Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell is a collection of discrete vignettes that chronical the life of India Bridge, the wife of a prosperous Kansas City attorney and mother of his three children in the 1930s. Mrs. Bridge is a novel that is delicately laced with symbolism and nuance but has no central plot or arc, instead it relies on exquisite refracted observations that are presented in 117 short vignettes each of them one to three pages long. The title, Mrs. Bridge, (an example of the subtle symbolism) references India Bridge’s transition to her life as the married appendage of her husband, a signifier that her roles as wife and mother supersede her individuality – she is ever the good girl/the good wife/ the good mother, and tries mightily to embrace the prescribed social persona and roles given to women of her time and status. She sees and defines herself so much through the lens of other people’s expectations of her that she hardly knows what she likes or wants or believes. For me, the most poignant moments in the book depict instances when she experiences an awareness of those personal vacancies and gets glimmerings that she’s missed out on something profound. As her children grow and leave home, and her husband works long hours to give her material security and then dies, she finds that living solely for others has impoverished both her own life and what she had to give to her relationships. She’s left alone with a vast and aimless emptiness at the end of her life.
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