This has been the year of the mask. Leave the house for any destination—the shop, the park, the hospital, or the office—and they drift into view. Black. White. Ubiquitous medical-issue turquoise. Patterned cotton. An occasional showy satin. Out in public, we have become a nation without mouths.
There is a curious semi-anonymity to this new state of affairs. I am asked more regularly for my ID when buying wine (and wonder how many enterprising teens are taking advantage of the pandemic to procure booze.) Prior to this year, if you’d asked me to pinpoint the main function of a mask, I would have pointed to disguise. Before Covid-19, I understood masks as theatrical props and plot points in fairytales and mid-noughties teen romcoms rather than a necessary form of protection.
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This shift in popular perception of the mask has been stark and sudden; a fact that has only been underscored to me as I reread Brigid Brophy’s novel The Snow Ball. Initially published in 1964 and reissued this November, the book touches on many things that remain out of reach: big parties; vast and sometimes overwhelming crowds; unexpected flirtations, and the erotic frisson of a masked stranger. Spun out over a single evening as its characters navigate an 18th century-themed New Year’s Eve costume party from snowy midnight through to “blood-coloured” dawn, Brophy’s prose sparkles as she transports her readers into the midst of a packed ballroom floor.
At the centre of that cast stand three women. The ball’s hostess, a fifty-something woman named Anne, slides through the throng clad in “a golden syrup of lamé.” The grand house which forms the setting for the ball is full of ugly statues, grand staircases, voluptuously white bedrooms, and secretly stashed handfuls of expensive peppermint creams that Anne occasionally steals off to eat.
She’s not the only one sneaking around. 18-year-old Ruth, awkwardly costumed as Cherubino from Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro,” arrives with her parents and proceeds to do the most teenage thing imaginable: interspersing her dances with brief retreats to the cloakroom to write in her diary. Her entries are frantic and earnest, an effort “to have exact record of how felt at time: [because] am sure most people falsify when they remember such things afterwards.” Throughout the night she frets about boys, intimacy, and the book’s protagonist: “Anna K. is the most attractive woman I have ever seen. I detest her.”
Anna K, however, is too preoccupied to notice Ruth’s youthful jealousy. Clad in a simple black gown, she has come to the ball in the guise of Donna Anna: a character from another Mozart opera “Don Giovanni.” This costume proves pivotal, given that there is also a masked man in attendance dressed as Don Giovanni himself. Once he appears, Anna must decide whether or not she wishes to be seduced by him. One does not need to know much about Mozart to appreciate the operatic shenanigans that ensue as the pair hide from and seek one another.
The Snow Ball is a funny book. I mean that in both senses of the word, given its simultaneous wittiness and peculiarity. In it, Brophy creates a world of distorted surfaces—the prose is packed with chandeliers, mirrors, thick carpets, Siamese cats, grotesquely painted cupids, crooked wigs, and men who resemble boiled eggs. Characters dip in and out of view. As the hours tick by, friends are rendered strangers. “Have you noticed what a metaphysical ball this is?” the masked man asks Anna at one point. “All these people bumping into each other and asking ‘who are you?’ even when they’ve known each other for years.”
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Costume balls have always been rich ground for novelists and playwrights. What better, after all, than an arena in which identity is malleable and no-one is quite who they claim to be? In The Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth Century English Culture and Fiction, Terry Castle describes the topsy-turviness of a masquerade as one of “sensuous, exquisite duplicities” with its “shimmering, liquid play on the themes of self-presentation and self-concealment.”
In The Snow Ball, that sense of play becomes surprisingly literal. The ball’s crowd moves like the sea. At one point Anna K interprets the “silken waves” of costumes as “ocean waves, which crashed against the staircase, casting up a sprinkling of foam and laughter.” Although there is an obvious point about motion—the comings and goings of a party are often tidal in nature—there is something powerful, too, in this acknowledgement of a party as a place of collective immersion. The book’s gaudy setting is defined by the close, rolling press of other people’s bodies. Descending into the “ocean” is an experience textured with sweat, heat, noise, errant limbs, and the brush of nearby garments.
In this regard, the escapism Brophy offers the reader is currently twofold. It is fun to read about other people’s parties at the best of times. Glitz, deceit, depths, and shallows: all provide a heady cocktail for the reader tucked up in bed or perched on a park bench. But right now, much as the idea of the mask itself has transformed, so too has our understanding of closeness. To be in a crowd is not currently an option. To imagine a ballroom thrumming with the colour and clatter of hundreds of people is to indulge in potent fantasy. In reading these scenes we are not just imaginatively transported elsewhere, but reminded of all that is presently off limits. We can enjoy this account of wavering desire for a masked stranger while recognising that any equivalent sense of spontaneity or frisson would require a different world.
In a recent essay for the New York Times, ‘Is It Strange to Say I Miss the Bodies of Strangers?’ Leslie Jamison speculates about what has been lost in our pandemic-induced distance from one another: “How long will this muscle memory endure—the part of us that’s wary of any kind of bodily proximity, that’s wary of our own bodies and the bodies of others as vectors?” Before this year, such proximity was largely taken for granted, whether unpleasant (public transport at rush hour) or enjoyable (festivals, packed theatres, the euphoria of a great gig.) In Brophy’s gleaming story, proximity yields both pleasure and confusion. It also gives one the sense of the ball as a single living organism: enfolding its characters in a whirl of shuffling feet and darting glances as snow steadily falls beyond the windows. Tentatively, as we edge towards our own near year, I find myself hopeful that our present wariness of proximity will only be temporary—even if my future is more likely to hold modest house parties where stairs are navigated in search of the loo, rather than lavish costume balls with masked strangers and high intrigue.
