The troubling position of women in Pat Franks Alas, Babylon - Essay Example

Ladies in Waiting The troubling position of women in Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon “Darling, you are my right arm. Where I goeth you can go — up to a point.” — Alas, Babylon (242) One of the most interesting things about post-apocalyptic literature is the opportunity it presents to re-imagine the world from scratch. Survivors of earth-rending events have the challenge, but also the opportunity, of rebuilding an entire world, reinventing their roles and priorities to make a better world from the ruins. Many writers of this kind of post-apocalyptic fiction have envisioned brave new worlds rising from the ashes: In Alas, Babylon, one of the effects of nuclear war is to put a de facto end to segregation in a small Southern town; in Stephen King’s The Stand, good has the chance to triumph over evil; in Russell Hoban’s cult classic Riddley Walker, “true” history (as opposed to the puppet-show battles between good and evil that stand in for accumulated historical knowledge) is the key to mankind’s salvation. Post-apocalyptic fiction, whether overtly or intentionally, betrays the ideas that matter most to the author and the ideologies that an author believes are most important to both society as a whole and to individuals. It’s worth considering the fact that — with a few notably, markedly feminist exceptions — these concerns do not expand to include the role of women. Women in post-apocalyptic literature rarely see their roles expand; more commonly, their roles retract to encompass the field of woman’s work: preparing food, bearing and raising children and attending to domestic matters. (This work is, of course, important to any emerging society, and our intention in exploring this question is not to negate the significance of the tasks that women perform; rather, the question at hand is why these domestic tasks are assigned exclusively and specifically to women and why women are excluded from other tasks of building a society in this field of literature.) In Pat Frank’s novel Alas, Babylon, women are praised for their efforts even as they are relegated to second-class status. In this examination of Alas, Babylon, we’ll look closely at the conditions of five female characters to consider how Fort Repose, Florida’s particular post-apocalyptic society treats the issue of women: Florence Wecheck, the town’s telegraph operator before the bomb drops; the two loyal wives: Missouri Henry, wife of the ne’er-do-well Two-Tone Henry, and Helen Bragg, whose husband is an enlightened and absent military man; Rita Hernandez, a girl from the wrong side of the tracks who used to be involved with the book’s male protagonist; and Elizabeth “Lib” McGovern, the fiancée and later wife of the book’s male protagonist. Before delving into the novel’s characterizations, it’s perhaps important to examine the novel’s context. When Alas, Babylon was written in 1959, the United States was in its prime: that year both the Nobel Prize for physics (awarded for the discovery of the antiproton) and the Nobel Prize for medicine (for work in understanding the structure and function of DNA) were awarded to United States scientists. After the successful conclusion of World War II, Americans were happily focused on the homefront. Just looking at the list of most popular television programs of 1959 paints a picture of sturdy households with shared values: Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Father Knows Best and Perry Mason, all programs that featured strong male leads capable of solving any problem life sent their way, were among the year’s most popular shows. (Interestingly, this is the same year that Playboy magazine made its debut, featuring a scantily clad Marilyn Monroe and stepping in to fill the gap left by the war’s pin-up girls.) At the same time, the United States was under the shadow of nuclear war. Relations with the Soviet Union were strained. Fidel Castro had been successful in overthrowing the Cuban government and establishing a communist government in its place that very year. As employment rose in the post-war United States, uneasy relationships developed between women — who had taken wartime jobs with the expectation that they would return to the kitchen when the war ended but found they had less inclination to do so — and men, home from the war and struggling to find work. This is the world in which Alas, Babylon begins. This is the world where Florence Wecheck lives. Florence, painted broadly by Frank at the beginning of the book as a typical gossipy neighbor whose main function is to paint a picture of the book’s male protagonist Randy Bragg: “[Florence] had watched Randolph graduate from bicycle to jalopy, vanish for a number of years in college and law school, reappear in a convertible, vanish again during the Korean War, and finally come home for good when Judge Bragg and Mrs. Bragg were taken in the same year. Now here was Randy, one of the best known and most eligible young men in Tumucuan County, even if he did run around with Pistolville girls and drink too much, a — what was it the French called it? a voyeur.” (4-5) Florence’s purpose in the text is a fairly straightforward one: She holds a mirror up to Randy’s character so that the reader has a vantage point from which to judge his progress over the course of the novel. She shows us Randy’s “before” picture so that we can be properly appreciative of his “after.