Women's Fiction
Lucía Lijtmaer, trans. Maureen Shaughnessy, Cautery
Charco Press, 236pp, £11.99, ISBN 9781917260060
reviewed by Bronwyn Scott-McCharen
‘Women’s historical fiction’ is, in one sense, like pornography — you know it when you see it. The glossy covers featuring stylish stand-ins for the spunky heroines, often coupled with an airbrushed skyline of the city in which the story takes place, are prominent features on bookstore shelves and bestseller lists, the stories within these covers beloved by book clubs big and small. Agents and editors are hungry — starving — for it, especially if it sports some ‘literary’ flair and tackles an era not commonly seen in historical fiction (anything but World War II). And a common and seemingly ubiquitous feature of this golden formula for publishing success is the dual past-present timeline.
The dual past-present timeline usually — though not always — centres around two protagonists, one a woman living in the past, the other living in the present. Both struggle with uncannily parallel or complementary challenges that highlight what it means to be a woman in a given place and time, and are often linked either by blood (mother-daughter and grandmother-granddaughter stories tend to be popular) or plot device. Readers can relate to the contemporary while learning from the historical. Empathy and education — a combination that seeks easy readerly gratification coupled with the self-improvement sought through broadening one’s intellectual and often cultural horizons.
Lucía Lijtmaer’s Cautery is a different sort of dual timeline work of ‘women’s historical fiction’, one that employs this structure and a few of its tropes but largely succeeds in subverting them in clever and unexpected ways. Cautery follows two women, one real and one imagined, one left unnamed and one semi-forgotten to history. Our anonymous contemporary narrator is a young Spaniard living in Barcelona, while our representative of the past is Lady Deborah Moody, a 17th-century English noblewoman who moved to the Massachusetts Bay Colony before voting with her feet against the stuffy Puritan establishment to found her own settlement in New Netherland, or what is now part of present-day Brooklyn.
The contemporary plot is, as they say, relatable — the narrator is recounting the trauma of a past relationship that has brought her to the point of seeking revenge on her ex-boyfriend, a careerist local politician representing the kind of hip, left-wing party popular with young Europeans fed up with low, stagnant wages coupled with an ever-rising cost of living. As the story slowly unravels — alongside the narrator herself — she shares her apocalyptic visions and fantasies concerning the wholesale destruction of Barcelona and her impressions of a city that has become unrecognisable due to mass tourism and rampant gentrification, along with memories of friends and past lovers lost. ‘For a long time, all I want to do is kill myself,' the narrator says, and it’s a start to the story that might portend yet another entry into yet another popular genre of fiction, the ‘sad,’ ‘weird’ and/or ‘unhinged’ young woman Bildungsroman.
Cautery’s historical plot, on the other hand, begins not with fantasies of dying but with death itself. Lady Deborah Moody has found herself buried in a heretic’s grave for the sin of having defied the religious and political authorities of her day, and it is from this grave that Moody narrates her own story. It sounds like the perfect set-up for a feminist tale of empowerment, yet Moody quickly reveals herself to be less of an idealised historical heroine and more a faithful reflection of a woman of her status and time. When dealing with actual historical figures, however minor and/or overlooked, certain constraints are obviously imposed on their fictionalisation, but that has never stopped a ‘strong woman’ in history from being painted in shades of presentism. Luckily, Lijtmaer avoids this trap, and the Lady Moody that appears in Cautery is one that feels like a more or less faithful representation of an actual 17th-century English noblewoman.
Do these seemingly parallel (plot) lines ever meet? There are a few thematic and narrative links, however loose, between the unnamed woman in present-day Barcelona and Lady Moody in the nascent North American colonies. Both are beholden to male power in the distinct forms it takes in the 17th and 21st centuries, male power that indeed hides among even the most ‘enlightened’ of men. Lady Moody recalls the shock and disillusionment she experienced when her close friend and co-conspirator, the more overtly rebellious Anne Hutchinson, confesses that her fiery sermons are not, in fact, inspired solely by her own relationship with God and the world but rather by her spiritual mentor, the Reverend John Cotton. ‘John is my teacher, Deborah,’ Anne says. ‘The words I’ve been preaching, day after day in my sermons, are his words.’ Likewise, the pseudo-feminist ethos of the contemporary narrator’s ex is captured in a succinct, cutting phrase: ‘You talk about the feminist potential of the new party and I serve you an aperitif.’ And it is this same male power that is responsible for the expulsion of each woman from the life she has created in Barcelona and the Massachusetts Bay Colony, respectively. Questions of (neo)colonialism also run through the two seemingly disparate parts. Is the displacement of local populations caused by mass tourism and gentrification simply the newest form of a very old phenomenon? And can we really trust those who claim to be on the front lines ostensibly fighting for a better society?
The methods each woman uses to either rise above her humiliation at the hands of powerful men or enact cathartic revenge on them all involve money — lots of money. Financial freedom and feminist liberation appear intertwined in Cautery, though it is with a heavy dose of irony, pessimism and — in the case of the Barcelona plotline — an added dose of humor that Lijtmaer makes this point. Two things are eternal, it appears: money and male power. Only capital can stand on its own against patriarchy, both then and now. Only cold, hard cash can — potentially or partially — erase the age-old inequalities between men and women. It’s a bitter, realist pill to swallow.
In the end, neither blood nor plot device precisely but something else links the contemporary story of Barcelona and the historical one of Puritan New England, a certain spirit of resignation to the higher power of God, money or both that’s difficult to define and pinpoint. But this sense of ambiguity is what makes Cautery a refreshingly realistic entry into a genre that, despite its professed fealty to the historical record, often feels like a fantasy of an imagined past, the past as authors and readers wish it were and not as it actually was. One does not — or should not — read Cautery to learn about oppressive Puritan priggishness or the early days of European colonisation of North America, nor about the effects of gentrification and mass tourism in Barcelona, but rather to travel back and forth in time; one should not only relate to the contemporary narrator and her familiar problems, but also bear partial, limited witness to a past that is, in more ways than not, alien to our present, yet one that nevertheless can still reveal certain universal and timeless truths.
