The Fiction of Ellen Douglas

Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1996 "All This World Is Full of Mystery": The icF tion of Ellen Douglas. Elizabeth Wilkinson Tardieu Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Tardieu, Elizabeth Wilkinson, ""All This World Is Full of Mystery": The ictF ion of Ellen Douglas." (1996). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 6284. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/6284 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced bom the microfilm master. 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"ALL THIS WORLD IS FULL OF MYSTERY:" THE FICTION OF ELLEN DOUGLAS A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Elizabeth Wilkinson Tardieu B.A., Agnes Scott College, 1972 B.S., University of South Alabama, 1985 M.A., University of South Alabama, 1990 August 1996 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 9706367 Copyright 1996 by Tardieu, Elizabeth Wilkinson All rights reserved. UMI Microform 9706367 Copyright 1996, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. (c) Copyright 1996 Elizabeth Wilkinson Tardieu All rights reserved Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. FOR JOHN, AND MY MOTHER AND FATHER iii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank Peggy Whitman Prenshaw for her careful reading of this manuscript, her unwavering support, and her friendship. I am indebted also to Veronica Makowsky and John Lowe, whose love of Southern literature was infectious and who encouraged my intellectual wanderings. My thanks to Josephine Haxton, who patiently answered my questions for an entire day and who responded promptly to all subsequent correspondence. I hope my respect for her and her writing is reflected in this work. I want to thank my parents, too, who always valued books because they felt they make people more human. I will always cherish their wisdom and love. I am grateful to my husband John, whose love, support, and patience have allowed me to reach this point. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ......................................... iv A b s t r a c t ................................................ vi Introduction............... ................................. 1 Chapter 1 "We Were a Little Bit More 'Churchy’ Than Most People": Douglas’s L i f e .......... 15 Chapter 2 Seeds of Mystery: A Family’s Affairs . 41 Chapter 3 "The Words Were Only Questions": Point of View in Black Cloud. White Cloud .... 60 Chapter 4 "How Can I Be Sure That if I Wake Up I May May Not Really Be Waking into Another Dream?": Where the Dreams Cross and Apostles of L i g h t ........................ 78 Chapter 5 A "Double Sense of Changing Specificity and Unchanging Type": Myth in The Rock Cried O u t ...................... Ill Chapter 6 "I Reach Out to You All": Author, Narrator and Reader in A Lifetime Burning . 138 Chapter 7 "Inside or Outside, It’s All the Same Thing": Mystery’s Culmination in Can * t Quit You. B a b y .......................... 172 C o n c l u s i o n ................................................ 201 Works C i t e d ................................................ 211 Bibliographic Note ............................. 224 V i t a ....................................................... 225 v Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT This dissertation, "’All This World Is Full of Mystery:1 The Fiction of Ellen Douglas," provides an introduction to the life of Ellen Douglas (pen name for Josephine Haxton) and a study of the author’s major fiction from A Family’s Affairs through Can’t Quit You. Baby (1962 - 1988). The first chapter gives an overview of Douglas’s life preceding her first novel, A Family’s Affairs, with a focus on those people and events contributing to the themes and structure of her writing. The subsequent chapters trace the development of her craft, discussing in chronological order A Family’s Affairs. Black Cloud. White Cloud. Where the Dreams Cross. Apostles of Light. The Rock Cried Out, A Lifetime Burning, and Can’t Quit You. Baby. In all these works, mystery permeates narrative, as characters portray human beings’ basic inability to understand the forces at play both within and outside themselves. On one level, the writer depicts primarily white, middle class people going about their day-to-day activities. On another level, however, she dislodges readers’ perceptions of the norm by using the everyday to reveal how unknowable the events and people one takes for granted really are. Underscoring her stories with myth is one way the author implies the large scope of mystery. She draws on comparative mythology, particularly Joseph vi Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Campbell’s theory of the monomyth and Heinrich Zimmer’s "The King and the Corpse," as well as fairy tales and mythic archetypes. She also conveys mystery by manipulating point of view. Irony undermines the validity of the overt story, and she increasingly includes the author as a character to remind the reader of writing’s subjectivity. Dreams often lie beyond one’s conscious control, and Douglas employs them to emphasize the unknown realms within and outside the individual. Myth, point of view, and dreams all function to underscore the mystery which permeates and transcends human existence in her fiction. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. INTRODUCTION Ellen Douglas, pseudonym for Josephine Haxton, has written seven books of fiction set primarily in the imaginary towns of Homochitto and Philippi, Mississippi. Although some of her novels are not in print and have received minimal criticism, all her writing exhibits a stylistic and thematic sophistication that deserves consideration. In each work the author addresses societal problems, such as race relations, women’s roles, and the elderly’s disempowerment, but all issues point ultimately to the unknowable essence of human existence, that realm outside conscious understanding where the truth resides. Mystery, thus, composes the core of her fictional concerns. In Douglas’s collection Black Cloud. White Cloud, the character Estella in "Hold On" voices many of the author’s beliefs about the impenetrable mysteriousness underlying life. At the beginning of the tale, the white protagonist Anna has gone fishing with her sons and runs into her black former housekeeper Estella. As the two share cigarettes, beer, and stories about their families, their seemingly equitable friendship soothes Anna’s guilt about racial inequality. In response to this easy exchange, Estella feels free to discuss an African American belief in magic. She admits that she did not attend to a boy who broke his leg in Anna’s front yard because she was pregnant,

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