Black Milk

standards. His wife, Agnes, had an affair with another man, and when she bore his child, Lewes was happy to claim the baby as his own. Though the couple remained legally married, they had ceased to see each other as husband and wife. Mary Ann and George lived together. She adopted his sons as her own. It wasn’t unheard-of in Victorian society for people to have relations outside of wedlock, but their openness about their love was simply scandalous.

At a time when women writers were few, she not only wrote fiction to her heart’s content but also became the assistant editor of the Westminster Review. She called herself Marian Evans for a while, molding her name, seeing how it felt to have a masculine moniker. In her attempt to distance herself from the female novelists who produced romances, she decided that she needed a male pen name. To honor her love for Lewes, she adopted his name, George, and then picked out Eliot because it fit well with the first name.

In 1856 Lewes sent a story titled “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton” to his publisher, claiming that it was written by a “clerical friend.” The publisher wrote back saying he would publish the story and congratulating this new writer for being “worthy of the honors of print and pay.” Thus began a new stage in Eliot’s literary career. She wanted to remain incognito as long as she could, enjoying the advantages of being anonymous, and thereby unreachable. Her nom de plume enabled her to transcend Victorian gender roles, and carve for herself a greater zone of existence.

One evening at a party, Lewes read aloud a spellbinding story by Eliot and asked his guests to guess what kind of a person the author was. All of them came to the conclusion that the story was written by a man-a Cambridge man, well educated, a clergyman married with children. (Similar reactions were received when Eliot’s stories were sent to other writers. Only Charles Dickens thought the author had to be a woman. Only he got it right.)

I love to imagine this scene: in a high-ceilinged apartment, a dozen or so guests sitting comfortably on cushioned sofas and armchairs, sipping their drinks, eyeing one another furtively as they listen to a story by an unknown author, their eyes rapt in the flames in the fireplace, their minds miles away as they try to guess the gender of the writer, and fail.

In her popular masterpiece Middlemarch, which Virginia Woolf famously described as “one of the only English novels written for grown-up people,” Eliot created an impressive character named Dorothea. She is intelligent, passionate, generous and ambitious-in all probability a representation of the author herself. It is a constant disappointment to feminist scholars that neither Dorothea nor Eliot’s other female characters ever achieved the sort of success or freedom that she enjoyed. But does a woman writer need to create fictional role models to inspire her female readers? Like all good storytellers, Eliot found pleasure in combining challenge and compassion. “If art does not enlarge men’s sympathies it does nothing morally,” she wrote. Contrary to the common belief, she wasn’t someone who despised all things deemed to be womanly. Though she had masculine features, a cherished male pen name, a certain bias toward women writers and chutzpah that was, at the time, deemed fit for a man, she also enjoyed her femininity to the fullest. It was this unusual blend that mesmerized those who met her in person.

After the death of Lewes, she married a man twenty years her junior with whom she shared common intellectual ground. Like Zelda Fitzgerald she fell in love with brains first; like Ayn Rand she could be imposing in her private affairs. She died shortly afterward in 1880, at the age of sixty-one. She was buried in Highgate Cemetery in an area reserved for religious dissenters-even in death, not quite fitting in.

Louisa May Alcott and George Eliot, two contemporary women writers with a common passion for storytelling, one of them regarded as the voice of feminine writing, and the other known as a defeminized author-both equally unconventional in their ways. They remind me, across centuries and cultures, that there are other paths for a woman than conventional marriage and motherhood. Perhaps marriage is less a legal arrangement or social institution than a book awaiting interpretation. Every reader brings his or her own gaze to the text, and ends up reading the story differently.

One Blue, One Pink

Two years after saying “I do” in Berlin, I’m shaking like a leaf on the bathroom floor in Istanbul. The tiles on the walls are painted emerald and streaked with dark green ivies that suit your mood perfectly when you feel like a leaf.

I had spent the last year and a half teaching at the University of Arizona as a full-time tenure-track professor in Near Eastern studies. Moving from chilly Ann Arbor to sunny Tucson required a radical change in my wardrobe, which, thank God, consisted of two suitcases. During this entire time I had been commuting like crazy between Tucson and Istanbul, and now here I am, sitting with my back to the bathtub, taking deep breaths to calm my thumping heart.

In my hand there is a tiny object. It feels odd to attribute so much importance to an object this small and plastic, but that is how it is. On the back of the box it came in it reads: “If two lines appear on the screen it shows pregnancy. One single blue line indicates lack of it.”

But at the moment I avoid looking at the screen, focusing instead on every other trivial detail, such as the date of expiration and the place of manufacture. It is made in China. That is why it cost me one-third of the price of the other home pregnancy test kits at the drugstore. I wonder how reliable it is. Doesn’t it say in the newspapers that Chinese toys can cause allergies? How about Chinese test kits, could they give false positives?

More curious about the reliability of the product in my hand than my own physical condition, my gaze slides down to the small white screen. Relief. Oh, good. There is only one line. Blue. I wasn’t ready for the second line. I can go now. But there is a nagging suspicion at the back of my mind, and something tells me not to hurry, not so soon. Then, just as I feared, taking its sweet time, the pink line appears.

Why doesn’t the pink line come first and then the blue one? Or why don’t they appear simultaneously? There would be less anticipation that way and far less apprehension. Have the Chinese manufacturers designed it this way to make it more exciting for women?

It takes me a few minutes to stop quarreling with the Chinese manufacturers and acknowledge my situation. Slowly but surely my mind recognizes what my heart has already accepted: I am pregnant.

Now what? I need to talk with someone but whom? The first thought that pops into my head is to consult with the finger-women. Yet I quickly abandon the idea. I can’t tell them anything yet. Especially not Milady Ambitious Chekhovian, who, I fear, will tear the walls down. Nor Miss Highbrowed Cynic, I definitely can’t tell her either. Even talking to Dame Dervish sounds like a lame idea. She will not give me advice to solve this predicament; instead she’ll want me to figure it out on my own. But I am far too panicked for that.

Who can I speak to if I can’t speak to them?

That’s when I recall Mama Rice Pudding. She is the only one among the Thumbelinas who knows anything about babies and pregnancies. But where is she now? How is she doing? I haven’t spoken to her since that night under the Brain Tree. I need to see her urgently. But will she talk to me? I’m sure she is still quite upset and will not respond if I send her an invitation. I guess I should go and find her.

Once again, I take a flickering candle and descend into the labyrinth of my soul. Again, I find it very confusing down here, where there are no road signs, no traffic lights. I don’t know where Mama Rice Pudding lives and can’t imagine what her house looks like.

After an hour of toiling I find her house. It is made out of a milk carton, complete with lace curtains and pots filled with tulips, carnations and hyacinths on its window ledge. I press the doorbell. It chirps a merry tune of singing birds.

“What do you want?” she asks when she opens the door and sees me.

She is wearing a rose-patterned dress and has her hair done up with multihued clips. She seems to have gained a bit more weight. On her feet are fuchsia-colored slippers with pompoms. She wears a red and white polka-dotted kitchen apron that has “Super Cook” written across the top. A divine smell wafts from inside the house. Something sweet and fruity.

“I want to apologize for breaking your heart,” I say meekly. “I don’t know how to make it up to you, and I fear that now it might be too late. It is just that there is something urgent we need to talk about. May I come