SOURCE: Macpherson, Heidi Slettedahl. “Comic Constructions: Fictions of Mothering in Anne Tyler's Ladder of Years.” Southern Quarterly 39, no. 3 (spring 2001): 130-40.

Anne Tyler is a popular novelist, and even today, such a designation is more likely to warrant animosity than admiration in academic circles. Of the critical reviews or articles centered on Tyler, many are, indeed, critical—of her subject matter (the family), of her style (realism), of her narrative voice (wry, whimsical). Yet examination of Tyler's canon, and most specifically, of her 1995 novel Ladder of Years, reveals that such critical disregard is, in part, based on limited readings of her complexly comic novels. Tyler's twelve novels before Ladder of Years follow roughly the same trajectory, and her central concern—the war between flight and stasis—is evident in each of them. Thus when Tyler published Ladder of Years, in which protagonist Delia Grinstead “accidentally” abandons her nearly grown children and her health-worried husband, critics latched onto familiar Tylerian signals—wry comedy, a hopelessly inefficient yet lovable central female character, and an urge to give way to fantasy (while avoiding explicit sexual desire). In doing so, critics took up familiar opposing stances in relation to her work. Tyler is either considered heir to the American tradition of domestic realism, with the result that her work may well become part of the canon (as opposed to, say, the contemporary experimental writers whose postmodern extravagances will soon render their work dated and obsolete), or she is an enclosed, politically conservative novelist engaging in feminist backlash writing and promoting, through her realistic narrative, a dying style with no relevance to contemporary debates about narration or even reality.

Neither of these (exaggerated) critical stances actually reflects Tyler's position. Contemporary fiction, like Tyler's, which fails to embrace postmodernism wholeheartedly, is thus almost automatically seen as realist, despite obvious problems with that designation. Tyler's style is best described as a veneer of reality pasted onto fantastic situations gone awry, and her use of metafiction as well as fantasy effectively invalidates the realist tag. Moreover, her quirky, comic plots, far from relying on stock gender roles, actually unsettle gender politics precisely at the points where they seem to be upholding the patriarchal status quo. Few writers so faithfully delineate the position of the mother in contemporary fiction, nor explore the desire for escape from this role so openly. Tyler's stance on the family is a knowing stance, and what critics sometimes take for misplaced nostalgia is, in fact, an indication of Tyler's willingness to explore the fictions of the American family. In choosing such a “narrow” focus, Tyler is not, as some would have it, setting aside the politics of such a focus, but explicitly exploring them, and her style is a far cry from simple realism (if such a designation truly exists).

Tyler's main narrative focus is the family—and yet, as Mary F. Robertson so cogently expresses in her positive, influential essay on Tyler, “Medusa Points and Contact Points,” this is not the family of patriarchal harmony; it is a family constructed of misfits, outcasts, those that don't belong (or even those that shouldn't belong). Thus, while the family does occupy the most important part of Tyler's plots, such subject matter is not necessarily linked into the cosy depictions of settled patriarchy that critics sometimes assume. In fact, a Tyler family is a family that fragments. The attempt to reconstruct a family unit, an enduring Tyler motif, is a hopelessly doomed endeavor. Any construction of Mom, Dad, Dick and Jane is repeatedly and pointedly defined as a construction, and then promptly deflated. Made up of papier-mâché, it collapses and is rebuilt, collapses and is rebuilt again.

In Ladder of Years, Tyler's approach is the most overtly experimental of all of her novels. She incorporates fantasy explicitly, and uses metafiction to explore the ways in which fiction and “reality” combine to determine female identity. Tyler's use of the fantastical Bay Borough as a site for exploring Delia's fluid identity is perhaps the best example of her reworking of “realism.” Though Bay Borough does not exist in the same way that Baltimore exists in the novel, it retains enough of its position as “real” to seduce the reader into forgetting its status as fantasy, and the novel itself never calls out to remind the reader that she or he is reading (despite the intertextual references which litter the novel). People appear and disappear in the narrative; it is home to a host of unlikely runaways; time itself is warped in the text, with the past and present mixing almost randomly; it is both “vacation” and “real life,” yet the distinction is difficult even for the protagonist to keep straight. Delia herself asks, “When would the things she had [in Bay Borough] become her real things?” (215), and significantly is unable to determine when “her vacation ended and her real life [had] begun” (252). These factors belie the stance that what Tyler writes is simple, straightforward fiction. Dealing with contemporary family issues though she does, Tyler cannot, in Ladder of Years, be truthfully represented as a realist; too much of the fantastic is bound up in Delia's reinvention of herself. It is to her credit that Tyler is able to incorporate the fantastic so subtly.

