He didn’t turn or reply. She walked back to the fire and waited, gazing at his back. His shoulders were squared, his chin was up, and she knew he was getting his disrupted emotions into line and under control again. They did not speak for several minutes, but the protracted silence was veiled by music. Neither tango nor rumba now, nor the syncopated beat of jazz. June and her friends had stopped dancing. The pure exalted strains of Wagner’s Prelude to Lohengrin, flowed into the room now, calming and uplifting.
When its last bars had disappeared into the void, Jerry turned and walked back to Charlotte. She glanced up at him. The tenderness of his expression was reinstated. Also there appeared on his face all those little indefinite lines, lights, and shadows of that unquenchable sense of play of his, which had the power to divest the most heartrending scenes of tragedy.
“What a woman! What a woman!” he said, shaking his head at her disparagingly. “She has an idea she can make a Galahad out of a Lancelot!” He gave a deep shrug. “Well, perhaps she can. Who knows? I’m putty in her hands. Perhaps she can. Anyhow, I’m going to let her try!”
This was the mood which Charlotte had known first and had always loved. “Oh, let’s have a cigarette!” she exclaimed and passed him an open box.
He took one of the white shafts and placed it between his lips. She struck a match and held it to its tip, gave him the lighted match, and they repeated the intimate little ceremony that had broken down her self-control in that grubby restaurant outside Naples. Trivial as it was, and trite, again it struck down into the very core of Charlotte’s emotions.
“Oh Jerry, isn’t it simply wonderful to light each other’s cigarettes from the same flame again?” she exclaimed. He didn’t reply, just kept on shaking his head slowly back and forth, but looking at her so fondly that the negative gesture was another avowal. “And just think it isn’t for this time only!” she went on; “that is, if you’ll help me to keep what we have, if we both try hard to protect the little strip of territory that has been granted us. Any two people who share an important responsibility have to consult about it occasionally. Don’t you see there’ll be lots of problems that obviously I ought to talk over with you about your child?”
He stopped shaking his head then. “Our child,” he corrected, with a whimsical smile.
She drew in her breath sharply as if he had touched a nerve. “Oh Jerry,” she said when she could trust her voice. “Don’t let’s ask for the moon! We have the stars!”
AFTERWORD
Acursory outline of Olive Higgins Prouty’s 1941 novel, Now, Voyager, suggests a fairly typical romantic melo drama. Charlotte Vale, a homely and unhappy woman of unspecified “middle age,” controlled by her wealthy and domineering mother, suffers a nervous breakdown. Through psychiatric care as well as a remarkable physical transformation, she begins a new life on a European cruise arranged by her sister-in-law, Lisa, where she both falls in love with a shipmate, Jerry Durrance, and becomes the kind of sociable creature she has never been. Although Jerry is unhappily married, he is loyal to his wife, and their daughters, particularly the youngest, Tina, who adores her father and is resented by her mother (who evokes Charlotte’s own mother). After the cruise, the two separate, agreeing that they will not see each other again, but will hold onto the memories of their love affair.
After she has returned to her hometown of Boston as a changed woman, and taken up her duties again as her mother’s companion, Charlotte has the opportunity to marry. Now at this point, the reader would expect one of several developments: that Charlotte’s shipboard romance has prepared her for this, the “real thing,” a true love that will last forever, or that Charlotte knows she will never love anyone but Jerry, and his wife conveniently dies, leaving Jerry and Charlotte to raise Tina in a loving and supportive home. Charlotte does indeed end her engagement, for she prefers the memory of Jerry to the living reality of a man she does not really love. But ultimately what Charlotte chooses is her own freedom and autonomy.
Striking coincidences occur in the novel, but they do not facilitate the predictable “man and woman walk off together into the sunset” conclusion of much romantic fiction. After Charlotte’s imperious mother dies during a bitter argument with her daughter, Charlotte seeks refuge at Cascade, the same sanitarium where her transformation began under the care of Dr. Jaquith. There she meets Jerry’s daughter Tina, also a patient at the facility, and she becomes her counselor, her nurse, and her “chum.” In the end, Charlotte brings Tina to live with her. Jerry comes to see his daughter at Charlotte’s house, and Charlotte insists to Jerry that they can never be romantically involved, but will always have a connection based on their devotion to the welfare of Tina. The story ends with one of the most memorable declarations of love and loss ever uttered: “Don’t let’s ask for the moon!” Charlotte says to Jerry in the last lines of the novel. “We have the stars!”
