SOURCE: Jones, Paul Christian. “A Re-Awakening: Anne Tyler's Postfeminist Edna Pontellier in Ladder of Years.” Critique 44, no. 3 (spring 2003): 271-83.

Following the 1995 publication of Anne Tyler's Ladder of Years, familiar comments about the author's much-debated stance on feminist issues once again appeared in book reviews. For example, in the Yale Review, Lorrie Moore described the Baltimore of Tyler's novel as “a land and time unto itself, untouched by such things as feminism […] or politics of any kind” (141). Brooke Allen, in the New Criterion, lamented that Tyler's characters “seem eerily untouched by any of the revolutions, be they sexual or feminist, of the last forty years.” Additionally, Allen complained, “Not only do none of Tyler's wives see themselves as feminists, they apparently do not even acknowledge that such a creature exists” (33). Similar observations have greeted the debuts of many of Tyler's novels since the 1970s, when her negative reviews of a number of feminist works and her published remarks about novels by “liberated” women—“I hate 'em all”—unsurprisingly earned her the reputation of being unsupportive of feminist concerns (Ridley 23).¹

Because Tyler has not publicly addressed those criticisms of her work and continues to focus her fictions on female characters who seem unaware that “there might be any alternative to conventional marriage” (Allen 33), it has been easy for critics, as Heidi Macpherson has noted, to construct Tyler as “an enclosed, politically conservative novelist engaging in feminist backlash writing” (130). However, in the last decade or so, a number of scholars have re-examined Tyler's body of work to explore the author's complicated position in the landscape of contemporary feminism. One of the most insightful of these studies, by novelist Doris Betts, concurs, even if ironically, with Tyler's strongest critics, admitting that “Tyler's women often collaborate with the chauvinist enemy […] by staying married” and noting that “her heroines are seldom angry enough to star in the average Women's Studies syllabus” (3). Yet Betts is unwilling to label Tyler as antifeminist and instead characterizes the author's feminism as a “less dramatic sort” in which women “have an abyss running right through their own backyards and still hang out the laundry” (13). By this, Betts means that Tyler's women seldom “light out for the territory with Huck Finn,” rather, they function and sometimes even blossom amid stifling environs (12).

Because of the tendency of Tyler's characters to endure rather than to revolt, Betts can write, “No rebellious Nora goes slamming out of her doll's house in [Tyler's] conclusions; no woman is swimming out to where horizon meets sea or going mad from seeing creatures swarm inside her yellow wallpaper” (11). That comparison to work by Henrik Ibsen, Kate Chopin, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a useful one, one that I pursue further in this article, because consideration of why readers do not perceive Tyler's female characters in the vein of Ibsen's Nora Helmer, Gilman's narrator, or, most important, Chopin's Edna Pontellier is necessary for a clearer understanding of Tyler's feminism or alleged lack thereof. Specifically, I argue in this essay that reading Tyler's novel Ladder of Years alongside Chopin's The Awakening, one of the early, landmark feminist texts, reveals Tyler's book to be engaged in a “postfeminist” revision of Chopin's text, one that posits a feminist trajectory for women that does not necessitate a complete flight from the domestic sphere.

Initially, one must acknowledge that Tyler has never placed herself in the tradition of writers such as Kate Chopin or any of her “liberated” devotees, the female authors of 1960s and 1970s fiction, whom Tyler calls “really strident, bitter, look-what-men-have-done-to-us women writers.” In an interview with Alice Hall Petry, she states, “Certainly I don't hate liberated women as such; I assume I'm one myself, if you can call someone liberated who was never imprisoned” (Understanding 18-19). The position Tyler takes in that statement and throughout her fiction might be characteristic of what some critics have dubbed “postfeminism,” a movement, as portrayed by Gayle Greene, that “hardly acknowledges the world, let alone challenges it,” a movement toward the “privatization and depoliticization of [women's] concerns, the sentimentalization of the family, the resignation to things as they are” (200). In a lengthy catalogue of “postfeminist” American, British, and Canadian writers, Greene places Tyler first in her list, which also includes Mary Gordon, Ann Beattie, Anita Brookner, Sue Miller, Ellen Gilchrist, Rosellen Brown, Jill McCorkle, Marianne Wigginson, and Alice Hoffman.

