UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

______, 20 _____

I,______, hereby submit this as part of the requirements for the degree of:

______in: ______It is entitled: ______

Approved by: ______

SCRAPBOOK

A dissertation submitted to the

Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTORATE OF PHILOSOPHY (Ph.D.)

in the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the College of Arts and Sciences

2001

by

C. Lynn Shaffer

B.A., Morehead State University, 1993 M.A., Morehead State University, 1995

Committee Chair: Don Bogen

C. Lynn Shaffer

Dissertation Abstract

This dissertation, a collection of original poetry by C. Lynn Shaffer, consists of three sections, predominantly persona poems in narrative free verse form. One section presents the points of view of different individuals; the other sections are sequences that develop two central characters: a veteran living in modern-day America and the historical figure

Secondo Pia, a nineteenth-century Italian lawyer and photographer whose name is not as well known as the image he captured with his camera, the Shroud of Turin. Though many themes are present, the poems’ main concerns include the photographic nature of memory as an alleged recorder of experience, the act of viewing, and the faith, or lack of it, that we place in those phenomena. In addition, the poems investigate how, after tragedy, memory can overwhelm an individual until a person’s identity transforms his personality, as is the case with many veterans. In contrast, other poems explore the effect of the mind’s refusal—due to sickness or grief—to allow memories to occur.

Collectively, through the characters’ struggles, the poems speculate about how memory functions within the subtext of loss.

The dissertation also includes a critical essay about biblical and apocryphal revision in

Toni Morrison’s Jazz and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, revision similar to that Alicia

Suskin Ostriker has observed in contemporary women’s poetry. The essay explores the way in which both novels challenge the Christian narrative that transforms sex— biological fact—into gender—culturally assigned roles based on sex.

Acknowledgements

Many people have supported me in a multitude of ways, and each of them has helped

make this poetry collection possible. First, I must thank my mother, Sue Howard, and grandmother, Dorothy Clevenger, for their interest in and encouragement of my writing, including tireless attendance at numerous poetry readings. I am grateful to many other family members, including my stepfather, Randy Howard, and my grandfather, John

Clevenger. Sincere thanks to Michele Griegel McCord and Cynthia Ris, whose friendship has sustained me and whose kind assistance helped tremendously with final

decisions about the content and structure of this collection. I am fortunate to have to

thank other dear friends who have supported me in countless ways: Juliana Vice, Marta

Tomes, Cathy Silvers, Vivé Griffith, Brad Vice, and many more friends and fellow

writers that I have encountered over the years. Many thanks to the instructors I consider

friends: Don Bogen, John Drury, Andrew Hudgins, Jim Schiff, George Eklund, and

especially Michelle Boisseau, whose poems made me want to continue writing and

whose encouragement helped me think I could contribute something to poetry. Thanks to

Robert McDowell for his helpful feedback at the West Chester poetry conference. Lastly,

I want to thank my husband, Steve, my greatest supporter and a person so wonderful that

he continues to defy my every attempt to write a love poem that does him justice.

Some of the following poems, in their current forms or in earlier versions, have

appeared or are forthcoming in Beauty for Ashes Poetry Review, Clackamas Literary

Review, Louisiana Literature, and The Raintown Review.

Table of Contents

I Getting On With It 6

Letters 7

Four Weeks Home 9

The Oldest Daughter Remembers 10

Long Weekend 11

After Killing The Dog 14

Fight 15

Love Story 16

Why You Don’t Talk About War 17

Scrapbook: Daughter to Father 18

Candid 19

II The Viewing 21

Funeral Home Photographer 22

Woman with Cats 24

River Around A Village 27

Fear of Spiders 28

Crow Summer 30

- 1 -

The Bus Driver 32

The Bus Driver’s Wife 33

War Story 34

Funeral Quilt at the Highlands Museum 36

Young Woman Without Memory 37

III First Child 42

Camera Obscura 43

Sacred Art 44

Streets of Turin 45

Secondo Among the Crowd 46

The Hunt 48

Secondo Speaks to an Accuser 49

Fever 50

Funeral 51

Secondo’s Questions for the Heavenly Father 52

Mother’s Question to Son 53

Confession: Son to Mother 54

Ysabel 56

This Night 57

- 2 -

Child Born Late in Life 58

Secondo Imagines Heaven 59

Il Faccia del Dio 60

The Repentant Magdalene 61

Questioning the Word: Biblical and Apocryphal Revision in Toni Morrison’s

Jazz and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace 62

- 3 -

There is a history of darkness in the making of images. Wright Morris

- 4 -

I

- 5 -

Getting On With It

Over there he walked the back lines, a boy trying not to think of home. The words of his father distant, unbending: Buck up, boy, buck up. After the war, shocked at being alive, he went home to start over. Twenty years later, the lawn mower caught, he jerked too hard, and he crawled uphill, wounded, again away from the thing that hurt him, and again in the trees every insect and bird— the machine-noise fading—began to chatter. Every leaf hid creatures whose hearts beat steadily while he bled. Buck up, boy, buck up. He would give up pieces of himself to live, he’d done it before, though in a country he’d never even seen in books.

He ripped his belt from his pants and cinched his leg, knew to save his energy, and made it to the door. What he thought then would be his response to sympathy later: Only two toes gone, and not even ones you need. Buck up.

- 6 -

Letters

Dear Mom

Thanks for the chocolate bars. They were warm and sweet, and good as anything I’ve ever eaten. And don’t worry. I’ll send a note every week. This will be our story, and it can’t end until At last the soldier, older and wiser, returns home.

Tell Dad I’m doing my duty and taking care of my feet. Boots don’t last long here, and you know I was always rough on shoes.

Rebecca

Sorry I haven’t written sooner, but I like to think I won’t be here long enough to write, like the time we were first dating and I went to Denver to stay with my Aunt Rill. Remember, I beat most of the postcards home, and we read them together in bed.

I almost forgot to tell you—I found this mutt hanging around camp for food. He’s missing a leg and ugly as sin, but we feed him a scrap when we can. There’s a picture of him on the film I’m sending.

Dear Dad

Over here, you have to be cautious. Even the kids are dangerous, they say. Today a little girl ran up to us, and fell back so suddenly I thought she tripped.

But then I realized [no stanza break]

- 7 -

you don’t trip backward.

Have you gotten any of my letters? It’s hard to tell from what you write in yours. I’m sending a picture of the spring we found. In one of the shots, you’ll see me swimming. I bet it looks like summer camp to you.

Please throw out the letters I send as soon as Mom reads them. Envelopes pile up, beg to be reread and studied over. You know how she worries. No use saving things like they were people.

- 8 -

Four Weeks Home

At night, reporters remind us that death is local— a young father not seen for two days. Kept home from war by bad eyesight. Missing in a town so small you notice, and pitch in to look. He could have surfaced with a story to explain everything, a sudden urge to head to Cincinnati, impulse forgiven by family in exchange for his life. Eleven weeks later, they found him inside his car in a culvert. For a week at least, he’d survived the bleeding and sat pinned beneath the wheel, hidden from view by the sumac and brush. No one could say he hadn’t suffered or he’d gone quickly. What he must have thought while he waited. Likely as not someone would see the sun glint off the silver fender or reflect in the outside mirror. Chances were good he’d be found sleeping, to be taken from the hot interior to tell of his ordeal over a home-cooked meal and a glass of cold milk. He’d be home soon enough to bury his kid’s turtle that died the morning he left. No way around it, a raw deal, to live just long enough to outlast hope.

- 9 -

The Oldest Daughter Remembers

He choked the tractor and rushed into the barn to see the rats I thought were kittens. He said babies or not they were rats, and snuffed them under his heel. Skulls gave way beneath him. He rubbed his feet on some hay to clean them. As he moved across the field, his shoes splayed mud. The tractor belched, wrenched, made the earth red and pungent.

- 10 -

Long Weekend

I The father has covered his daughter with blankets, secured the window locks, and left the door ajar, a ritual he thinks gladdens her to sleep.

In bed, the girl draws in the sound of her father’s voice as he talks downstairs. She waits out the gaps of silence while the shadows in her room urge her to distraction.

She sits up, pauses, stands, inches her way downward with the industry of a bird gathering twigs and string, and listens.

II He talks loudly. As his voice moves through the open window, it creates a line of silence. Beyond it, crickets chirp. In a photo on the mantle, everything’s poised to change: a boy’s smile, the air just before the rain ends, faint light the man remembers as sunrise. He had watched the sun like the face of someone he knew he’d never see again. Drunk on beer and the presence of his buddy who rarely visits, he talks so loudly he’s almost convinced himself he’s alive.

III The first person he killed was a woman. That day, the sun shone before the rain stopped, and he was thinking of the weather, [no stanza break]

- 11 -

that thought with him as he rounded a bend and saw her setting a booby trap. The rain ending. The woman. Some unnamed region in his brain loops the two ceaselessly, and now rain and sun together summon her, the prickling rain, the impatient sun.

IV She stooped on bended knees, brown legs tensed. Then she turned. A simple look backward stopped him— eyebrows raised slightly, lips parted, she responded as if to the sound of her name. When he shot her, it was beautiful, the way she twirled around, falling on her trap. It blew her legs off. She sat stunned and staring.

He waited for her to die, then threw up.

In dreams, when she opens her mouth to scream, it’s a black cave he falls into, screaming.

V Hawk closing the distance, strays invading the yard. Everything threatens.

The dog that snapped at his daughter, he carries to the shed and shoots. The bones brighten in the pond [no stanza break]

- 12 -

where fish nest, jump at random from the water-dark, glide intimately through ribcage, eat anything to survive.

When he catches, cleans, and consumes the fish, when his wife and child sit close and eat the fish he brings them, he is happy.

- 13 -

After Killing The Dog

You think it was easy? I liked the dog fine. But all it takes is once to finish you off. That much I know. My wife doesn’t. The trick is never pause to think. Just carry the bastard out fast. Aim and pull the trigger. End of problem. Oh, the dog, the dog didn’t mean to hurt her. Shit.

- 14 -

Fight

The shit, as they say, is hitting the fan, Rebecca, whether you like it or not. I know you’re not sleeping, so let’s get it out in the open. It’s not my fault she fell off the horse. We’d be lying if we let her think that safety comes with age. This is something we can teach her we know is true, and always true. My God, if you had seen her atop that palomino. It’s not that she wasn’t afraid. Her eyes were wide, I’ll tell you. She hugged that horse between her knees, but sat straight up and leaned into the turns. You know how you practice and sweat to learn something, and one day you stop fumbling and do it? That was her, today, on her first try. I watched as the both of us became strangers. Like anyone, I laughed out loud, and she didn’t look once to me for what to do. Fearless. Good God. So she fell. She wasn’t hurt. Get over it.

