Journal of the Short Story in English, 48 | Spring 2007 [Online], Online Since 01 June 2009, Connection on 03 December 2020

Journal of the Short Story in English Les Cahiers de la nouvelle

48 | Spring 2007 Varia

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/119 ISSN: 1969-6108

Publisher Presses universitaires de Rennes

Printed version Date of publication: 1 June 2007 ISSN: 0294-04442

Electronic reference Journal of the Short Story in English, 48 | Spring 2007 [Online], Online since 01 June 2009, connection on 03 December 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/119

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword Emmanuel Vernadakis and Linda Collinge-Germain

Coding and Decoding in “The Red Circle” Edward H. Cohen

Escaping the Examined Life in George Moore’s “Home Sickness” Richard Rankin Russell

Female expansion and Masculine Immobilization in the Short Story Cycle Rachel Lister

The Eternal Present in Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Michele D. Theriot

Negotiating Loss and Otherness in Margaret Laurence’s “The Loons” Jennifer Murray

Hatching the posthuman: Margaret Atwood’s “Bluebeard’s egg” Carol Merli

The Readerly Politics of Western Domination : Emily Prager’s “A Visit from the Footbinder” Judie Newman

Book Reviews

Gaïd Girard, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu : Une écriture fantastique Paris : Honoré Champion, 2005, 459 pages Laurent Lepaludier

Hélène Machinal. Conan Doyle : de Sherlock Holmes au Professeur Challenger Presses Universitaires de Rennes, coll. “Interférences”, Rennes : 2004, 368 pages David Le Barzic

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Foreword

Emmanuel Vernadakis et Linda Collinge-Germain

1 The forty-eighth issue of the JSSE contains seven essays and two reviews.

2 In “Coding and Decoding in ‘The Red Circle’” Edward H. Cohen reads an atypical Sherlock Holmes story in which he points out significant departures from the conventional patterns as strategies for decoding the shape and meaning of the case. His study of the above particulars leads him to claim that it stands as a milestone on the road to World War I and prefigures the ethnic violence that has littered the landscape of recent human history.

3 Richard Rankin Russell’s “Escaping the Examined Life in George Moore’s ‘Home Sickness,’” owing to a technical failure, was first published in JSSE 45 without its works cited page. It is republished here with its bibliography.

4 “Feminine Expansion and Masculine Immobilization” by Rachel Lister examines the representation of gender identity in the modern American short story cycle, a form which has become particularly popular with female authors. Based on Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples and on Joyce Carol Oates’s All the Good People I’ve Left Behind, Rachel Lister’s analysis explores how both Welty and Oates employ the form to engage with masculine dilemmas and to question dominant models of masculinity. In particular, the readings focus on the immobilization of the male quest figure and the isolated male artist.

5 Joyce Carol Oates is again dealt with in Michele D. Theriot’s “The Eternal Present in Joyce Carol Oate’s ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been ?’” The paper focuses on the protagonist’s inability to see or appreciate the past and future and how sources for the story aid in shaping that idea.

6 In the fifth essay of the volume, Jennifer Murray proposes to reevaluate Margaret Laurence’s “The Loons” in view of the central role of the loss of the father in its construction of meaning.

7 In “Hatching the Posthuman: Margaret Atwood’s ‘Bluebeard’s Egg’” Carol Merli explores the relationship between body and text through Atwood’s use of post-modern strategies. The open-endedness and undecidability within the story may be unsettling

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and even confronting, but can also be liberating, opening up a space for new stories and new selves.

8 In her article on Emily Prager’s “A Visit from the Footbinder”,Judie Newmann explores the relations of mother to child, the oppositions between West and East, male and female, and the commodification of trauma in art. According to Professor Newmann, Prager confronts and subverts a readerly politics of western domination, engaging directly with the theories of Julia Kristeva.

9 The volume ends with Girard Gaïd’s book on Le Fanu1 reviewed by Laurent Lepaludier and Hélène Machinal’s work on Conan Doyle2 reviewed by David Le Barzic.

NOTES

1. Gaïd Girard, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu : une écriture fantastique, Honoré Champion, Bibliothèque de littérature générale et comparée, Genève 2005. 2. Hélène Machinal, Conan Doyle : de Sherlock Holmes au Professeur Challenger, Presses Universitaires de Rennes , coll. “Interférences”, 2004.

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Coding and Decoding in “The Red Circle”

Edward H. Cohen

1 Like many of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, “The Red Circle” is a classic example of what Roland Barthes denominated the “hermeneutic” text, a narrative driven by the search for a solution to an enigma (19-20). Such a text, according to Peter Brooks, concerns “the questions and answers that structure a story: their suspense, partial unveiling, temporary blockage, and eventual resolution” (18). This careful plotting, he adds, is the dynamic aspect of narrative through which the text “unfurls before us a precipitation of shape and meaning” (35).

2 “The Red Circle” was published in two installments. In the first part, Holmes investigates a trifling domestic problem: the eccentric behavior of Mrs. Warren’s lodger. Clues left by this reclusive figure lead Holmes to deduce that the person occupying the room is a substitute for the man who rented it, that the new lodger is a woman of foreign origin, and that she will receive a coded communication from a “confederate.” When Holmes intercepts the message and deciphers the code, he realizes that Mrs. Warren’s problem assumes a “sinister aspect.” In the second part, which addresses the more serious complication presented by the case, Holmes and Watson hurry to the site from whence the code originated. There they are surprised to come upon Gregson of Scotland Yard and Leverton of Pinkerton’s Detective Agency, who are pursuing Gorgiano of the Red Circle. The four men enter the building together and discover a “grotesquely horrible” figure: the corpse of Gorgiano himself. While the officials wonder who the killer might be, Holmes replicates the code, summons the concealed lodger, and invites her story. Emilia’s lengthy account—of her marriage in Naples to Gennaro Lucca, of their flight to New York to escape the Red Circle, and of their subsequent flight to London to evade Gorgiano—convinces Holmes that Gennaro has justifiably killed his pursuer. The case closes when Gregson agrees that “this lady’s husband will receive a pretty general vote of thanks.”

3 One of the later adventures, in a highly formulaic series, “The Red Circle” is in several respects an atypical Sherlock Holmes story. First, unlike most of the cases, there is little emphasis on Holmes’s singular powers of observation and deduction. At the outset,

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uncharacteristically, he resists Mrs. Warren’s plea for assistance and dismisses her uneasiness. And even when he agrees to take on the case, the enigma that he unravels is the lesser of the two “threads” leading to the “tangle.” The story centers not on Holmes’s investigation but on the double narrative: the two plots that coalesce in the pursuit of Gorgiano of the Red Circle. Second, in many of the cases, a significant clue or code stands as a metaphor for the investigation as a whole and tests Holmes’s methods of detection. One of the most celebrated examples is the string of conclusions that he deduces from a character’s hat. In “The Red Circle,” Holmes’s reading of the candle code leads to his realization that Mrs. Warren’s problem “opens a pleasing field for intelligent speculation.” But breaking this code requires no real expertise: Holmes himself admits to Watson that it is “not a very obscure cipher.” Third, as several scholars have remarked, the project of the Sherlock Holmes series is to maintain or restore the social order of the late Victorian era. The loci of anxiety in the stories are threats to middle-class morality, domesticity, respectability, and conventionality. In “The Red Circle,” however, the threat comes not from within but from abroad, and the disruption is not chiefly social but political. Fourth, into almost every story Doyle introduces a motif to establish an undertone or even to thematize the case. The repeated figure may be a pattern of images or references, like the comic allusions to birds in “The Blue Carbuncle” or the ominous reports of deaths in “The Speckled Band.” Embedded in “The Red Circle,” though, are no fewer than three binary systems: chaos vs. order, darkness vs. light, and small vs. great. These polarities stand as analogies to the code at the center of the story and to the figure in the title. Fifth, in many of the stories, Watson concerns himself to establish the temporal context of the case: the date when the client first approached Holmes; the number of days that passed during the course of the investigation; or even the span of time that has elapsed between the conclusion of the case and the present moment of narration. Of “The Red Circle,” however, Michael Hardwick observes correctly that “no date is given nor clearly deducible” but suggests incorrectly that the omission “is of no matter” (162). For the story resonates most powerfully for readers if the date of the action is understood to be simultaneous with the date of publication and if the tale is construed as grounded not in the scandals of the late Victorian era but in the emerging threats of the twentieth century. In this essay, I propose to read these five departures from the conventional patterns of the stories as strategies for decoding the “shape and meaning” of “The Red Circle.”

“Different threads, but leading up to the same tangle.”

4 The hermeneutic tensions between enigma and solution inscribe themselves powerfully in the Sherlock Holmes stories. As Rosemary Jann observes: “Such stories are governed by a paradoxical textual dynamics: they move toward solution but exist only so long as closure can be postponed” (22). In “The Red Circle” further tension arises between two enigmas—the identity of Mrs. Warren’s lodger and the pursuit of Gorgiano—that culminate in one resolution.

5 In his commentary on “The Red Circle,” Owen Dudley Edwards notes that the story was published in two parts “against Doyle’s wishes” (201). In retrospect the division is instructive, for the break articulates both the separation and the connection between the two investigations. It is significant that the first part ends at the point when

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Gennaro’s message stops. Holmes has learned, by intercepting and decoding the candle flashes, that “there is some devilry going forward.” And although he resolves to “define the situation a little more clearly,” his investigation is now essentially concluded. It is also important, both spatially and temporally, that the second part begins with Watson glancing “back” at Mrs. Warren’s top window and observing the shadow of her lodger “waiting with breathless suspense for the renewal of that interrupted message.” For Watson’s backward glance, in addition to uniting the two parts of the story, links as well the two investigations that have unfolded concurrently but which must be accounted for sequentially. When Holmes and Watson come upon Gregson and Leverton, the occasion presents itself for the narration of the second investigation: the search for Gorgiano. In a brief rehearsal—constructed as a conversation among Holmes, Gregson, and Leverton—Watson recounts the dramatic discovery of Gorgiano’s corpse and the process by which Holmes replicates the candle code and summons Emilia Lucca to the grisly site. The two “threads” of investigation have led “to the same tangle.” And the remainder of the story, save for a short epilogue, is related entirely in Emilia’s “remarkable narrative.”

6 The “tangle” is the story of Gennaro and Emilia: their emigration from Naples, their new life together in New York, their pursuit by Gorgiano and the Red Circle, their flight to London, and their communication through the newspaper and by flashes of light. Holmes and Watson have been “taking the signals” meant for the lodger, while Gregson and Leverton have been “on the trail” of Gorgiano. The two threads of their concurrent investigations come together at the moment when Watson lights the “detective’s lantern” and illuminates “a dark figure on the floor”: the body of Gorgiano.

7 The conjoining of the two investigations parallels other narrative strategies of resolution in the story. It is curious, for example, that Holmes’s investigation pursues a lodger whose behavior has made a landlady uneasy, while the investigation conducted by the official forces pursues a thug with “dreadful powers.” Holmes works parallel to the official police, but he is oddly oblivious to the greater implications of the quarry they both pursue. As Edwards quips, “the story ultimately sidelines him” (xv). Also, because Emilia has related her account “in rapid and fluent but very unconventional English,” Watson translates her narrative “for the sake of clearness.” His “grammatical” rendering of her story echoes Holmes’s translations of the flashes into letters, letters into words in Italian, Italian into English. It is both surprising that the two investigations coalesce and satisfying that they achieve resolution in the words spoken by the lodger but translated by Watson. For the enigmas in the story are resolved less by Holmes’s powers of detection than by Watson’s powers of narration.

“And not a very obscure cipher, Watson.”

8 According to Brooks: “The clearest and purest example of the hermeneutic would no doubt be the detective story, in that everything in the story’s structure, and its temporality, depends on the resolution of enigma” (18). In addition to presenting itself as a study in narrative complexity, involving tensions between enigma and solution, “The Red Circle” also contains the hermeneutic task of deciphering a profusion of texts and signals.

9 Throughout the series, Sherlock Holmes is portrayed as a reader of innumerable texts : books, maps, codes, letters, receipts, indexes, newspapers, telegrams, registers, a ritual,

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a racing form, a gazetteer, and even these stories that Watson has fashioned from the cases. In “The Red Circle” two important texts prefigure the code at the center of the case. The first is a string of “laconic messages,” printed on “slips of foolscap,” by which Holmes deduces that Mrs. Warren’s lodger is attempting to conceal her foreign identity. The second is “the great book in which, day by day, he filed the agony columns of the various London journals.” From the lodger’s request for the Daily Gazette, Holmes is led to peruse the paper’s advertisements for evidence of “any message to reach her from without.” And there he finds—among “a chorus of groans, cries, and bleatings”— the key to the signal message: “Remember code agreed—one A, two B, and so on.”

10 “The Red Circle” is not unlike an earlier Sherlock Holmes adventure, “The Dancing Men,” which also “contains the subsidiary hermeneutic task of interpreting cryptograms” (Fowler 156). In that story the cipher is a sequence of stick figures, and Holmes breaks the code by applying “the rules which guide us in all forms of secret writings.” When he uses the cipher to lure the sender of the messages, he explains that “what one man can invent another can discover.” This paradigm of coding and decoding is repeated in “The Red Circle” when Holmes uses the candle code to summon Emilia: “It was I who called,” said Holmes. “You! How could you call?” “Your cipher was not difficult, madam. Your presence here was desirable. I knew that I had only to flash ‘Vieni’ and you would surely come.” 11 The candle code, sent as a series of flashes, is surprisingly unsophisticated. Holmes has told Watson that the cipher is not obscure, and here he reiterates that the cipher is not difficult. What purpose, then, is served by this decoding? To demonstrate Holmes’s skills of deciphering? Hardly. The flash code has been spelled out in the agony column, and reading the signals requires no great expertise. As Gennaro sends the flashes of light to Emilia, Holmes and Watson have only to intercept them, to count them, to substitute letters for their numerical counterparts, and to assemble them into words. Holmes has anticipated “that the affair will grow more intelligible,” and the simple act of translating “Attenta” and “Pericolo”—“Beware” and “Danger”—confirms that Mrs. Warren’s problem “takes on a sinister aspect.” It is significant that the deed by which the signals are “suddenly cut short, ” the murder of Gorgiano, precipitates the conclusion of Holmes’s investigation. He has been “taking the signals,” and it is reasonable to regard the threat that they signify as an icon of the case as a whole.

12 In “The Dancing Men,” Alastair Fowler argues, “the anticlimactic structure obviates suspense, but allows the decipherment to become a retrospective microcosm of the investigation. . . . The coda of decoding is like the explanatory recapitulation . . . that completes the classic detective story” (157). Similarly, at the conclusion of “The Red Circle” Holmes anticipates yet another text: “Well Watson, you have one more specimen of the tragic and grotesque to add to your collection.” His decoding of texts and signals, a metaphor for the process of detection, parallels the act of reading the story itself.

“Now that Gorgiano is dead we fear nothing.”

13 Many scholars now concur that there is an ideological undertext in the Sherlock Holmes series (Belsey 117; Fowler 168). Whether the emphasis falls upon purely

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intellectual deciphering or upon socially implicated detecting, the project of the stories is to preserve the social order of the late Victorian era. To this end, most of the early adventures suggest that threats to this order can be contained and managed. But in “The Red Circle” the threat is political and its source is foreign.

14 Patrick Brantlinger observes that the perceived menace of the foreign—“the invasion of civilization by forces of barbarism”—was a prominent theme in English fiction at the turn of the twentieth century (230). In A Study in Scarlet, for example, Watson complains that the increasing flow of immigrants to London from the far reaches of the globe is turning the city—the center of British identity—into a “great cesspool.” Throughout the Sherlock Holmes stories foreigners are represented as intruders, and Holmes himself often serves as a mediator between English civility and the foreign elements that threaten English values.

15 In “The Red Circle” the three Italian characters are associated with disorder. Emilia responds without restraint to the sight of Gorgiano’s corpse, and Watson finds it “terrible and amazing to see such a woman so convulsed with joy.” Gennaro is a shadowy figure whose presence is indicated only in the signals that he sends “after dusk.” And Gorgiano is portrayed as “a savage,” “a devil and a monster,” “grotesque, gigantic, and terrifying.” As Jann remarks: “Foreigners are always treated as exotics by Doyle, as if to imply that the infection of British normalcy is more plausible when it comes from exposure to alien contagions” (76).

16 When the perpetrators of disruption are greedy or dissolute English men and women, the transgressions are generally local. But when the sources of danger are foreign, the threats tend to be magnified. The invasion of London by Emilia, Gennaro, and Gorgiano imperils the bourgeois stability symbolized by Mrs. Warren and her lodging house. Holmes’s minor role in resolving the case underscores the nation’s vulnerability to threats from foreign agents. He can decode the signals and the official forces can follow the trail, but Gennaro is the one who repulses the disorder imposed by Gorgiano. This resolution suggests that neither Holmes and Watson nor Gregson and Leverton can vanquish the foreign threat to British stability. Jann notes that “although Holmes usually solves the mysteries surrounding secret societies and pacts, he is often too late to avert the deaths they instigate” (91). “Despite Holmes’s best efforts,” adds Martin Priestman, these failures occur most frequently when “the secret society featured is foreign” and when its members are “less predictable in their behavior and final treatment” (76). Priestman and Jann conclude, respectively, that “alien activities are no concern of British justice” (79) and that “exotic foreign conflicts are usually simply expelled from orderly England or adjudicated by a higher source of justice” (91). But the intrusion here of Gorgiano—a man of “exaggerated and monstrous” passions— represents a threat that defies law and faith. In this respect, “The Red Circle” complements another Holmes story, “Wisteria Lodge,” published thirty months earlier, in which “terrorism is exported to England” and “political assassination and intrigue infiltrate the English estate” (Kestner 170). Both texts anticipate “a horrifying cascade” of evils, according to Edwards, “in the face of which Sherlock Holmes can do little more than make an occasional difference” (xii).

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“That black cloud appeared which was soon to overspread our sky.”

17 In a story that presents itself as a unity of complexities, deciphering the several layers of coding in “The Red Circle” compels the reader to unpack, in turn, three parallel motifs: wresting order from chaos, extracting light from darkness, and deducing great things from small ones. Doyle threads these binaries through the first part of the story.

18 The case begins by iterating a well-established project of the Sherlock Holmes series: the triumph of order over disorder. Mrs. Warren interrupts Holmes as he is “arranging and indexing some of his recent material.” But she justifies her intrusion by recalling that he had successfully “arranged an affair” for one of her former lodgers. This emphasis on Holmes’s ordering skills anticipates his processes of sorting and deciphering evidence. For the key to the case is revealed in the scrapbook in which he has meticulously filed the agony columns of the daily papers. From a chaotic “rag-bag of singular happenings,” Holmes selects the sequence of notices that leads to the cipher. “We know the code,” he says to Watson, “so surely our task should be simple.”

19 At the start of the story, moreover, Holmes tells Mrs. Warren that he “cannot see” the reason for her alarm. “You are uneasy, as I understand, because your new lodger remains in his rooms and you cannot see him.” The repetition of the words “cannot see” is countered by Mrs. Warren’s report of Holmes’s success in a case involving a former lodger: “He would never cease talking of the way in which you brought light into the darkness.” Later, when Mrs. Warren’s husband is abducted, Holmes’s curiosity rises. He warns the frightened woman: “Do nothing rash. I begin to think that this affair may be very much more important than appeared at first sight. It is clear now that some danger is threatening your lodger. It is equally clear that his enemies, lying in wait for him near your door, mistook your husband for him in the foggy morning light.” This oscillation between illumination and obscurity anticipates the circumstances under which Holmes will observe the candle flashes.

20 When he agrees to take up Mrs. Warren’s case, Holmes tells her: “I must understand every detail. The smallest point may be the most essential.” This tension between the small and the great establishes a pattern sustained throughout the first part of the story. Mrs. Warren herself has collected a handful of clues, she tells Holmes, “because I had heard that you can read great things out of small ones.” And indeed Holmes reads the lodger’s printed communications as “laconic messages” that offer “a pleasing field for intelligent speculation.” He speculates that the unfolding case may be either “trivial” or “much deeper than appears on the surface,” and when he learns that Mrs. Warren’s husband has been assaulted he realizes that her “whimsical problem enlarges.” “This affair,” Holmes acknowledges, “may be very much more important than appeared at first sight.”

21 These triple polarities stand as self-reflexive analogies to the code at the center of the story and to the figure in the title. Although cracking the candle code presents no challenge for Sherlock Holmes, the circumstances under which he reads it are instructive. “As we peered from the darkened sitting-room of the lodging-house,” Watson recalls, “one more dim light glimmered high up through the obscurity.” Through “the gloom of a London winter evening,” he and Holmes observe the flashes of light and read Gennaro’s “urgent message.” Suddenly, the signals assume a grave

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significance. Ordered, clarified, and enlarged, the code anticipates the threat that lies at the heart of the case.

22 Like the triple binaries that shape the first part of the story, the eponymous red circle operates on three levels. First, it is the name of the Neapolitan society that Gennaro had joined in “his wild and fiery days.” Second, it is both the mark upon the summons that Gennaro received, ordering his presence at a lodge, and the “fatal disc” upon the lot that he drew, ordering him to murder his benefactor. And, third, it is the sign of violence visited by Gennaro upon Gorgiano himself, who is discovered lying “encircled by a ghastly crimson halo of blood.” Emilia reveals that “the oaths and secrets of this brotherhood were frightful” and describes the “dreadful society” as one from which “no escape was possible.” She tells Holmes that Gorgiano “had earned the name of ‘Death’ in the South of Italy,” and Leverton confirms that Gorgiano is “at the bottom of fifty murders” in America.

23 In her account of Gorgiano’s pursuit, Emilia recalls the terror she felt at the moment “when that black cloud appeared which was soon to overspread our sky.” Here, in a text so heavily laden with figures of speech, the reader discerns an analogy between the threat posed by Gorgiano and some even greater menace. Coded in the margins of the story, Edwards suggests, are “phenomena betokening the advent of world cataclysm” (xii).

“This is an instructive case.”

24 In the penultimate story in the Sherlock Holmes series, “The Veiled Lodger,” Watson describes the archives of the great detective’s cases as “a perfect quarry for the student not only of crime, but of the social and official scandals of the late Victorian era.” His survey is accurate for most of Holmes’s cases. The disorder foregrounded in “The Red Circle,” however, is neither scandalous nor Victorian. The story was first collected—in His Last Bow—among other stories published between 1908 and 1917 that “reflect a wider and increasingly less contained and ordered world” and that stand as “milestones for a world on its way to war” (Edwards xii). “The Red Circle” is best construed as an episode of the rising tide of ethnic violence of foreign origin common in the early years of the twentieth century.

25 According to Brooks, reading a hermeneutic text results in the creation of a “space of suspense” that “we work through toward what is felt to be, in classical narrative, the revelation of meaning” (18). But what meaning is revealed in “The Red Circle”? Near the end of the story’s first part, as Holmes’s investigation draws to a close, Watson poses a variation of the same question: “What is at the root of it?” And Holmes explains, obliquely, that he expects nothing from his involvement but the pleasure of “studying”: “Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons with the greatest for the last. This is an instructive case.” A parallel passage occurs at the conclusion of the second part, when Gregson reflects: “What I can’t make head or tail of, Mr. Holmes, is how on earth you got yourself mixed up in the matter.” And Holmes replies: “Education, Gregson, education. Still seeking knowledge at the old university.”

26 What is “at the root” of this case? And what is “instructive” about it? The force of the repeated questions and responses confirms Brooks’s assertion—quoted at the start of

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this essay—that artful plotting in the hermeneutic text “moves us forward as readers” toward a disclosure of the story’s “meaning.” Although that meaning is never made explicit, it must reside in the objects of the two investigations: the source of the signals (Gennaro) and the source of the mayhem (Gorgiano), both of whom are members of the Red Circle. Emilia in her narrative recites a roll of the society’s activities: blackmail, vengeance, extortion, intimidation, murder. “It was part of their fiendish system,” she explains, “to punish those whom they feared or hated by injuring not only their own persons, but those whom they loved, and it was the knowledge of this which hung as a terror over my poor Gennaro’s head and drove him nearly crazy with apprehension.” Ultimately, the red circle of the title must be construed as an emblem and locus of ethnic violence.

27 Jann observes that “the Sherlock Holmes stories for the most part do not focus on what were perceived at the time as the most serious threats to social order in later Victorian and Edwardian society. We catch no glimpses . . . of the anarchists and other terrorists who disturbed the peace . . . for political reasons” (72). But in “The Red Circle” Arthur Conan Doyle directs new “light into the darkness” of human affairs. Edwards remarks that this case is noteworthy for its “awareness of the social, national, and spiritual tensions inherent in ethnic networks” and asserts that, among Sherlock Holmes’s adventures, “this story is the clearest milestone of all on the road to world war” (xxvi). First published in 1911, “The Red Circle” codes the ethnic violence that littered the global landscape in the first decades of the twentieth century and that persists to the present day.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York : Hill and Wang, 1974.

Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. London : Methuen, 1980.

Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness : British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914. Ithaca : Cornell UP, 1988.

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot : Design and Intention in Narrative. 1984. Cambridge, MA : Harvard UP, 1992.

Edwards, Owen Dudley. “Introduction.” His Last Bow. By Arthur Conan Doyle. Oxford : Oxford UP, 1993. xi-xxxv.

Fowler, Alastair. “Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Dancing Men and Women.” Addressing Frank Kermode: Essays in Criticism and Interpretation. Ed. Margaret Tudeau-Clayton and Martin Warner. London : Macmillan, 1991. 154-68.

Hardwick, Michael. The Complete Guide to Sherlock Holmes. London : Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986.

Jann, Rosemary. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Detecting Social Order. New York : Twayne, 1995.

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Priestman, Martin. Detective Fiction and Literature : The Figure on the Carpet. London : Macmillan, 1990.

ABSTRACTS

“ Le cercle rouge ” fait partie de cette dernière série d’histoires de Sherlock Holmes, toutes écrites selon la même formule. Le présent article propose de montrer qu’il s’agit néanmoins d’une histoire atypique, à plusieurs égards. La stratégie particulière qui se met en œuvre pour décoder la forme et la signification de l’affaire criminelle décrite éclaire des écarts révélateurs par rapport aux modèles conventionnels : La violence du texte laisse une trace plus profonde que le raisonnement qu’il met en œuvre pour la découverte du criminel. Le mystère est résolu par un processus narratif plutôt que par un travail de lecture participative. Enfin, c’est une intrusion étrangère plutôt que le désordre domestique qui délimite le récit. Avec cette histoire Arthur Conan Doyle cherche probablement à jeter une nouvelle “ lumière dans l'obscurité ” des rapports humains. Publié en 1911, “ Le cercle rouge ” semble éclairer la route sinistre sur laquelle s’engagent les Nations à l’orée de la Première guerre mondiale en préfigurant ainsi la violence qui les conduisit à souiller le paysage de l'histoire récente.