Many readers of the Feminist Press edition of Now, Voyager will likely come to the novel through the 1942 film adaptation, starring Bette Davis in one of the greatest roles of her career (and one of her favorites, as well). For these readers, it may be a surprise to learn how closely the film follows the novel, from the concluding words cited above, to large portions of dialogue, to the “two on a match” cigarette-lighting ritual that Paul Henreid (as Jerry) and Davis share. But for those familiar with the film version, as well as those who are discovering Charlotte Vale and Olive Higgins Prouty’s story for the first time, Now, Voyager offers more than an ugly duckling tale or a heterosexual romance or a story of surrogate motherhood.
There is a paradox at the center of the novel, in that it simultaneously elevates and undercuts stereotypes about women’s desires. On the one hand, Now, Voyager seems to offer up many clichés about femininity, the family, and heterosexual romance that have long been criticized by feminists. For example: only with physical transformation—weight loss, makeup, a new hairdo, and fancy clothes—does Charlotte become desirable, and only when others respond positively to her does she begin to value herself. When mothers wield too much power (i.e., in the absence of the father, as in the case of Charlotte’s mother, or with an indulgent father, in the case of Jerry’s wife), their children have nervous breakdowns. Only when Charlotte achieves a break with her mother’s authority, by falling in love with a man, is her transformation seemingly complete. Most of these clichés are stock elements of what has always been known derogatorily as “women’s fiction”—narratives written for a female audience, and built upon “feminine” themes of beauty, love, and self-sacrifice.
An entire generation of feminist critics has challenged the bad reputation that women’s fiction and its cinematic corollary, the “woman’s film,” have acquired. Within the romance and the self-sacrifice, beneath the emotion and the tears, there are powerful explorations, in these much-maligned genres, of women’s understandings of who they are and who they want to be. From Tania Modleski’s demonstration that women’s fiction “contain(s) elements of protest and resistance underneath highly ‘orthodox’ plots (25),” to E. Ann Kaplan’s definition of the “woman’s film” as a genre that “addresses female spectators and resists dominant ideology (124),” feminist film and literary critics have demonstrated that women’s fiction—most of it written by women, for women—deserves serious feminist attention.
And indeed, Now, Voyager reads much more convincingly as a story about self-discovery and awareness than as a conventional love story. Yes, Charlotte undergoes a physical transformation, but in the course of the novel, less and less attention is paid to her physical beauty and more is paid to her developing consciousness of the world around her. Yes, mothers are bitter and mean-spirited in the novel, but they are surrounded by other kinds of models of female support and nurturance—that between sisters (or sisters-in-law, as is the case with Charlotte and Lisa, the widow of Charlotte’s brother, who scandalizes the family in her own way by marrying “too soon” after the death of her husband) and between friends (Charlotte and Deb,
the friend she makes on the ship). While Charlotte’s “mothering” of Tina certainly makes her a better mother than either Mrs. Vale or Isobel Durrance, the connection between Charlotte and Tina is built upon friendship and companionship, with the strong implication that this is an alternative to, not a substitute for, the mother-daughter relationship. The new Vale household includes not only Charlotte and Tina, but June, Charlotte’s niece, who was once Charlotte’s tormentor but finds in her transformed aunt a supportive and unique companion as well. And yes, Charlotte’s love affair is transformative, but Jerry is hardly the romantic hero who is such a stock figure in so many romantic novels—he himself has had a nervous breakdown (a fact eliminated from the screen version), and he is of a distinctly lower social class than the upper-class Charlotte.
