Showing papers in "Studies in short fiction in 1996"

"For the Use of the Magazine Morons": Edith Wharton Rewrites the Tale of the Fantastic

Abstract: Edith Wharton's relationship with the reading public and the market economy was ambiguously made up of acceptance and resistance, desire and mistrust. She obviously sought success and dealt with her publishers in a very professional and business-like manner, yearned to establish a connection with her readers, but was aware of the dangers involved in lowering her literary standards to meet popular taste. In the latter part of her career, pressed by economic necessity and a decrease in popularity, she appeared at times more willing to compromise and come to terms with the requests of the marketplace.(1) Her rewriting of two tales of the fantastic, "Pomegranate Seed" (1931) and "All Souls'" (1937), is a good illustration of the delicate balance between the demands of the text and those of the public, and Wharton's differing degrees of success in maintaining it. These are Wharton's last "ghost stories," written toward the end of her life and generally considered among her best. Although they have received a good deal of recent critical attention, so far no examination of the stories' production and publishing problems has been conducted on the basis of the manuscripts.(2) I would like to offer here a reading of these two tales that takes into account their earlier manuscript versions and the substantial variants introduced in the published ones. I will try to explain the reasons for these changes by referring to some yet unpublished correspondence between the writer and her editors. I think that a closer look at Wharton's writing process will throw a different light on the narrative focus of the tales, partially undermining some earlier interpretations. My evaluation of the revisions, and of their impact on the final structure of the texts, will take into consideration Wharton's own ideas on the ghost story as a genre, as well as recent theories of the fantastic. In an early essay entitled "The Vice of Reading," Wharton stressed the importance of "an interchange of thought between writer and reader" (513), but she also exposed the harm to literature of what she called "the mechanical reader" in "bringing about the demand for mediocre writing" (519). In the "Preface" to Ghosts, the collection of tales of the supernatural published in 1937, she recalled: "When I first began to read, and then to write ghost-stories, I was conscious of a common medium between myself and my readers, of their meeting me half way among the primeval shadows, and filling in the gaps in my narrative with sensations and divinations akin to my own" (2). At the end of her career, Wharton had to come instead to the frustrating conclusion that "the faculty required for their enjoyment [of ghost stories] has become almost atrophied in modern man," and identified the causes in "those two world-wide enemies of the imagination, the wireless and the cinema," thus elaborating on this issue: "to a generation for whom everything which used to be won by an effort, and then slowly assimilated, is now served up cooked, seasoned and chopped into little bits, the creative faculty (for reading should be a creative act as well as writing) is rapidly withering, together with the power of sustained attention" (2). As an example of this unfortunate change in the reading public she referred to having been bombarded with anxious inquiries, following the first publication of "Pomegranate Seed," about "how a ghost could write a letter, or put it into a letterbox" (2). It is this kind of mechanical reader who undermines the effect of a tale of the fantastic and puts inappropriate demands on the writer. A letter from Rutger Jewett, Wharton's editor at Appleton, confirms this positivistic trend: "Every week since `Pomegranate Seed' was issued I have forwarded letters to you which have been sent me by the Post. Certainly the story aroused interest. I am wondering if the writers of these letters are trying to make you give a material, physical explanation of psychic phenomena. …

Minimalism and the Short Story

Abstract: In literary analysis the term "minimalism" refers not only to a certain understated style of fiction writing, but also to an assembly of charac-teristics that are particularly ascribed to the short story, for both minimalism and the short story are governed by an aesthetic of exclusion. Generally in such texts, distraction and clutter are stripped from the depiction of human commerce until the reader encounters the whole of society reflected in slivers of individual experience. Here, the unstated is present as a cogent force. Amy Hempel--who, much to her chagrin, is often identified as a "minimalist"--describes it this way: "A lot of times what's not reported in your work is more important than what actually appears on the page. Frequently the emotional focus of the story is some underlying event that may not be described or even referred to in the story" (Sapp 82-83). In effect, the writer must somehow frame the empty space carefully enough so that the reader has at least a faint chance of inferring from what has been given exactly what has been omitted. The reader is given what, to all appearances, is a realistic account of a trivial matter or event. Although the final version resembles external reality, the method of presentation suggests that there is more to the story than the scant narrated details. Whether as a consequence of this apparent simplicity or strictly because of its brevity, the minimalist short story is too frequently underrated; yet, the very artistry of its laconic composition is what makes it a powerful prose form. For some critics there exists a sacrosanct curtain between poetry and prose that will not allow them to identify the techniques of minimalism as poetic or to accept a short story as a "prose poem." Arguments against minimalism in prose fiction range in tone from the mildly cautionary to the borderline hysterical: Madison Bell observes cautiously that Raymond Carver is "a superb technician of this mode, probably the best, but as a trend-setter he is a little dangerous" (67); Sven Birkerts warns, "If fiction is to survive as more than a coterie sport, it must venture something greater than a passive reflection of fragmentation and unease" (33); Jerome Klinkowitz is convinced that minimalist fiction "suspends all aesthetic innovation in favour of parsing out the most mundane concerns of superficial life (for fear of intruding with a humanly judgmental use of imagination)" (364); and in 1989, five well-known writers and critics threw a wake, called it "a round-table discussion," and published their collective eulogies under the rifle, "Throwing Dirt on the Grave of Minimalism" (Koch et al.). The frequently negative attitude of critics toward the artists whom they choose to label as "minimalists" has caused many of these writers to respond defensively, impatiently brushing away the term, sometimes suggesting one that sounds more positive. A case in point, Raymond Carver once remarked, "somebody called me a `minimalist' writer. But I didn't like it. There's something about `minimalist' that smacks of smallness of vision and execution that I don't like" (Simpson 210). Yet, Carver has become the quintessential referent for minimalism. Amy Hempel's response to being called a minimalist reveals a similar concern: "[T]he only thing I really felt was unfair was a review in which my book was used as the occasion for a very tired essay on minimalism. ... I much prefer the term miniaturist" (Sapp 85). Maybe so, but no matter how much nicer Hempel's term sounds, it is inaccurate because a miniaturist produces a version smaller in area than the original image but does not delete a single detail, whereas the minimalist produces a partial version contained in a space so carefully condensed that one must infer from the part exposed exactly what has been omitted, what lies beneath, i.e., the whole picture. Responding good-naturedly to the "m"-label in an article he titled, "On Being Wrong: Convicted Minimalist Spills Bean," Frederick Barthelme determined that budding minimalists were responding to the difficulty of their elders' fiction by writing stories in which "a plain sentence, drab as it may seem, might be more powerful by and large than the then standard-issue clever sentence . …

A Conflict of Closure in Virginia Woolf's "The Mark on the Wall."

Abstract: Virginia Woolf's "The Mark on the Wall" concludes with the identification of that mark as a snail, this after several pages of digressions--on history, reality, society, art, writing, and life itself--incited by the flimsy ruse of an ontological inquiry. Readers have reacted variously to this revelation: As T. E. Apter notes, some, like A C. Bradbrook, have found it "exasperating" (54), while others have found the "cruelly disappointing" (Guiguet 217) or "trivial" (Apter 54) or "insignificant" (Gorsky 51) nature of the mark to be important to understanding that Woolf is proposing that objective reality is less important than the world of perceptions internal to each individual, a line of thought that leads ultimately to the idea that what the mark is "really doesn't matter" (Lumpkin 29), or the ironic Doppelganger to this idea, that "The writer deflates herself comically when the mark is revealed as a snail . . . (Gordon 167). I suspect, however, that if there is a joke here, it is on us, that Woolf, like Mary Carmichael in A Room of One's Own, "is playing a trick on us. . . . [She] is tampering with the expected sequence" (81). We expect closure, so that's what Woolf gives us-or seems to. I don't think the mark on the wall is a snail--or at least it might not be--and while it may not matter what the mark actually is, what it is not (or may not be) could matter a lot. The first paragraph of the story raises the initial doubt, though it doesn't come into focus until the end. The narrator, writing the story some months after the event, is "now" trying to remember the time of year when she "first looked up and saw the mark on the wall" (77). By remembering the scene, she is able to decide that "it must have been winter time . . . when I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time" (77). I am intrigued by the phrasing here. At the end of the story, when the narrator's disgruntled companion stands and says ". . . I don't see why we should have a snail on our wall" (83), there appears to be little question that he is going to remove it: Upset by the war and unable to do anything about it, he seems unlikely to tolerate a more local and actionable irritant. But the narrator's phrasing, that this was the "first time" she saw the mark on the wall, suggests subsequent sightings: One does not say "first" when one means "only." If the mark were a snail subsequently removed by the companion, it would not have lingered beyond that after-tea session. That the mark still remains at the time of writing, or at least remained for some time after the original event, is possible, even likely, and this would seem to rule out its being a snail. Let me admit that there are objections that can be raised to this proposal, the most obvious being that the narrator apparently confirms her companion's identification: "Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail" (83). Also, she uses the past tense here, as she does in the first paragraph, when she says "The mark was a small round mark, black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantlepiece" (77). The verb tense would seem to indicate that the mark "was" but is no more, as would be the case with the snail removed. One might also point out that, in the course of the story, the narrator's focus comes and goes from the mark itself, so that the "first time" remark may pertain only to the first time she focused on it during that after tea interlude. Dealing with the last objection first, the phrasing does not strike me as correct: It would be like describing dinner by saying, "The first time I saw my plate was when I cut a slice of beef; the second time was when I speared a carrot; the third time I saw it . . .," and so on. This would be odd even if the period of linear time covered were several hours, and, while the plot duration (if I may use the word "plot" regarding this story) is indefinite, an after-tea sit and smoke interlude would likely be quite short. …

Suspended Narratives: The Short Story and Temporality

Abstract: Genres provide a conceptual framework for the mediation (if not the `solution') of intractable problems, a method for rendering such problems intelligible. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 20 In Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie writes of "a painter whose paintings had grown larger and larger as he tried to get the whole of life into his art. `Look at me,' he said before he killed himself, `I wanted to be a miniaturist and I've got elephantiasis instead'" (50). While the short story as a genre is not equivalent to the miniature, this passage implicitly suggests a nagging dilemma for short story enthusiasts: is there a relationship between narrative length and aesthetic scope? If Rushdie's painter finds it necessary to create a succession of ever-widening canvases in order for him to encapsulate "the whole of life into his art," does this then mean that condensed narratives such as the short story offer a reduced spectrum of human experience when compared with more expanded forms?(1) In order to differentiate between techniques of narrative compression and those that accentuate elaboration and expansion, let us first turn to McKeon's observation that genres crystallize certain philosophical predicaments. One problem explicitly manifested by the short story pertains to the complexity of negotiating temporal experience through narrative. All narratives engage temporality in some way, but short fiction intimates how thoroughly our apprehension of historicity has been conditioned by sequential narrative forms such as the novel. Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the "threshold," a chronotope in which "time is essentially instantaneous ... and falls out of the normal course of biographical time" (248) sets up a useful paradigm for thinking about short fiction's tendency to accentuate a single event, as opposed to the novel's propensity to knit numerous events together in a serial fashion. As we shall see, emphasizing the isolated event over the event-as-series has far-ranging hermeneutical repercussions. Suspending continuity, the short story intimates that the impulse to mold time into a sequential narrative is often incommen-surate with our experience of temporality.(2) Many short stories depict situations where characters are perplexed by a given set of circumstances, circumstances that seem to preclude a mode of interpretation that will allow a mediation back into what Bakhtin calls the "normal course of biographical time," where events are understood through their being integrated into a series. As a means of making my discussion more concrete, I would like to use William Sansom's short story "The Vertical Ladder," as an illustration to describe short fiction's treatment of temporality. In this story, a young man attempts to impress a young woman by accepting a dare to climb two ladders, a 20-foot wooden ladder that leads to a second, this one attached to a gasworks that towers high above the ground. Most of the story pertains to the character's increasing terror as he painfully works his way to the summit. Close to the apex of the gasworks, after having taken with him the young woman's handkerchief to affix onto the rooftop, he sees that his companions have removed the first ladder and are about to leave him alone. To his horror, at the story's end, the young man discovers that the last rungs of the ladder are missing, which was something that couldn't be perceived from the ground. He can neither complete his quest, nor return to safety: Flegg stared dumbly, circling his head like a lost animal ... then he jammed his legs into the lower rungs and his arms past the elbows to the armpits in through the top rungs and there he hung shivering and past knowing what more he could ever do ... (original ellipses; 422). Alone, paralyzed in a present that seems endless, Flegg; might be said to embody the manner in which short stories suspend the single event from the future and, often, the past. …

