Gail Godwin's The Odd Woman (1974) does not at first glance seem to be in the currently popular mode of self-conscious fiction—and perhaps for this reason has not attracted the critical attention it deserves. Neither a work as involuted as one by Borges nor a Kuenstlerroman, The Odd Woman centers on the relation between literature and life, especially on the effect that literature—and the lies it often tells—has on those who believe it. Of special interest is the novel's focus on fiction's traditional portrayal of women and its effect on women's relations with and reactions to men.

For Jane Clifford, the protagonist of The Odd Woman, words possess an almost magical quality. The novel opens with Jane lying in bed trying to overcome her usual insomnia by pondering the written records of sleeplessness left by other insomniacs. To Jane, words seem imbued with the power to heal, the power to influence life:

she believed in them deeply. The articulation, interpretation, appreciation, and preservation of good words. She believed in their power. If you truly named something, you had that degree of control over it…. The right word or the wrong word could change a person's life, the course of the world.

As Jane admits to herself, "everything for her is measured in words."

To Jane, a professor of English literature serves as far more than simply vocation or avocation. It is not just an object of perception but conditions her very mode of seeing. She views her own life through the refracting filter of literature. Jane's mother, Kitty, oversimplifies matters when she accuses Jane of looking up her life in books, but Jane interweaves her life with books; she experiences her life through literature, through the books she has so entirely assimilated. A teacher of Romantic and Victorian literature, Jane has lived since graduate school "more in the nineteenth century than in her own." For Jane the worlds of fiction and the "real" world are one: she admits to a student that, gazing at the moon, she might perhaps perceive it through Coleridge's poetry. Climbing off this student's motorcycle, she "made a point of thanking him with the formality of a Jane Austen heroine climbing decorously from a carriage."

Jane not only experiences literary worlds as real, she treats the actual world as if it were an aesthetic creation. The anecdotes of her family history become the formative stories of Jane's present as well as her past, serving as simply so much more fiction for her to analyze and interpret. Jane dwells, for example, on "Kitty's train story," Edith's fainting story, and Cleva's escape story. Her astute friend Gerda, criticizing Jane's conception of her family history, asserts that Jane transforms her relatives into symbols and their stories into myths. Jane creates her own personal yet widely allusive fictions.

Central to the plot of The Odd Woman and to Jane's conception of art and life is her relationship with Gabriel Weeks. We might expect Jane's affair with Gabriel to represent her life in the "real" physical world in contrast to her life in the world of her literary imagination. A rather silent man, Gabriel denies the importance of words, and Jane's encounters with him center around sexual rendezvous, non-verbal meetings. Such an estimate of the relationship, however, is misleading, for Jane's affair with Gabriel is but one more expression of her overwhelming immersion in words. Gabriel is a product of Jane's very literary imagination: having heard him speak at a Modern Language Association seminar, Jane dreams him as a lover. Even long after their sexual relationship has begun, she admits to herself that he "represented a dream." Her affair with Gabriel begins with her researching him, tracking him down through her imagination with the aid of the Oxford English Dictionary, various indexes and catalogues, and Gabriel's monograph.

Jane's prefabricated fantasy affair with Gabriel, she tells us that "with Gabriel—she often planned her conversations, sometimes weeks in advance"—reveals and reflects an attitude which underlies her concern with literature. Godwin links Jane's interest in fictions with the wish to avoid sexuality, to ignore or de-emphasize the physical world in favor of the world of the imagination. Note that the motivations behind Jane's previous affair (and near marriage) were the literary discussions and intellectual rapport Jane enjoyed with her lover's mother. Gabriel represents for Jane not immersion in but escape from the physical world. Jane's relationship with Gabriel proves almost a denial of sexuality and of physicality. After being with Gabriel, Jane finds herself constipated: "They had shared the same hotel room, and the result was that she had been unable to go to the bathroom for three mornings because she could not bear to make the noises necessary to these functions."

Gabriel, in turn, proves a suitable match for Jane. His interest in love seems equally intellectual and hypothetical: the topic of his monograph is "Lessons on Love by Three Pre-Raphaelite Painters." Along with Jane, one feels Gabriel's presence as intellectual rather than physical: the novel, narrated so completely from Jane's point of view, gives scant description of Jane and Gabriel's lovemaking. Gerda tells Jane that Gabriel must be Jane's perfect lover—that is, "a perfect blur," someone only remotely physical. Gabriel, the intellectual lover derived from dreams and words and paper research, is indeed Gabriel the angel.

