperfield, much more fragile of the two and fraught with insecurity, accompanies her stick of a husband on his travels. In Panama, the couple drift ever further apart and Frieda finds herself drawn to the seedy underworld of the city where she encounters (and falls for) the prostitute Pacifica.
Bowles addresses the darker corners of life but with plenty of dark and razor sharp wit. This kind of exploration that blurs the lines between sexuality and the female quest for independence has been addressed before (Angela Carter and Djuna Barnes) but Bowles' humor and wit are unmistakably her own.
Bowles’ sentences teeter magically between tragedy and farce – for example, “Miss Goering felt as uneasy as one can feel listening to parade music in a quiet room.” Delineating plot in the novel is pointless - the one constant is that on every page the reader will be surprised.
Bowles’ strength lies not only in her wit and her strength of characterization but in her obsession with the crystalline nature of experience. Her prose is often pure rugged description, crisp and cinematic, and emotionally complex - and every description, ardent, detailed, is a description of the whole.
Though she wrote only one novella, one short play, and fewer than a dozen short stories over a roughly twenty-year span from the early 1940s to the mid-1960s, Jane Bowles has long been regarded by critics as one of the premier stylists of her generation. Enlivened at unexpected moments by sexual exploration, mysticism, and flashes of dry wit, her prose is spare and her sensibility skews the world and hands it back to the reader afresh.
Her only novel, “Two Serious Ladies,” is a darkly comic experimental study peopled with sly characterizations of men and women, dissatisfied with the emptiness of their neat little lives. Focusing on the separate emergences of Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield from their affluent, airless lives in New York and Panama into a less defined but intense sexual and social maelstrom, Bowles creates worlds out of the unexpressed longings of her characters adrift in their own lives. It is as if they have a sense of purpose obsessively directing them towards or away from their own comfort.
The two ladies referenced in the novel’s title, Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield can be said in a way to be trying to “find themselves” at a time when women's roles were severely limited. Both rebel against patriarchy and the accepted idea of what a woman should be. The two women are acquainted but their journeys to self-discovery are very different. Christina Goering is a spinster who takes a companion, Miss Gamelon, into her wealthy home. The two are bound by routine, solitude and often bitchy exchanges. Christina longs to escape and buys a house on an island. A male friend, Arnold, moves in with them followed briefly by his father.
Frieda Copperfield, much more fragile of the two and fraught with insecurity, accompanies her stick of a husband on his travels. In Panama, the couple drift ever further apart and Frieda finds herself drawn to the seedy underworld of the city where she encounters (and falls for) the prostitute Pacifica.
Bowles addresses the darker corners of life but with plenty of dark and razor sharp wit. This kind of exploration that blurs the lines between sexuality and the female quest for independence has been addressed before (Angela Carter and Djuna Barnes) but Bowles' humor and wit are unmistakably her own.
Bowles’ sentences teeter magically between tragedy and farce – for example, “Miss Goering felt as uneasy as one can feel listening to parade music in a quiet room.” Delineating plot in the novel is pointless - the one constant is that on every page the reader will be surprised.
Bowles’ strength lies not only in her wit and her strength of characterization but in her obsession with the crystalline nature of experience. Her prose is often pure rugged description, crisp and cinematic, and emotionally complex - and every description, ardent, detailed, is a description of the whole.
posted by hellkittennyc at 9:15 PM
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