University of Cincinnati

UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI Date:__3 August 2006_______ I, _____Kelcey Celia Parker_______________________, 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: Three Hundred Crowns This work and its defense approved by: Chair: __Dr. Brock Clarke_____________ __Prof. Michael Griffith_______ __Dr. James Schiff_____________ _______________________________ _______________________________ Three Hundred Crowns: A Novel 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 2006 by Kelcey Celia Parker B.A., Xavier University, 1993 M.A., University of Cincinnati, 2002 Committee: Brock Clarke, Chair Michael Griffith James Schiff Abstract Three Hundred Crowns is a novel set in modern-day Prague. The title refers to the average price of walking tours in Prague (the Czech currency is crowns), and tourism is both a part of the plot as well as a narrative vehicle for questioning how we tell stories about our lives and about place. The narrator is a thirty-something American woman who very much wants to get married, and who arrives in Prague with her married childhood friend. She is a naïve tourist who begins a relationship with her tour guide, and is then thrust into the role of tour guide herself. The novel is in the terrain of Jane Austen’s novels, where two women have different paths toward marriage and the narrative focuses on one in particular as she questions how to navigate this path. The novel explores how the issue of marriage (and motherhood) for a thirty- something woman today is different from and similar to what Austen’s characters faced two hundred years ago. Continuing in the tradition of women’s literature, the narrative form of the novel borrows from Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando, which is written in the form of a mock biography. Three Hundred Crowns is presented as a mock tour; it’s told after the narrator has returned home to the States, and she narrates her story as if she is giving the reader a tour of her experiences in Prague—even as she seeks to have those experiences guide her next decision. Milan Kundera, the Czech author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, calls the novel the great prose form in which an author uses experimental selves to explore some themes of existence. He says that philosophy and religion attempt to offer answers, but novels ask questions. Three Hundred Crowns explores questions of identity, marriage, narrative construction (or how we tell a story), and our encounters with place, history, and postmodern reality. 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Dissertation Prospectus 2 Three Hundred Crowns 15 Kathryn Davis’s Hell: 291 “Something is wrong in the house” of Fiction 2 Dissertation Prospectus “Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body.” --Jane Austen My dissertation is a novel set in modern-day Prague and titled Three Hundred Crowns. The title refers to the average price of walking tours in Prague (the Czech currency is crowns), and tourism serves as a part of the plot, as a narrative vehicle for communicating the narrator’s experiences, and as an overriding metaphor for her journey through life. In terms of plot, the narrator is an American tourist in Prague, who begins a relationship with her tour guide and then becomes a tour guide herself. As a narrative vehicle, the unique language of tourism and the specific stories of Prague are interwoven into the telling of her story. The narrator’s experiences as a tourist inform her understanding of her journey through the unfamiliar terrain of this time in her life, and she finds herself fluctuating in her roles as tourist and guide. Three Hundred 3 Crowns is heavily influenced by Czech literature and history and by a tradition of women’s literature, especially the work of Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen. The plot follows the main character and first-person narrator, Angela, who, finding herself at a low-point in her job as a high school English teacher as well as in her marital prospects, visits Marie, a childhood friend who now lives in Berlin and is married to a successful American businessman. The two travel to Prague for a weekend, and though Marie returns to Berlin as planned, Angela decides to stay in Prague indefinitely. Angela meets and begins a relationship with Ivan, her tour guide. As she struggles to define her relationship with Ivan, she reconsiders her approach to life, marriage, and motherhood. When Ivan leaves town, Angela takes over his position as tour guide. As she conducts tours and learns more about Prague and about Ivan, Angela must once again revise her way of thinking. During this time Marie, unhappy in her own marriage, suffers a breakdown in Berlin, and Angela tries to be there for her even as she tries to make decisions about her own life. Angela’s tours, as well as her narrative in the novel, become a way for her to process and understand herself and the events of her life. Throughout the novel, Angela reads and engages with Czech literature, especially the work of Franz Kafka and Milan Kundera. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera says, “Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven’s music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life.” Angela employs this quote at the end of the novel to explain her purpose in relating the events of her time in Prague. The first word of the quote, “guided,” speaks to the novel’s central concerns. On the literal level, how does a tour guide enhance someone’s encounter with a new place? What does it mean for Angela to be a guide of a city she doesn’t know? On deeper levels, how does Angela navigate the strangeness of her life, 4 how does she engage with it more deeply, how does she make decisions about her future? In Kundera’s quote, an individual is guided by his sense of beauty to transform a chance occurrence into a motif. Angela’s chance meeting with Ivan as tourist and guide is transformed into a motif of tourism with its questions of navigating unfamiliar spaces. Angela relates to Kafka’s existential tales of alienation as she ponders what it means to exist in a place where she knows no one, where she doesn’t speak the language, and where she is expected to do a job she is unqualified to perform. At the same time, she has anxieties about the bureaucracy that Kafka portrays—anxieties about having a license or being approved (like K. in his search for Klamm’s validation in The Castle), but none of these fears bear out. The bureaucracy is so large as to not even notice her—which leads to deeper questions about her existence. Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude tells of a man who works as a trash compactor and who saves literature and books of ideas from the bin. His love affair with books and his conflation of books and reality mirrors some of Angela’s personal experience. Three Hundred Crowns is also about ideologies and about the intersection of Czech and American cultures. In less than twenty years since Prague’s “Velvet Revolution,” the peaceful retreat of the Communist occupiers, Prague has been “occupied” culturally and economically by American corporate capitalism. McDonald’s has prime real estate (and two floors) on Wenceslas Square, American pop music blares throughout stores, and tourism is big business. Ivan, who makes his primary living as a tour guide, and who was a child under communism and an adult under capitalism, is nostalgic for a socialism that never came to fruition but which is evident in pieces of propaganda on his wall and in statues that no one has bothered to take down yet, like the ones on Zizka’s hill. Angela, as an educated American woman, knows that marriage is not 5 her only option for fulfillment, but as she has gotten older, she has also embraced a nostalgic and idealized view of marriage that causes her much longing. Where Ivan longs for a socialism in which people are interchangeable parts in service of the larger system (symbolized in the statue of one soldier carrying a dead brother), Angela longs for a domestic life that allows her to retreat into her roles as wife and mother, roles that she hopes will give her purpose and meaning (symbolized in the statue of the socialist family standing together). Both statues are in the back of a monument that no one ever visits, and both ideologies and interpretations limit the characters’ ability to move forward in their relationships. The narrative form of my novel as a “mock tour” is deeply influenced by Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando, which is written in the form of a mock biography. The biographer who narrates the life of Orlando adopts the specific language of biographies and biographers in order to investigate, among other things, the multiplicity of the self and the problems inherent in representation. Woolf’s biographer-narrator is constantly faced with describing inconvenient or awkward moments in Orlando’s history, such as when Orlando sleeps for seven straight days: “Up to this point in telling the story of Orlando’s life,” the narrator says, “documents, both private and historical, have made it possible to fulfil [sic] the first duty of a biographer, which is to plod, without looking to right or left, in the indelible footprints of truth” (65).

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