Now, Voyager was originally published in 1941 in both hardcover and paperback editions. The Feminist Press edition replicates the slightly abridged Dell pulp, as this was the version most widely (and perhaps avidly) read in the 1940s. Now, Voyager is the third of Prouty’s five novels devoted to the Vale family of Boston (the others are White Fawn [1931], Lisa Vale [1938], Home Port [1947] and Fabia [1951]). Olive Higgins Prouty (1882–1974) was, at the time of the publication of Now, Voyager, a well-established, best-selling novelist. Prouty was a woman of privilege who married well. Throughout her adult life, Prouty struggled to fulfill her creative desires as a writer as well as her family responsibilities as a wife and mother. In Prouty’s autobiography, Pencil Shavings, one of the manifestations of that conflict is how she views her writing in terms of gender. Shortly after her marriage to Lewis Prouty, she meets the editor of American Magazine where she will eventually publish a number of short stories. In response to the editor’s query about what kind of stories she writes, Prouty replies: “Nothing requiring great knowledge. . . . Just little domestic things that I know all about” (126). Thirty pages later, Prouty quotes herself telling another editor: “There are two things I want to avoid in my writing—sentimentality and melodrama” (154). Prouty is self-deprecating when she makes this statement (“no doubt it sounded painfully priggish”), but these two citations suggest that Prouty was very much torn between two kinds of self-definition: a “writer” (i.e., serious and literary) or a “woman writer” (domestic and sentimental).
To most reviewers of Prouty’s work, the “woman writer” was more visible than the “writer.” The reviews of Now, Voyager were generally positive, except for a particularly negative review in the New York Times. The reviewer accuses Prouty of having written bad women’s fiction, from its “genteel, gingerly smiling nicety,” to its “pretentiousness,” to the backhanded compliment that Prouty excels at describing Charlotte’s clothes—“an important point which will reconcile many of her female readers” (Hauser 1941). This review was not typical, but even the positive reviews of the novel contain an implicit reference to what are presumed to be the limitations of “women’s fiction.” One reviewer calls the book “pleasantly substantial,” as if this were a surprise (Ross 1941), while another notes that “Young people and women will like it” (Van Dyne 1941).
Some readers may be familiar with Prouty because of her patronage of Sylvia Plath. Prouty attended Smith College (1900–04), and she was the benefactress of a scholarship awarded to Plath in 1950. Prouty also provided financial and emotional support when Plath attempted suicide. Prouty financed Plath’s stay at a psychiatric institution, and visited her often; she also took an active role in Plath’s treatment (“Prouty was a meddler, but an informed meddler . . .” [Beam 154]). Unfortunately, whatever Plath’s disposition was to her benefactress, she mocked Prouty in her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, through the thinly disguised character of Philomena Guinea. Early on in the novel, Ms. Guinea’s patronage leads Esther Greenwood (Plath’s alter ego) to read one of her books in the town library (she notes, disingenuously, that “the college library didn’t stock them for some reason”), and to mock her writing style (33). Not only, then, did Prouty herself struggle with her identity as a (woman) writer; readers of Prouty’s fiction must also struggle with the crude image of a wealthy but untalented writer, put forth in one of the works most influential on generations of feminist readers. But Plath and Prouty had more in common than the scornful portrait of Philomena Guinea suggests, for Prouty too wrestled with demons and sought psychiatric care. Indeed, Now, Voyager’s exploration of breakdown and recovery stems at least in part from Prouty’s own experiences.
Now, Voyager opens as Charlotte Vale, voyager, is exposed to one of her first tests. She is having lunch with Jerry, another passenger from the ship, during a day trip to Gibraltar. Jerry has left the table momentarily to send a cable. The day trip marks the first time that Charlotte has ventured out into the social world of the ship. The opening paragraph of the novel tells us what Charlotte sees and imagines, for she has read that there is snow in New York City. “It was difficult to visualize sheets of fine snow driving obliquely against façades, while sitting on an open terrace in the sun gazing at calla lilies in bloom bordered by freesia” (5). The description of Charlotte’s appearance emphasizes that she wears her identity like her new clothes: “She sat close to the table, knees crossed beneath its top, one foot emerging encased snugly in light amber-colored silk and a navy blue pump. She flexed the ankle up and down as if to convince herself it was hers” (5). This use of free indirect style—the capture of Charlotte’s consciousness from both the “outside” and the “inside,” thus demonstrating awareness of how she “looks,” in both senses of the word—is one of the distinctive features of Now, Voyager. Throughout the novel, Charlotte is observed as she observes the world around her.