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with this kind of characterization, and it makes sense that Florence, his and his family’s long-time neighbor would be in the position of giving it. What is interesting is that Florence’s assessment of Randy’s character is based in long periods of absence as Randy engages in activities in which Florence — as a woman — cannot participate. Randy “vanishes” into college and law school and “vanishes” for his time in the military. When Florence describes his return to Fort Repose as a “reappearance,” she means it in the truest sense of the world: Randy has resurfaced in society. Whatever changes school and war might have brought to his psyche, Florence cannot consider beyond noting how they affect his chosen method of conveyance. Florence is on the outside. She can reflect Randy’s current situation at the beginning of the novel because she can only see the exterior; as a woman, she is not permitted into the hidden spaces of his manly world. As the telegraph operator for Fort Repose, Florence should hold a unique position in the world of Alas, Babylon as a transmitter and receiver of information. Indeed, Florence recognizes the importance of her role so clearly that on the day of the nuclear attacks, she comes into work as usual. The town is in turmoil and many people remain in their homes, but Florence does not. She reports to work, where she deals efficiently with a long line of people eager to send messages. When the power goes out in the bombed areas, rendering Florence’s job null, Florence does not join in the communication services of the new regime. Instead, her friend Alice moves in with her, and they busy themselves with the work of feeding and caring for other people. Florence is a working woman who is returned to her place at home by virtue of a cataclysmic event. Writing about Alas, Babylon, David Brin (no stranger to apocalyptic fiction) says that “devastating calamities do not have to mean the end of human aspiration.” (45) He points out that the actions of Randy Bragg represent a battle to save not only individual lives but also a notion of civilization, of responsible guardianship of freedom, of salvaging what can be saved. It’s no accident that Florence’s sphere of influence is reduced from the center of communication for the town to the hub of her home. Unlike Florence, Helen Bragg and Missouri Henry are women who have chosen the more traditional female role of wife and helpmeet. Missouri, who earns most of the family’s money when her shiftless husband is between work, does so in the time-honored role of keeping house. In her essay “’Extraordinarily Convenient Neighbors:’ African-American Characters in White-Authored Post-Atomic Novels,” Jacqueline Foertsch argues that Missouri Henry’s character fulfills many of the racial expectations of the time: Missouri, whom Randy calls by the childish name Mizoo, cleans the Bragg household, “shuffling” as she goes (9), fulfilling various stereotypes with her jollity, size, and dialect speech.” (133) The day after the nuclear attack takes place, Missouri is washing dishes at the kitchen sink, singing spirituals “just like always.” (149) I would argue that Missouri’s actions here are as stereotypically feminine as they are racial. Missouri’s world is so confined to the household — her own household at the Henry’s cabin and the larger household of the Bragg property — that the events of the outside world do not affect her. She goes about her domestic responsibilities calmly and dutifully, just as she has stood by her lazy husband and taken up his slack in their household, confident that as long as she performs her feminine duties, the larger world can be taken care of by its larger players. At the conclusion of the book, when the town of Fort Repose makes its decision to continue rebuilding rather than deportation to another safe zone, Missouri is conspicuously absent — the implication being that she will follow the male decision makers in whatever course of action they choose. Helen Bragg finds herself in a different position from Missouri, but in many ways, the two characters a similar. Helen’s husband — Randy Bragg’s brother — has sent Helen and their children to Fort Repose to stay with his brother because Mark Bragg feels nuclear war is imminent. Uprooted from her familiar surroundings and surrounded by the sudden chaos of nuclear war, Helen’s job is clear because it has been clearly expressed to her by her husband: “Your job is to survive because if you dont the children wont survive. That is your job. There is no other.” (66) It’s significant that when Mark asks his brother to look after his family, Randy uses the funds Mark gave him to make an attention-getting purchase at the grocery store. Though Randy’s purchase is an unusually large one, the fact that he is making it instead of Helen suggests that Helen’s priorities are not entirely where they should be. Helen’s reluctance to leave her husband leads to their last-minute arrival in Fort Repose — they land in Florida just a few hours before the first nuclear bomb is launched — and forces Randy to perform a duty — shopping for the emergency — that should be hers by right. Helen is ill-equipped to cope with the domestic life that the new regime requires of her, and her breakdown in chapter nine is a significant turning point in the novel. Though Randy’s girlfriend Lib explains Helen’s behavior as the result of too much stress — she confuses Randy with her husband and tries to kiss him — in fact, Helen’s behavior signifies that she is ready to take on the domestic role that she has been reluctant to adopt. In her essay “Not Bombshells but Basketcases: Gendered Illness in Nuclear Texts,” Jacqueline Foertsch points to Helen’s behavior as “evidence of a weak constitution in times of nuclear crisis,” an event that “[threatens] the utopic stability of her family’s structure.” (22) In my opinion, however, Helen’s