University of South Florida Scholar Commons Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 3-27-2008 The Drowned Girl Karen Brown Gonzalez University of South Florida Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd Part of the American Studies Commons Scholar Commons Citation Gonzalez, Karen Brown, "The Drowned Girl" (2008). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/265 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Drowned Girl by Karen Brown Gonzalez A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Co-Major Professor: Rita Ciresi, M.F.A. Co-Major Professor: Hunt Hawkins, Ph.D. A. Manette Ansay, M.F.A. William T. Ross, Ph.D. Date of Approval: March 27, 2008 Keywords: stories, women, Connecticut, suburbia, adultery © Copyright 2008, Karen Brown Gonzalez The girl is leagues and leagues away from the first kiss of prologue, but she, throat caked with mud, white skin scaled verdigris, must be the message within the bottle. —Eve Alexandra, “The Drowned Girl” Acknowledgments Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications for publishing portions of this work in slightly altered form: “Send Me” in American Fiction: The Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Writers, Number 4, 1992, “Affairs of a Career Girl” and “Tropical Passions” as Things I Did While You Were Gone, in Epoch, Vol. 40, No. 3, 1991, and “Nude on Thin Ice” as “The Boyfriend” in Epoch, Vol. 41, No. 3, 1992. “Girl on a Couch” in Freight Stories, Vol. 1, 2008. 2 Table of Contents Abstract i Introduction 1 Love in Suburbia 19 Send Me 45 The Drowned Girl 64 Part-Time Virgin, 1978 85 Girl on a Couch 102 Affairs of a Career Girl 123 Hukelau Jules 138 Lawn Man Love 160 Confessions of a Party-Wife 179 The Little Sinner 205 Mistresses 217 Tropical Passions 241 Nude on Thin Ice 254 The Frontier Husband 266 Bibliography 282 About the Author End Page i The Drowned Girl Karen Brown Gonzalez ABSTRACT The Drowned Girl is a novel-in-stories that depicts the lives of eight characters living in a small Connecticut town. This work is one told through varying perspectives. Characters are mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, daughters, sons, and lovers. Their lives intersect physically, and emotionally, and the separate stories reveal the facets and repercussions of events both past and present: the death of a son and brother in a car accident, the life and death of a notorious town figure, the past and tragic future of a young woman, Jules, whose body is found one spring in the Connecticut river. The Jules stories, six in all, document her spiral into despair, and involve the other characters as friends, lovers, and parents. As the locus of the cycle, Jules and the mystery of her death prompt characters to re-view their own circumstances, and the way in which past decisions have played a part. These revelations—of betrayal, and loss, and the way they affect key characters, are effectively inscribed in the story cycle’s ability to convey a communal disparateness. Each character’s story brings a new perspective, and the accumulation of the parts provides a more encompassing view of the whole. The focus on an upper middle class neighborhood called Ridgewood—a subdivision built on dairy farm land in the mid-sixties—is key to the thematic link that ties the stories together. I am interested in revealing the corruption of the natural landscape, the carving up of rural areas after World War II to create suburban ii communities in which family incomes and demographics are almost completely homogenous. The suburb of Ridgewood is mapped by roads designed to conform to a hierarchy that includes cul-de-sacs, and a pattern leading to residential areas of greater affluence. This setting serves as a backdrop to the complex disintegration of the family. iii Introduction My goal in utilizing the novel-in-stories genre, or the short story cycle, is to depict the lives of eight characters living in a small Connecticut town. The focus on an upper middle class neighborhood called Ridgewood—a subdivision built on dairy farm land in the mid-sixties—is key to the thematic link that ties the stories together. I am interested in revealing the corruption of the natural landscape, the carving up of rural areas after World War II to create suburban communities in which family incomes and demographics are almost completely homogenous. The suburb of Ridgewood is mapped by roads designed to conform to a hierarchy that includes cul-de-sacs, and a pattern leading to residential areas of greater affluence. This setting serves as a backdrop to the complex disintegration of the family. This work is one told through varying perspectives. Characters are mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, daughters, sons, and lovers. Their lives intersect physically, and emotionally, and the separate stories reveal the facets and repercussions of events both past and present: the death of a son and brother in a car accident, the life and death of a notorious town figure, the drowning of a woman in the Connecticut River. These revelations—of betrayal, and loss, and the way they affect key characters, are effectively inscribed in the story cycle’s ability to convey a communal disparateness. Each character’s story brings a new perspective, and the accumulation of the parts provides a more encompassing view of the whole. 