Literary Wives is an on-line book group that examines the meaning and role of wife in different books. Every other month, we post and discuss a book with this question in mind: What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife?
Don’t forget to check out the other members of Literary Wives to see what they have to say about the book!
Other participants:
- Kate of booksaremyfavouriteandbest
- Naomi of Consumed by Ink
- Rebecca of Bookish Beck
- Kay of What Me Read
- Marianne of Let's Read
Mrs Bridge by Evan S. Connell
Mrs Bridge is set in middle-class Kansas City in the years between the late 1920s and the post-war period, and quietly follows the life of India Bridge, a respectable, well-off wife and mother living exactly the life she is supposed to want.
The story unfolds through a series of small, precise vignettes which show moments in India Bridge’s life that, when taken together, give you an almost perfect sense of her character and her world. We meet her in her late teens and then follow her through her children’s younger years, their adolescence, and later, as they leave home and begin lives of their own.
She lives a lonely life, with a husband who works almost constantly, and within social expectations that quietly but firmly shape everything she does. She couldn’t necessarily articulate that sense of restraint, but she clearly feels disconnected from herself and from her own life.
Early on, she reflects that as a young woman she had felt marriage and family life might not be for her but she wasn’t taken seriously. That life simply wasn’t presented as a real option. Women (and men, to a lesser extent) were given one narrow path: marriage, children and domesticity. Mrs Bridge falls into what is expected of her, and from there she keeps rolling forward, never quite feeling like she is steering. She is always the passenger, never the driver. This idea is beautifully and painfully captured in the final scene of the book.
I felt a little disconnected from her as a character but I think Connell does this deliberately. We feel removed from India because she is removed from herself. There are moments when she comes close to recognising what is missing and trying to do something about it, like when she leaves a potentially controversial book lying around, hoping it might start a conversation with her husband. But she always retreats. It is as though she is too afraid to follow these flickers of awareness through, too frightened to really confront the emptiness she senses in her life.
There are a couple of possible reasons for this. She may be afraid of what she will discover if she looks too closely. Or she may simply never have been given the emotional language or life skills to identify and act on her own needs. This is a time when women were barely acknowledged as having needs at all, let alone encouraged to take them seriously.
One of the most unsettling moments in the novel is her strangely muted response to a friend being killed by their own child. It feels as though she is frightened of strong feeling itself. Possibly she knows that if she faces the horror and pain she not be able to contain herself.
There is also an undercurrent of casual, unquestioned racism running through the novel that feels entirely of its time. It appears in off-hand remarks, in social assumptions, and in the way people who sit outside Mrs Bridge’s world of comfort and respectability barely register as fully realised lives. The prejudice is not loud or dramatic; it is simply absorbed into the background of everyday life. In a way, this mirrors Mrs Bridge’s own emotional blindness. Just as she rarely interrogates the limits placed on her as a woman, she also never questions the social order that places her so securely in it and others so far outside it.
So much of what Mrs Bridge does, she does because she thinks she should. Hosting cocktail parties. Hiring a maid. Keeping special hand towels for special occasions that she hopes no one will use and no one ever does. These rituals of correctness become substitutes for meaning. They are how she measures whether she is succeeding at her life.
Her relationships with her children are shaped in exactly the same way. She is deeply invested in what they should be doing, what they should care about, and how they should behave. She is so focused on the “shoulds” that she misses the quiet, ordinary pleasure of discovering who her children actually are and of building relationships with them that are genuinely mutual.
What does Mrs Bridge say about being a wife?
What Mrs Bridge ultimately says about wives, and about women like Mrs Bridge, is so beautifully restrained. It shows how a life can be carefully constructed, socially admired, and still feel profoundly uninhabited or empty. Marriage does not ruin Mrs Bridge and Mr Bridge isn't cruel to her or her children. Mrs Bridge shows something something more insidious: a world that trains women to be accommodating, pleasant and grateful, while preventing them from coming to know themselves and be themselves.
This is a wonderful novel. It is short yet perfectly crafted. I really can’t fault it and I would recommend it to everyone.
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