Book of the Week: Women who haunt and seduce

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a day ago

Michelle Duff is an award-winning journalist, admired for her work concerning the realities faced by women—including health, sexual violence, gender and social issues— which reached a professional crescendo during the #MeToo years. In her short story collection Surplus Women, she brings with her to fiction an icepick-sharp instinct for detail and truth.
Duff uses the principles of reportage to not only find and craft a vivid story but depict it from multiple perspectives. In the title story of her collection of 15 stories, a group of young domestic servants voyage toward the shores of the colony of New Zealand from the hostile climes of industrial England in 1922. They hail from the lower rungs of the class strata. These single women arrivals were considered fortunate should they marry. In some cases, they were able to class jump up a notch into the category of those settler colonialists who had been granted tidy plots of farming pasture by a government which expropriated from and disenfranchised Māori. The ghosts of these women have come to form a certain consciousness we recognise today as Pākehā.
Duff is a graduate of the fiction program at the International Institute of Modern Letters, where she won the 2023 prize for fiction for the manuscript that would comprise Surplus Women. The catalyst for her collection involved a research paper documenting the 'surplus women' of the British Empire. The excess of women christened as such arose in the 19th century as the Industrial Revolution expeditiously altered economic and social life across Britain. Rapid population growth and industrialisation of labour, twinned with vastly disproportionate opportunities between men and women, prompted social panic, where large numbers of unemployed and unmarried women risked, it was thought, widespread poverty and immiseration.
Overwhelmingly, women workers were single. Prior to and during the First World War women secured factory work in greater numbers across the war years. The economic and social consequences of the First World War both worsened and provided opportunities for women where factory work, the dominant employ of women, reliant on exports, cratered along with the population of men; their numbers decimated during the war. Numbers of single women seeking employment skyrocketed during wartime; women found employ in the factories still operational, but with the return of servicemen and therefore the loss of jobs they had trained for now granted to these returnees, their status in the labour force again changed.
To address these superfluous women who outstripped men in number, and the economic and social position of women more generally, the British government in 1919 established the Society for the Overseas Settlement of British Women, using emigration throughout its colonies as a natural solution to the problem; the motherland simply performing her duties of expanding her dominion through declared benevolence. Historian and journalist Jane Tolerton writes that from 1918 to 1939 domestic service represented the largest share of employment for women, and during the 1920s around 4500 British domestic servants arrived in New Zealand through the scheme arranged between the two countries, 'as an attempt to solve both the post-war 'surplus women' problem in Britain and the 'servant problem' in New Zealand'. But, Tolerton observes, 'as with earlier schemes, the women left quickly for marriage or other occupations'.
Duff understands ordinary, working people, and treats their lives with dignity and tenderness. She is a compassionate writer. There is a sense of kin with her characters; a sense that she, too, has known the gutters – and sees, as Orwell wrote when depicting the eccentric and troubled characters of the Paris slums of the early 1930s, how 'poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour'.
Surplus Women opens with the story 'Easy', where a group of coarsened, sophisticated 14-year-old girls, whose 'knowledge and disdain for the world seemed contained in the arch of one perfectly tweezed eyebrow', allow Jess, our sheltered protagonist, access into their inner sanctum. Jess denies her true nature; less brash, less crass, in order to comport with Sylvie, who challenges teachers and dates men in their 20s – a familiar and not in the least discomfiting rite of passage that seemed to go unquestioned for certain girls in the 90s; a time where rumours and sightings of such grown men with cars and the means to acquire alcohol and pick up minors were tacitly accepted and largely went unspoken.
In an instructive scene, Duff deftly portrays the class position of Sylvie, and provides immediate insight as to why she's nihilistic: absent parents means she puts her little sister to bed, smokes inside, drinks Purple Goanna, spots dark jokes, and flies into a rage when questioned on her own sexual experiences after needling Jess to do the same.
