Cruel and Barbarous Treatment by Mary McCarthy

First published: 1939

Type of plot: Psychological

Time of work: The mid-twentieth century

Locale: New York City

Principal Characters:

• The young woman, an unnamed woman soon to be divorced
• Bill, her husband
• The young man, her paramour

The Story

In this, Mary McCarthy's first published story, the initial two sentences summarize the whole. The remainder of the narrative details the careful, ritualized process by which the protagonist makes her way from a clandestine affair to public disclosure and impending divorce. McCarthy's satiric view of bourgeois society is never sharper than in this study of how a bored woman transforms her life from a series of "timekillers, matters of routine" to one of "perilous and dramatic adventures," merely by ending her marriage in three steps. This is a story wherein the third-person narrative voice is orchestrated with a care matched only by the protagonist's own arrangement of events.

The young wife loves groups of three: the love triangle that she has brought into being, the three-times-a-week minimum for social outings during which she can "tremble . . . on the exquisite edge of self-betrayal," and above all the three-part sequence into which she organizes her drama of marital disintegration and from each of which she squeezes all the excitement she can before moving on to the next.

First, during the period of secrecy, the "subterranean courtship," there is the Public Appearances routine. Its main advantages come from its "outlawry," which tends to force the illicit lovers into an especially strong dependency and which gives the young woman intense feelings of superiority. This latter derives from her feeling that she has "bested" her husband and can feel good about her restraint in not gloating over the victory. Then too, she can feel superior to the callow Young Man, whose "imperfections" seem so clear under the pressure of his having to attend parties and act as if they were her "private theatricals." In this triangle she has power: "She was undoubtedly queen bee."

The second "preordained stage," made necessary when the possibilities of the first are "exhausted," the young woman calls the Announcement. It, too, has special characteristics that provide not only emotional stimulation but also feelings of superiority. To make the Announcement rids the lovers of the "morally distasteful" secrecy, and, more important, it allows her to satisfy her curiosity about What People Would Say. What good is a secret if it is never revealed? It is not only revealed to a wider and wider circle of friends but also finally used to discover How Her Husband Would Take It (and to discover the full strength of his love by putting it "face to face with its own annihilation," and thus putting it into "the category of completed experiences"). Once again, the young wife's genius for arranging stage performances shows itself in the public conference á trois, and her instincts for the ritualistic reveal themselves in her arranging "the confession in the restaurant and the absolution in the Park."

The final, Post-Announcement phase proves to be the shortest and least satisfying of the three: There is no triangle; there are only the "dull moments . . . she spent alone with the Young Man." For a person who finds pleasure in the flux of instability and manipulation, some method of breaking the stasis of pairing must be found. The young woman does not perceive the situation in these terms, however, and concludes that she is the "victim" of unconscious forces, "a sort of hypnotic trance." In the throes of a depression that is neither "dramatic" nor "pleasurable," she takes refuge in this vague sense of fate, wondering if it might be that she is "designed for the role of femme fatale," to be "a bad risk," to enjoy the "glamour" of the title Young Divorcee.

Just when her options seem to be gone, when she remembers the old fear of spinsterhood, when she realizes there is "no signpost to guide her"—just when, in other words, the story seems about to deliver something as artistically vulgar as poetic justice—she rallies and finds new improvisations, saving both herself and the narrative from a final triteness and exhaustion.

Bibliography

Abrams, Sabrina Fuchs. Mary McCarthy: Gender, Politics, and the Postwar Intellectual. New York: Peter Lang, 2004.

Auchincloss, Louis. Pioneers and Caretakers: A Study of Nine American Novelists. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1961.

Brightman, Carol. Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World. New York: Clarkson Potter, 1992.

Epstein, Joseph. "Mary McCarthy in Retrospect." Commentary 95 (May, 1993): 41-47.

Gelderman, Carol W. Mary McCarthy: A Life. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988.

Grumbach, Doris. The Company She Kept. New York: Coward, McCann, 1967.

Kiernan, Frances. Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.

McKenzie, Barbara. Mary McCarthy. New York: Twayne, 1966.

Pierpont, Claudia Roth. Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.

Stock, Irvin. Mary McCarthy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1968.

Stwertka, Eve, and Margo Viscusi, eds. Twenty-four Ways of Looking at Mary McCarthy: The Writer and Her Work. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996.

Wilford, Hugh. "An Oasis: The New York Intellectuals in the Late 1940's." Journal of American Studies 28 (August, 1994): 209-223.