Different Spheres Clashing Realities and the Transformative Reprising of “Women’s Work” in Lisa Moore’s February

Abstract

Feminist and Marxist criticism is applied to explore the disparity between the economic reality that leads to Cal’s death in Lisa Moore’s February and Helen’s apparent ability to transcend economic need through traditional “women’s work.” It is argued that Helen’s profession is personally and socially transformative, not repressive or regressive.

The importance of the institution of paid employment is that it confers both an element of identity and determines economic and social status. An expression of what we offer to society, our occupational role is also, conversely, tied to what society is willing to offer us. Traditionally, the nature of paid work has been different for men and for women, as professions have been divided roughly along gender lines. In recent decades, of course, many members of society have fought against that enforced dichotomy and the economic disparity that stems from it, with varying success. In most countries, that struggle is still far from complete, and many women remain seemingly disadvantaged with regard to employment and income. One has only to consider the position of single mothers and widows, who have higher rates of poverty globally due to a “perfect storm” of circumstances. However, many married women, too, are economically vulnerable because of dependence on their spouse (Sorensen 173). Of course, that is not to suggest that only women suffer economic disadvantage due to the intractable circumstances that affect them. Friedrich Engels posited more than a century ago that gender relationships have close ties with class-based oppression, given that the relationship between a man and a woman is similar to that between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Both men and women may face profound limitations regarding their employment, because of their class, credentials, or gender.

Authors of fiction are, of course, entirely free to craft and organize their fictional worlds however they see fit. They are unconstrained by the practical economic necessities that affect the “real” world. At the same time, the novel is a vehicle through which social issues are highlighted. Lisa Moore’s acclaimed novel February is primarily a narrative of her protagonist Helen’s “grief work” and recovery following the tragic loss of her husband. Economic and class themes regarding the nature and division of work form a quiet but vital subtext, however, given that Helen’s husband, Cal, died on board the oil rig Ocean Ranger, working a job that he took despite its dangers because of the family’s economic necessity. In the years that follow Cal’s death, Helen gradually and concurrently with her emotional healing finds for herself a uniquely realized yet traditional form of employment, which offers her a measure of security after years of scarcity and fragmented, ill-fitting employment. The intention of this article is to use aspects of February to present a case study of how gender-based occupational roles may be reexamined, culminating in the transcendence of their limitations. The conceptual framework surrounding the interaction of work and gender will be outlined, followed by a discussion of how February may be seen to fit into that framework and to both espouse and transcend traditional limitations. The fundamental acceptance of a gender-based division of occupational roles and spheres often creates an irresoluble tension that leaves women, both in theory and in practice, manacled by what may be regarded as the limitations of their own strengths and abilities—for example, the qualities of empathy, cooperation, and giving. To the extent that Moore, within her fictional setting, transcends this conundrum, her work may be regarded as revolutionary.

February is set within a realistic and often depressed social setting, centering on an event that had emotional and socioeconomic ripples of distress and its long aftermath. The tendency to look toward the sea for industry and wealth combined with the “corporate hubris and failure of safety regulations” that contribute to Cal’s death are a realistic and somewhat politicized reflection of a culture built by capitalism, which victimizes those with limited means (Wyile). As one critic notes, a gender-based bias exists here as well, as “ . . . we don’t ask ‘people’ to do dangerous jobs, we ask men to do dangerous jobs” (Kay). In a critique of the novel and its concentration on the female protagonist’s experience rather than that of the men who actually died on the ocean ranger, Kay points out that over 95 percent of workplace deaths are among males. In contrast to this stark, fact-based context, however, the sometimes whimsical nature of Helen’s journey toward what is for her optimal employment suggests that she does not remain moored in the same socioeconomic reality that Cal occupies. Occupying a middle ground between realism and fantasy, Helen’s work has powerful symbolic and transformative connotations. While Cal goes on board the ill-fated oil rig upon acknowledging the failure of fonder pursuits and the need to support his family (his hope is to save enough money to buy a convenience store, thus joining the class of capitalists), Helen’s own much more congenial occupation ultimately elevates her above class-based realism. Far from being a liability, as an economic analysis of flexible, home-based “women’s work” would suggest, Helen’s eventual employment as a seamstress appears to represent an escape from harsh economic circumstances. As she works to transcend the tragedy of her early widowhood and her grieving for Cal, the economic realities that led him to his death are likewise transcended, building, in the context of the novel, a connotative or symbolic link between the emotional and the economic.

