You, Me, and Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark: Week Three
(pages 149-206)
Hey, folks. Here we are, week 3 of 4 in our reading together. If you aren’t reading along, please bear with me for one more week, and remember that I am absolutely NOT turning this newsletter into a book club or anything like that. This was a little experiment, something I thought might be fun to do together. After next week’s final post, it’ll be back to business as usual around here (whatever that is).
For those of you who are still with me and Lessing, let’s discuss (and THANK YOU!):
What a relief it was to see Kate safely delivered to a hotel in her feverish state. Once there, she’s in the position of those who she previously cared for. It’s her turn to be helped. It’s taken this rather severe, mysterious illness to push her out of her caretaker role. (And it’s the significant amount of money earned at Global Foods that’s allowed her to be cared for in this way.)
Kate is transformed not just in role, but in appearance. “If this face had walked through the village, the women would have recognized kindred flesh.” Kate’s polish and privilege, the expensive surface that set her apart in the small village in Spain, is erased by illness. Illness transforms her. She loses weight, and her gray hair comes in, and her face sags from the drastic weight loss. “She looks nothing like the pretty cared-for woman of the home in South London; and the people who had been so happy to see the kind, the smiling, the elegant Kate in Global Food and in Istanbul would not have recognized her.” She isn’t the mother anymore, the nanny. She’s become something else. But what?
In her dream, Kate is replaced by a young girl, and is imprisoned by the villagers, turned into an enemy because she has been discarded by the young king. “Kate had to get out of the pit, she knew that. Somewhere not far away the seal was, alone; and it was again trying painfully to make its way along the ground towards the sea. It believed she had abandoned it.” In this dream, we have the repercussions (in her subconscious) of what Kate saw in the mirror earlier that day. The illness has scrubbed away the veneer, showing her to be an aging woman. And an aging woman’s turn on the dancefloor is over. She must be replaced by the nubile young girl. That’s the law that governs life in this kingdom. Kate has gotten caught up in that dance, and those laws, when what she should really be paying attention to—the seal, her true self—is lying neglected. In the next dream, the seal lies inert in her arms, in a coma or dying. Time is running out for Kate to save herself, to make it to the sea, which is to fully inhabit her true self.
When Kate goes to see the play, we get a return of the view of her as “a woman.” We at first see Kate from outside. Through the illness she’s lost the filters and controls built into her by society, of how one is meant to behave. She’s allowing the inner thoughts and feelings to come out. Outlandish and disruptive, but perhaps the first time she’s let her real feelings fly like that.
She’s mostly recovered (maybe?) from her mysterious illness, but she’s been transformed physically. Thus changed, she leaves the hotel, on to the next stop on her journey: Maureen’s flat. In Maureen, Kate finds a young woman who is free, but considering marriage. Perhaps this would mean giving up her freedom, conforming herself to the role of wife and mother as Kate did. Or maybe Maureen, being of a different generation, would go into marriage differently. But it feels like Maureen is stepping into the narrative in juxtaposition to Kate, and we’re to consider her as such. Young, lovely, unencumbered now, but so was Kate once.
At Maureen’s, seeing herself in the mirror and through the young woman’s eyes, Kate recognizes that if she doesn’t “pull herself together,” fitting her appearance back in line with her family’s expectations of her before she returns to them, they would “have a fit.” So her impulse to deal with her hair, get new clothes, etc, is still tied to their idea of her, not what she truly wants for herself. What’s more, out on the street, thinner and grayer, with her unruly, undyed hair, she finds that she has become invisible. “She knew now, she had to know at last, that all her life she had been held upright by an invisible fluid, the notice of other people. But the fluid had been drained away.”
After her conversation with Maureen about marriage, Kate walks in the park and she is again Mrs. Brown. She’s wearing clothes that fit, she’s made an effort to tame her hair, and just like that, she’s visible again. But not visible as Kate. Visible as Mrs. Brown. This is how she sees herself in that moment. She realizes that it’s only a matter of changing her clothes. She isn’t invisible in her ill-fitting clothes and undyed, untamed hair because she’s middle-aged. She’s invisible because when she presents herself like that, she doesn’t conform to societal norms. Mrs. Brown does. So who will Kate choose to be, going forward? And what about that seal?
For next week, read from page 206 to the end. See you then!