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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 March 2008
Evan S. Connell's Bridge novels, Mrs. Bridge (1959) and Mr. Bridge (1969), are products of a post-World War II culture set in a prewar Kansas City of the 1920s and 1930s. In this paper, I argue that these novels pointedly articulate their historically disjunct construction – remaining firmly planted in a carefully articulated history and geography of pre-World War II Kansas City and representing the alienation and dissipation of postwar suburban life – in both the presentation of the racial and social geography of Kansas City between the wars and in the gap between the novels' two generations of the Bridge family.
1 Gerald Shapiro, “Evan S. Connell: A Profile,” Ploughshares, 13, 2/3 (1987), 11–25, 20.
2 John Tytell, “A Man Who Can't Cross Over,” Catholic World, Nov. 1969, 90–91.
3 Any historical novel – say Henry James's Washington Square or George Eliot's Middlemarch – contains some degree of this historical dislocation. I argue not for the uniqueness of Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge within the historical-novel genre, but for the specific social and culture coding of their layered representation (and, tangentially, against readings which flatten that layering).
4 Charles Thomas Samuels, “Dead Center,” New Republic, 7 June 1969, 21–23, 22.
5 Richard Rhodes, “Life of a Kansas City Puritan,” Chicago Tribune, 20 April 1969, M5; reprinted in the Washington Post, 20 April 1969, 274 and Book World, 20 April 1969, 5.
6 This flattening is borne out in the thin critical history of the novels, which has focussed almost exclusively on Mrs. Bridge as a novel about the 1950s, akin to Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955). Glenna Matthews, “Just a Housewife”: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 216–17; Stacey Stanfield Anderson, “Togetherness in ‘Disturbia’: The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Mrs. Bridge,” in idem, “The Trouble With Togetherness: Narratives of the Postwar American Family” (Ph.D. dissertation, Claremont Graduate University, 2004), 21–74.
7 Florence Crowther, “Stranded Matriarch,” New York Times Book Review, 1 Feb. 1959, 30–31, 31. For an expansive bibliography (125 items, with selected quotations) on both novels see Ray Lewis White, “Evan S. Connell Jr.'s Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge: A Critical Documentary,” MidAmerica, 6 (1979), 141–59.
8 Charles Poore, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, 7 Feb. 1959, 17.
9 Fanny Butcher, “Portrait of Womanhood?,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 25 Jan. 1959, B8.
10 Guy Davenport, “The Dilemmas of a Solid Citizen of Kansas City, Who Had Everything and Nothing,” New York Times Book Review, 20 April 1969, 1, 30.
11 Webster Schott, “Last Half of a Superb American Saga,” Life, 25 April 1969, 8.
12 John Goss, “Lieutenants and Luftmenschen,” New York Review of Books, 24 April 1969, 40–43, 41.
13 Dana Heller, “The Culture of ‘Momism’: Evan S. Connell's Mrs. Bridge,” in idem, Family Plots: The De-Oedipalization of Popular Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 60–76, 61.
14 Heller, 63, 62. Cecelia Tichi draws a similar connection between Friedan and Connell: “Their texts emphasize the underlying vacuity of the homemaker whose life was so typically camouflaged in hyperactivity that anxiety about leisure seemed unlikely to arise”; Mrs. Bridge “is a portrait in affluent suburban WASP emptiness denied and evaded in a cloak of activities.” Cecelia Tichi, Electronic Hearth: Creating an American Television Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 93, 94.
15 Evan S. Connell, Mrs. Bridge (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1991; first published 1959), 171.
16 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 43, 68.
17 Shepherd, Allen, “Mr. Bridge in Mrs. Bridge,” Notes on Contemporary Literature, 3, 3 (1973), 7–11, 8Google Scholar.
18 It is difficult to establish a firm timeline for both novels, especially for the middle of each narrative, which focusses on 1935–39. Most of the dates for events in the novels can be determined by counting backward from the Bridges' European trip (in the fall of 1939). However, there is some slippage between the two stories: just before the trip, Mrs. Bridge's age is given as 48 in Mrs. Bridge (143) and 47 in Mr. Bridge (282); cousin Lulubelle Watts dies in 1934 in Mr. Bridge (115) but sends Carolyn a wedding present in 1941 in Mrs. Bridge (224). Evan S. Connell, Mr. Bridge (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1991; first published 1969).
19 Mrs. Bridge, 5.
20 Mr. Bridge, 3.
21 Mrs. Bridge, 197. Crescent Heights Drive is apparently a fictitious street, but must be quite near Stratford and 59th Streets, which are within a block of the Bridge's driveway: Douglas “cut through the vacant lot [across the street from the Bridge home], climbed the fence behind the Edison house, trotted down their driveway, crossed Stratford Road, and at the corner of Fifty-ninth Street … ” (Mr. Bridge, 72).
22 William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement in Kansas City (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1964), xvi, 125.
23 Mrs. Bridge, 128.
24 City Plan Commission, City Planning: Kansas City, Missouri, 1920–1941 (Kansas City, MO: City Plan Commission, 1942), 7–8.
25 Mrs. Bridge, 5.
26 Ibid., 5. The Bridges also try to hire a chauffer, but Mr. Bridge cannot stand being driven about, so in the end he decides one is unnecessary.
