“Some will tell you to endure. You tell them you had rather prevail”.Dedication to her daughters...

Wed, 02/27/2013 - 6:46pm -- KChin

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“Some will tell you to endure. You tell them you had rather prevail”.

Dedication to her daughters from Divining Women by Kaye Gibbons

Library Director’s Notebook
March, 2013

If there happens to be anyone around today who does not believe that “mental cruelty” is a reasonable grounds for divorce, they should read Divining Women by Kaye Gibbons as an irrefutable means of changing their minds.

 In some ways, it does not matter that the book is set at the very end of World War I when women in America did not have the vote, and married women could be committed to hospitals and mental institutions, pretty much on the whim of their discontented husbands.  The cruel use of brutal threats, insinuation, insults, and sneers is not limited by country, century, race, sex, or age.  Yet the setting of this novel as the world war ends and the flu pandemic begins is surely not just happenstance.

 Young Mary Oliver ,the narrator of Divining Women, was raised in a well-to-do family of strong women and loving men.  Mary is therefore totally unprepared for the abuse she witnesses when she arrives in Elm City, North Carolina  to help her Aunt Maureen safely through a risky childbirth.  Mary soon learns that her uncle Troop exercises an unhealthy at times sadistic power over Maureen that threatens her very sanity and the life of her unborn child.

Troop himself has had a bizarre upbringing.  Early in his life his mother, Nora, married to Mary’s grandfather, Tobias, left her husband in high moral dudgeon , furious that he had taken a sudden yen for unconventional  ideas, including nudism! For the rest of her life, Nora wrote regular, scathing letters to her ex-husband, demanding ever-increasing amounts of money to support her lavish lifestyle and accusing him and his new wife and family of ruining Troop’s life and depriving him of his birthright .

As a result, her son Troop is indeed bankrupt, not in funds but in feelings. Brought up to believe himself grossly slighted and unloved, Troop has decided to withhold love from the world, and from none more ruthlessly than his tender and loving wife Maureen, whom he mentally tortures in various subtle and unsubtle ways.

The stage is set for death, whether through war, plague, or severe mental duress. Divining Women is about damaged women who manage to remake their lives even in the face of overwhelming odds.

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