Women’s Work?

Interestingly, Helen’s occupation is also one that would traditionally be considered women’s work within a socioeconomic framework. Throughout centuries, certain professions and types of manufacturing have been formally and informally designated as women’s work, based on a complex network of reasons, be it a desire to keep women in the private, home sphere or a perceived need for women’s employment to fit around the needs of the family. Women’s work is not inherently or inevitably oppressive; far from it. It can be deeply satisfying and, indeed, a source and forum of ingenuity and strength. The vital factor may be the woman’s ability to choose freely her mode of employment—and this is something that, historically, has very often been limited.

Near the conclusion of Homer’s Odyssey, after the eponymous hero has returned home but has not yet revealed himself, a subtle reversal takes place that illustrates this point. Whereas much of Homer’s epic is dedicated to the somewhat playful entertainment of the notion that female figures, whether human or goddess, in fact have more power to stir things up than the strict patriarchal structure of pre-classical Greece would allow, in book 21, much of that state of affairs is undone. Penelope, famously, has clung to her kingdom and held an unruly throng of suitors at bay for almost twenty years through her ingenuity and her accidentally independent status. Her son being too young to provide protection or direction, Penelope takes matters into her own hands, her name having become synonymous for loyalty, strength and ingenuity while her absent husband is caught in the clutches of the sea. Indeed, Penelope uses her loom—a device with very strong connotation of women’s work—as a defense against unwanted suitors, weaving a shroud by day and unraveling it by night so that it is never finished. In this manner, Penelope controls her kingdom and awaits her husband’s return.

What is often overlooked amid the heartwarming drama of that happy event, however, is that it coincides with Penelope’s abrupt banishment to women’s quarters, her choices taken from her as Telemachus suddenly comes of age and finds his bearings. Go back to your loom, Mother, he says, in effect. Odysseus’s bow, symbol of his strength, which has been in her custody, suddenly becomes men’s business and none of her concern. The fundamentally unruly state of affairs that has been going on since the king’s absence is about to be set right, and this involves, of course, a return to quarters, zones, and work that is strictly delineated along the lines of gender. While Penelope certainly always used her loom, she was not confined to it until the attainment of her heart’s desire, the return of her husband.

Notwithstanding the presence throughout history of primarily male tailors and, more recently, designers, there is a traditional conception of textile production as women’s work, a paradigm so familiar to us that we are unsurprised that Penelope has a loom or Helen a sewing machine. Moreover, sewing and weaving have a particularly strong historical association with women who, like both Penelope and Helen, have been left alone and must make do for themselves, without male help. Historians agree that the term work when applied to women in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century almost inevitably involved sewing or needlework in some form (Wilson 167, Lieb 29). Interestingly, Roszika Parker argues that sewing may be so associated with femininity because it involves, for the most part, making things for others and as such “was engendered by an ideology of femininity as service and selflessness and the insistence that women work for others, not for themselves” (6). While the specific type of sewing that a woman learns varies according to her social class, with lower-class women making simple garments for the family, those in the working class making fancier garments for those in the class above them to wear, and upper-class women learning fancy, decorative sewing, all groups “may fall back on needlework as a primary means of self and family support, should the vicissitudes of fortune shear away the bulwarks of masculine protection” (Jones). Looking much further back in history, Elizabeth Barber argues in Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times that recent archaeology has confirmed that fiber arts were a “fabulous economic force” undertaken primarily by women from ancient times up until the Industrial Revolution. Therefore, Moore’s heroine Helen, settling upon a career sewing wedding dresses for women in a professional class higher than hers, is following in the footsteps of both the Victorian woman in diminished circumstances and, in a broader sense, her entire gender from time immemorial. In fact, the anachronistic elements of Helen’s profession are very clear. What is interesting, however, is what else this decision on the part of the author entails.

Sociological analysis of gender and work has been slow to adjust to changes in ideology and desire. While women’s rights interest groups have fought their way to inclusion and something resembling a promise of equality (if not the actual item), both the lived reality and the theory that describes it remain shackled to the notion that it is difficult or impossible to reconcile the concerns of the public and private spheres, of the family and the workplace. According to several scholars writing in the 1990s to the present, the work of Talcott Parsons in the 1950s and ’60s still remains a model of choice for the sociological analysis of gender and work.

