Book Review: Kyra

Louisa Thomas International Herald Tribune

Feb 12, 2008

Kyra

By Carol Gilligan

241 pages. $25. Random House.

It can be hard, 25 years after it was first published, to appreciate the impact of the psychologist Carol Gilligan's book "In a Different Voice." Its argument that women and men make moral decisions differently - women emphasize relationships, while men focus on justice - now sounds familiar, even if its implications are still controversial. Although some scholars criticized (and continue to criticize) its findings, politicians, parents and teachers began to re-evaluate how they treated young boys and girls. Gilligan was named to the first professorship in gender studies at Harvard.

Now Gilligan has written a novel. Set in the mid-1980s, around the time she was first challenging the "masculine bias" in psychology and society, this book too is a clarion call. Here the goal is "changing the frame": overthrowing the old (male) order of domination and aggression and replacing it with a new ethic based on selflessness, openness and reciprocity.

"Kyra" is both a thought-provoking polemic and a love story. Its title character is an architect who splits her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she fights losing battles in faculty meetings at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, and Nashawena, a tiny island off the coast of Massachusetts, where Kyra is designing a new city - a kind of commune that she hopes will challenge the notion of the traditional city and change the way men and women interact.

Nashawena is a refuge for Kyra. Ten years earlier, in her native Cyprus, she had watched her half brother kill her husband - ostensibly for political reasons, but actually, she knows, because of his deep jealousy of her husband and alienation from their family. After her husband's death, Kyra fled the strife in Cyprus, as her parents had fled Hitler years earlier, dedicating herself to a vision of a world without violence, imperialism or estrangement, using architecture as her instrument. "To change the structure of people's inner lives," her husband once told her, you have to "change the outer structures as well." For a decade, Kyra lives as if her husband "were still here, our heart-minds joined." But when she meets Andreas, a passionate and idealistic Hungarian director, she finds herself weakening.

When Andreas leaves her, Kyra suffers an existential crisis, requiring the intervention of a sensitive female therapist named Greta. The drama between Andreas and Kyra is re-enacted in Greta and Kyra's therapy sessions, as Kyra becomes obsessed with the idea that Greta will leave her. And so she will, of course, when the therapy is no longer necessary. For Kyra, getting better means being betrayed once more.

Problems in the therapeutic relationship; problems in the academy; problems in the geopolitical sphere; problems in the city - the list of broken structures found in "Kyra" goes on and on. But all these problems, the novel suggests, have a common root and a common solution: that men need "a new spiritual or psychological relationship with women." Later that relationship is identified as "love." Kyra's new settlement on Nashawena is called the Carthage Project in order "to symbolize an alternative to Rome and what it stood for: empire and war." In contrast, Carthage represented art and was founded by a queen. Thus the novel's implicit message: to bring about a better world, women shouldn't strive to be more aggressive, competitive and ambitious - in short, more like men. Rather, men should become more caring and empathetic, more like women. The challenge for women is to demand that change.

In keeping with this theorizing, Gilligan sometimes seems to be using the characters' monologues to press her own arguments. Yet "Kyra" is best when Gilligan herself seems quietest, when she allows her fictional creation to emerge as a person in her own right. She may be prone to improbable utopian visions, but Kyra is also thoughtful and observant and her quest - to find a little harmony in a broken world - too important to be easily dismissed.

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