"The Mark of the Beast": Rudyard Kipling's Apocalyptic Vision of Empire

Abstract: The past decade has finally laid to rest the stereotype of Kipling the jingoistic poet of Empire. With few exceptions, recent critics of Kipling's work have commented on the ambiguity and multi-voicedness of his fictional portraits of Empire, and have rightly insisted on separating Kipling's public persona from his artistic personae. Of course, no one can deny the sympathy for the project of empire-building--and the admiration for those engaged therein--that runs throughout much of Kipling's Indian fiction, but there are also darker, more cynical visions of Empire in his work. Yet, despite the increasing number of publications on Kipling's relationship to Empire--totaling more than 20 articles and at least three books during the past 15 years--and despite the virtually ubiquitous acknowledgment of the ambivalence that characterizes Kipling's work, few analyses have engaged particular stories in depth to demonstrate how this ambivalence is worked out. This essay will examine "The Mark of the Beast," a work that can shed much fight on Kipling's relationship to Empire, for it represents one of his most forceful critiques of Empire: as an allegory of the relationship of British colonizer and Indian colonized, it deserves a place alongside such stories as "The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes"(1) and "The Man Who Would Be King." The events related in "The Mark of the Beast" are deceptively simple.(2) Fleete, a landowner newly arrived in India, overindulges in alcohol at a New Year's party, and commits an outrage against the Indian ape-god Hanuman by grinding his cigar into the forehead of a temple-statue in Hanuman's likeness. He then announces drunkenly, "Shee that? `Mark of the B--beasht! I made it. Ishn't it fine?" (218). Abruptly, a naked and leprous "Silver Man" steps out from behind the image and, before the narrator or his friend Strickland can intervene, touches his head to Fleete's chest. Strickland and the narrator carry the still-drunk Fleete home, and now begins the gradual transformation of Fleete into a beast: his sense of smell grows keener, he eats raw meat, his horses shy when around him, he grovels on hands and knees in Strickland's garden, and he finally loses the power of speech and howls like a wolf. At the same time, a mark appears on his chest--presumably where the Silver Man touched him--and it is similar to the spots on a leopard's hide. Strickland at this point informs the narrator to prepare for trouble, and during that night the Silver Man appears at Strickland's house, walking around the outside while Fleete convulses in his room, reacting to the leper's presence. Strickland concludes that Hanuman has bewritched Fleete to punish him for the desecration and decides to intervene. He and the narrator capture the Silver Man, tie him up, and tell him to cure Fleete. When he does not, they torture him with heated gun-barrels. At dawn, they release the Silver Man and tell him "to take away the evil spirit" (230); he touches Fleete's left breast, and Fleete promptly returns to his normal condition and falls asleep. The Silver Man leaves, and Strickland goes to the temple of Hanuman to consult the priests about atoning for Fleete's desecration of the idol, but is told that the incident he describes never occurred. When Strickland returns, Fleete cannot remember anything about the incident either, but jokes about a dog-like odor in his room. Strickland promptly dissolves into hysterical laughter, as does the narrator, realizing that, in torturing the Silver Man to save Fleete's life, he has forfeited all claims to being a civilized Englishman. The narrative closes with the ironic statement that "it is well known to every right-minded man that the gods of the heathen are stone and brass, and any attempt to deal with them otherwise is justly condemned" (232). The encounter between Fleete and Hanuman's idol is suggestive of the primal encounter of colonizer and colonized, of Englishman and Indian, of East and West. …

The Minimalist Short Story: Its Definition, Writers, and (Small) Heyday

Abstract: A new type of short story peopled, according to many critics, with motiveless characters involved in meaningless actions, began to appear in American publications, notably the New Yorker, in the 1970s and by 1985 had, some of the same critics said, taken over the market. "... Fiction has, in the past few years, fallen into a holding pattern with what has been called minimalism ...," Robert Dunn wrote in 1985 ("After Minimalism" 53). The minimalist fad, Madison Smartt Bell said in 1989, was so dominant "that nothing else could get through into the light" (Koch et al., 61). Minimalist stories were denounced in scholarly journals, literary magazines, and the New York Times Book Review. The minimalist story, Carol Iannone said, was "a grimly logical demonstration project for the `deconstruction' of literature's pretensions to meaning and range, of its claim to speak a higher and subtler language than that available in popular culture of everyday life" (61); its narrator, according to Charles Newman, was "dragged down by his characters, adopting their limitations and defects" (25); its narrative voice, Grace Paley was quoted by Bell as saying, didn't "come from anywhere" (Koch et al. 47). Although references to minimalism, generally negative, continue in current short fiction criticism, as in Jon Powell's 1994 article which equates minimalism with dehumanization (651), much uncertainty appears to remain as to exactly what the minimalist short story is: who--beyond Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, and one of the Barthelmes--the minimalist writers are or were, and where they were published; when the minimalist short story was prevalent; and whether in fact it prevailed at all, at any time. As of this writing, for example, the most recent edition of Holman and Harmon's Handbook to Literature does not define the word, nor do two thick anthologies of short stories, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction (5th ed.) and Fiction 100 (7th ed.); the glossary in another anthology, The Story and Its Writer, at least makes the attempt, "A literary style exemplifying economy and restraint" (a definition that may not be inaccurate but is also a fairly apt description of many sonnets), and names Donald Barthelme, Carver, and Amy Hempel as practitioners (1595). Mark A. R. Facknitz in Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature divides minimalist writers into two types, formal and social, the "formal minimalist" being "a technician with a taste for clear, colloquial language and uncluttered plots," using "narrow temporal frames, present tense, and first-person narrators while eliminating editorial or authorial intrusions" (714). These traits, however, aptly describe so many stories in the "social minimalism" category (which Facknitz says is also called dirty realism and Kmart realism) that it would seem to be a subset of the former. When asked about the term, specialists in modern and contemporary American fiction often, in this writer's experience, refer colleagues or students to Shapard and Thomas's Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories, obviously equating minimalism with shortness; but Sudden Fiction contains almost no minimalist short stories, not even the stories by Carver and Mary Robison, the only generally recognized minimalist writers included in the collection. In a 1985 issue of the Mississippi Review devoted to commentary about literary minimalism, Kim Herzinger's introductory article names the stories of Carver, Beattie, Robison, and Bobbie Ann Mason among many others--the list is repeated several times, with variations--as minimalist fiction, "work loosely characterized by equanimity of surface, `ordinary' subjects, recalcitrant narrators and deadpan narratives, slightness of story, and characters who don't think out loud" ("Introduction" 7). A few pages later Herzinger adds other traits to the list: compression, "aggressive lucidity," "spareness and cleanness, above all the obvious `craftedness,'" and a "profound uneasiness with irony as a mode of presentation" (14). …

This Cosmic Pawnshop We Call Life: Nathanael West, Bergson, Capitalism, and Schizophrenia

Abstract: 1 After three days of sleep, Ass Lonelyhearts dreams a dream. And in this dream he finds himself an object in a pawnshop window, displayed along with such fetishistic objects as diamond rings, watches, shotguns, fishing tackle, mandolins, as he puts it, "the paraphernalia of suffering." This scene causes him to meditate on the material world's "tropism for disorder, entropy," only to conclude that "All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth while." And so Miss Lonelyhearts continues this battle for order by shaping the objects in the window into various configurations--a phallus, a heart, a diamond, a circle, a triangle, a square, a swastika, a cross--only to collapse finally in futility and exhaustion (West, Miss Lonelyhearts 30-31). Now this strange dream mirrors the assaults that have been made on all belief systems throughout the text. But it also suggests, more subtly, the criticism of commodification and a dehumanizing capitalism that lies at the heart of West's enterprise. When one tropes life and religions and what passes for "values" as objects in a pawnshop, then one has succumbed to a powerful species of nihilism indeed. And yet the pawnshop has other connotations. It suggests that all of us are used goods, that all of us are involved in an exchange system in which we are forced to barter ourselves to the highest bidder, that all of us are rejected or extraneous objects seeking some sort of system to give us meaning and value. These are not comforting thoughts, and yet they form the core of West's vision of life as a cosmic pawnshop, a buyer's market where the only tenuous hope we have for survival lies in self-deprecating humor and mechanistic disengagement from the emotions. In a letter to a friend, West observed about himself: "I do consider myself a comic writer, perhaps in an older and much different tradition than Benchley or Frank Sullivan. Humor is another thing; I am not a humorous writer I must admit and have no desire to be one." As several critics have noted, West's "comic" characteristics are not as close to Greek traditions--ridicule through comic reduction--as he would like us to believe.(1) In his two major works, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day of the Locust (1939), West clearly intended to experiment with the traditions of vaudeville comedy, burlesque, comic-strip action, and the grotesqueries associated with the dark violence of gallows humor, all modern-day adaptations of ridicule through comic reduction. But West was also attempting something much more complex. He aimed in these two texts to use a particular theory of comedy--derived from Henri Bergson--in order to make a particularly Bergsonian criticism about what passes for life in a dehumanized, mechanized, and industrialized society, that is, society as pawnshop. In depicting his characters and their lives as ludicrously machine-like, commodified, and objectified, West condemns the schizophrenia and alienation that capitalism has produced in its modern victims.(2) West's characters are schizophrenic and alienated because they are victimized by their beliefs in two conflicting ideologies. On one hand, they embrace the humanist ideology; they believe themselves to be "totalities" and "selves" as they throw off their oedipal inheritance. But according to the "anti-oedipal" ideology to which West subscribes, they can be seen more accurately as part-objects of the machine we call life. And the disparity between these two systems produces for West and his readers the rather dark humor of both works. In laughing at his characters, West laughs specifically at the conflicts caused by their subscription to humanist beliefs, which are later contradicted by their mechanistic behavior and attitudes. And yet his characters have had no choice but to behave as machines, as comically grotesque automatons who have been programmed to deconstruct. Like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, he rejects the bourgeois notion of a "self," of human beings as "individuals" or "totalities. …

