Cracking The Patriarchy

Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead is a novel in the same vein as Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections—both expose the ugly emotional underbelly of an outwardly “perfect” nuclear American family. But whereas The Corrections details the lives of white middle class Midwestern Protestants, Seating Arrangements examines the upper echelon of the US social hierarchy, namely the Harvard-Princeton elite. Both these darkly comedic novels are among my favorites. Here, I comment on Seating Arrangements as social critique.

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Winn Van Meter is the middle-aged patriarch of the family—stiff, emotionally oblivious, tightly controlled, and enormously uncomfortable with the feminine flurry of pre-wedding activities that have engulfed his home (for his quite pregnant elder daughter Daphne's wedding).

Winn’s life appears perfect—loyal wife Biddy, beautiful Ivy League-educated daughters, a lucrative career, and a vacation home on a Martha’s Vineyard-type island. This is where, on Friday evening, Winn entertains his extended family with wine and lobster on a sprawling deck. Quintessential WASP-y perfection is exemplified by lanterns illuminating the lawn and crisp white linens stretched tightly over the corners of waiting beds. 

But Shipstead lifts the lid off this impeccable establishment and peers into the emotional kettle in which Winn and his family stew. During the course of the wedding weekend, which devolves from upper-crusty sophistication into something akin to bacchanalian revelry, the characters’ painstakingly curated carapaces crack wide open. In fact, the family members rather resemble the lobsters that Winn sacrifices to the boiling water—trapped in a net of false civility, transactional relationships, underhanded insults, and social jockeying, they are plopped into the party weekend, forced to suffer until it’s over. 

I almost feel sorry for the poor schmucks as the weekend unravels, but their attitudes regarding privilege are inexcusable. For instance, in a flashback to a Harvard luncheon during the Viet Nam era, the college boys baldly justify sending “lower classes” (or “delinquents”) to war, claiming that their own “kind” should live to serve capitalism. And when Biddy quips “Let them eat cake” in regards to the discontents of wealthy wives, it feels deliberately obtuse. Biddy might think she’s being witty (possibly masking her own discontent), but there’s not an ounce of irony in the ultra rich ironically parroting the ultra rich. 

Winn’s younger daughter Livia, a lovelorn college student and marine biology enthusiast, functions as a disruptor in spite of benefitting from her family’s privilege. Her unseemly emotionality, which results in a plunge into the sea as a girl, an embarrassing outburst at a Harvard event, and an attempt at rescuing Winn’s lobsters during a disastrous one night stand, represents something both uncontrolled and uncontrollable, and perhaps more real than the structured society in which she lives.

With Livia’s observation of an airplane in the night sky—“how strange that something so drab, so confined … might be mistaken for a star”—Shipstead draws attention to the banality and rigidity of Livia’s social milieu, which, like the airplane, has been mistaken for something beautiful. And forces more powerful than wedding-weekend details are at work: just as the vast night sky surrounds the airplane and the dark sea roils around her family’s island, emotions, such as Winn’s lust, fear, repression, and false superiority, roil within. 

After Winn’s final fall (both literal and figurative), the novel hints at a relinquishing of control and a chance for redemption. It’s unclear whether Winn will actually change, but it’s the overarching message that’s more urgent: competitive, controlling, patriarchal elements in society are a powerful force, but, if Winn Van Meter’s story is any indication, the patriarchy is more vulnerable than we think.