Historically, it was during and in the aftermath of the industrial revolution that work became fragmented, divided between the home and public sphere and thus generating a need to protect both. Parsons argued that the “separation of the worlds of work and family was necessary for the stability of each institution and for the society as a whole” (cited by Pleck 179). Moreover, this separation both supports and is supported by another fundamental division in norms, beliefs and feelings, such that “human emotions were split between the two worlds—particularistic ascriptive norms governing the family and universalistic, achieved norms dominating the world of work” (Pleck 179). Thus, the primary affiliation of women was with the family, and their contribution to the society is seen to stem from their role in “contributing to the overall stability of society” by maintaining the family; anything else, “in Parsonian terms” “can be considered only as subsidiary” (Beechey 155).

In the mid-1950s, Talcott Parsons neatly explained what he considered to be the basically intact functionality of the split between male and female roles, and public and private (family) spheres:

Women are involved in the bearing and early nursing of children, and there therefore best adapted to performing internal expressive roles, while the absence of men from these activities makes them best adapted to instrumental ones. Since the tension between the kinship system and the occupational system requires a clear segregation of sex roles, the man is ascribed the instrumental role while the woman is removed from competition within the occupational system by her confinement within the family.

(cited by Beechey 161)

What is remarkable is to what extent the basic tenets of the above view still influence theories of gendered work, even when the examination is fundamentally critical rather than approving of this dual dynamic. Of course, feminist thought has long recognized the limitation in the close affiliation between the woman and the family to the exclusion of her professional, economic and perhaps personal fulfillment. In recent research, a consciousness of the woman’s “second shift” and its impact on income prevails. The second shift refers to the household tasks waiting to be done after a woman gets home from work. There is a consequent tendency of women to find part-time, flexible (and incidentally, lower paid) work. Indeed, Wharton notes that flexibility in employment is not enough to accommodate the demands of families and wage work. Noonan finds that traditionally male and female household tasks account for a gap in the amount of time spent on paid labor, and that, therefore, more equity at home may reduce the current wage gap. Sayer examines trends by using women’s time diaries in 1965, 1975, and 1998, concluding that women continued to do more unpaid work in the household than men but that men spent increasingly more time. Nevertheless, a thirty-minute-per-day time gap had emerged.

Notwithstanding the previously noted predominance of men in dangerous professions (Kay), most research indicates that women in traditionally female types and configurations of employment, often designed to accommodate child or elder care or a “second shift,” face a systemic economic disadvantage. My argument is that, in February, Lisa Moore, with her somewhat curious assignment of job roles that seem strictly divided along gender lines, is actually engaged in transforming and healing this breech in gender-based equity. As a modern-day Penelope despairing of her man’s return from the sea (though ultimately this despair is alleviated by the reemergence of another), Helen goes far beyond the original Ithacan queen, with no obligation to unravel what she has sewn. Her creation of wedding dresses melds an economic success with an emotional one, posing no need to choose between the two or to compromise on care for her family. These fortunate circumstances are all the more evident when viewed in contrast with Helen’s earlier struggles.

Helen’s Progression

Helen undergoes a subtle socioeconomic transformation during the course of the novel that echoes her emotional movement toward wholeness and healing. As a young widow with four children, she is portrayed as close to financially destitute, attempting and ultimately failing at a series of jobs while “waiting for the settlement,” which is a long time coming. The arrival or indeed the amount of the settlement is not recorded in the novel, but in the present time Helen’s economic state has transformed itself into something much more robust and healthy. She is in a position to take occasional vacations and to have her house renovated. All of that, could, of course, have been the result of the settlement. However, in the absence of discussion of such, the interest hovers over and occasionally alights upon Helen’s new career.

