On its surface, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna is an immigrant’s tale. Beneath, the plot details the ways fathers’ and husbands’ violent indifference and indifferent violence subjugates wives and daughters—turns them into property, not people. The men in this novel cajole, coerce, corral, and at times beat women into marriage, endless child-bearing, and lives of unpaid labor. Without the option to choose how they put their bodies to use, these women are little more than chattel—the ideal role for women in Patriarchy’s hierarchy between the sexes.
How so? Patriarchy prefers naive, uninformed girls who become docile wives who understand sex as a duty paid in babies. She is visibly chaste before marriage and conspicuously pregnant afterward. Whereas women who seek pleasure in sex—even exhibit a little curiosity—are whores to be paid in cash or bruises. Yet Patriarch anticipates, indulges, and excuses male sexual appetites. Their bodies show no outward sign of the sexual act; hence, fidelity and accountability are, for them, always a matter of choice. By contrast, pregnancy betrays a woman’s sexual activity. Without a means to counterbalance this double standard—to circumvent or remove the evidence—she has no choice but to bear its responsibility, burden, and shame.
As I read Stella Fortuna, I thought, “if only these women had open frank education about sex, including its pleasures and dangers. If they had access to private, unfettered birth control, they might have lived as whole human beings.” I also thought, “if we just raised men to see themselves as co-creators and held them accountable for every deposit of their sperm in a woman’s body.”
Then I laughed and laughed until I cried.
If you want to read this book on the cheap, I offer my copy for sale on Ebay.
A story for sisters, daughters, and grand-daughters