Finding Meaning in Female Emptiness in “Softie”

Finding Meaning in Female Emptiness in “Softie” https://ift.tt/eJFwsiH

Reading Megan Howell’s book, Softie, was an immersion into the dark depths of female emptiness, and the ways in which females transform their bodies and push their boundaries in desperate attempts to fill an unbearable void. Through interconnected stories, we meet characters grappling with their demons: a young girl whose earlobe fixation leads to a disturbing relationship with an older man and a pair of scissors, a 12-year-old who picks her skin bloody while enduring cruel taunts, and an alcoholic teacher who dissolves herself in bathwater seeking safety. This striking collection takes readers on an intimate journey through feminine emptiness –  resonating with a universal loneliness many will recognize.

The stories in Howell’s collection plunge into heavy themes. Reproduction. Family violence. Sexual abuse. Cruelty between women. Moving through the terribly real experiences of women through Howell’s stories, which were drizzled with the absurd and elements of magical realism, I found myself caught in feelings of overwhelming grief and sadness, painful desire, and an anger that left me, and the women and young girls in these stories, sometimes frozen. 

It is the titular story in Howell’s debut that best emphasizes the wide range of feelings and depths of unbearable loneliness. Softie tells the story of Clio, a young girl who tried to kill herself before even leaving her mother’s womb, and whose mother tried to kill her when she was too young to remember. “And now you’re mine,” says her famed father, who has a taste for underage girls, particularly for his own daughter. When propositioned to leave the only home and person she’s really known, Clio finds herself terrified. “What if there’s worse people?” Clio asks Rosa, her father’s latest, underage muse. “There’s nothing worse than what he does to you.” 

Rosa response rings with a harrowing truth – that physical and sexual violence is one of the worst things for a woman to endure. A wave of grief overwhelmed me, reading of Clio’s struggle, how seeing a female free made her want to kill herself again. 

Freedom. When I reflected on the other stories in Softie, I began to wonder about the relationships between being female and free. In the current American landscape, where this relationship is being challenged and loudly fought for, Howell’s last story, “Age-Defying Bubble Bath with Tri-Shield Technology,” draws attention to the power of loneliness and the ways in which women have folded themselves in just to be free. 

Alda, a physics teacher at a Catholic school whose mother recently passed, finds herself utterly alone. Her sisters, Maureen and Joyce, unable or unwilling to engage in a relationship with their alcoholic sister, leave Alda to her own devices. Caught by the “psychedelic swirls of Day-Glo pink and green” bubble bath with a new serum to stop aging, Alda continues to submerge herself in the tub, the serum melting “off extra pounds” but leaving Alda just as lonely as before. 

In an attempt “to be small and safe again–that was all [Alda] wanted”, Alda pours all the bubble bath into her tub, letting “the water unravel her completely, becoming a part of it,” but it wasn’t as if Alda wanted to die. She wanted a “new chance at life … [so] she let her desire shrink her down until there was nothing left but dirty bathwater. The faucet was still running. The tub overflowed.” 

As Alda’s story and Howell’s collection come to an end, I was left with the image of Alda, absorbing and drifting in dirty bathwater while the water continued to run. And I felt the unbearable loneliness that pulled Alda, Clio, and the other females of Softie pull me down into the water too, but this time, meaning joined me.

The collection’s meaning crystallizes in a line from “Cherry Banana,” where Henry, a man waiting for his runaway daughter while carrying on an affair with a hotel receptionist, observes: “They pass through me like water in my hands.” This image captures the essence of Howell’s exploration: women and girls, subjected to violence and stripped of freedom, often find themselves drowning in loneliness, slipping through the hands of a world that offers little safety.

But perhaps this unbearable loneliness helps lead women and young girls to catharsis. While Howell’s stories of these females are thread together by the darker parts of woman- and girlhood,
this thread connects them – the emptiness connecting women across individual differences
and experiences. The unbearable loneliness is not an individual burden, but an entity itself that binds women together in their struggle for meaning and liberation.

FICTION
Softie
By Megan Howell
Published on December 1, 2024
West Virginia University Press