The scenes of night drives and the sexual dynamics between men and young women are hypnotic: 'Jess glanced into the rearview mirror and felt ice slide down her spine. Corey's eyes were fixed on her. There was a gnarled tree, rearing up like a horse in the moonlight.' In preparation for losing her virginity on a grimy sofa, Jess hears the 'Velcro rip of a wallet … a thought burrowed its way up: Oh. I can put a mark in the book'. They have sex in the plebian home of the mother of one of the men. The woman is working a night shift. The scene in its entirety shapes not only a deflating, claustrophobic sense of pathetic hopelessness but the tragedy of all their lives; their dead end jobs, their scrimping shift work, their pestling lack of opportunity, the perfunctory way they so casually dehumanise and ruin one another.
'Easy' is a devastating story, and one of the strongest in the collection. It establishes Duff's unmistakable talent for crafting surprising, complex characters and evocative scenes that rise from the book's pages into the world. In Duff's hands, sexual assault is not so straightforward as victim and perpetrator even when it is stark who wields the power. Instead, she suggests throughout her stories that all characters are victim to social and economic forces which treat their lives cursorily, as if a chessboard; where as indistinguishable pawns there are among them no winners and only losers, mere expendable foot soldiers lacking narratives beyond fulfilling their duties as preordained to reside and struggle and fail on the margins. This interlinked interrogation of gender and class—and elsewhere in the collection, race—represents the precise aims of feminism which Duff examines with grace and discernment.
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In the exceptional story '$$Britney$$', sex workers Jade and Lauren share an endearing warmth and affection for each other that transports the reader back into intense youthful friendships of staying over entire weekends, sharing clothes, makeup, boyfriends and memories one can't quite believe one lived through. Duff slyly explores the subtleties of racism, even within deep, committed friendship, where Lauren appraises her friend who is 'part Māori, and had beautiful brown eyes, which Lauren thought made her look more interesting. Jade had gone quiet for a long time after she'd said that.' In that one swift line, Duff exacts a breach between the friends. The vampiric pair haunt the night and wake to find civilian life carries on without them in 'mid afternoon, dead time. The shadows fell long and brutal'. Sitting in Burger King, 'the daytime world was populated by people who walked with purpose, intent on paying for their food … Lauren was always amazed at the way everything just clicked right back into place each morning, as if the night before had never been.'
Throughout these stories, worn out and damaged people are capable of possessing great kindness, manipulation and mercilessness; there is no moralism nor reductive sympathies nor absurd, pharisaic characterisations to be found. Likewise the women convey a complicated aspect of femininity, where the power beautiful women exert when in possession of nothing else of consequence is ultimately impotent and implicitly aware of its limitations. '$$Britney$$' is a painful read with a crushing final scene that outlasts its own pages.
In the title story Zara is a public servant primarily concerned with her own middle-class grievances and scornfully dismisses pensioners with time on their hands who come to her desk seeking information about long passed relatives of the war years. Zara haughtily observes these retirees as they step over the unhoused Mauve who sleeps outside the archives where Zara works. Imagine, she thinks to herself, 'spending less time on recreating your own mythologies and more paying attention to the world around you'.
The story works as an adroit caricature of Wellington pieties. Zara and her husband's relationship is at odds with Irene and Alexandra, two women among the envoy on the ship making passage 100 years earlier toward New Zealand. The story shifts across the decades between modern day Wellington and life on board. The friendship between Irene, who hadn't many friends back home, teased as she was for wearing hand-me-downs, and the hardscrabble Alexandra, represents one of the more special relationships in the book. Irene remembers her father at the docks to bid her farewell, 'her home country disappeared in a grey scribble of hills and clouds'. At work in the archives, Zara exhumes a sketch of Irene's that depicts the bow of the transporting ship docked in Wellington Harbour, accompanied by a photograph of the friends, hopeful about the foggy promise of their lives ahead. Some will live long lives, others not, still others are designated in the official record 'spinster'. In a particularly lovely scene Irene observes the young women beside her, and 'surprised herself by forming the thought; these are my friends'. The women, Zara contemplates as she regards a plaque impressed into the ground beneath her feet delimiting the shoreline of 1840, 'had been shipped here, along with hundreds of other women of child-bearing age, to work. She was useful as a pair of hands, and as a womb. By the measure of the time, Irene was a failure.'
