Rachel O’Connor
Surplus Women by Michelle Duff (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025), 240pp, $35
There is an intrinsic irony in the title of Michelle Duff’s Surplus Women, since the women who populate the pages of the collection’s 15 stories are, far from being excess to requirements, being used—and in every sense of the word. And while many of their exploiters are men, this is by no means the only dynamic at play; these women are complicated victims, as likely to turn on themselves and each other as they are to direct their vitriol towards the abusers, whether casual or calculated, with whom the loosely interlaced stories abound.
Duff’s characters inhabit a range of eras, some real, some imagined. The earliest setting is that of the title story ‘Surplus Women’, which begins in 1922 with two characters who, unlikely to secure social and economic stability through marriage given the dearth of eligible men in the aftermath of World War I, have been dispatched to New Zealand to become indentured servants. These particular ‘surplus’ women encounter all the deprivations of a long sea voyage in steerage class, but also endure the personal tragedy of a uniquely female kind of loss. The fragments of their stories are pieced together a century later by the character of Zara, new mother and National Library archivist, who is herself drowning in resentment in her increasingly uneven and unhappy marriage to a yuppie husband who fails to step up.
Male empathy deficit and entitlement is a theme Duff casts an unforgiving light on in more than one story of the collection: professional women, despite working along with their husbands to provide the family income, still bear the major share of obligation and labour within the shared domestic sphere. Zara’s husband complains that ‘this place is a shithole and the kids aren’t even dressed’ before leaving for work in the morning, while Sash, the police detective protagonist of ‘Torn’, is plagued during her working hours by phone calls from her husband, who calls to chide her for maternal inadequacies which include failing to buy milk, and forgetting their daughter’s cross-country event. Sash’s worldly and confident professional demeanour falls away in the face of his criticisms. ‘You can’t just say you’ll do things and not follow through. It sets a bad example for the kids,’ he admonishes her, a paternalistic, guilt-engendering stance revealed to be all the more ironic when we arrive at the dark outcome of the story.
And while some of Duff’s women do manifest enormous drive and ambition, in this collection their energy largely proves to be negatively charged, wreaking havoc in the protagonists’ lives and relationships. In ‘Monstera’, we meet Anastasia, whose success in the heady world of real estate sales implodes in a farcical blur of white wine and infidelity, and a logistically unlikely error of judgement involving a Monstera deliciosa plant. The protagonist of ‘Toxic’, Roz, similarly fuelled by ill-advised sex and alcohol, self-combusts, with dire consequences for both her relationship (with one of the collection’s rare specimens of male tenderness and integrity), and her career as a sensationalist newspaper reporter in London. She beats a retreat back home to New Zealand:
In London it was 7 am. Hamish would just be waking up, stretching lazily in bed. He was so tall, or their mattress so short, that he always slept with his spine curved around hers for their bodies to fit. She wondered what he would do with the negative space. She doubted he would have filled it yet. He would have to fall in love again first. Her legs buckled beneath her, and she put a hand out to steady herself. She felt a weight shifting.
‘Easy’, the first story in the book, is set in a very particular time frame in New Zealand’s recent past, when telephones still had cords and cradles, and loutish youths could still have sex with 14-year-old schoolgirls without much fear of retribution. The story of Jess’s short journey from virgin to slut in many respects sets the tone of the volume, in a sad, explicit and unvarnished examination of the cocktail of parental and societal neglect and intense peer pressure that steers ignorant girls into premature sexual activity, and exposes them to its terrible risks and costs. The depiction of the awful power girls can exert to destroy each other, in situations where they should be at all costs saving each other, is particularly poignant. In ‘$$Britney$$’ we are confronted with the extreme consequences of this too-rapid journey, as two wildly underage sex workers, beautifully drawn characters in all their actions and interactions, strut the streets of Wellington while still navigating all the emotional swings and slides of adolescence. In ‘Torn’, we find these two again, or rather Sash the detective does, in the inevitable sequel.
As clearly and ably as she portrays the past and present, Duff draws the future for us, too. ‘Collateral’ is set in an only slightly altered society in which powerful women deal out systematic retribution, with the assistance of a vague but sinister technology, to an entitled and unrepentant perpetrator of sexual assault. There is nothing futuristic at all, however, in this story’s alignment with the #MeToo movement, and its exposition of the potent and harmful impact of social media and its extraordinary capacity to harness and manipulate popular opinion.