Interestingly, in an earlier novel Godwin's main character wonders what it would be like to make love with an angel. In The Odd Woman, Jane Clifford finds out. The only way she can physically fulfill herself in bed with an angel is to escape into a fantasy; an angel cannot by his very nature be a satisfactory lover, and a satisfactory lover seems not to be what Jane seeks. Such sexual failure and the falsification implied by dreaming for oneself and angel as a lover is foreshadowed by the poem which Jane discusses with her students.

Early in The Odd Woman we are told that Jane teaches Blake's "The Angel" to her class and surely the speaker of the poem represents Jane: "I dreamt a Dream! what can it mean? / And that I was a maiden Queen, / Guarded by an Angel mild." Just as Jane dreams up Gabriel, her "Angel mild," she envisions herself most comfortably as a "maiden Queen," virginal and pure, whose only safe object of physical affection might be an Angel mild. For Jane, angels have the innocence she had before puberty and before Kitty's remarriage forced sexual knowledge on her:

"Little Jane has Engelshaar…. The hair of an angel. It will soon turn dark. Yes, my dear, as the soul loses its purity, the Engelshaar must go dark." Within months, Jane had witnessed, horrified, the old nun's prophecy fulfill itself. Her hair became dark the winter she was in the fourth grade, the first winter she spent her weekends with the newly married Kitty and Ray. And there was worse to come. Soon, on other parts of her body, dark hair began to grow as well. She was alarmed and shaved herself with a razor and got down on her knees at night and prayed it would not come back. It came back. Darker and thicker than before. Her guilt pressed upon her.

The happiest time of Jane's adult life is the period in which she retreats from the physical world into the world of the mind and writes her dissertation:

She withdrew into her carrel in the quiet of the library; she withdrew, without embarrassment, into the utter earnestness of her mind. Here she was pure and light, stripped of her usual fears about her own inadequacies, about the uncertainties of the future…. Outside, it snowed constantly. One snow followed another. The campus was white and silent. Outside and inside her, all was cold, white, pure. She looked in the mirror of the library's women's room and saw a clear-eyed being with nothing about her wasted, no excess skin or energy which was not in use. Her skin, it seemed to her, glowed with a mental and spiritual electricity, like a saint's skin.

Clearly, Jane's immersion in her work and the chaste frozen environment in which she thrives reflect her fears of and retreat from sexuality and the world around her.

Jane's attitude toward sexuality, that she can only allow herself to make love to an angel ethereal and mild, derives from the influence of her grandmother. Edith, who raised her. Edith tells the young and impressionable Jane that "There are certain duties in marriage…. There are certain things one has to go through with because the man needs them, you see." Central to Jane's familial mythology is the episode bringing Edith together with her husband-to-be. Jane "had always liked that story; something in it was very close to her, very close to her own feelings about the human race."

"Life is a disease," [Edith] moaned, and fell forthwith in a slender heap of white lawn at the feet of a young German immigrant named Hans Barnstorff, who adored her on sight. When she woke from the fever, on her daddy's farm, all her hair fallen out, there was Hans, who still saw the most beautiful woman in the world. "Let me protect you from it." he said.

Edith's marriage, then, becomes a retreat from life. Godwin uses Jane's strong identification with Edith and with the view that life is a disease to explain Jane's interest in the angel Gabriel which she connects with Jane's dependence on literature. In a love affair with Gabriel, Jane hopes to recapture her innocence and be the maiden Queen of Blake's Song of Experience. As in Blake's poem, life's romantic dreams of innocence end in experience, with the morning dawning and the angel gone.

Gabriel and Edith are not the only characters Godwin uses to underscore Jane's problems. In contrast with Jane, characters as different as Ray and Howard disclose that not only is Jane's interest in literature symptomatic of her problems with sexuality but such interest itself causes problems for Jane. Both Ray and Howard symbolize and embody sexual energy in Jane's world. The man who took Kitty away from Jane and Edith and who nightly attracts Kitty away from her jealous daughters has the apt surname "Sparks" (compared with the weak Gabriel Weeks). To Jane, Ray represents a threatening physicality.

