It’s a long walk back to Co’s, the original family homestead, miles it seems, all of it through snowy marsh. Corinne wishes out loud she’d worn her boots, but such is the weather of a spinster aunt. After what seems like an hour, she stops by a tiny house without lights, hears shrieking, and rushes her way to the back. Corinne hurries in to find a whalish woman jerking around on the floor. An impatient nurse, standing nearby, declares, “She has been this way the whole time.” Corinne comforts “Lulu,” the sprawling creature, announcing that “Sister” has come. Corinne and Lulu, as we’ve learned in a conversational aside between Juliana and her husband, are twins.
Meanwhile, back at Juliana’s, there’s another unexpected visitor, Aleck, a man once rejected by the busy, committed Corinne. As he explains, he has recently lost his wife and has come in search of his onetime love. Thrilled to learn that she’s just left, he rushes out to her house (in a closed carriage, mind you). He enters rapidly, then stops cold as he sees an old woman rise from her chair. “Miss Corinne Boyle?”
“I don’t wonder you ask, Aleck,” Corrine says, faltering, “but I should have known you anywhere.” Then she starts to sob. After a while, with her nose red and skin chalky white, they speak as old friends, although he cannot hide his disappointment and revulsion. His thoughts: “What a fool! What a sentimental simpleton he had been to forget that a woman must fade fast in a life like hers! Fade, and shrivel, and dry into hardness!”
For a while after he leaves, Corinne cries out to God at this unfairness. And yet as she calms down she reassures herself that God has guided her well in this life. Her ability to love, and receive love, was not to be within the realm of men; it is love born of commitment, honor, the keeping of a promise long ago made to a dying mother. She has kept her word and in return received unconditional love.
She has also upheld her end of one classical spinster formula: Divide a family of girls into wives and outcasts. The wives reign, and the outcasts, even if they chose their fate, as did Corinne, tell themselves elaborate religious stories about the rewards of their sacrifice. One recent example of this sisterly dichotomy occurs in Marvin’s Room, by Scott McPherson (1992), a play first and then a movie starring Meryl Streep and Diane Keaton as the sisters. The sister who has remained at home all her life to care for ailing relatives is now ill herself with leukemia. After some persuasion, the prodigal, biker-chick sister returns home with her surly adolescent son. After many conflicts and awkward attempts at reconciliation, the sick one explains to the prodigal how she was able to stand her life as family nurse. It’s because, simply, she has been unconditionally loved. And although she doesn’t say this, she has been able to shut herself off from the world, avoid sex and the messiness of men in exchange for an unshakable sense of nunlike purpose. In the voice of the deluded martyr, she cries: “I’ve had so much love.”
We are supposed to find this pathetic, and because it invokes such a profound denial of a fully lived life, we do. At the same time, she’s had the love she claims to have wanted. In remaining true to her vow, so has Corinne. But the reader understands the spinster formula, the essential code. We are never allowed to consider her choice as anything less than insane.
True, sometimes spinsters themselves couldn’t stand it at all and broke down. Jennie Gerhardt, heroine of the eponymous Theodore Dreiser novel (1911), finds herself dreading “before her [the] vista of lonely years…. Days and days in endless reiteration.” But others were all too glad to avoid packing up the trousseau. For these women, an unusual degree of female freedom, work, caring for others, and the company of like-minded women represented a better solution to life than the role of wife. Even in the end.
The activist Frances Power Cobbe wrote in 1869, “Yes, the old maid will suffer a solitary old age as the bachelor must. It will go hard. But,” she added, “she will find a woman ready to share it.”
CHAPTER TWO
The Single Steps Out: Bowery Gals, Shoppies, and The Bohemian Bachelorette
I do love it—me makin’ a spectacle ’o myself… but that’s how it is now: [I’m] an American girl in her finery and telling the men “where d’ you get off?”
Here is the work-a-day fact: No one knows where you came from, no body knows where you go.
…Your white collar girls?… I see them on buses, poor damned share croppers in the Dust Bowl of business, putting up a fight in their pretty clothes and keeping their heeby-jeebies to themselves. There’s something so courageous about it, it hurts me inside.
A GAL’S LIFE
Picture a silent-movie set in the heart of Manhattan’s old Lower East Side, scene one, twilight. We pan across the tenements and laundry lines and see what we expect to see: a tangle of peddler’s carts, drunk, disheveled men, and large-bosomed women surrounded by animals and children who race like little Artful Dodgers in and out of the crowd. Making her way slowly through this mess is a girl. The camera picks her out, follows her, and slowly irises in to frame her face. Highlighted in her cinematic bubble, our girl twists a thinning gray scarf around her neck. Her face is chalky pale. Kohl liner has smudged to form half moons beneath her eyes. She looks ready to faint.
Back in the full shot that is her world, she limps along, past the garbage and the gangs of rude, hissing boys, and stops at last outside a windowless structure. Cut to the crumbly interior. The exhausted girl enters, then does what she’s supposed to do and faints. Plaster drops like snow onto her face. Cue the villain.
Most likely she knows him, this man now staring down at her, assessing his options. (Clearly going for help will not be one of them.) He shakes her, slaps her a few times, then with a quick look around props her up against a wall and lifts her skirts. The rest we don’t see, but we know that whatever went on it was her fault, for she lives a depraved unnatural female life in a harsh, cold world that has depleted whatever slight moral fiber she had to start with.
At about the time our spinster was canonized as an unfortunate social specimen, there appeared on the female landscape an even more unsettling single girclass="underline" the “factory maid” and her salacious cousin “the Bowery gal.” These new single icons were identified and dissected in the penny press. They later became the heroines of cheap novels, live points of interest in city guidebooks as well as characters in early vaudeville. This depraved and unnatural female, the poor thing preyed on by horny landlords, would become a staple of the new aesthetic form known as melodrama. She was born to fade to black.
The Bowery and factory gals were immigrants, part of the European exodus that had begun during the 1820s and increased radically every fifteen years thereafter. (In 1830, for example, there were an estimated 18,000 new Americans—Germans, Italians, Poles, Scots, Irish, Greeks. By 1845, the number stood at roughly 250,000.) As one commentator put it, Europe had “vomited.”