THE WLBS: WOMEN OF WHIMSY by Rachel Ellen Banka A thesis submitted to the faculty of The University of Mississippi in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College. Oxford May 2015 Approved by ____________________________________ Advisor: Professor Tom Franklin ____________________________________ Reader: Professor Annette Trefzer ____________________________________ Reader: Professor Nancy Wicker © 2015 Rachel Ellen Banka ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii Dedicated to: Michael and Paula Banka. You have loved, supported, challenged, and guided me unceasingly. Thank you. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have been fortunate enough to know and enjoy the support of many wonderful people in my twenty-one years. All of them contributed in some way to my academic success and to this novel and thus deserve my thanks. In all things, I owe my first debt of gratitude to my amazing and peculiar family, who built me up into the person I am today. Michael and Paula Banka, Amy Banka, Margie and Chuck Sorbom, Kate Benoist, and all the rest: Thank you for everything you have done, are doing, or will do for me. Thank you for being you. In addition, I would like to thank my “second family”: Megan Smith, my best friend/roommate/cheerleader a girl could hope for, and her fantastic parents, Tracy and Karen Smith. You guys have always accepted me, embraced me, and provided me with Eggo chocolate chip waffles, even though we have no biological relation compelling you do so. There is also a staggering number of educators who have lifted me up, molded my mind, taught me how to think for myself, made me a scholar, made me a writer, and made me a better person over the years. Without Tom Franklin, this novel literally would not exist. Thank you, Tom, for being my writing mentor, role model, source of guidance, and constant well of support and advice these past four years. Without Emma Richardson, I would not have found the joy of writing fiction. Thank you, Mrs. Richardson, for introducing me to my passion and encouraging me to pursue it. At the university-level, Professor Beth Ann Fennelly and Professor Hilary Becker also deserve my unending gratitude for the wealth of information they’ve taught me and, more importantly, the abundance of kindness and assistance they’ve offered me. I’ve worked with many tremendous professors at the University of Mississippi, but you, Beth Ann and Dr. Becker, have been my most enthusiastic champions. Also, thank you, Professor Annette Trefzer and Professor Nancy Wicker, for sitting on my thesis committee. I truly appreciate it. Last but not least, I would like to extend a special and heartfelt thanks to all of the educators at the Mississippi School of Mathematics and Science, especially Mrs. Richardson (mentioned above), Mr. Chuck Yarborough, Mr. William Funderburk, and Mr. Charles Brown. Finally, a huge thank you to: Sean Connor, for coming up with the first clue; Gunter Pevey, for being a caring neighbor and friend when stress overwhelmed me; Dr. Nancy Wiggers, for being a compassionate and understanding employer; and Chancellor Dan Jones, for leading the University of Mississippi with integrity and dedication these past six years. iv ABSTRACT RACHEL ELLEN BANKA: The WLBS: Women of Whimsy (Under the direction of Tom Franklin) This thesis is an entirely fictional novel about the five members of a women’s book club in a small Mississippi town. It is told from three alternating perspectives and spans the course of one month, November, 2013. It is a story of lies, literature, love, and loss; of identity, community, friendship, and betrayal; and of hidden treasure, whatever form that takes. v TABLE OF CONTENTS WRITING WHIMSY: THE JOURNEY FROM SHORT STORY TO SENIOR THESIS (INTRODUCTION) ………………………………………….…. 1 CHAPTER ONE ……………………………………………………………………….. 12 CHAPTER TWO ………………………………………………………………………. 36 CHAPTER THREE ……………………………………………………………………. 54 CHAPTER FOUR ……………………………………………………………………… 67 CHAPTER FIVE ……………………………………………………………………..... 82 CHAPTER SIX ………………………………………………………………………… 91 CHAPTER SEVEN ………………………………………………...………………… 104 CHAPTER EIGHT……………………………………………………………………. 112 CHAPTER NINE ……………………………………………………………………... 123 CHAPTER TEN ………………………………………………………………………. 133 CHAPTER ELEVEN …………………………………………………………………. 141 CHAPTER TWELVE ………………………………………………………………… 153 CHAPTER THIRTEEN ………………………………………………………………. 160 CHAPTER FOURTEEN ……………………………………………………………... 169 CHAPTER FIFTEEN ………………………………………………………………… 179 CHAPTER SIXTEEN ………………………………………………………………… 186 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN ……………………………………………………………. 195 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN ………………………………………………………………. 203 vi CHAPTER NINETEEN ………………………………………………………………. 209 CHAPTER TWENTY ………………………………………………………………... 222 CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE ………………………………………………………….. 228 CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO …………………………………………………………. 235 CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE ………………………………………………………. 243 CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR ………………………………………………………... 