My first response to this book, published in 1959, was to praise it as an early contribution to what was soon to be launched as the modern-day feminist movement, as it is a penetrating study of a woman trapped by her own outdated middle-class conventions. But then I realized that it would do this book an injustice to define it so narrowly, as Connell in his understated way brilliantly strips bare the racist, classist, xenophobic and intolerant mindset that afflicted much of middle and upper-class America in the 1930s and 40s, and he does so in a manner that somehow manages to creep under your skin and burrow uncomfortably there.
Mrs. Bridge is married to successful lawyer Mr. Bridge, and lives in country club suburbia in Kansas City, Missouri. She has two girls and a boy, a black cook and laundress, and devotes herself entirely to curating her beautifully appointed home, assuring her husband’s ease and her children’s proper comportment, and to any number of lady-do-rightly causes with the “Ladies Auxiliary” of her tight little privileged world. Her husband is rarely home and rarely seen, especially by the children, but Mrs. Bridge fully appreciates his role as the bread-winner even as she wishes he gave her fewer opulent presents and instead would show her affection on occasion. In scenes that speak volumes about this suburban housewife, we see her go out of her way to pick up the new laundress in her car, but squirm with discomfort when the woman gets in the front seat. She attends a distant relative’s wedding with her children, who note the bride’s obvious pregnancy at the ceremony. A notice of the birth a few months later prompts Mrs. Bridge to exclaim about “premature births” to her incredulous offspring. And so on.
As her children mature and develop a frightening independence of thought and behavior, Mrs. Bridge begins to have increasing moments of doubt about her relevance in the orderly world she has forged. Her son Douglas perpetually embarrasses and enrages her by insisting on coming through the back servants’ entrance, wiping his hands on the guest towels during dinner parties, and building a 6-foot tower of garbage in the next-door lot. Daughter Ruth doesn’t seem to care about good grades, refuses to carry a purse, and is too pretty and knows it. Only Carolyn is willing –for a while–to keep her mom company, pays a great deal of attention to her wardrobe, and is an enthusiastic church-goer and teachers’ favorite.
In very short chapters, we peer with author Connell into the corners of Mrs. Bridge’s life as it slowly slides into boredom, and from boredom to anxiety, from anxiety to depression, from depression to ennui. Mrs. Bridge suffers from a kind of claustrophobia that she can neither define nor overcome. She picks up a book critical of the “leisure class,” is provoked, but soon loses interest. She wants to vote liberal in the next election, but in the voting booth can’t bring herself to defy her husband’s rock-rib Republicanism. She takes an art class and discovers some natural talent, but abandons the course.She describes the suicide of an outspoken intellectual friend suffering from alcoholism as an unfortunate case of food poisoning.
Connell poetically captures the pain of Mrs. Bridge’s life in a single paragraph describing the woman’s nighttime preparations for bed. She is applying cold cream to her face and begins to wonder who she is, and who the man getting into his pyjamas is. “She considered her fingers, which dipped into the jar of their own accord. Rapidly, soundlessly, she was disappearing into white, sweetly scented anonymity…. All the same, being committed, there was nothing to do but proceed.”
The book has many moments of humor, but Mrs. Bridge is fundamentally a tragedy. The book ends in an unforgettable scene where her huge impractical Lincoln town car that she is incapable of parking by herself and which was a present from her now-deceased husband, is trapped half-in/half-out of the garage with her stuck behind the wheel, and she sits there in a snowstorm for hours with no way to get out of the car and no one to hear her cries for help. Truly, an image of invisibility almost too painful to bear.
