Blooming by Susan Allen Toth

First published: 1981

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: 1940-1958

Locale: Ames, Iowa

Principal Personage:

• Susan Allen, a young girl, later a writer and professor of English

Form and Content

Susan Allen Toth’s first book, Blooming, is a thematic autobiography of 211 pages, covering the time period of her grade-school years in Ames, Iowa, through her arrival at Smith College to begin her freshman year. Throughout her tracing of formative influences, apprehensions, and successes in her life, there are several important consistencies of attitudes and values that are evident throughout her book.

First of all, she expects good things from life but is apprehensive about how to get them, so she is eager for life experiences. Furthermore, her character is firmly rooted in the Protestant work ethic, which accounts for the industry and tenacity with which she deals with challenging or distasteful tasks; as she grows up she believes that work is an essential ingredient of adult life. Friends, specifically female friends, form a rich and sustaining network for her. Boyfriends, however, seem more like prizes to be won than friends in whom to confide. Boyfriends may be transient, but girlfriends are enduring. Given less prominence in her autobiography are her widowed mother and older sister.

As Toth records each experience in her life and infuses it with meaning and significance, she does so by relating it in some way to an anecdote involving her daughter, Jennifer, whose girlhood is more complex and less ambiguous than that of her mother. A common practice in the book, in fact, is for Toth to begin a chapter with a memory about her daughter, which then serves as a catalyst for important related recollections of her own childhood.

Blooming is topically organized, with each of its eleven chapters exploring a significant theme or period in Toth’s life. The first, titled “Nothing Happened,” gives the backdrop of Toth’s personal orientation as an outgrowth of the moral, religious, and ethnic composition of the town in which she was reared. In the 1950’s, the town of Ames was a small, racially homogeneous, conservative white society with very little crime, where tragedies, if they did occur, were only “freakish twists of fate.” Toth calls the setting a “background of quiet.” Beginning with such a formative and internal perspective, Toth ends her book with a chapter titled “The World Outside.” Here, she first brings her daughter back to Ames to visit her old haunts and then explores the sense of her own childhood “vibrations from a world outside Ames,” from shopping sprees in Des Moines, annual forays to Lake Carlos in west-central Minnesota, a trip to New York City with her mother and sister, to the gradual exodus of herself and her friends to colleges some distance away after high school graduation.

Within the frame of “inside Ames” and “outside Ames” which the first and last chapters present, the remaining chapters in Toth’s book convey ideas or involvements that are either formative or expressive of her personality and values. The chapters do not read like a unified, cohesive, chronological account of her life organized by stages, but more like a series of individual, even independent essays, each with its own merit and meaning. The second and the tenth chapters, titled “Swimming Pools” and “Summer at the Lake,” trace her affinity for water and the peace that contact with it gives her. The third and fourth chapters, “Boyfriends” and “Girlfriends,” present the value of close friendships to her sense of well-being and, in fact, to her validation of self. The chapters “Science” and “Bookworm” follow, revealing her ineptitude with scientific endeavors and her talent for reading and writing. The seventh, eighth, and ninth chapters—“Party Girl,” “Preparation for Life,” and “Holidays”—explore her developing social and professional skills. “Preparation for Life” is especially important in that it shows Toth characteristically eager to gain monetary and psychological independence and at the same time to fulfill her sense of the Protestant work ethic. Throughout her book, Toth occasionally alludes to her teaching position in the English department at Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota, by way of illustrating how what she learned in her childhood and youth has been put to use in adulthood.

Each chapter begins with an italicized section of several paragraphs that shows the adult Toth interacting with her daughter in some way; the chapter proper is, then, an extended flashback or series of flashbacks, not necessarily in chronological order. She presents memory stimulated by its association with a recent event, thus exploring her childhood and adolescence by comparing some aspect of it with her daughter’s less protected life. Although Toth does not overtly measure the value of her life by what it has taught her about being a good parent, she does repeatedly present her own life episodes in relation to those of her daughter. She seems to envision life as a continuum, evolving for some larger purpose outside itself. The book is memorable for its presentation of events from the life of one person growing up in the small American town of Ames in the 1950’s, but it is more noteworthy for its far-reaching and poignantly detailed chronicle of how place shapes personality and how the child is father (or mother) to the man (or woman).

Critical Context

At the time when Toth published Blooming, there were already in print a number of autobiographical childhood reminiscences set in various regions of the United States. Most of these, however, centered on the South, the North, large cities and ghettos, or ethnic communities; the Midwest was largely ignored as a setting for autobiography. Among autobiographical works of fiction, however, the Midwest is notably represented in writings of Ruth Suckow (Iowa), Sherwood Anderson (Ohio), Theodore Dreiser (Illinois), and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis (Minnesota), among some others. One critic, Robert L. Bartley, has called the Midwestern small town “our least understood regional culture” because of the dearth of literature from that area.

Besides beginning to fill that void, Toth has written vividly and engagingly, with the kind of details that bring to life the decade of the 1950’s. She dispenses pleasantries and not politics, optimism and not cynicism. Although the Korean War was being waged, children growing up in small-town Iowa were not directly affected by it and so paid more attention to sock hops and science projects. If they seem repressed or sheltered when compared to peers in a more urban setting, they were at least happy and enthusiastic.

Blooming gained instant acclaim in reviews from all regions of the United States, and was identified by The New York Times Book Review as a “Notable Book of the Year” in 1981. Toth’s first book, it was published when she was forty years old. It was preceded by several fiction and poetry selections appearing in Harper’s, Redbook, Ms., and The North American Review and was followed by two other autobiographical novels, Ivy Days: Making My Way Out East (1984) and How to Prepare for Your Class Reunion (1988).

Bibliography

Barbre, Joy Webster, et al., eds. Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. The essays in this collection, which grew out of a national conference, examine the context, forms, and use of voice in women’s personal narratives. None addresses Toth specifically, but they provide helpful background material.

Benstock, Shari, ed. The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. In this essay collection, a number of feminist critics examine theories of autobiography and analyze central examples of women’s use of the genre in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While none of the articles addresses Toth’s work in particular, the approaches included here offer valuable models for critical analysis of Toth’s memoir.

Booklist. LXXVII, May 1, 1981, p. 1185.

Heilbrun, Carolyn. Writing a Woman’s Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. Heilbrun writes critically about how traditional accounts of women’s lives have represented women as passive, rather than active, and she argues for closer readings of women’s life stories. This book is useful for its analytical approach to women’s autobiographical writing.

Library Journal. CVI, April, 1, 1981, p. 788.

Lochner, Frances C., ed. Contemporary Authors. Vol. 105. Detroit: Gale Research, 1982. This reference entry offers a brief biography of Toth, a useful listing of her publications, and a short comment from the author on her goals in writing.

Ms. X, July, 1981, p. 31.

The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVI, May 24, 1981, p. 4.

The Wall Street Journal. CXCVII, June 11, 1981, p. 26.