Human art, like human lives, will feel incomplete without both masculine and feminine influence. Though Plato’s retelling of the legend is factually spurious and meant to be comic, we can find a deep truth in Aristophanes’ tale from the Symposium concerning aboriginal humans split by a vengeful deity into gendered halves: Whenever we can only access the archetypal virtues of one half of humanity or the other, we will keenly, if intuitively, sense that lack on some level. We will have to go outside of ourselves to look for solutions. If we do not find them in things as they are, we will invent solutions, construct solutions—possibly by desperate attempts to repurpose the compromised materials of our own wounded bodies, damaged rationalities, and broken hearts.
As one of this truth’s many implications, there can be a constricted, airless, limping quality to art that focuses too heavily on the experiences of one gender or the other. Whether it knows it or not, it is missing something. Susan Fish’s Renaissance, in every sense of the term a woman’s novel, neatly though narrowly escapes this airlessness—though at times by a truly close shave. So how does Fish do it? A deft touch with surfaces is part of the formula; Renaissance’s total effect evokes Virginia Woolf’s observation, at the turn of the last century, that women often seem to take up the novel not because the novel is the only possible vehicle for their ideas but because it is the vehicle that lies readiest to hand. Where biography, memoir, or creative nonfiction could have rendered an equal depth of truth, fiction allows an author the greatest latitude to follow the ramblings and branchings of a given topic in a sprawling variety of directions.
Renaissance also has a kind of kinship with the future woman’s novel Woolf imagines—one which would begin with, and be buoyed up rather than rendered conflictual by, feminine friendship and solidarity. Denying themselves within the space of this novel (for various plot-grounded reasons) the generative and restorative interplay of most men’s and women’s shared endeavors, Fish and her female characters are left with nowhere to go, at least outwardly. The solution given is to grow—and, since the walls are closing in, this growth must take inward and upward directions. In reading the novel, I frequently heard in mind a line from Jonathan Larson’s musical Rent: “The only way out is up,” sings the soprano, “a leap of faith.”
But faith in what, exactly? Fish’s protagonist, a Canadian nonprofit director and mother of three grown children who is named Elizabetta (or, more prosaically, Liz) Fane, is only nominally a believer in the transcendent. Though she is, for most of the story’s space, a visitor to a Catholic convent—exchanging her work in garden and orchard for the tangible goods of peace and quiet—Liz carries no water for the place’s metaphysics or doctrines. All this inner dryness, we soon find, is the natural consequence of having grown up in a fundamentalist family where the flat answer to all emotional problems was the unadorned and unaccompanied name of Jesus. When no other explanation is offered, when no realistic embodied encounter with the transcendent is made possible, even the name above every other name seems to pale and grow bloodless.
So when family tragedy strikes—and this tragedy goes unnamed for nearly two thirds of the novel, during which almost the only source of suspense is the reader’s guesses at the nature of the loss—Liz has few inner resources on which to be thrown. Neither work, husband, nor grown children can console her, because the nature of the key event estranges her from all three. So off to idyllic Italy she goes—the idyllic Italy, nota bene, of the turn-of-the-millenium girl-power self-rediscovery genre. It might take the reader a while to pick up on supersubtle indications that Fish is aware of the resonance and of its absurdity, but ultimately we sense that she is playing with the resonance—and particularly with the puritan Liz’s discomfort with it—to score some effective early chuckles and moments of interest.
Later, Fish will further subvert the genre through a twisty side-plot of rediscovered friendship and mistaken identity—a side-plot that, in itself, feels as though it could have been pruned without loss to the story, but whose purpose in being included is clear enough: This lopsided branch, like the story’s trunk and other leaves, feels cultivated to call attention to the myriad ways in which women’s inherent value and whole-life well-being can fall as casualties to other ends. Instead of feeling valued for their own sakes, the women of this novel tend to feel themselves treated as an expendable natural resource, discarded or discounted once they no longer fall into the matrix of qualities that once garnered them social praise or material benefit: in the first act, being young, healthy, pretty, pleasing, and inexperienced; in the second, being compliant, servile, fertile, nurturant, and self-effacing.
There must be more than this to women’s lives, we can feel Liz thinking for most of the novel, though it takes her quite a long time to learn to say the quiet part out loud. There must be more than this helpless state of feeling one’s worth tied up with qualities one can neither bestow upon oneself nor control with one’s intellect or will, and which can so easily be ripped away by time, chance, accident, or the ill will of others. This vexed state of consciousness around femininity is explored early on through the encounter with off-putting images of the mother of Christ, displayed on the walls of the convent: one is tagged by the visitors as “Our Lady of Perpetual Constipation,” another as “Of Course I’m A Virgin How Dare You.” The ersatz titles’ irreverence barely registers in light of the deeper recognition: Even when it comes to the woman considered by generation after generation to represent the greatest ideal and the highest exemplar, even some of the most revered artists of history have failed to picture her in ways that honor her unique character and her full humanity. What is there left to say when beauty itself is painted as though it were ugliness?
