Sex and Violence in This Woman

After the success of Christ in Concrete in 1939, di Donato cared about other things, rather than writing and publishing more of his fiction.  He toured the country in support of Christ in Concrete, worked in a camp for conscientious objectors during World War II, had himself a family, and started his own construction business.  It was not until nineteen years later, in 1958, that di Donato published another novel.  It was called This Woman, and it was criticized widely for its lack of substance.  Critics felt that di Donato did not live up to the reputation he created for himself with the success of Christ in Concrete. 
Even recently, This Woman has been called “at best, simply a collection of di Donato’s sexual exploits and fantasies” (Esposito 182).  Certainly, This Woman does not reach the coherency of plot nor the beauty of the language he achieved in Christ in Concrete.  Yet, as a work on its own, This Woman was a very experimental and sexually vulgar piece for its time, one that might have shocked readers and turned them away despite its often poetic prose.
In contrast to the plot of Christ in Concrete, This Woman is about Paul’s sexual obsessions and jealousies as an older, married man.  Because it carries the same intimacy of Christ in Concrete, but tells a much more forbidden story for its time, This Woman was virtually condemned.
Like Christ in Concrete, This Woman enters into the characters’ minds with ease.  Di Donato wanted the reader to know what these characters were thinking.  He often slips into the first-person narrative from the third-person omniscient narration, as he did in Christ in Concrete, happening mostly with Paul, but also occurring quite frequently with Paul’s wife, Isa.  We are granted access to Isa’s psyche in one particular scene, wherein she thinks about Paul while also reminiscing about her dead husband Jack:
     She purred and giggled.  The same bed but different.  Didn’t think I’d feel it under me again.  It’s fun doing it here.  This guy’s good.  Don’t care who knows it.  I wonder if Jacky’s all right, my little angel, well, mother is with her, nothing to worry about.  My insurance check should be in the mail, wish I had made Jack take out a bigger policy.  “Oh sweetheart how I’ve been needing you.  You’ll murder me you darling son-of-a-bitch.  Don’t stop.  I love it, I love it.”  Only Jacky matters to me, and it’ll be many years before she knows what it’s all about.  I love that baby.  She’s mine, all mine.  I’ll give her the best.  Mother’ll guess what’s going on.  I’ll buy her a new dress.  She’s never been able to stop me from doing what I please.  “Paolo boy, you know your stuff.  You kill me.  This is the way I want to die.”  This guy’ll slaughter me before the night’s over.  Goodie, goodie, he fits beautifully (Woman 18).
Notice how di Donato also mixes in what Isa is saying with what she is thinking, thus allowing the reader to see her on the outside as well as the inside.  She lies, telling Paul that she needs him while all she can think about is her dead husband Jack and his insurance policy.  By initializing the novel in a third-person omniscient narration, di Donato possessed the freedom to move in and out of every character’s head.  With Three Circles of Light, di Donato limits himself by narrating in the first-person in the form of Paul.  In Christ in Concrete and This Woman, he allows himself much more narrative freedom.
Even when di Donato is narrating in the third-person, he is still getting inside his characters’ psyches, such as when Paul recollects his father’s death, his own affair as a child with an older woman, and the religious consequences involved:
That was the Spring his father was killed in a construction accident.  His father’s death was the destroying of his Paradise.  The Christian God vanquished the pagan God.  Imagination wavered.  In him the sense of sin and fear were born.  His father’s death was the wages of sin.  His father had been unfaithful to his mother.  Stella had betrayed her husband.  He had taken Stella’s lust to his lips and had sinned against God and his mother.  He had been cursed.  His father had lain with his godmother Diane Dunn.  Her baptism of him was the original curse.  That was long ago.  And since his many years he had easily had eager lust from married women (Woman 39).
Even though di Donato narrates in the third-person, the reader still has a clear sense of what Paul is thinking.  His thoughts are printed directly on the page, but are simply put there by di Donato in the third-person.  The intimacy involved with This Woman in terms of the connection and identification of the reader to the characters of the novel, often rivals that of Christ in Concrete.  We know how the characters in This Woman are thinking, feeling, and acting.  This makes the novel much more absorbing and intriguing for the reader.  So, then, why was This Woman deemed a failure, while Christ in Concrete was hailed as a success?  There are two key explanations for these results. 
