A Necessary Separation: Grand Union by Zadie Smith Response
In the short story Sentimental Education, Zadie Smith takes the time to explain the distance the main character, Monica, places between herself and the male gender as a whole. At the start of the story she described this distance in its evolved gentle state, when she she sees her son as a muse, a doll that must be cared for and admired because he is wonderful. She then goes on to describe how this distance may have started, with an ex-lover, Darryl. Monica describes Monica in a more sexually intimate light, someone to have sex with and spend time with bounce her own ideas off of. Her lover, Daryl, is disposable, deliciously so, allowing her to enjoy all the freedom that temporality has to offer.
The novel then goes into full flashback mode for the next couple of passages where she frequently stops to take the time to explain Darryl physical handsomeness, the admirable parts of his personality, and muse on how compatible they are as a couple on campus. But then you can see Monica explain to us, and herself, how immensely incompatible. Monica and Darryl are that they are not going to last. In the passage on page 9 Monica starts:
““In a matriarchy, you’d hear women boasting to their mates ‘I subsumed him into my anus. I really made his penis disappear. I just stole it away and hid it deep inside myself until he didn’t even exist.’”
Darryl was cleaning himself with a tissue at the time, frowning at the brown stains. He stopped and laughed, but then lay back on her sperm-stained blue futon and frowned again, taking the notion seriously (he was studying Social Political Science).
”‘I really swallowed him up,’” Monica continued, getting louder, without meaning to, “‘I took his flesh and totally nullified it with my own flesh.’”
”Yeah... I’m not sure it’ll catch on.”
”But it should! It would be NICE.”
Darryl rolled on top of her, no taller and no shorter, and kissed her all over her face.
“You know what would be even nicer?” he said. “If there were no matriarchy and no patriarchy and people just said: ‘Loved joined us together and we became one.’”
“Don’t be disgusting,” she said. ”
It is very clear that he either is not all that interested in female empowerment or that it simply never crossed his mind. He ignores it or challenges the idea of female empowerment, perhaps, because he doesn’t see it as important. Monica finds the discussion incredibly important because it directly affects her. She wants to give herself all the freedom and wiggle room she can to grow into the person she wants to be, the woman she knows she should evolve into. This is, in turn, makes Daryl’s dismissal of the matter an unacceptable trait in a long term partner for Monica because of how invested she is in the liberation of herself. She invents a new language to take back her own agency as a woman who has sex.
The fact that she knows that they are incompatible with each other in the long term allows her to keep his opinions at a distance. She doesn’t have to work to keep him around so he’s disposable whenever necessary. It can be exhausting to know that the one closest to you really doesn’t care, or want to care, about the things that are most important to you, like creating a feminist language. But because she knows that this relationship will eventually come to an end. She can ignore his ignorance for now because it eventually will not matter to her, and thus it cannot harm her. It doesn’t matter too much if Darryl doesn’t believe in the same feminist ideologies as she does. She’s not keeping him. It will matter much more if her life partner has different views, but that’s a problem for another day, much farther in the future, and that future is not now so there is no reason to be hurt by it.
There is a clear set of boundaries that Monica creates that makes her life seem very peaceful. She still lives with hardship and failing relationships and systematic biases, but she is so sure in herself that there is no need to panic over every little detail, the way I sometimes do. There’s no need to convince Darryl to adopt her new words and phrases because he doesn’t matter enough to make an effort to convince. There’s so need to convert Darryl into a model citizen because he doesn’t matter that much. Knowing that people come in and out of your life with varying levels of importance as truth rather than an uphill battle against some unseen force can make your life so much easier.
I am in my early twenties and I needed to read this. Not only am I allowed to create this distance between myself and the men that come into my life, but also anything that I know is temporary. And I know one could make the argument that everything is temporary, but some things very much are so. My minimum wage job was temporary because I knew I was working for better employment opportunities. My broken heart would heal because it cannot be broken forever. I don’t have to weep over that boy for too long because there are billion of others ready and willing for a chance at a connection. I’ve been working harder at establishing a distance between myself and very temporary things. These lessons that flit in and out of my life don’t have to hurt, they can just teach and then go.