“There is only one valid theme in literature: Life will disappoint you.”Footnote ¹ So suggests Benna Carpenter in Lorrie Moore's Anagrams, a collection of linked short stories that has also been marketed as a novel. A metafictional recycling of the alternative “stories” of Benna's life, Anagrams presents the central character with an opportunity to try out different lives and different narrative strands, to test the disappointment inherent in literature and in life. This may be Moore's most overt play on masquerade and (re)invention, but her oeuvre is suffused with women characters who attempt a variety of escapes from their presumed narrative closures and who struggle with feminism and its consequent impact on their narrated lives.

Throughout her oeuvre, Moore offers a jarring kind of feminist inquiry, one that borders on, and on occasions slips over into, postfeminist critique. Her fictionalized feminism provokes uneasy laughter, but no firm or lasting answers for the disappointment that attends growing up female. Moore both pokes fun at, and holds to account, the feminist sensibilities that her characters struggle with and are disappointed by in their imagined lives. In what follows I argue that Moore's fictional representations of both feminism and postfeminism provide a platform for exploring female agency. In attending to the patterns of repetition and revision in Moore's work (in Moore's own words, a sort of cubismFootnote ²), this essay scrutinizes her interest in slippery humour and identities on the move whilst also suggesting that a refusal to close down ambivalence towards feminism is a hallmark of her writerly practice.Footnote ³ Moore cannot fully be positioned either as a feminist or as a postfeminist writer; instead, she playfully engages with aspects of both in her pursuit of humour.

However, this humour has not been without its detractors. In his review of critical responses to Moore, Robert Chodat notes that one critic has dismissed Moore's work as “stories simply about ‘articulate career women quipping their way out of pain.’”Footnote ⁴ In this reading, humour stands in for (or prevents) engagement, acting primarily as a temporary bandage. But Moore's use of humour is not that simple, and neither is her exploration of feminism. Chodat tries to rescue Moore from critical disregard (or even disdain), suggesting that her comedy requires her to use words “marvelously estranged from their ordinary semantics” and that what is key to her humour is an insistent, unanswered question: “whether the failures of contemporary life can be ignored by telling alternative stories about it.”Footnote ⁵ The “alternative stories” of her fictional women's lives require a testing of the boundaries of feminism and of how well such a framework offers guidance, support, explanation or simply comic relief.

Moore is experimental in form but also resolutely committed to deep characterization, a combination that sits uneasily between postmodernism and other forms of contemporary fiction. As Alison Kelly forcefully argues in the only book-length critical treatment of her work, Moore maintains a “steadfast commitment to capturing the texture of human life [that] always predominates over any deconstructionist inclinations.”Footnote ⁶ One of the textures that adds weight to Moore's work is her creation of a metafictional feminism that seeks to call attention to itself – that overtly names itself a construct – whilst at the same time slipping away from a firm commitment to a feminist politicized ideal. Kelly remains unconvinced of Moore's feminist engagement, suggesting that whilst “the experiences that dislocate and alienate her female characters can generally be traced back to their gendered identities,” Moore is equally attuned to male and female anxieties, with the result that “it is well to avoid an emphatically feminist interpretation of Moore's aesthetics or subject matter.”Footnote ⁷ Kelly does acknowledge that Moore claims to be a feminist, but “not to the exclusion of all else” (151) and this “both/and” perspective is one that is repeatedly encountered.

Moore's fictional references to feminism reveal it to be a construct that is familiar to the women of her stories and novels, if unevenly embraced by them and sometimes wholly rejected, though often comically. Moore's relentless focus on humour is a necessary part of her engagement with feminism. It is most often treated lightly in her work, perhaps in order to defuse its power, and it is this depoliticization of women's issues that marks her work in some ways as straddling the line between feminism and postfeminism. As I have elsewhere argued, postfeminism is

As Moore herself argues in an interview in the Paris Review, “Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.”Footnote ⁹ It is this very tension that makes her work hover around and between feminism and postfeminism, rather than settle definitively on one side or the other of this critical and creative divide. In part this has to do with definitions themselves.

Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra argue that “[d]efinitive conceptualizations of postfeminism are as elusive as references to postfeminism are pervasive.”Footnote ¹⁰ It is certainly the case that postfeminism is most often represented in the media as a sort of popular feminism, which appeals to young women who can ironically gesture to feminist concerns whilst simultaneously finding power through an aesthetic routine. Feminists themselves often take a dimmer view, concerned that the ‘post-’ of postfeminism signifies the death of feminism, or at the very least a significant rupture with feminist aims. Although Tasker and Negra resolutely place postfeminism's influence in the 1990s, thereby postdating Moore's earlier work, most feminist critics trace its genesis back to the 1980s, when it first started to make its appearance in the popular media.Footnote ¹¹ Misha Kavka argues, for example, “There is clearly no one date, no revolutionary moment, in which feminism passed the baton to its ‘post,’ not least because there is no one discourse that can claim to exhaust the range of thinking and projects undertaken in the name of feminism.”Footnote ¹² Her concern is that the term “postfeminism” “appears to position feminism precisely in/as history,” and that it embraces such a wide spectrum as to make it unwieldy and untenable, combining backlash conservatism, third-wave feminism, post-structuralist opposition to second-wave “essentialism” and “I'm not a feminist but …” doublethink.Footnote ¹³

Linking postfeminist culture to consumerist ideology, Tasker and Negra also attempt to unpick the way in which it “deploys a variety of positions with respect to feminism, at times celebratory and at times laying blame for contemporary anxieties at the door of a past politics now felt to be misconceived,”Footnote ¹⁴ as in, for example, Moore's short story “Terrific Mother,” discussed below. For Tania Modleski, postfeminism is “actually engaged in negating the critiques and undermining the goal of feminism – in effect, delivering us back into a prefeminist world,”Footnote ¹⁵ and noted British feminist Imelda Whelehan expresses similar concerns, suggesting that postfeminism offers little more than a new method of blaming women for their own predicaments and a failure of collective thinking and collective social action.Footnote ¹⁶ Indeed, Moore's women themselves fail to work collectively, focussing on their own dramas; if the personal is political, for Moore the personal remains personal, though with a confused feminist overlay that promises, but does not necessarily deliver, more. Consider the following examples, where feminism is invoked, but not necessarily embodied.

In Anagrams, Benna tries to fix her life not by addressing deep-seated issues, career impasses or relationship traumas, but, in postfeminist fashion, through a beauty regime:

Here, as elsewhere, Moore's character focusses on superficial alteration rather than on more fundamental change, which links neatly with Tasker and Negra's suggestion that postfeminism “enacts fantasies of regeneration and transformation” that “speak to a desire for change” but without the feminist challenge of sustained social critique.Footnote ¹⁷

Benna also argues, “Graduate school can knock the girl out of you, and, really, sometimes you just need to be a girl” (157). Bizarrely, the need to reestablish girl-ness includes the frivolous drawing of large breasts on a scratch pad, which seems to connote laddish-ness more than girl-ness, but this is set alongside comic sympathy for an imaginary friend, Eleanor, who is going through a potential breakup with her straying boyfriend. When told that the woman with whom he is having an affair works at the telephone company AT&T, Benna replies, “I'm so glad I have MCI” (157); she need take no action as a result of this news.

Similarly, in Moore's story “Community Life,” which is part of the collection Birds of America, published in 1998, Olena, the main character, reads the biography of a French feminist, but only “for the hairdo information,” again engaging only with the surface or appearance of feminism and not its deeper subject.Footnote ¹⁸ Olena is also a librarian who alters her career plans when she discovers that despite wanting to teach English literature, “she failed to warm to the graduate study of it, its french-fried theories – a vocabulary of arson!” Instead, “she'd transferred to library school, where everyone was taught to take care of books, tenderly, as if they were dishes or dolls” (58). Here, Olena accepts a gendered division between the theory and practice of literature, the perceived male destruction of the text and the female soothing and coddling of it within a domestic framework. Whether these “french-fried” theories include écriture feminine is undisclosed, her silence on the subject rendering a feminist reading of theory moot. Perhaps significantly, Olena had, as a child, seen the space of a library as one where “only the boys have to be quiet. She and the librarian could do whatever they wanted” (58). This was due to a literal reading of the sign “PLEASE BE QUIET BOYS AND GIRLS” (58). The lack of a comma offered Olena freedom to be disruptive if she wanted to be and the passage's humour relates to the adult understanding of the prohibition: Olena later recognizes that quietness is implicitly attached to girls, with no need for instruction as such.