- 15 -

Love Story

My wife prefers animals to people. They’re honest, she says, like the wilderness; if a dog bites, he’s given you fair warning. She doesn’t discriminate by cuteness, urges spiders or waterbugs onto newspaper and flings them gently outside. Our mud-colored cat—ugly as hell and meaner—she brushes every morning until he’s sleek as corn silk. The stupid animal doesn’t know to be thankful. His claws grow long and sore, but he belly-growls when she trims them. I’ve watched her wrap the damn thing in a towel and patiently fish out each paw, careful to avoid cutting the quick. Once, to save a dog from hunger, she spent an hour beside the road coaxing him finally into our car. When she carries or feeds an animal, her thin arms tighten, and her face gleams. Sometimes she is beautiful. With a quick blow of her heel, she has killed out of love a baby possum dying in a ditch. What else but love, to know beyond wanting what can’t be saved, to deny what consumes you?

- 16 -

Why You Don’t Talk About War

There’s not a goddamn thing talking about it will do. Here’s a story for you. I was sixteen. Got my daddy’s gun and decided to find something to use it on. I came up on this buzzard, huge thing. This one wouldn’t budge, kept tending the innards of his unrecognizable meal. I shot him. He looked at me, then convulsed, puked every rotten carcass he’d eaten. Nobody wants to see that. Nobody needs it.

- 17 -

Scrapbook: Daughter to Father

You hid it, but I found it anyway. Out of context, photos reveal nothing. Who were the boys tied to bamboo sticks, pieces of them taken and taken home?

Further left than the frame encloses, stands a woman whose dark hair traps the sun. Did you see her watching so long that if you touched her hair, it would almost burn you?

Here, boys pose by the body of a man someone killed. You were the photographer perhaps, or the owner of the helmet in the foreground? Did you notice how the man watches himself becoming a corpse? His eyes travel inward.

And here, the dog that wandered into camp. From the eager way it stares, you fed it. Was it a chore that pleased you, though you were always hungry then? There’s a leanness in your eyes as well.

In a black-and-white, you’re writing, poems maybe, or letters to a woman you loved. Wishing. Forever. Shadows here are never still.

News from home you must have dreaded and needed. Names matched to actions you couldn’t witness. It’s like forever entering a room where people are laughing, and with your coming the laughter fades.

- 18 -

Candid

At forty-nine, he must have thought he was beyond transformation. Exhausted and amazed, he watches the toddler, fresh from her bath, resist her clothes. Screeching, she careens through hallways, pure sensation. As his oldest daughter tries to harness the girl’s hands into the proper places, he returns with a camera, but the girl shifts out of her sister’s arms: I’m naked as a jay bird. She breezes past. Come give Daddy a hug, he laughs, but this time she will not be tricked.

One shot taken as she runs by, and he gets her mid-air. This will be the one he keeps with him. Father and one daughter helpless in the moment. The youngest, suspended. She concentrates and rises from sheer will, a prelude to running beyond the camera’s reach.

- 19 -

II

- 20 -

The Viewing

In his mismatched suit and loafers, my uncle has forgotten his wife’s death. His mind wants to undo what we cannot, but it’s not efficient. Every few minutes he remembers again, as if waking from a nightmare every hour to realize that the worst that can happen has.

Dressed in a blazer he says his wife picked out this morning, he retraces his steps like an animal. He hasn’t forgotten the way lovers— separated by errands—reconnect: a flash of color, recognition of walk or hairstyle would reveal her. Casket, perimeter, outer room, casket. Two trips, three trips, and he’s forgotten. Who’s that? He doesn’t pause for an answer, searches the faces of family as unfamiliar as his wife, swathed in flowers.

Now someone has told him it’s his wife up there, and he stops to ask me if it’s true. I want to tell him that all that came before should console him, that something muted winds out through heart and skin to be born, just as it did for the ones in all the old photographs, now boxed expectantly in the quiet dark.

But he stares, waits. I wait. Surely he’ll start walking again. Perimeter, outer room, casket. But he stares, nods, and I think I begin with I’m sorry.

- 21 -

Funeral Home Photographer

They got my name from the local paper. No one else would do it, and folks need what they need— I’ve learned that much. People pull out stories like photos. Most parents want to remember the baby they had who won’t grow to leave mementos, a life’s clutter that fills rooms.

A pretty blonde told me her dad went room to room looking for her mother. No one wanted to tell him the truth; they left her to do it, she said. She needed me to help, to take photographs so he’d remember his wife is dead. Proof to counter his stories.

Standing over the wife, it was like I was up ten stories and about to fall. She didn’t pose inside her smaller room. The man came in, for something he couldn’t remember. What stories he could tell me, he said, the ones he’d forgotten better than the ones he hadn’t. He needed his wife and went to find her. I wanted to leave

and never go back. Damn the daughter, leaving him no consolation. His mind created stories to help explain why she had left their house in need of her attention, the dust settling in all the rooms, as it was when they had met in 1951. Who was the daughter to force him to remember?

But I took the job to do it. I had to remember to get a wide shot of the coffin so he couldn’t leave thinking she was only sleeping. For once I couldn’t get it out of my head. How many stories have I been told, in how many rooms lined with flowers that no one needs,

and with the stench of flowers? Everyone needs to know what I see. If I told them, they’d only remember, so I say Not much. I tell them that in quiet rooms I do my job, nothing more—I take pictures and leave. [no stanza break]

- 22 -

Nothing could satisfy, but they want stories and ask if I like what I do; I say Not much. I lie to everyone.

Folks talk to keep from thinking. I leave a room and stories trail behind me. I kissed the wife’s cheek once— to remember for the husband. People need what they need.

- 23 -

Woman with Cats . . . what, anyway, was that sticky infusion . . ./ that poetry by which I lived?

At nightfall she walked to her mailbox. As a car drove past, someone threw a cat from the window. Her father always said anything not human belongs outside, so she’d never harbored a dog or cat, but she cooed on instinct, enticed it from the weedy ditch and gave up a box, a towel, a wind-up clock to simulate a mother’s heartbeat. And then her solitude. At first, inside the handmade shelter, the cat hummed itself to sleep, but soon enough sought to touch her, wedged between her ankles, warm hollow between her shoulder blades, or curled into her hair and plied with insistent paws, dreaming of its own beginnings. Of course,

she loved it and hated it: the haughty languoring in the sunlit patch she noticed was fading the carpet; the gleefully obsessive swatting of every loose object off every surface. And then there was a day, let’s say, when depressed by the evening news, she thought if she were God she’d explode the whole damn planet. She stretched out leanly on the carpet, watched as her hand darkened, then lightened, a path in the fibers, then in another movement wiped it out, over and over until her fingertips tingled. From the floor, she noticed a pen jutting over the table’s edge, so perfectly teetering, defying the flat finality of the ground below. Raising her arm so her fingers would reach, she tapped lightly and the pen turned—an inky needle of a compass—pointed to the left but stayed put, and again, another touch, [no stanza break]

- 24 -

and it rolled slightly, paused, then fell.

Before the end of the year, she decided the tabby needed company, and three’s an odd number so she made it four. Soon she knew the only way to live was to give yourself over to something that can’t speak but makes demands.

She eats a solitary dinner in the bathroom while cats hide, hunker, sleep, yawn, feed, mingle, stalk, dash wildly at invisible prodding, and loiter in every niche, the bed and couches, desk and dresser, and spaces beneath and between. The soft scurrying, the whisper of padded feet, make her lonely and she opens the door, ascends to the familiarity of cats, crawls on her hands and knees to feed at their bowls, first admiring the precision, the delicate lapping that somehow satisfies. Her tongue dips into the salty protein, dissembles it, moves it. A bit of food falls from her tongue and she resists the urge to bring it to her lips with her hands, and again laps at the viscous sheen, curls her tongue and each time gets closer, some food on her tongue drops, and again, until she times it right and takes it in, lies back and sleeps. When she wakes she thinks a cat is purring, realizes it is she, as it stops. She wants to get it back, listens to the low rumbling and mewing of cats: Abyssinia, Siamese, Balinese, fox-like Somali, American short hair, all the non-pedigrees, including the brown tabby rescued from the brush.

When asked, she says she just likes cats, but their hair on her blue suit comforts, and driving home she anticipates the happy circling around her ankles. Surrounded, [no stanza break]

- 25 -

remembering the joyful idling, she tries to recall it, strains at the throat, mute but hopeful, as one who has been away, standing in the midst of past friends, yearns to slip into the old language.

- 26 -

River Around A Village

Grandfathers could not save the village, women could not save the village with children, beautiful dragonflies, hovering at their ankles. The children felt it most, bellies full with hunger. Soldiers who took pictures of the young ones and let them wear their hats— the colors of trees—surely they would not kill, so we had the children lie down. They obeyed, a precious river, guarding our homes, fighting also in their fathers’ absence. The tanks rolled close, stopped. My youngest stood up and ran to me. Even before birth, she had squirmed.

We named her Chim, a bird still enclosed but ready for flight. Her sisters stayed. The mothers wanted to surround themselves with the sweet warm breath. It is that single moment before the movement we grieve for, the waiting out of the last instant something could be saved. Suspended, our breath welled within our bodies. One man stood quietly, looked as if he knew me until men’s words punctured the air, quick jabs. We almost moved to scoop up children, cup them in our hands like water brought to the lips in delight. But then a rumble inside the snouted machines, a lurch forward, and the river cried, as if to replenish itself. Thinking I could blind memory, I turned away. My little bird pulled at my legs, trying to lift us both in flight. She might have screamed, we might all have been screaming then, but the machines roared. Little bones held up the beasts a moment, one moment.

- 27 -

Fear of Spiders

No particular reason. One day not, the next, afraid. Size didn’t matter. Little or huge, they could come from anywhere to crawl across your face while you slept, leave a bite so next morning you’d know. My father said it was a shame, a crying shame, a boy of twelve afraid of something he could squash in an instant. He brought me books and magazines, borrowed encyclopedias from my grandparents, and told me no man’s afraid of what he understands. Like boneless sorcerers, I learned, spiders conjure what they need from within themselves. Their functional webs hidden everywhere, intricate traps in trees and grass, corners of rooms and even water. Exotic spinners, and numerous: the Labyrinth spider, the Triangle, Platform, Filmy Dome, Sheet Weaver. Some fly by forming the liquid silk into nets to catch the air. Others sulk beneath ground in crafted holes and let their prey come to them. One night, they crawled inside my spine, and I woke screaming, clawing at my shirt. Get out of there! My father came to my room, and I thought I was in for it, but he sat with me until I slept. Next day as I tore weeds from the garden bed, he yelled for me to come and see what he had found. As I got closer, I saw him knock a clump of mud from the house. Come here and look, son. He waved away the mud-daubers and pointed to the ground. As he exploded the catacombs, orange paralyzed spiders tumbled out like stars. They store them for food. We could leave their nests alone, he figured, since daubers don’t sting like wasps. He smiled, clasped his hand on my shoulder, and waited. In the remnants of their prison-house, the spiders lay shriveled. Around us, humming insects trolled the yard. More nests lined the eaves of our house, [no stanza break]

- 28 -

and spider webs glistened in the grass, exposed by dew. I looked up at my father and tried to smile. Neither of us could help the other.

