Folly (25 page)

Another way of thinking about realism is that it is “the representation of experience in a manner which approximates closely to description of similar experience in non-literary texts of the same culture.”
¹⁶
This is particularly relevant to
Folly,
which begins with a quotation from Kathy Kahn's collection of oral histories,
Hillbilly Women
(1973). In researching this afterword, I have noted with interest that many books about southern mill workers are collections of or based upon oral histories.
Consider also that midway through the writing of
Folly,
Brady went to North Carolina to conduct and tape interviews with mill workers. In transcribing these tapes, Brady listened to and attempted to capture the rhythms and particularities of their speech. In a sense, then, the novel is an attempt to contextualize actual women's stories, previously presented in historical texts, within a constructed plot consistent with the leftist feminist and lesbian literary traditions. The effect is that of literary realism: a description of lived experience in language closely modeled on narratives by the women themselves.

The kind of realism that Brady uses in
Folly
may, to some extent, have contributed to the isolation she has expressed feeling as a lesbian writer and her failure to break through as a mainstream writer. On the one hand, lesbian fiction has become increasingly conventional, requiring heroic protagonists, romantic plots, abundant sex scenes, and idealized settings. As in the mainstream, formulaic fictions—mysteries, romances, adventures—are most popular with lesbian readers and thus most appealing to lesbian publishers. Although
Folly
has a lesbian hero, some sex, and an upbeat ending, its attention to issues of class and race mark it apart from the escapist fiction so beloved by lesbian readers. On the other hand, Brady's style of didactic realism does not quite fit into the stream of “serious” postmodern fiction most highly praised by the academic and critical establishments. But for those readers who value conscientious, responsible, and sensitive attempts to imaginatively represent ordinary women's lives, Maureen Brady's
Folly
is a work to be treasured.

VI

Folly
(and Maureen Brady as a writer) belongs to a realist tradition not only in its formal achievements, but also in one very important thematic intention. In her informative essay on the writing of the novel, Brady explains that her motivation for writing was “the longing for wholeness and connection.”
¹⁷
It is clear in her essays, interviews, and fiction that Brady—like most feminist and lesbian feminist writers—is engaged in a quest to restore or create connections that have been fragmented by the alienating conditions of modern life including patriarchy, racism, homophobia, and capitalism. The ultimate lesbian and feminist goal is a whole, healthy, and strong female self. Postmodern theorists hold a very different set of values and assumptions. Wholeness, connection, unity, self: all are perceived as illusory effects of a language structured around the words I, me, self, ego, identity. The postmodern “self' is more properly understood as a fluid, fragmented, multiple set of subject positions.

Many feminists have argued that this notion of subjectivity is produced by privilege, that women and other disenfranchised groups need to emphasize selfhood, wholeness, and integration of previously fragmented parts. Brady certainly would argue this position. Indeed, her motivation for writing
Folly
was to “re-member” herself by reclaiming her working-class heritage. On the other hand, she is not totally dissimilar to postmodernists. To her thinking, subjectivity cannot be reduced to simple categories of identity: woman, lesbian, worker, mother, white, African-American, and so on. Her characters are complex subjects, and their multiple selves do not necessarily blend in seamless harmony. Their goal may be wholeness, but the process of negotiating wholeness is difficult, contentious, and incomplete.

The number of subject positions, themes, and issues that Brady introduces—mostly successfully to my reading—is remarkable. We see Folly as mother, worker, political activist, white woman, and lesbian; Lenore as daughter, worker, lesbian, and friend. The African-American women in the novel are more thinly drawn—a problem that I will discuss below—but even Mabel and Sabrina are presented in more than one dimension. The novel interrogates issues of class consciousness, sexuality, mother—daughter relationships, community, racism, age, pregnancy, and education. Despite this topical fecundity, the novel does not feel hurried or scattered, in part because it is unified by a few specific themes: the realization of various forms of power, the creation of new ways of being, the recognition of difference and resolution of opposition, and the understanding and appreciation of alternate points of view.

