SOURCE: Rogers, Katharine M. “Alison Lurie: The Uses of Adultery.” In American Women Writing Fiction: Memory, Identity, Family, Space, edited by Mickey Pearlman, pp. 115-28. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989.

[In the following essay, Rogers examines Lurie's dissection of traditional marital inequities and her presentation of sexual infidelity as a catalyst for newfound self-awareness and independence among the passive, self-sacrificing women characters of her novels.]

By entitling her first novel Love and Friendship, Alison Lurie invited comparison with an author whom she resembles in her area of interest, in her disenchanted view of human nature, in her coolly ironic puncturing of pretension. Like Jane Austen, Lurie characteristically focuses on the development of a woman's identity, through increasing self-knowledge and decision-making, and portrays this through her character's relationships with men. But while Austen shows her heroines maturing as they move toward their proper choice in marriage, Lurie shows them maturing afterward, as they try other life choices, typically represented by an adulterous affair. Thus, she can deal with older women: while Austen's heroines, who must be marriageable in nineteenth-century terms, range from seventeen (Marianne Dashwood) to twenty-seven (Anne Elliot), Lurie's can range from twenty-seven (Emily Turner) to fifty-four (Vinnie Miner). Because adultery is no longer so heavily charged, morally and emotionally, as it was in the nineteenth century, Lurie is free to use it as a device for comic satire and intellectual exploration of character.¹

When Frances Burney's Evelina writes to Mr. Villars on her marriage day, “All is over, … and the fate of your Evelina is decided!”² she is only making explicit an assumption traditional in fiction—one which to some extent reflected the actual situation in traditional society—that a woman's whole life was defined by her marriage. It followed that any developing she was going to do had to be accomplished before she chose her husband. Austen uses this crucial choice to reveal her heroine's basic character and force her to reject naive overconfidence and surmount immature limitations. As Elizabeth Bennet learns to distrust her snap judgments and Emma Woodhouse to break through her complacent self-centeredness so as to know herself and other people, Anne Elliot learns to rely on her own judgment rather than deferring to older but not wiser authorities.

Lurie's heroines also assume that their marriages have determined the course of their lives. Coming of age in the fifties, they married right out of college and settled down to be wives to their husbands and mothers to their children. In middle age Erica Tate despondently thinks that she has already made her choices, taken the significant moral actions of her life long ago; now that she has more knowledge of herself and the world, she is “equipped to make choices, but there are none left to make” (The War between the Tates, 58).³ But in fact, unlike Austen's characters, Lurie's can change their partners and their life-styles. She presents them with choices that force them to examine their beliefs and values; whether they ultimately keep these or reject them, they have matured as human beings through having faced and made the decision. Typically, Lurie sets up the alternatives in the form of the heroine's husband and a lover. Such a choice is realistically momentous for these women, who are committed not only to firm and conventional moral principles but to a confident belief that they are happily married. But, at the same time, Lurie uses the lover symbolically to represent a radically different life-style and set of values.

When their stories begin, Lurie's heroines have reason to be pleased with themselves and their situation. Attractive and privileged, they are successfully married to successful men. They are intelligent, well-educated, and sophisticated; they have high moral standards and make a point of living up to them. Katherine Cattleman insists on inconveniencing herself to correct some typing errors, for she “did not like being in the wrong, and badly wanted to put” her obnoxious employer “back there where he belonged” (The Nowhere City, 159). Erica's “greatest ambition is to be right: seriously and permanently in the right. Until recently, that was where she usually felt she was” (WT [The War between the Tates], 25). They have no doubts about what is right or whether they can behave properly. Whether they are being the perfect wife and mother (Erica) or gracefully balancing the roles of creative writer and corporate wife (Janet Belle Smith of Real People), they enjoy “carefully constructed lives and self-images, glowing with conscious enlightenment.”⁴

Their illusions are so plausible that at first they take in the reader as well as themselves. We do not realize that their apparent control of themselves and their lives is sustained by shutting out what they do not want to see. Nor do we notice that, although they are not totally conventional (Janet publishes stories, Emily Turner has married beneath her), none has seriously questioned the fundamental assumptions with which she has been brought up. Although theoretically they had many choices in life, they have acted as if they had none. Having accepted the feminine mystique of the fifties, they devote themselves wholly to their families and expect marriage and children to provide them with happiness and fulfillment. Erica can be cheered by a banal conversation that “reminds her that she is successfully married, whereas Helen is a widow, and her best friend Danielle Zimmern a divorcée; that Brian is an important professor who receives urgent business letters; and that he calls home every evening when he is out of town” (WT, 16).