Before assigning Tyler the role of representative postfeminist, we should pay more attention to the term itself and to the appropriateness of its application to her work. The actual meaning of the term has been debated in recent decades. Some scholars use it merely as a term of periodization that denotes women's writing since the early 1980s. A second group of critics see it as a much more politicized movement, one actively engaged in a conservative response against feminism and the gains women have made in recent decades. As Linda Frost explains, for these critics, “postfeminism primarily represents a period of political and ideological backlash” (148). For example, Geneva Overholser calls postfeminism “sexism [under] a subtler name” as it encourages men and women to “go back to the old ways” and take “a breather” from feminism (34). Similarly, Elspeth Probyn, stating that it has also appeared under the guise of “new traditionalism,” argues that the ultimate goal of postfeminism is “the recentering of women in the family and the home” (150). These critics use “postfeminism” almost synonymously with “antifeminism,” viewing it as a dangerous attempt to undo the work of feminism.

However, the approach to this term that seems most fitting to a discussion of Tyler's work is a third one that examines postfeminism as a form of feminism adapted to the postmodern age. This approach sees postfeminism as “not simply the point of intersection between postmodernism and feminism but the postmodernization of feminism” (Frost 152), meaning that postfeminism perceives the concerns of feminism through a lens of postmodern uncertainty, ambiguity, and pluralism. In her essay “Feminism, ‘Postfeminism,’ and Contemporary Women's Fiction,” Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt explains how postfeminism can share the fundamental tenets of feminism while also embracing a postmodern awareness. In her study of postfeminist writers, including Louise Erdrich, Margaret Atwood, Anne Roiphe, and Sue Miller, Rosenfelt argues that postfeminist novels, like feminist ones, “retain an awareness of male domination in gendered relations, […] a vision of injustice and a longing to redress it.” However, she also finds the postfeminist novels to be “less clear about what can be done, and more likely to grieve and worry than to rage and hope.” They are “more skeptical than optimistic, more aware of limits than transgressive of traditional boundaries” and thus are “a retreat from the visionary politics of their predecessors” (270).

I believe that an intertextual reading of Tyler's Ladder of Years in terms of the feminist novels that preceded it can illustrate how her novel can be called postfeminist in Rosenfelt's sense and can clarify more generally the relationship between postfeminist and feminist work. Just as postfeminism could not exist without the model of feminism, postfeminist works likely also require feminist models to follow, to respond to, and perhaps to revise. I propose in this essay that Chopin's The Awakening acts as that model—or intertext—for Ladder of Years.² My usage of the term “intertext” follows Michael Riffaterre's definition: “the intertext is another text […] that shares its lexicon and its structures with the one we are reading. This intertext represents a model on which the text builds its own variations” (2). Chopin's chronicle of the awakening of late nineteenth-century Creole wife and mother Edna Pontellier from routine and meaningless doldrums to a life of fulfillment and sensual pleasure before she tragically ends her own life appears to provide such a model on which Tyler's text bases its crucial revisions.

Intertextual readings have often been used to understand Tyler's work, and criticism of Ladder of Years has been no exception.³ Macpherson has noted that “the reader cannot help but be aware of other texts when reading Ladder of Years” (135). Because the novel's central character is Cordelia (shortened to Delia) Grinstead, the youngest and most loyal of three daughters to an aging father, many reviewers have focused on intertextual connections to Shakespeare's King Lear; other readers have attempted to draw connections between the plots of contemporary popular romance novels, the sort that make up the bulk of Delia's reading, and fairy tales. At least one critic, Virginia Carroll, has suggested, if only briefly, a connection to Chopin's novel.⁴

Indeed, The Awakening appears to be specifically evoked, mirrored, and revised throughout Ladder of Years, the story of a housewife and mother who decides during a beachside vacation to walk away from her family and establish a separate life elsewhere. Tyler's heroine's situation is a late-twentieth-century parallel to that of Edna Pontellier, and the two characters' stifling, unfulfilling marriages to men who are significantly older than their wives are very similar as the books begin. Edna feels like “a valuable piece of personal property” (4) in a marriage described as “purely an accident […] resembling many other marriages” (19). At one point, out of frustration, Edna throws down her wedding ring and unsuccessfully “stamped her heel upon it, striving to crush it” (53). Tyler's Delia also suffers in her marriage, characterizing herself as “a sad, tired, anxious, forty-year-old woman who hadn't had a champagne brunch in decades” (18). She wonders if her husband, her father's medical associate, married her merely to guarantee his professional future. A grown woman who still wears “baby doll” dresses, she realizes that she “had lived out her married life like a little girl playing house, and always there'd been a grown-up standing ready to take over—her sister or her husband or her father” (127).