Bay Borough is intriguingly framed by images of time travel and dreams, and a clear sense of construction is implicit in the narrative, as Delia constructs herself, and is reconstructed by Bay Borough denizens. Delia shrugs off her married title, reinvents herself as spinster woman, and finds herself a job outside the home for the first time in her adult life not long after she enters the town.¹ Absurdly, she is barely out of her bathing suit—evidence of her spontaneous shrugging off of family life—when she makes the momentous decision to live in a boarding house and become “Miss” Grinstead.

Delia's escape from her family (and thus its assumptions about her) is nominally set in motion by an argument with her husband, but the real impetus seems to be Delia's desire to enact a role outside the one placed on her by her family. A chance supermarket encounter with Adrian Bly-Brice leads her to assume the role of his girlfriend in order to antagonize his estranged wife, and this temporary play-acting in some ways acts as a rehearsal for Delia's subsequent reinvention of herself. As the editor of a quarterly magazine devoted to the bizarre subject of time travel, Bly-Brice acts as the agent who introduces Delia to the two necessary components of her escape—character realignment and time travel. Delia is unsure of how to react to his magazine, wondering, “was this whole publication a joke, or was it for real?” (49). The question is set aside, and explicit references to time travel only resurface at the end of the novel, when Delia looks back on her sojourn in Bay Borough and remarks, “It had all been a time trip … a time trip that worked” (326). Yet, threaded throughout the narrative are references to earlier decades, most frequently the 1940s and 1950s, and Delia's journey to Bay Borough does indeed seem to be a trip to a nostalgic past.

Peter Kemp calls Bay Borough “a cosy time-warp encapsulation of an earlier, homelier America” (9). However, references to contemporary issues riddle the novel, including a battered women's shelter, lone parenthood, and computerspeak, rendering it impossible to view Delia's time in Bay Borough as a wholesale removal to an earlier era. Indeed, the idea of warped time is particularly significant, in that elements of the past and present converge uncomfortably in Bay Borough. A good example of this convergence is apparent to Delia as she enters the town:

Clearly, modern times had overtaken the town. Buildings that must have been standing for a century—the bricks worn down like old pencil erasers, the clapboards gently rubbed to gray wood—now held the Wild Applause Video Shop, Tricia's House of Hair, and a Potpourri Palace.

(87)

Later, after Delia has officially renamed herself “Miss” Grinstead, the town's appearance shifts again: “It looked out of date, somehow. The buildings were so faded they seemed not colored but hand tinted, like an antique photograph” (120). Even Delia's new home reflects confusion over time. At first, she rents a room in an old-fashioned boarding house which sports a 1950s kitchen. Yet the old-fashioned kitchen features in only one scene—a contemporary Thanksgiving which satirically involves a gathering of strangers and a catered meal (152).

The various examples of such convergence are overwhelming in number as well as description. Suffice it to say that this pattern of instability is consistently apparent, and Bay Borough is a town figured somewhere between dream and reality. Brooke Allen suggests that the town is “a dreamscape just as Miss Grinstead herself is not a person but a fantasy of Delia's” (33). Indeed, the repeated references to both dreams and temporal disruption suggest that Delia's construction of Bay Borough is a fluid one. This is strikingly apparent in a passage where the town celebrates its own begetting. The celebration of “Bay Day” occurs wrapped in an all-encompassing fog which suggests its unreality. Indeed, the fog acts as a pointer to the town's position as incompletely definable. The passage is characterized by images of flux and replacement, and is moreover framed by dream imagery which suggests its unreality. The passage preceding it ends with Delia in bed, crying softly and listening as the children in the next house drop off to sleep (129), while the passage placed directly after the Bay Day fog scene is an account of the dreams of loss that Delia has herself (133-34).