From another early scene in which a visiting monk teaches the women to prune olive trees, it is clear we are meant to understand that Liz’s large egregious wounds, like the olive tree’s, lurk under the surface in “the entire lower center”—the womb—and therefore, once healed, they are meant to have that generative power from which further life will spring. The passage strains to teach the reader an elementary lesson on symbolism—“Sometimes an olive tree was more than an olive tree”—to be sure we will not miss the point.
Yet this overstressed point flashes out, both wry and relevant, in light of how the novel’s last third unfolds: as an apparent judgment upon judgmentalism, a dire warning that if we ever permit ourselves the feeling that there is a “right” way to do anything, even if we are in point of fact right about the “right” way, we may be called upon to pay for this feeling dearly: in the painful coin of lost relationships, cooled tenderness, and cultural irrelevance. We may, in a word, suffer the only damnation our moment recognizes: the loss of attention. Fish as implied author seems keenly aware of a folded truth Liz senses only partially: that the ways we judge judgment may abruptly reveal themselves as self-contradictory and self-defeating. To the story’s credit, it suggests this possibility without forcing the reader’s sympathy with it.
If anything, the narrative risks allowing our sympathy to fall where it may, regardless of the implied author’s possible intentions. If it is impossible to tell what Fish’s real-life sympathies around the novel’s crisis may be, impossible to tell whether her sympathies track to her protagonist’s or not, let this be a point for further aesthetic meditation: Do we feel there has been a full rendering of justice to reality, if the nature of a key narrative act remains obscure because of its potential to raise the reader’s reactive emotion? Or are there narrative actions—“high events,” as Charles Baxter names them—whose impact may gain by being kept obscure, rather than having their violent nature violently and sensationalistically splashed across the page? If I cannot say more without revealing the central event Fish goes to such trouble to conceal, let this, too, be an opportunity to deepen mystery. Here I simply want to notice that the novelistic manner of revealing this particular hidden thing, in the moment it comes abroad and is known, tells us much more about the character who tells it than about the nature of the act.
Keen irony falls into Fish’s hands here, and she uses it as a scalpel to dissect the flaw in Liz’s heart that made her unable to forestall the exact kind of loss she was professionally trained to prevent: If Liz had not been so sure of her own rightness, it’s implied, the person in trouble might have come to her before the tragedy occurred. It even transpires that this person did indeed reach out to her before the tragedy, though possibly not about the tragedy itself—but that the contact happened at a time when Liz herself could not respond promptly. As things fall out, Liz feels she has been tried and found wanting. Judgment has been passed on her competence, her goodwill, her wisdom—all the qualities in which she has tended to experience herself as having worth. In the very circumstances where her power should have been most in play, she has been rendered powerless.
And it is just here, in its own third act and Liz’s, where the energy of Fish’s narrative comes to the fore. Most conventional stories along these lines would end sooner, center their perspectives differently, and aim to teach a different lesson—one in which Liz as a character would fully merit the judgment passed on her, a later generation’s typical mores would prevail, and maternal values would be well and truly damned by being ignored. Instead, Liz—pay attention to her name: Elizabetta (“who am I that the mother of my Lord should come to me?”) Fane—becomes the arguably unlikely yet well-nigh predestined recipient of a Mariophany. Through her encounter with the mother of Christ, Liz discovers that she herself is valued and valuable: not for the results of her activism, not for the outcomes of her fertility and relationships, but simply for the essential, original created goodness she possesses.
This goodness, God’s gift to her of her very own being, pre-exists and can make room for both her personal agency and her physical nature without being reduced to either. If this feels like a long and circuitous path to travel to arrive at such an elementary point, then we can recognize it as a particular kind of narrative ending identified by literary critic Viktor Shlovsky: an ending in which characters do not change their state of being but, instead, come to a deeper understanding of it. Of such epiphanies, Shlovsky asks us to consider: “Why was it so difficult to understand such a simple thing?”
If we can come to terms with what makes it so difficult to understand the very simplest things about ourselves and our nature—the thousand ways we are blinded by sin and alienated by circumstance from seeing and experiencing the original goodness and integrity of our bodies and souls—then we will be a considerable step closer than we currently are to binding up at least one of the “large, egregious wounds” that currently slash through both public and private life. The Tuscan sun upon the gardens of Renaissance may not bring us all the way back to Eden, either aesthetically or in the realm of ideas—but it does throw fresh light on a rarely seen side of our post-Edenic damage.