The most successful stories examine class and systems of power. 'List Day' opens in a district court where Frankie represents several clients on legal aid, mostly on remand. Frankie, pregnant, smiles at a woman seated on a concrete planter box outside court with a baby in her arms. The woman curses at her; despises Frankie's wearying attempt to find commonality when each woman represents, on appearance, either end of the power scale; one with the power to condemn, the other only condemned. Frankie has been but a passing tourist in the woman's world, and the woman sniffs this out. The grey courtroom walls 'suck in air' and the presiding judge of the day 'works swiftly, stitching people's lives together as if with a giant needle, in and out'. Frankie recognises a man from her past in the dock, and the narrative turns backward into the past, where young Frankie took a summer job in the regions to pay for her studies in a factory producing flower bulbs. Both the courtroom and factory depictions are alive and chime with truth; the stifling and sagging, dispiriting court where a familiar set of names and crimes rotate and repeat; the dusty factory in the heat of summer with its characters on the escape or seeking casual, nameless opportunities, its forklift drivers and women in PPE gear manning the line, the interpersonal dramas, part-time friendships and petty slights, its workplace incidents and slow-burning infatuations doomed before they begin but begin they do.
Many women of a certain tendency will recognise the draw of a brooding, troubled recovering addict like Matt, Frankie's obsession, with a burn scar 'like a smiley face on one hand and a series of black dots going up his wrists, and his fingers were nicotine-stained'. Frankie is entranced, but Frankie also has the inherent means to enter and depart this world at a whim; her university studies ensure her a pass beyond this dalliance: this is not her life, after all; it's a lark, a daring workplace story to titillate her future white-collar law colleagues.
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There are multiple ways of reading Duff's stories that deal with men's violence toward women. One read offers a simplistic, feminism 101 approach; violence is bad, women are passive victims. While the former is true and indeed women are victims, at times Duff proselytises simplistic feminisms or easy winks (men being sexually deficient, for one). In 'Spook', Genevieve, a woman we take to be in her 60s, offers a wearisome line about men not knowing their way around vaginas. Wearisome not because it's necessarily untrue but because it's a leitmotif so overplayed in contemporary narratives about sexual politics as to barely touch ground. But Duff also offers slippery counterarguments throughout her stories. A character in another story simply asks what she wants in bed. In its forthrightness, the remark shocks and shifts the thinking of the story's protagonist. Elsewhere, in a cleverly executed scene, a character describes being looked at 'like he was about to do something violent. To me, she thought. I can make him feel like this. She laughed with the rush of it.'
Roz, the frightening protagonist high on a death drive in the final story 'Toxic', works as an unscrupulous, muckraking reporter for a grossly misogynist editor at The Telegraph in London. She cheats on her boyfriend. He tells her she is poison and in response Roz proceeds to systematically disassemble her life while avoiding any meaningful human contact. Roz isn't outright punished for her transgressions; in fact it's evident she's largely escaped culpability across her life, but this means she's not learned anything of worth and has instead elected to pursue impulsive hedonism and choices—or avoidance of choice— born of delusion, which proves deeply harmful. So, punishment as psychic pain.
For Roz, as with other women in the book, there is no absolution. In a scene that journeys the plains of the central plateau, Roz rises from a valley, where 'birds folded themselves into origami in the pale sky' and a hitchhiker she collects gently wonders why she only asks questions, never answering. The accruing tension of this story, and the remembrances that float and disappear from Roz's consciousness are stunning. In a final scene, Roz's incoherence and pain is so complete she begins to fall, a tipping that summons the surplus women onboard; the rolling pitch of the boat reflecting their own bewilderment and lack of tether though for reasons entirely distinct to Roz's, whose delirium conveys the destruction of habitual denial and repression on one's psyche.
