She Has No Autonomy. Can She Be Happy?

The Atlantic

2 days ago

The community, or, as its members call it, the Dorf, has everything a person might need. It has a medical center and a kitchen, a 'Babyhouse' for child care, and a 'Laundryhouse' for the obvious. The Steward acquires food provisions for the Dorf's hundreds of residents, and every Saturday afternoon, the wives walk over to Stores to pick up their family's weekly grocery allotment. (There's even a sauna for shvitzing, though the members wouldn't use that word.) As a child, the titular character of Kate Riley's debut novel, Ruth, can't conceive of a life outside this 'complete ecosystem.' But as an adult, she wonders whether anyone can endure a life without the one thing the community doesn't provide: any room for the self.
The Brotherhood, the Anabaptist Christian sect that occupies the Dorf, can easily be explained in terms of what it forbids. To start, there are no bicycles or ball games, no mirrors larger than the palm of one's hand, and almost no personal property. At one point, when the Dorf merges with another colony, candles, musical instruments, and dolls are added to the list of verboten items; Ruth's mother replaces her doll with a knot of terry cloth in the middle of the night. The group's primary rule, The First Law of Roßdorf, states, 'There must never be talk, either in open remarks or in insinuation, against a brother or a sister, against their individual characteristics—under no circumstances behind the person's back. Talking in one's own family is no exception.' Even critical opinions are forbidden among Ruth's people.
What an institution like the Dorf celebrates can be harder to define for those who grew up in a highly individualistic culture. Yet Ruth, a generous coming-of-age story, portrays this cloistered place sympathetically, if often with a wink. The Dorf, we learn, has a zeal for sing-alongs (though not a talent for them). Its inhabitants share a heartwarming penchant for making floral arches on special occasions. Inventive elementary-school teachers bury a cow's skeleton so the children can excavate it like archaeologists. And much to the reader's pleasure, the Dorf has Ruth—a very creative woman raised inside a group that enforces uniformity. She's a wit, a half-hearted troublemaker, the kind of woman who takes a pound of meat at a hotel buffet just because she can. And though her life lacks the things that many women in contemporary fiction want—agency, freedom, maternal bonds, a romantic match—it is also delightfully normal, relatable in its small joys and frustrations.
Ruth is arranged in a series of almost-irreverent vignettes, which date from Ruth's early childhood in the 1960s through her middle age. The through line is the author's refusal to look at the Brotherhood from the outside in; Riley isn't some voyeur watching a house on a summer night just after the lights come on. Instead, she puts the reader right alongside Ruth. The third-person narrative voice is Ruth 's great achievement—its constant vacillation between droll superiority and unabashed earnestness makes it hard for the reader to determine whether they know better than the characters or if, in fact, they have quite a lot to learn from them.
The novel is full of Ruth's deadpan delivery and intellectual verve. She is precocious, and a ham; she holds 'a monopoly on brainy female despair.' She is also never offered a choice in any meaningful decisions about her life. Although she earns copious college credits while in high school, the colony's elders send her off on a cooking course after graduation. When that proves less than fruitful—Ruth excels only in 'the dark art of aspic,' turning sundry meats into jellies—they move her into stenography and archival work, like some sort of late-19th-century typewriter girl. She silently harbors a crush on Calvin Winslow, a fellow lover of Dostoyevsky, but is paired for marriage with Alan Feder, a man whose first reported words of intimacy with his new wife are 'I'm a very cautious driver.' In fact, Ruth learns of their engagement only when Alan approaches her and speaks to her unbidden, something that does not happen between unmarried men and women on the Dorf. Most galling to me is the scene in which Ruth, freshly delivered of her third child and ripe for another bout of postpartum depression, expresses the fervent hope that they might name the new baby girl 'Idea'—'it meant her favorite thing.' But she awakens from a short nap to learn, without explanation, that her husband has called the baby Gretel. She does not protest.