- 29 -

Crow Summer

It’s another summer when dinner-table talk of crows rustles like their black wings. They cackle from the tree line, pinion cobs between their beaks, tear through husks and burst kernels. Juice glistens. All day the man pounds the air with bullets and all night beats out a newer, better plan. His wife watches from a window as he and their son-in-law drop bird after bird.

Fallen crows rotting in the ditch, or thrown to the cat don’t intimidate. They always come back. Now at the sight of the gun, they fly, and as soon as the man turns away, they tense to return. The look-out perches in a tree nearby, keeps guard while the others eat.

When he caws, the birds lift lazily, a grudging retreat as the heart often makes, or the seat of the will that we call the heart.

Corn the man never liked much anyway— that one proclamation and he ignores the crows, concerns himself with other interests.

The woman leaves the house, stares down at the field intently, as if walking into a room and not yet remembering the reason.

The look-out seems to smirk as she approaches, a toothy, cartoonish smile that infatuates her. The plunderings of crows rasp dryly as husks.

Inside, the man moves from room to room— the kitchen fresh as towels reserved for guests. The refrigerator sits ready with makings.

[no stanza break]

- 30 -

Outside his wife provides a single desperate offering, a small mound of corn, husked and even silked, given over to crows, which they gulp down, but then move stealthily back to the bigger field, so she seeks out the rifle cradled in the cabinet.

The heft of it against her cheek and shoulder pleases. For days, she shoots at the guardian crow until she surprises them all and hits the mark,

fittingly close to the heart. She winds rope around the bird’s rough claws and hangs it from a stake, a dangling warning

at the garden’s edge. With another unspoken understanding, she knows now this will be her task each summer, one she will complete gladly, like anything done well.

- 31 -

The Bus Driver

For twenty-some years, five days a week, twice a day, I drove that route. I paid attention, you know? They’d get on in the morning, the little ones with their sack lunches, again in the afternoon clutching the graded papers and pictures they’d made in class. While the kids streamed in, a few stood beside me and let the fan slice up their voices. I knew the little ones best. They stayed close. You know how it is, right? Older ones gotta have their privacy. About age twelve or so, they stray back to the middle, and then each year they move farther back.

Anyway, like the sign said, safety first, right? I didn’t hear or see her. Probably kneeled to tie her shoe. I bet her folks warned her about that, you know? Christ.

There was this feeling of more than air between the tire and the road. Not twenty feet from her house, her mother screaming. What else was there to do? Her knee turned out, away from me.

Her face. That not-look. I stooped over, put my mouth on hers to seal the air in, but the mother, the kids in the windows, I could hear each one, like this live thing coming from all directions.

- 32 -

The Bus Driver’s Wife

Almost a year now, it’s all he is. I mean, to him everything is alive because that girl, bless her, isn’t. I watch him watching. The ceiling, the wall, the flowers. I can’t tell him about the impatiens I planted along the drive. Even the trees scare him. Yesterday they crept along the fence, he says, and today they’re near the walk. I pull the blinds until they angle across the trunks, so they’re only shadows of trees, but he shifts to the slats, says they pulse like gills, like gills he says. I scare him, too, I know. I’ve seen him try to match his breathing to mine— he holds his breath until I exhale then starts it up again, as if everything would only breathe in unison, as if this one huge heartbeat could put things to right.

- 33 -

War Story

He takes pictures with the camera his father sent with a note: This is so you can send pictures home. He likes landscapes, aerials with smoke rising from squares of brown and green, like cotton escaping a quilt from home. On ground, he tries to capture the humid air, a hot-day ripple over pavement, if there were pavement. In photos, helicopters hang a four-bladed silence, and tall grass leans toward the stolid jungle. In another, a child shot by mistake. The curve of her teeth makes her smile through the hole in her cheek.

Each day he eats, sleeps restlessly, one day volunteers to make a jump. Pictures taken in a cramped plane— his own boot, shadowed, plods on a sunny field. With the others he crouches, as in huddles before and during many games, preparing as in childhood— glass sliver taken from flesh, or a needle-stick, or something as simple as a first haircut, when you arrived on the other end of it, thinking That wasn’t so bad. He smiles.

He approaches the sunlit exit in the plane’s side and steps out with easy motion, as if stepping off a curb or the wooden weight of a diving board— a concrete curb, a plank quivering with absence.

Smiling, he turns, faces downward, [no stanza break]

- 34 -

spiraling with purpose. The air cools and warms the way the water changes when freewheeling children dive a pushing weight in familiar lakes.

Above, chutes open and pull men up, and farther up, more men jump. They all wait beyond seeing when his unopened pack drops past them. He falls past the other jumpers, who then watch, too. It’s the common dream of flying revealed only in sleep or as sleep approaches, and leaning into it he thinks Yes, so easy, I remember now.

- 35 -

Funeral Quilt at the Highlands Museum

She knew something is better than nothing so she pieced this quilt with all she had left— sheets from their beds, Sunday clothes, scraps of shirts they wore the day the search-boat hooks found them, and they were laid on the bank like rugs stretched in the sun to dry. She wondered what happened—maybe one thought he could save his brother but couldn’t. She knew too well what’s done is done no matter how, so she cut stars and Dresdens, secured the stitching, thought of the time they scattered the table with tissue-paper flowers, and the night they were warm with fever and she, with a wet cloth, cooled them. Each night as she cradled the sewing frame, pulling each stitch tight, the clean squirming smell of them tiptoed around her. When she finished, she might have forgotten, walked to their beds to tuck them snug, then raged against the neat and silent room.

- 36 -

Young Woman Without Memory

1 In one day she took ten showers, forgetting each in minutes. The strangers who come to care for her measure days, fear the waste lonely places they think she now inhabits. They tape lists in every room, accumulate details. Get up. Take shower. Eat. Check off each as you finish.

2 On a bus moving through its route, she sits in back, watches an old woman whose body weaves with movement as she pushes a needle through fabric held taut in a wooden circle. When the doors whoosh, she forgets the woman, and where it is she is supposed to go, until she sees the paper in her hands directing her to work, down and up streets whose names she reads over and over as passengers talk. That is where the cop was killed. That is where I lived years ago, on a street named Ithaca, no less.

She notices an old woman sewing despite the bustle of the bus, and admires the steady jabs that puncture the cloth.

3 The strangers wonder how she can enjoy her youth. They know if they allowed her to drive, no journey would be the same: her own street explorable, [no stanza break]

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the lines of the road directing her, putting her at ease. No look back to wave good-bye, no returning for something forgotten in haste.

More enticing than a husband she would meet for the first time each morning, or an unfamiliar child’s familiar needing, are the weeds that shush at the field’s edge, the distance of the sky collapsing behind the blanket flowers lining her balcony.

4 At a yard sale she buys a black-and-white photograph, framed. A boy chases a chicken on a cloudy day. The sun breaks through, a lattice-work of light. Leaves blur as they fall—others take shape on the grass. The frantic bird stretches his frilled neck forward and pauses, one claw firm against the ground, one mid-stride. And the boy, too, tensed: legs and arms bent as he leans into his run, short hair standing, pants and shirt wrinkled with movement.

The woman unframes the picture, tacks it to the wall and sketches a mural of the world cut off by the camera. The top of a tree unsevers, blossoms out of the photo onto the flat paint. A hill sprawls again into the distance, the edge of a road lines its way as far as her walls will let it and almost encircles the room. She works in perpetual imprecision, [no stanza break]

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using stray bits of whatever’s at hand. Each time she enters, she begins in delight, what she sees outside the only template: in autumn, leaves in flux, buds in springtime, and ice thorning the trees in winter. In the center, colorless, the boy and the bird are always running with urgency, like the woman on her best days, when no snips of images materialize to move obscurely as shadows, and she can continue outward, as a stretch of white in a snow-drenched valley reflects light, and you must stop and simply look.

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III

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In 1898, Secondo Pia became the first to photograph the shroud of Turin and, thus, the first to reveal the cloth image as an apparent negative, rather than positive, imprint, which suggested the shroud could not be a painting, as some had claimed.

***

“Between this face and us there is no human intermediary.” Paul Claudel, 1935

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First Child

Secondo’s wife sits in a doorway. From a distance, she is a maiden enlivening a fresco, the yellow paint of her house flaking on either side of her. She plaits her dark hair, weaving each section as deftly as she handles thread. The braid drapes over her shoulder as if to protect her, lovingly, like the man who watches his pregnant wife from the window. Secondo has the look of someone who asks why there are no more miracles, then receives one. The woman rests her hands on her belly. It is as if she holds the sun— the light warms the tops of her hands, and beneath them the infant pulses. Children play tug-of-war in the street, over a line marked in dirt, an easy division.

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Camera Obscura

Faces everywhere inside the cathedral— the solemn cherubs guarding the altar, the priests, Secondo’s own countenance— all shining hazy as ghosts in the polished wood, in the glass enclosing the shroud. On the linen, the calm face Secondo stares at intently. I must do a good job, like any other, do it well and move on. He thinks only this during the eighteen-minute exposure, not knowing that for some Christ would soon surface, prompted by his hand.

That night, Secondo sleeps only in short bursts, waking each time as a sleepwalker in morning, uneasy, soil on his feet and the front door open. When he dreams, old men surround him, talking, enchanted with the red flower they open in his chest with scalpels, peel away his skin, take notes, drink. From childhood his mother’s voice whispers to him: Hold the crystal to the candelight, Secondo, until your lashes frame it, and look to see what you see. Fear moves through him the way a boat sends an arc of water rolling outward.

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Sacred Art

All day I waited for the crowds to leave. The people have great faith, but even the faithful rejoice when proof is offered them. They talked quietly, and pointed at the altar where the angels knelt on either side of the shroud. When the doors opened, few left and more entered. I could see glimpses of people walking past in the piazza outside, apparitions headed to unknown places. The noise of the crowd mingled briefly with the whispers inside. Doors opened, closed. Loud, hush. Loud, hush. Rhythmic as a heartbeat. Perhaps the very sounds God himself hears rising up from the earth.

In the evening, the quiet welcomed us as we entered the Duomo. Carlino and I did not speak as we placed the crystal screen in front of the shroud to protect it, then, after fixing the lights, I climbed again onto the scaffold to take the photograph. What did I think during the exposure, looking down on what could be the son of God? I could not think. I was as a child waiting for a ripe melon to be cut open— the air was like that.

In the darkroom, the solution urged the face to appear, and what I can only call my soul emerged, as water—over time—wears away the earth and rocks. My first thought: God is with us. Here is proof!

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Streets of Turin “Particularly wounding for Pia . . . were malicious insinuations that he had deliberately faked his photograph and that it was all just a hoax.” Ian Wilson The Blood and the Shroud

One man jeers as Secondo passes: That is the man, the charlatan. It is blasphemy.

In butchers’ windows, in neat rows, the heads of calves plead to be bought, carnations and lemons between their lips. Rows of limes and tomatoes in wooden carts undulate in the bright sun, oranges shining from within.

