[In the following essay, Briganti contends that women in Malamud's fiction generally exist only to provide the momentum or impetus for the male characters to reach self-knowledge.]

It is generally acknowledged that it is through the abandonment of egocentrism that the protagonists of Malamud's novels arrive at self-definition. Any attempt to escape reality is doomed to failure and solipsism, and the individual who conjures up his own interior world condemns himself to impotence because he does not have a world to act in any more. Malamud's characters are presented in the act of self-creation which involves reconciliation with their own past and giving up false notions of freedom; they become accomplished individuals, with a commitment to a profound relationship, defined values, and a space in society. The quest for identity engages them in a sentimental education, and those who succeed in the struggle against their own egocentrism not only conquer a new life, but learn how to respond to the other with that charity and sympathy without which for Malamud there is no possibility for regeneration. It is through commitment that the protagonists realize their freedom.

In this quest, women serve primarily as antagonists and as a means to precipitate the crisis in the male protagonist. In The Natural, Memo Paris and Iris Lemon, far from being complex characters, are there to confront the protagonist with temptation and ruin on one side and possibility of redemption on the other. So Memo Paris, a new version of the “dark lady” of much British and American literature, is the vindictive temptress whose “sick breast” seems to exemplify an inability to love, while Iris Lemon (and the name itself is only too openly symbolic) is presented like a somewhat simplistic Great Mother of fertility. This same duality reappears attenuated in A New Life, where S. Levin finds out that Avis Fliss (like Memo suffering from breast fibroma) has been spying on his adulterous relationship with Pauline Gilley and has been collecting evidence with the intention of reporting it to Pauline's husband. But Avis is more a pathetic lonely woman than a vindictive temptress, and Pauline, although pregnant by the end of the novel, is hardly a goddess of fertility. In The Fixer, Raisl's function is to offer her husband the possibility of redemption through sacrifice. Like all the other female figures, she too is relegated to her sexual role, and Yakov Bok curses her “miscarrying womb and dry breasts.” In The Tenants, Irene, initially Willie's “white bitch,” and for some obscure reason suffering from cystitis, is the cause of the two male characters' rivalry, and therefore, indirectly, of their literary crisis. We ignore everything about her, except that she used to be, as she confesses to Harry Lesser, “a fucked-up kid,” who “drew men like flies until [she] began to wake up frightened” (TT, [The Tenants] 108). She seems to be the prototype of the Fanny Bick of Dubin's Lives and, like her successor, her only function in the novel is to precipitate a crisis and to offer a potential for redemption which is rejected by the male protagonist.

It will be argued in the present paper that two tendencies can be distinguished in Malamud's fiction: in one group of novels (The Natural, The Tenants, Dubin's Lives), the protagonist is unable to free himself from his subjectivity because of an intrinsic passivity, while in the other (The Assistant, A New Life, The Fixer, Pictures of Fidelman), the protagonist succeeds in overcoming his earlier traits and assumes an active role, and, consequently, achieves a positive identity. I will illustrate this argument in terms of the voyeuristic impulse in the characters of S. Levin in A New Life and William Dubin in Dubin's Lives, showing how women, being the object of a voyeuristic scrutiny, never rise above the sexual roles which strictly determine their function in the narrative.

Theodore Solotaroff observed that “As in the romances of another moralist, Nathaniel Hawthorne, there are a good many mirror images in Malamud's tales, and they signify much the same preoccupation with those moments when the distinction between the objective and the imaginary is suspended and the spirit sees either itself or, in Hawthorne's term, its ‘emblems.’”² To lights and mirrors we can add the images that refer to eyes and windows and the verbs that indicate the visual function. These images, although always present in Malamud's works, recur more frequently in A New Life and in Dubin's Lives, where they serve well the purpose of characterizing these two novels and of defining their positions at the two extremes of Malamud's production.