This career, in and of itself, is scantily but pervasively mentioned. Indeed, the very lack of revelation and the sketchy quality of the description of Helen’s career makes it appear as a series of shadowy but rather powerful impressions. Helen’s sewing is explained, consistently, as a hobby that grew into a career. At first mention, we are told: “So Helen took another job, she started sewing again, she went to yoga” (Moore 22). The juxtaposition of yoga and sewing in this sentence serves to imply that the sewing, like the yoga, existed in Helen’s life first and foremost as an interest. This is reinforced by the next mention, occurring much later in the narrative: “She sews wedding gowns, a kind of business venture that grew from a hobby” (113). Only later still is a more comprehensive explanation of Helen’s business given, and even then it is merely sketched in, so that we have a suggestion or impression of a woman who has cleverly and by serendipity stumbled into a workable career. The nuts and bolts of the business remain veiled. Indeed, a section with the heading “Helen making wedding dresses” contains only one line (in approximately three pages) about Helen making the dresses. The subject remains in shadow, until it bursts forth at one point with the clarity of selective specificity:

Helen’s clients are mostly friends of friends, and often she goes to the wedding. She has a feeling about the wedding dresses she makes; they are sacred. They matter to Helen . . . her clientele are mostly in their late forties or fifties and they do not want virginal and they do not want foolish. Nor do they want the stiff suits they have worn to boardrooms for the past twenty years. Her clientele are radiologists or engineers or surgeons, or they are at the university.

(240–41)

It is here that it becomes apparent that Helen’s true role is not merely as a seamstress but as a voice for a group of women with whom she identifies, but who are, oddly, one or two steps removed from her own situation—a few years younger, a good deal more imbued with the “hard skills” that are, in Helen’s own family, much more in the purview of men than of women. Yet, somehow, Helen is uniquely poised to create and deliver to these women the thing that they need to symbolize their reentry into a love relationship.

Helen’s creation of her niche and ability to step into it is in one sense redemptive, as she had earlier struggled with finding appropriate employment and supporting her family. On closer examination of these previous professional incarnations, however, something else becomes apparent—Helen’s tendency to find within herself unexpected, serendipitous areas of competence in almost every role. Taken together, these have a cumulative or building quality, each just a little more successful than the last. Her first job after Cal’s death is as a bartender, where she

found she couldn’t count change. She’d look at the change in the cash register drawer and the change in her open palm and the five-dollar bill in her other hand and she had no idea what it all meant. She got the orders wrong.

(15)

The description does not point to inherent incompetence—rather, the causes of the inability are ambiguous. Is it that she is in a state of shock resulting from Cal’s death? Or is the work simply a poor fit for Helen? In the narrative, the two issues converge. Helen’s grief work is preeminent, and as it is accomplished she gradually finds herself able to concentrate on other forms of work. After some time passes, she “started teaching a water fitness program for women over fifty at the Aquarena, youth being her only qualification”(140). Nevertheless, the description indicates that she has some inherent appeal for the women taking the class. Still later, when she herself is older, she has “a job in an office, and Helen had to learn about computers. . . . Helen hated computers” (200). However, she finds an authentic and appreciated role for herself in the office setting, as she “could settle disputes with a tilt of her head; she was regal and intuitive about all the small hurts and poverties and flares of temper” (201). The trajectory of her professional life, from lesser to greater competency and fitness, echoes Helen’s psychological journey, from bewilderment and grief following her husband’s death to increasing acceptance and finally happiness and self-actualization. The same general improvement is echoed by shifting social circumstances and increasing opportunities for women within the novel’s time frame, from the 1980s till the present. However, Helen herself appears to buck the trend, retreating voluntarily from a mixed-gender workplace to home-based “women’s work.”

Helen moves into situations where she is able to work with and for women, more and more exclusively. For example, in the office in which she works, female co-workers are the ones for whom she mediates, although mention is made of her interactions with her male boss. The job teaching aquafit classes is, of course, entirely conducted within a female environment. And as a creator of wedding gowns for a specific niche group of women, as described above, Helen is able to give the women, symbolically, what they cannot otherwise acquire – a gown that reflects their own version of femininity. In other words, Helen thrives in a gendered world, flounders and fails in one that is poorly differentiated. Her adoption of women’s work, therefore, is, for her as an individual, a positive adjustment, not indicative of limiting or sequestering.

It is equally important, however, that this celebration of gender-specific work is accompanied by a repudiation of what is, after all, the most powerful economic factor for women—marriage, or, rather, marriage as an economic factor. Single women, particularly mothers, experience significantly higher rates of poverty (Sorensen 173). Remarriage is often a way out of the predicament. The following passage, in which Helen’s ultimate profession is first introduced, was quoted briefly above. Consider the complete passage:

So Helen took another job, she started sewing again, she went to yoga. Nobody said, “Have you thought about meeting somebody else?” For a long time, nobody dared.

