The Odd Woman and the City: New York as a Woman

Vivian Gornick’s The Odd Woman and the City tells a tale of New York City through its people. It is witty, disjointed, and personable. One hardly knows which aspect of the memoir is the most entrancing: her earthy description of the sought after city, the autobiography she inadvertently reveals through this dissection of her home, or the omnipresent friendships that litter her cityscape. More than this, she and New York become one — inseparable and symbiotic. As much as Gornick needed to keep retracing the avenues of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and the Upper East and West sides to feel connected to herself, the city needed her to keep its ‘sidewalks’ paved, its construction men hammering, and its skyscrapers towering, casting shadows over her slowly advancing form on the street below. 

We tend to think of the places in which people grow up as integral to themselves and their development, yet rarely consider the fact that communities that ‘create’ us and our cultures are equally constructed products of human thought. Gornick’s assessment of her city can explain the frequent personification of places in literature and the wider cultural canon as female, or even as actualised women. The cities we live in are not just mazes of concrete, glass, and wood, nor are they simply the culmination of millions of minute, chance interactions between myriads of citizens. They are nurturers. In Western culture, this, of course, means they are typified as women — mostly as mothers. Gornick’s relationship with the city is dictated by her gender. With no children or partner as she approaches her nineties, Gornick’s love is reserved for feminist literature and the people of New York, and the city cradles her right back in its maternal bosom. 

Gornick’s choice of title lends itself to reading her relationship with New York as a partnership. Vivian Gornick and New York go hand in hand. Instead of intentionally invoking herself in the title, however, she references a whole category of women who all individually feel they are represented and ‘found’ in a city large and chaotic enough to enforce anonymity on one’s own doorstep. Gornick’s status as an ‘odd woman’ is a reference to George Gissing’s 1893 The Odd Women, which dealt with the one million ‘surplus’ of women in Victorian England compared to the male population who were ‘left out’ of society due to their statuses as ‘unmarried’. The women in the novel, through matrilineal structures, teach other middle class women and girls secretarial skills. The marriage market, however, takes all of the younger women in its firm grasp by the last pages of the novel, and Gissing ultimately conforms to the plot-muddling and capricity frequently seen in the presentation of Victorian women. Gornick alludes to Gissing incessantly throughout her memoir, rejecting the Victorian sentiments behind the title of ‘odd’ and instead absorbing this exclusive identity as inherently female and thus powerful. 

Even as she aligns herself with its margins, Gornick feels herself to be, and through her writing, is central to the city of New York. Gornick’s position as the ‘odd’ woman out of New York married life, although no longer considered abnormal, mirrors the position the city takes on in the cultural zeitgeist. For those who live in the city, it is the people who truly form it; bodegas, street names, and subway lines are all important, yet form its backdrop rather than play a key role in New York’s culture. Gornick’s conversations across different neighbourhoods demonstrate this strikingly — there is a lack of cohesion amongst New Yorkers, and thus, the city fades into the background. For tourists like me, the shining lights and screeching yellow taxis obscure what might be considered the reality of the city in an all-consuming haze. Essentially, New York is lost to our imaginations and self-perceptions. It is this similarity between Gornick and New York which allow them both to bear their feminine titles: to be shunned while performing essential civilisation-sustaining work is a cornerstone of the female experience. 

Illustration by Isabelle Holloway