I confess that I vaguely remember ever hearing about The Group by Mary McCarthy when I was growing up. I say this, because I got my love of reading from perusing my mother's bookshelves. I can't remember if I ever saw it there, but I never thought of it again until I saw recently a review of it in The Guardian (UK newspaper) for a re-release. It sounded interesting from what the article said and since I liked The Women's Room by Marilyn French, I decided to give this book a read. I'm glad I did. I am always amazed, after completing a Master's Degree in English/Literature, to discover witty, acerbic, and personally and politically relevant women writers that were never mentioned in any class or seminar I took over a period of 6 years. Why had I not heard of Mary McCarthy? Was she relegated to the dismissive category of "popular" "women's fiction" when it was published? Was she deemed inconsequential by male academia? Probably all of the above. As one who questions the sacrosanct "CANON" of literature for its snootiness and creaking bones, it makes me mad that millions of young women will never learn about this book in colleges. If they are now.... then good for them. It's time that the "domestic" novel isn't tossed aside as trivial or unimportant simply because men aren't interested in knowing about it. Sadly, I wish this type of thinking was completely over, but canon-ites are a stubborn lot.In many ways The Women's Room follows the same format as The Group. We follow several young women through various stages of their young lives. French starts from a first person viewpoint in a girl's childhood. The Group begins with a group of women who have just graduated from Vassar and are attending a wedding; the first of their set to do so. Kay is the compass around which all the women in the group spin like satellites. It's 1930, a year after the Stock Market Crash and before WWII. It's a confusing time for all concerned. When Lakey, Pokey, Libby, Priss, Polly, Norine, and Helena attend Kay's wedding they are all on the cusp of their next adventures in life; jobs, marriage, travel, more university, etc. They are well educated women and politically savvy, but they are precariously new and wobbly like newborn calves. It's tough to nail down a particular theme in this novel, but the overriding spectre hanging over all of them is the assumed privilege of men and though excellently educated, the limited prescribed spheres of these women. Politically, it is the height of the Socialist and Communist heyday in America. FDR is proposing the New Deal and Unions are forming. Science and medicine are confused and Freudian analysis is all the rage. There are conflicting theories about motherhood, breast-feeding, birth control, lesbianism, and free love vs. adultery. It was a heady time. And perhaps this is precisely why I and many of my friends have not heard of the book. It was published in 1963 and dared to assert that in the author's mother's time, these questions were openly discussed among the university and elite classes. The curtains were coming down on the sacred hearth and people's true lives were being exposed for what they were! It was an honest and searing glimpse. Perhaps that was too much controversy for the early 60s.McCarthy's writing style is a little hard to follow at first, but you get used to it quickly and when she leaves a chapter, we find we miss the woman who was revealed in it. We see each of the women's views throughout a chapter and then we see the same woman's life from everyone else's view of the same events. It shows us that roles and masks do not tell us the deep secrets and fears residing in our heads and that what is said about someone can be so far from the truth as to be unrecognizable. No one truly knows what goes on in another's life but this book reveals that for women, there is so much more going on than the domestic bliss the men wish was keeping the little lady happy in the home. If they only knew! And they would know, if they would only listen. But the divide between the sexes isn't universal and there are glimmerings of hope amidst the racism and political and social ideas of the 1930s which reside alongside all those ideas that we in the 21st century now take for granted. It's hard to put myself into that time and experience the insecurity of some of these women; to raise a voice, a question, or challenge an accepted idea. As feminists we take so much for granted about what was always at stake for us; even basic freedoms like disagreeing with male doctors or even disagreeing with husbands, all of whom knew best for their women of course. These women couldn't even trust their own minds after an excellent college education! I learned so many things about that time period that I never knew before. We are all divided by class and education; these are the monied classes after all--but there are some experiences in women's lives that are universal.The book is glorious, sad, jubilant, and heartbreaking, but it's not maudlin or overwrought. It's honest. We see these women warts and all and we may not like some of them. It doesn't matter. Candace Bushnell, who wrote Sex and the City, feels a particular kinship with this book and the review in The Guardian even compared McCarthy's book to hers, but they are vastly different. I admit to not being a fan of Amanda, Samantha, Carrie, and Charlotte who would never have the discussions that The Group had. I found the group to be far more nuanced and complicated than the mere sexual antics of the requisite blondes, brunettes, and redheads. The campiness of SATC leaves me cold and I've never identified with any of them. But I can identify with The Group and I'm still pondering why. Food for thought.I'm glad I read this, but I wish I'd read this or knew of it sooner. Like every book of it's kind, are we ready to read it? Books do have a way of coming into our lives when we most need them. I think it should be on every university reading list.
