The Bad Wives Club:

Two Young Women Writers Explore the Ideas of Marriage and Mothering in The Bad Wife Handbook and Unmentionables

The Bad Wife Handbook. Rachel Zucker. Wesleyan 2008. 130 pages. $22.95 (hardback)
Unmentionables. Beth Ann Fennelly. W. W. Norton & Company 2008. 126 pages. $23.95 (hardback)

If we were to plot out the trajectory of American women’s poetry on wife-hood, from Anne Bradstreet to Sylvia Plath to Louise Gluck to Rachel Zucker, what would that look like? Even the word “wife” seems freighted with connotations of motherhood, domestic chores and duty. What does it mean for a woman to be a wife in contemporary society? How can one be a “good” or “bad” wife? These are some of the questions posed to a contemporary reader in Rachel Zucker’s The Bad Wife Handbook and Beth Ann Fennelly’s Unmentionables.

Zucker and Fennelly question the guilt and the societal expectations in an unmerciful, sometimes piercing light. Can a contemporary woman keep her individuality, her art, her erotic self, alive in the face of the expectations of being a “good” wife, a “good” mother? What do those words even mean?

Even before Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath wrote their sly, subversive poems on the subject of being wives in the 1950s and 1960s, women have been struggling to define themselves both as wives and individuals. A writer, even one who wants to be a “good” wife and mother, must create her work alone, in spite of the desires and needs of children, husband and the home. The pull between desire and fidelity, between the needs of the mother and the neediness of the infant, between husband and ex-boyfriend – these frissons and frictions mark the exploratory territory of these two fiercely honest poets.

The two poets use different syntactical strategies while addressing similar subjects – Fennelly’s poems simmer and stir, bursting out of their narrative structures to include as much of her inner turmoil and messy, robust sexuality as possible, while Zucker’s tease and bemuse with their constant shimmying of pronouns, subjects and verb tenses. A few sentences from Zucker’s “Autography 3” demonstrates the slipperiness of her syntax:

I’m talking clearly, sincerely when I say I saw a man and he was not my married. This he’d you. He made you he. I made you husband; it was so. We chose to.”

A thread of guilt underlies many of the insistent questions about mothering, about loving; am I doing the right thing? Am I doing enough? Motherhood, sex, nursing, the effects of hormones of the writer’s brain, and the lure of infidelity; these are the subjects of poems in both books. The desire to write is passionately embedded within the poems, a constant pulse, as if the authors are fighting against a wave of distraction and their anarchic bodies themselves. Both writers are working in an autobiographical mode, some might say confessional, though Fennelly’s humor and Zucker’s linguistic trickery leaven any hint of melodrama. Both writers protest the loss of their sexual and individual selves under a veil of wife-and-mother-hood; “but what does your husband think?” is the refrain in “Autography 6,” while Fennelly remembers longingly a different, more erotic kind of play while with her daughter in a zoo in “The Mommy at the Zoo.” And in her poem, “Two Minds,” Fennelly dreams of an affair, then of danger to her baby and wakes up

…wet all over. Her thighs are slick,
and her nightgown is soaked with breast milk.
One is free from having to make a choice.”

Both books have a sense of fractured consciousness and multi-strand logic. In Zucker’s last book, the title makes this explicit: The Last Clear Narrative vividly described her entry into marriage and motherhood. After that, thinking (and writing) becomes necessarily fragmented, because, as she states in “Squirrel in a Palm Tree” from The Bad Wife Handbook, in relation to paying attention to her children and all the dangers surrounding them: “anything which requires concentration is danger—.” In her blog postings at the Poetry Foundation, Zucker describes feeling unable to play word games because of pregnancy hormones, the difficulties of typing with a baby in your arms, and gives explicit lists of the way her time is spent, on poetry, yes, but much more, on the simple but urgent work of mothering sick kids and attending to the mundane chores of the household. “a woman with young children is not a woman but a mammal, salve, croon, water carrier” Zucker writes later in that same poem, “Squirrel in a Palm Tree.”

Both books also use other characters from the arts and history to talk about sex and gender. Darwin and the Annunciation both appear in The Bad Wife Handbook, as she considers sex and gender in relation to evolution and the cell as well as Mary’s reluctant acceptance of the call to mother Jesus. At the beginning of the book, there are a mysterious set of lyrics about a man who is and is not her husband. In one of these poems, “The Tell,” after a previous poem that describes dreaming of a man with a basketball, she starts the poem by saying “The basketball makes him not my husband/ and saying so in poems makes me/ / the bad wife.” Again referencing the separation she experiences between mind and body, erotic desire and the desire to be faithful, she writes “My mind wrote me a letter requesting to be/ left out of it. My body sent flowers/ and a note: ‘sorry for your loss.’”

The most compelling poems are the most direct and confessional “Autography” series at the end of the book, which seem less like formal, self-conscious poems and almost like notebooks, as the title of the poems in the section might imply.

A reader, anonymous, suggested my poems would be better
if the marriage/motherhood stuff wasn’t so literal.

Life too, I’d say.”