In A New Life all characters seem to be affected with what Freud refers to as “scopophilia,” the obsessive tendency to watch others and themselves; and in this act they reveal their own impotence: they look without seeing, compelled to indulge in their visual faculty through a medium which itself becomes an obstacle. The landscape, which Levin looks at from his office window, becomes ominous: “Staring out of the window, Levin noticed that the cracked glass resembled a forked lightning” (ANL [A New Life], 227). Levin watches Pauline, the woman who has become his lover, through fogged windowpanes, half-closed windows or curtains, which become symbols of his impotence to overcome a sense of estrangement and to establish a relationship with the woman. Gerald Gilley, Pauline's husband, shows the same kind of impotence, that is, of inability to see: “Gilley … stood there for a wavering minute, a redheaded owl peering into the dark … blinked without seeing them although staring in their direction” (ANL, 188) (emphasis added).

On his first night in Cascadia as a guest of Gerald and Pauline, “[Levin] caught a glimpse of the Gilleys, man and wife, embracing in their nightshirts” (ANL, 24). This scene foreshadows the anomalous position of Levin, outsider and spectator, which will reach its climax when, having become the lover of Pauline, he seems to abdicate in favor of Gilley, and choose the role of a voyeur:

He watched for a touch of Pauline, a glimpse of her dress as she passed the half-shaded window, or whatever morsel luck would let fall into his empty hands. … Levin was startled by a touch on the arm. A cop, staring at his beard, said a taxpayer had called and complained of a Peeping Tom. … He crossed the street and stood … a few feet from her partly-open, dark bedroom window. … In the stillness he heard the rhythmic creaking of a bed, and then on the night—a bird, catch it, hold it—the soft cry of a woman at the height of her pleasure.

Gilley had, in an inspired moment, satisfied her for him.

(ANL, 243-44)

However, Levin, newcomer in Cascadia, and haunted by old terrors and by the fear of another failure—“A white-eyed hound bayed at him from the window—his classic failure after grimy years to master himself” (ANL, 164)—not only watches, but is watched by all the characters that move around him, and these two elements, watching and being watched, interplay throughout the novel in a complex way: “He … found himself staring into a pair of brown eyes … then he saw Pauline Gilley watching him through the glass top of the back door, something like pity in her eyes” (ANL, 164). What seems significant is that through the novel Levin moves from the voyeuristic attitude that characterizes his lack of commitment to reality, his role of impotent spectator, to becoming a victim of the voyeurism of the other characters. From being a watcher, he gradually becomes the object of scrutiny, as through errors, faux pas, uncertainties, he takes in his hands the reins of his own life and accepts the need to act in reality, even though this ultimately means giving up his aspirations.

Although at first he “thought in terms of experience with [Pauline], not necessarily commitment,” he finally accepts the responsibility that she represents. However, Pauline, like Laverne, Nadalee and Avis has still little human significance for Levin. She is only the pretext for his crisis; by becoming his mistress she precipitates the events and forces him to dive deep into his own nature and past existence; but as a character, she is another example of Malamud's inability to create believable three-dimensional female figures. Throughout the novel she never acquires a real substance and her image remains somewhat blurred. Gilley sees her as a neurotic wife, Levin as a potential lover, and even the image she has of herself is only that of “a mother of two.” At first put off by her barren chest, Levin finally falls in love with her “because she had one unforgettable day given herself to a city boy in a forest. And for the continuance of her generosity in bed. … Or was he moved to love because her eyes mirrored Levin when he looked” (ANL, 217).

