A 20th-Century Woman: Joni Murphy's Barbara
In Joni Murphy’s novel Barbara, a woman speaks from the “dark womb” of a theatre enveloped by red velvet curtains. Her voice—intimate, conversational, contemplative—announces itself with an exhortation: “To feel the subtle grain of a moment, that is the goal, to be present.”
It’s 1975, and our narrator is a 40-year-old actress filming a Western in a Colorado ghost town. When she isn’t working or fooling around with her co-actor and lover, Jake, she’s talking—to him, yes, but mostly to us. The story she tells is at once her own and that of the 20th century, a personal tale refracted through an era of technological and scientific advancement, burgeoning consumerism, artistic experimentation, and war.
I’ll call our narrator Barbara, though she never reveals her name—the book’s title is a reference to a film, Saint Barbara, that gives the narrator her big break and in which she plays the titular role. You get the sense that a formal introduction isn’t necessary, as if her story were part of a monologue, delivered over coffee and cigarettes, to a rapt listener. For instance, when recounting the events of one summer spent working in theatre (youthful flirtation, perfunctory seduction by the rakish lead, harrowing back-room abortion), she keeps the identity of the man involved to herself: “You’ve probably seen him in movies, though he was never quite a star. I don’t say his name because he has a wife and kids, because saying his real name would pin it all down and that’s not something I care to do.”
The story she tells is at once her own and that of the 20th century, a personal tale refracted through an era of technological and scientific advancement, burgeoning consumerism, artistic experimentation, and war.
“Pinning it all down” is something Barbara declines to do on other occasions, especially when it comes to her own fraught experiences with men. “The world got friendly when I got pretty,” she says, “even though some people had a harsh way of showing their goodwill.” Perhaps it’s her Silent Generation attitude at play, but it seems that there are parts of her story that she’s reluctant to revisit. “Sometimes what happens to you does not make you better, it’s just what happens,” she says matter-of-factly.
She’s less blithe when it comes to her mother, who died by suicide when Barbara was only 13. Her scientist father’s work on the atomic bomb took their young family from Idaho to New Mexico, and her housewife mother devoted herself to establishing “beauty and order” wherever they went. When it’s later revealed that her mother had been abused by her step-father in childhood, this commitment to domestic harmony is understood as a way to sublimate still-present horrors. The language of nuclear annihilation recurs throughout the novel, as if to insist on the destructive reality refused by Barbara’s patriotic father, who sees his work as necessary and even noble. It also underscores her mother’s pain:
Carelessness, meanness, tangled-up want, can be so easy and yet their consequences reverberate out and out. Like a blast wave. Like a ripple. The child has been given the elements of trust and disgust. Hot breath in a small bed. Just between us he said. The gleam of wet teeth in the dark …. She was irradiated in her own room, where she was supposed to be safe. How many years did my mother remain factually alive while internally her cells were damaged, while inside she was dying?
In Barbara, the intimate takes place alongside the world-historical. Barbara marries a young man in Paris; that year, Patsy Cline, Sylvia Plath, and Edith Piaf die. Medgar Evers and John F. Kennedy are assassinated. The 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, is bombed. Lev, Barbara’s older second husband who served in World War II, speaks of honing his craft as a director while filming the carnage, his camera “seeing” what he couldn’t bear to: piles of corpses in concentration camps, skeletal survivors waving at his approach.
This historical awareness is a constant in Murphy’s work. Her debut novel, Double Teenage (2016), follows two friends from girlhood to adulthood, set against a backdrop of violence and social strife including the Columbine High School massacre, 9/11, mass protests, and the trial of serial killer Robert Pickton. Animals Talking (2020) is a trenchant satire in a playful register (the animals do indeed talk), set in a world only degrees removed from our own. If the historical events in Double Teenage threaten to dominate the frame, in Barbara they sharpen our view of our protagonist, a thoroughly 20th-century woman in each of her guises—daughter, ingénue, artist, mistress, wife, older lover.
That she’s an actress is key, as Barbara is fundamentally a novel about seeing and being seen. Murphy elegantly brings together the world of film and gender. In her teen years, Barbara learns that “[a] girl can be any object … A girl can be a high arch hidden inside a clean white Ked. A girl can be a ponytail done in a careless fashion. She can be a gesture, a consumable, a style.” Her beauty is both currency and a trap, and she spends her lifetime learning how to wield it. She masters the art of entering a room, captivating her audience with a slight tilt of the chin, finding the right light. “If you want people to look you must become your own cinematographer,” she explains. Interspersed throughout the novel are black-and-white photographs gesturing to the scenes described and inviting us to look for ourselves: a dance class, the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, a fashion model, Monica Vitti laughing, a stand of aspen trees.
In her earlier novels, Murphy’s artistic influences and knowledge of critical theory are explicit. Here, the references are mostly left unnamed but are felt nonetheless. As I read, I thought idly of French philosopher and filmmaker Guy Debord, Dreyer’s silent era classic The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel Malina (1971), Malle’s film My Dinner with Andre (1981), the work of Walter Benjamin, and the films of Robert Altman. I suspect every reader would see something different in Barbara, which, for all its rich allusiveness, feels strikingly distinct.
Despite her wishes (“I want to stay girlish forever”), Barbara speaks with experience. While the novel charts her journey into adulthood, its perspective is firmly middle-aged. From her dingy room at the Eldorado Hotel, where she’s staying as she films the Western, Barbara grapples with aging and loss. Her father has recently passed away. “You can’t call yourself an orphan at 40, that would be ridiculous,” she says breezily. “Everyone’s parents are either dead or alive, so it’s nothing special really.”
I suspect every reader would see something different in Barbara, which, for all its rich allusiveness, feels strikingly distinct.
Barbara can shrug nearly anything away, but as the novel progresses, her parents come more clearly into view, and their stories gain prominence. She tells Jake, “My mother died and then my father died and I lived between them. Now it’s now. The story takes hardly any time at all. Except I was young at the beginning and now I’m not.” Barbara, having spent the majority of the novel narrating her past, now returns to her present. Parentless, she can begin reckoning with their legacies and her own, the idiosyncrasies of memory and time, and the long century that held them all together. As Barbara talks, her voice unspooling like so many reels of film, I think of the epigraph by Richard Brautigan that introduces the novel: “I live in the Twentieth Century / and you lie here beside me.”