The inability to position Bay Borough firmly and Delia's undefined relationship to it are points which are reinforced throughout the text. Even Delia is perplexed by her relationship to the town: “Or maybe she wasn't gone; this whole experience had been so dreamlike. Maybe she was still moving through her previous life the same as always, and the Delia here in Bay Borough had somehow just split off from the original” (100). This sense of moving through her life “the same as always” acts as a foreshadowing of her eventual reinscription into the role of mother, however that is defined.

Tyler's exploration of gendered identity points to the fact that what seems to be one thing, may actually be something else. Delia Grinstead, homemaker, mother of three, youngest daughter of a beloved patriarch, subconsciously understands that these “roles” do not contain her true identity—so she sets out to create another one. Yet in the process, she comes to understand that her attempt to step outside of the roles placed on her by her family entails more than simply re-naming herself, or inventing herself anew. It is a process which has implications beyond her, and reaches out into the community that she has, temporarily, adopted. This emphasis on female identity as constructed—and therefore as possibly reconstructed—cannot help but invoke a feminist reading.

Gayle Greene rightfully notes that “to write about ‘women's issues’ is not necessarily to address them from a feminist perspective” (2), thus it is not inevitable that Tyler's examination of gender roles is feminist. Indeed, it would be disingenuous to suggest that Tyler's relationship to feminism is unambiguous, or that feminist critics generally praise Tyler's depictions of gender roles; many, if not most, do not. Alice Hall Petry, for example, declares that Tyler's position is not only anti-feminist, but almost apocalyptically infectious,² while Greene regrets Tyler's “resignation to things as they are” (200). A literal-minded reading of Ladder of Years, which ends with what might be seen as a dispiriting return to the family home, initially seems evidence of such resignation. Yet Tyler is deflating this romantic “happy ending,” and a certain sense of irony is apparent here, if one cares to look beyond the seemingly negative closure of the text. Moreover, Tyler's exploration of gender roles—and her examination of the difficulties of stepping outside them—deserve critical attention even if—or precisely because—the resolutions to her texts suggest capitulation. Through her examination of mothering, Tyler explores shifting representations of women, and the shifting reality that surrounds them. If she appears to provide a less-than-feminist answer, then surely this is precisely the challenge that critics must explore.

Appearances can, however, be deceptive. For example, it can appear that a popular novelist has nothing to say to a literary critic. Tyler's lack of ostentatious experimentation masks her less obvious manipulations, and her gentle narrative voice relieves her comedy of any satirical sting. It is this gentleness which may, in part, have deflated her critical appeal. As Charlotte Templin reveals, it is possible that Tyler would be “rated even higher by academics if her comic art resembled more closely the ironic and verbally complex comedy of Thomas Pynchon, for example” (193). Not only does she use the wrong kind of comedy, but she writes humorously about the wrong things, or so it would appear. If one considers Tyler's comic method of dealing with questions of social roles, for example, it is easy to see how her work might have been overlooked by critics intent on discovering women writers with something more overtly political to say.

Indeed, just when feminist consciousness-raising fiction of the 1970s explored the role of the mother in polemical texts which focused on abused, misunderstood, or angry women, Tyler created Charlotte Emory of Earthly Possessions, who begins her first-person narrative with the words, “The marriage wasn't going well and I decided to leave my husband. I went to the bank to get cash for the trip” (5). Already the tone is lighter here than might be expected, given the subject matter (indeed, one critic dismissed Earthly Possessions as just “another runaway housewife novel” [Shelton 857] which, if nothing else, suggests the critical milieu at the time). Anatole Broyard argues that Charlotte can be reduced to “a woman on the run from boredom toward an empty ambiguity” (12), and critics in general find the return to the home evidence that Charlotte's trip need not have begun. Here Tyler's comic narrative voice obscures, it seems, the deeply ambivalent portrait of American domestic life which the novel traces.

In another of her 1970s novels, Tyler creates Elizabeth Abbott of The Clock Winder. Elizabeth is first introduced as “a tall girl in dungarees” (7) who seems to have no “fixed destinations” in her life (8). By the end of the novel, Elizabeth is transformed into Gillespie Emerson, mother of two, the family handyman. Tyler's deliberate use of the seemingly sex-exclusive “man” here is intriguing and suggests that Tyler's working through of gender roles is more complex than is generally assumed. Indeed, the final images of Elizabeth/Gillespie are disruptive, as handyman and mother clash. She is still in dungarees, but her youngest child is shown as “clinging like a barnacle” (281), effectively cutting off her handiness. Though critics have suggested that this resolution is a happy one, in interviews, Tyler herself suggests the opposite.

