Table of Contents
“A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O'Connor .................................................................................. 3
(Mary) Flannery O'Connor ........................................................................................................................ 3
An overview of A Good Man Is Hard to Find ......................................................................................... 9
"Secular Meaning in 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find'" ............................................................................... 12
“The Red Convertible” by Louise Erdrich .................................................................................................... 20
Louise Erdrich.......................................................................................................................................... 20
"Postcolonial Theory and the Undergraduate Classroom: Teaching 'The Red Convertible.'" ................ 27
Critical Essay on "The Red Convertible".................................................................................................. 29
Critical Essay on "The Red Convertible".................................................................................................. 33
Critical Essay on "The Red Convertible".................................................................................................. 37
“The Closing Down of Summer” by Alistair MacLeod ................................................................................. 39
“Remembering Alistair MacLeod” .......................................................................................................... 39
"The Everyday in 'The Closing Down of Summer' by Alistair MacLeod"................................................. 39
"'The Tuning of Memory': Alistair MacLeod's Short Stories" ................................................................. 52
“Roman Fever” by Edith Wharton .............................................................................................................. 61
Edith (Newbold Jones) Wharton ............................................................................................................. 61
"Wharton's 'Roman Fever.'" ................................................................................................................... 74
"Critical Reception and Cultural Capital: Edith Wharton as a Short Story Writer" ................................. 77
“For Esme, With Love and Squalor” by J.D. Salinger .................................................................................. 91
J. D. Salinger ............................................................................................................................................ 91
Vanity Fair article: “Holden Caulfield’s Goddam War” ........................................................................... 96
"Sergeant X, Esmé, and the Meaning of Words" .................................................................................... 96
“The Turkey Season” by Alice Munro ....................................................................................................... 105
Introduction by Margaret Atwood for Alice Munro’s collection, My Best Stories ............................... 105
Alice Munro........................................................................................................................................... 121
The Plots of Life: The Realism of Alice Munro ...................................................................................... 139
`Gulfs' and `Connections': The Fiction of Alice Munro ......................................................................... 152
“A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O'Connor
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The following article was found in The Literature Resource Centre database.
(Mary) Flannery O'Connor
1925-1964
Entry Updated : 02/11/2004
Birth Place: Savannah, GA
Death Place: Milledgeville, GA
Personal Information
Career
Writings
Media Adaptations
Sidelights
Further Readings About the Author
Personal Information: Family: Born March 25, 1925, in Savannah, GA; died of lupus August 3,
1964, in Milledgeville, GA; daughter of Edward Francis and Regina (Cline) O'Connor. Education:
Women's College of Georgia (now Georgia College), A.B., 1945; State University of Iowa, M.F.A.,
1947. Religion: Roman Catholic.
Career: Writer.
Awards: Kenyon Review fellowship in fiction, 1953; National Institute of Arts and Letters grant
in literature, 1957; first prize, O. Henry Memorial Awards, 1957, for "Greenleaf, " 1963, for
"Everything That Rises Must Converge, " and 1965, for "Revelation"; Ford Foundation grant,
1959; Litt.D. from St. Mary's College, 1962, and Smith College, 1963; Henry H. Bellaman
Foundation special award, 1964; National Book Award, 1972, for The Complete Short
Stories; Board Award, National Book Critics Circle, 1980, for The Habit of Being; "Notable Book"
citation, Library Journal, 1980, for The Habit of Being.
WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:
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Wise Blood (also see below; novel), Harcourt, 1952.
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A Good Man Is Hard to Find (stories; contains A Good Man Is Hard to Find [also see
below], The River, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, A Stroke of Good Fortune, A
Temple of the Holy Ghost, The Artificial Nigger, A Circle in the Fire, A Late Encounter
with the Enemy, Good Country People, and The Displaced Person), Harcourt, 1955
(published in England asThe Artificial Nigger, Neville Spearman, 1957).
(Contributor) Granville Hicks, editor, The Living Novel, Macmillan, 1957.
The Violent Bear It Away (also see below; novel), Farrar, Straus, 1960.
(Editor and author of introduction) A Memoir of Mary Ann, Farrar, Straus, 1961,
reprinted, Beil, 1989 (published in England as Death of a Child, Burns & Oates, 1961).
Three by Flannery O'Connor (contains Wise Blood, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find, "
and The Violent Bear It Away), Signet, 1964, reprinted, New American Library, 1986.
Everything That Rises Must Converge (stories; contains Everything That Rises Must
Converge, Greenleaf, A View of the Woods, The Enduring Chill, The Comforts of Home,
The Lame Shall Enter First, Revelation, Parker's Back, and Judgment Day), Farrar, Straus,
1965.
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, edited by Sally Fitzgerald and Robert
Fitzgerald, Farrar, Straus, 1969.
The Complete Short Stories, Farrar, Straus, 1971.
The Habit of Being (letters), edited by S. Fitzgerald, Farrar, Straus, 1979.
Collected Works, Library of America, 1988.
Work is represented in many anthologies and appears in periodicals,
including Accent, Mademoiselle, Critic, and Esquire. An
annual, The
Flannery
O'Connor
Bulletin, was established in 1972.
O'Connor's papers are part of the permanent collection of the Georgia College Library.
O'Connor's writings have been translated into French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Greek,
Danish, and Japanese.
Media Adaptations: A two-act play, The Displaced Person, by Cecil Dawkins (first produced in
New York at American Place Theatre, 1966) was based on five stories by Flannery O'Connor. A
movie version of Wise Blood was directed by John Huston and released in 1980; in 2004,
O'Connor's short story "The Artificial Nigger" was adapted as a dance by Bill T. Jones called
"Reading, Mercy and the Artificial Nigger."
"Sidelights"
A. L. Rowse called Flannery O'Connor "probably the greatest short-story writer of our time,"
and this opinion is not unique among critics. Though O'Connor's work has been compared
frequently with that of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nathanael West, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, among
others, "as a person and a writer she was a complete original," wrote Josephine Hendin. A
religious writer who defined her "subject in fiction" as "the action of grace in territory held
largely by the devil," O'Connor nevertheless believed good writing begins in a concrete
"experience, not an abstraction." Her writing reflects this by being firmly rooted in her native
South. Her Catholic family lived in Milledgeville, Georgia, since before the Civil War. "Ours is a
real Bible Belt," she once said. "We have a sense of the absolute,... a sense of Moses' face as he
pulverized the idols,... a sense of time, place and eternity joined." In his book The Christian
Humanism of Flannery O'Connor, David Eggenschwiler said that "she insisted that the ultimate
concerns of her art transcended the natural but that her art was primarily of the concrete world
in which the transcendent was manifested.... She sought a more than worldly knowledge, not
by knowing the world badly but by knowing it well."
Considering her limited output as a writer, the critical response to her canon has been
extraordinary. More than a dozen books, chapters in many more, and hundreds of articles have
been devoted to O'Connor's work. As Hendin noted in The World of Flannery 0'Connor, the
author produced "a body of work of remarkable uniformity and persistent design." Her themes
have been identified by Stanley Edgar Hyman as the "profound equation of the mysteries of sex
and religion, ... change of identity, transformation, death-and-rebirth, ... the perverse mother,
... what Walter Allen ... calls a `world of the God-intoxicated,' [and] the transvaluation of values
in which progress in the world is retrogression in the spirit."
O'Connor wrote: "I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the
meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and that what I see in the world I see in
relation to that." Andre Bleikasten, however, wrote of the "heresy" of Flannery O'Connor and
warned that "O'Connor's public pronouncements on her art--on which most of her
commentators have pounced so eagerly--are by no means the best guide to her fiction. As an
interpreter, she was just as fallible as anybody else, and in point of fact there is much of what
she has said or written about her work that is highly questionable.... The truth of O'Connor's
work is the truth of her art, not that of her church. Her fiction does refer to an implicit theology,
but if we rely, as we should, on its testimony rather than on the author's comments, we shall
have to admit that the Catholic orthodoxy of her work is at least debatable.... Gnawed by old
Calvinistic ferments and at the same time corroded by a very modern sense of the absurd,
O'Connor's version of Christianity is emphatically and exclusively her own.... Flannery O'Connor
was a Catholic. She was not a Catholic writer. She was a writer, and as a writer she belongs to
no other parish than literature."
She was, however, a theological writer. As such, Ted R. Spivey explained, O'Connor dealt with
violent and grotesque people because "man has in his soul a powerful destructive element,
which often makes him behave in a violent and grotesque manner.... [Her writing is about] the
existential struggle with the principle of destruction traditionally called the Devil." Numerous
critics see this preoccupation with the demonic as a central characteristic of O'Connor's work.
In opposition to this evil force O'Connor places a God whose "grace hits the characters in [her]
stories with the force of a mugging," Hendin wrote. The climactic moments of grace in her
stories and in her characters' lives have been described by Preston M. Browning, Jr., as "those
moments when her characters undergo a traumatic collapse of their illusions of righteousness
and self-sufficiency." As Washington Post critic William McPherson put it, "the question behind
Miss O'Connor's stories is not whether God exists--he's there, all right--but whether men can
bear it." Claire Katz summarized, "it is the impulse toward secular autonomy, the smug
confidence that human nature is perfectible by its own efforts, that she sets out to destroy,
through an act of violence so intense that the character is rendered helpless, ... [thus
establishing] the need for absolute submission to the power of Christ." Hermione Lee of New
Statesman echoed this view when she wrote, "Essentially, O'Connor's subject is acceptance: the
point at which her sinners become aware of the awful unavoidability of Grace. All the stories
drive towards an appointed end, often of horrifying violence.... The power of the work lies in its
suppression of this severely orthodox subject beneath a brilliantly commonplace surface.... Its
masterly realism springs from the life in Georgia, but its intellectual energy, and its penetration
of grotesque extremes, derives from the faith."
Richard Poirer felt that this outlook contributed to O'Connor's major limitation, namely, "that
the direction of her stories tends to be nearly always the same." Hollins Critic reviewer Walter
Sullivan agreed but added, "what she did well, she did with exquisite competence: her ear for
dialogue, her eye for human gestures were as good as anybody's ever were; and her vision was
as clear and direct and as annoyingly precious as that of an Old Testament prophet or one of
the more irascible Christian saints."
Her stories are not all terror and violence, however. There is also humor here, what Brainerd
Cheney called "a brand of humor based on the religious point of view." James Degnan believed
that O'Connor's was "a vision that clearly sees the tragedy of a world in which people are
hopelessly alienated from each other, but a vision which stresses the comedy of such a world."
In the introduction to Everything That Rises Must Converge, Robert Fitzgerald wrote, "There is
quite a gamut of [comedy,] running from something very like cartooning to an irony dry and
refined, especially in the treatment of the most serious matters." Kenneth L. Woodward likened
O'Connor's "grimly Gothic humor" to that of William Blake.
In execution O'Connor's work "bears no relation whatever to the so- called `art novel,'" noted
Melvin Friedman. He explained, "Her novels and stories are in every sense traditionally
constructed and make no use of the experimental suggestions of a Joyce, a Proust, a Faulkner,
or even a Styron." He called her characters "almost all fanatics." Another critic, Louise Gossett,
observed that "the bold lines of their portraiture ... converge directly on the spiritual errors of
the present.... When these lines are too direct, the fiction lapses into preaching." (O'Connor's
letters reveal that she was aware of this problem. She wrote, "The novel is an art form and
when you use it for anything other than art, you pervert.... If you do manage to use it
successfully for social, religious, or other purposes, it is because you made it art first.")
It is the author's characters that rivet the attention of readers to her stories; Alice Walker noted
that it was for O'Connor's characterizations "that I appreciated her work at first ... these white
folks without the magnolia ... and these black folks without melons and superior racial patience,
these are like the Southerners that I know." John Idol summed up Flannery O'Connor's fiction as
follows: "In the twelve or fifteen of her best stories Miss O'Connor aptly blended satire and
reverence, the concrete and the abstract, the comic and the cosmic, earning for herself a
secure place among the writers of the Southern Renascence."
O'Connor's posthumously collected nonfiction has also earned praise. Granville Hicks wrote
of Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, "I had read some of these lectures in one form or
another, but until they were brought together I had not realized what an impressive body of
literary criticism they constituted." John Leonard wrote that Mystery and Manners "should be
read by every writer and would-be writer and lover of writing.... [O'Connor] ranks with Mark
Twain and Scott Fitzgerald among our finest prose-stylists." In 1972, O'Connor's Complete Short
Storieswon the National Book Award for fiction.
O'Connor's farm, Andalusia, in Milledgeville, Georgia, opened to the public in 2002. The farm is
where O'Connor lived and wrote most of her works.
FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
BOOKS
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Allen, Walter, The Modern Novel, Dutton, 1964.
Baumgaertner, Jill P., Flannery O'Connor: A Proper Scaring, Cornerstone Press Chicago,
1998.
Bloom, Harold, ed., Flannery O'Connor, Chelsea House Publishers, 1998.
Browning, Preston M., Jr., Flannery O'Connor, Southern Illinois University Press, 1974.
Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 1, 1973, Volume 2, 1974, Volume 3,
1975, Volume 6, 1976, Volume 10, 1979, Volume 13, 1980, Volume 15, 1980, Volume
21, 1982.
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 2: American Novelists since World War II, Gale,
1978.
Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1980, Gale, 1981.
Drake, Robert, Flannery O'Connor, Eerdmans, 1966.
Driskell, Leon V., and Joan T. Brittain, The Eternal Crossroads: The Art of Flannery
O'Connor, University Press of Kentucky, 1971.
Enjolras, Laurence, Flannery O'Connor's Characters, University Press of America, 1998.
Eggenschwiler, David, The Christian Humanism of Flannery O'Connor, Wayne State
University Press, 1972.
Feeley, K., Flannery O'Connor: Voice of the Peacock, Rutgers University Press, 1972.
Friedman, Melvin J., and Lewis A. Lawson, The Added Dimension: The Art Mind of
Flannery O'Connor, Fordham University Press, 1966.
Gossett, Louise Y., Violence in Recent Southern Fiction, Duke University Press, 1965.
Hendin, Josephine, The World of Flannery O'Connor, Indiana University Press, 1970.
Hyman, Stanley Edgar, Flannery O'Connor, University of Minnesota Press, 1966.
Johansen, Ruthann Knechel, The Narrative Secret of Flannery O'Connor: The Trickster as
Interpreter, University of Alabama Press, 1994.
Kazin, Alfred, Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway
to Mailer, Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1973.
Kreyling, Michael, New Essays on Wise Blood, Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Martin, C. W., The True Country: Themes in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor, Vanderbilt
University Press, 1969.
May, John R., The Pruning Word: The Parables of Flannery O'Connor, University of Notre
Dame Press, 1976.
McFarland, Dorothy Tuck, Flannery O'Connor, Ungar, 1976.
McMullen, Joanne Halleran, Writing Against God: Language as Message in the
Literature of Flannery O'Connor, Mercer University Press, 1996.
Muller, Gilbert H., Nightmares and Visions: Flannery O'Connor and the Catholic
Grotesque, University of Georgia Press, 1972.
O'Connor, Flannery, Everything That Rise Must Converge, introduction by Robert
Fitzgerald, Farrar, Straus, 1965.
Orvell, Miles, Invisible Parade: The Fiction of Flannery O'Connor, Temple University
Press, 1972.
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Rath, Sura Prasad and Mary Neff Shaw, editors, Flannery O'Connor: New
Perspectives, University of Georgia Press, 1996.
Reiter, Robert E., editor, Flannery O'Connor, Herder, 1968.
Short Story Criticism, Volume 1, Gale, 1988.
Spivey, Ted Ray, Flannery O'Connor: The Woman, the Thinker, the Visionary, Mercer
University Press, 1995.
Waldmier, Joseph J., editor, Recent American Fiction: Some Critical Views, Houghton,
1963.
Walters, Dorothy, Flannery O'Connor, Twayne, 1973.
Whitt, Margaret Earley, Understanding Flannery O'Connor, University of South Carolina,
1995.
PERIODICALS
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America, March 30, 1957, October 17, 1964.
American Literature, March, 1974, May, 1974.
Arizona Quarterly, autumn, 1976.
Books and Bookmen, May, 1972.
Book World, February 11, 1979.
Catholic Library World, November, 1967.
Censer, fall, 1960.
Chicago Tribune, April 15, 1979.
Christian Century, September 30, 1964, May 19, 1965, July 9, 1969, November 16, p.
1076.
Commonweal, July 9, 1965, December 3, 1965, August 8, 1969, November 3, 1995, p.
14.
Contemporary Literature, winter, 1968.
Critic, October-November, 1965.
Detroit News, March 25, 1979.
English Journal, April, 1962.
Esprit, winter, 1964 (entire issue).
Esquire, May, 1965.
Georgia Review, summer, 1958.
Hollins Critic, September, 1965.
Modern Age, fall, 1960.
Modern Fiction Studies, spring, 1973.
Ms., December, 1975.
New Republic, July 5, 1975, March 10, 1979.
New Statesman, December 7, 1979.
New Statesman & Society, February 8, 1991, p. 37.
New York Herald Tribune Book Week, May 30, 1965.
New York Times, May 13, 1969, March 9, 1979.
New York Times Book Review, June 12, 1955, February 24, 1960, May 30, 1965,
November 28, 1971, March 18, 1979, August 21, 1988.
Renascence, spring, 1965.
Saturday Review, May 12, 1962, December 16, 1962, May 29, 1965, May 10, 1969,
November 13, 1971.
Sewanee Review, summer, 1962, autumn, 1963, spring, 1968 (entire issue).
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Southwest Review, summer, 1965.
Spectator, August 30, 1968.
Studies in Short Fiction, spring, 1964, winter, 1964, winter, 1973, spring, 1975, winter,
1976.
Time, May 30, 1969, February 14, 1972, March 5, 1979.
Times Literary Supplement, September 12, 1968, November 21, 1980.
Source: Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2004.
Source Database: Contemporary Authors
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The following article was found in The Literature Resource Centre database.
An overview of A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Critic: Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton
Source: Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997
Criticism about: (mary) Flannery O'connor (1925-1964), also known as: (Mary) Flannery
O'Connor, Mary Flannery O'Connor
Nationality: American
[Piedmont-Marton is an educator and the coordinator of the undergraduate writing center at
the University of Texas at Austin. In the following essay, she discusses O'Connor's story as a
strong example of the author's short fiction.]
A Good Man Is Hard to Find is one of the most widely discussed of all Flannery O'Connor's
stories. It also provides an excellent introduction to her work because it contains all the major
ingredients characteristic of the remarkable literary legacy left by a woman who only lived to be
thirty-nine years old and who was too ill to write in her last years. Readers who encounter
O'Connor for the first time should be aware that she always identified herself as a Southern
writer and as a Catholic writer and that her stories are always informed by these identities and
beliefs.
As a Southerner, Flannery O'Connor's fiction draws on a rich tradition of humor and regional
specific detail. Beyond the comedic characters and precise rendering of their dialects, however,
O'Connor's South is a place rich with myth and history. In two influential essays, The Fiction
Writer and His Country, and The Regional Writer, now collected in Mystery and Manners,
O'Connor argued that the best literature is always regional literature because good writing is
always rooted in a sense of place, in a shared past, a sense of alikeness, and the possibility of
reading a small history in a universal light. She further claimed that among the regions in the
United States, the South was produced the best writing because it had already had its
fall. Southern writers possess special insight, she said, because we have gone into the
modern world with an inburnt knowledge of human limitations and with a sense of mystery
which could not have developed in our first state of innocence as it has not sufficiently
developed in the rest of our country.
By the references to the fall and loss of innocence in Mystery and Manners, O'Connor meant
the Civil War and the crisis of identity, guilt, and shame that accompanied it. Such an
experience gave Southerners a richer, more complex sense of who they were and how they
were connected to the land than their Northern counterparts had. O'Connor's characters tend
to express some degree of confusion and ambivalence toward the South. The Grandmother
in A Good Man Is Hard to Find is a good example. As James Grimshaw points out, she is a
southern stereotype in that she is cautious, devious, indirect, and afraid of the unfamiliar. She is
also vain and obsessed with the trappings of class. In O'Connor's own words in a letter to writer
John Hawkes, the Grandmother and other old ladies exactly reflect the banalities of the
society and the effect is comical rather than seriously evil.
As an unapologetically religious writer, O'Connor's stories are informed by the particulars of her
Catholic faith. Readers need not share her faith in order to appreciate her fiction, but it helps to
be aware of the basic tenets of Catholicism that appear in A Good Man Is Hard to Find and
her other stories. O'Connor's religious vision was sacramental; that is, she believed that Christ
provides outward signs that confer grace on members of the church. In this view, an individual
may not earn opportunities for grace by good works, but he or she may turn away, like the
Misfit does, from grace when it is offered. In O'Connor's fiction the outward sign of grace often
appears as an act of violence. In a letter about A Good Man Is Hard to Find, O'Connor
explained that her use of grace can be violent or would have to compete with the kind of evil I
can make concrete. O'Connor's fiction was always shaped by her beliefs in mystery, grace,
redemption, and the devil. In an essay titled Catholic Novelists, O'Connor explained that the
Catholic writer's beliefs make him or her entirely free to observe and that open and free
observation is founded on our ultimate faith that the universe is meaningful, as the Church
teaches.
A Good Man Is Hard to Find pits the banal and superficial Grandmother against the
malevolent Misfit. Although the story starts off as a satire of a typical family vacation, it
becomes a tale of cold-blooded murder as the focus narrows to the Misfit and the
Grandmother. The story becomes, in O'Connor's words, a duel of sorts between the
Grandmother and her superficial beliefs and the Misfit's more profoundly felt involvement with
Christ's action which set the world off balance for him. She also cautions readers that
they should be on the lookout for such things as the action of grace in the Grandmother's soul,
and not for the dead bodies. The struggle between the Misfit and the Grandmother is not
confined to her efforts to save her own life but also takes the form of an argument about faith
and belief. The Grandmother, who has chattered nonstop since the family left home, is
gradually rendered mute in the face of the Misfit's assertions about Christ, and when she makes
her only sincere gesture of the story, reaching out to touch him, the Misfit is threatened and
horrified and shoots her three times through the chest. Before he shoots her, however, the
Misfit offers a lengthy explanation for how he ended up where he is and why he believes what
he does.
O'Connor uses the Misfit's deeply held and passionate convictions as a foil, or contrast, to the
Grandmother's easy platitudes and cliches. The author is critical of the woman's empty
reassurances that he is a good man at heart and if he would pray Jesus would help him. The
Misfit, by contrast, devises his own challenging and rational way of looking at the world based
on his belief that Jesus thrown everything off balance. The source of his stubborn non-belief
is his insistence that everything be explained rationally. Because the Misfit did not see Christ
performing any miracles, he cannot believe they ever happened. The presence of a divine
force operating outside the bounds of reason, in the words of Robert Brinkmeyer in an essay
published in The Art and Vision of Flannery O'Connor, is what upset the balance of the universe.
In other words, the Misfit cannot place his faith is something he cannot be rationally certain of,
while the Grandmother continues to cling to a faith without an intellectual foundation or
certainty of belief. The Misfit is incapable of wrapping himself around the paradox as Flannery
O'Connor phrased it that you must believe in order to understand, not understand in order to
believe.
As the paths of these two characters converge in the final moment of the story, they are both
given opportunities for grace. When the Grandmother finally runs out of words and is left to
mutter Jesus over and over, O'Connor is suggesting that she is moving toward a deeper
awareness of her faith. Similarly, when the Misfit angrily pounds his fist into the ground and
complains, I wisht I had of been there. It ain't right I wasn't there because if I had been there I
would of known, we recognize his frustrated longing for faith. When he confesses If I had of
been there I would of known and I wouldn't be like I am now, the Grandmother has a moment
of clarity and recognizes his twisted humanity as part of her own by calling him one of her
children. In O'Connor's words, The Misfit is touched by the Grace that comes through the old
lady when she recognizes him as her child, as she has been touched by the Grace that comes
through him in his particular suffering. The Grandmother realizes, O'Connor explained in a
later essay, that she is responsible for the man before her and joined to him by ties of kinship
which have their roots deep in the mystery she has been merely prattling about so far.
The Misfit has an opportunity to accept grace but recoils in horror at the Grandmother's
gesture. In his parting words, however, he acknowledges how grace had worked through him to
strengthen the woman's faith: She would of been a good woman, if it had been somebody
there to shoot her every minute of her life. Brinkmeyer points out that the Misfit's
`preaching' to the Grandmother `converts' her to Christ. The Misfit himself seems lost, as his
dismissive words to Bobby Lee, It's no real pleasure in life, indicate. Flannery O'Connor,
however, had the last word on the Misfit and his future: I don't want to equate the Misfit with
the devil. I prefer to think, however unlikely this may seem, the old lady's gesture, like the
mustard-seed, will grow to be a great crow-filled tree in the Misfit's heart, and will be enough
of a pain to him there to turn him into the prophet he was meant to become. But that's another
story.
Source: Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton An overview of A Good Man Is Hard to Find, in Short
Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.
Source Database: Literature Resource Center
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The following article was found in The Literature Resource Centre database.
"Secular Meaning in 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find'"
Critic: Stanley Renner
Source: College Literature 9, no. 2 (1982): 123-32.
Criticism about: Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964), also known as: (Mary) Flannery
O'Connor, Mary Flannery O'Connor, Flannery OConnor
Nationality: American
[(essay date 1982) In the following essay, Renner suggests a secular interpretation of the
conclusion of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find."]
Just as literature illuminates life, life illuminates literature, sometimes causing a shock of
recognition that simultaneously verifies the author's imaginative vision and advances our
comprehension of both the vision and the means employed to reveal it. A recent account in a
Southern newspaper of developments in a murder trial casts such light on Flannery
O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," a story that has proved particularly troublesome
because O'Connor's statements about her intention in its violent climax enjoins an
interpretation that does not appear to be supported by the logic of its own content. I refer to
O'Connor's representation that at the moment of the grandmother's death at the hands of an
escaped killer, when she sees him as one of her own children, she enjoys a sudden accession to
divine grace, a "special kind of triumph" that seems beyond the capacity of the character as we
know her in the story.1 O'Connor's reading of the climax seems to demand a doctrinaire
approach that some readers are unable to bring to the story.2 The design of the story itself,
moreover, suggests that its meaning is wider than that indicated by the author's own
interpretation. The newspaper account referred to invites a reading of the grandmother's last
words in terms of a causal relationship with broad cultural implications and overtones of
universality.
The newspaper piece, featured by a large metropolitan daily, reports on the murder trial of a
young man accused of the sexual-molestation slaying of an eight-year-old girl. Arrested a few
days after the crime, the young man admitted his guilt; and it was the playing of his taperecorded confession that provided the news peg for the article. The confession includes a
revelation that bears a remarkable similarity to the climax of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," as
may be seen in the following excerpt from the article:
[The accused] began crying as he told the investigators that he decided to kill the girl because
"she said that God loves me." Investigators returned to the comment later.
The taped conversation revealed:
Q--Do you know, Robert, why you killed her?
A--I don't know ... I don't know. She just said that and I just ...
Q--When she told you that Jesus loves you?
A--Yeah.
Q--You killed her? Why did that particular thing make you want to kill her?
A--Cause it ain't true.
Q--Why do you believe that?
A--God just wouldn't let things happen that happen, you know, so he don't care.3
In "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," for comparison, the grandmother, obviously terrified by the
prospect of death, tries to disarm the Misfit's murderous intention by reminding him of the love
and goodness of Jesus. Ironically, as in the story from life, she only activates his frustration and
rage, which builds to such an intensity that when she leans toward him and claims him as one
of her own, he shoots her three times through the chest.
Thus, in both the real-life story and the fictional one, the murder is precipitated by an utterance
of the victim. Moreover, in both cases, it is the assurance of the love of Jesus that stirs the
murderer's homicidal rage. The grandmother says, "Jesus would help," not "Jesus loves you,"
but the import of the exhortation is much the same. So is its effect. For both the young man
and the Misfit the appeal to Jesus' love and care somehow presses unbearably against the very
quick of their problem, and they lash out against torment. In O'Connor's story the murder does
not immediately follow the grandmother's assurance of Jesus' help. There is a longer
development of the Misfit's problem with Jesus, followed by the grandmother's recognition of
him as one of her own children, which is the immediate cause of her murder. But the pattern of
events in both stories is similar. An individual violently maladjusted in society is urged with
childlike naiveté to be governed by the goodness of Jesus. Maddened by the incongruity
between such a simplistic exhortation and his own experience of life, he murders the source of
the exhortation.
This chain of causality puts the climax of O'Connor's story in a somewhat different light than
that in which it has usually been viewed. Most significantly, it leads toward the conclusion that
the grandmother's last words are more than an expression of parental love, Christian charity,
and forgiveness toward the Misfit, based, as the author stated, on a recognition of their ties in
the depths of the Christian mysteries. Although the degree of awareness with which the
grandmother speaks the words is precisely the pivotal ambiguity in the story, what she says
may be taken to mean that she is responsible for the Misfit in a causal sense. This approach to
the climax indicates that there may be dimensions to the story beyond those on which the
standard reading has been based.
In understanding the ending of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" the key is what to make of the
grandmother. Is she the heroine, as the author apparently regarded her, or the villain, as other
readers have found her?4 The more common view is the one sanctioned by O'Connor that,
limited though she is, the grandmother is granted a moment of illumination during which she
realizes the emptiness of her faith and extends to the man who is about to kill her the true love
of Jesus.5 But this view seems to demand more sympathy than the story grants her. The author
has characterized the grandmother so that it is virtually impossible to say anything
unquestionably good about her. One cannot even fall back on the excuse that she means well,
since most of what she means is to please herself by devious means. To be sure, she is created
in the vein of comedy; her sins of self-serving seem ingratiatingly human and harmless enough.
But, as O'Connor pointed out, the comedic method is this story's way of being serious. 6 In
bringing the grandmother and her world into collision with the Misfit, O'Connor seems to be
implying some sinister connection between them. From the opening paragraph the journey
that gives shape to the first half of the story seems to lead inevitably, fatally, to the violent
confrontation that defines the second half.
Indeed, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" seems to invite the reader to hold the grandmother
responsible for the Misfit. Developing this generally unexplored approach to their
interrelationship does not imply that we are expected to excuse the Misfit's crimes or that they
are really the grandmother's fault. Yet there is evidence of a causal link between the two
characters that suggests a broad approach to the story's ambiguous ending. The author herself,
in explaining how she read the story, connects the grandmother's moment of grace with her
recognition "that she is responsible for this man before her."7 "Responsible" can be understood
in more than one way, but the meaning most strongly indicated in the story is that of causality.
Thus, as Bailey is her son in a literal sense, the Misfit is one of her own children in a figurative
sense: what the grandmother represents has somehow produced what the Misfit represents.
We may note in passing that neither of the grandmother's "offspring"--one a nonentity, the
other a violent criminal--reflects very favorably on her achievement as a parent.
In what sense, then, has the grandmother, as symbolic parent, been responsible for producing
the Misfit? This is the key question posed by the story's climax, and it is a major function of the
rest of the story to provide an answer.
"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is designed in two parts, the first of which is devoted mainly to
the characterization of the grandmother. The portrait that emerges has two faces: one is that of
a believable old lady, very much, as O'Connor intended, like our own "grandmothers or great
aunts"; the other is that of the culture of which she is so representative a figure.8 In the latter
role, she is, in fact, something of a caricature of the South, drawn in the manner of an editorial
cartoon, with its distinctive features exaggerated and mocked to make a satiric point. For one
thing, she personifies the ideal of gentility, manners, and breeding inherited from the old
plantation culture. Her white gloves and prim white polka-dotted navy blue dress trimmed in
organdy and lace may not be as practical for automobile travel as her daughter-in-law's slacks,
but at least they certify her as a Southern Lady. The grandmother also champions the Southern
ideal of politeness, with its warm-hearted, well-meaning, outgoing consideration for others.
Children should show respect to older people, one should be friendly and agreeable to
strangers, and one should feel a tug at one's good heart at the sight of a "cute little pickaninny"
too poor to have britches and other things "like we do." Above all, she exemplifies the
simplistic, uncritical religiosity for which the South is well known.
In short, the grandmother is an ironic embodiment of the South of the good old days, when
people were God-fearing, genteel, courteous, hospitable, charitable, and honest--in a word,
good. This is, of course, the land of the Great Southern Dream toward which, in so much of the
fiction of the region, people of the South look back with exquisite and paralyzing nostalgia, the
land of the old plantation culture which O'Connor evokes in the now familiar image of the great
plantation house, with its tall columns across the front, its driveway lined with trees, its arbors
and gardens where ladies and gentlemen lived the romance of the Old South. With fitting irony
it is reminiscing about "better times" with Red Sam--the red-necked proprietor of one of those
shabby filling-station cafes that seem almost to typify the rural South--that reawakens in the
grandmother's mind her dream of lost paradise. And it is her desire to return to the old dream
world that brings her and the culture she personifies into fatal collision with reality in the form
of the Misfit.
Of course, the grandmother is far from what she thinks she is, and thus she personifies a
culture whose pretensions of honorable gentility are belied by reality. C. R. Kropf has rightly
seen her as another misfit, and so is the aspect of the South she personifies. 9 The old woman is
like a child who treats pets and dolls like make-believe people, wheedles and lies to get her
way, uses baby talk ("pitty sing" for "pretty thing"), and responds to taunts from other children
by threats of getting even. Her amusing illiteracy marks her as a good deal less than genteel.
Her dress is a garish travesty of true ladylike taste. She actually enjoys the privation of the black
child along the roadside because it is picturesque. In a particularly deft exposure of her pseudogentility the grandmother is paired with Red Sammy Butts, personification of the red-necked
South, with whom she enjoys an immediate and deep-rooted rapport based on their common
vernacular and identical system of values. And in the confrontation with the Misfit, O'Connor
heavily underlines the superficiality of the grandmother's religion. Especially rich is the
implication that her mindless repetition of the name of Jesus is very close to profanity--taking
the Lord's name in vain.
Equally a misfit with reality is the grandmother's view of goodness in life. It is a particularly
ironic measure of her blindness that the model of better times she holds in reverence is the
plantation culture of the Great Southern Dream, which, insofar as it existed at all, fed on the
life's blood of the slaves whose labor made it possible. The dream is pointedly associated with
death: it is just outside of Toomsboro where the grandmother recalls the old mansion and
points out the graveyard that was attached to the plantation. Thus she grieves for better times
and laments that "People are certainly not nice like they used to be," while the story ironically
implies that people never were as nice as she dreams they were and that if a good man is hard
to find nowadays, the reason is not far to seek. It lies somewhere in the causal chain by which,
for all her ideals and dreams of goodness, the grandmother has reared nothing better than the
generation symbolized by Bailey with his parrot shirt, suggesting mindless repetition of the
given, and his wife with her kerchief's rabbit ears, suggesting mindless and prolific
reproduction, which, in turn, has spawned the generation of ungovernable juvenile anarchy
symbolized by John Wesley and June Star.
Thus Flannery O'Connor portrays the South in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" as a childish,
illiterate, mendacious, garrulous, and blind old woman, a failed parent who has ruined her own
offspring, with a false and destructive dream of the past and an equally false and destructive
self-perception in the present. But that is not the whole story. One of the curious things about
the South is the incongruity between its great courtesy and its strange proclivity to lawlessness
and violence.10 This is the paradox of the South that O'Connor has portrayed in the composite
formed by the grandmother and the Misfit. Incongruity, the misfit between appearance and
reality, between blindness and objective perception, becomes a major motif in the story,
recurring in the dream of the old plantation culture, the grandmother's self concept, even in
the style of the story, where, to intensify its impact, O'Connor creates a jarring misfit between
the violent horror of what takes place and the blank matter-of-fact tone in which it is narrated.
This pattern, of course, culminates in the confrontation between the grandmother and the
Misfit--the former an epitome of Southern gentility, the latter of callous violence.
It seems quite unhelpful to see the grandmother and the Misfit in terms of good and evil or
innocence and evil. The grandmother may be a lovable well-meaning old body, she may, as
O'Connor thought of her, resemble our own beloved grandmothers and great-aunts, she may
even indicate the tolerant affection with which O'Connor regarded the South; but the story
holds her responsible for a substantial share of the disorder it portrays. The apparent triviality
of her misdeeds is another misfit, for both literally and figuratively they lead inexorably to the
far from trivial derangement of the Misfit. Conversely, the Misfit is a cold-blooded killer, yet we
are drawn to sympathize with his tormented inability to reconcile himself to the profound
incongruities of the world in which he is trapped. In its effaced point of view the story seems to
withhold judgment and merely extend an invitation to see and understand. 11
Clearly the Misfit sees the phenomena of existence more objectively than the grandmother.
Indeed, in his insistence on the plain truth against a more pleasing rearrangement of reality he
has something of Huckleberry Finn's uncompromising eye. Huck is unable to see anything but a
Sunday school picnic in Tom Sawyer's Arab caravan. Similarly, the Misfit calls the grandmother
back to reality when she begins to embellish her story of the accident--the car rolled over not
twice, as she says, but "Oncet. ... We seen it happen." Thus in its ironic exposure of the
grandmother's idealizing vision "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" repeats Mark Twain's attack on
the South for its worship of style, its willful blindness to the unpleasant reality beneath the
decorative surface. Limited though they are, both Huck and the Misfit see this mismatch and
neither can bear it. Huck lights out for the Territory. The Misfit tries to annihilate it.
O'Connor creates the Misfit around a keen existential vision of life. He perceives the
tenuousness of faith and the crucial difference between a divinely ordered world and one with
no transcendent governing principle beyond natural law. Unable to believe in the former, he
finds himself in a world of radical freedom where all possibilities are open--"You can do one
thing or you can do another"--because there is no moral order to invoke. He is imprisoned in a
web of necessity from which he cannot extricate himself; no matter what he does, he comes to
the same fate. He feels himself inexplicably and undeservedly punished; whatever he does he is
still condemned to the same prison of incertitude and suffering. Indeed, whether guilty or
innocent, he is on death row, facing capital punishment. Like Meursault in Camus's The
Stranger, the Misfit has committed crime, but in the radical indecipherability of the world the
sequence of moral logic linking deed, guilt, and punishment has come undone for both men. As
the Misfit says, "I can't make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment."
In a marvelous image of his existential extremity O'Connor shows the Misfit's eyes, without his
glasses, as "red-rimmed and pale and defenseless-looking."
The Misfit is defenseless because he has no way of accommodating the apparent
meaninglessness of existence: no faith to assure him of the divine purpose behind the wall of
appearances, no capacity to transform what is into what one would like it to be. The problem is
that the grandmother's shallow view of goodness is nothing less than the institutionalized mind
of the culture. Thus the Misfit's human yearnings to live and be free are doubly denied: by his
fatal entrapment in necessity and by his subjugation to a view of existence that is enforced
upon him with all the authority of society even though it does not fit visible reality and is belied
by the lives of those who judge him by it.
It is the Misfit's violent exasperation at the incongruity between what he has experienced and
seen with his own eyes and the whole cultural edifice of Jesus-centered goodness, established
with all the weight of law and custom, that is replicated by the real-life story behind the
newspaper article with which this discussion began. (I am, of course, both taking the article at
face value and reading between the lines.) When the girl invokes the love of Jesus, the young
man is confronted with the misfit between his own experience of life--a life tormented by
socially abhorrent, perverted sexual cravings--and all that her words imply of the lifting of
human burdens, the assurance of understanding, acceptance, and pardon, the ideal of spiritual
goodness and sexless purity, and the sheer societal and legal weight of Jesus on his life.
Deranged by the incongruity, he savagely strangles and stabs her to death. As the Misfit tries to
explain to the grandmother the profound existential complexity of his life, she presses on him
the help of Jesus as the solution to all his troubles. This scene, subtly probing the mechanism of
the Misfit's violence, is surely one of O'Connor's finest things. Eloquently emblematic of his
entire life, it dramatizes his compulsion to justify the truthfulness of his existence against the
demonstrable falsehood that stifles him and the mechanical prattling about Jesus and goodness
that is the only response he ever gets. The Misfit feels himself drawn again into the futile
confrontation between the truth of his own experience and the blank wall of the "Authorities"
that has been the bane of his life (the capitalization of the term suggests its proper thematic
weight). The story deftly plants evidence that his problem began early in life. Some readers are
taken in by O'Connor's indirection and assume that the Misfit really did kill his father. But he is
a truthful man, and if it were possible to enter the world of the story, we would find his father
buried in Mount Hopewell Baptist churchyard a victim of "the epidemic flu." The Misfit has
merely overheard psychoanalytical talk by the penitentiary "head doctor," who undoubtedly
diagnosed his homicidal tendency as a displacement of the primal revolt against parental
authority. When the Misfit acknowledges that his parents were good people, evidently in the
grandmother's sense of goodness, we understand that his trouble began in childhood with the
rigid imposition of the ideal of goodness that the story ironically undercuts. Now, as the
grandmother, deaf to his plea for understanding, reminds him of Jesus, he sees her as the blank
wall of Authority, as yet another manifestation of the institutionalized standard of Jesuscentered goodness that has plagued his entire life.
Thus the story builds to its explosive climax. Pounding the ground in agitation, his voice about
to crack, the Misfit hurls his life's truth against the grandmother's terrified vacuity. Then "her
head cleared for an instant. She saw the man's face twisted close to her own as if he were going
to cry and murmured, 'Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!' She
reached out and touched him on the shoulder." At this, the Misfit kills her.
With authorial prompting most critics have accepted the grandmother's moment of clarity as
her accession to grace. As Dowell puts it, "she suddenly realizes that her superficial
commitment to good has been meaningless because she lives without faith, that is to say
without Christ."12 It may be rash to resist the authorial view of the story; nevertheless, that is
claiming a good deal for the grandmother as we know her in the story, a demurral that is based
on literary, not theological, grounds. As she is characterized, the grandmother may be capable
of some insight into her shortcomings, but she has not been presented as a person whose
realization would take a religious form at all, certainly not one so devoutly pat.
If the grandmother's role in the climax remains enigmatic, the Misfit's is less so. He sees in the
old woman the mentality behind the blank wall of Authority, the simplistic, unreasoning mind
of the culture that all his life has judged him by an ideal standard that fits no one. When the
grandmother claims him as her own offspring, he sees what she represents as the embodiment
of falsehood. At the same time he hears her self-servingly try to get him to accept adoption into
her family of goodness, represented so ironically in Bailey, his wife, and his bratty children. Her
touch on his shoulder suggests several meanings. It is reminiscent of the royal touch of healing,
but ironically it reminds the Misfit of the way Authority has poisoned his life. It is the conferral
of a parental blessing, but the implication of the grandmother's causal responsibility for his
misfit, together with the presumption that he is one of hers, like all the Baileys of the world, is
more than he can bear. Best of all, since the touch is on his shoulder, it suggests the ceremonial
dubbing of knighthood that recognizes the squire as worthy representative of Christian chivalry
and sends him forth to champion its ideal of gentility, justice, and goodness in the world. Small
wonder the Misfit finds the touch venomous and shoots the grandmother to death.
But how are we to take the grandmother? O'Connor grants her a dim awareness of her
manipulation of reality in "not telling the truth but wishing she were." She is capable of
sympathetic concern for animals, pickaninnies, and adults--as when she volunteers to spell
Bailey's wife in tending the baby during the long hours on the road. Thus, although the story
does not prepare for her to realize the inadequacy of her hazy superficial religion or to sense
even dimly the way in which the institutionalized falsehood she personifies has spawned the
Misfit, it does prepare for her to feel sympathy for his hurt. She does not understand a word of
his life's truth, but when she sees him about to cry, his real suffering touches her almost
instinctive springs of sympathy and human kinship.
This may not be much, but it is enough to make the grandmother the heroine of the story. For
though it is in one sense an allegory of the South, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is in a larger
sense a dramatization of the human condition that chooses between two ways of responding to
the patent imperfections and misfits that constitute reality. The grandmother is a caricature of
the South, but in the way that her every impulse is tainted by instinctive, unconscious egoism,
she is also a droll personification of human nature as we have come to understand it in the
wake of Darwin and Freud; she is, then, Reality. Thus, in a final instance of the misfit motif, the
Misfit cannot accommodate himself to reality; and that way lies madness. His response to the
inevitable failure of human beings to live up to their ideal of goodness is to kill them, thus
purifying the world of falsehood to make it good. Since every action of the grandmother,
however well intentioned, would, as the story shows, be tainted every moment of her life with
the unconscious egoism inherent in human nature, "She would've been a good woman," in the
Misfit's terms, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." This is
both a brutal and unworkable response to reality since it means that he will have to kill
everyone who shows the grandmother's imperfection--that is, everyone. As the story indicates,
he has made an energetic beginning.
The grandmother, simple-minded though she is, makes a more constructive response than the
misfit. She is able to extend to radically imperfect humanity the touch of sympathy and
acknowledgment of kinship in weakness and sorrow that may be the best hope for ameliorating
the human lot. All this can, of course, be cast in the religious terms of a fallen world, sin, faith,
and grace, but it can also be read with no sacrifice of resonance as the dramatization of one of
the basic themes of modern literature. Thus the grandmother is approved for her gesture of
sympathy for the scabrous Misfit as the mariner is redeemed when he learns to love the slimy
creatures of the deep, as Conrad's Axel Heyst is taught to put his faith in life in spite of its
imperfection, and as Forster's characters learn the one lesson that may ameliorate the
disjunctions of modern reality--"only connect."
Notes
1Flannery
O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1961), p. 11.
2See,
for example, William S. Doxey, "A Dissenting Opinion of Flannery O'Connor's 'A Good Man
Is Hard to Find,'" Studies in Short Fiction, 10 (Spring 1973), 199-204.
3James
Chisum, "'God Loves You' Spurred Killing, Coe Tape Says," The Commercial
Appeal (Memphis, Tenn.), 20 Feb. 1981, Sec. 1, p. 1, col. 1.
4See
O'Connor, Mystery and Manners, p. 110.
5See,
for example, Bob Dowell, "The Moment of Grace in the Fiction of Flannery
O'Connor," College English, 27 (December 1965), 236; Leon V. Driskell and Joan T. Brittain, The
Eternal Crossroads: The Art of Flannery O'Connor (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
1971), p. 70; Carter W. Martin, The True Country: Themes in the Fiction of Flannery
O'Connor(Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1969), pp. 134-135.
6Mystery
and Manners, p. 108.
7Mystery
and Manners, p. 111.
8Mystery
and Manners, p. 110.
9"Theme
and Setting in 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find," Renascence, 24 (Summer 1972), 180.
10I
do not mean to imply that the South is worse than other regions of the country, merely that
it is different. If other regions have been equally violent, they have not been so polite.
11In
the Misfit's sardonic eulogium over the grandmother's corpse O'Connor also, with great
imaginative richness, brings to culmination his keen existential vision of life. For the
existentialist the encounter with death humanizes the individual, turning him back to life with
an awakened sense of concern and responsibility. The grandmother would have been a good
woman, therefore, if she had experienced an existential awareness of death "every minute of
her life." "As terrible as the threat of annihilation is," explains William V. Spanos, "for the
existentialist it often becomes a paradoxically benign agent." [A Casebook on
Existentialism (N.Y.: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1966), p. 7.]
12"Moment
of Grace," p. 236.
Source: Stanley Renner, "Secular Meaning in 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find'." College
Literature 9, no. 2 (1982): 123-32.
Source Database: Literature Resource Center
“The Red Convertible” by Louise Erdrich