The plot of
Folly
revolves around a labor strike and the acceptance of lesbian identity. Although these may seem to be very different stories, Brady connects them not only through plot devices (Folly and Martha first make love after the picnic celebrating the successful union drive, for example) but also through the theme of power. The novel contrasts abusive power with the enabling power of women uniting to change the conditions of their lives. Abusive power may take the form of bosses controlling workers, many instances of which we see in the main Fartblossom plot, but also in scenes set in the A&P; of men over women as Mary Lou discovers in her struggles with Roland; or of whites over African-Americans, the realization of which is expressed in the interior speech of Folly and Lenore, from white women's perspective, and of Mabel, from that of African-American women. In contrast, when the women walk out of the mill to protest the treatment of Cora (merging class and gender interests), when they vote in the union and negotiate better working conditions, when Folly and Martha fall in love and act upon their
feelings, when Mary Lou realizes she can go to college and choose a life other than the mill, when Lenore names herself lesbian and circulates her copy of
Sappho Was a Right-On Woman,
when Evelyn stops drinking and mends fences with her daughter, when Folly and Lenore each separately reach out to understand the world from an African-American woman's point of view—when these things happen women empower themselves to create new worlds and new ways of being. Whether or not Folly, Martha, Mabel, and the others start their cooperative mill, whether or not Lenore is able to realize her fantasy of a local gay pride parade, Victory will never be the same.

Brady's characters achieve their goals by recognizing the differences that exist between them and by working to resolve their oppositions. The most important example of this is the struggle to overcome racism among the striking women, but I will first point out a smaller and more discrete example of this method. In the first chapter of the novel, Folly explains to Martha that she doesn't want Mary Lou to see Lenore because Lenore is, by reputation, “queer.” There is an awkward silence, and Folly realizes that Martha is a lot like Lenore. The woman who had seemed familiarly like herself, now seemed different, alien, “other.” But Folly takes one step further: Martha “was husky. She flicked her cigarette ashes with a manly gesture. ‘For Christ's sake,' Folly said to herself, ‘so do I'” (6). This shift in position dissolves the opposition between queer and not-queer, between friend and alien, between self and other. As a result, Folly is both open to becoming a lesbian herself and also to accepting Lenore as her daughter's friend. Characters in the novel constantly shift their position in order to understand another point of view, changing their behavior and beliefs as they change the angle from which they view the real world. In doing so, they call into question the differences and oppositions set up by various hierarchies of power and at least lay the groundwork for communities based upon equality and mutual respect. Boundaries—between lesbian and heterosexual or African-American and white—exist to separate, but they can become “borderlands” (as Gloria Anzaldúa writes) in which to transcend the separation.

The questions of perspective, separation, and borders are pursued most significantly in this novel around the racism of white women. In her essay on the writing of
Folly,
Brady discusses the firm boundaries—quoting Minnie Bruce Pratt, she calls them as charged as an electric fence—that have been drawn between the races. This novel is as much her attempt to cross these boundaries as it is to reclaim her white working-class self. But, she says, “In writing about racism in
Folly,
I found myself coming up to the fence, stopping, encountering a vast blank span in my imagination as
I considered my Black characters.”
¹⁸
Her first reaction to this vast blank span was to restrict herself to writing her African-American characters from the outside, because of her fear of being presumptuous. In a novel containing so much interior monologue, however, this solution was itself racist by denying subjectivity to African-American characters. She expressed her dilemma to Audre Lorde who responded, “You cannot be presumptuous, you can only be wrong.”
¹⁹
Brady tried again, writing chapter eleven from Mabel's point of view. Although this is the only place in the novel that an African-American woman is presented from the inside, Brady said in an interview that, had she written two more drafts of the novel, Mabel would have become as central a character as Folly and Lenore.

What Maureen Brady discovered in herself—an initial inability to imagine the world from the point of view of African-American women—becomes a prominent theme in the novel. Both Folly and Lenore come to understand that racism functions not only in its grossest aspects—segregation, discrimination, violence—but also in the subtle daily ways in which whites discount the equal value of being African-American. Both women come to realize that they have never really seen African-American women before, or considered them truly human, or wondered about the reality of their lives. By the end of the novel, each has made substantial steps toward doing so.