AUTHORS

EDWARD H. COHEN

Rollins College, Florida

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Escaping the Examined Life in George Moore’s “Home Sickness”

Richard Rankin Russell

1 George Moore’s 1903 short story collection, The Untilled Field, was the first modern collection of Irish short fiction and, as Richard Allen Cave has noted, influenced Irish short story writers from James Joyce to Bernard MacLaverty to “move dexterously between inner and outer worlds of experience to define the fluctuating qualities of a particular consciousness or sensibility” (“Introduction” xxvi). Moore’s collection features a long-misunderstood story entitled “Home Sickness,” which revolves around the intricate psychological vacillations of James Bryden, as he returns to his native Ireland from his adopted New York City, only to become dissatisfied there and return again to the city. Moore not only brilliantly captures a perennial theme of Irish literature—immigration because of harsh economic and cultural conditions—but also holds Bryden up as the quintessential modern man, who is unconsciously uneasy with the prospect of living the contemplative life represented by a rural Ireland, a milieu which itself is criticized for its sometimes stultifying conditions and its circumscribed daily life. He thus chooses to return to New York’s hustle and bustle in order to escape himself, although he is so unused to self-examination he tells himself he must re- emigrate because of the controlling village priest. Despite Moore’s real criticism of the surveillance methods of the priest and the nosy townspeople, Bryden at least has a chance to live an examined life in Ireland. This potential for self-fulfillment in a bucolic Irish milieu has been misapprehended by critics of the story as thoughtful as Ben Forkner, who praises “Home Sickness” for “concentrat[ing] in Bryden’s dilemma most of the themes of The Untilled Field: exile, barren land, religious domination and interference, and provincial boredom and despair” (29).Moore’s own anti-clericalism has so colored our reading of the stories in The Untilled Field that the aim of this crucial story has been misread as an attack on the Catholic Church at least in part, while the thrust of the story lambasts the lack of self-awareness common to modern, urban man paradoxically conveyed through his highly interior prose style.

2 Through his subtly depicted study of James Bryden’s mind, Moore richly implies his potential for self-awareness while also suggesting that Ireland and its literature could

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serve as sites where human consciousness might be protected from the pernicious influence of modernity, often city-centered, which he found increasingly distasteful in England and America. Moore’s imagining of a realistic, communal Ireland as pictured in “Home Sickness” offers an intriguingly different one from the mythologized version even then being proffered by Yeats and Lady Gregory. Although Moore came from a Catholic landowning family in County Mayo and admittedly despised the peasantry of the area, especially on inheriting the estate of Moore Hall upon his father’s death, he nevertheless rises above his anti-pastoral prejudice and adopts a qualified approval of rural life in “Home Sickness” as a site where the individual might attain real selfhood in the context of community. Never one to idealize the pastoral as a site of innocence, or abstract it as a monolithic entity, Moore refuses, however, to dismiss it in favor of an unabashed valorization of the city. Despite his fully realized depiction of Bryden’s interior life in this story, Moore clearly shows how his central character resolutely refuses to engage in any serious self-exploration and thus settles for a sharply delimited self that itself is deadened and diminished by the frenetic pace of life in the Bowery area of New York City, to which he returns and lives out his days.

3 Moore’s interest in fully depicting Bryden’s consciousness in “Home Sickness” is intricately tied to his desire for a reinvigoration of Irish intellectual life over against what he came to see as the stagnant life of the mind he found in England. Properly understanding Moore’s attitude toward Ireland at the time of writing The Untilled Field is crucial for interpreting the story, which despite its harsh, realistic portrayal of Ireland, suggests that it is a site in which cultural revival might take place. That revival, however, would have to start with a genuine reawakening of the self. Cave points out that Moore’s autobiography Hail and Farewell! (published in three parts in 1911, 1912, and 1914) is “an account of how to cultivate a genuine renaissance in the self, which he sees as the only way a larger movement for social and aesthetic revolution will begin to be a possibility in the country” (“Introduction” xxi). Moore gradually realized that portraying fictional selves more deeply and thoughtfully than they had been in Irish literature might prove exemplary for his countrymen’s personal renaissance. In his 1926 preface to The Untilled Field, using language still redolent with latent hope for a true Irish revival of the self, Moore recalls that he wrote the stories “in the hope of furnishing the young Irish of the future with models” (xxix).

4 Much criticism of Moore has been colored by Hail and Farewell!, in which he skewers the romanticism of the Irish Literary Revival, including his own attempts to revive the Irish language. But as Declan Kiberd has shown, Moore was fully invested in the movement at the time of writing The Untilled Field: it would be wrong to assume that the corrosive tone of Hail and Farewell had also characterized his relations with the Gaelic League and the Literary Theatre. The insolent satire which permeates that brilliant but willful book tells us a great deal about Moore’s state of mind between 1910 and 1914, but reveals nothing of the passionate intensity with which he threw himself into the work of the Gaelic League in 1901 and 1902. Those who knew him well in his Dublin years—men like John Eglinton and George Russell—were in no doubt as to the depth of his commitment, which they found at times ridiculous, but which he himself learned to mock only when it abated. (26) 5 Although Moore felt he was too old to learn the Irish language, he made great efforts to have the stories of The Untilled Field translated into Gaelic, even having the book published first in Irish under the title of An tUr-Ghort in 1902 (20). Even though his later disappointment with the Gaelic League and with Ireland is significant, Moore continued

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to see the English language “as the language of business, journalism and commerce with the outside world, Irish as the idiom of culture, education and the domestic life” (27). Robert Welch concurs with Kiberd’s assessment of Moore’s antipathy toward English, noting that for Moore, “English itself seemed to be a language slackened by abstraction and commerce, whereas Irish was vivid, fresh, untainted by the exhaustion of modernity” (“Preface” 7).

6 John Wilson Foster suggests that Moore’s conversion to the values of the Irish Literary Revival stemmed from his anti-British stand during the Boer War, which enabled him to conceive of himself as an Irishman concerned with abstract values linked to rural culture such as spirituality: He suddenly thought of himself as an Irishman rather than an Englishman, and found himself railing against English materialism and cosmopolitanism, coarse next to Ireland’s spirituality and nationality. In “Literature and the Irish Language,” he retracted the hymn to England that closes A Drama in Muslin and attacked “the universal suburb” which England was trying to make of the world. (127) 7 Thus, even though Bryden in “Home Sickness” does not speak Irish and despite the story’s having been translated into the English language, Moore suggests that his rural, squalid Irish village functions as a latent site of cultural and personal renewal; Bryden’s re-emigration to America relegates him to a milieu characterized by commerce and trade and a lack of self-reflection. Welch argues that by the time Moore returned to Ireland from London in 1901 he was convinced of the value of contemplative reflection in the individuation process: “he placed great value on the individual gaining, through experience and self-scrutiny, some insight into and acceptance of his own nature” (“Moore’s Way Back: The Untilled Field and The Lake” 29).This self-scrutiny could work best, Moore felt, in the largely non-material milieu of rural Ireland, although he deplored its poverty and what he saw as its close-mindedness.

8 Understanding Bryden’s interior life, much of which occurs below the surface of the story, requires an unusual degree of attentiveness from the reader. Moore placed a special burden on the reader to enter his characters’ minds, which was influenced by his reading of the Russian writer Turgenev, whose A Sportsman’s Sketches provided the model for The Untilled Field. Adrian Frazier points out that in Moore’s 1888 essay on Turgenev, he turns away from the realism of Zola which he had valorized in his early fiction, relegating Zola and popular writer Rider Haggard to the “fact school” and elevating Turgenev as the great master of the “thought school” (162). In his fiction of the early twentieth century, Moore was inspired specifically by Turgenev’s depiction of impressionistic mental states. In his perceptive article on Moore’s indebtedness to Turgenev, Cave points out that Moore’s penchant for letting phrases and details accrete into an aggregate impression of mental attitudes rather than explicitly detailing particular states of mind is directly borrowed from Turgenev, who trusted the reader enough to make the nuanced interpretations necessary for apprehending the contextual point being made: “It is because his mastery of his material is so exact that he can ‘lead the reader at will’; he does not need to describe feelings or analyse mental attitudes because that mastery is so thorough that he has an absolute confidence in the reader’s ability to make scrupulous inferences” (“Turgenev and Moore: A Sportsman’s Sketches and The Untilled Field” 46). Cave sees this narrative technique adopted by Moore in the stories of The Untilled Field as the source of his statement to a friend about the “dryness” of the volume that suggests readers must become aware of its complexities by repeated readings of it (45). Only by becoming more familiar with these stories,

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which have acquired a sort of mythic status in Irish literary history that often impedes their accurate interpretation, can we truly realize Moore’s depth of psychological insight into his remarkable characters that he desperately wished their real-life counterparts might also acquire as part of a growing self-awakening in Ireland.

9 An intense scrutiny of James Bryden enables us to begin building an impression of the conflict operating in “Home Sickness” between the attraction of rural Ireland and the lure of urban America. Moore’s precisely controlled diction and carefully deployed sentence structure even in the opening passage reflect Bryden’s state of mind and its vacillations from moment to moment in subtle and suggestive ways that anticipate Moore’s praise in Avowals (1904) of the similar way in which Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean “relate[s] the states of consciousness through which Marius passed” (Orel 168). For example, the degree to which Bryden has become depersonalized by living in New York City is reflected in the opening paragraphs of the story, in which the narrator only refers to him as “He.” The opening sentence subtly conveys the tedium of his life: “He told the doctor he was due in the barroom at eight o’clock in the morning; the barroom was in a slum in the Bowery; and he had only been able to keep himself in health by getting up at five o’clock and going for long walks in the Central Park” (21). The skillful use of semicolons only creates brief pauses, suggesting the degree to which Bryden has been caught up in the frenetic pace of New York. While he argues that his exercise before work keeps him healthy, he merely has compounded the hectic pace of his day and worn himself out further. He also is likelysubstituting the anonymity of Central Park for the intimacy of his native village. The reason for his trip to Ireland is to improve his health, which has been sacrificed to his career. While he soon finds he longs for Ireland, one connotation of the story’s title, the title also suggests that the frenzied pace of his adopted home has literally made him sick.

10 It is significant that Bryden is only named when he arrives at the train station, five miles from his village of Duncannon, Ireland: “A car was waiting at the station, and the boy, discerning from his accent and his dress that Bryden had come from America, plied him with questions, which Bryden answered rapidly, for he wanted to hear who were still living in the village, and if there was a house in which he could get clean lodging” (21). Part of his warm greeting arises from the villagers’ fascination with a relative stranger from America and part of it stems from the possibility that he will spend money recklessly, but more important, his attachment to a landscape and a web of communal memory here confirms him as an individual most himself in the context of community.

11 One of Charles Taylor’s arguments about the formation of the self seems particularly apposite regarding Bryden’s homecoming. As Taylor points out, “One is a self only among other selves. A self can never be described without reference to those who surround it” (35). Taylor is at some pains to make this point, since, as he notes, “not only the philosophico-scientific tradition but also a powerful modern aspiration to freedom and individuality have conspired to produce an identity which seems to be a negation of this [point]” (35). Moore’s description of Bryden’s village accords with the long-standing Irish worldview of self-in-community that has been occluded and even denied by the modern world. Bryden’s new self develops through his interaction with the villagers, who function as the “webs of interlocution” that Taylor holds are the constitutive matrix for identity formation (36). Bryden’s interlocutors give him the

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necessary feedback that helps effect the rise of his latent self, one that is prone to contemplation and self-renewal.

12 After reacquainting himself with some of the villagers on his first night back, Bryden retires to his bed. The passage that follows demonstrates his terror of being left alone. Through sentences that convey a rapid succession of individual sonic images, the narrator shows us Bryden’s realization of the desolation of the village and he lies awake, frightened, undoubtedly missing the impersonal hum of the city: The cackling of some geese in the street kept him awake, and he seemed to realize suddenly how lonely the country was, and he foresaw mile after mile of scanty fields stretching all round the lake with one little town in the far corner. A dog howled in the distance, and the fields and the boreens between him and the dog appeared as in a crystal. He could hear Michael breathing by his wife’s side in the kitchen, and he could barely resist the impulse to run out of the house, and he might have yielded to it, but he wasn’t sure that he mightn’t awaken Mike as he came down the ladder. His terror increased, and he drew the blanket over his head. (24)

13 Since he cannot see, he projects an image of what he knows is likely there and frightens himself at the sparseness of the landscape. Most terrifying of all is Michael’s breathing, not only for its delicate evocation of humanity, but also because of his lying in such close proximity to his wife. Bryden, afraid of relationships generally, is particularly shocked and horrified by this quotidian example of married life, and he longs to escape.

14 Moreover, being within Michael’s house itself, placed as it is in a natural, detached setting with all the intimacy that setting bespeaks, heightens the terror of the city- dwelling Bryden. He has undoubtedly been living in a tenement in New York and that urban dwelling has helped dehumanize him. Gaston Bachelard has pointed out the mechanical properties of urban architecture in articulating his theory of topoanalysis: he argues that houses set “in a big city lack cosmicity. For here, where houses are no longer set in natural surroundings, the relationship between house and space becomes an artificial one. Everything about it is mechanical and, on every side, intimate living flees” (27). Michael’s natural intimacy with his wife, made more personal by his house’s isolated setting, frightens Bryden, who has felt less exposed in the city because of its architectural impersonality and cloistered blocks of buildings. As Bachelard further holds, in a statement pertinent to Bryden’s state of mind here, “In our houses set close one up against the other, we are less afraid” (27). The isolation of the house in this passage thus leads Bryden into a state of mind that nearly disables him mentally. Forced back upon himself and made to contemplate himself more closely than he has done in some time leads him into an awareness of his intense loneliness, a loneliness that has been masked by the impersonality and pace of city life.

15 The next morning, however, he has recovered enough to eat a hearty breakfast and stroll outside. Forbidden by Mike from helping with the mowing, he lounges by the lakeside and dreams the day away, lulled into an imaginative reverie by the combined sounds of the breeze, the reeds, ducks, and by the lapping of the water at the shorelines, along with the interplay of sun and cloud on the water. His reverie puts him into a much better mood, and when he sees the local villagers, he chats idly with them, while still feeling himself superior to them: “whenever a peasant driving a cart or an ass or an old woman with a bundle of sticks on her back went by, Bryden kept them in chat, and he soon knew the village by heart” (my emphasis; 25). After meeting and

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reacquainting himself with the local landlord one day, he procures a boat from him and rows around the lake every morning.

16 Although the passage following this one in which Bryden is portrayed as day-dreaming sounds escapist, his entry into this mindset is actually a crucial step toward acquiring a contemplative approach to life: Bryden rowed about the islands every morning; and resting upon his oars looked at the old castles, remembering the prehistoric raiders that the landlord had told him about. He came across the stones to which the lake dwellers had tied their boats, and these signs of ancient Ireland were pleasing to Bryden in his present mood. (25) 17 Gazing into the distance, into immensity, enables Bryden to be transported in his mind to an imagined, but no less real reality than that which surrounds him. Bachelard argues that daydreaming arrives “in the space of elsewhere” and suggests that “When this elsewhere is in natural surroundings [. . .] it is immense. And one might say that daydream is original contemplation” (Bachelard’s emphases 184). The sheer immensity of Bryden’s vision is achieved by his condition of being motionless, which state, Bachelard claims, facilitates the movement into contemplation: “As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense. Indeed, immensity is the movement of motionless man. It is one of the dynamic characteristics of quiet daydreaming” (184). Motionless in his boat, Bryden escapes the hectic movement of the city, which militates against contemplation, and acquires through his stillness the dynamism of immensity as described by Bachelard.

18 His expanded mental capacity now makes him receptive to other options than those normally presented to him in his formerly circumscribed urban world. Thus, despite his aversion to emotional relationships, when Margaret Dirken appears one evening to him as he fishes a smaller lake near the village bog, she is a welcome respite from his solitude. He has noticed her before at local dances, but had never spoken to her. Now, however, “he was glad to speak to someone, for the evening was lonely, and they stood talking together” (26). As he looks at her, he admires her beauty but then is quickly disturbed: Her cheeks were bright and her teeth small, white, and beautifully even; and a woman’s soul looked at Bryden out of her soft Irish eyes. He was troubled and turned aside, and catching sight of a frog looking at him out of a tuft of grass, he said: “I have been looking for a frog to put upon my pike line.” (26) 19 Although James F. Carens argues that this passage suggests that “Margaret [. . .] has an Irish charm that Bryden cannot dismiss” (54), Bryden’s attitude toward her here is much more complex than Carens implies. Why, within two sentences, is Margaret transformed from an idealized beauty into a troubling image? The answer lies within Bryden’s perverse psychology. At first, he manages to attend to her specific beauty and abstract her enough to incorporate her into his idealized landscape of ancient Ireland that he fantasizes about every morning as he rows a borrowed boat on the bigger lake. But then reality intrudes in the form of individuality. Margaret’s soul peers at him, puncturing his conflated image of woman and myth—she may temporarily function as a Mother Ireland figure in this sense—and resists his abstraction of her.

20 There is not even any real evidence that he cares for her; in fact, he has pursued her out of a perverse desire, it seems, to reincorporate her into his fusion of woman and landscape and make her over into the abstraction to which he first was attracted. This desire is compounded by his evident wish to conform to the social conventions of the village, which Margaret apparently brings up in an effort to force his hand on the issue.

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Despite his disdain for the “peasants” around him, Bryden succumbs to this village woman’s pressure and societal custom and becomes engaged.

21 After the parish priest bans Bryden’s parties in which excessive drinking and a great deal of dancing occurs, he is angered. Bryden has also gotten engaged to Margaret to avoid being censored by the priest, thus unconsciously succumbing to the village conventions he has sought to distance himself from, but since he has no real self- awareness, he still separates himself from the villagers, and is shocked by their obedience to the priest. In thinking about their passiveness, he explicitly contrasts their rural Catholic existence with the urban, secular, restless life he has temporarily left behind in New York: “And their pathetic submission was the submission of a primitive people clinging to religious authority, and Bryden contrasted the weakness and incompetence of the people about him with the modern restlessness and cold energy of the people he left behind him” (27). Already, though he too has submitted to the priest’s authority by getting engaged to Margaret, Bryden feels the allure of the city drawing him back, though that place seems to render its inhabitants without agency.

22 Bryden is anxious to be married, but cannot obtain his money from America for several more months. In the meantime, a letter arrives from America from a fellow employee in the bar. Although it is a mere inquiry into whether he is returning from someone who is not close to him, it spurs a renewed longing to return to the Bowery: He tried to forget the letter, and he looked at the worn fields, divided by walls of loose stones, and a great longing came upon him. The smell of the Bowery slum had come across the Atlantic, and had found him out in his western headland; and one night he awoke from a dream in which he was hurling some drunken customer through the open doors into the darkness. He had seen his friend in the white duck jacket throwing drink from glass into glass amid the din of voices and strange accents; he had heard the clang of money as it was swept into the till, and his sense sickened for the barroom. (29) 23 Those loose stone walls surrounding the village remind him of the city walls and pavement of the Bowery. Suddenly he misses not just their uniformity, in contrast to the jumbled stone walls of the village, but also the hubbub of that other life. That world of action and busyness lures him away from the loneliness of the village and the effort he will undoubtedly have to make to start examining and knowing himself if he stays. Although Cave intriguingly argues that Bryden’s vision of the “worn fields divided by walls of loose stones” implies that “the quality of his perception intimates his own slow breaking down to the pattern of spiritual greyness common to the villagers if he should stay” (“Turgenev and Moore: A Sportsman’s Sketches and The Untilled Field” 60), the juxtaposition of the staid rural landscape and frenetic Bowery cityscape in this passage suggest instead his longing for the non-reflective world of the city, although he cannot even reflect enough to admit this fully to himself. Margaret’s clinginess frightens him and, still lured by his image of the Bowery as a site of activity and impersonal relations, he searches desperately for reasons to leave her.

24 “Hunted” alternately by the smell of the barroom and by Margaret’s quest for marriage, he rapidly examines and rejects reasons for going back to America, finally seizing on the priest as a symbol of the harsh repressiveness of the village and convincing himself he misses the excitement of politics: The smell of the barroom hunted him down. Was it for the sake of the money that he might make there that he wished to go back? No, it was not the money. What then? His eyes fell on the bleak country, on the little fields divided by bleak walls;

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he remembered the pathetic ignorance of the people, and it was these things that he could not endure. It was the priest who came to forbid the dancing. Yes, it was the priest. As he stood looking at the line of the hills the barroom seemed by him. He heard the politicians, and the excitement of politics was in his blood again. He must go away from this place—he must get back to the barroom. (my emphasis; 29) 25 Bryden’s loathing for his parish in this passage seems more constructed than real as he seems to struggle valiantly to come up with reasons to leave for the Bowery, repetitively trying to convince himself that the priest is at fault and even feigning an interest in politics as a reason to return.

26 Criticism of the story, however, has overwhelmingly seen this passage and the one cited earlier in which Bryden, shocked by the townspeople’s submission to the priest, contrasts “the weakness and incompetence of the people about him with the modern restlessness and cold energy of the people he left behind him,” as evidence of Moore’s anti-clericalism and read that attitude onto Bryden. Proof of Moore’s anti-clericalism in general abounds, as his most recent and best biographer, Adrian Frazier, notes. Frazier points out that Moore’s objection was not to Catholicism per se, especially not in its long-standing folk practices such as local pilgrimages and worship in cottages instead of churches, but to the modernization of the Church under Cardinal Cullen’s “devotional revolution,” in which a whole series of devotions used to promote a newer, more rigid dogma were introduced (309). Moore became so dissatisfied with the Church’s drift toward modernism that, Frazier argues, “In The Untilled Field, the tales about artists in Ireland or exiles returned are always tales of dissatisfaction, tales of Ireland as a prison run by jailers who are priests” (309-10).

27 And yet “Home Sickness” stands out from the volume’s other stories about exiles in its focus on the incorporation of an innovative interior narrative technique to depict its protagonist’s state of mind, a strategy that suggests Moore saw strong possibilities for self-renewal in Ireland. Elizabeth Grubgeld has argued that Moore’s fiction written after 1900 increasingly is concerned with developing a narrative style that modeled a growing trajectory toward self-consciousness on the part of his characters: “After the turn of the century, Moore’s fiction steadily advances toward a depiction of the process by which we progress from intuition to consciousness” (204). She realizes the stylistic significance of “Home Sickness” for his subsequent fiction, noting that “In this story, which of all those in The Untilled Field most prefigures the achievements of The Lake and The Brook Kerith, Moore [. . .] establishes a technique integral to his sense of how a life finds meaning through the recollective process of narration” (218).And yet Grubgeld wrongly suggests that Bryden finds meaning in his life “through the recollective process of narration”; rather, when he finally experiences a moment of contemplation at the end of his life, he chastises himself for not having had the courage to live an examined life in Ireland. Bryden’s problem is not so much with the Church’s oppressiveness but with not examining himself.

28 Frazier’s casting of the stories of The Untilled Field as a monolithic example of Moore’s hatred of the modern Church is hardly new. Almost every critic writing on the volume reads Moore’s dissatisfaction with the Church onto his characters including Bryden himself. For example, in what is still considered a landmark essay on The Untilled Field, John Cronin, discussing Bryden’s reason for leaving the village for the second time, states that, “his sturdy independence will not brook the priestly control of his lovemaking and his future marriage to Margaret Dirken” (123). In an earlier article, Brendan Kennelly attributes Bryden’s decision to go back to America to the priest’s

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repressive control of the villagers: “Because of this claustrophobic world with the priest at its centre, Bryden leaves Ireland and Margaret Dirken behind him, deliberately choosing the noisy bar-room in the Bowery slum to the intolerable repression of the Irish village” (154). Seamus Deane concurs, arguing that “although he wants to marry a local girl, Margaret Dirken, and settle down in the beautiful landscape of his youth, the authoritarian interference of the local priest so discourages him that he finally returns to New York and abandons all he loves” (170).

29 Besides being colored by Moore’s personal disdain for the Church’s trajectory toward modernization, this misinterpretation of Bryden’s motives for his decision is undoubtedly influenced by Moore’s depictions elsewhere in the volume of other controlling priests, such as Father Maguire, who figures in the linked stories “Some Parishioners,” “Patchwork,” “The Wedding Feast,” and “The Window,” and attempts to arrange marriages in the parish in order to revive it. But Maguire’s harsh domination of parish life is explicitly contrasted by the gentle character of Father MacTurnan in the stories “A Letter to Rome” and “A Play-House in the Waste.” This character attempts to help his parishioners and, according to James F. Carens, represents “sure evidence that the artist in George Moore could not remain for long a prisoner of his anticlericalism” (57). Clearly, Moore’s priests in The Untilled Field have to be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Although the priest in “Home Sickness” is authoritarian, his presence does not really explain Bryden’s decision to re-emigrate; rather, he seems to be an excuse hastily seized upon by Bryden as a rationale for departure.

30 Richard Allen Cave’s more thoughtful argument about Bryden’s decision to leave suggests that although the priest’s dominance in the village bothers him, he actually leaves because of his realization of the stultifying quality of life lived by the peasants: Though a parish priest vigorously condemns the drinking and dancing that Bryden’s money can buy for the villagers to celebrate his courting of Margaret Dirkin, more than that shapes his decision to go back to the Bowery: it is the joyless drudgery of the peasant farmers working their smallholdings for a pittance; the hard, unyielding landscape; and the meanspiritedness and self-pity these seem together to induce in the villagers that afflict him. He pities them but comes to dread sharing their condition. (“Turgenev and Moore: A Sportsman’s Sketches and The Untilled Field” 60) 31 Cave’s reading gets significantly closer to the complex reasons for Bryden’s re- emigration than do those of Cronin, Kennelly, Deane, and Frazier, which represent the main line of criticism on this aspect of the story. But even Cave’s response neglects the main reason for Bryden’s departure—his unconscious desire to escape back into an urban environment where he only has to react to those around him and never reflect deeply and develop an emotional and intellectual life. Moore felt strongly at this time that rural Ireland, despite its poverty and the increasing authoritarianism of the Church, could provide the contemplative milieu in which deep personal and societal change might flourish.

