A Jewish Feminine Mystique?: Jewish Women in Postwar America

11. Reading Marjorie Morningstar in the Age of the Feminine Mystique and After

194 11 Reading Marjorie Morningstar in the Age of the Feminine Mystique and After barbara sicherman Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar appeared, to great fanfare, in September 1955: Book-of-the-Month Club selection, Reader’s Digest Condensed Book, a Time cover story, and an initial print run of 100,000. At over 190,000 copies, it was the best-selling novel of the year and went on to sell more than 1.7 million copies in the next decade; a popular 1958 movie version starred Natalie Wood and Gene Kelly.1 Wouk’s previous novel, The Caine Mutiny (1951), had won a Pulitzer Prize and racked up the largest U.S. sales since Gone With the Wind, but the popularity of a story with a young Jewish heroine was something of a surprise.2 The novel is the coming-of-age story of Marjorie Morgenstern, whose upwardly mobile immigrant parents move from the Bronx to Central Park West as the story begins. It is 1933 and Marjorie is a seventeen-year-old Hunter College student enjoying a grand social whirl, overseen rather ineffectively by her anxious and status-conscious mother. She also aspires to a career in the theater: Morningstar is her stage name. The plot centers on Marjorie’s on-again, offagain romance with Noel Airman, a bohemian and renegade Jew (formerly Saul Ehrmann) whom she meets at a Jewish summer resort in the Catskills. He is a songwriter who personifies the sophisticated artistic world she hopes to inhabit. When he finally proposes, five years later, she turns him down and settles for a conventional attorney, orthodoxy, and suburban domesticity. Marjorie Morningstar was widely reviewed in the general and Jewish press, in the “little magazines” favored by intellectuals, and even in Catholic journals and the recently launched National Review.3 Reviews were mixed, ranging from “singularly undistinguished” (Binghamton Press) to “damned nearly the Great American Novel (Urban Division)”—this last from the (London) Spectator.4 More commonly, reviewers praised it as a good yarn; many also noted that it might profitably have been cut. Marjorie Morningstar’s initial success and its continuing cachet with Jewish women provide me with an ideal opportunity to explore responses to a book published in my lifetime, a project that builds on a longstanding interest in Reading Marjorie Morningstar 195 women’s reading in the late nineteenth century. My work has been influenced both by literary critics who challenged the view that texts have a single and controlling meaning, and by historians who tried to make sense of reading practices in their infinite variety, fluent or halting, oral or silent, solo or communal—and how these practices changed over time.5 Collectively, this work has demonstrated the significance of social location and historical context not only in what books are read, but in how they are read and what they mean to the reader—a meaning often quite different from what authors intend or critics allow. The larger point is that texts don’t just happen to readers but that readers actively create their own texts. This essay examines the cultural work of Marjorie Morningstar, first, by placing it in its historical context as a cross-over novel (as a Jewish subject appealing also to non-Jews), and second, by examining the responses of its early readers. The contrasting reactions of two groups of readers—the first, married women who wrote the author at the time of publication, the second, women now mainly in their early sixties who read the novel in their early to mid-teens—highlight the importance of an often overlooked category in discussions of reading: the stage of life at which a work is read. The responses also suggest that, notwithstanding the author’s male view of a Jewish woman’s coming of age, the novel addressed issues—sexuality, ambition, and life choices generally—that resonated with female readers of a particular time and place.6 As with Levy’s rye bread, one did not have to be Jewish to enjoy Marjorie Morningstar. The success of this cross-over book, in which virtually all the characters are Jews and anti-Semitism does not raise its ugly head (except perhaps among Jews), occasioned considerable comment. Meyer Levin spoke for many when he declared that the “novel succeeds in making the Jewish milieu an unquestionable area in American life.”7 Reviewers attributed its appeal to the new interfaith tolerance in an era of detente between Jews...