This emphasis on Tyler's so-called “happy endings” may, in part, perhaps, be traced back to the marketing strategy used to sell Tyler's books before she received her Pulitzer Prize. In the back of the 1983 Berkley paperback edition of The Clock Winder, for example, there is a quotation from People Magazine. “To read a novel by Anne Tyler is to fall in love!” Over the page, her novels are listed along with other “bestselling” Berkley paperbacks, the majority of which appear to be romance novels. Representative titles include Savannah, Dreams Are Not Enough, To See Your Face Again, and Seasons of the Heart.³ There is even an advertisement for Priscilla Presley's Elvis and Me. While the People quote remains in the Berkley editions of her work after 1988, the overt association with romance novels fades. More emphasis is placed on her “whimsical unpredictability” and her appeal to a wide audience.

Tyler seems to cultivate such an audience by regularly writing short stories for women's magazines, one of the most underrated of all venues for literary expression. She is certainly aware of critical disapproval for such texts, and incorporates an (ironic?) indictment of them in Ladder of Years. Delia Grinstead is initially presented as a consumer of romance books (though she intriguingly moves to more “serious” novels upon her escape from the family). Her choice of reading material is not only ridiculed by members of her family, but also seems implicated in her outlook on married life, though it is difficult to tell just how much irony is being employed in this characterization. The boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl-back plot outline is an implicit one in Ladder of Years, and while the novel somewhat follows this trajectory, its unsatisfying resolution, and the failure of the men in the novel to conform to their expected roles, renders the romance frame impotent by the end. Tyler's parody of romance narratives is more subtle than, say, Margaret Atwood's in Lady Oracle, but it is nonetheless present, alongside another parody—that of the novel of self-discovery in which a woman leaves home in order to find herself. Tyler creates a protagonist weaned on the plots of romance novels and surrounded by the cultural baggage of fantasy. Tyler delineates a plot of replication which looks back to the plots of 1970s feminist texts, nods to Shakespeare, and invokes a fairytale structure which it then dismantles.

The novel begins with a newspaper clipping, recording Delia's disappearance. The account is deliberately vague in its description of Delia and its bemused tone sets the reader up for another comic novel. Delia herself does not read the newspaper clipping until much later, so the reader knows, even more clearly than Delia does, that her family's perceptions of her are vague at best, and completely false at worst. What's more, by the time Delia has access to this information, she has already transformed herself anyway, dropping her married title in favor of “Miss” and presenting herself as a lone spinster, traveling light. While Delia believes that, having shaken off her family, she has a free hand in selecting the mask she will wear and the role she will play, she soon learns, disconcertingly, that the community which she has adopted, Bay Borough, has also adopted her, and in the process, transformed her image to suit their needs. Thus, her new identity is circumscribed, if not invented, by the community to which she is drawn. Through Delia's changing characterization, Tyler addresses issues of autonomy and femaleness in relation to the community, a body which itself participates in the invention of character as Delia steps (at least temporarily) outside of the role of mother. The process of her character formation moves her from the role of “kittenish” woman (her family's version) to that of independent spinster (her own version), mystery woman (Bay Borough's version), and returning mother.

In part, this process is infected by the novels that she reads, lending a metafictional element to the novel. The reader cannot help but be aware of other texts when reading Ladder of Years. Apart from the explicitly named novels that Delia reads, the novel points to Shakespeare's King Lear (Delia, short for Cordelia, is the youngest of three daughters, and the favorite), as well as numerous fairy tales in which women act as prizes for the handsome hero to claim. These plots have to be abandoned if Delia is to discover anything “real” in her sojourn to the fantastical Bay Borough, where she divests herself of the mantle of motherhood only to find it thrust back on her once again, albeit in a slightly different form.

