THE BLEEDING HEART by Marilyn French Summit; 377 pages; $12.95 The bestseller is the AK-47 of the women's liberation movement. It has
proved to be a highly effective weapon: relatively cheap, easy to mass
produce, reliable and deadly even in inexperienced hands. A case in
point was Marilyn French's first novel, The Women's Room . It hit
middle-class America at the right time. Consciousness was up; stale
marriages were crumbling like mummies exposed to the air; Jacks were
breaking their crowns and Jills stopped tumbling after. The Women's
Room certainly contributed to the body count. Its views were stated
with unnerving energy and conviction; the prose was tight; the suburban
settings had the authentic odor of nylon pile, and the characters were
quivering chunks torn from the author's own life. Her soul on ice,
Marilyn French sounded like a feminist Eldridge Cleaver. The Bleeding Heart suggests a slight thaw. Its core is a seemingly
endless and inconclusive dialogue—SALT talks in the gender
wars—between a 45-year-old woman and her lover, a middle-aged
businessman. Dolores Durer is a professor of English at a Boston
college, divorced and the mother of grown children. She is in Oxford,
England, to complete research for her book, Lot's Wife: A Study of the
Identification of Women with Suffering. Victor Morrissey, 50, is in Britain to open a branch office. His wife is
in a wheelchair in Scarsdale, N.Y. She lost both legs when, enraged and
intoxicated after learning of her husband's philandering, she drove her
car into a concrete abutment. The relentless tenet of The Bleeding
Heart is that women always suffer and pay more than men. Even Dolores' name is a constant and heavyhanded reminder: the Latin
dolor, for pain; durare, to endure. Victor means victor, the confident,
satiated gladiator who pats his woman on the rump and rushes off to
compete for glory and riches. He gets ample time to give his side of
the story. The man is bright but no intellectual threat to Dr. Durer's
fevered assertions and generalizations. Still, he may be too smart to
challenge such filibusters as, “What I want, Victor, is to change the
world … To make it a place where women's way of seeing, thinking,
feeling, is as valid as men's. Where maybe even men will join the women
because they will see that women's way of thinking is more decent, more
humane, and in the long run, Victor, more likely to preserve the human
race!” Dolores never backs down; her self-respect is at stake, and it is
apparently still too new and fragile to allow concessions. One can
admire her for this, even while she uses her vulnerability to assume
the dual role of a martyred carrier of great truths and a political
radical who believes “you have to be narrow when you're at
war.” Neither is it difficult to understand Dolores' need for
Victor's warm body at the same time that she resents him. She has had
it rough, as her copious flashbacks to a miserable marriage and family
tragedies indicate. Life is messy, after all, and consistency is often
the first casualty.
