The Odd Woman by Gail Godwin

First published: 1974

Type of plot: Comic realism

Time of work: The early 1970’s

Locale: A Midwestern university town, a Southern town, New York City, and Chicago

Principal Characters:

• Jane Clifford, the protagonist, an assistant professor of romantic British literature
• Edith Barnstorff, Jane’s grandmother, a Southern lady
• Kitty Sparks, Edith’s daughter, Jane’s mother
• Gabriel Weeks, Jane’s lover, an art history professor at a neighboring university
• Gerda Mulvaney, Jane’s confidante and friend for the past twelve years

The Novel

The title and central issue of Gail Godwin’s story are based upon George Gissing’s 1893 novel, The Odd Women—a pessimistic study of the possibilities of women in the late nineteenth century. Godwin’s The Odd Woman is one character’s search in the late twentieth century to resolve her personal story: Will Jane Clifford find a perfect faithfulness in marriage, the kind of love George Eliot and George Henry Lewes had, or will she remain “odd” in the sense of Gissing’s women, single, unpaired? The novel spans Jane’s semester break at a Midwestern university where she has filled two successive sabbatical leave vacancies in the English department. Her future is uncertain; she has no teaching position for the next academic year, yet if her married lover receives a Guggenheim she could go to Europe with him.

The death of Jane’s grandmother, Edith Barnstorff, at the end of the first chapter triggers the action of the novel, a journey that encompasses half the country, most of Jane’s past, and the remainder of the novel. When Jane flies South for the funeral, it is a visit into her family’s past and her relationships with her mother, Kitty, half brothers, Jack and Ronnie, half sister, Emily, and stepfather, Ray Sparks, whom she perceives as “the villain” of her story.

Although Jane’s visit takes her deep into the past, it fails to resolve the problems of the present. She recalls Edith’s contradictory advice (“I think, on the whole, it is better that you do not marry. Some people aren’t made for the married state,” but later, “Sometimes I get down on my knees and pray that you will find a good man to take care of you, as Hans took care of me”) and realizes that what she wants is “the end of uncertainty, of joyless struggle,” a struggle “without assurance of a happy reward.”

The search for her “best life” takes Jane to New York City, for an impromptu few days with Gabriel Weeks, her married, middle-aged lover for the past two years. In reassessing their relationship, Jane decides that her image of Gabriel, a professor of art history specializing in the Pre-Raphaelites, has been created “almost totally through her own devisings and dreams.” A nineteenth century Romantic at heart, Jane believes in the reality of the inner life, a life she has constructed for Gabriel and herself. In New York City, she discovers that Gabriel does not share her faith in “a kind of love that—that exists in a permanent, eternal way,” and she decides to leave him.

The final stop in Jane’s odyssey is Chicago, where she visits her oldest friend, Gerda Mulvaney, a woman who re-creates herself in the image of each newly adopted cause. Deeply involved in feminism at the time of Jane’s visit, Gerda argues with her, accusing Jane of living a life of “avoidances and evasions and illusions.” After Gerda’s attack, Jane realizes that she has failed to connect her own search with those of any of the women in her life. She sees herself “in transit between the old values . . . and the new values, which she must hack out for herself.”

Distraught and exhausted, Jane returns to her apartment and the prospect of five days alone with herself, “researching her salvation,” before the new semester begins. Jane learns that she will probably receive a last-minute replacement position for the next year, and, having found at least that much resolution, she goes to bed listening to the sounds of someone playing the piano late into the night, “trying to organize the loneliness and the weather and the long night into something of abiding shape and beauty.”

The Characters

Jane Clifford is extraordinary in her belief in the importance of words and the reality of the inner life. The most appealing quality Godwin has given her thirty-two-year-old protagonist is her sincere desire to make of her life what Aristotle calls “a good plot”: something that moves from possibility to probability to necessity. Toward this end, Jane reevaluates the symbols in her life—Edith Barnstorff, Kitty Sparks, and Gerda Mulvaney—and realizes that their stories cannot be hers, that “you had to write yourself as you went along, that your story could not and should not possibly be completed until you were.” What Godwin’s readers are likely to admire in Jane is her continued search for order and meaning in her life, and her awareness that she may never find them.

Godwin reflects other characters in the novel through Jane’s consciousness. Edith, Kitty, Gerda, and Jane’s lover, Gabriel Weeks, are presented almost entirely through Jane’s flashbacks and recollections. In Jane’s mind, her grandmother Edith is “the perfect Southern lady.” The story of her marriage to Hans Barnstorff (who, hearing Edith declare that “life is a disease,” said “let me protect you from it”) affects Jane deeply, and her death leaves Jane to pursue the “truth of the individual life” alone. Jane also sees herself as separated from her mother, Kitty, a part-time classics teacher and full-time wife to Ray Sparks, and Gerda Mulvaney, a friend passionately involved in her latest cause. Both women seem to possess what has eluded Jane—“a real vocation,” something she believes “we are all in search of.”