Heritage and Deracination in Walker's "Everyday Use." (Alice Walker)

Abstract: Everyday Use," a story included in Alice Walker's 1973 collection In Love and Trouble, addresses itself to the dilemma of African Americans who, in striving to escape prejudice and poverty, risk a terrible deracination, a sundering from all that has sustained and defined them. The story concerns a young woman who, in the course of a visit to the rural home she thinks she has outgrown, attempts unsuccessfully to divert some fine old quilts, earmarked for the dowry of a sister, into her own hands. This character has changed her given name, "Dee Johnson," to the superficially more impressive "Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo"--and thereby created difficulties for the narrator (her mother), who recognizes the inappropriateness of the old name but cannot quite commit herself to the new. She tries to have it both ways, referring to her daughter now by one name, now by the other, now by parenthetically hybridized combinations of both. The critic, sharing Mrs. Johnson's confusion, may learn from her example to avoid awkwardness by calling the character more or less exclusively by one name. I have opted here for "Wangero," without, I hope, missing the real significance of the confusion. Indeed, in this confusion, one begins to see how the fashionable politics espoused by the central character of Walker's story becomes the foil to an authorial vision of the African American community, past and present, and its struggle for liberation. Walker contrives to make the situation of Wangero, the visitor, analogous to the cultural position of the minority writer who, disinclined to express the fate of the oppressed in the language and literary structures of the oppressor, seeks a more authentic idiom and theme. Such a writer, Walker says, must not become a literary Wangero. Only by remaining in touch with a proximate history and an immediate cultural reality can one lay a claim to the quilts--or hope to produce the authentic art they represent. Self-chastened, Walker presents her own art--the piecing of linguistic and literary intertexts--as quilt-making with words, an art as imbued with the African American past as the literal quilt-making of the grandmother for whom Wangero was originally named. The quilts that Wangero covets link her generation to prior generations, and thus they represent the larger African American past. The quilts contain scraps of dresses worn by the grandmother and even the great-grandmother, as well as a piece of the uniform worn by the great-grandfather who served in the Union Army in the War Between the States. The visitor rightly recognizes the quilts as part of a fragile heritage, but she fails to see the extent to which she herself has traduced that heritage. Chief among the little gestures that collectively add up to a profound betrayal is the changing of her name. Mrs. Johnson thinks she could trace the name Dee in their family "back beyond the Civil War" (54), but Wangero persists in seeing the name as little more than the galling reminder that African Americans have been denied authentic names. "I couldn't bear it any longer, being named after the people who oppress me" (53). She now styles and dresses herself according to the dictates of a faddish Africanism and thereby demonstrates a cultural Catch-22: an American who attempts to become an African succeeds only in, becoming a phony. In her name, her clothes, her hair, her sunglasses, her patronizing speech, and her black Muslim companion, Wangero proclaims a deplorable degree of alienation from her rural origins and family. The story's irony is not subtle: the visitor who reproaches others for an ignorance of their own heritage (a word that probably does not figure in the lexicon of either her mother or her sister) is herself almost completely, disconnected from a nurturing tradition. Wangero has realized the dream of the oppressed: she has escaped the ghetto. Why, then, is she accorded so little maternal or authorial respect? The reason lies in her progressive repudiation of the very heritage she claims to revere. …

From Eros to Agape: Reconsidering the Chain Gang's Song in McCullers's "Ballad of the Sad Cafe." (Carson McCullers)

Abstract: Carson McCullers closes her "Ballad of the Sad Cafe" with the chain gang--"Just twelve mortal men, seven of them black and five of them white boys from this county. Just twelve mortal men who are together" (66)--singing out on the Forks Fall highway. Throughout her works, McCullers uses music as a substitute when the intensity of the moment is too powerful for words. In a conversation, McCullers stated clearly her awareness of the inequities that permeated her home region: There is a special guilt in [Southerners], a seeking for something had--and lost. It is a consciousness of guilt not fully knowable, or communicable. Southerners are the more lonely and spiritually estranged, I think, because we have lived so long in an artificial social system that we insisted was natural and right and just--when all along we knew it wasn't. (McGill 217) At the end of the "Ballad," McCullers's literal integration of the singing chain gang in a segregated South is her way of conveying the message that this novella has less to do with Eros--the passionate, individual love that exists between humans and controls the actions of Miss Amelia, Cousin Lymon, and Marvin Macy--than with Agape, the brotherly love of God. McCullers must have known from the world as it existed around her in Columbus, Georgia, in the first half of this century, that the chain gangs, those groups of men in black and white striped uniforms who worked the roadside swinging picks, digging ditches, laying pipes, picking up trash, were rare visual examples of integration in an otherwise segregated South. The irony that McCullers suggests through the men's song--that they must be chained to be together to find harmony--was not lost on her. Although the Southern prison system was segregated, the chain gang from its inception was integrated. According to Statistical Abstracts of the United States: 1951, Georgia did not submit information about prisoners received or discharged between the years 1938-45 (141), although a 1946 government document (Prisoners in State and Federal Prisons and Reformatories) indicates that 50.3% of new felony convicts in the South were black (29). In Georgia, there were 1,062 white men to 1,710 black men received in the prison system during this year of statistical gathering (30). It is safe to conjecture that black men outnumbered white men on most chain gangs throughout the first half of the century. In My Memoirs of Georgia Politics, Rebecca Felton relates many disturbing memories that date from the turn of the century, including the story of a black man who spent 15 years on a chain gang for stealing a shotgun, and that of a 12-year-old black boy who was given 12 years on the chain gang for borrowing a horse to go for a short ride (658). In the case of Johnson v. Dye (1949), an escaped black Georgia prisoner was held by a federal court because of the horror stories about inhumane treatment--"that it was the custom of the Georgia authorities to treat chain gang prisoners with persistent and deliberate brutality [and] that Negro prisoners were treated with a greater degree of brutality than white prisoners" (Goldfarb 373). Georgia authorities could offer no testimony to the contrary, and the runaway escaped extradition. In a 1932 bestseller, Robert E. Burns, a white man, documented the treatment he experienced in his I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang, available during McCullers's teenage years in the Muscogee County Library in Columbus. A second book in that same year, John Spivak's Georgia Nigger, called the public's attention (and, in all likelihood, that of the 15-year-old McCullers) to the atrocities in McCullers's home state. Both books were widely reviewed with the aim of reforming the penal code. In World Tomorrow, E. Y. Webb notes that Georgia Nigger has "relatively few new facts brought to light here, [but it is] . …

Hemingway's Critique of Anti-Semitism: Semiotic Confusion in "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen." (Ernest Hemingway)

Abstract: Hemingway's "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen" (1933) seems, at first glance, a scant story; consequently, it has been the subject of only three brief scholarly essays, none of which has appeared in the past two decades. Peter Hays reads the story as a modern revision of the legend of the Fisher King; Julian Smith sees it as an analeptic tale told by Jake Barnes of The Sun Also Rises with the narrator's identity withheld; and George Monteiro believes that its main interest lies in the light it sheds on Hemingway's attitude toward Christianity and the medical profession but faults it for having an unnecessary and insubstantial first-person narrator who is not meaningfully connected to the plot.(1) The main problem with these readings is that either they implicitly view the story as thin and are therefore compelled to read it through a speculative (in Smith's case, a wildly speculative) intertext, or else they are left with the important questions Monteiro raises: why tell the story through a nearly anonymous narrator?; and, what on earth can the point of the story be? The point of the story, however, is supported by these readings, for Hemingway's odd tale is all about the problems of reading a text and the consequences of misreading. Specifically, it is about semiotic confusion, a confusion caused by the failure of signifiers to point to appropriate signifieds (not merely the subtle forms of slippage that concern deconstructionists, but the sorts of wholesale aberrations that would bother most folks), and about characters who employ the wrong intertexts or misapply sign systems in their efforts to interpret signifiers. In "God Rest You," an older (and wiser?) narrator recalls a scene from his earlier days in Kansas City when he had been, perhaps, a reporter, hospital worker, or ambulance driver (his occupation is never specified in the text).(2) The story engages the theme of semiotic confusion from the opening sentence in which Hemingway employs a narrative strategy of presenting a description that describes nothing: "In those days the distances were all very different, the dirt blew off the hills that have now been cut down, and Kansas City was very like Constantinople" (43). This sentence presents a non-map with which to locate the story by informing the reader that a present-day sense of spatial relations is unhelpful; that the one concrete image in the sentence no longer exists; and that Kansas City can best be imagined through an intertext, Constantinople, which--even if the reader has seen it--would be of no use since the narrator does not say, aside from the dirt, how the two cities are alike. As if this were not frustrating enough, the reader is immediately told: "You may not believe this. No one believes this; but it is true" (43). Having struck a Hawthornian note in which the actual blends with the fanciful, the mundane with the uncanny, the narrator proceeds to describe a "4neutral territory" of deserted city streets covered with snow in the early dark on Christmas Day. Through the smoke and snow, an incongruous, concrete image appears--a silver French racing car in a lighted show window with the words "Dans Argent" on the hood. The narrator recalls that he "believed" this to mean "the silver dance" or "the silver dancer" and was "pleased" by his knowledge of a foreign language (43). Implied in his verb tense is that the narrator now knows that it means "in silver"; but what is more important thematically is that in the very first paragraph a signifier has been misread, because of a faulty mastery of a sign system (French), and the character who misread it assumed that he read it correctly. The paragraph concludes with the narrator walking to the city hospital on the high hill (which, given the opening sentence, may very well no longer exist) where he enters the reception room and sees the two ambulance surgeons, Doc Fischer and Doctor Wilcox. Here, the theme of semiotic confusion is further advanced by the problematizing of cultural stereotypes. …