Both Chopin and Tyler use the figures of the overpowering father and the absent mother to represent the male oppression that dominates these women's lives. The fathers exert extraordinary influence, whereas the mothers remain only faint memories. Because Edna's mother died when she was quite young, their father raised her and her sisters and continued to maintain control even as the adult daughters married. In one instance, he tells Edna's husband Léonce that he is “too lenient” with the disobedient Edna and that “authority, coercion are what is needed […] to manage a wife” (71). Though Tyler's Delia also lost her mother as a child and adamantly claims to retain no memory of her, she differs from Edna in that she has never even left her father's house; instead, as a teenage bride, she and her husband, Sam, settled into the family home and “her sweet-sixteen bedroom,” eventually taking over the practice following the father's death. Delia's father seemed to expect her, as “Daddy's pet,” to remain with him, discouraging her from going to college and using her as his receptionist and as company on his house calls. The relationship Delia shares with Sam, fifteen years her senior, is much like the one that she shared with her father: she continues her work at the reception desk and accompanies him on house calls. Because of the age disparity, this marriage approximates a parent-child relationship. The scene at the beach in which Sam lathers an “obedient” Delia with sunblock lotion recalls a similar beach scene early in The Awakening when Léonce scolds his young wife Edna for being “burnt beyond recognition” (4). In both marriages, the husband seems more surrogate father than loving partner.

Both Edna and Delia struggle against the role that Chopin calls the “mother-woman.” Edna admits that she does not think of herself as one of those “women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels” (10). Delia, on the other hand, begins Tyler's novel as a “mother-woman,” though one who is wondering what she will do as her children grow into adulthood. She comes to realize that a woman must have some role other than mother, especially when her children no longer appear to need her. The opening scene of the novel begins Delia's evolution from this role: She is approached in the grocery store by a younger man, Adrian Bly-Brice, who asks her to pretend that she is his lover while his wife, from whom he is separated, also shops in the store with another man. Delia plays along, but soon realizes that her shopping trip is going astray as she ends up with a cart load of pasta, consommé, and the ingredients for blancmange, forgetting or choosing not to buy corn flakes, catfood, and the strained spinach from the baby food section, because they were such “family item[s]” (8). As she plays the role of mistress to this younger man, she begins to imagine roles for herself other than the “mother-woman” who entered the store and considers following the example of Adrian's wife, Rosemary, the kind of woman who “never purchased [her] groceries by the cartload” (9).

Despite that single appearance, Rosemary Bly-Brice becomes an significant figure in Ladder of Years, serving as its first Edna Pontellier, a successful businesswoman and liberated wife who has persuaded her husband to take a hyphenated married name and who has left him for a lover, abandoning “every single one of her possessions when she left” (51). After Delia begins her nonsexual affair with Adrian, she becomes completely fascinated with his wife's bold act; she is uncertain why she finds Rosemary's departure “so alluring,” but she often “stood mesmerized in front of Rosemary's closet” (51). For Delia, Rosemary becomes an early model, the self-sufficient woman, who puts her independence above maintaining her routine life out of mere inertia. Rosemary is a latter-day Edna, in some ways more extreme than the original, who at least took “whatever was her own in the house” (84), before leaving a place that “never seemed like [hers], anyway” (79).

In the course of the two novels, both Edna and Delia begin to perceive themselves as capable of leading different, more satisfying lives. Edna's fresh perspective of herself arises out of various factors, including the attention of her young suitor, Robert Lebrun, and the empowerment that comes to her after her first night swim. During this vital event, Edna “grew daring and reckless” and “wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before” (28). “Intoxicated with her newly conquered power” (29), she returns to the shore and “waved a dissenting hand” to her companions, “paying no further heed to their renewed cries which sought to detain her” (29). The swim provides the new vision of herself that enables her to take control of her life: “She could only realize that she herself—her present self—was in some way different from the other self. That she was seeing with different eyes and making the acquaintance of new conditions in herself that colored and changed her environment” (41).