(22)

The seamless movement of thought from a job to a hobby to the possibility of meeting somebody else offers a suggestion that they are all part of the same general question or problem—Helen’s predicament following Cal’s death, and how she is to reestablish her life and living. The question “have you thought about meeting somebody else?” is not overtly economic, but its placement in the passage and our knowledge of socioeconomic realities suggests that it could be such. Indeed, if Helen had remarried, it might be assumed that she would have had an easier time feeding her family and might not have had to attempt, unsuccessfully, various professional roles that offered her little satisfaction and failed to provide for her needs. Yet Helen, like Homer’s Penelope, is impervious to the suggestion of remarriage—not, like Penelope, out of the actual hope that a presumably drowned husband will return but perhaps out of a lack of acceptance of the impossibility of his return. Along the way, still in isolation, her weakened position gains strength. It becomes evident that Helen is in the process of finding her own and independent brand of power and way of functioning. In this way, the traditional women’s work is powerfully vindicated as it is a source of strength for Helen. It is interesting to note that other elements of the novel point to this vindication and return to wholeness through adopting and transforming a feminine role. Whereas Helen’s own girls do not wear dresses, Helen makes them for her beloved granddaughter, Claire, a girl being raised by her young single mother:

She made Claire dresses with smocking. Her own girls she had dressed like boys. They had to be tough; that must have been what she was thinking. They had to be ready.

(207)

Both the shift in Helen’s thinking and her current progression past her earlier philosophy that girls had to be tough are apparent here. The contradiction in the fact that the woman who makes dresses for a living dressed her own girls like boys is not perhaps ironic but allows us to trace a trajectory or change. Helen is in a sense re-inhabiting a feminine world that she previously lacked the luxury, perhaps, to partake of. And it is in this world that she finds fulfillment, success, and, only after those have been achieved, a new love. Far from refusing a gendered world, Helen rejects merely the compromises that might come with it in a world where the heterosexual relationship is part of an economic system.

Hard Times

It is generally acknowledged that single mothers are among the most economically disadvantaged members of any society. Brown and Moran found that single mothers are twice as likely as married mothers to experience economic hardship, even though they are, also, twice as likely to be employed full-time (21). Brown and Moran also associate these factors with depression, demonstrating the health and emotional repercussions on mothers. Helen endures years spent on the fringes of economic survival while waiting for the elusive settlement. Moore takes great pains to establish a realistic portrayal of the situation of a mother with scant visible means of sustenance for herself and her family. At the same time, she offers solutions to the economic dilemma that occasionally inhabit that fringe between the realistic and the numinous. Moore relates the difficulty that Helen has in putting food on the table, “because how do you feed four kids and pay Newfoundland Light and Power?” (15). She gets help from a charity fund that “didn’t go far,” and from her sister Louise, who is “just getting started in nursing” and therefore has little to spare. At that point, her son John, who is ten years old, starts a paper route. The reader is asked to accept that John’s paper route is a solution, either partial or whole, to the problem of acquiring money for groceries: “[John] wanted to buy groceries, so she let him. . . . Once John bought her a steak. He was very proud of himself” (17).

It seems that the importance of the mention of John as breadwinner at the age of ten is not, as might be expected, to establish either the poverty of the family or the mother’s over-reliance on her son. Rather, it is a seemingly successful solution that overleaps time, putting John in the role he will later have, that of worker and provider. As such, it straddles the boundary between the symbolic and the realistic, and thus a precedent is established for viewing professional roles in this light within the narrative.

The Provider

Indeed, John, seemingly without resentment, casts himself in the role of rescuer, provider, and protector. In fact, his role is enormous; within his family of origin, he is the one who mends and heals the breaches that have come about in the aftermath of his father’s death. Thus, John provides groceries for the family in his father’s absence and his mother’s inability to do so; he attends the birth of his youngest sister, and watches over her in perpetuity. However, it is in his professional role that John goes even further in sewing up the jagged ends that his father’s demise have left in the family. First, he reprises his father’s professional role by going aboard the oil rigs himself. Initially working as a “roustabout” and “tool pusher,” his job later consists of climbing into the oil tanks and checking them for leaks with ultrasound equipment, thus acting as a safe-keeper or guardian preventing tanker-related mishaps.