"Wolfings": Angela Carter's Becoming-Narrative

Abstract: Who has not known the violence of these animal sequences, which uproot one from humanity, if only for an instant, making one scrape at one's bread like a rodent or giving one the yellow eyes of a feline? A fearsome involution calling us toward unheard-of becomings. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (240) The wolfsong is the sound of the rendering you will suffer, in itself a murdering. Angela Carter, "The Company of Wolves" (110) In his essay "Angela Carter's Desire Machine" Robert Clark claims that Carter's reworking of the Little Red Riding Hood story plays out "the standard patriarchal opposition between a feral domineering mate and gentle submissive female" (149). In Carter's "The Company of Wolves" Red Riding Hood ends up in the wolf's arms instead of his stomach, significantly, as the wolf pack's howls rise around them on the night of the solstice. What I will argue in this essay is that, contrary to Clark's interpretation, the components of this peculiar alliance challenge the narrative of masculine desire rather than reinforce it. Because he overlooks the dimensions and determinations of this bond, Clark's reading remains on the Oedipal path in a psychosexual forest, a path that I believe Carter's version actually foregrounds and critiques. When the beast and his prey lie down in each other's arms, consumption is narrativized in "The Company of Wolves" as a metamorphosis, what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari term "the becoming-woman." Although Carter's Red Riding Hood might be interpreted as the modern heterosexual woman "out on the town" (Clark describes her as a woman "enjoying her own sexuality and using it to tenderize the wolf"), the girl's alliance with the wolf attests to more than just a rewritten feminist ending. Instead of reinscribing the full meal deal, Carter's narrative performs a deconstruction of "the virgin function" (what Vladimir Propp might term the "minimal unit" of wolf-o-centric desire). It is a tale of girl becoming . . . more than just meat or nourishment for the quest. With his interpretation of the wolf as "sexual threat metaphorized . . . literally," Clark reads Carter's version as a typical story of sadistic male dominance without closely examining the terms of this metamorphosis (148). He most obviously overlooks this transformation with his failure to consider the significance of the werewolf legends that begin the narrative. In Carter's version, a sampling of folk wisdom about wolves and three distinct werewolf legends precede the actual Red Riding Hood tale. The move from these old wives' tales to the "tamed" nursery fable challenges the oppositions of purity and danger that Clark insists upon reading the story through. Carter deliberately saturates the tale with a proliferation of genres and thus, in a sense, reframes the sexual socialization that the nursery tale implies. These narrative transformations, or "becomings" as Deleuze and Guattari term them, suggest a (dis)ordering that explodes the "natural" sublimation of civilized glances and table manners that hold the binaries of purity/evil, subject/object, and beast/girl. The Path The legends and old wives' tales that open "The Company of Wolves" encode an ideology of borders and the human subject, a dialectics of safety and dissolution of the self. "[S]tep between the gateposts of the forest with greatest trepidation and infinite precautions," the narrator warns, "for if you stray from the path for one instant, the wolves will eat you" (111). The warnings, a pack of wolf tails, suggest a narrative multiplicity, a proliferation of the tale within its own variations that indicates the metonymic dislocation of old wives' tales into folk legends into a child's nursery fable.(1) This multitude of stories mimics tales told round the fire, blessed by the dark circumference of forest. …

The Synchronic Series as the Origin of the Modernist Short Story

Abstract: Story collections by James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and D. H. Lawrence, and across the Atlantic by William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, and Ernest Hemingway, all helped define a new style of short fiction. A key to this stylistic and thematic "revolution" is that short fiction of the modernist era is often clearly a collection: much of the cumulative power and effect of Dubliners or In Our Time comes from the fact that we read the individual stories in relation to each other. Sometimes continuing characters or recurring settings work toward this relationship. A good deal of the complexity and innovation of modernist short fiction derives from this interconnectedness. What many do not realize, however, is that there was a non-modernist model for precisely this kind of short story collection. This was a popular and common story structure that looked just like a modernist short story cycle except that it did not share the lofty artistic goals. I call the non-modernist analog a "synchronic series." Despite many approaches and styles, the basic criteria for the synchronic series are always the same: each story is simultaneously both independent from ("synchronic") and interdependent with ("a series") all the other stories. This format became ubiquitous at the turn of the century because of shifts in the production and consumption of periodicals. Though the synchronic series looks like very non-modernist, old-fashioned texts, when examined carefully, it reveals radical possibilities, which will be discussed at length. Many favorite stories--Genesis, The Odyssey, 1,001 Arabian Nights, and Don Quixote, to name a few--resemble the above definition of the synchronic series. However, none of them grew out of the specific historical circumstances that produced the publishing boom at the turn of the century. This boom, in turn, led to some unique properties. Thus, the term synchronic series is not applicable to any story that is connected but still somewhat separate; it applies only to fiction shaped by unique cultural and economic influences, as I will explain below. The synchronic series format took hold with the success of Arthur Conan Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes" stories, beginning in July of 1891. The format was no accident. Conan Doyle took credit for inventing it and made no bones about exploiting the independent/interdependent paradox. In a 1900 interview cited in Richard Lancelyn Green's introduction to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle explained that, it had occurred to him that serial stories in magazines were a mistake because if the first number was missed the readers were debarred from the story, and he therefore thought of writing a serial without appearing to do so, with each instalment complete in itself and capable of being read on its own "while each retained a connecting link with the one before and the one that was to come by means of its leading characters." (xiv) The popularity of Conan Doyle's proposed format was truly unprecedented. Ostensibly, most of the "high" modernists were quite different from their more popular "anti-modernist" contemporaries. According to their own description, modernism sought a break from traditional forms and a move toward a more experimental, self-reflexive, deliberate aesthetic. The urbane, ultra-literary modernists--Eliot, Pound, Woolf, Lawrence, and others--did not cater to the uneducated masses. Nevertheless, the immensely popular synchronic series looks identical to the modernist short story collection, and this prominent model tells us that reports of a "modern stylistic revolution" are greatly exaggerated. That the revolution was actually an adaptation is not so surprising. Some modernists freely admitted influence from other artistic movements. For example, James Joyce was extremely fond of co-opting popular media forms for his own ends. …

Prolegomenon to a Generic Study of the Short Story

Abstract: In my efforts to understand the qualities of the short story--or perhaps I should say, "stories that are short"--I am always haunted by Ruth Suckow's stinging 1927 rebuke against the critical use of the definite article. "All discussions of art on the basis of `the' are unprofitable," scolded Suckow. "I never meet any of these `thes' without wanting to say `Boo!' to its pretensions." The phrase "the short story," is a "fundamental stupidity," and to anyone who uses it, she mocked, "I feel I must inquire gently, `And who are you, my little man?"' (318) Suckow was, of course, reacting to what one critic of the time called an "orgy" of formalistic rules and formulaic stories that followed Brander Matthews's The Philosophy of the Short Story and Henry's popular success during the first 25 years of the century, finally forcing even Edward O'Brien, the most influential champion of the form, to condemn the short story (along with its damnable rule books) as a mechanized, mass-produced metaphor of the machine age. However, knowledge of the historical justification for Suckow's sarcastic skepticism is small comfort to me, for since my own attempts to discover what is unique about "stories that are short" began in the early seventies, critics have been no less insistent in their rejection of all such efforts to characterize the short story as a genre, Suzanne Ferguson concludes that there is no evidence that either a single characteristic or a cluster of characteristics distinguishes the short story from other fictions (218). Norman Friedman says he does not believe there is a definition of the short story more specific than "a short fictional narrative in prose" (29). Mary Louise Pratt suspects that discovery of the attributes of the short story is impossible, or if possible, not very interesting (111). And John W. Aldridge, in a repetition of Edward O'Brien's reaction against the form so many years ago, has recently blasted the contemporary short story as so much "assembly-line fiction"--all empty technique and no significance. Many critics have long argued that genre definitions are of dubious value--either so exact that they completely stifle what they pretend to describe or so general that they can be applied to any literary work. Benedetto Croce is simply the most influential to have claimed that all genre descriptions "either evaporate into the general definition of art or appear as an arbitrary raising of single works of art to the status of genre and norm," concluding as vehemently as Ruth Suckow, "All books dealing with classifications and systems of the arts should be burned without any loss whatsoever" (43 and 188). In what follows, I would like to suggest that the current critical attitude toward genre might be more hospitable to a new approach toward a generic understanding of the short story than it has been in the past. At least, I want to Jay bare some of the causes of past critical resistance to a generic theory of the form and try to lay the groundwork for a new critical approach in the future. The first problem I wish to review is the fact that the resistance to a generic theory of the form by most critics from Suckow to Ferguson, Friedman, and Pratt is based on their failure to find, as Ferguson puts it, a "single characteristic or cluster of characteristics that ... distinguishes the short story from other fictions" (218). Wittgenstein's shrewd solution to this Crocean refusal to accept a universal entity present in all instances of a kind or a connecting relation that all items must share was, of course, the family resemblance metaphor: Do not look for something common to all, urged Wittgenstein, but rather for a whole series of complicated networks of similarities and relationships that overlap and crisscross, sometimes involving overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail (31). However, even the family resemblance compromise has not been without its critics. …

Narrative Voice in J.D. Salinger's "Both Parties Concerned" and "I'm Crazy."

Abstract: Billy Vullmer in "Both Parties Concerned" is the narrative forerunner to Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye John Wenke (24) has suggested that following his success with Billy's narrative voice, J D Salinger returned to his Holden Caulfield character with this type of narration in mind for "I'm Crazy," one of the two stories around which Catcher was eventually constructed(1) Wenke sees a linear progression in the development of Salinger's narrative technique that begins in "Both Parties Concerned," proceeds through "I'm Crazy," and culminates in Catcher Clearly, "Both Parties Concerned" does anticipate Catcher in that both are successful attempts at skaz narration However, "I'm Crazy," which falls chronologically between the two, is different in terms of narrative technique While it shares similarity as a first-person narrative, it lacks the essential characteristic of skaz that is found in these other stories Russian in origin, skaz differs from other first-person narratives in that it attempts to "give the illusion of spontaneous speech" (Prince 88) Although a carefully prepared and highly polished text, a successful skaz leaves the reader with the impression of listening to an unrehearsed, rambling monologue such as one might hear from an excited or talkative stranger on a train or in a bar "I'm Crazy" clearly does not live up to this definition Although a colloquial first-person narrative, it fails to create the illusion of spontaneity Three characteristics of Billy's narrative contribute in large measure to making it a successful skaz These include the use of cliches and trite figures of speech, emphatic hyperbole, and extensive repetition that suggests a self-conscious concern about his ability to communicate successfully Each of these characteristics contributes to the sense of spontaneity by adding a degree of imprecision to the meaning of the speaker's utterances, as if he were struggling as he speaks to understand what it is he really wants to say These same characteristics are also part of Holden's narrative voice in Catcher However, they are largely absent from "I'm Crazy" In "Both Parties Concerned," Billy uses a number of cliches and trite figures of speech: "What was I supposed to do? Sit around home like a dope every night?" (14); "Then she laughed like a dope" (48); "I thought you'd be tickled to death" (14); "But that morning I had to shake the stuffin's out of her" (48); "She was crying to beat the band" (48) Reliance on such cliches and stock similes makes Billy's utterances seem unplanned, primarily because their use implies a lack of forethought that more original or creative figures of speech would suggest In "I'm Crazy," on the other hand, Holden generally avoids using such figures of speech The few times he does resort to them, however, they tend to be more complicated and original: "It was as though Buhler and Jackson and I had done something that had died and been buried, and only I knew about it, and no one was at the funeral but me" (36); "Old Spencer handled my exam paper as though it were something catching that he had to handle for the good of science or something, like Pasteur or one of those guys" (48) The complexity of these similes suggests deliberate forethought that makes them seem anything but spontaneous Hyperbole similarly adds to the sense of spontaneity in Billy's narrative Such exaggerations primarily add emotional emphasis to the speaker's thoughts Because they cannot be interpreted literally, their meanings are somewhat imprecise, and thus indicate that the speaker is responding more from his emotions of the moment than with considered forethought …

The Repudiation of Sisterhood in Edith Wharton's "Pomegranate Seed."

