Plagued by a Breakfast Sammy

It's cold today. Okay, so it's not actually cold, but it's Florida cold. It's hey-I-thought-I-lived-in-the-Sunshine-State-and-I-know-it's-February-but-jeez cold. It's you-expect-me-to-stand-in-my-cold-kitchen-and-cook-breakfast cold.

I needed a breakfast sandwich and a strong coffee to survive this blustery 50 degree weather.

As I drove to the library with my book bag in the backseat and my coffee in the cupholder, I crammed that greasy breakfast sandwich into my mouth. When you eat this daintily, you actually lose the privilege of calling it your mouth, actually. I crammed that sandwich into my face-hole. Buttery croissant, bitter cheddar, creamy egg. I inhaled it as I moaned out loud. It was just so good an so warm. I told myself that probably no one was even paying attention to me. It was fine. Just eat your breakfast and focus on the task at hand. I parked in the garage by the library, and briskly walked over, breathing heavily at the unjustness of this cold morning. My coffee, warming my hand, was just what I needed now.

I had never heard of Kay Boyle's Plagued by the Nightingale (1931) before my adviser recommended--twice!--that I include it on my list. Now that I have read it, I understand why.

The family around which this novel centers asserts again and again that the most important obligation one has is to procreate for one's family. The reality of having children within these circumstances becomes both a promise of freedom and a threat of imprisonment. The tension that emerges from this freedom/prison binary underlines the entire novel and drives forward an idea of migrancy. Can motherhood allow mobility? Or does it tether you completely?

The end of the novel is clutch in its attempt to answer this. Luc--the family friend and handsome young doctor--has fallen in love with Bridget--the American wife of Nicolas. His love prompts him to ask the pressing question directly to Bridget: "What are you going to do about [the nightingale]? What do you think you will do? . . . You can't just give freedom. It's a much more complicated thing than taking it away." Bridget responds vaguely that she will indeed give the nightingale its freedom, but she doesn't explain how.

The nightingale works nicely as a symbol of motherhood in the text. Since Ovid and Gower, the lovely nightingale and its song has represented the tragic women who had been silenced: the nightingale sings the songs that they cannot. Oldest sister and young mother, Charlotte, is the first to become obsessed with the absent nightingales.

"Do you know, Nicolas," said Maman as they all walked up the path around the pond. "Every other year the trees here by the water were thick with nightingales. Never a summer has passed but that they came back to us and sang all night here in the trees. Even in Charlotte's garden there was one nightingale that had his nest in the acacia tree before the house."

"Papa said they would be sure to come back this year," said Charlotte turning her head this way and that as if to catch some sound of them. "But they're so late, perhaps Papa is wrong."

But the nightingales do not come back. Not of their own accord, anyways. Charlotte describes the nightingales as having "forsaken" them and she focuses incessantly on the acacia tree that used to house them.

I have some more coffee, but wish I had another breakfast sammy to munch on. I can't decide what it means that the nightingales disappear the summer Bridget arrives. Charlotte even exclaims to Bridget that she doesn't want to have to choose between her and the nightingales--she wants both. Why can't she have both? I feel like I need the support of melted cheese and toasty bread to figure this out.

Towards the end of the summer, Charlotte announces her pregnancy to the delight of her husband and family and horror of her brother. Nic immediately declares, "'Lolette, you're only thirty-two, and five of them already! Isn't it time you decided whether your responsibility is to the living or to the unconceived?"

The question takes on a matter of urgency as Charlotte begins suffering from a very difficult pregnancy. As Charlotte is forced to take to her bed, she asks her family to keep the window's shutters open so that she may see her acacia tree. The tree seems to take on a similar quality to the empty nursery: what is absent is what is most important. Charlotte keeps looking at her tree, waiting for the nightingale to return.

Bridget tries to help Charlotte by purchasing a nightingale from a pet shop. The bird refuses to sing, though. Instead, the nightingale turns "his merciless eye" upon the women, "uttering no sound." The caged nightingale becomes tied with these two young women--Bridget and Charlotte--and the question of their own mobility and freedom.