"I don't think sex is comical to the people taking part in it. It's comical to others."-Mary McCarthy, on the Jack Paar Show 1963https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmZ2i...It is easy to overlook McCarthy's wit because she has so loaded up this novel with a lifetime of observations on the kind of women she turned out not to be. There is plenty of T.S. Eliot's "The women come and go, talking of Michelangelo" in these sketches of Vassar girls, as they discuss Cézanne, O'Keefe, and read Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Croce, Tolstoy's "What is Art?" They have Marx, Spengler, Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle on the shelves (which is amusing considering that McCarthy was married to the man). The furniture in Kay's apartment, for example, was meant to be talked about, in Norine's nothing had been admitted that did not make a "relevant statement" - though "what the polar bear was saying Helena could not make out." "I reacted against Lakey's empty formalism," Norine was saying. "I went up to my room that night and spewed out the window. That was Armageddon for me, though I didn't see it yet. I didn't discover socialism till junior year. All I knew that night was that I believed in something and couldn't express it, while your team believed in nothing but knew how to say it - in other men's words."In that quote you can see a lot of Sylvia Plath's impotent rage which McCarthy didn't have because she was too concerned with being artistically great, politically active, sexually adventurous. This novel cries out for comparison with the Daddy-oppressed poet, the Vassar girls being of Plath's class. I was about a fourth through the novel when picking up a few details I realized that it was set in the 1930s. You could've fooled me, I thought, because its language and morality seem firmly rooted in 1950s American culture. There is Fanny Farmer, and Campbell's tomato soup poured over meatloaf recipes; when pissed off people say "drat her" and when they end up at tiny restaurants they are called "dinky" ones. I went back to the beginning and saw that oops, it's spelled out there in the opening line: we are in the 1930s. The privilege of these girls doesn't jibe though with the quarter of the country unemployed these years, which is helpful to keep in mind. The opening scene is a wonderful panorama of these sister-graduates at a wedding. We are dizzy meeting everyone like the uninvited guest that we are. Names go by without us able to latch onto who we are meeting, but we pick up on the moral atmosphere all the same. No one really thinks Kay has married well. Kay doesn't intend on being one of this class. She has married Harald, but since the marriage Harald has lost his stage job and reads The New Yorker and soon enough we find out he's been hiding a few secrets from his newlywed. You picture Kay clipping out hearty recipes from McCall's magazine. Lately she's into cooking casseroles and those with beans. They might have to change residence due to financial concerns, but hopefully not move into a place that is too unsightly: "Kay wouldn't live in a basement; it was unhealthy. She glanced at her beans again and slammed the oven door." This is where McCarthy the intellectual might be pressing her case too hard, though I don't mind it: "Kay had a ruthless hatred of poor people, which not even Harald suspected and which sometimes scared her by its violence, as when she was waiting on some indigent in the store" - as she turns the heat off for the brewing of Maxwell House coffee.You can practically feel the advice columns McCarthy's early readers were reading, a target audience if there ever was one. There is lots of helpful, gaudy detail about what it was like to be sexually active at this time: losing one's virginity, contraceptive options, ejaculation habits, premature and otherwise (one memorably shot out by the ridiculously named Dick Brown landing on the virgin from Boston's tummy - and don't call her "Brahmin"!) You better believe there is plenty of detail on the vulgar mating rituals, of affairs, friends screwing each other behind their backs, all of which must have caused fainting fits in the early 1960s to its first readers, as they turned the pages eagerly while steadying themselves for the sexual revolution. This is too much fun any one novelist should ever be allowed. Norine, she of the evening jeweled tiara and the long white gloves, instigated a "fracas" between Harald and Putnam over sleeping partners. Helena's mother Mrs. Davison is not surprised: "I said to your father (this) reminded me of the old suffragette demonstrations. Chaining themselves to lampposts, and that young woman, Inez something something, Vassar she was too, who rode a white horse down Fifth Avenue to demonstrate. Dressed to kill."It's good to see the hypocrisies of feminism haven't changed in sixty years though it's comforting to see the relationships between mothers and daughters haven't changed either.Mother Davison says: "I said to myself: 'No man ever planned this (fight).'""But why?" asked daughter Helena."No grown-up man will ever put on a tuxedo unless a woman makes him. No man, whatever his politics, Helena, is going to put on a tuxedo to go out and sympathy-strike, or whatever they call it unless some artful woman is egging him on. To get his picture in the paper" ...Helena laughed and patted her mother's plump arm."What was her field at college?""English," said Helena. "She did her main work for Miss Lockwood. Contemporary Press."Mrs. Davison smote her forehead. "Oh, my prophetic soul!" she said, nodding.