If to Levin she is the “masked lady” just long enough to stir his excitement and confront him with the thrill of mystery, the reader is never allowed to remove the veil and again a deeper insight into her character. By showing her behind half-drawn curtains and misty windowpanes, Malamud makes her the object of Levin's voyeuristic scrutiny and denies her a complex personality. She doesn't exist. When debating between his desire to continue the relationship and his feeling of remorse, Levin never takes Pauline into consideration but “he feared the husband of the wife, ashamed of eating his apple” (ANL, 222). Even when Levin somehow overcomes his voyeuristic impulse and assumes an active role, Pauline's function remains simply that of the instrument through which Levin can prove that his old self has changed and is now ready for a new life. His “falling in love with her breaks his tie with his old self: he is not any longer on the periphery of things, watching and observing the local flora and fauna with his binoculars and nature book.”³

A New Life ends positively not because Levin succeeds in fulfilling his dream of a brilliant academic career; on the contrary, he is forced to give it up, but because for the first time in his life he accepts the burden of his responsibilities and chooses an active role. When Gilley asks him, “‘An older woman than yourself and not dependable, plus two adopted kids, no choice of yours, no jobs or promise of one, and other assorted headaches. Why take that load on yourself,’” Levin can answer: “‘Because I can, you son of a bitch’” (ANL, 360).

Levin symbolically breaks the circle of his stifling subjectivity when in a fit of anger he punches the cracked windowpane that he inherited from Duffy, his unfortunate predecessor, whose footmarks, for a series of coincidences, he has been following so far. It is his first act of rebellion, symbolic of his decision to act and to shake off his shoulders the shadow of his predecessor who ended up committing suicide.

Once he has acquired the courage to expose himself and to face his own eyes as well as those of the people around him, he shaves the beard that he had grown “in a time of doubt … when [he] couldn't look [him]self in the face.” The mirror where he confronts himself does not reflect a flattering image, but what matters is that Levin survives the ordeal:

He had searched long in the mirror, felt ill but lived. Too much face, the eyes still sad candles, blunt bent nose, lips without speech telling all, but the jaw looked stronger, possibly illusion.

(ANL, 246)

The role of voyeur is now taken by Gilley, Pauline's sterile husband, amateur photographer, “very talented at candid shots” (ANL, 15), what Barthes would call “un agent de la Mort.”⁴ The analogy between the lens of the camera and the keyhold, privileged stimulus of voyeuristic imagination, comes naturally to mind. Photography, which in Sundquist's words, “perfects the fantasy of the voyeur who sees all without being implicated in the scene,”⁵ provides Gilley with a gratifying and, as he himself will admit, useful hobby. Thanks to this hobby, he finds out the relationship between his wife and Duffy. For Duffy, in turn, photography turns out to be fatal, since it makes him lose the support of Fabrikant, the only person who was willing to defend him, and consequently provokes the loss of his job and his suicide. The camera, the means that Gilley uses to act out his voyeuristic aggression, becomes an actual deadly weapon. The last action of Gilley, consistent with his role, consists in taking a picture of Pauline and Levin as they are leaving Cascadia:

Gilley was aiming a camera at the operation. When he saw Levin's Hudson approach he swung the camera around and snapped. As they drove by he tore a rectangle of paper from the back of the camera and waved it aloft.

“Got your picture!”

(ANL, 367)

In this act, Gilley's voyeuristic aggression explodes. Taking a picture amounts to reducing the subject to “Tout-Image” that is the death in person; it means to expropriate him of himself and make him an object; to put him in a file, ready for any kind of subtle manipulation⁶.

Dubin's Lives, Malamud's most recent novel, ends in ambiguity, but still in such a way as to be grouped with The Natural and The Tenants, where the protagonists are hopelessly sealed in their egos and whose quests for a new life always lead to failure. The failure of Roy Hobbs and Harry Lesser is partly due to their incapacity to commit themselves and to accept a relationship with another human being. They both remain isolated and, therefore, sterile, frustrated in that quest for an identity which eludes them, trapped in a narcissistic life as they are, unable to love and to lose themselves in the ‘other’ in a constructive relationship.

