Stoner (1965) by John Williams: a feminist critique

i'm sorry. this is going to hurt

Content warning: themes of sexual violence, ableism and alcoholism are discussed in this piece, and elements of the plot are revealed. Please be advised.

And he to me: “This wretched measure is kept by the miserable souls who lived without infamy and without praise. […]
They have no hope of death, and their blind life is so base that they are envious of every other fate.
The world permits no fame of them to exist; mercy and justice alike disdain them: let us not speak of them, but look and pass on”.
Immediately I understood and was certain that this was the sect of cowards, displeasing both to God and to his enemies. […]
These wretches, who never were alive, were naked and much tormented […]

— Dante Alighieri, Inferno III.34-49, 64 trans. Robert M. Durling

In an interview, John Williams described the protagonist of his second-to-last novel, William Stoner, as “a real hero” (Introduction xii)¹ because of his near-unwavering dedication to his work. In a 1958 letter to his agent, Marie Rodell, he wrote that “the point of the novel will be that he is a kind of saint.”² In the first page of the novel the narrator affirms that Stoner’s colleagues “held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, [and] speak of him rarely now” (3): no hero in the eyes of his peers, if Stoner is a saint he is one because he is constantly martyred: by his cruel, enigmatic wife Edith at home, and by his nemesis, professor Lomax at work.

Ordinary, commonplace, banal, Stoner’s life begins in the dirt of a farm in Missouri; yet it seems to only truly start in a mandatory English class, upon hearing Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 (“That time of year thou mayst in me behold”) recited. The scene is beautiful, poignant; the prose turns lyrical, as Stoner’s gaze seems to finally see, as he starts to finally feel, and understand the meaning of his own life. He becomes an academic, hungry for more words, more understanding, more knowledge, more books. Stoner notices his own loneliness, yet he finds better companionship in literary heroes (Tristan and Iseult; Paolo and Francesca; Helen and Paris) than with “his fellows who went from class to class” (16) and to whom he never speaks. Perhaps drunk on these visions of great lovers from epics and poems, he falls in love at first sight with a young woman called Edith of whom he knows nothing, except that she is “tall and slender and fair,” pouring tea with her “slender, almost fragile fingers” (47). She is unwilling to accept his courtship, and unwilling to receive his hand; she seems to dislike Stoner, without being able to express any real feeling outright. He ignores her discomfort in his presence, choosing to take her perfunctory words literally:

He smiled and said awkwardly, “Then I’ll have to see you as often as I can, so that we can get to know each other.”
She looked at him almost with horror. “I didn’t mean that,” she said. “Please…”
Stoner was silent for a moment. “I’m sorry, I— But I do want to call on you again, as often as you’ll let me. May I?”
“Oh,” she said. “Well.” Her thin fingers were laced together in her lap, and her knuckles were white where the skin was stretched. She had very pale freckles on the backs of her hands.
Stoner said, “This is going badly, isn’t it? You must forgive me. I haven’t known anyone like you before, and I say clumsy things. You must forgive me if I’ve embarrassed you.”
“Oh, no,” she said. She turned to him and pulled her lips in what he knew must be a smile. “Not at all. I’m having a lovely time. Really.”
He did not know what to say. He mentioned the weather outside and apologized for having tracked snow upon the rug; she murmured something. He spoke of the classes he had to teach at the University, and she nodded, puzzled. At last they sat in silence. Stoner got to his feet; he moved slowly and heavily, as if he were tired. Edith looked up at him expressionlessly. (52-53)

The text is filled with words of discomfort: Edith is “unsmiling,” “tense,” “silent,” she “[draws] back from him a little,” speaks “faintly” and nods “reluctantly” (51-52). Then, when he proposes that they “get to know each other,” she stares at him “almost in horror” and all but begs him not to pursue her: “Please…” she utters, unable to say more. Fear of being perceived as unkind, unwelcoming, unfeminine holds her words back; she does not speak further. Her pained silence is easily mistaken for delicacy, that great feminine quality which has been praised and sought for centuries; Stoner chooses to believe Edith’s forced declaration of “having a lovely time,” with no regard for her distressed behaviour. He ignores her plea, he insists on seeing her again. Edith’s hands are held together so tightly in her lap that her knuckles are white; Stoner notices, yet focuses on the “very pale freckles” adorning her hands, whose fingers, he notes again, are thin where earlier they were slender and fragile. He repeatedly dismisses every signal Edith sends him; she seems to marry Stoner only because he keeps insisting, because it was the done thing. Too weak to rebel against the rules of propriety, perhaps unsure if any other offer would come her way, Edith accepts her fate and Stoner’s hand.