Another of today’s most topical issues is taken by the horns in ‘Spook’, whose protagonist Genevieve, a sharp and cynical grandmother, works as a surveillance agent, staking out the parks near parliament. The story is set in a near-future New Zealand in which, in the wake of a large-scale civil war, the Truthers are still conspiring to undermine democracy—although whose version of democracy currently reigns is left intriguingly blurry. Their insidious threat becomes personal when Genevieve discovers that her own daughter is succumbing to a neighbour’s ‘Truther-adjacent ideology’. As Genevieve puts it, one minute ‘you’re “just eating healthy”, and the next you think the government are blood-sucking snake people who must be stopped at any cost’. In an inventive subplot, estranged girlfriends and former Olympic gymnastics rivals must unite to save the day. Genevieve’s voice, hard-bitten and funny, is a joy to read.
‘Dreamsea’ offers another consideration of a not too distant future. The only characters, an unnamed man and woman, avail themselves of an opportunity to temporarily reunite in a meticulously constructed virtual resort setting, in order to resolve and purge the painful residue of their shared past. The frayed edges of the artificial environment are effectively wrought; the woman observes that ‘seagulls whirred and clicked’, but aren’t quite right, looking ‘too much like bats,’ while ‘clouds bobbed in place at the corner of her vision’. The story’s gentle mockery of the whole ‘wellbeing’ money train exemplifies Duff’s fine eye for detail and instinct for irony, though the focus of the storyline oscillates rather confusingly between the damage and blame of the past and the bliss of the imagined reunion. Obviously the beatific serenity of the carefully curated location precludes any messiness (with the bizarre exception of a scarcely acknowledged tsunami that momentarily clears the beach), just as the suspension of reality precludes any actual resolution, despite this being the ostensible goal of the exercise, but it is one of the few stories in the collection where I found myself wishing for more violence, whether of action or emotion, rather than less.
One step further out of the real world is taken in ‘Equilibrium’, a biting, sometimes hilarious satire set in a department of heaven tasked with ensuring that human efforts to redress social imbalances do not succeed, on the basis that these efforts interfere with the accepted celestial doctrine that ‘not all humans can thrive’. In an incisive indictment of every social services agency anywhere ever, angels debate at exhaustive length whether harps should or should not be employed to call teams together. These angels receive unfriendly emails from ‘your friendly people and culture team’, bitch and whine about colleagues and superiors via Team Chat, and grudgingly attend meetings (the dialogues of which are delivered in script form) in Sorting Rooms. The fun begins when it transpires that there is a subversive element in the system, and the alarm is sounded when anomalies begin to surface: ‘at least 20 single mothers with small children have somehow gained access to safe and warm housing in a single day’ in a suburb of Melbourne, a process that ‘would normally take at least a year’, while in North America a 12-year-old rape victim in rural Mississippi inexplicably secures ‘access to safe medical care’. The hunt begins to root out the rebels, but who can really trust whom in heaven?
Duff’s forays into the future are shrewd and original, but it is in the stories of yesterday and today that the sharp knives of an unremittingly grim realism cut away any lifelines, any opportunities for redemption or escape. Duff delves fearlessly into the varied ways and means by which women are manoeuvred, by men and by each other too, into situations and lives in which they are less valued, less safe, less worthy. The characters that result ably demonstrate the depth of meaning contained in that often-misquoted line from William Congreve’s Restoration play, The Mourning Bride:
Heav’n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn’d,
Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn’d.
As Dr Oliver Tearle of Loughborough University has pointed out, since the Furies, or Erinyes, were female deities in ancient Greek mythology associated with the Underworld, it seems likely that when the phrase ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’ was first used, ‘fury’ was intended to refer to the Furies, rather than simply to wrath. In Surplus Women, Duff gives us scenes, visceral and violent, from a real tragedy, and a cast of female characters who go through all kinds of hell, and emerge damaged, dangerous, and very, very angry.
RACHEL O’CONNOR was born in Christchurch. Her short fiction and non-fiction have been published in Ireland and New Zealand, and broadcast on Radio New Zealand, and her debut novel, written for her Master of Creative Writing, was translated and published by Kedros Publishing in Athens. Rachel currently lives in Auckland, where she is completing a creative PhD at the University of Auckland.
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