s.penkevich's Reviews > Empty Wardrobes

‘In my family, marriages aren’t a beginning, they’re an end.’

I should have learned by now not to finish novels while on the desk at work. Books such as this can deliver a swift and sudden gut punch of an ending, leaving you viscerally staggering—a trait I tend to look for in a short novel—and within seconds I’m smiling my customer service voice and resolving a problem that can never compare to the emotional devstation still blooming inside. Empty Wadrobes, Portuguese writer Maria Judite de Carvalho’s 1966 novel, sets its literary teeth to confronting the systemic patriarchal socializations that make women into objects in their own lives, like novelties in a museum or furnishings in the showroom of a man’s life. The story follows Dora Rosário, widowed at a young age by a man ‘whose sole activity’ was ‘being nothing,’ and luckily climbing out of poverty in order to raise her daughter Lisa, as a secret of her past shatters her world and inspires her to reinvent herself. Gorgeously translated by Margaret Jull Costa and told through a narrator seemingly a distance from the story but revealed to be much more emotionally close than expected, Carvalho writes with a sharp wit and dark humor across this quietly devastating novel that becomes an unflinching portrait of patriarchal society where uncomfortable truths are silenced and the lives and dreams of women are suppressed at the mercies of men.

‘When he died, Dora found her life transformed into a desert.’

As Kate Zambreno points out in the intro, the domestic setting of Empty Wardrobes only underscores it as a tale of how the political seeps into daily life, with the novel set ‘in the regime of a dictator who weaponized Catholicism and “family values,”’ of Portugal under Salazar. For instance, Dora Rosário’s name means “rosarie,” and she spends her life in memory of her late husband much like one slowly going bead by bead in prayer, remaining largely interior, humble in manners and dress, and most notably, rather compliant. This is a society ruled by men but also one where troubles, taboos, or anything deemed impolite for society is swept under the rug and left to fester. The novel opens recounting the years following the death of Duarte, Dora’s husband, and how the domestic insistence of women to only be homemakers has left her with no job skills and a hungry child is a society that, for all it’s religious gesturing, has no interest in actually helping her. By happy circumstances she is able to find work in an antique shop dubbed The Museum by her and her daughter, Lisa, and affords a manageable lifestyle, yet it is still one of modesty that doesn’t branch beyond caring for work, her daughter, or mother-in-law (she is at all times ‘under the simultaneously suspicious and reticent eye of her mother-in-law’). She is, as the now teenage Lisa says, ‘both ageless and hopeless,’ living her life as if always mourning Duarte, that is until a secret upends everything and she decides to begin anew.

‘ You refuse to see that it is the jungle. For you, it’s a paradise that you don’t want to lose.’

Feminist existentialist Simone de Beauvoir wrote that while society has always belonged to men ‘none of the reasons given for this have ever seemed sufficient.’ The disconnect between the opportunities and social graces given to men compared to women, much of what upholds patriarchy, are evident from the juxtaposition of Duarte and Dora. While she is an eyesore to those when in need and otherwise completely overlooked (until she begins to lean into a more male-gaze sexualized manner of dress and make-up), Duarte is spoken of as a saint despite having no accomplishments to his name. He spent his days refusing any sort of efforts to climb the social or corporate ladder, not wanting to participate in that world at all. Which, yea, great, but would his insistence of purity be applauded if he were a woman, or would be looked at as a leech or burden the way people look at Dora while she is struggling financially. She is not allowed ‘invisible pedestal on which he had placed himself’ the way a man is. ‘An egotistical Christ,’ Dora thinks of him, ‘a secular, unbelieving Christ who had only come into the world in order to save himself. But save himself from what, from what hell?’ Having social mobility and understanding allows Duarte to choose to see the world as being without predators, but as Dora think ‘ they exist. And while they may not devour us, they devour the food that should be ours.’ For her, optimist is a privilege she cannot have when seeing how at every opportunity those with wealth, power, and social standings ensure those without are decimated. Yet she is socialized to only blame herself:

‘“Some people got religion or killed themselves after losing someone, whether that person died or just left them. Dora Rosario, however, didn’t blame anyone else for her misfortune. Only herself. She loathed herself, but not enough to seek relief in death. No, she simply disliked herself, a more modest sentiment.’

