04.01.2025 (1): Closed Eyes
Jan. 4th, 2025 06:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sunshowerdandelionI think Brookner's A Closed Eye is about the patriarchal bargain. The main character, Harriet, has clearly been made to make a hard bargain: her soul, in exchange for her parent's souls - and maybe in the end the bargain accrued interest or something, that the system saw fit to take her child's life as well.
The first part of the book is quite explicit about the bargains women make to live. Harriet's mother makes it very explicitly, and makes it to save herself and her husband. The men is this novel are mostly strangely arid, detached for having not made sacrifices for the care of others. Harriet's father is even a grotesque - I'd describe him as a grotesque - because he is unaging, unaffected in an innocent way, where Harriet's mother, Harriet, and even Imogen (Harriet's daughter) are made to prop up his boyishness. I think vampiric would be another apt descriptor - though that applies to both Harriet's parents, and I found the novel to have overtones of horror in the first part. I don't think Freddie (Harriet's husband) is excepted. Although Harriet repeatedly insists that he's kind, the latter parts have his bland impervious kindness imprisoning Harriet. He's also a sexual boor, and what Harriet reads as his 'generosity' in tolerating a wife's illicit affair I read as uncaring. The sole slight exception is maybe Monsieur Papineau (as he confesses to loneliness, and devotes some care to Harriet), but even he is a strange, wrinkled Peter Pan.
The second part of the book concerns Harriet's effort to get out of the bargain. I found this part intensely heartbreaking, but not in an 'enjoyable' (whumpy) way. This is a woman who realizes belatedly that she's lived for very little. Her husband wants to abandon her (Abroad! Abroad!), her child thinks she's wrongheaded, her child's friend thinks she's kind but foolish, her friends think her unsophisticated, an irritating ingenue. Her mother also shares this opinion. I think this speaks to the impossibility of 'winning' the patriarchal bargain. Yes, Harriet was provided for, but towards the end, where she literally wants a room of her own (just somewhere to live without her relations, without being a daughter, a parent, etc) she's unable to fulfill her wish. The affair, as Harriet owns up, is more about her having this sort of separate life.
I found the imagery of Harriet's soul - I am sure it is her soul she wants, in the room bathed in sunlight and her lying on the bed having nothing to do - I found that very lovely and I wanted to hug her then.
And then she's able to fulfill her wish and I thought it rather cruel of the writer to go about in this way. Harriet loses all her attachments, forcibly, through death. I guess the slight note at the end, of rebirth, of faint optimism with Lizzie, is because Harriet at last chooses to have relationships of care with someone who's independent of her.
Of course since this is (I think) a realist novel, I might have hallucinated all this meaning. Regardless, I deeply admire the book. In my reading of it I found it rather dull (but Brooknerian dull, in that it's very well-written, very flowing) but I guess that's more a painterly rendering of a woman who's been forced to make her bargain in this way.
The first part of the book is quite explicit about the bargains women make to live. Harriet's mother makes it very explicitly, and makes it to save herself and her husband. The men is this novel are mostly strangely arid, detached for having not made sacrifices for the care of others. Harriet's father is even a grotesque - I'd describe him as a grotesque - because he is unaging, unaffected in an innocent way, where Harriet's mother, Harriet, and even Imogen (Harriet's daughter) are made to prop up his boyishness. I think vampiric would be another apt descriptor - though that applies to both Harriet's parents, and I found the novel to have overtones of horror in the first part. I don't think Freddie (Harriet's husband) is excepted. Although Harriet repeatedly insists that he's kind, the latter parts have his bland impervious kindness imprisoning Harriet. He's also a sexual boor, and what Harriet reads as his 'generosity' in tolerating a wife's illicit affair I read as uncaring. The sole slight exception is maybe Monsieur Papineau (as he confesses to loneliness, and devotes some care to Harriet), but even he is a strange, wrinkled Peter Pan.
The second part of the book concerns Harriet's effort to get out of the bargain. I found this part intensely heartbreaking, but not in an 'enjoyable' (whumpy) way. This is a woman who realizes belatedly that she's lived for very little. Her husband wants to abandon her (Abroad! Abroad!), her child thinks she's wrongheaded, her child's friend thinks she's kind but foolish, her friends think her unsophisticated, an irritating ingenue. Her mother also shares this opinion. I think this speaks to the impossibility of 'winning' the patriarchal bargain. Yes, Harriet was provided for, but towards the end, where she literally wants a room of her own (just somewhere to live without her relations, without being a daughter, a parent, etc) she's unable to fulfill her wish. The affair, as Harriet owns up, is more about her having this sort of separate life.
I found the imagery of Harriet's soul - I am sure it is her soul she wants, in the room bathed in sunlight and her lying on the bed having nothing to do - I found that very lovely and I wanted to hug her then.
And then she's able to fulfill her wish and I thought it rather cruel of the writer to go about in this way. Harriet loses all her attachments, forcibly, through death. I guess the slight note at the end, of rebirth, of faint optimism with Lizzie, is because Harriet at last chooses to have relationships of care with someone who's independent of her.
Of course since this is (I think) a realist novel, I might have hallucinated all this meaning. Regardless, I deeply admire the book. In my reading of it I found it rather dull (but Brooknerian dull, in that it's very well-written, very flowing) but I guess that's more a painterly rendering of a woman who's been forced to make her bargain in this way.
