Journal of the Short Story in English, 45 | Autumn 2005 [Online], Online Since 13 June 2008, Connection on 09 July 2021

Journal of the Short Story in English Les Cahiers de la nouvelle 45 | Autumn 2005 Varia Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/jsse/116 ISSN: 1969-6108 Publisher Presses universitaires de Rennes Printed version Date of publication: 1 September 2005 ISSN: 0294-04442 Electronic reference Journal of the Short Story in English, 45 | Autumn 2005 [Online], Online since 13 June 2008, connection on 09 July 2021. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/jsse/116 This text was automatically generated on 9 July 2021. © All rights reserved 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword Linda Collinge and Emmanuel Vernadakis Failed Detectives and Dangerous Females: Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Detective Short Story Ellen Harrington Escaping the Examined Life in George Moore’s “Home Sickness” Richard Rankin Russell “Children are Given us to Discourage Our Better Instincts”: The Paradoxical Treatment of Children in Saki’s Short Fiction Ruth Maxey Revision as Transformation: The Making and Re-Making of V.S. Pritchett’s “You Make Your Own Life” Jonathan Bloom The Stained-Glass Man: Word and Icon in Flannery O'Connor’s “Parker's Back.” Michel Feith History and Denial in Nabokov’s “Conversation Piece, 1945” Tim Conley L’écriture rouge de Sherman Alexie : l’exemple de "The Sin Eaters" Diane Sabatier My tongue did things by itself”: story-telling/story-writing in “Conversation with a Cupboard Man” (Ian McEwan) Richard Pedot A Tapestry of Riddling Links: Universal Contiguity in A. S. Byatt’s “Arachne” María Jesús Martínez Alfaro Earthly Men and Other Worldly Women: Gender Types and Religious Types in Jeanette Winterson’s “Atlantic Crossing” and Other Short Fiction Carla A. Arnell Journal of the Short Story in English, 45 | Autumn 2005 2 Foreword Linda Collinge and Emmanuel Vernadakis 1 The ten essays of the forty-fifth issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English deal with nineteenth and twentieth century English, Irish and American stories by W. Collins, A. Conan Doyle, Saki, V.S. Pritchett, Ian McEwan, A. S. Byatt, Jeanette Winterson, George Moore, Flannery O’Connor, Nabokov and Sherman Alexie. 2 In “Failed Detectives and Dangerous Females” Ellen Harrington studies the gender complications that occur in W. Collins’s and A. Conan Doyle’s stories when detectives interact with women in the household. 3 Ruth Maxey, in “Children are Given Us to Discourage our Better Instincts”: The Paradoxical Treatment of Children in Saki’s Short Fiction,” examines Saki’s portrayal of adult behaviour towards children, the complicities between animals and children in his work, the child’s secret world or private psychic sphere, and the ways in which his literary technique supports these depictions in order to clarify the reason why Saki both challenges and upholds the cruel treatment of children by adults. 4 In his essay “Revision as Transformation: The Making and Re-making of V.S. Pritchett’s ‘You Make Your Own Life,’ Jonathan Bloom focuses on one short story to permit a comprehensive analysis of the additions and deletions, from autograph manuscript to final typescript. He shows how Pritchett fashioned his stories through a long process of writing, re-writing, and revising in order to achieve his intended effect. 5 Richard Pedot’s working hypothesis in his essay “My Tongue Did Things by Itself: Story-Telling/Story-Writing in ‘Conversation with a Cupboard Man’” is that “McEwan’s deconstruction of the oral/textual antinomy—and by the same token of realism in fiction—has to be approached in relation to the stories’ specific challenge: that of handing narration over to people usually deprived of speech—because of intellectual incapacity and/or because their right to speak is queried on moral grounds.” 6 In “A Tapestry of Riddling Links: Universal Contiguity in A.S. Bayatt’s ‘Arachne’” Maria J. Martinez describes Byatt’s work as a tapestry woven with multiple but interconnected threads. It reads, she explains, like a mixed-genre narrative that manages to give the reader a glimpse of those recurrent patterns associated with myths Journal of the Short Story in English, 45 | Autumn 2005 3 that some writers are still able to retell in stories that are always the same and always different. 7 In “Earthly Men and Otherwordly Women: Gender Types in Jeannette Winterson’s ‘Atlantic Crossing,’” Carla A. Arnell studies Winterson’s complex representation of religion in a story from Winterson’s first short story collection which captures that complexity. 8 Richard Rankin Russell suggests in “Escaping the Examined Life in George Moore’s ‘Homesickness’” that “Home Sickness” is better understood as an imaginative critique of urban modernity, the pace and materialism of which Moore felt undermined the conditions needed for a contemplative mindset. 