Lurie proceeds to demolish her heroines' illusions of rectitude and well-being, usually by disrupting their marriages. The opening sentence of her first book announces, “The day on which Emily Stockwell Turner fell out of love with her husband began much like other days” (Love and Friendship 9). What jolts Emily into this realization is a conversation in which he refuses to talk to her about his work as a college English instructor. Having spent her day doing routine domestic tasks with no society but their four-year-old son and a garrulous cleaning woman, she feels a natural need for intellectual stimulation; but Holman would rather read his newspaper than exert himself in discussion, and then he can't imagine why she is offended. Is she perhaps having her period? So much for the theory that an intelligent woman can live through her husband's work.

Having aroused Emily's dissatisfaction with her superficially satisfactory marriage, Lurie presents her with an alternative in the form of a lover who is very different from Holman, so different that her relationship with him dislodges her preconceptions about herself and what she wants in a husband. The release of her previously constricted sexuality is less important than the opening of mental possibilities. Lurie's married heroines are trapped by their external situation—all but Janet are untrained for careers; their husbands oppose their working outside the home; they are tied down to households and children. But what she is more interested in is the internal factors that trap them: their need to be perfect wives and mothers, their fear of threats to their images of themselves and their situation.

Though the lovers are for the most part believable on the realistic level, they also symbolically represent what is missing in the heroine's marriage (or life situation, in Vinnie's case) and what is essential to eliciting the full range of her personality. Once she has done what had been unthinkable for her, she is ready to rethink her life in general, including the values she has been living by. Even if the woman chooses to remain in her original situation, as Emily does, this time she chooses it in an informed way.

Lurie's insight into the flaws of a seemingly ideal marriage, and into the complicity of even educated women in their own exploitation, is drawn from personal experience. (Her protagonists, from Mary Ann Hubbard in Only Children to Vinnie Miner in Foreign Affairs, are close to her own age at the time the story is set.) At Radcliffe Lurie and her fellow students sneered at the occasional woman who braved convention by attempting to get the professor's attention in a Harvard classroom.⁵ In “No One Asked Me to Write a Novel,” Lurie tells how family pressures, combined with rejection slips, persuaded her temporarily to give up writing and throw herself into a life like Erica's.” “I organized family picnics and parties and trips; I baked animal cookies and tuna-fish casseroles. … I played monotonously simple board games. … I entertained my husband's superiors and flirted with his colleagues and gossiped with their wives. I told myself that my life was rich and full. Everybody else seemed to think so. Only I knew that, right at the center, it was false and empty. I wasn't what I was pretending to be. I didn't like staying home and taking care of little children; I was restless, impatient, ambitious.”⁶ Lurie's heroines (except for Janet) do not have a specific unused talent to pinpoint their dissatisfaction. Nevertheless, their lives do not fulfill their intellectual or emotional needs, although they have a strong stake in believing them “rich and full.” Lacking a vocation, concerned only with the personal sphere, they are given the choice appropriate for them: between two men. By involving them in extramarital affairs, Lurie forces them to part with their cherished illusions and to see themselves more realistically.