Delia also begins to view herself with “different eyes.” After the grocery store adventure with Adrian, she begins to perceive herself as sexually attractive, independent, unpredictable, and perhaps even unfaithful to her husband. “She couldn't remember when she had last been so aware of herself from outside, from a distance” (27), and she begins to crave an escape from “the grinding gears of daily life—the leaky basement, the faulty oven, the missing car keys” (29). Because she “like[s] the thought of beginning again from scratch” (139), she follows the precedent of Rosemary and the pattern of Edna; during her family's annual vacation, she spontaneously walks away from the beach front and her family with only the clothes that she is wearing. However, Delia goes further than Edna's move down the street or Rosemary's move across town. Instead, as she leaves the beach, she hitches a ride to another town, Bay Borough, without a word to her family about where she will be. She begins her life anew and intends this time to decide for herself what her life will be, without a father or husband making decisions for her.

Unlike Edna, whose quest was primarily for sensual experience, perhaps in an attempt to replicate the intoxication of her night swim, and whose chosen avenues included sex, food, music, and art, Delia's goal appears to be self-fulfillment. In other words, she desires a new image of herself, as self-sufficient, yet necessary to those around her. She begins her quest in the persona of “Miss Grinstead,” buying a grey suit and a black leather handbag and obtaining a job as a legal secretary. She quickly gets her employer's office in order and imagines people saying of her, “That woman looks completely self-reliant” (123). In her new existence, Delia eventually discovers elements of life that she felt she had lacked in Baltimore; she tells one of her sisters who finds her and attempts to retrieve her, “I have a place now, […] a job, a position, and a place to stay” (113). To a woman who had previously “felt like a tiny gnat, whirring around her family's edges” (23) because she viewed herself as “expendable” or “purely decorative” (127), this change is a welcome one. She soon finds herself needed by the circle of friends that she establishes, by the new kitten that she adopts, and by the Miller family (an abandoned father and son) whom she comes to work for as a housekeeper. Delia realizes that “she seemed to have changed into someone else—a woman people looked to automatically for sustenance” (183).

Following that transformation. Delia encounters another of the novel's Edna figures, Ellie, the former wife of her employer Joel Miller who, after mistakenly believing that she had cancer, left her husband and son “to make the very best of [her] life” and “do exactly what [she'd] dreamed of,” pursuing a career as “a TV weather lady” (167). As an independent woman, Ellie is presented by Tyler as ridiculous, reckless, and almost pathetic. She is mocked in the local media for her emphasis on her appearance; she has numerous car accidents. In a crucial scene, she cuts Delia's forehead in a moment of hysteria and will not take Delia to any of the local doctors for fear of damaging her public image.

If Rosemary functions as Delia's initial role model, raising the possibility of a flight from home. Ellie's depiction appears to question this flight as the only option open to women. Although Ellie felt “Stuck for life! Imprisoned! [and] Trapped forever” in her marriage to Joel (228), she confesses to Delia that she still questions the rationale of her actions. She wonders if other wives, who have stayed in their marriages, feel the same as she did and asks “Wouldn't I have been perfectly fine too? Shouldn't I have stuck it out?” (254). Ellie admits to Delia that she believes that she “did make a mistake,” but Delia tells her it is one that she can “unmake” (254-55). Ellie is an Edna figure who ultimately reconsiders her choices. Trying to calm Ellie's worries about her decisions, Delia seems to convince herself that although leaving home may be necessary for some, it is not the only valid response to an oppressive setting.

