Today we’re reading The Furies by Janet Hobhouse, originally published (posthumously) in 1992. I’m re-visiting this book after reading it last year (September 2022), so that I can share a bit more than what I originally posted on Instagram.
I bought a copy of The Furies in one of NYRB’s (New York Review Books) semi-annual sales, and it sat on my shelf for over a year. It was one of those books I knew I’d love, but I wanted to save it “for the right time”. I actually find myself saving (or perhaps avoiding) books like this a lot—a sort of “saving the best for last” kind of mentality.
But as a reader, I don’t think that mentality translates very well. When is it time for the “last”? I blame this habit on being a Mood Reader, but in reality I think something else is responsible. When I was little, I always saved the best food on my plate for last, so I guess it’s just the way my brain is wired—to save and savor satisfaction, often to a point of pointless protectiveness. I’m currently trying to break this habit of NOT reading the books I think I’ll like best, but that journey is another story!
Back to the book at hand…
The first thing we learn upon opening the book is that the author, Janet Hobhouse, died from ovarian cancer at 42, a year or two before The Furies was published. It’s a tragedy that will forever be wrapped up in the book, as you quickly see how closely-tied the story is to Hobhouse’s real life. It’s an autobiographical novel, or simply auto-fiction in today’s literary terms.
I’m glad I finally read this (back in September). I was immediately entranced by the densely-packed sentences and rich, evocative, atmospheric language (as I always am). As you’ll see in the quotes shared below, and as Daphne Merkin so aptly phrases in the introduction, “her sentences go on forever”.
This writing style might annoy those who prefer brevity—clean, minimal sentences. And while I don’t particularly love flashy writing that values beautiful words over clarity (or maybe I do sometimes), I think Hobhouse shows control in her flourishing sentences. Nowhere did I stop to think “hmm, could have left some of these words out.” But style is taste, which is always subjective.
Table of Contents
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this book for the last 6 months, so I figured it was time I truly sit down and write about it. Find my original review on Instagram here. And here’s what you’ll find below!
Blurb
Synopsis
Prologues & Parthenogenesis (essay)
More Quotes
Conclusion
“Her sentences go on forever, owing more to Henry James than Raymond Carver, looping back and zigzagging all over the place like rollercoaster rides, heedlessly qualifying themselves as if the language were having a conversation with itself.” (on Hobhouse’s writing style, from Merkin’s introduction)
Blurb
An exhilarating, fiercely honest, ultimately devastating book, The Furies confronts the claims of family and the lure of desire, the difficulties of independence, and the approach of death. (From NYRB)
Synopsis
The book follows Helen, from a childhood at boarding school, to adolescence in New York with her mother and grandmother, to early adult years with her father in England, where she attends Oxford; then onto her adult years, through relationships, marriage, affairs, careers, writing, and loss.
The heart of this book is Helen’s tumultuous relationship with her mother, although at times that relationship falls away from focus. But mostly it’s about a woman’s life, and all the hardships that comes with it: familial strife, romantic relationships, identity, grief, and, ultimately, death.
The naming of the four sections—Women, Men, The Furies, Alone—gives you a glimpse of how Helen’s life is narratively-arranged: from a female-centered reality, to one in search of male love and validation, to a disavowal of that love (independence of a kind) and grief, and finally to an emotionally-solitary existence.
Prologues & Parthenogenesis
We dive right into a 30-page prologue that details the protagonist’s family history, a story of immigration, wealth, fierce women, and lost fortunes.
This is a family the protagonist, Helen, has never known, which is precisely what makes it so interesting and important to her. For many years, she only knew a life of her and her mother, completely disconnected from this history, from any blood relations. While the story told in the prologue could be an entire novel in itself, what it really sets up for us (and for Helen) is a thread of dysfunctional family dynamics and ferocious women (it’s a matrilineal family more than patrilineal), as well as some familial idyll further back in history.
She evokes parthenogenesis (virgin birth/origin/creation in Greek mythology; asexual reproduction in scientific terms). A family of women without men. Beginning with the matriarch, Angel, the family tree becomes an enclosed sphere of mothers and daughters, turning into a tight rounded corner with only Helen in the end.
“The family was its complete, exclusively female, self: widow Mirabel (Angel) and her two daughters, the good daughter Shrimp (officially named Elizabeth after Angel’s mother) and her bad daughter Emma; Emma’s good daughter Bett (named after Shrimp) and her bad daughter Constance; and now Bett’s daughter, named for Constance and later, following an argument with Constance, renamed Helen. Now we were six, four generations of almost mystical Manichaean symmetry and Mendelian simplicity, an unassailable oval, an egg shape of female solitude.”
That intense dynamic between women within the family, and the noticeable absence of men, continues on for Helen through her whole life.
~
Helen’s relationship with her mother, Bett, begins in idolatry. As a child, Helen spends a few years at boarding school, but when her mother finally returns to bring her to live in New York, she’s elated. She adores her beautiful, glamorous mother, and their bond is suffocatingly-tight. Helen doesn’t know her father, an English man from a wealthy family. Bett left him to return to America while Helen was still a baby.
“All I knew was Bett and my rapacious desire for her. It was a state of longing so fierce, because we were so often separated, that I can only compare it to being in love…My existence, so much of it apart from her, was haunted by her absence…I knew two worlds when I was a child, discrete and simultaneous, a world of things that was immediate and sensuous, and alongside that the world of which I was always conscious: this desired other which was she. Only when these two worlds came together, only when she became my concrete, sensuous present, was I ever whole.”