Here nothing is certain, no prices set down in granite, if you care to barter and the vendor feels generous. Secondo, newly in love with facts, shares them as he selects the fruit. Did you know oranges are actually berries named hesperidium?

Sitting at the Café San Carlo, he watches the men and women in their easy conversations. How wonderful, he thinks, to sit and speak of everything insignificant.

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Secondo Among the Crowd “ ‘Memory’ is the only writing that Pia left about his work.” Excerpt from the official Shroud website

1 It was thought to photograph the Relic . . . I offered myself to do that work . . . .

2 He had wanted to see the shroud, standing close to others who waited eagerly outside the duomo, to let his excitement mingle with theirs as together they grew closer to the cloth displayed beneath glass. A man recognized Secondo and spoke loudly, Why is it we cannot see for ourselves what your camera shows, Secondo?

3 I have never had the pretensions of ‘inventing’ any special method nor used any tricks, like some people wish to believe.

4 Some stand with their arms crossed, heads tilted, certain they will see and have their doubts proven. Others talk excitedly— nodding and gesturing, each confirming the other, knowing they will see and have their faith proven.

From a distance, he watches them day after day gather like birds, easily scattered and quick to return.

5 Closed in the dark room . . . I felt a strong emotion when . . . I first saw appearing the Holy Face on the plate . . . .

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6 One day a woman recognizes Secondo as he crosses the piazza. She lays her hand on his sleeve and smiles, You have shown the world he exists. It is a gift from God.

7 My worry was great and deep . . . because I had to photograph a subject that I ha[d] never been able to see.

8 Some days, though he stares at the people in their dark coats, they fall from focus. He thinks of the man’s face— the one the crowd waits to see— and it appears before him. He wonders what it would mean if he were only a man who had learned the ugliness of the world and could not escape it, was dying of it, yet lay so peacefully he almost smiled.

9 I could from that moment be sure about the good result of my enterprise . . . . I hope that my loyal declarations have destroyed these hypotheses that I am believed to have done . . . .

10 At home, Secondo finds a favorite sequence of photos of a horse in motion, calls his wife to him and asks, The horse is flying, Ysabel, isn’t it?

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The Hunt

He is young in age only, my father told my mother, and we left the next day. The truffles shine like pearl, Papa said as we walked, and they are as precious.

When we rested, Grandfather told me Your Papa sniffs out truffles better than my hounds. I yearned for nightfall, when the earth-drenched musk of truffles revealed themselves. That night, the moon refused to materialize, but the hunters emerged with their dogs and scurried into the woods. The quiet clung to us like mist.

Beside a clump of beech trees, he began to dig, and soon pointed at the shallow hole. Inside, luminous, were the pale truffles, clenched around the tree roots. Papa laughed, That is where the moon hides, Secondo. He had found the moon, and I believed.

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Secondo Speaks to an Accuser

Look here at these photos of a horse running— the first, unremarkable, what the eye expects. But the second, third, fourth: a horse in flight!

Let us say that what you speak of me is fact. Do you really wish it so? Think of the child who one day knows nothing of the cruelty of the world, then begins to suspect it. Think of the moment of epiphany, the first large need withheld, or the first hurtful truth spoken with glee. Would you have us all be children, toppling finally into certainty?

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Fever

For the first time, fear came into the yellow house the boy had lived in seven years. A neighbor-woman helped his mother lift his father into a tin tub. Secondo followed the line of his body: thin legs; long fingers, and fingernails shining with yellow half-moons; arms that had carried sacks of feed and a child at once; brown hair curled against his forehead, darker with sweat. He watched his father float above the water, waited for him to break the surface as they lowered him into the tub. The strange woman sang to his mother, It is malaria, the bad air. The woman’s lip quivered. Tears dropped from his mother’s eyes: God will save him. She poured more liquid. It flowed over his father’s ribs, an awful waterfall.

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Funeral

For two nights Secondo slept, and each night was certain the morning would bring his father, who would again undo the curtains and wake him to the chores they would complete together.

He emptied of hope as the house filled with people, words of solace flying from their mouths to leak out beneath the door and through windows, weightless as air—when he followed them, they were gone. Outside he watched the chickens strut in the dust. His father had showed him how to kill one quickly by twisting the life from it like water from a cloth. Thinking of it comforted him— the heft of the live bird his father wanted him to feel so he would understand the sacrifice.

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Secondo’s Questions for the Heavenly Father

When I am lonely, why won’t you comfort me as any good father would?

We are told Christ did not rush to help his friend Lazarus, instead let him first feel the coldness of four-days-death. Is it the son acted in his father’s image? Will you eventually come and call us out of our dark cave?

Would you have faith be as the weeds in our garden that when uprooted come back all the stronger? How do the weeds know to return— not to rest peacefully dormant— that there would be air to breathe and sun to nourish them?

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Mother’s Question to Son

They will remember your name, Secondo, for good or ill, and why not? Can you not see what you have done for them? Your photograph shows the image of Christ imprinted by God. Isn’t that what you thought as well? Remember the photographs you saw in the papers, just before you bought your first camera? The horse and rider halted though taut with speed, suspended above the ground while running, as some had believed. You called it a miracle. You said there are things in front of us we cannot see until we are meant to. What has changed?

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Confession: Son to Mother

It is a picture of a man imprinted on cloth. Beyond that, I cannot say. Why does that disappoint you? You know as well as I the nature of proof. You did not need to see in order to believe what was unmaking my father as he lay beneath the ground in his good suit. You watched his portrait as if it were the man himself. For years you stared and urged, but his gaze would not follow you around the room. Though you stayed inside for months, his absence opened like a field and you ran through it. The mountains rose up: We exist. Here we are. The peonies, with their gaudy heads, taunted: We breathe and live. What you needed to know, you could not. A huge opening, the sky remained blue and silent.

Much the same for me. A photograph that will not speak. An imprint of Christ immortalized by light as he moved between worlds? I cannot know.

I am a liar, a saint, a tool of God? How can I be all three? As a child, I asked you But who made God? It is a sin to ask such questions, you told me, but what good is belief that springs from desperation or ignorance? The people go to see, the crowd winding round more steady than their faith. [no stanza break]

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What of those who claimed needing proof was sacrilege and now run to witness it? How can they be certain it is the son of God?

Surely you can understand. Think of how you’ve fed on Papa’s image, flat and framed, the one you led us to each night. Look at the photos of you and Papa, hanging side-by-side. You turn toward him as if to a liege. And those years he looked out over us— when did he ever tower over us the way you situated his picture then? What does that picture tell of the man, that he came from Albi—the smallest details— his hatred of olives, fascination with spiders looming their miracles in the corners of our rooms? What truth displayed in the two people staring in my study? Even the earrings you wear there—a gift of jade, bird earrings from Papa, given in youth—hover below your ear lobes and cannot break free.

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Ysabel

For two weeks, his wife watches. He wakes from fitful sleep, takes a few bites of minestra, a sip or two of coffee, and stares, rubbing a finger over the linen tablecloth. She tells him, You are a good man, an honest man, but his eyes shine too brightly, underscored with darkness.

The third week, while he dreams, citrus tingles her lips, blood oranges stain her fingertips, and still she pierces the skins with her nails, coaxes them away from the jewels within. She consumes every piece of fruit.

Next morning she tells him truthfully, We have no fruit, niente. Could you go to market?

His leaving gives her hope. Other miracles have occurred while they were apart. In the vibrant streets, in the clarity

of autumn, where the duomo stands clear against the sky like a high relief, he will find, and return, her old Secondo.

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This Night

Complete calm inside the house. So much quiet I could believe nothing happens outside that doesn’t make sense. In the trees, consistent lowing of a dove, the same dove of nights past, I like to think, as if such comforts are selected for us and arrive without fail when needed. Nothing must be done. I look forward to the warm bedclothes that now hold my wife. Our oldest child loves me enough to visit, lies now in her old bed. Down the hall, our youngest slumbers— you can only call it slumbering, the blissful weighted sleep of the very young, secure in their ignorance. Our lives this night smooth as an obsidian pond left untouched by wind. The steadfast dove chimes to remind me of this world and call me to it. Everything we believe is true sometimes. I dream unremarkably the entire common night.

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Child Born Late in Life

My father once told me I was his new religion: he imagined me and I was given. He said I gave him God again, that they were two old friends who meet to share stories of their children, and I gave him another one to tell. He laughed when I told him that when I was seven, Jesus was my secret friend. He had wild brown hair and knobby knees. We swapped aggies, played boccie, and fished.

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Secondo Imagines Heaven

Oh, Ysabel, here’s the best part. We listen to God’s confession. He’s sorry for acting like the guilty cousin who never comes to visit, and he regrets, of course, death and disease and hunger, the obvious things. But death, we console Him (having died and survived), is necessary, given the limited space of the planet. Then He regrets that, and speaks of enlarging it, but we dissuade Him. As we enter, He photographs us. He, too, enjoys photography (after all, He let us invent it), and keeps a scrapbook of history. I show Him the image I have of you, the one I made in Piedmont, the hills in the background. Guess which picture he shares with me, his favorite?

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Il Faccia del Dio

I was so very tired, Ysabel, from setting up the equipment, and the lights failed. I had to climb down and then back up the scaffolding to replace the bulbs.

Then, in the darkroom, as I watched for the picture to develop, it felt as if the whole world could only wait, breath held in the anteroom of heaven.

Even the cool and quiet room could not steady my hands as I submerged the plate. I was afraid my skills had failed me, and then it appeared—whose I do not know, but a child’s face in its mother’s womb shows less calm. Remember how we so envied and loved the peace on Chiara’s face as she lay at your breast, three days old but the look of a sage, content in her secret knowledge? The same in his countenance, and more. I hurried home, knowing your excitement would match mine.

Inside their homes people slept unknowing. At that moment, I thought I knew what I had witnessed, and I wanted to yell out, see the dark windows brighten.

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The Repentant Magdalene a painting by Georges de La Tour

Secondo thumbs through paintings in a book about the life of Christ, and returns to Magdalene.

She sits illumined only by candlelight, her chin nestled in the palm of her right hand, the other touching a human skull that rests on a closed book.

Despite her stillness, the intensity of her thought creates the candle’s flame and causes it to flare. Her knowledge— if it comes—will come not from the room reflected in the mirror’s face, nor from the words now pressed between the book’s pages like forgotten mementoes, but from inside herself.

It is the shadow Secondo most admires— the bottom half of the painting thick with it— and the painter’s understanding that darkness will draw the eye to light.

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Questioning the Word: Biblical and Apocryphal Revision in Toni Morrison’s

Jazz and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace

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“What is the difference whether it is a wife or mother, it is still Eve the temptress that we must beware of in any woman.” Augustine, Letter 2431

Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood have both said—justifiably—that they dislike labels when they are used to pigeonhole writers for the labelers’ own purposes. Without exploring that issue in minutiae—a worthwhile examination but not my focus here— suffice it to say that the fiction of both women suggests each is concerned about hierarchy as a factor in contemporary society, which includes not only social class and race but also gender as a determinant for both granting and denying privilege. Whatever term one wishes to use to describe such interests, Morrison and Atwood, like many contemporary writers (men as well as women), populate their novels with characters who are often empowered (usually men) or disempowered (usually women) by the social import placed on their gender.