The most common means of acquiring a personal identity in Malamud's novels is provided by work; but Malamud constantly suggests that devotion to work should not be obsessive; instead, it should be tempered with respect for the reality of life. Roy Hobbs is so carried away by baseball that anything he says, does or thinks, is related to that sport. The same bias shows in the total devotion of Harry Lesser to his art: since he sees himself only as a writer, all other human, social and emotional activities are secondary to him. In The Tenants, Malamud, besides elaborating on his fundamental literary preoccupation—the development of a personal identity, focuses on a recent interest of his, the relationship between the artist and art, on one hand, and art and reality on the other, the issues of which are made even more explicit in Dubin's Lives where the protagonist is a biographer.

Dubin started to write biographies because “He felt that the pieces of his own life could be annealed into a unity. He would understand better, be forewarned. He felt he had deepened, extended his life; had become Dubin the biographer (DL, [Dubin's Lives] 98). But gradually his profession becomes an alibi not to live his own life, while at the same time providing him with a way, although an illusory one, to break the boundaries of his existence: “Everybody's life is mine unlived. One writes lives he can't live. To live forever is a human hunger. … Prufrock had measured out his life with measuring spoons; Dubin, in books resurrecting the lives of others” (DL, 11-12). This is one of the most effective passages focusing Dubin's personality, which immediately reveals itself as strongly narcissistic.⁷

The biographer struggles to extract art from experience, watching himself live, write and cope with the complex interplay of life and literature, individual and society. Art becomes for him the only means of controlling life and exorcising the terror of death. To create with words and images becomes a mode of transforming writing into some ascetic but self-fulfilling practice of the soul, into a value substitutive of any other truth. But at this point, Dubin approaches a crisis: D. H. Lawrence, the character he has chosen for his next biography, after his initial choice of Virginia Woolf, “whose intelligent imagination and fragile self had drawn him to her,” seems to be elusive and recalcitrant; his personality, extremely different from the biographer's, does not provide Dubin with any clue to effect that process of identification that is necessary for him in order to deal with it in its complexity. Confronted with a character such as Lawrence, who “‘lived a vast consciousness of life. At his best he wants man to risk himself for a plenitude of life through love’” (DL, 303), Dubin goes through a crisis, as a biographer and as a man. And because of this interplay, if not confusion between art and life, which characterizes Dubin, it is not clear whether his sudden passion for Fanny, the attractive dropout whom his wife has hired as house helper, is, at least to some extent, stimulated by the biography of Lawrence. It seems evident, however, that the voyeuristic relationship of the biographer with the lives he writes about, from the very beginning marks his relationship with Fanny:

He enjoyed coming on Fanny in motion: forcefully stroking the rugs with the vacuum cleaner; the choreography with a mop over the kitchen floor … she was gifted in femininity, Dubin had decided. Fanny wore miniskirts; on hot days she appeared in shorts and gauzy blouses … her white or black bra visible through the garment.”

(DL, 26)

Here too, as in A New Life, the recurrence of images related to mirrors, eyes, windows, defines a relationship voycuristic as well as narcissistic with reality. Dubin, immoderate Narcissus, confronts daily his image in the mirror: “He beheld in the mirror … a flash of himself in his grave, and with a grimace clutched his gut where he had been stabbed” (DL, 15). The spell thrown on Dubin by the reflecting surface might indicate a fragmentary identity in need of constant verification, as it seems to be proved by the tendency to catch glimpses of himself that hit him as violently as traumas: “The biographer caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. Shock of recognition …” and by his need to define himself over and over according to the role played at that particular moment: “Old Billy Goat,” “Dubin Prometheus, bringer of heat in a cold house,” “Dubin frozen stiff, snowman. Death's scarecrow,” “Dubin, man of the world,” “Dubin the single.”

