Between the Pages
by Marianne Szlyk

Badlands. by Cynthia Reeves. Oxford: Miami University Press, 2007. 
ISBN: 978-1-4243-3108-6.  221 pp.  $15.

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This reading of Caroline’s flight from the archaeological dig and her professor might be a bit simplistic.  In one scene, half-memory, half-hallucination, she claims to be returning to Daniel and the children. Daniel recalls that her return surprised him and that at the time she did not really explain her decision.  Later she confesses to him that she and Dietrich “fought all the time” (154) and that she failed to bury the two Miniconju’s bones despite what she once told him.  Caroline is a devoted mother, especially in her rapport with her son Henry, and she had difficulty bringing her children to term.  However, it is simplistic to regard Caroline and the Miniconju woman as embodying a nurturing, physically feminine principle that Dietrich, Daniel, and Henry do not—and her decision to return East as a decision to choose motherhood over personal ambition.  Daniel clearly cares for his dying wife and his children; he has also succeeded in his profession designing attractive houses for wealthy clients.  Caroline, on the other hand, withdraws from those she loves.  When Daniel responds to her confession, she drives him away.  Earlier he finds that she has hidden some of his college sketches, which represent his idealism and his desire to design buildings that transform their inhabitants’ lives as Taut’s cities did.  Could Caroline’s flight from the dig be a tactical withdrawal, echoing an earlier decision not to pursue dance?  Could her emotional return to the Badlands be the same sort of withdrawal as well?  After all, she is dying.

This moving, puzzling novella is worth reading on a number of levels.  First is the most compelling, the level that holds Caroline’s humanity and her place in her family.  After all, Badlands focuses intently and compassionately on the last day of one woman’s life without distracting readers with busy detail or irony.  A feminist-oriented reading could also be productive because gender roles, parenting, and society’s expectations each play a part in shaping Caroline’s life.   Unlike the Miniconjou woman or Mrs. Dalloway, Caroline could have chosen otherwise, which makes her story so intriguing.  Similarly, Reeves’ invocation of the Badlands and Native Americans deserves more attention because of the latter group’s political status and the Singlemans’ economic privilege.  Caroline may well have transformed the dead woman and her son into a fetish.  It would be interesting to see what a sophisticated literary critic would make of this book, but one does not need to be armed with literary theory and graduate-level credits to appreciate Badlands.

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