Vinegar Girl - Anne Tyler

Summary Kate, a woman with a blunt and straightforward, but not necessarily unpleasant personality, lives with her scientist father and fifteen year old sister, Bunny. Her father presents her with a request: that she marry his lab assistant, Pyotr, so that he can obtain a green card and thus remain in the U.S. and continue to be her father’s lab assistant. For some reason, she agrees to this and in the background her younger sister tries to date their neighbor, who is much too old for her.

Where does it come from? Vinegar Girl is based on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. I needed to re-read the play in order to remember the plot, as I hadn’t read it since I was in junior high school. Will’s play is about a man, Batista, with two daughters. The eldest, Katherine, is a “scold” or a “shrew,” that is, she speaks her own mind and is seen as disagreeable and undesirable for marriage, while the younger, Bianca, is sweet and obedient. Batista declares that Bianca, who has numerous suitors, cannot marry until her older sister has married. Enter Petruchio, who wishes to marry Katherine and “tame” her. He woos her by means of simply declaring her to be in love with him, then sets about with the taming. Bianca’s various suitors adopt various disguises and deceptions to woo her as well. (Shakespeare is big on disguises, deceptions, and mistaken identities, but this play is really exceptional in that regard, to the point where following who is really who can get confusing.)

What does it retain? Tyler keeps many of the play’s plot points and characters, altering them for a more modern setting. Of course, fathers don’t marry off their daughters nowadays, or set them up with dowries, or even really have much say in their daughters’ love lives at all, so the green card set-up is a clever way of keeping the marriage idea centered around the father character. There were lots of other little nods to the play. Both Bianca’s and Bunny’s wooing involved tutoring. Both Petruchio and Pyotr have wedding wardrobe issues. And there’s a somewhat controversial Katherine/Kate speech at the end of both the play and the novel. These things, among others, are parallels that I find pleasing in a retelling and I can’t say I didn’t enjoy them. However, well… I’ll leave that for the sections below.

What new things does it bring? Unfortunately, beyond making Shakespeare a bit more accessible for modern audiences, I’m not sure this retelling brings much else to the story. The updated setting, language, and plot make for an acceptable door into the world of William Shakespeare. It helps that the book is published under the label of Hogarth Shakespeare; if you read it, you’re well aware that you’re reading an adaptation of a Shakespeare play. So, if you like it, it might lead to looking into other retellings or exploring the original play, which is a good thing.

Is it worth it? Meh. Tyler had an opportunity here to give Kate some more agency in her own life than what Katherine had in The Taming of the Shrew, and in my opinion, she fell pretty short on that count. That said, even though the original play seems to be pretty straightforwardly misogynistic (as would be expected for the time period), Katherine’s “taming” may not be as simple as it looks. As Emma Smith, a professor of Shakespeare Studies at Oxford University puts it, “Sometimes we assume [...] scenarios which were quite unproblematic to early modern audiences have gained moral complexity because our attitudes to [...], in the case of The Taming of the Shrew, the relationship between the sexes, have changed since Shakespeare’s time.” But she argues that “The Taming of the Shrew was always ambiguous, right from the start.” She points out Shakespeare’s lack of stage direction and that many of the lines can be interpreted in different ways. For instance, that controversial speech from Katherine at the end of the play can be portrayed as that of a woman who has been subdued and cowed–or tamed, or it can be seen as a speech given sarcastically, from a woman who does not mean what she says, all depending on the way it is portrayed. But Tyler’s Kate’s speech has none of that ambiguity. It comes off as pandering and weak, detailing how bad men have it in this world. Tyler’s Kate is an enigma and not in a good way. Despite seeming to have an independent personality, she capitulates to her father’s needs without much of a fight and it’s hard to understand why.

You might like it if… This book read like a 90’s rom-com to me, so maybe if you like those, you’ll like this. 

References:

Smith, Emma. This is Shakespeare. New York, Pantheon Books, 2021.