Bookmarked

first Mrs. Wilcox, the older woman who touches other lives through her simplicity of understanding, Forster gives us the image of a woman who prevails, but not through will or willfulness, nor through resistance and opposition. Externally a conventional wife and mother, Mrs. Wilcox reaches out in spirit to pervade rather than impose on others around her. With her ties to the wych-elm and the house of Howards End, she is clearly “connected” to an old agrarian England, which antedates both the motor cars and telegrams of Henry Wilcox’s capitalism and the concerts and literary talk of the Schelegels’ cosmopolitan culture. I could never be a Mrs. Wilcox—I’m far too combative as well as too reliant on words and wit. But I’m intrigued by the possibility she suggests of a different way to be powerful. Not my mother’s way of taking on all comers, of bravery, bullying, self-invention and charm. But a quiet, almost guileless way, in which there is nonetheless full retention of dignity and influence. This is appealing. And perhaps I’m too quick to conclude I could never be a Mrs. Wilcox. Could I not take on some of her attributes, absorb the lesson of her modesty, link to people, men and women alike—in a generosity of spirit free of calculation? Mrs. Wilcox is sustained by her ancestral roots in Howards End, but I have my roots in the soil of English literature. From these I imagine myself rising and spreading, touching generations of my students and my family, a self that is realized through a kind of grace rather than self assertion. I see this figure still as a woman, an avatar of Forster’s feminine, but a woman freed by virtue of age and understanding from the divisiveness of gender. She is liberated not by “fighting for woman against men” but by connecting—“only connect” is the mantra—with both in the least defensive, most expansive ways.

To the Lighthouse

I first read To the Lighthouse in my Bryn Mawr freshman English course, the same year-long course that introduced me to The Portrait of a Lady. Our teacher was Ramona Livingston, a middle-aged plump-cheeked woman, who lived near the college with a husband and daughters and, as a lecturer, taught two or three sections of freshman English. Though I wasn’t attuned then to the distinctions of rank in academe, she seemed distinctly less glamorous than some of the English department stars who were teaching friends of mine in other sections, and I envied my friends these more scintillating instructors. Ramona Livingston seemed so average and quotidian, so lacking in any edge of mystery or suffering. Still, the work I did under her direction taught me to read closely, write clearly, and grasp the basic tenets of modernism. In our study of To the Lighthouse we looked at the open-ended symbolism of the lighthouse, Woolf’s narrative flow in and out of her characters’ consciousnesses, and her deft and poignant play with time. It’s interesting to me now, though, that we did not consider any issues of gender. This was the early sixties, and though I had chosen to attend a women’s college where a female instructor was introducing me to a novel by a woman author that centered on a memorable female protagonist, I failed to have a single conscious thought about any one of them—author, teacher, character, or myself—being a woman.

If there was a theme that most engaged me, it had nothing to do with my gender but rather with conflict between the solitary and the social, the struggle, surely, of my young life then. When it came time to pick a topic for the major paper of the course, I chose to focus on the figure of the artist, a personage at once gifted and stigmatized, in the fiction of Thomas Mann.

I had encountered Mann the previous year in my senior English class at Rosemary Hall under the tutelage of the formidable Miss Fayetta McKown, a much more imposing English teacher than the motherly Ramona Livingston (though I’m trying here, admittedly belatedly, to give Mrs. Livingston the credit I feel is due her). I remember Mrs. Livingston’s prescripts, but I remember Miss McKown herself, one of those teachers who live on, magnified and iconic, in the imagination of their students. Revered by many of us as mysterious and intellectual, she sat in class with her chin propped on the back of her long-fingered hand and thrilled us with her musings about literature. One of our texts was an anthology of English and European short stories and novellas. The volume, as I remember it, contained Maupassant’s “The Necklace” and “Mademoiselle de Maupin” by Henry James. But the story in the volume I loved best was Mann’s “Tonio Kröger,” a story about the figure of the artist that seemed to give literary representation to my own alienated yet intense state of being.

“Tonio Kröger” sets forth Mann’s concept of the artist—a figure estranged from bourgeois life yet at the same time bound by ties of love and loyalty to the milieu that excludes him. In terms of plot and even character, it is only minimally a full-fledged story—for much of it, the adult Tonio simply reflects on the artist’s predicament. But the part I have always remembered, so that it has lingered in my mind as the very heart of the work, is its opening scene. Here the boy Tonio—dreamy, brunette, artistic, half Italian by virtue of his mother, hence his first name—waits expectantly to walk home from school with his blond, thoughtless friend Hans, and Hans treats him carelessly. Poor Tonio Kröger, dark-eyed and different. I understood everything about him: his apartness, his intensity, his efforts to win a friend who prefers more banal pastimes, his failure to be normal, his love for his books, his suffering. Remembering so vividly Tonio’s painful and unrequited love for Hans of the blue eyes and Danish sailor suit, I had forgotten, until recently rereading it, the second scene in which Tonio’s affections