Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

Lillian Boxfish Take a Walk is based on real-life ad woman, Margaret Fishback, and it represents the evolving roles of women in 20th century America and the real challenges that they faced. Though she defies most norms of her time, Lillian’s life is still largely circumscribed by her gender, as she must forgo professional ambition when she decides to become a wife and mother. From her mother’s disapproval of Aunt Sadie to her discussion with Wendy and Peter, Rooney demonstrates the extent to which women’s roles as workers and wives changed throughout Lillian’s lifetime. Lillian introduces the contrast between her mother’s generation and her own:

My mother—who was well-educated, read widely, passably fluent in German, conversant with the works of Freud and Adler, married at twenty, and never received a dollar of wages in her life—was also a woman who took difference as a slight. Anyone not living a life that fit the mold of her own—wifedom, motherhood—constituted a personal affront, an implied rebuke, an argument against. I thought Sadie quite bold (2-3).

This view is something that Lillian makes an effort to reject, both personally and professionally. She even denies the Victorian-era year of her birth by lying about her age. Her mother, Miss Lockhart, and Olive Dodd all represent the idea that proper ladies are “called on” or “courted” by men who might potentially make them wives and mothers. Lillian and Helen—driven by ambition, living on their own, and having sex outside of marriage—represent its opposite.

Lillian’s independence and ambition are presented as the exceptions to the rules. Her struggle to be paid equally to the men in her office who do the same work demonstrates how slowly roles evolved. Rooney emphasizes this by repeatedly pointing out that when men start families, they receive raises, while women “get the boot the instant they show signs of spawning” (27). The public disbelief over Lillian’s rejection of marriage and motherhood—and the general uproar when she changes her mind—further shows just how little expectations of women had changed.

The women Lillian encounters in the 1980s represent less circumscribed professional roles but also persistent judgment of their personal lives. The female guests and the discussion about career advice during the public television program suggest that girls were by that point expected to have professional goals. Wendy, furthermore, is an independent and ambitious photographer. However, because Wendy’s relationship with Peter doesn’t fit neatly into the category of “boyfriend/girlfriend, many people cannot understand it. Maritza’s concern about what Lillian will think of her being an unwed mother also demonstrates that patriarchal views of marriage and motherhood still held sway. Lillian’s rejection of these rigid roles and judgments conveys a hope that the movement toward social and economic equality for women will continue to evolve.

The ubiquity of advertising in the modern world and its influence on people’s everyday decisions are central to the novel. Lillian is aware of the ads’ illusions but also unable to resist them; this is how she finds herself stuffed with Oreos in the novel’s second chapter without even knowing how they arrived in her apartment. Though she says it in a different context, Lillian’s statement that “[c]hoice is an illusion promoted by the powerful” encapsulates the goal of advertisers as presented in the novel (214): to convince people to buy things and ideas without knowing precisely why. She describes the goal of her work: “You would find yourself in the department store, and you would not necessarily know why you had come there, but only that you were going to buy some merchandise that was going to make you feel better” (128). Though Lillian draws a line between her efforts to appeal to people’s common sense in the first half of the 20th century and modern advertisers’ strategy of appealing to their baser instincts, both types of advertising represent the ability of mass-manufactured brands to influence by creating illusion.

Beginning with Phoebe Snow, advertising has an outsized influence on Lillian’s values. She recognizes advertising’s power to suggest things without saying them outright. Phoebe suggests “not so much a passenger train as speed and freedom, not so much a gown as style, not so much a hairdo as beauty” (3). When Lillian becomes an advertiser during the Depression, she “churned out the only commodities that still held their value: courage, poise, humor, and hope” (45). Lillian knows that if she can associate these values with the items she is selling, she can create the illusion in people’s minds that they will bring happiness and fulfillment. This is what leads her to scorn sentimentalism. Ironically, Lillian’s resistance to manufactured love makes her an advertisement like Phoebe Snow herself: not so much a woman who prioritizes independence as “sunny spinsterhood.” However, Lillian’s narrative shows that the perpetual strength and happiness she advertises is an illusion like any other.

The illusory nature of advertising is also emphasized by a date’s observation that her job is to disappear behind the Macy’s brand “the way a crane creates and then erases itself from the skyline” (117). This association of erasure with advertising appears elsewhere in the novel, as when Lillian credits the poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” with creating universal ideas about St. Nick while also erasing itself as the source of these ideas, something she calls “the greatest print advertisement in American history” (240). This suggests that when done well, advertising can be so powerful that people forget it exists and simply follow its influence. Lillian herself succumbs to this when she marries Max and leaves her job to become a mother, noting that she has willingly become the target of her own work, “those in charge of their household, each buying for her man” (159). By having her acknowledge her own vulnerability to advertising, the novel blurs the line and suggests that choice is illusory when there are major forces influencing people, even if these forces are telling lies about their products.