The following article was found in The Literature Resource Centre database.
Louise Erdrich
1954Name: Louise Erdrich
Also known as: Karen Louise Erdrich
Introduction
Biographical Information
Major Works
Critical Reception
Writings by the Author
Further Readings about the Author
Critical Essays about the Author's Works
WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:
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Imagination. Westerville: Merrill, 1981. (Nonfiction)
Jacklight. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984. (Poetry)
Love Medicine. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984. Expanded ed. New York:
Holt, 1993. Rev. ed. New York: Harper Perennial, 2009. (Novel)
The Beet Queen. New York: Holt, 1986. (Novel)
Tracks. New York: Holt, 1988. (Novel)
Baptism of Desire. New York: Harper and Row, 1989. (Poetry)
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The Crown of Columbus. With Michael Dorris. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. (Novel)
The Best American Short Stories 1993. Ed. Louise Erdrich. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1993. (Short fiction)
The Bingo Palace. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. (Novel)
The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. (Memoir)
Grandmother’s Pigeon. New York: Hyperion, 1996. (Children’s fiction)
Tales of Burning Love. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. (Novel)
The Antelope Wife. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. (Novel)
The Birchbark House. New York: Hyperion, 1999. (Children’s fiction)
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.
(Novel)
The Master Butchers Singing Club. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. (Novel)
The Range Eternal. New York: Hyperion, 2002. (Children’s fiction)
Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country. Washington: Natl. Geographic, 2003. (Memoir)
Original Fire: Selected and New Poems. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. (Poetry)
Four Souls. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. (Novel)
The Game of Silence. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. (Children’s fiction)
The Painted Drum. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. (Novel)
The Plague of Doves. New York: HarperCollins, 2008. (Novel)
The Porcupine Year. New York: HarperCollins, 2008. (Children’s fiction)
The Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories, 1978-2008. New York: HarperCollins,
2009. (Short stories)
Shadow Tag. New York: HarperCollins, 2010. (Novel)
Chickadee. New York: HarperCollins, 2012. (Children’s fiction)
The Round House. New York: HarperCollins, 2012. (Novel)
Introduction
Widely regarded as one of the preeminent authors of contemporary Native American literature,
Louise Erdrich has earned praise for her complex, multilayered evocations of Native American
life in the midwestern United States. Erdrich is generally seen as a Postmodern chronicler of
reservation life. She makes ample use of multi-voice narration, oral storytelling techniques,
magical realism, and interlocking storylines to offer a communally focused, holistic depiction of
Native American communities and their relationships with outside forces. In 2012 Erdrich
received the National Book Award for Fiction for her novel The Round House (2012).
Biographical Information
Erdrich was born on 7 June 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota. Her father was of German descent,
while her mother was half French-American and half Ojibwa (also referred to as Chippewa). The
eldest of seven children, Erdrich grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her parents taught
at a local school run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She was encouraged to write from an early
age, and her literary aspirations were fueled by the Native American oral storytelling culture in
which she was raised. In 1972 Erdrich became part of the first coeducational class at Dartmouth
College in Hanover, New Hampshire. There she first made the acquaintance of her future
husband and collaborator, Michael Dorris, an anthropologist who was then director of the
fledgling Dartmouth College Native American Studies Department. Erdrich graduated in 1976
with a bachelor’s degree in English, and in 1979 she received a master’s degree in creative
writing from Johns Hopkins University.
In 1981 Erdrich married Dorris, becoming the legal mother to his three adopted children. Their
three biological children were born over the following years. Although much of the couple’s
literary output during their marriage was collaborative, it was not usually jointly signed, an
exception being the novel The Crown of Columbus (1991). In 1984 Erdrich’s first poetry
collection,Jacklight, was published to a warm reception. Later that year she published her first
novel, Love Medicine, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1991 Erdrich and
Dorris’s adopted son Reynold Abel was killed in an automobile accident. After several years of
increasing marital tension and sordid intrafamilial conflict centered upon Dorris’s abuse of the
couple’s biological and adopted children, Erdrich separated from him in 1996. Dorris committed
suicide the following year. Erdrich currently resides in Minnesota, where she is the owner of
Birchbark Books, an independent Native American bookstore in Minneapolis.
Major Works
Although Erdrich has received much praise for her work as a poet—as well as for her occasional
nonfiction and children’s books—her literary reputation rests primarily on her novels. Her first
work in the genre, Love Medicine, established the midwestern setting and fragmentary,
nonlinear narrative structure that characterizes much of her subsequent fiction. The first
edition of Love Medicine comprises fourteen interlocking stories—expanded to eighteen stories
in the 1993 edition and sixteen stories in the further-revised 2009 edition—about the
experiences of several generations of Ojibwa people living on a North Dakota reservation. The
narrative begins in 1981, moves back in time to the 1930s, and gradually returns to the 1980s.
Variations upon the cyclical, episodic structure of Love Medicine recur in other of Erdrich’s
novels, as do its general setting and some of its characters. These recurrences have led critics to
compare Erdrich’s fictitious North Dakota Ojibwa community to Yoknapatawpha County, the
invented setting of many of American author William Faulkner’s stories and novels.
Among the most highly regarded of Erdrich’s novels is Tracks (1988), which consists of two
alternating and often mutually contradictory first-person narratives. The first narrator is an
Ojibwa elder, while the second is a teenaged girl of mixed background who wishes to disown
her Native American heritage. Both accounts involve a dangerous, charismatic woman whose
life takes on mythic dimensions and serves as a fulcrum for the internal deterioration of
reservation society as well as the external encroachment of white America.
The award-winning The Round House, though likewise set on a North Dakota reservation, is less
closely related to Erdrich’s earlier novels. The work features a single narrative voice, that of an
Ojibwa man, Joe Coutts, reflecting on a period during his early teens when his mother, the wife
of a tribal judge, was sexually assaulted. The resulting story combines elements of the mystery
genre and the coming-of-age tale, while also serving as a meditation on the vagaries of the
criminal justice system.
Critical Reception
Erdrich’s use of Postmodern narrative techniques has occasionally been criticized as showy and
artificial. Nonetheless, she is generally regarded as one of her generation’s most important and
skilled Native American authors. Critics have noted the political ramifications of her work and
its dismantling of conceptual boundaries. Rita Ferrari (1999), for example, argued that Erdrich’s
skillful manipulation of narrative technique, which removes the border between the real and
the spiritual world, “questions the politics of representation” and allows expression to oftmarginalized cultural voices, while Silvia Martínez Falquina (2002) asserted that Erdrich’s
novelistic voice enacts a liminal, Postmodern “trickster discourse” that subverts traditional
cultural dichotomies.
The germinal influence of Native American history and folk traditions on Erdrich’s work has
likewise attracted attention. Amelia V. Katanski (2004; see Further Reading) studied the
relationship between one of Erdrich’s recurring characters and a real-life figure from Ojibwa
history. David T. McNab (2008), taking a broader approach, discussed the ways in which
Erdrich’s literary treatment of death and dying reflects aboriginal animism and cyclical
conceptions of time.
The Round House was praised for its complex rendering of Native American history and social
commentary within the framework of a crime story. Candace Fertile (2012; see Further
Reading) commented on Erdrich’s definition in the novel of family as “the people who take care
of a person,” as distinguished from bloodlines, which “can cause problems.” John Freeman
(2012; see Further Reading) noted the “elliptical storytelling method” in the novel, observing:
“No writer in the United States possesses the narrative intelligence Louise Erdrich does today.”
FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bibliography

Pearlman, Mickey. “‘A Bibliography of Writings by Louise Erdrich’ and “A Bibliography of
Writings about Louise Erdrich.”” American Women Writing Fiction: Memory, Identity,
Family, Space. Ed. Pearlman. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1989. 108-10; 110-12. Print.
Catalogs Erdrich’s works and provides a selection of reviews and criticism.
Biography

Washburn, Frances. Tracks on a Page: Louise Erdrich, Her Life and Works. Santa Barbara:
Praeger, 2013. Print.
Examines Erdrich’s life and the impact of her experiences as a Native American woman
on her writing.
Criticism

Beidler, Peter G., and Gay Barton. A Reader’s Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich. Rev.
and expanded ed. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2006. Print.
Provides essays on each of Erdrich’s novels up to 2006, as well as a dictionary of
characters and a glossary of Ojibwa words.

Erdrich, Louise. “Whatever Is Really Yours: An Interview with Louise Erdrich”. Interview
by Joseph Bruchac. Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets. Ed.
Bruchac. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1987. 73-86. Print.
Discusses various topics related to Erdrich’s writing, including her mixed ancestry and
cultural background, her collaborative relationship with Dorris, and her transition from
poetry to fiction.

Fertile, Candace. “Tribes and Tribulations”. Rev. of The Round House, by Louise
Erdrich. Globe and Mail 27 Oct. 2012: R24. Print.
Praises Erdrich’s skill in fashioning a novel that succeeds in seamlessly weaving together
a crime story, social commentary, and history—both the tangled legal history that
complicates the investigation of the rape at the center of the story and the broader
history of Native Americans.

Freeman, John. “Crime Scene”. Rev. of The Round House, by Louise Erdrich. Toronto
Star 25 Nov. 2012: IN7. Print.
Observes that although love and violence have often been linked in Erdrich’s novels, The
Round House plumbs new depths in ‘the connection between sex and history.’ Praising
Erdrich’s “narrative intelligence,” Freeman describes the novel as playing with its
readers, “even as its narrator thinks he is telling the whole truth.”

Hughes, Sheila Hassell. “Falls of Desire/Leaps of Faith: Religious Syncretism in Louise
Erdrich’s and Joy Harjo’s ‘Mixed-Blood’ Poetry”. Religion and Literature 33.2 (2001): 5983. Print.
Discusses the blending of various Christian and Native American religious images and
beliefs in Erdrich’s poetry.

Jacobs, Connie A. The Novels of Louise Erdrich: Stories of Her People. New York: Lang,
2001. Print.
Surveys Erdrich’s novels in the context of the Native American storytelling tradition.

Katanski, Amelia V. “Tracking Fleur: The Ojibwe Roots of Erdrich’s Novels”. Approaches
to Teaching the Works of Louise Erdrich. Ed. Greg Sarris, Connie A. Jacobs, and James R.
Giles. New York: MLA, 2004. 66-76. Print.
Studies the influence of Ojibwa history and culture on Erdrich’s novels, focusing
particularly on the life of Manido’gicĭgo’kwe (Spirit Day Woman), a real-life Ojibwa
singer. Katanski suggests that Manido’gicĭgo’kwe may have been the inspiration for
Fleur Pillager, a character who appears in several of Erdrich’s novels,
including Tracks and The Bingo Palace.

Laflen, Angela. “Unmaking the Self-Made Man: Louise Erdrich’s Fictional Exploration of
Masculinity”. Women Constructing Men: Female Novelists and Their Male Characters,
1750-2000. Ed. Sarah S. G. Frantz and Katharina Rennhak. Lanham: Lexington, 2010.
207-226. Print.
Considers the portrayal of masculinity in the novels Tracks, The Bingo Palace, The
Antelope Wife (1998), and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse.

Matchie, Tom. “Tales of Burning Love: Louise Erdrich’s ‘Scarlet Letter.’” Telling the
Stories: Essays on American Indian Literatures and Cultures. Ed. Elizabeth Hoffman
Nelson and Malcolm A. Nelson. New York: Lang, 2001. 153-168. Print.
Suggests that Erdrich’s novel Tales of Burning Love (1996) can be read as a response to
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter.

McClure, John A. “Narratives of Turning in Native American Fiction: N. Scott Momaday,
Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich”. Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of
Pynchon and Morrison. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2007. 131-161. Print.
Discusses how contemporary Native American authors have dealt with the colonialist
implications of returning to traditional religious practices, which are “inextricably linked
to a history of conquest and coercive acculturation.” McClure cites as examples
Erdrich’s Love Medicine and The Bingo Palace, as well as N. Scott Momaday’s House
Made of Dawn (1968) and Silko’s Ceremony.

McNab, David T. “Of Bears and Birds: The Concept of History in Erdrich’s
Autobiographical Writings”. Approaches to Teaching the Works of Louise Erdrich. Ed.
Greg Sarris, Connie A. Jacobs, and James R. Giles. New York: MLA, 2004. 32-41. Print.
Explains the conceptual approach to history in Erdrich’s autobiographical works,
observing how her writing has been influenced by aboriginal notions of the circular
nature of time. McNab also emphasizes the spiritual qualities of Erdrich’s engagement
with Cree and Ojibwa history.

McWilliams, John. “Doubling the Last Survivor: Tracks and American Narratives of Lost
Wilderness”. Approaches to Teaching the Works of Louise Erdrich. Ed. Greg Sarris,
Connie A. Jacobs, and James R. Giles. New York: MLA, 2004. 158-169. Print.
Situates Erdrich’s novel Tracks within a literary tradition focused on the tribulations of a
symbolic “last survivor” of a dispossessed race. McWilliams argues
that Tracksrepresents an innovative and often subversive reconfiguration of the usual
tropes of this tradition.

Quinlan, Eileen. “Ritual Circles to Home
Names”. Names 55.3 (2007): 253-275. Print.
in
Louise
Erdrich’s
Character
Explains how character names in Erdrich’s novels reflect the characters’ desire to return
to a supportive community circle.

Russo, Maria. “Old Crimes, Family Dramas and Lingering Love”. Rev. of The Round
House, by Louise Erdrich. International Herald Tribune 16 Oct. 2012, Leisure sec.: 12.
Print.
Provides a brief synopsis of The Round House, noting its links to previous novels by
Erdrich. Although Russo describes the novel ‘as less sweeping and symphonic’ than her
novel The Plague of Doves (2008), she acknowledges that it is “just as riveting” as it
reveals “the bedrock truth” about the community in which the story takes place.

Stookey, Lorena L. Louise Erdrich: A Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood, 1999.
Print.
Provides introductory essays on Erdrich’s life and works.
Jump
to
Critical
Essay(s)
about
the
Author's
Works:
Rita Ferrari, “‘Where the Maps Stopped’: The Aesthetics of Borders in Louise Erdrich’s Love
Medicine and Tracks.” Style 33, no. 1 (1999): 144-165.
Birgit Däwes, “Local Screenings, Transversal Meanings: Leslie Silko’s Ceremony and Michael
Dorris’s/Louise Erdrich’s The Crown of Columbus as Global Novels.” Amerikastudien/American
Studies 47, no. 2 (2002): 245-256.
Silvia Martínez Falquina, “Beyond Borders: Trickster Discourse in Louise Erdrich’s Fiction.”
In Beyond Borders: Re-defining Generic and Ontological Boundaries, edited by Ramón PloAlastrué and María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro, pp. 139-156. Heidelberg: Winter, 2002.
Denise Low, “Rev. of Original Fire: Selected and New Poems, by Louise Erdrich.” Midwest
Quarterly 45, no. 4 (2004): 427-428.
David T. McNab, “‘Plenty of Food and No Government Agents’: Perspectives on the Spirit
World, Death and Dying in the Writings of Louise Erdrich.” In Studies in the Literary
Achievement of Louise Erdrich, Native American Writer: Fifteen Critical Essays, edited by Brajesh
Sawhney, pp. 95-113. Lewiston: Mellen, 2008.
Christina Judith Hein, “‘Can the Squaw Bluff’: Negotiations of Vision and Gazes
in Tracks and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse by Louise
Erdrich.”Amerikastudien/American Studies 54, no. 1 (2009): 121-142.
About this Essay: James Overholtzer
Source Database: Contemporary Literary Criticism

The following article was found in The Literature Resource Centre database.
"Postcolonial Theory and the Undergraduate Classroom: Teaching 'The Red
Convertible.'"
Critic: Kristin Czarnecki
Source: Pedagogy 2, no. 1 (winter 2002): 109-12.
[(essay date winter 2002) In the following essay, Czarnecki presents "The Red Convertible" as a
tool for teaching postcolonial theory to undergraduate students, asserting that such a reading
uncovers the impact of social disenfranchisement on the motivations of the characters Henry
and Lyman.]
The language of literary theory often appears too technical for the undergraduate classroom,
its ideas too abstruse for students grappling with the complexities of the literature itself. Yet
theory is crucial to understanding literature's historical and cultural significance, as well as its
perpetuation of, or resistance to, conventional notions of class, race, and gender. Postcolonial
theory interrogates such issues particularly well by acknowledging that throughout history
white Western culture and values have been imposed on people of color, most viciously in the
colonization of Africa, India, and Native America. Postcolonial theory, then, examines how
colonized people resist their colonization, either by rejecting it outright or, more often, by
manipulating the colonizer under the guise of submission. Yoking together issues of empire,
ethnicity, and cultural production, postcolonial theory compels readers to question what is
valued in different cultures and why. Studying the Native American writer Louise Erdrich's
(1984) short story "The Red Convertible" through postcolonial theory, for instance, fosters
students' appreciation of pertinent issues regarding marginalized groups in American society.
"The Red Convertible" concerns two Chippewa half brothers, Lyman and Henry. Lyman
narrates the story of Henry's death shortly after Henry has returned home from Vietnam. He
begins by describing the death itself and then backtracks to establish the close bond that he
and Henry shared. They worked, traveled, laughed, and fought together until Henry's
psychological devastation after his captivity as a prisoner of war. Throughout the story Erdrich
depicts the indomitable spirits of two young Native American men and the desolation wrought
on them by white American values. The brothers' red Oldsmobile convertible is a symbol of
their financial success and is integral to Henry's brief recovery and ultimate demise. For
students to see this connection, however, they must do more than passively accept the story's
portrayal of Native Americans. They can look at the facts--the brothers live on a reservation, are
intermittently employed, lack an intact nuclear family, and engage in some awfully strange
behavior--but they must go further to appreciate Erdrich's decentering of stereotypical images
of Native America.
Locating the story in a postcolonial framework allows students to do this. They must ask the
questions through which literary discussion develops into cultural critique. Why do the brothers
live on a reservation? Why are there no viable long-term jobs for them? Why are they not in
college? Why would they blow their cash on a car when they could apply it to their education or
to fixing up their house? The answers lie not only in the encroachment of white values on
Native America but in Native Americans' modes of resistance. Lyman and Henry are acutely
aware of what outsiders think of them. Their "strange" behavior actually mocks and attacks
racist generalizations about Native Americans. Students rush to view Henry's fatal leap into the
river as suicide, yet through a postcolonial reading of "The Red Convertible" they begin to
understand his desperation and the myriad ways white society compels his tragic means of
salvaging his identity. Ultimately, students question the implications of one culture's attempts
to define another. Even when stereotypes appear benign or perhaps complimentary (e.g.,
Native Americans are very spiritual), their fabrication by those outside the culture makes them
inherently pernicious. Studying the work of postcolonial theorists establishes this premise.
Students learning to recognize the shortcomings of stereotype will find Edward Said's ideas
lucid and straightforward. In his groundbreaking Orientalism Said (1979: 5) states that "locales,
regions, geographical sectors [identified] as 'Orient' and 'Occident' are man-made" through "a
tradition of thought, imagery and vocabulary that have given [them] reality and presence in and
for the West." Orientalism is Said's name for a "way of coming to terms with the Orient that is
based on the Orient's special place in European Western experience" (1). It opens the gateway
for discussing such issues as the West's ingrained images of the other, in this case white
America's view of Native Americans. Students will realize that "Orientalism, therefore, is not an
airy European fantasy about the Orient, but a created body of theory and practice" (6) that
continues to shape their view of the world.
Said, Homi K. Bhabha, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak form the "Holy Trinity" of postcolonial
theorists (Young 1990: 175). Key terms in postcolonial discourse associated with Bhabha
include ambivalence, "the complex mix of attraction and repulsion that characterizes the
relationship between colonizer and colonized," and hybridity, "the creation of new transcultural
forms within the contact zone produced by colonization" (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 1998:
12, 118). Spivak investigates the colonized's "'negotiation' with, rather than simple rejection of,
Western cultural institutions, texts, values, and theoretical practices" (Moore-Gilbert 1997: 78;
my italics). Students can bring these ideas to their reading of "The Red Convertible" to examine
how Henry and Lyman resist and synthesize white values to survive at the site of colonial
dominance. Purchasing and then relinquishing the car, distrusting the reservation's white
doctor, volunteering for the U.S. Army, and fleeing from yet returning to the reservation all
locate the brothers in a liminal space from which a culture emerges that defies the colonizer's
simplistic categorization.
To enhance their postcolonial reading of "The Red Convertible," students can also read
newspaper articles about America's colonial legacy, particularly the ongoing debate among
schools to maintain their Native American mascots. Undergraduates are often passionate about
this topic; many contend that an Indian mascot symbolizes pride and bravery. They bristle when
their values or opinions are challenged, yet a postcolonial approach reminds students of
America's past, in which Native Americans were forced to battle whites for survival. Students
can then look to "The Red Convertible" for characters parading around in war paint and
feathers. There are none, and the "warrior Indian" is recognized for the racist caricature that it
is.
Critical essays--read critically--also reveal how racist stereotypes are perpetuated. Marvin
Magalaner's essay "Of Cars, Time, and the River," although it praises Erdrich's fiction, can be
read as an attempt at colonization. Magalaner (1989: 96) admires Erdrich's "ability to place the
petty, sensational lives of her characters in delicate balance with the enduring, changeless
qualities of nature," yet his reflexive association of Native Americans with nature encourages
rather than refutes Native American stereotypes. Similarly, students may take issue with
Magalaner's calling Erdrich's characters "savages" (104), a remark that might slip by unnoticed
without the benefit of a postcolonial approach. Magalaner describes Erdrich's stories as
"replete with slapstick scenes, grotesque confrontations, weird, inexplicable visions, abnormal
sexual interludes, and violent exchanges" (96). Yet what is considered abnormal, and why, and
to whom? What may be a "weird, inexplicable vision" to one person may make perfect sense to
another. Raising such issues with students leads to lively discussions on culture, values, and
alternate modes of perception.
Despite the pedagogical benefits of postcolonial readings, Emory University's "Postcolonial
Literature" Web site (www.wsu.edu/~brians/anglophone/postcolonial.html) explains some of
the problems of postcolonial studies, including the possibility that dwelling on a story's ethnic
stereotypes may, paradoxically, reinforce them for white readers. Similarly, positing people of
color as other is another Eurocentric imposition. Nevertheless, the Web site advocates
postcolonial readings by offering links to postcolonial authors, terms, theorists, and related
sites, such as "A Said Bibliography at UC, Irvine." Ultimately, I believe that a postcolonial
context fosters better comprehension of a dominant culture's effects on the marginalized.
When students work with the fundamental concepts of postcolonial theory and criticism, they
can become more critical, careful readers of texts involving non-Western peoples and cultures.
Source: Kristin Czarnecki, "Postcolonial Theory and the Undergraduate Classroom: Teaching
'The Red Convertible.'"Pedagogy 2, no. 1 (winter 2002): 109-12.
Source Database: Literature Resource Center

The following article was found in The Literature Resource Centre database.
Critical Essay on "The Red Convertible"
Critic: Rena Korb
Source:Short Stories for Students, Vol. 14, Gale, 2002.
Criticism about: Louise Erdrich (1954-), also known as: Milou North, Karen Louise Erdrich,
(Karen) Louise Erdrich, Heidi Louise
Genre(s): Short stories; Novels; Poetry; Memoirs; Historical fiction; Children's literature;
Textbooks; Political fiction
In Erdrich's story "The Red Convertible," Henry Lamartine makes three memorable journeys off
the Chippewa reservation. The first journey, which he takes with his brother Lyman, is a
pleasure-filled jaunt around the western part of the United States. The next time he leaves the
reservation he is sent to fight in the Vietnam War. His third journey is his last; he travels with
Lyman to the Red River to commit suicide. These trips all differ greatly, but the presence of the
Lamartine brothers' red convertible ties these journeys together.
To lose the red convertible is to lose the ability to experience joy and freedom, but Lyman tries
to reject this truth by refusing to take the car.
In the opening paragraphs of the narrative, Lyman sets up the sense of freedom and luxury that
the red convertible brings to Henry and him by suggesting the impoverishment and disaster
that befall the Chippewa on the reservation. Ironically, the only reason Henry is able to afford
his share of the convertible is through misfortune; he had two checks in his pocket when they
saw the car--his weekly paycheck and "a week's extra pay for being laid off." Lyman is the sole
person on the reservation with the talent for making money. In this aspect, he differs from the
rest of the Chippewa, a truth that "everyone recognized." Allowed special privileges, such as
keeping a percentage of the money he raises for the church selling spiritual bouquets, Lyman
soon discovers that the "more money I made the easier the money came." In Lyman's
successes, the failures of the rest of the people on the reservation are revealed by implicit
comparison. Yet, despite his talent, even Lyman experiences his share of difficulties. After only
one year of owning the Joliet Café, "the worst tornado ever seen around here" blew in, and the
"whole operation was smashed to bits. A total loss. The fryalator was up in a tree, the grill torn
in half like it was paper." This incident, which touches Lyman, the one person with good luck,
further emphasizes the nature of the depravation on the reservation and why the brothers-particularly the unlucky Henry--feel the need to escape by means of the red convertible.
It is no coincidence that Henry and Lyman come across the car in Winnepeg, on a trip off the
reservation. They had been walking around, "seeing the sights." The narration implies that such
a marvelous object--a car that "reposed"--was not available on the reservation. The brothers
purchase the car, as they say, "before we had thought it over at all," and it turns out to be their
ticket to a new world. "We took off driving all one summer," writes Lyman, visiting many places
around the West and Northwest. In Montana, the brothers find a spot that was "So
comfortable." There, Lyman "feel[s] good," and Henry seems at peace with the world, "asleep
with his arms thrown wide." Lyman is not sure of their exact location, for "it could have been
anywhere." With the red convertible in their grasp, joy is everywhere because the car provides
the key to life off the reservation and away from the constraints and troubles the reservation
bears.
The red convertible brings the brothers to travel as far away as Alaska, a place they "never
wanted to leave." Lyman describes their time in Alaska as idyllic. It is a nether world, neither
light nor dark; the "sun doesn't truly set there in summer, and the night is more a soft dusk."
Alaska makes Lyman feel as if he is in a pleasant dream world, where responsibilities or difficult
tasks or choices fall away. "You might doze off, sometimes, but before you know it you're up
again, like an animal in nature," he says. "You never feel like you have to sleep hard or put away
the world." Alaska also brims with the promise of possibility, for "things would grow there. One
day just dirt or moss, the next day flowers and long grass."
As the season changes, the sky begins to get darker and the "cold was even getting just a little
mean." The brothers need to escape the upcoming winter and its metaphoric chill, so they head
back south, looking for "greener pastures." However, although they speed through the
northwestern states, they are hopelessly "racing the weather," and the winter eventually
catches up with them back on the reservation. This is a place too beaten down to support the
red convertible, so it is not surprising that the brothers "got home just in time . . . for the army
to remember that Henry had signed up to join it." Henry thus sets off on his second journey,
but it bears no resemblance to the one from which he has just returned. This journey is not a
pleasurable one; Henry must go without the company of his brother and the potent force of the
red convertible.
The Henry that departs the reservation, the Henry of the summer trip in the red convertible, is
full of life, vitality, and strength. "I don't wonder that the army was so glad to get my brother
that they turned him into a Marine," Lyman muses. "He was built like a brick outhouse
anyway." Henry's nose, "big and sharp as a hatchet, like the nose of on Red Tomahawk, the
Indian who killed Sitting Bull, whose profile is on signs all along the North Dakota highways," is
a further representation of Henry's power and vigor. Despite possessing the physical qualities
of a fighter, Henry is captured by the enemy. Although the family only receives two letters from
Henry while he is gone, Lyman understands that the red convertible offers the best chance of
helping Henry through this hard time. As Lyman states, "[I] wrote him back several times, even
though I didn't know if those letters would get through. I kept him informed all about the car."
After three years, Henry returns home, but according to Lyman, he "was very different, and . . .
the change was no good." This new, reduced Henry has been sculpted by the Marines and the
experience in Vietnam. He spends his time watching TV, sitting in a chair and "gripping the
armrests with all his might." Even the red convertible brings no life to Henry. In desperation,
Lyman destroys the car, rendering it "worse than any typical Indian car that had been all its life
on reservation roads," in hopes that Henry will restore it. This ploy eventually works, and Henry
spends all of his time, day and night, fixing the car. That spring, when Henry suggests they go
for a ride in the convertible, Lyman believes that Henry "could be coming around." Lyman feels
all the hope that the melting snow and the "very bright" sun bring. Their younger sister takes a
picture of Lyman and Henry, who significantly is still wearing his soldier's field jacket and the
other "worn-in clothes he'd come back in." Lyman takes it as a good sign that Henry smiled
when Bonita asked him to, but it is only much later that Lyman sees in the photograph what he
overlooked at the time: that "the shadows on his face are deep as holes. . . . [and] curved like
little hooks around the ends of his smile."
Lyman believes that the ride to the Red River in the convertible represents a new beginning.
"The trip over there was beautiful," he recalls. "When everything starts changing, drying up,
clearing off, you feel like your whole life is starting." They park at the river, a place where they
can revel in "all this green growing earth." While at first Lyman thinks that Henry was "clear,
more peaceful," he is wrong. Lyman comes to understand Henry's pain, for "I felt something
squeezing inside me and tightening and trying to let it go all at the same time. . . . I knew I was
feeling what Henry was going through at that moment." Despite the comforting presence of the
car and his brother and the memory of the summer of the red convertible, Henry is haunted.
Henry has lost the will to live, which Lyman comes to understand when his brother says that
"he wanted to give the car to me for good now." To lose the red convertible is to lose the ability
to experience joy and freedom, but Lyman tries to reject this truth by refusing to take the car.
He even tries to beat feelings of hope back into his brother, and the two men fight "for all we're
worth." Lyman allows himself to be fooled by this altercation, which ends in mutual laughter.
He and Henry carry on as they used to, pulling the beers out of the cooler in the cars trunk and
throwing the empty cans into the river. "I think it's the old Henry again," says Lyman. "He
throws off his jacket and starts springing his legs up from the knees." Trying to bring back the
spirit of their previous summer, Lyman likens Henry to the natural world. "He's down doing
something between a grass dance and a bunny hop."
When Henry commits suicide, he does so through the forces of nature--by jumping into the
river. However, Henry's trajectory replicates that of the beer cans the brothers had thrown into
the river to "see how far, how fast the current takes them before they fill up and sink." As
Henry is carried halfway across the river and his boots fill with water, he becomes yet another
pieces of useless debris. Lyman wants to prevent this from happening. He jumps into the river,
in vain hopes of saving Henry. Unable to do so, he nevertheless refuses to give up and get out
of the river until "the sun is down," signifying that the day has closed in on Henry. Lyman is
embittered by the false hope the red convertible held out for him and his brother. He believed
it represented good times, but the past no longer lives in the present, and the convertible
cannot bring good times ever again. In his despair, Henry pushes the car into the river that took
Henry. The car undergoes a sort of death, too. Lyman watches as it sinks in the water. "The
headlights reach in as they go down, searching, still lighted even after the water swirls over the
back end. I wait. The wires short out. It is all finally dark." Yet, even then, the red convertible
manifests a greater will for life than its owner, and, at the same time, marks its presence on
Lyman forever; for he is left with "only the water, [and] the sound of it going and running and
going and running and running."
Source: Rena Korb, Critical Essay on "The Red Convertible," Short Stories for Students, Vol. 14,
Gale, 2002.
Source Database: Literature Resource Center

The following article was found in The Literature Resource Centre database.
Critical Essay on "The Red Convertible"
Critic: Laura Kryhoski
Source:Short Stories for Students, Vol. 14, Gale, 2002.
Criticism about: Louise Erdrich (1954-), also known as: Milou North, Karen Louise Erdrich,
(Karen) Louise Erdrich, Heidi Louise
Genre(s): Short stories; Novels; Poetry; Memoirs; Historical fiction; Children's literature;
Textbooks; Political fiction
On the surface, Louise Erdrich's "The Red Convertible" is definably tragic. A closer examination
of the story, however, reveals a work mirroring Erdrich's background. Influences of a catholic
upbringing abound, yet the body of the work is steeped in Anishinaabe tradition. These
influences, in tandem, paint a different picture for the reader. With a little research into
Erdrich's past, the reader uncovers a work with a spiritual, vibrant quality in the guise of what is
really not a tragedy at all.
The act of suicide . . . is an act of transcendence for Henry. Lyman is able to calmly process
Henry's suicide precisely because he is responding to a notion of a watery afterlife. . . .
Fundamentally, the structure of "The Red Convertible" is in keeping with an oral tradition.
Although the narrator (Lyman) clearly identifies himself in the first paragraph of the work, his
account maintains an oral quality. Lyman's narrative follows a pattern Nancy Peterson, in her
work "History, Postmodernism and Louise Erdrich's Tracks," identifies as repetition with
variations, rhetorical patterns associated with orality ("I was," "I owned," "I had") in Erdrich's
writing. The work is also out of synch or sequence, as if it was being recalled and then told by
the narrator. This quality of a tale being recalled, rather than carefully recorded, is evident
when Lyman mentions his purchase of the red convertible in the beginning of the narrative and
makes a shift backward to recount the specific details of the purchase. In addition, the entire
account is related as a series of memories. Lyman does not give readers a linear picture of the
events surrounding his brother's life; rather, he provides the reader with snapshots, or
moments, from the past. Specific breaks in time accentuate this quality. For example, Lyman
takes a moment to digress from his narrative to recall a picture of his brother he is forced to put
away due to the painful memories it evokes. Lyman also has a tendency to shift, or drift, from
recalling the main events of the story to engaging in more personalized, involved descriptions
of minutiae, or minor detail. It is these qualities of orality that conjure up the image of a
storyteller in the mind of the reader.
The Anishinaabe culture, like many indigenous cultures, relies on stories and storytellers to
communicate and therefore preserve cultural values. Erdrich claims her creative inspiration
stems in part from her Native past. Members of her family historically have engaged in
storytelling from time to time, and repeated exposure to this family tradition, Erdrich says,
influences her writing style. It is not surprising, then, to discover an Anishinaabe oral tradition
serving as the supporting framework for the story.
An important component of this framework is the interrelationship the narrator has, or the
connection he feels, with the natural world. Native Americans have a deeply spiritual
connection with Mother Earth. Implicit within the context of this relationship is a deep respect
for creation, for nature, and a feeling of interconnectedness with Mother Earth. The individual
does not exist, rather, the individual is within an interconnectedness, the Anishinaabe's place in
Creation that brings balance and belonging to the world, according to D'Arcy Rheault,
Anishinaabe scholar, in his work The Circle of Life: Thoughts on Contemporary Native Life. This
sense of universality, of participation, implies belief in a world consciousness, a responsibility to
this planet as part of a universal collective. Simply put, Lyman is part of something bigger,
namely Mother Earth. For instance, rather than taking personal credit for his accomplishments,
Lyman attributes his material success with the restaurant along spiritual lines, claiming, "I had it
all in my mother's name." And, Lyman gives a matter-of-fact response to a sensitive inquiry into
the legitimacy of his relation to Henry, with a decided lack of concern, claiming "we had the
same mother, anyway." A fraternity exists between the brothers that transcends traditional
notions of relation; this fraternity is linked to Lyman's Anishinaabe beliefs.
One of the most powerful elements present within the work is the author's use of the color red.
In the beginning of the story, the object of the narrator's affections is a bright red convertible.
Juxtapose, or compare, this image, one of excitement and vitality, to the image of Henry, blood
dripping down his chin as he chews on a piece of blood-soaked bread. The contrast is quite a
powerful one. The color red is symbolically associated with love, passion, health, and vitality;
however, red is also connected with the sun and all gods of war, anger, bloodlust, and
vengeance. The author uses these images to create an interesting dichotomy.
For Lyman, images of a healthy, happy Henry are embodied in the spirit of the red convertible.
He describes the vehicle in human terms, claiming, "There it was, parked large as life. Really
asif it was alive." All of the memories related in the first half of the narrative are related to the
convertible, to a Henry full of vitality, playfulness and life. To solidify this relationship, Lyman
consistently mentions the vehicle belongs to Henry; from the outset of the story, when he
states, "now Henry owns the whole car," until the story's end, when the question of ownership
inspires a fight between the brothers. The car becomes a source of comfort and a connection
for Lyman to his brother. A marked shift in tone occurs in the second half of the work, as
Lyman's account moves from pleasant memories of a road trip to the dark days spent with a
brother changed by the Vietnam War. Lyman recalls, "Henry had not even looked at the car
since he'd gotten home, though it was in tip-top condition and ready to drive." All of Lyman's
hopes for his brother subsequently become symbolically invested in the bright red convertible.
This parallel between the convertible and Henry is made clear with an act of desperation on the
part of the narrator. In his efforts to reach his brother, Lyman invests in a belief in a happier
past, stating, "I thought the car might bring the old Henry back somehow." The car is then
violated, just as Henry has been violated, as Lyman smashes it with a sledgehammer. Erdrich
uses this symbolic act as a vehicle for social commentary. A perfectly good car, a perfectly good
life, both needlessly destroyed. But unlike the car, Henry cannot be repaired, and he realizes
this: "I know it. I can't help it. It's no use." Lyman's attempts to revitalize and revive a glorious
past for Henry fail. The final moments of the story support this connection when the narrator
sees fit to send the car to a watery grave to join his brother. Again, Erdrich is commenting on
the devastation and travesty of war and the hopeless artifice of Henry's attempt to evoke a
more innocent, carefree past, as demonstrated by his efforts to repair the red convertible.
Juxtapose the image of the convertible and what it symbolizes in the story to the violent image
of Henry chewing on blood-soaked bread. He is a shadow of his former carefree self and
appears to be in a dream state. Lyman recalls the incident as he describes "blood going down
Henry's chin, but he didn't notice it" despite the fact that "every time he took a bite of his bread
his blood fell onto it until he was eating his own blood mixed in with the food." This view of
Henry, so dramatically transformed, alludes to Erdrich's Catholic upbringing. To Christians,
blood represents not only human life, but also human frailty and mortality. Having blood upon
one's hands relates directly to murder. The image of the Eucharist, the symbolic final meal
amongst Christ and his disciples, also comes to mind. The bread and cup as symbols of Christ's
body and blood are symbols starkly contrasted with the image of Henry. He has become the
sacrificial lamb. His actions, however, have taken a queer turn, as he ingests his own blood.
Erdrich purposely gives the reader this distorted view of Henry, and the conclusion to be drawn
from this rather bizarre scene, this strange twist to a traditional story, is that Henry has been
sacrificed for no good reason. Henry, as a result of his war experience, remains out of synch
with the world until his death.
The author amplifies the notion of an exploited Henry on several levels. Henry is referred to
within the course of the story as having a nose resembling that of "Red Tomahawk, the Indian
who killed Sitting Bull, whose profile is on signs all along the North Dakota highways." Most
historical accounts surrounding Sitting Bull's death recall the unjustness of the event, the
brutality of his murder along with eight of his warriors, and the bloody carnage left behind that
was formerly his band of people. This band was brutally massacred during their migration
through the Badlands to the Pine Ridge Agency. In consideration of the Sitting Bull reference,
the warrior image of Henry creates a strange irony implicit in the idea of the Native American
serving or fighting for an enemy who has formerly defeated him. The author's use of this
reference to Sitting Bull exacerbates the injury to Henry, a consequence of his experiences in
Vietnam.
Erdrich's Christian as well as her Native American background, however, put into perspective
what would otherwise have been a terrible incident in Lyman's view. At the conclusion of the
story, Henry wades out into and is caught by the current of the river, his voice calmly reaching
Lyman with the message "My boots are filling." Although Lyman's initial response to his
brother's suicide attempt is to try to swim out to save him, he does not recall for the reader any
desperate attempts made in the process of finding his brother, nor any frustration on the part
of the narrator. Instead, there is a lapse of time in the narrative until the moment when Lyman
"gets out of the river" and proceeds to calmly submerge the car in its murky depths.
The water imagery is a clever creative device hinting at an endless number of cultural and
religious images. In the Catholic (Christian) faith, water symbolizes life. Christ's acts of
transcendence involve turning water into wine, and walking on water, acts that transcend the
earthly condition. Christians are also baptized in water in an admission of faith and to purify
their souls. Recalling the blood image appearing earlier in the text, St. Paul identifies the ritual
of baptism as being one of death and rebirth, simulating the death and resurrection of Christ.
Flowing water in Western philosophy also represents change and the passage of time. Finally,
for many cultures, the river symbolizes life, the mouth of the river sharing meanings with a gate
or a door, a passage to another world. Mythologist Mircea Eliade, as quoted in "Sacred Springs
and Other Water Lore," expounds on water and its regenerative powers, stating,
Immersion in water symbolizes a return to the pre-formal, a total regeneration, a new birth, for
immersion means dissolution of forms, a reintegration into the formlessness of pre-existence,
and emerging from the water is a repetition of the act of creation in which form was first
expressed.
The act of suicide, in these terms, is an act of transcendence for Henry. Lyman is able to calmly
process Henry's suicide precisely because he is responding to a notion of a watery afterlife, his
attitude exemplified in the act of submerging the car and betrayed in his statement at the
outset of his narrative when he declares "now Henry owns the whole car."
It is difficult to read "The Red Convertible" as strictly a tragedy. Louise Erdrich not only uses the
narrative to expose Henry's misfortune but to celebrate the promise of a spiritual life beyond
the sound of the swirling water, "the sound of it going and running and going and running and
running."
Source: Laura Kryhoski, Critical Essay on "The Red Convertible," Short Stories for Students, Vol.
14, Gale, 2002.
Source Database: Literature Resource Center

