SIX OF ONE...AN AMERICAN CLASSIC?

Rita Mae Brown

Harper & Row, 310 pp. Hardbound $9.95

"We Must Create Our Own Media!" wrote Rita Mae Brown in A Brown Paper Rapper. "Good femir.ist theatre, literature, good anything is going to come from us. The establishment is not going to produce it for us. And when we produce it ourselves the establishment media is not going to finance, produce it, distribute it." She gave that rap in an article printed in off our backs in 1972 and reprinted in her 1976 book of essays. Either she has redefined the establishment or she's not producing good feminist literature. Her latest book, Six of One, marks her second novel released by a mainstream publisher.

By my definition, Six of One is a feminist novel, yet it could appeal to a variety of readers ranging from Les Guillieres devotees to Huck Finn fans. The book is a beautiful story of friends and lovers, spanning the years 1905 to 1980. It is set in the Pennsylvania town of Runnymede sitting directly on the Mason-Dixon line. Predictably, the town clings to its Civil War rivalries, epitomized by the Union statue on the north side of the town square and the Confederate statue on the south side. The intimate bonds and conflicts unravelled in the story, however, are far from predictable.

The story is grounded in the present-day triangle of Nickel (a nickname for Nicole, who.is unmistakably modeled after Rita Mae), her mother Juts, and her aunt Wheezie. Nickel, the "infamous" writer, has returned to buy her childhood home, which her mother and aunt still own. Through a series of flashbacks, the book traces Juts' and Wheezie's battles and reconciliations over such traumas as stolen hair ribbons, Wheezie's lust for religion, bootleg whiskey, and Juts' theft of Wheezie's secret stash of pornography to bribe her into lowering the price on her half of the house.

Interwoven with their lives is the story of Celeste and Ramelle, lesbian lovers who get away with living openly because they belong to Runnymede's southern aristocracy. The character who ties the pairs together is Cora, Juts' and Wheezie's mother ari Celeste's maid, Cora and Celeste have a warm friendship that almost bridges their class differences. They complement one another. Cora is earth motheropen, generous, and accepting; "Good luck and bad luck are like your right and left hand. You gotta use them both." Celeste is genteel, a high-born, intellectual with a sharp wit: “I've had many affairs. I felt it was my duty to my biographers." And“God is someone who comes after menopause.'

Six of One has its villains, too. There are Brutus Rife and his sons Caesar and Napoleon who own the town munitions factory, and Extra Billy Bitters who "struck fear in the hearts of mothers" and, 'regrettably, marries Wheezie's daughter. There's also pathos in the death of Celeste's younger brother in the war, the murder of Cora's husband by Brutus Rife's thugs, and other tragedies which one would expect in a saga spanning 75 years.

The episodes border on soap opera. Ramelle, for instance, falls in love with Celeste's brother Curtis and has a child Spottiswood. This complication only serves to magnify Ramelle's and Celeste's love, and Ramelle and Spottiswood spend three months each year with Curtis a la the mythic Persephone. In another sequence, Celeste steals out at night and shoots Brutus dead. The townspeople ignore the deed. No one misses him. Rita Mae Brown, however, often manages to make the absurd come alive, thanks to her wit and vivid style.

In other ways, her wit and style are limiting. She tends to use her characters as stand-up comics. sacrificing the subtleties that would allow th

change and grow. She attempts to span the timeframe through themes of love and struggle, but the real continuity lies in the fairly static nature of the leading characters.

Despite the flaws, Six of One is Rita Mae Brown's best novel. It has the sure-fire humor of Rubyfruit Jungle and In Her Day but with much more substance to it. It is feminist in that the central characters emerge as strong and sensitive women. My strongest reservations relate to Rita Mae Brown's own reservations. By choosing to speak through the mainstream media, she puts herself in a different league. The most obvious misfortune is that none of the profits from book sales (and Harper & Row must think there will be profits), will go to strengthen the women's movement. Granted feminist publishing houses do not have the distribution capabilities of a Harper & Row, but they will never realize that potential until they publish established authors who have broader-based audiences. On the other hand, if Rita Mae Brown can establish herself as a modern Mark Twain (which she aspires to), the compromise may be worth it. After all, wouldn't you rather school children read an American classic with the perspective of Six of One?

-Linda Jane

Interview With the Muse and Six of One are available at Coventry Books.

Clio's Musings

On March 7, 1870, in Laramie, Wyoming, a packed courtroom in the Laramie Grocery Building observed the first women jurors. Judge John Howe empaneled five women as an experimental solution to the increasing lawlessness and low number of convictions brought about by men. He assured the women, "You shall not be driven by the sneers, jeers and insults of a laughing crowd from the temple of justice....The strong hand of the law will protect you." Newspaper cartoons cruelly caricatured the women, who were too busy with murder and cattlerustling cases to pose for photographs, but Judge Howe commented, "In eighteen years' experience 1 have never had as fair, candid, impartial and able a jury in court than this term."

Margaret Fuller was born on March 23, 1810 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her father taught her English, Latin, Shakespeare, Moliere and Cervantes before she was a teenager. A friend of Emerson and Thoreau, Ms. Fuller conducted her famous Wednesday afternoon Transcendentalist Conversations with local women in the first female bookstore in Boston, run by Elizabeth Peabody.

Margaret Fuller became the first woman reporter for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune. She taught French and Latin át Bronson Alcott's school in Boston and started “conversation" classes to educate women of the city. She admitted that it was difficult to get women "to the point from which they shall naturally develop self-respect and learn self-help". She died July 19, 1850 when she, her husband Giovanni Ossoli and their two-year-old son Angelo drowned during a shipwreck in a storm off Fire Island, New York.

When the mind is once awakened to this consciousness, it will not be restrained by the habits of the past....It is therefore that I would have

Elaine Lindy/Women's Roots

by Paula Copestick

Woman lay aside all thought, such as she habitually cherishes, of being taught and led by men....I would have her free from compromise, from complaisance (and) from helplessness....Man should prove his own freedom by making her free.

The American Women's Gazetteer by Lynn Sherr and Jurate Kazickas

Peoples

History

MATCH 8: INTERNATIONAL WOMENS DAY!

Since 1910, International Women's Day has commemorated the struggles of women in the workplace, in the home and in society the world over.

March, 1979/What She Wants/Page 7 Grundig is