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Girls of Easy Virtue The University of Southern Mississippi The Aquila Digital Community Dissertations Summer 8-2011 Girls of Easy Virtue Elizabeth Anne Wagner University of Southern Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: https://aquila.usm.edu/dissertations Part of the Fiction Commons Recommended Citation Wagner, Elizabeth Anne, "Girls of Easy Virtue" (2011). Dissertations. 991. https://aquila.usm.edu/dissertations/991 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by The Aquila Digital Community. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of The Aquila Digital Community. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The University of Southern Mississippi GIRLS OF EASY VIRTUE by Elizabeth Anne Wagner Abstract of a Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of The University of Southern Mississippi in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2011 ABSTRACT GIRLS OF EASY VIRTUE by Elizabeth Anne Wagner August 2011 This is a collection of four stories I have written during my time in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. ii COPYRIGHT BY ELIZABETH ANNE WAGNER 2011 The University of Southern Mississippi GIRLS OF EASY VIRTUE by Elizabeth Anne Wagner A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of The University of Southern Mississippi in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Approved: __Steven Barthelme___________________ Director __Angela Ball________________________ _Julia Johnson________________________ _Monika Gehlawat____________________ _Martina Sciolino_____________________ _Susan A Siltanen_____________________ Dean of the Graduate School August 2011 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Steven Barthelme, Frederick Barthelme, Rie Fortenberry, Melanie Barthelme, Julia Johnson, and Angela Ball. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………………………..iii INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………….………….…….v CHRISTMASTIME………………………………………………………...……….....1 LAKE RESORT…………………………………… …………………..…………….26 GIRLS OF EASY VIRTUE………………………...………………...……….………49 ONE WAY TO FIND OUT………………………………………………………...…85 iv INTRODUCTION I believe I am like most people who study fiction writing in that I came to fiction writing with a desire far greater than my ability. I wanted to write, but I did not know how to do it. The longer I studied writing and the more stories I read, the less certain I became of what a story was and how a story was made. Because of this difficulty, writing fiction, at least for me, quickly became a process of experimentation. The nature of this experimentation has to do with not only the unknown elements, the subconscious, but also with the known elements, the technical, problem solving elements. I believe a writer‟s approach to experimentation in both of these areas begins in the self. This echoes Flannery O‟Connor‟s notion of personality: “Art is the habit of the artist; and habits have to be rooted deep in the whole personality” (O‟Connor 101). What we write comes out of who we are and we have limited control over that: it has to do with our experience, what we are interested in and what we like, what we have read and what we have not read. It also comes out of what we are able to do. A writer may know that he should vividly dramatize a scene, but this knowledge does not necessarily translate into ability because there is not much to guide or instruct a writer beyond examples from other writers and no two writers will dramatize in exactly the same way. Ultimately he has got to figure out how to dramatize that scene through his own trial and error and the specific character of this trial and error will come from his own experience and personality. Because of the necessity of “not-knowing” and experimentation, learning to write fiction, for me, has been a matter of putting faith in my own inclinations and tendencies v within this process of experimenting. In other words, faith in oneself is a major part of writing fiction and this speaks to the two most valuable things I have learned in workshop. The first is that I must cultivate my own vision of world and not be afraid of it. The difference between the way I see things and the way other people see things—my own disparity and oddness— is what will make the work interesting. The second thing is that I am better off writing things that make me uncomfortable. This can apply in regard to subject matter, but it can also apply to the problem of writing in a way that seems different from the way other people write, a way that might turn out to be completely wrong. The best example I can think of here comes from one of Hugh Kenner‟s essays about F. Scott Fitzgerald: To list his array of devices so casually is not to underrate the expertise of Gatsby, but to note how inductively the expertise was acquired. He did not so much isolate and reflect upon techniques as observe himself responding to what he read, and sort out what had made for comfortable or uncomfortable reading. When after too many pages of preparation one novelist let something happen—a newborn‟s cry—Fitzgerald found this event without significance “except the strained one of making the reader think—„Well, after all that climb it must mean more than I think it does!‟” That was his chief gift, fidelity to his own responses. Reading in this way, reading everything—War and Peace, well-machined junk—he remained quarter-educated, but he learned to set up situations and manage transitions without fuss. (Kenner 35) Fitzgerald learned how to work from who he was and he learned how to isolate the vitality of his own interests. Most of the criticism Fitzgerald‟s work receives stems from this, but it seems to me the most important thing a writer can learn. Fidelity to one‟s own responses is a brave thing. It is also the easiest way to cultivate an independent vision of the world. As I try to improve my own work, I know that it‟s important to remember this. Though the stories included in this manuscript have been revised extensively, I still vi find that they are often too long and too heavy; sometimes there are just too many words (notice even here my maddening use of “sometimes” and “just”). I see this and know that it must be changed, but I also recognize that this change must be careful. I must not learn to write a different way; I must learn how to write the way I write, only better. One example of this process of experimentation can be found in my focus on making a story with pieces that fit together and create a realistic sense of cause and effect. I focus on the creation of cause and effect because it has been the most difficult element of writing short stories for me, and because I focus on this element I do not worry too much about controlling other elements of the story. Much of the higher order work of my fiction writing—depth of character, texture, atmosphere, the accumulation of connected detail, and the overall creation of meaning—are done almost subconsciously. I deliberately do not think too much about many of my choices, especially those that have to do with selection of detail. Instead, by putting more conscious emphasis on the creation of a realistic causality, my subconscious mind is allowed to work more freely on the higher order elements. Many writers have written about this process of “not- knowing.”1 Writing, to me, becomes a balancing act of the known elements—the elements that I am consciously trying to control—and the unknown elements—the elements that I am trusting to my subconscious mind. To illustrate this balancing act, I will look at the most recent story in this collection, “One Way to Find Out.” This is the most complete and well-constructed of the four. In this story, I had no idea that there would be such a focus on mothers. I had in 1 For example, in his essay “On Writing,” Donald Barthelme calls writing “a process of dealing with not- knowing, a forcing of what and how” (12). He writes, “Without the scanning process engendered by not- knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention” (12). vii my mind a woman who had once been very close to her brother but was no longer close to him. I started to imagine this woman dealing with the real feeling of losing someone who is both your peer, but also your responsibility. After I had spent some time with this feeling and this woman, I began to imagine a situation in which this loss might have occurred. The situation I imagined was one where the siblings were bonded by their childhood with a mentally ill mother. I chose this situation because I hoped that their past with their mother would heighten the drama of the story and hold the reader‟s attention. After I wrote the first draft, I found that the story was unbalanced and too subtle. The character‟s emotional difficulty was present, but the external situation— the cause and effect of this difficulty—did not seem to justify it, leaving the reader confused, unconvinced, and bored. I had to figure out a way to make the emotional risk of the story match the events that were creating this risk. This is the problem solving of fiction writing. One of the ways I decided to solve this problem (with the help of my faithful reader SB) was to make Andrea pregnant and concerned about her fitness as a mother. Through striking a balance between the creation of a character with a real emotional difficulty and the construction of a story that was interesting and believable to the reader, the theme of motherhood, and perhaps some notion of what it means to be a child, came to the forefront.
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