The following article was found in The Literature Resource Centre database.
Critical Essay on "The Red Convertible"
Critic: Jennifer Bussey
Source: Short Stories for Students, Vol. 14, Gale, 2002.
Criticism about: Louise Erdrich (1954-), also known as: Milou North, Karen Louise Erdrich,
(Karen) Louise Erdrich, Heidi Louise
Genre(s): Short stories; Novels; Poetry; Memoirs; Historical fiction; Children's literature;
Textbooks; Political fiction
In "The Red Convertible," Erdrich uses symbolism in a variety of ways. The most important
symbol is the title car, the significance of which changes as the story unfolds. Erdrich's use of
symbolism in this way gives her story depth and complexity and enables her to communicate
ideas and character developments without lengthy explanations. As a result, the red
convertible embodies, at various points in the story, everything the story is meant to express.
Fraternal bonds, freedom, innocence, control, and wisdom--all of these themes are carried by
one red convertible.
Perhaps the convertible's greatest contribution to the story is as a symbol of the relationship
between Lyman and Henry. Initially, it represents their close companionship. They bought it
together on a whim, which demonstrates their willingness to share a major responsibility and to
do so on impulse. After buying it, they took a summer-long road trip together. The decision to
take the trip was mutual, and their unplanned approach to the trip also was mutual. That they
enjoyed the extended trip shows that they were close and genuinely enjoyed each other's
company.
The convertible symbolizes the brothers' reaching out to each other. Before leaving for
Vietnam, Henry used the car to reach out to Lyman. He told Lyman to take the car, and he
handed over his key. After returning from the war, Henry was emotionally distant, but again he
tried to give Lyman full ownership of the car. These are significant episodes in the story because
they reveal Henry's love for Lyman. As a Chippewa, Henry learned to be reserved in expressing
his feelings; his culture expected men to refrain from emotional displays. Because of this, he
would not tell his brother outright that he loved him, wanted him to be independent, or feared
that he (Henry) might not return from the war. Instead, he expressed these feelings by offering
the car to his brother.
Lyman used the car as a means to reach out to Henry. When Henry returned from the war
moody, detached, and silent, Lyman intentionally damaged the car to get Henry involved in
something. When Henry saw the condition of the car, he said to Lyman, "When I left, that car
was running like a watch. Now I don't know if I can get it to start again, let alone get it
anywhere near its old condition." Henry's statement is deeply significant when read in light of
the car's dual meaning. Lyman's decision to damage the convertible was important because he
saw the car as his brother's only chance of regaining his sense of self. When Lyman damaged
the car, cosmetically and mechanically, he demonstrated his willingness to risk not only a prized
possession but also his relationship with his brother (symbolized by the car) for his brother's
happiness. The changing physical condition of the car is also symbolic of the relationship of the
brothers because it reflects the status of their brotherly closeness.
Besides symbolizing the complex relationship between Lyman and Henry, the convertible
represents other aspects of the characters' inner worlds. During the summer road trip, it
represented freedom. At the time, Lyman was only sixteen, an age at which most young people
long to explore the world and to make their own decisions. Together, Lyman and Henry used
the car to leave the reservation where they lived and to see what was beyond its borders.
The convertible also symbolizes the carefree, innocent life that precedes Henry's three years in
Vietnam. Lyman and Henry traveled without care or worry, enjoying whatever experiences
came their way. When Henry prepared to leave for Vietnam, he gave Lyman his key to the car.
Henry likely realized that by going to Vietnam, he was sacrificing his innocence. Lyman,
however, could still enjoy being carefree, so, by giving Lyman his key, Henry was encouraging
him to embrace his last innocent years. At the end of the story, Henry dies in the river, and
Lyman runs the car in after him. This is a highly symbolic moment because it represents the end
of Lyman's innocence as well as the end of the brothers' relationship. The car had no meaning
for him after his brother was gone, and he had learned too much about the world to feel
carefree again.
The car represents as well a much-needed outlet for Henry after the war. When he came home,
he was unable to function as he had in the past. After Lyman damaged the car, Henry had the
opportunity to work toward a goal, instead of watching television all day. In this way, the car
symbolizes Henry's need for a sense of purpose and mastery. He did not know how to be a
member of his family or community, but he did know how to fix the car. Fixing the car seems to
have lifted his spirits because it was familiar and something that allowed him to feel useful and
competent for a while.
"The Red Convertible" is a seemingly simple story, but the changing symbolism of the car gives
it richness and depth. In describing metaphors, scholars often use the terms vehicle and tenor.
The vehicle is the image used to communicate meaning (the tenor) to the reader. Applying this
terminology to the convertible in Erdrich's story, the reader finds numerous tenors revealed
through one literal vehicle. Fraternal bonds, freedom, innocence, control, and wisdom--all of
these themes are carried by one red convertible.
Source: Jennifer Bussey, Critical Essay on "The Red Convertible," Short Stories for Students, Vol.
14, Gale, 2002.
Source Database: Literature Resource Center
“The Closing Down of Summer” by Alistair MacLeod
“Remembering Alistair MacLeod”
Source: The National Post
Link: http://arts.nationalpost.com/2014/04/24/remembering-alistair-macleod/

The following article was found in The Literature Resource Centre database.
"The Everyday in 'The Closing Down of Summer' by Alistair MacLeod"
Critic: Laurent Lepaludier
Source: Journal of the Short Story in English, no. 38 (spring 2002): 39-55.
[(essay date spring 2002) In the following essay, Lepaludier examines the philosophical, literary,
and aesthetic implications of the quotidian in "The Closing Down of Summer."]
"To every thing there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under heaven"
(Ecclesiastes, III, 1)
Studying the theme and poetics of the everyday in Alistair MacLeod's stories is particularly
appropriate because they are often set in the Cape Breton area in Nova Scotia and describe the
life of its inhabitants. As Elizabeth Lowry points out, Alistair MacLeod is "an astute observer of a
very specific local setting (...); of its landscape and industry, its closed communities, quotidian
tragedies and domestic disappointments."1 The everyday is usually connected with the idea of
stability in terms of setting--the home, the workplace or the usual haunts. A familiar setting
may find a corresponding structure in time--the repetitive and iterative modes expressed in
semantic, verbal, adverbial or adjectival ways. In drawing a picture of how a group of Canadian
miners spend their holidays in their native place on the west coast of Cape Breton, "The Closing
Down of Summer" highlights unchanging traditions and portrays social habits. Yet this short
story conveys a sense of change, notably through its title which suggests a passage to another
season. A study of the poetics of the quotidian and of its significance is bound to tackle the
question of the representation of time but also the theme of the changeable and the
unchangeable, the particular and the universal, to try and interpret the philosophical, symbolic
or aesthetic implications of the story. The narrative constructs the everyday of a community as
dual, as this essay will first show. If duality suggests potential changes, it is confirmed by a
paradoxical impression that the quotidian works as a form of transience rather than one of
stability. Whether the everyday can be transcended is the last question addressed in this study.
Constructing the Everyday
The quotidian is obviously a matter of time. In this story, what occurs every day or just about
every day is not mainly expressed in the preterite--only a section is--but in the present tense.
The use of the present strikes the reader because it is unusual in narratives and because it is
regularly used throughout the story: "Here on this beach, on Cape Breton's west coast, there
are no tourists." (7)2 This statement presenting a fact--the specific assertive value of the
present tense--also suggests in the context an unchanging characteristic of the place which
seems to be taken from a documentary--the generic value of the present tense establishing a
characteristic or a usual fact3. Other statements describe the scenery and the miners' attitude
in the present tense too, bringing together an unchangeable setting and an attitude shown as a
regular and unchanging habit: "The golden little beach upon which we lie curves in a crescent
for approximately three-quarters of a mile and then terminates at either end in looming cliffs."
(8) Also close to a present of description in the following instance, the telling of habits is
expressed through iterative forms enhancing the recurrence of events:
At the south cliff a little brook ends its journey and plummets almost vertically some fifty feet
into the sea. Sometimes after our swims or after lying too long in the sand we stand
underneath its fall as we would a shower, feeling the fresh water fall upon our heads and necks
and shoulders and running down our bodies' lengths to our feet which stand within the sea.
(9)
Different aspects of the present tense can also be found in consecutive sentences with the
same blurring effect: indeed one is tempted not to make a difference between the descriptive
assertion, the general characteristic and the daily routine of holidays:
Beside us on the beach lie [descriptive] the white Javex containers filled with alcohol. It is the
purest of moonshine made by our relatives back in the hills and is impossible to buy [general]. It
comes to us [habit] only as a gift or in exchange for long past favours (...) It is as clear as water
[descriptive], and a teaspoonful of it when touched by a match will burn with the low blue
flame of a votive candle until it is completely consumed, leaving the teaspoon hot and totally
dry.
(10)
It is noteworthy as well that the modal "will" is here used to depict a present habit and not the
future.
The use of the present tense does not correspond to the creation of a background to a singular
event. In fact, it is sustained--apart from the section in the preterite--and together with the
present perfect, shapes the structure of the story. Indeed, one can find it on page 12 ("Out on
the flatness of the sea we can see the fishermen going about their work"), 17 ("In my own
white house my wife does her declining wash among an increasingly bewildering battery of
appliances."), 27 ("I must not think too much of death and loss, I tell myself repeatedly."), and
in the very last pages. The iterative meaning of the present tense is often highlighted by
adverbs of frequency or phrases such as "unaccountable times" (9). The story does not have a
singulative value: it is meant to convey a sense of the usual, to depict the daily life of these
miners on holiday. No singular event occurs to disturb the regular order of things.
The description of the setting also shapes the everyday, creating familiar landscapes or
seascapes. Actually the quotidian is not that of the home with its domestic activities--the
women's everyday in the story. It is that of the men's haunts outside. The beach, the brooks
with their trout, the gardens, what they hear about tourists, highways, cars, motels and lobster
traps are part of the men's daily life. The plural, often used, also contributes to the evocation of
recurrent activities seen in their multiple and iterative aspects. Besides, taking showers under a
fall displaces the domestic into outside natural surroundings. The "quiet graveyards that lie
inland" are also their concern because the miners are the ones who take the dead back home.
The narrative voice which constructs familiar time and setting is first identified as collective. Six
pages have to be read before finding the first person of the singular "I." The first person of the
plural controls the narration almost from the very beginning: "We have been here for most of
the summer." (7-8) Its use continues consistently over the next pages, alternating with the
singular in most personal episodes until the very end. Even though the singular has an
importance, it essentially illustrates the plural: what concerns the narrator--the loss of his
brother, memories about his father, remarks about his wife--is typical, usual. It also appears
that the narrator is the miners' authority, not an authoritarian leader at all, but someone who
discreetly signals what the collective spirit has already decided, as the conditions of their
departure show at the end of the short story. Obviously his function is essentially collective. His
words "strike the note for (...) the translation of personal experience into motifs which have a
collective significance."4 His voice is thus much more the voice of a community of men than
that of an individual, which contributes very much to the originality of the narrative, particularly
in an enunciation that sounds both immediate and timeless because of its general value5.
The collective self present in the narration reflects upon itself and the everyday of a community
treated as a whole. If individual bodies are a matter of concern, it is because of their collective
value, for they are "our bodies" (9). The narrative depicts them as though they were not
separate: "We have arms that cannot raise above our heads" (9). Numbers matter more than
individuals ("many of us", "few of us"). Singularity has been lost to the collective being of the
community, which further enhances the importance of routines. The everyday defines the
community.
The everyday in Cape Breton functions as a point of reference for another sort of daily life,
away from home, the daily round of mining work. General remarks such as "we are perhaps the
best crew of shaft and development miners in the world" (8) or "our crew is known as
McKinnon" (26) evoke the mining trade. Occasionally--but seldom--is mining an object of
iterative description in the present ("when we work we are often twelve hours in the shaft's
bottom or in the development drifts and we do not often feel the sun." (9). It is the mining work
that holds the community of men together in its daily round. The presence of everyday work
also transpires in the sentence "we are all still in good shape after a summer of idleness" (8)
The miners' bodies bear the marks of the other--and more lasting--quotidian: the skin, the hair,
the scars, the limbs testify to this other daily activity:
Bodies that when free of mud and grime and the singed-hair smell of blasting powder are white
almost to the colour of milk or ivory. Perhaps of leprosy. (...) Only the scars that all of us bear
fail to respond to the healing power of the sun's heat. (...) Many of us carry one shoulder
permanently lower than the other where we have been hit by rockfalls or the lop of the giant
clam that swings down upon us in the narrow closeness of the shaft's bottom. And we have
arms that we cannot raise above our heads and touches of arthritis in our backs and in our
shoulders, magnified by the water that chills and falls upon us in our work. Few of us have all
our fingers and some have lost either eyes or ears from falling tools or discharged blasting caps
or flying stone or splintering timbers.
(9)
Bodies bridge the gap between the miners' two lives: "We are always intensely aware of our
bodies" (10). The other link is memory, which functions in connection with bodies: "Lying now
upon the beach we see the external scars on ourselves and on each other and are stirred to the
memories of how they occurred." (10) The permanence of the marks of the daily routine of
work impinges upon that of the summer holidays.
The miners' life at work surges when brought into contrast with the domestic routine of the
narrator's wife:
Her kitchen and her laundry room and her entire house gleam with porcelain and enamel and
an ordered cleanliness that I can no longer comprehend. Little about me or about my work is
clean or orderly and I am always mildly amazed to find the earnings of the violence and dirt in
which I make my living converted into such meticulous brightness (...) For us most of our
working lives are spent in rough, crude bunk-houses thrown up at the shaft-head's site. Our
bunks are made of two-by-fours (...) Such rooms are like hospital wards (...).
(17)
His working life is also contrasted with that of his children and comes in the form of a wish:
I have always wished that my children could see me at work. That they might journey down
with me in the dripping cage to the shaft's bottom or walk the eerie tunnels of the drifts that
end in walls of staring stone. And that they might see how articulate we are in the
accomplishment of what we do.
(23)
Everyday work also permeates life at home, as the episode of the narrator's father's coffin
falling down upon the bearers recalls the dangers of mining. The irony of the choice of such a
trade does not escape the narrator's notice: "I was aware even then of the ultimate irony of my
choice." He dropped out of the university because he wanted to "burst out", "to feel that I was
breaking free" and chose precisely to "spend his working days in the most confined of places"
(25).
If the miners' everyday life is dual, that of their families bears the mark of permanence. The
adverb "permanently" typifies the life of the narrator's wife: "Now my wife seems to have gone
permanently into a world of avocado appliances and household cleanliness and vicarious
experiences provided by the interminable soap operas that fill her television afternoons." (18)
The miners are estranged from the daily round of their families' activities. Their sons will live
completely differently from them. The wives' and the sons' everyday, characterised by
permanence and security, function as foils to the miners' dual and seasonal quotidian with its
risky aspect. Indeed, in constructing the miners' everyday, the narrative conveys the transience
of the quotidian.
The Transience of the Everyday
Time seems to be hinging on the present moment. The title of the short story evokes an end
suggesting the closing down of a shop, a factory, a club or the termination of an activity. A
sense of impermanence is conveyed by the use of the progressive form as in "We are lying now
in the ember of summer's heat and in the stillness of its time." (12) The instantaneous and
temporary value6 is reinforced by the temporal deictic "now" and the image of the ember
expressing the end of summer. The present moment is felt as protracted and precarious. The
present tense can also intimate the provisional character of the everyday:
The sun no longer shines with the fierceness of the earlier day (...) Evening is approaching. The
sand is whipped by the wind (...) We flinch and shake ourselves and reach for our protective
shirts (...) In the sand we trace erratic designs and patterns with impatient toes.
(27)
Transience also connotes the perspective on the quotidian implied in the use of the present
perfect. If it brings together past and present7 it also defines a time-bound and short-lived
period: "All summer it has been very hot. So hot that the gardens have died and the hay has not
grown and the surface wells have dried to dampened mud. The brooks that flow to the sea
have dried to trickles." (7) This feeling of the passing of time, on being on the edge is sustained
throughout the story with a very consistent use of the present perfect together with the
present. This is reinforced by adverbs denoting mutability such as "still", "not yet", "as yet", etc.
The ephemeral nature of the everyday is thematically illustrated by the seasonal quality of the
period described. The characteristics of the end of summer suggest the round of the seasons,
creating a sense of expectancy even at the very beginning of the story: "We have been here for
most of the summer. Surprised at the endurance and consistency of the heat. Waiting for it to
break and perhaps to change the spell." (7-8). The slight changes in the weather signal the end
of the holidays. The narration underlines the transitory character of the period: "Still we know
that the weather cannot last much longer and in another week the tourists will be gone and the
school will reopen and the pace of life will change." (8) Implied in the seasonal inscription of
time is the cyclical nature of the everyday. There is indeed a time for everything, a time for
work and a time for idleness--which is coming to an end. The miners' bodies themselves bear
the mark of a long summer approaching its end as recalled by the permanence of the scars:
All summer we have watched our bodies change their colour and seen our hair grow bleached
and ever lighter. Only the scars that all of us bear fail to respond to the healing power of the
sun's heat. They seem to stand out even more vividly now, long running pink welts that course
down our inner forearms or jagged saw-tooth ridges on the taut calves of our legs.
(9)
The theme of transience seeps into the very description of the landscape with verbs
suspiciously redolent of the end as in "The golden little beach (...) terminates at either end in
looming cliffs." (8) Or again in "At the south cliff a little brook ends its journey" (9).
The quotidian holiday routine is beset by foreshadowing and memories of the other everyday,
that of mining. The scars on the miners' bodies remind them of accidents: "memories of how
they occurred" (10). Remembrances are conjured up in the form of analepses, either
singulative--i.e. referring to one event--or iterative--i.e. referring to an habitual one (with the
use of "would" and adverbs of frequency as in page 13). They bring the quotidian past of work
into the present. But what awaits them in the near future is anticipated. It is sometimes implied
in the use of the present tense characterising the miners' life, sometimes announced by the
modal "will" as is their future employment in Africa: "In Africa it will be hot too, in spite of the
coming rainy season, and on the veldt the heat will shimmer and the strange, fine-limbed
animals will move across it in patterns older than memory." (16) The determinant "the" implies
knowledge of a place familiar to the narrator. Because "will" sometimes announces the future
and sometimes characterises the miners' activities, the gap between present and future tends
to be reduced, suggesting the invasion of daily work into an idle everyday.
The everyday is fraught with intimations of death, past and future. Memories of death, the
ultimate passage, surge from the familiar setting itself: "In the quiet graveyards that lie inland
the dead are buried. Behind the small white wooden churches and beneath the monuments of
polished black granite they take their silent rest." (12) The lexical field of death conjures up
immediately the death of fellow miners: "Death in the shafts and in the drifts is always violent
and very often the body is crushed or so blown apart that it cannot be reassembled properly for
exposure in the coffin." (13) Then through analepses, the narrator recalls the deaths of miners
in Ontario's Elliot Lake and Bancroft uranium shafts "some twenty years ago." (13) There
follows another flashback to the time when the narrator's younger brother died in
Newfoundland "fifteen years ago." (14) The memory expands over two pages.
Such memories together with the unchanging everyday life of his wife remind the narrator of
the fleeting nature of time: "It is difficult to explain to my wife such things and we have grown
more and more apart with the passage of years." (17) The estrangement from his children
encourages the same feeling:
(...) And of how I lie awake at night aware of my own decline and of the diminishing of the men
around me. For all of us know we will not last much longer and that it is unlikely that we will be
replaced in the shaft's bottom by members of our own flesh and bone.
(22)
The discrepancy between the songs his family sing and those he knows inevitably evokes death:
There was always a feeling of mild panic on hearing whole dance floors of people singing aloud
songs that had come and flourished since my departure and which I had never heard. As if I had
been on a journey to the land of the dead.
(19)
Even the Celtic revival, which should have brought together the older and the younger
generation, is "a revival that is very different from our own" (20) and the narrator feels closer to
the Zulus than to his own sons. A sense of an oncoming death permeates the narrator's
comments: "I would like to tell my wife and children something of the way my years pass by on
the route to my inevitable death." (22) In a comparison, he pictures himself as "a gladiator who
fights away the impassiveness of water as it drips on darkened stone." (22) So it is not simply
the idle quotidian of holidays that is at stake but his life. The narrator cannot help facing death
in his risky work--and in the narrative itself:
I must not think too much of death and loss, I tell myself repeatedly. For if I am to survive I
must be as careful and calculating with my thoughts as I am with my tools when working so far
beneath the earth's surface. I must always be careful of sloppiness and self-indulgence lest they
cost me dearly in the end.
(27)
In that context, the change in the weather takes on a symbolic dimension. The waves breaking
upon the beach, the wind in their faces and the approaching evening lead to questions
expressed as direct thought ambiguously evoking change and death: "Perhaps this is what we
have been waiting for? Perhaps this is the end and the beginning?" (27) The wind and the men's
sigh are actually compared further on: "There is a collective sigh that is more sensed than really
heard. Almost like distant wind in far-off trees." (28). The waves stand as a symbol of death in
the miners' eyes as they destroy the shapes of their bodies in the sand:
The waves are higher now and are breaking and cresting and rolling farther in. They have
obliterated the outlines of our bodies in the sand and our footprints of brief moments before
already have been washed away. There remains no evidence of what we have ever been. It is as
if we have never lain, nor ever walked nor ever thought what thoughts we had. We leave no art
or mark behind. The sea has washed its sand slate clean.
(28)
If the signs of death are sometimes implicit in the obliteration of the outlines of the bodies and
of the footprints, they are explicitly commented upon.
The visit to the churchyards, the farewells and the journey to Toronto in the cars take on a
symbolic dimension. The miners, numbed with moonshine, undertake a night journey to the
land of the dead, ready to face their doom and the narrator feels "like a figure in some
mediaeval ballad who has completed his formal farewells and goes now to meet his fatalistic
future." (30) The fifteenth century Gaelic song which surges like a "towering, breaking wave"
(31) illustrates the theme of the journey towards death:
I wend to death, knight stith in stour;
Through fight in field I won the flower;
No fights me taught the death to quellI wend to death, sooth I you tell.
I wend to death, a king iwis;
What helpes honour or worlde's bliss?
Death is to man the final wayI wende to be clad in clay.
The dirge which concludes the short story echoes in the reader's ears and comments upon the
symbolic value of the title: the closing down of summer might be permanent and not just
seasonal. The miners' everyday is never seen as trivial for it is endowed with a transcendent
dimension.
Transcending the Everyday
A miner's life is not devoid of a confrontation with the customary. It might be a harsh life with
its "twelve-hour stand-up shifts" (10) or the rudimentary housing conditions--the "rough
bunkhouses" (17)--or the triteness of community living with its "snoring and coughing or
spitting into cans" (17). The narrator even confesses it might lack originality: "Perhaps we are
becoming our previous generation?" (18) Yet the everyday is transcended by work. Expressing
his wish that his children could see him at work, the narrator celebrates the miners'
achievements as with a litany, repeating the same structural pattern at the beginning of each
sentence:
That they might journey down with me in the dripping cage to the shaft's bottom or walk the
eerie tunnels of the drifts that end in walls of staring stone. And that they might see how
articulate we are in the accomplishment of what we do. That they might appreciate the
perfection of our drilling and the calculations of our angles and the measuring of our powder,
and that they might understand that what we know through eye and ear and touch is of a finer
quality than any information garnered by the most sophisticated of mining engineers with all
their elaborate equipment.
(23-4)
The isotopy of scientific precision illustrates and corroborates that of perfection. Work is indeed
magnified. The "joy of breaking through" and the pride of "liberating resources" enhance the
"glamour" of professionals living a nomadic life that "sedentary" people cannot understand.
The miners' work attains an aesthetic perfection that transcends the quotidian. The isotopy of
perfection is here connected with that of beauty:
(...) there is perhaps a certain eloquent beauty to be found in what we do. (...) It is perhaps akin
to the violent motion of the huge professional athletes on the given days or nights of their
many games. Men as huge and physical as we are; polished and eloquent in the propelling of
their bodies towards their desired goals and in their relationships and dependencies on one
another but often numb and silent before the microphone of their sedentary interviewers.
(24)
The movements of the bodies transcend the utilitarian to reach an elaborate rhetoric needing
sophisticated interpreters. Ironically, only the miners themselves seem to be in a capacity to
appreciate their own performance in dark and enclosed tunnels. The modalising adverb
"perhaps"--used twice--barely contains the temptation of grandiloquence. For work magnifies
the MacKinnons and endows them with the qualities of mythic heroes.
The narration verges on myth-making, defamiliarising the MacKinnons' quotidian working life
and giving it a magnified status. They form a sort of tribe of nomads, only comparable perhaps
to this other tribe of fishermen with whom they exchange favours. In the tribe each individual
finds his purpose in the collective being. The personal pronoun "we" gathers and defines the
community of miners. The narrator certainly feels closer to the Zulus than to his own family. He
takes interest in the nomads of Africa. He is attentive to their bodies, their shouts and their
eyes and reads their feelings in their dance. The bond between tribal men is implied in the
sentence: "Hoping to find there a message that is recognisable only to primitive men." (20)
Their bodies "magnified" (9) by the work and full of scars resemble the bodies of warriors. Their
status is given epic proportions. Their working clothes make them "loom even larger than we
are in actual life" (29). As primitive men, the MacKinnons form a tribe of warriors like their
Scottish ancestors on the "battlefield of the world" (11), fighting "adversary" walls (25). They
have their own rules and seem to be above the laws applying to ordinary citizens, speeding and
drinking moonshine, "seldom fined or in odd instances allowed to pay our speeding fines upon
the spot." (11) Adventurers and treasure-hunters, they can be found in Haiti, in Chile, in the
Congo, in Bolivia, in Guatemala, in Mexico, in Jamaica or in South-Africa--the enumeration
magnifies their importance. The narrator compares himself to "a gladiator who fights always
the impassiveness of water" (22). He also feels like a figure in a medieval ballad "who goes to
meet his fatalistic future" (30). In fact, the miners belong to a timeless, hence mythical world
for they also feel "As if we are Greek actors or mastodons of an earlier time. Soon to be
replaced or else perhaps extinct." (29). The significance of their lives must be appreciated in
relation with the Ancient times, the Middle Ages or the timelessness of tribal consciousness.
The phone calls announcing the deaths of miners lose their specificity in time. The comparison
with the ballads and folktales underlines their unchanging truth and testifies to their
timelessness:
The darkness of the midnight phone call seems somehow to fade with the passing of time, or to
change and be recreated like the ballads and folktales of the distant lonely past. Changing with
each new telling as the tellers of the tales change, as they become different, older, more bitter
or more serene. It is possible to hear descriptions of phone calls that you yourself have made
some ten or fifteen years ago and to recognize very little about them except the undeniable
kernel of truth that was at the centre of the messages they contained.
(14-5)
The notion of telling as recreation participates in the mythical conception of time and rituals.
The miners' working life seems to unroll in archaic time, free from the bonds of change or
progress, or from the tyranny of the fleeting moment. Yet "The Closing Down of
Summer" conveys the sense of a coming end. To exorcise the fleeting of time and share in the
world of myth, the miners perform rituals of many kinds.
Drinking is treated as a community ritual, a sort of bond connecting the miners with their
families back in the hills or with the fishermen who act out "their ancient rituals" (12) and with
whom they trade alcohol for fish. Moonshine cannot be bought and, because of its symbolic
value in the eyes of the community, it is essentially a sign of social belonging, part and parcel of
the rituals of barter and mourning: "It comes to us as a gift or in exchange for long-past favours:
bringing home of bodies, small loans of forgotten dollars, kindnesses to now-dead
grandmothers." (10) It burns with the purity and religious significance of "a votive candle" (10).
The miners also carry it along with them in their cars on their way to Toronto as they leave, as a
sort of viaticum or part of a rite of passage since the departure takes on a dimension of death.
The postcards sent home, although they only "talk about the weather continents and oceans
away" (21-2) participate in the ritual of exchange with the younger children: "postcards that
have as their most exciting feature the exotic postage stamps sought after by the younger
children for games of show and tell." (22).
The MacKinnons perform their "rituals of farewell" (29) at the end of their holidays. These
rituals have the power to transform everyday life, to give it a holy dimension because they
imply a belief in the invisible. Visiting the banks, checking out the dates on the insurance
policies, gathering the working clothes, but also visiting the churches or standing by the graves
constitute the different steps of a rite of passage which reveals the spiritual nature of the
everyday. Indeed the narrator realises that "we have become strangely religious in ways that
border close on superstition." (29) The various objects--Christian or pagan symbols--taken along
keep the miners close to their ancestors and their past in a timeless and archaic dimension:
We will take with us worn family rosaries and faded charms and loop ancestral medals and
crosses of delicate worn fragility around our scar-lashed necks and about the thickness of our
wrists, seemingly unaware of whatever irony they might project. This too seems but a further
longing for the past, far removed from the "rational" approaches to religion that we sometimes
encounter in our children.
(29)
These sacred objects keep the miners in touch with their homeland and families in spite of the
distances and differences. This is also true of the sprigs of spruce trees "wedged within the
grillework of our cars or stuck beneath the headlight bulbs". (11) The sprigs bring together the
everyday of summertime and the ordinary working days. What is collected by chance is
deliberately given significance, made sacred and ritualised: "We will remove them and take
them with us to Africa as mementoes or talismans or symbols of identity." (11) The rather
unspecified value attached to the sprigs brings together the roots, the sacred, the homeland
and the identity of the community. The significance of the quotidian must be found in this
connection. This is expanded in a comparison with their ancestors:
Much as our Highland ancestors, for centuries, fashioned crude badges of heather or of
whortleberries to accompany them on the battlefields of the world. Perhaps so that in the
closeness of their work with death they might find nearness to their homes and an intensified
realization of themselves.
(11)
The meaning of life is inseparable from death, expressed in the many rituals of death evoked or
remembered in this short story.
Visits to churchyards, wakes, "youthful photographs" (13) or the yellow telegram "kept in vases
and in Bibles and in dresser-drawers beneath white shirts", "[A] simple obituary of a formal
kind" (15) both recall and exorcise death. Mourning joins in with a cult of the dead and of the
ancestors. Memories of burials, such as that of the narrator's younger brother, link up with the
conditions and dangers of mining in a compelling manner. The collapse of the grave, with the
sliding earth and cracking wood, evokes the brother's death and a miner's typical professional
risks:
The next day at his funeral the rain continued to fall and in the grave that received him the
unsteady timbers and the ground they held so temporarily back seemed but an extension of
those that had caused his life to cease.
(16)
It is in those rites of death that the everyday routine finds its profound significance as a struggle
against death and the proud continuation of community traditions.
Daily life is also transcended through Gaelic music and folktales. Gaelic songs constitute a link
with the past. The miners remember them from their early youth; they sing them on the beach,
on their journey and at work. They differ from the songs of the modern hit-parades in that they
are "so constant and unchanging and speak to us as the privately familiar." (19) Their presence
in their childhood and youth and their continuity in mature age certainly accounts for their
familiarity. The Gaelic language of their Scottish forebears had been instilled into them but
came up in the isolation of the shafts:
As if it had sunk in unconsciously through some osmotic process while I had been unwittingly
growing up. Growing up without fully realizing the language of the conversations that swirled
around me. Now in the shafts and on the beach we speak it almost constantly though it is no
longer spoken in our homes.
(19)
The "ballads and folktales of the distant lonely past" (14) come up as a point of comparison to
account for the meaning of phone calls. Traditional music, when the bagpipe-player plays
"Flowers of the Forest" causes "the hair to bristle on the backs of our necks" (14) awakening a
sense of social identity and prompting people to speak the Gaelic language in outbursts of
mourning farewells. Contrary to an artificial summer-culture "Celtic Revival", the MacKinnons
experience a descent into their remote past, the depths of their archaic nature and community
spirit: "Singing songs in an archaic language as we too became more archaic and recognising the
nods of acknowledgement and shouted responses as coming only from our friends and
relatives." Although the songs are "for the most part local and private" and would lose "almost
all of substance in translation", they reach for the universal as the narrator hopes, referring to a
quotation from his daughter's university textbook. It is because the archaic or mythical
constitutes the universal foundation of the particular, the local or the private. The Gaelic songs
and folktales revive the past and the present in a timeless mythic transformation. In singing in
Gaelic, the men's quasi-unconscious incantation reaches the depths of the collective
unconscious in which they experience a sense of the familiar: "After a while they begin to sing
in Gaelic, singing almost unconsciously the old words that are so worn and so familiar." (30)
Time is thus ritually abolished and the everyday acquires another dimension since it shares in
the traditional expression of a community. The quotidian mining work and the singing in Gaelic
are but two ways of using traditional tools: "They seem to handle them [the old words] almost
as they would familiar tools." (30)
In the fifteenth-century Gaelic song which concludes the short story, life--and the everyday--is
seen as a journey towards death: "I wend to death". In the perspective of the short story, it is
the miners' everyday which is endowed with epic overtones: "knight stith in stour / Through
fight in field I won the flower / No fights me taught the death to quell". The alliteration in [kl] in
"clad in clay" draws attention on the final word "clay" as both the symbol of death and the
familiar element of mining work, the word combining the metaphysical and the everyday.
It is the Cape Breton miners' quotidian life of labour, which haunts the whole story. The miners'
summer-time everyday only finds significance in relation to it. It shows the transience of life
which can be transcended by everyday work itself, by myth-making and rituals. The purpose of
the narrative is not simply to construct the everyday. It aims at giving a voice to often felt but
unexpressed feelings of identity. Miners do not speak directly in this short story. Yet through an
essentially collective voice ("we") mixed with a discreet personal one, with recourse to the
experience of a community, their rituals, gestures, traditions, myths, songs or language, the
narrative recreates folk culture--as "the ballads and the folktales of the lonely distant past" (14)
would, not reproducing bygone legends but seeing the archaic in the contemporary. Thus
Alistair MacLeod participates in what John Barth called "the literature of replenishment".
Notes
1. Elizabeth Lowry, "Little Red Boy", a review of MacLeod's Island: Collected Stories and No
Great Mischief, The London Review of Books, 20 September 2001, 21.
2. All references to "The Closing Down of Summer" are taken from As Birds Bring Forth the Sun
& Other Stories, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, (1986), 1992, 7-31 and are given
parenthetically in the text.
3. These notions are taken from Jean-Rémi Lapaire & Wilfrid Rotgé, Linguistique et grammaire
de l'anglais, Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1991, 393-404.
4. Elizabeth Lowry, ibid.
5. See Randolph Quirk & Sidney Greenbaum, A University Grammar of English, Harlow:
Longman, 1973, 41.
6. Randolph Quirk & Sidney Greenbaum, op. cit., 41.
7. See Jean-Rémi Lapaire & Wilfrid Rotgé, op. cit., 457.
Works Cited
Lapaire, Jean-Rémi & Wilfrid Rotgé. Linguistique et grammaire de l'anglais. Toulouse: Presses
Universitaires du Mirail, 1991, 393-404.
Lowry, Elizabeth. "Little Red Boy", a review of MacLeod's Island: Collected Stories and No Great
Mischief, The London Review of Books, 20 September 2001, 21-2.
MacLeod, Alistair. "The Closing Down of Summer". As Birds Bring Forth the Sun & Other
Stories. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, (1986), 1992, 7-31.
Quirk, Randolph & Sidney Greenbaum. A University Grammar of English. Harlow: Longman,
1973.
Source: Laurent Lepaludier, "The Everyday in 'The Closing Down of Summer' by Alistair
MacLeod." Journal of the Short Story in English, no. 38 (spring 2002): 39-55.
Source Database: Literature Resource Center

