Staff Pick - Mrs. Bridge by Evan Connell

[Brian Bess]

The unexamined life of a conformist

I am convinced that if we want to understand what an affluent housewife’s life was like during the first half of the 20th century we need look no further than Evan Connell’s ‘Mrs. Bridge’, published in 1959. Its companion novel, ‘Mr. Bridge’, was published ten years later, covering many of the same events from the husband’s point of view.

Walter and India Bridge are an upper class couple in Kansas City, Missouri, raising their family in the years between the world wars, which means that many of the ensuing years include the Great Depression. This national economic disaster is never mentioned in ‘Mrs. Bridge,’ which gives a good indication of the impact that it had on a certain segment of the population. Walter is a workaholic lawyer, leaving India and her cohort wives to occupy their days with Auxiliary Clubs, shopping and lunches. The Bridge’s have a faithful black housekeeper, Harriet, whose loyalty to the family precludes her acceptance of a higher offer from a friend of the family’s. The Bridge’s have two daughters, Ruth and Carolyn, nicknamed “Corky”, and a son, Douglas.

India Bridge’s first name is the only exotic thing about her. She wondered if her parents somehow hoped she would become a person more suited for that name. Her neglect in asking that question was perhaps the first of many examples of the incurious attitude she adopts about most things for the rest of her life.
“She was not certain what she wanted from life or what to expect from it, for she had seen so little of it, but she was sure that in some way—because she willed it to be so—her wants and her expectations were the same.”

Once she marries Walter and their children are born she slips into a groove of behavior and expectation that determines the pattern of her life. Opportunities to question the status quo arise and pass throughout her life but she never takes advantage of any of them. However, one of her friends, Grace Barron, does. Grace is somewhat eccentric, often dressing in jeans, a dirty sweatshirt, tennis shoes and a baseball cap. Grace says to her friend, “India, I’ve never been anywhere or done anything or seen anything. I don’t know how other people live, or think, even how they believe. Are we right? Do we believe the right things?” Grace calls up doubts in India’s mind and, while those doubts nibble at the edges of her consciousness, India never does allow them to take up permanent residency. They obviously take up more space in Grace’s, though, because she eventually succumbs after taking fifty sleeping pills. Of course, India seizes on the possibility that she may have eaten some spoiled tuna salad and that that was what killed her. That is what she tells her children.

She has guest towels in the bathroom that even the guests never use because they look too nice. When her messy son Douglas repeatedly wipes his hands on them she is disproportionately furious with him, especially after he points out the fact that they’re not being used by anybody.

She is a dabbler in several pastimes but never pursues any of them seriously. She buys a record of Spanish lessons but never gets beyond the “Como esta usted, muy bien” stage. She goes with Grace to a concert but when Grace asks if she’d like to go back with her the following week, India says they have a social engagement (obligation) at another couple’s house.

Although she thinks her husband’s habit of spending more time at the office than home with his family is temporary, she gradually sees that it is his way of life. When he is around, he usually has his nose in the stock exchange pages of the newspaper. He is never demonstrative in his love and gets offended if she asks him why he doesn’t tell her he loves her more often. Other than laying down the law with his children when they want to do something unorthodox his participation in the daily affairs of their lives is nil.

Perhaps the most extreme test of India’s unquestioning faith in her husband occurs when they are dining at the club. A tornado is approaching the restaurant very rapidly. All the other dinner guests have adjourned to the basement and the steward approaches their table and advises them to do the same. Walter Bridge refuses to budge until he finishes his steak dinner. India grows increasingly nervous and apprehensive. He ignores her when she asks if they should go. The lights go out after the power goes out and the trees are bent sideways in the extreme winds.
“It did not occur to Mrs. Bridge to leave her husband and run to the basement. She had been brought up to believe without question that when a woman married she was married for the rest of her life and was meant to remain with her husband wherever he was, and under all circumstances, unless he directed her otherwise…For nearly a quarter of a century she had done as he told her, and what he had said would happen had indeed come to pass, and what he had said would not occur had not occurred. Why, then, should she not believe him now?”
Shortly afterward the wind dies down and the lights come back on. “There!” he says. “I told you, didn’t I?”

Connell’s novel is essentially plotless in the conventional sense. It is presented in a sequence of extremely short chapters, depictions of various significant and trivial incidents through the years. I have not encountered many relatively short novels pre-Vonnegut that contain so many chapters (117 total). It is all the more impressive for being a first novel. Perhaps Connell’s major accomplishment, aside from the fact that he makes this very mundane and uneventful life fascinating, is that he never condescends to the characters. He never steps in to judge them for their inflexible attitudes or aversion to introspection. He accepts them at face value and invites us to do the same. Connell himself was born and grew up in Kansas City. His father was a physician rather than a lawyer but one imagines that the family life may have been very similar to the Bridge family’s.

Eventually, the oldest daughter moves away to New York, on her own (she had always been the most rebellious), the second daughter marries and the son joins the army after the U.S. enters World War II. And then Walter Bridge collapses in his office, presumably of a heart attack brought on by overwork. India Bridge is left alone, especially now that the children have all moved on. The final scene is a literal depiction of her isolation, sad and chilling in more ways than one. “Hello? Hello out there?” she asks, answered by no one “unless it was the falling snow.”