However, John also surpasses his father’s role. Unlike the rest of his family, John acquires higher education (an engineering degree), guaranteeing that he will not indefinitely be obliged to risk his life on the oil rigs. It is significant, perhaps, that John decides to gain more education in response to his observation that “thirty-two was getting too old for the rigs . . . it can’t be good for you” (131). His father, Cal, died aboard the Ocean Ranger at the age of thirty-one. It may be that it seems appropriate to John to be following in the footsteps of his father until he lives out the years of his father’s life span. After that point, he is free to reinvent his role to some degree. However, John’s own strategy combines that conventional approach with an observation that must, based on his actions and character, stem from a kind of altruism rather than pragmatism: “Everyone is afraid of something. Find out what everyone else is afraid of and go into that” (134). His perception that “everyone” is afraid of going on an oil rig may logically stem from his early life. As his work is not unique, it cannot be the case that everyone in the broader world is afraid of oil rig work, but it is more than likely that everyone in his own family or community is.

Then, the purpose of “going into that” becomes ambiguous. At first glance the statement seems to be about finding one’s niche in order to maximize economic benefit to oneself. At second glance, we find it may be, rather, about the importance to the community of one’s taking on the tasks that others are afraid to fulfill. Here again, the emotional and symbolic significance of a professional role supersedes its economic reality.

Helen’s Girls

It is evident that Helen exists, at least in part, within a gendered world in which social and economic roles are thus defined. However, there is, as we shall see, an uneasiness or ambivalence regarding the gendered reality and its social and economic meanings, leading Helen to variably, and sometimes unreliably, present and process it first in one way and then another. A world of work that is divided along gender lines is embraced or even endorsed by Helen, or so it would appear, when it is revealed that she has urged her son but not her daughters to further their schooling. Of course, Helen herself, long after the fact, denies this, saying, “I said education to all my children” (133). The girls themselves say, “She never said education to us,” but then modify this, mentioning that Helen had wanted them to go to secretarial school, or to “get a trade. She said nursing . . .” (133). Subsequently, another daughter, Lulu, presents a different possibility: “Or retail. . . . She saw Cathy and me in retail. She saw us married is what she saw” (133). Marriage melds with retail in this statement so that we are unsure whether the one is supposed to lead to the other in the speaker’s, or indeed Helen’s, mind. At the same time, we have absolutely no assurance or even indication of which version of past events is correct. The suggested conflation of marriage and economic sustenance hovers at the edge of acknowledgment and endorsement, though it is not, as we already know, a path that Helen has embraced for her own economic survival or that of her children. It exists, rather, as an unfulfilled, orphaned expectation—rehabilitated in part by John, who, however, becomes the provider and the economic salvation for Jane and their child.

In the era in which the novel is set (1980s to the near present), gender divisions still exist in labor. Despite shifts that have allowed women to enter previously male-dominated professions, “women are highly overrepresented in clerical and services occupations, for example, while men are disproportionately employed in craft, creator and laborer jobs” (Wootton 15). The professions that Helen may have suggested to her daughters, therefore—nursing or secretarial—are very much in keeping with the division of labor roles.

Jane’s Work

By far the most difficult to characterize in terms of professional occupation and its significance is Jane, the mother of John’s child. As an unemployed academic, Jane defies categorization in the class system, as she is both highly (and expensively) educated and qualified, and currently without income or the means of acquiring any. Jane’s economic status is clearly laid out by her father, who questions her ability to raise a child given that she is “by no means financially secure” (89). He also refuses to help her, leaving her adrift and helpless with a child on the way, much like Helen after Cal’s death. While not in any of the occupational roles traditionally set aside for women, Jane finds herself in what is perhaps the quintessential predicament relating to feminine vulnerability; that is, she is pregnant and without visible means of support, either from her father or a husband, so must turn to these male figures for help—which, indeed, she receives from John.