Olena takes such silence even further. After her lover betrays her with another woman, Olena seeks release through sleep, the quietest of escapes, and observes, “His car was always parked on the outside of the driveway, and hers was always in first, close, blocked in, as if to indicate who most belonged to the community, to the world, and who most belonged tucked in away from it, in a house” (69). Yet this observation – which relates as much to her ethnicity and status as a second-generation immigrant as it does to her gender – is then abandoned before it can be explored any further. Moore takes her readers to the edge of a realization over gendered behaviour and feminism, but deliberately shies away from pushing the realizations to their ultimate conclusions or to political or politicized action. There is no overt recognition of the power structures that determine “who most belonged,” only a focus on the individual who does not. Olena does not “take back the night”; she folds herself into it.

In “Agnes of Iowa,” also in the same collection, Agnes asserts, “She was a feminist – basically: she shaved her legs, but just not often enough, she liked to say.”Footnote ¹⁹ Again, feminism is presented comically. It is at best associated with the body, though depoliticized: the implied slogan “The personal is political” is reduced to its smallest possible canvas, a woman's unshaven legs. Kavka argues,

By this definition, Agnes is no feminist. When she moves from the Mid-west to New York, Agnes begins to call herself “ON-Yez” in order to intrigue strangers, to manufacture a sense of foreignness as she tries to locate herself within a space that does not yet seem to be hers. She lives “improvisationally,”

Agnes's desire is expressed as foreign, though hardly in attractive terms – the Third World allusion suggesting poverty and despair. It suggests a hierarchy of power relations and associates them not with the exterior world, but with the interior one. Her linking of manicures and plays, the superficial and the cultural, as escapes from her unexamined existence suggests political apathy, not engagement, and it is no surprise that she never leaves the shores of the US (and is indeed destined to return to Iowa, comically pronounced ‘Ohio’ by her New York acquaintances).

In “Terrific Mother” Adrienne travels with her husband to an artistic retreat, but she is not treated as an artist herself, despite her talents. She is, instead, a trailing spouse, who tries to fill her time with yoga and massage. At exercises one morning she speaks with another trailing spouse, Kate, who talks about “rehearsal” marriages and the frustration of training a man only for another feminist to come along and benefit from her hard work. Adrienne argues, “I think there's something wrong with the words feminist and gets the guy being in the same sentence,” to which the only response is, “Yes, well – .”Footnote ²¹ This partial retort is an implicit acknowledgement that the sentence indeed offers a tension in its articulation, a tension that becomes even more apparent when the conversation changes tack. Kate suggests that her feminism has only led to more misery: “I'd insisted on separate finances, on being totally self-supporting. I was working. I was doing the child care. I paid for the house; I cooked; I cleaned. I found myself shouting, ‘This is feminism? Thank you, Gloria and Betty!’” (278). The fact that this example is not feminism is not addressed; instead, the conversation moves on – seamlessly, it appears – to bodily disfigurement. This encapsulates one of Tasker and Negra's concerns, that postfeminism “involves an ‘othering’ of feminism (even as women are more centralized), its construction as extreme, difficult, and unpleasurable”; or, to put it another way, postfeminism “does not always offer a logically coherent account of gender and power.”Footnote ²²

In that same story, a dark narrative of catastrophic loss, Adrienne argues that the phrase “You would make a terrific mother” from which the title is taken had become the “wolf whistle of the nineties” (251). Mother she is not (and therefore not attractive?), an image that recurs for Moore throughout her oeuvre. The theme is particularly stark in her latest novel, A Gate at the Stairs, where an adoptive mother's longing for a child is dismissed as “artificial and touristic … motherhood in a safari suit.”Footnote ²³ Neither “terrific” nor “real” as a mother during the present tense of the book, Sarah Brink, one of the two women around whom the narrative revolves, also embodies a confused feminism. She owns and runs an expensive restaurant but attempts to defer to her husband in other matters (his lack of interest making this deference somewhat ineffective). Initially, Sarah adopts her husband's name, but when re-inventing herself after bereavement, adopts another. In relation to the first reinvention, Sarah admits,

Here, marriage is an escape from having to recognize the provisionality of identity and life – but not a successful one. Indeed, by the end of the novel, even this shaky haven has disintegrated. However, the confusion of Sarah's feminist stances – including choosing her husband over her child on more than one occasion, with disastrous and heartbreaking results – remains. Though Sarah subsequently disappears from the novel (which is primarily the story of her part-time nanny, Tassie), her inability to mother well, and her strident but confused political stances, haunt the text and act as a reminder to Tassie, the young protagonist, that not all life choices are freely made, despite the superficial feminism that seems to guide women's behaviour.