Charlotte seems the most free of her family. She and her husband own multiple homes, she is doused in diamonds, she has five (apparently) beautiful children. Charlotte, along with her family, travel the world, leaving their family behind to await their return. But Charlotte always does return. She is constantly re-acclimated into her family's orbit and her family's values. She is not a wife and mother so much as a daughter. Bridget, as an outsider, also seems to be perceived as more free. As a married woman, she is no longer in limbo, waiting to be chosen or taken away. She has a set path that she may follow. But financial insecurity plague her and her husband, along with his failing issue. The couple feel as though they have no escape from the insular family home, and that while they may have a path to follow, they have no way to travel it.

Charlotte's lack of freedom becomes hauntingly apparent when she dies from her pregnancy complications. The acacia tree topples during a storm. Her husband relays to the family of the chaos with "the tree crashing down and Charlotte screaming like a maniac." The fate of the tree horrifies the family to whom "the world itself might have splintered about them and they would have been n more surprised." The fate of the nightingale seals the fate of Charlotte, and by that afternoon, Charlotte is dead.

It's super cold now! Even my coffee is cold! I don't need a breakfast sammy anymore--I need a blanket and a hug.

After the family has collapsed after the tragic death of Charlotte, Luc proposes to Bridget that they run away to India together. This is Bridget's chance to escape the cold, frigid paralysis of France for the warm heat of India and a healthy lover (sounds pretty nice at the moment, tbh). For a majority of the novel, the family has been pressuring Nicolas and Bridget to get pregnant and Nicolas has been pressuring Bridget to get pregnant with Luc's child. As Luc begs Bridget to leave with him, it seems all of the pressures finally come to a climax.

The tenderness that shook him, the sweet bright soft rebellion in his eyes were gifts to him, thought Bridget, gifts she could spare to him who had been a poor man with no intention but to marry in a small ungracious way. Even the words in his mouth were gifts to him which would be his forever. She had given them and surely it would only be his passion and his love for another woman that would ever take them away. What was the nightingale's small liberty to the deep wide exemption she had given Luc, she thought. His mouth had been marble and his perfect limbs as unaware of conquest as a Greek man's alive in an alien time. Let Rennes, let Marthe, let Annick, and let Julie lie like cast-off sins for which he has no further use, she thought. She had breathed into his nostrils and he had revived.

This seems like the perfect opportunity to answer the family. Bridget could have Luc's child. The three of them--Nic, Bridget, and Luc--could form some sort of awkward family of their own to reap the financial legacy of Nic's family and the physical inheritance of Luc.

But Bridget does not choose that. She doesn't choose that at all. She sets Luc free.

So what of Bridget? If Charlotte is dead and Luc is free, what can happen to Bridget.

I think the answer to that is in the form of the book itself. The book is inundated with scenes of the ocean and of ponds and of flooding. It's entirely immersed. And with that, the structure of the book seems to follow the movement of waves. A pivotal event occurs--such as Luc touching Bridget with his blood impassioned--before retreating back to the standard norm--the two of them apart with little interaction. Their next exchange increases--Luc implies his preference for Bridget over the other sisters--before it recedes once more. The book's plot operates as waves moving in with the tide. Charlotte's death is the moment of high tide (indeed, her inlaws' mausoleum is discovered to be submerged in water). Luc asks Bridget to run away with him during a flood of emotions, but the water must recede. Bridget tells Luc that she plans on having a child with Nicolas. She plans on returning to the status quo, returning to low tide. She has accepted the type of mobility motherhood permits within this text: she will anchor herself to Nicolas and his family with a baby so that they may receive 50,000 francs to travel and start their lives. She becomes a caged nightingale so that her husband can try to fly above the waves.

I have a theory about how water is working in these texts (Plagued, The Awakening, The Waves), but I'm still figuring out all of the kinks and nuances. Stay tuned!

#kayboyle #plaguedbythenightingale #nightingale #motherhood #migrancy #mobility #water