I must confess I don't often buy a Persephone book. Not that they aren't lovely and desirable, but the combination of high price and postage overseas tends to put me off. However, this beautiful new Persephone Classics edition, and a special offer price, was just too good to miss. Lots of people have been reading and reviewing it, so forgive me if I'm going over old ground, but I had to chip in with my two halfpence.
The Home Maker really is a radical story. I think it might even be seen as quite radical if it was published today, but as it came out in 1928, it's pretty staggering. As the novel begins we meet the Knapp family, a pretty dysfunctional bunch. Lester, a sensitive, thoughful man, is trapped in a job he absolutely hates, and Evangeline stays at home, attacking the housework in a terrifyingly vicious way, hating every minute of it but unable to rest for a second. And not only the housework. She is on the backs of her children from morning till night, reprimanding, ordering, struggling to mold them into the family she thinks she ought to have. To say she is driven hardly encompasses it, and the damage she is doing to the children, though not spelled out in so many words, is plain to see. Henry has such a poor digestion that a ginger biscuit will cause him to throw up, Helen has weak lungs and is vague and impractical. As for three year old Stephen, everyone is very sorry for Eva, who is seen as a real martyr for having to cope with this angry, disobedient little boy, described by a neighbor as an imp of darkness.
Everything changes, though, when Lester loses his job and has a serious accident. With the family finances in jeopardy, the only choice is for Eva to go out and work, which she does with huge enthusiasm and great success. Meanwhile Lester, once recovered enough to sit in a wheelchair, takes on the running of the house, and most important, the caring for the children. He is loving, caring, perceptive of their needs and their development, and needless to say they flourish like mad under his gentle care. So what will happen when Lester seems to be regaining the use of his legs?
The Home Maker is a remarkably perceptive and very moving novel. It's great to see the two older children getting strong and confident, but the most wonderful change is that of little Stephen -- and indeed of his father, who starts to really take notice of him and to come to understand him and his agonies, the primary one is that his mother has taken away his beloved teddy, threatening to give him a wash. The moment when Lester suddenly gets it is brilliant and extremely touching, and as for Stephen, he undergoes a huge, and hugely important, transformation as a result of finally being understood and knowing that he is loved:
Stephen's eyes overflowed.... but he was not crying, he knew that. It hurt to cry and this did not hurt, it helped. The water ran quietly out of his eyes and poured down his cheeks. It was though something that had ached inside him so long that he had almost forgotten about it were melting and running away. He could feel it hurting less and less as the tears fell on his hands. It was as though he was being emptied of that ache.....and now nothing hurt Stephen at all, there was no ache anywhere.....he felt so different, so light! so washed! so clear.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher was clearly an amazing woman. She fully embraced the Montessori teaching method, which encourages children to learn by trial and error, to make their own decisions and choices and to take responsibility for them, and it is this methodology (though never named) that Lester happens upon as he becomes the primary carer for his family. She obviously also had an acute grasp of psychology, as is shown not only by the transformation of the children but also of Eva, who is clearly not suited to housework and motherhood but who grows and flourishes to an amazing extent once she is out of the house and in the workplace. Apparently Fisher denied that this was a feminist novel, but clearly it is, in the sense that it supports a woman's need to make a place in the world and not be tied to the home. I imagine many of her contemporary readers will have been shocked at the reversal of conventional roles -- and even today, it is not unheard of for men who have made the decision to be 'house-husbands' to be looked down on as somehow emasculated. So hooray for Fisher, and hooray for Persephone for reissung this in such a lovely cover. If you haven't read it yet, you're in for a treat.