Zucker writes in “Autography 17,” with an ironic wink at her subject matter. Expressing anxiety towards her subject and her audience again in “Autography 6,” she writes:

And they said I’d been hiding in science and in jargon and in metaphor and they liked my searing honesty but what did my husband think…we like the idea of a young woman writing about her marriage but what did my husband think…”

Zucker is clearly uncomfortable revealing too much but also uncomfortable not revealing, or feels that her audience would like something different from her:

…when I’d written “let’s discuss married sex” then I didn’t, and they wanted more married sex, for the husband and wife to actually have sex and then someone said, but they are, right? they do, right? it’s just pretty subtle and they said we want more blatant sex and someone said does anyone else see another man in these poems? And then they said the science was off-putting.”

She’s playing with us, the reader, the concept of audience for a very intimate subject, and the whole idea of direct confession and the ways of talking about sex and fidelity. “Her mouth’s a busted clasp,” she claims in “Autography 8.” Interestingly, when Zucker writes about her husband in this book, she uses the impersonal “he” and “the husband,” and sometimes blanks out words in her poems referring to him.

A few reminders of the September 11^th tragedy in New York City filter into these “Autography” poems, as well, in particular in “Autography 15.”

…a father I know buys potassium
chloride, cipro, soup, duct tape.

Dreams of ghosts under the kitchen table.
Of his brother. Of falling.

Another man says he’d have stepped over
anyone to find his wife.”

The connection between the tragedy and the highlighted intensity of the love between husband and wife, mother and child, makes these moments in the book even more emotionally sharp.

As Zucker’s poems hint and hesitate with their white space, dashes, odd syntax, blanks and white space, the long lines meandering but only coyly revealing, Fennelly’s poems hit us squarely in the face from page one. The first poem, a lusty ode called “The First Warm Day in a College Town,” brazenly flips the “middle-aged male professor lusts after young female students while pondering his own mortality” poetry cliché on its ear by having her female professor speaker lasciviously eye scantily-clad young male joggers.

Hard to recall just now
that these are the torsos of my students…
who every year…grow one year younger…

…some year if they catch me admiring
the hair downing their chests, centering
between their goalposts of hipbones…

some year if they catch me admiring, they won’t
grin grins that make me, busted,
grin back…”

We know she gets the joke when she writes later giving advice to an older male poet in “Not Knowing What He’s Missing:”

The old poet writes importantly about the hungers…
being greedy for intensity…fierce honey from hives
abandoned far up the mountain. And the women,
their flavors and flaws. The places he’s had them,
Paris, Japan, dire Copenhagen, stony islands in Greece.
And now he is eighty, and wishes to be in love again.
Sometimes his wishes sound like bragging…

…she seems to have found the intensity
he yearns for. This also sounds like bragging…
If she could, she’d let him
bear her secret. She’d let all the great men bear it,
for a few hours. Then, when she took it back,
they’d remember how it feels to be inhabited.”

In the poem, Fennelly compares herself to the older male poet and suggests that the source of his quest for intensity, his hunger is fulfilled in her ability to have children. In both poems, she seems to be challenging male’s poets and their ability to talk about their erotic desires, asserting her own will and desire through her poetry.

Fennelly’s book also has a long series on Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot, her struggles to continue painting during and after pregnancy, and the condescension of male painters to her and her position as a mother and a painter. Fennelly is drawing a line between herself and Morisot, imagining the difficulties of balancing a palette on a pregnant stomach, the need to nurse a baby overtaking the need to paint a wonderful scene.

There are moments when both writers revel in moments of rebellion, embracing the inner wild woman. In Zucker’s delightful “My Wickedness,” she imagines becoming the wicked witch of Oz fame, mocking Dorothy:

All the good wife
wants is to go home.

When no one watches
I teach the dog to fly.”

And Fennelly’s hilarious, dark-edged response poem, “Because People Ask What My Daughter Will Think of My Poems When She’s 16” gleefully challenges her future daughter:

I’m the hole
in the photo, you’re the un-
safety scissors. I’m the lint
in the corners of my purse
after you steal the coins…buttons
you undo after I’ve okayed
your blouse…”

Imagining her daughter’s rebellion, and her inherited love of danger and thrill, Fennelly sees that being a mother continues into a time when she will be reviled by her own offspring, but still mischievous, her spirit still remaining in the coy unbuttoning of a shirt.

By being painstakingly honest about their lives, including the negative side of being a mother and wife, Zucker and Fennelly also illuminate the positive side – see Fennelly’s fierce embrace of her pregnancy in “Not Knowing What He’s Missing,” or Zucker’s comment from “The Rise and Fall of the Central Dogma:” “we are happier than the poems describe.” Exposing the limitations and the graces outside the cherubic, de-sexed clichés of the modern wife, we are left with images of a harried, but transcendent art, an attempt to answer Muriel Rukeyser’s fierce charge: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” In these two books, the collages of argument and eroticism bustling with physicality and an earnest desire to write down the true experiences of two married thirty-something women’s lives in our somewhat apocalyptic decade, may not have split open the world, but they certainly try to rattle it.