Who is Bridget?

A craft post on character

The rumors are true! I’ve finally started drafting Bonfire. I’m all of 4000 words in, which is not all that much, given that I am estimating this one will clock in at around 120K (my longest, Conversion, is about that). Though I swore that this time I would be fictionalizing everybody, I have been unable to escape my attraction to strange minor events discovered in primary sources and begging to be fictionalized, so the prologue is all real people, attending a real event, with their humorous speeches taken verbatim from the record. Typical. The trick with being Katherine Howe is, by definition, any novel I write is going to be a Katherine Howe novel, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

As I move deeper into Chapter 1, developing my Inciting Incident, I am meeting for the first time in this novel a wholly imaginary person. I have an idea of her - I know what she does for work, I know where she lives and with whom, and about how much she is paid, and a bit about how old she is. Her census data, for the most part, is easily assembled from a mass of plausible details. But we are all of us more than the sum of our census data. (Perhaps some descendant will discover me in the 2000 census, living in Inwood with two Manhattan School of Music students, and puzzle over what that fact says about the lives we were living. To that person I would say two words: experimental viola.) Bridget isn’t one of my central characters, but while she is here I want to make her as whole a person as she deserves to be. I want to understand what kinds of assumptions people hold about her, which will help me understand what she might have to contend with, on any given day.

Bonfire owes much of its conception to Tom Wolfe and Edith Wharton, two sharp-eyed chroniclers of a certain strata of New York society. But for all their sharpness, both of my models for this project had their vision obscured by deep ink blots where whole populations of people would ordinarily be found. Wharton treated domestic laborers with casual indifference, asking them to put flowers in some water, or sometimes to serve disappointingly prepared meats, without bothering to wonder who they were, or what they felt, or what they were doing all day. Wolfe had a keener sense of the varied social strata of society, but regarded women as cutouts, amorphous obstructions in crazy getups, maybe with an accent to make them exotic, rather than as people with depth and ambiguity. My first imaginary character, Bridget, stands at the intersection of these two overlooked or overly flattened categories: she’s a woman, and she’s a domestic laborer.

I found this image in the New York Public Library picture collection, which is an idiosyncratic and marvelous resource. Humor is, in some respect, uncomfortable truths expressed. Or, if that’s going too far, let’s say that humor can express uncomfortable positions, widely held. This cartoon is funny because it mocks the social pretensions of a would-be servant - cook? maid? laundress? her labor is so invisible that it’s not part of the joke - not only in her opinion on Long Branch versus Newport, but also in the details of her dress, and her officious hat. The society press of the late 19th and into the mid-20th Century constantly bemoaned the pernicious “servant problem,” and this cartoon is part of that bemoaning. The mistress of the house has to hire someone new because she is understaffed yet again, and an opinionated woman who acts like taking the job is doing her a favor is the best option she’s got. The young housewife in this cartoon is in this position because, from the worker perspective, someone like Bridget would have hated domestic labor so much that, given the option, she would much rather turn to factory or office work. Bridget would quit when she got married, she would quit if she could get work as a clerk, she would quit if the housewife looked at her funny. She could always get another position, because someone else up the street would be quitting too.

I want to see Bridget’s face. The longer I think about it, the less likely I am to actually name her “Bridget” - she might be a Katie, or a Hannah, or a Lizzie. I know a few things with increasing certainty, though, even if I am not yet sure of her name - Bridget is freaking exhausted.

And in addition to being exhausted, she’s probably hot, and her back hurts. She doesn’t want to be posing for fifteen minutes for some photographer while holding her dustpan like it’s a prop. She has to hold the dustpan all day. She has to bend over and get on her knees to sweep up the dust. She has to go up and down the back stairs, all day long, four winding flights between her garret room and the kitchen. She can be summoned by a bell. She also knows Hannah (Katie?) well enough to know she doesn’t want to be posing holding an iron either. Bridget remembers when Hannah (Katie?) burned her wrist on that damn iron, and she knows that sometimes Hannah (Katie?) pushes the iron in her dreams. Bridget thinks the missus can take this job and shove it, and as soon as John (Jack? Eamon?) gets that raise he’s been talking about they’re going to get married. Provided his drinking stays under control.

Perhaps this is a variation on my post from last week, in which I professed to be a plotter rather than a pantser. I made it sound like I had to have everything assembled before I was ready to start drafting, all the ingredients pre-measured and waiting in pretty little miniature glass bowls in a well-lit and pristine test kitchen. But now you see that I have a recipe, and I’ve gotten most of the dry ingredients out of the pantry, but they are all heaped in a mess on the kitchen counter and I’ve probably gotten baking soda and baking powder confused. I’m writing my way into Bridget, building her from my understanding of her time, and her place, and her work, and her census data, and the expression on her face, and the knowledge that she matters to my story, no matter what Wharton and Wolfe say.

So what’s next?

On Thursday my Marymount students and I are nosing about the American Wing of the Met to look at visual culture that relates to the history of New York City.

This coming Saturday I’m Zooming in to talk about a career as a writer at UEA.

And next week I will be back in Cincinnati for Books by the Banks.

But more importantly than that, I’m drafting. I’m trying for 1500 words a day. Wish me luck.