Her student, Howard Cecil, also confronts Jane with her fears of the body. While Jane wants to relate to Howard through ideas, unemotionally and intellectually, "Howard spoke in terms of 'feeling' always." Jane, on the other hand, tries to be what Kitty's apt typographical error describes her as: "a good think." When Howard challenges Jane to join him on his motorcycle, she primly climbs aboard and that night dreams of making love with him—Jane's repressed sexuality bursts forth even more obviously in her orgy of drawing pornographic pictures, pictures which she characteristically flushes down the toilet the following morning.

Just as Ray was Kitty's student, Howard is Jane's, and Jane notices the symmetry. Although both attend a literature class, Ray and Howard are anomalies in such a group. Ray's "all-time favorite book" is The Fountainhead, and Howard disagrees with Jane about the power and importance of words: "I don't think certain things can be named…. I think a poem just is." The similarity between Ray and Howard forces itself upon Jane's consciousness when Ray echoes the question Howard had posed to Jane: "Don't you want to be happy?" These two sexual representatives of the non-literary world, Ray and Howard, become spokesmen, then, for the happiness which they have found and which Jane cannot seem to find. Linking these two unlikely men together, Godwin implies that Jane's interest in words, her literary imagination, stands in the way of her happiness, or perhaps even causes her unhappiness.

By comparing Jane and Gerda we can begin to see exactly how and why Jane's immersion in literature prevents her from being happy. Gerda represents the "real" world as opposed to the inner life of the imagination represented by Jane. Gerda labels Jane a romantic and sees herself as a realist. When Gerda decides to marry Bobby Mulvaney, she takes practical matters rather than love into consideration, for she is not an English major but an economics major: "I would be bringing him something and he would be bringing me something…. I believe marriage is an economic proposition: the whole world did, until literature confused the issue." Gerda's marriage does not survive, but then neither does Jane's romantic engagement to James, or James's mother.

In the present of Godwin's novel, Gerda manages Feme Sole, a feminist magazine which she aggressively and affirmatively, as well as humorously, refers to as her new organ. In contrast, Jane is about to teach George Gissing's The Odd Women. The expression "feme sole" is "derived from the Old French 'woman alone.' In legal terms … it means an unmarried woman, divorcee, or widow." In contrast to the rubric "feme sole," "odd woman" connotes, as Gissing tells us, a state of incompleteness: "So many odd women—no making a pair with them. The pessimists call them useless, lost, futile lives." Jane herself admits that she sees herself as fitting into Gissing's definition. In the essential difference between "feme sole" and "odd woman" lies the difference between Gerda and Jane which results from their differing orientations. Jane becomes an "Odd woman" rather than a "feme sole" precisely because, as Gerda tells her, she is a "novel-reader," a "starry-eyed romantic."

As a small child, Jane waited for her life to begin, believing that literacy would be the key to open life for her: "When is my life going to start, she had thought—even then, at age five. And she was sure it would start when she began going to school and learned how to read and write." Once she learns to read and write, Jane conceives a new notion of when life will begin, believing it will come when she finds a man and falls in love. Being engaged to James, she finally thinks "about how softly she had slipped into her destiny, how unobtrusively her 'real life' had begun." While Gerda, feme sole, vows no longer to "ask or expect to be fulfilled or emotionally completed by a member of the opposite sex," Jane, the odd woman (her relationship with James having failed), believes she must keep herself "open and alert. I have to keep ready for my other half." Such a notion with its disturbing sense of insufficiency and incompleteness derives directly from literature—from novel reading.

The very title of Godwin's novel testifies to the importance of literature's harmful effect on women. Jane turns to a significant passage from Gissing's The Odd Women and quotes an excerpt from it. The entire passage proves central to Jane's problem and Godwin's purpose. Under discussion is a woman's love affair with a man who, it turned out, was not to be trusted. Rhoda Nunn, the central figure in Gissing's novel, has little sympathy for the woman but does not directly blame her for her lack of judgment:

All her spare time was given to novel-reading. If every novelist could be strangled and thrown into the sea should have some chance of reforming women. The girl's nature was corrupted with sentimentality, like that of all but every woman who is intelligent enough to read what is called the best fiction, but not intelligent enough to understand its vice. Love—love—love; a sickening sameness of vulgarity. What is more vulgar than the ideal of novelists? They won't represent the actual world; it would be too dull for their readers. In real life, how many men and women fall in love? Not one in every ten thousand, I am convinced. Not one married pair in ten thousand have felt for each other as two or three couples do in every novel.