behavior up to that point has signaled her weakness, and her “breakdown” signals her recovery. When she embraces Randy as her husband, she is recognizing him as her patriarchal leader and putting herself at his mercy. Her submission is a kind of feminine adoration. It’s significant that from this moment, Helen begins to truly recover and to truly embrace her role within the Bragg compound.With her husband’s fate uncertain, Helen immerses herself in domesticity, putting up meat in salt to preserve it and working with the town’s other good women to create a comfortable home for all the townspeople. She becomes a better role model for her daughter Peyton, whose outdoor adventuring is curtailed when she neglects to tell her family where she is going, even though she returns with much-needed fish. (It’s worth noting that Helen’s children embrace their roles fully by the end of the novel, with her son Benjamin Franklin killing a dog with his gun to protect the family and Peyton protesting that her place is in the small colony of Fort Repose survivors, even though staying there significantly reduces the number of options she will have for her future.) Helen becomes a surrogate wife for her brother-in-law, performing the duties of the household with a glad heart and no questions about her role. Helen is rewarded for her domestic efforts with a new husband: news comes that Mark is certainly dead, and Helen is free to marry Dan Gunn, the community doctor who has fallen in love with her. Their marriage cements Helen’s status as a woman with domestic priorities. There is no such salvation for Rita Hernandez. Rita has two strikes against her from the beginning of the novel: She in Minorcan and therefore (in the book’s world) has different priorities and concerns than the white people in the story and she is a woman who enters into inappropriate relationships. (In the book’s backstory, she had a relationship with Randy Bragg that was probably a sexual one, though this is never explicitly stated. Her casual question about which of his female house guests Randy is sleeping with [204] suggests an intimate history.) Jacqueline Foertsch points out that Rita embodies many of the same qualities that make Randy’s character admirable, though in Rita they are negatively skewed. Like Randy, Rita has been stockpiling goods in preparation for the eventuality of war. Like Randy, she takes advantage of the town’s new barter system to procure the things she wants. Like Randy, she works hard to protect her goods from the gangs of thieves that have become rampant in the post-bomb world — and probably more rampant in Rita’s inner-city home than in Randy’s bucolic property. Like Randy, Rita’s social power has been changed by the post-bomb world for the better. She tells her brother Pete that the “war’s going to level people as well as cities.” (156) But Rita, unlike Randy, is overstepping her bounds, and her punishment is severe. Accepting a ring from a man as a tribute rather than as a promise to fulfill her domestic obligations, Rita is infected by radiation poisoning. Foertsch cites the ethnic implications of Rita’s behavior, but her punishment is just as specific to Rita’s crimes against her gender: “Cruelly abandoned by Randy in his white, male, middle-class superiority, Rita is forced to make symbolic marriage with the bomb, impregnated not with a child but a monster: radiation poisoning. Her refusal to know her place, her sociosexual role, is the sin for which her terrifying dose of radiation exposure is supposedly just reward. As opposed to the impervious, oblivious Henry family, Rita has both a firmer grasp of the bomb’s social significance and a normal (“human”) physical reaction to the bomb’s contaminating effects.” (135-136) Rita’s crimes are confusing if we view Alas, Babylon as a novel of survival because her “crimes” are the keys to her survival. She is only guilty of the same things the men around her are doing to ensure their own families’ survival. Only if we view her rejection of traditional female duties and blatant assumption of male roles as Rita’s crime does the extremity of her punishment make sense in the context of the novel. Tellingly, Rita essentially disappears in the novel’s concluding chapters: She is given no voice in the determination of the town’s fate nor even a decision as to how long her own life will extend after her brush with radiation poisoning. She has been pushed to the margins of the text; having broken the rules of the story, she has been banished from it. Her story is over. Rita has already been rejected by Randy by the time the novel starts in favor of the more pliable Elizabeth McGovern, who proves herself over the course of the novel to be the very paragon of the female domestic virtue the novel embraces. Elizabeth — whose nickname “Lib” is ironic in light of the novel’s approach to the issue of women’s liberation — is the ideal daughter and girlfriend, for which she is rewarded by the novel’s end with the opportunity to become the ideal wife to Randy Bragg. From the beginning, it’s clear that Lib has her womanly priorities in order. Even before the first bomb is launched, Lib has given up her job at the Cleveland Clinic — she has a degree in psychology — and moved to Florida to care for her ailing mother. When her mother dies, she ostensibly breaks character to help bury her; certainly Randy thinks that’s what Lib is doing: “…she thrust the shovel savagely into the sand. As she dug, her stature increased in Randy’s eyes. She was like a fine sword, slender and flexible, but steel; a woman of courage. It was not gentlemanly, but Randy allowed her to dig, recognizing that physical effort was an outlet for her emotions.” (55) In