Another woman trapped in an illusion of her own is Sash. In 'Torn', Sash is a detective in a small town 'sandwiched beneath the ranges and the low-slung river'. Here is a riveting, quick-paced story that wrestles with conflicting moral questions, where Sash wilfully represses the violence of her own home and where a younger Jade and Lauren reappear; recurring characters haunt as motif across the stories. The girls remind Sash of 'pit bull puppies she found shoved in a shed out the back of a gang pad once, snarling. Cute, she thinks, but also, they've already learned this is how you survive'. Positioning the girls as victims caught up with heavies, Lauren retorts that the decision was theirs to make. 'Feminism has a lot to answer for', Sash thinks. 'Repositioning exploitation to make it seem like agency'.
The story 'Gracie' deals with similar themes, involving two young girls living with their single mother who is employed in shift work at a freezing works and can barely keep it together. The three live in a hotel in dire conditions of poverty and great risk of harm. The girls eat two-minute noodles and lose clothing at school that can't afford to be replaced. 'All goods, my Gracie. We'll get you another one', her mother assures. A sympathetic school pupil offers Gracie a muesli bar and through this gesture we understand how Gracie must appear to others.
In 'Orbits', a couple try to escape the disorderly reputation of their pasts. At their back are their respective families, who struggle with drug addiction, crime and other expressions of intergenerational poverty. The couple reside in a meagre home outfitted by items sourced from the Salvation Army and paid for by Whetū's job as a meat packer. Like many of Duff's characters, Whetū has not yet learned to live with his ghosts.
Here, and in similar stories, Duff has various characters make reference to 'white trash' families, a term important for the purposes of her narrative but one she treats with circumspection and care. It tends to be those who speak in generalised terms out of habit or convenience who make such claims; police officers requiring shorthand qualifiers, for instance, which Duff both critiques and accepts. This class represents a strand of Pākehā culture thoughtfully imprinted throughout the book, and in doing so reaches back in time to the women who arrived poor, owning nothing, whose prospects were uncertain, and who dwell in and bewitch the book through their future ancestors, some of whom continue desolate lives of poverty and abject suffering.
Duff is an immersive storyteller. Her stories captivate and pull the reader under. Her women are desperate and dysfunctional; they feel they have vacated their own lives. They all want. They all long. Duff is interested in a woman's unconscious, that inaccessible part of ourselves that yet reveals who we are without our knowing; the slips of the tongue, our habits of mind, the ways we behave when we think no one is watching. And Duff's nose for a story is utterly compelling. She offers both lively, sophisticated plot and thoughtful mediation on themes that at their core concern strong, complicated women, as Mary Gaitskill does in Bad Behavior or Elizabeth Wurtzel theorises in Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women.
It is clear Duff loves women, and she loves her characters; she trusts her characters and believes in them. She presents the fallible lives of girls and women who live, largely, on the margins, on their wits. In a sense, Surplus Women belongs to the tradition of contemporary New Zealand Gothic. These stories are, in essence, ghost stories; where women wile and haunt and seduce and possess, from mother to daughter, ancestor to progeny, friend to friend; and there are generational curses at work, too, where the repressed returns in eternal recurrence despite a character's best efforts to amend or outrun their lives. In this country, realism is gothic, after all; a place freighted with unrest and spirits as anyone attuned to the landscape, the people themselves notwithstanding, will attest. In these stories, spectres of the past haunt the present as does colonialism itself; abandoned selves and undone futures reappear and manifest in form and women are resurrected, inhabit other voices, other lives, or their own, years later, though still with the same old ghosts of shame and bitterness, self delusion or violence that rises and falls from places women fear within.
Surplus Women by Michelle Duff (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35) is available in bookstores nationwide.