We must also discuss the character of Delia in terms of how she fits into the spectrum of Edna figures. Tyler follows much of Chopin's model in her construction of Delia. Like Edna, Delia is an unsatisfied housewife and mother, whose awakening to a new view of herself leads her away from her home and family. In Chopin's novel, Edna, perhaps convinced that she lives in a world that will never let her become truly independent, is swimming to her death as the novel ends, an action that many readers see as a final escape from the oppression of her society. Tyler makes it clear from the beginning of Ladder of Years that her own awakening heroine will not make the same choices as Edna and that Delia will never follow the final footsteps of her predecessor—nor does she need to. Although much of Edna's awakening is reflected through her initial swim and subsequent suicide, we are told on the first page of Tyler's novel, in a newspaper clipping that reports Delia's disappearance, that “authorities do not suspect drowning, since Mrs. Grinstead avoided swimming whenever possible and professed a distinct aversion to water” (3). Delia's family is well aware that she “hate[s] to swim” (45) and that “the temperature had to be blistering, the ocean flat as glass, and not a sea nettle sighted all day before she would venture in” (72). The novel often equates Delia with a cat to emphasize further her avoidance of water. As her sister reports to police, Delia “may have been a cat in her most recent incarnation” (3). This feline imagery reflects the notion of Delia having a cat's nine lives, but it also indicates that it is not in her nature to walk into the sea and drown herself. Only once in the novel does she even seem to consider suicide, when she realizes that the only way to be completely untraceable by her family “would be dying,” but she quickly clarifies that “of course she hadn't meant that the way it sounded” (107). The novel does, however, imply that, with time, Delia perhaps could become more like Edna. As she takes a vacation by herself, she makes some efforts at swimming, though she is careful not to get her hair wet and advances cautiously. She is not swimming in Edna's triumphant manner but is merely floating and “wait[ing] for the most docile wave to carry her back to land” (250). However, Delia's attempts cause Ellie Miller to present a cautionary question about whether “it feel[s] funny going swimming on [her] own?” (252). In the end, all of this imagery continually reminds readers that Delia is a very different Edna and that she will not end her own life in a desperate attempt to escape the domestic sphere.

The most significant difference between the two women's paths involves the legacies that they leave behind. Edna's suicide does not change her world. She leaves no daughters, only two sons, Raoul and Etienne, who can be seen as the continuance of the patriarchy. One can easily imagine that Léonce, on hearing of Edna's death, will quickly find another young wife to replace her and to raise the two boys, who themselves will probably retain only a faded memory of their mother. Tyler's ending reads much differently. Delia's actions result in a radical change in both her daughter, Susie, and her husband, Sam. After more than a year of Delia's absence, a phone call home reveals many changes, most notably her daughter's impending marriage; Sam surprisingly is against the marriage, insisting that Susie should live on her own for a year first because he “hate[s] to see her jumping straight from school to marriage. From her father's house to her husband's house” (242). He urges Susie to get her own apartment and job and flatly rejects Delia's suggestion that their daughter take Delia's old position as his receptionist. He, who earlier seemed to be the representative of Delia's oppression, has adapted and learned from the mistakes of Delia's life. As a result of his encouragement, Susie becomes a young entrepreneur who takes control of her marriage, halting the wedding ceremony minutes before it begins and postponing it several days until she is certain that her groom is someone to whom she wants to be married.

A changed daughter and husband signify the success of Delia's journey. In the process of transforming herself, she has reformed her domestic sphere. Sam, a father and husband, now considers the consequences of his actions on the women in his life. Susie, a daughter and now a wife, understands the importance of women's self-fulfillment and equality in a marriage. Although the closing paragraphs return to the sea side, mirroring Edna's final return to the sea, Delia does not physically go to the shore. Instead, she only recalls that first trip, when she walked away from her life, and revises her initial view of that important moment. She realizes that not only herself but her family had grown; “the people she had left behind […] had actually traveled further, in some ways” (326). Her actions, her striving for self-sufficiency and for a new vision of her own capabilities have resulted in positive change in her family and home. Now she can return and reinsert herself without feeling that she has compromised or sacrificed.

In many ways, the differences between Delia and Edna starkly illustrate the characteristics that Rosenfelt attributes to postfeminism. Tyler's text conveys postfeminism's “pervasive nostalgia for family life, whatever its boredoms and betrayals” (285). Even before Delia ultimately returns home, she has created a substitute in her new job as housekeeper to the Millers. In this role, she finds herself shopping for clothes for the son, Noah, buying him Christmas presents, and carpooling him and his friends. Rather than begrudge these duties, Delia only notes that “it was so easy to fall back into being someone's mother” (172). This is a far cry from Edna's final view of her children as “antagonists who had overcome her; who had overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul's slavery for the rest of her days” (113). Delia had never wanted to leave her children but had felt abandoned and neglected by them. By starting over with the twelve-year-old Noah, she returns to the mother role with which she is most comfortable. And, notably, Tyler has Delia being paid for these duties, certainly a feminist assertion that child-rearing and housekeeping are indeed labor worthy of pay. In her care for Noah and her final return to her own grown children, Delia reflects postfeminism's tendency “to reinstate […] familial relations, perhaps especially motherhood” (Rosenfelt 270).