Abstract: What the ghost really needs is not echoing passages and hidden doors behind tapestry, but only continuity and silence" (Ghost Stories 3). This passage in the author's Preface to The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton refers ostensibly to the physical silence that she found increasingly unavailable in her lifetime, to the "silent hours when at last the wireless has ceased to jazz" (3). In some of the stories in the collection, however, we find evidence of her ongoing concern with a different kind of silence, the emotional silence of those condemned to the condition of non-communication with their fellow creatures. Wharton articulates this concern in her autobiography, A Backward Glance, and dates it from the "owning of [her] first dog," which "woke in [her] that long ache of pity for animals, and for all inarticulate beings, which nothing has ever stilled" (4). 1 believe that this pity "for all inarticulate beings" extended to a concern for the absence of communication among women and that it surfaces in her ghost stories, wherein manifestations of the supernatural, the normally hidden and silent world, figure the suppression and silence of women that Wharton found in her society. Several of her ghost stories illustrate this notion with terrifying effects, and one in particular deals specifically with the virtual silence between the woman writer and her female reader. "Pomegranate Seed" tells the sinister tale of the recently married Kenneth and Charlotte Ashby--she for the first time and he a widower--and the "shadowy third"(1) between them, his dead wife, Elsie, who continues to communicate with him by way of letters after her death. At the story's end, Kenneth has disappeared--presumably gone to join Elsie--and Charlotte and her mother-in-law are left with only a final, barely legible letter as a clue to where he may have gone. The emphasis oil the letters and on the characters in their roles as sender and receivers clearly identifies this as a story about writing and reading, and the few recent critics who have taken up "Pomegranate Seed" wisely focus on its nature as such. Most, however, concentrate on examining the story's clues to Wharton's ambivalence toward her writing and toward female authorship in general. Such ambivalence indeed abounds, but my approach to the story, while acknowledging the ambivalence, reveals a parallel but more decisive strain, at least in the text if not in the author. I read "Pomegranate Seed" as Wharton's indictment of the woman writer who perpetuates the state of noncommunication among women--who embraces the power of writing but can only do so at the cost of repudiating both her own gender identity and the responsibility of sisterhood, of keeping faith with other women through her writing. Wharton thus looks forward in this story to later feminist theorists, like Luce Irigaray, who have raised and continue to grapple with questions of women's language in a world dominated by masculine subjectivity and discourse. Recent critics who offer explications of "Pomegranate Seed" focus oil its ambivalence or the evidence of struggle with an inner dilemma. Carol J. Singley and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney read the story as a "parable about women's ambivalence toward the power of reading and writing" (178). Candace Waid, in Letters from the Underworld, finds in "Pomegranate Seed" evidence of Wharton's inner "conflict between the realm of an invisible God who is associated with truth and reading and the domain ruled by her mother that was devoted to social appearances" (199). Annette Zilversmit in her essay "Edith Wharton's Last Ghosts" focuses on indications of Wharton's attempts to come to terms with "her most potent fears, the phantoms, not of men or society, but of other women, seemingly more attractive or deserving than herself or her heroines" (298). Margaret McDowell, concentrating on the later ghost stories for a "fuller understanding of [Wharton's] life and thought in the last years of her career" (292), finds increasing ambiguity toward the end of Wharton's life and career. …

Redefining Place: Femes Covert in the Stories of Mary Wilkins Freeman

Abstract: In writing about women and their "place" in nineteenth-century New England society, Mary Wilkins Freeman frequently used images that emphasize the places, spaces, and environments occupied by her female protagonists. Settings typically include houses, porches, yards, churches, parlors, and kitchens--spheres in which the "True Woman" of the times could fulfill society's expectations of her and where the emerging "New Woman" could still serve in her duties to others rather than to herself. At first glance, one might assume that, "as a realistic recorder of the status and sensibility of the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century New England woman" (Reichardt xi), Freeman is simply perpetuating that century's stereotypical images of woman's limited "place." In addition, these stories further the concept of restrictive spaces with numerous images that reflect covering or containment. Freeman's women "cover" themselves with shawls, bonnets, gloves, and parasols; they "enclose" their homes with fences, rails, paint, and flowers; they "shield" interior furnishings with carpets, wallpaper, curtains, and quilts; and they "contain" their belongings in baskets, drawers, bags, and aprons. These and other images of enclosure emerge frequently and significantly, and the reader begins to wonder if Freeman's metaphorically "covered" women are any different from the earlier femes covert of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, a term used to define one of two "places" traditionally assigned to women--unmarried or widowed femes sole, and married or "covered" women. After all, her New England "nun," Louisa Ellis remains single and alone, enclosed by a future filled with days metaphorically strung together like encircling rosary beads. Also, one of Freeman's married women, Sara Penn, in her well-known "revolt," merely relocates from one enclosure to another when she moves her family from their house into the new barn. Much critical attention has been given to Freeman's protagonists as women who exhibit innovative qualities of independence, strength, and even rebellion; however, if they continue to be restricted and inhibited by Freeman's rhetoric of enclosure, are they indeed breaking through the traditional images of femininity or are they merely staying "in place"? In the late nineteenth century at a time when women were beginning to move into traditional male professional, educational, and work spheres, still "they were not set free from constraining images of femininity" (Cutter 383). Even in legalese rhetoric, jurists referred to the married woman as a "feme covert." But one might expect a woman author writing about women to reflect the reality of those women at a time when the American female was beginning to develop a new consciousness of self--an identity not necessarily enclosed by the confinements of patriarchal and societal expectations. A closer look at Freeman's images of enclosure in the contexts of individual characters' situations does indeed reveal that attempt. Instead of remaining passively static in restrictive places imposed by outside forces, Freeman's women--both married and single--actively determine and maintain places of their own choosing, enclosing themselves in situations and choices that reflect personalities and purposes conducive to the affirmation of self. Whereas Freeman's enclosure imagery may, at first, tend to focus the reader's attention on previously established stereotypes for woman's limited places, instead they clearly redefine and redesign for these women their own places that reflect self-definition. Freeman's female protagonists are satisfied with their particular existences; even though they may enjoy lifestyles that are non-conformist, even eccentric by community standards, they are content with their choices--with the places that they have determined. Rejecting marriage, for example, as the traditional "place" for conventional young ladies in the nineteenth century is Louisa in the story of the same name. …

Cinematic Rhythms in the Short Fiction of Eudora Welty

Abstract: This little clicking contraption with the revolving handle will make a revolution in our life--in the life of writers ... We shall have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy screen and to the cold machine. A new form of writing will be necessary ... But, I rather like it. Tolstoy (1908) At the same time that Eudora Welty, born in 1909, was learning to process literature by reading and being read to as a young child in Mississippi, she was also being initiated into the world of a burgeoning new art form, the cinema; as she explains in One Writer's Beginnings: All children in those small-town, unhurried days had a vast inner life going on in the movies. Whole families attended together in the evenings, at least once a week, and children were allowed to go without chaperone in the long summer afternoons.... (36) Given such memories, it is not surprising that we should find reflections of this same film culture in a number of Welty's stories: Stella-Rondo's "marvelous blonde child" is aptly named Shirley T; the ladies of Leota's beauty parlor read Screen Secrets; and Wilbur Morrison wields power over his children in "June Recital" by threatening to withhold picture show money. Moreover, note the similes Welty uses, again in "June Recital," to convey Loch's and Cassie's perceptions: from his window, Loch sees the Maclain porch hanging "like a cliff in a serial at the bijou" (CS 275) and Cassie views her father opening his morning paper "like Douglas Fairbanks opening big gates" (CS 295). Clearly, Welty grounds these characters in a world in which "all children had a vast inner life going on in the movies." Of course, Miss Welty would attest to the fact that being a "constant moviegoer" (qtd. in Ferris 169) has inspired her writing in this way. Whereas Alfred Appel, Jr. finds one of the sources of Miss Welty's comedy to be "a revival in spirit, if not in form, of the most ancient sources of comedy, the Dionysiac revels" (60), Welty suggests a more immediate association with cinema: "In devotion to Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Ben Blue, and the Keystone Kops.... My sense of making fictional comedy undoubtedly caught its first spark from the antic pantomime of the silent screen ..." (One Writer's Beginnings 36). In fact, we need only look to "June Recital" to see this notion played out: Upstairs, the sailor and Virgie Rainey were running in circles around the room, each time jumping with outstretched arms over the broken bed.... They went around and around like the policeman and Charlie Chaplin, both intending to fall down. (CS 282) Welty would also likely accept the argument posited by Ruth Weston that Welty's childhood encounter with The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari(1) influenced her creation of "a landscape of gothic terror in `First Love' images of suffering, entrapment, and death in the unusual cold ..." (34). The presence of these film allusions in her stories attests to Welty's engaged involvement with film culture, to be sure. But I would argue that her work reveals a formal association with film as well--one that centers on her use of various cinematic techniques that, learned from her experience as a moviegoer, afforded Welty new ways of experiencing "stories" and, in turn, inspired new ways of writing them. Welty herself concludes that a significant relationship exists between the techniques of film making and her work as a short story writer--a "kinship" that affects her almost intuitively, as she explains: [Film] can do all the things you do as a short story writer to bring out what you are trying to do. And I think as a short story writer I feel that I must have absorbed things. I've been a constant filmgoer all my life. I must have absorbed some of the lessons which have come in handy. …

Waves of Time in Faulkner's Go Down, Moses

Abstract: Always, when we read Faulkner, we move into a world of changing relationships and shifting boundaries. Narration emerges from apocryphal observations as often as from firsthand accounts. Lineage and ancestry are one and at the same time fixed in blood and stone and entirely mythical. Characters in one story react to some event that occurred in another novel or story with no overt linkage spelled out. Cause and effect become not linear but amorphous and ambiguous. Yet, slowly, and reliant on the reader's experience, rich, complex meaning emerges, evocative both of Faulkner's South and of larger human issues. Faulkner's readers and critics are not strangers to how time shapes storyness. Frequently in Faulkner, the reader must disentangle chronological developments from the linear progression followed moving through a story. Such entanglement is not, of course, unique to Faulkner, but, taken together with his complex and layered chronologies, it creates much of what is distinctive and significant about his work. By feeding information in a delayed sequence in his collection Go Down, Moses, Faulkner forces the reader to move back and forth between stories in an attempt to create logical and systematic patterns of meaning. The ancestry of the character Ike (Isaac McCaslin) creates a typical pattern of delayed information. Ike is referred to at the age of 70 in the very first story ("Was"), but it is not until four stories later in "The Bear" that the reader learns that Ike is a product of a union between Theophilus McCaslin and Sophonsiba Beauchamp, a couple whose union Faulkner so comically thwarts in that first story. The reader must decipher lineage in this collection by examining how time flows. Faulkner helps effect this deciphering of the flow of time by turning the series of stories into a genealogical puzzle. Time and ancestry are expressed through one another, and in time's relationship to ancestry & meaning of lives begins to emerge. But ancestry is not the only expression of time in this text. Faulkner surrounds the reader with a myriad of other references and allusions to time, creating a cascading flow that structures the wholeness of the collection. Before examining particular expressions of time in Faulkner's text, a consensual understanding of what is meant by the concept of time is necessary. Time as flow, distinguished from the view of time as particulate moments, is characterized by Michael Shallis in his study On Time: An Investigation in Scientific Knowledge and Human Experience in this way: Time is experienced in two fundamental ways. It seems to flow--the passing of seconds, days and years--very much like an endless stream or river, ... Time is also perceived as a succession of moments with a clear distinction between past, present, and future. (Shallis 14) Shallis also describes these two most prevalent, generalized models of linear and cyclical time: Time seems linear most of the time. It stretches back into the past like a temporal ruler marked in a scale of years, decades, and centuries, and it stretches away into the future.... However, time is also perceived as cyclic and therefore not necessarily "progressive." In such a view, based on the various cyclic characteristics of nature, the day, the season, the year, time becomes the element within which natural events occur, always coming full cycle .... (Shallis 14-15) Literature often presents this cyclical view of time, emphasizing recurrent patterns (diurnal or seasonal). Short stories in particular, because they condense time, adopt this pattern of representation rather than the linear. Shallis, however, points out the difficulty of modeling the flow of linear time: Time as an endless flowing stream ... is not suitable for a practical clock. However, a cyclic view of time, where the repeatability of an event, like the observed passage of the sun through the sky, day after day, can provide a most appropriate basis for a clock. …