Literature fosters certain expectations in its readers, and Jane proves a prime example.

Reading The Odd Women, Jane sympathizes with the romantics of the novel who have fallen prey to literature's lying promises: "When Monica Madden, who was still young and pretty, met the older Widdowson, a bachelor with money, in Battersea Park, Jane thought furtively, as she had thought the last time she read this novel: Oh, go ahead and marry him. Why not? Maybe in this reading it will come out better." To be happy Jane feels she must have the love literature promises her; but Gissing tells us—and Godwin's title endorses the belief—that such love is not to be had in the actual world. The blanket indictment of writers and readers seems, however, belied in Godwin's novel by the example of Kitty, both a writer and a reader, satisfied in her marriage to Ray Sparks. We must ask how Kitty, unlike Jane, escapes the harmful effect of literature.

Literature seems to operate in Kitty's life much as it does in Jane's. An insomniac like Jane. Kitty also relies on reading as a cure. Kitty now teaches Medieval History—one kind of story-telling—and at one time, like Jane, taught Romantic Poetry. Moreover, Kitty has authored what would be the very worst kind of fiction according to Gissing and Godwin, the romantic fiction so harmful to women because of the expectations it nurtures. Kitty wrote stories for Love Short Stories, love stories which "repeat the same old plot again and again; the plot of a girl, give or take the color of her hair, who threw everything out the window to get her man."

Unlike Jane, however, Kitty manages to balance the outer with the inner life, to live both in the actual world and in the world of the imagination. While Jane joins Edith in endorsing the view that "life is a disease," Kitty joins Cleva, Jane's great aunt who ran away with a man only to return in a coffin, in embracing life and running away with her unbridled impulses:

Edith recognized in Jane a similarity to herself, another similarity Kitty did not have…. Perhaps Edith saw in Jane her own tendency to imagine the worst. For when Edith said to Kitty, who was embarking on a date with an Undesirable, "You know what happened to Cleva," Kitty (as she reported to Jane, years later) simply said, "Oh, pooh." Not so with Jane.

Kitty runs off with two men, first Jane's father and later the non-literary Ray Sparks. Although Kitty carries on an affair of the imagination mostly via telephone calls in public booths with a professor of English, an affair reminiscent of Jane's relationship with Gabriel, Kitty eventually gives the man up in favor of Ray. She offers the wry and pragmatic explanation: "I was so sick of always having to clutter up my purse with all that heavy loose change."

Despite Gissing's and Godwin's warning of the dangers of literature, of the harm the fantasy world of fiction can exert on a woman's "real" life, Kitty mediates between the two worlds. She manages the balance because she has practical insight into the relationship between the literary world and the actual one:

One day Jane, who was four or five at the time, asked Kitty "Why don't you write a story about a woman who teaches school at the college and writes love stories on the weekend and has a little girl like me?"

"It wouldn't sell, that's why," replied Kitty.

"Oh, I think it would be very interesting to read," said Jane.

"It would be interesting to people like you and me," Kitty said, "but I can assure you, Love Short Stories wouldn't buy it. My girls have to have respectable, slightly glamorous jobs, but nothing too important. There must be nothing too permanent or heavy in their lives, because they have to throw it all out the window when the man comes along."

Kitty distinguishes between what we find in books which is subject to economic necessities and what we find in life. She tries to explain to five-year-old Jane that life and art differ. More than twenty-five years later we find Kitty still trying to impress the lesson on Jane:

You are such a child in some ways, darling. You're such a good little student. You've always been one to look up your life in books and develop crushes on teachers who would tell you "answers." So [George Eliot] was happy, "outrageously happy," for twenty-five years with [Lewes]. Can anyone living look me in the eye and tell me they have lived with a man for twenty-five years and been outrageously happy? You're living in myths, Jane, to expect such things…. The trouble with myths … is that they leave out so much. They leave out all the loose ends, all those messy, practical details that make living less than idyllic. That's why myths can remain beautiful.