“If the feminine mystique was the ‘problem that had no name’ for unliberated women,” Ann Dally suggests, “one might say that motherhood is the problem that cannot be faced by modern feminists” (179). Indeed, it has become a commonplace that in the battle for women's rights, mothers themselves were sidelined if not explicitly lined up with “the enemy.” While this portrait of early feminism is skewed at best, and represents a version of feminism that was decidedly in the minority and short-lived at that, this portrait has been sustained through media inventions of feminists as women who wish to smash the family (rather than, more appropriately, as women and men who wish, inter alia, to reconfigure the nuclear family in ways that shift the balance of power to a more egalitarian mode). Tyler's choice to use an abandoning mother as a (comic) protagonist thus speaks volumes. Delia is no political feminist, overtly demanding change in the family and relying on sustained intellectual arguments to get her message across. Indeed, this can be seen as one of the strengths of the novel, for, as Rosie Jackson notes, “If the myth of a mother leaving has always tended to invite a negative response, a new mixing of her motives with a crude version of feminism now fixes prejudice even more firmly against her” (15-16).⁴ Tyler's delineation of Ellie Miller, another abandoning mother who leaves her son to pursue a career as a television weather presenter, rests on this assertion of crude feminism (at least in the eyes of Bay Borough's inhabitants). Ellie's own explanation of her departure from the family is given short shrift by her former neighbors, none of whom are “impressed in the slightest” (167) by Ellie's justification of her actions. Nor, it appears, is Delia herself, who asks, without irony, “What kind of woman entrusted her son to a stranger?” (199). Ellie's brush with death and her unhappiness in marriage are not seen as motive enough to leave the family home; she thus becomes an “abandoning mother,” despite the fact that she merely occupies the position of noncustodial parent. This “abandonment” is hardly on the scale with Delia's own. If Ellie's behavior is “scandalous,” as Delia suggests it is, then what do we make of her own? She left without warning, has not maintained contact with her children, and for the most part does not even acknowledge that she has children; they are not part of her new script.

One must step back from the construction of Ellie as a “bad mother” because Delia, who is surely a “good mother” since she is our heroine, is actively constructing Ellie in opposition to herself, even though they inhabit the same space. Jackson suggests that because a mother is always “linked into, defined by, her relationality to her child,” then “a mother who leaves becomes a kind of grammatical nonsense” (45). Indeed, Tyler's text also seems to make this point, as mothers are judged to be no longer motherly if they are not in constant contact with their offspring—even by Delia, abandoning mother herself. Rather than an affirmation of anti-feminism, this knee-jerk reaction points to the social construction of motherhood and the difficulties of redefining that role. Indeed, one of the things that is particularly intriguing about Bay Borough's temporal instability is the way in which, despite cosmetic differences, the mothering position seems fixed. In this blended society, women from a variety of backgrounds can be accepted as mothers: some are unwed, one raises a child in a retirement home, and one of Delia's companions is considered both as a girl-next-door figure and as a mother who isn't quite sure who her baby's father is. Clearly, who occupies the position of mother is not important. This fact suggests a welcome openness towards nontraditional families. However, the idea of a “good” mother is not so easily transformed. The key to this “goodness” lies primarily in attentive, loving presence, and the key to “badness” lies in neglecting family ties.

Delia's intriguing immunity from the town's censure for being an abandoning mother is never fully explained; this gap suggests, as powerfully as the images of flux and warped time do, that Delia is in the realm of the fantastic. While others are “punished” for abandoning motherhood, she is allowed to inhabit this position again—significantly, by replacing Ellie Miller. Although Delia initially resists personal ties, maintaining an almost sterile life as the uncomplicated Miss Grinstead, boarding house tenant, and prim secretary for the town lawyer, she is unable to retain her distance. By allowing the community to contribute to the construction of her identity, Delia evolves into the mothering figure she had sought to deny. Despite recognizing the dangers, she answers an advertisement to be a “live in woman” (the job title itself is revealing) and thus effectively replaces the “deficient” or “bad” mother Ellie. Delia's first reaction to the job advertisement is one of disbelief: “You can't expect a mere hireling to serve as a genuine mother” (160), she huffs. The reader is implicitly reminded that mothers are not paid for their attentions, and Delia's immediate rejection of the idea of a live-in woman as a perfectly acceptable substitute for a mother reveals her own complicity in the social construction of mothering. She deliberately throws away the newspaper that contains the advertisement, as if a simple mental rejection of the idea is not enough.