For her, the world is bleak and she must silently suffer within it. She is ‘a gray woman, slightly bent, lost in a plundered city deserted after the plague,’ without Duarte, though we do see a transfiguration once her past becomes a broken idol, the crumbling producing a shockwave that will inevitably crumble the lives of all the women in the novel. This little book has some jaw-dropping twists, including the final moments where I wanted to shout “fuuuuuuuuuuck” into the void.

‘Men’s dominant positions in [society] allows them to be absolute subjects and to make women into absolute objects,’ wrote Mona Chollet in her book on the stigmas against women, In Defense of Witches, echoing the ideas set forth by Beauvoir. One of these ways is that men have positioned themselves so that ‘their decay is not counted against them’ the way it is for women. Or, as retweeted by Carrie Fisher while facing age-shaming when she appeared in the Star Wars sequels, ‘Men don’t age better than women, they’re just allowed to age.’ It is constantly thrown at the reader that Dora at age 36 is considered old and obsolete. This has even seeped into teenage Lisa who expresses that ‘by the time you’re thirty, it’s all over.’ Contrasted with this is Ernesto, the wealthy lawyer and pedophile who is able to be considered a sort of silver fox and productive member of society in his late 40s. Similarly, an act that could be a image-destroying moment for a woman is nothing by ‘looking around here and there for a little excitement,’ for a socially fixed man.

‘At the same time that young women are disadvantaged by age and gender, youth does carry currency, which can be mistaken for power. If you are a woman, however, this currency is not on your terms.’
- Tavi Gevinson

There is another aspect here where underaged girls are told they are mature and given access to social standings yet only for the purpose of abuse. ‘ If you can still be considered “mature for your age,” you are not an older person’s equal,’ Tavi Gevinson warns in her extraodinary article on power dynamics, ‘this observation can easily go from an act of respect to license for harm.’ We have Lisa, freshly 17, who is repeatedly characterized by her ‘love of life,’ her ‘ strange ability to turn people and things into glass or even air,’ and her faith in her hopes and dreams to escape the traps laid out for women. To the lecherous eyes of men, particularly men who have amassed wealth for the purpose of hoarding power over others, this becomes a commodity that they wish to hold. Men often mask their insecurities by dating women much younger than them (Leonardo Dicaprio has reduced himself to simply being a living meme about this) to hold onto the fleeting past of youth and because they can manipulate desire and their wealth to groom them into not noticing the glaring power imbalances. A woman who dates a younger man is considered suspect or unflatteringly called a cougar, but for a nearly-50 year old man to sleep with a teenage girl here they get congratulations at the office. This is particularly vile in a socio-religious community where women are preached at to want nothing beyond household duties and servitude to a husband, and readers here are forced to see the horrors coming of youthful dreams snuffed out to be commoditized into a sexual trophy, to be a housewife in a rich man’s home the ways a hunter hangs heads as decor on their walls. As Chollet writes, this is all another way social conditioning of patriarchy ‘locks women into their role as reproducers and disenfranchises them from participation in the world of work.’

Ana, the mother-in-law and ‘the main tower of the fortress,’ is often representative of the internalized misogyny that allows these conditions to persist generationally. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir warns against mothers becoming a mouthpiece for patriarchy by conditioning young girls into lives of domestic servitude (though she most effectively demonstrates this in her novella Inseparable), and we find that the most damning moments in Empty Wardrobes are not only condoned but encouraged by Ana.

We find this in other ways, too, such as the cult of silence around abuse or tragedy in the family. Aunt Julia has suffered horribly in the past, but nobody mentions it other than ‘that man,’ or ‘the child’ the same way Dora’s own suffering will be ‘that woman.’ Without giving voice to things, even if it isn’t ‘for polite society,’ it robs women the opportunity to speak out against them or use their voice to demand better. One is reminded of the opening to Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique where she describes a wife who ‘was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—‘Is this all?’’

Which is, effectively, how these women become furniture in their own homes and lives. Or as the narrator says ‘I had ceased to be his companion and become, instead, the landscape to which he had grown accustomed.’ Carvalho’s sharp words force us to revile these realities in Empty Wardrobes, and the devastating conclusion will leave the reader seeing the necessity of speaking out against them. As [author:Kate Zambreno|3501330 writes in her intro, this captures ‘the consciousness of so many women familiar yet unknowable, no longer muted, not saturated with sanctimony but alive, alive with rage transmuting disdain into hilarity by sheer force, alive with intense paroxysms of sadness.’ It is a short book but it will certainly leave a hell of a bruise.

4.5/5