32 Bryden’s disgust with the priest stems from his recognition that the life lived by the priest and the local community is antithetical to his detachment from others, which is enabled by a urban milieu; correspondingly, the prose in this passage suggests that he is searching for reasons to return to America and the busy, impersonal life of the Bowery. When he recalls the priest’s interference, he does so in a repetitive phrase that suggests he is trying to convince himself: “It was the priest who came to forbid the dancing. Yes, it was the priest” (29). Carens briefly acknowledges the possibility of this

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reading when he notes that, “‘Home Sickness’ thus seems to be touched by Moore’s anticlericalism, unless we conclude that Bryden blames the priest for his departure as a rationalization of his longing for the urban scape of the Bowery” (55). Bryden does not so much hate or fear the priest but fears instead becoming part of a personal community in contrast to the impersonal world of the Bowery he has come to know and love. The priest represents the fear of the intrusion of personal relationships into his emotionless life. After all, he sought Margaret’s hand in marriage partly to escape the priest’s wrath. That the priest stopped the dancing Bryden so enjoys adds to his fear of the personal, for although dancing seems personal, it actually is a way for him to have impersonal relations. We should remember that although he “had found himself opposite to her in the reels” (26), he had barely spoken to Margaret before that first evening when he met her by the lake. That impersonal letter from his co-worker in America that seems so intimate to the villagers who see him read it brings all that bright and busy world back to him, alluring him with its hectic pace. His cycle of illusion/disillusionment has begun again and now he convinces himself that he hates the village and its peaceful life. That life is characterized by interpersonal relationships and is symbolized by his forthcoming marriage to Margaret and his pastureland that the landlord has so generously given them.

33 Thus, even though he will not admit to Margaret or himself that he is not coming back, he leaves. She knows he is leaving, and asks him to tell her outright, but he does not, rushing away instead and rejecting her offer to come with him: He hurried away, hoping he would come back. He tried to think that he liked the country he was leaving, that it would be better to have a farmhouse and live there with Margaret Dirken than to serve drinks behind a counter in the Bowery. He did not think he was telling a lie when he said he was coming back. (58) 34 He vacillates as he runs toward the train station, but luckily meets a car and its motion sufficiently enables him to feel he has left the village and the personal relations it represents behind: “Once he was on the car he felt himself safe—the country was already behind him. The train and the boat at Cork were mere formulae; he was already in America” (58-9). Conveyed by a succession of vehicles, Bryden is quickly led back into the life of the city and its dehumanizing qualities—speed, anonymity, atomic individuality—even before he reaches it. Raymond Williams has argued that the qualities of the modern car—privacy, enclosure, and individuality—recall the earlier descriptions of “crowded metropolitan streets—the people as isolated atoms, flowing this way and that; a common stream of separated identities and directions [. . .]” (296). Bryden’s embrace of these locomotive devices linked to an urban milieu suggests his comfort with particularized negative qualities of life in the city, despite his need for contemplation, a state of mind able to be attained in the city, but only through much more effort than he is willing or able to give.

35 Upon his return, Bryden is relieved to be back in the Bowery and feels “the thrill of home that he had not felt in his village” (30), but he nonetheless has managed to delude himself yet again. America must surely have been a dream to him before he emigrated the first time; its shabbiness and disorder, however, literally made him sick and long for home so he left. Now, after returning the second time, he does not pause to reflect how the milieu of his native village might have satisfied the embryonic life of the mind that had begun to emerge, however fleetingly, during his time there and simply proceeds based on his moods. He merely briefly wonders, “how it was that the smell of the bar seemed more natural than the smell of fields, and the roar of crowds more

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welcome than the silence of the lake’s edge” (30). He will not answer these questions because he is no longer capable of doing so: the city’s impersonal and artificial qualities have successfully blotted out his sensitivity toward the land and his partially regained disposition toward contemplation.

36 The disingenuous phrase, “thrill of home,” that the narrator uses to describe Bryden’s return to the Bowery suggests just how fully he is deceiving himself that he is truly home. Despite his poor Irish, Moore would have known that, as Fintan O’Toole has pointed out, the phrases sa mbaile and sa bhaile, the equivalents of the English phrase “at home,” “are never used in the narrow sense of home as a dwelling. They imply, instead, that wider sense of a place in the world, a feeling of belonging that is buried deep within the word’s meaning” (167). Bryden has already acknowledged this deeper sense of home early in “Home Sickness” when he is described in New York as beginning “to wonder how the people at home were getting on” (my emphasis; 21). Despite having experienced back in Duncannon just the sort of “feeling of belonging” that O’Toole argues characterizes the connotations of “at home” for Irish emigrants, Bryden denies that community and settles for a pale simulacrum of one that is largely devoid of feeling.

37 Having escaped one terrible marriage, he enters another one, and lives out the rest of his life. The flatness and limpidity of the sentences in this concluding section suggest just how repetitive and empty his life in New York has become and significantly, he does not even attempt to call the Bowery “home” now: He entered into negotiations for purchase of the barroom. He took a wife, she bore him sons and daughters, the barroom prospered, property came and went; he grew old, his wife died, he retired from business, and reached the age when a man begins to feel there are not many years in front of him, and that all he has had to do in life has been done. (30-1) 38 Bryden has succeeded in his career, but he has failed miserably at any self-examination. Just as he was unnamed at the beginning of the story, implying the dehumanizing effect of the city upon him, he has become reduced by the end of the story to a pronoun again. Always superficial, his inner life has receded even more from him.

39 The last sentences, in which a vision of Margaret floats before his eyes, seem ambiguous upon a cursory reading. Is Bryden merely fantasizing about the life he could have had with Margaret,as many commentators have suggested, and continuing in his cycle of illusion and disillusionment, or is he experiencing something else? I suggest that Margaret’s image is not significant in and of itself, but important for what it represents: the world of personal relations and the contemplative life he might have had if he had remained in the village, broken the engagement off, and began to reflect on his selfhood. For this vision passes quickly and smacks of romanticism: Margaret’s soft eyes and name vivified the dusk. His wife and children passed out of mind, and it seemed to him that a memory was the only real thing he possessed, and the desire to see Margaret again grew intense. But she was an old woman, she had married, maybe she was dead. Well, he would like to be buried in the village where he was born. (31) Despite its vividness, Bryden rejects this image, realizing the fruitlessness of trying to pursue Margaret yet again.

40 The image that replaces it in the concluding paragraph in the story – a vision of the village – lingers, however, suggesting the life that was available to him there without her that even now is receding from him:

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There is an unchanging, silent life within every man that none knows but himself, and his unchanging silent life was his memory of Margaret Dirken. The barroom was forgotten and all that concerned it, and the things he saw most clearly were the green hillside, and the bog lake and the rushes about it, and the greater lake in the distance, and behind it the blue line of wandering hills. (31) 41 It is easy to conflate this vision of the village with those earlier visions Bryden has of the village shortly before his arrival and during his reveries by the lake in which he naively idealizes the landscape.But Moore makes clear that this vision of his “unchanging, silent life,” is associated with “his memory of Margaret Dirken.” I use “associated” here because the memory of her is not the important vision—it is merely a psychological entry into the landscape of the village and what that terrain potentially represents—self-awareness. Seamus Deane thus misapprehends the significance of this concluding passage by arguing that its “tender note of regret” stems from his memory lingering “on Ireland and Margaret” (171, 170).

42 Although Bryden is stereotypically conflating Margaret and the landscape into a unified figure again, what seems important here and what was lacking in this conflation earlier in the story was his failure to recognize that he needed a contemplative life even as he momentarily had his best chance at it. Earlier, his romantic daydreams about the Irish landscape had been interrupted by Margaret, who temporarily embodied them, and whom he perversely sought. Now, he has entered into a reverie about Margaret, whose image leads him back to those hills and lakes again. This chiastic pattern suggests not a mirroring of his earlier thinking, but a significant change. He now realizes that that milieu, as materially poor as it was, could have provided him a life with real meaning, a life with deep, lasting human relationships, but that he had impulsively gotten engaged to her in order to escape that very life even as he needed it most. Instead of seeking a woman who might have fulfilled him and aided in his process of self-discovery, he sought one he abstracted and idealized so that he might escape having to know himself and another human being—a double burden. The grinding poverty, the priest, and the peasants of his native village were all abominable to him, not so much for their repressive and repressed qualities, but for their personal qualities. Even as he grasps the significance of that landscape for his life, for what might have been, it recedes from him and he realizes he has never known himself nor never now will.

43 While it has been rightly noted that in the stories of The Untilled Field Moore is deploring the romanticized pastoral Ireland of the nationalists, he nonetheless was attempting to posit rural Ireland, despite some of its repressive qualities, as a site rife with potential for rich cultural and personal renewal. What has passed largely unremarked and unrealized about “Home Sickness,” the most important and lasting story in the volume, is Moore’s stylistically innovative depiction of Bryden as a symbol of modern man, caught up in and depersonalized by the allure of the negative elements of urban modernity, such as atomic individualism and frenzied activity, which preclude any sort of meaningful, contemplative life. Bryden is thus a forerunner of T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, who also is paralyzed by uncertainty. Just as Prufrock suffers an emotional and intellectual death by drowning in the babble of urban voices around him at the end of that poem, so does Bryden, in the pool of chaos and dehumanization that awaits him on his return to the city.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston, MA: Beacon Press,

1994 rpt. of 1969 Beacon Press ed.

Carens, James F. “In Quest of a New Impulse : George Moore’s The Untilled Field and James Joyce’s Dubliners.” The Irish Short Story: A Critical History, ed. James F. Kilroy. Boston: Twayne, 1984. 45-93.

Cave, Richard Allen. “Introduction.” The Untilled Field. Gerrards Cross, England : Colin Smythe, 2000. vii-xvii.

---. “Turgenev and Moore : A Sportsman’s Sketches and The Untilled Field.” The Way Back: George Moore’s The Untilled Field and The Lake, ed. Robert Welch. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1982. 45-63.

Cronin, John. “George Moore: The Untilled Field.” The Irish Short Story, eds. Patrick Rafroidi and Terence Brown. Gerrards Cross, England : Colin Smythe, 1979. 113-25.

Deane, Seamus. A Short History of Irish Literature. Notre Dame,

IN: UNDP, 1986.

Forkner, Ben. “Introduction.” Modern Irish Short Stories, ed. Ben Forkner. New York : Penguin, 1980. 21-42.

Foster, John Wilson. Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival : A Changeling Art. Syracuse UP, 1987.

Frazier, Adrian. George Moore, 1852-1933. New Haven, CT : Yale UP, 2000.

Grubgeld, Elizabeth. George Moore and the Autogenous Self. Syracuse UP, 1994.

Kennelly, Brendan. “George Moore’s Lonely Voices : A Study of His Short Stories.” George Moore’s Mind and Art, ed. Graham Owens. New York : Barnes and Noble, 1970. 144-65.

Kiberd, Declan. “George Moore’s Gaelic Lawn Party.” The Way Back : George Moore’s The Untilled Field and The Lake, ed. Robert Welch. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1982. 13-27.

Moore, George. “Preface.” The Untilled Field, ed. Richard Allen Cave. The Untilled Field. Gerrards Cross, England : Colin Smythe, 2000. xxix-xxxiii.

---. “Home Sickness.” The Untilled Field. Gerrards Cross, England : Colin Smythe, 2000. 21-31.

O’Toole, Fintan. The Lie of the Land : Irish Identities. London : Verso, 1999.

Orel, Harold. “A Reassessment of George Moore’s Achievement in The Brook Kerith.” English Literature in Transition 34 :2 (1991) : 167-80.

Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989.

Welch, Robert. “Preface.” The Way Back : George Moore’s The Untilled Field and The Lake, ed. Robert Welch. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1982. 7-12.

---. “Moore’s Way Back : The Untilled Field and The Lake.” The Way Back : George Moore’s The Untilled Field and The Lake, ed. Robert Welch. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1982. 29-44.

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. NY: Oxford UP, 1973.

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ABSTRACTS

La nouvelle de George Moore, “ Home Sickness ” (Le mal du pays), publiée dans le recueil The Untilled Field (Le champ en friche, 1903), a été souvent perçue – à tort – comme une œuvre anti- catholique, puisque y est dépeinte au vitriol la figure d’un prêtre réactionnaire. S’il est évident que Moore, lui-même catholique au demeurant, a marqué son œuvre d’un trait profondément anticlérical, la nouvelle “ Home Sickness ” est plutôt une critique originale de la modernité urbaine. Moore considère le rythme et le matérialisme de cette modernité comme un facteur de dégradation des conditions vitales à un esprit contemplatif. Bien que Moore et le protagoniste de l’histoire, James Bryden, soient tous deux révulsés par certains aspects de la vie rurale, une opportunité s’offre tout de même à ce dernier, celle de mener sur sa vie une réflexion : cependant, celle-ci n’est possible que dans la mesure où Bryden doit quitter New York et retourner définitivement dans son village natal, en Irlande. Il reste que Bryden voit dans l’ingérence du prêtre la raison de son départ vers la ville. A cela, le narrateur ajoute une vérité qu’il assène au lecteur : la ville a mentalement appauvri Bryden… TRADUIT PAR LAURA ROMASCU

AUTHORS

RICHARD RANKIN RUSSELL

Baylor University, Texas

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Female expansion and Masculine Immobilization in the Short Story Cycle

Rachel Lister

1 As a versatile, provisional form, the short story cycle privileges plurality and openness. It contests boundaries and enacts the possibility of multiple beginnings and renewable identities. Forrest L. Ingram delivered the first detailed exploration of the form in 1971. In Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century Ingram illuminates the “duality” of a form that embodies “the tension between the one and the many” (19). He observes: “Every story cycle displays a double tendency of asserting the individuality of its components on the one hand and of highlighting, on the other, the bonds of unity which make the many into a single whole” (19).

2 In recent years, critics have attended to the gendered dimensions of the form. In “Gender and Genre: The Case of the Novel-in-Stories” Margot Kelley observes that “about 75 percent of the current writers” of the story cycle are women, “often women who live in positions of double marginality as members of visible minorities” (296).1 Kelley draws on Carol Gilligan’s research to illuminate the form’s gendered dimensions. Gilligan uses the images of the web and the hierarchy to figure the ways in which boys and girls approach conflict. Her studies of children reveal that where girls confront dilemmas through “a network of connection, a web of relationships sustained by a process of communication”, boys set up “a hierarchical ordering to resolve a conflict” (Gilligan 32, 33). These images represent the “contrast between a self defined through separation and a self delineated through connection” (35). The short story cycle enacts both sensibilities: it “suggests that a coherent or unified identity requires both autonomy and connectivity” (Kelley 304). Feminist theory posits that women are more likely to conceive the self in these terms. Feminist critic Rachel Du Plessis identifies the “both/and” vision as a “trait” of the female aesthetic: this vision signals “the end of the either-or, dichotomized universe, proposing monism … in opposition to dualism, a dualism pernicious because it valorizes one side above another, and makes a hierarchy

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where there were simply twain” (“Etruscans” 276). The short story cycle is a nonhierarchic form; it privileges this kind of vision.

3 As Kelley observes, the prevalence of female writers in the story cycle canon is hardly surprising (Kelley 304). This essay will illuminate how two women writers use the form as a site for female expansion and masculine immobilization. In particular, it will examine the masculine struggle to acquire the “unified identity” embodied by the form. My readings will investigate the representation of thwarted, immobilized men in Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples (1949) and Joyce Carol Oates’s All the Good People I’ve Left Behind (1979). Both writers are celebrated primarily for their novels and short stories, but take particular pleasure in the versatility of the short story cycle. While writing The Golden Apples Welty found that the form relieved her of the “burden of the novel, with all that tying up of threads and preparing for this, that and the other” (Kreyling Author 137). Speaking to Oates in May 2005, I asked her about her experience of writing story cycles. She reflected that she has grown to “love the form” and that she regards it as a particularly useful tool for the young writer who may find writing the “unwieldy” novel “a difficult psychic experience” (“Seminar”). The gender politics of both writers furnish further affinities. Welty and Oates reject the feminist label but centre on female experience in their fiction. They seek to challenge gender boundaries and dramatize their effects. Speaking to Charles Bunting in 1972, Welty distanced herself from any feminist agenda, insisting: “I’m not interested in any kind of feminine repartee” (725). Oates remains skeptical about essentialist views of gender difference, attributing it primarily to social conditioning: “Though I don’t believe that there is a distinctly ‘female’ sensibility, I know, of course, that there has been a female fate” (“Review” 28).

4 Judith Gardiner contends that gender identity is more available to girls than boys; she perceives a troubling indeterminacy in the way that boys construe the self: “boys have more difficulty than girls in acquiring gender identity, and men exhibit more disturbances in gender identity than do women” (189). Similarly, Oates states that “girls and women are conditioned more conspicuously” (“Seminar”). Dominant models of masculinity pose a threat to healthy selfhood: “This is the era of Women’s Liberation, but I really must say that I think men have a far more difficult time, simply living, existing, trying to measure up to the absurd standards of ‘masculinity’ in our culture and in nature itself, which is so cruel” (Bellamy 20). According to Oates, these standards arise from the masculine preoccupation with isolation and containment. She writes of the “very masculine, combative ideal of an ‘I’ set against all other ‘I’s’” which “projects its emotions outward into everything, everyone, into the universe itself” (New 119, 260).

5 In Feminine Fictions Patricia Waugh observes that modern representations of the male hero have integrated elements of the “master-plots” of nineteenth-century history. They perpetuate the image of the male self “conceived in terms of containedness, difference, autonomy” (Waugh 17). This kind of subjectivity rarely prospers in the short story cycle, a form that frustrates “containedness” and undermines notions of centrality.2 It has become the ideal space for representing the kind of subjectivity that is commonly associated with the female subject: a selfhood that develops from “relationship and dispersal” rather than “the maintenance of boundaries and distance” or “the subjugation of the other” (Waugh 22).

6 Several women writers have used the form to sideline these “master-plots”. In her reading of Sarah Orne Jewett’s cycle, The Country of the Pointed Firs, Elizabeth Ammons

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notes that Jewett marginalizes her questing hero, Captain Littlepage, by placing his adventure narrative early in the cycle. Littlepage’s story is a paradigm of the “solitary, climax-oriented, city-focused literature – significantly coming from a man and totally about men” (Ammons 48). Jewett presents the story at the beginning of her cycle because “It is to be confronted early on, appreciated, and then moved beyond” (Ammons 49). In her reading of Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women Janet Beer observes that Munro restricts masculine plots to “single episodes” in the cycle to mark the end of “male exclusivity” (126, 125). Welty and Oates use the form not only to contain certain masculine plots but to engage with the masculine dilemma concerning what happens next.

7 Following Jewett’s Littlepage, the thwarted male quest-figure resurfaces in Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples, a cycle of seven stories linked by recurring characters, including King MacLain, and the fictional setting of Morgana. Welty goes further than Jewett in her containment of the quest plot; she denies her hero the privilege of narration. She exiles King MacLain to the margins of the cycle by staging the process of fictionalization that shapes his identity.3 Determined to retain his autonomy, King spurns domestic boundaries and repeatedly leaves home to assert his ego boundaries through sexual conquests (“Myth” 74). Ostensibly, King commands his quest. Margery Hourihan notes how the conventional quest-plot moves “both towards concealment and towards disclosure, creating uncertainty and constantly promising the reader that all will be revealed” (46). The short story cycle complements this kind of plot. Characters move around the form, taking center stage in some stories, retreating to the margins in others, and often vanishing from the cycle altogether. With his sporadic appearances and enigmatic gestures, King enacts this structure. However, his strategy takes effect only if Morgana’s storytellers respond. King’s quest plot is a vehicle for the storytelling and sexual energies of Morgana’s female watchers and waiters. For narrator Katie Rainey, the act of tracking King MacLain displaces unfulfilled compulsions: “Why do I try to figure? Maybe because Fate Rainey ain’t got a surprise in him, and proud of it” (265). By mapping out his latest move and speculating upon his next one, Morgana’s watchers and waiters move his plot forward.

8 Welty exploits the openness of the form to decenter King’s quest narrative and engineer her own game of concealment and disclosure. She catches him out by capturing him in positions that betray his contingency. In “Sir Rabbit” King seduces a local girl only to become the unsuspecting object of her gaze: “With her almost motherly sway of the head and arms to help her, she gazed at the sounding-off, sleeping head, and the neck like a little porch column in town” (339-40). Welty subjects King to further infantilization in “The Wanderers”, the final story in the cycle. When mortality catches up with him, King capitulates to the call of home. For the male quest hero, homecoming closes down the possibility of autonomy. The separation between self and other is no longer sustainable. The community gathers for Katie Rainey’s funeral – the death of one of King’s narrators is surely significant – and we witness him trying to assert his independence once more in a pathetic re-enactment of his early questing days; he creeps mischievously down the hall for food, “as if nobody could see him” (446). In a rare moment of articulation, King registers his loss of control over his story: he has, he tells Virgie, “ended up at the wrong end” of life (443). His vision is characterized by the either/or, dichotomized mentality: he is either heroic as the

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romantic quest-figure or defeated as the domesticated husband. A unified identity eludes the aging King.

9 Homecomings are a common feature of the short story cycle. They mark the moment when characters confront the tension embodied by the form. Where some characters resist the home and continue to guard their autonomy, others re-engage with their communities, no longer viewing the home as a threat to self. In the short story cycle, homecomings are generally more successful for female characters than male.4 Virgie Rainey is Morgana’s female quest-figure. When she returns home, she achieves reconciliation between contingency and autonomy.

10 The reader first glimpses Virgie as a moving image of transgression; in “June Recital” Loch Morrison spies her leaping across a ditch with her sailor in full flight towards sexual consummation. For most of the cycle she appears only within the bounds of Morgana’s consciousness; where the community mythologizes King for his defiance, it castigates Virgie for her air of self-sufficiency. Virgie is a member of an established if rather lowly Morganan family, yet she leaves home and returns at will, neither spurning the community nor defining herself through its norms. She elides the difference between inside and outside, disconcerting Morgana’s boundaries. In “The Wanderers” she takes center stage and displays the kind of both/and vision defined by Du Plessis: a vision that dismantles hierarchy and polarization: “Virgie never saw it differently, never doubted that all the opposites on earth were close together, love close to hate, living to dying” (452). Reflecting on her contradictory relationship with her piano teacher, Miss Eckhart, she embraces its duality: she accepts “the horror in love … the separateness” (460). Virgie’s “both/and” vision enables her to sit with the “old black thief” at the end of the cycle, “alone and together”, physically enacting the duality of the stories themselves (Welty Collected 461). She embodies the kind of duality that is represented by the humming-bird, a recurring motif in the cycle. J. Gerald Kennedy outlines three types of sign as conventions of the short story cycle. The first of these is the “topical sign” which “includes all objects, images, and actions which readers perceive as ‘symbolic’ in the traditional sense” (19). Kennedy notes that such signs often reinforce the sense of duality or ambiguity that intensifies from story to story. In The Golden Apples the humming-bird is a topical sign; presenting itself periodically throughout the cycle, it figures the possible unity of opposites: it is “Metallic and misty together, tangible and intangible, splendid and fairy-like” (Welty Collected 308).

11 For Morgana’s alpha males, spaces and narratives remain firmly gendered; the home is designated female and is shunned. Loch Morrison, the spiritual and perhaps biological heir to King, moves to New York and does not return to Morgana.5 Welty capitalizes on the provisional nature of the story cycle and closes down another quest plot; we hear only that Loch writes from New York and “‘likes it there’” (449). Relieved of the pressure to tie up all narrative threads, Welty does not pursue his story. Welty decenters the male quest-figure but gives a voice to those men who balk at “absurd standards” of masculinity. In the fifth and sixth stories she dramatizes the struggles of the MacLain twins who are living in the shadow of King’s legacy. Unlike their father, Ran and Eugene MacLain need boundaries: “You know I have to stay in Morgana” Ran tells his mother (157). Eugene escapes domestic borders for one day but fears their ultimate dissolution: “And at the same time it would be terrifying if walls . . . the walls

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of whatever room it was that closed a person in in the evening, would go soft as curtains and begin to tremble” (407-8).

12 Ran’s voice narrates “The Whole World Knows” but other voices drown it out: Snowdie MacLain’s maternal badgering, Miss Perdita Mayo’s charged monologues, and the choral voice of the “Circle” (380). This discursive density threatens to dislodge Ran from the role of narrator, mirroring his tenuous position as husband, father, provider and inheritor of King’s legacy. Also inhibiting Ran is his ambivalence towards the discourses of interiority. In Writing Masculinities, Ben Knights illuminates masculinity’s “deep suspicion of introspection, conventionally associated with dreaminess, passivity and hence with feminisation” (1). Uncomfortable with his subjectivity, Ran buries his most urgent thoughts in circumstantial detail; he tentatively disperses his petitions to his absent father throughout the narrative, curtailing them as if in fear of what Henry James terms “the terrible fluidity of self-revelation” (xx James’s italics). Verbal paralysis also afflicts Eugene in “Music from Spain”: “It was a life-long trouble, he had never been able to express himself at all when it came to the very moment” (421).

13 Knights attributes this apprehension to hegemonic gender identifications: “the opposition of word and deed is tinctured with a female/male opposition … Ambivalence towards the feminising word marks the lore of deeds” (117). This opposition clearly informs the masculine narratives in The Golden Apples.King offers his deeds to the feminizing words of the town gossips. Ran’s attempts to emulate his father culminate in desperate deeds: his bungled suicide attempt and the rape of his lover Maideen. Knights observes that the man who cannot emulate “heroic narratives” senses “a gap in his own consciousness: the rankling awareness of the disparity between the model and the actuality” (190-1). This “rankling awareness” haunts Ran’s voice as he becomes increasingly conscious of the hiatus between his “ideal and real self.” Knights identifies violence as one possible response to this “dissonance” (190). Violence signifies “an attempt to act out in however self-destructive a physical form the dominance that you believe you were promised but of which the world has cheated you” (Knights 190-1). Abortive fantasies of violence infiltrate Ran’s fractured narrative as he seeks admission into “the lore of deeds”: “I fired point-blank at Jinny – more than once. It was close range … I saw her pouting childish breasts, excuses for breasts, sprung full of bright holes where my bullets had gone. But Jinny didn’t feel it” (385).

