The Wives of Bath

by Susan Swan

  International acclaim for Susan Swan’s

  The Wives of Bath

  “One of the most powerful depictions of adolescent female sexuality that I have ever come across.”

  Barbara Gowdy

  “Raunchy, funny and fast-paced. This is the kind of book women have been waiting for.”

  Ottawa Citizen

  “A touching, suspenseful, often hilarious tale.”

  Publisher’s Weekly

  “Riveting … a compelling read that provides much insight into the dilemmas of being female.”

  New Statesman & Society

  “A highly entertaining read.”

  The Montreal Gazette

  “Wonderfully imagined … its polished unity, luminous style, stunning metaphors and glancing humour make The Wives of Bath exceptional. Very highly recommended.”

  Library Journal

  “A human, humorous and poignant account of growing up female in a world where, as Swan says, ‘it was just more fun to be a guy’.”

  The Guardian

  “A fascinating novel.”

  The Washington Post

  Also by Susan Swan

  The Biggest Modern Woman in the World

  The Last of the Golden Girls

  Unfit for Paradise

  Stupid Boys Are Good to Relax With

  VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 1994

  Copyright © 1993 by Susan Swan

  Preface copyright © 2001 by Susan Swan

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

  Copyright Conventions. Published in Canada in 1994 by Vintage Books Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. First published in Canada in 1993 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, Toronto. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Susan Swan

  The wives of Bath

  eISBN: 978-0-307-36358-9

  I. Title.

  PS8587.W345W58 1994 C813’.54 C94-931877-9

  PR9199.3.S83W58 1994

  v3.1

  For Patrick, who was there

  ——

  Preface: A Novel’s Journey into Film

  Writers often dream of their novel being made into a successful film. But a sad, little sinking feeling overcame me the moment I heard the screenwriter wanted to set the film version of The Wives of Bath in the present. This would mean jettisoning the time period of my novel about a murder at a girls’ boarding school. Its tale of a friendship triangle between three girls reflects some aspects of my own experience as a boarder at Havergal College in Toronto in the early 1960s, so this period was nostalgic for me. It was a transition era before the protest generation—dominated by President Kennedy and the Peace Corps, lingering sexual taboos and rigid definitions of what it meant to be male and female. The ideas associated with this period were central to the novel. Hence my sense of loss. Could I bear to let someone else change my story? But the screenwriter, Judith Thompson, one of Canada’s best-known playwrights, thought these ideas could carry over into the present. She didn’t grow up in the 1960s and preferred to use a contemporary idiom.

  My background in theatre meant I already knew that adaptations of novels were not adaptations at all, but translations, and with a very few exceptions, most theatre performances and films will suffer if the director tries to duplicate the book. Likely all of us have gone through the experience of going to the film of a well-loved book and coming away disappointed. Surprisingly, these films are often the result of a director trying to stay slavishly true to the novelist’s vision. Directors risk turning a novel into a lifeless film unless they are free to create their own interpretation of a book. I’d learned this in the 1970s collaborating on theatre pieces with Toronto choreographers. Time after time, I was told my word-based notions wouldn’t read on the stage. Time after time, the choreographers were right, and I learned to trust those with theatre experience.

  Using language skilfully is not only the novelist’s most powerful tool, it’s the central tool and the matrix of the story. Novelists have to create the effects, including making a character, through dialogue and descriptive passages. Plays depend, in part, on verbal play for their dramatic impact while films are not a linguistic medium at all. Dialogue aside, language in screenplays is used to point to the right kind of imagery. This is humbling, but essential for a novelist to understand! So I uttered a bittersweet sigh and gave Judith the go-ahead with the modern setting.

  Later, reading Judith’s original screenplay, I was delighted by her interpretation of the boarding school triangle although superficially her script looked vastly different from my novel. For one thing, Judith’s characters now spoke modern slang. And there were other changes. One of the girls’ cultish worship of King Kong as a symbol of masculine power had been exchanged for the love of a falcon, kept secretly on the school grounds; the boarding school of Bath Ladies College was now liberal; and Mouse, the narrator, had lost the hump that might have made her look a little grotesque on the big screen.

  Still, I was pleased to see how closely Judith kept to the emotional ground of the story and to its three characters. Intact were Paulie Sykes, the boarding school rebel who wants to pass as a boy; the kind and beautiful Tory Quinn, who struggles with Paulie’s idealizing love; and Mouse Bradford, the timid new boarder. She’d made Paulie, Tory and Mouse come alive through believable screen dialogue and skilful interpretations of the emotionally important scenes in the novel.