The way Dubin indulges in watching and defining himself reveals also a tendency to narcissistic self-contemplation and a voyeuristic relationship also with himself—Dubin will stop to watch himself, he will come out of himself to be a spectator of his own actions—which reflect in turn detachment and lack of commitment in his life. In Hawthorne, from whom, as mentioned above, Malamud may have derived this type of imagery, the insistence on mirrors and reflected images symbolizes a tendency to voyeurism. According to Eric Sundquist, in Hawthorne this tendency “often takes the form of his fear of being subjected to the gaze of the other and his obsession with voyeurism and detective-like surveillance.”⁸ This is certainly true also for Malamud, whose characters, when not spying, are haunted by the idea of being spied upon, and often are at the same time voyeurs and victims of voyeurism.

For a curious coincidence, to support his thesis, Sundquist quotes D. H. Lawrence who, in his essay on The Scarlet Letter, noting the relation between voyeurism and transgression, points out that during their sexual intercourse after the Fall from Eden, Adam and Eve “kept an eye on what they were doing, they watched what was happening to them … before the apple, they had shut their eyes and their minds had gone dark. Now, they peeped and pried and imagined. They watched themselves.” Dubin's voyeurism is being linked to transgression and showing itself explicitly when the biographer finds himself spying on Fanny, and watching himself while spying on her; but it also shows a refusal to live and to be involved in human relationships, to come out of his subjectivity. This tendency marks all of Dubin's relationships, starting with the one with nature, that he seems to derive from Thoreau, of whom he wrote a biography: “In sum, William Dubin, visitor to nature, had introduced himself along the way but did not intrude. He gazed from the road, kept his distance even when nature hallooed … on the whole, in varying moods Dubin looked at the scenery, and the scenery, in varying moods, looked at him. … If you dared to look you earned seeing” (DL, 9-10). The analogy with Thoreau's clandestine gaze seems clear: “Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. … To look at her is [as] fatal as to look at the head of Medusa.”⁹

This same voyeurism characterizes Dubin's relationship with his wife. In a scene at the beginning of the novel, that seems particularly significant, Dubin, looking at Kitty from the window, believes he is watching some ritual dance; he thinks he may have discovered a new side of his wife's personality, and the banality of what is actually taking place escapes him completely:

Kitty, as he dried his razor by the sunlit window, seemed to be dancing on the lawn. … It was a running dance, very expressive—fertility rite?. … He tried to figure out what the ceremonial meant: wounded bird, dying swan?. … He felt how strange life was, then began thinking of Passions of D. H. Lawrence, before he realized Kitty was in the house, screaming to him, her face red, eyes angered, frightened.

“Why the hell didn't you come and help me?”

“What for?”

“A bee, William,” she cried.

(DL, 17-18)

Kitty is a perceptive and attractive middle-aged woman. As most of Malamud's female characters, she doesn't have a profession nor any special vocation. In fact, except as mother and wife she hasn't accomplished much in her life—she is rather what one would define an accomplished woman, with a conspicuous interest in psychoanalysis developed after her first marriage with a doctor. Full of idiosyncrasies and neuroses, she suffers from insomnia and worries about cancer and leaking stove-gas. After having been married twenty-five years to Dubin, she starts ruminating on her first husband, who died of leukemia at forty. She is so constantly intent on brooding on the past, analyzing the years of her marriage, that finally to Dubin she comes to represent the past with all its disillusions and failed expectations. Malamud, however, is not interested enough in his female characters as to tell us more about the way Kitty deals with her ghosts and with the progressive estrangement of her husband; we see her only from Dubin's point of view as a neurotic and dependent woman groping about to keep her balance. On the other hand, we know that if change for Kitty depends on her husband, for Dubin the only possible way to bring a change into his life would be to come out of his own ego and commit himself to a responsible relationship with another human being; but he is distracted and lacking in generosity. His marriage, which at first he thought would provide him with a way to give a purpose to his life and to give up loneliness, has proved unable to fulfil his expectations: Dubin at fifty-seven is not very different from the twenty-year old “self-reclusive too subjective romantic youth.” he doesn't sympathize with his neurotic wife—“He left her standing sadly naked before the glass”—and is relieved when she decides to see a psychoanalyst. After twenty years spent together, the two only share their weaknesses and loneliness: “You're out on your private little black sailboat in the rough green sea and here I'm alone on a dreary lava-like shore,” says Kitty bitterly.

