San Jose State University SJSU ScholarWorks Master's Theses Master's Theses and Graduate Research Summer 2014 The Age of Chameleons and Pow Wows Marta Svea Wallien San Jose State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/etd_theses Recommended Citation Wallien, Marta Svea, "The Age of Chameleons and Pow Wows" (2014). Master's Theses. 4486. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31979/etd.n9hd-m4jc https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/etd_theses/4486 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Master's Theses and Graduate Research at SJSU ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master's Theses by an authorized administrator of SJSU ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE AGE OF CHAMELEONS AND POW WOWS A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Department of English and Comparative Literature San Jose State University In Partial Fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree Master of Fine Arts by Marta Svea Wallien August 2014 © 2014 Marta Svea Wallien ALL RIGHTS RESERVED The Designated Thesis Committee Approves the Thesis Titled THE AGE OF CHAMELEONS AND POW WOWS by Marta Svea Wallien APPROVED FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE SAN JOSE STATE UNIVERSITY August 2014 Dr. John Engell Department of English and Comparative Literature Professor Peter O’Sullivan Department of English and Comparative Literature Dr. Noelle Brada-Williams Department of English and Comparative Literature ABSTRACT THE AGE OF CHAMELEONS AND POW WOWS By Marta Svea Wallien My novel is about Toby Walter’s choice to desert the life she knows and live in a place filled with death and disintegration. Her motives stem from several events and changes that occur in her life, including her mother’s experience with breast cancer, her friend’s death, her father’s death, her dog’s death, and her mother’s relationship with another man after her father has died. The writing of this thesis involved trying to understand this character and why she leads the life she does. The more I worked on this story, the more Toby’s motives began to surface. I want this novel to speak a kind of truth about the way in which this character lives. She learns that she cannot fully escape her past. This is one truth I felt important to touch upon in my novel—the difficult, ongoing struggle to “move on” from certain obstacles that occur in life. The choices I have made in presenting this story reflect both novels that have influenced my writing and ideas about writing held by authors I admire. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Dr. John Engell, Professor Peter O’Sullivan and Dr. Noelle Brada-Williams for reading and providing their input as I worked on this novel. This novel would not have become what it is without their assistance and dedication. I would also like to thank my parents for their support and encouragement during all of my academic studies, including my time at San Jose State University. This novel is for Red and the Ignorant Rug Merchant. v TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction……………………………………………………. vii 2. Works Cited……………………………………………………. xviii 3. The Age of Chameleons and Pow Wows……………………… 1 vi Introduction My novel is told from Toby’s first-person perspective, in a narrative order that is non-linear. It focuses on Toby recounting the moments in her life that led up to her decision to leave her husband and young daughter. At first, I did not have a clear reason for writing the narrative out of sequence. I began writing scenes I pieced together in the order I felt was natural. It was not until I wanted to find out my reason for these inclinations that I re-read a few novels with similar non-sequential structures. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury helped me to see the purpose behind my narrative through each novel’s non-linear framework. In each text, the author’s choice regarding narrative structure aids in the development of both character and theme. Each novel has a layered narrative, due to the author’s choice in building a non-linear timeline, which shows each narrative’s concern with the idea of time. Employing a similar structure helped me to see why Toby makes the choices she does, and how she evolves as a person. In Woolf’s novel, we are introduced to a day in Clarissa Dalloway’s life. The story is told mainly from her perspective as she is preparing for a party she is hosting that night. This present acts as the backdrop to the jumble of memories she recalls throughout the day. A similar pattern also occurs in the perspectives of several other characters, including Peter Walsh and Septimus Warren Smith. Clarissa’s direct and indirect interactions with these perspectives help develop her as a character. And again, these interactions are shown through present day scenes and memories. For example, the reader understands Clarissa’s sense of herself as she is remarking on the beauty of a day: vii “She sliced like a knife through everything…She knew nothing…she would not say to herself, I am this, I am that” (8-9). Later, we come to know Clarissa through other characters, as when Peter Walsh remarks on past events in his life with her: “But it was Clarissa one remembered. Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all…there she was, however; there she was” (76). The interspersing of events over time serves the same purpose in my work. My novel begins one day during the month when Toby has returned to her family after an absence of five years. The story opens with Toby feeling out of place as a mother, and the reader does not know why this is—and neither does she. But as the story progresses and the reader is thrust into moments from Toby’s past, her decisions become clear because they are illustrated through her interactions with other characters. For instance, in one scene, the reader is thrust into Toby’s past as a young teenager in a family dealing with a mother suffering from breast cancer. It has already been established before this scene that Toby has not only left her husband and daughter, but has also, even before leaving husband and daughter, stopped speaking to or seeing her birth family. I wrote this scene not as an explanation for her current abandonment, but as a step in the development of Toby as a character, much like the scenes in Woolf’s novel. None of the scenes in Woolf’s story explicitly state why Clarissa decided to marry Richard instead of Peter, or why she made other choices in her life. But scenes from the past show the reader the way in which all of these jumbled moments have helped shape Clarissa at the time of the central action. My scene details Toby’s first encounter with her mother’s possible death. Toby’s mother, Ruth, is diagnosed with breast cancer when viii Toby is in middle school. Readers are shown how Toby deals with this: “During the coming days, my siblings and I tiptoed around my mom…we pretended not to hear her hoarse calls” (56). This begins Toby’s need to avoid the inevitable and seemingly endless pain and trauma of life. Woolf’s novel is one example of the way in which a non-linear narrative structure can work in developing characters. But this structure is also essential relative to the novel’s theme about time. Throughout the story, Clarissa and other characters remark on the motion of time and how it has affected them. The reader is given a sense of how time moves through these characters’ lives by access to their memories and their talk, and the non-linear structure is accompanied by the backdrop of Big Ben, which informs readers where the characters are in relation to actual time. For instance, the reader sees how time affects Peter Walsh through his part in the narrative: “Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand” (49). Similarly, the reader experiences Clarissa’s sense of time through her point of view: “She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself…he made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun” (186). Time in Woolf’s novel focuses on death, and death symbolizes different things to each character. For Peter Walsh it means the loss of someone he has loved, for Septimus Warren Smith it means freedom from turmoil, and for Clarissa Dalloway, death means life. In the end, the reader learns through many jumbled yet juxtaposed temporal moments, that the thought of death, a thought experienced over years, causes Clarissa to live life on her own terms. ix After re-reading Woolf’s novel, I thought more clearly about time in relation to Toby and the structure of my novel. Toby learns that time is an abstract concept that can mean both everything and nothing. When Toby is at the Salton Sea, time stands still, and it ceases to matter. But when she is at home with her family, she finds it is impossible to make up for time lost with her husband and daughter because death pervades her thoughts. Time in her home is a countdown to the end—to death—an aspect of life with which Toby is obsessed and cannot escape. In contrast, the Salton Sea is a place where death has already happened. I depict the Salton Sea as a place of decay and desolation.