However, she almost immediately changes her mind: “Actually … a hireling would in some ways be better than a mother—less emotionally ensnarled, less likely to cause damage. Certainly less like to suffer damage herself” (160). In Ladder of Years, Tyler confronts directly and obliquely the “problem” of motherhood in a patriarchal culture by providing a portrait of a woman who forsakes this role, only to find herself wrapped up in family life in other guises. As Karen Gainey maintains, Tyler's fictions reveal that “total escape from patriarchal culture is impossible—and that gendered positions make it particularly hard for women to find a way out” (210). Indeed, rather than reifying these positions, or accepting them uncritically, Tyler actually presents desire for release coupled with the recognition that release is not always possible.

Tyler's fictions have always engaged with notions of what constitutes a mother, or a mothering position, and these portraits are fluid, rather than fixed. For example, she constructs maternal and nurturing characters who thrive in their roles as mothers. (Mary Tell of Celestial Navigations is probably the best example of a character who positively revels in the position of mother.) However, Tyler also constructs female characters who long to step outside of their female roles, or who consciously “play” the role society has set for them. Stanley Cohen and Laurie Taylor, sociologists who study the role of escape in everyday life, suggest that the playing of roles can, in fact, be a means of attempting to escape their significance (53); by self-consciously distancing oneself from the roles one plays (that is, by seeing them only as roles, and not as real), it is possible to imagine that one has escaped the necessity of taking the roles seriously. However, there are problems with this supposition, as Cohen and Taylor point out:

Role distancing even at—and perhaps especially at—the meta-level maintains an essentially conservative relationship between the individual and the social fabric. By asserting that our part in it is something more than is apparent, our state of consciousness is frozen or at least can only move backwards in increasingly complicated spirals of awareness, awareness about awareness, distance and distance from distance.

(58)

Tyler incorporates this problematic meta-awareness in Ladder of Years. When Delia stands outside of herself to view Bay Borough, she sees the town's inhabitants as performing roles—and clearly outdated ones at that: “The women walking home with their grocery bags seemed unknowingly ironic, like those plastic-faced, smiling housewives in kitchen-appliance ads from the fifties” (234). Instead of pursuing the analogy, Delia merely shrugs it off, uncomfortable that she could view “happy” Bay Borough in this way, and unwilling to alter her construction of Bay Borough to incorporate this new information.

The reality which Delia constructs initially seems little different from the type constructed by early feminist fiction which depicted escape from the domestic sphere. This fiction (which may have contributed to feminism's seeming anti-motherhood stance) often rested on a notion of rejecting motherhood. Novels such as Joan Barfoot's Gaining Ground explicitly proclaimed that it was only through forsaking motherhood that a woman could gain a sense of self. Barfoot's protagonist escapes from Canadian suburbia into the pseudo-wilderness of the countryside. She abandons husband, children, and all social ties, discovering her true feminine nature only while involved in the cyclical seasons of tending her garden. Although her family and her neighbors deem her action mad, the narrative makes clear that this choice of escape is a positive one, if not a necessary one. Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle, which explicitly foregrounds not only physical escapes, but also imaginative escapes into romance fiction, primarily examines the escape from the mother, figured as a three-headed monster. Atwood's protagonist, Joan Foster, is significantly childless, and thus able to escape more easily (and more comically) than Barfoot's Abra.

Novels such as these have come under the rubric “feminist novels of self-discovery.” Rita Felski argues that in these novels “the primary obligation for women is a recovery of a repressed identity and a consequent refusal of social and communal responsibilities which do not accord with internal desires” (135). Delia attempts to refuse these community and social roles, but ends up replicating them all over again. Her journey is not so much circular as shaped like a Möbius strip, that infamous one-sided object. She moves out of those roles, only to find those roles in a different landscape, surrounded by different people; the path away merges into the original path, though both sides seem to have been traversed. One can view this recognition conservatively, as a reinforcement of the status quo and thus patriarchal positionings of gender roles, or as a mature recognition that stepping outside of gender roles is not as easy as leaving one's family, if one still intends to live within society itself.