Jane’s work, funded by “an eighty thousand dollar scholarship at the New School in New York,” has an enormous and unique social value but seemingly no economic value at all. Moreover, it is not in any sense traditional women’s work, as it involves rough or dangerous conditions and contact with a vagrant population, not in an overtly helping capacity but to construct an “ethnography of indigence” that interrogates the spiritual beliefs of these people (101–2). Jane’s work fulfills a unique niche that Moore has taken the trouble to create or render and to insert into the social landscape of her novel. Viewed through a Marxist/feminist lens, however, similarities between Jane’s work and Helen’s emerge. Jane’s occupation and status, like Helen’s own, is ambiguous and contradictory. Its meaning is difficult to ascertain within the symbolic substructure of the novel until one considers that, like Helen’s, Jane’s work has an element of artistry, in putting together previously disparate strands of meaning. Moreover, Jane, like Helen, is the one who identifies a previously unrecognized niche. In effect, through their consciousness of these forgotten or emergent roles, both Jane and Helen are remaking society, bolstered by that new consciousness. However, while the social relevance of Helen’s making wedding dresses for professional women entering a second marriage is readily self-evident—she is catering to an emergent demographic or population not previously considered—the relevance of Jane’s work among vagrants is less obvious, both within the context of the themes of the novel and the sociohistorical setting that the characters inhabit. It is on one level an attempt to introduce and deal with the sheer variety of human existence, as Jane reflects on the fact that she has been frightened by some of the vagrants and their behaviors, their delusions, their occasional violence, and their hopelessness. She admits that these are facts she has not included in her thesis, and certainly, there is an irony in the fact that Jane has been awarded an expensive scholarship to study the poorest of the poor in a way that neither offers them assistance nor, arguably, produces a usable result. The irony points to deep social inequalities, suggests the lack of utility or real understanding of the intelligentsia class, and echoes the deeply inequitable allocation of wealth throughout society that is also apparent in Helen’s being left almost destitute as a result of the actions and negligence of a multimillion-dollar company and a contested resource.

However, Jane as a representative of that class-based inequity and wastefulness, is ultimately unconvincing, as it is apparent that a reversal of some sort has taken place, rendering her almost as dispossessed as those she has been interviewing. Her sympathy for them, and the fact that she herself is “failing spectacularly” makes her a poor representative of a privileged class. Most curious and most lyrical, however, is a passage that describes Jane’s profound observation about the indigent people:

Best of all, they knew the scope of a single lifetime and how not to make a mark.

When Jane had finished studying the street people, she experienced a glimmer of what it might mean to be invisible, to live without a trace, to hurt nothing. A kind of passivity that harkened back to an Aquinian notion of grace. One had to be empty to experience grace, empty or uncertain, and even then it was not a sure thing. She had kept all that out of the thesis. Her master’s thesis had made a mark. She was not willing to be empty.

(122)

The reflective tone of Jane’s remembrances of doing her thesis research, as well as her present circumstances, suggest that she has, indeed, found herself in a state that can be deemed empty. Her former certainty about her work has evaporated, as indicated in the statement: “Jane had shaped the material because she’d felt for a while that she knew what it meant. Or she’d pretended she did” (121). When she learns of her pregnancy, she thinks of it as a “Zen koan,” a paradox and an unanswerable riddle (126). We are left to speculate that the riddle may have to do with the potential for new life that a pregnancy represents, and the loss of her old existence and purpose. After being, effectively, abandoned by her father, Jane enters a state of uncertainty and desperation that may indeed by “Aquinian” and leads her to contact John. Subsequently, John’s ability and willingness to take responsibility for Jane and the baby, as well as the advent of the new addition to the family, an emotional focal point for the entire story, does seem to provide a type of grace.

Thus, the role of the indigent people in the story may indeed be a spiritual one, as per Jane’s original intent, and despite her subsequent disillusionment on this point. One wonders, also, whether there is a tendency on the part of the author to criticize Jane and what she stands for, in the manner of bringing her down a notch. It is interesting, in light of this question, to contrast Helen and Jane and what they each represent. Whereas Helen is relatively uneducated, unworldly, marries young, and has four children, all of which would appear to limit her capability in the professional sphere, Jane is unmarried at thirty-seven, unencumbered (until the pregnancy), and highly educated, with no apparent impediment to her worldly success. Yet these differences are effaced by what may be described as a spiritual similarity between the two women, the fact that they both are raising or have raised children within the same social, geographic, and indeed familial setting, and, of course, that they are connected through John, who at some time is the provider for them both.