A more postmodern element of postfeminist writings is also reflected in Delia's journey. As Rosenfelt explains, these texts

do retain a pained sense of gender inequity. But they are less clear than feminist texts about how to fight it, or even about who the enemy is. They are less likely to locate the sources of inequity primarily in a masculine lust for power and control or a male ruling class's determination to maintain its privileged status; they are more likely to acknowledge a diversity of human conduct that includes mistakes and totalitarian inclinations among women, decencies and vulnerabilities even among men.

(280)

Rosenfelt concludes her description with an assertion of postfeminism's “complexity of vision” (280). Ladder of Years shares this complexity. The men in the novel are criticized for their treatment of Delia. From her father's preventing her from going to college and using her as free labor in his medical practice to Sam's taking her for granted and assuming patriarchal privilege on the father's death, the men in the novel do not view Delia as an individual but see her as a commodity to be passed among themselves. However, the book also places some responsibility for her situation on Delia herself. Tyler argues that Delia has let herself be put in the position of a child, cultivating and becoming accustomed to an image of dependence, immaturity, and childishness. Her time away from home reveals her potential to shape people's opinions of herself and demand respect and appreciation. When she returns home in her new persona, she looks at her old wardrobe with astonishment—“all that froufrou and those nursery pastels”—and it is unlikely she will ever let herself be seen as a baby doll or little girl again (304). Typical of postfeminist work, Tyler does not place all the blame for gender inequity on men and instead suggests that, at least in the case of Delia, many women have accepted these unfair situations for too long and could change their circumstances with some effort.

Because Tyler's circular plot places Delia in the same location as when the book began, many critics see a lack of development in her characters or progression in her plots. John Updike, for example, has argued that Tyler's “one possible weakness” is her “tendency to leave the reader just where she found him” (278). Though he wrote this in a 1977 review of Tyler's Earthly Possessions, he would probably find the same fault with Ladder of Years because the two novels end very similarly. Earthly Possessions told the story of Charlotte, another runaway housewife, fleeing from her stifling marriage to a minister. In the process of withdrawing money from her bank account to fund her flight, she is taken hostage by a bumbling bank robber and is forced to accompany him from Baltimore to Florida. After finally escaping captivity, she, seemingly without question, returns home to her husband. Many readers found this resolution disappointing, believing Charlotte had resigned herself to the familiar male oppression that she felt she could never escape. However, the assertion that no change has taken place is contradicted in the last lines of the novel. As the couple settles into bed at the novel's conclusion, Charlotte's husband offers to take her on a vacation as an appeasement; she refuses the offer and tells him just to go to sleep. The last line of the novel simply states, “And he does” (200). While not an overt feminist assertion, the final line does indicate a new power for Charlotte; her wishes and desires can now be stated and her husband's response can be compliance. Her journey in the novel, including her ultimate resistance of oppression as she walked away from her captor, produces a transformed home where she now has power to effect change.

Delia also seems to be similarly empowered at the conclusion of Ladder of Years. We can see that even before Delia returns home, as she discusses Sam's handling of Susie's wedding plans with him over the telephone. As Delia presents him with two options, she tells him, “either way, you will go along with it.” “I will?” her husband inquires, and Delia responds, “You will” (244). This exchange is evidence that Delia's transformation has occurred not just in her own self-perception; she has actually changed and her family can observe and respect this change. Another illustration comes when she arrives back home and is immediately asked by her daughter to handle negotiations with the landlord of Susie's new apartment. Before she left her family at the beach, Delia had never had any experience with leases or rent. When she makes her first living arrangements at a boarding house in Bay Borough, she is sure it is obvious that “she had never arranged for her own housing before” (91). However, once back home, she is looked on as an expert problem solver in this area, as she tries to get Susie out of the lease she has just signed. This newly self-sufficient Delia is depicted as a benefit rather than a threat to her family.