First, This Woman does not have a central plot on which to base the characters’ feelings and emotions.  We know exactly how Paul and Isa are feeling throughout the novel, but we have difficulty discovering a meaning for these thoughts, as the plot has no strong foundation.  In This Woman,  Paul meets Isa, and eventually they marry and Paul works out his sexual jealousies.  Although this may seem like a decent plot foundation,  di Donato does not spend enough time writing about what happens, and too often spends many pages inside the characters’ minds.  The result leaves the reader lost in the characters’ emotions, which easily becomes tiresome.  In the corpus of di Donato’s fiction and especially his development of Paul throughout, This Woman plays an important part in Paul’s sexual development and resolution.  Standing as a novel on its own, however, with both strong characters and a strong plot,  This Woman frequently wanders away from its plot.  As in Three Circles of Light, This Woman needs a more concrete plot before it can be considered as strong a novel as Christ in Concrete.
Second, the sexually vulgar material of This Woman’s prose was too much for its time and was probably rejected by many of its reviewers. The following passage is an example of both di Donato’s use of powerful prose, and his use of sexually explicit material.  It is again a jump for di Donato from third-person omniscient narrator to first-person in the voice of Isa:
     —That devil has taken everything out of me, legs feel wooden, water in the knees, arms want to fall off, joints won’t hold together, feel beat-up, came with the kitchen sink.  What hit me?  Get his number and call the cops.  My guts ache, my gadgets hurt—the first orgasm at thirty!  The bastard is wonderful, sends me—where’s he been all my life?  The others felt like finger-jobs, bananas and candles, this boy has the magic key—and that tongue!  Hope ma didn’t see how far up his teeth marks go.  People on the beach will notice.  Fangs like a tiger, eat me if I let him.  One more bout and I’d give up the ghost.  Never seems to tire, born for it, restless—mad, bad, curious.  Bangs me, comes back in no time—more-more—terrific, got what the doctor ordered, puts me through the wringer, makes me die happy, sonofabitch with the stormy eyes (Woman 55).
Although this form of sexually explicit prose may not seem too drastic today, it certainly was at the time of publication in 1958.  These candid passages about his sexual encounters probably hurt di Donato as an author and This Woman as a novel.  However, on the literary level, these sexual portions were simply expressed as truthfully and as vulgarly as they were in action, and as di Donato wanted them to be expressed.  He simply wanted to describe the sexual tensions and desires between Paul and Isa, and he did so with unambiguous prose. 
This style would not be that bad, if it were not accompanied by violence.  Paul is clearly an abusive, almost sadistic, husband, and yet the reader is expected to sympathize with him as well as Isa.  During sex, Paul often beats Isa, slapping and punching her in the face and bringing forth blood.  The most extreme example of this sexual violence in This Woman comes near the end of the novel, when Paul becomes so jealous of Isa’s dead husband that he takes her to his grave, digs him up, and tramples on him.  During this entire time, he is obsessed with the idea of Isa and Jack in a happy marriage, and his sexual rage overcomes him:
He clove and splintered the polished coffin.  Without pausing he hacked into the veneer and white silk lining, smashing apart the lid.  In the uncertain darkness he kicked aside the debris from the corpse [. . .].
In the sepulchral shadows he became aware of the dead man’s face between his feet; the very first instant of Isa’s and [Jack] Tromm’s eyes meeting, the smiling and agreeing, the possibling and why-the-hell-notting [. . .] and the oh-ing and ah-ing [. . .] and kissing and smoothing over genitals and the positioning and first entering and fitting and pushing and pulling and sumping and squishing eggwhite squirting [. . .].
He slashed the aproned funeral suit from the corpse.  The blued-black-white body was revealed; large, heavy spread, shapeless; the clerk’s hands with spatulate fingernails, the lardlike nonathletic limbs resembling the snaps of him in bathing trunks on a beach with Isa; the undersized privates receded (Woman 189-193).
The ruthlessness of the event—Paul digging up Jack’s dead body—combined with Paul’s sexual jealousies and imaginings of Isa and Jack copulating, come together to form a passage which not only causes the reader to cringe, but which can easily be considered revolting, especially for its time.  Di Donato can certainly write, and much of this passage—gruesome or not—works poetically.
The content, however, should not take anything away from its writing style, and critics of di Donato claim that he did exactly that.  In This Woman, di Donato uses the long, flowing sentences, the stream-of-consciousness, and many different techniques to convey his desired message.  He wants the reader as involved in This Woman as the characters themselves are.  This is why he refuses to omit such sexually explicit material.  It would subtract from the truth and emotion the novel contains, and which in turn led to the unfortunate harsh criticism this novel received.