Contemporary attitudes often have their roots in ancient traditions, many of which are illustrated in religious and secular literature. Regardless of ethnicity or religious leaning, few could deny that much of the way we perceive our world stems directly or indirectly from the Bible. Since the time of Augustine when monotheism took hold, Christianity has upheld a belief in a saving Father with little regard for woman's place in religion

(Armstrong 50). Writers who wish to revise literary traditions, of course, must begin

with the texts of the past and, thus, sometimes logically work within and against the

Christian narrative, an authoritative text steeped in language spoken largely by and about males. Such narrative has contemporary residual effects. Gail Corrington Streete, religious studies scholar at Rhodes College, examines the way biblical texts treat

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assertive behavior in women as aberrant, noting that “[L]ike every enduring literary

symbol, especially those of biblical literature which have also entered the iconography of the sacred, the Great Whore has a long heritage” (4). Even those not well-versed in the

Bible associate many of their ideas about gender with it (accurately or otherwise,

consciously or otherwise), particularly the Old Testament. These stereotypes—of both

men and women—are often considered valid because they are, it is sometimes argued,

“recorded” in the Christian text.

Atwood has observed this influence in the attitudes of contemporary writers who often

“polarize morality by gender” (“Spotty”). Indeed, Atwood’s Alias Grace and Morrison’s

Jazz seem to focus on the “feminine” topic of relationships, and both novels provide

apparently happy endings; however, such endings are enticing and believable mainly to

two kinds of readers: those accustomed to surface reading in which the author can be

taken at her word, and those who view such fiction as meeting the requirements for

women's writing. 1 At their simplest, Jazz and Alias Grace merit a close look as masterful, paradoxical endeavors which demand that readers demand more: from writers, from themselves as readers, from history.

More complexly, both Alias Grace and Jazz extend and develop the kind of biblical revision Alicia Suskin Ostriker has observed in contemporary women’s poetry; such revision is a daring pursuit because the writer “who tinkers with biblical narrative puts herself in a position like Salman Rushdie . . . pitting her own imagination against orthodoxy” (121). Up to the challenge, both Morrison and Atwood attack the Christian

narrative that colors our thinking about sex—biological fact—and transforms it into

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gender—culturally assigned roles based on sex—much as religious figures have

transformed spirituality into a set of narrative rules privileging the masculine, which they

attempt to justify as being the word and will of God.

Examining Jazz and Alias Grace together not only better illumines each work’s

aesthetic intricacy but also reveals that such revision—done by two diverse,

contemporary women writers—is not an isolated phenomenon in current fiction. The

biblical revisions undertaken by Morrison and Atwood speak to ways in which

individuals might live as spiritual beings within a hierarchical religious system, as well as

current notions of women as writers who must situate themselves within a largely male-

centered literary tradition. Perhaps it is that daunting task which has spurred the large

number of historical novels written by women in the last few years. 2 It may be that such

writers (men included) see a need to revise or at least fill in history as it has been

recorded. In Atwood’s case, the historical documents describing Grace Marks were

many but conflicting, as historical “records” often are. 3 Toni Morrison’s latest book,

Paradise, provided her with the opportunity to, among other things, delve into the

personal lives of people usually ignored or slighted historically. Since many have spent

time exploring Atwood and Morrison as feminists, it should be said that many of the

strategies both women employ are feminist in that gender exists, as it must, as a societal

determinant. 4 Jazz and Alias Grace are meta-fictional novels that foreground essentialist ideas of gender by highlighting, among other things, the unreliable nature of such stereotypes, as well as the narrative mode which often seeks to represent and imitate traditional hierarchies.

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The novels which are the focus of this project subscribe to the Gnostic idea of spirituality, reintroducing feminine imagery—figures of speech comparing God with any feminine element—similar to that which had vanished from orthodox Christian tradition about the time the Gnostics' beliefs were deemed heretical (Pagels Gnostic Gospels 57,

63). Such revision reverses the method found in the Bible, in which God is described as male, and female imagery is rarely used and then primarily by God himself. 5

Morrison’s Jazz In an interview with Zia Jaffrey, Morrison explains that in Jazz she attempted to

“explode the idea of an all-knowing, omnipotent, totalitarian, authorial voice.” For

Morrison, Christianity presents itself as molding material because of its “vagueness”

(Ruas 117). It is apparent that her interest has evolved more specifically in her last two

novels, both of which explore the Fall from the Garden of Eden, though in very different

ways. Paradise, Morrison asserts, is “built on exclusion. Chosen people always being

those people chosen by God to exclude other people” (Time Online interview). Before

page one, Jazz reveals an interest in biblical tinkering, one which Morrison suggests is

still necessary. 6

Jazz follows a black couple, Joe and Violet Trace, who have moved to Harlem from the South in the late 1920s. Joe has had an affair with young Dorcas, whom he is accused of murdering (though that’s up for debate), and the story begins when Violet storms the funeral and attempts to “cut” the dead girl. Though the storyline and central characters clearly pique interest, it is the narrator who distracts the reader, and the prefatory excerpt which starts the novel introduces a duality soon seen in the narrator. The book begins

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with an excerpt not from the Bible but from an apocryphal text—the Gnostic Gospels— found buried in Nag (Naj) Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945. The Gospels consist of thirteen leather-bound papyrus books containing fifty-two texts, described within the texts themselves as secret gospels. Many of the Gospels replicate some of the same sayings as found in the New Testament but situated in different contexts; the more radical passages cannot be recognized in any orthodox Christian tradition and many critique traditional

Christian beliefs, such as the Resurrection (Pagels Gnostic Gospels xv).

The Jazz epigraph suggests the larger implications of the novel about biblical narrative, which casts men as the main characters of a story laid out by God. Thus, the epigraph sets a "masculofeminine" (51) 7 tone for the novel and adopts a gnostic point of view by disrupting gender delineations. By using an excerpt from "Thunder, Perfect

Mind," Morrison prods the reader to associate the female voice with text that clearly resonates with biblical rhythms: "I am the name of the sound/ and the sound of the name.

I am the sign of the letter/ and the designation of division." This small excerpt from the

Nag Hammadi texts does not, of course, reveal the feminine imagery; however, once the reader becomes intrigued with the mystery of the narrator of the novel, she will likely look back to the epigraph for clues and, eventually, read the poetic text in its entirety (or at least become familiar with the general tenets of Gnosticism). There, the feminine is obviously present, described as a "she" composed of opposing characteristics: "I am she whose wedding is great,/ and I have not taken a husband./ I am the midwife and she who does not bear./ I am the solace of my labor pains./ I am the bride and the bridegroom"

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("Thunder" 1). Thus, though the voice often seems predominantly feminine, lines of sex

are not clearly drawn, and Morrison enlarges on the Gnostic use of gender conflation.

Similarly, the location and identity of Jazz's narrator are difficult if not impossible to

determine. He/she 8 is an amalgam of many types of literary narrators and embodies all

of them at various points in the text: omniscient and limited omniscient, reliable and

unreliable, male and female. The narrator is not an impartial observer, often blaming

individuals for their own problems or showing concern, both unpredictably; she/he

reveals that he/she used to hate Golden Gray but now worries about him (151). At times,

the narrator seems privy to information denied the characters themselves, but it is clear

that she/he is not always "well-informed" (137), often prefacing statements with the word

"maybe" (142), and this uncertainty is a source of frustration:

I have been careless and stupid and it infuriates me to discover (again) how unreliable I am . . . Now I have to think this through, carefully, even though I may be doomed to another misunderstanding. I have to do it and not break down . . . I have to alter things. (160, 161)

The blatantly indiscriminate manner in which the narrator "imagines" (120) some things and changes others calls attention to the unreliability of narrative. Both Morrison and

Atwood remind the reader that narrative is an unreliable mode of discourse as quirky as its teller. They do this so that the reader will begin to think about the Bible as a narrative, and the religious themes that they manipulate seem plausible, necessary alternatives.

Clearly, Morrison is operating within the Gnostic tradition as the Gospels provide many diverse viewpoints, new twists on the orthodox texts, just as her novel does. 9 The

Testimony of Truth, for example, narrates the story of Eden from the serpent's point of

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view (Pagels Gnostic xvii). Trimorphic Protennoi ("The Triple-formed Primal Thought") exhibits a similar revisionary content:

I am androgynous. [I am both Mother and] Father, since [I copulate] with myself . . . [and with those who love] me . . . I am the Womb [that gives shape] to All . . . I am Me . . . the glory of the Mother. (55)

Many Gnostics believed that the story of Eve's creation upholds an androgynous creation

(56), and Morrison aligns her narrator with this belief, providing he/she with both male and female characteristics, depending on the part of the story being described.

Discussing Violet, the narrator says "This notion of rest, it's attractive to her, but I don't think she would like it. They are all like that, these women" (16); labeling women as

"other" suggests the narrator identifies with men or is a man. Soon after, though, she/he describes what it is like at the beautician's:

you get to lie back instead of lean forward; you don't have to press a towel in your eyes to keep the soapy water out because at a proper beauty parlor it drains down the back of your head into the sink. (18)

This meticulously detailed description suggests that the narrator has experienced such hair-washing first-hand and could be a woman, as most men in the late 1920s did not go to beauticians. Morrison does not, however, simply eradicate masculinity from religion and replace it with the feminine; instead, she provides "clues" which jibe with traditional roles of both genders and withholds gender information:

. . . . but if you have been left standing, as I have, while your partner overstays at another appointment, or promises to give you exclusive attention after supper, but is falling asleep just as you have begun to speak—well, it can make you inhospitable (9) . . . It is terrible when there is absolutely nothing to do or worth doing except to lie down and hope when you are naked she won't laugh at you. Or that he, holding your breasts, won't wish they were some other way. (63)

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Because the identifying pronoun has been omitted, it is obvious that, in the first quote, the writing is designed to conceal the narrator's sex. Morrison’s latest novel Paradise also begins with an excerpt from the Gnostic Gospels; there, she purposely obscures some of her characters' race because "[f]orcing people to react racially to another person is to miss the whole point of humanity" (Time). Like racial markers, Morrison seems to suggest, gender markers result in mindsets that can control how we evaluate individuals, in life

and in fiction. To work against this phenomenon, Morrison has other characters defy

stereotypical gender-role assignations: Joe is muscular and tall, but he also sells

cosmetics, and the women accept him, almost as a surrogate; his "two color eyes" (70)

further suggest his dual nature. Violet remembers the mythic Golden Gray—offspring of a white woman and black man—as her grandmother's "stories about a little blond child.

