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.While Vida doessuggest that there is new political life to be found in Natalie s roleas a feminist activist, the novel can only unfold its own ambivalentand partial displacement of totalization, its need to repudiate bothuniformity and complexity, by leaving the details of Natalie s politics tothe reader s imagination.Totalization = Death: Killing Time andEnduring Stasis in The Women s RoomThis imagination forms the center of French s The Women s Room, andit results in exactly the sort of reproduction of totalization that Vidastruggles to skirt.In particular, the novel s opening passage encapsulates HEIR APPARENT 61the very possibility side-stepped by Vida: that the new politics offeredby the women s liberation movement may only reenact Vida s devil schoice between evils between the 1960s temporal immediacy of deathby the sword and the temporal perpetuity of a death that never ends.The Women s Room explores this question of feminism s own relationshipto temporal inertia and totalization primarily through the novel s cen-tral radical character, Val.The novel traces heroine Mira s life from earlychildhood to middle age, returning again and again to the years shespent in the late 1960s as an English graduate student at Harvard; Val,also an older student, is Mira s best friend during these years andthe acknowledged center of their group of women friends.As the1960s turn into the 1970s, Val alters in ways clearly associated withthe politics of extremity: She was agitated and more and more sin-gle-minded: the situation in Southeast Asia became more intolerableto her as the bombings were increased, American forces increased (French 398).Running from political meeting to meeting and neglect-ing her schoolwork, Val attempts to increase her own instrumental-ity and effectiveness to meet the increase in American violence beingperpetrated in Southeast Asia.This perception comes to a head a fewdays after the Kent State shootings, when one of Mira s group offriends points out that authorizing the shootings had actually increasedthe Ohio governor s popularity.In this moment, we can see theactual historical occurrence of the stalemate that was rendered rhe-torically on the walls of Mira s bathroom stall.In light of this blitheacceptance of a government that kill[s] our children, there is no longerany hope that the single-minded instrumentality of Val and thoselike her can match, much less disrupt, the instrumental violence of thestate (French 434).At the conclusion of this passage, Val receives acall from her daughter, who is away at college, and her daughter s voicecarries through the phone to the group that has gathered to watch theirprotest march on the news: MOMMY! Chris s voice screamed. I ve beenraped (French 437).With this statement, the section on Kent State concludes both literallyand figuratively, creating a kind of sleight-of-hand substitution ofradical feminist issues for New Left issues at the very moment whenthe New Left reaches a dead end.Indeed, in the account of the rapeand its aftermath, Val transforms from a totalized New Left radical to atotalized feminist radical.She later recounts her position to Mira, saying, [I]t became an absolute truth for me.Whatever they may be in publiclife, whatever their relations with men, in their relations with women,all men are rapists, and that s all they are (French 462).That Chris s 62 POPULAR FEMINIST FICTION AS AMERICAN ALLEGORYrapist is African American serves as another and particularly disturbingindication of Val s new absolutism.While Val had sympathized withthe young black men waiting in police custody before the trial of herdaughter s rapist, she realizes after the trial that such sympathy was gonein her, and that it would never return.It didn t matter if [men] wereblack or white, or yellow, or anything else for that matter.It was malesagainst females, and the war was to the death (French 455)
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