Mrs. Bridge

Mrs. Bridge is the debut novel of American author Evan S. Connell, first published in 1959. In 117 brief episodes, it tells the story of an upper middle-class, bourgeois family in Kansas City in the period between the First and Second World War, mostly from the perspective of the mother, the Mrs. Bridge of the title. Mrs. Bridge and her family are forced to deal with the changing habits and morality of the America of that time, especially in the areas of civil rights and gender equality. The book was followed in 1969 by Mr. Bridge. The two were adapted for the screen and were released as Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990).

Evan Connell has said the character of India Bridge is based on his mother. His mother was an eccentric woman name Ruth, however she preferred to be called "Elton". He said his mother was dying of cancer at the time the book was published in 1959, and she never read the book. Connell, like the family in the story, grew up in Kansas City.

The titular character, India Bridge, is a wife and mother of three, of a well-to-do middle-class family in Kansas City. Her husband, Walter, is a lawyer who spends most of his time at the office. Mrs. Bridge's life revolves around her children and much of it plays out in the home and in and around the country club, in a social environment whose primary values are "unity, sameness, consensus, centeredness". Her fears and anxieties are revealed through her actions rather than spelled out; one moment of "inarticulate rage," as one reviewer called it, occurs when her son uses one of the guest towels: "'These towels are for guests,' said Mrs. Bridge, and felt herself unaccountably on the verge of tears". She is particularly though vaguely disturbed by "her son's penchant for coming into the house through the 'servants' entrance' rather than through the front door", since it forces her into thinking about class. Though the 117 vignettes are chronologically organized, from the 1920s to the early 1940s, there is not much in the way of plot, consistent with Mrs. Bridge's life in which nothing dramatic seems to happen, and her first name, "India", is indicative of the elusiveness of life and excitement: "It seemed to her that her parents must have been thinking of someone else when they named her".

As the novel progresses it becomes clear that the elusiveness of the excitement that could be associated with her first name is symptomatic, and Mrs. Bridge goes from one almost-realization to the next. Her almost-realization of class difference occurs when she is struck, in a bookshop, by a book called Theory of the Leisure Class (a social critique of conspicuous consumption), a book she skims through and is disquieted by. One of her friends, Gracie, asks her if she also feels sometimes as if she is "all hollowed out in the back", a question Mrs. Bridge remembers only when she hears that her friend has killed herself.

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