14 Ran’s story ends with bewildered speculation about other plots. He asks his missing father and brother: “What you went and found, was it better than this?” (392). Eugene has made a home in San Francisco but remains as dislocated as his brother. “Music from Spain” dramatizes his attempt to escape his daily routine and mobilize his identity. Like Ran, his deployment of violence proves fruitless. He begins his day by striking his wife, Emma, but the irrational assault leads only to disembodiment: “His act … slipped loose from him, turned around and looked at him in the form of a question” (394). Eugene’s internal dialogue betrays the disjunction in his mind between “the model and the actuality”; Welty italicizes the voice that encodes the masculine ideal, marking Eugene’s estrangement from his “real self”: “Why not strike her? And if she thought he would stay around only to hear her start tuning up, she had another think coming. Let her take care and go about her business, he might do it once more and not so kindly” (395). This macho discourse verges on the absurd. In reality, Eugene perceives female sexuality as a threat to self. Grotesque images of women taunt him throughout the day:

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the provocative mechanical dummy in the House of Mirth and the menacing vision of Emma’s advance, her kisses assailing him “like blows” (417, 423).

15 When Eugene leaves the house, he realizes that “no familiar person could do him any good” and decides to “seek a stranger” (400). He wanders through the city with an enigmatic Spanish guitar-player. By diverting from his daily routine, Eugene moves temporarily beyond gender identifications. He takes the “greatest comfort” in behaviors that are gendered female (Welty Collected 423): the “dreaminess” and “passivity” that, according to Knights, arouse masculine suspicion: “The now calming ocean, the pounding of a thousand gentlenesses, went on into darkness and obscurity. He felt himself lifted up in the strong arms of the Spaniard … He was without a burden in the world” (423). Eugene returns home, exhilarated by his day, but remains estranged from his home environment. Emma has also seen the Spaniard that day and gossips with a neighbor about his impropriety in church, oblivious to her husband’s experience.

16 Eugene’s narrative is not gender-specific. He repeats the plots of fellow-Morganans Cassie Morrison and Nina Carmichael: young girls from Morgana who live vicariously through self-defining wanderers but ultimately retreat to known spaces. It is significant that Morgana finds roles for Nina and Cassie. Both step into preordained roles; Cassie fills Miss Eckhart’s position as the town’s spinster piano teacher. When we meet Nina in “The Wanderers” she is “Mrs Junior Nesbitt heavy with child” (443). There are no such roles available to Eugene, who eventually returns to Morgana to die of tuberculosis. We do not see Eugene again, but learn of his premature death from Virgie. She recalls that on his return Eugene remained unreadable to the Morganans whom he resisted to the end: “Sometimes he looked up in the town where he was young and said something strangely spiteful or ambiguous” (458). Like his father, Eugene sees his return as a defeat and guards his autonomy fiercely: “His light, tubercular body seemed to hesitate on the street of Morgana, hold averted, anticipating questions” (458).

17 With Eugene out of their grasp, the Morganans are doubly determined to make a hero of King’s remaining son. In “The Wanderers” we learn that they have woven their version of his scandal into Morgana’s tapestry of MacLain legend and elected him town mayor: “They had voted for him for that – for his glamor and his story … for marrying a Stark and then for ruining a girl and the thing she did … They had voted for the revelation; it had made their hearts faint, and they would assert it again” (433). Virgie recognizes Ran’s uneasiness with this role: “Ran knew that every minute, there in the door he stood it” (433). In the short story cycle, particular moments or revelations often achieve full significance only within the context of other narratives. By working backwards the reader might verify Virgie’s evaluation of Ran’s displacement. A single sentence in “The Whole World Knows” illuminates the absurdity of Ran’s ending: his rare self-revelation that,“To me, ambition’s always been a mystery” (382). Through Ran’s ensnared plot Welty reveals how men fall prey to patriarchal discourses and paradigms: “to collude with a system of power it is not necessary to be objectively a beneficiary of that system, only to be persuaded that you are a beneficiary” (Knights 6). Through her portrayal of Ran and Eugene, Welty challenges the viability of ‘heroic’ narratives and unveils the masculine “disturbances” highlighted by Oates and Gardiner. She uses her form not only to debunk heroic narratives but also to reveal the paucity of alternative plots for men.

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* * *

18 Thirty years after the publication of The Golden Apples, Joyce Carol Oates published All the Good People I’ve Left Behind.Like Welty, Oates uses the story cycle as a site for feminine quests and masculine immobilization. She charts the development of wandering heroine Annie Quirt through a number of stories; dispersed among them are thematically linked stories about married couples. As the cycle progresses, the connections between the two worlds emerge; Annie attended college at Ann Arbor with some of the couples. Annie shares Virgie Rainey’s quality of otherness. The couples have lost contact with her but they remember her vividly. They speculate on Annie’s fate just as the young Morganans ponder Virgie’s destiny, already thinking of her “in terms of the future” (Welty Collected 291-2). One does not wish to suggest that Oates modeled Annie Quirt on Virgie Rainey, but that she, like Welty, perceived the form’s utility for representing the heroine who moves beyond familiar scripts and finds the “other way to live” (Welty Collected 361).

19 Like many other heroines of the short story cycle, Annie achieves a unified identity by becoming an artist.6 In Joyce Carol Oates: Artist in Residence Eileen Teper Bender perceives a “double awareness” in Oates’s identity as artist. Oates stresses both the “autonomy of the artistic process” and the “critical necessity of the self – whether artist, character, or reader – to take shape, to actualize.” As an artist, Oates is “both self-erasing and self- reflexive” (Bender xii). This doubleness “gives shape to the paradoxical human journeys” dramatized in Oates’s fiction, in which “failure and dislocation seem prerequisite for the fullest expression of human possibility” (xii). Annie Quirt enacts this process and achieves this kind of double awareness.

20 The first four Annie stories dramatize sexual relationships in which she veers precariously between independence and contingency. In response to one lover’s query about her sexual history, she states: “I never think about the past … I mean, what the hell? – it’s all over with” (52). Tempering this complacency are her masochistic cries for help and bouts of hysteria and depression during which she yearns for stability and love. After experiencing failure and dislocation in relationships, Annie retreats to Quebec City and resolves to live “without boundaries and without the need to erect them” (123). At the end of “Walled City”, the fifth Annie story, she listens as her lover Philip knocks at her door. Annie appears cured of her contingency: “She wondered how long, for how many years, she had been perfectly safe, perfectly alone, without knowing it” (144).

21 Annie orchestrates her isolation but she does not achieve healthy autonomy. In her study of Oates’s fiction, Joanne Creighton identifies “the characteristic Oatesian woman” as the “unliberated heroine” who “sits around waiting for something to happen, or builds an impenetrable wall around the self so that nothing can happen” (Creighton 156). At the end of “Walled City”, Annie appears to have succumbed to this fate. However, endings can materialize when least expected in the open terrain of the short story cycle. Oates opts to release Annie from the fate of the “unliberated heroine” by offering the reader one last glimpse of her in the final story of the cycle. “All the Good People I’ve Left Behind” centers on married couples : the Enrights and the Mandels. Fern Enright, one of the Ann Arbor wives, reports that Annie has become an artist and had a successful one-woman show at a gallery in Chicago. Through Fern’s eyes Annie appears as part of a group, “coming out the Brass Rail with several other

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people, men and women both …” (225). This fleeting reference reassures the reader that Annie’s retreat into self was a transitional period. It is of course significant that Annie is surrounded by “men and women both.” She is no longer alienating women by focusing her attention exclusively on men. She has achieved the balance between the contingency that drove her into the arms of unsuitable lovers and the autonomy she craved. In “The Myth of the Isolated Artist” Oates writes approvingly of “a few human beings, gifted with the ability to ‘see’ themselves as ‘other,’” who are “not overly intoxicated with the selfness of the self” and who “devise works of art that are autobiographical statements of a hypothetical, reality-testing nature which they submit … to the judgment of their culture” (74). Annie releases herself from the bonds of solipsism by reconfiguring her identity and, through her autobiographical art, creating herself as “other.” She is both self-reflexive and self-erasing.

22 This “double awareness” eludes the male artists in All the Good People. Like Welty, Oates marginalizes men who enact the “combative ideal of an ‘I’ set against all other ‘I’s”. In “New Heaven and Earth” Oates berates her male contemporaries for enacting “the old, losing, pitiful Last Stand of the Ego, the Self-Against-All-Others, the Conqueror … Namer and Begetter of all Fictions” (53). In All the Good People such men are satirized and dismissed. Before completing the final stage of her isolation in Quebec City, Annie has a brief relationship with Philip, a sculptor whose art manifests his obsession with origins and boundaries. Philip’s art does not allow for doubleness or paradox. He describes his pieces in terms of conquest and containment, asserting his position as the “Begetter” of his art: “everything was material, potentially … It might begin by resisting but eventually it would surrender, if he chose to pursue it; otherwise it would be broken” (136). He derides Annie’s preference for post-Impressionist painters, rejecting any form of art that queries boundaries: “he had dismissed them contemptuously … the post-Impressionists had failed to come to grips with the structures that underlay everything” (136).

23 For would-be novelist Ron Hammersly, success is contingent upon self-containment. At Ann Arbor he tells fellow students Ted and Alex of his plans to sequester himself while writing his novel: “He will retreat from active life” and “spend the next ten years on an immense ‘clockwork’ novel” which “will be proclaimed as a masterpiece, an epic, a work comparable to Ulysses” (148). Ron’s methodology manifests the masculine obsession with origins: he will take “dozens of books” with him but he will “thread together fragments” of these discourses along a “continuum of his own creation” (148). Oates completes her satire with Ted’s response; he derides these pretensions but later declares himself Ron’s inspiration when the novel is a success: “‘I suggested that he retreat from active life like a monk, like a mystic … and give himself a dozen years or more so that he might create a real masterpiece: something like Ulysses” (224).

24 Like Welty, Oates devotes more space to men who venture beyond the quest for supremacy. In “The Tryst” John Reddinger is the centre-of-consciousness. Through his affair with Annie, John relinquishes his hold on the self, if only momentarily. The affair transports him into new territory; he yields control, “for once … letting a woman take the lead” (51). At the beginning of the story John exhibits the masculine preoccupation with boundaries. He looks out at his street and draws fortification from its fixity: “Like beads on a string were the houses, solid and baronial, each inhabited, each protected … he knew them and the knowledge made him pleasurably intoxicated. He was Reddinger. Reddinger, John … He was in charge of the world” (50). Annie disconcerts

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John’s gender boundaries. She embodies a thrilling conflation of stereotypically masculine and feminine traits; initially he is enchanted by her more ‘masculine’ qualities: her “haphazard, promiscuous life,” her lack of “shame or self-consciousness” (55). Annie’s “long restless rangy body” becomes the site for John’s experimentation with gender configurations (50): he is stimulated by the “tomboyish wag of her foot” and her “tough, ungiving” flesh (50, 49).

25 Relinquishing control is “a novelty, a delight” but it soon becomes “unnerving” (51). In her reading of female imagery in Faulkner, Yeats and Lawrence, Oates observes that men project any ‘deviant’ tendencies onto women to assert their command of the self: “A man’s quarrel with Woman is his quarrel with himself – with those ‘despised’ and muted elements in his personality which he cannot freely acknowledge because they challenge his sense of masculine supremacy and control” (Oates “At Least” 35). Unease tempers John’s fascination as Annie begins to confront him with “muted elements” of his identity, causing him to look inwards. Like Ran and Eugene, John resists interiority, resulting in moments of disembodiment: “But I love you! I love you! – Had he said these words aloud? She looked so frightened, he could not be certain” (56). When his relationship with Annie begins to mobilize covert facets of his personality, John reasserts his supremacy. Annie attempts suicide and John sends her away, immediately resuming his stance at the window, mechanically reciting the names of his neighbors. Similarly, Ran MacLain projects his “quarrel with himself” onto Maideen. Through her speech Maideen enacts one of the “despised and muted elements” of Ran’s identity: his subjugation to communal discourses: “it was beingtold … in the clear voice of Maideen where it had never existed … just repeating, just rushing, old – the town words. Telling what she was told she saw, repeating what she listened to – young girls are outlandish little birds that talk” (378-9). The rape of Maideen is a physical enactment of Ran’s “quarrel with himself”.

26 Oates’s cycle abounds with images of masculine alienation and disembodiment. The male characters seem to be painfully aware of the “absurd standards” to which they must aspire. In “Blood-Swollen Landscape” Oates dramatizes the debilitation engendered by the masculine drive to compete. Martin is a young academic competing for coveted full-time posts. Like Ran MacLain, Martin indulges in fantasies of violence to channel his anxiety about measuring up. Realizing that the “containment of his former life” has begun to “shift out of shape”, Martin approaches a girl in the woods behind the campus who seems to be “Brain-damaged” (72). When she begins to run from him, he grabs her arm and is exhilarated by “a strength, concentrated in those fingers, that he had not noticed before” (74). Like Eugene MacLain, he hardly seems to partake in the act but rather sees himself commit the attack: “he saw the length of his own arm dragged out hard, he saw the bulk of his body out of the blinded lower half of his eyes” (75). He also returns home, “unreadable” to his wife (77). Martin does not appear in the cycle again; his is another truncated plot.

27 In the final story Oates presents husbands and established academics who are still struggling to form a unified identity. When Alex Enright attends a party he is inexplicably troubled by the number of guests. The narrator must serve as psychologist and explain his aversion: “(Since childhood he has been unable to tolerate the thought of being one individual among many – one cell lost in a vast indecipherable tissue – though he is not really aware of his feelings)” (146). The tension between the one and the many, identified by Ingram as the defining principle of the story cycle form, haunts

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other men in the cycle. In the park Annie sees “straggling, indeterminate figures, mostly male, who walked along the wide gravelled paths in utter isolation, like creatures blundering through a single, singular dream, which could not be shared by anyone else” (118). Connectivity eludes the men in this cycle.

28 Ted Mandel, another husband and isolated male, is unable to conceive of himself as a distinct identity: “When he thinks of himself he thinks of – of nothing at all: his face in his mind’s eye is dim, blank, empty” (152). At the end of the cycle Ted remains stranded. Divorced from his wife, he displays thedesperation traditionally assigned to the mature, spinster heroine. He is at a stage thatAnnie has already lived through in “Sentimental Journey”, her fourth story. After several failed relationships, she takes refuge in an improvised romance narrative. She contacts Warren Breck, an old admirer from college. Aware that her words are “absurd and grotesquely sentimental” she nevertheless sends him a letter and, when he arrives, throws herself into the hackneyed scenario (104). After a brief affair of awkward sexual encounters and frantic declarations Annie is forced to reclaim her identity when Warren, another immobilized male, refuses to leave her apartment. We leave Ted trying to write himself into a romance plot, contemplating affairs with Fern and Annie. He meets up with Fern but when she reports her sighting of Annie he remembers how he used to dream of “That tall-headed girl, the artist” and wonders: “Perhaps she, Annie, had been the woman meant for him all along” (225 Oates’s italics). Ted, like King, has somehow arrived at the “wrong end” of life.

29 Short story cycle writers and critics continue to celebrate the duality and openness of the form. Eudora Welty and Joyce Carol Oates, like many other women writers, use the short story cycle to open up narratives for the female quest-figure. In the final stories of their cycles, Virgie Rainey and Annie Quirt stand apart as women who have achieved the “both/and” status embodied by the form. However the openness of the short story cycle is itself double-edged; it enables writers to leave stories unfinished. By creating gaps, the story cycle writer indicates not only the possibility of freedom but also of immobilization. In The Golden Apples and All the Good People I’ve Left Behind it is the men who are particularly vulnerable to this fate. While women thrive in the form’s open terrain, men founder. Repeatedly, the male characters in these cycles find themselves stranded with nowhere to go. Welty and Oates close down the master plots that foster isolation, containment and control and engage instead with the “disturbances” that accompany the masculine search for an alternative identity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ammons, Elizabeth. “Finding Form : Narrative Geography and The Country of the Pointed Firs.” Conflicting Stories : American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century. Ed. Elizabeth Ammons. New York : Oxford UP, 1992. 44-58.

Beer, Janet. “Short Fiction with Attitude : The Lives of Boys and Men in the Lives of Girls and Women.” The Yearbook of English Studies 31 (2001) : 125-32.

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Bellamy, Joe David. “The Dark Lady of American Letters.” 1972 Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates. Ed. Lee Milazzo. Literary Conversations Series. Jackson : UP of Mississippi, 1989. 17-27.

Brown, Julie. ed. American Women Short Story Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays. Wellesley Studies in Critical Theory, Literary History, and Culture. New York : Garland, 1995.

Bunting, Charles T. “‘An Interior World’: An Interview with Eudora Welty.” Southern Review 8 (1972) : 711–35.

Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. 1984. New York : Knopf, 1999.

Creighton, Joanne V. “Unliberated Women in Joyce Carol Oates’s Fiction.” Critical Essays on Joyce Carol Oates. Ed. Linda W. Wagner. Critical Essays on American Literature. Boston : Hall, 1979. 148-56.

Dunn, Maggie and Ann Morris. The Composite Novel: The Short Story Cycle in Transition. Twayne’s Studies in Literary Themes and Genres 6. New York : Twayne-Macmillan, 1995.

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. “For the Etruscans.” The New Feminist Criticism : Essays on Women, Literature and Theory. Ed. Elaine Showalter. London : Virago, 1986.271-91.

Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice : Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982.

Hourihan, Margery. Deconstructing the Hero: Literary Theory and Children’s Literature. London: Routledge, 1997.

Howells, Coral Ann. Alice Munro. Contemporary World Writers. Manchester : Manchester UP, 1998.

Ingram, Forrest L. Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century : Studies in a Literary Genre.Paris: Mouton, 1971.

James, Henry. Preface. The Ambassadors. By James. New York : Holt, 1965. VII-XXIV.

Kelley, Margot Anne. “Gender and Genre: The Case of the Novel-in-Stories.” American Women Short Story Writers : A Collection of Critical Essays. Brown. 295-310.

Kennedy, Gerald J. ed. Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities. Cambridge : Cambridge UP, 1995.

–––. “Toward a Poetics of the Short Story Cycle.” Journal of the Short Story in English 11(1988): 9-25.

Knights, Ben. Writing Masculinities : Male Narratives in Twentieth-Century Fiction. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999.

Kreyling, Michael. Author and Agent: Eudora Welty and Diarmund Russell. London : Bellew, 1992.

–––. Understanding Eudora Welty. Columbia : U. of South Carolina P., 1999.

–––. “The Short Story Sequence : An Open Book.” Short Story Theory at a Crossroads. Ed. Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey. Baton Rouge : Louisiana State UP, 1989. 148-67.

Luscher, Robert M. “The Short Story Sequence: An Open Book.” Short Story Theory at a Crossroads. Ed. Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey. Baton Rouge : Louisiana State UP, 1989.

Manning, Carol S. “Welty, Tyler, and Traveling Salesmen : The Wandering Hero Unhorsed.” The Fiction of Anne Tyler. Jackson : UP of Mississippi, 1990. Ed. Ralph C. Stephens 110-18.

Munro, Alice. Lives of Girls and Women. 1971. London : Bloomsbury, 1994.

Oates, Joyce Carol. All the Good People I’ve Left Behind. Santa Barbara : Black Sparrow, 1979.

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–––. “At Least I Have Made a Woman of Her : Images of Women in Yeats, Lawrence, Faulkner.” Profane 35-62.

–––. “New Heaven and Earth.” Saturday Review 4 Nov. 1972 : 51-4.

–––. New Heaven, New Earth : The Visionary Experience in Literature. New York : Vanguard, 1974.

–––. “Seminar with Joyce Carol Oates.” Rothermere American Institute, Oxford. 19 May 2005.

–––. Review. The New Republic 21 Apr. 1979 : 28-30.

–––. “The Myth of the Isolated Artist.” Psychology Today May 1973: 74-5.

Rozga, Margaret. “Joyce Carol Oates : Reimagining the Masters, Or, A Woman’s Place Is in Her Own Fiction.” Brown American 281-94.

Waugh, Patricia. Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern. London : Routledge, 1989.

Welty, Eudora. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. London: Boyars;

London, Penguin, 1983.

NOTES

1. Kelley writes that the short story cycle is “closely related” to the ‘Novel-in-Stories’ (304). However, she uses her taxonomy to refer to texts commonly identified as story cycles: texts such as Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine. J. Gerald Kennedy provides an illuminating examination of taxonomies for the form in the 1988 essay, “Towards a Poetics of the Short Story Cycle”. In 1995, Kennedy edited Modern American Short Story Sequences, using Robert Luscher’s preferred term. In this article I will use the term ‘short story cycle’ as Ingram’s observations are particularly pertinent to my readings. 2. Story cycle critics often identify The Golden Apples as a paradigm for the form. Robert Luscher states that The Golden Apples , along with Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg , Ohio, “serve[s]as the midpoint” of a formal continuum which stretches from the “miscellaneous collection” to “the traditional novel”. He argues that both cycles “illustrate a balanced tension between the independence of each story and the unity of the collection as a whole” (163). 3. Welty’s satirization of the male quest-figure is well documented. In “Welty, Tyler, and Traveling Salesmen”, Carol S. Manning examines how Welty and Anne Tyler “undermine the male fantasy of the free-spirited hero” and “unmask and unhorse the romantic quester” (112). 4. Coral Ann Howells observes that Alice Munro’s story cycle The Beggar Maid is “obsessed with homecomings” (63). In Lives of Girls and Women Del transports the reader to a future time when she will make an imaginative return to her home town: “It did not occur to me then that one day I would be so greedy for Jubilee” (249). In Sandra Cisneros’s cycle, The House on Mango Street, Esperanza longs to leave home but the women in her community predict that she will return to reconnect with her community. 5. Michael Kreyling writes: “Mrs. Morrison might be one of [King’s] partners; Loch’s Perseid behaviour clearly does not come from Mr. Morrison, father of record” (Understanding 123). 6. Munro’s Del and Cisneros’s Esperanza secure their autonomy and reconnect with their communities by becoming writers. Del reveals that one day she will “want to write things down” about Jubilee (249). After foreseeing Esperanza’s return, Aunt Lupe assures her: “your writing will keep you free” (61).

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ABSTRACTS

Cet article étudie la thématique des personnages masculins paralysés dans le short story cycle. Il s’appuie sur la théorie féministe pour examiner d’une part les traits particuliers du short story cycle et d’autre part les raisons qui rendent ce genre si attractif pour les auteurs féminins.

AUTHOR

RACHEL LISTER

University of Durham.

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The Eternal Present in Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”

Michele D. Theriot

1 The opening line of Joyce Carol Oates’s frequently anthologized 1966 masterpiece of short fiction “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” immediately draws the reader into the past: “Her name was Connie” (25). Of course, the title of the work mentions the past also—“Where Have You Been?” Seemingly, then, the past, or at least some recognition of past actions, past times, past experiences will play a part in this story. Add to that the first part of the title “Where Are You Going” which calls to mind the future, and the reader can discern that perhaps the story will reveal a journey from past to future for this person who was named Connie. And certainly we do see that; many critics have pointed out the story of initiation pattern in this short work. As Christina Marsden Gillis notes: Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is a story about beginnings and passage points; and it is a story about endings: the end of childhood, the end of innocence. The account of fifteen-year-old Connie’s encounter with a mysterious stranger named Arnold Friend, a man who leads his victim not to a promising new world, but, rather, to a violent sexual assault, is a tale of initiation depicted in grotesque relief. (133) 2 However, what is most interesting about Connie’s story is that although the title makes reference to the future and past, although the story’s verb tense emphasizes the past and the story of initiation framework that organizes the plot relies on a move from a past “self” to a future “self,” Connie herself has no sense of the past or future. For almost the entire duration of her story, Connie is locked in the present, a present that has no sense of the past, a present that is wholly uninformed.

3 In the story’s title, the present is conspicuously missing, yet this is the only state of mind and state of existence with which Connie appears to be in touch; it is the only part of the human condition and human experience that she understands. The story, despite its use of past tense, reveals to us where Connie is. Connie is always in the moment with

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no regard for what got her there or where the moment will lead. For her, the past is blurry, and the future is of no consequence. Certainly, though, Connie, “a typical American teenager of her time and place” is not alone in this attitude (Showalter, Introduction 9). How many adolescents necessarily plan very far into the future; how many young people use past experience as a guide for future decisions? To many of them, as in the case of Connie, it is only the here and now that matter. Though, from what we learn in the story, being mired in an “eternal present” carries with it dangerous and devastating consequences. Thus, the title then becomes a kind of urgent warning, a signal to look beyond the space of “now” or else be forced, perhaps by very violent means as in Connie’s case, to confront a future of “vast sunlit reaches of land [ . . .] never seen before” (Oates, “Where” 48).

4 The title also marks a biblical allusion. The “source” is revealed in the “secret code” painted on the side of Arnold Friend’s car: “ He read off the numbers 33, 19, 17 and raised his eyebrows at her to see what she thought of that, but she didn’t think much of it” (Oates, “Where” 33). Mark Robson explains: The title of Oates’s story is taken almost directly from Judges 19:17. The translations differ only slightly, but the essence of the passage is the same: Where are you going, where have you been? One of the closest translations to the title of the story is The New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures [. . .] which reads: “When he raised his eyes he got to see the man, the traveler, in the public square of the city. So the old man said: ‘Where are you going, and where do you come from?’” The significance of the passage, apart from giving the story’s title, is that Judges is the 33rd book from the end of the Old Testament, the chapter is the 19 th, and the verse is the 17th. Thus the numbers “33, 19, 17” refer to this passage. (60) 5 Connie probably “didn’t think much of” this reference because she possibly does not know the bible as none of her family “bothered with church” and because Old Testament contains “stories” of the past, a part of history that is incomprehensible to her.

