Revenge of Donna Reed

TITLE: THE EROTIC SILENCE OF THE AMERICAN WIFE

AUTHOR: DALMA HEYN

PUBLISHER: TURTLE BAY BOOKS; 304 PAGES; $22

THE BOTTOM LINE: Don’t be fooled by the sex; Heyn’s analysis sets women back three decades.

Dalma Heyn’s study of unfaithful wives begins promisingly with a startling canvass of literature’s most famous adulteresses. From Anna Karenina to Emma Bovary, the cheating woman pays a steep price for her unchecked sexuality: she winds up dead. “What if she were your best friend, or your sister?” Heyn challenges. “Would you still need to see her punished?” Heyn, it seems in her opening pages, is going to vivisect the biases that continue to hold women to a different sexual standard from men. Oh boy, I think with post-Murphy Brown glee. Dan Quayle is going to hate this book!

Unfortunately, instead of a leveled playing field we get a portrait of the American wife as a self-deluded woman who is steeped more in the ethos of the ’50s than the ’90s, largely by her own unconscious design. Based on a slender sampling of unfaithful wives, Heyn makes sweeping generalizations about the malleability and self-deception of American wives and their inability to assert their own needs within the marital relationship. All of this — which is presented with oozing sympathy but is actually quite patronizing — is used to justify a wife’s decision to take a lover to find emotional and sexual succor. While Heyn never directly encourages women to have affairs, she strives to make heroines of her subjects. “Adultery is, in fact, a revolutionary way for women to rise above the conventional,” she writes. In other words, Real Women Cheat.

Heyn argues that women, even sexually active ones, undergo a transformation at the altar that is born largely of reading too many happily-ever-after fairy tales. They abandon their true needs and desires to don the robes of sexlessness, self-sacrifice and self-denial. “The Perfect Wife, is, of course, Donna Reed,” Heyn writes. “Her virtue exists in direct proportion to how much of her self is whittled away.” Having dampened her “visceral, honest, unshaped and uncontrolled responses,” the American wife begins to feel like a shadow or zombie. To retrieve her personhood, she understandably takes a lover. Suddenly, she feels alive again. Simply negotiating the “lunacy of the logistics” as she outwits her husband and children makes the adulteress feel “at once frighteningly out of control and, strangely, very much in command.”

How many women really match this pitiable description? But if Heyn is right — if, in fact, a large cross section of American wives suffer from Donna Reed syndrome — the news here is not that women have extramarital affairs and feel good about their infidelities, as Heyn’s fluid narrative suggests. Rather, the news is that after 30 years of battling to shore up women’s self-esteem and break down entrenched sex roles, the feminist movement has achieved nothing. That women have learned nothing. That women still bask in a sense of worthlessness that sounds ominously like Betty Friedan’s “problem with no name.” If all of this is true, feminists should regard this book with considerable alarm and demand that the problem be explored systematically (Heyn readily admits that her sampling is not scientific) to diagnose the cause and extent of the problem.

Instead, feminist luminaries are embracing this book as the next entry in a liberating canon that extends from Friedan’s Feminine Mystique to Susan Faludi’s Backlash. “Dalma Heyn shows us a new reality and a tantalizing hint of the future,” gushes a blurb from Gloria Steinem. “Neither women nor marriage will ever be the same.” Gail Sheehy writes, “It’s about time women gave voice to all their dimensions, including the erotic, without shrinking in guilt.” (One wonders if the response would be so sanguine if the interview subjects were, say, husbands who cheat.)

Try as Heyn does to keep the interviews trained on reawakened eroticism, her subjects keep veering into far larger issues: power, equality, companionship. What most are describing is not a heady affirmation of their sexual appetite but a dismal failure to lay claim to their very life. While the subjects make clear that adultery is a symptom, Heyn offers it as a solution. To suggest that extramarital affairs reflect women’s sexual needs is like saying that the recent Los Angeles riots reflect the desire of poor people to possess television sets. It may be true — but what a tiny piece of the truth it is.