The past, although Dubin seems to be continuously analyzing it, is not reconciled with the present and accepted; it does not become a useful experience; instead, it is only a burden. Of his childhood, Dubin only remembers his mother's insanity (Dubin's mother belongs to a long series of suicidal and insane women in Malamud's fiction). Of his father, he recalls the indolence and resignation, and is unable to grasp the meaning of a life redeemed by the struggle for a dignity achieved through the sorrow experienced together with and for another human being.

It is know that the dialectic counterpart of voyeurism is narcissism, and Dubin not only relishes his daily confrontations in the mirror, “In the lusterless mirror his left eye was fixed, distant, cold; contemplating his frightened right eye,” but goes so far as to use other people as reflecting surfaces: “The unconscious is mirrored in a man's acts and words. If he watches and listens to himself, sooner or later, he begins to see the contours of the unconscious self … You see in others what you are.” (DL, 130)

In such novels as The Assistant, A New Life, and The Fixer, the protagonist seems to have gone through a positive change by assuming a fatherly role. In The Natural and The Tenants, where the protagonists fail in their quest for identity, their failures come together with the refusal or the absence of the fatherly role.¹⁰ In Dubin's Lives, although the protagonist is a father of two children, of whom one is adopted, his relationship with them turns out to be fragile and unresolved. When he goes to visit his adopted son in Sweden, more to appease his guilty conscience for having betrayed his wife than for a genuine interest in the boy, Dubin discovers that Gerald has taken back the name of his real father, Kitty's first husband. Their encounter is made pathetic by the absolute lack of communication: “Dubin talked to the youth's back and Gerald talked to the night. … The biographer limped behind him” (DL, 110-11). The reason for this incapability to communicate has already been provided by Dubin, in a rare attempt to analyze his relationship with his adopted child:

Q. “Tell me, Dubin, what did the boy really mean to you?”

A. “I saw myself in his eyes—a fatherly type.”¹¹

(DL, 270)

With Maud, the daughter born from his marriage with Kitty, Dubin is not more successful. Sealed in his own egocentrism, careless and distracted, he cannot even remember his daughter's age. The only ties he has are sentimental ties with the past: “He had wanted one of Maud's affectionate notes as a child to keep in his pocket. The uses of the dwindling past” (DL, 120). And when Maud asks for help, he is unable to respond. Needless to say, in spite of Zen meditation and heightened sensibility, Maud has to succumb to the destiny of Malamud's female characters, and her crisis of identity is closely related, in fact it has its origin in her sexuality: she is made pregnant by a man thirty years her senior, married, black.

The numerous parallels between Maud and Fanny—they are the same age, they both drop out of school to live in a Buddhist commune, and they both become involved with men old enough to be their fathers—seem to point out the motive of the unconscious incest desire which runs in much of Malamud's fiction. But they are not convincing and do not add substance to the personalities of the two women; Maud, in particular, never becomes more than the stereotype of the Berkeley vegetarian, health-nut, and faddist.

The “Promised End,” the novel that Harry Lesser, the protagonist of The Tenants is writing, is not only a mirror of his own life, but can be considered also the paradigm of Dubin's Lives:

It was about a writer, a … man who is often afflicted by the thought that he has wasted more of his life than he was entitled to … he finds it hard to give love … It's the old giving business, he can and he can't, not good enough, too many unknown reservations, the self occluded. Love up to a point is not love at all. His life betrays his imagination.¹²

This incapacity to give, exemplified by the voyeuristic attitude, also mark Dubin's relationship with Fanny. As in The Natural Roy does not realize what Iris Lemon is offering him, and refuses both her and what she stands for—love, fertility—when she reveals her past to him, so Dubin cannot overcome the “girl-of-my-dreams” syndrome. Although Fanny gradually turns out to be a positive character, with clear implications of fertility, because of her past, “Dubin saw clearly what she had and what she lacked: was unmoved by her. She lacked, he thought, experience of a necessary sort; certain mistakes are wrong to make” (DL, 193). The mistakes he cannot forgive her for can be identified with that fullness of life which Lawrence preaches and which Dubin is impotent to pursue, because even in the most ecstatic moments, rather than merge himself into the experience, he watches himself live: “Here is William the Bold, with upraised sword on a black charger, galloping onward under the bright blue sky (DL, 62).

