Sue Monk Kidd was in her fifties by the time her first novel The Secret Life of Bees (2002) was published, but her second - The Mermaid Chair - reads like a far more mature work.
Kidd was born in Sylvester, Georgia, although she now lives near Charleston, South Carolina, and The Mermaid Chair occupies a place in the Low Country sub-genre of Southern literature. Although set almost entirely on the fictional barrier island of Egret, on which stands a fictional monastery, Kidd had Bull Island in mind, and the Mermaid Chair in its chapel is based on the Mermaid Chair in the parish church of St Senara, Zennor, Cornwall, England.*
Zennor of course was where D. H. Lawrence and his German wife Frieda fruitlessly sought refuge from the zenophobia of the time in 1915 (and where Katherine Mansfield and Middleton Murry briefly joined them), and it no doubt didn't escape Kidd's attention that D. H. Lawrence's most famous novel Lady Chatterley's Lover is partly about adultery. In The Mermaid Chair, Jessie Sullivan's adultery with Brother (Doubting) Thomas (or Whit in, er, real life) is central to the story, and the intense emotional and sexual development the couple experience (and their love nest surely owing something to Mellors's hut in Lady Chatterley?) is a major part of the their individual development as separate, more fully rounded people.
This intelligent novel of challenges to spiritual, sexual and familial life, although very popular, does not deserve to be restricted to the chicklit ghetto to which some people (quite possibly unintentionally) might seek to confine it.
*The legend is that a mermaid living in nearby Pendour Cove fell in love with Matthew Trewhella, who sang the closing hymn in the church every night. She took to visiting the church in a dress, he took one look at her and fell in love too, carried her to the cove and disappeared into the sea with her. The Mermaid Chair has two wooden bench ends, one of which is carved with a mermaid holding a comb and mirror.
In this quarter's Oxford American, there's an article called 'Beth Ann Fennelly's Ode to Ten Sexy [Southern] Books', and most of her choices are indeed pretty sexy. However, having just read Southern novelist Sue Monk Kidd's extraordinarily popular The Secret Life of Bees, I'm surprised that that book didn't receive a mention, as there are some passages which positively drip with sex.
The protagonist Lily is 14, Zach no doubt about the same age, and Sue Monk Kidd has a particularly powerful way of expressing Lily's developing awareness of her sexuality. Perhaps the word 'membrane' is a little unsubtle here, but the passage is otherwise very subtle indeed:
'I knew I was crying because he had that one-sided dimple I loved, because every time I looked at him I got a hot, funny feeling that circulated from my waist to my kneecaps, because I'd been going along being my normal girl self and the next thing I knew I'd passed a membrane into a place of desperation.'
A little later Zach gives Lily a notebook, and OK, perhaps we are given a little redundant information when we're told that it is 'green with rosebuds on the cover', but Lily's reaction to this gift is pure sexual electricity:
'I threw my arms around him and leaned into his chest. He made a sound like Whoa, but after a second his arms folded around me, and we stayed like that, in a true embrace. He moved his hands up and down my back, till I was almost dizzy'.
The above words are an excellent example of how strongly sexual intensity can be expressed without being specific, although the narrative immediately after this underlines how impossible this love between a white girl and a black boy was in South Carolina in 1964:
'Finally he unwound his arms and said, "Lily, I like you better than any girl I've ever known, but you have to understand, there are people who would kill boys like me for even looking at girls like you."
'I couldn't restrain myself from touching his face, the place where his dimple caved into his skin. "I'm sorry", I said.
'"Yeah, me too", he said.'
Heartbreaking. As Zach states later on, 'We can't think of changing our skin. [...] Change the world - that's how we gotta think.'
Posts
