The Divine and Miss Johanna
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THE DIVINE AND MISS JOHANNA A dissertation presented to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy Eleanor Williams June 2006 This dissertation entitled THE DIVINE AND MISS JOHANNA by ELEANOR WILLIAMS has been approved for the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences by Zakes Mda Professor of English Benjamin M. Ogles Dean, College of Arts and Sciences WILLIAMS, ELEANOR. Ph.D. June 2006. English The Divine and Miss Johanna (595 pp.) Director of Dissertation: Zakes Mda The Divine and Miss Johanna is a novel that began as a first-person tale of a spiritual woman who fell in love with someone else and left her husband. Her parents took the husband’s side in the messy break up. Its title has varied from Blue to Runaway Wife to The Silver Lake. Should a reviewer classify the book as it was in its early stages, it would have been classified as “women’s literature.” The author’s journey as a writer has been at least as profound as the influences that created an entirely different novel— the study of modernism, postmodernism, gothic, magic realism, and the sublime as well as the effect professors’ and writers’ comments had on the author and her writing. The Divine and Miss Johanna evolved into a novel that blurs the boundaries between the American gothic tradition and the lush, lyrical world of magic. It is a book that questions what it means to be a Christian and the meaning of spirituality. Told in different voices, all of the characters move in spaces that a reader might interpret as real, as a projection of the character’s unconscious, or, perhaps, as a space of deep denial. In turn, The Divine and Miss Johanna is negotiating the territory between American gothic and Latin American and African magic realism in a uniquely American way. The novel also explores the hypocrisy of Christianity and the import of faith. The author believes that the book now is literature—not “women’s literature.” The critical introduction establishes the context in both the author’s life and her readings and scholarly research for such hybridity. Approved: Zakes Mda Professor of Creative Writing and World Literature 5 Table of Contents Page Abstract ...................................................................................................................3 Introduction: Wild Things: A Life and a Novel.......................................................6 Works Cited ..........................................................................................................88 Works Referenced .................................................................................................93 Prologue ................................................................................................................97 Chapter 1: Jonathan ............................................................................................123 Chapter 2: Grace ................................................................................................162 Chapter 3: Jonathan ............................................................................................225 Chapter 4: Frances .............................................................................................249 Chapter 5: Grace ................................................................................................289 Chapter 6: Jonathan ............................................................................................326 Chapter 7: Grace ................................................................................................349 Chapter 8: Jonathan ............................................................................................368 Chapter 9: Leon ..................................................................................................425 Chapter 10: Grace ...............................................................................................464 Chapter 11: Jonathan ...........................................................................................508 Chapter 12: The Divine and Miss Johanna .........................................................546 6 Wild Things: A Life and a Novel 1 If you want to go where the wild things are, you have to leave your map behind. —Laura Miller. Washington Post Book World In reviewing T. Coreghessan Boyle’s latest book of short stories, Tooth and Claw, for the New York Times Book Review on September 11, Laura Miller writes that many of the stories are accomplished but obvious (8). She asks herself why so many stories in this collection fall short of being satisfying and concludes that it is because “Boyle’s stories strike an unhappy medium in which the characters lack nuance and the narrative lacks surprise” (8). However, Miller goes on to say that “now and again, [Boyle], delivers a hint of the sublime, that sensation of brushing against the pelt of something wild and unfathomable” (8). “Sublime”, “wild”, and “unfathomable”—such wonderful words to describe literature—words with which all authors would like to hear our work described. “Wild and unfathomable” strikes me as something out of control, and “unfathomable” makes me think of spirituality tossed together with gothic grotesqueries. And “sublime”—to me— is that which transcends the human experience in whatever form, thus creating a certain magic. In her review’s conclusion, Miller states: These two stories [“Tooth and Claw” and “The Doubtfulness of Water: Madam Knight’s Journey to New York, 1702”] allow a little room for mystery to seep in, and so elude what is a nagging flaw in Boyle’s short (sometimes his long) fiction, a certain patness. If you want to go where the wild things are you have to leave your map behind you. (8) Miller sums up all that good literature must have—“a hint of the sublime, at least an illusion of mystery, an ending with a certain ambiguity that might lead to a haunting note 7 of communion, and maybe, the wildness that comes from discovery as opposed to preconceived knowledge” (8). “Accomplished”, “a certain patness”—words Miller uses to describe many of the stories in Tooth and Claw are similar to the words that triggered the poet James Wright’s struggle with depression and alcoholism. Elizabeth Hoover in the July/August, 2005 Poets and Writers writes that he viewed himself as unable to rise above competence in his poetry (21). He wrote copious letters over the years to other poets, which Farrar, Strauss and Giroux recently published under the title Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright. “Wild”—why does that word make me think of freedom, of dancing under the stars, of tossing one’s clothes to the wind and sailing off into the unknown? I recently published a reworked chapter of my dissertation novel as a short story entitled “The Yellow Bathrobe” in an anthology, Grace and Gravity. Here is a clip from Barbara Simon’s review of the book in Pedestal Magazine: The authors take chances, not so much from form, [. .], but from plot and theme. An example of the “wildness” inherent in Grace and Gravity is “The Yellow Bathrobe” by Elly Williams. Slightly longer than most of the stories, “The Yellow Bathrobe” roams all over the landscape of womanhood. We are inside the head of Frances, mother of a grown daughter, grandmother, wife of Leon. Are we to sympathize with Frances, woman whose husband has cheated on her throughout their marriage with a series of “incidents,” or are we to dislike her, woman who is jealous of her daughter? Perhaps, we are to feel sorry for her. She has a lump in her breast, tried to commit suicide, had a baby succumb to SIDS and is incapable of feeling happiness. Williams doesn’t tell us what to feel—or even if we should feel. That sort of restraint from an author makes for a good read and Grace and Gravity is full of other great stories. (http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/Secure/content/cb.asp?cbid=4596) 8 Here a reviewer is writing about my wildness—a great compliment to my way of thinking. Given that this story is a chapter from The Divine and Miss Johanna, being singled out for an example of wildness could not be more to my liking. That kind of praise for my work has been a long time coming. 2 From the moment of my birth, the angels of anxiety, worry, and death stood at my side, followed me out when I played, followed me in the sun of springtime and in the glories of summer. They stood at my side in the evening when I closed my eyes, and intimidated me with death, hell, and eternal damnation. And I would often wake up at night and stare widely into the room: Am I in Hell? —Edvard Munch, painter of The Scream, The Rescue Artist Growing up, my brothers and sisters and parents played the perfect family. My father, the Harvard-educated doctor, my mother, a housewife wealthy in her own right, my elder sister, Janet, and elder brother, Peter, smart, attractive, clearly on the road to success. Me, the dumb, boy-crazy blonde. Charlie, my gay twin brother, who. one, is not really my twin, and,two, no one in the family admitted for years was gay. Cari, the baby, blonde curls and blue eyes, coming along six years after Charlie, the rest of us eighteen months apart. FYI: Charlie and I have always thought we were twins. We call each other Twin. Having so much money and defined roles such as doctor, doctor’s wife, doctor’s children was the perfect camouflage for a family with secrets like mine. We had two 9 homes—the city house in Binghamton, New York and the farm in