Carolyn Chute’s The Beans of Egypt, Maine tells the story of a rural working-class community crumbling apart as big industry and corporate incursions leave its people having to survive by making money instead of supporting each other through farming, barter, and shared work.
While many working-class novels feature a central character whom the reader is supposed to root for as she or he climbs out and away from the home community, this novel focuses on the community that is left. Their world becomes a smaller, ghostly place as their land is eaten up and turned into suburbs, strip malls, highways, and prisons. Those who had lived modestly and in the traditional ways of rural American culture find themselves pushed to subsistence living, depression, and desperation.
Where once farming life made a big family a desirable and respected foundation for the community, now these large families have fathers and sons in jail or in dangerous, low-paying jobs where a lack of affordable health care drives them deeper into debt and frustration.
The men in the story, particularly Reuben Bean and his nephew, try to live according to models of masculinity that are dated and increasingly considered outlaw—working hard, drinking hard, ruling the roost, and creating a large family to carry on one’s name. Middle-class culture has not bothered to offer them the niceties or the leisure to “uplift” themselves to particular sets of manners and customs, like having a nice lawn in front of an immaculate house, and so they are seen by the middle class as barbarians who must be dismissed as human beings and corralled to be working machines, since that is all they are deemed good for.
The working-class men in the novel end up dead or caged, leaving the women finding either no work, with the shame of welfare and food stamps, or grueling factory work that affords a living standard less healthy than that with government assistance.
The novel embodies the impossibility of the happy melding of the classes in the thwarted romance of Roberta Bean, a poor mother of many, and March Goodspeed, a realtor who is snapping up the lands to increase his own wealth. Unlike many working-class protagonists, Roberta Bean does not want any of the middle-class trappings of success; therefore, her relationship with middle-class March Goodspeed never really gets going.
No middle-class person would want to be Roberta, even though she is independent and full of integrity. Roberta supports herself and her children by dint of her own resourcefulness and determination. She is capable with cars and people. She is compassionate but does not let herself be taken advantage of. Roberta is no tragic figure, but in a just world her virtues would entitle her to much, much more than she has in terms of respect and material things:
Across the road, the tall woman, Roberta Bean, is dressed in a man’s ribbed undershirt and green wool pants. She is circling a piece of bare ground with an axe, her babies in yellow raincoats. The babies ornament her ankles, dangle from her pant legs. Thwank! Thwank! Thwank! Her axe beats upon the chopping block. . . . Out of the openings of the undershirt, Roberta Bean’s assiduous, straining, bony neck and scarry long arms work the axe on the stringy wood. Faster. Faster. Now and then one of her dark eyes turns onto the Lincoln Continental. . . . The tall woman moves all over the Lincoln’s rearview mirror as a prizefighter moves around the ring. The white wood is spewed into the pile . . . faster, faster. Her back is to March now. She seems to ignore him. (94–95)
In this depiction of Roberta, we see her as a middle-class man, March Goodspeed, sees her. She is strong, capable, in control. Her children love and admire her unquestionably, and she is not anxious about her motherhood, nor beleaguered by it. She goes on to help March jump-start his car (much to his embarrassment and pleasure). Initially, he thinks she will go to get men to help him, and he is mortified by this, but Roberta does it herself with her truck.
March’s own wife is enfeebled by paraplegia, so to him, Roberta’s strength and competence are a revelation—he soon finds himself enamored of her. March’s perspective allows the reader to see how transcendent Roberta’s self-possession is: she is not just strong and capable for a woman or a poor person—she is impressive to people who have much greater means at their disposal.
March Goodspeed would have her for a mistress, but he fundamentally misunderstands her. In a very funny passage where Roberta anonymously leaves him her own brand of love token on his home’s doorknob—a plastic bag of rabbit meat she killed and cleaned herself—he perceives it as a threat from the hostile locals who resent his move to town.
For a person like March, meat comes in tidy plastic-covered styrofoam squares, and is just something to pick up at the megamarket. From Roberta, rabbit meat is a gift out of her limited resources: labor and food. It almost literally comes out of the mouths of her children. But it is a true generous gift, not a groveling, pitiful offering. Roberta, again taking over a manlike role, is a provider in a real sense, where March only has income:
She tapes a note to March Goodspeed’s front door . . . a childlike scrawl: WELCOME TO EGYPT HERES A LITTLE PRESENT. Then she ties the bag of bunnies to the doorknob. She is silent out there in the fog, careful not to scuff against the hot top so she won’t wake the man who wears the shiny shoes, her consideration bordering on love. Then she strides away. (100)
The vast gulf between Roberta and March ensures that they can never really have a relationship that more than “border[s] on love.” What Roberta does out of her capabilities is perceived unintentionally by March as a threat—he does not deal with the death that comes with eating meat in his middle-class life.
To his credit, he tries to express his love in kind: he shows up at her house regularly with edible treats for the kids. But Roberta does not simper after his interest. She remains aloof and in control. She does not let her heart destroy her with alliances that are a bad idea. To some readers March may seem Roberta’s ticket out—a financial and romantic solution to her problems—but Chute understands that Roberta’s self-control and integrity are all she has to take care of herself in the world, and she won’t sacrifice them for expediency.
March fades away from Roberta, goes back to his new house on the newly developed land without a murmur. But around them, the consuming class wants what Roberta has for their own uses, and there will be no simple walking away if the working class refuses corporate encroachment.
Source
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Chute, Carolyn. The Beans of Egypt, Maine. New York: Warner Books, 1985.
Categories: Literature, Novel Analysis
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