Word: widowing
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Dewi Sukarno was dewy-eyed with chagrin at being "compelled to do a thing which is not at all elegant." That inelegant thing, said the Indonesian dictator's pretty widow, is to sue one top Tokyo newspaper, one news agency and two leading Japanese weeklies for "having created a false and damaging image about myself." For years on end, complained Dewi, "these publications have been brainwashing the Japanese people with all manner of imagined poison about me." The latest toxin: a suggestion that her fiance, a Spanish banker, was connected with the Mafia. "This really is too much...
Part of the justification for retelling all this is Scott's presentation of three exceptional women characters. It seems clear that for the author they are England. One is a tough elderly widow, Maybel Layton, who has foreseen the end of British India for years and feels that it is richly deserved. The second is Mildred, the wife of Colonel Layton, Maybel's stepson. The third is the book's major figure, a retired mission schoolteacher named Barbie Batchelor. She is a good, decent person, not very bright, and downright foolish about matters of practicality and self...
...investigation into her identity was one of gradual awakening. "When Bill died," she explains, "I was a gloved, girdled and hatted upper-middle-class mamma. There was no need to work, but I could not tolerate sitting in that house being the 'widow of . . .' or the 'mother of . . .' What it finally came down to was the whole thing of being a person. I wanted to make it on my own. That's not to say that I was a leader in Women's Liberation. The whole atmosphere of the movement was almost forced...
...children would already be at least adolescents, thus sparing the nation bulletins from a maternity hospital ("The President and baby are doing well") and jokes about the latest White House formula or diaper pins. It might well be that a cigar-smoking, oddsmaking computer would opt for a widow as the ideal candidate, since that would remove the husband question yet endow her with a patina of nonthreatening domestic respectability. Throw in a couple of grown children, the computer might add, and let the word out that she loves to cook-on occasion...
...because Williams is almost religiously obsessed with the duality of the flesh and the spirit, and partly because he has an abiding concern for the violated heart. Many of his women spend an amazing amount of stage time in negligee, a provocation and an invitation to the bed. The widow Maxine Faulk (the surname is scarcely subtle) comes onstage in The Night of the Iguana with her blouse enticingly unbuttoned. Yet Hannah Jelkes in the same play is a stalwart saint of duty who has clearly transcended sex and is presented as a human being of nobility. Maggie...