Beyond Women’s Work

Ultimately, it is Helen, not Jane, who manages to elude the limitations that the patriarchal social structure imposes on women. It is Helen who transcends the economic necessity of marriage, thus resurrecting the unadulterated emotional resonance of the institution. Finally, although Helen will never be an engineer, doctor, or academic, these are the “friends of friends” for whom she creates gowns that are symbolic of a nascent or newly recognized female identity, not virginal and yet not androgynous.

When Helen does remarry, it is only after she has already carved out this life and living for herself. Marriage satisfies an emotional longing, and may be seen to fill an emptiness in her that has been there since Cal’s death. Indeed, the final scene in which she momentarily panics at having lost sight of Barry under the ocean waves, followed by his reemergence and rejoining her on shore, signals a conflation between the two men and a deep fulfillment or healing that occurs at the moment of Barry’s “return.” In some sense, it is indeed analogous to Odysseus’s return to Penelope after many years and having been presumed dead. But while this “Penelope” may have been sent back to her “loom” and to the arena of women’s work, we may be assured, at least, that she has gone there of her own accord, that she has gained agency and control of her fate, and that the choice of profession does not sequester her in the private sphere but is rather a source of profound empowerment. The fact that it appears to serve her in both the domestic and the professional sphere likewise indicates that Helen has managed to resolve a problem that has affected women for an excessive length of time, and continues to do so. Studies find that women are economically disadvantaged in comparison to men in part because of the second shift of housework they perform at home and the drive to seek more flexible means of employment outside the home (Noonan, Sayer 285, Wharton 189). That this is a problem points to the unequal distribution of labor among men and women, with women still doing the lion’s share of the second shift.

Resolution and Transcendence

The image of Helen’s wedding dresses, not virginal and yet unlike the business attire that, for a time, women felt that they had to wear in order to rise within a “serious” profession, may indeed be a leitmotif for women’s accomplishment in this novel. Because the making of the wedding dresses represents, in Helen’s life, the achievement after long travail of a fitting occupation that resonates with her abilities, her creative expression, and her being, the symbol is also one of transcendence, of Helen’s eventual ability to resolve the difficulties that her husband’s death and her own place in the patriarchal socioeconomic system have created for her. Only after these more existential problems have been dealt with—in other words, until her grief work has been done—does Helen reenter the institution of marriage, not as social currency but out of a pure wish for connection and love. Shortly before the novel’s happy conclusion, Helen is in Greece, where she watches a couple share an apple:

The woman had an apple and a paring knife . . . she cut the apple in half. . . . The woman handed him half the apple and she ate the other half, leaning forward squinting into the wind.

(245)

Helen muses that “it might have been her and Cal” (245). But what is the meaning of that symbolic reprisal of the events in the Garden of Eden, leading to the loss of paradise, an event for which the woman is traditionally blamed? There is no sense of foreboding in this little scene, only of equity and sharing. If blame is to be placed, and death and knowledge to be the result, here the man and woman share it equally, it is implied. The divided apple replaces the whole one with which Eve tempted Adam, and it is infinitely more quotidian but more sustaining.

We are given enough room to speculate, at the conclusion of February, that Helen, on another beach, in the midst of her new life, has achieved the fulfillment of that bittersweet potential. The presence of realistic details throughout the story relating to economic necessity and hardship convinces us that this is, indeed, achievable in the real world, while the slight tint of a magical existence that colors Helen’s wonderful new career gives us the hope that may lift us to that slightly higher or more evolved plane of ordinary reality. The novel has been criticized for its emphasis on Helen’s experience while purporting to be a story about the Ocean Ranger tragedy (Kay). However, an exploration of Helen’s experience is clearly the author’s purpose, with the sinking of the oil rig and the death of Cal vital social and personal backdrop. The novel’s rootedness in this actual event and the socioeconomic context that surrounds it lends it social relevance. The strong emotional narrative—the story of Helen’s grief work—is one powerful engine of transformation in the novel. Helen’s ability to root herself in her satisfying profession, engaging, and elevating traditional connotations of women’s work echoes and reinforces this transformative quality, asserting the potential power of the gender-based employment, above and beyond the use of marriage as a means of economic security. Helen’s freedom of choice and her emotional healing put her on the right path, but her course is determined by Moore’s unique and creative rendering of professional roles within the novel. Ultimately, the reader receives the benefit of an enhanced awareness of potential female autonomy and power.