Laura (Femmes Fatales) (18 page)

Bedelia’s character inherits her deadly illusions from several villainous female protagonists in earlier novels, including the title characters of Gustave Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary
(1856–57) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s
Lady Audley’s Secret
(1861–63). Like them, Bedelia comes across as perversely sympathetic, partly because the men in her drama aren’t exactly heroes, and partly because she embodies the dilemma of women who have few, if any, opportunities—except for marriage—to improve their financial position and live well. Bakerman accurately calls Bedelia “a professional wife” (1984, 48).

In Flaubert’s novel, Emma Bovary marries for security, but her Romantic dissatisfaction with the life of a provincial doctor’s wife leads her to lies, bankruptcy, and adultery. Deserted by her husband, Lady Audley abandons her child, takes on a new identity as a governess, and marries into status. When her legal husband returns and recognizes her portrait, she kills him, and is exposed by Robert Audley, nephew of her second husband and friend to her first.
Bedelia
is also a narrative of unmasking. Bedelia resists having her portrait made, yet clings to her black pearl ring as fatally as Lady Audley preserves her child’s shoe.

Because of Caspary’s explicit interest in Wilkie Collins’ novels,
Bedelia
may also be cousin to Collins’ poisoner, Lydia Gwilt, whose revenge drives the sensational plot of
Armadale
(1864). Lydia, on her own in a sexist and class-ridden England, murders her abusive first husband and manages to escape legal punishment by manipulating the pity of men. Unlike Bedelia, Lydia’s viewpoint comes across vividly in her diary and letters, but the two women ultimately drink their own poison, undone by fatal husbands whom they can neither reject nor dispatch.

In
Bedelia
, Charlie Horst’s most horrifying revelation is not that his wife may be trying to poison him, but that his sexy, submissive, perfect wife is playing a deliberately dramatic role. Having scorned Bedelia’s favorite reading—novels of women’s adventures in love—Charlie finds himself living in one. He is shocked to discover that her name, tragic past, and cloying present are all fictions: she has learned to manipulate men’s expectations of women with deadly efficiency. Bedelia is a complex killer protagonist; instead of driving men to crime and destruction, Bedelia is a hard-boiled murderer herself, though stewed in women’s fiction rather than crime novels. As a female criminal who seeks to elevate her position, Bedelia evokes commentary on the ways in which women may get ahead. Bedelia may be, as an early cover had put it, “The Wickedest Woman Who Ever Loved,” yet money cannot be her motivation, since in her sequential wifely roles she can’t use it openly. As a serial bride Bedelia seeks again and again the thrill of seduction, of being chosen, of exercising the power granted to females.

Caspary wrote several stinging portraits of women who marry for security and live for illusion with disastrous results, notably
Thelma
(1952), narrated by a Caspary-like friend of the title character who has more to occupy her than love affairs. As Caspary put it when drafting her autobiography, “My protagonist is always a career girl unless, as in
Thelma
, she is the anti-heroine who believes that a woman achieves success only as the wife of a man who supports her in style.” She went on to identify Thelma as a composite of her fault-finding and eventually mentally ill sister and another relation, who “lamented the failure of her daughter happily married to an artist who hadn’t a lot of money.”

Caspary admitted she understood this type from the inside as a woman she could have been (“Discards,” 576). Thelma marries a man she doesn’t love in order to be given material wealth and security, though she remains romantically attached to a footloose former lover. Thelma’s long-suffering husband and daughter turn on her in the end, rather than fall victim to her machinations permanently.

Through the character of Ellen in
Bedelia
, Caspary explores a self-supporting woman. The novel’s omniscient narrator notes that in another era Ellen would have been considered attractive, but “fashions in women change as drastically as in clothes” so that “nowadays Ellen’s face was considered too long, her head too narrow, the pale brown coronet of braids absurdly out of style”(
Bedelia
, 8). Ellen thinks of herself as “the Tailored Girl and enjoyed wearing suits and shirtwaists” at her job, but she suffers the candor of her stylish friend, Abbie, who tells her, “There’s nothing so abhorrent to the masculine eye as a plaid silk shirtwaist. It simply shrieks old maid” (
Bedelia
, 14).

Caspary’s fiction pivots on the trade-offs women face. Ellen, though pitied by Abbie and unloved by Charlie, dresses as she pleases and also smokes defiantly. Bedelia gets the man, but she must play the expected role, at least until she kills her latest husband. It is Bedelia who is bitter, who sees men as “rotten” and “beasts” (
Bedelia
, 94), not the disappointed Ellen who still has a life because she has a job. As Charlie tells her (while Bedelia is dying upstairs), “You’re an independent woman because you go out and earn your living.” Ellen retorts, while smoking a cigarette, that she enjoys her life, and comments pointedly, “But men don’t like a girl to be too independent, do they?” Charlie, who is thinking about how he will have to discover his charmingly dependent wife’s body, doesn’t respond (
Bedelia
, 185).

In
Bedelia
Caspary manipulates point of view far differently than in
Laura
, yet to equal effect. Whereas
Laura
’s narrators reveal their information, much of it incorrect, in
Bedelia
, the narration reveals the thoughts and feelings of Charlie and Ellen, but not those of Bedelia or her nemesis, detective Ben Chaney. Like Charlie and the others, we never know exactly what Bedelia thinks or feels, only what she chooses or can be pressured to reveal. While this limits the portrait, the strategy allows for much of the novel’s suspense as we wonder how she will respond in the end to the growing charges against her. But whether she is trying to flee from exposure, attempting to seduce Charlie into believing her, or taking poison at his command, the mask never completely slips. Similarly, Ben’s disguise as a painter stays in place until he reveals himself.