Riley might have cast such a group as brutally anti-feminist, the novelistic equivalent of the polygamist compound in the HBO series Big Love, where girls are heavily groomed by the community's elders and poverty prevents them from leaving. In another book, Miriam Toews's novel Women Talking, which is based on a true story, a group of Mennonite women debates whether to flee their isolated community—or stay and fight—after a group of men are caught drugging and raping them. The young women in Emma Cline's The Girls, about a Manson-like cult in 1960s California, are trapped by their sadness and shoddy sense of self, which the group's charismatic leader can sniff out and utilize to his own violent ends. Happiness isn't even on the horizon for the women in these stories. The question, instead, is whether they will escape their captors.
But Ruth is not a novel about whether a dissatisfied woman ought to stay or leave. That dichotomy would sound overly simplistic to Ruth's ears. When a friend from cooking school visits the Dorf and, after some polite chatter, hard-whispers to Ruth, 'You've got to get out of here,' the lingering feeling is awkwardness, not desperation—Ruth worries she'll be pitied. Because Ruth does know the outside world and never considers living in it. She attends an American public high school and experiences its highs and lows. (Imagine the emotional peril of attending homeroom in a modest, pleated floor-length homemade skirt with matching vest and bloomers in 1977.) She accompanies Alan to conferences at Midwest hotels and is an ardent news consumer. The Dorf is open enough to American culture that at one point her young daughter colors in a printout of Tupac Shakur.
Instead of a tale of entrapment or escape, Ruth is a story about how a woman full of longing can operate inside a collective that shuns the very notion of wanting. Riley's great trick is to tap into the anodyne, to make Ruth a woman whose concerns—about her husband's grating tics, the disintegration of her favorite dress, the inscrutable demands of the patriarchy operating above her—are essentially universal, even if their specifics might strike some readers as alien.
To get by, Ruth operates in two modes: 'Cheerful, she made mischief, and mournful, she destroyed.' The mischief is minor but searching. In middle age, she begins to ask the servers at communal dinners for inventive, if far-fetched, methods of food delivery: 'her soup in an envelope, her ice cream on an Egyptian litter.' Later she discovers her 'calling'—that is, a trifling talent that the community's leader will let her pursue—drawing flippant cartoons and messages on the dining-room whiteboard ('Jesus sez 'Do not worry'—Matthew 6:25').
The destruction is often bleakly funny, as when Ruth is so dispirited by her dullard of a husband that she sits in the passenger seat of the car, makes eye contact with passing strangers, and tries to look 'like a woman abducted.' Occasionally the desolation is real, and it might feel familiar for many women: long afternoons spent in bed, sometimes weeks at a time—at one point leading to the removal of her children from her care. She is given to secret bouts of crying.
Then again, other moments are shot through with radiant pleasure. There are her three children, whom she loves 'as she was meant to love her neighbors, as herself.' On spring days, when 'the larks leap in the sky,' she wakes 'with a deepening courtesy for life, hers particularly.' And she has Island of the Blue Dolphins, a children's book about a girl trapped alone on an island, which she reads repeatedly instead of cleaning, imagining herself living in the girl's whalebone hut with her dog for a companion. This is a telling fantasy—to feel more content in one's dreamed aloneness than in real society.
Is Ruth happy? Can she be—without personal property, without the ability to express fondness for her own children over others, without a suitable outlet for her cutting intellect and great expectations? Could anyone find happiness when their spouse and job are selected for them, their preferences assiduously repressed, even their dress patterns and fabrics decided by committee? Well, perhaps.
Happiness, it turns out, feels much the same on the Dorf as it does in any big city or small town. It's fleet as a fox and changeable as a mood. Sometimes it appears in the form of a coveted bottle of floral-scented hair conditioner or a favorite dessert. Sometimes it feels like the sound of an ill-tempered child or a snoring husband. Sometimes it is tantalizingly out of reach—just as it can be for any woman.