Tassie and Sarah are at very different stages of their lives, but both fictional women identify with and respond to the implied centrality of feminism to their lives, through personal struggles with naming and identity or through metafictional musings on narrative closures. It is not accidental that Tassie, having refused the advances of Sarah's husband, addresses her audience directly as “Reader” in the penultimate line of the book, and offers the final retrospective announcement: “That much I learned in college” (322). The implied “Reader, I married him” resolution is not Tassie's; she, at least, is free to choose a different narrative closure. Moore's multiple narrative threads create a discordant story that pulls in several directions at once, exploring motherhood and how it is performed, politics and the military, and family values (or the value of the family).

Throughout her work, Moore offers a metafictional critique of prevailing narratives, including motherhood. To explore these ideas further, the remainder of the essay will focus primarily on Moore's manipulation of Benna Carpenter, the central figure of Anagrams, who circles in and out of relationships, as well as in and out of identity modes. Kelly argues that Anagrams is “a work of fiction that extends the literary representation of subjective identity and experience.”Footnote ²⁴ Its constant wordplay, and its insistent use of make-believe as a form of escape from “the angst of introspective early-middle-age,”Footnote ²⁵ combine to offer the reader a detailed account of gendered identity construction (and deconstruction).

In the last section of the book, “The Nun of That,” Benna's imaginary friend Eleanor says she would like to write a book “filled with women sitting around having lunch, talking like this – about God and diaphragms and Middlemarch. After every lunch they'd all take out their compacts at the table and reapply their lipstick” (113). That Moore's imaginary character reveals this desire to the real character as they eat lunch shows how cleverly Moore has constructed her commentary on metafictional feminism. That the imagined Eleanor combines the weighty with the superficial speaks to Benna's wavering construction of gendered identity, crossing between feminist concerns (ideology and theology, birth control and the female text) and postfeminist ones (the perfect application of lipstick). Gayle Greene argues that whilst metafiction, in commenting on its own narrative conventions, has been critically linked to male writers, it also offers “a powerful tool of feminist critique.”Footnote ²⁶ Moore's work, which self-consciously explores narrative paths, offers just such a critique, particularly in its exploration of women's potential life choices: staying with or leaving bad husbands or lovers, pursuing or leaving dead-end jobs, or deciding whether or not to become mothers.

Within Anagrams, Moore plays around with words and characters, as well as the reader's trust. The very title, Anagrams, tells the reader a great deal about what to expect: a book of wordplay, where games replace communication, where language is malleable and indeed disfigured. “I love you” becomes “isle of ewe,” a phrase with no meaning whatsoever. Anagrams offers a movement between masquerade (a touchstone of feminist critique) and make-believe (more closely linked to fairy tale and romance), with characters presented as real or fake, or somewhere on a continuum, sometimes aware of their own mimicry and at other times taken in by their own machinations. Moore's narratives self-consciously refer back to each other in a loop of meaning that re-presents situations and characters from new and sometimes bizarre angles. Throughout, Moore also plays around with feminism and postfeminism, as her characters explore the limits of political stances when set alongside (or against) personal desires.

Moore's choice of the short-story cycle to tell the stories of Benna Carpenter is formally appropriate, according to Karen Weekes, who argues that the “malleable genre of the cycle has … increasingly come to reflect a dramatic fracturing of the self.”Footnote ²⁷ Most critics see Anagrams as a series of four short stories followed by a novella. In the introduction to The Collected Stories, however, which was published in 2008, Moore complicates this reading by not only including the stories of Anagrams, but also calling them part of her “first novel, a novel that took as its form a novella not included here and four stories that are. If one is digging and collecting, one might as well scoop it all up.”Footnote ²⁸ Moore has it both ways here, and perhaps it is appropriate that she calls the collection both a novel and a series of stories, both includes it in her collected work and excises part of it, because the cycle follows not one Benna Carpenter, but several versions of her, as well as versions of her friends Gerard and Eleanor. In one story, “Yard Sale,” they even compete against each other, the threesome of their relationship under threat. Repeatedly, Benna notes, “It's two against one out here; we just keep taking turns” (43). In many respects, Anagrams provides an even better example of Chodat's question about Moore's humour than the short story he focusses on in his own essay, since Anagrams explicitly engages with the question “whether the failures of contemporary life can be ignored by telling alternative stories about it.”Footnote ²⁹