  For instance, in the novel, Mouse has a dream in which she is unable to help her dead mother when one of the vengeful boarding school matrons shears off her mother’s golden hair in a tower room and pours oil on her mother’s frilled blouse. In the screenplay, the three girls read, out loud to one other, letters that they’ve each written to their mothers. Tory confesses she’s as addicted to her mother’s love as she is to chocolate; Mouse worries she can’t remember her mother’s face now that she’s dead; and Paulie asks her mother—a teen prostitute who gave her up for adoption—to meet her for a beer on the same street where, Paulie writes, “you sell your ass.” This is a funny and profound scene because the audience sees not only Mouse’s vulnerability but the vulnerability of the other two and the way all their fates are inextricably affected by their mothers’ personalities and expectations.

  A mother is, for better or worse, a girl’s first role model. And for me, the core of the novel revolves around the struggle of the three girls to come to terms with what they feel is an unheroic identity, namely, growing up female. In the novel, Mouse is confused by the two female choices in the early 1960s. On the one hand, Mouse sees the mothers of the boarders who meet the feminine standards of the day, but lack real power or authority. On the other, she encounters the teachers and matrons of the boarding school who remind her of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath because they are the only women she has met who live by their own rules. Yet even their power is limited, and Mouse concludes near the end of the novel: “We were all Wives of Bath—from the teachers who terrorized us with their bells and gatings … But no matter how hard any of us struggled … Bath Ladies College was only a fiefdom in the kingdom of men.”

  In Judith’s script, set in the 1990s, the teachers and matrons are kinder and less marginalized than their counterparts in the novel. They actually seem to like the girls and identify with them, although they are just as helpless as the older women were in the novel to prevent Paulie’s self-destructive and violent descent. In the early days of the filmmaking, Judith and I on occasion read our versions of the same scene from the novel and screenplay at literary festivals. Inevitably, I was struck by how little she needed to say to evoke a character. For instance, once after I read the novel’s opening pages (in which Mouse
explains to the reader who she is and then sets up Paulie’s crime as “a bizarre, Napoleonic act of self-assertion”), Judith brought down the house—theatrically speaking—with her terser version in Paulie’s voice, “I killed him for his dick.”

  The film of The Wives of Bath changed both directors and production companies twice before the option to make the film was given to the award-winning independent director Lea Pool and Montreal producers Cite-Amerique, who premiered the film to great acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival and Berlin International Film Festival in 2001. Half a decade after I agreed to a present-day setting, I was lucky enough to see Lea Pool’s film Emporte-moi. When Cite-Amerique came in with an offer that included matching the talent of Lea Pool with Judith Thompson’s original screenplay, I accepted readily.

  If Judith understood how to make the passion of teenage girls live in scenes and dialogue, Pool, in her turn, appreciated the Sapphic quality of their teenage love. However, as Pool told an audience member at Sundance, she never saw the novel or her film as a lesbian coming-out story. For her, it is a story of adolescent love at a time in girls’ lives when they are unaware of sophisticated political and sexual preferences. This was very much how I saw the story too.

  The representation of adult sexuality in Lost and Delirious, as the film was eventually called, is openly celebratory, unlike the alienated sex scenes in the novel which reflect the repressions of the early 1960s when boarders were so embarrassed by their bodies that they undressed in washroom cubicles or took their uniforms off under their nightgowns. Consider the scene in the novel when Mouse spies on a fellow boarder, Ismay Thom, struggling into her merry widow. “She appeared to be stuck in the tight, elasticized material, which squeezed her blubbery thighs together like breasts. A gross kind of leg cleavage, you could say.” The sexuality in the novel has little in common with the stunning sex-positive scenes that had film critic Roger Ebert remarking in a Chicago Sun-Times review (January 2001) that, “You’re absorbed from beginning to end because the characters are enormously interesting and likable. And because they are gorgeous. And because you could hear a pin drop in the 1,400-seat Eccles Center during the sex scenes which are not explicit, but are erotic.” Despite the beautiful sex scenes in Pool’s film, the actors nevertheless express the girls’ frustration with their female roles, and their need to make what is perceived as unheroic, heroic. In the film, the girls discuss Lady Macbeth in class (a scene that’s not in the novel) in a way that underscores, comically and movingly, how young women can see femininity as something weak and passive.

  I was inspired to base the conclusion of The Wives of Bath on a heinous crime that took place in Toronto in 1978. A seventeen-year-old girl, who regularly passed herself off as a male gas jockey, murdered an elderly Toronto taxi driver. Dressed as a girl, she lured him to her room on the pretext that she needed his help with some luggage. Then she killed him with a baseball bat, cut off his genitals and pasted them on her body with Krazy Glue. In this woeful garb, she presented herself to her girlfriend’s father who had accused her of not being a real man.

