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University of Cincinnati UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI Date: 12 May 2005 I, Molly Ann McCaffrey hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in: English and Comparative Literature It is entitled: Heaven and Earth: A Collection of Short Stories This work and its defense approved by: Chair: _Dr. Brock Clarke_____________ _Dr. James Schiff______________ _Professor Michael Griffith______ Heaven and Earth: A Collection of Short Stories A dissertation submitted to the Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTORATE OF PHILOSOPHY (Ph.D.) in the Department of English and Comparative Literatures of the College of Arts and Sciences 2005 by Molly Ann McCaffrey B.A., Indiana University, 1992 M.A., Miami University, 2000 Committee Chair: Brock Clarke ABSTRACT This dissertation consists of two components: a collection of short stories called Heaven and Earth and a scholarly essay on Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone. The focus of both my critical and creative work has been on the formation and development of identity in terms of gender, class, culture and ethnicity. The title story of this collection follows two American women visiting East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. During their travels, these characters confront not only their loyalty to each other but also American attitudes about class and nationality. Although my fiction works primarily in the realistic tradition, it simultaneously subverts traditional ideas about conventional morality, thus challenging social institutions and political ideologies that affect identity. For instance, many of my stories feature women who reject patriarchal assumptions about gender and culture. In “Sliders,” a young pregnant woman comes face to face with antiquated notions about gender while eating hamburgers with her grandmother. “Things in Common” explores how issues of class come to bear on the development of a lower middle-class teenage girl growing up in the rural Midwest. Conversely, a short story called “Gravy Train” explores the impact of wealth on an urban young woman’s self-esteem. The collection’s title, Heaven and Earth, like that of the title story, represents a meeting of the real and the ideal, a metaphor that can also be applied to the condition of the women in my fiction. While these characters suffer from both earthly tragedy and petty frustrations, they also experience moments of transcendence, that is, moments that keep them yearning for more of life despite its ongoing difficulties. The critical component of this dissertation explores these issues in an essay asserting the sociopolitical impact of The Wind Done Gone, Alice Randall’s 2001 retelling of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Randall’s revisionist novel challenges the ideas of racial purity and historical truth, and it is my intent to question the same types of prescribed notions about identity in both my academic and creative pursuits. TABLE OF CONTENTS Pictures of the Day I Was Born 2 Sliders 33 Things in Common 36 Gravy Train 77 Annunciation 98 The Other Man 118 The ‘Ville 129 The Lake in Winter 192 Heaven and Earth 202 Black is White: Telling the Truth about Gone with the Wind in Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone 244 Dissertation Prospectus 270 1 PICTURES OF THE DAY I WAS BORN Part of me wishes I could go back. Back to before this weekend, before I met my birth mother. She gave me a gold necklace and a t-shirt from the bar. The necklace has a pendant in the shape of a horseshoe: beams of light surround a crowned gold heart. It reminds of pictures I have seen of the sacred heart of Jesus, and I can’t help but wonder what it is that I believe in. I don’t wear gold. Just silver. But how can I tell her that? I just got off the phone with my mom, my real mom. That’s what I call her when I have to distinguish between them. Louellen is my birth mom, or usually just Louellen. “I can see everything for what it is now,” I said to my real mom when she called an hour ago. “Really?” she said. “What does that mean?” “I was worried that I would feel conflicted. That I wouldn’t know who my real family is. I used to feel guilty about it, but it’s not the same anymore. Now I know that you and Louellen are two different parts of my life, and that’s okay.” But as soon as I hung up the phone the guilt returned. Now, I want to call my mother back and tell her that I never want to talk to Louellen again. I want to tell my mother that I love her, that she’s the only mom I need. I don’t realize how transparent I am until my husband Henry 2 asks me what’s wrong. I can feel him circling, searching me for clues, but I don’t want to give in to his interrogation so soon. “What did your mom say?” he asks. “You know,” I say. “The same thing she always says.” “Let me guess. She said she was fine with Louellen being here this weekend. She said it’s no problem at all. But you can tell it actually pisses her off?” I don’t even respond to Henry. I don’t have to. He knows he’s right. He knows me, and my family, as well as I do, and he’s heard our story over and over. My younger sister Robin and I were both adopted before we were six weeks old. Like kittens. Just old enough to be weaned, but not old enough to remember. Except we’re not from the same litter. In 1970 I was born in a Baltimore city hospital, the illegitimate daughter of a nurse-in-training named Louellen and her ex-boyfriend Joe who had gone to Vietnam only months before I was born. After Louellen said her goodbyes to me, I spent a month and a half living in a Catholic orphanage being raised by nuns before meeting the two people I would come to know as parents. Robin has also met her birth mother, but her story is still more of a mystery—her mother Natalie was only fifteen when Robin was born in 1973, and her upper-middle class parents pressured Natalie into giving Robin up for adoption. On Robin’s eighteenth birthday, Natalie filed the paperwork to find out who had adopted Robin. Less than a month later, she received the information in the mail and called. She had been waiting all those years just to make contact. Robin and Natalie have a tenuous relationship now—crafted out of rambling emails, awkward phone calls and one short visit. To this day, nobody knows, or is willing to admit, who Robin’s biological father is. 3 My parents never hid the fact that we were adopted. Before I was old enough to read, I was able to recite by memory the story of how I came to be their daughter. And they always said that they would support us if we wanted to look for our birth mothers or any other family. They said it, but I never believed it was true. I believed, instead, that doing so would be uncomfortable for all of us and in some way it would hurt our relationship. So I never thought about it in any serious way. It wasn’t an option. I was at least that devoted to my parents—devoted enough that I wouldn’t even consider the one thing I was afraid would truly wound them. “So what are you going to do?” Henry eventually asks me, and I realize I should do something. “I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe I’ll email her later. It’s too late to call back.” It occurs to me that email might actually be the best option. It will give me the chance to go over some of the details we didn’t get to on the phone, and it will allow me to do so without having to deal with any more of my mother’s endless questions. Louellen married my biological father, Joe, two years after she gave me up. The wedding took place six months before their second child Joey was born. Henry likes to joke that the two of them had yet to figure out where babies came from. After Joey, they had three more: Chris, Lee and Amy. So we’re all fully related. Not half brothers and sisters, but the real thing. The adoption agency found Louellen eight months ago, mere weeks after I had filled out the necessary forms and passed the required psychological tests. It was during one of these interviews that they had first mentioned the possibility that Louellen had reunited with my birth father. These things happen, they said. So I was prepared for the idea, even if it made me feel somewhat anxious. But when we found out for sure, the shock hit Henry hard, as if he never 4 really understood the whole thing was real. Suddenly, I had more family than he did. Overnight—or thirty years later depending on how you looked at it—I had inherited an entire brood. I met Henry at an outdoor concert about five years ago. I had called to get a ticket and found out that if I went alone, I could sit in the second row. Going solo seemed like a worthwhile sacrifice to make to be that close to the stage.
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