Notes on a Scandal
By LIESL SCHILLINGER writing in The New York Times back on September 23, 2007
By LIESL SCHILLINGER writing in The New York Times back on September 23, 2007
(Note:I am posting this review from 18 months ago because I finally bought this book for Annie from The Village Bookshop at Matakana last weeeknd).
Pic right - Mamah Borthwick Cheney, around 1912.
In “Ragtime,” his fable of social change in early-20th-century America, E. L. Doctorow sent a stuffy paterfamilias on an expedition to the North Pole, leaving his docile wife behind in New Rochelle. In the Arctic, the man was disgusted to encounter uninhibited Eskimo women coupling lustily with their husbands.
Watching one of them in flagrante, he thought nostalgically of his seemly spouse and doubted whether the Eskimo wife even deserved the name of woman. But while he was off finding the True North, his wife was undertaking her own journey of discovery, setting her sensuality aflame with the teachings of Emma Goldman. Upon the explorer’s return, he sensed with alarm that the orbit of his “moral planet” had shifted. In their marital bed, his wife was “not as vigorously modest as she’d been.” To him, her liberation felt like a punishment from God. But what did it feel like to her? Would changing mores permit her to leave a man she had outgrown and still keep her good name?
“Loving Frank,” an enthralling first novel by Nancy Horan, is set at the same time as Doctorow’s modern classic — the decade before World War I — and recreates its weld of fact and fiction, wrapped around the core theme of female self-actualization. Unlike the wife in “Ragtime,” however, the woman under scrutiny in Horan’s book actually lived, and the world’s reaction to her liberation is known.
The “Frank” of Horan’s title is the architect Frank Lloyd Wright; the “Loving” came from a woman who has been all but erased from history’s rolls: Mamah (pronounced MAY-muh) Borthwick Cheney, a learned, lovely woman who scandalized Chicago when she left her husband and two young children to flee to Europe with Wright — who left behind a wife and six children of his own. The two fell in love in 1907, while Wright was building a “prairie house” for Mamah and Edwin Cheney in Oak Park.
If guilt were calculated by the sheer number of abandoned offspring, Wright’s rap sheet would have been longer than Mamah’s; but Mamah was more vilified because she was a woman. (Horan weaves lurid contemporary press accounts into her narrative as proof.) In society’s view, Wright was merely misbehaving, while Mrs. Cheney was doing something far more shocking: acting like an unnatural mother.
If guilt were calculated by the sheer number of abandoned offspring, Wright’s rap sheet would have been longer than Mamah’s; but Mamah was more vilified because she was a woman. (Horan weaves lurid contemporary press accounts into her narrative as proof.) In society’s view, Wright was merely misbehaving, while Mrs. Cheney was doing something far more shocking: acting like an unnatural mother.
Horan prods readers to consider an uncomfortable question: Were Mamah’s feelings unnatural? Edwin Cheney didn’t think so; he granted her a divorce and allowed her access to their children. Wright didn’t think so; he wanted to marry her, but his estranged wife, Catherine, refused to divorce him. Compelling the reader’s sympathy, Horan evokes the image of Mamah, sunk in depression after the birth of her second child, recording a quotation by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her diary: “It is not sufficient to be a mother: an oyster can be a mother.” Mamah wanted more. “For as long as Mamah could remember,” Horan writes, “she had felt a longing inside for something she could not name.” A few months after the diary entry, that longing acquired a name: Frank Lloyd Wright.
Read the full review here.
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