TeaThere is a growing literature of maternal flight: novels about women who abandon not only their husbands but also their children. In the real world, men are more often fugitives; The father’s relation to family life is considered incidental, while motherhood is revered as an internal state. This means that women who “un-mother” themselves are doing something impossible: The connection between a woman and her child is not just emotional, but also creative. Joan Barfoot understands the inside-out nature of the logic involved in maternal responsibility: “She created these other people and their needs,” says Gaining Ground’s estranged mother, Abra, “and now she has to cater to them.”
Abra is negligent in providing for her children or their needs. The novel is rigorously and carefully about the business of separation, which is also the business of becoming a single and undivided self.
Gaining Ground was published in Canada in 1978 under the title Abra, before it was published in the UK under the current title by Women’s Press in 1980. It was around that time that Barfoot’s fellow Canadian Alice Munro began writing about adulterous, runaway women whose free-spirited nature meshed well with the feminism of the time. However, Abra does not withdraw from domestic life for the sake of another man, nor does she return to her children, as does Leda in Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, after spending years trying to get back what she had lost. Abra is close to the protagonist in Cathy Sweeney’s recent breakdown, who doesn’t have a single answer to the question of why she left her former life: In Japan, Sweeney writes, “So many people disappear that there’s a word for them – johatsu. It translates as evaporated people.
These novels cannot fully resist the question of whether the bolting mother is a monster or a victim of social expectation. Gaining Ground was written before any of them and, already, Barfoot was intelligent enough to reject the terms of the debate: Abraham never questions the morality of becoming his true self.
The novel begins with the arrival of a young woman to Abraham’s cabin in the woods, nine years away from her old life. Abraham feels her presence as a pressure, as an expectation, but can barely remember who the girl is, or who she herself used to be. Then, a moment of recognition—it’s his 18-year-old daughter, Katie: “I know her now, and it connects me to her.”
Katie’s arrival reminds Abraham of his beloved, well-organized home in Toronto; her marriage, which sometimes consisted of “watching movies late and making love on the couch and popcorn”; And his two children. Their first child, a son, provoked an intense feeling of attachment: “I didn’t even want to talk about him, although he completely occupied my mind, because I somehow felt that talking about him took him away, separated him, gave a piece of him to someone else.” Her second child seemed nothing short of a miracle: “She was a baby, beautiful, and she was mine and Stephen’s and we created her, but now it feels natural”.
The story may be about maternal dilemma, depression, loss of meaning, but it always revolves around the ideas of truth and appearances. Abraham’s life doesn’t seem “real.” Barfoot offers about 16 different types of separation without going over his own footsteps or saying the same thing twice. There is a cumulative, persistent modernist influence in the composition of Abra’s departure, but she manages to keep it human, or within the human, and when Abra first sees the cabin, we are completely convinced that it is her “home.”
She has brought no watch or mirror, and takes pains to avoid talking to other people. Her hair proves troublesome on her first day of digging the vegetable garden and so she blindly cuts it off. Abra works to grow food, gather wood, and survive during Canada’s long winters. She only thinks about what is in front of her. The work’s descriptions of the natural world and the changing seasons are reminiscent of the self-reliance of Annie Dillard or Thoreau, writing in a transcendent spiritual tradition. However, the revelation to Abraham is not about the eternal glory of God, but about a kind of indecency. She wants to create a life in which she can gradually lose “my name, my memory, the labels I have used, and therefore my understanding of all the words”, in order to reach a place of bliss.
When Katie comes from a world where “there are intentions and anger everywhere”, Abra tries to share what she has discovered about the “emptiness”. She reflects on how she once looked at her husband and wonders, “Did I make him?” The answer is that he invented them all: “I simplified them. And then I reacted to what I had created, behaving as if what I had invented was real.”
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It’s hard to find an ending to a book that isn’t trying to be anything at all, so it’s largely to her credit that Barfoot manages an impressive, dramatic conclusion to Katie’s journey. Gaining Ground is a wonderfully slow-paced book and Barfoot’s originality and control remains thrilling almost half a century later. It’s great to see that this reissue has put the novel at the center of things where it belongs.
