A couple weeks ago I finished a novel called The Disorder of Longing by Natasha Bauman. I really enjoyed it and wished I had recommended it to my book club because it would’ve generated great discussions. The novel is about a young woman, Ada Price, living in the early 1900’s who is constrained by women’s role in society and her husband’s expectations that she simply be a “good wife.” When she goes for a walk in the town’s plaza by herself and when she has lunch with her servants, her husband starts a list of her misbehaviors, which he ultimately uses as evidence of her “hysteria.” At the same time that Ada is growing more frustrated by the suffocating boundaries of her life, her husband takes an interest in orchids and builds a greenhouse for his collection. Ada is enticed into the world of orchids and even secretly buys a vanda. When she gets home with it, she realizes she can’t keep it anywhere her husband will see it, so Ada makes her servant girl keep the vanda in her room.
Orchids are not the focus of this novel, but they help illustrate how repressed the husband is in contrast with the orchid’s flamboyant and exotic nature. They also represent the unrestrained beauty, sensuousness, and freedom that Ada longs for. She eventually runs away to Brazil to try her hand at orchid hunting, but disguised as a man. While this allows Ada more independence than she’s ever experienced before, she still has to hide her female identity, which is another form of restriction and denial of self. I really liked this book and appreciated how the author brought the world of early 20th century America and that of the orchid hunter to life. I wished the ending offered a more clear resolution to Ada’s crisis of identity and gender roles, but perhaps that wasn’t possible in real life either.
