Trapped in a Cage in Helen Weinzweig’s “Basic Black with Pearls”

Every now and then, I get to the point where I’m not sure what I want to read. When that happens, I go to my bookshelves and start to browse, pulling down a book, reading the description and the first page, then returning the book until I come upon one that I want to read. This process is how I came to read Helen Weinzweig’s Basic Black with Pearls, a book that a friend gave me a while back. Weinzweig’s novel sucked me in from the start because I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect. Sarah Weinmen calls Basic Black with Pearls an “interior feminist espionage novel,” and that really describes the novel because it is a work that deals with the interiority of Shirley Kaszenbowski and her existence as an “invisible woman” due to her age and class.

Weinmen mentions that Basic Black with Pearls contains references to Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, and Virginia Woolf’s work, among others, and we can read Weinzweig’s novel in relation to these texts. As I read the novel, I thought about Chopin, Gilman, and Woolf, but I also kept thinking about novels such as Anna Seghers’ Transit, not in relation to gender but in relation to the ways that Toronto works as a character in Weinzweig’s novel like Marseille does in Seghers’ novel; I thought about Judy Blume’s Wifey because of the connections between…