6 Connie loses her innocence through a possible violent rape and murder at the hands of Arnold Friend, but it seems that she is not the only one who is initiated into a new reality. Readers can only assume that her parents and sister will lose a bit of innocence as a result of losing a daughter and sister to a mysterious and violent stranger. Elaine Showalter points out that “[Connie’s] coming-of-age story also anticipates the coming- of-age of American society, its emergence from the hazy dreams and social innocence of the 1950s into the harsher realities of random violence, war, and crime” (Introduction 7). Like Connie, the adults in this world that Oates fictionalizes do not seem ready for what is to come; they, too, are stuck in an eternal present, or, at least, they encourage such a state. Joyce M. Wegs notes: Because [Connie’s father] does not “bother talking much” to his family, he can hardly ask the crucial parental questions, “Where are you going?” or “Where have you been?” The moral indifference of the entire adult society is underscored by Oates’s parallel description of the father of Connie’s friend, who also “never . . . [bothers] to ask” what they did when he picked up the pair at the end of one of their evenings out. (101) 7 Likewise, it is revealed that “June went places with girl friends of hers [...] [so] when Connie wanted to do that her mother had no objections” (Oates, “Where” 26). Connie’s mother does not pester Connie to reveal her plans or her past whereabouts; instead, she is satisfied with knowing where Connie is at the moment. Past and future are of no consequence. June is the only one who seems interested in inquiring about where

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Connie has been. Occasionally she will ask about the movie Connie was supposed to see, marking some responsibility for a past act, but Connie can quickly slough off the past by lying about her actions and dismissing June’s inquiry with a tepid “So-so” (Oates, “Where” 29). June does not press for further details, so the matter closes, and Connie is able to move on with no regard for the past acts, real or invented.

8 While this title does carry such significance in illustrating the state of Connie’s consciousness, Oates’s first choice for a title must be considered also when analyzing her protagonist’s character. The influence of Charles Schmid’s exploits on the creation of the story is well documented, but “The Pied Piper of Tucson” was just one of the elements that inspired this work. In Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates, Greg Johnson reports, “With [Oates’s] usual impulse toward blending realism and allegory, she connected Schmid’s exploits to mythic legends and folk songs about ‘Death and the Maiden’” (135). Oates herself acknowledges this inspiration and elaborates: An early draft of my short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” [ . . .] had the too explicit title “Death and the Maiden.” [. . .] Like the medieval German engraving from which my title was taken, the story was minutely detailed yet clearly an allegory of the fatal attractions of death (or the devil). An innocent young girl is seduced by way of her own vanity; she mistakes death for erotic romance of a particularly American/trashy sort. (“Short” 148-49) 9 Oates did not specify in this aforementioned article exactly to which artist’s engraving she is referring, but a study of the various interpretations of the “Death and the Maiden” theme by German artists of the late Medieval period and early Renaissance reveals a clear connection : both Connie and the Maiden of the engravings and paintings are vulnerable to Death because they are permanently fixed in the present.

10 Oates mentions that she is struck by the allegorical nature of the German engraving of Death and the Maiden, and for that reason, perhaps this engraving that she was so affected by is actually from the early Renaissance period rather than the medieval period. The reason for this is that the gender of Death underwent changes with the ushering in of Renaissance philosophy and art; depictions of Death became inextricably linked to Christian iconography, particularly renderings of Adam and Eve (Guthke 95-96). Karl S. Guthke explains: When in the Middle Ages Eve was blamed for, and death was accordingly personified as a woman, this death figure could on occasion be cast in the role of the seductress to sensual pleasure (luxuria); but when, as was more frequently the case, Death was modelled on Adam as the guilty party, the corresponding male death figure was not normally seen as the seducer. It is only in the Renaissance, in its literary and pictorial articulation of the “Death and the Maiden” motif, that the roles are reversed: death as the incorporation of the erotic, even of lust, now makes his entry as a man—the “boneman” becomes the seducer, suitor, lover [. . .]. (96) 11 In looking at works such as Albrecht Durer’s 1503 engraving Coat of Arms of Death, which utilizes the “Death and the Maiden” motif, Hans Schwarz’s 1520 woodcarving titled Death and the Maiden, Niklaus-Manuel Deutsch’s Death and the Maiden (1517) and Hans Baldung Grien’s various versions of “Death and the Maiden,” (some works are titled Death and the Maiden, but in following this theme he also has Death and Woman (1518-20), and Girl and Death (1517) to name a few) one can readily recognize the figure of Death as a “gentleman caller,” and certainly the erotic nature of each work cannot be denied1. The maiden—in many cases, she is nearly completely naked, with only a scarf as a covering—in all of these works is young and beautiful. And due to her youth, she lacks the insight to look anywhere but forward, but not forward to the future, just forward in

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stasis, like Connie. Furthermore, characteristically, all of the Renaissance depictions of “Death and the Maiden” show Death approaching from behind, and the maiden is unaware of this fate because she is or has been looking forward (Guthke 95-104). Again, this forward stare is not a glimpse into the future because, as the Greeks believed, the future is behind us. Bernard Knox explains: “the Greek word opiso, which means literally ‘behind’ or ‘back,’ refers not to the past but to the future. The early Greek imagination envisaged the past and the present as in front of us—we can see them. The future, invisible, is behind us”(11). The maidens cannot see their future fate, Death, because they are locked in the moment. Hans Baldung Grien’s 1510 oil painting titled Death and the Maiden perhaps most vividly depicts the horrors and consequences of being “locked in the moment,” and the connection to Connie’s tale is striking.

12 Grien’s painting shows a young woman totally oblivious to the world around her. She is holding a mirror and is quite enraptured by her own reflection; she is touching her hair, so it seems that her hair is of great importance as she is inspecting her image in the mirror. The problem here is that she is so captivated by the way she looks at that moment that she cannot see Death behind her, the sands of time running out above her head, the past and youth (if, in fact, that is what the baby at her feet represents) in front of her, or a guardian—perhaps an older woman—to the left of her. This guardian lifts one arm against Death as if to delay him, and her other hand is on the back of the mirror, either holding it up or attempting to move it away so the maiden can break free. Nevertheless, the maiden’s fate is not so hard to determine—Death has come for her, and he will not be denied. Death is her future—it is where the maiden is going; it will be her “present” soon. If she were not so vain, not so focused on that one moment, she would be prepared for whatever she is meant to face.

13 It is not too difficult to see how this relates to Connie. Like the maiden, Connie is vain and self-centered. Oates herself admits that Connie is “shallow, vain, silly, hopeful, doomed” (“Short” 149). She “had a quick, nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors or checking other people’s faces to make sure her own was all right” (Oates, “Where” 25). But Connie’s glances do not seem to be occasional, for her mother sees fit to tell her, “’Stop gawking at yourself’” (Oates, “Where” 25). Although Connie may not always be staring into a mirror, she is preoccupied with imagining her present image: she could “look right through her mother, into a shadowy vision of herself as she was right at that moment” (Oates, “Where” 25). And looks certainly do seem to be important to her: “she knew she was pretty and that was everything” (Oates, “Where” 25). Later, she is even worried about how her hair looks when a strange car pulls into her driveway. She does not worry much about who is there; rather, her concern is with the present state of her hair.

14 Connie does not value the past; she cannot recognize a past. For instance, she doubts the validity of the old photographs that show her mother as a once-beautiful young woman. To Connie, her mother, “scuffling around the old house in old bedroom slippers,” is someone “who hadn’t much reason any longer to look at her own face” (Oates, “Where” 29, 25). She does not esteem the link to the past, the valuable feminine family heritage that her mother provides or represents. Instead, her mother “makes [her] want to throw up sometimes” and “Connie wished her mother were dead” (Oates, “Where” 26). Furthermore, although Connie’s mother attempts to talk to her about the mistakes other young girls are making so maybe she will base her future decisions on those past examples, Connie dismisses her just as she dismisses June:

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Connie’s mother kept dragging her back to the daylight by finding things for her to do or saying suddenly, “What’s this I hear about the Pettinger girl?” And Connie would say nervously, “Oh, her. That dope.” She always drew thick clear lines between herself and such girls, and her mother was simple enough to believe it. (Oates, “Where” 29) 15 In a way, she is like the maiden of Grien’s painting ignoring her guardian’s hand on the mirror; Connie’s “guardian” is telling her to stop living for the moment, to stop “gawking” in mirrors and wake up to the fact that actions of the past, hers or another’s, can be a major shaping force in future actions, but Connie just stays focused on now. This focus, or lack thereof, leads to Connie’s downfall. Like the maiden, she is so in tuned to the present, she cannot see the future at her back.

16 Connie’s future comes to her in the form of Arnold Friend, who actually does seem to sneak up on her from behind on that Sunday afternoon when she decides to stay home to avoid connecting with the past thorough her family at Aunt Tillie’s barbecue. Instead, she stays home feeding her vanity by letting her freshly-washed hair “dry all day long in the sun” and reveling in the moment by listening to current pop music played on “a program called XYZ Sunday Jamboree [that consisted of] record after record of hard, fast, shrieking songs she sang along with” (Oates, “Where” 30, 31). And while Grien’s maiden remained transfixed on that reflection on herself in the mirror, Connie’s actions of this fateful Sunday indicate that Oates’s maiden finds herself reflected in two media—mirrors and pop songs of the time. According to Wegs, “Since music is Connie’s religion, its values are hers also. Oates does not include the lyrics to any popular songs here, for any observer of contemporary America could surely discern the obvious link between Connie’s high esteem for romantic love and youthful beauty and the lyrics of scores of hit tunes” (101). Connie finds articulated in songs those ideas about life, love, and her place in both that mold her identity—they are her identity. Music is always in her head; it is “always in the background, [. . .]; it [is] something to depend upon” (Oates, “Where” 28). James Healy notes : “As a typical fifteen-year-old teenager, Connie faithfully listens to the radio, and it is through the lyrics to popular songs that she shapes her notions of love and relationships—‘sweet, gentle, the way it was in movies and promised in songs’ (39)” (item 5, pg. 1). Just as a mirror reflects the appearance of a person, the words of these popular songs reflect Connie and all that she knows, thinks, believes. And like the mirror’s image, the music’s reflection is superficial. But then again, much like a typical fifteen-year-old, Connie is superficial. After all, she does spend an hour and a half singing along with the songs, “worshipping” the music that she loves so much (Tierce and Crafton 221). But the problem with music is twofold; first, it keeps Connie preoccupied, and secondly, the music played on a show such as XYZ Jamboree is probably the latest music, songs that reflect current attitudes, concerns and ideas, thus, again keeping Connie planted in the present.

17 Given the description of these songs as “hard, fast, shrieking songs,” one would not necessarily expect that she is listening to music by Bob Dylan, the man to whom the story is dedicated. Oates says of this dedication: “Written at a time when the author was intrigued by the music of Bob Dylan, particularly the hauntingly elegiac song ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,’ it was dedicated to Bob Dylan” (“Short” 149). Additionally, the story’s title links it to Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Both of these songs are characteristically Dylanesque—folksy, ballad-like with simple guitar accompaniment, certainly not “hard, fast, shrieking.” Perhaps listening to Dylan, particularly the two

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previously-mentioned songs, would have served Connie well—“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” centers on the question “where have you been?” As Healy points out, the song “begins with the following question: “Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?’ In each stanza of the song, the narrator tells through catalogs of images what he saw, what he heard, what and whom he met, and finally what he is going to do” (item 5, pg. 1). All of these questions would be lost on Connie; the boys she has met “[fall] back and [dissolve] into a single face that was not even a face but an idea,” but the music is still there, “the urgent insistent pounding of the music” (Oates, “Where” 29). Furthermore, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” could have alerted her to some future danger, given her possible answers to the question “where are you going.” At the very least, the lyrics warn of changes, of instability, of the impossibility of stasis: You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last. But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast. […] Take what you have gathered from coincidence. [. . .] This sky, too, is folding under you And it’s all over now, baby blue. Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you. Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you. The vagabond who’s rapping at your door Is standing in the clothes that you once wore. Strike another match, go start anew And it’s all over now, baby blue. (Dylan, “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue”) 18 Tom Quirk notes the influence of Dylan’s music: “the history and effect of Bob Dylan’s music had been to draw youth away from the romantic promises and frantic strains of a brand of music sung by Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, and others. It was Bob Dylan, after all, who told us that the ‘times they are a changing’” (86). Times will change for Connie, but she does not know that yet. Had she heeded the warnings and been cognizant of the past, she may have been able to see change as a likely part of the future. And like the example of the Pettinger girl who apparently gets into some “trouble”, these warnings or lessons delivered in the lyrics of Bob Dylan go largely ignored by Connie; she prefers to bask in those images of herself as reflected in mirrors, the faces of others, and those songs that would be played on XYZ Jamboree.

19 This music that keeps her so spellbound aids in disguising the evil that comes in the form of Arnold Friend. As mentioned earlier, Arnold, like the figure of Death in Grien’s painting and numerous other works of the Renaissance, “sneaks up” on Connie. When she first hears the car in the drive way, she cannot see who is there, so she must make quite an effort to determine the identity of her visitor. Even though Arnold may not literally be placed behind Connie, he does represent that fate that Connie is yet unable to see. An image from Grien’s painting is repeated in the scene with Arnold—the mirror. Both Arnold and Ellie wear metallic sunglasses that “mirrored everything in miniature” (Oates, “Where” 32). Also, Arnold’s car is gold, suggesting another mirrored surface. Both surfaces reflect the situation at present—Connie can see what is right in front of her in Arnold’s glasses, but she cannot see Arnold because although he is with her at that moment, he is not an important part of her present. Instead, he embodies Connie’s future. Also, the sides of the car have been painted with current expressions, Arnold’s name, and a mysterious code. Perhaps the most important element here is the music: “now Connie began to hear the music. It was the same program that was playing

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inside the house” (Oates, “Where” 32). Arnold further aids in keeping Connie focused on the present by aping the style of the time: She recognized most things about him, the tight jeans that showed his thighs and buttocks and the greasy leather boots and the tight shirt, and even that slippery friendly smile of his, that sleepy dreamy smile that all the boys used to get across ideas they didn’t want to put into words. She recognized all this and also the singsong way he talked, slightly mocking, kidding, but serious and a little melancholy, and she recognized the way he tapped one fist against the other in homage to the perpetual music behind him. (Oates, “Where” 37) 20 Connie can respond to Arnold because he personifies the values of her world. As Wegs notes, he is “the external embodiment of the teenage ideal celebrated in popular songs” (101). He reflects that superficial image that Connie finds so compelling. At first glance he looks handsome, he finds music important, he sounds like Bobby King, and he tells her the things she likes to hear. But when Arnold’s carefully prepared image of the present starts to unravel, Connie cannot quite comprehend the significance of it all.

21 First, Connie notices the saying “MAN THE FLYING SAUCERS” painted on the side of Arnold’s car. What strikes her is that “kids had used it the year before but didn’t use [it] this year. She looked at it for a while as if the words meant something to her that she did not yet know” (Oates, “Where” 36). This phrase suggests some preparation for the future, and at this critical point, that should mean something to Connie, but she is unable to see how the past can help one prepare for the future. Connie does not understand this phrase because it is from the past; in a sense, it is old-fashioned, and this kind of vestige of the past and what it represents mean nothing to her. Additionally, when bits and pieces of both Arnold’s and Ellie’s image fall apart, Connie’s confusion is heightened. She discovers that they are relics of the past merely costuming as figures of current culture. Arnold clearly illustrates that he is not the reflection of pop music ideals that Connie thought he was when he says, “Yes, I’m your lover. You don’t know what that is but you will” [ . . .] “I know that too. I know all about you. But look: it’s real nice and you couldn’t ask for nobody better than me, or more polite. I always keep my word. I’ll tell you how it is, I’m always nice at first, the first time. I’ll hold you so tight you won’t think you have to try to get away or pretend anything because you’ll know you can’t. And I’ll come inside you where it’s all secret and you’ll give in to me and you’ll love me—.” (Oates, “Where” 40) 22 Surely Connie had never before heard love described in these terms in any songs on XYZ Sunday Jamboree.

23 At this point, in a sense, the music stops and the mirror breaks; this maiden “looks behind her” and finally sees her future in Arnold’s words. But now that unknown future becomes the known present. Connie may no longer be focused on her image in mirrors and music, but she does recognize that her “new” state will involve Arnold Friend. Arnold says to her, “’The place where you came from ain’t there any more, and where you had in mind to go is cancelled out,’” negating past and future and suggesting that what she knows now will be eternal, another eternal present state. And Connie’s revelations at this point seem to reinforce that notion, for her kitchen looks like a place she has never seen before, and at the end, she steps out into “so much land that [she] had never seen before and did not recognize” though she had seen the same landscape earlier that same afternoon (Oates, “Where” 48).

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24 Overall, Connie never sees the danger lurking because “too late, [she] comes to the realization that her future has been inexorably shaped by her past”—her sneaking away to the restaurant, her ambiguous first meeting with Arnold Friend, her lying to her mother, her staying home alone (Hurley 4). Instead, she stays focused on the moment and develops memories only of songs and not real experiences. She remains mired in an eternal present, one that is not informed by experience, but one that is marked by a series of events that pass with no need or desire for reflection. Connie’s inability to learn from the past and plan for the future ultimately condemns her to a violent confrontation with the future, a future she is wholly unprepared for, and then this future, as with all time, becomes a part of her present, and given Arnold’s intentions, we can only assume that Connie has no future to look forward to anyhow. In the end, in Oates’s own words, “Death and Death’s chariot (a funky souped-up convertible) have come for the Maiden” (“Short” 151).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dylan, Bob. “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” 6 Mar. 2004.

Gillis, Christina Marsden. “’Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’: Seduction, Space, and a Fictional Mode.” Showalter, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? 133-40.

Guthke, Karl S. The Gender of Death: A Cultural History in Art and Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.

Healy, James. “Pop Music and Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’” Notes on Modern American Literature 7.1 (1983): Itm. 5.

Hurley, C. Harold. “Cracking the Secret Code in Oates’s ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’” Studies in Short Fiction 24.1 (1987): 62-66. Academic Search Premier. Ellender Memorial Library. 13 Mar. 2004.

Johnson, Greg. Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Plume, 1999.

Knox, Bernard. Backing into the Future: The Classical Tradition and Its Renewal. New York: Norton, 1994.

Oates, Joyce Carol. “Short Story into Film.” Joyce Carol Oates: A Study of the Short Fiction. Ed. Greg Johnson. New York: Twayne, 1994. 148-51.

---. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Showalter, WhereAre You Going, Where Have You Been? 25-48.

Quirk, Tom. “A Source for ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Showalter, WhereAre You Going, Where Have You Been? 81-90.

Robson, Mark. “Oates’s ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’” Explicator 40.4 (1982): 59-60.

Showalter, Elaine. Introduction. Showalter, WhereAre You Going, Where Have You Been? 3-20.

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---, ed. Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2002.

Tierce, Mike and John Michael Crafton. “Connie’s Tambourine Man: A New Reading of Arnold Friend.” Studies in Short Fiction 22.2 (1985): 219-24.

Wegs, Joyce M. “’Don’t You Know Who I Am?’: The Grotesque in Oates’s ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’” Showalter, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? 99-107.

NOTES

1. These works can be viewed in the following books: Schwarz’s woodcarving is reproduced in Grossinger, Christa. Picturing Women in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997; all others are reproduced in Guthke’s The Gender of Death: A Cultural History in Art and Literature .

AUTHORS

MICHELE D. THERIOT

Michele D. Theriot is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages and Literature at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana. She regularly teaches Early American Literature, Eighteenth-Century British Literature, and courses in Poetry and Fiction. Her research interests include Sylvia Plath, the short fiction of Joyce Carol Oates, and early American poetry.

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Negotiating Loss and Otherness in Margaret Laurence’s “The Loons”

Jennifer Murray

1 “The Loons” belongs to Margaret Laurence’s story-sequence A Bird in the House which is built around the character Vanessa MacLeod and her growing-up years in the fictional town of Manawaka, Manitoba.1 Following on from the collection’s title story which has the death of Vanessa’s father as its central event, “The Loons” is set in a time prior to the father’s death and is the first of three stories which deal with Vanessa’s progressive opening up to the world around her and her increasing awareness of the suffering, poverty and forms of oppression outside of her family circle (Stovel 92). More specifically, “The Loons” gives us Vanessa’s perception of a young girl called Piquette Tonnerre who is of Métis descent and who accumulates the social disadvantages of poverty, illness, ethnic discrimination and being female.

2 The story has been taken to task for the questionable values attached to its use of Piquette as the stereotype of the doomed minority figure, most notably by Tracy Ware who asks: “To what extent [does this short story] confirm a debased master narrative that regards Natives as victims of a triumphant white civilization?” (71). At the same time, Ware recognizes the “enduring sense of [the] aesthetic merit” (71) of this story which so clearly has its place within the canon of Canadian literature. Evaluating the text against its depiction of the Métis can only lead to the negative conclusions that Ware arrives at, namely, that Laurence’s “The Loons” falls ideologically short of the expectations of today’s politically-conscious reader.

3 What this reading of “The Loons” does not take into account is that the “aesthetic merit” of the story is situated elsewhere—not in the portrait or role of Piquette as such, but in the story’s treatment of loss and in the central role of the father in the symbolics of this particular knot of meaning. In the context of the full story-sequence, loss and the father would seem more naturally associated in “A Bird in the House,” where the death of the father is the central event. In “The Loons,” the death of the father is recalled and reactivated as an informing event related to other moments in Vanessa’s life and to her relationship to others, Piquette bearing the weight of this role as ‘other’.

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4 On one level—that of Vanessa’s childhood perception of Piquette2—the story is about incomprehension, misconstruction, defensiveness and the impossibility of communication between the two girls. But the entire history of this failed relationship is revisited through the narrating voice of the adult Vanessa; in the telling of the story, she reshapes past events through the experience of loss provoked by her father’s death and invests them with symbolic value. Like the dreamer and the dream, Vanessa’s story is more about Vanessa than about those around her; it is her attempt to fit her own sense of loss into a world which is, more than she knows, beyond her.

5 The father’s role in giving Vanessa access to symbolic values is central to the story; indeed, the first ‘event’ in the story is the father’s announcement of his concern (as a doctor) for the health of the young Piquette, who is in his care. After having prepared the ground briefly, he asks his wife: “Beth, I was thinking—what about taking her up to Diamond Lake with us this summer? A couple of months rest would give that bone a much better chance” (110). This act of social generosity, which is to involve his whole family, introduces the reader to the father’s values; it also inaugurates the continuing association in the text between the father and Piquette. The father is a reference point for Piquette; she invokes him to justify her refusal to accompany Vanessa on a short walk: “Your dad said I ain’t supposed to do no more walking than I got to” (113), and in later years, Piquette tells Vanessa, “Your dad was the only person in Manawaka that ever done anything good to me” (116). This positive assessment of the father is the only shared ground between the girls. In response to the comment above, Vanessa “nodded speechlessly [...] certain that [Piquette] was speaking the truth” (116).

6 In the name of her love for her father, Vanessa will make several attempts at approaching Piquette: these attempts are regularly met with rejection, leading to a moment of hurt for Vanessa: ‘Want to come and play?’ Piquette looked at me with a sudden flash of scorn. ‘I ain’t a kid,’ she said. Wounded, I stamped angrily away […]. (112) 7 This pattern recurs twice on the following page, with Piquette’s “scorn” taking on other forms—“Her voice was distant” (113); “her large dark unsmiling eyes” (113)—and her refusals becoming more verbally aggressive: “You nuts or somethin’?” (113); “Who gives a good goddamn?” (114).

8 The impossibility of sharing between the girls is seen both from the perspective of the child Vanessa, who is mystified, “wondering what I could have said wrong” (113), and from the more experienced perspective offered by the narrated construction of events. This double vision allows the reader to see the misperceptions and involuntary insensitivity on which Vanessa’s attempts at communication are based. Where Vanessa fantasizes Piquette into “a real Indian” (112) and projects onto her the knowledge of the ‘secrets’ of nature, Piquette lives her identity as a Métis through the social rejection which characterizes Manawaka’s view of her family: ‘I bet you know a lot about the woods and all that, eh?’ I began respectfully. […] ‘I don’t know what in hell you’re talkin’ about,’ she replied. […] If you mean where my old man, and me, and all them live, you better shut up, by Jesus, you hear?’ (113) While the child cannot understand the defensiveness of Piquette, as readers, our knowledge of Piquette’s social conditions, outlined in the opening paragraphs of the story, leads us to a position of empathy with the offended girl. Similar effects are

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produced by Vanessa’s enthusiasm about her summer cottage, —“‘I love it,’ I said. ‘We come here every summer,’” (113)—expressed in the face of Piquette’s poverty, which habitually excludes her from the world of lakeside summer homes. Just as much as Piquette’s social disadvantages, Vanessa’s self-absorbed immersion in the comforts of middle-class Manawaka is the source of the girls’ mutual wariness.

9 As the narrator of the story, the older version of Vanessa puts forward expressions of regret at the failure of the relationship between herself as a child, and Piquette. This regret, however, is not distinct from childhood, but a part of it, recounted in the past tense: “Piquette and I remained ill at ease with one another. I felt I had somehow failed my father, but I did not know what was the matter, nor why she would not or could not respond” (115). The linguistic markers “somehow” and “did not know” suggest that the emotional experience of failure remained confusing for the child, but the ability to formulate this metadiscourse indicates that things have become clearer to the adult Vanessa. This acquired comprehension allows the narrator to develop the expression of failure once again, two pages further on, including, this time, more details about the possible expectations of the father: Yet I felt no real warmth towards her—I only felt that I ought to, because of that distant summer and because my father had hoped she would be company for me, or perhaps that I would be for her, but it had not happened that way. (117) Through the voice of the more experienced Vanessa, the regret of the past is understood to have been intimately related to a sense of having failed not herself, nor Piquette, but her father. The focus is on the father’s symbolic role in attributing potential value to the possibility of their friendship.

10 Along with the father’s generosity towards Piquette, a series of other values related to the father are offered in the short story. The father’s name, MacLeod, is also the name which designates the family cottage (111), which itself is associated with nature and authenticity: it is the father who comes and sits by the lake with Vanessa to listen to the loons (114); the lake, the nighttime, the loons, all come to signify intuitive communication (“we waited, without speaking”), mystery and transcendence (“They rose like phantom birds”), a reproach to human civilization (“Plaintive, and yet with a quality of chilling mockery, those voices belonged to a world separated by aeons from our neat world of summer cottages and the lighted lamps of home”) (114).

11 The idea that the loons belong to a separate world is reinforced by the father’s comment that the loons had been there “before any person ever set foot here” (114). The loons are both a form of access to the continuum of natural time as opposed to civilized time, and a reminder that man cannot bridge that gap; there is therefore a form of retrospective loss attached to the image of the loons: the imagined loss of what came before and is now inaccessible. However, the birds also prefigure future loss—the enduring presence of the loons is endangered, as Vanessa tells Piquette: My dad says we should listen and try to remember how they sound, because in a few years when more cottages are built at Diamond Lake and more people come in, the loons will go away. (114) We can also see the metonymic association between this loss and the approaching end of the permanence of Vanessa’s world; her father, associated with the loons in Vanessa’s childhood, is soon to disappear: “Neither of us suspected that this would be the last time we would ever sit here together on the shore, listening” (115). The symbolic charge of the loss of the loons is therefore great for Vanessa, but meaningless to young Piquette, who, on learning of the precarious situation of the birds, says: “Who

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gives a good goddamn?” (114). For Piquette, they are literally, “a bunch of squawkin’ birds” (115).