He was a boy, but I thought of him as a girl sometimes, as a brother, sometimes as a

boyfriend" (208), which is reminiscent of the gender conflation frequently occurring in

the Gnostic texts. Androgyny and convolution of identity markers serve as a starting

point for revising the Christian tradition which privileges men's stories and the male

narrative point of view.

Atwood’s Alias Grace Atwood's Alias Grace also draws on documented historical events and centers on the historical figure Grace Marks, a Canadian scullery maid who was sentenced to die for the murder of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, but whose sentence was later reduced to life imprisonment (she was released, just as Atwood's Grace is, twenty years later). Another

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servant, James McDermott, convicted for the murders of both Kinnear and his maid and

mistress Nancy Montgomery, was hanged in November of 1843. Atwood first introduces

religion by connecting her main character's life in the penitentiary to biblical punishment

with an epigraph in Section II; the quote from the Kingston Penitentiary "Punishment

Book" includes a catalog of prison offenses and punishments: "Laughing and talking" will get a woman prisoner "6 lashes; cat-o-nine-tails" and "Staring about and inattentive at breakfast table" warrants "Bread and water" as punishment. The epigraph highlights the inconsistency of punishment inflicted on the inmates of the nineteenth century.

Strategically placed early in the book, the excerpt broaches the subject of divine retribution, which is further developed in the character of Grace, who observes

They want you to be able to read the Bible, and also tracts, as religion and thrashing are the only remedies for a depraved nature and our immortal souls must be considered. It is shocking how many crimes the Bible contains. The Governor's wife should cut them all out and paste them into her scrapbook. (27)

The Governor's wife is rarely referred to in other terms; she is defined by her husband

and his professional role in society, much as many Biblical women are referred to, if at

all, only as their husband's wife, for example "Lot's wife" or "Noah's wife." The

Governor’s wife is representative of women who cannot express interests that do not fit

with the gender-expectations of their time. Males could attend hangings without

question, but women who would attend such events were described as "not very delicate

or refined" (Alias Grace Section II). Women who were curious about criminals, for

example, had to live vicariously through stories in the newspaper, just as the Governor's

wife clipped articles of crimes and kept them in her scrapbook. Of course, there are

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cases of women in the Bible who operate within traditionally male circles, just as the some of the Gnostic Gospels place women in subservient roles; Judith and Esther, for example, were leaders in the political realm, and the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas instructs that each woman should "make herself male" to be accepted by God (Pagels Gnostic 49).

However, biblical women are largely relegated to trivial positions, whereas most

Gnostics believed that the feminine was an essential component of God and vice versa.

Atwood's Grace assumes newly-revised characteristics of many biblical figures reconfigured in female form. Though Atwood does not utilize the Nag Hammadi texts as

Morrison does, she does incorporate an apocryphal text, the story of Susanna and the elders. Atwood blends an apocryphal tale with an orthodox Christian story in a key scene that is described as "the first falling-out" Grace has with Nancy (described in these terms, it also echoes the biblical story of Cain and Abel). They are cleaning Kinnear's bedroom and stop to discuss a painting of a young woman taking a bath and two elderly men watching from the bushes. Nancy says it portrays a biblical scene, but Grace—who clearly knows the Bible—disagrees:

And at that moment Mr. Kinnear came into the room. He must have been listening in the passageway, as he seemed amused. What, he said, are you discussing theology, and so early in the morning too? And he wanted to be told all about it . . . I was shy, but at length I asked him whether the picture was of a Biblical subject, as Nancy had said. And he laughed, and said that strictly speaking it was not, as the story was in the Apocrypha . . . he said the Apocrypha was a book where they'd put all the stories from Biblical times that they'd decided should not go into the Bible. I was most astonished to hear this, and I said, Who decided? Because I'd always thought that the Bible was written by God, as it was called the Word of God, and everyone termed it so. And he smiled, and said that though perhaps God wrote it, it was men who wrote it down; which was a little different. But those men were said to have been inspired; which meant that God

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had spoken to them, and told them what to do. So I asked did they hear voices, and he said yes. And I was glad that someone else had done so. (221-222)

Atwood alters the orthodox Christian narrative by utilizing an apocryphal text, but she,

like Morrison, does not suggest a substitution of one narrative for another; instead, she

implies that this story, too, is insufficient. As Grace begins to learn herself, the reader

should ask "Who decided?" First, Grace draws comparisons between herself and the men

Kinnear describes as having recorded "God's word"; like them, Grace too hears voices,

though she hears not the voice of God but of a woman, Mary Whitney.

Since the Susanna episode is told in flashback, it is apparent that in her relationship to

Simon, Grace is like the God Kinnear describes—she speaks, Simon records:

Sometimes I imagine that whatever he is writing down, it cannot possibly be anything that has come out of my mouth, as he does not understand much of what I say, although I try to put things as clearly as I can. . . . But at other times he appears to understand quite well, although like most gentlemen he often wants a thing to mean more than it does. (242-43)

Grace, then, is the source of knowledge that many have tried to understand: Reverend

Verringer, Dr. Workman, the lawyer MacKenzie, and Simon, to name a few. Atwood allows for a feminine equivalent of the Christian orthodox Father-figure by equating

Grace to God, though Grace's speech is likened to the traditionally feminine activity of quilting: "As she stitches away at her sewing, outwardly calm as a marble Madonna, she is all the while exerting her passive stubborn strength against him" (362). In contrast to biblical narrative, it is Grace who manipulates with her words, rather than the recorder.

Thus, Simon represents both the way in which our culture has been unable to agree on the

meaning of God's word, and also the way in which many have manipulated that word to

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serve their own purposes, using scripture to "mean more than it does." Simon becomes more unsure as Grace becomes more confident; it is he who cannot make sense of her narrative: "He has been traveling blindly . . . without learning anything except that he has not learned anything" (293). The novel can, then, be taken as Atwood's attempt to, as she states it, "put a woman at the centre . . . to include the hitherto excluded" ("Spotty").

Simon reacts to this disruption in accordance to a culture that is used to a male-centered narrative, as his analogy suggests: "Suffering from malaria. Bitten by snake. Send more medicine. The maps are wrong" (293). Because Grace cannot be understood, she is dangerous to society, though she is the one woman Simon would marry because she (and

Atwood) have revised the stereotype of women who live for "knitting, stitching, and tedious crocheting" (293), solely domestic pursuits.

Atwood also uses the story of Susanna as an analogy to Grace's experiences, which can be seen in the way Kinnear describes the story (or, more specifically, as Grace describes him telling it):

he said she was a young lady who had been falsely accused of sinning with a young man, by some old men, because she refused to commit the very same sin with them; and she would have been executed by being stoned to death; but luckily she had a clever lawyer, who was able to prove that the old men had been lying . . . . (223)

Like Susanna, Grace is "saved" by a "clever lawyer," and Grace wants Simon to see the parallels and assume that, like Susanna, Grace has been wrongly accused. But the

Susanna story is not simply a mirror tale; rather, it furthers Atwood's revision not only of the orthodox Christian narrative but of the apocryphal narrative as well. A close examination of both situations highlights the differences: Susanna rarely speaks while

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Grace’s speech dominates, Susanna’s innocence is apparent to the reader while Grace’s innocence is in question, and, perhaps most importantly, Susanna does not “trick,” while

Grace is manipulative. As Susan Sered and Samuel Cooper point out, Susanna differs

from many of the women in the apocryphal and orthodox writings in that, unlike Judith

(Holofernes) and Esther (Ahashueros), Susanna does not trick any male (47). Grace,

however, does: she clearly manipulates Simon (sometimes for noble purposes,

sometimes not) and a case can be made that she dupes several people with the

"hypnotism" (AG Chapter 48). Sered and Cooper assert that "The story of Susanna is so

thoroughly a gendered story that if Susanna were to successfully trick, the story would

present a compelling model of female strength" (47). Alias Grace does present such a

model by allowing Grace to construct her own story—as the real Grace never could in

her life—and to gain some form of power. Choosing such a “gendered” tale is a feminist

strategy that allows her to topple traditional gender roles, ones embodied in biblical and

apocryphal stories, through the character of Grace.

Atwood forms a feminine-based spirituality that grows as Grace constructs it. The

readers, then, learn as Grace learns. Her experiences teach her that the system of

Christianity—as upheld by the rules set forth in the Bible and those who advocate them—

is logical only to those who perpetuate the system. While at Kinnear's, Grace went to

church and heard a sermon about Divine Grace (a happy pun indeed). She explains that

she thought

that if you could not get Divine Grace by praying for it, or by any other way, or ever know if you had it or not, then you might as well forget the whole matter, and

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go about your own business, because whether you were damned or saved was of no concern of yours. (253-54)

Though she has grown up hearing stories from the Bible and singing religious hymns, child Grace was not able to reconcile the particulars of Christianity and so the adult

Grace must construct her own version. She soon learns that others will use their positions of power to take advantage of her; the minister who makes sexual advances toward her in prison does so in the name of God, pretending to offer comfort (35). Thus, the Bible predisposes many powerful men to think of women as either victims or dangerous creatures: "[the preacher said] we should beware of the woman sitting at the door of her house, which Proverbs 9 warns of, or of any such who might tempt us by saying that stolen waters are sweet" (253). Atwood implies that—in the name of feminism—many people oppress the very group they seek to liberate by viewing women as eternal victims; in Alias Grace, Atwood demonstrates how that attitude oversimplifies. The novel, a dubious tale of a wronged innocent, satirizes that simplistic tenet. If readers believe

Grace is yet another female victim, they have been duped. 10 The further implication is

that texts—historical or religious—often predispose individuals to buy into the myth of

woman-as-victim. In the case of religion, the culture has distanced women from God,

paring spirituality down into a set of codes and rules; Atwood’s Grace, however, has a

more intimate bond with God:

. . . . then my eyes were opened and I knew it was because God had come into the house and this was the silver that covered Heaven. God had come in because God is everywhere, you can't keep him out, he is part of everything that is . . . God is everywhere I thought, so . . . God is in Nancy and God is in McDermott, and in McDermott's hands, and God is in the axe too. (316-17)

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If she committed murder, Grace implies that she has done so because of the influence of

the Christian narrative, which says that God is everywhere and so you must follow

blindly because nothing happens for no reason, but one known only to God. This passage

also indicates the fusion of orthodox Christianity with Atwood's Gnostic-like revision,

which allows women to experience God not as the recorded, masculine "word" but as an

actual, often feminine, presence.

Whether Grace is speaking truthfully about her feelings or is instead manipulating

Simon is debatable, 11 but either way she has an understanding of the distancing effect of orthodox Christianity that places a schism between the individual and God; the oft-quoted phrase from the Gospel of John—as interpreted by many orthodox Christians—directs individuals to the church: "[Jesus says] I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes by the Father, but by me" (14:6). Though not drawing directly from the Gnostic texts, Atwood creates in Grace a Gnostic spirituality in which divinity comes not from an exalted, man-made structure but dwells within the individual. Atwood attempts, among other things, to close the gap between the individual and God by placing the divine within

Grace, one that gives her comfort and strength. Atwood's female deity takes the form of a common maid, Mary Whitney. After Mary's death, Grace reports, she "heard a voice, as clear as anything . . . saying Let me in" (178), and thereafter faith in Mary's memory soothes Grace. Though Grace may be lying about Mary's voice, Mary is certainly a symbolic presence in Grace's life, if not an actual one. Unlike the biblical figure of the

Virgin, Atwood’s Mary is not merely a conduit for the divine, she is herself divine.