During their first night together, she frowns while he touches her and then “[turns] her head sharply away and [lifts] her arm to cover her eyes,” making no sound; when he lays down again, she “[flings] the covers from her and [crosses] swiftly to the bathroom. He […] [hears] her retch loudly and agonizingly” (71), then accepts her excuse that it was due to her drinking champagne earlier that night. William Stoner has received no sentimental education; he is not versed in the art of love, he has no emotional understanding of Edith. This first night may be excused as a mistake; yet he soon falls into error:

Within a month he knew that his marriage was a failure; within a year he stopped hoping that it would improve. He learned silence and did not insist upon his love. If he spoke to her or touched her in tenderness, she turned away from him within herself and became wordless, enduring, and for days afterward drove herself to new limits of exhaustion. Out of an unspoken stubbornness they both had, they shared the same bed; sometimes at night, in her sleep, she unknowingly moved against him. And sometimes, then, his resolve and knowledge crumbled before his love, and he moved upon her. If she was sufficiently roused from her sleep she tensed and stiffened, turning her head sideways in a familiar gesture and burying it in her pillow, enduring violation; at such times Stoner performed his love as quickly as he could, hating himself for his haste and regretting his passion. Less frequently she remained half numbed by sleep; then she was passive, and she murmured drowsily, whether in protest or surprise he did not know. He came to look forward to these rare and unpredictable moments, for in that sleep-drugged acquiescence he could pretend to himself that he found a kind of response. (74-75)

We, in the year 2023, would call what Edith repeatedly suffers at the hands of her husband ‘marital rape’, which was legal at the time of the action within the story (between 1920 and 1923) as well as at the time of publishing; and yet the text itself calls it a violation, and while Stoner ignores her feelings, the reader cannot. The would-be hero and saint’s “love” makes him blind to her silent protestations and unwillingness; his love and his wants outweigh her pain. His desire makes him long for times when she is too “sleep-drugged” to even turn her head away from him. This saint, this hero, this ordinary man repeatedly rapes his wife, never “hating himself” nor “regretting his passion” enough to stop.

A shift in narration seems to suggest that Edith shares some culpability with her husband. The issue of sexual violence is never again mentioned in the book, as if sexual relations between husband and wife had stopped after the birth of their child, Grace, in 1923, while Edith is remarked to behave monstrously towards Stoner for all the years to come. She is, the narrator affirms, hysterical, bitter, brooding, grating, depressed: a bad wife. Her behaviour is weighed against Stoner’s saintly endurance of it; what is more, Edith being bedridden with post-partum depression,

for more than a year William kept the house and cared for two helpless people. He was up before dawn, grading papers and preparing lectures; before going to the University he fed Grace, prepared breakfast for himself and Edith, and fixed a lunch for himself […]. After his classes he came back to the apartment, which he swept, dusted, and cleaned.
And he was more nearly a mother than a father to his daughter. He changed her diapers and washed them; he chose her clothing and mended it when it was torn; he fed her and bathed her and rocked her in his arm when she was distressed. Every now and then Edith would call querulously for her baby; William would bring Grace to her, and Edith, propped up in bed, would hold her for a few moments, silently and uncomfortably, as if the child belonged to someone else who was a stranger. Then she would tire and with a sigh hand the baby back to William. Moved by some obscure emotion, she would weep a little, dab at her eyes, and turn away from him.
So for the first year of her life, Grace Stoner knew only her father’s touch, and his voice, and his love. (87)