12 Meaning is to do with symbolic construction and “The Loons”, for all of its focus on Piquette, is about Vanessa’s construction of personal meaning. Coral Ann Howells notes that Vanessa’s choosing to write about Piquette is a way of “silently displacing her own feelings into [Piquette’s] story” (41). This process is clearest in the paragraph which announces the father’s death: That winter my father died of pneumonia, after less than a week’s illness. For some time I saw nothing around me, being completely immersed in my own pain and my mother’s. When I looked outward once more, I scarcely noticed that Piquette Tonnerre was no longer at school. (115) The words which tell of the loss of the father are almost immediately followed by words which tell of the disappearance of Piquette. This is given in the form of a negation: “I scarcely noticed…,” but what the young Vanessa had “scarcely noticed,” the narrating Vanessa gives weight to by placing it in verbal proximity to the death of the father, obliquely associating the two events. Through indirection, therefore, Vanessa speaks of her own loss. But the process is not entirely parasitic; in the telling, she also constructs Piquette.

13 Piquette is, in some ways, a difficult character for today’s reader to take on board: like Pique, the daughter of Morag Gunn in the final Manawaka story, “The Diviners”, she “suffers from the weight of too much thematic relevance” (Howells 51) since, as I noted earlier, she accumulates an extraordinary number of handicaps, all of which are seen to be indirectly related to her Métis origins. In spite of the older Vanessa’s gentle mocking of her earlier self in her desire to ‘naturalize’ Piquette into a folkloric Indian, the story does imply that part of Piquette’s tragedy is that, like the loons, she belongs to a more ‘authentic’ heritage which has been/is being destroyed.3 The romanticism which the narrating voice mocks is nonetheless supported by the story’s symbolism, as is the attempt to fix Piquette into a sterile, stereotyped role of ‘representativity,’ something that Piquette’s direct discourse has violently rejected.

14 Yet, we do have access to a more tenacious Piquette; in her silences, rejections, and refusals, she is a character who is fighting for her own survival in a world clearly divided along class lines and this tenacity is seen principally in her rejection of Vanessa’s self-satisfaction. Vanessa’s sense of superiority over Piquette is implicit in the narrator’s comments about the Métis girl’s invisibility to her younger self; at that time, Piquette was but “a vaguely embarrassing presence” who “moved somewhere within my scope of vision” (109). Moreover, Piquette can drop out of sight for years without notice: “I do not remember seeing her at all until four years later” (115). It would seem to be the total separateness of their social worlds that creates and sustains what might be experienced as a ‘lack of affinity’. Whereas these social differences remain unformulated to the child Vanessa, they are close to the surface for Piquette whose discourse refuses to endorse the smugness of the well-off Vanessa: ‘Do you like this place,’ I asked […] Piquette shrugged. ‘It’s okay. Good as anywhere.’ ‘I love it,’ I said, ‘We come here every summer.’ ‘So what?’ (113) Other details suggest a Piquette who has dreams of her own, but who cannot allow herself to expose them to others: “When she saw me approaching, her hand squashed flat the sand castle she had been building, and she looked at me sullenly, without

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speaking” (113). For Piquette, the child Vanessa is a potential enemy, someone to guard oneself against. Dreams cannot be shared, and cannot even be envisaged within the society of which Vanessa is a part.

15 Indeed, even in her later teenage years, Piquette holds no hope of improvement for herself within the confines of small-town Manawaka: “Boy, you couldn’t catch me stayin’ here. I don’ give a shit about this place. It stinks” (116). Piquette knows that Manawaka holds nothing for her in the sense that no one there believes in her chances for a better future. When she becomes engaged to be married, she remarks that, “All the bitches an’ biddies in this town will sure be surprised” (117). The implication that the town gossips have nothing good to say about Piquette is underscored by Vanessa’s own reactions. On seeing Piquette several years after the summer at the cottage, Vanessa is “repelled” and “embarrassed” by her, and although she is “ashamed” at her own attitude, she gives way to an emphatic outpouring of animosity towards the teenage girl: I could not help despising the self-pity in her voice. I wished she would go away. I did not want to see her. I did not know what to say to her. It seemed that we had nothing to say to one another. (117) The force of this expression suggests a negative identification with Piquette on Vanessa’s part. It is as if Piquette represents the photo negative of Vanessa’s life; the result of poverty, illness, and lack of education made flesh and standing there as a threat to the integrity of Vanessa’s identity as a middle-class, reasonably well-educated girl with a future. There is no indication in the story that Vanessa ever overcomes this violent rejection of Piquette during the Métis girl’s lifetime.

16 This moment of intense emotional confrontation is followed by what may be seen as the story’s signature moment: For the merest instant, then, I saw her. I really did see her, for the first and only time in all the years we had both lived in the same town. Her defiant face, momentarily, became unguarded and unmasked, and in her eyes there was a terrifying hope. (117) These last two words encapsulate the relative positions of the two girls. Where Piquette ‘reveals’ her most guarded treasure—hope, arguably the most positive emotion which exists, Vanessa reproduces the condemning judgement of the town; with the word “terrifying,” she declares this hope to be without any ground. It is therefore coherent with Vanessa’s view of Piquette’s life that the Métis woman should be left as a single mother, follow in the drunken path of her father, and finally die in a house fire along with her two children. Vanessa’s reaction to this news is, “I did not say anything. As so often with Piquette, there did not seem to be anything to say” (119). It is not that there is ‘nothing to say’ about Piquette, but rather, that what there is to say would involve a questioning of community values which would also have to be a form of self- questioning.

17 The narrative does not take the direction of a critique of human and social relationships; it deals with the vague sense of guilt expressed by the narrator—“I wished I could put from my memory the look that I had seen once in Piquette’s eyes” (119)—by sublimating Piquette into the symbol (along with the loons) of something lost. The ground is prepared through the falling action of the story which lists the avalanche of losses which Vanessa experiences after having heard about Piquette’s death: “The MacLeod cottage had been sold after my father’s death”; “The small pier which my father had built was gone”; “Diamond Lake had been re-named Lake Wapakata”; and

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finally, “I realized that the loons were no longer there” (119). These different elements reinstall the triad of the father, the loons and nature as the paradigm of loss and the narrator then brings Piquette into this sphere of symbolism: I remember how Piquette had scorned to come along when my father and I sat there and listened to the lake birds. It seemed to me now that in some unconscious and totally unrecognised way, Piquette might have been the only one, after all, who had heard the crying of the loons. (120) “Piquette,” “father,” “lake,” “birds,” “loons”: all of these words are given a place in the final paragraph. The narrator too, is present amongst these elements, and her place as the one who reconstructs meaning is affirmed: “I remember how […].” But it is affirmed, finally, as a process of questioning: in the phrase, “It seemed to me now that in some unconscious and totally unrecognised way,” (where it is uncertain as to whether it is the narrator’s unconscious or Piquette’s which is being invoked), the narrator seems to romanticize Piquette’s Métis status into the ‘natural’ world and confer on her the positive charge of nostalgia related to loss.4 In this statement of restricted awareness, it would seem that the narrator is trying to resolve the problem of her own position in relation to Piquette; the irreconcilable distinction between how she felt towards Piquette and how she felt she should have felt, if only for her father’s sake.

18 The solution to this is to transform Piquette from the living girl—judged by society, including Vanessa and her mother—as “sullen and gauche and badly dressed,” “a real slattern,” “a mess” (118), into a symbol: a young girl, representative of an oppressed minority, with a tragic destiny, doomed to die.5 In this form, the loss of Piquette can be associated with both the death of the father and the disappearance of the loons; the desire to bring Piquette into this association suggests an unresolved sense of guilt— towards the girl character, on the level of the diegesis, but also towards the Métis people, whose “long silence” (108) is echoed in the “quiet all around me” experienced by Vanessa (119) as she becomes aware of the disappearance of the loons. Silenced by death, Piquette’s ‘otherness’ can be neutralized and romanticized into nostalgia.

19 The contradictions which structure “The Loons” give the story its force. In spite of the control of the adult narrator in the choice and ordering of memory, there is no attempt to beautify the emotions of her childhood self. The limited, often egocentric aspects of her childhood perspective are rendered, so that the reader’s sympathy goes out towards the other girl, Piquette. This construction of perspective may be seen as a form of generosity, whereby, in spite of Vanessa’s statement that “there was nothing to say,” the narrator’s rendering of the past has allowed the reader to achieve an awareness of Piquette’s specificity as a character: she has moved from the general sense of absence which characterizes her in Vanessa’s memory, to a form of visibility in which the reader may see her as the victim of multiple vectors of oppression; in this context, her ‘defiance’ and ‘sullenness’ become the marks of a fighting spirit, and her ‘hope,’ the sign of her humanity. Through these effects constructed by the narrating voice, the earlier generosity of the father is ultimately echoed and loss takes on its complex human dimension.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Howells, Coral Ann. Private and Fictional Words : Canadian Women Novelists of the 1970s and 1980s. London: Methuen, 1987.

Laurence, Margaret. A Bird in the House (1970). Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Stovel, Bruce. “Coherence in A Bird in the House,” in New Perspectives on Margaret Laurence : Poetic Narrative, Multiculturalism, and Feminism. Ed. Greta McCormick Coger. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996.

Vauthier, Simone. “‘A Momentary Stay Against Confusion’ : A Reading of Margaret Laurence’s ‘To Set Our House in Order.’” The Journal of the Short Story in English vol. 3 (1984): 87-108.

Ware, Tracy. “Race and Conflict in Garner’s ‘One-Two-Three Little Indians’ and Laurence’s ‘The Loons.’” Studies in Canadian Literature vol. 23:2 (1998) : 71-84.

NOTES

1. I am grateful to my colleagues in Besançon who participated in a discussion on “The Loons.” 2. See Vauthier (96-99) for a detailed analysis of Vanessa’s function as narrator (based on the short story “To Set Our House in Order,” but equally valid here). 3. Indeed, Tracy Ware argues that the association of Piquette with nature, on the basis of her Métis origins, “den[ies] Piquette her full humanity, [and it also] makes a tragic outcome inevitable. We will never be able to imagine a future for people whom we regard as separate[d] from us ‘by aeons’” (80). 4. Margery Fee’s comment, quoted in Ware, that “Native people […] are so rarely depicted as individuals, because they must bear the burden of the Other—of representing all that the modern person has lost” (Ware 82), seems relevant to the construction of Piquette as a character who comes to bear the symbolic weight of the very idea of loss. 5. Ware declares that this symbol is “a misrecognition because it ignores the historical struggles of both Natives and Métis” (79).

ABSTRACTS

Je me propose ici d’étudier l’impact symbolique de la disparition du père dans “ The Loons ”, une nouvelle de Margaret Laurence. Au niveau de l’intrigue, l’histoire est celle d’une amitié impossible entre la narratrice, Vanessa, fille de médecin, et une jeune métisse, Piquette, soignée par le père de Vanessa. Les différences de niveau social, d’éducation et d’origine ethnique créent une incompréhension fondamentale entre les deux filles et vouent à l’échec les tentatives de Vanessa de sympathiser avec Piquette. Cet insuccès attriste Vanessa ; elle pense avoir déçu son père qui espérait que le sort de sa jeune patiente serait adouci par le contact avec sa famille. Devant son incapacité à transformer la réalité et le remords qu’elle en éprouve, la narratrice transforme son souvenir de Piquette, l’exclue, en symbole. Ce symbole se développe autour d’un

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noyau d’éléments sémantiques associés à l’authenticité, la nature, et la nostalgie du passé ; des concepts valorisés par le père, et qui, pour la narratrice sont liés au sentiment de perte occasionné par sa mort

AUTHORS

JENNIFER MURRAY

Jennifer Murray is an associate professor at the University of Franche-Comté. Her research is focused primarily on Canadian literature and on American writers from the South. Ms. Murray’s publications include articles on Margaret Atwood, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor and Tennessee Williams. She is currently working on the short stories of Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro.

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Hatching the posthuman: Margaret Atwood’s “Bluebeard’s egg”

Carol Merli

1 In her introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood, Coral Ann Howells, having commented that Margaret Atwood’s short stories “have as yet received little scholarly attention”, suggests that discussion of the stories and other writings is a kind of “academic sleuthing” as critics “explore the metaphysical dimensions and postmodern strategies of Atwood’s story-telling” (10). In this essay I will engage in a bit of this sleuthing as I consider the “postmodern strategies” of one of Atwood’s stories, “Bluebeard’s Egg”, particularly in regards to the relationship between the body and text.

2 Madeleine Davies, in a discussion of three of Atwood’s novels, argues that “[i]n each text…, the body that Atwood writes offers a figurative commentary on the framing narrative and forges provocative connections between the two…‘text’ and ‘body’ are locked together in mutual expression” (69). The complex parallels and intersections between body and text of the “posthuman subject” are remarked by Katherine Hayles, who argues that the subject “is an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction”. The fluidity and unfixed nature of the posthuman subject is analogous to unfixable and volatile signification, and Hayles sees “deep connections between the struggle to maintain control of … narrative and the threat to ‘natural’ body boundaries posed by the cybernetic paradigm” (23).

3 These comments present a useful starting point for a reading of Margaret Atwood’s story “Bluebeard’s Egg”, where multiple intertexts circulate in the narrative, evoking and resisting old “meanings” and opening up new ones, at the same time as the body threatens to enter the world of cyberspace. Just as identity in this story is not fixed and single, but layered, enigmatic, deceptive and in the process of transformation, so do other stories haunt the text: echoes not just of the older Bluebeard tales (particularly those of the Grimm brothers and Perrault), but of epic, fairy tale, myth, detective fiction, science fiction, even the nineteenth century novel. These create complex and shifting layers of palimpsests which destabilize attempts to arrive at simple and single

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“truth”. In “Bluebeard’s Egg” language and bodies intersect, at the same time as both are in a continual process of construction and reconstruction; textual meaning and the meaning of the body are fluid, situated as they are “within the history of discourse itself” (Hutcheon, 7). While this open-endedness and undecidability may be unsettling and even confronting, it can also be liberating. If the story is not fixed, you can create your own (the egg at the end is smooth and white, waiting for new inscriptions); and unfixed subjectivity/bodily identity, whilst it may lead to “a failure to be completely there, or with the occupation of liminal territories which mark uneasy gaps between ‘real’ and ‘other’” (Davies, 58), can also generate a liberating space in which the self can be remade (the egg also suggesting new birth). In the rest of this essay I will explore the play of unfixable signification in “Bluebeard’s Egg”, and then consider the way it is analogous to, and interconnected with, the unbounded body and emergent subjectivity.

4 Numerous critics have pointed to the complex network of intertextual references throughout Atwood’s fiction. Sharon Rose Wilson comments, for example, that “Margaret Atwood reuses the old, great stories, modifying and usually subverting them, hiding their traces in order to reveal contemporary landscapes, characters, and problems” (xi), which is rather like the process described in “Bluebeard’s Egg” by Sally’s cooking instructor, who “quoted one of the great chefs to the effect that the chicken was merely a canvas”; it is what she does to it that makes “all the difference” (143) – a slyly subversive assertion of the independent creativity of the chef/writer in the face of those postmodern theorists who deny the author agency. This process of modification and subversion can leave the reader unanchored and grasping for transparency and stability of signification. According to Michael Riffaterre “a valid interpretation … must arrive at a stable picture of the text” (227), despite the fact that we cannot know the author’s intention. This may be achieved, according to Riffaterre, through a “dialectic exchange between a coded message and its decoder” (228). What Atwood presents in “Bluebeard’s Egg”, though, are multiple and contradictory coded messages and numerous possible keys to unlock the code, none of which quite fit. The story itself is a secret chamber.

5 In “Bluebeard’s Egg” there are several references to games and puzzles: to Monopoly, to Pick Up Sticks which Sally remembers playing with Ed’s children where “if you moved one stick in the tangle, even slightly, everything else moved also” (164), and to Ed himself as a puzzle: “the house is made of ice. It’s held together only by Sally, who sits in the middle of it, working on a puzzle. The puzzle is Ed” (153). Like Sally, the reader works on the puzzle of interpretation, but echoes and layers of other writings create a network of possible significations so that meaning is endlessly deferred. In “Bluebeard’s Egg” each clue, each possible reading, each “piece of evidence”(134) in the “tangle”(164) of narrative possibilities the reader “glue[s] into place in the vast mosaic”(134), are like Sally’s attempts to gather together bits of evidence and piece Ed together. But moving one stick means that the whole structure shifts and stability is tantalizingly elusive, a point Atwood makes in her poem “True Stories”: “The true story is vicious/and multiple and untrue” (244).

6 Despite this undecidability, there is always a tantalizing sense that resolution might be arrived at if the reader were only to work at it hard enough: “Everything about Ed means something, though it’s difficult at times to say what” (149). The reader is in something like Sally’s position as she contemplates the enigma of Ed: if Ed is in her inner world, “in Ed is Ed’s inner world, which she can’t get at. She takes a crack at it

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anyway”(152). The problem for Sally is that arriving at a sense of “Ed’s inner world” (which Sally likes to imagine as a fairy-tale realm in which Ed, the nurturing healer, carries a magic potion) is always blocked by the exigencies of the self. The angel of the house has wings that are “frayed and dingy grey around the edges” and she looks “withered and frantic”(153), rather like the queen bee in Sylvia Plath’s “Stings” – “Her wings torn shawls, her long body/Rubbed of its plush” (214). But just as the bee in Plath’s poem is reborn “More terrible than she ever was, red/Scar in the sky, red comet”(215), so does the egg, “pulsing…rose-red, crimson”(166), suggest vivid possibilities which go beyond the end of the story – a breach in the boundaries of the narrative. The possibility of rupturing the boundaries is suggested in Sally’s rereading of stories she already knows: “Sally would ramble about the house or read the endings of murder mysteries she had already read once before” (151) (where we wonder whether Sally is raising her consciousness about the possible danger of Ed, or even picking up some tips about how to dispatch someone herself). Her rereading could suggest that she is ‘stuck’ on the same old story, but also suggests the possibility of reimagining the ending, reminding us, as we, too, “reread” a story, that narratives are never closed, but always in process.

7 Sally makes a number of practice forays into deconstructing old stories, including a skirmish with the specialist (and excluding) language of the heart surgeon. “The heart men are forbidden to talk shop at Sally’s dinner table, but they do so anyway” (144), and Sally can’t resist needling them from time to time. “I mean,” she said to one of the leading surgeons, “Basically it’s just an exalted form of dress-making, don’t you think?” “Come again?” said the surgeon, smiling. The heart men think Sally is one hell of a tease. “It’s really just cutting and sewing, isn’t it?” Sally murmured. (144) 8 Sally’s “needling” (where she becomes the one who does the sewing, using language to “stitch up” these eminent males), her finding equivalence between the domestic, feminine world and the masculine enclave of the medical specialist, reveals and deconstructs the hierarchies of power implicit in the way language is used.

9 Sally also uses the subversive potential of language to imagine scenarios from which she retreats in her everyday life. In her Forms of Narrative Fiction course Sally “had no trouble concocting a five-page murder mystery, complete with revenge” (155). Her dinner parties also act as a venue for the process of creating fiction – in this case drama. We are told that “what she likes best about these dinners […] is setting the table, deciding who will sit where and, when she’s feeling mischievous, what they are likely to say. Then she can sit and listen to them say it. Occasionally she prompts a little” (144). Sally as writer/director is empowered, an artistic detective figure who constructs and then reads the scene, predicting the way it will unfold. But in “real life” the story can get away from the creator, the endings can be unpredictable (which is analogous to Elaine’s feelings in Cat’s Eye as she views her art: “I can no longer control these paintings, or tell them what to mean” (409)). Nonetheless there is a potent sense of the imaginative possibilities that might arise from twists in old plots. Whilst Sally “has no control over” her “black and white heart” with its “insubstantial moth-like flutter, a ghostly heart” (165) (an image which suggests the old narratives that haunt the present), she is learning to envisage new ways of telling the story that “the story left out” (166).

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10 Within “Bluebeard’s Egg” there are numerous instances of spaces that leave room for the telling of stories that have been “left out”. An example of this is Sally’s invention of stories for Ed’s first two wives: “Since their actual fates have always been vague to Sally, she’s free to imagine all kinds of things, from drug addiction to madness” (150). Sally can only imagine negative possibilities for these ex-wives because her vision of the world is circumscribed by the need to endorse the patriarchy’s negative vision of women if her own status is to have any value – as Cristina Bacchilega comments, “Sally accepts the restricting plot in which a woman’s survival depends on her being recognized as the ‘true bride’” (114). But within “Bluebeard’s Egg” there is another, recuperative story: the story of Bertha, famously silenced in another “Bluebeard” text, Jane Eyre. Charlotte Bronte, like Sally, imagines madness for a troublesome wife and shuts her, without language, in an attic. In Atwood’s story Bertha resurfaces as the writing-instructor who teaches others new ways to tell stories. Sally’s bitchy remarks about Bertha arise from the fact that Bertha wants Sally to think about who is telling the story, and this threatens Sally’s belief that survival depends upon clinging to the status quo. Sally prefers to repeat male stories, believing, for instance, that the “pay- off” of her job is “that her boss provides her with an endless supply of anecdotes”(141), but these are not her stories, and cannot confer any kind of imaginative freedom.

11 Throughout “Bluebeard’s Egg” old patriarchal narratives lurk beneath the surface, but apparently with a diminished capacity to harm, watered-down, like the “anecdotes” that her boss tells. These old stories might be able to be left behind, or at least rendered less dangerous, if only the habit of telling them could be broken. The routine of repetition is a bit like Ed’s unchanging routines of lovemaking. Sally’s neurotic and habitual story of the women waiting to besiege Ed, which “sets even her own teeth on edge” (153) is a tamed-down version of the story of the sirens waiting to lure Odysseus to his fate on the rocks surrounding their island, which Atwood briefly alludes to: “everywhere he goes he is beset with sirens”(139). It is a story that has lost its edge. The old heroic narrative of epic seafaring and mortal danger, of surviving the lure of the sirens and the precarious passage between the rocks inhabited by Scylla and Charybdis, is replaced by the banal suburban scene of innocuous-looking Ed “puttering around the rock garden”(134), making things safe for Sally’s car. In an apparent reversal of roles, Sally becomes Odysseus (though the car seems to be voyaging by itself) and Ed the protective keeper of the rocks.

12 Another remnant from time past is the playhouse at the bottom of the ravine. Maria Tatar comments that this may be a place where Ed has “romantic trysts” with other women (113), but this reading suggests that an attentive reader will be able to piece together a series of clues that will lead to some kind of a “solution”, whereas the reader is much more likely to be led up the garden path. Instead, the playhouse, which is described as “ancient” and “falling apart” (133), can been seen as another vestige of an older story, a crumbling remnant of the pleasure castle of an earlier Bluebeard, connected with Ed in that he too is clad in a “relic” (133) (his old windbreaker) and comes from “an era so prehistoric Sally can barely imagine it” (133). Considered in this way, the ravine contains all that is abject: the leftovers of the old tales that have lost their power to terrify, the brutality and bloodiness of Bluebeard being dissipated into drunks who “emerge squinting like moles into the light of Sally’s well-kept back lawn” (133), and to Ed snacking on cold roast beef rather than dead girls (the gruesome repast of the cannibalistic robber and his gang in the Grimm brothers’ Bluebeard tale “The

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Robber Bridegroom”). Nonetheless these relics still have the power to unsettle the smooth surface that Sally works to maintain, like the drunks who break down the fence between the house and the ravine which has been constructed to police the borders between civilization and wilderness. The house balances rather precariously “on a ravine lot” (153), and the dangers that are potentially here surface in a later narrative, Cat’s Eye, where the ravine is a place where dead girls are found and wildcats indeed roam.

13 If the stories that have already been told can still unsettle the surface equilibrium of “Bluebeard’s Egg”, the stories yet to be told are potentially even more disturbing – but also exhilarating. Whilst women’s dismembered bodies lie at the secret heart of earlier Bluebeard tales, in “Bluebeard’s Egg” the unbounded body which, at its extreme, blurs the distinction between human and machine/cyborg is presented as a new kind of threat, but also as having liberating potential. Just as echoes of other texts retreat and rise to the surface, so too do bodies, such as the bodies of Ed and his children: “Right now the kids are receding, fading like old ink; Ed on the contrary looms larger and larger, the outlines around him darkening. He’s constantly developing, like a Polaroid print, new colours emerging” (152).

14 The association of the human body with language is also apparent in the description of the “black and white” image of the heart on the screen. This links the heart with written script, and, like language, “lies on the borderline between oneself and the other” (Bakhtin 292), resisting ideas of a simple, bounded and “readable” entity. Thrown up on the screen the heart is in the borderland, a space that shifts as the boundaries between body and machine lose their distinctiveness.