Writing Her Own Life

Caspary herself was as complex as any of her characters. She was moved by ideals affecting workers and women, but was much more inclined to start a social group than to recruit, organize, or protest. In the thirties she created the “Conversation Club,” a group of Communist wives who put on social events (1979, 181). Caspary was aware that she was not going to portray World War II Rosie the Riveters, but her own trajectory as a professional. Yet she remained conscious of working women in all contexts. In her seventies Caspary visited and taught writing workshops to prisoners in the New York Women’s House of Detention. When she proposed a nonfiction book on the lives of inmates, she also proposed to portray the lives of the staff and administration working there as well (“Women in Crime,” 17–18).

Kathi Maio, in her review of
The Secrets of Grown-Ups
for
Sojourner
, called Caspary a “Rebel with a Cause,” and accurately assessed her “mild-mannered radicalism.” As she put it, “Caspary is not primarily a feminist. But, rather, a natural and unabashed female rebel” whose stances therefore can be “contradictory” (12). Perhaps it is more precise to say that Caspary’s rebellious spirit enabled her to enjoy her professional and private lives. For example, early on she chose to break into business writing to support herself so that she might write fiction. In 1910, a generation of Jewish women educated in the United States began to enter colleges and the business world. Caspary might have done either. Her choice of stenography placed her in the business category chosen by about 15 percent of Jewish women her age, a perfectly acceptable one to her family (Schloff 2003, 97).

But Caspary had no intention of launching a business career. She used her father’s age and her own lack of confidence as excuses for not attending college (1979, 37). She may have realized that the University of Chicago was likely to steer her toward such domestic careers as teaching, nursing, and the new profession of social work, rather than writing. She must have recognized that Jewish professionals often worked in their own communities. Caspary had a larger scope in mind. Caspary used stenography to break into copy writing and then creative authorship. It is no accident that her first novel,
The White Girl
, is about an ambitious black woman who passes as white, or that Caspary places this protagonist in a shop much like her father’s workplaces, with an owner who is to some extent a portrait of her father.
5
Vera herself “passed” as a good-girl office worker until she could pass on to a more Bohemian artist’s life in the wider worlds of Chicago, New York, Hollywood, and Europe.

Caspary considered herself a non-practicing Jew. In reply to a query for a display on “The Jewish Woman Writer” in 1977, Caspary said, “I am quite without religion but definitely feel that I am Jewish” (“General Correspondence”). However she was conscious that prejudice operated within and without Jewish circles, and rejected both contexts. Her family saga,
Thicker than Water
, as autobiographical as many of her other novels, examines hierarchies of race and class within a Jewish community over several generations. She was quick to rebuke anti-Semitism. Early in her writing career Caspary rented a room in which to work temporarily. When the landlady revealed she had told the other boarders that Caspary was “only half Jewish,” Caspary snapped back, “‘What a pity,’ I said, ‘that it was the front half’” (“Working Draft,” 41).

Caspary’s core identity was as a writer. Many of her characters beyond Laura and Waldo also write, including Sara Collins’ radio mysteries in
Murder at the Stork Club
, a false diary by the title character of
The Man Who Loved His Wife
, and the overall chroniclers of
Stranger than Truth
and
The Mystery of Elizabeth
. Even Bedelia constructs her own romance plots. The power of imaginative shaping ultimately allowed Caspary to focus her own life on a writing career in which she drew heavily from that life for fiction.

In her autobiography Caspary frames herself as the ultimate fictional character. At the beginning of her life story she describes a “specter” that she has tried to bury “in a closet smelling of old women’s dresses.” This is who she might have been, a “skinny girl shivering as the Chicago wind sweeps across the Wells Street station of the South Side El.” This failed self is one whose life has been eaten up by family duty and dull subsistence though she longs for better things. “Saddest of all,” Caspary writes, “She is a writer among those secretly writing in locked bedrooms the poem, the story, the novel that will never be published” (1979, 1–2).

At the end of her autobiography, Caspary again evokes this ghostly double who jeers at the successful writer. She concludes, “Everything good in my adult life has come through work: variety and fun, beautiful homes, travel, good friends, interesting acquaintances, the fun of flirtations and affairs, and best of all, the profound love that made me a full woman.” Here Caspary may be bowing to her upbringing as well as thumbing her nose at those who thought she couldn’t have both career and marriage. She closes by saying, “Those who come after us may find it easier to assert independence, but will miss the grand adventure of having been born a woman in this century of change” (1979, 281). Caspary was, to paraphrase Ida Cox, a woman wild enough not to live the blues. Because of her independent spirit, her fiction and self-portrait continue to champion self-supporting women even into the twenty-first century.

A.B. Emrys

Kearney, Nebraska

October 2005

NOTES

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Friends of the Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison, for a grant-in-aid and the Research Services Council at the University of Nebraska-Kearney for their additional support, all of which enabled me to use the extensive library resources at the University of Wisconsin and thoroughly explore the Vera Caspary Papers archived at the Wisconsin Historical Society. I am also grateful to the Authors Guild for permission to quote from Caspary’s works and unpublished manuscripts. The archive includes the drafts and revisions of The Secrets of Grown-Ups, which is far longer in manuscript than in its published version, as well as working drafts of Caspary’s published works, business and fan correspondence, and unpublished scripts and other writing.

Except for the present Feminist Press editions, all of Caspary’s books are out of print. Assorted editions of some are available from online booksellers, and some large libraries still have copies.
Laura
has been released on DVD, and the adaptation of
The Blue Gardenia
, Caspary’s screen story of a lonely telephone company worker who may or may not have killed the company masher, is available on DVD, as is Caspary’s screen adaptation of
A Letter to Three Wives
.