Immediately, Charlotte’s conception of the weather difference between here and there, between North America and this sunny scene on the Mediterranean, acquires a particular form, that of a “drop curtain,” which not only allows Charlotte to distance herself from her surroundings, but also separates and shields her from who she was and who she is becoming: “It was difficult, too, to believe that the scene before her was reality. It was more like a drop curtain rolled down between herself and the dull drab facts of her life” (5). The use of this image (in the first few sentences of the novel, no less) provides Charlotte with both protection and a means to understand herself. The theatricality of the curtain image evokes in the reader the sense of Charlotte as a player in a drama, pulling back the curtain to reveal different scenes from her past. For here, as throughout the novel, flashbacks are always introduced by way of an association, a connection, with what is happening in the present.
Through flashbacks in early chapters of the novel, we learn about Charlotte’s domineering mother and about Dr. Jaquith’s role in Charlotte’s recovery. In particular we learn about the one love affair Charlotte ever had. As a young woman, on a boat cruise with her mother, Charlotte fell in love with Leslie Trotter, a ship’s officer. Charlotte’s mother disapproves, and convinces Leslie to end the relationship. In order to make her point, Charlotte’s mother, at the end of their trip, insists on taking Charlotte to the neighborhood where Leslie’s family lives, as if to rub her daughter’s nose in the reality of the inferior social class with which she has dared to mingle.
While the flashbacks have an expository function, they also serve to underscore the links between the past and the present. For if Jerry is the obvious substitute for Leslie Trotter, complete with inferior class credentials (Charlotte notes early on that her mother would disapprove of Jerry), he is also a kindred spirit to Charlotte. After an evening spent together, Jerry returns to his stateroom (a shared, inside stateroom that emphasizes the class difference) and Charlotte to hers. A description of Jerry’s unhappy life with an unpleasant wife (also in free indirect style) is followed by the continuation of Charlotte’s flashback to Leslie, suggesting the common bond between Charlotte and Jerry as observers of their lives.
The epigram to Now, Voyager is from Walt Whitman: “The untold want, by life and land ne’er granted, / Now,
Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.” Dr. Jaquith has given Charlotte the poem typed on an index card, and she reads it in chapter six, when the painful conclusion of her affair with Leslie Trotter is presented to the reader. Interestingly, in the preceding chapter—when we begin to discover the common bonds between Jerry and Charlotte—he too is defined as a voyager. Jerry is reading The Education of Henry Adams, and when, in his stateroom, he finds his place: “These words flashed up at him at the beginning of the next paragraph: Thus he found himself launched on waters he had never meant to sail” (42). In the space of two chapters, then, the flashback to Charlotte’s past with Leslie Trotter creates a connection between Charlotte and Jerry that is far more complex than simple romantic attraction. Jerry is not just a replacement for Leslie Trotter; he is also a voyager like Charlotte. And then, when Charlotte tells Jerry about her time spent at Cascade, another connection between the two is revealed: he tells her that he, too, had a nervous breakdown (though he couldn’t afford to go to Cascade).
Much of Charlotte’s growing awareness is conveyed to the reader by references in the novel to Charlotte’s time at Cascade, but especially to the wisdom and caring of Dr. Jaquith. While Dr. Jaquith is not a psychoanalyst and not a Freudian, he is a psychiatrist. His central role in the novel might well evoke the feminist critique of psychoanalysis that emphasizes the extent to which the central relationship of psychoanalysis, between (male) doctor and (female) patient, reproduces gendered power relationships, as well as the tendency of psychoanalysis to reproduce normative notions of femininity. Dr. Jaquith is the “good father” who takes the place of the “evil mother.” Yet the cure initiated by Dr. Jaquith is a far cry from the stereotypical image of an all-knowing doctor who forces the female patient into the socialized mold of femininity. Throughout the novel, Dr. Jaquith’s plan of treatment is defined as a combination of several important principles: He believes in the conscious exercise of free will (“He said he’d gladly help her learn how to use her free-will [it would require some study], but she’d got to do the using, and apply it to everything” [50]). He urges his patients to trust in actions (“Ignore sensations. Discount emotions. Think, act, feel, in this order. Then thumb your nose at what you feel.” [51]). And he views independence as a vital goal of treatment (“Dr. Jaquith would be proud of her this morning. Here she was alone, making her own decisions, her own mistakes too, perhaps, but afraid of nobody” [108]).
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