Within Anagrams, Benna plays around with narrative and words in order to construct a life which is closer to her fantasy of how life should be; in offering several versions of her relationships with others, including a make-believe child, Benna escapes from a fixed gender identity. Truth is endlessly deferred, and endlessly created, and the self-conscious performance of femininity (through masquerade, amongst other things) offers up avenues of escape from fixed locations. Peter Brooks reminds us,

Consider, therefore, the repetition of references to children in the collection and the feminist implications of their presence or absence. In the first story, “Escape from the Invasion of the Love-Killers,” Benna is a widow who does not want children. She actually argues, “Once you've seen a child born you realize a baby's not much more than a reconstituted ham and cheese sandwich. Just a little anagram of you and what you've been eating for nine months” (6–7). In consuming what the mother consumes, the child here is little more than a parasite, the mother no more than a host. This is in stark contrast to the view of her friend and neighbour, Gerard, who teaches aerobics to children, and is “convinced that it was only through children that one could connect with anything anymore, that in this life it was only through children that one came home, became a home, that one was no longer a visitor” (6). It is of course significant that Moore creates a situation where Gerard and not Benna links home and family, unsettling as this does the preconceived sense that women and not men long for familial attachment. In this version of her life, Benna is a cynical nightclub singer who deliberately resists intimacy of any kind; as if to reinforce this, the whole story is told in the third person.

Their roles subsequently reverse in the second story, “Strings Too Short to Use,” as Gerard transforms into a nightclub piano player, and as Benna becomes an aerobics instructor, though she works with senior citizens rather than children. During a breast examination, Benna is told by a nurse-practitioner that having children can prevent “Career Women's Diseases”; in this story, pregnancy could, quite literally, save Benna's life. The reader encounters an entirely different Gerard, although the setup is the same: neighbours. However, Benna and Gerard are also partially cohabiting and their refusal to commit fully to one space is telling. Gerard betrays Benna by having a relationship with Eleanor, who in this story is still a real character herself. Despite her breast lump and the warning from the nurse, Benna has an abortion, but even that short pregnancy does, it appears, relieve her of the cancer. Benna exercises choice, but she does not politicize the issue.

In the third story, children are absent – or rather replaced by a pet, a dog who is part of a tug of war between Gerard and Benna as they (again) split up. Benna is also being left by her friend Eleanor, who is married in this version of her life. If there is a child in the story, it is Benna herself, who resists her mother's attempts to assert connection. When her mother says to Benna, “Not every woman thinks like you and I do. Some just want to settle down,” Benna notes, “This yoking of mother and daughter was something she'd taken to doing of late – arbitrarily, without paying attention” (43). She resists the “my mother/myself” intimacy that is asserted here. Certainly this Benna desires connection with men, and wants to settle down, and the mother of the story, who presumably did do just that, offers resistance to that particular narrative closure.

In the following story, “Water,” Benna finds that having no dependants means that she ends up having too much taken out of her pay cheque. At best, then, children are a tax break. Benna is a well-known, if young, scholar of art history, and has the benefit of a teaching assistant: Gerard. In this version of her life, where she has moved to California on her own, Benna notes that her friend Eleanor almost seems make-believe, “more imagined than real” (57), a plot element that takes on greater resonance in the last story, when Eleanor is indeed entirely made-up. Benna is also dissatisfied with her life, a fact that Gerard cannot understand, given that she has what he wants: the traditional signs of success in job security, a career track and peer notice. Benna specializes in Mary Cassatt, and a certain parallelism is suggested when she reviews her lecture notes: “the old familiar notes about the childless Mary Cassatt giving herself babies with paint; the expatriate Mary Cassatt, weary and travelling, dreaming homes for herself in her work; woman Mary Cassatt, who believed herself no woman at all” (58). Benna is alone, and lonely, awaiting change that does not come. She is shocked to discover that Gerard, in many ways her subordinate, has what she might term a real life, including a spouse and a child. Her reaction, “Perhaps he is imagining it. Perhaps he has only an imaginary daughter” (59), sets the reader up for the final story, in which Benna herself imagines a child, Georgianne, as well as her friend Eleanor. The story also explores, if obliquely, the “choices” of career versus family, and who has the right to expect both, and who is likely to achieve only one.