"One of My Babies": The Misfit and the Grandmother

Abstract: Criticism of Flannery O'Connor's fiction, under the spell of the writer's occasional comments, has been unusually susceptible to interpretations based on Christian dogma. None of O'Connor's stories has been more energetically theologized than her most popular, "A Good Man Is Hard To Find." O'Connor flatly declared the story to be a parable of grace and redemption, and for the true believer there can be no further discussion. As James Mellard remarks, "O'Connor simply tells her readers--either through narrative interventions or be extra-textual exhortations--how they are to interpret her work" (625). And should not the writer know best what her story is about? A loaded question, to which the best answer may be D. H Lawrence's advice: trust the art, but not the artist. One cannot deny that the concerns of this story are the basic concerns of Christian belief: faith, death, salvation. And yet, if one reads the story without prejudice, there would seem to be little here to inspire hope for redemption of any of its characters. No wishful search for evidence of grace or for epiphanies of salvation, by author or reader, can soften the harsh truth of "A Good Man Is Hard To Find." Its message is profoundly pessimistic and in fact subversive to the doctrines of grace and charity, despite heroic efforts to disguise that fact. This vexing little masterpiece cannot be saved from itself. It has a will of its own and a moral of its own. There are really only two characters in this story: the Grandmother and the Misfit. The rest are wonderfully drawn--hateful little June Star, or whiny Red Sammy--but they do not figure in the central debate. Although the Misfit is not physically present until the final pages, his influence hangs over the story almost from the beginning, when the Grandmother warns her son Bailey of the dangerous criminal "aloose from the Federal Pen" (The Complete Stories 117). Once the family sets off on their vacation trip, the Grandmother seems to forget her feigned concern, for it is only a strategy by which she hopes to force Bailey to take the family in another direction. But the reader has not forgotten. We wonder only when, and where, the inevitable confrontation will take place. At Red Sam's filling station, we suppose. But O'Connor has other plans, which are fulfilled in a chain of events so contrived, so improbable, and so perfectly appropriate to this earful of cartoon characters, that we can only be delighted by the writer's disdain for the niceties of plotting. It is a brilliant stroke: their car rolls over in a field miles from anywhere; and then, as sure as sundown, the Misfit and his crew slowly move toward them. The story rapidly moves to its climax, when the Misfit shoots the Grandmother dead. But what comes just before that killing interests us even more. The Misfit has already directed the execution of the Grandmother's entire family, and it must be obvious to all, including reader and Grandmother, that she is the next to die. But she struggles on. Grasping at any appeal, and hardly aware of what she is saying, the Grandmother declares to the Misfit: "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!" As she utters these shocking words, "She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest" (132). Noting that some squeamish readers had found this ending too strong, O'Connor defended the scene in this way: "If I took out this gesture and what she says with it, I would have no story. What was left would not be worth your attention" (Mystery and Manners 112). Certainly the scene is crucial to the story, and most readers, I think, grant its dramatic "rightness" as a conclusion. What is arguable is the meaning to the Grandmother's final words to the Misfit, as well as her "gesture," which seemed equally important to O'Connor. One's interpretation depends on one's opinion of the Grandmother. …

The Search for the Artist in Man and Fulfillment in Life - Rebecca Harding Davis's 'Life in the Iron Mills.'

Abstract: Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills can be read as Davis's expression of confusion regarding her own perception of the artist. The character of Hugh Wolfe, presented with characteristics of both sexes and divided between the entrapment of his life's situation and the desire for an unspecified "something else," can be seen as a reflection of Davis herself. John Conron suggests that Davis "makes [Wolfe] an exemplary type of the man of feeling, whose feelings have been repressed by his environment," but Davis is in fact more concerned with the nature of the artist as restricted by humanity and environment (493). Furthermore, the narrator and obvious references to other artists frame the novella, and these aspects of the text serve to further broaden the search for the nature of man as artist. Throughout the novella, Wolfe is presented foremost as an artist, introduced amidst a "scene of hopeless discomfort and veiled crime," and is thus depicted primarily within an environment that would surely not be conducive to developing artistic ability (Davis 9). The hunchback Deb first calls the reader's attention to the individual nature of Wolfe as artist, perhaps fittingly so, as Deb's physical characteristics distinguish her from the rest of society just as Hugh's "difference" causes him to be isolated: She felt by instinct, though she could not comprehend it, the finer nature of the man, which made him among his fellow-workmen something unique, set apart. She knew that, down under all the vileness and coarseness of his life, there was a groping passion for whatever was beautiful and pure. (10) This hint of difference in Wolfe is not clearly defined, but Deb can sense the unique element within Hugh, without necessarily being able to pinpoint exactly what it is that constitutes this difference. She seems aware (and thus makes the reader aware) that Hugh is superior to the other men in the mill and that this special quality he possesses manifests itself in a yearning for more from life. Wolfe can look beyond his current situation and maintain his depressing existence only with the belief that there are other options available to him. Wolfe, with his "meek, woman's face," is isolated not only by physical characteristics that do not conform to the expected standards of the male physique, but furthermore by the fact that he has received a certain amount of education, no matter how minimal, and thus "had the taint of school-learning on him" (10, 11). He is decidedly "not one of themselves" in the opinion of the other workers, due to his "foreign thoughts and longings breaking out through his quietness in innumerable curious ways," and Wolfe in fact expresses himself through art as an escape from the confines of his existence (11). At this point, Davis interrupts her own narrative in the form of the feeling narrator, and reiterates for the reader that Wolfe is to be regarded as extraordinary: Think that God put into this man's soul a fierce thirst for beauty,--to know it, to create it; to be--something he knows not what,--other than he is. . . . With all this groping, this mad desire, a great blind intellect stumbling through wrong, a loving poet's heart, the man was by habit only a coarse, vulgar laborer, familiar with sights and words you would blush to name. (11) Davis seems here to be "groping" toward her own definition of what an artist is and toward the characteristics that distinguish Wolfe from other men. Yet she too is groping and cannot overcome the insurmountable barrier of defining the indefinite. She can only identify that Wolfe is searching for an alternative, for something else, without either Davis or Wolfe knowing themselves exactly what it is they are seeking. Wolfe clings to the hope that there are alternatives to his present situation in order to go on living, and when this hope of difference is taken from him by his later imprisonment, the only option he sees remaining is to take his own life. …

Text and Countertext in Rosario Ferre's "Sleeping Beauty."

Abstract: Rosario Ferre is one of a group of angry young Puerto Rican women authors who have seized the pen and wielded it effectively. Educated on the island and the mainland, Ferre is the daughter of a former governor of Puerto Rico and by birth a member of the upper-class, conservative society she satirizes in her fiction. She has acknowledged that writing is for her a destructive as well as a constructive endeavor and that she is driven by a need for vengeance and a desire to give permanence to what hurts and to what attracts her ("Writer's Kitchen" 215). The anger that impels much of her work is evident in her 1976 collection of stories and poems, Papeles de Pandora (Pandora's Papers or Pandora's Roles).(1) In Greek mythology, Pandora is identified as the first woman and is given by each of the gods some power that could bring about the ruin of man. According to certain accounts, her husband, Epimetheus, opens the vessel containing the gifts and thereby releases plagues, sorrow, and mischief upon mankind. The version that has prevailed, however, blames Pandora and her curiosity for the disaster. The first woman is thus identified as a dangerous creature having an evil nature and bent on doing evil to men. Ferre's book tells what Molly Hite has termed the other side of the story, the alternative version that gives events a different set of emphases and values (4). Ferre has spoken of the need to rewrite "history" as it should have occurred, with Desdemona killing Othello and Ariadne deserting Theseus ("Entrevista" 90), and in Papeles de Pandora she engages in revisionary mythopoesis (see DuPlessis). The stories (papers) show not only the roles in which women are often cast but also the attempts some women make to break out of those roles. Ferre often images her female characters as dolls (decorative, passive, powerless, without voice or will), and the English translation of Papeles de Pandora is entitled The Youngest Doll, after one of the best known of the narratives. The one that concerns me here, "Sleeping Beauty" ("La bella durmiente") has been much discussed, but little attention has been focused upon its form and structure.(2) The story is a collage of opposing texts and countertexts that play off, rub against, and collide with one another. The resulting friction produces sparks. Discordant discourses and dissonant tones highlight conflicts. Different perspectives upon the same events throw into high relief the chasms that separate contrasting views. The structural fragmentation of the narrative and absence of dialogue underscore the lack of true communication among the characters. As Diana Velez has observed, Maria de los Angeles "has only private internal speech, the speech of dreams" (80n8). Others talk and write about her; she is reduced to silence and marginalized. The two letters she writes do not appear over her signature. The following pages examine how letters from the protagonist, the director of the convent school where she is educated, her father, and her husband clash with one another and with social columns, newspaper clippings, captions written in a photo album, a birth announcement, snatches of the protagonist's interior monologue, and comments by an omniscient narrator. Each of the three divisions of the story--"Coppelia," "Sleeping Beauty," and "Giselle"--takes its title from a famous ballet, a nonverbal text that draws inspiration from a written one: E. T. A. Hoffmann's "The Sand-Man," Charles Perrault's "The Sleeping Beauty," and Heinrich Heine's De l'Allemagne. In 1987 Ferre commented on her ambivalence with respect to classical music, stating that while she recognized the beauty of compositions by Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt--all men--she resented the fact that she was expected to listen silently, respectfully, to the old masters without being allowed to respond to what they were saying ("Una conciencia musical" 8-9). The role of passive, worshipful listener was alien to her. Equally alien, in all likelihood, was the role imposed by classical ballets, based upon male-authored librettos and music, traditionally choreographed by men and with male-designed sets and costumes. …