15 In his essay “The Precession of Simulacra” Jean Baudrillard argues that our “postmodern” culture is a world of signs, which have become not just a substitute for the real but the real itself. Distinctions between the “real” and the model have broken down, and we now exist in a world of hyperreality: “Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum” (6). Contrasting iconoclasts and iconolaters, he comments that the “metaphysical despair” of iconoclasts “came from the idea that the image didn’t conceal anything at all, and that these images were in essence not images, such as the original model would have made them, but perfect simulacra, forever radiant with their own fascination” (5) – a description which is reminiscent of the egg “glowing softly as though there’s something red and hot inside it” (166). Baudrillard argues that, compared to iconoclasts, “icon worshipers were the most modern minds, the most adventurous”, since “therein the great game lay – knowing […] that it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them”(5). He presents successive phases of the image: It is the reflection of a profound reality; It masks and denatures a profound reality; It masks the absence of a profound reality; It has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum. (6) 16 “Bluebeard’s Egg” demonstrates all the stages of the “image”, but particularly the uncertainties and deceptiveness of the second and third stages which are perhaps the most disturbing, because the “masking” creates an uneasy sense of threats that cannot be articulated or pinned down. The possibility of “nothingness”, of absence, is as frightening – or perhaps more frightening – than the Gothic room full of dismembered bodies. To avoid the possibility of an empty room within herself Sally expends energy

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creating a range of different identities that act as simulacra, “masks” that cover her fear “that she’s a nothing, the way Marylynn was before she got a divorce and a job” (140). The fact that Sally has literally had a series of jobs (and taken a series of courses) suggests her restless anxiety and fear of commitment as well as fear of looking too deeply at herself in case she finds that she really is “nothing”, that she belongs to the world of the cyborg: “This is the latest in a string of such jobs Sally has held over the years: comfortable enough jobs that engage only half her cogs and wheels”(141). She also avoids scrutiny of the world she inhabits, describing the men in her life in terms of images dug up from advertising: Ed is imagined as “a boy with curly golden hair”(135), her boss “looks like an English gin ad” (142). Labelling them “stupid”, in the case of Ed, and “[vapid]” though “outwardly distinguished” (142) in the case of her boss, she constructs identities for these figures to render them “safe”. Despite this, she stashes away pre-packaged food on planes as a reserve in case she finds herself in that metaphoric empty room without supplies. In all its miniaturized plasticity, it suggests the world of simulacra, perhaps of Baudrillard’s second phase, in that airline food more often than not “masks and denatures a profound reality”. In contrast to this food, Sally desperately tries to hang on to the “real” in her elaborate cooking, starting from scratch, for dinner parties. Its “authenticity” is a tilt at the “instant” food Ed, in fact, prefers, an attempt to assert the “real” as against the “image”, though in the process she burns her fingers when she peels chestnuts for the purée, suggesting the revenge of the world of hyperreality in response to her futile attempt to resist it. The plane food represents the kind of fare you might have to take with you to survive if entering the world of cyborgs; what Sally tries to avoid recognising is that she may be living in one already.

17 Sally also works at herself as a kind of defense against the possibility that “she’s a nothing”. Her attempt to hide this possibility from herself results in behaviour that suggests merging of the second and third stages of Baudrillard’s image. Sally’s masks both “denature” reality and conceal the absence of it. She works to contain the body and disguise incipient signs of aging with dress and makeup. Body maintenance is necessary, so Sally thinks, to camouflage how she “really looks”(138). The word “real” accumulates significance: Sally’s story is to be “cast in the realist mode” (156); “Ed is a real person, with a lot more to him than these simplistic renditions allow for” (135); and when he shows her into the room with the heart monitor, Ed “checked to make sure there was nobody real booked for the room” (146). When Sally dresses again, “she put on her clothes, neutrally, as if he were actually a doctor” (147). Given that Ed is “actually a doctor”, this complicates the idea of what is “real” and what is not, what is fact and what is fiction. In much the same way Marylynn’s “naturalness” (her undyed hair, etc.) may not reflect transparency of being, after all. She presents an image, “makes everything she is wearing seem fashionable”(138), but there is the uneasy feeling that her hair, her clothing may act as a mask.

18 For Sally, being “real” wards off the danger of being “nobody”; yet to be “nobody” is to be both most abject but also most threatening. Odysseus saved himself from the Cyclops by declaring himself to be Nobody, a name that allows him to survive but which negates his existence. This dialectic of being and nothingness is also at the heart of “Bluebeard’s Egg”. When Odysseus reclaims his identity by declaring his name as he sails away from the island of the Cyclops, he puts himself in danger: Polyphemus throws rocks at him because he now has “reality”, whereas as Nobody he was

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invulnerable – unreadable, and therefore ungraspable. Read in the light of this episode in the Odyssey, Ed’s act of moving the rocks around in the garden may seem less benign and innocent than it did initially. Perhaps he is motivated by the desire for self- preservation – the need to protect himself if he is “unmasked”. The facility with which his body can transform itself (a modern-day version of the transformations so common in fairy tales) is seen as Ed shaves himself. His “smooth skin” reflects his “egg-like” potential to give birth to something alien – “Assyrian…or a frost-covered Arctic explorer; or, demi-human, a white-bearded forest mutant. He scrapes away at himself, methodically destroying the illusion”(160).

19 In a recent article in The Guardian, “Aliens have taken the place of angels”, Atwood writes about “why we need science fiction”, saying: Literature is an uttering, or outering, of the human imagination. It lets the shadowy forms of thought and feeling - heaven, hell, monsters, angels and all - out into the light, where we can take a good look at them and perhaps come to a better understanding of who we are and what we want, and what the limits to those wants may be. Understanding the imagination is no longer a pastime, but a necessity; because increasingly, if we can imagine it, we’ll be able to do it. 20 In much the same way as fairy tales articulate the “shadowy forms of thought and feeling”, and warn against the dangers of transgressive behaviour through an interweaving of realism and fantasy, so science fiction, as Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. says, “is not a genre of literary entertainment only, but a mode of awareness, a complex hesitation about the relationship between imaginary conceptions and historical reality unfolding into the future”.

21 In “Bluebeard’s Egg” Atwood demonstrates this “complex hesitation” as the magical transformations of the fairy tale world morph into the more frightening transformations of the “posthuman”, such as the transformation of the heart from flesh into machine which Walter describes to Marylynn: “some day, when they’ve perfected it … all hearts will be plastic, and this will be a vast improvement on the current model”(164). The possibility of this kind of transformation troubles the insecure hold on “reality” throughout. If it reaches this, the “heart” will become its own simulacrum. But the blurring between the image and the real is already operating as far as hearts go. We learn, for example, that “Ed is a heart man, one of the best, and the irony of this is not lost on Sally: who could possibly know less about the workings of hearts, real hearts, the kind symbolized by red satin surrounded by lace and topped by pink bows, than Ed? Hearts with arrows in them”(139). Here there are multiple ironies as the image of the heart supplants the “real” heart (“it masks the absence of a profound reality”). If Sally is privileging the emotional life over the mechanics of the body, the symbol she reaches for has all the “unreality” of simulacra, a blend of Baudrillard’s four phases of the image. The red satin heart reflects (or is an emblem for) “a profound reality”, but in its kitsch-ness it denatures this whilst acting as a hollow emblem for feeling that may not be there. At the same time Ed becomes a strange, robotic replica of an “ordinary” human. The description of him as “a heart man” suggests not just the insular clubbishness of the medical fraternity but the absence of the complex personal dimensions that make one human.

22 We are told that Ed “was good with small appliances” (146) (a perversion of the more familiar phrase “good with small children”), and his affinities with the world of the machine are apparent when he uses his new heart monitor on Sally: “He seemed so distant, absorbed in his machine, taking the measure of her heart, which was beating

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over there all by itself, detached from her, exposed and under his control” (147). The machine becomes an extension of Ed, a threatening instrument of power and control. At the same time as the machine separates Sally from part of her body, Ed’s body merges with the machine. The possible outcome of this blurring of borders between human and technology is imagined when Sally, at the party, “looks over at Ed, who is staring off into space, like a robot which has been parked and switched off”(164), which goes one step further than her earlier intimations of his affinities with the world of hyperreality, when she fears that “Ed will vanish, to be replaced by a stuffed facsimile, useful for little else but an umbrella stand. Ed is a real person” (135). Marylynn also produces an image of Ed that demonstrates a desire on her part to contain and control and render harmless: “…he’s just like a button: he’s so bright and shiny. If he were mine, I’d get him bronzed and keep him on the mantelpiece”(139). Lurking beneath Sally and Marylynn’s insistent assertions of Ed’s cuteness and innocence and stupidity are the Gothic fears and fantasies of monstrous transgressions and transformations found in earlier Bluebeard stories, repressed but not erased. Psychic fears and desires now emerge from the shadows as, to use Gabrielle Schwab’s words, the “phantasmic aspects of the technological imagination” (194).

23 Schwab comments on the way the “technological imagination” (which is prone to throw up “fantasies of cyborgs”), “expresses fears and desires that are not so much from technology per se as from deeper psychic sources” and that “technology becomes a field of cathexis, an imaginary screen onto which psychic energies from the most archaic to the most current may be projected” (194). The body “becomes a text, screen onto which cultural fantasies, desires, fears, anxieties, hopes, and utopias are projected”(194). Schwab argues that because we are not yet habituated to cyborgs, we have a “tendency to see them as grotesque” which “involves a defense mechanism against their inherent threatening qualities”(194). But in “Bluebeard’s Egg” Ed’s ultimate disguise (if he does indeed belong to the world of cyberspace) is that he is not grotesque but “handsome”. Whatever he is, like the egg he is in the process of becoming, even if that is only in Sally’s imagination: “she’s always conscious of Ed’s presence in the room, any room; she perceives him as a shadow, a shape seen dimly at the edge of her field of vision, recognizable by the outline”. This latent body, this “shadow”, is akin to the “shadowy forms of thought and feeling” that Atwood describes in her interview.

24 This process of emerging, written on the body, looks beyond the text to the birth of a new paradigm. Whereas Baudrillardian postmodernism presents a bleak vision of a world that has lost touch with its referents and which does not offer the possibility of social change, Donna Haraway offers a more positive picture of the possibilities inherent in the ambiguities between “natural and unnatural, mind and body, self- developing and externally designed” (152), saying of cyborgs that “in our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling”(154). Haraway sees the power of writing as central to survival for those who have been oppressed, “on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other”, and argues that “Feminist cyborg stories have the task of recoding communication and intelligence to subvert command and control” (175). The power of writing glows softly in the egg at the end of the story. It suggests the potential for the birth of a new story, neutral, freed of gender (or at least androgynous, associated as it is with the smoothness of Ed and with female reproduction) and able to destabilize old power structures of “command and control”. It represents the power of

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“stories, retold stories” to “reverse and displace the hierarchical dualisms of naturalized identities” (Haraway, 175).

25 The final paragraphs of “Bluebeard’s Egg” suggest the beginnings of this process of reversal. Sally’s acquiescence to the old gendered power structures, however ironic, has been shaken: she notices, for example, the way Ed describes Mrs Rudge as “the woman”, as he did Mrs Bird before her; this erasure of individual identity is something that has happened to her and that she has done to herself. In bed, Sally envisages her heart beating “on and on forever; she has no control over it”. “But now she’s seeing the egg, which is not cold and white and inert but larger than a real egg and golden pink, resting in a nest of brambles” (165). Whereas earlier in the story Sally feels herself to be shut off from Ed by a wall, and that she is “locked outside” and “must hack her way through the brambles”, here she, the active princely one, has arrived at the heart of the narrative. Karen F. Stein suggests, ‘the power the protagonists gain … derives from their own authorization and self-assertion, from their voices. Telling the story is the act that gives them power’ (158). At the end of this story there is the possibility that Sally will shift into the first person. The final sentence of the story is enigmatic: “But what will come out of it?’(166). At the very least an alternative to the passive and helpless “ghostly heart” seems possible. The pulsing egg, ‘rose-red, crimson’ (166), suggests the bloody chamber of past stories, but also something more vibrant, a fresh new heart. Within it lies the possibility of another story which, instead of leading to death, may take us into an exhilaratingly posthuman, post-gendered future.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Atwood, Margaret. Bluebeard’s Egg. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1983.

–––. “Aliens have taken the place of angels.” The Guardian, Friday June 17, 2005. 3 Oct. 2005.

–––. Cat’s Eye. London: Virago Press, 1990.

–––. Interview. Voice 4. 3 Oct. 2005.

–––. “True Stories”, in Eating Fire: Selected Poetry, 1965-1995. London: Virago,1998.

Bacchilega, Cristina. Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.

Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U. Texas P, 1981.

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. London: Penguin Classics, 1985.

Csicsery-Ronay Jr., Istvan. “The SF of Theory: Baudrillard and Haraway” Science Fiction Studies, 55.18 (1991). 21 Sept. 2005.

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Davies, Madeleine. “Margaret Atwood’s Female Bodies.” The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. Ed. Coral Ann Howells, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Holquist, Michael. “Introduction”. The Dialogic Imagination. M. Bakhtin. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U. Texas P, 1981.

Howells, Coral Ann. “Introduction”. The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. Ed. Coral Ann Howells, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Hutcheon, Linda. “Historiographic Metafiction.” Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction. Ed. Patrick O'Donnell and Robert Con Davis, Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1989. 3-32.

Plath, Sylvia. Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. London: Faber and Faber, 1981.

Riffaterre, Michael. “Interpretation and Undecidability”. New Literary History, 12.3 (1981): 227-242.

Schwab, Gabrielle. “Cyborgs and Cybernetic Intertexts.” Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction. Ed. Patrick O'Donnell and Robert Con Davis. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1989. 191-213.

Stein, Karen F. “Talking Back to Bluebeard: Atwood’s Fictional Storytellers.” Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations: Recent Poetry and Fiction. Ed. Sharon Rose Wilson. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2003.

Tatar, Maria. Secrets Beyond the Door. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.

Wilson, Sharon Rose. Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-tale Sexual Politics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.

Zipes, Jack (trans.). The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. New York: Bantam, 1987.

ABSTRACTS

Dans la nouvelle “Bluebeard’s Egg” de Margaret Atwood, nombre de stratégies post‑modernes sont employées pour explorer le rapport entre le corps humain et le texte littéraire. La fluidité du sujet et l'instabilité du corps, toujours en cours de “ devenir ”, présentent des analogies avec le sens insaisissable, évasif et fuyant engendré par la structure intertextuelle du récit littéraire. La remarquable complexité de cette structure déstabilise le lecteur pour l’empêcher d’atteindre une vérité “ pure et simple ”. La fin ouverte d’une histoire et l’insaisissabilité de son sens peuvent, certes, perturber voire rendre hostile le lecteur à l’égard du texte. Elles peuvent cependant aussi le libérer, ouvrant pour lui un espace neuf dans lequel il pourrait créer ses propres histoires et des identités nouvelles. Ainsi, Sally, l’héroïne de Margaret Atwood dans “ Bluebeard’s Egg ”, porte en elle les traces de vieux récits qui hantent son personnage. Elle fonctionne comme un modèle pour le lecteur qui, à travers ses formidables tentatives de déconstruction, en particulier dans sa propre écriture, crée pour elle-même (et pour le lecteur) une multitude de possibilités de sens et de développements identitaires, toutes résultant de distorsions nouvelles qu’elle apporte à de vieux récits.

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AUTHORS

CAROL MERLI

Carol Merli is a Senior Lecturer in English at La Trobe University, Australia. She teaches and researches in the areas of the short story and nineteenth and twentieth century women’s writing, with particular emphasis on the meaning of place and belonging in Australian culture. She has published a number of articles on Australian literature and edited a collection of essays on Virginia Woolf, Illuminations: New Readings of Virginia Woolf (Macmillan India, 2004).

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The Readerly Politics of Western Domination : Emily Prager’s “A Visit from the Footbinder”

Judie Newman

1 China runs as a theme through Emily Prager’s work, centrally in A Visit from the Footbinder and Other Stories and Wuhu Diary, intermittently in Eve’s Tattoo and Roger Fishbite, and vestigially in her other works. Prager’s biography offers a partial explanation. When her parents divorced, her mother remarried and sent Prager alone, aged seven, with a tag round her neck, to her father in Taiwan. Prager spent three and a half years in the East (Taiwan and Hong Kong) and never went back to her mother. Later she adopted a Chinese daughter, LuLu, and returned to China when her mother died, to show LuLu her native city of Wuhu. Prager repeatedly describes China as “a very maternal place for me”1because, when she was a lonely seven year old, the Chinese people she knew were so kind to her. At the same time Prager is no sentimentalist, as her career indicates. Employed as a child as a soap opera actress, Prager became a satirical columnist, worked for National Lampoon in the 70s, then from 1978 for Penthouse. It was not then usual for a feminist to write for a man's magazine. Prager commented that “What I found there was complete freedom to write female supremacist humour, good pay to go with it, and a thoroughly unconverted audience.” 2Her anthology, In the Missionary Position, collects her pieces, which include pro-choice columns, the first reviews of live television, parody (“Mrs Chaucer's Canterbury Tales”), and an article about the Wonder bra patent dispute which generated so much publicity that the manufacturers sent her ten Wonder bras in different colours. Prager has offended both the puritan and the libertine. While A Visit from the Footbinder and other stories was banned in South Africa as a danger to public decency and morals, one of her journalistic pieces “How to tell if your girlfriend is dying during rough sex” was censored by the Penthouse editor as too sensational. Interviewed on The David Letterman Show in 1982, she was asked “What's a feminist like you doing writing a column for Penthouse?” The implication was that she had sold out, despite the feminist content of

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the column. Prager's answer revealed her pragmatic concern to avoid preaching to the converted: “I'm in the missionary position over there, ” she answered 3.

2 Prager’s topic in “A Visit From the Footbinder” raises the issue of how far she sells out to a Western agenda in which China features as underdeveloped, timeless or backward, in need of assistance in order to participate fully in a globalised world. Footbinding features prominently in the archetypical Western vision of China as primitive and barbarous, the film The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958) in which Ingrid Bergman quite literally occupies the missionary position, is a biopic based on the life of Gladys Aylward, a missionary in China 4. Aylward used storytelling to Western, Christian ends; she ran an inn in order to convert travellers, attracting them by telling them Christian stories. In the film Bergman is horrified by the “barbarity” of the Chinese (demonstrated in a particularly unpleasant public execution) but eventually adopts China as her home. In order to finance her mission, she pragmatically accepts the role of “foot inspector” following a decree against footbinding, and convinces the local villagers not to bind their daughters’ feet. Bergman, of course, is effortlessly successful (cue many little Chinese girls cutely wiggling their toes) but her only real interest in the cause is the bargain she strikes with the mandarin which allows her to evangelise in the villages she inspects, thus maximising the number of converts to Christianity. This is not a film with any great claims to subtlety, or of presenting any accurate image of China. The main Chinese roles are not played by Chinese actors but Westerners in “yellowface” : Curt Jürgens as the love-interest, Lin-Nan (of mixed Chinese-Dutch extraction), Robert Donat as the Mandarin. Filming took place mostly on the river Colwyn in Wales with local Welsh residents of Chinese ancestry cast in supporting roles (though not in speaking parts, since they had strong Welsh accents.) The “China” displayed here is envisioned through a Cold War lens, either as greedily rapacious or as a helpless victim, needing to be rescued by western intervention, modernisation and development. The film therefore appears to exemplify the tendency of the West to renew itself from non-Western cultures, in the imperial belief that the world is totally accessible to the Western traveller or observer, as a commodity or spectacle for Western view. In this kind of reading, the West uses the East to prove its own greater civility, using an account of horrors as a legitimation of its own domination. As Spivak has argued, Imperialism's image as the establisher of the good society is marked by the espousal of the woman as object of protection from her own kind. 5 3 Prager is obviously open to the same critique. “A Visit from the Footbinder” is a heartbreaking story as the knowing reader follows the rapid movements of innocent Pleasure Mouse, aged six, bounding around the palace, quite unaware that after this day she will never run anywhere again but at best hobble short distances with the help of a cane. In the story Prager spares no details of the pain suffered in the process of footbinding, and is clearly open to the accusation of gratuitous horror-mongering. Nobody is footbinding today, after all.

4 Prager is not, however, alone in her interest in footbinding which has become a topic for feminist theory. In About Chinese Women Julia Kristeva interprets the Chinese system of footbinding as having specifically feminine significance, exemplifying Chinese culture’s understanding of women’s equal claim to the symbolic 6. Kristeva notes that “Freud saw footbinding as a symbol of the castration of women, which Chinese civilization was unique in admitting” (83) thus to a degree admitting women into the

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symbolic order. Thus, in the West, female sexuality is denied symbolic recognition, as opposed to China which organises sexuality differently by a frank admission of genitality. As a result of footbinding, the body is marked and therefore “counted in” to culture rather than being excluded. Kristeva argues that because of the existence of two unequal poles of familial power, the individual has more room for manoeuvre in China than in the monotheistic patriarchal family, and that “in ancient China a certain balance seems to be reached between the two sexes” (85). In Woman and Chinese Modernity Rey Chow’s reaction is withering. Chow criticises Kristeva for the sexualisation of China as “feminine”, and Other to the West. In her view, to read with Kristeva is to envisage the Chinese practice of maiming women’s bodies as if it were Chinese society’s recognition of women’s fundamental claim to social power. Chow argues that Kristeva fantasises the “other” culture into some sort of timeless “before”, an originary space before the sign, so that China is constructed as the negative or repressed side of western discourse. Kristeva, she argues, is allochronistic, situating China in an ideal time marked off from our time, a time which has much in common with the way femininity is described in her work. Woman in Kristeva is a space linked to repetition and eternity, a negative to the time of history. Her formulation is particularly Utopian in respect of the idealisation of a supposedly maternal order in China.

5 Prager’s description of China as a maternal space apparently promotes a similar vision. Wuhu Diary opens with her invocation to China, guardian of my memories, nurturer of my spirit . . . China is China to me no matter who rules it. It is a matter of people, trees, birds, smells, and earth, not politics. 7 6 In fact, Prager spent her childhood with her father as an American military dependent in Taiwan, a location which could hardly be more politically and historically resonant. In “A Visit from the Footbinder” the relations of mother to child act as a figure for the discussion of development. “A Visit from the Footbinder” is set in the China of 1260, as development comes to a crashing halt, quite literally, when six year old Pleasure Mouse is crippled by the footbinder. Footbinding (at the mother’s behest) holds the child static, immobilised in a traditional role, unable to develop, as is physically exemplified in the broken feet and shuffling, slow progress of the boundfoot women in Prager’s story, suggesting an implicit argument for modernisation and development. To what extent therefore does Prager promote a readerly politics of western domination? And why dramatise footbinding, now a relic of the distant past? Footbinding was already associated with unmodern practices when Mao came to power and denounced those who failed to share his blueprint for revolution as old women with bound feet. Prager describes footbinding as follows: Golden Lotus was the name men gave to the disgusting, shrivelled up, rotten, ingrown bound foot of a grown woman . . . It was comparable in size and shape to a well-chewed cat toy. (Wuhu, p. 169.) 7 The story draws most of its facts from Howard S. Levy who describes footbinding as “a vivid symbol of the subjection of women”8. First described by Friar Odoric in 1324, with the first Chinese reference occurring shortly thereafter, footbinding began with the aristocracy and filtered down, eventually lasting more than a thousand years. Its origin was attributed to Li Yu (937-978) the second emperor of the Southern Tong dynasty who supposedly forced his favourite concubine Yao Niang to dance with small bound

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feet on the golden image of a large lotus flower, and subsequently made a six foot gilded stage in the shape of the lotus9. There were opposition movements over the years. The Manchus conquered China in the 17th century and tried to outlaw it, unsuccessfully (their own women adopted tiny high heels to simulate bound feet); Christian missionaries intensified the challenge; and it was banned officially in 1902, though it still went on until the middle of the 20th century. Even once the practice was abandoned, women with bound feet had to keep them bound, because it was too painful to do otherwise. Footbinding confined woman to the home, the interior, thus preserving her chastity and (in a hot climate) her facial beauty, effectively reducing women to the operative space of the boudoir. It was believed that it led to a teetering, swaying walk which was considered erotic (like modern day high heels), and that the need to compensate for tiny feet by clenching the upper leg led to bigger buttocks and a tighter vagina. Men supposedly wanted to have sex with a bound-foot woman because of the sensation of tightness on intercourse, considered akin to intercourse with a virgin. In short, footbinding made a woman into an eternal child, to be violated repeatedly and yet always for the first time, eternally timeless in a rather different sense to that envisaged for woman by Kristeva. Bound-foot women spent a lot of time and care embroidering their shoes which are now collected as beautiful art objects. The object stood in for the woman. A prospective bride would send her shoes - not herself - to the prospective mother-in-law, since small and beautiful shoes were evidence of a docile, obedient girl who accepted discipline. The physical effects were also psychological. As Fan Hong comments, the intense physical sufferings brought about by the process of breaking and binding the feet in early childhood produced a passivity, stoicism and fatalism that effectively 'bound' not only the feet but the mind and emotions. 10 8 The process of footbinding was excruciating, as the small toes were bent under and into the sole, and the big toe and heel then forced close together till the arch broke and the foot shortened. The flesh often became putrescent during the binding, and portions sloughed off from the sole; sometimes one or more toes dropped off. The pain continued for about a year, and then diminished, until at the end of two years the feet were practically dead and painless. 11 9 It took about two years to achieve the desired three-inch model. Levy's informants describe the pain, graphically. In summer their feet swelled and smelled offensively, in winter they hurt if they approached a heat source. One describes her little toes as curled under “like so many dead caterpillars”12. Unbinding restored circulation and was painful, so the feet were not often exposed to air or washed. The foot was rarely unbound, almost never seen, a more secret part of the body than the vagina. Holding a woman's foot was thus considered an act of great intimacy. The awful smell of the rotting foot was appreciated much as that of a rare cheese is to a contemporary “foodie”. Although the age of binding varied, the process was usually undertaken before the age of seven, so that the bones were still cartilaginous, and would be soft. The girl being bound was usually bound by female relatives, mother or grandmother13. The girl held water chestnuts in her hands so that her feet would be as small as them; her feet were soaked in a broth of monkey bones or other potions to soften them; an auspicious date was chosen, often the 24th day of the eighth lunar month, the festival of The Little-Footed Miss (usually in late September or early October when the cooler weather began, a time when there was less risk of the feet swelling, and perhaps

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therefore fewer deaths from gangrene). Tiny shoes might be placed before the goddess's altar and incense burned. Afterwards the girl was forced to keep moving about to avoid gangrene and to speed up the process. Every week or two the feet were then bound tighter and forced into smaller shoes. The result was to create a short pointed foot, always hidden beneath a beautiful embroidered shoe, which made the foot look like an extension in line of the leg.

10 Prager’s story is faithful to almost all of the above details and therefore at first appears to conform to a fairly obvious feminist agenda, in which footbinding features as a classic example of the ways in which woman is subjected by patriarchy, in line with the argument that deployments of power are directly connected to the body, with membership of the community transcribed into the flesh 14. Footbinding has also, however, been interpreted in terms of economics. Theodore Veblen explained it in the context of the theory of conspicuous leisure – which required small hands and feet, to signify a person incapable of useful effort, and thus not a peasant 15. Like 19th century crinolines or tight corsets, the rationale is to demonstrate the pecuniary reputability of the male owner by showing that his woman is useless, expensive and has to be supported in idleness : what would today be described as a “high maintenance babe”. Cinderella (a story which is first recorded in ninth century China) is a footbinding story. Small feet rescue her from kitchen drudgery and transport her into the arms of a prince. In Prager’s story, Warm Milk, a peasant become a concubine, is similarly transported.