In literature, one of the most recurrent symbolical structures is represented by the tendency to identify sexuality with sin. Therefore eroticism is placed in the equivocal position of being at the same time the most powerful expression of life instinct and the most essential experience of ego dissociation. Only love can resolve this dichotomy: the impulse to love becomes a motivation to find human order in chaos. Dubin cannot resolve this dichotomy, and his passion for Fanny proves to be another symptom of immaturity; his physical desire, another form of narcissism. Not even when he finds her again after a winter spent under a sterile and exhausting discipline of strict diet and jogging, and finally makes love to her, is he able to abandon himself to the experience. Twice he loses her and twice he finds her, and in both cases the magic of the moment is reduced to a sterile accounting transaction: “This evens it, Dubin thought, for the cruel winter. Was it this, he wondered, he had earned tonight?”

Like Lesser, who falls in love with Irene because he finds that she fits well in his life and in the novel he is writing, Dubin also falls in love with Fanny because she represents that richness of life Lawrence writes about and from which he has always felt excluded: “Dubin felt heartened to have recovered her. He felt himself a gifted man, an excellent biographer” (DL, 211). Both Dubin and Lesser fail to understand that the delicate equilibrium between art and life is compromised when one of the two is pursued at the other's expense. When Fanny fails him, Dubin gets stuck in his writing, unable to use his imagination to free himself of the tyranny of that same imagination. “What also ran through his mind was whether he had responded to her as his usual self, or as one presently steeped in Lawrence's sexual theories, odd as they were” (DL, 23). Incapable of disentangling his life from the lives he writes about, he struggles in the prison that he has built for himself.

His view of the lover is as distorted as that of Kitty and of his children. The first impression the reader gets of Fanny, being filtered through Dubin's eyes, is that of a promiscuous ex-hippy; and only when the point of view shifts from Dubin to the narrator does the character of Fanny acquire some positive traits: late in the novel we learn that in Venice she had acted not out of a nymphomaniac impulse, but out of resentment at the role Dubin had forced upon her, that of a young mistress to whom he refused to get emotionally close. While Dubin goes through an extenuating regime of diet and exercise in the pathetic attempt to fight against the undoing of time, she grows into a maturing young woman with a sense of direction and self-discipline. Dubin, as mentioned above, approaches nature with the ambivalent attitude of a voyeur; Kitty has a purely aesthetic view of it: she collects sunsets and endlessly rearranges the hedges in her garden to create pleasant color combinations, in a constantly frustrated attempt to grow something. Fanny, instead, buys a farm, because she says, “I've often felt I wanted to dig my hands into the soil and make something grow,” and plans to get a degree in environmental sciences. Dubin is conscious only that “Her abundant body, though not voluptuous, had a life of its own” (DL, 21), and his view of her hardly changes with the progress of their relationship. In fact, just after one encounter with Fanny, Kitty shows more insight into her personality than Dubin after two years: “She's intelligent, has a mind of her own and the usual dissatisfactions of someone her age” (DL, 24).