fact, though, Lib’s participation in the age-old rite of burying the dead is completely consistent with traditional women’s work. Lib takes on the task of caring for Randy and the community he has gathered around him, urging Randy to eat more fish and drink more juice to prepare him for the work he will do as a man. She is completely comfortable expressing her love for Randy: “When you love someone, that should be what you think of most, the first thing when you wake in the morning and the last thing before you sleep at night. Before The Day that’s how I thought of you. Did you know that? First in the morning, last at night.” (76) Perhaps most importantly, she acknowledges Randy not only as the practical head of their family but as its moral head when she asks him what he is going to do to the men who attacked Dan Gunn to steal his medical supplies. She sits in on the men’s meeting about the planned vigilante action, bringing them coffee, careful not to interfere with what is patently a man’s decision. And when she marries Randy, she surrenders her voice to his completely, so that when the decision has to be made at the end of the novel about whether to stay in Fort Repose or leave, she does nothing to indicate her own wishes, trusting her now-husband to make the decision for both of them: “This was Randys town and these were his people and he knew he would not leave them. Yet it was not right to make this decision alone. He looked at Lib without finding it necessary to speak. She knowing what was in his mind, simply smiled and winked. He said, I guess Ill stay, Paul.” (310) Lib has become the ideal woman for the new world order, domestically oriented and willing to agree that a man’s word can suffice for her own. It’s clear that women in Alas, Babylon are expected to fulfill traditional gender roles; a fact that’s further pushed home by the book’s other female characters. Young Peyton, for instance, gets the greatest praise and attention in the book not when she succeeds in catching fish to feed the family (in fact, she’s punished because of her actions) but when she discovers an old-fashioned sewing machine that can be powered without electricity, an undeniably domestic discovery, and a wind-up phonograph, suggesting that her role as she grows to womanhood will be to bring music and beauty to the lives of people around her. Though a woman has become the President of the United States because of catastrophic deaths along the line of succession, Mrs. Josephine Vanbruuker-Brown (the former Secretary of Education) serves a fairly singular purpose in the novel: to officially enshrine in Randy Bragg the powers he’s already assumed in the community of Fort Repose. (By extension, her decree also gives the town permission to issue birth certificates and perform weddings, two topics of unquestionably feminine concern.) Elizabeth McGovern’s mother is buried in their garden to conserve gas, and when Lib is asked about whether they should set out a headstone, Lib says the house is her memorial marker. It is in domesticity that the women of Alas, Babylon find their rightful place and their reward. Even former career women, including Florence and Lib, turn unhesitatingly toward the domestic sphere, fussing over meals and men folk and voluntarily surrendering any non-domestic ambitions. Women like Helen, who struggle with the absoluteness of their new domesticity, are rewarded for their eventual sacrifice with marriage and family status. Women like Rita, who battle the status quo and refuse to know their proper place, are severely punished for their indiscretions. The collapse of civilization following a nuclear attack raises many questions in Alas, Babylon, and it’s clear from the plethora of post-apocalyptic novels that exist that there are no clear or easy answers to the question of what matters most in rebuilding a civilization. In the case of Alas, Babylon, however, the role of women in the new world order is a troubling one, trenched in involuntary domesticity that sends women’s sociopolitical status one hundred years into the past, to a time where women’s place was indisputably the home. It’s interesting to wonder how a world shaped by more female input would manifest itself, and how the Father Knows Best ethos of Alas, Babylon might transform were women given greater rights to choose their own futures. Nuclear holocaust would undoubtedly be a global disaster; if society were to emerge with the gender constraints outlined in Alas, Babylon, the aftermath could be just as disastrous. Works Cited Brin, David. “Alas Babylon by Pat Frank.” Through Stranger Eyes: Reviews, Introductions, Tributes and Iconoclastic Essays. New York: Nimble Books, 2008. Foertsch, Jacqueline. “Not Bombshells But Basketcases: Gendered Illness in Nuclear Texts.” Studies in the Novel. Winter 1999. ---“Extraordinarily Convenient Neighbors: African-American Characters in White-Authored Post-Atomic Novels.” Journal of Modern Literature. 30:4. Summer 2007. 122-138. Frank, Pat. Alas, Babylon. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005. Freedman, Carl. “Science Fiction and the Triumph of Feminism.” Future Females, The Next Generation: New Voices and Velocities in Feminist Science Fiction Criticism. Marleen S. Barr, ed. New York: Rowan & Littlefield, 2000. Schwartz, Richard A. “Family, Gender and Society in 1950s American Fiction of Nuclear Apocalypse: Shadow on the Hearth, Tomorrow!, The Last Day, and Alas, Babylon.” The Journal of American Culture. 29:4. 406-424. Smetak, Jacqueline R. “Sex and Death in Nuclear Holocaust Literature of the 1950s.” The Nightmare Considered: Critical Essays on Nuclear War Literature. Nancy Anisfield, ed. London: Popular Press, 1991. Read More