As Helen grows into adolescence, she grows tired of her mother’s flakiness, dramatics, and depressive episodes. Moving from apartment to apartment, job to job, different boyfriends coming and going, and Bett often relying on Helen for emotional support, all lead Helen to resentment and rebellion.
“For myself in regards to Bett, it was a long time before the flaws in the deity appeared. Signs of her weakness, indications of something other than omnipotence, gradually pierced the waves of devotion that had surrounded and protected me in thinking about her.”
It’s not until her grandmother—Emma, an artist who left Bett and her sister behind while they were still teens—shows up that she begins to experience some sort of familial feeling.
So it doesn’t take long for us, the reader, to feel the impact of such a glaring generational tailspin. After over a century of rich family lineage, we arrive at young Helen, the sole branch at the bottom of a decaying tree, alone with a mother who needs mothering, in search of an escape.
“That my mother, who viewed herself as related to very few other beings in the universe, should have descended in a mere three generations from this world of wealth and kindness, this reliable multiplicity of connected others, this cohabitation of cousins, aunts, servants, etc., says something about the speed of American life in this century, which can not only provide a solitary immigrant with the means to create, in a matter of decades, a secure and well-populated dynasty, but can also, at the same rate, take all these steps in reverse, reducing, as in our case, a huge, prosperous, civically active and internationally connected clan to a mere handful of desperate solitaries, operating like loose ball bearings in outer space.”
~
There is a mythic quality to the prologue, a deep narrative of ancestry. It is so removed from Helen’s story, the disconnect is jarring, but of course it serves its purpose. The creation of this “novel” feels like a search for answers, a creation of history and identity, an origin story.
By starting the book with this family history, the author/protagonist seems to be asking: Is it some sort of familial curse that leads its women to dysfunction, dissatisfaction, and detriment? To a ferocious independence that leaves them abandoned and abandoning?
Helen retells her life story, from beginning to end, maybe not with resentment, but certainly with pain—though it’s masked, seemingly devoid of pity. She does not linger on any of it, she is only trying to parse out a reason. By the time you reach the end, that search feels more harrowing—the shadow of her family is fast-approaching as her own death gets closer.
“Sometimes I was afraid because I did not know how to die. It was the same kind of fear you have before an important exam. I didn’t know how to do it, how to disintegrate, give up pieces of myself one by one, I didn’t understand what would be asked of me, the expertise, as though dying were something I’d not only participate in but orchestrate. Dying didn’t seem a transitive business to me, but something I had a limited amount of time to learn about. I don’t mean dying gracefully or with dignity, I just mean going, going that wasn’t sleeping. They said I was going to die and they indicated it was going to be soon and I just wasn’t ready, I was unlearned, untutored. How give up strength, will, surrender body functions piece by piece?”
Perhaps this book only works for readers who can relate to that desperate and flailing search for answers and understanding of oneself. Wondering why you are the way you are, where each and every dysfunctional element originates. I’m quick to assume that’s everyone, but there must be people out there who don’t torture themselves with such things…
~
This novel does not bring solace on any front. There is no resolution—and I don’t think there would be, even if Hobhouse had lived long enough to truly finish it. It asks questions of life and family and the self that never seem to get wrapped up neatly, even if death comes later in life.
There is a reason the blurb on this book refers to it as “ultimately devastating”.
More Quotes
“In the most practical way I want to find out how to live, who other people are, who I am and how we can coexist. I want to know what is good and right…I want the dignified shortcut, enlightenment in a less psychically, not to say physically, bruising form.”
“If we were like sisters to the world, it was because we were both children, and it seemed to me more and more that I was going to have to be the one to grow up if either of us was going to survive.”
“In my woeful state of either/or, love with solitude seemed an indefectible combination. I could idealize marriage and feel rock-safe inside it without having all the bother, distress, disillusion of living it out.”
“And the photo of Bett and Constance and Gogi all on the sofa at her wedding, all with those stunning legs, I put that out, too, as if to say, you see, it’s a family, it has a beginning, a middle, and not so finally necessarily an end, as if I were promising to keep it going, to bear it forward, keep the tree of it living, as Gogi said in her letter to me, how the dying part didn’t matter as long as the tree went on.”
“I am so used to my existence in relation to his. I am still an object in a sentence governed by a man. First it was a woman, then it was a man, and now they’re both gone. And here’s the irony, because here is where I always wanted to be. Ever since I first admired women, it was for that ability to do it singly, cut a swath, create their own breeze when they passed…they were able not just to survive alone, or hobble sweetly like Bett, but to triumph, to have love and lovers and still the self. Perhaps I should have admired women for staying married or keeping marriages going, but it always seemed too easy to me, and me too with Ned, too easy to have any merit. And that’s a joke, too, because easy is one thing it never was.”
“Heroism has been exclusively for males, and as for power, as far as I knew, it existed in women only in monstrous form…Power contained inside a female and used as energy rather than rage was new to me and made my grandmother almost supernatural.”
Conclusion
The reason I love this book so much is Hobhouse’s ability to articulate certain thoughts and feelings in ways I never could, or at least haven’t. The stubborn desire for independence at all costs, disavowing love at every turn, chasing loneliness, the strict admiration and pursuit of a life entirely free from the traditional constraints of love and marriage and dependence on men. How else does one avoid abandonment but to become the abandoner?
I will swaddle myself in the sentences of this book, both for comfort and self-interrogation. I’m looking forward to reading another of Janet Hobhouse’s books, November, sometime this year. But I’ll continue to think about this one, and revisit it as needed.
Thanks for reading today’s issue of Empty Head! More reviews, notes, and essays are on the way.
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