The Calamity of Unwanted Motherhood
The protagonist of Penelope Mortimer’s 1958 novel, Daddy’s Gone a-Hunting, is a 37-year-old housewife named Ruth, who is sliding into a madness of midlife suffocation and despair. Alone in her kitchen early in the novel, Ruth drinks gin and tentatively confesses to an imagined listener the source of all her angst. When she married Rex, her trivial bully of a husband, at 18, she was three months pregnant with their daughter, Angela. “She doesn’t know, of course,” Ruth explains, to no one. “I didn’t want to get married. I didn’t want Angela. We had to get married. There was nothing else to do.”
The burden of consequence on Ruth is a dead weight. She has no perceptible life force, no desires, less shape than crumpled tissue paper. Her fuzziness is countered, now being reissued in the U.S., was published several years before Betty Friedan’s But the novel, seemingly set in the late ’50s, appears to anticipate what Friedan proposed as “the problem that has no name”—the profound unhappiness of a generation of educated women trapped in the domestic sphere with no way out. In one chapter, Mortimer likens the women of “the Common,” Ruth’s suburban community, to icebergs, outwardly “bright and shining” but uniquely scratched up under the surface. “Some are happy,” she writes, “some poisoned with boredom; some drink too much and some, below the demarcation line, are slightly crazy; some love their husbands and some are dying from lack of love; a few have talent, as useless to them as a dying limb.” Together, “their energy could start a revolution, power half of Southern England, drive an atomic plant.” Deprived of an outlet, however, it tends to short-circuit.
