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    Better Than the Train Tracks

    Posted Wednesday, July 09, 2008 10:05 AM | By Hanna Rosin
    Well, I suppose that through a certain feminist lens everything looks like progress (From Anna Karenina to Ellen Tien). There was a time when any literary heroine who attempted some escape from the confines of a dull, loveless marriage wound up dead or alone or trapped in a dull, loveless marriage anyway. Then came the silent sufferers of the John Cheever era. And now we have our raging house bitches, freed by the pen. And I suppose there's a certain justice in that. Men don't do it because it still seems petty or pathetic or somehow beneath them to trash their wives in print (i.e., Philip Weiss' condescension). With women, the act still carries an outrageous glamour. (Katie Roiphe wrote a recent essay in New York about how happy she was about her divorce. Claire Bloom's memoir about her marriage to Philip Roth, among others, is a classic, and Roth only sought revenge obliquely, through a fictional Eve.) But I guess I don't see the liberation or happiness at the end of this road. Freedom from housework, freedom from the sole responsibilities of child-rearing, freedom from semi-arranged marriages. I'm with you. But freedom from intimacy? Freedom from love? And then what?
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