This stance is challenging for a feminist reader more familiar with texts which assert that identity is constructed through escaping family and patriarchy and negotiating a space outside these institutions. Ladder of Years suggests that the effects of socialization are more pervasive than that, and mirrors Marianne Hirsh's claim that “[t]o posit, even tentatively, a space outside of ideology and patriarchy is to support and participate in that very ideology, rather than to attempt to undermine it” (145). Just as Tyler, by having Delia abandon romance novels in favor of “serious” literature in order to signal her identity split, still manages to keep the romance narrative in the background, so she reminds the reader about novels of self-discovery. Readers familiar with such texts will recognize a pattern as strongly as a habitual romance reader will recognize that when boy-loses-girl, he'll eventually get her back. What is striking about what Tyler does in Ladder of Years is that she breaks both patterns. If the romance ends with the heroine in the romantic hero's arms, the novel of self-discovery generally ends with the heroine becoming heroic by learning to live alone, or by successfully breaking out of the patterns society dictates for her. Ladder of Year's problematic ending, which has Delia return home to Baltimore and abandon her pseudo-family and potential lover in Bay Borough, contains neither promised conclusion.

Delia's attempt to reconstruct a family unit—significantly, not a desire formally acknowledged and one she even denies—starts to break down as the line between the family that she works for and her own family begins to blur. Obviously, this acquisition of a “new” family suggests parodic parallels with contemporary experience. Delia's initial reaction, “It was so easy to fall back into being someone's mother!” (172), suggests that she initially accepts this new family—at least until her young charge Noah turns into an adolescent. Delia's subsequent unease is heightened by her desire for and (nominal) physical expression with her employer, Joel Miller, after which Delia retreats.

While Delia has no intention of fleeing, flee she does—back to the reality of Baltimore and to her position as “real” rather than “surrogate” mother. In keeping with the tone of the narrative, two conflicting impulses reign over Tyler's ending. While there is a certain amount of regret that Delia does not stride away from the whole confused affair, there is also a recognition that there is nowhere else for her to go. She has attempted a character realignment and found that, for one thing, society would not allow it. Furthermore, she realizes that she cannot be entirely free from her past—hence the images of time convergence, time travel, and incessant replication. It is no coincidence that, on the first evening that Delia comes back home, her son Ramsay tells her the plot of the contemporary film Groundhog Day, in which the main character is trapped in a single day until he plays it right (289). In Ladder of Years, Delia learns that replication is possible, perhaps even desirable to point out the flaws in particular ways of thinking; however, it is not and cannot be a way forward.

If Delia's return home is ultimately unsatisfying, the alternative—returning to Bay Borough—is no more satisfying. A return would not signal a rejection of the patriarchal family, since Delia's position as live-in woman has increasingly become the emotionally involved one of stand-in wife and mother. Yet the ending of the novel remains problematic, especially for a feminist reader. Allen mistakenly suggests that Tyler creates a happy ending (34), but this seems to me to be reading against the novel's trajectory; the romantic conclusion is abandoned as unworkable at least three times in the novel: when Delia gives up reading romances, when she leaves Joel Miller, and when she accepts her husband's inability to fulfil the role of romantic hero.

If the romance frame is broken, so too is the frame of self-discovery, the implications of which are tremendous for critics who deny Tyler's engagement with gender politics. By revealing that Delia's difficulty with securing a sense of self is not confined to the moment she leaves her family, Tyler provides an in-depth analysis of woman's place in society and subtly criticizes facile accounts of shrugging off one's past. Joseph Voelker writes in relation to Earthly Possessions but equally applicable here, “to empty oneself … is merely to provide a cleaner slate on which the world will insist it be recorded” (8). Partly as a result of this, Delia evolves into a mothering figure despite her insistence on the title of Miss and her declaration of independence and distance.

Delia becomes dislocated in time and space, yet remains firmly fixed in the very position she seeks to deny—that of middle-aged mother. The novel enacts repetitions and time jumps in a way that cannot be firmly located in the cozy cul-de-sac so often assigned to Tyler's fictions. My feminist reading rescues this fantastic narrative from the constricting label of realism, allows the novel's experimentations to receive the attention they deserve, and engages with rather than denies Tyler's complex gender politics. Tyler presents an ending which may disappoint a feminist reader, and yet, this very upsetting of the conclusion a feminist reader might expect challenges her to re-examine the utopian feminism of the 1970s which suggested that social change would be unproblematic. In this way, Tyler “writes beyond the ending” of a feminist text, and challenges her readers to engage with the issues that she problematizes.

Notes

1. Although Delia worked both for her father and for her husband as a receptionist for the family medical practice, this position is not recognized as a profession. Furthermore, it is significantly sited within the family home, thus compromising any attempt to see it as work outside the home.

