Two Serious Ladies: Searching for meaning in a meaningless world
For many today the fundamental existentialist questions are decadent fantasies, or as in today’s parlance the plight of the privilege. To opine on the individual’s disconnection from the world feels ridiculous in a world of deadly viruses, refugee crises, and climate destruction.
Yet those questions were also lightly mocked at the height of the boom of existentialist writing. Jane Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies (1943) is a light satire on the female bourgeoise subject that is not out of step with today’s cultural zeitgeist.
The novel is focused on the frustration of Christina Goering and Frieda Copperfield, both affluent and equally bored of their lives in 1940s New York.
As a result, Frieda heads off to Panama where she goes through a sexual awakening with Pacifica, a teenage prostitute, raising desires seemingly unknown and subsequently prompting her to leave her husband. Christina heads to the “island” to mix in the underworld of the homeless, Communists and gangsters, rotating from one sexual liaison to another.
But both in their respective journeys are looking for something that isn’t there. They are driven by a nameless desire that has no destination.
“Because I believe the hardest thing for me to do is really move from one thing to another, partly,” said Miss Goering.
“Spiritually,” said Arnold, trying to speak in a more sociable tone, “spiritually I’m constantly making little journeys and changing my entire nature every six months.”
“I don’t believe it for a minute,” said Miss Goering.
“No, no, it I true. Also I can tell you that I think it is absolute nonsense to move physically from one place to another. All places are more or less alike.”
Such cutting conclusions to their journeys are given by those who surround Christina, yet not absorbed by her. Later, Dick, the Communist, tells her that the individual has a choice to join a worker’s revolution and serve another’s happiness, or “fall plunk into the middle of a mysticism”. Her escapism will lead her astray from reality completely.
This is the fate for both Christina and Frieda as they fruitlessly seek a spiritual fulfillment that will forever elude them. The futility of such a journey reaches its apotheosis when they both meet each other again at the end of the novel.
When they do meet in a New York bar it is as though they are looking into their own mirror. For the first time they can see what has blinded them since they began their journey. Both are cast off by their respective partners, Ben, Christina’s current boyfriend is hosting a business meeting just a few feet away, while Pacifica rushes off to meet a young blonde boy that makes Frieda jealous.
Since they last met Frieda has grown skinnier and sports skin eruptions on her face. “You have gone to pieces” Christina tells Frieda. In exchange, Frieda tells Christina that “you have lost your charm. You seem stodgy to me and less comforting”. Yet neither appear to listen to the other and see the same rot that has taken them hold.
When Pacifica leaves to meet the boy, Christina is suddenly put off by how dependent Frieda is on her. Even Pacifica describes Frieda as a “baby” when she returns. Frieda declares she has to return to Panama, the land of play and the backdrop of her own artificial journey.
For both, Bowles shows that their spiritual quest is akin to a childish fantasy to simply escape. Christina’s residence, home to Miss Gamelon, Arnold and Arnold’s father (Edgar) leach off Christina’s hospitality, yet she remains unmoved and even enjoy their company. Arnold and Miss Gamelon engage in a tit-for-tat play, both initially hostile but succumbing to each other like teenagers. But all three leave Christina and return to a familiar normality.
In his Edgar letter to his wife, pleading to her to let him back he writes:
But it is my idea that sometimes age affects us like youth, like strong champagne that goes to our heads, and we dare what we have never dared before, perhaps also because we feel it is our last chance. However, while as youths we might continue in such an adventure, at my age one very quickly finds out that it is a mere chimera and that one has not the strength.
That the urge to resist bourgeois conformity is like a drunken outburst is beyond Christina’s comprehension. Edgar, a generation above Christina, is showing her that such escapism is a fleeting fancy and it is in comforting structures such as family where one finds true consolation.
But it is in the final lines of the book where the essential meaninglessness of an atheistic world still doesn’t reveal itself to Christina. Instead, Christina hints at a meta-void: that she knows that something is missing in her life that stops her realising the tragedy of her mission.
She stood on the street and waited to be overcome with joy and relief. But soon she was aware of a new sadness within herself. Hope, she felt, had discarded a childish form forever.
“Certainly I am nearer to becoming a saint,” reflected Miss Goering, “but it is possible that a part of me hidden from my sight is piling sin upon sin as fast as Mrs. Copperfield?” This latter possibility Miss Goering though to be of considerable interest but of no great importance.
In that final line Christina plays down the significance of her journey seeking spiritual fulfillment, short of dismissing it wholescale like the characters she has met along the way, but still one that lessens the importance and ultimately betrays the central focus of the novel.
Therein lies the irony. While we watch Christina listen and not learn, us readers are able to open our eyes the absurdist whims of the upper classes, as a very real spiritual and cultural decay takes place.