Apollo and Dionysus: Donald Barthelme's Dance of Life

Abstract: "We all doubt our authority. We're not sure we understand it." --Donald Barthelme(1) 1 In "A Picture History of the War" we meet a son, young Kellerman, who cannot live up to his father's expectations, and a father, the general, who has nothing coherent to say to his son. Eventually Kellerman, in a Kafka-like gesture, repudiates his father ("I'm not accepting any more blame, Papa," he declares), but his need for guidance remains. In the final paragraph he approaches a group of firemen, "gigantic in their black slickers," and begins questioning them about the nature of life. The firemen may be frightened, they may not even know where the fire is, but they represent authority and, for Kellerman, that is enough.(2) As many readers have noticed,(3) the problem of authority--the search for order, control, and a meaningful set of values--appears everywhere in Barthelme's fiction and on every level: in our political life (Barthelme's President speaks in empty "cadences");(4) in our cultural and intellectual endeavors ("many famous teachers," we are told, "teach courses [merely] in themselves");(5) and in our relationship with the spiritual. God's death, for example, has forced the angels to struggle with new definitions of themselves, to proffer new proofs in the manner of Thomas Aquinas, and even attempt an angelic version of humanism ("for a time the angels had tried adoring each other")--all to no avail ("On Angels"). That the author's search for order is as personal as it is professional has been suggested by his friends and literary acquaintances. In 1970, when Barthelme was coming to national attention, critic Richard Schickel described him as a man with rimless glasses and carefully trimmed beard, who dresses "conservatively"; his New Yorker manuscripts are "very neatly typed." Says a friend, "Barthelme has an impulse to control every aspect of his life" (42), as even a cursory glance at the author's work reveals: his meticulous concern for diction, tone, and rhythm; his fascination with the look of a piece on the page; all of those crisp line drawings and incisive collages. And yet there is another side to Barthelme that also appears in his fiction: in those very collages that fragment reality, those juxtapositions of conflicting elements, his stream-of-consciousness monologues and colloquies of disembodied voices, and most especially, in his yearning to write a kind of literature that approaches the condition of music--these are the strategies of an author who wishes to break down established categories, demolish traditional forms, to acquire an insight that will take him beyond categories and forms. As journalist Sally Kempton noted, so many years ago, Barthelme "thinks that some shift of vision, if he can manage it, will reveal the true nature of our existence to him" (Schickel 44). The interplay of these two impulses--the Apollonian search for order and the Dionysian longing for freedom from conventions--informs much of Barthelme's work and is often expressed through the metaphor of music. References to music are everywhere in his fiction (consider a few of his titles: "The Piano Player," "The Police Band," "The Policemen's Ball," "The New Music," "The King of Jazz," "Traumerei," "Aria," etc.), reflecting his background and interests. In several interviews he speaks of the classical records in his childhood home, his early enthusiasm for jazz, later country and rock (O'Hara 184-85; see also Bellamy 52). But music not only gives him personal pleasure; it also serves as a useful representation of conflicting elements in his work. In its Apollonian guise, music has a tonal center, traditional chord progressions, a hierarchy of notes with rules governing their movement; rhythmic regularity, and carefully crafted compositional forms, like the fugue, concerto grosso, the classical sonata. As such it perfectly captures the desire for coherence and centeredness, the intricate social dance that preoccupies many of Barthelme's characters. …

Writing Region across the Border: Two Stories of Breece Pancake and Alistair MacLeod

Abstract: In a Tennessee folk tale from the early twentieth century, a Yankee traveling salesman receives a dose of regional wisdom when his car breaks down in the southern backwoods. Judging from the last hour of his trip, the salesman decided his best chance of reaching civilization lay in abandoning the road and cutting through the surrounding forest, which he did, only to find himself hopelessly lost minutes later. Luckily a young farm-boy was hunting nearby and offered to guide the salesman to the nearest service station. Grateful for this rescue, the salesman tried to strike up a conversation with the boy along the way. "That's a mighty fine rifle you have," he told the boy, who shrugged and responded, "It's the same rifle my granddad carried in the Civil War." Duly impressed, the salesman asked if he could take a look at it, so the boy stopped and handed him the gun. The salesman turned it over in his hands. "That's a good-looking barrel to have gone through the Civil War," he said. "Oh, it's not the same barrel," the boy rejoined. "Granddad put on a new one not too far back. The salesman fingered the gun respectfully. "Well, it's still a fine wood stock to have lasted all these years," he offered. "I s'pose," the boy responded, "but my daddy put that stock on not five years before giving it to me." The salesman scratched his head. "I see. Well, it's still a mighty nice trigger to have stayed easy all this time." The boy shook his head. "I put that on just last month." At this final admission, the salesman returned the firearm, practically beside himself with amusement. "Son, I hate to say this, but that rifle's practically new." The boy took it solemnly. "Nosir, it's the same gun my granddad carried in the Civil War."(1) The story of the gun has always struck me as profound, in particular for the way it seems to inform the process of identity-construction in the regional community. The salesman, the outsider who has no sense of the community or its spirit, reduces his understanding of the rifle to an assessment of its use-value after he has determined that it was not, in fact, carried through the Civil War. For the boy, however, the rifle remains both a figurative and literal intersection of past and present, not so important because it dates his ancestry as far back as the War Between the States, but because it provides him with a tangible fink to that ancestry, a fink that justifies his present occupation of the land and continually articulates his relationship to it. The gun is not, as the salesman would contend, mere memorabilia, but a symbol of the hunting and fighting, with their implicit emphasis on reading the landscape, in which the boy's ancestors participated and in which the boy now participates in order to survive. History for the boy, then, becomes not only dates and facts, but a genetic tie to the land itself, his inheritance of the gun representing an external affirmation of his passage into manhood and his ascent into this physical, almost life-and-death, relationship. This kind of understanding, of course, allows the boy to navigate the woods where the salesman cannot, and his clear vision of the forest implies a clarity and rationality about his correspondent sense of history, symbolized by the gun. Nonetheless, there remains a side of me that sympathizes with the salesman; in his world of contracts and premiums, the gun can only be a gun, and its worth is dictated almost solely by the changes that have been made to it, changes which in this case serve only to decrease its value. Moreover, if the gun is symbolic of the land and the people who occupy it, then the salesman's comment strikes even more sinisterly at the changing value of the regional community itself. …

Motion Sickness: Spectacle and Circulation in Thomas Hardy's "On the Western Circuit."

Abstract: Dreading the moment when the inexorable stoker, grimly lurking behind the rococo-work, should decide that this set of riders had had their pennyworth, and bring the whole concern of steam-engine, horses, mirrors, trumpets, drums, cymbals, and such-like to pause and silence, he waited for her every reappearance. ("On the Western Circuit" 246) The grim stoker, who makes only this one brief appearance in Thomas Hardy's 1891 story, "On the Western Circuit," is the invisible producer of phantasmagoria, embodying all the evils that the steam roundabout's cheery whirl seems to belie. Harmless and beautiful as a ride on the roundabout may seem at first, the reader does not need to have been tutored by "The Fiddler of the Reels" or by the ecstatic dancing scenes in The Return of the Native to know that such a face-flushing holiday from reality will do neither its riders nor onlookers any good. "On the Western Circuit" traces meticulously the consequences of one ill-chosen ride: disaster for a housemaid, Anna; for the admiring onlooker who woos her, Charles Bradford Raye; and for her mistress Edith Harnham, who writes Anna's love letters to the peripatetic Charles and falls in love with him herself. The love triangle may be old, but roundabout love is new. At the story's base is the arrival of a machine that brings urban worries--and urban illusions--into Hardy's rural Wessex. The presence of "steam circuses, as the roundabouts were called by their owners" (245) creates a phantasmagoric effect that engenders a thoroughly mistaken love at first sight, a sort of love impossible in anteindustrial Wessex. The steam circuses do not merely conceal some aspect of reality, but create, in a viewer's eye, an illusion that becomes preferable to reality. When Charles falls in love with what he thinks he sees of Anna on the roundabout, he sets into motion a chain of events designed to recreate or to perpetuate the phantasmatic desire.(1) Out of children, young men, old people, and three pretty girls spinning by on the roundabout, Charles Bradford Raye creates a girl he loves madly. And out of the revolving images and counterimages she sees while riding the roundabout, Anna deludes herself into believing she has chosen Charles. Conceived in a whirl, this love has its existence strengthened and sustained by three subsequent evils, all linked causally, but also poetically, to the roundabout's motion: first, Charles's financial ability to pay for Anna to ride again; second, Charles's job moving with the judicial circuit, which keeps him away so that the enchantment does not wear off; third, a series of letters between Charles and Edith, who eventually pursues a full-blown epistolary romance (under Anna's name) with the absent Charles. A whirl of illusions, in other words, follows on the original visual mistake, allowing a queer emotion--that both is and is not love--to be created. But in the beginning was the image, born of the roundabout. Hardy's distrust of the modern and of technological innovations is evidenced in every one of his works. His novels sometimes seem an almost Luddite rejection of the forces of urbanization and mechanization (not to mention transportation) that were in his day rapidly replacing "homogeneous piles of medieval architecture" (244) with more homogeneous piles of slag, and greenswards with suburbs.(2) He deploys a variety of techniques to convey that distrust. He is fond of curious juxtapositions, for example, as his repeated use of French exiles, and English or German soldiers quartered in Wessex makes clear. He also lets drop a great many references to the metaphysical "ache of modernism"; "vague latter-day glooms and popular melancholies" (246) often afflict his fashionable youths. And there are more than a few pilgrimages to London, as when Caroline Aspent and Ned Hipcroft travel up to see the Great Exhibition (in the 1893 "The Fiddler of the Reels"), or Sam Hobson passes through suburban streets at night with loads of vegetables from the country (in "The Son's Veto," also 1893). …

Nostalgic Narcissism in Comic and Tragic Perspectives: Elizabeth Bowen's Two Fictional Reworkings of a Tennyson Lyric

Abstract: Tennis, anyone?" is the opening of Peter De Vries's delightful "Touch and Go (With a Low Bow to Elizabeth Bowen)," and its closing words arc "Tennyson, anyone?" (De Vries 30, 32). Surprisingly, "in conversation Miss Bowen said that she had not realized," until she read this parody, "how often she relied on Victorian poetry for her titles (e.g., `Tears, Idle Tears,' `The Happy Autumn Fields,' etc.)," according to William Heath's report in 1961 (Heath 166n2). Bowen was not necessarily disingenuous: the creative process arises from deep levels of pre-verbal awareness; memory is unreliable; influences operate deviously (creating and overcoming anxieties as they do so). What is important is the way Tennysonian allusive structures shed light on the two stories Heath has named. The fact that "Tears, Idle Tears" and "The Happy Autumn Fields" are both rewritings of the same lyric is of special interest, for it shows us Bowen's ingenuity and breadth of resource as she considers alternative ways to rethink a celebrated poem-and a provocative one. Tennyson's "Tears, Idle Tears,"(1) a poem evoking the sense of strangeness, vivid freshness, and sudden melancholy brought on by memory, was lauded in an essay by Cleanth Brooks as rich in the ironic tensions beloved of New Criticism: "The days that arc no more arc deep and wild, buried but not dead--below the surface and unthought of, yet at the deepest core of being, secretly alive" (Brooks 174). Bowen's own "Tears, Idle Tears" has never been studied in detail, so far as I can find.(2) "The Happy Autumn Fields," with its title taken from line 4 of the same Tennyson lyric, has often been looked at, but never in a detailed Tennysonian context,(3) and never in concert with its Tennysonian companion piece (as we may call it). Yet the two short stories belong together, and not only for their shared Victorian allusions. The theme of both tales, I suggest, is nostalgic narcissism--presented from a comic perspective in "Tears, Idle Tears," from a tragic one in "The Happy Autumn Fields." The ostensible theme of the Tennyson lyric is, of course, nostalgia: "So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more" (15). But the nostalgia develops from melancholia to morbidity by the poem's conclusion: "O Death in Life, the days that are no more!" (20). Though psychoanalysis of the speaker of such a brief (if evocative) lyric might perhaps seem risky, in a previous investigation of lyrical masterworks of a nostalgic kind (Goethe's "Kennst du das Land," Blake's "The Land of Dreams") I found a pattern suggesting the presence of narcissism at the heart of all nostalgia (Bidney 86-92). So it is appropriate that Tennyson's concentrated distillation of extreme nostalgic melancholia should have stimulated, in the psychological imagination of Elizabeth Bowen, brilliant fictional studies of narcissism--its potential pathology and (more surprisingly, given the gloom of Tennyson's lyric dirge) its possible remediation. Bowen, I am suggesting, radically re-imagines in these two stories a Victorian lyric of nostalgic melancholia, and she does so in order to show how this condition fosters, and is fostered by, a regressive, narcissistic mind-set. In contrast to traditional Freudian theory, recent psychological scrutiny of the origins of narcissism has focused not on the oedipal struggles of father and son but on the child's first (pre-oedipal) relation to the primary caregiver, traditionally the mother. As Barbara Schapiro explains in summing up the work of Otto Kernberg, "Due to the unavoidable shortcomings of maternal care, the relationship with the mother as our first love object is primarily characterized by ambivalence," which also "results in a corresponding split in the ego" because the "child internalizes both the `good,' loving mother and the `bad,' frustrating one. If the relation with the mother imago is damaged" by some trauma such as "emotional rejection, the internal splitting becomes even more intense" (Schapiro ix-x). …