The following article was found in The Literature Resource Centre database.
"'The Tuning of Memory': Alistair MacLeod's Short Stories"
Critic: Colin Nicholson
Source: Recherches Anglaises et Nord-Americaines 20 (1987): 85-93.
Criticism about: Alistair MacLeod (1936-)
Nationality: Canadian
[(essay date 1987) In the following essay, Nicholson analyzes the intertextual relationship
between past and present, self and other, and memory and self-identity in the protagonists
of The Lost Salt Gift of Blood.]
On February 25th, 1986, in Edinburgh, Paul Ricoeur delivered as the fifth of his Gifford
Lectures On Selfhood: The Question of Personal Identity, a paper which he called "Narrative
Identity." The lecture considered the temporal dimensions of the self, and although my own
antennae were attuned in particular ways by the work I had been doing on Alistair MacLeod's
short narratives, I was nonetheless surprised at the ways in which the lecture seemed to
address itself directly and in some detail to the concerns of MacLeod's fiction. "What is it,"
Ricoeur asked, "that assures the identity of the self throughout the history that unfolds
between birth and death? How can the permanence and change of the personality be
reconciled?" He went on to suggest that within the framework of language, the temporal
dimension of life is narrative; a live history thereby becomes a narrative history. By identifying
itself with what Ricoeur termed the figuration of character, the self acquires a concrete
identity, refigured by the mediation of narrative: a narrative identity. Both the autobiographical
mode of many of MacLeod's short stories and their insistent seeking out of a present-tense
registration for affective memory give point and shade and definition to Ricoeur's speculations.
MacLeod constructs a deeply historicised discourse in which self and other endlessly merge,
diverge and recombine.
Reviewing the seven stories which comprise MacLeod's first collection, The Lost Salt Gift of
Blood1, Matt Cohen remarked "... these people earn their living, and it is not a very good one, in
semi-suicidal conditions: mines filled with rats, dampness, the possibility of collapse or
explosion; or fishing in waters which have become polluted or fished-out with the passing of
time. And so the young people dream of escape, while their parents and grandparents hope
they will stay on--to support them--but also hope they will leave--to find an easier life for
themselves ..."2 It is an acute summary, and one which takes us back to Ricoeur and forward to
the techniques which MacLeod develops to give experiential voice to the historical
environment and regional contours of his native Nova Scotia. We can trace in this slender
volume the processes of growing up in and away from a delimiting and economically
determined childhood. But they are determinations which also lend substance to selfdefinition. As the stories compose a meditation upon time and identity, lines from Eliot's Four
Quartets provide a persuasive gloss:
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.3
We will watch the burden of those lines recur, but meanwhile we can note that one of the
seeming constancies in the changing emotional landscape of these stories is a use of the child
as focaliser for narrative event. The first, "In the Fall," narrated by James, a boy of almost
fourteen, charts the violent eruption of difference into a hitherto ordered and orderly, if harsh,
existence when necessity demands the selling of a loved but economically burdensome and
sickly horse. Rude intrusions of monetary actuality mark a decisive shift out of childhood as
memory and desire now begin to mix differently: "And I think I begin to understand for the first
time how difficult and perhaps how fearful it is to be an adult and I am suddenly and selfishly
afraid not only for myself now but for what it seems I am to be" (p. 25). Typical of MacLeod's
use of grammatical precision4, the boy's growing sense of self-awareness projects itself as a
wider movement in the shift from "I" to "you" as the narrator describes his difficult way back
into the house. Then, referring to his ten-year-old brother, the final sentence gestures
ambiguously towards a future promise. "I think I will try to find David, that perhaps he may
understand" (p. 30).
"The Vastness of the Dark" figures an eighteen-year-old, discovering that mere physical
journeying out from childhood environs brings no guarantee of release or escape. Memories of
a coal-mining family history and his own extra-marital conception within it are the mental and
emotional freight he must always carry with him. In "The Return," a ten-year-old is the
focalising agent in an uneasy revisiting of his father's family origins. And eighteen, too, is the
age of the conscience-stricken, pool-playing schoolboy, presented in the third-person, in "The
Golden Gift of Grey." Learning that parental habits and beliefs are more resilient than he had
anticipated, he learns also that an ambiguous grey offers relaxation from a tight parental coding
of moral black and white which his own preferred experience is already guiltily destabilising.
While the remaining three stories centre upon first-person adult narration, in each case a past
is continually recoiling. Plots construct emotional returns to earlier events whose effects
resonate within and thereby structure an unsettled and unsettling present. In these tales, the
child is father of the man in calculated and disturbing ways.
In the much-anthologised story "The Boat," this trajectory of feeling produces a narrative which
offers itself as a paradigm of MacLeod's favoured techniques. Already resonating with the
possibility that this child may also have become author of the father's death as well as his
textual reincarnation, the disconcerting now in which the narrative voice awakens to begin its
story, sets a contextual immediacy for the shaping operations of a preterite existence which
everywhere disrupts, infiltrates and defines the parameters of narrative contemporaneity. This
is a presented voice so thoroughly imbued by past relationships that it appears inseparable
from the recalled experience to which it gives utterance. Memory is everywhere pre-text as the
"I" which speaks in the now of our reading brings us to participant awareness of a complex,
shared formation.
There are times even now, when I awake at four o'clock in the morning with the terrible fear
that I have overslept; when I imagine that my father is waiting for me in the room below the
darkened stairs or that the shorebound men are tossing pebbles against my window while
blowing their hands and stomping their feet impatiently on the frozen steadfast earth. There
are times when I am half out of bed and fumbling for socks and mumbling for words before I
realize that I am foolishly alone, that no one waits at the base of the stairs and no boat rides
restlessly in the waters by the pier.
(p. 129)
This image of the fishermen at his window is to surface on two subsequent occasions: the first
when the narrator recalls that his father "would make no attempt to wake me himself" (p. 146),
the last when he imagines his now isolated mother still listening to "the rubber boots of the
men scrunch upon the gravel as they pass beside her house on their way down to the wharf.
And she knows that the footsteps never stop, because no man goes from her house, and she
alone of all the Lynns has neither son nor son-in-law that walks towards the boat that will take
him to the sea. And it is not an easy thing to know that your mother looks upon the sea with
love and on you with bitterness because the one has been so constant and the other so untrue"
(p. 150).
"The Boat"'s second paragraph continues to register the present of the remembering adult,
noticing "the grey corpses of the overflowing ashtray beside my bed" (p. 129). This too
prescribes a later memory, from earlier days, of his father's bedside table: "a deck of cigarette
papers and an overflowing ashtray cluttered its surface" (p. 134). The word overflowing
connects remembered images, and "surface" in the second, further prefigures the father's
dying. As for Eliot's persona, so for our narrator:
It seems, as one becomes older
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence-Or even development
(p. 186)
The comforting attempt by our narrator to separate himself from these initial footfalls in the
memory--"they are only shadows and echoes, the animals a child's hands make on the wall by
lamplight, and the voices from the rain barrel; the cuttings from an old movie made in the black
and white of long ago" (p. 130), is deconstructed by the very discourse in which the attempt is
embedded. As the phrase "long ago" leads, in the following paragraph, into the story's first and
momentary deployment of the past tense, we discover that this past will not be so easily
located in a fixed and knowable time and space. The opening act of waking up leads on now to
a narrative reconstruction of the boy's dawning consciousness.
His first memory of his father is sensuous; aromatic and tactile, whereas "my earliest
recollection of my mother is of being alone with her in the mornings while my father was away
in the boat" (p. 131). Moreover, the boat is named Jenny Lynn, his mother's maiden name, "as
another link in the chain of tradition" (p. 132), and that image itself links forward to "the
bracelets of brass chain which my father wore to protect his wrists from chafing" (p. 141). So a
father's prior entrapment in a life of work to which he is not even bodily suited is signalled by a
recurrence of the same image. "The chafe-preventing bracelets of brass linked chain that all the
men wore about their wrists in early spring were his the full season" (p. 146). With the story's
concluding image, the father's corpse crumbling in the hands of our remembering narrator, an
image which returns us to the nightmarish beginning, we see this lasting enchainment. "There
was not much left of my father, physically, as he lay there with the brass chains on his wrist and
the seaweed in his hair" (p. 151). In its mental transfigurations, of course, the dead father
always already haunts the narrative. The structure of the plot is the patterning of recall, and
this sense of an ending forms a continuing present in which there is no terminal situation. Eliot
again seems relevant to the reader's encounter, where
--the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started,
And know the place for the first time
(p. 197)
With perhaps this qualification; that in Alistair MacLeod's fiction there seems to be no
identifiable first time, and all narrative unfoldings are themselves preterite, pre-scribings of
sequences which are always already pre-texts for the ongoing act of imaginative memory.
From his mother the boy learns more than is immediately apparent. "When my father returned
about noon, she would ask, 'Well, how did things go in the boat today?' It was the first question
I remember asking: 'Well, how did things go in the boat today?' 'Well, how did things go in the
boat today?'" (p. 131). As one of the text's many unspoken reverberations, the reader is left to
realise who asked the question on the father's last day, and how, and by whom it was, and
continues to be answered. These silent registrations of the text are voluble. But the mother
asks another question, this time in hostile tones, of the tourist visitors to Nova Scotia from a
world beyond her literal horizons; tourists who take her daughters away, to a world which thus
threatens her hard-earned security. "'Who are these people anyway?' she would ask, tossing
back her dark hair, 'and what do they, though they go about with their cameras for a hundred
years, know about the way it is here, and what do they care about me and mine, and why
should I care about them?'" (p. 137). It is a question which the narrative persona turns back
upon his own people, exploring his and their motivations and desires. In the telling of his tale,
he opens his and their lives and ambitions to the wider world of experience in which the boy,
his sisters and his father have either sought to participate, or have joined.
But that joining is also a separation, and in the world of these stories it becomes apparent that
nothing can be left behind. Language is left to achieve whatever duplicitous constancies it may.
When, in "The Boat," the boy who has since become a university lecturer promises his father to
"remain with him as long as he lived and they would fish the sea together," his father "only
smiled through the cigarette smoke that wreathed his bed and replied, 'I hope you will
remember what you've said'" (p. 147). During that last fateful fishing season, the boy's mother
had said "you have given added years to his life" (p. 148). These things linger in the recall of one
who must go on living with the very real possibility that his father's death by drowning was a
wilful act to accomplish the boy's release from a world of work which the father experienced as
relentless and unsatisfying. Again, the boy's hopeless attempt in a stormy sea to mount a
rescue operation for his drowned father by turning the boat "in a wide and stupid circle" (p.
149) conjures, in tragic reprise, his father's manoeuvre during the infant boy's first sailing in a
calm enclosure--"in the harbour we made our little circle and returned" (p. 131).
What might register as random contingency in existential encounter, exhibits iterative structure
in recall. Knowing this, the narrator must accept opposing senses: of uncertainty in lived
experience, and patterned inevitability in narrative reconstruction. For "The Boat" itself
encodes a narrative response, if you like an answerable discourse, to the father's voice which
had sung "the wild and haunting Gaelic war songs of those spattered Highland ancestors he had
never seen" (p. 140). That voice had in turn wrought transforming effects for the retaining
narrative consciousness: "when his voice ceased, the savage melancholy of three hundred years
seemed to hang over the peaceful harbour" (p. 140). The melancholy survives in the son's
narration.
Such bardic intimations of mortality figure also in the stories of MacLeod's second collection, to
be published next month, and called As Birds Bring Forth the Sun.5 Its opening story, "The
Closing Down of Summer," seems in many ways to articulate, directly and alternatively,
with "The Boat." Spoken this time by a miner called MacKinnon, leader of what he proudly
boasts is "perhaps the best crew of shaft and development miners in the world" (p. 2), it brings
into different focus aspects of emotional self-definition which play beneath the surface of the
earlier story. Characterised again by a narrative commitment to the present tense, "The Closing
Down of Summer" excavates modes of constancy against which autobiographical change might
be measured.
The youth in "The Boat," who does what his father desires but cannot accomplish, leave fishing
for a university education, finds intertextual response in a young man who leaves university
after only one year "spent mainly as an athlete and as a casual reader of English literature" (p.
15), to become the miner he now is. As in "The Boat," encounters with literary texts prove to
be sharply double-edged pleasures. In that story, the young boy read Great Expectations and
discussed David Copperfield with his father, provoking self-reflexive comparisons between
MacLeod's narrator and those of Dickens. In "The Boat," too, the choice of "useless books over
the parents that gave him life" (p. 144) leaves our narrator with the forlorn wish "that the two
things I loved so dearly did not exclude each other in a manner that was so blunt and too clear"
(p. 145). He remains troubled by the knowledge that "the grounds my father fished were those
his father fished before him and there were others before and before and before" (p. 149), and
that to those who remain behind, those fishing grounds "are sacred and they think they wait for
me" (p. 150).
Differently, and then similarly, in "The Closing Down of Summer," university is soon abandoned
by a narrator impressed "by the fact that I was from a mining family that has given itself for
generations to the darkened earth" (p. 15):
I was aware of the ultimate irony of my choice. Aware of how contradictory it seemed that
someone who was bothered by confinement should choose to spend his working days in the
most confined spaces. Yet the difference seems to be that when we work we are never still.
Never merely entombed like the prisoner in the passive darkness of his solitary confinement.
For we are always expanding the perimeters of our seeming incarceration. We are always
moving downward or inward or forward or in the driving of our raises even upward.
(p. 15)
Referring to the comparatively banal existence of his estranged wife's entrapment in the
conventional world of commodity-fetishism, MacKinnon says "she has perhaps gone as deeply
into that life as I have into the life of the shafts, seeming to tunnel ever downward and outward
through unknown depths and distances and to become lost and separated and unavailable for
communication ... Perhaps we are but becoming our previous generation" (p. 10). This
subterranean metaphor undergoes further mutation when MacKinnon ponders the possible
significations of a mining gang travelling the world, "liberating resources" (p. 16) and then
moving on, leaving the mines to be developed by other workers underground, producing the
profits from which social structures are built. These societies are in turn subjected to all kinds of
political transformations, through all of which "Renco Development on Bay Street" will wait for
the miners "who would find such booty" (p. 16).
If the act of mining develops metaphorically into a narrative enigma, the words "constant" and
"constancy" compose an iterative figuration as lexical ikons. The topography of textuality itself
becomes the subject of narrating memory's excavations. Inscriptions of mortality recur; durable
on tombstones, "reading the dates of our brothers and uncles and cousins" (p. 5), and in "the
yellow telegram ... permanent in the starkness of its message" (p. 7), or else transiently with the
telephone call which "seems somehow to fade with the passing of time" (p. 7), yet which
survives in memory. All of these become texts to be read, signs to be deciphered. MacKinnon
recognises that he is looking for "patterns older than memory" (p. 8) and striving
simultaneously for an articulate equivalence to the eloquent and satisfying physicality of
working in the mines. Facing the frequency of violent deaths in mineshafts the world over, it
may seem natural that MacKinnon's miners "have perhaps gone back to the Gaelic songs
because they are so constant and unchanging and speak to us as the privately familiar" (p. 11).
But even this comes to symbolise an entombed activity, "lacking in communication" (p. 11).
Their professional appearances as MacKinnon's Miners' Chorus eventually become "as lonely
and irrelevant as it was meaningless. It was as if we were parodies of ourselves, standing in
rows, wearing our miners' gear, or being asked to shave and wear suits, being plied with rum
while waiting for our turn on the program, only then to mouth our songs to batteries of tape
recorders and to people who did not understand them" (p. 11).
MacKinnon tries to read meaning in the art of Zulu dancing which he had seen in the Africa to
which he is about to return, and does indeed feel some kinship with it. But "their dancing," he is
forced to concede, "speaks a language whose true meaning will elude me forever. I will never
grasp the full impact of the subtleties and nuances that are spoken by the small head gesture or
the flashing fleck of muscle" (pp. 11-12). He sees, though, connections between his watching
the Zulus and his miners singing to a dwindling band of comprehending listeners. The sense of
narrative foreboding which pervades our text seems to owe as much to MacKinnon's keen
perception that the culture from which he sprang is itself fading as it does to any sense of
impending personal jeopardy. And his disgruntlement at the inefficacy of language leads to this,
where the limits of his words are felt as the limit of his world: "We have sentenced ourselves to
enclosures so that we might feel the giddy joy of breaking through. Always hopeful of breaking
through we know we will never break free" (p. 16). The contending possibilities of Gaelic and of
English as surviving systems of communication are compared with the lot of a French-Canadian
mining gang who "will not go to Africa for Renco Development because they are imprisoned in
the depths of their language" (pp. 16-17).
As they leave the beach on which they have been "lying now in the embers of summer's heat
and in the stillness of its time" (p. 5), another sign of evanescence is read upon the sand. "Our
footprints of brief moments before already have been washed away. There remains no
evidence that we have ever been. It is as if we have never lain, nor ever walked nor ever
thought what thoughts we had. We leave no art or mark behind. The sea has washed its sand
slate clean" (p. 18). And given the density of Gaelic reference in this and other stories, and their
signifying function as a historic system of registration, it becomes difficult not to be aware of a
further referential curve. Vanishing traces on a shoreline here conjure associations with those
clearances elsewhere, equally determined by the economic motivations of others, when people
were herded to the sea's edge and translated from Highlands and Islands on the western fringe
of Europe to this easternmost island landfall on Canada's Atlantic coast. A gathering sense of
peripheral impermanence seems in both cases to be an appropriate structure of feeling.
Certainly there is a painful contour in these stories of dispossession and emotional
deracination. Gracefully transformed in a memorably written present, it aches nonetheless.
MacLeod's art ensures his own compromised survival. Linguistic and cultural continuity is an
autobiographical problematic for the author himself. He belongs to the first generation of Cape
Bretoners not to be brought up as native speakers of Gaelic. His literary accomplishment in
giving line and form to the people of Nova Scotia is disconcerted by the fact that his mastery of
English literary discourse itself marks a process of change and slippage from historic origins. So
it is hardly surprising that the echoing resonances with characterise his writing prevent any easy
assimilation into the present which his stories adumbrate. At the end of "The Closing Down of
Summer" the imbrication of time past and time present achieves a different kind of intertextual
configuration and the nature of textuality is again foregrounded.
More than a quarter of a century ago in my single year at university, I stumbled across an
anonymous lyric from the fifteenth century. Last night while packing my clothes, I encountered
it again, this time in the literature text of my eldest daughter. The book was very different from
the one I had so casually used, as different perhaps as is my daughter from me. Yet the lyric was
exactly the same. It had not changed at all. It comes to me now in this speeding car as the
Gaelic choruses rise around me. I do not particularly welcome it or want it and indeed I had
almost forgotten it. Yet it enters now regardless of my wants or wishes, much as one might see
out of the corner of the eye an old acquaintance one has no wish to see at all. It comes again
unbidden and unexpected and imperfectly remembered. It seems borne up by the mounting,
surging Gaelic voices like the flecked white foam on the surge of the towering, breaking wave.
Different yet similar, and similar yet different, and in its time unable to deny:
I wend to death, Knight stith in stour;
Through fight in field I won the flower;
No fights me taught the death to quell-I wend to death, sooth I you tell.
I wend to death, a king iwis;
What helpes honour or worlde's bliss?
Death is to man the final way-I wende to be clad in clay.
(p. 36)
Across five hundred years, an elegising lyric speaks its own perception of present ending. But it,
too, is textually complicated. The source for these verses is a Latin poem in thirty-four distiches
printed from a thirteenth-century manuscript6. Not only is literary textuality thus historicised,
its mode of existence is further compromised in the now of MacKinnon's remembrance. When
he read the lines in his daughter's literature text, "the lyric was exactly the same." But as it
returns again, "unbidden and unexpected and imperfectly remembered," it changes in crucial
respects. First written on scrolls, this present tense lyric was composed in four quatrains. In a
deconstructive turn our narrator ruptures the enclosure of this text by reproducing only two
quatrains from the original. He then, in the uncertain recuperation of his memory inserts the
word 'final' where the original produced 'kynde':
Death is to man the kynde way
I wende to be clad in clay.
"Kynde" means natural, and signifies an acceptance very different from MacKinnon's own. The
"patterns older than memory" for which he searches, are traced in the discourse which
presents him. But it is a kind of discourse which resists closure. No longer positing the
consolation of permanence, the literary text offers, rather, the discursive possibility of
intertextual relationships: relationships which demonstrably modulate with changing time and
circumstance. There is no still point in its turning world. In Alistair MacLeod's writing, our past is
recuperated in a continuous present: uncertain, jeopardised even, but open still, and still
possible.
Notes
1Alistair
MacLeod. The Lost Salt Gift of Blood. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976.
Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text.
2Matt
3T.
Cohen. Edmonton Journal, March 6th, 1976.
S. Eliot. Four Quarters, in The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot. London: Faber &
Faber, 1969, p. 182. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text.
4Simone
Vauthier gives a detailed account of this precision in her analysis of a single story,
"Notes sur l'emploi du Présent dans 'The Road to Rankin's Point' d'Alistair MacLeod,"
in RANAM,XIV, 1983, pp. 143-158.
5Alistair
MacLeod. As Birds Bring Forth the Sun, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986.
Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text.
6Carleton
Brown. Lyrics of the Fifteenth Century, Oxford: O.V.P., 1939, pp. 248-249, and note
157, p. 340.
Source: Colin Nicholson, "'The Tuning of Memory': Alistair MacLeod's Short
Stories." Recherches Anglaises et Nord-Americaines 20 (1987): 85-93.
Source Database: Contemporary Literary Criticism
“Roman Fever” by Edith Wharton

The following article was found in The Literature Resource Centre database.
Edith (Newbold Jones) Wharton
1862-1937
Also known as: Edith (Newbold Jones) Wharton, Edith Newbold Jones Wharton, Edith Wharton,
Edith Newbold Jones, David Olivieri, Edith Newbold Wharton
Entry updated: 09/28/2005
Nationality: American
Birth Place: New York, New York, United States
Death Place: St. Brice-sous-Foret, France
Genre(s): Autobiographies; Essays; Historical novels; Novellas; Novels; Novels of manners;
Short stories; Social novels
Awards
Career
Further Readings About the Author
Media Adaptations
Personal Information
Sidelights
Source Citation
Writings by the Author
Personal Information: Born January 24 (some sources say 23), 1862 (some sources say 1861), in
New York, New York, United States; died of a cardiac attack, August 11, 1937, in St. Brice-sousForet, France; buried in Versailles, France, next to Walter Berry; daughter of George Frederic
(heir to merchant- ship fortune) and Lucretia Stevens (Rhinelander) Jones; married Edward
Robbins Wharton (a banker), 1885 (divorced, 1912). Education: Educated privately in New York
and Europe. Military/Wartime Service: Organized American committee of Red Cross in Paris,
France, and worked on behalf of Belgian refugees during World War I. Memberships: National
Institute of Arts and Letters, 1930-37; American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1934-37.
Occupation: Writer
Career: American novelist, poet, and short story writer.
Awards: Pulitzer Prize, 1921, for The Age of Innocence; D. Litt., Yale University, 1923; Nobel
Prize nomination, 1927; Gold Medal, National Institute of Arts and Letters; Cross of the Legion
of Honor (France); Chevalier of the Order of Leopold (Belgium); Montyon Prize, French
Academy.
WRITINGS:
NOVELS
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The Valley of Decision, Scribner, 1902.
Sanctuary, Scribner, 1903.
The House of Mirth (also see below), Scribner, 1905, new edition with forward by Marcia
Davenport, 1951, reprinted, Macmillan, 1987, reprinted, Oxford University Press, 1994.
Madame de Treymes, Scribner, 1907.
The Fruit of the Tree, Scribner, 1907, reprinted, Virago, 1988.
Ethan Frome (also see below), Scribner, 1911, new edition, 1938, reprinted with
author's introduction, 1960, reprinted, Penguin, 1988, with an introduction by Elaine
Showalter, Oxford University Press, 1996.
The Custom of the Country, Scribner, 1913, reprinted, Knopf, 1994, reprinted, Oxford
University Press, 1995.
The Reef, Scribner, 1913, reprinted, 1985, paperback edition, with an introduction by
Louis Auchincloss, 1996.
Summer (also see below), Scribner, 1917, reprinted Barnes & Noble, 1995, large print
edition, G. K. Hall (Thorndike), 1996.
The Marne, Appleton, 1918.
The Age of Innocence, Meredith, 1920, large print edition, G. K. Hall (Thorndike), 1994;
with an introduction by Regina Barecca, Signet Classic (New York), 1996; edited with an
introduction by Cynthia Griffin Wolff and notes by Laura Dluzynski Quinn, Penguin (New
York), 1996.
The Glimpses of the Moon, Appleton, 1922, reprinted, Macmillian, 1994, large print
edition, G. K. Hall, 1994, paperback edition, Scribner (New York), 1996.
A Son at the Front, Scribner, 1923, reprinted, Norther Illinois University Press, 1995,
large print edition, G. K. Hall, 1996.
Old New York: False Dawn (The 'Forties), The Old Maid (The 'Fifties), The Spark (The
'Sixties), New Year's Day (The 'Seventies) (four short novels), Scribner, 1924, reprinted,
Virago, 1988, reprinted as Old New York: Four Novellas, Scribner Paperback, 1995.
The Mother's Recompense, Appleton, 1925 , reprinted, Virago, 1988, paperback edition,
Scribner (New York), 1996.
Twilight Sleep, Appleton, 1927.
The Children, Meredith, 1928, reprinted, Virago, 1988, published as The Marriage
Playground, 1930.
Hudson River Bracketed, Meredith, 1929, reprinted, Virago, 1988.
The Gods Arrive (sequel to Hudson River Bracketed ), Meredith, 1932, reprinted, Virago,
1988.
The Buccaneers (unfinished), Appleton-Century, 1938 , reprinted, Viking, 1995, large
print edition, Wheeler, 1994.
Ethan Frome [and] Summer, with introduction by Michael Millgate, Constable, 1965.
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The Edith Wharton Omnibus (includes The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome, and Old New
York), Scribners, 1978. Madame de Treymes and Three Novelists, Macmillan, 1987.
The House of Mirth; The Reef; The Custom of the Country; The Age of Innocence, edited
by R. W. B. Lewis, Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Madame de Treymes and Others, Virago, 1988, reprinted as Madame de Treymes and
Three Novellas, Scribner, 1995.
Two Novels by Edith Wharton: Ethan Frome and Summer, North, 1993.
Edith Wharton: Three Complete Novels (contains The House of Mirth, Ethan
Frome, and The Custom of the Country), Gramercy Books (New York), 1994.
Edith Wharton: The Age of Innocence and Two Other Complete Works of Love, Morals,
and Manners (also contains Summer, and Madame De Treymes), Gramercy Books, 1996.
Four Novels (contains The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, The Custom of the
Country, and The Age of Innocence), Library of America (New York), 1996.
New York Novels (contains The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and The Age
of Innocence), Modern Library (New York City), 1998.
SHORT STORIES
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The Greater Inclination (includes The Muse's Tragedy, A Journey, The Pelican, Souls
Belated, A Coward, The Twilight of the God, A Cup of Cold Water, and The Portrait),
Scribner, 1899.
Crucial Instances (includes The Duchess at Prayer, The Angel at the Grave, The
Recovery, `Copy': A Dialogue, The Rembrandt, The Moving Finger, and The Confessional),
Scribner, 1901.
The Descent of Man, and Other Stories (includes The Mission of Jane, The Other
Two, The Quicksand, The Dilletante, The Reckoning, Expiation, The Lady's Maid's
Bell, and A Venetian Lady's Entertainment ), Scribner, 1904.
The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories (includes The Last Asset, In Trust, The
Pretext, The Verdict, The Potboiler, and The Best Man), Scribner, 1908.
Xingu and Other Stories (includes Xingu, Coming Home, Autres temps..., Kerfol, The Long
Run, The Triumph of Night, The Choice, and The Bunner Sisters), Scribner, 1916.
Here and Beyond (includes Miss Mary Pask, The Young Gentleman, Bewitched, The Seed
of the Faith, The Temperate Zone, and Velvet Ear-Pads), Appleton, 1926.
Certain People ( Atrophy, A Bottle of Perrier, After Holbein, Dieu d'Amour, The
Refugees, and Mr. Jones), Appleton, 1930.
Human Nature (includes Her Son, The Day of the Funeral, A Glimpse, Joy in the
House, and Diagnosis), Appleton, 1933.
The World Over (includes Charm Incorporated, Pomegranate Seed, Permanent
Wave, Confession, Roman Fever, The Looking-Glass, and Duration), Appleton-Century,
1936.
Ghosts (includes All Souls, The Eyes, Afterward, The Lady's Maid's Bell, Reform, The
Triumph of Night, Mrs. Mary Pask, Bewitched, Mr. Jones, Pomegranate Seed, and A
Bottle of Perrier), Appleton-Century, 1937.
An Edith Wharton Treasury (includes The Age of Innocence, The Old Maid, After
Holbein, A Bottle of Perrier, The Lady's Maid's Bell, Roman Fever, The Other
Two, Madame de Treymes, The Moving Finger, Xingu, Autres temps, and The Bunner
Sisters), edited by A. H. Quinn, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1950.
The Best Short Stories of Edith Wharton, edited by Wayne Andrews, 1958.
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Stories (includes The Other Two, The Lady's Maid's Bell, and The View), adapted with
notes and exercises by Kenneth Croft and E. F. Croft, Prentice-Hall International, 1962.
Roman Fever and Other Stories (includes Roman Fever, Xingu, The Other Two, Souls
Belated, The Angel at the Grave, The Last Asset, After Holbein, and Autres temps...),
Scribner, 1964.
The Edith Wharton Reader (includes Ethan Frome, The Bunner Sisters, selections
from The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, and short stories), compiled by Louis
Auchincloss, Scribner, 1965.
Collected Short Stories (two volumes; includes stories from the ten volume edition and
thirteen additional stories), edited by R. W. B. Lewis, Scribner, 1967.
The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton (includes The Lady's Maid's Bell, The
Eyes, Afterward, Kerfol, The Triumph of Night, Miss Mary Pask, Bewitched, Mr.
Jones, Pomegranate Seed, The Looking-Glass, and All Souls), [New York], 1973.
Quartet: Four Stories (includes Roman Fever, The Other Two, The Last
Asset, and Afterward), Allen Press, 1975.
The Stories of Edith Wharton, edited by Anita Brookner, Simon & Schuster, 1988.
Short Stories, Dover, 1994.
Edith Wharton's New England: Seven Stories and Ethan Frome, edited by Barbara Anne
White, University Press of New England, 1995.
Afterward, Modern Library, 1996.
The Collected Stories of Edith Wharton, selected and introduced by Anita Brookner,
Carroll &Graf (New York City), 1998.
Contributed stories to numerous anthologies and magazines.
OTHER
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Verses, C. E. Hammett, Jr. (Rhode Island), 1878.
(With Ogden Codman) The Decoration of Houses (nonfiction), Scribner, 1897, reprinted,
Arno Press, 1975, revised and expanded edition, Norton, 1995.
The Touchstone (novelette), Scribner, 1900 (published in England as A Gift from the
Grave: A Tale).
(Translator) Hermann Sudermann, The Joy of Living, Scribner, 1902.
Italian Villas and their Gardens (nonfiction), Century, 1904, reprinted, Da Capo Press,
1976.
Italian Backgrounds (memoirs), Scribner, 1905.
A Motor-Flight through France (nonfiction), Scribner, 1908.
Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verse, Scribner, 1909 , reprinted, Folcroft Library Editions,
1974.
Tales of Men and Ghosts, Scribner, 1910.
Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort (nonfiction), Scribner, 1915.
(Compiler) The Book of the Homeless, Scribner, 1916.
French Ways and Their Meaning (essays), Appleton, 1919.
In Morocco, Scribner, 1920, reprinted, Century, 1988, reprinted, Ecco Press, 1996.
The Writing of Fiction (criticism), 1925, reprinted, Octagon, 1967.
Twelve Poems, The Medici Society (London), 1926.
A Backward Glance (autobiography), Appleton-Century, 1934, reprinted, 1988.
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(Compiler with Robert Norton and Gaillard Lapsley) Eternal Passion in English
Poetry, Appleton-Century, 1939, reprinted, Books for Libraries Press, 1969.
The Old Maid (play based on the novel of the same title), French (New York), 1951.
(Under name David Olivieri) Fast and Loose: A Novelette by David Olivieri, edited by
Viola Hopkins Winner, University Press of Virginia, 1977.
Ethan Frome: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism, edited by Kristin
O. Lauer and Cynthia G. Wolff, Norton, 1994.
Edith Wharton Abroad: Selected Travel Writings, 1888-1920, edited by Sarah Bird
Wright, St. Martin's Press, 1995, large print edition, Thorndike, 1996.
The Uncollected Critical Writings, Princeton University Press, 1997.
Also adaptor, with Clyde Fitch, of a play version of The House of Mirth. Contributor of poems
and stories to literary journals and women's magazines, including Scribner's,
Harper's, andCentury.
Media Adaptations: A play based on The Old Maid adapted by Zoe Akins won a Pulitzer Prize
for Drama in 1935; a dramatization of Ethan Frome by Owen and Donald Davis was produced in
New York in 1936; a stage version of The Custom of the Country by Jane Stanton Hitchcock was
produced On Broadway at McGinn/Cazale Theater, in 1985; "Old New York," adapted from
Wharton's story by Donald Sanders, was produced in the parlor of the Old Merchant's House
Museum in New York in 1987; "Two By Wharton," a play based on the stories "The Other Two"
and "Autres temps..." adapted by Dennis Krausnick was produced at The Mount (Wharton's
restored estate) in Lenox, Mass., in 1987; a film version of The Age of Innocence starring Daniel
Day-Lewis, Winona Ryder, and Michelle Pfeiffer was produced for Columbia Pictures by Martin
Scorsese in 1993; a film version of The House of Mirth starring Gillian Anderson and Dan
Aykroyd was written and directed by Terence Davies, and released by Sony Pictures,
2000; Innocents, a play based on Wharton's novel House of Mirth was produced at the Ohio
Theater in New York, 2005.
"Sidelights"
American novelist Edith Wharton was the first woman to receive some of the country's most
distinguished literary awards--the Gold Medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and
an honorary degree from Yale--and the most celebrated American female author of her times.
The friend of novelist and fellow American expatriate Henry James, Wharton shared with him
many of the same themes and values. Wharton is generally perceived as preserving more of the
details of her character's lives and less of the Jamesian analysis of their personalities, yet her
works show a concentrated interest in personality; her first book, The Decoration of
Houses, introduced the notion that furnishings should express the homeowner's personal
tastes; her novels show the conflict between her characters' individual values and social
expectations. Though her characters seek to escape from the pressure to conform, they often
find themselves bound by it. Wharton experienced this conflict first-hand, sometimes as the
defender of the social establishment, and sometimes as an individualist who paid a high price
for her personal freedom. Best known for her novels The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and The
Age of Innocence, she also published poetry, criticism, nonfiction about the First World War,
travel writing, and several collections of short stories. Her books suffered a period of critical
neglect because of their similarity to the works of James. But a revived interest in what they
reveal about women's roles in society brought them back into discussion. Her books have been
translated into Italian, German, and French.
Edith Wharton was the daughter of George Frederic Jones, a descendent of the merchant shipowners the Schermerhorns and the Rhinelanders. Her mother descended from Gen. Ebenezer
Stevens, who took part in the Boston tea party, the expedition against Quebec, and the battle
at Yorktown. Their sensibility, in part determined by their Dutch Reformed and Episcopalian
beliefs, did not include a high regard for the world of art. Thus, when the teenager began to
write verse and short stories, her family did not encourage it, and later seldom mentioned her
literary success. The New York social circuit was also increasingly made up of the nouveaux
riches, whose appreciation for culture lagged somewhat behind their knack for gaining wealth.
Understandably shy in this environment, Edith happily traveled Europe with her parents. There
she met Henry James, who became her mentor and admiring critic. When not traveling, she
spent most of her time in her father's library, only entering the social milieu when her parents
insisted.
In those hours alone, Edith read voraciously and made her first attempts at writing. Some of her
first poems were published in the Atlantic; other poems and stories appeared in Scribner's,
Harper's, and Century magazines. She had a volume of her poems privately printed when she
was sixteen. Walter Berry, a friend of the family, was one of the first to see her early attempts
at writing fiction, and helped her to make the necessary improvements. Berry became a lifelong confidante, sharing with her the intellectual pursuits that few others cared to share.
In 1885, Edith married Boston banker Edward Robbins Wharton, known to the family because
of his membership in her mother's social circle. He was more than ten years older than Edith
and suffered ill health, which, combined with Edith's dissatisfactions with their social life,
encouraged her to devote more of her time to writing. They owned a house in Newport, Rhode
Island, which she redecorated with the help of the architect Ogden Codman. The book they
wrote about the project, The Decoration of Houses, explained that a house's decor ought to
express the owners' personalities instead of merely aping aristocratic tastes. The book sold
well, to the dismay of her family; confirmed in her pursuit of a writing career by its success, she
moved to Lenox, Massachusetts and enjoyed her association with other writers who lived
nearby. Her next book was a volume of short stories, The Greater Inclination, published in 1899,
followed by another collection and a novelette, The Touchstone, published in 1901 and 1902,
respectively. She published, on the average, a book each year for the rest of her life.
As Edward's mental illness progressed, her writing and her trips to Europe took on new
importance. They were divorced in 1913. Wharton came to prefer life in Europe, where she was
esteemed as a writer. In France, she owned two estates, one on the Riviera and the other just
outside Paris. She befriended the French writers Paul Bourget, Charles du Bos, Paul Valery,
Andre Maurois, Auguste Rodin, Andre Gide, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Jean Cocteau. Also admired
by American authors such as William Dean Howells, Thomas Hardy, and George Meredith, she
often entertained them as guests. Berry, by this time an international judge and head of the
American Chamber of Commerce in Paris, remained her closest friend, advisor, and traveling
companion. On friendly terms with notable American families such as the Tafts and the
Vanderbilts since childhood, she was also hostess to many distinguished men, including Charles
E. Norton, Bernard Berenson, and Theodore Roosevelt. Her home in France was one of the
stops on Roosevelt's world tour in 1909-10.
Because Wharton was a perfectionist in everything, she was sometimes seen as a charming
person and other times was described as snobbish; the same comments were made about her
writings. As Louis Auchincloss remarks in American Writers, "As some of Mrs. Wharton's
acquaintances complained that her taste in furnishing was too good, her French too precisely
idiomatic, so have some of her critics found her heroes and heroines too exquisite, too apt to
exclaim in rapt unison over little known beauties in art and literature with which the majority of
her readers may not be equally familiar. The glittering structure of her cultivation sits on her
novels like a rather showy icing that detracts from the cake beneath. That same majority may
be put off by descriptions, however vivid, of physical objects and backgrounds that obtrude on
the action, by being made to notice, even in scenes of tensest drama, a bit of red damask on a
wall, a Jacqueminot rose, a small, dark Italian primitive."
Other critics recognized Wharton's eye for details as an essential facet of masterful technique.
In The Greater Inclination and Crucial Instances, for example, "Mrs. Wharton shows herself
already in full command of the style that was to make her prose as lucid and as polished as any
in American fiction. It is a firm, crisp, smooth, direct, easily flowing style, the perfect instrument
of a clear, undazzled eye, an analytic mind, and a sense of humor alert to the least
pretentiousness," Auchincloss related in Edith Wharton.
These first stories were also praised for their cleverness, Henry Dwight Sedgwick noted in
an Atlantic piece on the novelist's work. "To most people," Sedgwick summarized, "the point
she plays most brilliantly is the episode.... In Mrs. Wharton, this aptitude is not single, but a
combination. It includes the sense of proportion, and markedly that elementary proportion of
allotting the proper space for the introduction of the story,--so much to bring the dramatis
personae into the ring, so much for the preliminary bouts, so much for the climax, and, finally,
the proper length for the recessional. It includes the subordination of one character to another,
of one picture to another, the arrangement of details in proper hierarchy to produce the
desired effect." John Bayley wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that "her fiction, like her
life, was built on rules and concealments. Neither, she must have felt, was worth much without
them." Bookman critic Harry Thurston Peck commented in 1899, "In the way of fiction we have
seen nothing this year that has impressed us so much as [ The Greater Inclination ].... There is a
finish, an assurance, and a tenacity of grasp about her work that show her to be already an
accomplished literary artist."
The Writing of Fiction explained what Wharton had learned about the craft from her fellow
novelist Henry James. Noticeable similarities in their works are based on a common interest in
the rules of society as they encroach upon the freedom of individuals from several social strata,
in particular the wealthy and the American abroad. Like characters drawn by James, Wharton's
characters met with two kinds of tragedy, Calvin Winter explained in a Bookman review. Their
problems were due "on the one hand, to the complications arising from not understanding,
from the impossibility of ever wholly getting inside another person's mind; and on the other,
from the realisation that one cannot escape from one's environment, that one's whole family
and race have for generations been relentlessly weaving a network of custom and precedent
too strong for the individual to break."
Fred Lewis Pattee, writing in The New American Literature: 1890-1930 noted other similarities:
"Edged with satire, pointed with wit, [Wharton's works] are French rather than American or
English. To compare them to the work of Henry James is conventional, but it is also
unavoidable. The tap-roots of the art of both pierce through the Anglo-Saxon into Gallic strata.
Only in her materials is she American.... Both James and Mrs. Wharton must be classed as
virtuosi trained in the school of [French novelists] Stendhal [Marie-Henri Beyle], [Honore de]
Balzac, [Gustave] Flaubert, and [Ivan] Turgeniev. Both must be classed as intellectuals,
concerned fundamentally with form, with manners, with art."
Even so, Wharton's works were significantly different from the works of James. "In technique
and finish all [Mrs. Wharton] has touched is distinctive," wrote Pattee. In Edith
Wharton,Auchincloss observed, "She dealt with definite psychological and social problems and
handled them in her own definite way. Her sentences never have to be read and reread, like
James's, for richer and deeper disclosures." In contrast to the gradual accumulation of subtle
effects for which James is known, Wharton's vivid depictions of people and objects led readers
through a series of impacts. As Peck commented, "Mr. James himself has nothing to teach her
in those half-elusive but exquisitely effective strokes that reveal in an instant a whole mental
attitude or the hidden meaning of a profound emotion."
Wharton was sometimes harshly critical of society. Irving Howe commented
in Encounter, "In The Custom of the Country... she turned to--I think it fair to say, she was
largely the innovator of--a tough-spirited, fierce and abrasive satire of the barbaric philistinism
she felt to be settling upon American society and the source of which she was inclined to
locate, not with complete accuracy, in the new raw towns of the Midwest." A member of New
York's elite having "old money," Wharton was keenly aware of the relative lack of gentility
among those whose fortunes were gained in industry instead of real estate. The corrupting
power of wealth was particularly evident among the nouveaux riches and the rising middle
class. Howe added, "Endless numbers of American novels would later be written on this theme,
and Sinclair Lewis would commonly be mentioned as a writer particularly indebted to The
Custom of the Country; but the truth is that no American novelist of our time--with the single
exception of Nathaniel West--has been so ruthless, so bitingly cold as Mrs. Wharton in
assaulting the vulgarities and failures of our society."
Wharton was especially effective at piercing the veil of moral respectability that sometimes
masked a lack of integrity among the rich. In House of Mirth, for example, an intelligent and
lovely girl must lose her status as a member of the leisure class if she is to avoid moral ruin. Lily
Bart rebels against the standards of her social group enough to smoke, gamble, and be seen in
public with married men; however, her sense of decency keeps her from marrying a wealthy
but vulgar suitor merely to secure her fortunes. Her other opportunity consists of a young
lawyer who makes fun of the "high society" his modest but adequate means entitle him to
observe. When the first proposes, she turns him down; when the second proposes, it is too
late--he finds the distraught Lily dead of an overdose of sleeping pills. Publication of this best
seller in 1905 provoked much discussion in the United States, where it was hailed as one of the
best novels the country had ever produced.
Wharton believed that good faith among the rich was not to be taken for granted, since it was
grounded not in conformity to social standards but in an individual's commitment to respond to
the needs of the less fortunate. She also understood that social pressure among the poor could
be just as confining. In her novel Ethan Frome, she shows how the title character suffers when
he is caught between two women--his wife, on whom he depends for economic survival, and
his true love, a younger relative of his wife's who has come to the farm to help with the work.
Ethan and his love see no way out except suicide, but their attempt fails, and they become
invalids waited on by Zeena. Edwin Bjoerkman commented in Voices of Tomorrow: Critical
Studies of the New Spirit in Literature that Ethan lives "between those two spectres of his lost
hopes: the woman he needed and the woman he loved. All other tragedies that I can think of
seem mild and bearable beside this one." Though often regarded by reviewers as a departure
from Wharton's usual subject matter, Bjoerkman suggested, "after all, the tragedy unveiled to
us is social rather than personal.... `Ethan Frome' is to me above all else a judgment on that
system which fails to redeem such villages as Mrs. Wharton's Starkfield. Those who dwell in our
thousand and one Starkfields are [as] wrecked mariners, fallen into their hapless positions
through no fault of their own. And though helpless now, they need by no means prove useless
under different conditions."
Some critics felt that Wharton's portraits of men were unfairly negative. "Men especially have a
hard time of it in Mrs. Wharton's novels," Howe commented in Encounter. He continued, "In
their notorious vanity and faithlessness, they seldom `come through'; they fail Mrs. Wharton's
heroines less from bad faith than weak imagination, a laziness of spirit that keeps them from a
true grasp of suffering; and in a number of her novels one finds a suppressed feminine
bitterness, a profound impatience with the claims of the ruling sex." New York Times Book
Review contributor Janet Malcolm, however, looking back on The House of Mirth, The Reef , The
Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence, remarked that in Wharton's fiction, "the
callousness and heartlessness by which this universe is ruled is the callousness and
heartlessness of women. There are no bad men in Wharton's fiction. There are weak men and
there are foolish men and there are vulgar New Rich men, but no man ever deliberately causes
harm to another person; that role is exclusively reserved for women." While not accusing
Wharton of misanthropy or misogyny, other critics have spoken of her pervasive pessimism.
Howe related Wharton's "feminist resentment" to "a more radical and galling inequity at the
heart of the human scheme. The inability of human beings to achieve self-sufficiency drives
them to seek relationships with other people, and these relationships necessarily compromise
their freedom by subjecting them to the pain of a desire either too great or too small. Things, in
Mrs. Wharton's world, do not work out."
Other critics, however, stressed the positive values that infused Wharton's novels. Howe
pointed out, "In books like The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence she could work on the
assumption, so valuable to a writer who prizes economy of structure, that moral values can be
tested in a novel by dramatizing the relationships between fixed social groups and mobile
characters." The results of this testing were not always negative. As Frances Theresa Russell
related in the Sewanee Review, in Wharton's characters, for the most part, "the moral failures
are offset reasonably enough by the successes." Though far from idealistic, her novels argued
the importance of living with a sense of duty to others. James W. Gargano explains in American
Literature, "Faith, as Edith Wharton defines it, is no generalized and temperamental optimism;
it is, instead, an almost mystical assurance that only moral action can save the ever-threatened
community of human existence. Beset by dangers inherent in social arrangements, man clings
to survival by the thread of his moral instincts; he is, at his best, motivated by what Mrs.
Wharton calls, in Sanctuary, `this passion of charity for the race.' In other words, goodness is
useful, and men and women must, under pain of extinction, bequeath it to their children."
Wharton produced a body of work that affirmed the need to conserve certain fundamental
values that were quickly losing ground in the twentieth century. The Valley of Decision, her first
long novel, depicted the moral decline in Italy during the eighteenth century, and was deemed
a successful work of history recreated in exquisitely-crafted fiction. James W. Tuttleton
explained in the Yale Review, "She continually argued the necessity of the individual's
commitment to the cultural tradition;... the catastrophe which ensues when social upheavals
like revolution, anarchy, and war destroy the slowly and delicately spun web of that tradition;
and the necessity of imaginatively preserving... the precious values of the past." By showing in
her fiction what becomes of people when culture ceases to be a moral force, and by recording
her memories of a time when it was, Wharton "hoped to revive the memory of a set of slowly
evolved cultural values suddenly wiped out by a succession of destructive changes in American
life beginning in the 1880's--including the rise of the industrial plutocracy (`the lords of
Pittsburgh,' as she called them); massive immigration which totally altered the ethnic character
of New York City; the First World War, the depression, and the New Deal; and the nationalistic
hatreds, at the close of her life in 1937, building toward the Second World War." Wharton
seems to have "felt that the universe--which for her is virtually to say, organised society--was
profoundly inhospitable to human need and desire," Howe commented in Encounter. Q. D.
Leavis wrote in Scrutiny, "Mrs. Wharton, if unfortunate in her environment, had a strength of
character that made her superior to it. She was a remarkable novelist if not a large-sized one,
and while there are few great novelists there are not even so many remarkable ones that we
can afford to let her be over
In addition to writing about the importance of values, Wharton validated them in her service to
the less fortunate during and after the First World War. An energetic fund-raiser, she was aided
by "Edith Wharton" committees in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, and
Providence. With her financial support, an ambulance unit, a workroom for female garment
workers, and a sanatorium for women and children with tuberculosis were established in
France. She also compiled Le livre des sans-foyer (The Book of the Homeless ), sold to raise
money for American hostels for refugees and the Children of Flanders rescue committee.
France recognized her philanthropy by awarding her the Cross of the Legion of Honor; she also
was made Chevalier of the Order of Leopold in Belgium.
Books informed by her war experience, however, were not regarded as her best. Auchincloss
explained that she saw the war "from a simple but consistent point of view: France, virtually
singlehanded, was fighting the battle of civilization against the powers of darkness. It was the
spirit that made men fight and die, but it has never, unfortunately, been the spirit of fiction.
Reading The Marne... and A Son at the Front... today gives one the feeling of taking an old
enlistment poster out of an attic trunk.... Mrs. Wharton knew that the war was terrible; she had
visited hospitals and even the front itself. But the exhilaration of the noncombatant, no matter
how dedicated and useful her services, has a shrill sound to postwar ears."
After the First World War, The Age of Innocence, another novel about Old New York society,
again showed passionate characters hemmed in by their desire to keep their membership in a
dispassionate social group. Newland Archer is engaged to marry an acceptable and attractive
girl, but falls in love with Ellen Olenska, a European divorcee. Olenska had married a Polish
Count, a villain from whom she escaped with the eager aid of his secretary. Equally passionate
but seeking to reestablish her honor in New York society (which is not sure she is acceptable),
Olenska encourages Archer to keep his commitment. To make it easier for him, she returns to
Europe. Thirty years later Archer's son is free to live the life of feeling Archer could not bring
himself to embrace. "Archer, with his insecurity, his sensitivity, and his passion has obeyed the
moral imperatives of his class and time and has given up Ellen and love for the furtherance of
the shallow-seeming aims, all amorphous as they are, of his [New York] world," observed Louis
O. Coxe in New Republic. Wharton allowed Archer to confess that a life of duty had its rewards-and yet it was a lonely life, since the next generation, represented by Archer's son, enjoyed a
freedom from social pressure that made them unable to understand this kind of sacrifice, Coxe
added. The novel was highly acclaimed as one of Wharton's best novels, and, according to New
York Times writer W. L. Phelps, as "one of the best novels of the twentieth century" in 1920,
and "a permanent addition to literature." The Age of Innocence won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921.
Wharton believed the honor should have gone to Sinclair Lewis, who dedicated his next
novel, Babbitt,to her in 1922.
Commenting on Wharton's place in literary history, Louise Bogan wrote in Selected
Criticism, "Mrs. Wharton's work formed a bridge from the nineteenth-century novel to the
magazine fiction of the present.... She contained in herself, as it were, the whole transitional
period of American fiction, beginning in the bibelot and imported-European-culture era of the
late nineties, and ending in the woman's-magazine dream of suburban smartness." Malcolm
suggested, "Her strongest work... has a stylization and abstraction, a quality of `madeness,' that
propels it out of the sphere of 19th-century realism and nudges it toward the self-reflexive
literary experimentation of [the 20th] century." In addition, Alfred Kazan noted in the Virginia
Quarterly Review, Wharton "could speak out plainly with a force [James] never could muster;
and her own alienation and loneliness gave her a sympathy for erratic spirits and illicit emotions
that was unique in its time. It has been forgotten how much Edith Wharton contributed to the
plain-speaking traditions of American realism." Ten years before her death in 1937, Wharton
was nominated to receive the Nobel Prize in recognition that she had become the most
distinguished American writer of her generation. That she did not receive the award does not
diminish either her achievement in letters or the high esteem granted to her by her
contemporaries in both America and Europe. Percy Lubbock maintained in Portrait of Edith
Wharton in 1947, "The sagest and sternest of the craftsmen must admit that she meets them
on their ground."
FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
BOOKS
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American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies, Scribner, 1981.
Auchincloss, Louis, Edith Wharton, University of Minnesota Press, 1961.
Bauer, Dale M., Edith Wharton's Brave New Politics, University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.
Beer, Janet, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Charolotte Perkins Gilman: Studies in Short
Fiction, St. Martin's Press, 1997.
Benstock, Shari, No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton, Macmillian (New
York), 1994.
Bentley, Nancy, The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, Wharton, Cambridge
University Press, 1995.
Bell, Millicent, The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, Cambridge University
Press, 1995.
Bell, Millicent, Edith Wharton and Henry James: A Story of their Friendship, Braziller,
1965.
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Bjoerkman, Edwin, Voices of Tomorrow: Critical Studies of the New Spirit in
Literature, Kennerly, 1913.
Bogan, Louise, Selected Criticism, Noonday, 1955.
Craig, Theresa (photography by John Bessler), Edith Wharton: A House Full of Rooms,
Architecture, Interiors, and Gardens, Monacelli (New York), 1996.
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale, Volume 4:American Writers in Paris, 1980,
Volume 9: American Novelists, 1910-1945, 1981, Volume 12: American Realists and
Naturalists,1982.
Dwight, Eleanor, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life, Abrams, 1994.
Dyman, Jenni, Lurking Feminism: The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, P. Lang, 1995.
Fedorko, Kathy A., Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton, University of
Alabama Press, 1995.
Fracasso, Evelyn E., Edith Wharton's Prisoners of Consciousness: A Study of Theme and
Technique in the Tales, Greenwood Press, 1994.
Goodman, Susan, Edith Wharton's Inner Circle, University of Texas Press, 1994.
Grace, Kellogg, Two Lives of Edith Wharton: The Woman and Her Work, Appleton, 1965.
Howe, Irving, editor, Edith Wharton: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, 1963.
Howe, A World More Attractive: A View of Modern Literature and Politics, Horizon Press,
1963.
Howe, Decline of the New, Gollancz, 1971.
James, Henry, Letters to Walter Berry, Black Sun Press, 1928.
Kellogg, Grace, The Two Lives of Edith Wharton, Meredith, 1965.
Killoran, Helen, Edith Wharton: Art and Allusion, University of Alabama Press, 1996.
Lawson, Richard H., Edith Wharton, Ungar, 1977.
Lubbock, Percy, Portrait of Edith Wharton, Appleton-Century, 1947.
Lyde, M. J., Edith Wharton: Convention and Morality in the Work of a
Novelist, University of Oklahoma Press, 1959.
McDowell, Margaret B., Edith Wharton, Twayne, 1976.
Montgomery, Maureen E., Displaying Women: Spectacles of Leisure in Edith Wharton's
New York, Routledge, 1998.
Nettles, Elsa, Language and Gender in American Fiction: Howells, James, Wharton, and
Cather, University Press of Virginia, 1997.
Nevius, B. R., Edith Wharton: A Study of Her Fiction, University of California Press, 1953.
Pattee, Fred Lewis, The New American Literature: 1890-1930, Century, 1930.
Price, Alan, The End of the Age of Innocence: Edith Wharton and the First World War, St.
Martin's Press, 1996.
Singley, Carol J., Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit, Cambridge University Press,
1995.
Turk, Ruth, Edith Wharton: Beyond the Age of Innocence, Tudor (Greensboro, NC),1997.
Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 3, 1980, Volume 9, 1982.
Wagner-Martin, Linda, The Age of Innocence: A Novel of Ironic Nostaglia, Twayne
Publishers, 1996.
Walton, G., Edith Wharton: A Critical Interpretation, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,
1971.
Wharton, Edith, A Backward Glance (autobiography), Scribner, 1934.
Wharton, Edith, Ethan Frome: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts,
Criticism, edited by Kristen O. Lauer and Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Norton, 1995.
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Wharton, Edith, The House of Mirth: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and
Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical
Perspectives, edited by Shari Benstock, St. Marin's Press, 1994.
Wharton, Sanctuary, Scribner, 1903.
Wolff, Cynthia Griffin, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, Oxford
University Press, 1977.
Worth, Richard, Edith Wharton, Messner (New York), 1994.
Wright, Sarah Bird, Edith Wharton's Travel Writing: The Making of a Connoisseur, St.
Martin's Press, 1997.
Wright, Sarah Bird, Edith Wharton A to Z: The Essential Guide to the Life and Work, Facts
on File, 1998.
PERIODICALS
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American Literature, March, 1972.
American Quarterly, fall, 1957.
Architectural Digest, March, 1994, p. 84.
Atlantic, August, 1906, February, 1978.
Bookman, volume 9, June, 1899, volume 33, 1911.
Colophon, number 4, 1932.
Encounter, July, 1962.
Films in Review, February, 1977.
Library Journal, July, 1994, p. 146, August, 1994, p. 154, October 15, 1994, p. 103,
February 1, 1995, p. 112, July, 1995, p. 109, November 15, 1995, p. 116.
Life, April, 1994, p. 78.
London Review of Books, March 7, 1996. p. 21.
Nation, November 3, 1920.
New Republic, June 27, 1955.
Newsweek, September 22, 1975, October 9, 1995, p. 68.
New York, November 21, 1994, p. 70.
New Yorker, September 4, 1978.
New York Review of Books, February 23, 1978, November 30, 1995, p. 16.
New York Times, October 17, 1920, October 25, 1986.
New York Times Book Review, November 16, 1986, January 2, 1994, p. 7.
Publishers Weekly, November 6, 1995, p. 87.
Saturday Review, August 9, 1975.
School Library Journal, May, 1994, p. 73.
Scrutiny, December, 1938.
Sewanee Review, autumn, 1932.
South Atlantic Quarterly, winter, 1970.
Times (London), July 13, 1984.
Times Literary Supplement, April 1, 1988.
Twentieth Century Literature, January, 1973.
Variety, January 24, 1994, p. 68.
Virginia Quarterly Review, winter, 1941.
Yale Review, summer, 1972.
Yankee, June, 1995, p. 82.
Source: Contemporary Authors Online, Thomson Gale, 2005.
Source Database: Contemporary Authors Online