“The Nun of That” is the longest “story,” and the only one that is divided into parts. It is stylistically more complex than the stories that come before it, and engages the reader with the idea and artifice of make-believe from its very beginning. It also deals more firmly with the consequences of gendered identity that are only hinted at, or skated over, in the former stories.

The reader knows, for example, from the first few pages that Benna has an imaginary daughter and an imaginary friend. But how far does this imagination go? Is Mrs. Kimball, Georgianne's babysitter, real or not? How real is Darrel, her student lover? When she questions herself about him, it raises our suspicions: “Why is it that I can't quite describe or picture Darrel? I close my eyes for two seconds and try. Is it that I'm not paying attention?” (124). Or is it, in fact, that she has conjured him up to fill a need within her, even as he complicates her life through jeopardizing her position at the college, her friendship with Gerard, and her own sense of racial relations, given that she is a white woman and he is an African American Vietnam vet?

And, most significantly, this is a section where the narration moves between the first and the third person. Almost every time Benna's profession is referenced, as “the teacher,” the stories move to the distant third person. Here, the profession and the person are disconnected – the profession is a masquerade, reflecting perhaps the academic impostor syndrome whereby one feels that one will be unmasked by the students before them, but also a sense of artifice closely associated with femininity. The following passage is telling: “as some sort of inexplicable dread filled her like ink, all she could think was that she would rather be someone, anyone, else” (215). The ink of the metaphor is a reminder of her profession, but this Benna is not the successful art historian of “Water.” Rather, in this version, Benna works as an adjunct lecturer at a community college and has not finished her PhD dissertation. She is in transition, and in waiting; the sardonic comment Benna makes in “Water” seems more relevant here: “You can lead a life to water, but you can't make it drink” (55). She has been given responsibility for three sections of the same introductory course, “The Reading and Writing of Poetry,” and teaches them all differently. She is aware that she “had never been able to organize her courses well” (197). Benna also self-consciously separates herself from her profession through the use of the distancing second person: “You camouflage yourself as imperious teacher, as imperious lover, as imperious bitch, simply to hang out and survive” (194).

Even when she takes up first-person narration, Benna appears unsure of herself and her role. In marking the essays and poems she has assigned, she notes, “I try to find things to cross out or circle, so I can feel like a teacher, someone who knows things” (121). More bizarrely, perhaps, she imagines that “there are really only a hundred people in the whole world and they all have secret jobs as other people, rushing to airports, switching outfits, chowing down small, packaged fruit pies in taxicabs … I wonder who else is me” (65–66). Maintaining provisionality, she must imagine herself into existence, and perform a role that feels foreign to her: teacher, friend, mother (and lover?).

Such tactics scream escape and longing, and these facets become even more pronounced in relation to her home life, where her daughter intensely consumes her time. In creating an imaginary child, as Weekes notes, Benna “escapes the pain and difficulties of motherhood but savors the intimacy with and dependence of her child.”Footnote ³¹ They play together, eat together, and discuss school and travel plans. Georgie even has her own babysitter, for when Benna wants to go out, either with Gerard or with Darrel. Her imaginative landscape thus includes constraints of time and place, attenuating Weekes's point above. In a particularly surreal moment, Benna goes shopping with Georgianne for school clothes. While the sales assistant shows Georgie a dress that is clearly too old for her, Georgie chooses a dress that is too young. It is also covered in little peach-colored babies (73). The imagery is intense and disturbing and suggests a recycling of desire, a repetition gone too far. Thus whilst Weekes argues that Benna has the pleasures of motherhood without the pain, it is also true that Georgie ends up out of Benna's control, vandalizing her print of Renoir's Madame Charpentier and acting naughty on other occasions. Georgie even temporarily disappears, as does Eleanor, once Benna accidentally outs herself as a fantasist to Gerard when he is in hospital, and admits to her constructions. There is a delicious moment where Benna discloses that Eleanor is “a very heavily made-up woman. Heavily, heavily made-up” (202), a pun both Gerard and Benna enjoy.

