had been a suburban housewife, married to a prominent and prosperous geologist. When she was forty-five, her husband left her for another woman. Though she had a college degree, Mary was not really prepared to earn enough to support herself. When she was evicted from her apartment, she lost what little she had left. Although she finally found a job working for a cleaning service, she cannot afford to pay rent. At sixty, she spends her nights in airports, laundromats, church basements, or unlocked garages. She is too proud to admit the truth to her two married children, who answer her occasional pleas for money with descriptions of their own minor financial difficulties, and she is too canny to let her various “ladies” know that she is living in the streets, for their revulsion toward the homeless would result in her immediate dismissal. Mary looks forward to nights and weekends when her employers are out of town, for then she can move into their homes to bathe, eat, and sleep in comfort. Yet Mary never forgets that these pleasures, like everything else about her life, are merely temporary. When the worst happens and she becomes ill, she has to face the fact that unless she finds a home, she will die.

Unlike Leila and Mary, who devoted themselves to pleasing men only to be betrayed by them, it takes only one experience of being used to persuade Becky Souza Burgess that it was wiser to use men than to be used by them. Although she likes Terrence Burgess, Becky does not love him. Nevertheless, after maneuvering him into marriage, Becky makes her husband’s happiness her first priority. Only when he loses his job and refuses to get another, so that she must supply his every need while he sleeps in front of the television or sneaks out to date other women, does Becky decide that he is worth more dead than alive. At the beginning of the novel, Becky has been arrested for killing Terrence with the help of Sam Solomon, a seventeen-year-old high school senior whom she has seduced for the purpose.

Even though one may understand why Becky is angry, it is difficult to think of her as a victim. In one way, however, she is not unlike Leila and Mary. Again, a woman is betrayed by a man—or, in her case, by two men: first Terrence, who was too self-centered to give her the affection she craved, then Sam, who, however unintentionally, led the police to her by being too frugal or too stupid to jettison the television and the videocassette recorder supposedly stolen by Terrence’s unknown killer. Admittedly, Becky is a cold-blooded murderer; admittedly, by her actions she destroys the lives of two men. Yet like Leila and Mary, she is also the victim of social assumptions about gender. If her initial mistake is the result of trusting a man with her life, her second error is shocking society by behaving like a man. To her surprise, Becky finds the jury unsympathetic, not primarily because of her deviousness or her brutality but because, as a female, she demonstrated the predatory behavior that society expects and encourages only in males. By crossing the gender line, Becky has made her conviction inevitable.

In The Longings of Women, Marge Piercy again demonstrates her mastery of technique. For example, throughout the novel she uses third-person narration, but by focusing on only one protagonist in each chapter, she achieves an effect of immediacy that is ordinarily found in stories told in the first person. Moreover, although the events that take place during the course of the novel are related in chronological order, with the exception of thoughts and memories, in fact Piercy maintains not one, but two, time schemes. The chapters dealing with Leila and Mary are set in the present and move onward, while those in which Becky is the primary character take place in the past and move up to the present. Thus although at the time of the novel Becky is actually twenty-five, at her first appearance she is still in high school. Step by step, then, the author shows her moving toward murder, until, very late in the book, Becky’s life has come to the point where the novel actually begins.

In another way, too, Becky’s story is handled differently from those of Mary and Leila. Not only does the omniscient author reveal the truth about Becky’s motivations and her actions, but she also follows a fictional author as she attempts to write a nonfiction book on the same subject. Because Leila has published a book about women in prison, she is asked to produce a work about the sensational Burgess case. This presentation of Becky from two perspectives, one authoritative and one tentative, the product of speculation, has some interesting results. Since Piercy has already entrusted her readers with the facts, there is a strong element of comic irony in Leila’s fumbling interviews. In the difference between what is true and what Leila’s subjects say they believe, the author also dramatizes one of her major themes, the tendency of human beings to delude themselves, especially when their emotions are involved.

Fortunately, an omniscient author is exempt from human illusions, at least on the pages of her book. Piercy’s method of maintaining her authorial presence in The Longings of Women is particularly interesting. While it is evident that this is a novel with three protagonists, all of equal importance, it is significant that the novel begins and ends with Leila. She seems to have two major functions. First, her place in the plot is pivotal: Leila is the only one of the three protagonists who knows both of the others. Leila is connected with Becky because of the book she is writing, and she is involved with Mary first because she is one of the women whose house Mary cleans, and later because it happens to be Leila’s house in which Mary collapses. Even more important, Leila is uniquely suited to speak for the author. Even though she may not always see her own situation clearly, she has an analytical mind, and as a sociologist, she has been trained to view people and situations objectively. Therefore it is not surprising that in the chapters about Leila one finds most of the comments that illuminate not only her own situation but also those of the other women in the novel.

Indeed, one of the points Piercy makes is that women who in many respects are very different have more in common than they realize. Her three protagonists have been trapped because they believed the common assumption that a woman’s worth is derived from her relationship with a man. Mary spent her youth catering to the whims of her husband, only to be dropped for another woman; then she attached herself to another man, who repeated the pattern, firing her when he no longer needed her to set up his business or to warm his bed. Leila may not be financially dependent on her husband, but like Mary she made him much the center of her life. Leila is happiest when she is helping Nick analyze the characters in one of his plays; in other words, she feels most valuable when she is serving him. With her radio newsman, Becky is just as slavish as the other women in the novel, and even though she is not emotionally tied to her husband, for some time she finds her identity not in her job but in preparing meals he likes and doing laundry to his satisfaction. Abandoning her old dream of becoming a television personality, Becky hurries into marriage, hitching her wagon to Terrence’s star. By living with him and becoming like him, she intends to achieve her goal of rising into upper-middle-class society.