Although Lurie uses this adultery plot in Love and Friendship, The Nowhere City, Real People, and The War between the Tates, it does not become boringly repetitious any more than Austen's marriage plot does.⁷ Rather, the repetitive elements enable her to explore varied aspects of her themes of marital discontent and female consciousness-raising. In The Nowhere City, Lurie focuses on the negativism produced by acceptance of the feminine mystique, especially in a punctiliously righteous woman. Defining virtue as sacrificing her self-interest to her concept of ideal behavior, Katherine distrusts all enjoyment; imposing rigid controls on her desires, she fears anything that might unsettle the status quo. She wants men to be “reasonable, predictable, and considerate of her” (118); that is, they must not violate her expectations of proper behavior or challenge the adjustments that both protect and limit her. She is an intelligent and attractive woman, yet she has never been happy; in The Nowhere City, she suffers from a flagrantly unfaithful husband, an intrusive employer, an environment she hates, and sinus headaches. Not only is she convinced that these afflictions are irremediable, but she takes a certain self-righteous pleasure in them: the misbehavior of her husband and her employer highlight her own rectitude, as her loathing for Los Angeles proves her taste; through sinus headaches, which she cannot help, she can give vent to the pain and anger that she is too well conducted to express openly. Thus, her behavior patterns sustain her self-image even though they obstruct her happiness. She collaborates with her husband's inconsiderateness by masochistically expecting it. (In turn, his “impatient tolerance” of her limitations merely confirms her feeling that she cannot overcome them.)

Nevertheless, as the book progresses, she comes to realize how she contributes to her misery and that her protective shell is in fact a prison of inhibitions. It takes an aggressive lover, her exuberant employer, to break the shell. By openly expressing his feelings and sexuality, he forces her to recognize her own and to violate her limiting self-image as an irreproachable person. He makes her see that her concept of love is moralistic and self-destructive: “giving up everything for some other person in a very grudging, painful way” (240). This is not only unpleasant for her, but, since chronic self-sacrifice is no more natural for women than men, it leads to the sinus headaches which so annoy Paul. The result is that she critically examines the rigid standards which she had automatically accepted, opens her eyes to see if there are others which suit her better, and chooses a new life style.

The adjustment of Janet Belle Smith in Real People seems at first to be much more clear-sighted and constructive than Katherine's. Apparently she has achieved a happy balance between her roles as serious writer and wife; she even has a sympathetic male fellow-artist, a painter named Kenneth, with whom she can enjoy a platonic relationship without sullying her self-image. The only flaw she sees in her life is that her writing has become trivial and repetitious—something that will be corrected by a few weeks in Illyria, an idyllic artists' colony where she can become her “real self” (17). Or rather, one can become—Janet's preference for one over I, noted by Nick Donato, an outspoken fellow guest (“Janet has an imaginary friend named Wun. An Oriental,” whom she makes responsible for her feelings [75]), suggests falsity in her ladylike self-image by giving away her need to disclaim emotion and egotism. At first we suppose, with Janet, that her sophisticated, impersonal style expresses her control over experience; gradually, we realize that it serves to insulate her from it. The first person point of view in Real People directly involves us in Janet's self-deception and the unpleasant self-recognition that follows.

Only a violently upsetting experience would be enough to shock Janet out of rationalizations that seem to serve her so well; and again, this comes in the form of a passionate affair with a man so unlikely that he upsets her deepest convictions about her own nature and possibilities. Unlike her husband and Kenneth, the vulgar pop artist Nick challenges her assumptions about what nice people do, whether she is a nice person, whether she ought to be. Janet enters Nick's studio as a slumming tourist gathering material for a witty anecdote.⁸ She leaves after a passionate encounter that makes her recognize impulses in herself that do not at all fit her refined self-image: she not only has strong sexuality, but has responded to a man who violates all her standards of acceptable behavior. At the same time, Nick makes her see the truth about her genteel substitute for adultery and her compromise between niceness and artistic expression: Kenneth did not abstain from sexual overtures out of consideration and respect for her but because, as a homosexual, he was not interested; she cannot be a serious writer if she insists on censoring herself in order to maintain everyone's approval. Finally, Kenneth (embittered because her affair with Nick has shattered his illusions about her) forces her to see that the conformist pressure she has been blaming on an unsympathetic husband and stuffy friends is actually within herself: what she is really protecting is not her family, but “some idea of yourself that you're terribly fond of … the idea of this charming, intelligent, sensitive lady writer who lives in a nice house in the country with her nice family, and never makes any serious mistakes or has any real problems” (151-52).