9 In “The Stained-Glass Man: Word and Icon in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Parker’s Back,’” Michel Feith studies the iconicity of O’Connor’s writing. The short story is viewed as an ideological and aesthetic testament, revolving around a negotiation between Word and Icon. From the religious icon represented in the text, the essay shifts to the text as icon, in a self-reflexive mise-en-abîme of the visual dimension of the whole of O’Connor’s œuvre, insofar as it concentrates meaning in an “anagogical” way. 10 In “History and Denial in Nabokov’s ‘Conversation Piece, 1945,’” Tim Conley uses Nabokov’s favourite theme of the double to question the narrator’s self-declared “liberal” position as he recounts his seemingly accidental encounter with genteel Holocaust deniers. His essay offers a reading of “Conversation Piece, 1945” which reconsiders the political and ideological connotations of what it means to call a fiction “Nabokovian.” 11 In her essay, “L’écriture rouge de Sherman Alexie : l’exemple de ‘The Sin Eaters’” Diane Sabatier analyses Alexie’s story as a macabre allegory in which, by linking the holocaust to the genocide of the Native American tribes, the writer reflects on some of the greatest interrogations of philosophy and literature. Journal of the Short Story in English, 45 | Autumn 2005 4 Failed Detectives and Dangerous Females: Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Detective Short Story Ellen Harrington Translation : Anne-Laure Hoareau That empty-headed puppy, Mr. Matthew Sharpin, has made a mess of the case at Rutherford Street, exactly as I expected he would. —Wilkie Collins’s Chief Inspector Theakstone in “The Biter Bit” 1 What makes this new detective Sharpin fail, in addition to his ego, is his blinding admiration for the culprit, Mrs. Yatman. The policeman’s infatuation for the murderous cook, Priscilla Thursby, in another Wilkie Collins story, “The Policeman and the Cook,”1 causes him to destroy the evidence of her guilt and set her free. And, most famously, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Sherlock Holmes’s fascination with “the daintiest thing under a bonnet on this planet” (168) causes him to underestimate her and fail his client. In Domestic Crime and the Victorian Novel, Anthea Trodd notes the increasing danger that the insertion of the detective into the home environment meant to the ladies of the house,2 but the women antagonists in these stories embody the inverse of that threat, a theme also seen in the fiction of the day, “that the police are ill-equipped to cope with the guile of the angel in the house” (Trodd 40). Each of these stories poses a “dangerous” woman as a challenge to a detective’s authority. While this plot is certainly derived from the sensation fiction of the same era, presenting an intriguingly dangerous or aggressive woman ultimately in need of men’s stewardship,3 these stories also emphasize the weakness of the detective, his inherent human vulnerability. This notion of detective failure complicates the idealization of the detective as a figure of social justice that evolves as part of the classic detective formula. Detective fiction’s interest in discipline and justice as well as Journal of the Short Story in English, 45 | Autumn 2005 5 the penetration of the figure of the detective into private, domestic, and thus feminine, spheres brings gender concerns to the forefront in many detective stories. 2 Both Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin mysteries, published in the 1840s, and Charles Dickens’s serialized novel Bleak House, published in 1852-53, feature a detached, effective detective who successfully solves his cases (with some missteps in the case of Dickens’s Inspector Bucket). The failures that Collins introduces are typical of fiction concerned with contemporary social fears about the power of a professional detective to intrude in the home. The inside job that Sharpin fails to deduce in “The Biter Bit” (1858), a woman conniving to cover an excessive milliner’s bill, also appears in Collins’s popular 1868 serialized novel The Moonstone as Inspector Cuff’s wrong solution to the case. Cuff, whom the novel presents as a clear threat to the daughter of the house Rachel, from whom the Moonstone has been stolen, comes into the case as a capable hired detective; Cuff’s presumption that Rachel took her own diamond to cover secret debts proves wrong. The case is not solved by the seemingly serviceable Cuff, but by a member of the household aided by an insightful doctor’s assistant. Though no recognizable formula for detective fiction exists at the time Collins is writing (indeed, his work helps to establish the formula and, along with Poe’s stories, clearly influences Arthur Conan Doyle’s depiction of Sherlock Holmes), Collins clearly does not work to mythologize the professional detective as a force of justice like later writers will. Considering Collins, Robert Ashley notes that in several of Collins’s detective stories, “the detectives all reach the wrong conclusion” and “the mystery is solved by chance rather than by skillful sleuthing”; Ashley suspects that, “In other words, Collins’s detective fiction was in reality a happy accident” (60).

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