247 EPILOGUE …………………………………………………………………………… 249 vii Introduction Writing Whimsy: The Journey from Short Story to Senior Thesis At some point in the past couple of years, as I alternatively wrote and contemplated and edited and fretted over my senior thesis, The WLBS: Women of Whimsy came to represent two distinct stories in my head. On the one hand, of course, there is the fictional tale I have attempted to tell within the novel itself, the narrative about five women negotiating modern life in a small Mississippi town. I have already devoted over two hundred pages to that plot, and ultimately, I must let my characters speak for themselves through the product of my time and effort. However, alongside that plot in my mind, there is also the story behind the novel, which has gone unwritten until now. This latter story chronicles the journey I have taken in order to stand before a committee of three professors on April 28, 2015 and present the culmination of my four years as an undergraduate at the University of Mississippi and a member of the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College. At present, I would like to use a few pages to summarize that saga and, briefly, to speak for myself: I. Exposition The WLBS: Women of Whimsy did not go by that name originally. Similarly, I did not conceive of the tale as a potential senior thesis or a possible novel when I first started to work on it. The first full draft of the initial piece was simply “The WLBS,” a twenty- 1 page short story I was writing for my Advanced Fiction Workshop with Professor Tom Franklin in the fall of 2012. It came from an opening paragraph for a future story I had jotted down and labeled “The Treasure Hunt” during the previous summer. “The Treasure Hunt” read, in its entirety: The treasure hunt was Beth Jordan’s idea – something to break the monotony of living in Whimsy for a few weeks. The rules, as we decided them while we sipped sweet tea in Meredith Davis’ living room, were simple. The hunt would start right after our next meeting and last five weeks, one for each member of our book club. Beth would go first, hiding one of her favorite literary classics somewhere in downtown Whimsy and planting clues across town, followed by Jennifer Finch, then Meredith, then Audrey Mitchell, and finally me, as I was the newest member of our club and the most reluctant to speak up. The core of the story had eluded me that August, so I had tucked the quarter-page away in some digital corner of my computer and presented a dark, dramatic short short story called “Lindsey” for the first of my two workshop submissions that semester instead. “Lindsey” – or, rather, my experiences writing and receiving responses to “Lindsey” – strongly influenced the direction in which I would end up taking “The WLBS” two months later. Critically, “Lindsey” was right in my comfort zone. It was, in truth, the epitome of all the fiction I had written in college so far: emotionally heavy, symbol-laden, nearly plotless, and told from the point of view of an introverted young 2 female with a quick but somber mind. Tom and my peers gave me mostly positive feedback on my latest offering, as they had with “The Dead End” and “Perched” the semester before. Yet I found that I wasn’t satisfied with the piece or proud of my endeavors. I knew the work was forgettable and largely unremarkable. When it came time to write my next story, consequentially, I pulled out “The Treasure Hunt” and started carefully considering the directions in which I could take it. Since I expected it be the last piece I would ever get to workshop with Tom, I resolved to develop it into something unlike anything I had written before: something long, with a stronger plot, a comedic tone, and a variety of characters with a range of voices. Thus began “The WLBS.” I also wove many elements of my academic studies into that first draft, however. That semester, I was taking British Literature of the Romantic Period with Dr. Hannah Rigby and Junior Seminar: Literary Criticism with Dr. Annette Trefzer, whom I would later ask to accept a position on my thesis committee. The former course led me to read Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and “Love and Freindship,” and I was so taken with the irony and biting social commentary in Austen’s comedies of manners that I decided to attempt to write a similar brand of humor into “The WLBS.” Likewise, I read Eudora Welty’s collection A Curtain of Green in Dr. Trefzer’s course and became highly fascinated by the way Welty portrayed Mississippi as an insular, unique, often funny, and almost enchanted place considered mundane by its inhabitants. The two authors ended up shaping the first draft of “The WLBS” in very real ways, perhaps more than I realized as I originally penned the story. Emulating both Austen and Welty, I attempted to create a town as alive and quirky as any of its residents, 3 and I strove to narrate the domestic and social dramas unfolding in my characters’ lives from a perspective just close enough for the reader to feel the enormous pressure that seemingly small conflicts can exert on an individual or select group of people, yet pulled back just far enough that the reader could still see the comedy of the situations and the characters that populated the piece.