  Although you won’t see this crime portrayed in Pool’s brilliant film, you will see something equally surprising and stirring in its place. When I found out late in the production of the film that Pool had left out the novel’s ending, I suspected the producers of watering down the story for commercial reasons. As the credits came up, and my film agent, Tina Horwitz, and I staggered happily from our seats, I realized I was relieved that Pool had chosen another ending. The crime in the novel was a device to reflect on the characters’ thoughts and feelings about themselves as girls, but Lea Pool’s camera didn’t need the crime to convey these same things. To stick with my ending might have tipped her powerful drama over into the genre of film horror because cinematic effects are so much more visceral and immediate than words on a page. To portray something so horrific in the film might have interfered with the audience’s ability to stay with the story.

  It’s rare for novelists to be shamelessly satisfied with their book’s journey into film. However, I feel as if my story about boarding school girls has passed through the imaginations of three women sitting around a campfire, each one adding their unique knowledge to my tale of female rebellion and adolescent love. Writers and readers should never hold it against a film if the film isn’t exactly like the book it was based on. The question is—is it a good movie? That, in the end, is film’s truest service to a work of literature.

  Susan Swan

  New York, 2001

  Tell me also, to what conclusion

  were the generative organs made,

  And fashioned by so generous a maker?

  —from the prologue to

  The Wife of Bath’s Tale,

  by Geoffrey Chaucer

  (author’s translation)

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface: A Novel’s Journey into Film

  Epigraph

  Part One Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Part Two Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Part Three Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Part One

  The ghostly woman on the giant tricycle stared down at me like an old friend. Only “stared” is the wrong word. The lids of her eyes were collapsed inwards—puckered the way a pair of lips look when all the teeth are removed.

  “You,” I said, but the figure didn’t seem to hear me. I began to tremble and sigh. Now this odd creature made an excited clicking sound, the kind of coaxing noise you make to a horse. She lifted the handlebars of her bike so the front wheel reared up on one end.

  “Where did you bury him, Mouse? Is he in the geranium garden? Or did you hide him in the old hockey shed?”

  “I can’t remember,” I said in my meekest voice. Scowling, she settled her shoulders into a racing hunch, as if a hundred unseen bicycle riders were about to overtake her, and pedalled vigorously through the doorway. In the dark below I could hear the clank and rumble of the heating pipes. There was no other way out now. Rising around me on all sides, instead of the grey sandstones of the school—I saw rows of shiny eyeballs with slowly nictitating lids. I swallowed fast and went through the door to find her.

  1

  My name is Mouse—Mouse Bradford. Mary Beatrice Bradford, if I want to be long-winded about it. I’m sixteen now, the same age Paulie was when she performed her weird, Napoleonic act of self-assertion. It was my father’s scalpel she used, not the X-Acto knife mentioned in the news—a B-P Rib Back surgical blade, one and three-quarter inches long and brand-new. My stepmothe
r, Sal, must have ordered it for Morley from the Hartz medical catalogue. I kept it in his doctor’s bag in my room at school. The bag was hardly bigger than a lady’s purse. A real dandy in black natural-grain cowhide with a wrap-over lock and double handles of solid leather. I needed to have it around to remind me of Morley. Otherwise I had nothing to prove I was his daughter except for my deep-set eyes with their odd, luminous stare, and my queer five-inch fingers. “A pianist’s hands”—that’s how the guidance counsellor described them. She didn’t say I had surgeon’s hands like my father. She didn’t expect girls like me or Paulie to have a serious profession. Even our headmistress, Miss Vaughan, believed a backup skill was all we needed. I can’t say their views bothered me. I didn’t want to own hands that could wield a scalpel with semi-murderous precision. I mean—yes, I’d better be clear about what I mean or Alice will have my head—if you could slice precise little rips in the right places so nobody would know you’d carved your patient up like the Thanksgiving turkey, well, then, you’d be capable of carving up anybody, anytime.

  Luckily, for me a medical life was never in the cards. I faint easily, for one thing. The sight of blood does me in. Even the word “needle” makes me feel lightheaded. I can’t imagine my own hands on Morley’s scalpel cutting out a new identity for myself.

  I’m five foot four and a half in my stocking feet—not really what you’d call big, although I have met many girls shorter than I am. The main mouselike things about me are my slender, fan-shaped ears and my long, pointed nose, which makes me look older and wiser than I am. I am clever, though, and I don’t take up much room. My left shoulder is also slightly rounded—some would say I’m humpbacked like a rodent, and I can’t argue with that. I call my hump “Alice,” after my real mother; it’s from the German name Adelaide, meaning “of noble birth.” Alice, poor soul, is not as smart as I am, but she keeps me on my toes. She won’t stand for anything but the truth.