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The Tree of Knowledge Revisionists of the Bible who wish to emphasize the feminine must inevitably

contend with the earliest story that finds fault with women: the Fall from Paradise and the

supposed originator of sin, temptress Eve. The Bible records that because she desired knowledge, which God forbade, Eve brought about suffering for herself and all humanity.

Thus, the Bible deems knowledge the realm of God and the men whom God deems

worthy of some knowledge. The Gnostic Christians revised the role of knowledge and

individual spirituality; for them, knowledge was not the cause of sin in the world but the

means to true communion with the self and, thus, God. 12 Many Gnostics suggest that a third characteristic of the Divine Mother is Wisdom, translated as a Hebrew feminine term, hokhmah (Pagels Gnostic 54)—a personified “she.” They also suggested that literal interpretations of the Fall were foolish, asserting that, taken allegorically, the story made

more sense and that Eve's action was, in fact, positive. 13 For Gnostics, Eve was the

"perfect primal intelligence" that awakened Adam—the soul—to his inner spirituality

(Pagels Adam 66-67). Jazz and Alias Grace echo this Gnostic tenet, and much of their novels reworks the role of knowledge in women and religion through the story of the Fall and post-lapsarian existence.

The first and perhaps most well-known story in the Bible centers on authority and, more specifically, knowledge. Genesis says that God placed "the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil" (2:9). Though told not to do so, Eve and then Adam eat of the tree of knowledge. God condemns humanity, saying that "man is become one of us, to know good and evil" (3:22). Clearly, much of

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Christianity is founded on the control of knowledge that is doled out by the ultimate

Father. Most of the stories of the Bible emphasize the tales of men who are deemed faithful because they do not question, as when Abraham is told to sacrifice his son; in other words, those worthy of God’s attention do not seek to know more. Women are

rarely chosen as such figures and play insignificant roles in these stories. Eve has, of course, received much attention, but over time her role has become that of scapegoat, even though the Bible itself describes Adam as equally culpable. Morrison turns on end the idea of the Fall. In Jazz, the temptation occurs after Paradise has been left behind.

Joe and Violet meet in the country, though Violet isn't adept at her work:

Humiliated, teased to tears, she had about decided to beg a way back to Rome when a man fell out of the tree above her head and landed at her side . . . . [“Violet asks] You sleep in trees?" "If I find me a good one." "Nobody sleeps in trees." "I sleep in them." . . . . "Could be snakes up there." "Snakes around here crawl the ground at night. Now who's softheaded?" (103-104)

Told from Violet's point of view, her metaphorical creation story emphasizes the feminine; unlike the second creation tale of Genesis in which Eve is taken from Adam's side (2:21-22), Violet appears first, and Joe arrives suddenly "at her side" (103). Joe's predilection for sleeping in trees is a direct reversal of Eve and Adam's initial reservations about the tree in question. The tree becomes, in fact, a symbol of all that was good about Joe and Violet as a couple. At this point in their relationship, too, Joe knows about and so avoids "the serpent," implying that knowledge—as the Gnostics

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believed—is necessary and useful. Though difficult at times, descriptions reveal that this time was Edenic for Joe and Violet, as was their early married life when they "had birds

and plants everywhere" (127).

When temptation occurs in Morrison's Edenic retelling, it is the man who succumbs,

even though he is fully aware of the situation. Joe meets Dorcas, and Morrison—playing

into the inaccurate but well-known apple myth of the Genesis story—defines their

relationship with apple symbolism. Joe describes his desire for Dorcas, addressing her directly (after her death):

I looked at your knees but I didn't touch. I told you again that you were the reason Adam ate the apple and its core. That when he left Eden, he left a rich man. Not only did he have Eve, but he had the taste of the first apple in the world in his mouth for the rest of his life. . . . You looked at me then like you knew me, and I thought it really was Eden. (133)

Though more subtle, knowledge is again key: Joe's appreciation of the Fall story is not so much that Adam had Eve, but that he had learned something, grown in knowledge of the world that the apple represented. Joe has never known his parents or his real identity, and Dorcas represents knowledge: he says Dorcas looks at him as if she knows him

(though he soon learns otherwise). Joe's association of Dorcas/apple/knowledge continues and soon he will do anything "To bite down hard, chew up the core and have the taste of red apple skin" (134-35). But in Jazz, it is women who hold the information.

Alice and Felice are the ones who know about Dorcas which, if you take the ending at face value, 14 is what enables Violet and Joe to move on. True Belle holds similar

information about Golden Gray's father, warning him that "the man who saved the rattler,

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nursed the rattler, fed the rattler only to discover that the last piece of information he would have on earth was the irrevocable nature of the rattler" (155).

Knowledge, though, can be useless without self-awareness. Joe obsesses about his mother's identity, believing that she may be the fabled Wild of his hometown, which leads him ultimately to Dorcas. Because Wild cannot be known, she is almost divine.

The key to salvation, then, lies not only in knowledge but in self-awareness, a Gnostic idea that Morrison's characters come to understand. What Violet actively seeks out and learns about Dorcas and her own childhood allows her to survive, as she tells Felice:

"Now I want to be the woman my mother didn't stay around long enough to see" (208). It is an understanding of one's own self and one's past, not of God, that offers peace.

Atwood, too, begins her novel by inverting the story of the temptation and Fall, but her method differs from Morrison’s in that she then constructs a new Eve from her main character. Simon attempts to unlock the mysteries of Grace's mind by offering her different objects. The day they meet, the first object Simon presents is an apple:

What does Apple make you think of? he says . . . And is there any kind of apple you should not eat? he says. A rotten one, I suppose, I say . . . . The apple of the Tree of Knowledge, is what he means. Good and evil. Any child could guess it. But I will not oblige . . . He waits. Finally I lift the apple up and press it to my forehead. (40-41)

The chapter ends in anticipation. Simon has enticed Grace, but, unlike Eve of the

Genesis story, she does not succumb. Planting such imagery (pardon the pun) so early in the book strategically enables Atwood to introduce age-old topics of good and evil

(which tempt the reader to read on) and to create a complicated character who is a hybrid of other heroines and villainesses of which Eve is among the first. 15 Many Gnostics

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revered Eve and associated her with Divine Wisdom, refusing the orthodox view that knowledge separates one from God (Gnostic 54). Similarly, Atwood's revision includes many familiar details of the traditional story, but Grace-as-Eve subverts traditional assignations of blame used as justification for the marginalization of women. (And it is

not insignificant that Grace holds the apple to her forehead.) Atwood does not allow this to be only implied; her women characters express such views. About menstruation,

"Eve's curse," Mary Whitney tells Grace that "she thought that was stupid, and the real curse of Eve was having to put up with the nonsense of Adam, who as soon as there was any trouble, blamed it on her” (164). After her release from prison, Grace writes to

Simon that she believes that "the Fruit of Good and Evil were the same" and even though eating or not eating would result in death, at least "if you did eat of it, you would be less bone-ignorant" (459). Grace informs Simon that she will only tell him this because she is

"aware it is not the approved reading" (459). Grace's words echo the Gnostic text Gospel of Truth that privileges knowledge: "Ignorance . . . brought about anguish and terror.

And the anguish grew like a fog, so that no one was able to see" (Pagels Gnostic 125).

Though Grace's physical self is imprisoned, her knowledge gives her some control and self-assurance. Her cut-to-the-chase comments on life, particularly religion, reveal a

Gnostic practicality that draws spirituality out of knowledge, not merely out of faith of the unknowable supernatural. Atwood’s delightful tongue-in-cheek sarcasm makes it clear that Grace is anything but “bone-ignorant.”

Just as Morrison takes the Biblical issue of knowledge and reassigns knowledge-as- power to the women in her novel, Atwood allows Grace to be the keeper of knowledge.

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Though many groups of men—scientists, doctors, and preachers—meet to discuss

Grace's future and the nature of the soul itself , 16 it is the imprisoned Grace who possesses much of what they want to know. Using biblical references, Atwood links the issue of knowledge to the Bible early in the novel:

Simon says that he has been going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it. And he looks at me, to see if I understand. I know it is the Book of Job, before Job gets the boils and running sores, and the whirlwinds. It's what Satan says to God. He must mean he has come to test me, although he's too late for that, as God has done a great deal of testing me already, and you would think he would be tired of it by now. But I don't say this. (38)

Atwood equates Grace with, among others, the biblical figure Job; like Job's, Grace's

narrative reveals much suffering in her life. But Grace's allusion to "whirlwinds"

indicates that knowledge is the issue at hand. The Christian narrative places most

knowledge in the possession of the male figures, and the All-Knowing Father who is the

gatekeeper of that knowledge. Here, Grace alludes to the passage from Job where God,

speaking "out of the whirlwind," asks "Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words

without knowledge" (38:1-2). He who holds knowledge is powerful, and thus Grace is

likened to God who possesses it. Just as the Bible records God humbling Job, Grace

humbles Jordan, who seeks Grace's knowledge, about what happened on the day of the

murders and also about the human mind itself. Through Grace, Atwood revises the

Christian tradition that says only men should have knowledge and that a woman's

salvation depends upon a saving Father:

[Jordan thought] It was knowledge [women] craved; yet they could not admit to craving it, because it was forbidden knowledge (82) . . . . [To Simon, Grace was] a nun in a cloister, a maiden in a towered dungeon, awaiting the next day's burning at the stake, or else the last-minute champion come to rescue her . . . . all was as it

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should be . . . But then Grace stepped forward, out of the light, and the woman he'd seen the instant before was suddenly no longer there. Instead there was a different woman—straighter, taller, more self-possessed . . . It was as if it were he, and not she, who was under scrutiny. (59-60)

Simon describes the physical effects of Grace's newly-formed spirituality. Accustomed to the biblical (and thus literary) images of women, he expects Grace to be a meek victim, but she "steps out of the light" in wisdom; this harks to the Gnostic text the Gospel of

Thomas that instructs one to look inward because "There is light within a man of light"

(Gnostic 120). Throughout the novel Grace grows in wisdom and self-assurance while

Simon, physically free and a man of science, loses control of himself—first by his thoughts of Grace and then (if we take the story at its word) his loss of memory. Unlike

Grace who has her own knowledge and her bond to Mary, Simon has no source to draw upon.