27 Mr. Bridge, 18.
28 Ibid., 23.
29 We also learn that Couperin has struck her on at least one occasion (Mrs. Bridge, 124–26).
30 Mr. Bridge, 175.
31 Mrs. Bridge, 33. Note that the Negro districts on this map correspond to blocks in which relatively little new construction had gone on in the previous decade (Figure 1).
32 Ibid., 10.
33 Mr. Bridge, 76.
34 Kevin Fox Gotham, Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development: The Kansas City Experience, 1900–2000 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002), 36.
35 A. Theodore Brown and Lyle W. Dorsett, K.C.: A History of Kansas City, Missouri (Boulder, CO: Pruett Publishing Company, 1978), 183. For a sharp analysis of a similar intersection of race, geography (Chicago), and literature (Richard Wright's Native Son), see Catherine Jurca, White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 99–132. Jurca quotes (ibid., 110) Ernest W. Burgess, writing in 1928: “the residential separation of white and Negro … is only one case among many of the workings of the process of segregation in the sorting and shifting of the different elements of population in the growth of the city.” Burgess, Ernest W., “Residential Segregation in American Cities,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 140 (November 1928), 105CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
36 Gotham, 33.
37 Gotham (33) cites the following indices of black isolation: 13·2% in 1900, 21·7% in 1910, 23·7% in 1920, and 31·6% in 1930.
38 Early in Mrs. Bridge (6) we learn that each Christmas Mrs. Bridge adopts a needy family on the north end of town from a list of the “one hundred neediest families in Kansas City” that are identified in the newspaper.
39 Sherry Lamb Schirmer, A City Divided: The Racial Landscape of Kansas City, 1900–1960 (Columbia, MO and London: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 106.
40 Similarly, the “bloody election of 1934” – in which a number of murders and assaults accompanied a fierce political fight that divided the city – is barely addressed, though Senator Horton Bailey appears in Mr. Bridge as the figure of corrupt politician T. J. Pendergast. Henry C. Haskell, Jr., City of the Future: A Narrative History of Kansas City, 1850–1950 (Kansas City, MO: Frank Glenn Publishing, Co., Inc., 1950), 137–57, 134.
41 Mrs. Bridge, 135.
42 Ibid., 173.
43 Ibid., 187.
44 Mr. Bridge, 220.
45 Ibid., 242.
46 Ibid., 330.
47 Ibid., 333.
48 Ibid., 317.
49 Ibid., 332–33.
50 Ibid., 125.
51 Mrs. Bridge even enacts these sentiments in a vignette involving a local election: “‘But don't you find it hard to know what to think? [Mrs. Bridge asks her friend Mabel Ong]. There's so much scandal and fraud everywhere you turn, and I suppose the papers only print what they want us to know. … How do you make up your mind?’” In the election itself, Mrs. Bridge eventually votes as her husband would: “for the world to remain as it was” (Mrs. Bridge, 87, 88).
52 Mrs. Bridge, 228.
53 Ibid., 177.
54 Ibid., 15.
55 Heller, “The Culture of ‘Momism’,”, 63.
56 Gotham, Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development, 21.
57 Mrs. Bridge, 230.
58 Heller, 60–61.
59 Ibid., 63.
60 Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 9, 71.
61 Mrs. Bridge, 230.
62 Friedan, 47.
63 Mr. Bridge, 360–61. Interestingly, Mr. Bridge here is much more willing to consign Grace Barron to a Friedanian position than his wife is: “The idea of suicide exasperated him. Now her children must suffer, and she had hurt her husband in the cruelest way a woman can hurt a man. Rather than go on living with him she had willfully destroyed herself. She had shown her children how little they meant. She had left her husband to endure every ugly speculation” (ibid., 360).
64 Mrs. Bridge, 230.
65 Kenneth Keniston, The Uncommitted: Alienated Youth in American Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1965), 4, 11. Goodman worries “that the accumulation of the missed and compromised revolutions of modern times, with their consequent ambiguities and social imbalances, has fallen, and must fall, most heavily on the young, making it hard to grow up.” Paul Goodman, Growing up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1960), 217 (emphasis in original). While I will not be addressing the sense of failure in the novels, that aspect comes through as well.
66 William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957; first published 1956), 7.
67 For a critique of the “myth” of suburbia's homogeneity see Bennett M. Berger, “The Myth of Suburbia,” Journal of Social Issues, 17, 1 (1961), 38–49.
68 Edgar Z. Friedenberg, Coming of Age in America: Growth and Acquiescence (New York: Random House, 1965), 13, 24.
69 Goodman, 12 (emphasis in original).
70 Mr. Bridge, 2.
71 Mrs. Bridge, 42.
72 Keniston, 281.
73 Mrs. Bridge, 28.
74 Ibid., 49. In part, when Mr. Bridge explains the purpose and use of his handgun (as well as hinting at his experience in World War I), it redeems this scene in a masculine/experienced voice; however, Mr. Bridge later decides that Douglas can no longer inherit the gun when Douglas forgets to latch a window one night.
75 Mr. Bridge, 155. Compare to the section titled “Venus of Mission Hills”: “As [Mr. Bridge] was passing Carolyn's room he glanced in. She stood naked on one foot in front of the long mirror, arms poised as if she were about to dance. … The fault was hers, he thought angrily. … He reminded himself that she was his daughter, but the luminous image returned like the memory of a dream” (ibid., 274).
76 Ibid., 192.
77 Ibid., 194.
78 Mrs. Bridge, 198–99.