Fanny appears gradually under a more favorable light, different from the provoking twenty-three-year old woman who transpires sex and expresses herself only through clichés. But the way the biographer perceives her remains unchanged; two years after the beginning of their relationship, Dubin is surprised when he realizes that she is able to think: “Fanny's term paper revealed qualities he had not often observed in her: of knowing more than she seemed to; of being organized as she thought things through” (DL, 231). Fanny is generous and giving. She represents the future and the possibility of a “new life” for Dubin; but Dubin is incapable of giving; he takes from her what he can transforming her into a new version of the inspiring Muse: “These visits of Fanny sparked his work. Ideas swarmed into Dubin's mind” (DL, 103). And while debating on whether Kitty or Fanny should have the privilege to typewrite his manuscript, he ends up alienating his wife's love and seeing Fanny only as a temporary palliative to his fear of aging.

Unable to make the leap, trapped in his subjectivity, but still desperately attracted to Fanny and to what she represents, Dubin confines himself voluntarily to the role of the voyeur, which seals his impotence and passivity:

What a base thing to be doing, Dubin—at your age a Peeping Tom. He observed himself staring at them through the avocado leaves, a gray-haired old man with thick salt-and-pepper sideburns and jealous eyes.

(DL, 330)

All the female characters in Malamud's fiction share a common shallowness and common values: they all respect marriage and family life, and, whatever their past, they all seek fulfillment through a permanent relationship with a man. They are unidimensional characters who are never confronted with the responsibility of a choice. While they never face a crisis, because their roles—of wives, mothers, mistresses—prove to be immutable once they are set at the beginning of the narrative, men appear to be problematic figures of writers, biographers, teachers, baseball players, striving to achieve an identity and to reconcile themselves to the demands of love and commitment. In A New Life, the protagonist succeeds in his struggle to free himself of his obsessive subjectivity. Determined not to repeat his past mistakes of escape from reality and detachment, he agrees to marry Pauline, to accept responsibility, and to reject the role of voyeur. In Dubin's Lives, although the conclusion remains somehow ambiguous, it seems legitimate to suppose that William Dubin will remain trapped in the prison of his own subjectivity, unable to adopt new models and to create a new life for himself. Haunted by his past, but unable to learn from it, he accumulates sterile suffering. Refusing to accept responsibility and to make a commitment, he condemns himself to failure and frustration.

Notes

1. Bernard Malamud, A New Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1952, 1966), and Bernard Malamud, Dubin's Lives (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), hereafter referred to as ANL and DL within the text.

2. Theodore Solotaroff, “Bernard Malamud's Fiction: The Old Life and the New,” Commentary, 33 (March 1962), p. 199.

3. Neal D. Kreitzer, “The Quest for Identity in the Novels of Bernard Malamud,” Ph.D dissertation, University of California, Davis, 1974, p. 172.

4. Roland Barthes, La chambre claire (LeSeuil: Editions de l'Etoile, 1980), p. 144.

5. Eric Sundquist, Home As Found (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 141.

6. Barthes, p. 31.

7. Béla Grunberger observes that “the idea of, and desire for immortality is linked to moral narcissism.” From Narcissism, Psychoanalytic Essay, trans. Joyce S. Diamanti (New York: International Universities Press, 1979), p. 17.

8. Sundquist, p. 105.

9. The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1968), 11:45.

10. Kreitzer, p. 172.

11. Jean Starobinsky observes that

    “Au narcissisme indivis de l'adhésion à soi succéde et s'oppose une seconde forme de narcissisme: la projection de soi. Plutôt que de narcissisme, il faudrait parler ici de pygmalionisme, car c'est Pygmalion qui nous offre l'exemple mythique de cette attitude. Au lieu de se replier immédiatement su lui-même, l'amour s'aliène, devient oeuvre; mais, par le détour de l'oeuvre, il cherche encore à s'unir à soi: l'amour n'est ainsi sorti du moi que pour se préparer le bonheur d'un retour. … Narcissisme hyperbolique, plus exigeant, plus créateur, voué à l'imaginaire et à l'insatisfaction qui le tiendra indéfiniment—mais délicieusement en haleine.”

    From L'Oeil Vivant (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), p. 180

12. Bernard Malamud, The Tenants (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), 6.