"Signifying Nothing": Conrad's Idiots and the Anxiety of Modernism

Abstract: On or about 25 July 1894, Conrad wrote to Marguerite Poradowska: Man must drag the ball and chain of his individuality to the very end. It is the [price] one pays for the infernal and divine privilege of thought; consequently, it is only the elect who are convicts in this life--the glorious company of those who understand and who lament, but who tread the earth amid a multitude of ghosts with maniacal gestures, with idiotic grimaces. Which do you prefer--idiot or convict? (Collected Letters 1: 163) Metaphorically extended, this impossible choice between two modes of being--idiot or convict--is both a theme and a structuring principle that runs across the best of Conrad's mature modernist work, written during the first decade of the century. But it is not really a matter of choice. The author who cannot will himself into idiocy is willy-nilly a convict, imprisoned with in his own skepticism, sentenced to a lifetime of hard labor, anxiously trying to quarry meaning out of the brute matter of existence.(1) In what follows, I would suggest, on the same forensic note, that one may detect the "voice prints" of that Modernist anxiety in one of Conrad's earliest and most problematic short stories, a text that is both a symptom and a diagnosis of the same cultural crisis. The symptomaticity of the story is evident in its ultimate failure; the diagnostic power that turns it into a text of some cultural significance lies in its apparent awareness of that failure. "The Idiots," written in May 1896, during Conrad's honeymoon in Brittany, has been almost unanimously treated by critics as an embarrassing bit of juvenilia. In his Author's Note, written in the summer of 1919, Conrad himself had, according to Najder, dissociated himself from the story "unobtrusively but quite clearly," dismissing it as "such an obviously derivative piece of work that it is impossible for me to say anything about it here" (Najder 441). The story was subsequently described in Guerard's influential study as "an amateur's desperate search for a `subject' after a dismal experience of `writer's block,'" a verdict that seems to have foreclosed any further critical discussion (95).(2) The story did, however, draw some attention as a suggestive source of speculation for psycho-biographical or pathographical studies. Hardly a honeymoon piece, it is, no doubt, highly interesting if one takes the liberty of studying the author's psychosexual life. Bernard C. Meyer, for instance, has focused on the figure of the wife, the half-demented murderous woman who was to feature more fully in Conrad's later work as Winnie Verloc (the surrogate mother of another congenital idiot, who, like her early prototype, stabs the father-figure in a fit of fury). It is probably Meyer's rather ruthlessly clinical discussion that Najder has in mind when he observes, a touch acerbically perhaps, that the story "was to provide great fun for all Conrad's future psychoanalytical critics" (195). I would argue that "The Idiots" is indeed interesting mainly for its symptomatic significance, but the anxiety it articulates, in the most inarticulate manner, is not merely the private mental torments of a troubled individual trying to adjust to the marital state, but a much wider-reaching cultural malaise. I believe that the biographer's justified refusal of facile, sometimes vulgar psychoanalytic or pathobiographical speculation does not necessarily rule our the perception of symptomaticity where psychic, textual, and cultural vectors are significantly related. The following discussion would question the still prevalent distinction between the psychic (private, subjective, internal) and the cultural parameters of human reality, and suggest that any such watertight compartmentalization is ultimately less productive than the rather messier practice of watching these enclosures intersect and blend into each other. …

Reader Activation of Boundaries in Kate Chopin's "Beyond the Bayou."

Abstract: Boundaries exist everywhere in the worlds created within short stories and within the experience this genre offers the reader. Generally, we use the word "boundary" in the ordinary sense of demarcation, but I would like to suggest that we use it as a "term of art" in the study of short fiction. Without becoming overly technical, we can borrow from the mathematical notion of boundary as both limit and field. As a beginning I will show how these adjusted definitions give us some new leverage on a particular story by Kate Chopin, and on the nature of storyness itself. "Beyond the Bayou" is a rich illustration because it is about boundaries of the usual sort (physical, temporal, psychological) while it foregrounds the boundary conditions of the reader's experience. Many writers have described a landscape of the mind, a spatial configuration of physical boundaries that metaphorically reveal a character's state(s) of mind. In "Beyond the Bayou," Chopin chooses a marshy, sluggish body of water as the real and symbolic boundary for the storyworld in which her heroine La Folle exists. An introduction to the physical setting comes first in the story, as if an orientation to place were somehow more important than anything else. One might argue that any opening is just to "set the stage," but this cliche obscures the real function of any storyworld threshold, as Susan Lohafer demonstrates in Coming to Terms with the Short Story.(1) At the very least one can say that Chopin wants the reader to notice the bayou, for it is mentioned not only in the title, but also in the first sentence of the story: "The bayou curved like a crescent around the point of land on which La Folle's cabin stood" (175). That the bayou is intended to be seen--and seen as a boundary--is clear from the way the shape of the bayou encloses the world where the character La Folle fives. Mental mapping is an immediate reader response to the narrator's description at this point. The physicality of the boundary is so clear here that the reader can sketch it. Chopin strengthens this image of the bayou as a delimiting boundary by adding a growth of woods behind La Folle's cabin, to complete the encirclement of her environs: Between the stream and the hut lay a big abandoned field. . . . Through the woods that spread back into unknown regions the woman had drawn an imaginary line, and past this circle she never stepped. This was her only form of mania. (175) Chopin seems to want the reader to "map" this region, as her choice of words suggests: The narrator speaks of "drawing an imaginary line." This physical boundary of the bayou is clearly meant to have a shaping effect--on La Folle's experience, on the reader's experience, and thus on the story itself The fines between the physical and the psychical boundaries are blurred, however, in this mental mapping. Even as the reader tracks the narrator's description of the physical landscape, so, too, she takes the character's perspective and experiences La Folle's perception of the psychical boundary, the point beyond which La Folle cannot go or beyond which she cannot function because she is terrified of crossing this boundary to her world.(2) The negative impact of this delimiting boundary is figuratively revealed in the barrenness of the enclosed field and by the threatening strangeness of the woods at the back of her cabin. When considering the story as a spatial construct shaped by the bayou, the reader sees it as no accident that Bellissime, the white master's house, is at the farthest remove from the cabin of La Folle, a former slave, beloved though she is of his children. Here are dialectically opposed landscapes, a patterning frequently used in short stories and, here, helping to create cultural context. The very real physical distance and barrier between the two homesteads represent the also very real social, economic, and racial separations between the characters. …

Sex Wars in 'Moon Deluxe': Frederick Barthelme and Postmodern Prufrock

Abstract: Minimalism is dead, or so it has been portrayed recently, and most who are in a position to speak on the subject are glad to see it go.(1) Raymond Carver survived the assault on the movement with his reputation intact, only to succumb to cancer. Ann Beattie draws a fair amount of critical attention and is widely anthologized. But other writers lumped in with them have fared less well. So I was glad to see in 1994 the beginnings of a critical conversation about the writings of the convicted minimalist Frederick Barthelme. Although he is often lumped together with other minimalists for discussion, none of the detractors have taken a serious enough look at Barthelme specifically. However, two recent articles examine his work in enough detail to call for response. Timothy Peters's "`80s Pastoral: Frederick Barthelme's Moon Deluxe Ten Years On" takes issue with John Aldridge's attack on minimalist writers and on Barthelme in particular. Robert Brinkmeyer's "Suburban Culture, Imaginative Wonder: The Fiction of Frederick Barthelme" focuses on the novels, employing a definition of the grotesque that allows Brinkmeyer to read the novels with an eye to locating them in a distinctly southern tradition. In both essays the writers attempt to extricate Barthelme from the sinking ship of minimalism and to find in his work something that refutes his dismissal by critics who do not like that now not-so-new writing. Both agree he elevates the mundane, the quotidian, and the pedestrian to the level of art. Brinkmeyer says "by the detailed evocation of a place--suburbia--that is by its very definition placeless, a place that could be anyplace ... he achieves poetry" (105). Peters argues that Barthelme is "working in a mode, if not a genre, that goes back to the eighteenth century: that of the urban, or town, eclogue, and its cousin the mock pastoral" (181). In both articles there is much to agree with, much to provoke a thoughtful rereading of Barthelme, and many tools with which to begin prying open his texts. What I would like to do here is offer an alternative to Peters's method of approaching Barthelme's Moon Deluxe. Peters's approach yokes together the stories in Moon Deluxe and Nabokov's Lolita. "The suburban dreamscape," he says of the territory of Moon Deluxe, "now seems as innocent as that lost America of Nabokov's Lolita" (175). He points out another connection between these two texts: some of the stories depict "relationships between older men and young girls or much younger women" (175). The latter at least is true. But I do not agree with the notion that Moon Deluxe portrays a kind of American arcadia, a nostalgic rendering of the Myth of the Good Ole Days. Rather, I would like to propose that what we see in the Barthelme's stories are the remains of a battlefield, with his male protagonists as the shell-shocked, walking-wounded survivors of the sex wars. I think Barthelme's protagonists and narrators are better seen as post-revolutionary men--that is, men best defined as post-sexual-revolution and post-feminist. Their reticence, voyeurism, extreme self-consciousness, and yielding of power to women suggest that J. Alfred Prufrock rather than Humbert Humbert may be a better comparison in approaching Moon Deluxe. In Iron John Robert Bly writes, The Fifties male had a clear vision of what a man was, and what male responsibilities were.... During the sixties, another sort of man appeared. The waste and violence of the Vietnam war made men question whether they knew what an adult male really was. If manhood meant Vietnam, did they want any part of it? Meanwhile the feminist movement encouraged men to actually look at women, forcing them to become conscious of concerns and sufferings that the Fifties male labored to avoid.... In the seventies I began to see all over the country a phenomenon that we might call the "soft male. …