THE EROTIC SILENCE OF THE AMERICAN WIFE, by Dalma Heyn, Turtle Bay Books, 304 pages, $22.

In “The Erotic Silence of the American Wife,” Dalma Heyn tries to understand the problems created by the dichotomy between women’s innate sexuality and the roles women are virtually required to play to be accepted in American society.

Heyn’s curiosity initially focuses around the question of adultery: Why is it that:

“Adulterous wives are punished. Adulterous husbands, generally, are not. … We feel men are acting naturally, normally, in accordance with some romantic tale of courtly ardor in which the overcoming of obstacles in pursuit of a forbidden woman is truly noble. … But an adulterous woman, confined to a romantic tale in which the only quest for the good is the quest for a husband, cannot be tolerated.”

Soon that question expands: Why is it that women do not talk about their quests for pleasure? Why is it that, early into adolescence, females begin to change, to lose much of their selfhood, and soon after marriage, appear to have lost themselves almost entirely? Why do they feel compelled to become The Perfect Girl? The Perfect Wife?

Heyn cites a 1990 study of 3,000 adolescent boys and girls conducted by the American Association of University Women:

“… The largest study ever undertaken on the link between gender, self-esteem, and education — it is stated that only 15 percent of the girls will argue with their teachers when they think they are right, compared with nearly a third of the boys. Teachers call on girls less frequently than boys. They tend to evaluate boys’ work on its academic merits, girls’ on its neatness and orderliness. Only 29 percent of girls agree with the statement, `I am happy the way I am’ — compared with 46 percent of teen-age boys. … For girls, the report concludes, the loss of self-esteem is far more dramatic than it is for boys, and `has the most long-lasting effect.”‘

This, perhaps, is the crux of the matter more than is the question of women’s sexuality, or whether women do or do not have affairs. In trying to probe the reasons occasioning women’s behavior in adulterous relationships, Heyn uncovers a larger issue, one that she unfortunately tries to make fit her admittedly unscientific study.

The author, formerly editor in chief of Family Health magazine and executive editor of McCall’s, interviewed women of all ages from around the country. She was struck by their silence: “Many women had never uttered a word about their affairs to anyone else and were happy to have a chance to talk. …” As they opened their lives to Heyn, she found that most of these illicit liaisons began as a desperate search to reclaim lives that appeared to be lost.

“Many of the wives I talked with were … women who had held on to their voices, their authenticity, and their sexuality — up until marriage. … But a funny thing happened even to them at this juncture where women’s desires and culture once again intersect: At marriage, the lure of an idyllic relationship and of happily ever after was just as beguiling as it ever was.”

In what Heyn terms an attempt at “becoming Donna Reed,” the women in the study consciously squelched their own personalities as they strove forth on the quest of becoming the perfect wife and mother. To follow this quest they paid a heavy price:

“In yielding to an image of `goodness’ that splits them off from themselves and from others, in taking to heart a condemning inner voice that threatens them with loss of love at every turn, all the women I talked with felt psychically bound, caught between what they really feel and what they’re supposed to feel, between who they are and who they should be.”

Heyn’s mistake in “The Erotic Silence of the American Wife” is in focusing on women’s repressed sexuality and the adulterous “solution” women in the study used for its reclamation. The problem is not simply one of sexuality; it is much more complicated than that. It has to do with the way society shapes women, the roles it dictates women must play, the goals women are convinced they must have.

It has to do with self-nurture, with permission for women to become people, not objects charged with the nurture of others. The solution found by the women in this study is only one way — and a destructive way — of dealing with the problem:

“The conventional goodness the women entered when they married, and through which they found they still assumed status and approval, was precisely what was killing them — and their husbands, too — and they felt they must smash that framework in order to save them both.”

What Heyn does in “The Erotic Silence” is identify questions rather than answer them, and the value of the book is in its call to action. The traumas of the women in Heyn’s study are, in large part, common to us all (regardless of whether adultery figures in our experience) and the need to resolve these traumas, to reshape our lives and those of our children, remains urgent and compelling.

Poised on the eve of the 21st century, women find there is still a long, long way to go before they can claim “liberation” with any honesty and confidence.

Janet C. Beaulieu is a free-lance writer who resides in Bangor.