Janet finally acknowledges that her “real self” includes ugly passions and that it is timidity that weakens her fiction and her life as well: between the external pressure to conform to a restrictive role and the internal pressure to behave properly in its terms, she had limited her options and blinded herself to anything that conflicted with her self-image. By the end of the novel, with a clearer picture of herself, she is free to consider alternative choices. Janet thought she would change simply by moving into Illyria, where she could pursue her work without interference and associate with sympathetic fellow-artists; but what she needs is something far more radical than new surroundings: she must be jolted out of her complacent certainties by perhaps the one event that could force her to change her view of herself.

In The War between the Tates, Lurie provides her most brilliant exposure of what her heroine once thought was a successful marriage. It is altogether a subtler work than The Nowhere City: Erica's masochistic self-righteousness is less obvious than Katherine's, Brian's selfishness more finely dissected than Paul's, the Tates' stresses not schematized by a move to another culture, and the ending ruthlessly realistic. Erica, once very satisfied with herself as the wife of a brilliant professional man and mother to two lovable children, now finds her children changed into brutish, ungrateful adolescents; her only consolation is “her friend and husband, Brian” (11). Then she discovers that he is having an affair with a mediocre young woman. This provokes her to reevaluate her “perfect” marriage, to see it for the unequal bargain it is. While Brian does interesting, prestigious work, she, with similar mental capacity and training, is expected to devote her days to the cheerful completion of routine tasks (vividly rendered in step-by-step descriptions and food imagery). If she does her work well, it is taken for granted; if anything goes wrong, she is blamed. She begins to question Brian's plausible doctrine of “separate spheres” in a marriage, whereby “if he lost his job (which had never been very likely and was now impossible, since he had tenure), it was his fault. If the children became uncontrollable, it was hers” (13).

Since her whole life was built around her family, Erica finds herself with nothing—no career, no satisfying social life, badly damaged self-esteem. She clings to behaving correctly herself but finds that this brings no rewards. The only alternative Lurie offers her is Sandy Finkelstein, the owner of an occult bookshop, who has worshiped her from afar since their graduate school days. He is a shabby dropout, a born loser of ridiculous appearance; but he is unselfish and loving, the only character in the book who is not involved in competition or “war.” Erica turns to him in her misery, finds some consolation, and even, very briefly, thinks of going off with him. But though she can now value his freedom from convention and egotism and can recognize the wisdom of his saying that we must all some time adjust to being losers, she realizes that she needs the security and success that Brian offers.

So the Tates reunite, this time with more realistic expectations of life and each other. Erica is no longer trapped in her assumptions that she must listen to Brian because he is a just, objective moralist and must realize his and her own ideal of the perfect wife and mother of a perfect family. In an early scene, she had weakly let Brian talk her out of taking a part-time job by playing on her guilt, though even she recognized that his argument was shoddy (it might damage the children). Now she takes an interesting job and starts to let go of the children (which turns out to improve their behavior slightly). Having seen other possibilities, specifically life without Brian, she will be able to form independent views and defend them.

Sketched in Love and Friendship, developed in The Nowhere City, Real People, and The War between the Tates, Lurie's breaking marriage plot forces her heroine for the first time to examine the assumptions she has lived by. In terms of comic effect, we see the deflation of complacency, delightfully illuminating because the complacency is so high-level and sophisticated. In terms of character development, we see identity emerging as a result of breaking through constraints and facing truth.

Lurie uses surprising adulterous affairs not only to shock her protagonists out of their self-assurance but to explore the potentialities of her characters by mixing and matching them: Does prissy, repressed Katherine have it in her to accept Iz Einsam's open expression of feelings? Is snobbish, self-centered Vinnie Miner of Foreign Affairs capable of opening up to Chuck Mumpson's warmth? (Eighteenth-century women novelists did the same thing, less realistically, by supplying their heroines with five or six suitors.) Honey Hubbard in Only Children flirts with Dan Zimmern, who is more playful and sexually exciting than her stodgy workaholic husband; but in the end she prefers Bill's solid devotion to the casual exploitation that Dan would impose on any woman involved with him. Erica Tate is too conventional and success oriented to feel more than sympathy for Sandy, but her friend Danielle—less conventional and more angry at her sophisticated intellectual husband—can come to love the “pig pediatrician” Bernie Kotelchuk, though she takes care to settle the terms of their marriage beforehand to prevent misunderstandings produced by their different backgrounds. This process of considering possible men and settling for the one who is best for her indicates Lurie's realistically disenchanted view of marriage; she recognizes that every match is a compromise in which, at best, people find those who meet their most important needs.