Like Rhoda Nunn of The Odd Women, Kitty understands that the worlds of literature and everyday life are discontinuous, separate, and that she cannot carry expectations from the one to the other.

Jane, on the other hand, lives according to the belief that life and art can indeed be one. When Edith forces a tour of Europe on Jane, Jane finds herself uncomfortable and unhappy travelling:

But London was different. Jane recognized it at once. She knew it intimately. It was like coming home, to your soul's home. She never got lost—not once. It was as though she carried a map of the city inside her head. If she wanted to see the courtroom when the case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce was heard in Bleak House, she took a bus or a tube and went to Lincoln's Inn. If she wanted to sit in the church of Saint-Dunstan-in-the-West, where a vicar named Donne had preached every Sunday, she went to Fleet Street…. London was Jane's city…. Yes, London was safe. It was like wandering around in your own imagination…. Nothing was difficult for her here. The printed word transformed itself obediently into reality whenever she called upon it.

Jane finds a haven in England because here literature and life are one; her expectations are fulfilled. Returning to America, she continues to seek such fulfillment. She "ransacked novels for answers to life," believes that "once she had truly named her insomnia … she could befriend it," intends to rely on words to dissuade potential criminals from harming her, and yearns for the true love her favorite fictions have conditioned her to expect.

At one point early in The Odd Woman Jane admits to herself that she reads too much for her own good and she goes on to realize that

stories were all right, as long as you read them as what they were: single visions, one person's way of interpreting something. You could learn from stories, be warned by stories. But stories, by their very nature, were Procrustean. Even the longest of them had to end somewhere. If a living human being tried to squeeze himself into a particular story, he might find vital parts of himself lopped off. Even worse, he might find himself unable to get out again.

Jane does not heed her own warning, and Godwin underscores the fact. She prepares us for the above passage with the statement that Jane "had an insight—the beginning of one, rather—about stories" (emphasis added). Jane fully learns the lesson, Kitty's lesson, and completes her insight in the final pages of the novel; indeed, the entire book moves toward the climax and the completion of Jane's perception that the worlds of life and art are far from identical.

In addition to the story of Edith fainting away at the feet of her husband-to-be, Hans, with the words "life is a disease," and the story of Kitty's decision finally to rid herself of all that loose change, the story of Cleva's elopement and subsequent death influences Jane tremendously. In 1905 Cleva ran off with an actor in a melodrama passing through town, had an illegitimate child, and

returned ten months later, in a coffin. Her death remained a mystery. Hans had gone to New York on the night train and returned with the coffin and the infant girl, after Edith had received a note from Cleva, scrawled in pencil on the back of a torn theatre program: "Sister I am in grave trouble please can somebody come the villain has left me," and an address.

The force of the story for Jane issues in part from the fact that she has a tangible written relic of the episode over which she can and does ruminate at length: the note from Cleva to Edith. In support of Jane's belief that life and art are indeed continuous, the melodrama in which Cleva's "villain" acted is aptly The Fatal Wedding. Taking off from the title and comparing Cleva's story to Edith's life, Jane agrees with Edith in concluding that "You had your choice: a disastrous ending with a Villain; a satisfactory ending with a Good Man. The message was simple." Jane believes that, like art, the actual world is composed of heroes and villains, and she casts her life accordingly. Ray Sparks acts the part of a villain along with two of Jane's elementary school teachers. At a Modern Language Association seminar, Gabriel and Zimmer play hero and villain respectively.

At the end of The Odd Woman Jane tracks down and visits Von Vorst, the villain of The Fatal Wedding and the man with whom, she has supposed all her life, Cleva ran off. Contrary to all Jane's expectations and the scenario she had prepared herself for, Von Vorst does not act the part of the villain. When Jane returns home, the truth of the encounter hits her in a shocking revelation: the villain in life, the man who carried Cleva off, may not have been the villain of the play in which he acted; Cleva's lover may not have been Von Vorst: "Did 'villain' in 1906 simply mean the person you hated because he had hurt you—as 'son of a bitch,' 'prick,' 'bastard' meant today regardless of what mild creature played Villain or Man About I own on the stage?" The man with whom Cleva ran off may well have been Edwin Merchant, who played the part of the hero and "happy husband" in the melodrama.