1 Modern American short story cycles are multi-cultural, deriving from ancient oral traditions that emphasize repeated characters, settings, and situations that create a history and community of tellers. These tales are told by a variety of speakers relating the stories of a group of characters, each having their own resolution, and yet building upon each other. The use of linked tales, from Homer’s Odyssey and Ovid’s Metamorphosis to A Thousand and One Nights and the widespread use of “cycles” in the medieval period point to early beginnings of this narrative tradition. Boccacio’s The Decameron, published in Italy in the 14th century is an example of independent works enriched by inclusion in a group of related pieces. Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, and Mallory’s Le Morte D’Arthur are others. The modern concept of the short- story cycle, or, as Maggie Dunn and Anne Morris call it in their study, the composite novel, appeared in the nineteenth century, and evolved to maturity in the twentieth century. Long misunderstood, puzzled over, and often neglected, critics were uncertain how to classify such important twentieth century texts as The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), Dubliners (1914), Winesburg, Ohio (1919), In Our Time (1925), Go Down, Moses (1942), The Golden Apples (1947) and Lost in the Funhouse (1968). Not quite novels in the traditional sense, but somehow more than collections of stories, these works fell into an unnamed middle ground. Many generic labels have been suggested, including story cycle, short-story cycle, multi-faceted novel, story novel, paranovel, loose-leaf novel, short story composite, rovelle, integrated short story collection, anthology novel, modernist grotesque, hybrid novel, story chronicle, and short story sequence, to name a few. More recently, the term novel-in-stories has been popular. 2 The status of the short story cycle is often disputed, cast as a “beginner’s” version of the novel, or as a form somehow beneath the novel in literary value, despite the many award-winning works that have utilized it. Still, the story-cycle’s ambiguity resists definition. Classification of such a work is dependent on a variety of identifiable devices, and key critical studies have attempted to define what these might be. The first book- length study of the genre, published in 1971, Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century, by Forrest L. Ingram, uses the popular term short-story cycle, and focuses predominantly on Kafka’s The Hunger Artist, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, and Joyce’s Dubliners. He defines the genre as “a book of short stories so linked to each other by their author that the reader’s successive experience on various levels of the pattern of the whole significantly modified his experience of each of its component parts” (19). This definition relies on the “experience” of the text by a reader. Susan Garland Mann published The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and Reference in 1989. She delineates two different common “types” of story-cycles: Character-dominated, and those with a theme of isolation or fragmentation. She also identifies various conventions associated with cycles—generic signals, like the title of a work, simultaneous self- sufficiency and interdependence, and tension between the separateness and interdependence of the stories. Her analysis includes Dubliners, Winesburg, The Pastures of Heaven, The Unvanquished, In Our Time, Go Down, Moses, The Golden Apples, Everything That Rises Must Converge, and Updike’s Too Far to Go: the Maples Stories. Both Ingram and Mann argue for an aesthetic of the short story cycle that asserts unity in 3 terms of community relationships, as in the cycles in which members of a town or a family reappear in several stories. Examination of the genre is complicated by debate among critics who hold to varying definitions of what comprises a story cycle. Dunn and Morris’s study (The Composite Novel: The Short Story Cycle in Transition), like those of Ingram and Mann, emphasizes the integrative aspects of the work, with a desire to view the text as a whole, rather than fragmented parts.