This assertion in postfeminist fiction that a woman can be fulfilled and empowered within the domestic sphere concerns its critics. Tania Modleski, for example, worries that postfeminism is “delivering us into a prefeminist world” (3). Elspeth Probyn finds the return to the home particularly problematic because postfeminism “hawks the home as the ‘natural choice’—which means, of course, no choice” (152). In Tyler's novel, Delia's home and family finally appear to be the “natural choice” for her. Also there are implications that the other Edna figures, Rosemary Bly-Brice and Ellie Miller, might return to their respective homes. However, the novel does not depict home, marriage, and motherhood as the only choice for the women in Delia's world. Eliza, Delia's sister, has never married and supports herself by working at the Pratt Library in Baltimore. Her other sister, Linda, is divorced from a professor and raising twin daughters on her own. Delia's mother-in-law, Eleanor Grinstead, was widowed at an early age and had to take a secretarial job to support her young son. Contrary to the critics' concerns, Tyler's novel as a work of postfeminist fiction presents its characters with a number of choices but includes home and marriage among them.

Rather than rejecting feminist values, postfeminism, at least as conveyed in Anne Tyler's work, should be seen as a complication or even an evolution of feminism. Tyler's fiction, including Ladder of Years, fits the traditional schema of feminist fiction that Deborah Rosenfelt formulates: Women “progress from oppression, suffering, victimization, through various stages of awakening consciousness to active resistance and, finally, to some form of victory, transformation, or transcendence of despair” (269-70). Tyler's heroines, Delia included, are involved in this progress, even if on a smaller or less dramatic scale than characters like Nora Helmer and Edna Pontellier. Tyler's women participate in “the remaking of one's world” that feminist fiction demands (Rosenfelt 281). The problem for many readers is that the world these characters “remake” is the home and family, the domestic sphere. That aspect of Tyler's fiction calls into question for many critics any feminist values her narratives may hold. Carolyn Heilbrun, for example, writes in Writing a Woman's Life that Tyler only gives readers “portraits of women clinging to a life and conditions they have in fact outgrown, instead of launching off into another world” (128). Such criticism seems to ignore the possibility of a woman's exerting any power within the domestic sphere and to envision flight from this sphere, the path of Edna Pontellier, as the only viable option for women. Tyler imagines another possible trajectory. Rather than condemn the home as an impossibly hostile setting, she sees it as a place where women can exist and even thrive if suitable reform is enacted.

Tyler's rewriting of Chopin's The Awakening, complete with a postfeminist version of Edna, takes Delia through many of the stages that Edna experiences. However, rather than have Delia permanently leave her family as Edna chooses to do, Tyler brings a newly empowered Delia back to a transformed home, husband, and children. Unlike so much fiction about women that cordons off the domestic space as a location where an enlightened woman could never be fulfilled, Tyler's novel restores the home and family to the list of places that will benefit from the independence, self-awareness, strength, and confidence of women. Within this postfeminist novel then is strong feminist assertion about the women's capability of transforming their spheres of influence, wherever those might be.

Notes

1. The feminist works to which Tyler gave unfavorable reviews include Pat Rotter's anthology of feminist fiction. Bitches and Sad Ladies: An Anthology of Fiction by and about Women (1975); Ellen Moers's Literary Women: The Great Writers (1976); Lois Gould's A Sea-Change (1976); Marilyn French's The Women's Room (1977); and Andrea Dworkin's Right-Wing Women (1983). Tyler's complaint against much of this work is the tendency to generalize about relationships between men and women in service to a polemical argument. For example, she condemns Gould's novel for being “less a story than a statement—a generalization on the very nature of men and women” (5).

2. Ibsen's A Doll's House and Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the other works to which Doris Betts refers, could also serve this purpose. Like Ibsen's play, Tyler's novel features a frustrated house-wife who feels that she has always been merely a doll for her husband and father. Like Gilman's story, the central character of Tyler's work is a doctor's wife who feels that her own concerns are neglected.

3. Intertextual readings of Tyler's work have explored connections to authors such as William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty. That approach has appeared particularly fruitful in exploring the intertextuality between Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. For examples, see the essays by Mary J. Elkins, Adrienne Bond, and Paula Gallant Eckard.

4. Virginia Schaefer Carroll's brief reference to Chopin's novel suggests that readers of Ladder of Years “may even flittingly think of Edna Pontellier at the end of The Awakening, drowning herself when she realizes the constriction and force of her social bonds” (98).

Works Cited

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