She has a similarly disenchanted view of love, at least the romantic form; it is not an elevating or even an overwhelming passion in marriage or adultery. Lurie never loses sight of comic aspects, even in Love and Friendship, where she comes closest to presenting sexual passion as ecstasy. Early in their relationship, when Emily and Will are in a diner, Emily feels a marked pressure on her leg under the table; she feels flustered and guilty, knowing she should move her leg but somehow not doing so. How surprised she is when Will gets up and the pressure remains. Then she discovers a large crosspiece under the table.

In Only Children Lurie suggests that love may be both self-destructive and selfish; perhaps it is no more than urgent dependence, manifested as possessiveness by strong people like Bill, as propitiatory compliance by helpless ones like Dan's wife, Celia (252-53).⁹ Anna, the wisest of the adults, is repelled by the idea of “complete merging of two souls”: to know all another persons's thoughts and expect them to give themselves completely is enslavement. Celia, who thinks giving herself to “the right man” is beautiful, is pathetically exploited in her marriage (76).

On the other hand, in Foreign Affairs Lurie shows the unattractive consequences of not loving or being loved. Again, she uses an adulterous affair to open up possibilities to her heroine and make her question her values. The affair is literally adulterous only on Chuck's side, but considering the importance Vinnie attaches to culture, taste, and gentility, her relationship with Chuck, a crude, half-educated engineer, is as much a breach of cherished standards as were Katherine's and Janet's adulteries. Vinnie clings to her standards of elitism and self-control because they reassure her of superiority in a world that slights middle-aged single women. (At the same time that Lurie dissects Vinnie's single-minded pursuit of her own comfort and self-interest, she mocks the obtuseness of a world that expects “plain aging women” to be particularly self-effacing [4]). Vinnie has constructed a neat, superficially successful life for herself; but she is patronized by others, centered in herself, and dogged by self-pity, vividly personified as an imaginary dirty-white mongrel named Fido. Her first emotional response to Chuck is reluctantly to feel sorry for him, “perhaps even sorrier than she is for herself” (195); then she begins to appreciate his ingenuous friendliness and finally, as a result of their passionate affair, to recognize his worth.

Vinnie's first experience of mutual love frees her from her fear of emotional commitment and from the self-centeredness that cut her off from others and burdened her with Fido. Chuck's faith in her, produced simply by his ignorance of her social signals, forces her to try to live up to his image of her “as helpful and kindly” (240). At the beginning of the book, it appeared that Vinnie's life was as determined by her plainness as those of the other heroines were by their attractiveness; as they married without thought immediately after college and became dependent on their husbands, she developed a rigid and isolating self-sufficiency. As their identities are defined by their marriage, hers is by her career (10). (Plain men, less dependent on the approval of the opposite sex, are under less pressure than women like Vinnie to protect themselves by shrinking from emotional commitment.) Knowing Chuck makes Vinnie revise her standards and awakens her to her own capacities for joy and generous feeling. She resists the temptation to retaliate upon the daughter of a critic who has sneered at her; she puts herself to considerable inconvenience to help that daughter and her husband to reunite, even though these two young, beautiful, loved people might naturally evoke her envy. Her sophisticated friends would not have expected her to resist the temptation, but “Chuck Mumpson would take it for granted that she'd go” (373).