Many readers of Jazz and Alias Grace will take the books at face-value; that is, they will follow along and experience the stories laid before them without skepticism. The novels, though, encourage deeper readings undertaken by resistant readers. Morrison and

Atwood have both suggested the importance of such readers. Morrison has said that the most important task of literature instructors is to teach students “not to be satisfied with the superficial or first reading” (Time); clearly, then, it is the writer’s duty to create literature that demands such responses. So, we must be suspicious when Morrison’s novel ends happily, just as the narrator is surprised: “So I missed it altogether . . . Busy, they were, being original, complicated, changeable—human, I guess you’d say” (220).

Or when Atwood’s Grace writes that her Tree of Paradise quilt will be bordered by

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snakes made to look like vines (459-60), we should pause and read between the lines.

“The Cinderella happy ending,” Atwood has said, “[has] been called into question”

(“Spotty”). Thus, both Morrison and Atwood employ self-reflexive markers that provide maps for reading the two books, as when Grace wonders at Janet’s joy that Grace “was to

have a happy ending, and it was just like a book; and I wondered what books she’d been

reading” (446). When we read in Jazz that a man named Lestory (or LesTroy) becomes a

mythic “Hunter’s Hunter” and is the father of “Golden Gray,” we should be raise a

collective eyebrow and question.

Working within and rebelling against the Christian tradition that tries to control

knowledge and define it as largely masculine, Morrison never reveals her narrator’s

identity and Atwood will not pronounce Grace guilty or innocent. Simultaneously

refusing to offer clearly defined truths while developing extensive religious themes

emphasizes that the power of religious institutions and the figures who run them is often

founded on the control of knowledge. Through their characters, then, Morrison and

Atwood intentionally use orthodox and heterodox Christian texts to reverse and revise the

modes of discourse within which women have traditionally been allowed to operate.

Their characters—both male and female—can, for the space of the fiction, transcend

narrow definitions of gender that can be traced back to the Biblical narrative. Their

characters exist within a Gnostic tradition, which privileges the knowable over the

unknowable; thus, their fiction removes the reader from the intimidating presence of

controlling biblical and historical claims.

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1 In her article “Scent of a Woman’s Ink: Are women writers really inferior?,” Francine Prose poses the possibility that, whether or not such delineations exist, many readers believe “that men write like men and women like women . . . it’s assumed that women writers will not write anything important—anything truly serious or necessary, revelatory or wise” (62). Harper’s Magazine June 1998: 61-70.

2 Examples are plentiful: Ntozake Shange’s Betsey Brown, Sherley Ann Williams’s Dessa Rose, Bobbie Ann Mason’s Feather Crowns, Julia Alvarez’s In The Time of Butterflies, Marge Piercy’s City of Darkness, City of Light, Jane Smiley’s The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton, just to name a few. Though both Paradise and Jazz are historical novels, I focus on Morrison’s earlier Jazz because (like Alias Grace of Atwood) shows her ability to work successfully within the male-dominated post-modern genre; often criticized for being too character-driven, in Jazz Morrison demonstrates her versatility. And, of course, both Jazz and Alias Grace work with and within the Gnostic tradition, which is my focus here.

Many critics fault Morrison’s fiction as being too moralistic or sentimental, particularly in Beloved. Denise Heinz makes a strong “argument for the supernatural” in that novel, arguing persuasively that “fantasy [allows Morrison to] negotiat[e] the divisiveness of double-conscious” (“a state of affairs in which an individual is both representative of and immersed in two distinct ways of life”) (149, 5). I refer readers to her chapter on the supernatural, as well as her informative introduction which in part summarizes Stanley Crouch’s distaste for Morrison’s alleged inability to overcome “the temptation of the trite or the sentimental” (quoted in Heinz p. 4). I cite here, as does Heinz, Crouch’s review: Review of Beloved. New Republic. 19 Oct. 1987: 43.

Paula Gallant Eckard and Colin Nicholson have noted the post-modern proclivity in some of the works of both Morrison and Atwood. In Jazz, Eckard says Morrison “has created a post-modernist novel which blends modernist themes and subjects” (11). She explores the role of music as it relates to African-American tradition and Morrison’s use of signifying like that described by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Speaking of The Handmaid’s Tale, in his introduction Nicholson identifies Atwood’s “patterns of textual archaeology and exploration in self-reflexive ways to connect her work to forms of attention in post- colonial—and postmodernist—writing elsewhere” (6).

Philip Page’s excellent article “Traces of Derrida in Toni Morrison’s Jazz” examines her “postmodern themes” as related to Derrida’s concept of differance, As Page also observes, Morrison has discussed “her interest in the ambiguity of presumed dualities, and she insists that her novels remain open-ended, not as final authoritative statements but as maps or texts with plenty of ‘holes and spaces’ “ (55). (To read more of that interview, see Morrison’s “Memory, Creation, and Writing.” Thought 59 (Dec. 1984): 385-90.) Though Jazz has been written about considerably less than Morrison’s other novels, criticism exists. Two worthwhile works examining Morrison alongside William

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Faulkner include Unflinching Gaze: Morrison and Faulkner Re-Envisioned (Eds. Carol A. Kolmerten, et.al. Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1997) and Philip M. Weinstein’s What Else But Love?: The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1996).

3 Atwood, in In Search of Alias Grace, describes the frustrating omissions and unreliability of historical records: “There is—as I increasingly came to discover—no more reason to trust something written down on paper then [in the nineteenth century] than there is now” (32).

4 According to Sandra Tomc, for example, Atwood amalgamates her Canadian nationalism with feminism: “The Handmaid’s Tale delivers a curiously and, for Atwood, an unwontedly conservative interpretation of women’s exemplary social actions . . . [T]his conservativism is . . . politically motivated, not by Atwood’s feminism in this case but by her nationalism . . . . conflati[ng] feminism and nationalism” (74, 84). Gayle Greene studies the work of four women writers and their literary contributions to form in what she calls “feminist fiction,” claiming that “[t]hough metafiction . . . is more often associated with postmodern (i.e., male) writers than with feminist fiction, it is a powerful tool of feminist critique . . . to challenge the cultural and literary tradition” (1-2). Greene’s study does not include Morrison, but her focus is metafiction and Morrison’s published work at the time of Greene’s publication (1991) did not include Jazz, which was published in 1993 (and Atwood’s Alias Grace in 1996).

5 Pagels cites some examples in The Gnostic Gospels, as when God is compared to a mother eagle who “stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young . . . beareth them on her wing” (Deuteronomy 32:11).

6 Historical “tinkering,” of course, may not be clearly understood or examined by some readers. Barbara Christian’s excellent “Fixing Methodologies: Beloved” elucidates this problem by discussing at length the lack of critical emphasis given to the importance of the Middle Passage, the “event that is [that] is the dividing line between being African and being African American” (364), as symbolized by the figure of Beloved.

7 ”Feminomasculine” might be another option but for clarity’s sake I use the term Pagels’s created to describe the “great male-female power” (Gnostic 51).

8 She/he is also a possibility. I have interchanged the combination to avoid privileging one gendered pronoun over the other.

9 It is interesting to note that Morrison and Pagels are friends.

10 Mitt Beauchesne seems to be one such reader. In his dismissive book review of Alias Grace, he scoffs at Atwood’s “vintage stereotypes,” then claims the book “isn’t literary.”

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Mr. Beauchesne explains that he expects the book “to become a favorite classroom text of feminist English professors” but never deigns to explain what he thinks the book is about or to provide his definition of “literary.” National Review 10 Feb. 1997: 58.

11 Interpretations may vary about the character of Grace Marks. I believe (and hope) that Atwood’s Grace is guilty of murder and thus a dangerous, crafty, intelligent woman. I prefer that to the alternative, and I think the book supports my reading.

12 For an excellent discussion on this topic, see Pagels’s “Gnosis: Self-Knowledge as Knowledge of God” in The Gnostic Gospels. I am interested, too, in the topic of depth in both Jazz and Alias Grace and how that relates to knowledge power-struggles; that is a topic for another time.

13 Of course, as Pagels observes, the Gnostics were not the first group to view Eve in this light. See Pagels’s Adam, Eve, and The Serpent page 64+.

14 The ending of Jazz is too tidy, and so I am suspicious. Joe and Violet’s relationship is repaired very neatly, too neatly perhaps. Morrison may suggest, in her narrator’s words, that “Something is missing there . . . Something else you have to figure in before you can figure it out” (228).

15 Atwood discusses this in “Spotty-Handed Villainesses.” She says that her “favourite” bad female character is Becky Sharpe of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair because “She is wicked, she enjoys being wicked, and she does it out of vanity and for her own profit . . . .”

16 This is well-illustrated in a scene from Chapter 49 when the men discuss the nature of the soul. Reverend Verringer exclaims that “we cannot be mere patchworks” (406)!

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Works Cited

Apocrypha. King James Version. Iowa: World Bible Publishers.

Armstrong, Karen. A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity,and Islam. New York: Ballantine Books, 1993.

Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. New York: Doubleday, 1996.

--. In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction. Public Lecture at the University of Ottawa. Nov. 21, 1996. Univ. of Ottawa Press, 1997.

--. “Spotty-Handed Villainesses: Problems of Female Bad Behavior in the Creation of Literature.” Online. Speech given in various versions. 1994. April 23, 1998.

Christian, Barbara. “Fixing Methodologies: Beloved.” Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Eds. Elizabeth Abel, et. al. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1997.

Eckard, Paula Gallant. “The Interplay of Music Language, and Narrative in Toni Morrison’s Jazz.” College Language Association Journal 38.1 (Sept. 1994): 11-19.

Greene, Gayle. “Introduction: Feminist Metafiction as Re-Vision.” Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1991.

Heinze, Denise. The Dilemma of “Double-Consciousness : Toni Morrison’s Novels. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1993.

Holy Bible. King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers.

Jaffrey, Zia. “The Salon Interview: Toni Morrison.” 1998. Online.

Mitchell, Carolyn A. “I Love To Tell The Story”: Biblical Revisions in Beloved.” Religion and Literature 23.3 (Autumn 1991): 27-42.

Morrison, Toni. Jazz. New York: Plume, 1992.

Nicholson, Colin. “Introduction.” Ed. Colin Nicholson. Margaret Atwood:

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Writing and Subjectivity. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

Pagels, Elaine. Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. New York: Random House, 1988. --. The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Random House, 1979.

Ruas, Charles. “Toni Morrison.” 1981. Conversations with Toni Morrison. Univ. Press of Mississippi: 1994.

Sered, Susan and Samuel Cooper. “Sexuality and Social Control: Anthropological Reflections on the Book of Susanna.” The Judgment of Susanna: Authority and Witness. Society of Biblical Literature, 1996.

Streete, Gail Corrington. The Strange Woman: Power and Sex in the Bible. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997.

Suskin Ostriker, Alicia. Feminist Revision of the Bible. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993.

“Thunder, Perfect Mind.” Translated by George W. MacRae. Nag Hammadi Library Online. 28 July 1998.

Time Online Interview. 21 Jan. 1998. May 1998.

Tomc, Sandra. “ ‘The Missionary Position’: Feminism and Nationalism in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Canadian Literature 138-39 (Fall-Winter 1993): 73-87.

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