[Dzanc; 2016]
In Kirstin Allio’s debut collection of short stories, Clothed, Female Figure, there are no male narrators and few male characters. Instead, women are the life force of every story, and mother-daughter relationships take the foreground. By controlling for the gender of her characters, Allio draws our attention to another vector of oppression: class. Her stories are set in a world (like ours) where some women own “country estates” and others are janitors; some are “famous feminists” and others do their laundry. Together, these accounts speak to the importance of intersectional feminism and the challenges of living it.
In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced the term “intersectionality” to describe the way “women experience oppression in varying configurations and in varying degrees of intensity,” depending on other dimensions of identity, including “race, gender, class, ability, and ethnicity.” Since then, intersectionality has become an important framework for third-wave feminists, who are concerned with the way systems of oppression overlap. In practice, they argue, every woman experiences patriarchy differently.
Clothed, Female Figure suggests the merits of this theory. Class, as much as gender, impacts the way Allio’s characters experience the world. Even flowers mean different things to different women, depending on their socioeconomic situations. In the book’s first story, “Millennium,” the owners of a forty-acre estate send flowers to their resident gardener, who is dying of skin cancer. To the wealthy couple, the bouquet makes a cheerful get-well gift; but to the gardener, it stands for a lifetime of labor, subsistence living, and bodily sacrifice. On a cultural level, flowers are also symbols of female anatomy. Allegorically, then, Allio suggests that money changes a woman’s womanhood.
The collection’s stories are set in the murky waters between socioeconomic strata, where “clothed, female figures” from different backgrounds are forced into contact. Some of the Allio’s most interesting scenes take place between employers and employees in the domestic sphere. Natasha, a Russian nanny, narrates the books eponymous story. She works for (and lives with) Virginia, a successful doctor. In one scene Virginia brings a personal letter to Natasha’s room:
It was last Saturday when I heard my employer’s appraising step along the attic hallway that leads to the little room that comes with my paycheck. . .
‘Oh, Natasha!’ her surprise at finding me in my own private corner was unconvincing. ‘Here’s this — ’ and she held out a rather bulky letter, laden with small stamps, as if someone had a tedious math assignment. I had the impulse to snatch it up, but it seemed essential that I measure my response: that it be equal, exactly, to my employer’s.
‘Thank, you Virginia.’ There was a pool of quiet around us. . . .
‘Is Colin napping?’ I inquired.
‘A miracle,’ said Virginia. I nodded as if to excuse her.
‘Oh!’ She paused to signal what was coming was such an incidental request it had only just now occurred to her. ‘Would dinner at six be possible?’
While Virginia and Natasha share a mailing address, their relationship is transactional: Natasha provides a service — feeding the family, tidying the house, caring for the children — and receives a paycheck in return. But the intimate nature of her work blurs professional boundaries. To navigate this ambiguity, Natasha keeps her responses “equal, exactly, to [her] employer’s,” while Virginia attempts to appear laissez-faire. She presumes Natasha is oblivious, when, in fact, she is more aware of the conversation’s subtext. Her livelihood depends on it.
All the women in Allio’s stories are intelligent, but those in subservient positions often have a better grip on reality than their superiors. In “The Other Woman,” the narrator’s mother is a university janitor who also grades papers “capably,” maybe “brilliantly,” on behalf of a distinguished anthropology professor, Nam Shemaria. Like all instances of passing, this one discredits the logic of hierarchy, proving success and capability don’t correlate. After she discovers her surrogate’s identity, Professor Shemaria is scandalized that a janitor could do her job: “‘A single mom with no education, recurring breast cancer,’ she faded off, shaking her head. ‘We women.’” Professor Shemaria uses the word “women” to paper over race and class differences. She claims to represent all women everywhere.
There are few instances of overt classism in Clothed, Female Figure. Instead, Allio suggests the subtle, counterintuitive ways that hierarchy perpetuates itself. Here, even charity exacerbates inequality rather than reducing it. In “Millennium,” Rosemary, a gardener’s daughter, remembers receiving “thin-ply garbage bags of clothing with an envelope that read: PLEASE SIGN ENCLOSED FOR TAX DEDUCTION.” To Rosemary, this token donation only highlights her mother’s neediness. It doesn’t make up for a system in which so many are suffering. In the collection’s longest story, “Quetzal,” the protagonist’s mother, Diane, attracts the generosity a “philanthropist-landlord” who has a crush on her. Here, gender and class are interconnected. As a young, beautiful widow, Diane has a better chance of upward mobility if she plays along with patriarchy. When her youth expires, this privilege will too.
None of this is to say that Allio’s wealthy characters are happier or more self-possessed than those who face economic hardships. If anything, the opposite seems true. One of the first things we learn about Heather, the narrator of “Still Life,” is exactly where she falls on the socioeconomic totem pole. She and her husband are poster children for upward mobility: “once they were post-college sweeties, with a collection of plastic cutlery in a shoebox,” but now Heather wears “expensive shoes” and owns a house “in the historic registry neighborhood.” Still, privilege does not guarantee happiness. After her best friend, Gilda, commits suicide, Heather spirals downhill. Because Heather and Gilda had so much in common — they are both stay-at-home moms, suffering from what Betty Friedan called “the problem that has no name” — Gilda’s death forces Heather to examine what makes her life worth living. Here, wealth doesn’t deliver women from patriarchy; it fetters them.
But Allio does not portray stay-at-home moms as victims. Instead, she subverts the post-Friedan expectation that all financially secure housewives are miserable. In “Announcements,” Elena likes being a mother. In the ninth month of her pregnancy, she “gives her notice. Not three weeks paid maternity leave, but goodbye forever to the deliberate clatter of high heels bisecting the commuter rail platform.” She doesn’t look back.
The baby [Alexis] is three months old and Elena has the sense that Time itself has a three-month-old’s consciousness. Time cannot, for example, roll over, and Time’s blue eyes are still bleary, even flat, marked by a previous universe. She supposes Time can hear — her baby passed the hearing tests — but can’t or won’t pick out the words of her specific pleas, spells, sentences . . . Time, like her baby, moves spastic, with a startle reflex.
Alexis becomes Elena’s whole world, her way of measuring time and marking progress. Nothing exists beyond him. As readers, we are immersed in this way of seeing. When Elena imagines taking her son to a park, where “an ice cream cone will once again mean what it meant when she was a kid,” we remember our first ice creams, too. Interestingly, Elena does not take her good fortune for granted. She “knows she is privileged to be a housewife” and fantasizes about “buy[ing] ice creams from the singing truck for all the low-income children.” Seeing beyond her own predicament, even for a moment, makes Elena grateful.
Clothed, Female Figure brings the diversity of feminism’s constituents into stark relief. Allio’s greatest gift is for re-writing the “same” domestic world from different vantage points. With every story, she urges us to both imagine other people’s life experiences and remember that we can’t. Social progress, she suggests, depends on a self-conscious attention to what we do and don’t have in common: you don’t know what you don’t know.
Gillie Collins lives in New York City. She writes about books, movies, and photography.
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