She is not, of course, totally transformed by her experience of love; when we last view her, she is accepting Fido as a permanent companion (but he is smaller than before). The same is true of Lurie's other protagonists, all of whom but Katherine return in the end to their husbands/life-styles. (We don't get enough detail on the new Katherine to know how radically she may have changed.) In every case, the lover's attractiveness to the heroine is outweighed by his deficiency in qualities essential to her. Lurie is too realistic not to recognize that, by and large, people's basic character and values are sufficiently formed by their late twenties to make total transformation impossible. But intelligent people can be brought to examine attitudes that they had unthinkingly developed and to recognize elements in themselves that they had repressed. Vinnie, Emily, Janet, Erica, and even Honey move toward examining their previously unexamined lives, a movement that is essential to their development as human beings even if not outwardly conspicuous.

Such an examination is particularly significant for women, because of the traditional pressure on them to accept rather than to question. A patriarchal society defines women's roles in terms of service to others and convinces them that not only their virtue but their fulfillment lies in putting other people's needs before their own, regardless of how those others behave. Thomas Gisborne, an eighteenth-century conduct-book writer, blandly asserted that women are naturally qualified by Providence to adapt happily to the wishes of those around them.¹⁰ The feminine mystique that shaped the Lurie heroine's attitudes (and has not yet been dissipated by women's liberation) assumes that highly educated women can find fulfillment in caring for small children and promoting their husbands' careers and, moreover, that this job is so easy that it should be accomplished without strain. The less women examine these propositions, the more convenient for society. In the typical Lurie novel, a woman who has always prided herself on being reasonable and controlled suddenly finds herself overwhelmed by sexual passion. But her sexual awakening is less important than her realization that her ideals of rationality and self-control had been defined by patriarchal society and might be replaced by more genuine ones, based on experience and independent thought.

The pressure on women to conform to the status quo has tended to make them cautious and fearful of change. Erica's reaction is typical. “Whenever something sudden happens, her first impulse is to withdraw, consider the situation, regroup her forces” (335). Women are prone to accept their lives as set and may deny problems so as to avoid disbalancing a stable situation. This keeps them back, as has been pointed out by Donna Shalala, the former president of Hunter College. Going on to an even more prestigious position, she shocked her audience by remarking that women should always be prepared to move on. Most women, on the contrary, resist thinking about a major change unless prodded by some outside force such as Lurie provides for her characters. Her women are pushed into unfamiliar situations and end up enjoying them. In ironic contrast, her men, who seek change with virile adventurousness, are discomfited by it. Paul is as ridiculous in disreputable disguise at a beatnik coffeehouse as Brian is at the student pot-party to which Wendy drags him (NC [The Nowhere City], chap. 11; WT chap. 14). It is middle-aged Vinnie who grows and changes in Foreign Affairs, while young Fred comes out from his upsetting affair much as he went into it.

Women's traditional role in the family has sensitized them to other people's needs and led them to attach high importance to maintaining relationships.¹¹ This concern has strong positive effects (explored by Belenky, by Carol Gilligan in In a Different Voice, and others), but it can also impede women's development of individual selfhood, as it makes their concept of self-worth depend on the behavior of other people. Erica expresses this problem when she complains “that identity is at the mercy of circumstances, of other people's actions. Brian, by committing casual adultery, had turned Erica into the typical wife of a casually unfaithful husband: jealous and shrewish and unforgiving—and also, since she had been so easily deceived, dumb and insensitive. Her children, by becoming ill-mannered adolescents, had turned her into an incompetent and unsympathetic mother” (58).¹² Enmeshed in their family, women find it particularly difficult to define individual goals and to move resolutely toward them. By separating a woman from her accustomed context of family relationships, the adulterous affair gives her a chance to look at herself and her situation independently.

