Work in Progress - chastened but (fairly) cheerful

Testing times

As some of you already know, one of the projects I am currently working on is the re-conceiving of an earlier novel which has fallen out of publication, and which I am now overhauling in some detail. The setting, and the theme of the novel, are very close to my heart. Small Deaths, as it was then called - I am now looking for a new title¹ - is set on the Western Front during the First World War. The main action takes place in and around a small farm which has been taken over by the British Army to serve as a Casualty Clearing Station. The farmer’s wife, Madeleine, and her young son still live in the farmhouse, with Madeleine trying to run what is left of the farm, and to provide meals and laundry for the officers billeted with her in the farmhouse. And it is Madeleine I am currently concerned with.

Partly prompted by my fiercely perceptive agent, but equally driven my own awareness of the lack of proper respect I gave to Madeleine in the first iteration of the book, I am now revising the character to give her the attention she deserves. I am relieved to say that the novel does pass the Bechdel test, but chastened to realise that it does not do so by much. In case you’ve not heard of the Bechdel test, a brief diversion here.

In 1985, Alison Bechdel, in her cartoon strip Dykes to Watch Out For, set one of her character’s rules for going to see a movie as follows:

The rule, and it works for all fiction, is simple. There must be more than one woman character, and, where two or more women meet and talk, they must not be having a conversation about men. There have been other variants since, and the test can, of course, be adapted in various ways for persons of colour, ethnic minorities, and so on. But, however, you slice it, the test still stands, and it’s astonishing how many movies do not make the cut (television shows and series are slightly better). If you’re interested in pursuing the topic at greater length, you could do worse than read an article published in Vogue in 2020.² Things honestly haven’t changed much since then.

So, back to Madeleine. In the original version, she was very much a woman to whom things happened, as you’ll see from this passage from fairly early in the book, where we learn a little about her and her life.

“Madeleine had been the first of the girls to be married. Her sisters, older, more solid, more daunting in their certainties, had their followers, to be sure, but there was no suitor, it seemed, quite sure they wanted a lifetime of that assured decisiveness, however comforting the warmth of their wide hips. Madeleine, though, smiled more, was more pliable, more enthusiastic, and so the young men of the village vied for her favours. She only had eyes for one, though. Tall, silent Alexandre, with his downcast eyes and his beautiful, capable fingers, as he offered magical carvings he had made from wood he had found around the edges of his father’s farm. Birds, rabbits, foxes, slowly, over the months, the little shelf over her bed was filled with wild things, leaping, gazing, crouching, pouncing, playing. All the wonder which she felt at the world around her Alexandre had captured in the wood. And so he won her heart, silently. They were married within the year, and little Alexandre was born ten months later. Then came the war. Alexandre had been among the first from the village to go. He had been in the reserves, had no reasons to oppose to the sergeant when he came to fetch him, had simply to pack his little bag, kiss his wife and baby son, and set off walking, setting his stride to the sergeant’s.

Madeleine never saw him again.

A letter came, which the curé read to her. ‘Missing, believed killed.’ What does that mean, she’d asked. Have they lost him? Will he come home? No, my child, the curé had tried to explain without actually saying the words. It means that they cannot find his body. The shells, you know, the explosives, they destroy everything. 

Then the war came closer, she heard the shells, she saw from afar the torn soil, the stripped trees, the barren wastes, and she understood.”

The task now, which I am facing with some relish, is to give Madeleine a lot more depth and agency - and conversations which aren’t about men.

1. Suggestions for a better one are always welcome.

2. ‘Why Are Films Failing The Bechdel Test When TV Has Progressed?’, by Radhika Seth, British Vogue 2020