Women’s independence and the choice of solitude

Women’s independence and the choice of solitude are embodied most clearly in Jenny Fields, whose refusal to organize her life around men makes her an object of suspicion but also gives her a language for self-determination. Her choice is not simply to avoid relationships: she wants meaningful work, a life of her own, and eventually a child, while resisting the assumption that any of these desires makes marriage or sexual availability obligatory. Through her nursing, her estrangement from her family, and her encouragement of mothers living apart from husbands, the novel tests what independence costs—and who has the authority to define it.

Education, Work, and a Life of Her Own

Jenny’s early decisions arise from her perception that the opportunities offered to women can conceal a prescribed destination. Her parents sent her to Wellesley, but she suspected that the purpose was less to give her an education than to prepare her to meet and marry a socially acceptable man. She regarded the arrangement as a kind of waiting period before marriage, rather than as a chance to shape a life according to her own interests.

She had declared English literature as her major, but left college for nursing when she saw her classmates chiefly cultivating the poise and sophistication they would need in dealing with men. Nursing seemed more directly useful: it led to work she could actually do, without the ulterior purpose she associated with her college education. She completed her nursing program at the head of her class and enjoyed the profession. The contrast is important: Jenny does not reject learning or labor; she rejects the idea that a woman’s education should be valued mainly for its usefulness in attracting a husband.

The practical details of her working life reinforce her independence. Jenny liked nursing’s simple uniform and comfortable shoes, and the night desk left her time to read. She preferred the frankness of working boys and soldiers to the social maneuvering she had encountered among college men. But as wartime life made everyone seem to her newly self-important, she stopped having anything to do with men. Her distance from them grows out of a judgment about the terms on which women are expected to relate to them, not from an inability to work, read, or care for others.

Family Expectations and Estrangement

Jenny’s independence also puts her at odds with her family. Her mother interpreted her departure from Wellesley as evidence of a disreputable future, while the family’s gifts could carry the pressure of that assumption: her father repeatedly supplied nursing shoes, and her mother gave her unopened packages she described as hot-water bottles. Jenny kept the packages in her small room near Boston Mercy Hospital, alongside boxes of shoes she had not opened. The objects register care, but also the family’s inability to understand the life she has chosen.

She experiences the family’s emotional pattern as a movement from childhood affection to adult expectation. In her view, children are first given love and then, at some appointed point, expected to fulfill obligations. By leaving Wellesley for nursing, Jenny breaks that pattern; she and her family gradually become uncomfortable with one another, as if they are learning to unknow each other. Her independence therefore has a relational cost: she does not merely live separately but becomes estranged from the family whose idea of her future she has rejected.

That experience shapes Jenny’s own idea of parenthood. She believes she would love a child just as much at twenty as at two, and suggests that older children may need a parent more, not less. Her view runs against the family pattern she has observed, in which affection seems to give way to demands as a child grows. The possibility of having children does not lead her to abandon her independent life; instead, it intensifies her conviction that care should not expire when a child ceases to be small.

Solitude, Motherhood, and Social Suspicion

Jenny’s desire to live alone coexists with a desire for a child. At Boston Mercy Hospital, she sees people who are distressed by pregnancy and thinks they should not be forced to have babies; she also sees people who want their children, and their desire awakens her own. She imagines wanting one child while having as little as possible to do with a man. The combination unsettles the conventional pairing of motherhood with marriage and makes clear that her wish for a family does not entail a wish to share her body or life with a male partner.

During the war, Jenny stays at the hospital while many nurses leave because she wants to care for mothers and babies. Many of the mothers have husbands who are away, dead, or missing. Jenny sees their situation as a possible ideal: a woman and her new baby, with a life ahead of them and no husband’s continuing presence. She encourages mothers to regard themselves as good women and, sometimes, to see solitude as an advantage. Yet the novel preserves a difference between Jenny’s ideal and their circumstances: some mothers grieve, feel abandoned, resent their children, or want a husband and father for them. Her advocacy makes solitude imaginable, but it does not make every woman’s experience of it the same.

The hospital disapproves of her encouragement of unwed mothers, and Jenny’s reputation suffers. Other nurses mock her as someone who wants a child without taking the conventional route. Their response shows how readily a woman’s desire for privacy, work, and motherhood is recast as evidence of sexual impropriety. Jenny names that contradiction in her autobiography: wanting a job and a life alone makes her suspect, and wanting a baby without sharing her body or life with a man makes her suspect again. The stigma does not arise because she has failed to state what she wants; it arises because her wants do not fit the categories available to judge her.

Autonomy, Gender Conflict, and the Novel’s Argument

The novel places Jenny’s private decisions within a wider polarization between men and women. Its violence runs in both directions: Jenny is killed by a man who hates women, while her son, T. S. Garp, is killed by a woman who hates men. Jenny herself becomes a target of antifeminist hatred, while Garp becomes a target of radical feminists. The pattern complicates any account of independence as a solution that can simply end conflict. A woman’s refusal of prescribed roles may expose the force of those roles, yet the resulting antagonism can turn into violence against both women and men.

Jenny’s account of being treated as a sexual suspect also gives the novel its clearest statement of the social bind. A woman who wants neither a husband nor the identity of a sexual outsider is pressured to believe that something is wrong with her. Jenny counters that judgment through the plainness of her choices: she wants to work, live alone, and have a child. In this sense, solitude is not a failure to enter adult life but one possible form of it, and motherhood need not erase the woman who becomes a mother.

Jenny’s influence reaches beyond her own biography because she has learned that shocking other people can win more respect than quietly trying to live with privacy. That discovery is at once a strategy and an indictment: the need to shock reveals how little room the surrounding culture grants a woman whose life does not conform. The novel does not make solitude a universal prescription, and the mothers Jenny encourages do not all share her view. Instead, it insists that a woman’s desire for work, privacy, or a child cannot by itself establish that she is defective. Jenny’s independence matters because she claims the right to define those desires for herself, even when family, colleagues, and a gender-polarized public interpret them as provocation.