2. In “Tyler and Feminism,” Petry writes, “What will happen when a new generation of American novelists, raised in that era when feminism was taken for granted, attempts to represent fictionally the status of the American woman? Lacking an experiential point of comparison, will they simply revert to earlier, more sentimental or farcical renderings of women as second-class citizens—the kind of reversion that happens so often when a once-controversial movement is absorbed into the normal rhythms of life, or—worse—when backlash becomes so politically correct that to take a giant step in reverse is suddenly deemed worthy of applause?” (41-42). Petry sees Tyler's work as “increasingly” antifeminist (41) and notes that in 1972, Tyler indicated an aversion to novels of women's liberation (Petry 33). Given the passage of time, it is problematic to assume that this early statement represents Tyler's feelings today. Furthermore, an aversion to “women's lib” novels does not necessarily signal an aversion to feminism.

3. The authors of the books mentioned are, respectively, Eugenia Price, Jacqueline Briskin, Eugenia Price, and Cynthia Freeman.

4. This may seem a strange comment to make, as I myself proclaim a feminist stance. My point here is not that Delia shouldn't be a feminist, but that Ellie is seen as evil in part because, it seems, she is (at least in the eyes of Bay Borough, if not necessarily in the eyes of the reader). Delia is spared this censure, and this is vital. Tyler here is making an important point, one that some feminists, who view Tyler as submitting to conservative family values, have failed to recognize. While a recognition of feminism might help Delia articulate her desires (significantly, she is surprised to be questioned about her motives and cannot, initially, light on a reason for abandoning her family), a strict allegiance to a feminist narrative might end up alienating her in this new, decidedly ahistorical and unpoliticized town. The discontent of the ignored and almost superfluous mother cannot be neatly placed in a box called “feminism.”

Works Cited

Allen, Brooke. “Anne Tyler in Mid-Course.” New Criterion 13.9 (1995): 27-34.

Atwood, Margaret. Lady Oracle. 1976. London: Virago, 1992.

Barfoot, Joan. Gaining Ground. 1978. [First published as Abra.] London: Women's P, 1992.

Broyard, Anatole. “One Critic's Fiction: Tyler, Tracy and Wakefield.” Rev. of Earthly Possessions, by Anne Tyler. New York Times Book Review 8 May 1977: 12.

Cohen, Stanley, and Laurie Taylor. Escape Attempts: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Everyday Life. 1976. London: Routledge, 1992.

Dally, Ann. Inventing Motherhood: The Consequences of an Ideal. London: Burnett Books, 1982.

Felski, Rita. “The Novel of Self-Discovery: A Necessary Fiction?” Southern Review 19.2 (1986): 131-48.

Gainey, Karen Fern Wilkes. “Subverting the Symbolic: The Semiotic Fictions of Anne Tyler, Jayne Anne Phillips, Bobbie Ann Mason and Grace Paley.” Diss. U of Tulsa, 1990.

Greene, Gayle. Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.

Hirsh, Marianne. The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.

Jackson, Rosie. Mothers Who Leave: Behind the Myth of Women Without Their Children. London: Pandora, 1994.

Kemp, Peter. “A Change of Life.” Rev. of Ladder of Years, by Anne Tyler. Sunday Times 7 May 1995: sec. 7: 9.

Petry, Alice Hall. “Tyler and Feminism.” In Salwak 33-42.

Robertson, Mary F. “Anne Tyler: Medusa Points and Contact Points.” Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies. Eds. Catherine Rainwater and William J. Scheick. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1985. 119-42.

Salwak, Dale, ed. Anne Tyler as Novelist. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1994.

Shelton, Frank W. “The Necessary Balance: Distance and Sympathy in the Novels of Anne Tyler.” Southern Review 20.4 (1984): 851-60.

Templin, Charlotte. “Tyler's Literary Reputation.” In Salwak 175-96.

Tyler, Anne. The Accidental Tourist. 1985. New York: Berkley, 1986.

———. Celestial Navigation. 1974. London: Pan, 1990.

———. The Clock Winder. 1972. New York: Berkley, 1983.

———. Earthly Possessions. 1977. New York: Berkley, 1984.

———. Ladder of Years. London: Chatto and Windus, 1995.

Voelker, Joseph C. Art and the Accidental in Anne Tyler. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1989.