In the 1990s there were a series of bizarre cases involving strip search phone call scams in rural areas of the US. A man claiming to be a police officer called many restaurants and grocery stores accusing female employees of theft and demanded that the manager strip search these young women. This happened in over 70 venues and, surprisingly, many of the managers carried out these invasive, humiliating searches only to later discover they were a hoax. An example from this case was dramatised in the 2012 film 'Compliance' whose story would have felt far fetched if it hadn't been based on a number of real documented cases. Institutional power can lead many ordinary people to commit outrageous acts of physical and sexual violence simply because a figure of perceived authority orders them to. I was reminded of this while reading Clare Beams' excellent debut novel “The Illness Lesson” because even though it's set in private girls' school in New England in the 1870s its themes are still very relevant today. It movingly and artfully describes how hierarchical structures can normalise such abuse, especially when men are in a position of power and have control over young women.
The novel focuses on Caroline, the only daughter of an influential intellectual named Samuel who starts a progressive school for girls. Many years prior Samuel had been one of the founders of a failed commune and he seeks to partly redeem himself with this new venture. Caroline joins in his plan as a teacher alongside another ambitious young intellectual David Moore, one of Samuel's devotees. They create a makeshift schoolhouse in the barn of the former commune and attract several adolescent girls to join as their first students. In this isolated situation the girls develop strange hysterical ailments after Eliza, the most charismatic girl among the group falls ill. As the teachers desperately seek a solution to prevent their school from failing, things quickly unravel and drastic steps are taken.
There's an engaging tension and poignant conflict to Caroline's character as she's had quite an isolated life being raised by her father after her mother died during Caroline's girlhood. She's Samuel's daughter but also a kind of protege and his minder. While she is devoted to him, she also feels unruly passions stirring within her and a desire for life outside of the intensely circumscribed boundaries of this intellectual household. She feels “They had trapped her in their plans, these men.” This claustrophobia and suppressed desire is expressed with beautiful imagery in the form of strange vibrant red birds which take up residence in their area. These birds are simultaneously alluring and intimidating as they drift through the backdrop of the story, stealing from the girls for their nests and swarming in the distance. It's such an evocative metaphor for all the conflicting inner desires that both Caroline and the girls are experiencing.
In the mid-1800s there were a number of communal experiments associated with the Transcendental movement. Most of these communities soon collapsed as high-minded thinkers quickly found the reality of agricultural living too challenging. Novels such as Hawthorne's “The Blithedale Romance” and Louisa May Alcott's “Transcendental Wild Oats” satirise these failed communes. Clare Beams also creates a novel within her novel called The Darkening Glass written by Miles Pearson, a former member and dissident of Samuel's commune. Pearson is deceased but his presence is felt throughout the story as Eliza is his daughter and each chapter of “The Illness Lesson” begins with epigraphs taken from his fictional novel. The Darkening Glass is also set on the school grounds where the commune used to be so this location is haunted both by this failed community and Pearson's fictional depiction of it. It's clever how Beams creates this layered sense of history in this location which adds tremendously to the atmosphere of the story.
There’s something classically dramatic and engaging about this novel and the situation it portrays. It’s a bit like Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible’ and a bit like Alcott’s “Little Women”, but has a strong feminist perspective about the way women and girls are often categorized and controlled in society. Yet it also has its own striking poetic quality which subtly describes these young women’s ambiguous feelings and how each navigates development in her own unique way. The story is also filled with a lot of tension between the girls, Caroline and David’s wife Sophia who all wrestle with their own jealousies and struggle for dominance amongst the group. This makes it a riveting tale as well as a shocking one when the ideals of this progressive school entirely collapse. Because all the action of the novel is contained in one location reading it felt a bit like watching a play. At times it seemed to me like the author was controlling the situation too tightly to keep the story at Caroline and Samuel’s country house and therefore bring the story to a crisis point. But this is a minor quibble within a book that’s so intelligent and forceful in the larger statements it makes. I greatly admire the power and passion of this novel.