Whilst Eleanor stays missing, Georgie is, finally, resurrected after the death of Gerard and the loss of Benna's job, the only other anchors she has. Benna acknowledges that her make-believe child is “a gift I have given myself, a lozenge of pretend” (225). It is this final truth underneath the artifice that perhaps leads Kelly to suggest that “Moore's focus on Benna's most intimate yearnings – for lasting love, for children – brings Benna alive as a credible character even though she is also very conspicuously an artful construct, repeatedly fabricated.”Footnote ³² Moore herself argues that Anagrams enacts

The mutual exclusivity of these lives offers a way of exploring the overlaps between feminism and postfeminism, between expecting to have it all and being told you have to choose, between embodying a political feminism or paying lip(stick) service to it. Benna refuses to choose, or chooses poorly. She starts again, even when it seems she has no alternative lives left to explore.

It is perhaps for this skill that Moore should be more highly rated: her ability to meld a postmodern experimentation with a gendered sense of identity, a way of focussing on the fragmented self not just as a reaction against the constraints of a realist narrative, but as an opportunity to explore multiplicity and artistic agency. Joanne Frye suggests, “If the narrating ‘I’ is herself examining and rejecting cultural interpretations of her life experience, her own re-emplotment then becomes a double subversion.”Footnote ³⁴ Benna herself argues, “This is why a woman makes things up: Because when she dies, those lives she never got to are all going down with her” (225, italics in original). Benna could be standing in for the author herself, the creator of other women's lives (and loves). Repetition and revision allow Moore to analyse female agency from a multitude of perspectives, with a humorous yet serious eye on feminism, postfeminism, and the negotiations between them.

As Kelly reminds us, “one of the meanings of the Greek word ‘anagram’ is ‘writing anew’”Footnote ³⁵ and this is what both Benna – and Lorrie Moore – are able to do, without promising any conclusions or better endings, neither promising a feminist commitment to social action nor resting solely on a postfeminist reduction to ironic aestheticism. After all, our final vision of Benna is in transit, accompanied by her imaginary daughter. She is on a journey out of the country, but she has not yet left. Mary Hawkesworth suggests that “all versions of feminism confront an unfinished agenda and continue to struggle to achieve increasingly elusive goals”; feminism is “never fixed or static … never a finished project.”Footnote ³⁶ Such a statement could also be made about Moore's work, in its deliberate ambivalence, its bifocal (or even cubist) view of women's lives.

According to Tasker and Negra, postfeminism is “provocative” in that it is both “troubling” and “compelling”Footnote ³⁷ and this, too, could as easily be said of Moore's work: it offers up a comic exploration of the pain of womanhood, motherhood, feminism and postfeminism, addressing all of these aspects but settling on none. Her characters, like the title character in “Agnes of Iowa,” live, as noted above, “improvisationally” (79) and desire makeovers (or, “do-overs,” as Benna attempts). They drift ineffectually at times, including Tassie in A Gate at the Stairs. They employ masquerade, enacting versions of happy families, including in “Charades,” where Therese's family avoid genuine interaction and utilize wordplay to keep distance: “everyone aims instead – though gamely! – for enactments.”Footnote ³⁸ In this story, the grown-up children ignore their father's pain and pretend to forget that their mother was “a frustrated, mean mother”Footnote ³⁹ in order to carry on being a happy family, in order to avoid the confrontation that will finally and firmly tear the fantasy apart.

Moore's latest novel reveals how destructive the desire for motherhood can be, how real the consequences of bad mothering are. In A Gate at the Stairs, bad mothering results in the death of one child, the abandonment of another, and disorder. If Benna remains always beloved in the cocoon of fake motherhood, Sarah Brink from A Gate at the Stairs does not. This novel, like Moore's others, uses humour but also pathos, as well as a self-conscious metafictionality. Near the end of the novel, Tassie reflects,

Moore's comedic voice signals not the end of her work but the beginning of its critical afterlife. If there is “only one valid theme in literature” (63), Moore has admirably captured the angst attached to narrative disappointment, the desire for replication and reinvention, if not a shifting of responsibility, and the problematic landscape of both feminism and postfeminism for her mature and maturing women characters.