Again the use of vocabulary serves to imply more than is explicitly told by the narrator, but while earlier the choice of words spoke of Edith’s discomfort and Stoner’s violence, here the shift occurs on a moral level, painting Edith in black and Stoner in white. Edith’s emotions are obscure, her baby is a stranger to herself, while little Grace knows her father’s love. His daily activities are presented in detail, as if an extraordinary burden has been placed on him, “more nearly a mother” for his care of his own daughter. Any culpability Stoner might have had is erased, weighing nothing against his daily, thankless sacrifice. Because he cooks and cleans and never reprimands his wife, the narrator seems to expect the reader to dismiss his earlier violence, to put it aside and forget it. Later on, the narration even refers to Edith’s outbursts of anger as “violent assaults” (234). Stoner’s sainthood depends on his being martyred day after day by his wife, whose character undergoes several sudden changes in behaviour that neither Stoner nor the reader can decypher. Her inconsistency seems to have no explanation but lunacy; her obstinate opposition of anything that might bring her husband any joy only relents when she discovers that he is having an affair, as if being free of the pressure of her wifely duties allows her, finally, to be somewhat tender. Her cruel behaviour only resumes when the affair is brought to an end, which might put in doubt the supposed cessation of the forced sexual relations between Edith and her husband, gone unmentioned since page 85 of 278.

Stoner’s affair with his former student, Katherine Driscoll, opens a two-chapter romance that seems to have accidentally wandered into the novel from an entirely different novel. William Stoner is different with Katherine, and the novel itself seems to behave differently, because it is through love, Stoner learns, that one truly becomes human. Borrowing the concept of the “manic pixie dream girl” from film criticism, meaning a female character with no human corresponding who exists “to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures³,” Katherine exists to teach broodingly soulful forty-something years old Stoner what love is, and who he can be, embracing life and its infinite mysteries. There is no depth to her character, whose characteristics superficially mirror Stoner’s, to make her the perfect companion to his former solitude. She is as intelligent, studious, and hard-working as him; she is passionate about the same literature; she is sensual, deeply attracted to Stoner, and has the same concept of love and life as he does.

“Lust and learning,” Katherine once said. “That’s really all there is, isn’t it?”
And it seemed to Stoner that that was exactly true, that that was one of the things he had learned. (198)

Katherine’s body is “long and delicate and softly fierce” (196), “her slender pale neck curving and flowing out of the dark blue robe she habitually [wears]” (198), the curve of her back is “graceful” and her neck, again, is “slender” (198). In contrast, Stoner’s enemies are disfigured: Lomax’s handsome face and deep, rich voice only serve as a sharp contrast to his deformity: “He was a man barely over five feet in height, and his body was grotesquely misshapen” (91), with a hunched back and stiff thin legs. Charles Walker, assistant to Dr. Lomax, is “crippled;” in a particularly egregious scene clearly meant to establish him as a snake in Stoner’s bosom, “the scrape of his foot across the bare cement [raised] a loud and grating hiss that sounded sibilantly hollow in the room” (134-5). Grace, Stoner’s now-estranged daughter, “grew fat” at thirteen: “her face grew puffy and dry like rising dough, and her limbs became soft and slow and clumsy” (235); when she loses her weight again she becomes popular, and as expressionless and masklike as her mother. She falls pregnant, is hastily married, and widowed within six months as her young and unloving husband dies in the Second World War; then Grace becomes an alcoholic, “almost happy with her despair; she would live her days out quietly, drinking a little more, year by year, numbing herself against the nothingness her life had become. [Stoner] was glad she had that, at least; he was grateful she could drink” (248). Having left her alone to grow within her mother’s emotional abuse, becoming a stranger to his own daughter, this saint and hero is glad, at least, that she can have the great consolation of an addiction to alcohol.

