Here is the sound of an author tipping her hand: "She turned, as always, to analysis, being a twentieth century woman and so subject to the superstition that what the mind could understand couldn't any longer hurt the heart, that what the tongue could utter was in the hand's control." It is the sound of an author urgently ordering and overruling her character, laboring to construct a sense of agon—contest, choice—when the evidence is already in and the outcome safely determined. This tone dominates Marilyn French's second novel, "The Bleeding Heart," and that is regrettable, because Miss French speaks to urgent issues between men and women, between what she sees as the unarmed individual and an oppressive society.
That she "speaks to them" at all, instead of embodying them is, however, the problem: Miss French has the soul of a polemicist nobly and earnestly gotten up in novelist's clothing. I truly wished the disguise had worked more than intermittently, but it is no surprise that anger and righteous disgust are vivid in their colors and will show through. "The Bleeding Heart" is not so vengeful as "The Women's Room," Miss French's first novel, but it is still undermined as fiction by its commitment to political rather than esthetic truth-seeking. As a reader I am never pleased to have to decide which of these commitments means more to me. In a more complex novel, they would not be separable….
This is a free excerpt of 237 words. There are 516 words (approx.
2 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our French, Marilyn 1929–: Critical Essay by Rosellen Brown Access Pass.