Finally, the full insight that the literary world has no necessary correlation with the actual world bursts on Jane. Villains in art need not be villains in life. Moreover, her insight confirms the truth of Jane's early wondering whether or not the concept of the self is itself a myth—"Characters were not so wholly good or bad, heroes or villains, anymore," whether or not the very notion of personality—the staple of fiction—is itself false. As the concepts of personality and of heroes and villains die, so does "all the stuff of novels" on which Jane depends to give meaning to her life.

Unfortunately, The Odd Woman does not end on an optimistic note of lessons learned. Jane will try to incorporate Edwin Merchant as villain into a new mythology rather than give up the belief, so central to her, that art accurately reflects and comments on life. The revelation comes too late for thirty-two-year-old Jane Clifford. Even though she has—however half-heartedly—managed to break off her unhealthy relationship with Gabriel, she remains an "odd woman" still. The novel closes with the snow falling, reminding us of Jane's retreat when writing her dissertation, and pointing to another such frozen retreat from the actual world. Godwin seems to offer a forceful indictment of literature and the harmful effects it can have on its readers. Jane can never be happy except, perhaps, in the safe world of the imagination, the only world which can begin to fulfill the expectations literature has fostered in her. We must go on to ask how Godwin can escape her own indictment of literature, whether her message does not undermine the very novel in which it is embodied. Gissing's novel first gives voice to the charge against fiction and the lies it tells to women, and he would probably defend his own novel against the charge by asserting that it counteracts those lies, offering women bleak truth instead. As Jane notes, Gissing's novel displays his "unrelenting pessimism. It was one of the few nineteenth-century novels she could think of in which every main female character who was allowed to live through the last page had to do so alone. The book's ending depressed her utterly." Godwin might find her defense against the charge she, too, levels against literature in pointing to the pessimistic ending of Jane's story as an example of the truth-telling that we must require from contemporary fiction. Godwin, however, has some of the Jane Clifford in her, and her novel still embodies some of the old attractive lies.

In Sonia Marks we have a fairy-tale figure, the woman who represents something special to Jane, who is a "winner." Not only the mistress of an attractive and interesting man (unlike Ray Sparks) who manages to become his wife and a mother, Sonia proves a popular and spell-binding professor of literature who never had to sell out like Kitty and write Love Short Stories or give up her dreams. According to Jane, Sonia has it all. Here we have the woman in "real" life who fulfills all the promises fiction offers, and Godwin does not undercut or deny Jane's vision of Sonia. Perhaps, she admits, we can have it all; Godwin yearns to believe the conventional fictions that tell us that men and women do fall in love and live happily ever after. Gerda's pragmatic economic point of view may be right, but we still join Godwin in favoring Jane, the "heroine" of The Odd Woman and the focus of our sympathies, who has not given up love like Gerda.

Finally, Godwin proves unwilling to choose the outer life over the life of the imagination in a decision that her novel—Sonia Marks notwithstanding—argues will prove necessary. Like Jane, Godwin's narrator prefers "building your own interior castle" to living in the actual world. Godwin's novel closes not with Jane Clifford, a hopeless, albeit sympathetic case, but with her neighbor, a man (interestingly) who, more than anyone else in the novel, represents the escape from life and the immersion in art and the world of the imagination:

He kept bird-feeders. A modern-day hermit if there ever was one, he worked in the library's Special Collections and kept to himself. [Jane] had watched him often from her window, frail, nervously alert, refilling those feeders. At night, after the rest of the street was long asleep, she heard him playing Mozart.

Despite her convincing quarrel with the literary imagination, Godwin ends The Odd Woman with the beautiful and simple image of Jane lying in bed listening to this man take elements of the actual world and transform them into something far more precious—art:

All was silent, safe and still. [Jane's] heartbeat slowed from melodramatic terror to its usual insomniac tick. From the little concrete house behind came the barely audible tinkle of a soul at the piano, trying to organize the loneliness and the weather and the long night into something of abiding shape and beauty.