The following article was found in The Literature Resource Centre database.
"Wharton's 'Roman Fever.'"
Critic: Jamil S. Selina
Source: Explicator 65, no. 2 (winter 2007): 99-101.
[(essay date winter 2007) In the following essay, Selina probes the symbolic significance of
knitting as a link between the present and the past in "Roman Fever."]
Half-guiltily she [Mrs. Grace Ansley] drew from her [...] black handbag a twist of crimson silk run
through by two fine knitting needles. "One never knows," she murmured.
(47)
These lines, quoted from Edith Wharton's "Roman Fever," refer to one of the two protagonists,
Mrs. Grace Ansley, whose daughter, Barbara, facetiously accuses her and Mrs. Slade, the other
protagonist, of being "young things" who must be left behind to "their knitting" (47). At her
friend Barbara's flippant accusation, Mrs. Slade's daughter, Jenny, politely demurs, but the
former retorts, "Well, I mean figuratively" (47). Wharton's emphasis on the figurative
dimension of knitting, established at the beginning of the rising action, continues to be felt to
the end of the story. Indeed, significant points in the plot are marked by references to knitting.
And "Roman Fever," too, is connected with Mrs. Ansley's knitting because of Mrs. Slade's
references to "the deathly cold" and the "damp" evening air of Rome, or to the "bad chill"
Grace, in her youth, supposedly catches at the Colosseum (52). In light of the "cold" and
"damp" air that continues to drift between the two protagonists from the past into the present,
Mrs. Slade's disdainful dismissal of knitting, and Mrs. Ansley's furtive insistence on knitting, this
activity certainly plays a major role in the story. Indeed, Wharton uses knitting to signify the
delicate link between the present and the past, but, ironically, it also signifies a façade in the
denial of, and protection against, the linkage between the past and the present.
Although she tries to hide her guilt-ridden past, Mrs. Ansley extracts it from the secret recesses
of her mind just as she "[h]alf-guiltily" draws a "twist of crimson silk" from her black handbag. If
black signifies the gloom of guilt, then crimson signifies the heat of sexuality and risqué
youthfulness of romantic passion. And the act of bringing out the yarn, which is exquisitely
delicate ("silk"), is the act of bringing the delicate thread out of the past into the present or
bringing the present into the past. Indeed, pursuing a cyclic course, time repeats itself with only
a slight difference. Just as her clever daughter has flown to Tarquinia for tea and "intends to fly
back by moonlight" (48) with a Marchese, ostensibly in the company of her friend, Jenny, so
Grace, in her youth, maintaining an ostensible friendship with Alida, had her own adventure in
the moonlight with Alida's fiancé, Delphin Slade. Now the middle-aged Grace Ansley takes up
knitting, for, in the absence of other kinds of useful work that have become obsolete because of
the "new system" of courtship, Barbara's mother has "a good deal of time to kill" (47).
But, as Wharton suggests with dramatic irony, Mrs. Ansley is concerned neither with living,
savoring the present moments, nor with reliving, remembering moments of the past. She
appears to maintain that to watch a "stupendous scene" now and remember the time when
she has been here earlier is hardly of any significance: She "get[s] tired just looking" at timeless
beauty and not doing something productive, such as reflecting or musing (47). Hence, she has
much time "to kill" rather than to preserve. That is, she prefers to be oblivious to both the
present and the past, and, ironically, she turns to her knitting as a comforting instrument for
forging the path of forgetfulness. Indeed, she is quite content with her limited knowledge and,
consequently, with her distance from both the present and the past: "'I've come to the
conclusion that I don't in the least know what they [the daughters] are,' said Mrs. Ansley. 'And
perhaps we didn't know much more about each other'" (48). Although this turning point, which
comes with a "shy glance" from Grace and her use of Mrs. Slade's first name, Alida, reveals a
lessening of the gap between the present and the past, as between the two women who have
seemingly been "intimate since childhood" (48), like Alida, Grace, who fragments time in her
daughter's youth as in her own, continues to ignore the connection between the past and the
present. As Grace resists forging a link with Alida, so, despite "ceas[ing] to fidget with her bag,
and [... sinking] into meditation" (50), she resists forging the link between the present and the
past with Alida.
Reclaiming her distance with Alida, Grace "settle[s] herself in her chair, and almost furtively
dr[awing] forth her knitting," she uses it as her protection and her façade (50). Wharton marks
this significant turning point in the story with another dramatic irony as the two women talk
about the game of bridge, only to reject it in the "presence of the vast Memento Mori which
face[s] them" (50). Even in the act of building the bridge between the present and the past, as
between themselves, both women reject proceeding into the connection. And as Grace seeks
refuge in her "knitting," Alida takes "sideway note of this activity" (50). It represents the façade
with which Grace and Alida maintain the "interval[s]" of their intimacy and, hence, the
semblance of a connection between the present and the past (49): "Mrs. Ansley lifted her
knitting a little closer to her eyes. 'Yes; how we were guarded!'" (50). Attempting to prevent the
secret and passionate past from spilling into the present, Mrs. Ansley pretends to casually
follow Mrs Slade's delicate thread of "old memories" (50). That is, while following the silk
thread of her present activity, she struggles to erect a subtle barrier of safety to protect herself
from Alida, who is assiduously and cautiously digging up a certain portion of the buried past:
"[Mrs. Slade] turned again toward Mrs. Ansley, but the latter had reached a delicate point in
her knitting. 'One, two, three--slip two; yes, they must have been,' she assented, without
looking up" (51). As she "slip[s]" a stitch--that is, moves a stitch from one needle to the other
without knitting the stitch to close the gap between herself and Alida--so she skips from the
emblematic needle of the past to that of the present without stitching the past with the
present. Indeed, the cover Grace has been creating for her own comfort illustrates that she
(much like Alida a little later) really does not grasp the thread of the past and that the cover has
served merely as the make-believe link between the past and the present. For, as Wharton
ironically suggests, "one never knows" exactly how elusive the past is.
But, despite Grace's subtle attempts to protect herself from the discovery of this connection
between the past and the present, as the emblematic action of dropping her knitting indicates,
she learns, as the knitter, to accept the gradual uncovering of the linkage between the past and
the present. The first time she "drop[s] her knitting" is right after Alida produces a "hardly
audible laugh" of jealousy (51). Then, when Alida announces that she had written the love note
that sent Grace to the Colosseum, "[Grace's] bag, her knitting and gloves, slid[e] in a panicstricken heap to the ground" (53). Now it becomes clear to Grace that she has been clinging to
false memories. Clearly, the delicate pattern of memories she has been knitting for herself
suddenly falls from her grasp, for memory turns out to be the interpretation and not the
knowledge of the past. As Wharton marks earlier turning points in the story, so she marks the
climax through a reference to knitting. Now, for the knitter, the act of remembering becomes,
to use Homi K. Bhabha's argument, the painful act of re-membering, "a putting together of the
dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present" (63). With Alida's
announcement, the present trauma of emotions (that both women have been struggling to
cover and control) breaks out on the surface, and the two women are forced to confront the
buried and mangled past. But dropping the black handbag is significant because it suggests that
the burden of guilt slips away from Grace as she is forced to acknowledge her guilty past.
Indeed, Grace alone is the knitter because she alone acquires the grace with which to
acknowledge the past and hence to see the connection between the present and the past.
Works Cited
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
Wharton, Edith. "Roman Fever." Literature across Cultures. Ed. Sheena Gillespie, Terezinh
Fonseca, and Carol A. Sanger. 4th ed. Boston: Allyn, 2005.
Source: Jamil S. Selina, "Wharton's 'Roman Fever.'"Explicator 65, no. 2 (winter 2007): 99-101.
Source Database: Literature Resource Center

The following article was found in The Literature Resource Centre database.
"Critical Reception and Cultural Capital: Edith Wharton as a Short Story
Writer"
Critic: Gary Totten
Source: Pedagogy 8, no. 1 (winter 2008): 115-33.
[(essay date winter 2008) In the following essay, Totten questions the low level of critical
interest in Wharton's short stories as compared to her novels and explores the effect of the
capitalist marketplace on the reception of female authors in general.]
In his introduction to Best American Short Stories of the Twentieth Century (1999: xv), John
Updike notes that the stories in the collection have been "four times selected," first, for
publication; second, in Edward J. O'Brien's Best Short Stories annuals; third, among over two
hundred selected by Updike's coeditor, Katrina Kenison, from the eighty-four volumes of the
annual published since its inception in 1915; and fourth, as one of fifty-five chosen from
Kenison's list by Updike. Despite having written many short stories during her career, some
chosen by O'Brien (1915b: 7) for his Best Short Stories' "Roll of Honor," passing his "double
standard of substance and form" (see appendix),1 Edith Wharton never had a story published in
the annual as one of the best of the year, and thus does not survive what Updike calls the
"fathomless ocean of rejection and exclusion" surrounding the "best of the best" (xv).
Arguably, a number of Wharton's short stories rank among the century's best, and readers of
her short fiction would likely defend the merits of various stories; perhaps the frequently
anthologized "Roman Fever" (1936), "The Other Two" (1904b), R. W. B. Lewis's (1968: xiv)
choice for "the best story Mrs. Wharton ever wrote," or ghost stories such as "The Eyes"(1910)
or "All Souls'" (1937), which, as Helen Killoran (2001: 108) observes, "vie for masterpiece
status" among early-twentieth-century critics. It is also worth noting that not long before he
died, William Dean Howells wrote to Wharton on 7 October 1919 that he was compiling "a
book of the really 'best' American short stories" and would like to include "The Mission of
Jane"(1902), "which has been a favorite with my family ever since we read it ... in Harper's
Magazine." While the overall reaction to Wharton's short story collections among both her
contemporary reviewers and recent critics is mixed, these appraisals, like the criticism of her
novels, represent what Wharton (1996: 160) herself recognized as the trajectory of
"condescension, praise, dithyrambic enthusiasm and gradual cooling off," which any writer can
expect over a long career.
Barbara White (1991: xi), in the first (and only) comprehensive book-length study of Wharton's
short fiction, suggests two reasons that, despite Wharton's reputation as a short story writer
during her lifetime,2 she does not enjoy such a reputation now and is seldom mentioned in
books published on the short story since the mid-1900s: first, she "lived at the wrong time"-"too late to pioneer in the [short story] form and too early to participate in the formal
experiments of the 1920s"; and second, her general reputation was negligible, overshadowed
by male writers, particularly Henry James, with whom many contemporary reviewers of her
short fiction compared her (sometimes as James's superior). Although her literary reputation
has been reestablished, her debts to James challenged, and her short stories collected and
anthologized, we continue to replicate past critical opinion or "best of" lists, as Updike's book
demonstrates, to deny Wharton a reputation as a short story writer.3
Wharton's critical rehabilitation has been accomplished chiefly through an attention to her
novels rather than to her entire body of work, and I would like to consider how and why the
elision of her short fiction continues to shape critical opinion. The inclusion of four of her
stories in the Heath Anthology of American Literature, edited by Paul Lauter (first published in
1989 and currently in its fifth edition), counters this elision to some extent through sheer
volume (most anthologies include one and no more than two of her stories), 4 a fact that proves
significant within the medium of the literary anthology, which not only has limited space to
represent authors' work but also influences critical reception and canon formation. Indeed,
the Heath raises the question of how Wharton's increased cultural capital, represented, among
other ways, by this expansion of the anthologized Wharton canon, affects her critical reception
as a short story writer. Considering the trajectory of Wharton's critical reception, from her
exclusion from "best of" short story collections both during and after her lifetime to her
prominent appearance in the Heath,her current reputation as a short story writer, or lack
thereof, seems to depend on several factors, including conflicting theories about short story
form and technique, her relationship to literary and cultural history, and her use in literature
classrooms. I will use the term cultural capital to address the value--aesthetically, critically,
culturally, and pedagogically--of Wharton's short stories and of her reputation as a short story
writer.
As Nina Baym (2005) notes, Wharton falls into the category of writers chiefly identified as
novelists although they also wrote short stories (Theodore Dreiser is another notable example),
and from the outset of her career, critics pegged Wharton as a better novelist than short story
writer. In a May 1899 review, John Barry (14) even seemed to predict Wharton's eventual
reputation as a novelist of manners when he wrote that, despite the skill exhibited in the
stories of The Greater Inclination (1899), the subject of the leisure class is perhaps better
suited to the novelist than to the short story writer. In his review of Xingu, and Other
Stories (1916b), Edward Hale (1916: 231) observed Wharton "at her best in her novels," and
reviews of The Writing of Fiction (1966 [1924]), such as an anonymous review in the December
1925 Times Literary Supplement (388), emphasized what Wharton as a novelist (not a short
story writer) of "achievement and ... fine taste" could tell us about fiction writing, although
Wharton devoted a chapter of the book to short story technique. Percy Hutchison (1930: 480),
reviewing Certain People (1930), invoked the Jamesian standard to assert that while Wharton is
preeminently a novelist, "It would not have been possible for one so markedly of the school of
Henry James to eschew utterly the short story. With authors for whom the circumscribed
moment, the fleeting mood, is so heavily freighted with consequences, the short story ...
affords the only outlet for the moment or the mood not sufficiently freighted to sustain the
complete novel."
Wharton's own critical opinion of the differences between the novel and short story coincided
with this appraisal. In The Writing of Fiction, she identified the short story's main concern as the
"dramatic rendering of a situation" (1966 [1924]: 47), while the novel is kept alive through
character (48). Even if effective, Lewis (1968: viii) characterizes this theory as "not ... very
demanding." Of her skill in rendering situation, Lewis sees Wharton as "often subtler, and both
her ambition and her imaginative achievement greater, than her common sense critical
remarks might lead one to expect," but he notes her lack of innovation in short fiction
compared with Joyce, Lawrence, or Hemingway and concludes that she does not modify the
genre in any way (vii; though he views her as the first American short story writer to make the
"marriage question" "almost exclusively her own" [ix]).
Caught between major developments in the traditional literary history of the short story,
perhaps it is not surprising that Wharton still fails to figure among the writers who, if left out of
a collection of the century's best American short fiction, would leave it "perversely deficient,"
as Updike says of Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald (xv). Wharton wrote stories well into the
modern age but is usually, and in many ways appropriately, read within the realist tradition,
though Hildegard Hoeller (2000) has recently made a convincing argument for reading a
dialogue of realism and sentimentalism in Wharton's fiction. Her fiction and criticism often
exhibit an "antimodernist aesthetic," to borrow Frederick Wegener's term (1999), and, at least
on the surface, she seemed to favor a method rooted in earlier European narrative traditions.
In The Writing of Fiction, she argued that the emphasis on situation in the short story reveals it
to be the "direct descendant of the old epic or ballad ... in ... which action was the chief affair"
and characters were types, as in Molière (1966 [1924]: 47). In her stories, Wharton generally
"emphasized unity of effect in the French [realist] tradition of Flaubert and Maupassant," as
White (1991: xi) notes, and contemporary reviewers also acknowledged, sometimes gratefully,
this traditional approach. "Readers who seek relief from the jazz tempo of so much of our
contemporary fiction" will welcome her story collection Here and Beyond (1926), George
Meadows (1926: 423) wrote, and Raymond Mortimer (1933: 506-7) observed that Wharton's
form in the stories of Human Nature (1933a) is "as justifiable as that of a sonnet or a French
classical drama." "Though I don't suggest that young writers should imitate her technique," he
continued, "they could learn a helluva lot from carefully studying it."
Yet the criticism also belies some uncertainty about what exactly one should praise or learn
about technique in a Wharton short story, and on occasion Wharton herself seemed unsure
about her mastery of the form. In a 19 November 1907 letter to Robert Grant, Wharton claimed
a preference for the "smaller realism" (the "small incidental effects that women have always
excelled in, the episodical characterisation") that she achieved in the short story versus the
broader scope of the novel and noted "the sense of authority with which I take hold of a short
story" (1988: 124). By the end of her career, however, while writing her autobiography, she
noted in a 6 January 1933 letter to Grant that she would "never feel at home in any other form
of literature" than the novel (1933b). Yet in a 6 February 1938 letter to Grant, after Wharton's
death, Elsina Tyler claimed that Wharton "was conscious ... of her own supreme mastery in the
short story, though she would not have used the words I have just written" (Tyler 1938).
Critical opinion is similarly inconsistent. Not all critics past or present seem to agree with
Wharton's privileging of situation over character in the short story, nor do they apply her own
criteria to her stories, producing uneven criticism and further complicating her reputation in
short fiction. Margaret McDowell (1976: 85) insists that Wharton's "careful ordering of detail"
allows her to "attain in ... her shorter works a psychological complexity in characterization"
typical of the novel, and Brooke Allen (2001: 39, 36) claims that, despite the limitations placed
on character in short fiction, Wharton achieves a "quick precision of characterization" through
her "taut, epigrammatic style," which is "especially suited to the short form." While
contemporary reviewer John T. Rodgers (1926: 423) found the stories of Here and
Beyond marred by "follies of style and literary technique," he viewed Wharton as Cather's peer
in terms of "character-sketching." Edward J. O'Brien (1923: 203), however, contended that we
rarely "surprise the breath of life in her [short story] characters," and Hale (1916: 231) ignored
distinctions between the novel and short story to argue in his 1916 review of Xingu that the
"sketches of character" in Wharton's short fiction fail to measure up to her novels. More
recently, Cynthia Griffin Wolff (1977: 61-63) similarly argued that Wharton's early stories lack
the control needed to develop the complexities of character and suffer as a result, though
Wolff viewed some of the later stories as more successful. The persistent appraisal of
Wharton's short fiction through criteria more germane to the novel is perhaps ultimately
advantageous to her overall reputation, however, since her association with the novel, which is
generally viewed as a more significant genre than the short story, is largely responsible for her
current greater overall reputation as a major American writer, even if she is not viewed as an
innovator of the modern short story.
Of course, Wharton, who expressed concern in A Backward Glance (1934a: 369) that readers
would find the subject of The Age of Innocence (1920) outdated and its treatment hopelessly
nostalgic, worried more about her work's anachronistic relationship to modern life than its
commitment to modernist technique. While Wharton's unreliable narrators, increasing
economy of language, and pessimistic tone (White 1991: xi) might strike readers as modern, a
persistent comparison in a novel such as Twilight Sleep (1927) between younger, modern
characters and older, more traditional characters, and the dramatization of the negative
consequences of modern life, imply her ambivalence toward modernity, an ambivalence
shaped, as Wegener suggests, by both social and aesthetic concerns (1999: 117). To use White's
terminology, perhaps Wharton is best viewed as a writer "bridging the Victorian and modern
eras" (1991: xi), a transitional period in the American short story for which we seem to have not
yet developed an adequate critical language, the current state of our critical poetics, then,
further complicating Wharton's reputation in short fiction.
Critical uncertainty about how to deal with Wharton's short stories (or even her novels, for that
matter), which fall between the tidy periods of literary history, tellingly demonstrates the
discipline's reliance on conventional systems of literary classification. David Perkins (1992: 62)
notes that these classifications "are used and contested in struggles for institutional power,"
serving as "organizing principles" for courses, literary societies (e.g., the divisions of the Modern
Language Association), scholarly journals, anthologies, academic conferences, and the job
market. Perkins believes that scholars "regard [literary] periods as necessary fictions": "We
require the concept of a unified period in order to deny it, and thus make apparent the
particularity, local difference, heterogeneity, fluctuation, discontinuity, and strife that are now
our preferred categories for understanding any moment of the past" (65). Still, literary
historians have proceeded "naively and ad hoc," Perkins concludes, rarely "reflect[ing] upon the
processes by which they obtained their classifications" (84). The difficulty of placing Wharton
squarely within a modernist tradition allows us to consider our "moves," in Perkins's words
(84), and, pedagogically speaking, provides instructors with opportunity to educate students
about the complex contours of literary history and criticism and the relationships between
critical practice, literary aesthetics, and ideology.
Another such complexity that instructors would be well advised to emphasize in regard to
Wharton's reputation in the short story, particularly as it relates to her uneasy placement in
traditional histories of the genre, is the phallocentric nature of literary history. In a 1987 College
Literature article on Wharton and Fauset, Elizabeth Ammons drew our attention to the need for
a "new literary history" to adequately account for the contributions of women writers at the
turn of the nineteenth century. Ammons argued that "throw[ing] out the standard categories of
periodization" during this time and following the directions and connections suggested by
"women's historians and by the careers of women writers themselves" reveals "literary
historical continuity and coherence (rather than rupture) from the nineties through the
twenties." Ammons observed that Wharton is marginalized when forced to conform to the
"inherited categories" of the period and compared to the iconoclastic content and form of the
"1920s' triumvirate of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner" (208), but when the work of
women writers is "take[n] seriously" (209), Wharton becomes part of "a rich contemporary
context" rather than "an oddball" (208). More recently, Stephanie Thompson (2002) has
similarly noticed the inadequacies of using a male-dominated literary history to categorize
Wharton's work as modernist and has demonstrated as much by reading Wharton within the
early-twentieth-century clash between highbrow and middlebrow culture.
While Thompson focuses on Wharton's later novels and Ammons also focuses on Wharton's
novel-length fiction in her extended exploration of these ideas in Conflicting Stories: American
Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century (1991), Michele Ware (2004) argues that
Wharton's modernist practice is most apparent in her short stories. Ware notes that Wharton's
modernism is subtle and coincides with broader definitions of modernism, such as Daniel
Joseph Singal's (1987: 8) assertion that "modernist thought ... represents an attempt to restore
a sense of order to human experience under the often chaotic conditions of twentieth-century
existence." Wharton's modern aesthetic developed "from her earliest writings on art,
architecture, and design," Ware contends (17), where, as in The Decoration of Houses, she
"repeatedly uses the terms 'rhythm' and 'logic' to describe the harmony that should exist in and
between proportion and symmetry" (19). Though she does not focus on the ways in which
modernism's privileging of a masculine point of view limits our approach to Wharton's short
fiction, Ware demonstrates how the stories' "interplay of tradition and innovation ... refutes
many of the dismissive [antimodernist] charges against her" (17), thus, similar to Ammons and
Thompson, revealing the need to challenge traditional literary historical paradigms and
approach Wharton from within her broader contemporary context.
Another important aspect of Wharton's contemporary context to which we are just now
beginning to attend is the dramatic rise of consumer culture within which her work was
produced and received. The literary value of her work is unavoidably implicated in the cultural
and economic ferment of consumerism, and recent scholarship exploring Wharton's
relationship to consumer culture notes not only its impact on her characters but also, as in Amy
Kaplan's The Social Construction of American Realism (1988), how it informs her identity as a
successful woman writer in the literary marketplace. Her novels eventually earned her between
$25,000 and $35,000 in serialization, and serialization, book publication, and film rights
combined for her 1928 novel, The Children, would net her $95,000 (approximately $1.1 million
in 2007), the most she earned for a novel (Lewis 1975: 484). Her short stories earned her
considerably less, of course, though Wharton received a top price of $5,000 (approximately
$76,000 in 2007) for "Bread upon the Waters" (later retitled "Charm Incorporated"), published
in Hearst's International Cosmopolitan in February 1934 (Lewis 1975: 507), a story that,
ironically, critiques the characters' tendency to apply the logic of consumer culture to social life,
turning people into exchanged commodities by which one can profit socially.
Wharton's success left her at odds with old New York society, which, as Kaplan (1988: 68)
observes, negatively affiliated literary work with manual labor and deemed fiction writing, in
Lewis's words, "improper for a lady" (1975: 298). But even if writing was considered a
questionable female pursuit, there was little doubt that women's writing was commercially
viable. A reviewer ofThe World Over, for example, underscores Wharton's success in the mass
market by noting that she should never have permitted the stories in the collection "to be
exhumed from the files of the ladies' magazines" where they "probably ... read very nicely
between the advertisements" (Nation 1936: 537). The reference highlights the popular and
consumer culture contexts of women's fiction, which, though here intended to unfavorably
reflect on the substance of the stories under review, Wharton skillfully navigated and explored
in some depth in her work. In her novellasThe Touchstone (1900b) and Bunner Sisters (1916a)
and
stories
such
as "April
Showers" (1900a), "'Copy':
A
Dialogue" (1901),
and "Expiation" (1904a), Wharton examines the relationship between writing and consumer
culture and its consequences, both empowering and troubling, for women. In "'Copy': A
Dialogue," for example, Wharton interrogates the costs of female literary celebrity by
juxtaposing the monetary and emotional values of the public and private texts women produce.
The issue of female celebrity becomes even more problematic in"Expiation," in which a
novelist negotiates, through her novel's public reception, the relationship between monetary
reward and moral censure. Through the image of the female shopper inBunner
Sisters, Wharton further troubles the consumer contexts of female literary production by
questioning, as Kaplan (1988: 84) argues, "whether to write realistically means to shop for
material in the lives of other people and to strip them of the lives they possess."
Kaplan also argues that despite Wharton's seeming unease about the relationship between
women writers and the marketplace, she found the "profession of authorship [to be] a viable
alternative to the stifling constrictions dictated by her class and gender" (86). Indeed, it appears
that Wharton was able to hold her own in the unladylike and unrefined skirmishes of the
marketplace. When the Ladies' Home Journal declined to pay the agreed-upon $25,000 to
publish her memoirs, countering with $20,000 if she reduced the finished product by 40,000
words, Wharton cabled her editor, Rutger Jewett: "Absolutely decline reducing price and will
sue ... unless agreement kept" (Lewis 1975: 507). When Jewett reminded her that the journal
had been losing money, Wharton wrote back, "I will neither take back the manuscript nor
accept a lower price for it." As Lewis observes, supporting her two estates and many charitable
organizations was taking a financial toll, and she concluded her letter to Jewett with the
following observation: "No doubt the Ladies' Home Journal is hard up, but so am I, and I
imagine that they have larger funds to draw upon than I have" (507). Wharton eventually
received the $25,000.
I reference Wharton's depictions of and experiences in the writing market because the
relationship between literature and capitalist economics emphasizes not only the market
influences shaping Wharton's writing production, but also the continuing nature of this
influence upon the current canon debates, which enter our classrooms through the literature
anthologies we ask students to purchase. As we know, the tables of contents in various editions
of literature anthologies reveal important patterns of inclusion and exclusion over time. The
mysteries of canon formation in relation to literature anthologies are indeed complex, as
Joseph Csicsila (2004) observes in his recent book on the issue, a combination of practical
pressures (such as higher costs for works still under copyright or the physical restraints of an
anthology's length) and less quantifiable cultural pressures. Martha Banta (2005) reminds us
that anthology editors' decisions are not merely a function of their own ideas about canon and
authorial reputation but also are contingent upon other market forces such as the texts that are
available for inclusion. Banta notes that costs and legal issues associated with copyright and
permissions can seriously affect the stories included in anthologies. Furthermore, space
considerations restrict anthologies from using many novel-length works (the
1989 Norton anthology was the first to include Ethan Frome in its entirety, a move that
"symbolically confirmed Wharton's high status," according to Csicsila [2004: 189]) and, as Nina
Baym (2005) notes, Wharton's works generally do not work well as excerpts.
Teaching practice further exerts practical and cultural pressure on the contents of literature
anthologies. David Richter (2000: 125) notes that "education is an important conservative
force" that works with the "very idea of a canon" to "keep the canon constant" and that those
who "compile textbooks and anthologies function ... as both the preservers and reshapers of a
[canonical] tradition." Yearly collections of the best works such as O'Brien's Best Short
Stories annuals, which, as the book jacket of the 1930 edition reveals, were (and still are)
adopted as texts in many college courses, also influence notions of literary value within
literature classes. Today, the most widely read literary texts are those read in schools, Richter
contends, and "teachers are likely to teach texts that were valued when they were students" or
teach texts that are useful for providing examples of "alliteration, symbolism, or other features
that ... teachers like to explain" (125). According to anthology editors Jim Leonard, Nina Baym,
Bill Cain, and Paul Lauter, in addition to practical contingencies such as copyright costs and
physical space, instructor input also significantly affects content decisions. Cain (2005) notes
that instructors become used to finding certain stories in anthologies and their teaching
practices and preferences conform to these expectations. If certain stories are removed,
instructor satisfaction with the anthology suffers. A text's "good track-record in the classroom,"
to use Banta's (2005) words, increases an anthology's usefulness to instructors and, ultimately,
its marketability.
In our current multiculturally informed college classrooms, the definition of teachable has
undergone further change. Attention to writers other than white, European, heterosexual
males has increased along with classroom discussions about writers' attitudes toward race,
class, gender, and sexuality. Understandably, instructors value anthologies containing texts that
allow them to discuss these issues, but many instructors also hope to find selections that allow
them to explore conventional aspects of literary texts such as structure, characterization, or
symbolism. Sometimes the same text can fulfill both needs. As Cain and Banta note, interest in
issues of marriage, divorce, and female sexuality in the early twentieth century makes a story
like Wharton's"The Other Two" particularly appealing to instructors (and it appears in many
current anthologies) as it coincides with the sorts of issues instructors regularly discuss
and like to discuss in their classes today. Banta observes that this story also lends itself to
interesting discussions of formalistic issues such as reliable and unreliable narrators. In the
online instructor's guide for theHeath anthology, Ammons (2005) argues even more vigorously
for Wharton's formalistic importance, noting that the anthology's Wharton selections "can be
used to show perfect mastery of conventional form. Her taut, elegant prose and expert
command of dramatic structure beautifully manipulate the conventional Western short story
pattern. ... You can practically teach the standard modern Western short story--at its best--from
a Wharton story."
Wharton's historical track record in American literature anthologies also reveals the
relationship between pedagogical and critical practice. Csicsila (2004: 184) observes that
"despite her critical setbacks of the late 1920s and early 1930s ... Wharton figured
conspicuously in first-generation classroom collections of American literature," suggesting that
her work was "in demand by college instructors," and "nine of the seventeen college-level
anthologies published between 1919 and 1946 featured a [Wharton] selection." Some of the
stories included in early anthologies included "Autres Temps ... ," "A Journey," "The Lady's
Maid's Bell," "The Other Two," "The Pelican," and "Xingu" (184-85). While Wharton's declining
respect in the 1940s affected her presence in literature anthologies, Percy Lubbock's Portrait of
Edith Wharton (1947) and Blake Nevius's series of studies on Wharton published between 1951
and 1954 had a profound impact on her reappearance. Nevius's Edith Wharton: A Study of Her
Fiction (1953) seems to have "made an immediate impression on anthology editors," Csicsila
observes, as "four of the six classroom collections of American literature published between
1954 and 1958 promptly incorporated Wharton's work" (187), citing Lubbock's biography and
Nevius's critical study. Wharton's appearance in what Csicsila terms "multicultural-phase"
anthologies has been much more consistent, and she appears in thirty-six of thirty-nine
anthologies of American literature published between 1967 and 1999 (188). "Roman
Fever" and "The Other Two" figure predominantly in these anthologies due, Csicsila argues, to
both their formalistic and thematic appeal (188).
The selection of Wharton entries in the Heath Anthology of American Literature presents an
even broader portrait of her life and work, however. The anthology, which is self-conscious
about the ways it intervenes in and shapes canon formation, includes Wharton's early
work "The Valley of Childish Things" (1896) (not so much a story as a sketch or "aphoristic
fable," in Shari Benstock's words, about female dependence [1994: 78]), "The Eyes" (1910),
major stories such as "Souls Belated" (1899), "The Other Two" (1904b), and "Roman
Fever" (1936), and passages from what has become known as the "Love Diary," in which
Wharton recorded her affair with Morton Fullerton. In its attempts to cover the highlights of
her life and work, chronologically, aesthetically, and biographically, the Heath validates the
importance of Wharton's career. With six entries in the anthology, Wharton has a wider variety
of her work represented than James, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, or Hemingway, all of whom, except
James, wrote stories selected by O'Brien and published in his annual as one of the best
American short stories of the year, and no major anthology to date has included as many of her
works.
Discussing the rationale behind the Heath, general editor Paul Lauter (2002: xxxv) reveals the
influence of a multicultural perspective, noting the editors' attempts to "respond to earlier
movements for social change" by including ignored writers, such as women and minorities. In a
recent e-mail (2005), Lauter observes that by including Wharton and certain of her works in the
anthology, the editors attempted to "promote her emergence" from under James's shadow in
the late 1980s. Initiating this particular aspect of Wharton's critical rehabilitation through her
short fiction rather than through her novels counters a major trend in her critical reception.
Lauter also notes that the editorial board faced the decision of whether to include the full text
of Kate Chopin's The Awakening in the anthology, which seemed to promote Chopin as the
most important turn-of-the-century female writer. They decided that they would rather
promote Wharton, especially if instructors were forced to choose between the two, and
included a number of Chopin's stories instead of the novel (the novel appears in the last two
editions, but the emphasis on Wharton remains, Lauter notes).
In American literature survey courses, instructors could discuss the significance of these
editorial decisions and the relationship of literature anthologies to the canon. Further,
instructors could share some of their own decision-making process with students, summarizing
for them the pedagogical and cultural theory informing the particular selection of readings
taken from the anthology. Although time is limited in a survey course, it might be helpful to
have students read brief articles on the canon debate5 so that they have a context in which to
understand issues such as the significance of the Heath's emphasis on Wharton. Wharton's
prominent appearance in the Heath provides an excellent case study in canonicity and critical
reception that introduces students to how the canon shapes their reading habits, cultural
attitudes, and education. Involving students in discussions about how canons and anthologies
affect the critical reputation of various writers, and thus how these same factors determine the
specific writers they will and will not read and study, raises their awareness of the relationship
between their education and cultural ideology.
Whether we engage our students in these discussions or not, our literature classrooms are
always already implicated in the culture industry; our text selection and teaching perpetuate
notions of literary value and authorial reputation, both aesthetic and economic. While the texts
included in anthologies are partly influenced by copyright restrictions or space limitations, a
good deal of choice remains with both anthology editors and instructors. In relation to Wharton
specifically, the teaching of her short stories in literature classrooms has not yet seemed to
have an appreciable effect on the critical reception of the stories. But critical opinion and the
resulting canon adjust slowly. Indeed, we have been worrying about the status of Wharton's
short stories for some time now (at least since the early 1990s, when White noted the paucity
of critical work on the stories), and whether the published critical response to Wharton's stories
rises to the level implied by their prominence in the Heath anthology remains to be seen.
Currently, the MLA Bibliography lists seventy-three journal articles on Wharton's short stories
since 1957, fifty-four of these appearing since White's book-length study in 1991, nineteen
book chapters (fifteen of these published since 1991), and three books since 1991 about
Wharton's ghost stories or her short fiction in the context of other writers. 6 Given her
increasing cultural capital over the past few decades, we can probably anticipate an increased
critical interest in her short stories as Wharton scholarship in general proliferates.
Notes
1. In his introduction to the first annual (1915b: 7-8), O'Brien noted that a writer achieves
substance when his or her "power of compelling imaginative persuasion transforms them [the
story's facts] into a living truth." In terms of form, O'Brien insisted that "the true artist ... will
seek to shape this living substance into the most beautiful and satisfying form, by skilful
selection and arrangement of his material, and by the most direct and appealing presentation
of it in portrayal and characterization." O'Brien divided the stories he examined into four
groups:
The first group consists of those stories which fail, in my opinion, to survive either the test of
substance or the test of form [no accompanying comment or asterisk]. ... The second group
consists of those stories which may fairly claim to survive either the test of substance or the
test of form[;] ... to possess either distinction of technique alone, or more frequently, ... a
persuasive sense of life in them to which a reader responds with some part of his own
experience [single asterisk]. ... The third group ... includes such narratives as may lay convincing
claim to a second reading, because each of them has survived both ... the test of substance and
the test of form [two asterisks].
Finally, I have recorded the names of a small group of stories which possess, I believe, an even
finer distinction--the distinction of uniting genuine substance and artistic form in a closely
woven pattern with a spiritual sincerity so earnest, and a creative belief so strong, that each of
these stories may fairly claim, in my opinion, a position of some permanence in our literature as
a criticism of life [three asterisks].
2. In his 1936 New York Times Book Review article on The World Over (1936), Percy Hutchison
even referred to her as a "master" of the short story form (534).
3. We do, however, seem willing to grant her expertise in a subgenre of short fiction such as the
ghost story, of which, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1988: 159) argue, "Wharton, like James,
was one of America's most brilliant practitioners."
4. George Perkins (2005) concurs; he notes that the decision to include a second Wharton story
in The American Tradition in Literature anthology was made "in deference to the growing sense
of Wharton's worth."
5. David Richter's brief but thorough essay "What We Read: The Literary Canon and the
Curriculum after the Culture Wars" (2000) is an accessible introduction to the canon debate for
undergraduate students.
6. See, in particular, Janet Beer's Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman:
Studies in Short Fiction (1997), Reiner Kornetta's Das Korsett im Kopf: Ehe und Ökonomie in den
Kurzgeschichten Edith Whartons (The Corset in the Mind: Marriage and Economics in the Short
Stories of Edith Wharton, 1996), and Jenni Dyman's Lurking Feminism: The Ghost Stories of
Edith Wharton (1996).
I wish to thank Martha Banta, Nina Baym, Bill Cain, Jim Leonard, Paul Lauter, Don McQuade,
and George Perkins for sharing with me their informal thoughts about Wharton's appearance in
various anthologies. My additional thanks to Martha Banta for her suggestions on an earlier
draft of this article. Excerpts of letters from the Edith Wharton Papers, Yale Collection of
American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, are reprinted
by permission of the estate of Edith Wharton and the Watkins/Loomis Agency.
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Source Database: Literature Resource Center
“For Esme, With Love and Squalor” by J.D. Salinger

The following article was found in The Literature Resource Centre database.
J. D. Salinger
1919-2010
Name: J. D. Salinger
Also known as: Jerome D. Salinger, Jerome David Salinger
Introduction
Biographical Information
Major Works
Critical Reception
Writings by the Author
Further Readings about the Author
Critical Essays about the Author's Works
WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:





The Catcher in the Rye (novel) 1951
Nine Stories (short stories) 1953; also published as For Esmé--With Love and Squalor,
and Other Stories
Franny and Zooey (novellas) 1961
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, and Seymour--An Introduction (novellas) 1963
The Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J. D. Salinger. 2 vols. (short stories) 1974
Introduction
Salinger is recognized by critics and readers alike as one of the most popular and influential
authors of American fiction to emerge in the years following World War II. Hailed for his
mastery of symbolism, idiomatic style, and thoughtful, sympathetic insights into the insecurities
that plague both adolescents and adults, he became equally legendary for his withdrawal from
public life at the height of his fame. Critics have lauded his resonant exploration of adolescent
angst in The Catcher in the Rye as well as his capacity to express his characters' profound
dissatisfaction with the spiritual emptiness that lingers behind the bustle of contemporary life.
Biographical Information
Salinger was born in the New York City borough of Manhattan to Sol Salinger, a Jewish importer
of meat and cheese, and his Scots-Irish wife, Miriam Jillich Salinger. A subpar and unmotivated
student, Salinger attended several public schools as well as the prestigious, private McBurney
School. Flunking out of McBurney, he was sent to Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne,
Pennsylvania, which became the model for the prep school in The Catcher in the Rye. After
graduating in 1936, he briefly attended New York University before dropping out. Although his
father wanted him to take over his import business, Salinger decided against a career in
business and enrolled in Ursinus College, a liberal arts school in Pennsylvania. He dropped out
after one semester and moved back in with his parents. During this time, he took courses in
writing at Columbia University from Whit Burnett, an editor for Story magazine. Impressed by
his student's work, Burnett included Salinger's first published story, "The Young Folks," in a
1940 edition of Story. In 1941 the New Yorker agreed to publish "Slight Rebellion off Madison,"
a story that served as the basis for The Catcher in the Rye, but decided to postpone publication
due to the United States' entry into World War II. Although Salinger was drafted into the army
in 1942, he continued to write, reportedly bringing his typewriter everywhere during his tour,
including the battlefield. Several of the stories composed during the war were published in
theSaturday Evening Post. Salinger served in counterintelligence and took part in the invasion
of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge, events that led to his hospitalization for "battle
fatigue." In 1946 "Slight Rebellion off Madison" was finally published, and he began an exclusive
relationship writing for the New Yorker. His reputation increased over the next few years, but it
was the publication of The Catcher in the Rye that brought him widespread fame. The novel
stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for thirty weeks and sparked a great deal of
controversy over its use of coarse language and denigration of traditional values, which only
added to its popularity. The sudden onset of fame unsettled Salinger, and he requested that his
photograph be removed from the second printing of the novel. Upon publication of his
collection Nine Stories in 1953, he moved to Cornish, New Hampshire, to get away from the
press and public. From then onward, Salinger focused his work on the Glass family, a clan of
socially maladjusted and psychologically unstable geniuses. After 1965 he largely disappeared
from the public view. He resurfaced in the 1970s to file a lawsuit preventing the publication of
an unauthorized collection of his short stories, in the late 1990s to decry the publication of a
former lover's memoirs, and in the 2000s to fight against a proposed sequel to The Catcher in
the Rye. In 2009 Salinger broke his hip but made a full recovery. However, his health went into
sudden decline during the first few weeks of 2010, and he died of natural causes at his home in
New Hampshire. He is survived by his third wife, Colleen O'Neill; his children, Matthew and
Margaret; and three grandsons.
Major Works
Salinger's achievement lies in his skillful expression of the increasing sense of alienation felt by
young people in post-World War II America as they reluctantly faced an ominous future of
enforced and thoroughly superficial conventionality. One of the most powerful and
controversial aspects of this depiction is his use of colloquial speech to create convincing,
accessible protagonists who voice their concerns in a way many can understand. The majority
of his work revolves around the Glass siblings. The offspring of vaudeville performers, these
seven gifted and emotionally fragile individuals all live under the shadow of Seymour, the
eldest, a man of daunting and esoteric intellect who kills himself in his early thirties. "A Perfect
Day for Bananafish" takes place during a vacation taken by Seymour and his wife Muriel. It
opens with a sustained telephone conversation between Muriel and her mother in which both
reveal themselves to be shallow, materialistic, manipulative, and glib. References to Seymour
indicate that he has returned from his service in World War II clearly damaged by the
experience and that his behavior has been eccentric at best, irresponsible at worst. However,
these observations--which come through the overheard words of Muriel and her mother--shed
more negative light on the two women than on Seymour, who does not appear until two-thirds
of the way through the story. He is on the beach telling a young girl about "bananafish," fish
that swim into holes but cannot get out because they have eaten too much. After spinning this
strange parable of self-destruction, Seymour returns to his hotel room and, while Muriel is
asleep, takes a pistol from his luggage and shoots himself in the head.
The long story "Franny" takes place in the fall of 1954 at an eastern Ivy League college. Franny,
the youngest of the Glass daughters, arrives to attend the Yale football game at the college of
her boyfriend, Lane Coutell. During their pregame lunch, Lane is depicted as a self-centered
snob who dominates the conversation by describing his recent paper on French author Gustave
Flaubert. Franny, who has been quiet to this point, sees that Lane epitomizes the phoniness in
people that has been disturbing her greatly, and she and Lane get into an agitated discussion
about poetry. Excusing herself, she goes to the lavatory and begins to cry. When she takes a
small, green book from her purse and presses it to her chest, she is at once soothed. She rejoins
Lane and tries to explain to him how disturbed she has become with the pettiness of college life
and the egocentricity she observes around her. Reluctantly, she tells him of the green book, The
Way of the Pilgrim, which instructs one how to pray until the meditation eventually becomes
self-active. Lane, intent on consuming his frog legs, is obviously unmoved by Franny's fervor.
More disturbed than ever, Franny attempts to return to the ladies' room but faints on the way.
She is revived, and as the story ends her lips are silently moving, presumably forming the words
to a prayer. "Seymour: An Introduction" is closer in form to a fictional essay than a proper
narrative. It is told in the voice of Buddy Glass, the closest sibling to Seymour in both age and
personal experience. At forty years old, Buddy attempts to explain how Seymour came to be
viewed by his family as a great poet and holy man. After providing a general description of his
brother's background and quirky personality, Buddy describes Seymour's poetry, prose, and
physical appearance, ending with a series of anecdotes intended to reveal his brother's purely
spiritual state of being. Along the way Buddy--a writer of fiction--ruminates on the writer's debt
to his readers, his characters, and himself, and he contrasts his career with that of Seymour,
who eliminated these concerns by choosing never to publish. This line of thought is believed to
reflect Salinger's own attitude about being a writer; he once referred to Buddy Glass as his alter
ego.
Salinger's most famous work, The Catcher in the Rye, focuses on the experiences of a painfully
sensitive sixteen-year-old named Holden Caulfield. Set during the 1940s, the novel follows
Caulfield as he spends several days wandering around New York City after being expelled from
his fourth private school. Instinctively resistant to all authority and conformity, he detests
"phonies" and is quick to expose gestures that reveal insincerity. Caulfield's search for authentic
human contact and love becomes a frequently humorous parody of the classical heroic odyssey.
Intent on finding a bond with someone of substance, he searches for an idealized female figure
but instead finds himself interacting with prostitutes and street dwellers. In the end, it is his
younger sister Phoebe who epitomizes the untainted feminine principle within the wasteland of
adult hypocrisy, lust, and perversion. Caulfield unconsciously projects upon Phoebe all that he
seeks in others, even though she is only ten years old. Despite her willingness to run away with
him, however, Caulfield decides against drawing her into his unresolved conflict. He also seeks
counsel from his former teacher and family friend, Mr. Antolini, but ultimately withdraws from
the man's protective gestures. A final note of irony and desolation sounds in the last chapter,
when it is revealed that Caulfield has been telling his story from the confines of a West Coast
mental institution.
Critical Reception
While some critics have claimed that Salinger's work suffers from a maudlin tone of emotional
immaturity, most continue to view him as a leading figure in modern American literature. One
reviewer who claimed that Salinger lapsed into undisciplined sentimentality in his later work
was esteemed author John Updike; at the same time, Updike cited Salinger's early stories,
especially "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," as a major influence on his own career. In addition,
critics have interpreted "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" as a canny modernization of Aesop's
fable "A Case for Patience," which may account for its timelessness. Salinger's stories also have
been analyzed from a psychological perspective, with commentators seeking to provide insight
into the tumultuous mental landscape of the Glass family. Scholar Senol Bezci, for instance, has
invoked psychoanalyst Erik Erikson's theory of social development to underscore the true
nature of the relationship between Franny Glass and Lane Coutell. "Traditional readers as well
as most critics of Salinger erroneously tend to see Franny and Lane in a binary opposition: they
praise Franny for being sensitive and genuine whereas condemn Lane for being shallow and
phony," Bezci argued. "However, a beholder equipped with the knowledge of Erikson's theory
... can easily interpret that both characters are confused adolescents who could not successfully
complete their identity formation." Furthermore, critics have maintained that, far from
idealizing Holden Caulfield in the manner posited by many readers, The Catcher in the
Rye condemns the young protagonist's detachment and pessimism. According to Leo Robson,
"The book is not especially subtle in expressing its suspicion and criticism of Holden, which
makes it all the more disappointing, in literary terms, that he has become a hero to readers
young and psychologically unhinged." Moreover, Salinger's retreat from the world has sparked
a great deal of interest over the years, with some reviewers speculating upon the author's
activities in hiding and others asserting that his legendary status stems, in part, from the
mythical air imparted by his disappearance. Ultimately, though, Salinger is remembered most
for his unique and profoundly influential contribution to literature.
FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CRITICISM

duMais Svogun, M. "Repetition, Reversal, and the Nature of the Self in Two Episodes of
J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye." English Studies 90, no. 6 (December 2009): 695-706.
Underlines the thematic resonance that connects a scene between Holden and Phoebe
to a scene between Holden and the prostitute, Sunny.

Fassano, Anthony. "Salinger's 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish.'" Explicator 66, no. 3 (spring
2008): 149-50.
Notes similarities between Salinger's story and Aesop's fable "A Case for Patience."

Garett, Leah. "The Kvetcher in the Rye: J. D. Salinger and Challenges to the Modern
Jewish Canon." In Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon: Essays on Literature and Culture in
Honor of Ruth R. Wisse, edited by Justin Cammy, Dara Horn, Alyssa Quint, and Rachel
Rubinstein, pp. 645-59. Cambridge, Mass.: Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard University,
2008.
Compares the echoes of Jewish tradition in the works of Salinger and Franz Kafka.

Gopnik, Adam. "J. D. Salinger." New Yorker 85, no. 48 (8 February 2010): 20.
Commends the attention to detail and emotional depth of Salinger's fiction.

"In
Memoriam
J.
D.
Salinger." Writer's
Digest (27
http://www.writersdigest.com/article/in-memoriam-salinger/#
August
2010):
Praises Salinger's meticulous construction of Holden Caulfield's voice as a main reason
for the longevity of The Catcher in the Rye.
Jump to Critical Essay(s) about the Author's Works:
Myles Weber, "Reading Salinger's Silence." New England Review 26, no. 2 (2005): 118-41.
Donald J. Greiner, "Updike and Salinger: A Literary Incident." Critique 47, no. 2 (winter 2006):
115-30.
Senol Bezci, "Youth in Crisis: An Eriksonian Interpretation of Adolescent Identity in
'Franny.'" Novitas Royal 2, no. 1 (April 2008): 1-12.
Elaine Woo, "J. D. Salinger Dies at 91." Los Angeles Times (29 January 2010):
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-jd-salinger29-2010jan29,0,3567764.story
Leo Robson, "To Have and to Holden." New Statesman 139 (8 February 2010): 50.
Charles Kochman, "A Symbol of Individuality." Publishers Weekly 257, no. 7 (15 February 2010):
136.
Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, Salinger, 1919-2010." Newsletter on Intellectual
Freedom 59, no. 2 (March 2010): 48.
David Linton, "Thank You, Mr. Salinger." ETC 67, no. 2 (April 2010): 167-69.
Michael C. Obel-Omia, "J. D. Salinger and His Indispensable Guide, Holden
Caulfield." Independent School 69, no. 4 (summer 2010): 101-02.
Source Database: Contemporary Literary Criticism
Vanity Fair article: “Holden Caulfield’s Goddam War”
Site: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/02/salinger-201102

The following article was found in The Literature Resource Centre database.
"Sergeant X, Esmé, and the Meaning of Words"
Critic: John Wenke
Source: J. D. Salinger, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1987, pp. 111-18.
Criticism about: J. D. Salinger (1919-), also known as: J(erome) D(avid) Salinger, Jerome David
Salinger
Nationality: American
[(essay date 1987) In the following essay, Wenke examines the significance of failed
communication and self-expression in "For Esmé--with Love and Squalor."]
She went on to say that she wanted all her children to absorb the meaning of the words they
sang, not just mouth them, like silly-billy parrots.
--"For Esmé--with Love and Squalor""For Esmé--with Love and Squalor"
During a time when many writers are reconsidered, reconstructed, rediscovered, or revisited,
the last ten years have been remarkable for the apparent decline of critical interest in J. D.
Salinger. Over the last two decades, Salinger has had so little to say that his commentators,
once a spirited and argumentative group, seem to have followed the lead of the master and
have become, for the most part, silent. Many readers of Salinger's work vacillate regularly
between the conviction that he is in New Hampshire composing masterpiece after masterpiece
but refusing to publish, and the less fantastic, more sobering suspicion that he is simply growing
vegetables and repeating the Jesus Prayer. Nevertheless, the small body of fiction remains as a
cryptic reminder of a significant contemporary writer who has adopted an enigmatic public
silence. While any resolution to the mystery of Salinger's silence must remain elusive for the
moment, certain implications in his best short story may go some way in accounting for the
retreat, without having to construe it as an outgrowth of his later preoccupation with Zen. His
continuing silence may well have evolved from the conviction that deeply felt human emotions
need no expression--a position implied by the successful aesthetic resolution of "For Esmé-with Love and Squalor."
In the fifties and sixties, the critical debate over "For Esmé" focused on various aspects of love
and squalor as they relate to the narrator (Sergeant X), Esmé, Charles, and Clay (Corporal Z).
While the story does in fact dramatize Sergeant X's redemption from an emotional and physical
breakdown through the transformative powers of love, the narrative also--and most
importantly--examines the reasons why forms of expression--whether conversational, literary,
or epistolary, to name a few--either have meaning and propagate love, or lack meaning and
impede emotional stability. For Salinger, failures of language advance the horror, vacuity, and
despair of modern life. Throughout the narrative, Salinger reflects his concern with exploring
the validity of language by persistently alluding to such indirect, constructed modes of
discourse as letters, books, or inscriptions. Failed forms of communication seem to be
everywhere, the most notable of which is Sergeant X's illegible response to a Nazi woman's
inscription, "Dear God, life is hell," in Goebbels' "Die Zeit Ohne Beispiel." In "For Esmé" letters,
books, conversations, and inscriptions usually create (or continue) rather than alleviate the
emotional vacuum in which most of the characters live. Nowhere else in Salinger's fiction does
he more intensely present the paradox and dilemma of modern man: to speak is not to express;
to employ forms of expression is often to evade the difficulties of significant communication.
Beneath the most obvious progression of action and theme in "For Esmé" resides the moral
basis for Salinger's art which indicates why, at the end of the story, two successful acts of
communication are completed, while, throughout most of the story itself, dramatizing the
reasons why most acts of expression fail.
In a story replete with failed forms of communication, one must consider why Esmé's saving
letter has such a positive effect, and how it has anything to do with the rest of the narrative as
well as Salinger's later and continuing silence. These issues can be explored by first examining
the story's many human relationships. In "For Esmé," it is difficult to find many instances of
love based on sympathetic understanding and shared experiences. Debased, destructive
relationships predominate and are manifested most vividly through the narrator's relation to
his wife and mother-in-law, his fellow soldiers in camp, and Clay and Loretta. Underlying these
failures of love and sympathy reside the breakdown and deterioration of the power of language
to express true feeling.
At the outset of the story, Salinger satirizes the mundane actualities and practical
considerations of postwar America. The narrator's wife, a "breathtakingly levelheaded girl," and
the impending visit of Mother Grencher, who, at fifty-eight, is "not getting any younger," detain
him from going to Esmé's wedding. Apparently, the wife has little sense of Esmé's importance
to her husband, and the narrator, while wryly undercutting his wife's practicality, does not
seem capable of acting against her wishes. His tongue seems to be firmly in cheek as he ticks off
the reasons why the proposed trip need not be made. In fact, he seems to be repeating the
strictures as they were dictated to him. Such a failure marks a continuation of the "stale letters"
the narrator received during the war. Reports on the service at Schrafft's and requests for
cashmere yarn, like the prohibition against attending the wedding, extend selfish interests,
while, at the same time, they evidence little concern for the narrator's needs.
His difficulties with these two women signal a problem that appears elsewhere in other forms-the sterility of conventional relationships. There is, for example, no fellowship among the
troops at the training camp. The absence of community is predicated upon the failure of
language. These letter-writing types, living in a self-imposed limbo, pen their letters in order to
avoid human contact. The narrator, in particular, uses forms of expression to distance himself
from those around him; he escapes, for example, into the books which he carries about in his
gas mask container. His general disgust with experience appears most clearly through his use of
cliché. Such tired language mocks the traditional bravado associated with war, and it exploits
the disparity between fresh rhetorical assessments and degraded, sterile statements:
I remember standing at an end window of our Quonset hut for a very long time, looking out at
the slanting, dreary rain, my trigger finger itching imperceptibly, if at all. I could hear behind my
back the uncomradely scratching of many fountain pens on many sheets of V-mail paper.
Abruptly, with nothing special in mind, I came away from the window and put on my raincoat,
cashmere muffler, galoshes, woolen gloves, and overseas cap. ... Then, after synchronizing my
wristwatch with the clock in the latrine, I walked down the long, wet cobblestone hill into town.
I ignored the flashes of lightning all around me. They either had your number on them or they
didn't.
Just as the narrator's exploitation of cliché reflects the general bleakness of military life, so also
does the perversion of romantic language point to significant failures in conventional ways of
ordering experience. The relationship between Clay and Loretta is maintained through
meaningless forms which make their courtship an exercise in mutual self-delusion. Intending to
marry "at their earliest convenience," she writes to him "fairly regularly, from a paradise of
triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations." Their relationship epitomizes the way in
which language in "For Esmé" fails to communicate deep feeling, but instead propagates the
antithesis of love--squalor. Salinger implies that their lack of self-awareness and moral
introspection is not merely contemptible, but is actually a succinct embodiment of those very
forces of insensitivity and self-justification which create and sustain the absurdity of war. Clay
revels in the delusion that temporary insanity, rather than sadism, made him shoot a cat.
In "For Esmé--with Love and Squalor," such characters as the narrator's wife and mother-inlaw, Clay and Loretta, are impervious to the existential ravage inflicted by the war; others, like
the soldiers in the camp and the narrator himself, perceive the bleakness of experience but can
do little or nothing to overcome it or escape from it. By escaping into letter-writing, into books,
or by adopting a cynical attitude, they repudiate the possibility of community and compound
their isolation through acts of quiet desperation.
Nonetheless, the very fact that the story is even told in the first place suggests that there is a
way to be immersed in squalor, recognize it as such, and eventually overcome it. "For
Esmé"depicts extreme human misery, the suffering of being unable to love, at the same time
that the narrator's very capacity to tell his story provides the completion of the psychological
therapy which began when he read Esmé's letter and fell asleep. In telling the story, the
narrator has clearly achieved a balance in his life, which, at the outset of the story, is implied by
his good-natured, if ironic, tone. Unlike all other attempts to communicate, Esmé's letter and
the process of telling the tale itself come directly out of the forces underlying their personal
encounter in the Devon tearoom and possess a basis in love which is founded upon similar
recognitions of the effect of squalor on the other. These acts of communication are not
spontaneous emanations, but come out of periods of retrospection and consolidation during
which each perceives the import of that "strangely emotional" time which they spent together.
Esmé's decision to send X her father's watch could not have been hasty or gratuitous. A six-year
period of recovery precedes the composition of the narrator's "squalid and moving" story. For
Salinger, it seems, meaningful human expression must be founded on authentic emotions
which evolve into a sympathetic comprehension of another's individuals needs. Forms of
expression are, in themselves, neutral; they become meaningful or parodic to the extent that
love or squalor resides at the heart of the relationship. The love that Salinger affirms in "For
Esmé" does not depend on words, but on an emotional inner transformation which must be
understood and assimilated before it can be expressed. Forms of expression cannot create love,
as Clay and Loretta try to do through letters, but only express what has mysteriously been there
from the start. In "For Esmé," we encounter a significant moment in Salinger's fiction, a
moment during which ineffable emotional states find expression in literary forms.
Given what has been argued thus far, it would be helpful to examine just how the conversation
between the narrator and Esmé in the tearoom relates to his epiphany at the conclusion of the
story. Basically, we shall see how their conversation offers vital insights into the psychological
needs of each character, even though the apparent surface meaning of their words does not
seem to indicate the formation of a deep and lasting bond of love.
For both the narrator and Esmé, language does not directly mirror their true inner states, but
instead provides a defense, a kind of mask from behind which the suffering self cryptically
speaks. The narrator adopts a protective cynicism, which largely accounts for the strange
shifting of tone and point of view evident throughout the meeting, Esmé's famous malaprops
and inflated diction are the basic elements with which she constructs her persona. For both
characters, language offers a way to cover up their psychological fragility, insecurity, and acute
self-consciousness, even though some very minor actions help to reflect most clearly the
tenuousness of their respective poses. The narrator, for example, smiles but is careful to hide
his "coalblack filling," while Esmé's fingernails are bitten to the quick and her tendency to keep
touching her hair belies her posture of self-assurance.
It is probably not necessary to detail Esmé's strained attempts to appear older, more mature,
self-possessed. Nonetheless, a brief look at the way the narrative voice oscillates between
sarcasm and sincerity will suggest how language covers up, rather than directly reflects, the
true state of the narrator's being. When watching the choir practice, the narrator emanates a
glib, sardonic attitude: "Their voices were melodious and unsentimental, almost to the point
where a somewhat more denominational man than myself might, without straining, have
experienced levitation." His deflation of the choir is offset a few lines later by a genuine
admiration for Esmé's voice: "Her voice was distinctly separate from the other children's voices,
and not just because she was seated nearest me. It had the best upper register, the sweetestsounding, the surest, and it automatically led the way." During their conversation itself, his tone
and emotional state continue to fluctuate between sarcasm and sincerity. When asked whether
he attends that "secret Intelligence school on the hill," he notes that he is "as security-minded
as the next one" and therefore tells Esmé that he is "visiting Devonshire for my health." Shortly
thereafter, the narrator admits that he is glad she came over, since he "had been feeling
lonely."
Generally, their conversation is amiable, congenial, interesting, and leaves the narrator
pondering the "strangely emotional" moment which the departure of Charles and Esmé
creates. On the surface, this meeting does not seem to satisfactorily explain Esmé's capacity to
overwhelm X with love at the end of the story. On the basis of the language and action alone,
one may be inclined to view Leslie Fiedler's nearly blasphemous assertion that "For Esmé" is "a
popular little tearjerker" with some sympathy. The conversation, however, helps to suggest
some basic facts about each character: the narrator is greatly in need of emotional sustenance;
Esmé, midway between childhood and adulthood, must cope with the pain of having lost both
parents at the same time that she must bear the responsibility of taking care of her brother.
Their conversation implies, but does not explicitly record, the extent of each character's
emotional reaction. Ultimately, one must perceive that, underlying the words and actions of
this scene, some kind of inscrutable magnetism touches the narrator and Esmé, which evolves
from an instinctual and unconscious sense that each possess what the other most deeply
needs. In light of the subsequent action, it can be argued that Esmé senses in the narrator the
capacity to represent a surrogate father, while the narrator, disgusted by the petty actualities
of stale middle-class life and the bleak atmosphere among the letter-writing types, senses in
Esmé a saving balance between the "silly-billy" innocence of children and the squalor of
adulthood. In the tearoom, neither character is fully aware of the implications of this "strangely
emotional moment." But as time passes, each retrospectively achieves insight into the nature
of their love, and the capacity to respond is manifested by the creation of meaningful forms of
expression. Only later, with Esmé's letter and the loan of her father's watch, do we find that she
fully recognizes the import of the meeting. For the narrator, the recitation of the story--the
artistic process--fulfills his promise to write Esmé a story both "squalid and moving."
Salinger denies us a view of the psychological process which prompts Esmé to forward her
father's watch. We do, however, witness X's emergence from a hell characterized by explicit
failures of language to communicate love. While his inability to read, write, or think clearly is a
result of the "suffering of being unable to love," human contact causes even further
deterioration. His conversation with Clay and the letter from his brother structurally parallel X's
earlier conversation with Esmé and the letter he later opens from Esmé. Here, however, these
forms of communication perform exactly the opposite office, indicating that language, not
founded on love and a sympathetic comprehension of another's condition, express negation
and advances alienation. Because of his insensitivity, Clay cannot comprehend the extent and
cause of X's emotional deterioration. Clay does not even understand why X sarcastically
interprets Clay's reasons for killing "that pussycat in as manly a way as anybody could've under
the circumstances." The conversation culminates in X's nausea, which follows Clay's most ironic
failure to perceive the meaning of X's words:
"That cat was a spy. You had to take a pot shot at it. It was a very clever German midget
dressed up in a cheap fur coat. So there was absolutely nothing brutal, or cruel, or dirty, or
even--"
"God damn it!" Clay said, his lips thinned. "Can't you ever be sincere?"
X suddenly felt sick, and he swung around in his chair and grabbed the wastebasket--just in
time.
This is undoubtedly the same wastebasket which holds the torn remnants of his brother's
request for souvenirs, the accoutrements of the very war which threatens to destroy X's being.
His brother's letter was probably sent in the unquestioned belief that the Sergeant receiving
the letter would be the same one who left home. This Sergeant, however, has gone through a
revolution of consciousness, profoundly altering his relation to home, self, and society.
Americans back home like X's wife, mother-in-law, and brother inhabit a spatial, experiential,
and psychological world which is entirely foreign to X's life. They have no way to comprehend
the waste and horror which X has seen. Thus, his brother's letter accentuates distance, fails to
provide relief, and moves X closer to an absolute loss of reason.
Neither callous letter, nor talking to Clay about Loretta, nor listening to Bob Hope on the radio
can help X to recover his faculties. Instead, he needs personal contact with someone who has a
sensitive understanding of the way war can destroy one's being. Like X, Esmeacute; has been
ravaged by the war and, emotionally, her experiences and problems are similar to the
Sergeant's: she has been stripped of her former source of coherence, order, and love through
the death of her parents; Sergeant X's former way of ordering experience no longer pertains to
his life; both need to reconstruct their lives after being "wounded" by the war. By chance, X
opens Esmé's letter and receives help from the only available source. The act of reading the
letter stuns him, touching off an awareness of the significance of their meeting in the tearoom.
The letter and the loan of her father's watch spring from Esmé's deep desire to express love. It
is not so much the letter's stilted words or the statistics which affect X; instead, it is his deeply
felt, overwhelming experience of Esmé's love which begins his cure by inducing sleep.
"For Esmé" reflects the power of language to communicate love. Here, Salinger successfully
mediates between silence and sentimentality by presenting two instances of expression-Esmé's letter to the narrator and the narrator's story "for Esmé"--which evolve from each
character's comprehension of the meaning of love. These forms of expression represent moral
and aesthetic resolutions to the problems of human communication permeating the narrative.
Unlike the endings of many classic American tales, the conclusion of "For Esmé--with Love and
Squalor"fulfills the process of self-recovery rather than simply bringing the hero to a point at
which he either has nowhere to go or is about to make use of what he has learned. "For
Esmé" has closure at the same time that it suggests how the narrator will live within society,
even though his experiences have taught him the inherent failure of conventional society. On
the one hand, the ending of the story completes the process of therapy which began with the
discovery of Esmé's letter, fulfills the promise to write her a story, and completes the office of
symbolic father. As Ihab Hassan notes, the story can be looked at as a "modern epithelium." It is
also a wedding gift, a parting gesture of love from father to daughter. On the other hand, the
narrator has managed to gain a balanced perspective; he has found a way to avoid paralyzing
isolation and survive with good humor even though living within a world dominated by the likes
of his wife and mother-in-law. Even though he may be impeded from acting as he would like, he
still has his art.
Communication is difficult within such a world, but possible. Salinger dramatizes this difficulty
by crowding his world with people who are not so much malicious as unconscious. The best one
can say about Clay, for example, is that he tries to help X. But like most characters in Salinger's
fiction, Clay is impeded by his utter incapacity to transcend the values which he holds sacred
and never questions. Thus, one response to the horror which threatens civilization resides in
accommodating oneself completely to the stereotypical conventionalities of middle-class
existence--the world of Saks, cashmere, convenient marriages, college psychology courses, war
souvenirs, and complacent acceptance of army bureaucracy. But in presenting two successful
expressions of love, Salinger offers an optimistic answer to the implied question: How can one
respond to the void after confronting, in Esmé's words, "a method of existence that is ridiculous
to say the least?"
Nevertheless, "For Esmé" presents the early signs in Salinger of his apparent acceptance of
silence, not as a negative or cowardly retreat from the literary field, as some of his detractors
would have it, but as a positive, implicit recognition of emotions that are in themselves
meaningful and therefore need no expression. This story is so interesting because it confronts
the difficulty of significant human communication at a time when he still seemed to believe in
writing (or at least publishing). "For Esmé--with Love and Squalor" is indeed a high point in
Salinger's art for many of the reasons his other commentators have noted. Most notably,
though, it addresses one of the central problems of Salinger's fiction in particular and modern
literature in general--the problem of finding valid forms of communication--at the same time
that the story suggests that love is the force which animates expression. In a story in which love
ultimately triumphs, the relationship between the narrator and Esmé embodies a beautiful, if
tenuous, example of how individuals might pass through squalor to love, achieving meaningful,
redemptive expression, even though the successful uses of language are a constant reminder of
its general failure.
Source: John Wenke, "Sergeant X, Esmé, and the Meaning of Words," in J. D. Salinger, edited
by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1987, pp. 111-18.
Source Database: Contemporary Literary Criticism