This concern with awakening her heroines to look critically at their lives is what makes Lurie a feminist author. It is true that doctrinaire feminists disapprove of her work¹³ and that she subjects their slogans to the same witty deflation she applies to other forms of cant. Nevertheless, her encouragement of radical questioning, symbolized by the respectable wife's trying out of adultery, is liberating. So, in a lighter way, is her deadly accurate rendition of the irritations and frustrations usual in marriage—obtusely self-centered husbands, ungrateful children for whose deficiencies their mother is made to feel responsible, an endless round of routine tasks, none of which are appreciated. It is true that Lurie's husbands also have cause for dissatisfaction—Katherine's perpetual sinus headaches balance Paul's unthinking self-indulgence—but the focus is on men's routine exploitation of women in marriage. Lurie brilliantly exposes the obtuseness of otherwise intelligent, sophisticated men toward their wives. They cannot see that their marriage is an unequal bargain and that their wives have needs comparable to their own. Though Brian shows no interest in Erica's problems, he expects her to listen sympathetically to his. He is aggrieved by his children's misbehavior and doubly aggrieved because Erica is failing to handle them; he does not think of their effect on Erica, who has to see so much more of them. When Emily fails to keep house properly, Holman does not try to find out what is wrong with her but merely reflects, “Women went through these emotional periods, in his experience, and in his experience the best way to deal with them was to get out of their way” (Love and Friendship 222). Lurie's adultery plot not only punishes these husbands as they deserve but highlights the husband's obliviousness to his wife's feelings and needs by contrasting it with the lover's attentiveness. The contrast is even sharper in the cases where the husband feels he is entitled to an extramarital affair because his wife is no longer giving him the devotion or excitement he considers his due.

Lurie has been criticized for exaggerating her characters and maintaining too great an emotional distance from them. Actually, these techniques are totally appropriate for an art that is comic as well as realistic, an art that (like Austen's) aims to deflate pretensions, expose rationalizations, and pinpoint incongruities. Moreover, Lurie is critical but not heartless. She makes us understand why her women are self-righteous and her men obtuse; we realize that these failings are society's fault as well as their own.

Notes

1. This would, of course, be unthinkable in an Austen novel. The only adulterous wife she includes, Maria Bertram Rushworth, is immediately banished from the world of Mansfield Park. Another adulteress, Colonel Brandon's dead sister-in-law, is only mentioned in retrospect in Sense and Sensibility. However, Austen evidently shared Lurie's doubts about marital bliss, since there are almost no examples of it within her novels, even though they culminate in happy marriages.

2. Frances Burney, Evelina (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), 388.

3. In this essay Alison Lurie's novels will be identified in the following way, and page numbers are given in parentheses in the text. Foreign Affairs (FA); Love and Friendship (LF); The Nowhere City (NC); Only Children (OC); Real People (RP); The War between the Tates (WT).

4. Sara Sanborn, review of The War between the Tates, by Alison Lurie, New York Times Book Review (July 28, 1974): 1.

5. Lurie, “Their Harvard,” quoted. Something about the Author, ed. Anne Commire (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1987), 46: 130.

6. Alison Lurie, “No One Asked Me to Write a Novel,” New York Times Book Review, June 6, 1982, 47.

7. Foreign Affairs follows a similar pattern, as I shall argue below, even though Vinnie is unmarried. The exceptions are Only Children, which centers on the child Mary Ann, and Imaginary Friends, with a male protagonist. However, Mary Ann's mother, Honey, gets considerable attention; she flirts with adultery and does some examining of herself and her marriage. And even in Imaginary Friends, the protagonist is forced by his strong attraction to a person radically different from himself to question the assumptions he has complacently taken for granted.

8. H. Porter Abbott, Diary Fiction: Writing as Action (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1984), 52.

9. Cf. Miranda Fenn's opinion: “The real life of romantic love, after its early flights, is nasty, brutish, and short. … Marriage is kinder, but it also lives on lies, little tame ones—one makes the best of the bargain” (LF, 212). Since Miranda has changed her name from Mary Ann, she may be the former Mary Ann Hubbard of Only Children.

10. Thomas Gisborne, An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (New York: Garland, 1974), 116.

11. Mary Field Belenky, et al., Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 46-47.

12. It seems inconsistent that the same patriarchal tradition that holds wives and mothers responsible for everything that goes wrong in the household and pities the poor husbands and children driven to misbehavior also ridicules husbands for failing to keep their wives faithful and obedient. The only constant is that women are blamed—whether for withholding goodness or for being so evil that they need to be controlled (and, simultaneously, so weak that a real man should be able to control them).

13. See, for example, Rachel Cowan's review “The Bore between the Tates,” Ms., Jan. 1975, 41-42.