The dual past-present timeline usually — though not always — centres around two protagonists, one a woman living in the past, the other living in the present. Both struggle with uncannily parallel or complementary challenges that highlight what it means to be a woman in a given place and time, and are often linked either by blood (mother-daughter and grandmother-granddaughter stories tend to be popular) or plot device. Readers can relate to the contemporary while learning from the historical. Empathy and education — a combination that seeks easy readerly gratification coupled with the self-improvement sought through broadening one’s intellectual and often cultural horizons.
Lucía Lijtmaer’s Cautery is a different sort of dual timeline work of ‘women’s historical fiction’, one that employs this structure and a few of its tropes but largely succeeds in subverting them in clever and unexpected ways. Cautery follows two women, one real and one imagined, one left unnamed and one semi-forgotten to history. Our anonymous contemporary narrator is a young Spaniard living in Barcelona, while our representative of the past is Lady Deborah Moody, a 17th-century English noblewoman who moved to the Massachusetts Bay Colony before voting with her feet against the stuffy Puritan establishment to found her own settlement in New Netherland, or what is now part of present-day Brooklyn.
The contemporary plot is, as they say, relatable — the narrator is recounting the trauma of a past relationship that has brought her to the point of seeking revenge on her ex-boyfriend, a careerist local politician representing the kind of hip, left-wing party popular with young Europeans fed up with low, stagnant wages coupled with an ever-rising cost of living. As the story slowly unravels — alongside the narrator herself — she shares her apocalyptic visions and fantasies concerning the wholesale destruction of Barcelona and her impressions of a city that has become unrecognisable due to mass tourism and rampant gentrification, along with memories of friends and past lovers lost. ‘For a long time, all I want to do is kill myself,' the narrator says, and it’s a start to the story that might portend yet another entry into yet another popular genre of fiction, the ‘sad,’ ‘weird’ and/or ‘unhinged’ young woman Bildungsroman.
Cautery’s historical plot, on the other hand, begins not with fantasies of dying but with death itself. Lady Deborah Moody has found herself buried in a heretic’s grave for the sin of having defied the religious and political authorities of her day, and it is from this grave that Moody narrates her own story. It sounds like the perfect set-up for a feminist tale of empowerment, yet Moody quickly reveals herself to be less of an idealised historical heroine and more a faithful reflection of a woman of her status and time. When dealing with actual historical figures, however minor and/or overlooked, certain constraints are obviously imposed on their fictionalisation, but that has never stopped a ‘strong woman’ in history from being painted in shades of presentism. Luckily, Lijtmaer avoids this trap, and the Lady Moody that appears in Cautery is one that feels like a more or less faithful representation of an actual 17th-century English noblewoman.
Do these seemingly parallel (plot) lines ever meet? There are a few thematic and narrative links, however loose, between the unnamed woman in present-day Barcelona and Lady Moody in the nascent North American colonies. Both are beholden to male power in the distinct forms it takes in the 17th and 21st centuries, male power that indeed hides among even the most ‘enlightened’ of men. Lady Moody recalls the shock and disillusionment she experienced when her close friend and co-conspirator, the more overtly rebellious Anne Hutchinson, confesses that her fiery sermons are not, in fact, inspired solely by her own relationship with God and the world but rather by her spiritual mentor, the Reverend John Cotton. ‘John is my teacher, Deborah,’ Anne says. ‘The words I’ve been preaching, day after day in my sermons, are his words.’ Likewise, the pseudo-feminist ethos of the contemporary narrator’s ex is captured in a succinct, cutting phrase: ‘You talk about the feminist potential of the new party and I serve you an aperitif.’ And it is this same male power that is responsible for the expulsion of each woman from the life she has created in Barcelona and the Massachusetts Bay Colony, respectively. Questions of (neo)colonialism also run through the two seemingly disparate parts. Is the displacement of local populations caused by mass tourism and gentrification simply the newest form of a very old phenomenon? And can we really trust those who claim to be on the front lines ostensibly fighting for a better society?
The methods each woman uses to either rise above her humiliation at the hands of powerful men or enact cathartic revenge on them all involve money — lots of money. Financial freedom and feminist liberation appear intertwined in Cautery, though it is with a heavy dose of irony, pessimism and — in the case of the Barcelona plotline — an added dose of humor that Lijtmaer makes this point. Two things are eternal, it appears: money and male power. Only capital can stand on its own against patriarchy, both then and now. Only cold, hard cash can — potentially or partially — erase the age-old inequalities between men and women. It’s a bitter, realist pill to swallow.
In the end, neither blood nor plot device precisely but something else links the contemporary story of Barcelona and the historical one of Puritan New England, a certain spirit of resignation to the higher power of God, money or both that’s difficult to define and pinpoint. But this sense of ambiguity is what makes Cautery a refreshingly realistic entry into a genre that, despite its professed fealty to the historical record, often feels like a fantasy of an imagined past, the past as authors and readers wish it were and not as it actually was. One does not — or should not — read Cautery to learn about oppressive Puritan priggishness or the early days of European colonisation of North America, nor about the effects of gentrification and mass tourism in Barcelona, but rather to travel back and forth in time; one should not only relate to the contemporary narrator and her familiar problems, but also bear partial, limited witness to a past that is, in more ways than not, alien to our present, yet one that nevertheless can still reveal certain universal and timeless truths.