The following article was found in The Literature Resource Centre database.
The New Yorker, Feb 8, 2010 v85 i48 p20
J. D. Salinger. The Talk of the Town Gopnik, Adam.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2010 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast
Publications Inc.
J. D. Salinger's long silence, and his withdrawal from the world, attracted more than the usual
degree of gossip and resentment--as though we readers were somehow owed more than his
words, were somehow owed his personal, talk-show presence, too--and fed the myth of the
author as homespun religious mystic. Yet though he may seem to have chosen a hermit's life,
Salinger was no hermit on the page. And so his death throws us back from the myth to the
magical world of his writing as it really is, with its matchless comedy, its ear for American
speech, its contagious ardor and incomparable charm. Salinger's voice--which illuminated and
enlivened these pages for two decades--remade American writing in the fifties and sixties in a
way that no one had since Hemingway. (The juvenilia of most American writers since bear the
mark of one or the other.) But if it had been Hemingway's role to make American writing
hardboiled, it was Salinger's to let it be soft, even runny, again.
"For Esme--with Love and Squalor," which appeared here in the issue of April 8, 1950, is an
account of the horror and battle shock of the Second World War--which the young Salinger
fought during some of its worst days and battles--only to end, amazingly, with the offer of an
antidote: the simple, direct, and uncorrupted speech that young Esme's letter holds out to the
no longer entirely broken narrator. It was the comedy, the overt soulfulness, the high-hearted
(to use an adjective he liked) romantic openness of the early Salinger stories that came as such
a revelation to readers. The shine of Fitzgerald and the sound of Ring Lardner haunted these
pages, but it was Salinger's readiness to be touched, and to be touching, his hypersensitivity to
the smallest sounds and graces of life, which still startles. Suicides and strange deaths happen
in his stories--one shattering story is devoted to the back and forth on the telephone between a
betrayed husband and the man in bed with his wife at that very moment--but their tone is alive
with an appetite for experience as it is, and the certainty that religious epiphanies will arise
from such ordinary experience. A typical Salinger hero is the little boy who confuses "kike" with
"kite," in "Down at the Dinghy"--who thinks that his father has been maliciously compared to
"one of those things that go up in the air. . . . With string you hold."
Salinger was an expansive romantic, an observer of the details of the world, and of New York in
particular; no book has ever captured a city better than "The Catcher in the Rye" captured New
York in the forties. Has any writer ever had a better ear for American talk? (One thinks of the
man occupying the seat behind Holden Caulfield at Radio City Music Hall, who, watching the
Rockettes, keeps saying to his wife, "You know what that is? That's precision.") A self-enclosed
writer doesn't listen, and Salinger was a peerless listener: page after page of pure talk flowed
out of him, moving and true and, above all, funny. He was a humorist with a heart before he
was a mystic with a vision, or, rather, the vision flowed from the humor. That was the final
almost-moral of "Zooey," the almost-final Salinger story to appear in these pages: Seymour's
Fat Lady, who gives art its audience, is all of us.
As for Holden Caulfield, he is so much a part of the lives of his readers that he is more a person
to phone up than a character to analyze. A "Catcher" lover in his forties handed Holden's
Christmas journey to his own twelve-year-old son a few years ago, filled with trepidation that
time and manners would have changed too much for it to still matter. Not a bit--the boy
grasped it to his heart as his father had, as the Rough Guide to his experience, and used its last
lines as his yearbook motto. In American writing, there are three perfect books, which seem to
speak to every reader and condition: "Huckleberry Finn," "The Great Gatsby," and "The Catcher
in the Rye." Of the three, only "Catcher" defines an entire region of human experience: it is--in
French and Dutch as much as in English--the handbook of the adolescent heart. But the Glass
family saga that followed is the larger accomplishment. Salinger's retreat into that family had its
unreality--no family of Jewish intellectual children actually spoke quite like this, or revered one
of the members quite so uncritically--but its central concern is universal. The golden thread that
runs through it is the question of Seymour's suicide, so shockingly rendered in "A Perfect Day
for Bananafish." How, amid so much joyful experience, could life become so intolerable to the
one figure who seems to be its master?
Critics fretted about the growing self-enclosure of Salinger's work, about a faith in his
characters' importance that sometimes seemed to make a religion of them. But the isolation of
his later decades should not be allowed to obscure his essential gift for joy. The message of his
writing was always the same: that, amid the malice and falseness of social life, redemption rises
from clear speech and childlike enchantment, from all the forms of unself-conscious innocence
that still surround us (with the hovering unease that one might mistake emptiness for
innocence, as Seymour seems to have done with his Muriel). It resides in the particular things
that he delighted to record. In memory, his writing is a catalogue of those moments: Esme's
letter and her broken watch; and the little girl with the dachshund that leaps up on Park
Avenue, in "Zooey"; and the record of "Little Shirley Beans" that Holden buys for Phoebe (and
then sees break on the pavement); and Phoebe's coat spinning on the carrousel at twilight in
the December light of Central Park; and the Easter chick left in the wastebasket at the end of
"Just Before the War with the Eskimos"; and Buddy, at the magic twilight hour in New York,
after learning from Seymour how to play Zen marbles ("Could you try not aiming so much?"),
running to get Louis Sherry ice cream, only to be overtaken by his brother; and the small girl on
the plane who turns her doll's head around to look at Seymour. That these things were not in
themselves quite enough to hold Seymour on this planet--or enough, it seems, at times, to hold
his creator entirely here, either--does not diminish the beauty of their realization. In "Seymour:
An Introduction," Seymour, thinking of van Gogh, tells Buddy that the only question worth
asking about a writer is "Were most of your stars out?" Writing, real writing, is done not from
some seat of fussy moral judgment but with the eye and ear and heart; no American writer will
ever have a more alert ear, a more attentive eye, or a more ardent heart than his.
“The Turkey Season” by Alice Munro
Introduction by Margaret Atwood for Alice Munro’s collection, My Best Stories
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Published in 2009
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The following article was found in The Literature Resource Centre database.
Alice Munro
July 10, 1931Name: Alice Munro
Nationality: Canadian
Genre(s): Short stories; Television plays
Biographical and Critical Essay
Dance of the Happy Shades
"Walker Brothers Cowboy"
"The Peace of Utrecht"
"Dance of the Happy Shades"
Lives of Girls and Women
"The Flats Road"
"Epilogue: The Photographer"
Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You
"Winter Wind"
"Walking on Water"
"Marrakesh"
Who Do You Think You Are?
The Beggar Maid
The Moons of Jupiter
"Visitors"
"The Turkey Season"
"Dulse"
"Hard-Luck Stories"
"Accident"
"Labor Day Dinner"
Writings by the Author
Further Readings about the Author
About This Essay
WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:
BOOKS
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Dance of the Happy Shades (Toronto: Ryerson, 1968; New York: McGraw-Hill,
1973; London: Lane, 1974).
Lives of Girls and Women (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1971; New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1972; London: Lane, 1973).
Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson,
1974; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974).
Who Do You Think You Are? (Toronto: Macmillan, 1978); republished as The
Beggar Maid (New York: Knopf, 1979; London: Lane, 1980).
The Moons of Jupiter (Toronto: Macmillan, 1982; New York: Knopf, 1983;
London: Lane, 1983).
The Progress of Love: Stories (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1986; New York:
Knopf, 1986).
Friend of My Youth: Stories (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990; New York:
Knopf, 1990; London: Chatto & Windus, 1990).
Open Secrets: Stories (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1994; New York: Knopf,
1994; London: Vintage, 1995).
Selected Stories (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1996).
TELEVISION
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"A Trip to the Coast," To See Ourselves, CBC, 1973.
"Thanks for the Ride," To See Ourselves, CBC, 1973.
"How I Met My Husband," The Play's the Thing, CBC, 1974.
"1847: The Irish," The Newcomers, CBC, 1978.
OTHER
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"Author's Commentary," in Sixteen by Twelve: Short Stories by Canadian
Writers, edited by John Metcalf (Toronto: Ryerson, 1970), pp. 125-126.
"The Colonel's Hash Resettled," The Narrative Voice: Stories and Reflections by
Canadian Authors, edited by John Metcalf (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson,
1972), pp. 181-183.
"Home," in 74: New Canadian Stories, edited by David Helwig and Joan
Harcourt (Ottawa: Oberon, 1974), pp. 133-153.
"How I Met My Husband," in The Play's the Thing, edited by Tony Gifford
(Toronto: Macmillan, 1976), pp. 15-34.
"A Better Place Than Home," in The Newcomers: Inhabiting a New
Land, edited by Charles E. Israel (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1979), pp.
113-124.
PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS
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"The Dimensions of a Shadow," Folio, 4 (April 1950): 4-10.
"Characters," Ploughshares, 4 no. 3 (1978): 72-82.
"Wood," New Yorker, 56 (24 November 1980); 46-54.
"Working for a Living," Grand Street, 1 (Fall 1981): 9-37.
"The Ferguson Girls Must Never Marry," Grand Street, 1 (Spring 1982): 27-64.
"What is Real?," Canadian Forum, 62 (September 1982): 5, 36.
"Miles City, Montana," New Yorker, 60 (14 January 1985): 30-40.
"Lichen," New Yorker, 61 (15 July 1985): 26-36.
"The Progress of Love," New Yorker, 61 (7 October 1985): 35-58.
"Secrets Between Friends," Mademoiselle, 91 (November 1985).
Five books published in fourteen years have firmly established Alice Munro among
Canada's best writers of prose fiction. Her form is the short story, and her material is
largely the experience of a girl growing up poor in a small southwestern Ontario town
and subsequently making her way, with pain, self-awareness, and amazement, through
the various passages of life: school, leaving home, university, marriage, children,
divorce, making a career, and establishing new relationships. Munro's talent lies in
presenting these ordinary experiences so that they appear extraordinary, invested with
a kind of magic.
Munro, the daughter of Robert Eric Laidlaw and Ann Chamney Laidlaw, was born in
Wingham, Ontario, in 1931. Alice Anne Laidlaw started writing stories when she was
about fifteen. Because she lived on the outskirts of town, not quite town but not yet
country, she could not go home for lunch. She spent her noon hours locked in the
schoolroom writing stories that she never showed to anyone, writing being regarded
as a freakish activity in Wingham, even for girls. These stories, as she has since
described them in interviews, were intensely romantic, tales of rapes and abortions,
the occult, and love that is stronger than death. In 1949 she left Wingham for London,
Ontario, and two years at the University of Western Ontario. It was not until after her
marriage in 1951 to James Munro and the couple's move to Vancouver that she started
to write from her own experience about her native region.
Munro country is Huron County and in particular Wingham, through which the
Maitland River flows on its course to Lake Huron. West of Wingham, it winds
through a section called Lower Town, past the Laidlaw place, and through the fields
know as the Flats. This landscape and the Scots-Irish community that lives there, as
perceived in childhood and re-created in adult memory, form the imaginative core of
Munro's Dance of the Happy Shades, Lives of Girls and Women, Who Do You Think
You Are? and some of the best stories in Something I've Been Meaning To Tell
You and The Moons of Jupiter.
For this reason, Munro has been called nostalgic, old-fashioned, interested in a past
that has disappeared. It is more accurate to think of her as a regional writer. The
authors for whom she has expressed most admiration are regional writers of the
American South--Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, and, especially, Eudora
Welty. She has said in an early 1970s interview with Mari Stainsby: "If I'm a regional
writer, the region I'm writing about has many things in common with the American
South.... [It is] Rural Ontario. A closed rural society with a pretty homogenous
Scotch-Irish racial strain going slowly to decay."
Munro's first published story, "The Dimensions of a Shadow," appeared in the
University of Western Ontario student publication Folio in April 1950. She recalls
that her landlady remarked of this story, which was romantic and rather gothic,
"Alice, that's not a bit like you," and remembers thinking, "That's very odd, that's not
like the me you know; and why do you assume that's me?" The landlady's surprise
was perhaps not to be wondered at, considering how the author had worked to make
herself seem like everybody else, a defense perfected in Wingham where ridicule was
directed against anything odd. Later, in the 1950s in West Vancouver, a wife and a
young mother with a house in the suburbs, she lived, she says, "two completely
different lives--the real and absolutely solitary life and the life of appearances,"
pretending to be what everyone wanted her to be. After twelve years in Vancouver,
the Munros moved in 1963 to Victoria, British Columbia, where they started a shop,
Munro's Books. Their youngest daughter Andrea was born in 1966, to join Sheila,
born in 1953, and Jenny, born in 1957. All during the 1950s and early 1960s Munro
was privately writing the stories that were collected into her first book, from the
earliest ones, "The Time of Death" and "The Day of the Butterfly," written when she
was about twenty-three, to the last ones, "Boys and Girls," "Walker Brothers
Cowboy," and"Images" written when she was thirty-five.
Many of the stories that, with some revision, went into Dance of the Happy
Shades (1968) had been first sold to the few available Canadian markets for short
stories--the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the woman's magazine Chatelaine,
and little magazines such as Tamarack Review, Canadian Forum, and Queen's
Quarterly. These were years of constant rejections from publishers, but Munro's
perseverance paid off. Dance of the Happy Shades won the Governor General's
Award for fiction in 1969 and commanded for its author the recognition of a wider
audience.
The stories in Dance of the Happy Shades are not linked by common characters or by
a common narrator. Nevertheless, taken together, they give a good idea of what it is
like to grow up and come of age in a small town. The opening story, "Walker Brothers
Cowboy," is about the young narrator's dawning awareness of the powerful shapes
that lie behind routine life in Huron county. It introduces characters who, in various
guises and under various names, are central figures in Munro's fiction: the female
narrator, whose extraordinary powers of observation, analysis, and perception make
her feel different from other people and rather isolated; her younger brother, who does
not notice things and seems to belong comfortably in the world; their father, who is a
silver-fox farmer defeated by poverty during the Depression but still preserving an
imaginative vision; and their mother, who yearns for gentility and in this story is a
figure of exhausted energy, although in other stories the mother is often rebellious,
struggling ceaselessly against the confining values of the town.
The autobiographical origin for many of these characters is evident, though details
have been altered or omitted. Munro's father, to whom Dance of the Happy Shades is
dedicated, raised silver foxes in the 1930s. The family, which included Alice and her
younger brother and sister, was very poor. Their mother was hopeful and ambitious,
wanting Alice, as Munro put it later, "to be a middle-class girl in a much posher place
than Wingham." When Alice was twelve, her mother developed Parkinson's disease, a
debilitating illness from which she suffered until her death in 1959.
The technique, apparent in the stories in Dance of the Happy Shades, of piling up
exact details, of reconstructing ordinary life so that it appears luminous, invites
comparison with magic realist painters such as the American Edward Hopper or
Canadians Alex Colville and Jack Chambers, whose work Munro admires. At the end
of "Walker Brothers Cowboy," the little girl, thinking about her father's life, is
reminded of "a landscape that has an enchantment on it, making it kindly, ordinary
and familiar while you are looking at it, but changing it, once your back is turned, into
something you will never know, with all kinds of weathers, and distances you cannot
imagine." This recognition of the penetration of the everyday landscape by the
mysterious and enchanted is at the heart of Munro's vision and to some extent
explains the tension one can always feel in her work between the ordinary and the
extraordinary.
This tension is variously expressed in the stories by the contrast between the way the
unobservant younger brother sees things and the much more complex perception of
his sister; by the contrast between those people who, as the title story puts it, "live in
the world" and the misfits, the fatally ill, the people in love, the eccentrics, artists, and
idiots who do not; or sometimes simply by the treachery of ordinary objects and
events which suddenly present themselves in menacing or grotesque aspects, become
bearers of astonishing messages, or take on legendary significance. Very often
in Dance of the Happy Shades a story ends with a tilt in the narrator's perspective
which allows her to feel the shadow of the other world.
The wordsritual, ceremony, andlegendaryare resonant ones in Munro's stories,
because they suggest the patterns of that other special world which can sometimes
reveal themselves in this ordinary one. For the same reason, the central episode in
several of the stories in Dance of the Happy Shades is a ritual event such as the "ritual
of back-and front-seat seduction" in "Thanks for the Ride," the funeral in "The Time
of Death," the birthday party for the dying Myra in "Day of the Butterfly," the high
school dance in "Red Dress--1946," and the annual piano recital in the title work.
Several of these early stories conclude with a grand final sentence containing some
word or image that sums up the whole story--never more luminously than in those
stories which, together with "Walker Brothers Cowboy," seem most central to
Munro's vision: "Images," "Boys and Girls," "The Peace of Utrecht," and "Dance of
the Happy Shades." The first two are rite-of-passage stories in which the transition
from childhood accompanies recognition of the fact of death. The last two form a
climax to the collection, presenting, in "The Peace of Utrecht," the entrapping world
of guilt, materialism, unconsummated relationships, silences, and social taboos and,
in "Dance of the Happy Shades," the possibility of a way out of this entrapment
through art. "Dance of the Happy Shades" is about a piano recital at which a retarded
girl plays what no one has expected to hear--real music, "something fragile, courtly
and gay, that carries with it the freedom of a great unemotional happiness." There is
perhaps the implication that such freedom and serenity are possible only in the world
of the shades, the misfits, the mentally retarded, the artists.
Thus Dance of the Happy Shades closes with a message from the country of art. The
last words before the epilogue in Munro's second book, Lives of Girls and
Women (1971), are "Real life." Indeed "Real Life" was the title that the author at one
time favored for the book. This rejected title, surely at least in part ironic, suggests the
book's form as a Bildungsroman or apprenticeship novel, at the end of which
traditionally the protagonist has completed his or her education and is on the threshold
of "real life." But the title may also suggest the continuing tension in this book
between the ordinary world of "real life" and the special world inhabited by
eccentrics, religious believers, lovers, and artists.
Lives of Girls and Women was written in a year, during which Munro worked on the
book for three hours every day. Before this, the author had the material in her head for
nearly ten years. For Munro, the process of writing is partly invention, partly
remembering the way something looked, the way somebody spoke, a certain feeling.
It is not, as she has often said in interviews, a process directed by a theory of how to
write. She never thinks about how to write her next story. She does not have a plan for
a collection, preferring to write whatever story comes along and to respond to the
demands of her material. She begins each story by writing a scene, revising it as many
as thirty times to "get it right." It seems, she says, like an enormously "chancy thing"
every time and not a process she can analyze.
Lives of Girls and Women was written and marketed as a novel, although its structure
is more that of interlinked stories. In an interview with Geoff Hancock published in
1982, Munro talked about her sense of the market pressure to write novels: "For years
and years I would convince myself that I really had a novel there and I would take
these ideas I had and bloat them ... [but] they would just fall.... So it took me a long
time to reconcile myself to being a short story writer." But whatever its label, critics
and readers liked Lives of Girls and Women. It won the 1971-1972 Canadian
Booksellers Award; the American edition sold out four printings in a month; it was an
alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club in both Canada and the United
States; and, with the New American Library Signet edition in 1974, Munro entered
the paperback mass market. In January 1975, a version of one section of Lives of Girls
and Women entitled "Baptising" was produced as a television drama in the
CBC Performance series, with the author's seventeen-year-old daughter Jenny playing
the lead role of Del Jordan.
Lives of Girls and Women presents significant moments in Del Jordan's development
from childhood to the point at which she plans to leave her hometown of Jubilee for a
job in the outside world. Seven self-contained sections, chronologically arranged, and
an epilogue make up Del's narration of her encounter with the world's outcasts and
eccentrics, her growing awareness of death, her relationship with her mother, her
experiences with religion, art, and sexual awakening, and her vocation as a writer.
Section one, "The Flats Road," establishes the symbolic geography of the book in its
contrast between Del's father's world of the Flats Road, home to a disreputable
assortment of bootleggers, misfits, and idiots, and her mother's desired world of order,
decency, and knowledge, as it is temporarily represented in her view by Jubilee. This
first section focuses on what Del comes to understand about the lives of eccentrics
like the Jordans' neighbor on the Flats Road, Uncle Benny, who lives in the mad
world which is adjacent to the ordinary one, but chaotic and strange: "lying alongside
our world was Uncle Benny's world like a troubling distorted reflection, the same but
never at all the same."
In subsequent sections, Del is frequently an intrepid explorer of this territory where
"anything might happen." But as she grows up she develops strategies for dealing
with, and finally celebrating, the ordinary world. She realizes that her mother's
forthright individualism and uncompromising innocence make her a freak among
Jubilee people, who have "no need to do or say anything remarkable." Therefore, Del
in Jubilee, like Alice Munro in Wingham, becomes a "chameleon," adopting the
disguise of ordinariness under the cover of which she is secretly developing her
identity as a writer. A repeated rhythm throughout the book is Del's temporary
abandonment of herself to the dark visions of madness or death or to the bright visions
of love or art, followed by her return to "real life" with a heightened appetite for its
ordinary details.
As might be expected in a book centered on the protagonist's education, growth, and
development, a central concern is Del's sexual coming of age and her efforts to
discover for herself a suitable female role. The models of womanhood available in
Jubilee function mostly as warnings of the Scylla-and-Charybdis dangers through
which Del must navigate. On the one hand, there is her best friend Naomi who settles
for the expected female routine: an office job at the local creamery, pots and pans put
away on credit for her hope chest, pregnancy, and then marriage. On the other hand,
there are the eccentrics who exist outside normal Jubilee life and end up either like
Marion Sherriff or Miss Farris, drowned in the Wawanash River, or, like Del's
mother, considered "a wildwoman." Del wants the life of the intellect, as promoted by
her mother, but she also wants men to love her, as do many other Munro characters
and narrators in the later stories.
The last section of Lives of Girls and Women, "Epilogue: The Photographer," invites
the reader to stand back from the rest of the book to consider the process of writing a
novel and the relation between the observed world and the fictional re-creation. The
fictional character Del Jordan is writing a novel, seeking, like Munro herself, to
discover ways of presenting the truth in fiction. Del says, "For this novel I had
changed Jubilee, too, or picked out some features of it and ignored others.... The main
thing was that it seemed true to me, not real but true, as if I had discovered, not made
up, such people and such a story, as if that town was lying close behind the one I
walked through every day." She makes the discovery that in order to tell the truth, her
fiction must be true to the ordinariness of Jubilee, for people's lives are "dull, simple,
amazing and unfathomable--deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum." Del concludes
with a description of what she wants her writing to be, a description that many
reviewers, not surprisingly, used to describe Munro's own accomplishment: "what I
wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark
or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together-radiant, everlasting."
Although Munro's perceptive rendering of the theme of growing up was impressive,
the similarities between her first two books raised questions about the range and
versatility of her talent. Why did she stop with the adolescent experience in Huron
County, choosing not to write about adult experiences of marriage, having children,
and so on? There had been, by this time, a turning point in her own life. Her marriage
had broken up. She had come back in 1972 to London, Ontario, to live on her own
with her two younger daughters, determined to support herself on her writing. She
accepted the invitation of the University of Western Ontario--the school that she had
attended twenty-five years earlier--to be writer in residence for the 1974-1975
academic year. Divorced in 1976, she married Gerald Fremlin and moved to Clinton,
Ontario, where she currently resides. Surely, now that the ghosts of childhood and
parents had been dealt with in two books, there must be, out of this later experience,
some ghosts of adult life worth writing about.
And indeed there were in Munro's third book, Something I've Been Meaning to Tell
You (1974). In several stories in this collection the familiar Munro territory of the
small southwestern Ontario town is the setting for the outrageous mother, the
perceptive daughter, barriers between family members, taboos of silence and
reticence, class differences, and rites of passage. Munro treats these elements with
customary skill in "Marrakesh" and "Executioners"; in "Winter Wind" and "The
Ottawa Valley," both about a mother with Parkinson's disease; in "How I Met My
Husband," a cheerful story based on class differences in Huron County; and in"The
Found Boat," in which attraction and repulsion between the sexes in late childhood
are delicately balanced. Added to these tales are seven stories set in a big city, often
Vancouver, that are concerned with urban life, adult experience, the complications of
marriage and of the breakdown of the relationship, the barriers to communication
between the sexes and between the generations, and other new material.
One way in which this volume differs from the earlier books is that most all the stories
in Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You, including the six set in Jubilee, have to
do with the contemporary world. Even retrospective stories tend to end up in the final
paragraph with the present. There are frequent topical allusions to activities and
manners dating from the late 1960s and early 1970s: meditating in Uttar Pradesh,
India; organic health food stores; hippies; Rosicrucians; earnest people who have been
in growth groups, learned yoga, and looked into transcendental meditation.
Although the stories in this collection are each separate, with more variety of setting,
characters, and incident than the stories had in Dance of the Happy Shades, there are
ways of grouping them together. Some of the stories, notably "Memorial," show the
adult lives of people who have left Jubilee for the city, carrying with them Jubilee
materialism and giving it wider scope and a more modern guise. June in "Memorial"
has devoted her life to the informed purchase (using Consumer Reports) and orderly
maintenance of material objects, but when her son dies in a car accident--suicide is
suggested--these objects cannot fill up the emptiness.
In three of the autobiographical stories, "Memorial," "Winter Wind," and "The Ottawa
Valley," grownup daughters wrestle unsuccessfully with the ghost of the mother and
her still unmet demands. In "Winter Wind" the narrator recalls her mother as a sort of
artist manquée. She makes the same contrast between her mother's world and her
grandmother's world that Del makes inLives of Girls and Women, comparing her
"mother's world of serious skeptical questions ... and unsettling ideas" with her aunts'
world of "work and gaiety, comfort and order, intricate formality." In the last
paragraph of the intense final story, "The Ottawa Valley," the narrator says that her
mother "is the one of course that I am trying to get": "it is to reach her that this whole
journey has been undertaken. With what purpose? To mark her off, describe, to
illuminate, to celebrate, to get rid of her; and it did not work, for she looms too close,
just as she always did." In these stories guilt is not gotten rid of, but it is recognized
and accepted, which in itself can be a form of release.
Another important grouping of stories explores the deceptions and the reticences
between lovers and ex-lovers. In the carefully modulated title story, Et weaves into a
pattern of fatal attraction, doomed love, and possible poisonings certain events from
the past involving her beautiful sister Char and the hotel owner's glamorous and
ambitious son, Blaikie Noble. The reader is left wondering about Et's story (which she
has "been meaning to tell" Char's widower), just as in "Tell Me Yes Or No" the reader
is left to contemplate just how much of the story the narrator has made up as a tactic
to deal with her absent lover's failure to write her a letter. The narrator of "Tell Me
Yes or No" begins, "I persistently imagine you dead." In these stories, the
communication suggested in the titles--"Meaning To Tell You" and "Tell Me"--is
never realized. In other stories, characters await letters that never arrive and letters are
written that cannot be sent. The narrator of "The Spanish Lady" begins by writing to
her husband Hugh and her friend Margaret two different versions of a letter that she
can never post: "if Hugh loves Margaret I should be glad," one version asserts, and "I
despise you both," proclaims the other. In "Material" the narrator intends to write a
graceful letter to her ex-husband Hugo, acknowledging the fineness of his story about
Dotty, one of life's defeated people whom Hugo had never seemed to notice much at
the time, even when he was deliberately causing her harm. Instead she writes, "This is
not enough, Hugo. You Think it is, but it isn't. You are mistaken Hugo." In these
stories, Munro's carefully balanced sentences are able to convey what the characters
themselves despair of ever communicating: the layers of meaning; the implications in
the lies, deceptions, and silences; the gap between what the characters mean and what
they are able to tell.
Despite such difficulties, several characters, especially older ones, share with the
young narrators of the two earlier books a restless compulsion to look at everything
and find significance in what they see. In "Walking on Water" a retired druggist, Mr.
Lougheed, has resisted moving from a neighborhood and from an apartment house
now taken over by young people and hippies. Thinking about things he has seen in
that house--Rex and Calla in the apartment downstairs making love, for example--he
cannot regret his new experiences, however alien they seem to the way things used to
be in the time of his own youth: "Whatever he learned here, he was not sorry to have
learned. He listened to his contemporaries talking and he thought that their brains
would crack like eggs, if they knew one-tenth of what there was to know....[H]e kept
on, with an odd apprehension of a message that could flash out almost too quick for
the eye to catch it, like some commercials he had heard about on television."
Similarly, in "Marrakesh," Dorothy, a retired Jubilee schoolteacher, has given up her
earlier nostalgia for "old mossy rotten picturesque things" and developed an "irritable,
baffled concentration" bent on seeing everything, including shopping centers, cars,
flashing signs, and supermarkets: "Anything would do for her to look at; beautiful or
ugly had ceased to matter, because there was in everything something to be
discovered."
As in earlier books, characters sometimes feel that they are on the threshold of making
discoveries. They look for signs, try to penetrate beneath surfaces, and puzzle over
messages, although sometimes the language seems hard to interpret. Dorothy looks at
the spare brown body of her granddaughter lying in the sun "as if it were a hieroglyph
on her grass." The narrator in "The Spanish Lady" says about the cry of rage of a
dying derelict at the railway station: "This is a message; I really believe it is; but I
don't see how I can deliver it." In "Winter Wind" the narrator, who is a writer trying to
capture the shape of the lives of her mother, aunts, and grandmother, says that she
knows things about these people beyond what the facts themselves would bear out:
"Yet I have not invented it, I really believe it. Without any proof I believe it, and so I
must believe that we get messages another way, that we have connections that cannot
be investigated, but have to be relied on."
The stories in this collection sharpen one's sense of differences by juxtaposing two
ways of life or two ways of being in the world: past and present; old and young; town
and city; male and female; and, in almost every story, outcasts and those who, to
quote the narrator of "Executioners," succeed with "luck and good management" in
turning out "to seem like anybody else."Something I've Been Meaning To Tell
You makes the journey from the small southwestern Ontario town to adult life in the
big city. Munro's next book, Who Do You Think You Are? (1978), completes the
journey by returning home.
By the time Munro was writing the stories collected in Who Do You Think You Are?,
she was living in Clinton, with her second husband, to whom this fourth book is
dedicated. Clinton is just twenty miles from Wingham, where her father Robert
Laidlaw had lived for seventy-five years. Laidlaw himself became a writer shortly
before his death in 1976, completing the manuscript ofThe Macgregors (1979) while
he was waiting to go into the hospital for what would be an unsuccessful heart
operation. Perhaps not surprisingly, Wingham people did not enjoy being the source
of material for stories. As an editorial in the Wingham Advance Times (16 December
1981) headed "A Genius of Sour Grapes" put it, "Sadly enough Wingham people have
never had much chance to enjoy the excellence of [Munro's] writing ability because
we have repeatedly been made the butt of soured and cruel introspection....
[S]omething less than greatness impells her to return again and again to a time and a
place where bitterness warped her personality."
Like Munro, Rose, the central character in Who Do You Think You Are?, makes a
journey away from her small town only to return. She leaves West Hanratty, changes
her rural accent, marries into a higher class, and moves to the West Coast. However,
she carries along as baggage her childhood, her past, her sense of self-importance, and
her still unassuaged feelings of guilt. Adept at dissembling, Rose makes her way
among wealthy suburbanites, academics, and media people. She assumes roles and
strikes poses. But she finds out something about who she really is at the end of the
book when she returns to Hanratty. As the title suggests, Who Do You Think You
Are? is about the recognition of identity. In West Hanratty, the question "Who do you
think you are?" is scornfully asked as a scourge against ambition, pretension, and the
desire to be successful. Munro's New York publisher, declaring that Americans were
too self-assured to use or understand this expression, substituted the more static
title The Beggar Maid, under which the volume was also published in England.
Throughout the 1970s, Munro was consolidating her reputation as a story writer.
Robert Thacker lists, in The Annotated Bibliography of Canada's Major
Authors (1984), fourteen theses and dissertations written on Munro's work in the
decade between 1972 and 1982. Reviewers and literary critics were discovering her
carefully wrought style with its appearance of artlessness and spontaneity. They
admired her ear for accurately recording the way people talk, her unsentimental
treatment of female sexuality, her creation of exceptionally perceptive narrators as
filters for experience, and her ability to reveal the strange or paradoxical in the
apparently ordinary. There were honors and awards. In 1977 Munro became the first
Canadian winner of the Canada-Australia Literary Prize. Who Do You Think You
Are? won the Governor's General's Award for fiction in 1979 and was runner-up for
England's Booker Prize. Her stories were finding regular markets, especially in
the New Yorker, which has a contract for first refusal. She was also writing scripts for
the CBC, most notably "1847: The Irish" the second episode in the CBC series The
Newcomers: Inhabiting a New Land, which was aired 8 January 1978.
Among the generally positive reviews of Who Do You Think You Are? were two
curious early notices published in Books in Canada (October 1978)
and Chatelaine (November 1978). These two notices described a book of short stories
about two characters: Rose from West Hanratty, Ontario, and Janet from West
Dalgleish, who both marry wealthy men and move to Vancouver, have affairs, leave
their husbands, become writers, and move to Toronto. Wayne Grady in Books in
Canada remarked on the "faint Nabokovian twist" at the end of the book, when a
Dalgleish woman asks Janet, "That Rose you write about. Is she supposed to be you?"
The book that reached the bookstores, however, was a collection of ten stories about
one character, Rose. What happened was this: Munro's Canadian publisher
Macmillan, anxious to publish one of her collections for the 1978 fall season, put
together a collection of six stories about Rose plus six others about a new character,
Janet, author of the Rose stories. This book went into galleys in September 1978, and
advance copies went out to reviewers. The design of providing a portrait of the artist
together with the stories she wrote seemed clever--finally, to Munro, too clever, fancy,
and pretentious.
The idea for another Rose story came on a Friday night. Munro wrote it in two days
and took it the following Monday to Macmillan in Toronto. The publishers were not
pleased at the idea of changes; the writer was determined. She paid $2,500 herself to
make substantial alterations to a book already in press, later commenting, "Even if it
had cost me twice as much I would have done it. You see, I knew all along the book
wasn't right." In the revised version, three Janet stories, "Connection," "The Stone in
the Field," and "The Moons of Jupiter," were dropped; three others "Mischief,"
"Providence," and "Who Do You Think You Are?" were reworked into Rose stories;
the new story "Simon's Luck" was added to make up a collection of ten stories about
Rose. Who Do You Think You Are?, in its final form, is a successful hybrid. Each
story has the tightness and self-containment of a short story, but the collection has the
novel's advantage of being an extended form in which a complex central character can
be developed. These "linked stories," as Munro calls them, illuminate one aspect of
Rose's life at a time, in more or less chronological order, focusing on whatever is
central to that story and leaving everything else about her life in the shadows.
Some readers have suggested that the vision of life presented in Who Do You Think
You Are? is unusually grim, with a more relentless attention given to unconsummated
relationships, unfulfilled lives, isolated characters, imprisonment, victimization,
freakishness, and the failure of communication. During the pre-World War II years,
Rose grows up on the wrong side of the bridge in West Hanratty, a place of
"legendary poverty." There, she is surrounded by images of rural squalor--toilet
noises, stained underwear, relatives who say "yez," decaying houses, front-yard
dumps. Poverty has created a special world so that, when Rose later thinks of how
West Hanratty was during the war years and the years preceding, "the two times were
so separate it was as if ... it was all on film and the film had been printed in a different
way, so that on the one hand things looked clean-edged and decent and limited and
ordinary, and on the other, dark, grainy, jumbled, and disturbing."
Maimed characters, misfits, and the fatally ill continue to appear in the stories as
grotesque reminders of the close presence of this other disturbing world: Becky Tyde,
dwarfed and twisted by polio; poor, abused Franny McGill; the senile old woman in
"Spelling" who is lost in her "emptiness or confusion that nobody on this side can do
more that guess at"; Milton Homer, the town fool who lives without social inhibitions
and with no sense of precaution; crippled Ralph Gillespie, whose skillful imitations of
Milton Homer are eventually mistaken by newcomers to Hanratty as his own idiocy;
Rose's father, who dies of lung cancer; and Rose's lover Simon in "Simon's Luck,"
who dies of cancer of the pancreas. The stories themselves present small moments of
illumination and recnition as Rose perceives this irrational world in her various
encounters with those least rational of human experiences: death and sexual love.
Rose's life and circumstances may sound depressing, but she does not find them so.
She is busy observing things and learning: "Learning to survive, no matter with what
cravenness and caution, what shocks and forebodings, is not the same as being
miserable. It is too interesting." Like Munro's other central characters, Rose is always
an outsider, all the more capable on that account of making discriminations and
finding significance in ordinary things. In the "Author's Commentary" on "An Ounce
of Cure" in John Metcalf's Sixteen By Twelve (1970), Munro remarks about that story
from Dance of the Happy Shades: "when the girl's circumstances become hopelessly
messy, when nothing is going to go right for her, she gets out of it by looking at the
way things happen--by changing from a participant into an observer. This is what I
used to do myself, it is what a writer does." It is what Rose does too. At parties,
among sophisticated people, she turns her past--the outhouse, West Hanratty, poverty-into charmingly ironic and amusing anecdotes. Even those times of her life when she
felt most lonely and rejected can seem, in retrospect, comic.
One of the themes explored most fully in this book, as in the previous books, is the
relation between the past and the present. In the title story, the last in the collection,
when Rose has come back to West Hanratty to take her stepmother Flo to the county
home, she meets someone from her school days, Ralph Gillespie, whom she
recognizes as a kind of double. Nothing is said, but the "peculiar shame" of thinking
that she might have been paying attention--in her acting and in her life--to the wrong
things, that "Everything she had done could sometimes be seen as a mistake," that
shame seemed to have been eased. When Rose later reads about Ralph Gillespie's
death in the local paper, she feels "his life, close, closer than the lives of men she'd
loved, one slot over from her own." Rose, going home, recognizes something of who
she really is.
Recognition, acceptance, celebration of one's true identity continue to be themes
in The Moons of Jupiter (1982). With this fifth book, dedicated to Bob Weaver who
bought several of Munro's early stories for the CBC, the author put the lie to the
notion that readers do not buy or read collections of short stories. The Canadian
paperback rights were sold to Penguin of Canada for $45,000, a record amount for a
Canadian short-story volume. The reviews were almost uniformly laudatory, with
William French of the Toronto Globe and Mail (16 October 1982) asserting that
Munro's "ability to convey nuances and imply the ambiguities inherent in human
relationships has never been greater" and Benjamin De Mot in the New York Times
Book Review (20 March 1983), calling the book "witty, subtle, passionate ...
exceptionally knowledgeable about the content and movement--the entanglements and
entailments--of individual human feeling."
Stories the publisher had originally intended for Who Do You Think You Are? frame
this collection of twelve stories. The opening section, "Chaddeleys and Flemings," is
made up of two stories narrated by Janet, an exile from Dalgleish. "Connection"
focuses on the women of her mother's side of the family, while "The Stone in the
Field" focuses on the very different sort of women who were her father's sisters. The
very fine concluding story, "The Moons of Jupiter," centers on the complexity of
Janet's feeling during her father's last days in hospital before his unsuccessful heart
operation. These framing stories achieve their effects through juxtapositions: the
contrast between the self-dramatizing, traveling Chaddeley cousins, with their high
self-esteem and their view of life in terms of "change and possibility," and the
painfully shy and self-effacing Fleming aunts, with their Presbyterian lives
circumscribed by the unchanging routines of farm work; Janet's memories of how she
perceived these female figures when she was a child and her altered perceptions of
them now; Janet in the planetarium hearing about the unimaginable immensities of the
universe, the "Innumerable repetitions, innumerable variations," while she is thinking
painfully not only of her father's life but also of the lives of her grown daughters, all
finally separate from her and ultimately unknowable; Janet's indissoluble connection
with Dalgleish life and her husband Richard's contempt for her "background"
("Background was Richard's word. Your background. A drop in his voice, a warning.
Or was that what I heard, not what he meant?"); and, throughout, the narrator's version
of events poised always against her sense that her reconstructions can be only
provisional efforts to render what is ultimately mysterious.
Apart from the framing stories, the stories in the collection are separate and stand on
their own. Having experimented with a "novel" in Lives of Girls and Women and with
"linked stories" inWho Do You Think You Are?, Munro seems to be returning in her
latest book to the form that best suits her sense of experience as fragmentary and
unconnected. In her interview with Geoff Hancock, Munro makes this comment: "I
like looking at people's lives over a number of years, without continuity. Like
catching them in snapshots. And I like the way people relate, or don't relate, to the
people they were earlier.... I think this is why I'm not drawn to writing novels.
Because I don't see that people develop and arrive somewhere. I just see people living
in flashes. From time to time. And this is something you do become aware of as you
go into middle age. Before that, you really haven't got enough time experience. But
you meet people who were a certain kind of character ten years ago and they're
someone completely different today. They may tell you a story of what their life was
like ten years ago that is different again from what you saw at the time. None of these
stories will seem to connect. There are all these realities.... Mostly in my stories I like
to look at what people don't understand. What we don't understand. What we think is
happening and what we understand later on." Bringing together stories that are
separate and unlinked helps convey Munro's sense of multitudinous, competing
realities. As she remarked to Hancock, why not a collection of stories "just like a tray
with a lot of different sandwiches on it. And what on earth is this feeling that
somehow things have to connect or they have to be part of a larger whole?"
Hence the assortment offered in The Moons of Jupiter: some first-person narratives
and some third-person narratives; a retrospective story like "The Turkey Season,"
about a young girl's feelings for a man who may or may not have been homosexual;
stories centering on old age such as "Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd" and "Visitors"; and
stories about women in their forties, acknowledging uncomfortable discoveries about
themselves and their unruly emotional lives. The focus, as always, is on human
relationships: between daughter and father or mother, wife and husband; between
friends; between lovers. Perhaps all the stories can be said to be about what Munro
calls in "The Stone in the Field" "the pain of human contact."
There are memorable depictions of women of all kinds. In "Visitors," Grace and Vera,
"dried-out, brown-spotted, gray-haired" sisters, sit outside in the shade on hot summer
afternoons crocheting their tablecloths. In"The Turkey Season," two more sisters, Lily
and Marjorie, gut turkeys with fast and capable hands and talk about what is wrong
with young people: "They said that ninety per cent of the young girls nowadays drank,
and swore, and took it lying down. They did not have daughters, but if they did and
caught them at anything like that they would beat them raw." The Chaddeley cousins
have had lives without sexual passion: "In those days it seemed to be the thing for
women's bodies to swell and ripen to a good size twenty, if they were getting anything
out of life at all; then, according to class and aspirations, they would either sag and
loosen, go wobbly as custard under pale print dresses and damp aprons, or be girded
into shapes whose firm curves and proud slopes had nothing to do with sex,
everything to do with rights and power. My mother and her cousins were the second
sort of woman." Finally, Munro's gallery includes the narrators and characters in
"Dulse," "Accident," "Bardon Bus," "Labor Day Dinner," and "Hard-Luck Stories,"
all variously caught up in voluptuous delight, hysterical eroticism, tearfulness,
recriminations, and power struggles involved in love relationships.
The collection as a whole conveys powerfully the experience of women, vulnerable
and at the mercy of life. Many of these women have left safe marriages to take risks of
living alone or of finding new love relationships. Lydia, in "Dulse," wonders if she
should not, after all, "have stayed in the place where love is managed for you, not
gone where you have to invent it, and reinvent it, and never know if these efforts will
be enough." The narrator of "Hard-Luck Stories"makes a similar distinction between
two kinds of love: "There's the intelligent sort of love that makes an intelligent choice.
That's the kind you're supposed to get married on. Then there's the kind that's anything
but intelligent, that's like a possession. And that's the one, that's the one, that
everybody really values. That's the one that nobody wants to have missed out on."
This second sort of love involves risks that are explored in six of the stories. George,
in "Labor Day Dinner," recalls the first time he met Roberta: "She seemed to him
courageous, truthful, without vanity. How out of this could come such touchiness,
tearfulness, weariness, such a threat of collapse he cannot imagine." In "Prue" and
"Hard-Luck Stories," women realize that they are the sensible choices of the men that
they love, not very sensibly.
An artist of discontinuity and disarrangement, Munro has always distrusted forms that
move toward resolutions and final explanations. Therefore not new in The Moons of
Jupiter, but perhaps more urgently presented, is the sense of life's randomness. This
theme is explored directly in the story "Accident," in which the death of a child under
the wheels of a car is the crisis that breaks up one marriage and initiates another.
In "Labor Day Dinner" George and Roberta are driving home after dark when
suddenly a car without headlights, traveling through a stop sign at eighty miles an
hour, "flashes before them, a huge, dark flash, without lights, seemingly without
sound." What they feel is not terror or thanksgiving, but strangeness: "They feel as
strange, as flattened out and borne aloft, as unconnected with previous and future
events as the ghost car was, the black fish." In other stories, such as"Bardon Bus" and
"Hard-Luck Stories," people's lives meet at accidental crossings and intersections.
Throughout, what intersects are the different ways in which people manage--the
methods they have of getting through the mischances, lucky changes and unexpected
turns of their lives.
The reader's experience in reading Munro's stories is one of recognition. We say, yes,
that is how life is; we recognize and acknowledge discoveries about our deepest
selves. And this recognition is the purpose of the author's journeys into the past,
undertaken with compassion and determination to "get it right," to get down the tones,
textures, and appearances of things. Instead of plots, Munro's work offers
arrangements of materials that shift our perceptions of ordinary events and make us
see the ordinary in an extraordinary way. Her books are a demonstration of her sense
that "at some level these things open; fragments, moments, suggestions, open full of
power."
Papers: Alice Munro's papers from 1951 to 1977, including correspondence with
various Canadian writers and drafts of her fiction, are held by the Department of Rare
Books and Special Collections, University of Calgary Library, Calgary, Alberta.
FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR
 Mari Stainsby, "Alice Munro Talks With Mari Stainsby," British Columbia Library Quarterly, 35 (July
1971): 27-31.
 John Metcalf, "A Conversation With Alice Munro," Journal of Canadian Fiction, 1 (Fall 1972): 54-62.
 Graeme Gibson, "Alice Munro," in his Eleven Canadian Novelists (Toronto: Anansi, 1973), pp. 237-264.
 Kem Murch, "Name: Alice Munro; Occupation: Writer," Chatelaine, 48 (August 1975): 42-43, 69-72.
 Alan Twigg, "What is: Alice Munro," in his For Openers: Conversations with 24 Canadian
Writers (Madeira Park, British Columbia: Harbour, 1981), pp. 13-20.
 Geoff Hancock, "An Interview with Alice Munro," Canadian Fiction Magazine, no. 43 (1982): 74-114.
 J. R. (Tim) Struthers, "The Real Material: An Interview with Alice Munro," in Probable Fictions: Alice
Munro's Narrative Acts, edited by Louis K. Mackendrick (Downsview, Ontario: ECW, 1983), pp. 5-36.
 D. E. Cook, "Alice Munro: A Checklist (To December 31, 1974)," Journal of Canadian Fiction, 16 (1976):
131-136.
 J. R. (Tim) Struthers, "Some Highly Subversive Activities: A Brief Polemic and a Checklist of Works on
Alice Munro," Studies in Canadian Literature, 6, no. 1 (1981): 140-150.
 Robert W. Thacker, "Alice Munro: An Annotated Bibliography," in The Annotated Bibliography of
Canada's Major Authors, edited by Robert Lecker and Jack David (Downsview, Ontario: ECW, 1984), V:
354-414.
 Nancy I. Bailey, "The Masculine Image in Lives of Girls and Women," Canadian Literature, 80 (Spring
1979): 113-118, 120.
 E. D. Blodgett, "Prisms and Arcs: Structure in Hébert and Munro," in Figures in a Ground, edited by
Diane Bessai and David Jackel (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1978), pp.
99-121.
 James Carscallen, "Three Jokers: The Hope of Alice Munro's Stories," in Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in
Honour of Northrop Frye, edited by Eleanor Cook and others (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1983), pp. 128-146.
 Hallvard Dahlie, "The Fiction of Alice Munro," Ploughshares, 4 (Summer 1978): 56-71.
 Helen Hoy, "'Dull, Simple, Amazing and Unfathomable': Paradox and Double Vision in Alice Munro's
Fiction," Studies in Canadian Literature, 5 (Spring 1980): 100-115.
 Rae McCarthy Macdonald, "Structure and Detail in Lives of Girls and Women," Studies in Canadian
Literature, 3 (Summer 1978): 199-210.
 Louis K. MacKendrick, Some Other Reality: Alice Munro's Something I've Been Meaning to Tell
You (Toronto: ECW, 1993).
 MacKendrick, ed., Probable Fictions: Alice Munro's Narrative Acts, (Downsview, Ontario: ECW, 1983).
 W. R. Martin, "The Strange and the Familiar in Alice Munro," Studies in Canadian Literature, 7, no. 2
(1982): 214-226.
 W. H. New, "Pronouns and Propositions: Alice Munro's Stories," Open Letter, 3 (Summer 1976): 40-46.
 J. R. (Tim) Struthers, "Alice Munro and the American South," in The Canadian Novel: Here and
Now, edited by John Moss (Toronto: NC Press, 1978), pp. 119-133.
 Bronwen Wallace, "Women's Lives: Alice Munro," in The Human Elements, edited by David Helwig
(Ottawa: Oberon, 1978), pp. 52-67.
 Susan J. Warwick, "Growing Up: The Novels of Alice Munro," Essays on Canadian Writing, 29 (Summer
1984): 204-225.
 Lorraine M. York, "'The Other Side of Dailiness': The Paradox of Photography in Alice Munro's
Fiction," Studies in Canadian Literature, 8, no. 1 (1983): 49-60.
About this Essay: Catherine Sheldrick Ross, University of Western Ontario
Source: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 53: Canadian Writers Since 1960, First
Series. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by W. H. New, University of British Columbia.
The Gale Group, 1986. pp. 295-307.
Source Database: Dictionary of Literary Biography

