The Hatchet Woman of Harvard

Lennon, Brian. "The Hatchet Woman of Harvard." Review of Defiance by Carole Maso. The Boston Book Review 5.5 (June 1998): 42.

Reproduced here in edited form, for personal or classroom use but not for republication. Citations should follow the original printed version.

Something in the apparent greatness of Lolita, or Ernesto Sabato's El Túnel, or Thomas Bernhard's The Lime Works might be said to come at (and with) the expense of gender conventions through which male-identified authors explore sociopathic predation from the predatory position itself, while their female-identified counterparts explore the world of the prey (victim). That such distinctions ought to be spurious prevents no one from confirming, and indeed reinforcing them---as, flattering themselves with delusions of social autonomy and exteriority, male-identified writers continue to revisit Hemingway's exhausted pugilists, while their female-identified peers idealize a socially chthonian nurturer.

Carole Maso has written a ferocious novel cataloguing the life's memories of a Harvard professor of physics as they engulf her in the days leading to her execution for the murder of two men (her students). A child prodigy who at age twelve left working-class Irish Catholic Fall River, Massachusetts for WASP-y Harvard, Bernadette O'Brien had "graduated at fifteen. All doctoral work completed by seventeen." As a precocious outsider, she notes in the "Death Book" that frames this novel's narrative text, she "grew quickly into her role as dwarfed adult, surrounded by that awful swarm of needy, oversexed, crowing adolescents. The kind of boys a school like Harvard invariably attracts." At least four, possibly more abortions follow her accommodations of their desires. As an adult and a professor, working almost exclusively with male science students, her unorthodox teaching methods focus directly on the harnessing of this "naïive, explosive, barely tapped sexual energy," on its sublimation into work: "The numbers are the most demanding, most [text missing]"

But at least two of her students are relieved of this pledge (and in the process, of their sexual dignities, and subsequently their lives) by Bernadette herself. Contemptuous of her prison women's advocate, who wants her to claim victim's status for herself, Bernadette regards with amusement the unabated sexism construing women's crimes as deviations from their essentially good nature: "They seem most interested that I did not kill in self-defense. That [the killings] were planned in some detail." On the contrary: Bernadette the murderer has been "all mind and violence, and nothing felt.... You, my end of the century romantics, my gentle readers, will never believe it---but to me it was all oddly sterile, mechanized." And she resigns herself to punishment by a male-domina[text missing]

Combing the books for loopholes---talking to all kinds of crazy feminist lawyers and women's advocacy groups... Beatrice needs to face some basic facts, to get a grip. I have killed a post-coital, drowsy, filthy rich, Harvard kid in a Piggly Wiggly motel in Backfuck, Georgia, and I am going to fry for it. I will not agree to anything less.

If Bernadette is a compelling literary character, that is because she considers, and permits us, moral speculation: to this end, she tells us the story of her brother, sent to die in Vietnam by the wealthy and powerful who now pay her (Bernadette) to educate their ownsons; the story of her philandering father, who made of her mother a "bitter and worn woman"; a story of what may be (Bernadette does not permit it to be clear) sexual abuse; a story of what may be (Bernadette does not permit it to be clear) incest. And she offers a compelling literary problem, we might say, because she refuses to commit to the apparently redeeming causality of any one of these many stories.

As in Ava (1993), Maso's innovative phenomenological exploration of terminal illness, what "story" may be extracted from Defiance might be said to be nearly incidental: the function of a saying or a writing, rather than of a telling, and more invested in the accumulation of texture than in the manipulation of the devices of character and plot. The oddest and loveliest elements of this work are its interpolations---quotations extracted from self-help texts, flow charts and diagrams, and what we might call call logic or equation poems, which inserts lyric into mathematical grammar:

the central fact f: {
f = will (die (he)) AND
could (choose (she, alters (she, f))) AND
not (choose (she, alters (she, f)))

Indeed, Maso's narrator, who knows of a great deal more than physics itself, fissures into something of a literary-critical mouthpiece, here, as early as page five:

I place myself in this tight narrative, just one more prison, in a world of prisons, knowing full well the ending in advance, the beginning, the sordid middle. A story like a vice, future reader, innocent reader. You with your bleak, internal demands. A story like a vice, gentle reader. You who feign suspense or harbor closet wishes for redemption, salvation---or at the very least a little flourish of transcendence---don't look for it here. When you put your hand into this toothed, confining box, know what you're getting into.
Oh, not to discourage you. There will be sideshows...

Literary-critical self-consciousness runs high, here; echoes of all the familiar masculinist and feminist postmodernist subversions of literary convention reverberate through Defiance, touched with their own subtle embellishments of thought and wit. It is a forthright and uncompromisingly provocative stance in the face of literary currents that seem to be turning even further from the legacies of the 1960s, and the usual apparent risk, of a kind of gestural solipsism, is certainly run, here. Or rather, in this case, it is rather magnificently outrun. Defiance is risky, vibrant, and vitally [text missing]

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