11 While faithful to the historic facts, Prager’s story employs a fundamentally ironic perspective, privileging reader over protagonist. “A Visit from the Footbinder” depends upon a series of oppositions between exaggerated movement and stasis, contrasting the rapidity of Pleasure Mouse with the slow movements of all the other women, tottering on canes or being carried. The formal effect is not unlike that of an animated cartoon, Tom and Jerry perhaps, or any other “cat and mouse” screenplay. The playful, speeded-up movements of Pleasure Mouse lull the reader into a state of unwariness, as if the story were only a game in which the protagonist, however often threatened or apparently injured, will always bounce back, unscathed. In cartoons the little mouse usually wins; the reader remains distanced by the form, observing from an omniscient position, rather than anxiously involved. The fate of the other women, however, strikes a warning note. While Pleasure Mouse “danced a series of jigs”, was “leaping up and down”,“fled”, “raced”, “ran trippingly alongside”,“scampered”, “sped”, her mother Lady Guo Guo “tottered”, “shuffled”, and “lost her balance”, her sister “toddled”, “wavering slightly”, and her aunt Lao Bing, relies on being carried about in a sedan chair. In a series of vignettes, the bound-foot women are portrayed as always inside, their interiority featuring as an image of a rotting, living death, from the sickening atmosphere of the smelly sedan chair to the mother’s ceremonial tomb. Warm Milk, as pale and ghostlike in the moonlight “as pure white jade” (24), and heavily pregnant, complains that her feet “stink. . . like a pork butcher’s hands at the end of a market day” (23) and has to be carried back to her bed by her maids. When Lady Guo Guo goes out into the courtyard (27) the sunlight strikes her like a crossbow bolt, because she is so unused to being outside. The static vignettes of the immobile women are connected only by mobile Pleasure Mouse, scampering between boudoirs and rooms on her last journey through a series of ominously named landmarks, the Felicitous Rebirth Fishpond, the Perfect Afterlife Garden, the Bridge of Piquant

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Memory, the Stream of No Regrets, and the Heavenly Thicket, all of which will exist for her only in memory once her feet have been broken. They will be too distant for her to walk to them. Unlike the reader, Pleasure Mouse has no understanding of what is to come, and is eager to become grown-up. The Path of Granted Wishes reminds the reader of the fairy tale motif of the danger of the granted wish; the Avenue of Lifelong Misconceptions is her final destination. The problem with this ironic procedure is that the story remains enclosed within the mode of omniscient narration. The narrator is entirely knowledgeable, even intervening in first person mode to give a short account of events in the tenth century “before our story began”. (16) As opposed to the ignorant Pleasure Mouse, the reader is superior in knowledge, aware from the very beginning of the story what the final horror must be, and implicitly positioned within a readerly politics of western domination. “We” are enlightened; Pleasure Mouse is mired in ignorance. We look ahead to a final horror, secure in our superior knowledge.

12 Prager was motivated to write the story when, in Beijing in 1979, she saw in a shoe store a pair of six inch long slippers. When she pointed to them the patrons giggled. These were orthopaedic shoes for crippled women whose feet had been unbound when the Communists took over in 1949. Prager's reaction at that point is chilling in its insouciance: “This was a tremendous find and the perfect gift for my collector friend Michael.”16 Nobody would take her money however, and finally a woman gave her the cotton coupons necessary to buy shoes, refusing to take anything in return. Prager left “vowing to write something worthy of this gift”17. The anecdote, told against herself, reveals the crassness of the Westerner, buying a piece of another culture, a representation of trauma and pain, exhibited as commodified alterity. As James Clifford argues, for the Westerner identity is a kind of wealth (of objects, knowledge, memories, experience) . . . In the West, collecting has long been a strategy for the deployment of a possessive self, culture and authenticity.18 13 The modern period enjoys an “aesthetics of decontextualisation”19 in which value is enhanced or accelerated by removing objects from their contexts, as in the display of “primitive” or “ethnic” objects as art. In the lush colour plates of Beverley Jackson’s book on footbinding, Splendid Slippers, Chinese embroidered slippers are “splendid” as art only because they have been removed from their context of smelly feet, pain and blood, and photographed against a silk background, as objects in a collection 20. Rey Chow argues that even when looking at images of a brutal past from an “enlightened” perspective, there remains a residual pornography of the gaze. There is therefore a risk that the woman is exploited not once but twice, in the reproduction of her as object. The story which condemns footbinding can therefore also exploit the victim a second time. Western observers, and arguably readers, are “voiced subjects” looking at “silent objects”21 – embroidered slippers, or in this case Pleasure Mouse, who has no voice in the story but is merely seen from outside. Narrative practice thus appears to perpetuate the opposition between Western observer and Eastern “object”, reinforcing a readerly politics of domination.

14 But the story is more complicated than this would suggest. Prager’s tactic is to place the footbinding at the centre of a series of transactions, erotic and commercial, in which power is founded noton straightforward domination, but on a process of negotiations between male and female. Prager's is a risky strategy, inviting the accusation of “blaming the victim”, but it is a procedure designed to prevent the Western reader occupying a position of smug superiority. In a recent thesis, Wang Ping

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has argued that ultimately the bound foot was the sign of division between the sexes in China - a woman with unbound feet was not really a woman 22. By binding their feet women turned their bodies into art, and culture; the raw became the cooked. In Prager’s story the tale is told of how a piece of the first footbinding became a precious stone and then a ring worn by the courtesan Honey Tongue, an image of raw material transformed into art. The footbinding process begins in art –the dancer and the poet- emperor – and it serves to reinforce and stabilise gender divisions, in a culture anxious about the shifting and eroding boundaries of gender, sex and hierarchy. The practice is understood less as merely brutal subjection of women, more in terms of a transaction between the sexes in which women acquiesce to – and then exploit – their own subjection. The footbinder, a Buddhist nun, is linked to the tenth century nun of myth, and moves across time to the present, transforming magically into Honey Tongue, a high class courtesan, the main attraction of the Five Enjoyments Tea House, where she sells herself at so high a price as to be almost beyond Lord Guo Guo’s means. As a character who moves across time zones, who exemplifies beauty as construction, and clearly has full access to the symbolic realm, she is also expert at offering sexual pleasures (implied by her name) for pay. At the moment of footbinding, Honey Tongue, with her painted face and nails, turns into the unadorned, natural-footed footbinder in the pain-affected vision of Pleasure Mouse. They are aspects of the same role, collaborators in a transaction, the natural and the constructed. One draws her power as well as her pain from the other. Honey Tongue makes this point in the story when she tells Pleasure Mouse that the pain will recede “and then you have a weapon you never dreamed of” (17). The emphasis on woman as both prey and predator continues in the imagery, and in the name of Pleasure Mouse’s sister, Tiger Mouse. Her feet are described as “no longer than newborn kittens”(13). Pleasure Mouse plans to embroider cats and owls on her slippers; both feed on mice. The story plays a similar game of cat and mouse with the reader, arousing our sympathy for the child but refusing to simplify the phenomenon of footbinding into easy categories of innocent women/ brutal men, symbolic East/functional West, or enlightened West/barbaric China.

15 In her tale Prager explicitly draws attention to the notion of a transaction in order to alert the reader to the complexity of the issues, but she keeps the experience of pain firmly in view, taking the attack on the commodification of trauma into art as her central focus, and introducing a plot innovation. In footbinding practice it is usual for the mother to bind and break the daughter's feet. Here, however, she invents a professional foot binder who is employed for pay. The process is not so much traditional as partly modernised. Lady Guo Guo justifies the departure from custom in terms of modern progress, and a better aesthetic result. “It is an aesthetic act to her, objective, don't you see? For us it is so much more clouded. Our sympathy overcomes our good judgement. ” (32) 16 Importantly the footbinder sends away the large audience gathered to enjoy the footbinding, and its attendant zither players, tellers of obscene tales, skilled kiteflyers and owners of performing fish. As an artist herself, she does not tolerate lesser performance artists. As readers we are therefore invited to register our distance from the audience on the page and to question our own role. Is Prager’s also an obscene, gratuitously horrific story? How are we different from those who are waiting to hear obscene tales as Pleasure Mouse screams? Are we merely, as readers, voyeurs to a staged ethnic spectacle? The third person narration makes us into spectators, an audience watching a series of scenes, only to make us recoil in horror from the actual

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spectators. The technique plays with our distance from events by placing a second audience inside the story.

17 Above all, the story condemns the commodification of trauma. The woman’s flesh is treated by the footbinder as the raw material of art. Pleasure Mouse's artist friend Fen Wen, the master painter, weeps when he realises that Pleasure Mouse will never be able to visit him again in the Meadow of One Hundred Orchids. The symbolism of the orchid is significant here. In Chinese culture the “four gentlemen” (plum blossom, orchids, bamboo, chrysanthemum) are popular subjects for paintings, signifying the four seasons. The orchid (spring) represents purity, an appropriate association for a six- year-old child whose carefree spring is about to end abruptly. Fen Wen buys into the cultural for his living and therefore sees Pleasure Mouse as an art object, constructed rather than natural, who has “grown from a single brush stroke to an intricate design” (14). In the story, Pleasure Mouse runs through a landscape of signs, of carefully constructed gardens and enclosures. Fen Wen's meadow encloses lines of trees on each of which grows one orchid; the scene is explicitly cultural rather than natural. He is employed by Lady Guo Guo, painting scrolls for her enormous ceremonial tomb. The tomb is employing hundreds of artists (making screens, scrolls, hangings, paintings, and sculpture) plus silk weavers, poetry chanters, trainers of performing insects and literary men, “throngs of humanity of every occupation crammed into the burial chamber and its anteroom hoping to be hired for a day's labour.” (19). Some artists live off death, some off the child’s mutilation. The chamber’s interiority is a monument to a life which is a living death. Lady Guo Guo is entombed, confined by footbinding to immobility.

18 In the story we see “beauty” paid for – but we also see it paying off. The footbinding is at the centre of a series of transactions. While ostensibly preoccupied with immortality and the eternal, Lady Guo Guo is entirely focused on economic transactions. She has spent the preceding sixteen years seeing to the construction of her tomb and is now decorating it, haggling briskly over the soft furnishings from a bargaining table set up in the tomb itself. The death mask and ancestral portrait are next on the list to be commissioned. When her husband appears, there is a rapid exchange of hostilities concerning her extravagance, which he argues will bring down the aristocracy by enriching the merchant class. She counters that he has been trading as a merchant himself under a false name, while imposing excessive taxes and price-ceilings. Lord Guo Guo, infuriated at the discovery that she has been buying marble expensively imported from the West (Egypt), cuts off her funds. To obtain extended credit from her husband for the tomb, Lady Guo Guo successfully deploys the threat to leave Pleasure Mouse with natural feet – unbound, and therefore unmarriageable. She uses a non-western concept of time to pressure him into an immediate decision, citing the geomancer’s insistence that the “propitious hour” (29) for footbinding is upon them and will not recur for twelve seasons of growth. Time is money for Lady Guo Guo. Their conversation exposes the collaboration between the male and the female in maintaining footbinding. Although he argues that “No man could do a thing like that” (29), and that it is women who carry out the practice, she counters that “No man would marry a natural-footed woman.” (29). Faced with the threat of Pleasure Mouse’s social ostracism, the husband capitulates – and in his turn presents an imported western object, an expensive ebony cane from Africa, for Pleasure Mouse to lean on. The story exposes the fact that a bargain has been struck between the different camps

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(aristocrats and merchants, East and West, male and female) in a mutually beneficial transaction over the child’s body. Essentially Lady Guo Guo has traded her child’s body for her own profit, enforcing the “correct” sexual definitions in a transaction with her husband in which she uses her own subjection to her advantage. Pleasure Mouse's pain pays for both the expensive raw materials and the artistic realisation of the monument. Just as beautifully embroidered silken slippers conceal beneath them the deformed and rotten feet of the women, so an entire artistic economy is built upon the mutilation of the female body. Kristeva says of the Chinese woman that she will suffer, “But in the long run she will have the symbolic premium as well : a sort of superior knowledge, a superior maturity.” (84) Lady Guo Guo, manoeuvring and striking a balance with her husband gets a premium which is far from symbolic. Pleasure Mouse’s entry into the symbolic as an “intricate design” is accompanied in Prager’s story by heartrending screams. Waves of agony as sharp as stiletto blades traversed the six-year-old’s legs and thighs, her spine and head. She bent over like an aged crone, not fully comprehending why she was being forced to crush her own toes with her own body weight. (p. 36) 19 Honey Tongue offers her the choice of life or death and for a moment “Time was suspended in the temple” (36), until Pleasure Mouse opts for life, bellowing with pain, and “Time, its feet unbound, bounded on.” (36). What Kristeva leaves out of her account – and what Prager leaves in – is the pain of a very small child.

20 Nobody is footbinding today, but they are buying trainers made in Asian sweatshops and envisaging the East as a global market. “A Visit from the Footbinder” shifts from an understanding of footbinding as either patriarchal horror story or feminist symbolic capital, to envisaging it as part of an economic transaction. Footbinding, in Prager’s narrative, is situated in a series of what might be termed, to use Rey Chow’s terminology, biopolitical transactions. Chow draws upon Foucault’s argument that the various institutional practices devised by society to handle human sexuality are part of a biopolitics, a systematic management of biological life and its reproduction. Although Chow’s major focus is upon ethnicity, in the course of her discussion she raises the image of China and the West as collaborative partners in an ongoing series of biopolitical transactions, where human beings are the commodity par excellence. In her example, political dissidents are exiled one by one, as others are arrested, so that the Chinese government is setting itself up as a business enterprise dealing in politicised human beings as precious commodities, as if China has to maintain a supply of the “goods” demanded by the West. If some are traded off, others will be caught : human rights can no longer be understood purely on humanitarian grounds but rather must also be seen as an inherent part – entirely brutal yet also entirely logical – of transnational corporatism, under which anything, including human beings or parts of human beings, can become exchangeable for its negotiated equivalent value.23 21 The West is not innocent in the transaction. The humane release of famous dissidents is also a means of palliating the embarrassment of Western companies doing business with the Chinese regime. Importantly in Roger Fishbite, her rewriting of Nabokov’s Lolita, (also a novel centred upon female child abuse) Prager restores the voice to her abused child, now a first person narrator, and puts the blood back on the shoes, in the context of corporate globalisation. Unlike Nabokov’s victimised heroine, Lucky Linderhof shoots dead her abuser (in Disneyworld), and founds a charity and a TV chat show

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dedicated to combating abuse. Lucky’s mother collects chinoiserie, including bound- foot shoes. “She had the tiny pairs of shoes in little glass boxes all over the house.” 24Obsessed with her “retro Chinese life theme” (71) she is murdered by her new husband, the predatory Roger Fishbite, in a staged hit-and-run accident outside a shop, Boxer Rebellion Antiques, where she has just purchased lots of pairs of tiny shoes, now scattered all over Madison Avenue. The Boxer Rebellion, in 1900, was the pretext on which the United States gained a trading foothold in Chinese markets, and involved widespread looting of the Forbidden City by the International Relief Force. The shop might as well be called “Eastern Loot” or “The Spoils of the Orient”. Afterwards Lucky finds the shoes stained with blood – her mother’s (149). As the rest of the novel demonstrates, the Chinese retro lifestyle is not as “retro” as it appeared, as the Chinese shoes turn into the sneakers made by bonded child labour (against which Lucky demonstrates) and the small shoes of sexually exploited American child models, actresses and child beauty queens. Tellingly however, Lucky’s fellow demonstrators in the piece of anti-globalisation street theatre which she devises are rich Asian consumers, the daughters of a deposed Cambodian war criminal (Keema Thep), a Hong Kong multimillionaire importer (Inharmonia Chen) and a social-climbing software billionaire (Sondra Kowtower). Lucky’s mother’s fate demonstrates the risks of museumising cultural otherness. But Lucky’s Naomi Klein-inspired protests are examples of limousine liberalism, still part of a consumerist world, in which shopping is envisaged as a weapon and a moral statement 25. Katharine Viner reports Klein as suggesting that the careful use of enlightened consumer power (so-called supermarket activism) could counter the reach of globalisation. Klein’s own sweatshop-free wardrobe depended upon the fact that “I happen to live a few blocks from some great independent designers, so I can actually shop in stores where I know where stuff is produced.”26 Similarly, when the newspapers describe her fellow protesters as wearing “Ninja outfits” (p. 180), Lucky is shocked to her uptown core : “We’re in a time when salesgirls on Madison Avenue can’t tell Armani when they see it.” (p. 180). The West does not get off lightly. Despite her resistance, Lucky is still part of the commercial mechanisms which she seeks to oppose by buying “No Logo” goods. Where “A Visit from the Footbinder” incriminates the past and the Chinese abuser, RogerFishbite turns the tables to direct the spotlight onto abuse going on in the developed world. It is rather as if Cinderella’s slipper had transformed into Naomi Klein’s trainers.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Appadurai, Arjun. (ed.), The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1986).

Chow, Rey. Women and Chinese Modernity. The Politics of Reading between East and West (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

–––., “Where Have All the Natives Gone?” in Padmini Mongia (ed.) Contemporary Postcolonial Theory : A Reader (London : Arnold 1996), 122-146.

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–––.,The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York : Columbia University Press, 2002).

Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture : Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge. Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1988).

Falk, Pasi. “Written in the Flesh,” Body and Society 1,1 (1995), 95-105.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage 1980).

Hong, Fan. Footbinding, Feminism and Freedom. The Liberation of Women's Bodies in Modern China (London : Frank Cass, 1997).

Jackson, Beverley. Splendid Slippers : A Thousand years of an Erotic Tradition (Berkeley : Ten Speed Press, 1997).

Klein, Naomi. No Logo : Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (London : HarperCollins, 1999).

Kristeva, Julia. About Chinese Women. Trans. Anita Burrows (London and New York : Marion Boyars, 1977). First published as Des Chinoises (Paris : Editions des Femmes, 1974).

Levy, Howard S.. Chinese Footbinding : The History of a Curious Erotic Custom (London : Neville Spearman, 1966).

Ping, Wang. Aching For Beauty. Footbinding in China (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

Prager, Emily. “A Visit from the Footbinder,” in A Visit From The Footbinder and other stories (London : Vintage, 1999), pp. 11-39. First published in Great Britain by Chatto and Windus, 1983.

–––., In the Missionary Position. 25 Years of Humour Writing from theNational Lampoon, Titters, Penthouse, New York Observer, Guardian and the New York Times(London : Vintage 1999).

–––., Roger Fishbite (London : Chatto and Windus, 1999).

–––., Wuhu Diary. On Taking My Adopted Daughter Back To Her Hometown In China (New York: Random House, 2001).

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (London : Macmillan, 1988), pp. 271-313.

Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class [1899] (New Brunswick, N.J. : Transaction, 1992).

Viner, Katharine. “Hand-to-Brand Combat”, Guardian, 12 September 2000, p. 18.

NOTES

1. Gaby Wood, p. 3. 2. Missionary, p. 21. Page references for subsequent quotations will be cited in parentheses in the text. 3. Missionary, p. xv. 4. The Inn of the Sixth Happiness. Directed by Mark Robson. Written by Isobel Lennart. Produced by Buddy Adler. Twentieth century Fox, 1958. 5. Spivak, p. 299. 6. Rey Chow, Women and Chinese Modernity, passim. Kristeva, Of Chinese Women, pp. 83-5. 7. Wuhu, p.3. On the treatment of the adoptive mother in Wuhu Diary see Judie Newman, “Biopolitical Transactions : Transnational Adoption in Emily Prager’s Wuhu Diary,” in Largeness of Nature: American Travel Writing and Empire, ed. David Seed and Susan Castillo, Liverpool University Press, forthcoming 2007.

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8. Levy, p. 23. 9. See “Footbinder”, p. 16. Page references for subsequent quotations will be cited in parentheses in the text. 10. Fan Hong, p. 289. 11. Levy, p. 2. 12. Though there is a record of one town in China, Liuxia, near Hangzhou City, which specialised in expert footbinding. Levy, p. 28. 13. Ping, p. 68. 14. See Pasi Falk. 15. Veblen. 16. Wuhu, p. 150. 17. Wuhu, p.150. 18. Clifford, p. 218. 19. Appadurai, The Social life of Things, p. 28. 20. Jackson, Splendid Slippers. 21. Chow, “Where Have All the Natives Gone?” p. 130-132. 22. Ping, p. 68. 23. Chow, The Protestant Ethnic, p. 21. 24. Roger Fishbite, p. 40. Page references for subsequent quotations will be cited in parentheses in the text. 25. Klein, No Logo. 26. Viner, p. 18.

ABSTRACTS

Orpheline de mère, Emily Prager a passé une partie de son enfance en Chine. Elle y est revenue pour adopter sa fille. Dans “ A Visit from the Footbinder ”, la Chine est présentée comme un endroit très maternel. Le rapport que la mère entretient avec son enfant devient ici un tracé pour aborder plusieurs thématiques : la problématique du développement et de la modernisation ; les oppositions entre l'Ouest et l’Est, l’homme et la femme ; enfin, la transformation de la blessure humaine en produit littéraire consommable. Par le truchement de son narrateur omniscient, Prager confronte et renverse les principes standards du modèle de lecture occidental pour s’engager activement dans les thèses défendues par Julia Kristeva (dans Des Chinoises, 1974).

AUTHORS

JUDIE NEWMAN

Judie Newman is Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham, and the author of Saul Bellow and History, John Updike, Nadine Gordimer, (as editor) Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred; A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, The Ballistic Bard, Alison Lurie, and Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter: A Casebook. She is currently researching Fictions of America, a critical study of transnational narratives for Routledge. She is a past President of the British Association for

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American Studies, a Founding Fellow of the English association, a winner of the Arthur Miller Prize in American studies, and Chair of Main Panel L of the Higher Education Funding Council Research Assessment Exercise.

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Book Reviews

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Gaïd Girard, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu : Une écriture fantastique Paris : Honoré Champion, 2005, 459 pages

Laurent Lepaludier

REFERENCES

Gaïd Girard, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu : Une écriture fantastique, Paris : Honoré Champion, 2005, 459 p.

1 Gaïd Girard’s book in French aims at examining Le Fanu’s writing from several critical approaches, allowing for a wealth of interpretations. Although it mainly concentrates on Le Fanu’s novels, it also deals with his tales and short stories to a great extent. The first chapters contextualise the production of the stories. The role played by The Dublin University Magazine (chapter I) was essential not only for publication but also because of Le Fanu’s and DUM’s same interest in European culture and the development of Irish literature. The “spectres of History” (chapter II) which haunt Le Fanu’s works often mix History and Irish legends – this characterizes his particular treatment of History and literature. The question of genre is also studied (chapter III) in reference to Irish legends and literary History, particularly the influence of the gothic tale. Chapter IV explains how Le Fanu uses the form and content of Irish legends and gives them the shape of the short story with a definite interest in literary style. The focus then shifts to landscapes (chapter V) with connections to the gothic sublime and the picturesque, and to haunted houses (chapter VI). Studies of specific novels and stories examine, for instance, hallucination, distancing from the gothic, and women’s and men’s spaces. The theme of the pact with the devil (chapter VII) is treated with distance by Le Fanu who plays with gothic stereotypes, and the chapter further focuses on the figure of the double. Chapter VIII, entitled “Masks”, approaches the stories with references to the carnivalesque tradition, to the sensational, the terrifying grotesque, and the fantastic grotesque. The chapter on mesmerism and modernity examines the way the stories combine the influences of mesmerism and new scientific developments. Le Fanu shows

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a deep interest in the “psychological fantastic”. The following chapter, which deals with paranoia, continues in that line. Chapter XI is concerned with female characters and focuses on the notions of desire, sexuality and hysteria, exploring the depths of the fantastic and the human mind. A last chapter, on mirrors and portraits, offers reflections on art and writing. This well-researched and well-written book is complete with extensive notes, bibliography and index, and will be a reference not only for readers of Le Fanu, but also for short story critics as well as those interested in the fantastic and its motifs. The numerous references to historical and literary background, the genre studies, the close analyses and the quality of the style are excellent reasons to read this book.

AUTHORS

LAURENT LEPALUDIER

Université d’Angers

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Hélène Machinal. Conan Doyle : de Sherlock Holmes au Professeur Challenger Presses Universitaires de Rennes, coll. “Interférences”, Rennes : 2004, 368 pages

David Le Barzic

REFERENCES

Hélène Machinal. Conan Doyle : de Sherlock Holmes au Professeur Challenger, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, coll. “Interférences”, Rennes : 2004, 368 p.

1 Conan Doyle’s œuvre is articulated along three major literary axes and Hélène Machinal accordingly divides her study into three parts: crime fiction (1887-1898), fantasy fiction (1898-1912), and speculative fiction (1912-1930).

2 While mysterious deeds and strange events tend to be rationally accounted for in the early Sherlock Holmes stories, the essentially fantastic components of the later fiction are already in place. In fact, Hélène Machinal explains, science no longer holds the key to unlocking the human mind in Conan Doyle’s second writing phase. Instead, unfathomable forces rule in a world of overwhelming fear and uncontrollable angst. Announcing the third part of Doyle’s life and career, The Lost World introduces Professor Challenger as well as a rising genre known as speculative fiction or futuristic novel, in which the uncanny is no longer depicted as a fatality but as the goal of an active quest.

3 Hélène Machinal shows how these three literary movements reflect the inquiring mind of a writer in constant dialogue with a fast-moving era. Driven by fascination and anguish, Conan Doyle takes part in, and makes sense of the political, scientific and intellectual progress of his time (1859-1930).

4 The quest into the unknown characterizes both Conan Doyle’s literature and Hélène Machinal’s research. In exploring every nook and cranny of Doyle’s oeuvre, “from

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Sherlock Holmes to Professor Challenger”, Hélène Machinal sheds light on the lesser- known periods, publications, characteristics and characters of the Scottish writer. She stresses that Doyle not only laid the (still-standing) foundations of the detective short- story but also incorporated and developed in his works the great literary and ideological debates of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

5 Analyzing the fiction of the author in its entirety enables Hélène Machinal to present his life and career as an ongoing philosophical reflection leading to his engagement with spiritualism in 1916.

6 Hélène Machinal emphasizes the global coherence and vision of a prolific writer whose work has been unfairly pinned down to a literally episodic –albeit symbolic– character and genre. It is here restored to its incredible richness and variety, depth and complexity.

AUTHORS

DAVID LE BARZIC

Université d'Angers

Journal of the Short Story in English, 48 | Spring 2007