Gerontion and the Maiden

Felicia Mendive proclaims her goal in the opening line of the book: “I want all the good things of this life.” She gets more than she bargains for and learns the limitations of her cold approach when she comes to experience a passionate love. Set in contemporary St. Louis for symbolic and thematic reasons, this romance reworks the age-old theme of reason versus passion against the backdrop of a May-December marriage. Felicia, an upwardly mobile woman in the banking world, wills to control the course of life through her rational powers. Bemused, she watches her friends, Sally Caruthers, a thirty-two year old bookkeeper with her biological clock ticking, and Jane McBride, a world-wise forty-five year old divorcée having the time of her life, muddle through their amours; and determines not to let marriage and babies ruin her rise to wealth. She views Sally as hopelessly needy and Jane as an incorrigible nymphomaniac. On a lark, Felicia and her two friends, visit a channeler who receives cryptic messages in verse from the entity called Aspasia, an actual woman from ancient Greece, a courtesan and wife of the statesman Pericles. On repeated visits to the medium, the messages seem pointed at Felicia and at her single-minded pursuit of money and power. Sally pairs off with a sports writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and the middle-aged Jane finds excitement with a young champion rodeo bull rider. After young Felicia marries the vastly older Gus Walsingham (the Gerontion or old man of the title), the sixty-five year old wealthy owner of a bathroom fixture and hot tub business, a crack begins to form in her cool rationality. Both members of the couple enter into the marriage contract with motives other than that of romantic love. Felicia’s life mirrors that of Aspasia; the spirit of the disincarnate woman helps Felecia discover the extent to which happiness is achievable by use of either reason or of passion alone. Both have pitfalls along the way.