In keeping with the way the novel pursues issues on both personal and political levels, each woman comes to her epiphany from a different vantage point. Folly's transformation is initially motivated by her concern that the strike and union drive succeed. She is first shocked by her own racism in the powerful beauty shop scene in chapter eleven, when Mabel challenges the narrow view of reality held by the white women. Folly feels immediately guilty and regretful, but also immediately understands the form their racism takes: erasing the subjectivity of African-American women. Folly resolves to remedy this deficiency within herself by learning as much as she can about the experiences and perspectives of African-American women and about herself as a white woman, as marked by her color as Mabel is by hers. Although the immediate goal is a successful union drive (an accurate reflection of the history of organizing in the South), Folly comes to understand that the most insidious consequence of racism for white women is a failure in knowledge and empathy. For the rest of the novel, she attempts to remedy this epistemological deficiency.

Lenore undergoes a very similar kind of growth, motivated by personal friendship rather than political struggle. As she comes to know Sabrina,
she realizes the unwritten rules that establish the boundaries between African-Americans and whites in Victory. There are the physical boundaries of neighborhood and church, but of equal importance are the psychological boundaries that prevent whites from talking to African-Americans or thinking about how they live their lives. Through Sabrina, Lenore begins to step over those boundaries and to look at life from the other woman's side of the fence.

Folly
is remarkably successful in its portrayal of white women recognizing the phenomenology and consequences of racism and undergoing a transformation in consciousness and behavior. But, as Maureen Brady would no doubt agree, it is far less successful as a whole in itself transgressing the borders of the imagination. And it is worth pondering why Brady—like most white writers—was so timid in her portrayal of African-American characters. She is no doubt correct in identifying the imaginative blankness that most white people have about the lives of people of color. But the task of the writer is always to leap over barriers to the imagination. I find it interesting that Brady is very successful in creating older characters like Daisy in
Folly,
or Min in the play,
I Know a Hundred Ways to Die,
even though she herself has not experienced old age. Even though she may have known women like Folly, Lenore, and Mary Lou, it requires an extension of the imagination to bring them to life as literary characters. Why then, do many white women come up against the electric fence when they try to imagine the external and internal reality of African-American women?

This question elicits considerable debate, of course, and will not receive a final answer here. Many white women probably would agree with Cindy Patton, for example, that feminist fiction needs more honest portrayals of racism from the perspective of African-American women, bull that the appropriate format might be “an autobiographical work best co-authored by a black and a white novelist.”
²⁰
She reflects the strong taboos against a member of a privileged group speaking from the perspective of the oppressed. Anna Livia, on the other hand, challenges this assumption, asking, “In whose interest is it that white women should feel Black experience is so different from ours as to be unimaginable?”
²¹
The answer to her rhetorical question is obvious: the racist power structure. Although she confesses to having been little more successful than Brady in overcoming the taboos, she calls upon both writers and readers to use literature to live outside the self.

Anna Livia makes a very important point. Literature is the product of imagination, as Maureen Brady contends, and the imagination is not bound by personal experience. If it were, no author could write anything
but autobiography and I do not believe that to be the case. For that reason I disagree with Patton's suggestion, or the commonplace assumption that only African-American writers can create African-American characters, or that lesbians can only write about lesbians, and so on. But I also think that Brady's hesitancy—and the hesitancy of most white writers—to create an African-American character from the inside does reflect the uniquely divisive character of racism in twentieth-century America. Social divisions, although similar in many ways, are not all the same. The evidence of contemporary literature suggests that it is easier to make imaginative leaps across gender, age, social status, religion, even sexual preference, than it is across race. Racism, especially against African-Americans, is the great shame and tragedy of our nation. It is hardly surprising that its legacy should include failures in literary imagination. Although not completely successful, to Maureen Brady's credit, she struggles mightily with this legacy in
Folly.