By implicitly suggesting that it is foolish for a woman to define herself as a handmaiden to a man, Piercy is not urging her gender to become self-centered and selfish. Becky is not unhappy when she is helping to support her family, who, unlike Terrence, appreciate her efforts. Both Leila and her son take great pleasure in their relationship, which is based on mutual respect. Yet when the family becomes one’s only reason for living, the situation is as unhealthy as dependence on a single individual. Therefore it is better for Leila that her friend’s orphaned daughter chooses not to move in with her. Deprived of a chance to start another family, Leila learns to be happy with her cats, who give her more love than Nick ever could, and with her writing. For the first time in her life, Leila is doing what she wants to do, rather than what she feels she must do. Certainly she enjoys seeing Sam’s appealing uncle, Zak Solomon, put Nick in his place, and she enjoys his company and his lovemaking. Yet even if Leila does eventually make a commitment to Zak, she will never become as emotionally dependent on him as she was on Nick.

Because of circumstances, the other two women in the novel do not attain the degree of independence that Leila does. Mary lost too much time depending on her husband, and now she is too old to become fully self-sufficient. Nevertheless, her life does improve immeasurably after Leila arranges for her to move to California, where she becomes a housekeeper for Leila’s sister. Even though she must still depend for her survival on her power to please, in this case it seems unlikely that Mary will fail. Becky, too, has lost her chance for independence, at least for a number of years, and, like Mary, she must survive by catering to others. The reader’s glimpse of Becky is as a prisoner, gamely setting about to make the right friends and coldly calculating the chances of an escape.

By using not a single protagonist, but three, Piercy has enriched her novel immea-surably. Regardless of whether the author intended it, The Longings of Women can be seen as an illustration of the golden mean, the concept described by the Greek philosopher Aristotle and adopted as truth by most great minds of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Mary represents one extreme, total subservience to one’s mate, while Becky represents the other, self-assertion to the point of disregarding the rights of others. It is Leila who epitomizes the golden mean, the ideal, by learning how to nurture without losing her own identity, how to assert herself without destroying others.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. XC, December 1, 1993, p. 660.

Boston Globe. March 13, 1994, p. 92.

Chicago Tribune. April 17, 1994, XIV, p. 3.

Kirkus Reviews. LXI, December 15, 1993, p. 1546.

Library Journal. CXIX, January, 1994, p. 164.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. April 3, 1994, p. 5.

The New York Times Book Review. XCIX, March 20, 1994, p. 23.

Publishers Weekly. CCXL, December 13, 1993, p. 61.

The Washington Post Book World. XXIV, March 27, 1994, p. 5.

The Women’s Review of Books. XI, July, 1994, p. 46.

Interwoven Lives

The sixty-five chapters of The Longings of Women weave an intricate tapestry, each titled after its protagonist—Leila, Becky, or Mary—and presented through a third-person, limited omniscient perspective. Each character's story stands robustly on its own, be it novel or novella. In a dance between episodic sequences and chronological unfolding, sprinkled with flashbacks, Piercy deftly intertwines the lives of these three women. Yet, she artfully preserves the integrity of their unique narratives, ensuring that their collective journey never eclipses the personal odysseys of Leila, Becky, and Mary. This multifaceted approach grants readers a broader understanding of the characters than the women possess about one another. As observers, we peer through various prisms, amplifying our awareness of their imperfections, self-deceptions, and fallibilities.

Vivid Settings

The novel's settings, described with piercing clarity, become reflections of the characters inhabiting them. From the birthplace of Becky—steeped in a bittersweet blend of affection and neglect—to the cold pretentiousness of her in-laws' grand estate, each environment echoes the essence of its residents. While some critics lament the abundance of detail, Patricia Volk notes Piercy's ability to bring a room full of strangers to vivid life by dessert's end. Yet, she questions the necessity of overt statements like "Leila aimed to be a good woman," suggesting that such clarity denies readers the thrill of self-discovery. Meanwhile, Elayne Rapping appreciates the lush detail, acknowledging that although the narratives occasionally lean towards simplicity, Piercy's profound insights and empathy for her flawed heroines shine through, overshadowing any perceived narrative easiness.

The Longings of Women revisits and expands upon a poignant theme—home, homelessness, and the quest for belonging—that Piercy has touched upon in her earlier novels and poetry. This exploration can be traced back through her works such as Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Vida (1980), Braided Lives (1982), and Fly Away Home (1984). These stories collectively set the stage for her latest novel's journey. Similarly, Virginia Woolf’s seminal work A Room of One’s Own (1929) delves into the transformative power of a personal sanctuary for women. Meanwhile, the oppressive notion of a place as a confining prison, a patriarchal means of containment, is a theme interwoven in The Longings of Women much like it is in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s haunting "The Yellow Wallpaper."