The misogynistic elements in the novel operate on two levels: within the narrative, exemplified by Stoner’s treatment of his wife, and without it, exemplified by Williams’ treatment of all his female characters, who are underwritten fantasies. Edith, the fantasy of martyrdom, and Katherine, the fantasy of sex, standing opposite each other as pillars in Stoner’s life, where his daughter is an afterthought, unseen, unheard, a footnote buried within the pages. Whether it comes from the action or the narration, the misogyny of the novel makes it so that the feminist reader must, in some way, exercise a patient division between their self as a reader and their values. If the elements of misogyny and ableism thus far discussed were left uncriticised, what would remain of Stoner is a compact narrative of a man whose love of books saves him from a bleak existence parallel to that of his miserable parents; the touching story of a man whose life is changed by a single Shakespearean sonnet about life and love and mortality, which it ends up mirroring. As a campus novel, Stoner—especially in its very first chapters—offers a keen representation of the scholar enthranced by books, the literature lover fascinated by words and grammar, stories and poetry. Some of the most quotable passages in the novel speak of the power of books to operate a deep-set change within us, in how we relate to the world. To Stoner, the university is a home and a temple, a comfort and a shelter. He has no desire to escape its cloisters, and he never does go back into the world; never fights in the world wars waged around him, never takes his wife to Europe as he’d promised, never walks outside the path from home to office and classroom. The indolence which prevents him from divorcing his wife, from taking a stance against her in defence of his daughter, from fighting in the wars, from acting instead of reacting all his life would relegate him outside the bounds of Hell in Dante’s cosmology—the Inferno where he read of Paolo and Francesca in his youth tells him also that the wretched who sinned of indolence mai non fur vivi, never were alive. Like them, Stoner is soon forgot by his fellow professors—no fame of him exists, yet he is looked upon with much mercy from readers.

Williams described this novel as “an escape into reality”—a reality that reflects the world we inhabit all the more for its treatment of women and people with disabilities, and for how easy it is for men, like William Stoner, to be remembered for their work, casting aside everything else about them—their sloth, their domestic violence, their paltriness—as too small and unimportant to make a dent in their reputation. Too insignificant to figure in Stoner’s own death-bed review of his life. An escape into reality, to the very end.

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Further reading

INTERVIEWER: He actually wrote his whole work, those three big novels, between 1960 and 1972—in the era of the Cold War, of the Cuba crisis, the Vietnam War, the Black Panther movement. Did he feel that a writer has a political or a social function?
NANCY GARDNER WILLIAMS: No. No, he had a personal one. He didn’t feel he carried direct political responsibility with his writing. Though it did come into his writing in Augustus, in the sense of recording or at least inventing a world that bears some relation to our world, to the real world, as he explores the question of war. It’s the same in Stoner. But as far as any immediate responsibility is concerned—for example, to go on television and say something—no, not at all.

—Mrs. Stoner Speaks: An Interview with Nancy Gardner Williams. The Paris Review, 20 February 2019.

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Since the writing of this piece, I have come across an article by feminist literary critic Elaine Showalter making very similar points. I especially enjoy her conclusions:

Now, strangely, he is a moving exemplar for many readers, who see him as an inspiring model of integrity who faces his sad life with unflinching courage and finds redemption in faithfulness to his ideals. They revere Williams’s artistry as a writer of restrained, unsentimental prose that carries great emotional weight. Rediscovered at a time when the humanities are in decline, academic jobs are scarce and teaching takes a back seat to blogging, the novel’s message of humble and heroic service to literature has obvious appeal for sorrowing humanists, too. Stoner, one critic writes, is the “archetypal literary Everyman.”
But Williams’s insistence on making Stoner a blameless martyr, rather than a man with choices, and denying him any ironic self-awareness about the causes of his Job-like misfortunes leaves the novel far from perfect.

—Elaine Showalter. “Classic ‘Stoner’? Not so fast.”. The Washington Post, 2 November 2015.

1. Williams, John. Stoner. New York Review of Books, 2003 [1965].

2. Tayler, Christopher. “I just let him have his beer.” London Review of Books, Vol. 41 No. 24 · 19 December 2019.

3. Rabin, Nathan. “The Bataan Death March of Whimsy Case File #1: Elizabethtown.” The A.V. Club, January 25, 2007.