Surviving marriage narratively. Storytelling through women's friendships in Mary McCarthy's The Group (1963) and its adaptation by Lara Feigel (2020)

This essay examines the narrative potential of novels structured by women's friendships by reading Mary McCarthy's The Group (1963) alongside its adaptation by Lara Feigel (2020). I look specifically at the conceptualisation of friendship through narrative voice and structure to explore the shift that is portrayed between the two novels. I show that McCarthy's novel critically examines the grouping of its protagonists and their stories based on gender with the use of free indirect narration. For the contemporary adaptation, Feigel chooses the perspective of an autodiegetic first-person narrator who diverges into third-person for extended passages to narrate her friends’ lives. While McCarthy's novel exposes the implications of the conventional marriage plot for women's narratives, the entanglement of the friends’ storylines in Feigel's novel suggests that these limitations have been overcome. Yet, both novels also expose that the relationships between the privileged white women protagonists are complicit with and rely on antisemitism, homophobia (McCarthy) and racism (Feigel).