Jane’s lover, Gabriel Weeks, is the least defined of Godwin’s characters, and he is also the one with whom Jane is struggling the most. A middle-aged man with no lines in his face, Gabriel is less angelic than ethereal. Married to Ann Weeks for the past twenty-five years, Gabriel occupies much of Jane’s inner, but little of her external, life. He has never told her that he loves her and remains equally noncommittal in his plans for their future. Gabriel believes that perfect art but not permanent relationships can exist because “a relationship, by its very nature, is transient . . . it is made between people, and people change.” Gabriel is located in the moment; he is incapable of transcending time through love.

Critical Context

The Odd Woman was Godwin’s third novel, following The Perfectionists (1970) and Glass People (1972). It has nearly twice the length and complexity of either of her earlier books and is generally regarded as an important book in her development as a novelist.

Concerned in her first two novels with the possibilities of self-definition for modern women, Godwin gives the question historical and literary context in The Odd Woman. Using George Gissing’s 1893 novel as a counterpoint to her own story, Godwin draws her readers into Jane Clifford’s contemporary struggle for resolution, giving that struggle larger and more profound implications about the relationship between the life of the mind and the outer life than are to be found in either of her previous novels. Focusing primarily on character rather than action, her work since The Odd Woman has continued to explore the intersection between art and life and the haunting presence of the past in everyday life.

Bibliography

Allen, John Alexander. “Researching Her Salvation: The Fiction of Gail Godwin.” Hollins Critic 25, no. 1 (1988): 1-9. Although Allen focuses on Godwin’s A Southern Family (1987), he provides a useful account of the search for human dignity pursued by characters in all of her novels. The essay is followed by a brief note on her life.

Brownstein, Rachel M. “Gail Godwin: The Odd Woman and Literary Feminism.” In American Women Writing Fiction:Memory, Identity, Family, Space, edited by Mickey Pearlman. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1989. In an insightful essay, Brownstein uses The Odd Woman to analyze Godwin’s development and critical reception in the context of her feminism. The essay is followed by two useful bibliographies, compiled by Pearlman, of Godwin’s complete works and of writings published about them.

Cheney, Anne. “Gail Godwin and Her Novels.” In Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, edited by Tonette Bond Inge. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990. This comprehensive essay, prefaced by a sketch of Godwin’s life and augmented by original biographical research, traces the autobiographical elements in her novels, up to and including A Southern Family. A bibliography of Godwin’s major works cites stories and essays as well as novels.

Current Biography 56 (October, 1995): 26-29. Profiles Godwin’s life and career as an award-winning novelist and short story writer. Critical reaction to her work is discussed, providing a valuable framework within which to compare The Odd Woman to various other of Godwin’s writings.

Godwin, Gail. “A Dialogue with Gail Godwin.” Interview by Lihong Xie. The Mississippi Quarterly 46 (Spring, 1993): 167-184. Godwin discusses her works, comparing them to major or minor keys in music depending on the emphasis she gives them in relation to certain plot elements and characters. Among the topics she covers in this interview are characterization, as well as the southern influence on her writing. The Odd Woman is briefly discussed.

Kissel, Susan S. Moving On: The Heroines of Shirley Ann Grau, Anne Tyler, and Gail Godwin. Bowling Green, Ohio: Green State University Press, 1996. This critical analysis of Grau, Tyler, and Godwin reveals how the work of other Southern women writers has influenced each author. Also discusses Godwin’s universal communal vision.

Lorsch, Susan E. “Gail Godwin’s The Odd Woman: Literature and the Retreat from Life.” Critique 20, no. 2 (1978): 21-34. This essay traces the novel’s theme of art as an escape from reality.

Seidel, Kathryn Lee. “Gail Godwin and Ellen Glasgow: Southern Mothers and Daughters.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 10, no. 2 (1991): 287-294. Seidel’s essay documents Ellen Glasgow’s influence on Godwin and compares the experiences of their heroines—such as Jane in The Odd Woman—who must leave the South to escape the restrictive feminine ideals of their mother’s generation.

Westerlund, Kerstin. Escaping the Castle of Patriarchy:Patterns of Development in Gail Godwin’s Novels. Uppsala, Sweden: University of Uppsala Press, 1990. This solidly researched book, the first ever published on Godwin’s fiction, shows how consistently she focuses on her heroines’ gradual journeys toward self-discovery. It also shows that Godwin’s novels, read in chronological order, reveal her own development as a feminist writer. Westerlund’s fourth chapter, “Suspended Woman,” compares The Odd Woman and Godwin’s Violet Clay (1978) as novels whose heroines seek fulfillment outside marriage and traditional gender roles, but who still perceive men as obstacles to that goal.

Wimsatt, Mary Ann. “Gail Godwin, the South, and the Canons.” The Southern Literary Journal 27 (Spring, 1995): 86-95. Explores the two major causes of Godwin’s exclusion from the canon: her feminism and the fact that her novels are bestsellers. Godwin’s novels are saturated with autobiographical elements, and her portraits of women ensnared in unhappy marriages are derived from her own life experiences.

Xie, Lihong. The Evolving Self in the Novels of Gail Godwin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1995. A critical appraisal of many of Godwin’s novels, including a chapter devoted to The Odd Woman. A bibliography and index round out this outstanding resource.