What do You think about The Group (1991)?
I had never heard of this book before, and I have to confess I only picked it up because I read part of the introduction Candace Bushnell wrote. I am happy I did, since I was fascinated by this novel. At the very beginning I thought it was just going to be one of those books that follow women lives after they graduate, and how they struggle to find someone to marry, get pregnant and start a family. As I kept on reading I found that it is more than just the typical chick-lit. What impressed me the most was that there were several times throughout the story where I had to remind myself that the story was set in the 30s, since the topics it discussed where things that are still relevant to modern women today.I liked the characters and felt their stories were honest and real. This was a book I was sad when it ended, not because the way it ended but because it was over.People compare it with Sex and the City, but I would say it is more profound and true. I think the author was brave publishing a book that touched topics that might have been a taboo at the time.
—Carmen
Mary McCarthy's "The Group" is both a story of friendship and an exploration of the social mores among the "privileged" in Prohibition-era America. The book explores the lives of a group of seven Vassar graduates, who had "grouped together" in a college dormitory and whose lives occasionally intersected throughout the story. The girls come and go in New York; some of them remain close and some drift apart as they leave Vassar behind and enter into love affairs, careers, marriage and motherhood. Parts of the book - Dottie's first experience with a man, Kay's husband's infidelity, Priss's struggles with motherhood, and the return of Lakey - would have been considered extremely shocking when the book was published and are still rather juicy today. I imagine the 1950s sweater set sharing the book with each other and identifying with the characters, saying "I'm a Kay" or "I'm a Helena" or "I'm a Polly," much the way the girls of my generation say "I'm a Carrie" or "I'm a Charlotte" or "I'm a Miranda." If you read the book for what it is, a story of friendship in pre-war America, you can get a sense of the motivations and insecurities that might have driven our grandmothers. And I think that, even today, we can identify with one or more of the characters. Personally, I'm a Priss.
—Jaclyn
"The Group" had been on my list for awhile, and when I saw it for two bucks at a used bookstore in Kingston, NY, this summer, I went for it, and not without having a little conversation about Mary McCarthy with the old shopkeeper (he was trying to recall the name of the woman with whom McCarthy had had a big feud via published opinion articles, and it didn't come to him by the time I left, so if you have any leads...).It took me awhile to get into "The Group," because a lot of the story, about a group of eight Vassar graduates navigating the adult world for the first time, centers around what I was initially perceiving as superficial high-society concerns. Indeed, some parts of the narration resemble that of the "Gossip Girl" series. But, as I got into the book a bit more, I found myself sympathizing with many characters (especially Polly, who became my favorite), as the story really is one about coming of age. The young women, like young people throughout history, navigate the world in search for fulfillment, but simultaneously grapple with the social expectations that come with being a Vassar alumna, as well as the examples (not always positive) set by their parents. The world is changing rapidly at the time of their graduation in the early 1930s, and, like young people today, the group must factor social and economic changes into the lives they are attempting to create. In the end, they each experience personal tragedies of varying forms, but still emerge with a sense of strength, emanating, in part, from their bonds with each other.I think both men and women would appreciate "The Group" for the social history it provides, but many of the main conflicts are women-centric, which would probably appeal more to women, I think.
—Elise