The following article was found in The Literature Resource Centre database.
The Plots of Life: The Realism of Alice Munro
Critic: George Woodcock
Source: Queen's Quarterly, Vol. 93, No. 2, Summer, 1986, pp. 235-50. Reproduced by
permission
Criticism about: Alice Munro (1931-)
Nationality: Canadian
[(essay date Summer 1986) Woodcock was a Canadian educator, editor, author, and critic. In
the following essay, he explores realism in Munro's writing, particularly as it relates to her
younger female characters.]
But the development of events on that Saturday night; that fascinated me; I felt that I had had a
glimpse of the shameless, marvellous, shattering absurdity with which the plots of life, though
not of fiction, are improvized. (Alice Munro, Dance of the Happy Shades)
There is a challenging ambivalence in Alice Munro's stories and her openended episodic novels,
a glimmering fluctuation between actuality and fictional reality, or, if one prefers it, a tension
between autobiography and invention which she manipulates so superbly that both elements
are used to the full and in the process enrich each other.
The paperback edition of Munro's second novel, Who Do You Think You Are?, bears on its
cover the reproduction of a neo-realist painting by Ken Danby, called "The Sunbather." It has no
illustrative function; none of the episodes that make up the novel concerns or even mentions
sunbathing. Yet it is hard to think of a painting that could have been better chosen to convey
the special tone and flavour of Munro's writing.
A girl sits naked on a partly shaded patch of grass, her knees drawn up, her arms resting on
them, her cheek resting on a wrist. Everything is rendered with the meticulous exactitude that
only tempera, as a medium, makes possible the tones of the gently tanning skin perfectly
caught, the grass blades spiky yet pliable in the darkening green of high summer; the girl's face
shows neither joy nor discontent, but a kind of indrawn pensiveness. Yet the realism, precise
and particular as it may be, is much more than mimetic. The artist is not merely representing
life, not merely recording how a particular girl with rather greasy hair and a largish bottom
looked when she sat on the grass on a certain day in July. He is creating an image, outside time
and place, that stands in our minds not merely as a painted surface, but as an epitome, a
focussing of several generalities that come together in its eternal moment generalities like
youth and girlishness and the benison of sunlight and the suggestion of fertility that we sense in
the girl's broad hips and at the same time in the springing green of the grass and weed leaves
among which she sits.
And this, except that she is using words rather than paint to impress her images on the mind, is
very near to what Alice Munro tries to do. Just as magic realist painters create a kind of superreality by the impeccable presentation of details in a preternaturally clear light, and in this way
isolate their images from actuality, so Munro has combined documentary methods with a style
as clear as the tempera medium in painting. In this essay I propose to discuss the methods in
the hope of illuminating the ends.
Alice Munro has been rightly reluctant to offer theoretical explanations of her methods, for she
is quite obviously an anti-dogmatic, the kind of writer who works with feeling ahead of theory.
But even on the theoretical level she is shrewd in defining the perimeters of her approach,
perhaps negatively rather than positively. She once, for example, in an essay written for John
Metcalf'sThe Narrative Voice, entitled "The Colonel's Hash Resettled," cautioned against
attempts to read symbolism excessively into her stories. And she was right, for essentially her
stories are what they say, offering their meaning with often stark directness, and gaining their
effect from their intense visuality, so that they are always vivid in the mind's eye, which is
another way of saying that she has learnt the power of the image and how to turn it to the
purposes of prose.
Her visuality is not merely a matter of rendering the surface, the realm of mere perception, for
she has understood that one of the great advantages of any effective imagist technique is that
the image not merely presents itself. It reverberates with the power of its associations, and
even with the intensity of its own isolated and illuminated presence. Munro herself conveyed
something of this when John Metcalf, remarking on the fact that she seemed to "glory in the
surfaces and textures," asked whether she did not in fact feel "surfaces' not to be surfaces,"
and she answered that there was "a kind of magic . . . about everything," "a feeling about the
intensity of what is there."
When Alice Munro first began to write, her work tended to be undervalued, except by a few
exceptionally percipient readers like Robert Weaver, because her tales of Ontario small-town
life were taken to be those of a rather conventional realist with a certain flair for local colour.
And realism at that time, following its decline in the visual arts, was going into a somewhat
lesser eclipse in literature. Canada was becoming aware of modernism, and this meant that for
a time at least writers were concerned with thematic and symbolic fiction rather than with
anything that savoured of the mimetic.
Alice Munro has always been one of those fortunate and self-sufficient writers who never really
become involved in movements or in literary fashions. From her start she had her own view of
life, largely as she had lived it herself, and her aim was to express it in a fiction distinguished by
craftsmanship and clear vision rather than by self-conscious artifice. It was a curiously
paradoxical method of self-cultivation and self-effacement that she followed, for she has
always written best when her stories or the episodes in her novels were close to her own
experience in a world she knew, yet at the same time she cultivated a prose from which
authorly mannerisms were so absent that it seemed as though the stories had their own voices.
In the process Alice Munro became, next to Marian Engel, perhaps Canada's best prose stylist.
But linked to the pellucid clarity of that voice, or voices, there was always the intense
vision and in this context I mean vision as a power of visualizing. The comparison with magic
realist painters that I made early in this essay is not merely an analogical one, for Munro is
always deeply concerned with describing, with establishing scenes and people clearly in the
mind's eye, and as in real life, so in her stories, we establish our conception of the character of
people first by recognizing what they look like and how they speak, and then, such familiarity
established, proceeding inward to minds and feelings. The photographic element in her
presentation of scenes and characters as visualizable images is an essential factor in her writing.
The camera, of course, does not always lie, but through the photographer's conscious
selectiveness and even more through the tendency of the lens to isolate the image from the
chaos of actuality, it does offer us a different reality from that which we normally perceive. In
an interesting essay entitled "Alice Munro and the American South," J.R. (Tim) Struthers
discussed the influence on Munro of writers like Eudora Welty and James Agee, and in doing so
he talked of the way in which both these writers were fascinated by the possibilities of
photography as a medium and its relationship to the kind of realistic writing which they carried
on. They saw the special literalness of the photograph not as a usurpation of the role of
imaginative perception but as a means of enhancing it. In this sense Struthers talks of Munro as
having a "visual or photographic imagination," and as an example he cites the ending of a
harrowing little story of the scalding death of a baby, "The Time of Death," which appears in
her first volume of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades. The story drifts away into its
intended anticlimax as the little shabby neighbourhood absorbs the minor tragedy and then, at
the very end, the narrator steps backward out of the stunted lives of the characters and stands
like a photographer taking a middledistance shot of the setting:
There was this house, and the other wooden houses that had never been painted, with their
steep patched roofs and their narrow, slanting porches, the wood-smoke coming out of their
chimneys and dim children's faces pressed against their windows. Behind them there was the
strip of earth, ploughed in some cases, run to grass in others, full of stones, and behind this the
pine trees, not very tall. In front were the yards, the dead gardens, the grey highway running
out from town. The snow came, falling slowly, evenly, between the highway and the houses
and the pine trees, falling in big flakes at first and then in smaller and smaller flakes that did not
melt on the hard furrows, the rock of the earth.
This paragraph, which terminates the story, is not only a good example of Munro's ability to
create sharply visual images, still shots, that stir our feelings, in this case pitying despair. It also,
by an echo many readers must have recognized, establishes her links with an earlier strain of
realism, that of the James Joyce of Dubliners. The Joyce story I mean, of course, is "The Dead";
though the title of the story is reminiscent of Munro's, the main action of the story is quite
different from hers, but in the end there is the final paragraph in which, as in "The Time of
Death,"the idea of death and the image of snow are brought together:
Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part
of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly into the Bog of Allen, and, farther
westward, softly falling over the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every
part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on
the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His
soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly
falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
The resemblance is tenuous but haunting, and the echo is quite clear. I am not suggesting that
there is a conscious borrowing here, for, as all writers know, recollections of their reading can
lodge in recesses of the mind until they are called up to fit into the bricolage that the
imagination makes out of the resources of memory, conscious and unconscious alike. More
important, perhaps, is the general resemblance between the kind of realism that Alice Munro
developed during the 1950s and that of the early days of modernism, the kind of realism one
finds not only in the early Joyce and more lyrically expressed in the early Lawrence, but also
in their continental European contemporaries like Thomas Mann and Italo Svevo. There is the
same tendency towards the Bildungsroman, whether manifest in a novel or disguised in a
cluster of related stories; the sense of a society observed with oppressive closeness from within
by someone who wants to escape; the concern for the appalling insecurities created by what
was then called social climbing, and now is called upward mobility; the agonized awareness of
the perils of moving through the transitions of life, from childhood to adolescence, from
adulthood to age.
While Alice Munro's approach has a great deal in common with this European realism of the
early part of the century that trembled on the edge of modernism, without herself going
forward as some of the modernists like Joyce and Wyndham Lewis did from realism to the
extremes of formalism, it has little in common with the kind of prairie writing that represented
realism for Canadians during the decades between the great wars. Writers such as Robert
Stead, Martha Ostenso and Frederick Philip Grove were concerned with the pioneer farmers
and their struggle with the frontier lands of the great plains. Alice Munro was dealing with a
society that had long passed out of the pioneer stage, and represented a decaying established
culture rather than a frontier one. The problem of those who inhabited it was not, as it had
been with Grove's characters, to conquer the wilderness without being destroyed in the
process, but to escape before one had been dragged down into the mental stagnation and
physical decay of the marginal farmlands of Ontario.
Alice Munro herself grew up in this background, and much of the content of her stories and
novels, if it is not strictly autobiographical, does echo the experiences of her youth. Like Del
Jordan in Lives of Girls and Women, she was brought up on a farm where her father bred silver
foxes without ever prospering greatly; her mother, like Del's, was a bright, frustrated woman,
whose iconoclastic cast of mind contradicted her social ambition, and who died of Parkinson's
disease. Again like more than one of her heroines, Munro married and moved west to British
Columbia, which gave her another terrain for her stories; also like them, she stepped out of a
disintegrating marriage and returned to Ontario. In other words, she wrote of what she knew
best, and while each of her stories lives within its own complete world and is not a mere
mirroring of the writer's life, it is inevitable that the fictions she drew out of the intensely
remembered country of her childhood should be more convincing than those she conceived in
British Columbia, where she was never completely at home.
Turning to the books themselves, there are three collections of short stories, Dance of the
Happy Shades, Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You and The Moons of Jupiter, and two
novels, Lives of Girls and Women and Who Do You Think You Are? They have appeared at fairly
symmetrical intervals, between three and four years from one book to the other, and up to
now they have alternated in form, a novel of related episodes following a collection of
miscellaneous stories.
Dance of the Happy Shades appeared in 1968. It was a late date in terms of Munro's writing
life, for she had been publishing stories sporadically since the early 1950s, and I remember
when I met her round about 1955 I did so with pleased recognition, since I had already read and
admired some of her stories. I am sure I became aware of them through Robert Weaver, who
more than anyone else "discovered" her, broadcasting her stories on various cb programmes he
ran, publishing them in Tamarack Review when it began in 1956, and including them in his
Oxford anthologies, Canadian Stories, of which the first appeared in 1960.
Munro's experience was not unique; it was that of almost all Canadian writers of fiction, who
during the 1950s and 1960s had to face a reaction against the short story on the part of both
book publishers and popular magazines in Canada. It was only in the later 1960s, largely
because of the success with which Weaver had introduced stories to radio audiences, that
publishers once again began accepting collections and finding that willing readerships existed.
Once Munro's Dance of the Happy Shades appeared in 1968, her acceptance by Canadian
readers was assured, and her later volumes were successful not only in Canada, but also in the
United States, where the marginal agrarian communities she portrayed were recognized as
familiar, and where reviewers, ignorant of other Canadian writers, almost automatically
compared her with American analogues like John Cheever and Joyce Carol Oates. In fact, like Al
Purdy with his poetic rendering of the "degenerate Loyalist" heritage of Ameliasburgh and
thereabouts, Munro offers the portrait of a distinctively Canadian society and does it in a
distinctively Canadian way. Her sense of the interplay of setting and tradition is impeccable, so
that there are really two ways of reading Munro, the exoteric one of the reader who knows a
good story when he comes upon it, and reads it with enjoyment and not too much concern for
authenticity, and the esoteric one of the Canadian who is likely to read it with a special sense of
its truth or otherwise to the life and land he knows.
Perhaps because, unlike the later collections of stories, it is gathered from the writings of a
relatively long period at least fifteen years as against three or four The Dance of the Happy
Shadesis more varied and tentatively venturesome than the later volumes. It shows the author
trying out different modes and approaches. There are stories, like "The Office," that rather selfconsciously explore the problems of women setting out as writers in an unsympathetic
environment. There are others, like "The Shining Houses," a study of the callousness young
property owners can show in defending their "values" (i.e. the selling prices of their homes),
that are as ambivalently suburban as anything by John Cheever. "Sunday Afternoon" is a little
social study, highly classconscious for a Canadian writer, of the relations between a country girl
hired to serve in a rich middle-class home and her brittle-brainless employers. And in "Thanks
for the Ride" Munro makes a rare foray across the sex line and tells in the voice of an
adolescent boy the story of his first lay; in fact, the point of view is deceptive, since the real
interest of the story lies in the portrait of his partner Lois, a fragile yet tough working-class girl,
much used by men and yet in her coarse independence strangely inviolate.
Most of the remaining stories fall into a group of which the main theme is childhood and
growing up in the Ontario countryside, with action centred sometimes on the farm operated by
the father of the central character and sometimes in the nearby town where the mother at
times lives separately and where the girl attends school. The father-dominated farm represents
the world of nature and feeling, a world devoid of ambition. The mother-dominated house in
town represents the world of social and intellectual ambition, just as the school is the setting
where the heroine establishes her relationship with her peers among the small-town children
but also develops her desire to escape into a broader world. In some of the stories the mother,
living or remembered, is shown advancing into the illness Parkinson's disease that will
accentuate the oddity which most of her neighbours have already mocked in her.
The three stories of childhood, "Walker Brothers Cowboy," "Image" and "Boys and Girls," are
perhaps the most important of this group, both for their vivid evocation of the decaying rural
life a century after the pioneers of Upper Canada, and for their delineation of the relationships
between parents and children in hard times.
"Walker Brothers Cowboy," the opening story of the book, takes us to a time when the silver
fox farm has failed and Ben Jordan has taken up peddling the patent medicines, spices and food
flavourings distributed by Walker Brothers. The story, told by his daughter who does not name
herself, begins by relating this time of stress and need to the slightly better past on the farm.
The girl's mother, also unnamed, tries desperately to maintain self-respect in a situation she
sees as a demeaning loss of social standing, even though she lives physically better in the town
than on the farm.
Fate has flung us onto a street of poor people (it does not matter that we were poor before,
that was a different kind of poverty), and the only way to take this, as she sees it, is with
dignity, with bitterness, with no reconciliation. No bathroom with claw-footed tub and a flush
toilet is going to comfort her, nor water on tap and sidewalks past the house and milk in
bottles, nor even the two movie theatres and the Venus Restaurant and Woolworths so
marvellous it has live birds singing in its fan-cooled corners and fish as tiny as finger-nails, as
bright as moons, swimming in its green tanks. My mother does not care.
The father, more self-contained, more ironic, finds ways to live with Depression conditions and
salvage his pride. As the story opens we see him walking with his daughter beside Lake Huron
and telling her how the Great Lakes were gouged out of the earth by the ice coming down in
great probing fingers from the north. Clearly the girl prefers her father's company to her
mother's:
She walks serenely like a lady shopping, like a lady shopping, past the housewives in loose
beltless dresses torn under the arms. With me her creation, wretched curls and flaunting hair
bow, scrubbed knees and white socks all I do not want to be. I loathe even my name when she
says it in public, in a voice so high, proud and ringing, deliberately different from the voice of
any other mother on the street.
Travelling his route of the desperate dusty farmlands, Ben Jordan makes fun of his situation by
improvising as he rides a kind of endless ballad of his adventures on the road, and this becomes
a kind of leitmotiv one day when he sets out with the girl and her brother and, leaving his
Walker Brothers territory, takes them to a farmhouse where a woman who was once his
sweetheart is living. The clean bare farmhouse with Catholic emblems on the walls and an old
woman dozing in a corner becomes a kind of stage on which is revealed to the girl that people
we know may have dimensions to their lives of which to this point we have been unaware. The
sense of something theatrical and unreal and different from ordinary life is given by the fact
that Ben Jordan and his old sweetheart Nora Cronin name each other, but nobody else in the
story is named. The strangeness of the hitherto unknown past is framed within the nameless
ordinariness of the present.
In "Image" a different kind of framing takes place. The story begins with the girl, again
unnamed and again mainly a spectator, remembering the coarse cousin, Mary McQuade, who
comes in to act as a kind of nurse in family crises and who is now filling the house with her
overbearing presence because the mother is ill. The father once again Ben Jordan but now an
unspecified farmer runs a trapline down by the river, and one day he and the girl go down to
harvest the muskrats. On their way they encounter a crazy recluse, Joe Phippen, who patrols
the river bank with an axe in search of imagined enemies. They go to the cellar where Joe has
been living since his house burnt down; for the girl it seems like an underground playhouse,
except for its sinister smells and a mad cat the hermit feeds whisky. As they leave the cellar Ben
Jordan cautions the girl when she gets back to tell nobody in the house about the axe. At table
with Mary McQuade he relates the story of Joe and his drunken cat, and Mary is filled with
indignation.
"A man that'd do a thing like that ought to be locked up." "Maybe so," my father said. "Just the
same I hope they don't get him for a while yet. Old Joe." "Eat your supper," Mary said, bending
over me. I did not for some time realize that I was no longer afraid of her. "Look at her," she
said. "Her eyes dropping out of her head, all she's been and seen. Was he feeding whisky to her
too?" "Not a drop," said my father, and looked steadily down the table at me. Like the children
in fairy stories who have seen their parents make pacts with terrifying strangers, who have
discovered that our fears are based on nothing but the truth, but who come back from
marvellous escapes and take up their knives and forks, with humility and good manners,
prepared to live happily ever after like them, dazed and powerful with secrets, I never said a
word.
In this story the filial link is complete. The father puts his trust in his daughter, and she keeps it
in a kind of complicity to protect the strange and eccentric and unpopular in human
behaviour a complicity that will re-emerge in Munro's fiction.
But in "Boys and Girls" the trust between father and daughter is broken, and that is one of the
complex aspects of growing up, involving as it does the girl's gradual realization of the
difference between the sexes that in the end, and no matter what Freud may have said, makes
fathers see sons as their successors and makes men stand together.
The action of this story takes place entirely on the fox farm. In a passage of admirably clear and
restrained description Munro creates the feeling of the place and details the daily tasks the girl
performs as she helps her father, keeping the pens supplied with water and spreading grass
over them to prevent the foxes' pelts from being darkened by sunlight. Her little brother also
helps, but she jealously guards the main tasks for herself, and resents her mother's attempts to
trap her into household tasks. The curiously detached centre of all this activity is formed by the
foxes which, despite generations of captivity, have not ceased to be wild animals, hostile and
intractable:
Naming them did not make pets out of them, or anything like it. Nobody but my father ever
went into the pens, and he had twice had blood-poisoning from bites. When I was bringing
them their water they prowled up and down on the paths they had made inside their pens,
barking seldom they saved that for nighttime, when they might get up a chorus of community
frenzy but always watching me, their eyes burning, clear gold, in their pointed malevolent
faces. They were beautiful for their delicate legs and heavy, aristocratic tails and the bright fur
sprinkled on dark down their backs which gave them their name but especially for their
faces, drawn exquisitely sharp in pure hostility, and their golden eyes.
One has the sense that although loyalty to her father would never let her admit the thought,
these wild captive creatures have earned the girl's sympathy, and what happens shortly
afterwards seems to confirm this. She begins all at once to realize that her cherished position in
the little world of the farm has become insecure:
This winter also I began to hear a great deal more on the theme my mother had sounded when
she had been talking in front of the barn. I no longer felt safe. It seemed that in the minds of
the people around me there was a steady undercurrent of thought, not to be deflected, on this
one subject. The word girl had formerly seemed to me innocent and unburdened, like the
word child; now it appeared that it was no such thing. A girl was not, as I had supposed, simply
what I was; it was what I had to become. It was a definition, always touched with emphasis,
with reproach and disappointment. Also it was a joke on me. . . .
The critical point comes shortly afterwards, when her loyalties are all at once tested, and her
response is as astonishing to her as it is to anyone else. Her father buys superannuated horses
to slaughter for fox food; occasionally there will be a perfectly healthy animal among them for
which in these days of increasing mechanization a farmer no longer has any use. A mare of this
kind, whom they call Flora, is bought and kept over winter. She is a nervous animal, in some
ways almost as proud and intractable as the foxes, and on the day she is being taken out to be
shot she breaks away into a meadow where a gate has been left open. The girl and her brother
are sent to close it.
The gate was heavy. I lifted it out of the gravel and carried it across the roadway. I had it halfway across when she came into sight, galloping straight towards me. There was just time to get
the chain on. Laird came scrambling through the ditch to help me. Instead of shutting the gate, I
opened it as wide as I could. I did not make any decision to do this, it was just what I did. Flora
never slowed down; she galloped straight past me, and Laird jumped up and down, yelling,
"Shut it, shut it" even when it was too late. . . .
The mare, of course, is eventually caught and killed. And then, at mid-day dinner, her brother
Laird tells on the girl:
My father made a curt sound of disgust. "What did you do that for?" I did not answer. I put
down my fork and waited to be sent from the table, still not looking up. But this did not
happen. For some time nobody said anything, then Laird said matter-of-factly, "She's crying."
"Never mind," my father said. He spoke with resignation, even good humour, the words that
absolved and dismissed me for good. "She's only a girl," he said. I didn't protest that, even in my
heart. Maybe it was true.
Two themes that will recur in Munro's later writing have been introduced; the burden of
femininity, and the need to break free. They take on increased importance in her first
novel, Lives of Girls and Women. This appears to have begun as another collection of stories
that had enough of a common strain for the publisher to suggest she might turn them into a
novel; its origin survives in the episodic and rather discontinuous structure of the work.
Lives of Girls and Women really completes the three stories I have just been discussing. The
inconsistencies that existed between them are ironed out. Ben Jordan is still the father and he
runs a fox farm. The other characters are now all named, the girl becoming Della (or Del), the
mother Ida, the brother changing to Owen, and with this naming everything seems to become
more precise in intent. Even the locality is named, for the farm is on Flats Road in the
disreputable outskirts of the town of Jubilee, and the action alternates between the farm and
the town, where Ida takes a house where she and Del live except in the summer months.
The eight parts (significantly they are named but not numbered, so that they seem as much
stories as chapters) really serve two functions. Each is an exemplary episode, self-contained
even though its characters spill over into the other episodes, so that it can stand on its own.
Yet, in the classic manner of the Bildungsroman, each episode builds on the last, revealing
another side of Del's education in life, and as the progression is generally chronological, the
continuity becomes that of a rather conventional novel, which begins in the heroine's childhood
and ends when, as a young woman who has just allowed a love affair to divert her from winning
a scholarship, she turns to the world of art and begins her first book.
The general inclination of Lives of Girls and Women is indeed that of a portrait of the artist, and
the first-person voice in which it is told is appropriate. It looks back to the final and title story
of Dance of the Happy Shades, which tells of the last party of an old music teacher who
astonishes and annoys her middle-class pupils and their parents by producing a girl from a
school for the retarded who is clearly, whatever her intelligence, something near to a musical
genius:
Miss Marsalles sits beside the piano and smiles at everybody in her usual way. Her smile is not
triumphant, or modest. She does not look like a magician who is watching people's faces to see
the effect of a rather original revelation; nothing like that. You would think, now that at the
very end of her life she has found someone she can teach whom she must teach to play the
piano, she would light up with the importance of this discovery. But it seems that the girl's
playing like this is something she always expected, and she finds it natural and satisfying;
people who believe in miracles do not make much fuss when they actually encounter one. Nor
does it seem that she regards this girl with any more wonder than the other children from
Greenhill School, who love her, or the rest of us, who do not. To her no gift is unexpected, no
celebration will come as a surprise.
The sense of art as a miracle, and the sense also of some special kind of intelligence that
recognizes it recurs in Munro's books, and it is linked with the idea that there are levels of
access to truth which have nothing to do with what in the world passes for wisdom or
intelligence.
This is shown quite clearly in the first chapter or story of Lives of Girls and Women, "The
Flats Road," where the central character is an eccentric, Uncle Benny, who lives in a house full
of junk on the edge of the bush and works as a hired man on Ben Jordan's fox farm:
Probably the reason he kept on working for my father, though he had never worked steadily at
any other job, was that my father raised silver foxes, and there was in such a business
something precarious and some glamorous and ghostly, never realized, hope of fortune.
It is through Uncle Benny that Del and her brother begin to learn the perilous wonders of the
natural world, represented by the great bog with its ravenous quicksands that stretches beyond
his home; it is through him that they begin to recognize the inexpressible strangeness of human
relations, represented by his disastrous adventure with a mail-order wife:
So lying alongside our world was Uncle Benny's world like a troubling reflection, the same, but
never at all the same. In that world people could go down in quicksand, be vanquished by
ghosts or terrible ordinary cities; luck and wickedness were gigantic and unpredictable; nothing
was deserved, anything might happen; defeats were met with crazy satisfaction. It was his
triumph, that he couldn't know about, to make us see.
Through the remaining chapters of Lives of Girls and Women runs the recurrent theme of
people who, whether they intend or know it, "make us see." In "Heirs of the Living Body" it is
the old great-aunts preserving a model of the idealized Victorian Ontario farm life as they
provide for their brother, Uncle Craig, who spends his time writing a vast prosaic chronicle of
the history of his district. When he dies, his sisters give Del his manuscript, remarking: "He had
the gift. He could get everything in and still make it read smooth." And ironically, though Del
rejects Uncle Craig's manuscript by losing it, this is what her narrative seeks to do, to get
everything in that is of importance, and to "make it read smooth" the realist's ambition.
In other chapters her mother's intellectual restlessness, her own search for a faith that seems
to meet her poetic expectations of religion, and the frenetic dedication to a parody of art which
inspires the hysterically flamboyant teacher Miss Farris who produces the school operetta every
year (and having lived to the limit of her own style commits suicide), are all stages on the path
to self-realization and to realization of the true nature of the world along which Del is
proceeding. So in the strangely poised title chapter, "Lives of Girls and Women," Del's sexual
fantasies about middle-aged Mr Chamberlain come to a climax in more ways than one when he
takes her out to the country and masturbates in her presence. It could have been a shocking
and traumatic experience, but Del takes it in her ironic stride, already at heart the observerwriter to whom everything is grist to the mill. This comes out at the end of the chapter, when
her mother makes the statement that gives chapter and book their common title:
There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women. Yes. But it is up to us to make it
come. All women have had up till now has been their connection with men. All we have had. No
more lives of our own, really, than domestic animals. . . .
It sounds like a good feminist statement until, talking of "self-respect," Ida Jordan makes it
clear at least in Del's mind that she is talking about the caution and calculation which "being
female" must impose on women,
Whereas men were supposed to be able to go out and take on all kinds of experiences and
shuck off what they didn't want and come back proud. Without even thinking about it, I had
decided to do the same.
And this is precisely what Del attempts, becoming involved in a love affair with a fervent young
Baptist, being so submerged emotionally as to lose the scholarship her brilliance at school has
led her to expect, but retaining enough of a will to reject finally his desire to overpower her
mentally as well as sexually; resisting his attempt to baptize her forcibly, she brings their
relationship to an end.
Her love burnt out, her scholarly ambitions abandoned, Del turns to the writing she has dabbled
with over the years, and sets about composing a highly Gothic novel about a Jubilee family all of
whose children have ended tragically, in suicide or madness. And then, by chance, she meets
one of the sons, recently released from his mental home, and finds how false her perceptions
have been, like the distortions of a bad photographer. Writing, she decides, must be true to the
spirit of what it portrays, to its often unsensational reality. And it is in this realization, we are
free to assume, though Munro never says it directly, that Del has written the book we have just
read.
If one reads it in connection with the earlier stories to which it is so closely linked, Lives of Girls
and Women is a remarkable achievement both in human understanding and in technical
prowess, presenting a psychologically and emotionally convincing episodic narrative of a
questing child's development into a young woman on the edge of artistic achievement, and
using a quasidocumentary form so effectively that we are always aware of the imagination
shaping and illuminating the gifts of an obviously vivid memory.
The second novel, Who Do You Think You Are?, is a much less convincing book than Lives of
Girls and Women, in both emotional and aesthetic terms. It too is a Bildungsroman, extending
well beyond childhood into the darker times of middle age with its failed marriages, humiliating
love affairs and mundane careers. The story of Rose, her upbringing in the rural slum of West
Hanratty, and her subsequent and doomed marriage to a rich fellow student, develops the
theme of social climbing and its perils that is already present in Lives of Girls and Women. The
novel, again a series of loosely connected episodes, is written in the third person, and this shift
in point of view accompanies perhaps even creates-a notable change in tone from the earlier
book. InLives of Girls and Women the sense of familiar authenticity was sustained by the fact
that the aspirant writer as central character was assumed to be both participant and observer.
In Who Do You Think You Are? the participant is observed, and there is a kind of hard
objectivity to the book with its relentless social documentation of low life in West Hanratty at
the end of the Thirties. Though Munro does make a largely successful attempt to project the
inner life of her principal character, the other leading figures in the novel, like Rose's crotchety
stepmother Flo, her violent father and her snobbish husband, are shallow projections, almost
caricatures, portrayed with none of the feeling and understanding that characterized the
presentation of the father and mother, Ben and Ida Jordan, in the earlier novel.
Yet, though the general tone of Who Do You Think You Are? is at once harsher and more brittle
than that of Lives of Girls and Women, there is a variation of quality within the book, and the
first four chapters, which deal with childhood in Ontario, are the most effective. When the
action moves into other places, notably the alien realm of British Columbia, the documentary
background becomes more uncertain, and as Munro deals with the problems of adults living
out their erotic fantasies she seems too near her subject for the special kind of luminous
objectivity that characterizes the stories of childhood and adolescence to develop.
A similar criticism applies to the later stories contained in Something I've Been Meaning to Tell
You and The Moons of Jupiter. Reading them, one becomes aware how little Munro has
changed as a writer since the early period of the 1950s and the 1960s when she first attracted
the attention of readers. She is still at her best as the magic realist. She has not moved, like so
many of her contemporaries, into fantasy, or into an experimental use of memory like that
of Margaret Laurence, while the episodic and open-ended form of her so-called novels arises
not from any deconstructionist intent, but, I suggest, from the kind of perception that sees life
discontinuously, episode by episode.
In making these remarks I do not mean to suggest that the later stories are unimpressive. They
are always skillful in their presentation of human situations, and the prose never falters. There
is not a sloppily written piece among them. As studies of generational distancing, some of the
stories seen from the viewpoint of old people, like "Walking on Water" and "Marrakesh," are
entirely convincing, while here and there are still marvelously lucid evocations of childhood and
adolescence like "The Found Boat" and The Turkey Season . Much less satisfying are the
stories of middle-aged women with elusive lovers, and here the very impeccability of the
writing seems to emphasize the psychological hollowness. At times, in recent years, one feels
that Munro has fallen into the trap of virtuosity. She is so good at the kind of story she has
always written that she seems never to have felt the need to try anything different. The result
has been a certain leaching of character from her writing; some of her later stories are so well
made that they seem anonymous, like those New Yorker stories which might have been written
by any one of a number of North American virtuosi; indeed, the Munro stories of which this
seems especially true, like "Dulse" and "Labour Day Dinner" in The Moons of Jupiter, in fact
appeared in theNew Yorker.
I am conscious, remembering what I expected of Munro when I first read her early stories
and Lives of Girls and Women, of a disappointment with her career seen as a whole. Most of
her early stories and some of the later ones are among the best ever written in Canada. But
those whom we think of as major writers, while they do not necessarily evolve in the sense of
becoming always better, do tend to metamorphose and so indefinitely to enlarge their scope,
as poets like Earle Birney and Dorothy Livesay and novelists like Robertson Davies and Timothy
Findley have done. In this respect Alice Munro has remained fundamentally unchanged,
applying the same realist techniques with the same impeccable skill and merely varying the
human situations. Her potentialities have always been major; her achievements have never
quite matched them because she has never mastered those transformations of form with which
major writers handle the great climactic shifts of life. She has written of all the ages as she first
wrote of childhood, and that is why her lives of girls are so much more convincing than her lives
of women.
Source: George Woodcock, "The Plots of Life: The Realism of Alice Munro," in Queen's
Quarterly, Vol. 93, No. 2, Summer, 1986, pp. 235-50. Reproduced by permission.
Source Database: Contemporary Literary Criticism

The following article was found in The Literature Resource Centre database.
`Gulfs' and `Connections': The Fiction of Alice Munro
Critic: Lorraine York
Source: Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 35, Winter, 1987, pp. 135-46. Reproduced by
permission
Criticism about: Alice Munro (1931-)
Nationality: Canadian
[(essay date Winter 1987) In the following essay, York discusses the theme of connection in
Munro's work, primarily in Lives of Girls and Woman and The Moons of Jupiter.]
"Connection," muses the young narrator of the story section bearing the same title in The
Moons of Jupiter, "That was what it was all about." The same claim could well be made for
Alice Munro's fiction. Although she is often praised for her creation of fictional places Jubilee,
Hanratty, Logan it is also true that Munro has defined a linguistic area no less peculiar to
herself. That area is, of course, partly defined by her spirited use of the oxymoron (amply
discussed by Helen Hoy and Lorraine McMullen), but even individual words may be trademarks
of Munro's sensibility. My own list of "Munro words" includes: "humiliation," "familiar,"
"shameful," "hopeful," "amazing," and especially "connection." More than any other term,
"connection" sums up the fundamental vision of Alice Munro's fiction.
This emphasis on connections and connectedness whether religious, sexual, historical, or
aesthetic has become increasingly marked in Munro's works, starting with Lives of Girls and
Women. In her first collection of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, "connection" is not
a key term at all; it rarely, if ever, appears in any of the fifteen stories. Fourteen years later,
however, in The Moons of Jupiter, "connection" has become a frequent verbal touchstone, the
title of the first section of the very first story ("Chaddeleys and Flemings"), and a fundamental
organizing motif, drawing together the entire collection of stories.
Appropriately, connections first become of interest to Munro in her first book of
interconnected stories: Lives of Girls and Women. Connections fascinate Munro profoundly in
this work because they are precisely the substance and aim of Del Jordan's search: connections
between herself and the external world, and between religious, sexual, and artistic experiences.
Indeed, the whole collection chronicles a young female artist's drive to perceive connections
between her inner and outer worlds.
Del's search and ours as readers begins with an investigation of the connections sought by
two characters Uncles Benny and Craig. (Interestingly, the men also represent two kinds of
connection to Del one is her "false" uncle and one is her uncle by blood.) Uncle Benny, though
not a blood connection, has ultimately more to teach Del about connections than does her legal
relative. Although Benny is mystified by the workings of the outer world the connections
between Jubilee and the metropolises of Kitchener and Toronto, for instance he represents a
subtler, more mysterious connection for the young Del. "So alongside our world was Uncle
Benny's world like a troubling distorted reflection, the same but never at all the same." When
Del attempts to express Benny's connections with the universe by writing out in Joycean
fashion his cosmic address ("Mr. Benjamin Thomas Poole, The Flats Road, Jubilee, Wawanash
County, Ontario, Canada, North America, The Western Hemisphere, The World, The Solar
System, The Universe"), Benny does indeed become a troubling, distorting "Poole": "Where is
that in relation to Heaven?" he persists. Through Benny, Del glimpses a whole array of
connections which defy or "lie alongside" rational thought superstitious, intuitive, or religious
connections which she will investigate further in Lives of Girls and Women.
Benny's pulp newspapers have, of course, provided Del with a connection to the world of
depravity and violence, but Benny's life, his "troubling distorted reflection," has also brought
before her eyes the inescapable interconnectedness of human lives. She muses on her parents
near the end of "The Flats Road" section: "they did not look at each other. But they were
connected, and this connection was as plain as a fence, it was between us and Uncle Benny, us
and the Flats Road, it would stay between us and anything." Lives of Girls and Women is, to a
great extent, a dramatization of this idea of connections.
Uncle Craig, on the other hand, is a character who has his connections with the outside world,
his place in the cosmos, neatly sorted out: "He saw a simple connection between himself,
handling the affairs of the township, troublesome as they often were, and the prime minister in
Ottawa handling the affairs of the country." Craig has devoted himself to chronicling the social
connections of the pioneers of Wawanash County, and the microcosmic domestic connections
of the Jordan family: "And to Uncle Craig it seemed necessary that the names of all these
people, their connections with each other, the three large dates of birth and marriage and
death . . . be discovered . . . and written down here, in order, in his own large careful
handwriting." Although Craig is a fanatical devotee of connections, he lacks both the
connection with the abstract or mysterious and the sense of human connectedness which Del
has associated with Uncle Benny; his connections are mere data, and his work cuts him off from
other human beings, as he sits doggedly typing in his office, significantly locking out the
laughter of Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace.
Del, then, has had an opportunity to study two modes of connection one which involves
superstition and chaos and one which involves their opposites, calculation and order; her task
in Lives of Girls and Women will be to find a way of uniting the two. At this early stage, though,
Del suffers more often than not from acute feelings of unconnectedness. When she is tickled
and tormented by her cousin Mary Agnes she reflects, "I was amazed as people must be who
are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a
value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves." Understandably,
Del reacts to this sense of unconnectedness by trying to gain the upper hand, by trying to sever
her connection with the "strange world" of other human beings: she bites Mary Agnes. "When I
bit Mary Agnes," she confesses, "I thought I was biting myself off from everything. I thought I
was putting myself outside, where no punishment would ever be enough."
Following Uncle Benny's lead, Del initially looks to "Heaven" for a sense of connectedness.
Indeed, she seeks a higher connection, an assurance that "all those atoms, galaxies of atoms,
were safe all the time, whirling away in God's mind." Soon, though, Del discovers that these
connections are, for her, imposed and unsatisfactory; they do not bear any relation to her own
experience. "The idea of God," she confesses, "did not connect for me with any idea of being
good, which is perhaps odd." Later, during the Good Friday service at the Anglican church, she
perceives that Christ himself, because he was partly mortal, may have experienced the same
split between divine plan and individual experience when he was on the cross: "My God, my
God, why hast thou forsaken me? Briefly, the minister said, oh very briefly, Jesus had lost touch
with God . . . He had lost the connection. . . . But this too was part of the plan." Del, however,
entertains the thought that this was "the last true cry of Christ" his final testimony to the
unconnected nature of the universe.
Closely related to this concept of religious connection in Lives of Girls and Women is the
concept of sexual connection. When Del is riding with Mr. Chamberlain through the countryside
prior to their sexual "encounter," she recalls that "In some moods, some days, I could feel for a
clump of grass, a rail fence, a stone pile, such pure unbounded emotion as I used to hope for,
and have inklings of, in connection with God." Now, though, she can only reflect in both
excitement and dismay that the landscape has become "debased, maddeningly erotic." Sex, we
soon see, can no more give Del the sense of connectedness than could religion; it cannot even
rival her former religious feeling. Ironically, her first sexually charged meeting with Garnet
French takes place during a revival meeting a strong indication that this sexual connection,
too, will prove as fleeting and unsatisfactory to her as her earlier flirtation with religious belief.
As a child, then as an adolescent, Del tends to see sexuality as a purely physical rather than
spiritual connection. When her Uncle Bill and Aunt Nile visit the Jordans, Del never imagines
that her aunt and uncle might indulge in sexual relations: "decent adults," she thinks, "made
their unlikely connection only for the purpose of creating a child." Later, this mechanistic view
of sex is fostered in Del and her friend Naomi by their covert readings of Naomi's mother's sex
manuals: "Care should be taken during the initial connection. . . . "
In spite of her adolescent fascination with the physical aspects of sexual connection, Del
ultimately desires a spiritual connection as well. "It was the stage of transition, bridge between
what was possible, known and moral behavior, and the magical, bestial act, that I could not
imagine," she confesses. "Nothing about that was in Naomi's mother's book," she adds.
Because Del does yearn for a spiritual or "magical" connection in her sexual life, she is
particularly upset when she reads a New York psychiatrist's theory that women's mental
connections are purely physical; that when a boy and a girl look at the moon, "The boy thinks of
the universe, its immensity and mystery; the girl thinks, `I must wash my hair.'" Ironically, in
Del's relationship with Garnet, these stereotypes are completely reversed; Del desires
physical and intellectual enlightenment in sex and Garnet mistrusts everything beyond the
literal: "Any attempt at this kind of general conversation, any attempt to make him think in this
way, to theorize, make systems, brought a blank, very slightly offended, and superior look into
his face. He hated people using big words, talking about things outside of their own lives. He
hated people trying to tie things together." In Garnet, Del, the seeker of connections, finds her
natural enemy: a man who is entirely anti-connection.
When Del turns from sex to art as a means of making connections, she is unwittingly illustrating
her mother Addie's words, "There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women.
Yes. But it is up to us to make it come. All women have had up till now has been their
connection with men." Even though Del disparages her mother's advice, she breaks the old
male-female power connection in "Baptizing" and decides finally that it is up to her to make
her own connections with the external world. "Unconnected to the life of love, uncolored by
love," she dazedly realizes, "the world resumes its own, its natural and callous importance." In
her art, Del discovers that it is the physical world, in all its rich and diverse detail, to which she
must seek connection. When she meets Bobby Sherriff in "Epilogue: The Photographer," she
realizes how she has let this crucial connection lapse in the novel she has been writing: "I hardly
connected him with my mad Halloway brother" she confesses. Just as a younger Del discovered
that she could not make a connection with spiritual forces by wandering about with her eyes
shut, because she was afraid "of bumping into something," the Del of the epilogue discovers
that the physical world provides the artist with the only connection to the transcendent that
she needs.
In Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You, Munro focuses on a particular element of this
connection between the artist and the world: the vital connection between self and
others."Material," for instance, is a story concerned with the way artists use and transform
human relationships in their work. The narrator sees that Hugo has used the "harlot-inresidence," Dotty, for the purposes of his fiction, and she also sees that "This is not
enough" because she alone maintained a personal connection with Dotty while they were living
in the same building with her. (Hugo's turning off the water pump which services Dotty's
basement apartment is a striking example of his tendency to sever human connections.) On the
other hand, the narrator's present husband, Gabriel, though he shares with Hugo the
knowledge of "what to do" with material (Gabriel is an engineer), at least has what Hugo
lacks a sense of human connection. It is Gabriel who persuades the narrator to buy the book
containing Hugo's story for her daughter Clea: "He is interested in Hugo's career as he would be
interested in the career of a magician or popular singer or politician with whom he had, through
me, a plausible connection, a proof of reality."
Often, in Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You, characters lament the absence of these
human connections in their lives. In "Walking on Water," Mr. Lougheed's glimpse of the
animalistic sexual connection of the flower children, Rex and Calla, increases his own sense of
alienation from this younger generation. Although the couple's "essential connection" is
abruptly broken when they see Lougheed, "their voices joined . . . in laughter that seemed" to
the Mr. Sammler-like Lougheed "not only unashamed but full of derision." Interestingly, this
episode is later echoed in "Marrakesh," when Dorothy unwittingly stumbles upon the
lovemaking of her granddaughter, Jeannette, and Blair King. She, too, has experienced the lack
of connection that Lougheed and many other Munro characters share: "She believed then . . .
that Jeannette was in some important way a continuation of herself. This was not apparent any
longer; the connection had either broken or gone invisible." Instead, the body of her
granddaughter basking in the sun becomes a "hieroglyph" to Dorothy, a visual sign of the
human connection that can never fully be recovered.
In "Winter Wind," Munro argues explicitly and eloquently that the artist, in particular, must not
lose faith in these human connections, frail and elusive though they may be. The mature
narrator interrupts her story about her grandmother's life to ask herself how much of this story
is based on her knowledge of fact and how much her intuition and imagination. Finally, she
decides that the latter qualities may yield a truth far superior to that deduced from Uncle Craiglike fact: "Without any proof I believe it, and so I must believe that we get messages another
way, that we have connections that cannot be investigated, but have to be relied on."
Munro does investigate these human connections, but her investigations are neither purely
rational nor scientific; they are fictional and intuitive. In Who Do You Think You Are?, for
instance, she examines a character whose sense of unconnectedness is far more acute than
that of Del Jordan. Rose suffers from a chronic sense of disjunction: her father is both a
secretive reciter of poetry and a hatefilled child beater; West Hanratty, her home, is divided by
a river (and by economic conditions and opportunities) from Hanratty proper. Even when Rose
is older and more prosperous, this sense of unconnectedness continues to plague her; she
senses that "the barriers between people were still strong and reliable; between arty people
and business people; between men and women." Rose has a glimpse of other barriers between
humans when she tries to read one of her stepmother Flo's letters to an assembled company
and suddenly feels a "fresh and overwhelming realization" of "the gulf that lay behind her." This
unconnectedness to one's past to one's Hanratty, Jubilee, or Logan becomes a major concern
in Munro's work, especially in her next collection, The Moons of Jupiter.
In Who Do You Think You Are?, Rose tries in various ways to attain a sense of connectedness,
some more successful than others. Her attempts to forge sexual connections are disastrous,
mostly because she expects to derive her essential identity from them. She marries Patrick
because he will worship her, make her his "White Goddess," his "Beggar Maid," and she later
grasps at Simon because he is "the man for my life." "Without this connection to a man," the
narrator observes, "she might have seen herself as an uncertain and pathetic person; that
connection held her new life in place." Only dimly, by the end of the collection, does Rose
suspect that the only person for her life is herself, and that the important connections to
discover are those between herself and her past.
The latter realization, in particular, comes slowly to Rose, for her past seems, from the vantage
point of the present, bizarre; it seems to be material for shocking, dramatic stories to be told at
cocktail parties. Even as a young girl she reflects that "Present time and past, the shady
melodramatic past of Flo's stories, were quite separate." "Town oddity" Becky Tyde, like Bobby
Sherriff, seems cut off from her legendary role; "only a formal connection could be made,"
muses Rose. Eventually, Rose reaches beyond this merely formal connection with her past
when she returns to Flo and Hanratty in "Spelling."Like Helen in "The Peace of Utrecht," Rose
discovers scraps of her old writing in this case, old letters she sent to Flo from
Vancouver "False messengers; false connections, with a lost period of her life." Although these
scraps of writing do not awaken the texture and feeling of the past, as do Helen's notes about
the Peace of Utrecht, they do, at least, force Rose to acknowledge that her connections with
the past have been false, and that she must forge honest ones in the future.
Ironically, at the end of Who Do You Think You Are?, Rose attempts to forge honest
connections with a man she has not seen for forty years Ralph Gillespie. For Rose, trying to
understand Ralph is akin to trying to understand herself; both are mimics, imitators whose
imitations of life have become stale, even dangerous. Here, at last, Rose finds the most honest
connection of her life: "What could she say about herself and Ralph Gillespie, except that she
felt his life, close, closer than the lives of men she'd loved, one slot over from her own?."
The subtitle of Alice Munro's The Moons of Jupiter could very well be "Connections," for here
she studies the problem in greater depth than in any previous work. Here, too, she gives voice
most strongly to the idea that art may be the most reliable means of forging an honest
connection with the past.
Family connections, and the guilt or pride they may instil in us, are a central concern of both
sections of the first story sections which are closely interconnected. In the
first, "Connection," the narrator claims that her maternal cousins provided "A connection with
the real, and prodigal, and dangerous, world." Years later, when one of those cousins, Iris, visits
the narrator and her husband in their pretentious Vancouver-area home, it becomes apparent
that this connection has vanished; Iris is now out of place, uneasy in an unfamiliar suburban
world. Nevertheless, the narrator's act of throwing a lemon meringue pie at her husband when
he openly deplores her vulgar connection reveals more emphatically than any words could the
persistence of an essential connection with the cousins. It reveals, more specifically, a
connection with the cousins' world of jokes and hilarity (throwing a pie is, of course, a stock
comic routine). For all of the cousins' pride in their supposedly aristocratic connections in the
Old World, this brash exuberance is their true legacy and birthright. (A comic but macabre
version of this family pride appears in"Accident," where Frances' sister-in-law Adelaide flaunts
her "connection" with an "undertaker . . . in another town" [he is her uncle] by using the latest
mortuary terminology.)
Guilt aroused by family connections is the corresponding motif of the second section, The
Stone in the Field. The sight of even an eccentric non-relative, Poppy Cullender, in the family
parlour humiliates the narrator: "I disliked his connection with us so much. . . ." Later, she likens
one of her paternal aunts to Poppy, and claims that she "couldn't really think of her as my aunt;
the connection seemed impossible." Whereas the maternal cousins thrive on connection (they
sing interconnected rounds, and they never return to Dalgleish after one cousin's death
because, as Iris sadly writes, "the circle was broken"), the paternal aunts are completely
unconnected to the outside world. Not only do they have no telephone connections, they spurn
physical connection: "No embraces, no touch of hands or laying together of cheeks" in that
household, the narrator recalls. And yet, mysteriously, their circle remains unbroken; the sisters
remain secluded with each other for the rest of their lives, occasionally sending Christmas cards
to the narrator which arouse in her not nostalgia but "bewilderment and unexplainable guilt."
Largely as a result of this unexplainable guilt, the narrator, like Rose, makes a concerted effort
to return to her childhood town, to forge those forgotten or disparaged connections with her
past. Ironically, though, the object of the narrator's search is not a living connection at all; it is a
huge stone which marked the grave of a mysterious hermit who was rumoured to be an
admirer of one of the paternal aunts. The narrator's failure to find this unmarked gravestone,
and her discovery of an up-to-date, businesslike farm in its place give ample testimony to the
elusive nature of connections. These are the connections which cannot be "investigated,"
tracked down, and pinpointed, but which must remain as mysterious and as unlocatable as the
stone in the field.
In The Moons of Jupiter, Munro elaborates upon the idea that art can be the stone in the field,
the marker of our connections with the past. Characters often come across scraps of history
while working on a writing project; the narrator of "The Stone in the Field" finds the
newspaper notice about the hermit's death while reading microfilm "in connection with a
documentary script I was working on, for television." The narrator of "Bardon Bus" is working
in Australia "in connection with" a "book of family history which some rich people are paying
me to write." (Ironically, this writer who is investigating family connections which are
entirely unconnected to her forms a false ménage with a man referred to as "X.") Work and life
are continually connected, interwoven.
More specifically, fiction and story-telling are prime means of creating connections out of an
experience which is often choppy and chaotic. In "Visitors," Mildred compares the storytelling
techniques of the two brothers Albert and Wilfred. Whereas Albert baldly presents the facts as
separate and unrelated particles, Wilfred is a weaver of connections: "In Wilfred's stories you
could always be sure that the gloomy parts would give way to something better, and if
somebody behaved in a peculiar way there was an explanation for it." Connections, then, are
more pleasing to ponder aesthetically and emotionally. Nevertheless, Munro also reveals the
dangers inherent in insisting that connections always be made. At the end of "The Stone in the
Field,"the narrator admits that "If I had been younger, I would have figured out a story" about
the hermit and her aunts, a story which would have featured "a horrible, plausible connection"
between the hermit's silence and his death. Connections, when drawn so neatly in life or in
fiction, Munro suggests, can hinder imagination and understanding instead of promoting both,
as they are supposed to do. Maturity, for the narrator and for the writer, involves a refusal to
"believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and
easy to recognize."
In The Moons of Jupiter, Munro follows her own advice; she presents not the final, immutable
connections in people's lives but, more frequently, their desperate attempts to find
connections. Many characters suffer an acute lack of connection between their inner
experience and the world around them: Lydia, in "Dulse," who in the wake of her lover's
rejection "could not make the connection between herself and things outside herself"; the
narrator in "The Turkey Season" whose feelings about the mystery of the universe cannot "be
connected with anything in real life"; and the woman in the story Kay tells in "Bardon
Bus," who sees her old lover and "can't connect the real man any more with the person she
loves, in her head." Maturity for these characters, too, often means accepting that connections
may not always be possible or even necessary; as Mildred realizes in "Visitors," the reason
Wilfred once gave for his weeping at night is probably "only distantly connected with the real
reason. But maybe it was as close as he could get."
In The Moons of Jupiter, therefore, the process of working towards connections is more
valuable than the product the connections themselves. The best illustration of this maxim
appears in the title story. The narrator's father, awaiting a heart operation in a Toronto
hospital, is a man who takes pride in his ability to perceive connections, even if he cannot
always understand how he has arrived at them: "I ask my mind a question. The answer's there,
but I can't see all the connections my mind's making to get it. Like a computer." Nevertheless,
he believes that there can be an answer (the names of the moons of Jupiter, for instance) and
he believes that he can attain it through connections. His daughter, on the other hand, finds her
faith in such processes seriously diminished. She discovers that sometimes answers are relative;
for instance, when she attends the planetarium show she learns that all of the information
about the planets which she had learned as a child has been updated, curiously transformed.
Similarly, she finds that she cannot make the separate elements of her life connect; it is as
though they were moons orbiting a planet. In particular, she sees that her children will follow
paths of their own. In the last scene, this new acceptance is signalled by her refusal to go back
to the museum to see "the relief carvings, the stone pictures." Like the past, the stone reliefs
will always be there; she needn't see them and master the idea of them, in order to affirm their
existence, just as the narrator of "The Stone in the Field" needn't find the stone in order to
assert her connection with the past. Connections in Munro are of central importance, they are
"what it was all about," as the narrator of "Connection"says, and yet they needn't be pursued,
for they are all around us and deep inside us.
Source: Lorraine York, "`Gulfs' and `Connections': The Fiction of Alice Munro," in Essays on
Canadian Writing, No. 35, Winter, 1987, pp. 135-46. Reproduced by permission.
Source Database: Contemporary Literary Criticism