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Shackles
A reissued CanLit tale of feminism and power
Naomi Lennox struggles with two promising writer, and dutiful wife to unambitious and proper Arthur. Will she follow her desire to pursue a writing career, supported by her lover Hugo Main and well-known writer Shireen Dey? Or will she remain bound to her husband, her family, and her role in society at the expense of everything else?
First published in 1926, Madge Macbeth’s Shackles magnifies the middle-class power and gender dynamics of its time. At turns provocative and surprising, and filled with dialogue and debate that expose early twentieth century limitations and opportunities for both women and men, Shackles is a colourful depiction of first-wave feminism in Canada.
“Shackles is a fascinating novel of one woman’s struggle to forge an artistic life amidst the intersecting restrictions of gender and economics.”—from the new introduction by Notes From a Feminist Killjoy author Erin Wunker
Naomi Lennox struggles with two promising writer, and dutiful wife to unambitious and proper Arthur. Will she follow her desire to pursue a writing career, supported by her lover Hugo Main and well-known writer Shireen Dey? Or will she remain bound to her husband, her family, and her role in society at the expense of everything else?
First published in 1926, Madge Macbeth’s Shackles magnifies the middle-class power and gender dynamics of its time. At turns provocative and surprising, and filled with dialogue and debate that expose early twentieth century limitations and opportunities for both women and men, Shackles is a colourful depiction of first-wave feminism in Canada.
“Shackles is a fascinating novel of one woman’s struggle to forge an artistic life amidst the intersecting restrictions of gender and economics.”—from the new introduction by Notes From a Feminist Killjoy author Erin Wunker
- GenresFiction
290 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1926
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
July 4, 2011
Freedom! Naomi Lennox only wants freedom to write and to escape her suave, smooth (he quotes Shakespeare and is quite eloquent) but manipulative and demanding husband, Arnold. Arnold seems like a nice guy on the surface, but is actually a bit of a tyrant and a moss-back when it comes to his essentialist views of women and men. But Naomi (and the reader) has a number of surprises that obstruct her road to freedom in this seemingly-anti-marriage novel (1926) by Madge Macbeth, a good, prolific writer from Ottawa who is unfairly forgotten nowadays.
I found this book really interesting. Loads of dialogue and debate which I prefer to description. I finished it in a few days. It is full of unexpected twists and turns and fascinating arguments expressing different points of view and different views of marriage from the conventional early-twentieth-century one of Naomi's to the unconventional gender-role reversal of her novelist-friend Shireen Dey's marriage (in which she is the bread-winner and her husband Julius is the housekeeper).
I was shocked by the ending. I later read that the ending is not really unexpected, as it turns out, and vividly displays the "shackled" status of middle-calss women in Canada, even in the first half of the 20th century. Apparently, things didn't really accelerate in terms of changed attitudes among women & men in Canada until the 1970s, or so Kelly's long & informative introduction (to the Tecumseh Press edition) reveals.
What I thought would happen is that Arnold would run away with Hester,and Naomi would run off with her "enlightened" lover Hugo, discover he is almost as bad as Arnold and then run off by herself (something like Nora in Ibsen's "A Doll's House"), realizing (as Anthea Bruchner, a character in my own book "The Suicide & other poems by Thomas Higginson," comes to believe) that no-one can truly be free unless they live alone and are unhindered by marriage and other attachments. Freedom! Freedom to do what they want, when they want, without having to live with other people and doing what they want!
But life (and people) is/are not that simple, as Macbeth's unexpected (to me, anyway) conclusion delivers...and there are many people who find freedom and fulfilment living with or for other people, even in marriage.
A fascinating and easy-to-digest read!
I found this book really interesting. Loads of dialogue and debate which I prefer to description. I finished it in a few days. It is full of unexpected twists and turns and fascinating arguments expressing different points of view and different views of marriage from the conventional early-twentieth-century one of Naomi's to the unconventional gender-role reversal of her novelist-friend Shireen Dey's marriage (in which she is the bread-winner and her husband Julius is the housekeeper).
I was shocked by the ending. I later read that the ending is not really unexpected, as it turns out, and vividly displays the "shackled" status of middle-calss women in Canada, even in the first half of the 20th century. Apparently, things didn't really accelerate in terms of changed attitudes among women & men in Canada until the 1970s, or so Kelly's long & informative introduction (to the Tecumseh Press edition) reveals.
What I thought would happen is that Arnold would run away with Hester,and Naomi would run off with her "enlightened" lover Hugo, discover he is almost as bad as Arnold and then run off by herself (something like Nora in Ibsen's "A Doll's House"), realizing (as Anthea Bruchner, a character in my own book "The Suicide & other poems by Thomas Higginson," comes to believe) that no-one can truly be free unless they live alone and are unhindered by marriage and other attachments. Freedom! Freedom to do what they want, when they want, without having to live with other people and doing what they want!
But life (and people) is/are not that simple, as Macbeth's unexpected (to me, anyway) conclusion delivers...and there are many people who find freedom and fulfilment living with or for other people, even in marriage.
A fascinating and easy-to-digest read!
Displaying 1 of 1 review